Category Archives: Paperback Yoga

Leap of Faith

July 1, 2019 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Names are signifiers and we are the signified. We have proper names, like Daniel and Kate and Muhammed. Some given names, like Lola, sound good in song and dance. Some names, like Ratso, don’t sound good under any circumstances. We have surnames, like McCarthy and Doiron and Zapatero.

We have pen names, like Dr. Seuss, Mark Twain, and John le Carre. There are logo names, like Colonel Sanders, whose double is the current Secretary of Defense in the USA. Sometimes we have pet names, like Winnie and Booboo, whether we have pets, or not.

There’s nothing and everything in a name, since a cauliflower is a cauliflower is a cauliflower, except when it isn’t, as in Denys Morgan, who is Denys Morgan, living and working in Cleveland, Ohio, except when she’s Devta Kaur, living and breathing and practicing Kundalini Yoga.

It was during an immersion teacher’s training course at the Kundalini Research Institute in New Mexico seven years ago that Denys Morgan received her spiritual name, Devta Kaur, which more-or-less means “one who has the consciousness of the divine or angelic.” It was a leap of faith.

The owner of Total Body Solutions in C-land, she is a masseuse and yoga teacher. She is hands on the wheel on a mission. She’s the kind of grass roots working woman that if she couldn’t cut hair, she wouldn’t open a barbershop. The change of name didn’t lead to a change of heart. She’s always been about service.

“My services are for those searching for freedom from stress and pain,” she says. She takes a holistic approach towards vitality and longevity. “My goal is to share my passion for massage, yoga, meditation, sound, vibration, and energy therapy with all. My mission is healing the world one person at a time.”

Zachary Lewis was one person one day when Denys Morgan gave him a hands-on demonstration of Shiatsu, a massage modality that translates as “finger pressure.”

“Lying shirtless on a mat on the floor, I marveled at her power to zero in on my tightest, sorest spots and to relieve tension in areas where I hadn’t even sensed it, such as my neck, shoulders and spine,” he said.

“Some techniques were new to me. Where most therapists place your limbs gently back down, she let my legs and arms drop heavily to the floor, or even tossed them down. Other times, she’d hold and shake them vigorously. While she used her feet to walk on or knead my muscles, or push me into a stretch, she was also just as likely to use her elbows as a wedge to break up knots.”

Shiatsu is using all your fingers and toes and elbows.If you’re Denys and Devta rolled into one, it’s going at it with twenty fingers and multiple elbows. If you’re Zachary Lewis, it’s rolling with the punches.

He left a new man.

A pseudonym is a name someone uses instead of his or her real name. Pseudonyms include aliases, pen names, stage names, nicknames, superhero and villain names. Some are on the upside and some are on the downside. “Baby Face” Nelson sounds good, but he was a bad man. Beta Ray Bill defends those threatened by monsters. Vlad the Impaler says it all.

James Butler Hickock was known as “Wild Bill” by the wild men he ran to ground. GM’s CEO Charles Wilson was known as “Engine Charlie.” Kal-El’s alias is Clark Kent and Clark Kent’s stage name – star of comic book and screen – is Superman.

In some cases, pseudonyms are adopted because they are part of a cultural or organizational tradition, for example, devotional names used by members of a religious or spiritual fraternity.

In the tradition of Kundalini Yoga, a spiritual name is both vibration and vise grip helping to elevate energy through the power of sound and meaning. It is your soul’s identity. It challenges you to live up to your highest consciousness. Adopting a spiritual name is taking a step toward leaving old habits and old thinking behind and connecting more deeply with your real infinite self, according to 3HO.

3HO and Kundalini Yoga are what Yogi Bhajan brought to the western world from India in the late 1960s.

“You are all here and we will ask you to understand your spiritual incarnation and your spiritual name and try to find the strength to live it. I give you a healthy, happy, holy way of life,” he said.

“Thank you, Guru Ram Das, for building the beautiful Golden Temple for seekers to find their way home. I will never forget the palatable presence of the Naad as I stood in awe in the sacred, timeless place. Truly the highlight of all my trips to India! On the day of your birth, I bow to you again and again!” said Devta Kaur about her most recent visit to the sub-continent.

The Golden temple in Punjab, India, is called the Golden Temple because it is plated in gold. It is the most prominent pilgrimage site of Sikhism. The construction of the building was completed by Guru Ram Das, the fourth guru of the Sikh tradition, in the late 16th century. To this day a unique feature of it is twenty-four-hour free food. The Golden Temple gives out grub to thousands of people every day, on the house, for the asking.

Denys was certified as an aerobics instructor by the Aerobic Fitness Association of America in 1986, launching her career in the health and fitness way of life. She has since drilled in many different kinds of aerobic exercise and strength training. In 1997 she was certified as a personal trainer with the National Alliance of Fitness Professionals.

Her academic work has been mostly in biology and psychology. She holds an Associates in Arts degree and studied pre-med at Cleveland State University. She spent a semester abroad studying biology at the University of Westminster in London.

She spent more than ten years as a Red Cross volunteer certifying people in CPR and first aid. Anyone who jogs on running trails, hits the weights at their gym, plays touch football, will need first aid sooner or later. In the meantime, a good massage is a good balm.

Denys got going on massage therapy in 1991 and received her license to practice from the State Medical Board of Ohio in 1994. In general, she offers therapeutic deep tissue massage combining a variety of different techniques. Her specialties are Japanese Shiatsu, Chinese Medicine, and Native American healing. She has trained in other massage modalities, including Swedish Massage, Cranial-Sacral Therapy, Trager Method, Myofascial Release, Reflexology, and Reiki, among others.

She has been named “Best Massage Therapist” in northeast Ohio and has been a guest several times on local radio and television stations. Her clients include all walks of life, professional football and basketball players, dancers from the Cleveland Ballet, triathletes, cyclists, marathon runners, not to mention unheralded weekend warriors and office workers who spend all day in a chair, to their regret.

Denys has worked professionally with movement and fitness for more than thirty years, and in a few years, burning the midnight oil, will have been studying yoga for thirty years. She began at the Reese Institute in Orlando, Florida, and in 1992 completed her teacher’s training. In 1994 she started teaching yoga in the Forest City. She has developed an eclectic blend of several styles, including Hatha, Ashtanga, Raja, Bhakti and Kundalini, as well as Dynamic Meditation and Tibetan yogic techniques.

It’s diverse and eclectic, but it’s more old-school yoga than spin yoga or yoga tone and sculpt or yogalates. It’s more than exercise. It’s more than just fitness, although a component of fitness is one of the gears. It’s not about the Body of Steel. It’s more like the Christian Body of Glory or the Tibetan Rainbow Body. It’s a frame of mind.

Much of her knowledge comes from the horse’s mouth, having spent time in ashrams up and down India. In 2007 she worked on Kriya and Raja Yoga, Osho and Vipassana Meditation, as well as Yoga Trance Dancing for six months. While there she committed herself to Bhakti Yoga and took lessons in leading devotional singing and Sanskrit chanting.

Two years later she was back in India for six more months, furthering her studies of Dynamic Meditation with an Osho Master. She spent several months in the Himalayas completing her International Teachers Training Program, accredited through Yoga Alliance, giving her a total of over 800 hours of overall training in all aspects of the vocation. She took courses in sound therapy, learning the vibrations of Tibetan Singing Bowls, chimes, and symbols to create healing energy through sacred sound. She spent several months in the practice of Bhakti Yoga, singing bhajans daily.

She has led retreats to India, as well as in Central America. She has taught in Serbia, England, and Italy. She spent several years living in Costa Rica practicing yoga and massage and ran a retreat center. She co-hosted adventure yoga and surfing on the Caribbean coast.

Sometimes the highest goal of human existence is sprinting to the surf to catch a bitchin’ barrel.

In 2010 Denys co-hosted a 10-day yoga retreat to Goa, India, authorizing the participants to an 80-hours training certificate accredited through Yoga Alliance. She helped them sightsee some of India’s holiest places, such as Hampi, the birthplace of Hindu culture, Varanasi, the place where pilgrims come to worship the Ganges River, and Bodhgaya, the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment She was a kind of spiritual Rick Steves, sans cable TV show and eat drink make merry.

In 2015 she co-founded the Ananda Bhakti Hatha Yoga teacher Training program. In 2017 she started a program called “Stay Sane,” which incorporates Kundalini Yoga to help those struggling with mental health issues.

As a teacher she has an extensive knowledge of anatomy and physiology, yoga philosophy, and brings enthusiasm, creativity, and dedication to her work. As a healer, bodyworker, and spiritual mentor she relies on her intuition and inspirations.

Denys follows the tenets and spark of Shirdi Sai Baba, Sathya Sai Baba, Pramahansa Yogananda, Meher Baba, and Yogi Bhajan. “By their grace I am blessed to spread their message. The essence of my work is prompted by my guru, Sai Baba. ‘Love All, Serve All’ and ‘Help Ever, Hurt Never.’”

In the past year she has joined forces with Pop Life. Located in the Waterloo Arts District, on the east side of the North Coast, the collaborative is rooted in art, design, and wellness. They work with artists and designers and the space features a gallery, yoga and wellness studio, and a cafe. She is the yoga and wellness director.

Next year she will be conducting a RYT 200-hour certified course at Pop Life featuring Kundalini Yoga. “Level One Teacher Training in Kundalini Yoga is a transformative experience, whether you decide to teach, or simply use it as an opportunity for personal growth. You will change,” she says.

We all change as we grow, but the only time you need a change of heart is when your heart isn’t in the right place to begin with.

Her intention for the program is inspired by Yogi Bhajan. “I want to make my teachers ten times greater than myself” and “I have come here not to get students, but to make teachers,” he said. Although the program will be diversified, it will regardless offer authentic philosophical and devotional components.

“Those changes can be a challenge to your family and your community. Don’t take it personally and definitely don’t make any big decisions during training. Simply allow yourself to dive deeply into your own identity. It is a physical and mental challenge. Do your best to keep up and set up your life.”

Pop Life isn’t like Pop Art. It’s not on the outside looking in. It’s not stuck in any moment. It’s on the move. It doesn’t look like anything other than what it is.

Denys Morgan, even by another name, whatever the signifier, popping the collar of whatever hat she’s wearing, living her life heart desire, is the thing itself, everything that is significant.

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland Ohio http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Paint It Black

Image May 1, 2019 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

“Everybody needs a helping out, if that ain’t what it’s all about, tell me what.” Amy Grant

Going 9000 miles anywhere is a taxing no picnic undertaking. All roads may lead to the same end, but if you are an Iowa farmgirl since transplanted to Cleveland, Ohio, going to India is not the same as going to Seattle or Boston or someplace in between. It’s going halfway around the world to another continent culture world view.

Despite economic progress, India remains a poor country. Someone is always begging you for a hand-out. Pushing and shoving is a way of life. Personal space isn’t personal, it’s public. There are a billion Indians. Pick pocketing is common. Grab and go is even more common. Getting anything back after the fact is uncommon. Sanitation and hygiene are lacking. Among other things, Delhi Belly is a pain in the butt.

If you are a Western woman, staring and unwanted attention are par for the course anyplace anytime day or night.

When Deanna Black went to India last month, she made the trip look easy. She didn’t stand still for anything. She kept her eye on the prize.

“I’m not surprised,” said Frank Glass.

“The first class I ever took taught by Deanna was by accident, it was the hardest yoga class I ever took, and I had to sit out going to Inner Bliss the rest of the week.”

This from a man who three times a week for three years went to Bikram Yoga classes until he had no more sweat to give.

Deanna Black is a yoga teacher and holistic fitness trainer. Her point of view is far and wide. She studies engages practices aerobics, Prana Flow, Ashtanga, strength training, TRX, kettle ball, Insanity, Zumba, spinning, West African Dance, hoop dance, slacklining, stand up paddle board yoga, and “any other movement and activity that connects you with your body, your mind, your soul, and the nature around you.” She also assays positive psychology, which comes in handy when you are at the front of the room.

“Deanna was subbing that class. No one expected what we got,” said Frank. “She wasn’t bossy or demanding. She was actually encouraging, but she kept at it. She’s nothing if not relentless. I remember wondering if I was going to make it.”

She has studied with Shiva Rea and her Prana Vinyasa teacher training program since 2004. “The classes I create are designed to empower you to do more than you thought possible,” she says. “The benefits are more than meet the eye.”

She is an old-fashioned modern kind of gal, “balancing and aiming for what I want while leaning on the history of what worked and did not work from the past.”

The class was a mix of sheer effort vinyasa, endurance strength work, and baling hay, even though Deanna Black has done undergrad and grad coursework in advanced exercise physiology and psychology at Iowa State University. Making your way in the class, however, wasn’t about classwork and observation reading study reflection.

“It was about peeing on the electric fence for yourself,” said Frank Glass.

She can back off the pedal to the metal if she has to, as when she volunteers for teaching dance fitness to seniors at the Westside Community House.

Born and bred in a small town in Iowa, living in the big city of Cleveland since 1995, Deanna describes herself as a “farm girl whose DNA is filled with farmers, teachers, trailblazers, and travelers, and an adventure yogini, thrive activist and bucket list catalyst.”

It’s a lot to be. It’s a lot like mixed farming.

Mixed farming is a blend of multiple crops and livestock, maximizing light, moisture, and nutrients, complementing land and labor demands across the year. Erosion is minimized, biodiversity is maintained, water is conserved, and habitats preserved. Monocultural farming may better increase production levels, but capitalism isn’t always the bottom line.

She goes back to Iowa often, especially during harvest time. Although she isn’t Old McDonald Had a Farm, she helps out in her own way.

“I can’t even call it a job, it’s so much fun,” she said. “I am taking care of the farm animals, which includes emceeing pig races and goat yoga. I am recess patrolling jumping pillows pedal karts apple slingshots and mazes. I am lifeguarding the corn pool, which includes acro yoga sessions. I am making delicious apple cider donuts and taste testing from our scratch bakery. And I have a team of farmtastic people to help.”

When she went to the subcontinent she went on behalf of the 88Bikes Foundation.

“They continue to be instrumental in my trips to India,” said Deanna. “For all the work they do with girls who are survivors or at risk for human trafficking. It is the timing of me doing this work with them on International Women’s Day, to empower, to educate, to let the world know that the female spirit is not to be suppressed. It is to be respected and honored.”

She arrived in Allahabad in early March. It was the day after the Kumbh Mela wrapped up. It had been going on since January 15^th, although it’s been going on for centuries. The Kumbh Mela is a mass pilgrimage. In 2013, the last time it was staged in Allahabad, an estimated 120 million people came to it over a 2-month period.

“Flags were still flying from each country represented,” she said. “Even with many tents and porta potties still up, the area felt abandoned. Still, a feeling of peace washed over me, particularly after I stepped into the Ganga with prayers and gratitude. Afterwards, I visited the birthplace of Indira Gandhi and learned not only how remarkable she was, but how the women of India stood strong all together and made a significant difference. It was an inspiration for leading into International Women’s Day.”

Indira Gandhi was the first and only female Prime Minister of India. Even though a politician, she had once been a child revolutionary, leading the Monkey Brigade at the age of 12 as part of India’s struggle against the British Empire for self-determination. Despite often criticized as a “goongi goodiya” – dumb doll – she was twice prime minister and was named “Woman of the Millennium” by the BBC.

She was assassinated by her bodyguards in 1984.

The brainchild of Dan Austin, a writer, filmmaker, and one-time bicycle deliveryman, the non-profit 88Bikes was born in 2007. In return for a sponsorship of $88.00, a bike is delivered to someone somewhere in the developing world. The child gets a photo of the person who donated the bike, and the donor gets a photo of the child who received it.

“We feel strongly that you can connect people across the world like this,” he has said. “I think that’s the root of what 88Bikes is about, this one-to-one connection.”

It’s many thousands of bikes going to Peru, Cambodia, Mongolia, Ghana, India, two wheels at a time.

Deanna is aware of how much awareness it takes to get a bicycle into the hands of a kid with little chance of scoring one for him or herself. That’s why she goes halfway around the world. “It’s joy-based philanthropy,” she said. “What brings us joy? Connection!”

“The happiness they deserve is now within reach,” says Dan Austin.

Before she could get 88Bikes on the road, however, she found herself speaking in front of a large group in Allahabad gathered for the Run4Niine.

“The race is in recognition that thoughts and views on menstruation in India need to change,” said Deanna. “To say that this conversation is taboo is to say a conversation about women is taboo. To say menstruation is dirty is to say a girl or woman is dirty. It is beyond time to change this thinking.”

Even though menstruation is a natural phenomenon, like blinking heartbeats hairiness and breasts filled with milk, it is problematic in many parts of India. “Close to 70% of Indian women risk getting severe infection, at times causing death, due to poverty, ignorance, and shame attached to their menstruation cycle,” said Swapna Majumdar, a New Delhi journalist who writes on gender and development.

When they are menstruating, Indian women are not supposed to touch a holy book, handle kitchen utensils, or look at pickles. Demystifying what is supposedly taboo about periods and creating awareness about hygiene has been an uphill struggle in the country. More than 30% of girls in northern India drop out of school after they start menstruating.

“It is connection with birth and the cycle of life,” said Deanna. “It’s not something to be left unsaid. It’s part of the sacred flow of womanhood.”

The next day was the day to get into the flow of pedal power.

“I’m super excited,” she said. “Tomorrow one hundred girls are getting their own bicycle.” She and her companions, Ruby and Ramon of the Blossomy Project, were outside Kolkotta. About 500 miles east of Allahabad, on the Bay of Bengal, it used to be Calcutta, once an East India trading post, now the capital of West Bengal state, India’s third-largest city with nearly 5 million inhabitants. It is regarded as the artistic, cultural, and intellectual center of the country.

It’s also the home of Mother House, headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa, who is buried there.

The Blossomy Project is a non-profit organization that works to empower survivors of human trafficking through art-based programs. Since riding a bike is as much an art as a skill, they were partnering with 88Bikes.

Deanna had a big envelope full of donor cards.

“Each card is one of who donated to 88Bikes. I am taking a road trip to meet these girls and give them their cards with their bikes.”

It was bright day in the 90s. March is the sunniest month of the year on the northern east coast of India, although it is also one of the wettest. A heavy rain and hailstorm had passed by a few days earlier.

“Watch out boys,” said Deanna, giving a donor card and bike to the first young girl. “This girl has got a bike with things to do and places to go.”

The first girl hopped on her bike and raced away.

“She took off immediately to school to take a Sanskrit exam. With her bike she can get to school much more easily. These girls also use their bikes to patrol the neighborhood and visit communities and bring awareness about how to stay safe.”

Ruby and Ramon and Deanna exchanged high fives.

“Each time I come to Kolkotta, these two have been instrumental in getting me and the bikes connected with girls,” said Deanna. “So happy to have the Blossomy Project. Shout out to Ruby acting as translator and all-out rock star making things happen.”

“I can go anywhere,” said another girl, getting on her bike.

Deanna showed her the back of the donor card that came with the bike.

“You can go anywhere,” it said.

“I love moments like this,” said Deanna.

Sunday night was Funday night in Kolkotta. Everyone went out to a show by Tanmoy Bose, a percussionist and tabla player. A native of the city, he was one of the first Indian musicians to meld folk songs and tribal drumming into a large band setting. His own band, the Taal Tantra Experience, signifies worship through rhythm. The music is nothing if not spilling over with life.

“I’m still amazed with that violin,” said Deanna. “If anyone in Cleveland knows of concerts like this, let me know, I wanna go.”

After the bikes were distributed, it was time to go home. The return flight to the United States from India doesn’t take two three days, but it might as well, when you’re on the way back to your own digs. Once on native ground, she exclaimed, checking out the run-up to the NCAA tournament, “Yeeeaaasss!!! Nothing like coming back to the States during March Madness!”

A few days later she got a Facebook message from Amita Gour, one of the girls who had gotten a bike.

“Thanks for your visit to Allahabad, Deanna,” she wrote.

“So happy to spend time with you and your family,” Deanna wrote back. “Thank you so very much for all the time you spent with me showing me around. And thrilled about your new bike.”

The thrill is in lending a helping hand.

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Throwing Down the Hammer

May 1, 2019 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

“I’m all lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily, I came here for their special offer, a guaranteed personality.” The Clash

In the United States Congress is made up of two chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate. They are both in Washington D. C. The chambers are filled by direct elections in the fifty states by the American voting public. Statutory law is proposed and created by Congress, with the White House stage-managing business as usual.

Many of those laws have been progressive, from the activism at the turn of the 20th century to the New Deal in the depths of the Great Depression to the Civil Rights bills of the 1960s.

Most of them have been regressive, such as the marriage and property laws of the 19th century, the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, among other protectionist laws, and just about everything the GOP has done in living memory, bad laws in lieu of good ideas. Many lawmakers live on the wrong side of fear.

Some of them have been bone-headed, from the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to Prohibition to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the last based on glib lies eagerly believed by the eager beavers ready to make a buck on waving the flag.

There are laws Congress makes that are homeland lifestyle laws. They are about America, about our allegiance and attachment to its ideals, interests, and traditions. They are about embracing a way of life. When they address the way we live now, they are about what makes life liberty and the pursuit of happiness a real way of life, not just foggy notions from long ago.

They are stale toast when they try to recreate the past.

The most up-to-date attempts to fossilize American values are from the font of the Make America Great Again Wall of Shame Rantings of POTUS. The Big Man in the Oval Office is a race-baiting tax-dodging whore-loving atheist mouthing Christian platitudes, of all things, although it doesn’t seem to matter to his zany supporters. They rally around the ranting and red hats. It’s spooky Americanism in the Haunted White House.

Homeland legislation has often been the purview of the good old boys in love with the good old days. Their guiding principle is “In God We Trust” and God forbid anything change anytime soon. Even though change has accelerated by leaps and bounds in the past one hundred years, and even though Orange Julius can’t keep his mouth shut, the conservative order in the United States is not very much different today than it was one hundred years ago during the reign of Silent Cal.

Thank God Congress is coming back into session next month, the week of Labor Day. They may only work 138 days a year, but they have their work cut out for them. If the United States stands for anything, it stands for free enterprise. It stands for capitalism. It ultimately stands for consumerism. In the mid-1950s the President of the National Sales Executives was already blithely declaring, “Capitalism is dead, consumerism is king.”

Even President Trump, with his crazy fast thumb on social media, and incredibly busy with issues such as body-shaming Senator Elizabeth Warren, trying to remember his wife’s name, and the mental health menace of xBox, is cognizant of what really makes America great.

“The WTO is BROKEN. NO more!!! Today I directed the U.S. Trade Representative to take action so that countries stop CHEATING the system at the expense of the USA!”

Make America Great Again!

“I built the greatest economy in the World, the best the U.S. has ever had. Best stock market, economy and unemployment numbers ever! Most people working within U.S. ever! Low interest rates, very low inflation! Country doing great!”

Make America Great Again!

“Did you hear the latest con job? President Obama is now trying to take credit for the Economic Boom taking place under the Trump Administration. He had the WEAKEST recovery since the Great Depression, despite Zero Fed Rate & MASSIVE quantitative easing. NOW, best jobs numbers.”

Make America Great Again!

President Trump has raced Air Force One to one trade junket after another over the past year, burning up the carbon, and sent proposals to Congress, and taken to Twitter, going hard after Europe South America China with tariffs tariffs tariffs to protect American jobs workers businesses, humping the notion that the business of America is business. He has gotten on top of the mountain of nationalism and shouted his message for all to hear, both prophet and salesman and head honcho of the lunatic fringe.

“I have the absolute right to PARDON myself!” he tweets again and again.

It is hard to believe incredible bewildering just about impeachable that he hasn’t focused his tweeting laser-like eye on yoga. It might not be long, though. When Dhvani, an athletic-wear company from Oregon that makes yoga clothes, put up a 30-foot billboard in Times Square criticizing the president, the response was swift and sure.

“You’re just full of shit,” said Donald Trump Jr.

There are many things that threaten the American economy, from unemployment to energy prices to fiscal crises to cyber-attacks to data fraud to extreme weather events to large-scale involuntary migration to illicit trade to asset bubbles. There’s always something. If there is one thing that is a clear and present danger to the well-being of Main Street and Wall Street, it is yoga.

Although yoga pumps tens of billions of dollars into the economy, it is only one of the arms of the practice, the arm that is the spigot, the physical aspect of it, from studios to mats ‘n’ stuff to groovy lulu outfits, as well as ancillary products and services like seminars supplements physical therapies alternative regimens and R & R.

The danger yoga poses to the American economy lies in the other seven arms of the practice, some of which are so antithetical to the American way of life as to be nearly treasonous. Even though the commodification of yoga is a done deal, even the body beautiful, the face on the myth of beauty health success, is on shaky ground, since one of the aspects of traditional yoga is acceptance of one’s body, to be at one with it, in all its imperfections.

The body can be improved upon, but it’s not a lump of clay in search of aesthetic perfection. At least, not if you exist outside the star-studded world of the stars and pro sports. They’ve got the dough to work on the clay they are. Its objectification only serves the merchandiser, not necessarily the consumer. It is buyer beware, just like it’s always been.

Tom Brady, the star quarterback of the New England Patriots, makes about $40 million a year. His football fans far and wide ultimately are the ones who fork over the dough. When it comes to being careful with the merchandise, Tom Brady pays all the attention in the world to his body. Practicing yoga is partly exercising the body, but the million-dollar part of the practice is exercising the brain.

Practicing yoga is having a fan base of one, you.

Old-school yoga is a stuck in the craw problem for the United States. If it ever gains a foothold it could be dangerous. If it got out of hand it could threaten the consumer society that makes America as great as it is. At the very least, Aparigraha – meaning non-covetousness – should be outlawed immediately. The consumer society is predicated on coveting a bigger house bigger car bigger clothes and the newest devices, never being satisfied. The new minimalism is the old maximalism. It’s a wild goose chase, but it’s what makes the world go around.

“There’s nothing I’d ever buy, but I love consumerism,” said Johnny Rotten of the punk band the Sex Pistols. “I like being there, in the shopping malls. It’s wacky.”

What is hare-brained, and what Orange Julius and Congress need to understand, is that buying into non-consumerism is the same as throwing the flag into the mud and trampling on it. The American government has often intervened interfered intruded into life in the United States in order to advance and preserve what it considers the aims and ambitions of its people. The country may be doing great now, business is booming, but if the growth of yoga is left unchecked, and its precepts go invasive on native soil, it could cast a spell, causing a downward spiral in the economy.

The virtuous cycle is all about disposable income demanding more stuff and manufacturers ramping it up to meet the demand. Business spending on technology, productivity, and capital goods is a significant factor in sustaining the economy and raising the standard of living, but the mainstay is consumer spending. It is 70% of gross domestic product. It is the most important driving force of the economy.

When consumer spending drops off growth slows, prices fall, and deflation creeps in. If it goes on too long, and the economy steadily contracts, the result is hard times, recession and depression. The White House, and all our houses, start looking ragged at the edges.

The ground rules of yoga are anathema to capitalism and consumerism. It’s not just Aparigraha, either. The eight-fold path is meant to lead to a purposeful and meaningful life, by way of truthfulness and continence, among other things. There is little in the way of truthfulness on Madison Avenue and almost no continence. Self-discipline and spiritual observances are a big part of yoga. They’re a big part of going shopping. Samtosa is defined as contentment. If that concept ever got adopted, there would be hell to pay at Amazon. They would have to resurrect Stonewall Jackson to fight that battle.

In the United States, society is structured in such a way that many people are regarded and regard themselves as profit-generators. Everyone else is either helping or hindering you on the yellow brick road to Fort Knox. It is a selfish way of life, but a way of life that has led to the good life.

No one wants to go back to the Great Recession, much less the Great Depression, or any bust of any kind. President Trump has got his quick thumb on that button. His arch-enemy Hillary Clinton practices yoga, which he has pointed to as unacceptable.

“She does a lot of yoga, right?” he said. He mocked her for justifying deleting e-mails as an ethical result of yoga practice. “I think that one of the great crimes committed is Hillary Clinton deleting 33,000 e-mails after Congress sent her a subpoena.”

Yoga has been integrated into the fabric of life in the United States, but only the get up stand up part of it. The other parts don’t fit well. They fit so badly, indeed, that alarm bells are clanging coast to coast. Parents and school boards in Georgia, Alabama, and California have gotten yoga expelled from programs in their states, for good reason. They understand the treat at ground level.

Orange Julius and Senator “Moscow” Mitch McConnell and the rest of the GOP need to take a hard look at the Russian city of Nizhnevartovsk, where yoga in all its forms was banned in 2015, under the rubric of it being foreign and subversive. The owners of the city’s yoga studios received letters telling them to close up shop and “stop spreading new religious cults and movements.” Classes at a stadium and public meeting hall were suspended. Schools and local physical culture centers were advised in no uncertain terms to cut out the asana and meditation practices of “an occult character.”

That’s the spirit, comrade!

President Trump has torn more than one page out of the Russki playbook. Ronald Reagan said “Tear down the wall” in the 1980s, referring to the Berlin Wall. President Trump has repurposed the phrase, saying “Build the wall” in our own times. It is time he includes the practice of yoga, and its foreign influences, to the same blacklist where all the other foreigners his wall is designed to keep out of the homeland are listed in black and white.

Bad ideas are as bad as bad people. The president knows that. The Trump Wall is meant to keep bad people out of the United States. The president needs to build it higher. It needs to be built higher to keep out bad ideas. The ideas and beliefs that make up the practice of yoga are a menace to the zeitgeist of the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave in the 21^stcentury.

The Trump Tower might fall like the Tower of Babel, for Christ’s sake!

The activist Alyssa Milano has called on removing the president from office with “the power of yoga.” She proposes chanting a reality-altering mantra every day for throwing him out. That’s going to backfire. President Trump knows a bugbear when he sees one.

Consumerism and affluence may be a corruption of the American Dream, but it’s all we’ve got. Yoga would have us believe it’s best to never buy anything you can’t carry in your tote, the tote your children are carrying. They think that’s the future, but there’s no future in that. Bigger is better and more is more, not the other way around. Loyalty and permanence are undermined by consumerism, but that’s the way it is. It’s every man for himself and God against all.

Get to work, Congress. Do the right thing by the homeland. Send a bill up the hill. Since the commander-in-chief is still the commander-in-chief, at his command yoga can go back to where it came from. With a tweet and a fountain pen President Trump can outlaw yoga and restore American values.

Build the blockade make the stonewall make the country great again make the mats go away throw down the hammer bust those yoga blocks to bits no more standing on your head and ban foreign ideas foreign ethos foreign beliefs, once and for all!

Paperback Yoga

Ditching the Back Seat Driver

April 1, 2019 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Most people don’t care if you’ve taken a million yoga classes, or not. If you do something bad to them, they aren’t going to say, “That fella needs more yoga classes.” They are going to say something less kind and understanding. If you do something good, they’re not going to say, “It’s because of all the yoga classes that fella has taken.” Saints get taken for granted. Nobody cares where the crown of light came from.

They aren’t going to say you are a saint because you’ve spent your savings at the local yoga studio. They will probably say something along the lines of, “That fella needs to put his halo away and start living in the real world.” It begs the question, but a $16 billion dollar business in the USA is about as real as it gets, unless it’s as unreal as a sideshow.

When you apply for a job your prospective employer, unless it’s a yoga studio, isn’t going to ask if you’ve taken a bazillion yoga classes. If you can’t or won’t lift that bale and tote that barge you are not going to get your foot in the door, no matter what kind of a yogi you think you are. Capitalism doesn’t care about high-mindedness.

If yoga studios had their druthers, they would be full to the gills seven days a week, except on the birthday of B. K. S. Iyengar, the man who got the ball rolling. That day is a holy day. Studios would like to be so full of folks 24/7 that even their most loyal customers would have to display VIP passes to get in the door. That’s why more than less classes are barn burners with a rocking soundtrack and the hands of a nubile assistant adjusting your pose. When the playlist is blasting with the hammer down, and the adjustments are flowing, speed traps are for suckers.

Yoga is big business. Anybody who thinks otherwise need only spend a few minutes checking out Facebook pages. “Welcome to the universal family of yoga jobs and yoga retreats,” says Global Yoga Community. The Yoga Teacher Resource Community describes itself as “helping yoga instructors in their yoga business.” Members and administrators post about topics including how to select liability insurance and navigating advertisement options. Yoga Jobs All Over the World proclaims they are “kind of like a global yogi Craigslist.”

God save us from the crap that is Craigslist, global or otherwise.

In between, from the West to the East, from Hoboken to Madras, yesterday today tomorrow, somebody is peddling something every minute of the day on the back of the practice. Yoga teachers often say, “It’s all yoga.” They say it with a smile. If they are right, it explains everything about the one-time spiritual path. The path today isn’t so much metaphysical as it is “Turn Here for Your Friendly Walmart Superstore.”

Everybody is your friend in the world of yoga, and all your friends are peddling videos and books. There is the “7 Day Yoga Crash Course.” They don’t say what is going to happen on the 8^th day. Probably crash and burn, but that is beside the point. Other courses pay off faster, in 4 and 5 days.

There are many people who take yoga classes month after month, year after year. It’s hard to say if they are slow learners or simply devotees. If they are slow learners, they deserve a pat on the back. If they are devotees, they need a slap in the face. Somebody needs to remind them life is not lived inside a classroom. If they are yoga teachers, they get a pass. Paychecks are what keep the wolf away from the door.

Life is lived out in the wide world. It’s one thing to listen to the steel belts humming pleasantly on the asphalt from the cocoon of a studio. It’s another thing to stand on the side of the highway, 18-wheelers loaded up and rolling, rubber smoking and diesel fumes acrid, drivers tossing down little white pills in the glow of all-night diners, the radio tuned to crazy talk show stations.

What’s the point of taking endless yoga classes? The practice is not rocket science. Learn a few asanas, a few flows linking them, how to breathe, how to meditate, the yamas and niyamas, and you’re all set to go back down the beanstalk. The overarching claims of wellness will only make you go in circles.

It’s easy to fetishize yoga teachers. It’s easy to idealize and glamorize idols of all kinds. Who doesn’t want to shrug off responsibility and stay on the yellow brick road of life with the hand of a guru at your elbow? If you’re young and naive, or a seeker seeking a better way, it’s the way to go. But at some point, it time to ditch the teacher and stand on your own two feet.

Yoga teachers are full of aphorisms like “Reach higher. It will steady you.” Why it would steady anybody is unclear, but if you are afraid of heights, don’t do it. The air is thinner up there. Down in easy pose they say, “Open up your palms if you want answers from the universe. Put your palms face down if you want answers from within yourself.” It got so I started making fists of my palms and shaking my fists at them.

An eager beaver instructor with a taste for tall tales liked to tell us, “Take the Hanuman Leap.” I always let that one lay. I wasn’t about to monkey see monkey do. “If something in your life isn’t serving you, quietly thank it for the lesson, and let it go,” was something I heard a million times in the ten-or-so years I took yoga classes. On behalf of everybody who ever worked nine to five to pay the mortgage and feed the kids, I say let the cliches go down the drain. Nobody I ever knew ever quit because the job wasn’t serving them. In most cases the no serving part was a given. They either made the best of it or screwed up to the extent they needed firing. Anybody who quit did so because they could go somewhere else where they could make more money, where they could sooner rather than later let it go, once and for all.

One day a yoga teacher said, “Let that shit go.” Everybody in the class laughed. She was talking about friendships relationships what somebody did or didn’t say and how we hope things will get better. I scowled and did a down dog, letting the shit go and the platitudes slide down my back.

“The only moment that really matters is right now,” is an all-time favorite mantra of yoga teachers. It makes sense now and then. Most of the time it doesn’t. If it was true, yoga would be one of the unhealthiest healthy practices of all time. Standing on your head right now before you are ready can be more than a pain in the neck. There is no saving your neck if it goes wrong because you don’t know what you are doing. Full speed ahead isn’t what standing on your head is all about. Planning in advance is what really matters, making sure what has a lasting impact on you isn’t the wrong end of a baseball bat. Nothing would ever get done, including breakfast lunch and dinner, if right now was all there was.

One command that made me gnash my teeth was “Be your authentic self.” Nobody is their authentic self in a yoga classroom. A warm and fuzzy refuge is all well and good but there comes a time in every man and woman’s life when it’s best to become your own man or woman. Otherwise, we become Pee-Wee Herman. Becoming your own true self isn’t possible if you are baloney in somebody else’s slice of life. We are not all in the same boat. We are all in different boats in the same ocean.

In classrooms you become what the teacher is, what the teacher is saying, what you hope will get you somewhere. You become like the yogis in class who you admire. You buy into the ethos and the ethic becomes you. You buy into the chalk talk and that’s that. After a while whoever you were is beside the point. It’s a brave new world, but it’s not a world you had a hand in making. Your thinking becomes whatever yoga is thinking, like how people become what they learned in school, what they do at work, and what they see on TV. You go into people-pleasing mode, otherwise people might not like who you are.

Making an authentic self can be a slog through hell or a dance in the sun. Not everybody is good with it happening to their spouse, siblings, and friends. They wonder how it will impact them. But when you are being authentic you are being all parts of yourself, the good the bad the super-duper awesome and the ugly. It’s the only way to find true acceptance rather than a phantom hug from a make-believe friend. It’s better to be a first-rate version of yourself rather than a second-rate version of somebody else.

Everybody gets a temporary driver’s license first. Then they get their permanent driver’s license. After they have gone through a used car-or-two, they get a new car. Getting behind the wheel by yourself, ditching the back seat driver, is the way to go to get somewhere good.

Paperback Yoga

Shock and Awe

April 1, 2019 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

“You’re early,” Barron Cannon said.

“I know, but I wanted to come in before class and ask if you would help me navigate my new electric pants,” Zadie Wisniewski said. She was wearing cherry pop yoga pants.

“I don’t think you need any help from me,” Barron said. “Your pants look high voltage enough to navigate themselves.”

“What do you mean?”

“The color, you can’t beat that red.”

“Oh, right, they are bright. They’re a special pair. They’re usually black. No, what I mean is, they’re actually electric.”

Barron Cannon taught yoga classes, usually at the crossroads of Lakewood and the west side of Cleveland near where he lived. Zadie was there for a Hot Yoga class. Her pants were hot looking enough to fit right in to the theme of the class.

She was wearing spanking new Nadi X yoga pants. The X pants are high-tech high-performance yoga wear, trumping Perfect Moment, Lululemon, and Runderwear. They are up to date. They are like wearing a self-driving car.

There is a battery attached to a port on the pants. Wires are woven into the fabric. Sensors sewn throughout the pants are synced to an app that collects data as the wearer practices yoga. If a pose is going wrong, the app makes that part of you that is getting it wrong vibrate with a low-voltage electrical charge. When you make an adjustment, the app pipes up with praise. If you keep getting it wrong, the app keeps buzzing you and saying, “Please try again.”

“Are you pulling my leg?” Barron asked.

“No, of course not,” Zadie said. “These pants cost me two hundred and fifty dollars.”

“They’re cool,” said Folasade Adeoso, an influencer with 86,000 followers, the day she first pulled the pants on and pranced on a pretend runway at her yoga studio.

“That’s an arm and a leg,” Barron said about the bleeding-edge pants designed to make you bleed money.

“So, I wonder if I can roll my mat out in front of you, and if you would handle my phone, keeping it next to you in case I need an adjustment?”

“Sure,” Barron said. “I’ll do my best.”

“Great!”

“You said navigate. What does that mean?”

“The app is supposed to do it all on its own, but I would feel better if you kept your eye on it.” She handed Barron her iPhone. It was an iPhone 16 Pro Max. It was the most phone Barron had ever seen.

“It would be super if you would put it on your mat where both of us can see it.”

“All right,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if I like this. You should be paying attention to what you’re doing, not relying on an app. Besides, when you come to my class, supervision is my responsibility.”

“I know,” said Zadie, “but this will usually be for at home, for when I do yoga in my spare room.”

Nadi X yoga pants are the brainchild of Billie Whitehouse, a fashion and tech designer. She has developed vibrating underwear that buzzes for its own reasons, never mind what’s going on with your private parts. She has developed a driving jacket that vibrates right side left side to alert you to turn right or left. The latest thing she and her tech team thought up were the new vibrating yoga pants.

“The vibrations on the body cue you about where to focus and the app lets you know how you went at the end of each pose. Get the smartest yoga experience!” is how the experience is described. “Nadi X guides your yoga practice through the latest state-of-the-art technology based on your body’s alignment. Listen to the audio instructor on your phone and feel the guidance on your skin.”

“The vibrations will guide your focus,” says Billie Whitehouse.

It is downstream to go modern, take sense and mindfulness out of the equation and go straight to machine learning, go straight to the Big Brother of asana practice, the brother who has your best interests in mind and won’t mine any of the data it collects about your body.

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” the showman PT Barnum said long ago. He would have been happy to see the birthrate rise in our own age and get in on more of the action.

“Wearable X is the future of wellness that brings together design and technology to create a better quality of life through experience and fashion,” says Wearable X, the Australian cyber company behind the yoga pants device.

“Putting electronics into garments is still so new and so difficult,” says Ben Moir, co-founder with Billie Whitehouse and chief technology officer. “Yoga pants get stretched, get sweated in. The sensors had to be invisible and the pants had to not be a tech-looking product. That’s kind of an engineer’s nightmare.”

“We’re very proud that it is at its peak.” Billie Whitehouse said about their new cow nose ring attire device, proudly pointing the way to the unforeseeable future.

“I’ve got to bounce on that,” Barron said to himself. “I smell a rat.”

“They make my butt look good,” said Isabelle Chaput, half of a French performance-art duo, a few months earlier during a demonstration of the pants in New York City

The high-waisted four-way stretch level one compression pants aren’t just for gals, either. “These leggings are extremely well made. The high waisted band is flattering, and these are honestly my go-to leggings for everyday wear,” said Justin Gong, reviewing the pants on Amazon. “Whether it’s a full 40-minute flow or a 5-minute session, my Nadi X allows me to flow whenever I want.”

It’s great to get what you want, whenever you want it, whether you’re a gal or a guy, or whoever.

They were named Nadi X for a reason. “In Sanskrit, the nadi are the highways of communication that exist around the body when all your chakras are aligned,” Billie Whitehouse spelled out, updating the past, eliding then and now. “As You Think You Vibrate” is one of the company’s mantras.

Over the next twenty minutes the Hot Yoga class filled up, a quiet buzz and energy filling the room until there were thirty-some mats lined up in a loose order alongside and behind Zadie when the proceedings got started. Barron taught a one-hour flow class in a room heated to the mid-90s. His method was to start slow, pick up the pace, end slow, and encourage a five-minute corpse pose at the end.

He didn’t like it when folks rolled their mats up after the last pose and bolted the room. “Hold your horses!” he hollered.

The Nadi X pants are manufactured in Sri Lanka, an island country off the southern coast of India. The nation is prosperous economically, has a strong military, and is the third most religious country in the world, with 99% of all Sri Lankans saying religion is an important part of their daily life. They are by all accounts proud to produce the vibrating pants for the spiritual practice of yoga.

Wearable X has even designed several yoga sequences for travelers, making the pants and the app work with phones on airplane mode, assuming the flight attendants don’t mind a downward dog in the middle of an aisle at 38,000 feet.

“Sitting is the new smoking,” Billie Whitehouse said. “It is a genuine epidemic. It’s not just because we’re at desks all day but because we’re constantly on airplanes.”

Baron Cannon had never been on a big airliner, only a seaplane that flew 30-minute tours over Long Lake in the Adirondacks. He had been on it several times, whenever he went north to the High Peaks for a week of hiking, always flown by the same pilot, a short stocky old man by the name of Bob, who if you saw him in the street you might mistake for a bum. He flew his battered Cessna with one hand, pointing out landmarks. Sometimes he flew the little plane with no hands, talking with both hands. He always landed it, fair or foul weather, like the lake was a baby’s bottom.

Nadi X is a godsend for all the yogis who burn up the carbon, flying here there and everywhere, globe-trotting for profit and diversion. The pants are machine washable and powered by a rechargeable battery that lasts up to an hour-and-a half, which is as long as most yoga classes ever are. The battery connects by Bluetooth to a smartphone, letting one and all choose the level of effort they’re going to be putting into the practice.

“Once you have set your vibration strength, you can place the phone next to your yoga mat during your session. Your pulse is monogamist to your phone. You can have different Nadi X pants, but your phone will always want to connect to your pulse.”

Everyone knows that their smartphone never screws up and is always up to snuff. Silicon Valley would have a heart attack if it was otherwise. That would be the day a robot car runs into a robot directing traffic, sending it to the garbage dump.

“The audio instructions are paired with gentle vibrations to give you clues where to focus. The accelerometer values are processed in your smartphone and the audio instructions will let you know if you have made it into the pose at the end of each pose.”

After a couple of instructional noises from the phone, Barron shut the sound off, muttering to himself.

Within ten minutes it all fell into place for Zadie. She wasn’t an expert, but she wasn’t a novice either. In her late 20s she was fit and smart, smart enough to catch the cues and act on them. By the middle of the class there were hardly any cues anymore. The class was flowing. She was deep into it and getting it just right.

That’s when the trouble started.

Even though she was going strong and was intuitively aware of how good it was all going, Barron not even glancing at her, she was getting zapped more and more frequently. The vibrations were rolling up and down her legs almost continuously. There was something wrong with the device, she thought.

Was there a ghost in the machine learning? There must be! Maybe it’s all this sweat, she thought, mopping her brow. She looked up from the floor pose she was doing to ask Barron to turn her iPhone off, but he was gone.

He was patrolling the room making hands-on adjustments, alignment-based assists for backbends and forward folds. Barron didn’t push anybody deeper into their poses, but he tried to get them into the integrity of the pose, within the constraints of what their flesh, tendons, ligaments, joints, and bones would bear.

A young woman had complained about it in one of his classes, saying that touching her was inappropriate and reminding him about the #MeToo movement, saying its concerns were a real issue to her.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he said. “You’re compromising your safety.”

“I don’t care, hands-off,” she said. “My husband’s a lawyer, just in case you’re a pervert.”

“Oh, the hell with it, get out of here and don’t come back.”

“What?” She glared at him. The class stopped and everyone watched the goings-on. Those who knew Barron better than others rolled their eyes heavenward. They knew banishment was coming. Barron didn’t believe in the customer is always right.

“You heard me,” he said. “Out.” He fixed his hand firmly on her arm and led her to the door.

When they were outside, he leaned into her and said, “Tell your husband the local Hells Angel chapter practices at my class Saturday mornings, so I don’t ever want to see your face again or hear a word from your legal beagle about anything litigious, understand?”

“You’re an ass,” she said.

“Let’s leave it at that, sweet lips,” Barron said. “Now drift.” He went back to his class.

Love, peace, and understanding, he thought, were all well and good, except when it came to the empowered privileged well-bred wallets from the better neighborhoods, especially on the lakeshore, which was called the Gold Coast, where he was sure she sprang from.

Barron was an anarchist at heart. He believed anarchism walked the walk best with the practice of yoga. Any other affiliation with anything else, capitalism, socialism, democracy, dictatorship, consumerism, minimalism, left-wing, right-wing, high and mighty, and the lunatic fringe, was inimical to the practice. Barron was an idealist, but practical enough to pay his taxes and not run red lights. He kept his anarchism to himself.

Zadie was close to the breaking point. The longer the class went on and the sweatier she got, the more her pants shocked her. It was only 12 volts, she knew, but it was getting to be 12 volts every second. Maybe it was more voltage than she thought. Was it getting stronger? Yow, that stung!

“The hell with it,” she finally cried out. She ripped her cherry pop yoga pants off and angrily tossed them into a corner. She was left wearing a pair of royal purple Under Armour pure stretch underwear.

Everyone behind Zadie gave them a close look.

“Eyes on me, everyone, front and center,” Barron said. “Let’s get back to business.”

“Those pants can kiss my butt,” Zadie said, getting back into the flow of the class.

“And, no,” she said, looking straight at Barron, “I won’t need any adjustments for the rest of the class today, thank you very much.”

Paperback Yoga

Hitting the Bricks

March 1, 2019 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

There once was a union maid, she never was afraid, of goons and ginks and company finks, she went to the union hall when a meeting it was called, and when the Legion boys come ’round, she always stood her ground.” Woody Guthrie

Early in 2019, five weeks into a union-led strike against the country’s biggest car maker, General Motors was losing about $90 million a day and thousands of auto workers were watching their savings shrink. Yet there was no end in sight for the longest labor upheaval in many years. Nearly 50,000 workers were idled, picketing outside GM factories from coast to coast, squabbling about wages, retirement benefits, and the fate of the shuttered Chevrolet plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

At about the same time, teachers at New York City’s YogaWorks studios, a nationwide chain that advertises itself as “America’s #1 Yoga Studio,” asked the wellness corporation to recognize a union. “It would appear to be the first union in the United States to include yoga instructors,” according to The New York Times.

“Yoga teachers are poor,” said Abi Miller, feeling like the low man on the totem pole. He posted his feelings on a Facebook group page. “This is a vibration that I lived for the first years of teaching yoga,” he said. “I did lots of free community events. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing those things, it prevented me from jumping towards my dream. It held me back because I was afraid to ask for the money that I was worth. It delayed my process of stepping into the teacher that I am meant to be. This industry is in full boom and makes a ton of money every year. If you are a teacher, why wouldn’t you be deserving of having a little piece of that pie?”

Although yoga is for everybody, everybody can’t always get to the front of the table for their piece of the pastry. Joe Hill, the songwriter, and union organizer, back in the day, once pointed out why that was. “Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

“We believe yoga is for every body,” is the mantra of YogaWorks, fiddling with spelling and meaning. “No matter your age or fitness level, we offer yoga that will work for you. Our programs remain authentic to ancient yoga tradition while seamlessly integrating today’s popular styles. Join us on the mat, we’re here to honor and empower your journey toward personal growth and well-being.”

Even though the request by their employees, who honor and empower the journeys of all those who come to the studio, was polite, if firm, the response by the company was equally firm, if not exactly polite. It was stern, if not rabid, in the tradition of labor-management relations, which are almost always adversarial.

Unions and bosses have never exactly been a baby blue meeting of the minds. They have spent most of their time since the Industrial Revolution poking one another in the eye. When it’s gotten out of hand, which it often has, it’s ended up as an eye-for-an-eye. Sometimes it gets ramped up to two eyes for one. It never gets damped down to turning the other cheek. No one is that Christian Buddhist Muslim Jewish or God-fearing.

In the 1890s the Carnegie Steel Company went toe-to-toe against the nation’s strongest trade union, which was the Iron and Steel Workers. An 1889 strike had won them a three-year contract, but three years later Andrew Carnegie was determined to break them. The company locked the workers out of the plant and all of them were fired.

They workers stormed the factory and took over the company town. Three hundred Pinkerton guards, locked and loaded, were called in, but when they got there they were met by thousands of strikers, many of them locked and loaded, too. After a full-out gun battle, the Pinkertons gave up and ran for it. In all, nine strikers and seven Pinkertons were killed. More than a hundred were injured. Eight thousand Pennsylvania National Guardsmen were called in and the strike was quickly broken.

The Battle of Blair Mountain, near Welch, West Virginia, in 1921, was a spontaneous uprising of ten thousand coal miners who fought the company’s hired guns and their allies, the state police, for three days before federal troops intervened. In 1987, while union members staged a fight as a distraction, others set fire to the Dupont Plaza Hotel in Puerto Rico. The union was in a dispute with management about pay and health care. Ninety-seven people were killed, many of them burned beyond recognition.

In New York City, the battle between YogaWorks and their working people was more in the way of a war of words. It was about hitting the bricks, not throwing bricks. Non-violence stayed the course. A YogaWorks official sent an e-mail addressed to their NYC teachers and trainers, painting the union as an untrustworthy group simply looking to collect dues from them, and on the look-out only for their own welfare.

The e-mail, from Heather Eary, a regional vice president, ended in blunt capital letters. “DON’T SIGN A CARD.” The capital letters referred to cards being circulated by teachers and by the union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, stating the signatory wanted the group to represent them.

“YogaWorks does not believe that employees joining, and paying dues to, a union is in the best interest of YogaWorks, our employees or our students,” the message said. “We are surprised that the machinist union would ask us to help them possibly take away your right to decide whether you want to go running to join them.”

There was something queer about the message, as though it needed to get into down dog on both feet and both hands, to get itself grounded in the gap between the company’s principles and appetite. “Our offer to work in collaboration with the company still stands,” said David DiMaria, an organizer with the union. “Hopefully they will see past their original reaction.”

Carla Gatza, the head of human resources for YogaWorks, said, “We believe that our company, our employees, and our students are best served when YogaWorks and its employees work together without the interference of a third-party union.”

“They often say the yoga teachers are the center of this business,” Tamar Samir, embroiled in the unionization bid, said of the company’s leaders. “But then somehow the way that teachers are supported in terms of pay and benefits and job security doesn’t match that.” That being said, YogaWorks promptly closed its SoHo center, throwing its employees out of work and its students out on the sidewalk.

A union is an association of workers, often in a trade or profession, formed to protect and further their interests and rights. They began forming in the mid-19th century in response to the social and economic impact of the Industrial Revolution. National unions bubbled up in the post-Civil War era as the coasts and regions were brought together by commerce and railroads.

Labor unions benefited greatly from the New Deal in the 1930s, especially after the Wagner Act was passed to legally protect their right to organize. The number of workers belonging to unions peaked in the mid-50s at about 35% of the workforce and the total number of members peaked in the 70s at about 21 million. Membership has declined ever since. In 2013 there were 14 million members compared with 18 million in 1983. In 2013, the percentage of workers belonging to a union was 11%, compared to 20% in 1983.

There are more than 50 thousand yoga teachers in the United States, and according to the Yoga Alliance there are two people interested in becoming a teacher for every current teacher on the classroom floor. At that rate, should they succeed in signing up the proletariat of yogis, the Machinists and Aerospace Workers will soon be the biggest union in the country.

“Do I think that yoga teachers deserve more job security and better pay? Yes,” says J. Brown of J. Brown Yoga. “Are there a lot of yoga center owners who are participating in a business model that exploits teachers? Yes. Does the Yoga Alliance 200-hour teacher training standard bear a lot of responsibility for creating this model and fueling more people to follow it? Yes.”

He didn’t stop there. “Do I think that 100 teachers in NYC becoming part of the union, so they can attempt to negotiate the terms of their employment with YogaWorks, will do anything to change the model across the industry and give teachers more job security and better pay? The answer is no.”

There are about six thousand yoga centers nationwide. Twenty years ago, all of them were mom and pop places, independents, riding the wellness gravy train. In the past ten years venture capital has gotten its tentacles into the practice, for good reason.

There are 36 million pairs of active feet on mats nowadays, according to Yoga Journal. The number of people doing yoga grew by 50% in the past five years. Sun salutations are now as popular as swinging a golf club, without even having to go outside and get a sunburn. Popularity polls show that 15% of everybody has done yoga in the past year.

J. Brown sees “bottom line economics infecting the entire landscape of yoga centers. That is why yoga teachers have come to be paid so little and treated so poorly by both the corporate and independent operators.”

The median income in the United States is about $32,000. Median pay at GM is about $40,000. Roughly speaking, the average hourly pay for a member of the United Auto Workers ranges from $28 to $38 for those hired before September 2007, and between $16 and $20 for workers hired afterward. In 2015 yoga teaching was rated as one of the top one hundred jobs in the country, according to CNN, with a median annual paycheck clocking in at more than $60,000.

The compensation at YogaWorks ranges from about $35 to $100-or-more to teach classes of an hour’s length, occasionally an hour-and-a-half. The average teacher, teaching an average of 25 classes a week, working about 30 hours a week, at an average rate of pay of $50.00 a class, will make their $60 thousand-or-more a year without breaking a sweat, unless it’s a hot flow class.

One of the complaints made by yoga teachers about their jobs is the extra time they have to spend cleaning the yoga rooms after class, even though the rooms are simply empty spaces with wood floors that usually just require mopping up some sweat and sweeping up some dust balls.

The pay for hotel maids ranges between $9.00 to $13.00 an hour across the country. The pay range hardly varies, suggesting there aren’t many opportunities for increased pay or advancement, even with several years of experience. The average cleaner, working 40 hours a week, vacuuming making beds disinfecting hotel rooms, makes approximately $21,000 a year, a third of what the average yoga teacher makes.

But it’s not just cleaning up after class. There’s more to it than that in the teaching racket. Hotel maids may have to mess with some messy stuff in the rooms they clean, but they don’t have to fiddle with their iPods. Yoga teachers do. “We’re constantly having to change our playlist, constantly having to sequence, testing it out,” Melissa Brennan of CorePower Yoga said. “The expectation is go out and do all of this work and then come back and bring it back to the studio.”

The work on their digital music players is not compensated and has led to resentment, notwithstanding that teachers make about twice what the average Joe and Jane do. On the other hand, resentment is not morally superior to making money, so you might as well make as much of it as you can when you can.

Melissa and Effie Morgenstern are suing CorePower. They claim the company has failed “to pay its instructors for certain hours worked, causing their average weekly compensation to drop below the minimum wages they are entitled.”
“They hide behind the fact that you have all this gratitude and love and appreciation for yoga and your peers,” said Effie. “In a lot of ways, they weaponize relationships,” Melissa said. “I know there is a part of me that feels really foolish for buying into that and thinking that these people did care about me.”

The suit is the fourth action with similar complaints filed against CorePower. Almost two thousand other yoga instructors joined a separate class action lawsuit, claiming they are “overstretched and not being paid the minimum wages they are entitled to.” In a statement, CorePower Yoga said the lawsuit brought by Brennan and Morgenstern is without merit and maintains there was no wrongdoing. “CorePower is proud of its practices, believes they are fair, and will continue to stand by and defend them.”

When yoga went commercial it went capitalist. Yoga is cool beans, but cool capitalism is still capitalism, no matter how many times headquarters quotes BKS Iyengar Seane Corn Leslie Kaminoff or anybody else. They might as well cut to the chase and get right to Sadie Nardini, the bright shining light of yoga commercialism.

The debate about traditional vs. modern in the world of yoga is over. It’s been bushwhacked. The answer is free market capitalism. It’s about selling and winning and making money. It’s not for the faint of heart. After all, you can go broke in the yoga game, like anywhere else. “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell,” says Frank Borman, businessman and ex-NASA astronaut.

Yoga is progressive open-minded socially conscious, except when it isn’t, when it comes to collective bargaining. Then it’s status quo push back time. “The dynamic of unions doesn’t reflect who we are, how we interact, how we make decisions or where we need to go,” is what automaker corporations and venture capital yogis all say when push comes to shove. It’s my way or the highway.

Yoga literally means union. Yoga yoke union. It can be understood on different levels, philosophically, religiously, and psychologically, as in no longer living at cross-purposes with yourself. It can simply mean going to yoga class, getting in step with like-minded folks. It might soon mean a first sighting thunderbolt, yoga teachers walking the picket line, fending off glib-talking union-busting ginks and finks.

Meanwhile, Andrew Carnegie, the Bluto of plutocrats, is rolling over in his grave laughing hysterically, while new-age union bosses are getting with the new dynamic, and Krishnamacharya and his antecedents are springing up out of corpse pose with surprised looks, all shook up at the ruckus.

Paperback Yoga

Making the Scene

January 1, 2019 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

“Now it’s time for change, nothing stays the same.” Motley Crue

Yoga has never been what it has been or what it is. It’s not one thing, even though it doesn’t say one thing and mean another. Not everyone brings the same curiosity interest hunger to it, nor does everyone get the same thing out of it. There are a lot of drops in the ocean of it, which is apropos, given hatha yoga’s beginnings.

Matsyendranath, the founder of hatha yoga, was tossed into the ocean about a thousand years ago by his parents when they determined he had been born under a bad sign. He was swallowed by a big fish, stayed swallowed but survived, and grew up. One day when the fish dove to the bottom of the ocean, he overheard Siva and Parvati, who happened to be nearby, talking about yoga. He made notes, practiced what they preached for twelve years while inside the belly of the whale, and when he finally made it back to dry land became a yoga teacher.

Everyone called him ‘Jonah, Jr.’ behind his back, but his students called him ‘Lord of the Fishes’ face forward.

The Yoga Alliance has nothing on Matsyendranath’s credentials, since he put in more than one hundred thousand hours of groundwork compared to YA’s 200 and 500-hour teacher training certificates.

For about five thousand years yoga was largely a mind game, focusing on energy and awareness. The right stuff was life force, the vital principle, discernment and consciousness. Yoga exercise wasn’t a big part of the package. It was hardly part of the package, at all. When almost everybody was working dawn to dusk to just get by, there wasn’t a big demand for vinyasa classes.

In the Industrial Age, when machines make our machines, and we sit in cars, sit in the glow of our flat screens, and sit around telling Alexa what to do, a little get up and go has become a priority. Yoga has become primarily a physical practice, for good reason. “Birds born in a cage think flying is a sickness,” said Alejandro Jodorowsky. But, many people still crave strength and movement skills. Coupled with the mental fortitude the practice brings to bear, yoga has become a go-to for tens of millions.

In the last one hundred-or-so years yoga has become whatever anybody says it is, from Yogananda to BKS Iyengar, from Pierre Bernard to Bikram Choudhury, from Lilian Folan to Tara Stiles. In the 1970s it was Ashtanga Yoga, in the 1990s it was Power Yoga, and in the 2000s it was Anusara Yoga.

Back in the day it was build your own internal fire. Today it’s the warm and hot and very hot room. Tomorrow is up for grabs, given the implications of climate change.

In the last twenty-or-so years it has become a cornucopia, yoked to acrobatics and paddleboards, booze and barnyards, therapy and retreats. There are conferences and festivals. It’s the ever-changing life-changing magic of the practice. If yoga is about transformation, it is living up to its mission in the new millennium.

In the same way that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change, the age-old practice is going through some changes.

AntiGravity Yoga and Fitness, developed by Christopher Harrison, a former gymnast and dancer, in 2007, is about getting hitched to a fabric swing hung from a ceiling and stretching and working out on it. The device is called the AntiGravity Hammock.

“Suspend your disbelief, and I can bring you to better health, less pain, and allow you to feel the joy of flying,” he says.

The yoga has its roots in his AntiGravity, an entertainment brand established in 1991, which has conceived and collaborated in over 400 productions since that time, from Broadway shows to the Olympics to the Academy Awards. Chris Harrison designed bungee dance technology and developed hanging silk as a performance apparatus. His AntiGravity Theater and National Aerial Performance Training Center is based in Florida.

AntiGravity Yoga has spread to gyms and studios in more than 30 countries, including Madonna’s Hard Candy Fitness. “It’s not as hard as it looks, and it’s actually not as terrifying as it seems,” observed Jessica Booth after taking a class at Studio Anya in NYC. “Once you’re in the hammock correctly, you’re so much more secure than you’d think. If you do exactly what you’re told, you’ll find yourself doing front and back flips, handstands galore, and even hanging upside down.”

Some people hang on for dear life, while others get a great workout in. You can even fly back and forth like it’s a playground swing set. Since a good part of the exercise is done upside down, everyone feels taller when they’re finished.

“It makes you feel like a total badass,” Jessica added.

AcroYoga is yoga melded with acrobatics and healing arts. It got off the ground in the early part of the 21^stcentury, although Krishnamacharya used to do it in the 1930s, playing the role of the base, while a child played the flyer, doing asanas above him. It’s a vigorous workout usually involving three people, base, flyer, and spotter.

The base is on the ground, on his or her back, while the flyer is the person elevated off the ground, moving through a series of dynamic postures. The spotter is there to make sure things don’t go haywire, and save the day, if need be. The circle ceremony, promoting openness and communication within the group, is what everyone does before class.

Jason Nemer and Jenny Sauer-Klein founded AcroYoga International in 2003. It blended gymnastics with playfulness with yoga. They systematized the terms and training and execution of the practice. They made common poses a matter of teamwork.

It’s the yoga of trust, because you’ve got to trust the person whose hands and feet you are balanced on. You are moving up there, but are being moved from below, as well. It is move play connect. It is leaning on each other, believing your partner will always be there to lend a hand.

It isn’t easy, requiring muscles, core strength, and kinesthetic awareness. It takes long-established practice to new heights. It’s more fun than sweating your ass off at a Bikram Yoga studio, too.

SUP Yoga is doing yoga on a paddleboard, and it’s also more fun than sweating your ass off at a Bikram studio. For one thing, you’re outside, on the open water, in the fresh air, not in a steam bath of a mirrored torture chamber. For another thing, if you fall, you fall into clean water, not face first onto a Bikram-mandated moldy carpet.

Standing up on canoes and rafts and propelling yourself with the help of a pole or paddle is thousands of years old. The Waikiki Beach Boys of Oahu pioneered the modern style of stand up paddle boarding in the 1960s. Although nobody knows who actually premiered SUP Yoga, Rachel Brathen is one of the pioneers.

“My fiancée was always surfing on a longboard with big dogs, and I thought, if he can surf with a dog on a board, I should be able to do a down dog on a board,” she said.

On shore, people asked her, “Do you teach classes in this?”

“Sure!” she said, channeling her inner and outer teacher, which she is, as well as the author of the New York Times bestseller “Yoga Girl”.

A week later she started giving her first classes.

SUP Yoga is a little more complex than posture yoga, which barely requires a mat, if that. It calls for essential gear, including a paddleboard, paddle, leash, personal flotation device, and an emergency whistle. It takes some getting used to. Just about anything that is done on a mat can be done on a board, but the board is wobbly all the time, which engages on-land muscles in a different way. It demands you be intentional with all your movements, and stay in the present, every split second.

Otherwise, it’s over the side.

On the far side, from kooky to cute, is doing yoga while under the influence, and practicing with pets.

Boozy yoga got its start when studios started pairing their classes with cheese and wine tasting afterwards, cocktails at the local saloon after Friday night classes, and mimosas after Sunday morning flow classes. There’s nothing like a pick-me-up after the pick-me-up of a good yoga class, although it can get to be too much of a good thing.

One in eight American adults meet diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder.

Beer Yoga is happy hour on the mat. Pop-up classes get sponsored by a local bar or brewery. There are 24 hours in a day. There are 24 beers in a case. It can’t be a coincidence. It’s got to be destiny, karma. It’s also got to be a new revenue stream for beer makers. Who knew yogis would be getting into suds?

There is even Drunk Yoga, created by Eli Walker, a yoga teacher in Brooklyn, NYC, for those unconcerned about hitting the bottle hard. A plastic tumbler of wine is near to hand at every mat, although everyone is limited to one glass just before class and one glass during class. All bets are off after class.

“With Drunk Yoga, I wanted to create a safe and silly space for yogis and non-yogis alike to just have fun and move their bodies,” says Eli Walker.

“I’ll drink to that,” say her students.

“We make new friends over a glass of wine and just lighten the fuck up about yoga,” observed Jamey Powell. “And you know what? It worked for me. It is as fun as it sounds.”

Getting in the groove with pets and barnyard animals are surefire ways to lighten the mood of any yoga class. Yoga with your dog, or Doga, for short, is changing it up from a daily walk and into the yoga studio. They don’t actually do anything once they are there, except maybe keep you company and relax in corpse pose for an hour, but it keeps them from chasing squirrels.

“Dogs really benefit from Doga whether they participate, or not,” says Mahny Djahanguiri, who has been bonding with canines for about five years. “In my class the dogs are dogis and humans are yogis.” The idea is that animals lower anxiety levels and generate feel good hormones.

She has written “Doga: Yoga for You and Your Dog”. The how-to book includes pictures of how to deploy large dogs as bolsters and small dogs as hand weights.

Yoga with animals has spread to horses, cats, and baby goats. Goat Yoga got started at Lainey Morse’s farm in Oregon in 2016 when a friend suggested she host yoga classes. “I said OK,” said Lainey, “but the goats have to join in.” She had eight goats. The goats joined in. Within a year there was a waiting list to get in on the classes.

“The most fun part for me is watching people’s faces when a little goat comes up to them while they’re doing a yoga pose,” she said. “It’s a distraction, but it’s a happy distraction. It’s hard to be sad and depressed when there’s baby goats jumping on you.”

In the past two years Caprine Vinyasa, better known as Baby Goat Yoga, has grown by leaps and bounds. The goat kids might distract you with their melt-your-insides cuteness, might climb on your back when you’re in plank pose, and might leave little pools of goat pee here and there, but they are ideal therapy partners.

Jut watch out when you’re in headstand, as goats tend to butt heads.

Rooftop Yoga, Silent Disco Yoga, Naked Yoga, TRX Yoga, Broga, MMA Yoga, and Soul Flow Yoga are among a myriad of other niche practices that have suddenly sprouted on the scene in recent years. It’s always great to take risks and try new things, but new roads sometime mean superhighways and other times just mean new ruts.

On the other side of redesigned ways of doing things at your local studio, festivals and conferences drawing national and international audiences have proliferated in the past twenty years. Some of the best festivals are Sat Nam Fest, OM Yoga Show, and Wanderlust. They are launching pads for the old school that endures and the cutting edge that works.

The OM Yoga Show is a yoga gathering in London. Studio owners from around the world come to participate and network at one of the biggest such expos in the world. “If you’re in the yoga industry bring business cards with you,” said Sarah Highfield, founder of Yogarise. “Come in your yoga clothes – there are lots of classes on offer. Finally, turn up hungry, because there are plenty of tasty food stands to try.”

Sat Nam Fest is five days of asana, mantras, and meditation, revolving around Kundalini Yoga. Wanderlust is yoga by day and concerts by night, celebrations of mindfull living, living it up, summer surfing with “great nature, great food, great people, and more!” It has grown to 8 festivals annually in the USA and Canada.

Even though there are many ways to sharpen skills nowadays, from blogs to podcasts to instructional videos, one of the best ways is still the live event, workshops and conferences. They are about meeting influencers and experts face-to-face, learning new know-hows and relearning classic ways of doing things, and sharpening the saw. Almost everybody comes home from conferences, from investing in themselves, from being in rooms with the energy of like-minded individuals, with a greater focus.

The Omega Institute hosts an annual Yoga Service Conference. “The conference is a wonderful opportunity to connect with folks whose yoga, meditation, and mindfulness practices are primarily focused on service to the world,” said Sue Julian of the Yoga Prison Project. The Toronto Yoga Conference has grown to 300 exhibitors and 700 hours of seminars and training sessions. The Yoga Journal Conferences have long been venues to experience the diversity of the practice, get inspired, work on your skills, and experiment with new ones.

The modern world is about change. Yoga is a practice of moxie and awareness. The first step in riding the wave of change is awareness.

In its own domain, yoga in the modern world has been experimenting, experiencing growing pains, shooting off in all directions. It gets hare-brained at times, shooting itself in the foot, electrifying at other times, shooting for the stars. It can do whatever it wants, even though it can’t do whatever it wants. It can only do what works, which is why it is still in business, still breathtaking.

Although new isn’t always progress, all yoga was once new.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Monkey On My Back

December 1, 2018 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

On the northeastern coast of the Atlantic Ocean, the town of North Truro is on the Outer Cape, on the other side of Route 6, on the other side of the ocean by about a mile, and looks across Cape Cod Bay. It is 20 minutes past Wellfleet, and 10 minutes to Provincetown, which is the last town at the end of the line.

US Route 6, once known as the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, runs from Bishop, California to Provincetown, Massachusetts. Before Dwight Eisenhower got the federal interstates built, it was the longest highway in the country.

Going into town for scallops and an IPA is as easy as pie. The road from North Truro to Wellfleet rolls past scrubby trees, while the road to Provincetown narrows, tucked into sand dunes. The National Seashore, from Race Point to Marconi Beach, ranges for many miles.

When President John Kennedy created the new National Seashore in the early 1960s, he created something old by leaving it alone. From the overlook at Marconi there is a broad view of the Atlantic Ocean. Down the steep sand dunes is a long wide flat stretch of beach. Hotel and resort developers and real estate interests haven’t been able to turn the seashore from Orleans to Provincetown into their version of hellish happiness.

Although Provincetown gets jammed to the gills in July and August, the summer before summer and the summer after summer are laid back on the Outer Cape. It’s laid back, but there is plenty to do.

There is plenty of green space on the Outer Cape.

There is the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, almost 8,000 acres of dunes, salt and freshwater marshes, and an old lighthouse. There is a nine-mile long sandbar accessible by kayak. Nickerson State Park is several thousand acres of woods, home to fox and deer, and hiking trails. Walk or jog or ride the Cape Cod Rail Trail.

Explore Provincetown’s Commercial Street, chock full of restaurants, funky shops, and art galleries. There are street performers, although not all of them are official street performers. Some are in the flesh performance artists. There are comedy clubs and night clubs.

At the Wellfleet Drive-in, starting in September, old school movies like “Jaws” and “Grease” and “Back to the Future” are shown on the big screen. Families back their pick-up trucks in, flip the tail gates down, and spread sleeping bags out on the bed of the truck. Teenagers bring gigantic flamingo lounge pool floats and flop on them between the cars.

Or, don’t do much. Grab a book, a folding chair, a tube of sunscreen, and head to the beach. There’s plenty of sunshine. It’s always chill on the sand. There are always clams, mussels, and oysters afterwards.

There is some yoga on the Outer Cape, a very nice studio in Wellfleet, and several in Provincetown. They are smallish and on the small side spaces. Yoga East on Race Point Road might fit a dozen people on their polished sunlit floor. In the summer, unless it rains, they are half empty.

There is plenty of air and space to do yoga outside, on the shady grass behind the North Truro Library, at spots all over in the parks, and on the seashore. Not many do, however, an opportunity lost. Unless it is a class that has moved outside, spotting a yoga mat on the Outer Cape is like spotting Moby Dick.

Thar she blows!

Not that you need a mat to get it done. If you want to practice poses on the beach, it’s best to ditch the mat, anyway, and go natural. The hard sand closer to the water is great for standing poses and the soft sand farther back is great for floor work.

If yoga is a personal practice, meant to get you to go inwards, the ocean shore and many of the beaches on the bay side are great places to go solo. They are easy to find, all of them have parking lots, and either stairs or tracks down to the beaches. Almost everyone is usually tucked in within a few hundred yards of one another. Go in either direction, go a few hundred yards, and you will suddenly find yourself alone.

It’s where to go to get the monkey off your back.

You may be able to see Head of the Meadow Beach over one shoulder, and Coast Guard Beach over the other shoulder, but it will be just you and low tide and the seagulls and gray seals somewhere in between the two. The gray seals ply the shoreline, their way of steering clear of sharks, who stay away, aware of the shallow water and the dangers of getting stranded in the sand.

Although most yoga is practiced in group settings at studios, gyms, and community centers, back in the day yogic fundamentals recommended practicing alone. The idea was to connect with your breath and body without anybody else breathing on you or sweating up a storm in headstand on their mat inches away from you. Practicing yoga in a group setting, with somebody at the head of the class, is a structured ready-to-wear way to get your yoga in, but it’s somebody else’s structure.

Going it alone, there’s no need to keep an eye out for anybody tilting swaying and falling over on top of you. There isn’t any shake and bake, keeping up with the vinyasa, staying in step with the playlist. There’s no list of any kind.

Practicing alone means there aren’t any teachers telling you what to think, making sure you don’t have to think for yourself, since that is what you are paying them for, anyway. Practicing alone means you are free, on the loose to think for yourself, instead of ingesting received wisdom. Practicing alone means you can make yourself up, steering clear of holiness and hipster cant.

On the bay side of Cape Cod, from North Truro, where there are always front row seats to sunsets over Provincetown, it is about four miles south down the beach, past Pilgrim Beach Village, Cold Storage Beach and Corn Hill Beach to Pamet Harbor in Truro, where the sand abruptly ends at the mouth of the harbor. For much of the walk, as far as Cold Storage Beach, houses are perched high on the sea cliff, out of sight, squatting quietly at the top of long steep weather-beaten stairs.

At the base of the escarpment, all along the narrow beach, the Atlantic Ocean stretching three thousand miles on the backside and Cape Cod Bay seventy-some miles into the distance, is a good place to practice yoga alone, walking the line, except when it isn’t.

“Are you all right?”

They were an older couple, out for a walk. He was wearing a snap brim straw hat and she was wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. There was a concerned expression on her face.

“Yes, it’s just a yoga pose. It’s called Twisted Monkey. I do it for my hip flexors and for my lower back.”

“Oh, we thought maybe you had hurt yourself.”

“I did hurt myself, but that was an accident, and now I do this to get better.”

“Does it help?”

“It does help, in more ways than one, even though it’s not the be all and end all. It helps my backside, and it helps keep my head on straight, too, which is a good thing.”

“Did you hurt your head, too?”

“No, but I get headaches sometimes in this crazy world.”

“I’m with you about the craziness,” the man in the old summer hat laughed. “Maybe I should try some of that yoga.”

“Take some classes, learn the fundamentals, what have you got to lose?”

Take a step to the side, around the billboard, and there’s a different way of looking at things on the other side.

Yoga classes, under the direction of an accredited teacher, are the way to learn the practice. They are also a way to be in a community. They engender and reinforce a sense of purpose and place.

At the end of the day, at the end of the line, everyone practices on their own, even when they practice cheek to jowl in a crowded yoga studio. Unless they don’t like being alone, and the class is a way of pretending everyone in a crowd is on your side. They are, of course, as long as you stay in the crosswalk.

Practicing on your own internalizes what you’ve learned. Yoga isn’t rocket science. There is a bucketful of learning to it, but it’s as much horse sense as it is wisdom. Going it alone, without anyone bending your ear, listening to your own breath, shucking shellfish, walking on sunshine, can be the best way to get to whatever fresh clear air thinking is out there.

Paperback Yoga

Busting Out the Yoga Pants

November 1, 2018 Edward Staskus 1 Comment

By Ed Staskus

Slightly less than 20% of everyone in yoga classes are men. That is sharply down from the 100% it was one hundred years ago. Since then the practice has been annexed by gals bending like pretzels. Even when they aren’t lithe and limber, they’ve fine-tuned in to the mental and physical health benefits of yoga.

The twist is that for thousands of years it was a men’s club. No women need apply. The idea of Daisy Dukes doing yoga was anathema. The prohibition was laughed out of the closet about fifty years ago. Now it’s a closet full of clothes with nothing to wear.

“I’ve been teaching yoga for over 25 years and I can’t believe how the number of men participating in yoga has not really increased,” says Yogi Aaron, director and master teacher at Blue Osa in Costa Rica.

When it comes to the practice nowadays, many men are like honey badgers. They just don’t care. Some of them have thought about it but never taken the first step. They don’t think it is intense hardcore challenging enough. The “no pain no gain” school of thought is still going strong. A few strong men, like Chuck Norris, do some yoga for flexibility and balance, even though they don’t need to, being Chuck Norris.

They don’t worry about anybody’s pantywaist deconstruction of the practice. They roll up their sleeves. They bust out the action pants.

The action movie star and martial artist never loses his balance in any posture. Balance loses to Chuck Norris. When he does inversions, he doesn’t go upside down. He tips the universe over. In honor of this feat the new 7th series in Ashtanga Yoga is called “Chuckitsa.” It cleanses every drop of lily liver from your body and soul.

“Many men have misconceptions about it,” says Gwen Saint Romain, a wellness instructor and registered yoga teacher at the Rex Wellness Center in Raleigh, N. Carolina.

“I think that one of the misconceptions is that it is always very gentle, meditative and mindful, that there aren’t physical benefits,” she says. “But it’s definitely not just meditating. Some yoga classes, like power yoga, are extremely rigorous, sweaty workouts. A lot of guys come to a yoga class for the first time because they are invited by a friend, a spouse or girlfriend. They find out quickly that yoga can be a very intense workout.”

Chuck Norris finds intense yoga classes right up his sleeve, although he doesn’t break out into a sweat about them, cool as a cucumber. “How many push-ups can you do in chaturanga?” he was asked. “All of them,” he said. He pulls his Action Pants on both legs at a time. The secret ingredient in Red Bull is Chuck Norris’s piss and vinegar.

The yoga entrepreneur Bikram Choudhury challenged him to 90 minutes of super-hot yoga in his LA-based “torture chamber.” He said it would make a man of him.

“I’ve got to tell you, partner, I once bet NASA a cold beer I could survive re-entry without a spacesuit,” Chuck told the Speedo-clad taskmaster.

“Nothing is impossible, believe me I know” said Bikram. “Girls hang all over me and thousands of people pay me thousands of dollars to tell them how to lock their knees, but that’s impossible.”

In respect for the ancient practice of yoga, an esteem he didn’t necessarily feel for the fitness guru, he let the comment slide.

When he pulled the space stunt a stark-naked Chuck Norris re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, streaking over 14 states, and reaching a temperature of 3000 degrees. He landed on his feet and ran two hundred miles to the nearest airport for a flight home. An embarrassed NASA was compelled to deliver a growler of ale to his front door.

When Bikram demanded he lock his knee in class, Chuck Norris stormed the big wig’s throne and put him in a headlock. He didn’t release Bikram until he had counted to infinity. The groupies in class got impatient, although Mrs. Bikram wasn’t even aware her husband hadn’t been home in a long time.

“From physique to mental health, yoga is one of the most beneficial practices in the world. Most Western yoga classes are dominated by women, but more and more men are starting to become interested in getting on the mat,” says Lanai Moliterno, a yoga instructor in Encinitas, California.

“A lot of men have jumped on board, have discovered the numerous benefits yoga can bring, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Enhanced strength? Injury prevention? Better sexual performance? Increased calm and focus? Who knew stretching and breathing could do all this?”

Chuck Norris agrees yoga is a steady hand to helping stay calm and focused, even though he has never not been calm and focused. When he goes target shooting, he always hits 11 out of 10 targets. With nine bullets. He always wins games of Connect Four in three moves. He wins every game of chess in only one move, a roundhouse kick to the face.

Although there was little confusion a hundred years ago about what and who yoga was for, the case for the practice today is a little more complex, especially in the mano a mano world.

“Years ago, just as Jay Cutler was ascending to the top of the bodybuilding world, he told me about a secret he’d recently begun to incorporate into his training,” says Steven Stiefel, an LA-based writer for health and fitness magazines.

“It was yoga! He credited his improved flexibility with his ability to train more efficiently and avoid injury. And then he won the Mr. Olympia title.

“Today, there are more yoga classes than ever, but a lot of people, men in particular, remain confused about what happens inside those classes and how they should feel about it. Is it stretching, meditation, some combination, or something else entirely? Could it be the secret to unlocking your tight hips and superhuman athletic potential, or will it just make you sprout a man bun and go all new age?”

You don’t want to get it wrong, unless you live in Brooklyn or San Francisco, in which case you’ll hit the nail on the head.

The only time Chuck Norris was ever wrong was when he thought he had made a mistake. His computer has no backspace button. He doesn’t make mistakes. Chuck Norris has done yoga and not gone new age or sprouted anything under his cowboy hat. He has cows in the back forty grilling his steaks for him.

Many weightlifters have added yoga to their fitness routine. There are several ways it can improve lifting, including increasing range of motion, reducing soreness, minimizing risk of injury, and fomenting correct posture.

Holding and releasing poses in yoga class relaxes tight muscles and encourages flexibility. Yoga draws oxygen into muscles. It flushes lactic acid. The practice enlivens balance and strengthens joints and smaller stabilizing muscles, helping prevent injury. Big men tend to be top-heavy. Core strengthening work, emphasis on the back, and chest and shoulder opener poses are instrumental at improving bearing and carriage.

There are many reasons why yoga might not be a good fit for many men, however. While it’s true their postures would probably improve, most men never have any trouble with back pain. What would they do with all the balance and flexibility they gained? Yoga sharpens focus, but men are fee-fi-fo focus fighters, anyway. Their heartrates and blood pressure are fine exactly where they are. It’s square enough yoga is a stress buster, but stress makes life more interesting. Busting out a mat is getting on the road to dullsville.

Nothing Chuck Norris does is ever dull. He can roundhouse kick his enemies yesterday. He sleeps with a night light because the dark is afraid of him. He can drive in Braille, and when he misspells a word, the Oxford English Dictionary changes the actual spelling of it.

Despite the best efforts of yoga promotors vendors marketers and merchandisers, there are still more gals than there are guys in classes. Studio owners and teachers say that the number of women to men is usually 80 to 20. Surveys by Yoga Journal have consistently found that the practice attracts far more womenfolk than menfolk.

Why don’t more men do yoga?

“My husband said he felt bored,” says Praneetha Akula, a Silver Spring, Maryland, resident who dragged her man to the studio.

Chuck Norris never gets bored, inside or outside a yoga studio. Getting bored is an insult to yourself. Chuck Norris’s head would explode if he ever insulted himself. Anybody else’s head, if they insulted him, would instantly explode just from the thought of it.

Maybe men shouldn’t bother doing yoga, unless they are like Chuck Norris, which is impossible. When he meditates, going inward, he finds a smaller tougher Chuck Norris inside himself.

“In a society that places people in convenient ticky-tacky boxes, it seems today’s yoga is clearly for women,” says Dr. Phil Maffetone, an endurance athlete, sports medicine clinician, and author of the “Big Book of Health and Fitness.”

Do real men do yoga?

“Knowing its potential value in health and fitness, various forms of yoga are something I have recommended over my career, to both men and women. But I don’t do it. Having tried various styles, there are more than 100 different types of yoga, I never enjoyed any of them,” he says.

“I get the same benefits of yoga, its scientific and perceived values, from other approaches, without the formality, the special clothes, or going anywhere. I wonder if men are turned off to things like chanting, Sanskrit terms for poses, cliché yoga music, and pretzel poses. Or, maybe men are too aggressive in their workout ethics to even try yoga, which might be the reason they are more often injured than women.”

On the other hand, maybe that’s exactly the reason more real men should get their get up and go butts down on the mat. Take a breath. Slow it down. Forget the finish line.

On top of that, it’s more manly than most men think. It was originally created designed practiced by men, taught by men, for men. It stayed that way for thousands of years. It was physically demanding enough in an age when everything was physically demanding. In the last half century women have crashed the party, which is all to the good.

Who wants to do yoga in a room full of dads, dudes, and varmints? Rooster Cogburn in tree pose would be a sight for sore eyes, but it would also be a sore sight.

Yoga makes everyone, women and men, better at what they do. If you’re flexible, it will help you build strength. If you’re strong as hell, it helps you find balance. Ethically, it grounds you in the Golden Rule. Mentally, it gives you a way to handle pressure and stress.

We can’t all be Chuck Norris. In fact, no one can be Chuck Norris. He once inhaled for 108 seconds – 108 million seconds. He has never read the Yoga Sutras. He stared them down until the Sutras squealed and told him everything he wanted to know. He would be the crazy best yoga teacher of all time. His classroom adjustments would never be forgotten by anyone, ever.

Since he could sail around the world in boat pose, if he ever wanted to, it wouldn’t hurt men to jump the Ship of Fools and join him on the USS Chuck Norris. But Chuck don’t care if you do, or not. Why should he? After all, when Chuck Norris does yoga, starting with sun salutations, the sun salutes him.

At the end of the day, yoga is about the self. Gird your loins and find some sunshine on the forward deck. Do your own warrior poses. Don’t worry about Chuck Norris. He’s the only man dead or alive who can divide by zero. He can take care of himself. Zero in on yourself.

Paperback Yoga

One Now at a Time

September 1, 2018 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Now matters more than anything. It is alive immediate distinct. If it wasn’t for now everything might happen at once.

Living in the now has been around for a long time, back when now was in the past, from about the time mirrors and cast iron were invented, up to the techno time of today. Everybody knew about it back then. “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly,” said Gautama Buddha more than 2500 years ago.

Nowadays the concept gets a lot of play. It has become a power phrase, meaning be aware of the moment, get out of your stream of thoughts, and make your life happen in the present. All you have to do is remember to do it amid the distractions of the modern age.

It used to be easier living in the now than it is now. Back when it was archaeological, much of life was spent in the slow lane, unlike now, when everyone is in the passing lane. Thousands of years ago everyone wasn’t always thinking about something that had happened, or might happen, or what they needed to do right now.

There wasn’t a whole lot happening, in any event.

They didn’t multi-task in the Stone Age. There was no need to disconnect because no one was connected. It was more of a single-task time. They didn’t drive fast here and there and everywhere. Ox carts and horse-drawn wagons were generally one-speed. They didn’t have to appreciate nature because there was so much of it. It was in your line of sight day and night. There was no need to take time out from the office for a nature walk.

Nonetheless, way back when, even Roman emperors, who had a lot to do, beating back barbarians and planning the next conquest, recognized the savvy of living in the now. “Man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant,” said Marcus Aurelius. “All the rest of his life is either past and gone or not yet revealed.”

Even in our own age the wisdom of living in the now has been appreciated extolled recommended. “You must live in the present, find your eternity in each moment,” said Henry David Thoreau. “Fools look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.”

In TV time Oprah Winfrey has passed sentence on the past and the future. “Living in the moment means letting go of the past and not waiting for the future,” she said. “It means living your life consciously, aware that each moment you breathe is a gift.”

When you’re killing time, time is quietly killing you. It’s time to get up stand up. It’s now or never.

The Now Generation is the Me Generation gone fast forward and spread far and wide. Before the 1960s gratification was often postponed in favor of the future. But in the blink of an eye self-sacrifice became self-fulfillment. In the 70s and 80s the immediacy of lived experience and self-gratification became the lifestyle choices of a generation.

When Nike unveiled its ‘Do It Now’ slogan in 1987 it hit a home run. Before the end of the century its business grew by more than 1000 percent. A stitch in time saves nine isn’t a rip in the space-time continuum. It’s getting 100 percent of it done now.

In the 21^st century we spend about half our time thinking about something other than what we are doing, according to a study conducted by Harvard University. The only exception is sex, when almost everyone has his and her mind on the job at hand. Very few men or women whip out their iPhones when they’re in the moment, since they’re having a ringing good time, anyway.

The benefits of living in the now are many, notwithstanding better sex. Those benefits include less worry-warting and over-thinking, fewer distractions and improved concentration, putting your focus where it counts, getting things done, and having a richer experience from a direct-felt comprehension of reality. Staying foursquare in the present helps you be more creative, more decisive, and more happy, too, since you’re not lamenting the over and done nor fretting about the future.

Yoga has been associated with living in the now for most of its history.

“There is so much power in the experience of the present moment that whole spiritual disciplines have been created solely to bring us into the now,” according to Kino MacGregor, an Ashtanga Yoga teacher and writer about the discipline. Some of yoga’s eight limbs, or precepts, can only be practiced in the moment. You have to root your consciousness in them to get anywhere.

Much of yoga practice is predicated on practicing with no judgment and no expectation. In other words, just do it. In so doing, the past and the future have nothing to do with it. Getting on a yoga mat means getting off the merry-go-round of attachment and goals.

The first thing Patanjali, the godfather of yoga, says in the Yoga Sutras is, “Now begins instruction on the practice.” He doesn’t say, never mind, we did that yesterday, or, we’ll get to that tomorrow. He says there’s no time like the right time, which is now.

“When life seems crazy and fast and full of distractions, I just remember that yoga is now,” explained Hayleigh Zachary, a Los Angeles-based teacher trainer.

It is often said yoga takes you right into the present, the only place where life exists. Don’t become attached to anything, just flow with it. The past can be depressing and the future an anxious place. Being in the now is being both in time and stepping out of time.

Sometimes we are self-absorbed and other times we are absorbed in what we are doing. When we are in mid-stream landing a big trout, steering a car through a hairpin turn, or extracting a wisdom tooth, we are absorbed in the now. There’s no thinking about checking the latest tweet about something-or-other.

Yoga used to be about spiritual realization. It has become becoming one with your body. In any case, in line with a new emphasis on living in the now it has become the pursuit of self-realization.

Athletes often describe themselves as being at their best when they are in the zone, playing in the now. “I treat every day like it’s my last day with a basketball,” said LeBron James, arguably the best basketball player of his age. “See the ball, hit the ball,” said Pete Rose, arguably the best baseball player of his age. “I never looked down the road,” said Jerry Rice, arguably the best football player of his age. “It was always about playing each and every game 100 percent.”

Being in the flow of the here-and-now means bringing a focused concentration to your game, dissociating yourself from distractions, ignoring the irrelevant. Being in the zone is like tunnel vision. Everything extraneous falls away, everything happens in slow motion, and everything you accomplish in the zone is effortless and purposeful.

You forget yourself and you become yourself, no matter that the phrase, which dates from the 1970s, came from the TV show “The Twilight Zone” and means, more-or-less, “out of this world.”

Although living in the now, savoring the experience, has its benefits, ignoring the past can have its costs. Remembering the past is a way of learning from it. It’s long been said, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. When you’re engulfed by the now, it’s hard to remember anything except right now. A life without past or future is like a tree without roots, a tree without buds in the spring. It’s like jumping off a skyscraper and on the way down to the sidewalk looking around with a happy smile, so far, so good.

But the past is disappearing fast and there ain’t no future in the trip down to the bottom of the manhole. You need eyes in the back of your head as well as the front. You’ve got to keep your eye on the prize.

In 1876 the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes ran for President of the United States against the Democrat “Centennial Sam” Tilden. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but when the votes were re-counted in Florida, the election was cast into the hands of an electoral commission, and one Republican Supreme Court justice decided the contest. “Centennial Sam” went home. “Rutherfraud” B. Hayes went to the White House.

One hundred and twenty-four years later another Democrat won the popular vote, the election was thrown into doubt by hanging chads in Florida, and the ultimate decision of who would sleep in the East Wing came down to one Republican Supreme Court justice.

If the consciousness-raising Al Gore hadn’t been so absorbed in the now of the campaign, and had heeded his history lessons, he wouldn’t today be known as the man who for a few short weeks was the next President of the United States.

Politicians of all stripes believe in the tyranny of now. Rah, rah, rah, vote for me, take it or leave it, never mind what I said ten minutes ago. The bad old days are in the past. The future isn’t promised to anyone unless we make it happen today. That’s how they get elected. However, Donald Trump’s cynical 2016 campaign demonstrated the power of applying lessons from the dark past, even though those lessons were miserable and mercenary.

The only consolation is that he will almost surely twitter his mind away and his time will pass.

The problem with living in the now is that in nothing flat it’s gone. It’s always in motion. It barely exists. One now always leads to another. If yoga is a practice of consciousness, the issue with now is that you can never be fully conscious of it. You can’t concentrate on it, be conscious of it, because it is so fleeting. The stream of consciousness on a yoga mat is one thing but following the bouncing ball of now to nowhere is another thing.

In the 19^th century American cities suffered high rates of typhoid, cholera, and yellow fever. The epidemics were especially deadly to children. Many infectious diseases were the result of unmanaged waste and dirty water. In time people got tired of living in the now. They brought the future into the present so something could be done about the past.

Nowadays Americans rarely suffer from typhoid or cholera, and never think about what now was like a hundred years ago. We don’t have to worry about anyone on the mat next to us who might have yellow fever, because someone a hundred years ago was committed to making things better for us. They weren’t satisfied with now.

Another problem with living in the now is that when we make choices in the moment without considering how they will be remembered in the future we are playing with fire.

There is a reason Jerry Rice was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2010, why LeBron James will be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, and why Pete Rose will never be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. All team sports are bound by rules and regulations. They are the accretion of years and decades. The rules are not just the officiating on the playing field. Some of them make reference to the other side of the sidelines. When Pete Rose gambled on baseball during his playing days, he gambled on the pleasures of now over the set-in-stone proscriptions against gambling.

He came up snake eyes.

Jerry Rice and LeBron James have both described themselves as students of the game. They learned their lessons from the past so that they wouldn’t have any regrets. Pete Rose, on the other hand, flaunting the past, made sure he got nothing for something, forever tarnishing his legacy.

A confounding problem with living in the now is that now goes hand in hand with the past and the future. They are not three separate entities. The nature of time doesn’t work that way. When Alice asked the White Rabbit how long forever was, he said, “Sometimes, just one second.” When someone practices yoga in the now, they are practicing a five- thousand-year-old discipline. It’s not a pop-up. It’s not going to disappear when you roll up your mat, even if you disappear. It is likely yoga will be fashioning split seconds into forever five thousand years from now.

Anybody getting into a self-driving car twenty years from now, kicking back on the way to their yoga studio, on the bridge over the river of time, will be kicking back because somebody planted the seed of the self-driving car twenty years ago.

Time has long been thought of as a river, time passing by, never recovered. It might be better, however, to think of it as spacetime, in which the past, present, and future are materially identical. They all exist on a par with each other. We are spread out in the fabric of time. The past and the future are inaccessible because now, where you are now, is in a different part of spacetime.

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow,” said Buddha a long time ago. That’s one way of putting it. “The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” said Albert Einstein not so long ago. That’s another way of putting the same thing.

Forever is made up of everybody living in the now, even though now isn’t what it used to be. There’s a lot more of it. Don’t miss out on forever. Tomorrow’s yesterday is always today. Don’t run out of time. Be here now the Big Bang the whole ball of wax in the blink of an eye.

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