I picked up this book yesterday for $9.95: Beyond Power Yoga by Beryl Bender Bircher, whose 1995 book “Power Yoga” named the genre.

Another book that I bought at an earlier sale and have found very useful is this one: Yoga and Pilates for Everyone, multiple authors. It has 1500 source photos in it, and has comprehensive sections on Iyengar Yoga, Pilates, Yoga Therapy (asanas grouped by ailments), Yoga in Pregnancy, and Childrens Yoga.

The most useful section for me so far has been Jonathan Monks‘ section on Yoga - Pilates fusion, especially his introductory body awareness / postural alignment stuff.

This and the alignment focus of my Iyengar classes has been helping me a lot in my power classes.

Speaking of which, check out this CBS 60 minutes report on Bikram: Bikram on CBS (.mov, 28 MB).

Evil is the new good…

Here are some more resources on Bikram to help you get a fix on the phenomenon:

• Bikram Update- A blog entry by a Bikram student that highlights some of the advantages, including the fixed sequence.
• Bend It Like Bikram - A short article from Yahoo! India.
• Helter Swelter - featured quote: “Many people don’t know this, but Bikram yoga is actually the black sheep of yoga practices. Whenever I find myself sipping chai and chatting with a group of yogis, as soon as I confess my love for Bikram, the conversation pauses, as if I’ve just told a group of Christians that, funnily enough, satanism has me feeling better than I’ve felt in years.” (ha! )
• Bend It Like Bikram - The Guardian Observer (UK)’s expose on Bikram.
• The Money Pose - People either love this guy or hate him…
• New twist to yoga positions as guru sues - Bikram copyrights his sequence.
• Open Source Yoga Unity - The left-wing hippie organization that formed to oppose Bikram’s copyright claims.
• Yoga Suit Settlement Beggars Open Source Ideals - “OSYU’s apparently altruistic act of draping itself with the mantel of the open source movement now seems crafty and disingenuous. The true state of matters has emerged and it’s just business as usual. The OSYU is just another set of pragmatic business people who cut the best deal they could for themselves. When it was time to reach a settlement, openness was the first casualty.” Oh dear… I guess they weren’t such left-wing hippies after all
• Wikipedia on Bikram Yoga, and Bikram Choudhury himself.

Check out this book - The Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga.

Bill asked about the yoga teacher training that I’m doing.

I’m 6 weeks into a 2 year Yoga Teachers Association Australia (YTAA) approved teacher training course being taught by Kate Pell at West End Yoga.

In this first term the course consists of a 2 hour lead practice session on Monday at 6 am, a 2 hour “Alignment in Practice” class on Wednesday at 6 am, 2 hours on Thursday night for Anatomy and Physiology, and for the first five weeks of the term, 3 hours on Friday night for Yogic Philosophy.

In addition there are three home practices a week of 2 hours (6 hours home practice), and we’ve already done 1 weekend workshop of 12 hours.

I’ve struggled with the home practice, with the other responsibilities I have - my present job with its irregular schedule, my son Prahlad, the Sunday Feast, and the members of the Atma Yoga core community.

I talked with Kate about it yesterday morning after the Alignment class, and she was understanding, supportive, and encouraging. “You guys have a strong bhakti yoga practice, so you don’t have to worry too much about that,” she said. “There are times in life when it’s easy, and other times when it won’t be so easy. Try to block out 1 hour a week to do a home practice, and then when you’ve done that hour you might just decide to stretch it out another half hour”.

This is the Nike Yoga mat that I’m currently using. I’ve tried three different mats so far - a 4 mm “sticky” mat and a 6 mm studio mat from Iyogaprops.com.au, and most recently this little puppy, which I picked up at Rebel Sports.

I initially got a green one, but I handed that on to Zoe when one of the other students on the yoga teachers training course, Ann, gave me her grey one, which is a little more subdued color-wise. I gave Ann and her partner Russell, who is also on the yoga teacher journey, a copy of Bhagavad As It is - the rice paper one with everything that the deluxe edition has (minus the color plates) as well as a “index of verses quoted”.

The Nike mat is thinner than a 4 mm sticky mat, and doesn’t have as much cushioning. It is lighter and less bulky as a result. It is a sandwich construction with two layers, giving it two sides which are a darker and lighter tone, and have different grip characteristics. I found this mat to have superior grip over the sticky mat. My studio mat, which is too heavy to take anywhere (hence the name “studio mat”) has a comparable grip.

The Nike mat comes with its own carry string, which has a loop at each end with a toggle, which allows you to loosen or tighten the loop to hold the mat rolled up, and sling it over your shoulder.

Another feature of this mat is a stitched centerline, which you can dimly see in the picture below. With this stitched centerline, which is dark on the light side and light on the dark side, it makes it a lot easier to align standing postures. In wide stance poses such as Virabhadrasana, the warrior poses, it’s easy to align the forward and back feet along the mat using the centerline. In poses such as tadasana it makes it easy to align your feet parallel to something, and you can be certain that you’re centered on your mat in all poses.

I definitely recommend this mat.

Pros:

• Good grip
• Two different surfaces with varying grip
• Light and compact
• Comes with carry drawstring
• Centerline stitching for superior alignment
• Feeling of leetness and technological empowerment

Cons:

• Has a cool Nike logo on it, so all the more “spiritual” yoga hippies think you’re a sell-out.

Cost: AUD $26.00 - AUD $39.95 / USD $20.00 from Amazon

It hit just after lunch. I had the day off work yesterday, so we took the opportunity to go to Murari Caitanya and Sukadeva’s new restaurant, Gopals, over in Sherwood. The prasadam (food) there is wonderfully light and tasty. It’s very sattvic - clear and clean.

I had the main course (menu in Spanish) - a plate of rice, subji (”vegetable curry” in common parlance), kofta (deep fried vegetable nuggets), fresh garden salad, and a bowl of halava (sweet) with custard.

That was fine, until Murari Caitanya’s wife brought us out a generous helping of her wonderful apple pie, and Murari Caitanya Prabhu poured custard over it.

After that I felt that I’d overeaten, and Param and I both commented that now would be a good time to take a nap. About 10 minutes later it hit me like a train.

I don’t think the lunch was the cause - more the trigger - it probably had more to do with the two day intensive yoga workshop we just did on the weekend. One day of partner yoga / bodywork, and one day of Okido dynamic Zen Yoga. You can check out a video of Okido yoga here. It’s very dojo-influenced, and Dr Oki would challenge the Westerners to be more group conscious and the Asians to be more individualistic to encourage them to become conscious of their cultural conditioning.

The Okido yoga brought back a lot of memories of my Aikido training while in Grammar school, including a part of the Okido workshop where I was supposed to escape from two guys who were hanging off my arms (of course I did it!). I might look around for an Aikido dojo here in Brisbane to take Prahlad to (thanks Google - there’s one in Westend near the West End Yoga Studio, and it’s the same school that my earlier training was in - Yoshinkai). I did some more training in Peru, as there was a dojo a few minutes away from the temple. The late night training times didn’t do it for me though, and I haven’t done anything since I got back to Australia.

If two six-hour days weren’t enough, after the Sunday feast that night we had our Monday morning led practice class, two hours from 6 am. You’d think that Kate would give us a restorative class - but no, she poured it on like Murari Caitanya pouring custard onto apple pie. Asanas that I’ve seen but never tried, and some I’ve never even heard of.

If you saw the Yo-Gah! video that Madhava Ghosh pointed out a few weeks back, I was like Jerry during the sun salutation sequence. It was ridiculous.

Anway, it all came back on me that afternoon, and I crashed like an Al-Qaeda Airways 747. First of all I lay down in the driver’s seat in the car, reclined back. Then I crawled into the back while Param drove, and lay on the back seat. Then when we got home, I stayed in the car on the back seat for an hour and a half before I managed to stagger inside where I collapsed on the floor for another hour and a half.

I’ve got another 4 and a half weeks of this in this term, and another 54 weeks until we’ve completed the teacher training. It’s going to be interesting to see how I come out at the end of this.

In other news we found a place for our retreat. After going out to the Samford Valley and generally putting the word out to the universe that we needed a place, the Lord within the heart made the arrangements for a flyer for a Brahma Kumaris retreat to manifest at the restaurant with the address of the Theosophical Society’s retreat center at Springbrook, on the way out to the coast.

I shot them an email last night to find out the details of hiring the place out. We are so totally there.

Part of my yoga teachers training course involves a three hour class each week on Yogic Philosophy. It’s taught by Dr. Tamara Ditrich, who lectures in Sanskrit at the University of Queensland. Her students have included His Grace Svayambhu prabhu and His Holiness Prabhavishnu Swami.

It’s an intense, interesting,and enjoyable experience. Last Friday two of the five of us doing the course went along. Others went to the Nrsimha caturdasi festival at the temple and manned the Atma Yoga program.

The processing of the information that is presented in this course is very good for my conception of Krishna Consciousness. I like to be conscious and intentional about what I’m doing. As Krishna das Kaviraja mentions in his Sri Caitanya Caritamrita, discussing things in this way helps to strengthen one’s faith. I am familiar with all the elements - the facts, the figures, the ideas, the personalities, that are being presented, and what I am really enjoying is integrating the meta-narrative that Tamara weaves them into.

Here is something very interesting that H.H. Tripurari Swami wrote:

In our daily life we should test the metal of our faith in God with the fire of reason. If it starts to melt, we should withdraw to spiritual practice and saintly association - the company of men and women of faith. If it is strengthened through the fire of reason, this faith is no longer tender (komala), and such firm faith will fuel our spiritual practice, and more, it will grant us entrance into spiritual life and enable us to fuel the practice of others.

I am going to write about the material that is being presented, especially the meta-narrative - you can read about all the elements in Srila Prabhupada’s books, but how they fit together is something else - and about my processing and integration of this presentation into my conception.

This is the activity of the madhyama-adhikari stage - the integration of reason with faith. Kanistha adhikari means something like a religious fanatic (outsiders will consider this person to be a bit “dogmatic”). Reason and critical deliberation is unimportant and even suspect. In the madhyama-adhikari stage reason comes more to the forefront. At this point, almost perversely, a practitioner becomes susceptible to doubt and even conversion, if they are not solid in their practice, as mentioned above. In the uttama-adhikari stage, beyond this, reason again retires.

An example of this:

Reporter: “What would you do if you found out tomorrow that Krishna wasn’t God?”

Srila Prabhupada (smiling broadly): “I would do the same thing, because I am happy.”

That is the realization of the Uttama-adhikari - topmost faith - beyond reason, and based on experience. Pratyaksvagamam - direct perception of the self.

Let me first of all talk about the weakness of a purely academic approach to understanding the information and constructing a meta-narrative.

The western ideal of study is to be the impassive, immutable “objective observer” who is neither involved in nor modified by the material they are studying. In this model you try to explain everything from a supposedly neutral point of view, which is in fact whatever subjective state of consciousness you possess, with all its assumptions, preconceptions, and limitations. You try to explain the tradition, and end up in many cases explaining it away.

The idea of the tradition, on the other hand, is not to understand it from your present point of view. The approach to the tradition recommended by the tradition itself is not to try to explain the tradition, but to try to experience it. You do not fit it within your frame of reference, you fit yourself within its frame of reference, and see where that takes you. The goal is not to explain it away, transforming it with the power of reason to make it fit where you are at and what you are all about, but rather to experience it and be transformed by it. You cannot taste the honey by analyzing it and licking the outside of the bottle - you have to dive in.

If I didn’t have a few years of trying to chant the Hare Krishna mantra and do service to my Guru and his mission behind me, then I might be negatively affected by the presentation I am hearing. That effect would be to reduce it to intellectually interesting information which doesn’t translate into a transformative practice. However, after having directly experienced the transformative power of the process and studied the teachings for some time, I’m in a better position to explain the meta-narrative from the perspective of our own meta-narrative, assimilating the presentation into the frame of reference of the tradition.

If you find the processing I do on the information disturbing then please don’t read the articles that I’m going to write about it. The madhyama-adhikari platform is characterized by contention and dispute, but I’m not so much inclined toward debate. I’m happy to share my processing of this information for others who may come across it and wonder how to integrate it with their faith. I’m not trying to promote it as a doctrine, however, but just as my processing of the information. There are many ways to peel a mango, many points of view and valid ways of explaining the same thing in a way that arrives at the same essential conclusion.

I’ve added a new category “Yoga Teacher Training” for recording my experiences on my Yoga Teacher Training Course.

Updated the Atma Yoga website with our Winter timetable. Organizing that has been taking a lot of time and energy.

5 of us started the Yoga teacher training course this morning at 6 am.

Latest Fedora Reloaded Podcast clocked over 1000 downloads from our site, and was picked up by Red Hat Magazine. I’m going to do a KC one in the same style post haste.

Still very busy. More news later…