The Sacred Cow

My first yoga teachers simply didn’t teach seated meditation. But that didn’t bother me. I was restless when I entered class, and always fiending for a good, hard sweat. I liked pushing my body, but the thought of being still for any lengthy period of time only agitated me. I would sit quietly and still in places that forced me to: airplanes, cubicles, cramped buses, and vaccination clinics where someone was sticking a needle in my arm to ward off some disease I might contract in some developing country. But why would I sit in silence voluntarily? That just seemed silly, not to mention b-o-r-i-n-g. Read More »»

About a month ago, I went to a class, based on a friend’s recommendation, with a teacher I had never studied with before. I rolled out my mat and sat quietly as I waited for the teacher to enter the room. When she did, she sat down in front of the class, and immediately started chatting casually with the group of 30 or so students—some of whom she obviously knew well— about a recent and quite personal experience she’d had that had really enraged her.

The story went on for a while, as I waited for the class to begin. I felt a bit uncomfortable with her incredibly chatty tone, partially because I was not “in the club”, partially because I felt weird about hearing such personal details of a stranger’s life, and partially because the lesson she was imparting was about owning one’s anger rather than practicing forgiveness. Read More »»

I didn’t come to yoga because I wanted a yoga butt. In fact, when I started practicing, I didn’t even know what a yoga butt was. (I’m still not totally sure.) That being said, my body has definitely transformed from my 10-year physical Hatha yoga practice. I’m leaner and have a faster metabolism, my muscle tone is more equally distributed, and I have greater strength. I’ve gotten older, obviously, but I get sick less frequently and have greater endurance. I like my yoga body better than my non-yoga body, and I know that I am not alone. Read More »»

At my brother’s wedding last month in New York, I mentioned to a wedding guest that I wrote about yoga for a living. “Is that a religion?” he asked. “No, no,” I answered, immediately dismissing the idea that I might be “a religion writer” and simultaneously wondering how many drinks it would take for a total lightweight like myself to forget that I was wearing three-inched heels.

I went on to explain that yoga is more of a philosophical system  than it is a religion. He tried to argue, citing some book he’d heard of, but I contended that I should know—after all, I’ve been studying the path for more than a decade, and he’s never even taken a yoga class.
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Welcome to The Sacred Cow! This is a brand new blog that I have developed in conjunction with Pranamaya to further the company’s mission of creating thoughtful and unique conversations about yoga.

If you aren’t already familiar with Pranamaya, it’s an innovative San Francisco-based company that creates one-of-a-kind media—mostly DVDs—with modern yoga masters like Sri Dharma Mittra, Paul Grilley, Sarah Powers, and Gary Kraftsow. The company was founded in 2002 by longtime friends Ian Albert and Mark Holmes to capture the teachings of these great thinkers and practitioners, and offer those teachings to the world. Read More »»