I’m pleased to say that my own practice improved by leaps and bounds last year. It really began with my first week with Kofi Busia in summer 2008. Add to my Omega pilgrimages the combination of more frequent practice (inspired by regular emails from a group of yogi friends) and tough weekly classes with John Schumacher, and I find my body changing in ways I wasn’t sure were possible. I’m doubtless due for a plateau here soon, but have been enjoying the thrill of new strength and depth in my asana practice.

I find new depths in my philosophical outlook, too. The past two years have brought several deaths in my family and among the families of my friends. I lean on yoga more than ever for a sense of connectedness and calm in facing the impermanence of all things.

The sign at the gas station on the corner was blown clean off its foundation by this week's winds

The past week we’ve had shockingly fierce winds here in Washington. This morning I saw the sign marking a gas station on the corner of my street had been blown clean off its foundation. I am wondering if this marks some kind of omen for the year to come?

Madison Square in NYC

Back to work this week, after a grand holiday season. Christmas was quiet and very enjoyable after a busy, busy fall. New Year’s was even better, with me tagging along as happy arm candy while Mark worked as producer and director of NPR’s New Year’s Eve broadcast, Toast of the Nation.

I’ve been to New York several Januaries now. (This was not Mark’s first New Year’s broadcast). Yet I’m always surprised how cold the city can be, temperature-wise. The people I find quite warm. I think sometimes New Yorkers have the reputation for being harsh and unfriendly, it’s not true at all. They’re fast-moving, but quite open with visitors. I still can’t get over how much more livable the city seems nowadays than in the 1980s when I first began visiting. Back then I remember running around on the upper west side, near Riverside Drive. The apartment buildings were grand and gracious, but many cars parked on the street bore signs saying, “No Radio In This Car.” I haven’t seen anything like that in years.

I had to trek through the Times Square subway station on New Year’s Eve, but it was a controlled bustle. Tons of city and transit police out keeping a jaded eye on things. Wind chills were in the teens that night– I thought the folks on their way to stand in the cold out at Times Square were insane. I was on my way to the nice cozy club where the broadcast was hailing from: The Mingus Big Band, live at The Jazz Standard. I felt like I was truly where it was at that night. Poor Mark, meanwhile, was out in a drafty sound truck parked in front of the club, directing the show with voices from NPR in Washington filling in his ears. He promptly came down with a nasty cold once we got home!

A highlight of my trip was a visit to the Iyengar Yoga Institute of New York. The studio is a lovely, airy space up on the eleventh floor of a building in Chelsea. I was there on a clear windy day and enjoyed a class with one of their senior teachers, Bobbie Clennell. She taught a restorative class for Level III students that was a revelation to me. I’d never taken a restorative class that wasn’t also a gentle class, suitable for beginners. We did a lot of intense supported backbends that had a tremendous opening effect on my shoulders and chest. I have immediately introduced several of them into my home practice. Another pose was supported headstand using the rope wall in the studio. We hung with our hips supported by the ropes for more than five minutes so our heads were in mid-air. Exhilarating!

Now it’s back to my quiet mat at home. No rope wall, but I’m content. I have a quiet space with an open wall, and I make my own steady progress. I had a list of goals for my practice in 2008 that were mostly met. Time to make new plans now that it’s 2009.

This came along at just the right time for me. I was feeling kind of burned out after a six-month stint of teaching five classes a week. Because I was pouring so much energy into my classes, I was really neglecting my own personal practice. To have the luxury of a full week where I had nothing else to do but work on my own form and strength was heavenly. My great friends Fritz and Donna joined me to carpool up together and we had a ball, hanging together like the three musketeers the whole week.

The teacher was Kofi Busia, a yogi I admire tremendously. I wrote about him with enthusiasm last year after meeting him for the first time. Fritz and I had planned ever since that time to try to go to one of his longer workshops as soon as we could.  I love his teaching because he’s not only extremely knowledgeable about yoga asana and a million other topics (music, sports, physiology, you name it). He’s also a really warm human being. Sadly, that can’t be said about all well-known yogis. They tend to be intense, serious people and not always the kindest or most approachable. Kofi believes that yoga should make us better people, not just bendier people. It’s so typical that his website has no photos of himself, only of his teacher, BKS Iyengar.

The Omega Institute is like summer camp for grownups. It’s a little slice of new age heaven, with locally grown vegetarian food. It’s in the upper Hudson River valley just east of the Catskill Mountains. While forty of us were there for the yoga workshop, other visitors there for topics like Buddhist meditation, watercolor painting, songwriting, shamanism and “past life regression”. One afternoon the whole yoga class burst out laughing as we heard the most bloodcurdling screams coming from the past life workshop. (I don’t know if I’d want to know about my past lives!)

My practice has been tremendously influenced by that one week. It may be some time before all the ways it has affected me become clear.

The outset of the book is heavy going, as Gilbert describes crying oceans of tears and spending night after night in misery on a series of bathroom floors. But she won me over completely once she and the book arrived in Italy. She gives herself over to food and the pleasures of daily life, including the beautiful Italian language. Her description of being charmed by the florid profanity and histrionics at a Roman soccer game conveys her affection for Italy, and is itself completely charming. It is an abrupt change to follow her to a yoga ashram in India, living a life of austerity and prayer. Her new regimen includes five hours daily of scrubbing floors, a vegetarian diet, and daily wake-up calls at 3:30AM for prayer. But her search for an experience of God over four months of prayer and meditation is rewarded with a true glimpse of the transcendent. The final stage of her journey, in Bali, is embodied by a voice that’s clearly older and wiser than the desperate woman who began the story.

As with most memoir, the question for the reader is can you sympathize with (or in some cases, stomach) the complaints of the writer. In re-reading the negative reviews, it seems many critics couldn’t relate to her troubles or her goals. Before diving into the book, I had my own concerns about whether it would be my cup of tea. In the past I haven’t been a big fan of the hits of modern memoir. Excerpts I’ve read from books like “Prozac Nation” or “Running with Scissors” have left me cold. I feel little besides impatience with what seems to me to be endless navel gazing, wallowing in sad childhoods and victim psychology. This book, however, sucked me in immediately. Gilbert has an entertaining voice, able to cover her early mid-life crisis with a touch that’s doesn’t minimize her pain, but is light enough that she avoids taking herself altogether seriously. And she’s genuinely working to try to improve herself, to find happiness and to make her life better. Again and again, her wit and irreverence kept the book from being sappy or tiresome. I was happy for the hard-won equanimity she found, and enjoyed sharing the voyage with her.

Thanks, Kim, for giving this one to me!

I’ve set up a couple of music mixes that I play on my iPod during class, and have posted three of them on the iTunes website. Here’s the first one I thought might interest my readers:

This blog, of course, owes its name to the mulberry in front of my house. (See “Why Mulberry Jam?”) The masthead on this page is a photo of the tree in autumn. This fall my mulberry faithfully turned its usual spectacular shade of gold. You would laugh if you saw my photo library because it has WAY too many pictures of this tree. Every year I can’t resist taking another series of shots trying to capture the evanescent beauty of the turning leaves.

As it happens, this year we’ve had a very warm fall, with only a few light frosts all the way up through mid-November. As a result, the leaves have hung on much later than normal. Up until Saturday the mulberry held all its leaves, hovering protectively over the house and lighting up the whole street with the brilliance of their yellow color.

Finally on Sunday morning we woke up to a heavy frost with temperatures well below freezing. A light coating of silver lay over everything. From my kitchen window I looked out and saw the morning sun beginning to strike the tree. And then it started. As the sun warmed the leaves that were made heavy by their coating of frost, they began to fall. At first just a few here and there, but in a few minutes, the tree was creating a rain of golden heart-shaped leaves. There was no breeze, so the leaves fell straight down to the ground, fluttering gently and turning over in the sunlight on their way.

I ran out in my bathrobe and stood beneath the tree. The sound was incredible on a quiet Sunday morning. Without the usual sounds of traffic I could clearly hear the leathery rustle of the leaves as they fell past their fellows and landed gently on the ground. I was surrounded by bright fluttering coins that brushed my head and shoulders as they fell. I ran back in for my camera and attempted to capture the image.

There is no word in English to describe that feeling of mingled joy and sadness at the beauty of fleeting experience. The Japanese have the concept of “mono no aware,” or the sadness of things. It’s very much connected to a Buddhist sense of the brevity of life and the transience of beauty, summed up in the old Japanese phrase “swirling petals, falling leaves.” It’s partly that spirit that encourages the entire nation to turn out for cherry blossom viewing or hanami, during the brief days when the sakura are in flower.

On Sunday morning, the rain of leaves continued, until within an hour the tree was almost completely bare. By afternoon on the same day the formerly brilliant leaves had faded to a dull brown that thickly carpeted our front walk and yard. Now the tree stands with naked branches, waiting for spring.

I think most people recognize that mental stress and tension definitely affect the body. Iyengar wrote “While yoga may begin with the cult of the body, it leads toward the cultivation of our consciousness. As we cultivate our mind, we are able to avoid the stress that would otherwise lodge itself in our body, causing disease and suffering.” (Light on Life, B.K.S. Iyengar.) I know that some of the worst illnesses in my life have definitely had a relationship to the stress in my daily life. Mind you, I don’t think this relationship always applies to things like simple colds. Sometimes you just get exposed to people with infectious conditions. But I do believe that when the soul is sick, the body is likely to be also.

What I think we are less likely to remember is that the reverse relationship also applies: the stress of the body affects the mind. I remember reading a report on a small study where women with serious depression were given Botox injections. The Botox was not used in this case for cosmetic purposes but to relax their habitual sad and frowning facial expressions. Shortly thereafter, the women reported a dramatic improvement in their moods and a lifting of their depression symptoms. (See articles that appeared in the Washington Post and FoxNews among other places.)

This study was far from scientific, being much too small and with limited follow-up on the women. But I found it very thought provoking. Why do we so often act as though the body-mind link communicates only one way, from mind to body? We know that a rough day at the job engenders headaches and tight shoulders. Why should we doubt that holding the body with poor posture or habitual imbalances or an angry facial expression can also negatively affect both mind and spirit?

Have you ever seen photographs of Tibetan Buddhist monks? One thing that always strikes me is how pleasant they look. Many of them have faces of such kindness and warmth you can’t help but feel they’d be wonderful people to know. I believe it has to be related to the kind of meditation they habitually practice, of meditating with compassion for the world and all its problems. Doing that kind of spiritual work day after day has to make itself felt in the body and especially in the face. Or perhaps because they habitually smile and look kindly their spirits naturally become more compassionate as a result. The outside and the inside are one and the same.

Kofi Busia is the teacher of my teacher’s teacher. He was a senior student to Iyengar himself for many years, but is quick to say he’s not a typical Iyengar-style teacher. He has never been certified by any organization, but when you meet him you quickly realize you’re in the presence of a bona fide master. During the course of a three hour class, his deep knowledge, on subjects ranging far beyond yoga asana,was awe inspiring. Well, I was certainly awed. Mr. Busia is African, and he teaches through story-telling. He talked about everything from Ayurvedic body types, to the origins of the Spiritualist movement in America, to how lions hunt their prey (as contrasted with how tigers and leopards hunt). All this plus his insightful teachings about asana have given me teaching material and work for my own personal practice.

Especially since I was disappointed in my efforts to go away for a yoga intensive this summer, I was happy to get to do some advanced work with a new teacher, even on a smaller scale. (See “Switching Gears.”) I sincerely hope I have the opportunity to study with Mr. Busia again soon.