WE JAM ECONO

The history lesson.  Is it necessary?  I mean, Be Here Now, right?

My first exposure to yoga practice was when living in Berlin in 1994.  I was doing a little bit of English conversation, some for money, some for trade.  A yoga teacher traded me conversation and I went to her yoga classes.  Ok, I got by just fine in German, but there's a big difference between "where's the bathroom?" and "lift and spread your upper, inner arm bones" when it comes to foreign language vocabulary.  It was kind of a crack up, me, the young bike messenger, in a little studio in west Berlin doing physical imitations of people practicing yoga and then sitting around with the teacher for an hour correcting her (really pretty horrible if I recall correctly) English.

Then, fast forward about 5 years, and perhaps you've heard this story before.  Boy meets girl, girl drags boy to Bikram Yoga class.  I was a bicycle racer at the time.  I had heard Mike Sayers say he did Bikram in the off season.  Mike Sayers raced professionally, mostly on domestic teams, and was based in Santa Rosa.  (You probably haven't heard of him.  Domestic pros jam econo.)  But when a professional bike racer says "I practice yoga," an aspiring amateur listens. 

Then a couple of years later I burnt out hard on the bike racing.  Leesville Gap Road Race, 2001.  Overraced and experiencing bad allergies I got dropped on the main climb, and while toiling away for the next 40-ish miles to the finish there was a revelation:  You don't have to suffer like this.  I didn't know it at the time but that was it for road racing.

Pretty quickly I turned a corner and started going to a nearby yoga studio.  I figured it was a practice that I could grow into and do for the rest of my life.  And after being a bike racer, giving 90 minutes of my day to a yoga class was really nothing.  Most racers at the level I was at will easily log 10-15 hours of riding during the race season, and that's when you're doing races every weekend.  Over the winter you may ramp up to at least 20 or even 30 hours/week.  90 minutes a day: no prob, bob.

That last road race was on July 1, and by September I was enrolled at the teacher training at the Yoga Source in north Berkeley.  That's also a story you may have heard before: the student who dives head first into yoga, starts practicing at the closest studio to their house, and without ever going to another studio commits to a 200 hour teacher training.  This is probably less common now in the inner bay area since most people have 3 or 4 yoga studios near their house.  The main teacher was Jazz Poitier and there were a handful of other teachers.  One of the more notable was Chris Hoskins.  You should check him out; he teaches at his own little space called Studio Yoga 6 in Berkeley.  Sure, I could say in hindsight I wish I would have practiced for a few years so I would have understood what I was doing more, but I also can't say that doing a training that quickly has been a disservice to me.  Jazz was an intense and talented teacher and it got me going to this place I'm at today.  No complaints.

But while I was too much of a n00b to understand a bigger picture of yoga and asana I was exposed to a lot of different teachers and then began exploring on my own.  Weekends with John Friend and Ana Forrest, checking out some of the deep, rich resources around the bay like (then bay area resident) Rod Yee or Richard Rosen.  And I ended up spending a lot of time in Alice Joanou's classes when she taught at 7th Heaven.  If you haven't been to Alice, she has her own studio in Oakland called Loka Yoga.  Alice jams econo.