Yup that’s the headline on the front page of today’s National Post.

Sugar is reported to be behind diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

According to SHAPE, the average American eats 22 teaspoons of “bad” sugar daily.

BTW all sugar is sugar but naturally occurring sugar, when consumed in moderation, is considered healthy because it’s bundled with fluids, fibre, minerals and antioxidants. SHAPE says about 17 grams of sugar can be found in every cup of cherries!

Think of what might be in your morning rice cake covered in peanut butter and topped with banana.

And you know who you are

I took a double class with my one of the best teachers at SunYoga in Oakville last night and while the first class was pretty easy even though we used weights, it was the second class where we worked on mula bandha that did it for me. Oh yeah, we were big on ujjayi (victorious) breath as well to help us power through our posses.

Sounds brutal doesn’t it? It’s not and trust me I spent a fair amount of time on my knees in deep meditative recovery posse (I just made that posse up.) while the class continued.

Now before we go any further and for the benefit of full disclosure you’re going to read and hear a lot of nonsense IMHO when it comes to yoga or any discipline involving meditation or the martial arts. Done them all and heard it all but likely didn’t understand most of it. Just being honest here So when I come across somebody who insists they know that chakras in the body exist I consider this a metaphoric description somewhere north of fairies on the lawn. It’s sort of like the third eye concept where some think (and this from Wikipedia) it’s the centre of some mystical and esoteric concept referring to the ajna (brow) chakra. Accessing your third eye brings with it mystical powers of insight. Right.

How lovely it would be if it were true. But it’s not. So let’s move on to what is actually real.

And that’s soreness from hard work from working with mula bandha which if you read the hyperlinked article comes from the Sanskrit word  ”mula” meaning root and “bandha” meaning lock or bind. What we were practicing was the engagement of the pelvic floor and bless our teacher for having the courage to show us the intimate movements that are required to engage the muscles of the pelvic region. Not all young women would be as brave in front of a room of students that included a handful of male students.

I watched Michael Stone, the amazing teacher at The Centre of Gravity, demonstrate the engagement of mula bandha by lying on his back and engaging his diaphramic and pelvic muscles. When he sucked in his gut most of the air in the room disappeared. I grew pale and women fainted (sort of). I’ve never seen anything else like this demonstration.

Meantime I’m sitting on my mula bundha and breathing deeply. The soreness will pass and the muscles will grow stronger.

Here’s a 15-minute trailer for a documentary first seen at the 2008 U.S Democratic National Convention and it’s terrific. Smart, swarmy and often silly it captures the essence of today’s modern yoga.

Let’s face it, yoga in North America is a multi-million dollar industry that’s on the edge of a Starbuck’s type expansion as mega studio start driving out the little mom and pop yoga studios. There’s talk of yoga in the Olympics someday and copyright on some yoga styles. Some folks are getting really hung up where yoga is going. Here’s clip from Q from CBC Radio One that’s all about the yoga wars.

But ultimately all that is not what yoga is about.

There’s a great line in the movie where a young woman says “when the teacher is ready, the student appears.” The student in this case was a filmmaker who had lost his sense of self after the attack on New York City. He found something in yoga that had been missing in his life and his new young teacher encouraged him to bring his film camera to retreats and other classes and thus this documentary film which seems so ordinary at first.

And then this silly funny little movie just reaches out and grabs your heart.

Unfortunately the clip ends in mid sentence and we’re left with nothing else to do than roll up our matt and go to class and breathe deeply.

* from the documentary.

It’s because yoga works. Period. Full-stop. If you want to change your life do yoga.

Yoga works whether you’re sensationally gifted and beautiful. It works whether you do it in your underwear or naked or in parka. It works regardless of other people’s issues around the physical body and beauty and grace. This video of Briohny Smyth is a gift.  It will show you what is possible in this world in a very pleasing manner to my eyes at least. It has raised some controversy among some in the so-called yoga community who are attached to controversy. That’s sad IMHO.

But let us not dwell on that.

Because yoga works when you’re old and hairy and pudgy and not as gifted and nowhere near as beautiful as Ms Smith. It works regardless of your thoughts and your judgements.

This parody video of humorist Michael A. Stusser (“the dead Guy Interviews”) is also a gift.

It’s not as pretty. It’s not as graceful. It’s not as perfect. But it’s amazing in it’s own simple way. I wish my yoga was so strong. (Ah an attachment!)

And as my most favourite yoga teacher would say: “It’s just yoga.”

BTW found this on the Daily Cup of Yoga blog. – highly recommended.

Namaste.

Kimberley was working the room really hard and we were responding as a group pretty well. There were a few moans and grunts but lots of deep breathing and tons of hip openers. And then we did frog (which is a killer and it’s a good thing I’m too old to father any children) and then into happy baby.

Yoga isn’t about straining but at my age I’m reclaiming flexibility lost over the decades so small victories like this one are to be treasured and celebrated.

It’s a video of B.C. yoga teacher Meghan Currie doing the most amazing things with her young body that an old fart my age can only view and wonder.

In the meantime, there’s some young dude in the video who setup the camera and then spent the rest of the time starring into a computer screen.

Dude! Wake up. In 40 years from now what was on the computer will be long forgotten. What is happening in front of you is timeless and unforgettable.

Meghan is my new inspiration. I’ll never be that young and agile again. I’m not likely to be that strong. But I’d like to be that brave and generous and both of those qualities are things I can control.

So it’s Tuesday morning and I’m off to a morning yoga class where getting down and up from the mat is considered a major achievement for me. Throw in some deep breathing and maybe a downward dog or two and despite the gout in my big toe (which brings new levels of awareness) and I continue this inner journey of exploration.

Oh why is youth wasted on the young?  :)

Cleaning lady is my creative day. It’s sort of a date with myself as recommended by Julia Cameron in her groundbreaking book The Artist’s Way.

Anyway I’m surfing the library shelves looking for something I can read in a couple of hours when I came across Dangerous Instints by former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole.  This is one chilling read and one I recommend to everyone. But here’s the warning: After reading this book you’ll lock your doors even during the day when you’re home alone. I do now.

Is this paranoia?

As one of my yoga teachers said last night we are responsible for our own feelings about other people. True enough but I countered with this comment: Sometimes the guy carrying a baseball bat isn’t going to team practice. My teacher said her gut instincts would save her.

According to O’Toole it’s relying on gut instinct that gets people dead.

Why?

Because the psychopath or sociopath has learned how to appear absolutely normal. By the time your gut reaction kicks in, O’Toole says it’s way too late.

 Dr. Robert Hare claims that there are 300,000 psychopaths in Canada and that would equate to 305 million in the USA. Now obviously not all these people are serial killers but they do have issues.

O’Toole says suspects in many crimes get overlooked because investigators had a gut instinct that he (or more rarely she) just couldn’t be the suspect.

If I read O’Toole correctly she looks for aberrant behaviour in individuals. For example, police were stumped during one child-abduction case. After ruling out the parents, police were at a loss and called in O’Toole. After looking at videos of the news coverage she point police to a relative who seemed to be relishing in leading the media campaign to find the child. Sure enough!

In another case where police were about to launch a massive media campaign, O’Toole suggested that a missing young woman was likely with a boy friend and not hiding at all which a few days later was found to be the case when the girl walked into the house unaware of the concern.

The take-away from O’Toole’s book is don’t trust gut instincts when you’re walking in a tough neighbourhood at night. Trust your mom. Call a cab. Same for the unexpected knock on the door. Don’t open it if you’re home alone. Period. If in doubt, call the police. But above all, keep the doors locked and don’t hitchhike kids. As for online dating: Forget about it.

Love everybody but if they cross a line (and here I mean any boundary issue that makes you wonder), lock the door.

Shot on a warm summer’s day in New York City it’s about a guy with a camera, a girl in a red dress, the city and being young (and flexible).

Remember to dance your way through today.

Here’s the young woman (Meghan Currie) in a short video that shows what’s possible when you’re young. When you come to yoga later in life such moves may not be possible. I find getting up from the matt to be a satisfactory movement for me

BTW variations of this post are going up on my photography teaching blog at www.peterwestphoto.com and my business site at The West Agency www.peterwest.ca. Ms Currie is a Canadian as evidenced by her .ca web address and her connection to a B.C. yoga studio. She’s also on Facebook.

I also found the photographer Robert Sturman.

I have several clients who should pay some attention to Currie’s online marketing work. She also appears to be connected to Lululemon 

So what makes this the best class. It comes down to three things:

Number one is the teacher. My teacher Kimberley is the best teacher I’ve ever practiced with. She’s as good as the teachers at the Toronto Yoga Centre on Yonge Street near Eglinton Ave in Toronto where I practiced regularly back in the late 80s.

So what makes Kimberley so good? She knows her yoga. She can do things I only read about in Yoga Journal. (That’s her in the photo I shot for the studio.) Even better, is she is a caring and gentle teacher who runs classes that range from as gentle as you could wish right up to Godzilla-killer workouts. This morning was just a little south of Godzilla. Lost track of how many chutugangas I did. (BTW as much this will embarrass the heck out of Kimberley, she is only one of several really good teachers at Sun Yoga.)

Number two is the studio is exceptionally well run and clean as a whistle. Don’t settle for any sloppiness when picking a studio. Before we came to Sun Yoga we asked at another studio what form of yoga they taught and the valley-girl behind the counter said “hot”. We got out of there as fast as we could.

Number three: I’ve reached a new personal plateau. My body has grown stronger over the last year. Last year at 62 and following open-heart surgery I was delighted to be able to pull my yoga shorts on by myself. But now, 13 months later, I am much stronger and the overall soreness I was experiencing is fading. In the last four days I’ve taken five classes and now I’m going for a vigorous walk. Amazingly wonderful.

Finding a great studio and wonderful teachers is a challenge.

These days anybody with a few thousand dollars to spend and 200 hours to spare can get a yoga teacher’s certificate. Thousands of people have taken these courses in the last few years. And it’s my experience that a lot of them are young women in their mid-twenties who are teaching to make a few bucks before their lives get serious with marriage, kids and maybe even a corporate career. Few of them are going to be able to make teaching yoga a lifelong career.

Why? Well figure it out.

My guess is most studios pay yoga teachers anywhere from $30 to $60 a hour to teach. When you teach yoga you’ve got to use your body. Teaching once or maybe even twice a day isn’t so hard. But where’s the money? If you teach 10 classes a week you’re making between $300 to $600 a week. Let’s pretend you teach 40 weeks per year (remember you’re still teaching part-time) you’re making $12,000 to $24,000 annually. That puts you under the poverty line. If you’re supporting a family, this is a disaster.

So if you’re a yoga teacher, what do you do?

You can’t possibly teach 50 or 60 hours a week. Even if you’re 20 and in amazing shape your body can do this much work.

So a career as a yoga teacher is a challenge. So what’s the solution?

As a solution-focused coach I’d ask a client to describe what it is they want to accomplish. We’d use a technique called the miracle question and the answer can take days to write out fully. One of the other tasks I’d assign our yoga teacher is to research who is already doing what they want to do. in other words is there another teacher already being successful in the same way? If so, then this is a person who we research, perhaps meet and maybe even work for.

My guess is the future of teaching yoga is going so sound the same as the career path in journalism. When I graduated from Humber College with a three-year certificate in Public Relations I wanted to go work at a newspaper to garner that hands-on experience. Problem was I was told that there were no jobs in journalism. I ignored the doomsayers and within six months I was working for a small city daily newspaper.

Funny thing is. Everybody who gave up looking for work as a journalist never got to work at a small city daily or become the editor of a community newspaper or the group editor for a big bunch of highly profitable trade magazines as I did. I had great fun as a journalist.

Same thing for teaching yoga. IMHO everybody who wants to teach yoga by creating a profitable career path for themselves can do it. What they need to do is learn how to run their own business as well as how to teach yoga. Few indeed will have the courage or the ability to figure this out. And that’s why some yoga teachers hire coaches

Don’t ask me. I don’t know!

But trust me there are 61,800,000 people on Google who will tell you.

Mostly this well-meaning advice is just platitudes and quick-fixes offered as a solution to the problems of life.

All in all, useless information IMHO and somewhat demeaning to adults seeking answers to real-world issues in their own lives.

So where would I start?

Perhaps it would be helpful to try and determine why a certain decision seems hard?

So how can we explore this situation?

I recommend deep breathing. Start by sitting on a couch (although I have done this in a coffee shop) preferably with someone you trust, like or love allowing you to put your feet onto their lap. So long as they have warm hands they may hold your feet (but no going above the ankles…remember this is work) and their role is listen.

If they’re really good they won’t even nod or squeeze your feet gently when they have a judgement in their own mind about what you’re saying.

They may ask questions for clarity and after you’ve had time to talk they may share where they’re at so long as there isn’t a solution implied.

At The Centre of Gravity I remember we were encouraged to share our thoughts but we were cautioned not to enter into a “dharma talk”. A dharma talk as far as I understood the caution was a story which had a embedded moral or implied teaching.

To get back to the couch, the role of the seeker is to keep breathing and occasionally report on what’s happening in the body. It’s been my experience that the body never lies. Its wisdom is centred in the heart and not the head. The reporting can include temperature sensations (I feel hot), muscle awareness (my jaw is tight), aches and pains (my back is killing me) and even the way the body is breathing (I notice I’m gasping for air.)

This meditative breathing and reporting will being awareness to the body. This bodily awareness has the effect of calming the mind and while no great insights may arise, the process has the effect of creating a more tranquil and receptive environment for thoughts to arise in the mind. These thoughts may not come immediately but it’s been my experience they will come up and then I can more easily take the next step which is right action.

And what is right action?

Reapply all the above to the question. Add a partner to hold your feet.