Originally published in The Faster Times.
A few weeks ago, I got accepted to study yoga with Richard Freeman, a master Ashtanga instructor who I highly respect. He only trains 40 or so students a year, out of Shiva knows how many who apply. From what I can tell, the ones who receive the special rose have either been studying yoga for a long time or reveal themselves to be completely broken-down and desperate. I fall into the latter category.
I’m going to get physically worked over in the Ashtanga primary and intermediate series, learn how to chant and count in Sanskrit, read essential texts, attend anatomy labs, and absorb the basic principles of Buddhist meditation. The whole thing will last 25 days, with 200 hours of total instruction, the yoga equivalent of a Bachelor’s Degree. It won’t exactly be Spring Break. But at this point in my life, it’s exactly what I need.
Starting June 1, here I go.
Of course, this assumes that I can afford to attend the training.
The day I got my acceptance email, after excitedly hopping around my office in my yoga shorts for 15 minutes, I got to thinking about procuring funds. Freeman’s studio, the Yoga Workshop, is in Boulder, Colorado. I live in Los Angeles, against all rational judgment. So, in order to study with the master, I must temporarily move to Colorado while continuing to support my family in California. This isn’t something I can easily do on a freelance writer’s income.
I have to pay for the training, and also for whatever futon-containing room I can find in Boulder for a month. Also in the expense report: A glamorous round-trip plane ticket to Denver on Southwest Airlines. Unlike Kevin Smith, I don’t take up two seats. I’ll require a small amount of money for food. As for beer, an essential item in any experience, I’ll pay for that myself. All told, it adds up to about four grand.
This is where Kickstarter enters. Kickstarter is a web site where creative types, from painters to filmmakers, journalists to videogame designers, can raise grassroots money for their projects. People who have Kickstarter projects offer “incentives” to their “backers” at various levels, some of the incentives quite juicy. The idea is that if you have a financial stake in the creation of a project, then you’re actually, in a way, part of that project. It’s Internet democracy in action, the best of what the web has to offer. The one catch, for people who start the projects, is that if you don’t make your entire fundraising goal, then you don’t get any of the money. It’s all or nothing.
Kickstarter accepted my proposal, not because I wanted to go to yoga school, as that doesn’t necessarily qualify as an artistic project itself, but because I needed the yoga school to support a book. I have a comic yoga memoir called Stretch coming out in August. By studying intensively with a senior teacher, I intend to banish, or at least diminish, my ignorance.
Thus blessed by the company founders, I made a Kickstarter page for myself. On it, I put a mini-essay, like this one but shorter and even more pledge-drivey. I also posted a picture of me doing janu sirasana while my befuddled Boston Terrier, Hercules, gazes adorably into the camera. Then, on my laptop camera, I filmed a cheapie video where I plead my case, kick up into headstand, make a joke about being willing to stand on my head for money, come down, and plead my case some more.
Then I set a fundraising goal and “launched” my project. Thus began the process of begging people for money, nearly every day, via my Facebook page, Twitter feed, and occasional group email.
In the spirit of Kickstarter, I’ve offered incentives to my backers. On the low end, people who donate will get emailed excerpts from my book. As the pledge levels rise, I offer signed galley copies of my book, some of my wife Regina’s handmade jewelry or, for more money, one of her beautiful paintings and collages. For a thousand bucks, I’ve promised to give the eulogy at people’s funerals, assuming I’m still alive and coherent when they die. Not surprisingly, no one has given $1000.
But I did have a friend give $700, in exchange for one of Regina’s paintings. I’ve had other people give $200, so they can have the dubious privilege of taking a private yoga class with me. Others have given a buck, or five, or ten. A cousin who I’ve known since the year I was born was quite generous, and so were many total strangers. One woman donated after Googling the words “namaste motherfucker,” which I include in my Kickstarter essay, because she has a T-shirt company called Namaste Mofo. I also got a $200 donation from a new video-game magazine called Kill Screen, en lieu of payment for an article that I’m writing for them. It felt like an appropriate thing to ask, because last fall that magazine launched itself through its own Kickstarter project.
Yoga brings people together in a world that attempts, at every turn, to separate and isolate us. For me, who practices most of the time by myself at home and sometimes goes days without speaking to another human being besides my wife and son, raising money to send myself to yoga school has allowed me to feel part of some weird sort of virtual kula, or community. I’ll not soon forget the generosity, kindness, and good humor that people have donated along with their hard-earned money. It’s been a lovely experience.
In fact, I’ve now given to a couple of Kickstarter projects myself: One for a computer game designed by a cartoonist who’s work my son likes, and one for New Orleans writer Michael Patrick Welch, who’s writing a memoir about escaping Hurricane Katrina with his pet pygmy goat. In the case of the former, I just found it by poking around Kickstarter. In the case of the latter, I got an email from Michael asking for help. All I could think was, I’ve been there, pal. In fact, I’m there right now.
Yoga has turned me, a notoriously cheap bastard, into a more generous person. This is coded into yoga’s DNA: When you practice properly, you want to do good and you want to help other people who are trying to do good. I try to remember as I post my daily Facebook moan for money. Kickstarter hasn’t seen my last donation.
As of this writing, I’ve raised 88 percent of my fundraising goal. But I still have more than five hundred dollars to go, and only nine days to get there. Did I ask you for money yet? No? Well, here’s the official plea: Send me to yoga school, and win fabulous prizes!
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