One Thursday night last month, I taught a yoga class. It was the first in a series I’ve scheduled in L.A. leading up the monumental cultural event that will be the August publication of my yoga memoir Stretch. I figured the class, like most things yoga-related, could serve more than one function. Maybe I’d build a little audience for the book while also honing my yoga-talking and yoga-teaching skills. Essentially, it would be the yoga equivalent of an out-of-town opening.

I’d been preparing for weeks. First, I reserved the Shakti Box, a pleasant, warm, well-appointed space above the Video Hut near the corner of Vermont and Franklin. Some friends of mine had taught there. I liked the fact that it offered few frills, and also that it was very clean. Until the spring of 2009, it had been the private practice space of a nice woman named Edie, and then she decided to share the love. In addition to yoga, Edie books regular improv classes and a “Women’s Circle” at the Box, so clearly she’s open to different stuff. When I approached her with my idea for a “yoga comedy night,” she didn’t hang up on me immediately. She didn’t even hang up when I told her I was going to call the class “Club Sutra.” She offered a really reasonable rental price. Club Sutra was go.

A few weeks later, I ran into a friend who’d attended Club Sutra. “These things take time,” she said. That hurt. But the first step toward realizing you have a problem is admitting that you need help. I needed help teaching yoga.

To that end, I secured the services of my friend Julie, a good-humored, kind, no-bullshit professional yoga teacher with a few celebrity clients. She also gives classes twice a week at the Shakti Box. I came up with a theme-”The Beginner’s Mind”-and asked her to develop a 45-minute practice, plus a 15-minute cool-down, surrounding that theme. Then I chose readings from the book about my beginnings as a yogi, and I started thinking through a short and amusing lecture about the Eight Limbs of the Ashtanga system. This didn’t take me very long, so I had plenty of time to get down to what I do best. Promoting myself.

I posted on Facebook and Twitter. And then on Facebook again and Twitter again. I sent out an email to a lot of people. Also, I posted on Facebook three more times. It worked. The day before the class, a book blogger for the L.A. Times gave the class a skeptical preview write-up. I sent the link to Julie, and she wrote back, “It is ON!”

True enough, though I couldn’t quite share her excitement. I’ve had press before, and it doesn’t always lead to turnout. The post circulated, got mentioned in passing on The New Yorker’s book blog, and was retweeted here and there, but in the back of my mind, I thought, “if I had a free night in Los Angeles, would I go to a yoga class taught my a mid-list humor writer?” And then I thought, “probably not.”

*****

The class started at 7 PM. I arrived at 6:30 and played games on my Iphone until Julie showed up 15 minutes later with the keys to the space. We went upstairs, turned on some lights, modulated the temperature, and drew the shades. Soon after, Julie’s husband Eric came up the stairs. He wanted to show some support. At five minutes ’til, a woman appeared. She seemed to be in her mid-50s.

“Is this the yoga class?” she asked.

“Come on in,” I said.

“A friend of mine in Seattle read about this on Twitter and told me I had to come,” she said.

“Cool.”

“I’d never heard of you.”

“Most people haven’t.”

Spread out your mat, I said. There’s plenty of room. She hadn’t brought a mat, she said. That was fine. We had plenty of mats, too.

The four of us chatted for a while. Our mystery student had spent her whole life doing extreme sports, and now her body was ruined. She’d recently moved with a guy to L.A., and she’d been looking for some yoga. Every class she’d attended thus far had been too challenging for her, full of snobby agro-practitioners who thought they were so special.

“Well, you’re in good company here,” I said.

No one else appeared.

At 7:10, Julie said,

“You know what traffic’s like in L.A.”

“It’s hard to get people to come out to stuff,” Eric said.

“Not a problem,” I said. “I’m used to playing small rooms.”

I felt that mothy flutter in my heart that I always get at my gigs when I realize that no one else is coming. It’s very familiar to me. When it happens, I take a deep breath, say something to myself like “the show must go on,” and proceed as though I were playing to a packed house, or, in this case, yoga studio.

I read for a little while, to decent effect, and then Julie took over. We did some light seated warm-ups, and then she had the three of us stand. Julie later said that as soon as she saw our mystery guest attempt a forward bend, she threw her lesson plan out the door. Our new friend no longer had functional lumbar discs. She could barely move at the waist.

For the next 45 minutes, Eric and I were essentially on our own. We’d both already practiced that day, so it didn’t matter. Julie worked exclusively with our only student, giving her blankets and blocks and adjustments and more special treatment than anyone expects to get when coming to a yoga comedy night.

I took the floor again and spoke amusingly, our guest and Eric each asked a couple of questions that I answered more or less, Julie led us through some shoulder-stand variations, and then it was time for savasana, which I led. Then I shut up and meditated for about five minutes. It was over. Exhale. When the dimmers rose, my only student said,

“That was the best yoga experience I’ve ever had.”

“Seriously?” I said, and then, catching myself before I self-deprecated excessively, “Hey, that’s great. But it was mostly Julie.”

“We were a combo, Pollack,” Julie said.

“Seriously, though,” the woman said. “Thank you guys.”

My pleasure, lady.

As I walked back to my car, I felt a different kind of flutter, and this one wasn’t gnawing at the core. I’d helped give someone the best yoga experience of her life. That was no small matter. But if yoga teaches you anything, it’s not to become attached to such thoughts. The next time I did Club Sutra, I could easily give someone else the worst yoga experience of her life. Less likely things have happened.

"I have mixed feelings about zoos and parks, but they are such a great opportunity for teaching our kids respect for other species along with all the other fascinating stuff. Kids today grow up with all kinds of cutesy animal characters in their lives. Everything is neutered to by gentle and passive--benign. Sometimes even adults fall into thinking this way and are stunned when a mountain lion or bear attack happens in a state park or a shark attack happens at the beach. We avoid the realities of nature, and we especially avoid teaching our kids about death.

In our home, those nature movies where predators are seen eating other animals have always been welcome. My son started watching Planet Earth at age 4. Some parents thought this was horrible - too violent. But we talk to him about what's happening on the screen and in the end when I'm the one cringing as a baby elk gets eaten by a hungry pack of wolves, my son looks at me and says "it's just the circle of life, momma! Those wolves have to eat, too" And he's right!

The most recent wisdom to come out of his mouth related to this is his response to as discussion about trying to live forever. He said, "Why would anyone want to live forever?! If you lived forever then life wouldn't be so special." I hope he can remember that little nugget throughout his life. Condolences to the trainer's friends and family. I bet she died doing what she loved."

As for me, I'm grateful to have such a wise wife and wise son. And four pets that couldn't eat me if they tried.

Harper Perennial, a publisher in no way influenced by the politics of its parent corporation, presents:

Coming this summer to a bookseller either near you or on the Internet.

When I went to my first San Francisco Yoga Journal conference in 2009, I mostly found myself wandering around the Hyatt confused, frustrated, physically exhausted, and waiting for lunch. This year, I returned with a strategy, a curriculum of sorts. I’d barely do any physical yoga at all; with that, I’ve become all too familiar. Instead, I’d begin my journey into yoga’s subtler aspects, its deeper mysteries. It was time for an introduction to Tantra.

Most people, if they’ve heard of Tantra at all, would say, “Oh, yeah, that’s that thing Sting and his wife do before they fuck.” Until pretty recently, I’d have said the exact same thing. And now, though I know far less about Tantra than I do about, say, the mechanics of the NBA Draft Lottery, I’ve begun to acquaint myself with some basic facts.

The popular Western yoga form that most closely resembles traditional Tantric practice is kundalini, what with its chanting and its coiled-snake energies and all. But Tantra is actually a complex, variegated body of spiritual work that has only really begun to leach its way into contemporary yogic study. You’re more likely to find a class about paganism than one about Tantric yoga.

But at the Yoga Journal conference, which caters largely to extreme yoga weirdoes like me, Tantra can carry the day, as it seemed to this year. There were lectures in Tantric philosophy, courses on Tantric history, and intimations of larger things to come. I tuned in to some of those, and also took a class called The Art Of Tantric Meditation.

The class leader, Sally Kempton, was (and is) an extremely advanced meditation teacher, which either made it totally ironic or completely appropriate that the class took place in a thin-walled basement conference room in the middle of the convention’s noisy and crowded Yoga Marketplace. From the crackling walkie-talkies and guys who occasionally walked through the room whistling and wearing beige work shirts, I gauged that we were also directly adjacent to some sort of maintenance closet. It was noisy in there. We sat in straight-backed conference chairs, the color and consistency of old puke, and attempted to connect with the divine.

As any master teacher worth his or her cushion would, Sally Kempton told us to ignore the sounds. More accurately, she asked us to let the sounds penetrate our consciousness, notice them, meditate on them, and then let them go. The sounds were, like our breath, or bodies, our thoughts, and everything around us, part of a greater cosmic energy. I found myself somewhat distracted by the extraordinarily hot woman sitting to my left, so close that our knees were almost touching, though the distraction had less to do with the fact of her extraordinary hotness than with the fact that she kept fidgeting with her cell phone by pulling it in and out of a plastic Bakugan backpack. Why, I wondered, did this woman have such a backpack, and how could I incorporate the backpack into the Tantric idea that all physical things are really just a condensed form of “divine light”, or sound vibration? This was a difficult question that our teacher wouldn’t be able to answer, because there was no way in hell I would ask.

In any case, we did many different meditations over the course of two hours, including one where Kempton taught us an interesting technique to intensify and then expel negative emotions. Then arrived the moment of truth, the money shot, so to speak. The teacher announced that we would now do a sexual energy meditation.

In traditional Tantrism, sexual-energy rites were practiced by obscure sects as a kind of clan initiation, and had very little to do with mainstream belief. In contemporary interpretations, they’re a way for middle-aged hipsters to blend their Shiva and Shakti energies together into a series of million-dollar orgasms. What we did in that basement conference room was neither obscure nor wealth generating, but it definitely felt good.

The teacher said: Imagine something extremely sexually arousing. I initially thought of Lynda Carter, circa 1976, but that seemed like kind of a cliché, so instead I concocted a few other scenarios that I won’t share with you right now. Regardless, as she instructed, a warm feeling, almost like intense light, began to emanate from my genital center. No, it wasn’t a boner. Don’t be perverted. This was a higher sensation that transcended mere sexual pleasure.

Then she told us to take that divine feeling and move it through our bodies, starting in our toes, and then into our ankles, and then our calves, and then our legs, and then our thighs, and traveling upward through various meridians and chakras. Getting to such a place wasn’t so hard, really. I’d been meditating all morning, even all weekend, and my mind was primed. As I sat there in that shitty chair in that shitty room with its shitty carpet, a strange kind of semi-ecstasy permeated my every pore. My body began to involuntarily shudder with pleasure.

Next to me, the hot woman with the Bakugan backpack went “OHHHHHHHHHH!” Then the woman sitting next to me on the other side, in a slightly lower tone, went, “MMMMMMMMM!” Not wanting to be left out, I murmured a deep, low, “AHHHHHHHH!” The room had reached a state of Samadhi, where our individual selves had dissolved into a greater cosmic consciousness, probably fueled (though not in my case, I swear), by fantasies of having sex with George Clooney.

Then it was over, and our teacher released us into a room where entrepreneurs were selling stretchy pants and massage balls. A few hours later, after I’d gone to The Ferry Building to quite wisely invest $3.50 on a mixed “meat cone” from Boccalone, I returned to the conference to attend a lecture on the future of Tantra in the West. On the way there, I ran into the woman who’d been seated to my left.

“So, that workshop…” I said.

“Yeah, that was kinda weird,” she said, without looking me in the eye. “What’s up?”

And then she walked away, spastically and hurriedly, carrying the secrets of the Tantra in her Bakugan backpack.

I'm not going to invoke the name of a Hindu God or invent my own style of Power Vinyasa Mega Bhakti Flow (TM). I don't believe in any God, and can barely get out of bed in the morning. So, "The Hot Jew Of The Yoga Generation" it shall be.

Use it with discretion, and I will as well.

Namaste,
NP

Image courtesy of the fabulous Yogabeans!