bad yogi

I'm the one sitting on the lap of my Dad, the Texas oilman, out-
side our trailer. My Dad is six foot seven inches tall.




I haven't done any pranayama, breath work, since my recent illness. But when I do, the unimpeded flow of air into every corner of my lungs is a gift.

The asanas or poses which we usually think of as yoga are actually just one of yoga's eight limbs. Pranayama, for example, is a limb of equal importance. Imagine spending as much time on breathing as on poses...

Today I inhale into fully emptied lungs in three waves of expansion, without retention between them. Exhalation is unimpeded. In between, normal breaths.

I have done more complicated forms of breath work: ujayi, viloma, digital pranayama. But perhaps because I have strayed into advanced-level and teacher-training classes directly from a long tenure in therapeutics (for injured people), I have a great many complicated ideas about breathing but no clear path for the intermediate future. Clearly, I need a teacher, especially if I am ever to be a teacher. At the same time, I know that the best teachers turn one back to oneself, to time alone on the mat.

This, then, is Bad Yogi: out of illness and injury, the movement forward. The quest for knowledge. To the mat I bring decades of (possibly ephemeral) Western fitness training, nineteen years of Anderson Method stretching, a long acquaintance with injury, the four years of practice in this tradition of yoga (mostly in therapeutics) with its tale of grudging redemption, more philosophy than you could shake a downward-facing stick at, a desire for transcendence, and the occasional child and cat.

What this tradition is, and what the particulars of its grudging redemption have been and will be, is the theme of Bad Yogi.