Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi. Brian Leaf

* There was no other explanation as to why a man at Georgetown would not be wearing either the 1980s-era exercise attire as described above or the requisite Georgetown men’s unofficial uniform of khaki pants, bucks, baseball cap, and tucked-in white, pink, or blue button-down shirt.

* Years later, in my studies of yoga, I learned of the bandhas, or “locks,” as they translate into English, and sure enough there was mula bandha, a practice of lifting the muscles in the pelvic floor, from pubis to rectum, as in Kegel exercises. And mula bandha, the book instructed, could be used therapeutically for, among other things, ailments of the gastrointestinal tract. So it happened that Oskar was, of course, spot-on!

Chapter 2

       Six-Packs

      All life is an experiment.

      The more experiments you make the better.

      — RALPH WALDO EMERSON, journal, November 11, 1842

      Iwanted to practice and study yoga as much as possible, so I incorporated it into my Georgetown classes in every way that I could. For philosophy class, I wrote a paper entitled “Was Plato the Founder of Yoga?” (Unlike many modern philosophers, let’s say, for example, Woody Allen, Plato believed that a sound mind requires a sound body, and in fact, the word Plato means “broad shoulders.”) And for Catholic imagination class I wrote “Did Jesus Do Yoga?” (By the way, believe it or not, he did. Maybe. There is some pretty good evidence that sometime during his “lost years,” between the ages of twelve and thirty, Jesus might just possibly have journeyed to India and Tibet and intensively studied yoga and Buddhism.)

Sophomore year of college I moved with a bunch of friends into a house way off campus. To avoid the extra round-trips to school, I took a semester off from Oskar’s yoga at Yates and found a class right around the corner from my house. This class offered a different style of yoga, called Iyengar. Until then I had not imagined that there could be different schools of yoga. I thought, “Yoga is yoga, like basketball is basketball.”*

      But I learned that Oskar taught a type of Sivananda yoga. A Sivananda yoga class includes a bit of everything: chant, breathing exercises, meditation, poses, relaxation. And if Sivananda yoga is the five-course meal, or even the buffet table of yoga, then Iyengar yoga is the curmudgeonly dietician who demands that you sit up straight while you chew.

      My Iyengar yoga class met in a junior high school gymnasium. We were supposed to bring a towel to practice on, but a towel offered little padding, and I usually forgot mine anyway, so I’d wind up practicing right on the hardwood floor. This was 1990, before the popularity of the now-ubiquitous “sticky mat” that you can purchase at Whole Foods, Target, and any gas station.^† (Okay, maybe not the gas station, but I think they’re headed there soon, along with the full line of Prana yoga wear.)

      Beyond the superficial discomfort of elbows and knees on the cold gym floor and the resulting flashbacks of elementary school dodgeball humiliations, I enjoyed the class. I missed the relaxed flow of yoga postures and the overt spirituality of Oskar’s yoga classes, but I appreciated the Iyengar teacher’s detailed instructions for the proper alignment in each posture.

      That year, I also began practicing a bit of yoga every day on my own, even when I went home to New Jersey on school breaks. (Though, in New Jersey, when someone goes into a room by himself to “meditate” and emerges thirty minutes later looking glassy-eyed and refreshed, there is all sorts of elbowing and winking, “Yes, he’s been meditating, if you know what I mean, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”)

      To connect with other yogis, I started subscribing to Yoga Journal magazine and visiting yoga centers in Washington, DC. I even sent away for a giant laminated poster of Dharma Mittra, demonstrating 908 postures. It’s fair to say that if there had been a yoga chess set in pewter, I’d have had two. I was a full-scale yoga buff.

      It was also that year that my colitis flared up again. My doctor had told me that colitis comes back at intervals and that everyone has their own period of return. It looked like mine was two years. I was devastated and flew home to New Jersey to see my doctor, get violated by three feet of rubber tubing, and start treatment.

      After a very long weekend, I returned to Georgetown armed with a pharmacy bottle of sulfasalazine pills and several six-packs of Rowasa enemas. I think I can speak definitively for all nineteen-year-old boys when I say that amid the busy schedule of studying, partying, and attempting to meet women, I had no wish to steal away into a dorm bathroom and issue myself an enema. I was no fonder of colitis, however, and so I did it several times daily, feeling quite deflated and sullied each time.

      Over the next three weeks, my symptoms persisted, even with the treatment. I began again to lose weight and become lethargic. Two years earlier Dr. Brenner had told me that when the symptoms returned they might be more difficult to control. He had even mentioned the possibility of surgery and a colostomy bag. I was sad and scared.

      The doctor had also told me that the medicine would make me temporarily sterile, but that I could go off it later in life when I wanted to have children. Even at age nineteen, when I felt as close to having children as to retiring, this side effect disturbed me. Something that made me temporarily sterile seemed a pretty harsh substance to put into my body.

      As fate would have it, though, I needed the meds for only a little longer, because the following week something unexpected and somewhat miraculous happened.

      One evening in October 1990, I noticed that my symptoms were worse on days that I had skipped yoga. And I wondered, therefore, if doing more yoga would lessen the symptoms. For me, this was a giant leap. I had never heard of a mind-body connection. I had no clue that the choices I made could affect my health. I know that sounds crazy, but I was that ignorant.

      Once I made the connection, I decided to medicate my condition with yoga. I self-medicated with four sun salutations, followed by ten minutes of deep relaxation, five times a day.

      Taking these twenty-minute yoga breaks five times every day was a huge time investment. But it felt like the right thing to do.

      I was a man on a mission. I was Rocky in Rocky IV.

      And my effort proved worthwhile.

      Because three days later my symptoms were gone.

      GONE!

      No losing weight and becoming lethargic. No medicine that made me sterile. No colostomy bag.

      I was elated.