in it. But did I believe in it strongly enough to hold resolute if he dismissed it?
I avoided him and canceled my checkups.
But, eventually, during a visit home, at the urging of my parents, I faced Dr. Brenner. I thought that in the best-case scenario he’d call me nuts, and in the worst-case scenario, well, who knows.
But instead, he nodded, “Yeah, I’ve heard that yoga can help colitis. There have even been a few studies.”
Dr. Brenner looked me right in the eye, probably for the first time. We shared a moment. I thought he had joined me, was right there with me in my zealous commitment to yoga. Another convert, ready to swap out his scrubs for sweats. And truthfully, I think he was. I think he acknowledged the possibilities, even saw for a moment the potential to rise above society’s addiction to pharmaceuticals, but then he shook his head slightly, as if waking from a daydream, made a sound like “Uunc,” blinked a few times, and seemed to forget all about it. He jotted a few indecipherable notes in my folder and left the room. I never saw him again.
This brings us, finally, to the first of our eight Keys to Happiness:
Do yoga. And if you already do yoga, do more yoga.
Yoga cured my friend Trish’s chronic and debilitating back problems. Laigne, a coworker, had always suffered from having one leg a quarter inch shorter than the other. That threw off her hips, her spine, and her gait. She could barely run. Until she started doing yoga. Now she’s strutting with ease. And, obviously, it changed my life.
So join me by doing some yoga. And if you’re new to yoga, don’t try only one class. Finding the right style of yoga is like dating. You might have to try various styles before you find the one for you. There’s a spectrum of classes, from power vinyasa, if you like a vigorous workout, to gentle restorative, if you prefer something much cushier. So try at least three different yoga styles in your area. Look for yoga centers, or check bulletin boards at the library or health food store. You can also try a Google search for “yoga class [your town].”
In the meantime, while you’re dating a few styles, you can also use appendix 1, which offers a simple yoga flow for you to practice right at home. You can record yourself reading the directions and then play them back as you practice, or if you can’t say the word buttocks without giggling, you can download a recording of me guiding the practice at www.Misadventures-of-a-Yogi.com.
Named must your fear be before banish it you can.
— JEDI MASTER YODA
After graduating from Georgetown, I moved into an apartment with my brother for one last year of living together before he got married (we had shared a room in my parents’ house since I was one). We rented an apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. From our window we could see the Statue of Liberty and all of lower Manhattan.
I took a job as a high school math teacher. I had started Georgetown four years earlier as a champion debater and future corporate attorney, but I graduated as a yogi math teacher. You already know about the debater-to-yogi transition that happened on day one of Oskar’s yoga class. The other transition, from lawyer to math teacher, happened thanks to Ricky.
The story is this. During my first year at Georgetown, my business classes were not lighting me up, igniting my creativity, or capturing my heart, and I craved those things. Many business students in my Productions and Operations Management class felt the opposite, as if they were in exactly the right place.* But not me. So I looked around for somewhere to channel my energy, and I found Georgetown’s Community Outreach Club.
The club’s mission was to help out in the urban community, and I was assigned to work at a homework center in downtown DC.
My job was technically to help kids with their homework, which sounds nice, but in reality I spent all my time trying to keep order in the room. Someone else would have been better suited to the job; I imagined a big lovable-but-strict teddy bear of a guy, like the physical therapist character who looks like Sinbad in Regarding Henry.
At the homework center, I did, however, make a nice connection with a fifth grader in the group named Ricky. So I was thrilled when Ricky’s parents asked me to tutor him outside the program. He was getting old for the group, so they offered to pay me the $35 a week that they had been paying the center if I would come to their house and tutor Ricky after school three days a week.
Ricky and his family lived in a two-room apartment in DC. Not two bedrooms, but two rooms. His mother worked as a house cleaner, and his father was a huge man with giant hands who came home from work every day in a tux. I was convinced that he was low-level muscle for a local crime boss, but I think in reality he drove a limo or maybe bussed dishes in a fancy restaurant.
Ricky was a D student and had been labeled by his school a bad kid and future drug user. They had basically written him off.
Ricky had simply been caught between two languages: his family and community spoke Spanish, but he learned English at school. No one at home was able to help him with his homework, and he felt lost in school. Who doesn’t goof off when they feel lost, frustrated, and trapped? But once he had help with his homework, Ricky worked tirelessly, and his grades soared. I actually became worried that he was caring too much — in fact, he started reminding me quite a bit of myself.
Ricky and I spent many hours together each week. Sometimes on my days off, he’d call with a homework crisis, and I’d stop by for twenty minutes or we’d work together over the phone. Some days I just stopped by for no reason, and we’d hang out.
Ricky and his family were so proud of him, and so appreciative of me. His mom and dad loved me the way only a parent can love a complete stranger who helps their child. They treated me like family. I appreciated the $35 a week, and just as much I loved the homemade paella. A home-cooked meal is priceless to a college student on a meal plan, and even more priceless to a college student on the daily ramen noodles and mac ’n’ cheese of a non–meal plan.
Here’s how much Ricky’s mom loved me: She regularly committed for me the unpardonable sin of cooking paella without pork or beef, and without even understanding why this was necessary. She just went on faith. She’d cook their paella on the traditional paella pan that covers four burners, and on a very sad and lonely electric chafing dish she’d cook my anemic meat-free paella.
My vegetarian desires vexed Ricky’s mom to no end, but she simply acquiesced. The pork she easily wrote off to my religion (“Oh, es Judeo.”) — I believe that I was the first red-blooded, curly-haired, prominent-nosed, honest-to-goodness Jew to enter their home. Ricky’s dad once reassured me, “My boss is Whooish, and he’s very nice too.”
So while Ricky’s mom could rationalize my pork ban, she had absolutely no context for understanding my beef abstinence. I think she really worried about me.
The language and culture gap between Ricky’s parents and me caused many funny blips. One day I had a cold, and Ricky’s mom kept
