Major exhibit of yoga-​​related art to come to the Mall

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Get ready, Wash­ing­ton, we are about to dive deep into yoga’s his­tory over the ages.

YOGA: THE ART OF TRANSFORMATION | Freer and Sack­ler Gal­leries
Through mas­ter­pieces of Indian sculp­ture and paint­ing, Yoga: The Art of Trans­for­ma­tion explores yoga’s goals; its Hindu as well as Bud­dhist, Jain, and Sufi man­i­fes­ta­tions; its means of trans­form­ing body and con­scious­ness; and its pro­found philo­soph­i­cal foun­da­tions. The first exhi­bi­tion to present this leit­mo­tif of Indian visual cul­ture, it also exam­ines the roles that yogis and yogi­nis played in Indian soci­ety over two thou­sand years.

The DCist also has more details on the exhibit, includ­ing crowd­fund­ing, which will start on May 29. Under the aus­picies of the Smith­son­ian Insti­tute, Yoga: The Art of Trans­for­ma­tion will be opened from Octo­ber 19 to Jan­u­ary 2014.

Listmania comes to city rankings for yoga

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There is an unhealthy fas­ci­na­tion with lists on the web so the news should not be surprising.

Forbe’s has pub­lished a List of Top 10 Cities for Yoga, and Wash­ing­ton is in a tie for fourth place, in a tie with New York City. Some­how, Los Ange­les does not make the list, though you’d prob­a­bly have to divide up sub­urbs. San Diego does.

Who elected Forbe’s as the arbiter of yoga sta­tus among U.S. cities and why?

To deter­mine the top U.S. cities for yoga, we turned to data from the mar­ket­ing firm GfK MRI, which con­ducted sur­veys in 205 mar­kets last year, ask­ing par­tic­i­pants whether they prac­ticed yoga, and if so, how fre­quently and for how long.

To be fair, Alice G. Wal­ton has writ­ten mul­ti­ple arti­cles about yoga, med­i­ta­tion and neu­ro­science so we can’t ascribe her motives to the lat­est run on Lul­ule­mon stock.

The appeal of an Ashtanga practice

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Ash­tanga prac­ti­tion­ers have more options than you might think:

Wash­ing­ton Post Express Never Out Of Prac­tice: Mysore yoga classes help stu­dents advance at just the right pace - ”First-​​timers get per­sonal train­ing in a few pos­tures, start­ing with five rounds of sun salu­ta­tions, and that may be all they do. As they return to class and mas­ter that sec­tion, the instruc­tor adds on. Advanced stu­dents can com­plete the begin­ning of the series, but at some point, even peo­ple who can hook their legs around their necks need an assist, a mod­i­fi­ca­tion or a pep talk.”

A few months ago, I pointed to another arti­cle about Ash­tanga and Mysore prac­tice in the DC area.

Thanks to Don­a­van Wil­son for tip­ping me off about this arti­cle since I am “out of pocket” (mean­ing “away,” it’s jour­nal­ism jar­gon, if I remem­ber correctly.)

On leaving the OAS and CICAD

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After 15 years, my ser­vices at the Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States (OAS) and the Inter-​​American Drug Abuse Con­trol Com­mis­sion (CICAD) in Wash­ing­ton, DC, have ended.  I leave with lots of ques­tions since this change is going to be a mile­stone in my life.  After all, this job was where I lasted the longest, and it has served as scaf­fold­ing for my self-​​identity.

Each day work­ing in an inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion is both a priv­i­lege and a bless­ing, in part because the job comes with excel­lent pay, ben­e­fits, col­leagues and other perks, as well as  a chal­leng­ing mis­sion. The OAS was really the bridge that allowed me to make the tran­si­tion back to the United States from liv­ing abroad for 18 years. When I started work­ing there in 1998 as a tem­po­rary hire in the infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy divi­sion, I could feel the shift in my mind­set because I felt at home:  it had an insti­tu­tional frame­work that com­bined Latin Amer­i­can cul­ture  and social relations. In 2005, I joined CICAD (actu­ally the Exec­u­tive Sec­re­tariat of CICAD since the Com­mis­sion is actu­ally made up of mem­ber states), which is a front-​​line cat­a­lyst for drug pol­icy at a dynamic time. Technically, I was  the bilin­gual writer-​​editor for the web site, reports, pro­pos­als and other doc­u­ments, but I was really a kind of infor­ma­tion asset man­ager and insti­tu­tional memory.

Photo: portrait of Michael Smith, taken by Javier Sagredo

On my last day at the OAS. My friend Javier Sagredo snapped a shot of me.

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DC Yoga Week – starting today!

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It’s here again! Thirty seven DC yoga stu­dios are join­ing forces to encour­age peo­ple to take to the mat.

DC Yoga Week 2013 – dc com­mu­nity yoga
The DC Com­mu­nity of Yoga (DCCY) is host­ing the 8th Annual DC Yoga Week and Yoga on the Mall Mon­day, April 29 thru Sun­day, May 5.  This means par­tic­i­pat­ing stu­dios will be offer­ing FREE and $5 classes daily – all week long!

If you’ve been look­ing for an oppor­tu­nity to explore other yoga stu­dios and styles, now’s your chance because of free or low-​​cost classes. The weather should be good for Sun­day when you can catch Yoga on the Mall.

Bad Tim­ing

This week, I am at an undis­closed loca­tion on the Del­marva penin­sula, with wife, yoga mat, lap­top, note­books, and read­ing mat­ter, and will be unable to take advan­tage of dis­counted rates and open doors. I may get to DC in time for the week­end activities.

Asking a hard question about Art of Living

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I have added a new page to my Art of Liv­ing section.

Because the sec­tion tends to draw the most web traf­fic, I thought it was time to update some of its con­tent and I chose to add a page on whether the Art of Liv­ing Foun­da­tion could be con­sid­ered a reli­gious cult or sect. Cult and sect are cul­tur­ally charged words and any under­stand­ing of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and his orga­ni­za­tion will depend on your own cul­tural and reli­gious back­ground and beliefs. I will be cau­tious about pass­ing judgment.

Stairs and chairs

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About two months ago I got in the habit of climb­ing 8-​​9 flights of stairs 3-​​5 times a day in my office build­ing. Instead of using the restroom on my eighth floor, I go to the one in the base­ment via the ele­va­tor and return by the stairs. I started because I notice that I was not get­ting to the gym enough to main­tain my aer­o­bic sta­mina — and I was putting on weight. It also helps me burn off accu­mu­lated ner­vous energy from sit­ting at my key­board or the oppo­si­tion, feel­ing slug­gish because of lack of movement.

An addi­tional pay­off in my yoga prac­tice is that I can hold chair pose (Utkatasana) with­out my thighs scream­ing for mercy after 20 seconds.

From the yoga mat to the massage table and back

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I found myself in a curi­ous posi­tion over the week­end in yoga class. I was unable to sus­tain myself in a pose mod­i­fied for novices or peo­ple not used to sus­tain­ing their body weight. It should have been eas­ier for me.

Mod­i­fied side plank

The pose was side plank (Vasisthasana) — most vinyasa 1 prac­ti­tion­ers grind their teeth when they have to get into this pose from plank. In this case, the teacher decide to use me as a demo for the pose and its mod­i­fi­ca­tion, which required me to place the lower knee on the ground to sup­port my core (as illus­trated in the photo to the right). I found that I could not keep my leg directly under me and aligned in the same plane as  my body because I could not fully open up my hip. It seemed to reach a limit at about 45 degrees. It was more dif­fi­cult rest­ing on the right knee, but I also had issues with the left vari­ant. When I tried to mus­cle my way into a more open expres­sion, it was as if I butted up against bone, with no give. It actu­ally hurt.

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Catching your breath helps manage stress

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While lament­ing the dis­tor­tions that my Kin­dle Fire HD has intro­duced in my read­ing habits, I did man­aged to fin­ish a book this past week. In fact, I rec­om­mend that you buy a print copy because it comes with an audio CD that may be help­ful in get­ting the knack for a breath­ing tech­nique.

The Heal­ing Power of the Breath: Sim­ple Tech­niques to Reduce Stress and Anx­i­ety, Enhance Con­cen­tra­tion, and Bal­ance Your Emo­tionsby Doc­tors Richard P. Brown and Patri­cia L. Ger­barg (Shamb­hala, 2012) is a use­ful primer on why you should develop a breath­ing prac­tice even if you are not into yoga. It reviews the sci­en­tific research on the use of breath work in improv­ing resilience to stress as well as anx­i­ety, depres­sion, insom­nia, and trauma-​​induced emo­tions and behav­iors. Brown and Ger­barg rec­om­mend a sim­ple tech­nique that slows your breath­ing to five breaths per minute, com­bined with sim­ple visu­al­iza­tions of mov­ing energy along the spine or from the head to the soles of the feet. They call it Coher­ent Breath­ing, and it can be mod­i­fied to resem­ble the ujjayi (Darth Vader) Resis­tance Breath­ing that most yoga prac­ti­tion­ers already know. I’ve used the tech­nique to slow my mind down before going to bed or while seated on a train or wait­ing in line.

The key is to slow down the pace, and that can be harder than you’d expect. For instance, with my sudar­shan kriya prac­tice, the ten­dency is to speed up the pace and make it ener­giz­ing. After work­ing with the prac­tice for a while, you’ll catch on to the pace and it will become sec­ond nature. The slower pace makes it eas­ier to slip into a med­i­ta­tive mindset.

The CD con­tains a half dozen instruc­tional takes on breath­ing tech­niques, and then it moves into a full 15-​​minute ses­sion, plus a short body scan.

More infor­ma­tion is avail­able on their web­site. There are also some audio files of radio inter­views, pod­casts and other mate­r­ial. Addi­tional infor­ma­tion can be found at Coher­ence, which goes into sci­ence behind the technique.