Becoming Yoga:
Celestial Summer Weekend at Omega

Published:
AboutTown, Winter 2010

It’s 7:45 on a Saturday morning, August 21. I am driving down Lake Drive, press pass in hand, to attend the Being Yoga 2010 Weekend Conference Retreat at the Omega Institute not far from Rhinebeck. “Celestial summer-camp,” “the business of enlightenment,” I muse. Less amused, I think that I’m too old for this, that my credentials for this article consist of one year of Jessie Montague’s Basics class at Satya Yoga in Rhinebeck and a sort of outsider’s interest in all things yogic.

This marriage of cynicism and insecurity aside, I am also aware of an old, uneasy feeling, unlike the one normally accompanying my ventures into the world of asanas and pranayama. Walking into Guest Services, I circle in on the queasy feeling surrounding me—a combination of melancholy and a vague dread similar to the one attending my first summer at sleep-away ballet camp in the Berkshires when I was 10. I dismiss the connection.

Having no particular agenda other than writing this article, my principle of course selection has been essentially to maximize exposure to the different paths taken in yoga, and to experience those teachers who, according to the 16-year-old yogini living in my house (my daughter), are yoga’s current rock stars. In that vein, my first class is, appropriately, titled “The Yoga of Liberating Love,” and is “guided” by Shiva Rea, from Malibu. Ms. Rea teaches the “sensual experience of the divine,” infused by a combination of meditation, visualization, dancing and poses (“asanas”) designed to liberate the natural, healing “alchemy of love.” Sitting in Omega’s Lake House, enveloped by the first cool late August morning after a summer of endlessly blistering days, listening to the playlist ranging from Sanskrit chants to Bessie Smith, I become quite prepared to believe that with enough shiva in my life, the world will open to me as a place of continual sensual delights. Really. Shiva Rea is a combination of blond surfer babe and mystic healer. Watching her sway and stretch, I wonder whether this isn’t really all in service of the perfect body. To which I am quite prepared to say: “So what”?

My methodology of course selection serves me well, as my next class— entitled “The Ancient Practice of Tantric Yoga,” taught by Pandit Rajmani Tigunait—could not have been more different. Where Ms. Rea is resplendent with beauty and bonding. Master Tiguanait’s class is esoteric and difficult, conceptually and also literally, since he speaks an English richly infused with his native Hindi. The class involves a series of difficult breathing exercises which, if done properly, suck the abdomen into the rib cage, making it seem to disappear. As an outsider I can report that the disciples attending his class describe this practice as transformative. As a reporter I can attest to the calm and radiance of this teacher, a man in his late 60s, and to the fact that one would have to be much more cynical than I to doubt whether he has reached a level of consciousness far superior to the doctors, college professors and lawyers that abound in my life.

I have a similar thought in Sri Dharma Mittra’s class the next morning, charmed by this impish and beautiful 70-year-old svengali who literally “stands” on his head and speaks quietly about the emptiness of the material world.

Was it also really emptiness, these initial inner smirks I felt the afternoon before as I walked into “The Wild Child of Yoga,” taught by Sharon Gannon and David Life. Even if David’s last name were not so absurdly apt, I thought, cramming my yoga mat into the small space remaining in this huge and crowded room: What’s with his long flowing hair? And why do I feel like a groupie at an outdoor rock concert? True to expectation, Life and Gannon came complete with microphone headsets and quips that flew back and forth between them, punctuated by “Yes, David,” and “Right, Sharon.” Ms. Gannon initially receded while David took center stage, leaving me to wonder whether even in this world, the man inevitably dominates. Gannon re-materialized midway through the class, however, and I found myself convinced by her humor and wisdom. While I had calculated her age to be roughly the same as mine, her body was as lithe as a young girl’s.

Gannon instructed us into a yoga twist that she suggested might cure eating disorders—“if you want it to,” she commented obscurely. Clarifying the thought, she expanded, “The world is very polite that way. It won’t help you unless you ask it to.” From my perspective, albeit twisted, this struck me as profound. During Gannon’s headstand demonstration several class members asked her to show the pose from another angle. “You know”, she said calmly, “you could move yourself.” Expanding further, she remarked, “It used to be that the student wouldn’t dream of asking the teacher to move. Now students think nothing of it.” I found Gannon’s combination of exoticism, school “marm” and sage very appealing. And, by the end of the class, when she and Life casually walked back to the podium, fiddled with their iPod, and blared Hendrix’s “Wild Thing” into the calm of the sanctuary, I was hooked.

Throughout the weekend I asked myself whether there might be a common thread among these divergent practices. As I considered this question, themes spoken within these classes came unmistakably to echo one another: the celebration of impermanence, the acceptance of death, an awareness of the present. As essential principles of Buddhism and Hinduism, I expected them here. What surprised me was the seamless way these themes were woven into these widely divergent practices, resonating somehow sensibly both in the sensual world of Shiva Rea, the minimalist, ascetic tradition of Sri Dharma Mittra, and the more idiosyncratic, playful vision of Sharon Gannon and David Life.

I considered a comment made by Jessie Montague, co-owner of Satya Yoga and the guru who taught me everything I profess to know about Downward Dog and Chaddarunga. I had interviewed Montague at Bread Alone last spring. Sitting outside, resplendently pregnant and quite literally glowing, Jessie commented that everyone who seriously undertakes the practice of yoga is in some kind of pain. Her remark intrigued me then, but seemed incongruous with the confidant woman opposite me, so comfortable and settled in her body. I mused on her comment that first day at Omega, looking for evidence of pain among the other teachers and disciples I encountered.

Walking between classes on Omega’s rainy pathways, it dawned on me that I had misunderstood Jessie’s remarks last spring. It isn’t that people who are uniquely in pain are drawn to yoga, it’s more that the people who are drawn to yoga are acutely aware of the pain of just being here, and know that embracing this fact is somehow both liberating and ecstatic.

And then it hit me: why I was drawn to this conference, why I felt such melancholy driving down Lake Drive that first early fall morning of late August, why I felt a loss akin to a feeling I had during my first summer of sleep-away camp. Just two weeks before, my husband and I had taken our daughter to begin her freshman year at college, the same institution where our older son was about to begin his final year. The irrecoverable sadness in this moment is a truism that needs no further elaboration.

I did not come to this conference consciously expecting Shiva Rea and Sharon Gannon to show me a way to continue. And while I don’t profess any measure of expertise on the subject, I can attest that my weekend at Omega gave me a glimmer of insight into a world that I hadn’t quite understood before—that the physicality of yoga practice and the mental rigors of meditation and mindfulness are all essentially about confronting human suffering and moving on—and that the people who have made a life of this practice understand this and are exalted. And, at the risk of sounding hopelessly loopy: That learning how to balance on one leg, or how to do a headstand, or a shoulder stand, or how to place your knees on your elbows while standing on your hands may somehow, in some way, lessen the human sting of watching our children walk away from us.