It seemed pretty risky at the time, maybe more so now

As you can see in my Binghamton “hippie” journals, there was nothing brash in my decision to quit my job, go without an income or health coverage, and relocate to study and practice a yoga life fulltime.

Yoga was definitely improving my emotional, mental, and physical life.

Economically, I was marginal, living in squalor (winter in that farmhouse must have been miserable, and getting to work through the snow often an impossibility).

My job wasn’t going anywhere, anyway, and for much of the preceding year before taking up yoga, I had been deeply depressed. As a professional journalist, my income was borderline near poverty despite working weird hours and Saturdays, which did nothing to alleviate my condition.

None of the stockholders, of course, appreciated any of this.

I’m still left wondering why I set a late autumn deadline for the move.

I suspect I felt that the summer would be one to remember, and it was, bringing a period of intense self-discovery and growth. The delay also allowed me time to have a better understanding of my teacher and the community. Was I overlooking something treacherous? In the years since, we’ve seen all too many incidents of financial and sexual scandals in the Eastern spiritual communities in America. As I’ve learned in subsequent years, that was true to some degree in my ashram, especially after my residency.

Crucially, I was single and unattached, even though my love life had certainly picked up.

And so, eight months after my introduction to yoga and then the repeated trips to my guru’s ashram on a former farm in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania more than an hour south of where I was living, I packed up and resettled.

As I would discover, the most important lessons in yoga were not about the physical exercises, hatha, but in the practice of meditation, ethics, and spiritual community.

The real lessons arose as back-to-the-earth skills, along with new people skills, too. I’ve come to think of this as my Master’s degree.

The experience has been abstracted and distilled into my novel Yoga Bootcamp and its earlier version, Ashram.

For me, it was ultimately positive. I wish there was something similar for lost youth today, though I’ve never seen myself in a position to offer that, either.