Tag: Yoga

Ten pioneering leaders in American yoga

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I took up yoga in the early 1970s, it was still pretty exotic. In fact, a fair question would ask if yoga was mostly happening in New York. That was my impression from the ads in the weekly Village Voice newspaper, which listed many visiting teachers from Asia, especially.

Not all of the teachers were exactly kosher, either.

The model of the maverick guru was Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural cartoon, inspired by the Sufi and Zen Buddhist Samuel Lewis, but my own teacher, Swami Lakshmy Devi in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania, and Swami Rudrananda at Big Indian in New York’s Catskills, would also fit much of what I describe in my novel Yoga Bootcamp. All three were born in America.

Here are ten more teachers who advanced yoga’s popularity in that era:

  1. Richard Hittleman, New York, beginning in the 1950s. Hatha exercises.
  2. Walt and Magana Baptiste in San Francisco, early ’50s. Hatha exercises.
  3. Swami Vishnudevananda, arriving in 1958, San Francisco, a student of Swami Sivananda in the Himalayas. While emphasizing hatha, he also advanced other aspects of yoga, including meditation. My teacher was trained at Visnu’s Manhattan center. The network now headquartered in Montreal.
  4. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Transcendental Meditation in the early ’60s. With the Beatles and others as celebrity followers, his emphasis on teaching meditation rather than the physical exercises became trendy.
  5. Swami Satchidananda, arriving 1966, New York, also a student of Swami Sivananda. His invocation at the Woodstock festival made him celebrity material. With his big beard and smile, he looked the part.
  6. Swami Prabhupada, founder of what were best known as the Hare Krishnas, or the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Arrived 1966, New York. Brought kirtan, or chanting, and the Bhagavad Gita scriptures to public awareness.
  7. Amrit Desai, arriving in 1968 in the Philadelphia area. His influential organization continues as the Kirpalu Center in the Berkshires in Massachusetts and is known for training and certifying yoga instructors.
  8. Yogi Bhajan presented his Kundalini yoga as hatha and chanting with a Sikh infusion. He founded his Happy, Healthy, Holy Organization in 1968.
  9. Ram Dass, formerly a prominent Harvard psychologist and psychedelic pioneer, published the seminal book Be Here Now in 1971 at the Lama Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. We all wanted to go there, wherever or whatever it was. Its focus was on the philosophy, rather than the exercises – a huge breakthrough, from my point of view.
  10. B.K.S. Iyengar, arrived in 1973 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His focus on technical precision in the hatha exercises influenced many teachers.

Ten popular Hindu deities

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Nobody knows how many gods and goddesses there are in Hinduism. Some say more than 100,000. They’re likely to pop up in places like the ashram in my novel Yoga Bootcamp.

Here are ten of the most popular.

  1. Shiva. The destroyer, especially of evil.
  2. Parvati. His wife. Goddess of fertility, love, and devotion. Also known as Uma.
  3. Vishnu. The preserver or protector.
  4. Lakshmi. His consort and shakti (source of energy). Goddess of wealth, fortune, and prosperity.
  5. Brahma. The creator or self-born.
  6. Saraswati. His consort. Goddess of knowledge, art, music, learning, and wisdom.
  7. Ram or Rama. The seventh avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu.
  8. Krishna. The eighth avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu.
  9. Ganesh or Ganesha. A popular, comical son of Shiva who gained his elephant head as the result of one of his father’s wild rampages with a sword. A kid can’t go headless, can he? Let’s see what we can find as a substitute.
  10. Hanuman. He’s monkey-faced and an ardent devotee of Lord Rama. Some versions have him as a son of Shiva. He’s popular for all kinds of reasons.

Ten basic yoga terms

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As yoga spread as a form of physical fitness across America, some of its terms have become widely used by the general population. These arise in Sanskrit, one of three recorded languages that are believed to be close to a proto-Indo-European root of many of today’s languages that stretch across much of Asia and Europe.

Here are ten you may hear.

  1. Namaste. Often translated as “that of God in me greets that of God in you.”
  2. Karma. Action or doing, leading each individual to reap the consequences of his own actions, good and bad.
  3. Mantra. A word or phrase that is sounded repeatedly to aid concentration in meditation.
  4. Om. Also spelled Aum. The greatest of the mantras. Repeated properly, it produces great harmony in the body and the mind.
  5. Ahimsa. Non-injury.
  6. Chakra. One of seven points of subtle energy threaded along the spine, each one opening like a lotus and unleashing related awareness.
  7. Asana. Sitting or posture. Each of the physical exercises is known as an asana.
  8. Shanti. Peace.
  9. Ashram. A hermitage or dwelling place of a teacher and students.
  10. Jnana. Discernment or spiritual knowing.

Mixmaster? Just look at ‘Yoga’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

What, me as a Mixmaster?

Just look at the topics percolating in Yoga Bootcamp.

A beater like this was once a common utensil in household kitchens, used for mixing ingredients in cooking and baking.

Here are ten:

  1. The origins of yoga as a popular American practice.
  2. Yoga as a way of life. It’s much more than a means of physical fitness.
  3. Back-to-the-earth lifestyles. There’s a lot of basics to learn from a hands-on perspective when it comes to gardening, firewood, well water, construction, and the like.
  4. Sharing a household. It’s another way the resident yogis come to know each other deeply. That includes faults and failures despite individuals’ idealized professions. Their goal, of course, is to help each one become a better person. You can’t do this part alone.
  5. Authentic identities. There’s no room for holier-than-thou facades in this maverick laboratory. Swami’s faults are front and center.
  6. Meditation and selfless service. These are emphasized more than the physical exercises, for good reason.
  7. Celibacy and sex. It’s a struggle to stay focused on the spiritual path. Just look at all the males in their bramacharies.
  8. Vegetarian as more than a diet. They also garden and make their own bread. And then there’s the coffee, which other ashrams would ban. Oh, yes, and they fast every Monday. Care to know why?
  9. No recreational drugs, no radio, no TV. The ashram is a place for detoxing from addictions of all kinds.
  10. Counterculture identity. The story is set in the high hippie era, and despite their prohibitions on sex and drugs and the like, the residents are more counterculture than ever in their lives. They’re seen on its cutting edge, in fact. It’s a curious paradox, in its own way, but it is colorful and exciting.

Be among the first to read it!

You need to visit this ‘Bootcamp’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My newest novel takes place in a Yoga Bootcamp. It’s run by an unorthodox American swami who’s also known as Elvis or Big Pumpkin, for good reasons. His followers think he’s divine, and they’re out to spread the word as yoga itself is first becoming popular across the nation.

Each of them has moved to his farm to intensify their practice. What they find has as much to do with cleaning toilets or weeding the garden as does standing on their heads in exercise class. Even a single day can embrace eternity as well as a cosmic sense of humor.

Mysticism? It’s largely quite down-to-earth, as you’ll see.

The novel is being published and released today at Smashwords.com. And that certainly has me levitating.

Be among the first to read it!

WHEN YOU MEET THE BUDDHA ON THE ROAD TO THE RESTAURANT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A central suggestion arising at the end of my first novel, which then shapes my new one, What’s Left, is that her father will be crucial in guiding the family in its embrace of Buddhist practice. Even if I cast that as spirituality rather than religion, it’s a big challenge.

In the course of multiple revisions, this was greatly toned down and redirected.

While Cassia’s concerned with more fully defining who her father was, the novel’s primary focus is on her. Here’s some background that’s much fainter in the final version:

Where had he come from, what prompted his interests, what were his pet peeves, what made him truly angry or truly delighted?

To make this little more concrete:

Some people contend my Baba was a lama. Not the camel-like pack animal from the Andes but a Tibetan Buddhist born in a humble city along the Mississippi, of all places. After college in Indiana and a broken heart, he looped into Dharma by way of, well, a hippie farm where Thea Nita also lived. And then he found refuge in something like a monastery. And then he magically returned here. You thought a monk couldn’t get married? Technically, no, though we’re dealing with an American twist in the mechanics of reincarnation. Or so they’ve told me.

In the end, much less of the responsibility falls on him. Rather, he helps establish an institute having a resident teacher, Rinpoche, who becomes his colleague.

~*~

For Cassia’s father, religion is a way of engaging life more fully. He might even say it is liberation from the tangles of daily life.

Let’s open our range of focus a bit wider.

Where do you go or what do you do to be free? Can you describe the feeling?

~*~

A large Queen Anne-style house with a distinctive witch’s hat tower something like this is the headquarters for Cassia’s extended family in my new novel, What’s Left. If only this one were pink, like hers.

AND HAVE A GOOD DAY?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

In the early days of Friends, they’d often greet each other with the question, “How does Truth prosper among you?” Not “How are you doing?” or even “Good morning.”

Strikes modern ears as puzzling, even problematic, beginning with that verb prosper, which we tend to consider along financial terms rather than thrive or even proliferate. Equally unfamiliar is the idea of Truth being active – alive – rather than static and unchanging.

To further thicken the plot, consider their linkage of Truth and Christ, so the question also asks, “How is Christ alive among you?”

How would you answer that!

~*~

For more along these lines, take a look at Religion Turned Upside Down.

 

NOT ALONE BY A LONG SHOT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

When the name Jnana was bestowed on me back in 1972, it was soon expanded to Jnana-Devanandashram – or Jnana-Dev, in a diminutive.

Apart from recognizing my unique character and giving it focus, the name also linked me to a major saint and at least one mythical spirit in India’s past.

Prominent among them was Jnanadev, born in 1275 and described – I love this – as a mystic poet and slave of love. His Jnaneshwari is considered the second most-important commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. Alas, he died at age 21.

Now I see there’s another of our own time who’s a musician who performs with Tibetan monks.

That’s before we get to Facebook, with its host of entries, or the Jnana Yoga displays. As for Jnana alone in a Google search? There are millions, thanks to those software engineers from India.

Still, let me guess, I’m the only one you know. Am I wrong?

UNCOVERING THE PLACE OF STRUGGLE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In his Pendle Hill pamphlet last year, Marking the Quaker Path: Seven Key Words Plus One, Robert Griswold opens with the term “condition,” which initially seems familiar enough. Quakers often remark to a comment, “This speaks to my condition,” or even “the Friend speaks my mind,” conveying a sense of unity and affirmation.

Griswold, though, gives the concept a darker twist, noting that a meaningful spiritual journey requires seeing ourselves in our places of failure and weakness rather than a state of “being in charge,” as we so often do. Think of Anne Lamott’s “three essential prayers” — Help, Thanks, and Wow — and admit a long personal list invoking the first.

I would extend that awareness of condition not just to ourselves individually but to our families and circles of faith and then the wider society. I’d say there’s great need everywhere.

This, then, leads to the subsequent steps where we turn to the Holy One and our kindred spirits for direction and growth.

Curiously, condition is not a word I find used widely in either Scripture or early Quaker literature – not directly, that is – but it does fit the situation of many people as they set out in faith as recorded in both.

Could it be that in many of our religious circles, we’ve been running away from this very difficult but essential challenge? We go to worship looking for rest and renewal, not more turmoil and suffering.

O, Lord, give us strength!

~*~

More of my own reflections on alternative Christianity are found at Religion Turned Upside Down.

WHY HAVE THE YOUTH GONE?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Quakers are not alone in this regard, but what we’ve been enduring is that no matter how much effort we put into raising our children within the faith community, they disappear somewhere in their junior high years. For decades, we’ve been hoping they’d reappear as they started raising their own families, but we’re seeing little of that, and again, we’re not alone.

It’s all too easy to blame competition with Sunday morning soccer leagues and the like, although we might also argue that the values the kids learn in their athletic competition more closely fit those of the larger, secular society than those they are taught in religious settings. Rabbi Michael Lerner makes an extended argument in his 2006 The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right, as he contends that too often our children see all too clearly the dichotomy between what we say we believe in faith and what we actually do in a dog-eat-dog marketplace. It’s a harsh criticism. No wonder religion is losing.

As I gaze around our mostly graying worshiping circle, I wonder just where the young adults are today – not just within religious communities, but just about everywhere I venture. Maybe they’re all hidden away working multiple 24/7 jobs trying to make ends meet. I don’t envy them the economic scene they’re contending with.

But I also wonder about the message they carry about faith itself. If the teaching among youths growing up “under the care” of Quaker Meeting has been to build a hopeful, optimistic foundation of values, how do we help them survive the brutal struggles they’ll encounter in the wider world? How do we instill an awareness of the importance of religious community and shared discipline in maintaining a drive toward a more loving and just society?

Perhaps we’ve been too comfortable in our safe, middle-class, largely professional upbringings and neighborhoods and expectation of college and career.

In my own thinking, I keep returning to the concept of the two seeds, one of Christ and the other, call it what you wish – the point is, we face not just “that of God within each person” and its potential, but also a counter element to challenge. It was a line of thinking at the time the Quaker movement erupted in Britain. Think of the parable of the wheat and the tares.

Contending with the two may be what’s been missing in our teaching and example.

~*~

More of my own reflections on alternative Christianity are found at Religion Turned Upside Down.