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The life yogic Pt. II

Hot yoga - the unanticipated whipping boy of a dinner party discussion about the Shiva (destruction)-Shakti (creation) of yoga - eventually caught a break, though the humorous litany at the table continued.

Hot yoga - the unanticipated whipping boy of a dinner party discussion about the Shiva (destruction)-Shakti (creation) of yoga - eventually caught a break, though the humorous litany at the table continued.

"There's an epidemic of women taking up yoga then leaving their husbands!"

"I really, really hate chanting."

"I can't stand instructors blathering about their day, how they were pissed off in line at the grocery store and then, somehow, let it all go. I'm paying for this shit - I only have an hour here!"

Gossip, innuendo, and contrarian sentiment is commonplace in any milieu (e.g. ski pros bitching about being ski pros), but even the profoundly enlightened can have their patience tested.

"People will always have opinions about everything," begins celebrated local yogi Julia McCabe. "Lots slag yoga without understanding what it's all about, yet only a handful are in it for the wrong reasons. The only thing that really bothers me is fake spirituality - the illusion that being a yogi requires talking in a sunshine and rose-fart kind of way. It's contrived and insincere."

How does someone who has made their living in the yoga world for years deal with the sudden deluge of exploitation?

"It's easy to be disturbed, but it's more important to stay on your own path and not worry what others are thinking or doing. Yoga is about getting to the root of our nature and that essence can't be rocked by clothing brands or how many mats get sold. That being said, I'd rather see a yoga studio on every corner than a Denny's."

That's so yoga. Something you'd expect from someone writing a book entitled Hong Kong Yogi Rat Pack Boom about her adventures teaching yoga around the world, who ran yoga teacher-training in Nicaragua that morphed, in the miraculous way things do for McCabe, into a lesson in sea-turtle conservation. And yet amazingly, for someone so deeply immersed, whose classes are a seamless mix of physical practice, philosophic crumbs and her own unpretentious, fun-loving ways, when yoga first reared it's head for McCabe she'd bolted. Like me, she was no quick convert.

"In Montreal a friend and I did a class in a cold, dark auditorium. I was sleepy and bored the entire time. This woman had us sitting around watching her belly while she breathed. It was all we could do not to laugh. Horrible. No spark in it. After that I just made fun of yoga people... until I moved to Whistler."

Aha. A contextual watershed is required. You have to find your way in. For McCabe it was a friend's invitation to check out a new studio-Neoalpine-and its charismatic founder Patrick Creelman. "You just wanted the kind of energy he put out," she recalls. "He lit the fire."

My own entry point was more about not being intimidated by "the scene."

Passing out in a Bikram class (see last week's column) killed my interest for years until I was introduced to a gentler, slower format in the basement of Millennium Place. Soft-voiced Christina Tottle was a perfect teacher for damaged me - no pose mandatory, alternatives available when something taxed our physical ken. Like many skiers, I'd long ago sacrificed flexibility for muscularity, and rejoiced at this incremental path to improvement. But when Christina went travelling I found myself adrift; the right instructor interface was key. I went looking again.

Someone suggested power yoga. ("Great workout!") But it was too much for a beginner. Poses changed so quickly it could have been step-aerobics. I'd finally manage some upright posture with a semblance of balance only to find everyone else horizontal on the deck. By the time I got down to the mat they were all up again, the instructor weaving through the lot barking orders like a drill sergeant. I was so comically out-of-sync it resembled an episode of The Three Stooges - starring one stooge.

It wasn't for me, but now, at least, I knew what was. And when I found my way into McCabe's lunch-hour class (90 minutes is beyond my physical and mental attention span) I'd found a yoga home - one where we both laugh because I can't say "yogi" without conjuring the ursine cartoon guru of food theft.

The lesson is simple: yoga is for everyone but not all yoga is for you. Yoga's spectrum, however, accommodates a wide range of practices that collectively speak to our search for the lost intersection of our nature and nature itself.

"The difference between us and a deer touching its toes in the woods is our discriminate thought and emotional landscape," notes McCabe. "It's human to ask why we've lost the inner peace we think we should have to the bullshit of our world."

Yoga is one of a legion of tools used to seek answers, but the pop-cultural bandwagon means it will also feature its own legion of tools - though fewer than in most things. And the awareness yoga engenders minimizes any downside: naysaying is only human. Something we should have known all along, are happy to discover, but rebel at being reminded of in a rose-fart voice.