Tag Archives: Rodney Yee

First impressions of the Gaiam Yoga Club

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Back in late June, I men­tioned that I had been offered a chance to join Gaiam Yoga Club. After a slow start due to a hec­tic sched­ule, I have started to fol­low the pro­gram on a daily basis and have now fin­ished up my third week. Rod­ney Yee and Colleen Said­man are the teach­ers in this inten­sive yoga immer­sion pro­gram. The core is in three formats:

  • Videos of demos: these are Flash videos with very high pro­duc­tion val­ues, both in terms of visu­als and audio. I’ve seen a good num­ber of yoga DVDs. These are up there with the best ones for begin­ners. Each week’s mate­r­ial is divided up into 10-​​12 seg­ments that can be viewed inde­pen­dently. Yee and Sei­d­man take turns demo­ing the poses and vinyasas. They pro­vide a huge vol­ume of insight and tips into the poses. It reminded me of all the good hands-​​on work­shops that I’ve taken in the past two years (Beryl Ben­der Berch, Jor­dan Bloom, Alan Fin­ger, Desiréee Rum­baugh) because all the good teach­ers pound away at rein­forc­ing the fun­da­men­tals and the details of the poses, even with expe­ri­enced prac­ti­tion­ers. You can come back to these videos repeat­edly to review the instruc­tions, see the adjust­ments that Yee and Sei­d­man make to each other, and catch some­thing new that you had missed the first or sec­ond time around.
  • Audio pod­casts: you can lis­ten to these daily prac­tices, either in your browser, in an audio appli­ca­tion or down­loaded and save as a pod­cast to be played in your MP3 player. These ses­sions, nar­rated by Yee or Sei­d­man, are 20-​​35 min­utes long and fol­low up on the points made in the video ses­sions. The audio is use­ful because it makes me focus on my body, rather than peek­ing up at a com­puter mon­i­tor or TV screen.
  • Visual sequences of each daily prac­tice: these are pho­tos of Yee and Sei­d­man in the poses of the sequences, which gives visual queues to those who may not know the San­skrit names of all the poses yet or may be unsure about all the com­po­nents of the pose.

What sets this sys­tem apart from DVDs, pod­cats, or books is that it’s linked to a time sched­ule. The videos are the foun­da­tions for the weekly focus (stand­ing poses, back­bends, twists, etc.). Then the audio record­ings become avail­able at 24 hour inter­vals. Four pod­casts are for daily prac­tices, and then a fifth one has just pranayama and med­i­ta­tion. Finally, the sev­enth day is a rest day. It’s not pos­si­ble to rush through the work pro­gram because you have to wait to become eli­gi­ble, but you can always go back to review. This is nec­es­sary because the pro­gram imparts a lot of infor­ma­tion that has to be linked to the mind and the body, and it can’t be done if the yogi is skip­ping ahead.

There are other fea­tures to the pro­gram, like com­mu­nity forums, blogs, and per­sonal pages, that I will cover in future entries.

As I’ve men­tioned before, a rep from Gaiam Yoga Club invited me to test their pro­gram free of charge for 13 weeks or about three months. The way I’m going, I won’t fin­ish the whole “12-​​week” pro­gram because I have skipped a week or a night of check­ing into the web por­tal to take the next les­son so I’ve fallen behind. The Gaiam Yoga Club cost about $65 a quar­ter ($5 a week, as they like to describe it).

A guest at Gaiam Yoga Club

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I’ve been given access to the Gaiam Yoga Club with Rod­ney Yee and Colleen Said­man. I guess, in return, I’m sup­posed to give feed­back about my expe­ri­ence and per­haps write about it here.

The pro­gram of videos, pod­casts and print media runs for 12 weeks, and is meant for the begin­ner who is prac­tic­ing at home. My first impres­sion is that it’s a really pol­ished prod­uct, with high pro­duc­tion val­ues on the hand­ful of videos that I’ve seen so far. There’s a lot of mate­r­ial to be absorbed, even when you’re not start­ing from scratch. Nor­mally, this online ser­vice costs $5 a week, billed quar­terly (every 13 weeks). So I am being offered the equiv­a­lent of $60 to par­tic­i­pate, assum­ing that the invi­ta­tion was for the whole pro­gram. I just wanted to get that out front from the beginning.

What sur­prised me the most is that given the high pro­files of Yee and Said­man on the yoga scene, the back­ing of a major retailer in the lifestyle busi­ness, like Gaiam, and the strong invest­ment already made in the prod­uct, I’m sur­prised that I had not heard about this ser­vice before. It was launched in May, but I have not seen much pro­mo­tion for it, and I do get a fair share of yoga-​​related e-​​mails for prod­ucts, retreats, and other mat­ters. For instance, I was try­ing to find a graphic, a ban­ner ad or some­thing like that to illus­trate this blog post­ing, and I google the web for the one dis­played here. There was no spot on their web­site that offered graph­ics or a media kit.

A web riff on a YouTube comedy video – sex

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New York Times Between Poses, a Bar­rage of Pickup Lines: the YouTube video men­tioned in this arti­cle is funny, though it’s not ready for prime time. I just can’t rec­og­nize a fac­sim­ile of a real yoga class in the video but that may just be an issue of pro­duc­tion val­ues. But the pre­text of the video is a real issue and I’ve seen the phe­nom­e­non in a few of my classes.

Flow Yoga, my down­town stu­dio, gets men­tioned in the arti­cle because it has a Thurs­day night social get-​​together, and even has plans for speed dating.

This story actu­ally opens an eth­i­cal issue of human rela­tions on the yoga mat, espe­cially when teacher-​​student inter­play moves out­side the yoga stu­dio and espe­cially when sex­ual chem­istry is thrown into the mix.

Yoga therapy draws attention

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New York Times: The Yoga Ther­a­pist Will See You Now under­scores the recent growth of yoga ther­apy, but also car­ries a warning:

But experts inside and out­side the indus­try say yoga ther­apy should be approached with cau­tion. In gen­eral, a per­son can prac­tice as a yoga ther­a­pist after 200 hours of yoga teacher train­ing, which might include basic train­ing in anatomy, breath­ing, med­i­ta­tion and giv­ing adjustments.

At the end of the arti­cle, there is a para­graph about NY-​​based designer Donna Karan “spon­sor­ing a 10-​​day Well-​​Being Forum in Man­hat­tan to bring together doc­tors, yoga ther­a­pists and yoga teach­ers…” That may explain why the arti­cle got com­mis­sioned in the first place. The event is orga­nized by UrbanZen with Rod­ney Yee, for­mer model Christy Turling­ton and a host of big names serv­ing on the board. Karan is push­ing inte­gra­tive med­i­cine that com­bines alter­na­tive health with con­ven­tional med­i­cine fol­low­ing the death of her hus­band from lung cancer.

Yoga — or rather life — gets messy

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Rod­ney Yee used to have a blog at Yahoo Health. I checked it out a cou­ple of times a while back, and then for­got about it. Yee has moved up in the online world. His new on-​​line home is at Lime.com’s Yoga sec­tion [MLS: Lime.com has appar­ently gone bust and dis­ap­peared from the web, and Yee moved on to Gaiam Yoga Club]. He has a TV show, as part of Lime’s ambi­tious project to bring healthy liv­ing to the big time, and has been doing short video blogs.

Of course, Yee has been in the news a lot recently because of his mar­riage to NYC yoga stu­dio owner, Colleen Said­man, which got cov­ered in the NY Times (sorry, but the story has already been archived). But you can get a bitch­ier ver­sion of it at New York Mag­a­zine. Soul­jerky has another take on the mess. Yee divorced his wife of 24 years. A few years ago, he had an affair with a stu­dent, which became an exam­ple of how to betray the student-​​teacher relationship.

Stu­dio politics

In my own home yoga stu­dio, Thrive Yoga, we’ve gone through a stretch that calls into ques­tion of incar­nat­ing the yogic ideal : the two own­ers of Thrive Yoga have parted ways. Kim Groark was the more advanced teacher while Susan Bowen had the good busi­ness mind. Over the past two years, they lost their shared vision of what they wanted to make of the stu­dio. I don’t know any of the details, just that at the end the ten­sion hung like incense in the air of the stu­dio. Susan bought out Kim’s share of the busi­ness, and Kim “decided to leave Thrive Yoga to pur­sue a dif­fer­ent path,” as the announce­ment stated. More expe­ri­enced yoga entre­pre­neurs have told me that stu­dio part­ner­ships rarely work out. Yoga teach­ers who strike out on their own, set­ting up their own shops, want to have full con­trol over their busi­ness and prac­tice so there’s going to be an innate con­tra­dic­tion in a joint venture.

I felt dis­con­certed by the whole shift: I had gone to Kim’s classes more fre­quently because I was drawn to her flair for teach­ing (influ­ences of Kun­dalini, Shiva Rea) and the classes fit my sched­ule in the evenings. I was also con­cerned about the long-​​term via­bil­ity of the stu­dio because I get classes (2-​​5 times a week) at no charge, in exchange for host­ing, main­tain­ing and updat­ing the web­site. I would find it had to pay for a year unlim­ited pass, which is what I would need for the same priv­i­lege. The split took me out of my com­fort zone on the mat.

I bought Yee’s most recent book, Mov­ing Toward Bal­ance: 8 Weeks of Yoga, because it’s beau­ti­fully illus­trated and laid out. And I still take classes at Thrive Yoga.

Taking one step back — and "not trying too hard"

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I wanted to make some things clear about the blog and web­site. The rea­son that I’m writ­ing it is not because I have any spe­cial knowl­edge about yoga, pranayama, med­i­ta­tion or life, except for what I have expe­ri­enced within my body’s skin. I am writ­ing about it because yoga (under­stood in the broad­est sense) is the most impor­tant thing hap­pen­ing in my life. I am writ­ing about it with all the con­tra­dic­tions and incom­plete vision of a novice.

Erich Schiff­mann wrote in Yoga: The Spirit and Prac­tice of Mov­ing into Still­ness:

Yoga is a sophis­ti­cated sys­tem or achiev­ing radi­ant phys­i­cal health, superb men­tal clar­ity and there­fore peace of mind, as well as spir­i­tual nsight, knowl­edge and understanding.

When I started fool­ing around with yoga late last year, I played a trick on myself. I told myself that yoga should be easy and I didn’t have to “try hard.” Instead of fol­low­ing my DVD rou­tine, I switched to doing a much less phys­i­cally demand­ing audio CD rou­tine. When I stopped try­ing hard and began lis­ten­ing to my body, rather than keep­ing pace with Rod­ney Yee, I began to have glimpses of what Schiff­mann is writ­ing about. I had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence with med­i­ta­tion — I stopped “try­ing hard” and relaxed into a deeply refresh­ing rest­ful­ness of mind. I said, “Wow — I’ve got to get me some more of this.”

In this whole process, I’ve never really had a “moment of con­ver­sion.” It’s been a grad­ual change in which I’ve learned not to “try too hard” and take myself too seri­ously. If I did, I wouldn’t be out on a mat in a stu­dio expos­ing my pearly white legs and my extra gut that cuts off my breath in halasana. I just tell myself that Bud­dha had a few extra pounds him­self, if you judge from some of the stat­ues. I know that I could get a lot more out of my classes if I did not try to keep pace with the oth­ers. That’s one of the rea­sons why I like Sam Dworkis’s advice: The Oper­a­tive Word of Yoga Must Be: Toward :

Because the word yoga can be loosely defined as union and bal­ance and because the human body can never be per­fectly bal­anced, then an appro­pri­ate yoga prac­tice can only move a per­son toward bal­ance of body, mind, breath, and spirit.

Of course, the coda to this tan­gent is that if you don’t chal­lenge your­self — what Schiff­mann calls “find­ing your edge” — you’re not going grow in your prac­tice. It just seems that know­ing my own psy­cho­log­i­cal makeup, my most risky behav­ior when I overex­ert myself and don’t lis­ten closely enough to my body.