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Learning the Yoga Ropes

Most Western practitioners stress the physical component of yoga—i.e. yoga-as-workout—at the expense of its spiritual, meditational aspects. Followers of Western-based gurus such as Iyengar are therefore less likely to adhere to its founding Vedic principles than practitioners of Kundulini yoga and other forms associated with Eastern spiritual tradition.

According to former Metro Pulse staff writer and current Yoga Journal editor Hillari Dowdle, Westerners have been influenced primarily by three teachers, all three of whom are disciples of Indian yoga guru Krishna Charya. The aforementioned Iyengar advocates a method that calls for the precise, deliberate execution of basic yoga postures. "It's the yoga of body alignment," Dowdle says. "It's precise and physically exacting."

Iyengar also authored Light on Yoga, a book that now serves as a Bible of sorts for those who wish to study yoga postures; Knoxville's Ron Felix is an Iyengar teacher.

A second form, Ashtanga yoga, founded by Charya pupil K. Pattabhi Jois, is the most aerobically challenging of the commonly practiced Western methods. "Every Ashtanga class is a two-hour sweat-fest," says Dowdle. "It's physically challenging, with constant movement, as opposed to Iyengar, where you tend to get into a pose and hold it."

Viniyoga, founded by a teacher named Desikachar, is the mildest of the three Western forms, predicated as it is on slower, gentler movements and one-on-one instruction. Says Dowdle, "It's more about adapting yoga for your own personal needs."

Dowdle notes that much of what passes for yoga in health clubs and community centers around the country—so-called Power Yoga or Hatha Yoga classes, for instance—is little more than glorified aerobics, traditional poses set to a dance beat. "I think the best teachers are the ones teaching out of a certain tradition," she says. "'Hatha' yoga signifies that the class is about postures, rather than a specific school.

"Yoga is sort of suspect to the Western mind. We don't trust gurus. We want to go to Barnes and Noble and buy the book ourselves. Then we think we've figured it all out. But we really haven't. In yoga, there are endless things to learn."

—M.G.

Hillari Dowdle makes the transition with relative ease

by Mike Gibson

"Ooooooohhhmmm..." I'm sitting in the lotus position on the lawn of Laurel High School as dusk settles over Fort Sanders, my legs twisted up pretzel-style into my lap, as if in some grotesque caricature of a hippie...."Ooooooohhhmmm..." I've just finished a yoga class, a series of stretching exercises designed to release energy—both physical and spiritual. "Ooooooohhhmmm..." And now, I'm supposed to be meditating—freeing my mind from the day-to-day thoughts that keep us all from experiencing inner peace and achieving personal enlightenment...
As class breaks up, folks stand around talking about how great that was, how refreshed they feel. I join in, but with serious reservations...I'm filled with angst. I'm wondering, Was I doing it right? Did I achieve anything? And exactly what was the point...?
—Hillari Dowdle, "The Art of Not Thinking", Metro Pulse, July 4, 1996.

When former MP reporter and editor Hillari Dowdle wrote of her muddled introduction to the gentle art of yoga, little did she guess it was an augury of things to come. But that it was; seven years and a few hundred lotus postures later, Dowdle has evolved from dilettante to dedicated yoga practitioner. Her transformation was made complete in early 2003 when she accepted a post as chief editor at Yoga Journal, the world's best-selling yoga-related publication.

Now living and working in San Francisco, she is the magazine's first non-Buddhist editor; her job entails regular congress with world-renown experts, international yo-gurus like Patricia Walden and Rodney Yee. On a recent holiday break, she held forth on her new job, wellness by way of yoga, and the dichotomies inherent to mixing Eastern discipline and Western culture.

"I started yoga because I was having really bad back problems, which is the number one reason most people do yoga," Dowdle says. "Back pain is definitely the biggest yoga-motivating factor. But then I started noticing this muscle definition in my arms and chest that I didn't have before. I didn't want to quit."

A system of physical routines with metaphysical underpinnings, yoga derives from ancient Vedic philosophy, the wellspring of Buddhism, Hinduism and other Eastern spiritual disciplines. The word yoga means "yoke," and it nods at the idea of "yoking oneself to the divine."

Dowdle says that early Vedic practitioners believed strongly in holistic mind-body wellness, and often undertook programs of (oxymoronic though it may seem) rigorous meditation.

"Ancient spiritualists wanted to sit for many hours in meditation, so they had to build up their bodies, in a sense, to do this," Dowdle says. "It expanded from there. The idea is that you can't have true spirituality without a strong body, a strong vessel."

Dowdle left Metro Pulse in 2000 for to become managing editor of Cooking Light magazine in Birmingham, Ala. Though it is bigger than Knoxville by half, Birmingham offered a smaller menu of yoga options, and she was forced to take classes in a discipline other than the one she had studied in Tennessee. (See sidebar for an explanation of yoga disciplines in the West.)

"Birmingham was so far behind Knoxville in terms of yoga," Dowdle says. "Knoxville has some great teachers, people like Ron Felix (an Iyengar-influenced teacher) and Andrea Cartwright and Joan Harrigan (pupil of world-renowned Swami Chandrasekhharananda). People don't realize what they have there; I still miss it sometimes, even here in Berkeley."

Disheartened by this and other cultural shortcomings in Birmingham, Dowdle jumped at the chance to relocate to San Francisco's more yoga-friendly climes when a serendipitous sequence of events saw her emerge as the leading candidate for a newly vacated editor's post at YJ; she and partner Coury Turczyn (former Metro Pulse managing editor) moved to California in February of 2003.

Today she works in "a super-funky old building in Berkeley, in an office a lot like Metro Pulse, but with even crappier furniture." Her charges include a full-time staff of 35 (including several practicing yogis), and she and her fellow editors recruit free-lancer writers from the ranks of the yoga elite. YJ's circulation is about 300,000 worldwide, more than twice that of competitors like Yoga International or the European Yoga, which Dowdle describes as "wildly, totally, crazy British, like 'Yoga for beating your hangover' and stuff like that.

"It's interesting for me now to be in an office environment where people are actively practicing their spiritual principles on the job," Dowdle continues. She says the magazine provides its employees with yoga instruction six times a week during work hours, with three beginner sessions and three advanced classes to choose from. (Dowdle participates in the latter.)

"The good news is I get to do yoga three times a week in the office," says Dowdle. "The bad news is that the job soaks up so much of my life that I don't have much time for it otherwise."

Dowdle says her involvement with yoga has been as good for her health as it has been for her career. Since she first assumed the lotus position on the front lawn of Fort Sanders' Laurel High way back in '96, she has dropped more than 20 pounds, improved her muscle tone and found relief for her intermittently sore back.

"The best thing about yoga is that it's the ultimate weight stabilizer," she says. "When you get to where you want to be, weight-wise, yoga helps you stay there."

And though Dowdle's approach to yoga is admittedly very Western, in that it emphasizes physical discipline more than spiritual principles, her practice has had a palpable effect on her so-called "subtle body"—a Vedic term for that portion of the self which lies beyond the realm of physical consciousness.

"The way to get through to us Westerners is through our bodies," Dowdle laughs. "If you can get us to focus on nothing but our inner thighs for three minutes, you've accomplished something. Then the body becomes a focus for meditation, and we become interested in the other, non-physical stuff in yoga."