As a research scientist, my father spent his early career experimenting in the lab and his later career as a project manager overseeing the journey of single  chemical compounds from the lab through the process of FDA approval to the drug store shelf.  He often told me, “Scientists go into the lab to test a hypothesis or to answer a question. What you have to understand is that the quality of your answers is directly related to the quality of the questions you ask.”

I thought about my father this last weekend when I taught Yoga Lab, my first class at The Bellingham Yoga Collective. Given that  the class meets at 8:00 am on Saturday morning, there are no yoga tourists- only keen and committed practitioners, many of whom are also seasoned teachers.  I like to think I am somewhat committed and the hour is, shall we say, a bit of  a stretch.  (I know, I know, I can’t help it— bad jokes are kind of my thing.)

So, back to Yoga Lab and the questions we ask.

I can roll out a mat and ask “How can I get a good work out in today?”  which is a lovely question and, truth be told, not a particularly hard one to answer. I can ask, “What’s the easiest way to approximate any given pose?” which is another fine question,  for which I have many tricks and tips to offer toward more than a few  answers. 

I can also ask, “How can I practice today to increase my physical capacity over time so that I might do poses in the future I can not do now with harming myself?  How might I work today so that my I  expand my intellectual understanding of the tradition, the poses, my body, my limits, my strengths? How can this practice  serve me to find a self-acceptance that is grounded in the reality of what is and still holds open the possibility of new realities yet to unfold?” And so on. 

I told the group that I want to test the hypothesis that regular, practice over time with clarity of intention and awareness can help expand our  physical, emotional, and intellectual capacities in such a way that the expansive nature of the Self becomes a direct experience and a reference point in the midst of the ups and downs of life. 

And look, I am not new and I am not particularly prone to grandiosity when it comes to my teaching work. I know the limits of a 70-minute public asana class as much as anyone does.  Nor do I have all my self-realization eggs in the basket of postural practice, as much as I love the poses these days. I am simply saying, all of the do-this, don’t-do-that, keep-this, maintain-that, put-your-foot-here-and-your-hand-there and look-at-the-book and listen-to-me and the  barrage of instructions  that come out of my mouth for a simple down dog are not in service to the poses only. Or they needn’t be. 

To be clear,  I have zero interest in anyone’s motives for practicing asana, very little to say about what is real yoga or not, and policing other people’s practice is outside the scope of my concern these days. If you want to work out and I want to expand my Inner Self, we can still have a great time together. I mean, follow my instructions and you will probably  get a workout along the way, but I digress.

I also like to think of yoga asana as an experiment, rather than a protocol of promises and guarantees. Some experiments fail. Others produce surprising results. Some experiments confirm the hypothesis they began with, while others don’t. I figure the evidence of the efficacy of my personal experiment  in yoga isn’t really the poses anyway, it is about a movement toward, and expression of, Love. And if you know me, you know that on any given day, there is evidence to suggest my experiment  is not going well. I am far from  perfect with  plenty of rough edges that need significant smoothing out. Of course, I am also playing a long game and so for all the refining left to do, I am decidedly not the creature who first went into the lab. For that reason, if no other, I stay in the lab and remain, dare I say, somewhat hopeful.

On a practical note, I taught bakasana and parsva bakasana and we made a great start together. I have lots of ideas about how I might assist folks in their asana practice and really, that’s my job— the asana. How the rest of experiment unfolds,  the rest of all that stuff I am talking about,  has to happen inside each person over the long haul and will most likely occur in the other 6 days, 22 hours and 50 minutes each week that they are NOT in my class.  But, I do feel fortunate to offer my very small piece to the puzzle of students becoming more fully themselves. 

Anyhoo— Its hot AF out there in America right now and I am happy to be so far north that I am still chilly a lot of the time. I planned a summer intensive for August, in case you want to come to the northland and do some asana, hike in the woods, sail on the ocean, and eat some great food. I would have given you more notice but I had no idea where we would be with the vaccines and such.

But here it is.