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This endeavor, a website and video, came about when a student, who attended classes at the Rasa Yoga Studio in Manhattan, many years ago, tracked me down here in Colorado.  She’d been practicing for more than 20 years with an audio cassette I’d made sometime in the 90’s.  Her cassette broke.  That it had continued to work so long was incredible.  She asked if I had another, and if she could buy one.  I went to the cellar and was astonished to find a couple cassettes. 

 

The cassettes had been so poorly made and are horribly outdated.  I thought I might record a video on my smartphone.  A video would bring the practice up to date and provide a visual for my friends in NYC from all those years ago.  One day, on a walk with Katie Elliott, the artistic director of, and co-founder of, the 3rd Law Dance Theater, I told her my intention.  After a moment, she asked, “would it be okay with you if 3rd Law produced it?”  So, here we are.

 

Katie and 3rd Law have been so kind and generous.  It took a while to pull together.  Largely because our videographer, amazing videographer, is in such demand.  A few weeks before our scheduled shooting, I was hospitalized with acute on chronic heart failure.  We shot the video two weeks after I was discharged from the hospital.

 

I’m telling you this because this approach to practicing yoga can benefit anyone, any age, any condition in most remarkable ways.  That sounds like a sales pitch, but there’s no product I’m selling.  I’m only offering an invitation to enter an investigation, an experiment.  I’m sharing my history, my experience, my failures.  If any of it seems appropriate or of value, you’re welcome to it.  

 

​I’m an old man now, and fat.  I’ve endured and continue to endure a host of diseases and some limitations.  I’ve survived sexual abuse, a teen-age suicide attempt, and years of alcohol dependency.  In all the years I’ve been teaching, I’ve encountered these, and many other stories, in the persons I’ve had the privilege to work with.  My history, with theirs, has been the evolution of what I now call The Rasa Yoga Experiment.

 

I was delighted to receive a friend’s comments after she watched the video.  “You’re enormous!” she wrote.  “In your light blue outfit, you’re as vast as the sky.”  Okay.  Why not be as vast as the sky, no matter what your story is or what your body looks and feels like.

 

Be willing to experiment.  Perhaps fail, if you’re lucky enough.