kripalu perspectives: kim rosen on the power of poetry

From Rumi to Rilke to Sharon Olds, poetry is a powerful tool that can help us connect to the core of the human experience. Kim Rosen, a poet and spiritual teacher, discusses how the words, rhythms, and images that make poetry a vital, immediate art form can also sustain the soul throughout life’s many challenges.

July 2010 podcast The Power of Poetry (listen now, download an mp3, or subscribe via iTunes or RSS feed).
Kim Rosen is teaching at Kripalu August 8–13.

mastering the yin and yang of yoga

Can’t make it to a cave in China to study with a Taoist master? Spend time with teacher Paulie Zink and you’ll feel as though you did. With graceful simplicity, Paulie transmits an amazing depth of knowledge in a playful yet challenging way. Paulie’s own training with a qigong and kung fu master translates into an exploration of movement and stillness unlike anything you’ve experienced in hatha yoga classes.

“If you’re not having fun, you won’t do this at home,” Paulie says, and his attitude is positively infectious. The teacher who inspired what has become known as Yin Yoga, Paulie reminds us of the inherent artistry and deep wisdom of ancient practices, as well as the timeless truth that we are each our own best teacher.

Experience one of the most unique yoga teachers of today in Yin and Yang Yoga: An Exploration of Stillness, Alchemy, Power, and Flow, July 9–11.

a holistic spin on an old classic

If bobby sox and malteds come to mind when you think “hula hooping,” be ready for a surprise. There’s nothing quaint about hooping these days, and there’s even a transcendental twist to this comeback. At the forefront of the movement is Holistic Hooping™, a dynamic fusion of yoga, meditation, and HoopDance. Join Kandice Korves-Kaus, Andrew Kaus, and Hilary Heart for a fun-filled weekend that will awaken you to new levels of self-expression.

Discover Holistic Hooping: A Fusion of Meditation, Yoga, and HoopDance, July 16–18.

kripalu: the summer 2010 yoga destination

Got yoga on your mind? Kripalu is the place to be. Come explore new ideas and experiences this summer in our yoga-inspired programs and trainings. Take the opportunity to study with someone new—including West Coast teachers with fresh, inventive takes on yoga. We offer yoga for all styles, all traditions, and all levels. Come for a weekend or 5-day program—practice, relax, and meet interesting people. You’ll return home ready for whatever the world brings.

Check out all of our yoga-inspired programs.

evenings at kripalu

Informative. Engaging. Inspirational. From experiential workshops to concerts to dance events, most of our evening activities are free of charge to Kripalu guests and staff. Take a Tuesday cooking class, calm the body and relax the mind in a Thursday night meditation, and dance Saturday night away to unique and exhilarating music from around the world. Whatever night of the week it is, we’ve got something exciting going on.

Learn more about evenings at Kripalu.

advance your yoga teaching

Kripalu’s 500-hour teacher training modules go deeper and broader into the art and science of yoga and yoga teaching. More meditation. More pranayama. More about bringing yoga to special populations. More transformational teaching techniques to add to your toolkit.

Find out more about our 500-hour certification.

Get inspired: find out what excites our faculty about training teachers.

from the archives

Read an excerpt from Getting the Love You Want, Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt’s best-selling book on the psychoemotional realities of relationship. First run in the November 2008 issue of Kripalu Online, this excerpt is full of invaluable information on making our relationships—with our partners and ourselves—lasting love connections. Read “Creating a Lasting Love Relationship.”

healthy living recipes

This month, Executive Chef Deb Morgan shares a Kripalu classic—Pad Thai Noodles with Peanut Sauce—that has staff members dancing in the halls when it comes back on the biweekly menu rotation. Nutritionist Kathie Swift pinpoints the ingredients that aid detoxification and keep inflammation at bay.

July Healthy Living Recipes
Pad Thai Noodles
Peanut Sauce

desktop wallpaper

Enjoy the beauty of the Berkshires every day with Kripalu’s desktop wallpaper. Available with and without a calendar.

Easy to download.

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Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to teach the art and science of yoga to produce thriving and health in individuals and society.

Visit Kripalu's website.

welcome

As you settle into July, the month of fireworks and barbecuing, try trading worries for laughter and self-discovery (like comedian Beth Lapides, author of this issue’s feature article, did). It might help to take a crack at something unexpected—like hula hooping (with a twist), poetry, Yin Yoga, or a Pad Thai recipe from the Kripalu Kitchen. And then there’s yoga. Whether your interest in yoga is brand new or you’ve been a devoted fan for years, you’ll find something to inspire and delight you at Kripalu this summer. When it comes to yoga (and hula hooping and Pad Thai), we’ve got you covered. Happy summer!

the comedian’s way, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the laugh

by Beth Lapides

Corn or tomatoes?
Can’t bear to decide. Nervous
breakdown on aisle nine.

This haiku from Beth Lapides’ collection Did I Wake You? encapsulates her quirky and hilarious take on life, humor, and self-awareness. A Woody Allen-class worrier transplanted to Los Angeles, Lapides is also a longtime yogini whose search for serenity is part and parcel of what she calls the “Fool’s Journey”—finding the funny in the deepest, most vulnerable places.

I was lying on a massage table in the middle of one of those health expos that are so popular nowadays. A practitioner had explained the technique: two inhales—one to the lower belly and one to the heart—and an exhale. And I was working it hard. But I was also worrying. I’d asked her what this technique was called and she’d said pranayama. But what kind of pranayama? I felt my brow furrow, an almost perfect reverse of her calm smile.

Worry leads to worry. That’s why there’s a whole strand of worry beads instead of a single worry bead. You never have just one worry.

So worrying about not having the information I needed to understand this healing modality (I like to do it right!) led to worry about my bags. Were they safely tucked away under the table? Were they tucked too far under the table and sending their all-too-material vibes up into my ethereally healing body? Of course I got that the worry itself was my real baggage. I reminded myself that the Kabbalah says “Worry is the devil,” but don’t worry about it, I told myself, or the devil wins.

I felt so vulnerable, waging this very personal worry war in a room filled with Los Angeles yoga-chicknics. I refocused on the sound of my breath and tried to drown out their chattering—the baby was due … the non-toxic nail polish rocked … the job hadn’t panned out…

“How does your body feel?” the practitioner asked. “Good,” I answered quickly.

“How does your body feeeeel?” she asked again. I stopped breathing and tried to assess. Now I felt worried that I wasn’t feeling enough.

“Relax,” the practitioner said, “healing doesn’t have to be so serious.” And then I burst out laughing. And, finally, the healing could begin.

It may strike you as ironic that I teach comedy, yet I take everything so seriously. But we teach what we need to learn. And apparently lightening up is something I have to learn over and over again. I mean get to learn. Because I do love to laugh.

My first step toward en-lightening up came years ago, when I was still very serious, even more serious than I am now. One bleak New York day it occurred to me that we live, accumulating wisdom, until finally we really get it. And then we die. To my twenty-something-year-old eyes, this seemed Bergmanesquely tragic. “Or,” I heard a little voice say, “maybe it’s funny.”

Maybe it’s not tragic, maybe it’s comic. I couldn’t get that thought out of my head. They say repeated thoughts are angelic. I knew nothing of angels then. I was a scrappy/brainy/artsy-fartsy downtown-Ivy League-performance artist. But I did know something about listening to that little voice. So I made one of the most difficult changes I’ve made in my life: I stopped working in serious performance art spaces and started working in comedy clubs.

What a rude awakening that was! Still, an awakening is an awakening; take them where you can get them. And what I woke up to was the fact that I was hungry for laughs in a way that I’d never been hungry for anything except love. And maybe buttery toast. And that surprised me. Which is perfect, because surprise is one of the essential elements in comedy.

I’d never been the class clown. In fact, I loathed the class clown. Why couldn’t the class clown pipe down so we could all get back to learning? I loved learning! In the comedy clubs I loved learning the craft of comedy. But I was horrified at how old fashioned, hateful, and divisive so much of the comedy was. The difference between men and women? Between L.A. and New York? Between cats and dogs? Really? Weren’t we well past that? And even more than the retro subjects, just the way stand-up sounded seemed old fashioned. And violent. All those punch lines. And comedians talking about killing and bombing.

One night a club owner called me over. “It’s strange,” he said. “The audience isn’t laughing at you but they are listening. That barely ever happens. And the only reason you’re not getting the laughs is that you’re in the wrong rhythm. You’re going ‘one two, one two.’ And it should be ‘one two, one two.’”

Could it possibly be that simple? I was horrified and elated. I walked around for weeks trying to internalize that rhythm. No luck. Or maybe extreme luck, because what I did find was the courage to take the next step on the Comedian’s Way: to find my own rhythm, beyond one and two.

I didn’t have the opportunity to act on it until a few years later. I was in L.A. waiting to follow Andrew Dice Clay at the Comedy Store. I was hating him for his misogynistic act, hating the audience for laughing at him, and hating myself for hating it. And I felt all the comedy drain out of me. Shortly thereafter I created Un-Cabaret, the show that made my Hollywood reputation. A place where great comedians could tell stories and talk the way we talk on the phone: intimately, organically, authentically. Sometimes it was confessional, sometimes it was a rant, sometimes a story, sometimes stream of consciousness. But it was always rhythmically varied, with each comedian sounding uniquely like themselves. And that really was key, because the rhythm of your voice is the wave that your inner truth rides on.

But how to make that inner truth funny? That was the next step—and even harder than the first two. Because in order to find the really deep funny you have to be willing to go to the pain. Anger, bitterness, shame, blame, frustration, humiliation, despair. That’s where the real comedy lives. Some people will tell you to follow your bliss, but I say follow your pain. Follow it, convert it into comedy, and the laughing creates an alchemical reaction that takes the “ow” out of now. As long as you understand your pain better than the audience.

The one thing that really keeps an audience—be it a club crowd, a boss, a class, a date, or even a jury—from laughing is that they are worried about you. Which is maybe why I still pre-emptively worry. I worry so you don’t have to.

But I shouldn’t. Because the one thing that is most worrisome to audiences is the feeling that they know you better than you know yourself. Self-knowledge (svadhyaya in Sanskrit) is not just the knowledge of the big Self and how you are connected to it, but the deep understanding of yourself, in this particular incarnation. Which, of course, will end just as you come to understand it fully! And because of all this comedy work, I have come to know myself deeply. I am very well known, to me anyway. Which is a lot like being famous, without all those pesky paparazzi.

Although I love the paparazzi. The flashing lights, keeping you right there in the moment. That’s what I love about the stage, too. There is nowhere else except now. And in the now, with the laughs rolling in, I feel light. Lighter than I do in any healing session. Light as a feather.

In fact, in Egyptian wisdom traditions, the heart of the deceased, the seat of their soul, is weighed on a scale against the feather of Ma’at, the goddess of truth. If the heart is free from the impurities of sin, and therefore lighter than the feather, the deceased can enter the eternal afterlife. So, the whole goal of life is to be lighthearted.

For me, there is no one aha moment of getting this lightheartedness, of learning to activate the seventh sense: the sense of humor. It’s a practice. All along we look for the truth, the laugh-out-loud truth. And then we die anyway. Which is, I am learning, possibly the funniest thing of all.

Beth Lapides is a comedian and author of the haiku collection Did I Wake You? She is an actress (Sex and the City), a columnist (My Other Car is a Yoga Mat), and a writer for NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Utne Reader. Beth created the groundbreaking alternative comedy phenomenon Un-Cabaret (Comedy Central, Sirius, and audible.com) with her spouse, partner, and co-teacher, Greg Miller.

Join Beth Lapides and Greg Miller for an exploration of your personal “Fool’s Journey” in The Comedian’s Way: A Creative Path for Writers, Performers, and Other Humans, August 1–6.

spreading the word…

Wanderlust Yoga and Music Festival, Lake Tahoe, California
Daily yoga classes, nightly dance parties, and awesome extracurricular activities. Wanderlust is a one-of-a-kind festival bringing together the world’s best yoga teachers—including Shiva Rea, Baron Baptiste, and Seane Corn—with musical performances from Moby, Bassnectar, Brazilian Girls, Pretty Lights, and others, all in a setting of breathtaking natural beauty.

Check out Wanderlust, July 29–August 1.

quote of the month

Blessed is the person who is too busy to worry in the daytime and too sleepy to worry at night.
—Author Unknown

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