About two weeks ago I received my first letter from Ana Vitoria, who lives in the northeast of South America’s largest country. Cool!

I’ve always loved getting letters in the mail. In high school, I wrote to my friends regularly—and they wrote back. I even wrote to strangers I met while traveling–and they wrote back. I remember very clearly how great it was to catalog my thoughts and the events in my life. Even more thrilling to receive a response.

letter from Ana

So, I was smiling from ear to ear as I opened the white World Vision envelope postmarked “Recife, BR.”  Ana’s funny, 7-year old thoughts were penciled in crooked letters on the organization’s stationary: she has a cat named Shena. Her favorite color is pink. She likes rice pudding.

I made my way through the Portuguese first (hard to read in crooked pencil marks) and then read the translation. Fun!

I imagined her sitting down with her project worker, maybe on some porch or outdoor bench near her school, maybe the fields are green around her, or maybe they are brown and parched.

I see her answering his questions about what she might want to say to me, this stranger so many thousands of miles away in this famous city of this famous country. I imagined how my life that must seem, in her imagination, to be overflowing with luxuries.

As we head into December—a time of unrelenting indulgences with presents to buy, trips to take, parties to go to, New Year’s hopes and dreams on the horizon—I’m gearing up to write Ana a letter of my own.

I’ll be thinking about how to put my life into simple words. I’ll be thinking about all the many, many blessings that I have, all the advantages I overlook everyday. I’ll look for the words that a 7-year-old would understand, one who struggles to have enough to eat. It makes me wonder if I couldn’t do more for Ana than just send her a Christmas card.

(In some countries that World Vision sponsors, you can buy a child’s family a goat!)

And in the meantime, I’m feeling pretty grateful to be sending her a little money every month. It’s a great feeling to contribute to her well-being. Maybe you’ll contribute at the office this year, or volunteer at a local food bank, or even sponsor a child of your own?

Happy holiday month and Hari Om!

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Or maybe it’s just me—I’ve  spontaneously stopped eating much meat or drinking much alcohol lately, and it’s making me sensitive to, you know, broccoli, kale, and stories about animals.

Jack in good health

This story about Jack the Cat really got to me today.

Jack the Cat escaped his carrying case before being loaded onto and American Airlines flight bound for California on August 25, where his owner, Karen, was moving.

Lost in the airport for 61 days, he fell through the ceiling at JFK customs on October 25 and was rushed to pet hospital in Manhattan.

American Airlines flew Karen back to New York to attend to her cat. But he was too weak from malnutrition and dehydration to continue on. On Sunday, after Karen had flown back home, Jack was put to sleep, surrounded by Karen’s friends and supporters.

Despite measures like a feeding tube, intravenous fluids, antibiotics and one operation, veterinarians finally recommended euthanasia.

“Forty to 60 percent of his body area was affected by devitalized tissue, tissue without blood flow,” Dr. Daly said.

A Facebook page devoted to Jack, Jack the Cat Is Lost in AA Baggage at J.F.K., had more than 24,400 “likes” as of Monday morning. On Sunday, a post entitled “RIP Jack — Full Info” reported that Jack had “gone over the rainbow bridge.”

Rest in peace, furry friend.

Sniff.

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It was hard to leave at that moment, especially to return to my rather foreign life in New York. I was a part of his family more than ever now, and they needed all the help they could get.

(Two 1/2 months earlier, Bill had been diagnosed with a stage 4 brain cancer, just a few weeks after his 36th birthday.)

My brother, Bill, one week after diagnosis, with his family. July 2011

On that September trip, I had gotten close to my 5-yr old nephew, Alex, and my 3-yr old niece, Sammie. I had gotten to know my sister-in-law in a way that only people thrown together into crisis can. I had one of the most intense—and in an odd way, satisfying—experiences of family I’d ever had.

I worried about leaving them at this moment, yet I needed to get back home to keep my own life going.  If my life fell apart—emotionally, financially, or otherwise—I wouldn’t be much good to anyone.

On my poignant plane ride back, thinking so much about family, I also felt lucky to be in a position to help. My brother’s airline (he’s a pilot) was flying me out to the west coast of Canada and back. My job as an editor was giving me the time off. I was able-bodied and I had a enough savings to afford miss a paycheck.

Still, I also felt the temptation to retreat into worry, sadness, and self-pity. Nothing compared to my younger—and only—brother getting stage 4 cancer.

Yet instead of descending into self-indulgence, something else, completely surprising, happened.

On the plane’s head-set TV,  an advertisement came on for an organization that sponsors children and their communities in impoverished parts of the world. Usually I leave that kind of work to other humanitarians. But that morning I felt an instant connection to those children. I deeply understood what it would mean for them to have some extra help.

In fact, for the price of a sandwich every week I could get a child a visit to a doctor, help her (or him) grow a garden, or even buy her textbooks or help her go to school for the first time. Thinking about it made me cry all over again.

I thought about it back at home and I investigated the organization. I waffled and I wavered. But the feeling that I needed to do this persisted.

So here are the three reasons why I decided to sponsor Ana Souza Silva, age 7, of northeastern Brazil.

Ana, 7

1. There is almost no price on giving ($10 a week? nothing), but there is a huge price to not receiving. To give to someone who needs help is an honor and a privilege.

2. I am Ana; Ana is me. We are connected. The act of giving is the understanding that our lives are, ultimately, bound together. It’s the, “there but for the grace of God go I” idea.

3. I’ve felt a special connection with Brazil for several years, and it’s a country I will most likely visit again. The fact that I might meet Ana one day makes giving her money all the more real, and all the more meaningful. (I’ve already started the paperwork!)

4. (I know I said three, but there are more!) It’s really, really easy. It’s the easiest way I know to give thanks for the privilege of my own life. It *is* the embodiment of “thanksgiving.” Why wait for the date in November before I embrace this commitment to living?

5. It’s almost hard to describe how exciting and moving it is to give a little money to Ana each week. It chokes me up every time.

Maybe this holiday season you might also give to a needy child or a needy family. It really feels amazing. I chose to work through World Vision. They are a Christian organization, but they get great reports. Happy November!

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Are you surprised?

What surprises me (constantly, sigh) is the endless creative ways that entrepreneurs organize yoga for busy brides-to-be. Writes the Times:

It’s not just New Yorkers: The Los Angeles-based company Yoga for Weddings (slogan: “Bringing the Deep Breath to the Big Day”) offers private 90-minute classes, with a focus on “heart-opening poses” like the Cobra, for brides-to-be and their pals in nine United States cities (cost: $500). Innerlight Center for Yoga and Meditation in Middletown, R.I., started offering $200-an-hour bachelorette parties last year; already demand this year has tripled, said Kim Chandler, the center’s director.

That’s a lot of cash for a little namaste with your girlfriends…. but it’s about priorities.

I’m guessing smart companies know that a few sweaty down dogs with your closest lady friends might work out better in the long run than a big drunken glitter-covered mess that you don’t remember well even the next morning.

Photo c/o the New York Times

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… Swami Ramdev, a yoga guru with political aspirations and hundreds of thousands of followers, has created another front of protest. Tents have been prepared at a campsite in New Delhi for a mass yoga session on Saturday followed by a hunger strike. Mr. Sibal and other top ministers met Swami Ramdev at New Delhi’s airport on Wednesday and spent nearly two hours trying in vain to persuade him not to protest. –NYTimes

photo c/o New York Times/ B.Mathur/Reuters

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, where we have not a thing to protest, and only joy in our hearts, yogis and music lovers are preparing for the second attempt at a ginormous public yoga class in the city. As you might remember—maybe you were there—last year’s Flavorpill event was rained out. This year, the Wanderlust team has taken over, and will be offering instruction by Anusara’s golden child, Elena Brower, Breakti’s creator Anya Porter, and Kula Yoga/Wanderlust director, Schuyler Grant at Pier 63 near 24th Street and the Westside Highway on June 7th. Music will be provided by New York’s favorite in-class musician, Garth Stevenson, and Earthrise Soundsystem.

Wanderlust at the Standard in Miami, 2011

From political theater to giant concert, appropriate use of yoga has once again proven to be hard to establish. But a lot of people do seem to think it’s more fun when attached to another agenda, and when practiced with a lot of other people. Maybe.

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One of my favorite passages from Neal Pollack’s hilarious book Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude involves him going to a Yoga Journal conference in San Francisco. He describes it thus:

Lurching through the doors of the Hyatt, I entered a sea of crazy old ladies seeking their next kundalini high, as well as a decent number of smokin’ hot babes in tight lululemon pants. A few men floated about carefully, like Triassic-era furry mammals looking for eggs to gnaw not wanting to disturb the dominant species. Everyone seemed excited and awake. I was a midnight guy in the Valley of the Morning People.”

Pretty accurate.

He goes on to describe the sub-basement room his workshop takes place in, and the blue masking tape that marked “even rectangular spaces each large enough for a yoga mat and some miscellaneous props.”

I was in the middle of a mind-boggling lecture on Tantra when I remembered Pollack’s line about the tape. And as I looked around me, I realized—I was surrounded.

Blue tape at the YJ Conference keeps everyone in line

The blue tape was everywhere, in every lecture room and practice space. Fronts of rooms were taped, backs of rooms, even spaces that it was unlikely anyone would ever practice, such as beside the stage or right near the door. The only places that weren’t taped were the marketplace and the lecture hall (which did, however, look like a powder-blue tea cup).

Clearly, the blue tape is a pragmatic solution to human tendency towards chaos. And I admit it made me feel somehow safer from the throngs of people: I had space to put my shoes, my bag, my notebook, and pen. It gave me some private property, and acted as a psychological barrier in a radically impersonal space full of strangers.

Still, it did have an elementary school feel to it, like it was meant to help us to color more neatly between the lines. And it could not protect us from our thoughts, like, “that’s an unfortunate hair style” or “wish I had started yoga in the womb so I wouldn’t feel so behind now.”

Nor could the ubiquitous blue tape protect us from weird vibes or aromas, like my neighbor’s unbrushed-teeth smell that he blew on me as we did an excruciating IT band release in Bo Forbes’s “Mind-Body Flow: Crafting a Therapeutic Practice.”

more blue tape

Since Pollack had pointed out the tape—and it had lodged in my memory—it did add some levity to my endeavors at the conference. There I was, one of a thousand women and a hundred men flip-flopping around the Hilton Hotel, loaded with yoga mats, blankets, bags, water bottles and swag, like perky Spandex-clad pack-horses. We were searching for yoga knowledge—or just yoga fun—to be delivered in neat packages that appealed to our upper-middle class sensibilities (with a dash of the hippie dippie).

Who were we kidding? Were we for real?

Most of us were earnestly excited, but our questing also seemed a bit silly.

So maybe we do need help coloring between the lines, playing nice, and staying on point. “Hi, that’s MY Prana mat bag, don’t touch it,” or “Keep your eco-friendly, hand-dyed shoes on YOUR side of the blue tape, please.”

Now, now, kiddies.

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This weekend in is the second Yoga Journal conference in New York (the first was in 2009), and through a stroke of good fortune I was able to attend. Not wanting to waste a single drop of my precious pass, I chose to do the Friday all-day intensive with Rod Stryker, creator of Para Yoga.

In other words, I would spend the entire day with a Tantric teacher instead of at my day job. You can imagine that my choice was not difficult: reviewing manuscript for a remedial English textbook, or learning about how to overcome my limitations by becoming a living embodiment of the divine. Hmm. I put in for a personal day, rolled up my blue piling yoga mat, and packed off to the Hilton Hotel in mid-town.

I had another agenda, too. Stryker is a long-time student of Panditji Rajmani Tigunait, the spiritual head of the Himalayan Institute where I’ve been doing the Living Tantra series since July 2010. I wanted to see how Stryker interpreted the teachings of Panditji—and Panditji’s teacher, Swami Rama—for American yoga people. Truth be told, I was having some trouble with the mysterious and magical stories of Tantra’s history and practices. How exactly was I supposed to conduct a fire ceremony, or the secret rituals? How did my urban Brooklyn life fit in with Tantra’s esoteric take on reality?

So here they all were again, Tantra’s basic ideas, but presented in the low-lit conference room of a corporate hotel, rather than in a vegetarian ashram in northeastern Pennsylvania. In Tantra, Styrker reminded us, we don’t make the self go away in order to have a spiritual practice. Rather, we alchemize ourselves so that the divine works through us. How do we attract divinity? Not by giving up worldly things, but by becoming more like the divine in our daily lives. Tantric asana practice is a discipline to refine your energy so that the alchemy can happen.

What about sex and death, you ask? Well, in the left-handed path, which is all about enjoyment, no desire is denied because all desires are expressions of the divine. In the left-handed path, you can have all the sex you want, but you might also meditate in a cremation ground by sitting on a corpse. Ewww.

Since many people are not always comfortable with corpses—and truthfully probably not so much with hedonistic sex either—they have to practice asana, pranayama, mantra and ritual to clear out their misconceptions of the Source and limitated conceptions of the Self. In other words, on the right-handed path, which emphasizes liberation, people have to work to align their desires with the divine, to know that there IS a source behind everything. And this source is beyond what we can conceive of with the rational mind. In the right-handed path, no ecstatic copulation—and no visits to graveyards—is required.

Stryker talked for most of the morning session, introducing the subject of “god” and all its forms at about the half an hour mark. “We have all these choices but they are not related, not integrated. It’s like going to several specialists and getting several opinions–it almost paralyzes you. In Tantra we integrate them.”

Then we practiced. Gentle asana—that reminded me very much of ViniYoga asana practices—with the emphasis on the breathing pattern. On the inhale bring the breath down the spine and relax the bandhas, on the exhale bring the breath up the spine and contract the lower two locks. We were trying to build fire in the belly, the fire of manipura chakra, where our issues get burned up and purified, and where our sense of agency originates.

We did this in standing poses, back bends, and forward extensions, even adding in the mantra, Om Agni Namaha—the mantra to stimulate and propitiate the fire at our navel center.

Then we sat for meditation.

By the time we broke for lunch—and again after the afternoon session—I was high as a kite, floating on a pulsing current that eliminated every thought and even the need to breathe. When I asked Stryker a question in person afterward, my eyes felt dilated like I’d become a wide-eyed alien who had just visited the optometrist. It seemed like light and energy were pouring through them, but Rod answered my question without seeming to notice. No matter, I will bathe everyone I meet with my Tantric-generated fire, I thought, walking unsteadily out into the glaring hallway of the enormous hotel.

Clearly that wasn’t going to last long. In the evening I was signed up for David Romanelli’s “Yoga & Chocolate” class. While “yoga & chocolate” might seem to qualify for the left-handed path, it wasn’t hedonistic at all. In fact, going from Stryker to Romanelli was like falling from the breathless heights of Kilimanjaro and landing with a thump in a Starbucks.

Not that the chocolates weren’t good—the Vosges chocolates were complex and intriguing, especially the vegan one with Oaxaca chilis. It was the yoga that was prosaic. Your basic sun salutation, your basic back bend, your basic forward fold. And the sprinkling of interesting factoids throughout the class felt calculated to deliver a message to a demographic to which Romanelli, a self-proclaimed “major Gemini,” assumed we belonged—the too busy, too distracted crowd who was out of touch with our emotions and our five senses.

Romanelli was a clever marketer, but his delivery was flat—and in fact, he read from his factoids from a script. He seemed happiest when he was embracing beautiful women—of whom he seemed to know a great many (I saw him embracing them all over the Hilton).

Still, the 100 or so women—and 8 or so men—in attendance thought that “Yoga & Chocolate” was the way to go, and who am I to question how people approach meaning in their lives? I’d just dropped in from Mars, after all.

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It’s also not a new idea. My ob/gyn, Dr. Eden Fromberg, opened Lila Wellness Center in New York several years ago to meet women’s pre-and post- (and pre- pre-) natal needs. And there have been programs such as Receptive Nest, and studios such as Brooklyn’s Bend & Bloom, helping women to reach full “bloom” in their childbearing years. Other renegade yoga specialists have been helping women for years to make the all-important mind-body connection necessary.

But the NYTime’s article this weekend, “Yoga as Stress Relief: An Aid for Infertility?” raises this issue with a new twist: once-skeptical fertility professionals (doctors) are giving yoga the green light. The tide is turning in how acceptable yoga is to support women in their quest to become pregnant.

Medical acceptance of yoga as a stress reliever for infertility patients is slowly growing. In 1990, when Dr. Domar first published research advocating a role for stress reduction in infertility treatment, “I wasn’t just laughed at by physicians,” she said. “I was laughed at by Resolve, the national infertility organization. They all said I was perpetuating a myth of ‘Just relax, and you’ll get pregnant.’ ” At the last meeting for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, Dr. Domar, now on the national board of Resolve, gave multiple talks, including one about how to help the mind and body work together in infertile couples.

And this is a national phenomenon, not just a jag in New York or San Francisco where there are always a handful of people pushing the envelope.

Still, even with yoga’s help, infertility doesn’t sound like too much fun.

“A lot of people want to boil it down to ‘If you relax, it will happen,’ ” Ms. Petigara, a former in vitro fertilization patient who adopted a son, wrote in an e-mail. “I absolutely feel that yoga can have a very positive impact on infertility, but infertility is a lot more than ‘just relaxing.’ ”

Oh!!! As in, lie back and think of England? Well, yoga never was really about passivity.

If you happen to be dealing with infertility right now, you can attend the March 17th tele-seminar on “Yoga for Fertility” led by Jill Petigara, who teaches in the Philadelphia area. But you’ll have to Google the details.

Food for thought

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Oy vey.

For the first time in 4 years, I don’t have a tropical destination this winter: no Costa Rica yoga retreat to lead. My teaching cohort has gone off in India for 6 weeks. So there’s no guaranteed relief this year: relief for lizard-like skin, plunging vitamin D levels, or the feeling of being embalmed in wool (boiled or cashmere makes no difference: I’m a summer girl; I like to feel my limbs free).

So imagine how grateful I am to the yoga centers nearby who had the brilliant idea of installing saunas. In this weather, it’s fantastic to be warm. It’s great to feel really HOT. It feels SO GOOD to sweat like a tropical plant opening up to a sweltering afternoon shower. And in a weird way, it’s great to suffer in the way opposite from the day-to-day suffering.

When Spa Castle (Korean spa in Queens) is too far away, the Russian baths are too skanky (or just too much cash), I know I can slip over to Kula Williamsburg or Greenhouse Holistic (N7 & Roebling), take a class, and douse my unhappy epidermis with dry heat until the leathery stiffness begins to give. And at Kula, I can also have some of Brownie’s delicious banana bread after (which is going to make bikini season a little harder to prepare for this year).

Ahhhhhh. Long live the convenient neighborhood sauna.

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Above: a few minutes of yoga on the Great Lawn before yogis fled for shelter

In June, nature and the NYC Park’s Department were more powerful than 13,000 people doing sun salutations on NYC’s Central Park: we got rained out. (More reason for mind training, folks! Were you really thinking about the sun??!?!? Or were you eyeing your cute neighbor? Or drooling over that tasty treat in your goodie bag?)

Flavorpill promised to try Y@GL again in September. But as of last week, they’ve moved Attempt #2 to 2011, promising not just a better experience then (lines fewer than 20 blocks long), but more tie-ins to charities, a national edition of these gi-normous “yoga experiences,” and a weekly health and wellness mailer.

It makes a lot more sense for an event that size to generate something more useful than an entry in the Guinness World Records. After all, most yogis want to make a difference.

In case you’ve forgotten—or couldn’t make it in June—you can watch Flavorpill’s videos and catch up. (They must have been shot from the helicopter that hovered over us making it impossible to hear.) And they really do provide a better view than we got from the lawn itself.

So even if you can’t do your downdogs in a throng of thousands, on a nubby lawn, with a new slippery mat (c/o Jet Blue) this September, you can still attend Flavorpill’s smaller yoga events (at places like MoMA) during the year. And of course, you’ll start getting the wellness mailer next month. Just think: there’s a whole year of them to warm you up for Y@GL 2011.

And if you’re among those who find the so-what factor fairly high, then you’ve got an entire month free of cheek-chewing. No more massive public gatherings in the name of yoga…. for at least September.

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