Leslie seated at a massage table demonstrating a technique for a roomful of students

Leslie Kaminoff is a best-selling author and yoga educator.

Category: personal

  • Fall travel and teaching is back…and so is my OM!

    Fall travel and teaching is back…and so is my OM!

    autumn leaves on the groundFall has always been my favorite time of year. Here in New York, in the northeastern United States, summer is notoriously hazy, sticky, humid and stinky. A crispness emerges in the air just past August, making it far more pleasurable to simply breathe, and it feels amazing to enjoy my lungs in this way.

    Particularly following my first (and worst) experience with COVID-19 in February and March 2020, enjoying my lungs was definitely not the case. Long COVID symptoms continued for a year as my body dealt with challenges including breathing difficulties, extreme fatigue, brain fog, and eventually a six-and-a-half-hour ablation procedure for AFib and other arrhythmias exacerbated by the virus. The good news is that I’m almost fully recovered from all of that, and have regained the strength and endurance to begin traveling and teaching again, something I’ve sorely missed.

    When I first experienced the coughing and bronchial inflammation common to COVID-19, I was tremendously grateful for a background in breath practice. I could see how anyone without similar experience might be sent into a panic as the length and depth of their breath became shorter and shallower. That panic alone might send someone to the hospital and onto a ventilator. Fortunately, after years of practicing yoga I knew at a somatic level that the length and breadth of my breath could be modified significantly, without dying. This is what yoga teaches in both asana and pranayama: it is a controlled stress experiment. From our first class we’re being asked to put our body in some weird, difficult position and then breathe. Yeah, right. For anyone without these experiences in their history, COVID must have been terrifying.

    I am connecting especially deeply with breath work these days, having been through my own breathing challenges. I can say with a high degree of certainty that had it not been for my ability to recalibrate my moment-to-moment breathing due to my training and practice of breath-centered yoga, my COVID symptoms would have certainly landed me in the hospital in March of 2020, and I’d most likely not have survived intact, or at all. 

    58.5 seconds of OM

    During the last years I’ve been using the length of my OM as a metric of recovery. It was pretty dramatic how short my OM was during the summer of 2020 – I would start coughing and sputtering and shuddering. Trying to get a “deep” breath was impossible, until I remembered that deep doesn’t have to be big – it can also mean very small and close to the core of my body. This anatomical understanding brought comfort and a something to focus on until my bronchia quieted down. I’m happy to say that – on a good day – I’m back up to about a one minute OM (well, 58.5 seconds to be exact, as in this video I made in April!). I can’t get there every day, but it is a relief to know it’s possible.

    OMs are how I open my workshops, encouraging each student to do their own length OM rather than chant in unison. When I don’t force my breath into anyone else’s pattern it permits me to relax into the process. It really isn’t a competition (well, that’s what Lydia says, but she’s the least competitive person I know!) and completing three comfortable, calm, personal-length OMs is a wonderful thing to experience.

    I’ve got a number of upcoming workshops, both in-person (in London at triyoga Camden), and over Zoom (so you can attend from anywhere), where breath will be the primary focus. SPECIAL NOTE: If you or someone you know will be in London October 7-10, I’d love to connect at one of the public programs, or in a private session – especially if I can be of any help with recovering respiratory function.

    And don’t forget, you can access a huge amount of my teaching material and one-on-one yoga content by subscribing to breathingproject.com.

    I hope to see you soon, either in-person or virtually. Enjoy the Fall (or Spring, if you’re down under)!

    Leslie

  • This is my job now.

    This is my job now.

    Teaching in front of a 100+ students in Weesp, Netherlands
    Leslie working alone in front of multiple computer monitors

    I have been composing this message in my head for a while now, but before I worked out any of the details, I did have a solid grasp of the title:

    “This is my job now.”

    At least, that’s what I keep hearing in my head every time I return to the challenging, complex work of building my new web platform at BreathingProject.com. It’s been a real stretch for me, not to mention a shift in identity. My skill sets as yoga educator, bodyworker and anatomy teacher have been built by working directly with other people, not by wrangling with audiovisual editing programs and web hosted content management. I am definitely in my wheelhouse interacting with other humans, not as I am now, sitting alone at my workstation, but…

    This is my job now.

    So much has already been said and written about all the ways work conditions have changed for us in the last two and a half years. Speaking from personal experience, I can look at just one fact that sums it all up: after nearly two decades of teaching and traveling to lead multi-day workshops in locations around the globe, since March 2020, I’ve taught only 22 workshops. Excluding two week-long cadaver dissections, I have only shared physical space with students in six of those 22. Everyone else who’s learned and practiced with me since the pandemic has done so by looking at screens and hearing voices transmitted from spaces far away.

    By contrast, in the previous two and a half years, from September 2017 to March 2022, I taught at 60 live workshops, conferences and other events. So basically, my in-person contact with students has been reduced by 90% since Covid. So, for better or worse…

    This is my job now.

    I have accepted that this reality will never fully go away. Of course, I still gladly welcome all invitations to teach in-person events, but it is clear the conditions allowing that to be my primary focus are in the past. We’ve been working with all our hosts to produce hybrid events, live streaming the workshops and posting the recordings for ongoing access. All these recordings will eventually be archived permanently and fully searchable at breathingproject.com.

    This is my job now.

    And, I’ve become deeply aware of the difference between my job and my career: a job – any job – can be taken away; a career cannot. Personal, societal or technological changes are perpetually making certain jobs less relevant, or even obsolete. My career as an educator is a lifelong commitment, a deep part of who I am, and I will always find the means to keep doing it.

    Growing up I never had a master plan. I could only have become an educator, anatomist, bodyworker by dropping out of formal education at a pretty young age – and by following my interests – by observing and absorbing from some of the best people on the planet I could find – and by having the stubbornness to stick with it long enough to see the world come around to share enough of my interests. Since I never had a “Plan A,” I certainly do not have a “Plan B.” So, I’m on this train all the way to the end of the line. I invite you to hop on and ride with me for a while and see where it leads us.

    Leslie Kaminoff's signature

    P.S. Oh, yes. I almost forgot. This message has been a rather wordy way of saying that BreathingProject.com is officially out of Beta, which means we have hopefully worked out all the major kinks and glitches. Since some of the tech we are using is quite new, it took a bit longer than we had planned. Please continue to let us know about any functionality we still need to improve

  • The Anatomical Gifts That Keep on Giving

    The Anatomical Gifts That Keep on Giving

    University of Massachusetts anatomical gift donor form

    In a temporal twist of fate, last week I got the news that my father, Harvey Kaminoff, passed away about 5 minutes after I returned from the local FedEx office to overnight his anatomical gift donor forms to the UMass Medical School. Although my father’s death was sudden, it was not unexpected. Fortunately, I had just organized a family visit with him the day before his death at the nursing home where he had been cared for since last October. Over the decades of my anatomical study, Harvey expressed interest in donating his body to help others gain the same kind of experience he’d seen deepen my knowledge and practice.

    I am extremely grateful to Amanda Collins, the Director of Anatomical Services at the UMass medical school, and her colleagues, who helped expedite the donation process in record time. The fact that Harvey’s body will be helping first-year medical students learn gross anatomy this fall in Worcester, MA tremendously brightened an otherwise sad occasion. You can read more about my father’s influence on my life and work in this Facebook post. It seems to have struck a chord, garnering more engagement than usual.

    In my decades-long study and teaching of anatomy, I have been personally and professionally enriched by the generosity of many donors like my father, and it has been an honor to facilitate an anatomical gift – this time from the family’s perspective.

    My dad in his youth, on the left, and with my three sons and me in 2017.

    While I’m on the topic of anatomical gifts, I’ve just learned that two spots recently opened up for our previously sold-out Movement Anatomy Hands-On Cadaver Lab in Colorado Springs March 14-18. We are limiting participation to 6 students per table, so if you’ve ever dreamed of learning anatomy in this amazing format, our lab will be as up-close and personal a setting as you will find.

    I will be teaching alongside the amazing Lauri Nemetz, MA, BC-DMT, LCAT, ERYT500, C-IAYT, a yoga and movement educator who specializes in myofascial anatomy as well as one of the lead dissector on the international team at the Fascial Net Plastination Project, and past faculty dissector for Anatomy Trains Dissections®. Once these 2 spots are taken, the course will be full, so reach out soon via the KNM Labs website.

    I have provided links below for those inspired to learn more about anatomical gifting, which serves a different purpose from the organ donation choice on the back of most drivers’ licenses. They fill a vital educational need, and many regions across the United States are chronically short of full-body donations for the kind medical study we do in our labs.

  • Miami, Memories and Me

    Miami, Memories and Me

    Here we are at the cusp of September 2021, well into a second year under the looming threat of the Covid-19 pandemic. I, for one, really didn’t think I’d be saying that. Many of my workshops got rescheduled from 2020 (one even postponed multiple times!) but I am truly thrilled and eagerly anticipating a fall season of travel teaching.

    Me (L) and my brother Rick, Key West circa 1963

    There’s a lovely synchronicity that my re-entry to live, in-person teaching includes a weekend workshop at Kino McGregor’s new Miami Life Center, titled The Anatomy of Yoga, the Yoga of Anatomy. This topic will provide a solid grounding to the yoga I teach, and practice but – separately – I consider South Florida my ancestral home.

    In the early to mid-60s, I lived in South Florida, splitting time between an apartment above my grandparents’ bar in Key West and Miami Beach, where my mother relocated as she rebuilt life with two young sons after her split from my father. Far from being the fashionable, hip enclave it’s become, the South Miami Beach I knew in the 1960s was almost entirely the province of an aging Jewish population that had found refuge from the cold Northeast and the ravages of the Holocaust. Thinking about that time span now, it’s incredible to realize that for the people I was living with in Miami, the end of World War II was as recent a memory as 9/11 is for me.

    And now, after nearly two years of pandemic-separation, I will get to visit with my mother who lives back in the region, as well as teach in Miami! With so many memories intertwining on this return, I anticipate having a very resonant, heartfelt experience on this journey.

    I am very grateful for the opportunity to help Kino open her beautiful new facility, and for all the hard work her team has put in to make it possible, in spite of nearly overwhelming challenges. It takes a lot of guts to open a new yoga facility these days, and I’m happy to support anyone who’s willing to take it on. If you or anyone you know is in the Miami area, I’d love to have a chance to connect.

    This will be a hybrid event, with a limited number of vaccinated or recently negative-tested students attending the sessions in person as well as virtually, and filmed for replays by Omstars, a great online resource. I’m very much looking forward to connecting with the community there – even with all the challenges intrinsic to gathering with a group of people for an in-person learning event.

  • Greetings from my self-imposed isolation in New York City!

    Greetings from my self-imposed isolation in New York City!

    Stale Peeps-on-a-stick pair very nicely with a fine rosé.
    CREDIT: Lydia Mann 

    I hope you and your loved ones are faring well and staying safe during this challenging time in our shared history. Lydia and I are nearing the end of a self-imposed 14-day quarantine after returning from a month-long teaching tour of Australia. 

    The trip home was….well…a trip. Our original flight on Cathay Pacific was canceled, so we enjoyed a 15-hour layover in Hong Kong. We wore our N95 masks, did our best to sequester ourselves in the near-deserted airport lounge, and we had a whole bulkhead row to ourselves on the half-empty flight back.

    In spite of all our precautions, I got off the plane from our 44-hour journey with a cough, sore throat and a bit of a fever.  Ordinarily I’d expect to be a bit under the weather after such a travel ordeal and would have paid it no mind but, given the current concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic, we exercised an overabundance of caution and self-imposed the quarantine at home. My fever went away in a couple of days and I was feeling myself a few days later, consistent with my ordinary recovery from a trip down under.

    Unsurprisingly, several of my upcoming live workshops have been rescheduled for later in the year. We’ve got wonderful hosts who are doing all they can to accommodate the changes needed during these chaotic times. There is still so much unknown, but please refer to my calendar page for updated workshops.

    Much yoga teaching has moved online in the past few weeks, a rapid and wonderful alternative during this crisis. I have made sections of my online course “Practices” and selected resources from “Fundamentals” available for free as part of a larger project called “Studio Relief.” This initiative by Mark Walsh, founder of The Embodiment Conference, brings together teachers from many styles who have donated online resources for the house-bound public. You can access my classes at this link.

    As wonderful as these heartfelt and generous offerings are, I feel the need to point out that it is imperative not to permanently de-monetize our value.  If a studio is offering free classes in hope that members or card-holders do not cancel ongoing payment plans, that’s a valid business strategy. But if you are an independent teacher putting classes online for free to stay connected, consider asking students to pay on a sliding scale. It’s simply a matter of offering value-for-value. After all, internet service isn’t free nor are your electric or food bills, so neither should the yoga instruction you offer.

    Wishing you and yours well,

  • A very full (Mr.) September!

    A very full (Mr.) September!

    Well, the month I’ve been waiting for is finally here: September 2019 is when everyone who purchased the Jade Yoga Calendar gets to look at my bare chest for a whole month. Being a calendar model is now something I can check off my bucket list, along with being on the cover of Yoga Journal (although it was the back cover, when Jade used my calendar photo for an ad in the May-June issue). A big special shout-out to the amazing photographer Francesco Mastalia, whose wet plate collodion work is truly gorgeous.

    Now, Lydia and I are off on the first of two fall European teaching trips, and we’re excited to be starting our tour by visiting three new cities, as well as returning to some old friends in the fourth. That makes four workshops, in four countries, in three weeks.

    First stop is Stockholm, Sweden to teach a weekend workshop for Yoga Shakti titled Breath-Centered Yoga and “Reimagining Alignment,” September 7-8.

    Next, we land on the beautiful coast of Ireland in County Clare’s Lahinch Yoga for a midweek (Tuesday-Wednesday, September 10-11) program focused on integrating body, mind, and breath as well as non-linear teaching methods and arm supports.

    Then, we hop over to Amsterdam where we recently added a Friday evening masterclass to accommodate the waiting list for our sold-out weekend program for Global Flow Yoga. The weekend will touch on some cool topics like fascia, fluids and creative chaos in the classroom, September 13-15.

    From Amsterdam, we fly to Valencia not to teach but to visit the home of one of our favorite dishes – paella! It’s a trip we’ve wanted to do for a while, and we’re very happy to have a couple of days there before we wind up the trip in Madrid. This will be our fourth time teaching for our good friends Blanca and Pablo at Dhara Yoga. We really enjoy teaching in Madrid, and during this visit we’ll cover some more advanced topics related to Hatha Yoga theory and practice like Shushumna Nadi and the physiology of meditative states, September 20-22.

    After all that, we will be more than ready to come home just in time for some rest and fall foliage. Enjoy the beginning of your fall!

    ANNOUNCEMENT: For those of you who have been following my Wednesday night online classes on OmPractice, please note that due to my travel schedule, I am suspending those classes until further notice.

  • My Friend Ti.

    I want you to know about a friend of mine. Her full name is Terecita Mahoney Blair, but everyone calls her Ti (sounds like “Tee”).  August 8 is her birthday and I sincerely hope it marks the start of a wonderful next year.

    Ti is one of my (s)heroes. Life has dealt her some pretty tough cards yet she consistently inspires with dedication, determination and a relentlessly positive, honest outlook.

    I don’t know too much about her early life, but in 2009 Ti got hit by a bus. Her spine was badly broken, and she needed 5 surgeries in the years that followed. Turns out, the hardware that was implanted did not do what it was supposed to and she has been struggling with a host of bizarre and awful symptoms, often being dismissed by orthopedists and other medical professionals. It’s a wonder she was vertical at all, once she learned that nothing more than scar tissue and muscle spasms were keeping her vertebra together (photos below of the faulty and replacement hardware).

    photo of spinal hardware
    Bad spinal hardware, that never should have been put into anyone’s body, and never permitted spinal fusion to take place.

    Ti wrote about her new spinal hardware: “Bottom screws into sacrum, L5 and L4. You can’t see them, but new Titanium plated cages were inserted. Bone should grow within the vertebrae and on the outsides of all the hardware, making for a solid fusion.”

    I met Ti five years ago this month in Los Angeles, when I taught a workshop at Black Dog Yoga, where she was working as their Teacher Training Administrator. Ti was familiar with me through my online courses, which Black Dog had been using as part of their teacher training. You never know who’s going to walk into one of your classes. All educators need to remember that. Ti was just four years post-surgical, and I could have asked a million questions of her, but if I thought I could keep her *safe* during my workshop, I would have been sorely mistaken. All we can do is set up reasonable experiments for our students to try on their “rectangular laboratories” (aka yoga mats), and encourage them to notice what they are experiencing.

    Ti at her temporary work station (laptop on her bright pink walker) answering questions from students in my online Yoga Anatomy course.

    Ti was a careful and wise student, applying the anatomy and asana practice I was presenting, and referencing what she found in her own body. As she wrote in a recent Facebook post: “Leslie Kaminoff’s Yoga Anatomy (is) the foundation of how I teach and understand pain, relationship and balance.” As an educator, I couldn’t possibly hope for a better student.

    When Ti and her husband moved to Denver, it was a natural fit for her to connect with the creator of our online courses Kelsey Kaufman, who lives in Fort Collins, CO. Ti eventually became our anatomy homework coach for the online courses. I am touched and honored to know that her work with us has been a lifeline when she’s been so laid up with physical pain, she’s had to take a break from pretty much everything else.

    I travel around the world teaching yoga for a living – mostly to other yoga teachers, and I feel privileged when I meet people like Ti, whose primary focus is on doing whatever good they can for populations they care most about.  For Ti it’s seniors and first responders, two groups that often get lost in the cracks of our society.  For others, it’s trauma survivors, prison populations, people in recovery, teens at risk…the list is endless. This commitment to using the tools of Yoga to better the world is a never-ending source of inspiration.

    video link Last year, we were thrilled when she was voted the 2017 Silver Sneakers 2017 Instructor of the Year. Please watch this video celebrating Ti’s award and bear in mind that – unbeknownst to her – her spine was being inadequately held together by ill-conceived hardware all the time she was jumping around and leading these classes! Ti’s commitment to frequently invisible populations, in this case older folks needing to get or stay moving, catapulted her along and her life-experience made her a sympathetic example for these elders experiencing their own physical challenges.

    What really makes Ti a hero to me is that through all the pain of recovery as well as her internal demons, she not only maintains a positive attitude but keeps focus on what really matters to her: other people who are struggling. The way she walks through the world reminds me of my teacher, T.K.V. Desikachar’s, admonition that “yoga is relationship.”

    Reconnecting with Ti in Los Angeles a number of years after she showed up in one of my workshops, and just as she was joining my online courses as homework coach.

    There is a great deal of talk about corruption of yoga, and commercialization, and the need for third-party reimbursement and licensing and blah blah blah blah. But Ti is an example of true yoga in action. She has made it her life’s work to seek out and serve communities in need, people who might not otherwise know about coordinating breath and mind and movement in a way to enrich and embody their day-to-day experience. She works one-on-one with veterans and first responders recovering from traumatic injuries, and has forged remarkable relationships with many of them.

    She has been brutally honest about the pain and despair that lurks behind her smiling face and started a Facebook project to help her through this really tough post-surgical period. She is using the medium to raise awareness for many of the causes she supports, by wearing a different “Ti-shirt” every day emblazoned with their logos. Here are a few of the organizations she supports:

    The 2018 Colorado 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb honors and remembers fallen firefighters.  Ti has promised (with her surgeon’s permission) to climb at least one stair on 9/11.  She has set a goal of raising $1,111.00 by then, and I am certain she’ll do it simply because it is something she has set her mind to. I just donated $108.00 and hope you will too, if you can spare it.

    Safe Call Now: A no-cost confidential crisis referral service for public safety agency employees all first responders and their families nationwide.

    Emergency Responder Trauma Counselors (ERTC) provides specialized counseling for emergency services personnel and their family members, related to their work and home life and the variety of stressors in which affect them. Including but not limited to PTSD, anxiety, addiction, depression and grief.

    ResponderStrong: Emergency responders working with the National Mental Health Innovation Center to improve mental wellness among Colorado responders and their families. .

    Officer Involved Project: Officer Involved is a thoughtful documentary that examines officers who have been involved in deadly force incidents during their tour of duty.

    I am proud beyond measure to know Ti and others like her, who constitute the vast majority of the yoga teaching universe.  I’m similarly proud to offer what I can in the way of teaching to the online community we’ve built over the years – a community that now spans 45 countries and over 4,000 students – many of whom are lucky enough to have Ti as their homework coach. On the occasion of Ti Mahoney Blair’s birthday, I recommit to keeping my yoga real and staying connected to those around me. I hope you are inspired, as I have been, by her life and work.

    Happy birthday, Ti!

  • I was asked “What is your favorite quote?”

    You know those Facebook quizzes…the ones that ask a bunch of questions and then deliver what is supposed to be some insightful truth about you, which you’re then supposed to post for all the world to see? I hate those. If you invite me to take one (or to play Candy Crush) I will unfriend you.

    That’s why I was surprised at how deeply I responded to a series of philosophical questions posed by the folks at Triyoga in London, where I’ll be teaching at the end of June. As it happens, the key question they asked me was “What is your favourite quote?” I instantly knew the answer.

    Even before I was attracted to yoga in my late teens, I had been very curious about fundamental world views. My readings at the time tended toward the mystical as well as the philosophical. As part of my yoga training with the Sivananda organization, I got a big dose of Vedanta and Yoga philosophy, which I continued to study for many years.  In spite of the fact that I ended up teaching the basic tenets of Yoga/Vedanta, I developed deep misgivings about what I saw as the disembodied nature of the teachings. Years later, I stumbled on a quote in the book Philosophy: Who Needs It, by Ayn Rand:

    “Humans are beings of self-made soul.”

    That one devastating statement shattered any remnants of the mystical thinking I had inherited from my days at the ashram. It awakened me to the fact that the fundamental essence of my being is my own creation, and it belongs to me, and no one else. In other words, my soul is not on temporary loan from god or some great undifferentiated cloud of consciousness. Through the accumulation of the countless free-will choices I’ve made ever since I’ve existed, I have created the kind of person I have become.

    I came to realize that mystical teachings get it backwards when they insist that existence emerges from consciousness. Rather, consciousness can only exist as an emergent attribute of a physical entity. This is a fundamental point of divergence between my view and that of most other yoga teachers. The issue has been called the primacy of existence vs. the primacy of consciousness. The primacy of consciousness view allows for the separability of body and soul. My yoga is grounded in the indivisibility of body and soul – the primacy of existence.

    The dualistic roots of yoga philosophy can easily reinforce disembodied thinking by reducing a person to two fundamentally incompatible elements: Purusha (consciousness) and Prakriti (physical nature). This is reminiscent of another Ayn Rand quote from her book Atlas Shrugged when she wrote that proponents of the soul-body dichotomy “…have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost.” Similarly, Samkhya (the darshanic partner of Yoga) famously describes a human as a lame man who can see (Purusha) being carried around by a blind man who can walk (Prakriti). By asserting the indivisibility of body and soul, I reject both models.  Humans are not the ghost of a consciousness somehow being carried around by a dead lump of matter.

    I’m grateful that the questions sent me by Triyoga for their blog post created an opportunity to consider these and other issues. I’ll be offering a special 90 minute donation-based program while in London: Free Will and The Nature of the Soul: A Philosophical Inquiry with Leslie Kaminoff with all profits going to a favorite charity of mine, The Africa Yoga Project. This will be on Facebook Live too, so we hope to see you there!

  • Relationship: it’s the key to what I do

    Just finishing a month of teaching in Australia, I’ve had innumerable opportunities to practice a principle my teacher T.K.V. Desikachar often emphasized: “Yoga is relationship.”  One of our Brisbane hosts is the witty and fierce president of Yoga Australia, Leanne Davis. I was intrigued to learn her community is small enough that they all know each other. With only around 100 teaching programs in the whole country, Yoga Australia is able to provide support, check-ins and coaching in a really personal manner. It’s not a model that could directly scale in the U.S., but it’s worth noting that the only valid way to deal with ethics and scope of practice issues lies in the context of the community in which teachers operate. Studios, peers, colleagues – as well as the students –  always need to be in direct relationship to teachers, and feel empowered to give them feedback. We all need to be answerable to someone, but that someone should be part of our immediate community.

    I have been thinking about the role of coaching and personal connection in relation to the specialized work I do. It will be a big part of my upcoming 5-day (30-hour) immersion “Breath Education: Coaching Better Breathing,” August 20-24, 2018, under the aegis of my educational nonprofit, The Breathing Project, Inc. With an intimate group, I look forward to covering the anatomical and practical underpinnings of breath coaching, as well as how to nurture supportive relationships for therapeutic breath work with individuals and groups.

    Having just turned 60, I can confidently say that every good thing I’ve achieved in my life, every positive effect I’ve wrought, has been based on a willingness to be related. Whenever I shied away from relationship by generalizing or depersonalizing, I have failed. I am committed to remembering this for my next 60 years.

  • Return to OZ

    Lydia and I are preparing for a month of travel and teaching, in fact it’s our biggest teaching tour to date! We are really looking forward to the upcoming tour, which takes us to:

    We work hard on these teaching tours, but we always schedule a couple days on each side of the workshops to enjoy the host city. We’ve heard Sorrento is beautiful and while I’m teaching there I’ll turn 60 years old (on March 13). Word on the street is there may be some celebrating going on, so come out to the workshop on March 14th to help cheer me into my 7th decade! I believe there’s still room in some of the workshops, so if you or someone you know is down under, please come out and say hello.

    All this planning got me feeling nostalgic about my first visit to New Zealand and Australia in 1983 so I dug out some old photos. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles with my partner Lynda Huey where we worked at Dr. Leroy Perry’s International Sportsmedicine Institute.  Lynda was the athletic director and, although I was teaching yoga flexibility to the athletes, my main job was to administer a new form of electro-therapy that was getting great results with pain and soft tissue injuries.  The instruments I specialized in, the Electro-Acuscope and Myopulse, were in great demand around the world at the training areas of track meets so, eased by the fact that Lynda and I were also working part-time as travel agents, it created a perfect opportunity to travel.

    August of 1983 found us in Helsinki, Finland for the first-ever world championships of Track and Field. Towards the end of 1983, we were invited by Australian Olympic swimming legend Murray Rose to present our rehab work at a Sports Medicine event at Sydney’s Town Hall. After a stop to visit some friends in Auckland, we arrived in Sydney and were taken on a whirlwind tour of the city by Murray and his friends.

    In this photo, I am posing for an AP photographer with Evelyn Ashford, who at the time was the world’s fastest woman. Evelyn had sustained a hamstring injury in an early heat of the 100 meter dash, and I was treating her with the equipment.  She recovered well enough to make the U.S. team and win a gold medal the 1984 L.A. Olympics in spite of a slight re-injury at the team trials (for which I also treated her). As part the promotion for the Sydney event, I was invited to a T.V. interview on “Good Morning Australia.

    This photo shows me on set preparing the equipment for my segment.  I am wearing my best (and only) suit for the occasion. I was apparently still wearing that outfit when we visited a game preserve outside Sydney.  There, I met kangaroos for the first time. Once the film was developed back in L.A. , I also noticed for the very first time that I was – at the tender age of 25 – going bald on the top of my head. I was shocked and devastated, but I’ve gotten over it.

    The rest of our trip was terrific.  We traveled to Canberra to tour the brand new Australian Institute of Sport, and the headed up the Gold Coast to visit with some friends in Nambour before continuing up to check out the facilities at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Finally, we went all the way north to Cairns, where we had a memorable scuba dive off the Barrier Reef. Lynda and I actually returned to Sydney in 1984 for a return visit that was more of a pleasure trip.