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What I’ve learned about Yoga so far-Part II

Posted by scalesonfire on March 7, 2011
Posted in: Analogies, Yoga. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Most religious and political thought is primitive and driven by impulses that have been around for thousands of years.  In our current society, these thoughts are protected more because of a driving thirst to protect culture and customs, and not because individuals harbor genuine beliefs.  Really, we all just want to be right in the end, and anything that we fear will interfere with that automatically becomes wrong.  Its how we ended up in a society with so many moral and political questions to answer and it’s left the individual with some burning questions about the self.  First, how does one handle hearing uncommon beliefs?  The answer is simple: with all of the verbal fire and brimstone they can.  Of course the objective is to be correct, so any other ideas or notions must be attacked.  Second, how does one exist in a society whose elements are stacked against their beliefs?  The liberal thinks the conservatives are elitist, the conservative thinks the media is liberal, the Christian thinks the Muslims are extreme, the Muslim thinks the Christians are immoral, and everyone thinks this is a terrible place to try to raise children with traditional beliefs.  This is a time like all of the other times in history-one of little acceptance and tolerance, and I live in a country where businesses thrive on selling the things that everyone will both need and tolerate.

The United States is a typically Christian nation that is obsessed with having things bigger, always looking better, and doing more things for show than for substance.  Its no wonder we owe countries money, we have governmental shut-downs, and we think that Sarah Palin is a relevant presidential candidate.  Its also no wonder that when helpful things are brought here they must be diluted to fit this need for enhanced superficiality.  The next time you claim something has been “americanized” to be sold here to Americans, consider what that means.  It generally means that the product had to be changed in order to be sold to a consumer that’s uncultured, close-minded, and judgmental toward things they don’t understand.  Americans love to say “I don’t know how it works, but it does.”  They also love to disregard things that leave them too deeply engaged with things they plainly won’t understand, like things with religious undertones or things that highlight discomfort.

So Americans have a warped view of yoga.  Some see it as being too religious, others think it brings on too much discomfort.  The yogis around the world might come to know this and say “great America, we don’t want your dirty hands all over yoga anyway,” but people who know the business of americanizing things might jump at the chance to introduce more bland and generic forms of yoga here.  Why?  Because yoga makes you smoking hot, as if you couldn’t tell.  Americans have been searching for years for things that leave them looking emaciated, and they’ve proven that they’ll take any pill, try any method, pay any amount and endure any hardship to be thin.  I say its even deeper than that here.  These people will do anything to fabricate discipline without actually experiencing it.  Their obsession with celebrities is indicative of this.  We find pleasure in knowing the personal business of individuals who are more attractive, talented, and driven than we are.  We follow their trends, we do what it takes to look like them, and our media paints the untrue picture that these things come easily to these people.  They don’t, and that’s because it takes real discipline to both work at the highest level of your craft and also have a body that is in peak condition.  Most Americans lack that discipline.

So how can truly undisciplined people be so preachy about religion?  The common person in America will state “I’m a Christian, how can chanting in a yoga class help me look sexier?”  So now, when yoga is being sold here to the masses, those branding their yoga like to leave in all the things that make you sexy, and take out all the things that involve surrender, meditation, foreign customs, and embracing discomfort.  Sounds like “commercial yoga” to me, and I feel as though this has happened with every beautiful and artistic thing Americans have ever been allowed to touch.  Turn on a radio and tell me what’s happened to music.  What’s happened to movies, and how many times can the same movie be made in a different form?  Let’s not even get into what’s happened to printed words on paper.

What we really need is someone to explain where yoga and things like it should fit in our society, and that might take seeing fitness a different way.

Let’s say that fitness was a religion, structured like Christianity:

Classic workouts in gyms with personal trainers are like church.  They’re places to go to feel a communal and existential feeling with others as you learn to do the right things for yourself.  They’re effective for building confidence in your abilities as a person, and for helping you learn some of the proper ways to go about certain tasks.  You don’t need too much of this to feel empowered, and for good reason-a great deal of your money can be poured into this for a level of personal security you may not always need.

Personal workouts are like studying the bible.  You will find a great deal of mental wealth if you can bring yourself to understand the things you’re doing and because the impressions are exhausting, you may approach these activities at your own discretion.  They experiences can always enrich your life if you choose to understand them.

Yoga is like prayer.  Its something you should seek out and do daily, without interruption, with full focus, and in a designed order.  Creating this connection between mind and body daily is what will give you constant mental reinforcement to attack and complete the challenges you face.

Now, seeing the fitness approach that way might turn off some, but why can’t we treat the important things in life this way?  If we’re trying to use yoga to be a quick fix to achieve a superficial look and create an air of discipline we don’t really possess, then American yoga is tainted.  I’ve got no beef with Tara Stiles or Bikram Choudhury as I might with say, the Beachbody corporation.  My problem is with those who have made it easy for individuals like them to brand their own yoga and sell it to people who don’t respect yoga for what it is-an incredibly powerful form of discipline that can consume and enrich a life.  Comparable things are difficult to find in America, really, because they’re difficult to preserve.

Making a Case for Yoga

Posted by scalesonfire on January 19, 2011
Posted in: explanations, fitness Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

If we can eat pizza and sushi at a ballgame.  If we can serve “French” fries with every one of our traditional meals.  If we can celebrate English Puritans’ new life in a new world by eating like maniacs.  If we can celebrate the birth of a Jewish carpenter we believe to be the son of God by showering each other with gifts.  If we can celebrate that same carpenter’s death and resurrection by believing in an imaginary rabbit that hides colored eggs.  If we can, be American, we can do yoga as a country.

It’s painfully true that most “American” customs have little roots here.  My problem is that it doesn’t matter where our customs came from, whether one is discussing Christmas trees or Valentine’s candy, we only keep and practice the ones that have to do with indulgence.  One nemesis of mine, caffeine, a highly addictive and controlling drug that currently has our country by the short hairs, is mostly consumed because it helps people do things they’d rather not do on little or no sleep and energy.  So many people are dependent on it that these days, coffee brands have oil money, and energy drinks sell the way soda used to.  We can harm our selves without regard, and that ability is what sets us apart from other countries.

God, send me another sign. That 'Cupid' thing you were telling me about went way over my head.

We’re also macho, which leads me to a custom that is all ours-gym vanity.  Yeah, it seems that throughout history, people have strength-trained, used their body weight to be stronger and fitter, done all types of stretching and balance movements, but gyms as we know them are a new element in our lineage.  They’re places that are much less about helping people lose weight than they are about making gym owners money and feeding this need for communal superficiality that so many Americans have.  Basically, they’re expensive indoor beaches with mats and weights instead of sand and water.  The gym is what’s created the backwards connection people have between weights and fitness.  The gym is the reason personal training in our country doesn’t work.  The gym is the reason that the fitness industry is one thousand parts vanity and one part health.   And we love gyms, because we think that helping yourself look good is loving yourself.

Helping yourself be better is loving yourself.  Yoga helps you be better.  The three most beautiful things I’ve experienced in my life are newspapers, the World Series, and yoga.  Still, yoga is the only one I can share.   Yoga is the only thing I’ve ever done that I’ve seen it heal things internally.  I had scoliosis before I started practicing yoga, and I was an inch shorter and sixty pounds heavier.  My bench press and squat numbers were better then.  Now I can carry groceries longer, or hold a heavy child all day, or do laundry without a car.  I’m ‘country strong’ now, it’s all useful.  God forbid someone ever wants to fight me, I’ve got the determination and strength to kill anything that comes at me.  I’ll be focused on it too.  I haven’t been one for any sort of intoxication since I started practicing yoga, so in any contest, chess, tennis, scrabble, I’m sharp.  And cool.  Yoga’s melted away my temper, so today, I’ll walk away from that fight, and I’ll never be the one to start one.  I react less, and I’m proactive more, and all the while, my body just asks me for more yoga.

Maybe a new platform (or mat) will help Barack defeat the GOP in 2012

Not simply because I do it, or because its effective, or because it can make positive mental shifts for you, do I think that all of America should step onto a yoga mat.  I really think it should be our principle form of exercise for three reasons:

First, anyone can do it.  There is yoga for the young, old, sick, and healthy.  There is yoga that helps you get better at sex and yoga that helps you fight addiction.   There is yoga for beginners and the advanced.  There is yoga that both beginners and advanced practitioners do together.  There is yoga for people scared of yoga, and there are yoga competitions where people watch other people do yoga.

Second, we can’t truly identify its religious roots.  We think it has Hindi roots and we know it contains so many elements of ancient Indian culture, but by now, we’ve stripped it of that.  Those who maintain many old-world elements have already branded their yoga, some by branding the system of postures and some by labeling it with their name.  Here, and everywhere else, we are free to explore yoga postures and yogic movements at our discretion and exercise gurus and companies have watered it down here.  Accomplishing a yoga program every day takes a level of focus and dedication that’s missing in America.  If we all treated yoga like a necessary daily activity we’d all understand that focus and dedication enough to apply it to other parts of our life.

Third, its not about looking good, and if you’re mind is on looking good as you do it, and not executing postures, you will fail (and probably fall).  So mentally, its a healthier format of exercise than say, joining a gym just to worry for two hours about what you need to fix on your flabby body.  Yoga fixes from the inside out, which is also the way the United States needs to be fixed.

The Continuous Cultural Divide

Posted by scalesonfire on January 13, 2011
Posted in: Response. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

How does one get to the Wall Street Journal? Practice, practice, practice...

Last Saturday morning I was on my way to meet a regular client when I picked up my usual weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal and was struck by a feature at the top of the first page.  It read WHY CHINESE MOTHERS ARE SUPERIOR and displayed a picture of a smiling, slim Chinese woman with her arms folded for implied elegance flanked by two teenage girls who looked like younger versions of the woman, except not fully Chinese.  I was intrigued by the headline and read the article.  The woman was Amy Chua, a professor at Yale University, and this week the woman amidst a firestorm of judgmental parents and adults with strong opinions on childrearing methods.

As it turns out, many people were as intrigued as I was.  Nearly four thousand comments have been left for the online version of the article, the most for any online Wall Street Journal article ever.  An astounding one hundred and seventy-eight thousand people “liked” the article on Facebook, and yes, there are lots of opinions.  Some think that eastern methods are far too harsh, citing mental and emotional breakdowns in children who completely reject the methods.  Some think that Prof. Chua’s insights offer some of the freshest and most revolutionary ideas on childrearing we’ve been allowed to read in a long time.  I just thought it all pointed a huge foam finger at childhood obesity.

In fat, stupid kids

We live in a strange time, especially in the west, where childbirth is a right, mostly because abortion is a choice.  Meaning, many women and families have the option to negate pregnancies, so those same individuals, in choosing to get pregnant, see it as a right to be and stay pregnant.  It should be the opposite.  One chooses to be pregnant, and they have the right to abort the pregnancy.  All it means is a great deal of people with children, not because they’re interested in raising stellar individuals or forming effective families, but because they’ve been given the right to have them.  To me, the parenting problem begins here.  Before the letter grades, before slamming the ABCs into their heads, before pre-natal yoga, the decision over the baby’s birth holds the keys to what sort of individual the baby will become.

If so many see it as a right, they’ll make every other decision based on right, i.e. “I have the right to feed my child whatever I want,” and “I have the right to raise my child however I want.”  What these parents forget is that seeking pleasure, or doing things based on what they “want” is what initially created the child.   What they’re doing by parenting this way is teaching whole families to seek pleasure.  There’s no guidance in those priorities.  There are so many areas of our society where eliminating choice necessary.  That’s not to say that we should relinquish freedoms to an omniscient government so that food may be rationed and jobs are chosen for us.  It’s that individual censorship that lacks in our society, or a voice that screams clearly from within that the things that are better for us are far more important than the things that make us feel good.

This is a difficult and often rejected concept in the west, but it’s the basis and foundation of families in the east.  Now, when eastern principles are running families in western societies, things can become skewed.  So, if a parent has eastern-type expectations for a child at school, the expectations come more from the idea that western children don’t properly apply themselves, making those who actually do the winners in our society.  If a parent thinks that put-downs are encouragement, it happens more because they know other children never get any encouragement, positive or negative.  They’re told they make their parents proud, but they’re not “encouraged” to seek the highest level of what they’re doing because of possible failure, or because parents aren’t really fond of people who are actually about things.  Remember, these are people who simply work because they’re about their children.  Western children aren’t encouraged to really be or do anything of merit, because people here don’t think life is within their control.

I believe that statement to be true.  Children here are raised under a cloud of “ifs.”

If my baby is born healthy

If my child is interested in this or that

If my child gets into college

Here, it’s the norm to treat a life span like something that’s left to a state puppet master.  Those leaving life to chance are taking an even bigger chance with the things we should hold most dear.  If family is most important, then why not enforce your most important values, making it so that you control your family’s priorities for generations?  The answer is, because individuals here have no idea what the correct values are.  This is a place where we give more importance to reality shows about other people’s lives than our own.  Second, if education is important, why do we simply rely on schools to provide it for our children?  If children here practiced things, and not simply schoolwork but also every thing that took perfecting to really enjoy, then we’d have far more individuals with developed talents in far more areas.  Practice, in terms of repetition is taboo in our society.  We hear about people who are diligent and dedicated to things, but not many of us actually are.  A nerd-type enthusiasm for one’s craft is a cause for ridicule.  Really, human beings have the capacity to practice and perfect almost any concept that human beings can already comprehend.  Lastly, if our bodies are most important, then why is it also taboo to do the best things with them and to put the best things in them for fuel?

"Kids, this is soccer. In other countries, children practice this for hours every day because it's important to them that they get better. Here, we need this game because kids refuse to run to do anything, and because they can't understand baseball."

A deficiency in all three is holding back American children.  Their families don’t know what families should do, or how they should be run, and they make a multitude of incorrect and sensory choices.  They go to schools that aren’t equipped to raise children for their parents, and surely can’t serve out work ethics like school lunches, so children learn to do things, but never how or why to practice and perfect them.  They eat based on what tastes good to them, and they do as much sitting as adults, so much that children need to be encouraged by the media to be interested in activity.  This trio of issues produces a child (and later and adult) who, according to society is normal, but in terms of being an effective adult is failing.

This is what Michelle Obama is afraid to say when she’s saying that getting kids active will help childhood obesity.  What’s missing in all of these speeches from the White house lawn are insights into proper priorities and observations of our changing society.  Old world ideas might not survive in our world, and new world ideas aren’t always effective just because they’re new.  Smart ideas trump both.  I’m not a parent yet, but if and when I do have my own family, I’m going to start with a foundation that says to all “this family treats progression, enrichment, and our bodies with the utmost importance.”  Prof. Chua’s aim is one of reaction to western society and defending against the mediocrity that society accepts.  It may lead to exceptional performance in school and life or a negative emotional reaction to a surrounding environment that doesn’t support these methods.  The west’s aim is help everyone get the things they desire, which may produce loving, supportive families or incredibly fat and incompetent children.  I say, if you really love your children and they’re not just here to cement your right to have them, then you’re making intelligent decisions every day that are based on who you want them to be.  You’re not simply waiting to see how society will determine who they are and who they will become.  It will be far too late when you find out.

A shortlink to the original article:

http://on.wsj.com/f4TYN5

The ‘State of Fitness’

Posted by scalesonfire on December 2, 2010
Posted in: fitness Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

The United States has a problem that has drained the life and dignity out of our once great nation.  We are living up to perceptions.  We are considered lazy, and we do all we can to support that perception.  We delve in the unnecessary, and it’s created a purposeless society, filled with products and traditions that debunk rationality.  Although partisanship rules government, liberalism is at the core of our individual behavior.  We are raised on “easy ways out” and on “getting by.”  Terms are improperly defined here: “shame” has more to do with a society-influenced superficial shame (i.e. “I won’t wear that, because it makes me look fat”) than a shame at abandoning true personal principles (i.e. “It bothers me when my children are so lazy.  Is that my fault as a parent?”).  As a society, our aim seems to be to keep the appearances of things for each other, all the while working for ourselves in situations we truly don’t care for.  Even worse, we look for help with things we should be doing on our own.  The deathly combination of these factors has created a dynamic that might have frightened our founding fathers.  A culture built on superficiality, filled with people who can’t do basic things for themselves, made up of families that live in discontentment for generations.

All in all, it sounds like a great deal of unhappy fat people, too many battered self-esteems, and a childhood obesity problem that’s caused the entire nation to take notice.  Growing up with this problem festering all around me, I was lost in it also.  I believed that physical fitness, whether for athletic performance or aesthetic effect, required certain things, all of them expensive, and all of them working much better than the basic methods I was taught originally.  From expensive gym memberships to supplements that I’d be afraid to take now, I decided that I needed certain things to be fit and live a lifestyle that I deemed perfect.  It was perfect to me especially because I felt others envied it.  But fitness, being a basic need, shouldn’t be a point of envy, and if a person is envious of another who is handling a basic human need, then they’ve already acknowledged a class system that shouldn’t exist.

How could it be fixed?  In America, when there is a need, first industry is created.  So fitness, such a small element of our culture for generations, became one of its largest the more self-esteems became lost.  The more people forgot the notion that fitness is a basic need and saw fitness as a way to look like others they envied, the more companies began to capitalize on the insecurities of the public.  Injecting body image envy into a society that already struggled with valuing personal accomplishment, was devoid of shame, and was too lazy to ever understand the proper processes of most things, has proved to be a toxic concoction.  Fitness, as a selling tool became much more about results without process, paying for elements that should be completely free, and a bombardment with images that now create deep envy in the human psyche.  The fitness industry grew and has thrived this way.  They are out to help people do amazing things without real work, make them pay for things they’ve never needed, and constantly show them images of ways they should be.  If any other industry operated this way, there would be outrage.

In fitness, it’s considered positive, and people who do the direct opposite (usually with great success) are seen as negatively impacting the others.  In fact, the fitness industry cares very little about these individuals unless they are elite athletes who are being used to rile the envy of the public.  Those who approach fitness properly are simply not acknowledged by the fitness industry, and just aren’t counted as active people.  The less an individual spends on things like gyms, infomercial videos, and cheesy personal trainers, the more ostracized they are from the fitness industry.  I’m calling for real active people to take back the industry that I know is rightfully theirs.  I think that if the fitness industry became more about the active, and less about the inactive, then we’d see the real faces of fitness.  We’d see the individuals who are dedicated to their practices.  We’d see the individuals who laugh at those who’d like to simply look the ways they look without any understanding of their daily effort.  I believe that we’d learn deeper definitions of discipline and determination and that these understandings would improve our lives far past fitness.

That scares the fitness industry, and I do know that the basis of industry is to capitalize on a need.  I simply believe that artificially creating that need for the industry’s betterment is insidious in nature.  I also believe that if the need is a natural and basic one, that this practice can cripple a nation, which I believe it has.

My goal, as a personal trainer, an active person, and an American, is to be the foremost voice of reform on this issue.  I’ve come to understand in training my clients that encouraging their superficiality, promoting fitness industry gimmicks I know would never work in my own life, and appealing to their comforts will make my job and their process more difficult later.  In this way, the fitness industry, through careful execution, public ignorance and laziness, and a nationwide air of superficiality, has made people even more fat and depressed than ever.  The more people look in the mirror and become depressed with what they see, the more they pump money into this multi-billion dollar industry.   I’ll be using Scalesonfire.com to first build the case against the fitness industry, second, to explain the ways active people properly execute fit lifestyles, and last to reform the reasons we should exercise.  If we want a fitter, healthier country, we’ll have to be different people.  Today, I’m standing up to lead us there.

Get up and Goal

Posted by scalesonfire on November 19, 2010
Posted in: Motivational. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

Real training is all about your mental approach. Unfortunately, we aren't a society that wants to condition our minds to do anything. It makes us quite uncomfortable.

Recently I was reading MIND GYM by Gary Mack.  If you’ve never seen it around, it’s a great book about the athlete’s mental approach.  Very helpful and useful stuff.  Things that would help me in my own training.  The only problem was that I was skimming books that might help me explain to my clients that the proper mental approach is key to their success.  The book explains how famous athletes and coaches have always set goals and why they end up successful, but I get hired (as do most other trainers), generally because people have set the wrong types of goals.  They mostly want to look a certain way.  But that’s the same as me saying I’d like to be a billionaire and that I’ve now set it as a goal, but I’ve got no background in any profession or no ideas of how to make, save, and invest money.  How would anyone be able to help me with that?

By comparison, trainers like to base their businesses around the stupid concept that people should try to look better.  It’s why all of these ridiculous exercises and fitness “methods” exist.  It’s why people come up to me asking me which exercises work certain body parts.  It’s why people fail.  There’s no worse feeling than failing at a goal that was empty to start.  Most will say that there’s no worse feeling than failing in the fitness process, but today the two are generally the same.

My main beef with our society is that a great deal of our problems are self-created, and I’ve always maintained that obesity is one of them.  But in an even more basic way, that pesky ten pounds won’t go away because goals can’t be superficial.  If you’ve set any goal in life, and it’s based on how things should look, comparison to others, or isn’t complete because the full goal will make you uncomfortable, then it’s a goal that will fail.  Not only will it fail, but you’ll go out of your way to say the odds were stacked against you.

I don’t train professional athletes…yet, but I do know that success, whether in athletics or life, happens above the shoulders.  I tell people all the time that all their lives they’re driving a car with two arms, two legs, and a heart for an engine.  All they’re doing is constantly teaching the brain to drive better than others.  Still, most are reckless drivers, literally and figuratively.  If you’re the type to text and drive, putting yourself and others in danger for something as simple as an “OMG he really said that to you?” then I believe you’d be just as reckless with your body.  If you’re the type to soup up your car with new lights, wheels, and a stereo so that everyone will stare when you drive by, but never give the car proper maintenance, then I believe that in your life you’d rather buy good clothes than healthy food.

I wonder if Ben Franklin wrote anything in "Poor Richard's Almanac" about being Forever Lazy

Individuals in society can be who they are, I won’t go out of my way to condemn them, until they start to rely on goals set in this sort of ignorance.  The ignorance doesn’t simply fuel the fitness industry to create exercise contraptions to sell on television, it fuels our economy.  The phrase “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is skewed in the United States.  People eat in a way that shows they aren’t concerned with life, they go out of their way to relinquish liberties for comforts, and they aren’t happy unless they have the things that make them jealous.  If our Declaration of Independence was rewritten, I’d imagine that it would read:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men were created to eat, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are indulgence, jealousy and the pursuit of selfishness.”

That sounds a whole lot like the place we see every day, and it’s the way western society is depicted, both from within, and around the world.  It’s in our music, our movies and in the things weak individuals do on the internet.  We don’t want to be ourselves, we’ll do or take anything that changes the way we feel about ourselves, and we’ll create unrealistic dreams and goals just to make ourselves feel better.  We have children because time is ticking away, not because we think we’ll be effective parents.  We buy pets because they’re cute.  And we buy billions of things every year that have no real purpose.  Basically, as a trainer, I’ve been taught to help people be more selfish, all the while understanding that they won’t pay unless they’re allowed to be that way, and they won’t see results if they continue to think that way.

Is it easier to understand now why this profession is so difficult?  I’m not complaining though, because when a person gets it, they’re changed for life.  My goal is to show the world that a life of impossible dreams means an early death.  And if that dream sounds impossible, I can only blame it on the era in which I was born.