Yoga Wisdom by Stephanie Spence

Author:Stephanie Spence
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510737105
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Remaining Accountable

To me, yoga is a way of life—not a practice. A strong, flexible body is the bonus. My practice had helped me cultivate a rich and full life; I wanted to see how other yogis lived it—and leverage their wisdom to inspire those who’ve never tried it.

WHAT’S GRAY WATER ANYWAY?

I decided to embark on a Great Yoga Road Trip up the West Coast of the United States and into Canada in a rented RV I named Ted. I figured that, living with this beast for a month, it had to have a name. Ted worked. I loved Ted.

First stop: LA. I should have known no self-respecting Angelena would care to have an RV park next to her, so my first night: spent in the middle of nowhere. Ted and I pulled up to the country-kitchen-decorated trailer with an office sign hanging from the shingle, where a retired old proud-to-be-an-American-pin-wearing Gruff Guy checked me in. He was clearly not happy when I confessed I’d never backed into a space before.

“Why the hell didn’t you get a pull through?” he asked. “What’s that?” I replied. With a huge amount of effort, Gruff Guy peeled himself out of his lounge chair and directed me toward my spot. With his help, my first rear pull-up to the plugs and water line was uneventful. Though he never spoke to me again.

It had started to rain, so I pulled on my slicker and, holding an umbrella over the plugs, tried not to electrocute myself as I hooked everything up. Sloshing around in my brand-new wellies, tickled pink to be off on my first-ever solo adventure. I’d read countless tales of lone women travelers (Beryl Markham’s West with the Night being my favorite), and while an LA RV park is no Africa, it certainly felt like a foreign country.

And then I had my first gray water shower. What’s gray water, you ask? Well, it’s the bathroom waste that’s stored in the RV until you hook up at the park and dump it. Dressed in my cutest yoga outfit — my first appointment with a teacher in less than an hour—I yanked the hose out of the slot way too fast. Splosh! I got soaked. In my defense, the connection was sketchy at best, and it was my first time.

Of course, I didn’t make the appointment. Everyone knows what LA traffic is like at its best. Since Ted didn’t do street parking, I needed to take a cab to the nearest car rental company, pick up a car, and then drive to the studio. And not before I’d managed to erase the gray water stench. I did, however, have a yoga lesson of another kind, by way of a very chatty cab driver who happened to be Indian. Very interested in my trip, he told me he considered “American yoga” a tragic example of fitness—nothing like the “real yoga” he grew up with.

Can’t say I could argue against the fact that the mainstreaming of yoga has produced a posse of pose-crazy yogis set on outdoing one another.

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