The System
Before we go any further, take a moment to thank yourself for taking the time to read this book, even if it was given to you as a gift. You are reading these lines, so you have already taken the first step. If you just continue one step at a time, a life of bliss will become an ordinary part of who you are—you will be a modern yogi. The modern yogi does not seek to escape ordinary life, but rather integrate yoga into it. She simply lives her life in a holistic healthy manner, practicing the four elements of this book—physical yoga, breath and energy, food and nutrition, and mind training.
This is your first step toward a life of unconditional joy. At first, some of the information might seem overwhelming or to require too much effort, yet soon enough you will realize how effortless a life of joy can be. It is like riding a bicycle. At first, it is intimidating and difficult to find the balance, but you know that it will be great once you can ride smoothly. You try, and maybe fall a few times, and then get the hang of it. Before you know it, you just get on the bike and ride, enjoying the fresh air and the motion. You don’t really need to focus on the process anymore. It is the same with creating a yoga lifestyle. Go through these steps, start practicing, and you will find that the practices become super joyful and easy, and the effects on your life become transformational. So let’s leave the suffering behind and step together toward a life of joy, the life of a modern yogi!
The Process
Let’s roll out the plan and see where we are heading.
First, we will set our goals and intentions, and next, we will present some foundations, creating the healthy lifestyle principles and attitudes that will help us with all the practices we will do later.
Once we have our basic set of lifestyle practices, we will take the next step and learn a bit more about ourselves. Using the tools of Ayurveda (the dosha system), we will learn how to evaluate where we are in our life, at the moment. We will learn how to identify what is out of balance and the causes of imbalance, and we will learn practices to get back into balance.
Then we will look at the tools that will help us gain health and happiness. We will begin with yoga, learning the different poses and how to practice them. Then we will learn about breathing techniques, followed by the food chapter where we will get some basic understanding of how to make good food choices. Finally, we will learn about the mind and techniques for training it, including a variety of meditation techniques.
Though I present the yoga section first, it is important to read and begin the mind practices as well as the food and diet practices as soon as you are comfortable with them—hopefully all at the same time—so reading through the entire book first can be extremely valuable to get an overview. Then you can look at the practice manuals in Part 2 to get ideas about how to incorporate this information into a practical practice.
In some yoga traditions, one has to master the asanas—the poses—before going on to pranayama, or breath and energy work. Only after mastering asana and pranayama would one continue on to concentration and meditation. The idea is that it is easier to work with our body than with our mind. In this book, we are not going to choose one over the other; indeed, the bodywork will be a great part of our initial practice, but the mind will be an underlying tool, the one setting the tone. We will use the physical practices to get healthier in our bodies, as well as to train our minds. I use a holistic approach to work on all aspects simultaneously, yet you may find that you focus more on one element to begin with, and that is fine. However, it is important that you notice if you are skipping some practices altogether, and to understand why you are doing so. Sometimes we avoid what we need most to grow. There is no need to force anything, but with a playful attitude, we will try to build a total sustainable life.
Along with the physical practices and mind practices, we will start to look at what goes into our bodies. We will essentially learn to be our own doctors and cultivate the ability to listen to our body and identify what it needs. Food and nutrition go hand in hand. Once we know the ingredients that serve us well, and understand the basic effects they have on how we live, it will be easier to create our diet.
Review of the Process
Find the middle path, a place where you are happy to show up to practice and can practice with joy—a place where you progress safely and enjoy the process. This is the best way to move more quickly toward your goals in a sustainable way.
Setting a Goal—the Destination
What is your final goal? Why did you buy this book? What are you looking to change, achieve, or grow into? There may be things in your life right now that prevent you from feeling completely joyful. Not everything can be changed, but a lot can—especially YOU! So let’s think in terms of YOU. What is YOUR goal?
Achieve your goals only if you know what your goals are. This step is one of the hardest to take. You don’t need to know exactly or specifically what it is that you are in search of, but many of us do have an idea of some things that we would like to change. It might be as simple as being happy, more relaxed, losing the stress, the weight. Perhaps you have a more complex goal in mind, like finding out who you really are: a simple question with an answer that can only be discovered by you.
My Story
I grew up in Israel and was told that I am Jewish. It even said so on my identity card, yet I always wondered what it meant. Could I choose my religion? If so, why was it decided for me? Who gave me this identity called Jewish or Israeli? Why did they not consult with me first?
As a toddler, I spent three years in Texas. I had an Israeli background now mixed with some American conditioning. This was the first step of shaping my international thinking. I visited Europe with my parents for a month when I was twelve, with many trips to small villages and mom-and-pop bed and breakfasts. At thirteen, for my bar mitzvah, I was given the option to visit New York and New Jersey with my younger brother instead of having a big party—the norm for a bar mitzvah celebration. Of course I took the trip to the USA. I was the guardian of my eleven-year-old brother, and we stayed with American families, some religious and some not. During our stay, we discovered break dancing, Bruce Springsteen, a video game arcade, and many things I did not know about growing up in Jerusalem in the ’70s and early ’80s. It was 1984. Who was I then? An Israeli? A wannabe American?
Later, during my three-year compulsory military service, I felt more confused than ever about who I was; I couldn’t find the meaning of life and was starting to feel very depressed. I could not comprehend why people were fighting, why they were so close-minded regarding their views, and why they were willing to risk their lives for these views.
I felt happy with some of the simple things I had, but was not sure what I was supposed to achieve in life, what my purpose was. I would go from one extreme to another. One day it seemed to me that I was supposed to be a millionaire by the age of thirty. Some days I felt I was born to be a spiritual leader, while on other days, I was contemplating methods of suicide. Because I did not know what happens after death, I did not have the courage to kill myself.
I needed answers. As I finally finished my military service, I embarked on a journey to Asia, a very common journey among young Israelis, yet my journey was different. I left on my own, just my backpack and me. I told my mom I’d return in two months or two years. She was supportive.
I was on a quest—the search for a reason to live and an understanding of who I was. It seemed to me that we go through life running after our tail, trying to get somewhere, but the only place we all reach is death. My journey took me to many spiritual teachers and centers. Every center I entered, every teaching I heard, every yoga practice I did, and every form of meditation I practiced never really directly addressed my question, but somehow gave me a non-logical reason to keep practicing, to keep finding out the truth for myself.
It was seeing the great masters and how they lived life and handled situations, hearing their words and seeing their actions that drew me closer to understanding what I wanted. I wanted to achieve their state of mind, their vitality and the radiant joy that projected from them.
The first time I entered a Zen monastery, I just knew I needed to be there. I was immersed in feelings of clarity, simplicity, and security.
The pursuit for understanding health and happiness has continued throughout my life. While running my art and photography studio in New York City, I practiced Tibetan Buddhism and Zen. I practiced a variety of yoga styles, learned from each one, but committed to the ashtanga vinyasa, Mysore style. I loved the self-practice aspect of it, but not that the practice was the same every day. This is why I developed my own system, so you can do a self-practice, but still have variety in your sequences.
Within the realms of food and nutrition, I experimented with a variety of diets, from vegan to raw food, from macrobiotic to vegetarian. Since none of them worked for me all the time, I eventually became a flexitarian.
Beyond formally going through a holistic cooking school and studying nutrition, I kept on reading and researching these topics with vigor, and with continuous study and experimentation. I worked with family, friends, and clients to keep refining the best practices for health and happiness. Over time I realized that there is no one answer to all, which is where the flexitarian method was born.
I took all the traditional tools I learned and merged them into my Western life. I became a modern yogi—living a yoga lifestyle while still continuing with the ordinary life. A yogi is someone who practices yoga on all levels: physical yoga, including breath work, eating well, and having a healthy mind. A yogi is someone that cares about themselves as well as the environment and others. Some claim that the female version of yogi is a yogini. For simplicity we will use the term yogi for both male and female.
What Do You Need?
To find the peace and joy that I found, you do not need to travel to Asia or join a Zen center, though sometimes stepping out of your element helps. Some people go on a yoga retreat to step away from their everyday life and give themselves time to reflect on what it is that really matters.
Since this book focuses on health and happiness, what matters to you? What do you need in life to be happier and more fulfilled? Do you know? Is it confusing? Maybe you have many ideas. Consider putting it all down on paper. Be as detailed as you can. Write down everything that comes up. Don’t try to edit or make it pretty, just write; this is only for you. Ask yourself: What do I need? What do I really want as an ultimate goal? If you could design your perfect self (most joyful, healthy self, etc.), how would you like to be?
Now read it.
Stop and read it again. Feel it in your gut. How does it feel? Read it out loud. What resonates as true? What jumps out? Is it something specific or something more abstract, like be happy?
Now sit down, close your eyes, and try to envision yourself in the state in which you want to be. What do you look like? How does it feel? Pay attention to every detail and make it become real in your mind. What are the obstacles that prevent you from being in that state?
Now that you know where you are going, you can put your goal aside. It will be there always, and you should be able to keep seeing yourself in that state, but do not get attached to any timetable.
Review: Setting Your Goal
Setting Intentions—Short-Term Goals
Having a goal or destination is important, but once we know what it is, we need to work toward it with mini goals—or intentions—that are short term and easier to manifest. Setting intentions is part of the process of reaching your goal. If, for example, my goal is to realize enlightenment, I can’t just close my eyes and have it. Well, technically I can, but for most of us it doesn’t work that way. It is like saying my goal is to be healthy, fit, strong, and free of illness. Wonderful. Since we can’t just blink and make it happen, we need stepping stones to take us across the river to our destination. These stepping stones are little steps toward your goal that you can achieve within a limited timeframe. These are your intentions.
An intention may be something that will keep you in balance or help get you into balance. For example, if you have a stressful day ahead, commit to taking two deep breaths every thirty minutes, and before you make any important decision. Maybe your intention is to eat a healthier lunch or to meditate for ten minutes every day. These are tasks that you know you can do. You may want to skip them, make up excuses for why you can’t do them today, or why you don’t have time, but setting an intention is like signing a contract. It’s a commitment. So set intentions that you know you will actually do. You can set grandiose goals that may seem romantically beautiful, but it’s more important to be realistic and set intentions that are somewhat challenging, yet still within your reach. I’m not saying you should find excuses for not following through; rather, enjoy setting intentions that do take you further—that encourage you to practice and improve. Set goals for a relatively short amount of time—a daily intention, a weekly intention, and maybe a monthly intention. You can always extend your intention over and over again.
Every morning as you wake up, have a ritual of setting your daily intention and connecting with your weekly intention. Maybe the weekly intention is set every Sunday night or Friday morning—whatever works for you; just be consistent. Decide on a time of day to set your intention, say in the morning after washing up and before breakfast. Sit down, look at your watch, and give yourself five minutes. Maybe set a timer, so you know you have a full five minutes just to sit and reflect. If you decide on your intention in one minute, spend the rest of the five minutes visualizing yourself in that state or manifesting your intention. It may feel silly, and you may feel that you already know your intention, but at least for the first month, make sure you give yourself these five minutes daily. Treat it like a spiritual ceremony. Do it with enthusiasm. This is where you start manifesting your dream.
Tips for Setting Your Short-Term Goals
Commitment—The First Step: Show Up!
So you know where you want to go and you have even been able to set up smaller daily intentions, but maybe you’ve already found that after two days, you seem to slack. I am running late today, feeling tired; oh, I’ll just start again tomorrow.
Setting up a routine—a ritual of practice—is as important as any part of mind training. This is true even if you know exactly what your intention will be or you think that having a routine is useless; that is your mind taking control of you. Remember, we are looking to take control of the mind.
So maybe your first intention is to simply show up. If you don’t show up, how will you practice? How will you make any improvement? This is why we start with setting intentions for goals that we can actually meet and build up from there. When you have a feeling of success—of achievement—you will take the next step because you will be encouraged to keep going. Even small achievements give the mind the stimulation to keep going. But the slightest disappointment will cause the mind to create excuses—why now is not the right time, or why this practice may not be right for you, or you are not the type for this, and on and on. The mind is very creative; let’s keep moving forward positively. For now, your intention may simply be to read through this entire chapter by the end of today or tomorrow. No step is too small.
Taking a small step at a time is always a good idea, especially when challenges arrive. For some, the food will be the most challenging aspect of improvement; for others, it will be the meditation or the movement. It really doesn’t matter where the challenge is as long as you are committed and make these constant small steps toward improving. Show up to do the work, no matter how insignificant it may seem.
So if your intention is that of commitment to the practice, work on just showing up for five minutes each day to set your intention. Even if you end up fiddling and daydreaming for the whole five minutes, your mind and body will get used to getting up and preparing, and most importantly, you will eventually set up new standards of commitment.
To help you stay connected to your practice, create rituals to help you realize your goals. You may decide that before meditation, you will light a candle or refresh the flowers. Maybe before you do yoga, you will light incense or simply look at an inspiring photo of a yoga pose and say, “Thank you for the inspiration.” Sometimes having a small, fun, and easy ritual is the first step toward developing a longer practice. I love to start with a few breaths, feeling my body and offering gratitude for the opportunity to practice.
On days that I don’t feel like doing a yoga practice, I simply show up and do small things that I love. I watch my fingers take out a match from the box, the movement of the match as it strikes the box, and the magic of the flame that appears. Slowly, I light a candle. Candles make me happy. Then I sit at the top of my mat and take a few breaths, feeling gratitude expand from my heart. I slowly move onto all fours for some cat-cow (see yoga section) to release the back. Maybe the next step will be to just try a low lunge. I keep going slowly, until, like an old engine, something clicks and starts running. Then I keep going with my practice. But the first step, no matter how much I didn’t feel like it, was to show up. Something always happens after that, but without showing up, nothing will happen.
Show up, do one small good thing, then another. Before you know it, your life will transform into a holistic practice.
Show Up! How to Make Your Practice Happen
Do the Best You Can in Every Situation
If you can show up, smile, and do your best, you’re headed in the right direction. Really, you can’t do more than that anyway. Well … at times you can; you may want to push yourself harder on an exercise day or during a yoga practice, but that is not always for the best. When we push too hard, we can burn out or get injured; injuries force us to slow down much more than if we would go slowly to begin with. I used to like to push hard because I wanted to get over the hard work part and be flexible or strong or enlightened. I did see quicker progress but also got injured at times.
When I was injured, my mind would come to “save” me. Now I had excuses for why I couldn’t practice, which allowed me to step out of the race, a race my mind had invented. This way I felt my ego was protected all the time. When working hard, I seemed to be strong, and when injured, I could say it was due to the great work I had done. This way of living worked at first but quickly became old. I was not really happy to be injured, and when I needed to get back to the practice, it was torture. I was out of shape. I had fallen off the wagon, and it was hard to pick up again.
Life can get a bit too intense when we constantly try too hard. Even if we do feel that we are progressing due to hard work, we will almost always move faster and with greater ease if we learn how to practice with grace and compassion. Do the best that you can, without judgment or great expectations. This does not mean you lose sight of your goal or intention; it just means you do your best to get there and are okay with whatever the outcome is. As you will see, not all days are the same. Some days you will wake up with a clear mind or an open body, and then the next day may be different. At any given moment, if you simply do the best you can and enjoy where you are at the moment, you will begin to experience the joy of practice as well as the joy of life. Then you will be more likely to stick with the practice and see results.
How to Improve Happily and Efficiently
Standing on the Shoulders of Our Teachers
This principle of a new artist practicing in the arts is true for anything: First you study and receive teachings, and the more you practice, live, and breathe these teachings, the more you embody what you’ve learned, until you create a specific set of spices for your own recipe, so to speak.
“Practice and all is coming,” claims Pattabhi Jois, the father of ashtanga vinyasa yoga. It is not by talking about yoga that one becomes a yogi. Indeed, reading and discussing is important, but it is the practice in everyday life that creates an artist, a teacher, or a master. This practice is what then allows the master to embody the teachings in an authentic way.
Ganga White, a prominent yoga teacher who studied with many masters, tells us that we should be “standing on the shoulders of the past” (White, 2007). In other words, we need to respect the ancient and previous knowledge, and then take it a step further.
An artist, a yoga teacher, a musician, or even a philosopher starts with studying masters of the past. Practicing yoga and studying with great masters is of great value. At a certain point, after substantial practice and time, you may find this knowledge engrained within you. Once the knowledge is there, you may begin exploring what works for you, what feels right for you as an individual. This is the point when you have acquired a great toolbox of knowledge and possible practices, and you can decide which of them will become your own and how you can modify them to really fit who you are. At this stage, you become your own master. Don’t rush to this stage. Take your time to practice with teachers, and always keep practicing and studying. There are moments when the ego feels it already knows everything. Make sure to question your ego regularly.
The tradition, the teachers of past and present, are guides—shepherds presenting the grass. Once we can see the grass, we can try to eat it and see if the teachings resonate with us. Then give it another bite; at first it may be bitter—new—but eventually, we may learn to see the benefits. Maybe with the guide of a wise one, we may learn how to chew, how to digest, and how to use the new powers we gain.
The teachers that I respect the most are those that empowered me, not controlled me—those that were sharing all they had without holding back. They were willing to show me all there is and accept me for who I am.
I hope this book will empower you in the same way and allow for these teachings and practices to merge with your current life—incorporating the yoga lifestyle into your life. I intend to share with you all that I know and all that worked for me, including tools that
I have created from my own research and practice, either new or a mix of highlights of the best information I gathered from different sources—my own salad of practices.
Really living in joy—having a blissful life—is something that will be truly yours only through your own experience. You can learn about many things and even recite what you learned, but it is only when you actually live it through experience that you attain mastery.
I have learned a great deal from my teachers and masters, but it is through my own practice—my own experience and my own realizations—that I have come to be who I am. I hope that you, too, will use this book as a guide and as an inspiration to practice so that you may live your life in a new and fulfilling way with ownership of your life and your happiness.
Practices for the Ultimate Student