Boston Yoga Conference and Maine Comedy

Yesterday, I volunteered with the Green Yoga Association at the Boston Yoga Journal Conference at the Boston Sheraton. In exchange for volunteering, I got to take a class with Shiva Rea, who I have never taken a real life class with. I only know her from my yoga DVDs, and her amazing yoga music compilations.

Whew! That was a ton of hyperlinks. Glad to see you back from them.

Wait, here's one more: The last yoga conference I went to was 2 years ago, and I wrote about it then too.

So here's the deal with Shiva Rea: I honestly do not understand much of what she says. Her name definitely means something yogic, and I wonder if it's her real name. She says things like shakti, embodying, yantra, mandala, fire, water, pinda, and lots of other things about our chakras that I only vaguely get. Still, though, I thoroughly enjoy taking a class with her.

I was explaining the class to Justin this way: "It was so cool, because most of the time in a yoga class, the teacher gives you alignment cues that have to do with internally or externally rotating muscles, making sure bones are stacked, you know, anatomical cues, BUT, with Shiva, she would tell us to make sure we were connecting muladara to anahata, and that cue made me be able to backbend better! The chakra cues actually got me deeper into asana!"

And Justin laughed, which is what he does when he has no idea about the words coming out of my mouth.

At one point during class, I looked up, and there were about 150 women on all fours gyrating in unsettling ways. If someone was at the Sheraton for a different conference, say, the Bausch and Lomb conference, and they mistook this room for one of their meetings, they might report us to management.

At the end of class, we gathered around the middle of the room, and we were each handed a plastic cone cup full of uncooked rice, which was explained to be an offering to some god, not sure which one.

I think this was called a puja, and I have no idea what that means. We were also handed rose petals, which we were instructed to put on our heads, like the Holy men in India do. So there we were, a bunch of sweaty white ladies from Boston, gathered around a makeshift alter in the middle of a conference room at the Boston Sheraton, with rose petals on our heads and paper cups of rice in our hands.



Then Shiva taught us a chant "Om Srim Hrim Srim Kamale....", and lots more after that, which we repeated a few times. Then she goes, "Ok! Only 17 more times!" and lots of the women laughed.

Then they realized she was being honest. We literally had to do the chant 17 more times. In between chants, we were told to throw the rice toward the altar. I was in the back of the group circled around the altar, and I decided not to throw my rice, for fear it might end up in someone's eye, then we really would need the Bausch and Lomb people.

At first, I didn't chant because I didn't know the words. It used to be that I refused to chant because I didn't know what the chants meant. Then I started to look them up, and they pretty much all mean the same thing: peace and happiness to all living things, nature is awesome, this god of nature is awesome, this god of water is cool too, etc. After a while, I started to like the chant, so joined in and became the epitome of the white, suburban, white-wine-drinking, yoga doing stereotype that I am.

And then I drove to Maine and told jokes to hundreds of ZZ Top looking, leather vest wearing, motorcycle riding Masons at a makeshift comedy club.


And I mean makeshift. It was separated from an indoor kids play area by a partition on wheels, and I could hear the screams and laughter of kids from the stage, even over the din of the Masons ordering bucket of beer after bucket of beer. These guys were genius. They figured out a way to have a night out, not have to pay for a babysitter, and get hammered!

I thought, whoa - I'm doing comedy for them? Then I introduced myself to one of the bearded leather vest wearing dudes, who looked at me like, whoa - you're doing comedy for us? Just another reason I love comedy - bringing together people who might never otherwise connect.

The show was a fundraiser for a friend of theirs who I think fell off his motorcycle. He got up onstage and told all the Masons he loved them, and the Masona shouted that they loved him back, and I immediately loved all of them. The crowd was friendly enough, but not really interested in what I had to say onstage. Overall, as the opener, I ate a bag of dicks, but it didn't even matter to me, since I was so connected through my muladara and anahata!