Marcum - Close to OM: stretching yoga from your mat to your life

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For all of my teachers

I HAD MY FIRST RUN-IN with yoga in the 70s. I cant remember if it was Lilias Folan on TV or if I started with my workbooks at home, but somehow I got turned on to yoga at fifteen years old. And then I got off onto my whole drugs-wild-lifestyle and drifted away from yoga. I moved to LA in 1990 and started taking flow classes with people like Bryan Kest and Seane Corn. Then, because I had no idea what to do with my life, Grace Slick told me, Youve got really strong legs, you dig this yoga stuff, try that. And she gave me money to go to White Lotus and do my first teacher training.

Not long after White Lotus, I was at 24-Hour Fitness, the teacher didnt show up, and the two other people in the room said, Why dont you teach the class? Despite my training I really had no clue what I was doing. But I did know that when we practice we come in with such mishigas, tumult, stuff from the world, our worries, anxieties. Then we practice, and all of a sudden something shifts. We get up out of savasana and think, Wow, I feel a lot more peaceful and calmIve got a different perspective on life.

Yoga has seen me through treatments for hepatitis C from my intravenous drug use in the 70s and 80s. And it has kept me grounded and healthy enough to be celebrating thirty-two years of being clean and sober as I write this. My years of teaching have made me aware that underneath every normal-looking person theres divorce, illness, fear, mental instability, financial issues. Were all going through so much. Thats why Andrea Marcums book Close to OM: Stretching Yoga from Your Mat to Your Life is so important. Andrea shows us that yoga doesnt mean you have to do gymnastics. In fact, the real transformation comes out of the stillness. With her unique voice she guides us out from under where were Stuckat (to use her word) and toward a better understanding of what brings purpose and meaning to our lives.

I met Andrea many years ago in my classroom in Los Angeles. Even back then, she had a fire about her. She was an intense student whod show up pretty much every day to my flow classes wearing her baggy black Thai-style pants looking ready for jujitsu. Andreas passionate about learning. As Ive watched her evolve from student to teacher, shes stayed on the path of being a seekerquestioning and truly integrating what shes learning into what she feels is real. Andrea isnt afraid to take risks. Whether thats opening a studio in LA, organizing her own retreats, or writingshe puts it all out there, travels, grows, and is committed to really looking at the integrity behind what shes doing.

Close to OM is accessible for newer students while it resonates with those of us who have been taking or even teaching yoga for years.

Andreas combination of relatable stories, down-to-earth philosophy mixed with clear alignment points, and straightforward meditation invites us all into a conversation thats as fun as it is serious. She manages to make us laugh as we learn about ourselves, about yoga, and about life.

V INNIE M ARINO

I WAS IN THE SIXTH GRADE when I discovered gymnastics. One typically foggy afternoon, my mom dropped my friend Addie and me off at the Santa Cruz Gymnastics Center. Located in Northern California, Santa Cruz is part college town, part beach town. The UC Santa Cruz campus stares down at the Beach Boardwalk and Fishermans Wharf from stunning redwood forest hills. I grew up there, when middle-aged mothers surfed Steamers Lane and men with shoulder-length beards in No Nukes T-shirts and vintage VW buses were at nearly every intersection. Organic, wheatgrass juice, and soy milk were commonplace vernacular long before they hit the mainstream.

The Santa Cruz Gymnastics Center was the first legitimate competitive gymnastics program in the county. It was there that Steve, our raw-garlic-clove-consuming, Robert Blyworshipping teacher, introduced Addie and me to tumbling, balance beam, uneven parallel bars, and vaulting horse. In the years to come, gymnastics would be my blessing and my curse.

I spent endless hours smelling the sprouted wheat bread baking at the Staff of Life Natural Food Market next door while I tore the calluses on my parallel-bar hands and destroyed my ankles with the full twisting layouts in my floor routineall in the hopes that Steve would decide during one of his drum circles to put me on the competitive squad. Little did I know finding my way onto the team would introduce me to an albatross I would spend decades attempting to shake.

The pressures of body image were mounting. Being a teenager sucks, and being a gymnast while youre a teenager is even worse. Addie was told she was too thin and not strong enough. Id been put on diet after diet to try to get the fat girl slim. In an average-girl lineup, I wouldnt have stood out as corpulent. But by gymnastic standards, I was a lard-ass, and they werent afraid to let me know it.

There was no room for self-acceptance in the competitive gymnast agenda, which queued me up for years rife with self-loathing (even beyond my adolescence). All those hours in the gym had left me stocky, muscle-bound, and flat-chested. We were expected to be ballerina thin and yet to perform physical feats that required us to be strong like little boys. Our coaching was like being handed Mens Fitness when what we really needed was Are You There God? Its Me, Margaret. It made for a schizophrenic coming-of-age, one that tried desperately to put puberty on pause. I competed for four years, starting in proficiency Class Three and moving up to Class Two. My weight yo-yoed up and down, but somehow never down enough for Class One.

The preoccupation with stick-thin slenderness and humiliating weigh-ins wasnt the only blow to my self-image. I was sporting a very unfortunate Dorothy Hamill haircut, made worse by an abundance of cowlicks. Silver braces covered my buck teeth like train tracks struggling to cinch the gaping abyss between the front two. Because I refused to wear the painful nightly neck gear that had been assigned, any actual correction would be a long time coming.

It also didnt help that I was Andy.

One summer when my mother, my brothers, and I were in New York City for a visit, I wandered into the ladies room in Central Park. Oh, the little boys room is around the corner, a startled East Coast accent belted in my direction. When I noticed everyone looking at me I froze. A flash of bright red across my mistaken-for-male face How could I defend my female-ness? If only my mother had let me get my ears pierced the way Id been begging hersurely that would have spared me (as it does androgynous Italian and Latin American baby girls everywhere) the humiliation of being called he. Devastated, I caved, ran outside, and burst into tears.