What's the story behind the "Yoga for Men" class?

In 2007 I made my first trip to India. I fell in love with the country instantly. Why I love India is the subject for another essay, but one strong feeling stayed with me when I returned: that I wanted to go back and be of service in some way.

There is so much need in India that you could make a lifetime of work by just choosing any corner in any village, town or city and asking, “how can I help?” This is changing slowly.

As fate would have it, I did have the chance to go back just a few years later, to do a service project, for a good long time. The project that I worked on there and my time there is detailed in a new defunct blog, but I can send it along to anyone who is interested.

I had three months there on that trip, a paid sabbatical, to work on the project. Wells Fargo, the company I worked for at the time and still do at time of writing, allows its employees to take up to four months off every seven years to work on a service project. I found a project to do there, related to some volunteer work I was doing in the US, and off I went.

At that time my yoga practice was purely a physical practice. Asana—the third limb of yoga—only. I had been practicing casually, but regularly, for about 12 years or so at that time.

The project was in Pune, a large city about three hours east of Mumbai. By coincidence or fate, this is the home city of the BKS Iyengar institute. It is one of two or three best known yoga ashrams in the world—for a certain kind of yoga. I was thrilled to learn this, because I imagined myself practicing there when I wasn’t working. That proved to be rather more difficult than I had imagined, because the main classes there are reserved for teachers, in the Iyengar tradition, by special invitation, and the waiting list is about two years long, or was at the time. They really kind of laughed at me when I waltzed in announcing that I was in Pune doing volunteer work and therefore should be allowed to study there. They turned me away about three times—by “they” I mean the major-domo running the studio. But I persisted, and I called in the influence of friends of friends, and they finally took pity on and allowed me to take “public class” upstairs in the smaller studio. I didn’t care. I was in. The teachers of the public classes were students of BKS Iyengar himself, master teachers in their own right. I started classes and was thrilled—learning so much. I would see Mr Iyengar every day practicing (he was well into his 90s and had a deep and disciplined practice), and I would go to the library and read his books sometimes; he would be just a few feet away, writing. He died several years later; I’m so glad I had that experience.

Meanwhile, every morning I would take a walk, very early, in a little park near the apartment where I was staying in a part of town called Model Colony. In the part stood a very large gazebo. Early on I noticed gatherings in the gazebo, and at one point I heard a lot of laughter. I inched my way closer to discover a group of middle-aged men doing yoga. They were having a great time and invited me to join them. They practiced Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings, I think. And my classes at the Iyengar Institute were Monday and Wednesday evenings. I gladly joined the gentlemen in the gazebo.

So picture this: a group of middle class, middle aged men, none of whom had ever done yoga, get together and decide that they should learn more about the physical practice (in India, the physical practice of yoga is not necessarily the first thing one thinks of when they hear that word as is the case in the US). So they hired a teacher, a young guy, to teach them.

But since they had never really been in a yoga studio they had no pre-set notions that the environment should be quiet and focused, let alone reverential. Instead, they treated it more like, say, basketball or golf or army style calisthenics. It was social, supportive, a little raucous, in short, fun. They were high-fiving each other and encouraging each other, teasing each other gently. The patient teacher would sigh, roll his eyes, and do the best he could to keep their attention.

My presence changed the energy, as any new element in a system will. I was a Westerner, had studied yoga, was unmarried, was a volunteer in their town, etc. They were intrigued and very, very welcoming and friendly.

The teacher picked up that I had a practice and he was, I think, happy to have a student who took the whole thing seriously. In that class I was sort of a star, while in the Iyengar classes just a few blocks away I was kind of a remedial student—it’s very different kind of practice, very much focused on alignment and props. It’s moves more slowly, but it can be very intense. It’s disciplined.

Nonetheless, both experiences left profound impressions on me. From the Iyengar Institute I developed an appreciation of alignment, and from the men’s yoga group I started thinking about all the ways in which yoga could be a more jovial and collegial pursuit, especially as a way of getting more men to practice.

I started reflecting on how classes in the US were 80% women and 20% men, and the ratio of male teachers was even smaller. A style of yoga had therefore developed that was focused on flexibility, or a general bendiness.

I realized that when I told many men that I practiced yoga their first response was, “I’m so inflexible,” as though that were a requirement. But I understood why they said that. When they tried yoga they probably looked around at the class, mostly women, and realized that they weren’t able to “do” half the stuff. Moreover a lot of them felt more validated, athletically, when they were sweating, which they may or may not get in a yoga class. Also, while some men love being surrounded by women doing yoga, some men felt emasculated by it. In addition, doing things athletically together is a way that men bond with each other. It’s less intimate on the surface, but has a buddy quality that is reminiscent of boyhood pursuits. Men find camaraderie through athletic pursuits; that can lead to deeper community.

The gazebo classes in Pune planted a seed for me—to teach a men’s only class—that I was not able to realize until 8 or 9 years later. What happened in my own yogic journey after I came back from India and before I did my first teacher training in 2016 could be the subject of another post.

So now I teach a men’s class on Saturdays at Yoga Mayu. Gentleman, I hope you’ll join. Description is here.