Edi Pasalis, scholar in residence at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, said across America yoga has exploded in popularity over the last three or four years. She found the explosion exciting. "It speaks for great opportunity for religion in America," she said. During her residency at Kripalu, Pasalis is working on a project with the working title, Yoga and Faith.
The Yoga and Faith project reflects her own experience, Pasalis said. She went to Harvard as an undergraduate, and majored in economics. She got a business degree at University of Michigan. For several years, she worked in high tech businesses. In some ways, she felt this part of her life reflection on her staunchly secular background. It valued 'veritas', the Harvard motto, intellectual truth.
Pasalis grew up Greek Orthodox. Something was missing from the experience, she said. Church services involved a lot of ritual, which she loved, but she did not know how to connect with it. In 1996, though, she found yoga, and through yoga, she saw things differently. She called it "a transformation from secular to sacred." Within three years she had quit her job and enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. She also completed yoga teacher training at Kripalu.
Pasalis began working on her project during her second semester of Divinity School, in fall 2000. "I was blessed in the process," she said; "I crafted my Harvard experience around it." She began the work as an independent study there. When she first entered the program, she was looking at ancient yogic practices, learning Sanskrit, and studying ancient Indian texts and the history and Hinduism. But she found she was more interested in the modern ramifications of yoga. She switched her focus to the modern American spiritual landscape, and began a study of her own and other people's individual experiences with yoga. From there, she began to examine how yoga effected and was effected by the situation in modern America.
Yoga is a type of knowledge transferred from teacher to student, Pasalis explained. The yoga sutras and ancient practices have filtered down to modern day yoga. People follow essentially the same process now as they did when yoga developed, though with a greater helping of branding and marketing. Pasalis said the difference between studying the modern practice and the past was the difference between studying history and anthropology. She was interested in the modern use of ancient teachings: what happened when a middle aged woman from New Jersey took a yoga class at the YMCA and had a spiritual experience different from an aerobics class? "Most books out now are how to," she said: how to do the triangle pose; how to begin pranayam, the breathing exercises; how to say a mantra. She wanted living stories.
Pasalis hoped ultimately to begin a new conversation about yoga, she said. People had said a great deal about the physical process of yoga, and the ways in which it relieved stress and illness. People talked about yoga as a psychological process. She would like to talk about it as a spiritual and sometimes religious practice. Eventually, she wanted to spread the conversation beyond her writing and give workshops. "I think as more and more people consider the philosophical aspects of yoga, the conversation will arise," she said.
Pasalis has taken delight in her time at Kripalu. Kripalu is rooted in tradition, but not stuck there, she said. The people there are living American modern yoga. She has five months to research and write about her topic. She has begun by listening to many stories. She has talked to all sorts: people in the Karma Yoga program, providing services for guests for six to 21 months; students in the yoga teacher training program; senior staff; workers in the shop; the manager of the seva volunteers. For her, yoga offered a transition form secular to sacred. For others, she said, it brought about a transformation from one kind of sacredness to another.
Yoga practice could be completely secular, Pasalis said. When connected with the divine it becomes transformative. One Kripalu employee who grew up Jewish, but had practiced the religion rarely and sporadically as an adult, talked about eating dinner in the Kripalu chapel. She saw many people taking a moment before eating to bless the meal. It gave her a desire to say a traditional Hebrew prayer before she ate. The environment made prayer or blessing natural, easy and authentic.
Pasalis brought up two aspects of yoga that connected it with spiritual or religious practices or experiences. "One is about experience of the divine," she said. "It takes shape in many ways- an inner knowing, a sense of grace." Yoga was developed to lead to interaction with the divine.
"Yoga brings about a certain intensity of experience," she said. Practicing it means being awake in the present moment. "Sometimes being awake is so intense, prayer is needed. It looks like God."
Sometimes this experience had a religious sensibility, she said. It did not have to. For many people, especially those who had no early religion, yoga held their spirituality. It deepened their experience of spirit.
"People often say they are spiritual, but not religious," she said. She was not restricting her work to religious experiences. "People can have a deep faith in their own inner knowing and the goodness of the universe. I am interested in this faith as well as the religious impulse. Why do people need it? What does religion offer that yoga doesn't? How do they co-exist?"
For people from strong traditions, yoga had often deepened faith, or changed the emphasis of a faith, or broadened it, or taken someone back to old traditions. Pasalis has spoken to many people who broke with the faith they were raised in when the reached high school. They saw hypocrisy in its structure, or lost belief.
She also talked with many for whom yoga deepened their faith, especially Christians. Some said they felt Jesus with them on the mat. Some felt yoga as prayer. She had met nuns who did yoga. There was a precedence for this mix of practices in Buddhist communities, she said.
Many people missed immediacy in their religion, she said, especially in Judaism and Christianity, because some had found them something of a hollow ritual. "I say that gently, without judgment." These people found a way to reinvigorate their faith through yoga.
The second aspect came through the practice of yoga. People could practice yoga without any sense of this communion, but even at its simplest and most physical the practice of yoga gathered the behaviors of spiritual practice. People often made a ritual of where and when they practiced yoga. At the beginning of a class, an instructor often had students create an intention, or called for a moment of silence.
And Yoga was not just postures and positions. It covered many practices: chanting, breathing exercises, guides for living well with loving kindness, truthfulness and cleanliness. Yoga practicers might change diet. They would not necessarily become vegetarian, but they might give up caffeine or have less sugar.
It was a step from yoga postures to chanting, of course, Pasalis said. "I see that. People argue, so many people are just learning yoga in gyms. It's all about postures. They do hot yoga, where it's all about how much you sweat." She was amazed, she said, how many people start this way, to improve their golf game or to meet people or to get a tight butt, and move on to other yoga practices.
"Why, is a mystery," and at the heart of her investigation.
For example, she talked with a woman from Woods Hole who started taking yoga classes because she had no other choice except curling. She was a biker too, and she got interested in yoga as physical exercise. Then she had some wild experiences. She got initiated with a guru, and now thinks of yoga as her spiritual home. She goes to the Vedanta center to learn about ancient yogic writings. This has happened to many, many people, Pasalis said.
Kripalu wanted to build the body of knowledge about modern yoga, and the experience of living it, Pasalis said. The scholar in residence program was open to all yoga teachers, but especially to those Kripalu has trained; Amy Weintraub, last year's scholar, has a book coming out on yoga and depression. Pasalis said her residency was giving her the chance to get deep into thought about her topic and deep into her own yoga practice. Kripalu was also easy place to write- she met with kindness, and no judgmental critiques.
She added that many people she has spoken to have had experience with many yoga traditions, and so has she. Kripalu very much open to specific practices of other yogic traditions: "It's the Universalist Unitarianism of yoga."
Yoga had changed the shape of her life, she said. One of the goals of yoga was to come to all experience, good and bad, joyful and painful, present for greater intensity of emotion. With that increase, she had often felt a sense of awe and wonder, and had wanted to offer gratitude and praise.
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Winter Storm Warning Issued for Berkshires
Another snowstorm is expected to move through the region overnight on Friday, bringing 5 to 8 inches of snow. This is updated from Thursday's winter weather advisory.
The National Weather Service in Albany, N.Y., has posted a winter storm warning for all of Berkshire County and parts of eastern New York State beginning Friday at 4 p.m. through Saturday at 1 p.m.
The region could see heavy to moderate snowfall rates of 1 to 2 inches per hour overnight, tapering off Saturday morning to flurries.
Drivers should exercise caution on Friday night and Saturday morning, as travel conditions may be hazardous.
Saturday night should be clear and calm, but warming temperatures means freezing rain Sunday night and rain through Monday with highs in the 40s. The forecast isn't much better through the week as temperatures dip back into the teens with New Year's Eve looking cloudy and frigid.
Many homeowners are showing their holiday spirit by decorating their houses. We asked for submissions so those in the community can check out these fanciful lights and decor when they're out.
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