Goal Mate: Yoga for Running, Golfing, Dating, Public Speaking

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Photo: Alexander Milligan

Whether to improve your game or give you game, these inventive classes use yoga to enhance other pursuits.

For Going the Distance (running, golfing, cycling)

Pros on the Nets, the Mets and the Giants have all done yoga. Now savvy amateur athletes can benefit from asana guidance, too. This winter, Yoga Works (212-769-9642, yogaworks.com) offers a variety of two-hour yoga workshops that help runners, cyclists, skiers, golfers, dancers and marathoners train smart and stay focused.

Eschewing the smorgasbord approach, the Running Center (therunningcenter.com, 212-362-3779) holds ongoing yoga classes specifically for runners’ needs—knee and leg health, breath control, and mental endurance.

Yogi J.Brown (917-446-8871, yogijbrown.com) works with golfers on precision and flexibility to improve their swings and their scores.

And come January, Marissa Spano (917-734-7301), a recent transplant from Hawaii, will offer group classes for cyclists, using the techniques of pranayama (breath work) and asana to strengthen knees, ankles, wrists and shoulders and to develop balance on the bike. Ask her about her work with divers and surfers, too.

For Getting Some (dating, sexuality, fertility)

“First comes love, then comes marriage…” and now comes yoga for all stages of coupling. Start with Y-Date?!, an annual event at Noodle Yoga, in Dumbo, Brooklyn (718-624-5525, noodleyoga.com), where owner Nadia Block holds an open-level class followed by a singles soiree (the next Y-Date?! is scheduled for Spring ’07).

Once you’ve met the One, prepare yourself for consummation at a Yogic Ecstasy workshop with Marisa Sullivan (347-563-1404, yogicecstasy@yahoo.com) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Sullivan helps women (and soon men) to expand their orgasmic potential through kegels, breathing exercises, vocalization and guided imagery.

And keep those nethers supple and toned at the ongoing Let’s Stay Juicy class at the Breathing Project (212-979-9642, breathingproject.org). If your next stop is babyland, boost your fertility in a Receptive Nest workshop led by Barrie Raffel and Karen Safire (212-898-0414), which focuses on restorative poses and calming the nervous system.

For the Call-back, the Calling and Speaking Up (writing, singing, public speaking)

Liz Caplan of Yoga for Singers (212-645-9369, lizcaplan.com) works with Broadway performers, while Suzanne Jackson of Yogasing (610-444-4135, yogasing.com) works with opera singers and public speakers—both offer yoga workshops, coaching and DVDs to help open up the muscles used to breathe, and to help calm performance jitters.

To get the creative juices flowing, award-winning TV commercial producer Barbara Benedict offers Yoga for Writers, Artists and Other Creative Souls at Levitate Yoga (212-974-2288, levitateyoga.com), a vinyasa class that incorporates artistic assignments (bring a sketchbook or journal).

Yoga for Public Speaking is also a part of Yoga Effects’ comprehensive 8-Part Beginner’s Series (212-754-5600, yogaeffects.com). Director Liz Mandarano says yoga helped her become a better speaker and lawyer—and motivated her to quit the corporate life. Who says creative leaps are limited to artists?

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Ken Wilber: Man of the Our

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Ken Wilber thinks we could all benefit from adopting each other's philosophies.

Ken Wilber, founder of the Integral Institute, has written more than two dozen books. In his latest, the forthcoming Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World (Integral Books, $23), the scholar draws on science, psychology, philosophy and world religions to argue that an integral understanding of them all will benefit our lives more than a my-way-or-the-highway attitude. On Friday 8 and Saturday 9, he brings his complex theories to the masses, joining Tibetan Buddhist monk Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche at the New York Society for Ethical Culture for a program titled “Spirituality and the Modern World.”

Photograph: Roxana Marroquin

What is the “integral approach”?
It’s a map of human capacities and tools developed by comparing theories spanning the last 2,000 years—psychoanalysis, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, science, philosophy, etc. Common themes tend to emerge.

You say that modernist and postmodernist theories have trashed ancient thought, such as the world’s major religions. How?
The great metaphysical traditions contain extremely important truths about body, mind, soul and spirit, but express them in ways that made science—in this case, science is modernism—very suspicious. Science came in and said, “I need objective evidence.” And in part that was right: Those traditions couldn’t understand, for example, what’s going on with the brain’s chemistry during meditation. So half of what science did is really important. But the other half was a disaster; it reduced everything.

So science and religion became locked into a domestic dispute?
Yes [laughs]—of colossal proportions!

And it’s important to reconcile these ideas because otherwise we only profit from one body of knowledge instead of both?
Exactly. The integral approach finds common ground. Why should these things be fighting? It makes no sense whatsoever.

But now you’re coming to talk along with someone who is a master in one particular spirituality. Isn’t that counter to the integral approach?
You can use any tradition you want, including, in this case, Tibetan Buddhism, as a basis for the integral approach. People get excited because we don’t tell them what to think. They fill in the blanks themselves.

What do you hope will ultimately come of your theories of spirituality?
I hope we could all have a bigger view of things. There’s a lot of war in the world today—and virtually every answer to it is “Get rid of the other views.” It’s crazy—not once did somebody say, “Hey, wait a minute: Everybody’s right.”

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Wellness: The Twisting and Turning Trends of the Season

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Fall Preview 2006

The world of yoga will stretch in several new ways this season.

Yoga day spas: Area Yoga and Namaste Yoga were among the first to offer extras such as bodywork, nutrition counseling and even psychotherapy. Before you know it, you could be using your class card for a facial.

The slipping of savasana: When centers cram the content of a 90-minute session into 60 minutes of “express” yoga, savasana—the meditative relaxation that concludes each practice—is sometimes shortchanged, and is in danger of disappearing altogether.

Downward-facing daddy: First there was mommy yoga, then kids’ yoga, even dog yoga. A few family-unit classes have already popped up and we expect many more.

Small time: Big studios stay big by offering scads of basic classes to attract beginners. Veteran practitioners will flee to smaller studios (such as Kula Yoga Project, the Shala and Yoga Center of Brooklyn) in search of reliable, advanced classes taught by homegrown studio owners.

Alternative deities: Classes such as Jill Satterfield’s are fusing Buddhist principles with yoga practice. The 92nd Street Y and the JCC hope to launch Jewish yoga classes within the next year. It can’t be long before Christian yoga, popular in the Midwest, makes its way here.

Yogi passports: Based on the popularity of retreats in Costa Rica and Mexico, NYC studios are sponsoring studies farther afield; trips are planned to Brazil, Japan and Patagonia this year and next.

“Power” power yoga: Since sports-tailored classes—yoga for golfing, surfing and biking—will soon flourish, it can’t be long before career-performance classes sprout up. How about yoga for public speaking?

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AS PUBLISHED IN TIMOUT NEW YORK