I've been doing yoga for the past ten years. It's a really remarkable thing for overall strength, fitness, and flexibility. You become less prone to injury and less prone to sickness if you do it regularly; you can also radically diminish stress, massively enhance your overall feeling of well-being, and even banish chronic pain. You can also hurt yourself if you aren't careful, and if you approach yoga like it's some kind of no pain-no gain exercise in extreme self-torment. But if you have the right mindset--that you have to keep it gentle, keep it steady, "stay within yourself," and listen to what the bod is telling you about what it wants to do and not do on a given day--it can really reorient your life in marvelous ways.

When I first started, I took classes, and studied both Bikram-style and ashtanga yoga. Then I taught for a little while at the studio where I learned. Then life changed course, and for the past several years I've practiced on my own, sometimes using a DVD (Rodney Yee, Brian Kest, Baron Baptiste, and Shiva Rea are my favorites, though I never cease to giggle when they issue mysterious orders such as "drop your groins," "touch the still point within," and "enjoy the lunar qualities" of the pose).

One thing I've noticed over the years is that there are as many ways to do yoga as there are people who practice it--and also that there are a lot of fundamentalists out there who insist that the only way to do yoga is to do it their way. The fundamentalists must be ignored, of course, in this as in most walks of life. And, conversely, the innovators must be enjoyed and celebrated for the inspiration they bring to their craft.

I loved this New York Times profile of Vinnie Marino, a former addict who now teaches yoga in LA. Marino combines vinyasa-style yoga with a no-nonsense attitude and a love of rock and roll. In fact, it was Grace Slick who urged him to become a yoga teacher, and who paid for him to get certified when he was working as her personal assistant during the early 1990s. His classes have soundtracks that include Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, and the Pretenders--something yoga fundamentalists would regard as heretical. Most yoga classes, if they have any music going at all, have something new agey and more or less Indian-sounding going on in the background; it's all designed to be very peaceful and meditative and inward. And that's fine. But it's great to see Marino openly asserting that this is not the only kind of ambience music can bring to yoga. I doubt I'm the only person who likes to put on some classic rock now and then to do my sun salutations. You get a different feel that way -- but it's just as good, and sometimes better.

Rock on. Namaste.