STRETCH: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude
Coming August 2010 from Harper Perennial
Years after achieving literary stardom as the author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, Neal Pollack has fallen into a rut. He’s overweight, the hair on his head is thinning, and the hair on his face is pretentious—all of which a New York Times critic points out while panning his second book, Never Mind the Pollacks. That review, combined with the complete failure of his attempt to become the frontman for a rock band, leaves Pollack lying facedown in a puddle of his own tears, pounding the mattress and sobbing into his pillow. His wife intervenes by saying: “You should do yoga with me.” “Yoga,” he writes, “didn’t occur to me, ever. Why would it have? EA Sports had never put out a yoga video game.”
Yet Pollack is desperate enough to try anything—even if it means trying to stand on his head in the exercise room of the Lance Armstrong 24-Hour Fitness in Austin, Texas. As he struggles to master the “alligator pose” and keep from kicking other people in the face, Pollack begins to feel better. Soon, he’s working his way through the chakra system and coming closer and closer, he mistakenly believes, to dharma megha samadhi, “a state of enlightened bliss where the ego separates from the self and the practitioner realizes that he's powerless to control the vagaries of an endlessly shifting universe.”
Pollack moves his family to Los Angeles and soon finds himself immersed in its “weird and circuslike” yoga scene. He takes part in a 24-Hour Yogathon, volunteers at his neighborhood yoga studio, attends a “yoga Olympics” in an airport hotel ballroom, becomes a reporter for Yoga Journal magazine, gets invited to yoga conferences and yoga rock shows, travels to Thailand for a two-week yoga retreat, and starts teaching yoga himself. Though Pollack mercilessly lampoons America’s seemingly omnipresent yoga culture, he also undergoes a profound personal transformation. His dedicated yoga practice, he writes, “has done more for my physical and mental well-being than anything else I've tried.”
