ABOUT
Welcome to YBC40. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the email newsletter for info on classes and events, ...or link to this site via RSS feed. If you'd like you may have YBC40 articles from this site delivered by email as they're posted. Thanks for visiting and enjoy!
I’m kind of an unlikely yogi. Having grown up in New York City, first in The Bronx and then in Queens and Manhattan, I’m the last guy you would think to find helping usher in the new age. My family and background were very conservative and after Stuyvesant High School, I went on to attend West Point– The United States Military Academy. After five years in the army I came to Los Angeles to attend film school and pursue Screenwriting.
The writing is actually what got me into Kundalini Yoga. Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces changed the face of filmmaking starting with its influence on George Lucas and Star Wars. All of the major blockbusters of the eighties which followed, used Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ as the backbone of their structure.
So when I came across Joseph Campbell talking about and explaining Kundalini energy and the seven chakras, I was intrigued. This man was known as The Father of Mythology, an academic who is considered one of the great minds of our time. Soon after, I saw a kundalini yoga class at the Hollywood YMCA and I was hooked. Actually, as I often tell my students I didn’t start a serious practice for some time after that because I still had a bunch of bad decisions to make. But the seeds were planted. A few years later I picked up the practice with dedication and that commitment grows daily.
Once I got in there I had the experience. I often try to describe the experience of Kundalini Yoga to people who’ve never done it. The best way I can explain it is to say that Kundalini Yoga is the actual, real-time, physical experience of everything that religion promises you about God. Instead of just talking about it, however, you experience it. The breath or prana as it’s known in the east, is the holy ghost and when you breathe consciously you and God become one– actually you’re always one, but when you breathe properly, you become acutely aware of it. It’s all here right now and Kundalini Yoga gives you the strength of mind and the physical radiance to experience all the wonders of the universe in the moment. It doesn’t matter what religious belief you subscribe to, Kundalini Yoga gives you a deeper experience of your God, whatever that may be to you.
I used to drink a lot of beer and plenty of other good stuff. I smoked cigarettes. I did drugs. I don’t do any of that anymore and when people ask how I did it, I tell them I never quit any of those things, I simply added more and more yoga. If you read any of the many books about great spiritual masters of the east, like Parmahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of A Yogi when students ask them about a problem, inevitably the answer is: more yoga, more yoga, more yoga. That’s the amazing thing about yoga. It actually means ‘to yoke’ or join together and it’s a technology of the human being that allows you to join with your soul in the moment. Using the breath and movement, it stops the mind-stuff so that you can experience your true self– in short it makes you feel good. So needless to say, the more yoga you do, the more of your better half comes through and those things that aren’t so good for you just fall away. If you want to change anything in your life you literally only have to do yoga with a decided intention and things will change. It really works, which is why I chose to teach it. I got so much out of the practice that I realized I could also give a whole heck of a lot back too. It’s been the best decision of my life.
At first I created YBC40.COM to give information on the actual Kundalini Yoga Boot Camp that I teach. Then I realized this site could be so much more. I write the posts and articles in the same way I speak to my classes and in that way I hope that this site will be a digital extension of the teaching.
Enjoy.