Santa Barbara and the Web

Here's a tale of serendipity and the beauty of having an amorphous ethereal space such as the world wide web into which to belt out your calls to the spirits. Back in January, about three days or so before I was leaving for my "book tour," it occurred to me that very few events had been set up, so I put out a rather desperate plea to various anonymous email addresses that I found on a yoga website.

One of these poor recipients generously responded, from Ojai, California. A yoga teacher who knew how to put links in her emails, she was just writing to say hi. Armed with the knowledge that Ojai was near Santa Barbara and that Santa Barbara was rather groovy and likely a good place to find yogis burrowing in the woodwork, I asked the teacher if she knew a place in Santa Barbara that might host a reading. She introduced me by email to Jenni at Drishti, one of this new genre of thing called a "yoga store," and there the success story began.

Jenni it turned out is a master at creating community (her email newsletter, an excerpt from which follows, attests to this). She put on a gorgeous event with yummy (I hear) cookies (which I was too nervous to eat), and lots of yogis, scholars and their friends. Here's her writeup, from the newsletter, of the fete (and thanks, Jenni, for calling me "acclaimed"). Her store can be found here. Drishti, by the way, means "gaze," as in, we yogis sometimes gaze at our navels.

"Acclaimed Yoga Author Visits Drishti
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On January 18, Elizabeth Kadetsky came to Drishti on her tour through California to give a book reading and Q&A session. Elizabeth teaches journalism at Columbia University and has been a yoga practitioner for 20 years. Her newly-released book, First There is a Mountain, has received much critical acclaim, and has raised the eyebrows of some in the yoga community. Through her research in India with B.K.S. Iyengar and some of his contemporaries, Elizabeth attempts to piece together a history of modern yoga, one which doesn't necessarily match up to the often-touted notion that the practice of yoga stems back 5,000 years. Her book also tells the story of her personal experience practicing yoga in India, earning it the description of travel memoir as well as yoga history.

"The book reading at Drishti drew a crowd of very interested yogis who have themselves spent time studying similar topics. The Q&A discussion was full of insightful questions from the crowd and well-thought-out answers from Elizabeth, and had to be cut off due to time constraints, rather than a lack of questioning! The general feedback from the evening was that it was an excellent opportunity to gather and discuss the practice of yoga from an intellectual and potentially critical standpoint. People were appreciative of this forum, the likes of which we are rarely able to experience."