The Quest

Asia » China » Shanghai
June 1st 2006

Published: June 1st 2006

The Quest

I’m writing today from the train, on the way to Shanghai, the start of yet another transition. I’ve been offered a job as director of the Y+ teacher training academy and I’m traveling with a suitcase full of books and all my ‘winter’ gear.

The job offer came two weeks ago when I was visiting with the current director, Rachel Hull. She’s an Australian teacher whom I met during my year in Byron Bay. She taught part of the teacher training that I took back in 2003 and has been here since last March. She got the program started and now is moving on. We were having a drink in the Element Fresh café attached to the new Xintiandi (new sky and earth) studio in Shanghai. I knew she was leaving and wanted her local contacts among body workers and other helpful western-trained folks in Shanghai. She was lamenting the difficulty of finding a replacement for herself. It was the usual stuff, she’d contacted people but had no takers on coming to China, perhaps because they view the country as backwards, dirty and Communist. I was sipping a “Delicious Mauritius” smoothie when she gave me this look.

“What is you YogaAlliance certification?” she asked.

Shortly after finishing the nine-month course in Australia, I debated the merits of paying the $40 annual dues to YA for certification and the right to put the letters RYT after my name. I figured it would be good marketing and little did I know the doors that it would open for me. I’d qualified at the 500-hour level and in that respect, I’m qualified to direct a teacher training. Never mind that I’ve not done this before, I happen to be in the right place at the right time. And in China, that’s 9/10s of the deal.

I haven’t worked out all the details, but my job involves mostly administration. While Rachel has done the preliminary groundwork to launch the program, my job will be to keep it running. That means finding qualified teachers, developing materials, arranging for translation, teaching courses, evaluating trainees and turning a profit.

It’s funny because a few weeks before, I was wondering what I would be doing when my current contract expires in October. I was reticent about teaching class after class to students who mostly couldn’t understand English well enough for them to grasp the philosophy and more subtle elements I like to put into my classes. Sometimes I felt like a glorified aerobics instructor, not because of the yoga, but because of my inability to communicate. Not that I can’t say some things. I can get students into and out of postures with a combination of demonstration and mangled Chinese, but it is a long march from there to explaining the conversation between Lord Krishna and the Warrior Arjuna in the ancient Indian text, the Bhagavad Gita. So I’d mentally created the idea of some kind of change when Rachel popped her question.

It didn’t take long for me to say yes, though I really don’t know what I am getting into. This is becoming familiar territory and I’m understanding that we really don’t ever know what we are getting into. When I took on teaching my first yoga classes in Fairbanks I had no clue what to do, but my teacher had confidence in me. “If you are in doubt,” Teri said, “just teach the form.” It was a bit like I imagine Krishna telling Arjuna when he was faced with killing thousands of his relatives. I might not know the answer right now, but if I let go of needing to know what is “the right thing” and instead trust the power of my intention, to just rely on the form, it’ll all turn out okay. Like Krishna his disciple “As a warrior, your job is to fight and defend. If, despite your ignorance, you act with honest intention and devote the fruits of your actions to the Spirit, you will be free from any bad karma generated by he slashing of your sword.” Not that I will be massacring 5,000 invaders but I like the idea that if I do the best I can, I can trust that it will all work out.

And that is what brings me to Shanghai this week. I’m moving some of my things up to the big city in preparation for replacing Rachel. The company directors are behind me and they’ve promised to help me grow into the job. I’ll join the current teacher training at some point, as soon as the company can replace my current position. And the next training begins July 31st, still a ways off but I can see it from here.

When I told a friend about this opportunity, he said it would be a great ‘resume builder.’ This is something I have heard before, notably in 1993 when as a reporter I was asked to spend two weeks visiting remote Alaskan villages, sleeping on gym floors, subsisting on cheese burgers and standing in -20 cold all the while trying to convince exhausted dog mushers to tell me the joys and horrors of their last 24 hours and 100 miles on the Iditarod Trail. This came about a week after I’d spent two weeks doing much the same thing on the Yukon Quest, a similar race. “It will be good for your resume,” my manager told me, translating the old saw about ‘building character’ into a modern day job enhancer. Besides, I knew, no one else was available or willing. What the hell, I told myself, at least I can say I did it.

The low point was in a town called Shageluk, known derisively as ‘Shag.’ It was in the relative comfort of McGrath where I first heard about the town. A bitter ‘outsider’ told a young man, just about to graduate from high school in McGrath, that the best thing to do with his destitute home-town would be to splash the buildings with gas and burn the entire village. A sad thing to say about a place where people, like everywhere, are just doing the best they can.

Will Peterson and I stuffed our selves into our pilot’s 4-seat Maule for the hop from Iditarod to Shageluk. Tom is a CPA, that is, a member of the Christian Pilot’s Association and before boarding he often offered a prayer. And while Will sat up next to Tom, we all knew that is was God who was Tom’s co-pilot. Once we’d landed on the frozen Innoko River, Tom executed another ritual, handing us both a bag of peanuts. We lucked out to find housing with a white woman Will knew who was doing the difficult duty of teaching amid the influences of 24-hour satellite tv, rampant joblessness, substance abuse and dysfunction on nearly every level. Even the colorful clown faces atop the frozen playground equipment frowned. At the time I wondered how one could even buy such dismal equipment. As I snapped a photo, the clowns watched motionless as a drunk man emerged yelling obscenities from cabin, lamely kicking another drunk in the ass.

My sadness multiplied in a 16’X24’ log cabin, the kind with plywood floors slop bucket plumbing. There were several world class mushers inside, sitting on rough-hewn benches drying their gear around a barrel stove. I remember seeing Susan Butcher, Rick Swenson and Jeff King, roughly 550 miles into their journey. I sat down next to Martin Buser who like the others has since won the race several times. I asked him about his latest experience. He was down, his dogs were sick and amid my insecurity, I was blind to the simple fact that I might have had the presence to ask him about similar times when he’d been in the same sled. Instead, he just grunted into my microphone and I was left with nothing. I turned off the recorder, wondering where I’d gone wrong and what I was going to feed to listeners on the next broadcast. I’d failed to push the right button somehow and the mushers, having watched the whole thing, started pushing mine.

“Some reporters can be so stupid,” Buser said to his pals. “They just don’t think.”
While he spared himself the effort of saying it to my face, he was clear. But I stood there, mostly because there was no where else to go.

“Lynn Swan,” someone said referring to the former Pittsburg Steelers running back turned television reporter. “He was the best, because he understood what it was like.”
“Yeah,” another said. “It takes a competitor to understand competition.”

Jeff King just sat quietly in a corner. He is smaller than the other imposing six-footers and later that day, he came to my aid. He’d seen what was going on, how the lead dogs had put this pup in his place and I appreciated that he didn’t jump in. “Be careful about listening to what people tell you,” he said explaining the psychology of race survival. “They’re trying to make you doubt yourself. It can be a simple question like when you are getting ready to leave a checkpoint and they ask ‘Are you gonna take that dog?’ And it might be a perfectly good dog, even a strong dog, one that you will need to finish the race and their question puts a doubt in your mind and you start re-evaluating the dog and maybe leave it behind and that simple question might cost you the race.”

Dog mushing, I learned in that moment, was as much a test of physical endurance as mental training. The winners not only create a good team and have luck on their side, but they learn to quit doubting themselves when stepping into the unknown.

That is the beauty of running 1000 miles on the back of a dog sled. No matter the result, nearly everyone faces both elation and despair along the way. Conditions force some from the race. Others, convinced that the conditions are against them, just give up. Race officials know this and as long as the team is healthy and capable, the best among them encourage reluctant mushers to get back on the sled. They know, mostly from experience, that if the participants can just keep putting one mukluk in front of the other, they’ll finish. And it will be one of the greatest things they’ve ever done.

I never ran a dog race because I never wanted to make the commitment or spend the tens of thousands of dollars needed to make a real go of it. I always joked that if someone would underwrite the venture and give me two years to train, then I’d try it. I’d seen first hand the devotion the best mushers have to this ‘sport’. These men and women can sit around a table all night, talking about dog food, dog gear, dog breeding and dog training. Their whole lives revolve around dogs, sleds and trails. I’ve even witnessed long conversations about dog shit.

Looking back, I had no idea 1993 would be such a memorable year. It was the same year I started practicing yoga. And like the way many mushers get into the sport with just a dog or two at first, I started slowly. But now most of my life revolves around the practice. Now I hang around yoga people. We talk about yoga poses, yoga diets, yoga philosophies, yoga retreats, yoga teachers and from time to time even our shit.

A dozen years after my one and only Iditarod experience, I was back in Fairbanks again, watching Lynn Swan work the crowd on the Riverboat Discovery. He’d since graduated from TV to promoting the Big Brothers/ Big Sisters organization. Although I no longer had a little brother, the director invited me along as I was part of the ‘family.’ I went because I wanted to know Lynn Swan’s secret.

“It wasn’t that hard,” he told me after I’d explained the Shageluk story. “When I got to the Rohn River, a remote checkpoint, I built a fire. And you know, people come around to get warm. And I just happened to have a bottle of whiskey with me, and as the bottle went around, the stories came out. And the cameras just happened to be there at the same time.”

Although race rules prohibit ‘outside assistance’ like directly providing food and housing, not even the officials were going to complain about being warm and comfortable. Swan understood something about human nature. He didn’t know exactly what stories he was going to get, he just knew how to create the conditions for his success.

And for me, I don’t know exactly how I’m going to run this teacher training, but I know that if I make effort in the right direction, it will all turn out well.

Innoko River School http://szshx.shx.iasd.gcisa.net/frame15880.html
Iditarod www.iditarod.com/
CPA www.christianpilot.org
Yoga Alliance www.yogaalliance.org

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