After the diagnosis, Dr. Brenner started me on some meds. They took a while to kick in, but by the summer I was better. And the timing was excellent, because in the fall I was to attend Georgetown University.
After that first ten-month battle with colitis, I vowed never to take a healthy bowel movement for granted, and I’m proud to say that for twenty years I have succeeded valiantly in this department. Still today, in fact, I often find myself down on my hands and knees examining the evidence with the gratitude, wonder, and delight of The Last Emperor’s court physician.
During my first two years at Georgetown, I was blessedly colitis-free. But even so, I realized how deeply stressed I was, and that though I knew how to get As, I knew little about how to be comfortable, relaxed, and happy. I wanted desperately to feel more at ease. I wanted to feel more loving and more free-spirited. So I started doing experiments to learn how to live.
In one experiment I decided to follow my urges and whims exclusively. I imagined that if I studied when I felt like studying, I’d be most productive at those times, and that if I felt like hanging out with friends or working out, I should do those things then, when my intention was strongest.
I think there’s really something to this. And I see now that this has always been my foundational practice: trusting in the intelligence of true desire, authentic intuition, and flowing energy. This practice has influenced my biggest decisions, has informed my professional life, and eventually led me to Kripalu yoga.
But unfortunately, that particular experiment failed … quite miserably. After three weeks, I awoke one morning (severely behind on reading and writing for my classes), wearing the same clothes that I had been in for several days, with vomit on my shirt where a woman had puked on me the night before, and with a sprained ankle from earlier that same night when she and I had jumped a fence so we could hook up on the fifty-yard line of the Georgetown football field.
I needed some discipline and some honing of my intuition before I could completely release to the flow.
For the decade following that project, I explored, I traveled, I trained, and I experimented. I searched for ways to feel comfortable and happy. I consulted psychics, scientists, yogis, swamis, Ayurvedic physicians, life coaches, and even (accidentally, I assure you) a prostitute. I tried meditation, herbs, flower essences, psychotherapy, and shouting out my angst. I almost tried sesame oil enemas, walking on hot coals, and urine therapy (the daily practice of drinking one’s own midstream morning urine).
And I learned a lot.
From yoga, I learned how to stand and how to breathe.
From yoga’s sister science, Ayurveda, I learned how to eat, how to poop, and how to sleep.
From meditation and Kripalu yoga, I learned to awaken my feelings and my intuition.
And from Jerry Garcia, Misha the yogi, and a scary shaman named Genevieve, I learned to emote, to connect, and to love.
During this journey, I found eight Keys to Happiness, eight rules to live by for health and vitality. Eight principles, each powerful in its own right, but the first seven trumped by the final and eighth key.
And with these keys, I healed my colitis, calmed my ADD, ignited my intuition, and opened my heart. And, luckily for me, without a single sesame oil enema, without walking on hot coals, and without sipping even one Dixie cup of my own morning urine, I learned how to feel more comfortable, more authentic, more relaxed, and happier.
But, again, I’m getting ahead of myself. So let’s take it back two decades to begin our tale in the time of Bill Clinton; the Beastie Boys; Beverly Hills, 90210; and the United Colors of Benetton …
THE EIGHT KEYS TO HAPPINESS
Do yoga. And if you already do yoga, do more yoga.
Follow your heart.
Cultivate and follow your intuition.
Apply at least three pieces of Ayurvedic wisdom to your daily schedule.
Meditate.
Connect with your heart, and interact with others from that place.
Speak and act from your true self.
Become most real.
I didn’t plan on getting so involved with yoga; I sort of stumbled into it.
When I was a senior in high school, my brother, Larry, was attending the University of Virginia. The school is very large, so it can offer all sorts of fun electives, and there are enough students to fill even the most peculiar classes. During his first semester, Larry took kung fu and riflery, and in the second semester he took skeet shooting and a class that helped train him to run a marathon. After the marathon, Larry’s nipples were so chafed from rubbing against his sweaty shirt that he had to wear a Band-Aid on each side for a week.
Larry’s kung fu and riflery classes had us joking that he was covertly training for the CIA, but after the Band-Aids, as well as a miniature golf elective, we dropped the joke. We couldn’t see James Bond needing Band-Aids to protect nipple boo-boos.
So at the end of my senior year of high school, sitting on my toy soldier–themed comforter, I was preregistering for my Georgetown classes, and I wanted to round out my humanities and business courses with something similar to what Larry had taken at UVA. Georgetown is a smaller school, so fewer courses are offered. I was choosing between jazz dance, squash, step aerobics, and yoga. I selected yoga as the most exotic choice.
Five months later, on day one of yoga class, I’m sitting on a long bench outside a classroom in Georgetown’s Yates athletic building waiting for the teacher to show up. This is 1989, so as you visualize this scene, incorporate lots of very tight spandex, neon sweatbands, leg warmers, and feathered hair. It will also help if you include a few Members Only jackets and a pair of acid-washed jeans, and perhaps hum Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You” or Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” as a quiet sound track.
I’m waiting on the bench as woman after woman shows up. We’ve got freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and grad students, and they’re all women. No other men. At all. I am brand-new to yoga, so I have no idea what’s going on. I am seventeen years old and surrounded by thirty-one women, all wearing tight spandex. You’d think I’d feel great about this ratio, but, frankly, I’m terrified. I wonder if I am mistakenly sitting outside a woman’s gathering of some sort. Perhaps “Menstruation and You” or “A Woman’s Guide to Dating at Georgetown,” or, worst-case scenario, “Aquatic Jazzercise.”
Why were there no other men on the bench outside that yoga class? Answer: this was 1989, before many guys did yoga. Men can now hug and cry and do yoga and drink white wine and wear an apron and cook free-range chicken picatta. But in 1989 we were pretty much hemmed in between Al Bundy and Magnum P.I. — limited to watching televised sports, eating large pieces of meat, and drinking cheap beer stored in a small fridge next to the couch.
Even with the skewed demographic on the wooden benches, before long I knew I was indeed in the right place, waiting for a yoga class, because soon the yoga teacher showed up. And he was unmistakably the yoga teacher. Either that, or he was from the drama department and had come straight from Georgetown’s production of The Ten Commandments.*