Teachers who have influenced me: Part I - Steve Ross

Steve Ross was one of those first "real" yoga teacher I knew of. He had a show on the Oxygen channel, and in high school and college, every day I would wake up at 6AM to catch his yoga class, Inhale.

Waking up at the crack of dawn was no small task for me, a major night owl, so I would sleep on the couch in the living room, and set the TV to automatically turn on at 5:55AM, and most of the time, I was doing yoga half asleep, and would only really wake up when I fell over trying to do Vrksasana (Tree pose).

I didn't know much about yoga then, at least not the way I know about it now. I didn't know how the psoas works as part of the hip flexors, and how it affects the lumbar spine and femur. I didn't know who Patanjali was, and what yoga citta vritti nirodha meant. Steve's class was something I liked doing for no reason.

Years and years later, after Inhale went off the air, and I had been branching out in the wide world or yoga, I snagged a copy of his book, Happy Yoga, from the Seattle Public Library, and brought it on a vacation to Floria to hang out with my friend Gayle. Little did I know that this book was the first door to my exploration of yoga philosophy, and the simple but definitely-not-easy lesson: "you can't get happy, you can only be happy".

A year after scouring Steve's yoga book, I finally met him in person, flesh and blood, at the Southwest Yoga Conference. When I stood in front of him, I cried, cried, cried, and then I cried some more.

The most important thing that Steve Ross taught me, and brought to my life, is that life is full of humor and music, and that yoga without laughter is just a lot of painful stretching.