Chris McBain runs Bear Yoga, but it’s not like he’s the CEO or anything like that. After all, his subtitle and tag line for the company is "The Travellin’ Yogi: There’s no place like OM."
In that persona, he instructs me about the niceties of Vedic Yoga history before we’ve even really introduced ourselves. He is definitely a teacher at heart, and all that poetic biographical history stuff on his website appears to be genuine.
"I provide consulting and workshops to organizations, to local fitness groups, gyms around the city, tourist organizations, and I also provide substitute teaching to local yoga studios."
Chris fleshes out the details of that poetic biography, and his unguided, unending, search. He personifies the ‘hungry ghost’ of Buddhist philosophy, searching for enlightenment everywhere and anywhere, changing countries and jobs and social environments in the pursuit of what he eventually describes as a self-acceptance.
"When we talk about what yoga is, (it) is an ancient Vedic science of uniting the mind, body and spirit. So I guess my journey has happened since the beginning of my life, because of the hunger I have had; in searching for meaning: that union, that completeness. So to define yoga in its broadest terms, I’ve been practicing since I was a wee baby."
And this is not just because of his pursuit of some kind of physical perfection, by any means.
"When we hear ‘yoga’, people often think of this workout, but it’s much broader than that... There’s Bhakti yoga which is devotional yoga (everything from meditation to prayer to religious activities); there’s also karma yoga, which is the yoga of selfless service. These (two forms) are the bedrock of Indian spirituality. They form what Indians would say is the truest of all yogas, because the physical practice of yoga began in Vedic tradition as a means of preparing the mind and body to meditate, and in meditating to achieve a state of samadhi, which is that union with the divine, or the higher self, or the collective unconscious."
If it sounds like there’s a whole bunch of other stuff going on besides the image I get of people sitting on mats, sunlight streaming past their placid features, while their body is pretzeled into unimaginable knots. And I’m right.
"In fact, in the most ancient Vedic scriptures, there are only really three physical postures described in yoga. It’s only really in the last 200 years that you see the hundreds of postures come into play, more accurately in the last 100 years, especially when yoga came to the west."
But Chris cautions that this doesn’t mean that the physical maneuvering is any less of a connection to the more metaphysical purposes from which yoga originated.
"In the physical practice of yoga - hatha yoga - ‘ha’ means ‘sun’, ‘tha’ means ‘moon’, and the literal translation is the unification of the masculine and feminine energies that are inside every person." Chris explains that Hatha yoga encompasses all modern variations of the physical expression of yogic exercise, "whether it’s yin yoga or kundalini yoga, ashtanga yoga or power yoga, or even dude yoga, it’s all hatha: physical.
"If you’ve ever seen ashtanga yoga, where people are moving really fast, and they’re sweating their brains out...they’re engaging tapas, which is a heat that builds in your body, a fire, and it burns off all of that monkey energy where your mind is racing and you can’t concentrate. And by the end you’re able to sit, and there’s just a stillness and a contentment that happens."
So where does Bear Yoga fit into all of this?
"It’s for gay, bi, trans men of the beefy/hairy variety! I’m not a skinny little yogi, and that’s a misconception: that you have to be this perfect athlete with the V shape to engage in yoga and reach its benefits. There is a benefit to yoga that can reach anybody and everybody.
"I came into yoga, maybe like every gay man, with a negative self-perception. We talk about women’s struggles with social perceptions and societal pressures creating eating disorders and the like, but gay men also face that... And so when I first engaged yoga I thought I was fat, I thought I was ugly, whether consciously or not. But as I started to engage with yoga with intention, I started to love my body just as it was. And I started to love myself, just as I was. And I don’t have a V! I’ve got a U!"
"Yoga taught me to love myself."