They sell neti pots at Target now, but some twenty years ago when I was a young, just-out-of-college hipster living in San Francisco, there was not a yoga studio on every corner as there is now—just one every ten blocks or so. When I decided to take yoga classes to help alleviate the stress of being in charge of a room full of preschoolers all day, I chose an ashram in the Mission district. Nobody at the ashram was from India, but they had all studied there, and one of my favorite teachers—the one with the very long beard and hair and the mellow demeanor, had achieved some sort of yogi status.
One day, after I had been taking classes there several days a week after work, for a year or so, my teacher went around our class of intermediate students and asked if there was anything specific we would like to learn. I raised my hand from my little yoga cushion and said that I would like to learn some more exercises for helping with sinus problems. (I had been having allergies and sinus headaches ever since I’d moved from my college town in Vermont to the big city.) Another girl in the class said that she’d also like to learn those exercises. Our teacher said he could hold a special advanced class and we should talk to him after class to set up a time. We did just that.
I’m not sure what I had in mind when the teacher said “special advanced class for sinus problems.” No doubt I was excited about the words “special” and “advanced.” I think I may have pictured doing more of the techniques he had already shown us—breathing exercises and massaging our sinus points, perhaps a few inverted poses to get things flowing. What I did not picture was that a few days later I would be standing in the bathroom of the ashram with my esteemed teacher and my classmate (and yes, it was crowded), watching my teacher pour a little white ceramic pot full of salt water into one nostril and then watching the liquid come out the other esteemed nostril.
I am not by nature a judgmental person, or at least I wasn’t when I was young. In fact I was very open-minded. And game. After the teacher handed us our own neti pots (new and clean), I tried it. It was a little awkward, but I got the hang of it. I remember standing in that bathroom with salty water dripping out of my nostril thinking, “This is yoga?!”
