Photo by Trish O'Reilly
January 2006 | Whole Health
Extreme Yoga
Exploring an ancient practice’s outer limits—and gravity surfing—with Ana Forrest
By Lisa Maria
In the yoga world, studying with Ana Forrest is so strenuous that it’s a bit like joining the Navy Seals. During a recent “Gravity Surfing” workshop, one male student appeared to be wearing black plastic pants. But they weren’t plastic—they were dripping with sweat as if he had walked right out of the ocean.
The man was teetering in the Twisted Root pose, a challenging handstand with legs crossed at the knee and ankle. Forrest was spotting him, using black weightlifting gloves to give her traction on his slippery skin. Clad in tiger-striped pants and an orange tank top, a single braid the length of a horse’s tail trailing down her back, she spoke into a headset microphone, encouraging him through the pose, “Don’t let the breath die out… don’t make quitting an option.”
It’s not just physical strength that Forrest asks of her students, it’s also the courage to travel into uncharted mental and physical territory. Yet it’s nothing she hasn’t asked of herself.
Relaxing after class, she talks about the deformed leg that marred her early life with tremendous pain and incapacity. Worse still was the sexual, physical and emotional abuse she endured as a child.
Her string of addictions began at a very young age, first with alcohol and tobacco, then pot and harder drugs. Bulimia followed. As if that weren’t enough, she developed epilepsy, migraines, heart attacks, major injuries (including head trauma and leg paralysis) and Hashimoto’s Disease (a thyroid condition).
After three suicide attempts by the age of 18, Forrest decided to “make one more jump. For life.” Familiar with yoga since first taking a class on a dare at 14, she spent her last dollars on a month-long yoga teacher-training program in Guadalajara, Mexico. In one fell swoop she quit alcohol, drugs, tobacco and meat, but failed to anticipate the detox fallout she would experience while the other students were quietly meditating.
“It was part of what built my self-esteem,” recalls Forrest. “I’d be sitting there in lotus, my hands planted on my knees, watching (hallucinated) things crawling up my arms.”
Making the turn
Life began to turn around for Forrest, but she still had challenges. Despite study with many excellent teachers, she was forced to cultivate new ways of practicing because no one seemed able to help with her pain.
“When I could actually do a pose, coming from being crippled, sick and all that stuff, it was such an accomplishment,” she says. “It was like wow! I hear people talk about how the poses don’t matter, and the poses so matter.”
She pauses, taking a sip of pomegranate juice, manicured silver-tipped red fingernails wrapping around the glass. “Adversity is how we dig up these very deep parts of ourselves and claim parts of ourselves. I basically had to reclaim all of me because it was all gone.”
These days, Forrest demonstrates her supple strength at yoga conferences nationwide, traveling from her home on Orcas Island.
Typically, she floats into a handstand, then parallels her legs to the earth, toes spreading wide. For the next 20 minutes, Forrest flows from one black diamond pose to the next with only her hands touching the floor.
She explains, “To do these demos is a testimony to what my spirit can do. It’s also a way of spreading magic dust.”
She blows imaginary glitter off her open palm saying, “I want to inspire people.”
It’s working. She is a tower of strength at 49.
Drawn to Native American spirituality, Forrest has participated in many ceremonies, including Sundance, Inipi (Sweat) Lodge, Vision Quest and Pipe, as well as various healing ceremonies. She claims her most important teachers to be “lightning, wind, storms, stars, fire, living water, earth, trees, animals and Wakan Skan (That Which Moves In All Things)—the Great Mystery.”
She also examined the teachings of Lakota medicine man Black Elk. After reading of his concern that the “hoop of the people” (the sacred circle of unity and solidarity) was broken, Forrest made a soul pledge, “to mend the hoop of the people.”
A stretching heart
She’s pledged to her husband of three years, Jonathan Bowra, a Zen meditation teacher. In her third marriage she feels that she’s finally found her partner.
“My heart for a long time was so brittle that the only way it could open was by breaking open in bits,” she says. “Now it’s finally starting to really stretch.”
The couple enjoys the soothing nature of Orcas, where Forrest loves to ride her Yamaha V/Max 1200—“it’s very fast!”—through the local forests.
The feisty teacher is sometimes criticized for going against established elements of yoga practice, such as inverting during the menstrual cycle and letting the neck be relaxed in many poses (Triangle, for example).
Tradition alone doesn’t persuade, if it involves centuries of yogic way.
“Does it work for me?” she asks. “If not, it’s irrelevant. If it doesn’t ring that truth bell, it’s just words.”
Other instructors have criticized the intensity of poses she offers in workshops. She counters, “What I’ve learned is that the most merciful thing I can do is get my body hot because then all those tight places are more lubricated and move more easily…my work is very hard, I make it that way on purpose. It’s very deep and very challenging. But what you get from it is rich.”
Forrest’s dedicated students include actress Marisa Tomei, former California governor Jerry Brown and legendary founder of A&M Records, Jerry Moss. Actress Lisa Bonet (a student of 15 years) claims, “Ana has been one of the major influences and teachers and healers in my life.”
“Yoga is a place to make some of the really core, basic, most important discoveries of your life,” says Forrest. “Who are you? What is your purpose? What are your unique gifts that you have to offer this world? How do you have the courage to do that? To connect to your spirit? Then have the courage to do as your spirit dictates.”
The power in her teaching is transformative, says school teacher and workshop participant Nykki Poole: “I have learned through Forrest Yoga to choose life—because I can, because I should, and because [without it] I don’t.”
After 32 years of teaching at a Los Angeles studio, Forrest is moving to a larger location that includes a center for healing and continuing education.
“I’m working to establish Forrest Yoga so that it will continue to grow long past my lifetime,” Forrest says. “I want something that will feed and nourish humanity for years and years, that can be part of the quantum leap we need to make in our evolution.”
Lisa Maria is a yoga teacher and journalist based in Los Angeles.
For those who can’t make it to her workshops, Forrest’s teaching is available via her latest DVD, “The Pleasure of Strength.” It’s full-on Navy Seals intensity, albeit with a good deal more compassion. Check out www.forrestyoga.com for workshop dates and more information.
![[Send]](http://seattle.consciouschoice.com/sendlink/send.gif){kind=small}
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
