From the periodical Healing Retreats and Spas

"The NFL's Yogi: Is there More to Baron Baptiste than Meets the Eye?"

By Eden Marriott Kennedy
September/October 1998

If you haven't yet heard of Baron Baptiste, just wait- ESPN's Cyberfit Power Yoga master is coming to a cable channel near you. Whether he's hawking his instructional yoga videos on the QVC shopping network, directing his classes with infectious enthusiasm, or leading the Philadelphia Eagles football team through integral yoga workouts, Baptiste seems to exist at the calm center of his own promotional hurricane.

The Philadelphia Eagles? How exactly does a slight, 34-year-old yoga master communicate with a 300-pound football player who looks like he'd rather draw blood than practice a Downward Facing Dog pose?

"Jeffrey Lurie [owner of the Eagles and a student of Baptiste's in L.A.] said to me, 'Listen, I want you to teach what you teach to my players. This will be a breakthrough thing in the NFL. This is what's missing,' "recalls Baptiste. "And I thought to myself: football? I mean, I hated football my whole life, I just thought it was total escapism and violence."

He flew east and soon found himself face-to-face with eighty young football giants who loved what he had to say. Loved it. From Beverly Hills to Bryn Mawr, it was a whole new ballgame. "Just to work with a whole group of focused, committed guys . . . it connected with something in me," he says now, slightly awed. "Boy, has it changed my whole psychology."

If football has changed Baptiste, Baptiste, in his turn has changed football. Yet traditional sportswriters have been reluctant, when covering Baptiste, to even use the word yoga without making fun of it first. Creative euphemisms abound as they struggle to describe Baptiste's function in the Eagles organization: "conditioning guru," they call him, or "peak performance specialist," or "personal trainer," or "specialist in dynamic stretching and injury prevention." Even the L.A. Times- a paper that usually looks unflinchingly at the more unusual aspects of life- described Baptiste's classes as "ancient aerobics." The Philadelphia Inquirer waggishly portrays Baptiste as a "yogi among the bears," referring to the sequoia-like athletes who surround him during practice. With his little-boy face, it's easier to compare him to Goldilocks than admit that he knows what he's doing, and that his teachings have been embraced by the manliest of men.

However, former Eagle linebacker Bill Romanowski is not embarrassed to praise what Baptiste does. "These are not stretches, they're more like poses that are good for your concentration and focus," he says. No, Romanowski doesn't use the word yoga, but he acknowledges the word pose. It's a start.

Yoga is gaining acceptance in the stressed American psyche because it works. If football players are doing it; if Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Raquel Welch and John F. Kennedy Jr. are doing it; if men, women, and children from Hartford to Hollywood are all doing it Baptiste-style and living better lives because of it, then who's left to persuade?

The "traditional" American yoga community, that's who.

"He's a showman," says one Midwestern yogi who's been watching the scene for years, and who worries that Baptiste's fast-moving, sweat-inducing "power-yoga" is just aerobics without the pumping, beat-box soundtrack. "I think he's diluting traditional yoga just to make money, and I don't agree with his concept of yoga. Basically, I think he's giving my profession a bad name."

The more popular Baptiste becomes with mainstream fitness seekers and aerobics refugees, though, the harder it becomes for the American yoga establishment to ignore him. And his popularity is forcing them to define their own positions more closely.

A longtime yoga practitioner explains, "I don't think his tapes are safe for beginners — those models [in his video classes] are flirting with injury, he drags them through the poses way too fast." He goes on to disdain Baptiste's "cavalier presentation" and worries that he touches the women he's teaching in a too-familiar way. "I think he's trying to impress people rather than help them."

Baptiste refutes his critics, saying, "I'm a real yogi, I've had real, authentic yoga training in the different traditions, but I've chosen to take this task. For whatever reason, I'm just driven to do it, to bring yoga more to 'the masses.' It isn't to say that I'm watering it down, but I'm putting it into words that are more accessible, taking the yoga principles and the yoga itself and demystifying it, telling people, 'this can benefit you in your life.' It's not something weird; you don't have to join a monastery.

"If you try to take the majority of people in America into a quiet, contemplative environment — if you bring something in too pure of a form, something too different, people have fear. But with power yoga, more active yoga, it brings them into a whole process where their hearts are pumping, they're breathing, they're working their muscles. It's an easy crossover from traditional fitness, it isn't too different, it makes sense, they're getting a good physical workout. And then suddenly — and you hear this from nine out of ten people — they've tapped into an inner calm, a poise, an equanimity, an inner peace with themselves that they've never experienced before in their lives." This inner balance, Baptiste believes, forms the essence of yoga, no matter what the style.

Even critics have to admit that "his parents were great, and that Baptiste's lineage is strong. Baron's father Walt, a world-famous bodybuilder and former Mr. America, founded San Francisco's first yoga studio in 1935. Magana, Baron's mother, was photographed for a 1963 layout in the San Francisco Chronicle while eight months pregnant with her son, demonstrating yoga for expectant mothers. ("So I suppose I have yoga in me since before I was born," Baron laughs.) At twelve, Baron was studying, fasting, and meditating in a Himalayan ashram, and at fifteen he was teaching children's yoga classes in San Francisco. His sister, Sherri Baptiste Freeman, has been a popular yoga teacher in the Bay area for years.

"B.K.S. Iyengar was criticized, too," says a Baptiste supporter, "but he stayed true to his convictions and now he's accepted. Baron has been called a showman with the same energy as when Iyengar was called a 'furniture yogi' and people looked at using bolsters and mats as cheating. Baron has a way to give people something they can relate to. He awakens their enthusiasm, and if they choose to go deeper, it's their choice."

Bringing depth to the connection between the traditional, sweaty, American ideal of fitness and the traditional, sweaty, life-changing practice of yoga is Baptiste's goal. Teaching sports to his own two athletic boys has shown Baptiste that focused competition can help them test their strengths and show them what they're really made of. Spiritual lessons can be learned from even the most commercial of enterprises.

"The real champion athletes that I've come to admire — when they lose, it's impetus for them to practice harder, to become better, more focused, more aware," says Baptiste. "In a spiritual context, it's about not being so attached to the outcome." In other words, enlightened athletes understand that winning isn't everything.

Nonattachment is sometimes easier to teach to kids on the field than to their parents on the sidelines, however. "I try to talk to parents about not being so attached to the outcome of a game, about it being a team effort and an opportunity for kids to work with their friends and be good at something," he says. "Later on in life that applies to business, to relationships. If you don't understand that, you're going to end up very frustrated ad full of a lot of pain. Happiness and success, that's a delusion. If you think that losing is really all that bad, that's a delusion as well."

The jury's still out on Baron Baptiste, but whether you see him as a huckster just out to make a buck on the latest health craze, or the prophet for a calmer, gentler generation of American gymgoers, it doesn't matter much to him. Even the breathless young yoga babes filling up his classes don't faze him any more; strict practice has prepared Baptiste to weather everything from temptation to misperception, because in his innermost, secret, nonattached heart of hearts, he knows it doesn't matter whether you win or lose — it's how you handle the fame.

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