Podcast appearances and mentions of Larry Payne

In this episode, our Alaska and Hawaiian MEC Chairs, Will McQuillen and Larry Payne, as well as our Joint Negotiating Committee Co-Chairs, David Wilhelm and Doug Grant, all sat down to provide an update on the status of our Alaska-Hawaiian merger and the state of our Joint Collective Bargaining Agreement (JCBA) negotiations. Through the episode, we covered several topics, including the union's actions during the last six months to prepare for negotiations, the importance of unity, current perspective on negotiations, and what happens once a Tentative Agreement is reached.    Alaska Hawaiian Joint Website

In this episode, our Alaska and Hawaiian MEC Chairs, Will McQuillen and Larry Payne, as well as our Joint Negotiating Committee Co-Chairs, David Wilhelm and Doug Grant, all sat down to provide an update on the status of our Alaska-Hawaiian merger and the state of our Joint Collective Bargaining Agreement (JCBA) negotiations. Through the episode, we covered several topics, including the union's actions during the last six months to prepare for negotiations, the importance of unity, current perspective on negotiations, and what happens once a Tentative Agreement is reached.

Text me your thoughts! You are ready for a path to better well-being, and the Tracks for the Journey Podcast will provide great resources! This brief episode explains the benefits you receive listening. The twice-monthly episodes offers programming that will improve your well-being with practical insight and inspiration from progressive Christian spirituality, positive psychology,  meaningful relationships, and justice ethics with Dr. Larry Payne. Learn about the TRACKS EXPRESS NewsletterSupport the Show.Subscribe to the TRACKS EXPRESS newsletter and find more resources for well-being at https://www.tracksforthejourney.comEnjoy the Youtube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@tracksforthejourney77

On Wednesday's show: The Texas Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday about whether the state's abortion law harms women who face complications during pregnancy. We take a closer look at the legal questions at play in this latest salvo in the battle over reproductive rights in the state. Also this hour: We discuss the latest developments in politics in our weekly roundup. Then, in an unfortunate coincidence, two friends happened to be diagnosed with breast cancer at the exact same time. Their conversations and revelations through that difficult period are the basis of a book called Two By Two, that seeks to pay it forward to others facing similar battles. And we remember longtime Houston civic leader, activist, and educator Larry Payne, who passed away on Sunday after a battle with cancer.

Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off.  Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.  Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes.  And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level.  That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.  King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before.  The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.  Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the

Tracks for the Journey is a channel dedicated to your emotional and spiritual well-being. I'm Larry Payne, the host, and I'd like to explain in more depth how you can benefit from joining me on this life journey. My Tracks for the Journey channel utilizes great resources to enhance your emotional and spiritual well-being. Progressive Christian spirituality is founded on God's essential love, all-pervasive presence, collaboration with all creatures to create the future, and connections to all faith traditions. Another vital resource is Positive Psychology that enables people to thrive. I also use history to give breadth to our explorations. These sources interact with my 50 years of professional experience as a pastor, hospital chaplain, and licensed counselor. Join me to explore your well-being!Friends, before we begin, let me mention that TFJ is available in a book series. I've revised and expanded each podcast as an essay for you to enjoy. Search on Amazon with my name and the TFJ title for volumes 1, 2, and 3, available in paperback or Kindle edition. Or go to my website for a direct link to find these and other resources. Thanks for listening today! Support the showFind more information and resources for well-being at https://www.tracksforthejourney.comEnjoy the Youtube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@tracksforthejourney77

Felipe Gonzalez is the former Principal Technologist for HEB. Larry Payne is a sales & marketing executive with STRATACACHE. Together, they have forged a strategy to help tech companies successfully partner with retailers (spoiler alert- you need more than a compelling ROI)

Felipe Gonzalez is the former Principal Technologist for HEB. Larry Payne is a sales & marketing executive with STRATACACHE. Together, they have forged a strategy to help tech companies successfully partner with retailers (spoiler alert- you need more than a compelling ROI)

One of Leslie's oldest Yoga friends, Larry Payne, Ph.D. joins him to talk about some of their shared background, their mutual teacher T.K.V. Desikachar and the history of the individualized work that has become Larry's trademark.Larry is the co-author of Yoga Therapy Rx, Yoga for Dummies and The Business of Teaching Yoga. Larry is founding president of the International Association of Yoga Therapists.Larry's website - Samata InternationalVintage Desikachar Yoga Routine for Soccer and Football - with Larry Payne, 1986DVD of Krishnamacharya Tribute, Los Angeles 1987Remembering Rama Vernon - Zoom Tribute December 2020Mara Carrico - YogaLady

Episode 2: Internationally-renowned yoga teacher and author Dr. Larry Payne talks with the Happy Endings podcast about how he used yoga to cure his back problems.  Larry is also the author of "Yoga for Dummies" and is the founder of the Yoga Therapy program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Larry can be found at www.samata.comTo read more from Chris Joseph, go to https://linktr.ee/chrisjoseph_author 

In this episode of For Such a Time as This, Larry Payne sits down to talk to Dr. Nicole Walters, Dean, Kolbe School of Innovation and Professional Studies, about equity in education. Walters outlines the importance of diversity and inclusion in education, discusses education access and shares how the programs in the Kolbe School practice equity. Learn more about the programs mentioned.

In this episode of For Such a Time as This, Larry Payne sits down with long-time friend, Fr. Donald Nesti, CSSp, founder of the Center for Nesti Center for Faith and Culture at the University of St. Thomas-Houston. They talk about his formation as a priest, discovering his call at Duquesne University and following that call to Houston, Texas, where he started the center. They discuss faith, the common good and the importance of Pope Francis' latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. Donald S. Nesti, CSSp Center for Faith and Culture https://www.stthom.edu/Academics/Centers-of-Excellence/Center-for-Faith-Culture/Index.aqf Fratelli Tutti | Pope Francis https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html

Episode #10 meet Yoga Therapy Founder Larry Payne. Ph. D,.C-IAYTHe is an internationally respected Yoga teacher, author, and founding father of Yoga therapy in America. Dr. Payne co-founded the International Association of Yoga Therapists and the Yoga curriculum at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is also the founder of the Yoga Therapy Rx ™ and Prime of LIfe Yoga™ programs at Loyola Marymount University, and the Corporate Yoga Program at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Getty Trust. In 2000 he was the first Yoga teacher to be invited to The World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, and in 1996, he performed the first documented headstand at the North Pole. He founded Samata International Yoga and Health Center in Los Angeles in 1980, where he continues to teach groups and individuals. Dr. Payne is co-author of the international bestseller “Yoga for Dummies”, Yoga Rx, The Business of Teaching Yoga and Yoga Therapy and Integrative Medicine. He is featured in the Prime of Life Yoga, and Yoga Therapy Rx DVD series. His most recent publication is AARP's Yoga After 50 for Dummies 

“Would the real Larry Payne please stand up?” The climatic question for a popular quiz show demands to know the feature character’s identity. It’s easy to end the show but much harder to define our identity in the journey of life. Join me as this episode explores what identity means and how we can shape it by knowing better our past, future, and present Self. It’s good to answer the question, “Would the real You please stand up?”

2021 finds the United States politically polarized. Larry Payne sits down with Dr. Chris Wolfe, Assistant Professor of Political Science, to talk about healing the political divide and the challenges and opportunities we have in the election of Joe Biden, the U.S.'s second Catholic President. They speak on the need to listen and hear one another and difficulty that lies in supporting political figures who don't represent the fullness of the Church. Prudence in Politics w/Dr. Chris Wolfe | The Rundown Dr. Christopher Wolfe, Faculty Profile

Larry Payne sits down and talks with Dr. Richard Ludwick, President of the University of St. Thomas - Houston, about education, leadership and why now, more than ever, the responsibility to educate in matters of truth and ethics lie in Catholic institutions. Learn more about the Ed.D in Ethical Leadership

Larry Payne speaks with Dr. Eduardo Torres, Interim Director of the Doctorate in Ethical Leadership, about the need for ethical leadership on today's society. Torres speaks on his experience in education and his first hand accounts of how good and ethical leaders can transform schools, districts and most importantly, students lives. Learn more about the Ed.D in Ethical Leadership Las Americas Newcomer School

We are delighted to hold conversation with Simon Low, Vikki Stevenson and Ruth McNeil to talk about the Yoga Garden Party, a yoga festival that raises funds for The Hope Foundation (www.thehopefoundation.org.uk) which supports street-connected children and vulnerable communities in Kolkata, India. The event has been running for 10 years and has now raised in excess of £100,000 for the charity. In June last year, due to the devastating effects of both the Covid-19 pandemic and a super-cyclone which hit Kolkata in May, the event went virtual with classes running online via Zoom. Simon, Ruth and Vikki were due to be taking their second yoga trip to Kolkata this January, raising further much needed funds for HOPE. Due to the ongoing pandemic this trip has had to be postponed, but they have decided instead to again bring some of the UK's best loved yoga teachers directly to your homes as part of Yoga for HOPE offering yoga classes throughout January.  The full schedule and booking can be found here: https://www.thehopefoundation.org.uk/product-category/virtual-yoga-garden-party/   Follow The Hope Foundation on Instagram at @the_hope_foundation_uk.    Follow the Yoga Garden Party on social here: www.facebook.com/yogagardenparty www.instagram.com/yoga_garden_party About Simon Low Simon began his yoga journey with Dr Larry Payne in Los Angeles in 1988 and has since continuously drawn wisdom from many approaches and teachers in the fields of yoga, chi kung, Chinese medicine, physical therapy, psychology, and eastern and western philosophy. Since the years as founding Director of Yoga at Triyoga Simon has been focused on teacher training with The Yoga Academy, along with his international retreats and workshops. If Simon was pressed to use a label for the yoga he shares it would be Yin & Yang Yoga……..an approach cultivating balance in mind, body, practice and life. His latest project is an online yoga platform www.homeyoga.lifewhere you can find classes taught by Simon as well as Vikki and Ruth. Simon has an old dvd: Yin & Yang Yoga with Simon Low (available on Amazon) & a Yin Yoga App for iPhone (iPhone only). www.simonlow.com About Vikki Stevenson Vikki has been practising yoga and meditation for over twenty years and teaching for over a decade. She offers classes and 1:1s in Essex and online as well as retreats worldwide. She has a strong interest in the therapeutic aspects of yoga.  www.yogawithvikki.co.uk  About Ruth McNeil Ruth is a long-time yoga practitioner and an experienced yoga and Pilates teacher with over ten years of teaching experience. She teaches weekly vinyasa flow, yin yoga and Pilates classes in Surrey and London and yoga retreats worldwide. www.rmyoga.co.uk   ***   From The Heart is a podcast about Yoga, Mindfulness, healing and wellbeing from Dawn Lister and Daniel Groom, founders of Anahata Yoga Centre, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, UK. Conversations in this light hearted, kind and honest podcast series brings together people who have found ways to practise self-care in their lives, by sharing their knowledge, experiences and insights. Anahata is a heart centred and nurturing Wellbeing Studio in Leigh on Sea, Essex. Specialising in Yoga, Pilates, Yoga Therapy and mindful meditation. They offer expert tuition in small groups run by qualified and specialist professionals, who are experts in their field. Many of their teachers offer skills which support members of the public affected by long term health conditions, which may affect them physically, mentally and or emotionally. www.anahatayogacentre.com. Follow Anahata Yoga Centre on on Facebook and Instagram at @anahatayogacentre.

Larry Payne sits down with Paul Beck, President of Cristo Rey Jesuit College Preparatory School of Houston, to talk about the importance of education, mentorship and professional development. They discuss Cristo Rey's unique work-study model that allows students to gain critical skills in a professional business setting and the budding partnership with the University of St. Thomas. The partnership allows students to carry the work study experience through to the college setting by way of the Rising Stars program. Helpful Links: Cristo Rey Jesuit College Preparatory School of Houston UST Rising Stars Program

Larry Payne sits down with Herb Johnson, Director, Security Management Institute, Office of Graduate and Professional Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former Executive Director, Catholic Interracial Council of New York, to discuss the elevation of Wilton Cardinal D. Gregory, the first African-American cardinal, the black experience in the Catholic Church and signs of hope for the future. Helpful Links: Wilton Cardinal D. Gregory The Doctrine of Discovery The National Black Catholic Congress Catholic News Service: "Black Catholics rejoice with elevation of first African American cardinal"

HAL MEC Chairman Larry Payne and Sean Lee update the pilots of Hawaiian Airlines on the latest developments in Honolulu. Published on November 12, 2020.

Larry Payne sits down with Amy Auzenne, Pastoral Associate for Evangelization and Formation at St. Ignatius of Loyola Catholic Church in Spring, TX, to discuss the USCCB document Open Wide Our Hearts and talk about how her suburban community at St. Ignatius is opening themselves to encounter - learning to see, hear and love their neighbor.

Larry Payne speaks with Lacy Wolf '81, president of the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, about the work that unions do, how his Catholic Faith influences his work, and his experience in the Labor Movement. Wolf ties his work back to Catholic Social Teaching - The Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers - and explains why treating all workers with dignity is something to continue striving towards.

very week Danielle will be hanging out with fans from all ends of the Schmoedown fandom to discuss their favorite moments of the week, and have a little fun along the way! This week Danielle and Kelsey are joined by Jake Berlin from A Certain Point of View, Suge from Let's Get Ready to Talk Schmoedown, and Larry Payne from The Gucciverse!

The crew is back to talk about the matches that happened this week, play-in match "Spicy" Sabrina Ramirez vs Vinnie "The Ice Pick" Mancuso, and the first matches from the first round of the singles tournament, Lon "The Delinquent" Harris vs Sabina "The Great" Graves, Paul "The Powder Keg" Preston vs Eric "Z-Man" Zipper, and Jader "The Hurricane" Paramo vs Jim "The Whiskey Man" Vejvoda. Suge, Justin, Fares, and Bidoor individually broke each match down. There was also some talk of heelwork in the Schmoedown, and then Larry Payne joined to talk about Bonnie "The Smokeshow" Somerville and Jim Vejvoda. Are they ever going to learn the rules of the game and should players who don't know the rules be allowed to play? All of that plus more! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lets-get-ready-net/support

Today you'll hear from Larry,  a Retired SVP at Cisco, avid Golfer, and Proud father of 3:How not getting money for college was a blessing in disguiseWhy he switched into sales from engineeringWhat happens when your employer is bought by another companyBeing announced as a new manager without being offered the jobA failure from his early years in managementThe importance of a sleep routineWhat he is doing right as a parentWhy 'follow your passion' may not be good adviceHow he recovers from bad daysWhy marriage is a 60/40 partnership https://twitter.com/lpaynecisco

Suge and Justin are here with special guests Daney Carvalho and Chris Hall to break down everything that happened on Schmoedown Backstage today. First, the boys discuss what happened with Mike Kalinowski and Andrew Ghai. Kalinowski has decided to enter the singles tournament, so Ghai is facing Ben Bateman in a No. 1 Contender match next. Does Ghai deserve that shot or is this just a match put together because they know people will tune in for it? Then the boys turned their attention to the announced round one matchups for the singles tournament, and they have a lot of thoughts on these. Towards the end of the show, Larry Payne joined the boys for a discussion on the draft and how it's going to work at the beginning of next year. Be sure to listen! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lets-get-ready-net/support

Suge, Justin, and Fares welcomed Larry Payne onto the show, and special guests "Magic" Mollie Damon and Sean "The Saint" Sullivan joined the boys in giving their spoiler-filled thoughts on the day's Star Wars tournament match between "Lights Out" Laura Kelly and Andres "Ace" Cabrera. A spot in the tournament final was on the line, and they discussed who came out on top and how they got there. Did Laura live up to her billing as the favorite or did Andres pull another upset? Plus, a preview of the tournament final between the winner of the day's match and Andrew "The Hunter" Dimalanta. And Fares let Mollie know how much he stans her husband Alex! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lets-get-ready-net/support

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Leanne Woehlke  Well, let's just dive right in. I'd love for you. Leslie. Tell us a little bit about your journey. What was life like for you before yoga? How did you find yoga? Leslie Kaminoff  Um, well, I was quite young. So life was like a lot of 19 year olds just trying to live independently, but still with some help from parents. So, we'd have to go back to like 1978 when I was 20, and took my first yoga class I was living in in Manhattan in the East Village at the time. Before it was fashionable when it was actually kind of dangerous. And my father was taking yoga at the Sivananda Center here in New York City on 24th Street. And he invited me to class and I went, and I went somewhere else during final relaxation, some place I'd never been before. And that intrigued me. And so I signed up for beginners course. And by the summer of 1979 40 years ago, I was up in Canada. In at the main ashram, the headquarters of the Sivananda organization is in the back north of Montreal, and I was doing my teacher training there, and it's just been pretty much what I've been doing. Ever since it's pretty much the only career I've ever had, Leanne Woehlke  Wow. What would you say? It's, it's funny is this week I actually went and I taught at the middle school, they asked me to come teach. So I taught six classes for them. And as you know, and would expect in Savasana, they get so still. And so you know, Leslie Kaminoff  If you do your job, right, and the rest of the class they get still. Leanne Woehlke  Right, that's true. But what do you think it is about Savasana and that takes people to that place? Leslie Kaminoff  Well, I can speak personally and you know, it might resonate with others, because I don't think I was I was that unusual as a, you know, a 19 year old. I had never laid down before, on a floor or a bed or otherwise with the intention of doing anything other than sleeping or whatever else you do in bed and so the idea of just lying down and intentionally consciously relaxing every part of my body was a brand new experience. So I could say that was the first time I experienced intentional relaxation as opposed to just being tired and lying down and sleeping. So that is life changing was for me. Leanne Woehlke  Yeah, I agree. I think it's just a sense of as our lifes get busier and busier, that intentionality drops away, the relaxation is, you know, gone completely for most of society. So it's interesting, this practice of yoga, and I'm in this personal questioning myself, like, what is the future of yoga? What is going to happen and what are your thoughts on that? Leslie Kaminoff  Well, something can have a future if it's if it's a thing and yoga is not thing. So, you know, when when a question like that is is posed, it has to be contextualized. To a great extent. I mean, I asked a similar question to my teacher, Desikachar, way back in would have been 1992 when I was visiting India and studying with him. And it was in a very specific context, though, because at the time I was working with a group called unity and yoga, which some people know is actually what turned into the Yoga Alliance. And we were doing a big international conference and inviting all of these teachers and gurus, you know, back then there were still many active gurus running yoga organizations. And we had extended an invitation to Desikachar to attend and maybe even keynote, this event. And well, we shouldn't have called it a keynote because they were There were some fairly big egos there, and it wouldn't have been good to make one person, the keynote and not the others. But anyway, he he politely declined the invitation but offered instead to do an interview with me.Which has been posted on my blog forever. And so at the end of the interview, I asked him this question, you know, I said, since you're not going to be with us, you know, next year when we do this conference, if you know this, I was recording it. And so I said, if this microphone were somehow magically linked to that, you know, event and this gathering of 500 plus people and you wanted to say something to them about the future of yoga, what would you say? And basically, he said, You know, I don't have the right to say anything about the future of yoga, at least for Westerners, and particularly for Americans because I'm not American. I'm an Indian. I'm living here in Madras. I have my own context, I have my own religion, I have my own history and context basically, is what he was saying. And, you know, the, he said, when you're talking about the future of yoga, you're what you're really talking about is the future of mankind. And he said, it was best for Americans to handle the future of yoga in America, and best be handled by people who care about the future of mankind. And that was the most I could get him to commit to say, because, you know, he was very much about the individual and, and, and entering into a connection with the person in front of him and saying and doing whatever was appropriate in that context. So the idea of him saying something that could be appropriate for 500 people he didn't know was not really the best way for him to Give a response. But what he did say was very interesting. Number one, he's not gonna, you know, be pontificating from Madras about what Americans shouldn't shouldn't be doing in the name of yoga. That wasn't his nature. You know, he probably would react the same way I do when I see all these permutations of, you know, goat yoga and pig yoga and rage yoga and beer yoga. And I think I saw your yoga and stripping the other day like burlesque yoga. You know, so all of these things that attach the word yoga, he would, you would have had a reaction, but he also would have had the perspective that, you know, in the context of the time and place where these are being offered, this is, this is what it takes to get certain people on a mat. And if that's what it takes, you know, and if once you're on that map, somebody asks you maybe for the very first time in your life to do what I did when I was 19 years old, which is to lie down at the end of all of this, and intentionally relax your body or at least be conscious of your breathing. You know, if you're doing something like that, for the first time in your life, it has the possibility to absolutely transform you as it did for me. So, while at the same time I can maintain my standards of what you know, I consider to be yoga for me, and how I teach and the people I teach. I can be very conscious of the fact that that's not everyone's context. And some people wouldn't get onto the mat unless there was the prospect of going to class with their dog or having a goat climb on them or being buzzed with beer or weed or being able to curse or whatever. So, you know, I'm pretty open minded about that. Even though I do have my reactions every time I see one of these new things come up. So that's the future of yoga. I think it's As long as we can keep the field free from people who have that reaction and then have the additional reaction of they have no right to do that, and someone should stop them. As long as we can keep the world safe from the yoga police. I think we're okay. And I've been working hard to do that for several decades now. Leanne Woehlke  Right it you know, I agree, I think if somebody can go to goat yoga and take a picture with a goat dressed in a Santa or an elf costume, and then they get the idea like, Hey, this is kind of fun. And then they come great. Is that going to be my regular practice? No, because goats pee and I don't really want to goat peeing on me or my yoga mat or my child or any of it. Leslie Kaminoff  Well, humans fart and they do that constantly. So you know, where do you draw the line? That's up of someone's body. Leanne Woehlke  That's true. Leslie Kaminoff  Yes, true. Leanne Woehlke  Now talk a little bit you alluded to it about how you have He works diligently to try to avoid yoga becoming regulated. Leslie Kaminoff  Hmm. Yeah, um, Well, I think we have to clarify terms. Because people use the word regulation, they throw it around a lot without really understanding what it means. Because I see people out there doing stuff that perhaps they shouldn't be doing. And they point to the fact that Yoga is an unregulated, multi billion dollar field at this point. And it should be regulated to prevent people from, you know, abusing their position and all of that. So, regulation is something that government does. And the power that's wielded by the government, it's very simple to understand the kind of power that the government feels it's a gun period. They wield force. And when they start wielding that force in What up to that point has been a free market, free for quality to rise to the surface and free for ship to sink to the bottom. You know, that's the nature of the market. And the fact that some people don't like the shit doesn't mean that they have the right to use the government's guns to stop them from doing it. There's other things that can help prevent some of the abuses that go on mostly better education, and better peer to peer relationships, better community communication, better feedback mechanisms that could be built into some of the things for example, that the Yoga Alliance is doing. But when, I'm not exaggerating, when I say government is a gun, you know, think of it this way. What's the worst thing that your country club can do to you if you break their rules? You know, you out there kick you up, what's the worst thing the government can do to you? If they, if you break their rules, Leanne Woehlke  they put you in jail? Leslie Kaminoff  hat if you don't want to go to jail? What if you resist going to jail, and they want you to go? They will, they will send someone with a gun to take you to jail. And that's regulation, period. And, you know, the Alliance is is an example of that. It's the Country Club. You know, you don't have to join. You may complain about who they let in or who they don't let it in or who they keep in. But the strongest penalty they can impose is to kick you out of their club. And they have done that. People have been delisted people have been deprived of using their designation. It's not a huge number with lots of digits in it, but it's not zero. It's probably not 100 it's somewhere between zero and 100. But, you know, but the point is they they're not equipped to be an investigative kind of organization where they can launch, you know, tribunals, about the teachers behavior. You know, people see the Alliance is the first court of appeal for misbehavior in the classroom. They are being very misperceived as to their role. You know, that represents a severe breakdown in community level communication and peer mentorship. And, and a lot of times it happens because of the very human tendency for people to want to avoid conflict. You know, if a teacher is doing something in the classroom, or saying something that you don't like, or if you get hurt you, you have to remember I've worked for a body as a body worker for many, many years treating yoga injury. So I hear these stories. No, so if whatever bad happens in the classroom, it is very unlikely that the student will confront the teacher about it. They may confront management you The studio owner or if it's a club or whatever, you know, they could leave a bad review or whatever, but very seldom directly to the teacher. So we don't have good mechanisms for teachers getting critical feedback or not good enough mechanisms, or enough mechanisms at all, you know, what students are very willing to share with teachers His praise, how much you're changing my life, how great I feel, how much you love your class, how much I love you, you know, the projection that goes on all of that. So there's probably nothing more psychologically damaging for a person then to be exposed only to praise and never exposed to critical feedback. And so that's something we need to acknowledge and and address I do it in my workshops by you know, we've created an online forum that all the students have access to, they can respond anonymously if they want or leave their name and email if they want us to get back to them. And I've gotten some devastating critical feedback on those forums. Stuff that it's really hard for me to hear because it just, you know, puts a knot in my stomach. But that's exactly what I need to hear in order to grow as a teacher and as a human being and to find my blind spots. Right. So, you know, all of that is a conversation worth having. But the important thing to remember is that kind of communication, it's from the bottom up, it's, it's, you know, community based. It's it's ground level, peer to peer mentorship, all of those things. When people look at the Alliance wanting to impose discipline or standards from the top down. They're really, really missing the point the lions can't do that. Even if it's decided to do that. It would be really, really bad at doing that. They're bad at returning emails. You know, they can't even return a goddamn email, how are they going to become, you know, this kangaroo court of yoga justice. It's just it's a gross misperception you know of what their role is. Leanne Woehlke  I think that there's a sense of I've heard, you know, from teachers, I've heard from students that they graduate from teacher training, and they ask, well, do I need to get certified with Yoga Alliance? And the first thing I say is, wait a minute, it's not a certifying body. Let's clarify what it is and what it isn't. And that conversation, but I think this concept you raise about community based feedback is really interesting. Leslie Kaminoff  Yeah. It was part of my recommendations as one of the advisors on the standards review. You know, my, my recommendations went far beyond the scope of the one committee I was on, which was scope of practice. I just, you know, I basically just did a brain dump on everything I've been working on the last 30 years since before the Alliance existed. You know, I was in the room when we came up with the standard. So I was on the ad hoc committee. So I've been involved in this conversation before there was an Alliance. So I've seen the art of how this has gone, you know? So yeah, Unknown Speaker  If people need a little bit of context for this conversation, not just a knee jerk reaction like, Oh, you know, the Alliance should be doing more to prevent this this sort of thing. What they do well, the thing the Alliance has done well is the advocacy work, which is keeping the government out of the business of regulating yoga, they have been successful in every state in which they have gone in, to fight whatever stupid measures were being proposed by these, you know, second post secondary or vocational training boards that each state has to, to pull yoga into their, into their control. They've been very successful and the reason they have resources in order to do that very necessary work as well as they do, because of the registry is the registry is not as you pointed out, it's not a certification. You know, the only one who can this person who can certify Teachers, whoever trained them, and that's important to remember. Leanne Woehlke  Right? And you know, and I think that it's, it's a good point to even for, for students to understand. What does that mean? Obviously different schools have different credentials, different experience, different history, etc. Let's switch gears a little bit. And let's talk about, you know, you mentioned obviously, you've worked with bodies for years and trained so many teachers. Leslie Kaminoff  There's one hanging on the wall behind me. Can Leanne Woehlke  I see it? I love it. Leslie Kaminoff  Yeah, sometimes it doesn't work out well for the clients and just Leanne Woehlke  at least there's not multiple bodies. Leslie Kaminoff  Yeah, well, you haven't seen the closet. Have you? Leanne Woehlke  That's true. That's true. Um, talk a little bit about your you're known for the breath and the practice. What do you feel is the purpose of the breath and the practice? Leslie Kaminoff  Is that what I've known for most people Just think I'm the guy that wrote the book. Leanne Woehlke  Well for anatomy, I mean, but but really, I think I know when I had you talk with my teachers and training last year that you really clarified so much for them about the breath and the importance of it and so say a little bit about how did you come to that understanding? Leslie Kaminoff  Oh, um, well, I can I can point to certain milestones along the way. And certainly, just teaching yoga At first, the Sivananda system of yoga, you know, in the late 70s, early 80s, I was on staff with you and and I was directing the Los Angeles Community for them for a while in the early 80s. And teaching many, many classes and then many bodies in the class many different bodies in the classes. And I developed my interest in anatomy just from that from observing all the differences and similarities that exhibited in terms of them being able to do or not do or to what extent they could do or not do this, this basic 12 postures I was teaching them. So having the format be the same for all the classes was a great way to get started, because all the differences showed up because I was teaching the same postures all the time. And of course, you know, my curiosity started just in my own body with my own practicing before I was teaching, like why can I do this? Why can't I do that? You know, how can I do something tomorrow that I'm not able to do today? And then just extending that into that same question into the students I was working with so but the the the turning point for the breath part of it and because you know, breathing is part of the Sivananda sequence, there's breathing it's taught you know, you teach Kapalabhati you teach abdominal breathing, you teach alternate nostril breathing. You teach people to coordinate their breathing with the sun salutation. The Surya Namaskar and the beginning of class. But the turning point really came. It had to have in 1981, shortly after I went to Los Angeles to run that community for Sivananda. And I met someone who was to become a lifelong friend, who was just sort of starting out himself, Larry Payne, who I'm sure you know, who's one of the founders along with Richard Miller of IAYT, the International Association of Yoga Therapists, and he was just getting his center started in Marina Del Rey, I was in West Hollywood at the time it but we, we met had a visit and he had just gotten back from traveling around India visiting all of the famous yoga teachers that he could he tells very colorful stories about that trip. And it seemed like the person who was most impressed with was was the one name he mentioned that I had never heard before, and that was Desikachar. And I said, Well, what makes this guy so special? And all he would tell me was "it's all in the breath." That's all he would say. I think that's all he could say at that point. I don't know how much more than that he understood even after having met him. But it stuck in my mind. I forgot the name Desikachar. I didn't hear the name again until around 1987 you know, like maybe six years later. But this thing that is all in the breath really stuck with me. So I started paying more careful attention not just to how I was breathing in my practice, but how all the students were breathing. And that just led me into that particular focus when I was learning about anatomy to learn more about the diaphragm and the ribcage and so by the time I met Desikachar in 1988, I had all of these observations and sort of tricks that I had learned about different ways to coordinate the breath with movement. So I had a lot of questions. But in between that I did start working in the field of Sports Medicine and bodywork and dance medicine. When I moved back to New York after living in LA, I worked for an osteopath, who treated dancers in LA, I was working for a chiropractor treated athletes. And one of the, this osteopath I work for was quite well known and he attracted some very, very good people to work with him and, and one of them was a woman named Irene Dowd is very well known in movement circles here in New York and internationally, really. And she used to work there couple days a week, and I remember and she doesn't remember saying this to me. I asked her years later, and she not only didn't remember saying it to me, she didn't remember ever having said anything like this. She said it didn't sound like her, but I know, I know who it was her, I have a good memory. And I was asking her some questions about the diaphragm about, you know, what's the right way to breathe in this movement and that was later breathing that movement and in a That. And she just she said this word. Well, if you do it that way, you're going to lose the postural support of a diaphragm. And I was like, What? diaphragm postural support. It's a breathing muscle. But it made total sense was it just something clicked when she said that was like, Wow, there, this is a muscle of postural support, not just something that gets air in and out of your body. And and so that was in my mind. You know, just a couple years later, I met Desikachar. And so all of this stuff just was just in this brew, this mix of trying to figure things out and that's the guitar. I didn't really have any anatomical answers for me. The practice the philosophy, everything else, yes. And in spite of the fact that he was trained as a structural engineer, before he took up the serious study yoga with his father Krishnamacharya. He did not in western anatomical terms really have a lot to offer me by way of explanation when I was asking all these questions, so I just kind of kept limping along and figuring it out on my own. And, you know, here we are, you know. And what I did learn about the anatomy, though, did reinforce everything I learned from Desikachar, in terms of the brilliance of the system and the brilliance of what his father came up with, by recognizing the intimate connection between the movements of the spine and the movements of the breath, and how you can play with that to produce different effects in different people for therapeutic purposes. So that all went into the mix with the fact that, along with all this, I should mention them in the context of this whole period of my life, from then until now really, is that I've had my hands on thousands of people, feeling their bodies, feeling their breath, helping them with their breath, you know, working on deep muscles like the psoas and the diaphragm. And all of that. So there's a lot of kinesthetic learning that's come through my hands about this as well. So everything's influencing everything else. Leanne Woehlke  So why do you think we're seeing more injuries in yoga? Leslie Kaminoff  Just more people are doing yoga. I mean, just quantity of injuries or percentage of people practicing who are injured. So how did you mean the question? Leanne Woehlke  You know, I don't have hard numbers, it seems as if, and I don't know if it's with ramped up frequency or as the population of people practicing increase, we're getting people who maybe have some predisposition, or prior underlying injuries or, issues going on. It seems you know, a lot of shoulder issues, even in my own studio, and I'm pretty careful about anatomy and not pushing it too hard. I, you know, I tell them, there's nothing enlightened about putting your foot behind your head. So unless you really feel you need to do that this other poses probably gonna do the same thing Leslie Kaminoff  It's more about getting your head out of your ass instead of putting it up there. So, go go with that one if, you know, feel free to use that one, Leanne Woehlke  Right, that's that's much more useful. But it seems like I've had a couple of students who were, you know, sound bodies end up with back issues with a bulging disc, and, you know, I could look at it and say, okay, it's a mom who's had a new baby, so maybe she's holding her body in a certain way. She's pretty hyper mobile in some areas, too. Leslie Kaminoff  Yeah, well, first of all, I don't know that there are more yoga injuries as a percentage of numbers of people practicing. We can speculate we, you know, I don't know who has those numbers or if they even exist. Because and it's true with just about anything. You know, is it better reporting? Is it the fact that Social media amplifies things. Who knows? I do know, though, that if you look at the arc of the last 30 years or so, the styles of yoga that have become more prominent, that have really played a key role in popularizing it, in our culture, and in particular in fitness culture are the more intense forms of yoga. You know, the more athletic vinyasa, hot vinyasa styles, all of it really comes from Ashtanga. The influence of Pattabhi Jois's Ashtanga vinyasa style of teaching can't be overestimated. Because that's what made the gyms want teachers. You know, that's what made people want to make money training teachers. You know, back in the mid 90s, when we first started turning our attention to like the standards that might go into training and teacher, there was a lot going going on right then but the main thing in the market and by the way, nobody up to that point had attached the word industry to yoga. You know, 10 years prior to that, you know, in the early to mid 80s nobody attached the word industry to fitness either. Fitness became an industry in the 80s thanks to Jane Fonda in the in the VHS and you know the development of things like Nautilus and you know, the Olympics being in Los Angeles and the running craze that already been going on. There's a lot of things that came together in that place in time where I happen to be in LA in the 80s, working in sports medicine with Olympic athletes. And Jane Fonda students who were getting injured down the road because we were just down the road from her studio, right. So you know, I saw that coming together in the fitness world. Then 10 years later, I saw the fitness world start swallowing the yoga world. But there was a tremendous demand for teachers for yoga teachers at that time and not enough supply. And it's hard to imagine that now 30 years later when actually the opposite is the case. Right? So we kind of created a monster with these standards. Because we handed people the recipe for Look, here's how you teach a teacher training. Here's the subjects, here's the hours and boom, you know, but there was a definite need in the marketplace at that time. And it was being filled by people like Beth Shaw. You know, who, who you know who Beth is, right? Okay. Yeah, yeah, she created yoga fit. And, and so, you know, it was brilliant. I mean, she's a brilliant businesswoman. You know, she's going to the clubs and saying, hey, look, you want yoga in your clubs, I can give it to you next week. Just give me your aerobics teachers for the weekend. Because they already know how to teach group fitness, they're already on your payroll. You don't need to hire new people. Just give them to me. In a weekend, they'll know how to teach yoga class. That's how yoga fit was born. And it was brilliant. You know, but it made people like me and colleagues of mine and folks who had been coming to unity in yoga conferences and who would start to go to Yoga Journal conferences. And when they started doing that, it's like, you know, we're looking at this and going, you know, I don't know off the top of my head how many hours it takes to, you know, reasonably train a yoga teacher, I'm pretty damn sure a weekend isn't enough. And that's that's the, you know, one of the questions we sat down with and we came up with the 200 and the 500 things, you know, so and so this this boom has just been happening it's it's definitely showing signs of leveling off. There's all indicators right now that, you know, the unlimited growth model that a lot of studios and the bigger yoga businesses, you know, we're, you know, basing their growth model on this expected increase year over  year demand for what they're offering. You know, it's it's been pretty saturated right now and businesses are dropping like flies. I mean, Yoga Works delisted its stock a couple of months ago and, you know, they're there and in trouble closing studios left and right. And, you know, there's just a lot of market saturation right now. And the last thing that business needs, by the way is dealing with a unionized labor force, do you really want to put the final nail in your coffin just unionize the teachers that'll do it in a heartbeat. It's a whole other conversation. But it's back to the injuries. You know? We like we were not comfortable as humans, I think, not having a story that explains things, you know. I mean, that's, that's what religion is for, you know, it's not always the best explanation or an accurate one, but it's a story and it explains things, you know. And, and, and so, you know, we see all of this happening, and it shows up on social media. And it's all these conversations. And, frankly, some people have found a way to make a living being scaremongers about all of this. You know, I won't mention any names William J. Broad, but um, you know, there's others I can mention who you know, with probably all good intentions are really decontextualized what's actually happening in in yoga, you know, because here's one factor, right? Yoga makes you more sensitive to what's going on in your body, you start paying attention. Right? It's a double edged sword. I always tell people Yoga is this double edged sword. The good news is that it makes you more sensitive to what's going on in your body. The bad news is it makes you more sensitive to what's going on in your body. Right? It's the same thing. You know what what can be a tremendous benefit can also be a problem, you start noticing things. Plus, yes, you do have some more intense, forceful styles of yoga being taught, and you have people doing adjustments on people they shouldn't be doing. I can't tell you how many stories I've heard of people, clients who have come in to get bodywork and the stories of how they got injured in class by a teacher shoving or pulling or yanking or cranking on them and you know, it does happen and because We are more aware of all of these issues now they're being discussed. They're being incorporated into the way we train teachers, the way we educate teachers and the public, you know about these classes. But again, that's sort of the leveling, balancing nature of a free market. You know, when we come up with problems, as an industry or as individuals in the industry, there's no one thing is called the industry. It's just people working in the same field. But they're, they're individuals, but the ones who are responsible and want to offer good instruction, good training for teachers, the one the ones who want to have good information will seek it out and, you know, eventually, you know, things will get better. And, and, look, it's human nature to just push and find your limits by pushing and learn how to respect them by pushing too far. You know, I have been that I have been that person in class, I've been that person in my own practice, I didn't need it, I didn't need another teacher in the room pushing me at a certain point in my yoga career, to just want more and more and more, you know, more awesome as more range of motion, more variations, more intensity, whatever. And I was young and my body was young, and it was able to withstand it without too many negative long term consequences other than some arthritic knees, which, frankly, it probably gotten started even before I started yoga by you know, playing basketball on concrete when I was younger, right? So, you know, we we live and we learn to sometimes we learn by by hurting ourselves, it's unfortunate, you know, if we have to learn by letting other people hurt us. And I think that's, that's something that, you know, I've been working really hard in my workshops and, you know, whatever I whenever I write things or do interviews to you know, say look, we need to need to have this conversation. Because it is a it is a problem. But I don't know that as a percentage of people practicing, it is that much higher than it used to be. I know people back in the old days in, you know, the old classical hatha yoga days before the Ashtanga stuff before the athletic stuff who really mess themselves up just by doing really long headstands plows, shoulder stands, you know, real problem like real problems with their spine and their spinal cord and their spinal nerves from the way they've damaged their necks and their spines from you know, the classic kind of intense, hatha yoga things that we were doing back in the day. So each each style has its own risks. Leanne Woehlke  So if if we're looking at it, what is the the right way then to have individualized treatment or individualized treatment but practice and instruction so that you're getting what's right for your body or Leslie Kaminoff  Well, yeah, when you say individualize, it's not necessarily one on one. I can individualize a practice, in a group of any size. All I have to do is make sure that each student is being offered the agency an opportunity to conduct their practice as an inquiry into what's working for them. And there's a very simple formula for that, you know, and it's not proprietary, you know, I share it all the time in my workshops, and I teach using this method is very simple. It's called, try this. Now, try that and see what you notice. Right? And so, in order to use this, though, you have to not be attached to the idea that there's only one right way to do things and there's only one right result that you'll get when you do that thing, right? Because that's certainly not true. So Turning the practice into an inquiry is far more powerful, and ultimately safe than just administering cues and corrections. And comes from the standpoint that if you do it the correct way that I'm teaching you, you will not get hurt, because that's that's utter bullshit. That does not, that's not true, even a little bit. Leanne Woehlke  Yeah, I think there's also no way to know what's going on inside someone's body or what their joint actually looks like, unless you have an X ray. Somebody could have really, you know, shallow hip sockets or really open hip sockets and the pose is gonna look entirely different and feel very different. Leslie Kaminoff  Absolutely, absolutely. The main thing is to get the student to be a little more attentive to what's going on inside their own bodies, you know, and not rely on the teachers eye or experience or knowledge to keep them safe. You know, there's this there's this whole, you know, conversation about well, the teachers gonna come in and they're because they're a good teacher, and they have this experience or they or they wrote an anatomy book, you know, they're going to know more about what's going on in your body than you do now, from a certain perspective, that's true because I can see your body in a way you can never see it. Because not because I'm smart, because I'm not you, you know, that's a given. So, on the one hand, yes, I have access to information about you that you don't have. It doesn't mean I know what's going on inside or what's healthy or safe for you. I just know what I just know what I'm seeing. And what I'm seeing is something you can't see. So we have to balance that reality with the equally true reality that the only person who can ever know ever has a shot at knowing what's going on inside someone's body is themselves. And a lot of people don't want that agency. They don't want that responsibility. They want someone else to do it for them. And, you know, you know, I saw this happening with Desikachar all the time where, you know, he was very skillful at deflecting that and handing the conversation back to the student and not letting any of that stuff stick to him. And for that reason some people found him infuriating. They found him evasive, secretive, they would think, or just plain annoying. But what he was really doing was not accepting that responsibility for someone else's experience. And, not be willing to inject his answers into someone else's context. Because, you know, it may not be for them, it may not be right for them. And that's how he that's how he handled me. 100% Leanne Woehlke  And that's how you handle your students. That sounds like Unknown Speaker  Well, I do my best. I mean, I'm not Desikachar, but it's good to have a good role model. Leanne Woehlke  Tell me about what is a situation where you've just been so inspired by the practice, Unknown Speaker  by the practice by, like something that happened on my mat or in the In working with Desikachar, or Leanne Woehlke  Either one, it could either be on your mat as a personal experience, or that you've seen, you know, as a witness of a student. Leslie Kaminoff  I think some of those inspiring moments, literally inspiring moments are when I'm working with someone else. And sometimes it's in a group situation in a clinic or workshop where I'm demonstrating on one person and people are watching. Because then, well, let me talk about that. Because, you know, this happens all the time in the private one on one work, but when it's especially inspiring, when there's a group of students observing me work, to illustrate something we're learning about breathing with with someone's body. And usually I'll ask for the person who has the you know, worst breathing in the room, asthma or, you know, tendency toward panic attack or whatever it is who you know who's got a breathing issue, so I want them And almost always, there's this moment when I can figure out how to get them to relax and stop trying to breathe. Get out of their own way and just let the body take a natural breath on its own. Once all the effort and you know trying to breathe goes away, here's this breath that comes in. In those moments, I like to think of myself as a breath midwife, you know? Or doula breath doula, perhaps I don't know. And it's very moving. It's very moving. It's always a very emotional moment, not just for the, for me and the person I'm working with, but sometimes even more so. For the people that are watching. It's very, very evocative. It moves something that's like, there's this. Sometimes it's a simultaneous... again, good news, bad news thing that happens the moment like that. And the good news is, of course I, you know, this, this breath comes in, it's like wow, this, this can move, you know, I'm feeling space where the breath has just moved, that I have not felt for who knows how long that's the good news. And then right on the heels of it sometimes not always, but sometimes is, Oh, now I can remember why I stopped breathing that way in the first place. Right? Because there's something there's something that arises in the context of our development that has to do with what we call affect regulation, how we learn how not to be overwhelmed by our internal emotional body states that we do with our breathing, we learn to regulate our affect with how we modulate our breathing spaces. And sometimes we can go through an entire lifetime without ever knowing that it's missing or knowing that we can recover. But when it does happen in these moments, it's incredibly inspiring. Moving for everyone who's present. So those are some of the best moments. And that happens all the time in private one on one work, but when it's sort of kind of amplified in a room of people who are just willing to be present and supportive of that happening, those are those are special moments and maybe some people who'll be watching us have been in one of my workshops, when we've done that and can definitely, you know, relate to to what I'm saying. Leanne Woehlke  It reminds me of this year, I did a session with someone that does some of Donnie Epstein's work. And he says, Leslie Kaminoff  Yeah, I know I know Donnie Epstein is Yeah, Network. He invented Network Chiropractic. I spoke to him on the phone once back in the old days when he's first getting started. Yeah, Leanne Woehlke  and it's now it's a lot of it. They just, it's done with breath. So to me is I thought like, okay, I'll experience it and you're on a table and moving the body in certain ways, with the breath. And you hear these stories about people that had long holding patterns and releasing it. So it's, you know, I was like, well, we kind of do this in yoga. Leslie Kaminoff  Well also talk to Michael Lee, because that's the whole basis of Phoenix Rising. Mm hmm. You know, and to to be involved in a skillful dialogue process with someone, as you're supporting them in these poses and positions. And, yeah, the, the tremendous breakthroughs people can have in this context is very inspiring. So yeah, if you ever get to talk to Michael about it, you'll you'll, you'll hear a lot of stories like that. Leanne Woehlke  Right? How do you think we do we need to emphasize the breath more in yoga. Leslie Kaminoff  I don't know who's we? Leanne Woehlke  Teachers in general, I mean, I think it's, it's there. But in this inquiry, it's almost as if there's, ah... again, as I'm kind of looking globally at the industry and thinking like, Okay, we've got this huge push for Asana. Hmm. But if we go back into looking at, you know, an Asana without breath really isn't yoga? Leslie Kaminoff  Well, Desikachar would say something like that, for sure. That was definitely his take on it is that, you know, well, he would be very practical. He'd say, you know, because we look, we'd be in the room, we'd be working at whatever practice he gave, and very simple practices, but you know, you're amongst your fellow yoga teachers or yoga therapists or whatever, and you're, he's there, and you want to impress them. So you start working a little too hard, you know, and he'll bust you on that. And so he would say things like, "If what you're doing in your asana practice is so physically demanding that you're losing a connection with your breath. You have ceased to do yoga." Yeah, and it's not that it's necessarily a bad thing that you're doing because you could be working out, you could be working on your strength, you could be working on your flexibility you could be, you know, learning some gymnastic trick. And you know, that's, that can be nice. And you know, it's not like it's bad. But if you want it to be yoga, according to this view, you have to select what you're doing and how you're doing it in such a way so as to be able to stay connected with this process of inhaling and exhaling. So if you're asking me if I think there should be more of that, well, yes, please. I mean, you know, I make my living teaching that. So I'd be stupid to say no. But again, I'm I have to also say, well, it's a free market out there. And just because someone wants to attach the word yoga to something, which by that definition, perhaps isn't, because the breath is who knows where, you know, they still may have a transformational experience because of whatever they're doing because, look whatever you're doing, whether you're focusing missing it on not, you're going to be breathing. You know, and, and breathing tends to want to find more space in your body, whether that's your intention in the practice or not. There is an intelligence which I don't think is too strong a word to use, about how your breath will help you find space for your breath eventually. And so even if it's not an explicit part of the practice, if what you're doing is called yoga, and it even slightly resembles asana practice, and it even has a little bit of this idea that you can bring your mind and your body and your breath together and you can relax a little bit. You know, because the word Yoga is attached to it that can lead you it can lead you into other experiences, it can lead you maybe to look it up on Wikipedia, you know, and you know, you're going to get An idea of the history and the philosophy and all of that, you know, it's not like this information is in hiding. It's, it's pretty available. You know, at least I've done my best to make it available and a lot of other people have and, you know, it's not it's not a Secret Doctrine. No One No One there's no secret super secret breath practice out there, that you know, you have to go to a cave to learn or, or, or sign an NDA before taking well actually there that does exist. But anyway, you know, some people know what I'm referring to. But it's these aren't huge secrets, really. It's the science is there, we're starting to understand things about, you know, polyvagal theory and vagal tone as it relates to breathing cycles. And, you know, the tako method is out there. There's just, there's a lot of available information and it's not that hard to find and if you have one of these experiences, and one of these classes and, and and the word Yoga is attached to it. It's like okay, maybe I can do it without the goat now, you know, and and find someone that that is going to explore it a little more depth perhaps if I'm willing to go to a little more depth. So yeah, more breath please. And you know, we people who care about as long as we keep doing our jobs, you know people find us Leanne Woehlke  what's next for you as a teacher? Leslie Kaminoff  Well not blowing the deadline we're working on for the third edition of yoga anatomy. That would be nice. You know, we've made the deal with our publishers Human Kinetics to come out with the third edition by around this time next year just in time for holiday gift giving in 2020. So Amy Matthews and I just had a meeting this morning we have you know, we were just regularly scheduled to keep tabs on each other as we work on the new material. For this third edition, which is really going to be much, it's going to be a lot more different from the second edition. And the second one was from the first and there's a lot of improvement in the second edition. But we said this this morning, the second edition was really what we wanted the first edition to be. But we ran out of time and budget and just patience from our publishers because we blew so many deadlines, getting the first edition out. So the second edition is really what we wanted the first edition to be, if we had had those resources. The third edition, we're reimagining a lot. And it's based on 10 years of experience. You know, from the last time we really worked on the book, and there's gonna be new illustrations and expanded chapters, new chapters, lots more information within the awesomeness so that's what's next after that is a book I've been meaning to write for since before yoga anatomy. So that's like 14 years. And it's more about yoga and my personal story. What I learned with Desikachar and my other teachers weaving in some of the things from the yoga sutras that I learned from Desikachar, and from my years as a body worker, and it also includes some of the stories I told her about, you know, the sweep of like the industry that I've been able to witness in the last 40 plus years. So hopefully, people will find it interesting, at least, I find it interesting to tell the stories, and it'll be interesting to get them, you know, out of my mouth, in my head and onto this computer here. So we'll that'll be the next thing. And I think also, upgrading my online material is a big priority for me. And that'll have to happen in the next couple of years too, because the stuff that we put up has been up for a while and I'm not teaching all those things the same way anymore, and I want to make sure that we're putting the best quality stuff out there. The fundamentals course actually is I don't think we need to mess around with that. That's the one that people use to provide the anatomy hours for the teachers. courses, and that's doing pretty well. It's the other ones principles and practices that I think are in need of some, some fresh perspective. So that's enough and travel, you know, you got all this travel happening or got a big tour to Australia coming up next year or we're headed off to Europe in a week. So, you know, I'll keep going where the gigs are squeeze it all in? Leanne Woehlke  Right? You know, I think that you've got such I'm excited for your books. I think I have the first version of Leslie Kaminoff  yoga, green or purple, Leanne Woehlke  purple. Leslie Kaminoff  That's the second. That's the second edition. Leanne Woehlke  So I look forward to the third and then your story about your own personal story. You've got such a rich history. And I love kind of getting to the people that have been practicing for four decades and have a broader history as opposed to just Instagram followers. Leslie Kaminoff  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's something you know, I mean, who could have anticipated social media and all of that back in the day, but, you know, it's just the evolution of things and people get information any way they can and, you know, build careers any way they can. But the one thing that's inevitable is everyone is going to age. You know, the people who are lucky enough to age, right? People complain about aging, I always remind them it really it beats the alternative. And so eventually, these more therapeutic ways of working the gentler ways of working, you know, as my friend Jay Brown says, gentle is a new advanced, that's his big thing, right? And there's a real truth to that. So, you know, however you got started, whether it's on Instagram or you know, with a dog or a pig or a mug of beer, or you know, joint too, Whatever, you know, if you if you stick with it, you're going to be doing it in an ageing body that's going to need to you need to adapt what you're doing to accommodate that. And, you know, hopefully I'll stick around long enough to get the next couple of generations to start looking at these things and just keep the conversation going. I mean, no, right now, I mean, for me, I always say this, you know, I said, how when I was younger, it was more and more and more and more, you know, how much can I do? In my practice? Now at age 61. Now, it's pretty much how little can I get away with? Leanne Woehlke  I hear you I turned 50 next month, and so looking at how my practice has changed over time. It's definitely very different than when I was in my 20s Leslie Kaminoff  Sure, yeah. And you know, you're busy now. I mean, you know, I don't have the free time I had in my 20s I'm living in an ashram anymore. I got shit to do The Yoga is for maintaining my ability to do my shit. You know, I, do my yoga to live my life not the other way around. And that's the perspective you get when you know if you stick with it long enough and your body ages and I hope my body will continue to age because that means you know, I'll still be here Leanne Woehlke  if you could put on like one billboard or one web page, your message for the entire world summed up happy Leslie Kaminoff  Don't be an asshole. I don't know. Wait a yoga message? Leanne Woehlke  Whatever your messages, Leslie Kaminoff  whatever my message is. Leanne Woehlke  Yeah. Leslie Kaminoff  Well, I would I would say something like I think one of my favorite quotes that I came up with, which ties a lot of different things together. But it uses Asana as a model for that, because that's what, that's the most accessible entry point. For the vast majority of people into my world, you know, I would just stick with the thing I say, which is that "Yoga is not about doing the asanaa. It's about undoing what's in the way of the asanas". And that's a deep statement and there's some deep teachings there. And that's a perspective I got from from my teacher. And it's really profound if you think about it that way. Because it's not like what we're looking for is somehow in the asana and we'll get it once we perfect it and unlock the benefit and there it is for us. It happens along the way every step along the way. When this thing that you weren't able to do yesterday, you're able to do a little bit better today because it showed you whatever was in your system that was in the way. So Yoga is fundamentally about uncovering and dealing with obstructions, you know? And the practices help us do that. Because like, when we learn a new way to breathe, what it's really doing is helping us unlearn our old way of breathing. So these these subtle little understandings, I think that sort of shift the perspective and allow us to get a lot more done with a lot simpler, a lot simpler practice. Yeah, the simpler the practice is the more profound relationship you can have to it. And that's something he forces you to recognize. Because the complicated shit is not available so much anymore. Leanne Woehlke  That's true. Leslie Kaminoff  Yeah, I've been cursing a little bit. I hope you're not gonna bleep me. Leanne Woehlke  No, you're totally fine. Right. Leslie, how can people catch up with you? Leslie Kaminoff  Oh, um, my personal website is Yogaanatomy.org. And that's two A's yoga anatomy, yoganatomy is someone else with the one A. So, yoga anatomy.org. And there's links to everything I do there my schedule and you know, things I write and blogs and online courses and what not. So that's the easiest way to find me. So thank you for asking. Leanne Woehlke  Absolutely. And then I think you're also or you were, I think you're taking a little break while you're traveling, but you're also on ompractice. Leslie Kaminoff  I was where were we evaluating how and when to reengage with live teaching on the internet. It was a really fun experiment. I really enjoyed doing it. But it when these tours started happening with the timezone difference and the changes and just scheduling wise, there were definitely times where I would have been up in an airplane. Or you know, be have it be three in the morning somewhere. For the regularly scheduled time that we that we started in the summer, when I was taking a break on Cape Cod for a month, and you know it, we kind of got it going, they're able to maintain a regular schedule. So it was it was fun. It was great. I love what they're doing with ompractice. And just, for me, to be fair to the regular students who would want to keep showing up. I just wasn't able to maintain the regularity of it because of all the traveling to the other side of the world and time zones and stuff. So we'll see. Just stay tuned. You know, if anyone's interested in that, it'll certainly be announced on in a blog post or on my web page or whatever. If we do the live teaching on the internet, the courses have been on the internet, those are on demand those those have always been there. Leanne Woehlke  Well, wonderful. Thank you so much. I so appreciate you taking time I know you're so busy. But I hope that this conversation reaches those who will benefit And you're an amazing teacher. So thank you for your contribution to the world of yoga. And to me personally, I really appreciate it. Leslie Kaminoff  Thank you. That's very kind. It's lovely to hear you say that and happy to have had the conversation. Thanks for inviting me. And yeah, just send me the link when it's out and I'll circulate it in my circles and, you know, get it out there. Leanne Woehlke  Awesome. Thanks so much, Leslie. I appreciate it.  

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In this week's match of Schmoebates Alex Mac invites Finstock Exchange's Andrew Dimilanta as cohost to help judge rookie debators and Action Army Generals Larry and Lindsey Payne to debate the biggest Schmoedown questions. Tonight's questions are... Q1) What is the best entrance of all time? Q2) What major franchise should have it's own league? Q3) What SD personality would be the best person to go on a one-on-one trip to Disneyland with?

This is the second in a series of short episodes that celebrate the beloved yoga teacher TKV Desikachar who died in 2016.Desikachar was the son of legendary yoga master T Krishnamacharya and teacher to the philosopher J Krishnamurti. He was a pioneer in the field of yoga therapy and author of the influential book The Heart of Yoga, published in 1995.This episode features highlights from an interview I recorded with Larry Payne, back in September 2018. In these excerpts Larry tells us of his first meeting with Desikachar and his father Krishnamacharya, and how his studies with Desikachar served as the foundation for his groundbreaking work in developing yoga therapy in the United States.Larry is the author of many books on yoga including the bestselling Yoga for Dummies book. In 1989, along with Dr. Richard Miller who I featured on the last episode of the podcast, he founded the International Association for Yoga Therapy. Larry went on to create the popular Yoga Rx program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles where he continues to serve as coordinator and primary instructor.Musical interludes: DJ Drez, Forever For NowNeed support on your medicine path?1-to-1 yoga, plant medicine integration and transformative coaching with Brian Jameshttp://brianjames.caSupport the Podcast!1. Leave a review on iTunes, or share with your friends on social media2. Become a Patreon supporter at http://patreon.com/medicinepath and gain access to podcast extras and hours of yoga practice resources including vinyasa sequences, breathwork, chanting and guided meditations.3. Leave a one-time donation at http://paypal.me/medicinepathyoga4. Purchase a print or Kindle version of my new book, Yoga & Plant Medicine: https://amzn.to/2mv3i36About Brian JamesBrian James is a yoga teacher, transformational coach and psychedelic integration counselor currently living in Montréal, Canada with his wife, astrologer Debbie Stapleton and their Boston Terrier Kingston. He has been exploring the intersection of yoga and shamanism for over 25 years.medicinepathpodcast.cominstagram.com/brianjames.medicinepathtags: brian james, heart of yoga, yoga, desikachar, richard miller

Larry Payne, Ph.D. is an internationally respected yoga teacher and back specialist. The L.A. Times named Larry “One of America’s most respected Yoga teachers”. He co-authored Yoga Therapy Rx, Yoga for Dummies and The Business of Teaching Yoga. Larry is founding president of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, founder of the Corporate Yoga program at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the first Yoga teacher to offer Yoga classes at the World Economic Forum, co-founder of the yoga curriculum at UCLA’s School of Medicine, and the founding director of the new Yoga therapy certification program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. In this episode we talk about: How him and richard miller met How he got into yoga and the people he was fortunate to study with How yoga is a stress reducer How Krishnamarchya adapted yoga to be about the individual (vini yoga) The evolution of today’s yoga What Prime of Life yoga is How Yoga Therapy started How his want for material things has changed over time What his purpose in life is    https://samata.com/ Prime of Life Yoga International Association of Yoga Therapists Class on Common Aches + Pains

This two part interview features amazing insight into the life and work of musician and yoga teacher, Mark Moliterno. In this episode Mark provides his personal journey to music and to yoga. Mark outlines tenets of yoga and how its correlation to our singing.  Mark Moliterno (MM, E-RYT500, C-IAYT, YACEP, POLY®, FOUNDER OF YOGAVOICE®) is an award-winning professional singer, voice teacher, yoga teacher, IAYT-certified Yoga Therapist, workshop leader, and author. He is a thought-leader in the area of 21st Century vocal pedagogy and a master teacher of both singing and classical yoga. His extensive performing career has taken him to many countries in a variety of leading operatic roles and as a concert soloist and recitalist. Additionally, he has completed more than 1200 hrs of formal study in yoga teaching and yoga therapeutics. A sought-after clinician, he presents YogaVoice® workshops at professional conferences and gatherings internationally. Mark is recognized for his one-on-one therapeutic mentoring and as a specialist in helping people understand and uncover their free, authentic voices. Mark Moliterno holds the BM and MM degrees in Voice and Opera from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music where his mentor was the famous vocal pedagogue, Richard Miller. Mark was introduced to yoga in 1985 when he met and studied with Larry Payne, PhD in Los Angeles at Samata Yoga. Over the years he has studied and practiced Viniyoga, Classical Yoga, and Ashtanga Yoga and subsequently became an E-RYT500 and Comprehensive Yoga Therapist through the YogaLife Institute of Pennsylvania. In 2016, Mark received the credential, "IAYT-certified yoga therapist", from the International Association of Yoga Therapists and in 2017 he was credentialed as a Prime of Life Yoga® (POLY) instructor. His yoga mentors are Larry Payne, PhD and Robert Butera, PhD. Mark's yoga teaching style is unique and balanced, with detailed attention to the coordinated, responsive awareness of breathing, physical alignment, and mental focus. www.theyogavoice.com  | @theyogavoice Choir Baton Host: Beth Philemon @bethphilemon | www.bethphilemon.com Visit Choir Baton Online: @choirbaton | www.choirbaton.com Choir Baton Theme Song by Scott Holmes

This two part interview features amazing insight into the life and work of musician and yoga teacher, Mark Moliterno. In this episode Mark continues elaborating on this sense of self and sound. Why is singing not a acalming activity for so many people? We often focus on teaching inhalation, but are we intentional about the how and why of teaching exhalation? The voice is an energetic instrument and Mark relates the voice to the different chakras, or energetic wheels that spin to build and disburse energy from the body. Mark concludes with how he integrates the yoga poses into his work as a singing teacher and how we can begin to consider yoga as a technology in which to approach our singing.  Mark Moliterno (MM, E-RYT500, C-IAYT, YACEP, POLY®, FOUNDER OF YOGAVOICE®) is an award-winning professional singer, voice teacher, yoga teacher, IAYT-certified Yoga Therapist, workshop leader, and author. He is a thought-leader in the area of 21st Century vocal pedagogy and a master teacher of both singing and classical yoga. His extensive performing career has taken him to many countries in a variety of leading operatic roles and as a concert soloist and recitalist. Additionally, he has completed more than 1200 hrs of formal study in yoga teaching and yoga therapeutics. A sought-after clinician, he presents YogaVoice® workshops at professional conferences and gatherings internationally. Mark is recognized for his one-on-one therapeutic mentoring and as a specialist in helping people understand and uncover their free, authentic voices. Mark Moliterno holds the BM and MM degrees in Voice and Opera from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music where his mentor was the famous vocal pedagogue, Richard Miller. Mark was introduced to yoga in 1985 when he met and studied with Larry Payne, PhD in Los Angeles at Samata Yoga. Over the years he has studied and practiced Viniyoga, Classical Yoga, and Ashtanga Yoga and subsequently became an E-RYT500 and Comprehensive Yoga Therapist through the YogaLife Institute of Pennsylvania. In 2016, Mark received the credential, "IAYT-certified yoga therapist", from the International Association of Yoga Therapists and in 2017 he was credentialed as a Prime of Life Yoga® (POLY) instructor. His yoga mentors are Larry Payne, PhD and Robert Butera, PhD. Mark's yoga teaching style is unique and balanced, with detailed attention to the coordinated, responsive awareness of breathing, physical alignment, and mental focus. www.theyogavoice.com | @theyogavoice Choir Baton Host: Beth Philemon @bethphilemon | www.bethphilemon.com Visit Choir Baton Online: @choirbaton | www.choirbaton.com Choir Baton Theme Song by Scott Holmes

Larry is founding president of the International Association of Yoga Therapists and director of the Yoga Therapy RX certification program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. In our conversation we talk about how meeting some of the legends of modern yoga inspired his move from working as a successful advertising executive to becoming one of the founders of Yoga Therapy in America. Larry shares some great stories of his time with TKV Desikachar and offers some invaluable career advice to yoga teachers and therapists.Samata Yoga Centre: https://samata.com/Intro Music: A Beautiful Mine by RJD2Support the Podcast!1. Leave a review on iTunes, or share with your friends on social media2. Become a Patreon supporter at http://patreon.com/brianjamesteaching and gain access to many hours of yoga practice resources including vinyasa sequences, breathwork, chanting and guided meditations.3. Leave a one-time donation at http://paypal.me/medicinepathyogaAbout Brian JamesBrian James is a yoga teacher, integrative coach, musician and artist currently living in Montréal, Canada with his wife, astrologer Debbie Stapleton and their two Boston Terriers, Kingston and Sweetie. He has been exploring the intersection of music, yoga and shamanism for over 20 years.medicinepathyoga.combrianjamesyoga.cominstagram.com/brianjamesyogaSupport the Medicine Path PodcastSubscribe! RSS / iTunes / Google Playtags: larry payne, yoga, yoga therapy, desikachar, krishnamacharya, career

Larry Payne, founder of Prime of Life Yoga and Yoga Therapy Rx, gives J a dose of expertise and humor in this conversation about his life and career. They discuss his journey to India and the many amazing teachers he encountered, the influence of TKV Desikachar on his life and teaching, bridging yoga and western medicine and the challenges therein, differences between yoga and yoga therapy, and the grand picture of yoga spreading around the world with the power of its transformative qualities. This episode is brought to you by YogaAnatomy.net.   This episode is part of our premium podcast subscription. To subscribe and support the show… GET PREMIUM.  

Today’s interview is a special one. I have the privilege to share with you the heart-and-soul voice of one of my favorite yoga teachers, Lisa Daugherty. She shares her experience of saying yes to the callings of her wild soul; growing through life and love; not being afraid to have breath and sound behind her voice; the medicine of yoga; and the courage to trust with a compassionate heart. This is a very human-to-human, heart-to-heart conversation. Lisa has enjoyed practicing and teaching yoga in and around central Indiana since 2002. Grounded in a deep connection to the earth, her teachings are rooted in creativity, wisdom and grace, earned over the years, by mothering four daughters, discipline, hard work, good friends, patience, and years of working as a doula to empower women through pregnancy and birth. She has contributed to numerous 200 hour yoga teacher training programs; and was twice the technical editor and video model for Yoga for Dummies, by Larry Payne. She can often be found in the woods, or on her bike, and hanging out with friends and family, laughing, singing, playing, planning, creating and sitting. She teaches many weekly yoga classes and workshops throughout the Indianapolis area; and also does private yoga instruction and Thai massage. In her classes, you can expect to hear a story or poem, maybe sing or be sung to, practice in a focused environment for the sincere cultivation of conscious breathing, mindful movements, rooted in yoga poses and somatic movement practices that strengthen and stabilize the body and mind, with deep respect for her students well being. For more information, go to http://realgeniuslife.com/podcast.

Phil Goldberg and Dennis Raimondi interview Larry Payne, Ph.D. They speak about designing yoga for people in midlife, Indra Devi and other yoga luminaries that Larry has known, as well as the development of Yoga Therapy as a discipline. A special thank you goes to Spirit Matters Talk for making this interview available here.

Larry Payne discussion by Discussion by Dennis and Phil

Larry Payne, PhD, is an internationally respected yoga teacher and author. A founding father of Yoga Therapy in the U.S., he is coauthor of Yoga Rx and the bestselling Yoga for Dummies. He is based in Los Angeles, where he founded the Samata Yoga Center, Prime of Life Yoga® and the Yoga Therapy Rx program at Loyola Marymount University. Over a career of 30 years, he has accomplished many firsts, including serving as founding president of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, cofounding the yoga program at the UCLA School of Medicine, teaching yoga at the World Economic Forum, and doing a headstand at the North Pole. We spoke about designing yoga for people in midlife, Indra Devi and other yoga luminaries he’s known, and the development of Yoga Therapy as a discipline. Learn more about Larry Payne here: http://www.samata.com/?page_id=21

How can the practices of yoga help us to have radiant health? Arising from the inherently therapeutic practices of the ancient system of yoga, Yoga Therapy is now a field for active research and treatment. The blossoming field of Yoga Therapy uses yoga's tools to help clients maintain wellness, prevent chronic disease, and improve the course of numerous illnesses. Larry Payne, author of Yoga Therapy and Integrative Medicine, joins regular guest host Dr. Laurel Trujillo for a discussion of Yoga Therapy's vast potential. Tune in and find out more about how yoga can help to heal body, mind, and spirit.   

About the book: If you’ve experienced loss, you may feel intense emotional or even physical pain. In fact, it’s not uncommon for grieving people to experience depression, anxiety, fatigue, and a variety of other physical, mental, and spiritual symptoms. If you’ve tried other ways to move beyond your loss but have yet to find relief, you may be surprised to discover the transformative effects of yoga. Yoga for Grief Relief combines over 100 illustrations of gentle yogic poses and the power of psychophysiology and neuroscience to help you recapture a true sense of well-being. You’ll also find breathing exercises, cleansing techniques, and self-relaxation tips to help you work through your loss and begin on the journey to self-knowledge and re-identification. At its core, yoga is about accepting change. If you are open to viewing your loss as an opportunity for growth, this book will help transform your grief with gentle clarity and awareness. To find out more, visit yogaforgriefrelief.com About the author: Antonio Sausys, MA, CMT, RYT, is a somatic psychotherapist and yoga instructor specializing in one-on-one yoga therapy for people with chronic and acute medical conditions, as well as emotional imbalance. He studied with yoga masters and teachers such as Indra Devi, Swami Maitreyananda, and Larry Payne. He has continued his professional development with training in integrative grief therapy with Lyn Prashant, foot reflexology, Swedish therapeutic massage, and Reiki. Antonio teaches and lectures periodically at the University of California, Berkeley; at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. He is a member of the World Yoga Council, the International Association of Yoga Therapists, and the Association for Death Education and Counseling. He is the founder and executive director of Yoga for Health—the International Yoga Therapy Conference, and television host for YogiViews.

Speaker Topic - Integrative Well-Being Dr. David Allen, a graduate of UCLA Medical School, has been in practice for over 30 years. Dr. Allen wrote the foreword to actress, health activist and author Suzanne Somers'  bestselling book “Slim and Sexy Forever”. While a medical student, he became interested in alternative medicine, and began a lifelong investigation into meditation, diet and nutrition, Oriental health practices (including tai chi chuan and acupuncture), and the relationship between the mind, the body, and our emotional states. A pioneering figure in alternative/integrative medicine, Dr. Allen founded the La Jolla Clinic of Preventative Medicine, and was the Medical Director of the Center for Holistic Health in Solana Beach, California, one of the first alternative medical facilities in the United States. Currently he is in private practice in Los Angeles, and is a frequent lecturer throughout California, including at the prestigious Esalen Institute in Big Sur, and as a guest faculty member in Loyola Marymount University's pioneering program Yoga Therapy Rx, directed by leading yoga expert Larry Payne, Ph.D.  For more information visit David Allen