A little yoga mind control is part of the art of the deal
Posted on Monday, June 9, 2008
Many of the men Cliff Riggs sees on mats at the Yoga Studio of Little Rock seem to be spilling out of boardrooms. Riggs, 70, said that he teaches professional men who often come in during their lunch breaks. While sometimes “they don’t tell anybody else in the office for a while” about their yogic toe-dipping, Riggs said that if they stick with it, these same men often become some of his best advertisers.
Matt Krepps, 40, co-owner of Barefoot Studio in Little Rock, said that a man “in a higher-power position or trying to be upwardly mobile... gets around with his head but lives a short distance from his body.” Krepps adds that “In the boardroom, these guys accumulate tons of stress in their bodies,” and while finding free time outside of work and family can be tough, “those that do find time to work out find out that it isn’t helping with the mental part of the stress.” Krepps says the Art of War by Sun-Tzu, the Chinese military treatise from the sixthcentury B. C., is required reading in some business schools. He said some men turn to yoga while trying to develop Sun-Tzu’s “balanced mental warrior ethos” and enter the yoga room with a “martial-arts paradigm” in mind that stresses equanimity and conservation of energy. “Everything for those guys rides on the big decisions [at work ] and so that means when the time of the big deal is going down they need to be cool no matter what,” Krepps said.
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