How "Wild Bill" Got Into Yoga

How “Wild Bill” Got Into Yoga

During the setup I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with a German man who is about the same age as me. At first glance he’s kind of a rough looking character who resembles the wild west icon “Wild Bill Hickock” but within a short conversation I was quickly reminded how you can’t judge a book by its cover. Anyway, we have worked well together and share a similar sense of humor. I asked him one day how he got into Yoga. He then began to tell me his story with a thick German accent. I’ll call him “Wild Bill”.

When “Wild Bill” was younger he loved to party with his friends. They would go out, listen to loud music, drink, and party for days. It was good times all the time. Then one day while he and his friends were partying at one of their favorite places on a lake next to a Nuclear power plant he took some LSD. “Wild Bill” was tripping pretty hard when he looked above the Nuclear power plant and saw four big green letters in the sky spelling out YOGA. He had never heard of Yoga before and when he came back down he was quite curios.

The internet wasn’t happening yet so he went to a book store and bought two books on yoga. He spent some time studying this strange stuff called yoga and finally tried it out. In the midst of his first experiment with it he had a profound experience of being his true self for the first time and burst out laughing uncontrollably. At that moment he gave up all the partying and anything that had to do with it. He adopted habits of clean living and became a vegetarian. That was 22 years ago.

Since then he as attended more yoga festivals than I can keep a track of and has done some wild stuff like chanting a mantra for 72 hours straight, lived on nothing but melons for days, and spent time with different masters of yoga disciplines. From what I can tell yoga has been a very positive thing in “Wild Bills” life and I must admit he’s shared some interesting wisdom with me. “Wild Bill” is just one of many in a sea of diverse personalities here at the Yoga festival.