Sting Got Me Into Yoga & Yoga Got Me Into Sting
I was a sophomore in high school when I joined my first band. It was an already established local punk band who needed a bass player. I had my own bass and amplifier so I was in. The two guys in the band were a year ahead of me in school but their band had a demo tape and they both had driver’s licenses whereas I was 16 and had braces, so they felt far ahead of me in the school of life. We all bonded on our shared love of punk rock but one band that they introduced me to was The Police, lending me the Live! double CD.
I knew the band by name and was familiar with some of their hits, Roxanne and Every Breath You Take, but never gave them much thought. My new bandmates taught me two important lessons:
The Police = incredible
Sting = the male Yoko Ono
It was their contention that despite being a hell of a songwriter, Sting was a pompous windbag responsible for breaking up one of the greatest bands of all time to go and make music for soccer moms. One exception was that he was able to have sex for 6 hours straight, apparently because of some form of yoga he practiced, which, to teenage boys, was godlike.
Fast forward to 2018, twenty years after being introduced to them, and I had rediscovered my love of The Police. Other than the occasional dip back into their catalog I hadn’t listened to them regularly throughout the years but now, in my late 30s and having shed a good amount (but not all) of the teenage angst I had carried when I was first introduced to them, I had gained a deep appreciation for their slow, reggae infused songs which, as a teenager, I tended to skip over in favor of their fast stuff. If you’ll recall, my introduction to The Police was through their Live! album which, on the first disc, they played everything about twice as fast on their studio albums. In addition to reacquainting myself with one of my former favorite bands, I was also searching for a way to keep in shape. Throughout my 20s weight training kept me fit but I was aging and weights were heavy so lifting wasn’t going to work. Through Siddhartha, a book that was a game changer for me, I was becoming more interested in Eastern thought so I began to think yoga would be beneficial. It seemed to do wonders for Sting, one of its most famous proponents (though everyone knows Gwyneth Paltrow invented it). I still held onto the idea that since his days with The Police he had been making music for soccer moms but, at the time, he was nearing 70, he looked amazing, and that sexual stamina rumor never stopped floating around, so I thought yoga was worth a shot and I hopped on the mat.
I quickly became hooked on yoga. I learned that despite what you see on Instagram with women in the skimpiest outfits they can squeeze into showing themselves as human Super Pretzels ™ and men displaying poses that would suggest they no longer have a need for a sexual partner, yoga is not about how flexible you are or, in my case, aren’t. I’ve now been practicing for nearly 4 years and can’t even get close to touching my toes. Doesn’t matter. It’s more like golf (perhaps not professional but certainly on a recreational level) where you measure your progress against yourself rather than against others. Early on in my foray into yoga I was on my mat waiting for class to begin when Sting’s Fields of Gold came on which prompted an instinctual eye roll. Ugh, Sting’s solo stuff, I thought to myself. Music made for car commercials and wedding dances. By the end of the song, as I emerged from my child’s pose, everything I believed about Sting’s solo offerings had been inverted on its head. There was magic in that moment: the class, the mat, the peacefulness of my surroundings… and the song. It was synchronicity at work. I wasn’t 16 anymore. Sting no longer equaled the male Yoko Ono. Now, Sting equaled smooth.
The more I thought about Sting, the more I began to realize how much we had in common. We are both Libras, both bass players (though our skill levels are miles apart), we share a reverence for the environment, and we both discovered yoga at the age of 38. Sting became an inspiration to me, the yogi sitting on my shoulder. I dropped coffee and picked up tea (don’t worry, eventually I found my way back to the bean). I stayed on the mat. I even began to think of Sting during moments of intimacy, perhaps as a way of extracting some of his storied stamina by power of thought, kind of like that old trick where one thinks about baseball to prolong things. Unfortunately it didn’t help me in that area, though it did provide me with a plethora of awkward thoughts to dissect and meditate on. While I cannot put my finger on exactly what it is, I believe there is a connection between me and Sting. Perhaps due to being older and wiser I no longer see him as the guy that locked up the world’s greatest rock band and threw away the key. Or it may be by virtue of yoga and meditation that provides me with a clear head, allowing me to see Sting as the spirit in the material world that I’ve been searching for.
