There may be a sea of conflicting teachers and studios and DVDs and theories about yoga and its wondrous payoffs, but Churchill thinks that somewhere in all of that noise there's a yoga for everyone. Or, as she says in the movie, "Despite its obvious contradictions, I still believe there is a true yoga, a life-changing practice, that can lead a person to happiness" - and, she adds in a perky kicker, "maybe even enlightenment!"
"As I look back at it four years later, it was naïve thinking" says Churchill today. The construct of trying to push your way to having enlightenment delivered to you on a timeline? "Therein lies the flaw of the premise," she admits. "It took me making this film to find that out."
The volunteer for the journey was one Nick Rosen, a journalist who had enough free time and few enough commitments to give himself over to the project. Churchill follows Rosen with her camera every day for half a year as he tries out a huge variety of yoga classes and teachings in New York City and Woodstock, and then in Hawaii and Los Angeles, and finally in India. He spends time with yoga bigwigs Norman Allen, BKS Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, and Madan Kataria, the man behind laughter yoga. Rosen even visits with wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, who says he's all about yoga for the regular guy ("You say Namaste, I say T and A").
It's a funny set-up, trying to foist a conversion onto a cynic. "Because I came at [the project] as a yoga practitioner, I wanted the person I was focusing on to be resistant," says Churchill. "It really wouldn't be much of - well, I wondered how much of a search it would be if someone was really gung-ho on yoga."
