:: June 2006 Volume 5/Number 4

Sitting Down With : John Abbott

By Julie Diefe

 

From Spanish and French language interpreter for the State Department, to international investment banker, to owner and president of the Yoga Journal magazine, the world’s largest yoga magazine….how does that happen? What is the motivation? Sitting down with John Abbott to learn what makes him tick, a softer side than that of powerful Type – A corporate executive emerges. Yet…(not nyet, although the Yoga Journal publishes in Russian, too, these days, as well as Spanish and Italian) the drive and love of different cultures is still evident - just influenced by the practice.

Julie: In your eight-year tenure at the helm of the Yoga Journal, what are the most significant changes you’ve seen in the yoga world?

John: The yoga community and the number of people participating in yoga have grown and, along with it, an industry that has gone through a great deal of growth and development since the mid-90s has been born.

It was an industry in the early to mid-90s characterized by people like Sara Chambers, the founder of Hugger Mugger - mom and pop businesses - and now we have people like Nike who are highly invested in yoga.

Yoga has become accepted and attractive in our publicity driven, commercial society.

Julie: We all have a history with yoga, what’s yours?

John: I went to graduate school in the mid-60s in Berkeley where yoga was known, but it was part of this curiosity looking to the east, looking for our truth, for solutions.

Julie: When did you take up the practice?

John: In 1978, when I first began yoga, I was a very intense, somewhat compulsive marathon runner. I was living in Paris, and I discovered yoga as a result of going to a doctor who scolded me for not listening to my body. As I was leaving his office he suggested that I might try yoga and that’s what took me to search it out.

Julie: So that you could continue to run?

John: So that I could first fix all of my injuries and then so I could continue to run. I was able to run for at least 20 years more than I probably would have if it hadn’t been for my taking up Iyengar yoga.

Julie: You’re not running now?

John: Oh, you get addicted, and I have run if not every day, certainly every single week regularly for 40 years.

Julie: That’s amazing.

John: It has two sides to the coin: one might be excellent and the other is wrong. It has a mindless repetitive dimension to it and it’s an invitation to repetitive stress; whereas discovering yoga was much more striving to balance and listen to the body. The yoga opened up the internal ears. For example, think about your feet. Most runners don’t think much about their feet; they’re there and they go along. But do they really think about ‘can you move your fourth toe?’ With most runners their feet go to sleep and they become deaf, mine very much so. Yoga was a means that was purely a physical pursuit, but I came in contact with some wonderful yoga teachers.

Julie: Here in California?

John: I had won a prize at the CitiCorp Investment Bank in 1978. Once a year they send one top level executive to the Stanford business school. I was living in Paris and went off on this sabbatical—which was marvelous—and the second day at Stanford I was walking past the student union and I saw on the girl’s gym a small sign: Co-Ed Yoga Classes. ‘That’s what I need!’

There I met a marvelous teacher who I still know, Elise Miller. I also met Judith Lasater and Jean Couch and these people were all in a passionate pursuit of Iyengar Yoga at that time.
My very first teacher in Paris wasn’t really clear what her lineage was, and as I think back it was probably a Sivananda-type practice. But at Stanford I got the bug for this electri-
city, this energy about B.K.S. Iyengar, and so my primary practice has been the Iyengar method. Certainly now in my job at Yoga Journal, I try other forms of yoga, but my main staple is my daily practice, and I think of Iyengar teachers as my principle teachers.

Julie: What would you say are the characteristics of an outstanding yoga teacher?

John: Integrity and sincerity in the conduct of their life and in their practices distinguishes the yoga teachers from the teachers of other exercise routines. It’s a very serious practice with an intellectual dimension, physical and very much spiritual.

And a real benefit of yoga is that it provides you with a set of practices that help you to conduct a more purposeful life and so the upstanding yoga teachers, the ones that stand out, embody this.

Julie: Would you say yoga is a lifestyle and, if so, in what ways?

John: Yoga is a life pursuit; lifestyle doesn’t appeal to me as a characterization of yoga. Lifestyles relate often to the clothes you wear and the cosmetics you use and the crowd you run with. Yoga transcends these things. It represents a set of practices and a pathway to spiritual, mental and physical development.

Julie: I’m interested in your corporate culture. One of the first things that struck me when I walked in, was that it feels different here in San Francisco than in your old offices in Berkeley.

John: Yes, these offices were chosen and designed very purposefully. The old offices, which a number of people were very sorry to leave, were quite funky with 1925 urinals, offices spread over three or four different floors, elevators breaking down every few days, and it was somewhat hazardous, too: a tall building bound to collapse in an earthquake.

Here, we have space that lends itself to good communications, a certain amount of it open, but not totally open. The offices have windows that people can look out through. You’ll notice the color palette we have on the walls is the color palette of the magazine.

Julie: That caught my attention.

John: Plus it’s quiet and it has good light, which are my criteria for good living space, too, and since we ‘live here’ - as you know, long hours - calm, quiet space with good light is what you need. On top of that, it’s very functional because we are all on one floor.

Julie: Let’s not forget about the yoga room!

John: The yoga room is the center piece of our offices. It’s our sacred space and we don’t allow people to wear shoes; our yoga community thinks that’s great but others think we’re weird. It is also our conference room.

Julie: How often are classes held?

John: We organize classes Monday through Friday, and we have four different yoga teachers from the community. We try and choose young, up-and-coming yoga teachers who are not on the conference circuit and are not nationally renowned, although right now we have someone in exception to that, Richard Rosen. Richard has been associated with the Yoga Journal for 20 years and he does a lot of our media reviews and he’s a wonderful Iyengar teacher.

Julie: There’s another national yoga publication launching shortly by Rodale Press, one of the largest publishers in the health and fitness industry. Because you’re a yoga practitioner as well as a publisher, do you ascribe to the unlimited abundance line of
thinking or as a publisher are you pragmatic about the emergence of yet another national yoga magazine?

John: Well, I have mixed feelings - you would know about that. It’s difficult to balance the business of yoga and it’s difficult to make money with a yoga publication. We have been fortunate and blessed that we are profitable and doing well as a result of a balance of different yoga businesses. So we see Rodale coming out with a yoga magazine as an immediate threat in terms of advertisers.

Aside from that concern, I think that it validates the coming of age and the mainstreaming of yoga. It’s really very positive and will be interesting to see how they approach it. Are they going to approach it the way Breathe magazine did because they’re calling it Yoga Lifestyle? There’s a slight bit of apprehension about the financial duress, which sounds like a strong word, but it is correct in terms of competition for advertising given their abilities; they can use their Runner’s World and Prevention and Men’s Health and now Women’s Health to do advertising the way we can’t.

Julie: On a scale of one to ten with one being the least serious, how serious would you rate the Yoga Journal in terms of a yoga publication?

John: I would rate it pretty highly, eight or nine, not rating virtually anything as a ten. And I say that fully recognizing that there is content in the Yoga Journal that many of my yoga friends, serious yoga practitioners, view as fluffy. But the Yoga Journal is meant to package yoga in a way that makes it accessible and attractive to an emerging yoga community, and at the same time maintain integrity of the teachings, and that’s the balancing act that we have to play.

Julie: Is that one of your biggest challenges of running this magazine?

John: Yes, but I think the greatest challenge is the creative side of the editorial and the art. And, too, it is being faithful to the integrity of the teachings, not slipping into commercialism and mixing yoga with other stuff. The commercialism of the ads are fine, I have no conflict with that. But I do have a problem when you talk about making yoga teachers over a weekend or mixing yoga with other practices where it becomes diluted in an attempt to find a broader appeal. So taking these teachings and making them fresh and attractive, that’s the challenge.

Julie: The Yoga Journal is also published in other languages. Would you talk a little about that?

John: In my first meaningful job in life I worked as an interpreter in French and Spanish for the State Department and then I went off to work for the Citicorp Investment Bank overseas for 20 years. In the last several years, soon after beginning this Yoga Journal project, I searched for ways to possibly internationalize Yoga Journal and I think this is really a testimony to the power of the practices of yoga in that this project initiated in Russia.

Julie: Why Russia?

John: In Russia I met a man who was very successful in publishing but also a passionate yoga person and he’s been extremely successful in licensing other major international publications. He publishes most of the first publications in Russian, including Cosmopolitan.

When they started Cosmopolitan in Russia they thought that they would license it and use 70 - 90 percent of the content from the U.S. edition, translate it and publish it. It didn’t work. Russians might like sex, but they didn’t like the content of the U.S. Cosmo so they ended up doing 90 percent Russian content and putting the Cosmo label on it.

With Yoga Journal it’s just the opposite. You look at these covers and the content and 70 to 80 percent is content directly from the Yoga Journal U.S. which shows how similar this is in different countries. In China it’s the same, in Brazil it’s the same, now there’s an emerging and a very vibrant yoga movement in many of these countries: in Russia, in China, in Hong Kong, Singapore, in Brazil, and really very big in Brazil and this is just wonderful.

Julie: That must feel good.

John: Yes, and they want to do conferences and they want to do videos. It really is amazing.

Julie: How do you manage the growth?

John: Well, it’s a real challenge because when it starts to get bigger you need a bigger organization and you need more capital and it becomes complicated. At some point I’m going to need to join forces either with a bigger organization or allow some investors so we can do this in an orderly way.

Julie: I’m fascinated by people in our age group who are thriving and…

John: You bring some years on yourself when you say that. I’m a newly minted, fully registered Medicare person at this point.

Julie: You’re thriving and you’re still inventing and you seem to love every minute of it. What is your secret?

John: The secret to this is the same challenge every college student or young person has: to find a pursuit or a career that really resonates with your passion, your likes, your strengths and most of them don’t.

The great luxury is to have discovered that the Yoga Journal was about to go bankrupt in 1997 and have taken a chance on it because the Yoga Journal gave me a platform to join my passion and my pursuit of yoga in a much more serious way that I didn’t have as merely a fringe activity from investment banking.

I was able to convert the hobby into something I could do freely all the time. I could take classes from the staff and I would go to all of them as if it were a great fringe benefit, which I consider it to be. And all the contact with all the yoga community - fabulous!

And this past year I invited Mr. Iyengar to come and he accepted and I spent ten days living in the same house with him in Estes Park. I mean this is just an infusion of energy and inspiration that’s very rare. How often in life do you have the opportunity not only to come into contact with, but really engage with and live with a truly great inspiring person? There are only a few of them on the planet.

All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2002-2006
LA Yoga Ayurveda & Health Magazine

.