All Decked Out

Learn more about Diane's yoga practice.

Can you tell me about the deck your dad built?

My father was a contractor when I was growing up in this sort of very nouveau rich town on the south shore of Long Island where everybody’s dad was the vice president of something. They all got BMWs for their 16th birthday. I so wanted that father! Then you move to Los Angeles where nobody has any parents here and everybody needs my father!

Everybody wants my dad to come over and explain if they really need to retrofit the house or why the roof keeps leaking and that leak isn’t necessarily where the water is coming from. Anything! So it was very nice for both of us when, all of the sudden, he had a set of skills that I needed and all of my peers, who had these really fantastic educations, really revered what he had to share.

I can always design and draw and come up with ideas as did my mom. They always worked together as a nice team. She could come up with a vision and he could build it.

The plan just kept expanding and expanding. There would be days when he’d be out there digging ten feet below to pour concrete to put the beams for the deck. And as it kept growing and growing, I kept thinking, “I’m never going to be able to sell this house because my father built the entire backyard.” His take was, “I don’t care how long it takes or how much work it is as long as there’s no time limit.” When you’re hired to do any kind of carpentry, I think owners of the home are so afraid that they’re going to get ripped off and they’re so worried that it’s not going to come out how they want or it’s going to take too long that they can’t have any fun with the work.

He’s still an artist at the end of the day and he just wanted to let it come to him.

What’s the advantage of doing yoga in your backyard rather than a studio.

No drive time. You shave 20 minutes off the event. Also, I don’t really spend a lot of time outside. When I lived in a little, tiny one-bedroom apartment, I kept dreaming of all of the things I was going to do in the yard. Sadly, now that I have the yard I don’t do any of them. So the only way I get to actually live and breathe and see trees and hear birds is to go out there and do yoga. Once you’re working, it’s like now I have the backyard but I don’t have anytime to use it!

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Other Articles With Diane Farr

Yoga's Farr Out
iane Farr went from magazine humorist to that wacky girl MTV’s Love Lines. Today you’ll catch a glimpse of her grown-up self on the heady drama Numb3rs (the new season starts tonight!) As a mom to a newborn son, Farr and her yoga practice have evolved. Trained as a teacher in India, Farr has made yoga more convenient. Not only does she practice in her own backyard but she and a close circle of friends who moonlight as yoga teachers alternate leading class.

The Road to Om: How Diane Got her Groove Back
You went to an ashram upon the recommendation of your Kundalini teacher Gurmukh at Golden Bridge in California. What was it like?

I didn’t really understand it before I got there. It’s supposed to be a holy communal society. The ashram holds 5000 people. Four thousand orphans lived there. You cook, you clean, you do something to keep the ashram sustainable.

An Interview with Farr on her Yoga Deck
Is it true that in your first Kundalini yoga class with Gurmukh , Winona Ryder was in your class and you thought that was how you became an actress?
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