so welcome wanted to have a conversation and I thought perhaps we can accomplish a couple of things number one is maybe touch on the landscape of yoga and how perhaps as teachers or even as practitioners we get a better sense of how yoga can more ideally meet these times and perhaps some of the ch challenges the times presents to yoga teachers and yoga practitioners moreover how through our actions over the last 10 20 years as yoga became popular and began to get seated in gyms and health clubs and all sorts of varieties of Studios with all sorts of ideas about what yoga was I thought perhaps we can kind of walk back to get a larger View and ultimately meet the moment I think in a in more in a more strategic way and when I say strategic it really speaks to not how as teachers and practitioners we can necessarily be more successful but really how practice can be more meaningful and ultimately how we can build a lasting Foundation upon which yoga can actually Thrive Beyond this generation and the future generation and how really the authoritative wisdom of yoga can really breathe life into us as individuals as well as a larger culture okay so let's kind of this is an opportunity to begin to start at the beginning and frame a couple of things foundational principles so that um we have a common language Let me just again you know I will I will this is a moment of conf true confession but I think it actually touches upon something that a lot of yoga teachers have felt in their life and that is this question that in inevitably confronts us anyone who's taught yoga this idea someone asks you what do you do and you say well you feel like you're forced to say I teach yoga I know me personally that has been one of the least I've always I've always dreaded that a conversation coming to that and me having to admit it because in a sense yoga teacher wow it's a pretty wide world of not just approaches to yoga but varying levels of understanding of what yoga is and varing levels of skill about teaching yoga and if you've been teaching it for three or four or five or six months and you've been teaching it for 40 years you basically wind up being labeled as a yoga teacher so you have different not only different styles different kind of interpretations of what yoga is different intentions of what yoga is and then there's this just this blanket terminology for the profession as such or what you do you know those of us who tried to separate from from this kind of wild um popery varying kinds of teachers uh have come up with this term yoga educator which somehow I think tries to elevate us out of the out of the morass of confusion that evolves around yoga and yoga teaching Etc so are you with me on on that I mean I think a lot of people feel as I do and that is that yoga teacher is a weird blanket term for um a lot of variations on the theme and partially it comes about because there's a fundamental distinction to be made so when we say the word yoga we are really elucidating on two concepts one is that yoga is something that you do and so that is you go to class and like great likelihood of if you go to a yoga class you are doing yoga movements that we call that are called Asos classically and it could be everything from like an absolute room you walk into a room that you walk into that's the temperature is 140° and it's a set series of postures or it's a Non-Stop flow of postures to you go to uh an environment that is um practiced by elderly people who are really working on fundamental work with the breath for example or very gentle movement it's all called Yoga Yoga is a means it's a methodology it's a in invol involves a series of practices and techniques and things that you do with varying degrees of emphasis and orientation and goals in mind and then there's this other aspect of yoga which is little less commonly it's a it's a refrain or a context that's not used as frequently which means yoga as a state as a quality of being more more specifically as a quality of perceiving or perception in this context yoga becomes ultimately ultimately the experience of One's Own Essence the essential self or Essence experiencing itself yeah that's kind of the state of yoga furthermore it's described as being only accessible to those whose intellect whose mind has become quiet in other words there's a quality of experience that's accessible only when the Mind becomes still that's yoga both are yoga the doing of yoga methodologies and the state of yoga now there are various stages of that state it's worth saying they culminate in a particular elevated really Indescribable place somati but there are levels of even somati according to the tradition there are nine levels of Sade nine levels of absorption whether your attention is outward or inward whether you're experiencing a sense of individuality a sense of individual sense of bliss or or Beyond anyway point is all of that is Yoga it's all yoga it's kind of a mishmash of yoga but generally speaking when we say we're going to do yoga we are talking about the first we are going to go do it we're not necessarily going to experience the state and that refers that kind of takes me back to something I've said many times and I think it's relevant to remember this and that is that you can do the poses and not necessarily experience the state you can experience the state and not necessarily do the poses so if the goal is the gifts the treasures that un that unveil themselves when you're in the state of yoga you may or may not need to do Asma and this is really the where the confusion the corner of the corner cor Stone of the confusion is and that is that you can do yoga and really what it means is you're doing ASA you can do as with loud music you can do ASA again as I said in a superheated room and they actually teach goat ASA and they teach weed and ASA and the wine and as and chocolate and AA but they call it yoga it it's fair to conclude that at the end of most of those classes while you might feel better you haven't necessarily achieved what I've at least begun to sketch as the state of yoga okay so that whole confusion now begins to say well okay if you teach yoga you could be a goat a yoga teacher a weed and yoga teacher etc etc etc and all the countless variations you could be teaching aen and have a fantastic playlist music accompanying you throughout the process and really the orientation is just get those poses done man if you do them well if you do them mindfully if you do them to the right Rhythm that somehow you would achieved yoga but that is that is not that is not necessarily the case at all and so that's part of the embarrassment I don't know the hesitation that a lot of us have about saying I'm a yoga teacher so what I thought we'd do today is just kind of move the conversation a little further down the line and just say look there's many possible outcomes from a yoga practice I think it would have helped a long time ago if we just said I'm an Austina teacher I'm a yoga teacher but you know those days have passed that opportunity and for that distinction probably does not exist anymore so let's talk about outcomes so there's clearly a possibility of the orientation or the outcome or the achievement that you are leaning into or directing a class toward you're picking modalities the aess the intensity the the what it is that links the poses Etc they say non-stop movement up dog down dog Sun salutes Etc and you could say it has an element where really the primary focus is Fitness various degrees of Fitness right and that's I would say an a possibility of what you want to get out of the yoga and you design a class like that or you create a class and you guide a class like that there's a few things about that one is like yeah you can get fitter I mean you can you can be more fit but I would submit to you it's there's other methods to become more fit that are highly much more effective much more efficient personally for Fitness I lean into high-intensity interval training in 20 minutes of of that youve multiplied your Fitness level quite quite a few times over what you can do when you're doing yoga we we I mean just in simple terms I don't even have to go into it per se only that if you're not elevating your heart rate and aerobic capacity 70 80% of your capacity for a certain level of phase of time then you're really not building Fitness per se and if you're doing that and doing yoga at the same time I can say you you may be getting fit but you're not doing yoga you're actually not doing yoga you're doing a fit Fitness thing using yogic looking modalities ASAS you can do it in this Fitness kind of Arena you can also do it as a way to master poses get more flexible get stronger and that's interesting because the poses do offer a kind of mirror not so much that if I perfect all the poses that I'm perfect but moreover that if you're moving toward potentially holding pose experiencing it and exploring a pose and moving deeper gradually in the pose as you are remain mindful of the way you breathe the way you're breathing while you're in the pose and continuing to drop into the posture more completely then the pose is actually become something bigger than a physical Endeavor becomes an opportunity to begin to see where the boundaries of memory and our thought process and our distractedness our breathing the body where that interface lies the body I like to say is our physical memory it's our material memory and so when we move into different postures it provides the opportunity if we are mindful not just by virtue of being there but if we are mindful mindful of how we breathe mindful of the thoughts that surface mindful of where and how we hold restriction in our body now ASA becomes something different so it's not just mastering the pose but it's also beginning to transform the mind the Mind stuff that the pose actually has revealed or is revealing to us now if my mind is externally stimulated externally oriented and in fact great music can be a wonderful accompany to accompaniment to your physical movements and your ASA practice but unfortunately that subversion of your attention to James Brown or whatever it is in the background inside joke on the James Brown thing you know whatever the music is then part of you is less present for the sub conscious experiences that are the the the that can possibly be revealed when you're holding a pose so the music and stuff actually becomes uh a limiting factor in the extent to which the posture can help you know yourself more completely there are I mean there's yes there are other elements of U I'm not even going to put in the fitness department but we're going to say that yoga can be therap can be therapeutic now keep in mind it can be therapeutic on a physical level or a mental psychological level right now we're just talking physically and you can use ASA to change your neuromuscular patterning to improve mechanics so things like a bad back by all means if you are selecting the right postures or if you're you've received skilled gu guidance about the right ways to condition back issues and for example then indeed we can use it to enhance us and transform us physically let's talk a little bit more let's go out of the Physical Realm I mean there's more ways that it can be used but those are the primary ways that I can think of and I guess that you know they all have value how much value can be argued um I learned that yoga if it did not affect the mind that really was not yoga so remember for the to speak to the these distinctions I'm I'm making I'm wanting us to discern the difference between yoga practice and as practice ultimately as a yoga teacher ASAS are just tools but they are tools ultimately that are meant to impact the mind so furthermore now what I would say is there's three fundamental areas and each of those have subsets within them I'll just try and cover these relatively efficiently in a more compressed way just for time but now really we use yoga as a orientation to the mind mind different my strategy the particular poses I would use necessarily or the way I practice those poses my attention to certain details will begin to change in particular the breath but the way I string together the postures would depend on how I want to impact the mind and there's more than one way that we impact the Mind perhaps the most important and most fundamental way that I would in I would look to impact the Mind through yogic modalities including breath work and ASA would be to create steadiness mental emotional steadiness and that speaks to really a very fundamental challenge that we all face as human beings which is that we confront and we live within material existence everything has a halflife you and I are going to die doesn't matter how much headstand I do doesn't matter how many students I have doesn't matter how long I can sit and meditate doesn't matter how many times I've done my Mantra I will die everyone will so that's creates a certain level of insecurity below the surface we would rather of course not acknowledge it not necessarily pay attention to it but we don't want to live with the knowledge that we're going to die all all the time but the reality is that as a result of that presence the even if the knowledge of that is subconscious we don't acknowledge it it creates a certain level of fear and we live with fear human beings live with fear and that of course influences all sorts of Behavioral emotional challenges and things like that so if I can use use these Mo modalities AA and breath work and attention work and intention work in the all brought together into a unique kind of alemy now my orientation is to to find steadiness if I can do that then I become more capable of dealing with uncertainty of dealing with change of staying calm in the midst of turbulence as things are as you're thrown into uncertain times there's a certain level of stability that you can continue to draw from to meet those times in the most effective way possible and so that makes it possible for you to be more likely to respond to life to respond to stimuli as opposed to react human beings are literally hardwired to prioritize fear and anger super primitive um impulses that rise along the brain stem and cued your lyic system and so if you can if we can ultimately provide the possibility of being more steady we can shift from a more reactive primitive fundamental biological urges tribalism group think and as I said fear and anger and we can bring other parts of the brain online and the result of that is that we can become more capable of choosing how we will respond to life steadiness is uh I think underrated in the yoga world the ability to remain stable in the midst of change and that's a specific orientation the second orientation I would say is to begin once we establish a greater and and by the way steadiness you know this great terminology now that's part of our ongoing broad lexicon which is this idea of reg ulation self-regulation the ability to self-regulate to strengthen your homeostatic responsiveness meaning that when you go out of balance you can come back to B state of balance most easily and most efficiently which as stress becomes more prolonged and chronic we become less capable of so in essence steadiness helps us Elevate our capacity to return to balance but now there's a second strategy that I'd like to highlight when it comes to the mind and that relates to beginning to deepen in your experience of what it means to be still the simple thought is this have you have you ever have you ever had the experience or have you ever reflected on who you are when your mind is still what's that experience we kind of have a lot of familiarity with our thoughts and what it's like when our mind is spinning evidently we have about 880,000 thoughts a day less than 2,000 a day are original we kind of think 90 some odd percent of them are the same thoughts day after day but who am I when my mind stands still that's the question who am I when my mind is still this profound teaching in Psalms be still and know that I'm God gives us some clue I don't mean in an egotistical sense it just simply means that there's a way of there's a communion there's an interface there's an experience that Dawns when the mind is still that doesn't Dawn at any other time this is why why meditation and deep relaxation Yoga Nidra why these profound practices were so prized in fact also I would offer why they have lived as long as they have the reason I've practiced yoga as much as I have over the decades which means basically every day for over 40 years with very few exceptions is that I learned early on that when I got quiet there was some profound experience Sublime experience that I couldn't get to through my rational mind that's what most people who practice yoga have learned and begun to connect to so the second option around how and why and your purpose for teaching and how you know the direction your teaching will go is can you ultimately look to deepening your experience of Stillness and thus learning and touching upon entering into this realm of who you are when your mind stands still be still and know there's a knowingness there and invaluable gift that for me certainly when I began practicing and why why I continue to practice reintroduces me to the innate wholeness that I am and that wholeness is the core of my what I would offer is the human Spirit ever renewable our bodies get tired sooner or later we'll St start to break down and age and everything else and they're prone to injuries and hurts and ET and we also have a kind of emotional threshold of how much we can handle I just recently read for example that a day of um heightened intense loneliness has the equivalence on your longevity as if you had smoked 15 cigarettes so our body is not um indefatigable indestructible but somehow human spirit is and so thus Stillness is an opportunity to enter into that and what I would offer is Yoga practice not just AA but the intelligent linking of breath and movement intention attention understanding yoga in an entirely different way than in the way I described the physical options as it relates to it is a deepening into that state it doesn't happen accidentally it can but what I'm talking about is a strategic orientation in that direction aiming you or your students into the profundity of Stillness there's a third option because that's a kind of communion or coherence the unification but there's a third one in which the Mind becomes quiet enough to be able to observe it itself and we can argue whether or not your ability to objectify your own mind is actually of mind or is it of a something of a higher nature than mind I'm now talking about what's so often described as mindfulness I'm talking about you know it's the idea of awareness in Sanskrit it's the concept of budhi Bui is not it's like the higher mind the mind that sees you observes you is never impacted by your thoughts your emotions which are always changing is able to objectify the mind and so that would be a third aspect of practice that's oriented to the mind what I learned and gathered through my study and reference in scriptures is the idea this kind of comes under this heading of Moon based practices and it's not important to categorize them but I I just just offer them here so people have studied either with me or with others and have heard that terminology you now have a framework for understanding it but within even the moon practices there's a great wide variation of possibilities okay so um that third one again is at the level of insight buy and now there's a third a third dimension to practice practice that's worthy of us kind of bringing out to the four and this is really where the practices of Tantra become most meaningful Tantra yoga and that is to begin to understand yoga is a process for cultivating energy in a way you know you and I spend uh most of our self kind of whether we're in exteroception or interception we see and experience ourselves as a body we see and experience ourselves elves as a body and as a collection of thought and emotions and so what was discovered was the possibility the profound experience that comes from experiencing yourself as really a vessel of energy now for some people that doesn't sound very out there but for some it might something is sustaining you something is engaged in keeping you healthy in your immune function and helping you go to the bathroom and helping you me vocalize and my mind moving uh assimilation for helping me say become enthusiastic in other words I'm speaking about pirana and this is the idea of the great mover that which moves us that's which animates us something moves me to think to move my body to gesture for my mind to move my mouth my vocal cords and so Tantra yoga and yoga itself can be engaged in the process of reducing the obstacles to that energy flow not unlike the way maybe an acupuncturist would work with needles but indeed we can work with breath and we can work with movement ASAS bandas mudras a whole another kind of um vocabulary of yogic techniques come into play to make that really uh meaningful as it relates you know again we're speaking to the energetic effect of Asa I don't necessarily need them when I'm just trying to perfect my body or kind of leaning into the fitness aspect of yoga but I do need them because there's actually different stages of practice and in a subsequent conversation we'll have here will'll speak to them but in short there's this process of removing the obstacles to energy flow as I said much like an acupuncturist would use needles an acupressurist would use thumbs for example we can use postures and we can use breath and we can use intention and then ultimately we want to start to build that energy there's this really simple Phil simple understanding simple principle to get which is that depending upon on where we're at and where we've been and what we've done and what we've been thinking and what we've been going through in our life Energy may be misplaced and imbalanced and sometimes and very often we have a lot of energy in places where it's not necessarily helpful or we have energy that's stagnant and then energies then places in our body that would be fortified and elevated if there was energy flowing through them there's not enough energy moving there so this is when it becomes really meaningful not only to undo the blocks energy flow but to begin to learn how to collect it and not just learn but really do those processes processes that allow that energy to move to a certain place and to enhance certain qualities there's a fundamental principle if you haven't heard me speak to it before it's really worth remembering and that is energy follows thought but also thought follows energy in other words I can actually and I just taught a retreat where some people were amazed in this experience it was it was really quite wonderful to see that light go on and that is that our mental state our ability to get still for example our ability to focus is very much reflective of our energy State and it may actually be quite well it may be significantly more accessible shifting your energy so that your mind changes than actually changing your mind so I can use the shifts of energy certain poses affecting energy differently this is something I devote an entire training to Vinyasa as much as I want to teach ensure that teachers understand the principles of Right movement and how you sequence effectively to stay safe and efficiently to build toward an apex pose even more more meaningful in the overall scope of teaching is to be able to shape People's Energy such that you can move them in a direction toward Stillness or confidence or quietude or elevated enthusiasm and inspiration and really I can change one's Mind by changing one's energy and I just a really brief story and that is in this Last Retreat I taught I I spoke to someone after this particular practice that had this kind of very focused intentionality I'm describing a a a practice specifically meant to help uh contain vital force and as a result of containing vital force M responds differently anyway this gentleman said to me you know I actually was really quite worried over the last few years I've really began to wonder if I had ADHD ad and that practice I felt more mental Clarity and and focus than I have felt in maybe ever this is his language to me more or less and I just want to point out this is someone whom really wasn't expecting the impact to be as significant as it was and the impact was such that it led to an absolute shift in not only the way way they thought but the way they even believed uh their own mind functioned so that speaks to the efficacy and the impact of changing your energy okay then finally along that line and I'll just you know kind of round close out this conversation final this final dimension of practice and this final dimension of practice relates to the idea of oh and by the way that's second one I just described would come under this category of sun again I'll talk about it more in another time and this fire this final stage is fire and again these are we can say they're just symbols but maybe they do me more but it's a conversation for another another it's another conversation and in this final stage is relates to Spirit and that is the ultimately it's a way of transforming the sense of dissolving this sense of separateness there's a distinct set of practices many of them come under the heading of Kundalini Yoga but to be very clear not Kundalini Yoga the brand which has existed for about 60 70 years let's see 60s what are we in now yeah about 60 years but Kundalini Yoga has been a practice that's been around for centuries and centuries and centuries and it does not it's not a specific set of poses it's a it's a thematic principle of how we dissolve the limitations of our perception using energy and using mind and ultimately cultivating a deep heartfelt connection to our source now that gate opens in one of the earlier categories I described in Stillness but now with the force with the elevation in our energetic state that experience of source or Unity expands intensifies and in this final stage there's ultimately um a place if you will of knowingness of knowing in essence that we're not alone that this individual this Corporal body of Mind Corporal body of mind which is finite actually houses the spark of the universe the universe is in me I'm in the universe and there is no distinction there's no drop off from one to the other they are one thing that's another kind of practice and I would I would say that these last two three stages I've described really final stage as I mentioned was fire and Kini yoga but also goes by other names laa yoga shata bakti yoga but all of them come together all of them come together in that moment but do you see how complicated it is to say you're a yoga teacher because the truth is these latter stages these latter three the intention to directly impact the mind in one of those three areas I described the cultivation development collecting harnessing of your life force and finally this ultimate merging with Source require a much higher skill set in the person practicing or the person teaching you to that's leading you to those experiences My Hope Is that these conversations Elevate our understanding of yoga and build a sustainable future for yoga that we come out of this um very limited kind of reductionist concept that yoga is whatever you do if it looks like yoga it's yoga again there's a state the state requires a shift in perception and whether you lean into the practices that aim to impact the mind or aim to impact your vital force or aim to impact you having a direct experience of your source as I said it just requires an intentional orientation skill so on the part of those who are teaching or who are practicing not all practices just because they involve things that look like what we've come to call yoga which is really in most cases just ASA different flavors of Asa practice doesn't mean we're actually doing yoga you know so my hope is that you will continue to deepen evolve your practice one of the great themes is you know continue to practice continue to learn learning is never done so to yoga keep practicing keep evolving stay teachable to the end