Practicing the Yoga Sutras | Episode 118 with Carroll Ann Friedmann

(00:09) so shall we start with uh three ohms maybe sure oh [Music] oh so you've recently published this book practicing the yoga suturas um and I'm very curious what inspired you to write this [Music] um my students I uh own a yoga studio we call it a Shala in Charlottesville and about I don't know 10 11 years ago in
(01:14) 2013 I met an extraordinary woman Dr in major in myor India when I was there studying at the aunga yoga Institute and she taught me how to chant all kinds of things including the sutras and so i' had been chanting the sutras with her and I wanted to keep chanting so when I came back to Charlottesville this was before I owned it the previous Studio owner uh woman Jennifer Elliott and I started a chanting group in on Sunday mornings we call it yoga church so we get together and just so that I wouldn't forget and
(01:55) so for from 2013 until Co until 2020 I would go and study with Dr gashri in India for one two sometimes three months and then come back and continue to chant with my students and what we found was that naturally as we chanted the sutras and we started to know them by heart just from repetition we started to think more about meaning and that's the way classically um Indians tend to study sacred texts first they chant them and they know them by heart and then once they inhabit you as sound then you start to throw your
(02:37) intellect at it and so we started having these discussions and the discussions were super fruitful and because I was kind of leading the group at that point I felt like I had to like you know do a little research so this Swami saand's sutris book was my first commentary and then I started collecting them and this kind of grew into a really Dynamic study stud group and at some point one of my students said when are you going to start writing this stuff down and I was like yeah okay that's an idea and so I
(03:10) started just kind of one suit at a time making notes and then I think around maybe 2016 or 17 I started to develop a scalpa a commitment to Gathering up this information and these discussions into a a share terrible format and that became a book so it was very organic I didn't like decide I want to write a book about something and you know it just grew out of this community that I'm in so you mentioned like a it was a sopa like um so writing itself in a way was a a practice for you that you were called to
(03:52) take on yeah I mean and I really in the book I talk about uh the importance of setting us sunala when you're taking on a new goal or a new project and my experience has been that um it's one by one by one by one slowly and and over a long time so the book really I wrote it for about five years um It sped up toward the end and when PR Swami PR Swami permanand of Indo yoga publishing when she was I gave her a chapter and she said yes we want to publish this then when I had a publisher I sort of like sped it up but I wrote that book
(04:39) from 4:30 to 5:30 in the morning every day for years you know and that's a sunala in my mind is this kind of consistent almost Relentless dedication to something and and it's Bit by Bit by Bit by Bit so it's not like a small heavy lift it's like the discipline and so yeah um you know that's what yoga church has been we've been doing it now for like I don't know 12 years we finally gotten to book four we're chanting book four and we're studying it but it's taken us you
(05:17) know a decade to get that far that's how careful like one by one by one really slowly and that's how I learn and teach ASA and I don't know it just it's a really especially for for um SU study it's a very fruitful approach to to take it in tiny chunks and just make it part of a daily lived experience instead of trying to dive in deep and finish the book in a weekend and you know yeah yeah yeah do you think that that's an important component in producing something that's of Great Value is having it be like a
(05:56) practice itself like the focus on the Journey of as opposed to just the destination yeah yeah I mean I'm I'm in a family of writers um my mother is a biographer my sister is a young adult novelist my other sister is also a novelist and um we talk about writing a lot and we talk about the most important and the most difficult thing is getting yourself in the chair you know like yeah just sitting down and starting and I've been a yoga practitioner and Astin a practitioner for 24 25 figures same thing like getting the mat rolled out is
(06:34) you know the the most difficult piece and the most critical piece and I think writing um is the same way and practicing any sort of spiritual practice if it doesn't have that quality of Relentless kind of repetitive practice Relentless repetitive dedication it usually doesn't ever gain traction you know so Retreats and things are important they can really uplevel your commitment or your experience and they can also give you kind of a chance to break out of the routine but um this book The the structure of my
(07:16) book practicing the yoga sutras is actually designed to be done a little bit at a time for a very long time like I think I had a couple I have a couple of students who got through the whole book in like a month or two because they were nursing an injury and needed something to do when they were sitting around icing their foot or you know something like that I have another friend who has had the book for a few months and he reads it a night before bed so but that regular quality um it's interesting how the book
(07:49) became a practice item you know like that I read novels I devour them you know like I read them really quickly and this book can't it can't be experienced that way it would be like turning a fire hose on you know you mentioned that um for many maybe all of us you know the the most challenging component is often you know like getting into the chair rolling out the mat that first step you know on on the journey does that connect to a specific Sutra to you yeah there's one and my my students laugh at me because I say this to them
(08:29) all the time we even have a t-shirt at ayc um that has this at the bottom it's satala and it means practice becomes well established when you do it for a long time without break and with faith with earnestness so you think it's going to work and um my the first time I ever heard that Sutra spoken out loud was uh our teacher in India uh he was giving a conference to 400 students packed into this little room we were all just hanging on his every word and he said it with this kind of like forbearing quality
(09:15) like he was kind of fed up with us because we were a bunch of like Eager Beaver westerners who were like okay when am I going to be enlightened like what you know I've been here for three months like when's it going to happen and you know he comes from a culture and the yoga sutras come from a culture where things take a long time and there is this um uh incredibly focused detailed Relentless quality to studying anything and this is why you know Indians become excellent Physicians and engineers and you know they have this
(09:54) quality of attention over time and this ability to discipline Minds that I think arises from this vadic culture you know that raised them including you know the Gita the upanishads and the other sutras and our impatience in the west the sutras are great medicine for the Western mind I mean they're good for everybody but for the Western mind we especially need the this sort of you know treatment that the sutras offer and the intelligence that they recommend for our minds CU our minds are out of control yeah yeah I want to come back to
(10:37) that but so yes I hear the importance of practicing for a long time without Break um but what about I I I I find that there's something to being aware that the the first step when you practice is the most challenging one right so like awareness of of just that order to practice for a long time continuously without a break I need to become comfortable with taking that first step again and again and again and again yeah I mean working with a community of yoga students for now I don't know going on 15 years and having
(11:18) my students fall in and out of practice um I think in order to create that sopa the commitment there have to be a few things in order and one is you need a a sa you need a community you need someone going where were you you know and so my teacher Sarah swatti Joyce who's now 83 lives in my India she had hundreds of students at a time and we were required to attend certain classes and if you didn't show up two days later you'd see her and she'd go where were you Saturday and you're just looking at her like how
(11:58) did you know no you look in the sea of people and you don't and to know that someone is wondering where you are so that's why um you know traditionally any kind of study in yoga any kind of yoga practice is there's a a student teacher relationship that's at the center of that experience and part of it is your your teacher is looking for you where were you where are you show up you know so there's a there's a sense of accountability and if you don't have a teacher you can have a buddy or
(12:34) something but someone needs to be someone beside your own ego needs to be aware of whether you're showing up and then you just need to be able to arrange your life to make it happen so like a lot of times the reason people don't practice whatever it is whether it's writing or you know a yoga an ASA practice or a meditation practice because their life is sort of cluttered and there's no there's no momentum there's no routine you know and so like for me I have to go to bed at 8:30 at night because in order for me to have my
(13:15) sit in my sitting meditation and pranama practice before I have a long ASA practice and then teach my students all of this happens before 9:30 in the morning I have to get up at 4:30 and so what that means for me is I can't watch TV like there's certain things that you shift around in your life to accommodate like a a a yoga practice with some traction you know you can't have it all so I think part of a sanala is being like okay so what am I willing to exchange for this because it h it costs us something any commitment
(13:54) we make has a has a cost so for me I go to bed really early and I eat dinner early and anyway there are other things but yeah yeah it makes me think of priorities I often find like the inner world has so many things that I care about but what do I really care about most so in like this example right like watching TV late at night how important is that to me and how important is it to me to have a morning practice right and uh I this connects to I think what's happening in the minds of most westerners maybe is that things are
(14:34) happening so fast all the time that I don't know if we're often stopping to think about questions like that like what is really the most important thing to me you know yeah and I think um for us you know we're in the Kaluga we're in this difficult time and perhaps now it's the most difficult because we literally have instant access to uh a circus for the mind at every moment so the mind you know resists Stillness silence discipline like it just doesn't um it doesn't think it wants that and then when it steps
(15:21) into Stillness and it goes this this is what I've been looking for and it's interesting TV you know we're all like yeah too much media but when the mind is on social media or television it's eata it's in one place it's a one-pointed mind um we me at least I get trans distracted by this stuff like I'm deep dive into whatever the media is and my mind craves that experience and this is what meditation offers the mind is this one-pointed focus and so like we can see when our minds craves something instead of being
(16:00) like bad mind you know we can ask the question okay why does my mind crave television because it wants to rest from its preoccupation with ego drama you know and TV does that for me so does social media I can be in somebody else's drama or whatever unfortunately and so do drugs and alcohol and there's this really interesting Sutra in um the fourth po that says we can attain somebody you know the the liberated mental state we can do it through having good previous births so we're kind of born somebody like we can
(16:42) do it through drugs we can do it through practice or we can do it through a combination of concentration meditation you know this this mind and what they say is and we know this you know people have experimented with different Pathways to mental liberation but the only one that doesn't create Karma the only one that doesn't leave us heavier than we arrived is the meditation path so I can watch TV for an hour and have this experience of ah my mind is in one place and it's not in my own drama it's in that drama and wow but
(17:20) I'm left with all these Impressions so there's more clutter and there's more heaviness than when I started now I've got their stories to deal with where in meditation the same one-pointed mind leaves me lighter you know leaves me more a a sense of freedom and and expansiveness and like a greater awareness even though um both activities satisfy the craving of the mind just like we can trip out into somebody like states with drugs or with other things but they leave us heavier you know than we were before they they leave us kind
(18:01) of karmal Laden and and I think that's why what I love about patang and the yoga sutras is that there's no like shame or kind of arbitrary ethical and moral rules there's just experience and patan says look at your own experience test this in your own experience this is what yoga is test this in your own life see what happens the results are what are true for you so don't I'm not I'm not going to tell you what to believe and then you go off and try to act your way into that I'm going to give you
(18:41) things to try try this and he's great because in the first suen sbody he says okay meditation is the solution to the chaos in your mind and you're like but I can't meditate I can't do that and he goes okay try this thing that doesn't work try this thing okay try this thing and he keeps going in at the end he says and if none of this works anything that makes you feel happy and uplifts you try that thing you know so he gives you like there's no Escape because he says whatever it is that brings your mind to
(19:17) a state of calm Equanimity do that thing that's just as good as the other things and he's he's really um he's non-dogmatic he whoever potentially is you know the guy with the body of the snake but that non-ma ISM I think is an amazing fit for our culture this is why I think pangali is so relevant because it's non sectarian they no deas there no gods and goddesses and the sutras there's no religion there's ishar kind of shimmering in the distance this kind of very vague idea of like personal like
(19:59) higher power type thing but it figures in in such a light way that the sutras can work with our modern sensibilities without creating a lot of friction you know there's nothing in there that makes modern people go what except maybe walking through walls and stuff like that this stuff in the fourth book but yeah and the third in the third book I mean some of that's pretty trippy but you can understand that in a way that's also non like spooky you know all of this Su just have I think uh different possibilities for interpretation that
(20:39) aren't all trippy so what's it what's your interpretation of that well like for instance um SW suchanda I have heard that when he was in the body I never met him in the body but when he was in the body he could walk into a room and be the the biggest thing in the room like so shining so full of like Tas that everyone looked at him and he was like giant he was a giant or he could walk into a room and be invisible he could make himself so small that no one even noticed he was there so there are sutras
(21:18) that say the accomplished Yogi can make himself invisible the accomplished Yogi can make himself enormous and so we can understand that literally like invisible you know like Harry Potter and his thing his cape or we can understand that on a pronic level like energetically and we know what it's like to make ourselves small and to make ourselves big like we've had that experience so I think a lot of the sutras in the third book that read kind of weird if you read them with a little bit of poetic intelligence they make sense you know
(21:57) just like reading the Bible the Torah or you know some of Lord Buddhist writings if you read them literally they are a little fantastic but if you read them with a kind of poetic open mind we go oh yeah I've experienced making myself big making myself small you know things like that yeah well I think it also connects with kind of this uh idea of of being dogmatic right the same thing with the with the book it's funny I think a part of the human experience is having Allegiance often right so it's like you start to
(22:31) read something and you love it so much and it's impacting you and then you're like this is my thing like I'm a person who loves the yoka sutras right and then you go through in a way that Allegiance I think can maybe cause you to not see each part clearly because you've already made the decision I love this thing therefore you don't have that same ability to be objective and I think the same thing could happen with the teacher like what what you're talking about right it's very interesting this
(23:05) relationship with with a teacher and I don't think it's so simple right it's like um patang is offering like try this try try this like which is I think the best kind of teacher which understands but it's still walking it's walking a line because it's like I'm offering you something to believe potentially that can impact you but I'm still telling you to explore on your own and see if this works for you like the best teachers acknowledge that everyone has the freedom and they see
(23:39) that you can only get so far by um kind of telling someone else like listen to me above you maybe that's what it Al automatically comes comes down to like what is the teacher saying saying don't listen to yourself listen to me or I'm offering you something of course you always have to listen to yourself this is the way life is yeah I mean we live in a culture full of fundamentalisms and you know fundamentalism is when falling in love with something becomes dogma and it becomes like fear-based and uh insecure you know because if our
(24:16) loves are secure we don't have to be fundamentalists but I think when in yoga especially I mean my background is I was a religious scholar like I've studied religion my whole life and religion is is based on Theology and and systems of belief that are at least inherently rational or work with each other and they're and it's based on uh Faith you know yoga especially the yoga presented in the sutras and I think it's in the Gita too although krishna's role in the Gita can confuse it because people are
(24:59) like well I don't believe in Krishna so all this doesn't matter to me but krishna's Krishna as a person is like a placeholder in the Gita I think but in the sutras you're not told to believe anything it's only try this have this experience practice and if you practice you will either decide that this is true this this works this takes me toward uh the steady mind you know Nea or this does not work for me and patang waiting and going okay then try this all right I'll try this but the lack of Dogma
(25:42) what's interesting about it and the if pangali is the teacher and we're the student the student teacher relationship with pangali is that when you have a teacher who's telling you what to do and how to do it you have no responsibility you just follow follow instructions and if you're told to do something you think I don't want to do that or that doesn't even sound right to me or I don't feel good here then you default to obedience and then you kind of spiritualize your obedience and you're off the hook as a
(26:14) moral agent you know off the hook as a moral agent I love that you don't have to be a moral agent because someone else is doing that for you and potentially there is no getting off the hook in yoga we are 100% responsible for our thoughts our feelings and our Behavior no outs so we can't blame our parents we can't blame the crappy teachers we had in the past we can't blame our bodies we can't blame our quote add or whatever it is because whatever is ailing us the sutras have a practice to treat it and so if we do the
(26:57) practice and it doesn't work like really do it like not like yeah I tried that for a couple weeks and I still feel the same way but if SATA n and it doesn't work potentially he's going okay then try this he just never runs out of possibilities the only um I guess caveat to that is in the eight limbs of yoga uh it starts with Yama you know the moral precepts and again Paton is I think non-dogmatic in that he doesn't say it's bad to steal it's bad to lie it's bad to do violence these are bad things you're a bad person
(27:42) he says okay you want a steady mind here's how you do it don't steal because if you Steal You will be disturbed you know don't be awful to people because if you are you will be disturbed so he even treats kind of common ethics and morality in the context of the personal responsibility to maintaining an aquanus mind which is our responsibility no matter what's going on out there that's our responsibility and it it's different um I have worked with a number of Yoga teachers throughout my life and the good
(28:26) ones wanted me to grow out out of them you know wanted me to grow beyond their like the the the limits of their personality so they were like okay and there would always be a point where they would start to pull away you know and I would panic and get my feelings hurt and all that but they were pulling away because they wanted to remind me you are responsible for this like I'm not responsible for this this is all you and that I think is what um both differentiates yoga from religious systems but it's also what allows yoga
(29:05) to coexist in a very powerful and kind of resonant way with any any faith you know it doesn't interfere with faith because it is about practice there's not a lot of belief Tangled Up in there even the pera proerty thing you know this idea of adma and matter and all that which you find in all the religious Traditions is so non-dogmatic in in patang and there's so many ways to accommodate it to religious and Faith systems where there's no conflict so it's fun because like you don't have to I have a lot of people reading my
(29:52) book who aren't uh Hindu you know like who who are Christian big time or Jewish my my uh one of my kind of so my daughters-in-law is very Jewish she's really getting a lot out of the book and some people who are like completely agnostic and it all works because pangali just isn't getting involved in all that he's just saying this is about you you know it's about your mind and your who has the rein of your mind either the ego is driving the mind or the booty the higher intelligence is driving the mind or the adman is driving
(30:31) the mind and so our our goal in yoga is to let Atman Drive the vehicle and then we're having a great time yeah it's a big goal has it been challenging for you to take ownership of your own inner experience that you're having that has to be a rhetorical question like honestly I told my husband um my husband and Liam is also a yogi and owns the sh with me and does yoga church with me and you know he's with me every day and I said you know it's aggravating because I've written this book and I've written it about this kind
(31:13) of full experience of yoga and I haven't gotten there yet like I'm not I'm not there yet you know I still work really hard at this stuff like sometimes I'm just working on Yama you know just like not lying to people to get myself out of stuff and sometimes I'm just like you know I go three or four days and I haven't had a decent meditation and you know that that's like real and and I say you know I I never I will never present myself as someone who's like arrived or has any like Guru status because it it's just
(31:47) and that's not the way I wrote the book so I I kind of wo my personal experience throughout the book mostly in ways to say and sometimes it was very vulnerable like when I was talking about um lying or stealing I told some personal stories that were kind of like I can't believe I'm going to tell people this you know but that is that's real and um I'm not at all interested in uh projecting an image of myself that is not real I mean that just to me is poison so yeah it's really hard and some
(32:21) days it's easier and without the community of people that I spend time with working around these sutras I would be lost if I were doing this on my own I would probably think I was a lot further along than I am you know but specifically in in the regard to taking like responsibility for the experience that I'm having and not making excuses like this is because of my parents or this is because of society or whatever it is that I think is a CH like the mind will is often quick to do that yeah right it doesn't want to take the responsibility
(33:04) it's too it's too much it's too big of a burden it's easier like you said to let yourself off off the hook in a way and just say I'm not in control really I mean some scars are real you know they're real The Impressions made in the Mind by past experience um the conditioned mind is real it it's not that it's imaginary it's so this is what we've got you know and some yogis believe this has been accumulating over many births not just this one but even this one there's enough so it's real and
(33:37) I don't think it's about like oh you know your pain it's not spiritual bypassing where you're like yeah you know if you're a yogi then all that stuff that happened to you doesn't matter anymore and all the Impressions that created you just need to but it's about when these things arise having practice to deal with the sensation you know the mental sensation whatever it is and then having the practice be able to help you dissolve the suffering that has accumulated inside of us so practice is
(34:14) like I've been um I've been sanding this giant nightmare of a metal porch this Summer that needs to be repainted and like first I did the pressure washing and that was was really satisfying because it's like fast you know and then I like started to sand different areas that were rested and I started to go why am I even doing this I don't want to paint this porch you know and just to and then now that I've got most of it sanded I've I'm having to Prime and like taking this painting this portch is going to take
(34:46) the whole summer like legit and so many times I'm like why am I doing this and we can feel like that like I don't want to deal with all this stuff like I want I want it to go away you know I just want it to like leave me alone or I want to pretend like it's not there or I want to blame somebody else when it does come up but yoga is so powerful because the practices you don't even have to in other words you don't have to go to your mat going okay today I'm dealing with my first boyfriend you know and all that
(35:17) junk that he left in my heart and all the all the feelings I have when I think about him and all you know we just get on our mats and we see what arises and it arises and if we're if we're practicing with non-attachment you know if we're not clinging to what arises it arises and it disperses and we're light like it's gone there's a um in the asanga yoga tradition there's a chant we sing at the beginning before we start practicing um the V gurunam and it's a chant to Pang [Music]
(36:05) that part samsar all of our births all of our experience all the junk halah Hala the gunk that lives inside us the heaviness the tar of our conditioned existence MOA Shan MOA is Liberation Shanti is peace and what it says is this practice can churn up the Lake of Samaras the Samar halah Hala like that story when um the Davis and the osaras are like churning the lake and all the junks coming up it'll churn up what's in us and that will rise up and dissolve and that's the beauty of practice is it churns so it's
(36:49) not that we're going yeah that stuff doesn't matter anymore because I'm Yogi and I got my mind under control it's that we're like okay we're going to do these practices whatever they are PR he tells us Yama as prama prara eight things and while we do these practices we can fully expect this churning of the lake of our past to Bubble Up and choke us and then if we are not attached if we can just like have that experience of emotion or anger or whatever and watch it dissolve and it will dissolve and people over
(37:31) year they don't know how to describe it but yoga does something different than a good run or a great tennis match or going to the gym or you know jumping jacks or whatever even something therapeutic like writing or journaling or Psychotherapy these practices are profoundly effective at liberating us from conditioned Impressions conditioned existence so it's it's not about blame you know like who do we blame it's about what do we do with this halah Hala with this sludge you know what do we do with it because here it is
(38:15) I don't know who put it there maybe my mom did maybe my dad maybe but I'm responsible for now what now what do I do do I making the choice to do the practices yeah to practice and to and also you know what you notice in asanga yoga and I'm sure this H it happened to me in integral yoga is you start a yoga practice you've come in from you've stumbled in from wherever you are you know like okay I'm here like show me how to stretch I'm really tight and you start to do these things whatever The
(38:48) Yoga practices are and you start to feel amazing really fast and you're like oh my gosh I'm in love and then for a little while you're floating on this like and that's really great and it keeps you in and then you start to churn enough so that the halah Hala starts to Bubble Up and all of a sudden you're like on your mat and you're crying and you're the heck what is this I'm supposed to feel good and just about the time that the practices start to churn this Lake of Samaras you know
(39:23) samsar halah Hala churning up you're like get me out of here and people they're out you know because it's too intense so what yoga allows is like okay we have eight different things that we're going to do and if you can you can move around but just be aware that what you're treating is conditioned existence you're treating the fundamental disease of the mind and this is serious business you know so I think I've been practicing for a long time without break and with a lot of faith and I am much much lighter
(40:04) than when I came in in 2020 and I was I mean 20 2000 2000 I was kind of a wreck in 2000 like really actually kind of a wreck and my relationships were a wreck and just there was a lot of chaos and now however many 24 years later um the the halah Hala is a lot more refined do you know it's like there's still stuff but it's not like demons with fly you know it's not like the super gross scary nasty stuff that used to Bubble Up out of that Lake in the first 10 years or so it's a long haul so you know yoga is
(40:50) Yoga is a long haul practice it there's no quick fix and it's Relentless so yeah you just keep showing up what do you think happens for someone who makes the choice to avoid all of this like it it feels like it's it's too much to deal with the churning to deal with my mind I don't want to do it and so I'm just going to keep going I'm just going to keep going yeah well so bangali has a couple of sutras that suggests that if you're a person of great bakti if you have like the capacity for great devotion you
(41:30) should do that because it's fast trck he says so for those who are can devote their entire lives to God do that because that's a fast track to the same destination which is peace you know yoga is not a practice suited for all temperaments you know it tends to work well for people who have kind of come to the end of their options I mean the people that I know who have benefited greatly and profoundly from yoga were in an enormous amount of pain when they showed up they were like okay you know what I have run
(42:13) out of things to do here like I can't actually live with this anymore so um there's a if you look around I'm not talking about like you know casual yoga but if you look at Deep yoga communities what those people tend to have in common is um very intense experiences of suffering that have kind of driven them to this practice it's not the only thing that works you know religion works for some people um some people can can experience their lives without uh deep profound suffering you know they just don't have that that karmic
(42:59) situation and that's okay you know and that's the other cool thing is that yoga is not like it's our way or the highway like this is the only you know this is the only way and potentially there are a couple times when he just says or you can just believe in God with your whole heart and then off you go you know so I think yoga is um it's not for everybody I don't mean like everybody can't benefit from samasa but like the real you know the real um practice of CH vir is a is a steep path like it's a hard
(43:33) it's like for people who think oh maybe I'll run a marathon or you know like um I want to write a book or you know that kind of thing and and you know it's not that people who don't have that sort of ferocious personality can't benefit from Yoga practices anybody can benefit from you know just any um any aspect of these practices or they're so sweet you know they're so beneficial but to go like deep into the conditioned mind and excavate it and liberate it from halah Hala this is a lifetime perhaps
(44:14) many lifetimes Journey you know and again it's a hard cell in the west right because we want to know like we went this 60 days to you know fantastic everything and it's hard to say in um in aanga yoga which is a pretty hardcore practice they say you're a beginner for 5 years and you're you're considered you know kind of experienced at 10 years and you should probably start teaching people after you've been practicing every day for 10 years you know so there's just a kind of patience this grows out of um a culture
(44:56) very different than ours you know the Indian culture and their sense of time and study and practice and building expertise um they play the long game you know and westerners we're like um our minds are like children you know they we want the short game and we want to avoid pain so maybe it doesn't work for everyone and that's okay or maybe like maybe when you get a little older you know like some people serious suar practice is is hard until they get to a point where their life is calmed down and you know they can make
(45:35) space for it it's harder for someone in their 20s than for somebody in their 50s you know depends maybe the person yeah some people are like ready to go they're like and and some but we find our Shala is um the the most regular practitioners are all in their 40s and 50s the 20-year-olds I mean look they're awesome is amazing but they' got a lot going on you know it's hard for them to Ian we have a few exceptions but it's hard for them to commit to that just regular regular Relentless
(46:09) sunala that's what yoga because maybe it's a results oriented in mind like back to what we were talking about at the start like sh that maybe that's a major shift from focus on the end to because I think that's the only way you can practice for a certain amount of time I mean Maybe not maybe someone can practice for a long time with like that well no it's true cuz the ASA this is where like the candy is like you know the ASA because like your ego is like yeah I'll go in there because I feel pretty awesome when
(46:40) I can do these poses you know like so there's a little bit of bait I think asaa we always joke about ASA being the gateway drug to yoga you know so like people come in and they they get better at ASA and their ego is like all right I'm on board until they get hurt or whatever but but that the AA like such a it's such a mild form of yoga you know what I mean like yeah and and it but it's but it can be I mean if it's practiced with the other limbs it can be really really strong that's why it's a
(47:14) great Entry Way totally that so many people have CU like oh my body just feels better now like yeah and that's really important simple yeah I mean if we don't have ease in our bodies how are we going to do the more subtle practices is you know like if you sit down to do some deep breathing or work with your Prana or if you try to like really get your mind and view but you're in pain it's hard yeah so like AA is no joke like it really does straighten things out you know I have a student who um he came in with like wrecked knees
(47:49) like seriously wrecked knees you know athlete reck KN and like he couldn't close his knee Beyond here and we do a lot of lotus poses and he was just like I can't do this yoga we're like no no no just stay just stay and after four or five years of just really regular study practice he's in padmasana you know he can sit in Lotus and he came in the other day and he goes this has completely changed my ability to do pranama in meditation because I can sit now comfortably and so it's all connected you know
(48:20) yeah I wonder if um often we don't realize how much better it can be than it is and so this is the other why it's so important to be in a sa because I'll tell my students sometimes look around and see somebody who has what you want and they don't have to have like a perfect life but they're just they have something you want you know in their in their being and ask them what are you doing you know so like we become like beacons for each other so we if you don't have anybody to look up to to like and this
(49:03) is why the kind of Guru shisha relationship has been important it doesn't have to be like a guru it can just be someone who's been doing this practice for a long time and is in better shape than they were I have a friend a really good friend who's been hanging out with me at my yoga Shala for I don't know 10 15 years and some will say to me man you're a mess when you got here and I'm like I like to hear that cuz like he he's like you've got any means my body my emotions my mind my
(49:34) relationships utter chaos and you know 10 years into practice and not utter chaos like still you know some little bushfires and I'm not like I'm not I have not arrived but so much sta so much sua you know so much stability so much comfort and he's watched me you know so we Inspire each other that way and if we try to do this on our own then we just get lost in our little ego sess pools you know we think we're better than we are we think we're worse than we are or we just we just go God this is so boring can I just do
(50:10) something else it's not so hard and it's a lot more fun so we really have to do these things in community I think to make it I don't know just because here's what happens when when people get into hardcore yoga practice like eight Lim yoga practice and they're not in deep relationship with other people they dry up they get really like there's something that shrivels they become like almost like um little deserts and you see it sometimes and their their spirituality has this kind of dry
(50:52) rigid quality uh not not they don't it's not that you have to live with people or you know that you have to have a family or but you need to have love in your life because this love the sweetness is you know part of the end goal when our when our minds are steady we have you know theonomous mind then Atman Rises up out of that and the qualities of Atman are one of the qualities is bliss you know Ananda sweetness so we we become like uh loving people not because we try hard but because it's our true
(51:35) nature you know to be in Ananda and to be aware of what's going on around us part of Love is just being aware of other people not being completely preoccupied so you know one of the qualities of op man is awareness like oh I see you and and Bliss and then knowledge like I understand how to I can act skillfully in this situation I know how to do that oh my gosh you know so I think if we're not in deep Community we don't um we can get really lost in these practices you see it sometimes I wonder too along with
(52:10) awareness if awe is an extremely important component do I have awe for this experience that I'm having it's like foundational respect for the experience and that just Rises up naturally I think when you know if you have a deep um I think especially with Asa and pranama um and with meditation with the with the kind of formal practices if you have a a kind of deep uh experience of these practices um that feeling just it rises up all the time and it it's uncontrived you know like it just pops up out of and then
(52:55) you're able to have it in other situations like I don't know watching a child play or being in the woods or just this spontaneous moment of like yes you know and but the practices without the practices without the formal practices I don't think we clear enough space you know we get so heavy I always tell my my students at the end of a practice whatever arose during this practice or whatever remains with you like oh I did that really well or my knee hurts see if you can be in shavasana and rest and let
(53:31) it dissolve like leave here lighter than you came because we that's what hopefully our practices You Know M Shanti halah Hala and then MOA liberate you're liberated from your sludge and shantia you have peace so that's why we practice you know to like be willing to do a deep dive into the this conditioned existence not to pretend like it's not there or like I don't know just like fake our way through because you know like people always want to look better than they are and then something happens and they flip out and you're
(54:09) like what is that you know so when we there's no like bypassing in the practice because it just dredges up all this stuff and yeah I mean I think when that happens and we're alone or even when we experience awe and alone it's cool but when it happens in community it's magnificent like it's really really wonderful and you know that's where um you the first question you asked me in this was why did you do this I Did It For My People you know this is all for my people I mean the reason I'm doing this interview and the
(54:49) reason I'm I'm not very good at promoting myself whatever marketing and all that but every time I go to market I go hey this is for my people you know my people are anybody practicing yoga with a with a the goal of the aquanus mind they are my people you know so it it really is that is joyful for me if I were doing this by myself yeah I I kind of believe that in a way we all have the same purpose and the purpose is to do something for your people yeah whatever that is swam sh would say peaceful eful useful useful useful to be useful I
(55:34) think all of our hearts have that desire to be useful in a way and um that's also part of the practice is to step into that and to be able to be useful without asmita without um it just creating more karma because like a lot of us want to be useful because secretly we want to be important and we want to leave our Mark and we want to have a life of purpose and you know the ego has has its own agenda for usefulness and I think being able to be useful even if it means um just like cleaning up after yourself you know like this this yoga is
(56:08) so mundane there's so it cracks me up because people uh make yoga into this like highly esoteric and blah blah blah and it's not like even even concentration meditation it's so mundane all it is is just keep your mind in one place for 30 seconds or so and see what happens you know what I mean like it's not very it's not very esoteric it's just it's just really hard you know actually I've described it a little differently to myself re recently of like the process that's happening is
(56:43) like I see it as like the mind starts to build sand castles you know and then the practice is seeing oh I've just been building sand castles and then to allow it to to go and get was bring the waves was and do it again do it again and my experience um is that after practicing for this amount of time it's easier to wash away the sand castles as whereas before you know I would even be aware that the sand castles were created you were building a fortress sand castle yeah no I mean it's the same these
(57:19) metaphors are really useful it's the same as drudging out the lake of some scaras and all that yeah so they're they're great stories but also make it a problem cuz that's the other thing that I think like really catches me in like the obsession with the self like oh there I go building this there's my mind going again so it's like no this is a part of The Human Experience no problem and I might like to come back to the space the most radical kind of awareness that yoga gives us is that
(57:50) I am not this body I am not this mind I am not this ego I am a vehicle for Consciousness and so all this is going to dissolve it's all going to be warm food even my even my most intense SBA is just part of procer just a big dance you know and I think when we when we can start to identify the mind the feeling thinking machinating part of ourselves identify it with Atman or when we can quiet it down so it reflects pure Consciousness then even our even our sort of drama becomes kind of light because it's all just like it's like the
(58:36) drama of a thunderstorm like yeah this is scary but it's going to go so all of our all of our junk like the the ocean's coming for that castle like it or not so and you know our castles even if they're really big and made out of concrete they're going to wash away one day so I think identifying the mind with opma and that's the real gift of the yoga practice is that we we transcend our ego our smallness our like the ego is just a prison you know it's like a little it's like a little really well decorated
(59:10) prison with like great music and lots to read you know what I mean like one day you're like ah I haven't left here ever you know yeah there's a lot to do in here but I want to get out of here and that's you know that's where yoga says okay I'll show you the door you know and that's a really um the ego is not like an enemy but it's a tool you know what I mean have you ever been in somebody's house who has like small children two or threey old children or maybe like a new puppy yeah my house yeah yeah okay so
(59:42) when you walk into a house like that and the entire house is covered with kids stuff like you trip over it everywhere you go you're like H there's a kid in charge of this house you know and no one's really very comfortable like like I have friends say yeah I can't can't have dinner with you because my son doesn't want to go and I'm like but your son's three you know like bringing like so I think the ego is like a three-year-old or a puppy or you know beloved and and really can be so
(1:00:15) delightful and has a really important role to play in the personality but that role is not being in charge you know because when that ego is in charge man nothing ever gets cleaned up and you have hot dogs for dinner every night and you know like that I always these metaphors I think help us not feel any kind of hatred or philosophy or resentment toward the ego but just know like your role is not to be in charge You Know Your Role is to make sure I brushed my teeth I put on deodorant I look nice I cut my hair I tidy up my area I get a job you
(1:00:56) know the things that the ego does for us like I'm I have some dignity I have some pride like I don't I don't show up on time show up on time I don't say obnoxious things in public I don't you know like the ego a well TR just like a well behaved child is a delight an absolute delight and a well- behaved ego is a delight but most of our egos have had run of the house you know so not so fun and yeah you don't want to invite company over because you don't know what's going to happen and the and an ego that's out of
(1:01:32) control it's like a child who says no you can't go to dinner because I'm having a tantrum you know like that we've had that experience of our own our own ego or when like you come in and your puppy torn up something that you really care about like the ego does that rather another example is like I want to go swimming but I I don't want to be seen in a bathing suit totally so you're not going to have the experience of sing that's Inge the ego is um means well it's trying to protect you from
(1:02:04) humiliation like that's its job you know you can't blame the ego like the problem like right you can't blame the kid I mean who can blame an out of control toddler for their own behavior we know whose fa that is yeah right we all know it's like the parents so the parent in the mind is the booty you know the intellect the discriminating intellect and if we are able to strengthen and refine that part of the mind then the ego will be in its right relationship right to the booty so the yoga practice
(1:02:37) refines and strengthens the booty because it creates a saic mind you know and that's the quality of a strong booty SAA so we've got these practices to help it's like when you call in you know that old show like nanny Super Nanny or where there was that British nanny who would come in to out of control households and get the kids in shape she didn't beat anybody right she wasn't mean she was just like okay I'm in charge here and here's how we're going to do this and at the end everybody was like oh thank you
(1:03:09) you know and that's what happens I think when our booty our discriminating Discerning mind is in charge of the whole the Manas you know the senses the ego the hamara even the indas the way the senses go out into the world when the booty is in charge everybody's happy and everything's running really well and that is what the tools of yoga allow us to strengthen and refine and uh train this part of the mind to do its job you know and then the ego is not hammered or rejected or shamed any more than a child in a well-run household
(1:03:55) feels you know ashamed that it can't have what it wants all the time you know what you know how it is Happy Kids Happy Pets there's usually somebody in charge and it's not them so there are all these really cool uh we understand I think because of our lived experiences how this thing this mind thing is supposed to work you know and just because we know how it's supposed to work doesn't mean we can make that happen but the practices are the tools to make it happen you know hence why you titled the book practicing practicing
(1:04:31) the yoga sutas because the yoga I think this is my big radical statement I don't think the sutras are philosophy I think the sutras are a practice manual I think they're an action manual pangel spends the first book saying here's why you want to go to all this trouble because of samati and I'm going to tell you about how amazing some is and then the second book is here's how you do it and that spills over into the third book and then the third book is here's how you're you're going to know that you're getting
(1:05:07) somewhere like these are some things that are going to happen when your mind starts to become strong and sharp and clear and refined and when the relationship between ego senses and intellect is you know ordered in the right way these things are going to happen to you don't be freaked out this is normal and don't get attached but this this stuff will happen and then at the end he says this is super fun and you love it however there's more to it than this there's this thing called kyala which means you don't even have
(1:05:39) to inhabit this complex if you don't want to you know if if you're kind of tired or you can stay here in the Mind Body complex and be a jivan mukti you can drive around your car like a NASCAR driver you know you can be an expert at the Mind Body complex that's Calia being liberated while in a body and I just think um you know Paton never really goes into any philosophy like it's all very it's very practical I sense so much gratitude that you have for the sutures yeah I mean I'm people are funny I I
(1:06:20) teach I do yoga teacher trainings every year and um we teach ytas we teach the Vita we teach theats and so we're a classical school so we teach kind of the old stuff you know and people either love the sutras and not so much with the Gita or they love the upanishads and I find that the people who really resonate with the yoga sutras tend to be people who like me are a little like rational you know like analytical like I have an analytical mind a Ral mind so the sutras really appeal to me because they're just this
(1:06:59) they're just cut and dried people who are really poetic and creative they love the aish shots and people who are really like emotional and and like have a Baki personality they love the Gita but what I think is that the sutras if they're experienced not as a kind of the reason I wrote the book is because I wanted like stories in there people say oh the Citrus are so dry and I'm like no they're not they just need a little bit they're they're aphorisms they're like a geometry proof they're tiny little
(1:07:30) things and so what I did was I just took the little proof and I like fluffed it up with you know like normal language and stories and whatever because geometry isn't beautiful until you live in a house built by geometry right so that's what I tried to do with the Sutra book is take these dry sutras and kind of build a house I mean look they're beautiful commentaries out there um I mean amazing ones I I read like a dozen of them start to finish to write the book this one is different because there are little empty spaces inside the
(1:08:11) book that ask you to write yourself into the book so when you finish practicing the yoga sutras you have an object a book that contains not just bonali thoughts but your thoughts it it it becomes a kind of not even a journal but it's a self-study tool because that's all I just s into practice you know so like even reading the book you don't just get to read the book passively you have to practice you have to write so the book itself is a practice object you know what I mean you can't read it I mean you
(1:08:50) could you could just skip that part like not do any of the bubbles because I'm not into that but it wouldn't be as I intended it you know I intended it to feel like a practice just even reading the book because I think that's where all the good stuff is in the practice in personal experience not thinking about stuff but doing things yeah because I I do notice there's this um there's ability to really comp uh compartmentalize in life so it's like yeah I'm just I'm studying philosophy here and when I meet with
(1:09:25) this group or when read this book I'm doing that but then when I'm doing something else I'm a completely different person or to think about you have a philosophy in terms of your wife or your best friend or your I I have so many students who are like my wife needs to read this book and I'm like yep that's where we go so the thing about this book as an object is that you write yourself into it like it's it there's a kind of it's a little heavy-handed because it's like you read a Sutra right
(1:09:54) like yog and then I'll give you the translation and then I'll tell you about it and then I'll say okay what about you and I ask a question and then there's a little bubble where you write your so you don't even just think about your response you like write it down that's the practice the practice is like taking pen to paper you know it's a thing you do and I my the feedback I've gotten from people so far is that that process of writing it down has been like a transformational process because
(1:10:29) it isn't just up here in the blur recesses of my mind and it's not like oh my friend or my spouse or my child needs to read this I mean I do have people who bought books for people in their family like I'm like you just do your thing let them buy their own book but it but I think that my experience as a human being for I'm 58 years old is that practice has launched me into a life I could not have imagined and I could I was thinking my way I mean I was like in my second graduate school program when I found
(1:11:13) yoga living in a pretty dismal place like on all levels I mean any it I was in financial chaos emotional chaos relational chaos um academic everything was chaos and these practices have taken me to a new reality and I deeply believe that I could have never thought my way there I had to practice my way there you know so instead of writing a commentary because we got enough of those and they're great I mean some of them are amazing I didn't write a commentary I wrote a practice book you know I'm so glad you did even just for
(1:11:55) your own experience feel how much it's given well I'm actually using it it's funny CU like when you write it like I didn't stop and like answer all the questions so now I'm like doing it myself because I'm like I should do this and it's kind of weird to read your own book you're like oh it is weird like there should be a comma there you know but yeah if uh people are interested in finding it what's the best way for them to do it so you can order it on Amazon however um it'll take a
(1:12:26) long time to get to you because of the distributor situation the best way is to go directly to the distributor and order it from them it'll get to you quickly and you can click on that my website is practicing the yoga sas.com nice all one word yeah so you can just click through there and I think the yal yoga um website also has a link to it yeah really appreciate this time with you thank you so much great to meet you Shanti I'm Shanti thanks for listening if you've enjoyed this content and think others might as well please
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