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Most professional musicians practice scales and arpeggios throughout their career. Scales allow the artist to become one with the instrument. In that way, music can express itself freely and passionately without fingers struggling to find the keys. This is not unlike yoga posture practice. Here the instrument is your body. A yoga teacher will take the time to expose you to the scales of embodiment in every class. Allowing you to become one with changing sensations as it moves. In that way, the symphony of life as practice can express itself freely, deeply and passionately through you. A big part of a yoga teacher´s job is to play the scales of sensation.  Repetitive, simple, sensitive movement is an oportunity to become intimate with your body, to get to know your instrument so you can play it with ease and passion. We play the scales in the beginning, in the middle and in the end of our yoga-journey. We practice the basics every step of the way.

Of course, you can learn to play a complex melody on the piano without practicing scales and arpeggios. You can play music without ever becoming one with the instrument. And it may sound just as great. But the artist in you will probably be drawn to what feels great: The intuitive flow and freedom offered by repetition. When the music flows without strain, delay or doubt it feels delicious. Major key, minor key, both can be played from a sense of oneness with the instrument. Giving yourself completely to the expression of music.

Of course, you can learn to play around with challenging yoga postures without preparing yourself with repetitive movement. You can do a yoga posture without the scales of sensation, without becoming one with what you feel. And it may look amazing. But the yogi in you will most likely be drawn to what feels amazing: Intimacy with embodied being, awareness, presence. When life flows without resistance, it feels delicious. Good times, bad times, all of life can be experienced from a sense of oneness with what is happening. Giving your self completely to the expression of life.

“The difference between an enlightened being and one who is not enlightened is that the one who is not enlightened thinks there is a Difference” (Some great zen master)

Before we put 2015´s endless stream of bad news behind us and start fresh, allow me to share something that happened last year which wasn’t all bad.

When planning a yoga retreat in Lesvos this summer several people advised me to cancel. The reasons were obvious. The village next to our retreat (Molyvos) is close to the border of Turkey and therefore among the first points of contact for the refugees crisis in Europe this summer. As the drama unfolded over the next couple of months, the media image of Lesvos changed from the wellness sweet spot I used to depict in yoga marketing to full-scale humanitarian crisis. Going through with a retreat there seemed like an insane thing to do. I mean it was perfectly safe there, nothing like that. But the bad press, the financial risk if nobody comes, the moral dissonance of it all…lots of red flags.

The decision to cancel was a no brainer.

The only problem was: I found myself unable to make that decision. Instead the decision came to do it as a donation project.

Where did that decision come from? If i´m honest, probably from some desire to to be a spiritual hero and feel better about myself. My entry into yoga was through Buddhism where i acquired a a deep fascination with the Bodhisattva figure. Bodhisattva are people who put the liberation of all sentient beings before their own. Rather than going straight to the state of liberation (nirvana) they commit to linger in in this world (samsara). Imagine filling a bottomless well of tears with the snow of loving kindness, one teaspoon at a time. For eons! That´s the Bodhisattva way. To dispel the miseries of the world, lifetime after lifetime until everybody is free. My favorite Bodhisattva-hero was called Avalokitesvara, a being who was said to have been awakened by the cries of the world. The pain of other living beings was what caused that magical event called “awakening “. At the age of 19 i thought that was über cool stuff ! Yes, I´m definitely prone to go for the narrative of spiritual heroism wherever i can – or its more modest cousin; moral commitment.

But honestly I felt nothing like a spiritual hero in 2015. Most of that year, i just opened the paper and cried like a baby. I cried when I heard about the Earthquake in Nepal, I cried over the Copenhagen assassinations, I cried over Danish politics going insane, I cried over lifeless babies on beaches, I cried over bombings in Beirut, the Paris terrorist attacks, climate change. I cried over loved ones that had died from cancer.

Worse still, I was fully aware that my crying did absolutely nothing for the world! (I actually managed to cry over that too if you can believe it!) Twenty years of spiritual practice and this was all I could come up with. A crybaby. A far cry from the Bodhisattvas I had been idolizing as a teenager.

Luckily I was in for some serious teaching in 2015. That year made it painfully clear to me that yoga is more than waiting for spiritual heroes (or waiting to become one). Opening the TV news continued to give me that throbbing pressure of anger in the throat, the abdominal wrench of guilt, that acid ache before the first tears, that sharp twitch of fear. Each sensation was a non-negotiable invitation to experience things as they were. Not as we expected them to be, not as we feared them to be, not as we hoped them to be. No one to save the day, no relief, just that shitty feeling.

But it felt more uncomfortable to sit in front of the TV screen and watch millions of people having their life destroyed than to go to Lesvos and try to help a a few to have a slightly less fucked up day. Notice the word uncomfortable there. That, i think is one big motor of action for human beings. It just felt bad to experience that roaring river of strong emotions stagnate in the shallow delta of hypnotic passivity.

I wanted it to go away, so I turned off the Facebook-drama-queen-machine. Didn’t work. I tried to meditate (BTW never try to meditate, just sit). Well, it didn’t work either. I went into heated political debates. That made it worse! I told myself spiritual bedtime stories to feel better about the state of things. Didn’t work at all.

I still cry like a baby most days when I open the newspaper.

If I have to be honest I can best describe the decision to do that Lesvos retreat as a completely ordinary and all too human reflex: A more or less unconscious move away from discomfort and towards comfort. It just felt bad to cancel so I found a way to go through with it that I could live with.

As it was, I was not the only one in discomfort. Despite my own and everyone else´s pessimistic expectations, yogis from different parts of Europe started signing up for the retreat. Some brought suitcases full blankets and sleeping bags for donation, some brought more cash from home, some gave their afternoons on the retreat to help out in local care initiatives. Apart from delivering the revenue from the teaching job to a local group working in the area, I did little to organize any of this. It happened spontaneously in response to the situation.

Acting on discomfort was not confined to yogic circles either. In Lesvos we met local business owners, families, and ordinary tourists who had spontaneously dropped whatever they were doing to help those in need. Some formed foundations, some canceled their flight home and stayed to help on the beaches, some passersby delivered a single day’s work, some organized collections of clothing and money from their home countries. Most of the people I met or heard of had no prior experience with humanitarian work and no idea what amazing things they were capable of before the disaster reached their backyard. In global perspective, their actions were perhaps nothing more than a teaspoon of snow in an ocean of tears, but that recognition didn’t seem to block their action.

If anything will remain engraved into my memory from 2015 it is that unflinching response of ordinary people exposed to the suffering of thousands at their doorstep. Last summer in Molyvos, no organizations, government, military or spiritual heroes showed up to save the day. There was just ordinary people responding directly to other ordinary people in need. No hesitation, no questions asked.

When fully exposed to the cries of the world, the next step is a no brainer.

It is my belief that the amazing people I met in Greece did what they did because they were fully exposed. They chose to do what they did not because they were spiritual people or because they possessed some special heroic nature. They simply woke up in that uncomfortable place on that morning. They simply could not do anything other than respond to the situation exactly as they did. For most of us, this full exposure was not available at that time. Action was not allowed to express itself in that particular way last summer. It was not our doorstep (Not yet at least). Unlike the people working in Molyvos, i went home again after a week. And cried some more. No shame in that.

Its 2016 now. I´m planning the next lesvos retreat in May. Some people say i should have cancelled. I have no idea how it will go. I also have no idea what is meant by words like Bodhisattva or awakening. I am more clueless than ever when it comes to walking “the spiritual path”. After seeing those people in Lesvos I am beginning to suspect I already met a thousand Bodhisattva in this lifetime but that I am too busy waiting for a hero in full lotus to actually notice. Not quite willing to expose myself to what is actually happening.

I can´t know for sure, but perhaps the story of Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara being awakened by the cries of the world is nothing other than a story of you and me being fully exposed to the TV news, to other people, to internal sensation. Or to the one we see in the mirror.

We all wake up every day.

I had no other way, always presupposing that I couldn´t chose freedom”
(Franz Kafka)
Every now and then, we modern yogis need someone to mess with our heads. Franz Kafka is a man for that job. His short story “Report to an academy” makes beautiful use of our monkey theme to reflect on modern yoga and it´s relationship to the Nature/Culture divide.

Kafka writes in the voice of a young chimpanzee captured in the wild. Our little hero wakes up on a big ship, wounded by gunshot and stuffed in a cage so narrow that he can´t stand up. After days of tortuous misery, he slowly loses the hope of freedom and starts looking for the next best thing: A way out. On the ship apes belong in a cage, so the way out is to stop being an ape. Our hero painfully subjects himself to teachings in how to shake hands, how to smoke a pipe, how to drink form the liquor bottle and, finally, how to speak. Upon his arrival to Europe he subjugates himself to more human teachers and regimens and reaches “the educational level of an average European”. We are introduced to him as he responds to an invitation from The Academy, delivering a report about his “former life led as ape”. The report is a story of becoming human. A one-way ticket to never fully arriving.  He boldly states:

“I felt more comfortable in the world of men and fitted it better; the strong wind that blew after me out of my past began to slacken; today it is only a gentle puff of air that plays around my heels (…) your life as apes, gentlemen, insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from you than mine is from me. Yet everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike.”

In the eloquent discourse of Kafkas ex-ape, there is no possibility of going back to animal nature. Neither is there any going forwards to pure human accomplishment We are left with the impossible process of becoming human. The tickling at our heels bears witness to the price of taking “the human way out”. Unrestrained, free, animal embodiment is forever lost to us once we enter into the domestication project that life in civilization requires. To Kafka, freedom is purely a monkey business. An irritating tickle reminding us all what we are losing every step of the way.

There are two things I like about this story: First, it portrays human nature not as a mode of existence but as a becoming. Humanness in this story is an irreconcilable process that is never quite nature, never quite culture and never even a mixture of the two. It´s neither this nor that. It´s something else. Something impossible.

Second, I like the distinction Kafka’s ape makes between freedom and a way out.

Both these points tickle my thinking about how we engage in modern yoga and meditation practices. Now there are many approaches to yoga. Some see it as a matter of domesticating something wild. As taming or transcending the animal in us (see Salute to the Monkey Mind part one). Another approach to yoga is seeing the practice as a returning to nature.

I´m sure most of us modern yogis have all subscribed to this yoga magazine in some way. Conciously or unconciously we are drawn to yoga as a practice of uncovering the natural, free animal in us. A s a yoga teacher I have definitely practiced and preached from idealized naturalness repeatedly over the years. Yoga is both practices and marketed as an opportunity to uncover the wilddeness within of rewilding the body. Walking in bare feet, eating raw, going on retreats in forests, mountains or beaches, opening our hips, balancing on our hands, breathing deep in the belly, cooking paleo, going into silence. It tastes like animal freedom.It helps us recover from stress, anxiety and fatigue. It´s undoubtedly nourishing for us to go into the wild and practice. But does a yoga holiday in the wild neccessarily help us with the human predicament of raising children in a polluted city, living a life in shoes or turning off the news with a pit in the stomach? Does it help us act when we encounter sufffering in ourselves and others?

“Rewilding” – at least in its commercial application – seems to be a rare privilege only accessible for the few. Not all of us have the opportunity to spend our life in silent self-reflection on a white beach drinking kale juice and learning to do a headstand every morning. Most of us are stuck in civilization’s hamster wheel, a cage of very real and often painful relationships to people, to nature, to power, to the body, to ourselves. Going “back to nature” has paradoxically become a privilege for the privileged. It takes resources to find a way out if the way out is to stop being human and attain purified naturalness. It takes time, money, pain, sweat and diet to keep up the strength and flexibility of a modern yoga-monkey.

How many of us modern yogis have not looked to yoga posture practice for a tension-free, liberated animal-like body? And we are willing to work hard to be able to afford yoga classes, workshops, super food, and yoga holidays in the silent wilderness. We take times away from our loved ones to work on our hanumanasana. And in between the holidays we overuse electronic devices, sleep too little, worry too much, fail to do anything about it and experience the pain of addiction to coffee, sugar, drugs, alcohol and other peoples opinion about us. Even the simple silly things like walking in high heels, carrying a bag on one shoulder or holding the belly in leaves a painful imprint in our enculturated human bodies. A pain of civilized restriction producing a dream of animal freedom. A trickle on our heels. A pain that make us long for going somewhere else, doing something else, being someone else. Someone more natural, more animal, more free perhaps?

This is where Kafka blows my mind. Between the lines, Report to an Academy gives us an analytical razor sharp enough to cut through spiritual materialism. (Especially the kind that is dressed up in commercialized naturalness and ape-acrobatics). Let all Instagram Yoga Celebrities pose in peace while we listen to a monkey-powered reflection on human attempts to attain physical freedom like that of the apes: Acrobats in trapeze on the variety stage:

“They swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air, they floated into each other’s arms, one hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. “And that too is human freedom,” I thought, “self-controlled, movement.” What a mockery of holy Mother Nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter.”

To Kafka’s ape, physical prowess for humans is a far cry from free animal embodiment. In the ape-gaze, modern yoga as seen in impressive handstand videos has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with wanting a way out.

Yoga will never turn us back into monkeys. (We have a generation of irreversibly injured yoga bodies to prove that). Our species have physical limits that will tickle our heels every step of the way (AND our knees, sacroiliac joints, lower backs, writsts…). Reminding us that we are not the free and unrestrained apes that we aspire to be. I know a yoga teacher who finds it acceptable that his body always hurts somewhere, that is just part of the game, he says. Yoga clearly never succeeds in transcending the animal in us. No amount of yoga can concour the mortal, fleshy vulnerability of our bodies. I know  medieval yogis wrote about super human powers and cheating death. But they are all dead now. We can let that one go i think. The apes laugh their butts off watching us undergo pain and torture on the mat and the cushion to attain that rewilded “free” animal body. Self-controlled movement. Whether we approach yoga as a disciplined mastery over the body (a cultural pursuit) or a practice of freeing a wild, natural body (going back to nature) it remains to Kafka a becoming human: A one-way ticket to never fully arriving. Becoming has no glorified purity at the end of the tunnel. We humans never quite “make it”.

Kafka blows my mind because he has the courage to eschew purity and insist on bastard impossibility. I would like to think that Report to an Academy has more to offer than a steriotypical punch in the face of big bad civilization. We can do more than just crying for a our internal chimpanzee cut in two by the bars separating nature and culture. We can practice yoga in a way where we dont have to spend the rest of our lives dreaming about a body we will never attain. Kafkas ape bears witness to the impossibility of coming to terms with Nature/Culture duality that human existence plunges us into. To Kafka, becoming human is simply an impossible situation! No completion is possible, no purity attainable, no picking and choosing will ever fully satisfy us. We can´t go back and we can´t move forwards.

So what if we could surrender to that?

What a relief! To let go of a way out and instead feel free to be just this. A half-baked ape-human at peace with itself. To surrender willingly to the irreconcilable becoming that is our life. Not quite the unrestrained wild animals we long to be, not really the perfectly cultivated human beings we would be “if only”... Just this. Beautifully incomplete. Immaculate imperfection.

What does this mean to a yogi? I´m not sure yet. It would have to be a collective experiment. I imagine we can practice surrender to the perfect impossibility of human life anywhere. Not just in white beaches or silent meditation halls. Not just in solitary silent retreats but also in engaged action and social life. I can imagine a yoga practice that allows us to explore, love and honor the limitations and capacities of this very body, these very relationships, this very walk on this very earth. On the mat, in meditation, at the computer screen, in high heels, watching the news, crying, worrying, holding the belly in, breathing out, falling in love. Feeling this and allowing what we are feeling to fuel spontaneous action. Allowing for a real time relationship with this impossible world.

Imagine a spiritual practice that doesn’t just make us feel great with ourselves but also intimate with the pain and joy of other beings. Imagine a yoga practice that calls for an unflinching response to what is happening here and now. Imagine no longer having to claw for a way out of reality’s hamster wheel. Imagine walking on earth willingly encountering everything that tickles our human heels. The sound accompanying every step being apes laughing laughing…

There are times where our life just flows and we take the corners as if we are on rails. No friction or bumps in the road. And there are times where we get out of a bed with a heavy heart and drag our feet through the day. I think it’s safe to say that 99,9% of us find our first yoga class in response to the latter type of day rather than the former. We come to yoga because we want to feel better. Or because we want something more. And it works. Yoga can help us take our “low” into a “high” so to speak. To lead a life with less friction. That desire propels us forward in the practice. Its cool.

And maybe one day we begin to suspect that there is More than wanting more.

New spaces opening in our practice, the “More” with a capital M, is quite often preceded by an experience of friction returning with a vengeance. Deeply rooted patterns repeating themselves enlessly despite everything we learned, irreparable bumps in the road, problems too big for us to soldier through.

In our practice, we often respond to this new situation with a feeling of disenchantment or even disappointment. Maybe you find yourself in your favorite class with your favorite teacher but you are just not feeling it. Maybe your steady self-practice that used to regulate and keep you strong just falls apart. Maybe you are just too busy, too sad, too tired, too bored, too distracted, too angry, too in love (too whatever!) to practice. Maybe yoga just doesn´t do it for you anymore.

The first couple of times this happens to us, we jump straight to fixing the problem. We get our ass in line and boot camp ourselves back to bliss. We seek out new styles of yoga, new teachers, new techniques until we get the magic back. We read books on how to get our spiritual, shit together. It works for a while. But there is More.  If we keep going, one day we may just wake up and find that nothing works. No way around the friction.

This is a threshold.

Being with the friction and adversaries of life is a golden opportunity to encounter the “More” of your practice. The unexpected, that which you didnt order on the welness-menu, that which you couldnt possibly have imagineed. Bumpy journeys are a chance to commit and go deeper in our relationship with yoga.
We are all painfully aware that nobody surfs through an entire human life touching only the white foam on the top of every wave. Surfing implies going under, getting up, waiting, flying, failing forward. Life is valley and peak, a steady and unruly stream of creative impermanence, impredictability. But even if we know this, it takes a lifetime of practice to fully appreciate it.

So when yoga no longer works as a romantic affair taking you from low to high, get ready for for the big wave of More. For being intimate with the life you are actually living – for better and for worse. Our failure to fix it, our inability to save the day, our “same old shit” haunting us through life is perhaps nothing but an invitation to fully appreciate this life.

Perhaps, the friction of our life is not only an invitation to get our shit together. The experience of friction could also be an invitation to fall apart. To let go of the modern imperative of constantly having to improve, develop, upgrade and win. To become intimate with who and what you are.

It´s quite simple really: A life with less friction just has friction. But can we fully appreciate that fact, are we ready to life our life not missing a heartbeat?

At some point we may become ready for More. To let go of fighting the lows and clinging to the highs. And perhaps then we can surrender to the totality of life. Bumps and all.

Perhaps.

A dear friend recently wrote to me telling that her friends thought yoga was self-centered. In Denmark this has been argued passionately in news papers and social media. Is the roaring success of mindfulness and yoga in the west not just making us less engaged in other people and more absorbed in our own little practice of navel gazing? Are we using eastern traditions to justify a life that is basically revolving around self-improvement, self developmenet, self-care and self gratification?

I´m sure you can imagine the heat of that debate. Ouch!

In a workshop I recently attended with Genpo Roshi  the question came up again: How can we sit here and meditate when people with no future are surviving in lifeboats only a couple of hours away from here? What are we really doing in our so-called spiritual practice? Are we really making a difference?

This is where I typically give a long, ignited speech in defense of yoga and meditation. It starts with explaining how yoga returns us to innate sensitivity. How the wisdom of the body teaches us to act on what we feel rather than watch in apathy as the world goes to hell. I will argue that in the long run, yoga makes the world a better place. That people who dedicate themselves to this practice will change and become less self-absorbed in time. If you push me hard enough I may even say that if yoga is really so self-centered, it’s least a better form of self-centeredness than most others. That at least doing yoga does no harm to anyone! My bottom line argument is this idea that yoga basically makes us better people.

I´ll get to that speech in a minute (can´t help it) but first, i´d like to share a new perspective I got on this debate from Genpo´s teaching. In the workshop we took that discussion just a bit deeper than I do in my usual rants. Here is how he opened the enquiry:

YES!. Yes, it is kind of self-centered to spend decades meditating in a monestary. We humans are hugely self-absorbed. Look right around you. And don’t forget to look at the ones who are not spending decades of their life on meditation. Are “they” so much less self-centered than “we” who got on the spiritual trip? Are “we” less self centered than “them”? Look at the state of the planet, the distribution of wealth, what does it say about us? Are any of us human beings really free from self-centeredness? Even Mother Theresa probably got a little tiny kick out of helping others.

What??? No defense speech? No protection? Just the naked, vulnerable exposure of having to admit that we are as screwed up as anyone else. This got me thinking. Why is it that I give that defense speech so readily? Who am I really protecting when I argue that yoga makes us better people?  Yeah, guess who.

It is so easy to numb our colonial hangover by pointing fingers at those who seem even more self-indulgent than us. I am sure we can all agree that it feels good to assume that attachment to the self and all the need and greed that comes with it is found “out there” in them and not “in here” in me. Especially if we are yogis and subscribe to the idea that our practice is all about dropping the self.

Non-yogis can point fingers at those who are doing yoga and meditate. Yogis point back at those who buy big cars, those who collect Valentino shoes or those who own multinational corporations. We can all point fingers at everyone NOT sitting in a sinking lifeboat right now looking desperately into the horizon. But I suspect that will not be a viable solution. 

So maybe we could go the other way. We could own our self-centeredness and deal with it accordingly. We can look our ego trip in the eye and recognize it for what it is. Yes, I’m self-centered! In fact, so much that I chose to stay here in the privileged part of the planet instead of leaving it to help where the other half lives. Yes I have chosen to spend most of my time on Earth attending to 1st world problems.

Hands in the air people! Let’s just own the oh so very human side of us that puts the self before everything else. No defense speech, no spiritual gloss. Why should my monthly charity donation, my Buddhist loving kindness practice, my dedication to teaching yoga give me a free pass to a seventh heaven where I can sit on a spiritual cloud and look down on the poor deluded ego-trippers of the world? Thinking yoga makes us better persons is perhaps nothing other than self-centeredness. And then, thinking our spiritual practice entitles us to  point fingers at others arrogance, greed, ignorance, aggression or egocentricity must be the ego trip that beats all ego trips.

When we drop defending ourselves then perhaps we will no longer need to hurt those we think are different form us. We will not need to project our own shit onto other people: People who meditate for years but keep on talking only about themselves, people who go on yoga retreats instead of opening a soup kitchen, people who buy electronic gadgets instead of sending the money to the Red Cross, people groom their corporate careers instead of building houses in Kathmandu valley, people breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2 and thereby contribute to the destruction of the planet.

We are not separate from those people. We ARE those people.

We point fingers at others because we cannot bear to look within. We cringe at the prospect of having to admit that we are just as hopelessly flawed as the rest of the human race. And so we wander through life pointing at “them”. Missing out on the opportunity to get to know and love what we most deeply are: Nothing other than this conditioned being consisting of this precise mixture of horror and wonder. Precisely this. Nothing better, nothing worse.

As said by Charlotte Joko Beck: “When nothing is special, everything can be”. When you discover that you are nothing special, nothing other than the rest, all of experience becomes special. Everything can be appreciated for being exactly what it is. Including yourself. There is nobody else you could be. There is nowhere else to point your finger. No defense speech needed. The boundary between inside and outside is wishful thinking.

Yoga may seem self-centered as it is a practice of continually looking deep within. But the space within is huge! In fact, it often shows to include everything that we thought was “not me”. When you have seen “within” for a while it seems that everything within is also without. And vice versa, what is outside of us is also inside: “Their” shit also “my” shit. Non-separable.

In that perspective the self seems like a tiny speck of dust floating within billions of galaxies. This does not mean that the self is not important. It just means there is more.
In that perspective, is it really worth the fight to have arguments and defend your self when someone says that yoga is just a big ego trip?

Here is an idea: When someone points their finger at you and says “self-centered”, just throw your hands in the air and say “guilty as charged”. And make sure you really mean it. Own it. Then perhaps there will be peace on earth, at least for the rest of that conversation. When we yogis take the bait, when we jump to defend ourselves with spiritual justifications we get more of the same shit: Self-centered, well-educated, privileged people discussing which one is on a bigger ego-trip.

Meanwhile, people with no future are surviving in lifeboats only a couple of hours away from here. I will spare you the pain of listing all the other horros that are happening right now.

So instead of talking about selflessness we can perhaps just do it?

We could begin demonstrating our lack of attachment to the self by dropping the defense speech when someone accuses us of being egocentric boheme hipster hippies.

Maybe we can just go: “Yeah, that’s right, spot on! There is just no end to our ego trip huh? … you want soy milk in your latte, right? Anything else I can get you?”

Throw in the towel in the ring. Lose the debate. Then life can move on and perhaps we can turn our indignation towards something worthwhile.

Q: where do you place the needle on ”yoga as a spiritual practice” versus ”yoga as a body shaper” scale.
B: Yoga is for me is unity. Therefore, it’s hard for me to place that needle anywhere. I see no opposition between spirituality and embodiment. There is nothing about your body that is not totally divine! No spiritual practice takes place outside the body. Without a body you´d be dead. I like to see it this way: If one side of the coin is spirituality and the other is embodiment yoga is the whole coin as such. That which includes and transcends all opposites.

Q: what drew you to yoga?

B: When I was about 8 years old, this little bird crashed into my window and died. My mother helped me bury it in the garden. I was devastated. She said it would go to heaven. However, I had trouble getting the whole idea of paradise. I imagined as a tropical version of my parents garden and figured there would not be enough space for those beings that die. Where do we all go? I wondered. That night I dreamt of the bird and in the dream, it came to me that maybe this world is nothing but paradise. That there is no outside to our existence. We never leave. The bird would rot and turn into earth and nourish a plant, get eaten and turn into part of an animal or excrements or food for worms or whatever. It never stops. In the dream, there was no heaven to go to. This was it! So we had better make the most of it, I thought. After a dream like that, I suppose the wise thing to do would be to just go out and enjoy life. Nevertheless, I didn’t. I got extremely interested in everything spiritual, supernatural or mysterious. In my late teenage years, this brought me to Buddhism where I studied with a Tibetan lama for about 10 years. My grandmother had introduced me to yoga as a child and I did go back into it again when it became fashionable in the mid 1990ies. However, I wasn´t really drawn to it until I met my teacher Godfrey Devereux. He spoke like someone who had fully realized that this was it. It was not just an idea from a childhood dream. He was living it and in his class, I was experiencing it. I was hooked to yoga right there and then.

Q: And how often do you really practice yoga.

B: There is always an opportunity for self-enquiry whatever I am busy doing. From that perspective, I practice yoga 24/7. … I got away with that one too easy didn´t I? I guess that´s not what you meant. My formal practice is mainly sitting on a cushion, which I do every day if possible. There are definitely days and sometimes even a week or more where I don’t get to do my posture practice, it depends how interested I am or whether I’m preparing for teaching.

Q: Do you ever loose motivation for doing yoga? How do you get back on track?

B: Of course. When I do, I just wait until interest takes me back to the mat. Right now, for example, I prefer sitting in meditation to doing posture practice. However, it can reverse again at any time. Interest and motivation comes in waves and I like to just to wait for the next one. You can’t push the river as they say.
Q: Do you do any other form of exercise?
B: I just started running this summer to challenge my asthmatic lungs. I´m shit at it though! I doubt it will last the winter. It´s probably just one of those silly projects.

Q: Who inspire your yoga practice?

B: The whole community around Dynamic Yoga is a great inspiration for me. Several of my colleagues in Denmark, the other Dynamic Yoga senior teachers and senior trainers are feeding my work and challenging my assumptions all the time. And I love the teaching language that is cross-breeding between us. My main inspiration is of course my teacher Godfrey who is the originator of the Dynamic Yoga training method. I´ve been studying with him since I started teaching. Lately I´ve been on retreat with a zen master who taught Godfrey way back in the 1980íes, his name is Genpo Roshi. I definitely want to do more with him too!

Q: Have you ever felt so attached to someone or something that you couldn’t let them or it go even though they didn’t serve you any purpose?

B: Sure! All kinds of lame things. I´m quite attached to a pair of Jimmy Choo stilettos that I never managed to wear for more than once, and only for about 20 minutes. I just can’t drop them even though they hurt my feet and are totally useless! I´m also still quite attached to my sense of self and all its little fantasies about its own existence and power. I just can´t seem to let go of it, even though it has become quite clear to me that it’s a fantasy. The idea of “me” has no grounding in reality. I´ve already been so many different people in this life that it makes me sweat just thinking about it. Still I hopple on with my stupid stilettos in my hand calling myself Birgitte as if that was a solid and permanent entity. But hey, if I really had “learned to let go of attachment” once and for all, there would be no “me” left to make that claim. It would be tricky to do an interview with such a person ha ha ha.

Q: How do you suggest we learn to let go of attachment?

B: I suppose letting go is not an act of doing. It’s something that happens when we stop doing. Letting go, surrendering is a spontaneous impact of doing yoga. It happens when it happens. I did at one point get very intensely into my practice and put my relationship with my yoga mat above everything else for quite some time (quite attached, paradoxically). That resulted in quite a few years where i got very “detached” from my friends, society, politics, science or the world in general. Life outside my practice simply did not interest me very much. I actually woke up one morning looking at my two kids and found myself thinking “child” rather than “my child”. It just happened! I really didn’t mean to. Let me stress: I don’t see that sort of behaviour as an accomplishment at all! In fact, I think that all my so-called detachment was just a cover up for a great big fear of being vulnerable here in this crazy world where things can hurt like hell and your loved ones can be taken from you at any moment. Detachment, when turned into a project in itself, can easily become a form of spiritual bypassing; a way of using spiritual practice to not have to deal with the difficulties in life. So to me attachments are part and parcel of being human. It’s just one side of a whole coin. My two kids need me to be deeply attached in order for them to survive. And one day I’ll need to let go of some of that attachment for them to thrive and live their own life. Right now my practice is just to live and be present in relationships with other living creatures as fully and freely as possible. Not trying to hold on and not trying to let go either. I´m not saying I’m good or bad at it. It´s just an enquiry.

Q: if you could only do one pose what would it be?
B: Savasana! Or wait…sitting in half lotus on my cushion… argh! That´s a hard one. I’ll have to think about it.

Q: how do you eat? What foods do you include the most? What do you avoid?
B: I eat whatever my body wants. Except peanuts. I’m so allergic you could kill me with a bag of peanuts.

Q: do you have any advice for us to become less disconnected to ourselves and more in tune with what goes on in our body/mind?

B: We have a saying in Dynamic Yoga: “Follow the delight – Feel sensation”. Right now your body is breathing, feel the nostrils changing temperature. Right now your heart is beating, feel the pulsation of blood in your chest, your hands, your fingers. Feel the pull of gravity, feel your muscles respond. Feel your feet touching the ground, your lips touching each other, the soft pressure of air against your skin. It´s always available right now. Sensations will keep streaming as long as you are alive. You have never been disconnected from your bodymind. Being consciously aware of body and mind it is just one side of the whole consciousness-coin. Our being includes it all. Yoga is to me an invitation to engage, to say yes to being at one with that which is always, already right here.

 

Yogalove.dk Finest
Pernille Lekic
Zenia Santini –naturazin.dk
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When you find the toothpaste in the refrigerator. When you lie awake at 5AM. When the meditation bell rings and you realize you just spent 30 minutes grocery shopping. When your mind goes round and round in circles to the rhythm of whatever rimes with anxiety. Say hello to monkey mind.

Migrating from Buddhist teachings, the concept of monkey mind has today found its way into modern yoga vocabulary. In the popular understanding, monkey mind refers to the incessant, repetitive chatter of your mind, especially (but not exlusively) during meditaton. I´ll leave the Buddhist history of the concept to the scholars. My business here is to reflect on popularity of this metaphor as a cultural phenomenon in modern spiritual practice. As the use of “monkey mind” is beginning to enter colloquial language in yoga studios, meditation circles and even corporate environments across the western world my question, is what does this metaphor do for us? And what can we do with it?

 

 

 

 

Split

Most of us are conditioned to experience our encounter with monkey mind as quite irritating. It is painful to experience a hyperactive mind. It is painful to be unable to stop. Adding to this is cultural conditioning. Modern yogis live in a world that is increasingly intolerant to waste of time, fuckups, unproductiveness, daydreaming and irrational behavior. We are expected to be focused, efficient, present, goal oriented and above all: In control.

The concept “Monkey Mind” seems to be doing some work here; externalizing that in us, which do not have “spiritual table manners”. Monkey mind is a concept that helps us distance ourselves from the things we are not proud of. It creates a comfortable split between “me” and that part of me which is hard to own. Here is an example:  When our thinking mind has a brilliant thought, we say: That was me! When it has a random, superfluous, repetitive, embarrassing thought, we say: That was monkey mind. (I´m paraphrasing a dharma talk by zen master Genpo Roshi, go here to hear it live). Consequently, modern yoga and meditation practice easily slips into a domestication project: “Taming the monkey mind”. Disciplining that in us that does not comply to the cultural norm. Show that unruly beast in your head that you mean business!

Show who? Who is the real monkey here? You or your thinking mind? Let´s face it. Without our ability to think, we naked apes would not have lasted a minute in the evolutionary history of planet earth. No way we could have pulled off civilization without creative and wild thinking. Without the human mind´s ability to gnaw incessantly at a problem until it’s solved, we would still be living in trees.

So why is it that once we start doing yoga and meditation we suddenly see the thinking process as “not me”, something we need to tame and control, something we need to distance ourselves from. Maybe we have been taught to split our heads in two so we can maintain an illusion of control. Maybe we just can´t bear life in our own skin, maybe the pain is just too much to bear. I have no idea. I do, however have a feeling that separation, domestication and control is not going to deliver the permanent peace that yoga so boldly promisess. On the contrary it may be pushing us further into suffering.

 

 

 

 

War

My best guess is that if you really do have a monkey in your head, it is likely to behave like any other wild animal. It does not purr and cuddle when met with insensitivity and domination. If yoga and meditation becomes a project of externalizing or demanding docility and obedience from your mind, don´t be surprised if it gets up at 5 in the morning to slap you around while it can. In bed, on the yoga mat, in meditation, when bored, when anxious. Any chance it gets, your monkey will fight for free expression. And we fight back. Sometimes we become loud and irritable “schhhh!. Sometimes we do it with soft bells, smiley voice, endless patience and a hidden agenda of slowly and silently strangeling the monkey in our heads by teaching it how to sit still and be quiet. I´m imagining that to the monkey mind, both strategies feel like a cage, one slightly more manipulative than the other, yet still a cage.

When monkeys feel entrapped and need a way out they can keep a pace and intensity that will drive any human insane! Monkeys are strong, agile and incredibly fast. But that temporary calm of your inner monkey can be a deceptive form of compliance. When the bell rings, when you are trying to go to sleep, when somebody pushes your buttons, monkey mind will take the opportunity to drag you by the heels into your darkest, deepest shadow and have its way with you. Oh that battle ground of Man against monkey mind. Mind against itself. An auto-immune response to spiritual self-improvement. Fighting Monkey Mind is a battle you can’t win.

Unless, of course, you are willing to loose.

Very few people have taught the art of completely loosing it. It’s a bold move to give up and leave the battle ground. It takes tremendous trust. I met only two teachers who extend this invitation to me – and really meant it. One, Genpo Roshi, teaches zen, the other, Godfrey Devereux, teaches yoga. In their respective approaches we find some interesting ideas of how to relate with the the monkey mind metaphor in new and productive ways. Both seem to have left the battleground of a split mind at war with itself to step onto a path of becoming intimate with that which we tend to externalize or push away as “not me”.

 

 

 

 

Intimacy

In zen (Genpo style) Losing it means allowing the splitting mechanism in our head to break down by becoming one with whatever happens. In relation to the problem of monkey mind, this could be done in many ways. If for example you are sitting, sit as monkey mind. Become one with the unruly thinking process. Let me just stress, sitting as is not the same as sitting with monkey mind. Sitting with is akin to witnessing or observing the mind. This is just another split. The observer and the observed. A trip to the zoo.

Sitting as monkey mind is different. It means no separation. No bars between you and the beast in your head. Enter the cage. Become monkey mind. In this version of zen practice it is just a matter of letting go and relaxing into that which is happening here and now. Genpo says:

“There is no barrier to begin with, nor a window to go through. The other shore does not exist. If this shore is not enough, it’s too bad”
(Genpo Roshi, 1994)

You already are monkey mind. Becoming one with it it not going to another shore, its staying here and becoming intimate with what we are. If we are full of confused, repetivite, imaginary chatter that is what we need to become one with. So here we encounter an approach of leavning the domestication project and unleashing the wild thinking process with no agenda of control. Becoming monkey mind means getting intimate with thinking. Honoring and empowering the mind to do its job and become one with thinking (if that´s what is happening at that moment, could be sensation, sound, emotion, action, anything). If 40 minutes of planning in seated meditation is what is going on, let it. You are still sitting. If reconstructed memory, imaginary scenarios, or incessant, insane, repetitive commentary is happening then allow it to run amok. You are already here sitting. There is nowhere else to be than where you are now. This is it. You have always already arrived where you should be. Whatever arises, the zen path of intimacy is to become one with it. Allowing yourself the freedom of having no agenda for what goes through your head. Even the agenda of having no agenda is unneccessary.

In yoga (Godfrey style) the practice of intimacy is primarily a somatic one. Similar to the zen approach yoga does not begin with splitting the observing subject (mind) and the observed object (body).  The path of intimacy in yoga encourages an immersion into activities that are already expressing the unity underlying our ideas of body/mind. Feeling sensation is one such process. Feeling is not the same as observing, labelling, naming, verbalizing or visualizing what is going on in the body. Feeling has no split. It is an invitation to intimacy, to become one with. No bars.

Where was your mind when you were fully engaged in that first kiss from your first love? Doing its job: Enjoying it! Relaxing into the delight, completely gone in kissing. (If it was a really good kiss – that is). For yoga posture practice we could call Godfrey´s strategy: Give the monkey a banana. One implication is practicing pain-free movement. No intense, acey or sharp sensations, no alarm bells ringing in your joints. Yoga posture practice should feel soft and delicious like a good kiss.When your joints are not in any immediate threat or danger the mind does not have to think and work out ways to stop the threat or prevent injury. Neither does it have to disocciate into a dream land far away from the painful sensations that sometimes are our bodies. Hence it can relax into feeling whatever sensations arise  (if you take ahimsa seriously and practice in a way that does not harm your joints) perhaps also enjoying the more and more subtle , elusive, soft sensations. In time we can perhaps practice intimcy with whatever sensations arise, even the ones that are not comfortable. Emotional pain such as fear, anger or grief often have a rythmic sensation-complex to them that can be felt deeply and appreciated for being what they are. But in yoga posture practice, the Godfrey-strategy would be to allow soft delight to draw us in and internalize the mind until we completely lose the battle of distinctions and splits and become one with sensation. Feeling sensations invites a becoming one with, simply because there is nowhere else we would rather like to be than here feeling the sensations that are our body at this moment in time.

So does that solve the monkey mind problem? Godfrey says:

                “It doesn’t mean that the monkey mind runs away. The monkey mind is still there. Having its fun while disturbing no one. Because there is no one there to be disturbed”
(Godfrey Devereux, recorded teaching).

So similar to the “becoming one with” approach of zen, this approach to yoga invites us to feel sensation so intimately that the one who experiences disturbing thoughs dissolves into that which is experienced. From that place it doesn´t matter what that monkey supposedley living in your head is up to. You are the tingling in your fingertips, the delight of your breath, the throbbing of pulses, the spaciousness, tightness, hardness, softness, flow, warmth, coolness, rhythm, sound, thinking.

So in both approaches, as i understand them, monkey mind is not neccessarily a problem in itself. Our relationship to this concept of someone thinking crazy thoughts inside our head is what makes us suffer.  If we do buy into the idea that there is a monkey in our minds then it seems the best thing we can do is become intimate with it. Turning away from it, fighting it, training it, taming it, domesticating it is a declaration of a war you can´t win anyway. Any fight with your mind is only a fight within your mind. (This includes the battle against your own tendency to fight with your mind btw!). The path of intimacy allows you to give up, loose that battle and win something much more satisfying.

When not under attack, monkeys can be quite peaceful creatures. Have you seen a monkey picking its fur or eating? When engaged in something interesting, they just chill out in quiet activity. One of my colleagues once tried to sit still and meditate until the monkey that was sitting in the tree a few meters away had moved. The monkey won. Of course! It was totally relaxed, it had no agenda. It was chilling out as monkey. Not trying to accomplish anything it wasn´t already doing.

The same thing is going on in you when you meditate or practice yoga postures. When you become intimate with what is happening, your mind goes quiet all by itself. No taming, stopping, stilling, cultivating, domesticating necessary.  When a wild monkey is left in peace, it feels safe. When it feels safe it relaxes. When nobody needs its presence or activity, a relaxed monkey may actually use the break to get some rest.

 

For a more on the teachings of Genpo Roshi go here

For a more on the teachings of Godfrey Devereux go here

Yoga is no longer the exclusive privilege of solitary cave men. Today´s yogis work for money, have relationships and live busy lives. This can spark the apparent dilemma between “my yoga practice” and “dealing with stuff”. You can hear it when we modern yogis talk about practice as that other thing we need to counter balance our life. We use yoga as an anti-dote to stress. We use yoga a bit of non-doing in a week of frantic activity. We use yoga as a bit of “yin” to all that “yang”. (fill in your favorite). Modern yoga seems to be fraught with a bittersweet longing for the cave, the alternative, the other. This is how we practice when life gets a little too hectic: to get a break, to heal and rest. There is nothing wrong with this. It really does get us a long way and we really do need it.

 

As we move further into our practice things may change. We discover that the cave is just another place in the world, not an antidote, not a separate space outside it. That the same old stuff is going on in here as everywhere else. Because whatever we do, the things happening now are our life, there is no cave to hide in, you are always right in the middle of it. The good news is that you are then also always smack in the middle of your yoga practice. You never left. Disturbing thoughts, pain, difficult relationships, stress, loneliness, joy, love, children, friends, parties, food, email, taxes, work, these are all here as part of your practice. This is the moment where yoga stops being that other thing we do to get a break from a busy life. Where we discover yoga as an invitation to become one with the constant activity of life.

 

Any yoga posture can extend that invitation to intimacy, to become one with, to needing nothing “other”. Solitary cave men had bodies just like you and me. And becoming one with the body through deeply feeling it, will blur all our neat distinctions between activity and release, holding on and letting go. Feeling the body in dynamic movement, we can encounter a deep inner stillness. Feeling the body in passive stillness, we can encounter subtle pulsations, rhythms and activities. Being still is not other than moving. Moving is not other than stillness. The same logic goes for yoga and that which apparently seems like “not yoga”. Perhaps your practice is no other than your life.

Yoga is no longer just the privilege of meditating cave men. Modern yogis live engaged lives full of relationships and responsibility. This sometimes leaves us with an apparent dilemma of balancing our time for practice and everyday life. Instead of seeing yoga as the art of balancing two separate things, these two workshops will approach yoga as an invitation to intimacy. Perhaps yoga practice is not something “other” than our daily activities, but rather an invitation to become one with them. Using your body as a doorway, we explore the possibility of becoming intimate with what you can feel. In this way yoga reveals the underlying unity between apparent separations and trade-offs. Feeling the body in dynamic movement, we access internal stillness. Feeling the body in static postures, we find subtle movement and pulse. Perhaps, your practice really is no other than your life.

Saturday 10.00-13.00 Moving into stillness

A soft, dynamic yoga posture practice where flow and activity invites your mind to go quiet. Using repetitive movement (ullola) we become intimate with body and mind. The class ends in a long relaxation and a little dialogue over tea

Sunday 13.00-16.00 The subtle pulse

Using movement as preparation, this class explores holding yoga postures in stilness for a longer period of time. Stillness is here used as an invitation to feel the subtle blissful pulsation of life under your skin. Ends with a guided relaxation and a seated meditation.

Price: 400 DKR per class

Booking: info@dynamicyoga.dk

Exotic as it was to teach retreats around Europe for 3 months it feels quite lovely come back home. Looking at the kids going off to school this morning I caught myself thinking that things will go back to normal now.
The mind is a funny one.
Back to normal? As if that had ever actually happened! Every time I feel prepared, every time I think I know what to do, every time I think I have it nailed, something unimaginable kicks in. Moreover, reality always seem to surpass the scenarios I manage to conjure up about the future. There is always more.

“Back to normal” is a concept. We use it to repress the fact that we are standing on a tiny blue planet moving through infinite space at an incredible speed with only a thin layer of transparent atmosphere to protect itself from collision. “Back to normal” is a way of repressing the radical fragility of being alive. Life is bursting with new variations; every new cell your body produces is slightly different from the last. By the end of today, most of the electrons making up the molecules in your underwear will have switched place with those making up the molecules of your skin. You are being born again every moment and there is no stopping it. Who am I to say that the tiny life of a Danish yoga teacher life will “go back to normal”? Who am I kidding?

A yoga teacher ought to know better. Yoga is a bit like water. It has no agenda, no preconceived ideas, no pre-planned route, no mold or form. It just encounters whatever is happening and takes shape according to what it runs through. Sometimes white and wild, sometimes it looks so quiet you could think it is standing still. But its movement can’t be blocked.

It is never “just another yoga class” because your body is different now than it was yesterday. All you need to do is take a moment to feel it. It is never the same teaching because the teaching changes like water depending on what it is passing through. Teaching yoga is always the product of an immediate body-to-body relationship, which cannot be pre-planned, cannot be figured out in advance. It can only be felt and responded to.

But even if we know better , we yoga teachers plan and prepare constantly. We buy plane tickets, we study, we practice, we spend a lot of time with our calendar. We have to. You can go to my events calendar page and see the grand scheme laid out for this autumn. It´s kind of a cute neurosis, really. We humans survive by pretending that tomorrow will match our expectations. That the plane will leave the ground, that the planet will still be orbiting around the sun, that we will still be breathing.

But once we actually get there, I guarantee you that it´s never going to be exactly as we imagined. Something new will – nilly willy – add itself to the mix and make a difference. We know this in our hearts, but we pretend to forget because it’s just too much to handle. Instead, we make up the story of “another day in the office”. As if that day ever arrived! If you pay attention, you can see difference seeping in everywhere.

The miracle is not how things change. The miracle is how things occasionally manage to appear stable! When the water runs so smoothly it seems to be standing still. Your life, your personality, your body, your another-day.in-the-office-experience is excactly such a miracle. Yoga is an invitation to explore the depths and currents underlying the miracle of your life.

“To be one is always to become with many” (Donna Haraway).

Body

There is no way to be sure. But I read in a book the other day that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of the cells that make up my body. The other 90 percent are filled with genomes from other species. No kidding! For every cell in your body there are approximately 10 more microscopic organisms living in you. That composite “thing” that we all like to call “human” is apparently filled to the brim with “other” species. Some microorganisms make you healthy, some make you sick and some are just in for a free ride.

You are not only you. You are also genes you exchange with your pet or your child’s virus infection. You are the plant you ate, the milk that was in your coffee. The pollen you inhaled, the bacteria you ingested while eating a carrot. Our bodies are mixtures, composite organisms. The author of the book, science studies professor Donna Haraway, boldly states: “We have never been human”. It seems that what I call “My body” is only being held together by a temporary and precarious orchestration of immune responses. This precarious balance allows me to feel, move, breathe, experience, speak, think. For a while. How rare and precious and that orchestration is. When I die, those 90% “other” will take advantage of “my” cells in new ways and the “we” will be mixed anew with more species. My body was “we” from the very beginning. Still, if it died today someone would mourn over the loss of this partiular body. It´s never going to exist again in this particular composition.

Speech

Consider the words you’ve just read. I’m not the only one talking here. Not even the language is mine! I was not born a native English speaker. The text above is full to the brim with the words of “others”. It mixed genes with american post-feminists, science studies, french sociology, microbiome theory, zen, yoga, tibetan buddhism, classrooms, the QWERTY keyboard, software, engineers, webhosts, electricity, burning coal, windmills. 

We could go on. The orchestration of words you read here is probably less mine than my body is human. I can´t even take credit for 10%. And as you read, this text, it is already decomposing. “My” speech is already cross breeding with “yours” the moment you ingested it with your eyes. It came from elsewhere and you already transformed it with your understanding. Speech is a gigantic, transformational “we” breathing us through and through. Still, you can hold me accountable for my writing. And I’ll agree to that. I’ll take responsibility for what is  being said by me.

Mind

We are taught to think of the mind as a private enclosure. These are “my” thoughts, “my” decisions. Right? But are they only my thoughts? Right now I have a song in my head that was played on the radio this morning. Rhianna. Again. I didn´t ask for that! If I try to trace back each of the decisions that run through my head in a day I get lost in the number of shoulders they all stand on. Thought does not seem to arise in isolation, my mind seems to me to be intimately merged with whatever it is in relationship to. Philosopher Michel Serres wrote:

“I think therefore I am anyone. A tree, a river, a number, an ivy, a reason or you, whatever (…) I think therefore I am not. I think, therefore I do not exist. Who am I? A blank domino, a joker that can take any value (…) I am just the plain whore of the thoughts that accost me” (Serres, 1995, p.31)

Serres suggests that thought does not arise from an isolated entity called “I”. They travel through us like a draft wind, they come on to us and mixes us up in new becomings. If your mind decides you want to to have a baby, a hundred million thoughts and decisions that it did not plan or choose will make a pass at you. How to make a baby? Fertility cycles, hormones, suitable partners, what if it fails? If a baby enters your life, you become the thought-whore of diaper commercials and baby food experts. Doctors, statistics, moral values and institutions will chat up your mind and change it. You become the vehicle of a new expression of love that never existed before that particular baby was born. A draft wind blowing through you full force.

In the Victorian age, spiritual thinking was all about “channeling” messages from spirits. Not coincidentally,  this kind of thinking arose alongside the discovery of wireless transmission (later known as radio). Today yoga teaches will talk about “downloading” inspiration for their classes from “consciousness”. Channeling spirits, radio waves, downloading teachings, internet. Thoughts are constantly cross breeding and mixing genes. They are not only mine or yours. Mind is mixed from the beginning. With technology, with babies, with theory, music, relationships, books, nature, time, numbers, spaces, with bare feet on sand, with the taste of lemon. Mind is a wide open big breath blowing through nonstop. A universal composite being with a very particular “me-effect”. “My” mind is inarguably not yours. There is a difference. I take responsibility for the concious decisions it pretends to make.

Enquiry

Where are we going with this? Trace back your body/ speech/mind and all you find is a big warm welcome to paradox. The personal and the impersonal, the universal and the particular are deeply entangled. Or should we say non-separate? Or dare we say empty of a separate existence? Look closely and you find mixtures… mixtures… mixtures all the way down. More enquiry.

We could go on. To the classical question: Who am i?  Or (given that 90% of me may be non-human): “What am i?” Am I a blank domino? A joker? A hollow bone being played like a flute? The witness? God? A carrot? Bacteria? Consciousness? Love? The deeper we go, the more perplexing it gets. What is this body, really? Who is speaking? What is thinking?

What is this???

There is no way to be sure. But I would like to suggest, (for now), that holding those questions fuel that eternal beginning called yoga. And that finding The Answer may be the (dead) end.

Love grows like grass. Within and beyond the nuclear family trees trunks, the tiny roots of love shoot out in all directions. Love is an unstoppable multiplicity. A spiky, unbreakable, bristling vitality. Breath by breath, year after year love overgrows an endless array of relational landscapes. Love is wild, ceaseless. Once the small cuttings take root all boundaries come alive. Separateness blurs into an endless, golden wavelike motion.

Love works by its own gentle power.  It is not an act of doing. Love is what happens when we give up the toil. When the mower of preference shuts down, we feel its tingling vibration moving through millions of feathery spikes. Love is the gentle, whispering background noise of life. It bows our head, it beats us to the ground, it buries us under ice, it powders us thick with snow and flowers. To be caressed by the gentle breeze, to receive the hails as they come is love.

Afraid of pain, we find ourselves seized by clinging and cultivation. On such days, we stand with clenched teeth and arms straight down by the sides; fists clutching dry straw. All we wanted was to embrace the infinite meadow, to become one with the soft and the vibrant. On such days, we feel separate. We don’t feel the vast breath of entangled roots beneath. We think we have to become worthy to grow into the world. We pull at the grass.

How to become one with love? We seek, grasp, work, rage. We imagine a union in the horizon and become numb to constant sprouting within the soles of our feet, numb to the growing of love as the tiny hairs in our skin. We try to unite but forget to feel the bristling vitality that constantly breaks through the tarnished contours of self. Love grows, not like grass. It grows as grass, as our fine- branched lungs, our pulsing capillaries, our bone marrow cobwebs, our hurricanes of hair. Tear ducts running wild.

Feel! Under the skin, nerve sitar strings bend and whisper in the wind. They never stop humming the quiet song of sensation: I am love. I cannot be uprooted; I am too vast, too distributed, too manifold. I am love. You cannot possess me, you cannot lose me, you cannot become one with me. You are me.

Nothing but love

A story about my first meeting with a spiritual teacher: A Tibetan Lama who handed me an axe instead of teaching me how to meditate. That was actually a much better idea than i was prepared to admit at the time.

Published by the creatively maladjusted Rebelle Society.

This is it!

“Whatever is happening is the path to enlightenment” ~ Pema Chödrön

I was in my early teens when I started to hang enormous quartz crystals around my neck and go overboard into New Age spirituality.

By the time I turned 20, I had divinities hanging on my wall like rock stars, and my house was so saturated with incense smoke that my friends said it was beginning to smell like bacon.

I was in massive pain. My body was a mess, my hair was falling out, I was in and out of the hospital with chronic eczema, and my love life was falling apart. I dealt with it by shaving my head, wrapping a white shawl around myself, and reciting mantras faster than all the monks of a whole monastery, on double espresso.

read more…

What does yoga postures, acupuncture, mindfulness and pizza have in common? At the Copenhagen Business School, scholars and managers met to discuss the role of Mindfulness Meditation in high performing organizations. Revisitng my former role as an academic scholar i presented a historical reflexion of the corporate mindfulness boom. See the video here 

 

Summary:

“Mind the Gap” is an academic meditation on the recent mindfulness-boom and its entry into corporate enviroments. What actually happens when esoteric practices take the leap across  the east/west gap? Are gaps between tectonic plates  spaces where things get lost or are they spaces where things get created? The presentation compares the global mindfulness boom with three other “indegenous” practices, who in recent history became global transnational phenomena. Looking at the way Transnational Chinese Medicine (TCM), Yoga Posture Practice and Italian pizza(!) spread across the planet, the very idea of a gap between the pure, historical original and a hyped contemporary copy begins to melts down.

In all three cases authenticity seems to be a performative mixture-effect appearing as practices travel across gaps rather than an innocent pre existing state to be corrupted or protected. For yoga and TCM especially, it seems that a mix of estern esoteric authenticity and western scientific credibility  is what has enrsured its global mobilization.

So, what does this mean for our analysis of the present mindfulness boom? Is mindfulneess just excotic food with the edge taken off so the tourist can swallow, but still get a sense of having travelled? Is the transition from buddhist self enquiry into corporate self improvement really just a counterproductive distortion pushing us deeper into suffering? What are the political and ethical implications when modern knowledge workers begin to close their eyes and count to ten?

The presentation draws heavily on scolarly work by Peter Elsass, Mei Zhan, Mark Singleton, Bruno Latour, Marilyn Strathern and my earlier work in the field of science, technology and society. The distinction between self improvement and self enquiry and their respective implications for human suffering is borrowed from Godfrey Devereux.

 

 

My latest for rebelle Society. Yoga in india was once a dangerous and subversive practice spitting in the face of power. What happened?

http://www.rebellesociety.com/2013/06/30/the-rebellious-heart-of-yoga/

Wild Yogis

To us modern westerners, the image of yoga posture practice is one of beauty, peace and good health. Yoga looks neat. A little too neat according to some. But not long ago, there was a time where yoga was an act of rebellion. Long before and up through the heyday of the British Empire, the western eye saw asana as a completely unacceptable and dangerous cultural phenomenon. Yoga was a bad ass practice.

Take for example hatha yoga-practicing Nath yogins of Bengal[1]. Born as caste underdogs these men found social mobility and freedom by combining austere asceticism with a powerful military organization. Wearing nothing but guns they pillaged their way forward. Some groups even managed to gain control over North Indian trade routes. Nudity, weapons and pillaging: A triple insult to the colonial rule of Britannia.

Ascetic mercenaries referred to as “yogis” or “jogis” were considered a force to be reckoned with for the British Government in Bengal. It took brute force and a long time to get these yogis to settle in villages and lay down their arms. But trouble persisted. Long after wandering naked and carrying a gun became a criminal offense, fakirs and yogis continued to disturb moral order by making public displays of “backward, uncivilized and dangerous” yoga posture practice[2]. The British were not amused!

So even though we yogis of today may associate our practice with peace, love and health, some of our yogic ancestors were pure guerrilla! Hatha yoga was operating behind the frontier of Victorian values, under the radar of imperial power. Yogis were flexible people on the move, people who could not easily be nailed down and fixated into the commercial circuit. Even if silenced by prohibition, immobilized by property rights and struck down by military power, hatha yoga remained rebellious. Practicing yoga postures was a way to spit in the face of cultural, economic, militant and moral oppression.

What happened?

It could seem that the yoga revolution has come a long way since then. As we all know the British Empire shrunk back into to a few isolated islands while yoga posture practice expanded itself to a global, transnational phenomenon. The modern yoga boom is, to be sure, a living force to be reckoned with. A happy and life-giving practice spreading smiles across the planet. So far so good.

But what happened to the rebellious heart of hatha yoga? Where did it go?

Allow me to get gloomy for a few paragraphs; I promise to restore your faith in yoga revolutions towards the end.

At first glance, things do not look great for a wild yoga rebellion of our time. Try opening a mainstream yoga magazine. Not only is the neat image of modern transnational yoga culture a far cry from that of the untamed Nath yogins. Much worse, it seems that the yoga rebellion has backfired. What was once an opposition to power – the yogic body – is today becoming its instrument.

The body of yoga has become a commodity. In Yoga books, magazines, online and in yoga studios we get exposed to an image of a (predominantly white and female) body that seems to defy both the law of gravity and the flow of time. Gravity and time. Forces to be reckoned with – or maybe not? Today’s economic, cultural and moral elites have deployed new and creative means to fixate that which wants to move, to get that which refuses to fit back in line!

Fixating the yogic body of today into the commercial circuit does not happen with gun and imperial law. We have diet regimens and posture drills that would make trained soldiers cry and we are not afraid to use them in the struggle to keep our bodies in alignment with the dominant cultural ideal. And yoga posture practice has, ironically, become a favorite tool to get our asses in line. Also, yoga posture practice is today predominantly marketed as a tool to make you flexible, beautiful, fit, and forever young.

But the look is no longer enough. It has to come with that extra cool glow of the hip(pie) and bohemian. That is the yoga-body that we are now being taught to desire – and buy – by the aid of the intelligent elite of marketing experts. No guns needed.

And it does not stop with the body. As yoga posture practitioners we get bombarded with values, expert testimony, scientific knowledge and spiritual authority figures that will tell us what is true, good and healthy.

Is the yogic body then, nothing but a mute raw material for consumption? A passive, blank page to be inscribed by shifting moral orders and cultural ideals? A pulp to be shaped by power?

I think not!

Yoga as a force of nature.

Yoga posture practice is still totally bad ass. Far behind the frontiers of commercialization, deep under the skin of all living bodies, the yoga rebellion is still breathing freely. If there is a yoga revolt alive today, it has no brand name, no logo, no sponsor, no PR employee, no merchandize, no charismatic leader and no moral elite.

Leslie Kaminoff has put it beautifully:

Yoga may have been discovered in India and taken up again in the West but it has not been invented by any one culture because “yoga is a force of nature”. Just as no one can claim to have “invented” electricity, no one can claim or own yoga.

I’d like to suggest that as a natural force, the heart of yoga remains rebellious. It does so because it has the power to hook up your mind with the intelligence of your body:

The force of nature which is currently keeping you alive. Right now you are breathing in a rhythm that supplies your body with exactly the volume of oxygen it needs. Right now your heart beats at just the right pace to supply your muscles and organs with blood. Your pupils are exactly the size they need to be so you read these words. Your body knows what it needs and how it can get it and it will protest violently if you go against its decisions. (Try to hold your breath as long as you can and see who wins). The intelligence of your body is a concrete, material force to be reckoned with[3].

You may have to sometimes turn away from clearly feeling the impulses of your body. You temporarily stick your fingers in your ears so as to not hear the silent language of sensation. But the wisdom of your physical body cannot be put out of service as long as you are alive. You will have to use brute force and a long time to get your body to lay down its arms. For your body knows very well how much it would really like to eat, who you really want to kiss, what postures will injure and which will nourish it, how long to work, when to sleep, when to surrender and when to fight. Your body can discriminate unflinchingly between loneliness and low blood sugar. It can clearly tell you the difference between pain and pleasure[4]. If you let it.

Freedom

It is a privilege to be able to practice yoga. Because the physical postures bring the gift of turning up the volume when the forces of nature speak their intransigent body language. Asana allows you to tap directly into the intelligence of your body, a natural force that will not yield until you are dead or at least dying.

If you are sleep-deprived, yoga quickly reveals how tired you actually are. If you have pushed yourself beyond your capacity yoga will allow you to feel and respond to the pain of stress and overexertion. If you have buried unresolved issues in your life don’t be surprised if one day in dog pose, something old and ugly sticks its head out of the ground. If you are being aggressive with yourself or your loved ones a sensitive yoga practice can help you feel more clearly the impacts of your actions. And that refined sensitivity comes off your mat all by itself. Getting intimate with the body – with how you actually feel is the beginning of an organic response that may change things. A revolution coming not from external command, rules, dogma, cultural ideals or regimens, but from the wisdom of your very own body.

To say yes to your body sometimes involves saying no to the things that just are not OK. Maybe we do not need more people telling us what to do? Maybe yogis of today do not need sleeping pills, therapy sessions, diets, cosmetics, surgeons and life coaches? Perhaps the yogic body is still an alternative to becoming a domesticated, docile puppet-body? An alternative to serving the cultural ideals, moral regimes and commercial circuits imposed on us by those in power.

Asana is revolutionary. It is revolutionary because it is a somatic practice – a practice of the body. Its rebellious heart beats behind the front line of rationality, under the radar of cultural elitism. If yoga causes us to eat, sleep, talk, work or love differently it is because the preferences of our bodies have been felt and responded to because it taught us to distinguish between pain and pleasure. When our practice involves listening deeply to the life force within us, yoga allows us to love ourselves exactly as we are. To let go of any need for external authority.

It can come as no surprise, then, that there are still places in the world where teaching yoga can put you in jail. Because within yoga lurks a YES to the life force within you. And thereby also an unflinching NO to those who want to control what you buy, how you look, who you kiss, what you eat, what you vote or how you think.

Modern yoga may look neat and domesticated when pictured in magazines as just another tool for self-improvement. But as a somatic practice of deep self-enquiry it has not lost any of its rebellious potential. Getting intimate with the body may just plug your fingers into the power outlet of an uncontrollable natural force. Remembering the rebellion within yoga is to pay tribute to that which cannot be put in place, that which cannot be tamed, that which no external authority can silence. That force within you that only accepts freedom.

 

A blog post for the creatively maladjusted Rebelle Society.  Postulating bodly that yoga is not about controlling your self or the world around you but rather to reveal the absence of any boundary between them.

http://www.rebellesociety.com/2012/10/18/beyondtheboundary/

full text below:

By Birgitte Gorm Hansen.

“You can not always control what goes on outside. But you-can always control what goes on inside.”

These words were printed in white on top of a photo…

The photo of a stunningly beautiful woman standing in the centre of a busy street. With traffic roaring around her she looks directly into my eyes while balancing in a rather impressive yoga posture (ardha baddha padmottanasana).

The picture magnetizes the gaze. The text printed above her head shines in clear, white letters.

“Cool,” said my friend who reading over my shoulder. “Can you teach me that?” Now that question requires a yoga teacher to choose her words carefully.

“Not a chance,” I said.

I cannot teach students to control “what goes on inside” so that they won’t be disturbed by “what goes on outside.” Practicing and teaching yoga has stripped me of any impulse to do so. Let me explain:

Most (not all) people who try yoga decide to come back because the practice gives them a good sensation in the body. A glimpse of something weightless, a relief of some sort. Many students have shared with me their occasional experience of their body as a soft, warm presence in which they can’t really tell left from right, top from bottom, floor from body, inside from outside.

Photo credit: Ditte Capion Damgaard

A common beginning to this is not being able to feel the exact position of your hands when lying in savasana, and sometimes it can feel like the whole of the body loses its boundaries or leak out into a fuzzy, aliveness: A warm softness not similar to the one we experience at the brink of sleep. Some get it when sitting I stillness on their cushion, a few experience it in active posture practice. A gap in the experience of distinguishing between sensations a blurring of sensation not unlike that of drifting down into sleep.

It’s nothing in particular, really. It’s rather the opposite of feeling anything in particular.

Practicing yoga with sensitivity (what I like to call ahimsa), seems to allow the body to go quiet and thereby invites the mind to take a rest from separating sand and distinguishing. If your posture practice creates no hard, noisy, painful sensations it becomes an invitation to soft quietness. Not just in savasansa, meditation or supported chilled out postures. It can happen if you become comfortable in dog pose, trikonasana, tadasana and it can come off the mat with you.

If there is no struggle, meaning that the body has been patiently prepared over time to enter the pose with integrity, yoga posture practice doesn’t feel like anything in particular.

When the body goes quiet, the mind’s ability to distinguish between what is going on “inside” and what is going on “outside” is invited to loosen its grip for a moment. This experience is not difficult or complicated, requires no faith or spiritual ability. Most of us don’t even realize that it’s happening at first. Often people just think it was a moment of sleep and discard it as distraction.

But through the years I’ve come to the conclusion that it is nothing like sleep. Feeling that you’ve been “gone” for a moment even while standing on your feet or sitting on your cushion or lying in savasana is not necessarily a detour. I’d like to suggest it’s a mini-break from inside/outside distinctions.

By this kind of experience, yoga has to me become a journey that reveals the inseparability of my being from everything else.

From my mat I get a peek into a different context, in which my daily experience of things in particular is immersed into wholeness. To be sure, this is not a religious experience or a transcendental state. I’m not becoming whole through yoga. I’m not being united with something divine, I have not entered a Great Beyond. I have not gone beyond the body.

If there is any beyond, it’s going beyond the very notion of a boundary between body and world. The revelation that I am by nature inseparable from everything around me. The recognition that I was born whole and need no completion.

From that perspective, no control is necessary, no guarding of a boundary between “inside” and “outside” is needed. Sometimes it’s just a glimpse, other times it goes on and on, and sometimes I´m not feeling it at all. When it happens it happens spontaneously and cannot be induced or commanded. I just keep going to the mat without looking for anything in particular.

Going back to the photo of the woman in the busy street—I like to think that she magnetizes our gaze because she exudes that state of feeling “nothing in particular”—of wholeness. I’d like to suggest that the peace in her eyes did not come because she learned to forget about the world around her. By contrast, she seems to have forgotten her Self.

Experiencing the world without struggling to defend a boundary around herself, letting life flow through her full force without resistance. That, I hope, is what makes her beautiful. We cannot take our eyes off her in the same way we cannot help but smile when a baby looks us right in the face.

Photo courtesy: Birgitte Gorm Hansen

Because we already know it.

We all carry the infant memory of how it is to live without erecting boundaries, to have zero point zero resistance to reality, to trust life. Because you are born whole, there is basically nothing you need to optimize, nothing you need to defend, nothing extra you need to acquire you to be 100% okay with this very world.

There is no higher power with which you should strive to unite, no better version of yourself that you need to become.

Just the wholeness that is your natural state when the activity of distinguishing and controlling loses its grip a little. The place where your sense, live and act beyond the boundary is always available in the life you live here and now. Some find this presence without ever having set foot on a yoga mat. Others need a consistent practice to enquire into what we most deeply are.

As a teacher of this approach to yoga the answer has to be an unflinching: Not a chance.

I have no impulse to teach yoga as a discipline by which to gain control of what goes on inside and shut out what goes on outside. For me yoga is an enquiry into the possibility that that separateness is only a temporary, practical measure. That the self/other boundary is hand luggage: Good to carry when our survival is at risk but not necessary to defend or control when safe on the mat. I´d like to teach yoga as a dropping into the living ocean of wholeness.

“Uhm… okay,” said my friend after that tirade. “That’s all very interesting. Eh, but I was actually just asking if you could teach me how to get my legs into that ardha baddha-lotus-thing that the girl in the photo is doing. Id really like to be able to balance on my toes like that, It looks über cool! Can you teach me that?”

 

“Yeah. No problem.”

Here is a blog post/essay I did for Elephant Yoga. relevant for yogis and mediators alike.

original post.

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/10/yoga-need-not-be-about-control-birgitte-gorm-hansen/

 

text version

Yoga makes some big and audacious promises.

According to The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Yoga is a practice that will stop the chatter of your mind*. I don’t know about your mind but knowing my own I’d say that’s a pretty tall order!

Never the less, most of us have found ourselves on the mat buying toilet paper, arguing with our boss or thinking about sex. And most of us have wondered why we keep doing that when we were supposed to be doing yoga! As much as we enjoy the bliss of being fully present, fully aware or mindful in our practice and in our life, we ever so often find ourselves caught up in memories, fantasies, auto-pilot perception or mental sleep walking.

Does yoga really work then, or is it just another false promise?

Desperately wanting the promises of yoga to be true, we quickly resort to the idea that the only reason yoga isn’t working for us is that we are not as dedicated and disciplined as we should be. We easily latch on to the idea all we need is to put more effort into training awareness, control our mind or discipline our bodies.

“If only I could make my mind STOP” we tell ourselves, “If only I could control the impulse to think about my job/lover/bank account/kids/career/butt…”

However, I’d like to suggest that yoga need not be about control. The famous opening of the yoga sutras “yoga chitta vritti nirhodah” has much more interesting implications than “yoga is a technique to tie down constant movements in consciousness.”

Godfrey Devereux puts it nicely when stating, “Awareness is not a dog you can call.”

Yoga, he seems to suggest, is not animal dressage. If awareness is in any way comparable to an animal, I suppose it would be one of those majestic, wild, free animals that go their own way. An animal which sometimes comes near to follow our actions with curiosity but soon after runs off again without warning. An animal which will sometimes nibble at the food we lay out in its territory but which may as well decide to ignore our kind gesture to go hunting in a forest far away.

Now, there are many examples of how people have found great meaning in catching, harnessing and training wild animals. And to be fair, some impressive accomplishments came out of that project. Civilization for example. But if we’re busy doing is yoga—and not a sophisticated version of synchronized dolphin swimming, one might wonder treating ourselves like dogs is really the way forward.

If yoga really does still the chatter of the mind, I think it is because yoga comes from a place within us that is deeply uncivilized.

A place that is deeper than our personal will, our techniques, our projects and ideals. To me, yoga is not a mental boot camp where we train ourselves to become fully aware. Yoga is a practice that allows us to experience the free, wild rhythm of awareness itself.

Sometimes we are fully aware of what we are busy doing, at other times we are completely gone. Sometimes we feed of that which our yoga practice lays out for us and at other times we go off far away to nibble at fantasies, memories and speculations.

Yoga works, yes.

But not because it teaches us how to discipline our minds and bodies. It works because it allows us to encounter a force much more powerful than that of self-control. Within the vacillating waves of perception “something” is experiencing how awareness oscillates between presence and absence, concentration and distraction, delight and suffering.

“Something” is constantly embracing the oscillations independent of our conscious effort, independent of personal will. I am deeply convinced that this “something” is a wild animal that we can inquire into coming face to face with every time we get on our mat. An unbridled creature who does not come when you call because it was already here.

*Freely and boldly translated from “Yoga citta vritti nirhodhah.” A couple of more scholarly translation would be: “Yoga is the cessation of movements in consciousness (Feurstein 1989) “Yoga is the restrictions of the fluctuations in consciousness” (Iyengar 2002),  “Yoga is experienced in that mind which has ceased to identify itself with its vacillating waves of perception” (Stiles, 2002). That´s all fine. However, the only valid interpretation of Patanjali is your own. Look for it on your mat.