Q: 'I agree that [yogic calmness] is important, how do we account for all the yoga teachers who fly Ukraine flags and require masks in their studios?' A: Yoga as drug.
Q: 'I agree that [yogic calmness] is important, how do we account for all the yoga teachers who fly Ukraine flags and require masks in their studios?' A: Yoga as drug.
Kate read my reply to Steve Kirsch’s question about how to wake people up from the covid sleep they are in. See previous post ‘Steve Kirsch asked "What are the best ways to red-pill someone?” My answer.’
Kate’s complete question was:
Thanks for that, Guy. One thought, regarding the need for people to become more calm/yogic in order to be free from fear and the mainstream narrative. While I agree that this is important, how do we account for all the yoga teachers who fly Ukraine flags and require masks in their studios (so to speak)? Not to mention the Dali Lama promoting the poke. I'm not challenging the essence of your perspective, just curious about what you think about this part of it.
My response
Great question, Kate! (And thank you for reading my piece.)
My partner and I have wondered about and talked about this a great deal because our 'initiation' into 'real' yoga was through the Art of Living Foundation. Different times and places for each of us. The AoL is huge, although mostly unheard of in North America and I think at its roots is a very good organisation. The founder, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has, for presumably political reasons, neither endorsed nor eschewed the injection. He has repeatedly come out to say that being healthy will keep you safe, please eat cumin and pepper and have a good diet to keep your immune system strong without explicitly adding 'you don't need the injection.'
Anyway and however, I know that the Art of Living Canada branch has been completely taken in and censors and excommunicates people who question the narrative. (I don't know about other branches or areas.) They even began to organise face-to-face meetings for only the injected. A few people protested strenuously by pointing out the hypocrisy of being 100% inclusive while excluding some people.
Why? The Japanese have a great phrase I like to use: 'modoki', which means not real despite the appearance of being real. So, yogi/yogini modoki. They aren't really centred. Now that is a strong statement to make against someone like the Dalai Lama, of course! (I didn't know he had endorsed it. Too funny. And I have always found something distasteful about his approach, so maybe he is modoki. Interesting.)
I attended a workshop with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar one time. Of all the 'wisdom' he shared, I clearly remember only two things. That he directed everyone to be calm and centred to "be equanimous". He repeated "be equanimous" many many times. And the other was that throughout the two hour session the head of AoL Canada and the senior teachers and junior teachers and most of the participants were jumping around his presence like Mexican jumping beans on speed. They were absolutely 100% not calm, not centred and the opposite of equanimous. And, I suspect, unable to hear or comprehend anything that he was saying.
Most of the these people, especially the teachers, all had daily yoga practices and yet had gone crazy there and, by their own stories, crazy everywhere and every time they were close to him.
AoL Canada teachers rejoicing in being without equanimity
Why?
Yoga is a perfect vehicle to hide one's Self from oneself because it provides an immediate palliative to anxiety. In my practice and life experience I discovered that yoga and meditation are often not enough to heal our trauma and so yoga can easily become an addictive drug no different than alcohol, sex, money or power. Except that it looks way better and often has immediate physical, emotional and psychological benefits that seem to be healthier than those that the 'bad' drugs provided.
Really, who am I? Is it even possible to know that I’m not the Buddha?
Have you heard the caution "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Why kill him? Because his power will overwhelm your own and you can quickly and easily and joyfully choose to lose yourself in his energy. You can easily be taken away from being truly grounded within your own true Self while likely increasing the disconnect from your body, the earth and its inter-weavings.
Most people who practice yoga are not actually truly centred and calm, they only look that way: yoga-modoki. Yes, they will do seva projects and sit and breathe and feel great. And they will hide from themselves that tiny voice from deep inside that is calling to them that they are in the wrong boat, on the wrong ladder while scrambling in ignorance to be present with their saviour or eat up his or her latest words. They are addicts, addicted to breath and the idea of transcendence in their escape from life in the here and now. They simply do not have the centred equanimity to see what is true for them and hence are easily tripped up by false appearances in the world.
Is this up or down, right or left?
I became aware of this very quickly in my own practice watching the AoL senior teachers behaving like children in a candy shop. Yoshiko found it appalling and refused to have anything to do with AoL, even though her life changed for the better from the breathing practice she learned from them. "How could Sri Sri Ravi Shankar allow this to continue?" she would criticise. I would answer that I'm sure he doesn't want it to, and is aware of it and is faced with the same problem we are: how do you wake up people who know the truth? These people have met their Buddha (another form of Fauci or whoever) and lost themselves. And the issue is the same: how do you tell them that their truth is wrong, especially when for most of them they have seen huge improvements in their physical, emotional and psychological health with breath and postures having so elegantly replaced their past drugs of alcohol, narcotics, negative thinking or whatever?
Mattias Desmet breaks down the asleep, the quasi asleep and the awake as roughly 30/40/30 percent. I'd love to see how that breaks down within large yoga communities. And within those communities, I would anticipate the asleep will be very asleep.
We've been practicing with Tommy Rosen, who has connected the dots between recovery from addiction and yoga in a truly amazing way. When covid got started he spoke with great shock and dismay at how so many of his great yoga compatriots had gone to sleep with the narrative. You can find him at R20.com. He even discusses, in places, how yoga can become a drug like any other drug.
And a final note. It has been in the time of covid that I have found how true is the Buddha's first requirement, the first step in the eightfold path: to see clearly with, "Right Understanding or Right View". How is it we are to see clearly, and know that we are in fact with 'right understanding'? An amazingly difficult challenge for most of us who are fully educated (indoctrinated) people stuck in the brain's need for absolute truths so long as they are disconnected from our bodies, our communities and the earth.
Within which house of truth are we happily ensconced?
"yoga and meditation are often not enough to heal our trauma"
Thank you for saying this. If someone wants to do those things, and it helps them a little, they should do so. But I've seen numerous talk therapists and psychiatric treatment centers embrace "mindfulness" as a cure, and they have it dominate the limited time they have to work with emotionally-wounded people.
As a result those clients are unhealed and become completely discouraged.
Yes. Our most beloved therapies come from a tradition of head not body. They will talk about the body and think that words are enough. Our society wants to look at what is life by killing it and then doing autopsies. And do not see how inane that is. Talk therapy and yoga can be like that: palliatives that often cut us off from the truth of who we are, shadow and light, ease and dis-ease.
I loved the Constructive Living Therapy by David K. Reynolds. The biggest challenge he faced with clients was to get them to do the physical and emotional exercises because most believed that reading about them was good enough.
The yogi-Buddhist teacher and scholar, Micheal Stone, talked about his plateau after 7 years. He despaired that he had wasted 7 years. Then he came to someone who showed him that Yoga was not a mind practice. It was an exercise to develop powerful engagement in the 'real' world through the integration of mind/body/spirit. Yoga is so easily confused as a body exercise, disengaged from the mind and designed for the mat.
Agreed. I later took an unconventional yoga teacher training course from a man who understood what you wrote. But I'm not sure I could have understood him and as fully benefitted without having done the other work first.
My partner and I were talking about that too as it relates to our finding an 'unconventional' teacher. If we met him a few years ago his approach would have been good and the depth of what he is actually teaching lost to us. We wouldn't have been ready for him then.
Stone makes the observation that at about 6-10 years the dedicated yoga practitioner will be faced with the realization of what yoga is really asking them to *renounce* [strikethrough] embrace. They freak and back off. Then focus on becoming a specialist in some often obscure aspect of yoga and lose their sense of humour. :-D And so true.
Thank you. As noted, my partner and I noticed that this group of senior yoga teachers were not *yogis* because they were besotted with being in *their* gurus presence. It wasn't a big surprise that they 'went' mostly to sleep because they were *already* asleep.
Their guru could not wake them up. LoL.
In yoga there is an axiom: problems created by the mind cannot be solved at the level of the mind. It is the breath that brings the mind under control, like the string which controls the kite. I add to that, "and without the string, the kite does not fly."
It really is a fascinating time we are living in. The truth of our collective inattention and distracting and, in a way, laziness, with respect to our social practices of the last few hundred years, perhaps more, has now made itself known. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.
"yoga and meditation are often not enough to heal our trauma"
Thank you for saying this. If someone wants to do those things, and it helps them a little, they should do so. But I've seen numerous talk therapists and psychiatric treatment centers embrace "mindfulness" as a cure, and they have it dominate the limited time they have to work with emotionally-wounded people.
As a result those clients are unhealed and become completely discouraged.
Yes. Our most beloved therapies come from a tradition of head not body. They will talk about the body and think that words are enough. Our society wants to look at what is life by killing it and then doing autopsies. And do not see how inane that is. Talk therapy and yoga can be like that: palliatives that often cut us off from the truth of who we are, shadow and light, ease and dis-ease.
I loved the Constructive Living Therapy by David K. Reynolds. The biggest challenge he faced with clients was to get them to do the physical and emotional exercises because most believed that reading about them was good enough.
Core Energetics (physical + emotional) + Pathwork (mental + spiritual) was very effective for me, after having plateaued with Yoga.
Yes. Well said and thank you for the comment.
The yogi-Buddhist teacher and scholar, Micheal Stone, talked about his plateau after 7 years. He despaired that he had wasted 7 years. Then he came to someone who showed him that Yoga was not a mind practice. It was an exercise to develop powerful engagement in the 'real' world through the integration of mind/body/spirit. Yoga is so easily confused as a body exercise, disengaged from the mind and designed for the mat.
Agreed. I later took an unconventional yoga teacher training course from a man who understood what you wrote. But I'm not sure I could have understood him and as fully benefitted without having done the other work first.
Yes.
My partner and I were talking about that too as it relates to our finding an 'unconventional' teacher. If we met him a few years ago his approach would have been good and the depth of what he is actually teaching lost to us. We wouldn't have been ready for him then.
Stone makes the observation that at about 6-10 years the dedicated yoga practitioner will be faced with the realization of what yoga is really asking them to *renounce* [strikethrough] embrace. They freak and back off. Then focus on becoming a specialist in some often obscure aspect of yoga and lose their sense of humour. :-D And so true.
Good point about humor! And in that vein I would replace "renounce" with "embrace".
LOL! Yes. Great point. Edit done.
Wonderfully insightful article, Guy. Thank you.
Thank you. As noted, my partner and I noticed that this group of senior yoga teachers were not *yogis* because they were besotted with being in *their* gurus presence. It wasn't a big surprise that they 'went' mostly to sleep because they were *already* asleep.
Their guru could not wake them up. LoL.
In yoga there is an axiom: problems created by the mind cannot be solved at the level of the mind. It is the breath that brings the mind under control, like the string which controls the kite. I add to that, "and without the string, the kite does not fly."
It really is a fascinating time we are living in. The truth of our collective inattention and distracting and, in a way, laziness, with respect to our social practices of the last few hundred years, perhaps more, has now made itself known. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.