Hello Tribe!
I haven’t blogged since July since I went off for the classical hatha yoga training in India. What a journey it’s been! Due to the nature of the training, I haven’t had much time to write (or think really), and now that the training is complete I am at a loss for how to put this experience fully into words. It’s been intense, transformative, challenging, and wonderful.
The training took place at Isha Yoga Center in the jungles of Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, in a nature reserve at the foothills of the Velliangiri Mountains where monkeys, peacocks, and elephants count amongst the closest neighbors. Isha Yoga is offered by the present day yogi, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, but the tradition and lineage is many thousands of years old.
My journey that past few years has taken me from New York to Silicon Valley to South America and now to India, all, in one way or another, in search of the truth about life and the truth about myself. What drew me to India was the promise of yoga as a method to generate the experience of life that I want, a state of balance, of joy, of peace and energy, 100% from within myself. My years of experience with yoga thus far had brought me to a certain point of wellness, but I wanted to push myself into the deep end to see what transformation could really happen. My original reasons for going through this training ranged from the fully spiritual to the practical, and I’ve listed them below.
- Overcome physical limitations
- Sleep & chronic fatigue have been a challenges for me since middle school, that is, falling asleep and feeling rejuvenated after sleep. I’ve needed 9+ hours a night to feel rested, and even then would find my energy low during the day. This was a tremendous limitation I hoped to remedy with the training.
- Soreness, tightness, and chronic pain throughout my body and muscles have also been issues that had developed, especially in my spine, during high school and college. In fact, back pain is what originally got me into yoga years ago. I hoped to further dissolve this pain with the training.
- Expand Spiritually
- Deepen my inner stillness and expand my conscious awareness
- Let go of emotional pain and dissolve limitations
- Understand the nature of life with greater clarity and insight
- Transmute fear into love
- Teach!
- Finally, I wanted to develop the capability to share the possibility of healing and growth with others by becoming a teacher.
So how did it go?…
Yoga: Skillfulness in Action
The notion that the spiritual life equates with inactivity is an unfortunate misnomer that we have in the West and is perhaps a cultural relic of hippie iconography. In my experience, these spiritual traditions in India and elsewhere, such as South America, embody a lifestyle of tremendous intensity and involvement with life. During the training, I received a taste of this firsthand as 16-18 hours a day of activity were generally expected of us.
The training ran from July nearly to Christmas, and throughout I was typically waking up at 3:45am and essentially going nonstop until my head hit the pillow around 10 or 1030pm. The daily training schedule included 7 hours of hatha (physical) yoga, information sessions (anatomy & physiology, ayurvedic & siddha medicine – traditional yogic forms of medicine, physics & cosmology, discourses on yogic science, interaction with the guru), various physical/teaching assessments and/or studying for these assessments, and about 2 hours of my own meditation practices. In 5 months we had 0 days off.
The yogic lifestyle is not about detachment from life, but is about experiencing life with the utmost intensity and involvement. As Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, “Yoga is skillfulness in action.” Fundamentally, the structure of this training was designed to turn the trainees into yogis first, and only then impart to us the ability to teach to the practices. The training deliberately pushed us through several breaking points in order to dissolve the hardened boundaries of ego, limitation, likes, and dislikes to remold them into a higher possibility. While on the one hand the training pushed me beyond so many limitations physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, at the same time I had never felt so held in grace in my entire life. The teachers, the volunteers, the monks, and the energy which envelops the entire ashram is so tremendously supportive. Yes, my ass was getting absolutely kicked by the training. But it was done in such a compassionate way. Now, having safely landed on the other side, I can truly say this experience has been the best investment in time and energy I have ever made in my life.
The practices I’ve learned are designed to work at the level of body, mind, emotion, and energy (described in more detail below), and are done with tremendous awareness and precision. Fundamentally, they activate the body’s inner capabilities of self-healing and align oneself with one’s environment in such a way as to make life increasingly effortless.
My Transformation
In terms of my personal transformation, essentially every physical issue I had coming into the training has been healed. The general pain, tension, and soreness in my body have totally dissolved. It was remarkable how quickly the pain melted away during the training. My spine has transformed from the weakest area of my body to the strongest, and I am quite comfortable sitting cross-legged on the floor, spine erect, for hours at a time. Such a simple thing that elevates quality of life immensity. Also, my relationship with sleep has totally transformed. I now fall asleep as soon my head hits the pillow, and I feel fully vibrant on just 6 hours of sleep. I can function quite well on 4-5 hours when needed. Again, it’s unbelievable how much something as simple as efficient sleep can totally transform quality of life.
Mentally, my mind has a new level of clarity, sharpness, and dexterity in terms of absorbing new information and applying it creatively and dynamically. Emotionally, I feel a sense of balance and peace I have never known consistently in my life. A deep sense of ease. The spiritual evolution is difficult to put into words, but I feel more aligned with innermost nature and with my purpose than ever before. On the one hand, of course, I’ve certainly absorbed a great deal of wisdom and insight about myself and about life, and I can walk this journey with a higher degree of consciousness and compassion. But, at the same time, much of what a I experience is an almost childlike state of feeling happy for no reason. The simple joy of being.
The world would be a very different place if every human being had the opportunity to learn these tools. In many ways, it’s like learning to be a human being 101. While there are certainly many esoteric aspects to the yoga, the most important things I’m coming away with from the training are the most basic: this is how to sit properly, this is how you breath properly, this is how you eat, this is how to sleep, this is how to focus your mind, this is how you heal your body, this is how to raise your energy. These are aspects of life that we overlook in modern education and are generally ignorant about in the West, but when you take a moment to think on it, these aspects are actually the most fundamental in determining the quality and vibrancy of one’s life.
So what is the fundamental basis of how classical yoga works?
The Science of Yoga
Classical yoga is of a different nature than most of the yoga presently found in the United States. Most of the yogas practiced in the West (and even in India now) are actually variations or distortions of classical practices that have emerged just the last several decades which work essentially only with the physical body. There is nothing wrong with this, and there is a great deal of physical benefit to be reaped from these practices. But, their ability to facilitate a life transformation at the most fundamental level is limited. Classical yoga essentially means that the intention behind the practices is to attain one’s ultimate spiritual wellbeing, and the science behind the practices has remained unchanged since the original science was developed many millennia ago. Have the laws of nature and of physics changed in the last 10,000 years? No. So, similarly, the fundamental science of the yogic system hasn’t changed either. Yoga is a discovery, not an invention by somebody.
The yogic perspective and the modern scientific perspective are aligned across many dimensions. From the yogic perspective, the human system is built the way it is due to the physics of planet Earth, and the physics of the solar system in which Earth exists. As Sadhguru says, the human form is a product of the potter’s wheel of the solar system, which has moulded and cultivated it through millions of years of evolution. If Earth was a different size or if the moon wasn’t there, for example, then life on this planet would have manifested in quite different shapes and structures. Therefore, nature has imbued the human form with a certain ideal geometry. The pain and discomfort we find our physical body is due to a misalignment between the geometry of our human system and the geometry of the greater existence in which we inhabit. This misalignment creates friction which then results in pain and resistance. Classical hatha yoga is a means of aligning the body in such a way that one experiences life in a physically frictionless state, transforming the body from a cumbersome burden into a vibrant platform capable of exploring higher dimensions of life. I have certainly found this to be true in my experience as my body becomes an ever increasingly comfortable, capable, and vibrant vehicle. Alignment leads to effortlessness.
Classical yoga is also designed to work at the level of energy. For over 10,000 years, yoga has understood the physical universe to simply be a manifestation of energy vibrating in different ways and arranging itself into different formations. A century ago, Einstein forever changed our modern understanding of the universe with his famous equation E = mc2, that is, mathematical proof that energy and mass are actually different manifestations the same thing. The equation also implies that massive amounts of energy are stored within even the smallest amounts of physical matter. From the yogic perspective, issues such as emotional imbalance, mental imbalance, anxiety, depression, lethargy, etc, are due to one’s energies being misaligned with the reverberation of the greater existence (AUM). Yoga is a means to correct this frequency distortion and to unlock the powerful latent energy stored within the human system (Kundalini). Unlocking and balancing this energy doesn’t just create mental and emotional balance, but, when practiced over time, has the power to elevate one’s consciousness into a different level of life experience altogether. For me, while I’m certainly not fully conscious of the moment to moment activity of my energy system, my experience of life is evolving into a state of inner vibrancy and inner stillness held together in a certain equanimous coexistence. This development is a product of the yoga’s effect on my energy system.
Application in the West
At a very practical level, I believe an opportunity for classical yoga to have a tremendous impact in the West is its ability to remedy psychological and emotional issues through its subtle understanding of the human system. Yoga understands that the energy system underlies our mental/emotional states, so yoga can offer precise practices with efficacy and reliability that remedy these types of issues. The West, despite achieving outward abundance and comfortable lifestyles like the world has never seen before, is ravaged by anxiety and depression in endemic proportions today. We remain generally loss as to how to heal and permanently resolve these ailments, and, unfortunately, the best we can typically manage is symptom control often through the use of side effect laden pharmaceuticals.
Yoga, by contrast, presents an opportunity for each individual to become the alchemist of their own wellbeing. The sensations of anxiety, depression, peace, or joy are simply different manifestations of chemistry in the human system. By working with the body and with energy in a conscious way, we gain the ability to determine the chemistry that we want within ourselves, and can embark on the process of transmuting pain into blissfulness.
My Intention to Share with Others
Overall, this experience has been a tremendous inner investment I will take with me the rest of my life. Externally, it is my hope and wish to offer this possibility of self transformation to more people. I believe people are ready, willing, and capable of transforming themselves, they just need to be given the opportunity and the right tools to do so. So I humbly hope to open this possibility to more and more people.
Initially, I will be doing this through two offerings 1) Hatha yoga teaching and 2) Life coaching.
Hatha Yoga Teaching
Once I get back to the USA (March 23), I will start organizing hatha yoga classes which will primarily be in the Nashville, Tennessee area. However, over the next 6-12 months I plan to put together more intensive retreats that will takes place in various locations across the United States and perhaps eventually on other continents as well. If you’re not in Nashville, I’m also happy to connect you with an Isha Yoga teacher in your local area if you’re interested. There are Isha teachers located around the world at this point.
Life Coaching
Separate from the hatha yoga teaching, I will be also offering life coaching services. The intention with this offering is to work with people who are highly motivated to manifest meaningful and permanent transformation in their life. We will go through an intensive process of 1) understanding yourself with greater depth & clarity by diving into the core of who you are 2) understanding what you truly want to create in your life, both outwardly in a material sense (career, relationships, etc), but also within yourself as your inner experience of life (energy, joy, balance, etc), and 3) applying practical exercises, lifestyle changes, and other tools to manifest this vision into reality. Over the past several years, I have scoured the globe for the wisdom and tools to actualize self transformation most effectively and I want to empower motivated individuals with the knowledge and capability to unlock the latent power, energy, and possibility within themselves.
Conclusion
This experience in India has been such a tremendous blessing in my life, and I hope this can have a ripple effect of helping more people. If you have any questions related to the yoga, the coaching, or anything about the journey, or you just want to say hey, I’d love to hear from you!
Presently, I am travelling in India for some time before returning to the ashram to do an 7 day silent meditation program. Here a couple videos from the various adventures if you’d like to take a look:
Much love and all the best,
Alex
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