whoo all right of all of the paths that
could have chosen of all the jobs that
could have had in the world and never
would have imagined myself becoming a
yoga teacher actually had you asked a
younger version of me what he thought of
yoga he would have told you for sure
Yoga is a joke and he wouldn’t been
kidding because actually the first time
I ever was introduced to yoga it was
through satire the first time I ever saw
somebody do yoga kinda Yoga was on this
TV show called bizarre hosted by a guy
named John Byner
some of you remember the show some you
may not you may remember a segment they
did though with a guy named Super Dave
Osborne so every week Super Dave would
come on and attempt some crazy stunts
and every week he’d end up just mangled
and broken in the most hilarious way and
the the producers of the show gave Super
Dave these cloth arms and cloth legs
just so that they showed him after the
stunt he’d be like just warped and
twisted well they gave the same arms and
legs to another character on the show
played by John Byner who was a yoga
teacher slash spiritual guru guy and he
would sit on this platform and just sort
of wrap and twist his arms and legs
around in the craziest ways he throw his
legs behind his head and talk about how
spiritual and healthy and enlightened
that was making him I remember being I
was seven years old and I was at the
speed skating camp and I thought it’d be
so funny if I put my legs behind my head
thinking this is just gonna be a riot
right click never mind click yeah well
you laughed a lot more than the kids did
the speed skating town they didn’t think
that was funny at all
that didn’t really deter me though I
kept on doing it a few years later I
became kind of obsessed with this show
called the hilarious house of frightened
Stein I was like a Saturday morning
cartoon almost all the characters on the
show were played by a Canadian comic
named Billy van one of my favorite
characters with this guy named the
Maharishi so the Maharishi we had like a
long beard and long hair and he wore
robes and he would sit down and say
these in name
nonsensical things and try to pass them
off a sort of Eastern mystical wisdom I
thought it was absolutely hilarious and
I remember walking to school in the
morning trying to make up my own little
pieces of mystical wisdom another early
memory of mine should weigh back
thinking about yoga’s from the 1980s
when my grandma actually took some yoga
lessons I remember asking her grandma
what did you do with these yoga classes
I was half-expecting her just kind of
throw her legs behind her head and say
something crazy but she said she
actually spent most for time just
sitting cross-legged and breathing I
said to her grandma there is no way
that’s yoga because that’s not even
funny these days Yoga does still
actually play like a big role in my
sense of humor and and comedy has really
informed the way that I practice and
teach yoga I’ve noticed a lot of
students actually giggle a lot in their
classes with me and I encourage it I
don’t tell people to stop when I think
about when I was first learning yoga
some of the postures were so absurd and
just ridiculous I remember being told to
do all kinds of different things with my
sacrum but I didn’t know what a sacrum
was true story these days though yoga is
not so much like a joke for me it’s
actually it’s my livelihood I teach I
teach a Religious Studies course on it
and it is it has kind of become almost
like a coping mechanism on one hand on
the other hand sort of a way to try to
build a better world I guess see I want
to be really hopeful and optimistic
about the world that we’re leaving for
our chair kids and I want to feel like
the world is actually kind of a
beautiful magical place where the best
parts of us get nourished and encouraged
to grow a lot of times I don’t feel like
that though and that’s really where the
coping mechanism part comes in and I’m
not just talking about sort of larger
social and economic forces I’m talking
sometimes about yoga itself I’m often
not very optimistic about where yoga is
headed
I see trends and tendencies in yoga that
actually are playing into and
contributing to some of those same
factors that caused me despair and make
me lose hope in the first place so what
I wanted to do today was
we talked about three of those trends
and tendencies in yoga today and talked
about how we might better understand
those trends through satire so that
means I’m going to be poking some fun at
some people so if you practice yoga and
you feel like I’m making fun of you a
little bit I’m really sorry
kinda okay so number one is this love
and light delusion the idea is that
we’re all one and really there are no
problems if we just recognize our own
essential oneness you know people with
an extremely bad case of this love and
light delusion believe that everything
is awesome the only people with problems
are the ones that haven’t realized we’re
all one now of course that’s kind of
ridiculous
like we’re not all one there’s a lot of
us there’s seven billion of us and we’re
all pretty different now I have had
moments when I’m meditating or
practicing yoga where the boundaries
between myself and the world around me
kind of get a little fuzzy and I start
to have like a bit of that sense of
unitive consciousness I feel like I’m
becoming one with everything then I get
hungry or my kids need my help with
something or I have to go to work at any
rate like there comes a point in time
when we need to sort of stop trying to
wish away all the distinctions and
differences in the world and recognize
there’s a lot of different stuff going
on you know this love and light delusion
it really in many ways is kind of
complicit or it works with a lot of
these sort of oppressive and
exploitative structures in the world now
but like I don’t want to make it seem
like I’m against love and light here
like I love love and light big fan but I
mean there comes a time really though we
have to recognize there are real
differences in the world so I mean it’s
this love and light delusion that really
it enables abusive yoga teachers and
gurus to enact all kinds of physical and
emotional and sexual traumas on their
students it’s the same love and light
delusion that enables multinational
corporations to you know go and exploit
really cheap sweatshop labor in order to
produce really sort of cute yoga pants
Ultra spiritual consumers that is not
the yoga that’s going to change the
world you know the yoga it’s going to
change the world really has to be based
on confronting our demons and dealing
with privilege being really open and
honest about stuff like race and class
gender and religion we need to start
realizing that our our strength really
is rooted in diversity and and
recognizing that is not a lack of
spiritual attainment I’m glad some of
you recognize JP Sears if you don’t go
check them out on YouTube is genius just
genius okay number two is called the
purity bubble so in the purity bubble we
believe that we can cleanse our way to a
better world people with a particularly
bad case of the purity bubble really see
the world is filled with toxins and Yoga
is a path try to push or flush some of
those toxins out don’t bother asking
what the what the toxins are I mean they
they come from everywhere they could be
it could be from food or from water or
from relationships or even from thoughts
the idea though is like it doesn’t
matter where they come from what matters
is that you flush them out like right
now in many ways the yoga mat is kind of
a perfect metaphor for the purity bubble
in 2014 I wrote an article about how
mats really aren’t necessary for yoga
practice like I can do yoga while I’m on
a mat but I can do yoga anywhere you
know I don’t need a mat to do yoga and I
got so many comments of people saying I
can’t even imagine doing yoga on the
floor like on the floor there’s like
filthy dirty germ-ridden floor see in
their mind the yoga mat was actually
keeping them pure now I mean in many
ways I feel like we can we can come to
terms with this this purity bubble and
kind of and kind of pop it a little bit
just by recognizing that there really is
no distinction between ourselves in our
environment like if the environment has
a problem
we have a problem this skin of ours is
very porous actually like it doesn’t it
doesn’t block you from the world around
you
we’re all breathing the same air right
now in a lot of ways we’re actually
breathing each other right now which is
a little gross
at any rate but you can’t you can’t
purify your way to a better world you
know if you want to if you want a better
world you have to actually start
cleaning it up and and this cleaning up
process it doesn’t just happen
internally it’s it’s got to happen in
both way I mean you have to sort of work
with the world to try to help to clean
it up and I mean before you ask you know
afterwards at the after party I don’t
have a strategy I don’t have a technique
on what I would recommend to clean up
the world you know I just have a feeling
that breathing air purified by Himalayan
salt lamps probably is not going to cut
whoa right all right so one of my
favorites is this return to the Golden
Age when was the Golden Age
what depends on who you ask for a lot of
Yogi’s the yoga the yoga the Golden Age
is actually back in proto history it was
at a time when ancient seers received
these mystical transcendent truths about
the human experience in the path to
freedom this path to freedom or moksha
is what’s seen as for many people so the
gold standard of what yoga is see Yoga
classically speaking is defined by
Patanjali this is in a book he wrote
called the Yoga Sutras 2,000 years ago
Yoga is not an evolutionary system where
we’re gradually improving on things and
getting better and better and better
it’s actually an involution airy system
the idea is to go backwards so in these
yoga sutras but Ang Lee wrote it was the
second line of the Yoga Sutras he wrote
yoga chitta vritti nirodh aha’ that
means Yoga is making your mind stop
moving so Cheeta as your mind and VT
means to whirl or to spin nirodh aha’
means to stop
pay so the Yoga Sutras are based on an
earlier philosophy in India called
samkhya and samkhya has a view of
consciousness that’s actually quite
unlike our typical kind of Western
notions of what consciousness is see for
most Western minds and I’m just guessing
here I think most of us think of
consciousness as having evolved from
some kind of primordial soup you know
there was like single-celled organisms
and then weird-looking fish and
eventually horses maybe and then and
then self-conscious human beings
eventually Hey well in samkhya the idea
is that consciousness was actually first
and all of matter actually evolved from
consciousness all of matter and all of
the problems that evolved along with it
and so if we’re looking for moksha or
freedom the path is actually to chart
that evolution backwards in Reverse all
the way back towards consciousness now I
mean it’s a really it’s kind of a
beautiful idea really this idea that you
can make your mind stop moving so
potentially goes a little bit further he
gets into these five different ways that
your mind stop moving these five with
these so the five ways your mind moves
our sleep memory imagination wrong
thoughts and right thoughts now a little
thought experiment for you who / what
are you if you’re not sleeping
remembering imagining or thinking
incorrect or correct thoughts but you’re
definitely not who you think you are
that’s for sure like in classical yoga
even correct thoughts are considered to
be a problem so the idea is you’re going
to have your mind completely just shut
down and stop and that for me is well
I’ll tell you what I think that the
thing that the golden ages are missing
is that having your mind stopped moving
is totally natural I think people that
have never done yoga before in their
lives about their mind stopped moving I
think when you listen to really good
music when you make
art when you have sex when you sorry
when you have in a memory visit there’s
a pretty when you go for a walk in
nature or even sometimes when you just
sort of stare off into space feel that
like your mind stops moving but then it
starts to move again like wishing for a
time when your mind doesn’t start moving
again is like wishing for brain death
this golden age for Yogi’s is really
hoping for the sort of divine revelation
to sort of swoop down somehow and just
solve all our problems by making us not
think the issue is that not thinking is
not going to solve any of your problems
it’s just going to make you not aware of
them it’s certainly going to do nothing
for everybody else who’s still living in
a world filled with thoughts and all of
their implications so what do we do how
do we engage in yoga in a way that is
actually going to work towards building
a better world well something happened
to me one of the first times I ever
practiced meditation was just sitting
around and doing nothing and I mean
let’s be honest that’s what meditation
is and I was thinking all kinds of
thoughts and then something shifted and
I realized that I was thinking all kinds
of thoughts that doesn’t seem like much
it seemed like a big deal but it kinda
is there is a world of difference
between thinking and realizing that
you’re thinking see if I start say I get
nervous right
when I get nervous my pupils dilate my
blood pressure goes up my cheeks in my
ears turn red I hope they’re not red
right now you know I start smelling kind
of funny if however I realize that I’m
having some nervous thoughts like I know
that then my first inclination is to
wonder I wonder if those nervous
thoughts are necessary right now
like I wonder where those nervous
thoughts came from I wonder do they even
need to be here at all see it changes
our relationship quite a lot and yoga
can do this
it can cause these shifts in perspective
see what I’m standing here on two legs
my perspective on on the world that I
live in and on myself is a particular
way if I shift though I’m just standing
on one leg all of a sudden my
perspective is different if I take these
legs and flip them both behind my head
that’s going to change my perspective
pretty radically on legs and on heads
and it would change your perspective
quite a lot on me so how is yoga
actually going to do this how is it
going to change the world a little bit
well I feel like it’s not going to do it
yoga’s not going to change the world by
making us all one yoga is not going to
change the world by cleansiness all of
our toxins and Yoga is not going to
change the world by returning us to a
simpler and more like authentic version
of ourselves but Yoga can help us to see
things differently Yoga can help us to
recognize that really you know bigotry
prejudice chauvinism these things are
not fixed they’re they’re constantly
shifting ideas right they’re just moving
thoughts Yoga can actually help it can
help actually make a better world it
will help make a better world by making
us more open to change and helping us to
realize that there are other
perspectives it is not going to give you
the right perspective right it’s not
going to give you any answers it’s just
going to open up more possibilities like
a better world is possible and yoga can
help us to realize that possibility
Thanks you