As a person identified with
artists and their path, the spark which led to founding my own yoga academy ignited
from my frustration of watching too many friends jettison their artistic goals
to become yoga teachers, only to later become despondent when their hand to
mouth existence hustling as a teacher left them exhausted and wondering what
their lives be might like if they hadn't switched hats.
Granted, the pressure to jump
ship and get a real job seems to come from the outside, as well. Ironically, it's difficult to be an
artist in a culture addicted to constant entertainment, worshipping
entertainers, and remaining sufficiently amnesic to aggrandizing actors and
rock stars, and ridiculing those on the opposite side of the social spectrum.
My own involvement with musicianship
wasn't a choice. One day, I couldn't
care less; the next, I picked my guitar and just understood. I glimpsed infinite possibilities and
that was my first samadhi, like getting hit by lightning. In the euphoric aftermath of that
sudden flash, I saw that this philosophy would be a life long path.
Teaching yoga often scratches
the performer's itch to be onstage at the center of attention. To lead a group of trusting souls
through a sequence of postures and meditative instructions is a massive
creative outlet! The challenge of clearly communicating to the students what
the immediate and ultimate goals of the practice are through poetic metaphors,
humor and charismatic fearlessness is a sweet space that teachers abide in.
It's just as satisfying as an audience's applause. I love it.
Sometimes, people appear
nervous when hearing the word yoga, though they are clearly masters of entering into
states of transcendence. For example, last year, at a Christmas party, I met a
champion skier who was nursing her right knee back to health — it was sixty
percent there — and she was still outperforming everyone else on the mountain.
Later, I found out she's a world-renowned rock climber. We started talking
about her adventures when my friend butted in and shared that I taught yoga
classes and dharma in the city. A wall went up, and after a brief awkward
moment, she said that she knew nothing about it. I quickly assessed my options
for interpreting her response: at face value, it sounded like she thought yoga
meant "Indian calisthenics" and had no desire to set foot on a rectangular
piece of plastic to put her foot behind her head. Contrarily, was she actually
a master of yoga who was reminding me that knowledge was not the same as
wisdom?
We quickly came to the
agreement that, regardless of their expression, when a practitioner spends
years honing their discipline to pushing themselves beyond the edge, they share
a profound high, and the rush of a transcendent state pours through them.
This could be called a yogic
state, and has many other names: athletes enter the zone, musicians play in the
pocket, poets and painters wait for the muse, drug enthusiasts trip out,
meditators call it samadhi, Christians enter the grace of God, warriors become
impeccable, and businessmen and women seek peak performance.
As a child, my introduction to
dharma was first given through my father. I was around ten years old — around the
same time I fell in love with the guitar — and was full of adolescent anxiety and
anger. My dad noticed how I was blocking myself from this state of being at
ease and offered a flexible strategy to hit the moving target of continual
transcendence. He was like that.
I distinctly remember standing
at the top of the stairs of our new house when he shared with me the truth of
my lack of "I-ness" by pointing out that I
was an idea associated with my name, but in reality, did not exist. I was actually a legion of sub personas
fighting for control of Michael like one hundred actors on a stage fighting for
a single microphone. As a swarm of birds moving like one super-organism, I also dissolved into something alien to
my first impression.
Even though his advice was way
over my head, it was far more thought provoking than just being told to "be
myself," and I accredit it to planting the seed for my attraction to the
spiritual path.
Shortly after our
conversation, I began devouring books on the work of George Ivanovitch
Gurdjieff — whose work my father was an avid practitioner of — as well as books on
witchcraft and astral projection. I remember practicing dissolution as I fell
asleep, visualizing my insides emptying out into a hollow shell and passing an
outer ring of sparks slowly from my feet to the top of my head and back again.
A visceral state of the fullness of the void came over me. Then, the lucid
dreaming started. My usual stress induced nightmares of plummeting into a
cave-like abyss, shocking me into an awareness of subtle dream bodies that, if
I became present with them, would allow me to float down to earth, or even fly.
At that time, I had no words to
frame experiences of non-dual absorption and only received shrugs from my
parents when I asked them what was happening.
Sudden discovery depends on
gradual development, and as children, when we lack confidence in new
situations, adults are, either intentionally or not, short to respond. Yoga
teachers breathily advise students to just be
present in all moments, and I don't think they realize what a high stage
that is, one that requires a consistent, reliable method to reach.
In the past seven years, I have
met teachers who could not only confirm the validity of this experience within
Tibetan Buddhist and Indian yogic scriptures, but have also taught me how to
stabilize it and use it as a path to liberation. Since all moments are potential windows for entering this
pure being state of transcending I chose the sanskrit word Sarva for my own academy because its means "all, entire, whole and
complete." Sarva is a synonym for astanga,
which is Master Patanjali's eight-step recipe for all-day yoga. They prescribe
avoiding harming others, making the best use of your time and resources,
physical disciplines, pranic regulation/redirection, sensory withdrawal, and
increasingly effortless levels of mental focus/absorption. It demands you get your act together
first before trying to teach others anything.
As well, we integrate the
Gurdjieffian work, the Fourth way, because it incorporates the three ancient
methods of physical mastery, emotional devotion, and intellectual evolution
into a practice within life where the personality is transcended and entire
solutions are revealed in a single instant.
On his last breath, Lord Buddha
said, "Be a light unto yourself" as a warning against having blind faith in
what he testified was true about the nature of reality and the cessation of
suffering. He knew that parroting his instructions would not yield authentic
realizations in his students — and worse, that impersonating him would destroy
his good works in this world. Yet the irony is that we must bind ourselves to a
teacher's lineage to become free, and we must carefully vet the ones with whom
we intend to entrust our dharmic mind.
Agnostic, skeptical, open-minded, earnest and hard-working are ideal
qualities in a student looking to receive teachings from a pure lineage, and
they must make it come alive and validated by testing it against their life
experience, just as they would kick the tires and scope the mileage before buying
a used car!
A student empowers their
teacher to teach them just as much as they have the power to deny them. We
become like our teacher because the desire to "grow up and evolve" is molded by
their guidance and presence. Not everyone sees your teacher as you do: simple
proof that your teacher is a reflection of the very best aspects of yourself. With
enough time spent under a teacher, they will shift and become more and more
mirror-like. This
relationship is living, dynamic and depends upon the student to keep it
functioning! The danger lies in pedastilizing a teacher or path, and then
clinging to it as the only valid way.
Rather than celebrating the
universality of this magnificently blissful and spacious experience tragically,
humans have repeatedly persecuted and killed each to uphold that their path as
"the true one," and that they alone are chosen to ascend. This is the sin of
making a graven image. Sin means
to miss the mark, like an archer with glaucoma. A graven image is a fixed
mental image — a story carved into the neural pathways — or what Joseph Campbell
referred to as eating the menu. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche calls it presenting
your credentials. Our personality "I" so badly wants to take credit for what
happened in the brilliance of that mind blowing experience that it makes up a
story to tell itself so that it can be relived. But, that story isn't what
happened! It's a subjective blurring that cordons off the holiness of that
precious moment into a memory which will most likely be cast like a pearl
before the denizens of the next dinner party or worse, one sees themselves as
superior to everyone else who just doesn't get it. The unconscious bait and
switch of communing with Reality, beyond all words to describe, for one
person's narrative, becomes a habit engraved into the synaptic patterns of a
soon to be disappointed, nostalgic and fundamentalist sucker. It's as ignorant
as thinking your reflection is actually in the mirror.
The yoga I'm interested in
teaching students is to perceive this mirror-like or, stainless nature to all
objects. Yoga/union means profound equilibrium has set in; equilibrium that
makes struggle untenable. Call it interdependence. Like a dreamer who has
awakened inside a dream still sees people and places but knows beyond all doubt
that its all made of their mind.
With dedicated training in unerring wisdom, one may begin to stop being
fooled by their instincts telling them to struggle/dominate their environment
and finally perceive the appearances of the sensual world as a
mirror/echo. First through
logic, then non-conceptual glimpses, leading to uncontrived and sustained
direct perception. Accordingly, this process reveals why compassion, reverence
and love are the only sane attitudes towards others.
I also like to remind students of
the reason their window of relief from tension will close in the most stealthy
and insidious way shortly after the ordeal of asana practice is over. Even the smallest movement of mind will
block this holy communion with ultimate reality, and when this view is lost,
our physical bodies age because our mind is constantly making a profound
albeit subtle mistake regarding its relationship to the world.
Is it worth going to asana
classes again and again if you never see the mistakes your mind is constantly
making? Is it sane to be an hour and a half older, and $20 poorer, only to
become addicted to a practice never intended to be "the end?"
I've seen it countless times in
students in yoga classes and succumbed to it many times myself. Ignorance.
Desire. Aversion. You swear that
you've been becoming high on breakthroughs, and yet you tear a hamstring. What
happened? It was going so well… I was
breathing my exhales all the way out and everything!
We are no different than a drug
addict who rushes back to the pipe for another epic escape and slips into an
overdose. A wise person starts asking penetrating questions at this point. In
Buddhist terms, this is renunciation moment. A window of shock has momentarily
opened to let go of the exaggerated, self-existent views, which cause us to
feel, as Alan Watts says, "alone and afraid in a world we never made."
So how do we avoid palliatively
switching professions, alienating ourselves from others, and become firmly
established in a life of awestruck transcendence? This brings me to the reason
for opening Sarva Yoga Academy: the authentic lineage instructions I've
received are so clear, effective and applicable to this daily life, I could no
longer stand by and not share it with the students who'd been coming to study
with me in yoga classes for the past fifteen years. I felt like I was teasing
people, trying to squeeze a complete picture into fifteen-minute dharma talks. Frankly,
I see a greater speed in saving the world from the ignorance of humans by
educating those students who have no interest in becoming yoga instructors, yet
long to integrate the deeper teachings of yoga to their personal and
professional lives. We're like sleeper cells; carriers of a holy virus, who,
heart by heart, spread seeds of sanity, abundance and love throughout
this world. I also want to educate and support yoga teachers who can and will
actually teach yoga, which is far beyond teaching postures.
Sarva Yoga Academy completed
its first seven-month term this past May, and graduated fourteen "Sarvies," as
they like to call themselves. We will begin a second term on October 7th and
are accepting last-minute applications for 2011-2012 term, which will be held
in Manhattan. ?
Q: What is the Fourth Way?
A: 'The
Fourth Way, or 'the Work' is a spiritual tradition. It's a way of life. It's a spiritual practice that seems to
be the foundation of all the major religions. In other words you can find parallel teachings in each of
the major religions that are already formulated in the Fourth Way as groundwork. However the Fourth Way as we know if
today, was not formulated until G.I. Gurdjieff brought the Work to the west in
1914. Prior to that, the
Work/Fourth Way was kept very secret and taught only in esoteric schools and
monasteries. So basically it is
practice that enables certain people who are in the possession of what is
called the magnetic center or, ability to attract teachings to practice a
spiritual life while staying in their regular, ordinary circumstances of
life. There is no need for them to
go into seclusion there is no need for them to renounce the world as they know
it, to renounce their families, their jobs…they can practice while staying in
life. That's why its called the
Fourth Way.
The first traditional three
ways of practice are the way of the fakir: the way of the physical body,
overcoming physical body and its desires.
The second way is the way of the monk, or overcoming the way of the
emotions, mastering one's emotions.
The third way is the way of the yogi, the way of mastering the
mind. And the fourth way is the
way in which all these three components are taken together and practiced in
unison at the same time. Hence the
Fourth Way yields fast results and it can be compared to the Buddhist tantric
practice in that way.'
Image by flyskyfrp, courtesy of Creative Commons license.