shivers up the spine

In Perpetual Motion: A Conversation with Norman Sjoman PhD on Yoga, Art and a Personal Sense of Order

2013-05-17T22:50:00.000-07:00

"Dark Rudra" original on canvas and paper, Norman Sjoman

I t happened the usual way things happen for me. I read something curious and then the thought of it grew, generating questions that then fractured and multiplied, interrupting my routines, populating my peripheral vision. I owe this particularly pleasant detour to Canadian painter, writer, yoga teacher and Sanskritist Norman Sjoman who I’m told was living in Argentina at the time I managed to make contact with him. See, I was on a mission to sequester myself (very successful on the isolation end of things) with the books I needed to read for my final comprehensive exam when I re-read Sjoman’s lovely book, The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, in which he wrote the following:

"I feel that the only possible way of communicating any meaningful sense of justice is through one's personal sense of order, one's aesthetic."

So of course, this seemed an unusual pronouncement to make. I mean, not that the statement itself is hard to understand, but that Sjoman had decided to open his discussion of the hatha yoga traditions of the Mysore Palace with this note to his readers seemed out of the ordinary. What was his concern with the aesthetic?

Norman Sjoman

Norman Sjoman has published on art, art history and the techniques of yoga, and also lectured on these subjects as well as Sanskrit at universities in various countries. Born in Mission City, British Columbia, Sjoman has a BA Honours from the University of British Columbia, a Filosofie Kandidat from Stockholm University. He has a Vidyāvācaspati (PhD) from the Centre of Advanced Studies in Sanskrit at Pune University, a pandit degree from the Mysore Maharaja’s Mahapathasala and a Diploma from Alberta College of Art. Over a 14-year period in India he studied four different śāstras (traditional philosophical disciplines), in Sanskrit, with several individual pandits. From 1970-1976 Sjoman studied yoga under B.K.S. Iyengar. Sjoman has taught yoga in several countries and is accredited by yoga studios in Canada, the Netherlands and Japan. In 1982 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Yoga by the Nippon Yoga Gakkei. At present he resides mainly in Calgary, Canada, while making frequent visits to India,

"Harihara," original on canvas/paper, Norman Sjoman

Europe, Mexico and South America. As a visual artist, Sjoman has illustrated his own books and books by others. He has prepared exhibition catalogues for various artists, including Druvinka, Shehan Madawela, Raghupati Bhatta, and R. Puttaraju. In 2006 Sjoman was invited to the first panel on yoga at the American Academy of Religion in Washington, DC, where he presented a paper entitled Summary of Research on Yoga. In 2006 he presented a monograph "The Yoga Tradition" at India's Lonavla Yoga Institute.

I like to think that like all detours from life’s main roads, this conversation (which is the result of a volley back and forth of questions emailed over great distances) gives you a sense of yoga’s tributaries and alleyways as Sjoman discusses art, poetry and the body in motion...all those things that make the busy pace of the main road that much more bearable. And so using something other than straight lines we build relationships that can sustain more than plans and ambitions: a personal sense of order, a treehouse, an āsana, a fable that happened one day in the backyard.

"Rudra Rajata" original mixed media on canvas, Norman Sjoman

Priya Thomas in Conversation with Norman Sjoman, PhD

"Burnt Rudra" original mixed media on canvas/paper, Norman Sjoman

"I feel that the only possible way of communicating any meaningful sense of justice is through one's personal sense of order, one's aesthetic." - Norman Sjoman

Priya Thomas: Given your quote above, I'd like to talk about your perspective regarding the study of yoga as a discursive enterprise, as a psycho-physical practice and as an aesthetic… knowing full well that you would likely not separate these things. I think readers would be interested to hear your thoughts on the value importance of aesthetics as pertains to yoga, and to hear about your own journey with yoga.

Norman Sjoman: I will try to avoid cheap comments even though the glib answer is endemic to media. I have discussed āsana as a psycho physical practice in Yoga Touchstone and Dead Birds. I will recapitulate some of that. First of all I have proposed dividing āsana into still and moving āsanas there. The idea of still and moving is a concept that dates from the Upaniṣads and describes the world. The word āsana itself means 'still' or 'position' (elaborated in Yoga Touchstone). The Indian term for movement is karma. It accounts for the physical and beyond the physical extending even further than our idea of subconscious (that determines the patterns in our body that limit or control our movement) into previous incarnations. The division of body and mind is artificial and stems from an orientation toward hyper objectivity as part of the metaphysic of scientific discourse and capitalism. We partially recognize this unity in our language with the word ‘emotion’ which literally means out of movement etymologically but we interpret that in terms of fight or flight.

So when we consider yoga, we have to consider the whole psycho-physical apparatus. This has implications beyond the physical – our dreams, our deep sleep states, the dissolution of the body (as happens every night when we go to sleep). In short, the practice of yoga is in reality an exploration of consciousness and this has been indicated from some of the earliest records in Indian thought, particularly in the Upaniṣads and continues almost up to the present in Indian texts.

To turn to art, these states of consciousness are not accessible to the dominating probes of objectivity (we could mention academics and politics here). Therefore, logically, in order to explore them we have to turn to something else – here, art. I think it is clear from the above that in āsana or movement, emotion is often a better means of access than anatomical abuse.

Now, in ancient India there were two forms of truth – satya and ṛta. Satya more or less refers to a form of objective truth and ṛta was something like the truth of the whole moving cosmos. The two do not necessarily correspond and overlap. In the first pāda of the Yogasūtram that occurs after the ability to grasp object and subject (consciousness itself) and discriminate between them; there is the sūtra, ŗtambharā tatra prajñā, literally consciousness or knowledge at that point carries (or is) ŗta, the form of truth that is beyond or the core of objective truth if we accept the above explanations. I might add that ṛta has disappeared as a concept in later Sanskrit. Interestingly enough, this word (ṛta) is the etymological source of our word art. I have traced this in an article in my book Art: the Dark Side. It is usually traced back to Latin which gives an idea of entertainer or street artist. But traced all the way back, we get the sense that the artist is a seer that has access to a higher form of truth. From understanding this, we can extrapolate the attitude we would have to take on the ground.

Regarding justice, Pablo Neruda said there is no justice in this world. The only justice to be found is in painting, in art where some kind of balance or order is necessary for it to be art and, I might add, there is nothing at stake any more. I think the similarities to yoga are obvious.

Priya Thomas: It takes many years I presume of practice before one gets to the point of considering there to be “nothing at stake” anymore with either art or yoga. For many, this would seem like a place they wouldn’t want to exist either....

Norman Sjoman: Perhaps you have misunderstood my comment here. In the case of art, there is a certain confusion that has arisen with the dominance of economic considerations in our lives. Previously one’s life was not governed by financial destiny. One had one’s space on earth and food and living was not under the control of business excess. When you work outside the fantasy of finance, there is nothing at stake. Your art is for itself. Most artists, excluded from financial reward (which is realized by promotion), practice their art because they want to (that is, emotion, above or the fact that they have no choice). We speak of doctors and doctors. Healers are excluded in a similar way. Yoga has been especially prone to financial liquidation because of its popularity and a somewhat pathetic understanding that it is just about some particular configuration of the body. Indian disciplines demand a lifetime of devotion (translate hard work). There is nothing really at stake because the discipline is only about you if you are fortunate enough to understand that.

Priya Thomas: I'm not sure I misunderstood your question about those for whom the notion of "nothing at stake" is anathema to their purpose in making art or doing yoga. I suppose I was in a way saying that for some, extrinsic motivators do seem to overshadow intrinsic ones. Wherever you look there's an artist or a yogi whose motivations are explicitly extrinsic. This, as you say, may pertain to economic considerations. But my point was that extrinsic motivators (i.e. those things that are at stake) continually appear in people's list of reasons for doing yoga or art. Is the intrinsic mode of being something that yoga can develop over what you call a "lifetime of devotion?" Or are artists (and yogis for that matter) necessarily those fish that swim upstream i.e. against the current? Didn't William Faulkner say, “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore”?

Norman Sjoman: I have to reread Faulkner. I have quoted him in Dead Birds as well. Our initial impulse to action is often extrinsic. If we are fortunate, our actions though should transform us in the process. Indian Śāstras (traditional philosophical disciplines) all expect that transformation after which they say, the śāstra itself is meaningless.

Priya Thomas: There is a fair amount of emphasis placed on Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra in contemporary postural practice. What do you make of this text occupying a central position in the perception of a canon?

Norman Sjoman: It looks now like my next book will be coming out, the 'Yogasūtraćintāmaṇi' which addresses this issue. This is a book about the much abused yoga sūtras. What I have done is, using the sūtras as a framework, drawn relevant statements from Indian scholars and yogins of a thousand years earlier - Upaniṣads, Buddhism and so on. These indicate a much older tradition than the yoga sūtras including the spiritual anatomy that is usually credited to the later śāktas. In addition to that I have gone ahead into the tantric and śaiva texts that were created in the thousand years following Patañjali and supply their comments and critiques as well. This enables us to see the yoga tradition as a tradition and place the yoga sutras within that rather than using them as the beginning and end of what is known as yoga. Taking the tradition as a whole enables us to understand this as a spiritual discipline directly relevant to ourselves rather than as some symbol system or mechanical system of authority. I could say more but I restrain myself.

Priya Thomas: You spoke earlier about the word emotion and its etymological relationship to movement. How would you describe yoga's relationship to emotion?

Norman Sjoman: Everyone who practices āsanas seriously has experienced the resolution of an emotional complex connected with a physical or anatomical release or access to movement and vice versa. I have spoke about that in detail in Dead Birds. Indeed, ‘attitude’ is often ultimately more important in the accomplishment of movement than physical preparation. Physical preparation tends to remain in a part of consciousness that is limited by a certain anatomical logic that might give some mechanical access in movement. Anatomy can be considered an ocean but it has boundaries. Emotion gives access to possibilities. In Indian terms, that word can be covered by the word ‘heart’. That adds a different perspective.

Priya Thomas: When did you first get interested in yoga?

Norman Sjoman: I began trying to work with Yoga in Sweden from a book. I heard the word Sanskrit there as well and, when I heard it, I knew that I would study that and began to do so. I did not even know it was an Indian language then. I have felt that the two complement one another. After all, they are both about concentration.

Priya Thomas: What book did you find that guided you to practice yoga in Sweden?

Norman Sjoman: The first book I found was one by Ghosh. I have never been able to find that book

again. Then I took some classes with a young French boy who had been in a car accident and had

BKS Iyengar

been severely injured. He had a Chinese physiotherapist who noticed that his movements were similar to yoga and worked with him with yoga. Then I found Iyengar’s book on āsanas. I went to Pune to study Sanskrit and found that Iyengar was there. I went to him for years.

Priya Thomas: Describe your art practice.

Norman Sjoman: I have always been interested in art even as a child. Now, I like to have a number of things in front of me. I dabble with them. With good fortune, one of them will take me and then I work on that exclusively until I am finished. Then I hang around and wait for something else to take me.

Priya Thomas: Why do you think there’s justice in art? Or in yoga?

"Language Mandala," mixed media on canvas/paper, Norman Sjoman

Norman Sjoman: Art requires a certain ‘balance’. That balance is a form of honesty. It’s easy to be tricked or attracted by an extraneous symbol – a flesh flash for example. Yoga, even at a physical level, begrudges absence of balance and alignment. How much more so with the mind? With the breath? With meditation? You can perceive a quiet mind directly.

Priya Thomas: Do you take movement to be a form of art? What constitutes art for you?

Norman Sjoman: I am constrained by the way you put your question. I would consider that movement which rises to ‘art’ (ṛta above) is movement that is part of the space around you pervaded or even formed by your own consciousness. And there is movement that is a fragmentation of that and does not rise to that state. There is a long argument in Indian aesthetics about the conveyance of this state to the spectator and the state of mind of the participant. There are different opinions. It is generally accepted that there is a stimulation of emotions in the spectator that rise up until they transcend the ego fettered mind and become a direct temporary experience of transcendence. The proof of that in Indian thought is the statement we make ‘I was lost in the music and I did not know a thing’. It’s not uncommon. One cannot expect anything less of art. I hope that is revealed in the photographs in Yoga Touchstone.

Priya Thomas: Can you describe the state of mind that arises in making/performing art? Is it akin to a kind of possession? Is it an experience of svarga (loosely translated, a temporary “heaven”)? Is it pratyakṣa (insight) – what is it?

Norman Sjoman: What more is there to say than above? Wallace Stevens has spoken eloquently in this excerpt of “The Man with the Blue Guitar:”

The Man With the Blue Guitar
I.
The man bent over his guitar,  A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,  You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are  Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,  A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar  Of things exactly as they are.”

II
I cannot bring a world quite round,  Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero’s head, large eye  And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can  And reach through him almost to man.
If to serenade almost to man  Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade  Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III
Ah, but to play man number one,  To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board  And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,  Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho,  To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
To bang it from a savage blue,  Jangling the metal of the strings…

IV
So that’s life, then: things are they are?  It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?  And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,  And all their manner, weak and strong?
And that’s life, then: things as they are,  This buzzing of the blue guitar.

V
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,  Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.  There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.  There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.  There are no shadows. Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place  Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place,  Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI
A tune beyond us as we are,  Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in the tune as if in space,  Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place  As you play them, on the blue guitar,
Placed so, beyond the compass of change,  Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way  The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.  The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,  A composing of senses of the guitar.

"Rudra Whispers," original mixed media on canvas, Norman Sjoman

"Tree of Life," original mixed media on canvas, Norman Sjoman

T he blue guitar refuses to compose “things as they are,” composing instead beyond them... not unlike an āsana, creating an aesthetic order both emotionally moving and utterly transformative. As Sjoman reminds us, the word emotion means out of movement. As any yogi hell bent on their physical postures knows, movement, so closely linked to order, is also linked to emotion... Who hasn’t had that moment in a yoga class when you could identify a physical location that had become the residence for a particularly stubborn memory? Those in seated meditation will tell you the same, pointing with kinetic precision to the locations of their emotional turbines and the eruptions of anxiety that are regularly diffused, carried by breath into the delicate passages of their wrists or the soles of the feet.

As summer approaches, even those who have no interest in yoga slip into circles around campfires, skip stones on oceans and circumambulate foreign cities, collaborating with other bodies as if these compositional forms of breath and movement, these poses, were hardwired into being... as if the movements of the night sky and its fireflies, or even the simulated flickering of the aurora borealis on my screensaver were but choreographic variations on a deeper theme, an infinitely flexible, more mutable order whose essence is perpetual motion.

All of Norman Sjoman's books are available to purchase online through Black Lotus Books.

Psycho-Spiritual Realizations from a Great American Road Trip with Author and Yoga Teacher Brian Leaf

2013-02-24T19:36:00.000-08:00

I t should come as not surprise to yogis that Leonardo da Vinci made a habit of writing and walking backwards. If you’ve spent any time in head or handstand you know how yoga’s inversions are designed to stimulate elaborate reversals, to flip the world on its ear. Such adventures of life lived upside-down are part and parcel of the yogic quest, and if you asked yoga teacher and author Brian Leaf, he’d tell you that there’s no better way to gaining a backstage pass to your own psychophysical matrix than by getting in a van and driving across the country on an extended road trip. His book Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi chronicles his attempt to get off the known path, to sleep in the back of a van like a beat poet or itinerant, to bring life back to the bare essentials, making his existence itself one grand psycho-spiritual experiment.

Brian Leaf

Brian Leaf, MA, is director of The New Leaf Learning Center, a holistic tutoring center in Massachusetts. In his work helping students manage ADD and overcome standardized-test and math phobias, Brian draws upon twenty-one years of intensive study, practice, and teaching of yoga, meditation, and holistic health. He is certified by The New England Institute of Ayurvedic Medicine and holds licenses or certifications as a Yoga Teacher, Massage Therapist, Energyworker, and Holistic Educator. He also incorporates Bach Flower Essences, Cranio-Sacral Therapy, Reiki, Shiatsu, and Tai Chi into his work. Brian is the author of eleven books, including Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi. His books have been featured on The CW, MTV.com, Fox News, and Kripalu.org.

Leaf’s book is a memoir of one man’s yoga experiments that invariably result in a host of absurd experiences. Uplifting and occasionally humiliating, the book is a comical and lighthearted marriage of the ridiculous and sublime that's a perfect fit for a Hollywood script. But as I found out in a conversation with Leaf, what preoccupies him in this landscape of the adventure chronicle is the role of yoga in developing intuition...that rapid fire cognition that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking... that knowing that comes on so quickly that you can’t quite justify it in common sense terms. In Brian’s words, intuition is the point of yoga, the very thing he was searching for in his psycho-spiritual experiments...

I knew I loved yoga so I went on this cross-country road trip to explore more styles of yoga mostly because that was right after Amrit Desai had been asked to leave Kripalu, and having been a student of Kripalu, I was really devastated. So I went on this trip to find other styles of yoga. And so I would do all of these programs and I'd go to ashrams and retreats and just always kind of searching. And so it turned out to be a big, long adventure. - Brian Leaf

Brian Leaf on the road

Priya Thomas in Conversation with Brian Leaf:

Priya Thomas: The book is quite funny. I laughed quite a bit reading it...probably because the laughs are rooted in some pretty awkward, even humiliating experiences.

Brian Leaf: That's great! You found it funny.. Yeah, for some reason that's just what came to me. The first draft was 15 pages that I wrote for my previous agent, my literary agent, were not funny at all. He didn't like them. When I would sit on my medication cushion, these things would just come to me, they'd bubble up. And I would sit down to write them. [laughs]

Priya Thomas: So what gave you the inspiration to write the book?

Brian Leaf: Well, it's a long story, I guess. I've always been a yogi and taught yoga and studied yoga for many years. And all along I've also been a tutor. I always did both things. And I had written a lot of other books that are all like test prep or study skills or vocabulary workbooks. But towards the latter books, I began to feel that I had really written books that took me away from myself. They weren't really who I was. And when I'm doing something that's a little bit out of alignment with who I am or what I believe, I find it very depleting, even if I don't notice it right away. But as I say in this book, I find that when I'm doing what really matters to me, what I really care about and what I really believe in, I feel best.

Priya Thomas: It's a yoga adventure chronicle, right? A story of a taking a trip bare-bones style, living in the back of your van, cross country with an equally zany college friend of yours...all in the pursuit of yoga...

Brian Leaf: Yeah.

Priya Thomas: So what gave you the idea to embark on a yoga adventure and then write about it?

Brian Leaf: Well, while I was taking the adventure I wasn't thinking about a book. When I took the adventure, I really just for some reason that's the way it always occurred to me to live. Originally I had thought about calling the book Psycho-spiritual Experiments....just these experiments in trying to figure out how best to live, how to be in the world. And so I didn't plan on having a big adventure. I just lived as life occurred to me.

And when I was at Georgetown in college I got really into yoga. I knew I loved yoga so I went on this cross-country road trip to explore more styles of yoga mostly because that was right after Amrit Desai had been asked to leave Kripalu and having been a student of Kripalu, I was really devastated. So I went on this trip to find other styles of yoga. And so I would do all of these programs and I'd go to ashrams and retreats and just always kind of searching. And so it turned out to be a big, long adventure.

Priya Thomas: So these psycho-spiritual experiments.... when did they start? In the book you mention that you started yoga after a serious bout of ulcerative colitis. Right?

Brian Leaf: That's right.

Priya Thomas: But did you actually start experimenting with your life in some way even before that? Or did yoga start to figure more prominently in your life after you found a need for it? Was it an experiment for its own sake?

Brian Leaf: So that's interesting. I mean, I guess now that I think about... Did you ever see that movie August Rush?

Priya Thomas: No.

Brian Leaf: It's a cute movie. I mean, maybe someone would consider it a little cheesy. But it's a cute movie about this kid and he's a musical prodigy. And he grows up in an orphanage and there's no music there for some reason. I can't remember why. But he hears it. He knows that there's this thing. I mean, it's kind of a metaphor for what we all feel spiritually.

So there's this thing and he knows it's out there. He just doesn't know what it is. And then finally he leaves the orphanage and goes on this big quest and he finds music and he becomes this musical prodigy. But not to call myself a prodigy [laughs], I don't mean that at all.
But I guess I always knew I was hungering in some way for this thing, even before I had something to call it. But it was in college that I consciously started doing these psycho spiritual experiments.

Priya Thomas: In the book you also talk about how yoga can bring awareness into the body... At one point you talk about how a lower back injury that you acquired through a skydiving injury set off a whole chain of events, a whole cycle of unforeseen emotional responses...

Brian Leaf skydiving

Brian Leaf: Yeah. And as I mentioned in the book, in Ayurveda, if one were to repress anxiety, it literally would lodge and become kind of a toxin in the colon. Or if one were to repress anger, it would go into the liver. And so the skydiving injury had hurt my lower back. I didn't quite make the connection then, but in hindsight I see that during yoga class, when I would be doing belly down postures, cobra, anything pressing my torso, my belly, my pelvis particularly into the ground, I would get really, really angry. And at the time, it didn't even occur to me that that was weird. I just said, oh, I'm so angry. And I would leave the room.

But sure enough about maybe a year later, one day the floodgates just opened. And I was overcome with emotion. And I was doing yoga very intentionally and with a lot of force. And just belly down posture after belly down posture, pushing hard. And then I had this big cathartic experience, which I think really unleashed all this emotion that I had trapped in my body, allowing me to be more free. And then once I opened the doors, it just allowed me to feel my heart a little more, which is a beautiful experience.

Priya Thomas: What’s your explanation for that?

Brian Leaf: I love the model of Ayurveda and how they speak about things. They say that when something in the body is blocked, it finds an incorrect way to come out.
And that's true literally, like you shouldn't stop a sneeze because it can exert, what, I don't know, pressure on your ear drums or something, right? And that's true literally with the sneeze. It's true metaphorically, or even literally, with everything. If anger is blocked, it will find some other way to come out.

Priya Thomas: Did you have bodily practices before you came to yoga?

Brian Leaf: No, not at all. That's the thing. I remember actually when I first went to Georgetown, I was not an athlete in high school at all really. And when I first got to college and I started taking yoga, I had never really stretched before. I hadn't been on any school teams, really. I mean, of course I played in the backyard and stuff when I was a kid, but I was very much in my head. So I didn't have any practices before that.

Priya Thomas: And yet you seem to have taken to the discipline of it pretty easily, from what I can tell in the book.

http://imgfave.com/view/1321728

Brian Leaf: Yeah, it's true. On day one it was like I found my home. It was like I was meant to do it and I just never had access to it. I don't know that I could have put words to it the way I can now, but in that first class I literally knew that I'd found something really important. I mean, kind of like when I met my wife I would say on that very first meeting, I knew I had met somebody really important in my life. And on that very first yoga class, I knew I had experienced something really important in my life.

Priya Thomas: And you talk about that in the book...about intuitions. In fact, I think you mention Malcom Gladwell's book Blink and the importance he places on intuition. Have you always trusted your intuitions?

Brian Leaf: Well, I’m not sure what I did when I was a kid... But this teacher I used to see at Kripalu for many years, I think one of the main reasons I sought him out was because he believed in intuition too and had been using it for a much longer time than I had. And so I think one of the problems in our culture, for example, is that we're taught to go through the mind.

Even in Malcom Gladwell's book (which is such a good book) each concept is backed up with study after study after study. Which is ironic in a way. I mean, it's useful because it speaks to people and it allows them to receive it. But it's ironic because ultimately the studies don't really matter. It's tuning into and hearing and listening to this universal flow of prana, which is just benevolent and I believe intelligent and speaks to the most abundant and pain free way to move in life.

Priya Thomas: Were there things in your childhood that would have supported this kind of world view or was it a real change for you to come to yoga and start to understand, as you say, this kind of force of the universe as being benevolent. I mean, for some that would be a pretty difficult transition to make if they came from an alternate worldview.

Brian Leaf: Right. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. For some reason, again, it would be like a wanderer who suddenly just came upon their home. I just feel like it wasn't a transition so much, it was more like a finding...like a switch turning on, and a remembering, like, oh yes, this is great. For example, in the book I talk about how I used to be a debater in New Jersey. I was the first place debater in high school debate. And I was good at it, so I received praise, so I continued to do it. But I was never comfortable. It kind of made me sick, really. I was kind of miserable. But when I found yoga, it felt more like me just waking up to who I am.

Priya Thomas: I remember in the book that you mention this charismatic sociology professor who among many other insights also gives you the motto, “fearless, honest, relaxed...” But in speaking about teachers, you also mentioned that you were lucky not to meet any renowned spiritual teachers in your early years. Now, why do you think that was important?

Brian Leaf: Well, when I was 17, just getting into yoga, I was really looking for somebody to do the work. I guess if I had met a charismatic spiritual teacher, there's a pretty good chance I might have just joined up full tilt and kind of given away my own quest, in a way, and just gone on their ride, on their trip. I think the goal for me was to wake up to me. And actually, again, my whole mission is to wake up to and live from my own inner knowledge. Dr. Edward Bach, who popularized Bach Flower Essences, one of his big philosophies was he said that any disease is the dissonance between the callings of our deepest self and our personality, or the way we live in the world. The difference between those two, the friction between those two is the reason for disease.

Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead

Priya Thomas: Yeah. Do you want to talk to me about Jerry Garcia? He makes quite the appearance in your book...

Brian Leaf: So yeah, there's a chapter in which a friend and I go to a Dead show. And I had only been to one other Dead show. And traveling is a fast route to that anyway because you're really out of your normal routine, especially one in the open you can have some pretty unusual transformational experiences. I went to this Dead show and... what happened? And I didn't even know the music really well enough to sing along to the whole thing. But I was trying to sing. So at some point I just surrendered to just try to feel the music, to let it in my body. It was just another one of those many experiences of trying to surrender and release and drop into my body. So anyway, I dropped into my body and I just started feeling the music. And then it just really overcame me in a way that now I've experienced occasionally like in a kirtan. My body is like vibrating with the music and it's filling me with energy and it's really becoming ecstatic. And then all of a sudden out of nowhere, this I've never experienced before or since, I would say. All of a sudden out of nowhere, a green light sprang between me and Jerry Garcia. And when I tell that to people, they ask if I'm on a whole lot of drugs. I was not, as far as I know. [laughing] So this green light sprang between my chest and my heart and Jerry Garcia, particularly his guitar. And then just a green light, just like a force started pushing me back. And I was just bursting with this love and feeling and energy and vitality.

Priya Thomas: What do you make of it? Do you think this could happen anywhere or with anyone, or was it really about Jerry?

Brian Leaf: At this point, it's speculation, right? But I would guess that Jerry Garcia was probably in the same way that many gurus are. I would say Jerry Garcia was a channel for some really powerful, mystical love and energy. And it makes sense given the culture that sprang up around him. He obviously was a medium of some kind for this beautiful energy. Oddly enough, I've already heard emails and Facebook from readers of the book. And several people, almost you could say many people have expressed having somewhat similar experiences with Jerry Garcia. He was like a guru. I think he was a channel. He was giving out either Shaktipat or some kind of energetic experience. And I think that's what a lot of the Deadheads experienced through him.
 
Priya Thomas: Well, I hate to hijack your story in any way, but I did have a dream once of Johnny Cash and he asked me for space in our kitchen cupboard. Because he was so insistent in the dream, I woke up the next morning and I labeled the cupboard “Johnny Cash's Cupboard” emptying it out of a wealth of non-perishables. (laughing) And it stayed that way for a year. But does that say something about me or about Johnny – I don’t know (laughing). I personally don't know much about Jerry Garcia, but I’ll take you at your word!

Brian Leaf: A lot of the powerful musicians might be the same way. I mean, they might be channels in their own way of energy. I mean, the kind of person who can draw 40,000 people to a stadium, if not just the quality of the music, right, there's got to be an energetic experience that the listeners are having that is energetic and spiritual.

Priya Thomas: I guess. Do you want to describe your meditation practice?

Brian Leaf: Well, my meditation practice... I mean, let's see. The meditation, I have an altar and I sit at my altar. And my meditation practice changed over the years, as I'm sure many people's would. My current meditation practice is I sit and of course I first spend a few moments getting centered and listening to my breath. And then open to the feeling like sensations of just being aware and mindful. Becoming mindful of the ways in which I might be rejecting or trying to change my reality. And just allowing that space. And then that way I suppose you could say it's a mindfulness meditation practice.

Priya Thomas: your wife is Canadian, is that right?

Brian Leaf: Yeah, yeah.

Priya Thomas: You talk about Canadians being extremely polite. I wondered if you had ever taken a yoga class in Canada. [laughs]

Brian Leaf: [laughs] No, I haven't. That's interesting. Is it different?

Priya Thomas: Well, I don't know, I'd be curious to hear from you about that. I forgot how you put it. I think you said your wife “reads all of the instructions on boxes...”

Brian Leaf: Oh, she follows the directions. Well, I'm from New Jersey. And do you know the reputation of New Jersey?

Priya Thomas: A little bit. [laughs]

Brian Leaf: Well, you know, everything is more crowded and you have to kind of fight for your elbow room a little bit. And there's just different assumptions in different places. Right?

Priya Thomas: Sure.

 Brian Leaf: So, for example, if I'm walking down the street and I bump into a friend and we stop to say hello, we would just stop in the middle of the sidewalk and people would go around us. And in New Jersey that would be totally normal. But to my wife that's like such a terrible faux pas to stop in the middle of the sidewalk and make people go around you. She gets really uncomfortable and kind of pulls me aside to the side of the sidewalk. [laughs] But in New Jersey, that would be somewhat normal behavior. But in Canada, I think it's not.

So there's a lot of things like that. I think Canadians are just very – Michael Moore did a little bit with that, didn't he? There was some kind of funny thing about how he went around, I can't remember where it was, in Canada and tested to see how many people had locked their front door.

 Priya Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure every American thinks that everyone in Toronto has their doors wide open. [laughs] Does your wife do yoga?

 Brian Leaf: Oh yeah. She and and I met actually at the Kripalu Yoga Ashram in Western Mass. A lot of Canadians go there. Do you know Kripalu?

Priya Thomas: I haven't done a lot of Kripalu myself, but of course I know of it.

Brian Leaf: Yeah. So she and I met there. Yeah, she's really keen with it as well.

 Priya Thomas: In your book you talk about meeting Bikram as a turning point...

Brian Leaf: Yeah. I mention him a few times because of various reasons. It was kind of like an epiphany...one of the many epiphanies in the book where I come to realize – and I think this is so important for any yogi to do because it's so easy to become almost jingoistic, to think that your yoga is the best... So I think that I had always unconsciously judged the more physical yoga. I'm a vata type person. I just benefit from gentle grounding things, and I'd always done more gentle grounding type yoga. And so I think I had always secretly judged the more physical, the more vigorous, the more jumping around kind of yoga. And it was interesting when I met Bikram to realize like, oh, maybe these people who do Bikram yoga aren't seething, masochistic people. But maybe the different styles of yoga are really just appropriate in the different constitutions and the different types of people.

In the West there's sort of a one size fits all approach. Spinach has iron in it, so it's good for you.
But in Ayurveda spinach may or may not be good for you, depending on how you digest it. So it was like, oh, Bikram has not necessarily created this bad thing. It's just that his yoga might be appropriate for some other people. And in my experience of him in the locker room, naked together [laughs] at Kripalu, he was just a sweet, jolly fellow and I enjoyed meeting him very much.

Priya Thomas: But spinach (if you will) offers a kind of order, right? (laughing) And if you throw that order around, I mean, if you start experimenting with everything because you realize that spinach, or how you cook it, may or may not be good for you, you could end up just sort of experimenting for the rest of your life. And for some people that's a happy place to be, and possibly for others it's a little bit frightening. What do you make of that?
 
Brian Leaf: Just experimenting forever?

Priya Thomas: Yeah.

Brian Leaf: Well, actually I wouldn't see it that way because I would say two things. One, what I love about Ayurveda is I feel like Ayurveda is like the instruction manual we were never given. When I was a kid there was this TV show called Greatest American Hero. And he gets this superhero suit, but there's no instruction manual. It's kind of how we are. All of us, we're like this superhero without the instruction manual. And I feel like Ayurveda kind of gives you the instruction manual a little bit. It says, hey, you know how things are hard for you to digest? That's because in your constitution that makes sense. If you do these things, you'll digest better. I feel like it kind of takes away the need to experiment a little bit. And I would say ultimately to me the goal would be to tap into the intuition. My experiments I would say were to bring me to following my intuition.
~

http://olio-ataxia.tumblr.com/post/3421559055/more-high-diving-horses

T he other night I dreamt of a friend. It was nothing spectacular, rather ordinary actually. (And yes, I’m aware of John Updike’s caution that talking about a dream means losing a reader). Anyway, in my dream, a dear friend told me about an unfinished project, the subject of a study begun many years ago. I had often wondered about this long lost project; I might even have asked once but we never had a chance to talk about it. When I woke up, I had no idea if anything I had seen in my dream was accurate, but I felt closer to the person anyway. Now, maybe I was like Brian Leaf, realizing that questions I’d never asked were still stuck in my blood, bones, tissues and sinew. Maybe I was finding out I didn’t know people quite as well as I thought I did. And because life doesn’t usually give us the answers we need, (at least not without some struggle) I did what Leaf did... I spent much of the day processing this false information, experimenting with its possibilities in the safety of my intuitive space.

As Brian Leaf says, the yoga journey gives you something discursive thinking can’t actually touch... like dreams, its technicolor beauty runs counter to everything in the waking world, replacing “what is” with extraordinary “what if’s”....making a blue moon of an ordinary night. I’m guessing that’s why Brian Leaf would journey so far to execute his grand life experiments....
Cos even if the Jerry Garcia experience only lasts for forty-five minutes (I think that’s how long they say the last dream before morning lasts) we all learn to carry a bit of that around, suspending our breaths at the top of an inhale like deep-sea divers, and then letting it all hang out out like this exhale will be our very last, as we hang out upside down at least once a day feeling the blood rush to our heads, intuiting the velocity of life is best felt when you're swimming upstream.

1968, Meditation and Obstinate Faith: A Litany of Daisy Chains for Dear Prudence

2012-12-25T19:07:00.001-08:00

Prudence Anne Villiers Farrow Bruns in Rishikesh, front row left

I have a set of pushpins squeezed into a pretend timeline in my mind. It’s linear (only for the sake of order) and runs left to right (convention). Anyway, on it, several crucial dates are pinpointed. It’s like those maps of the world people have on their inspiration corkboards with pushpins that represent every place they’d like to go. If I could fling myself back to one year on that ridiculously reductive line, it would be 1968. My reasons are myriad – I won’t start that list. But a good number of those reasons started flooding back to me when I spoke at length to American yoga and meditation teacher, author and film producer Prudence Farrow Bruns.

Prudence Anne Villiers Farrow Bruns is the daughter of film director John Farrow and actress Maureen O’Sullivan, and the younger sister of actress Mia Farrow. She also happens to be the subject of the breathtaking Beatles song “Dear Prudence."
On January 23, 1968, Farrow, along with her sister Mia and brother John, traveled with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi from New York to India and then to the Maharishi's ashram in Rishikesh, India for a Transcendental Meditation teacher training course. The Beatles arrived shortly thereafter, on February 16 and 20. Farrow became so serious about her meditation while in India, that she turned into a near recluse, rarely coming out of the cottage she was living in. As a result, Lennon wrote the song “Dear Prudence.”

Prudence Farrow Bruns

Farrow taught Trancendental Meditation for several decades after her teacher training course in India. She received her BA, MA and PhD in South and Southeast Asian studies from University of California at Berkeley. Her doctoral dissertation was on pulse diagnosis, titled Nadivijnana, the Crest-Jewel of Ayurveda: A Translation of Six Central Texts and an Examination of the Sources, Influences and Development of Indian Pulse-Diagnosis. She has also worked in film production, with credits including The Muppets Take Manhattan of 1984 and The Purple Rose of Cairo of 1985, with Mia Farrow and director Woody Allen. She also conceived and co-produced the 1994 film Widow’s Peak. Farrow became a magazine writer in the 2000s. Using her married name, Prudence Bruns, she has authored articles on Asian studies, world religions, ayurveda, and healthy living. She has presented at conferences and held teaching positions at the University of California at Berkeley, Rutgers University and the University of Wisconsin. She has taught Transcendental Meditation in Northwest Florida since 1970.

Occasionally, -like anyone not enough advanced in their yoga practice to be able to inhabit two (or more) lives at once- I lament that there must be a way to bend time, to live exponentially. And so it is with remarkable candour and detail that Prudence talks to us about her travels and experiences circa 1968. She relates the seismic impact of a spiritual experience that followed on the heels her father’s death, her unbroken loyalty to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, what the song “Dear Prudence” meant to her, the miracle she requested (and received) at Lourdes, teaching asana to Andy Kaufman, and the story behind her very name, a name which she notes, “fashioned my destiny.”

"I was sitting around my brother’s house reading a book on meditation because I was obsessed with it. It didn’t really make sense, but I was obsessed with it and he came up and he said, “What are you reading?” And I said, “I’m reading a book on meditation.” And he said “So, you’re interested in meditation...”
And somehow when he said that, I just felt... But I felt something happen and I just KNEW that I was hearing something that would have profound effects on my life..." (Prudence Farrow Bruns)


http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynn_el/6050847670/in/photostream

Priya Thomas in Conversation with Prudence Farrow Bruns PhD, December 2012:

Prudence: Hey Priya!

Priya: Hey Prudence, how are you?

Prudence: Fine. I’m so sorry the meeting that I was in just went over time...

Priya: No, that’s ok. I didn’t intend to start the interview this way, but I can’t get over how much your voice sounds like Mia Farrow’s! (laughing)

Prudence: I know! Well, you know, she is my sister!

Prudence Farrow Bruns and Mia Farrow

Priya: (laughing) I know...guess you must hear that a lot then.

Prudence: All of the girls... All of us sound the same!

Priya: How many are you?

The Farrow Family

Prudence: Four girls. Hardly girls now! Hardly girls now! Four old women! (laughing)

Priya: (laughing) Let’s see now, why were you named Prudence? Do you know?

Prudence: Probably you ask that question because...Well are you of South Asian descent?

Priya: Yes, I am.

Prudence: Well yeah, you know, there’s so much thought put into a name in India, don’t you think? Whereas here, it’s important in a different way...So you would notice that I’m called Prudence, where maybe most people don’t notice it.

Priya: That’s possible...

Prudence: Or maybe it’s just me? and I’m looking at it too philosophically??

Priya: No, it’s possible...

Prudence: Anyway, I don’t know. My father insisted on calling me Prudence and he said he had an aunt named Prudence. And my mother really didn’t want to call me Prudence because before “Dear Prudence” the song, it was not a great name to have...You know, like Prud-ence...It was a severe name. And so my mother really was against it and most of their friends were against it. So we thought that I was called after this aunt. But there’s no such aunt named Prudence. We can’t find it anywhere in his family geneology. So we don’t know why I’m called Prudence.

John Farrow, Maureen O'Sullivan

Priya: hmm...odd..

Director John Farrow

Prudence: My father insisted on it.
And it did make a difference for me having that name. I fashioned my life differently because of it. I really think I did.

Priya: Is that right?

Prudence: It’s in my book. I just finished the book and I begin it with that point that you know, well, that I have this name and that it really fashioned my destiny.

Priya: That’s funny... I was looking at your life (on paper anyway), and thinking that your name was unusual, that it somehow seemed to suit your life. When does the book come out?

Prudence: Well, I just finished it. And I have an agent and I’m going to New York in the middle of January and I’m going to be having a strategy meeting with him and a couple of other people and we’ll decide how to best get it out. So it’s at that stage.

Priya: So if we could go back in time now and talk a little bit about how you first came to meditation and yoga in 1966...Can you describe your introduction to meditation? I believe it was at UCLA, is that right?

Anandamayi Ma

Prudence: Yeah it was at UCLA. Well, it was really before that because I was looking for meditation for a long time and I didn’t really know why. I didn’t know anyone who meditated or anything like that. And when I was in LA visiting my eldest brother, a friend of his had been to India with Anandamayi Ma. You’ve probably heard of her, haven’t you?

Priya: Sure.

Prudence: And he spent six months with her and then she had told him to go to Maharishi in Rishikesh. And so he had learned TM (Transcendental Meditation) and I was sitting around my brother’s house reading a book on meditation because I was obsessed with it. It didn’t really make sense, but I was obsessed with it and he came up and he said, “What are you reading?” And I said, “I’m reading a book on meditation.” And he said “So, you’re interested in meditation..." And somehow when he said that, I just felt...you know you could understand this perhaps being Indian... But I felt something happen and I just KNEW that I was hearing something that would have profound effects on my life and that it was just what I had been searching for. So even before he said anything, I could feel it. This was what I was looking for.

Priya: Where did it go from there?

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1968

Prudence: So then he told me there was this saint in India called Maharishi Mahesh Yogi you know and then he told me all kinds of amazing stories you know...that were very inspiring. More important than that, was that in the West we were having sort of a revolution of thought. My generation was saying we’re not going to go the way our parents have gone. The answers are not outside, they’re on the inside. That you could change the world by changing yourself...All that kind of thinking was not part of our culture. That’s not the way anyone in our culture thought... But there was a whole bunch of us that collectively went through this. You know, and I think that we were definitely looking for some solutions and when I started Transcendental Meditation, because it was so generic in the way it was presented (it was mixed with yoga etc) I really thought this is what I’m looking for, this is what the world needs, or the West needs. This is our solution.

Priya: So you were pursuing something that went beyond just your own personal interest....

Mahesh Yogi with Mike Love (The Beach Boys)

Prudence: I got very excited at that point because I just thought it was revolutionary in the way that we were going to change things. It would change our minds. And by changing our minds, we could change people. So I was very excited on all levels and I wanted to go and study about it with this great saint who knew all about it. I just wanted to study and know more about it. And nobody here knew anything about it.

Priya: So how old were you at this point?

Prudence: Eighteen.

Priya: I know you said that you can’t really explain it but you must have some sense of why you were gravitating to meditation at that point...

1968, Rishikesh. Photo: Paul Saltzman.

Prudence: Well there were a lot of things happening at that time. I mean, we had people like Timothy Leary who just before that time were considered not just 60s gurus, but were simply respected teachers and professors at college you know...And he was saying, speaking from our generation that just like Columbus had set sail and found a new land, that we should be willing to venture out, that it was time for all of us to expand our horizons. So there was a lot of that in the air. And you know I don’t know...Well, when my father died I had a spiritual experience. I mean it was very profound. And it kind of whitewashed everything. Sort of like if you have very sweet honey on your tongue and you can’t taste anything else. None of the other tastes can be tasted. Same with that experience...Nothing really measured up to it. And I became very excited about becoming a truly spiritual person.

And I read Siddhartha I guess right after I had that spiritual experience and it just resonated with me. It just seemed so right that you can live spirituality. You know, you didn’t really have that in the West. You went to mass and you tried to be like Jesus but you couldn’t experience it...And I wanted to become someone who could experience god as a truly spiritual person. It became an obsession. I was full of obsessions! (laughing)

Priya: And yet despite your feelings about what was lacking in your experience of mass etc, you did want to become a nun at one point. Were you younger than eighteen at that time?

Prudence: Yes, because I had a spiritual experience when my father died. And both Mia and I had gone to convent school. Well, I don’t know what religious tradition you were raised with...

Priya: As it happens, I went to a convent school as well...of the Sacred Heart...

Prudence: Oh, so you know you could become a teacher or you could become a nun. You know, remember when you go on retreats and the vocation? And they’d say ok so some of you are going to get the vocation. And I remember after I left that school and I went on to high school, I was so petrified of getting the vocation! I was just so sure I was going to be the one that got the vocation.

Mia Farrow

Priya: Right.. (laughing)

Prudence: When I was young, ten and eleven, Mia and I...well, we all wanted to be nuns you know. She wanted to be a missionary nun. We had visited a Carmelite convent and they were all covered with veils and they prayed all the time. And I wanted to be one of those kinds of nuns that prayed all the time cos in that tradition prayer was the strongest thing. So that’s what I decided I wanted to be.

Priya: When did that idea change?

Prudence: After my father died when I was fifteen and when I had that experience then I wanted to be spiritual. I wanted to be a saint. I wanted to be close to god and all those things. And before I started meditation, I really considered becoming a nun but it conflicted with my meditation and yoga. You know they said you can’t practice yoga cos it’s devil worship and it’s better to just be a nun. But because I felt that my deep spiritual practice was coming from the meditation and yoga, I didn’t want to lose it.

Priya: You mentioned Timothy Leary. So had you done LSD before you started meditation and yoga or was it all in tandem?

Dr. Timothy Leary

Prudence: When my father died I had this spiritual experience...then when I was sixteen, people that I knew were doing peyote. So then I did that. And then there was acid when I was seventeen. So it was all happening during that time. And everything just ran together. And I knew I really didn’t want to do acid....you know it’s so dangerous. And it was much more powerful then than it is now. I mean people really didn’t come back from trips. They were lost. There was some really crazy stuff. And so it really was like Columbus going out on the high seas.... So I was really saddened that I did it because everybody was doing it, everywhere. You couldn’t really hang out with people and not have done it. My acid trips were really scary. I only did it a couple of times. I couldn’t do it a lot. I was too vulnerable I think. But it left its mark, for sure.

Priya: What was the spiritual experience you had after your father died? Do you mind my asking?

Prudence: No, I don’t mind your asking. It was like a good acid trip. What happened was I was in the desert with a friend outside of LA and I went into my room because I needed to understand what had just happened. I had just heard my father died. And I just needed to somehow grasp it in some way....to make sense of what happened. And I was sitting on the bed and I tried to think – what happened? Then I felt that I was going back to when I was a child and I was aware of my relationship with my father...which was a very primal relationship. And then I realized that it was kind of an archetypal relationship that probably everybody has that relationship.... It grew from that into an awareness that...well, it was like I went back to when I was a baby. But I was really seeing god when I saw my father. Then it moved past that, and I did see god. And god consisted of everybody I’d ever known in my life, in my family. And then from there, my grandparents and great-grandparents, but from different times, from different lives maybe...But it all happened quite fast. I was seeing a meeting all of these people individually, but at the same time it was a collective awareness and it became very moving. It was a larger context I could never, ever understand, but I could feel it. And that’s how I can explain it. It wasn’t intellectual at all, it was something I felt with my heart.

Priya: How long was it after your father died that you went to India? It would have been a few years right?

Prudence: 1963...yes, it was five years.

John Lennon, 1968

Priya: Which brings me to the subject of song, “Dear Prudence” which was written for you by John Lennon. It’s such a beautiful, expansive song...

Prudence: It actually captured the feeling of that course (that we took with Mahesh Yogi).

Priya: That’s interesting. Great songs seem to capture things in layers – distilling so many things in any given moment... Do you want to elaborate on what you mean when you say it captured the course?

Prudence: It captured that period that we were there.
Especially the feeling of India... and of that meditation course... none of the other songs that they ever wrote have that...to me... And when I hear it I just feel that time in India, that course.

Priya: Of course..

The Beatles, Rishikesh, 1968

Prudence: And that course was very powerful for me. It was a monumental experience. At that time Maharishi did not realize, this is what he said, is that he did not realize that we, the young people from the West, carried so much stress. And I was kind of a prototype of many that were to follow. I was just leading the way of many, many others that would come after me. You know, after that course, he didn’t have people meditate solidly. But on that course, he had people do it just as long as you could do it, and you’d just be meditating all the time. But meditation is also a practice of purification and while its packing in and integrating that silence of your experience. So for me, it was horrendous and amazing at the same time. It was a huge game-changer... To go into the solitary guidance of such a great man. I totally trusted him beyond anybody I’d ever met. So I could safely give myself over to the process of just complete silence and deep, deep, deep meditation. So it was extraordinary of course.

Priya: I believe that in your own words you’ve called your dedication to meditation “fanatical”...that you were in your room non-stop meditating while others took time off, the Beatles rehearsed. I think you mention that even your sister Mia went out to hunt tigers while you stayed in your room. What for?

Prudence: After that experience of my father, there could be nothing that could match that. So I became ferociously hungry for more.

Priya: Did you find what you were looking for?

Prudence: I did. I did. You know, originally I wasn’t allowed to go. Because of my age and all that...So I went to Lourdes for a miracle. You know, so that I could go to Rishikesh...Cos I figured I just have to go! There’s nothing else for me. I don’t want anything else.

Priya: Did you just say you went to Lourdes to get a miracle?

Prudence: Yes, because they wouldn’t accept me on the course. And I tried in California. I tried in New York and then I tried in England and it just wasn’t going to happen. I had to be twenty years old and I had to finish college. And that, to me, wasn’t going to happen. So I really felt, at the point where I was, where I just couldn’t live...I didn’t want to live without this. And I knew that this was what I wanted. So I figured, I’ll get a miracle. I’ll figure this out. I’m going to go.

Apparition Grotto in Lourdes, France - 1960s

Priya: Right. I hear you. (laughing)

Prudence: So then I went to Lourdes and I did. I got a miracle. And it was amazing! And when I came back from Lourdes, on the pillow of my bed, was a drawing. Some fan of my mother’s was there from Brazil and she was a dentist and her name was Lourdes. And she heard from my mother that I was coming home and so without telling my mother anything she just drew this welcome home drawing, stuck it on my pillow, and it was signed Lourdes, but it was all in blue. It was like the grotto where I had been! When I saw it on the pillow when I walked in the door, I just knew I was going to India. It was like this is it! It’s in the can. I’m going to India! I had no idea how it would work out, but I knew I was going to India and exactly one year later, Maharishi came to Boston where I was staying. In a year I was on my way to India, on an airplane with Maharishi, and all of that.

Priya: Certainly sounds like you were very willing to experiment with your life on the basis of that spiritual experience you had after your father died. But do you think your willingness to go out on a limb has something to do your having grown up in a world where so many people around you were creative sorts – who were probably heterodox and experimental in their approach to life in the first place?

Prudence's mother, actress Maureen O'Sullivan

Prudence: Probably...To a certain extent...Yeah, I think that there were people experimenting with all kinds of things around me. And I tended to gravitate towards people like that. You know, I have sisters and brothers who didn’t. But it is true that the kids who were from the wealthy areas like Beverly Hills in California, they tended to be bolder, to try things that other people didn’t. But having seen my friends and people I grew up with, nobody was obsessed like I was. Whatever anyone told me I couldn’t do or dared me to do, I’d do. I’m the kind of person that will still go out on a limb.

Priya: Right. (laughing)

Prudence: You know at my age, going to the Kumbh Mela...You know....I’ll still do it. I think it’s part of a radical personality...maybe? I don’t know...

Priya: Now the Beatles had a pretty publicized split with Mahesh Yogi. What happened with you and Mahesh Yogi in that period?

Prudence: It was amazing. I had absolute and complete respect for him through the whole thing. So nothing, nothing happened. Nothing but exactly what I dreamed would happen. Maharishi was a real master and I felt that I got the best guidance I could ever have imagined. And he was truly as great as I dreamed he would be. I didn’t see anything that the others saw. I only saw him one way.

Priya: Right. You’ve been teaching meditation since 1968. How has your practice changed since you first started?

Prudence: It’s just deepened. Beyond what I could even have hoped for. And that’s really true.

Priya: You also have an intellectual interest in several areas pertaining to yoga and meditation. You did your doctoral dissertation on ayurveda. Do you want to tell me a little bit about that?

Prudence: I was attracted to the medicine side because it’s the easier thing to translate number one... As in, it’s not like kavya (poetry) or something....And it was all fascinating to me. Dr. Ram Karan Sharma was hired to be my advisor and I was having a real blast. I loved every second of it.

Priya: Given that your spiritual experiences were something that you could not understand intellectually, why do you think you were interested in academic study?

Prudence's father, John Farrow (bottom left)

Prudence: I think it really started with my father. He also wrote several books and he loved history and literature. And he would have on Sunday afternoons, his best buddies, which were usually priests, Jesuits, come over. And they would sit and drink, but they would discuss literature and different philosophers and things like that. I never knew what they were talking about at all, but we were allowed to sit in on these if we didn’t say anything. So we would just listen.

As a child, I was not intellectual at all. Like Mia, and all of my other brothers and sisters, Patrick, they were very good at school. You know, they read all the time. You know, and I just could never read. I was always just running around outside and climbing trees... and I was terrible at writing, terrible at school you know. Maybe I thought, stupid – just not good at any of that. But yet, I really, really admired them.
So there was that going on.

Priya: But you seemed to develop an interest later...

Prudence: After I started Transcendental Meditation, (and even before) I wanted to study Latin. I wanted to study even though I never really did it, and was just awful at it.

Priya: (laughing)

Prudence: Then after Latin, I heard about Sanskrit...which was Latin times a hundred!! And so then, that became an obsession. I wanted to study Sanskrit.

Priya: You taught meditation to Andy Kaufman didn’t you?

Andy Kaufman

Prudence: I didn’t teach him meditation. I taught him yoga asanas. I knew him pretty well in a certain way because I was his teacher. This was at Cambridge Mass. in 1969 and he started meditation, but at that point I could only initiate people up to sixteen years old. So he was like seventeen or eighteen. So I taught him asanas and other kinds of meditation.

Priya: What was his interest in asana. Do you know?

Prudence: To expand his mind. He wanted to become more spiritual and he felt the power of meditation and he wanted to pursue it. He eventually became a teacher of meditation. He got really involved in it. At that time, there was no way anyone would dream that he would become famous or anything.

Priya: Right. Interesting. So you’re looking at making film on the Kumbh Mela.

Prudence: It’ll be my first time being at the Kumbh Mela.

Priya: So what’s the project about exactly?

Prudence: I’m not sure. I started a Dear Prudence Foundation. Did you know that?

Priya: Yes, earlier this year right?

Prudence: So it’s all tied in with that...my writing the book and all the other things I’m doing. But the foundation is really because I’m teaching Transcendental Meditation and really think people could use scholarship money to start studying because it’s expensive to start. This way the foundation can support people who want to study, become teachers and all the things in between. So that’s the real motivation that’s behind all this and you’ll see this later but with the foundation I’m focusing on the yoga community and developing a bunch of courses on ayurveda, the Yoga Sutras, the Hathayogapradipika. Because I have the Sanskrit background, we can use original sourcebooks and texts. We’ll also be teaching Sanskrit. So we’ll be offering these courses, not as part of academia, so we will make it easy for people to learn...

Priya: So then you’ve kept up your Sanskrit over the years? I noticed that you have been presenting papers at conferences. One title read, “Siva Nataraja: Adbhuta Dance.” What’s your interest in the ashen one’s awesome dance!?

Prudence: Well I notice you’re in dance. Speaking of noticing things...

Priya: Yeah sure.

Prudence: One of the things I want to do with these courses is expand into things like dance. Do you know that there are now twenty million practitioners of yoga in the United States alone?

Priya: I’ve heard such numbers.

Prudence: It’s continuing to grow exponentially. I’ve been going into the community and I’ve met a lot of the teachers. And what happens is that people start and they do it for body beauty and all that, but then the yoga starts to have an effect on them and they want to learn more. It’s reaching a level now where there are a lot of people who really want to learn more but don’t have access to the information that the tradition has held. And dance is part of that yoga world... Not that dance is necessarily yoga, but they are related. And I’d like to do something with these courses on dance as well. So the foundation is really to find scholarship money to help people start studying a number of different things.

I t may not be 1968, but Prudence is still meditating; she is still continuing to live and "grow exponentially," something she attributes to a strong practice. As anyone knows, a strong practice usually requires many hours spent unseen; there is an absence that swallows words and makes folks uncertain. And so, true to lore, where there's a meditator, there's also always a knocking at the door…
John Lennon’s “Dear Prudence” magnifies the name Prudence, repetitively evoking her long meditative absences, her lids of silence, as it presents the beguiling visual variety of the world we know: the sun, the birds, a litany of daisy chains for youth and beauty, its disarming melody ever pleading for her smile. If ever there was a gandharva sent to lure a meditator out of trance....
It’s not hard to understand why this Prudence in her Prahlada-esque devotion to hours of intense meditation would have been dear to Lennon. Or to get a sense of the wonder and rambling joy that Prudence and many others shared in 1968.

Prudence continues to live a fascinating, highly experimental life, crossing paths with intellectuals and glitterati – a milieu in which Bruns admits perhaps unconventional lives are better tolerated, if not encouraged. Yet, even here, Bruns’ temperament, her childlike enthusiasm (that we hear of in ‘Dear Prudence” – “like a little child”) her obsessiveness and obstinate faith set her apart, and have characterized her many years of practice. And through that practice, Prudence’s unusual name, the one her father had insisted on with no real precedent and no explicit reason, somehow generated a life of its own, becoming a metonym for a generation’s shared fascination with yoga and meditation.
Dear Prudence, as dear to us now as she was back then.

• • • • •

To learn more about The Dear Prudence Foundation and its upcoming projects, stay tuned to http://www.dearprudencefoundation.org/

Kundalini Yoga Teacher Simran Khalsa Asks: Why Poverty?

2012-10-29T15:33:00.003-07:00

Simran Khalsa

T he West end YMCA in Toronto held a staff meeting for its yoga instructors a few weeks ago. Across the table sat Simran Khalsa, the kundalini yoga teacher who, a few years back, had watched my life's rougher patches play out in yoga postures week by week, class by class. He was grinning as he looked across the oval board room table and said:

"Hey, I hear about your classes from one of my students... I've been meaning to come and check it out but haven't had time!" Then he turned to the instructor next to him and said: "You know she and I are born on the same day. We have the same birthday!"

There was something so comforting about seeing Simran in his trademark white kundalini garb and running shoes years later, radiating all things exceptional and simple.

I stepped into Simran's class accidentally while I was writing a 'novel' a few years ago. I would leave my house in the west end every morning, just to get out of the reach of its four walls. Then I would head to the Y with no real objective apart from sitting for hours at a time in view of a pool in which the voices of children and swim instructors echoed and dissipated behind flawless glass. I spent hours writing poolside, drawing childlike fragments... images in yellow, poppy and powder blue with colored pencils, until it became clear that mine was not a novel so much as a children's storybook about things you'd rather not tell children, or some unruly derivative of 'Life or Theatre' a la Charlotte Salomon.

One day, I was either out of things to say, or just too tired to write anymore that I walked past the treadmills and up a flight of stairs. There was a paper schedule tacked outside a closed door which read, "Kundalini yoga." For the next year I went to Simran's class three times a week, awkwardly making my way through postures that were unrelenting, trying my best to accommodate whatever emotional/mental states might erupt during 'breath of fire'. Simran always warned that breath of fire was provocative - it would test you, try your nerves before it calibrated them. Not unlike incoming tropical storm Sandy (it should hit Toronto in the next few hours) you didn't get into it without bracing yourself.

Anyway, this video was sent around at the west end YMCA this morning. It was made by Geoff Bowie, a Canadian filmmaker, longtime student of Simran's, and a regular in our classes. As you can see, Simran is - well, just plain special. I'm thrilled that Geoff has put this together and I have every intention of chatting with him in the near future to see if he and Simran would consent to an interview with this blog.

Until then, below is Simran Khalsa's answer to "Why Poverty" on TVO. If you are on an ipad or iphone, click here for a non-flash version.

Do Yogis Still Fly? Fables and Flightpaths of the Itinerant Yogi: An Interview with Jim Mallinson PhD

2012-07-25T05:52:00.002-07:00

Sir William James Mallinson PhD, self-portrait

Dr. Jim Mallinson and Balyogi Shri Ram Balak Das

B ob Dylan, birds, planes, yogis. Motorcycles, birds, magicians, yogis.
Backpackers, soothsayers, wandering mendicants, paragliding pilots, and of course, yogis.

A “musical expeditionary” if you recall, is what the always touring, ever-itinerant Bob Dylan wanted to be (for anyone who has seen the Scorcese documentary No Direction Home). Birds, (especially the aquatic kind, or hamsa) have long been associated with enlightenment and the migrant yogi. I don’t need to mention the complicated relationship modern yoga has had with travelling magicians, soothsayers and backpackers in the trippy 60s. So why does postural yoga so often focus on physical stillness when the yogi - if we take tales of the yogi in Tantric mythology seriously-, is the consummate vagabond: traversing geographic boundaries with ease, and even entering, inhabiting and exiting other human bodies imperceptibly? What is the relationship between movement and stillness given that those who may have devised yoga were likely themselves wanderers?

This is something Dr. Willam James Mallinson is uniquely well-suited to explain. Although he has never practiced his postural yoga in a modern studio environment (save for once with Danny Paradise), he does have a thing or two to say about itinerant sadhus and modern practice. And this is a good time to listen to what he has to say: If you haven't already heard, yoga scholars Dr. Mark Singleton (previously interviewed on this blog) and Dr. Jim Mallinson have teamed up to put together a corpus of hatha yoga texts aimed at the modern practitioner entitled Roots of Yoga: A Sourcebook from the Indian Traditions. The Kickstarter initiative to fund this new set of yoga texts has just sixteen days left towards its goal of raising $50,000. As of today, the campaign is just shy of the halfway mark, meaning the next modest contribution through Kickstarter could get the project airborne.

William James Mallinson, Bt., DPhil., is an Indologist specialising in the Indian yoga and yogi traditions. His main method is textual studies – he has studied Sanskrit since his undergraduate work at Oxford. His ethnographic research comprises almost a decade living in India, most of which was in the company of itinerant yogis and ascetics. From 2002-2008 he worked for the Clay Sanskrit Library as its most prolific translator, completing six volumes of translations of Sanskrit poetry. His prizewinning MA thesis at The School of Oriental and African Studies in 1992-93 was on the place of the ascetic yogi in Indian society. His DPhil at Oxford, which was supervised by the world’s leading scholar of Tantra, Dr. Alexis Sanderson, was a critical edition of a fourteenth-century text on a key technique of haṭhayoga, namely khecarīmudrā. The thesis was revised for publication in 2007 in the Routledge Tantric Studies Series. In 2010 it was reprinted in paperback and an Indian edition was published.

In addition, Mallinson has a non-scholarly book on his time living with yogis in India currently placed with the London literary agents Gillon Aitken. A documentary film which Mallinson devised, associate produced and co-presented, The Beginner's Guide to Yoga, was broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4 in 2007. In February 2013 he will film a documentary on The Original Yogis at the Kumbh Mela, to be co-presented with actor Dominic West. He has most recently been asked to advise on the Yoga: Art of Transformation exhibition to be held in Washington DC late next year, for which he is also to write a catalogue essay on the depiction of yogis in medieval miniatures. He is currently collaborating with the photographer Cambridge Jones on an illustrated history of yoga.

In honour of Mark and Jim’s Roots of Yoga project I interviewed Dr. Jim Mallinson at some length about the Kickstarter initiative and his ongoing scholarly research. But instead, as you will see, our conversation weaves through some unsuspected terrain. A self-described “contrarian” who began studying Sanskrit as a teen, Mallinson is also an avid paraglider pilot who won the British Open in 2006 and recently captained the south of Britain against the north in the 2011 inaugural North-South Cup. Add to this an expertise in filmmaking, a non-scholarly book project in the works and a more than casual interest in juggling and you have what I suspect one might call a polymath yoga expeditionary.

Dr. Jim Mallinson, photos: Claudia

Priya Thomas in Conversation with Sir William James Mallinson PhD, July 2012:

Priya Thomas: You know in order to orient myself with your work I read the paper you presented last year at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, as well as the Goraksasataka which appears in David White’s Yoga in Practice as well as brief snippets of something else... oh and your CV which was quite diverse. Now you describe yourself as an Indologist so I wondered if you might want to tackle that term for our readers and then what drew you to Sanskrit and the study of yoga.

Jim Mallinson: Ok well, Indology...well sometimes I have to look that one up myself. I'm not sure anyone's 100% clear what it means. But it means someone who studies classical India primarily through texts but not only through text. So yeah, I would say I'm an Indologist. How did I get into it all? Well, I started studying Sanskrit kind of by chance to be honest by a process of elimination. I was seventeen and I was at school and thinking about what I was going to do at university and I had kind of settled on Oriental studies. So I went to Oxford for an open day, to Oriental Studies and the main subject was Chinese. And the Chinese professor gave an introductory lecture and it was so boring! And it's a four year course and I was sitting there thinking god there's no way I can do this. He was a rather uninspiring teacher. And then, he said at the end of his talk, "if anyone's interested in Sanskrit, the Sanskrit professor's at the end of the corridor". I was the only one out of the fifty or so there that wandered down. And I already knew a bit about it because I had done classics at school and I had friends who'd been to India who had regaled me with stories of the lovely times they'd had there, and the two professors who were there in the study were kind of inspiring. And they turned me onto it and yeah I signed up. And I guess I was slightly contrarian as well; I probably wanted to freak my parents out!

Priya Thomas: Ah...yes.

Jim Mallinson: And then in England people quite often take a year out between school and university. So I worked in London for a bit, got enough money together and went off to India for six months and I was hooked. So since age seventeen, I've been back to India every year since.

Priya Thomas: So you got into all this by chance in some ways, but really by through the personalities you met then...

Jim Mallinson: Yes absolutely I would say. And then one of the two in the room was Alexis Sanderson who then ended up being my supervisor for my PhD.

Priya Thomas: So what was it that drew you to Alexis Sanderson?

Jim Mallinson: Well, he was clearly brilliant. To be honest, when I was an undergrad I didn't really realize quite what amazing work he was doing because he was just the lecturer at the time. To be honest when I read Sanskrit as an undergraduate, I wasn't that hooked. I was hooked on India but Sanskrit didn't grab me completely. But what did was India, and travelling around India and I sort of fell in with some of these yogis and ascetics and I spent a lot of time wandering around with them.

Jim Mallinson (far left), Balyogi Shri Ram Balak Das and other ascetics

Priya Thomas: It's not often you hear of people falling in with yogis!

Jim Mallinson: Yeah it's like falling in with a bad crowd!

Priya Thomas: Yeah can I ask how that happened?

Balyogi Shri Ram Balak Das and Jim Mallinson

Jim Mallinson: Um...how did it happen? Well I can remember the first time it happened, it was on my first trip to India before I had even started at Oxford. And I was up in a place called Pahalgam near Srinagar, well you know it's in Kashmir, and it's the beginning of the trek to the Amarnath cave where there's a big ice lingam. So there were a bunch of sadhus there and - in fact that trek is going on right now, there's half a million people apparently signed up for it, it sounds incredible - but anyway, they were camped at the bottom and then I happened to be there by chance but then I had very rudimentary Hindi but then I started talking to them and then I realized that you know if I went into town I could go and buy some vegetables and milk and stuff at the village shop, come back and for fifty rupees I could feed the whole camp and they'd be happy for me to sit around and make a fool of myself! And that was kind of how it started.

And I became intrigued, you know, these charismatic guys who are just wandering around... and some of them were doing yoga, some not, some doing various tapasyas (austerities), but kind of on this constant, ancient pilgrimage round and seeming to lead these ancient lives but making them real in a very modern context.

Priya Thomas: You just made a verbal distinction between the tapas they were doing and yoga; as in some were doing yoga, some were not doing that, some were doing tapas. So, in your mind, what constitutes that distinction?

http://wisdomquarterly.blogspot.ca

Jim Mallinson: Well, yeah that's an interesting question because most people do distinguish it quite clearly although I would actually argue and I actually have in a recent paper that particularly the physical practices of tapas are the origins of the physical practices of much of what we know as yoga. Or hatha yoga...in fact the word hatha kind of implies tapas to a certain extent, you know force...and things that are difficult. But there does seem to be a distinction even amongst ascetics today; people are known for their practice of tapas and some for their practice of yoga. And there is a certain amount of distinction. But they are both used I think, or understood as cultivating some kind of power which can then be translated into worldly power.

Priya Thomas: Right. Maybe this would be a good time to tell our readers a bit about the Kickstarter project that you've launched with Mark Singleton. What's it all about?

Jim Mallinson: Mark and I have discussed this for a while. I'm actually trying to set up a project at Oxford, a big five year research project, one of the outputs we discussed would be a reader of yoga texts but that's probably something that's much longer than what we envisaged for this Roots of Yoga project. This is the same idea but shorter, you know maybe two or three hundred pages. And what we want to do is it's going to be themed; there are going to be ten or fifteen themed chapters and then we are going to trace the history of each of those elements by providing translations from texts which discuss them and try to show how they've developed over time...

The curious fact is that the texts on yoga, on hatha yoga in particular, which are most relevant to the practice of yoga in the world today have been really poorly studied you know. So that's what I ended up doing for my PhD. I found a text that hadn't been worked on at all which is this text called the Khecarividya which is about the khecarimudra, so the practice of turning your tongue into your skull to drink the amrta which is meant to be dripping down. But then as I dipped into that I realized that:

a) there is a wealth of texts out there that hadn't been looked at at all
b) that most of what had been said about yoga or specifically hatha yoga had been based on just three texts that hadn't been very well edited.

Even the dates of the Hathapradipika, the Sivasamhita and the Gherandasamhita have not been ascertained properly. So when I finished my PhD I still felt totally lost contextually in that whole world because no one had looked at the corpus as a whole. So I said I'm going to go back to first principles I'm going to establish a corpus of texts on hatha yoga and that's what I've been doing for the last six years I suppose, on and off.

And so through doing that I've identified a bunch of texts that no one had ever paid any attention to before. And if you look at them and then try and fit them in historically you see who has borrowed from them and what they've borrowed from and you can work out a relative chronology and you can see how the ideas and practices of yoga have changed over the years. It's a common fault of writings on India and Indian religions in particular that people think of it as a kind of static monolith and that it was always the same, but clearly it wasn't with yoga.

Priya Thomas: So which texts in particular are you looking at for this project?

Jim Mallinson: Ok well there's a couple of really interesting texts that I've been working on that have been completely overlooked. One is called Amrtasiddhi which is a fascinating work; it's probably eleventh century. Amazingly I just got scans of a manuscript in a library in Peking. The reason it's such a fascinating manuscript is because it's bilingual, Tibetan and Sanskrit, and we know that the scribe has written at the end that it was copied in 1169. So it's very, very old. The oldest manuscript I've worked from is from 1477. Generally, manuscripts in India below the Himalayas don't last very long because of the monsoon climate. They're also written on paper so generally they've crumbled away in three or four hundred years. But this one, because it was in Tibet, survived all this time in the dry air of Tibet. So I've got that to work with. I already had a paper manuscript of the same text that I transcribed a while ago and the readings are similar to this new manuscript. Sorry to go on for ages about the nitty gritty details but it's the first text that teaches the physical practices of hatha yoga. The mudras specifically, like mahamudra and mulabandha. And verses from it have been found in later texts such as the Hathapradipika as well as subsequent texts right through to the nineteenth century and commentaries on the Hathapradipika. But no one, very few modern scholars have looked at it at all.

Priya Thomas: Wow. Ok, so that's one of them…

Jim Mallinson: Yeah there’s another one that I've edited from eight or nine manuscripts that's called the Dattatreya Yoga Sastras, (the yoga texts of Dattatreya). That is probably thirteenth century and it's the first text to teach hatha yoga and call it as such. So I've established this corpus of texts and when you look at all of them and you look at the ones that are attributed to Naths, (this Nath sect is always said to be the originator of Hatha yoga), and yet strangely enough they never call their yoga hatha! It's only the texts from other traditions that talk about Hatha yoga. I've argued in a recent paper that it’s because there are kind of two traditions: a kind of ancient, ascetic tradition and it's those guys that talk about hatha because hatha has this connotation of force. So this Dattatreya yoga text is associated with the forerunners of the ascetic order now known as sannyasis, you know the ones who run around naked at the Kumbh mela and stuff.

Priya Thomas: You mentioned that this text is circa the thirteenth century; has asana been introduced at this point? And when I say asana, I'm meaning fixed asana as opposed to the sequential movements we associate with modern, postural pratice. Are you suggesting that we're seeing asana at this point?

Jim Mallinson: Well that text, the Dattatreya Yoga Sastra says that there are 84 lakh or 8.4 million asanas, but it only names one: padmasana. And the other one in this Nath siddha tradition also lists siddhasana. But we do have earlier reference; the earliest references I've come across to asanas as such but not just purely meditational, seated asanas are from a slightly different tradition which then gets funneled into the Hathapradipika.

But what I would argue is that asana then becomes a repository for any physical practice...any practice where you do anything with your body. So in the Dattatreya Yoga Sastra it mentions various different techniques or approaches to yoga. And one of them in Layayoga. And it mentions a bunch of techniques of layayoga one of which is lying on the ground like a corpse. Layayoga is a kind of dissolving your mind - that's the ultimate - laya means dissolution. It's generally a meditative thing. So this idea is basically the predecessor of the corpse pose which then in the Hathapradipika gets slightly tweaked to actually become savasana, the corpse pose. And we see this with lots of things. We see this again with some of the physical mudras and also postures of tapas or austerity...things that are really quite old. It's not until the maybe sixteenth or seventeenth century and after that we get proliferations of actual textual descriptions of the eighty-four asanas, and in some cases we even get illustrated manuscripts. And there you find things like this text called the Jogpradipika which is an eighteenth century medieval Hindi version of the Hathapradipika (but not quite) which features for instance, a tapkarasana, (or a tapas-asana); that's illustrated in a lovely manuscript in the British Library. It features a guy hanging from a tree performing a very ancient tapas or austerity which is not called an asana until this period. So basically all kinds of things get funnelled into the rubric of asana. We don't really get any suggestions of the sequences (associated with modern yoga).

Priya Thomas: Right. Well what is the specific use of this particular corpus for practicing yogis?

Jim Mallinson: You know I'm generally fascinated with where things have come from and I would imagine that anyone who takes their yoga practice seriously would like to know why and where their practices come from. And for example, the corpse pose you know you can read about in these texts that we'll be providing translations from and explain how it's used as a method of dissolving your mind so that you can achieve samadhi through that. Similarly, some of the postures that come from the mudra some of them are aimed at making your breath rise up through your central channel. Others are said to just be good for your body and make you feel good. But as I say, it's kind of interesting because I've never been to a yoga class in my life!

Priya Thomas: Oh is that right? I wondered whether when you had done your ethnographic study with yogis whether you had undertaken a practice?

Jim Mallinson: Oh yeah I do. I practice yoga every day.

Dr. Jim Mallinson

Priya Thomas: Oh ok. so you mean a yoga class in a modern studio.

Jim Mallinson: Yeah well I hung out with my guru for years and years and he's taught me plenty of yoga but no, I have been to one class. It was in the west...

Priya Thomas: No no. First tell me about your time with your yogi teacher. Did you study one on one?

Jim Mallinson: Well I spent years just wandering around with him just the two of us. Well, actually, my wife Claudia, was there most of the time too... So yeah…

Priya Thomas: Ok so how did he teach you?

Jim Mallinson: Well he demonstrated the asanas, but then it's not just asana it's the whole yogic way of life...you know the diet and what have you. So I've kind of aspired to that although I've always realized that I was never going to get there 100 percent.

Priya Thomas: So were you living this way because you wanted to be an observer? Or were their other reasons for getting involved in the lifestyle?

Jim Mallinson: Well no. You couldn't do it for so long just to be an observer. No I just loved the life as well. I definitely found something very satisfying about it. Now why...why is a question I often ask myself! I'm not actually sure...

Priya Thomas: Ok...

Jim's guru Balyogi Shri Ram Balak Das and Dr. Jim Mallinson

Jim Mallinson: But it's a whole way of life of hanging out with him and similar guys and wandering around and being on a perpetual pilgrimage round and it all integrating with the classical tradition that I was studying; it just seemed like...seemed to bring some kind of meaning to my existence. I mean I've always enjoyed travelling...so that life of the itinerant sadhu kind of gives it some justification. Yeah so I spent most of my twenties with some kind of framework - I did all twelve of the jyotirlingas around India - and so I used that as a structure, to give some kind of excuse for my wide-eyed wanderings. But aesthetically I guess it appealed to me as well.

Priya Thomas: So in the context of what you've experienced, what was your proximity to the goals of yoga, namely mukti or siddhi?

Jim Mallinson: Have I got near it?

Priya Thomas: No, not really. not so much what I meant...

Jim Mallinson: (laughing) I can't say I can make any claims to that.

Priya Thomas: (laughing) I meant more what is your perception of those goals? I wouldn't really ask you if you'd got near it. Although I'm equally curious about that mind you, but I wouldn't know what to ask you to figure that one out... No really, what do you make of those goals, mukti and siddhi?

Jim Mallinson: Of the goals? What I've been taught by my guru for example is that you can't really guarantee anything through the practice of yoga even if you do exactly what you've been taught to do or exactly what's said in the texts or whatever. Ultimately, they would say that it's unconditional and that you need some kind of divine grace. Or to be accurate to the context, my guru's a Vaishnava which means he's a follower of Ram, although ultimately he's that kind of nirguni that believes in a formless god, but he would say that his practice of yoga is a way of making his body most amenable, most receptive to divine grace, but that ultimately he can't be sure of anything and that he has to hope that that will come.

Priya Thomas: Do you find that modern postural yoga, at least in its studio setting, is just not itinerant enough? I mean it's not paragliding!

Jim Mallinson: (laughing) Mind you I have done one class. There's a guy I think he's pretty well-known called Danny Paradise and he's a very good friend of a friend of mine and he was over near where I live doing a weekend and kind of residential thing. And we were hanging out; he's a great guy...and he said why don't you come along to the class. And so I said, sure why not? And you know I'm reasonably bendy and I can do tricky asanas and stuff but then it was ashtanga so I had no idea of the sequence or anything and I just felt completely out of place. It was quite funny.

Priya Thomas: You're not going to go back then.

Jim Mallinson: To be honest I've been doing it for a long time and there are certain things I like doing and certain things I don't. Know what I mean? I mean I try and keep up especially over the last couple of years, I've been trying to get switched on to the whole modern yoga thing.

Priya Thomas: Why?

Jim Mallinson: Why??

Priya Thomas: Yeah why?

Jim Mallinson: Just because I'd like to make my work more relevant you know. I don't want to get stuck completely in an ivory tower.

Priya Thomas: Ok.

Jim Mallinson: So I'm trying to engage that. That's why it's great working with Mark. He's been there. You know and I love reading Mark's book. (Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice) Again, I felt such a disconnection for years until I read Mark's book; I kind of couldn't really see where what I studied fitted in with what was going on in the west. So now I kind of understand much more how it does.

Jim Mallinson airborne

Priya Thomas: Right...I should ask you about paragliding though since it was mentioned earlier and I didn't follow through. This interest in paragliding is quite interesting. How did you wind up in that world?

Jim Mallinson: I got into that again quite by chance, a bit like Sanskrit. Just when I started doing my PhD which was on this text called the Khecarividya about khecarimudra. Strangely enough not within the text but within the kind of popular understanding of khecarimudra is a sense that it is meant to give you the power of flight.

Priya Thomas: Yes of course.

Jim Mallinson: So if you do it, you're meant to take off! And in a strange coincidence at just about the time I started doing my PhD, this friend of mine said "hey let's learn to paraglide, there's a place we can do it."

Priya Thomas: laughing.

Jim Mallinson: I was like yeah ok great what's that? I had no idea what it was or wasn't. Both I and my wife, -well now my wife-, we both learned and straight away I got completely hooked. It just sort of appealed to me. I could bang on about it for ages but it's not like an adrenalin sport. I've never been a crazy guy who'd climb out of the window at a party and walk along the window ledge or something like that! I mean I don't like going near cliff edges unless I'm strapped into my flying harness.

Priya Thomas: Ok.

Jim Mallinson: And it's kind of cerebral. And you can fit this thing into a backpack. And I live quite near just some small hills here in England and on a really good day I can fly a hundred miles just hanging from this kite which I can fit into a rucksack!

Priya Thomas: Wow, so it really is a kind of nomadic journey.

Jim Mallinson: Yeah exactly and I'd done a bit of that in India! And it's easier to do in the mountains where you can fly and then if you land up high somewhere you can spend the night and then you take off the next day and you carry on.

Priya Thomas: How strange, because I was thinking about yogis in mythology and the power of flight as well and so I was going to ask if you found anything in common between yoga and this flying business but you've already answered my question!

Jim Mallinson: Yeah I guess I do see a similarity. Yes I do. yeah. Yeah and it's amazing that it's not terrifying. As in, if it's scary I've definitely done something wrong you know. It shouldn't be scary. But it still completely transports you, you don't think about much else. If you see what I mean. It kind of takes your mind off your mundane worries. Which is what I guess you're trying to do with yoga to a certain extent as well.

Priya Thomas: It's interesting that you describe paragliding as cerebral...seeing as you're throwing your body off of a cliff right?

Jim Mallinson: Yes, but you only step off the cliff once the glider's above your head and inflated so it's not like going to free-fall at all, you step off and you kind of...

Priya Thomas: But you really need to be able to manouver your body to get things to happen the way you want...

Jim Mallinson: Yeah yeah there's a lot of that. You control the thing with your weight a lot, you swing it around and stuff yeah...

Priya Thomas: Now you're also a filmmaker is that right? You've made a film called The Beginner's Guide to Yoga?

Jim Mallinson: Yeah well I was associate producer on that and I devised it five or six years ago.

Priya Thomas: So here you are exploring connection with this thing called modern postural yoga which you appear to be sort of ambivalent about...at least in the modern, studio context right?

Jim Mallinson: Well... ambivalent...well I wouldn't want to do it down because I do it myself to be honest. Especially now that I'm busy and I have children, my yoga practice is mainly postural these days. My wife would kind of look askance at me if she found me meditating too much! (laughing)
Once the kids have gotten a bit older, it might be a bit easier.

Priya Thomas: But the interest in translating postural yoga to film/television? Why?

Jim Mallinson: Yeah well the idea was to pitch this idea to a production house, to Channel 4, which I don't think you would have heard of in the States, but it's one of the four big broadcasters here. And so we did and nothing happened. And I kind of forgot about it. Then a year later they came back and said, yeah love the idea and we found the perfect celebrity to present it. And then they dumped this well perfectly nice lady who's a celebrity for no particular reason, and while I wanted to show what yoga meant in India in contrast with what's going on in the west, (again not to do it down)
but somehow it became more about her. And the following month I made another film… a flying film that was about a kind of pilgrimage by a paraglider which we got broadcast...we managed to sell it to a few channels and stuff and I still get feedback from that.

But what I'm really excited about now is that I'm doing a film at next year's Kumbh Mela in February. Yeah we got a really big, a really pukka production company in London who are very excited about it and they're pitching it to the broadcasters. At the moment it's looking like it's almost definitely going to go ahead although I can't claim all the responsibility for that cos a guy called Dominic West whom you may have heard of who is an actor is an old friend of mine...he is going to present it with me. And he's just recently won the top TV acting award here in Britain. So he's pretty well known. You know cos he was the lead "The Wire".

Priya Thomas: Oh yeah, The Wire of course.

Jim Mallinson

Jim Mallinson: So yeah, he's on board but of course he's also sympathetic to all my fears and genuinely interested in the Kumbh Mela. So we'll retain a decent amount of editorial control over this one and hopefully do a better job.

Priya Thomas: Well that's a big part of the whole thing isn't it...and well film involves so many people that editorial control is a hard one...You also have a non-scholarly book on yoga that a literary agent is currently handling is that right?

Jim Mallinson: Yeah well I'll tell you what it's about.

Priya Thomas: Yeah..

Jim Mallinson: It's about the last Kumbh Mela that I went to three years ago in Haridwar. So I stayed in my guru's camp as usual and I was there just for two weeks and I'd always been wanting to write a non-scholarly book about that world but informed by my studies as well to kind of contextualize it. And then there was enough crazy madness happening in that two weeks to give me a frame to hang it off which is what I'm doing.

Priya Thomas: Is it a novel?

Jim Mallinson: No, well I mean it's all factual. The order of some of the events might jump around a bit. But no, it's purely factual.

Priya Thomas: Ok.

Jim Mallinson: It's about some of the crazy characters...and yoga will figure in it - not massively, maybe twenty percent or something will discuss the yogis in the camp and where they're all coming from and what they get up to.

Priya Thomas: Do you think that modern postural yoga has any relationship now to tapas - the likes of which you might associate with those wandering ascetics?

Jim Mallinson: Funnily enough in some of the stuff I've read like In Mark's edited volume, I can't remember the guy right now, someone called Smith (referring to Benjamin Richard Smith's chapter entitled "With Heat Even Iron Will Bend: Discipline and Authority in Astanga Yoga") wrote about how particularly in ashtanga yoga there did seem to be this concept of tapas and curiously enough there's strong parallels between what these very traditional yogis in India, yogis who do tapas get up to and Bikram yoga. I was just hanging out with this guy, a lovely, quite young yogi called Jagganath Das and I saw him in India in January at his place in Bihar and when I'd met him before he was doing lots of asana and he was doing this dhunitap, this fire penance they do every spring and summer. So they'll be starting at the Kumbh Mela when I'm there on the Vasant pancami which this year is at the end of February, and then they go for four months into the hottest part of the year and for a couples of hours every day, middle of the day, they sit and they meditate in the sun surrounded by burning cow dung fires. So when I saw Jagganath Das in January I asked him about this practice and he said well that's really my main period for when I do yoga cos it's a bit cold now and really you want to get the heat going, get yourself really hot and then your body becomes all supple and then it all works. (laughs)
There are interesting parallels there with the concepts of Bikram yoga.

Priya Thomas: Getting back to this idea then that asana - I think in the paper you presented at the American Academy of Religion last year you suggested that some of the militant practices associated with the subcontinent be examined more thoroughly before we are able to make a claim that sequential asanas don't predate the modern period.

Jim Mallinson: Yeah, god I can't remember what I said in that. (laughs)

Priya Thomas: Oh it's ok I've got it right here, you said: "in order to be sure however, that there are not Indian precedents for the sequences of postures I suggest that traditional wrestling exercises and training regimes of militant ascetics need to be examined more thoroughly"

Jim Mallinson: Yeah. Exactly.... you've got to clear out all the other possibilities. And that might well be possible. There's a guy called Joe Alter who has studied a lot with the wrestlers but I don't think he's...they do these exercises with dands which I think Mark looked into a bit...But I suppose he didn't find any evidence there.

Mallakhamba: Indian wrestling

Priya Thomas: No, not from what I’ve read. I have read Joseph Alter's work on wrestling as well…. But from your comment I take it that there are a few dark areas regarding asana worth revisiting…

Jim Mallinson: Yeah and in some of these akharas there are not just the wrestlers that Joe Alter studied but also ascetic traditions that are still doing exercises and I don't think that world has been studied at all, to be honest.

Priya Thomas: Ok

Jim Mallinson: It's slightly distinct from the guys I hang out with but it would be quite easy for me to find out actually. I keep meaning to make a list of questions to ask at the next Kumbh Mela but I will write that one down actually.

Priya Thomas: Yeah yeah sure.

Jim Mallinson: I've got some Naga friends; there's a split between the regular kind of ascetics who do yoga and tapas and the ones who are designated fighters. And they do do some different training, some different stuff. It would be worth asking them that. But I would be surprised to be honest, even though I did say that, but you've got to dismiss all possibilities. You know I think Mark covered things pretty well in his book.

Priya Thomas: Right of course.You're also collaborating with Mark Singleton as an advisor for an exhibit next year at the Smithsonian called Yoga the Art of Transformation...

Jim Mallinson: Ah yes, that's very exciting.

Priya Thomas: Yes it is.

Jim Mallinson: Yeah that's been really good fun. And Deborah, Deborah Diamond she's curating it, she's a good friend of mine, she's great. And what I'm writing about for the catalog has really informed my recent work actually; I'm going to a conference in Portugal next week where I'm giving a paper in which I use Mughal painting in particular to trace and really inform our understanding of the history of these yogi sects….which is what I'm writing about for the catalog. Also, I'm writing a shorter piece on the history of asana up to about 1650. So I think then Mark is then doing subsequent to that. But yeah Deborah just said that they got two more venues for it over the next three years and they reckon at least 800,000 people are going to come and see it.

Priya Thomas: Yeah it's quite exciting actually. Let's see here, to move on…oh yes...you also mentioned on your CV that you're a juggler.

Jim Mallinson: (laughing) Oh god, it's that awful CV again!

Priya Thomas: It's awesome, it's a great CV. I've never seen one like it!

Jim Mallinson: (laughing) Ha I think that's what the person at Oxford said as well... Yeah again I think the juggling tied in to when I got into doing asanas and stuff. And it's a bit like paragliding in that it's about brain and body at the same time.

Priya Thomas: But what activity with the body isn't though? But I think I see what you're saying. So you appreciate the cerebral quality of the juggling.

Jim Mallinson: It's fascinating what it does with your brain and what it really teaches you about your brain. Although I had about five years when I was really obsessed with it...actually before I went to paragliding (laughs) Before paragliding took over! (laughs)

Priya Thomas: Oh ok. So would you consider yourself as good at juggling as you are at paragliding? I believe you won the British Open in 2006, you were the captain of winning South in the inaugural North South Cup earlier this year...

Jim Mallinson: No not anymore no...I'm still, I'm still....well it's a bit like riding a bike.

Priya Thomas: What’s good? Are we talking more than three balls at a time, four balls? Just to quantify (laughing)

Jim Mallinson: Oh yeah I can do seven balls.

Jim Mallinson flying over the UK

Priya Thomas: Ok awesome. (laughing)

Jim Mallinson: (laughing) No one can really relax when doing seven but I can do six and five and get seven round a few times and five clubs and stuff like that.

Priya Thomas: Ok! Well that's interesting. Well on the CV it also says that you are by inheritance a baronet.

Jim Mallinson: Ah yeah. yeah yeah.

Priya Thomas: Do you want to tell me a little bit about the family? Is that of interest?

Jim Mallinson: Well my father's side of the family...the original baronet, it wasn't that long ago...I'm the fifth I think...and he, the family made a lot of money through timber.

Priya Thomas: Oh ok.

Jim Mallinson: ...international timber. And then whoever he was the first one William, because we've all been called William, (see I'm known as William James) anyway he was extremely generous and gave away loads of money, most of his money and funded libraries and schools and hospitals and stuff like that. So he was given this title in reward.

Priya Thomas: I see...

Jim Mallinson: And yeah my grandfather was a very eminent psychiatrist; he was the Queen's psychiatrist, the royal psychiatrist, their family psychiatrist. He's probably the most interesting figure in my immediate family. But yeah I've kind of moved away from where we were originally from; we've all moved about. And it's quite a small family so it doesn't loom that large in my life and it seems slightly absurd, but occasionally I play with it. (laughs)

Priya Thomas: Yeah. That's curious. (laughs)

Jim Mallinson: It got used in some of my books and...well I will never put it forward...if you see what I mean. But people sometimes do put it forward and care about it.

Priya Thomas: Well you know it's funny because after I read that you were a baron I wasn't sure whether I should put it forward...

Jim Mallinson: Yeah, ultimately I think it's slightly absurd the whole thing.

Priya Thomas: But then it's interesting.

Haridwar Kumbh Mela, 1850s

Jim Mallinson: It is interesting. Yeah. Funnily enough in this film I'm doing with Dominic at the Kumbh Mela, I rang up my guru to say - well cos you know we're all going to be staying in the camp - and he said, well I'll put up a tent for you. And there was only going to be three or four of us so we could all stay right there in the middle of the camp. And I said now look in return for it we want to pay our way and how much will it cost to put on a big feast cos that's what goes on at the Kumbh Mela. And they throw these feasts to move people's elevation to a higher rank or just to kind of spread wealth around their order or their tradition. And I said how much would it cost to throw a feast and he said well "how long is a piece of string?" "But the biggest one you could do it would cost you a couple of lakh or something" And then he said, "and for that we could make you a mahant". i.e. make me an abbott or whatever of the order. (laughs) And I laughed and said don't be ridiculous. But then I told the guys making the film and they said, "No, no Jim we're going to make you a mahant." (laughs) Which I feel very silly about.

Priya Thomas: (laughing)

Jim Mallinson: I'm still not sure I'll be able to go through with it. You know that's something I want to play on in the film we're going to do, a lot of these guys who do hold these senior positions, several of them have pretty checkered pasts.

Priya Thomas: Right.

Jim Mallinson: There are a bunch of dodgy rumours about them. You know, just cos you've got a name or a position or something doesn't necessarily mean you're anything special.
~

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I f you’ve ever complained that you don’t understand the textual basis of your postural practice, all the while making do with the tidbits you’ve heard from other yogis between classes, you might consider an alternate route to developing your yoga knowledge: become a patron to the work of yoga scholars. For while at one time yoga scholars might have remained sequestered within the walls of academia, Jim Mallinson divulges that scholars are increasingly reaching out to a non-scholarly readership changing the reach of the exacting philologist who labours in relative isolation hunched ever over crumbling manuscripts. And so yoga does for Jim Mallinson what it likely does for the likes of the rest of us: it allows us to accumulate energy, to generate a heat that can be unwavering, single-minded and still, and yet appears anything but stationary. Perhaps, herein lies the usefulness of the yogi’s wanderlust.

• Dr. Mark Singleton and Dr. Jim Mallinson’s Roots of Yoga Project seeks to reach its goal by August 10, 2012. Pleaser read more about the project at: The Roots of Yoga: A Sourcebook from the Indian Traditions

• Contribute generously to the project here

• To learn more about Dr. Jim Mallinson’s research, please visit: khecari.com

•  To participate in a sky safari, or just learn more about Jim Mallinson’s paragliding adventures please visit Himalayan Sky Safaris and for kicks here's another article on Jim's Paragliding adventures from The Gazette and Herald which I take it is located somewhere in the UK.