Joel Kramer emerges from the bedroom,
where he's been working on his asanas, slips easily
into Lotus position, and settles down for a long
talk about one of his favorite subjects. Kramer
is physically small and compact, with a solid though
not overly muscular body; his abundant energy spills
out in incessant hand gestures and in a forehead
that wrinkles deeply with each thought. Clearly,
he loves talking about yoga, loves doing yoga, and
he approaches the topic with all the reverence and
humor that such an intense interest inevitably inspires.
Joel, in the past 15 years or so,
you've carved out a name for yourself as something
of a maverick in the Western yoga community. You
are almost completely self-taught, you don'tseem
to follow anybody's rules but those of your own
instincts, and your theories, in some cases, debunk
some of the classical teachings of yoga. What's
yoga all about for you?
From my perspective, yoga is a transformative
process, a continual renewal of the possibilities
we have as human beings. And my movement in yoga
has been to translate a lot of what might be called
the wisdom of the ages into modern, meaningful terms
that can be appropriate for our lives and our culture.
That's exactly what makes your
approach so suitable for Western students, I think.
Your attention to the role of mind in yoga practice
-what you call Jnana Yoga is particularly attractive
to those of us interested in the body-mind synthesis.
How did you come across the principles of Jnana
Yoga and begin to apply them to your life?
In the 1960s I was concerned with
some of those excruciating dilemmas that young people
face, questions like, "Why am I here?"
"What's living about, anyway?" and "What
in the world should I be doing!" First I looked
for answers along a traditional, academic route,
working for a doctorate in philosophy and later
switching to the study of psychology. Eventually,
though, all that became like a game of tic-tac-toe,
where you know the game so well you never lose!
But I still wasn't getting the answers I wanted.
So I dropped out of graduate school in 1965 and
began to investigate the influx of Eastern philosophy
just beginning at that time. I was particularly
interested in the differences between Eastern and
Western approaches to the structure of thought.
One day a friend played me a tape
of a lecture by Krishnamurti. At the end of the
half-hour, I realized I hadn't heard a word of it!
When I listened to it again, I understood that I
had tuned it out because what Krishnamurti was saying
undermined many of the things I held dear. He was
talking about how deeply conditioned the human mind
is. This was my first introduction to what, in the
broadest sense, might be called yoga, the yoga of
the mind. I was totally fascinated by the methodology
of his approach to the inner search an inward turning
of the mind onto itself. I'd never seen anything
like this in all my formal training.
As I explored further and realized
what a highly conditioned mind I had, I also became
aware of what a highly conditioned body I had how
stiff and tight it was. So around 1967 I began to
do physical yoga. At that time not too much information
was available about Hatha Yoga, and the art, at
least in this country, was rather primitive. I began
to pick people's brains who knew something about
it, and I lived for a while with a man who had studied
in India. Although his classes didn't particularly
interest me, I was attracted by the way he moved
as an animal, a kind of elegance, an élan. So I
decided to look into this physical yoga on my own
and I've never stopped! It just clicked for me quite
naturally. Not that I was particularly flexible
I could hardly touch my knees at first, let alone
my toes, and I couldn't do any of the postures.
But I began to see that I was playing with energy,
and I developed an internal, nonintellectual understanding
of the meaning and differentiation of energy. The
physical yoga began to move energy in a way that
made it easier for me to become more attentive to
my internal processes.
Which in turn enriched your study of Jnana Yoga.
Yes. I began to see how the mind structures
and conditions. How it builds habits, and how those
habits actually filter our perception of the world.
I began to observe how I dodge things with my mind,
how I separate myself from others out of fear or
out of a need to feel better than they. I didn't
find all this particularly comfortable, but I did
find interesting!
Maybe you'd better clarify what you
mean by Jnana Yoga.
Jnana Yoga is a quality of awareness
in which the mind turns in upon itself and begins
to observe its own conditioning process. You're
not saying,''Oh, I shouldn't be doing this,"
you're not necessarily trying to control it or make
it go away, you're just becoming interested in the
nature of mental conditioning.
Much of the structure of our conditioning
reveals itself only in our relationships. Let's
say, for example, that you and I have a relationship.
If you hurt my feelings, I'll start to see you through
the filter or memory of that hurt. There are lots
of things I could do with that: I could forgive
you, I could avoid you, I could ignore you, or I
could eke out a little vengeance against you not
necessarily even consciously by a sharp word or
a subtle put-down, or by telling my friends what
a drag you are. And I would probably enjoy this
vengeance, even though I don't acknowledge that
I'm a vengeful person. But if I begin to look closely
at the nature of this relationship, I can observe
that when you hurt me, I automatically want to hurt
back. If I can just observe this automatic, conditioned
response without judging it, I can see my conditioning.
And that seeing frees me from having to react to
you in an automatic way. In order to do that, though,
I have to be willing to look.
This sounds very much like Buddhist
Vipassana meditation watching the arising of thoughts
and feelings without evaluating or trying to control
them.
Many traditions touch on this -Vipassana,
certain Hindu techniques, Taoist traditions. They're
all describing a quality of awareness that does
nothing but observe. You observe the movement of
thought within yourself; you don't try to silence
it or make it go away. You're trying to catch it
in the moment of its appearance. Although it sounds
simple, this is probably one of the most difficult
things to do, because it's very hard to do nothing
and just take a look at what's happening. But this,
I feel, is how we move toward real understanding.
Growth almost always involves a shattering of self-images,
a major shift in one's habitual life patterns.
Let's talk a little about your
theory of how the mind influences the body in asana.
I have found that the essence of yoga
is not physical flexibility, but the quality of
mind you bring to your practice. For example, the
mind is very much attached to making progress, to
getting better. But after you've made some initial
progress in yoga, you come to a point where the
body has to stop and assimilate it. You hit a plateau.
Suddenly, you have to put in the same amount of
energy just to maintain a certain level of proficiency.
Of course, at this point the mind starts losing
interest, and you back off, do yoga less or even
stop doing it altogether ... until your body begins
to complain and you feel motivated to put more energy
into it again.
In other words, you continue on
the same old treadmill.
Yes. And it's the attachment to progress
that causes this cycle. I'm trying to teach people
that part of the game of yoga is figuring out ways
of keeping yourself turned on so that the practice
stays new and fresh. For example, someone can be
in a finished asana that is aesthetically quite
beautiful, yet they may not be doing yoga at all.
Whereas another person may be far from the completed
pose but is much more in touch with their body and
what's happening there. As I've said, I feel that
yoga is a process. In some ways, the accomplishments
are like the froth on a wave. They have their own
beauty, but they're relatively insubstantial.
So the mind does have a direct
effect on the way we do postures.
Definitely. In fact, the real limits
in yoga are not physical (Of course, the body has
its limits, but that's not the issue.) The real
blocks are the limitations in the mind. We've already
seen how the mind can limit our movement in relationships;
it has the same effect in asana. For instance, think
about the reasons you come out of a posture when
you do. Maybe you're bored, you feel you've done
your duty, you've held it as long as some book says
you should, or whatever. If you look closely, you'll
find that the first thing that tires in a pose is
usually the mind. The quality of attention weakens
first. You begin to treat the body casually, and
then the body becomes tired. To build endurance
in yoga, you must build the capacity to be in the
body and attentive to it for longer periods of time.
Let me give you another example of
the role mind can play in asana. As I do yoga in
the morning, I may watch my mind say to itself,
"I want to be at least as flexible as I was
yesterday. Hopefully more so, but certainly no less."
The mind approaches an asana with a set of expectations
with a remembered level of flexibility that it wants
to match, feeling good if it reaches it, better
if it surpasses it, or a little turned off if it
doesn't quite meet it. The mind can't help doing
that, because the very nature of thought is comparative.
But if that becomes the total way you approach your
practice, you run the risk of ignoring the feedback
of the body while unconsciously pushing toward an
image. And that image limits you and causes you
to tighten.
There seems to be a paradox here.
We talk about yielding to the body's native intelligence,
but we've also seen that much of what happens in
the postures is controlled by the mind.
It's not really a paradox. At times
the mind controls the body; at other times the body
takes over. But at still other times there is total
movement, with the body and mind working together.
This point, which involves a fusing of body and
mind through the breath, has a special energy, a
special quality to it.
And you can reach this point by
focusing on the breath?
Yes, because the breath is one of
the systems that both functions automatically and
can be controlled. You've heard teachers say, "Breathe
into your shoulder,'' and you think, "How in
the world does one do that?" It's not that
you're breathing into your shoulder - you're breathing
into your lungs, obviously - but through the energy
of the breath and the focus of the mind, you can
channel and maneuver energy into different parts
of the body. In some ways, the breath is like a
miniature universe,involved in a process of expansion
and contraction, stretching and relaxation. Once
you learn how to use the breath in the body, you
can relax into a posture, acclimatize, adjust -
and come out of the asana fresh and relaxed.
One of the techniques you're well
known for is "stretching in the nerves."
What does that mean? Can you give us an example?
Ordinarily, when we're stretching,
we're reaching for an elongation in the musculature.
But there's another kind of stretching, neural stretching,
that doesn't require great extension or flexibility.
It involves using the muscles to move through the
nervous system, actually channeling energy in a
certain direction through the body.
For example try this: Extend one arm
parallel to the floor. Focus your attention initially
into the upper part of the chest and into the shoulder
and then begin to move it slowly out along the arm.
Sort of squeezing the the bicep and the back tricep
and locking the elbow, p-u-s-h energy down along
the top of the arm and into the elbow. Keep breathing.
Now move the energy into the forearm, squeezing
the muscles of the forearm, using the wrist as a
focus, continuing that movement outward and down
the arm. Now move the energy from the wrist into
the fingers of the hand, s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g outward.
What we're looking for is almost a feeling of vibration
movingdown the arm, like feeling the whole arm at
once Now relax. The actual movement of the arm in
this extension was no more than an inch or an inch
and a half, but it took real attention to feel that
line going. This is what I call stretching into
the nerves when you're using the muscles to pul1
the energy of the nerves downward and outward.
This technique doesn't improve flexibility
per se, but it does begin to give the body the assimilative
capacity to integrate flexibility through increased
neural strength. Working with lines of energy also
makes it increasingly difficult to injure oneself,
because injuries are usually the result of reaching
for flexibilities that the body is not ready for.
Another Kramer specialty is “playing
the edge.” What does that involve?
One aspect of yoga is learning how
to play on the edges of one's limits. It's a matter
of learning to distinguish between intensity and
pain. The maximum extension of the muscle is right
before pain, on the edge of pain. I call this the
final edge. Of course, there are also other subtler
edges. For example, a more immediate edge is where
the body meets its first resistance. Let's say I'm
stretching in Forward Bend, and I don’t feel
much, until I suddenly feel a little tug in the
small of my back. That little catch is an edge.
I can bypass it immediately, or I can stop there
and breathe until it goes away, and then move on
to the next edge. The process of moving through
postures is playing on the subtle feedback of the
body, waiting for the edges to open.
As you might guess, an edge can move.
It moves from day to day and from breath to breath.
And it doesn't always move forward. Sometimes it
moves back, which is psychologically hard because
the mind becomes attached to flexibility and accomplishment.
But it's important to listen to your body and be
able to advance or move back with the edge. You're
involved in a kind of flirtation, a dance, with
the edge.
I gather,
then, that you don't advocate pushing through pain
in a posture?
From my point of view, one should
never be in pain in Hatha Yoga. Pain is feedback
from the body, and it also shifts your attention
away from what you're doing. Have you ever noticed
that when you experience pain in an asana, your
attention is greatly weakened. But people tend to
push as far as they can, hold it as long as they
can stand the pain, and then come out. If, instead,
you use the posture to open the body, rather than
the body to achieve the posture, you will move more
slowly - but you will be involved in the real process
of yoga.
If your yoga is painful, it will become
a chore, instead of the real joy it should be, and
you'll figure out all sorts of reasons to avoid
it.
How do you deal with the pain of
injuries?
Injuries in yoga generally come from
one of two sources: greed or inattention, and sometimes
a combination of both. The problem with injuries
is that we tend to look at them as failures, not
as opportunities to learn. An injury is no tragedy,
it simply means that your edge moves way back. Just
follow your edge and listen to the feedback of pain.
It teaches you patience! Pain, then, is one way
our yoga is "sabotaged."
What are some of our other resistances
to doing Hatha Yoga?
There is the basic resistance to getting
down on the rug in the morning. And there is also
the resistance to letting go of certain aspects
of one's life that one is attached to. I mentioned
that growth involves the shattering of images. This
can he frightening, because the shattering of images
releases an energy that threatens to move you out
of control. All of a sudden, you don't quite know
who you are, or what you're going to do. By its
very nature, yoga begins to build the energy that
breaks through inner blocks. It's an amusing paradox,
because on one level yoga is a control freak's dream.
You can achieve control over the body, and even,
to some extent, over thought and emotion. But the
more you control yourself on that level, the more
you build energy that pushes you out of control
on another level. And most of us resist going out
of control.
Fundamentally, yoga involves an intricate
dance between control and surrender. At every moment
in an asana we have a choice: "Should I push,
or should I relax? Should I control, or should I
let go?" Most of us go the control route (we're
what I call "pushers") because it gives
us the sense that we're doing something, going into
the musculature and moving the energy there. It's
much harder to learn to let go, to allow the body's
wisdom to move us (to be what I call "sensualists").
It's in the balancing of control and surrender,
of the ability to move the body and the ability
to let go, that yoga really becomes meaningful.
The interviewer, Jeanne Malmgren
Cameron, is a Florida yoga teacher and freelance
writer specializing in health and fitness
issues. - Yoga Journal
July/August 1986
