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HR&S:
What influenced you to begin learning yoga?
GW: Back in the sixties, the interest in yoga was
just starting, and there weren't many yoga classes. When
I was about 19 or 20, in the middle of the turbulent sixties,
I had an inner urge. I had to find out what yoga was.
HR&S: How
did people look at yoga then? If I remember correctly, it
was treated like something strange, or an extension of the
beatnik movement from the fifties.
GW: Yes, even now it still
has remnants of those connotations, but back then they'd
make jokes. I was on the Joe Pine Show—I'm
dating myself here—he's a guy who'd attack people in
a funny way, and he just went wild with it. People didn't
think yoga was about exercise, but about swamis, fakirs,
and snake charmers. They would make jokes about pretzel
positions. They didn't know what it was all about, and it
took a lot of work and explanation to get people to understand
the practice.
HR&S: What kind of yoga
was most prevalent?
GW: It was mostly philosophical:
meditation, chanting, devotion. The first physical yoga
practices that came over were soft, always emphasizing how
gentle the postures were, and most of the classes were done
with incense burning and candlelight. Just being very mellow.
I dove into it quickly, it just seemed natural. I was studying
with a few swamis and yogis from India. I
practiced twice a day and I lived in an ashram for some
months. Then my brother wanted to have a center in
L.A., so I opened The Center for Yoga with the help of an
advanced teacher. But the advanced teacher didn't like L.A.
and soon left, so there I was running a yoga center after
studying for less than a year. I had to rise to the occasion
and teach, read every book I could, and talk to every yogi
I could meet.
HR&S: Did you have one
particular swami or advanced yogi who you considered to
be your mentor?
GW: I started out in the Sivananda
lineage and studied with many different yogis because there
are so many disciples of Sivananda. One of them, not very
well known in thiscountry, is Swami Venkates. I'm interested
in what is true and what works and what has value. If I
practiced or tried something for a while and it didn't have
value, I let it go, no matter what the "authorities"
said about it. I was a free thinker.
HR&S: Do you think yoga
should be integrated with whatever else you're doing, or
should yoga be the one thing you do?
GW: Yoga can complement and
balance anything you're doing, including sports or other
practices. Tai chi is one of the closest relatives to yoga
and I think it's a great system. But of all the systems
we have, yoga has the broadest spectrum of intricate
breathing practices and hundreds and hundreds of postures
that can be adjusted to any body in any state of health
or illness, injury or age. It is infinitely adjustable.
Yoga is the most holistic and completely balanced system
on the planet. It works on balancing the body, the structure,
the glands, the breath, the digestion, and the bio-psycho-physical
energy systems. Properly practiced, it brings a person to
their highest possibility.
HR&S:
If someone comes to you in a state of bad health—I'm
in the nine-to-five lifestyle, I get home and watch TV,
my back is killing me, I'm overweight—how do you answer
their concerns?
GW:
The old saying is to start from where you are.
Just start practicing and breathing, working with the state
of your mind and body. Find the most inspiring, turned-on
teacher you can and take classes. Let the river start flowing
and it will take you with it.
HR&S: What can someone
new to yoga practice look forward to achieving?
GW: We all approach yoga with
questions about time: How long will it take and where will
it get me? But in a certain way yoga is about the ending
of time. There are goals, but there are also no goals. You
want to attain certain postures, muscle tone, and relief
from stress; those are tangible, reachable goals. But it's
also about constantly adjusting, balancing, and tuning your
body to each moment. Learning how to do that is an ongoing
process rather than a goal.
HR&S: You can get into
yoga from either the spiritual approach or the total physical
exercise. What's the most common approach right now?
GW: I think on the deepest
levels there is no separation between the spiritual and
physical. The supreme intelligence works on the physical
and the unseen level. There is an enormous, trendy, and
solely physical interest in yoga right now, but we like
to believe that yoga is so holistic the physical practice
will bring people to other levels of spirituality. At the
same time, many people are attracted to yoga because of
its depth and levels.
HR&S: How does yoga cultivate
the spiritual from the physical?
GW: Yoga teaches you an enormous
amount about your body and how to control and balance and
work with all the different systems. But you also learn
about the mystery, because as much as you know, there's
an equal or greater part of being that is mysterious and
unknowable, the sacred from which comes the simple essence
of spirituality: self-knowledge, self-understanding, and
looking at the meaning of living and dying on the earth.
HR&S:
What other changes have you seen in yoga practices
over the last thirty years?
GW:
The things that are called new practices now
are not necessarily that new. Although they are new to this
country, many are ancient practices. Yoga has been handed
down and expanded through the centuries, and in more recent
times I've seen more scientifice under- standing integrated
into yoga. For instance, things like nutrition may have
been there, but they have much more precision now. There
is a lot of new understanding about body dynamics, body
kinesiology, and joint mobility which have expanded our
ability to use yoga. Yoga is changing by coming to the West.
Some people are trying to commercialize it, and others are
trying to strip away any mental or metaphysical side to
it. But though you see these kinds of attempts to change
it, the core remains the same.
HR&S: In your years of
teaching, have you developed any practices that you have
labeled personally?
GW:
Yes, several. In 1977 I got the idea to do double
yoga. I created over 150 postures that two people can practice
together, and published the book Double Yoga
in 1979.
HR&S: What are the
benefits of doing double yoga?
GW: You can support and assist
each other in poses you couldn't do alone, or that you can
do better than you can alone. It gives two friends or a
couple something to do together. We have a lot of fun with
it, but it's a very small part of what we practice and teach
in our workshops, because I think the individual practice
is much more important.
HR&S: What about the
Flow Series?
GW: The Flow Series
came out of a number of years of practicing Iyengar, Ashtanga
and other systems. I originally designed the Flow Series
for myself. I wanted a well-balanced practice to do every
day that included the major yoga postures. Although it was
influenced by the Ashtanga-Vinyasa style, which is sequential
yoga synchronizing breath and movement, I developed a very
complete, well-balanced practice made up of traditional
ancient postures which can be amped-up to advanced levels
or toned down to beginning levels. We recommend that people,
like the seasons, change their practice — sometimes
you do fiery yoga for a few days, then you do a softer practice.
Even as an advanced student, you don't want to be cranking
it to the max every day. They don't do that with racehorses
or any athlete. You want to flow up and down.
HR&S:
It seems that your business is alive because
of your passions, not your college degree.
GW:
If there wasn't passion, I don't think I could
do it. I believe yoga is here to stay; it has taken root,
and will always be a growing part of this culture. It's
hard to say what direction it will take in the future.
Yoga is like a plant that you put in a new environment,
it slowly grows and transforms into something in harmony
with its new home.
-- HR&S
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