J. Brown hosts one of the most influential Yoga podcasts out there, and Leslie has been a guest on his show three times. Now, Leslie turns the table on J. and interviews him about their shared history and perspectives on individualized yoga teaching.

Speaker A: Welcome to Clinical Corner.

Speaker B: I'm your host, Leslie Kaminoff, and I've been a yoga educator since 79, and most of that time, I've had the privilege of learning from working with individuals. In each episode of this podcast, I'll chat with other clinicians about the history techniques, and stories related to the healing work they do with their clients. The premium version of this episode, in which my guest and I review and analyze a video recording of them working with a client in a private session, is available by subscription at breathingproject.com. Now let's get to our episode.

Speaker A: We have our recording in progress. We've been chatting just a little bit. Good to see you, J. And I was just tickled to see you wearing the Breathing Project tshirt with the logo on it. That's fantastic.

Speaker C: Well, I mentioned to you before, we just started recording. I'll mention again for anybody who listens, that I'm a Gen Xer and I have a drawer full of prized T shirts that only get worn on special occasions. So this very rare limited edition Breathing Project shirt had no better occasion than this to be pulled out.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, it just warms the cockle of my heart to see the logo there on your chest, and I think I only have one cockle left at this point. This was the one year anniversary of my ablation procedure when I had my heart fixed last year. So it's been on my mind, but hey, I got normal EKG all year long, so that's a good thing. And we are here to talk about some clinical stuff. And you are one of the first people I thought of inviting on, not only because I've been on your podcast three times now, I think, but the way that I know your work has evolved over the years is almost a case study in not just your practice of working with other people, but in your approach to your own yoga, in your own body. A case study in the need to modify and adapt and to really have that individual approach to what you're doing that is so characterized by Desiccatchar's teachings. And we're both, of course, deeply influenced by Descachar. The last interview I did, it'll be posting soon, is with Larry Payne. And he and I go back even further than you and Iogog. Yeah, he's like the OG. I introduced him as one of my oldest yoga friends and I meant it in both senses. He's old and he's an old yoga friend. So, as you know, the first half of this is just a conversation about a little bit of your history and some of our shared history, perhaps. And then you sent a lovely video that we can review in the second part, which listeners will now know is available on the premium version of the podcast, which you can get into for very cheap at Breathing project.com. And I have to tell you, I have been inspired over the years to see all the different ways that you have created a viable online presence for yourself. Between the podcast and the streamed classes and the teachers classes and everything else that you and Josh have been able to put together, it's been quite impressive.

Speaker C: Well, I mean, we have to give credit where credit is due because not only have you seen some of that, but you've seen all of it because it began on the esutraol listserve.

Speaker A: Well, that's the shared history. Yeah, it goes way back.

Speaker A: Yeah, which was not designed to run large mailing lists from it was really a pain in the ***.

Speaker C: Did they get special permission or something? If I recall?

Speaker A: Yeah, there was no ethics. I was just scraping emails from everything. People would send me an email where they unintentionally exposed all the recipients, like, oh, more emails. I just dump it into my list. But I actually started that list very simply just by seeing who on AOL had listed yoga as an interest. It was that simple. And I just scraped all those emails as much as I could. And it got started that way, along with a few people that I knew. But not everyone had email addresses back then. It was really a novelty.

Speaker C: Well, I got emails back from people and I think I ended up with a list of about 60 of people who kind of had responded to that.

Speaker A: The colonel of your mailing list really was the responses you got from the piece you wrote on Esutra.

Speaker C: Exactly. That's why I mean, so now, whatever it is 20 years later I don't even know how many years later it is, it's a long time, maybe 25 years later or something. And that's whatever it is I'm doing now, it all started with that one post.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's pretty much exactly 25 years later, because that would have been around 97. And my motivation, of course, what was happening then was I had just dropped out of the ad hoc committee that was discussing the certification standards, which eventually turned into the two and the 500 hours stuff. And you and I have been involved in those discussions almost from the beginning, as well as a concerned practitioner. And I just I basically got tired of writing the same email to everyone who asked why I wasn't involved in this anymore. I said it would be much more efficient. I just had a list and posted a statement about it. And that was sort of the initial impetus for me creating a list that we could have discussions on. Yeah, I remember when I first had email, like, signing up for every mailing list I could think of because I just wanted to get email.

Speaker C: That's right. And then everybody had newsletters and then there was blogs. Then it turned into blogs at some point. But I will say that that post also it's funny, it's interesting to me that you I was thinking earlier today about coming to do this with you, and I was thinking about that you called it Clinicians Corner.

Speaker A: Clinical Corner. Yeah.

Speaker C: Clinicians Corner. Clinical Corner. And that you chose the word clinical because I generally don't think of myself as working in a clinical way. I know what you meant because I saw your episode with Gary where you talked about the moment where you knew that you were clinician and way you described it there, that's about when you're just working with real people in real situations rather than, like, being in a laboratory or something. I think that's what you mean by that.

Speaker A: Well, it was when I closed the door and closed me in a room with another human. I was expected to do something to help them, basically. That was a holy **** moment. It was like, Wait a minute, how do you talk? How do you relate to this person? I didn't have training for that. I had training to do the thing that I was expected to do with the person, which at that point was like electro therapy. I was a biomedical technician. I wasn't teaching yoga or anything. But still, the idea of being enclosed in a space for half hour, an hour, whatever it was, and this person is here with me to get help, that was like, how do I be that person? Right?

Speaker A: It preceded the Citar conference.

Speaker C: That's right. And you were there because, like you said, we both had problems with yoga lines. I remember confronting whatever head of the yoga line those meetings. I was very rude to him. I was young and punky. But I remember in that meeting, because I was trying to figure out whether what I did was yoga therapy or not, I stood up and I asked, does yoga therapy mean a clinical application? And Gary's eyes lit up. He was like, yes, that's the question. And he was saying, yes, it was. But when I said that, I wasn't thinking of the clinical that you just said. I was thinking of, like the way when we go to my daughter's psychiatrist and he just asks questions and then gets information and then puts it in to the database. And like, they were talking about in those meetings of like, someone comes in and they have scoliosis and they get a number, and then there's going to be a set of yoga practices that go with that, you know, that instead of surgeries and drugs, we're gonna use breathing and moving exercises. And I was like, no, no, no, I'm not interested in that. Because there is another meeting which is kind of cold and clinical can mean like, what is it? I wrote it down. And unemotional, right?

Speaker A: Meetings. It can be that whole reductionistic way of looking at things, which I've always fought against in the field of yoga or yoga therapy or whatever we're calling it. It's not just, oh, we're doing physical therapy, but we're substituting yoga exercises for PT exercises. It's an entirely different mindset. And for me, a clinician is someone that has skills in working with another human to help them. And I like it better than therapist for a variety of reasons.

Speaker C: Well, you wrote after that meeting, you wrote, I am not a yoga therapist. I wrote, yoga therapy is not yoga. We both wrote something after those meetings that was wanting to make some distinctions for some reason, or another or say.

Speaker A: That some of these distinctions don't make sense, because your thing, which I resonated with also was for yoga therapists. Aren't we just talking about a very skilled yoga teacher? Right? And Gary, of course, has this very defensible argument about, well, no, this is a tradition that goes way, way back. It's a sister science. Ayurveda, there's a skill set, there are competencies, there's a knowledge base, and you can train in it and then call yourself a yoga therapist or yoga chikitza, the Sanskrit designation. And I always wanted to have room for that perspective at IYT that didn't exclude people that didn't necessarily have that view. And my thing was always, well, if that's the case, then Nama, the national oryurvedic Medical Association and that branch of Iuit should join forces and legislate or lobby or whatever. And you want to get it covered by insurance, you want to go down that road, you want to be licensed eventually, fine. Don't have that. Spillover into somebody that just has learned over the years to skillfully interact with another person using the tools of yoga as an extension of their life and commitment to the practice. Because. Like. Desiccachar. As much as he was steeped in the tradition from his father and trained gary. I think. Would resonate a little bit more with the dementicalizing of the field rather than saying. Oh. We want to be part of healthcare delivery and you I think we're always arguing that idea that I'm a yoga teacher who knows how to work with people individually. That doesn't make me a different thing.

Speaker C: Well, I also felt like, especially in those meetings, because they were establishing the new standard, what became the 800 hours yoga therapy standards. And I just felt like what a lot of it was about. And I've spoken to a few people on my show about this over the years, that it was about distinguishing certain approaches in yoga from the power vinyasa stuff and all these other things that were happening at the gym that people were calling yoga and they wanted to distinguishes other approaches, therapeutic approaches. So there was all these people in that room, but me who were doing that, who had therapeutic approaches, who weren't working in the same way that other people didn't hold that same idea, like you said. And my case that I made was I didn't try to sell them on maybe there should be like a 200 hours baseline standard, because I felt like what was going to happen is we're going to take yoga practice that's actually about yoga, that's not about working out or whatever other things we might use it for. And we're going to relegate that to like a pillar again or wear like a high art where only people who go to the university or have $20,000 to spend and they wear white coats. That's where you get the yoga. That doesn't hurt you. And I was saying we need that in all yoga. I said we need yoga therapy in all yoga classes, even at the gym. And I was advocating for, like, we got to bring this to the grassroots, not some high art or at least.

Speaker A: The perspective, rather than seeing it as a profession or a practice. One of the skill sets that you want to end up having, if you stay in this long enough and work with enough people, you eventually end up working with people individually. And I wanted to get to that part in your history because you talk about it a lot on the podcast where the heyday of like, it was cool and chic to have a private yoga teacher, but there's a big difference between the skill set of leading people through a group practice and then you have a single person in front of you. Right, but before we get to that, I just wanted to point out something before you said about separating from the fitness. The Yoga Alliance is trying to do that with the initial standards, but trying to separate a reasonably length training, teacher training from a weekend training. And that was literally yoga fit. That's what they were doing. Right. Might want to try and get Beth Shaw on the podcast at some point and ask her about the origin of Yoga Fit, because that was such a driving conversation that got us into that room. It's like, did you know they're training yoga teachers in a weekend? And it sounds crazy when you say it that way, but at the point at which she introduced that training, there was a real need in the market. There was the demand for yoga teachers far exceeded the supply. And all she did was she went to the gyms and said, hey, you got aerobics teachers. You got, you know, group fitness people who know how to lead people in activity. Give them to me for a weekend. I'll teach them how to teach a yoga class and they're already on there.

Speaker C: You can learn a sequence in a weekend, no problem.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. There's no new hires involved here. They're already on the books, and they'll be able to lead this new class that you can advertise at the end of this week. It was brilliant, actually, as just filling a need in the marketplace. But then once we had the Yoga Alliance standards, it was like, oh, well, that became a menu or recipe for people to have all kinds of different kinds of trainings, including fitness based trainings and more workout type stuff. And then the yoga therapy, as you said, has to say, well, we're not that either, but there's always going to be another group of people who think whatever standards have been established aren't enough. And that's the ironic thing. It's just how it goes. So let's get to that point in your life. You've been teaching group practice for a bit. It's during this golden age that you like to talk about on the podcast, jay Brown Yoga Talks podcast. If anyone is listening to this podcast who isn't aware of Jays, which I don't think is possible anyway, go check it out. So do you remember the first time you were confronted with just a single individual student and what that was like and how you handled the situation?

Speaker C: Well, I taught one to one before. I taught group classes because I had a friend of mine who, when I first got really into yoga, while I was going to classes at Jiva Mukti on Second Avenue where I met you. And I have to add, just as a quick aside, I did not realize that you shared a moment with Gary where he had corrected you on from down dog, up dog to down dog. And, you know, you did the same thing to me the first time I was ever in your class.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker C: Exactly the same, which was incredible to me. When I saw that happened to me. I was a lesbian. He did the same thing to me. So I was going to classes. I was really into yoga, and I was actually in a really bad place. And I had a friend who was helping me and talking to me and said, what do you want to do? And I gave her a list of things that you didn't want to do, and she said, no, that's not what I asked you. And I said, Right now, all I want to do is play my bass and go to yoga classes. And she said, I think you should do that every day. And she said, Teach me yoga. Will you teach me yoga? And I was like, absolutely. So she became, like, my first yoga student, and I would just take whatever I did in class that day and kind of, like, bring it to me in a lesson. But I really wasn't qualified to teach. I was just sharing practice. Let's say I was just practicing with her, like, kind of doing it, and she was doing it along with me. But then later on, as you know, I did ride the weight and teach a lot of group classes. But as I mentioned earlier on in this conversation, I wrote that piece because I had injuries and pain and stuff that came up. And some of the things that we were teaching back then, I was teaching those crazy amounts of classes a week. You know, like, we're teaching over 20 classes a week. We're running all over the city for anyone. I did it for years, but my body started to break down. And ultimately what happened was I took this big trip to India, and I met this teacher who kind of was asking you this question, how do you feel? Which my other teachers had not asked me before. And ultimately, when I got back, I couldn't go back to those other classes anymore. And that's when I really got into the Desicca Char teachings. That's when I met Mark. That's when I, like I started having a self practice, basically. I stopped going to yoga classes and only practicing by myself at home. And I figured out I learned some of the primary principles. I think that Desa, Qatar is sort of known for, which is what yoga therapy is kind of built on in a lot of ways.

Speaker A: Where in this timeline was the work that you were doing with Alison West?

Speaker C: Well, before I went to India, I practiced with Alison for after jiva. I got kind of disenchanted when you left and Allison left because they decided everybody had to go to Kirtan, and it started to go in a more culty direction or whatever. I went with Allison because she was like to me, I thought of her as the smartest teacher I had at that point because she was so studied in different systems and she wasn't aligning herself with one in particular. She was doing a very kind of comparative analysis.

Speaker A: She was at the desicca charinas at Colgate.

Speaker C: She exposed me to all younger Ashtanga Desicca. I remember she had someone come to do a session with us. So I liked that. I liked that she had an art history background. So I think she was looking at things from this very wide view, and that was appealing to me. And I just thought she was smart. So I just studied with her quite diligently for a couple of years.

Speaker A: She was a scholar teaching basically. That was her mode as a scholar. You research this, you research that, and then you synthesize it somehow.

Speaker C: Yeah, I felt like she was one of the early and I know it's kind of cliche now, but like teacher of teachers types, she really positioned herself like that from the beginning because she was sort of hard edged. You remember the early days before she softened, and I think a lot of other teachers softened over the years, but those are earlier times. It was she was doing in her regular classes what is now considered yoga teacher training. And I remember when she did her 1st 200 hours training after they announced the 200 hours standards. I had already been studying with her for a couple of years, and I knew all of the material already. So all these people came in who hadn't met her before. And I was, like, the one who kind of knew how to do everything because I just been in class for two years, like, four days a week.

Speaker A: Now, you're already nursing some injuries you'd acquired in the Astanga and some of the Java Mukti practice. Right. At that point, I was, I think.

Speaker C: For a long time I didn't recognize my injuries as injuries because I was of that condition to view that pain and opening. So I had a really, I think, incorrect idea. I was holding about my body and it just got like you said I've heard you say, because I've taken your course, like, first your body whispers to you and then it tries to talk to you reasonably, and then it starts screaming at you. And I just think over time it got to the point where it started to scream at me and then it.

Speaker A: Leaves you flat on your back so you can't do anything but listen.

Speaker C: Exactly. That happened too. Definitely.

Speaker A: I've been there too, more than once. I'm not going to ask you the same question I asked Gary because it's a different context. But this word clinician, as you mentioned, has so many different shades of meaning, not all of which are positive. Right. But just watching you, this is a preview for people who maybe aren't going to see the second hour, who don't want to drop $15 on a month, which is a great deal, by the way. You have a little talk with this student of yours at the very beginning, and the method of dialogue and the redirecting her to her own experience is very interesting. And it reminded me of the times that I was paying exquisite attention to the way Desiccatchar would interact with people as well. And at first, all there would be would be talking and half the people in room were getting antsy, wondering when the yoga was going to start. And that was the most important yoga I saw happening, even before any practices were given. Right. And you have an interesting and this is a highly modified class that you're teaching in this video that we're going to look at. You're doing a chair assisted version of Salutations and various other exercises.

Speaker C: There's one other person they are doing without chair, too, which I really like.

Speaker A: Yeah, right. And you admitted in this dialogue that, hey, my body is not in the best shape right now, so I want to be using Jair. Right. So this is what we're doing. But underlying all that is a pretty standard class structure that you do use. And at what point did you decide, this is my jam, I'm not going to reinvent a new sequence every week? I found something that works, I'm going to stick with it. Was that a decision that you remember making or was it just a gradual sort of thing that eventually started happening?

Speaker C: It was a very conscious choice that I made at some point. I was known for creating sequences and I have very specific memory. I told this story before of coming up with a really cool sequence the night before and then going to teach the class in the morning. And there was like maybe five people there and three of them were nowhere near what I had planned for. Like, it just wasn't a class for them. But I didn't have a plan B. So basically, what did you do? I talked to the two people who could do it and then just was like, as encouraging as I could be to the three people who have a miserable class. And I remember coming away from that and feeling like that class wasn't about what they got. That class was about what I came up with the night before. And then after I got into desk at Char Teachings, and it was all one to one in personal practice. My whole goal behind what I was doing a breathing project. And then what I did when I opened up the Oscar was, I want to bring this into the group class context. So the choice to have a set program played into that for me because I had studied the stronger, and I thought, well, they got a set thing. And I also, in my own personal practice, needed a structure to go off of. To get myself to have a practice, I needed to know what poses I was going to do, like how many breaths in each one. And I kind of created a structure for myself that I didn't have to stick to, but it was a structure that held my personal practice. And that's what, at some point, when I decided I wanted to stop coming up with power yoga sequences and I wanted to try to actually do what Desiccat I thought Desiccatar was doing more, I decided I'm just going to have this kind of simple program. And at first, it wasn't that well received. Like, the center owner called me to the office. He was like, some students have told me, you're doing the same exact thing every time. Is that true? It was Lilya Mead, and I explained to her that I was really being inspired by Jessica Char and I was making this choice and why. And she came to the class, and she ultimately was very supportive and would come to my class because what would happen is people would learn it and they would know that I had kind of a thing and it was expected. And then it was very easy for me to go up to people individually, one to one, and offer all kinds of individual suggestions or choices that made sense for them. It was actually a tool for me to be able to individualize practice in a group class context because they weren't having to follow choreography all the time.

Speaker A: Right when your main attention is, what's the new thing I need to learn to do next? It can often go off of your own personal experience. You can only pay attention to so many things at once if you're there because it's something that's familiar that you've practiced before and the reason you're back is that you liked it the last time. I'm always reminding teachers about that who come to a weekend workshop because there's a lot of new concepts and mythbusting and stuff that happens in the workshops I teach. In fact, more often than not get this question is like, I'm not sure. What to do when I go back to teach this week. And I have to remind them, look, whoever shows up to your class is there. If they're coming back, they're there because they liked what you did last time. Don't screw that up. And Descuar would often say, 90% give them what they expect, then you can slip in 10% of what you think they need. And that's a similar thing to what I'm hearing for you. In a way, there's more variation available for each individual student if there's less variation in the actual predictable structure of the class situation. Is that a fair way to describe it true?

Speaker C: Yes, that is the idea. And then I would just simply add that I don't hold the structure in any kind of dogmatic way. Like, you're allowed to change it however you want. So it's meant not to be something that has to be stuck to, but just something that we can all go off to. It also had to do with that being able to us to do it together at the same time, because we both know, as you said earlier, like a one to one situation. And then someone doing it by themselves at home is very different than this thing that happened where everybody came to these group classes, you know, and so for me, again, these were like choices I made. And it also had to do with simplifying, simplifying practice. I've heard you talk about going and seeing Desiccatchar use the same simple forms again and again, and I felt the same. I was like, let me just create a simple program that we can utilize and then I can learn to teach really well. I kind of took that philosophy. I just want to teach this one thing really well, not try to teach everything and just kind of became my focus.

Speaker A: Yeah. And there are other systems that you can go anywhere in the world to a Shivananda Center and get the sequence more or less that you're expecting the same at Integral, you know, Astounda is sort of built on that whole concept, but there's this additional sort of baggage that comes with that. Sometimes it's like, this is what the guru came up with, and it's sacred somehow, and each thing is there for a reason, and you don't mess with the sequence. That was one of the things that got me out the door, Shivanand, is I was messing with the sequence, and also I refused a direct order from Slow Editioner that would get you out the door really fast. I saw you had Sukadev on the podcast.

Speaker C: Yes. He mentioned that he met you back in the day.

Speaker C: I think you made a good point about the structures, though, because I think that's right there's a difference between a set structure that has to be stuck to or a set structure that has added understanding that at some point you would abandon the structure as well. Because to me, I always saw the group classes as a way for someone to learn the things that they would need to have their own personal practice. And to me, that means they don't even necessarily have to go to yoga classes unless it's a pleasure for them to do so. But it had to do with them developing their own barometers, their own discernment. Jessica said, you don't check their poses, you check their discernment. And I was intrigued by all of those aspects of practice. So I made a class that I felt it looked enough like a vinyasa yoga class that people expected that they wouldn't be totally freaked out, but still we would just do inhale arms up, exhale arms down, like super simple forms. And I became known as the breath guy at the yoga center because I was emphasizing Jai so much. But again, that was sort of the transition. And then to your initial question about one to one, when I made that switch, at a certain point, I began to think about what I was doing when I was in a room with people because there was this time there was all these private students calling. Right?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: And so when I had the same experience that you talked about where you're in a room with someone and they're like, My neck hurts. Can you help it? What should I do? Like, the death teachings and the simple emphasis on breath and all those concepts were what I relied upon because it was based on this principle that it fits to you. I'm here to help you figure out how to do a practice that's going to serve you.

Speaker A: Yeah. And also the perspective of there's so much more that's working, that's not working here. And that's our starting point. Because otherwise and this is one of the somewhat negative connotations I think we can get with the word clinical is that it often gets us into this mindset of symptomology and focusing on what's gone wrong and having the answers that will help fix the thing that's gone wrong. When. In fact. What's most healing for people by the time they arrive to someone like you or to me for help is they probably already tried a bunch of stuff that is supposed to fix the symptoms or that focuses on what's gone wrong. And to whatever degree it hasn't completely helped them and they seek out something like yoga. We have that unique opportunity to be the person who's there that will remind them of how much is still going right. And that's a huge perspective shift for a lot of people who have been maybe in chronic pain or had issues that have persisted for a long period of time that they didn't get adequate help with. And that's something I had to keep reminding myself because you were there for a lot of the clinics we did at the Breathing Project where they bring in someone who had some even pretty intense stuff that had to look up on Wikipedia because I'd never quite heard of that disease or injury before and there's always this little voice in my head that freaks out. It's like I'm just a yoga teacher, what am I supposed to do with this? I can't even pronounce this thing. And so that's the perspective I would have to keep reminding myself of just to calm myself down. When they bring someone in who's got this really intense stuff going on, they brought in a woman who had double A lung transplant. I worked with people that had brain stem tumors and it's very reactive.

Speaker C: I remember after I got back from those meetings that we talked about earlier and I was making the promotional stuff for Abiyazi Ogas Center, I wrote practice that adapts to individual needs, including chronic and acute conditions. So I had all these people who would come in because their doctors said try yoga for one reason or another. But they already had, as you say, like teams of doctors and they knew about their condition way more than I did. So the role that I was playing was a supportive role and was empowering role for them to feel like they could find some kind of healing from within the inherentness of their own system. And that was a different thing and it certainly was about listening to their paying attention to who they are and listening and the practice being adaptable in the way that I hold it so that it would be fine for someone to make whatever changes they need to even in a group class. That mindset I think is what I was trying to bring to the group classes, which is a clinical application of sorts because it's about dealing with actual people but not that reductionist version that we talked about earlier, right?

Speaker A: Yeah. If there was like one word that could not be misunderstood or misconceptualized in any way that just adequately described the stuff that we do with people, it would be a lot easier. But I don't think there is as you know, I don't think therapist quite cuts it. Instructor is like, well I think that's good for someone who's just graduated from a 200 hours. But maybe they're not a teacher yet because you need experience right, to be a teacher educator. I use that quite a bit. And for purposes of this podcast and these discussions, I'm just running the clinical thing up the flagpole and for all I know, it's repelling people as much as it's attracting them to listen to these conversations. I have no idea. I'm open to hearing all perspectives on it.

Speaker C: Now, I get it because I think that from what I know of your work and what it seems like you're interested in talking about on this show, is that there is something that can happen between two people very often in a space of practice or of yoga or dare I say, healing. Not to sound cliche, but that we've seen happen that we wouldn't be doing it for all these years. We've had enough times where we are in that experience and we engage in this activity with them and it is helpful, or it seemingly helpful to them. And there's a very purposeful feeling that you get from that that feels like, this is why I do this.

Speaker A: Sure. And there's an extreme vulnerability that shows up when it's safe enough. The boundaries are respected and it's a feeling I know I've had in the past that tells me it's like there's something special happening here and I better treat it appropriately and not take it for granted or abuse it or violate this situation in any way. And look, we all learn these sorts of things by making mistakes over the years, but unless that behavior is being engendered in the teacher or the practitioner or the clinician by a sense of valuing that space and wanting to protect it, I don't think any external set of ethical guidelines or rules or regulations is going to get the job done. In fact, I think it provokes a reactive force in the opposite direction in a lot of people. Well, it's an alignment of sorts. We talk about the alignment of the body and if there are rules for the alignment of this pose and you're trying to learn them so you can do it safely, that's one way to kind of get started with the conversation. But unless you can feel within yourself what alignment is and is not, it's really not getting to the deeper levels. And I think the way we handle our interactions with other people is very much the same way. This is a very long intro to conversation about, I think, the second piece that you got a lot of attention from on Esuchara and that was Yogis Behaving Badly. Do you remember that exchange?

Speaker C: Kind of refreshed my memory. There's been many of those back the blog days where I caused bunch of stirs, I remember.

Speaker A: Well, it started with some news items about some we don't need to mention names, they're all famous at this point about some, let's just say boundary challenged behavior by yoga.

Speaker C: Right. I wrote what was it called? Ethical imperatives and sexually responsible behavior or something.

Speaker A: Yoga is behaving badly. Yes. And for those who aren't listeners to Jay's podcast. He did meet his wife in yoga class.

Speaker C: Yes. For people who don't know what we're talking about, this might be too inside old stories. I wrote a piece about I was asking whether or not it was okay for a yoga teacher to date students. And I was being very transparent. Like, that was one of the earlier times where I ripped down all the walls that I've come to do over the years, and I just bared my soul and was super honest. And a lot of people took issue with some things I said because I think they didn't really understand what I was doing or what I was saying. But my wife, who's now my wife for 17 years, she read it and she thought, oh, he's really an honest guy. And that actually led to us coming together because she read that piece, which.

Speaker A: I think is remarkable, that your willingness to address this issue, which everyone knows is important, but usually only from when it goes wrong, your willingness to address it and have a conversation about it led to the exact thing that you were writing about because you're like, hey, I'm a yoga teacher. I do this all the time. Where the hell else am I going to meet people, you know? And the very act of being willing to communicate about that attracted someone who read it. It was like, wow, this guy sounds cool.

Speaker C: Well, I also think that was an early precedence for me because especially if you remember the early days of the podcast and those intros I would do, it was all about wanting to tear down kind of the idea of what a yoga teacher was. There was like this glossy, instagram yoga teacher doing the poses, and everybody had these ideas about yoga teachers who didn't have pain or like these ethereal beings or whatever. And I knew first hand because I had a little bit of glimpse into some of the big name teachers and whatever, and they all had lots of pain and we're sleeping with heating pads.

Speaker A: And what do you think? Where's the table over there?

Speaker C: I was just like, that's not the real deal. I've always had this thing of, say, radical transparency, sometimes to a fault, but like, it was wanting to, like, expose what was really happening because I had been a yoga teacher for however long, and people were starting to look at me like I was somehow I'm some bigger name teacher. And I was like, Wait a second. And then when I started the show, that's when I was just basically admitting, like, I'm in massive pain. The center is falling apart. Let's be honest about it. So I think that article that actually led to my life partnership with my wife wasn't early precedence for kind of a practice of doing that, of saying, okay, I'm just going to share what's going on and let the lessons come from there now. I think I've done that to a fault sometimes over the years. I've got older and wiser about it. I think it's time going on.

Speaker A: Was there any point at which actually she doesn't listen to the podcast, right?

Speaker C: No, not really. It's one of the things I love about my wife. She doesn't care about that stuff. I mean, she does because she supports me in my creative pursuits of my teaching, and I think she believes in me, but she just, like, do the dishes. She doesn't want to hear me jabber on about whatever.

Speaker A: She doesn't hang out with other people who listen to it, who go to her. Did you hear what Jay said today? Nothing like that.

Speaker C: It's a really interesting phenomenon because there's a lot of people in my life who, like, people my family or people who live around here who I see all the time, who don't listen to the show, but people who are, like, all over the world who I've never met, who do listen to the show. And in some ways, they actually know what's going on with me in certain ways more than people right around me who don't, because I do share so much on a weekly basis of what's going on.

Speaker A: Yeah, it is an odd sort of remote intimacy that the Internet allows us to have with people anywhere on the planet, really. And yeah, and there is that contrast to, you know, the folks that are really close to you, other, you know, other family members, friends, people who get to see you all the time aren't tuned into that very much or at all. No.

Speaker C: I mean, they know me in other ways because they see me picking up my kids from school or whatever rather than an online class or something. But I do think that it's an interesting thing, and I was just thinking about it today because I had a class with three people who have literally been coming to my Live Stream classes for, I'd say, four years. These are like regular students who I met some of them in person when I used to travel. I met a couple of them, but a number of them, I've only ever had them online. And I was thinking about how, in a way, like, right now, you and I were not in the same moment together, because this is trying to stimulate that. But we're not in the same room. We're not in the same moment. I'm in my immediate moment, and you're in your immediate moment. And they're synchronized in an asynchronous universe of the Internet, we've synchronized my moment in your moment at the same time, which is, like, the closest thing we can get to being in the same moment. But that there is something that happens in there. Like you were even saying earlier, there's an exchange that happens between people. And when you talk about watching Desiccachar and me having that conversation with the student that we're going to look at in the second half today. That interplay. That interpersonal. Interplay and interaction and connection is where I think the real power is, where I find it most exciting in terms of doing yoga and sharing yoga.

Speaker A: Well, that was if you could distill the main message of what Desiccatar taught into that idea, it was that yoga is a relationship. And that was the consistent theme he kept coming back to, regardless of whatever other esoteric principles or something from the Sutras or the Punishads or whatever it is. And you would often use those as, you know, focus focal points for lessons. It all boils down to that. And it sounds sort of trite and overly simplified at first, and that there's not much to a statement like that. But after, what is it, 30 years now or so more, it really makes a deeper and deeper impression on me. That's what he chose to focus on and keep bringing us back to. Because, after all, I mean, you just described these people who have been coming to your online classes for, what is it, three years? You said something like that.

Speaker C: Yeah. More.

Speaker A: It's the same **** class every time.

Speaker C: I know. We do the same homes every time. What are we? I think that there's something too, and it's something I've talked about on the show a lot. There's a ritual to it. There's a certain song we've created together, space that we've created together. There is a feeling of being in it with others, even though there is a value. As much as I think it needs to be about personal practice, even when we come together to do it in the same room, there is some real value to people coming together, like minded people coming together and breathing in sync. There's so many cases of our ancestry doing this around the fire. Like the first beta, I remember you talking about being around the fire. And to me, it's a version of that in my own life. And the return again and again with the same people in the same ritual. And our lives have changed and things have happened and they and that all happened in been experienced in our practice rituals as well, together. There's something to the spirit of what you're saying with Desecatcher and what I was so inspired by that it seemed to me the transmission or the healing or the feeling of understanding that comes was in this space of friendship and engaging one another.

Speaker A: Yeah, you would call that mithra. Well, you were at the event we produced at Kapala where we played that video of him talking about that. I don't call them students. These are my friends. I call them friends. And he referred to that as mithra. Yeah. And it's interesting how these last two and a half plus years have, on the one hand, made that kind of connecting more challenging, but also made it that much more valued because of the challenges and has allowed us to do it in this medium that we're doing right now, like the Zoom sanda.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's at the end of the shavasana. How often have you wanted after a good shovasana, just to be left the **** alone? Why do I get up here? Why is there another class coming? Someone else wants my spot. And you can feel it. It's like that little thing that if you could only just stay there for as long as you wanted. And so that's why I don't end with people sitting back up and oming with some of these sessions that I do. It's like you're at home. I'm going to say goodbye now before we start the shovasana, because just stay as long as you want it's open.

Speaker C: I mean, I do like to bring a closed, but everybody knows they don't have to close. They can stay, and they can just listen to the others. Sometimes people just turn off, and I'm like, See, I have a good one.

Speaker A: There's no line at the bathroom either.

Speaker C: No, not at all. And I just think that in certain ways, as even said earlier, there was kind of this time where the Internet felt like, oh, I'm going to put things out into the Internet, and maybe I'm going to get bigger and I'm going to grow. And John friend created his whole thing, and there was, like a period of yoga teachers trying to, like, brand and grow, and then it kind of with everything that's happened now, I just don't have that idea about that. It's not important to try to get as many people as possible anymore. It's about getting enough people to make it work, to make it viable. But the people who want to be there, who are called to be with you in it, rather than trying to, like, tailor make it so that it can entice everybody in or something.

Speaker A: Yeah, it reminds me of, you know who Amanda Palmer is, the musician, singer songwriter. She was married to Neil Gaiman.

Speaker C: Sounds familiar. I'm not sure I know her too well.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, she has a Ted Talk called The Art of Asking where she talks about this, and she wrote a book about it. She was one of the first music artists who really successfully transitioned to having her connecting directly with her audience and funding her art that way. What happened was the last album she did on her last deal, her last label deal, okay, according to the labels standards didn't sell well enough for them to keep her going. It only sells like 17,000 units or something. And so she was like, well, screw this. I have a list. I've been accumulating. I have people who like what I do. This is evening before a patreon or anything like that. But she decided to just connect directly with her audience and cut out the middleman. And she did like a Kickstarter kind of thing for her next album. She raised a million dollars to produce her next album. And guess how many people contributed $17,000.

Speaker A: Well, we just have a few minutes left here, but it does make me wonder because I know you're still very much on the fence about getting back out there as the touring teacher again.

Speaker C: I know you say that my first in person workshop in more than two years is this Saturday. So I am kind of getting back on the horse a little bit. I haven't made plans to do any more extensive travel because honestly, I just don't know details. I hear of the flights getting canceled and all the heartache around it. I haven't been willing to brave it. And I've been finishing this first year of doing this online teacher training that I developed. I've been making it as we've been going along. So I'm almost done. I'm almost finished with it the first year and making all the modules because I've been kind of cocreating them with people. And so I feel like come this new year, I'm kind of getting ready and going to probably start scheduling some stuff, but not as much as I did before.

Speaker A: The teacher training won't take that much energy to keep going from this point on. Once it exists as a teacher, I.

Speaker C: Won'T have to be making all the modules. They're all made now.

Speaker A: Where's the workshop this weekend?

Speaker C: It's with the Yoga Teacher Association of the Hudson Valley. You probably know them well.

Speaker A: Yeah, sure.

Speaker C: They've been reaching out to me for years and I was, like, traveling all over the world and I never really hooked up. And then not too long ago, they reached out and they said, hey, you want to come do a workshop? And I looked at like two hour drive. I was like, yes, let's do it.

Speaker A: You don't have to get on a plane, right? We're driving to Montreal this weekend and I'm doing a workshop up there alongside the Fascia Research Congress. But got some travel coming up. I'm going to do California and I'm going to be at Troyoga in October. Okay.

Speaker C: The new regime is in place.

Speaker A: I'll say for you, we will see him. But it is positioned out of in there and we'll see how it goes. But it's sparse. It's pretty sparse. And you have to build an extra day arriving to make sure if there's a delay that you can still get there when you're supposed to teach.

Speaker C: As you know, like right before everything fall apart, I was doing like my living room tour style and just finding small spaces and getting small groups of people together. And that's probably what I'll go back to doing initially rather than trying to like because I don't even know if there is a circuit anymore. There was like a circuit of all those places, but all those places are.

Speaker A: Not all those places anymore.

Speaker C: That's right.

Speaker A: Exist. That's a lot.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Having been in this as long as I have and seeing the industry be created and then transform and now transforming again and in decline in many ways just in terms of how many places exist that could invite or host a visiting teacher. It's clear that this way of communicating the OnDemand streaming the podcasting. It's got to have a permanent place in how we do what we do. There's just no way around it.

Speaker C: I mean, I really came to think of the podcast as like a sane form of social media. For me, I left social media, but it was a way of putting out ideas and having the kind of conversations that I was always trying to spark with the blog writing and the common threads that we would do in a more long form way. So it was a very natural progression for me. But I have to say that it's a much better like it's one of the cases for why there are certain things that are better about the situation than before. Because I don't know that the running all around the world, that wasn't a very sustainable thing. You know, you would go to the same place every year. That first two years would be pretty good, but then it would be that third year where it would like, slump off.

Speaker A: We learned right away you can't go back exactly a year later, you have a serious sophomore slump. So we made it like 18 months minimum to go back to a place you don't wear out or welcome. But, you know, all bets are off now and we haven't been anywhere. For a couple years. So that time lag is yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker C: It's a whole new thing.

Speaker A: So listen, since we're going to sign off here at the first section, just let people who are listening to this part know where they can find you and learn about your stuff.

Speaker A: Just to evergreen the material here. We ought to know when we're doing this.

Speaker C: Yeah, we have like actually a number of things we play around with too in terms of like I'm sure you know this, some people really want to work with a group and some people want to do things more independently and we've been able to find a way to accommodate both of those things.

Speaker A: At one point you may have enough graduates to warrant a big grand in person reunion somewhere.

Speaker C: I love that. I mean, I'm all about trying to meet people and see people again. You know, like I said, that's kind of where my focus is turning now after creating this whole online thing.

Speaker A: Going into the retreat business, it's like, hey, everyone that's been connecting with me through electronic media for the last ten years, okay, we're going to have a grand gathering. I don't want to use that term. That's an Onsare thing.

Speaker C: I don't know man, I don't want to have this. I mean, I definitely want to get together with people but I don't know if it has to be grand gather. It could be small gatherings too. I'd be fine with that.

Speaker A: Yes. It's funny how the bigger is better is always a better mentality. Just isn't really that much of a viable or sustainable option anymore.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about before. I mean, that's really where I've come to is I'm not trying to make it big at all, just trying to like I said, I remember when we had that Desicca char thing and I was sitting there and I was looking at all you up there who are sort of like the people who are footsteps I'm walking in and I made the comment. It was like there were people there who felt like were examples of what it is to kind of hold true to your practice and your teaching and your integrity through the waves of the industry and all of it. And I just thought to me that I took inspiration from folks like yourself and in terms of people who've always kind of said what you really thought and stuck to your guns and held true to something that was important to you and that was clear.

Speaker C: Better than running advertising. I did that on the show for a while. I know it's better because it was sort of how everybody was doing it and we did it for a while was okay. But at a certain point, I think the premium model sometimes works better for a lot of reasons.

Speaker A: Yeah, it does. And it's more inclusive and it's more in line with the ethos that you're developing. I'm curious, I always wanted to ask, did you go back those old episodes and edit out the ads or are they still there?

Speaker C: No, I think they're there. We haven't bothered to go back out.

Speaker A: They're getting free advertising in your archives now.

Speaker C: It's true. We trade to our advertisers after all these years because it was never insertion ads and people were paying us, you know, quite a bit. We were not charging per click rates like some of the other folks. We were charging sponsorship rates, which isn't the same as like, per click rates.

Speaker A: Actually, I'm giving free advertising some of those old ever since it's you. You are?

Speaker C: Are? Because we always felt like people paid good money for those ads. They bought those ads. They're there.

Speaker A: Cool. All right, well, I'm going to put the recording on pause now.

Speaker B: And that was the first hour of the two hour conversation I had with Jay Brown. The second hour is, of course, available as premium content@breathingproject.com. You can check it out. First month is free, no risk. You can cancel at any time. And if you do sign up for that, you can see the video of our conversation and watch us watching a video of Jay teaching and discussing the way that he works one on one with people and gain some insight into how both he and I view this really special work that we do one on one with people. And that's really the sort of core message of what we're trying to dive into a little more deeply here at Clinical Corner. So I hope you get to enjoy that and see you next time. Till then, take care.