When I got sober in 1985 at the age of fifteen, I was trying to understand what the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous were actually asking of me.
Step Eleven: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with a higher power.
For an atheist, or for anyone with an active and obsessive mind, this step can be genuinely elusive. Prayer is relatively straightforward. The intellectual practice of training a mind full of persistent thought to become still and quiet is something else entirely. So what is the point of it? There are several.
The first is presence. When the mind quiets, even briefly, you are simply here, in this moment, rather than consciously trying to occupy many places at once. Many people find this to be the closest thing to bliss they have ever experienced.
The second is control. When you can still the mind, you become capable of redirecting it. When it wanders toward obsession or negativity, you can bring it back. This is real power, perhaps the most underrated form of it available to a human being.
The third is performance. When you can concentrate fully on what you are doing, you tend to do it better. This applies to everything from a yoga posture to a difficult conversation to a piece of writing.
Yoga as a vehicle for this is something I came to understand gradually. A yoga asana has three components. First, control of the body. From that, control of the breath. From that, a quality of focused attention that can eventually arrive at something like single-minded presence. In that state, in that space, something opens. Universal truths become accessible, not because they were hidden, but because the noise that was covering them has finally quieted enough to hear them.
In the early nineties I studied the work of Robert Lawlor, whose writing on the ancient Aboriginal Australians immersed me in a way of understanding consciousness and the natural world that I had not encountered before. I followed his work for a decade. During that same period I moved through a wide range of Eastern philosophical traditions, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Buddhist philosophy, the Tao Te Ching in many translations across many years. I am not a religious person and I am not superstitious, but I know when I am reading something of genuine value. That discernment has been one of the more useful skills I have developed.
In the late nineties I found a yoga teacher from Japan through the Integral Yoga Institute, Sat Shri Mahayogi Parmahansa, who changed the trajectory of my practice. I would never claim he was anything other than a mortal man, but he had an extraordinary mind and performed extraordinary actions. In the many encounters I had with him, he brought consistent wisdom and clarity. He did not ask me to follow his path. He pointed me toward my own. His words were soft-spoken and without judgment. He loved without conditions and taught without ego. For that he is revered in my mind, the way I revere my parents and my wife, imperfectly but genuinely.
I have deep love for the ancestral teachings of indigenous peoples from North and South America, for any group that has maintained a compassionate and reverent relationship with their land. I value the work of scientists, artists, poets, and philosophers across traditions and centuries. And I have finally arrived at a stage of life where I trust my own discernment enough to move through these teachings without needing a single authority to tell me what is true.
The great teachers across every tradition tend to arrive at similar places. Similar purposes. Similar rituals for caring for the body, the mind, other creatures, and other human beings. The convergence is itself a kind of evidence.
In my twenties and thirties I was willing to put my life in genuine danger in the pursuit of self-knowledge. I threw myself out of airplanes thousands of times. I sat at the bottom of the ocean and looked at enormous aquatic creatures. I climbed the sides of mountains secured only by safety gear and my own nerve. I have no regret about any of it. That particular path was right for my particular mindset and body. I do not think most people need to take physical risks to achieve self-realization. I think I did.
As I have grown more aware of myself and my purpose, what has become increasingly clear is this: the most important path, across all the teachings I have studied and all the experiences I have accumulated, is the path of compassion and truth. I want to help the people I encounter find relief from their own suffering. Not because I have any kind of messiah complex. Because there is genuinely very little else worth doing that matters as much. I am not attached to the mission. I just recognize it.
The work begins at home. I have to alleviate suffering in my own household first. I have to continue making changes in my own life before I can be of real use to anyone else. That sequence is not negotiable.
I have accumulated somewhere around ten thousand pages of writing that I intend to share in some form. Perhaps two-thirds of it is not worth reading. If the remaining third contains something of genuine value, and I believe it does, and if I can communicate it in a way that is accessible rather than self-important, then I will consider that a life well spent. Not with arrogance. With the quiet satisfaction of having found something true and tried to pass it on.
I am not a yoga teacher. I am a yoga admirer, someone who has found in the practice a direct and reliable path to training the body and the mind simultaneously. Whatever physical activity you practice, do it with full attention, with breath, with presence, with the intention to be here rather than somewhere else. You can call it whatever you want. It is all yoga.