Rolf Gates
Growing up brown in the white America of the sixties and seventies, I was not an expression of my nation’s ideals or aspirations, and this point was made clear to me over and over again in every conceivable way. How I looked was wrong, end of story, and that wasn’t going to change. The world I grew up in wanted people who looked like me to just go away—unless we were playing a sport. Then we became like a prize racehorse, something thrilling, something to be watched, admired, and possessed. This felt to me to be a far better fate than to live out my existence as America’s dirty secret. My body was to be a means to an end. I would spend my youth competing: first as an athlete and later as military officer.
The Buddha taught that we suffer because we believe the impermanent is permanent, the unreliable is reliable, and that things that are not the self are. Nowhere in my experience has that been truer than in the quest to use my body to wrest some measure of respect from a world that would prefer I not exist. By the time I was 14 I had started using drugs and alcohol to manage the traumas and hardships of my daily existence, and by the age of 26 I was a full-blown alcoholic in treatment.
Recovery
My early days in treatment and twelve-step meetings were my first experience of life outside of the culture I was born into. The first thing you notice at a twelve-step meeting is that they declare their ideals and aspirations in a preamble at the beginning of each meeting. The second thing you notice is that everybody appears more than willing to be accountable to the principles expressed in that preamble. As a new person I felt intense shame around my addiction and the mental and physical shape I was in. This did not appear to matter to the members of the twelve-step meetings I attended. Theirs was a culture of recovery and rebirth, and the possibility of my recovery was precious to them. In their world when someone wins, everyone wins.
The consistent expression and adherence to common principles in the meetings I attended created context for me in which I could learn and apply new ways of being in the world. My attitude and outlook were able to change within a culture of rebirth and mutual respect. As I changed, the way I saw the world changed.
Meditation and Yoga
Eventually my program of recovery became a program of self-awareness. One of the first things I noticed after the dust of my active addiction settled was that my body was wracked with a number of different sorts of pain. I had physical injuries from years of using my body to prove something. I had chronic physical tensions from the unresolved emotional trauma of my childhood and my addiction. And my body ached from the constant mental tensions created by the negative habits of mind that filled my days. Twelve-step programs explicitly recommend meditation in their eleventh step. Eighteen months into sobriety, I took them up on it. My first experience of yoga was the practice of seated meditation.
I would sit in a comfy chair, one of my few possessions in early recovery, and set a timer for fifteen or twenty minutes. During that time, I would attempt to count breaths. This remedial form of meditation had an immediate positive effect. The stress I was carrying in my body was cut in half for hours after I meditated. Soon there after, I got wind of yoga poses. The idea of moving in a sacred space, in a sacred way, while incorporating the attention and intention training of meditation sounded really good to me. People would later ask how someone who had lived as I had, spent years knocking people unconscious on playing fields and training with the special forces in the military, came to yoga. If you spent a day in the growing discomfort of my body in my late 20s, you would not need to ask.
Over the years, the combination of yoga poses and seated meditation has more than addressed the mental, emotional, and physical damage inflicted upon my body-mind by a life of trauma. In the beginning, I just felt myself finding more and more ease in my body. I have often said in the classes I teach that the first thing I noticed about yoga was that after practicing the poses, my couch felt better. This physical ease was eventually accompanied by an emotional one. I became less afraid and less angry. With intensive mental training on meditation retreats, I had begun to noticeably increase my overall brain functioning. Empathy for others, imagination, creativity, the ability to think through the consequences of an action, and most importantly the ability to sit with an impulse without reacting have all gathered steam in my life. As I approach 50, I feel as though I am on the cusp of true wisdom and compassion.
Community
When I first came to yoga, I brought my twelve-step culture with me and found a kindred spirit in the yoga community of the mid-nineties. In both the twelve-step world and the yoga world of that time, there was a profound awareness of the number of people finding help within those communities who were healing from sexual trauma as well as other forms of trauma and eating disorders. This awareness fostered a climate of respect for personal space and boundaries that manifested in the possibility of true privacy in one’s relationship to their body. In those communities, your body was nobody else’s business, and it was understood how painful the use and abuse of your own body could become.
As a young single man going through the trials of my dating years, I cannot remember a single instance in which I commented on a woman’s appearance while attending a twelve-step meeting. This sensitivity cut both ways. During those years my self-worth was defined by my ability to live out spiritual principles rather than what I could accomplish with my body or how my body looked.
I attended yoga teacher training about two years before yoga went mainstream in a big way. The summer of 1997 I was seven years sober on my way to a master’s program in social work. My attendance at a month-long teacher training program was to be a sober vacation in the Berkshires complete with quiet summer evenings and a lake to swim in. Little did I know that in just two years, everything was about to change.
Looking back, I can see the first rumblings of the mainstreaming of yoga during that summer, but my actual experience holds out real hope for the future of yoga. That summer I was young, strong, and capable, but no one seemed to care. What people commented on was not my appearance; rather, people seemed to like the fact that I lived yoga with all of my heart. The ability to get into this or that posture was almost unnoticed. Most people seemed to feel that if your body could do a pose, great; if it could not, so what? The poses were what you were doing; yoga was how you were being in the pose.
I graduated from that training program with the belief that yoga would make me more at ease in my body so that I could get on with what really mattered. With yoga I could taste life more fully. With yoga I could stand in the poses of my life, the loves, the labors, the works of creation with an ever-increasing ability to balance strength with surrender, wisdom with compassion. That fall I got a new puppy, Max. She ran like the wind through the forests of western Massachusetts; as I walked along behind her, I knew how she felt.
Up to that point, my recovery from my addiction and the culture I had been born into had been a case study in what works. I had been graced to live into the right healing modality at the right time again and again. When I needed to heal from addiction, I found a twelve-step program. When I needed to heal my body and my relationship to it, I found yoga. And when I needed to heal my mind and my relationship to it, I found meditation. In each case the community around the healing practice had created a culture whose principles and actions were aligned with the best interest of the individual. Then a truly huge opportunity happened: yoga got popular.
Sea Change
It is hard to describe what it felt like to have been a part of a very small subculture that had discovered life practices that truly worked and then glimpse the possibility of watching those life practices completely transform a city, an entire class of people, a society, the very world our children would grow up in. In a ten-year period in the United States, the number of yoga practitioners grew from one million to twenty-four million. For better or for worse, I and the other members of the yoga class of 1997 rode that wave.
The process was a little bit like building a frontier town. You use what you have when you have it. Not a lot of thought is given to city planning, and who gets to run things is often a matter of who got there first and who is willing to fight the hardest to run things as opposed to who is best suited for the job. In the case of yoga in the United States, the best method available for quickly adapting to the rapidly growing demand for yoga was individual initiative and entrepreneurship. Most yoga in the United States is taught by a new yoga teacher walking into an empty room and learning to make things happen. It is an incredible story of a relatively few people working largely in isolation creating a societal transformation.
In the hurly-burly of this success story, physical yoga poses were and are being taught skillfully in the United States on a truly massive scale, but the healing context and the intentional community held together by mutually agreed-upon principles were and are not.
My first sense of this and the effect it would have on my relationship to my body showed up in the fall a couple of years after I graduated from my teacher training. I had left graduate school to direct one of the first big yoga studios in the Boston area. I and two other teachers were working hard to meet the demands of a yoga community that seemed to be growing on a weekly basis. We had little time to do anything but teach and found ourselves practicing yoga poses together at work in between classes. That fall I spent a fair amount of time peeking at my peers and comparing myself. Both of my peers were more flexible than I was, and I began to think of myself as kind of average. At some point, getting into “advanced” poses had become both cool and indicative of knowing a lot about yoga. I did not question this shift at the time; I merely noticed that my yoga poses were no longer the sanctuary they had once been.
The “market,” our students, really liked the athletic poses, and by providing them our classes grew to unprecedented size. Class size also became an indicator of who was a good teacher and who was not. If you taught huge classes, you were a great teacher. This became a compelling focus for our efforts. Teaching hugely popular classes put the teacher in a position of worldly success that had not been dreamed of just a year or two before. Book deals, clothing lines, and franchises were all in the offing for those who could teach big classes.
The entrepreneurship that drove the growth of yoga also put the student in the position of determining what should be taught. Teaching the poses without the ethical, attitudinal, and meditative aspects of yoga allowed the mainstream culture to co-opt what is now aptly described as the “yoga scene.” Within just a few short years, the yoga community as a principle-based healing context ceased to exist.
Creating Culture
This has meant that our society’s dis-ease concerning the body, and the many ways this dis-ease is exploited, has had unfettered access to the yoga space. The appearance of success, big classes, small waistlines, and extreme poses have been accepted as the measure of success. In many cases, this has served to amplify an individual’s already pained experience with her or his body as they attempt to find health with yoga. In my own experience, the mainstreaming of yoga precipitated a five-year period in which I became a yoga athlete living out the same patterns of proving and striving that I endured as a young person.
With the birth of my first child, the mental and emotional backsliding of my yoga athlete phase was no longer sustainable. My heart yearned for the still space that people can create when they come together around explicitly agreed-upon principles. I began attending meditation retreats regularly and found myself once again practicing the right modality within the right context. Although it took years, I have been able to undo much of the damage to my relationship to my body, my heart, and my spirit that my time in the “spiritual marketplace” wrought.
Today I feel as though yoga in the United States has undergone necessary growing pains and learning experiences—and I along with it. To “roll out” yoga on a large scale, it was attempted to surgically remove the poses from the rest of the practice. It has been an experiment played out on a massive stage and in millions of small ones. I believe what we have discovered with this experiment is that if we are not willing to do the work to create a healing community, the dominant culture fills the vacuum and we cannot realize the potential of our healing practices. Taken as a whole, yoga is the opportunity to heal all of our relationships over time. All that is required is for us to be willing to do the work—all of the work.
A culture is something that we choose for ourselves and for each other. I believe that as we move forward as a community we will prove to have learned from our mistakes and choose wisely. We will create a healing community the likes of which we cannot now even imagine. The spread of yoga as a healing context with mutually agreed-upon principles will spread as rapidly as the spread of yoga as a healing modality.
In my own life, I am also optimistic. I believe I am better for having made the mistakes I made and learned the painful lessons they taught. The most important years of my life are before me, and I have the opportunity to take what I have learned into being a husband, a father, and a member of the many communities I now call home. I find that if I am willing to act wisely and compassionately toward others, I discover the ability to do the same for myself. It also works in reverse: what I heal in myself, I can heal in the world. My dog Max died in my arms a few years ago, having stood by me through fourteen years of professional yoga teaching. I am now raising my dog Chelsea in the forests of northern California. She runs through the sunlight at peace in her body and in her world, and I am more grateful than ever before to know how she feels.
Rolf Gates, author of the acclaimed book on yogic philosophy Meditations from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga, is a leading voice of modern yoga. He conducts vinyasa intensives and 200/500 teacher trainings throughout the United States and abroad. A former social worker and US Army Airborne Ranger who has practiced meditation for the last twenty years, he brings his eclectic background to his practice and teachings. www.rolfgates.com. Author photo by Louis A. Jones.