Bryan Kest
I wanted to be a stud. You know, a big, tall, ripped dude who could kick some major ass. As a young boy, a body that was six-foot-three with 220 pounds of muscle mass represented my ideal image of masculinity. And that was the image my buddies and I went for when we hit the gym. Not only was a man supposed to be buff and strong, but a “real man” had to be capable of fighting. In fact, I thought if a man couldn’t physically intimidate and dominate another man, he wasn’t a real man. Guys such as Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Clint Eastwood, and Arnold Schwarzenegger were the epitome of this ideal.
But I was exposed to violent masculinity before guys such as Arnold and Sylvester appeared on the big screen. I was like any other boy growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, or anywhere else in the United States, watching buffed-up superheroes like The Incredible Hulk on Saturday morning cartoons. Detroit, a hardscrabble, blue-collar town, wasn’t unique in proliferating these images and attitudes for boys and men. What boy doesn’t want to be the brave hero? It’s what we’ve been told we should want, passed down through generations of men.
Starting at Home
In fact, my first influence on my idea of a “real man” came even earlier than my favorite cartoons. My biggest icon was my father, and he bought into all the trappings of masculinity. He was six-foot-one, big, strong, and aggressive. He kept a set of weights in our basement and owned a gun. He was not only the first but the biggest influence on me, and his version of masculinity was supported by everything I saw in the media (which surely influenced him too) and impacted the other images I gravitated toward later.
My dad dominated all the time. I saw him get into several fistfights on the streets. If someone cut him off while he was driving, he’d floor it and then they’d both jump out and go at it at a red light. I saw one guy come at my dad with a baseball bat, running straight toward our car. I was sitting in the back seat, scared shitless.
I remember being 8 years old, living in Detroit, and one of our neighbors screaming, “There’s a burglar in the house! There’s a burglar in the house!” I can still see my dad breaking out his gun and running down to her house with me following him. He wasn’t jumping off buildings and didn’t have wings sprouting off his back, but to the degree you could be an action hero and human, he was.
My dad embedded violence and aggressiveness in me—and then he left. I was 10 and there was nobody to control us. My brothers and I had been scared to death of him, but we weren’t scared of my mom. He left and all hell broke loose at home. I was angry and there was no stopping me. But I wasn’t unusual. I was just a boy who was strong enough and aggressive enough to fulfill this cultural image of masculinity.
Adrift
There was tons of testosterone in that house even after my dad left. I was one in a pack of four rowdy brothers who fed off each other. We fought and wrestled nonstop. My mom had two homes outside of our house: the principal’s office and the emergency room. We even had our own seat in the emergency room.
I flunked fifth grade because I didn’t apply myself. I wasn’t doing my homework or even thinking about my grades. Because I flunked and because I needed discipline my mom couldn’t give me, she sent me to a Catholic boarding military school where I was exposed to even more violence. They beat me the entire year that I lived there. They each had their weapon of choice, whether it was a hockey stick or a paddle. All the punishments were physical and I cried every weekend when I got to go home. I’d plead with my mom not to send me back. So after the year was up, I went back to public school. But that didn’t last long.
I did what I wanted, instead of what I was supposed to do. By sixth grade, I was smoking dope and didn’t care about school. By seventh grade, I was smoking in the bathroom, skipping school when I had the chance, and not doing any work. I’m not sure how I made it to ninth grade, but that was the last year of school in my life.
I promised my mom I’d go back, but I never did. I was working, into drugs, and getting in trouble. I went to court a lot and was put on probation as a juvenile. Surprisingly, I managed to avoid detention centers. But when I was in my 20s, I made it to jail a few times, whether it was a holding cell or a short sentence. I didn’t even mind going to jail—I saw it as a place where tough guys ended up and it sounded good that I went. It was part of the street cred. Plus, I didn’t have much to live for that made jail seem bad.
From Machismo to Yoga
Not only had my dad fit the bill in terms of masculinity, he’d achieved the American dream. He was a successful doctor and he had a beautiful wife, four beautiful kids, and a big house in the suburbs. And he was still fucking miserable. The American dream hadn’t delivered.
He had a nervous breakdown and it started him searching. He would drag me to these churches where they were singing gospel. He was looking for Jesus or something, anything. But that didn’t give him what he was looking for, so he would try something else.
Eventually, my dad retired at age 42 and moved to Hawaii without us. This was crazy—we were an American Jewish family. You didn’t throw it all away to make a choice like this. You go to school, become a doctor, and be a good boy. Instead, he divorces his wife, leaves their four babies, and moves to the jungle. It’s the most horrific story we could imagine to have in our family. But he fell in love with Hawaii and it removed him from the society we live in and its endless pressures.
And in Hawaii he discovered yoga. He started because he had a bad back and someone told him yoga would help. So he tried it and liked its effects, especially what it did to him mentally. He was a pressure cooker. Back in Detroit, he couldn’t even make it to work without something outrageous happening because he was so aggressive. Between yoga and living among all the hippies from the sixties who had moved to Maui, he was less likely to blow his cap. He felt more relaxed and peaceful there, and the yoga released the tension in his body and mind.
He knew yoga was the best thing for his kids, but he knew we’d never do it if he asked us to. So he forced me to do it after my mom called and said, “You need to take him.” My dad showed up and asked if I wanted to live with him in Hawaii. I did, and it gave him the opportunity to lay down his one house rule: “Do yoga every day or move the fuck out of my house.”
Karma
My dad introduced me to David Williams, the Western pioneer of Ashtanga yoga, whom he had been working with for a month or two. I went with him every day, and I hated it. Weightlifting in the pursuit of the ideal masculine physique had made me stiff. I avoided stretching because it was too painful and my ego couldn’t see any benefits. What was flexibility going to give me? It wasn’t giving me anything that I thought was important. I hated yoga, but after six months of doing it, I couldn’t deny how I felt—and I felt amazing. Plus, it was such a vigorous form of yoga that it maintained my muscle mass, which made it ego-gratifying as well.
It was undeniable—this was the path I needed to take. This is the path I knew I needed to take. My other teacher, Brad Ramsey, was espousing the spiritual teachings of yoga and made them important to me in addition to the physical practice. I was an aggressive kid, but I wasn’t a stupid kid, and he inspired me to investigate yoga further. It was hard to deny its practicality and rationality. It just made sense to me.
The yogic teachings helped me realize the fallibility of that “tough guy” persona by exposing its true weaknesses. Those teachings led me to let go of my desire to get approval from others, mostly the people I found interesting and fun to hang out with. After all, I didn’t want to hang out with a bunch of fucking sissies. I wanted to hang out with the tough, active, adrenaline-junkie kids who wanted to jump off cliffs.
That awareness started my inner battle with the angel and the devil. The angel would point out that these guys were not the best crowd to hang with. They were macho, aggressive, and even superficial. But I was torn because they were doing the fun things. I wanted to surf and woo women, and I didn’t mind getting into a tussle along the way. The fun guys were just like that, but I realized the weakness in their mindset. I fought that battle for a long time by living in both worlds. I would sing “Hare Krishna” with my yoga teacher and then I would go hang out with the tough guys. I was living a double life.
A turning point came one day when I was walking down the street in Hawaii. As a white guy from the mainland living among the locals, I’d often get the “stink eye” and, if you made eye contact, a fight broke out. That happened to me all the time, but I wasn’t going to back down. If you look at me, I’m going to look at you. But I remember the day I decided not to do that anymore. It may have seemed submissive or weak, but I decided to look away when people made eye contact. I made the conscious decision not to go down that road anymore.
The Big Shift
Even after that decision, though, my dual life continued for years, especially after I moved back to Detroit. I had lived with my dad in Hawaii for a year, but how many cliffs can you dive off? It got boring and I came to Michigan and started hanging with my old buddies only to return to the same dangerous and, often, illegal, pursuits as before—only taking it further and further. I may have learned yoga, but I wasn’t practicing regularly. I was shopping for organic food during the day and fighting and smoking with my friends at night.
But after two particularly bad incidents and a drug bust, I withdrew from the world. I devoted the next few years of my life to my own transformation. I focused on my health, enrolled in college and started taking nutrition classes, and began a regimen of yoga in the morning, weights in the afternoon, and jumping rope at night. I was making a change and I was completely alone. It was a transition period, a withdrawal from an addiction. Through my new interests, I met new people. Whether it was through my macrobiotics seminar or my fitness classes, I was developing a new community, drawing to me people who were like the new me.
Although my anger and aggression didn’t just evaporate, that mentality was steadily decreasing for me. In my life, power had always been about dominance and aggression. But now I understood real power exists in another way, in Jesus’s example and the teachings of yoga. That other mentality can never win. It’s impossible. That mentality will keep you in jail, and jail isn’t winning. How can you be fulfilled in jail?
Beginning to Teach
A friend of mine moved to Pacific Palisades, California, and hired me to drive her car out. I thought Los Angeles was the best thing since sliced bread, and I thought “Man, I gotta live out here.” So at 20, I moved West. I landed in Inglewood and lived in my car at the park for a few months. I’d get up in the morning, get ready at a health club affiliated to the one I belonged to in Detroit, and then I was off to work in a variety of restaurants around town. During that first year, I was not only busing tables and cutting sandwiches, but I was also a physical fitness trainer and, unbeknownst to my clients, I’d throw some yoga into all their sessions. I also started sharing the practice with my coworkers who were curious about this yoga thing. Eventually, I started teaching fitness and yoga in a few local gyms and had more and more private clients. I’d get on my motorcycle, drive to Malibu, and go from mansion to mansion, training and teaching yoga to private clients. And as time went on, I was invited to teach yoga at a center for eating disorders and got hired by the Center for Yoga. Teaching yoga became a full-time job at a time when there were very few studios in LA County and very few teachers.
Even though I was teaching, I was still caught up with my image and ego. But I walked my walk and worked on my stuff. And the things I emphasized then and continue to emphasize now are the issues I was facing. I was working out the things I had directly experienced—such as my anger, violence, vanity, and ego—as I taught, and I noticed people resonated with it. It was clear I wasn’t the only one dealing with the problem of dealing with disappointment and the stress of not meeting one-dimensional cultural expectations.
What I taught then and continue to teach is how to use the practice, a step-by-step way to combat all those toxic images and get them out of my head. Yoga gives you the tools to make tangible changes. But the real yoga is not the physical postures. It’s awareness and the state of mind you cultivate as you move through the asanas. Without that meditative quality, the postures aren’t yoga and they’re not healing. In fact, some use the physical practice to hang on to youth or gratify their ego in a number of ways, thereby exacerbating the issues that hurt us the most. I always say, “If you bring your shit into yoga, you turn your yoga into shit.”
With awareness, a physical yoga practice becomes a tool to investigate your body. You have the opportunity to notice. There’s almost nothing that you are more judgmental and critical about than your body. In a physical practice, criticism and judgment are going to arise, and it becomes an opportunity to stop feeding mental energy and unconscious loyalty to these qualities. And when you practice that, then those qualities start to diminish because it’s not getting what it needs to be strong. You notice it, but smile (because you caught yourself) and pull your attention away from it and back to whatever is happening to your life in that moment.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Vanity and ego are the program we’ve been spoon-fed by the media since we could open our eyes. We look at a dancer’s or athlete’s body, toned and cut to shreds, and we say that is healthy—but the truth is that is completely fucked. That has nothing to do with being healthy. These people—dancers puking up their meals and performing injured, athletes taking drugs and abusing their bodies by constantly pushing themselves and dying in their 50s because of how hard they were in their 20s—have nothing to do with health, but we think they epitomize that.
In the pursuit of vanity, we’re constantly comparing and competing, not just with others but with ourselves. And it is ridiculous! You can’t rationally compare and compete with anyone, including yourself—unless you disrespect yourself—because we are so different and we’re always changing. There’s nothing more pathetic than comparing and competing, but that’s what the rat race is based on. We have catchphrases describing that mentality including “Keeping up with the Joneses.” But the Joneses are some seriously messed-up people.
Aging Gracefully
I’ve always taught what I practice and my rhetoric has reflected that. But the content of my routine and the focus of what I verbally share in class has changed over the years. It’s changed because I’ve changed. I now have two titanium discs in my spine, and I’m not 20 anymore. Routines need to change in order to stay healthful; that’s what I practice and it still works. I’ve simplified what I do in my practice these days, but it’s still challenging. At 50, it won’t be like I was when I was 20, and at 70, it won’t be like 50. The same goes for my teaching: it won’t feel authentic if I am not teaching what I am practicing or am just remembering old routines from some time in my history that don’t fit the moment.
I remain in the moment and I can acknowledge the change. I wanted to do a handstand push-up in my practice this morning and then realized it wasn’t happening and moved on. Years ago, I could have burned through fifteen of them without a problem. But it’s not happening now. The strength wasn’t there, and there was no judgment or criticism. If there had been judgment, I would have just noticed it, smiled, and moved on. It’s aging gracefully. And that’s happened because I was taking my own medicine. I am less angry, less vain, less attached to all this shit because yoga works. I still have a long way to go, but I’ve already gone a long way. What I’ve achieved inspired me to keep going because I can see it’s working. If it’s worked for me, it can work for other people —and it has.
Bryan Kest, who coined the now-ubiquitous term Power Yoga, is a world-renowned international yoga teacher and owner of Santa Monica Power Yoga studios. Bryan is also the creator of donation-based yoga. He has been practicing yoga since 1979, starting when he was 15 years old in Hawaii with David Williams, the first person to bring Ashtanga yoga to America. He also studied in India in 1989 with K. Pattabhi Jois. In addition to teaching locally at his studio in Santa Monica and his international teaching schedule, Bryan allows anyone to practice yoga anywhere with his live-streaming video series at Power Yoga On Demand. www.poweryoga.com. Author photo by kwakualston—kwakualston.com.