It is no wonder that circumnavigating solo sailors, at sea for months all alone, often find such clarity in the deep undisturbed quietness that they experience. Yes they may be fighting howling gales and the threat of death at any moment, but the quietness is always there when they start to become totally attuned to their ship and environment. At the moment I am reading The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier. Rarely will you read such simple, insightful words about the true 'self' that he discovers in the days, weeks and months alone, where he loses himself entirely to the ocean and the boat.

I suppose for many of us The Long Way is an appropriate title for our own journey in life; we spend an awful lot of time going nowhere, and like the circumnavigating sailor, returning to exactly where we began. 

When you spend a lot of time just sitting quietly, walking quietly or doing anything quietly, that is to say, with total awareness, you start to notice a few things that are so obvious you cant understand how you ever missed them before. Like the solo circumnavigator, you start to 'lose yourself' entirely.

What does this losing oneself mean? We throw the phrase around, and we get a sense o what we mean but it is very hard to define. I would say that it is when the illusion of the 'self' that you imagine yourself to be, falls away to leave the only real thing that you actually are, that thing that we are all so desperately searching for; the search that caused us to take up yoga or tai chi, to travel the world, to sit and meditate, to visit ashrams or buy statues of buddha. The search.

Most of us imagine that the end of this search lies in dedicated and continued practice, such as prolonged meditation or yoga. Indeed we may have brief glimpses of 'clarity', although we cant define what that was we are sure that it has something to do with the thing we are hunting so desperately. If we are not careful this can spiral into an entirely new search to regain that magical sensation, a new distraction.

Ee imagine that maybe if we accumulate enough meditation or yoga the clarity will stay, and yet the idea of practising meditation or yoga is a fallacy itself, another trap, it suggests an action or a thing that 'we' must try to do and instantly we fall straight back into the trap of the illusory self trying to solve the problem of the illusory self. Its like a shadow chasing itself to find its true source – it isn't possible.

But simply sit quietly, with no effort to do anything, no attempt to still the mind or restrict the thoughts, simply let go of everything, completely, even 'yourself'.
Just be there with the thoughts with the pains in the body, with the boredom, the constant calls to urgently do something, anything else and ask which of these passing things is 'me'? Which if them is the 'I' that I believe I am?

Let go for long enough and you will realise that you can't find an objective source to pin this sense of 'I' upon. It transpires that 'I' is there when the thoughts come and still there when the thoughts pass away into moments of mental emptiness. The I endures when your left knee is in agony and equally when you forget all about the pain and your knee ceases to exist in awareness. I is aware of the bird singing outside, the breath slipping in and out and the silence when all sounds evaporate.

As all of these things come and go, thoughts, pains, sounds and everything else within your consciousness, the only constant through all of them is that they are known.
'I' does not think, there is simply an equal knowing of thought and knowing the absence of thought.
'I' is not in pain, it knows pain and it knows it's absence. I knows sound and I knows silence equally.

I is absolutely everything, the apparent 'existence' of everything and the apparent 'absence' of everything. It doesn't need thought or no though; sound or silence; body or no body. It is always, entirely, completely, whatever is.

How more simple could it be? The thing you were looking for, the 'you' that seemed to be missing, was already there, all of the time, it simply can't not be there.

We will be spending three days just letting go on 'Beyond Mind' in May.

Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain--but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. There's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind. Driving you mad. - Morpheus; The Matrix
It is this inexplicable 'knowing' that drives many of us to begin searching for another way of being. There isn't a thought as such that something is 'wrong', it's much more a 'knowing' and we somehow know that it is to do with mind but also to do with everything. That is because everything that most of us call 'reality' arises from mind.
Our exploration of all of this should be experiential. Books, teachers and other sources can be useful to trigger new avenues of investigation but ultimately it is and can only be our own experience that will reveal the truth of things to us in a lasting way. There is a saying 'It is like a finger pointing to the moon; don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all the glories of the heavens'. Many of us get so overtaken by reading about matters of the mind, listening to podcasts about it and going to more and more teachers to learn additional techniques that we forget it is the practice itself that is the only way to pull up the roots of our unhappiness or mental discomfort. You cant keep running from the practice and expect to get any benefit.
The problem is that we tend to try and tackle this problem using by using our mind in an attempt to unpick a problem that is fundamentally caused by our mind, it's a bit like trying to fight a fire by setting light to more things. Of course we predominantly use our mind to solve most of the problems in our lives, or at least we imagine that we solve them, therefore it seems logical that mind will be equally useful here.
There is a simple meditation exercise that many people have tried at some time or another - we watch the thoughts as they appear and then drift away. There is often a focus on this observing and then allowing them to pass. What most of us overlook is the most obvious thing: if I assume that I am my mind, then who on earth are these thoughts appearing to and who are they passing away from?
If we are those thoughts then we would become a little bit 'less' each time the thought moved on wouldn't we? Yet we are still very much here.
There is something else, a canvas if you like, onto which these thoughts are projected. The canvas never changes, never gets coloured by the projections, it is always there regardless of if anything is projected upon it or not.
Insight meditation could be said to be an exploration of what this canvas is and to rest more and more simply as the canvas. In fact you cant actually be anything else as you already are the canvas, you have simply forgotten the fact!

 I travelled down to Bristol yesterday to hangout with two of my favourite people - Ash and Jambo, we spent . a good few hours working on the Advanced TT that we are running next year and of course it ended up with some very profound questions being asked, mainly about the role of yoga teachers in modern society and what we might offer them next year.

I was saying that one of my most uncomfortable hang ups is that I am averse to people thinking of me as their 'yoga teacher' . I feel very uncomfortable when a class claps me at the end of a workshop. Regardless of what you might think, I have no issue whatsoever with self-worth, I have plenty of confidence and my ego needs no boosting I'm sad to say! What I regret is that people don't realise that I was just an instigator, a catalyst, I can't teach them anything that they don't already know.  They have all of this inner wisdom and it would be even better if they stood strong in that wisdom. All that 'I' did was maybe reminded them of it. At the end of the day its not really important, that's just my own attachment & aversion shit to deal with, but it got me thinking anyway...

So my chosen topic for next year is primarily about our beliefs, or more specifically unpicking the illusion of our beliefs. As a yoga 'teacher' one of the easiest traps to fall into is perceiving yourself as a teacher at all.
On our 200hour TT we are very clear at the beginning, that anyone in this responsible role should be very wary about falling into the 'guru' trap.That is to say, it is very easy to start believing that it is 'you' that is somehow delivering something that people need. 

Of course we all must believe that we have something useful to offer to the rest of the world and I would guess and certainly hope that most people that set out as yoga teachers have - underlying all else - a desire to alleviate suffering in others. Nothing could be more altruistic.

But maybe we are overlooking something obvious before we start. 'We' cant actually do anything, however much we believe that we can. 
There are teachers that I just don't 'get' - they don't resonate with me and their teaching makes no sense to me - at least on a conscious level. It certainly isn't their fault and neither is it mine, it is just that what they are bringing to the table doesn't speak to the truth inside of me. There is absolutely no doubt though that what they bring might make absolute sense to someone else. I have no doubt whatsoever that in my own alter ego as a 'yoga teacher' the truth is exactly the same - some people click with how I frame things and some can't stand the sight of my scruffy barnet or my foul mouth.

Many wiser people than me have said that we can never ask a question that we don't already know the answer to - after all if we didn't know the answer in some form then the question wouldn't even occur to us to ask. However that isn't to say that we can see the answer in front of our face and that is where the teacher comes in.

We imagine that someone else, someone separate from us is 'teaching' us something, in the case of a 'guru' that they are 'removing our darkness or ignorance'. But in truth they are simply inspiring us to answer our own questions, it is as if what they are saying or doing is reminding us of something that deep down, we already know but have just forgotten. Do you see, you can't learn anything that you already know and you cant be 'taught' by anyone other than yourself. 
You might get that feeling that a teaching resonates very clearly with something deep inside of you, as a very obvious truth, in fact it would probably be the most true to say that your teacher is simply your own voice speaking loudly to you.

This isn't about beliefs, it is about knowing simple truths. 

If a teacher says something and you have to wonder if you believe it or not then you don't really know it as a truth.  However if they say something that clicks, that makes your heart sing. then it is already an inner truth, a wisdom that you hold - there is no dilemma about whether you need to believe it or not.

It may also be the case that a teacher you normally don't 'like' suddenly says something that clicks exactly with what you ned at a given moment. Likewise, teachers that have always been your favourites can start to grate with some of your inner truth. It's not as if we are unsure about this when it happens - we know if something resonates with us or not, it is glaringly obvious, we don't have to wonder about it. Sometimes we often may not even 'like the taste' of a teaching, but somewhere inside we know whether it is fundamentally useful and true.

So what does this mean for the teachers out there? It means that you don't have to worry about whether people like what you are saying or don't like what you are saying, both are largely irrelevant. Your only duty is to be entirely honest to yourself and speak your truth. If you teach from the heart, however limited your 'knowledge', your grasp of philosophy or sanskrit or whatever, it doesn't matter. Just being there and showing up completely is enough - after all how many times have you thought 'Oh my god that was an awful class I just taught' and then someone comes up at the end and says thank you, that class just made their week?
It isn't your job to know what is useful, or second guess yourself, or worry about other peoples opinions. it is simply your job to turn up and BE YOU.

Advanced TT details here

'Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous' - Frank Herbert

It isn't a rare thing at all for me to be sharing a concept or idea on a weekend of 'training' and to suddenly start laughing out loud because i can see that half the room have this amazing look of concentration / bafflement / total confusion about what Im trying to say. The problem is that words, not least of all being a subjective means of conveying ideas, simply don't cut the mustard when it comes down to describing the reality of how things are - which is inherently indescribable!

Most of the 'content' that we absorb and indeed deliver - in books, on courses and trainings, podcasts, discussions and exchanges, even our very thoughts are largely constructed from words. Ironically it is also our attachment to words and language, and our belief in the 'solidness of their meaning' that limits our own understanding of an existence that we are constantly trying to explain through language.

There is no doubt about it, language is a great means of communicating and processing on a gross level. It is a big step up from hand signals and gestures, it allows us to efficiently deal with the other actors in our own personal movie, permitting us to explore, describe, instruct, actions, objects, past, present and future.
However language is simply too limiting to convey more profound concepts. Often on weekends of training both myself and the other participants find ourselves searching for words to explain unexplainable concepts; tripping over our tongues in an effort not to say what we don't mean or to trap ourself into a corner that we didn't mean to construct. Using words to explain things beyond explanation is like desperately trying to untangle ourselves from the knot of duality by using another knot!

The fact is, when you begin to explore deeper truths, real understanding of how things are, language always comes up lacking - words -whether thoughts, written or spoken, can't say enough and yet they also say too much.

If language was such a great means for directing the thinker, reader or listener to  awaken from the dream reality that almost all of us exist in, then by now, in some language or other there would have been a text, which simply by reading it would have the power to unlock our minds from their matrix like prison.
Instead all texts that aim towards such lofty ideals can only allude to their purpose - from the Bible, to the Tao Te Ching and innumerable self-help books - the truth is only to be found through the reader not understanding the text itself - for to understand language is to miss the point altogether - but instead to feel, sense or experience non-verbally, what is being hinted at verbally.

What is not being said is just as important if not more so than what is being said.

This assumption that words can somehow free us leads many people ever deeper and deeper into a search for the next thing, the book that will make them finally happy, the yoga teacher or style that can unlock my suffering, someone somewhere must be able to explain what this is all about. Maybe I can talk or think my way out of this cycle of suffering, if i can only find the right words to explain it, suddenly everything will make sense!

Often accredited to the Buddha, but quoted by many from zen teachers to Bruce Lee, maybe the following analogy works best:
'It is like a finger pointing to the moon, don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all the heavenly glory!'

The finger, that is to say the words or the thought process ,has no power whatsoever to free you-it simply hints at the way, it isn't the way in itself . Become tangled in semantics of the finger at your peril and join the long line of academics in dusty rooms and lecture halls trying to unpick the ultimate meaning of words and language - a meaning that can't be unpicked. All the while wasting the real opportunity to live the 'feeling' , the 'energy' of those verbal intentions or suggestions.
 
Of course we can see that it is easy to fall into this trap, it is so much easier to a mind that thinks primarily in words to to imagine that it will find the answer deeply hidden within yet more words. It is only the unthinking mind that realizes that the answer lays not within the words, but in a place way beyond language , a place that can only be explored by your own light, not by your own descriptions of that light.

Of course the irony of this entire blog is not lost on me - it is an imperfect attempt to describe the indescribable; to point the way with the vaguest of gestures; to show something that can only be seen out of the corner of your eye, in a brief glimpse that vanishes if you try to focus o it too forcefully. Using words to explore the fallacy of words! Ha

I often say just allow things to simmer, try not to give them too much thought, absorb the sentiment but not the description, you will take exactly what you need from them and that will rise to the surface exactly when it is ready. 

I never said meditation was easy! Easy and simple are not the same thing. Just like any skill, getting there takes practice and practice might take time...but that doesn't mean that underneath, it is still a simple skill. Ironically it is the simplest thing that you can possibly do. It takes a total lack of effort, in contrast the the enormous effort that most of us associate it with.

The number of people i talk to that have 'tried' meditation and discovered it isn't for them is even greater than the number that don't go to yoga because they aren't very stretchy! Haha. Maybe what they thought was meditation wasn't meditation at all is my greatest suspicion!

Equally the number of people that i talk to who want to discuss the difference between meditation and mindfulness, or the pros and cons of all the different techniques, far outweigh those who stop procrastinating and just get on with the job of finding out. We can talk about meditation and mindfulness for weeks, do degrees on the subject and write papers on the merits and differences - it gets us no closer to walking our path-we are just delaying walking the path by looking at the map over and over again.

What is 'meditation'?
Try it and find out!

Ask me what is 'tea' and you'd get a similar answer - you have to drink it to know it - i could talk to you about tea all day but until you have had a great cup (tea before milk of course!) you will never 'know tea'.

I often say it is just a study of a strange creature, that creature being your mind. 'Know thyself' as Socrates declared. no-one else can know your mind except you, however many pieces of paper and certificates they have. But it is much more than that. It enfolds every moment of your existence.
Tibetan Buddhism calls meditation 'Gom' -  literally to 'become familiar with' - with what? With yourself, with your mind and all of its peculiarities.

'How should i meditate?' is the next most common question.
How do you want to meditate ? Is my normal answer
​
Sit, walk, wash the car, drink tea, have a disagreement with a neighbour. They all offer perfect opportunities to practice Gom, to become familiar with yourself, your reactions, your habit patterns.

Let's take the example of sitting because most people associate meditation with crossed legs, bums on mats.
​To practice sitting meditation, what you really want to practise is the art of sitting, nothing more and nothing less. To do nothing but sit. What else is there to do?
I can play all sorts of distracting games with myself that i might call or mistake as 'meditation': blocking thoughts, reciting mantras, getting tied up in thoughts, getting frustrated at my lack of 'progress', my lack of 'meditation'. All of this time i am ignoring the sitting, I have departed even from sitting. Im not sitting anymore, i'm somewhere else in my head, in the future or the past. My bum may be on the floor but i'm not aware of it, my awareness is elsewhere.

How complicated and pointless!!
However simply to sit and do nothing but sit, to be fully aware of sitting and totally immersed in sitting, to be distracted by nothing but sitting, that is a pleasure and it requires not the slightest bit of effort. Simply let go of everything but sitting. 

Q-How long should i sit for?
A-Until it is time to not sit!
Q How do i know when that is?
A You wont know unless you practise sitting :)

Im afraid you just have to sit, or walk, or drink tea or wash the car, and you just need to practice doing 'it'.
That is to say, practise it and nothing else - to know you are doing it, to feel you are doing it, to be thoroughly saturated by doing it.
​Then your meditation becomes everything that you do, in every second, and then you answer the question for yourself  and laugh:
'What is meditation?
​'There is no such thing as meditation, just doing'

And maybe eventually you'll realise
'There isn't even any doing, because there is no doer'

But thats a topic for another blog :)

It can be very confusing being a 'yogi' in the modern world, whatever being a 'yogi' actually means?
It's a label thrown around a lot, but Im not sure that many of us actually sit with the powerful significance of that label; a label of course which is in itself means nothing. Just a word. Semantics.

We are basically 'just human' after all, to apply any other label over the top of that is superfluous and opens the doors to doubt, guilt, feelings of unworthiness in the role we have projected upon ourself. 

After all a worker bee doesn't call itself a worker bee, a tiger doesn't call itself a master hunter, they just do what they were born to do; they live up to their own purpose, unquestioningly. They feel no need to declare what they are or what they do, essentially its an irrelevance. 

In this modern era of yoga with its countless, probably pointless divisions into all manner of systems and styles, it can often be overwhelming to know who or what is 'right' and whether to truly trust that you are doing the 'right' thing in your practice. How do you know you are a yogi?

Of course the simple answer is that you don't. The term yogi will only ever have the meaning that you apply to it. If to you it means that your practice is to meditate in a cave forever then you'll have clear markers of failure or success for both yourself and everyone else. If your idea of practice means that you dedicate your life to serving others, then you know what you have to live up to - or of course you just live it, Mother Theresa style, and have no need to call ourself a yogi - the word adds nothing, the practice is simply your life.

Alignment cues change and the ones we accept now will no doubt change once more over time - to imagine that we will ever have a definitive grasp of what is right for every anatomy is foolish to say the least. Students shift from teacher to teacher and from one style to another seeking and searching. Many studios seem more obsessed with opening ever more spaces and the instagram profile of their teachers than any actual knowledge or depth of practice. In a darker moment, one might say that we sit in the midst of a confusing mess.

We overlay an awful lot of complicated practices, rituals and nonsense on our practice and 'yoga'. 

However most of us simply miss the first matter of importance, which is that we simply need to practice. Not on a mat for one or two hours per week for £10 (although thats a nice start if you like that sort of thing) but we need to practice every single moment that we wake up and remember to do so - that includes when we are happy, angry, sad or content; eating our toast, on the toilet, driving a car or sitting quietly.

Secondly underneath it all, beyond all of this confusion of styles, studios and prceptions of what is yoga and what isn't, like a clear sky always behind the clouds, is the truth that to practice simply is enough.
We all have an inner guide, an inner purpose. If you think that you don't, then you really must spend some more time listening out for it because it is in there talking to you all of the time. Of course if you don't listen out for it then you wont hear it.
You body know what to do, how to move, when to move, if you listen carefully to it, to its pains, tensions, spaces, likes and dislikes. It knows to skip, to dance, to stretch or to rest. Trust it to know what is right.
Your breath doesn't need you to breathe it, it is perfectly capable of breathing itself, all that you have to do is to listen carefully to it and to give it the space that it needs.
You mind knows when it needs to be still, when to act and when not to. It may seem to chatter constantly but when you permit it the space to be still and calm, it will eventually walk through the door and sit quietly with you.

We spend so much time putting expectations on ourselves, when really freedom was right there in the palm of our hand all along- we simply have to relax our clenched fist and allow it to breathe.

In recent blogs I have talked about wisdom versus knowledge, trying less as a yoga teacher, the secret magic ingredient to teaching yoga and now I am going to talk about how important it is to be a fool in order to be the best yoga teacher you can :)

I've just rounded off my first functional breath-work weekend for existing teachers, I had a total ball and I hope that they did too, but a few really interesting points came up that I hadn't really ever considered.
This train of thought began when one of the lovely teachers present came up and told me 'Im so glad that i came, I think it took me ages to come to one of your workshops because I felt threatened by your approach to not having a system; I worried that I might start to doubt the validity of everything I've learned and believed in!' Wow! What incredible self-awareness and honesty! 

What probably confused them (or relieved them) was that in the first few minutes of the weekend I encourage everyone to disagree with anything i say; to simply shout out and speak up at any time if they disagree with me or to call bull%&*t on me if they think it right to do so. 

Truth is, I don't want people to agree with me, we rounded off pretty much every exercise with a group feedback session, I wanted to hear that things didn't work as much as i wanted to hear that they did!
Sure enough, without exception we found that when we were being honest, something that worked amazingly for one person, had the opposite effect on another. There really is no magic pill in anything! 

I hear way too many stories from students about workshops that people have attended with a super knowledgeable, yet super over-bearing or defensive teacher who wont stand for their viewpoint to be questioned let alone criticised. It says to me simply that those 'senior teachers' are afraid. They are afraid that they won't stand up to question, they lack confidence in the fact that other points of view are possible equally or even more valid than theirs and quite possibly they are reluctant to evolve and learn from those that they have separated as 'students' with less knowledge than them. Everyone is very quick to pay lip service to the term 'always a student' but do you really mean it? Especially if you are perceived as a teacher? Its just a question.

No-one likes to feel like a dinosaur with outdated knowledge, but the simple fact is there is ALWAYS someone that is more knowledgeable than you. There is always someone tougher than you, always someone faster than you. So how does this link to the benefit of being an idiot? Its all to do with having a fools state of mind and being content with the fact that you are, underneath it all, an incompetent idiot :)

I was very kindly complimented on the way that I described the often complicated mechanics and chemistry of breathing and was even more  shocked to be complimented (by a Buddhist) on the way i described a fairly simple yet often over complicated teaching of Buddhism in relation to the sensation of breath in the body. Chatting with Charlie, who I consider to  be an amazing teacher in his own field, he said that I made complicated things sound simple (funny because I think that he does the same with lucid dreaming and shadow-work) .
We both came to the conclusion that what we both do is to assume that everyone in the room is as stupid as we are!  

It took me ages to get these concepts clear in my own head. I came up with all sorts of odd visual ways of understanding them. I was always the odd on out in the science department, being far more creative than scientific by nature. To understand the trickier aspects of various philosophies has taken me even longer. Hence all of my odd stories of blood cells as DHl delivery vans carrying orders of bread and footsteps in dark alleys to explain the concept of emptiness.

To allow yourself to be criticised openly, to have your teaching questioned is an unnerving thing, but incredibly powerful if you allow it to happen.
At the end of the weekend I taught a brief exercise and explained what i thought the benefits of two variations were, I then got cross questioned by one of our own TT graduates (thats what they get used to doing!) and I realized that actually I didn't understand fully what I had just said because I couldn't answer her question.

What happens at this point? You generally react without thinking to a sensation in your body that says Im Under attack! You assume you are reacting to the person or the question but no, just to a sensation.
What works best at this point is to simply accept 'Im a fool as much as anyone else here and this is a great opportunity to re-examine something that I thought I'd understood. Either I've misread it somewhere, misunderstood it or explained it badly. My job now is to go back to the source and re-explore that topic to find out which it is. At this point i must be thankful to the person that has made such an astute question, they aren't my enemy, they are the enemy of my ego and my egos enemy is my friend; that is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

So allow yourself to be a fool, an idiot. Allow your ego to be abused and attacked. Allow yourself to be imperfect and wrong. Encourage criticism or questioning. Don't defend your views simply on the basis that they are 'your views'. You will find that you open up. You provide space for your students to open up and be imperfect too. That acceptance and empowerment is the sign of a useful teacher. 

I found this nice snippet from an article online, sadly i cant credit it as i cant see who wrote it but it relates to the fool archetype that exists in almost every philosophy and religion.

The Fool keeps us humble by revealing our limitations, and shows that anything is possible when you let go of expectations.
The Fool teaches us the healing power of laughter.
The Fool inspires us to share our joy and sadness so that others may laugh and learn and grow.
The Fool is never what you expect, reminding us to see the world with new eyes.
The Fool provides relief from pain and stress with an indulgence in the silly, the frivolous, and the funny.
And the Fool stings us out of complacence and stagnation, returning us to the path of growth with a blush on our face and a sting in our pride.