Heaven and Earth: Why I Teach Both
People are sometimes puzzled that the same person teaches a martial art and writes about yoga and the older esoteric traditions. To me it is one subject seen from two ends: the body, which is the most concrete thing we have, and the mind, which is the least.
Staying on the ground
I like the physical side because it is honest. You cannot fake a good position or a steady breath. Anything I believe has to survive contact with that.
Looking up
I also read the older texts and traditions: yoga, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, alchemy. I find them useful as maps of attention, and as records of what people noticed about themselves long before there was a vocabulary for psychology. I read them with respect, and with questions.
My rule
I try to keep four things apart: what a tradition says, what a symbol can mean to a person, what I have experienced myself, and what is a claim about the world. The first three are valuable. The fourth needs evidence. When something mixes them up, I say so.
Why it matters
Polarisation makes people choose: the hard-nosed person who thinks the inner life is nonsense, or the seeker who thinks the body is a distraction. I think both lose something. The practice I find most useful is to keep both in view: feet on the mat, attention open.
That is also the idea behind this site, and behind The Slow Initiation: foundations before mysteries.
A free guide
If you like reading about yoga and the older traditions, I go deeper on my YouTube channel, The Slow Initiation. Leave your email, confirm it, and I will send you a free PDF guide, Yoga Starts Before the Poses. After that you will hear about new videos. Nothing else.
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