Sobriety, Mindful Action and Yoga
Episode #2: a podcast with Hilary Brown and Rolf Gates
What is wise action? How can our asana practice create space for self aware life?
In this second episode of Conversations Beyond the Mat Hilary talks with Rolf Gates, one of the leading voices of modern yoga. A former social worker and US Airborne Ranger who has practiced meditation for the last twenty years, Rolf brings his eclectic background to his practice and his teachings. Hilary Brown is the founder & creative director of Yoga Moves Training Programs in the Netherlands.
Excerpt from full transcript:
Hilary:
What do you want people to know about your background, your essential background story? Just so people that don’t know you, understand where you came from?
Rolf:
I think that maybe the most important thing people ask me about, is what’s up with being in the military and then becoming a yoga teacher? And for me that wasn’t particularly inconsistent and incongruent. The way it’s described in the States is “you’re in the service” and I was called to that. My parents were professors and there was this kind of service to your community thing. I was young, so the military sounded like a good idea. Then as I got older, my content of ‘service’ kind of developed. But really what I think is the foundation of my yoga teaching is that I got sober in my mid-twenties, in a 12-step program, which is an explicitly spiritual practice. You get sober through spiritual practice, which is not that far from the concept of one of the central tenants of 12 steps sobriety. Your sobriety is maintained by your spiritual condition. And so there’s this kind of daily commitment to your spiritual condition. And in that world, it’s called practice. So someone went into yoga, and I heard the term Sadhana. Which is much the same. In a 12 step program, you develop your program, and it’s like your program of recovery. It’s the spiritual disciplines you put into place to make your life work, is called your program. And so when I went into yoga, and I met the concept of Sadhana where it’s this set of spiritual practices you use to kind of cultivate your heart and your mind. That made perfect sense to me. And I was like “Oh, these people are the same as me, basically. These people and this concept.” And so that’s how I stepped into yoga was through my 12 step work.
Hilary:
Did you see the parallel right away? Or is that something that came through the years of digesting?
Rolf:
No, it was pretty immediate. I just remember this guy was from Boston, like I am. And he explained Sadhana to me. And it clicked immediately, because I kind of galvanized around the idea of putting up your program. It’s called a program of action, where you select priorities and how you live one day at a time. And so there’s this ‘one day at a time’-thing and within those 24 hours “this is my program”. And the way that you maintain your health and wellness is by putting a lot of focus on your program, like how do you live this 24 hour period. And a phrase I was taught was “Putting together a sober day”. So how do you create a sober day? And to me, there’s so much congruence between how a Buddhist thinks or how a yogi thinks in terms of really looking at that 24 hour period and living wisely.
Hilary:
That’s really beautiful. I really appreciate that I have had some experience with the 12-steps, having lived in a household of various levels of addiction. Some people being in recovery, for better or for worse. So I’ve really been around that and I understand what you mean by the service. You find out you try to help yourself and then by helping yourself, you turn that around and pretty soon you have to help somebody else. Because you can only serve yourself so long, before you realize you have to give the gift back.
Rolf:
Yeah, that’s the phrase “You got to give it away, to keep it”. 12-step programs are profoundly effective teachers of how to live a spiritual life. There’s something about being in this communal setting, being able to be in a community seven days a week. I don’t want to put it on a pedestal. But I just want to say that you can imagine the value of going every day to groups of 30-40-50 people, talking about how they’re using spiritual practice to make their life work. Can you think of a more practical way to learn spiritual practice and to do so in the context of a community talking about how they’re developing their spiritual practice?
Hilary:
That idea of ‘Coming to church’ and ‘Going to God’, it’s like that. That’s the kind of spiritual practice.
Rolf:
It’s what I was doing every day. The group I belonged to was called ‘People helping people’. So there’s that piece too. A lot of the resistance I think people have, is to listen and to learn. Another is to ask for help. So this was a situation where listening and learning was the only game in town. And then the other thing you would do is ask for help. So it’s a great foundation for a spiritual practice.