Tag Archives: teachers

Adam Keen – On Yoga & the Quest for Meaning

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I am so delighted to bring to you Adam Keen. Adam is an amazing Ashtanga Yoga teacher who is constantly seeking answers and finding the big questions. He has his own podcast called Keen on Yoga and offers instruction via his  online teaching platform. During this conversation we discuss topics like:

  • how to investigate yoga practice from the angle of self care
  • the true purpose of yoga and how to access it
  • Ashtanga Yoga in the modern world
  • the benefits of Yoga on mental health
  • and so much more

Visit Adam on his website: keenonyoga.com
Find him on Youtube here: ADAM ON YOUTUBE
Follow him on Instagram: Keen_on_Yoga
Enroll in his upcoming Yoga and Mental Health Workshop here.

You can listen to the full episode for free here.

Todd McLaughlin

I’m so happy to have Adam Keen here today. Adam, how are you?

Adam Keen

Fine, lovely to be here. Thanks for inviting me. It’s really always a pleasure to be the guest rather than the interviewee. I’ve always said to people that it is actually easier to be a guest than it is to be an interviewee. To be the interviewer is challenging. When I hear people critique my interviewing style, I always say, well, I’ll set you up with the podcast next time you have a go. Because it’s really not easy, you know, to get that balance, right. And I’ve done over 100 on the Keen on Yoga podcast. Yeah, maybe 150 interviews now, and I’m still still working at it.

Todd McLaughlin 

Oh, definitely. Well, on that note, you have your own podcast Keen On Yoga. I’m curious, who are your inspirations if you are to listen to another interviewer? Or who have you gained a lot of inspiration from other interviewing styles? 

Adam Keen

Yeah. It’s a good question. I only listened to the older ones. I mean, obviously, you know, we’ve got a shout out to Peg Mulqueen at Ashtanga Yoga Dispatch. She has been out there for several years now. I’ve gained a lot of inspiration from from Peg obviously. I have a lot of respect for Peg for doing and you know, starting what she did so early and getting it out there with all those teachers so early. So I listened to that over the years from when she started. You know, I listen to Harmony and Russell’s podcast. I find Russell hilarious. You know Russell is a very funny guy and a friend and I’ve had him on the podcast, I find him very funny. Yeah, I know, bits and bobs. I look at stuff, at different interviews on YouTube. Yeah. Is that alright?

Todd McLaughlin

That is all right. Good answer. I was just curious. Sometimes I think that if I want to learn something here, let me let me listen to some of the greats. So that is why I am curious if there’s some people that that inspire you? 

Adam Keen

Yeah. I mean, the thing is, and I don’t want to derail this to a talk about podcasts or the kind of ins and outs of being an interviewer. It is really hard thing. And you never know how hard it is until you actually do it, you know, because you want to try and get out of the way. And the difficulty is, if you’ve got something to say, like me, you end up getting too much in the way. So people I admire are able to ask the questions and somehow get out of the way enough. Because when you come in tune into someone, I know as well as anyone else, you don’t want to hear the interviewer. You want to hear the guest. Nevertheless, I tend to still speak too much in the podcast, and I always berate myself for this afterwards. I just wish I’d shut up more, you know. And so I suppose the people I respect are the people that have managed to kind of corral the interview and conduct it in such a manner that it feels they’ve guided it. Interviewers are like a great waiter, you know, seamlessly at the table. They’re never hanging at the table, and you don’t want them there. But they’re always on hand when you need them. I mean, in England  one you probably don’t know, maybe do? Do you know Jonathan Ross? 

Todd McLaughlin

I don’t. 

Adam Keen

He’s a famous interviewer. Yeah, he’s a famous English interviewer. He’s been around many years, and he’s quite good in terms of giving people space. These are on the BBC on television. 

Todd McLaughlin

Nice. Nice. 

Adam Keen

Yeah. So yeah, that’s cool. You go, oh, I appreciate that. 

Todd McLaughlin

When did you start practicing yoga?

Adam Keen

Yeah, straight into that one. When did I start practicing? It was in 1999, I think when I started I was at university. And I’ve told this story many times, but I’ll tell again, the obvious backdrop of how I started is that I was depressed. I was studying philosophy, as most students of philosophy are. Probably, I don’t know, what comes first? The chicken or the egg? You know, like, whether the propensity is there with a philosophy student to be depressed. It ends up you know, they call it a counselor, the therapy area of the university. So I was in therapy. And then the teacher said, the therapist said, well, you know, you and everyone else in philosophy here is depressed as well. So, I find that kind of funny, but I also found that kind of concerning. The people that come into philosophy, obviously, are the people that had questions about life. We’re using the vehicle of lucid thinking, you know, rational thinking, to work those big questions out, and it didn’t work out. And that was what shocked me. Because, you know, as an 18 year old, when I went to uni, you know, I thought it would work out. I really thought that you could think your way out of your problems in life, you know. And what I realized is that you couldn’t do that. And so I started with movement practice. I thought I was going to be tai chi but that conflicted with my night life at uni. That class was on a good drinking night and so I didn’t do the tai chi. And there was a yoga class that was on a different night, there was, you know, it was a free night, you know, non drinking. So I thought I’d go on to that. But there’s something in maybe I intuitively thought there’s something in the body, right? If it can’t be done through the mind, it must be something in the energy of the body, that’s throwing up these negative thought patterns that I’m suffering from. I thought that could maybe be changed, like a, you know, rewiring a, you know, electrical thing or, you know, like reconditioning a car engine or something. There’s something wrong with the engine, you know, that’s making these thoughts happen, rather than the other way around. Thinking that if you could think more clearly, you know, then then everything would be okay. So, I stumbled into yoga classes. Most people do. It was a hatha yoga class. It was slow, but it was challenging at the time, I was not really in good shaper. You know, as you’re not when you’re in that that period of time when you’re kind of late teens and early 20’s. You generally kind of suddenly fall off the bandwagon. You know when you’re a bit younger. I was into football, I was into martial arts, at that certain age, you kind of you just let it go. I think when women get involved we’re not really, not that it’s their fault, but they come on the scene and then that encourages bad behavior on your part. Then more drinking and reducing the the things you should do so. So that was my life at that time. Outside of philosophy, and I was not in good shape. And I found yoga to be incredibly challenging even in the easier class. I remember doing bow pose, Dhanurasana. And finding that was very, very painful. Same with forward folds. That also was incredibly challenging, almost unbearably painful. Yes. So I wasn’t flexible. I wasn’t flexible at all. It just kind of struck me though that after the first class yoga was something that I had to do. Just for my own mental health, it felt like it was definitely the right thing to do. In terms of the responsible thing to do. To take care of myself, you know, because at that time, I was also prescribed antidepressants, I was on them, you know, and I’m not gonna say anything about medication. There’s a whole lot of debate out there about medication. So I felt though that I didn’t want to be on it forever. I felt that it wasn’t something I wanted. Maybe I felt I could maybe do without them. But I couldn’t maybe just come off it just like that. So that was a really another really fundamental reason to get to that yoga class and try and do something for myself. Rather than just, you know, go to the therapy and get the prescription. With that method I felt rather disempowered. I felt like I was out of control. And the yoga made me think, basically, on a basic fundamental level that I was doing something that put me back in control. Taking control of the situation, you know. But then on my plan to get into Ashtanga Yoga or, or become good at it, you know, the asanas, that kind of happened. Just because I had to be dedicated for the mental health reasons to be quite honest with you. Yeah, I did it every day. From 15 minutes a day, and expanded to 30 minutes a day. And then I expanded it a bit longer. At that time in England, yoga was the generally the domain of like, a certain middle aged lady. At this time, you know, not necessarily the case now, but at the time, it was, like an older lady who made the mainstay of these classes. They basically kicked me out in the end. The attitude at the time was that yoga was not really for a young guy. I was 19 or 20 as a bit feisty, you know. I was pushing buttons with the questions I was asking. 

You can listen to the full episode for free here: https://nativeyogacenter.buzzsprout.com

Thanks for reading this blog post from this YouTube video. Check out: 
Native Yoga Teacher Training – In Studio and Livestream – for info delivered to your email click this link here: https://info.nativeyogacenter.com/native-yoga-teacher-training-2023/

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New Student FREE 30 Minute Yoga Meet & Greet ~ Are you new to Native Yoga Center and have questions that you would like us to address? Whether you are coming to In Studio, Livestream or Online Recorded Classes we offer a one time complimentary 30 minute zoom meeting to answer any questions you may have. Schedule a time that is convenient for you. Click Here

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Instagram: @nativeyoga
YouTube channel: Native Yoga Center

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Please email special requests and feedback to info@nativeyogacenter.com

Conversation with Eric Shaw ~ The Sacred Thread of Yoga Philosophy

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Ever wonder if there is more to yoga than yoga postures? Join my guest Eric Shaw for a discussion around his new book called Sacred Thread: A Comprehensive Yoga Timeline: 2000 Events that Shaped Yoga History.  Eric’s teachings and passions have been influenced significantly by his teachers, in particular Shandor Remete and Rod Stryker. You can visit Eric on his website at prasanayoga.com and you can purchase a copy of Eric’s new book on Amazon here.

During this conversation we discussed:

  • the history and philosophy of yoga
  • the timeline associated with modern yoga
  • the origins of yoga in relation to the archeological findings at Mohenjo-daro
  • Eric’s experience with Iyengar yoga
  • What yoga was like on the West Coast of USA during its peak
  • Yoga as a global realization vs. a cultural specific identity

and quite a few more topics.

You can listen to the full podcast episode with Eric Shaw on our podcast site here.

Todd McLaughlin

I am so excited to have the opportunity to join in conversation with Eric Shaw today. Please find him on his website, prasanayoga.com. You can click the link in the description to easily access his work. He is the author of a book called BKS Iyengar and the Making of Modern Yoga. And he has also just released a new book called Sacred Thread: A Comprehensive Yoga Timeline: 2000 Events That Shaped Yoga History. 

Eric Shaw

Yeah, yes. 

TM

Thank you, Eric. And I’m so happy to have this chance to speak with you. I love yoga philosophy. And you’ve done a lot study. And on that note, can you fill me and the listener in….have you gotten your doctorate degree yoga studies?

ES

No, I’ve done a lot of a lot of academic work. I started a doctoral program in 2004, finished my studies in 2011 and pretty much got the knowledge base that I desired at that time. I was able to parlay that into practical purposes. It’s kind of like I feel like it’s something I want to do that is like climbing Mount Everest. 

But yeah, I didn’t get it done at that point in my life. I could talk all day about why it didn’t happen. Yet I did get a master’s degree out of it and I got a knowledge base. It was quite useful for me for writing work and lecturing work in the yoga world.

TM

Nice. Well, when you had to write a thesis for your masters, what did you base your thesis on?

ES

I based it on the life of BKS Iyengar. I did a very deep study of him. Partly because his followers were so prominent in the Bay Area where I was working in San Francisco. And because that system, according to my training was so alien to me. I was so confronted by it. Iyengar’s system, as everyone knows who studied it, it’s arguably the most comprehensive yoga system out there. You know, unless you went to some ancient system, perhaps as far as the modern systems go, it’s complexity, it’s philosophy, it’s understanding the body and the way that it’s set up structurally to function. The Iyengar view of function in yoga is very clear and vastly articulated. So the people who teach it, have a pedagogy, a pedagogical style, a teaching style, which is strangely aggressive. That’s to say, all those things were quite confronting to me when I arrived in the Bay Area in 2004. After training in Kripalu Yoga and other forms of yoga, which were much more meditative, and much more I thought holistic based. Pranayama based in spiritual aims. Here I was faced with this very physical culturalist yoga, which some people from that tradition might argue with me as characterizing it that way. But to me, it was so body centric and so awesomeness centric. That I think it’s kind of strange to say in the year 2022, because yoga has become more and more and more body centric. I mean, it’s been a processes happening for hundreds of years. But it seems like it’s only been accelerated. It’s come into the American context. But for me, that was difficult. And part of my working that out, to write this mono focal paper on my anger.

TM

Wow! Let me back up so I can get a timeline of your history of practice. When did you start practicing yoga? What was your first introduction to the yoga world?

ES

It’s kind of an interesting, funny story, given my history. My parents were ministers. And they were very open minded liberal ministers. They come from the west coast. So it’s very much different from the south where I’m living now. Yeah, yeah. Me talking about Christianity in this part of the world. But where I came from, they were liberals, they were, you know, anti war protesters. They were raging leftist. So I did get a political orientation in my Christian experience, but it wasn’t a right wing one, it was a radical left wing. So that was my background. And so there was a certain openness there to intellectuality at all levels. So when I told my parents I was an atheist, they didn’t bat an eye. When I told my parents that I was into Eastern traditions and studying Buddhism and meditation, they didn’t bat an eye, you know. So that became my practice very early on in my early 20s, and very much a life saving practice, because my mind was kind of out of control. And it may still sound that way. But meditation helped me control my life. And I dove right into meditation and have maintained that practice to this very day. 

TM

Got it. 

ES

So like, I did some early investigation in Buddhist traditions. And it wasn’t till the early 90s that I joined Siddha Yoga, which is the Hindu tradition, I actually did that in the midst of a time I was studying Christianity and a Religious Studies degree in many Minneapolis, Minnesota. But that kind of opened the Hindu world to me a little bit. And then when I started practicing Hatha Yoga in 2000, then I started to investigate Hinduism more properly and understand how different it was from the Buddhist tradition. How much richer, how much more embracing of the human experience and all of its aspects and even culture in all of its aspects. And so it was incredibly compelling to me, given my background and it pretty much became a gestalt experience for me, I just dove right into it.

TM

Wow. You made mention of the appreciation for Iyengar tradition and Iyengar’s guru being Krishnamacharya. Did you investigate other practices with any other teachers under that lineage?

ES

Yeah, actually with quite a few. I mean, the Bay Area, as I said, was a hotbed of strong Iyengar teachers. So it was easy to study with strong teachers who not only came to town to teach, but who were residents there. So my chief preceptor was Tony Briggs and he had a relationship to Shandor Remete, who was my primary teacher. A teacher I’d met actually was still in Portland, Oregon and before 2004 started studying with Matt Hewish at the time, who was a primary follower of Shandor. Strange to talk about Shandor in the Iyengar context, because few people even know that he studied with Iyengar. He actually stayed with him for 20 years, extremely long time and he was actually the president of the Iyengar Federation in Australia. But he made a jump to  embrace of martial arts and Bharatanatyam yoga, or rather Indian dance and he integrated into practices that he claimed to have learned at the Chidambaram temple in India into a new form that he called Shadow yoga. He’s continued to evolve his forms and change the names of them, but I learned from him and his teaching was profound and very vinyasa based, very movement based. But he was an Iyengar teacher. And then Tony. Tony had worked with Shandor, or so that was my connection with Tony. But Tony was a classic Iyengar teacher. I mean, he was gonna put you in a pose and hold you there and break it down into all its constituent parts in which muscles are engaged, and released and yada, yada, yada. So that training and another with Ramadan Patel and other big names in the Bay Area helped me understand asana and the alignment perspective, which I feel is, is very, very important. I mean, it’s at so many levels. But then I also worked with Paul Grilley, who was into kind of destroying the whole alignment concept. So I got a lot of a lot of input around yogic philosophy and yoga practice in those years that are invaluable.

TM

Amazing, just to touch upon what you just mentioned, I’ve enjoyed watching Paul Grilley’s work around anatomy and yin yoga, can you explain how Paul’s philosophy shatter that existing idea of alignment that you were studying? Can you tell me what that means? Or what that sounds like?

ES

Yeah, yeah. And it’s a good story. I think for anybody who wants to be a serious practitioner of yoga, I think it’s important to understand alignment principles, particularly from the Iyengar perspective, but it’s also very important to understand their limits. And Paul has done the spade work, he’s done the deep work in defining those limits. And I’m just shocked that so few people know his work, because it’s utterly revolutionary. Even if you don’t have Iyengar as a conversation partner for it. So Paul Grilley, you know, he’s ostensibly known for his work in yin yoga. And that’s how I first understood him and met him in yoga was my actually my teaching practice early on, because he was one of the first major teachers I met in Portland, Oregon. I wrote a small profile for him for a local yoga magazine, and we got to be friends. Then he was in an early video company making videos on yoga, you know, and when DVD still existed. A group of people there in San Francisco, who I met and hung out with, and then Paul was a part of that group, and he came down to do yoga videos there. And so he wrote, when I was there in San Francisco, and he recorded his Yoga Anatomy DVD, in which he distills all of his knowledge around bony limits in the body. So it’s the skeletal structure of the body, which determines which poses you can get and in which you can’t. And that’s, I know, that’s a very black and white statement. But it’s actually quite true that the soft tissue, of course, creates limits that we can push through in the attempt to attain any given Asana. And that’s what Iyengar practices are based on. That there is a limitless potential to achieve anything in yoga. Paul Grilley’s work debunked that theory in a way showing that bone structure does create limitation as to how far we can push into a posture. What he really determined and demonstrated directly in that DVD by comparing different human bodies, that the length of your bones, the orientation of the bones, in a given joint, the way it spirals out of that joint, the way it engages with the next joint in the chain determines whether or not any given poses even available. And that’s for a yoga teacher, who is attempting to guide students of different shapes and sizes into positions, proposes knowledge that is absolutely critical. Particularly if you’ve been trained in Iyengar yoga, because it does not integrate that knowledge. In fact, it’s kind of philosophically opposed to it.

Listen to the full episode with Eric Shaw for free on our podcast site here.

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New Student FREE 30 Minute Yoga Meet & Greet ~ Are you new to Native Yoga Center and have questions that you would like us to address? Whether you are coming to In Studio, Livestream or Online Recorded Classes we offer a one time complimentary 30 minute zoom meeting to answer any questions you may have. Schedule a time that is convenient for you. Click Here

Native Yoga website: nativeyogacenter.com
Online Yoga Class Library: nativeyogaonline.com
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Native Yoga Blog: toddasanayoga.com
Instagram: @nativeyoga
YouTube channel: Native Yoga Center

Listen to the podcast here on our Podcast website: Native Yoga Toddcast

Please email special requests and feedback to info@nativeyogacenter.com
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