We've talked a lot on this podcast about the selfie sermon: the kind of iPhone video native to Instagram influencers. Easily weaponized by conspiritualists, this sermon is equal parts intimate confessional, prophecy download, and motivational coaching, directly transmitted from your favorite self-anointed maverick expert. Social media seems perfectly designed for such hypnotic performances and spiritual darshans. But in the brick-and-mortar world, yoga teachers have long blurred the line between acting and teaching, space holding and theater, and ritual ceremony and fitness. If all the world's a stage, as Shakespeare had it, the wooden planks of the yoga studio—and the digital platforms built in ether—demand that teachers embrace a role, adopt a script, and sell a story to their audience. What we want to know is: where does the performance end and yoga begin, or perhaps more to the point, is there even a difference?Our guest host today is Jill Miller, who many listeners will know from her hugely influential body of work in yoga and movement as founder of Tune-Up Fitness. She's also a former actor, which played an important role in her transition to full-time yoga instructor. We're going to start today with an excerpt from her 2017 TED-style talk that she gave in Toronto titled, “Lights, Camera, Yoga."
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Conspirituality 80, Lights, Camera, Yoga, with Jill Miller.
We've talked a lot on this podcast about the Selfie Sermon, the kind of iPhone video native to Instagram influencers.
Easily weaponized by conspiritualists, this sermon is equal parts intimate confessional, prophecy download, and motivational coaching, directly transmitted from your favorite self-anointed maverick expert.
Social media seems perfectly designed for such hypnotic performances and spiritual darshans.
But in the brick-and-mortar world, yoga teachers have long blurred the line between acting and teaching, space-holding and theatre, and ritual ceremony and fitness.
If all the world's a stage, as Shakespeare had it, the wooden planks of the yoga studio and the digital platforms built in ether demand that teachers embrace a role, adopt a script, and sell a story to their audience.
What we want to know is where does the performance end and yoga begin, or perhaps more to the point, is there even a difference?
Our guest today is Jill Miller, who many listeners will know from her hugely influential body of work in yoga and movement as founder of TuneUp Fitness.
She's also a former actor, which played an important role in her transition to full-time yoga instructor.
We're going to start today with an excerpt from her 2017 TED-style talk that she gave in Sorrento, titled, Lights, Camera, Yoga.
At their heart, yoga teachers and actors are ambassadors of hosting peak experiences for audiences in ritualized communal settings.
They help the respective audiences to experience a journey through somatic and emotional landscapes.
The actor is the figure who sacrifices his own soma for the embodiment of the story and its stresses by diving into the script.
His experience is transferred and transmuted into thin air.
It's absorbed and re-experienced by the audience.
The yoga teacher carefully crafts circumstances for each pupil.
To journey into their own body and psyche.
They are the protagonist and hero of their own flow state within the class.
The teacher constructs the parameters of practice that the students adopt.
The teacher orchestrates a scenario where each student may trek through their own embodied valleys and peaks.
Both art forms end with a lights-out moment.
For the actor, the curtain closes.
For the yoga teacher, their eyes close in the darkened room for Shavasana.
But what happens when the stage lights and classroom lights bathe the teacher or performer after they've done their jobs?
At curtain call, the actor's stage presence is applauded, and she bows down to her audience.
The audience never bows back.
The yoga teacher shares presents with her class and mutually bows down to her students.
Jill, welcome to the podcast.
That was you in 2017.
How are you?
Well, I had had no sleep that night prior to that teaching, but I had a lot of sleep last night, this current night, four years later.
Thank you very much for asking.
Well, that's you in 2017.
It's great to hear that again.
It was a TED style talk called Lights, Camera, Yoga, as Julian said.
I just want to do a little bit of a setup for this.
So this was kind of my fault because I was working as a consultant for Yoga Alliance at the time.
And I pitched them this idea of curating a kind of TED Talk event on, you know, yoga issues that I thought were kind of cutting edge.
So my supervisor at the time, Andrew Tanner, he gave me the green light, he gave me some money, and I went out and I booked Diane Bondy to talk about being black in modern yoga spaces, Carol Horton to talk about how she moved from political science science research to yoga service research.
We had Andrea Jane talking about being a yoga scholar of Indian heritage, researching neoliberalism and cultural appropriation.
And then we also had my friend Michael Stone, who I asked in the spirit of provocation, but, you know, not without a little bit of smugness on my part to talk about how he managed the negative impacts of his own charisma as a yoga celebrity.
And, you know, one of the reasons that this event was never broadly released, and your talk, Jill, has been sort of hiding in the internet for a while, is that Michael died a few months later in his car in downtown Victoria of fentanyl poisoning.
He bought street drugs, probably to try and self-medicate his bipolar disorder.
And so the topic of that talk was just too on the nose for any of us to deal with because I had asked him to dissect his own charisma, which I now understand was a like a primal defense against something that eventually overwhelmed him.
And I'm mentioning it because that story kind of reflects on our topic today, which is in part about the difference between yoga practice and yoga performance, and it's about what we really know about the person who is on the stage and what they're actually going through.
And in the background, too, is this general ghost of charisma, which, as we discuss at length on the podcast, is a key ingredient of conspirituality influencing.
But this all brings me to, I also invited you!
And so, what do you remember me asking you to do, and how did you feel about it at the time?
Okay, I remember feeling really disgusted with the invitation.
Not that I didn't want to give a talk, but I have this part of my past that I didn't really want to examine fully because I felt a lot of shame around having been a, I'll do air quotes, failed actor.
And that I had invested 30 years of my life, more than 30 years of my life, in the art of performance.
Music, singing, dance, and acting.
And in Los Angeles, which I mean I moved out to after I started the theater company in Chicago after I graduated school there, and then I moved out to LA, you know, to make it.
Like all the dreamers who moved out here.
And not being able to pay the rent really was psychologically just such a huge blow.
And then I moved into the healing arts, which had always been with me, and healing arts were my salve in all the years of art making.
Like, I needed the yoga to come down.
And really, it became the fallback for me.
And so when you asked me to do this thing, I knew I had a lot to say about it, but I was like, oh my god, I really, I don't know if I really want to Talk about it.
And, um, but it was you.
I like you so much!
I was like, well, I'm gonna learn a lot from this.
And the other people involved were such, um, titans in my eyes.
And I knew I was a really good company, having been asked, and that I should probably do it.
It was one of those things that, um, I can't remember the yogic term for it, but when something repulses you, maybe you should go towards it and investigate what is that impulse in you.
So that was what I did and how I came to the decision to do it.
So thank you!
I don't know if you ever told me that it disgusted you and I'm kind of glad that you didn't because I might have backed off.
Matthew, when I viewed the video, which I mean I saw it like four years later, I saw it at some point during the pandemic when Andrew and I reconnected.
And I watched it, and I see my defensiveness, and I see some of my disgust.
There's a lot of intensity in there still, and I re-watched it just a few days ago, right as we prepared for this, and I saw some of the same feelings.
It's very unresolved feels inside of me about it all, but I'm still glad I did it.
I learned a lot.
I'm still learning a lot.
Well, I think it's also what contributed to the fact that it was on fire.
Like, it was a lit, you know, 25 minutes, and I don't think that happens unless... You're supposed to be 18!
And I don't think that happens unless somebody is, you know, working something out.
And let's get into the heart of it because you open your talk with three questions that I think will help set the stage for our listeners.
So you ask, if Swami Kripalu Vinoda had succeeded as an actor instead of a yoga master, would Kripalu Yoga exist?
2.
If Krishnamacharya hadn't pushed his students to perform asana demos all over India, would a non-performance-based yoga practice have emerged?
Probably not, because no one would have seen it.
His most famous student, Iyengar, went on to become the original selfie guru.
And then finally, you say, and in 1984, referring to yourself, if this 12-year-old tween and her mom hadn't bought a copy of Raquel Welch's yoga video, Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness, might I have never been transformed by this journey of yoga?
Okay, so let's go one at a time here.
I'll ask you these starters, and I know that Derek and Julian might pitch in details as well.
When you refer to Kripal Vinanda, who is this?
What did you learn about him?
Who is this guy?
Well this was Amrit Desai's guru.
Right.
And he was a failed actor in India.
Right.
And he had relationships like with apparitions.
Like his guru came to him through multiple forms and I mean I don't know all that much about him but it seems a little sketchy to me.
Like the transmission of the knowledge coming through reincarnates here and there.
So that's what I know about him.
Not a lot.
What do you know about him?
He also inspired Amartya Sai's kind of improvisational, fluid asana dance stuff.
And he did that because his sense was that, much like any kind of flow state action, that yoga practice wasn't supposed to be static.
It wasn't Oh cool!
Promoting yoga!
about hitting one's mark.
So there's only a few photographs of him and he's just sort of twirling.
He was a dancer, so he kept that up.
Oh, cool.
Okay, how about Krishnamacharya?
I mean, we can add some details here, but what were the demonstrations about?
Promoting yoga, promoting his school, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Wasn't Iyengar his like in-law or nephew or was a relative of his?
Yeah.
And much younger and it was his dog pony, right?
It was his show pony and He made him perform feats of asana all over the country, right?
To raise money?
I don't know, you tell me.
He was actually enlisted by the, or Krishnamacharya was enlisted by the Maharaja of Wadiur to do demonstrations throughout Mysore and the surrounding area.
to promote yoga as a kind of physical culture that was indigenous to India and part of the incipient public education program.
So they were trying to sort of validate and attract and recruit the attention and the excitement of regular citizens to participate in this thing that was going to become their national fitness culture.
And yeah, so Iyengar ends up doing, as he says, like up to 15,000 yoga demonstrations in his life or something like that.
Before that, what was interesting was that the way that he initially got people into his school before the Maharaja was that he would take a sort of plowshare or something that the horses would pull and put rope around it and put it in his mouth and pull it.
Oh yeah, he was a strongman.
Strongman stuff.
It was even predating yoga.
And his whole reasoning, from what I understand, was that he wanted people to believe that yoga was going to make you this strong.
So he wasn't even doing asanas, he was just doing shows of strength in order to get people into his school.
And Krishnamachari also had recurring bouts of of financial troubles even after the Maharaja 'cause that closed when he either died or moved on.
So that was a lifelong, he struggled for his entire life trying to make a living doing yoga. - Right, I think it was probably better off when he was pulling cars around and yeah, he was doing Jack LaLanne stuff.
You mean before he fired his agent, right?
Right.
And tried to just make a go of it as a yogi.
Just a little side note, there is a story that I haven't been able to confirm that the reason his school closed down in 1952 is the Maharaja fired him because he gave the king an adjustment by putting his foot on his head.
And crushing it down to the floor, and that just did not suit well with the king.
Okay, but moving forward in history then, you learn yoga first through Raquel Welch.
Tell us about that.
How weird is that?
Yes, it's very strange.
I was a very out-of-shape kid.
We lived in a solar home off the grid in Santa Fe, New Mexico, so we didn't have television, and I guess my mother decided that she was going to get in shape, and so she went out and she bought the Raquel Welsh yoga video, which was beta, beta max, and the Jane Fonda workout, also beta max, And I did them with her.
I bonded with my mom over these videos and I got lit.
I became absolutely obsessed with these at age 12 and I would race home every day after school and do them back-to-back.
My mom gave up literally within four or five days but something in me really connected with them and turns out that the Raquel Welsh yoga video By the way, very tight bathing suits in kind of a steam bathroom.
The opening credits, which you can see on YouTube, she is running in a camouflaged bikini alongside a Jeep on the beach.
That's the opening credits.
But it was Bikram's first series.
Yeah, and he sued her for it, right?
He sued her and he won.
Right.
I mean, that's fine.
Her career was fine without it.
She did okay anyway.
I mean, it sounds like these two fields of yoga and acting really sort of had a parallel journey for you, right, in your life.
And when we go back to the talk, you talk about the overlap between teaching yoga and performing as an actor in the following way.
I want to just quote you back to yourself.
You say, be present, keep it real, be believable.
There are many tactics that yoga teachers and actors employ to stimulate and simulate presence.
I thought that was really fascinating.
I was curious about your use of the word tactics and then also simulate.
In the service of a script.
Authenticity is like where it's at.
You want to be genuine, you want to be real, you want to be having real true emotional responses to your environment, to other partners who might be in the scene with you, and to circumstance.
And so in order for that to happen in the script, because you know the words, you know the words that are coming, you know the words that you already said, you have to plan out your emotional ride as a character.
And so if there, you know, for example, if there's something that you need to instill fear in yourself, or if there's a place where you need to have a moment of grief, you need to plot out Or implant into the script different triggers so that you have the correct emotional experience at the right time, the right beat.
Especially if it's in the service of the script, it's being filmed on camera, or if it's on the stage.
The way you magnify those emotional experiences are different depending on the medium.
Or I guess now we have cell phones it can be even, it's an even narrower lens.
So you have to set set it up and so tactics can be emotional recall so there could be you could plant in an emotional recall moment on the word burrow like maybe the word burrow is in your script or you could you know that at a certain point you get to a desk
And you're going to have a certain way you stroke the desk and the way you touch the desk is going to be that cue to trigger the emotion.
So there are different ways that you plant in these moments so that you have this true emotional recall.
And so those are, you know, simulations of Although they are very real, you're not crying, you're not fearful.
The physiology of your emotion is true, and the truer it can be, the better it's going to read on stage or screen.
Yeah, it sounds like you're saying you simulate the conditions for yourself under which the real emotion can present itself and come across authentically, yeah?
You say that both actors and yoga teachers are aware that they are aware that they're creating a present moment scenario for their respective audiences.
And this is sort of in this whole territory of the relationship between something being real and something being art or artificial, right?
Do you, is there something you're getting at here that is problematic or Just good to be aware of in maybe a slightly skeptical way about how the yoga teacher is blurring the lines in terms of performance?
I think a lot of it comes down to the yoga teacher's use of language and also their intent.
So if their intent is You know, for me the intent is I really want you to map your elbow versus the intent is I want you to find your shadow, right?
So I think the intent is going to Create the strategies to help your students locate that, whether it's locating their shadow or locating their elbow.
As a teacher, hopefully you've got a strategy to get yourself there.
I don't strategize to get people to their shadow, but there's an art form to that for sure.
You know, I think Julian's questions here actually pull back the veil on this primary anxiety in the yoga industry over the mystical concept of what you just brought up, Jill, which is authenticity and who has it and who doesn't and how is it signed and how is it shown and how can we get more of it and, you know, the group class is this performative space
in which the teacher will excel if they kind of fill it up and fill it up with something that gets read as an authentic presence and if they have some training behind them they'll do better at that and so if they get large and full and rich and authentic they'll be seen
But I think the problem is that the largeness and visibility comes to be associated with a kind of wisdom or social comfort or personal mastery and sometimes even like spiritual attainment.
It's like the person who's the extrovert and who's able to really control space is just sort of automatically conflated with the person who is the I don't know, enlightened or more enlightened or something like that.
But that's not always the reality, is it?
I mean, being able to own a room isn't the same as being, you know, okay in yourself, right?
Oh, no.
And edge is beguiling.
I mean, teachers who have a little bit of an edge and a little bit of darkness.
Yeah, that can be extremely sexy and potent to the unknowns, the unknown shadows in their students.
And then you get this sort of hall of mirrors and the adulation just cycles and recycles and recycles and recycles.
And before you know it, you're really caught up in it.
Both of you.
There's a dependency in there.
I mean, and it's so strange because the product that everybody is sort of circulating around, which is the authentic, is just some kind of spark or some kind of meeting of need with charisma that is very, very difficult to define.
But it doesn't really have any kind of qualities to it that make it either bad or good.
But in yoga, it's like the assumption is that that meeting is going to produce something positive.
The shared emotional journey is, I think, part of It's embedded in our human nature.
It's embedded in our brains.
I was listening to a podcast the other day that was talking about the power of story and how different people all over the planet listening to the same story, their heart rates will synchronize and they'll have a similar heart rate variability based on the story being told and when you're doing a yoga class or when you're in the presence of live theater that shared story is compressed in time and space and it's compressed in inside of four walls or eight walls or whatever the shape of the of the space is
And that is an emotional that's like a physiological group pro-social elixir that's very hard to get out of unless it gets unless somebody I don't want to use the word wakes up but unless somebody realizes they're they're being Their emotions are being manipulated strongly and then they start to have a physiological shift and then they can take a stand or walk out or roll up their mat or leave the theater or whatever it is.
But I think there's so much symmetry in that shared group experience and the actor who knows the script knows where it's going and the teacher can manipulate the emotion and story in the context of a class to You know, for their own...
For their own needs, or what they think are maybe the perceived needs of their students.
I always found myself attracted to instructors who made it feel as though they were speaking directly to me as well as encompassing the entire class simultaneously, which I believe is a skill.
Maybe some people naturally have it, but it also seems to be something that's learned.
You keep bringing up theater training, and I always associate yoga rooms more with theater, whereas Instagram yoga, I guess, would be more like television acting in some senses.
And they're all skill sets.
I just personally like the brick and mortar, as we call it.
And one cue I picked up from my own movement training was to utilize the entire room in every class.
So no matter how many people are in there, I wanted my presence to encompass the room.
Although, I did a little acting, but I was a playwright for a while, so that was more... I did acting to understand what the actors were going through, not because I ever wanted to actually hit at acting.
It wasn't my thing.
But what I did learn in that training was to make sure my voice hit every edge of the room, no matter where I was positioned.
So there were a lot of skills that I picked up from theater that translated very fluidly as soon as I started instructing.
When this question comes up though, I think this is an inevitable comparison and I want to entertain it here before we get more into the mechanics of this comparison we're making, which is how do you distinguish between the performative aspect of teaching and acting and the desire for adoration?
Oh, I really want to talk about the technical aspects of being in a room.
I like that part.
We are, we are.
Let's talk about acoustics.
Really?
We have to talk about adoration?
Well, it's part of your talk.
It's part of your talk that we're basing this on.
So let's get into that a little bit.
Because even in Los Angeles, I moved here 10 years ago now, and I didn't know there was a term for actors who are also yoga instructors, but I knew that that was a thing.
Well, you better explain that to the listeners, that call out.
You better explain that.
No, you better explain.
You told me that.
I only watched the video once, so that's where we'll position.
What is an M-A-Y?
Okay, so Derek, here's the deal.
I made that up for the talk, but we can make it a thing.
So in LA, there was a thing called Model, Actress, Whatever.
M-A-W.
Model, Actress, Whatever.
And for the artifice of the talk, I thought it would be funny.
You know this, Julian.
You've heard of Model, Actress, Whatever.
You live in L.A.
Totally.
So it's Model, Actress, Whatever.
Or you could say Model, Actress, Waitress.
Right?
Model, Actress, Barista.
So I just made up model, actress, yoga teacher.
So you have model, actress, whatever.
You can put any profession, entry-level, low-paying, model, actress, nanny, any of it.
Okay, but then let's get to the second part, which you're avoiding, which is that adoration.
How do you deal with that?
Especially the way yoga is presented as a spiritual endeavor and pursuit and people coming for healing, the performance, I would again argue that is an important part of that.
It's ritual.
This predates yoga studios.
But how does one deal with that?
space of like a desire for that adoration, but also trying to fulfill a role without going too far into that narcissistic side of things.
And that's something we study and cover so much on this podcast.
People have a lot of roles for you as a teacher.
They have a lot of needs that you are supposed to be fulfilling.
Seekers come to yoga.
And as a person who is also a seeker, because I don't consider myself not a seeker, I don't consider myself not a student, I understand that need and that craving for knowledge, for validation, for being accepted for your uniqueness and your quirks.
So What I say in the talk is I was, I certainly was prepared to adore others and to pedestal other people, but I had no training and no preparation for the experience of people crying when they met me, giving me gifts, giving gifts to give to my children.
Oh wow.
Mailing me money, letters, I mean, There's nothing still that prepares me other than I understand that need to be seen, and I just try to meet my students with as much mutual respect as I can, but it makes me very uncomfortable.
I don't know, Julian, if you come across this in your teaching also.
As you were talking, I was remembering the times that unexpectedly people have brought me gifts and I have not known how to handle it.
In fact, I think I've actually come across as kind of rude because it just felt so left field to me that people would randomly give me gifts.
We did have this story recently of an encounter between a student and a prominent yoga teacher at a Wanderlust Festival years and years ago.
where the teacher had put out a very famous book, and the student had been practicing out of it for months and months and months.
And they brought this book to the teacher's class at the conference and said, I've got your book.
Can you sign it?
And of course it was full of all of their handwritten notes.
And the teacher was not awkward with that.
The teacher did not rudely cast the student aside.
The teacher said, wow, this is really serendipitous and you should come to my training.
So that's the other fork in the road.
It doesn't make me want to invite in further.
For me, it's jarring.
However, I love it when I see little stickers all over my book and somebody asks me to sign it.
I mean, I ask people to sign my books.
People that I think are amazing educators.
So I'm not uncomfortable with the book autograph thing.
And it's it is really nice to see that someone's actually read your book because it took years to write it.
But yeah, I hear what you're saying there, Matthew.
So you coined model actress yoga teacher, but that's a thing.
And, you know, I think it's I've been aware of the fact for a long time that There are a lot of top-level yoga teachers, like A-list people who go to conferences, people who are on big platforms, who are, you know, actually theater, dance, or movie people, like going right back to Indra Devi.
And rock stars.
And rock stars as well.
It's a little bit of an epidemic, so I just wanted to gossip a little bit.
Let's throw out some names.
Who do we know got their sort of from the theater, movie, and dance world. - Okay, first I need to say that this isn't gossip and that what these people have mastered is stagecraft.
And they're incredible communicators and they have worked tirelessly at their art before they went into a career of yoga.
And that's one of the things that they can use to their advantage in the context of yoga classrooms.
So we jumped ahead, we didn't talk about the like acoustic properties of the voice or How you use a space, how you can selectively use a space creatively that can make a space really interesting for your students and not have it be so McDonald's land in the classroom.
Part of when you asked me to do this Talk you know I really was denigrating myself as an actor but as I dug into it and I was recognizing how many how much years I learned about set design and lighting design and acoustics and all of those things bear They show up in the yoga classroom in a way that really helps the students, I think, to move through the class.
And then there's all the anatomy and physiology and stuff.
All right, now let's talk about who are those people.
Yeah, and maybe what their techniques are.
Like if somebody has mastered acoustics or room design or things like that, I don't know what you got.
I keep using that word acoustics, I don't know why.
Okay, so top of the food chain, I also googled who is the most famous yoga teacher, you guys, in preparation for this podcast.
Who do you think it is?
It's Matthew.
Rodney Yee.
Julian, I would say Sean Corn also, but the internet said Rodney Yee.
You know what?
That's mass consumerism.
In the yoga world, if you asked that question, it would be Sean.
That's my opinion.
That's also just your algorithm, so maybe you have a Rodney thing.
No!
You do it right now!
Google it right now, Derek!
If Derek Googles it, he's going to get the guy with the singing bowl.
Right, Alan Hostetter.
Most famous yoga teacher in the world.
Yeah.
Our algorithms are totally fucked, Jill, like from doing this show.
I'm sure!
Completely fucked, yeah.
I was looking for a pediatrician, Zach Bush came up.
It was terrible.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, keep that dirt away from your daughter.
Okay.
Okay.
So, Rodney Yee was a ballerina, or a ballet person.
Ballerino?
Ballerina?
Ballerine?
Ballet person?
Ballet guy, yeah.
Ballet guy.
And then, of course, Rodney's wife, Colleen Seidman, is a model.
Cindy Lee, modern dance background.
All right.
Sheba Rae, a world cultured dancer, dancer, dancer, dance person.
Katherine Budig, actress.
Steve Ross, rock guy.
Sharon and David Gannon, they were in the performance art scene in New York City.
Sean Corn, soap opera.
Kerry Owerko, Owerko, also a dancer and theater person.
And then Mike, what I was wondering was Beryl Bender or Richard Freeman.
Now, some of your listeners may not be familiar.
First of all, I'm naming a lot of Gen X slash Baby Boomer people.
I don't know who the Millennial and Gen Z are.
I'm ashamed of myself.
I have no idea who the crossovers in that generation are.
It's an interesting question actually because I'm wondering if that if the crossover is fading because it's done its work and the and the actual performance sort of standards for yoga teaching are so well recorded on video and embedded within the the sort of zeitgeist that people that that you know millennials and zoomers can just pop right into gig working as yoga teachers picking up their theater training from online.
Mine.
Like, that's my that's my hunch.
But I think you're right is that I don't know who's like at the top of the food chain, who's, you know, in their 20s, who also has acting training.
But I think I'm a little bit out of touch, too.
Let me add this because Jill and I are both alumni from Equinox.
One of the things about Equinox is there was a moment, Matthew, and this is rolling off what you said and about that transition.
There used to be a very rigorous process of getting into Equinox.
Then it became they started hiring at least some of the clubs that I know of based on your Instagram following, not your teaching skills.
Not how you didn't have to try out, nothing of that.
But if you had 100,000 followers, you could get a job at Equinox.
And I personally know a few people that that happened to.
So that kind of changes the dynamic of performance.
Yeah, completely too.
You don't have to do anything of value as an instructor in the room.
But if you look good on the camera, there's a possibility you can get a gig.
It's funny, I remember maybe a few years before that when the transition happened where I started hearing yoga teachers who were younger than me talking about auditioning for yoga jobs.
That hadn't been a thing before, but suddenly it's like there's an audition, you go in, it's short, they want to see how you read on the stage.
So true and so terrifying.
So, I mean, a lot of what I end up having to mentor people who train with me on are some of these stagecraft or visibility, how to reach people type of qualities, you know, things that can be worked on, how you hold your body in the classroom.
How you project your voice, the porosity of your voice, and different tics that people have that hide themselves in the classroom from their students.
For example, there's crossovers here with those acting and yoga that I find really interesting.
In acting, your movements on the stage are called blocking.
And how every moment of you on stage is an emotional read to the audience as well as to other characters.
And so one of the things actors have to study a lot is body language.
We, or at least we think we're studying body language.
There's so many different theories of body language, but you work at that all the time.
And so, you know, different ways of hiding or concealing body parts or concealing zones of your body, you know, read in different ways to your audience.
This is all very culturally contextualized as well, because different cultures prize certain body parts as expressing certain things, and other cultures don't think that body part expresses a certain thing, right?
So anyway, there's anthropological stuff around this.
But to boil it down, one of the Biggest challenges for new yoga teachers who have had no theatrical training or performance training is just the fear of public speaking.
The fear of public speaking is, for some people, the most atrocious and deadly fear they have.
And so helping students to overcome that.
But one of the things that is a tell that a lot of new yoga teachers do is they conceal body parts or they find ways to hide their body in front of the classroom by I'm visible to you guys, I'm not visible to the audience, but by turning away from their students in different ways.
And so you can even use a block, like one of the things that I'll see in our practicums is the student will pick up a prop or some kind of crutch, like a strap or a block, and they'll literally hold it against their body, you know, cleave it to themselves like a safety blanket.
And these are things that, in acting training, your director or your acting coach, they will, you know, make you put these things down and, like, you know, open you up and you'll have to, like, feel the energy and deal with the emotions that come up and so on.
There's safe ways to do this in a classroom with it in the yoga context, but I find it really interesting That this word audition is being used to screen teachers, but those are the types of things that the evaluators will be looking for subconsciously.
They may not even realize that they're looking for teachers who seem open, who seem openly expressive, and who are paying attention to the students on the mat.
it isn't just about the charisma in front of the room and quote unquote how open you look, but how, in my esteem, it's how much attention you're paying and the intensity of that attention to each student in the classroom so that you can give appropriate verbal cues or coaching for given it's how much attention you're paying and the intensity of that
There's such an incredible set of paradoxes here because what you're really, what you seem to be describing is kind of like an entrainment towards comfortable extroversion.
And you know, compared to the majority of the centuries of history of yoga that we know about, that's never been what
yoga practice or contemplation has been about it's like it's it's something has turned upside down where the person who's modeling you know internalization or you know movements that will bring greater interoception or you know mindfulness that the person who's modeling that actually has to show those things through a kind of extroversion and that's just really bizarre it's like it's it's it's like an upside down world
Well, but you're not necessarily teaching introspection.
You have to cue people so that they can find introspection.
Right, right.
So it's not, you know, I can just flip a switch and I can go inside and just feel all the feels.
But what does that look like to a student?
Oh, I'm seeing Jill sense the air inside of her nose.
Wow!
There's nothing interesting about that.
It's interesting to me because I'm sensing the hairs and the turbinates and all that stuff.
But the teacher has to be able to create cue sets that evoke the story path of that experience for the student.
And so that takes some rigor to articulate that concisely.
And it has to be projected.
It's got to be audible.
Yeah, exactly.
Not only does it take the projection of it and the rigor of what it is you're actually guiding them towards, but it takes already having them along for the ride, which is all of this sort of stagecraft stuff in terms of how you're inviting them in, right?
Yeah, but the sacrifice is clear because with somebody like Iyengar, who gives 15,000 yoga demonstrations in his life,
His entire presence in the world is oriented towards showing himself to the student, not hiding his body, you know, being in a kind of open and completely accessible posture in which he's completely obsessed with every single minute detail of the surface of his skin, you know, and where the hairs are going and how this is moving and how that is moving to the point where nobody is really even asking, well, what does yoga feel like to this guy?
Right?
What does it feel like to be him?
And then you find out later that he's in chronic pain for most of the rest of his life.
He probably should have had his hips replaced.
There's this real kind of, you can show as a yoga teacher a pathway towards introspection at the expense of really not paying attention to it yourself.
He's giving an appearance of the ideals that are being espoused even while his actual internal experience is awful.
Right.
Crazy.
Well, there is also a school of thought in certain yoga schools that is completely anti-demo, anti-demonstration.
So there is literally no performance of asana by the teacher.
It is only a verbal recitation.
There's the star students, I guess, in the front row that other people can emulate.
Anyway, that's Completely the opposite of Iyengar.
I also don't think that's necessarily the best thing, especially for beginners that have no exposure to what these positions are.
And going back to Kripal Vinanda, he didn't demonstrate postures at all.
That's why we only have about 20 photographs of him, because his students would like slip into his room and take photos on the sly while he was in a kind of You know, yoga, asana, ecstasy, and swirling around, but he was not doing the manual where he's creating an encyclopedia of postures and showing everybody how to do something.
He says, you know, like, the purpose of asana is to allow the student to learn how to move in freedom, and that's not going to happen by telling them what to do.
Okay, so a lot of fun stuff here, but I want to turn to a more difficult subject.
Another overlap, of course, between the spirituality and performance worlds is this Venn diagram of objectification, misogyny, lack of consent, and abuse.
There's not a lot of daylight, I think, in quality and quantity between abuse in the yoga world and abuse in Hollywood.
And I was thinking about how, you know, In Last Tango in Paris, when Bernardo Bertolucci was finally confronted by the statements of Maria Schneider, who reported that she wasn't actually acting when Marlon Brando raped her on screen for that film, Bertolucci admitted that the scene wasn't in the script, that no one told Schneider about the plan until just before it happened, and that it was Brando's idea.
And so Bertolucci said, I wanted Maria to feel, not to act.
And when Bertolucci says act here, he's using a pejorative term implying that real acting isn't acting at all, that if you're acting, you know, people will see through it.
He's saying that real theater demands being in the moment, being fully embodied, being dead to your ego and your identity, and all in service to a higher good.
And I think the uncomfortable fact here is that in the abuse investigations I've done in the yoga world, the same rationale is used to explain the abuse of the student.
You know, it's unexpected, it's non-consensual, there's overly intimate contact that will bring the student into the present moment and force them into a state of authenticity.
So, you know, I can imagine any one of a number of the yoga predators that I've researched using a variation of Bertolucci's line to cover over abuse with this veneer of authenticity.
You know, the student should feel, they shouldn't be thinking.
So, you've been in the movie world, you've been in the theater world, you've been in the yoga world.
Is there a comparison to be made here, and are there overlaps that you see?
I think it's an exact comparison.
A lot of acting is about being uninhibited and getting rid of inhibitions and a lot of these inhibitions are sexual in nature because many scripts, you know, scripts are full of sex and of conflict and Intimacy, gnashing of bodies together happens at a very high frequency.
I mean, rated R is the rated.
Like, kids movies aren't gonna have this issue.
But when a director or acting teacher senses that a student is not
um not able to let go then there there are tactics that they will use both verbal and physical tactics um to help students loosen up and you know the seduction of you know the casting couch this is not a myth my acting coach i mean i had phenomenal acting coaches out here in los angeles literally their studio is Four blocks from my house.
It's not where I moved here.
It just happens that I live here now.
But this acting coach just got released from jail having sexually assaulted a 13-year-old.
And I hadn't, I mean, I had no idea until one day I was Googling to see, oh, I wonder what happened to my acting coach.
Just randomly, and I was like...
Under arrest?
Indictment?
What's going on here?
But this is so prevalent in the community.
You know, the people in power, there's an endless, endless tide of young dreamers, both male and female, that go into the acting profession and they want validation.
They want to be thought of as beautiful.
They want to be thought of as talented.
And people in power take advantage of that every single day in this industry, and on sets both tiny and independent and gargantuan and, you know, Star Wars-like.
I mean, Harvey Weinstein is the perfect example of the gross predator, but there is that at every scale in this industry, from community theater all the way to titans of industry.
It just seems that this Bertolucci's argument would be that to be in the moment and to be confronted with this violence provides The aura of authenticity, you know, he says, I wanted her to feel and not to act.
And just over and over again, I listened to, you know, students of Ashtanga Yoga say that, well, Pattabhi Joyce, when he, you know, manhandled me and got me into a posture in which I was never expected, I never expected myself to be able to attain,
That the same thing happened, that I was in a position suddenly that I didn't consent to, and yet the community taught them to accept that that was part of the purpose, that that was a losing of inhibition, and that that was a good thing to do.
The verisimilitude is too familiar.
This is very sad.
I'm just very sad to read about this because I think I knew about this but I didn't fully know about this.
In acting, it's not fair for everybody to not know the constraints.
As long as everybody knows the constraints, like if I knew I was in a scene where I was going to get raped, then I would know I was going to get raped.
But to not know you're going to get raped is rape.
Right.
So if I know the constraints, if the director knows the constraints, the other actor knows the constraints, the cinematographer, it's being lit for this, but for the actress to come in and not have the parameters of creativity being drawn out for her, I mean she could have I mean, honestly, that's what's so crazy, Matthew, is that about theater and about film performance, and it's also why I got out of it, is you had to re-traumatize yourself
And the actor and the actress and they have to re-traumatize themselves again and again to get the scene, to get it right.
And that takes a massive psychological toll on anybody.
The person who has to be the rapist and the the rapee.
And then those that have to spectate and capture.
So there it's all for the sake of art but I mean one of the reasons why I left In addition to not being fulfilled financially, I just didn't like the stress that I would have to endure again and again for auditions for For auditions, you would have to do stuff that was humiliating.
You know, my wife was telling me that these days there are now intimacy coordinators.
Have you heard of this?
Yes.
Right.
Which is incredible, just to bring this up a notch into a happier space, that there is now a discussion going on where there's actually a profession where somebody can be a monitor and can advocate for the actor and make sure that consent is attained all the way through a I'm wondering if we can do the same thing with charismatic yoga teachers.
We'd have a charismatic yoga teacher intimacy consultant who sat in the room and made sure that everybody was actually okay with the demands that were being made.
Oh, things are changing so fast, Matthew.
I mean, we're not in the same space anymore.
I know.
I don't know what's going to happen when we walk into a room together and what connection is unleashed or what distance is unleashed.
Who knows what is about to happen?
Jill, to go back to your talk and related to what you were just talking about a moment ago, you describe implanting the memory of being kidnapped as a child into the urn that you would receive as a prop, quote unquote, on stage when you were playing Electra.
And I wonder if you mind if I ask if that was something you imagined or if it was from a real experience you had?
I wish I had imagined that.
No, that was my life.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Because in the performance of your talk, it did seem like the emotion was still right there.
Still right there.
Yeah.
And it goes with what you were just saying, the sense of reliving trauma in the service of performance.
Yeah well that's what the actor does is you like remember how I said earlier oh you might touch the desk and you might you might plant it in that touching the desk in such a way or touching the urn in such a way was the moment of the rupture the moment of the terror right so this is what the actor has to do this all over the script these are the somatic easter eggs and it could be a moment of joy
It could be a moment of eroticism, it could be a moment of deep love or lust or fear, but this is the, you know, the soma script.
It's the emotional script that you have to write on top of the dialogue because the words aren't as important.
I mean, the words are important because that's what drives the story, but for the actor, it's The emotional notes are the things that spit the words out.
Just like when you're singing, the emotion behind the vowels is what moves the phrases along.
And so for the actor, it's not an intellectual exercise.
It's not an intellectual exercise.
It's this gut-wrenching heart thing that you've analyzed like crazy so that it comes off as extremely authentic.
It's a lot of work.
I mean, and that's why I had all this shame and denigration because other people cheapened acting for me.
I let some members of my family cheapen it for me.
I mean, I remember my father one time just offhand, I was memorizing a Shakespeare monologue while I was flipping pancakes, you know, on vacation at his house and going over Portia's soliloquy or whatever.
And he goes, what are you doing?
And I go, I'm reciting Shakespeare.
Just, you know, that's what you had to do on vacation, memorize all these monologues or whatever, memorizing Shakespeare.
And he said, seems like a waste of a mind.
And, ooh, that really stung, it still stings.
But the act of memorizing is a great, let's just say, neural exercise in, I mean, right, Matthew?
We went over this in the talk, isn't mamamsa?
The act, you just memorize just tracts and tracts and tracts of scripture to be recited perfectly in front of students or others.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, it's a big part of the old yoga tradition for sure.
And Jill, you described yoga as being kind of a salve for yourself.
You said earlier it sounded like it was the way that you managed the intensity of working to be an actor at that time and then you make this transition into Firing your agent and being a yoga teacher, do you feel like that was why?
That transitioning, that because yoga had been such a parallel kind of place of rebalancing yourself while being an actor, that your sense was like yoga teaching is going to be this completely different thing.
It was the only other thing that I was virtuous in.
I didn't want to work at a computer.
I mean, there was actually a customer of mine.
I was a waitress.
There was a customer of mine.
Two different customers that had good ideas for me.
One was he was going to open an online makeup shop.
This is, you guys, I'm really old, okay?
This is like 2001 or 2002.
He's like, I'm going to open an online makeup shop.
And I was like, who's going to buy makeup online?
What a terrible idea.
But I was like, okay, he seems really, like he's got a, you know, really energetic and he's got a great idea.
And so I showed up at the office one day and there was a desk and a computer and I'm like, I, I was there for 30 minutes.
I said, this is not going to work out because I couldn't see myself sitting still.
I should have been on the online makeup industry, guys.
I would have been a billionaire by now.
I was at the start.
And then another customer had an idea for me.
I guess I was really, I don't know, I was really struggling.
Maybe I was talking to customers about, I don't think I want to act anymore and I don't want a waitress.
What do I do?
And she was a hand model for children.
Like she was a grown woman and she had these really small hands.
I had these very, very small hands that look like a little boy's hands.
And she's like, well, you could go into hand modeling for children.
All my life I've dreamed of doing that.
No, no, you understand like they have toys like you would like hold on to a train or hold on to a Barbie.
Oh, that's hilarious.
Little chubby fingers.
Like I have these little, anyway, that's my hands.
So anyway, what was the question?
Oh, how did I get into yoga teaching?
Oh, I couldn't be a kid's hand model, so I decided to go into yoga teaching.
That's the answer.
No, I loved science, and I loved anatomy, and we were at the same time, Julian.
We were at the Forest Yoga Circle, and it was right around 9-11.
At 9-11 was when I had my crisis of, wait a minute, I'm not doing anything for the world.
By acting.
And I have this other skill set and I want to help people feel better in their bodies.
And that's when I dove into teacher training and started working as a teacher and discovering my voice.
I found my voice and moved into the world in the way that You know, Jill, one of the things that struck me most as I watched you work on this talk was that you really digged out the fact that at the heart of this strange collision between spiritual teaching in the yoga world and theater, there's the shared aspiration and I think repeated experience of ego death, or at least
Like, I've done a little theatre and it's certainly given me a kind of sublime or transcendent experience in which I'm relieved of the burden and banality of being myself for a while.
So, you know, you're on stage, you're on your meditation cushion, you're on your mat, you enter the flow of something that is greater than yourself.
Do you think these mysticisms are all the same thing?
I definitely do.
I think you'd have to ask the neuroscientists about that, but it feels something extraordinarily special and different and delicious that's different from the all-the-things-I-feel-all-the-time things.
Julian, you're a rocker.
Come on, dude.
And Derek, a DJ.
Like, you guys are also artists.
I think so.
I think that there are flow states that translate across all of these different domains.
And for those of us who have been in these crossover worlds, that's kind of The point of connection, right?
That's the pivot.
It's like, oh, this is a similar, I know how to inhabit this feeling and arrive at this kind of state and then wanting to share that state with others.
In terms of the neurological signs of flow state, you have to enjoy what you're doing.
You have to be passionate about it.
It has to challenge you at some level.
So if you're performing in front of people, there's that angle of being challenged to live up to that.
So the conditions, it doesn't necessarily matter the content that you're putting to achieve the flow state.
What matters is that those eight conditions that Csikszentmihalyi set out as what is possible to attain.
So you can cross-reference all of these different activities that we've been discussing and get into that flow state.
That's what's always Troubled me in some ways whenever I've come across, I don't come across it as much now, but earlier on when people would say, well, that's not yoga.
This is the actual yoga.
And that was very disturbing to me because if it got somebody somewhere that was meaningful and it made an impact in their life, that was all that really mattered.
Yeah, I think it gets back to the authenticity question, which is really centered around who's to say what is a real experience for a person.
And I think part of the maybe the disgust that came up when I asked you to do this in the first place is that, you know, There's the implication as I ask you, Jill, what does it mean to bring acting skills, theater skills into yoga?
There's the implication that you're somehow faking it or that you're, you know, you're deceiving people or that, or that, you know, there's some trickery going on or somebody is going to pull back the curtain and the wizard is going to have, you know, um, no clothes or something like that.
And, uh, I think it's more complex than that because The aesthetic sort of experience and entrancement, it can feel the same as the, you know, sublime feeling that you have alone that is unprompted by any kind of extroverted activity.
The yoga class's author is the teacher.
And the author of the script is usually not in the theater or on the film set.
I mean, sometimes they are.
But there's this outer author that the actor needs in order to fulfill a role.
Whereas in the yoga classroom, the teacher is really the author.
They're fulfilling a technique's rules.
You know, like if it's a Bikram class, if it's a Srimananda class, there's a set sequence.
In that case, actually, the yoga teacher is very much just an actor.
It's a prop of the system.
And they just happen to be amplifying it for the system's leader.
