As the crew is in the final stages of submitting their forthcoming book, Julian and Derek reflect on how yoga has evolved in their personal lives. In Part 1, they discuss the origins of their yoga practices, what led them to teaching, and some ideas about yoga philosophy in general.
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Thank you.
I never set out to do my teacher training to become a teacher.
That was not my intention.
I didn't think it was going to happen.
Near the end of my training, I lost my full-time job.
And for that next year, I had a very successful weekly DJ party with this guy named Kirsch Kalle in the Lower East Side, and that was able to pay my bills.
And at that time, I was like, well, I'll just start teaching.
I need to make a living.
And then within that year, I got hired by Equinox.
At one point, I was teaching 20 classes a week at Equinox.
So my journey to becoming a teacher was purely out of economic necessity.
Not to practice, but to actually teach.
And then when I realized that Equinox could pay a sustainable wage I did, you know, programs with them and then at the time they offered health insurance and all those things.
Then I just went full in.
And again, talk about the five year thing at that time, there was a real discussion about yoga studio, yoga being the real yoga and gym yoga was bullshit.
Oh yeah.
And I, and that, that really, that changed a lot of What I think is the last question we're gonna address here about the evolution of how you think about yoga, it changed my perspective because in the studios, you know, you have these closed environments that have their own philosophies, you know, an integral, it's very 19th century philosophy of yoga, Jiva Muti, we know the vegan attitude and we know what they're doing.
At somewhere like Kula Yoga, it was very much more my vibe, which was, Creativity was really what drove you.
So you found the studio that resonated and you get into this closed system, which is fine because that's what they exist for.
But What I realized teaching at Equinox is some people came there for anxiety relief.
Some people came there because it was their spiritual practice.
Some people wanted to have a tighter ass.
And at first I was like, oh, that's not why you do yoga.
And then over the years I was like, you know what, if having a firmer ass is why you're in here, cool, you're welcome too.
I'm not gonna talk shit about that.
And I feel like that transition was really important because there was always that discussion, which I was very much involved with.
Like, this is what yoga really means.
And at some point, I was just like, you know what?
If it's meaningful for you and it's bringing something into your life, then great.
Then I'm happy you're in the room.
And so then compared to somewhere like Jeeva Mukti where, you know, you could solve a range of people going there, but there is a tone that's set with the philosophy.
At somewhere like Equinox, it was like, here's 20, 30, 40, however many people in the room together and everyone's in here probably for a different reason.
But we're all enjoying this experience together.
And that was what really became important for me, that people were getting something out of it.
And I think that changed my view on yoga.
And I don't think that I get to conspirituality podcast without that shift in attitude.
Did you becoming vegan start Achieva Mukti?
No, I was, I was, I became vegetarian in college.
Well, I, and that's not true.
I was pescatarian for my twenties.
And then in my thirties, having been a Jeevan and being in that scene, I became vegetarian in my thirties.
And then when I came out here, I would say actually our, our Yoga Brains co-founder, Philip Steer, helped influence my decision to become vegan for two years.
And then I was, and then I, Then gradually shifted back into, you know, the veganism thing.
The hardest thing for me was pizza, because I'm, pizza is my- It's your culture.
I grew up in New Jersey, like it's, yeah, it's so, so pizza brought me back into, into dairy.
And then, you know, I don't want to get into my, I've talked about my health problems, which led me back to eating meat again.
But, but that was a 20 year journey of like, of a lot of different things around food that went on, but Ajiva Mukti, It played an influence into vegetarianism, but I was never into the vegan aspect, the way that they presented it, but I did find it on my own when I was in LA, which was well past when I was at Jiva.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I feel like, you know, I started teaching in like 93, 94.
After visiting India and being in India for three months, and then coming back, having done some teaching sort of informally,
Ended up getting really really established in the forest yoga scene and one of the things that I noticed as the 90s progressed into the 2000s is that There was a group of teachers all around my age who were kind of coming up at that time So like Shiva who's maybe a little bit older, but like Sean Korn and and and soul David Ray and We were all
We were all sort of shifting out of the previous attitude, which I feel like was actually very... It was very cliquish, and it was very much like there was a feud.
You know, the McCoys and the Hatfields or whatever that thing is, right?
We were on Montana Avenue, literally a block away from the original Yoga Works in Santa Monica, and there was this very, very strong message that the two studios did not mix.
It's like, it's yoga, and you think of it in this sort of mellow, peaceful kind of open way, but there was a strong message from Chuck and Marty, as far as I could tell, to their students, that Anna didn't know what she was doing.
And there was a very strong message from Anna that those people over there at YogaWorks don't know what they're doing.
And part of that is that when Chuck and Matti started in LA, and originally before them was Alan Finger, but he then ended up moving to New York, I guess, or whatever happened with him.
But they employed, so Brian Kest, Shiva Ray, Sean Corn, Saul David Ray, Max Strom, they all started working for Chuck and Marty and they would get furious when these people would go off and create their own studios.
And so Anna was one of the people who did that.
And Anna was a very tempestuous kind of conflict relational style and so I'm sure that didn't go well when they split up.
And so there was all of this sense that you had to be loyal to these particular teachers, and very much a sense that these teachers had gone to India, had studied with Iyengar and Patabi Joyce, had come back and were the experts, and there was a small number had come back and were the experts, and there was a small And so what I noticed happening is that amongst my generation, we were starting to sort of move out of that and say, "You know what?
To your point, it doesn't have to just be about one thing.
It doesn't have to just be like we're all on the same page in a kind of cultish way.
We all believe exactly the same thing.
We're all here for the same purpose.
We all have our eyes glued on the teacher and to get their approval and do everything that they say.
It started to become a lot more eclectic.
Micheline is another one who was part of that group, Micheline Berry.
And, you know, when I was at Forest Yoga, I was the only teacher there who used music and used poetry.
I would bring my boombox in, carry my boombox in on my shoulder, carry in my, like, briefcase of mixtapes.
