standing out
Rodney Yee is one of the best known names in yoga. He has been a gymnast and ballet dancer as well as a philosophy and physical therapy major. Yee took his first yoga class in 1980, which sparked what has become a lifelong passion. He has mainly studied Iyengar yoga, evolving his practice to include self-developed ideas which he brings to his teachings. In 1987, he co-founded the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, California, where he is still a co-director and teacher. Now based out of New York, he teaches regularly at Yoga Shanti in Sag Harbor, a studio co-founded by his wife, Colleen Saidman. He has four children.
Yee teaches workshops and retreats world-wide and leads teacher training intensives nationally. He is featured in over 20 videos/DVDs produced by Gaiam, Inc. and Yoga Journal, and along with co-author Nina Zolotow, has written two books: Yoga: The Poetry of the Body (St. Martins, 2002) and Moving Toward Balance (Rodale, 2004).
In an exclusive interview with the Greater Washington, DC edition of Natural Awakenings, Rodney Yee spoke about yoga, discussing it from a personal and philosophical point of view as well as sharing advice for those new or curious about yoga, and the special benefits yoga has to offer men.
At a time in my life when I was going through a lot of stress and depression including dealing with the death of a loved one, one of the things that really helped me out was doing your AM Yoga tape. I did it everyday whenever I got up, and somehow it helped me get my head together to do the things I needed to do, which were very difficult. Why is it that doing this physical act influences the emotional and psychological state?
First of all I think the postures themselves are literally magical. I think that they’re architectural and ancient sacred geography of the body. When you put the body into certain shapes, it’s like going into different buildings with different light, and different ways of moving in the building are going to allow things to move. They’re going to take care of you in different ways. It’s almost like if I’m feeling a certain way I go to a small room. If I’m feeling another way I want to go outside. The shapes of the poses are archetypical, they’re so powerful. I think that shifting the architecture of your body allows for different alchemy to happen.
What’s taking place to me when there is a lot of grief in the body and a lot of sadness or difficulty is the need to change the shapes of your body to let this stuff move through you. All of us talk about letting go. In the case of loss, it’s not so much that you’re ever going to let go, but there’s a certain amount of release that has to take place and a certain amount of grief that has to take place, and I think the poses not only enhance that but they also give you back other relationships. They give you a connection to the ground, they give you a connection to the earth, they give you a connection to your breath, they give you a connection to you. Depression is so overbearing and I think the breath is one of the few things that becomes even thinkable about doing and you come back to the simple inhalation and exhalation. You come back to very simple movements. The thing about AM Yoga is its not too overbearing, it’s not a big project, is actually very simple and because of that it’s like the brain doesn’t have to accomplish this whole big thing. That’s why I made it in that way.
So the simplicity of it was a conscious decision?
It’s something that can be almost like waking up in the morning and feeling like I’ve got to stretch my arms over my head and that’s going to help you to release some of the depression. Depression stores in the body when the body is crumpled forward and the chest is collapsed, the spine is round, when the head is down. People don’t walk around depressed with their chest open. So basically the physiology of the body, the anatomy of the body, the architecture of the body changes the balance of the body and the chemistry of the body. Through these very simple moves — opening and closing the chest, twisting the spine, doing all these very simple basic movements of the body, it’s almost like airing out the attic. It’s clean, it’s cleaning the body. It’s allowing the body to pump these experiences through. They’re important tools, which a lot of times save people.
There’s a Jane Kenyon poem where she says, “my dog climbs up the stairs, I hear the clatter of his bones as he lies down beside my feet and I hear the inhalation and exhalation of his breath and the sound of his breath saves my life.” We forget that when it comes down to really serious things in life, it comes down to really basic things. A lot of people are so depressed they can’t get up and move their body at all. It’s like you want to get under the covers of the bed and never climb out. So the simpler the movement can be the better. When I was really depressed I came back to one of the yoga practices of just watching my breath; watching my exhalation; completing one cycle of breath, taking it one step at a time. When things are really devastating it’s one step at a time. In some ways it’s always one step at a time. So when you’re depressed it’s almost like an enlightened state, in the sense that you’re not in the future, you’re not in the past. You feel present with the sadness and the heaviness and the difficulty that is happening right now. There’s something actually very enlightened about that. What we have to do is use that experience to be more present and yet at the same time realize that as we’re more present, not everything is dark and dim and sad. We have our face pushed into it for awhile, but when we open our eyes there it is again: the blue sky, the earth, springtime, winter, fall, summer. All the colors of life are all taking place.
I get a sense that with westerners there is less emphasis on the meditative aspects of yoga. Today more than ever before, with yoga becoming more popular and people going to classes all over and just doing the physical acts, meditation is less a part of it. Has that been your experience? It doesn’t seem like there’s as much attention to the spiritual side as there is to the physical and exercise side of it.
I think the yogis who came over 100 years ago realized that they weren’t going to come through the doorway of the mind and the spirit because Christianity was huge here. So the yogis basically said, let’s enter through the body, that’s what people are concerned about. They knew, just like I know, that it’s not going to end there once you give people a profound practice. I remember when I took my first yoga class I came out of it wondering why do I feel so good? Why do I feel so physically awake and mentally clear and emotionally clean? At first I might have gone in there to stretch my hamstrings but the net result was something much more wondrous.
So, it’s transformative?
We have a huge pyramid now. We have teachers who have been teaching for 50 years and we have teachers that have been teaching for one weekend. The myriad of what you can get from the yoga experience in a classroom is pretty varied. The thing is that people have to know that there is a wide variety of yoga classes. The beautiful thing though is that even in the most mundane offering of just physicality, I don’t believe that there is ever just the physical body. I often make a joke: the mind and the body and the breath and the spirit, none of them are like the American Express card, you can’t leave home without them (laughs).
We are the total beings, we can’t leave the mind and body behind, we can’t leave our heart and spirit behind. Here we are, all together. For me as a yoga teacher, if I don’t address every aspect of who’s in front of me then I’m not doing my job. It’s unfortunate that in some ways it’s just emphasis on the physical body. But at the same time, if that’s where the student is, if that’s where there concern is, I don’t need to tell them or preach to them necessarily. I just need to speak their language for awhile and realize and believe that the practice itself, if I teach it well, is going to reveal to them that there’s much more to the practice and to their own life than looking good and being able to move the body OK. Everybody’s going to come to it, no one is going to come out of extreme situations unscathed or untouched or unchanged. I have to have faith and trust that people are going to wake up to a much bigger part of who they are.
Do you think with committed practice there is greater overall holistic benefit? Like with meditation, after many years of practice, you are moving towards enlightenment or some larger whole?
Yoga practice includes meditation, it includes philosophy; asana, which are the postures; pranayama breathing and meditation techniques. Unfortunately the word “yoga” is being misused these days. Only the one aspect — the asanas, and maybe pranayama in a good class, are what people are associating with yoga. But the three last limbs of classical yoga all have to do with meditation. The whole package is an amazing practice of talking to the totality of who we are as human beings.
So then you are saying that all of it is equally important: the postures, the breathing and
the meditation?
I think any doorway you come through you are headed toward finding out more about yourself. Whether you find out more about your hamstring, eventually it will teach you about your soul. If you come in through the doorway of the soul, I think eventually you are going to come up against your hamstring. We do have a body, we do have a mind, we do have a soul, we do have a heart and this is who everybody is. This 6.2 billion people on earth have all those things, and whether you concentrate 5 percent on this and 25 percent on that, eventually you are the totality of all those things. All those things are taken into consideration whatever you do, whether you want to consciously realize that or not.
You come from an Iyengar school and there are many different types of yoga. Hatha is very popular here as well. For someone just starting out with yoga do you think one school is more advisable than another? What would you suggest to beginners?
I think what people need to do is realize that there are a lot of radically different schools out there. It’s like anything else, did you buy a Toyota, or a Mercedes Benz or a Saturn, and what made you buy those things? What kind of shoes do you have on today? Well you did a little shopping. You tried this one out, you looked at that one, and I think people should do the same with yoga. Even more than the style, which is important, is finding a teacher that you have some affinity with.
How would you define that? How does someone find the right teacher?
People need to go take a bunch of different classes in different studios. Obviously if you take a class and it hits home right away, that’s fine, you found home. You don’t have to go to 10,000 schools, but like anything else you need to do a little reading about different styles of yoga and go try some out, talk to people about it. There are a lot of resources at this point. It’s more about a personal fit than it is about me as a yoga instructor.
I have my own preferences but I don’t think I should bias people with my preferences. I just know there is a lot of good yoga out there and a lot of good teachers. There’s also a lot of bad yoga out there and a lot of really inexperienced teachers.
How do you identify that?
You have to talk to people and find out who’s who. You need to go take classes and ask yourself “how do I feel?” Did the instructor give me a lot of things that are interesting to me? Does it make me think? How do I feel? Is this something I like? If not, then just go and try something else, try another form of yoga, try another teacher. If your first experience is a bad one, go look for something else because there is something else out there. I’m trying to get people to trust themselves.
So this is intuitive on some level?
Yes. You can read up and ask for credentials. You can ask the teacher how long they’ve been teaching and who did they study with. Sometimes people say when the student is ready the teacher will show up but also, at this day and age, test your teacher. It’s a long tradition in the East to actually test your teacher. So the student has some responsibility, I guess that’s what I’m saying. Their responsibility is to do a little research and a little walking on the pavement. Test drive some teachers.
Many more women are into yoga than men. Why do you think that is, not so much why are women receptive to it, but why doesn’t it appeal to more men?
You have to realize that up until the last century, the last couple centuries, it was mainly a male endeavor. Now because yoga has the stereotype, in some ways a stupid stereotype, having to do with flexibility and stretching, which really has nothing to do with yoga, men are a little bit intimidated. “I don’t want to be the worst person in class so I’m not going to go,” which is really stupid. A lot of men want to meet women, so where else would you go? My wife Colleen and I always make fun—we teach a bunch of retreats and its 80 percent women! It’s like, are men crazy? If they want to meet women, come to a yoga retreat! That’s just a joke, I don’t want men to only come for that to be honest, but why are men intimidated — they think it’s all about stretching. They think they’ll go to a yoga class and not be good. A friend of mine said, “I’m used to being good. I was a good student in college, I was the best student in my class, I’m a successful businessman. I’m used to being competent and good, but I get into yoga class and I feel like I’m the worst one in there.” But I’m like, “that’s great!”
I know that feeling. I didn’t realize it was great though.
It’s great in the sense of like, let’s deal with our egos. Let’s be in something that’s going to humble you a little bit. It can be a really beautiful thing, but we’re not used to that.
Do you feel like there are benefits specifically for men in doing yoga?
Yeah, tons of benefits just like anyone else, not just men. Obviously first of all I think they’re going to become incredibly healthier. Health is a real problem for men once they get into their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, because they’re not sensitive, they’re not listening to their bodies. Basically it’s a very macho thing. They’re like “does your body hurt?” Oh well, just push through it. But those are messages from your body. Someone’s got to teach you the language of your body. These are not messages to just push away. They’re messages to listen to.
So we need to listen to our bodies.
Also, if you’re trained to be a better listener, it’s going to help you in everything you do. It’s going to help you in your business meeting; it can help you to be a better CEO of a company. All the things we teach in yoga, mindfulness, being present; these things are going to make you more capable of doing what you’re doing. It’s going to be expediential in their careers.
Men have been slower to engage in even aerobic exercise, and we often tend to focus on muscle building, doing things like weight lifting and resistance training. Are there benefits in yoga for men with that kind of focus?
Definitely. First of all, anything they do is enhanced by enhancing your concentration…period. Anything they do is going to be enhanced by balancing the body. That’s why cross training became important…balancing. You’re balancing the body and yoga is going to balance the body better than anything else. Awareness, concentration and balance, how can those three things not enhance everything you do? In sports, you’re going to be less injury prone, you’re going to have better concentration, and you’re going to drop into the zone much quicker and faster, much more often. That’s all going to be from yoga. It’s very simple, when you are doing asanas and you are concentrating on your breath and you are concentrating on the spread of you toes, what’s not going to be enhanced by being more sensitive to your entire body?
So this can have an impact on even specific sports?
It’s very simple, if I’m a tennis player and I’m always using my right hand, how is it not going to help me to use my left hand during yoga practice to balance out my right and left? When you have a car and you have misalignment in the car your tires wear out. If you always move your body the same way all the time, the joints, the ligaments, the tendons and the muscles wear out. If only the same basic neurological passageways are being used it’s putting the body in the exact same pattern all the time, and usually it’s not a balanced pattern. So your body’s going to wear out so much faster and be so much more injury prone. It’s very simple concepts. Why does yoga work? I’ll tell you a couple reasons that are obvious — balance, awareness and concentration…everything is enhanced.
For middle aged men, sexual health and sexual performance can become problems. Is there anything that yoga provides for men in this area?
Again, sensitivity awareness is a huge thing, on top of that is circulation. We create so much tension in our body that a lot of circulation is literally cut off. And you know, come on, sexual performance…circulation. Again, balance, awareness and sensitivity to the body, what else are we talking about?
This takes us into the Tantric thing, which in this country has become, almost exclusively, about sex.
It (Tantra) has almost nothing to do with sex hardly at all. Tantric Yoga was a philosophical revolution from classical yoga that is basically saying that we need to utilize all aspects of the human being to liberate ourselves. It was a huge philosophical revolution and it had very little to do with sex.
So how did that translation get lost?
It’s just a huge bastardization and a commercialization. It’s unfortunate. For example, when you write an article and you’re not going to write a book, you’re not going to write a five hundred page article. If you are going to write a short story instead of a novel, and if the short story is going to be good, it’s got to be really good. You’ve got to be able to describe things like great poetry, so much quicker, so much more concisely. And if you don’t, in some ways you brutalize the subject. It’s like, someone wanted me to write a blurb, they wanted me to write five hundred words on how to do yoga, and I said, well no, we’re going to have to narrow down the topic. How do you do yoga in five hundred words or less? I’d have to be a genius to write that. So many things get dumbed down to the most ridiculous thing, and of course sex sells, so let’s talk about sex. You take the most ridiculous thing about an entire philosophy and you expound upon it to sell a product, it’s ridiculous. I mean, it’s fine, it’s what it is, but that’s not what Tantric Yoga is.
I want to ask a little bit about your career. You first started doing yoga in 1980 and so it’s been over 25 years, and you started teaching in what, 1987?
Actually I started teaching in 1985. I started teaching yoga out of my apartment.
What kind of changes have you seen in the world of yoga in that time and how do you feel about them?
There are so many good things to be grateful for. There’s great opportunity, there’s a great way to affect and help a lot of people. There’s a lot of ways to get more people interested and benefited through yoga. All those things are fantastic. But there are downsides to the popularity. All of a sudden things get pigeonholed into really stupid stereotypes. There’s also a lot of people who put up signs to be yoga teachers who, really lickity-split, all of a sudden start. Would you take piano lessons from someone who has only been studying piano six months? So why would you study this huge, beautiful art form from somebody who’s been studying yoga for a weekend? That’s such bastardization. I feel hurt by—literally personally and professionally hurt—by people who are willing to teach that and people who are willing to put up a sign after that. So those are both extremes. Then you have people who have been studying 30 or 40 years, it’s amazing. You have a really a fat part of the pyramid. People who have been teaching five to 15 years who are really serious, who are really pushing the envelope and really discovering new things, who are making us all wake up to own ridiculousness, our own human satire.
You have studied Iyengar, and you have also brought your own elements into your practice. Are these things you have just made up on your own?
Not really made up. Say you are going to be painting everyday and you are going to be painting a lot. You may not reinvent the wheel, but you are going to make some self discoveries. Not everyone is a Picasso, not everyone is an Iyengar. I’m not necessarily reinventing anything, but I’m definitely coming up with things on my own. They may not be new necessarily, but they are coming from my body, from my mind and heart, from my breath through my experimentation. But whether or not they’re new? No, I’m sure Iyengar’s been through it already. But are they new to me. Are they coming from my own practice? Yes.
Do you have a guiding philosophy? From the things I have been reading about you, you seem to be moving in more of a spiritual direction.
Yeah, I think that’s where life goes in general. When you’re a young kid it shifts. I’m a father now. I’m married. I have parents in their nineties. Things are really really different and yoga continues to be an amazing tool to help me through the day. But my days are different than twenty years ago. The things I’m concerned about are different. One starts realizing your own mortality and the mortality of people that you love. How does one deal with that? You don’t deal with that with the same philosophy; philosophy changes, things are really different. You begin to value different things. I think the spirit and the soul and compassion and peace become more important than they were before.
So what’s on the road ahead for you? I see you have an upcoming retreat in Bali among other things.
Yeah, more teaching. Probably a lot of other stuff coming as far as electronic media, TV, things like that. I’m still doing other videos and DVDs with Gaiam. I’m doing some casting with Lime TV and there are a lot of other possibilities coming up.
You are almost 50 years old now and you have been involved with yoga and this kind of work for half of your life. How do you feel about what you have done and continue to do?
Yes, I’m 49. I hope that the work I do can positively help people through their daily lives. We’re all in this together. I hope that everything we do in every moment, every day, leads us to a greater awakening of compassion and peace.
For more information about Rodney Yee, including classes, upcoming retreats and workshops as well as videos, DVDs and books, visit www.yeeyoga.com and www.rodneyyeeyogastore.com.
