Sitting Down With Dr. David Frawley

Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is a widely recognized teacher of Ayurveda, Yoga and Vedic astrology. He has written over 20 books on the various Vedic Sciences and Vedanta. Dr. Frawley has lectured throughout India and has also helped establish schools and training programs in the U.S. and Europe. Julie Deife spoke with him this summer in Santa Fe, NM, where he resides.

By Julie Deife

Julie: How do you spend your time when you're here in Santa Fe?

Dr. Frawley: Well my time is very fluid. It depends upon how I'm orienting my energy. Usually a fair amount of time I'll spend researching, meditating, writing. I also spend a fair amount of time in nature, like this last month I've done nine major hikes in the high country. I have a strong connection with the land and the rocks and plants. I get my energy from there. I draw a lot of inspiration and ideas from being in nature and medita-ting there.

Julie: On the U.S. and India, how do you divide your time between the two?
Dr. Frawley: I take at most two trips to India a year. But even from here, I email articles and keep up. Since 1994, I've written more books that have been published in India than in the U.S. So, in that respect, I've been doing more via the India side than the American side. Right now I'm involved in projects trying to help the indigenous people of northeast India. Their culture is under siege. I'm promoting Vedic education through Yoga, Ayurveda and Vedic astrology, and the westernized education system there denigrates these things. So it makes a difference to have a westerner in India speak in their favor.

Julie: Where did you start this journey?
Dr. Frawley: When I was in High School, that was the late 60's, the hippie era, in Denver. I came into contact with various yoga groups and teachings, which got me interested. But I had a more philosophical and poetic mind, so I was interested in the ancient traditions and discovering what was behind the yoga that I saw.

Julie: Were you surprised when you were drawn to yoga and Ayurveda in the 60's?
Dr. Frawley: Not so much. I was always a bit different. I always felt like there was something very strange about the world in which I lived anyway. I could relate to texts like the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads, but you know supermarkets and shopping malls and all of that, modern culture I had trouble with.

Julie: And how old were you then?
Dr. Frawley: By that time I was 18, 19, 20.

Julie: Were you thinking you needed to get a job, or get, or do something.?
Dr. Frawley: No, I had no real interest or concern for that. Later in my 20s I started a landscaping business, when I moved out to California. I just took care of plants and grew herbs. That's how I began my interest in herbs that developed into Ayurveda. But I never had much of a practical mind. In fact, I've never had a strategy to make money. Whatever 's come to me in the terms of work and books, it's all just happened. I usually don't know from one year to another what book I'll write.

Julie: What aspects of Ayurveda are fascinating you currently? What are you working on?
Dr. Frawley: I'm actually with a broader project right now, not just Ayurveda, a broad based study of Agni, or what I call the soul and the sacred fire. The deepest form of Agni is the soul, it's the flame hidden within our hearts, which is also a power that pervades all of nature. There is an Agni in the rocks that builds up the mountains as in volcanoes, an Agni in the plants, the power of photosynthesis, an Agni in animals, their digestive fire. Agni is a cosmic principle through the sun. You see, for me yoga and Ayurveda are not subjects on the outside. You learn them through life and nature, they're part of life.
We're all forms of Agni. Look at our human body, we have a digestive fire, a pranic fire, a fire of intelligence, a fire of consciousness. We're flame walking around within a certain form.

Julie: As a Vedic astrologer would you comment on the state of the world for the near future?
Dr. Frawley: We're coming into a century of problems because of our disruption of our natural environment, mainly because of the kind of consumerist culture we have. Politically and environmentally, it's going to be a tough few decades coming up.

Julie: Are you saying it's astrological or because of our carelessness?
Dr. Frawley: Both. Astrology mirrors our karma. We set in motion certain karmas and you can see, once we've devastated an ecosystem, it's not going to come back next year. There are certain geological forces we've been tampering with which can be quite dangerous over time. Another big problem today is the mass media which people thought would unite us, because we could all communicate globally, right? Well now the mass media and the internet are being used to divide us up further. Anyone can project their agenda through the media, so now the media can be used to broadcast fundamentalism as much as it can to unite people. So, I think it's a situation that as a species we'll work through, but we have a difficult time period coming up.

Julie: So that's about a century of stuff to work through?
Dr. Frawley: Well, it's hard to say how long it's going to take. As an Ayurvedic doctor who has kind of an ecological perspective, we can also diagnose the earth. In Ayurvedic medicine, one of the main causes of diseases is blocking of the channels. That is what we're doing on the planet, we're damming up all the rivers. The Colorado River doesn't even reach the ocean anymore. When we disrupt the forces on our planet, it's got to have a similar effect on the planetary organism and cause planetary diseases.

Julie: How is this mirrored in us, as individuals?
Dr. Frawley: The individual immune system is breaking down because the global immune system or biosphere is breaking down. But whether it's the ozone layer or global warming, how can the individual immune system continue to function if the planet is disrupted? It's just common sense.

Julie: Common sense. So what do we do?
Dr. Frawley: It's a leadership and a cultural, and a civilizational question because we're dominated by market economy. Look at what's happened recently with the stock market because the focus was only the next quarter's profits. Well, that's our civilization now. We don't have a long-term plan that deals with our environment. I think the main problem though is that we're just too commercially minded. Everything is judged in terms of money, everything has a price. Ultimately the consumer becomes the consumed, everything becomes disposable, so then you yourself also become that. Even spirituality is very consumerist here, it's very much commercialized.

Julie: Yet our country is founded on spiritual freedom, in terms of equality of religion.
Dr. Frawley: That's more a political equality. But in terms of a spiritual goal in life it's not embedded in our civilization, we don't have the concept of dharma or moksha or self-realization. We have a concept of intellectual and material and political freedom.

Julie: Is it possible that yoga as it's growing in this country can make a difference that way?
Dr. Frawley: If we could combine - you might say - the outer freedom of the west with the inner freedom of the east, that would be a very powerful combination for transforming humanity. We need to add spiritual freedom to the rest of the freedoms we have and recognize that unless you have some spiritual goal in life all those material freedoms aren't really going to take you anywhere. They're just going to leave you in a comfortable rest home.

Julie: Several years ago you expressed disagreement with the American tendency to combine yoga and Buddhist meditation practices.
Dr. Frawley: What I said and what I still hold to, is that my problem is with people who reduce yoga to asana and then go to Buddhism for meditation, as if yoga itself had nothing to do with meditation. There is a meditation tradition within yoga, which is more important than its asana side, it's the essence of the whole system. And I think that if someone is a "yoga teacher", they should know something of the yoga teaching on meditation as well. If they only know yoga as asana and then go to Buddhism for meditation, or if they don't practice meditation at all, then they may be a great asana teacher but their understanding of yoga, I don't think is complete. There has been an unfortunate tendency for yoga teachers to neglect the meditation side of yoga.

Julie: Why?
Dr. Frawley: Because in America we stereotype things. Even if you want to publish a book on yoga, everybody thinks it has to be about asana. We tend to put things in grooves, whereas classical yoga is always many sided. It emphasizes teaching the individual, each individual is different. You can't have a meditation technique for everybody, you can't have the same asana practice for everybody, you have to understand individual capacities and that is the beauty of the yoga tradition.

Julie: Do you think yoga is evolutionary?
Dr. Frawley: Yoga is basically a force of higher evolution in humanity. It helps us unfold our greater potential for consciousness.

Julie: There were yoga people after 9/11 who were suggesting that the Gita would provide answers for our response, some people suggesting that was retaliation.
Dr. Frawley: Well, that's a difficult issue. The Gita can provide general guidance, but how we apply that requires interpretation.

Julie: But not to take Arjuna's battle literally?
Dr. Frawley: Well, Arjuna did have a battle, it was a literal battle, there was a war. Sometimes we have to fight in one form or another. But the battle is for dharma, it is not for oil.

Julie: But would the Gita give us assistance in understanding 9/11?
Dr. Frawley: The Gita would give us an understanding of the whole battle of human life and the Gita's message is that you have to make an effort. A lot of people think that yoga is effortless. Yoga is about working on ourselves, not just sitting idly around. Yoga is about going beyond your limitations, it's more like making a super effort. It's like if you had only one more day to live, you would certainly be motivated to do something with your life.

Julie: What is the yogic view of community?
Dr. Frawley: The yogic view is that we need a spiritual basis for our communities. Our current communities are based upon biological or political or ideological connections. We need a deeper level that can come from satsanga (spiritual communion). Unless you have some awareness of the level of the soul then your relationships are just based on ego based values and drives.

Julie: Is this what yoga centers can become?
Dr. Frawley: They can. But also I think we need to realize that yoga is not limited to what we call yoga. You know yoga is not in the name. It's based upon certain values and practices, on the essence, not on the package, that's why you really can't package yoga (laughs), because it's not even a form. Yoga is part of a greater spiritual tradition: Ayurveda, Vedic astrology, Vastu, Sanskrit, music, the dance. Yoga is an entire way to approach life.

Julie: Do you have closing thoughts you'd like to share?
Dr. Frawley: I want to help people understand that the yoga that's come here is only a small part of the yoga tradition. The amount of teachings that we have access to, or that have been translated, are less than 1% of the yoga teachings in India. The same is true with Ayurveda. There are tremendous resources in the yoga tradition that we need to go back to. After you graduate from school, you have to go back for continuing education. And it would be nice if we had more people who studied, researched, translated and traveled and tried to bring this out, you know, broaden the Yoga here. We have gone deep into asana practice in the U.S. But the whole science of prana is as complex as the science of asana. The whole science of mantra is as complex as the science of asana, the science of meditation is as complex as asana. We've become extremely adept at this one aspect of yoga, but we don't realize that all these other aspects of yoga can be applied with as much precision and have greater transformative power.

 

Dr. Frawley, Director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies, can be reached through www.vedanet.com. Two of his recent books are Yoga for Your Type (with Sandra Summerfield Kozak) and Yoga and Ayurveda (Lotus Press).