Julie: What would you most like students to understand about yoga?
Steve: That it’s a path to freedom and it’s not at all having to do with postures.
Julie: Not at all?
Steve: Almost none at all. Postures are foundational and if you get stuck with the foundation then nothing else gets built. The end result is called yoga because yoga means union.
Julie: In your asana classes do students know what you’re aiming for?
Steve: Some of them intuit it and some of them know consciously.
Julie: It is a fairly common belief that at death, one will find liberation. What do you think?
Steve: I don’t think so. The poet/saint Kabir said “what makes you think you’ll join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten?” He said “what is found here is found there,” so at the moment of death there is an opportunity to merge. However, tremendous fear rises up when the unknown presents itself so even though a portal opens for that possibility only some will take it because they are attached to their identification with their form. True liberation is when you stop the cycle of birth and death. It doesn’t happen just by dropping the form.
Julie: Where do you find freedom?
Steve: If you’re talking about spiritual freedom, freedom to be without thought, that kind of freedom, I find all my freedom within that realm – which is difficult to talk about.
The yogis have a saying “there’s no such thing as external freedom without internal freedom.” The only real freedom is when you’re free from all your identification and conditions and the way to get to that is to get to the point where there’s ‘no mind.’
Julie: Where is that?
Steve: It isn’t in the future somewhere, it’s in this moment. If there is ‘no mind’ in this moment, then in this moment you’re free. And as long as that moment lasts, you’re free, you’re a master. When the mind comes back in then you return to suffering. So the longer you can hold the moment of ‘no mind,’ the less you suffer. Pretty soon that state starts to bleed into your daily functions such as talking, driving and everything else you do, but there’s no identification with the story-based entity. There’s only consciousness expressing itself.
“Do you feel the life force in every cell of your being? If you do, then that’s real yoga.”
Julie: Can we have happiness without suffering?
Steve: You wouldn’t know it without suffering. If there’s no down then what does up mean? But, once you’ve had it [suffering], and you’ve had it sufficiently, and most people have had plenty of it by the time they’re 15 or 16, then they recognize what they don’t want. It’s the nature of the being to want unlimited happiness. And, it’s the nature of the mind to hang onto the known which includes suffering. So in order to find happiness you have to transcend the mind. And it’s possible.
Julie: Have you ever been miserable?
Steve: Of course.
Julie: How did you pull yourself out of it?
Steve: I don’t know that I did…everything just passes. Everything is impermanent. States come and go but that space in which they come and go is eternal. So misery comes, happiness comes, and that’s all on the surface of the ocean. But the depth remains constant.
Julie: Can you relate to the person you were 30 years ago?
Steve: I just read something a 75-year old man said: “I feel like I did when I was a teenager but something is wrong, terribly wrong with my body, that’s the only difference.” What he’s saying is that the sense of consciousness is always the same. Your beliefs come and go and your thoughts and body change but really you don’t change. I know what he means.
Julie: What is the secret to true happiness?
Steve: Accept fully whatever life brings you, knowing that it’s perfect. And whatever it doesn’t bring, you accept that also. Happiness is a function of acceptance. If you resist, you suffer; if you accept then you can be happy.
Krishnamurti was asked the same question and he said “I don’t mind what happens.”
That’s my secret, too.
Julie: Have you always been perfectly happy?
Steve: No. I have had radical ups and downs. But the kind of happiness I’m talking about could be described as deep contentment. And it’s so deep that whatever happens on the surface doesn’t matter.
Julie: Do we condition ourselves not to be happy?
Steve: We do. The whole culture is very conditioned not to be happy. It’s all about avoiding the moment. If we look at our culture with the tv, the cell phone, video games, movies and computers, every possible distraction exists to keep us from being present.
There’s a general consensus that to be present means to disappear. But your ego does not want to disappear; rather it wants to stay because it only survives with conflict. It can’t survive a constant feeling of peace. It says it wants peace, but it doesn’t. It needs conflict to survive which means you have to make an enemy. Who’s the enemy? Usually the enemy is the present moment and yet happiness is only found in the present moment.
Julie: Never enough, right?
Steve: Yes. The ego always wants more. And in that wanting you’re not in the present, you’re off chasing the future so you miss the moment. Life goes on this way, and you miss the whole thing and you go “what happened?” Next, you’ll come back and do it again until you get it.
Julie: Does happiness translate into feeling free?
Steve: You feel free when there’s nothing roping you in, there’s nothing to rebel against, there’s no conflict.
“I laugh when people say that I don’t teach correct alignment, because there is no such thing as ‘correct.’”
Julie: What kind of ‘freedom’ is sought through the U.S. ‘liberating’ people around the world through military actions?
Steve: It’s a joke.
Julie: Why?
Steve: It has nothing to do with liberation. It’s all about greed, money and power; it has nothing to do with freedom. George Bush said “The Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper” so that kind of sums up that philosophy. It’s the personification of unconsciousness.
For example nationalism, patriotism or any collective identity is just personal ego magnified to the collective degree. We need to wake up and become conscious of what we support. If you look around the world you’ll see that many governments are fairly repressive and destructive to their citizens.
Julie: Do you think we have the ability to change?
Steve: I think there is no political solution because of the structure of the human ego which is presently playing out all over the planet – domination, power, all that stuff. That’s pretty obvious.
If you look back at the history of the 20th century, what do you see? Wars, killing, torture, millions of people being killed by one another – for what reason? Power and greed. It’s the human ego that needs to shift. Unless there’s a fundamental shift on a collective, mass scale of consciousness, we’re headed for more trouble.
Julie: Do you detect a shift?
Steve: I do. I think our culture is really polarized right now. The media presents a certain image which is highly negative: life is getting worse and worse, everyone and everything is horrible, it’s not safe, fear, fear, fear – which is a fraudulent and incomplete presentation.
On the other hand you see many people doing yoga, meditation and all kinds of spiritual practices. There’s a giant sub-cultural awakening happening, and we’re moving toward a fundamental shift in human consciousness. Some people pick a date and say 2012 on the Mayan calendar. I don’t know, and that remains to be seen. It’s all speculation and therefore useless as far as I’m concerned. But the actual shift is already apparent. The basic choice is that either we annihilate ourselves and our planet, or we wake up.
Julie: You’ve spent quite a bit of time in India. How does this feed your journey?
Steve: It ended my journey.
Julie: This is it?
Steve: In terms of recognizing that there’s nothing for me to do, because I know that it’s out of my hands, yes. Just surrender to ‘what is,’ and ‘what is’ is consciousness, or source, or god. Wherever I’m supposed to be, whatever I’m supposed to do, it’s not up to me.
Julie: It’s not up to you but you do make choices everyday: “Yes, I will do this,” “No, I won’t do that.” How do you know when the infinite is saying “yes?”
Steve: Ramakrishna, the famous 19th century Indian saint, was asked if there is such a thing as free will, and he said “oh yes, yes, we have as much free will as a cow tied to a stake with a two foot rope.” In other words, you can walk in a circle and kick your feet, but that’s it. That’s all the free will you’ve got. So maybe you can pick your clothes for the day and pick what you’re going to eat.
Julie: What do you see that’s different about yoga in India, from yoga as we have it here in the U.S?
Steve: First you must understand that India is a country of devotion. They bow to their teachers, they bow to their parents, they have an altar in their homes and they’re worshipping god, whatever that particular form is. Whereas devotion here in the west, if you can call it devotion, is the devotion to the individual, which is egoic.
Julie: Devotion to individuality is what defines freedom here.
Steve: What we call freedom is what they call bondage. It’s a different situation and a different scenario. Here there is no real guru/disciple relationship per se. If you study with a yoga teacher here, it is basically posture orientated. There’s nothing wrong with that and it has its merits, but there’s a lot more to it than that. That’s why I laugh when people say that I don’t teach correct alignment, because there is no such thing as ‘correct.’ The thing is, all that stuff about alignment has been made up over the last 60 years.
Julie: I hope you can explain this.
Steve: Essentially it’s yogic fundamentalism: this is the right way to do it, the only correct way to do it, as if this is the yoga that has been handed down for 5000 years. Even a casual observation of yogic history will reveal quickly that this is not the case.
Having gone to different schools in India, what I’ve observed is that some people bend their knee, turn their foot in and that they all do it differently. It’s not about aesthetics. It’s something much deeper than that.
Of course American culture has taken it, and made it as shallow and superficial as possible. It’s become all about how it looks, and about the ‘correct way,’ about conforming to an arbitrary standard which is the opposite of what yoga is about. Yoga is truly about freedom, not about conforming.
Julie: Then yoga can be anything?
“Usually the enemy is the present moment and yet happiness is only found in the present moment.”
Steve: I think the main thing is that investigation of truth is beyond what is generally being presented in the yoga world in the west, which would ideally entail meditation, self inquiry, devotion, deeper aspects of yoga. In India if you say you’re a hatha yogi, unless you’re going to one of those places that makes money from westerners, they laugh at you. They just go hahahahaha. They say “you don’t know anything about yoga.” But even if you do, it’s considered the absolute slowest boat to realization – period.
Some of the most famous saints of India when asked about hatha yoga say it’s not truly a viable path to full god realization. For example, Neem Karoli Baba says “it’s a lost art.” And Sri Ramana Maharshi said, when asked what’s the best asana, “the only important asana is the asana of the heart.” And Ananda Mayi Ma said “it’s a waste of time.” What they are saying is that it’s all about devotion and opening yourself up to the ultimate reality and surrendering to source.
The main thing is just to see that there is so much more and to start waking up the heart. That’s why I go to India every year. Here, everything is head oriented. It’s all mind, everything is beautiful on the outside but a mess inside. Then you go to India and they’ve got nothing. Mud huts full of mosquitoes and you look at them and they’re happier than anybody you ever see here. They’ve got one arm and one eye and they’re generous and full of love. The Indian heart is so beautiful, and Americans can learn from that.
Julie: What would you like to say in closing?
Steve: Lighten up! Have a nice life. This is only yoga, this is not rocket science. What do you want on your tombstone? “I pushed my little toe down perfectly in every class.” Good, good for you! You’ll be back, doing it again for another 15,000 lifetimes until you wake up.
What’s important is the quality of your life in this moment. Are you present? Fully alive? Do you feel the life force in every cell of your being? If you do, then that’s real yoga.
