Julie: Let’s talk about the story behind your book.
Wah!: Speaking is a lot more real for me than writing, and there’s a certain energetic exchange that happens.
When I was at my computer and just wrote, it was okay, and it was knowledge based and wisdom. But there wasn’t any energetic exchange. When we did the book, we basically took all of the lectures that I’d done at teacher trainings, the things that I’d said at concerts, all these yoga classes, transcribed. But it comes forward differently in writing.
When I met with publishers, they wanted to make it a little more exact. They wanted to make it more organized and to present something that conformed to their identity. After several tries with publishers, I decided to self publish and leave it transcribed, which gives it this kind of authenticity and also the feeling like you’re there with me, in the moment.
It’s different when I’m together with people in an audience setting.
Julie: How so?
Wah!: Because I don’t really have any sense of self.
Julie: When you’re performing or in general?
Wah!: In general. I just don’t have an identity. I was a perfect candidate for spiritual work because I had no ego. I could adopt all of the teachings and just download them from the main frame. And I continue not to have a sense of self, which is why marketing and all these other things – they don’t happen around me.
Julie: I’m not clear about that, marketing and all these other things…
Wah!: Marketing requires an identity and I act more as a channel.
Julie: Then that presents a challenge in the commercial market place.
“You can never have a spiritual crisis, because spirit is your one constant.”
Wah!: A defect when I’m living in the world. But it’s a great gift to be in the presence of other beings who might want to take what I have to bring through. I’m able to take the thoughts or the energetic of the people that I’m with and put them down through the main frame and then talk to them directly. People say, “My God, it’s like you’re inside my head, and the things that you were speaking are exactly the things that were in my heart.”
Julie: You say in your book that karma is a horizontal energy, and I’ve never heard it described that way.
Wah!: I’ve never heard anybody say that either, but I’m describing the way it feels to me energetically. When I get a download or a hit, I feel like it’s coming directly down into the top of my head and into my body. That’s what I do in meditation, and the imagery for me is vertical. The spine is vertical. The heavens are above, I’m below. That’s another vertical.
And the karmas, which are the ways we work our issues through and the way we learn our lessons and the way that we evolve as souls through experiencing life situations is between me and you. It’s work on the same level. To me that looks horizontal.
Julie: You’re an Anusara teacher now, and you devote a large portion of your book to asana practices.
Wah!: I am greatly inspired by Anusara yoga, not technically an Anusara teacher.
Julie: And you used to be greatly inspired by Kundalini yoga. Would you talk about that?
“I’m not a musician yet.”
Wah!: I would say that the beauty of Kundalini yoga is in the self-healing and exercises and energetic work, which includes a lot of breath work, which is absent from a lot of processes. Some people consider pranayama a completely separate practice. Through Kundalini yoga I was taught that pranayama was an integral part of the yoga practice, and I like that. Kundalini doesn’t deal with the muscular, they just don’t. Anusara has an amazing system for understanding the body. And John’s [Friend] principles can be applied to any kind of yoga.
Julie: So Kundalini yoga served you well at that time?
Wah!: Yes, but for me it was deficient in certain areas, and so when I met John Friend, there were many things that finally came to light, and it was just like an expansion into what I felt was more of a complete world in yoga for me.
Julie: Have you always practiced yoga?
Wah!: Yes, since I was sixteen. What the style is and how it serves me has changed because all these practices and lineages were based on the needs of the time, on experimentation and various combinations of practices.
Julie: What was your practice at age 16?
Wah!: Kundalini.
Julie: Then Bihar. What did that school contribute?
Wah!: They’re complete knowledge freaks, and what the Bihar system did for me was explain to me scientifically, with Sanskrit names, the whole Kundalini experience. All of the energetic and the practices that we did, Yogi Bhajan learned between the ages of about four and 16. Since he learned all of this as a child, some of the methods and the ways that he presented it were childlike, sometimes un - scientific. It was playful, and I was ready to try anything. When I came into the Bihar system, it gave me a complete landscape of knowledge.
Julie: Now you’ve combined many aspects of yoga to create your own approach that you now teach.
Wah!: I’m just being myself.
Julie: Do we call it Wah! Yoga?
Wah!: We do call it Wah! Yoga. There are other people, musicians as well, who have been forced to source directly.
Julie: I think part of this is just that you are a musician and that’s a different way of thinking.
Wah!: You do have personality types that are methodical and they go through and they analyze and master a system, and there are other people who are just source people.
Julie: Like you.
Wah!: Exactly, they just source directly, so I wouldn’t even call myself a good musician. I’ve done some western music; I’ve done some reggae; I’ve done some African music, pop music. People say I play an eclectic mix of whatever. It’s just whatever I’m sourcing. For me, it’s how many different mediums can I impart this energy and how many different ways? I can totally talk to the yoga crowd ’cause I’ve been there. All right, now we’re in front of the festival crowd, that’s more mainstream. How do I reach them with the same energy? For me it all has to do with you. I’m just here to see how I can give you that connection.
Julie: Right now is like volume one, your yoga life. In ten years we may have volume two, which may be completely different. Is that so?
Wah!: Yeah, a CD or a book is just a documentation of did we find that energy and bring it forward? So what you’re getting from a CD is how I was able to draw an infinite energy out of musicians that I worked with. What you’re getting from the book is how I was able to draw an infinite energy out of my connection with students, an infinite energy out of my connection with an audience. I relish and really enjoy that challenge and that diversity.
Julie: Amazing that you can always connect with audiences, no matter how diverse.
Wah!: We played in Long Island for what I understood later was a group of Buddhists. We were in this center and I say, “Sita Ram Sita Ram” and I waited for them to chant back “Ram Ram Sita Ram.” Nothing all night, like this, two hours of me calling out and getting silence in return.
So if you can understand it from a musician’s point of view, you’re ready to run out. ‘Oh my god this is the worst night of my life,’ right? I just kept holding on to the connection. What happens is that I spoke; we did some more music.
At the end of the evening, they purchased every CD that we had brought, boxes and boxes of them, and I just was like, ‘what?’ And I understood then that these Buddhists never sang. Singing wasn’t a part of their practice. Silent meditation and connection within silent meditation was their practice and boy did they have a great connection that night.
So you can’t judge how the energy is coming forward.
Julie: When did you know you’d become a musician and what were the circumstances?
Wah!: I’m not a musician yet.
Julie: How do you manage a working and living relationship with one person?
“For me it all has to do with you. I’m just here to see how I can give you that connection.”
Wah!: My answer to this is the same as the answer to a previous question, which is, how many ways can you create infinite connection? You can create through sex, you can create it through having meals together, you can create it through shared friends, you can create it through work and in my case, the work that I do is that of trying to create infinite connection, and that may not be true for everybody.
Julie: How do you see the Southern California yoga community compared to other places where you go?
Wah!: I can confirm that each area of the country and of the world is different and they have their own distinctions. New York is hard core; Washington DC is very conservative…
Julie: New York is hard core, meaning?
Wah!: They want to know what you have to offer. They want to know if it works, and it better work now!
Julie: Describe L.A.
Wah!: I’m not sure that I can describe L.A. entirely. Perhaps that there’s more heart energy here and people are genuinely searching for a way to balance their lives between material and spiritual work. I feel a genuine thirst in L.A. And then there’s also a very developed materialistic world. It’s a different integration between earthly and spiritual matters.
People in L.A. are really good dealing with celebrities, at least in my own experience. If a celebrity comes to a yoga class, people honor the fact that they want to come and have their own space. There are different levels of awareness and compassion within a very developed material world.
People have a really rich understanding of that, and then within that I feel that there’s a very genuine desire to grow internally. You know, California has kind of always been on the cutting edge of thought. So there are some amazing explorations and also some very genuine thirst for internal evolvement.
Julie: Healing crisis. You address this in your book. Is that the same thing as spiritual crisis?
Wah!: For me you can never have a spiritual crisis, because spirit is your one constant. Healing crisis is when your internal work has accumulated enough resonance that it basically creates a shift in your external environment, so your relationship will change, your job will dissolve. I call it a healing crisis because when the external landscape shifts, it can be terrorizing.
Julie: But what lies beneath it could be beautiful.
Wah!: It is beautiful. It’s not chaos and destruction from my point of view. Say the mantras have been chanted a certain number of times, you’ve done enough yoga asana and pranayama, and then all of the sudden it starts purifying the inside. The inside gets a certain amount of resonance, which causes the external environment to shift, the purity that you have on the inside is purifying your life. It’s not necessarily chaos; it’s just purification if you will or evolution, it’s a bump up. The reason I call it a crisis is because you can’t get your head around it. You’re just like, ‘What happened?’ When those external things shift, we can feel a little bit estranged from ourselves because we didn’t really expect it to look this way.
Julie: Amma is an important figure in your life. You’ve done albums to her, you’ve done songs to her and she’s included in your chanting. What’s your relationship with her?
Wah!: Everybody has soul gods that watch over you. We’ve got teachers that are on the non - physical realm that are who we’ve discussed with and made all these arrangements to make it the way we did.
Amma has decided to come into incarnation. She’s crossed over from that side into this side. I feel that she is a self - realized being and an amazing soul. She has an expansion of soul that I’ve never seen before. I want to connect with her in any way that I can, so when she comes I physically connect with her, and when she’s not here, I chant and she’s there. As a soul force and as a spiritual force she is very much behind what I’m doing. With just a look or a touch she can communicate. She’ll completely shift me around. I’ll just be trying so hard and then she’ll come and touch my face and I’ll just be in tears. I’ll say I’m trying so hard, and she’ll say, ‘I know, I know.’ That kind of support, that’s the jewel. Who can support you on an etheric level like that unconditionally, with unconditional love?
Julie: What would you like to say in closing?
Wah!: We close everything with a prayer. A prayer for me would be that I continue to find opportunities and ways to bring infinite energy into the physical realm.
Reach Wah at wahmusic.com.
