Sitting Down With:
Beryl Bender Birch
By: Julie Deife
Few American yoga teachers have taught as many students as has Beryl Bender Birch, who’s been at it now for 33 years, over 20 of those with her late husband, Thom Birch. The style she is known for is Ashtanga Yoga, but the heart and clear energy that comes through experiencing her in a class, a retreat, a conference or something as personal as the following conversation, is uniquely Beryl. She studies and reflects and practices at least as much as any teacher I’ve been around, and more than most of them she has also truly found her own voice. A visionary and author of two books thus far, Power Yoga and Beyond Power Yoga, Beryl is ready to write again, this time about the Yoga Sutra as a treatise on quantum physics and another topic she is already teaching about: becoming a spiritual revolutionary.
But we’ll have to wait until her schedule slows down a bit. In her 60s, she’s more in demand nationally and internationally as a speaker and teacher than ever before; recently back home to New York after three stops in Germany, before coming here to Santa Clara, California, to teach at the Yogacharya Festival. Say hello to master yoga teacher, Beryl Bender Birch.
Julie: How does it feel to be teaching here at a nice little yoga conference when the world is falling apart? The war, the environment...
Beryl: I feel incredibly fortunate to be here with the sun shining, in an air conditioned room, cotton sheets, massive amounts of food to eat, potable water to drink, the luxury to be able to go to all these yoga classes and talk about spiritual evolution and work on our own transformation when you know that a huge percentage of the world is freezing their asses off on the side of a mountain in Pakistan recovering from an earthquake or breathing radioactive dust and drinking radioactive water and living in a country where the life expectancy of a male is 35.
Julie: Well okay, that’s one way of looking at it.
Beryl: You have two choices. You can feel guilty and depressed about being here because of what is going on in the world, or you just fill your heart with gratitude and say thank you, I’m so grateful. I don’t know what I did to be in this position, but I will do everything I can to serve and give back.
Julie: About some big issues that are facing us, and I know you think about the problems of the world, so I made a short list beginning with our president lying to the American people…
Beryl: Oh, God.
Julie: Do you have anything to say about that?
Beryl: (sigh)
Julie: Oh, come on.
Beryl: There are two ways to look at everything.
We are in the relative world, and in the relative world you look at things and say ‘that’s good, or that’s bad.’
Not everybody thinks that what our current president is doing is wrong or needs changing. I do but not everyone does. To the followers of Osama bin Laden, he’s like Che Guevara – a revolutionary trying to change the world.
I’d like to have a president who is inspiring and spiritually awake and moving toward inclusion and God-centeredness rather than focusing on exclusion and war and posturing for position in the world. But what you see through your perception, which has been molded by your world-view that you’ve inherited or acquired, you judge as good or bad.
Julie: And the other view?
Beryl: The absolute. But we can’t really look from the absolute view most of the time with the exception of little glimpses of samadhi. If you’ve really had the experience of yoga, which is the same as the experience of samadhi, then you’ve had that experience of boundlessness and eternal infinite connectedness of all beings and you realize that nothing is a mistake.
It’s not a mistake that George Bush is president for eight years. It is not a mistake that there’s war. It’s painful, yes, to see death and suffering and illness. It’s painful to see change. But change is transformation. Impermanence is the nature of prakruti, the world of form. The Buddhists call it form and emptiness. Conventional physics calls it matter and energy. New physics calls it particle and wave. Yoga calls it purusha and prakruti. We live in the world of prakruti and it’s difficult to accept the impermanence of nature, but part of the work of the spiritual path is to learn to celebrate impermanence. If this moment is uncomfortable, breathe, because two minutes later that will change. If this moment is comfortable – here we sit in luxurious surroundings – then the next moment there could be an earthquake. It’s pure illusion to think that there’s any security in the world of form.
Julie: You sound at peace. Is there anything that really bothers you? Don’t you have a pet peeve?
Beryl: Kids, way too God damn many of them in the world, man. Here’s a plea to men and women of childbearing age: Back off. I’m talking about from this moment forward, we can’t have so many children. You know, one person, one child. That means a couple, not one each, one together. Zero population growth. We, as a species, have to back off this obsession to breed. It’s absurd.
Julie: How did you start practicing yoga?
Beryl: I started with meditation. I had two meditation teachers: Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche who I met in San Francisco before he started Shambhala, and Munishri Chitrabhanu who was a Jain monk in the U.S. at the invitation of Harvard Divinity School – and he didn’t teach asana. Most of my early meditation teachers were Jain or Buddhist, so my yoga teaching is very influenced by Buddhist studies.
Julie: Why did you start the practice?
Beryl: That’s what I ask my students all the time. Why do you want to do this? This is a lot of hard work.
But I wanted to answer the question ‘who am I?’ from the time I was old enough to look out at the stars. What’s my purpose here? I was curious about God, the universe and cosmology, and my dad was a scientist.
Julie: What about your spiritual development?
Beryl: Spirituality came almost organically to me from previous lifetimes. I already had the Gaia principle in my mind, and I was not given to looking at the universe mechanically. I’ve been looking for God since I was 4 years old.
Julie: Have you found God?
Beryl: Once you have the experience of nirvana or samadhi, whether it’s for an instant or a minute or 14 hours, it changes you. It can be accessed through any of the paths of yoga (you know, karma, bhakti, raja, and so forth). Other paths that can take you to that awareness could be poetry or music or athletics. Some people have it spontaneously. Maslow called it peak experience.
Julie: Can you describe it?
Beryl: No. It’s very difficult to put an intangible experience into words. That’s why people who try to write about the experience of samadhi end up making maps or telling stories or writing out a set of instructions.
We’re at the point now where science is moving out of the old paradigm, a mechanical and inanimate way of looking at things and coming into alignment with the knowledge of the ancient seers and masters and rishis and gurus. The Yoga Sutra is actually a brilliant treatise on quantum physics.
Julie: Do you think science can prove the existence of consciousness?
Beryl: You can’t prove something intangible with tangible methodology. There is a quantum leap that happens that is unspeakable.
But going back to your question about experiencing God, once you have that experience, it’s a knowing. There’s no way to describe it, and there’s no way to give it to somebody else. All I can say is that the experience moves you from self-centeredness to God-centeredness.
Julie: Is that why you like it so much?
Beryl: I don’t know about liking it. There’s nothing else to do. What else is there to do? You can do what the Buddhists suggest which is to simply be with it because you know it’s going to change. Once you understand there is nothing but this moment then you’re not so keen to get to the future. You do the work because there is nothing left to do and there is no way out.
How can you get out of consciousness? You can’t.
Julie: Maybe you can go into it.
Beryl: That’s exactly right. You can’t say I’m going to study consciousness, let’s get some monks and hook them up to some biofeedback instrument and look at where they’re going.
The masters who gave us all this wisdom knew quantum physics, they knew the nature of the universe and they passed that along; but you can’t know it until you have the experience. So the only way to study it is to duplicate what they did – sit down, be quiet, go in and take a look. Go through asana, go through pranayama and have the experience! Then you go ‘aha, I see we’re all connected. There are no boundaries.’
It’s incredible and I love going out and inspiring people to be spiritual revolutionaries.
Julie: How do you do that?
Beryl: I say, ‘Wake up. Wake yourself up!’ and do it now because we are in crisis. We are at a point where I think a critical mass of spiritual revolutionaries is essential to make a shift. I don’t think that technology is enough to bail out the mess we’ve made on the planet or to save us as a species.
Only one thing is going to enable that, and that is a quantum leap in consciousness. And that goes back to critical mass. Every time somebody goes to the mat to practice, every time somebody sits to practice, every time somebody chops carrots mindfully, every time someone sits at a stoplight and breathes instead of freaking out because there is so much traffic, that is practice. That effort goes into the collective consciousness and moves us closer to the tipping point.
Does going extinct really matter? Not really in the big picture.
Julie: Consciousness will exist.
Beryl: Consciousness doesn’t care.
Julie: Let’s talk about teacher training. That’s pretty much what you do, right? You’re training a lot of teachers. How many have you trained? Who are these people? How do you stay in touch with them or do you?
Beryl: First of all, I can’t really train anybody to be a teacher. I tell people I can’t teach you to be a teacher. All I can do is show you how I practice yoga. So let’s commit for this week, or these two weeks or this month to practice. And that’s going to start, it’s not going to end, that’s going to go on 24/7 to the best of your ability.
There’s only one thing you have to do and that’s pay attention. Pattabhi Jois says: “take practice, all is coming.”
When I first heard that 25 years ago, I thought it meant just to work on your asana and everything else will fall into place. And then after many years I understood the meaning of abhyasa (practice), which is effort towards steadiness of mind – it was like an epiphany. Oh, my God! Take practice, all is coming.
Teacher training is just about doing practice for a ka-billion years. One day somebody comes up to you and says ‘hey, you know, you look pretty bright and clear and centered. What are you doing?’
‘Oh, I do this practice you know.’
‘Can you show me? What are those things you’re doing? Sun salutations?’
And you go ‘well sure, I can show you how to do that.’
And all of a sudden you’re teaching someone else how to do what you’re doing.
Julie: The training, the graduation, what do we actually learn?
Beryl: Every moment you’re graduating to a new level if you’re paying attention. Every time you do savasana you’re being reborn. You’re letting go of what doesn’t serve you, and you’re opening yourself to the realization that atman and brahman are one. There’s only one of us here. Not two, just one.
Julie: That’s it?
Beryl: So certification, graduation, you know, it keeps going, keep practicing, come back, check in. And teachers of mine – not mine really, but people that I have trained to teach – will come back to my workshops and they’ll bring their students who will come up to me after class and say things like: “You teach just like Sheila.” I have to laugh. It’s like meeting your grandchildren, you know? It’s great.
Julie: We were all shocked and saddened by Thom’s sudden unexpected death last year. How long were you and Thom married? Can you talk about it?
Beryl: Twenty-five years. Tom was a brilliant light. He had an incredibly keen, incisive awareness of people. He went right to the heart with a real fourth chakra connection. His yoga therapy, his hands-on work, his ability to see what was going on with people, was brilliant. He was a medical intuitive and probably the most psychic person I’ve ever met. But life was a huge struggle for him.
In the early 70s, long before I met Thom, I had asked for a teacher that would demand the very best of me, who would not make life easy but who would challenge me every step of the way. I didn’t realize that I would get that teacher in the person I married. But Thom always knew he was going to die in his 50s.
Julie: And now?
Beryl: The teachings are unfolding, and Thom is constantly present. He keeps turning lights on at our home, we have conversations and I ask him to pass on questions for me to Indra.
For more information about upcoming retreats and trainings or to reach Beryl Bender Birch, go to www.power-yoga.com.
Julie Deife is the founder and former publisher and editor of LA YOGA Ayurveda and Health magazine.
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2002-2006
LA Yoga Ayurveda & Health Magazine
