Yoga and the Twelve Steps: One Truth, Parallel Paths – Richard Jonas

Hysterical Blindness, Monsoon Wedding, one of the top-grossing foreign films of all time, and The Namesake. Her latest film, Amelia, co-starring Richard Gere and Ewan McGregor, was released in October 2009.

Although she describes her home practice as “a bit undisciplined”—“I’m spoiled by all you teachers! I only like to come to class,” she says—her yoga is not. When in New York, Nair attends class three times a week at the Iyengar Yoga Institute, “Monday, Thursday, and Saturday with James. And on the road, I have Iyengar Yoga teachers everywhere! In every major country I have identified and created friendships with Iyengar teachers. Never a week goes by without my practicing, but I am not good at doing it alone. I do it, but not deeply, not regularly enough.”

Nair made a brief visit to RIMYI in Pune, taking a class with Prashant Iyengar and visiting with Guruji.

Earlier, in 2005, she interviewed Guruji during one of his triumphal Light on Life appearances. “That was one of greatest honors I have ever received, to be asked to converse with Guruji,” she says of the event at New York’s City Centre. “I remember feeling like I had to be deeply prepared. I read Light on Life, of course, very very carefully. I met with him the night before for dinner. I told him, ‘Guruji, one condition only, that you won’t make me demonstrate anything in front of 3000 people.’ Then he laughed his beautiful cascade of laughter.

“I think it was our beloved Mary Dunn’s idea,” Nair recalls, “that it would be a great opportunity to have all 3000 of us taught by Guruji, even for just the Om.” At her request, Guruji instructed the audience in sitting and chanting, and hundreds who would never have had the chance to study with B.K.S. Iyengar shared an unforgettable moment.

Recently, Nair had a reminder of just how remarkable the evening was, and how much it meant to Iyengar Yoga devotees.

“It was the funniest thing,” she remembers. “I was in London last week, and some friend of mine walked me into a really fancy, overcrowded restaurant. They showed us to a terrible table and my friend took the maitre d’ aside. I could see them talking, my friend was trying to convince him. The maitre d’ turned around and asked, ‘Is that Mira Nair? I saw her interview B.K.S. Iyengar in New York!’

“Forget my movies! It was because of that interview that he gave us the best table in the place. We had the best meal and he kept sending special dishes over to our table from the chef all night!

“I was just telling James [Murphy], ‘You won’t believe where yoga gets us!’”

Nair is the founder of the Salaam Baalak Trust (baalak means “child”), a foundation with 25 centers providing a safe and nurturing environment for street children all over India. Funded with profits from Salaam Bombay!, her first film, the organization (www.salaambaalaktrust. com) is led by chairperson Praveen Nair, a social worker and Nair’s mother. Nair also founded Maisha, an annual filmmakers’ laboratory based in Kampala, Uganda, which supports emerging filmmakers in East Africa.

Richard Jonas, certified at the Introductory level, is a faculty member at the Iyengar Yoga Institute of Greater New York. He is also a writer and Vice President of the IYNAUS Board of Directors.

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We admitted we were powerless over our addiction—that our lives had become unmanageable.

Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

This version of the twelve steps is an adaptation from the original 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous developed in the 1930s. The twelvestep approach has grown since to be the most widely used approach in dealing with alcoholism, drug abuse, and other addictive or dysfunctional behaviors. See 12steps.org for more information.

YOgA AND The TWeLVe STepS: ONe TrUTh, pArALLeL pAThS

by Richard Jonas

Consider the path outlined in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Then think about a twelve-step program for recovery from addition.

When you come right down to it, says Senior Iyengar Yoga Teacher and filmmaker Lindsey Clennell, they’re quite similar.

Modern twelve-step programs, says Clennell, director of the film Addiction, Recovery and Yoga, “present many ideas which are basic yoga principles.” The new film is a fascinating look at the intersections between twelve-step programs and yoga, mostly Iyengar Yoga, in the lives of seven practitioners, including three Iyengar Yoga teachers, who talk on camera about their experiences in in-depth interviews that are funny, moving, provocative, and heartbreaking. The 85-minute movie can be viewed or downloaded free at www. adyo.org. To download, click on the Google logo. The film is also on Google Video, Veoh, and Yahoo Video.

The new film is a fascinating look at the intersections between twelve-step programs and yoga, mostly Iyengar Yoga, in the lives of six practitioners, including three Iyengar Yoga teachers.

“When you talk to someone who’s done twelve step and yoga, you see how yoga principles have come alive to them through the window of twelve step,” Clennell says. “They see the possibility of freedom from affliction. The program said to them, ‘Admit you can’t control your behavior and acknowledge that the only way to overcome your difficulties is by surrendering to a higher power.’ Yoga addresses the same subject in a different way.”

The interviewees discuss their own histories of addiction and the way yoga and twelvestep programs together led them to recovery. In the film, each is identified only by their first name, in the tradition of twelve-step programs.

They include three Iyengar Yoga teachers: Father Joe Peirera, the distinguished Senior Teacher from Mumbai who has achieved near-miraculous results treating HIV-positive and drug- and alcohol-dependent students with yoga via the Kripa Foundation; Kevin Gardiner, Intermediate Junior III, of Budapest, Hungary, and the Iyengar Yoga Institute of New York; and Tori Milner, Intermediate Junior I, also of the New York Institute. Since being interviewed for the film, which had a premiere this fall at a New York Institute event she hosted with Clennell, Milner has begun teaching a regular monthly series at the Institute entitled “Happy, Joyous and Free: Yoga for People with Addictions.”

Several students, most from the New York Institute, also tell their stories.

Besides discussing their problems with addiction and the steps to recovery, each participant is also shown performing part of a yoga practice.

The movie came about “by accident,” says Clennell, Intermediate Senior III, also a teacher at the New York Institute. “I went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting because a number of my students were in recovery and I thought I should find out what AA was. I was very impressed: the atmosphere and the way people were conducting themselves was exemplary in terms of community action. I mentioned it in my class at the Institute.”

Three months later, a regular student approached Clennell, saying, “Thank you for saying that about AA. I am now 63 days sober.”

“It was clear to me that this was a turning point in her life,” he remembers. “It was a poignant moment, and it made me think it might be possible to help more people by making the connection between twelve step and yoga.”

Clennell’s own first step was to interview Father Joe, then in New York teaching a workshop at the Institute and staying at the apartment where Clennell lives with his wife, Bobby, also a Senior Teacher. “Father Joe is an expert on this subject,” Clennell says. “He further inspired me, and I realized that the combination of yoga and twelve step was unique and effective.”

“Most of our afflictions are too obscure. We can’t quite see when we’re acting them out or when we’re engulfed in our negative characteristics.“

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A writer and filmmaker in his native England, with documentaries featuring Muhammad Ali and Mikhail Gorbachev and more than 200 music videos and concert films to his credit, Clennell “didn’t see it as a commercial project. I saw it as something to distribute for free, to people who might be helped by it.”

Clennell produced the film, which was shot over a year’s time by his son, director and cinematographer Jake Clennell, a longtime Iyengar Yoga practitioner who is currently filming a documentary about Guruji in India. The movie was edited by Hisayo Kushida, another New York Iyengar Yoga practitioner.

Clennell consulted with Mary Dunn, Senior Teacher at the New York Institute, not long before her death, and received her enthusiastic support. “I am glad it has been finished successfully,” he says, “but sorry she is not here to see it.”

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“In some ways the film is quite entertaining,” Clennell told me before we watched it together a second time. “If you don’t know anything about the psychology of addiction it’s very revealing.”

Addiction, Recovery and Yoga is “completely about subjective psychology, not action,” he says, “and subjective psychology as articulated by people who have had extreme experiences.” The film, though, avoids sensationalism. “That’s how addiction problems are usually treated on TV and in films. So in a way, our film is attempting to break new ground. It’s not exploiting the interviewee by getting them to reveal something

Yoga Sutras that suggest surrender to a higher power:

I.23: Isvara pranidhanat va Or, the citta [consciousness] may be restrained by profound meditation upon God and total surrender to Him.

II.45: Samadhisiddhih Isvarapranidhanat Surrender to God brings perfection in samadhi [profound meditation].

The afflictions:

II.3: Avidya asmita raga dvesa abhinivesah klesah The five afflictions which disturb the equilibrium of consciousness are: ignorance or lack of wisdom, ego, pride of the ego or the sense of ‘I,’ attachment to pleasure, aversion to pain, fear of death, and clinging to life.

The three-fold remedy:

II.1: Tapah svadhyaya Isvarapranidhanani kriyayogah Burning zeal in practice, self-study and study of scriptures, and surrender to God are the acts of yoga.

On friendliness:

I.33: Maitri karuna mudita upeksanam sukha duhkha punya apunya visayanam bhavanatah cittaprasadanam Through cultivation of friendliness, compassion, joy, and indifference to pleasure and pain, virtue and vice, respectively, the consciousness becomes favorably disposed, serene and benevolent.

In Patanjali’s list of the five fluctuations of consciousness are two which account for denial, viparyaya and vikalpa. Both involve a distorted view of reality:

I.8: Viparyayah mithyajnanam atadrupa pratistham Illusory or erroneous knowledge is based on non-fact or the non-real.

I.9: Sabdajnana anupati vastusunyah vikalpah Verbal knowledge devoid of substance is fancy or imagination.

Louise, practitioner

IN TheIr OWN WOrDS

Louise: I don’t have a problem with answering questions about alcoholism. There might be someone out there struggling who will think, “My God, that girl’s an alcoholic, perhaps she can help me.”

Tori: It’s turned out to be such a source of strength for me, to know that I had this problem and I could overcome it.

Louise: AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] was an amazing experience. From that day on, for the next three and a half years, I went every day.

Father Joe: Rock bottom is a basic realization that I don’t have to deny who I am. I am who I am, and it’s beautiful.

Brad: I thought I could do it on my own. That’s a big part of most addicts: they want to do it on their own or just can’t ask for help.

Jack: [On the way] to my first meeting, I was trying to convince myself to turn around and go home. And then suddenly I realized how many hundreds of times I had tried to approach this problem through my own efforts, and I said, “Jack, you’re not going to recover by yourself.”

Tori, teacher

Robert, teacher

Brad: I always had a Valium or something. To just have nothing in terms of a substance was such an uncomfortable feeling. I probably went to three meetings a day, I probably made 300 meetings in my first 90 days. It was the only place where I felt safe.

Kevin: When a person comes into the program they’re not receptive to complex ideas. You have to keep it simple.

Tori: I was incredulous at the deep honesty, that people were baring their souls in a roomful of strangers, that people would feel that trusting and comfortable to describe really intense feelings.

Louise: The stories can be so amazing and so magical. I’ve heard people making the most amazing amends. You are filled with admiration for their bravery, and then you see the sparkle in their eye from having a completely free conscience.

Robert: That’s really what twelve step is about: it’s enunciating your own experiences and letting others take what they will and leave the rest.

Kevin: I felt at home. I felt, “We’re all on the same page here, and it’s not about the externals.” I identified, and that opened something in me that gave me a little bit of hope.

Robert: Treating other people better, being compassionate, is an important thing to learn how to practice.

Jack: The program is a stopping ground for someone who is running. It’s the place to stop and say, “Wait a minute, my life is unmanageable.”

Tori: That first step was the one that they told me I had to do perfectly. You have to get this first one, you have to really admit you’re powerless over alcohol, you have to really know it and feel it.

Brad: As an addict, I always thought I had it completely under control. Denial really means you don’t even know you’re lying.

Father Joe: In the very first step, yoga helps. We have a set of restorative postures which calms down the person and leads that person to say, “I am all right. Deep down, I am all right.” … Hope comes in the second step when faith is expressed.

Father Joe: Recovery people, before they came into this practice, were soaked in lies. And a human being is made for the truth.

Father Joe, Senior Teacher and Founder, Kripa Foundation

Kevin, teacher

Jack, practitioner

Brad, practitioner

“Recovery people, before they came into this practice, were soaked in lies. And a human being is made for the truth.”

Tori: Going to meetings, working the steps with the sponsor, and then eventually you become a sponsor and you work with other people who are new and guide them through the steps. And through this process, you can’t help but be confronted with yourself.

Louise: [Step 3] is my favorite, because I am a control freak. Step 3 completely let me off the hook. Somebody else is in control.

Jack: I realized right away I was going to have a problem with “God.” [But] there I was on my knees, with my head on the floor, prostrated. Suddenly I realized, I can pray here [in Adho Mukha Virasana]. Yoga enabled me to approach “higher power.”

Robert: One of the things that helps to see one’s true self is surrender to a higher power, Isvara Pranidhana. Your whole being is absorbed in the experience.

Father Joe: The first thing that hits a human being in any recovery program is the truth about themselves. Humility, for me, is truth. You can’t see the truth if you are filled with egoism. Robert: The first three steps really connected to yoga in a strong way. I was fascinated. Lindsey: When people do yoga poses they have to know whether they’re doing them accurately. They have to know, “Is it true I’m straightening my leg? Is it true I’m straightening my arm?” That constant selfassessment and self-observation develops someone’s ability to adhere to the truth. Yoga gives someone a very practical way to keep their feet firmly on the ground.

Jack: It clicked that yoga was the way I was going to move through my recovery.

Louise: Step 11 is my yoga step. It’s about coming back into myself and my body. When I’m doing my yoga, my breathing slows down, I’m completely in the moment, feet on the ground, in the universe, right now.

Kevin: What keeps me practicing? Simply put, it makes me feel good. It calms me, it allows me to focus, it gives me energy, it seems to fulfill a relationship with my body that seems eternal.

Brad: Every time I would finish a class, I felt better. Feeling physically stronger helps me deal with life stress. My yoga practice helps me stay sober.

Lindsey: Yoga brings emotional stability. One of the things that drives people to addiction is emotional disturbance. Father Joe: As soon as you get into a practice like yoga, you start seeing the glimpse of where you’re going to be. Those few moments lift you up from darkness into light, from a deathlike situation to life, from a total denial to a truth that sets you free. Jack: Yoga changed my mind, changed my thinking. I became more self-accepting. As I did asanas, there were days when I would feel very elegant and graceful. Other days I was stiff and sore. Selfacceptance is one of the primary components of recovery. You really have to accept that you’re not perfect.

Father Joe: The final step is a psychosocial step that says, “Having had this spiritual awakening, we practice these principles in all the affairs of our life.” Now that is very true about yoga. Because when you practice yoga, you take that calmness, that serenity, into every event of your life.

Kevin: [Now] there’s distance between what’s coming at me and how I react, and I’ve learned that in my body, I’ve learned that from the practice.

Tori: Yoga offers a sobriety of mind and spirit that is really beyond satisfying. Relying on a crutch like alcohol or drugs to give me some altered state of consciousness—for me, that’s not even interesting.

Lindsey: People ask, “Is yoga going to help?” My answer is, “Yes, yoga helps in conjunction with a twelve-step program. The chances are you can be successful with this, put your life together and come away with a tool that will help you

develop yourself further, beyond recovery.”

NOTE: Some quotes from the film Addiction, Recovery and Yoga have been slightly condensed and edited for length

Twelve Steps continued from page 15 sensational. There were actually things people revealed which I didn’t use in the film. I was very careful not to exploit peoples’ experiences.”

Instead, he “tried to make a film which engages the viewer purely through subjective psychology. For yoga students, this is something of interest. A person in a twelve-step program or a person doing yoga—both get a practical understanding of their mental processes.” Addiction is clearly an affliction, Clennell points out: “In the Yoga Sutras, afflictions are illustrated so clearly.” However, he continues: “Most of our afflictions are too obscure. We can’t quite see when we’re acting them out or when we’re engulfed in our negative characteristics. With addiction, the person knows: ‘I’m drinking.’ Or, ‘I’m not drinking.’ Watching this film, the nonaddictive person starts to see how his behaviors might be similar. From that point of view, it’s an education in selfawareness, in affliction, and in the difficulties in achieving freedom from affliction. “Looking at the way interviewees have tackled something as difficult as addiction opens up a set of possibilities about self-study. You could look at something in your life as an affliction and, like people in twelve-step programs, work systematically, one day at a time, to overcome it. “The mechanics of denial which underpin addiction are also very much part of our behavior as nonaddicts. The line between someone who has an addiction problem and someone who thinks they don’t gets a little blurred,” says Clennell, who has no firsthand experience with twelve-step programs. “That’s why I don’t call myself an expert. The process of twelve step is a unique experience, and that comes across in the film. Those are the people who can help others, especially yoga teachers who have gone through the process. This makes the film especially useful for yoga teachers who have students with addictions.” Clennell has for many years encouraged his students to cultivate a personal meditative practice based on the three-fold remedy of Patanjali’s yoga, by being friendly and not being driven to perceive only others’ negative characteristics. “You can say, ‘I’m not violent, I’m not eating hamburgers,’” he jokes. “But it’s not about your external condition; it’s about your internal demeanor to other people. I tell my students, ‘Be friendly. Don’t withdraw affection from people.’

“This is a real practice that is one way of understanding Bhakti Yoga, or devotion to God, or surrender, or a sense of connection,” Clennell says. “God isn’t an abstraction; as they say in Jamaica, ‘Jah Liv.’ We can really bring the element of Bhakti into our practice with something within our immediate range of perception. Interestingly, in twelve step,

surrender to a higher power comes right at the beginning of the program.” The way addictive behavior controls us is not always obvious, Clennell says, “even when you’re doing something that’s crazy and self-destructive. Think of an alcoholic crashing around. He’s lost his job, his marriage is in trouble; but only when he finds himself in the hospital does he realize what’s happened. Finally he realizes, ‘I’m an alcoholic.’ You hear stories like that all the time at meetings. Only after years do people come to terms with their addiction because denial is so powerful.” Even for nonaddicts, though, “it’s easy to acquire and maintain negative mental patterns—and to be unaware, in continual denial about them.”

Even for nonaddicts, though, “it’s easy to acquire and maintain negative mental patterns—and to be unaware, in continual denial about them. When a nonaddictive person realizes that denial is part of all of us—and how strong it is—you start to look at what’s really going on, and self-study takes on an additional dimension.

“You have a choice of how you perceive others,” Clennell continues. “Often our reactions are hostile, because of status anxiety, jealousy, because we’re conditioned to look for what is threatening, to look for some aspect of the other person which reduces them in our view. That’s what makes it possible to do all the terrible things we do to each other.”

By contrast, he notes, “The twelve-step maxim of ‘Happy, Joyous and Free’ seems a pretty good state of mind to work towards.”

Key to this practice of internal nonviolence and friendliness, says Clennell, is “noticing when you’re taken over by an afflictive emotion like anger or fear. But much better, noticing when you’re taken over by a positive emotion, which we’re even less used to noticing. At the point when you feel elated or affectionate, when you admire somebody or feel attracted to them or like them, you should allow that feeling. We don’t trust that feeling; we trust anger or fear more.

“When you feel affectionate to someone, allow yourself to feel it. It may not be appropriate to act on it or make a remark. But to feel affectionate to other people is not a dangerous event,” he laughs.

“People spend a lot of time in a state of isolation and withdrawal,” Clennell says. “With yoga, people can move forward to new behaviors and new ways of being.”

Even for those seemingly lost in their addictions, yoga and twelve-step programs beckon a way back.