The roots of yoga are firmly established in philosophy and myth. As we know it today, Yoga is vastly different from the origins of the practice. Yoga is meditation, and the method has evolved to accommodate contemporary life, focusing on the asana postures to move the body and encourage physical health. In honouring yoga’s artistry, we need the influence of myth and philosophy to create a well-rounded practice and approach to reality.
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras explain the theory and approach to the practice of yoga through philosophy, and The Bhagavad Gita—a beloved text among yogis—shares the popular myth of Arjuna and Krishna to illustrate the concept of fate, devotion, non-harming, and other themes contemplated in the practice of yoga.
Mythology is a powerful tool of evolution. We learn to accept, integrate, and interact with others through stories. Myth demonstrates a way to live and be in the world; our stories create communities, ecosystems, and economies.
This week, we had the pleasure of interviewing the West Coast yin yoga teacher and author of From the Gita to the Grail, Bernie Clark, to talk about the influence of mythology in yoga, the mystery of quantum physics, and how to access a yin mind to balance the yang energy of Western society.
“When I first started teaching yin yoga, people were horrified because they thought I was exercising joints. Each practice has a different definition of exercise. A yang definition of exercise is a lot of repetitive, rhythmic movement. With yin yoga, we work with long-held static stress. Think of braces: people wear braces for years. That’s yin stress, and that’s what you need to affect the bones.” – Bernie Clark.
Check out the movie mentioned in the podcast: The God Particle.
You can watch or listen to the full episode or read the highlights below.
Experience the power of myth through movement on Practice with Clara.
Interview with Bernie Clark
What are your key components to physical health?
BC—In my realization, there are three components to physical health.
- Strength, you need to work on the strength. I’ve found when I first started doing power yoga, I couldn’t believe how hard it was. I remember getting a video of Rod Striker. It was a power yoga thing, and it kicked my ass. It was so hard, but after a year of doing Ashtanga Yoga, I went back and tried that video again. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. I found that through practice, I was getting stronger and stronger. But the strength plateaus because I could work with my body weight; that’s all you do in yoga. Today I also swing kettlebells and do other things to enhance my strength.
- Endurance, there’s only so much the heart rate can go up in the yoga practice; it doesn’t provide high-intensity interval training. I will run sprints, or I’ll do stair climbing to get the heart going.
- Mobility, I do a yin practice to keep the joints and everything mobile.
Is there a correlation between physics and the mystical?
BC— I always wanted to know why and how we do the things we do. I love studying mythology. I love studying comparative religions. Joseph Campbell, an American mythologist, very much influenced me; he influenced me a lot. I’ve always been fascinated by the mind and how it works. I also want to know how the universe works.
There’s my interest in physics. I love to build bridges between East and West because we have certain experiences in the East. You cannot deny an experience. It’s an anecdote, a fact, and somehow we have to describe the scientific models for the maps. If you will, they have to accommodate these experiences. Some of the experiences don’t fit on our maps. It doesn’t mean that the experiences are wrong. That means the maps have to be improved.
I’m always looking at ways to explain what people in the East experienced with our current Western maps. In the West, we invoke things like quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance that Einstein hated. Einstein spent the rest of his life trying to disprove quantum mechanics. This is one of the most robust findings of physics, this entanglement in the action at a distance. What we know is that it works in a certain way. We don’t understand how it can possibly work that way, but we know it works that way.
The other side of the coin is a lot of new-age wellness. People have taken the buzzwords from quantum physics, misappropriated them, and applied them in ways that quantum physicists have admitted they don’t understand. Richard Freeman was one of the most brilliant minds globally, and he didn’t understand it.
There are things we can’t explain, like dark matter. We have no idea what that is or dark energy. So there’s a lot of God particles still out there. Things we don’t know. Only 5% of the universe is unknown to us, which is crazy. A small percent of the universe is just what we know as electrons, protons, neutrons. The rest of it we don’t know yet.
What are the components of mythology?
BC—Joseph Campbell said that there are four main functions of myth.
- The cosmological function explains why we are here, how we came to be, and all cultures that exist.
- The sociological function serves to put you in your place in society. You are born to do a certain thing; that’s your Dharma.
- Then you have your psychological function. This is going to describe how you deal with the arc of ageing. The stories that you do when you’re a child, what you do when you become a teenager, a young adult. How to raise a family, what you do in your grandparent, going to the forest, becoming a guru, all that’s described by their cultures, myths, and how you relate to your life.
And then the biggest, most important thing is mystical. What’s it all about? Why are we here?
Explore myth on Practice with Clara through the Archetypes Playlist.
Yoga, meditation, and mantra classes are themed for the gods and goddesses of the Hindu Pantheon.
Goddesses of the Tridevi:
- Saraswati
- Lakshmi
- Durga
Gods of the Trimurti:
- Brahma
- Vishnu
- Shiva
The collections in this playlist are accredited by Yoga Alliance and count toward CE (Continuing Education) credited hours.
Interview with Bernie Clark
How did you come to yoga?
BC— I took up meditation in my early twenties to deal with stress in the business world. I was not in the high-tech industry selling, and the stress was just getting to me, and I asked my manager’s manager what he did to deal with stress, and he said he meditated.
I dove into Zen meditation when I was about twenty-two, and it wasn’t until twenty years later that I was looking for a Sanga to sit. I found a place that just opened up in Vancouver, and the owner at the time she kept saying, I should try yoga. I didn’t want to try yoga. I was just there for the Zen. I was only there for the meditation three times a week, but she convinced me by saying the magic words that yoga will help your golf game. I thought, well, if it’s going to help my golf game, yeah. I’ll try it. And so I tried it, and she was right. It did help my golf game.
I realized the point of yoga is to meditate. And so, I’ve been doing yoga since my twenties. It wasn’t until my early forties that I added the asana, the physical part, to help my meditation. So I guess I got into yoga over 40 years ago. But the asana is, I’ve been only doing those for just over 20 years.
How do you define yin yoga, and what is a yin mindset?
BC—Our culture is full of Yangsters, is what I like to say; we are very driven. If you think of New Year’s resolutions, it’s always to change something, and that’s a very yang energy. A yin mindset is more receptive and accepting, whereas the yang mindset is more controlled and directed.
The Ashtanga practice was my favourite, but I needed to balance, or I would have burned out. By the time I hit 50, I was stronger, but it was unrequited. I needed to find a balance.
I came across yin yoga through the teachings of Sarah Powers. And through Sarah, I met Paul Grilley, and I just fell in love with what they offered. At first, I hated it because it was hard, but it was simple, and I realized I needed to balance my yang activities with more yin activities. Like everything in life, you need balance.
The difference between yang and yin yoga is to think of muscles versus fascia. Muscles are active; I have to make an effort to contract the muscles. Fascia is springy like your Achilles tendon and plantar fascia. Fascial things are elastic, stretch a little bit, and then snap back.
You don’t have to will your Achilles tendon to retract. We have active movements. Then we have passive movements, things that we just allow to happen. We’re targeting these more passive tissues, the fascia, the ligaments, and the joint capsules with yin yoga.
When I first started teaching yin yoga, people were horrified because they thought I was exercising joints. You should never exercise joint capsules or stretch ligaments. Each practice has a different definition of exercise. A yang definition of exercise is a lot of repetitive, rhythmic movement.
We don’t apply the same movement in yin yoga as we do in a yang practice; with yin, we work with a long-held static stress. Think of braces: people wear braces for years. They don’t take them out every twenty minutes and put it back in again, that’s yin stress, and that’s what you need to affect the bones.
We need a different form of exercise or load or stress for our deeper connective tissues. Our health needs both. You need to work the muscles you need that active, rhythmic yang movement. And when you work the deeper tissues, you need the long-held static stresses by tractioning those tissues through yin yoga.
If you could choose any era to be born in, what period would you choose, and why?
BC—Probably the 22nd or the 23rd century, about a hundred years from now. I’m really curious to see what’s going to be happening then. If we’ve calmed down global warming or developed new forms of energy? I’m going to die before all that happens. I would like to see that.
What’s your superpower?
BC— I remember reading Herman Hesse when I was a teenager, and in his book Siddartha, the superpower of Siddartha stuck with me. It was the ability to just sit, despite whatever happens around you, to be able to sit and be present and know that this too will pass. That’s the superpower I always tried to work on, just being able to sit and be with what’s happening.
