Kino MacGregor manages to walk a fine line between the scroll-stopping stuff of Instagram and the deep practice of belonging, discernment, and freedom in yoga. If you do just take her in on Instagram, I wonder if you look past her flawless yoga asanas and pictures of the far-flung places she teaches, and read what she writes about her practices and experiences. She says repeatedly that yoga is not about the poses, which she calls the "grammar" of yoga; it's about looking deeply inside and freeing yourself through sensation, experience, and love. The poses do teach you how to learn to be in and understand your body, but they, along with the myriad other practices of chanting, pranayama, meditation, deep relaxation, and more, teach you how to move from the dissociation of daily life to getting closer to your experience of God.
In this conversation, we talked primarily about: 1) the responsibility of yoga teachers to protect the practices and lineages, 2) how 200 hours of training prepares you only to know whether you want to teach or not, but not how to teach, 3) how deep immersive study is the only way NOT to appropriate these practices, 4) how Ashtanga Yoga can be an accessible practice, and 5) how devotion to teacher and your own practice, largely through tapas or burning zeal, is the only way you will grow in the practice. We covered a lot more, and I hope you enjoy!
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Terms:
1. Asana: postures
2. Mantra: a sound formula for meditation
3. Sadhana: spiritual practice
4. Tapas: spiritual austerity or burning zeal
5. Arjuna: a main character in The Bhagavad Gita (a Hindu scripture)
6. Samskara: mental impression
7. Vasanas: the impression of actions that remains unconsciously in the mind and induces a person to repeat the action
8. Viveka: discriminative discernment of the untrue from the true
9. Abhinivesha: will to live
10: Koshas: sheaths of the body
11. Anamaya kosha: one of the five koshas, the food body
12. Manomaya kosha: one of the five koshas, the mind sheath
13. Pranamaya kosha: one of the five koshas, the vital energy or life force sheath
14. Anandamaya kosha: the last of the five koshas, the bliss sheath
15. Pranava: OM, the sacred sound
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References:
3. Omstars
4. Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health
5. The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Eknath Easwaran
6. Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, translated by Sri Swami Satchidananda
7. The Road Not Traveled, by Robert Frost
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Episode credits:
Original music by Kim's band Governess.
Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.
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