Bernie Clark – Prana One Breath Many Worlds

Bernie Clark- Prana one Breath Many Worlds
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[00:00:00] Hello, Yuni. Welcome to part two of my time, my very long time. I had on Zoom, Bernie Clark In , part two, we’re gonna talk all about Bernie’s most recent book, prana One Breath Many Worlds, which is a fantastic read, by the way. So definitely, check this out if you have not already. , Yeah, , cannot say enough good things about this book.

It’s just so. Beautiful. It’s like a story or stories with science sprinkled in. So we’re gonna get into this book and talk all about that coming up . Okay, part two. I’m excited about this. Of course, I have questions. , Of course, go figure, right? Yeah. , The first one I wanted to ask you is why this book and why now? That’s a good question. Thank you. In about 2006, I created my [00:01:00] first Yin Yoga teacher training. I went to Shanghai.

Somebody talked me into going there, and so I had to create a Yin Yoga course, and then I came back to Vancouver, and I started to give it again in… to local people. And I realized the course kind of broke down into different modules. There was a module on the physical body, where I talked a lot about what Paul Grilley had taught me about human variation and tension and compression.

But there was also a module on what Sarah Powers had been t-telling me about the mindfulness aspect and the Buddhist philosophy- Mm … which I’d long had a, an interest in, ’cause I’ve been doing Zen meditation since the ’70s. But there was also a third part, which was the energy body and some of the teachings of Dr.

Moriyama. So eventually, I got all this put up on the, on my website, and people said, “Well, there’s too much to read on the website. Can you make a PDF of it?” So I made a PDF of it, and they said, “Well, it’s too much for my home printer. Can you actually just do a book of it?” And [00:02:00] that book became Yin Sights.

That was the first book of yours that I owned. Right. Yes. So that came out in 2007. Yes. That’s exactly when I had first discovered… 2007 was when I had first studied with Paul. I did my first workshop with him. Uh-huh. And I was just fully Yin turned on, and so I was just buying all the books and all the DVDs and, like, yeah, so that’s when I got that book too.

Well, you’ll notice… And remember, in the first half of Yin Sights was kind of the history of yoga and tantra and hatha and Yin Yoga, and the second part was kind of the practice. Mm-hmm. And in there, I talk about the physical benefits, the energetic benefits, and the, the mind-body benefit, the mindfulness benefits.

Eventually, I got a publisher who asked me to do another version of it, so in 2012, I created a different version. But they said it had to be shorter. Like, Yin Sights was 450 pages, and they said the ideal book is only 275 pages. So you may notice this book is less than that. Yes. So he said I had to get rid of the first half of Yin Sights and just [00:03:00] do an updated version of the second half.

So in that second half, I still had the physical body, the energy body, the mind body. Well, I kind of regretted throwing away half of Yin Sights. Mm-hmm. So I wrote a book at the time. It was called From the Gita to the Grail, and it was my attempt to recast the first part of Yin Sights into mythologies, East and West.

I, I was very much influenced by Joseph Campbell, the great American mythologist. And I asked myself, what is Shiva dancing on a dwarf named Vidya mean to an accountant in Wall Street? Mm. How can us in the West understand these Eastern sort of symbols? We didn’t grow up in their culture. So From the Gita to the Grail, which is now called Shiva Dancing at King Arthur’s Court, was my attempt to bridge the stories East and West from a mythological, historical, philosophical, uh, viewpoint.

So that became the first book, and that was kind of my mind-body book. And [00:04:00] then in 2013, I started on my eight-year journey to do the physical body. Mm-hmm. And that was Your Body, Your Yoga trilogy. Your trilogy, yeah. Yeah. So I, I often thought, “Well, I’ve done two-thirds of my training.” Mm-hmm. So I’ve got the, the history of meditation and philosophy of yoga, and I’ve got the physical stuff, but I haven’t done Murayama’s stuff.

I haven’t done qi and prana. So I always thought, “Well, I’ve gotta complete it,” so that’s what made me sit down about three years ago and start to kinda document, what do we mean by prana? So that’s why I did the book, was just to complete my little self-set task. Now I can retire and feel like I’ve done it.

No, I think you have one more book in you, and I’ll tell you what it is. Oh, okay. Some of it’s in here. , So the thing I thought was very interesting about this book though is because if somebody were to just read it, they would think, “Oh, this is a pranayama, like, textbook,” right? Right. Like, “This is gonna walk me through how to do these different breath [00:05:00] techniques,” et cetera, et cetera.

Which it’s not, actually. ,

But one thing that I thought was very interesting about the way that you wrote this is you go from, what would you call it, like, historical fiction almost? Yeah. Like, sort of like Bernie’s traveling in his mind back , and, like, what would these conversations have been if I got into a time machine and was a fly on the wall, which is very fascinating.

And then also, your own lived experience as a, a longtime yogi. , And then talks about kind of, like, what you were taught about prana and how it’s taught. And it’s, it’s a really interesting, uh, read because it does weave all of those together. , And I think your last book should be a memoir.

Just saying. I know some of it’s in here. Yeah. But I think there’s a lot more probably that you could do, and I think that it would be very popular. That’s my two cents on that., So that should be your last book. , Or as many as you’d like, of course. [00:06:00] But maybe your next book. Okay. You decide how many you wanna write.

I do have some specific questions about the book. Well, let me just acknowledge what you’ve said ’cause I appreciate your feedback. M- my intention was to weave these three threads together like the gunas. Yes. For those who know a bit about,, yoga cosmology. And it… And I was, I was lucky enough to have some access, although I didn’t quite finish it in time, to the first draft.

And one thing I noticed from the first draft to this draft is the… You got those more seamless, the weaving. Mm-hmm. Whereas the first draft I felt sort of like it was a little more bouncy. It’s like, okay, now we’re talking about Bernie, and then whoa, what, now we’re over here. And you really managed to get those, to kind of be more like a tapestry.

Yeah. Right. Which was, which is m- no small feat, I’m sure. Yeah. That first draft I subjected you to was 150,000 words. And- And- … trying to get it down, this is only, like, n- 90,000 words. Right. Yes. I was able to trim those down. But I tried to weave these three lines of inquiry [00:07:00] together. And I didn’t wanna just do the history as history, because that can be kinda dry and boring.

Right. So I thought, well, I’ll take the historical facts but weave them into a little fictional vignette. And actually, I- And I think stories stick with people better than facts. I would say, actually, for my learning style, I really appreciated that. Like, if you had just been… If it had just been straight, like, dates and historical s- I would’ve just, like…

That would’ve been painful for me. Mm-hmm. , Because I don’t… I personally don’t learn well from reading. I love reading, but if I’m gonna, like, try to retain and learn information, I need it in other ways. So I’m really glad that you, you did do that. Um, okay. Let’s dive into some questions. Oh, but I have a question that I’ve never put down here.

Before that, have you ever considered doing audio forms of your book? I have. The, the challenge is all my books are self-published, with one exception, and that one exception was Shiva Dancing at King Arthur’s Court. It’s expensive. Ah. The, the trilogy I did, Your Body, Your [00:08:00] Yoga, the first book, it easily paid for itself.

The second two books I still haven’t got my money back from building those. But it- Yeah … the point wasn’t to make money. I just had to document all the stuff that Paul got me started on. And I think- And the same with this one. If this thing paid for itself, then I might consider putting the extra expense in to do the audio version.

But I- You heard that, Yinies … I don’t think I’ll ever get this back, the money back from it. You heard that, Yinies. If this book pays for itself, get out there and buy it. Bernie can do an audio. I don’t think for all of your books, but I think for this one, because it does have so many storytelling elements in it, it might be kinda nice.

Mm-hmm. Just to s- plant a seed. Yeah. Um, and it wouldn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to go to a recording studio. Just do it at home with a borrowed mic and, you know- … put it up on your own website. Sometimes, done is better than perfect, I think. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. , Okay, questions. On the top of 187, you mention some skepticism of Motoyama’s chakra detection.

I personally also [00:09:00] struggle- With passing on any of this particular chakra information, , and the charts on the connections between the chakras and the meridians, I struggle with that a little bit, , because I’ve always been a state your source person. And as much as I know and love my teacher Paul Grilli, who also had an immense amount of respect for Dr.

Motoyama and considered him a realized being and, you know, he’s, he’s all in on these theories Yeah … but I haven’t met him, and I haven’t directly studied with him Right … and I’m just a critical thinking kind of gal. And then when I read in your book about the Charles, Leadbeater connection, and I can never say this right, the Theosophical Society?

Yeah. Thank you. The Theosophical Society. Theosophical Society. And when I ment- when you mentioned that as well, then I became even kind of a little bit more skeptical, , because of that connection. , I am super familiar with that, uh, AMI machine, and I actually had an acupuncturist [00:10:00] use a machine on me, , to test my points on my fingers and my toes- Mm-hmm

, Years ago. Very f- very interesting stuff. Mm-hmm. , And again, I know that Paul considers Motoyama, , his teacher and an, and considers him an adept. So on one hand I feel like I could just take all of Motoyama’s work as gospel because it’s in a book, he was a wise dude, realized being, according to Paul, Paul’s all behind it, Paul’s my teacher, so I should just be like, “Yes.”

But, that’s not how my brain works. And so I’m wondering if you could tease out a couple of things here. First of all, a little bit about the, that society, and maybe briefly talk about, , Leadbeater and his, his view, just very briefly. Um, because what I am keenly aware of is that a lot of what we have learned as yoga professionals about the chakras is not actually based in Indian thought.

It’s sort of this rainbow bridge, new [00:11:00] age kind of stuff that we learn. Um, so I’d love to know your thoughts on that. And, and then just your thoughts on too, like, how much do we just take what our teachers say as fact when we don’t have more than one source? , And do you think that the removal of sort of chakra theory from India, and then this adding your own two cents, like a few of these people did, is problematic?

It’s a big question, sorry. Yeah. There’s a lot in there, and I go into this in a lot more detail in the book, the whole history of how the whole ideas of prana evolved through the millennia, and then the chakra stuff, and then what theosophy did to it once it started to come to the West. Mm-hmm. The reason we know in the West about the chakras is mostly because of Leadbetter- And, um, Arthur Avalon, who was the pen name of John Woodroffe, who wrote a book called Serpent Fire.

Mm-hmm. He was a, judge in [00:12:00] what was then called Calcutta f- at the British court. But at night, he was also a scholar, and he would study with tantric masters. So unlike Leadbeater in Theosophy Society, who had kind of a, a Western occult view of the world, , actually Woodroffe, really got into the teaching for this.

So we had two different kind of views that both came to the West around the 1920s, 1910s, and that stimulated a lot of what now we kinda call the, the new age or the- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm … Western understanding of all this. Before all that, we had the chakra theories as really created in the tantric world. It was a tantric model that developed the chakra theory, and their intentions were very different than what we think of today in the West.

Today in the West, we finally have kind of a, a uniform view of what chakras are. There’s seven of them, and they’ve got the colors of the rainbow, and they’re connected to the glands and to the nervous system. All that is new. Mm-hmm. All that’s in the [00:13:00] last 100 years or so. That wasn’t ever found in India or South Asia at the time.

So that’s stuff that’s started to be layered on top of it, thanks to the Theosophical Society and other people. And that’s fine. You know, our science is always un- growing. Like I said before, , in the last chat, Isaac Newton’s theories aren’t abandoned, they’re just … We got Einstein layered right on top of them.

So the newer maps are more accurate, more descriptive, more explanatory of what observations are. Things that we have maps from 2,000 years ago, they’re probably not as useful today because we’ve learned more and we’re standing on other people’s works. So today’s maps of the chakra are not the same as 500 years ago.

That doesn’t mean they’re bad or wrong, it’s just they’re different. They have different intentions today. Mm-hmm. Mm. I remember being with Paul in the chakras module and, and studying with him and asking him, um, one time outside, I said, “You know, I notice [00:14:00] in all of the lessons that we’re learning here about the chakras,” and we were of course doing, you know, chanting and bandha and a whole bunch of stuff.

I said, “You haven’t mentioned the colors of the chakras at all.” Right. And he said, “Well, according to Dr. Motiyama, that once you actually realize these for yourself, there actually isn’t a color attached to it.” And I remember at the time, a little part of me inside went, “Wah, wah,” because I’m just a very color-orientated person.

Right. Mm-hmm. And I was like, “Wait, there’s no rainbow?” And then years later, I learned that this kind of rainbow stuff had been added on, um, you know, to Indian views of … Not that in their, in their yantras there are colors, but it’s not like- Like we look at it when you go into a new age crystal and bookshop where you see like the, the poster with like the, you know, the yellow and the orange and the, you know, all of that.

, And so I, I’m always trying to find a way to tread that line [00:15:00] between, you know, am I so attached to what I thought was correct Yeah … that I can’t actually open my mind up to the fact that, oh, actually, that whole rainbow-guided meditation I used to do with my students, not really based in Indian thought at all, you know?

Um, and so that, that’s always a bit of a, a bridge to cross that sometimes I think we get- Well- … attached … just because it’s not based on the South Asian thought doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. True. My view is these are all maps. And in my view, a map is not right or wrong. Like a map of Vancouver is not Vancouver.

Yeah. A map of Toronto is not Toronto. The point of a map is to be useful. And if I keep getting lost, this is not a very good map. I need a different map. Like, let’s suppose I have a map of Vancouver that shows me where all the, the Starbucks are-. or coffee shops. I don’t drink coffee. That’s a useless map to me.

If you’ve got a map that shows me where all the golf courses are, that’s a good map. I’m gonna use that map. Right. Now, unfortunately, people fight wars [00:16:00] over whose map is right. No map is right. It’s just whether it’s useful or not. Now, most maps might be useful for certain things. Like a guy come Einstein, he comes along and he creates a map that has both Starbucks and golf courses.

Now we have a more complete map. It’s more useful. It’s still not right. Mm-hmm. It’s just a map. But if this map helps me, who cares? Mm-hmm. I’m gonna use this map. I’m not gonna believe this map is true. Now, if I want to know, is it gonna rain tomorrow on the golf course, this street map’s not gonna help me at all.

I need a weather map. Yeah. A very different map, very different intention. Now, which map is right? Neither map is right. If I’m looking for weather, I’m gonna use a weather map. If I’m looking for a location, I’m gonna use a street map. So if you’re looking for rainbows, there’s gonna be maps of the chakras that are rainbow that may help you in a certain way.

Mm-hmm. Dr. Motoyama’s map didn’t need the rainbows. Mm-hmm. He wasn’t looking for golf courses. He was looking for Starbucks. Right. Now, that doesn’t mean that the golf [00:17:00] course map is wrong, and it doesn’t mean that 500 years ago, a map of Montreal is gonna look like a map of Montreal today. When Jacques Cartier first discovered Montreal, his map was very different.

We have better maps today, but it doesn’t mean his map was wrong, ’cause a map is not right or wrong. It’s whether it’s useful or not. Mm. So we have lots of maps of tract- chakras throughout the ages, and I, I don’t say any of them are bad or good. It’s just a question of whether it’s useful to you. And if you found your rainbow map was really useful and you did your meditations and you felt good about it- Then don’t let Paul or Dr.

Murayama’s map dissuade you from that. Or, you know- ‘Cause just because you’re using a weather map doesn’t mean you have to use a street map. Or the teacher, all the teachers that are based in very, you know, old lineages in India. Mm. I think what I would do now if I knew, if I had known this information back when I was an earlier teacher and was offering this guided chakra meditation where there was a real focus on colors, is even a simple verbiage change [00:18:00] from, uh, let’s just use the heart for example.

Instead of saying, for example, “The heart chakra is green”- Right … I could have said, “You could picture”- Yes … if it serves you, the center as green. Like, it, it’s a small thing, but it, it makes a big difference, I think. Yes. Because you’re acknowledging that, like, this may not even be the case. So, you know, but we live and we learn.

Well, let, let… There is a chapter in my book called Kundalini Rising. Mm-hmm. And this is with this woman yogi, a Hatha yogi named Garima, and she had developed, first of all, through the Tantric field, and then she walked away from it, and she became a Hatha yogi. And in that chapter, it talks about a Swami Purnananda who wrote this magnus opus.

It’s called the Shat Chakra Nirupana. And this is the one that Sir John Woodroffe describes in his 1925 book, uh, Serpent Fire. So, he’s using the text that was written about 400 years earlier, and in that [00:19:00] text, they do describe colors in the chakras, but the colors aren’t rainbow. Mm-hmm. Each chakra has a certain number of petals, and they have- Mm-hmm

a certain divinity assigned to them. There’s a male divinity and a female divinity. And the intention of Tantra back then was to visualize these divinities, these chakras, so much that you became that divinity. Mm. And that was the point of, of Tantra, was this visualization technique. So, the colors served a purpose, but it wasn’t a rainbow thing.

There wasn’t a hierarchy of, you know, red at the low and w- ultraviolet at the top. Each goddess or god had his own sort of color, and it was a simply a tool for visualization. Mm-hmm. That’s in the Tantric path. But in the Hatha Yoga path, these were blockages along the Sushumna nadi, and their intention was to awaken the Kundalini and have it rise up to the sixth chakra, and then to the seventh, and join with Shiva.

So, these, in [00:20:00] Garima’s case, was not j- jewels to be decorated. They were doors to be blown open. Mm-hmm. We have a different reason for the chakras in the Hatha practice versus the Tantra practice, and it’s the Hatha practice that we’ve kind of come in today, that the chakras maybe are blockages or energies, centers along the Sushumna nadi that we have to either activate or deactivate in order to allow the Sushumna nadi to be open to the Kundalini flow.

And there are maps that say- Kundalini has to come up from the bottom. There’s maps that say Kundalini has to go down from the top and burn up the ch- the chakras. So again, you got a lot of different maps. I call this the yoga forest. There was never one yoga in South Asia. Mm-hmm. There was never one tree of yoga that evolved into these other yogas.

Instead, there’s a yoga forest with many very contradictory practices. So does Kundalini rise? For some maps, Kundalini goes down. In some maps, the [00:21:00] chakras are simply visualization nodes that you should focus on. For others, they’re blockages you have to burn open or centers you have to activate. So you got all different types of maps.

Now, in Paul’s course, he talks about chakras not so much from an energetic point of view, but from more a mindfulness point of view, and he got this from Dr. Murayama. Chakras in Murayama’s map are bridges between the three bodies, the physical body, the astral body, and the causal body. Now, that relates back to theosophy, and Charles Leadbeater, in his talk, he was talking about seven bodies.

Murayama made it three. Mm. But he had the physical body, the etheric body, which is kind of a more subtle form of matter, and then we had the astral body, the mental body, which had two parts, lower and higher, and then we had the causal body, the buddhic body, and the atmic body, and the chakras were different ways of transmitting energy from one to the other.

So M- Murayama [00:22:00] was influenced a lot by theosophy, and also a bit by, uh, the serpent fire of, uh, John Woodroffe as well, but also through his own experience. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, which is why it, it differs, yeah. Yeah, that’s right, ’cause everyone experience is gonna be different. ‘Kay, page 187, just in case anyone’s following along with their book while we talk.

, Can you just touch on Helene Langevin’s work? Because I think that Yinies will find that so fascinating, and- Yeah … and also,, you know, I’ve heard her name, but I’ve actually never read the work, so now that’s my job. I’m gonna- … you know, dive into to reading it. But yeah, if you… Not a, not a super long thing ’cause of course it’s in the book, but if you wanna just maybe touch on it or tease it out a little bit.

Yeah. I think Helene Langevin is a amazing, uh, researcher, and she’s done some very pivotal work. And in the fascia world, she’s very well renowned as well. Early in the 2000s, [00:23:00] she started to wonder about acupuncture and how it might work, and where are these meridian lines? And she started to kinda build some bridges.

So let’s, let’s back up a little bit back to Murayama. In Paul’s view, the chakras aren’t really related to energy per se. It’s more of a meditation type thing, uh, bridging these three bodies. In Motoyama’s view, however, he thought the chakras actually could have an energetic effect. Now, I haven’t seen many people that map chakras to meridians.

Here we’re talking two- Mm-hmm … very different maps. The chakra nadi map, that’s coming from South Asia. The meridian map, its organs are the, the organs. So instead of the subtle body organs of the chakra, we’re talking about the physical body organs. So in traditional Chinese medicine, I think we have meridians and organs.

Mm-hmm. In the South Asian psychospiritual model, we have nadis and chakras. They’re not identical. [00:24:00] Motoyama did believe that meridians came from the Indian teaching of nadis. He said if you look back before the, the Warring States period in China, like before 500 BCE, there’s no mention of meridians. But that’s the time that knowledge was coming up through the Silk Road into India…

Sorry, into China from India, and that’s when the nadi physiology was coming into In- into China, and that’s what spurred on the developments of the meridians. So Motoyama firmly believes meridians came from the nadi theory. Hmm. But the chakras didn’t follow that route. So the chakras stayed separate, and I, I can’t find…

I haven’t done an exhaustive look. I can’t find any historical continuity between the chakras and what happened in China. I know today there are some people who do c- correlate chakras with TCM, but I don’t think Paul buys into that or is influenced by that. I think they’re kinda [00:25:00] separate maps, like a weather map and a street map.

That’s the way I feel, too. Um, because I feel like, you know, having studied a little bit of both, you know, now, st- studying TCM, that there’s, there’s probably more differences than may- or maybe equal differences to s- to commonalities. And I think that sometimes we as, as human minds, we wanna compare this to that to make it easier for us to understand, and then sometimes all of the nuance of both get left out.

Right. Um, and I’ve actually heard the other… You know, so that’s Motoyama’s opinion, is that the meridians were informed by the nadis. But I’ve also heard that they, that it, that they weren’t, because they aren’t the same as the, the nadis. So I mean, who knows? We don’t have a time machine. We can’t go back.

Yeah. Well, my whole thing of the book, the nadis aren’t exactly the same as meridians. I think they had a different intention. Mm-hmm. So they’re similar maps. Yeah. But that doesn’t mean they’re exactly the same intention. And It makes sense that if we believe that there are realized beings who can close their eyes and [00:26:00] find these things internally, right?

Which is, I mean, we have to believe some of that if we’re following the yoga stuff. Then it makes sense that those realized beings in other areas of the world Would, would have a similar,, similar yet different- Experience … yeah, yeah. Yeah. That they would have a similar experience, but that it, like, would be in a different way culturally.

Uh, yeah, and they’ll, they’ll describe that experience using the language they’re familiar with. Mm-hmm. Their, their cultural metaphors. And then also the philosophy because, of course, in Daoism, there isn’t really this whole let’s rise in and up through the chakras so that we can come up through the crown of our head, merge with the divine, and escape our body.

Right. They’re a lot more focused with, like, how do we actually preserve our, our jing and, you know, and their- How do we become immortal in this body with more power? Yeah, they’re more of a nature-based influenced- Yeah … tradition. Yeah. So different that way. So then we get to this idea of meridians, and you briefly mentioned that Dr.

Moriyama created a device called the AMI, which is short for the apparatus for measuring [00:27:00] meridian intensity. So it actually should be the AMMMI, but fortunately he just called it the AMI. And what he pioneered or played around with was if you put a electrical probe on the tip of the finger and another one somewhere else, he would notice that sometimes there would be a current that would flow- Mm

through here. And he’d only put, like, three volts of electricity through you, but if I move that probe a quarter inch away, there’d be no flow. Mm-hmm. So he mapped out these, what do you call, low resistance pathways in the body, and when he mapped them out, they aligned very closely to the traditional meridian lines of- Mm-hmm

traditional Chinese medicine. And other people have done something similar. So that device would tell you how easily is the electricity flowing through this thing. Now, sometimes it’s not flowing very well, and that would be called a blocked meridian, so there’s something going on there. A stagnation, yeah.

Stagnation or blockage or something in the joint or whatever. So that’s quite interesting to see with the AMI the fact that it does work, that we are electrical, [00:28:00] and electricity can flow through the system. Now, what flows… What allows electricity to flow? Well, water is a great conductor of electricity.

Not pure water. Pure water is actually, a resistor, but if you put a little bit of salt in water, it’s a hugely efficient conductor of electricity. Well, where do we have a lot of water? Well, we got them through the blood vessels, but we’re not putting something on a blood vessel here. In the fascia.

Fascia is a water rich tissue that is continuous. We talked in the previous chat of how we’ve got this three-dimensional body stocking of fascia beneath our skin, and it’s continuous. It flows through the whole body. So Helene Langevin was wondering, well, let’s see if we can see if there’s something happening in the fascia that correlates to these traditional classical meridian lines.

Mm-hmm. What they did was they mapped out the boundaries between fascial septa Now, if you think of the upper arm, [00:29:00] this is the, the study she published just looked at the upper arm, but we got a muscle group here at the top called the bicep, and underneath that we’ve got the brachialis, and underneath that we got the tricep.

So we kind of got three muscle groups, and each muscle group has its own bag. So we got skin, beneath the skin we have superficial fascia. Underneath that we have deep fascia, and underneath that, every muscle group has its own boundary of fascia called the epimysium. Mm-hmm. And within that we got another layer of fascia called the perimysium, and each muscle cell has its own boundary called the endomysium.

So we got tubes within tubes within tubes. So what they did is they just classically mapped out where are the interfaces between, say, the bicep and the tricep. And by doing an MRI and doing a cross-section through here, she can map out, okay, here’s the various fascia indentations where the septa arises from the bone, covers the muscle group and goes back to the bone.

And then she overlaid that, where are the classical meridian points? And she discovered about 80% of the time the classical [00:30:00] meridian points are right in these fascial boundaries. Now, Dr. Moriyama has shown that there is some sort of electrical conduit between certain areas of the body, and she’s doing the other part of the equation.

She’s finding that these, these meridian lines and acupressure point– acupuncture points actually lie on the fascial boundaries 80% of the time. So you put it together and you start to realize maybe what the Daoists were intuiting through their interoception were simply the boundaries of the fascial m- bands.

Mm-hmm. So if you think of the spleen meridian goes on the inside, the medial side of the rectus abdominis, and the spleen and the stomach go on the inside and the outside. There’s a fascial boundary right there. When you think of the top of the leg, we have a muscle group called the rectus femoris. And on the medial side, that’s the spleen meridian.

On the lateral side, that’s the stomach meridian. So everywhere you look, these meridian lines that [00:31:00] the Daoists mapped out, they always tend to line up perfectly along these muscle group boundaries. In the back, we got the very famous urinary bladder ones, two racing- Mm-hmm … stripes going down either side.

Well, that’s called the rector spinae. Mm-hmm. You got this big strip of muscle going down there, and it’s wrapped around with fascia, and the inner one and the outer one are two parts of the urinary bladder line. So one of the first really interesting experiments she did was mapping out this con- correspondence between meridian lines and classical T- TCM and the fascial boundaries in the body.

Very cool. Then the second thing she started to do is she started to say, “Well, how does acupuncture then work?” Yes. So what– We got two kind of main theories, but the one that she worked with, when you put a, a needle in You know this you don’t just stick it in and walk away. You have to play with it.

You have to twist it and move it up and down until you get this feeling called de qi, [00:32:00] where you feel like the needle’s been grabbed. Well, what Helene did was look beneath the surface, and beneath the surface in the superficial fascia we got all these collagen fibers. Collagen is what makes up most of fascia.

And when you put the needle in there, if it’s of the right material, and you start to turn the needle, the collagen fibers get wrapped around it. Mm-hmm. And as you turn it, that’s putting a tension into the subcutaneous fascia, the superficial fascia. Now, living inside those on the scaffold of these fascial fibers are cells called fibroblasts.

Fibroblasts are the cells that create the fibers. I like to think of them as like spiders that spit out the web. The webbing is collagen and elastin. Now, the spiders are sitting in the web itself, and if you were to pull on the web, the spider would be sensing that. So imagine now you put a needle in there, you’re turning it, it’s wrapping itself around these collagen fibers, and they’re [00:33:00] putting a stress into the spiderweb, and now the actual fibroblasts are sensing that stress.

And what she did is she measured what happens to the fibroblasts after 20, 25, 40 minutes. It doesn’t happen right away. So this is what really got me to make the Yin Yoga connection here. When you put the twist in, the fibroblasts get elongated, and after 20 minutes it starts to reorganize its internal skeleton.

There’s an internal actin skeleton in cells that give it its shape. Cells are not amorphous blobs. If you go back 20, 30 years, the textbooks would all just show you a bag of soup. There’s a, an outer boundary of the cell, the, the cell wall or the cell membrane, and inside you got all this water. Well, it turns out, just like our skeleton has bones, a cell skeleton has actin filaments that also gives it shape.

After being distorted for 20 minutes, that skeleton starts to reorient to the new shape, and that triggers a cascade of chemical signals [00:34:00] that are secreted from the shell, um, from the cell. Things like ATP. Mm-hmm. Now, within the cell, ATP is a little battery. It’s an energy source. But outside the cell, it’s the chemical messenger.

It’s like sending a physical email to the neighboring cell saying, “We need to activate. W- we’re getting stretched here. Let’s lay down more collagen. Let’s make it stronger.” And you get this cascading, uh, communication signal. So all this, she pointed out, happens when we’re doing acupuncture,

But then she also speculated that when one of her articles showed somebody doing triangle pose, and that’s doing the same thing to our fibroblasts. Because when we stretch the body, well, we’re stretching our cells Because that’s what our body’s made of, is cells. So if you’re to hold that stretch for a while, then these cells will start to react and start to communicate to each other.

Very cool. Now, we don’t hold a pose for 20 minutes, but think in Yin Yoga. Mm-hmm. We might do a butterfly for five minutes, and then we’ll do a half butterfly for another five minutes on one leg, half butterfly on the other leg, [00:35:00] and then maybe a straddle. So over those four poses, you’ve held that stress into your fascia for 20 minutes.

Mm. Which is about the same minimum amount of time that acupuncturists leave the needles in. So now you’re starting to see a bridge between what people in the East were doing, and Helen Langevan’s showing, well, there actually is a physiological connection here. Which is so cool because, um, as someone who has had a lot of acupuncture, and I remember my very first acupuncture session was like a mind-blowing experience for me.

Yeah. So it’s hard when you have sort of a critically thinking mind, and people ask you questions about, “Well, how does that work?” And so I’m, I’m definitely gonna, , dive deeper into her work. That’s gonna be my homework. – Well, I’ll give you a third thing that she’s- Okay … playing around with. So we’re, we’re electrical chemical systems in here.

We’re not just hardwired, but the wires are important. This mechanical stress is important, but that also creates electrical [00:36:00] currents, and it also creates chemical, uh, reactions. Later, she had a team that did some experiments with subjects where they injected into the lower back just some saline water, just to irritate it and create low back pain.

And then half the subjects, they did a full body stretch for 10 minutes, and they did that twice a day. And they found after a week of doing this, the people that they did it to, they had no more pain and their walking is resolved. It’s back to normal again. But the people they didn’t do it to still were having inflammationary pain, a lot of low back pain, and you could…

shows up in the way they walked. Hmm. Now, the subjects weren’t humans. These were mice. Oh. And what she did was she injected into the lower back the saltwater, and then she picked them up by the tail at the edge of a table, and the mice would grab the edge of the table. And then they would just hold this stretch for 10 minutes, and apparently the mice loved it.

If they didn’t love it, they’d be wiggling around trying to get out. But it was kind of [00:37:00] like they’re going, “Oh, yeah, that’s great. Oh, I love that. A little bit more, please.” So the mice really loved this full body stretch. It’s like a nice down dog and you just, oh, yeah, feels so good. Well, you watch, you watch cats and dogs do it all the time, too.

Yeah. You know, every time they get up, they have to do a big, a big stretch. So it turns out this mechanical stress, and it’s only 10 minutes a day, helped to resolve the inflammation. And of course, we’re chronically inflamed in this day. It’s so common, they call it inflammaging. Hmm. Yeah. Then a couple of years later, another group did a, a similar test, but this time they injected into, in this case it was rats, breast cell tumors cancer tumors into the, the, the rats.

And again, they did the stretching, but this time only once a day, but for 10 minutes. And they had the control group that they wouldn’t stretch, and then the group that they did stretch. And after about 10 days, the control group’s tumors had been growing, but the stretch group’s tumors were half the size.

It was only about 42% of the other size. So they started to realize that [00:38:00] by putting this mechanical stress into the fascia, you’re changing the environment that allows the cancer cells to grow. Hmm. And this was done again on the, the early 2000s, like 2008 or something like that. But in later yoga conf- sorry, fascia conferences, like 2018 I think it was, there is now fascia researchers are looking at how fascia can influence the rate of c- cancer growth, either for the good or for the bad.

Oh, interesting. So our, our stressing of fascia is actually changing the fascial environment, which can allow things to get better or worse. Ooh, that’s something to watch. Yeah. Okay, totally switching gears now. Yeah. Um- So there’s Jeanne Langevin. Excellent- Yes … work. You talk a lot in this, in this book, because it…

there is a lot of your own experience here about this, um, the dizziness and the, like, the, you know, um, the kind of- Yeah … over-yanging yourself, you know? Yeah. Too much yanging. I was [00:39:00] a yangster. Yeah, and y- and how, and how it took actually quite a bit of time, and a lot of, you know, different health professionals and stuff before you kind of settled on, oh, maybe I’m just pushing too much.

Right. Like, maybe it’s too much yang, and I need to bring in some harmony of some yin in there. , I had a similar experience, \, I think I mentioned in our, our last talk. I don’t remember if it was before w- before I hit record or after, but, that I had, um, chronic fatigue, which again, is a big slap in the face for me to- Right

slow down and chill out a little bit. And how that shifted my relationship to my yoga practice, um, and it took it from me being, doing half the flow, you know, al- almost exclusively unless I was sick or on my cycle, and then I would do yin. I would do yin a couple times a week anyway. Um, to almost all yin, and then a tiny [00:40:00] side of restorative and nidra when I was, you know, on my cycle or ill.

And I was, I was just saying to you, and I’ve probably said it before, how much that changed myself as well. Yeah. To be like, I, I’m far less A-type now. I, I often- Right … joke with my students. And for those of you that are like me and are recovering A-type personalities, yeah. And I’m just wondering if you could just briefly touch on kind of- , on that journey very briefly, like- Right

what do you think, what do you think, was it just the repetition of feeling better and then crashing, and then feeling better and then crashing that finally kind of at the, at the last one gave you the aha? Um, ’cause I mean, these, these, these habits don’t, don’t go… They don’t die quickly, you know? No. Yeah.

It’s part of our personality, and that’s hard to change. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you’re right. In the book, I go through that whole story in, in sort of detail. I am a yankster. I’m a type A personality, A for Ashtanga. [00:41:00] I loved Ashtanga until it no longer loved me, so it’s an unrequited love. It’s like chocolate today.

I still love chocolate, but it doesn’t love me anymore. Aw. It gives me migraines. Sorry about that. So I was overdoing everything, and I was also overdoing my pranayama in the early days I had been told, I can’t remember who told me this, but if you do 1,008 Kapalabhatis, you’ll become enlightened.

Ooh. So I worked up to doing 1,008 Kapalabhatis every day, and later on I started to discover through more physiology training what I was doing to myself. I was basically just hyper ex- hyperventilating so much- Yeah … changing my blood chemistry, which is affecting the brain. So I think a big part of what triggered me was overdoing pranayama practice without a knowledgeable guru to guide me.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It took me a long time, took me many years to figure out that I was probably harming myself through too active of yoga practice. I was burning out and burning up. Um, I was… My pitta was out of control from a Ayurvedic point of view. Mm-hmm. Uh, I was doing way too much pranayama. Too much [00:42:00] fire.

Too much fire. I was breaking my knees, and I just wasn’t getting the message. And then I fortunately ran into Yin Yoga just at the time I needed. Yeah. So even though I slowed down, back in those days, they wouldn’t have called it chronic fatigue. That’s kind of a more modern thing. Mm-hmm. And even today, we don’t really have a good handle on autonomic nervous system dysfunction, dysautonomia.

Yeah. It’s still a very understudied area. But if I look through what I tried to do, and my company tried to help me, it baffled all Western medicine. So I tried Ayurvedic, and that didn’t work. I tried TCM, and that didn’t work. So eventually I just had to… I didn’t have a choice. I had to just slow down and do what I could do.

Now today, if you have chronic fatigue or long COVID, that would be called pacing. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Where just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something, because there’s a thing called post-exertional malaise, where you can do something really excited and you feel great, and then four hours later or the next day [00:43:00] you’ll crash, and it may take you many- Yep

days to get back. Now you’re feeling good. I’m strong enough. I can lift all these weights, and that’s okay, but then four hours later you crash. So back then we had no understanding of it, but that’s what was happening to me. Mm-hmm. I was doing way too much. I was crashing, and then when I’d start to feel better, I’d do more, and then I’d crash again.

Right. And this went on for months and months until I just finally had to give up Just that I’m only gonna do kind of the minimum, not the maximum S- it’s, it’s a surrender really- Yes … to like this is, this is all I can do. You have to accept this is what I can do, so- Yeah … this is it. Yeah. Well- A lot, a lot of times when I teach I tell people to notice what they’re feeling while they’re in the pose.

Mm-hmm. But also when you come out of the pose, but also over the next day or two. Yes. And then you have to think back, “What was I doing that may have caused that?” Yeah. I learned that the hard way. ‘Cause just because I can do something now doesn’t mean I’m not gonna pay the price later. Mm-hmm. As I say in the book, you either have to pay attention or pay the price.

[00:44:00] Yes. Yeah, it’s, it’s a tough lesson, but- Yeah … I’m glad you, I’m glad you got it. Um, and then I think once you’ve had enough surrender that you are in more of a state of harmony, then hopefully we can find, like, where’s the… Most people would use the balance, word balance. Yeah. I prefer harmony. Where’s the harmony now between these- Yeah

two energies for me? And it might be different tomorrow than it was yesterday. Yeah. Um, if it’s okay, I would like to read a section of your book. Yes, please. Okay. If you do a good job maybe I’ll hire you for the, the audio version. Oh, I would consider that. Okay, it’s this section. It’s on, for anyone following along, page 210.

What healed me? So what healed me? Was it yoga, Ayurveda, electrolytes, [00:45:00] PEMF, acupuncture? Perhaps, but if I had to name the medicines that made the deepest difference I would say slowness, stillness, surrender, and time. I had to stop fixing, stop striving, stop grasping, and instead start listening. It wasn’t about doing more.

It was about doing less and being more. I had been called into a different rhythm, one that honored chi, prana, and life itself. Not something to control, but something to trust. Each crash felt like a failure, a failure of the body. Within that failure was a chance to listen, to learn, and to rebalance my soul.

My crisis has stripped away the layers of ambition and identity I had long wrapped around my practice. In their place became something [00:46:00] quieter, truer, a deeper yoga, a softer breath. My experience of healing wasn’t linear, scientific, or tidy. It wasn’t provable, but it was palpable. It was real. My energy returned.

My vitality returned. Not all at once, not forever, but enough. “This is what life offers us. Not perfection, but possibility. And still, I sit every day. One day, that will be all I can do, sit and watch the sky, the birds, and the children. Practice contentment to sit and breathe with awareness and care, not as a retreat from life, but as a return to it.

Perhaps this is what the ancients intuited when they spoke of prana. Not to force command, but to breathe to receive.” Oh, that section- … so beautiful. So, so beautiful, and so [00:47:00] relatable. Hmm. Really, really lovely, and, and a big aha that happened over lots of time and struggle. Yeah. Yeah. Just a couple more questions.

Now, I noticed you didn’t put any specific kind of, like, how to do blank breath in your book. I’m assuming that was intentional, but I’m wondering why. Well, there is a l- little bit in the beginning. It’s like- Mm-hmm … I thought I could describe pranayama, but I’d rather, again, put it into a story how I learned it from a host of different teachers.

Yeah. Like, what’s the one way to do ujjayi? Well, there’s no one way. As I discovered, there’s dozens of ways of doing it. So there is no one way to do pranayama. Mm-hmm. But also, because I did pranayama on my own without proper guidance, I harmed myself. Mm-hmm. So it’s like I probably wouldn’t publish a recipe for how to create dynamite and just give it out to people.

You’re playing with fire [00:48:00] here. Yeah. So you have to be very careful with it. Yeah. So I’m not, I’m not gonna put a whole blueprint in there. I do describe what some pranayama is, some simple ones. Like, I have no problem doing alternate nostril breathing or slow breathing, but let’s be careful of the hyperventilating type breathwork.

Yeah, agreed. That’s, that’s what really changes us. And that’s what leads into my next question perfectly. , What do you think teachers should keep in mind when they’re including pranayama in their yin classes? Okay, well, I do do pranayama in my yin class, but I don’t call it that. Mm-hmm. And my intention is very deliberate.

I don’t know what’s been going on in the lives of the students that come to my class, so I’m gonna assume that most of them are still activated in their sympathetic nervous system, their fight or flight, their, their flee system. So I just want to do something simple to turn that down and turn up the parasympathetic.

And later in the book, I talk of what I learned from Dr, Professor, Professor Luciano Bernardi, um, a [00:49:00] breath specialist. And he talks about a 10-second cycle of breath that you only need to do for about two minutes, and it has a host of benefits, including turning off the stress system, turning on the rest system.

Mm-hmm. So I us- usually start my Yin classes with simple 10-second breath, maybe with some arm movements, some three-part Taoist breath or just centering breath. Do that for about two minutes, and that’s it. Mm-hmm. Once I turn off my lights, I don’t have to turn them off again. Yes. They’re already off. So I don’t have to do an hour of this, ’cause if the lights are off, they’re off.

Now, some people, because their mind is active, they may start thinking about that argument they just had with their spouse or boss, and they may turn the lights back on. Mm-hmm. But maybe halfway through the class you can do this again and turn the lights down, or you see somebody that’s really anxious, you might get them to do that.

But by and large, I don’t do a lot of pranayama during the Yin practice. I just do it at the beginning to turn off the lights. Yeah. So I’m not doing pranayama to have altered states of mind. For that, you need to do the hyperventilation stuff, [00:50:00] the, um, kumbhakas and bhastrikas- Mm-hmm … and so forth. That, I’ve learned my lesson.

I’m not gonna do that without a lot of one-on-one watching- Yes … enhancements and, and counter poses for that. Yeah, and also I think, you know, if you were working with someone one-on-one, still also making sure that they have a good support network because I think a lot of people don’t realize that how much this breath work can bring up in people.

Yes. Yeah. Um, I often get this question in my training, and so I always say, before you answer the question, what breath technique should I do in Yin, you have to have studied the breath techniques enough to know what is the energetic quality of that breath, right? So breath of fire and yin, uh, that doesn’t seem- Yeah

like a fit. Yeah. But like you said, alternate nostril breathing or even better, just lunar channel breathing. Yeah. You know? Beautiful for Yin. Like you said, like, these ones where you’re kind of slowing your exhale. Beautiful for [00:51:00] Yin. And I think it’s kind of even more fraught right now because, you know, we’re in the…

I don’t even know what world you would call it, but, like, breathwork has become a whole thing now. Yeah. Where some people have taken pieces of yoga pranayama and then, like, put their own spin on it, and now they’re hosting whole trainings and workshops on this. Yeah. And even I’ve, I’ve heard many yoga teachers say, like, you know, “Do you think I should take a breathwork course?”

And I’m like, “No, I think you should find a, a really good teacher and study pranayama, actually.” Yeah. , Because I feel like there can be sort of an underqualification and an, and a… I think overall, both in yoga and in sort of now general wellness circles, people underestimate the power of these works.

Yeah. I know of a colleague who was doing a lot of intense work like that, breathwork and things like that, and, and had, like, a psychotic break You know? So this isn’t the kind of thing that we just wanna dabble around with with our students. So I tend to, [00:52:00] like you, stick to the ones that are definitely more on the yin, kind of lunar, the whole intention is can we shift ourselves into parasympathetic nervous system.

And I leave the rest because I just think not, not safe for everybody, and definitely not matching the energy of, of a yin practice. Well, just like in teaching asana, we have contraindications and counter poses. Like, I don’t teach headstand or shoulder stand anymore because there’s other ways to get the same benefit without- Mm-hmm

the risk. So that’s a high risk, low reward pose. I don’t teach, um, Padmasana anymore ’cause it’s another high risk, low reward pose. There’s other ways to get the benefits. But there are s- some times when we do a pose and you just wanna let people know who should be careful of it. Yeah. Same with pranayama.

If you don’t know the contraindications and the counter poses, and the importance of kumbhakas, you don’t have a, I think, a right to teach that stuff. Agreed. [00:53:00] Yeah. Yeah. And I, I’ve heard about people with the Wim Hof method, the ice method- Yes. That’s one example of these- … basically teaching pranayama

breathwork people. Yeah. But he’s not giving any contraindications, and there are people who’ve literally died by doing that practice. Yeah. So you gotta give the warnings to this. Yeah. Not as a nocebo. Again, we don’t have to say, “Oh, you’re gonna die if you do this.” It’s just for some people, this is gonna alter their state of mind.

Yeah. And this may not be the right for them. And here’s how you might be able to tell and what you should do. And even with the breathworks that I offer, it’s usually parasympathetic. It’s designed to bring people out of that fight, flight, or freeze. But I always even say at the beginning of class, there isn’t, like despite what Instagram would tell you, there is not one breath technique for anxiety.

Right. Right? We’re all different. So I’m gonna introduce you over the course of our time together to a few breaths. If you find one helpful, stick it in your back pocket, take it out into the real world with you, which is where it really counts. And if you don’t find it helpful, just toss it out. You know, like don’t use it then.

You know, ’cause there’s no one size fits everybody, right? Yeah. So for example, I’m [00:54:00] an anxious type, and box breath is always- Yeah … ugh, over recommended for people with anxiety. Let me tell you, that breath makes me anxious. Right. So again, there’s no like, oh, well, box breath is good for everybody who has anxiety.

I’m like, there are people that actually holding their breath for any count of time that isn’t their natural rhythm will, will trigger them, you know? Yeah. So let’s be very mindful about that. Okay, I have one more question. So Bernie, what is prana? Of course I had to finish with that. Right. Well, that’s the whole book.

Exactly. Exactly. Prana has meant many different things to many different people throughout the ages. You know, if you look in the ancient Vedas, prana was a god. Prana was volition. If you look at the actual word itself, pra and an- Pra means to bring forth. An means breath or to move. So anything that moves you is prana.[00:55:00]

So your volition could be prana. Indra says, “I am prana. I am the source of all.” In prehistoric times, I, I start off with a story of a shaman, and in those days, there might have been a, an obvious r-recognition that when someone’s not breathing, they’re dead. Mm-hmm. Or when someone’s dead, they’re not breathing.

So clearly there was something about the air that was going in and out of the body that animated this person. So that, I think, is the beginning of what we thought of prana. There’s something in the air. But then when we got into historic times and we were into an agricultural community, city states of tens of thousands of people, water became the most important element ’cause water is needed to grow the plants, and water came from the gods, from the sky.

And so now water became equivalent to menstrual fluids and semen and life itself. And so th-all throughout the history of yoga, you find this homologue between semen and life force [00:56:00] and the importance of water. Hmm. And that informed all sorts of alchemy, alchemy and so forth. So at every stage, and this is what I go through the historical points in my book, prana has different kind of contexts.

We today might say it’s life force- Mm … or it’s life energy. But 2,000 years ago, they didn’t have that word energy, force. What does that mean? It might, there might have been some vitality. It might have been wind. It might have been life itself. But the idea that it’s life force didn’t really exist. That started in sort of 1700, 1800s, and as you go through the book, you can map those changes.

Today, if I was to define prana in a Western, modern sense, I would say it’s communication energy. Hmm. Not life energy. But I talked about those cells when Helene Langevin stuck your needle in there. These fibroblasts start sending out signals. That’s prana, the communication of cell to cell. There’s a whole brand new science called cellular signaling, and there’s [00:57:00] dozens and dozens of way that cells communicate.

Mechanical tension. When you stress the body, you’re sending signals to cells, and those cells are changing the mechanical signals into chemical signals, electric signals, magnetic signals. Even some cells emit photons, light. There’s light communication. So to me, prana is the way the body communicates between all the cells.

Beautiful. Love it. Is there anything else that I forgot to ask you that you’d like to add?

No, I think anything else we’d just probably say read the book. 100%. There’s a lot in there, and- Yeah … a lot of topics we haven’t- We don’t wanna do like a- … got into, but We don’t wanna go into a 10-hour- Yes … interview. Uh, so here’s the book again, for those of you watching the video. Prana: One Breath, Many Worlds.

It’s available pretty much everywhere right now, hey? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And, definitely I, I really, really loved the combination of that historical [00:58:00] teasing out that you did of, like, what is prana, and then of course the stories of you learning from your teachers, and of course the mistakes you made along the way.

Right. And then the memoir aspect. , I just thought it was beautifully strung and woven together as a, as a tapestry. Which would be no easy feat to try to bring those three things together in that way. , And that’s why I will start the request for a Bernie memoir. And anyone else can just contact Bernie and let him know if you would also buy a memoir.

, Because I feel, I feel like, You know, I remember when I interviewed Paul, and I said, you know, I like to start usually my first interview with somebody discussing- Yeah … your journey to yoga. And I remember him being like, like, “Really?” And I was like- Mm-hmm … “Oh, yes.” People, are so interested in other people’s yoga journeys, especially if it’s a teacher or somebody that they know of or, you know, have , have studied with or respect or admire.

That’s one thing I know for sure, is that yoga teachers love hearing other yogis’ [00:59:00] stories. And so thank you for sharing your stories in this book. And if there- Well, I guess to that point, within the book there’s a lot of the stories of my teachers. Yeah. You’ll find a bit of story of Paul and Sarah and Eric Schiffman and Dave Thompson I think, and I think that’s one of the things that made this such a wonderful read, is that it is like reading storytelling, and yet with, you know, some science sprinkled in, of course.

Right. But, like, it reads, it reads like, like a beautiful story of many people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So thank you for this gift. Well, thank you, Nic. Uh, thanks for inviting me on, and it’s great to be back with you. Yeah. And, uh, you and I will say our proper goodbyes once I stop the recording.

But for those of you that are watching or listening, until we meet again, bye for now. Bye-bye.