The Way of the Jivanmukta
Sharon Gannon and David Life discuss activism, ethics and bringing spirituality to the classroom
Interview by: Bridgette Shea and Mark Kinder of Om Magazine
Discussion took place at 404 Lafayette St. NYC, September 2004

Sharon Gannon and David Life are among the most well-known and respected Yoga teachers in the USA today. Their success has, as some might say, put them in the category of Yoga Super-Stars, as a result many aspiring yogis have studied at their New York City Yoga studios. A practitioner in their Lafayette Street center once told us, “If David and Sharon are at the center they create more of a buzz than if a movie stars where attending class there.” Despite the sensationalism in regards to their current popularity, David and Sharon are dedicated to the authentic teachings of Yoga. This dedication has lead to the release of several books, calendars, DVD’s and CD’s. Their popular style of Jivamukti Yoga is a creative, yet authentic Yoga practice with a strong spiritual message. This is reflected in their clear and creative teaching styles. If you haven’t taken a class with them yet then perhaps you should, or check out their new offering; an 8- volume DVD/ CD instructional class library entitled, The Portable Jivamukti.

On Activism
Q: Do you feel that a Yoga practitioner should take an active role in today’s political climate, and what role should they play?

Sharon: To be political means that you care about others; the other beings with whom you share this world with. So being political is very much in line with the teachings of compassion, which are the foundation of the yogic teachings.
The goal of the Yoga practice is Samadhi (Yoga enlightenment, super-consciousness). What is realized in the state of Samadhi is the oneness of being. Yoga practices are methods to help us over come “otherness; to free us from the constraints of linear time and bound perceptions of three-dimensional space. As long as we perceive incorrectly, meaning we are seeing many and not the One, then we must relate to the others, who we are seeing  in a certain way; a way which will bring us to more of a correct perception of reality. Others are there to give us the opportunity to grow. Others are our teachers. The world will either keep us in bondage, or provide us with the means to liberation. It is our choice in how we perceive the world. The world is the Divine Mother. It is only through Her blessings that enlightenment/liberation becomes possible. This is beautifully expressed in the following mantra from Chapter 11 of the Durga Saptashati:
Om sarva mangala mangalye shive sarvatha-sadhike,
Sharanye tryambake gauri Naranyani namo’sthu te
Which translates as: I salute the three-eyed Divine Mother, Narayani, who brings total auspiciousness and who fulfills the desire for liberation. Realization arises with Her blessing. She is the world itself. Only through the experiences of life can the soul be perfected. Honor this gift, your life, bow to Mother Nature.
So the project, we could say has to do with getting blessed by Her, creating a situation , creating a receptive vehicle in the form of one’s one body/mind complex to receive Her blessings. To live liberated is what the term jivanmukti implies.

Q: How can one become active without getting caught up in attachment, judgment or aversion?

Sharon: By practicing Yoga! Vairagya, the practice of detachment, renunciation will render the mind free of attachment, judgment and aversion. Stop blaming others!

Q: Do you think that becoming an activist can replace the goal of yoga, which is ultimately to realize God?
Sharon: One must actively pursue the goal of Yoga which is God realization. What this active pursuit involves is a clearing away of avidya or misknowing or misperception. Everything and everyone we see is coming from our own minds, which in turn is a product of our past actions; our karmas. Basically the Yogi is involved with cleaning up their own act. I suppose we could say that most activists today (I’m speaking of the ones who aren’t also Yogic practitioners) are concerned with cleaning up other people’s acts. To view the world as black and white, or the good guys vs the bad guys is a misunderstanding of reality.
Through Yogic practices you come to realize that it is all coming from your mind, that this whole world is being created out of the actions that you have done in your past. Well, when you begin to wrap your head around that one and embrace that concept it is a pretty heavy moment. You begin to contemplate the potential results of your actions. You know that however you treat someone will be the way that someone in your future will treat you. You begin to see the value in your actions. You can see the expensiveness of your actions. You begin to reflect on whether or not you can karmically afford certain actions. You look more closely into the conditioned automatic responses you may have to others who are being unkind to you. You certainly don’t get caught in the normal syndrome of waiting for other people to make things right in the world before you decide that you can be happy.
As His holiness the Dalai Lama has said, “Think of the problems in the whole world as your fault.” Implying that we are the problem, but at the same time we are the solution. To care for others rather than condemning them is in our own self-interest. His Holiness calls it “enlightened self-interest.”
Many think of this idea of emptiness or looking at the world as well as others as coming from our own mind, from our own karmas as soley a Buddhist idea. Yes, Buddhists have recognized the importance of understanding emptiness or where things come from, but Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras also presents this idea to the Yogi very clearly here’s one example:
vastu-samye-chitta-bhedat tayor vibhaktah pantah (YS IV.15)
Which translates as: Each individual person perceives the same object in a different way, according to their own state of mind and projections. Everything is empty from its own side and appears according to how you see it. 

Ethics
Q: Please explain to those who haven’t read your books why a Yoga aspirant should practice non-violence (ahimsa)

Sharon: The purpose of Yoga as stated by the holy sage Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras is Samadhi. Samadhi means super-consciousness, it means enlightenment. What is realized in that Yogic state of Samadhi is the oneness of being. That’s the big realization for the Yogi. That’s what the Yogi is striving to realize. So, once we realize or at least embrace this, that it is our goal to realize the oneness of being, then, we reflect, “What is holding us back from that, from that realization of the oneness of being?” And of course think of your own life, what’s holding you back? “Others, “otherness”. Otherness is the main obstacle for the Yogi to overcome to be able to realize oneness. How do you transcend otherness? You overcome otherness through compassion. Compassion is the ability to see yourself, in another, and to go even beyond seeing, to actually recognize and BE that self in that other.
If we wish to truly step into transcendental reality than we must wake up to the fact that  you can’t get rid of the others in your life by killing them! The marvelous  book, the Bhagavad Gita expresses this very clearly, as do all the yogic scriptures. You cannot harm or be concerned with harming others if you want to overcome otherness, you can’t do it by killing everybody, or causing them pain and suffering. The way is love. Love means merger. Compassion is that active form of love, when we come to know the other as our own self, as coming from our own self. Patanjali gives ahimsa as the first step in the Ashtanga (eight limb) Yoga system. As long as you perceive others and not the ONE, then treat who and what you see with kindness. Through kindness you will resolve your negative karmas and projections by absorbing them back into your own heart/mind.

Q: Bridgette: What are the obstacles and challenges in maintaining an ethical lifestyle? How can they be overcome?

David: The whole world culture is going against it for the most part; the culture of war, the culture of corporate monoculture, the culture of segregation and discrimination, enslavement of all species, not just human enslavement. All these things hold us back and they are all things that preserve what Sharon is talking about; the sense of other. People like to preserve the sense of other because their sense of self resides in the body. When you feel that you’re only the body then your approach to creating oneness in the world would be to kill everybody else, this way there’s only one left, and that seems to be the approach in general as human beings we’re taking. If not kill, at least restrain or push down all others so that there’s no competition with your oneness of being. So it’s sort of the opposite effect of what Sharon was saying we are engaged in and have been engaged in for a long time.

Sharon: Our Culture sees others in the framework of exploitation, “How can use them, how can they be of use to me?” And if we can’t see any use in them, then why should they be here? Why do we need penguins or pelicans or redwood trees?

Q: Mark: What steps would you suggest to the average person who is not conscious of Yoga ethics, do to move in this direction.

Sharon: Vegan Diet, or at least a vegetarian diet. 

David: That’s number one

Sharon: Not everybody can stand on their heads or do a ‘yoga’ practice every day, but everybody eats. So you can practice kindness three times a day when you sit down to eat your food.

David: It sounds simple, but its not that simple because the choice that we make about what to put on our dinner table is a political choice; it’s an economic choice that has repercussions in our health and our mental stability. It has repercussions in our communities and in our families. This one area can impact all other areas in your life.

Sharon: The war that this country is engaged in at this moment in Iraq, is being fought to obtain oil. Who besides the Us Military is the biggest consumer of oil in this country? The meat and Dairy Industry. Meat and Dairy is big business it is at the foundation of our economy. Of course these facts are not well publicized, never-the less it certainly is no secret everyone is aware of how much meat and dairy is on the American breakfast, lunch and dinner plate. Not many people connect the dots. Most do not realize the devastation to the earth that eating meat and consuming dairy products has.  The biggest consumer of fresh water in our country is the M&D industry. It is also responsible for most of the water pollution. The single biggest contributor to Global Warming is the M&D industries, way more than all the private driven car emissions! The fact that there are more cows in the US than there are human beings is something we should be concerned with. Most of us don’t come across many cows during our day. That would be inconvient for us, but where are they?

Mark: The slaughter is appalling, thousands of innocent lives a day suffering unnecessarily…..

Sharon: Thousands? Millions! Millions a day just in our own country. Ten billion farm animals are slaughtered in the US every year. There are only six billion human beings on the entire planet. If you want to see it in an atmospheric way, just think about that amount of grief, suffering, degradation and pain, we are surrounding ourselves with everyday, and then we expect to live happy, peaceful lives, that’s very difficult. 

David: And I might add also the karmic consideration is important too. If you accept karmic implications, and I guess the non-yogic practitioner might not; but if someone were to accept that for every action they take there is some reverberation, an opposite reaction; let’s call it a vibration through the atmosphere form any action we take, people might think and act differently.
People have been disempowered and they’re living in the culture of fear in America; fear of terrorism fear of whatever it is they’re afraid of, and as a result they feel that what they do doesn’t matter. Because of this personal disempowerment and fear, because of that sense that what they do doesn’t matter, then they feel that the actions that they choose to do could be any action and it’s not gonna make any difference. But one of the magical things about Yoga as many have experienced is that what you do does matter.

Mark: I’ve always been bewildered by the thought pattern of people being afraid of a future that has not yet come.

David: Right, right, and the people who are in charge like to keep the masses in that space because they’re easily controlled, or their vote’s easy to get , or their money’s easy to get, and it’s easy to get them into a habit of spending money in order to try to downplay their fear. As President Bush said right after 9/11, “go shopping.” That is the premise of America. If it bothers you, go shopping. (laughter)

Sharon: the heartbreaking thing is that most of what we buy ends up in a landfill soon after we buy it. We are turning our planet into a garbage dump. Sadly, the world that we are creating for ourselves to live in is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves. We view everything as disposable and consciously or unconsciously that is how we view ourselves; as worthless, as throwaways.

In the Class Room
Bridgette: People are so worried about hurting another’s feelings that they’re often afraid to tell others the truth. How do you think this affects the Yoga teacher’s ability to effectively convey Yoga philosophy without making the teachings too abstract or watering them down?

Sharon: Well, the teachers themselves have to have direct personal experience with the power of the practice. Once you have this direct experience, there is no way that you can be abstract or quiet about the richness of the practice and the importance of the practice. You want to share it. That’s your job as a teacher. The number one job of a Yoga teacher when they walk into a room that has 100 students, 50 students, 5 students or only one student, is to see that student as a divine. Everything else should come from that; whatever other instructions the teacher may convey should come from a space within themselves  where they are seeing the student as a holy being, or at least trying to, at least practicing trying to. That’s the teacher’s job, that’s the practice for the teacher, and if the teacher cannot do that or has a problem with the idea of that, then that teacher will have many problems teaching. Problems will arrive between them and their students and they will think that the problems are coming from the student when actually the problems are coming from within themselves. We must remember that the practice of yoga is about cleaning one’s own perception of reality.

David: I think a lot of teachers are afraid to express what they’re really feeling in fear of alienating a potential market. That’s legitimate; you can’t say that it’s not.

Sharon: I think that what we’ve done here at Jivamukti is that we’ve tired to show that one can teach the practice as it was originally meant to be taught, as a path to enlightenment, yet not alienate people. I hope that our success would be an example that others might follow and that it would give other people knowledge to experiment within their own lives, in their own communities, in their own towns, in their own yoga schools, centers and studios. “Well, they did it in New York City, my goodness what a cynical place; if they can teach it as a spiritual practice there, chant the name of God and promote veganism and kindness to all beings, at least perhaps, we could start by chanting OM in our little town here…yes let’s start with OM.”
You know, we would only hope that our contribution would have some value, at least in the realm of setting an example, showing that we were/ are willing to take a risk and engage in an experiment to see if it is really possible to teach yoga as a path to enlightenment in the world today. It’s an engaging, exciting and deeply rewarding challenge!

Mark: I recently read a survey where several hundred Yoga practitioners where asked what they liked in a class, 78% said they liked chanting, mudras, asana, pranayama and meditation, etc, the whole works, not just an asana class.

Sharon: The question is, what do you personally like and practice as a teacher? As for David and myself, we didn’t decide to be Yoga teachers first, first we were Yoga practitioners. Doing our best to study, chant, meditate, and be compassionate to others and so on, made up our daily lives. People would come up to us and say, “What are you doing, can I do some of that with you?” To share it made us feel good too.

Bridgette: What is your advice on maintaining successful boundaries with students, employees etc. in the Yoga business?

Sharon: Have your goal firmly established in your own mind. Don’t forget it. Remember it at all times. Your goal should be God-realization, Enlightenment. When this is established in the mind then all relationships become very precious. Because it is only through our relationships with others that we come to a relationship to God (this of course is what asana practice really addresses). We must see the Divine in every person who comes into our lives; we must live in a way that we remember that our job is to serve the Divine in that ‘other’ being. For our own freedom, we must strive to contribute to the happiness and to the freedom of that ‘other’ being.
When we do that, then something magical occurs. The s0-called ‘other’ beings in our lives (who we work with and interact with) stop being in our way, we recognize them as ‘the way’!

Mark: Recently a friend, an aspiring Yogi and choreographer from the NYC ballet commented on the fact that since your Jivamukti style of Yoga came to town the quality of Yoga classes in NYC has drastically improved spiritually. He felt that your classes influenced many studios in NYC. How do you feel about that?

Sharon: Many people who now teach at or direct Yoga centers in NYC have in the past attended classes, or have been students here at our school. David and I have tried to provide a place dedicated to teaching Yoga as a means to enlightenment, hence the name: Jivamukti (liberated soul). We did not create these teachings; they are old and have been preserved by evolved sages orally and in written form. They have been passed to us through the kindness of our holy teachers. I would be very happy if these practitioners, who you refer to, take some of these ancient sacred teachings, which are at the heart of our school, with them when they open their own studios. I wish them the same success. How can you not succeed when you are sincerely sharing the sacred teachings and practices found in the holy Yogic scriptures?

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