Sex and Psychedelics: Evidence Based Therapeutic Approaches with Dr. Cat Meyer

Podcast
Written By Geneva Tolentino

with Licensed Psychotherapist specializing in Sex, Trauma, and Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP)

SHOW NOTES | TRANSCRIPT

Step into a transformative conversation about sex, relationships, and psychedelics with the expertise of Dr. Cat Meyer, PsyD, LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in sex, trauma, and psychedelics working in the field for over 15+ years. She is also a ceremonialist, Celtic shamanic arts practitioner, author, and international speaker dedicated to evolving the relationship we have surrounding sexuality and our bodies.

Dr Cat’s clinical work with psychedelics combines her skills and knowledge of trauma, sex, and energy psychology.

She approaches the work with her clients from a multi-layered and spiritual perspective for powerful activations and Transformations.


Dr Cat is the founder of SexLoveYoga.com, an online platform integrating various schools of thought including science, kink, tantric yoga, and psychology designed to help people create a deeply fulfilling, prosperous relational and sexual life.

As an expert and published researcher on the topic of sex, Dr. Cat leads workshops and retreats internationally. She has spoken on several large stages around the world, including Mind Valley, Wonderland Conference, and Health Optimisation Summit in London. Dr. Cat is the host of the podcast Sex Love Psychedelics, author of the book sexloveyoga, and co-founder of Un.done women’s sensual yoga experience.


This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of the transformative potential at the intersection of sex, relationships, and psychedelics. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and empowered as we explore this potent terrain with the guidance of Dr. Cat.


In this episode, we cover:

  • Dr. Cat Meyer's journey and background

  • Exploring psychedelics and sexual healing

  • The taboo nature of Catholic teachings and how they amplify desires and cravings

  • Academic research on psychedelics and sexuality

  • Physiological and psychological effects of psychedelics like MDMA

  • Ceremonial settings for non-couples and holding ketamine-assisted therapy retreats 

  • The Concept of holding space and accountability in therapy

  • Sovereignty of oneself  and self-leadership

  • Power dynamics and healthy conscious dominance in relationships

  • Navigating sexual desire and libido

  • Addressing questions from listeners about sexless marriages and exploring non-monogamy

  • Different kinds of sex therapy


Helpful links:

TRANSCRIPT

Christine Mason  0:02  

If I could suggest one thing to people for their health as they age, it would be a strong lifelong yoga practice. Now the reason I'm saying that is evidence based. It's not just me and my subjective ideas, 10s, if not hundreds of millions of people around the world are practicing some form of yoga regularly. But yoga is like snow sports. It's all kinds of things. There's the equivalent of snowboarding, which is tricky and fancy. There's the equivalent of skiing, slalom skiing, ballet skiing. There's the equivalent of snowshoeing, you know, cross country, all different paces, speeds, complexities and prescriptions. But most importantly, it's a system that shows you how to and train your breath with your full organism, tune your inhale and your exhale to your movements. Focus and control the direction of your thoughts. And if done right, keep spine health, joint health, muscular strength and suppleness for your whole life long, no matter which approach you take. So today I'm going to tell you a little bit about the yoga journey in the west and my personal journey with it, and make some suggestions for people who are looking to begin or deep into practice. I might also get a little snarky. Maybe I'll get a little non unconditionally approving of some of the ways capitalism has captured yoga's liberation theology capacity and diminished it by putting people on a treadmill of classes at the studio and making the teacher more of a service cheerleader that you're purchasing, rather than a transmitter of deep wisdom. I always say that the most advanced teachers should be the ones teaching beginners to get the foundation correct, and that's coming out of my deep love. Okay, so I'll tell you the story first of how I found yoga. I was the Chief Marketing Officer of a company in Chicago, and I ran into a friend of mine who was at the time running another pretty big company, and he looked absolutely fantastic. He was in his 50s, and he was tan and lean and shiny, and let's just say that was a lot different than the last time I'd seen him. And I said, What happened to you? You look fantastic. And he said, yoga happened to me, and you look terrible. So I'm going to pick you up on Friday and we're going to go to class, and we'll see what we can do. And that's what happened when I got there. I couldn't touch my toes, and I was so jumpy the whole time really, really creaking and difficult to breathe through the postures. But at the end, we lay down in a pose called shavasana, or corpse pose, where you just lay on the ground and you let your bones sink into the floor, and you let your muscles fall away from the bone, and you just breathe deeply. And that was the first time that I who, at the time, had many small children at home, a lot of responsibilities. It was the pre.com boom. And I hadn't relaxed at all. And just like that T shirt that people are wearing now says I'm only here for the shavasana, I kept going back every day after that, just so that I could get those moments of relaxation, you know, so gradually I began to feel my body. Now, when I said I couldn't touch my toes, I would say also that I didn't have much control over my toes when I first started, for example, I couldn't spread them wide and lift them individually and move them. I couldn't run energy up my shins. I couldn't really feel the organs that were between my pelvic basin and my rib cage and identify them individually. It was more like a black hole in there. I definitely wasn't having conversations with my joints or feeling energy run up and down my spine or feel the top of my head lit up. That all came with practice. So I fell in love with the yoga, and that was a kind of very athletic Ashtanga Yoga, where you were jumping and breathing and sweating in a warm room. And for me at the time, because it was very stressed out, lot of cortisol running through my system that was a nice off gassing. It was kind of a combination of cardio and flexibility and other things. Later, I was able to add in mantra and chant and meditation when my body was less agitated, and when you look, in fact, at the origins of vinyasa yoga. Or that kind of heavy moving yoga. It was designed for adolescent boys to calm their bodies before they sat in meditation and concentration. So I was, you know, kind of in that lifestyle at that time. So it was very useful, the part of coming into a practice that matches your life. Stage age needs is really vital. A lot of what people are experiencing in classes now is a sort of one size fits all situation. So I'd like to talk a little bit about how yoga came to the west so that you can understand the lineage that you're seeing played out in modern Western yoga. Something that's been very important to me is the idea that we don't teach yoga, we teach people, and that Yoga should be customized to the age, stage and condition and culture of the person who is appearing in front of you as a teacher. So that's very different than 60 people in a hot room going through the same exact 26 poses, whether those are the 26 they need or not. So actually, let me start a little farther back, 1000s of years ago in the Indus Valley. Part One bija, that means seeds, by the way, the seeds of yoga in the West. So over 1000s of years, wandering Jain Buddhist and Hindu ascetics in the Indus Valley, which is currently part of India, part of Pakistan, Nepal and Tibet, but was more of a geo region that's linked by rivers and valleys and mountains and other ecosystems developed a set of physical, energetic and philosophical practices that seemed to optimize the human mind, body and spirit to help us live in the world more effectively and help us harmonize with divine wholeness, to basically bring the light into the body. Research also shows that there were similar practices in Egypt and North Africa that predate this Indus Valley version by a few centuries, and this is where we plant all of those Lululemon people today that this yoga philosophy that was contained in Some of the earliest Hindu text, specifically the Upanishads and the Yoga Sutras, which was written down in the fourth century. BCE is what you're seeing show up on the mat in every city in the west today. At that point, the physical methods of daily practice were still transmitted person to person through direct oral conveyance. And then somewhere in the fourth century, the oral teachings were gradually solidified in written form, first by the Indian sage Patanjali, and subsequently in scrolls and texts and sculptures and paintings by many artists and scholars.


So yoga, as it grew as a body of knowledge, became one of the six schools of Hindu orthodoxy, which was a method of liberation, really, the yoga component largely emphasized breathing techniques, concentration, the refinement of our direct perception, so seeing more and more clearly, and it gave some guidelines for living a good life. There wasn't a single yoga pose or Asana in the text, there was never a chaturanga in the text as a way to freedom, like other liberation theologies, early Christianity, before Christianity, frankly, Buddhism, for more than 1000 years, this yogic knowledge and the practice of it was largely kept in advance by monks, holy men and Brahmins, and also, like other liberation technologies and theologies, as it was, dispersed to a broader audience, it was co opted by existing power dynamics and hierarchies and structures, including when it came to the Americas in the 30s And the 60s, and then especially in the 90s, where you started to have venture capital investment and things like that, which I'll expand on more as we talk about this. And I think that this CO optation is meant to dilute yoga's potential impact on the individual. So between the 1600s and the 1900s during and subsequent to bridge colonial influence, the contact between East and West intensified. Globalism began to expose mainstream philosophers and religious people to broader religious thinking. And by the mid to late 1800s in some corners of society, a mystique and romanticism around the theologies of India arose, especially around the nature of consciousness and metaphysics, and those philosophies began to migrate to the US, and in some cases, merged with mystic Christianity. Vedanta or the Vedas was one of those philosophies, and that came to the US through the krishnamurtis, both Yuji and Jiddu, and gained a following. And you might think. Back to Emerson and Thoreau and other American philosophers who were directly influenced by this kind of thinking, which influenced the development of the movements that we know now as theosophy and the broader concept of spiritual, but not religious. And the ensuing American Vedant was a symphonic integration of multicultural Transcendentalism. You can also see that early influence today in Unitarian Universalist churches, Unity churches, Centers for spiritual living and more so, the spiritual trade winds eventually brought yoga to the United States also. And in 1893 a leading monk, Swami Vivekananda, visited New York, where he addressed the Parliament of world religions, saying, sisters and brothers of America, it fills my heart with joy, unspeakable joy, to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which You have given us. He became the ambassador not only for yoga, but for the recognition of Hinduism as a major world religion. And little did he know that 125 years later, 40 million Americans would be practicing an almost unrecognizable form of what he was teaching, although they would still be calling it yoga. Vivekananda eventually started an ashram in Los Angeles, and at the same time, a man named Pierre Bernard, known as the Great OOM was teaching yoga to society women. I think if you're interested in that, you should go back and listen to the episode I did with Christopher Wallace on classical Tantra. Tells the whole story of Pierre Barnard, where he was somewhat of a seductive charlatan. But nonetheless, there was something in it, because it because it got a toehold on the American continent, and it just grew from there. So Meanwhile, back in India, yoga was also changing. The limited Asana information that was in the yoga sutras and the traditional teachings of Indian physical culture and the early vinyasa sequences were being developed into a more modern, structured asana practice. Yoga was getting a very intense systemic upgrade and becoming much more physical. So in the late 1800s and early 1900s a man named Manik Rao blended European gymnastics and weight resistance exercises with revived Indian techniques for combat and strength. Rao's student, Swami kuvalayananda, was considered to be the most influential yoga teacher of his day, and he was blending traditional asanas with the latest European techniques of gymnastics and even naturopathy. He diligently applied the scientific method to postures and taught what could be proven and observed. So I have this quote from Wikipedia that I'll share with you. Although kuvalayananda was spiritually inclined and idealistic, he was, at the same time a strict rationalist. So he sought scientific explanations for the various psychophysical effects of yoga he experienced. He investigated the effects of some of the practices on the human body with the help of students in a laboratory at Baroda hospital. His subjective experience coupled with the results of those scientific experiments convinced him that the ancient system of yoga, if understood through the modern scientific experimental system, could help society discovering the scientific basis behind these yogic processes became his life's work. So into this soup came the great, great granddaddy of American yoga, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. And Krishnamacharya studied with kuvalayananda in the early 1930s now, he was an important figure, because every kind of yoga that you know now, power yoga, all of that stuff descends from Krishnamacharya. He was unique. He was an incredible scholar in the traditional teachings of Hinduism, with degrees in all six darshanas, which are the aforementioned traditional teachings in Hinduism, one of which is yoga. And he was a scholar of Ayurveda. So in addition to being a master of yoga, he was a rationalist scholar, a philosopher, an atomist, a physician, and thoroughly versed invested in the authority of the Vedas. So his experience with kuvalayanas athletic yoga, coupled with the traditional yoga emphasis on keen and direct observation, caused him to innovate and develop new forms of fast moving, deep breathing asanas that had never been seen before. So this development in the 1930s greatly influenced the way yoga would be taught around the world. As I said earlier, the method at the time was designed mostly for young men to calm and fine tune and prepare the body for meditation. His Asana was significantly different than any other kind of Asana, and it worked wonders. He became the lead teacher to the Maharaja, or the king of Mysore, and located his school on the palace grounds. He then, in turn, taught the most influential global yoga teachers of the 20th century, including bikiyasa yang gar, which became a. Anga yoga, Pattabhi Jois, which became Ashtanga Yoga, Indra Devi, which became classical yoga, and tkv desikachar, which became Vinny yoga, all of whom developed major lineages in the United States and whose students in turn seated further derivative teachings such as power yoga or yin yoga, and spawned what is now a $25 billion annual industry here. We'll get more to the migration of these teachers and the growth of their lineages later in this work. And I think it's important so that you understand just how much science, research and backing is available now, today, over the last 100 years, to support these ancient practices, and how much it's evolved and changed since then to support mind, body, spirit, wholeness. Okay, let's go on and talk about Indra Devi. Okay. Indra Devi, the First Lady of yoga. The next yoga wave in the United States began in the 1950s when Indra Devi, as mentioned, a disciple of India's most famous guru, Krishnamacharya. She opened Hollywood studio in 1947


and wrote a book in 1959 called Yoga for Americans. And in it, she said, a great many people seem to have taken up the study of yoga simply because Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Jennifer Jones, Marilyn Monroe, Olivia de Havilland, Mola powers, Robert Ryan and also the world famous beautician Elizabeth Arden, are known to have been devotees. She emphasized the physical aspect of yoga and didn't diminish yoga's capacity to make a person more glowing, slim or beautiful, even while inviting students to aim higher, to aim for enlightenment, I'll read you a short excerpt from her biography to paint a portrait of who she was. Indra Devi made an ideal, if unlikely, Ambassador for yoga, in part because she wasn't an Indian man born Eugenie Peterson to a Russian noblewoman and a Swedish bank director, she was every bit a sophisticated Westerner, comfortable traveling the world and mingling with newsmakers in high society, and yet she was never stern or ceremonious, and her warmth and quick wit endeared her to everyone she came into contact with. She attracted and welcomed students, regardless of their motivation, from slimming down to self realization. Debbie's own interest in eastern spirituality began in her teens when she came upon the writings of Bengali poet, philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and the American occultist who wrote under the pseudonym Yogi Rama Charaka. In 1926 the 27 year old actress and dancer attended a gathering at the Theosophical Society in Holland, where she became enthralled with Jiddu Krishnamurti. The next year, she sailed to India, following the renowned spiritual teacher from city to city. For 12 years, Indra Devi made India her home, marrying a Czechoslovakian diplomat, starring in an Indian movie. The stage name Indra Devi later became her legal name and rubbing shoulders with such notables as Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore, whose writings first sparked her love affair with the country. It helped to have friends in high places when krishnavacharya refused to accept a woman as his student in 1937 his royal patron intervened on Indra Devi s behalf, by the time Devi followed her diplomat husband to Shanghai in 1939 Krishnamacharya had warmed up to his sorry wearing student insisting that she teach yoga, and so she did for the rest of her remarkably long life. Devi died just shy of her 100 and third birthday in Buenos Aires, Argentina, her home since 1985 Devi brought a woman's perspective to what had been a man's world. Debbie's own students included Magana Baptiste and her husband, Walt, who, if you recognize the name Baptiste, Baron Baptiste, power yoga. That lineage still carries forward. I mean, basically he invented power yoga. They opened the first Yoga Center in San Francisco in 1955 after training with Indra Devi. They were also beautiful people of the time. Walt was Mr. America in 1949 maghano was a dancer. Their three children ended up being key figures in the 90s surge in yoga. So that kind of brings us to a certain point in the development of the story. Iyengar had a certain way of bringing philosophies of Asana forward that were really about slow, perfect alignment, the geometry of the body, very corrective. Ashtanga had a different way of bringing these practices forward, fast, moving, deep, breathing. Very athletic, very strong and Vinny yoga was more prescriptive, like you met the person who was in front of you, and you looked at their body, and you diagnosed what they needed, and you treated it almost like clinically. So let's pause there and go on to part two, which kind of backs us up a little bit, I guess, because we're talking about a slow. That then moves suddenly to mass presence through Woodstock, The Beatles, Californication and PBS.


So from the 60s to the 80s, a whirlwind of cultural forces converged to produce a general hunger for a shift in consciousness, and this seeking for new kinds of awareness brought yoga along with it. The context of the times was one of massive social change. After World War Two, for the first time in history, the United States had developed a standing army. I want you to drop that into your consciousness. We'd never had a standing army before that if the country went to war, resources were diverted and soldiers drafted. But a standing army means the creation of an entirely new military industrial agriculture complex, the redirection of resources to always be preparing for a fight. Factories that made cans in times of peace and bullets in times of war split now there was somebody making bullets all the time. This increased taxation and federal overreach, it meant there was a draft. It increased the use of petrochemicals. Most of the agricultural chemicals were coming out of some kind of weapons by product production. All of this came out of the decision to make being engaged in war and prepared for war on ongoing business. There was also a rising a general frustration with a kind of conformity of the 1950s suburbia and the stranglehold it put on personal expression. This was also the time of the dawn of scientific market research and marketing, a science to create demand where there was none. Consumerism was beginning to take hold. The war in Vietnam was creating an uprising among the young. Rachel Carson released Silent Spring, the first salvo attempting to bring the environment into focus. It was also the beginning of the self help movement, with new forms of psychotherapy and meditation coming out to help people change themselves. From Alan Watts to the beat poets the Summer of Love drug culture, hippies, many Americans were looking for a compelling alternative to what was becoming a shallow shadow culture of materialism and violence in America. And in this fertile field, those seeds we talked about earlier, long planted by theosophy and Transcendentalism, started to really bear fruit. And then, of course, there was the Beatles. As with so many other things in the 60s, The Beatles had a hand in raising the public's awareness of yoga. In August of 1967 the group decided to attend a public lecture on Indian spirituality and mindfulness given by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the London Hilton. The presentation itself, along with the fact that the group members decided to accompany the Maharishi for a 10 day retreat, became instant headline news worldwide. The Maharishi already had a large, devoted following before this incident, but once the world learned of it, he was an instant celebrity, and the public went crazy and sought out time with him and other gurus and swamis for themselves. They wanted to learn what the members of the Beatles were learning. They wanted enlightenment too, and with the Beatles bringing light to the practice of yoga, as well as the movement towards peace, more gurus began to open themselves to students from countries other than India. Schools were also now being open to the public, instead of just the elite or the chosen few, and you saw this really big guru wave come. It was not just the physical cultures of yoga asana that were starting to spread in the US through studios in Northern California and Southern California and New York, like with Indra Devi and the Baptist, these broader gurus led spiritual rivers, which were very welcomed. Yoga consciousness really landed in the early 70s, and many of those gurus have had a lasting impact on the yoga world today, including Yogananda, who lived in the US for 35 years and established kriya yoga and the Self Realization fellowship. He had a vast and expansive lineage and following, including the infamous Bikram Choudhury of Bikram yoga, Neem Karoli Baba and his disciples, who include, like Larry Brilliant and Ram Dass Krishna Das all those Jay utal, they brought an entire lineage of love, that yoga, that they brought was one of devotion to the Divine and serviced people. Srila Prabhupada came to the US, and the Hari Krishnas had effectively arrived with that gesture. ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was formed in New York. He taught the Bhagavad Gita started this big book company. And you know, the ISKCON is not without its conflicts. You know, there's a lot to talk about there, because that got pretty culty and hasn't changed a lot over the years. Yogi Bhajan also came in the late 60s, Kundalini yoga teacher recently somewhat discredited, but he created a system of healthy, prosperous and energetic living, including entrepreneurship. And he said, I've not come here to collect students. I'll create teachers, and teachers so created shall teach the world. All the way of life. That's what we've said, what we're doing and what we are happy, healthy and holy. And then there are a few others. There was Osho Bhagwan, Sri Rajneesh, that was the cult up in Oregon. But not to say that there wasn't some great teaching there. There was guru Mai and Siddha Yoga, which also arrived in this time frame. So let's just say this all lay the groundwork so that by the time Woodstock happened and over 500,000 people heard Swami Satchitananda give his opening speech there, yoga was already fast on its way to becoming a household word. Now, Iyengar Ashtanga Vinny yoga, the things that I mentioned earlier, those really arrived in full force at this time. Also, let me tell you a little bit more about Ashtanga. Ashtanga vinyasa, and even more specifically, a practice called Mysore practice is a vigorous physical yoga with breath and attention integrated from the outset, its effectiveness as exercise and in calming the mind has led to simplified derivatives. It's the foundation of what later became power yoga. It's an element in Jivamukti yoga and many other formats. It was developed in Mysore in India, as mentioned after Krishna. It has six organized postural series, which all begin with sun salutations and end with a closing sequence with different intentions in the middle for the entire body, the series are progressive. That means they get harder and harder. The primary series alone is tonifying for the entire system. And the first Westerners found this school and began to make their way to my sort of study with Joyce Tim Miller, who is a great ashtangi, is the first American disciple, and he has become a revered teacher in the Ashtanga community, as have Richard Freeman and David Swenson and I could go on with a very long list of people. Iyengar yoga came in the late 50s, and in 1966 bikiya sanygar published light on yoga, still the best selling yoga book of all time, with more than 200 postures, and he uses multiple props such as straps and bolsters and blocks and ropes on the wall to bring people into extension and full expression of those postures. It has many breathing techniques also his students and leading lights included Alan finger, Gabriel, Halpern, Rodney, Yee, Patricia, Walden, names you might be familiar with, but all of this athleticism and variety was a little bit muted by the way yoga reached the masses, which was through the power of television. Do you remember or have you ever seen any videos of lilius Yoga and you now, by 1970 yoga entered the mainstream enough to warrant its own television program, but lilius fallen, who was a soft, lovely woman with a very gentle voice, who wore these kind of gymnastics leotards and long braid kind of accompanied by tinkling piano music. She was the spokesperson. She was the person, and her style of yoga was what people were receiving. Time magazine called her the Julia Child of yoga, and her show ran for nine years, airing on more than 200 stations nationwide, and it was a very soft stretchy yoga. And for many Americans, earliest impressions of what yoga was for stretching, not for general athleticism, not particularly about enlightenment, possibly for women. And the combination of media, a pretty face and an accessible practice, created a nice distribution mechanism for yoga, but also probably led to some of the stereotypes, which has minimized the way that people understand its capacity for health and transformation.


So I'm going to skip forward now to the 1990s so look, when I started gathering statistics on this, about 40 million Americans were practicing some form of yoga between 2015 and 2020, that number almost doubled and 2021 in 10 people nationwide, or one in five on the coasts, were doing down dog on a regular basis at home or in the gym or in yoga studios or with their local parks and rec department. They mostly practiced for flexibility, stress relief, general fitness and overall health, and it works as expected for many people. Yoga Journal, the big publication in this sector, did a survey that said 86% of practitioners said that they experienced a stronger sense of mental clarity. 90% said they somewhat or strongly agreed that yoga is a form of meditation. In addition, there were more men and more kids on the mat as of 2020 than there had ever been before, with more racially and economically diverse base proportionately than ever before. Yeah, so what happened in the 1990s to cause this hockey stick and all. So if so many people are practicing this theoretically liberating, freeing and centering practice, why hasn't it had a more transformative impact on the overall culture? Why hasn't it worked more what is this yoga that this 40 million people are doing exactly? It's definitely not simple breathing practices under a banyan tree. It's mostly not the rigor of Ashtanga. It's definitely not Hinduism. Like anything that grows quickly and broadly. Yoga in the United States runs a vast continuum of styles, accuracy, quality, content, approaches, lineage, logic. It might include or exclude Hinduism or its practice as Indian roots. Sometimes it's even ignored, by the way, that's called cultural appropriation, right? It might include the resonant chanting of OM, you know, which has its own sort of metaphysics in the body, for how it shakes up the internal system through air. It's a breathing technique and through vibration. But some people put on head banging music, and some people put on hip hop, and sometimes there's chant that accompanies the whole practice. It might or might not include vital elements from a true whole body mastery practice, like breathing, spinal alignment, energy management, meditative intent or the principles for Optimal Living. It might be taught as a striving form of gymnastics or self improvement program, rather than a program of loving kindness and acceptance of yourself. It might include or exclude the celebration of the feminine or divine sexuality, or conversely, demonstrate a repetition compulsion, or the manipulative patriarchy compulsion. It might be also taught with beer or goats or chocolate. One thing's certain, anywhere there's yoga in America, there is likely to be fantastic body conscious fashion on display. If you go to any random class, it's hard to know what you'll be offered. You might find yourself doing slow stretching at the Y or 75 minutes of modified eight count burpees in a heated room. The more standardized styles of practice are incredibly different in the demands and the moods they set. For example, Yin Yoga will have you lay for 10 minutes in a supported pose to ease open the fascia joints and muscles in an incredibly relaxing way. Power Yoga will have you dripping in sweat and give you abs of steel, if that's what you're looking for. Kundalini Yoga will fire up your energy body and make you more attuned and integrated. Iyengar will mindfully align the skeleton and correct imbalances, and has a studious feel to it. Therapeutic yoga, Vinny yoga, so many there are some brand name yoga forms with standard sequences like Baptiste or Bikram, which come to mind. These sequences work the whole body and in a generally healthy body, progressively open the tissues, the body and the mind. However, when you go to a group class that isn't standardized along one of these lines, it's hard to know what you're going to get. It's heavily dependent on the teacher's personality, knowledge and skills, and who's showing up in the room that day. It's also dependent on the hybridization of a given teacher's unique experiences and complementary training. Real World Hybrid examples that I've seen have been yoga coupled with dance yoga, coupled with martial arts yoga, coupled with then Buddhism yoga and Reiki yoga and poetry yoga and psychology, like basically, the teacher's own intrinsic gifts will be added to the basic yogas. Now I've been so lucky because I've dropped into studios from Iceland to India, Boston to Bangkok, and have seen so many wonderful, vibrant communities. The joy of the practice is really everywhere. And also, there are many things that are being taught that aren't healthy. Teachers teach the wrong breathing, the wrong alignment. They lead class in the front, but don't observe the bodies of their students. They are in rote formulation mode, not in response to the needs of the bodies that are present in the room. They perform for but don't attend to the needs of the class, and often their scholarship is shallow, so that they know how to teach the capable students, but not the struggling ones. So this is to say, in another way, that the diffusion of yoga has been accompanied by a dissipation in the expertise and quality of teaching. It has also led to an increase in injuries, acute yoga injuries measured by ER visits doubled per 100,000 practitioners between 2004 and 2012, the last data that I saw and chronic injuries also arose largely from repetitive misalignment over what for many people is now decades of practice, specifically injuries in the hips, the lumbar spine and the shoulders, which Are the body's most vulnerable points. So this rapid diffusion happened, and I will tell you, for one reason, the increase in practitioners showed a parallel jump in money being spent on yoga. The dollars being spent on yoga went from 3.4 billion in 2004 to six. 16 billion in 2016 and the numbers almost doubled in that four year time period from 2012 to 2016


and it's, I don't know, I don't have the most recent numbers, but it's big, you know, and and so when there's a lot of people doing a thing, there's a lot of money flowing that direction. That means that all of the elements of capitalism inherent in building a business, such as market making, refining a business model, product refinement, lifetime, customer value, financial returns to investors, refined, messaging, branding and the like, are now present in the yokel world. And while sometimes well intentioned, it seems to me that the objectives of capitalism are at odds with the individual liberation that yogic philosophy originally aimed for. So in the late 90s and the early 2000s the rising interest in yoga practice, coupled with environmentalism and sustainability, LED smart marketers to segment off percentage of the population they call lojas, or lifestyles of health and sustainability. And just like kicking a marketing and business engine in gear to target retirees or children watching cartoons, the machine went into overdrive. Investment capital begin to flow into the yoga world. So for example, in 2004 the people who backed 24 hour fitness backed the acquisition of Yoga works, at the time the highest quality studio in America, to build a franchise model in 2006 financiers acquired Yoga Journal. Many of the original homespun yoga clothing and lifestyle companies were acquired also. So for those not particularly familiar with business, once external shareholders are in the picture the mandate of a company changes. Specifically, financial investors are interested in financial returns, growth, profits, and keeping more of the pie for themselves. They won't measure their success by the number of people they've liberated or healed, or how much of the suffering of a materialist, self denying world they've reduced. They very likely won't take their offerings into low income populations who can't pay $100 for yoga pants or $600 for a weekend conference. So in order for a yoga business to work at the scale of capitalism, the mode of operation has to be changed in the following ways, which is common to all services businesses. First, they need repeat customers. If people keep coming back and increasing their long term spending, it justifies what is known as the customer acquisition cost. But this directive is the opposite of freeing them via expertly developing a home practice, developing self and mind mastery, or loving themselves just as they are. Another thing they need is upsells. They have to get the average market basket up, which means workshops instead of regular classes or having students be sold on the idea of becoming teachers, even if that isn't their calling. In my view, having teachers pay to train is a sort of Ponzi scheme as a sector. We could instead be investing in dedicated students and creating masterful practitioners. The other thing that has to happen for the business model to work is one to many to lower the cost relative to revenue, businesses have to leverage methods of scale that always depersonalize the teaching. The idea, in this case, is to produce a class once put it on an online platform where a lot of future revenue can be booked against one production investment, and this means that the teaching is one directional. The teacher can't see the student and give feedback, assess progress and prescribe or suggest next steps. Online courses are good if people can't get to a live teacher, but they should be a supplement from having someone who's knowledgeable, watch and give feedback to you on your own body and placement. Another thing that a capitalist, driven business model requires is creating demand for more stuff, lifestyle products, enrolling the customer and buying items to support their practice, whether they're needed or not, for liberation or movement, clothing, jewelry, accouterments, etc. And then finally, keeping people on the hedonic treadmill, capitalism invests itself in selling Spiritual Materialism as a lifestyle. Progressive achievement and self improvement and other models of a patriarchal extractive system are part of it, and it works like this, you go to class, you feel a little better, it wears off, and you have to do something new, or you have to do it again so that you continue to feel better in a traditional practice. You would begin practicing at home, and you would begin to develop habits where you woke up in the morning and you did your Omi and you did your sun salutes to the sun, and gradually learn how to be mindful of your emotions and feel more and allow it to move through you and be able to direct and concentrate the attention of your mind. But that's not really what's happening when you get into making. Studio chains. And I don't want to dismiss the benefits that come to somebody who's gone to a Yoga works or core power, a Bikram yoga franchise and is really into it. I think that, you know, it's better than any yoga. Is better than no yoga, but the promise is so much bigger and so much better.


Some of the things that yoga has done well as it's come to the West have been making it more simplified and accessible. Routines that work the entire body and the breath in an hour or 90 minutes of ritualized, memorizable, repeatable motions have offered a practice that is impactful if it's consistently done, they're good enough. They're inexpensive, spreadable, available in more locations at all hours of the day. While one might call this the dumbing down of a highly prescriptive and complex practice, some yoga is better than no yoga. Bikram famously said that his 26 postures were designed for Americans because that is all they could handle. The repetition and the heat were also addictive. Another thing that has happened that may be beneficial is the athleticization and stripping away of Orthodox ritual. Many in the West have adopted Hindu inspired practices and deities and coupled those with yoga, many have made it non Hindu, which does not mean by the way, non Indian yoga, as taught by Krishnamacharya, was already stripped of its Hinduism, by the way, unless you were can do to begin with. And my core teacher, Mark Whitwell, who you've also heard on the show, emphasizes that yoga is really for everyone. You breathe and participate in that breath as your participation in life itself. You breathe and move and let the yoga Do you. If you're Christian, you do Christian yoga. I have a friend who set the surya namaskar to the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic. If you're Jewish, you did Jewish yoga, or perhaps better, you teach with no religious overtones, just guide into the direct experience of union of breath and air, of sunshine and being, and let the religious overtone be only an intermediary stopping point on the way to direct experience. Conversely, I will say that the introduction of the Hindu pantheon to new audiences was really vastly accelerated through this practice, the basics of Shiva and Parvati and Radha and Krishna and Sita and Ram and Hanuman and Vishnu and Durga and Saraswati and Kali and, of course, the universally loved elephant God Ganesh. All these deities and stories that are important to a billion and a half people around the world that we shared this earth with became familiar to Westerners. More profane uses putting Gods on socks and handbags to putting them on your own altar, maybe accompanied by a Quan Yin and a mother Mary or a Buddha. The affection for these stories and the archetypes that these stories represent has tapped a lot of people into a broader way of relating to different aspects of the Godhead, and that's pretty cool, especially if you're a woman and you didn't see any representations of female divinity growing up, you know, you now you get Durga, the warrior Mother Goddess, and you get Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance, and Saraswati, the patron of the arts. You know, similarly to bringing the awareness of the Hindu pantheon, is the awareness of the ancient language of Sanskrit. You know, the language was scholarly, and it was reserved for the few who would endeavor to read original texts. But now many non scholars, new students, are really getting to the etymology of the shared indo European roots of Sanskrit. For example, Sukkah means sweetness, and that is Sukkah in French, and sugar in English, and Sukkah in German. So when we chant loka, samasta, Sukhino, bavantu, we are really wishing that all beings reside in a state of sweetness or happiness or freedom, and it's the same for all of the poses and the numbers. And it all sounds so foreign, until you begin building the posture. Names, like, Muk is face, go is cow. So go Muk, Asana is cow face, post or auto. Mukha is downward face. And you get it, it's, it's really building body parts, animal names, etc, that it has postural yoga has, in a way, breathed new life into the knowledge yoga. So the scholarly revival behind Sanskrit is benefiting from this. There's been the invention of a new category of world music, Western or American Kirtan, which basically blends chant with folk and rock and country and blues and reggae and trip hop and drum kits and fiddle and steel pedal and keyboards and bass and harmonica and banjo and, you know, combines the old Sanskrit mantra with English invocations, and it's a really incredibly vibrant and enthusiastic new form of world music. 1000s of records, millions of voice. Is now singing this, trying to get in the mood, the mood of the Kirtan, the mood of love. I would also say, like I mentioned before, the feminization and the return of the feminine to the yoga worldwide. Until recently, four out of every five practitioners in the US have been women. 10s of millions of women have experienced this centering and strengthening and joyful expressive practice. They lead the industry, and they have and are leading a spiritual revolution from the mat. I would say, Western women took yoga to the masses. Indian men sang an ancient song, and disproportionately, it's Western women who enjoined the response, and it could be a vital and good movement for the rebalancing of male and female on Earth. Another thing that happened as yoga came west was the addition of scientific anatomy, injury avoidance that kind of built on Krishnamacharya, scientific understanding manic Rao and Krishna really understanding and looking at the science behind the yoga, we have seen the joining of medical technologies to demonstrate differences in core physiology. For example, yoga anatomy pioneer Paul Grilli x rayed the opening of a hip socket, showing that the size of this opening determines how far a leg can spread before the femur hits the hip bone. No amount of stretching will change that this person is never going to do a split if they have a closed opening. And it's the same with the carrying angle in the arms and many other elements in the body. Moreover, the common yoga injuries from repetitive motions done incorrectly, such as the front of the rotator cuff, which is caused by Chaturanga when you dive too far forward or like low push up, or the wrist, where is because the hand engagement on the outer edge is too heavy instead of putting it on the inner edge. Or the placement of the lumbar spine injury there occurs when spinal twists are done with pelvic displacement. So you need a more explicit alignment cue, and this can differ from what is taught in classical yoga. So the addition of the more scientific method yoga anatomy documented over a wider range of population, particularly women, has saved many people from pain. Of course, that requires a good teacher. I think there's also sequences and classes that have adapted to the unique needs of our culture. So I am going to postulate that everything that arises does so to meet a need. Therefore what might be seen by some is perversions to the core. Teachings can instead be understood as a natural extension, like we need to relax deeply in the West to counteract the stressful lifestyle. So we get yin yoga, we need embodied play as an escape from a rather workaholic culture. So we get acro yoga. We need ritual. So we get candlelight yoga. We need intimacy. So we get partner yoga. We need absolution. So you get yoga and chocolate and wine and beer. We need unbridled joy. So you get the dance form of yoga. We need cardio. So you get spinning and yoga combined together. Do you see what I mean? People adapt and invent because it works, because they see a need. This is the pervasive creative tension and universal expansive impulse to solving problems and inventing.


My friend Nicole AMI Becker says, From a cultural anthropology perspective, I see that we need synchronized community movement. In the growing absence of our communities of heritage, which had culturally specific dances and rituals that unified a community in movement and expression, one might see the synchronized movements of vinyasa flow as an expression of that desire that even until recently, was fulfilled with ballroom dancing and other social and dance circles. That's a really interesting perspective. I want to say that yoga, along with Zen, Buddhism, has really contributed to mindfulness and alternative medicine coming to the west. You have this meditation practice that is coming to the masses for a while, and in I want to say the mid 2000s the Kripalu center in Massachusetts introduced controlled studies working with the National Institutes of Health to document the impact of mindfulness and yoga on stress and health, to such an extent that the NIH called these practices as effective As medication through neuroscience and functional medical Resonance Imaging, or MRI, we are also able to see how mindfulness can direct the attention and pain reduction looping thoughts and other forms of dysregulation of the self. There's this guy you might want to look up called Jon Kabat Zinn. He was a leader in bringing the concepts of mindfulness from the east to the west. He focused his research at MIT on the mind and body's interaction regarding overall health, and founded the Center for mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. So those programs like mindfulness based stress reduction, MBSR, those kinds of programs. Were one of the results of his research. There's the Insight Meditation Society, which was founded by Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg. That's another one you know, where you're now starting to see that the meditation part of yoga, focusing of the mind, control over the direction of one's thoughts, the ability to shift into unity. Consciousness is also developing and getting spread. Yoga has been influential in a lot of other things. The expansion of vegetarianism and veganism, the arc and wave of a group class parallels a worship service and fills a need for connection. That is para religious. It can awaken people in these moments of practice to the connective and collective consciousness. You can't say, in my opinion, over and over, Namaste, or the light in me bows to the light in you, or I honor you 1000s of times in your life, and not have something about that stick. So, you know, I want to say that the point of all of these ideas is that even though it is a capitalist treadmill, and often very, very, very, very, very poorly trained teachers are up in front of a class, which makes me insane when I'm in there, like I see so many people making it so much harder than they need to. I want to just adjust their foot, lengthen their stance. I mean, whatever. It makes me so frustrated to see people being brought something that is less than ideal, where they can really get the activation and the freedom in the body. There's still a lot of good, you know, going on with it. So I want to say that I feel that, like with all of that good stuff that I just said, there is a spiritual materialism thing like I can own longer than you. I have a muscle type body from being a disciplined practitioner. I've done so many trainings I never say an unkind word or I eat an animal. These hallmarks of my spiritual development make me better than you, you poor thing. That is baloney, because when any spiritual practice is used to prop up self worth, it's really almost painful to watch, but I will say that the worst development, and I've alluded to this already in this show, is teacher training as the primary business model. I have been so lucky to have an amazing teacher in Eddie modestini and in Nikki Doan. Teachers in the asana side particularly, and he made the point once in class that teaching has migrated from a respected profession to a service business, and that this business model thrives when people keep coming to class instead of being freed to home practice, and that you have to train and certify more teachers, and that the teacher then becomes a performer or a cheerleader instead of a true Teacher. And this is what I have noticed is, without the teacher being really deep in the practice and entrained with their own in their own lineage, and someone kind of overseeing them, you get losing the breath. You get a violent speech. You get spiritual bypass. You get image over substance. You get lack of attunement. You get body issues, orthorexia, obsessions with clean eating. You get a new kind of shame cycle for missing practice. So I feel that, plus the cultural appropriation, things are really stuff that we can examine. In any case, I think what I'd like to invite us to as I bring this episode to a close today, is that we are in the middle, not at the end, of the way Yoga will be brought forward. And I would like us all to reclaim yoga as medicine. Its simplicity, depth and potential is deep medicine, and it's still available to us. A few years ago, this great yogi, Katherine buddick, asked Matti ezrati, who was the original founder of Yoga works, these questions, where would you like to see yoga go? If you could pull out your magic yoga dust and make everything okay? What would you wish for in the future of yoga? And Marty's response was, sometimes, I hope yoga is going to break, to split into yoga fitness and more traditional classes. I hope yoga schools will invest in their teachers and help them put out classes that are not just fitness oriented, but geared towards students needs. It is so powerful when done with that in mind, it's a healing art in a long tradition that incorporates a lot more than just asanas. My wish is that we can stop the image of yoga as an industry or just another fitness modality, and stop mixing it, and that we return to what is meant to be a healing art for the mind and body that is ultimately supposing to lead us to greater happiness and acceptance. Developing an autonomous practice and a personal practice is a big step. If you go to class for community and instruction, please also do at least a few minutes every day at home of breathing and moving in harmony. Get the core teachings right in Asana. The breath comes first, spinal alignment comes next, and then the placement of the articular limbs. Ah. Mark Whitwell teaches the easiest version of this. I know your yoga practice is participation in life itself. Meditation and concentration arise as Grace and fruits of practice. There's nowhere to get to just go to the mat. It's very important in the future of your yoga and in your life, to reject or lean out from things that entrain you into a patterned dependency and go deeper into those that liberate you be conscious about what you're trading off for, the look and the lifestyle, and know that you're being sold to wear the leggings if you want, because you like them, and know it's not yoga, as I'm sharing the taxonomies and styles today in this show the religious and non religious elements of the various forms of yoga. It's in part so you can choose for yourself and find a form that really resonates with you so that your body, mind and spirit, your exquisite breath, your exquisite body, get a highly personalized form of practice. I'll tell you a few short stories before I close New York from the airport, I taxi to a second floor studio in Union Square with a scent of tea and sweat, its walls painted orange pictures of smiling teachers and little gold frames. I lay myself down on a mat in this warm space and begin to breathe deeply, and then I move a little in silence. The breath and the body become one. My jaw releases. My mind takes a vacation and left with a broadened perceptual field of grace. After 75 minutes, my nervous system is re regulated. My eyes are bright and the glow is back. No coffee, no cocktail, no phone, a friend, no chocolate. Infusion needed. Just go to the mat. It works. Another one. San Quentin Prison, a lifer, is telling a hard story about abuse. The other men in the circle are choking up. Everyone pauses, puts one hand on the heart, one on the belly. We all close our eyes and breathe as one. We unite the circle, creating a net for this man's experience, where we can feel with him so he is not alone. Just breathe. Yoga is a light. It helps us be a stand for freedom and love by relaxing into the body, breath to our perfect embodiment, our sex, relaxing into the things that are just here, just the way we are, without wanting anything unchanged. That is the power of yoga, ultimately, that you're fully enlivened. You feel your whole body from tip to toe, stern to tail, in and out without wanting anything to be changed. Love, life. Love. What is a more Fauci love each other.


I think that every person can find a yoga that is right for them. If you haven't tried it, because you're doubtful, if you're calling it stretching, you've probably got some pattern that you're running not really understanding the capacity of it for balance and strength. Yoga was one of the key ingredients for me in reprogramming myself over the years. It taught me how to manage and redirect the energy in my body and to make the connection to the neutrality of energy itself. I see all thoughts and actions as only energy, not positive or negative, and I can transmute them in any way. I can remove the negative element and just use the energy disturbing thoughts arise, and now I ask myself, what can I do, other than sit here or numb out through work or busyness or sex or distraction? What can I do to not numb out, to really feel and leverage the emotion? The yoga practice that was handed to me started a new kind of self inquiry. I would begin to inquire, where am I in space? How good is my proprioception, the receiving, the receptors of myself, proprius, what am I actually feeling? What is actually happening? And as I became more intimate with my own experience, my awareness, my creative force, I could let it pass through me or transmute transform. And the practice ended up restabling My then highly traumatized and unregulated nervous system, an immense first step after the asana, the postural practice leached out the tension off of my then very wired body. I began seated meditation, sitting still, harboring a quiet mind initially, which felt impossible, even two minutes of meditation felt terminable, and every part of me resisted, but it didn't last. I initially it was like it was unproductive, it wasn't burning calories. But eventually. It became, watch your breath where it enters and exits the nostrils. Imagine a flame, say a mantra, drop in, become the watcher or witness of my thoughts, and then at some point, you have this moment where you zoom out. Hey, I'm not my thoughts, and if I'm not my thoughts, I can disidentify with them. Meditation was a key tool for acquiring the emotional skills to self regulate. And when I started that everything in my life, the great things and the ugly things, were all right there staring at me. So I got to make the decisions, one, that I was going to recognize when something was out of alignment, and two, that I would act on those realizations as quickly as possible. The yogic ideal is strength and suppleness being rooted yet able to reach the perfect combination of grounded and flexible in mind and body. There's an Indian fable that puts it sweetly. I'll tell it to you as quickly as possible. The serpent ananta, who is an incarnation of a deity, is all coiled up. And resting on his coils is the Lord Vishnu, like, kind of the middle coil comes over the middle, and he's laying on his side, kind of hanging out there. And then on the top of the nuntis head, the Earth is balanced. And, you know, here he is this big serpent, strong enough to support the world and soft enough to be a couch for the gods and so that that's the yogic ideal, strong like that, and equally soft. Personally, I geeked out on all this stuff. I went from doing the asanas and the meditation and the breathing to yoga philosophy, the study of original texts, then singing and leading call and response chant, my conscious practices. I still do Asana, I still sit, but arises because it feels good and I like it, not because it's an external discipline. Spirituality, for me, is absolutely not about withdrawing into a cave, but living in deeper erotic presence, in deeper positive ethics with self and the community and the planet care deeper relationship, embodying without shame. It's spaciousness in it, and through it, I have developed an umbilical cord to source, and for me, that's the unifying force that runs through every manifest thing in the universe. It's unmediated by preachers and scriptures and hierarchies, and it's granted me a lot of freedom. So I love it, and I know many of you do also, and even if you're not part of the yoga scene in any way, I hope you'll try and see what might come of it for you as a lifelong practice. You are nature. You are in a body in relation, sensual and present, and there is nothing more to be attained. Breathe and move and participate in life as it has been given. Look at you. My friend Mark says, You are the natural beauty and intelligence of the cosmos arising, and this is the truth. Nothing is asked in return. Thank you for joining me in my yoga episode today. I have taught over 100 classes this year, an online course called Living Tantra, if you want to dive more into philosophies. And I will be offering that class again in April of 2025 online. And you can read some of the reviews which, oh my god, blew me away. I mean, I know this stuff works to create more freedom, but the things people said were utterly humbling. You can go to my website, Christine mariemason.com, and look on courses and see some of the testimonials that people put up there. I was blown away. And I really hope you will join. If there's anything in there that's calling you. I'm also going to be leading a couple of in person retreats in 2025 one at the Art of Living Center in Boone, North Carolina, one in Oregon, at a beautiful hot springs. So also, check out those kind of gatherings. I'm doing a monthly live Satsang on Zoom. Information is also at Christine mariemason.com around that, as always, please support Rosebud woman. Rosewoman.com the anti shame, more joy, more peace, more power. Feminine and body products that I've been making since 2018 too much acclaim, and also radiant farms for psychoactive wellness gummies that can really help deal with some of the common distortions in a human body. Love you all the time. Om, Shanti Shanti Shanti peace peace peace, peace of the past, peace of the present, peace of the future. No regrets, no anxieties, and definitely, definitely being here right now. Shanti Shanti Shanti Peace Peace, peace of the mind. Body and Spirit. Peace, peace. Peace of the Earth, atmosphere and the heavens, peace through all space and all time to every single being on this planet, especially you.


Geneva Tolentino
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