An Interview with John Friend

Written by Philip Self

The following is an interview from the book, Yogi Bare: Naked Truth from America’s Leading Yoga Teachers, by Philip Self.

How did you become a yoga teacher?

My yoga teacher got very sick and asked me to substitute. After that experience, I taught a weekly class through college. I graduated from Texas A&M in 1983 and taught one class a week until 1986, when I started teaching two classes a week.

After college, I went into finance and accounting. It was a successful endeavor, but it wasn’t giving me the sense of fulfillment that my two yoga classes a week were giving me. I didn't want my epitaph to read, "He made a lot of money, but he didn't help much." In my heart, I couldn’t handle that, because the most important thing for me was to help people.

In 1987, I made a commitment to teach yoga full-time. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I quit my consulting job in Ohio, got in my car, and drove across the country to California. I didn't have any plans or know where I was going. One afternoon, I stopped in the middle of nowhere. I was completely unattached. It was the first time in my life I felt totally free. I knew yoga was going to be the thing for me. After six months in California of driving around taking classes, I moved back to Texas and started teaching full-time.

How did the California yoga classes influence you?

I started doing Iyengar yoga during my travels to California. I had heard the Iyengar style was tough, but I didn't know too much about it. I decided to go to the Iyengar Institute in San Francisco and take a class. Since I was already teaching yoga, I thought I was advanced, so I looked for the hardest class. The level 4 & 5 teacher’s class was on Friday mornings with Judith Lasater. The schedule said to call the teacher for permission. I called Judith and explained that I was a yoga teacher from Texas. I didn't say I had never done Iyengar yoga before, I just asked for permission to attend the class. She said I was welcome to come.

Judith proceeded to give a strong class, and I was totally blown away. I was muscling the poses, trying to maintain any sense of dignity I had left. One pose sticks in my mind—parivrtta Trikonasana. Judith had the forty-plus class of students standing around me. It was a whole new world for me. I had never been in a class where people stopped and looked at you. As she gave me instructions, I had perspiration coming out of me horizontally.

Progressively in that two-hour class, my sense of knowing anything about yoga dissolved. I was humbled by the whole experience. I felt like a little kid. It seemed everybody was at least two feet taller than I was. After class, I went to Judith and said, "I don’t know anything. Do you have a beginner’s class?" She said one was starting in fifteen minutes, and I decided to stay. I put so much energy into it that my legs were vibrating. I couldn’t believe it. When I walked back to where I was staying, with every step on those hills in San Francisco, I was going, "Oh! Ow! Ouch!"

I realized I didn't know much about the body. I had been studying yoga philosophy and knew the basics of posture and breath. But much greater than what I had even conceived of, that I decided I really needed to delve into the practice of Iyengar yoga intensively.

I was also studying other traditions to experience the full spectrum. In 1987, I studied with Pattabhi Jois in Santa Barbara and San Francisco. I met Desikachar that year. The Iyengar practice was something I really wanted to get into, because it was much clearer about alignment, which was most foundational. As I did more vinyasa, I realized if I didn't know how to do the pose there was a greater risk of injury.

Are you still aligned with the Iyengar tradition?

Not formally. About three years ago, I realized the philosophy I adhered to and the basic parts of my practice didn't align with Mr. Iyengar’s philosophy and the way he practiced. I slowly developed out of the system, and last year I formally resigned my Iyengar certification. It was an honoring to Mr. Iyengar, because I was teaching philosophy and alignment in a way he wouldn’t fully approve of. It was dishonorable and dishonest to continue to use his name for my teaching. And yet, there are so many things I teach and practice that are directly from him. He and his senior teachers have made the biggest impact on a technical level, and I will always honor that.

I teach technical alignment, which Mr. Iyengar emphasizes, but instead of giving a lot of little points of alignment, I use bigger instructions, broader strokes. I use more instructions about how to work with the subtle body, the energetic body, which I call energy loops and spirals. I call my method Anusara yoga.

What is Anusara yoga?

Anusara means to step into the current of divine will, to move with the flow of grace. Anusara is about opening to every part of ourselves and seeing every part as sacred, seeing everything as supreme consciousness. Instead of making a dualistic system by saying the body is just a casing for the spirit and we have to subjugate the body, or control the body, or discipline the body so we can penetrate to find the spirit, we see the body as beautiful, even though it’s transitory. Our body is our laboratory.

You are supreme, and there is tremendous goodness and worthiness inside of you. Find the blessing in your limitations, instead of seeing them as a curse.

When did you begin the practice of yoga?

My interest in yoga started before I practiced formally. When I was eight, my mother read me stories about yogis in the Himalayas who had supernatural powers.

I started practicing yoga formally when I was thirteen. I got some hatha yoga books and started following the photographs and the descriptions. The first book was Integral Hatha Yoga with Swami Satchidananda. There wasn’t much explanation as to how to do the poses. I would look at the photograph to imitate and end of crashing into my mother’s furniture. My mother still has photographs of me trying to do headstand in the middle of the living room.

Your mother sounds like an interesting lady.

My mother is special. She gave me my first chemistry set when I was three.

The junior welding set at four.

It was weird. I got rocket ships in those first few years. She always encouraged me to do what was true to my heart. When I was into yoga and doing really weird things as a kid, even though she didn't fully understand it, she supported me and my sense of discovery and investigation.

She gave me boundaries, but she let me grow my feathers, so I could fly out of the nest. If you don’t allow the baby bird to grow the feathers, then the cat will eat it. I went to work when I was fourteen sweeping the floor in a pizza parlor. I walked home at night. When I was sixteen, she gave me a bus ticket to travel halfway across the country to the King Tut exhibit. I was encouraged to play the edge where it’s scary and free, and it’s going to make you think. You make mistakes, but you learn to accept your choices and use whatever arises for your own betterment.

When I was thirteen, I read the Mascaro translation of the Bhagavad Gita and it rang true. It was so beautiful, and the teachings were so powerfully profound. I found a philosophy I could base my life on. I joined the local Theosophical Society and became the youngest member of the group. I began to hang out with meditation groups. I became the mascot of the local Sufis. They decided I was very peculiar even for those groups.

My classmates thought I was pretty strange. I was one of the most unusual students at my school, but everybody respected me. I was a funny, normal guy, but I had this yoga mysticism side of me that they never really understood. At my high school awards banquet, I was awarded the title of "Most Likely to Astral Project in an English Class.""

They wouldn't have given you the comical honor if they didn't care about you.

I'm glad I wasn't a social misfit. I could really connect to all the different cliquesóparty people, drug people, intellectuals, and athletes. I was popular, but different. That was hard in high school, because you don't want to feel different. But I stuck to my convictions because they meant so much to me. I was this mature little kid who was really into yoga. I had a burning to know about life.

At sixteen, I had another profound spiritual experience that created a major shift in my life. The Theosophical people and the Sufis had gotten together for a one-day meditation. We were silent except for chanting. From early morning until late afternoon we meditatedóvisualizing and using our inner vision to contact inner energy centers. The whole day was so powerful that by the time I left, I was so naturally stoned I was seeing light outside and inside. I felt totally vast, expanded, illuminated.

I walked out of the house where we had been meditating. It was a gorgeous summer day. Everything looked different. Everything was bright, colorful, alive, beautiful. When I got home, my mother was cooking a Porterhouse steak, which was one of the family favorites. That was the big meal on Saturday night. I walked in and said, "Mom, I decided I'm not going to eat meat anymore." She thought, "We'll take John to the psychologist on Monday. He'll be okay." I intuitively felt if I ate meat, I would lose the ethereal feeling and get dense. For about twenty years, my mother didn't believe me. Every major holiday she would ask me, "Do you still want the turkey leg today?" "No, Mom. Still not eating meat." She eventually realized it wasn't a fad.

How did you connect with your teacher, Gurumayi Chidvilasanada?

In October 1989, I went to India to study with Iyengar in Pune. Then I traveled around the country and got sick. I happened to be in Goa, and I really needed Western food, because my stomach couldn't handle the Indian spices any more. I had heard of an ashram in Ganeshpuri, north of Bombay, which supposedly had very good Western food. I decided to go there, rest for a couple of weeks, and eat some good food.

I arrived at the Ganeshpuri ashram in late October. The first question I asked the welcoming host was "Where's the cafeteria?" She asked me if I had written to Gurumayi. I said, "No, I don't know who she is, but I am really in need of food." She probably thought I was a tourist coming through without interest in her teacher, but she still welcomed me. For the next three days, I proceeded to sleep, go to breakfast, practice yoga by myself, eat again, and sleep. I totally took advantage of the facilities.

I decided I really needed to tell the lady of the house that she had a great ashram, and I was very grateful. Someone said, "Gurumayi is sitting in the courtyard this afternoon." There was darshan line, so I stood in line and as I approached Gurumayi, I noticed there was a lot of prana, or dense energy, in the atmosphere. By the time I got right up to her, the prana was so thick that when she posed her first question, "Where have you been traveling in India?", her mouth moved but the words seemed to come out in slow motion. They hit my ears so much slower than the movement of her mouth that it scared me. I was speechless. My mouth was open. My heart was racing. I had expected to make a perfunctory type of acknowledgement. Instead, I was witnessing something totally unnatural.

There was a Western swami sitting near her. He touched my shoulder and said, "She-said-where-have-you-been-tra-vel-ing-in-In-di-a?" Over-articulating, as if he didn't know whether I was deaf or dumb. I told him I understood English. I tried to compose myself, and said I had been to Pune. "With Iyengar?" she asked. She seemed to know the answer. I said, "Yes, I am an American yoga teacher, I am in India studying yoga, and I heard your ashram had good food, so I came." She laughed. And then I said, "I do advanced hatha yoga, and I would be glad to give you a demonstration." I caught myself and I thought, "What did you just say?" It was the stupidest thing I had ever said in my whole life. The biggest demonstration I had ever given was at the YMCA for twenty people.

She gave me this side glance and cat grin and said, "We'll arrange it." She turned her head away and the darshan was over. I fell down and bowed. I stumbled away, went back to the dorm, and splashed water on my face. There was dusk light coming through the window onto a little mirror over the sink. My eyes were lit up like cat eyes shining bright, and I was shaking.

I went to bed that night in a dorm room of about sixty bunks. About two-thirty in the morning, I had this dream where Gurumayi came and stood in front of me. Her form was crystal clear. She didn't say anything; she just stood there. I was lucid, but I recognized I was in a dream. My eyes popped open. I was scared to death thinking, "This lady's inside me! I'm out of here!" I got up and packed my bags. I counted my money, and I didn't have enough rupees to get to Bombay. I had to wait until the bank opened in the morning. I waited on the bank steps, and this guy came and put a sign up and said to me, "Bank closed. Holiday."

In frustration, I went back to my favorite hangoutóthe cafeteria. A woman came over to me and asked, "Are you John Friend?" I said, "Yes." She said, "For as long as you are here, you are to teach the hatha yoga teachers." "But I'm leaving as soon as I can get money," I told her. "Well, Gurumayi wants you to teach the teachers," she replied. For some reason I said, "Okay. What time?" She said, "Four in the morning."

I taught a class and another class. Each day, I was looking to see if I could get to the bank. For four days the bank was closed. I was caught in this routine, and people were being super nice. Then I got this call (phone rings) saying that tomorrow at seven in the morning I was to give a hatha yoga demonstration in the courtyard for the entire ashram and Gurumayi. The ashram population was about a thousand people. I put the phone down and was afraid I would have a heart attack.

The phone ringing is a nice element of synchronicity.

Isn't that great? That's the way it works with this story.

You might need to get that. It's probably Gurumayi. Stranger things have happened.

Exactly.

I figured I had to do the most advanced demonstration of my life. I had to do the most incredible backbends, forward bends, twists, inversions, and hand balances. I had to be totally warmed up before I went out on stage. I got up at four o'clock the next morning to start practicing in the dark between the bunk beds in the men's dorm. One posture that I was worried about is called durvasana, where you put one leg behind your head and stand up on the other leg. It's a striking pose. I had done it before, but this time as I was bending the knee and bending forward to come out of the pose, I lost my balance. I couldn't get my foot out from behind my head hit the cement floor. I almost knocked myself out. I lay crumbled on the floor. All my fear came up. I was thinking, "This is going to be a catastrophe. I'm going to fall in front of a thousand people and humiliate myself. I can't do this."

I happened to look outside as the sun was rising over the village of Ganeshpuri, where the great saint Swami Bhagawan Nityananda lived and died. A few days before, I had been in the room where he had taken mahasamadhi, and I spontaneously sat down and started meditating. It was a simple room with a bed in it, but something about the room was so beautiful that I had cried.

As I lay on the floor that morning, I thought about Swami Nityananda, and I called out to him, really to God, for help. A cool breeze came in through the window, and immediately, I felt calm. My trembling stopped, and I felt composed. I had been comforted, and my prayer had been answered immediately. I thought, "I'm not even going to warm up anymore. I'm just going to have to give it to God, because I know I can't do it. I have to totally surrender."

I went out to the courtyard and stood by the stage. There was a chant going on in an adjacent temple. I looked at this little platform they had placed on the stone courtyard. The ground was not a level surface. The carpeted platform was slanted and elevated three feet. The first pose I was going to do was press into a handstand. I'm thinking, "There's no way. How am I going to balance? I can hardly do it on the floor. I'm going to be elevated on a table with carpet on an uneven surface." All my fears started to come back.

The night before the programming director had given me directions on how the program would go. He told me, "It's fifteen minutes performing. You don't have to say anything. You can just do your performance." I went along with that.

Gurumayi came out of the temple when the chant was concluded. She sat in her chair in the courtyard, which then filled with people. It's showtimeócamaras, music, MC. "Good morning, everyone. Today we're very happy to have with us a Texas hatha yogi who came here to eat the food." The whole crowd burst out laughing. I was embarrassed, but he said some honoring things and gave me a nice place. I got my cue, but I thought, "I can't just do this. I have to say something." I belted out, "I just want to thank everybody here," and spontaneously started giving this little speech. Gurumayi make a hand gesture to get me a microphone. Somebody grabbed a microphone and jumped to the stage. With mic in hand I said, "I came to eat the food, and yet you welcomed me because I was a visitor to your home. I am so grateful and moved by your open-heartedness that I want to give something back. My performance is my offering."

I put the mic down and stood on the stage. I put my hands in namaste, closed my eyes, and said a prayer. "Gurumayi, I need some serious help. If you are who they say you are, I need all of that." I bent over into Uttanasana, put my hands on the stage, and started pressing up both legs into a handstand. It was like someone took a blanket, wrapped it around me, and lifted me up. I was upside down looking at my hands on the uneven carpeted stage. I stuck the handstand. I wasn't even trying. I opened my legs up and threw them into Padmasana in a handstand. Perfect. For fifteen minutes, I flowed through this routine. I did poses I hadn't even planned to do. I felt so totally supported. It was magic. I was detached, seeing this thing happen as if it was somebody else's body. I stopped, put my hands in namaste, and the crowd gave me a standing ovation. It was an incredible moment.

Spontaneously, I jumped off the stage and went over to Gurumayi and pranamed. I knew that was the first tangible grace I had ever experienced. I had read about grace in books for years and thought I understood the concept, but I believed grace was something someone might not experience in their lifetime. I experienced it there. It was very tangible. From then on I felt connected to her.

As soon as I got back to Texas, the phone started to ring, and I started getting more work. People invited me to teach, not only locally, but also nationally. I went from barely making it as a yoga teacher who contemplated going back to accounting, to becoming a successful yoga teacher.

How has your relationship with Gurumayi evolved?

We have become more psychically bonded. Our relationship is almost the same today in a lot of ways, even though I have been privileged to spend time with her. I see her every year. She often stays in her ashram in South Fallsburg, New York. I go there during the summer and teach.

Has the sense of awe diminished?

It's only increased. It's like seeing the vastness of the stars. It never ceases to amaze you. The more you know about astronomy, the more you are blown away. You start to realize how far away those stars are, how many there are, and how many galaxies there are. The more I get to know her, the more the mysteries and wonders increase. I am very much in awe. She is a real teacher and has taught me on a very physical, tangible level how to teach and how to be with people in my hatha yoga. I am very grateful, because I can feel how present she is in my life, and it's a gateway to something bigger.

Looking back, do you feel a sense of being called?

I don't know about being called, but I think we have certain things that are destined. Destiny is a result of our previous actions. We all have a certain dharma. In that way, one is called. We all have a natural current of talent and skill in our particular lifetime, and each of us has to find what that is. When you find it, there is a natural ease. You flow with it.

Yoga is not about control. For me, teaching has been the thing, but first and foremost I see myself as a student. That's the most important lessonóI am not ultimately in charge. I am not ultimately the authority. I am ultimately the student. Instead of me trying to control as the leader when I'm doing pranayama and asana, I feel like I am co-participating, co-dancing with so much greater energy. That brings me joy. There's a bigger ocean of consciousness that I am part of. This other part of the consciousness is the lead dancer and I am just following, but I am trying to dance with it as best I can. There are times in your practice when you hit that magical connection so deeply a beautiful ease arises, and both dancers dissolve into one dance.

Do you follow a particular religious tradition?

I am a student of comparative philosophy. I read Buddhism and practice some of the Buddhist tenants. My altar at home is Hindu-oriented. I love the Sufi tradition. By my bedside, I have the new Testament, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, and the Dhammapada. Those are the things I read for inspiration. I find good in all of them.

I don't often suggest a student do it that way, to mix a lot of traditions. That's just the way my mind works. I like to check out a lot of different things and find a common denominator. It's not the easiest approach, because you can get confused when you take a lot of different roads. Many times, I will suggest that a student find what they are comfortable with and dive deeply into that. In America, we are more exposed to the Christian faith, so why not dive deeply into Christianity. I think that's honorable. But study. Don't be ignorant. Use your discernment, your discrimination, and study about the history. Find the roots, and respect the other cultures Christianity came out of. Those cultures are part of the Christian faith.

Isn't Jesus revered in parts of India?

Yes. In the northern part, they have historical documentation to say he visited certain places in India. Some scholars would question that, but I think it's very possible. The metaphors of the Bible have very similar references to previous scriptures that have come out of India.

What are the benefits of meditation?

Meditation helps you make practical decisions. You become much more intuitive. You might not know how a particular act or decision is going to affect you or anybody else, so ask yourself, "Is this the right thing to do for the higher good?" Something inside knows those currents, those ripples, way down and ahead. What is right is the natural, intuitive feeling of the heart.

The more you listen to your inner voice, the more you stay connected. I have to make choices. Is this choice going to bring fulfillment? Is it going to be in line with nature or is it going to be for the satisfaction of personal desires? Am I going to gratify a simple pleasure or am I going to go for something higher? The more I am connected, the more I know this decision, this choice, will be right.

My meditation practice connects me to the highest part of myself. I feel the natural goodness inside myself and inside others. There is a natural joy. Meditation is not this pinpointed focus where I block out everything around me or inside me. I am much more open to what is arising. I feel my thoughts and my body. By seeing what naturally arises inside, I see that these things are temporary, like the clouds passing in the sky. My witness consciousness is the unchanging blueness of the sky. Other parts of me are the clouds. They are quite beautiful, but transitory.

I gain insight and wisdom through meditation. Sometimes I get afraid or angry. That's natural. Those things come from the same place as peace, joy, and love. They all come from the same source, but the witness sees those things separately. The witness is much more steady and vast than the little clouds of emotion and thought that arise.

When I go into my heart, I feel love and experience vastness and illumination. The trick is to live that way when I open my eyes.

(Copies of Yogi Bare are available through Anusara.)