The Heart of Yoga

Since psychedelics first escaped the research environment and sparked the counter-culture in the mid twentieth century, they have been aligned with the traditions of the East. But how do Yoga and psychedelics relate to each other? Are they complementary? Or antagonistic? Mark and Andy discuss the original counterculture, the current "psychedelic renaissance" and latest applications to mental health, as well as their own experiences.   In this episode you will hear...   01.32 High school Yoga catching on. The Divine is not located elsewhere. The colonization of spirit based cultures.   08:00 Screwy mainstream cultures, systems and radical Yoga. Capitalism without a product.   12:00 Spiritual change of states and that thing we all wanna hear more about : psychedelic experiences   23:00 Feeling like there's way to get to absent truths. Heroic quests. The problem is the ego. The solution is to destroy the ego.   28:00 You don't have to untie the knot. The knot never happened. Finding your way back. Psychedelics and prescription drugs. Yoga is a tool.   37:00 No more psychedelics, sex or weed until your practice is established. Yoga and Buddhist Mindfulness Meditation. There's a difference.   46:30 Is the a Yogic framework for the use of psychedelics? A call to stop interfering. Higher defilements.   56:00 Current culture doesn't have the capacity to enjoy mystical experiences without it turning into a problem.   1:04:00 The sublime and the ordinary are one. The secrets of the universe are already given. Putting Yoga in the drinking water. Follow this podcast for new episodes here: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS/XML If you feel moved to submit a question for a future episode, you can do so here: https://www.heartofyoga.com/podcast You can find more from the Heart of Yoga on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

Mark and Simone discuss the roots of addiction, its cause and its cure. Simone relates her journey through her husband's early death and being mother to three little boys through to adulthood. Simone holds a PhD in nursing and works in the field of chronic pain. She is the author of Yoga Rx for the 12 Steps, and working on a new book on helping friends and family deal with addiction in their loved ones.    Simone's story is a reminder that Motherhood is yoga. Our teacher Krishnamacharya would say that mothers are the nurturers of the community, therefore they must be nurtured too, and given their yoga and space to practice every day.    "I find Simone's story particularly helpful for all people struggling with pain, grief, and addiction of all kinds. So, everyone, really. Most pertinent is that after a long academic career in chronic pain management, it turns out that the skill Simone holds as a yoga teacher proves the most useful healing methodology. It's a story of hope and triumph over circumstances." — Mark   In this episode you will hear...   01.30 Seeing a friend in despair, in the grips of alcoholism. How did it happen ? 08.10 Mothers ''get'' Yoga first. Please the mother and everybody is happy. 16.00 Pain and isolation. Tapping into something outside of one's self. 22.25 The birth of feeling loved, cared for and nurtured. Recovery. 26.00 The motivation and inspiration behind the book. 35:00 How the boys are doing in the modern world and their Yoga. 44.30 Four years of western medical education, Simon's journey and revelations. 57.00 The loss of a home. Everything up in flames. Follow this podcast for new episodes here: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS/XML If you feel moved to submit a question for a future episode, you can do so here: https://www.heartofyoga.com/podcast You can find more from the Heart of Yoga on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

Minami Takashima was a successful business woman in corporate Japan, and here she tells her story of stepping out of exploitation and corporate hierarchy and stepping into her own power. Minami and Rosalind talk about the role of Yoga in this journey and how it has inspired her to teach across different countries and languages. The key theme is finding the authority of our experience and power. Minami offers private sessions in person in Nelson, New Zealand, and over Zoom in English and Japanese. You can find her on Instagram here :  @yogawithminami In this episode you will hear... 01.53 The Belly Of The Beast : Corporate Japan. 05.00 ''Being a woman you are second class...'' 07.00 Getting free from the internal and external structure. 11.15 A little shoot of yoga into corporate life. Mother being the first Guru. 17.40 The process of Yoga learning, synchronicity and Bali. 21.15 Awareness of invisible hierarchies, breaking points and gratitude. 30.00 Stuck in Oz during the pandemic and finding the motivation to keep sharing. 37.00 Bringing teachings back to Japan and meeting Japanese culture and suppressed sexuality. 45.00 Tantra, sex and taboo. 50.45 Finding confidence in teaching, where it comes from and the power of one's own experience. Not needing approval. 54.50 Yoga texts and different relationships with knowledge. Being the authority of your own experience. Follow this podcast for new episodes here: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS/XML If you feel moved to submit a question for a future episode, you can do so here: https://www.heartofyoga.com/podcast You can find more from the Heart of Yoga on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.    

Mike Bucher is a musician in Los Angeles. His band, Iglu and Hartley have had hit singles around the world — great uplifting rock and roll. He now ventures forth as "Mike B and the Universe" with has solo album just released, 'Bloom Baby Bloom'. Mike is a yogi and a teacher in the heart of yoga. Mike speaks candidly about staying real in the midst of celebrity and the life of a working musician, and speaks about how Yoga has been a catalyst for his life, music and relationship. He teaches in Los Angeles and on his new album combines his great love of the American tradition of song and his yoga realization. Here we have a meeting of Woodie Guthrie, Bob Dylan and the Kinks. It is a very useful work in the world! Highly recommended. Stream or download it here! In this episode you will hear....   2.30 - The band, meeting Mark and the touring artist years. 9.00 Strength That Is Not Received Destroys Itself. 11.00 The tortured artist syndrome and substance abuse. 15.15 The effect of yoga practice before a big concert is not just for the performer. 25.40 No such thing as ''I am a separate body....a sperate world...'' 27.05 You don't need to try to get into someone else's Mandala. You're sitting in your own. 30.00 Yoga does not require sophisticated language. Just practice. 35.00 Intimacy must come with yourself first before anyone else. '' You can't take heaven by storm''. 37.00 How Heart Of Yoga resonated with Michael with living in the heart of the yoga industry. 43.00 Teaching Yoga to those with special needs and in a downtown L.A. church. Coming from a Catholic background. 48.30 You must teach Yoga with respect with who a person is.  Yoga and religion. 55.00 Song writing, Mandalas, inspiration and writing the new album of 108 songs.     Follow this podcast for new episodes here: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS/XML If you feel moved to submit a question for a future episode, you can do so here: https://www.heartofyoga.com/podcast You can find more from the Heart of Yoga on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

Kelsey Barrett is a modern-day witch. She is a practicing herbalist and Yogini. Mark says: “In previous centuries she would have been burnt at the stake for her strange powers that threatened the knowledge authority of orthodoxy. She would have been shunned to the outskirts of the town, a forest dweller with twigs and moss in her hair and strange garb. These days the public realize she has useful healing powers, so allow her to enter the town or village.” Kelsey combines medicinal herbs, Yoga and intimacy arts to help her friends navigate the tricky waters of our time. Mark and Kelsey discuss her craft and realization. Dialogue includes sexuality, intimacy and the necessity for a personal hathayoga to actualize sublime intimacy. Otherwise sacred sexuality seems to be confined to the poetry and iconography of forgotten cultures. Yet obviously remains the potential of every person today. Actual Yoga makes sacred intimacy real and no longer just fanciful unfulfilled desires. The mind of the modern West is like a closed box of lidded thought that cannot be pierced or access the obvious mystery dimensions above the crown or go deep into the roots of Mother Earth. Kelsey recalls her crown opening up to higher dimensions and the state of the Yogini… a flow of life synchronistically ascending and descending, mysteriously became her experience. In the ancient world after death a Yogi’s crown was ceremonially pierced, symbolizing the ascent of the life force infinitely above, in death as in life. Such sublimity arises as everyone’s potential through Yoga. Intimacy with all aspects of life, for example Kelsey talks about the power of rose for the heart, and the power of realising illness as visitation of the Goddess. Follow Kelsey on Instagram here: @heavynettlegathering Follow this podcast for new episodes here: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS/XML If you feel moved to submit a question for a future episode, you can do so here: https://www.heartofyoga.com/podcast You can find more from the Heart of Yoga on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.  

Yoga IS Relationship. What does that mean? I thought it was doing the splits on the beach and posting it on Instagram? I thought it was living alone in a cave for twenty years until you could live on just air? Mark and Rosalind explore just exactly HOW yoga transforms our relationships, and lift the lid on some of the challenges and dysfunctions in relationships that make yoga sorely needed. Some previous relationship dysfunctions get aired as examples of the usual mess and how it can change. We discuss what “connection” really means and whether it comes from another person, how to stop evading emotions, and the urgent need for a transformed approach to relating with the ones we love. More themes: Guidance and direction vs dysfunctional social dynamics Hierarchy within relationships - is it inevitable God and Sex, Now We Get Both Everybody is blooming in their own garden Follow this podcast for new episodes here: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS/XML If you feel moved to submit a question for a future episode, you can do so here: https://www.heartofyoga.com/podcast You can find more from the Heart of Yoga on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

In this special episode, we share (with permission) edited extracts from a May weekly “Teacher’s Gathering” in the Heart of Yoga Studio. Mark is speaking about who can teach Yoga, about what is required to teach Yoga, and about being your authentic self. Teachers around the world share their experience, discussing what the role of the teacher really is, how to cope with teaching on zoom, and whether you can even decide to be a yoga teacher. A capital-R Reality check and sense of communal support for all teachers out there. This teachers’ gathering happens weekly. It’s open to all supporting members of the Online Studio. You can join at: www.heartofyoga.com/studio Follow this podcast for new episodes here: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS/XML If you feel moved to submit a question for a future episode, you can do so here: https://www.heartofyoga.com/podcast You can find more from the Heart of Yoga on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

In this week’s episode, Mark and Rosalind talk about the expansion of consciousness that happened in the 60s and beyond, “on wings of song.” It was the Beatles going to Rishikesh that first took Mark to India, and we tease out these connections between the two “freedom systems” of Yoga and rock and roll. We listen to the Kinks with the first use of sitar-like drone on a western pop song (“See My Friends”) and talk about Little Richard’s riotous performances as group therapy for a repressed society. Can rock and roll be legitimately seen as having some spiritual effect or purpose, or is it “just” entertainment? Is it a legitimate form of inspiration? How should we respond? Why did so many talented artists die so young, and is it avoidable? Was this when God and Sex really came together in public consciousness for the first time? We go free range ruminating on the remarkable gifts given to us all by our musical luminaries, and discuss practices to really receive these transmissions and make the most of them. This episode features short musical clips replicated only for commentary and criticism under ‘Fair use’ (legal doctrine that allows a user to use portions of copyrighted materials for the purpose of commentary, criticism, reporting, teaching, and research). Follow this podcast for new episodes here: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS/XML If you feel moved to submit a question for a future episode, you can do so here: https://www.heartofyoga.com/podcast You can find more from the Heart of Yoga on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.  

As yoga studios shut down across the world, yoga teacher Joseph Lauricella came untethered from his Chicago teaching space, yet he wanted to find a safe way to be in Nature and continue to share practices of breath and intimacy with yourself with people. The ‘The Yoga Bus’ project was born. Continuing public education into Yoga as spiritual practice, so much more than fitness. Joseph Lauricella is the author of 3am Bull Rider, a memoir about living on the road across the United States in 1995, Codi and the Maple Tree, a children’s book based on his experiences rescuing a wolf cub and living with him and 42 other wolves for a year. In addition to being an author, Joseph is a master yoga teacher and bodyworker, which inspired him to write and publish: Postures, Prayers, and Poems: A Yoga Journey Through Earth Body and Soul, which he reads us a poem from in this podcast. Joseph currently lives on the Yoga Bus with his two Chihuahua Yoga dogs and is working on his next book. He has a degree in Sociology and Native American Studies and is deeply influenced by mentorship within Lakota traditions, as well as his own Roman Catholic Italian immigrant family background. Mark and Joseph discuss teaching in a natural, non-patterned way, just sharing, how to adapt to changing circumstances and where the motivation to do so comes from. As well as Yoga as a reminder of the state of unconditional love, handling overwhelm of worldly patterning, and being on the road with the Grateful Dead as a template for the Yoga Bus. Joseph and Mark talk about Roman Catholic Italian origins and how this mixes with Yoga, and discovering Yoga as a Catholic — do Christians need Yoga? And finally Joseph reads us the poem ‘Breath’ from his book Postures, Prayers and Poems. Links Postures, Prayers and Poems Joseph's Website Joseph's Instagram   Follow this podcast for new episodes here: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS/XML If you feel moved to submit a question for a future episode, you can do so here: https://www.heartofyoga.com/podcast You can find more from the Heart of Yoga on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

Mark sits down again with his friend Andrew Raba to talk about education, cultishness, ambition, choosing a career path, the mess that is our early twenties, psychedelics, and learning Yoga. What is self-understanding? Where do we find it? Is ambition a positive or negative quality? How do we know what to do with our lives? What is Yoga exactly and how can it help? How do I find my natural directions? Mark and Andy discuss these questions and others, under the overarching theme of Yoga and the empowerment of self-responsibility, making the choice to love and to quit blaming others for our emotional state. “Yoga is not information gathering.” Follow this podcast for new episodes here: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS/XML If you feel moved to submit a question for a future episode, you can do so here: https://www.heartofyoga.com/podcast You can find more from the Heart of Yoga on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.