Tami Simon:Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion regardless of financial, social, or physical challenges. The Sounds True Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need, including at-risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and those in developing countries. If you’d like to learn more or feel inspired to become a supporter, please visit soundstruefoundation.org.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Peter Sterios. Peter Sterios is a popular yoga teacher and trainer with over four decades of experience. He’s the founder of LEVITYoGA and also Manduka mats, and with Sounds True, he has written a new book called Gravity & Grace: How to Awaken Your Subtle Body and the Healing Power of Yoga. In this new book, Peter guides readers to create healing yoga practices that serve each person’s unique tapestry of personality, background, and body type. Peter is here at Sounds True in our Boulder studio. He offered a special Gravity and Grace and Yoga class to our staff. And now I have the opportunity to talk to him about how the type of yoga he teaches, which is based on the principles of gravity and grace, and awakens our subtle body and the inner teacher we each possess. Here’s my conversation with Peter Sterios.
Peter, it’s great to be with you here in the Sounds True studio in person, and I wanted to start by talking about the gorgeous title of your new book, Gravity & Grace. When I say it to people they sigh, actually. There’s something about it that I think people have a recognition—gravity and grace—these two things together. So tell me about gravity and grace, both in yoga, in the practice of yoga, and in life. And I know this is a big question, and I really want you to take it.
Peter Sterios: Great. The terms I’ve discovered are very complimentary, and gravity is a term that most of us are familiar with and it operates in a world that we experience every day. And it’s a physical energy.
Grace, in a way, is a non-physical energy. And it’s something that we also live with every day. It’s a little less familiar because of its non-physicality. Our five senses are limited to experiencing gravity, it’s easy. We feel the weight of gravity through our bodies, through our sense of touch. Grace—it’s a little fuzzy. And until we open to the fact that this force operates, if we allow ourselves the space to feel it and experience it, it’s as powerful for me now as gravity, especially in yoga. And I think I’m so happy that you showed up to class this morning because you have this now visceral experience of some of these ideas, of how they integrate into an ordinary yoga class.
So on the yogic or physical level, how these terms relate, what drove my desire to explore gravity was injury. And I mentioned this a little bit this morning. How when there’s a physical limitation in the body, any type of movement can be painful. And as a yoga practitioner, when I hurt my back, as a yoga practitioner of almost 15 years, I was challenged, frustrated—every word that you can come up with to describe “I can’t do what I used to do easily.” There was all this self-doubt, etcetera. And it took me a while to figure out that I had to be content with micro movements that, literally, with what I sometimes refer to as “millimeter miracles.” These little glimpses of movement through resistance that open us up with hope to be able to reclaim some of that movement that was lost through injury.
I had a lot of time to think about it and experience or experiment with it. And I discovered, through this herniated disc in my back, the ability to influence movement through the use of breath and gravity. And that if I understood the architect, pardon me, if I understood how the force of gravity operates the, let’s say, call it the “direction” that gravity operates. I could position my body in different ways to let gravity move right through that place in my body that was painful. And I referred to this as sometimes like, gravity is a yogi’s “acupuncture needle.” It’s that force that kind of stimulates these places in our body that are tender, that are limited, let’s say, in some way. And that little bit of movement provided this hope that someday I would reclaim full movement in my back.
The light bulb moment went off for me when, after I recovered from the back injury, I went back to my practice and I could apply some of these ideas to the other places in my body that were limited. Places where, let’s say, I held subconscious stress that yoga would help. But if I didn’t practice yoga every day, that stress would come back. And it was like, wow, this isn’t living up to the promise that I thought yoga would, that I would completely heal from some of these places in my body that just were stubbornly resistant to movement. So that was what kind of made me realize, wow, gravity is such a powerful experience on a yoga mat.
And the grace piece comes in a little through the backdoor, let’s call it. Because I had a spiritual teacher who used to come to San Luis Obispo where I lived. He was actually a Roman Catholic priest. And he would come and talk about these two terms: gravity and grace. He would say things like grace is this force of attraction that operates outside our sensory experience of life. And that grace is one of these things that keeps us grounded psychologically. And to me, that was powerful. To have this experience of grace, which is literally attraction at a non-physical level. Gravity being an attraction of bodies at a physical, grace, this attraction of bodies at a non-physical level. What does that mean, nonphysical?
We all have this sense that we are more than just flesh and bone. We have a sense of our soul, let’s call it, or our spirit, and that when we walk into a room—and this is a perfect example—this conversation with you is so much easier with me being able to feel how you’re taking my words and feel how your presence is inspiring my presence that I don’t think we’d get on a phone call or get even a digital podcast. So this attraction at a non-physical level, how does that operate in yoga?
It operates when we understand …Most of us go to yoga class inspired by a teacher or something that they’ve heard about yoga. And we find a teacher, and that teacher has a knowledge or a presence that inspires us to do this practice that can be painful, frankly, in the beginning of a yoga practice. It’s a tough sell sometimes for people to say, “I don’t like yoga, it makes me hurt.” Well, actually, maybe if you approach that stiffness or resistance in your body a little differently, that experience would be tempered with this understanding that it’s a necessary step to get free of that resistance. And this is my experience with grace. It’s like we experience something that’s painful and our psychology says, “I think I’m going to pass on that.” But there’s something inside that says to you, “Actually just give it another try. Just try it a little differently or wait until tomorrow and try it again. Just give yourself another opportunity to have this potential.” And where does that voice come from inside? This is where the grace equation comes in for me.
It’s like when we’re getting information from a source other than our logical analytical mind that’s there if we create the space and the stillness to hear it, to listen to it, and to move. And in the class this morning for instance, what I was trying to do is bring people aware to tension in their body that’s subconscious. And the shapes that I created, some of them very quickly got the people in theclass conscious that they were …”Oh, I’ve got some resistance here.” And then how do I create a release? How do I inspire people to find an ability to release that resistance, to release that discomfort that they’re feeling? And I did it by cuing, with my voice, where to place your attention, and then also this image—whether you visualize it or could actually feel it—how the subtle sensation of your breath can go anywhere your mind puts your attention to. And that’s what the yogis called prana or vayu, this kind of movement of sensation that they refer to as wind. That movement of sensation can actually zero in on these places. And how do you know when it zeros in? On the inhalation cycle—I discovered this in my back injury—if I took the subtle sensation of my breath into the lower back where the disc was herniated, I would feel a spike of pain. And you think, “That’s interesting, I don’t want to do that anymore.”
But what I finally realized is that I don’t have any part of my lung in my lower back. So to actually physically breathe into my lower back is technically impossible. But when you understand how this subtle sensation of breathing can move, it’s like I relate it as the wake of a boat. When you drive a boat on a still lake, the motor and the boat are the physical breath. And the wake that kind of has its own life once it leaves the boat is the subtle breath. So I was moving, let’s say, the wake of my breath into this area of my back. And because of it I knew, OK, my attention and my breath is going there. If that’s the only movement I can do in that moment—I was bedridden for two weeks—that’s the only movement that I can stimulate in my lower back. Maybe that’s going to have an influence on the circulation of physical energy, and also subtle energy to promote healing. And that was my experience. The doctor said that if I didn’t have surgery, that I would have a lifetime of pain. And literally, within four weeks of breathing like that, I was able to sit upright and move about somewhat normally. And within 12 weeks I was able to go back to actually doing some yoga, restorative yoga. So that’s how this works physically, in a way.
TS: Now Peter, there’s a lot I want to ask you about. But let’s talk about the experience you had when, after you recovered from your injury, you went back to the yoga mat. And you had developed this way of identifying and releasing what you called subconscious stress. I think a lot of people know that they have subconscious, maybe semi-conscious stress. And they’re on their yoga mat, but they’re not sure how to access it. Where is it? It’s subconscious. How does the gravity and grace approach work?
PS: So in this moment of returning to, let’s say, a regular yoga practice. One day, and I don’t know exactly how it showed up, I came to this idea that if it worked for healing this imbalance in my lower back, could it help me create balance in these other areas of my body that held this subconscious or semi-subconscious grip in my body, which was the seat of this other pain in my life?
And what I’ve learned through most of the research that I’ve done in the book, it is so crystal clear to me now that the body and the mind are inseparable. So if we’re working with a physical limitation in our bodies, I can almost say with 100 percent accuracy, there is some subconscious psychological grip, let’s call it, involved in that limitation you feel physically. How do we discover that?
As I started to explore how this process worked, I started to notice the places in my body where I became aware of the grip. The most important one for me at the time was the pelvic floor. So I felt, OK, I have this chronic tension in the pelvic floor. Well how do I know that? Because I started to realize that most of my day, if I just took my attention down into the pelvic floor, I could realize that there was a subtle grip in my sphincter muscles. Now this is kind of funny and it’s, in a way, not something you’d expect to hear in an average yoga class. Talking about urinary and anal sphincters.
TS: I’m glad we got to your anal sphincter this quickly in the conversation. That’s good.
PS: I think it’s so important. It kind of gives the listeners an opportunity to see where this conversation is going to go. So for me, this idea that men in general, it’s just, if we can use some generality for conversation’s sake. That men tend to be tight asses. OK. Now, why does that expression even exist in the English language? That was always a curiosity to me and generally aimed at men. Well think about it. Historically, men have come from that kind of Neanderthal period where they were responsible for the survival of the family. And they were out hunting, and providing food, and protecting family, etcetera, etcetera. So there was always this fight-or-flight energy in the body for a man. And that resulted in this correlation, in a way, between anxiety and contraction of—this expression tight ass, this common pattern of contraction that men hold. And that was easy for me to access because I could feel it, and then I could begin to understand how to release it through this practice.
When I moved my attention up a little higher, I noticed the diaphragm was a second area of a lot of tension. I noticed in my patterns of breathing. I notice in Shavasana, at the end of a yoga class, if I’ve completely relaxed my diaphragm, that the weight of my abdominal organs would increase the force of gravity. And that apparent, that virtual, let’s say, gravity of the organs dropping in my belly, grounded my pelvis and my lower back. That additional gravity of just the weight of the organs on me had this—what would you call it?—systemic relaxation to my entire body. It was like the parasympathetic nervous system just went, “Aah”—like you said about the title. I started to feel that when that diaphragm let go, my whole body let go. So that was also an important thing for my thinking.
OK. The pelvic floor, I understand. The diaphragm is new. This idea that we have this gateway into the parasympathetic nervous system through the release of the belly. And all the modern research that’s in the book supports that idea with the vagal nerve tone. So for me, that was like OK, that’s another piece. I’m going to put that in the tool kit.
Then I moved up into the heart space. And because I’ve had a lot of loss in my life, I started to feel how numb I was around my heart. And that’s many generational factors of my family, in general, that we tended to not show or express heartfelt things. So when I started to uncoil this— what’s the word?—this stagnation and numbness around my heart, I realized that as the diaphragm releases, the top of the lung softens naturally. And when the top of the lung softens naturally, just by noticing what’s happening naturally as the air exits the physical lung, there’s this sinking of the heart tissue as it loses its volume. That created a softness around my heart. Actually, first it created space around my heart. And then this space created the softness. Like my heart just sank into that space. So that was also a powerful experience in Shavasana for me. That instead of trying to open the heart, setting myself up for Shavasana, I actually did the opposite. I softened the top of the lung consciously on the exhale. I created this space around my heart, and I felt my heart drop.
So now I’ve got these three pieces, and it just was logical. You know what? These are places that yogis referred to as chakras. Is there any relationship between where I hold subconscious stress and tension, and these magical places of settled body energy that the yogis recognized thousands and thousands of years ago?
So I started experiencing with my throat. And I’ve had three near-death experiences with drowning. And the first one was probably the scariest one, where I was trapped in a submerged boat and confronting my last breath. So I had a lot of trauma, physical trauma, from just those muscles gripping to keep water out of my lungs. And also the psychological trauma of looking at your last breath for probably ten, 15 seconds before I was rescued.
So I started to recognize that I had things still stuck in this kind of chronic tension resulting from this trauma. And then it was a logical OK, let’s go higher. Let’s go into this third-eye space in between the eyebrows. And I’ve had periods of chronic migraine headaches. Could those be related? Is there something that I can do? And we did this in class this morning where I consciously …I discovered that by softening the optic muscles behind the eyes and feeling, in Shavasana, the weight of the eyeballs dropping, that I could create this spaciousness in the face and the spaciousness in the brain tissue. And all of a sudden, I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a migraine.
So all these pieces started to fit in, and then the book showed up, which is an amazing process. And I was in a situation where now I had to communicate what I was experiencing, and how do I find language that’s not too scientific, not to yogic, that gives even beginners this experience of how to find this softness in the body to create this spaciousness physically and psychologically—that inspires intuition and inspires people to take their own self-authority of how they move in a typical yoga class or practice.
TS: I’m wondering if we could do an experiment right now with a listener. That person who says, “I hear what you’re saying. I’m interested. I’m excited. I’m not 100 percent sure I know how to release through gravity so that I’m inviting more grace and guidance in.” And Peter, this is something obviously—and you talk about it in Gravity & Grace—it’s not only when we’re on the yoga mat. So this person could be driving in their car while you’re giving these instructions. But let’s do it. Let’s have an experience together.
PS: Oh my God Tami, I mean, what you’re saying is wonderful. But I would hate to give this experience to someone driving in a car right now.
TS: It’s OK. We’re just living our life with a sense of yielding, surrendering, letting gravity have its way with us, and opening to grace. Let’s see.
PS: Love that. OK. So one of the simplest things to do is just be still for a moment. Wherever you are. Sitting comfortably or even lying down comfortably, whatever is the opportunity that you have. And the first element is just being conscious of how you breathe. And there’s no agenda here about how to breathe. It’s just observing what you’re doing when you breathe. Where the sensation of your breath enters your body, where it moves inside your body, and how it exits your body. And in a practice of yoga, typically, it’s breathing with mouth closed through the nose. And if your nose is blocked for whatever reason at the moment, you may have to cheat a little bit if you find yourself short of breath.
So you begin with your eyes closed, preferably. Focusing on the subtle movement of your breath in through the nostrils, up through the nasal passages, and down into the lungs. Front side and back, and following it through, if you can, where you breathe into your belly. And if that sensation continues further, into the pelvic floor. And as you complete the inhale, you softly exhale. Moving your attention from the pelvic floor, back up through the belly, up through the thorax and chest. Up through the throat, around the nasal passages, and back down at the nostrils.
And you use this conscious breathing practice initially just as a place of observation without any mental influence. Making note of the rhythm of your breath, how the duration of the inhale may be two to three seconds. And the duration of the exhale may be two to three seconds. If you feel comfortable, you can increase that. You can internally count yourself, make it a three to four second inhale comfortably and at three to four second exhale comfortably.
After two to three cycles of breathing this way, I’d like you to exhale slowly. And now on the inhale, feel the cool, subtle expansion of your breath. In the nostrils, up around the nasal passages, and then filling into the lungs through the belly, into the pelvic floor. Cool expansion. And on the exhale, warm softness from the pelvic floor. Returning up through the torso, up through the throat, around the nasal passages. And exiting, warm softness at the tip of the nostrils.
Do that for two or three cycles of breath. Inhale, cool expansion. Front side and back in the body. The full length of your torso. Exhale, warm softness from the pelvic floor up through the torso, through the throat, and exiting the nostrils. And after two or three cycles of that, just slowly open your eyes. Did you notice anything?
TS: Oh yes. I noticed a tremendous calming and sense of enjoyment, and sense of, sort of, occupying the internal space in the body.
PS: Yes, it’s a powerful thing to breathe. It’s an even more powerful thing to breathe consciously and to understand the properties of breathing that are most efficient at creating these releases. You noticed that I talked about the quality of the inhale being cool and expansive. We’re not trying to stretch on the inhale. In a way I relate it to the ebb and flow of, let’s say, the ocean. When we inhale, I encourage people in class to let the fullness of your breath lift you out of the pose slightly. Now, that’s not a mechanical coming out of the pose, that’s just being sensitive to this subtle natural expansion of the lungs through the ribs. And particularly the back ribs that tend to lift around our spine slightly out of a pose. That’s an important reset for the nervous system, for the sympathetic nervous system.
On the exhale, that warm softness. Just the word “soft” phonetically creates an energy in the body that creates the root physical response in the body. So if you’re sub-vocalizing, if you can’t feel these things, you visualize them. And your nervous system kind of takes that lead from the visualization and creates that release. And that warm softness feeling on the exhale is what creates space. That space creates the pleasure and experience you’re talking about, what I call little moments of bliss. Ananda is the Sanskrit term. And those little moments of bliss create an inspiration for movement. Because we naturally crave that space of bliss and we want to move closer to it. And that’s what I’m cueing in a yoga class. You create that internal experience and your intuition guides you. Not only where to move, but how deeply to move. And you can do this with each cycle of breath, come out a little bit, and go back in a little, and maybe a little further. And that back and forth flow is literally the process that I’m teaching now.
TS: What kinds of instructions do you give to people to increase that weighted feeling of gravity, that sense of groundedness and downward motion?
PS: In the old days I used to cue it physically, like press into your feet. And I’ve stopped doing that. What happens, the subtle sensations move in channels. These channels known as nadis in yoga. The more muscular effort you use, the more those subtle channels get squeezed. So the efficiency of feeling subtle sensation gets diminished. And my current way of cueing this is to use and trust that grace fills this void that could recreate when we surrender. That some internal intelligence or even external intelligence dependent on your spiritual alignment—you get this source of inspiration that guides you to move.
So all I’m doing is, how do I create language to help a student visualize it in the beginning? Visualize the way to have your internal organs falling, or visualize the weight of your shoulders or collarbones dropping. Or visualize for instance, releasing the sphincter muscles and feeling your tailbone dropping.
And the people that you know get it the first time they come to my class go, “Oh my God, I felt my sphincter muscles release and my tailbone drop. That was incredible.” That’s wonderful, and that happens. But oftentimes, the more familiar thing is I couldn’t feel it, but I could visualize it. And I encourage. Don’t worry if you feel it or not. Keep visualizing. Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference. And eventually, that neural pathway that you’re creating through visualization will actually stimulate a physical response. It’s just a matter of time.
TS: I want to talk more, Peter, about this liberating the energy and the flow in both the belly center and the heart center. These are two centers physically and also in my own experience. They seem like centers of spiritual intelligence that are really, really important. And I’m wondering if you can talk more about the section of your book called “Science and Yoga Meet.” And you talk some about the science that we now have a second brain in our belly and the intelligence of our heart. And how your work dovetails with some of these new scientific insights.
PS: Can I share a story?
TS: Yes.
PS: That leads into this. So I think I missed two Sounds True deadlines finishing my book. And you may not have been aware of that, but I was heightened, heightened, aware of it. And on the last deadline, I purposely went up to British Columbia, where I was teaching, and had an opportunity to stay in a house on the beach for two weeks with no interruptions and no responsibilities other than to finish writing.
And as the story goes, I was teaching up there and I didn’t finish. And as I was leaving, my host up there said, “Listen, we’re going away for two weeks. Why don’t you come back and housesit in my house?” So I went home, went to my family, and I said, “Hey, I know I’ve been gone for ten days. But I didn’t finish and I really need to finish this book. Do you mind if I go back up there?” And of course my family’s response is, “You haven’t finished? Of course we want you to go back. Get out of here.” Exactly.
So I got on a flight the next day. I made the reservation at like 10:00 at night for a flight that was 5:25 the next morning. I had to get to the airport an hour before, I got up at 3:30. I’m standing at my front door at like 4:10 in the morning, the Uber driver’s at the curb. And I had this strong feeling I’m forgetting something. And I had a suitcase full of books and a suitcase full of clothes. What am I forgetting? I look down at the coffee table right by my front door, there was a book on the coffee table. And all I could read was the title in big white font, The Biology of Belief. And I thought, that looks interesting. I picked it up, stuck it in my backpack. I started reading it on the flight out of San Luis Obispo. And by the time I got to Victoria, I’d finished the book.
Now, I was 10,000 words away from that requirement of the contract I had with you guys. I wrote 50,000 words while I was at this writer’s retreat in the next two weeks. Because Bruce Lipton’s book opened my eyes to the importance of connective tissue and skin. How the membrane holds an intelligence, and just what I understand about connective tissue. How the window into this magical connective tissue network, not only for mobility, but also for emotional energy and how we store positive and negative residue, let’s call it, in the connective tissue of our bodies. And the skin is just like that window into that system. And Bruce Lipton’s book is all about the importance of the skin and of the cell membrane—how the intelligence of a cell is not dependent so much on the genetic makeup, but more on the environment that it lives in. I was like, OK, he had these insights. I’m starting to see these insights in the human body. As a practicing yogi, how do I develop more sensitivity to feeling and using the skin? How our skin meets a yoga mat, for instance. How do I cue how to ground instead of pressing? Why don’t I just feel the texture of your mat? Can you feel the texture of your mat? That awareness of awakening the feeling cell receptors in your hands to feel, creates this current into this system.
So for me, Bruce’s book started to break open what I thought was going to be the finish of my book, which was frustrating at times, because I want it to be done after two and a half years or writing. And within Bruce’s book, he referred to other authors. And these other authors opened up even more, especially Paul Pearsall’s work around the heart and all his work with heart transplant recipients who all of a sudden started inheriting these physical characteristics of the donor. Vegetarians craving burgers and just crazy stuff. So I started to realize, OK, our guts, the gut research, the heart research, all of these contemporary sciences are finding this inseparable link between mind and body, and where the seats of our intelligence reside. How does yoga relate to this understanding? They understood where these chakras are. The chakras at the heart and in the gut, in the pelvic floor. These are seats of mystical, subtle body energy that has intelligence in it. And how do we integrate it all? And that’s what the books about.
The book is about creating not only first the understanding of how these overlap. But then the last section in the book talks about how to integrate it into whatever practice of yoga you’re doing. I purposely …Part of the intention of this book was to cross borders. It’s not another style of how to do yoga. It’s how to take whatever style of yoga you’re practicing and add this subtle body connection to it that will intuitively move you into a personal practice. A practice of yoga that’s personal and unique to who you are, in the way you currently are. You meet yourself where you’re at. You don’t need to be extra flexible, extra strong. You begin just where you’re at. And this is the beauty of, for me …As a teacher, I can walk into an all-levels class, and with the focus on a subtle body awareness that we all share, no matter what we are physically and no matter what style of yoga we practice, we can all relate on that subtle body level. And these words that I’ve chosen are simple English words to connect people with these subtle spaces. And with time, consistent practice, patience, compassion for the limitations that you feel you’ve had or inherited or genetically are programmed for, you can influence your experience. And that influencing, self-motivated influence of your experience, is incredibly inspiring.
TS: Now you mentioned that the way that you teach this gravity and grace approach could apply to any style of yoga. And really, in some ways, probably any type of movement art even beyond yoga. And in the final section of the book, you talk about these three principles that are really the core notes, if you will, of the gravity and grace approach. And I want to touch on each one if you will. And the first is this back body breathing. I thought, this is very interesting, the idea that we can breathe through the back of our body and that will help awaken our subtle energy systems. So explain that.
PS: Sure. I don’t think there are many people who grow up with a good education in how to breathe. And what education we do get growing up generally says chest up, breathe full, expand your ribs, or breathe into your belly. Which is helpful if you’re a shallow breather. But in my experience, it’s a limited way of breathing because our lungs operate in a three-dimensional world. Our breathing should operate in a three-dimensional world.
How I discovered back body breathing was through my back injury. And that, frankly, the child’s pose, with your knees together where it temporarily limits your normal front body breathing. Belly or chest, there’s a temporary inconvenience, let’s call it, a resistance to your normal breath. And very quickly you have to realize that if you don’t figure out someplace else in your body to breathe, you’re going to get short of breath and anxiety is going to climb.
And I coach beginners or people who have limitations in the back or in the front of their bodies to approach this as softly as you can. If you need to breathe, breathe. Don’t just try to force it into the back.
But this idea that yes, can we awaken to this experience of back, let’s call it three-dimensional breathing. By temporarily restricting our normal breathing, which is in the front body. And realize that we have the side and back of the lungs to breathe into. And it usually works within one or two practices of trying it. You start to get the swing of it, that you can actually feel the movement of your breath filling into the back of your lungs. And the sides, in this particular pose.
Now, the goal isn’t to back body breathe for the rest of your life. The goal is to break your addiction to front body breathing, because it’s limiting, and to be more three dimensional about your experience with yourself and your breath. So this first step of these three principles is learn how to back body breathe. Where it comes in handy for yogis is the subtle channels that move subtle body energy. The three principal channels run on the front of the spine. So it’s back body, but along the front of the spine. And when you start physically breathing with this awareness that actually takes subconscious grip in the paraspinal muscles and the intercostal muscles of the back, which when we lift our chest up, we can track those muscles at the back. So when we’re trying to breathe deep, we’re actually contracting the muscles of our back, which choke those subtle channels of energy in the spine.
So this back body breathing reverses that tendency. It releases muscular tension in the back. It opens those subtle channels where sensation moves up and down your spine and you can start to feel it. And like the previous suggestion, if you don’t initially feel this subtle movement, you visualize it. And eventually, it awakens.
So back body breathing is really a technique that I’ve introduced in the first pose that every class of mine starts with, which is child’s pose. I’ve taught the last 20 years. Every class I’ve taught has started with child’s pose except once in Iceland when the ground was too cold. So we did it standing. But yes, that’s how back body breathing initiates this process of awakening this awareness of subtle body.
TS: Spine mechanics, the second principle.
PS: So when I go to a new studio to teach, I often …And usually half the room is teachers and half the room is beginners. This is the environment that I’m teaching in these days. That’s a really challenging place to teach. So one of my first questions when I’m teaching spine mechanics is OK, the teacher’s in the room. “Tell me how you cue your students to create elongation in your spine, extension in your spine.” And I hear all these common instructions. Lift your chest up, pull the shoulder blades back and down. Externally rotate your arms, open your heart. It goes on and on.
So what spine mechanics is literally about is, what are the ways in which we physically create movement in our spine? Without all of this peripheral elaboration of trying to create an open heart or creating this lift through the crown of the head. I mean, how do you lift through the crown of the head? That’s the question that, because oftentimes I’ll say lift through the crown of the head. Well, what mechanism do you use to lift the crown of the head up? And I get, “It’s breathing, it’s visualizing.” I said, “No, there is a physical technique to lift the crown of the head up.”
And I found it when my back was hurt. The chin slides in a little without the forehead tipping. So what you’re trying to do is move the chin without the forehead moving, and that creates a slight elongation in the cervical spine, the neck. That feels like the occipital part of the skull is lifting slightly off the Atlas bone. And that, frankly, is the only extension that’s required for the upper part of your spine. And I’ll get to this.
So the spine mechanics, within the spine mechanics, there are five principles or fundamentals, I call them. The first fundamental is this term of elasticity, that our spines are actually designed to elongate and compress. And compression has gotten a bad rap in yoga. Most yoga teachers think that compression is bad. And excessive compression is bad, of course, as is excessive elongation, excessive extension. So what we’re looking for is this understanding of the optimum techniques to move our spine.
And I use this slinky toy as an example. The slinky is this wonderful model, let’s say, of how the spine is designed to work. It’s designed to spread stress over its entire length as a unit. And oftentimes, in yoga, we partition parts of the spine. We focus on a pose that opens up the dorsal, the thoracic region of the spine. Or we focus on forward bending for the lower end of the spine, or whatever it is. And what I discovered with the back injury is if I isolated parts of my spine, I would hurt my lower back. If I tried to use my spine as a unit, I would be able to spread whatever bending stress that was influencing my sensation in the lower back over the entire length of the spine. And my anxiety was less, my mobility was greater, and it seemed to be working for me.
So this first fundamental of elongation, sorry, elasticity includes elongation and compression. Little bits of both of those are extremely healthy for the spine. Too much …so the elongation comes from this movement of the chin, this extension on the back of the skull and on the tailbone end of the spine. So if you imagine the slinky pulling it apart, on the tailbone end, it’s literally a passive energy when you release the sphincter muscles. When you release the sphincter muscles, the grip in the pelvic floor lets the sitting bones separate a little bit, and it releases the tailbone to drop.
Initially, I don’t think there’s many students that will have that experience, and this is where the visualization comes in. Every student will have the experience of creating elongation through the back of the skull. Compression happens naturally, and this is where the term levity comes in, to allow gravity to compress us, if our body is aligned anatomically neutrally. And that requires intuition and balance, essentially. But once we create that alignment, we allow the body to compress a little bit, because it creates its opposite: it creates this principle of levity. That for every force in the universe, there’s an equal and opposite force in the opposite direction. So when we allow our bodies to sink a little bit—and I cued it in dog pose today—on the inhale, come out of the pose. On the exhale, soften your hips and shoulders. Well, when you soften your hips and shoulders in dog pose, gravity will pull you closer to the floor. But there’s an intuitive response in the arms and legs, because if you don’t use your arms and legs in that pose, you’ll collapse all the way to the floor. The intuitive response is to engage your arms and legs. So you’re creating that surrender in the hips and shoulders, which creates opening for the joints to move. And then this extension of the arms and legs.
How it works in the spine, similar. You release the sphincter muscles, you feel the subtle drop of the tailbone, and you create that extension on the back of the skull. That’s what creates it.
The second principle is chest dropping. And this to me is how to create openness in the heart. And it is created by softening the top of the lung on an exhale, because it’s happening naturally. We just have to bring our attention to it happening. And our attention, combined with what’s actually happening, creates a powerful experience for the heart. It creates this opening that I talked about earlier and the feeling of the heart dropping, which, on the physical level, loosens up the muscles in the thorax to create more extension in the spine. Because if those muscles in the back aren’t gripped by lifting the chest when they’re soft, the extension on the back of the skull creates a beautiful, even extension in the thorax. And it’s just the perfect amount that your body is able to do. You don’t have to exaggerate it.
Next one is what I call belly consciousness. And belly consciousness really is just about this idea of what defines a healthy belly. And in the West in general, we’ve been sold this idea that a healthy belly is based on its appearance. Cut, firm, etc. And in Eastern culture, the belly is much different. It’s a seat of this soft quality—this intuitive, this “gut” feeling that we get when we’re open to the intelligence that the belly center holds for us. And like the analogy of muscular effort, creates a squeeze on these subtle channels. When we’re excessively core strengthening—you hear that term a lot in yoga: engage your core, core strength, it’s all muscular based—it’s actually doing a disservice to the subtle channels of your lower centers. It’s choking those subtle channels. And does it physically help a weak back? My experience with a weak back that was injured, to a point, yes. But beyond that point, in Western culture, Western athletics, we tend to overdo things. I don’t know if you’ve noticed. Our physical …we’re always pushing to get more, to get stronger, etcetera. And you can overdo core strengthening, and much to the detriment of the lower back. So for me, this belly consciousness is about just rethinking what we envision a healthy belly to be.
The next one is bone softening. And bone softening is this idea that at one point in our lives, our bones were soft. We did that journey through the birth canal. We had to have soft bones. And there’s a remnant of that understanding of bone softening, in that the marrow inside our bones is still soft. And how do we create an awareness in the marrow of our bones so that we can feel its energy of softening? And why even bother? What’s the deal with bone softening?
When I discovered research on connective tissue, I realized that my image of what connective tissue was, was limited by previous research ten years ago. And current research in the last five years has found that connective tissue is like this inner woven net that has no logical direction to it. It’s literally, the term, scientific term is multi-fractal. It’s moving in every possible direction in a chaotic, what appears to be a chaotic structure. And that structure permeates, not just encapsulates, but permeates tissue, organ, and even they’re finding at the subtlest levels, it permeates bone.
So now all of a sudden, this model of mobility, this model of how we move, has changed. And bone softening, when you actually feel where bones cross in a yoga pose or where bones meet the floor in a yoga pose, that you can put your attention where that intense feeling of bone crossing bone or bone resting on hard floor, where you can actually create an experience of that subtle softening of the marrow sinking into the intersection or the confrontation of the floor. It has an influence on your experience. It mitigates the intensity of that experience. And that little bit of movement when you’re injured, like when I was injured, that little bit of movement created by bone softening was inspiration that, “Yes, I can still move.” Even if it’s just at this microscopic level. Because any physical movement in that moment would be too much. It would create anxiety and lock down on that awareness of space.
TS: Let me ask you a question about that, Peter. Because something like bone softening, probably most people would think, “OK, I’m going to have to visualize that. I’m going to have to imagine it.” And how is it that from imagining our bones softening, something actually happens? What’s your understanding of that mechanic?
PS: It’s the nervous system. It’s how the nervous system processes information. It’s why we go to the movies. We go to the movies to basically inhabit the energies of the actors and to become part of what we’re experiencing. And there’s an emotional, a physiological and emotional response to watching a movie.
This term “chick flick” you hear a lot. In my household, I think if we had to choose, if my wife and I want to go to a movie, she would be oriented towards that genre of movie. I might be oriented to some more biographical, or sports, or whatever. But I go to movies with my wife because I know she enjoys them.
And the thing that’s funny about those movies, even though I don’t necessarily enjoy them, when I watch them—I’ll see movies like City of Angels three times, and I’ll cry all three times. My nervous system is becoming a part of that movie, and it’s creating this response. So bone softening operates in that way, that principle. That if we can stimulate that neural channel of the bones softening, our mind starts to process that information and it has a response in this connective tissue web. This is the other research that fascinated me when I discovered it.
Connective tissue has a way to communicate that’s independent of the nervous system. And when you think about it, it’s a mechanical process like a wave. When you think of a whip, when the cowboys of old would whip. This energy would create a sound out at the end of that whip, that snap at the end. To me, that’s fascinating. It’s like a mechanical movement that’s creating this audible sound and this experience at the other end of the whip if you get hit by it. So bone softening, in so many ways, through this awareness of the influence or connective tissue has, at this microscopic level at wherever you put your attention, it operates in that way. There’s this communication of connective tissue, the connective tissue network, that can produce the physical response of bone softening.
So, like back body breathing, the intention isn’t to soften your bones. The intention is to create this subtle awareness of how to influence connective tissue response to intense sensation in your body. So I use the term bone softening. It gets people’s attention. In the book it’s explained quite well that this experience is more about how we create subtle body movement when physical movement is too extreme. And for advanced yogis—this isn’t just for people with injuries or in limitation—for advanced yogis, what we find is we hear …Throughout my first 20 years of learning yoga, I was taught how to reach the peak of a pose. That there was something special to find at its peak. But no one would ever talk about what happens after you reached the peak. What is beyond the peak? How I get there? It’s like you climb Everest. I got there, I’m just going to go back and live off my laurels. No, we never truly reach the peak. We find that the amount of movement and the amount of release gets so infinitesimal out near the end of this journey, that the difference between effort and non-effort is indistinguishable. And that at that refined level, essentially effort and non-effort become one. And the process doesn’t end there, it keeps moving.
So this was a powerful experience for me to understand. It’s not the destination, it’s not the peak pose. Yoga …It can happen anywhere you start in that moment where you meet that resistance between effort and non-effort. And you can work with these subtle body principles to create movement along that path. And the last fundamental of spine mechanics is this term levity. And levity I could talk for the next hour on.
TS: Now this is also what you have called the type of yoga that you now teach that brings all these principles together. Levity yoga. Right?
PS: Yes. So levity is this special word in the English language because it has both a physical definition and a psychological definition. And when we think about the equal and opposite reactions of gravity, levity showed up. This word levity showed up in my life just at the right time: literally a year before I started sitting down to write this book. And in a rather ordinary conversation I had with a scholar, yoga scholar, friend of mine. He was saying, lamenting all this seriousness in yoga. And I said, “Yes, we just need more lighthearted yoga.” And he said, “That’s it. You’ve got a word for that.” And I said, “Yes, levity.” Because that’s the psychological definition of the word, that we actually have lightness of heart or humor. And I intentionally integrate humor into my teaching. And I joke about it too. I joke about the fact that humor is not 100 percent. It’s like intuition. Intuition is not 100 percent. We get better at it each time we trust it and we use it. And in humor, when I use humor in a class and it falls flat, with that kind of pregnant silence like, “Did he just say something funny?”
I’ll feel that awkward silence for a while, let the students feel it for awhile. And then I’ll share this, “Yes, that was an attempt at humor, but it requires a sophisticated understanding of humor to fully appreciate it.” And then that usually gets the laugh that I’m after and kind of stimulates that humor channel, it’s called. What I call the in the book the seventh sense. The seventh sense is this powerful override that humor has to derail this brain-centered consciousness towards the heart. And it’s where humor is that bridge between the heart and the brain, and it works perfectly every time. We take that presumption that the brain knows everything, and it reorients the brain back into the heart center that really truly understands what’s best in a current situation.
TS: Now Peter, this is not going to be very funny. There’s only one more major principle that you talk about that underscores levity yoga, this gravity and grace approach, and it’s called fundamentals of flow. Can you briefly describe what you mean by that?
PS: Yes. So after 15 years of doing a rather, what I would call, static style of yoga, Iyengar yoga, which is basically holding poses, navigating the depth of the pose through awareness of muscular effort in certain subtle places around the body.
I had this experience of doing Ashtanga yoga for the first time. And I requested from a teacher of Ashtanga that she teach at my studio; she taught me Ashtanga. So for the next three years I had this powerful experience, even though I was teaching Iyengar yoga, I was practicing in the morning Ashtanga yoga.
And what I noticed was the differences, the powerful differences in those two styles of yoga. And frankly, there’s something magical when we choreograph our practices, coordinating movement with breath. And that got me thinking, OK, the limitations I experienced in Iyengar yoga are overcome let’s say, or modified with this fundamental, this flow style of yoga. And then all of a sudden, I started to find this research about the flow state in brainwave activity. And I started to realize, and I had this experience so many times now. It’s just, I accept it. That when we’re practicing Vinyasa style practices where we link our attention with our breath and our movement. That our mind is occupying this present moment experience where all the spiritual traditions of the world encourage you to move into the present, to move out of the past or project into the future.
And the dimension of time. I teach two-hour classes in my teacher training. A two-hour class is almost impossible to find anywhere. Most yoga studios now are driven economically towards 60 minute classes or 75 minute classes. But for two hours, you would think, “Oh my God, what could we do in two hours? I’ll be exhausted.
But the dimension of time, the way I cue is distorted. And two hours feels like 20 minutes. And to me, that’s what the fundamentals of flow are about. “How do we keep our mind.?” Our minds sorry, not just the brain. But our heart and our gut brain in a present moment experience. And that’s what that chapter, that part of that last section is about: practices. And the book describes these practices of how to stay in present moment experience during the practice of yoga. And how do you know if you’re in that state? The most obvious, the dimension of time is distorted. You find that a two-hour practice feels like 20 minutes.
TS: And finally, this is the last thing, Peter, I want to talk to you about. You mentioned in this conversation that your work with gravity and grace empowers people to have a very personal practice. They start knowing from the inside out how they need to adjust themselves, and how they can give in more to gravity, and invite in more grace. And I’d love to know any advice you have for that person who says, “What? I’m not ready to trust myself. I don’t think my subtle body’s awake enough. I’m still struggling here.” How do they move into more of that self-trust as they practice?
PS: That is a big question. It has a lot to do with authority. Like our relationships going through school when we’re young, we rely on authority to help us understand things we don’t understand, and the way most yoga is taught these days. It’s a similar model, that the teacher in front of the class is the authority, and that by following the authority of this external teacher, we will be safe to practice yoga.
But unfortunately, that’s not what’s happening. The research that I did on this book uncovered several medical peer-reviewed papers from prominent medical schools that researched yoga-class-related injuries. And it highlighted some of the weaknesses, let’s say, in the current model of teaching yoga. And that is relying on teachers, young teachers with limited experience guiding classes that are too large with repetitive movement. Most of the yoga injuries are due to repetitive strain injuries—so going to the same type of class day in and day out, doing the same types of sequences day in and day out, with a teacher who has a limited knowledge of what the subtle body is doing through all these external body cues and movements, and encouragements to go deeper, and etcetera, etcetera. So how do we take that first step to trust gravity and grace and just our own intuition? This is a hard pill to swallow. Trial and error. You try it. And if you experience a setback from that first experience, you do your best to understand, well, what is it that I did here that caused me to have this initial setback? Can I approach it again in the near future, preferably the next day, and try it again? And can I listen?
Initially, this is a struggle. And I had this experience, frankly. It’s written in the book. My teacher at some point 20 years later decided it was time for me to go away, to go out on my own. And I had to go through this process for myself. And it took me a good five years to understand how to move my attention into these places. My hope is with the book, it’ll give the student who’s sitting on that threshold that you talk about more guidance and inspiration to trust, to trust that inner voice within themselves, to move in the ways that I’m suggesting in the book.
And frankly, at times, it’s taking what you learn in a class and maybe doing a little bit of homework at home and saying, “Well OK, I’m going to classes where teachers aren’t talking about the subtle body, but I really like the class and I like the community that’s surrounding this class. How can I keep going but still start to apply some of these things?” You have to do some homework. You have to create that understanding alone by yourself. And it’s not easy. It is one of those defining moments in a yogi’s life when you step out from the shadow of your teacher and into this realm where you’re standing alone.
I am excited, to be honest, about the reception that the book has received so far from the people who have read it. Some of the testimonies at the start of the book are testament to that. That people with injuries have been able to overcome them just by reading the book. And that’s my hope, that we empower ourselves, no matter what level you’re at, to take that first step. And if that step has its obstacle in itself, to just take a step back, wait. And then another day, try it again, take the next step, and just familiarize yourself with that process. And eventually, my hope is that these wonders that I’ve discovered with gravity and grace will fill into that vacuum and void that you create when you step out onto your own. And that you really feel this intuitive influence for healing and for growth.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Peter Sterios. He’s the author of the brilliant new book called Gravity & Grace: How to Awaken Your Subtle Body and the Healing Power of Yoga. Peter, thank you so much for bringing Gravity & Grace to Sounds True. Thank you.
PS: It’s been my pleasure, Tami.
TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at soundstrue.com/podcast. And if you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. And also if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.
