Interview with Father Joe Pereira

Since 1996, The Yoga Studio on Rosewall has been host to an annual weekend workshop with Father Joe Pereira. Those who are privy to his teachings are always delighted by what he has to offer – a weekend rich in asana, sequencing, physical and mental surrender and an undercurrent of gratitude for the beating of one's own heart.

Father Joe is a Catholic priest who has had the privilege of working closely with Mother Teresa and studying yoga regularly with BKS Iyengar in Pune. (He often refers to Mother Teresa and Mr. Iyengar as the “yin and yang” of his spirituality.)

Father Joe's formidable work as a yoga teacher is conveyed by his deep understanding of the subject. He adopts precision in the performance of the poses and evokes the fire hidden beneath the physical aspect of the body to awaken cellular consciousness. This is the key to addiction recovery, which is why he employs yoga in recovery programs in the organization he founded, Kripa (www.kripafoundation.org).

We spoke to Father Joe about this transformation, about this ability of Iyengar yoga to wake up the body and bring you closer to your own essence.

Sadhana: When I think about you, your workshops, you teach a lot to the heart. When you teach asana you're teaching on a physical and spiritual dimension. Today, you said: seek the wisdom of the body and discover God's grace. Could you explain how this epitomizes yoga for you?

Father Joe: Yoga has a beautiful explanation for faith because it lifts you up from the physical and psychological into the trans-rational, the dimension of experience, not just the convictions, but the experience.

In the West, there is prejudice that feelings can emanate from thinking, thinking comes first. Actually, many modes of therapy have this bias. In India and in yoga, it's not the thinking that matters first. What comes first is the cellular consciousness. In dealing with addiction I have seen that if we change the cellular consciousness of patients recovering from addiction, their response to treatment shifts from compliance to surrender.

S: How is it that Mr. Iyengar's teaching wakes up cellular consciousness? I know it does from my own experience – but how?

FJ: Iyengar yoga works on a process to bring a person from the peripheral level of awareness to the centre. Even when you talk about the sympathetic nervous system and all that, through the autonomous nervous system, leading to the central nervous system, this is a gradual journey. And an inward journey. This is unique in Iyengar yoga. Nobody explains yoga is such a journey. When you go through the various kosas – annamaya kosa, pranamaya kosa, manomaya kosa, vijnanamaya kosa, anandamaya kosa ** -- you discover you are not just a physical being. Something more.

The exercises of breathing bring about pratyahara (withdrawl of the senses) and create within you a certain attitude of dispossession. This is a spiritual phenomenon.

(** Kosas are the sheaths, or layers of Being. They are described at length in BKS Iyengar's book Light on Life)

S: What is the importance of dispossession?

FJ: That is spirituality. Once you experience dispossession... It's like the gospels. Yoga has taught me to seek God's Kingdom first. Everything else is getting added unto you.

Yoga is a meeting point for me. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” It's a beautiful saying by Jesus, but it is yoga that taught me how to discover this Kingdom of God. Which is: the basic reservoir of well-being that is within us.

This transcendence is a beautiful experience because in that transcendence each one discovers their centre and their identity and, in that identity, they discover that their centre is also the centre of the universe.

S: How does this translate into the work you do with addiction?

FJ: Many people who come for recovery don't know we are going to make them do yoga. But we have them take a good look at their body. We work through simple restorative exercises that may help them to feel good. And that attracts them.

S: Is it a faith in yoga?

FJ: Faith is a journey. You will go through a lot of darkness and even doubt. But knowing that Guruji has gone through those moments of darkness and doubt, we trust what he has prescribed definitely works. I broke my back. He gave me twenty-six asanas, one more painful than the other. I had to work on them for one and a half hours everyday. It took me two and a half years to wipe out the pain. So that is faith.

S: In the West, how do we get people beyond the idea that yoga is a workout? Connect more to the essence of yoga?

FJ: In the West, religion has died. You have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. You are afraid of using yoga as a religious tool. So, in that, I can understand the reactive behaviour. But any authentic yoga instructor knows that this is not just a body workout. It has to do with soul.

Unfortunately, because people these days are health and body conscious, yoga is used compartmentally for that. Which has its own benefit. But its like, you know, the story of the six blind men and the elephant. There are all these yoga schools and some are just reading the trunk, some are reading the ears of the elephant, the legs of the elephant... they're all having their own experience. Yoga is much more than that. Some come up with different names for yoga. Even Iyengar yoga is not correct. As soon as you label yoga from a particular aspect, you have lost understanding of its spiritual.

S: In what way?

FJ: You're just taking one dimension of a beautiful teaching that is all about wholeness and holiness and stripping it to a practise of exercises or a practice of a certain technique.

S: For you, is wholeness and holiness the essence of faith?

FJ: Faith is definitely a gift from God. But as Mother Teresa said, “God makes it happen, we are to let it happen.” There's a whole dimension of the individual in relationship to the universal Self. Yoga, in that sense, brings the individual to understand what it is to “Know Thyself”.

Because that is the essence. “Be still and know that I am God.”

Finding the Yogic Path

My mother attended yoga classes for years. She geared up in her leotard and tights, walked through the front door and disappeared for a couple of hours. We couldn't imagine what she was doing there. Eventually, she brought home a tape and frequently closed herself off in the living room, breathing audibly while she lay on the floor.

My sister and I would giggle and roll our eyes. Yoga was another planet we'd rather pass by.

Those images of my mother floated through my mind when I signed up for a six week Hatha course. No way was I going to wear a leotard and I sure wasn't going to breathe so the whole block could hear.

When I walked into the cool blue of a shaded room, the instructor sat tall in the centre of it like a lotus in the middle of a pond. She was in her mid-forties. Her arms were sinewy and fit. And she glowed like a body of water, reflecting and gleaming with light. She bent and twisted into asanas (poses), inviting the class to do them too. I can't remember which poses we did, only that I enjoyed them. My body responded with

gratitude.

After that initial introduction, I became a sporadic student. I'd moved to Victoria to attend the university and went infrequently to the yoga classes held at the downtown Y. The teachers there were all trained in Iyengar yoga, a form of Hatha that has been sharpened and refined by yoga master BKS Iyengar. The classes were more demanding than the Hatha class I'd been to. There, I'd flopped easily into the poses, but here I was required to use and develop strength I did not yet have. My arms ached from hanging in the air, my legs shook from the recurrent instruction to “lift my kneecaps”. After the hard work, though, there was repose. Lying in savasana, well-being penetrated deep into my tissues. Invariably, I left feeling better than when I'd arrived.

Still, I was inconsistent. And I forgot about yoga altogether until my son was born and my life was thrown into turmoil. The arrival of this new Being inspired wonder and joy in my life. But unbidden things, like fatigue and isolation lapped at my mind and body. I was trying to keep my world under control, but my emotions smashed recklessly against the shores of my being. The endless demands of new motherhood, a failing relationship with my son's father and the sudden loss of my young adulthood – all dissolved the ground under my feet.

A friend reminded me of yoga at the Y. There were scholarships for women like me, financially bereft and in need of community. I signed up for a level two class, something that fit my schedule, if not my skill. In those classes, I began to feel the wonder of my body again. I worked and stretched out my fatigue. As I learnt to align muscles and joints, the clouds in my mind momentarily parted; I touched into a part of myself I thought I'd lost. It wasn't a nameable thing, nor was it graspable, but submersing into it I was repleted. Nourished by the whole wide universe.

I signed up for a second class at the Y. Then a third. I wanted to cultivate this experience, not just taste it. None of my life made sense to me. But yoga, yoga in its ancient, studied wisdom made sense. It was a path to freedom. Freedom from the busy, theatrical mind. And that, I was sure, was what I wanted.

That was eleven years ago. Over the years, I have dedicated many hours to the practice of yoga. Indeed, I have built a life around it. Some times, I run into resistance. Moments of scepticism, even boredom and irritation. But these are temporary and invariably lead to a deeper learning or understanding of yoga and of life.

Mostly, I am grateful. Grateful to my teachers for inspiring me to follow this path. Grateful to the way Mr. Iyengar has developed the poses, refined them to awaken the cellular consciousness of the body. And to the lineage the that preceded him, to those timeless teachings that sought to open the portal into the realm of Spirit and Self.