Kino MacGregor

have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good Wolfe thanks

for joining us. Our guest today is Keeno McGregor, international yoga teacher, author, producer of six Oshtanga yoga DVDs, a writer, co founder of Miami Life Center, and founder of Miami Yoga Magazine. Her YouTube channel has reached more than two million views within the last year. Kino Practices through the fourth series of Oshtanga Yoga. We were fortunate enough to interview Keino on location at a yoga studio in Columbus, Ohio recently. Here's the interview. Hiko, Welcome to the show.

Thank you, thanks for having me. Yeah, we're really glad to have you. We are here at the site that you just finished. I guess you've got tomorrow to go still a weekend yoga workshop at our town, our hometown here in Columbus. So we're glad to have you. Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two Wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there's two

wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and love and beauty, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like hatred and greed and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you Feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work you

do well first and foremost. To me, that parable means that we have a conscious choice that we can make moments moment of what our life stands for and what our actions stand for. That we can choose to create the life that we want by changing our behavior patterns from things that are based in the past into a conscious choice to live more peaceful life in the future,

starting off with changing our behavior in the present moment. So, in other words, when we interact with people and situations in our daily life, there's always a temptation to go, you can say, towards the bad wolf. There are always things that will annoy us. There are always things that will activate fear. There are always things that will generate negativity.

And if we choose to feed those, and we choose to think more thoughts about them and give those more energy, then will be going down the same road that we've walked in the past. But the whole purpose of yoga is to be able to change the basic habit pattern of the mind and to choose to craft a more peaceful life and a more peaceful response into the world. So every breath that we take is a conscious redirection

of our intention into that more peaceful life. And this is the way that the yoga practitioner is able to repattern the basic consistency of their choices and ultimately transform their entire life. You that's something we talk about on this show A fair amount. Is that grasping for pleasure resisting pain? And you write about that a fair amount, and you actually say that yoga is not about getting rid of all these things and control in your environment.

It's about keeping your peace of mind, regardless of whether you experience ease and flow or stuckness and difficulty. Absolutely, so how does that? How does yoga help someone do that? And then furthermore, how does someone take that? So it's I would I would say similar to meditation. Right, you can meditate, You've got that period of time you're meditating, then you've got your other twenty three hours of the day. So in the yoga practice, we have this tool called

awesomea which are the physical postures. And these physical postures are like a laboratory for your nervous system. So the postures are actually not meant to be easy. And many people misconceived yoga and they think, oh, yoga, that's so peaceful. I'll go in and I'll just be at peace, you know, and the same thing I would imagine with meditation, I'll just sit there and I'll be in bliss, right, And it's not a right. So you're into yoga and one of the first things you realize this, this is hard,

Like these postures are hard. They're not easy. It's not easy to stand on your head, it's not easy to do a deep back. Then, in fact, some of the postures have the specific intention of stimulating a negative response in your nervous system. They actually go in and create a false stress, a stress that's voluntary, a stress that isn't an actual threat to your life. And then when your challenge, when you're on your physical edge, all of

your neurological response to stressful situation is triggered. So if you have depression inside of you, then that gets triggered. If you have anxiety, panic, that gets triggered. If you have anger, frustration, fear, all of those things they get triggered. Then you get the chance in that moment to retrain

how you respond to that stress. So instead of caving into it, instead of buckling and giving up, instead of crying and collapsing, you get the chance to retrain the habit pattern of your nervous system, so you can literally pull into your breath. Through the power of the breath, you gain a quantimity, You gain the conscious control to walk the middle path. You neither fight against those things which you deem as negative or run towards those things

which you think are positive. You don't hanker for a pleasant experience, and you don't push away the negative experience. You just experience it for what it is, whether it's pleasurable, whether it's painful. You take your breaths in the posture following the healthy technique to make sure that your body is safe, and then you move on. So you neither feed it, nor you nor you fight against it. And

it's really that middle way. That's the essence. Now, the idea with the laboratory of the yoga practice is that whatever is inside of you gets triggered. So if you have all that stuff inside of you, it gets triggered, you work on it. The idea being that those basic patterns then are replicated in your life. So the next time you experience anxiety, depression, this sort of thing, you actually are given the instruction to use the same tools

that brought you into peace and equanimity in the asena. So, for example, if a situation comes up where you're having a panic attack, which a lot of people actually experience extreme anxiety in say deep backbends, then whatever is the tool that got you through that same emotional state through the laboratory of the physical posture or the asena is

meant to be replicated in your life. So, for example, if when you're in the deep backbend, you experience that panic arising with what got you out of that was to engage your pelvic floor, take five conscious deep breaths, open the eyes, gaze at the tip of the nose. Then you're asked to redirect your mind to that task in the moment that you're a neurological system produces that same response in your life, which I think would be amazing.

I mean, imagine if every time someone got really mad at you and you wanted to fight back, instead of fighting back, you just squeeze your pelvic floor, took a deep breath, and if it was really annoying, you looked at your nose, you know, I mean the world would be a really peaceful place would be staring at their nose all day. I was gonna say, I'm gonna squeeze so um how early in and I don't want to I don't want to go too deep into deep yoga practice.

We were a general podcast. But how early in the yoga practice I do yoga semi regularly. How early do you start finding those negative emotions? Is it you've you've described back bends, a certain one and other ones? Um do you find that really from the beginning or a lot of times does it take a little while to you get into the ones that really trigger a strong

emotional response. I think that depends on what type of class that you join, because there are some classes that have as their intention yoga for simple health benefit, and then these postures are meant to be there are in those classes, they're meant for the postures to be easier, and students are not encouraged to find that edge inside

of themselves. UM. So, there are certain styles of yoga that are based in the spiritual lineage of this practice, which have is their intention, the equalization of the two opposing forces of pleasure and pain, of inhalation, exhalation of

openness and activation. This sort of thing. Lineage based styles of yoga can actually bring you up into that right from the beginning, and sometimes people are not necessarily interested in that from the beginning, and so yoga that's interested, say in just health or fitness oriented yoga um is sometimes more popular, but in for example, in the kind of yoga that I practice and teach, in the Ashtanga method, it's right from the beginning, you know, it comes it

comes at you right right from the very beginning. Because it's right from the beginning, you're asked to follow the method. And sometimes people even have a reaction to following a method, so then already they're being triggered. I had actually a situation with the student recently who I was teaching her the method, and she just did not like it. She just said, well, I don't want to do that. I want to do like this, and I want to do that.

These are all my preferences. And I paid good money to take your class, and I think that you should deliver that to me because that's what I paid for it. She just went on, and I had and I just calmly had to restate to her again and again, this is the method. If you want your money back, you can get that, but this is the method. And this is the goal of the method, and I can't teach you anything else. If you want something else, you have

to go somewhere else. We worked through that, and over the course of about two weeks, she really was able to see some patterns inside of her related to anger and frustration that through surrendering to the method, she was able to work through on on at least an initial level.

How do you know if you are dealing with that type of yoga, the type you're describing, it's a very sounds like a very lineage based practices is a good word for it versus another type, because a lot of the things tend to be common, right, even in yoga classes that are supposedly fitness. You've got the sun, salutations are happening, some of the basic things, there's a there's a little nice reading, there's incense burning, right, What's how

do you how do you know? Well? I guess it's a little bit like how do you know when you're in you're you're where you're supposed to be in your life? You know, I feel like you attract the situations that are really appropriate to what you're yearning for. I discovered the oshtanga yoga method as as a result of a genuine desire for how to live a more peaceful life. I was going through a period of darkness and I turned to this that of yoga. I turned to yoga.

I didn't know that I was going to find Ashtanga yoga, but I was. I had the intention of I want to start yoga in order to lead me to live a more peaceful life. And from that intention, I was led to the Ashtanga yoga method. So, first and foremost, I think that if that desires in the heart of the student, naturally they will experience that. Uh. They will find that eventually through the power of attraction, just through

just through their sincere desire. The second thing I would say is that if you can do the research, find out who your teacher's teacher is, and your teacher's teachers teacher and it's and and look for someone that is steeped in not just the physical awsuma, but who's steeped in the spiritual journey of the practice, that understands the compassionate heart that comes from years of dedication to a

true spiritual practice. I think that's really interesting. We uh we released an episode recently with a a llama buddhislama who's in a very old lineage, and that that conversation sort of came up from her about finding out who yours, who your teacher's teacher teacher was, And um, I also find interesting at the same time that we end up talking to a lot of people, um who are start who take those things yoga or meditation outside of their tradition,

outside of the tradition, and yet still seem to provide benefit to people in some ways. And I just find that dilemma always always kind of interesting to explore. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's particularly in yoga. You can clearly see that there are awsina's yoga pastures that can be taken just for health benefit and have no

intention further than that. The awsma's are physically very very healing, so I think they're the student's intention is simply to get more healthy, then there are there are ways to

do the practice to actually accommodate that. If the student's intention is to walk down the spiritual path and truly find a transcendent piece that's outside of the realm of pleasure and pain, something that is beyond the ups and downs of the of the sensory world old then naturally that student will keep searching for the teacher that can

provide that experience. Okay, back to the interview. Any physical activity, any sport, you you come up against that that point you talked about, the the place where you feel like you can't do it, you're being pushed too far. How is yoga different than other athletic things that take you

to that point? How is it a better way to learn to transcend and deal with that perhaps than some of the others well, as far as I can see um, the idea with yoga is that when you reach your limit, you're not forced to surpass it, and you're not forced to sacrifice your physical health for any aesthetic or material goal. Whereas my husband, who was a dancer for many years, he always had his primary concern and dance as the

aesthetic performance. So in many ways he would reach a physical limit, but he needed to surpass it in order to achieve the aesthetic forms. He would sometimes sacrifice his physical body in service of in service of, you know, the temple of aesthetics, the temple of beauty and dance, which is awesome, it's what he wanted to do. Now in yoga, we don't have the goal being the physical forms. It's not the aesthetics that matters. Instead, it matters what

the inner experiences. So it doesn't really matter where you reach your limit. It also doesn't matter if you surpass it. But it simply matters that you go, you touch it, you experience it. You don't force your body to go beyond any limit. In the simple state of experiencing your limit every day, the pure faculty of awareness will naturally expand your limits. You don't need to try to push through them. You don't need to sacrifice your physical body.

So it's generally has the potential to be very physically safe if done with patients and non attachment. But if you try to say acrifice or physical body for the attainment of any external result, whether it's an aesthetic result or the result of a posture which would actually be aesthetic,

then you're sacrificing the inner journey. So ideally, yoga is an inner journey that uses these physical limits just as a mirror, so that the student really the spiritual, that the spiritual aspirant can figure out who they are when they're at that limit. You talked just a minute ago, about how you were drawn to yoga. Can you tell us a little bit more about the story of where you were, what brought you to yoga, and your journey

so far. I can look back now on my life and I can see that from the time that I was a little girl, that I've gone through periods of depression, that I have gone through periods of intense searching and

intense questioning. And I can see that when I turned to find out how to live a more peaceful life, I was going through a period of depression, and I was in a very dark place, and I was seeking to try to mask my sadness with an endless stream of parties and then endless dream of you know, external pleasure, and at some moment it's just got me burned out. At some moment it just stopped working. Um, you know, the things that had brought me escape no longer led

to escape. It's like my depression was waiting for me at the end of all of the sensory pleasure. So I woke up one day and I just said, I need to get out of this cycle. I need I want to live a more peaceful life. And it was from that desire that I you know uh turned to yoga class and it was my luck that I looked at a sign near where I was working at the time and it said Tuesday Thursday Ashtanga Yoga, and so

I joined that class. And I had done yoga on and off like U, in random classes and out of books. But I wanted to make a commitment to join yoga as a spiritual path. And that's when I found the Ashtanga method. Within less than a year after I took that first class, I had already been to India for two months, and I had already met Patabi Joyce and Our Joyce, his grandson, the two people who were my teachers.

So it didn't take you long. You found found something that that helped really quickly and kind of went all in absolutely so that that nature to be sort of all in. And I think I read something you wrote where you talk about you your your nature is to be like that, to go kind of all into things and really just give it everything. And you approached yoga like that to start talk about how you've learned to find that middle way over time. I think that first of all, when I found yoga, um, I had never

been clear about anything before in my entire life. So that clarity was probably the most enlightening thing that had ever experienced, because up until then I was wandering. You know. I just thought, well, maybe i'll go to graduate school. Well maybe i'll do this. Well maybe i'll be in academic, maybe i'll be a journalist, maybe i'll do this. Maybe, you know, it was just nothing was really a big pull.

My parents really concerned, you know, they were like, oh, what are you gonna do with your life, dear, And I'm like, I don't know, you know, maybe i'll work at a club the rest of my life, and you know, maybe i'll do this, maybe I'll do that. And then when I after I did that first yoga class, I immediately knew I wanted to take another one. And it was the first instant. And then when I read my teacher's book, Yoga Mala. You know, Grugi Street Katabi Joyce

wrote this book called Yoga Mala. And the night that I finished that, I had a dream about him and I woke up from the dream and I just knew I have to go to India, and I bought the ticket and it was the first thing in my life where I thought this, I want to do. I am doing that, and it was the first time in my life that I was clear about something and I followed it. And even though I was clear about it, I had

all this resistance. So the in fight to India's twenty four hours and then there's a four hour taxi from Bangalore airport into my sore. The entire almost thirty hours of the journey, all I did was think about how I wasn't going to bow down to some man. That's all I thought about for thirty hours because the tradition in the interest, you put your hands on the teacher's feet, like I'm not putting my hands on someone's feet, and I just went. Yet when I got there, I looked

into Grugi's eyes. My hands were on his feet before my mind cored question, and I really felt like my heart opened to him in that moment. I didn't know,

but that meeting would forever change my life. So now, rather than push forward and try to force things to happen, what I've learned from fifteen years or practice is that when things start to happen, whether it's an awesoma or rather in the yoga posture or something in my life, I just wait in experience, right, and then I wait for things to reveal themselves, rather than try to force and make things happen. I used to be really attached

to I've got to make this happen. I've got to get to India, I've got to do this, I've got to spend this much time there and try to plan everything, And especially the last couple of years, the thing that my practice has taught me the most is to just show up and be present and then to wait for to wait for things, to wait to see what wants to happen, and then when that happens, to meet it with equal force and energy so that there's um less

force and more receptivity. You could say, I've studied a lot of Buddhism, and yet I had never heard um the idea that the Buddhist definition of truth was what works, which I love because that's what I love about Buddhism. And you wrote that. But what what you go on to talk about next is what really interests me is that you talk about You say, if we look again at the Buddhist definition of truth is what works, we

see that what works constantly changes. What works one day will not necessarily work for every day that follows, and and talk about talk about what you mean by that. Well, in the yoga practice, our body is constantly changing, so we get this constant mirror of our body. But the body is never the same. I mean, everyone knows that some days you wake up and you feel full of life and energy. The next day you wake up and

you feel terrible and you want to stay in bed. Now, if you have to do this physical practice, you have this mirror for that every single day. If you force yourself in your physical body to try to replicate the same type of experience, you will harm your body. So the truth of bunday could be that you're tired in heavy,

So then you have to honor that. And so what works in your practice when you're tired and heavy is different than say Tuesday, maybe you slept really well and you wake up cheerful and joyful since something else is different, and then you follow that. But you can't force you can't hold onto the past and try to make it the present. You can't hold on to the present and try to make it the future. It's literally that you have to experience your body in the present moment and

honor what that experience is. That's on a small individual scale, but I think on a larger scale, especially as yoga teachers, you can get very attached into this is how you do the posture. Well, you know, that's how you do the posture for now, But any yoga teacher will definitely say that how they do the posture maybe for one year, two years, three years changes after that. The practice is constantly evolving and you explore things and new things are

revealed to you. So there's always a possibility that what works for you one year might not work for you the next year. And that's true with your students, right if you have fifty students in the room, the same direction is not going to work for each of them. So this person's truth is one thing, this person's truth is another thing, This person's truth is another thing. And so there's fifty different versions of the truth. How do

you do it? Back then, they're fifty different versions of that one for each student, each of them all equally valid. And that's something it feels so important as yoga teachers to be able to embrace all of the different all of the different ways we can find our path into the experience of ourselves. Yeah, I think that's really profound in a in a broader sense of that when we we some people have a tendency, and I've noticed it

a lot. They find something that helps them to feel better, and they become so excited and so passionate about it, and then that hardens into some sort of dogmatism that leads to that they can never It's very difficult to transcend. And I've had moments of that where you're so convinced I've now seen the truth. And I think what you're

saying is that truth is always evolving to some degree. Absolutely, something I wanted to ask you about also because on this show we talk all the time about about the paradox of attachment, Like we talk about the paradox of going after a goal versus you know, when when when is that a good thing? When is that a bad thing? When is um? When is personal change a good thing? And when is accepting yourself the way you are a good thing? And you say that the greatest teaching of

yoga is also the greatest paradox of life. Yoga teaches how to walk this thin red line between belief and impossibility, goals and attachment and temporary temporality and eternity with grace

and ease. Can you talk a little bit more about how And you've alluded to it about finding that that middle point, But I think that's a that's an idea that that I know, I wrestle with a lot, which is how do you find that little point between I want to I need a certain amount of energy and goal and drive to even push the spiritual process forward, and yet the spiritual process is largely about letting go. And so how how have you found that works for you?

The traditional yoga philosophy gives the instruction that we constantly balance all of our efforts between the effortful striving of the path and non attachment to fruits of our labor. And this is a very important concept that's presented in potentially yoga stu is and I think in that we find this way to work very strongly and intelligently while

at the same time containing the aspect of surrender. So, for example, the traditional story that's presented is the Bug of a Gita, where the warrior prince Argina is asked as his dharma as his life path, to be this archer that will play a pivotal role in the Battle of the Maha Bratto. Then he doesn't want to do it, and he ultimately says, you know, I can't do it.

I don't want to do this. In the Story of Thea, he sees all of his uncles, his childhood friends, and he sees that his job will be to kill them. His job would be to kill his archery teacher, which is one of the biggest insults that you can make as a student of archery. And his his charioteer is the incarnation of Krishna. Is Krishna the incarnation of God. Now what Krishna says to him, is Arjuna, in this moment, you must focus with your life force as the archer,

as the divine archer. You must focus on your goal with the full attention, with precision and detail, with your full life force. That is your goal, This is your dharma. You must focus on it. And then in the moment you release the arrow. It's what Krishna says to Arjuna. Surrender the fruits of your action to me, and it will be my arrow, and your work will be my work. And whatever you attain, you will attain through me, so that when the action is done, it is not his karma.

It's not Argenta's karma, but it's Christnas karma. Like that in the world, when you direct your attention towards your goal while at the same time giving your full attention to it, simultaneously realizing that whatever you attain, you attain through the grace of God, you do not attain through your own efforts. So you release your attachment to the goal, so you have strong effort simultaneously balanced with ultimate surrender.

And then when you attain the result, you have your humility because you know you didn't do it, You know that it came to you rather than it was something you forced and you worked into being. You showed up, you did your dharma, and then what you receive comes from a power much greater than you. And in that sense, we're able to maintain our connectivity. We're able to keep our hearts open, you could say, and not be too narrow minded um in terms of what that goal might be,

because we release our attachment to the goal. Another thing that I uh I read that you talked about, and we we it's a favorite phrase of mind, which is a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. And you talk about that you've got a

very busy schedule. Before the interview, we were talking about how often you're on the road, which is it is a lot, and you're clearly writing articles and writing books and and so how is that idea that a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing

play out in your life. Well, I think for me, the little bit of something that I have, first of all, is that I treasure what little bit of time that I have at home, and I really really enjoy the days where I don't have any appointments and they don't have any schedules, and I don't really need like a lot of those days. Otherwise I would think I would

just be in the state of luxury, you know. And the for me, the idea of treasuring those little moments of waking up and seeing the sunrise and it's mango season in Miami right now, and when we have a mango tree and picking up some mangoes and just appreciating that and being in the little precious moment of complete presence without any need to be anywhere else, without any need to run around and go on a schedule. For me, those moments are probably the most the most pleasurable and

the most treasurable. You tell a story about your trying to do a one arm candstand, which you shouldn't be able to do anyway, just doesn't make any sense, but you were struggling with it, and you you asked a somebody was in the circus to come to come teach you. And during that process you describe the way that you gave in the way that you collapsed. Tell us a little bit, because it sounds like it was a big

learning moments. Tell us that story. So when I finished the fourth series of the Oshtango Method, I started to look ahead and well, what's next. Then, like a couple of pastas away, there actually is a one armed handstand in my practice. And I started to get really scared, and I thought, who in the world could possibly teach me this? And then I remember that the only people I've ever seen succeeded a one armed handstand are the

circus people. So I contacted the circus school in Miami and I asked their top trainer to come and do a session with me. And at first he was probably one of the meanest trainers I've ever worked with, even Greugi was never he was Garugi was harsh with me, um or stern, you could say, but I never felt I never, I never. I never felt that Greuji was mean. And the first thing, his name is Ricardo Sosa, and

he's actually really awesome teacher. The first thing that he said to me was I can see right away that you're not strong enough to even do a good handstand. And then I immediately sort of felt this kind of collapse sensation, like oh, you know, and then he would try. And then as we began to work together, he would push me to this limit and my body would just suddenly collapse, and then he would yell at me and

I would say I'm sorry. And one of the most pivotal moments was he looked at me and he said, don't say sorry, just do And I'm someone who always says I'm sorry. You know, if I do something wrong, I'm always I'm sorry. And then I thought about it for a moment. I kind of wanted to cry, but then you know, I thought, well, let me just do it again. And I thought about it later and I thought, you know, actually, really sorry does nothing for him. He's right,

you know, what is sorry going to do? Imagine great, like, let's say you hit someone with your car. Oh, I'm so sorry. Great, what did that do for them? You know, just don't do it. If you're truly sorry about something, don't do the action. So, you know, I took that a sort of a lesson for me to look inside of myself. And as I mentioned before, I look back on my life and I can see that I've gone through periods of depression, and depression is the ultimate quitting.

Depression is the ultimate giving up. You give up on yourself. And I've gone through periods of my life, long periods of my life where I woke up with the thought, every single day is life worth living? Not in general? You know, like is life in general worth living? I always believe that life should continue, but I woke up with the thought, is my life worth living? Is my

individual life? Is that worth continuing? Because I woke up and I saw all of the pain and all of the suffering around and everything that was around, and all of the mistakes that I've made, and all of the ways that my actions consciously or unconsciously have harmed other people and the most important people in my life. And I saw that, and I couldn't see the purpose of continuing, and I literally quit on myself every single day, and

there are very few things that kept me motivated. And in that moment of literally being stronger in the physical body, I found an emotional strain as well that gave me the ability to tune into something that was bigger than any and all of the pain that I'd experienced. And the thing that I've learned the most from that is that love is bigger than any pain, and it doesn't make the pain go away. And I think a lot of people that talk about, oh, well, love is my

religion and love this and love that. I don't believe that love makes the pain go away. I think it's actually much more gritty than that. That you still have all of the pain, you still you carry that with you. I don't think it ever leaves you, not while we're incarnate, not here on earth. That the pain is all around you and you're constantly generating new pain, and it's constantly pushing you to the edge that you feel like you're

going to break. But your love is bigger than that, and you love through that, and you love because of that, and it's grander and bigger than any of the pain, not because it makes it go away, but because it is bigger than any of the paint you could possibly experience. Wow, that's a great that's a great story, and I think a great way to end. So thanks so much for taking the time in a in a busy weekend to

talk with this. I really enjoyed the conversation. So thank you very much, Thank you, thank you very much for my pleasure to be here. M a Stayama stay. You can learn more about Keeno McGregor and this podcast and our show notes at one you feed dot net slash keno