An Interview with John Friend

by Kathy Carroll

For 15 years, I was a once-a-week yoga practitioner. Week after week my teacher would extol the value of home practice, but week after week I was too busy — too preoccupied — to heed her advice. About four years ago something inside me began to shift and I started to make the time to do yoga at home. At first I felt resistance; it took a lot of effort to get myself to the mat. Over time though, my home practice has become what is often the sweetest time of my day. Doing yoga at home is paying off on many levels. I am enjoying a greater sense of peace, more connection with that silent observer within. My yoga postures are becoming stronger and deeper. Just the other day my sister complimented me. “It’s not just the blue dress,” she said. “You are carrying yourself differently.” The world looks different when you carry yourself differently.

I am honored and grateful to John Friend, founder of Anusara Yoga for sharing ways to help my own practice evolve and to help other students with their practice. This interview took place after an Anusara Teacher Training as we were driving through Washington, DC on our way to a party John hosted for students and assistants at Jane Fryer’s home.

Kathy Carroll: So John, how important is a home practice? What are its benefits?

John Friend: Home Practice is really the foundation of how we grow and improve in our yoga. You can take classes and workshops and they can give a lot of benefit. They provide the details and techniques. They can give a great experience of being in a group with others, which can really inspire us to grow to deeper levels. However, when we are by ourselves we are able to get in synch with our own rhythms and apply the types of actions and the poses that we need for our own individual benefit. So home practice is really what will help us grow the most. It’s the foundation of our practice that we want to keep coming back to time and time again. And, for teachers, through our own practice we get the deeper understanding of the principles that we are working with. Then we can teach and express these ideas from our own experience.

KC: Since home practice is the foundation of our yoga as you expressed so well, when would you suggest that new students begin their home practice?

JF: Well you can guide a new student right off the bat by giving them a few things to do—some of the poses you are working on in class. And give them a little routine, anything from 20 minutes to 45 minutes or even an hour. They can start practicing as often as three or four times a week at home. So getting them into some sort of commitment to try a few poses at home, can make a big difference.

KC: Sometimes it’s hard to get started. How do you suggest that we get out of our own stagnation and start?

JF: Again it’s going to come down to what you feel is really important. What kind of meaning can you put into the practice? If you have something that you are really shooting for, if you have deeper goals that are meaningful, that’s what’s going to infuse your practice and really help to jump start it. If you don’t have a lot of meaning for your practice, it’s going to drop off. So, let’s say you have a deep meaning, just find a period of time, maybe only thirty minutes, something that is really doable. Set reasonable goals that are really achievable. When your goals are reasonable and you can do them, then you infuse your practice with deep meaning. That’s what’s going to help charge your practice and get you out of the tamasic, dull state of mind.

KC: Yes! And it sounds like you are talking about bringing a spiritual dimension in.

JF: You have to bring a spiritual basis to it. Actually you don’t have to. Some people say, “I have this cellulite on my legs and it’s really the bane of my existence.” If that is really important for some people, they’re the ones who will get up every day and do a practice.

So, for them the physicality is giving them a home practice. However, I think that for me the practice is a spiritual art. And so my goals are much more than to bring certain muscular tone to my body.

KC: To get a student started, what kind of space should they have? What stuff do they need? I’m thinking of the physical practicalities of getting started with a practice.

JF: All you need is a sticky-mat sized space in your house. You can literally do a practice just about anywhere. Of course, if you have a space that is without so many distractions (which could be both noise and clutter, visual clutter) and you have more space where you can extend your energy out a bit – of course that is optimal.

KC: What about bringing poetry into our practice?

JF: You could find scripture or inspirational readings or quotes by people you admire and you might read them before you do the practice and remind yourself of the quote as you are doing the practice. You could infuse that kind of poetry into it.

KC: During the teacher training you were talking about dedicating our practice to a person. Tell us about that.

JF: Many times I dedicate my practice to someone that I really love and/or to somebody who might be in need of some extra energy. They might be suffering. So, I make every part of my practice, my breath, the actions in the poses, all of it, totally dedicated to offering back love to this person that I hold in my heart.

KC: Yes, and you mentioned before that sometimes we might want to dedicate the practice to a person we are personally having a hard time with, too – maybe to bring healing to a relationship. On another note, how would you see people progressing with their practice over time?

JF: You want to expand your range of poses — the different classes of poses, like standing poses, backbends, forward bends, twists, inversions, hand balancings, restoratives and so on. You want to keep increasing the variety of those types of poses through a period of a week or two. And then within each of those classes of poses you want to expand your repertoire so that you do more and more variations within those classes. In that way you are going to experience a greater depth of the practice, where you will cultivate deeper opening, deeper strength, and resiliency.

KC: Do you see people doing an overall practice with some standing poses, some inversions, some twists, etc.? Or is it better to have a different practice each day, where one day is my hip opener practice and another day might focus on shoulders?

JF: Well, it’s going to depend on a lot of things. It depends on how much time you have, how many days a week you’re practicing. So, doing an overall practice is a good idea if you are only practicing a couple times a week. Then it might serve you better just to do a general practice, where you include a little bit of everything. It’s what I call a potpourri class. Now if you are practicing more regularly, say, six days a week, you might want to have one day with a focus on backbends and stronger poses and one day with a focus on forward bends and twists. There are some standard types of poses that you might want to incorporate every day that include sun salutations (Surya Namaskar), standing poses and inversions. So you have these standard things within the template of your home practice. And then you add within that; you could still do a forward bend practice on one day and on another day a backbend practice. Then, maybe one day a week, you could do a restorative practice.

KC: Would you see a teacher’s practice as their way of working out their class plan?

JF: Yeah, sometimes the practice can be the same sequence that you would teach and in so doing you could learn a lot. You would learn the actions and the attitudes that you want to cultivate for the students. And you would also get a direct experience about the type of pacing that would be effective and how many poses and the sequence that would fit into your time limit. You would learn a whole lot. So you definitely have to be practicing to what you are teaching. On the other hand, as long as you are able to practice the poses separately, you can then combine and compile a variety of sequences. So you don’t always have to practice a particular sequence.

KC: That’s helpful. Now, back to a yoga space. If a person were to set up an ideal space for their yoga practice, what would it be like?

JF: The practice space that I have is a room that is really dedicated to yoga. It has a hardwood floor and high ceilings and lots of wall space. It is an uncluttered space and it has a big impact, a positive influence on my mind. It is beautiful and it has windows that open to the trees. I have inspirational things displayed like devotional pictures, pictures of teachers, saints, deities, and sacred symbols like Om.

KC: How do you do your own yoga practice?

JF: What I do is have a general template that includes Surya Namaskar, standing poses, some inversions. So as many days as I can within the week (many times I practice almost every day) I’ll dedicate a minimum of an hour and a half to two hours. Many times a three-hour practice is really best for me. And then I’ll do this wide variety of poses with those basic postures as a template. I’ll mix it up so that on one day I’ll do backbends, maybe hand balancings for a stronger practice and then the next day do forward bends, twists and hip openers.

KC: You have a pretty intense schedule. A lot of times you’re on the road. What do you do then?

JF: I still try to make the time. So then you look at what the schedule entails. Many times I just do it during my lunch break. The students get a two-hour break and that’s my practice time.

KC: What about Yoga off the mat? How can we bring our yoga practice into our daily lives?

JF: By putting feeling and meaning into it – make it more of a spiritual art on the mat. All the different challenges that we are faced with on the mat, the limitations of our body and mind on the mat, they’re a perfect metaphor for how we deal with things out in life, how we deal with others. So how you are expressing and treating yourself on the mat completely reflects how you will be off the mat.

KC: Tell us more about that.

JF: I take certain qualities of heart that I want to cultivate and then I focus on that during an intense two-hour practice and I physicalize or embody that quality of heart. By doing that, it puts that energy into the cells of my body.

KC: On a physical level, what about standing in Tadasana when you are waiting in the grocery line?

JF: Absolutely. Presenting yourself off the mat is just a continuation of what you’ve done on the mat. You wouldn’t do the alignment on the mat and then just forget about alignment later. You don’t have to use so much muscle to hold yourself, but you’re aware about your alignment.

KC: How can we make sure that people don’t hurt themselves? How can we strike a balance between appropriate challenge and not getting hurt?

JF: First, starting with a right attitude, being sensitive and tuning to a greater energy from the beginning allows us to line up in a way that injury is going to happen less. Second, you have to know the principles of alignment. Even with the best intention and the best attitude if you don’t know the alignment, you have a higher chance of injury. So knowing the alignment principles, including the proper actions and the proper forms, will enhance your experience and will reduce any kind of injury. An alignment of heart, body and mind is the way you prevent injury.

KC: So, along with knowing alignment, intention is really important.

JF: Your intention fuels the energy behind all of your actions. So you can have good alignment and yet if you have an attitude that is really aggressive and full of self effort and you push yourself, then you’re not being sensitive to yourself.

KC: Of course sometimes we get so gentle with ourselves that we don’t really take ourselves to the edge.

JF: It is a balance — a balance of effort and surrender. If you are too releasing, you can get injured that way too.

KC: Finally, what else do you think people should know about home practice, John?

JF: Even though you might set certain goals, make it a time for self-nurturing and enjoyment – self enjoyment. Play! Get on the mat and play without getting stuck in trying to make the form so perfect. Have fun with it!

KC: Thanks, John. You are an inspiration!

Reprinted from anusara.com