Dearest Friends,
Gernot Huber will be leading a retreat—Serenity of Full Awareness—at Feathered Pipe Ranch from August 25 to September 1. Gernot shares his thoughts on moving away from a strict goal-oriented practice, the importance of asking questions and using yoga to disrupt the body’s stress response.
AV: As someone with a background in tech and biology, how did you transition into teaching yoga?
Gernot: I worked in Silicon Valley for 7 years, but like many others, I knew that I didn’t want to work in tech for the rest of my life. About a year before I decided I wanted out of Silicon Valley, a co-worker introduced me to yoga and we would practice on lunch breaks at the office. As I was deciding what was next, I remember thinking, “Maybe I should teach yoga?” but I quickly dismissed the thought because it didn’t fit into my idea of who I
ought to be, which at the time was largely influenced by who my parents wanted me to be. I was also really drawn to nature, and wanting to make a difference with my life, I decided to pursue a career in conservation biology. I was accepted into a PhD program at Cornell University, and the stress of grad school made me realize that yoga was the one thing keeping me sane: yoga was no longer optional in my life.
 Three years into grad school, my girlfriend and I visited Chiang Mai, Thailand and loved it so much we decided to move there. I went to my committee and asked them if I could finish my PhD remotely, and they gave me two options: Stay in the
U.S. to get the PhD or switch to a Master’s and go to Thailand. I chose the latter option, because at this point, I knew that my path was pointing toward yoga. I defended my Master’s thesis in May 2009, did my yoga teacher training the following month, began teaching yoga a month later and have been teaching yoga full time ever since.
AV: Tell me about the themes that help guide your teachings each week and where you find inspiration for them.
Gernot: I have over time developed about 45 themes that I use to provide a focus for my classes, choosing a different theme each week. I started doing this as a way to provide a deeper learning experience in my drop-in classes, to keep my teaching fresh, and to stay in touch with those students of mine who only spend part of the year in Chiang Mai, enabling them to continue studying with me no matter where they are in the world. I publish a blog post every Sunday to
introduce the idea for the week —anatomical topics like hip alignment in forward bends as well as more philosophical themes like balancing effort and surrender—then teach each of my 90-minute classes that week to that theme, turning each class into a mini workshop in which we explore one subject in depth.
 For the most part, I re-use each theme about once a year, adding a few new ones and retiring others that don’t resonate with me any more. But each time I choose a theme, I re-read the last blog post for that theme and almost always change it in
some way, to reflect how my understanding of yoga is continually evolving, based on what I am learning from my personal practice, from my teaching experiences, and from other teachers. New themes come to me from many places. Sometimes they emerge from something I am experimenting with in my own practice or something I say in class, sometimes in response to a question from a student.
AV: So, what are your classes like?
Gernot: In my classes, we hold quite a few poses for multiple breaths, but I also always incorporate some amount of flow because it’s important for maintaining agility. However, the flows that I practice and teach are simple and slow. I intentionally simplify what we do in class so that we can focus more on how we practice, because how much awareness we bring to each moment of our practice is more beneficial than mastering ever more complicated poses and
sequences.
 I often ask students to come into a pose, then invite them to explore the pose by doing something different. It’s not so important what they change. What’s more important is simply changing something and then noticing how you feel. I
invite them to ask themselves, “Did the change have a positive or negative effect on my breath, on my sense of spaciousness, on my ability to be present in the moment with a sense of serenity?” It’s nearly impossible to explore these questions when you’re moving fast, and these explorations hold tremendous potential for growth. When we move quickly, and are too focused on outward achievement, we often end up replicating and reinforcing the patterns that are already
dominant in our daily lives, and which are already not serving us.
AV: Can you give me an example of one of those patterns?
Gernot: A major example of this is the tendency to strongly extend the neck in many poses, including poses that are clearly intended to be forward bends. This extension of the neck is an expression of working too hard, trying too hard to get somewhere you are not. It also replicates a pattern most of us are already overdoing in the rest of our lives, as most people already have more neck tension than they would like to have. So instead of learning healthy movement
patterns in yoga and bringing those patterns into their lives, many people are actually reinforcing their stress patterns in their yoga practice—all the while thinking they’re de-stressing because they’re practicing yoga!
 This is definitely a topic that deserves more attention. My aha moment about how striving in yoga replicates unhelpful patterns came about 10 years ago, right around the time that I became a yoga teacher. My wife and I were taking an Anusara class,
and we were doing a partner assist in king pigeon pose, using a strap around the ankle and walking our hands along the strap. My wife and I were assisting each other, and I remember getting upset that I wasn’t able to reach all the way to my toes—and somehow I convinced myself that it was her fault because she wasn’t assisting me correctly. I snapped at her, and that was when I first realized how yoga can trigger us into unhelpful patterns. It was a real wakeup call for me, and
I had to ask myself, “What am I really using this practice for?”
AV: How did your approach change after that aha moment?
Gernot: I realized that there is an opportunity in yoga to notice these patterns and to learn how to disrupt them. Some people remove the stress altogether and do a very gentle practice, and I do think there is a lot of value in that. But I also think that we can use a moderately intense asana practice to trigger ourselves, learn to notice when we are being triggered, and then practice disrupting the trigger. This is a very difficult skill that
requires—but also develops—a tremendous amount of awareness of what’s going on in your mind and body. The beauty of doing this in your yoga is that in the laboratory of an asana practice you can fine-tune the intensity of the triggers. You do that by fine-tuning the intensity of the poses so that the triggers are mild enough that you can learn how to respond to them rather than simply getting stressed out. It’s consciously engaging in the age-old battle between what the
ego wants and what will serve the true self.
 Becoming aware of that tension and choosing at any moment in time to listen to your true self is the real practice. So, I teach students to do the poses that get their ego involved, then teach them to take their ego out and notice what happens.
It’s having the awareness—and really the courage—to say, “I don’t care whether my feet came off the floor in Crow pose or not; I know that’s not what it’s about.” This is the lesson that we can take with us out into the world: Learning to diminish the undo influence of the ego a little, learning to choose serenity even when things aren’t going your way.
We invite you to join us at the Feathered Pipe Ranch this summer, August 25 - September 1, for Gernot's 's deeep exploration of mind, body and spirit The Serenity of Full Awareness: Asana, Philosophy, Science, and the Breath.
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Santosha: Living in Gratitude – Lanita Varshell
Try the yoga practice of santosha. A practice of contentment.
Santosha is not an emotion, but rather a state of consciousness. It is the ability to remain in the present moment, experiencing the happiness that can be found there, instead of the judgment that you might have once felt when you were so critical of yourself and others.
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Moving from Attention to Awareness – Gernot Huber
Our minds have the tendency to be overly reactive, to zero in on what appears to be the most pressing thing at any given moment, to the exclusion of everything else.
For survival in prehistoric times, such focused attention was probably a healthy response. But to live mindfully (and thus to maximize happiness), it is best to minimize this tendency, because being attention-driven and overly reactive keeps us in a state of perpetual low-level stress, always mindlessly reacting to the strongest stimulus.
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Contact Us |
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Feathered Pipe Foundation
P.O. Box 1682
Helena, MT 59624
(406) 442-8196
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