Talk given in May 2021 at an Embodied Intimacy Training module.
How did I get here? Here meaning to be to be offering what I'm offering. There are a few intermingled currents. One is obviously yoga. One is meditation. One is Tantra. One is child development and education. One is being a father.
The meditation was Zen meditation. The Yoga changed via many variations through the journey. But even though I always enjoyed practicing yoga, and I enjoy teaching yoga, it it did not lived up to my expectations. Perhaps my expectations were too high. I don't know. But I was hoping it would make me a better person. It didn't. That was quite clear.
So rather than giving up on the idea of being a better person, which would have been the sensible thing to do, I tried Zen. In Zen I learned that that was really stupid. I just had to be who I am, and stop fucking around trying to be somebody else. So that was the secret teaching for me in my Zen training, because the Zen thing apparently is all about being like a Buddha, you know, becoming somebody better. They call it enlightenment, but I can't and I wouldn't want to make any claim that I got that from it because I wouldn't even know what that's supposed to mean.
But I did get some things from it. Without which, my yoga would probably have fallen by the wayside as a failed project. I learned how to become one with anything, especially pain. And I learned how to do nothing. That was much harder, to learn, how to do nothing. What does it even mean to do nothing? They put me through that baking process and of course, this had a huge effect on my teaching yoga. And there was a certain moment when I was in a kind of a crisis. So I went to America to seek refuge with my teachers. Then something happened and I came back and within a couple of months, my student numbers were down from thousands to less than a hundred. From 30/40 a class to 5 or 6. I just couldn't teach the way I had been teaching before, which was about you've got to become perfect. You've got to do this with your body, that with your mind, all that and I just couldn't do that anymore.
But luckily, I was employed. I wasn't working for myself. I was employed by a very, nice woman, in the bottom of whose house I was also living. So I had a very ongoing warm relationship with her, who happened to be a multimillionairess. One day her accountant called a meeting in which he said, we're two years behind projections, it's terrible. And so, Louise, who was my employer, she said to the accountant, well, so what's the solution? And he said, well, in a single stroke, all our financial troubles will go away if you fire Godfrey because she was paying me so much money. And then there was a silence. And then she said this. "Godfrey is my thoroughbred. He can run as he wants" and left the room. So that was great, so I didn't have to pervert my understanding of yoga in order to make money which is a very rare gift to be given.
So I started to become very experimental in my teaching of yoga, and every now and then somebody I knew from the Zen world would come come to a class and say, you're not teaching yoga, you're teaching Zen.
Then about 17 years ago, my wife, being a woman, was a lot more tuned in to what was really happening with the students than I was. And one day she said to me, "Godfrey, I think we're being very irresponsible". And I said, "How's that? And she said, "because we're teaching people to become sensitive to their bodies. And they are responding and they're becoming sensitive to their bodies, and they're encountering their sexual energy. And we never mention it". So we had this conversation, and I understood what she was saying. And I said, "Yes, we'll have to do something about it". And I didn't. Nothing changed. It was too big a thing, for me to deal with. But then, eventually, I capitulated and started to own up to the fact that human beings are sexual beings and there's no way of escaping from that except suffering.
So then, I started to adapt what I was teaching towards concrete pleasure rather than abstract wholeness. Although I still sometimes teach towards wholeness, that's not the lens that I'm using with you. The lens that I'm using with you is towards pleasure. Overtly, it's the pleasure nature of the body, but covertly, it's the pleasure nature of Consciousness.
If you know anything about yoga ideology this is contained within a Sanskrit aphorism: "Satchitananda". You may have heard some people take it as a name, and they call themselves Godfrey Wodfrey SatCitAnanda, so that people will bow down a little more respectfully to them. What it means, if you go right to the essence is: "sat" means existence, "cit" means consciousness, and "ananda" means bliss. And I understand that to mean if it exists, it is consciousness and it is bliss. So, I'm coming from there. That's where I'm coming from. If it exists: pain, anger, jealousy, greed, war. It is consciousness. It is bliss. But maybe it's hidden from you. That it is like that. So that's kind of deep, where I'm coming from.
I could summarise some of that in a couple of aphorisms, which are not both mine. This one is also a very well known tantric aphorism: "Consciousness is all there is". And this doesn't mean that matter is an illusion. It means that matter is Consciousness. The body is Consciousness. It's not come from Consciousness, but is something else. No. It is Consciousness. So there's no split between mind and body, spirit and matter.
That's the way i understand it. Though, of course not the way a scientist does. To a scientist, and anyone who has succumbed, knowingly or not, to the ideology of scientism, matter is all there is. I'm married to a scientist and they're very impressive, in the things they can do, and the machinery that they've created to look more deeply into the structure of matter. But they're always looking from the outside.
Always looking from the outside. So they say "all there is, is matter". And they're not wrong. So long as you're looking from the outside. But, what does matter become when you look at it from the inside? Consciousness. How can you know that? Because you have a body and you've experienced your body. When you really experience your body, when you become very intimate with your body, then objects, actions, lines, forms and measurement they all disappear. When you really let go into your body, it becomes an amorphous, unknowing mystery. That somehow is totally satisfying. Despite the fact that you can't really say anything definitive about it in the language of scientists. But in the language of a poet, you can just read Rumi.
So, going back to what I am doing here with you. Satchidananda suggests, implies or, to me, confirms that the dynamic nature of everything is pleasure. Before it's love, before it's peace. These are also fundamental properties of Consciousness, but first is pleasure. That pleasure turning in, on itself, becomes peace. That pleasure moving outwards becomes love. So, becoming a bit more concrete, what I'm doing with you is activating the power of pleasure. We all know we can be addicted to pleasures, and that that's not always wholesome, or healthy. But that's part of pleasure's power. It can completely derail our intelligence.
But in the context of what what I'm doing with you, pleasure is nourishing. In fact, "pleasure is healing in inverse proportion to its intensity".That's the second aphorism, this time mine. I know that's a bit mathematical, but I'll just say it again. "Pleasure is healing in inverse proportion to its intensity". So that means something really intense is less nourishing than something very subtle. Now this is only a working proposition. It's not a definition of the nature of reality. So relax.
So, what I'm really interested in is the subtle presence, nature and significance of pleasure. Of course, that doesn't mean I'm not interested in intense pleasures. Of course, I'm a human being. But in terms of my professional persona, as as a teacher, I'm interested in the the healing power of pleasure. This interest of mine is focused through the power of sensation.
So I'd like to speak more now about sensation. Because that maybe the word or the noun that you hear the most coming out of my mouth when when doing my sessions. Well, I'm just been told on the cosmic intercom to say a sensation is Consciousness meeting Consciousness. Consciousness as awareness, meeting Consciousness as the body.
Sensation is always a conscious event. There's no such thing as an unconscious sensation. The activity that produces sensations is mainly unconscious, but the sensation is something that's felt. It may not be recognized for what it is. It's significance may not be understood, but a sensation is always felt, is always a conscious event. If it's felt deeply, maybe you don't recognize anything about it at all. If it's felt clearly you do recognize something about: "this is clearly hunger." You go and eat. But sometimes people think that sadness is hunger. And they go and eat. And this is really significant. Right, then they become addicts. And this is all because they're responding to sensations in a way that's not clear. In a way that there's no intimacy with those sensations.
Every sensation is unique. Even if it's feels pretty much the same, in pretty much the same place. It's nevertheless, like each one of us, unique. Although we're all incredibly similar. We are much more similar than we are different. But we play in those differences. We live in these differences. But we are actually almost completely identical. We're genetically almost completely identical to a mouse as well.
Of course, we have our unique history. We have unique DNA. Every sensation is unique. But every sensation is Consciousness as awareness meeting Consciousness as the body, and this is bliss meeting bliss. It's an amplification. It's a mirroring. When you feel a sensation really deeply. You feel pleasure. Even if in the beginning it was painful. If you really, really feel it, the layer of interpretation that said "shit, that's my ankle, it'll break if I don't move", falls away. And as that layer, all those layers, of interpretation fall away. What's left you could call it is the raw data. And the raw data is actually pleasure. When we call it a nervous impulse, or an ion exchange in the nervous system, that's just the concept made in the mind by scientists, looking at it from the outside, but on the inside, it's pleasure. If it's really felt, it will be felt as pleasure. So that's where I'm coming from.
How did I get here? Here meaning to be to be offering what I'm offering. There are a few intermingled currents. One is obviously yoga. One is meditation. One is Tantra. One is child development and education. One is being a father.
The meditation was Zen meditation. The Yoga changed via many variations through the journey. But even though I always enjoyed practicing yoga, and I enjoy teaching yoga, it it did not lived up to my expectations. Perhaps my expectations were too high. I don't know. But I was hoping it would make me a better person. It didn't. That was quite clear.
So rather than giving up on the idea of being a better person, which would have been the sensible thing to do, I tried Zen. In Zen I learned that that was really stupid. I just had to be who I am, and stop fucking around trying to be somebody else. So that was the secret teaching for me in my Zen training, because the Zen thing apparently is all about being like a Buddha, you know, becoming somebody better. They call it enlightenment, but I can't and I wouldn't want to make any claim that I got that from it because I wouldn't even know what that's supposed to mean.
But I did get some things from it. Without which, my yoga would probably have fallen by the wayside as a failed project. I learned how to become one with anything, especially pain. And I learned how to do nothing. That was much harder, to learn, how to do nothing. What does it even mean to do nothing? They put me through that baking process and of course, this had a huge effect on my teaching yoga. And there was a certain moment when I was in a kind of a crisis. So I went to America to seek refuge with my teachers. Then something happened and I came back and within a couple of months, my student numbers were down from thousands to less than a hundred. From 30/40 a class to 5 or 6. I just couldn't teach the way I had been teaching before, which was about you've got to become perfect. You've got to do this with your body, that with your mind, all that and I just couldn't do that anymore.
But luckily, I was employed. I wasn't working for myself. I was employed by a very, nice woman, in the bottom of whose house I was also living. So I had a very ongoing warm relationship with her, who happened to be a multimillionairess. One day her accountant called a meeting in which he said, we're two years behind projections, it's terrible. And so, Louise, who was my employer, she said to the accountant, well, so what's the solution? And he said, well, in a single stroke, all our financial troubles will go away if you fire Godfrey because she was paying me so much money. And then there was a silence. And then she said this. "Godfrey is my thoroughbred. He can run as he wants" and left the room. So that was great, so I didn't have to pervert my understanding of yoga in order to make money which is a very rare gift to be given.
So I started to become very experimental in my teaching of yoga, and every now and then somebody I knew from the Zen world would come come to a class and say, you're not teaching yoga, you're teaching Zen.
Then about 17 years ago, my wife, being a woman, was a lot more tuned in to what was really happening with the students than I was. And one day she said to me, "Godfrey, I think we're being very irresponsible". And I said, "How's that? And she said, "because we're teaching people to become sensitive to their bodies. And they are responding and they're becoming sensitive to their bodies, and they're encountering their sexual energy. And we never mention it". So we had this conversation, and I understood what she was saying. And I said, "Yes, we'll have to do something about it". And I didn't. Nothing changed. It was too big a thing, for me to deal with. But then, eventually, I capitulated and started to own up to the fact that human beings are sexual beings and there's no way of escaping from that except suffering.
So then, I started to adapt what I was teaching towards concrete pleasure rather than abstract wholeness. Although I still sometimes teach towards wholeness, that's not the lens that I'm using with you. The lens that I'm using with you is towards pleasure. Overtly, it's the pleasure nature of the body, but covertly, it's the pleasure nature of Consciousness.
If you know anything about yoga ideology this is contained within a Sanskrit aphorism: "Satchitananda". You may have heard some people take it as a name, and they call themselves Godfrey Wodfrey SatCitAnanda, so that people will bow down a little more respectfully to them. What it means, if you go right to the essence is: "sat" means existence, "cit" means consciousness, and "ananda" means bliss. And I understand that to mean if it exists, it is consciousness and it is bliss. So, I'm coming from there. That's where I'm coming from. If it exists: pain, anger, jealousy, greed, war. It is consciousness. It is bliss. But maybe it's hidden from you. That it is like that. So that's kind of deep, where I'm coming from.
I could summarise some of that in a couple of aphorisms, which are not both mine. This one is also a very well known tantric aphorism: "Consciousness is all there is". And this doesn't mean that matter is an illusion. It means that matter is Consciousness. The body is Consciousness. It's not come from Consciousness, but is something else. No. It is Consciousness. So there's no split between mind and body, spirit and matter.
That's the way i understand it. Though, of course not the way a scientist does. To a scientist, and anyone who has succumbed, knowingly or not, to the ideology of scientism, matter is all there is. I'm married to a scientist and they're very impressive, in the things they can do, and the machinery that they've created to look more deeply into the structure of matter. But they're always looking from the outside.
Always looking from the outside. So they say "all there is, is matter". And they're not wrong. So long as you're looking from the outside. But, what does matter become when you look at it from the inside? Consciousness. How can you know that? Because you have a body and you've experienced your body. When you really experience your body, when you become very intimate with your body, then objects, actions, lines, forms and measurement they all disappear. When you really let go into your body, it becomes an amorphous, unknowing mystery. That somehow is totally satisfying. Despite the fact that you can't really say anything definitive about it in the language of scientists. But in the language of a poet, you can just read Rumi.
So, going back to what I am doing here with you. Satchidananda suggests, implies or, to me, confirms that the dynamic nature of everything is pleasure. Before it's love, before it's peace. These are also fundamental properties of Consciousness, but first is pleasure. That pleasure turning in, on itself, becomes peace. That pleasure moving outwards becomes love. So, becoming a bit more concrete, what I'm doing with you is activating the power of pleasure. We all know we can be addicted to pleasures, and that that's not always wholesome, or healthy. But that's part of pleasure's power. It can completely derail our intelligence.
But in the context of what what I'm doing with you, pleasure is nourishing. In fact, "pleasure is healing in inverse proportion to its intensity".That's the second aphorism, this time mine. I know that's a bit mathematical, but I'll just say it again. "Pleasure is healing in inverse proportion to its intensity". So that means something really intense is less nourishing than something very subtle. Now this is only a working proposition. It's not a definition of the nature of reality. So relax.
So, what I'm really interested in is the subtle presence, nature and significance of pleasure. Of course, that doesn't mean I'm not interested in intense pleasures. Of course, I'm a human being. But in terms of my professional persona, as as a teacher, I'm interested in the the healing power of pleasure. This interest of mine is focused through the power of sensation.
So I'd like to speak more now about sensation. Because that maybe the word or the noun that you hear the most coming out of my mouth when when doing my sessions. Well, I'm just been told on the cosmic intercom to say a sensation is Consciousness meeting Consciousness. Consciousness as awareness, meeting Consciousness as the body.
Sensation is always a conscious event. There's no such thing as an unconscious sensation. The activity that produces sensations is mainly unconscious, but the sensation is something that's felt. It may not be recognized for what it is. It's significance may not be understood, but a sensation is always felt, is always a conscious event. If it's felt deeply, maybe you don't recognize anything about it at all. If it's felt clearly you do recognize something about: "this is clearly hunger." You go and eat. But sometimes people think that sadness is hunger. And they go and eat. And this is really significant. Right, then they become addicts. And this is all because they're responding to sensations in a way that's not clear. In a way that there's no intimacy with those sensations.
Every sensation is unique. Even if it's feels pretty much the same, in pretty much the same place. It's nevertheless, like each one of us, unique. Although we're all incredibly similar. We are much more similar than we are different. But we play in those differences. We live in these differences. But we are actually almost completely identical. We're genetically almost completely identical to a mouse as well.
Of course, we have our unique history. We have unique DNA. Every sensation is unique. But every sensation is Consciousness as awareness meeting Consciousness as the body, and this is bliss meeting bliss. It's an amplification. It's a mirroring. When you feel a sensation really deeply. You feel pleasure. Even if in the beginning it was painful. If you really, really feel it, the layer of interpretation that said "shit, that's my ankle, it'll break if I don't move", falls away. And as that layer, all those layers, of interpretation fall away. What's left you could call it is the raw data. And the raw data is actually pleasure. When we call it a nervous impulse, or an ion exchange in the nervous system, that's just the concept made in the mind by scientists, looking at it from the outside, but on the inside, it's pleasure. If it's really felt, it will be felt as pleasure. So that's where I'm coming from.