How Ashtanga Yoga Changed Gwyneth's Life (with teacher Eddie Stern)

0:02When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In a sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand. On the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders, and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers, and seekers, here to start conversations, because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world.

0:58Here we go. This week, we're sharing a gem from the Goop Podcast archives. It's a conversation I had in 2019 with my longtime friend, the legendary yoga teacher, Eddie Stern. In our conversation, we reminisced about the first time I stepped into his yoga studio and how developing a consistent Ashtanga yoga practice ultimately changed my life. Eddie has some big fans in the Goop office, and our team loved revisiting this episode from long ago. We hope you enjoy it too. Here's Eddie Stern and me.

1:35Have I seen you since you married me? No, this is the first time. Do I seem different? You seem so amazingly, awesomely great. Yes, for our listeners at home, Eddie Stern, who I'm interviewing today, who is a lifelong friend and mentor and yoga teacher, officiated at our wedding. It was so much fun. It was a beautiful wedding. Thank you. And you blew your nose in my pocket square when you started crying. I know. And I feel that I owe you a pocket square. I don't know. I've sold that on eBay for so much money. Put Lily through her first year of college. Actually, I washed it. I still feel that I owe you a new one.

2:22Well. Do you do lots of weddings? Do you officiate at lots of weddings? No. I do very, very, very few, only for the most special beloved people in my life. Performing a wedding is like a really, since I'm not an actual official professional priest, I feel there's a lot of responsibility in performing a wedding. It's really one of the most sacred things, I think. And you're there in front of God and everyone, making these really important vows and being sort of participating in those vows by helping to proclaim them. And I feel there's a lot of responsibility in that and I don't take it lightly.

3:01So I hadn't performed a wedding for, I think, at least six or seven years until you asked me to do yours. I'd gone into retirement. I'd only done about maybe maximum eight of them, six to eight. But I thought, OK, I'm going to stop doing this about six years ago. And then you asked me and then I was like so happy you asked me. but as somebody who is so connected and is your teacher in so many respects, I think one of my favorite things about you is that you're so funny and grounded and normal, and you're still like kind of you're this like punk rock New York kid from the 80s. But then you have this incredible connection to, I don't know what you want to call it, God or larger consciousness.

3:47So I imagine that a lot of people would want you to do it. So anyway, I'm just very honored. Anyway, it was a beautiful wedding. Thanks to you. Well, no, you know, you guys are a beautiful couple. It was, how would you describe it? Like a Hindu kind of. It was, it was pretty Jewish. Yeah, it was pretty Jewish. It was pretty Jewish. Yeah, it was. And it was only mildly Hindu. It was perfect. Good. Thank you. Yay. So I have so many, I'm so thrilled that you're here. Me too. Thank you for having me on your podcast. You have made such an incredible impact on my life for so many years. I think I was 25 when I first met you.

4:25So 21 years ago. Yes. Wow. And I came into your studio and you were teaching Ashtanga yoga. And at the time, yoga was not popularized at all in the way it is today. You know, having grown up in Southern California, you would kind of heard of yoga, but somebody brought me to your class. I was struggling physically and mentally. And so I was brought to you the practice that you taught. It was at the time. Well, it's, I don't know if people know what a strong yoga is, but we can, I'm going to ask you about it. Okay. But there was such an incredible restraint about it and a patience and that had to be learned as part of it.

5:12It was like I learned one pose and then I came back the next day and it was the same pose. And then, and I saw everybody next to me doing all these things, you know, and as an achiever, I just thought I want to do what they're doing. I want to, and then third day it was the same pose. And the fourth day it was the same pose in the fifth day. And then I got one extra pose. And what I realized it was the beginning of some kind of recalibration that is still in a way going on of trying to optimize yourself without being so results oriented. And I just wanted to ask you a little bit about a strong yoga and the practice and how you came to it.

5:51And if you, because, you know, you were a musician with a Mohawk running around New York city, how on earth did you find this practice? Well, first of all, in just an answer to what you were saying you felt about yoga and what it was doing for you, I think that was a very apt description. It is a recalibration. It's sort of a resetting of our system. Yoga does teach you patience and restraint. And one of the first things about yoga, the first limb, Ashtanga means eight limbs. and it means there are basically eight different ways that we can gradually begin to consciously choose how we're going to participate in our lives and in the world and the first thing that we choose is how we are going to restrain ourselves in particular ways so in america we have this idea of freedom the pursuit of happiness and this was built into our constitution but the idea that it's changed into over the ensuing you know several hundred years a couple years is that we feel that freedom means that I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want.

6:55And this is a lot of what our culture is based on now. But that's not freedom. That's hedonism. Freedom comes from when you are able to choose wisely the best direction for you to go in, which is going to bring about the greatest amount of ultimate good, not just for yourself, but for society or your family or the people around you. And sometimes that path involves a lot of friction. And challenge and restraint. And so the restraint that we're building by approaching a spiritual practice slowly and incrementally is to learn how to create healthy boundaries. So when we are struggling with things mentally, emotionally, and physically, it means that we're not too sure where to create these healthy boundaries.

7:34So we have to pull ourselves back quite often to the beginning, start from the bottom up and create those healthy boundaries as we go along. And one of those things is to know like, what are my actual limits? Like, I think I can do a lot. I want to do a lot. But by doing a lot, that's not always so good for me. Maybe I'll do a lot today and I'm not going to do anything else for the next two weeks. So that's not a constructive use of building a healthy, positive habit. So what we do in the yoga practice is we say, let's start with a little and see if you stick with it. And if you stick with it, then we'll start adding things on.

8:07And then before you know it, you're doing a lot more than you've expected you could do. and maybe even you get to the point where you think now I know this is enough for me right now you know I don't want to move forward from here because I'm in an okay place. How important is that commitment to the everyday piece of it? It's crucial for because what we're doing is we're creating a habit of awareness when we want to build a healthy boundary when we want to even if we want to transform ourselves if we want to grow whatever it is we need to be self-aware and awareness is actually a habit like sitting down to meditate every day you're building this habit of awareness you can't do it one day and then not do it for a month you won't build a positive habit what the habits do is it begins on a you know neurological level our brains are plastic it rewires our brain in particular ways so we become used to doing a thing in a particular way for a certain effect if you are eating a bad diet and you know that for your health you need to clean up your diet you can't eat a salad one day and then eat hamburgers for a week and affect that your, you know, expect that your arteries are going to be in better shape because you had one salad.

9:19So doing yoga is like, you know, eating salad for our body basically and for our physiology. The doing things every day creates a habit. The habit changes us physiologically, our brain structure, our nervous system structure. And then what that begins to do is it changes our baseline response to the way we interact with the world around us. So yoga is very much a bottom-up approach to transformation. We start with the body because it's the easiest thing to work with. And in the working with the body, we're accessing the nervous system. We're beginning to make changes to the way that our nervous system responds to internal and external environments, which is what the nervous system does.

10:03It coordinates those two. And then our baseline response changes so that when we come up against a challenging situation, we see it through new eyes. Like, oh, this person used to really annoy me, but now for some reason they don't. Or, oh, this situation used to make me really angry, but now I can take a deep breath. And that only comes from developing the habit of awareness and the habit of working with our body in a particular way. In the beginning, it doesn't need to be every day, two or three days a week. And then little by little, when you really want to get into it, you need to make a commitment.

10:36I always felt that my commitment to practice was similar to a commitment to being in a marriage also. Like, you know, you get married and you're in your marriage every day. And you work on the things when they're difficult and you enjoy the things that are wonderful. And from a commitment you grow and you become the person you are from commitment. The same is true with a spiritual practice. At Goop, we believe the spaces we spend time in shape how we feel and how we connect. That's why we're drawn to Convene, a global hospitality brand reimagining work in meeting spaces centered around design and care.

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11:56Convene for the moments that move your business. I remember always being when I would come to the studio if I was shooting a movie or something and I had to practice at five in the morning. And it was those really special few times where I came in and you were finishing your practice, which I think you started at three o 'clock in the morning or something. And to be able to, you know, without sounding cheesy, like be in the presence of a master like that, who the mastery that you had over your body. And, you know, I would look at you and think, my God, I had no idea that a human body could actually be in that position, but even more so the feeling in the room, it was very powerful.

12:44You know, it was so much, it had transcended the physical part so much. Whatever was going on internally in your practice was something that was really palpable. Yeah, I mean, I certainly have never considered myself to be a master of anything. whenever you're working with your body you even if it looks good from the outside on the inside you know that you're working really hard to pay attention or to be aware and we're not just physical beings and yoga is not just physical because our mind body is a continuum and our emotions express themselves through our body our emotions get held in our body so we're working on a lot of things when we're doing poses but also on another level yoga is very very physical because we use our physical body to access our emotions and our feelings and our mental states and our responsivity to the world.

13:36So we need to, I mean, we think about stuff because we have a form to think of it in. We have a body. If we didn't have a body, we wouldn't be able to think. We wouldn't be able to feel. If there wasn't a world around us, then we wouldn't have a body either. So this thing of having a body shouldn't be discounted by like any spiritual tradition Because we have one, all these other things are happening. I think yoga integrates that somehow. I don't know if that made sense. Absolutely. And do you think that that was by design, that that's, you know, thousands of years ago, that that's what the original yogis were trying to do, find some way to integrate these things or make connections spiritually through the body or process emotion through the body?

14:19I definitely do. I think that's one of the reasons why this is one of the things that led me first to start thinking about the nervous system and about writing the book that I just finished doing, that there's a reason why the yogis use the body. And we all know from the yoga text that the purpose of yoga is enlightenment, spiritual realization, or self-knowledge, knowing who you are, you know, like the capital S. and so I was thinking well why would they use physical poses to achieve something like enlightenment there's got to be a reason for it and so the thing that I came up across basically was that something's happening with the nervous system and there's a certain equilibrium which is occurring in certain structures of the brain like the brain stem and the yogis were using things like restraint of the breath or control of the breath, control of the body, control of diet and food, control of sexuality, control of sleep.

15:24These are all the main things that you see happening in the yoga texts. And how old are these texts? Thousands of years. The practices are thousands of years old. All of those brainstem functions are survival functions, the body automatically keeping us alive. One of the greatest fears that we have in life is the fear of death or the fear of extinction. So we want our body to keep us alive because we don't want to be dead. Now, what happens if for a little while every day I control my breathing? I control my posture and my blood pressure. I control how much I sleep or the food I eat. What happens if I don't eat for a day or two or a few days running?

16:00Who will I be if I don't identify with food? Who will I be if I don't identify with sex? Who will I be if I don't identify with my respiration? Because if we don't breathe for a few seconds or a minute, all of a sudden our body makes us want to breathe. So what they did was they restrained all these survival functions where our identity is tied into. Our identity and our sense of who we are, of existence, is absolutely one and the same as our physiological survival functions. But what they did was they began to restrain these, which allowed them to transcend the narrative that we create of who we think we are, the false narrative of our story, all the constructed stories.

16:45And you feel this when you do yoga is that you begin to transcend and evaporate the constructed stories that aren't making you happy, that aren't leading you towards deeper meaning in your life, but are keeping you locked in this, who do I need to be to please the rest of the world? And that doesn't bring happiness to us or to the world. So they worked with physiological functions to transcend these limited structures that we artificially create to find freedom. And where would they find freedom in these higher levels of brain functioning. And then when there was cohesive brain functioning, that would lead to greater levels of integration of pure consciousness into the entire physiology, transformative.

17:25That was my thinking process of my research, basically. And that's what the book is about, for the most part. The book is called One Simple Thing, A New Look at the Science of Yoga and How It Can Transform Your Life. That's the name of it. And these things are like super, super fascinating to me. So I think that's why the yogis started with postures and with breathing and with restraint. It was to control these, the narratives that are built into our survival function so they could go beyond that. Say, who am I beyond the story I tell about myself? And how do you integrate when being in that state with also being a human being in, you know, traffic and with fast food and problems at work.

18:11And do you, are you able to bring that consciousness into, like, I always find it, I always used to find it a little bit hard to reconcile the two things, like come to practice and feel this incredible integration, feel physically, you know, exhausted slash strong, feel an incredible sense of calm from having gone through the practice, and then go out, you know, onto Spring Street in New York City and sort of get crashed in the face with life again. Go to Krispy Kreme and buy a box of donuts, for example. Oh my God. Remember when one time I was on the street drinking a sports drink after yoga and you were like, what the hell?

18:57It's better than having a cigarette after yoga. Although that is the best cigarette of the day. Your lungs are so open.

19:06There's flows of information and all those things are important. We use yoga to be better integrated into the world. We all are born as the people that we are and we want to express who we are. We all do. Even the yogis who seem to be enlightened beings had their own personalities that they were expressing in different ways. And when you read either Nisargadatta or Ramana Maharshi or Ramakrishna or any of these enlightened sages, they had distinct personalities and they had distinct teachings that went along with these personalities. So I don't think we're not trying to get rid of the person we are.

19:41We're just trying to free ourselves from needing to be that person so it authentically gets, you know, expressed. So we're going to be who we are and we want to express that what we don't want to do is be artificial about who we are and try to be something that we're not i think a lot of what yoga does is it is helping to move things out of the way that are covering up who we really are and you know maybe who i really am is number one consciousness and number two maybe that consciousness is representing itself in this particular form is someone who likes tailored suits and listens to punk rock music like you Exactly.

20:20And so that might just be an expression of this particular incarnation that I am. And so I'll enjoy that. But I also have to remember other things, like to listen to people and to try to be kind. And if I do something wrong, to apologize and live up to the fact that I've made a mistake. Like, all those things have to do with honesty. Honesty is the second limb of yoga, actually. Not causing harm is the first one. And honesty is the second one. So if we look at all of the things that yoga says you should do in order to be authentically, you know, true to yourself, those are the first two things.

20:59Like, try not to hurt people and be honest. Be kind and be honest. If you can do those two things, like if I can do those two things, I think that's pretty good. I'm pretty satisfied. You might have to get Donald Trump doing some yoga. I mean, you know, if he wants to, I'm happy to do some with him. When I was, we put on a conference a few weeks ago on science and yoga conference. And one of the presenters was talking about how having yoga or these types of meditation practices in schools for dealing with bullying, you know. And sometimes you think if the people who are being bullied were doing yoga, they'd be able to deal with it.

21:39And what this woman was saying was, well, if the bullies could do some yoga, that would really change the way that they treat other people. So this is true. I'm not saying Donald Trump is a bully. I'm just saying that, you know, people in positions of great power sometimes need to know how to temper that. But I think you're right. I think that if all of our leaders came into their positions with this kind of consciousness, do no harm. Yeah. Honesty, creating self-awareness. Listening. Listening. Yeah. Being receptive to alternative points of view. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point, because we're at a time when there's, I think in my lifetime, the most resistance to alternative points of view, whichever side you're on, it's like people have become so stuck in that way of perceiving the world and their values, and it's sort of adhering to their values, you know, so both all sides, I feel like people are having a very, very hard time with the listening.

22:43piece. I agree. Totally. Totally. It's a very polarized state of affairs right now. And if you don't agree with someone's view, you're wrong and you're, you know, you're the enemy. So how do you approach it if somebody talks to you about something and you, you, you deeply disagree with their point of view, like as a yogi, what, what consciousness do you bring to that conversation there are things that still push my buttons um like what well um certain views on yoga for example that sometimes i respond a little bit like i'm a little too opinionated on some of my responses so but it's interesting sorry to interrupt but because i remember when i started practicing yoga 20 plus years ago there was such like people were so resistant to the idea of yoga and I remember there being articles about it and negative articles and negative articles about me doing yoga.

23:44Do you remember all that? I do. I thought at the time, wow, it was, I think it was the first time in my life I realized this sort of sideline commentary. And I thought, you know, I still have this sometimes today in my life where I think, well, how can you if you haven't really gotten the knowledge or tried something how can you opine on what it is and i remember that's the easiest way to have a judgment or an opinion is when you know nothing about something exactly why do you think there was so much resistance to yoga 20 years ago and why do you think it's become so popular today i you know i really don't know when I started doing yoga, the only reason you did yoga was because you were on a spiritual quest.

24:31Right. There was no fitness industry. There was no yoga industry. We didn't have yoga mats. There was no yoga clothing. There was no yoga industry. What year was this? This was 1986, 1987, closer to 1987. And I had done some yoga earlier when I was about 15 or so and was kind of profoundly moved by it. But then I didn't take it up as a practice till I was about 19 or so. And how, what was that path? I was working in a record store in Greenwich Village called Bleecker Bob's. And there was a guy working there who had done yoga with a yogi named Amrit Desai. He'd received something called Shaktipat from him, which was like a transference of energy and had a non-dual unity experience of himself and the universe that lasted for weeks.

25:20A what? He saw himself as one with the universe and the universe is one with him. And he lived in this state of consciousness for like for several weeks, he said, you know, not with drugs or anything like that. So he was sort of my first like yoga tutor. But we weren't doing yoga poses like he was giving me books to read. We were talking about philosophy. I became a vegetarian first and tried doing some meditation with him. we were taking a lot of LSD and mushrooms and ecstasy and this was like the the sort of the beginning of that journey and then I was sitting in a um in Washington Square Park one night with my guitar and I had been up all night tripping with Ted and then he went back home and I was still in the park just playing guitar and some guy came up to mean?

26:12We started talking and we got into spiritual topics. Like I didn't know necessarily what spiritual topics were, but we got into that zone of consciousness. And he said, have you ever heard of Ram Dass? And I said, no. And he said, oh, you should check him out because he writes about what you're talking about. So the next afternoon I was walking down West 4th Street and I saw on the church board that Ram Dass was going to be giving a lecture that night. And I thought, oh my God, this is like amazing. So, you know, when you start tapping into those levels of consciousness, synchronicity and things like that begin occurring.

26:45So I went to the lecture and afterwards went up and spoke to Ram Dass and there was light pouring out of his eyes. And I started seeing that all the things I was experiencing from psychedelics could be done with meditation and with yoga. And so I stopped doing drugs completely and went totally straight edge. This was at 19 and just started investigating this yoga thing. And there was only a couple of yoga schools in New York and I went to all the classes that I could, which were just a few times a week, and did it on my own at home in the afternoons and in the morning. And that was how my journey began.

27:18And by the time I was 20, yoga was the only thing that fascinated me. So I went to India. I took a teacher training course in South India and I came back to New York and started teaching yoga at 21. And that was 30 years ago. So there's no yoga industry at all? No, I didn't know you could. Like, I didn't start doing this to be a yoga teacher. I didn't know that I could teach yoga. I thought you had to be enlightened to teach yoga, like literally. Like if you weren't enlightened, you couldn't teach yoga. That's who could teach. So there was no thought of being a yoga teacher back then. And so then what happened?

27:53Then how did you see yoga starting to be popularized? Yoga got popularized, I think, because of some of the celebrity culture that was occurring around the practice. I think that yoga was working its way into the mainstream a little bit, but not a tremendous amount. Martha Stewart did a show on yoga, and I was invited on that show. You might have been practicing by then already anyway, I think. so it was sort of working its way into the mainstream but the way that it was working its way into the mainstream was definitely through quote unquote celebrity and involvement and in downtown New York we happened to be sort of one of the the locust points for that.

28:41I think you were the only one There must have been some stuff going on in California Maybe so, yeah. But I think we had bigger celebrities Yeah, there were some pretty big celebrities I mean, yeah, the school was like pretty insane for a while. But the thing about it was is that you guys, whether, you know, you were there, Madonna or Mike D or Willem Dafoe or all those people, you guys were struggling on your mats like anybody else. So it wasn't like you were at the front of the room and going, hey, look at me. Everyone was like working hard and sweating and being disgusting. There's a very ecumenical kind of a setup to a class like that where if you're not doing the work, you're not going to be there.