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Episode Transcript
The transcript is auto generated. There may be errors in transcription.
Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, Shard Lal. This is episode 39. In today's episode, we dive into the world of yoga to explore life principles we can learn from this ancient art. I'm thrilled to have a special guest with us, Travis Elliot. I discovered Travis's yoga classes during a particularly busy, stressful time in life. We just had a baby girl. Work was demanding and I had no time for yoga, but really needed it. Travis's shot effective classes, relatable stories and calming voice helped me find balance and peace that I didn't think was possible.
Today we talk to Travis on how the principles of yoga can be applied to daily life. Travis is a world renowned yoga and meditation teacher based in la, California. He works with the world stop athletes, celebrities, and entertainers. He's created bestselling yoga DVDs, Written acclaimed books on yoga and his chant album, the Meaning of Soul, debuted at number three on the iTunes World music chart. He's been featured in CNN, Huffington Post, Access Hollywood and More. Travis is inspiring yogis all over the world with the community of over hundred thousand students spread across 95 countries.
Travis is also an entrepreneur. His app, inner Dimension TV is used by folks all over the world. That's how I discovered him. We have a promotion for folks who want to try this app. We'll share details at the end of the podcast. What I love about Travis is that he makes yoga accessible to busy folks.
His programs are as shot as 20 minutes. His stories are relevant to the modern context, and he shares insights that can be used in daily life. In our conversation, Travis and I talk about finding life purpose, the power of storytelling, and how it can enhance yoga or any experience, the ego and how we should deal with it.
Success, and how his view of success has changed with. Fulfilling potential managing stress and a lot more. Whether you are a seasoned yogi or new to this practice, this episode is packed with insights and inspirations on how to live a good life.
But before we get to the interview, thank you very much for your support with your support. Now we listen to in over 95 countries, over 900 cities across the world, and we rank in the top 5% in the world. If you haven't already, please do consider subscribing. You could consider leaving us a rating as well.
Thank you in advance. Now, here's the interview.
Sharad Lal: Hi Travis, welcome to How to Live. How are you doing this evening in la?
Travis Eliot: Doing great. Beautiful sunny day in LA today. Life is good.
Thank you for having me on the podcast.
Sharad Lal: Thank you for making time, Travis.
I've heard your voice doing yoga most mornings. I use the app that you have and I hear you talking to me, and it's a little surreal talking to you in person and having this two-way conversation. Congratulations on all the good work that you've done helping folks live a balanced and meaningful life, and I think a great place to start would be, Travis, what caught you interested in meditation and yoga?
Travis Eliot: that journey really began when I was nine years old. I had a mom that was very spiritual but not religious,
just to give you some context, my mom and dad divorced, so there was a lot going on, a lot of turmoil. I was in the midst of tremendous sadness and grief and adversity and everything that I had known up until that age was really shattered. and meditation practice for me became a way to find healthy solitude and peace within the midst of all that Turmoil also at that young age are not limited with the depths of consciousness that you can access.
You really are much more free I think, when you're a child. So I was able to go to really. Profound states of inner bliss and even visions at times that really began to plant the seeds that would later germinate into finding yoga and becoming a yoga instructor, which didn't happen until I was 26 years old.
So I had been meditating for a few years from about the age of nine until basically I got to high school. And then when I got to high school, like many people in high school I, I explored a completely different path and that involved. Partying and drinking and girls and that continued through college.
So I really took a 180 from that spiritual path for many years. when I eventually discovered yoga at the age of 26. It was like the greatest homecoming that you can imagine. I felt like I was reunited with this kid that I was when I was nine years old, and it felt like the perfect place to be.
And I felt for the first time in many years that I'd come back to wholeness, and I knew from that very first yoga class that I needed to get back to that yoga studio and be on this path as much as possible.
Sharad Lal: What an inspirational story, Travis, you spoke about at the age of nine, you don't have constraints as you do meditation, and Buddhism teaches us the beginner's mind, which a lot of us have to do a lot of unlearning to go back to that stage. To be able to meditate without constraints.
That's really powerful. you At the age of 26. I know you were at LA at the time, at that time you were looking at pursuing a career in acting Was there any event that got yoga back to your life and how did it come?
Travis Eliot: Growing up in North Carolina, eventually I went to school and I was really passionate about all things related to filmmaking. I loved. Everything about it from cinematography to music scoring to acting, I really I really felt like filmmaking was one of the great ultimate expressions of art in modern day society.
And after I graduated college I was working in Wilmington, North Carolina and. Fortunate to get on a really big movie with John Travolta and Vince Vaughn and some other big actors. And after that movie wrapped, I'd worked on that for five months. I moved to Los Angeles to continue to pursue this path in the entertainment business.
But when I got to Los Angeles things. on the outside seemed amazing and fun. Again, more partying, the glitz and the glamor. I lived two blocks from Sunset Boulevard and the whiskey of Go-Go and the Viper Room and all these famous places that I'd seen and heard about in the movies. I was partying and drinking and doing drugs, and it felt like the hole in my soul was just growing larger and bigger I knew deep down inside of me that I was not on a good path. Eventually, I ran out of money and I had to get a job at this hotel, I was working in the banquets department, and this coworker of mine kept talking about yoga, but I had such a stigma as to what yoga was. I. Had a lot of resistance to it.
And I think that this speaks to a lot of men, unfortunately, and males. We think yoga is only for slender females that are super bendy and flexible. And that's how I viewed it. I didn't wanna go, I just didn't think it was the right thing for me. , but luckily this particular coworker kept badgering me over and over again to go.
Took a lot of persistence, but after about a year, I let him drag me to that yoga class. And had it not been for him, I probably wouldn't be here right now.
Sharad Lal: he's done such a service, not only to you, but to so many people who've gained from the experience you got in yoga and then became a teacher. I know many people in this part of the world, Southeast Asia, they remember the tragic tsunami that happened in 2004 in Thailand and I also know you were there during that time.
If you're comfortable talking about it, if you could talk about the experience you had in 2004 in Thailand during the tsunami.
Travis Eliot: Yeah, absolutely. Just to set up that story, in 2004, the year prior to that, in 2003, which is right after I had gone into my very first yoga class, I had gone on a yoga retreat in Kauai. And I had a near death, near drowning experience in the ocean. fortunately there was another participant on the retreat who was a lifeguard in the San Francisco Bay area who saved my life.
So that sets up the stage for a year later. Now I'm in Thailand and I'm also a student on this retreat I'm on this island called Lanta. We're in tropical paradise. It's just gorgeous. It's beautiful. Staying in a beachfront bungalow, don't have to get in a car. I may be able to walk to the yoga shaah, able to walk to the restaurant, get just amazing, fresh, organic food and drinking fresh coconut water.
It was pure heaven. And at the end of that retreat, One of the teachers that lived there invited me to stick around and start teaching yoga, the thought had never even crossed my mind. I was just happy being a student. I never expected to teach this, but when she posed a question to me, it was a pretty easy decision to make because I loved yoga.
I was in tropical paradise. I didn't wanna leave, and this was an excuse to stay. So I started teaching yoga and hadn't done the teacher training, but I just taught from what I knew and the experiences that I had and the passion that I had for yoga, and I think people could feel that. So I'm teaching for about two weeks or so, and then the day after Christmas, December 26th, one day I'm walking back from the road after having been at the internet cafe.
I'm heading towards my beachfront bungalow, and all of a sudden I hear the owner of the resort just screaming that the water's coming, the water's coming. So I quickly ran down to my bungalow and sure enough, the whole ocean. Was slowly surging in, and what really struck me in that moment was how radically different the whole ocean looked from what I had experienced it for those three or four weeks prior to this particular day where it was a very.
Crystal blue, serene ocean, and now all of a sudden it was dark gray and black and choppy, and it's just creeping into the shore, almost like a scene out of a horror movie. So I run to my bungalow, which was up on stilts. And I just start throwing all my stuff as fast as possible into the suitcase.
And after about five minutes of doing that, I ran out to the porch and I was surrounded by the water, surrounded by the ocean. And I didn't know what to do because I didn't really want to stay there. But also, I didn't wanna get into the water, especially after what had happened a year prior when I was in Kauai and almost drown.
but luckily after a couple of minutes, you may have heard the stories of the metaphor of what happened right before the tsunami came. It's almost like somebody pulling a plug out of the bathtub drain. This happened and the whole ocean receded back out, so the ocean receded. I ran down the stairs and I ran up to the top of a hill nearby.
And then several minutes later, the tsunami wave came and completely demolished the resort. and then a second wave came and finished what the the first one had already done. And so in that instant, I was really impacted by the impermanence of all things. One paradise had been flipped upside down into hell.
To this resort. This restaurant that I had eaten in for many days was completely gone. I ran up to the road. I hopped into the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of strangers and they drove me to the very highest point on the island cuz we had no idea what was happening. There was no police, there's no tv, there's no news.
We were completely clueless and in the dark, but when we got on top of the island, we started to talk to other people we began to find out that there was a huge earthquake. this had triggered tsunami waves all across that part of the world, and unfortunately caused tremendous suffering and and death and destruction.
as you can imagine, that really. Really changed my life. It, it put into perspective what had begun with my experience in Kauai, which is that life is really short and we never know when our time is going to be up. for me, I was struck with the fierce reality that I was investing my time and energy in, in a lot of the wrong places.
Such as materialism the ego, and in these moments of coming really close to dying, the only thing that I thought about was the people that I had loved in my life, the people that had loved me, and how I wouldn't get to say goodbye to any of these people. And that was it. If we can wake up to that realization now and invest our energy into the things that really do matter, That's going to put us on a completely different path and a completely different trajectory than the path of getting swept up within the illusion that happiness is gonna come through these physical things and come from the voice of the ego. So I made a pledge that very day on top of that mountain on Cota that I would dedicate the rest of my. teaching yoga and meditation to as many people as possible, that I would not let anything stop me. And from that day, I've been on that mission and here we are.
Sharad Lal: Wow, Travis, that is such an inspirational story. Thank you very much for this is getting a little goosebumps and emotional as you were talking. Thank you very much for describing that story and. I can see as I'm looking at you, how deep that motivation was, and with that motivation that clarity of your mission in life when you came back to la, how did you start structuring your life?
To accomplish the mission that you'd like to do?
Travis Eliot: It was intimidating. It's like standing in front of Mount Everest and saying, you know, , all right,, we have the mission. Now how are we gonna do it? This is really where the hard work comes into play. It's like at the beginning of having a goal and getting into any endeavor in life, whether it's starting a business or setting a goal to do something for your own health, the beginning is the hardest part, because you have to create the momentum.
So this is why we have to know our why, and I found my why on top of that island, because when you lose your why, you lose your way. But when you know your why, you never lose your way. So I started teaching to 1, 2, 3 people in a dojo, a Japanese dojo in West Los Angeles. And I remember also doing an event for a benefit for the tsunami where I invited people to come and all the money that was generated from that event I could donate to the survivors of the tsunami.
And I think there were only 12 people there, but my normal classes again, were very small. But I didn't care. I was so happy to be on this path. Concurrent to that, I was back at the hotel, but I had. Graduated from working in the banquets department to being a valet because of the valets, made more money than the banquet department.
And also I could be in these automobiles, parking cars, and I could be saying mantras and affirmations and envisioning this reality that I wanted to create for myself. So it was really exciting times where I. Making that transition from still needing to pay my bills, but also getting my feet wet into teaching yoga.
as I was teaching in the Japanese Dojo, my teacher that I'd studied with, a gentleman by the name of Govin das, he invited me to start substituting his classes when he traveled. And he had a really big following and a great following. So I would go in there. I would teach for him. He eventually wanted to get rid of some of his classes and he was able to talk to the owner into giving me the classes, even though there were a lot of other senior teachers.
And it really was an experience where it felt like I was on this path where, it involved a lot of work, a tremendous amount of work, but it also felt like the doors were just swinging open like I was meant to be on this path. And one thing led to another where I got the classes and then I was able to teach in a setting where we taught everything for donation, which was a beautiful experience to be a part of because we could really share yoga with as many people as possible.
And the thing about donation yoga is you take the class and then at the end of the class, you drop your donation into the box and there's a suggested donation, which back then I think was 10 or $12. Now it's like 20. But if you're good at what you do, , you get more people and you get more money in the box, and it actually ends up being the best financial game in town as a yoga instructor because of the traditional yoga model, the owners don't really pay the teachers that well.
So I was quickly able to leave the hotel permanently and be able to support myself and my family all off of donation yoga. that's how it all be.
Sharad Lal: you're talking about donation yoga, where people have an experience and they leave money, and I think a large part of that would be on how good you were as a teacher. I've had the good fortune of being coached, being trained by many teacher.
In real time as well as virtually. And what I find very powerful and unique about you is the storytelling style with yoga. So as you talk people through poses, you talk through stories that deepens their practice. And I was wondering if you're conscious about that. Did that come from your filmmaking experience?
And how does, how have you seen that elevate the experience of people that you work?
Travis Eliot: That's a great question and thank you for posing it. I'm just remembering that when I started teaching yoga, . I wasn't trained, so I wasn't so good with the anatomy and the alignment. So I really had to start in the beginning with the stories and with what I now call the holistic elements, the philosophy of yoga and this commentary that really is above and beyond the how to do a yoga pose.
So from the very beginning, that was the thing I think that carried me through until eventually I could go and get the proper training and education to level up the alignment with that. And as, Continue down the path of teaching. I would just get feedback. Your students will always tell you what's working and what's not working, and people would often come up to me at the end of a class or maybe even a few days after the class, and they may not even remember the sequence or they may not even remember the poses.
But the thing that they do remember is is the story that you told because the story is what bridges what happens on your yoga mat. And into your life, and this is really important to me. There are a lot of people that go and they act like angels on their yoga mat, and then the moment they leave their yoga mat and they go out into the world, they turn into the devil, they turn into an asshole and
And so it's really important that we take. These benevolent qualities that we strengthen on our mat and we bring that forth into our career, our relationships, and everything that we do. I can't remember who said it, but it really struck me and it was something along the lines that the world, as it made of Adams.
It's made of stories and from the very origin in the very beginning of humanity. It's all about the story. It's all about the story, and that's why the greatest teachers that have ever watched Planet Earth have used story. And metaphor poems analogy as a way to take somebody from one level of consciousness to a whole other level of consciousness.
So for me, the storytelling aspect to the yoga class is very important because it, it becomes a vehicle for wisdom. , it becomes a vehicle of real, practical, useful information that somebody can bring with them into their life, and that's a beautiful thing.
Sharad Lal: Absolutely agree. With my personal experience, when I'm doing yoga in the morning and listening to you talking the poses and talking the story, you somehow know what is needed. You talk about here, you're thinking about work right now. You have these stresses. This is the way to think about it.
This is what life is. And I guess they're fairly generic, but they're also specific to a certain type of people, maybe people who have busy lives. So I was wondering if you've given more thought to the types of stories and how you've evolved it over time.
Travis Eliot: Yeah, I think that a lot. The great stories are universal. Their messages are really applicable to, to everybody. It's a shared humanity, so some people collect coins, some people collect baseball cards. I now collect stories and I have a whole library of stories, I've also learned over time that there are these recurring themes. Theme may be silence or awakening or challenge or forgiveness, certain stories align with a certain theme. And when I go to create a yoga class or a yoga experience or yoga program, I'm always thinking about a theme. And the theme is like a thread of a necklace. And then you take these beads and you put it on the necklace.
So the beads may be a story, it may be a quote, it may be the poses and the sequences. It may be something from yoga philosophy. And all these beads are woven through this one single thread. and that creates this truly thematic experience so that somebody like yourself, when they're doing the class, whatever that theme is what you really feel, and you really feel it on a deep level.
When I teach yoga, I'm always thinking, teaching to not just the physical body. The physical body is very important, and the physical body for most of us is what gets us started within a yoga practice. But there's also these other dimensions. So I'm thinking about not just the body, but I'm also thinking about energy.
I'm thinking about in yoga, what we call prana or the chalon monks called Chi, and we can influence that energy. Different breathwork practices or what we call prana, yama, and yoga. I'm also thinking about the mind. Sometimes I'll bring in a study or some sort of a research thing or some information so that students are getting fed information into their brain.
I'm thinking about the heart because the heart is where we carry the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows of life. It's also where we carry the unfinished business of the heart, the past traumas and the past dramas. So if we really wanna awaken and transform, we have to address these deeper dimensions beyond the heart.
We also have awareness, or what's sometimes described as. Witness consciousness. And then at the very, very source and essence of all of that we could call it spirit or soul or source energy, but also addressing that. And from my experience, when you address all of those six dimensions, Then the human being is able to fulfill, to ignite their potential.
But if you're just focused on the body and maybe you're at a certain stage of your life where you don't want to hear all the other stuff, you're not ready for all the other stuff, that's fine. But it's just one dimension. It's just one slice of the pie. And what I'm trying to do is give everybody the whole entire.
Sharad Lal: So I'd love to hear if you've, if any specific example comes to mind where the transformative power of yoga, the way you described it, has helped you or some of your student make like a tangible difference in their life.
Travis Eliot: I've been fortunate to work with people from all over the world entertainers musicians, actors, celebrities Professional baseball players, football players, special forces, army Rangers, Navy Seals, Delta Force, and people in prison. when I think about the. Most transformative story. I can't help but come back to this particular individual in the prison system here in the United States that I've had the opportunity of meeting a few times and working with this gentleman by the name of Mike Bailey.
Mike, the first thing you notice when you see him is that he had, he has the word war tattooed across his. And the A is an anarchy sign. And then down the side of his face, along his entire cheek is a huge, massive scar. And when I went into the prison system, he came up to me and immediately shared a story, which was, He was labeled as the most misbehaved inmate in this entire prison population of a thousand men.
This is a maximum security prison where you have murderers, you have rapists, you have all sorts of violent crime people that are in there, it's a rough place. And so he. By his own admission was the worst of the worst. So they threw him in solitary confinement at one point cuz they didn't know what to do with him.
And by that point he was at his wits end. He was ready to give up on life. He grabbed the razor blade and he tried to slice the artery on the side of his throat. And when that didn't work, he took the razor blade and he swallowed it, trying to kill himself, just trying to end it all. They rushed him to a hospital nearby and luckily were able to save his life, and after he was stabilized, they brought him back to his cell in Solit.
But this time while he had been in the hospital, they had made a new addition in his cell on the wall. They had inserted a TV screen behind protective, bulletproof glass, and dangling from that was a computer mouse. So naturally he went to go explore what was on this computer screen. And as he's searching, he comes across one of my yoga programs program I made about 11 years ago called the Ultimate Yogi, which is 108 day program. he just picked a random class, which happened to be a yin yoga class. And he said in the middle of that class, he had this huge awakening. He had never heard languaging like, make your mind your best friend. That you are the creator of your own reality. You are the creator of your own destiny.
That in the present moment you could begin to shape your future by letting go of what's happened. In the past, he'd never heard of any of this. He had only grown up in a system, in an environment of violence and neglect and abuse. So the complete opposite. So he knew right then and there that following.
He was gonna go and he was gonna do this entire 108 day program. Now he didn't have a yoga mat, he didn't have any yoga props, so he took a razor blade and he etched in the floor of his cell, a two by se six foot rectangular shape. That was a shape of a yoga mat. And in the videos at the top of each mat, we would carve in the word ul.
and he did the same. So at the top of his concrete yoga mat, he carved in that word ultimate, and he proceeded to move through the program. And halfway through the program, the guards are telling me this, and the warden's telling me this too, that they didn't even recognize this guy. Like he was completely transformed.
Completely different. And then he gets to like day 91 or something They're ready to take 'em out of solitary and put 'em back into gp, what's known as general population, and for the first time in this prison's history. An inmate begged to stay in solitary confinement because he wanted to stay there and he wanted to finish the hundred eight day program.
He said that his cell turned into a cave in the Himalayan Mountains, and in that cave he had the greatest awaken. And so eventually he successfully completed the 108 day program and they released him into general population, and then he begged the staff to bring in an outside company that could start to do yoga teacher trainings.
They went out because they believed in the power of yoga. They brought in this company that started to certify these men in prison. They found out about me through the inmates. They invited myself and my wife Lauren, to come out there and teach. And to this day you now know that in the darkest of places, yoga has brought the greatest of light.
Sharad Lal: Travis I was getting very emotional while we were talking that story. That is such an inspirational story and. Many of us may not have had as extreme an experience and transformation as this young man had, but some of us have felt that spirituality, something special happening and seeing this happen to this person where his life turned completely around is such, such an inspirational story.
So thank you very much for sharing that. As people have some of these experiences. During yoga which are powerful, how do you help guide them to take it to a certain place where they follow their path? How do they take it from the mat to their real life and how do you help guide them through that?
Travis Eliot: One way is through the stories that we talked about earlier. Those are the things that I think are looping in the back of your head, and that's a teaching technique that helps us to bridge the gap between practice and life. And by the way, you get to a certain point within your yoga practice where you start to realize, That these two rivers that seem to be separated and running parallel to each other, the river of your practice and the river of your life, eventually you get to a place where these two converge together and you realize that there is no difference between your yoga practice and your life you just start to.
Not just do yoga on your yoga mat, but you really do yoga every moment of your life. Yoga infuses and pervades into every nook and cranny of your humanity and all that you do in the best of ways. And so it's inevitable. That if you stay on that path, that is going to happen. You don't have to make it happen.
It will come. Patabi Joyce, a great yogi from India who created Ashtanga yoga, used to say, practice and all is coming. You just have to show up. There's a great quote too by the Buddha that says, there's only two mistakes that you can make on this path. One is not getting started and two, not going all the.
Sharad Lal: picking on that, where you talked about not going all the way, many people sometimes get started but life comes in the way and it becomes difficult to continue with the practice. And there's travel, there demands, there's relationship. How have you guided people through those realities of life to continue with some sort of a practice so that they can find the peace they're looking.
Travis Eliot: This is one of the reasons why we do yoga classes that are only 10 minutes . Everybody's at different phases of their life, and we should never feel like if we're a new mom. Or maybe we have a loved one who is transitioning to the end of their life. They should never feel like they're flunking.
The test of being a yogi, if they're not practicing 60 or 90 minutes a day, I think that 10 minutes a day is better than zero minutes a day. there's always something out there that anybody can go and do, as long as they have at least 10 minutes, or maybe one day you just do a five minute meditation or two minute breath practice while you're in your car and you're getting ready to go into a meeting or you're getting ready to go to the office or whatever getting on an airplane.
Or you can even. Do it in as little as three breaths. The idea behind yoga practice is that it's not just a physical practice. It originally was created as a science for the mind, which is right in alignment with mindfulness and many of the other great ancient traditions,
but I always say to people, if you really want to know if your yoga practice is working, Stop doing it for six months and see what happens. Because usually what happens is your life begins to fall apart.
Sharad Lal: Travis, I can say if you stop doing it for seven days as well. I like sometime when I go on a holiday and I can't do it, I feel the impact of it. I'm more restless, I'm more on the edge.
As we were talking, some of the themes in yoga one of the things that people sometimes suffer right now is stress and anxiety and burnout, and people are working really hard, so how can they use yoga? To find some balance to find some peace in their life.
Travis Eliot: Stress arises when you're here, but you wanna be there. When you're in this situation, but you wanna be in this other situation.
And a lot of people live their entire lives that way, where wherever they are, they're thinking about the next thing and the next place that they have to get to. Anxiety arises when the mind is always projecting into the future about the what ifs and the fears of what if this happens? That as Mark Twain so beautifully said, my life is full of terrible misfortunes.
Most of which never happened. So fear, very often it's there to help keep us alive and there's a certain degree of fear that we need, but it can also, when it becomes imbalance, create things like anxiety. By the way, depression arises when we go the other direction, when we're stuck in the past, and we're always ruminating on this event that happened in our past and we're in that pattern or that endless loop where this thing is just cycling over and over again about somebody did something to me and I'm the victim.
What is the antidote to stress and anxiety and depression? The antidote from a yoga perspective is again, presence. What do we do when we get onto our yoga mat? Your yoga mat is the training ground. What do we do when we meditate? When you're sitting on your meditation cushion, when you're sitting in your meditation practice, that is your training ground, what you're doing.
on your mat, on your meditation cushion is you're strengthening and training certain qualities. You're planting certain seeds and you're either planting seeds or you're growing weeds. You're growing weeds. When you're in stress and anxiety and fear and worry, you're letting the weeds take over the garden of your mind, which then takes over the garden of your.
But presence allows us to intentionally plant seeds of benevolence, seeds, like presence, seeds, like joy, peace, equanimity, deep listening. And first, you have to do that with yourself. You have to experience it yourself. You have to give back to yourself. and then you can start to bring that into your relationships.
If we want to eradicate stress and anxiety, it's always gonna be about coming back to the present moment.
That could be being present on your breath, present within sensation within your body, or it could be presence within just being aware of these thoughts that are moving through the sky of your awareness.
Sharad Lal: I think that gets better with practice of whether you do deep breathing to center yourself or whether you're conscious of what's happening that gets built with practice, back to you Travis. You've achieved tremendous success as a yoga teacher, what have been some of the most important lessons that you've learned of success through this process, and how's your perspective on success changed over the last 15, 20 years?
Travis Eliot: Success to me is when somebody fulfills their potential human potential. That is true success. That is true Greatness. Success isn't about confusing your net worth with your self worth. A lot of times in society we have these programs that have been given to us and I had the same program and it took these two.
Traumatic experiences to really help me see into the matrix of the conditioning that I was brought up in, which is about having the certain job and having the certain income and the salary and the house and the car and the wardrobe and then the right neighborhood. And there's nothing wrong with those things unless they start owning you and ruling you.
So me, It's really about the purity of the why, the intention. And when this all started in Lanta and Thailand, it was about being of service, of serving people by serving yoga and meditation and these ancient wisdom to as many people as possible. And anytime that I deviate from that, anytime.
The ego gets in there and starts to think about doing things for money or status or followers on social media or whatever it is. I'm now so attuned to my own heart and guidance system that I can feel. A violation of purpose or what we call dharma within the physiology of my body. And so that's a guiding system one of the most tragic things is we could be hustling through life and we could be grinding through life.
And we're climbing the success ladder. And then we finally get to the top and we realize the ladder was on the wrong wall. So we have to make sure our striving and the goals and the ambition that we have in life is not coming from the ego because, it comes from the ego because when you get whatever you wanted or you achieve the goal that you wanted, you feel empty.
you don't really feel fulfilled, and that's how you know that it was an egoic why or an egoic intention. But when it comes from your heart and it comes from your soul, and it comes from being of service, when you get the thing or you achieve the thing, you feel so deeply fulfilled. I'll never forget walking out of prison.
With my wife, Lauren, after that first day, we were teaching all day. Didn't have a break the entire day, but it's a day that I'll never forget because we didn't go there for money. We just went there to be of service. And although the men said that they greatly benefited, we benefited just as much from that interaction of being with.
Sharad Lal: Very powerful Travis. And You're fortunate to be very strongly in touch with yourself, that you can see a physiological force that tells you that, hey, something's going wrong, and then you change path and ground yourself.
For people starting out who are not as evolved as you, what are some things we can do? We figure out that, hey, we are going away from our path, our ego is taking over.
Travis Eliot: The first thing is to just take a moment to pause because usually we're so wrapped up within the rat race of life. That the waves of the mind and yoga, these are called chite, riti, chitas mind, and riti is wave or fluctuation. So if you have a lake with a lot of disturbance on the surface you have no clarity because the mud is kicked up everything within the lake.
But when you pause and you allow the dust and you allow the mud to settle, and you allow chite and the mine waves to begin to settle, then you start to create clarity. And when you have clarity, then you have clear seeing. Which is one definition of meditation or VA pasta meditation is to see things as they are.
So then once we have clarity and we can see things as they are, we're able to discern, am I on this path because of my ego, or am I on this path because of wisdom? Am I dominated by ego and vanity? And conditioning of upbringing, or am I dominated by wisdom to be able to look within, to connect within? that's a really big deal because when you allow the ego to initiate what you do, that creates a certain chain of events or karma that inevitably leads to suffer.
So a lot of times when you're suffering and things don't feel right, they don't feel right in your guts. Things just seem to be falling apart. Nothing's clicking. A lot of times that's indicative that you've gone off the path. When you're on the path of dharma and purpose and wisdom. It's not that the challenges necessarily go away, but you feel through it all that you have.
The support of the universe behind your back and that even though you may need to climb up the mountains and move through the adversity of certain weather patterns, that you will be able to persevere because you're doing it from a deeper place and you're doing it for the benefit of other people.
Sharad Lal: Absolutely Travis. Before we end, what's the one piece of advice that you'd like to give to folks who are either on the fence about yoga or deepening their practice?
Travis Eliot: One piece of advice is to to have a vision for what it is that you wanna be. To also understand that you're already, as one's Zen master, put it perfect the way that you are, and yet there's still room for improvement. Sometimes we can fall into that mentality of, oh, I need to perfect myself and I need to go to yoga and I need to do therapy, and I need to go on the diet and I need to do this.
And we turn our spiritual and our wellbeing practices into something that becomes polluted by vanity and ego again. so it's that recognition of what is it that you want to. To be honest with yourself, where are you stifling your own potential? Because the more that you can awaken that potential, the more happy, the more joyful, the more fulfilled you will be.
Sharad Lal: Before we go, Travis, one very last question that we ask everyone at the end of your life, how would you know you've lived a good life?
Travis Eliot: It would be a question of did I live well and did I love well? And if the question was yes to both of those, I would have to say mission accomplished.
Sharad Lal: Thank you, Travis. You are already doing that in such a large way. You're making such a huge impact to people. People who you don't know in different parts of the world are listening to your voice and getting so much of clarity. So thank you for all the service you're doing. Thank you for taking our time to speak with us and wish you all the very best.
Travis Eliot: Thank you Sharad, for having me on your podcast and helping to spread the message. It's been a true honor to connect with you and I hope that I get to see you virtually through a yoga class online soon.
Thank you, Travis, for such an inspirational and moving conversation. For folks interested in practicing yoga and meditation with Travis, you can download the Inner Dimension TV app. and use the code How to Live to get a one month free trial.
Details are in the show description as well as the show notes. This could be the action step for today, downloading and using it free for one month. Full disclosure, the How to Live Podcast does. Any money from Travis on this. It's just that we've had a great experience using this and would love for others to try this.
If you're new to yoga, there are many basic sequences to get started with. For busy folks, they're all types of classes with 15 minutes, 20 minute classes as well. For seasoned yogis, you can enjoy the storytelling and see how it deepens your practice. All the best. That's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it.
We'll be back for another episode two weeks from now on April 25th. Hope you join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.
The transcript is auto generated. There may be errors in transcription.
Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, Shard Lal. This is episode 39. In today's episode, we dive into the world of yoga to explore life principles we can learn from this ancient art. I'm thrilled to have a special guest with us, Travis Elliot. I discovered Travis's yoga classes during a particularly busy, stressful time in life. We just had a baby girl. Work was demanding and I had no time for yoga, but really needed it. Travis's shot effective classes, relatable stories and calming voice helped me find balance and peace that I didn't think was possible.
Today we talk to Travis on how the principles of yoga can be applied to daily life. Travis is a world renowned yoga and meditation teacher based in la, California. He works with the world stop athletes, celebrities, and entertainers. He's created bestselling yoga DVDs, Written acclaimed books on yoga and his chant album, the Meaning of Soul, debuted at number three on the iTunes World music chart. He's been featured in CNN, Huffington Post, Access Hollywood and More. Travis is inspiring yogis all over the world with the community of over hundred thousand students spread across 95 countries.
Travis is also an entrepreneur. His app, inner Dimension TV is used by folks all over the world. That's how I discovered him. We have a promotion for folks who want to try this app. We'll share details at the end of the podcast. What I love about Travis is that he makes yoga accessible to busy folks.
His programs are as shot as 20 minutes. His stories are relevant to the modern context, and he shares insights that can be used in daily life. In our conversation, Travis and I talk about finding life purpose, the power of storytelling, and how it can enhance yoga or any experience, the ego and how we should deal with it.
Success, and how his view of success has changed with. Fulfilling potential managing stress and a lot more. Whether you are a seasoned yogi or new to this practice, this episode is packed with insights and inspirations on how to live a good life.
But before we get to the interview, thank you very much for your support with your support. Now we listen to in over 95 countries, over 900 cities across the world, and we rank in the top 5% in the world. If you haven't already, please do consider subscribing. You could consider leaving us a rating as well.
Thank you in advance. Now, here's the interview.
Sharad Lal: Hi Travis, welcome to How to Live. How are you doing this evening in la?
Travis Eliot: Doing great. Beautiful sunny day in LA today. Life is good.
Thank you for having me on the podcast.
Sharad Lal: Thank you for making time, Travis.
I've heard your voice doing yoga most mornings. I use the app that you have and I hear you talking to me, and it's a little surreal talking to you in person and having this two-way conversation. Congratulations on all the good work that you've done helping folks live a balanced and meaningful life, and I think a great place to start would be, Travis, what caught you interested in meditation and yoga?
Travis Eliot: that journey really began when I was nine years old. I had a mom that was very spiritual but not religious,
just to give you some context, my mom and dad divorced, so there was a lot going on, a lot of turmoil. I was in the midst of tremendous sadness and grief and adversity and everything that I had known up until that age was really shattered. and meditation practice for me became a way to find healthy solitude and peace within the midst of all that Turmoil also at that young age are not limited with the depths of consciousness that you can access.
You really are much more free I think, when you're a child. So I was able to go to really. Profound states of inner bliss and even visions at times that really began to plant the seeds that would later germinate into finding yoga and becoming a yoga instructor, which didn't happen until I was 26 years old.
So I had been meditating for a few years from about the age of nine until basically I got to high school. And then when I got to high school, like many people in high school I, I explored a completely different path and that involved. Partying and drinking and girls and that continued through college.
So I really took a 180 from that spiritual path for many years. when I eventually discovered yoga at the age of 26. It was like the greatest homecoming that you can imagine. I felt like I was reunited with this kid that I was when I was nine years old, and it felt like the perfect place to be.
And I felt for the first time in many years that I'd come back to wholeness, and I knew from that very first yoga class that I needed to get back to that yoga studio and be on this path as much as possible.
Sharad Lal: What an inspirational story, Travis, you spoke about at the age of nine, you don't have constraints as you do meditation, and Buddhism teaches us the beginner's mind, which a lot of us have to do a lot of unlearning to go back to that stage. To be able to meditate without constraints.
That's really powerful. you At the age of 26. I know you were at LA at the time, at that time you were looking at pursuing a career in acting Was there any event that got yoga back to your life and how did it come?
Travis Eliot: Growing up in North Carolina, eventually I went to school and I was really passionate about all things related to filmmaking. I loved. Everything about it from cinematography to music scoring to acting, I really I really felt like filmmaking was one of the great ultimate expressions of art in modern day society.
And after I graduated college I was working in Wilmington, North Carolina and. Fortunate to get on a really big movie with John Travolta and Vince Vaughn and some other big actors. And after that movie wrapped, I'd worked on that for five months. I moved to Los Angeles to continue to pursue this path in the entertainment business.
But when I got to Los Angeles things. on the outside seemed amazing and fun. Again, more partying, the glitz and the glamor. I lived two blocks from Sunset Boulevard and the whiskey of Go-Go and the Viper Room and all these famous places that I'd seen and heard about in the movies. I was partying and drinking and doing drugs, and it felt like the hole in my soul was just growing larger and bigger I knew deep down inside of me that I was not on a good path. Eventually, I ran out of money and I had to get a job at this hotel, I was working in the banquets department, and this coworker of mine kept talking about yoga, but I had such a stigma as to what yoga was. I. Had a lot of resistance to it.
And I think that this speaks to a lot of men, unfortunately, and males. We think yoga is only for slender females that are super bendy and flexible. And that's how I viewed it. I didn't wanna go, I just didn't think it was the right thing for me. , but luckily this particular coworker kept badgering me over and over again to go.
Took a lot of persistence, but after about a year, I let him drag me to that yoga class. And had it not been for him, I probably wouldn't be here right now.
Sharad Lal: he's done such a service, not only to you, but to so many people who've gained from the experience you got in yoga and then became a teacher. I know many people in this part of the world, Southeast Asia, they remember the tragic tsunami that happened in 2004 in Thailand and I also know you were there during that time.
If you're comfortable talking about it, if you could talk about the experience you had in 2004 in Thailand during the tsunami.
Travis Eliot: Yeah, absolutely. Just to set up that story, in 2004, the year prior to that, in 2003, which is right after I had gone into my very first yoga class, I had gone on a yoga retreat in Kauai. And I had a near death, near drowning experience in the ocean. fortunately there was another participant on the retreat who was a lifeguard in the San Francisco Bay area who saved my life.
So that sets up the stage for a year later. Now I'm in Thailand and I'm also a student on this retreat I'm on this island called Lanta. We're in tropical paradise. It's just gorgeous. It's beautiful. Staying in a beachfront bungalow, don't have to get in a car. I may be able to walk to the yoga shaah, able to walk to the restaurant, get just amazing, fresh, organic food and drinking fresh coconut water.
It was pure heaven. And at the end of that retreat, One of the teachers that lived there invited me to stick around and start teaching yoga, the thought had never even crossed my mind. I was just happy being a student. I never expected to teach this, but when she posed a question to me, it was a pretty easy decision to make because I loved yoga.
I was in tropical paradise. I didn't wanna leave, and this was an excuse to stay. So I started teaching yoga and hadn't done the teacher training, but I just taught from what I knew and the experiences that I had and the passion that I had for yoga, and I think people could feel that. So I'm teaching for about two weeks or so, and then the day after Christmas, December 26th, one day I'm walking back from the road after having been at the internet cafe.
I'm heading towards my beachfront bungalow, and all of a sudden I hear the owner of the resort just screaming that the water's coming, the water's coming. So I quickly ran down to my bungalow and sure enough, the whole ocean. Was slowly surging in, and what really struck me in that moment was how radically different the whole ocean looked from what I had experienced it for those three or four weeks prior to this particular day where it was a very.
Crystal blue, serene ocean, and now all of a sudden it was dark gray and black and choppy, and it's just creeping into the shore, almost like a scene out of a horror movie. So I run to my bungalow, which was up on stilts. And I just start throwing all my stuff as fast as possible into the suitcase.
And after about five minutes of doing that, I ran out to the porch and I was surrounded by the water, surrounded by the ocean. And I didn't know what to do because I didn't really want to stay there. But also, I didn't wanna get into the water, especially after what had happened a year prior when I was in Kauai and almost drown.
but luckily after a couple of minutes, you may have heard the stories of the metaphor of what happened right before the tsunami came. It's almost like somebody pulling a plug out of the bathtub drain. This happened and the whole ocean receded back out, so the ocean receded. I ran down the stairs and I ran up to the top of a hill nearby.
And then several minutes later, the tsunami wave came and completely demolished the resort. and then a second wave came and finished what the the first one had already done. And so in that instant, I was really impacted by the impermanence of all things. One paradise had been flipped upside down into hell.
To this resort. This restaurant that I had eaten in for many days was completely gone. I ran up to the road. I hopped into the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of strangers and they drove me to the very highest point on the island cuz we had no idea what was happening. There was no police, there's no tv, there's no news.
We were completely clueless and in the dark, but when we got on top of the island, we started to talk to other people we began to find out that there was a huge earthquake. this had triggered tsunami waves all across that part of the world, and unfortunately caused tremendous suffering and and death and destruction.
as you can imagine, that really. Really changed my life. It, it put into perspective what had begun with my experience in Kauai, which is that life is really short and we never know when our time is going to be up. for me, I was struck with the fierce reality that I was investing my time and energy in, in a lot of the wrong places.
Such as materialism the ego, and in these moments of coming really close to dying, the only thing that I thought about was the people that I had loved in my life, the people that had loved me, and how I wouldn't get to say goodbye to any of these people. And that was it. If we can wake up to that realization now and invest our energy into the things that really do matter, That's going to put us on a completely different path and a completely different trajectory than the path of getting swept up within the illusion that happiness is gonna come through these physical things and come from the voice of the ego. So I made a pledge that very day on top of that mountain on Cota that I would dedicate the rest of my. teaching yoga and meditation to as many people as possible, that I would not let anything stop me. And from that day, I've been on that mission and here we are.
Sharad Lal: Wow, Travis, that is such an inspirational story. Thank you very much for this is getting a little goosebumps and emotional as you were talking. Thank you very much for describing that story and. I can see as I'm looking at you, how deep that motivation was, and with that motivation that clarity of your mission in life when you came back to la, how did you start structuring your life?
To accomplish the mission that you'd like to do?
Travis Eliot: It was intimidating. It's like standing in front of Mount Everest and saying, you know, , all right,, we have the mission. Now how are we gonna do it? This is really where the hard work comes into play. It's like at the beginning of having a goal and getting into any endeavor in life, whether it's starting a business or setting a goal to do something for your own health, the beginning is the hardest part, because you have to create the momentum.
So this is why we have to know our why, and I found my why on top of that island, because when you lose your why, you lose your way. But when you know your why, you never lose your way. So I started teaching to 1, 2, 3 people in a dojo, a Japanese dojo in West Los Angeles. And I remember also doing an event for a benefit for the tsunami where I invited people to come and all the money that was generated from that event I could donate to the survivors of the tsunami.
And I think there were only 12 people there, but my normal classes again, were very small. But I didn't care. I was so happy to be on this path. Concurrent to that, I was back at the hotel, but I had. Graduated from working in the banquets department to being a valet because of the valets, made more money than the banquet department.
And also I could be in these automobiles, parking cars, and I could be saying mantras and affirmations and envisioning this reality that I wanted to create for myself. So it was really exciting times where I. Making that transition from still needing to pay my bills, but also getting my feet wet into teaching yoga.
as I was teaching in the Japanese Dojo, my teacher that I'd studied with, a gentleman by the name of Govin das, he invited me to start substituting his classes when he traveled. And he had a really big following and a great following. So I would go in there. I would teach for him. He eventually wanted to get rid of some of his classes and he was able to talk to the owner into giving me the classes, even though there were a lot of other senior teachers.
And it really was an experience where it felt like I was on this path where, it involved a lot of work, a tremendous amount of work, but it also felt like the doors were just swinging open like I was meant to be on this path. And one thing led to another where I got the classes and then I was able to teach in a setting where we taught everything for donation, which was a beautiful experience to be a part of because we could really share yoga with as many people as possible.
And the thing about donation yoga is you take the class and then at the end of the class, you drop your donation into the box and there's a suggested donation, which back then I think was 10 or $12. Now it's like 20. But if you're good at what you do, , you get more people and you get more money in the box, and it actually ends up being the best financial game in town as a yoga instructor because of the traditional yoga model, the owners don't really pay the teachers that well.
So I was quickly able to leave the hotel permanently and be able to support myself and my family all off of donation yoga. that's how it all be.
Sharad Lal: you're talking about donation yoga, where people have an experience and they leave money, and I think a large part of that would be on how good you were as a teacher. I've had the good fortune of being coached, being trained by many teacher.
In real time as well as virtually. And what I find very powerful and unique about you is the storytelling style with yoga. So as you talk people through poses, you talk through stories that deepens their practice. And I was wondering if you're conscious about that. Did that come from your filmmaking experience?
And how does, how have you seen that elevate the experience of people that you work?
Travis Eliot: That's a great question and thank you for posing it. I'm just remembering that when I started teaching yoga, . I wasn't trained, so I wasn't so good with the anatomy and the alignment. So I really had to start in the beginning with the stories and with what I now call the holistic elements, the philosophy of yoga and this commentary that really is above and beyond the how to do a yoga pose.
So from the very beginning, that was the thing I think that carried me through until eventually I could go and get the proper training and education to level up the alignment with that. And as, Continue down the path of teaching. I would just get feedback. Your students will always tell you what's working and what's not working, and people would often come up to me at the end of a class or maybe even a few days after the class, and they may not even remember the sequence or they may not even remember the poses.
But the thing that they do remember is is the story that you told because the story is what bridges what happens on your yoga mat. And into your life, and this is really important to me. There are a lot of people that go and they act like angels on their yoga mat, and then the moment they leave their yoga mat and they go out into the world, they turn into the devil, they turn into an asshole and
And so it's really important that we take. These benevolent qualities that we strengthen on our mat and we bring that forth into our career, our relationships, and everything that we do. I can't remember who said it, but it really struck me and it was something along the lines that the world, as it made of Adams.
It's made of stories and from the very origin in the very beginning of humanity. It's all about the story. It's all about the story, and that's why the greatest teachers that have ever watched Planet Earth have used story. And metaphor poems analogy as a way to take somebody from one level of consciousness to a whole other level of consciousness.
So for me, the storytelling aspect to the yoga class is very important because it, it becomes a vehicle for wisdom. , it becomes a vehicle of real, practical, useful information that somebody can bring with them into their life, and that's a beautiful thing.
Sharad Lal: Absolutely agree. With my personal experience, when I'm doing yoga in the morning and listening to you talking the poses and talking the story, you somehow know what is needed. You talk about here, you're thinking about work right now. You have these stresses. This is the way to think about it.
This is what life is. And I guess they're fairly generic, but they're also specific to a certain type of people, maybe people who have busy lives. So I was wondering if you've given more thought to the types of stories and how you've evolved it over time.
Travis Eliot: Yeah, I think that a lot. The great stories are universal. Their messages are really applicable to, to everybody. It's a shared humanity, so some people collect coins, some people collect baseball cards. I now collect stories and I have a whole library of stories, I've also learned over time that there are these recurring themes. Theme may be silence or awakening or challenge or forgiveness, certain stories align with a certain theme. And when I go to create a yoga class or a yoga experience or yoga program, I'm always thinking about a theme. And the theme is like a thread of a necklace. And then you take these beads and you put it on the necklace.
So the beads may be a story, it may be a quote, it may be the poses and the sequences. It may be something from yoga philosophy. And all these beads are woven through this one single thread. and that creates this truly thematic experience so that somebody like yourself, when they're doing the class, whatever that theme is what you really feel, and you really feel it on a deep level.
When I teach yoga, I'm always thinking, teaching to not just the physical body. The physical body is very important, and the physical body for most of us is what gets us started within a yoga practice. But there's also these other dimensions. So I'm thinking about not just the body, but I'm also thinking about energy.
I'm thinking about in yoga, what we call prana or the chalon monks called Chi, and we can influence that energy. Different breathwork practices or what we call prana, yama, and yoga. I'm also thinking about the mind. Sometimes I'll bring in a study or some sort of a research thing or some information so that students are getting fed information into their brain.
I'm thinking about the heart because the heart is where we carry the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows of life. It's also where we carry the unfinished business of the heart, the past traumas and the past dramas. So if we really wanna awaken and transform, we have to address these deeper dimensions beyond the heart.
We also have awareness, or what's sometimes described as. Witness consciousness. And then at the very, very source and essence of all of that we could call it spirit or soul or source energy, but also addressing that. And from my experience, when you address all of those six dimensions, Then the human being is able to fulfill, to ignite their potential.
But if you're just focused on the body and maybe you're at a certain stage of your life where you don't want to hear all the other stuff, you're not ready for all the other stuff, that's fine. But it's just one dimension. It's just one slice of the pie. And what I'm trying to do is give everybody the whole entire.
Sharad Lal: So I'd love to hear if you've, if any specific example comes to mind where the transformative power of yoga, the way you described it, has helped you or some of your student make like a tangible difference in their life.
Travis Eliot: I've been fortunate to work with people from all over the world entertainers musicians, actors, celebrities Professional baseball players, football players, special forces, army Rangers, Navy Seals, Delta Force, and people in prison. when I think about the. Most transformative story. I can't help but come back to this particular individual in the prison system here in the United States that I've had the opportunity of meeting a few times and working with this gentleman by the name of Mike Bailey.
Mike, the first thing you notice when you see him is that he had, he has the word war tattooed across his. And the A is an anarchy sign. And then down the side of his face, along his entire cheek is a huge, massive scar. And when I went into the prison system, he came up to me and immediately shared a story, which was, He was labeled as the most misbehaved inmate in this entire prison population of a thousand men.
This is a maximum security prison where you have murderers, you have rapists, you have all sorts of violent crime people that are in there, it's a rough place. And so he. By his own admission was the worst of the worst. So they threw him in solitary confinement at one point cuz they didn't know what to do with him.
And by that point he was at his wits end. He was ready to give up on life. He grabbed the razor blade and he tried to slice the artery on the side of his throat. And when that didn't work, he took the razor blade and he swallowed it, trying to kill himself, just trying to end it all. They rushed him to a hospital nearby and luckily were able to save his life, and after he was stabilized, they brought him back to his cell in Solit.
But this time while he had been in the hospital, they had made a new addition in his cell on the wall. They had inserted a TV screen behind protective, bulletproof glass, and dangling from that was a computer mouse. So naturally he went to go explore what was on this computer screen. And as he's searching, he comes across one of my yoga programs program I made about 11 years ago called the Ultimate Yogi, which is 108 day program. he just picked a random class, which happened to be a yin yoga class. And he said in the middle of that class, he had this huge awakening. He had never heard languaging like, make your mind your best friend. That you are the creator of your own reality. You are the creator of your own destiny.
That in the present moment you could begin to shape your future by letting go of what's happened. In the past, he'd never heard of any of this. He had only grown up in a system, in an environment of violence and neglect and abuse. So the complete opposite. So he knew right then and there that following.
He was gonna go and he was gonna do this entire 108 day program. Now he didn't have a yoga mat, he didn't have any yoga props, so he took a razor blade and he etched in the floor of his cell, a two by se six foot rectangular shape. That was a shape of a yoga mat. And in the videos at the top of each mat, we would carve in the word ul.
and he did the same. So at the top of his concrete yoga mat, he carved in that word ultimate, and he proceeded to move through the program. And halfway through the program, the guards are telling me this, and the warden's telling me this too, that they didn't even recognize this guy. Like he was completely transformed.
Completely different. And then he gets to like day 91 or something They're ready to take 'em out of solitary and put 'em back into gp, what's known as general population, and for the first time in this prison's history. An inmate begged to stay in solitary confinement because he wanted to stay there and he wanted to finish the hundred eight day program.
He said that his cell turned into a cave in the Himalayan Mountains, and in that cave he had the greatest awaken. And so eventually he successfully completed the 108 day program and they released him into general population, and then he begged the staff to bring in an outside company that could start to do yoga teacher trainings.
They went out because they believed in the power of yoga. They brought in this company that started to certify these men in prison. They found out about me through the inmates. They invited myself and my wife Lauren, to come out there and teach. And to this day you now know that in the darkest of places, yoga has brought the greatest of light.
Sharad Lal: Travis I was getting very emotional while we were talking that story. That is such an inspirational story and. Many of us may not have had as extreme an experience and transformation as this young man had, but some of us have felt that spirituality, something special happening and seeing this happen to this person where his life turned completely around is such, such an inspirational story.
So thank you very much for sharing that. As people have some of these experiences. During yoga which are powerful, how do you help guide them to take it to a certain place where they follow their path? How do they take it from the mat to their real life and how do you help guide them through that?
Travis Eliot: One way is through the stories that we talked about earlier. Those are the things that I think are looping in the back of your head, and that's a teaching technique that helps us to bridge the gap between practice and life. And by the way, you get to a certain point within your yoga practice where you start to realize, That these two rivers that seem to be separated and running parallel to each other, the river of your practice and the river of your life, eventually you get to a place where these two converge together and you realize that there is no difference between your yoga practice and your life you just start to.
Not just do yoga on your yoga mat, but you really do yoga every moment of your life. Yoga infuses and pervades into every nook and cranny of your humanity and all that you do in the best of ways. And so it's inevitable. That if you stay on that path, that is going to happen. You don't have to make it happen.
It will come. Patabi Joyce, a great yogi from India who created Ashtanga yoga, used to say, practice and all is coming. You just have to show up. There's a great quote too by the Buddha that says, there's only two mistakes that you can make on this path. One is not getting started and two, not going all the.
Sharad Lal: picking on that, where you talked about not going all the way, many people sometimes get started but life comes in the way and it becomes difficult to continue with the practice. And there's travel, there demands, there's relationship. How have you guided people through those realities of life to continue with some sort of a practice so that they can find the peace they're looking.
Travis Eliot: This is one of the reasons why we do yoga classes that are only 10 minutes . Everybody's at different phases of their life, and we should never feel like if we're a new mom. Or maybe we have a loved one who is transitioning to the end of their life. They should never feel like they're flunking.
The test of being a yogi, if they're not practicing 60 or 90 minutes a day, I think that 10 minutes a day is better than zero minutes a day. there's always something out there that anybody can go and do, as long as they have at least 10 minutes, or maybe one day you just do a five minute meditation or two minute breath practice while you're in your car and you're getting ready to go into a meeting or you're getting ready to go to the office or whatever getting on an airplane.
Or you can even. Do it in as little as three breaths. The idea behind yoga practice is that it's not just a physical practice. It originally was created as a science for the mind, which is right in alignment with mindfulness and many of the other great ancient traditions,
but I always say to people, if you really want to know if your yoga practice is working, Stop doing it for six months and see what happens. Because usually what happens is your life begins to fall apart.
Sharad Lal: Travis, I can say if you stop doing it for seven days as well. I like sometime when I go on a holiday and I can't do it, I feel the impact of it. I'm more restless, I'm more on the edge.
As we were talking, some of the themes in yoga one of the things that people sometimes suffer right now is stress and anxiety and burnout, and people are working really hard, so how can they use yoga? To find some balance to find some peace in their life.
Travis Eliot: Stress arises when you're here, but you wanna be there. When you're in this situation, but you wanna be in this other situation.
And a lot of people live their entire lives that way, where wherever they are, they're thinking about the next thing and the next place that they have to get to. Anxiety arises when the mind is always projecting into the future about the what ifs and the fears of what if this happens? That as Mark Twain so beautifully said, my life is full of terrible misfortunes.
Most of which never happened. So fear, very often it's there to help keep us alive and there's a certain degree of fear that we need, but it can also, when it becomes imbalance, create things like anxiety. By the way, depression arises when we go the other direction, when we're stuck in the past, and we're always ruminating on this event that happened in our past and we're in that pattern or that endless loop where this thing is just cycling over and over again about somebody did something to me and I'm the victim.
What is the antidote to stress and anxiety and depression? The antidote from a yoga perspective is again, presence. What do we do when we get onto our yoga mat? Your yoga mat is the training ground. What do we do when we meditate? When you're sitting on your meditation cushion, when you're sitting in your meditation practice, that is your training ground, what you're doing.
on your mat, on your meditation cushion is you're strengthening and training certain qualities. You're planting certain seeds and you're either planting seeds or you're growing weeds. You're growing weeds. When you're in stress and anxiety and fear and worry, you're letting the weeds take over the garden of your mind, which then takes over the garden of your.
But presence allows us to intentionally plant seeds of benevolence, seeds, like presence, seeds, like joy, peace, equanimity, deep listening. And first, you have to do that with yourself. You have to experience it yourself. You have to give back to yourself. and then you can start to bring that into your relationships.
If we want to eradicate stress and anxiety, it's always gonna be about coming back to the present moment.
That could be being present on your breath, present within sensation within your body, or it could be presence within just being aware of these thoughts that are moving through the sky of your awareness.
Sharad Lal: I think that gets better with practice of whether you do deep breathing to center yourself or whether you're conscious of what's happening that gets built with practice, back to you Travis. You've achieved tremendous success as a yoga teacher, what have been some of the most important lessons that you've learned of success through this process, and how's your perspective on success changed over the last 15, 20 years?
Travis Eliot: Success to me is when somebody fulfills their potential human potential. That is true success. That is true Greatness. Success isn't about confusing your net worth with your self worth. A lot of times in society we have these programs that have been given to us and I had the same program and it took these two.
Traumatic experiences to really help me see into the matrix of the conditioning that I was brought up in, which is about having the certain job and having the certain income and the salary and the house and the car and the wardrobe and then the right neighborhood. And there's nothing wrong with those things unless they start owning you and ruling you.
So me, It's really about the purity of the why, the intention. And when this all started in Lanta and Thailand, it was about being of service, of serving people by serving yoga and meditation and these ancient wisdom to as many people as possible. And anytime that I deviate from that, anytime.
The ego gets in there and starts to think about doing things for money or status or followers on social media or whatever it is. I'm now so attuned to my own heart and guidance system that I can feel. A violation of purpose or what we call dharma within the physiology of my body. And so that's a guiding system one of the most tragic things is we could be hustling through life and we could be grinding through life.
And we're climbing the success ladder. And then we finally get to the top and we realize the ladder was on the wrong wall. So we have to make sure our striving and the goals and the ambition that we have in life is not coming from the ego because, it comes from the ego because when you get whatever you wanted or you achieve the goal that you wanted, you feel empty.
you don't really feel fulfilled, and that's how you know that it was an egoic why or an egoic intention. But when it comes from your heart and it comes from your soul, and it comes from being of service, when you get the thing or you achieve the thing, you feel so deeply fulfilled. I'll never forget walking out of prison.
With my wife, Lauren, after that first day, we were teaching all day. Didn't have a break the entire day, but it's a day that I'll never forget because we didn't go there for money. We just went there to be of service. And although the men said that they greatly benefited, we benefited just as much from that interaction of being with.
Sharad Lal: Very powerful Travis. And You're fortunate to be very strongly in touch with yourself, that you can see a physiological force that tells you that, hey, something's going wrong, and then you change path and ground yourself.
For people starting out who are not as evolved as you, what are some things we can do? We figure out that, hey, we are going away from our path, our ego is taking over.
Travis Eliot: The first thing is to just take a moment to pause because usually we're so wrapped up within the rat race of life. That the waves of the mind and yoga, these are called chite, riti, chitas mind, and riti is wave or fluctuation. So if you have a lake with a lot of disturbance on the surface you have no clarity because the mud is kicked up everything within the lake.
But when you pause and you allow the dust and you allow the mud to settle, and you allow chite and the mine waves to begin to settle, then you start to create clarity. And when you have clarity, then you have clear seeing. Which is one definition of meditation or VA pasta meditation is to see things as they are.
So then once we have clarity and we can see things as they are, we're able to discern, am I on this path because of my ego, or am I on this path because of wisdom? Am I dominated by ego and vanity? And conditioning of upbringing, or am I dominated by wisdom to be able to look within, to connect within? that's a really big deal because when you allow the ego to initiate what you do, that creates a certain chain of events or karma that inevitably leads to suffer.
So a lot of times when you're suffering and things don't feel right, they don't feel right in your guts. Things just seem to be falling apart. Nothing's clicking. A lot of times that's indicative that you've gone off the path. When you're on the path of dharma and purpose and wisdom. It's not that the challenges necessarily go away, but you feel through it all that you have.
The support of the universe behind your back and that even though you may need to climb up the mountains and move through the adversity of certain weather patterns, that you will be able to persevere because you're doing it from a deeper place and you're doing it for the benefit of other people.
Sharad Lal: Absolutely Travis. Before we end, what's the one piece of advice that you'd like to give to folks who are either on the fence about yoga or deepening their practice?
Travis Eliot: One piece of advice is to to have a vision for what it is that you wanna be. To also understand that you're already, as one's Zen master, put it perfect the way that you are, and yet there's still room for improvement. Sometimes we can fall into that mentality of, oh, I need to perfect myself and I need to go to yoga and I need to do therapy, and I need to go on the diet and I need to do this.
And we turn our spiritual and our wellbeing practices into something that becomes polluted by vanity and ego again. so it's that recognition of what is it that you want to. To be honest with yourself, where are you stifling your own potential? Because the more that you can awaken that potential, the more happy, the more joyful, the more fulfilled you will be.
Sharad Lal: Before we go, Travis, one very last question that we ask everyone at the end of your life, how would you know you've lived a good life?
Travis Eliot: It would be a question of did I live well and did I love well? And if the question was yes to both of those, I would have to say mission accomplished.
Sharad Lal: Thank you, Travis. You are already doing that in such a large way. You're making such a huge impact to people. People who you don't know in different parts of the world are listening to your voice and getting so much of clarity. So thank you for all the service you're doing. Thank you for taking our time to speak with us and wish you all the very best.
Travis Eliot: Thank you Sharad, for having me on your podcast and helping to spread the message. It's been a true honor to connect with you and I hope that I get to see you virtually through a yoga class online soon.
Thank you, Travis, for such an inspirational and moving conversation. For folks interested in practicing yoga and meditation with Travis, you can download the Inner Dimension TV app. and use the code How to Live to get a one month free trial.
Details are in the show description as well as the show notes. This could be the action step for today, downloading and using it free for one month. Full disclosure, the How to Live Podcast does. Any money from Travis on this. It's just that we've had a great experience using this and would love for others to try this.
If you're new to yoga, there are many basic sequences to get started with. For busy folks, they're all types of classes with 15 minutes, 20 minute classes as well. For seasoned yogis, you can enjoy the storytelling and see how it deepens your practice. All the best. That's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it.
We'll be back for another episode two weeks from now on April 25th. Hope you join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.