In today’s episode, Glo Teacher Annie Carpenter welcomes Richard Rosen to The Glo Podcast. The pair dive into a discussion about their personal yoga journeys, exploring their influences and mentors, and how yoga has transformed their lives. Toward the end of the episode, Richard lightens the mood by sharing a poem that he wrote.
Join Glo Teacher Annie Carpenter as she interviews Richard Rosen, a revered teacher in the yoga community, for an enlightening chat about breath, practice, mentors, and finding your voice as a teacher.
Their heart-to-heart talk explores the essence of persistence in yoga and how commitment enriches both our practice and life’s purpose. Richard shares about his influences and mentors, and how he evolved his own yoga teaching voice. He and Annie talk about Pranayama and how it is often underestimated in an Asana practice, and they explore the concept of karma. Richard caps off the chat with a poem that is a lighthearted reminder of life’s unpredictable nature.
Join us for this conversation that is as informative as it is inspiring.
(01:33) Annie Carpenter and Richard Rosen intros
(11:05) teaching yoga
(14:12) pranayama
(20:03) teaching yoga philosophy
(22:09) the evolution of yoga practice
(28:13) life's phases
(34:40) exploring mortality … and a poem to lighten the mood
Annie's SmartFlow Yoga
The Nest Yoga Studio (Oakland)
Take Classes with Annie Carpenter on Glo
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
COLD OPEN
[00:00:00] Richard Rosen: Then the meaning comes out of you. It's your interaction with the world that creates the meaning. You have to look at yourself first and find some meaning in yourself. You have to be compassionate with yourself first before you can catch with other people.
MUSIC IN
[00:00:16] Derik Mills: Hi, I'm Derik Mills. Welcome to the Glo podcast. We are honored to have Annie Carpenter as a Glo teacher and host of today's episode. She was a guest on our podcast back in September, 2021, and that was episode number 23, she's known as a teacher's teacher. Annie has been a committed student of yoga for more than 40 years.
Her guest today is Richard Rosen in 1987. Richard co-founded the Piedmont yoga studio in Oakland with Rodney Yee and Claire Finn, they, in addition to a few others during that era helped bring yoga into the public spotlight in America. Richard is the author of five books about yoga. Annie and Richard dive into a profound discussion about their personal yoga journeys.
They explore the importance of choosing the right teacher, the vital role of pranayama and how their practices have transformed their lives over time. And toward the end, Richard shares a lovely poem that he wrote. Please enjoy this conversation between Annie Carpenter and Richard Rosen.
BEGIN INTERVIEW
[00:01:31] Annie Carpenter: Namaste, yogis. Welcome. Annie Carpenter here and I am so pleased to have Richard Rosen at my side today for a nice chat.
[00:01:42] Richard Rosen: I am completely humbled that you asked me to do the first one. I'm just blown away by this.
[00:01:46] Annie Carpenter: Richard, every time I get even a few minutes with you, I feel inspired.
Richard Rosen: My goodness.
Annie Carpenter: I really do. And let's just assume that anyone out there listening really doesn't know much about who Richard Rosen is. And so would you mind just saying who I am?
[00:02:02] Richard Rosen: You're gonna lose half your audience right now.
Annie Carpenter: Oh, stop.
Richard Rosen: I, I thought about this because I saw the question and I, I'm 76 years old. That's the main thing in my life, in my mind right now, I just turned 76, which this morning I was thinking about that and I just thought, how in the world did I ever get here? It just doesn't make any sense at all. I was born in New York city and that makes me a lifelong Yankee fan, but we moved to California, my family, when I was about seven or eight.
And I've lived in California, thank goodness, all my life, pretty much. And right now I live in Berkeley, even better. And I've been teaching, we're going to get into the yoga stuff in a while, Linda. When did you start? I started practicing yoga in 1980. Back when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth.
And I've been teaching since, full time since 1987. So we can get into that more if you'd like to do that.
[00:02:53] Annie Carpenter: I just would love for you to say out from the beginning that you're also an amazing writer and you have many books published and a few self-published and another four.
[00:03:04] Richard Rosen: Yeah. Five books.
[00:03:06] Annie Carpenter: Only five. And then the poetry
[00:03:09] Richard Rosen: Those are self-published. Those don't really count. Those are vanity publications.
[00:03:13] Annie Carpenter: Those are wonderful books.
[00:03:15] Richard Rosen: Thank you. I'll recite a poem for you later if you like.
[00:03:17] Annie Carpenter: Oh, that would be lovely. The squirrel one?
[00:03:20] Richard Rosen: Gosh, do you have the book here?
[00:03:26] Annie Carpenter: I don't. That's okay. Okay. I clearly Richard is a man of many talents and depth, and I would say there's something about Richard that understands how to stay with something over time. Would you agree?
[00:03:41] Richard Rosen: In most cases, yes.
Annie Carpenter: Okay, fair enough. And I'm going to just say right from the start that to me, that's a big piece about Yoga is that we a learn that skill and probably need a little bit of that skill even from day one. Consistency.
[00:03:56] Richard Rosen: Absolutely. Practice. Yeah. This is essential. Abhyasa. Abhyasa. From the same root as the word asana. The same root us to sit or persist any course for a long time.
Annie Carpenter: I love it.
Richard Rosen: Persist.
[00:04:12] Annie Carpenter: Yeah. Persist. Persist in our seats. Very good. All right. Knowing that we already have this man of depth and talent and inspiration, who, okay, enough who knows how to stay with something.
How do you see that a bringing you to yoga, helping you stay with yoga, even as your life changes? So all the things of being young and playful and having a child, all those things?
[00:04:41] Richard Rosen: You have to integrate it into your life. It's not, if it's separate from your life, then it's too easy to let it go.
And to look at it, you just have to say everything I do is yoga. When I go into class, that's a formal, that's a formal practice. But when I go out of class, I'm still practicing yoga in, in certain ways. By the way, I sit, the way I walk, the way I talk, the way I interact with people it's, there's a book by Sri Aurobindo.
I’m not sure that many people are, uh, familiar with it. It’s called the Synthes Synthesis of Yoga. And the epigraph to that book is all life is yoga. And that's what I, that's how I, that's how I, that's how I practice my my, that's how I look at my practice.
So the poses, the breath technique, the quality of the daily meditation. And the reason we do all that is so that our lives are, exactly.
[00:05:35] Richard Rosen: Directed or what? Our lives are are full that I think that's the whole point of yoga nowadays is to live your life to the fullest and and bring as much.
Help us help the world as much as you can in your own way. Yay. Yeah.
[00:05:50] Annie Carpenter: That. I do know that. I'm doing my best. Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting. A friend of mine has recently retired from a wonderful job. She was a guidance counselor at a high school and she is I'm going to use the word lost. She says, I just don't have meaning now.
[00:06:05] Richard Rosen: Yeah. It's hard. People give up their long time jobs like that and they're thrown out into the cold and they don't know what to do with themselves.
[00:06:12] Annie Carpenter: I feel like we as yogis, because of at least the attempt to integrate the practice, the practices in our lives that one day it would be nice to teach a little less.
I think you'll agree. But somehow I don't think that, Oh my God there's no meaning.
[00:06:29] Richard Rosen: Oh, there's plenty of meaning in life if you look around for it.
[00:06:32] Annie Carpenter: Yes, and I think the practice asks, that's what the practice asks us to do in some degree.
[00:06:36] Richard Rosen: Then the meaning comes out of you. It's your interaction with the world that creates the meaning.
You have to look at yourself first and find some meaning in yourself. You have to be, you have to be, you have to be compassionate with yourself first before you're compassionate with other people. It's hard to do for a lot of people to be compassionate.
[00:06:52] Annie Carpenter: Compassionate, loving,
[00:06:54] Richard Rosen: patient. You have to appreciate yourself.
Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't.
[00:07:00] Annie Carpenter: Been there. So let's let's talk about some of your early teachers and I'm thinking yoga teachers, but maybe there's a a non yoga teacher who was evenly inspiring?
[00:07:11] Richard Rosen: My teachers. I think the first prob the first one was the dearly departed Donald Moyer, who died a few, a couple years ago maybe, unfortunately.
He's fairly young still. He was a wonderful man. A very He was very intelligent in many different areas, and he loved Shakespeare, so we had something to talk about all the time. The next one after that would be Manuso Manos, who was my main teacher when I was taking teacher training at the Iyengar Institute in San Francisco.
And, I don't know exactly what to say about Manuso, but he was a very powerful teacher. He had a very strong influence on my teaching at first, which was a mixed bag. Manuso's Manuso, and I'm me, and I want to be like Mike, if and it didn't really work out that well.
But he had a really strong influence on the way I looked at yoga, but probably the greatest influence was Ramanand Patel And he really, he's, he's, he just he's I can't, I don't know what the word is. He knew things just keep coming up with him as well. If you stick with it, sometimes it's a little bit, I don't know if he's listening, sometimes a little bit.
But when it gets off on Republicans that's really hard to stay with. But if you go consistently, you'll get the, you'll get the real, the meat of the practice. Unless you're a vegetarian. The tofu. Yeah, the tofu.
[00:08:30] Annie Carpenter: I have studied with all three of those, and those of you who don't know, they're all three committed Iyengar teachers.
[00:08:40] Richard Rosen: No W. C. Fields said he wouldn't belong to any club that would take him in. Ha! I thought about it for a while, but I don't like, I didn't feel like I wanted to I've never been able to. Toe the line, and once, once you commit to being an Iyengar teacher and you take the test and you get certified, you're I don't know if the right word is locked in, but you have to do things in a certain way.
And I felt like I, I just didn't, I just didn't really want to, Oh, one more teacher I should mention at the end here, my good friend, Rodney Yee, I learned a lot from Rodney over the years. We've been friends now for 40 years. Just wanted to put that in. A lot of the the older Iyengar people fell away from that practice after a while because they had, it's good to follow it initially when you're still learning about yoga, but when you start to find your own voice.
And you have your own practice. And you might not want to, toe the line quite as much as they want you to. And I don't know, I don't know anything about the Iron Guard system today. I'm not close to any of the Iron Guard teachers, but in the old days, you either toed the line or you're excommunicated.
And you really had to stay with it and do the approved way of doing things,
[00:09:51] Annie Carpenter: And you wanted to be able to grow and shift and change.
[00:09:54] Richard Rosen: And be you eventually. My, you, when you first start teaching yoga you teach like your teacher. You hear your teacher in the back of your head. , the words come out the same the expressions. And I still, I'm sure you still do every now and then, that's it, that's a Donald Moyer thing, things like that come out. After a while you you have something that you have something of yourself to give to, to, to the students and you, you owe it to yourself actually to do that.
I, I never really became a certified Iyengar teacher, although all of my training, all of my teachers, everything has been Iyengar. Very rarely do I go outside and sun sample other styles.
[00:10:29] Annie Carpenter: That's so interesting because, as I Started with Satchidananda and moved on to Iyengar and on Astanga. And what I teach now is some mix of the, of the three. Um, and somehow you’ve able to get everything you needed from this one system.
[00:10:43] Richard Rosen: The system always appealed to me because it's very logical in a certain way. Yes, indeed. And it's very precise. And I really enjoyed that about the practice because you really had to, you couldn't be sloppy when you're in Nyong'o class. You had to really pay attention to what you're doing and really feel every little aspect of the practice, which is, sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees when you're doing that, move your little toes to the right a little bit more or something like that.
But in general, I really enjoyed that. This, the I guess the word is shrewdness or the, I'm not sure what the word is, but you really had to pay attention to what you're doing. . And that really appealed to me.
[00:11:17] Annie Carpenter: It's precise, precisely direct. Good. It's clear, precise. Yeah, exactly. It's, there's consistency in it, which we love and maybe don't love all the time.
[00:11:25] Richard Rosen: It was when I first started taking yoga classes in the eighties. You didn't have a choice in the Bay Area. You were denying our school or that was it. There was one yoga school in the East Bay in Berkeley, the yoga room. And there may have been another one too, I don't recall, but ...
[00:11:41] Annie Carpenter: There was an Integral Yoga Institute on Market Street in the city. Is that right?
[00:11:45] Richard Rosen: I went there in the late seventies. Huh. Then I missed that one. Yeah. In, in, in the East Bay, Oakland, Berkeley, whatever it was the Yoga Room. That was it.
[00:11:56] Annie Carpenter: I love how things evolve and how we--
Richard Rosen: Or explode.
Annie Carpenter: But how somehow most of us, I think you and I are the same this way. We like having a container ,boundaries that are close enough that we feel when we're going off the rails a little bit so that it heightens our attention. And sometimes the choice is to come back and toe the line. And sometimes the choice is, Oh, maybe this line needs to veer a tiny bit leftward today.
[00:12:23] Richard Rosen: For a while. But you do it because of the, you have a reason to do it.
[00:12:27] Annie Carpenter: Exactly. But if we didn't have that edge that we were bouncing against, I don't think the awareness would be quite as clear as strong. And I think that is that precision.
Richard Rosen: Precision. That's a good word.
[00:12:39] Annie Carpenter: Is wakes us up to that.
Would you like to talk about your books now or should I come back to that?
[00:12:47] Richard Rosen: What do you want me to say about them?
[00:12:49] Annie Carpenter: I love all of them, but I particularly, The, I first got to know you by reading your Pranayama books. I think I had read those books before I even met you at a Yoga Journal conference a gazillion years ago.
And I feel like they've informed many of us about how to practice even if some of the Pranayama techniques vary just a little bit depending upon the school we come from.
[00:13:13] Richard Rosen: Yeah, that's an Iyengar book, essentially. That was based on what I learned from Manuso and a lot from Ramanand, too. And yeah, I owe it all ... I know, I think in the front of the book I said, all those stakes are mine, all the good things come from my teachers, which is the way you're supposed to do it when you write a book like that. And yeah, I soften things up maybe a little bit, but yeah, the first book was well received.
I don't, I'm not sure the second book was quite as well received as the first one.
[00:13:40] Annie Carpenter: What I really appreciate about both of them and maybe increasingly into the second is this quality that you present as the Pranayama practice as an inquiry. And I have had few Pranayama teachers who stated that so clearly and for me, that piece that I totally got from you, both in class and in these, via these books just invites a state of meditative inquiry that I feel like yoga is really all about.
[00:14:16] Richard Rosen: Yes. Unfortunately, the Pranayama is a little bit. outside the pale. The niche I chose for my specialty was not very well received among the general population. I had a guy will come to class one time. He said, that was a good class, but do we have to do all that breathing at the end?
And I said, yes, you have to do all the breathing at the end. He never came back. But I really feel that Pranayama is breathing, let's put it that way. This is the sleep out Pranayama entirely. It's just a really important part of your life and I, I don't leave the, I don't leave the house in the morning until after I've done a Pranayama practice of some sort.
It's pretty simple right now, you've got to your breathing brings you to yourself and I think it's really important to be with yourself during the day as you go about your business.
[00:15:02] Annie Carpenter: So you're suggesting that gee, for some reason our culture really is much more interested in Asana than in
[
00:15:09] Richard Rosen: Pranayama. Absolutely. You know that. I do know that. Americans want to see, Americans want, Action. They want to see improvement, they want to see something happening, they want something, they want a return on their investment or their effort. And with pranayama, with breathing, let's say, it doesn't happen that way.
It's a, it's a spiral. You go up and down, back and forth. And it's not a very good icebreaker at parties, at least when you do an icebreaker. You say, he wants me to touch my toes, but you can't really say he wants me to breathe. I had a, my next door neighbor, who's been my neighbor for many years, is, writes for UC science something or another, and I was going to a workshop one time and he says Where are you going?
I said, I'm going to teach a Pranayama class. He says, what's that? I said, breathing. He said, don't they already know how to breathe? It's not really well understood and the benefits of it aren't really well understood either.
[00:16:07] Annie Carpenter: Yeah, I actually thought when we had this sort of surge of interest in the vagus nerve and trauma and how to heal from trauma, I thought, oh, maybe this pranayama practice will start to be more mainstream.
[00:16:21] Richard Rosen: That really hasn't happened. The thing with that is you got to do it the right way. True that. If you breathe, a lot of the, a lot of the a lot of the practices, a lot of the I used to review videos for yoga journal. I had the one time I had the most videos in the immediate parsec.
I had videos everywhere from yoga journal. And what I saw on those videos is that they always dumped, jumped into the deep end. This is Pranayama and you, yeah, exactly. Or no, Bhastrika. Bhastrika. Yeah. And that, that's fine, but not to begin. You have to start out at the re, you have to walk before you can run, right?
Or crawl before you can walk. So you have to get it. You have to know yourself as a breather before you start doing all this fancy stuff. And that takes time. There's no schedule. It just depends on the person, the intensity of the practice. That kind of stuff. What else is happening in your life?
It gets boring after a while. If you're not, if you're not, if you're not really interested in what, in, in doing it. So I used to call it the mule work. It's just got to keep plugging along until you. Just something that does something hits.
[00:17:27] Annie Carpenter: I just remember during the pandemic and I was teaching just a weekly pranayama meditation class. And I took away all of the holds, the pauses. We never did Bhastrika. We never did Kapalabhati because I just, all of our nervous systems were at this. Yeah. Yeah. And so it was both what do you call it?
Just witnessing. Witnessing. Yeah.
[00:17:51] Richard Rosen: Maybe three part breath. I used to teach at this school in the South Bay. I'm not going to name it. And the teacher, the head of the school always wanted me to teach the big stuff. I'd go in there and I'd look around the room and I'd say, They're not ready for the big stuff. They're ready for the little stuff. And then I didn't get invited back there much anymore.
[00:18:12] Annie Carpenter: But let me ask you this. When you say the big stuff, I feel like in all forms of yoga. And by that, even yamas and yamas, but certainly asana, pranayama, and the sitting practices is that I feel like we, we need to start simple.
And then we evolve into the big. And what I'm noticing is that I'm more interested in the simpler again.
[00:18:34] Richard Rosen: You have to go back to the simple every now and then.
[00:18:36] Annie Carpenter:. Oh, I thought I was going to stay here for the rest, for the duration.
[00:18:40] Richard Rosen: Yeah, you could do that. Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing now.
I don't really do any nasal stuff or anything like that. I'm just watching my breath mostly, but I'm doing certain different patterns and I'm just being very attentive the way I'm, the way I'm breathing because it's a, it's an expression of who you are essentially. And it's it, but you're so close to it that you don't really You don't really get it right away until you really look at it for a while.
And the older I've gotten, um, the more I can see it myself. And it's not always a pleasant picture, but you've got to go through that too.
[00:19:15] Annie Carpenter: Yeah. I feel like the breath, as I'm able to connect to the breath, when let's say I get angry at that person who cut me off when I was driving, does that ever happen to you?
Richard Rosen: No. You're past that.
[00:19:27] Annie Carpenter: no I'm not. It's, it really does. I can take a couple of conscious breaths.
[00:19:31] Richard Rosen: and What I do is I say, how do I do that? I say when do I do that? And I, and then I realized, everybody does it. We all do that. I was going to say something. I forgot. It'll come back. Yeah, it'll come back. Tomorrow, probably.
[00:19:48] Annie Carpenter: At 3 a. m. Yeah. Just on that note of how things evolve you and I have had a discussion about the stages, the ashram of life, of yoga.
[00:19:58] Richard Rosen: Oh, okay. Brahmacharya and all that. Yeah.
[00:20:01] Annie Carpenter: Yeah. How have you seen your practice change based on the needs of where you were in your life?
[00:20:08] Richard Rosen: Wow. That's a good question. Yeah. You could go on for a while on this. Or not go on at all. Okay. Of course, I, Whenever you start a practice like this, you're a student and, you're at the mercy of your teacher. If you really have a good teacher and that's the main thing, you've got to find the right teacher and you got to put your trust in that teacher.
To me, it's, it doesn't really. It doesn't, in the old days, let me put it that way, it didn't help to hop around. I found one teacher that I liked and I stuck with that one teacher and I thought that was, I thought that was, for me, that was the right way. But then as we were talking earlier after a while, you want to spread your wings and fly a little bit.
I guess that's the second stage. When you leave the the studentship and you become a little bit more of your own person.
[00:20:58] Annie Carpenter: what else? I'm thinking, and especially for somebody like you who actually married and had a child. Yeah. I didn't do that. Yeah. So that changes your life.
You've got to provide. You've got to look after. A lot of energy goes there. How did you stay with your practice? How did the practice evolve based on how your life was shifting? Okay.
[00:21:19] Richard Rosen: My wife goes to a psychic weekly and we don't talk about that. I wonder why, but seriously he's a family friend as well.
And one time I helped him break up a sidewalk, it's a long story, but he gave me a free session and so as not to insult him, I went. And he put me, he gave me a crystal and this is, and he and we were talking about my wife was pregnant at the time and he said, When you, when your child is born, the guru will awaken.
And I thought you are crazy, but it's true. Having a child is a learning experience of the highest degree for me, it was anyway, because, uh, you, for me, what I learned was you recreate your parents in the face of your child. You say, don't do that. And you say to yourself.
But why? And where'd that come from? Yeah. It was a very, it was a very enlightening, it was and has been and still is a very enlightening experience.
[00:22:17] Annie Carpenter: And so do you feel the practice has somehow given you that ability to say, wait, how do I do this? Where's this coming from?
[00:22:23] Richard Rosen: Not to create, not to recreate the mistakes of the past.
It makes, the practice makes one. I'm not saying me, but one more aware of oneself and where these ideas are coming from, particularly now at my age, I hate to keep saying that, but I really, I'm really beginning to see some of the some of the curiosities in in, in my background and my life, the way I think about things.
And it's very. It's very revealing. And sometimes it's not very, it's not very reassuring but it's very revealing to see why you how your earliest years in life with your parents, how deeply they affected you and how much, and continue to over, over time.
Exactly. I always vowed, my parents are fine people, but they were typical. older parents. They never, you weren't friends with your parents years ago, and they were fine parents, but they taught me things that, that nature and nurture was complete opposite, complete opposite to my nature.
They didn't really, they didn't really look at me as a separate human being. They just. They just brought me along with the, exactly the same way that they were brought along. This is the way they were and I'm not blaming them for it, but I think, when you have a child, as I discovered, you have to look at that child as a separate person and respect that the differences and encourage the strengths that you see, that you seem to see and let's goes. Yeah, you never know.
[00:24:00] Annie Carpenter: I just feel like that so mirrors the pathway of the yoga teacher, because again, we imitate our teachers for so many years and we're just teaching what is the right thing to teach as opposed to seeing our students and having them find their way in this practice that we're guiding along.
[00:24:20] Richard Rosen: That's the mark of a true guru to get rid of, start about Oh yeah. And Oh, what's his name? Yeah. Yeah. Him.
[00:24:29] Annie Carpenter: Him.
[00:24:30] Richard Rosen: We'll go with that. Peter Sterios was this, with this, what's his name? Shandor. Shandor. Shandor. Peter was Shandor's right hand person for years. And then one day, Shandor said, You're done.
And he said, Oh, and by the way, don't teach anything I taught you. And that was it. And Peter went out on his own. He's, he's striving right now, obviously. So that's, yeah that's, that's a good example of what a guru really supposed to do when you're ready, you're gone, you're on your own. Find your own way.
[00:25:03] Annie Carpenter: As your daughter is doing, I might add.
[00:25:07] Richard Rosen: Thank God for that.
[00:25:08] Annie Carpenter: She's a sweet one. And so then, I don't know, maybe some, most of the yoga books say we've got the first 25 years, then 25 to 50. And then we have the 50 to 75,
[00:25:20] Richard Rosen: which you're, which you
[00:25:22] Annie Carpenter: are now on the other side. So can you talk about that? Cause I'm still in that era.
[00:25:29] Richard Rosen: You, that's a, it's a days of retirement. When you enter the forest You retire to the forest. You bring your wife along is optional And, uh, you, you, you be in the study and what you’re studying for, of course, is sun to be Sannyasa, and to let it all put it all behind. I, I, I don’t know that I’m gonna go that quite that far. I’m, I’m, I like the forest, and I like my wife and my daughter. So, um, but, um, I, you know, I can see yoga, you know, is the old yoga was emphasis on the self separate from the world. But I think the new yoga, the modern yoga more, the more modern yoga is emphasis on the self in relationship to the world. Mm-Hmm. , you want to go, you want to experience life to the fullest, I think. And that’s what yoga helps you to do.
[00:26:24] Annie Carpenter: So I'm gonna, this is me looking at you from the outside and I've only known you really for what, seven years now?
[00:26:31] Richard Rosen: Maybe eight. Seems like I've known you for all my life.
[00:26:35] Annie Carpenter: Thank you. There's two things come up one is I've, I have watched, for example, your books and on the rare occasions when I get to come to your class as a student I feel like there's more and more depth of philosophy that is completely interwoven with whatever it was we're doing.
We are doing in your class, in your presence whether that's asana or Pranayama. And I feel like that is, I just feel like that is. I'm imagining that has become more possible, more interesting than when you were busy with a teenager, for example.
[00:27:13] Richard Rosen: You're in relation to students on that question, you were just asking.
[00:27:17] Annie Carpenter: When you're having guiding us through something and even if it's an interesting sort of translation, very specific translation of a word and how that matters and connects to what we're doing.
[00:27:27] Richard Rosen: Yeah. There has to be a balance with. Regular students, they're not terribly interested in a philosophical lecture, but they are interested.
It interests them to hear something in the background of the names of the poses or, what this is related to. So I try to keep it fairly lighthearted and You do it well.
[00:27:46] Annie Carpenter: Thank you very much. But your books, the later books are, in a word, more philosophical,
[00:27:51] Richard Rosen: Wouldn't you say? Yeah, that's I try to write.
for the average student. I'm not writing academic stuff. So it's, I do a lot of research for the books. And and then I try to write it in a way that it has some humor and, and it, it brings everything. down to earth where people can read it and fairly much of the same without having it. It's relatable. Yeah, it's relatable. Very good. Thank you. You're doing a better interview than I am.
[00:28:20] Annie Carpenter: So the other one piece that I want to get into in terms of these stages is what about this idea of karma? I've, I keep, I've been saying to my students lately, One of the big lessons of yoga is karma in the sense that whatever I do now, I'm going to feel it later if I'm paying attention.
And whether that's, going too deep in a pose or gee, I shouldn't have Yeah. Eating so much last night or, all the things. And I feel like our understanding gets subtler over the years. I feel like for me, and this is more in the last, I'm going to say 15, 20 years of practice. Is that I feel more quickly and more sensitively what my actions are doing in the moment.
That makes sense. And I feel like on good days, I can manage an urge before it becomes an action. Yeah. And so like you so often say that I've stolen, who am I?
[00:29:23] Richard Rosen: I've stolen that myself.
[00:29:24] Annie Carpenter: Yes. I know we didn't make it up. But I feel like that's a really deep learning that we can learn from, Oh, grounding the inner border of the big toe and pausing after an inhale.
Richard Rosen: And why did I get angry in that moment.
[00:29:40] Annie Carpenter: And that to me has been especially prevalent in my, from 50 on, let's say. Yeah.
[00:29:48] Richard Rosen: Why do you get to be 70?
[00:29:49] Annie Carpenter: I can't wait. Tell me all about it. What to expect?
[00:29:51] Richard Rosen: When I turned 70, which was six years ago now I realized that I was still 13 years old in certain respects and that, um, I hadn't really lived properly or lived fully, I should say, up until that point.
And so I made a very conscious decision at that point to find out what it means to live fully. We have these death cafes at at the Nest now, they're Leslie's leading them.
[00:30:19] Annie Carpenter: The Nest is our local yoga studio. And
[00:30:21] Richard Rosen: Leslie Howard is a marvelous teacher. Anyway, I was thinking we should have a life cafe and talk about what it means to be alive.I suggested to Leslie, she didn't really pick up on it, but it's really important to find out for me again, what it is that I'm doing. I said, I do things now that I'm not quite sure why I'm doing them anymore. I have to sit back and say, why are you doing this? What is it?
What is it? How is this helping you along the way? So what I'm saying is when I turned 70 I needed, I knew that I was nearing end of my life. The average life expectancy of a Caucasian in this country is about 77. And I thought, before I die, I wanna live one day fully as myself. Whatever that means. And so I started, I had to wait till I was 70 to do that, but I really wanted to find out what it really means to be fully alive. And I'll let you know when it happens.
[00:31:20] Annie Carpenter: I do think that's the point of the Death Cafe, isn't it?
[00:31:22] Richard Rosen: Pardon me? Oh yeah. It's the same thing about life, yeah.
But yeah, the Death Cafes are pretty interesting. The people really become very vulnerable and very revelatory when they get among people who talk about the same very delicate subject. Yeah.
[00:31:36] Annie Carpenter: It's interesting. There's a whole group of new books. Yeah. Whole movement about, cause us boomers are at a certain point.
[00:31:43] Richard Rosen: Really
[00:31:46] Annie Carpenter: Anything else you'd like to share about you, about yoga, about being fully alive for twenty four hours.
[00:31:54] Richard Rosen: I'll let you know. We'll do a follow up when I'm fully alive. When you've got it. Okay. Thank you, Richard. Thank you very much for having me. It was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.
Oh, should I do a poem? Oh, let's do the poem! The armadillo stopped a pea in the middle of the road. He never saw the SUV that never even slowed. He really hate to moralize about the episode, but as you see, it's most unwise to piddle in the road.
[00:32:22] Annie Carpenter: Would you read it one more time? Say it up. All right.
[00:32:24] Richard Rosen: From memory. The art of the this is the this is the armadillo. The armadillo stopped to pee in the middle of the road. He never saw the SUV, who never even slowed. We hate, we really hate to moralize about this episode, but as you see, it's most unwise to piddle in the road.
[00:32:44] Annie Carpenter: That is the armadillo by Richard Rosen.
[00:32:50] Richard Rosen: Wonderful.
MUSIC IN
CLOSING
[00:32:54] Derik Mills: Thank you to our entire team behind the scenes at Glo. I'm so grateful for your care and commitment to serving our members around the world. Thank you to our teachers for so beautifully sharing your gifts and talents. I'm also grateful to our lovely community of Glo members. You've supported us since 2008 and because of you, we get to continue to do the work we love.
It's the combined support of our team, our teachers, and our community that grants me the privilege to continue to bring you the Glo Podcast. Thank you to Lee Schneider, Red Cup Agency for production support. And the beautiful music you're hearing now is by Carrie Rodriguez and her husband, Luke Jacobs.
And remember, take care of yourself because our world needs you. Thank you for coming on this journey with me. You can find the Glo podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or glo.com /podcast, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Derik Mills.