Yoga, Self-Harm and Acceptance

On the challenges of learning to feel and relate more authentically

When I was asked to film the interview below, I had no idea where it might lead. I thought we’d focus on practical lessons from yoga philosophy, which we did in a way, but I found myself sharing some personal stories about self-destructiveness…

In hindsight, they highlight themes I’ll be exploring next month in an immersion for men – daring to be vulnerable and speaking from the heart, while identifying patterns that get in the way of authentic relationships. You can find out more about the men’s group here (it’s called “Power to Relate”, and we meet online from November 5-26).

Whether it’s with partners, friends, family or colleagues, relating to others can be a source of joy, but it gets stressful when things don’t go well. The first step to deeper fulfilment involves being clearer about how we feel, so we can navigate triggers and communicate more skilfully. As I explore in the video, I used to make that hard for myself, so I look forward to sharing some tools that have helped make it easier.

Thanks to Scott Johnson at Stillpoint in London for inviting me to speak. He posts a portrait each week on his YouTube channel – you can find them all here. Scroll down below for a transcript of mine. And if you like what you find at Ancient Futures, please consider subscribing – or keep me fuelled with a virtual coffee.

---

“Practice caused me harm. THIS is how I see yoga now…!”

Transcript of a portrait filmed at Stillpoint

SCOTT JOHNSON

Hello.

DANIEL SIMPSON

Hello.

SCOTT JOHNSON

What’s your name?

DANIEL SIMPSON

I’m Daniel.

SCOTT JOHNSON

Hi, Daniel. And thanks for coming on. Where did you grow up? And where do you live now?

DANIEL SIMPSON

Well, I grew up actually in the north-east of England, but I was born just outside London – by the runways of Gatwick airport almost. And these days, I live in Gloucestershire.

SCOTT JOHNSON

Okay, great. And what’s been the predominant practice, whether it’s contemplative or spiritual throughout your life?

DANIEL SIMPSON

Well, I think initially, my practice was to be lost in my mind, to be honest. And it was only as a result of getting too lost in my mind that I became really focused on yoga and contemplative practices. Meditation has been the most powerful practice for me, but it’s the one I do least – āsana practice was by far the most appealing and I overdid it. And somewhere in the middle is prāṇāyāma, which I think has become the most effective tool that I can use to really go to where I was trying to get to with the other practices anyway, which is to have a bit more steadiness in my mind and a bit more clarity that I can bring into the rest of my life.

SCOTT JOHNSON

So, there’s a lot there. So you started off with like, more of a psychedelic way into... a psychedelic way of your life. And that moved you into these more contemplative practices.

DANIEL SIMPSON

I mean, to be honest, I had a nervous breakdown. And, you know, a temporary psychotic episode would be the honest description of it. I smoked way too much dope. I took other drugs for various reasons – often the wrong reasons. They were powerful substances that could have yielded some of the insights that I later got from contemplative practice. But instead, I was looking for entertainment, to keep up with my friends who were perhaps more constitutionally suited to that sort of thing than I was, and I had a bad trip on acid as a teenager. I recreated the same sort of panic attacks from that 10 years later through really excessive consumption of cannabis. And eventually, I scared myself. I scared myself into thinking I needed to look more closely at who I was, what I was doing, what I was hiding from, to be honest, because I’d really built a way of avoiding my feelings. And it was only when I went on my first extended silent meditation retreat and had nowhere to hide, that I really found it was possible to sit with my feelings and to be a little more accepting of the frightened child in me that got a terrible shock, who had been ever since trying to find ways to numb himself.

And it’s only then that I was able to start considering how I could explore yoga practices as a way of actually opening up to feel what I felt. But I wasn’t very good at it if I’m honest, because I used yoga practice in a similar sort of way that I used, you know, 10 years of chronic cannabis smoking, which was actually to really beat myself up. I wanted to get good at it. I’ve always been quite driven. I was an ambitious young man. I had various fancy jobs, including being a foreign correspondent, which was the thing that I ran away from and smoked too much dope to deal with, for all sorts of reasons – my employers promoting the invasion of Iraq 20 years ago being the main one. But yeah, I guess I just tried too hard to be what I wasn’t, which is the exact opposite of what yoga was supposed to be guiding me towards.

So I started out with Iyengar yoga initially, and that’s obsessed with perfecting physical form, to the point that it’s actually impossible. So you’re striving and striving. I wound up in India spending a long time with very serious Iyengar teachers and practitioners who would, for several hours a day, tie themselves up with various bits of equipment so that they would get better skilled at getting into different shapes. And I was stiff. You know, the sports I did when I was younger made me stiff. I was a rugby player when I was at school – not a very good one, but I got into weight training as a result of that. I also did a bit of long-distance running and all of that stiffened me.

And when I first went to a yoga class, I could barely bend forwards and get my hands much below my knees never mind touch my nose – my nose… my toes. Touching my nose came later with all of this, you know, prāṇāyāma stuff. But I think I could see lots of other people could do things that I couldn’t and it piqued my competitiveness. And I found that really helpful because it helped me to stop smoking weed all day. It got me interested in going to yoga class and staying sober before I got to the yoga class and then feeling actually very contented in myself after the yoga class and not so interested in altering my state of mind, because it had already been altered by something organic.

And, you know, I think I misunderstood what practice could do for me in that way. I just thought I needed more of it, more of the time, to the point that I gave up my job, I spent three years basically as a yoga bum, mostly hanging out in Rishikesh with fellow obsessives. And I gave myself some minor injuries, particularly in my right hip. And I didn’t think much of that at the time. I just tried to power through it. I put weights on my thighs every morning, I tied belts in various positions to pull my hips backwards towards the wall, doing my damnedest to, you know, go against my body’s natural tendencies, because I thought that’s what yoga was. And it is in a way about leading us away from the comfort zone of our natural tendencies, but it’s actually supposed to take us deeper into who we really are. Whereas I think I was running away from it – trying to be someone else, trying to be the others in the room.

And after a while of, you know, a bit too much Iyengar yoga, a little bit too much bullying from the teacher to perfect these physical shapes – and always back to basics, do the same old things again and again – I got curious about Ashtanga, which seemed to be a lot looser in its application of a similar sort of mindset, you know doing the right thing in the right order. And so I went to Mysore. I dabbled a little bit, learned the basics of the primary series, eventually wound up in London studying at SOAS, where I went regularly – not quite, you know, the full six days a week commitment, but several times a week – to Hamish Hendry at Ashtanga Yoga London, and then really got into home practice. So every day, I was practising the primary series initially, and then I was getting envious again, because I’ve been doing yoga for by that time over 15 years, and I felt like I should be better at it than I was.

You weren’t allowed to progress to the next Ashtanga series unless you could drop back and stand up again. So backbends had never been my strong point. I pushed myself into trying to get good at them. And Ashtanga was wonderfully liberating in a way because it, you know, generated this inner heat that made everything more fluid, and the stiffness in my hip had evaporated, effectively. I was doing things I’d never been able to do. I could put my feet behind my head. I was actually quite good at that. I enjoyed doing it. I could put myself into supta kūrmāsana. I had this inner glow – you know, what a great yogi I now was, I was in a pretzel shape, self-administered – until a few years later, when my hip locked out.

And I didn’t really know what the problem was, so it took a long time to figure out what it was. I spent a lot of time and money on ineffective massage treatment, seeing various physios. And eventually I wound up with an X-ray that showed I had osteoarthritis. And I can’t prove that yoga practice caused that, and I wouldn’t begin to suggest that it did. I mean, I think I stubbornly repeated unskilful movements in my body in such a way as I compounded pre-existing tendencies, and as a result of that, I’ve been told I need a hip replacement. It’s not so bad that I need it tomorrow. And I’m trying to postpone it for as long as I can. But it’s forced me to abandon everything that I used to do in yoga practice.

I tried doing other things to ameliorate it. I was advised to try some weight training, which I hadn’t done since I was a teenager. I got really into it, I started squatting with heavy weights... and exacerbated my weak lower back problems. So I slipped a disc, I got chronic sciatica that I couldn’t shake. I was incapable of actually sitting in a chair, never mind doing āsana practice for quite a while. And facing this and realising – you know, this sort of Radiohead refrain going round: “you do it to yourself, you do…” – thinking, “why have I found another way of hurting myself? I thought I came to yoga to heal myself, how has it become this tool I've used to hurt myself?”

It’s been really challenging. It’s forced me to think much more realistically about yoga philosophy, which I teach... First precept, really, of yoga philosophy, non-harming, and somehow I’ve been unskilful in my engagement with yoga in a way that’s caused harm. I can’t blame yoga. I can’t blame teachers. I can’t really blame myself. I didn’t know I was doing it. But now that it’s happened, I’ve had to adjust. I’ve had to adapt. I’ve had to let go of a lot of what I used to do in terms of practice. And I’ve had to think about what yoga means to me in, really, everyday life. And it means really being able to accept things, first of all. Being able to move on, despite things that I would rather have be different. And to face each moment with a little bit more clarity about what’s actually going on in that moment.

And really, that means accepting myself, becoming a bit clearer about what it is to be me with my limitations as a human being in this body in this mind at this moment. And not trying somehow to power on through to the ultimate goal of dissolving all of that into the emptiness and fullness of the one true self that inhabits all beings – or whatever other stories I liked to tell myself about where I would get if I really went for it with yoga practice. Those goals are out there. But it’s very easy to use them as a way to ignore the reality of, you know, the difficulties of being here.

And actually, the clearer I am about some of those limits, some of those boundaries, the more skilful I find I’m getting at being this person in 2023, struggling in a saṃsāric existence. Not looking to escape any more, actually – not looking for the way out. Actually looking for a way deeper in to embracing the imperfections of life as it is. And perversely, that makes me a lot happier than trying to strive to improve everything, and become something bigger, better, faster, stronger, flexible... more flexible than I am now. It’s just bringing me back to myself.

SCOTT JOHNSON

I mean, that’s like, that’s an amazing share. I’m drawn to something you said at the beginning, which is like this idea of stiffness. And from what you just shared then, it’s almost like there’s been some kind of stiffness all the way through – you’re trying to make this and make it this, almost like trying to go for the high.

DANIEL SIMPSON

Yeah.

SCOTT JOHNSON

Like the beginning of the high was like, oh, I’m going to get myself absolutely wasted like my mates. And then the next one is, oh well, I’m not going to do that, but I’m going to meditate. And I’m going to do yoga like this. And I’m going to make sure I can do this. And there’s almost like a high of each one. And all the time there’s that striving for something that’s, like you said, that’s not you. There’s almost like… felt like… through this process it’s like, your body, like there’s your body is saying, no, Daniel. And because of that, there’s the softening.

DANIEL SIMPSON

Yeah.

SCOTT JOHNSON

There’s the softening. It’s almost like a softening has existed through this intensity.

DANIEL SIMPSON

And the simplest sort of explanation of it all, it was so ego-fuelled. You know, I couldn’t actually, you know, be myself. I wanted to big myself up. And that’s what the striving was about. It was fear that I wasn’t good enough. It was fear... In some way, the big fear from my psychedelic freakout as a teenager and my cannabis habit was that I was damaged in some way – that I was, you know, mentally unstable, that I had broken my brain. And in all sorts of ways, it felt very difficult to just be me. I felt like I had to make more of an effort to be acceptable, to be honestly lovable, Scott. I couldn’t love myself, I didn’t think anybody else would love me. I thought I needed to prove myself. And the more I learned about myself, the more I liked to think that I was, you know, not doing that, but I wasn’t being honest.

SCOTT JOHNSON

What does it feel like now to be you?

DANIEL SIMPSON

Humbling, Scott, is the honest answer. You know, I wanted to be impressive. I’m pushing 50. I’ve done things in my life that I’m proud of, but, you know, I’m just another person and... accepting... really, that that’s all that we all are. And to see myself as – this is really embarrassing to say – no better than anybody else is not only humbling, but actually really liberating, because I think deep down I wanted to be better than everybody else. And as I say, it’s an ego-fuelled delusion. It’s the source of yoga misery, rather than...

SCOTT JOHNSON

But you don’t have to.

DANIEL SIMPSON

Yeah, exactly.

SCOTT JOHNSON

What have you, with all of that, what have you learned about yourself through all of this, probably where you are now that you’d want to share with others?

DANIEL SIMPSON

I think it’s that we have a lot of power in us. And we have the power to do things helpfully and unhelpfully. And it takes a lot of wisdom to see the difference between those things. But even just to see that we have some capacity to control what’s happening inside of us. And that there is a way that yoga and meditation almost intuitively awakens that power, if we’re prepared to look honestly at what’s happening. And the easiest way not to do that is to start focusing on all the things outside of us that we want to control.

I think deep down, I wanted to control other people’s opinions of me, rather than even my own opinion of myself, which is a delusion. And also to see the ways in which I’m looking outside of myself for what I can find inside of myself. If I wanted other people to accept me, you know, really it was because I couldn’t accept myself. And so the clearer I can be about that being what I need, the easier it is to let go of all of the other delusions.

So that comes back to, yeah, yoga is a potentially very helpful tool, but it doesn't work all by itself. We don’t just do an āsana series and somehow get a little bit freer and easier in our lives. I’m walking proof of the fact that you can do all sorts of unhelpful things through focusing on that too much. But it does open a doorway to paying attention to what’s really happening. And I would just say, don’t be afraid of it. I think I was. I think I was afraid of actually facing the simple truth that I’m just another person. I’ve joined the human race, and I’m happy about that now.

SCOTT JOHNSON

Welcome.

DANIEL SIMPSON

Thank you, Scott.

SCOTT JOHNSON

Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. Appreciate your time.

---

If you like what you find here, and want to fuel more of it, click the button below or subscribe…