The sarcasm that dripped from the bully’s lips triggered me.
His judgments, the fact that he felt the need to share them as he walked by me and my Ganja Yoga Training participants in the large lobby of the Los Angeles yoga studio was shocking.
It wasn’t the accusation that our cannabis-enhanced yoga practice wasn’t really spiritual that left me feeling angry.
It was because he said it to my students, - people who had come from all over the country to come to California to take a four-day Ganja Yoga intensive with me, and I felt a big Mama Bear energy for them. I wanted to know this yoga-bully did not represent Cali’s pro-cannabis culture. I wanted them to know he was a twat.
But (- yoga!), I didn’t retort to his snide remark. I just gave him a (weak) smile, perhaps my eyebrows were raised too high to hide my bitchy mood, but I nonetheless kept walking by as he went into his Ayurveda training room, and we went back into our smokey yoga room.
I thought to myself how cool it was that the studio owner rented out both studios at the same time, knowing ours would be a giant puff cloud four days straight. I also secretly loved that it was causing a stir in the training down the hall. I like being a rabble rouser, what can I say?
Once we closed the door behind us, our group processed the bullying we just received.
It was a gorgeous conversation: He insinuated that enhancing it with cannabis made our yoga practice less spiritual. We asked, - could that be the case? While his methods sucked, is there truth to his claim? Are we simply doing drugs and calling it yoga?
Many in the group expressed having to work with shame and fear that indeed, they were spiritual-bypassing or otherwise cheating or cheating themselves by adding cannabis.
We earnestly asked ourselves how we could know if we’re really on a path towards enlightenment and our best life, and not walking on a road of ignorance with weed. These are all super important questions for the spiritual seeker. I reflected on my own story with cannabis to shed some insights.
Early To Yoga, Late To Weed
I didn’t get into cannabis until I was almost thirty, but I’d practiced Hatha Yoga since I was fifteen.
Mindful practice helped me through a bout of depression in my teens, gave solace to my feelings of loneliness at college, and through breakups in my twenties.
It’s my longest-lasting friendship.
When I Got Into Cannabis, Over A Decade Later, The First Thing I Noticed Is That It Made Yoga, (Like Sex And Music), A Far Deeper Feeling
Not only could I let my mind quiet in ways I had never before experienced despite my many years on the mat, but experiences of bliss, clarity, and relaxation in my poses and meditations were far deeper (and easier to attain) when I added cannabis.
With the right strain and dose, my mental chatter slowed down and I could more easily connect with the profound space and silence inside. Already, I’m noticing that after twelve years of sober yoga, cannabis is adding a spiritual element, in terms of the deeper feeling and clarity.
But there’s more…
Esoteric Aspects
When I started adding cannabis to yoga, I could finally feel the esoteric aspects of yoga that I’d been learning about for so long. Things like chakras, which in yoga are seven vortexes of energy that are said to run along the spine, and have a coordinating color and psychological association.
Being a smarty-pants, I’ve always valued the rational mind, and didn’t believe in anything that couldn’t be proven by science: Meditating on my heart, throat, or third eye when doing yoga sober rarely felt any more interesting than focusing on the palm of my hand, lip, or any other non-chakra part.
After I enhanced yoga with cannabis, however, the subtle yet not-so-subtle pulse of aliveness in these “energy centers” could not be denied, despite my rational, academic mind’s disbelief in them.
Not only did I feel chakras when I did stoned yoga, I actually found myself having orgasmic bliss from them!
True story: Spirals of cascading pleasure and delight swirled around my body, cascades of bliss, with no beginning and no end.
For real.
… Needless to say, these fruitful experiments propelled me to start blending cannabis and yoga practice regularly, before I knew yogis in India and spiritual seekers around the world had been elevating the practice for millennia. So, now we have both the mental and esoteric aspects of yoga being enhanced with cannabis. But there’s more!
Relaxation Is Spiritual
Let’s take a step back, all the way back to the basics.
Has cannabis facilitated your relaxation and pain relief, making you even feel like doing yoga?
Relaxation is known to be the first state of consciousness on the path to higher states of meditation, and cannabis’ main use-case, I’d argue, is to enhance relaxation.
Therefore, it stands to reason that adding cannabis enhances the spiritual aspects of yoga simply by getting us out of our heads and into our bodies (of course, with the right strain and dose), by reducing our pain, and by making our body sensations more salient and interesting. By helping us to relax and slow down.
Ready for more spiritual use-cases?
Dislodging Trauma Is Spiritual
Cannabis can help dislodge trauma from the fascia tissue. So, when we couple it with slow movement practice and awareness meditations, we can journey into the darker parts of ourselves, and heal things that we may not have had conscious or somatic access to.
In addition, psychedelic-induced altered states are a means of breaking through our cultural conditioning, into the expansive, free, information-rich universe of direct experience and infinite possibilities.
When altered, our thinking is non-linear, and our experience feels more like a poem than a narrative. This is the realm of magic, synchronicity, and imagination - beyond words and concepts. This is where material that’s buried deep in the subconscious mind can safely come to the surface. Radically changing one’s state of consciousness is a spiritual practice that can bring healing, deeply-meaningful experiences, in addition to the physical traumas and stuck emotions that cannabis helps to dislodge from the tissues.
Not A Panacea
Of course, cannabis is a tool to our spiritual practice, not a “silver bullet” that will do all the work for us. When I get complacent in my yoga (and human) practices, no amount of weed is going to make me a Buddha.
That’s Why We Call It A Yoga *Practice*
If I just sit on the couch after smoking instead of hitting my mat, and it’s due to the cannabis, then next time I need to smoke on my mat, try smoking less, try changing the method of consumption or strain, … and keep being mindful to the ways cannabis does or doesn’t serve my practice.
And of course, we need to develop mindfulness, relaxation, and a peaceful outlook without the herb’s help, using it if it’s there but always with mindfulness.
One of my ganja yoga students says it is like adding salt to your food; cannabis isn’t the food itself, it’s enhancing the food. If we only eat the salt, but not the food, then we miss the nourishment.
If we only smoke cannabis without cultivating the sometimes-effortful aspects of our spiritual practice, then we are not fully serving ourselves.
Not Everyone’s Path
Of course, this is not an assertion that everyone should use ganja alongside yoga.
People enhance their spiritual practice if they’re called to, in any way they’re called to, and this includes using various perfumed incense, drinking a cacao smoothie before class, or practicing in nature under the sun.
These, like cannabis, are ways to actively enhance our consciousness and our experience.
Some people may or may not be called to enhance their consciousness and mystical explorations with cannabis, and the call might be different on a particular day, during a particular phase of their life, or over the course of a whole life.
The important thing is to be aware that many of our reasons for being wary of the plant have been impacted by an incorrect history of yoga (cannabis was there, bruh!), - and relentless anti-drug agenda in all domains of life (including most yoga communities, Western and Indian.)
Guilt and shame are lower vibrations that, with education and self-love, we can learn to release. And judgment? That’s gotta go too. ;-)
