UrbanUpdate

When my yoga teacher announced that David Swenson was coming to our studio to teach guest classes, the way she said it made it seem like one of The Beatles was dropping in. I quickly came to understand that, while there are no winners and losers in yoga, he was one of the all time greats. Like, there are memes about him:  

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Swenson, who was born in Texas in the late '50s, has been practicing yoga since he was 13 years old—his older brother went out to California in 1969 for a surfing trip and returned with books on yoga and health food from the thriving capital of hippiedom. 

And though Swenson never fit in with the football-dominated, jocks-as-kings vibe in Texas, his life has, in a very different way, revolved around athleticism and the body. Now, Swenson teaches yoga workshops around the world, and is more often on the road than at home. GQ went deep on what he's learned over 50 years dedicated to wellness before that concept even really existed.

For Real-Life Diet, GQ talks to athletes, celebrities, and other high performers about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.

GQ: How did you get into yoga? 

David Swesnson: I grew up in Texas. My brother is five years older, and he was a surfer. He would surf in Texas–yes, you can surf in Texas—but  he would go to California in the summers to surf bigger waves. In 1969, when I was 13, he went to California and learned about yoga from a place called Paramahansa Yogananda Self Realization Fellowship. [Yogananda was arguably the first to bring Yoga to the US, and is often referred to as the “father" of yoga in the West. Steve Jobs gave instructions to hand out Yogananda’s book to everyone at his funeral.] My brother saw people doing yoga and he went to a bookstore and bought a book called Yoga: Youth and Reincarnation by a guy named Jess Stearn, which most people had never heard of. He also saw a health food book by Paul Bragg [of the nutritional yeast and liquid aminos]. We’d never heard of health food, we only knew about food, there wasn’t a distinction between those things yet. 

So my brother comes back to Texas from California and he’s doing yoga and eating health food and I started following in his footsteps, practicing yoga from books, eating health foods, so that was my introduction to what was called an alternative way of life back then. I was a vegetarian, and in Texas that’s weird! We were oddballs. We used to go to a park at the end of the street and do our yoga practice, and part of my new journey was growing my hair long, so I had this long hair to my waist. My brother and I were under a tree doing yoga and police cars rolled up and pulled their guns out and said, “what are you boys doing out here?”  

We said, "we’re just breathing and stretching, officer!” 

They said, “the neighbors called and said you’re doing some kind of devil worship,” because we were scantily clad hippie boys under a tree. So that was the environment. 

How was yoga in the 70s different than now? 

Yoga was gaining some ground in the late ‘60s, early ’70s but it was nothing like it is now. It was more of a spiritual quest, because the people who did it were the hippies of the Baby Boom. When I was growing up there was a great big question mark because people didn’t want to live the lives their parents had, like what was represented by the perfect families on those 50’s television shows. So hippies started doing yoga and taking drugs and traveling to India, and the Beatles chanted and went to India, and all this stuff was percolating. 

So there was this word yoga going around, and we found these books. California had more of a resonance for yoga than Texas, and that’s where I ended up finding out about this system of yoga I’m still involved with today called Ashtanga yoga. But initially it was just those books. There were no yoga studios, no yoga clothes, no yoga mats. Nothing. You just had a book and a desire to do it. Our yoga mat was a bed sheet or a beach towel. We wore were either karate pants because they were nice and baggy or a Speedo bathing suit. (Fortunately, the Speedo has gone away in the world of yoga.) But it was very simple, you just got a book and practiced. There weren’t really teachers. There wasn’t this whole industry. I feel a little like an old man telling stories, but it’s true. 

When did you begin teaching yoga? 

I had all manner of jobs. I worked construction, I sold Honda cars. I did whatever to pay for the cost of living while practicing yoga. I never really wanted to be a teacher, but then you’re practicing and someone says “what are you doing?” and then you teach them, so you become a teacher. 

When do you think yoga became more popular? 

It wasn’t until the ‘80s and ’90s. It used to be just the fringes of society, hippies looking for the meaning of life, but by the ‘80s something changed. There was an interview with Joni Mitchell where she said something like in the ’60s my generation wanted to change the world, now we just want to get rich. People wanted to get fit and streamlined and then got into things like running and aerobics and Jane Fonda and big hair. Then, in my opinion, what happened was in the '90s, my generation realized OK: we have all the material things we wanted, the car, the house—but something is missing spiritually, and there was a turn back to the 60s, and to yoga. Around this time something came into being called “power yoga” which two of my friends, Ashtanga practitioners, came up with at the same time, separately, on different coasts, where people wanted both: I want to be fit, but I want something spiritual or philosophical, something deeper than just doing aerobics. 

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Is there a sort of yogic diet that you follow?

When you do yoga you become more aware of your body, and sometimes you eat things you used to enjoy but you feel like a python—the food’s still in there. Your food choices naturally change when you realize certain foods make you feel better. To me, the more things that happen to a piece of food from the time it was harvested to the time you eat it, the less nutritional value there will be. I eat foods in their whole state. 

This can be harder for me when I’m traveling to teach. There are some years when I can be 300 days on the road. To create some consistency because I’m in hotels, I always travel with oatmeal because all I need is a way to heat water. (And even without that I can do overnight oats.) Oats, raisins, you’ve got a meal. I think it’s better than a protein bar—I used to eat them but then I realized there’s just so much corn syrup in those it’s better to have the plain food. When I’m teaching a lot, I tend to stick to fruit and nuts—maybe a spoonful of nut butter, carrots, because I need to be able to get into postures without feeling heavy. At night I’ll have a bigger meal of whole grains, salads. Sometimes I’ll eat fish. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 13, but now I’ll eat fish now and again. But I don’t tell students they have to do anything, I just hope they eat to feel good. 

Can you tell me a little bit more about Ashtanga specifically?

Ashtanga means eight-limbs, and it’s a philosophical way of viewing life. It’s also a method of yoga practice that involves five things: Ujjayi breath, which means sound-breathing—it sounds a bit like Darth Vader. It keeps you focused. We listen to our own breath as a barometer of how our practice is going. If it’s shallow I know I’m distracted. If it’s harsh I’m pushing too hard. 

We also have a visual point we look at. If you do meditation usually there is a visual point to look at that grounds you, like a candle or a bowl or something. Sort of like a distraction filtration system.  There is also an element of moving energy through your body which you could liken to Tai Chi. 

Then there’s the poses, the asanas themselves. Ashtanga is a specific arrangement of the poses, which I also liken to Tai Chi, because you do the same sequences over and over for your whole life, so it becomes a meditation in motion over the course of your whole life. And there are 6 different levels that we practice with and use these repeated sequences. People say that when you do these six sequences, it’s like spinning the numbers on a safe and the door opens. You methodically open through the muscles of the body. Then there’s the linking of the postures with the breath. This is called vinyasa. Ashtanga has gotten pretty big over the years. Athletes started doing it, celebrities started doing it. Sting, Madonna, Paul Simon, Eddie Vedder. One of the great athletes of all time, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, used to come to my classes in Los Angeles, and he said that it helped him have a greater longevity in his basketball career. It’s funny because I grew up in Texas where sports and jock culture is obviously so important and I never fit in with any of that, but I have a great respect for it.

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Any yoga that uses the word “power” or “vinyasa” or “flow” has a root from Ashtanga. It doesn’t mean Ashtanga’s better, but it’s the root.  Other yoga people used to moving slowly would get very upset by Ashtanga, and say that’s not yoga, you don’t huff and puff and sweat like that. 

My other friend Beryl Binder Burch wrote a book called Power Yoga, which was traditional Ashtanga but adapted for her work with runners and athletes. They used her book as training. Shiva Ray and Shiva Shakti and Jivamukti—these all stem from Ashtanga, but they’ve brought in other spiritual practices they feel strongly about, like how Jivamukti incorporates music and animal rights. But you can trace it all back to Ashtanga.  

If you watch someone doing Ashtanga it looks like gymnastics. There’s standing on your head, crazy arm balances, wild transitions. The paradoxical thing is the aim is to do all of this physical stuff with the end goal of understanding that I am not this physical stuff. 

So it’s more than physical.

There are physical benefits to yoga, better flexibility, balance, control of your body. But something happens under the surface, and that unseen thing is where yoga really lives. That’s what keeps people like me doing it for decades. Something inside just feels better, this yoga thing soothes the nervous system, calms the mind, and athletes found the benefits of the breath work, learning to be calm in the midst of chaos in addition to the stretching. 

What’s your yoga routine? 

You’re meant to do Ashtanga about five days a week. And it’s a very intensive practice, probably 90 minutes. Some of the sequences are incredibly physically challenging with arm balances and handstands. I don’t find myself to be a particularly disciplined person because I only do things that I like, but I’ve always found Ashtanga to be inspiring. (Just like no one had to tell me to surf—I love surfing.) I love balancing on my hands and trying to keep my mind focused. At some point I realized this yoga is my medicine. Just like medicine there’s points you need higher doses, and in my early years once a day wasn’t enough. I’d be doing yoga twice a day, like a dog chasing a tennis ball. But then I realized there’s other things in life you need to reserve energy for things like relationships. I realized I could just practice until I feel a good amount of energy in my body and then finish. It became: how can I be so efficient that I can step onto my mat like it’s a laboratory where I can infuse my body with energy to be able to go out and make the world a better place? 

 Some days I might do 15 minutes, other days it might be the whole sequence. This is my medicine, so how much do I need today? I’ve been doing it for 53 years. I don’t think of yoga as a 30-day challenge. It’s a 30 year challenge. 

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You’ve been able to do some really wild postures that are incredible feats of strength. As you get older do you struggle with losing the ability to do certain things? 

Here's the beauty of yoga: It’s not a competition. But even though we say that, everyone’s trying to outdo each other on Instagram with crazy postures. And there are things I cannot do now that I used to do. Aging is reality. I’m always confused about people who are into anti-aging, because to me not aging means death. Getting older is a great thing. 

In the beginning, you treat yoga postures like they’re money, putting these postures in your bank. But if you do yoga long enough, you want to start donating those postures to charity. For example, I want to give away putting both legs behind my head. This is challenging because you worked hard to achieve these things, but it’s not the goal to do them. If yoga were solely about flexibility and strength, the Cirque du Soleil performers would be the gurus, because they can do any of this stuff. But yoga is not some elite fitness program. It’s not only for people with two arms, two legs and a strong healthy body. I’ve taught people in wheelchairs, missing limbs, unsighted, people who can’t hear, people with severe arthritis. It transcends physical ability. Yoga is a tool that allows me to control the mind through my breath. So sure, there are some things I now cannot do, and, of course, I hold on to a few tricks I can pull off in front of an audience, but there’s also stuff I have to let go of. 

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