Interview med Stefan Engström

Biographical Questions

Name: Stefan Engström
Age: 45 (born 19th of September, 1960)
Nationality: Swedish speaking Finn

What is your education and background besides yoga?
Well, when it comes to my formal education I have a degree in electrical engineering. I started my career in the 1980's as manager in a company specializing in electrical installations. I did this for about three, four years, after which I did electrical planning work for another year. Then I spent a sabbatical year studying Spanish in Madrid. After my year in Spain I worked for ABB as export manager for five years. My official location was Helsinki, but my job included a lot of travelling - some two to three months of the year.

After five years of working in exports I didn't do any "normal" work for two and a half years. During these years I spent a long time in India and Australia learning yoga. After that I was doing project work for ABB for about six months every year during another five year period. The rest of that time I was learning and teaching yoga.
Since June 2000 I haven't done any export or consultant work, but have been focusing on doing my own yoga retreats and teaching.

Yoga background

When and how did you become acquainted with yoga?
When I was younger I was very interested in languages. Some 20 years ago I was attending an accelerated language learning workshop to learn Spanish. Classical music and role games were used for pedagogic purposes at this course. I would say that this method is about a hundred times more efficient than learning languages in more traditional ways, plus it is very relaxing. They do something that we could almost call Yoga Nidra. In one of these sessions I went into a meditative state. I had never experienced such a blissful experience before in my life. Nothing before had come even close to this experience.

I had read a lot about metaphysics and the understanding of the World, and about how difficult it is to draw a line between physics and metaphysics when you go very deep – so, when meditation happened to me I realized right away what was going on; I was very surprised and happy - not confused as one might expect. This is when I decided to take up a regular meditation practice. I also learned TM (transcendental meditation).

During that time - when I practiced meditation - it started to affect me: I started to eat differently, I read more spiritual books, and I started to become more sensitive for different foods. I also started being more sensitive for visual stimuli, like movies – I couldn't stand watching violence anymore.

Gradually I got more and more involved in my job as export manager. I was very enthusiastic and got sort of carried away. Normally, I got a little tired after work and then I wanted to do my meditation, but now I was so full of what I was doing, so I stopped meditating for a while. Then suddenly one day I was just too tired. I needed to meditate but couldn't do it. I knew that I had to do something to get it back - it was too important to be lost. It was the most important thing that I had. I realised that I had to get away for a longer period to learn meditation again. Consequently I took a Zen Buddhist meditation retreat in Greece in 1990 where Radha and Derek were teaching Astanga Yoga. I tried the yoga and it sort of blew me away. I did a workshop for two weeks and I have stayed with it since then.  

Then, where did you go to practice after you left Greece?
In Greece I heard about Tove Palmgren from Finland who had started to practise Astanga Yoga earlier. I attended her class in Finland once a week. Later I also went to the workshops with Derek and Radha in Finland and Greece.

So, in a way one could say that you were introduced to Astanga Yoga by coincidence?
Yes, I would never have gone looking for yoga asanas if the opportunity hadn't presented itself like that. Later, I have also done Satyananda Yoga, which is taught at the Scandinavian Yoga School. There is a place in Finland where there are two very good teachers. I have also done a bit of Hatha yoga and Sivananda yoga, but not really on a regular basis. Today, my only other asana practice besides Astanga Yoga is Yin Yoga.

Who is your most important teacher currently?
It is difficult to say... Maybe Life and situations within life itself, is my most important teacher.
I think that a good teacher should awaken your inner knowledge and be generous with information when the student asks. I have had many different teachers but during the last, let's say 10 years, I have mostly been working with Pattabhi Jois, Sharath, BNS Iyengar and John Scott. They all share these qualities although I have learnt very different things from all of them.

Where did the idea of 'body mechanics' come from?
That is pretty much my own thing. I got the inspiration from David Kyle, who gave a workshop on anatomy in Mysore. From his workshop I realised how much easier it could become if people understood anatomy better. There were many things in the asanas that I could do in a different way, and that was what I understood from his workshop. This is not to say that you need a profound and deep understanding of every anatomical detail – rather we are talking about practical anatomy in each movement.

I realized that I had to start analyzing everything from a different angle again. One cannot go on for hours and hours about anatomy so I chose to squeeze what was essential for our particular practice into a two hour lecture.
Basically, we need to know what joints we are using when we are practicing the asanas. This knowledge gets the students on the right track. Then, they have to do deeper research on their own. I have chosen to call the things I teach 'body mechanics' simply because what I teach is not really anatomy.

Much of what I teach sort of happens when I'm teaching. It has grown into modules of teaching. The last few years I have been putting more names to the things and I have been grouping subjects that belong together. I learn a lot when I am teaching. When you go over the subject in different ways it becomes clearer, and you can take out things, combine and squeeze together. Make it more compact and make it clearer and easier for students to understand.

What is the most important thing in your current practice?
Maybe patience is the most important thing. Since I took a one-and-a-half year break from the asana practice I have been trying to rebuild my practice in a slightly different way: I am not in a hurry, just trying to explore it. For the time being I am giving maybe 50% of my time to pranayama and 50% to asanas. I can't give up my pranayama all together so I can't dedicate all my time to the asanas. I want it to be much more relaxed. I am not looking for quick progress, before I understand how I can avoid getting injuries or getting tired. I am looking for getting back to what I had in a smooth and relaxed way without getting tired, and then going back to doing more pranayama.
When you do very extensive pranayama, you cannot do too much asana practice. You have to sleep and eat in a special way, and you have to be very quiet all the time.

But for now I am sort of sharing my time between asanas and pranayama. And I meditate always when I can – sometimes every day, sometimes once a week. So it is a mixed practice of all three things.

The aspect of patience is important – to accept, that I can't do things that I would like to do without exactly knowing why I can't do it. Sometimes I think that we have to go through difficulties like injuries to learn the importance of patience. It can be so much easier with patience and this is something that I normally share with the students.

Yoga questions

In your opinion - what was yoga designed for?
Well, if you would go to some of the old sources, like the old books or my pranayama teacher for instance, yoga was designed for helping people to become enlightened. To me that is such a strong word and personally I don't believe in using so much the word enlightenment. I would rather say that yoga was designed for increasing consciousness of the student. All the eight aspects of astanga yoga are aiming for that. One is supporting the other to bring you there. We do asanas to prepare us for pranayama and so on.

Why is it sometimes so difficult to do the asanas?
It is not difficult for all of us. To some people, it is difficult not to do it. Maybe the difficulty comes from that yoga was not really originally designed to be practised in a normal life with normal work and responsibilities and all the temptations. It was designed to be done in the forest or in an ashram, where you can focus on the process. They did the same work in maybe seven years that in our modern society would take much, much longer. 

Is it the western lifestyle that sometimes makes it is so hard for us to practice yoga more fully?
If you refer to the asanas, I think that for many of us the body is not really prepared for these difficult postures. Some people end up injuring themselves trying to do them without opening up the right places in the body first. This I started to understand some years ago.

The mental aspects are another issue, sometimes we are connected with physical things. It can be very difficult to go deep into yoga if you are having a crazy life. Yoga is working very well in the Western world as stress management. It takes away the stress that you put in every day, but if you want to go deeper it becomes very, very difficult and extremely intense. If you want to have family and everything else, you have to live with another yogi; if you want to go deep, you can't live with someone who doesn't understand what you are doing. Sometimes also some people doing yoga in the Western society are into it for some kind of "mystical fitness" appeal.

Do you have a favourite asana or one that you dislike?
Maybe one that has always been difficult – and if I don't practice it, it becomes difficult again – is baddha konasana. It has never been joyful to me. All the other postures have, but never this one. The other postures have changed: Sometimes I didn't like them and then I started to like them and look forward to doing them but baddha konasana has always been difficult. If you keep it open it stays open, but if you don't, instantly it starts to close again. I don't know what it is. It is just something very strange.

When you give a workshop, you make us practice silent sitting. What is happening when we just sit in silence?
Well, I think that different things are going on for different people. Maybe it is more interesting to talk about what should go on. Mostly, a lot of daydreaming can happen, of course. But slowly, the mind should stop and, well... when you are on an airplane looking down, you can see the bottom of the ocean if there are no waves. The activities of the mind are like the waves on the surface, and you can't see the real self or the connection with the universe or the "God energy" or force or whatever we choose to call it. Only when the waves of the mind stop, light can shine through into our normal consciousness. Before you get to that state – at least for most of us – there is something like a very deep rest and then a very, very blissful state. And it only comes every once in a while - in a way you could say that the bliss grows out of the silence.

How come sitting in silence is so difficult for so many of us?
I think that the restlessness, that is so common with beginners, is there because they don't realise how much actually goes on in their mind. Normally, you can connect your monkey mind with your actions, so that you sort of move with your restlessness. But when you stop these physical activities you see how the mind moves and it feels almost like you are going to explode because you aren't allowed to move your body. The mind goes even wilder when everything else has to stop.

So the mind becomes almost like an over-tired child after bedtime, because things have to stop somehow. If you go through that state it becomes easier, but you have to have somebody who impose some kind of discipline and to make you sit a little bit longer than you would like to. At home, most people would never do it. They need to be in a retreat setting or somewhere similar, where you are not allowed to move and let other things distract you. Once you get used to this, even though it might be difficult, something is pulling you back to the sitting.

How soon after we start the asana practice should we start the silent sitting (meditation) and pranayama?
You can start to do silent sitting whenever you want to, but you need a teacher. The better the teacher the more success you will have with it, of course. In pranayama you force your mind into states that you cannot force it to go into with just sitting silent. You need tools to control the prana in the body almost physically and you need to be sure that your physical body is prepared so you don’t get problems.

My teachers say that you should not start pranayama before at least maybe six months – everything from six months to three years. If you have done asanas for three years on a daily basis then you are definitely ready and healthy.

As a teacher you can tell when the student is ready. You look at how they behave and how they sit. Are they restless? Do they drift away somewhere without coming back? Do they get nightmares or anguish attacks? I watch the students physically and mentally, and from that I decide sometimes to let them wait for a while before starting their pranayama practice. It is difficult to do pranayama without a teacher.

In your eyes, what is the most important quality of a yoga teacher?
That would depend on what kind of yoga teacher... I would look for a yoga teacher that empowers the students, and who doesn't allow him self to become a cult - because that happens so much nowadays. Teachers become like famous rock stars. The good teacher can stay in the background when he is not needed and make people feel that they understand the things. The students have to believe in their own powers, feel better about them selves, become stronger, so that they can take responsibility. Maybe a person like that can stop creating a cult, can have courage enough not to just look for success but to promote the students to increase their consciousness.

Always, when the students like what you teach, they want to make a guru out of you. The good teacher will show them that this is not good for them. They need to not make yoga into a club but to keep on going deeper in their own research. He will make them understand that they have the knowledge inside, and that they have to awaken that knowledge, so that they, themselves, will take responsibility for all the feelings that will come: love, hate and everything. In order to mature into people who take responsibility. So, in a way, the teacher should take responsibility for showing the students to take responsibility, and empower the student. Because finally there is no freedom without responsibility.

Could you give some general advice for beginners of yoga?
When you begin practicing, just start to explore. After having done that for a while ask yourself why you are doing it. Then, let the question be with you for a while, and when you start to feel your answer coming then look for the circumstances, that best support that kind of practice. These circumstances might change over time. It is an ongoing process and you might have to return to that question again and again.

I am all the time coming back to the question: why am I teaching? What can I do with this? Sometimes I feel like I have to stop teaching because I don't know why I am doing it anymore. I can start all over again when I feel motivated for doing it, and when I feel it makes sense.

Sometimes you have to make changes to the way you go with your practice or your teachings. If you understand where you are going and what your limitations are, you don't expect the impossible from something that is not possible. You have to do that to keep you on the track with what you really want to do with your life.

I would encourage people to learn some kind of meditations technique and try to keep that going even if they do asana practice. Maybe, if they do pranayama, they don't need to do meditation. However meditation is a very important thing to become familiar with as early on as possible.

The combination of questioning and trust is the most important one. Always try to stay in balance. If you come to yoga when you are out of balance, you can fix it, but if you keep on doing the same thing, it might push you out of balance again. So, just because eating nothing but rice might be a good diet for you for two months, it won't necessarily be a good diet for you for the rest of your life. With the yoga practice you have to be attentive and sense when and how to advance to the next level. In the end it is essentially about being present in whatever it is that you do and ultimately to increase your level of consciousness.

Herlev, onsdag den 9. november 2005, bearbejdet onsdag den 5. april og 12. november 2006.