Peter Sterios - Gravity and Grace: How to Awaken Your Subtle Body and the Healing Power of Yoga

To the people, teachers, and students who have influenced my life in a way no book, video, or podcast ever could with presence.

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

Simone Weil

Contents

Foreword

We use the word alignment all the time to describe yoga poses, but when two human minds are aligned, it is pure magic.

When I first got to know Peter, we had both just finished teaching yoga at a five-day festival in the Bali highlands of Ubud. I loved the people and the energy there, but I do remember the utter relief in my body at the prospect of heading down to the coast at the festivals end. There was nothing I wanted to do more than hurl myself into the steep, barreling ocean waves Indonesia is famed for. Peter and I shared a taxi to where we were both staying in the coastal town of Canggu, Bali, and immediately began talking about our respective yoga journeys and philosophies. It was a conversation that began at the start of a two-hour drive through the thick Bali traffic and went on for days. Though the ocean was calling me, I couldnt leave the cafe we were sitting in. Peter and I talked the whole day. We were hanging off each others words, excited that the discoveries we held so dear were shared by another teacher.

Im thrilled to see that so much of what lit me up in those conversations is now presented in this book. Gravity & Grace is precisely the direction in which modern yoga needs to move. There are plenty of books that teach the technique of each asana: Move the ribs this way; make the leg straight. But learning the language of the subtle body so that yoga is no longer one size fits all, but instead unique to the needs of every body, is something that yoga practitioners are thirsting for. Even the ones who dont yet know they are thirsting for it will be when they read these insights.

Gravity & Grace is a return to the roots of hatha yoga. When you read classical yoga texts such as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, it is obvious that the original yogis were not concerned so much about achieving some kind of perfect shape in the pose; yoga was nothing close to the gymnastics competition that we have allowed it to become. What mattered was the internal experience of each yoga practitioner. Yogis were focused on the energy flow in the body. They were concerned about cultivating maximum health and vitality so their individual energies could be more in harmony with the universe.

As much as Gravity & Grace is a return to this original intention, it is also an incredible progression. Peters work is respectful to lineage and makes the map of the subtle body the yogis left us easy to understand. But there is not a lot written in the ancient yogic texts about how we can work with those maps. Peter has used his own explorations of the inner workings of yoga, a mindful awareness of bodily sensations, and cutting-edge science to create the definitive guide to the territory.

Your concept of what constitutes advanced yoga will shift dramatically through Peters work. Advanced yoga, to most people, is about reaching some kind of perfect expression of a complex pose. But advanced yoga is really about tuning in to the inner teacher. I call this teacher the wise guide inside; Peter calls it the teacher within.

In yoga and in almost all aspects of modern living, we have lost the ability to listen to the wisdom of our bodies; instead, we seek the approval of others as the source of our happiness. As Peter points out in this book, one of the basic questions people need to stop asking is, Am I doing this pose right? Instead we need to tune in to the rightness of the pose by how it feels.

I completely share this viewpoint. In my own work, I describe it this way: yoga is a feeling, not a shape. The instant we make the shape of the pose more important than the feeling of calm, grounded centeredness, the practice risks becoming yet another rat race. As soon as we start looking at the poses in terms of aesthetic perfection, we are working from the outside in. We start forcing our bodies into shapes using our will and muscular effort without listening and feeling whether it is good for us. All too often in yoga, we end up sticking square pegs into round holes.

We have inherited a uniform concept of the perfect pose, but Gravity & Grace makes clear that each of us has different blocks that need to be addressed in each pose. Some of these blocks are physical, and some exist deep in our psychology. The biggest joy in yoga asana is about releasing these areas. So much freedom emerges when we do this.

The problem has been this: even if yoga practitioners want to access their inner wisdom to let it guide them through the poses, until the release of Gravity & Grace, there had not been a book that explains exactly how. This book intelligently maps out the process. We benefit not just from the four decades Peter has on the mat but also from the way his mind works. It is not often we get such a perfect synergy of right- and left-brain thinking. This work was created by someone who understands how to express the process of listening and guiding the body from the inside out from both a rational point of view and the artistic, feeling experience it is a rare fusion. This is what makes Peter such a great teacher and Gravity & Grace so powerful. Besides yoga, Peters other career and passion is architecture. Like good architecture, a good yoga pose should allow us to feel expansive and connected to the outer world and not trapped inside our own walls. It is about creating spaces that flow and ultimately ones that let in light.

Gravity & Grace is not just the same old, same old. This book turns the practice of yoga from art into science so we can understand it and then back into art again so it doesnt become dry. It does this masterfully, and it is a joy to read. It is not a recipe book for techniques of how to do a pose. Instead, it is an elegant distillation of practical principles that can be applied to ones own unique experience. In a yoga pose, as with life, can we create flow where once there was resistance? Can we soften into where there is resistance instead of fighting it so much?

The stories Peter tells about how this process was revealed to him are insightful, real, and moving. Yoga poses and life both make us confront uncomfortable edges. Loss and challenge can be our greatest teachers, if we let them. One of the losses we learn about is when Peters core-teacher, Shandor Remete, a man who deeply inspired his journey, abruptly ended their teacher-student relationship. After twenty years of training, being unexpectedly cut loose set Peter into a tailspin, but it also paved the way for him to experience the practice of yoga in the refined way we learn about in Gravity & Grace. Other doors, too, seem to close: there is a health issue and then a back injury, things that could be devastating to a yoga teachers career. Instead, all of these events became the proverbial invisible hand guiding Peter toward what this book is essentially about: preparing students for the ultimate solo journey toward the inner teacher we all embody that awakens the tools to listen more to their own subtle body.