Electric Memories
Warren Buttery
Yoga | Story 2 of 4
Electric Memories is an online storytelling platform that documents, records, and packages your defining moments, lessons learned, and personal history across multiple media for permanent storage, access, and sharing. For more information, visit www.electric-memories.com.
For the complete set of Warren Buttery’s audio, video, and text remembrances, visit www.electric-memories.com/warrenbuttery.
The interviewer is Brian Gruber.
This interview is the second of a four-part series featuring Warren Buttery. You can read the entire series at medium.com/electric-memories
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If someone wants to get a sense of who you are today, how would you describe yourself?
I start with, I’m a yoga teacher. It’s my foundation of life and holds me to the island. I appreciate the island because it brought me to yoga.
I’m a chi nei tsang practitioner. I have a new skill, aquatic bodywork, which is kind of cool, a deeply healing practice, beneficial for me in the past, guiding people in and underneath the water.
A lot of what I do is about breath. With my yoga practice, I have a Kundalini bent as well as Hatha, I’m always teaching people how to breathe pranayama. The water stuff is all about breathing. When you hold someone underwater or are being held underwater, you no longer have control of your breath. Amazing things can happen. Trust.
When did your interest in yoga start?
I was in Burma, one of the last contracts of my humanitarian career, and my third spinal injury inspired me to do something about it. I have three, one in my neck that was pretty scary, two in my lower back. It was my body telling me that I needed to change. For my third spinal injury, I was lying flat on my back in my apartment in Yangon. I recognized I needed to do something about it. So I went to a yoga class and I thought, oh, this is kind of interesting.
When was that?
2015, 16. I started in 2015. Just a little here and there. I knew I needed to change so someone said, why don’t you come to Koh Phangan? I thought, well, that’s ridiculous. I can’t take drugs and drink tequila for breakfast and party all night. He said, no, no, no, there’s another side, there’s a healing side, go there. So I did. And practiced a little bit. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I understood that the change needed to happen, so I went to Nepal in 2016, 17. I found my teacher; I was going for one month but I stayed for one year. Sort of did an apprenticeship where I committed myself to the practice, learned a lot about my physical body but also my energetic body and a way to better connect with myself. It’s a beautiful place up in the forest, on the lip of the Kathmandu valley, and I spent a lot of time walking through the forest as well as practicing.
The Nepal Apprenticeship
Let’s go back to Nepal. How does one find one’s teacher? Destiny, a mystical connection? Or is it stumbling across someone you just decide to study with?
Yeah, it’s very mystical. Um…Google (laughs). I was looking to leave the island to really get embedded into yoga. I was looking for a one-month teacher training. And I was looking at India not really knowing what to do. But the visa process didn’t fit my timeline. And I just switched to Nepal. And I googled and on top of the list came my teacher. He has a Ph.D. in yogic science and a Ph.D. in Sanskrit. I thought, wow, I’m going to somebody real. One month became one year and he gave me this incredible apprenticeship, to practice, to learn the philosophy, the wisdom, what it’s like to live a life committed to practice, how he was raising his family. I had a connection to his little daughter, the first time I ever dealt with a little girl. That was interesting learning for me as well. Yeah, so committing to a karmic yogic path, a path of service, which I recognized then, oh, I’ve always been in service anyway, in the military, in my humanitarian career, and on my yoga path.
Was there a moment during that year where it went from, this is really a cool yoga class, I’m enjoying this experience in Nepal, to something transformative, either in terms of your intention to take teaching more seriously or some movement in your own identity?
I always knew I’d be a teacher. Because I’ve always trained people, no matter where I’ve gone, could be in the middle of Sudan. I’ve taken upon myself to train staff around me, national staff, international staff on all types of things. I’ve always had that in me. I’m always open to learn. A lot of people with even 20 years practice will come to his TTC’s (yoga teacher trainings). And they were generous enough to be able to share their learning which I took on board. So it was a rate of growth that I really appreciated.
Was there a point in doing that training that you had a deep sense that you were going to make this big commitment for the next phase of your life? Devote yourself to teaching yoga?
A part of it was, I have been coming to Koh Phangan for so long but I’ve always been a consumer. I’ve wanted to set roots here. And so what can I offer? How can I be useful as well as preparing myself physically and psychologically? So that was always my deepest intention. How can I ground here onto this magical island of healing and transformation? And of course a skill that potentially I can take traveling around the world. This is a very transferable skill.
So you decided selling ketamine was not the Phangan commercial path for you?
(Laughs) Getting high on your own breath.
I always knew I’d be a teacher.
Yoga for a lot of people is exercise, stretching with Sanskrit names. What’s yoga to you?
Yoga is the basis of everything that I do. It’s the philosophy. Asana, the daily practice that we have, is the hook that gets you into the door for advanced training. For me, because I love teaching the philosophy, these are incredible tools of how to understand self and the practice is actually a very small part of yogic philosophy. I like to ground myself in the philosophy first and to make my decisions based on that. I appreciate that everyone comes to yoga for a different reason. Except men, generally men come for two reasons (laughs). One is injury, physical or psychological. And the other is because of a woman. A woman led them there or they worked out in the gym and saw unique women doing their thing and thought, okay, I want to be part of that. For me it was both. There’s a woman who really led me back here. My first yoga teacher was a woman. And it was to understand my injuries.
Starting a Yoga Community
In Bangladesh, we were set up as teams from different humanitarian organizations. One massive holiday hotel at Cox Harbor, big white sandy beaches with women in burqas walking in the water, it’s quite a juxtaposition from this place. I started off in the mezzanine floor of this big ugly hotel at six o’clock in the morning and then people started to join me and we had 7, 10 people every morning practicing. I moved out of that hotel, I found a lovely hotel with a spare room on the beachfront. And we would practice three times, four times a week, with humanitarian workers from every nationality, including Bangladeshis and surf lifesavers on the beach. And from that, we had four people go off and do their teacher trainings. Some of them came back and yeah, we had 120 people who would be practicing at different days of the week, helping them let go of stuff they were carrying for years or from that emergency, which had its own challenges. That was beneficial to me and it proved how the practice can help me, and it proved to me I no longer fit in that world.
The scope and the drama of the humanitarian work in the stories that you shared is extraordinary. Your daily life here is different. Do you ever long to go back to that life because of that higher profile?
No way (laughs). I don’t fit there any longer. I have enough drama here on Koh Phangan (laughs) helping people going through their shit. The yoga teacher training as an example. I always start with the question, what’s your intention for being here. Some might say, to be a yoga teacher; it’s quite rare that comes up, less than 10 percent. The others, they’re looking for transformation. Yoga has provided me the basis, the tools for my own transformation and that’s what I share with them. I know it works because it worked for me. Now I’m not saying it’s going to work for everybody, because there are always going to be different modalities, whether it’s a good start point to get out of the head, which is where the stories collect. The trauma is in the body. And that’s what yoga offers, to release the trauma from the body.
The military and humanitarian organizations refer to their assignments as missions. What’s your mission now?
I am creating a yoga education platform with a colleague to bring this practice and philosophy at a deeper level to others. What has been really rewarding is an old army mate of mine, who I’ve not seen since we graduated in June 1991 as young army officers, he’s coming to train with us in February. For me, that’s full circle. So I guess my mission is to do the same thing as I did in my humanitarian career, create a safe platform with some tools for people to do good work on themselves. That’s what Moksha is. Liberation.
For me, that’s full circle.
Liberation
The instruction of yoga is a core element of who you are and what you do. How did that opportunity or focus emerge from those experiences?
Right. Thank you. Yeah, yoga for me underpins everything. Once I’d had these very deep healing experiences, I recognized that I wanted to do something more sustainable, how to fix this physical self. I went to Nepal and found my teacher. I had the opportunity to delve into a lot of the practices while strengthening and gaining flexibility in my body. That’s the physical side. But what I experienced is, the philosophy of yoga underpins everything. It has given me tools to help diagnose what’s happening inside of me, emotionally and physically and spiritually, and to give me the tools to be able to move out of whatever wounds there are around that.
I traveled around the world, teaching yoga in the Republic of Georgia and Bangladesh and in other places that I worked in my life, trying to extricate myself from my humanitarian career. I am truly a product of yoga: this stronger, more flexible, more empathetic individual comes from yoga. From that, I’ve been training people for eight years on how to be yoga teachers but working for other organizations. A dear friend and sister who I’ve been teaching with for a couple of years — we really understand each other — said, why don’t we create something a little bit different, something with a greater depth than we’ve been experiencing with other schools. So we created Moksha.
Moksha is about being passionate about the philosophy and practice of yoga as a tool of transformation. Not necessarily training people to be yoga teachers, though that is there if that’s what people’s intention is, but to give them a foundation of yoga, to understand themselves better, as it helped both of us. Yoga for me underpins the way I approach life. It gives me incredible tools that I like to share.
What’s the vision for the organization over the next year or two?
We’ve just completed our second training course. We’re in the fledgling stages. Our idea is to take it from a training every few months into something with which we connect with students for a longer period. To be able to support people for years, to create a community of healing through practice.
Does Nepal still hold a special place in your heart?
It certainly does, in several ways. My first journey out of Australia was 1991. I came to Thailand very briefly, then went to Nepal, hated it. I turned around and came back to Thailand. I didn’t go back to Nepal again until I was on my yogic path. I found my teacher. It was fateful that I did, because I found somebody who gave me a great deal of structure, who’s no-nonsense, who’s very Nepalese, and lives quite a humble life with his family with a huge work ethos. It gave me a great grounding. Dr. Chintamani Gautam. I call myself a yoga teacher, but he has so much more information, so much more practice and so much more knowledge. I feel grateful and humbled that he’s been there for me and with me.
We All Want Love
There are so many different modalities to healing. There’s lots of different pathways, and I’ve selected a few, yoga being a key, whether you’re going find it in practice, whether you’re going to find it with a counselor. Some tools will work for one but may not work for another, but I really implore people, and particularly men, to reach out to find something. It all starts with understanding self. What am I feeling? How can I check in with myself? Can I slow down and stop and listen to my body which I was ignoring for so long. That’s the first step. Recognizing there’s a problem here and how do I change it. They talk about midlife crisis. Mine happened at 48. But instead of going out and buying a Porsche, I came to yoga. I needed to heal. There was a physical imperative that I needed to resolve, through which I found yoga and all the healing modalities from there.
I like to draw men into yoga. I believe that the more men that practice yoga, the better the world will be. Because you’re more in tune with your body, more in tune with the emotions and the traumas that you might be carrying. If we as men have healthy role models to find that balance between masculine and feminine, that’s ha-tha. Hatha Yoga is the sun, the masculine, and the moon, the feminine. Bring it into center. Mother and father, daughter, and son.
What are the stories that have defined you, that have animated and activated you?
There are so many moments. I guess it’s this accumulation of experience. Just like complex PTSD, it’s never one thing that brings you here. It’s the accumulation of experience and my willingness, commitment to discover myself and the openness to find the tools to be able to do that. And to find the right teachers. When I broke free of the military structure, I recognized more equality in men, and to bring in the feminine; the humanitarian world is full of very powerful women. And that helped me find balance. Recognizing that conflict, the wars that are being fought, who are they really hurting? Yes, men, but it’s the women and children, the ultimate victims. And then their women and children. That generational pain like Afghanistan, which I’d lived in for 10 years over 20 years, generations of pain inflicted upon whole communities, the whole country, through religion, through dogma, through poverty, through conflict, through very disruptive political change, and recognizing how resilient humans are. Afghans, Sierra Leoneans, Ethiopians, Sudanese going through generations of conflict and to recognize that we all want the same thing.
We all want love. We all want to be heard. We all want to feel supported, in family, in community. We all want that. We all want to be held, in our wounds. And it wasn’t until I was able to stop and feel that I recognized that. And that’s why I’m here today in service to support men it’s men who create the trauma. Generally, it’s men who make decisions and acts of violence. Generally, it’s men whose brittle egos make decisions that react negatively, destructively on whole communities, whole nations, generations. That unhealthy masculine, the toxic masculinity, the misogyny, the ability to see difference, this necessity, that you are lesser than me, you are different than me. And yoga explained to me that that’s just not true. We’re all the same. My humanitarian career helped me to understand that it didn’t matter what environment I was in, people who have survived, they want the same thing. They want to be safe. They just want to be safe. And maybe I can support some people in feeling safe. The same way I try to support my partners in being safe. Different connotations of the term safety, but it’s the same thing. It’s how can I be loved and vulnerable and held in a world that’s often dangerous and feels unsafe?
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Electric Memories is an online storytelling platform that documents, records, and packages your defining moments, lessons learned, and personal history across multiple media for permanent storage, access, and sharing. For more information, visit www.electric-memories.com.
For the complete set of Warren Buttery’s audio, video, and text remembrances, visit www.electric-memories.com/warrenbuttery.
