Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

FOREWORD
The Yogi and the Shower Singer
by STING
    It may surprise you to read that someone who sings for a living like I do would enjoy singing in the shower as much as anybody else.
    My shower, I suppose like most, has the kind of hard surface that reflects the notes back at you with a satisfying and friendly echo, almost as effectively as the walls of a church or an underground cavern or even the electronic reverb in a professional studio.
    Admittedly, I don’t sing what anyone would recognize as songs per se, nor do I use the shower fitting as a fantasy microphone, but instead limit myself to vocalizing long resonant tones. I will sustain a single OM for as long as my lungs can hold out, and advance semitone by semitone of the chromatic scale, beginning near the bottom of my range and gradually rising high enough for the sound to disturb the Labradors sleeping in the kitchen below. When they start to howl in sympathy (or agony, I can’t tell which), I know it’s time to dry off, shave, brush my teeth, clothe myself, and start the day.
    As I enter the kitchen, the youngest of my six children greet me ironically, seated cross-legged at the breakfast table, chanting their own tuneless but grand, guttural OMs, eyes crossed and little hands flipping the bird in irreverent imitation of those mudras they’ve watched me assume at the end of my yoga practice.
    “Good morning, my little philistines!”
    “OHMMMMMMM ohmmmmmmm ohmmmmmmmm!”
    “Why do you make that noise, daddy?”
    Noise? Noise? I feign professional outrage while reaching for the coffee, black and bitter. Well, I suppose it’s a fair question. Why
do
I make these noises? And why do I spend a good deal of my morning attempting to turn my body into a pretzel, while breathing like a telephone stalker, or chanting ancient unintelligible sounds in the echo chamber of my bathroom?
    When my good friend Ganga requested that I write a foreword for his new book on yoga, I was both flattered and daunted by the task. While I’ve been practicing for more than fifteen years now, what do I really know about yoga? And has my fifteen years of practice changed me to any significant degree?
    In fact, I don’t spend a lot of intellectual energy thinking about yoga, or trying to articulate the processes it awakens, because, for one, I don’t have to teach it, and, two, it’s become an intrinsic part of my whole life, permeating it to such an extent that I don’t really know where it begins or ends.
    I have benefited from the wisdom of many teachers whose example has inspired me to undertake a voyage of discovery as complex and fascinating as music, through a realm that is mysterious, unexpected, and startling.
    I have made a space for myself and my yoga practice every morning for fifteen years. I can perform feats of flexibility with my fifty-five-year-old body that I couldn’t do when I was an athlete. That never ceases to amaze me, but is it the point?
    “Part of yoga practice,” Ganga has often reminded me, “is to connect.”
    And he makes his point clear: To connect flexibility and strength, balance, concentration, sexuality, consciousness, and spirituality, so that what may have begun solely as a physical practice can evolve into an integrated and holistic approach to all aspects of one’s life.
    For example, after Ganga’s advice, my chosen profession of singing has morphed into yoga and yoga into singing.
    Getting back to my shower practice, I will choose a low resonant tone and after a little practice I have learned to become aware not of this note I have chosen, but the subtle and ghostly harmonic five semitones above—the “dominant,” as it is known. This note appears almost miraculously whenever you give it some attention. With a little more practice, further and yet higher resonances from the overtone scale reveal themselves, all related mathematically to the “tonic,” my original note. Physics and metaphysics begin to blur here, as harmonic resonances beyond our hearing connect us to other realms.
    Nada Brahma … the world is sound, so the sutras say.
    Whatever seems solid and impermeable in this world is, at the molecular level, vibrating at pitches way beyond our range of perception. And this is the ultimate connecting principle.
    My shower singing connects me at a molecular level to everything around me, to the frequency of the earth, and indeed with a leap of the imagination, to the cosmos or realms of dark matter.
    And yoga, as my