Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting a truly beautiful Awakin Call with Gert van Leeuwen, moderated by Pavi -- full of wisdom and insights about the body, the release of tension, and moving from strain to strength from this master teacher who founded a unique style of yoga – one in alignment with what he saw to be yoga’s true principles, and based on a rigorous, multi-decade long study of anatomy, movement principles and psychology that continues to this day.

As a young man he trained for a decade in the Indian classical dance form. As an adult he studied yoga, and ran a studio of his own. Until one day he decided to put aside every shred of training he had received to observe his students in silence, and see what arose …it was a radical decision, and for Gert van Leeuwen, it led him to found Critical Alignment Yoga and Therapy -- a personal, dynamic, and evolutionary method. With two schools in Amsterdam and Russia, Critical Alignment is a precise, slow, and uniquely rigorous practice aimed to free body and mind from conditioned preferences in order to move from higher consciousness rather than willpower. "We can start to move from profound strength instead of strain," he says, aiming for a strength that results from the inside out.

Below are some of the nuggets from the call. Further resources, training opportunities, and information about Critical Alignment Yoga & Therapy follow at the end of this post.

Essence of Critical Alignment: Release of Underlying, Structural Tensions

• How Structural Stress Develops from Birth, from Unmet Needs: “How do we get rid of that structural element of stress which started to develop when we were very young? Psychology and psychiatry supports the idea that stress starts to develop between 0 and 3 years old and perhaps up to 6 years old, in a period when we are not really conscious about our behavior. … When we come to the planet when we are born, we start to develop our emotional brain, and the purpose of that development is to detect safety or danger. Of course in stress there is the functional part of danger, but I was looking at the relation/social interaction. Little babies explore the world through [the senses], and they detect safety through some of those needs or feelings – like love, care, being part of group, that kind of safety. And unfortunately, babies ask more than parents can give, because parents are also damaged in their lives. Suppose when you’re a parent and you suffer from depression, it’s very hard to give love to your child.”
• The Body as a Bucket of Emotional Needs, Fulfilled and Unfulfilled (Stress): “The feeling of love is a need, and a need is a feeling which can be experienced through the body. So suppose that your body is a bucket, and the fulfillment of needs happens by pouring the feeling into the bucket – for instance, love. When it’s only half full, something else takes over, and the feeling of love cannot reach its full development when anger and fear, for example, take over. The body simultaneously builds up a physical strain which is part of the negative emotion, and this strain blocks the experience of love more and more. Traumatized people, for example, experience a lot of numbness in their body. So when we look at tension and the blockage of certain feelings – of course when we are young, this stress response, like anger or fear, has a function in order to survive. Nature gave us the possibility, because when you’re in stressful circumstances, then stress paralyzes the body, fear paralyzes the body, and we have to continue. … [T]ime doesn’t heal all wounds. … Problem with stress is that we judge our actual circumstances by comparison. We have images from the past, and we look at our actual situation, and our brain (subconscious) make rough comparisons with the old images and then it starts to detect stress and the physical body will change, and our emotional life will change – everything will change. But problem is that brain makes mistakes by judging the actual circumstances. When we were young, we were vulnerable. But at this moment, we are not vulnerable anymore. That is a big difference, but stress is making this comparison all the time, even if the situation we are in is not really the same as when we experienced our traumas in the past.

• Stress as an Expression of Unmet Social/Relational/Emotional Needs: “The stress in which we need to change is the stress related to our social context, our social environment, our social interaction. That’s one part of stress – the brain still detects unsafety in certain situations. The question of course is, is it true that we are really unsafe, or does it come from our interpretation of the situation we are in, and how do we deal with that? Is anger still the right answer to unsafe circumstances, or is it possible to give another answer to the circumstances we’re in?”

• Opening to the Space of Our Bodies: “So when we change the patterns in our body – when anger takes over, it has a certain posture, and people develop in that posture and become strained (chest falls in, shoulders move up, neck becomes tense, maybe lower back becomes tense). When we change the body, to me, it feels like – when I ask people to experience the space in their chest, for example – they are afraid to move into it, because something in their subconscious brain tells them ‘don’t go there, because it’s not safe.’ I try to help my students see it’s not true. When you open up to space – when you try to fill the buckets of your suppressed needs, it will become your strength. Problem with that was that we need to isolate certain areas in our body which have the relation to the suppression of needs. When I began to practice yoga, the normal asana system wasn’t able to reach those areas. The root of stress, and the root of our tensions, is related to the heart regions, where we experience fear. We withdraw our environment because of fear – it makes our upper back curved. When it becomes curved, there will be a whole pattern of changes in our musculature system. In the end, we’re not able to move in area between shoulder blades anymore. We cannot reach that area through our own coordination anymore, because we need head, neck to bring back movement between shoulder blades in order to open up chest area again. No one can do that through their own coordination. Through asana, it’s almost impossible to change that pattern. So I developed props to isolate the areas (belly, upper back) in order to create free movement in chest again.”

• “When we isolate our tension and step into the explored feeling of space, for example, or energy, then at some point, we reach the edge of our comfort zone, and at the edge of our comfort zone, we have the possibility to change. But what is the cause that people are so afraid to step into the feeling and experience and space – it’s not just the sensation in the body, the spine, which causes the fear, but something inside us tells us ‘don’t go there.’ Because then you get vulnerable again. But it’s not true. My task is to explore with people that they don’t need to be afraid anymore, they can open up and step into space even when they reach the edge of their comfort zone. They can experience feeling of trust in order to go through it. The experience of trust is experienced in the whole body, and the feeling of stress is experienced in a part of the body. In that process of change, the whole body starts to open up – it starts to circulate and expresses itself as a whole. When we make a decision to step into the wholeness of the body, then the conflict will dissolve in the experience of the wholeness. That’s an analogy of the world – if you see the wholeness of the world, the local conflict will dissolve in it.”

• Releasing tension through relaxation rather than willpower/discipline: We make mistake in how to approach the release of tension through the body. The way to develop health traditionally is through discipline. … Military discipline means that soldiers need to follow orders (this sense of the word found its way through sport). Many times, body work followed this conflict, unfortunately. How can you discipline your tensions in your body, knowing that release of tension can only come through relaxation – surrendering to gravity? How can you discipline your body into building a trustful relation with it? We need to learn from our body. Relaxation is tricky word, because people think about being inactive. Nature gave us 2 strength systems in our body: one is willpower, the other is related to the skeletal muscles. [The second system] only becomes active when we release our tensions and when there is a proper passage of movement …. [W]hen every vertebra is mobile through the pressure of our body, we activate reflexes which cannot be activated by willpower [and] we have access to a strength system which is the supplier of energy. Willpower makes us tired, and gives us negative relation to energy. … When we got access to the deeper layers of muscles, we get more energy. … Skeleton strength brings the union in our body. We can experience our body as a whole. From a physical perspective, we need those muscles to become whole again. It’s about the order -- then we can start to interact with willpower. But willpower should not suppress the wholeness in our body.

• Stepping into the movement, one small step at a time: You can start your journey by isolating certain tensions in your body in order to open up again. The relation with our body is so difficult – when we’re at work, we forget it; and when we do our sports, we punish it. There’s another way, which I call “we move from B to A” – B is the way we’ve developed as adults with our tensions and traumas and stress-related memories, and A is the body we had when we entered the planet and it’s based on trust. The movement toward trust, from B to A, is maybe a long journey, but the good news is you don’t need to make A your original posture – it’s about stepping into that movement. So even a small step will be a full, 100% change in your awareness. It’s not about the long range of movement, it’s about the movement itself. If you make a small step in that direction, you will begin to benefit from it. So please, start to explore. It’s so simple. To step into that motion is not a big step. It’s a joyful exploration. Even the more complex asanas, they can even carry your own structural tensions in it. So when I look at performance of asanas, I very often don’t see a proper passage of movement. Because willpower can’t release yourself from that tension. So when you move from B to A, that’s the movement to safety, and then you can move to C (either normal life activities, where you are in unity with your body, or work or do your sports), but we need to go to the union first in order to express ourselves through our other activities.

• Relationship of yoga and meditation/mindfulness: “For me, the needs and the suppression of needs is the suppression of internal feelings. The book by Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, also talks about the importance of the body, the feelings in our body, our internal life as the foundations of our whole emotional world. If we don’t change the body, if we don’t break the tension – can we go beyond trauma? The body can’t express the feeling properly, and I cannot be related to it. So it’s all a beautiful movement, like meditation movements and yoga movements and mindfulness. But I want to go one step further: we need to change the body in order to experience the wholeness in ourselves again. So isolating the tension, reframing our posture into freedom and free expression is maybe the importance of my work that I can add to it. I think we can clearly work together, and it also happens already. You cannot go beyond feelings with words. The body expresses the feelings. If we can only feel through the body we can only change our relation to feelings and traumas and events through the body. That should be the first step, in my opinion, then you can do everything.

Gert’s Journey

• Development of a questioning/nonjudging mind and influence of Krishnamurti: Gert came from a Protestant family where there was a tradition of discussion and not judging too quickly. “When I was 16, 17, I became aware of the teachings of Krishnamurti and, of course, he is a questioner. He questioned everything, and I've felt very at home in his teachings. And he taught a lot in Holland because the head of the Theosophical Department was situated in Holland, and he had a close relation with the Dutch. So I felt very attracted to his teaching. When I was 18, 19, and reading some of his books and after my whole journey in my development up to being a yoga teacher up to a critical alignment yoga therapy. I started to become interested to his work again by looking at the videos of the conversation between him and Dr. A.W. Anderson (18 episodes), and I felt very, very committed again to his teachings. It felt a little bit that they've explored willpower from our relation with social interaction and thinking, and I did the same thing by looking at the body. I think together we made very close steps a different approach to conflict. … Questioning, instead of judging, can be a huge step in the development of mankind.

• His draw to movement as a field of exploration: “As Protestant, we are very sober. Movement was not very familiar to us. My first yoga teacher came from Surinam, from an Indian family. It was flower power time, when everyone was attracted to India. I had started to read Krishnamurti, and a friend asked me to come to yoga class with this teacher, who approached yoga from his [South Indian] dance background.” Gert became trained in yoga, and then later in bharatanatyam: “I fell in love immediately [with South Indian dance] because it was so technically very strong. I felt attracted to the story-telling part. It wasn’t like free-style dancing; no, it was almost mathematical learning, and step by step I learned to dance. … I was able to express, through my body and through movement because the technical part and the lyrical part came together. We tell stories by the use of body language, the use of gestures, mudras, and facial expression. And that combination really struck me. … My whole life is a coincidence, but that was my missing link in yoga, because yoga didn’t deal with expression. Maybe intuitively I started to explore feelings and expression through the body – which came together in the stress-related response in the body. We need our body to express safety not only to ourselves, but also to our environment and to our next generation. I need to clear my own stress responses in order to give freedom to the education of my child.

• On inspiration and creativity – working from silence and wholeness: “Inspiration is a beautiful thing, but it’s also very scary – you don’t know where it goes to. It’s unplanned. It may sound some sound strange, but when I was young, I already knew that I would become maybe well known in the field of yoga. You know something about yourself, and when you don’t judge and don’t repeat the old story of the tradition – and then come through silence – you become creative. When creativity comes from this place of wholeness in relation to your own body, in relation to thought, then something magical starts to happen. I’m so often amazed in the things I think, and I also don’t have the sense that I invented them. They just came, through questioning. And when you ask the right questions, the answer is also included in that. I’m very grateful that I had the possibility to develop like this. I don’t relate it to myself. There’s something in that silence, in the feeling of unity – when you attach to that, some new order comes out. I witnessed that in my own development. That’s one of the mysteries, in life, I think. Where does it all come from when it’s not planned, and when it’s something new? That’s trust – to trust to silence, to trust in the wholeness. It gave me so much that there’s no way back for me anymore.”

• On trusting in the flow and gifts of life: I’m not a commercial teacher. I’ve developed my work from that moment of inspiration. People come along on your path and they recognize something in you in which they want to share. It’s such an organic development. … I don’t know how it happens, but something in that subconscious -- when there’s no fear, when there’s no distrust, people recognize it and start to communicate from a subconscious level in trust to each other. And we all think in the back of our brain, of course, that the world is on fire and that we need to change. It will bring that energy together in a very beautiful and modest way. How it works, I can only share my own experience and how I observed how it happened. It’s very touching, it’s very beautiful, and it’s very delicate.

• Enlightenment is a movement in the here and now: “I don’t believe in enlightenment, but I do believe in lightness. I do believe in energy. I do believe in space. I don’t want to travel, and I come back to that word discipline. Disciplining means that you travel for a long time and in the end there’s a goal. I don’t want to wait to reach the goal; I want to experience the goal immediately, in here and now. That person with that strong kyphosis [back condition], when he lay down on that strap, that was his moment of enlightenment. Then he can move into another step and another layer in the release of his tensions, and another moment of insight will come. Enlightenment to me is a movement in the here and now, not a goal to be reached.”

For further resources and information about the method:

• An extended masterclass Gert taught at the official opening of his school in Russia can be found here.
• The Dutch website for Critical Alignment contains other resources and videos, and offers translation in English.
• A current list of all Gert's upcoming Critical Alignment Yoga & Therapy trainings and retreats is available here.
• One of the principal teachers of the method in North America, Zita van Wees, offers classes and workshops in Critical Alignment Yoga & Therapy in the Bay Area (California). This is Zita's website and she can be contacted here. Interested persons also can sign up to receive further updates about upcoming workshops and trainings through her newsletter. And a series of online Critical Alignment Yoga & Therapy videos is available on Zita's website here.

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!