by Linda Kelly
Over the moon to sit and have a chat with Jai Dev Singh, co-founder of Life-Force Academy with his wife Simrit, both of whom have changed my life through their teachings and transformative music honoring the healing that Kundalini yoga inspires. Here are a few nuggets from our conversation. Sat Nam!
Haight Street Voice: What’s your connection to the Grateful Dead?
Jai Dev: [laughs] That’s a fine question! It’s a deep connection, very simple: it’s one of my primary medicines, live music in general. The Grateful Dead are in the upper echelon of what’s most important to me when it comes to music. It has all the elements I need, that I want: depth, lyricism — they’re like sutras, the poetry is so rich and beautiful and speaks to our lives.
HSV: In your classes, you create this space, like the Dead, this wonderful space where more magic can come in, and the ability to listen becomes better — and listening to other people who are really focussed and driven is a really beautiful thing.
JDS: People who are concentrating their life force in a relatively singular direction. Yes, [kundalini yoga] is an experience, it takes you on a journey and I go on the journey too. I’m right there with you. It’s like you were saying about trying to figure out who you are. I am too! And it’s something that blossoms over time.
HSV: What does the Haight-Ashbury mean to you?
JDS: It’s kind of like a place of pilgrimage, such a crucially important piece of not only American history but the blossoming of consciousness in our world and the revolution of consciousness that first took place and was kind of like the pillar, and for a certain period of time the nucleus seemed to be in that area.
“Hippie” to me is a very positive word and represents all the things that I think are good and beautiful. So to me the Haight-Ashbury is the sacred land. This is something we still need to be caretakers of and nurture so it can continue to blossom. Creativity is really what it all comes down to, how are our lives uniquely creative. My life is uniquely creative in a different way than yours. Look at what you’re doing. And that’s that! Just being creative in a certain way is the most important medicine we have.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Jai Dev Singh: Okay cool …
Haight Street Voice: Hey y’all! Welcome to the Haight Street Voice and we are so freakin’ excited to have Jai Dev Singh with us who is an amazing Kundalini yoga teacher, rad Deadhead, just an overall amazing soul and has changed my life is so many ways of opening up and making me remember the beautiful path that we can all be on. Welcome Jai Dev!
JDS: Cool, thanks. So good to be here.
HSV: Yes, I’m so excited! So I wanted to start with today being — I know you’re an astrological guy. I was the editor in chief at astrology.com for 10 years …
JDS: Oh yeah?
HSV: I know you do the Vedic, mine was the western, but the sun is trining Jupiter, which is for everybody no matter what, and that was in the Dalai Llama’s birth chart. Did you know that? Sun trine Jupiter.
JDS: Yeah, no, I didn’t notice that. That’s cool.
HSV: Yeah, and that’s today, which is a really incredible beautiful energy, so I thought I thought this picture was kind of appropriate for my being blessed with finally being able to talk to you.
JDS: I love it.
HSV: I’m so [laughing] excited …
JDS: [laughs]
HSV: I got a little nervous and of course I did the 40-day challenge this morning. And oh, the Jupiter finger too [for the yoga class] — that cracked me up. Here I am with the Jupiter pose, I’m pointing to the sun with my Jupiter finger.
JDS: Yeah. And Jupiter is with the moon right now too because just last night we noticed that, just going outside, like, “What is that bright star right next to the moon and it’s Jupiter.
HSV: Oh, it is? Wow. I thought it was Venus.
JDS: Yes.
HSV: Speaking of which, we are both coming from California right now.
JDS: That’s right.
HSV: Okay, so I wanted to start with today, which is Dalai Lama, Jupiter, and then I thought, where are we gonna start this story with Jai Dev and I thought we could go to this backdrop here — hang on one sec…
JDS: [laughs]
HSV: [change to Jerry Garcia on first edition of HSV]. This is the very first edition of Haight Street Voice.
JDS: Cool!
HSV: And that’s Jerry walking down Haight Street in 1968.
JDS: Awesome, yeah!
HSV: “Goin’ to work” … right?
JDS: Right! Goin’ to work! [laughs]
HSV: That’s what the guy who took the photograph, he’s a really good friend of mine, Steve Brown, he was Jerry’s assistant for years and best friend, and he called it “Goin’ to work”.
JDS: Right!
HSV: Look at how happy he is. He’s just goin’ to work with his guitar, just having a good time.
JDS: Aw, nice. That’s so sweet.
HSV: That’s where it all for this magazine, for how I met you, so I kind of just wanted to start with what’s your connection to the Grateful Dead and how does that integrate with the whole kundalini thing for you? Cuz that is our connection is the Grateful Dead.
JDS: Yeah, right. Well, gosh, what’s my connection with the Grateful Dead …
HSV: I don’t know, is that too vague?
JDS: No, it’s not too big. It’s a fine question. I mean, it’s a deep connection. I don’t know where exactly it even started. I feel like I’ve been listening to them all my life. I’m too young to have been around in the heyday of the Grateful Dead. I was 16 when Jerry passed away. So even if you would’ve made a show, you know you’re not old enough to really metabolize it in any real significant way. But the music’s been around all my life and all the post-Dead years I go to as much live music as possible.
I would say my connection [to the Grateful Dead] it’s very simple: it’s one of my primary medicines, live music in general. But for me personally, the Grateful Dead are kind of in the upper echelon of what’s most important to me when it comes to music. It just has all the elements that I need, that I want — everything from it’s musically good, it has depth, the lyricism, they’re like sutras, the poetry is so rich and beautiful and speaks to our lives. It has all the elements, from Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, John Barlow, Bobby Weir — everybody, it just has this … all of that comes together into this intangible thing that we can’t really describe unless you’re a Deadhead, and then we all know what we’re talking about.
HSV: Right. I know why first show, my mom had passed away just before that and they created a space where it really was spiritual, where they were taking care of the energy in the room, the lyrics were speaking exactly what I thinking, and I was able to sort of have that feeling like I have when I do your classes. There’s this ability … they take care of everything so you can connect. That’s the way I feel about them.
JDS: Yeah. That’s beautifully said. What time period is that?
HSV: That was 1985 at the Henry J. Kaiser.
JDS: Cool!
HSV: I was dragged there. I think you read my book that I sent you …
JDS: Yeah!
HSV: I was dragged to my first show cuz I was into punk rock and I was like, “Uh, the fucking Dead.”
JDS: Right [laughs]
HSV: We can curse on this show by the way.
JDS: Cool!
HSV: I love that you curse in class! You even say “motherfuckin’”. [laugh] I was like, “Ah yes! That’s hilarious!” It’s great! No, I love it, Jai Dev, it’s hilarious. You’re so real.
But yeah, so I was seeing the Dead in the mid-80s, and then I met them again years later in the early ‘90s and they came to New York, my girlfriend was their pot dealer, and got to see them 5 days in a row and that’s when I hung with Jerry and went to the scuba diving store all that, long story.
JDS: Cool! How fun!
HSV: But this isn’t about me. But I wanted to show you in honor of the person who introduced me to you, is this woman, Christina Soloski.
JDS: Yeah, your book hat!
HSV: She actually introduced me to you. I was at a low point, my dad had died in 2018, she’s in Tahoe. She’s dogsledding here, those are her dogs …
JDS: Oh wow! Cool!
HSV: Right?
JDS: Yeah, no doubt.
HSV: Christina Soloski, and she’s wearing my Dead hat. It’s a selfie. That’s like the best selfie ever, right?
JDS: Yeah!
HSV: But anyway, she introduced me to you and your work and Simrit’s music and it at this pivotal moment when I was so ready for something and I didn’t know what it was. And she was like, “Oh, Jai Dev.” It was sort of under her breath, you know?
JDS: Uh huh, that’s awesome.
HSV: She’s like, “Life Force Academy” and I thought, “Oh, what is that?” And a couple months later I was still feeling lost and I don’t know what’s going on. And she again said, “Jai Dev” really simply. And then finally I did the dollar entry that you do, which is a really wonderful way to get people to just check it out without the pressure.
JDS: Mmhmm.
HSV: I mean, I do yoga but quite frankly I was kind of sick of the whole how many downward dogs and the routine. And yours, you create this space, again, like the Dead for me, where ….
JDS: Yeah.
HSV: I love the fact that you’re sort of talking and I like the sound of your voice and the music’s going but then I’m also doing something with my body — it’s this wonderful space that you create and again, I’m so grateful. I’m still a little nervous! I’m probably talking too much! [laughing]
JDS: [laughs] Yes, it is, it’s an experience, it takes you on a journey and I go on the journey too. I’m right there with you.
HSV: I was reading that you never prepare for your classes. You said that in your podcast with Robert Thurman.
JDS: Yeah, with Bob.
HSV: Yes, Bob Thurman.
JDS: Yes, it’s true I don’t prepare what I’m going to teach, but I was thinking about that more recently and I realized that I do prepare, but I don’t prepare by determining what I’m going to do in the class. But I do prepare my mind, but that’s different than preparing say, like, “Okay we’re gonna do this and this and this is what I want to talk about…” and all that, because I just learned over the years for me is when I would do that I didn’t ever feel … I just felt it was always better when I didn’t. But preparing my mind is something different to where you’re preparing yourself to be in a good attunement with the present moment, to be very present, to empty myself as best as I can so that we can just allow the natural creativity to flow through. And so I do prepare in that sense but I don’t prepare in the sense of, “Oh, we’re gonna do this, this and this.”
HSV: Right. It’s interesting you mention the thing about space. I have this … I have notes but then, I refine them but they all tend to get all over the place, being the Aries that I am. But the whole thing about space for me as I get older and as I hopefully get wiser is the more you create that sort of space, which this kundalini yoga does for me — all this more magic can come in, and the ability to listen becomes better. Doing my homework I was listening to your podcasts, which are fantastic. I did Bob Thurman …
JDS: Cool.
HSV: I did McCactus. He’s super cool, dude!
JDS: Secret Agent 23 Skidoo [laughs].
HSV: Never heard of him, I don’t have a kid, but he was super cool.
JDS: He’s cool. He’s an Emmy-award winning hip-hop artist but beyond that he’s a magical person. He’s famous for kid-hop but I knew him before that as an extraordinary, great MC. And once he had children, his life kind of took him into the kid-hop realm, but he’s just a great artist.
HSV: And then I did Trevor Hall, who I adore. I knew his stuff from years ago.
JDS: Cool! Yeah, Trevor.
HSV: There was this theme for me personally you guys all sort of talked about it or touched up it was the whole Joseph Campbell, the Hero’s Journey, the mythological journey that we’re all on and I just really was like, “holy moly, he’s a great kundalini yoga teacher and a badass podcast dude?” [laugh]
JDS: [laughs]
HSV: And I love it, there’s a quote from you as well that you say that you want to listen to people who are living their lives … they’re totally focussed on that one vision of what their purpose is here, and those are the people who you want to hang out with, talk to, explore, and I totally related to that, that totally resonated for me because my whole life I’ve been, “Well, I just want to talk to people because I’m just figuring out who I am. And listening to other people who are really focussed and driven is a really beautiful thing.
JDS: Right. Sometimes I’ll use the semantics: “People who are concentrating their life force in a relatively singular direction. But sometimes I think we have this word “purpose” and it maybe sometimes gets over contextualized in terms of profession and that type of thing, which I don’t really think of purpose in terms of profession or even craft, you know. Like I’m a teacher, it’s one thing I do and maybe it’s at some level some vehicle for a deeper purpose, but “purpose” is so far beyond comprehension, and that’s why it’s so interesting because it’s like you were just saying, “I’m just trying to figure out who I am.” Me too! And it’s something that blossoms over time. But by concentrating life force, meaning that all our horses are facing in the same direction — I have in my mind the imagery in the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna’s in the chariot with 5 horses. The 5 horses represent the 5 sense organs …
HSV: Wow.
JDS: And Krishna, who represents essentially God — the love intelligence of the universe is asking Arjuna, “Who’s your charioteer?” And that’s what I mean — or what I feel when I’m talking about concentrating life force is having all horses facing in the same direction. It’s like, “Who is my charioteer? What is it? Is it kind of my ego ambitions? Because profession can be filled with ego ambitions, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but again, who’s the charioteer? And ultimately what am I serving? What are we serving? So that’s … you know, tie it back into the Grateful Dead! That’s why I love, at least at the time that we’re recording this, in the next couple days I’m flying out to Red Rocks. If I’m blessed enough to be able to be in that space, for me it takes me — in that sound current space it helps me recalibrate and connect back into what my charioteer is, what am I serving? And that’s not something I’ve ever been able to fully articulate but that’s why we do what we do and why we write poetry and why we make music and why we do things like this so we can maybe bring some life into that and then communicate and connect with each other and hopefully have inspiration to keep going.
HSV: Right. Thank you for sharing that story about the horses cuz, yeah, I had a horse for years and when I do the third eye, when I really get into my space, I actually — I don’t know if I’m supposed to share this, but I actually see like I’m on the horse and I can see the horse’s ears here when you’re looking down their mane, and I feel like that is the movement that I’ve got going. So that’s a really beautiful image of moving forward with the horses. I totally feel that.
JDS: That’s really cool. They all represent the 5 senses and 5 elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Ether, but then that’s Earth, out of the Earth element comes the sense of smell, fragrance; out of Fire come light, which is vision; out of Water comes taste; touch is Air element, tactile perception; and the most subtle of the elements called Akash in sanskrit, or space, what we often translate as ether, is sound, so it’s the most subtle of the elements. That’s why to yogis, sound is supreme because it’s the vehicle of senses that can take you in the most connected into the subtle realms of life. That’s where the juice is. All of the elements can do that of course, but sound is the most subtle.
HSV: The gong at the end of the classes is like … it is! It’s trippy. It is like being on a trip, quite frankly — not that I’m a huge drug person but of course I’ve taken mushrooms and psychedelics in my life.
JDS: Yeah!
HSV: And it has that feeling of breaking through the kaleidoscope of your psyche, kind of breaking away all the darkness.
JDS: Totally!
HSV: Like, “crnnnnck” — don’t need that anymore!
JDS: Right. That’s cool!
HSV: Yeah, I love that part. Okay, what have I got next here? I know you’re from South Carolina.
JDS: Yeah, I grew up in South Carolina …
HSV: And so how does a young man end up in Nevada City, California with a beautiful wife and an incredible gift to humanity with the work he does and they do, not that you can explain all of that, but I know your journey is that you had some illnesses when you were young and so the Ayurvedic stuff, that’s what sent you down this path, or is that part of it?
JDS: Yeah, that was the catalyst for sure. That was as a teenager, still in high school. Then I moved to middle Tennessee near Nashville where I was going to school, or attempting to go to school. I was going to school to study production and technology in the recording industry, actually. But I was 18 and had just gotten to the university that had that program, and I took my first kundalini yoga class — happened to be kundalini yoga class. And that really had an impact on me. And so as hard as I tried to focus on school [laughs] I just really got into the practice and it really took my life in a different direction. And there are all sorts of stories inside of this but the quicker version is I said, “Well, let me try … this isn’t quite working.” So I moved to Charleston, South Carolina for a little bit because at that university I was at, in order to get into the classes where you’re in the studio and you’re actually learning production you had to go through two years doing all the math and, you know, get all your credentials of the university and I just didn’t have the bandwidth for it at that time. I had just gotten out of high school and I was over all that kind of stuff. So I went to South Carolina, again, to Charleston, and that’s where I met Simrit and I was teaching yoga there.
HSV: Ah!
JDS: I started teaching really quick because my teacher that I met, he didn’t live near us he just came — he lived 3 hours away. There wasn’t any yoga studio in that area where we lived, or if there was, there certainly wasn’t any kundalini yoga at that point in time. Now there is, you know, all over the place! But at point in time there wasn’t in Middle Tennessee. And so my first teacher I had, he couldn’t come very often, once a month, and after a few months he was like, “You should start teaching.” So I was like, “Alright?!” And he said, “Just do it.” And I said I don’t know how to teach but he was like, “You just do it. You tell them what to do and the rest will take care of itself. Read the thing if you don’t remember it, whatever!” It was just on campus, and we would do it on campus. I don’t even remember how I advertised it or how people found but people came. We’d just be outside on the grass. And so kind of right from the get-go it just worked for me, and I never had any ambitions to be a teacher. It just took off right from the get-go. That’s why I kind of feel like sometimes I think we are picking up where we may have left off.
HSV: Oh yeah, 100 percent. I went to SF State to study journalism with Ben Fong-Torres, moved to New York City did all that for 9 years, came back here and just last week I went to his film opening of “Like a Rolling Stone” about him being a journalist for Rolling Stone all these years, and I was living on the corner of Haight and Ashbury when I went to State and now I live here. So everything is full circle for me 100 percent, that whole Saturn Return kind of thing …
JDS: Ah yeah!
HSV: So I think we are kind of born into this thing and then we get — or maybe we don’t get totally tangentialized — but then we finally find it again hopefully. That drive, you know?
JDS: Yes. So that just took off — it didn’t take off in some business fashion but it took off in terms of this is what I was gonna be doing, this is what I’m interested in. I moved to South Carolina, kept doing all of that and then eventually though I really wanted to study Ayurveda more deeply, the healing medicine of India and it’s a very important branch of yoga and so I moved to Grass Valley, California to study Ayurveda because that’s where the California College of Ayurveda was. And at that point there were 2 main schools, there was one in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the great Dr. Lad school, the Ayurvedic Institute. And then there was this one. I really wanted to go to study with Dr. Lad but I didn’t want to live in Albuquerque. I wanted to come to California and so I moved to Grass Valley. Couple years later, Simrit moved out here, we ended up having a child and we never left! So here we are close to 20 years later. And that’s how we got out here. We love it here.
HSV: We love having you here! Thank you, Universe!
JDS: [laughs]
HSV: To tie things into … I’m so excited Haight Street Voice resonates with you, and the energy of the Haight and the Grateful Dead and all of that. What does the Haight-Ashbury mean to you energetically? San Francisco in general, what is your vibrational connection to it, emotional, whatever, what is your connection to the San Francisco Bay Area? California in general but coming down to where the counterculture basically exploded.
JDS: Yeah, I mean in a certain way it’s kind of like a place of pilgrimage. It’s so important I think — it’s such a crucially important piece of not only American history but just the blossoming of consciousness in our world and the revolution of consciousness that first of all took place and was kind of like the pillar, and for a certain period of time the nucleus seemed to be in that area. I remember not too long ago, this was maybe 10 years ago — my son’s 16 now so he was probably I don’t know maybe 10 or something like that and we were down on Haight-Ashbury because there is a kundalini yoga center there down on the corner of Ashbury and Waller Street.
HSV: Really?
JDS: Oh you gotta go visit!
HSV: Okay, I’ll go check it out, wow.
JDS: It’s right across the street from the Grateful Dead house.
HSV: Yeah, I live 2 blocks away … is it still there?
JDS: Oh you gotta go over. It should be. I don’t know how they’ve been during the pandemic.
HSV: I’ll check it out, yeah. Wow.
JDS: Yeah, it’s a cool place. It’s been there a long time. So anyway, we were there for something. I don’t know what we were doing. I don’t know if I was teaching or maybe we were there for a Sunday morning kind of gurdwara or Sikh ceremony … but I was walking around the Haight with my son just trying to transmit some little bit of history of what happened here and how important it was. And he was like, “Papa, is a hippie the same thing as a gangster?”
[laughter all around!]
HSV: Well, they are “OG” right?
JDS: Yeah, but I was like, “Well, not really…”
HSV: Kinda of! [laughing]. Against the grain a little bit.
JDS: It’s hard to transmit. Hippie to me is a very positive word, and represents all the things that I think are good and beautiful. So to me, it’s the sacred land, the Haight-Ashbury … the whole Bay Area really. But here we are at the Haight Street Voice!
HSV: Well it’s funny cuz I had to get the hell out of here because I grew up here. Everything was “whatever” and hippie-dippy and it drove me crazy when I was young.
JDS: I bet!
HSV: So I went to New York, which back in the mid-‘80s was still amazing. I mean it had Jean Michel-Basquiat and Keith Herring were still tagging. It was still really like a raw energy. I’m so grateful I got to experience that.
JDS: That’s cool.
HSV: But I came back!
JDS: Yeah!
HSV: Back to where I started, like we were talking about earlier. Okay, so what next? Oh! Okay, I’ve been working with Dr. David E. Smith who was the founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic back in the ‘60s. Saved a lot of people. It’s right over on Clayton Street. He’s a wonderful man, he’s in his mid-80s now and he’s looking to continue to working with people in need and he’s starting to get really connected with the whole psychedelic treatment thing, the psychoactive treatment for things like PTSD and depression …
JDS: That’s great!
HSV: I have this lined up [photo of Newsweek with shrooms on the Oct. 2021 cover]. Even on the cover of Newsweek! That was the beginning of October this year.
JDS: That’s great, great!
HSV: This is on the cover of Newsweek, which is pretty amazing …
JDS: Psilocybin, yeah, fantastic.
HSV: Phenomenal. So he’s a doctor, a real guy, I think that movie Fantastic Fungi I’ve watched a million times and just knowing underneath us all the mycelium, and that we’re all connected like that. I feel like it is coming full circle back to the idea of yoga and not necessarily that you have to take psychedelics but the whole psychedelic mind frame, I feel like it really — maybe it’s just because I’m in the area: mushrooms are coming up and my kundalini yoga practice has become really solid. I’ve this psychedelic drug thing and this strength of yoga in my peripheral and all around me, I’m so grateful for it. And even Nicole Kidman’s in that 9 Perfect Strangers where she’s leading a psychedelic treatment center … have you see that yet?
JDS: I started watching it …
HSV: It’s alright. But the idea that it’s so mainstream, it’s wild! And of course, this newsweek thing. It just makes think that everything is connected obviously — well not obviously but as I get older everything is connected, there is an interconnectedness to everything.
JDS: Mmhmm.
HSV: And when we start to really — and the yoga helps me get to that faster, like, “Oh yeah, right, how did I forget that?!” [JDS screen stops for sec] Did I lose you?
JDS: No, I just had adjust something. I’m here.
HSV: Ah, I thought I lost you. Lost my train of … Oh, Timothy Leary told me something when I new him in New York and it’s always stuck with me. I said, “Why are you hanging out with me, I’m just a journalist from San Francisco and I’m not that intelligent.” And he says, “You ARE intelligent. Intelligence is the ability to see the relationship between things, and you have that.”
JDS: That’s beautiful.
HSV: I was 24 years old and a kid but it really resonated because I always am trying to figure out how does that relate to relate to that? Being curious, and seeing the relationship between everything. I mean, that is why we’re here, to try and understand that, right? Do you agree? [laugh]
JDS: [laughs] I do agree. I do agree. Well that’s …
HSV: Maybe you can riff on that a little bit.
JDS: Well I mean that’s the great mystery, isn’t it? Everything somehow does seem to be connected and yet you know we’re all so separate, we feel so separate and individualized from each other. Like I’m over here kind of suffering in my own body and mind and predicament, and you’re over there in yours.
HSV: Right.
JDS: And yet if we listen to all the wisdom that’s traveled through all the different— whether it’s indigenous traditions. The indigenous peoples around the world, they new this totally and they really understood the interconnectivity of all things, and it’s in their stories, it’s in their language. I think when that consciousness is really held within a culture or society, it’s going to come through the language. And so that’s why these indigenous languages, ancient languages, they’re all so important because inside … and again, this is going back to sound, and what is language other than sound? And so it’s the sound waves that carry wisdom inside of them, inside cultural context of language. So yeah, interconnectivity is … we all feel great, we feel love, we feel in love, we feel totally connected to another person. We all experience that at times in our lives in romantic love, but if we can expand our capacity to experience love in greater and greater contexts, you could say more subtle, but also more subtle also means more substantive because it means it’s more sustainable and long lasting. Romantic love is fantastic and a whole lot of fun and passionate — it’s not so subtle at all, and so therefore it kind of has high peaks\ and low valleys …
HSV: Right.
JDS: And that’s okay, we just don’t want to depend on that for happiness.
HSV: Believe me, as you get older, it starts to be like, “Alright …”
[laughter]
JDS: It becomes more apparent that you don’t want to depend on it for happiness.
HSV: Yes.
JDS: And so if we can expand our capacity to love in more and more refined and subtle and interwoven ways to where I can feel love with you regardless of your ideas or regardless of your politics or regardless of anything at all but just the very fact that this is life, that I’m interacting with life. It’s life interacting with life, and that’s our starting point. Then, I have now a network that can help me feel greater happiness, more consistently with less peaks and valleys. And that’s what the Buddha is teaching, that’s what all the yoga practices are about is how do you tune the instrument that is the mind and body organism to experience more subtle wavelengths — going back into music — that’s why we love it. It takes us into these more interwoven and connected … if you’ve been to a Dead show — especially if it’s a really good one! — and you have those moments where everybody’s on the same wavelength all at the same time and it’s a field of love. And that’s just one example. They’re just tapping into to what’s there all the time if you have the capacity.
HSV: Right.
JDS: That’s what yogis are doing: we’re tapping into that web of intelligence, like Timothy Leary is talking about. It’s a web of intelligence. All the birds and the dolphins and the whales and the trees and all the plant beings and the four-legged creatures — they’re all being animated by it.
Oh, you’ve got George Clinton now!
HSV: Yeah, that was a good one. The interconnectedness, yes you mentioned all these interconnected things, in Fantastic Fungi when they have that sped up footage of the mycelium eating up the dead mouse … at first you’re like, “Oh god that’s so creepy!” And then you’re like, “Oh my god, that’s so beautiful!” You and Bob Thurman spoke about death and I was connecting things, as I’m want to do. How does that fit with that? I mean you’re talking to Bob Thurman and then we love the Grateful Dead and they’re called the Grateful Dead for a reason, and that’s something I think a lot of us forget to remember that death is a beautiful part of the whole thing, and having lost my mom when I was younger it made me that much more hungry for life. It sucked horribly, but it really gave me the courage to really go out there. Don’t fear death, let it be your propellant, let it help you understand and appreciate life all that much more. Not to get too heavy about death. I loved listening to Bob Thurman speaking about it. Everybody listen to Jai Dev’s podcast with Bob Thurman, it’s wonderful.
JDS: Cool, thanks!
HSV: Okay, going back to the magazine. It’s hyper-local with a global perspective. So it’s about community no matter where you are in the world. I don’t care if you’re … wherever you are. Hopefully say hello to the people you live near or you don’t just step over a homeless person you make sure they’re okay, you hopefully are connected — connected seems to be the operative word in this interview. If you could say something to the Haight-Ashbury community, let alone the global community, what would you like to say if this was a big loudspeaker and you could say whatever you wanted to say to everybody?
JDS: I don’t know … just keep going, you know? Baby steps, one foot in front of the other. To the Haight-Ashbury community I mean you’re kind of living on sacred ground there and so there’s such a richness. We keep bringing up the mycelium network and that we’re all walking on that type of network of fungal intelligence actually, and interwoven connectivity, and that’s just one physical expression of something that’s always there. So Haight-Ashbury is on hallowed ground, and what it represents is not — yes, it’s counterculture, but I took this class — back the year or so when I was going to school in Middle Tennessee — I took this fantastic class called “Counterculture Literature” so we read Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, we read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we read Turtle Island by Gary Snyder who actually lives up the road from me here in Nevada City.
HSV: Wow, cool! Awesome.
JDS: So yeah, it’s counterculture but that movement where popularly of course it gets associated with — and appropriately so — with LSD and the psychedelic movement and use of substances but really, those were just catalysts, and those were just what kind of opened up the doors of perception that allowed us to experience the more substantive layers of life and so that then they can be nurtured and birthed into new ways. I’m so proud of that culture and then also, to me, it’s like my elders, like Bobby Weir sitting behind you there who to me is a beautiful representative of really a very genuine wisdom-heart elder who lived through all that as a young person himself but didn’t get stuck in an era. When you go listen to the Grateful Dead, it’s not nostalgia music, it’s living — we go there because it’s alive. And the same thing I think with everything that was … that was a revolution of consciousness, that’s when kundalini yoga and all the different yogic traditions actually arrived in this country. It was happening all over the place. It was a force and a movement of energy that we’re all still a part of. It’s not like something … some historical antique that happened that now we reminisce about it like we’re going to visit relics in a museum.
HSV: Right.
JDS: But rather this is something that we still need to be caretakers of and nurture it where it is now so it can continue to blossom, and that has to do with art, it has to do with serving, it has to do with all the different facets of our society.
HSV: Education, healing …
JDS: Politics even. For those who have a dharma in that field, you know, we need to pray for those folks [laughs]. So all it, you know, all of it — whether it’s marching in the streets or raising our kids or creating our art or, you know, creating our businesses — but it’s creativity is really what it all comes down to is how are our lives uniquely creative, and my life is uniquely creative in a different way than yours is. Look at what you’re doing, you know, and that’s that. Sometime our creativity is public for others to see, but often it’s not. Often it just happens in the confines of our own kind of personal space, and that’s just as important as creativity that may be out in public because creativity, when it’s really inspiration, move me brightly, [Dead lyric, y’all], creativity is adding to life as it happens. In yoga and Ayurveda, Mother Earth energy is called “Prakriti: She who wishes to become many”…
HSV: Wow.
JDS: … and so by just being creative, you make yourself healthier. And by having creative outlets in your life it’s a good — and in a certain way the most important — medicine we can have. So creativity. What’s more creative than Haight-Ashbury richness and legacy?
HSV: Wow, that was really beautiful what you just said. I was just going to say while you were speaking, Bob Weir does say in this interview that there is actually a magnetism, like an actual energetic thing about those 3 blocks in the Haight. There really is. I’ve lived here in the neighborhood but there is this energy here, there really is. It’s really interesting.
JDS: Totally. Well, I can’t wait to come visit again. This is making me want to visit.
HSV: Thanks so much and yeah, People, go check out Jai Dev. I’ll add all the links when I post this. But man, thank you, I can’t even tell you how much you … you said something in last night’s class about your actual nerves in your body are dancing and they’re happy and I was like, “Totally! There’s a party going on in my body.” It was so cool, that’s exactly what it feels like. Even though I’m in shivasana, my body is so happy right now.
JDS: Yes.
HSV: And thank you for guiding me there.
JDS: You are so welcome.
HSV: So peace to you and get your ass down here and hopefully I’ll see you at one of these music events on the road.
JDS: I’m certain of it. Thanks so much Linda. This was fun.
HSV: Sat Nam. Thank you so much. I know you’re a busy guy.
JDS: Pleasure!
HSV: Peace.
JDS: Peace.
HSV: Ciao, bye!
