(RNS) — Before 23-year-old Etai Atula shared everyday yogic wisdom with his 525,000 followers on Instagram, he was an anxious, nerdy teenager from Brooklyn, New York. The former drummer of the indie rock band LAUNDRY DAY, like many his age, Atula was chronically online. But everything changed when he found yoga.
Now, Atula’s “karmic assignment,” he said, is to tell his story to a largely non-religious but spiritually curious generation in their own language. His new book, “Old Path New Prints: A Gen-Z Yogi’s Solo Pilgrimage Across Asia,” released Jan. 7, pulls entries from his diary along his journey through 10 countries over the past two years teaching and practicing yoga. During it, he often learned more, he said, from the “ordinary people and lay practitioners” than the “gatekeepers of knowledge.”
“It’s not just the story of how yoga changed my life,” Atula told RNS in a Zoom interview on Saturday (Jan. 24), “but it’s a bit of a treasure map on how it can change anybody’s life.”
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What can yoga do for Americans in Generation Z?
This is the question of my life, to be honest with you. As generations go on, this thing which we call yoga, spirituality or the Vedic knowledge, it gets less and less cool. And because of the influence of the internet and globalization, there is so much shiny allure in materialism. I’m not trying to knock materialism because a balance is required. There’s no reason to shun and distance yourself from it, because this is the world we were born into. We were incarnated in these bodies so that we can enjoy sensuality and so that we can experience what it means to interact mindfully with materialism. That being said, the people who control these different means through which we get our information don’t always have our generation’s best interest at heart. It is a system that puts commerce and a certain culture of consumerism over mental health and over mindfulness, and there is no profit incentive in creating the balance.
That’s where yoga comes in. Eventually, we have to realize we have a decentralized responsibility. On one hand, we have all these institutions creating centralized culture around the spectacle of society. But when it comes to the most beautiful things that we experience, whether it’s mutual aid or different gatherings around the world where people can come together, it is decentralized. There is no hierarchy. There is no pyramid in terms of who’s at the top of that, and an initiation into that has to come from within. So, the best thing that yoga can do for our generation is to provide a path away from this centralized ivory tower of indoctrination.
I’ve been shown through experience that all dogmas are fallible. If you follow one and discount all the others, then it’s a trap. Any book, any set of rules, any guiding principles are going to be interpreted differently by different people. We are all snowflakes, and we need to design our own sadhana (spiritual practice), our own life, right? So the reason why I traveled across so much of the world, seeking so many different things, is because I like to see it like a buffet. You take a little bit of what works and you leave the rest.
How do you offer yoga to your followers who may not know much about it or may not identify with it spiritually?
This is the thing that many teachers might actually disagree with me on, including some of my own gurus who say that it’s Upayoga. Upayoga is, from my perspective, a bit of a derogatory term describing the practice of yoga for a shallow benefit, like getting rid of your back pain or being more productive at work. Once you get into the depth of the practice, you understand that these treasures are nothing compared to the true essence of yoga. But when it comes to the path that I’m on, which is giving people an entry point, there’s this phrase that I hear a lot when it comes to another passion of mine — content creation and storytelling online — which is, “Hide the vegetables.” Because of the programming and institutionalization from the ivory towers that decide what’s cool and what’s not cool, what’s virtuous and what’s not virtuous, you don’t want vegetables. You want a chocolate lava cake from 7-Eleven. But if you are able to hide the vegetables behind something a little more sexy and romantic, then the child who’s eating the dinner will understand that the vegetables are actually the thing that they want most. You might have to wave a carrot on a stick in front of somebody who doesn’t know what yoga is in order to show them the depth of it.
That’s what happened to me. I came to yoga because it helped me with my panic attacks, and now I’m at a point where I’m realizing that that’s minuscule compared to the benefits that it really has. Our job is to translate it and to create a bridge, to make it a little bit more appealing. To make people see that, even if it’s just about weight loss at first, even if it’s just about digestive issues at first, come follow me, and just you wait and see what’s on the other side.
What surprises you about the responses you get?
More than anything else, people respond to my story with substance abuse with marijuana. But I believe that when I talk about my sobriety, it’s not about a certain plant, it’s about the fact that we have been programmed to escape through different instant gratification, different quick fixes, whether it’s online shopping or watching pornographic content or taking any type of substance or even just putting yourself in a situation where you don’t have to confront your fears. We have been taught that it’s so much more attractive and so much more worth our while to go and escape rather than to actually look into the face of our fears and do the work that might take a little bit longer. People hear me talk about marijuana, and they can relate because maybe they have all these different forms of escapism that are eating them alive. If you were to just say to somebody, “Addiction is bad, overcome your escapism and detach from your material attachments,” it’s not very appealing. But telling a story, especially a personal story, can give people a real-life example of what’s possible. Not to say that any of us will ever be perfect, but if you can even make an inch of progress, it means a lot to somebody who feels hopeless.
Unfortunately, a lot of teachers believe — and I believed this for a long time, too — that in order to maintain their credibility, they have to be flawless, which is such a destructive way of thinking because the only way to be credible is to be human and to make people see themselves in you. And now I’m becoming more and more comfortable every day with admitting my flaws and imperfections because I know that means the most to people who feel like they’re lesser, or like yoga is not for them.
What would you say to the 14-year-old version of yourself you mention in the book?
I remember (my 14-year-old self) as scared and insecure and unsure of himself, and also deeply nervous about a lot of things. And for him to even just catch a glimpse of how far I’ve come since then — not to say that I don’t feel those emotions, and a lot of times the way that I convene with him is through those emotions — I’m sure he would notice progress. If I was to actually verbalize something, it would be, “Keep being a nerd, and keep being proud of the things that you’re passionate about.” I think we get feedback from the world to quiet that part of ourselves, to just fall into line — be nonchalant, be too cool to care. Really, the passion to share what I’m excited about is a great strength, and it’s what’s led me to all the beautiful places around the world.
What do you think it means for this wisdom to come from you — a Gen-Z yogi who speaks the language of a young American?
When I first got into yoga, I really played with the idea of being a completely austere practitioner, where I left everything behind and I lived the life of a sadhu, or a monk. Right now, I’m at a point in my journey where I feel I was incarnated in this body for a specific karmic assignment. I’m somebody who didn’t grow up in the culture of yoga or of Hinduism or of Vedic knowledge. I’m new to it, and I’m mindful of it because there’s a difference between reinterpretation and straight-up disrespect. Yoga has been so brutalized and so far removed from its essence, the people, in reaction to that, have become very protective of it and say, “This is not yoga.”
But I’m interested in finding the middle path. How can I simultaneously be respectful and introduce (yoga) to an audience that might have not been interested in it otherwise? If you go online today, you can see people are way more interested in having really intense gym days and really productive work sessions than changing the rule book and getting away from all of these things that we consider virtuous, that we consider to be achievements in our society. So as somebody who is still, even deep in my sadhana, chronically online and deeply interested in the brain rot of my generation, what does it look like to create a bridge between ancient yoga, the language of Sanskrit, the teachings of ancient saints and the irony of everything that is wrong, everything that is hilarious about my generation?
This is the point of my life: How can I present this to people who don’t even want it, and how can I show people what I’ve seen? What is that one little nugget of knowledge that will get people to pull on the thread? Because the job of the teacher is not to drag someone all the way to the center of the practice. It’s just to give someone a little nudge so that they can fly on their own.
I’m still getting there. I’m 23 years old, and there are like, six days a week where I’m like, I need to shut the f*** up and just keep absorbing because I don’t know anything. I feel like I’m still at the beginning of my journey. The reason I continue running my mouth is because I know what it was like to be me four years ago, before I even knew what yoga was, and how if I’m 1% down my journey, that can mean so much to someone who’s 0% down their journey.
