An Interview with Matt Borer

Matt Borer teaches Ashtanga at Yoga Yoga full time, with an average of 13 classes a week, and he is a member of the Yoga Yoga Teacher Training faculty. He also recently married fellow yogini Hannah Floyd! Rusty Nelson sat down with Matt to talk about his life and work so far:

What was your first exposure to Ashtanga Yoga?

It was about 11 years ago, when I was 22. I was living the post-college life in Washington DC, looking to better my health in different ways -- going to the gym, biking, rowing and running. I was drumming for a band several nights a week and also bartending full-time. I went to visit a friend in L.A. for a weekend. One morning when I woke up, she told me she was going to a yoga class, and that I should go. I was pretty hesitant, so she insisted. So I went, dragging my bare feet, to my first yoga class.

I found out one year later that what I had done was Ashtanga. It was actually a class with Bryan Kest, whom I found out years later was one of THE teachers in L.A. and you know, I had thought that class seemed overly crowded! At the time, I had no idea what I was doing. I got the sense immediately that out of all the other sports and activities I had done throughout my life, yoga was what I had been looking for.

I went back to DC and started taking a weekly class at my gym. Then a studio called Georgetown Yoga opened right next to my apartment, and I started doing Ashtanga there six days week.

Who was your teacher at that time?

I had a fantastic teacher, Margaret Townsend. She was teaching about 18 classes a week in the DC area. She was very inspiring and pushed us in great ways. She was the person who encouraged me to begin teaching.

I did a 40-hour course in Vermont with David Swenson. As soon as I came back, Margaret told me she was taking off for a week and that I needed to teach her classes. Teaching that first class of hers was a daunting experience, she had an almost religious following. I remember walking in and everyone just stared at me. It was nerve-racking, but I survived. I started teaching a couple of classes a week, doing my best to squeeze my teaching between bartending and drumming. Later on I wound up managing Georgetown Yoga.

What was drawing you into the Ashtanga practice at this time?

At first it was purely physical, I did not really like any of the spiritual stuff. I felt pretty satisfied with where my life was at that point. The spiritual side did not happen for me for a couple of years. I did a crazy amount of reading, but I was more interested in asana and the history of the practice. Even if I read the philosophy, I didn't try to integrate it into my life at that point.

Something happened, when I was in the band. I was practicing Ashtanga five to six times a week at that point. I was driving from Richmond, Virginia to DC in the middle of the night after a gig. At about 4 am I suddenly found myself totally disoriented and wandering around in the dewy grass with no car in sight. I realized that we had been in an accident. The SUV had flipped three times end to end, and the only other passenger, Collin Watson our sax player, had not had his seat belt on. He was killed almost immediately. I was standing there in a haze as cars and police began to arrive, and there was a powerful voice in my head cutting through with crystal clarity.

This voice said, "You have two really simple choices. You can do what you want to do, which is go home and live with your parents, curl up in their basement and have them take care of you for a while. Or you can use this terrible accident as the most powerful experience you have ever had. You need to honor this and use it."

Though the accident is probably the worst event I will ever go through, I realized that I needed to remember this near-death event every day of my life and make it somehow worth having gone through. It opened me up to a whole new realm of thought that I had been oblivious to before. For me it was like a figurative sledgehammer to the side of my head. It immediately changed what I looked for in my life and how I behaved. It changed the way my Ashtanga practice affected me. The practice was beginning to heal and elevate me!

Were you reaching these conclusions with the aid of a spiritual community?

No, I just did it. My parents and a lot of people who cared about me wanted me to seek professional help from a psychiatrist, but I felt that I was having a powerful healing experience by treating the accident as an opportunity to wake up. I played a gig about a week later. Everyone in the band wanted to take time off, but I was convinced that if I did not play a week later, I would never play again. So I played the hardest gig of my career.

My yoga practice was offering me some incredibly healing experiences. I would have these savasanas, where I had these powerful, spiritually cleansing waking dream experiences. I would be standing in a huge misty room and there was an enormous crowd of people in front of me, and they were all people that I recognized. There were people in the dream that I knew for five minutes and people that I knew my whole life. People that were alive and people that were dead. Certain faces were clearer than others. I noticed that clearest people seemed to be those that I had some sort of unrest with or something that I had not told them that needed to be said. One by one, those people would come up to me, the first being Collin. We would look into each others eyes, and not have to say anything, just pure understanding. I would hug the person and then lift them gently up by their waist. As I lifted, that person got lighter and just floated away. Then the next person would walk up. When I woke up from these experiences, I felt 50 pounds lighter. It was an awesome spiritual practice for me. My yoga was sending me on an incredible path of healing.

How did you get to Austin?

I moved to Austin with a gal who had lived here before. I wanted to get off the East Coast and I always felt I had kind of a West Coast vibe, and wanted to get out that way. Austin to me is kind of like the West Coast in its feel, but better! So I moved to Austin.

Oddly enough my interview at Yoga Yoga was a VHS tape that I had sent of me teaching a class. I had to do that because I couldn't fly down for a normal interview. So Mehtab, Lori, and Guru Karam sat around and watched this goofy video of me teaching, which they apparently still laugh about.

I had also really wanted to come here because Yoga Yoga was able to offer me enough classes to teach full-time. I would no longer have to hold three jobs besides teaching yoga! All I wanted was to be able to survive off of teaching, so yoga could be my life. My move here to Austin and to Yoga Yoga has indeed afforded me the chance to LIVE my yoga full time.

As I said recently to my wife Hannah, "I feel like I may be one of the happiest people alive!"   

 

Comments

[Adam]

WOW! I took only one class with Matt and I thought he was a great teacher. Now, knowing all this about how he got here and why he is so committed to Ashtanga is enlightening. So many people come to yoga for so many reasons. Matt, thanks for sharing such intimate details and thanks to the interviewer for doing the post!