What do you most hope to leave your Ottawa students with?

I want to leave them with an experience with how their breath works and how, by carefully observing its cyclical patterns — as they sit and then as they do the postures — they can actually learn how to do the postures. In other words, they can learn to teach themselves by learning to observe closely the equipment they already have,if you use a yoga mat.

A lot of the function of the teacher is to point people back into observing their own internal process, because that’s the actual teacher.

If you could do just one more yoga practice or pose before you died …

I would choose a sitting posture, either Padmasana or Swastikasana, which are similar and used for meditation practice. Using those postures I could concentrate my mind completely on the central axis of the body — the centre of the heart, the navel, the centre of the pelvic floor, the crown of the head.

And, particularly at the moment of death, if you look deeply into your own heart, you might discover compassion. And since we’re dying anyway, what else is there to do?

Why should people take up yoga?

Because it will definitely give you the opportunity to become happy and then it’ll also give you the opportunity to make others happy. When you become happy, you become a little more skilful in dealing with other people and you’re no longer trying to get things out of them so much.

It’ll also help you with a lot of physical problems. It won’t make you immortal but it will certainly help with everyday aches and pains — spinal problems, postural problems, fatigue. And then of course, all the related psychological difficulties we experience every day.

Yoga helps you gain insight into how your own mind works and in doing that you become a little more compassionate. Also your sense of humour improves. (Laughs). I think that’s how it works actually.

You’re a vegetarian. Are there times you wish you weren’t?

When I travel and there’s nothing vegetarian on the menu in a restaurant. So for the last few years, when I travel,

I occasionally eat fish. Just a salad doesn’t do it. And if people aren’t vegetarians, they don’t really know how to prepare vegetarian meals with enough protein to keep you strong.

Why do you specialize in Ashtanga yoga?

It’s a particular approach to yoga that combines a lot of different levels of the practice in which you are concentrating on your breath and through concentration on the breath you learn to open up different channels of awareness inside your body right along the central axis.

Based on that, you move the body sequentially through postures, all based on the breath and the workings of the sensation patterns in the core of the body. It’s actually a very advanced and challenging approach to yoga. I’m surprised it’s as popular as it is. It’s often not practised very well, but often, if they’re young, practitioners have a lot of fun trying.

A lot of what I do is I go around and try to slow people down in their Ashtanga practice and tune them in to what is really happening inside with it, so that the practice leads very naturally to meditation practice and into deeper states of yoga.

I’ve heard some yoga teachers refer to Ashtanga as “junk yoga.”

That’s because it’s not understood by a lot of its adherents. But it has lots of restorative practices in it. It’s just that a lot of people have never studied enough to learn them. A lot of the popularization is done by teachers who are actually neophyte Ashtanga students and it’s a little bit embarrassing for me.

Why did you start doing yoga?

When I was 13, I read Walden by Thoreau. He made me start to look at nature and its very intricate interrelations and its patterns. When I was 18, I took up yoga when I first went to college and it was just a way of experiencing that excitement.

What do you mean by excitement?

When you become enraptured or awestruck by the nature of something. … That’s why I’m still fascinated by yoga, because I think people can cultivate these deeper states of mind without having to join any particular religion or sign up for anything or pretend they know something when they don’t know something.

What pops into your mind when you hear the name Ottawa?

Canals, Beaver Tails, hockey and all of the government buildings — those are just the images that come to mind.

How do you account for yoga’s phenomenal popularity?

It’s sometimes a mystery to me. Yoga does speak to everybody because I go all over the world teaching yoga. It doesn’t matter what culture someone is from, they all have a body. All of our bodies are very similar: If people learn to meditate on their own breath and on the sensations within their own body, they feel better. Yoga allows them to do that without falling into any other traps before getting there; meaning it cuts across religious, national, racial and linguistic boundaries.

In 2007 you wrote, “Can our yoga survive the remarkable rate of its own expansion? Will the potent and ancient tradition live through its commercial success?” What is it you fear?

I fear it’s being watered down to please the crowd. Teachers naturally want to have large classes, but are they willing to water it down so much that they don’t actually confront people with themselves and their own minds? Because it’s easy to reduce yoga to an exercise system and that way people don’t, at any point, discover the programming of their own minds. At that point, yoga just builds up people’s egos and gives them the sports experience rather than the mystical experience.

I think we’re always in danger of it slipping into that category.

A lot of celebrities — Sting, Madonna, Paul Simon — embrace yoga. How has that affected the yoga world?

I think it’s made it more glamorous and it’s definitely allowed a lot of people to hear the name, so people check it out. I would say it seems to be good that celebrities are doing it. But the danger is still there that they will treat it as just a form of physical fitness or something to add to their glamour or mystique, and that’s not necessarily beneficial for everybody.