My Story by Adam Keen

This post is the first in a serialisation of chapters for Adam's new book. Starting at the beginning he shares his story with us.

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Looking back, trying to make sense of one’s own journey will always give a different slant on things. Life will inevitably be lent meaning and direction that it didn’t have at the time. Even a sense of destiny.

I find this so often unrelatable; my own path might be best defined by perpetual doubt if anything. So, I want to make it clear from the start that this is not that kind of a retrospective.

Indeed, I never had a gameplan in all of this. Quite the opposite. None of this was meant to be, or anything of the sort. It certainly wasn’t in any way “Instagramable”. Most of the time, I’ve spent sitting in scruffy cafés in London making a coffee last for hours as I waited between classes I was ‘trying to build’.

I want to make this clear from the beginning that my only real forte in all of this in my eyes is to keep going. Often, in the face of quite good reason not to. I’ve certainly failed a lot more than I’ve succeeded, had my classes cancelled a lot more than been offered classes, and had an equal amount of doubt along the way as I’ve had conviction.

But I never wanted a proper job. When everyone else was signing up for their first jobs after university, I didn’t give this a second thought. I always wanted time to be able to reflect and think, I didn’t like the idea that I’d be so busy with life that I’d simply be carried away in its flow. I wanted something, unfathomably, more.

From a young age I always needed meaning. I couldn’t simply accept experiences as they were, I needed to understand them and work out why – why things were as they were. Growing up in suburban existence in a town outside of London, it wasn’t easy to procure meaning out of daily experience.

We didn’t have God and Church anymore, nor much of anything else as I can remember. And from a young age this made me quite depressed, prompting my parents to take me on regular visits to a psychiatrist who recommended medication.

But nothing really worked, because I couldn’t find anyone to talk about my need for a deeper meaning. Then, one day, I discovered on my dad’s bookcase some books of Carlos Castaneda the American anthropologist and his (at least partially fictionalized) tales of his time spent with the native American Indians.

They provided my first glimmer of hope that there was deeper meaning possible to life. So, up until the age of 18 when I went to university to study philosophy, I read everything I could that find that was asking these deeper questions. The simple asking of them provided a great deal of solace at the beginning.

However, studying philosophy at university, I finally realized that the answers were never going to come, and I had become tired of asking the questions. I became disillusioned with academia. It dawned on me when interacting with my professors, that clearly one couldn’t ‘think oneself happy’. They were clearly highly intelligent yet didn’t seem happy, embroiled in various rumours about their personal lives.

Suddenly, in a moment of intuition, I realized that there was something deeper than thought at stake here. It was rather an energy in the body that needed to be worked upon. For it was this energy that was behind the thoughts, good or bad, - not the other way around.

Having perceived this, I almost intuited a yoga practice; imagining that through precisely formatted movements, this energy could surely be influenced for the better. I felt there was something very stuck in my body that needed to be released, and that conscious physical movement would be able to do this, rather like unknotting a ball of wool.

On the other hand, yoga at that time was generally involved sitting around with incense omming. I decided to enroll in the Tai Chi club as I’d done a lot of Karate growing up. It seemed like the practice of these careful movements (minus the fighting) might be what I was looking for.

However, the Tai Chi night conflicted with a drinking night at the University bar, which I didn’t want to miss (as the only time I felt good at this time was when drunk, sadly). The ‘yoga club’ night I was free however, so I put down my prejudice and wandered over to a sports pavilion on a Wednesday night at the edge of the university campus.

I wasn’t optimistic for the reasons just mentioned, so I was very surprised when after the first class I left feeling calmer than I had for months, without being under the influence of alcohol. But it was no overnight cure.

I used to put out my cigarette before entering the class and light one up on leaving for at least the first year, going to the bar after class and still taking the anti-depressants, I’d been prescribed.

However, I knew it was working by the intensity of feelings in my body that arose in those first few years when I stepped on the yoga mat. It took incredible resources to get on and stay on the mat each day. I only did it because the alternative of living life plagued by bouts of anxiety and depression seemed worse.

So, after a coffee and cigarette, I started practicing on my own for 15 minutes a day (which seemed a lot at that time). I would roll out a towel on the floor on the dirty carpet of my shared student house and try to remember what I learnt in the class that week.

Over the span of a couple of years, I built this up to almost 2 hours daily. But it wasn’t a social-media worthy transformation, between my bed and my cupboard, on a bath towel over a stained carpet, I went through what I can only describe as an incredibly painful healing journey.

Other than knowing that not doing yoga was worse, the only other thing that kept me at it, was how much better I felt when I got it done. To be fair, it felt like all my anxiety came out at that time, so, although at that moment it was hard to tolerate, for the rest of the day I hardly felt any anxiety at all.

Moreover, doing something for myself, felt like I was taking life back into my own hands. I’d given this away many years ago to drug therapy and the advice of medical professionals who I assumed knew more than me. Until I felt like I hadn’t got the power to battle against by my own volition – that it was bigger than me.

Of course, my university friends laughed as I started following a yoga lifestyle, turned vegetarian, and started cooking my own food, I even got the requisite rainbow knitwear at the time and got my hair dreadlocked. I also started going out drinking less, so I started shifting friendship groups.

But none of this mattered if I could live freer of my mental health struggles.

The only real downside was my philosophy degree now appeared a waste of my efforts. In no small sense I also felt, somewhat rightly, that philosophy had failed me. Imprudently, looking back, I decided not to take my final exams after four years of study and set off travelling to learn more yoga instead.

The year was 2001 and there was nothing about yoga teachers to be found on the internet at this time (maybe they had a homepage with an address or phone number). It was all by word of mouth, usually you had to travel to where the specific teacher you wanted to learn from lived and taught.

It was very different times. Before the YTT has been invented, or the idea that anyone could have a career as a yoga teacher.

I had also found a new line of work to help support my learning yoga. Somewhat serendipitously, I’d started to work in restaurant kitchens during my last year at university. Working my way up, I’d built up a transferable skill (unlike philosophy!) that I then was able to travel with.

There was a period when I was scrubbing dishes in kitchens until past midnight for at least a year, shouted at constantly, and even had pots thrown at me by the chefs. I liked the kitchen though, the energy and the necessary order to it.  Equally, the magic in creation along with the practicality of feeding people. I gradually worked my way up over a couple of years then, until I had a CV, could call myself a ‘chef’, and was ready to take my work on the road.

After a short while, my wanderings led me to cooking at Yoga Plus, and Ashtanga retreat on the island of Crete, Greece. The place had been set up by Radha Warrell and her partner Derek Ireland who’d tragically died a few years before I arrived, and it was seminal in the spreading of Ashtanga yoga in Europe. Many of the well-known teachers of the day started their journey with yoga there.

I ended up working there for a few seasons and it wasn’t easy: sometimes we’d be cooking for over 100 people at a time. But it was here, in the yoga classes, that my perceived proficiency at yoga started to be noticed. With the confidence that gave me, I started to consider whether I might become that rarefied being too – a yoga teacher.

On my return to London, buoyed up by that confidence that only the young possess, I started teaching yoga, way too early and without any training. I knew very little of yoga really, but I was young, flexible, and enthusiastic about my subject which counted for a lot then.

Moreover, there wasn’t much yoga around, nor then was there much of a critical standard of teaching it – you just did it. So, I enjoyed a premature success as a teacher, practicing along with each class, I basically just showed them the sequence as they went through it with me.

My first teaching was for the staff of a local Buddhist centre where I was running the café as my actual job. This went well, so they introduced one class a week to the community, then, a second quickly followed as this was so popular. Within a year, I was renting spaces all over London to teach and experienced an early success that I simply took for granted at that time.

But I felt a fraud. I knew I didn’t know much of what I was doing in terms of yoga, and, as well as that, felt I was still early on in my own healing process with it. On many days, I would still turn up to a class suffering with anxiety or depression wondering how I would teach – probably brought on by the fact of my knowledge of my inexperience.

The lack of technique in my own practice had also led me to badly injure my knees in these years. Especially, because, as I was practicing along with every class I taught, I ended up doing a few practices almost every day.

After a few years I’d had both of my knees operated on for torn cartilage and had an almost permanently sore lower back.  Even so, I was becoming a popular teacher in London, despite my own physical and emotional pain that I was still hiding.

For that reason, I decided to run away from this situation I had got myself into. Also, people kept on telling me that you must go to the source, if you’re going to teach Ashtanga.

I decided to use my cooking skills to first make a soft landing in Goa as a cook for Purple Valley Yoga, a newly open yoga centre. My plan was to get accustomed to India and then head to Mysore to practice with Pattabhi Jois and his grandson Sharath.

Like all plans, it didn’t quite happen that way. Instead, the manager who’d invited me to the yoga centre, became my then girlfriend and now my wife (we’ve been together almost twenty years now). So, for that first year I didn’t go to Mysore and helped run the yoga centre.

This was very useful, because I got to learn from many of the renowned yoga teachers passing through at that time, like Chuck and Maty, David Swenson, Tim Miller, Nancy Gilgoff, Rolf Naujokat, Manju Jois, and we even hosted Sharath there for two retreats before he took over the mantle in Mysore and was unable to return to Goa.

We did visit Mysore together in 2007 and, in these early trips, I was a rather underwhelmed by the experience there. There was an established network of senior teachers there at this time, and, as newbie, you didn’t get a look in – no one really noticed your presence. But it did feel quite ‘special’, like something was happening there. I went for a couple of month-long periods around this time, arriving and leaving still hardly being noticed.

It was several years later from 2011, that Theresa and I started going more regularly to Mysore for three months at a time, at which point I began developing an individual teaching relationship with Sharath.

A lot of the time, this was unwanted – Sharath would be at the edge of my mat each day, almost miraculously, at the very posture I struggled with, karandavasana, a forearm balance where, in lotus, you lower the legs down into your armpits. His teaching style somewhat motivating through reverence, I would go back to my room each day and practice it until my forearms bled.

Pattabhi Jois had passed away in 2009 and my only real memory of him was as a very old man falling asleep while instructing the class from his chair at the front.  But as people say ‘the Mysore magic’ was still evident with Sharath.

We were able to go back each year as luckily as Theresa had a flexible corporate job in London that funded the trips. This meant I also needed a teaching job in London. I cycled around the city in the heat of August to every centre in London until I managed to find the only one that didn’t have ongoing morning classes and would risk taking on a completely unknown teacher.

This was in Belgravia and not such a nice space, but I was lucky as they decided to open a second site right in the heart of the ‘The City’, the financial district of London and we moved my Mysore classes there.

I taught this Mysore class for most of my thirties punctuated by trips back to Mysore. The class was very successful, at its height having over 50 people a day. But, again, this was a time of great doubt and struggle within for me.

I started to see clearly at this time, that the so-called ‘traditional’ approach to teaching Ashtanga yoga didn’t work so well when teaching average people. It was very different adapting it to the average person than what we were doing in Mysore as people who, firstly, probably had a natural aptitude at it, plus, had devoted all our life to it.

Many of my students hadn’t moved past half a Primary series practice in years as they couldn’t complete these postures and traditionally speaking, you didn’t move people on until they could complete the last posture.

But, as it dawned on me that most of my class would never do these postures, no matter how much they practiced, I started to feel redundant in my role. Equally, it seemed like a violence against an individual body, trying to force it into all these shapes, day in, day out, that it wouldn’t naturally do of its own accord.

It didn’t help the students to do it on their own either, instead, it often led to injuries (luckily, I never forced that hard, so I hope I wasn’t responsible for any).

However, being part of a community of teachers who I would meet each year in Mysore had become important to me. It’s quite a lonely profession as a Mysore teacher, you’re not the average member of society, so it helps having somewhere where you feel you belong.

Through not teaching Ashtanga as we were being taught at that time, I knew that I would no longer be welcome as part of the club. If I didn’t strongly limit students’ progress until they could ‘complete’, nor give the physical ‘adjustments, I felt like I would be left out. To question this strict method was seen a heretical.

For a few years then, I was quite torn as to what to do. The more I started to reflect, the more it seemed my time in Mysore had been more like joining a group of elite yoga gymnasts, than anything to do with the reasons of deep healing that inspired my original commitment to yoga.

I also felt uncomfortable in the increasing idolization of Sharath. I’d known him as a younger man before he took over as the head of AYRI as it was known at the time, but he had was now being elevated to guru status and eventually becoming ‘Paramguru’.

It didn’t sit well with me. I had always liked Sharath, but, like Pattabhi, I respected them as teachers of yoga asana, not as a spiritual guide. The fawning and adulation that was now commonplace around Sharath, that I’d seen around his grandfather, was not to my personal tastes.

But I limped on somewhat until the final straw came at the age of 38.  I sustained a bad shoulder injury at this time which meant I could no longer carry on practicing my yoga in the way I had been used to doing.

At which point, the whole narrative of ‘traditional ashtanga’ started to unravel for me. Along with other personal circumstances, it precipitated a kind of meltdown as I’d given most of my life to this practice.

As I am inclined to do in these situations, I made a rash decision, and packed my car to drive to Crete, the place I had been happiest all those years ago to try to clear my head. I had the idea to start my own retreat centre that would be free of the dogma I now felt disillusioned with.

It would be called ‘A Place to Be’.  By the end of the summer, I’d somewhat cleared my head and managed to find a location in a local village renting some apartments and a yoga space from a local family to take on for the following year to go through with my plan.

Theresa eventually came out to see if I was okay, and we returned to London, planning to work and save to return to Crete the next year to run our own centre. This had been something we had been thinking of for many years, ever since we met running the retreat centre in India, so we were very excited.

In April that next year, we packed the car and drove overland again from London to Crete. It was a lovely trip through Europe in the spring. We stopped in France and Italy and really enjoyed our time. Little did we know what was in store for us.

From the moment we arrived, it all went terribly wrong with the family who clearly had decided against wanting to rent us their property (even though we’d paid them for it). We had guests booked, so we pushed on trying to run a couple of retreats, but they ended up within a month threatening us off the property.

We returned to London that September penniless. Our cards were at their limits, and we had just enough money to pay the rent a small flat in a slightly rougher area of East London as, uniquely, we didn’t have to pay a deposit.

Furthermore, when I returned to the yoga centre I’d worked at so many years, they decided they wanted the teacher to stay who’d been covering my classes. Which was probably fair enough, I’d been a little erratic that past year to say the least.

Luckily for me, she didn’t take them up on it and I was allowed to stay at my old job. But, by this time, I only had a few students left. As well as my erratic behaviour, rather unfortunately, over the summer I’d been away, a fancy new yoga centre had also opened its doors down the road too offering free porridge and great facilities.

From over 40 students a day, I was now down to about 4. On the other hand, during my time away I had had a lot of time on my hands to think and practice and had come to a kind of epiphany regarding my method of teaching. I returned with this knowledge, but it was just that I had very few people to share it with.

Nevertheless, I was re-inspired and put everything into trying to grow my class numbers again. However, they didn’t really grow much. The territory of yoga had changed – the yoga teacher market was now utterly saturated with yoga teachers on every corner to choose from.

One day, when I came home after only having a few students as usual, Theresa suggested I start writing on social media my new reflections on yoga. I had only bought my first mobile phone in 2018, and I strongly argued against this proposition.

During our time in Mysore Sharath’s rule was no yoga photos on social media or even your website, and fellow students would call each other out if they did post anything asana related on Facebook, arguments broke out about it and still to this day there is a stigma about it in certain circles.

Some teachers had been using Instagram for years now, but I was scared to put myself out there. I also knew Theresa was right. I did want to share my thoughts and always enjoyed writing, but I knew speaking my mind I would become persona non grata amongst my past Mysore friends (which, indeed, it has).

If I didn’t promote myself now, in what had become a highly competitive environment, I would have no chance at surviving as a yoga teacher. But the only other option I saw, would be to fail at teaching finally at the age of almost 40. So, I started posting my reflections on social media. And, amongst many, my posts caused some interest.

They didn’t, however, alter my class numbers much. But then, suddenly, Covid hit. At first, like everyone else, it seemed like the worst thing that could possibly happen to me. I recall coming home on the last day we were allowed to stay open before the lockdowns and sitting in the kitchen telling Theresa that it was all over.

I had hung on as long as I could, but now, my teaching was finally finished.   At which point Theresa said in no uncertain terms, you must get online for your students. Again, I resisted. I thought, as many others did at that time, that Ashtanga yoga simply couldn’t be taught online. But she knew I just had to be there for them together as a group at this unprecedented time, no matter what ‘teaching’ happened.

I stormed out of the house and went out for a walk. As everything was shutting down around m, the streets alarmingly empty at midday, by the time I got back I had to admit that there was nothing else for it but to give it a try.

The first day of the lockdown I opened Zoom at the normal time of my class, having just downloaded the app on my phone. That first morning I had around ten students show up online. Which would have been a good number in the studio then.

Soon Theresa insisted I change from my phone to my laptop (again hesitancy on my part) and helped me order more kit from Amazon to set up lights and microphone as numbers grew. Soon I had over fifty people in the online class, and it was a pleasure to reconnect with students I’d previously taught in places like Istanbul, Qatar and even as far as Australia.

Theresa had two other good ideas still up her sleeve over those first weeks; we could start hosting online workshops with teachers we knew from our days at Purple Valley and in Mysore as they were all grounded too, and we could start a podcast to give those teachers the chance to speak about their teaching.

We were running a variety of highly popular online workshops with many renowned teachers in a matter of weeks.

The podcast also began very easily. Everyone was at home at that time with time on their hands, so immediately agreed to chat with me. (It was also a matter I felt very strongly on to provide a platform for many different voices on the practice of ashtanga which was appearing increasingly homogenized in approach).

Over the next two years of the pandemic, we were increasingly busy with this online work to the degree that we were able to move out of London (which had been my dream for some time). So, on one of the times when the lock-down was eased, we took the opportunity to pack the car and take the channel tunnel over to France.

Inevitably, we were shortly locked-down again in France, but, due to working online we were able to sustain ourselves and remained in France during most of the pandemic, almost 2 years. France came with its problems though, for we only had British passports, so to stay became too complicated.

As covid ended and the world opened, we decided to leave France for Bali. We enjoyed this new location for a while, however, as soon as people were free to move and go back to yoga centres again, I started getting invitations to teach in Europe.

Suddenly, I had some international renown through my online presence during Covid. Over the last two years we’ve been on the road living out of three suitcases, travelling to teach at retreats and workshops. It was incredible to meet students in person that had been with me and each other almost every morning online since lockdown.

I can still say it has been a remarkable journey, although characterized by failure, I’ve certainly been blessed with more than a little luck too. Looking back like this, I still can’t really make any sense of it.

Now let’s move on to the book.