Chetana Thornton is an adventure yogi. She’s one of the experienced teachers involved with Adventure Yogi, which was set up in 2007 to creating yoga holidays with a difference. These retreats incorporate action and fun, relaxation and transformation. Chetana’s own personal journey is also one of adventure. She lives the life. The yogic way of life is a whole life experience. She’s committed to following the example and teachings of spiritual leader, humanitarian and visionary Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, known throughout the world simply as ‘Amma’ and is actively involved in the charity Amma established, ‘Embracing the world’. Together with her kirtan musician husband Will, Chetana is also involved in her own project Awakenheartyoga.
Yogamatters was delighted to connect with Chetana at the Brighton Yoga Festival 2017 and have the opportunity to find out more about her life and yoga.
You describe yoga as ‘a way to come home to our self’. How has this been true for you personally? What does it look like in practice?
By ‘Self’ , I refer to this primary awareness, this consciousness prior to thought and programmes of conditioning. Speaking of a ‘coming home’ is this return to our real self: a reorientation, a shift of perspective to that which is authentic and ever present; this moment now, to know ourselves as primordial awareness within and out of which, thought and action arises.
Yoga for me has awakened consciousness through the form. Incorporating all the aspects of yoga has healed myself of injury and specific conditioning has unwound. Working one on one with yoga therapy has been highly effective for my clients and in groups though injury, illness and imbalances of the samskaras or karmas. Yoga has enabled me to apply somatic self-enquiry to awaken through core holding patterns. This coming home is a rooting or resting in awareness to totally meet what shows up. I first began yoga when I was 17 and it was as if I remembered it from before. I just allowed my body to unravel and move and make symbolic shapes, and then discovered that people actually taught this so I began my yoga quest in India. Life has shown me again and again yoga is love in action.
How do you infuse the principles of yoga into your daily life?
Life is constant change. Every day, we witness the mirage of appearances, the vacillations of the monkey mind externalised in the turbulence of mental and emotional oscillations due to identification to the five senses. The mind and body are like an ever-changing weather system covering the sky. Yoga finds a way to be the eye of the storm, the stillness in motion. Yoga enables us to recognise we are the sky unchanging amidst the veiling, the coming and going of clouds. We are what remains. Then we can also celebrate the expression. It’s like watching a great film: you know it’s a projection on a screen, you know it’s not real, but then you enjoy it all the more!
Yoga has taught me to embrace what is: this Bhakti path of devotion teaches you to see all as your own self. The outer appearance is unique, but the same life force animates us all. Bhakti yoga sadhana has awoken this knowing, to be moved from love, to not reinforce the illusion of separateness which is the root of all conflict and inner division in us.
What was is it like to volunteer within Ammachi’s ‘Embracing the world’ project and to have her example as your main inspiration and teaching?
Words cannot express my gratitude to Amma as my guru and as a living example in the world. To be part of her ‘Embracing the world’ charity through karma yoga programmes internationally and through Seva in her ashram and humanitarian base in Amritapuri has been life changing. Her charity and outreach have inspired millions through the Bhakti yoga tradition of devotion in action to a cause that is changing the planet through love embodied. Amma’s life is her teachings: each day, she reveals an example of selfless service. The survival of our planet depends on the understanding that all is your own self and everything is sacred.
Love heal all wounds. Amma
You travel all over the world leading trainings and retreats. What is your favourite place to practise yoga in the world?
Amritapuri ashram in Kerala, India.
Amritapuri ashram is between the sea and the backwaters, so we can feel like we’re on a small island of 4000 people with thousands of daily world visitors. Amritapuri is a microcosm example for positive renewable eco and spiritual living, demonstrating what is possible for this planet when we harmonise and align to a common goal, honouring the sacred in all life. This is living yoga.
My natural inclination is towards yogic life. I’m happiest when I have nothing. I love the routine of selfless service, kara yoga. I get to offer one on one volunteer treatments at the ashram for people in need , and share my love of art therapy through the recycled arts project I set up there, making creations from recycled waste that we sometimes sell for the ‘Embracing the world’ charity.
I teach yoga and meditation and guide the activities of adventure themes within Adventure Yogi retreats, which was founded by Michelle King over ten years back. It is pure joy to work for such an incredible company. I love that people from all walks of life come together, gather to explore active relaxation. They get to try something new that brings them out of their comfort zones into exploring new possibilities: through their yoga and meditation practice and off the yoga mat through activities such as the yoga of skiing or hiking.
Always on our own awakenheartyoga retreats and occasionally when we teach for Adventure Yogi retreats, my kirtan musician husband and myself work together to offer Awakenheartyoga: this is where we fuse live kirtan, mantra soundscapes and sound healing chants with electronica loops, along with harmonium vocals and multi instrumentation. Will plays whilst I guide a dynamic vinyasa flow or a restorative lunar yoga practice into a Yoga nidra meditation. For some, this may feel like the adventure in the retreat. To try something totally new and at first strange helps us open our minds to create new pathways in our brains and consciousness and awaken the heart.
I love witnessing people who come on retreats become like open flowers unfolding. We all return to innocence again. We emerge from retreats newborn. Retreats can open us like buds into full flower. I also love to offer therapeutic treatments on retreat, so I can make one on one contact with the retreat participants to support the psychological process, healing and the emotional unravelling they go through that allows them to de-stress and renew on all levels and hopefully make positive life transformation and practices to apply through their busy lives. For this reason, Adventure Yogi started online video tutorials, so we can take the tools we learn home with us and integrate them into a new way of living.
How did you come to AcroYoga and partner yoga?
I first discovered AcroYoga watching people dance through the asanas in the air, whilst I was volunteering as a therapist at Amma’s Europe programme in Barcelona. I was mesmerised. I was longing for community and to heal through play. Up until then, my path had been way too serious, applying austere practices, though I am grateful these kriyas and practices brought me to this way of being now. From all those years of extreme intensity – hours of vippasana, asthanga, fasting and specific spiritual practices, psychotherapy work, vortex healing therapy and years of sleep deprivation touring with Amma’s humanitarian charity – came utter exhaustion. Thankfully, the alchemy was that the ‘doer’ in me collapsed.
That’s where my love affair with AcroYoga began, although actually it goes way back to flying on my dad’s feet in the air at five years’ old. It’s so natural and so much fun!
Taking my yoga practice off the mat into the air helped me discover the simple joy of inverting, decompressing the spine and literally bathing the brain in cerebral spinal fluid – pure endorphins! Flying reinforces the principles of core engagement, bandha activation, hugging everything to the midline in acrobatic and yogic principles of total alignment. The need for clear communication and working as a team, unified in our intent and action, taught me a lot about how to take my solo yoga Sadhana from being a hidden secret yogi nutter out into life and community .
We began the Brighton AcroYoga scene and offer AcroYoga and partneryoga on retreats, workshops and at festivals, with all kinds of people of all ages. I’ve flown a new born baby, a toddler and a 99 year old super gran, in airport lounges, on a plane, a moving train, a bus, a canoe, a ship….literally when we began AcroNinjas, we decided to take this joy anywhere and everywhere!
Do you want to fly? You get to be like a five year old again! What adult doesn’t secretly want that
What role does meditation play in your life?
For me, it’s everything. From austere practices back when I started at 17, it’s now more about meditation as this now moment and awareness in action. I came to meditation before asana with a longing for self realisation, so I went into specific focused Dhyana meditation concentration practices in my early years with vipassana , atma vichara and self enquiry practices of the Vedanta tradition.
Now meditation just calls me. The discipline is out the door; the devotion is resident. I am as a lover in response to the call of the beloved, to come home from when I stray into ‘maya’, and get lost in the matrix so to speak. I feel what happens is I’m just called within, but it’s not a going away from or a transcending, but an inviting in to be everything ever at rest, as this all embracing awareness.
I have found mantra meditation to be the most vital tool for any yogi. It literally cuts through the conditioned mind into emerging peace. I find myself doing my mantra a lot when I am on the tube or in busy public places. It just brings me back to the source.
I approach the asanas as meditation in movement, prayers embodied. Often I teach and apply a mantra specific to the chakra relating to each pose, or my mantra given by my Guru. It literally frees me from identification to the body or mind. So meditation is more of the way you live your life, but creating stillness to really enquire can happen anywhere, anytime. I literally just found myself sitting down on the grass in Hyde Park in the middle of thousands of people recently in Padmasana at a very loud Killers’ concert. Strangely, I didn’t get jumped on! I love this finding the silence beneath and from which the noise of the world, all sounds, appear and disappear back to.
Meditation now is about resting and being taken by the silence, being this awareness of what’s appearing, resting in the context rather than the content of the mind (and believe me, this mind’s quite mad!) I don’t take my mind too seriously. When you have really seen you’re not the mind, you can’t really continue to believe in it, but it makes me smile at its tricks and tendencies.
Meditation, you could say, is more of an undoing than a doing. I feel realising your true nature is more of a realisation that you are not the mind, realising ‘mindlessness’: so yes most of the time, I’m out of my mind!
This one teaching from the master Neemkrauli Baba says it all for me: when his disciples asked him how should they meditate, his reply was ‘meditate like Christ meditated.’ When asked how Christ meditated, his response was as tears rolled down his cheeks, ‘He lost himself to Love ‘.
What else do you love doing apart from yoga?
Dancing, chanting, sweat lodges, being with people and listening to their stories, being in nature and being with Amma. My joy is to serve.
It’s been great to hear more about Chetana and her passion for service and meditation. This conversation is far from over! We’re already lining up another chat with Chetana, particularly around the theme of ‘Coming Home’. Watch this space!
In the meantime, if you want to find out more about Chetana, visit https://awakenheartyoga.com/.
If you’re interested in an Adventure Yogi retreat, then visit https://www.adventureyogi.com/.
If you’d like to find out more about ‘Embracing the World’ charity, then visit http://www.embracingtheworld.org/.