Alex Medin: Relax into Life
It is our great pleasure to introduce you to our old friend (and living legend) Certified Ashtanga Yoga Teacher, Alex Medin. Unfortunately this sentence doesn’t do him justice!
He’s an excellent and exceptional student in so many walks of life: a boxer, ballet dancer, a Sanskrit scholar, entrepreneur, and humanitarian to name but a few. In fact, if there is one allegory to describe Alex, it’s that after our interview he immediately wanted to do it over so we could do it better the second time around!
Alex Medin is a native of Olso, Norway, and is the byproduct of an unstable and violent home. Discipline, breakdancing, and boxing began to transform his life from one that was recklessly circling around drugs and crime, to one that led him on an unexpectedly beautiful adventure of self discovered. The impact of this unfolding of Self, is a man who is focused on helping youth recovering from their own substance abuse issues and inmates in prison through his charity organization, Back in the Ring.
Alex stressed to us the importance of freewill as it imparts the weight of responsibility to make good choices. “We are spiritual beings trapped in our karmic patterns,” he said, threading in verses from the Yoga Sutra and Bhagavad Gita to contextualize our present-day circumstance effortlessly through this ancient wisdom like a kind of Sanskrit-Sage Savant (though, we’re pretty sure he would insist otherwise.)
“There’s plenty of madmen in the world and the enlightened ones are few. We live in dualism and although we sometimes feel glimpses of the purity of Supreme Consciousness, we are still ruled by our inner psycho-physio patterning, and this is our starting point for yoga.
We interpret life through our various samskaras.”
Taking ownership, being responsible, doing the very best we can is our starting place in life.
Prakriti (material nature) is for our enjoyment, development, and benefit. The patterns are always changing and through exploration it’s up to us to figure out what creates lasting happiness. This is why we have to start with the patterns that drive us to work. It’s this urgency in Alex that makes him strive to be his best self.
“The only way to find freedom is through finding harmony within ourselves. Yoga is finding unity within diversity.”
The real grace of yoga happens in the letting go.
When yoga meets the man of Action, all good things flow towards him.
Alex holds his MA Thesis at SOAS University of London on the lineage of Krishnamacharya, which included interviews with T. K. V Desikachar, B. K. S. Iyengar, and K. Pattabhi Jois, as well as their lineage holders, Kausthub Desikachar, Prashant Iyengar, and R. Sharath Jois.
Towards the end of our lovely interview, Alex mentioned the multiple schisms that occurred within the Ashtanga Yoga Community near the end of 2017, and the deep heartbreaking disappointment that he felt when Sharath Jois removed of a whole generation of teachers from the “official” KPJAYI’s Recognized Teacher List.
“Yoga is a release. A cure for a pain we have not yet fully accessed or discovered.”
And, here we have discovered yet another wound…
The Finding Harmony Podcast is hosted, edited and produced by Harmony Slater and co-hosted by Russell Case.
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Opening and closing music compliments of my dear friend teaching Ashtanga yoga in Eindhoven, Nick Evans, with his band “dawnSong” from the album “for Morgan.” Listen to the entire album on Spotify - Simply Click Here.
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