The Dude Experience E-Book

Robert Busch

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 158

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Not just another book about self development that tells you to think positive. The author is offering a controversial perspective on Yoga, Coaching and other services surrounding the wellness cult. Coming from his own experience he offers a new perspective on evolving as a human being, that does not leave out all the struggles along the way. Find out what Goddess Circles and Conspiracy theories have in common. If you ever felt stuck within your practice, this is the inspiration you are looking for.

Leseprobe

Robert Busch

The Dude Experience

© 2019 Robert Busch

Umschlag, Illustration: Casey Michelle Wakely

Lektorat, Korrektorat: Joe Davidian

Verlag & Druck: tredition GmbH, Halenreie 40-44, 22359 Hamburg

ISBN

Paperback:

978-3-7497-8929-0

e-Book:

978-3-7497-8931-3

Das Werk, einschließlich seiner Teile, ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages und des Autors unzulässig. Dies gilt insbesondere für die elektronische oder sonstige Vervielfältigung, Übersetzung, Verbreitung und öffentliche Zugänglichmachung.

Thanks to Jesse, Karl and Don.

1. Intro

About five years ago I stepped into the world of social media marketing. I had been teaching Yoga for a couple of years and tried to find new ways on how to present my services. At that time I was clearing out my apartment in Germany and decided to spend some time abroad. The beginning of a long journey towards finding the meaning of life.

Years before that I had experienced clinical depression, which led me to a therapy and Yoga. Way before that, as a teenager, I was dreaming of becoming an author. My whole life had been an emotional rollercoaster with many highs and lows. Going through these experiences I found a way of somehow dealing with my inner struggles and finally became an author. In this process I came up with the brand name “Yoga Dude”.

This branding was meant to emphasise the fact that I am just a normal dude trying to find his way in life. Not a super yogi or a warrior, just a dude.

In the beginning some people made fun of that simplistic branding, which I fully understand and respect. People often got surprised, when I told them that D.U.D.E. is an acronym, that describes a method I created along the way. In this book we will find out what these letters stand for.

When I started as a Yoga teacher this was more a thesis, than a method. I did my best to apply that method within my own life and found myself pretty happy with the results. The goal had always been writing a book about this, but I wasn’t ready yet.

When I moved to Morocco in 2016 I set up an Instagram account with the name “Yoga_Dude”. This page became my public diary and I invite you to check it out while reading, as there are no pictures in this book, but it can be nice to get an idea about where I made all the experiences that I am writing about.

I had set up a website called “The Dude Experience”, that was not only about my Yoga teachings, but also about other activities such as writing, playing music and doing sports. These things are all connected with my Yoga practice.

Throughout the last four years I have experienced many different aspects of life. Some of them made me laugh, some of them made me cry.

I am thankful for both ends of that spectrum. These experiences became my teacher.

I wrote two autobiographical books in German language in 2019. Working on these books was my way of preparing to write this English book. This is not an autobiography, it is a book about what I am teaching in my classes. Writing this book about my approach to Yoga has been in the making for the last four years, while living abroad. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

This book is about my experiences and how they connect with the “D.U.D.E. method”.

Therefore we will start by getting to know who I was before I started practicing Yoga. We are all unique beings and in order to understand our values and perception of things, it is essential to look at where we are coming from.

The first chapters will give you an idea of who you are dealing with. We will be looking at different stages of my life that brought me towards Yoga.

After that I am giving you an insight on how I became a Yoga teacher and the challenges I was facing along that path.

We will explore different aspects of the practice itself and take a closer look at everything around it. This will lead us to observations about the marketing that surrounds Yoga and how we can choose the right teacher. With all that in mind I will be sharing my take on anxiety with you, and hopefully offer a way of dealing with that feeling that many of us suffer from. Towards the end we will take a look at the history of Yoga and put my method into its context. At the very end I will offer suggestions on how to evolve your own practice in a way that is beneficial for your well-being.

There will be a lot of controversial perspectives on Yoga and its surroundings. My goal is to make you think about your own practice and inspire you to evolve it. Most possibly you won’t be agreeing with all my thoughts and the good news is that you don’t have to. This book is written as a source of inspiration, that hopefully reminds you of something that you had already known a long time ago or at least had a feeling about.

At no point I intend to offend anyone with my observations. They might sound harsh at certain points, just to give you a heads up before reading. I grew up in an area of Germany were we have a saying that goes something like this:

“Making fun of someone or criticising them shows that we care about them.”

I know this sounds counter-intuitive. The idea behind that is, that every time we make fun of someone or criticise them, we give power to them. We admit that their actions matter to us and that we care about them. As much as I will question approaches within the world of Yoga, I have a lot of respect towards all people teaching and offering their services. Please always keep that in mind, while reading this book.

If I happen to offend you, I sincerely apologise for that.

2. Snowboarding

I grew up in a town far away from the mountains. All we had was a little hill next to a playground. For a few days in winter this little dune was covered in snow and we were more than excited to sled down this slope. All the kids were gathering and used anything they could find to slide down this little bump. Most of them would use plastic bags, as if they were sleds. One day one of my friends came up with the idea to dismantle the wheels of his skateboard and give it a go. His first attempt epically failed. He fell down, hurt himself and the board went down the hill without him and hit another kid. Everyone was quite upset with him for that experiment. All the parents agreed, that we shouldn’t use our skateboards on that slope anymore.

When I told my parents about it my dad came up with an idea. He had a friend that helped him get one of the first snowboards with soft boot bindings on them. My dad bought the equipment from him and gave it to me. Without any instruction I took the board and went back to the playground. Pretty quickly I figured that the bindings were not fitting my normal shoes. Besides that I had no idea how “snowboarding” works. Still I tried to ride down that mountain and shared the board with other kids. Nobody was really able to go down those few feet without falling, but it was still fun and we felt like real snowboarders.

My parents were not into winter sports at all. They were when they were young, but had no interest in going on a ski trip. They tried once after I was born, but the logistics got over their head and they decided to spend their vacations at beaches instead. At the same time they were always very supportive and tried to find a way for me to follow my interests. Our town had a ski club at that time that was offering one week camps for teenagers twice a year. They signed me up for one of these trips. After getting all the other gear, like proper boots, clothing and of course protection, I was ready to go.

A few weeks later I went on my first skiing trip, actually it was a snowboarding trip, but for some reason most people call everything happening in the alps “skiing trip”, no matter what you do there. Either way I was very excited. A few of my friends from the playground were with me on that trip. Before there was any snowboarding or attempts of it happening, we had to endure a 12 hour bus ride to our final destination in the Italian Alps.

Our bus had a few little screens on it. One of our instructors brought a VHS tape of a snowboarding movie. We loved what we saw there. Funky dudes living it up and doing insane jumps and tricks on their boards. It all looked so easy how these dudes were riding down huge mountains and flying through the air performing spins and some of them even did flips.

“How hard can that be?”

We were asking ourselves.

“I am gonna do a 180 spin on my first day”

One of the boys claimed.

We were pretty optimistic towards our first day at the real mountains with real gear. As we all had limited knowledge of the sport itself, we focussed mainly on our outfits and the designs of our boards. Apparently looking like a pro doesn’t make you one. The first night at the hostel we were up late and were quite tired the next morning. Nevertheless we were highly motivated to get going.

Instead of styling it out on our snowboards, we found ourselves doing some silly children warm up games with the whole group of 70 kids.

After that humiliation, we were divided into smaller groups. Me and my friends ended up in a group of six with one instructor. He took his time to explain to us the basic rules of safety and on how to put the bindings onto our boots. For all of you that had been snowboarding before: We are talking about the late 90s here, the equipment was pretty bad compared to what is offered today. It was heavy and a little ice in the wrong spot had the potential of causing a lot of trouble strapping on your board.

Somehow we figured all that out and took the chairlift, that would bring us up the slope. The bunny slope to be precise.

The instructor demonstrated to us how to do turns and honoured our impatience and lack of ability to listen by making us try. After we all failed miserably in doing anything he demonstrated us, he took us to the side and had a word with us.

“See, thats whats happening when you don’t listen. You need to listen and learn. There is no other way, otherwise we have to stop this.”

He made a good point there and we threw our expectations of doing 180s on our first day over board and did his silly exercises. After the first morning most of us managed to do one of the two turns. We were now able to do a backside turn, but instead of trying the other, a frontside turn, we were applying the “falling leaf” technique. Going from one side to the other, but always facing down the mountain. The difficulty in a backside turn arises from the fact that you don’t see where you are going for a moment. Stupid as we were we thought we could avoid this by simply going back to back. At least we made it down the mountain without falling.

Our instructor once again became a little angry at us. We argued him, that this was our “style” of snowboarding.

Probably in order to show us the weakness of our “style” he took us to another slope, that was not the bunny slope. Our own interpretation of going backside to backside still somehow worked, but we saw experienced snowboarders going down the slope far more gracious than we did.

It all made sense and we decided to listen to the instructor again. Looking back at it, I have a lot of respect for his patience.

After another two days, halfway through the trip, most of us, including me, were able to do both turns, backside and frontside.

The last two days of the trip we were allowed to ride on the mountain in small groups without our instructors. Only we had to be a group of three minimum, so if something happened one could get help while the other stays with the injured person.

We enjoyed our freedom and made use of it. The images of the movie we saw on the bus ride were still on our minds. In order to explore the “real” snowboarding we borrowed some shovels from the lift station and tried to build a jump. Needless to say that we had no idea on how to do that, but we did it. It took us three hours to create a little bump at the side of the slope.

That day we found out a few things:

1. You need to be able to ride towards the jump in order to take it.

2. The landing shouldn’t be flat.

3. It’s good to think about how to land, before you jump.

We gained those insights from many ridiculous falls and countless bruises. Luckily nobody got seriously hurt, but it was still pretty stupid of us.

At dinner, some of the other kids asked how our session went. We claimed that it went super well even though that wasn’t quite true, but at least we learnt something of value:

“We are not professional snowboarders just because we saw a movie and we need to practice more.”

The years went by and I was lucky enough that my parents signed me up for these ski trips twice a year. Besides improving our skills on the snowboard, there were many other things of interest during these trips. We had our first beers and tried to connect with the girls in the group. Those two activities went similar to our first attempts riding a snowboard: not well.

But that is another story.

The instructors we had were doing it voluntarily and in return got a little money, accommodation and their lift ticket. They were from our town and far away from being “real snowboarders” that we knew from the movies. All they were able to teach us was the technique on how to do turns. This was essential to any other progress, but came across very boring to us. We wanted to fly through the air like the dudes in the “Absinthe Movies”.

At that time, at least I did not realise how far away we are from that.

With good hopes I continued trying to improve my skills. It became clear that doing this twice a year for a week was not getting me anywhere. I started exploring ways to get more time on the mountain.

One of the instructors told me about the chance of becoming an instructor myself. That way I would get free trips to the alps and improve my skill set.

My Mom signed me up for the Instructor Training. I was pretty confident in my abilities and looked forward to that experience.

As I found out on the first day, this training was a lot of theory and not as much practical snowboarding as I expected. I felt bored again and did my own thing.

To my surprise I failed the exam at the end of the week, because my technique on the frontside turns was not sufficient to become an instructor. Not only that I was disappointed, I was mad at our teachers. Looking back at it, it was all my fault. After my first anger had passed I decided to continue trying and signed up for another exam a few weeks later.

On the second try I simply followed the instructions and actually listened to what I was told. All of a sudden it worked out and I passed the exam.

Another thing learnt:

“It is a good idea to listen to your teachers in order to learn something.”

Sounds simple but for the idiot 17-year old I was, it was a new way of approaching things. Not only that I passed the test, for the first time I felt like I knew what I was doing. Gone were the days were I would say:

“Not sure what is wrong today, but all of a sudden I can’t ride.”

Instead I had a tool set of techniques that allowed me to analyse why it didn’t work out and overcome the frustration. I started understanding that this was the way to learn something.

The season after I was joining our ski club not as a participant, but as an instructor. As it was my first time in the team of teachers, I had to take the beginner group.

There I was a few years after being a novice to the sport, now I was supposed to teach kids, that were only a few years younger than me, how to snowboard.

Of course these kids were just like we were in our first week: Big expectations, but no willingness to listen.

For the first time I understood how annoying that must have been for my instructors a few years ago. I guess that’s what they call Karma.

Describing what I have learnt over the previous years to my students helped me to improve my own skills. I saw their mistakes and noticed that I did similar things. Which taught me another lesson:

“If you truly want to learn something: Teach it.”

I continued teaching on our yearly trips, but I felt the urge to take it a step further. At that time, a friend of mine, who was one of my first instructors, started his first travel agency. Their business model was to bring people from our hometown to the Alps for just one day. It was pretty wild, as the bus ride was around six hours each way. We left Frankfurt around 3 am in the morning and arrived at the ski resort around 9am. After snowboarding or skiing we would meet up at the busses around 5pm and then return to Frankfurt just before midnight, if everything worked out.

Yes, you read that right: 12 hours on the bus to be 8 hours on the mountain.

My friend hired me as a tourist guide on the busses. After arriving I would teach snowboarding for about four hours. Then I had about two hours for myself on the mountain, before I would work at the bar, that he had set up, for another two hours. Followed by being a host on the bus for another six hours. It was well paid, I was allowed to take a friend with me for free and I enjoyed going to the mountains every weekend for three winter seasons.