I was raised on a dairy farm in central California, the youngest of ten children in a conservative Catholic family. Although I was immersed in church doctrine, it wasn’t long before what I was told to believe and what I experienced came into conflict. The result was a life-long search for practical truth.
Serious involvement in yoga began only after I finished my studies at UCLA and suffered serious head injuries in a cycling accident. As I was being wheeled into the operating room, I realized this was the first time in my life that I had no choice but to surrender to something outside myself.
Sometimes it takes a big hit to wake a person up. This was it. The doctors felt the result of my injuries was equivalent to a stroke and I feared my body was irreversibly damaged. When I got out of the hospital, I cried. I was terrified I would never be the same again and, in retrospect, am glad to report it was true.
In recovery, it became very clear that when it came to head and brain injuries, doctors knew how to triage, cut, paste and fix but “healing” was uncharted territory. That was going to be left up to me. In the hospital, several nurses came and went, performing the same routine checks and procedures, but one nurse was different. She was noticeably brighter. I knew I felt better and was going to heal whenever she was around. That was the first time I became aware of how profoundly healing it was to be near someone who is lit from within, and how their presence in and of itself could make a difference. I aspired to do that too. A path opened up for me, and was very quickly expedited by getting into yoga.
I worked intensively with Ana Forrest for many years. After the first four years, I then committed to teaching. When opportunities to instruct began rolling in, I knew I had made the right decision. While I had not gone through any formal training program, I was hired based on the work I had done with Ana and her reputation. Other individuals that influenced me along the way include Mark Whitwell, Angela Farmer, Roslyn Bruyere and Morris Netherton.
It was through Ana and Roslyn that I learned about Native American ways, healing, and power animals. One’s power or medicine animal is the animal nature of that individual. Consider it an earth-based Myers-Briggs personality test. An individual can have one or more and the animal nature can be fixed or flexible. When I began doing yoga, I was adamant that I was not doing it for spiritual reasons but instead to continue a physical practice that intuitively felt right after my accident. I quickly learned that engaging my body in the way yoga required made the spiritual aspect natural. This was my first experience of yoga being a portal. I thought, “If this was the continent I was born on, wouldn’t it make sense that I have an understanding of a spirituality that was unique to this continent?” Yoga is not of this continent but movement is global and the movement I was drawn to made me feel good, sane, healthy, and comfortable being in my own skin. I’m a body guy who was raised on a farm so an earth-based spirituality appealed to me. My power animal came to me in a dream, and I feel that both the dream and the animal inform what happens when I teach yoga.
More on Maurice…
About Maurice
My Power Animal Dream
FAQs about Swami O’Bryan
About Portal Yoga
FAQs about Portal Yoga
Ten Guiding Principles of Portal Yoga
Press and Media
