Episode #214: Whit Hornsberger
Whit Hornsberger’s spiritual journey can be traced back to the moment he blew his ACL on the University of Calgary basketball court, where he was a shooting guard for the Dinos. A combination of a misdiagnoses, along with a propensity of playing through injuries, led to Whit exacerbating the tear until the point that his playing career was over.
Once the dream of athletics was lost for good, Whit felt aimless. It went far beyond being deprived of the act of dribbling a basketball on the hardwood, or even ending his dream of one day turning professional. He began to realize the extent to which his entire identity had been tied up with the sport. “My whole life, from the time I was a young child, I just wanted to be a professional athlete and I put in an intense and extreme amount of time and effort,” he says. “The common saying is, ‘Big boys don't cry.’ So there was a lot of a lot of emotion and pain, both physical and mental, that had been pushed down, that I didn't even know was there.” Losing his ability to compete as a basketball player led to a shocking deconstruction of self. “When that all ended very abruptly, I really had no idea who or what I was, as the carpet was pulled out from underneath me. It felt very unstable and scary.” He adds, “I had no idea who I was, or what my worth was anymore. That really drove me into a very dark place in my mind, and a sense of unworthiness… really, a very dangerous place.”
As part of his long rehab process, Whit was re-introduced to yoga. His first encounter had actually come years earlier, thanks to a forward-thinking basketball coach who brought in a yoga teacher to work with players. In those days, many still considered it a new age fad, and few men—especially those into the “masculine” world of sports—ever ventured into a studio. So Whit’s response was not that surprising: to hit the weight room instead. But as he explains, this eventually led to his severe injury: “I continued with the macho, Type-A driven work ethic that can be helpful. But when it goes to an extreme, as it often does in sport, and in Western contemporary society, basically what happened was, I was carrying too much strength and muscle for my frame. There was too much torque in the muscles of my legs for the frame of my skeleton, and my ligament just wasn't designed to hold that much strength.”
Eventually he decided to leave Canada for Australia and live a frenetic life of surfing, partying and working as a way to avoid his deep pain within. But fortunately, he also continued with his yoga practice, which continued to be a kind of therapy for him; he was particularly moved by the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. He also chanced upon the Dalai Lama’s The Art of Happiness, which proved to be transformative. “I was in a moment of pain and suffering when I came across that book, and there was a flash of witness consciousness in my mind. I laughed to myself, and I realized in that moment, I was certainly not happy! If this was an art—that is happiness—I wanted to pursue it with as much intention as I did basketball and everything else that I've pursued in my life. So that's what got me going.” In the book, the Dalai Lama differentiates between the experience of true happiness and sense pleasure, and Whit realized his life had been about caught up in the endless pursuit of pleasure, which masked a deeper emotional pain. “And that fueled me to understand more about what was going on,” he says.
His deepening yoga practice led him to his first meditation course, which took place in Joshua Tree, California and was led by Jack Kornfield. The course opened Whit to the truth of dukkha, or suffering. He experienced not only the deep rooted emotional and mental pain he had been avoiding for years, but also excruciating physical pain through long hours of sitting cross-legged. Contemplating the nature of this pain led him to discover the critical role that tanha, or craving, was continuing to play in keeping him unhappy.
Over the next several years, Whit combined his love of surfing and travel with a continuing practice of yoga and meditation, and he also began to study Chinese medicine. After attending a yoga teacher trainer course, he discovered that male yoga teachers were in high demand, given how few men there were in the field at the time; he was soon fielding requests from yoga studios around the world!
In the meantime, he continued to develop his meditation practice. He sought out Kittasaro and Thanissara, both of whom had been ordained under Ajahn Chah in Thailand, among others. But Whit always ended up coming back to the Mahasi-style vipassana that he had learned from Kornfield in California. He appreciated its scientific and methodical approach, and found its “noting” method allowed him to investigate the mind at deep levels to see where tanha was still taking hold. At the same time, he was learning how to let go and give himself over to a mind filled with loving kindness. He ended up seeking a balance between the more relaxed, “Yin”-approach of the Thai Forest Tradition, with the more results-oriented “Yang”-energy of Mahasi, finding they complemented one another well.
Over time, Whit began to see how his body-awareness and mind-body coordination as an athlete translates to his growing mindfulness practice. “Just from being an athlete, and a very dedicated one, there was already a deep connection between awareness and the language of sensation in the body,” he says. “That continued to evolve as I got more and more into a yogic perspective, witness consciousness, and listening to the wisdom of the body.”
Wishing to deepen his Mahasi practice further, Whit enrolled in a course that Alan Clements was leading at the main Mahasi monastery in Yangon years before the 2021 military coup. The nearly 50 days he spent there would prove to be life-changing… although he learned very quickly that, unlike the more comfy meditation retreats offered in the West, “there's absolutely nothing in the monastery experience that is pleasurable to my dopamine receptors!” As difficult as he found the strict schedule and austere living environment, he came out a changed man. “As challenging as the conditions were, those conditions aren't the source of my suffering,” he recalls. “There was 500 monks and nuns and lay people, and so I couldn't hide from the fact that when I was suffering, and I looked at these monks and nuns with a smile on their face doing the same work, that I had to acknowledge that the suffering isn't something outside of me, that the trigger is inside! That was a profound experience to see how much wanting there was. It was just constant wanting… The Buddha said we suffer because we don't see the cause of our suffering, nothing else. That experience was like a Bachelor’s Degree in tanha! It radically shifted the way the mind was looking at things.”
But it wasn’t just being in the monastery that was so impactful, it was also experiencing how Burmese culture didn’t seem to separate the meditative life from the rest of worldly engagement, in contrast to what he’d experienced back home. “It was incredible, the way that the Dhamma is literally the bedrock, the foundation of the [Burmese] society,” he says. “It's how conditions have evolved there. And now us trying to integrate it into our [Western] society, it becomes more of a rigid approach.”
After this transformational experience, Whit returned to Canada, settling in Vancouver. There, he was asked to begin teaching the Mahasi technique. He now offers retreats worldwide, which integrate various influences that fed his own spiritual development, making his course experiences somewhat unique.
First off, Whit combines yoga and meditation in his retreats. He makes use of active yoga practices like vinyasa, which incorporates the use of conscious breathing to handle physical challenges, and “yin yoga,” which involves holding poses for extended periods while making use of mindfulness techniques. The practice of yoga also allows Whit to guide his students towards realizing how the Dhamma can be experienced through all activities and postures, as yogis observe physical sensations and associated feelings during their yoga routines.
Secondly, Whit makes a conscious effort to bring Eastern practices to Western audiences with a deeper respect for the holistic origins of the practice. “The way that yoga has evolved, it really has become a form of entertainment, and about creating, quote-unquote delicious, juicy, really comfortable, pleasurable experiences on the yoga mat!” While Whit encourages students to embrace the peaceful and calm states that can come through these postures, he cautions against developing an attachment to them or beginning to equate the practice itself as a way to simply feel uniquely pleasant sensations that are unavailable in one’s worldly life. This is also why he advises students to work towards postures they find uncomfortable, and to develop awareness within those moments of discomfort. “By the end of the retreat, the smiles are back,” he says, “And this time those smiles aren't based upon conditions, they're based upon insight and wisdom! That's the classic ‘Vipassana glow’ that we speak about.”
Similarly, Whit’s approach to meditation also challenges how the practice has long been framed in the West, where it is often understood as being primarily about an inner, silent journey. Instead, he calls on yogis to develop a spirituality that highlights their sense of inter-connectedness. “The biggest hindrance to receiving the gifts that the Dhamma has to offer through meditation practice is when our practice is all about us. ‘I'm doing this for me,’ because at the end of the day, the construct of self doesn't want to do what it doesn't want to do!” Whit explains. “It’s very difficult to get somewhere on this path when everything is about, ‘This is my spiritual practice, my meditation practice, I'm doing this for me!’ When you start to dedicate the fruits of your actions to others, and to society, and to the future of our species and all living things with whom we share this planet, you will begin to see your practice and the results thereof expedite exponentially. Then we begin to break down the sense of separation, that I'm doing it just for me.”
However, Whit’s emphasis is not based only on an altruistic desire to apply meditation towards the creation of a better, more peaceful society. It’s also an important reminder to yogis that their practice simply will not deliver the benefits they should expect if their meditation remains a strictly self-centric activity. “It takes a lot of the burden off the shoulders of the self when we can begin to focus on others first, and then literally the parasympathetic nervous system has a chance to be induced and come online, and from that relaxation response, that's where mindfulness comes from,” he says. “This is the antithesis of a selfish path! It's possible to do things, including meditation, from a selfish perspective. The ego instinct has many strategies as to how to make anything about itself, including spirituality.” And this is why he feels it is so important for a teacher to nudge yogis towards this reminder to open their hearts as they delve within.
It is this sense of giving, combined with a deep gratitude for the spiritual teachings emanating from Myanmar, which has propelled Whit to offer regular donations to support monasteries and humanitarian missions in the face of the military atrocities there. This is all the more remarkable in that Whit refuses to charge for any of his courses, but follows a Burmese monastic model of only taking donations from students. “We must honor these places from which the wisdom arose,” he explains. “Underneath that construct [of self], we are all extremely altruistic beings, we are highly generous and loving. And, sadly, at this point in time, especially in Western contemporary culture, we don't have so many avenues through which those innate qualities of the heart are able to be expressed. And so it can be difficult when people go back out into this system [after a meditation retreat], that is a vortex of individuality and selfishness and looking out for Number One, it's this is unconscious behavior. When that mind goes back into its conditioned, myopic perspective, it doesn't think about Burma… the collection of dana for Myanmar is something that is hugely important for my own spiritual practice. And from what I've heard from practitioners, it's very important to them that we're helping out a place that has given us so much through these practices and through these teachings.”
In this way, Whit’s teaching is not just forming a spiritual bridge between East and West, and between Burma and North America, but also a physical one connecting people and actions. “We all of us have such an incredible potential to be compassionate, loving, altruistic,” he says in closing. “It takes work and it takes patient endurance as the Buddha taught, but it's there! And once we reveal that potential that we all have, we have an incredible opportunity to create the change that we seek.”