Poison and Antidote

 By Tom Pilarzyk

Yoga teaches that we create our destinies moment by moment. Therefore, we are ultimately responsible for our happiness as well as our dissatisfaction. Gordon Sumner understands this.

 Better known as Sting, he is among the most famous yogis in the world, practicing astanga each day, harmonizing with kirtan master Krishna Das’ chants on Pilgrim Heart and having taught a yoga session in Los Angeles. His autobiography Broken Music helps us understand the man behind the glitterati mask, taking us to the doorstep of stardom with The Police. It is a story of unsettled alienation and discontent- of dukkha- and a long-sought peace.

 Life as Unsatisfactory

 Born of Northern England’s urban working class, Gordon Sumner’s insecurities from a confused childhood evolved into the struggles of an angry and driven youth, attending university and teaching school in the 1970s while moonlighting as a jazz musician. His ambition masked an inner turmoil and dissatisfaction. “I think my life has progressed from being a very unhappy child,” he would tell the Sunday Independent.

 According to Yoga, dukkha or life’s unsatisfactory quality is tied to the “three poisons”- ignorance, attachment and aggression.  First, we do not see our true nature or true self clearly. Rather, we strongly associate with our senses as we search for pleasure and avoid pain. We then cling to pleasurable sensory objects- people, places, things, experiences- that often evolve into sources of our discontent. These attachments batter us between the Scylla of hope and the Charybdis of fear. Frustrated at not being able to control situations, we feel or react with anger and soon externalize the issue by blaming others. Or we try to escape through avoidance or melancholy. Without insight, we repeat this cycle for a lifetime.

 The three poisons are the cause of so much of our suffering. Peace or release from their entanglement is said to come from regular practice of yoga and meditation and through serious self-study. They are universal, challenging even those whom we think have everything- wealth, fame, beauty and power- including Sting.

 The Book of His Life

 Sting’s early life was off-center, a stranger growing up in his own home: “I felt like I was in the wrong place,” he would admit in a 2004 Sunday Independent interview. He loved his parents, but his father was emotionally distant and his mother loved another man throughout his childhood. Gordon would catch them in each other’s arms. The resulting confusion, frustration and anger, he admits, haunted his later relationships with women. His challenges included early marriage and young fatherhood, and the ethical dilemma and emotional trauma caused by unfaithfulness and divorce. He had fallen madly in love with his present wife, actress and film producer Trudie Styler.

 Sting’s self-admitted workaholism has yielded fortunes unimagined, a fame almost unparalleled among British stars and an uncanny evolution in both thought and style spanning four decades. But it also demands frequent separation from Trudie and his children. Perhaps a key to his creativity is this dance between connection and disconnection. “You have to allow yourselves to evolve,” or as he explained in song: If you love somebody, set them free.

 Finding Release

 Sting’s music suggests a complicated man, emerging from the simple, raw driving rock beat and sad sexual desperation of “Roxanne” to the sophisticated Indian instrumentation and nuanced lyrics of love and reincarnation on “A Thousand Years.”  Not surprisingly, his lyrics occasionally borrow from the 5,000-year old yogic worldview.

 “My personal life is in my songs, in an archetypal form,” he noted on his website in September. “To a certain extent, my songs are abstract, but if I look at them closely I can see that I’m writing about my private life.” 

His songwriting spans a wide swath of human situations and a depth of complexity that reflect a fertile imagination. A transvestite street prostitute asking for neither acceptance nor condemnation. A hot-wiring car thief imagining the compromised life of his wealthy victim. A pirate’s bride waiting for her dead sweetheart to return from the other side of the world. A laid-back suitor given an ultimatum, a demand for an answer in seven days.

 These predicaments beg for resolution, for freedom from stress, isolation, deprivation and heartbreak. They are lives slightly off-kilter or conditions undeserved. “I think I’ve only written one song. It's about feeling trapped and gaining release,” he told a reporter from the Daily Telegraph in 2003.

 This too is the story of yoga practice- feeling constricted, listening to inner wisdom and loosening our grip. Through a 20-year yoga commitment, Sting has worked to cultivate synchrony of mind and body: “It’s about control and letting go, compulsion and release. Being goal-oriented but also having to surrender,” he explained in that Daily Telegraph interview.

 Overcoming the inner demons of his early career gives way by the 1990s to the synthesized resolution of international sounds. Sting admitted on a PBS special covering his 1993 tour that “I don’t have to be going through a trauma or spiritual negativity to make a record. I can virtually be happy and content to write songs that are essentially amusing.” The king of pain had learned to walk in fields of gold.

 Symbol of Surrender

 Self-acceptance, hard-earned after those early struggles, is the fruit of Sting’s transformation. “I am liking myself more and more. In those early days, when I was trying to make it, I’m sure I didn’t like myself,” he confessed to the Sunday Independent. “I am happier now than I’ve ever been.” 

In the summer of 1995 and at the behest of Trudie, workers would excavate a lake on their Wiltshire property in the English countryside. The skeleton of a 19-year old woman, hands tied behind her back, was found face-down. Ritually murdered, she symbolizes this world-famous yogi’s struggles, and ours.

 Sixteen hundred years ago, she would experience an early entrapment, an inner suffocation yearning for release. In camaraderie, Sting tenderly gave her a proper burial- this time face up toward the cloudless sky- with the sad but liberating sounds of bagpipes wailing in the distance and with his love and a priest by his side.

 Tom Pilarzyk is a social scientist, college administrator and yoga teacher at Seven Stones Center for Wellness. A certified Kripalu instructor, he has recently published on rape victimization and forgiveness