Gabe and I met at a seminar of something we are both passionate about. His kindness dominates, while his intelligence dictates. I knew I would want to find out more about him. Below is a small part of his story.

Portrait of Gabe Axel - his face in a tree

Branching Out

I couldn’t bear it. The dissonance. Two souls in one body, fighting for air. Blood rushing to the head or pumping through the heart. Only one at a time, never both. The mind inhabited a quandary that took every possible alley of thought to its end, and the heart would desperately beat its way to attention when mental activity would calm.

Gabe playing music

First Love

This was what it was like for several years as I dealt with what seemed like a competition between either using my mind or my heart at any given moment. This ostensible dichotomy permeated various aspects of my life. My sense of identity was polarized between scientist and artist for years. I loved the sciences in high school and much of college, and I have been a musician since the age of 12. I went onto complete a Masters degree in Neuroscience & Cognition in the Netherlands as well as compose music and perform with several bands. I always wanted to understand the human mind at large and everything from how it generated its perceptions of the world to how the imagination emerged from its depths.

Gabe on stage playing guitar

“M” for music

The momentum of growing up sent me hurdling through an obstacle course of reflecting upon my relationship to worldviews that might have otherwise been blindly inherited. What was my notion of what society expected from a scientist or an artist? “To take the path of the artist would mean heavily prioritizing a more spontaneous and watery attitude toward life—anything goes. Money cannot be of importance,” the mental chatter would go. “But I am proficient in the sciences and would serve the field well. And, incidentally, I would enjoy living a comfortable life.” The thoughts went on in cycles ad nauseam. Yet some vantage point was emerging in me that somehow knew that these were first-tier stances, so to speak—that they were partial and would soon be transcended. But, alas, for the time being that was my stage of development. How could I accept myself if I knew my own limited worldview was causing me anxiety? I wanted to develop faster.

Gabe in lab coat in school lab.

White Coat

My forays and achievements in different areas were fueled by an intense aspiration to feel, know, and breathe what it means to be human. However, this was accompanied by impatience, which I discovered was rooted in self-disapproval. I desperately wanted to fast forward to a point where I would be perfect, where there wouldn’t be two competing voices. The reason for the mind-heart division was staring me in the face. My notions of what artists and scientists were supposed to be were reflections of the boxes into which I was trying to fit myself: I thought that if I decided, as it were, to be a scientist I would be have to be soulless and objective, and that if I were an artist I would have to lose my rationality, my desire to analyze and calculate in order to understand. These boxes parceled the beliefs that had been handed down to me and that I took for granted. I had been attempting to run a program that was obsolete. I needed an upgrade to a way of being-in-the-world that let go of past conditioning and embraced the unknown. I also knew that the desire to understand my mind and the world around me by categorizing every thought, feeling, and action into sterile objects for examination wasn’t going to fly without also loving everything I saw.

Gabe standing in a barren landscape with one tree in the background

Untitled

What naturally followed taking these insights on board was a journey into self-love. First, I began the difficult work of accepting myself at my present stage of development, and delighting in it. The trick I learned was that this didn’t mean I had to abandon my aspiration. In fact, the aspiration now wasn’t carrying dead weight, allowing it to soar. Since I wasn’t planning on limiting myself in any regard, I took to even more fully embracing my fluidly transmuting personas. I loved myself. And since the law of consciousness is such that one’s worldview is a direct reflection of one’s own mind, my heart expanded. I would begin to love others and see that love was a language of its own, a conversation to be found everywhere and with everything. My perspectives deepened in a way that didn’t feel cerebrally exhausting or serrating, but effortless because the movement was guided by the force of Eros, the force that defines the evolutionary impulse and must be lived from the frothy edge of one’s own journey.

Human brains in a lab tray

Locate Consciousness

For a long time I had tried to locate consciousness. Was it to be found in the path of the scientist or the artist? I knew that both held important perspectives to the puzzle. I would alternate intense bouts of musical inspiration with intellectual analysis of brain chemistry and metaphysics. However, as the duality between heart and mind was shattering I realized that, unfortunately for many hard-nosed neuroscientists, consciousness is not in the brain. This realization sparked my decision to delve into yogic science. I poured my heart and mind into it. Day and night practicing asana, pranayama, and the other limbs of yoga in a search of the core of consciousness.

Yogic heart photograph with purple heart superimposed on top

The Realization

My quest has transformed from a search to a journey in which I grow to embody freer and fuller forms of consciousness. This means sourcing energy from my heart, my burning fire, and letting the mind expand with it. The mind will operate in service of the flames. The mind naturally wants to locate and box-in consciousness, but it’s a bit like a receding horizon, because it is consciousness itself that is driving the quest. And so, I am carving my own path without the need to call it anything at all, because only in retrospect would I desire to label it in order to tell the story. I live in the spirit of being alive, a continual student of life, which inherently requires the experimentation of the inner scientist and the conscious creativity of the artist. And one day I may tell another story, one that involves labeling my current experience. Or maybe I won’t.

Portrait of Gabe in black and white

Embody Free

Gabe Axel

Gabe Axel yoga teaching schedule http://www.gabrielaxel.com/