yoga and meditation

Juergen Teller : You once mentioned to me that you and Thom Yorke decided that you both hated yoga and meditation. What was that all about ?

Björk : [laughs] Well, I’d always resisted meditation with a full-on defense mechanism, but I’d never understood why. I wouldn’t meditate-no way, ever,-and Thom felt the same way. He got angry just talking about it. We ended up laughing about the whole thing, but we figured that singing is a form of meditation, where you kind of go to an imaginary place that you’ve built over many years. It’s like a state of trance. So to go to a meditation class where somebody tells you, "Do this, feel this" like they’ve got an instruction manual on how to get to this place - it’s offensive. It’s like reading a sex guide before you are with the one you love, and then asking whether they wouldn’t mind moving their thigh, like, twenty centimeters to the left-and then measuring it with a stick.

Juergen Teller : Right, right.?

Björk : Everybody has a different method of getting to that place, because everybody needs it. Some people play golf, some people get drunk-one method isn’t better than another. But if I ever sat down and listened to a guru tell me how to meditate, I would feel like I was having an affair. I would feel disloyal to my own temple.

Index magazine, june/july 2001