Reflections on Practice / April 2020

“Using yoga to ‘take the edge off’ is better than using Valium, but it’s not going to affect the positive change that yoga represents. My practice can be an aspect of what keeps me stuck, or it can be an aspect of what sets me free. It’s my call.” - Rolf Gates (from Meditations on Intention and Being)

I’ve been teaching a version of the modern postural practice for nearly 17 years now, and despite that length of time being a flash in the history of yoga, much has changed since my certification. On a personal level, I’ve exited the relentless race from one studio to the next and landed at the College of Charleston, where I currently teach six sections of yoga each semester. My college students range in experience level from “none whatsoever” to “I know it all already”. Surprisingly, those who have the most experience taking public classes are often the hardest to teach. They think that because they “do” yoga, they understand yoga. Because of the drop-in nature of the industry, few students are currently taught or required to learn the ways in which the philosophical concepts relate to the physical embodiment of the postures.

The Western World has contributed a great deal to the yoga canon with regard to the understanding of functional anatomy and biomechanics. But in typical fashion, using the momentum of “I’ll take that from here”, we’ve stripped much of yoga’s context and shaped it to meet our needs. If teachers and practitioners are willing to hold themselves accountable to the enduring lessons of the practice, then yoga can continue to reach those who seek transformation. If we cannot find our place in relation to those who came before us, then we risk sending sun salutations the way of shake-weight. We’ve already made ourselves ripe for ridicule, but can we find the undercurrent that can guide us back toward a more perfect union, in alignment with the lessons of the past?

Without getting too deep into the varying versions of yoga history, it’s largely agreed that the Eight Limbs of Yoga, collected and organized by Patanjali more than a millenium and a half ago, provide a key philosophical foundation for the practice. The Sutras introduced the notion of asana as one part, branch three, of the yoga tree, representing its role as a component of a tool for potential growth. Yoga is not shape making, it’s meaning making. Yoga is big business - mostly in the form of pants and other products, so the visuals that we see regularly are usually trying to sell us something. But yoga is a process that cannot really be captured in a still image, or even in a video sequence. The outward expression may be beautiful, and it may be deeply related to the yoga that the practitioner is experiencing, but the pose itself is not yoga.

Scroll back through my instagram and you’ll find plenty of photos of me demonstrating asana to market my classes. But I wasn’t really practicing yoga in the moments during which those images were captured. I was posing. “Doing yoga within the construct of a pose” and “posing” are two different things, but it’s easy for yoga students to chase poses because they have been told that yoga looks like Warrior 2, pigeon, handstand, and meditative seat.

Trying to make your body on the outside look like someone else’s body on the outside misses the point of the practice. Any time we add to or deepen a shape, an anchor should be dropped in the form of an energetic rooting or an exhale. The pose in this moment is the link between everything our body has done for us so far, and the expression that we are gazing toward. Think of a free climber moving from one anchor to the next. All of the transitions are thoughtful; there are moments of hereness and moments of progress - just be wary of attachment to growth as vertical.

Yoga lives in the place where the student utilizes the posture to explore the relationship between mobility and stability in their own structure, to feel a manageable and measured shift toward balance and energetic efficiency. One student arrives on the mat hypermobile by nature and another super strong by design. There’s certainly a relationship between what we’ve got at birth and where we go from there, but getting caught up in why we are how we are (or aren’t) can keep us from connecting to what could be.

After all of these years I haven’t stumbled across many (if any) postural cues that are universally applicable. Each student arrives with their own anatomical narrative. Yoga can be a tool to access increased flexibility, but it is not the blind pursuit of it. Students who are naturally flexible actually often miss out the most in yoga classes, because they can easily make the shapes, giving teachers the assumption that they are “getting it”. But are they growing from the pose? In a typical class, flexible students can often “do” a lot but still feel very little.

Those new to yoga - and even many experienced students - often mistakenly think that yoga is a practice of holding poses. The postures themselves are not about stillness. We grant the mind permission to stay with the body. We grant the body permission to move with the breath. We grant the ego permission to let the outward expression reflect - if just for the flicker of a moment - a self that is sufficient here and now while steadily committed to standing in the discomfort of growth.

Yoga requires that we recognize that the health of mind and body are inextricably linked. Much contemporary wellness propaganda suggests, directly or subjectively, that if the body is transformed to be more appealing to its wearer - thinner, stronger, shaped this way or that depending on cultural preferences - that one will feel better overall. We are told relentlessly in popular culture that changes in external circumstance will result in internal shift. Surely all of us have evidence through friends, family, or celebrity that no amount of praise or perceived physical perfection can make a person feel whole or well. If only the outside changes, suffering is but temporarily relieved if at all.

This is why yoga is hard to market (and certainly hard to teach) without being reductive. What sells in fitness and wellness is a product, a recipe, a program, a well-packaged, one-size-fits-all, finite solution to the problem at hand. While landing a complex posture for the first time provides a sense of confidence and achievement that is not without value, the pursuit of postures for the hit of validation feeds an insatiable beast rather than teaching it to heel/heal.

Yoga practice is rooted in intention. It doesn’t promise to be fun and doesn’t promise to be pretty. There’s not really anything to see at all of the process itself beyond evidence of its presence. The fruits of the cycles of growth are not in the shapes, but in relationships. The impact is reflected by a willingness to see and hear - not the good vibes only but the great injustices in the world at large.

I want to be clear: differentiating yoga is not a condemnation of other forms of exercise. Assuming that yoga practitioners alone possess the capacity to engage in meaningful, mindful movement and/or spiritual growth is ignorant. But the true benefit of yoga exists in the student’s commitment to purpose and awareness. No flowy sequence or funky arm balance is really going to set you free if you are using the postures as a spiritual bypass that reinforces existing patterns. If you’ve found yourself bouncing from studio to studio or class to class, looking to be entertained, engaged, inspired, I encourage you to find an experienced instructor and sit with them.

As my friend and fellow teacher Kelly-Jean Moore recently wrote:

I understand that most people practice yoga to exercise or stay flexible but I practice and teach a form of yoga focused on recognizing and interrupting patterns and then creating new habits of equilibrium. Yoga can save lives.

Embracing yoga practice means willingly accepting that there is no choreography you can follow, no posture you can unlock, no user manual to consult, that will allow you to escape your own humanness. But when you are open to embracing that (grim, to some, I know) reality, you can begin to work with what is within your reach and make some peace with what is beyond. THIS is the dance of the postural practice - working with these concepts in the context of the body. Working with the body without the context of the meaning, well, it’s like Rolf Gates notes: