Reflections on Teaching 2: May 2020 Edition

“I don’t know nothing except change will come / Year after year what we do is undone / Time gets moving from a crawl to a run / I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home” - Patti Griffin

From the time that I was fairly new to teaching yoga, I knew formerly dedicated students and teachers who had walked away.  I’ve walked away.  The spiritual practice, with some embodied component, has carried on through centuries.  And even as today the system churns out new teachers by the thousands, serious students continue to slip away and out of the fray, disheartened by an essence of yoga that seems to some to devolve more than evolve.

I haven’t abandoned the practice completely, obviously, I still teach yoga at the College of Charleston.  But I do so beyond the context of the current industry.  I’m no longer selling yoga, nor selling myself.  The students who sign up for my classes don’t know me at all prior to the first session, even if at some point in their youth they passed under my poster-sized image while their mothers shopped for running shorts at lululemon. 

I was skeptical of the yoga industry from very early on.  I saw the true colors of a handful of groundbreaking local teachers during my first few months as a studio manager.  I was maybe a little surprised and disappointed, I guess, but I’m not the kind of person to blindly idolize others.  I’ve always been aware to some degree that no one (least of all me) escapes the beauty or ugliness of being human and been suspicious of anyone who seems to have all of the answers.  

I think from the start I saw teaching yoga as a job like other teaching jobs I’d had before.  I knew teachers; I’d been a teacher.  Teachers disappeared somewhat in the work of teaching, because a teacher’s job is to focus on the students.  But the yoga world is a little different.  Yoga had gurus more than teachers until modern times.  I’m not a big fan of the guru model, there’s not a lot of accountability until the inevitable fall from on high.  Most teachers didn’t claim to be gurus, but they definitely were concerned with portraying a sense of elevated awareness as a result of advanced practice or study.  

I recall clearly a related conversation with a fellow teacher over a decade ago.  We were standing in my kitchen as she spoke about the importance of sangha.  “Sangha” can be translated to mean “community”, or “group of enlightened beings”.  It’s got Buddhist roots apparently, but I can’t get down the rabbit hole of what contemporary yoga has snatched up, decontextualized, recontextualized, and branded.  The point is that she felt like I had a responsibility, as a teacher and practitioner, to commit to being a part of the group, the tribe, the community.

I’ve never been a joiner, but the little groups that formed around studios even back then, they felt way too claustrophobic.  Also many of these people inside the circle seemed to think they were better than the people outside the circle.  That’s not a group I’m interested in isolating with.  I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just live my life, circling back for my practices.  During those moments I was certainly grateful for and respectful of the studio community, but I was coming to practice to be better able to forge more meaningful and varied relationships in the rest of my life, not to hide in a new and different version of a comfort zone. 

I saw and felt early on how insular yoga studios could be.  And if spaces and places feel super insular to people on the inside, you can pretty much bet that they feel fairly exclusionary to people on the outside.  It’s one of the ways in which yoga studios, even early on, fell and continue to fall short - speaking as if everyone knows the language, believes the same things, wants the same things, has the same needs.  

One of my least favorite tendencies in the yoga world is language around “all are welcome”.  There is so much talk about inclusivity, without recognizing that inclusivity doesn’t just mean that you’d take anyone’s money who walks in the door.  It doesn’t mean that you offer a free class once a week for those who can’t afford it and offer a type of condescending kindness to everyone who seems eager to learn.  If you want to be inclusive, you have to be willing to stop and look at the ways in which you might unconsciously be being exclusive. 

Many yoga teachers like to call out any kind of discourse or criticism within the industry, suggesting that we should all blindly support each other as long as we claim to wave the white flag of yoga.  But again, how can you ever hope to evolve or be better if you aren’t willing to take a hard look and consider that your alignment might be off, that you might have missed some piece of truth hiding in plain sight, that you may be stuck in a way of doing so deeply ingrained that you feel it as intertwined with your identity?  

Looking honestly at one’s self should be the cornerstone of an industry that seems obsessed with awareness, but it’s not actually a strength of most self-proclaimed yogis.  We’ve done a lot to grow and spread a spiritual materialism and bypassing that has served to turn away many longtime students and teachers and alienate countless others before they even begin.  “Good vibes only” is not a yogic concept.  It’s rather far from it, actually.  Arguably, that type of differentiation and disconnect is the opposite of the underlying principles of yoga philosophy.  

Messages to “rise above” and “let go” are the psychological equivalent of directing students to “lower into chaturanga”.  Often these cues are tossed about lightly and without any substantial instruction around the “how-to”.  Many students mistakenly think chaturanga is the hurried duck dive from plank into the big heart opener of upward facing dog.  But that ill-informed sequence literally leaves practitioners skimming under the opportunity for meaningful transformation.  Moving mindfully toward chaturanga, being able to sustain the shape, requires a willingness to slow down and feel.  We have the chance to not rush through and breeze beyond but modify and maintain structural integrity, supporting weakness in its shift to strength with a spirit of grace and acceptance as that growth occurs over time.  That process is essential to arriving in a place that one is capable of sustaining and perhaps eventually building upon.

Along those same lines, “letting go” of patterns that cause suffering isn’t as simple as deciding to do it.  It’s great advice I suppose, but how the fuck do you expect anyone to get there?  I’ve been holding onto what I’ve needed to survive for decades now.  Just exhale all of that?  Wow, thank you! Why didn’t I think of that before?  

These changes require time, dedication, and often the support of degreed and licensed therapists and holistic practitioners.  Acting as though a series of yoga postures, a good attitude, and a desire to manifest is all one needs to change themselves is laughably glib at best and dangerously ignorant at worst.  It gives some false hope and leaves others feeling more isolated and misunderstood.

I recognize that most yoga students are largely looking for an escape from their minds, not a window in.  They are looking to reshape their bodies rather than reorganize.  We’ve showed them that’s what yoga’s about after all, and now that’s what they want.  We offer crow before they fully understand chaturanga, encourage victorious breath before anyone has even acknowledged the real battle.

The lyrics at the start of this post are from a song called “When It Don’t Come Easy”.  Meaningful change never does.  The world around us shifts faster than we can grasp in some ways, is hopelessly stuck in others.  We struggle to navigate and often end up spinning in place because the work required for deep, meaningful change is not easy.  An hour-long asana practice may give you a brief sip of a sense of calm, but if you can’t start to sustain some level of evenness unless you sweat yourself into submission, are you really changing, or as Rolf Gates puts it, ‘just taking the edge off”?  

Adyashanti argues that “(Enlightenment) has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier...It's seeing through the facade of pretense.”  Much of the yoga industry is intent on building that pretense - in some cases because teachers themselves haven’t realized or been offered a chance to explore the true intention of the practice.  In other cases, it’s because we have felt required to dilute it to sell it, whether in the spirit of monetizing or as a means of meeting people where they are.  But when people are dealing with serious hardship, the messages in much modern practice seem horrifically trite and out of touch.

Yoga has a lot to do with the internal for sure, but by its very nature it’s about the interrelationship of the internal to the external.  It can be easy to see students and teachers tip from self-study (svadhyaya, of the niyamas of the ashtanga lineage) to self obsession.  Even acts of outward community support are often advertised on social media to point back to how open-minded or compassionate or yogic the person is.

I’m not suggesting that advertising your favorite non-profit, or leaning into the energetic of letting go, or kicking up into handstand for the fun of it can’t be in alignment with a deliberate practice.  But I have felt for years that this cult of personality and flexibility is cluelessly caught up in it’s own bullshit.  And I know I’m not alone.  We find ourselves at a pretty pivotal time in history.  Too much navel gazing prevents us from noticing that we need to embrace what we have claimed to know all along: no matter how great circumstances are for some, no matter how pretty things appear from where we sit, we move forward or stay stuck together.

Killer abs and a sick eka pada koundinyasana aren’t going to do much to collectively change the world.  There’s nothing wrong with either.  Everything in life doesn’t need to be serious and fraught with meaning.  But if we can individually begin to utilize yoga as a tool to embrace the profoundly powerful and painful process of seeing and hearing what’s uncomfortable, allowing it to break down our notion of who we think we are and how we think the world is - not just bracing to get past it but truly breathing through and shifting with the upheaval of it all, then I think that there’s a greater chance for civilization as a whole.  

Like Patti Griffin, “I wonder if we’re ever gonna get home”.  But despite my disappointment, I still have hope.