We live a culture that is about showing off the best, the fastest, the fanciest, the biggest, the most extreme of everything.
As yoga has adapted to the Western culture, become more mainstream and big business, it has become a lot about showing off your most advanced, hardest, flexiest pose. The selfie, media, photo catalog and self promote your life culture only perpetuates this obsession with our desire to want to show off to the world our greatness and self pride in outer accomplishment.
Often a lot of what we see in images from the mainstream yoga world are seemingly perfect looking, extreme and advanced postures. People perched on cliff tops in dancer pose, one moment of loss of focus and they may plummet to the ground 400m below. People doing yoga under a waterfall on jagged rocks contorted into some fancy pose with their leg noodled round their head.
You need to be clever to think of something daring and new so you can stand out and be noticed, that is hard work!
We as a culture love to see outer achievements and are very gratified by marveling at our astonishing feats of strength and stamina. But this is not what yoga is about. Showing off all these fancy, hard postures makes yoga appear elite and inaccessible to the masses that will never be able to get the leg behind their head, nor do they need to be able to do so to truly benefit from what yoga offers as a practice of self inquiry.
Unfortunately I think promoting images in mainstream yoga of advanced contortions done in effortless fashion gives off the impression that the more difficult a posture the more advanced the practitioner. And it gives the impression (even if it's not meant to) that yoga is a practice of pushing the body hard to extreme limits in order to gain the ultimate benefits.
My teacher would often say things along these lines- if yoga was about being strong, fit and flexible every gymnast or professional athlete in the world would be enlightened from practicing gymnastics or their sport, but it doesn't work like that. Yoga is not gymnastics. Yoga is not a pursuit of outer, physical prowess.
But, you might think so if you follow yogis on instagram! Or if you watched Tara Styles contort her body into pretzels in the back of a moving truck around Manhattan.
Yoga is about continuing to develop a deeper, more intimate connection to your body, energy (sensation) and mind (awareness). It is about uniting these 3 aspects of our being to connect more deeply to the sense of self, to who we are.
Then we start to gain the benefits of yoga and become more efficacious, healthy, happy functioning beings. You don't have to be able to do advanced bodily contortions to gain the benefits of the practice. It's not about what the posture looks like from the outside, or how deep you go in it, it's about using the practice to awaken self connection through, breath, movement and awareness.
There is nothing inherently wrong with getting strong and flexible from yoga. That just happens over time from a regular practice. But that is not the fruit of the path of yoga, unless you want it to be...
So, don't think yoga is gymnastics is isn't. Don't be put off by yoga because you can't put your leg behind your head or hold all your body weight on one arm, whilst doing a handstand split.
Yoga is for everyone. Yoga is about an ever continuing connection to your body and actual situation in life. It is about breathing, slowing down, reconnecting to your embodied experience of living. It is about taking your wondering mind and keen eyes and focusing them on your inner experience. It allows you to inhabit your life more and more as you continue to practice with sincere motive and a true desire to grow.
Yoga is for everyone, every body, every level of physical capacity.
Yoga is about fully living the human experience and that doesn't have to look like anything fancy and extreme on the outside. What's happening in your inner experience is what counts not the size of your abs or how long you can hold an arm balance.
As yoga has adapted to the Western culture, become more mainstream and big business, it has become a lot about showing off your most advanced, hardest, flexiest pose. The selfie, media, photo catalog and self promote your life culture only perpetuates this obsession with our desire to want to show off to the world our greatness and self pride in outer accomplishment.
Often a lot of what we see in images from the mainstream yoga world are seemingly perfect looking, extreme and advanced postures. People perched on cliff tops in dancer pose, one moment of loss of focus and they may plummet to the ground 400m below. People doing yoga under a waterfall on jagged rocks contorted into some fancy pose with their leg noodled round their head.
You need to be clever to think of something daring and new so you can stand out and be noticed, that is hard work!
We as a culture love to see outer achievements and are very gratified by marveling at our astonishing feats of strength and stamina. But this is not what yoga is about. Showing off all these fancy, hard postures makes yoga appear elite and inaccessible to the masses that will never be able to get the leg behind their head, nor do they need to be able to do so to truly benefit from what yoga offers as a practice of self inquiry.
Unfortunately I think promoting images in mainstream yoga of advanced contortions done in effortless fashion gives off the impression that the more difficult a posture the more advanced the practitioner. And it gives the impression (even if it's not meant to) that yoga is a practice of pushing the body hard to extreme limits in order to gain the ultimate benefits.
My teacher would often say things along these lines- if yoga was about being strong, fit and flexible every gymnast or professional athlete in the world would be enlightened from practicing gymnastics or their sport, but it doesn't work like that. Yoga is not gymnastics. Yoga is not a pursuit of outer, physical prowess.
But, you might think so if you follow yogis on instagram! Or if you watched Tara Styles contort her body into pretzels in the back of a moving truck around Manhattan.
Yoga is about continuing to develop a deeper, more intimate connection to your body, energy (sensation) and mind (awareness). It is about uniting these 3 aspects of our being to connect more deeply to the sense of self, to who we are.
Then we start to gain the benefits of yoga and become more efficacious, healthy, happy functioning beings. You don't have to be able to do advanced bodily contortions to gain the benefits of the practice. It's not about what the posture looks like from the outside, or how deep you go in it, it's about using the practice to awaken self connection through, breath, movement and awareness.
There is nothing inherently wrong with getting strong and flexible from yoga. That just happens over time from a regular practice. But that is not the fruit of the path of yoga, unless you want it to be...
So, don't think yoga is gymnastics is isn't. Don't be put off by yoga because you can't put your leg behind your head or hold all your body weight on one arm, whilst doing a handstand split.
Yoga is for everyone. Yoga is about an ever continuing connection to your body and actual situation in life. It is about breathing, slowing down, reconnecting to your embodied experience of living. It is about taking your wondering mind and keen eyes and focusing them on your inner experience. It allows you to inhabit your life more and more as you continue to practice with sincere motive and a true desire to grow.
Yoga is for everyone, every body, every level of physical capacity.
Yoga is about fully living the human experience and that doesn't have to look like anything fancy and extreme on the outside. What's happening in your inner experience is what counts not the size of your abs or how long you can hold an arm balance.