Yoga and the pursuit of the magic bullet
As a practitioner of yoga for the past one and a half decades, I have attended many classes, sought instructions from numerous wonderful teachers and learned a lot about the functioning of my own body. I remember when I drifted away from the practice in 2011 and found myself falling ill more often than not. For me, yoga is a great ally. A partner to keep me feeling good about myself, both physically and mentally. Yet there is something about yoga and the way it is practiced that bothers me. Allow me to explain.
I truly believe that yoga is a great form of exercise and conditioning. At the same time, I truly believe that it is not something spiritual that will make you into a better person. This is the essence of what bothers me. I find a lot of people seeking unrealistic goals through yoga. Whether it’s the power yoga student aiming for washboard abs or someone seeking enlightenment through meditation, I believe these to be misguided aims driven, in part, by the way in which yoga is portrayed and marketed.
The simple fact, according to me at least, is that yoga is a set of exercises that involve using the body and the mind. The aim is to release the various joints and muscles of the body to help you achieve essentially what your body, as a child, was designed to achieve. These ‘achievements’ are flexibility, balance and the ability to concentrate. That is it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now here’s the complicated part. These achievements may help you feel more calm. They may help you exercise better and get fitter. You may find that you have the ability to bend down and pick up that stack of papers that fell off the table. These are actually the ‘symptoms’ or results of your practice, not the actual thing that you have achieved. My point here is this: when your body and mind are in good shape, good things can happen to you. I have found amongst numerous friends and fellow yoga students that the ones who don’t seem to be seeking any fantastic result from yoga are the ones who tend to benefit most from it. It seems paradoxical to say, but it does make sense under further investigation. The individuals who practice yoga ‘in the moment’ are the ones who truly benefit. Being in that mindset allows the individual to focus on each position with a calm and relaxed mind. If, instead, you are thinking of what you will become after a few classes rather than what you’re doing in that moment, it is extremely likely that you will miss the point and fail to gain the benefits.
To summarize. I would encourage every person trying yoga — be it for the first, the tenth or the thousandth time — to not ascribe any great thoughts of higher consciousness to yoga. Treat yoga as a way to make you stronger and more capable. Once you are in that situation, your inner personality has a chance of being unleashed — whatever that may be. You may find yourself to be spiritual or practical; energetic or relaxed. That end state does not matter. What matters is that you treat the practice as a means of repairing the daily damage we do to our minds and bodies by not exercising them. I have met many yoga students over my time as a practitioner. The truth is that the best students — the ones capable of extreme flexibility and balance — are the ones who aren’t seeking something beyond their present state.
