the spirit of yoga
I just read a really smart blog post about stupid yoga, smart yoga, and life. The writer has met David Williams, the first non-Indian to learn Ashtanga yoga back in the 1970s. He talks about how yoga is about enjoyment, not about competition.
I think this is a pretty interesting topic. Yoga originated as a practice for spirituality and stilling the mind. In the US, though, it's often treated as simply a good physical workout. I have definitely seen, and occasionally been guilty of, the sort of competitiveness that the blogger describes. But I also was lucky enough to have good teachers, teachers who made good adjustments and paid attention and told us over and over again that if it hurts you're doing it wrong. I am happy to say that in 6+ years of practice I've really hurt myself only maybe twice (the one time I accidentally punched myself in the kidney a few years ago, and when I lost my balance and fell on my head last week).
For people who treat yoga as just a workout, though, it's hard to fault them. It *is* a good workout. The physical benefits of a regular yoga practice are just out of this world, no matter what age you are (and I think practicing good balance and flexibility becomes more and more valuable the older you get). I recommend yoga to people all the time for the physical benefits. I wish my dad would do some yoga--his knees are a mess and maybe it would help. One reason I love yoga is that I love seeing my body get stronger, seeing my strength increase and my abilities stretch farther. It's really neat to catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and think, "Holy cow, that's MY body doing that!" I've always been completely unathletic, so this is an aspect of yoga that I really enjoy. But it's not the only aspect of yoga that I enjoy.
In the NYT article about competitive yoga, the Bikram people make the point that getting people in the studio is the most important thing and if the workout gets them on a mat, then they're far more likely to find the spiritual benefits as well. They have a point. But I will make a statement and say that I really don't think yoga should be a competitive sport, much less an Olympic level sport. Olympians strive and strive for victory--that's what we love about them!--but how often do Olympic level athletes injure themselves in pursuit of their sport?
When I was a kid I knew a girl who was training to be an ice skater. She'd chosen the path as a small child, and pursued it so strongly that she was at a rink two hours from her house at 5 AM so she could practice before school. She had to be homeschooled for a time to fit her skating schedule. She was really good, but she got injured when she was a teenager and never quite bounced back to the same level. (She eventually went on to skate in Disney On Ice as the Little Mermaid, which is pretty awesome, and then I think she went to college for marine biology. Not an Olympic destiny, but not an unhappy one either.) Anyway, what I'm getting at is that calling yoga an Olympic sport would mean children would be training for it the way that they do for things like ice skating and gymnastics. The spiritual benefit of the yoga just would not be there for an Olympic level yogi. It would not be yoga anymore, it would be just a series of poses. Ultimately Olympic yoga would become so far removed from the original intention of yoga as to be something completely separate. That is not the yoga that I practice.
Part of me wouldn't mind exhibition-style yoga. It's the part of me that used to love watching my teacher Gene (a 63-year-old bald hairy little italian man) demonstrate poses for us. Yoga can be impressive and surprising and beautiful. I would kind of like to sit and watch people do yoga. But I think that a yoga exhibition like that would be very difficult to separate from a yoga competition. I don't want to be a part of anything that says one person does a pose better or worse than another person does it. I believe that one person does the pose, and another person does the pose, and both poses are beautiful. There's no comparison needed, or even possible, because the two practitioners are different people with different bodies and abilities.
I also read David Williams' Open Letter to students about his view of yoga practice. I think I would really love to be a teacher like Williams. Yes, there's a part of me that wants to be a yoga teacher so I'll stay in great shape and bounce back well when I decide to have a child. And yoga teachers are hot. You know they are. Mostly, though, I want to be a yoga teacher because I love yoga. I'm the kind of person who falls in love with something and gets excited about it, like a little kid wanting to show everyone he meets this awesome thing. Yoga is my awesome thing and I want to share it. I want to help people take better care of their bodies and stay healthy. My former teacher Gene told us about the classes he taught at a retirement home, and how much the yoga helped those elderly students. I watched my grandma gradually decline and lose her sense of balance until she could barely walk. I was a kid--I don't know how much of that was medical in nature and how much was a result of her sitting in a chair all day. How many grandmas could be helped by yoga, could stay mobile and live on their own longer? How many people have serious injuries that could be helped through a gentle and dedicated daily practice? How many businessmen and housewives and ordinary people need to give themselves a little time to reconnect with their spirit? This is what I want to do. This is what I feel the spirit of yoga is about.
I think this is a pretty interesting topic. Yoga originated as a practice for spirituality and stilling the mind. In the US, though, it's often treated as simply a good physical workout. I have definitely seen, and occasionally been guilty of, the sort of competitiveness that the blogger describes. But I also was lucky enough to have good teachers, teachers who made good adjustments and paid attention and told us over and over again that if it hurts you're doing it wrong. I am happy to say that in 6+ years of practice I've really hurt myself only maybe twice (the one time I accidentally punched myself in the kidney a few years ago, and when I lost my balance and fell on my head last week).
For people who treat yoga as just a workout, though, it's hard to fault them. It *is* a good workout. The physical benefits of a regular yoga practice are just out of this world, no matter what age you are (and I think practicing good balance and flexibility becomes more and more valuable the older you get). I recommend yoga to people all the time for the physical benefits. I wish my dad would do some yoga--his knees are a mess and maybe it would help. One reason I love yoga is that I love seeing my body get stronger, seeing my strength increase and my abilities stretch farther. It's really neat to catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and think, "Holy cow, that's MY body doing that!" I've always been completely unathletic, so this is an aspect of yoga that I really enjoy. But it's not the only aspect of yoga that I enjoy.
In the NYT article about competitive yoga, the Bikram people make the point that getting people in the studio is the most important thing and if the workout gets them on a mat, then they're far more likely to find the spiritual benefits as well. They have a point. But I will make a statement and say that I really don't think yoga should be a competitive sport, much less an Olympic level sport. Olympians strive and strive for victory--that's what we love about them!--but how often do Olympic level athletes injure themselves in pursuit of their sport?
When I was a kid I knew a girl who was training to be an ice skater. She'd chosen the path as a small child, and pursued it so strongly that she was at a rink two hours from her house at 5 AM so she could practice before school. She had to be homeschooled for a time to fit her skating schedule. She was really good, but she got injured when she was a teenager and never quite bounced back to the same level. (She eventually went on to skate in Disney On Ice as the Little Mermaid, which is pretty awesome, and then I think she went to college for marine biology. Not an Olympic destiny, but not an unhappy one either.) Anyway, what I'm getting at is that calling yoga an Olympic sport would mean children would be training for it the way that they do for things like ice skating and gymnastics. The spiritual benefit of the yoga just would not be there for an Olympic level yogi. It would not be yoga anymore, it would be just a series of poses. Ultimately Olympic yoga would become so far removed from the original intention of yoga as to be something completely separate. That is not the yoga that I practice.
Part of me wouldn't mind exhibition-style yoga. It's the part of me that used to love watching my teacher Gene (a 63-year-old bald hairy little italian man) demonstrate poses for us. Yoga can be impressive and surprising and beautiful. I would kind of like to sit and watch people do yoga. But I think that a yoga exhibition like that would be very difficult to separate from a yoga competition. I don't want to be a part of anything that says one person does a pose better or worse than another person does it. I believe that one person does the pose, and another person does the pose, and both poses are beautiful. There's no comparison needed, or even possible, because the two practitioners are different people with different bodies and abilities.
I also read David Williams' Open Letter to students about his view of yoga practice. I think I would really love to be a teacher like Williams. Yes, there's a part of me that wants to be a yoga teacher so I'll stay in great shape and bounce back well when I decide to have a child. And yoga teachers are hot. You know they are. Mostly, though, I want to be a yoga teacher because I love yoga. I'm the kind of person who falls in love with something and gets excited about it, like a little kid wanting to show everyone he meets this awesome thing. Yoga is my awesome thing and I want to share it. I want to help people take better care of their bodies and stay healthy. My former teacher Gene told us about the classes he taught at a retirement home, and how much the yoga helped those elderly students. I watched my grandma gradually decline and lose her sense of balance until she could barely walk. I was a kid--I don't know how much of that was medical in nature and how much was a result of her sitting in a chair all day. How many grandmas could be helped by yoga, could stay mobile and live on their own longer? How many people have serious injuries that could be helped through a gentle and dedicated daily practice? How many businessmen and housewives and ordinary people need to give themselves a little time to reconnect with their spirit? This is what I want to do. This is what I feel the spirit of yoga is about.