I jest lovingly because I do authentically love our modern yoga culture in America. I both love some of the artificiality of it and the deep, rich meaning that keeps bringing people back to the practice of yoga. I love arguing with fellow non-Indians about how to properly do ujjayi breathing or agreeing with them fully when we bash anyone that doesn’t share our liberal agenda. The yoga we practice today is perfect for our today. Could it be improved through better education of what yoga truly is in terms of honoring the creators of yoga, the ancient sages, and the spiritual importance that this practice serves? Yeah, sure! Everything can always be improved! It’s a beautiful fact AND it definitely means while continuing the mission of “true” yoga, we don’t have to be assholes about it.
Patanjali, supposed author of the Classical Yoga Sutras, posits that yoga is “the calming of the fluctuations of the mind” or “the cessation of the movements of the mind” or “the mind’s movements settling to stillness.” Or any of the other 2,000 translations of the Sanskrit work. Like the language describing it’s principles, yoga as a subject is as dense as frozen ghee. It’s philosophical density does not only drop from the heavens via the direct plug-ins of sage’s minds into the cosmic soup of knowledge; it accumulated over many thousands of years of cultural development and mixing. Also, plugging a mind into soup was not one of my best metaphors, and for that I give myself like six kriyas.
“Yoga,” etymologically speaking, relates to the old English “yoke,” derived from the Proto-Indo-European language’s “yugóm,” related to all words meaning a literal yoke in European, Middle-Eastern, and Indo languages, and finally “yoga” from Sanskrit. The word first appears in written history in the Rig Veda around 3,000 BC and refers to literal yoking together of horses. The five times “yoga” is mentioned through the Rig Veda, it is easy to conclude that this yoking is symbolic of a spiritual joining together of the self to the process of enlightenment and absorption with the divine (the “big Self”).
After the Rig Veda, Indian writings coalesce into the Epic period that gives us the longest, most epic poem of all time, the Mahabharata, which I tried to perform in its entirety in a slam poetry open mic, but I had to quit after the first ninety hours. Yoga is greatly expanded upon here, especially in the well-known Bhagavad Gita, which effects 1 in every 3 yogis each teacher training. In the Gita, yoga is a practice that gets one in the unitive state–as in, one is DOING yoga to ACHIEVE yoga. Different types of yogic paths are laid out here such as karma, bhakti, and jnana.
Fast forward to Classical yoga, during which Patanjali gave us the Yoga Sutras, his compiled instructions of another path: raja yoga. “King” yoga, as it translates to, is an eight-limbed path that INCLUDES hatha yoga (the poses–finally!) though it is a lifestyle practice far beyond the poses. It is a rigorous process of unlocking Samadhi, or union/bliss/enlightenment, via the body, breath, mind, and intellect. So, yes, Hannah, you may have totally experienced this in hot yoga the other day when you cried in half pigeon!
Kidding and also not kidding. Look, after another long process of historical this and thats, yoga eventually made its way to the West after mixing heavily with gymnastics and we ran with it. Well, we down-dogged with it. There are folks who bemoan and belittle the popularization of yoga in the West, telling us that we misappropriated a meaningful practice into a billion dollar industry of hot rooms, blasting Drake during asana, expensive clothes, and self-help everything. These folks go on to tel us that yoga is only meant to release one of material possessions completely and dedicate every minute of our lives to prayer and spiritual-y stuff. To those folks, I say: if you truly believe in the peaceful love and acceptance of your fellow humans, knowing that we are all one, then enlighten the f up.
Yoga is bigger than human opinion. Yoga is of a divine nature, the same nature that makes us all alive, observing BEINGS rather than observation-less sacks of tissue and bones. Yoga as a philosophical concept stretches and bends (get it?) with society as time passes and culture changes. Yes, we are incredibly privileged fools for the most part here in the US. We often have our heads up our own asses and are so concerned with the first-world-iest of problems that the entire Eastern world rolls its eyes at us. Yet throwing away our privilege is just as harmful as ignoring or even exploiting our privilege. This ancient 5,000+ year old practice is a huge gift to our society, and I’ve personally seen literally thousands of people–white, black, Indian, women, men, rich, poor, anything–generate a life of meaning, non-violence, spirituality, and love from this adapted practice of modern yoga. Even with expensive yoga pants on.
None of us are perfect and most of us are far from it. Yoga, ancient or modern, teaches us how to experience total perfection: accepting all that as imperfect as impermanent and therefore completely perfect in its place in the flow of time and space. That includes habits of judging people, difficult emotions, challenging disagreements, AND your leg cellulite, Hannah. In the words of Swamiji on his Idiot Abroad cameo: “Please love yourself.”
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