Yoga Needs No Embellishment

This photo is all about admiring yoga (postures) or at least the body that’s doing them. The photographer states: I think yoga is beautiful.

What a revelation!

Superficial Understanding of Yoga
My only question is: if these same (there are a few pictures) Yoga Asana would be performed on dank dark piss filled corners of the city and by ugly people if you’d still think it was beautiful?

This is an important distinction, because if you think of yoga (asana) as pictures of beautiful people/bodies wearing beautiful clothing doing the pose (beautifully) on a beach or a mountain top or some lovely place then you’ve misconstrued the true beauty of yoga. If you can not appreciate it for what it is in your own body, heart and mind then you have not deepened your understanding. This is not yoga you are seeing (it looks like it because of the poses), but it is more like the sugar coating of your own missed understanding of yoga which remains superficial.

Seeing the Difference
It is in my mind vital that we distinguish between our own need to flaunt and perform not only our expression of our bodies but also our hearts in this way that is about – the look-at-me-approval train, and to perform a sincere practice where you get sweaty, breathe hard, falter in a posture, make faces without knowing it, and get injured sometimes. Yoga’s beauty emerges from the inside as we have good practice days and not so good. As we take Yoga out onto the street and respond within our capabilities as a human who practices yoga every other day.

Yoga expresses itself more subtly and more privately. It is not as conspicuous as when it is staged with all this stuff and noise around.

What are you hiding from?
I wonder from what you are hiding. Is it your own pain? Pain of realization that you might never do a yoga posture perfectly (only an issue of performance), or pain of your body which never goes away, or the pain of realization that to deepen your practice and your heart you must forego the egos insistence to be admired. What is it then?

Yoga is Beautiful and Ugly, Painful and Freeing…
Yoga needs no embellishment like how this photographer (and many others! Self portraits – you know who you are) presents it here. There is no there there in the expression, just performance, staging. Try not to stage it next time. Watch it unfold and look for it below the surface. If you’re looking for the beauty, you’ll find a gold mine!

Photo by: Robert Sturman

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From the book - Zen in the Art of Archery

Master: The right art is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.

We masters say: one shot - one life! What this means, your cannot understand … if the shot is loosed with a jerk there is a danger of the thread snapping. For purposeful and violent peole the rift becomes final, and they are left in the awful centre between heaven and earth.

Student: What must I do then?

Master: You must learn to wait properly.

Student: And how does one learn that?

Master: By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing more is left of you but purposeless tension.

autobiography - Eugen Herrigel

What do you Bring?

I have been reading and hearing a lot about the good and bad of practicing yoga asana - the physical aspect of yoga, let's make this clear. About what it's good for, health-wise. what it's bad for, health-wise. What it can do for you in the way of making you feel better - about yourself?, about the human race? about your body? Yoga postures can do a lot of things for you - more than you'll ever know probably, and the pursuit of this knowledge is alive and well in all of us - students and teachers alike. I see it in the faces of my students, and other students in other classes. Eager to learn - but some of them, somehow are less eager to work for this knowledge. Some think they know already and i sense a kind of deadness in these people. One girl. she's doing trikonasana (triangle). One hand in the air. limp. falling almost. The attitude of her body arched and a bit contorted. Her head heavy. Her eyebrow cocked and mouth slightly open. Maybe this one's jaded. Has been doing yoga asana for-e-ver, but somehow is just going through the motions. No one stops to adjust her. Encourage her to go deeper. It is not considered good yoga etiquette to be directive... any more. Used to be that yoga was about deepening your experience and accepting instruction. Maybe she doesn't like adjustments for just that reason. It's insulting, she thinks. She's been practicing in the corner of the room. Without realizing, she has isolated herself and has become passive aggressive and withdrawn in her own practice. So this is it. This is what yoga can teach you. Today when i start the class, i begin by saying, "...if you do any yoga posture - any at all, it will do something for you. You will get that stretch you're looking for. You will achieve that posture (in your body) with practice. You will get something out of doing it. But - that is only the beginning of your yoga practice. Now it's time to change things around. To give something back. Change the notion of always getting and taking something from yoga: what it's good for, what it's bad for... Turn your mind from expectations. Rather - Bring something to Yoga. Your yoga practice. Ask yourself what can you give to your practice on your mat right now? During the ninety minutes we're here. What do you bring?"