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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The Hard Lessons You're About to Learn... (Part 1)

When did having a yoga class in a boutique or tea house or any other retail space become a good way to market a business? What does it say about that business? Is it cool? Hip? Chic? Interesting? Relevant? What does it say about us? What is this need to identify with anything that uses yoga as a catalyst for more sales? Has yoga become a label to identify ourselves with those other cool, relevant people? Has it become exclusive in the way that if you don't do yoga then we don't want you around? Has "YOGA" become so vapid in the eyes of those who do it that it's only use is to help promote, sell, or trend? Has yoga become just another item on the list of must-haves at the party of the year?

The attachment to the physical aspect of yoga (asana) without the graciousness of the spiritual aspect has led those who choose to believe it, marginalize yoga to the place of workout, the fountain of youth, and just another thing to help you relax at the spa. All fine benefits of yoga, yes, but not the raison-d'etre. Bringing yoga to our ego-ic level and understanding lessens its impact on our organism: our being. Projecting onto yoga all the same stuff of ego-identity that drive some to have face lifts, be the first to do: to have something, to brag, undermines yoga's essential and primary benefit: union with the Beloved. the Divine Heart, God, the energy of the cosmos. However you like to "name" it, it is all that and more. (As Ramana Maharshi says, to even name it, you have lost your connection to it.) All the stuff that yoga asks you to shed (boosting, grasping, attaching, hating) is actually amplified by the need to make it a part of who you think you are...all the adjectives: good, nice, chill, spiritual, cool, hip, relevant, interesting.

With the words, "I-do-yoga" come many reactions. There's a definite stigma: bad or good. Some of us let other's reactions dictate what we do. It used to be that I never talked openly about my practice or my teaching in front of my family because of all the jokes about it.

Yoga is NOT any of it.

Haha - but that publicly traded yoga wear corp (I even dislike mentioning the name because I don't want to market them) have helped shape the way in which yoga is seen, how we interact with it. Yoga, for a lot of people, has become just another commodity to exploit like anything that trends in social media: flavor of the moment. Look what they've started. And by a guy (the owner) who says he doesn't  do yoga. What a great little marketer. He's helped shape a generation of displayers: Look at what I can do; at what I've got; at who I know...or I've seen (rather).

Is this really the way you want to experience yoga?

Yoga asks you to be the antithesis of a good little marketer. To do without thought of reward. To give without thought of recompense. The lesson is to learn to shake this illusion (maya) of the material world and what you need from it...happiness, love, connection, comfort, prestige. It's all there, you've already got it all. But if yoga is used and not practiced then it can never bring you into the light of day and help shed the doubt that looms over us like a darkening cloud.

The emptiness is always there whether the material world seems to give you everything...you have become a slave to that idea...ask anyone who is encountering their own mortality!

It's a hard lesson to learn. But I will gladly teach anyone willing to go there! Are you? Willing I mean...