What Is and What Is Not Yoga
Leave it to America to take something which is literally thousands of years old and alter it into a commercial entity in just several short decades.
Craig Snyder wrote a piece called the Circus of Yoga on his new blog, thecraigsnyder.com (thanks to SoulJerky for the tip). Craig is a photographer of the skateboard culture, but, as is apparent from his writing, he knows a lot about yoga.
Alan “Ollie” Gelfand
by Craig B. Snyder
Snyder’s inspiration for the title of his post was a cover of Yoga International magazine that referred to a story about how yoga had been incorporated into Cirque du Soleil.
Craig took this thought a little further and offered an often critical overview about how yoga has been transformed in the West – particularly Florida, where he lives – over the past decades.
Snyder feels that yoga has been reinterpreted by the West, and that the quality of teachers is at the root of the fact that students are often misled about the intended benefits of yoga practice.
This is similar to the thoughts expressed by R. Sharath Rangaswamy in a recent interview in Lime, that you have to know yoga to teach yoga.
Sharath adds that it may take ten years to become a yoga teacher, in contrast with some yoga teacher training courses, which give teacher certificates after a weekend. Here’s the extreme of that genre: an online certificate you can buy for $50…
I think that if you look for it, there are plenty of places in the west where you can find yoga which follows the original tradition. This is especially true of yoga styles like Iyengar and Ashtanga which try to stay close to their roots.
Coming back to Snyder’s post, he lays down what he believes to be the meaning of yoga:
Yoga is many things, but it is not one. Yoga is not exercise, but contains exercise. Yoga is not a religion, but contains an awareness of religion – whether it is your preferred religion or someone else’s, or even none at all. Yoga is not about being a contortionist with the body, but being a contortionist with the mind. It is about settling the differences with the mind that get us into so much trouble. It is simply about loving yourself, something which many people find difficult to do.
Yoga (and meditation) is many things, but it is not one – it is about becoming one. A unified, living being, who lives without duality in their life, who lives without the chaos and confusion that creates harm to ourselves as well as others.
But yoga is not the answer, it is merely a way to discover the answer.
These thoughts resonated with me. An inspiring article well worth a read.