Me back when I still believed. Photo @ Ulrika Walmark
When I started going to yoga class regularly back in Brooklyn in 2001, it felt huge. It felt like I had stumbled upon something profound, something that was going to change the course of my life. And in a way it did. It definitely gave me visible muscle tone, and I did stop smoking cigarettes — largely thanks to the emphasis on breathing in the classes. And I eventually became a teacher.
But what was profound about the actual movement classes named Yoga I was attending was unclear. Sure, there was the incense, the altar with the shiva statues, the crystals and the flowers. The great mystery was being alluded to, and the teachers made it seem like cracking the code might be possible. And that all the Warrior Ones, Twos and Threes, the Wheels and the headstands were somehow going to get me there.
Wherever there was and whatever it was.
Over the span of my seventeen years of teaching, I’ve come across many sincere practitioners, who are in distress because they have gone to yoga class five times a week for X number of years and they’re still miserable. A very lovely asana practitioner recently told me: On the mat I feel confident, I trust my body, but off the mind I’m full of self-doubt and totally lack confidence. And this is of course because doing exercise classes regularly isn’t going to get you ‘enlightened’, or solve all your problems. And, what’s even more problematic, a whole bunch of these exercise classes (that are being sold as yoga), aren’t even that wholesome and they might give you physical problems, such as shoulder impingement, torn hamstrings, lower back pain. Especially since many of them are taught by people with very little own experience and very little training. And often, there are so many people in the warehouse spaces (called yoga studios) that even if the teacher is well-trained and experienced, there’s no way in hell that they will be able to attend, or even see everyone.
But for me, the biggest problem is, that these exercise classes that have people call themselves yogis, and embrace the fashion of a yogi; crop tops and leggings, and the lifestyle of a yogi: green smoothies, self-care and greenhouse gas mass-producing round trips to Bali have very little to do with the core teachings of yoga.
Malcolm X said, if you take the I out of Illness and add a WE, you have Wellness.
In modern postural yoga there’s so much MY, MYSELF and I. T. Krishnamacharya, modern yoga’s grandfather, established his yoga school on very shaky grounds and lies. He was physically abusive his most famous students Pattabhi Jois and B.K.S Iyengar. They in turn, continued the cycle of abuse and trauma. Jois sexually assaulted a shitload of his female students, under the guise of ‘adjustments.’ Iyengar was known for kicking and beating his students, and one of the most senior Iyengar teachers, Manouso Manos, sexually abused many of his students.
And when this ‘yoga’ came to the west it got mixed up with fitness culture and capitalism. A potent blend that made modern postural yoga what it is today.
I feel like I’m writing this SUBSTACK mostly for myself, to make sense what I’ve devoted seventeen years or my life to, and gauging how much harm I may have done, and whether any of my offerings have been helpful. I’m trying to understand if there’s anything worth salvaging here, and if I can continue to offer physical practices that I label yoga (for marketing purposes, I guess) and feel good about it?
People seem to like it. I like teaching them. But why? Because it’s easy for me? Because I feel ‘good’ at it? Am I doing harm? I don’t feel like I am these days, but I have my doubts.
The other week, I went to a yoga class here, on the island of Mallorca, by a teacher called Natalija. She teaches classical Hatha yoga. No flow. No core workouts, no music. No dance moves. No jokes. No banter. Just a lot of pranayama. Meditation. Chanting. Simple but sometimes challenging asanas held for many breaths at a time, so that the mind has a chance to settle in the body.
That class felt deep. In it, I sensed the potential of this practice. The potential for being a refuge, a source and a vehicle for svadhyaya (self-study). But not the navel-gazing kind, rather the one that takes us towards the realization of unity. Unity as inter-dependence.
If I cut you, I will also bleed.
It was beautiful, and the class resonated in me for a long time.
Once upon a time, my own daily practice meant going to Jivamukti classes five times a week. It left me with three herniated discs in the lumbar spine, and a pinched nerve . For a few months, if I dropped something on the floor it stayed there. I couldn’t ride my bicycle. And I was forced to stop all yoga practice for about six months.
Luckily I had already by then established what would become my daily practice: Meditation.
This is what yoga is really about, this is what I believe will take you a good bit on the way. Toward freedom and wellbeing. But it has to be practiced skilfully and diligently, and it has to be coupled with ethics. More on that later.