The Exploitation of Yoga Asana.

It’s everywhere. I used to do it. You may be doing it – exploiting the asana.

 

You know what I’m talking about.

How often do you find yourself taking pictures here and there, in front of this or that, in an asana?

How often to you advertise and teach yoga as an exercise class resulting in better physical health and relaxation?

Ask yourself these questions:

Do I identify Yoga primarily with physical postures?

Do I feel a need to constantly identify myself with asana?

Do asana provide me with an identity that I like?

Do I sexualize asana…..and pretend I am not?

Do I use asana as a fashion statement?

Do I, if I am a teacher, avoid lecturing to my class about actual Yoga doctrine?

Do I see teaching asana as a way to make money?

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The temptation is real.  These Instagram and YouTube yoga celebs are serious business about the exploitation of yoga into the ultimate sexy, trendy, life$tyle life$tyle.

And despite my own personal true love for Yoga’s original eight limbs, long ago, I once did some of these things too. (Some, I say.  Thank God I can look back on my life and know that I never once called myself a magical unicorn aerial rainbow yoga goddess. Amazing what you see out there!)

But asana without the other limbs of yoga is nothing and goes nowhere and is as ordinary as any other exercise – and as a ‘yoga’ teacher myself I could no longer stand to be what I actually was – an expert stretch instructor who, at the end of relaxing classes read something nice from Vivekananda or Deepak Chopra, bowed and said Namaste – oh and took plenty of pictures of postures.  The fancier, the better.  I used them on local advertisements.

Yet how the heck was I a yoga teacher when, at that time, I wouldn’t have been able to give a clear, contextual lecture on the subject?

In front of Indians? Hindu scholars?

If I’m a teacher of it, why would I not be ready for this anytime, anywhere?

 

Back then, just because I could show people physical stretches our society labels as ‘yoga’, did not make me a yoga teacher.

 

Back then, just because I attended a ‘respected’ teacher training and was given a meaningless, unregulated certification, also did not make me a yoga teacher.

Sure I was a stretch expert with a soothing voice, philosophical thoughts and easily parroted, watered-down yoga philosophy, but was I really ready to be a teacher?

 

Are you?

During those long years of teaching I craved way deeper understanding, insight and context for yoga. I longed for real knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sutras and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika but couldn’t seem to find a translation or commentary that offered me the penetrating insight I knew must exist somewhere in this world.

I searched and searched, read and read, kept practicing and one day, I found it – and it changed everything.

I finally found it by finding the right translations to the Yoga Sutras, Bhagavad Gita and the Pradipika.

(Translations of these texts are not all equal, many are vague and wishy-washy and some mediocre.)

A translation of anything depends completely on the translators grasp on BOTH languages.  Not just a grasp on one and partially of the other – resulting in half ass translations, resulting in half ass commentaries, resulting in half ass understanding by readers.

What I found in the translations and commentaries by a mahayogi named Michael Beloved elevated my mind into a glorious new understanding of yoga that I celebrate as a different kind of teacher today. His handle of the languages is beyond anything I had hoped for an combined with his comprehension, stunning insight and instruction on application of yoga is otherwise, as far as I can tell, unavailable in this realm.

 

The point is I would love for Yoga to be taken seriously.  As it stands now, it is not.  It’s meme’d, made fun of, made light of, grossly sexualized and being forced as a non-spiritual exercise into the public school system.  (Of course stretching and relaxation should be taught to everyone, but yoga is something super mystical, totally spiritual, and completely focused on scriptural and philosophical study making it inappropriate for a civic system which imposes separation of church and state.)

It’s not always easy to be a devotee of something so religious in nature and yet is falsely labeled as non-religious.

It’s not always easy to be a devotee of a practice so focused on leaving this world while mainstream yoga culture incessantly markets it as a fitness lifestyle for social activist types who want to see world peace in a place that has never known anything of the sort.

When, in fact, yoga is a very selfish enterprise, totally focused on the liberation of the individual and his/her escape from this traumatic dimension.

An side example. The ahimsa portion of the yamas is routinely exploited by social activist teachers who put pressure on society to recognize it. Yet its not meant for ‘society’, on the contrary it’s meant for someone ready to leave this world because they realize society is a program of nature and they want freedom from this program.  Yoga is the spiritual technology we use to override the program. So we don’t increase our karma with unnecessary violence. This effort to curb the natural violence within the psyche is done not to change the world, but to set free the soul into higher, less innately traumatice dimensional environments. Ahimsa isn’t applied to make the world a better place to stay in. When we study the richness of the Gita, we learn from Lord Krishna that we are not expected to solve what we perceive as the problems of this place, but rather, to figure our own individual way out of it through knowledge of the righteous duties we must individually execute to pay off our karmic debt and be released from spiritual incarceration. This is yoga instruction. This is the responsibility of the yoga teacher to teach.

Bottom Line

Yoga is so special, so unique in this strange creation it deserves to be understood that the exercise portion is necessary but done privately and purposefully for spiritual ambitions, not social accolades. It’s important to remind ourselves that deities and yoga masters are astrally present as a true yogi or yogini practices the steps of yoga and the acknowledgement of our efforts are recorded and observed by them, higher beings, not so much by our fellow Earthlings, as it is not with them that we aspire to be.

I would love for you to have a reason to move beyond the asana exploitation and your presentation of it as ‘yoga’.

I would love to see yoga teachers either bring their philosophical teachings on the yoga scriptures out from behind their backs and start teaching them as primary yoga, or start learning yoga philosophy in the first place!

I would love it if a yoga class only sometimes included asana because yoga students already have a strong home practice and don’t juvenially rely on a teacher for this portion of their practice. They rely on the teacher for it only to some extent. To a far greater extent the reliance is on the philosophical wisdom of the teacher.  This is what makes a yoga teacher a yoga teacher.

 If we ask ourselves questions about our practice, maybe we will have a better idea as to what our true motivations in yoga are.

Then, if we truly love the yoga, its holy texts and its requirements, then maybe you, like me, can get to work and stop exploiting yoga asana.

 

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YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEglXXfnvDb7H8lVlIPMg6A?view_as=subscriber

Blog: http://erinnearth.wixsite.com/yoga/blog

 

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