M Dumas painting
WHAT IS OUR TRUE FACE, What is our true yoga?
IF YOU ATTEND a modern yoga class in the USA [$10 to $15 per
hour up to $65 unless you are a “celeb” and then it is much more, you are
likely to feel like a piston in an engine. Instead of stepping onto a treadmill or onto a step climber
or doing a bike spin class, you go to yoga. You go there as an aspirant—as a seeker of something
physical and perhaps even spiritual—to become more flexible. You have the aerobic working for
you. And after a class you, typically,
feel something a little different—perhaps spiritual—but, typically, you do not
return. If you do return, you
expect it to be a workout, not unlike what you have been doing, but honestly,
and beautifully, you have expectations of something more, philosophical/spiritual.
Let’s perhaps hold a pose such as “triangle’ for a
muscle-burn trying to get your hand down to the mat while maintaining the
straightened forward leg, and then it’s back to “vinyasa,” which translates
into a quick “plank” (urdva chatruangdandasana) or “chaturanga” in “mass yoga,” pushing down (which is quite different from chaturangdandasana), [“crocodile,” but not really, and then upward,
pushing up into “sphinx” or “up
dog,” followed by flow into “down dog,” [“where we all meet”] and perhaps
another round of “tri” [Utthita Trikonasana, of course, on the opposite side], followed by “taking
a vinyasa,” [We were just there,
but we are going back again and again] and then moving into another pose such
as “Warrior Two,” followed perhaps by “Reverse Warrior” [unless you are an
animal or expected to be, into “”Warrior Three,” and [guess what] vinyasa.
Last Sunday, at a “yoga in the park” AND there, two weeks B4
at another “yoga in the park:” The above vinyasa, because this is what all yoga
teachers are taught. All sorts of
funky poses were thrown in, such as “crow, because it is awesome.” But ninety percent of the participants
didn’t have a clue what “crow” was or how to do it, because yoga is now a mass
yoga. Forget “crow,” and nearly
everyone fell behind in their basic “vinyasa,” so that they ended up feeling
like they each pose they were doing was an “ass-anana.” I
could read it in their faces.
Those who did keep up with the “flow” as I could do, were the
exception. This Sunday, it was
Power yoga; two week before, astanga-rooted, with it wondrous
world-championship vinyasa flow, as if this is the epitome of yoga. So many, who were truly drawn to yoga,
and entered this mass yoga, left, I am sure, both this Sunday and those on the
latter Sunday, feeling “yoga is not for me.”
We might espouse, as the two facilitators did, that yoga is
for everyone. And that is so
true. That it is beautiful, And
the admonition to be smiling all the while is, again, true. And yet, it is nearly impossible, given
the orientation of, really, the MAJORITY of yoga instructors who may have
limited training but just be good at facilitating a class and, really (from my
experience) the “certified” [which is really to say registered with an
organization] by virtue of spending 200—500 hours at perhaps $2600 per 200
hours. From my experience, the
most “trained” facilitators who would be likely licensed in the United States
as yoga teachers are more like to injure more people than the less
“certed.”
I would argue that what is called yoga in the world in which
I inhabit is not really yoga in the first place. There is no opportunity to listen to the body, to open, to
free the body rather than push, Push, PUSH to control the body. Go to Vanda Scaravelli.
When I go to “yoga in the park” or a less costly “community
yoga” [yes, because I am cheap], I expect to encounter the above dynamics of
which I am critical, but I have not been once disappointed in finding the
potential of injury. Perhaps
because I am attending the class, there is a drive by the instructor to “up the
anty,” bu I don’ think so. I think this is really what they do.
And so, I would encourage people interested in yoga
everywhere in the world to anticipate the above.
I would encourage you to not be discouraged, to do your own
practice, to go to a class and to really be intuitive, and not do all that
facilitator demands.
Recently I went to a class where headstands were a part of
the sequence. I saw people who
were overweight as well as thin people.
The expectation from the head of the school was that anyone could do
this across time, and that one might struggle tonight, but participants were
encouraged to give it a try. There
were, as is often the case, a good number of students. It might be the headstand in this class
or the “wheel” pose in another, but the science of yoga suggests that even if
you can do the headstand, and then do it for four years, suddenly, someday, you
might have an experience of excruciating pain and never be able to do it
again. And an overweight person
doing a wheel and perhaps being held up by an underweight person is something
any idiot would be afraid to subject participant to, but not a “certed” teacher
it seems. And if you were to get
“frisky,” and bend your neck a little more than usual (because you felt “really
loose,” [especially in Bikram (hot) yoga, you might provoke a stroke because
you compressed the vessels in your neck vertebrae. So, at that point, congrats for attaining “uber-flex”
at the cost of altering your life forever forward.
As I moved deeper into yoga, it was astonishing to me to
hear of all of the injuries caused by yoga, which had seemed to be to be
something akin to zazen, “sitting, at
rest.”
Congrats for “pushing the envelope” of Mod/mass yoga.
Today, 7/24/2013, on a bike trail, not yoga but that same
workout/fitness orientation, a young man flipped suddenly forward, cracked his
helmet, passed out, had blood on his face, a torn jersey, blood on his leg, was
“goofy,” but said that he had done this before, and had expected the second
concussion that he has had to fee worse.
Push that heat up there.
Get those towels. Enjoy the
rush. Yes, whip through those
moves fast “to get fit” or to lose weight. Bogus. But
someday, look up the actual aerobic impact and see that it equals a mild step
on a treadmill. Go yoginis, absorb
all of the yoga B. S. you’ve been taught.
I know it’s likely the only yoga that you have seen, or even all that
your facilitators have really seen for that matter. Keep working with fervor. Bring that body of yours under control. It is what fitness is all about in
2013. But fitness is so passé.
When you first get it, it will be about ‘wellness.” But perhaps when your teachers get
it—if they ever do—it will be about thriving. I don’t
see them really ever slow down, so take that, perhaps, as a strong clue. If they are “power yoga” people or
“Astanga, “ perhaps question it a little.
And then question all of your own words that lead you to “yoga”—all of
the words that you use in yoga, such as “flexibility,” and find that they might
just disappear and be replaced by real, real words that mean something.
In the future, perhaps I will offer a restorative-yin video
and a soft power yoga video to show another yoga directive.
