At least once a week, someone says to me, “you must be getting pretty good at yoga.” While that’s a lot less annoying, assumption-wise, than “you must be pretty flexible, then,” it still totally misses the target and flies smack into the nearest tree. More often, people will tell me that they’re not good at yoga. Most heartbreakingly, my son said to me recently that he doesn’t want to do yoga because he’s “not very good at most of the poses.”

I think I’m going to be saying this a lot in this space, but here you are again: Yoga is not about the poses. If you’re practicing certain poses with skill, flexibility and strength, that’s lovely, but it’s not necessarily yoga. And if you can barely touch your toes, well, that’s also lovely, and you might, in fact, be practicing yoga with great facility. As my wise teacher Richard Freeman says, “Blessed are the stiff.” He adds that the person who figured out how to practice yoga properly during his or her first trikanasana (triangle pose) was the luckiest person in history, because that meant they didn’t have to do any more poses.

According to my vast research in the form of a handout a teacher gave me last week, yoga is one of the six classical darsanas, or philosophies, derived from the ancient Indian Vedas. The practice of yoga is designed to transform your mind by clearing it, and your body, of bad habits. Some of those bad habits involve incorrect posture, which prevents energy from moving through the body properly. I have no idea what that means, exactly, but I do know that about a hour after practice, I almost always take a spectacular dump, and feel so much better.

Asana, properly performed, help purify the body, and therefore clarify the mind. In his absolutely essential text, The Heart Of Yoga, T.K.V Desikachar says that asana is a vessel for allowing us to explore the more subtle aspects of our nature, like feeling, thought, and breath. And I quote: “However beautifully we carry out an asana, however flexible our body may be, if we do not achieve the integration of body, breath, and mind, we can hardly claim that what we’re doing is yoga.”

So to those of you who claim that they’re “not good at yoga,” all I can say is: What that old Indian dude said. Don’t be intimated by those hot yoga babes and their flawless Birds Of Paradise, and don’t worry about those guys doing unassisted handstands in the center of the room. They’re as lost as you are, if not more so, because they’re often caught up in a misperception of their own physical excellence.

Many times, I’ve thought in class: “I suck compared with that person,” and in terms of that particular pose, and that particular moment, I probably did suck. But then life continued, and the next day I sucked a little less. The point isn’t to be good at a pose, but rather to be mindful and aware of the changes in your body and your mind that the pose creates. This will allow you to understand your self more fully and to lead your life happily according to your own principles.

Well, at least that’s what the yoga philosophers say. Most practice days, I find myself marveling at the awesomeness of my headstand. I look around the room to see if anyone’s holding it as long as I am, and I definitely want to be the only guy who makes it to the point where you stand on your head and fold the body halfway. At that moment, when I’m expressing that desire, I’m not practicing yoga. But then if I become aware of my thoughts, then I am practicing yoga. Unless I get too attached to the subtlety of my awareness, in which cases I’m not practicing, until I get aware of my awareness, and so on through an endless tangle of thought. That’s how, on a moment-by-moment basis, yoga is destroying my life.

Photo by enfad

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