What You Can’t See In a Selfie (Modified from a post by Alexandria Crow) If you only looked at facebook and Instagram you would be lead to believe yoga was just about how well you could do fancy poses. I am sure a lot people probably don’t see #inspiration and #yogalove in all the stunning images on social media but something more like #wtf #nothanks. The problem, of course, is that a pretty pose pic doesn’t even scratch the surface of what yoga really is. There is concentration, being in the moment, untangling your ego, working hard to burn through bad patterns so you can replace them with wise ones, and trying to find ease in this impermanent world. The poses are really a vehicle to teach all that philosophy: Because some poses seem easy and some seem hard, your ego often gets involved and labels which ones you like and which you don’t. It also sometimes encourages you to try to keep up with the person next to you and leads to injury. It’s also there, telling you to give up, when a pose scares you or intimidates you. By learning to pay attention to your tendencies on the mat you can learn a lot about what you do off of it in your regular life when faced with similar challenges. Patanjali’s first sutra pretty much says it all. My favorite translation of it is: “Yoga Is Now.” He doesn’t say, “Yoga Is Asana” or “Yoga Is Crow Pose,” he says it’s “Now.” Being here now—not in the throes of your mind’s painful stories, judgments, and patterns—that’s it. Since none of us can be here now all the time, we need practice to strengthen our skills of concentration first. The poses help us do that. When it becomes easier to see our minds’ stories and patterns, we can begin to eliminate the parts that cause suffering and amplify the parts that bring us ease, presence, and connection to ourselves and to others. That’s yoga. By taking photos of very fancy, beautiful poses and passing them off as yoga, as a community, we are at risk of alienating a lot of people from even trying it. The pose the camera captures isn’t your yoga practice but rather the result of it—years of it. And that’s what’s most beautiful about it. I’m practicing yoga when I’m strict with my students and challenge their patterns in class. I’m practicing yoga when people are unkind to me and I choose a nonreactive response. I’m practicing yoga when I sit on my bedroom floor in the morning and meditate. Why not throw in a couple shots of a failed attempt at a pose?, sitting in meditation, laying in savasana, etc. lets keep it real. There is so much more to Yoga than the post worthy pose.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 18:03:04 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015