Yoga is not postures. And the postures you think are yoga are very young, especially compared to yoga. Was that confusing?
We keep figuring out that yoga is so much older than we think we know it is. Let’s just assume it’s 3 or 4 thousand years old at this point. Those asanas you do? Some of them are under a hundred years old.
So what the hell is yoga, then?
It’s the underlying philosophy (which is meant to be experimented with and LIVED), and some of it did include postures but that was for the sake of people who need a physical entry point.
I need a physical entry point and I think right now, in this day and age, most people do, because most people now think the body is just a vehicle for the mind and that’s about as un-yogic as it gets.
But the physical entry point is not meant to be solidified. Yoga — the real yoga — is way too smart for that. Yoga is all and all is yoga, and each human is a unique expression of that so why would we think that downdog was somehow necessary to a yogic experience? And who would think that headstands were “advanced?”
People mistaking the material for the all, that’s who. People STILL living in a world of dualism where we are separate from the flow of the divine.
But we ARE the flow of the divine and so we come to what I really want to write about…
I’ve been studying yoga for 25 years. I’ve been teaching for 10 years.
And only just a couple of weeks ago did I feel like, as a teacher and as a student, that I had finally come to START to know “my” yoga.
“My” yoga being the yoga that is natural to this body and that allows this mind and spirit to engage on the same level as body. “My” yoga being a way of moving that integrates awareness and allows me to BE ME. (Language is so constraining right here… I’m struggling to express this.)
I am a student of Tantric Yoga, and in that system of nondualism, the ultimate reality is Awareness.
Awareness has two parts: noticing and then action based on clear sighted noticing and that is unencumbered, that is free and only in the moment and of itself.
For me, to even get close to that sort of awareness, I have to dive deeply into body.
For me, to dive deeply into body, I have to enter into the most easeful flowing state of movement possible.
And so my study of yoga, my experience of yoga, is much about breath creating fluid and strong movement.
This is too big for standing in down-dog or pushing my students into triangles. We are not triangular.
We are water.
And the key to our water state is in the mobility of the spine.
And so, I bring to you what I will henceforth refer to as Water Spine Yoga. You can read more about it here.
No Sanskrit… I do not want to use language that might push people away who need this work.
(I could go into a long rant, too, about how current yoga is very heavily masculine energy yoga and how that’s not what we really need right now and how the yoga I teach is meant to strengthen our feminine energy so that we can go out into the world and be the warriors of love and compassion that we are meant to be, but I don’t really want to go into that right now. HA)