A Different Approach To Yoga Training: An Invitation to Unlearn Your Yoga
Were you taught to trust what you know? Do you silence the voice inside in order to learn from others? How much time have you spent training and perfecting your Yoga based on the teachings of someone else? Are you staying within the lines of rules and requirements in your Yoga because someone else told you it was “the right way to do it?”
The experience of Yoga is THE EXPERIENCE of reunion with your innate intelligence. The reuniting of the self you show the world with the Self that exists within. Yoga is the reconciliation of YOU with YOU. You cannot fail at it. You cannot do it wrong. If the Yoga that you are studying says otherwise, it might be time to question it. And, it might be time to ask yourself why you give your own authority away to others who claim to know more than you do about how your practice should look and feel.
Along the path of our maturity and education, most of us were taught to color inside the lines, to follow the rules, to do things correctly as opposed to incorrectly, to get things right not wrong, to succeed and not fail, to listen and do as we are told. In the process, we lost our inner compass. We separated from (Vi-yoga) the part of ourselves that knows what’s right for us. We learned to look to outside authority over inner guidance, and to perfect our presentation, rather than to feel our sensation. Most of us were educated to doubt ourselves, and instead trust others who had our best interests in mind. Many of us received directions to stifle our own creative process and do what we were told, and in order to be “good” we followed the rules. These instructions often robbed us of the ability to think for ourselves, to make mistakes, to get things wrong, to learn from our experiences rather than trust others. Many of us became afraid to be anything other than perfect, and treated our unique differences as taboo and sinful. Ultimately, we hid the voice of our wisdom away somewhere deep down inside, and replaced it with the insatiable chase of external knowledge.
This model of education has been applied to modern Yoga, and it was an easy fit. Teachers are given rules to follow, scripts to perform, “right” things to say, & “right” ways to say them. Yoga teacher trainings are producing teachers that sound alike, that are uniform, predictable, and all but absent of Yoga. They are learning ways to keep students safe, at the expense of experiencing Yoga. They are limiting their creativity, and asking students to do things the “right” way, enforcing angles and degrees, and alignment cues as if all bodies are exactly the same. Students are discouraged from listening to their inner guidance with exhaustive instructions and flashy playlists. Yoga, contrary to its creative essence, has begun to look like one thing, rather than the multitude of expressions it has the capacity to take. The practice of Yoga has become a practice of coloring inside the lines, following the rules (limbs), and looking outside for guidance.
But...What if every “right” experience of Yoga didn’t look exactly the same? What if everybody was allowed to be the unique and individual expression of Yoga that they are, and not be required to mimic a paradigm of “correct” or “advanced”? Are teachers telling students to follow the rules because it’s “right” or because they are scared of being “wrong”? What if the experience of Yoga happens outside of the lines? What if Yoga doesn’t have anything to do with the opinions of others and everything to do with the voice of wisdom inside? What if there is no right or wrong in Yoga? What would practice look like? What would teachers teach? How would we know what to do? By courageously turning inward, into the chaos that we want to quiet, into the tension, the resistance, and even the pain. At its greatest, Yoga has the capacity to educate us about ourselves, from ourselves, by ourselves, as ourselves. This approach to Yoga takes courage (Vira) and a deep connection to your own personal feelings and inner guidance (Bhava). To dare for Yoga to be an experience rather than an achievement, to bravely doubt and question the system of right and wrong, the teachers who inform you, even the information itself seems to break all of the rules, but it might just be the gateway to freedom.
What would you want to learn from Yoga (or a Yoga training) if it’s not safety, right and wrong ways to do things, or how to be perfect? That’s the question I want to explore, as we unpack the motivation for pursuing Yoga as a path rather than as physical fitness.
If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that the things we have depended upon are questionable; That the ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, happy and sad might not be exactly what we’ve always thought they were; That the old systems of success and safety might be illusions, and if we are to be resilient in times of trouble and difficulty, it is up to us. But so many of us found that when our dependable structures began to wobble, that we felt rudderless, confused, and unsafe. When left up to our own devices, we realized we didn’t know what to trust. The year 2020 has cracked the lens of our perception, and if we are lucky, it has us questioning deeply the things on which we depend, including our Yoga.
I’ve told students for years and years, you can’t fail at Yoga, and teachers in training have consistently refused to believe it. Committing to the systemic model of education, students struggle to see Yoga as an experience rather than a requirement. You cannot fall short in Yoga, you can simply be where you are. Only and always. YOU are the measurement of success, not the achievement of a perfect posture or an advanced technique. And wherever you find yourself is perfect. Yoga teaches us to be who we are, in every moment, in every relationship, in every situation. Yoga is the experience of trusting our inner authority, and being aware of our tendency to forget And, it's the experience of remembering. What Yoga asks us to do isn’t improve, but only to be engaged, awake, and responsible. Yoga neither asks for nor requires perfection. In fact, it thrives on our imperfections, our mistakes, and our forgetfulness. Yoga is the experience of clarity beneath the static of input, expectation, demand, and fear. It’s always there, even when you forget, even when you can’t see it. It never disappears. It is the core of who you are.
One of my teachers says, “Yoga is who you are, and you practice to remember that.” You are the expert, because NO ONE can know you as well as you know you. So though there are myriad techniques for choreographing an asana practice, and there are exhaustive instructions for safety, alignment and uniformity, none of these tools are Yoga, and they don’t all work for everybody. If you want to learn how to access the wisdom inside that can guide others to their own inner wisdom, then come study with us. We don’t have all of the answers, we don’t get everything right, we don’t pretend to know everything, but we are excited to share what we’ve discovered, to support you in your discoveries, to hold space for you to access your inner knowing, and to teach you how to hold that space for others.
This path of Yoga takes courage, it’s the path of the warrior, the Yogi in the arena. It’s full of opportunities to make mistakes and learn from them. It calls you into direct experience, and doesn’t provide an all knowing authority to tell you all of the right things to say and do. Instead, it teaches you that the source of your knowledge is based in connection. Connection to yourself, your fellow practitioners, your community, and ultimately your students. We’ve been walking this path for a while, so we have many stories and experiences to offer, we have many suggestions to make about ways you can experiment and explore for yourself. When you train with Vira Bhava Yoga, we start from a place of trust. We trust that the Yoga you seek is inside YOU, and we spend time helping you discover that for Yourself.