Look online and you would be forgiven to assume that yoga is basically stretching, or even contortion. Comments abound: “that looks painful”, “I could never do that”, and others of similar ilk on the content algorithms surface to our doomscrolling.
Flick through half-a-century old yoga manuals and similar: men twisting and arranging their limbs to give impressive shows of physical feat. But here at least there are often many pages dedicated to the other technologies yoga entails: breathing techniques and primers on meditation.
This version of yoga being a physical practice is really only 100 years old1. And for most of its thousands-year development, it focused on more mental, and less bodily, practices. Meditation, visualisation; controlled breathing exercises; and gradually, an increasing introduction of the body as part of that process.
The world we live in, with its low signal to noise ratio, means we only get to see things that wow, shock, and amaze us. So it’s no surprise yoga has experienced the same fate: only the most incredible feats of the body make it through the filter of the algorithm, and thus public perception is shaped around that. Tragically, a lot of what yoga has to offer cannot be photographed: its refined mental states being only sensed by its practitioners (and maybe by their behaviours with those around them).
The yoga postures we know and love evolved in the context of meditation and self-inquiry that is at the heart of the disciplines of yoga. Tools not just to strengthen the body, but also sharpen the mind and its faculties. Ultimately, all experience is mediated by the mind—the buck stops there. Ask any bodybuilder whether they are strong or big enough, and even when they are in the top percentile of the world, their mind’s warped view has a different answer.
Thanks to the industrial revolution, we have never been more sedentary. And bodily practices are as close to a defibrillator to re-awaken our dulled senses. The physical side of the yoga practice, being full-body, is one of the most effective tools we have to bring more vitality and greater bodily awareness—things previous generations’ lifestyles granted them, without additional effort.
But to leave our yoga practice at that is missing half of the equation. Old patterns that keep us stuck, fostered divisions of us-vs-them, and preoccupations with fleeting worldly possessions: it is no surprise we have never been more miserable, and in a time of the greatest abundance mankind has seen, we have never felt more lacking.
In its fullness, the yoga practice helps us see clearly into who we are, the ties that bind us, and the nature of being human. Having shaken off cobwebs with the many flavours of yogasana, both stimulating or grounding as necessary, we have the perfect opportunity to sit and be still, and listen to the messages our subconscious has to offer.
Yoga in a sense is just stretching—stretching the limited worldview and limitations of who our ego thinks we are—but its highest expression requires no physical stretching of any sort, nor any yoga mat: simply a willingness to change our habits and tendencies. Attending to our tissues and bodily systems will naturally come first (or at least be up there in the list of priorities). But to those who ask the questions: who am I, where am I going, and is there more to the human condition, yoga has the answers.
Want to really dive into yoga, from the ground up? Join my beginner’s course on yoga, offering you the complete system, including but not limited to just postures. Coming soon. Join my mailing list to be the one of the first to sign up.