But then I remembered - those words are true, they are my words, that I’ve said many, many times since my trip. When my teachers had me integrate a new level of awareness of my breathing into my asana practice and when I added chanting to my practice to improve my breathing and help quiet my mind, it was so, so challenging. And even after 17 years of practicing yoga, I did indeed feel like a beginner.
After further contemplation about that headline, I realized that if sensationalism moves someone to read the article and learn something new about yoga, then it’s definitely a good thing.
My recent trip to India showed me that Yoga in the US and Yoga in India are two completely different kinds of yoga. Since I’d practiced yoga in India before, 9 years ago, I did have some degree of awareness of the discrepancy. That discrepancy influenced the philosophy of the studio - Yoga for EveryBody.
My objective has been for everyone to feel welcome (not just accepted, but actually WELCOME) to attend classes at the The Yoga Room, regardless of age, race, body condition, etc., which is different than the vibe at many studios in the US. We’ve always offered a range of classes so that all students can find a version of yoga practice that works for them.
But this recent trip further clarified for me the difference between Yoga in India and Yoga in the US.
In the US, yoga is an industry. Yoga sells. Celebrity yoga teachers make tons of money with flashy and sexy Instagram photos, product endorsements, teacher trainings, online trainings, retreats in exotic locations, their own lines of yoga apparel, and more.
Because of this, unfortunately, yoga practice in the US has been, in large part, watered down to acrobatics. It’s about who can stretch the farthest, do the biggest backbend, the most showy acro yoga pose, all of which create eye-catching photos that can be used in advertisements to sell something.
This focus on the physical aspect of yoga is, in some regards, good. Yoga is vast and its variety of practices serve to meet the practitioner at their current state. Physical exercise is certainly beneficial, and if the US version of yoga inspires people to exercise, that’s fantastic.
But in the US, we’re leaving out a major aspect of what yoga was meant to be. The main purpose of yoga, as is defined in the Yoga Sutras, is to help us calm and quiet our minds. It’s a calm and quiet so profound that one can spend their entire life exploring, improving, and refining.
And since a calm and quiet mind can’t really be captured in awesome photos that can be used to sell products, it seems that, sadly, this type of practice is undervalued, or perhaps not valued, in our modern US Yoga Industry.
Nevertheless, the mind-focused yoga practice I experienced during my training in India made me realize that there is a really big gap in yoga instruction in the US. There’s infinite value in cultivating a calm and quiet mind, perhaps more than we can easily understand, yet it’s rarely taught or practiced.
So beginning in the Fall, we’re reorganizing our offerings at The Yoga Room. We’re organizing our classes and offerings into three categories: Body, Therapeutics, and Mind, to provide a more complete representation of everything yoga has to offer.
