Oh, yoga. We love it, we leave it, and some of us may eventually come back to it with a deeper appreciation of its multi-layered complexity. Yoga instructor, JC Peters, recently blogged about going “on a break” from her yoga practice. She notes that it’s not an issue of discipline (she flosses), or lack of love for the practice (she still enjoys occasionally playing sweet tunes and rolling around on her mat for 10-20 minutes). Instead, she’s felt “insulted” by yoga: “She’s been bossing around my hamstrings and poking me in the belly. She has started telling me I’m not good enough the way I am, that I need to adjust the angle of my foot, or that I need to draw my low ribs in more, or that I should be thinking about my bikini body as summer comes.” For Peters, Yoga Barbie was the last straw.
But is what she’s referring to really yoga? She reveals several paragraphs down that other yoga instructors—rather than yoga—are responsible for her perceived insults. She also cites a disillusionment with yoga studios for failing to walk their talk; her perception of yoga teacher peers “running themselves ragged trying to make ends meet as independent contractors with no labor rights”; and her frustration with Yoga Barbie, “the representation of everything yoga helped me to get away from” as a young, anorexic teen. To support her contention that she’s far from the only person to endure a yoga separation, she points out an entire blog devoted to “falling out of love with yoga.”
But, do we really fall out of love with yoga? Or, more realistically, do we fall out of love with western yoga culture, by turns supercilious, ageist, materialistic, and fiercely wedded to western appearance norms and capitalism? Or, as our yoga practice progresses, do we transcend the honeymoon phase and, as we come into more intimate dialogue with our samskaras (the deeply ingrained templates which circumscribe our personalities, behaviors, and beliefs), do we interpret our inevitable discomfort and resistance as “falling out of love,” as with many deepening relationships?
Yoga is fundamentally defined as yoking: conjoining body, mind, heart, and soul, while also integrating the disparate and previously repressed aspects of the self. As commitment to practice deepens, everything arises on the mat that arises in life, reflecting our innermost selves and accompanying samskara. Tapas, the heat and discipline generated in practice, generates an increased capacity to face these patterns with compassion and stillness, accepting into our hearts the birthright of fullness while appreciating imperfections as divinely inspired.
In the day to day, however, it’s easy to forget that yoga is just another word for living mindfully, to confuse our relationship to yoga with our relationship to life, and thus to pin the blame for our discomfort on “yoga” culture or practice.
Has it ever felt like you have “fallen out of love” with your yoga practice? Did it last?
