After I had a serious post-divorce breakdown in the middle of my forties, I recognized that I needed to change and in order to do that, I needed to gain some clarity about who the hell I thought I was. Which is how I ended up in a 1000-hour yoga therapy certification program, trying to figure out the multidunous and contrary angles of human beings, starting with myself as Exhibit A.
The ancient yogis, I came to learn, categorized the various conditions of humanity with an OCD level of logic, nuance, and exactitude that is equal parts annoying and fastidious. Among other things, there are four parts of the mind, three gunas, or states of being, eight limbs of yoga, five basic elements of existence, a hundred and seven marma points on the body (and one in the mind), and five koshas, or layers of human embodiment. The system of yoga, I learned, is kind of like math. You can use it to figure out some really big shit, but you have to follow the small details carefully if you want it to be accurate. Otherwise, you’re just making stuff up and it has no correlation to reality.
I have serious misgivings and unease around American wellness culture, especially when it comes to the practice of yoga. This makes me sound like I’m cranky and gatekeeping a practice that isn’t even technically mine by virtue of birth or heritage, but that’s the exact problem with so much wellness content right now. It ignores context and origin, and as a result it often comes off as shallow, opportunistic, and privileged.
In yoga, you are trying to align, yes, but how do you know what to align with if you don’t have a context to guide you? Basically, I guess what I’m trying to say is that American wellness has a giant karma problem.
The no-nonsense yoga of the Vedas, and the Sutras, and the Gita is about so much more than sweating in a hundred degree room to get lean. It’s doesn’t involve twenty dollar smoothies with sea moss and adaptogens or sound baths with scented candles or performing backbends or going vegan or any kind of manifestation bullshit for personal gain.
What it does include is a lot of willingness to explore the discomfort of the mind in order to find embodied calibration, and I don’t know how you do that without keeping at least one uneasy eye on the simple idea that sooner or later—maybe in this lifetime, maybe in the next—you are going to reap what you sow.
In my experience, no one loves hearing this, but it’s also the goddamn truth. You don’t have to be religious to see evidence of this—just look around. We warmed the atmosphere and now the seas are rising. We built houses in floodplains and, oh hey, some of them are getting flooded. You can’t drink from a poisoned stream. You can’t fill a bucket from an empty well.
People are the same way. Hurt them and they will turn around and hurt others. Enslave a population and they will rebel. Keep everyone poor and no one will have the money to make anyone rich. If you’re an asshole to your morning barista every day, you might end up with spit in your latte. What goes around eventually comes around. Get with the program, yoga says. Wake up and deal with reality, starting with yourself.
For a while, based on some mistakes I’d made in a time of personal crisis, I thought I was a bad person. Yoga, I thought, might fix me. It would transform me, make me both much more of what I thought I should be and also much less. But that’s not at all what happened. Instead, I just found me. Not particularly good, but not all bad, either. An ordinary human with, according to the yogis, more working components than I knew about. Yoga gave me the gift of meeting my whole self for the first time. It gave me both an instruction manual and a FAQ for my operating system.
I currently cannot perform a backbend or the splits. I do not rise at dawn to chant (though I should maybe get back to doing that) and I eat meat. I don’t go to public yoga classes for the time being. Sometimes, my practice consists of lying on the floor in a patch of sun and seeing how heavy my bones really are.
I think everyone should be mindfully practicing something, no matter how old they are, what gender they are, what kind of health they’re in. No matter if they’re rich or poor, in jail or living high on the hog, married or single. I think this should be available to everyone. Maybe it’s tai chi. Maybe it’s writing a poem every day or playing the guitar or it’s blessing the clowns who cut you off in traffic. Maybe you’re religious. Maybe you touch all the trees when you hike or foster a dog or garden.
My point is that all of it is a kind of yoga. If you are breathing, you can practice. Yoga, the Gita says, is skill in action. This has nothing to do with putting your leg all the way up there or getting twisty on a mat and everything to do with occupying the moment you are in and meeting yourself so you can perform the work of the world. You matter and your actions and choices matter. A yoga practice should absolutely make you feel good, but the buck shouldn’t stop there. A yoga practice should make you feel good so you can go out and hopefully do some good, no matter who you are, where you’ve been, how much you have or don’t have.
I started practicing yoga to heal myself and I ended up wanting to help heal others, which I wasn’t expecting, but that’s the dance of life. That’s yoga.