The Yoga World Needs Some Love. Let's all step up!

I know I was supposed to write on Swara yoga - I promise that will be my next post. But today I have to post on this topic because I feel so strongly about it. You would expect that the world of yoga, yoginis and yogi does not know the meaning of the word "hate" or the opposite of love. Love, is that one thing that you would expect to find in abundance in yoga. All you hear and read about yoga online is loving yourself, and this world and everyone around you. Sadly, this is not true.

When people ask me why i practice asana and other aspects of yoga, my simple answer is it taught me to love myself, when I thought I was wholly unable of being loved by anyone. I found the courage to pick up certain pieces of my life and rebuild them, I still find that courage every time I step on my mat. I have had the fortune of having being taught by teachers who have inspired me to practice with an open heart. And once your heart is open, it is very difficult for it to go back into it's shell again. However, today a lot of what I see in the yoga community is not love. It is not love for the self, it is not love for others and sadly, it is definitely not love for yoga.

I had a conversation with an old teacher of mine to get some tips on alignment - postural alignment to be exact. I think he was disappointed in me for asking such a mundane question and maybe expected me to have (after all these years of practicing and teaching) a stronger understanding of alignment anyway. He also gave me a piece of  his mind of why I shouldn't focus too much on just asana and that I was trying to complicate yoga with all this talk to alignment, when it truly is a very simple practice. When I told him, I would like to learn alignment the way Iyengar teaches it because most Iyengar teachers I have met have an acute understanding of the human body and what needs to go where to avoid injury in an asana practice, he got even more upset. He did not have very nice things to say about Iyengar yoga and again was disappointed in me for having mentioned it at all. I could almost hear him through the phone, shake his head with exasperation at my comments and questions.

Now, I know the aim of yoga is not asana only - the number of times I have said it in my posts, in my classes, with people I have spoken to, is ridiculously large. I feel a lot of times, I am just repeating myself. But this point deserves repetition. It is indeed true that yoga has been reduced to perfectly achieve a crow or a handstand - and it is really more than that. On that journey, however,  if you happen to achieve 20 different headstand variations, then that is really good for you. I know and understand that asana practice is a stepping stone to all the magic that awaits an earnest practitioner of yoga. It is important now to say YOGA =/= ASANA. Asana however is a part of yoga !

As a teacher the first thing I get to teach people is asana. The majority of Hatha yoga teachers in the world are asana teachers first and then also people who teach pranayama or meditation. As someone who teaches asana, it is our responsibility to make sure our students learn the correct postural alignment. That they know how to enter into, stay in and exit from an asana. It is our prerogative that they do not injure themselves - we need teach them tips and trick to modify the asana according to their body type.

On average a yogi/ni practices 60 minutes everyday. In which time they get into adho mukha svanasana or downward facing dog many times, depending on the style of practice, much more in a vinyasa class for example. Having bad posture, bad hand alignment, being unconscious of how you are using energy to get into and stay in the pose, can severely damage certain parts of your body - wrists especially being the most vulnerable in adho mukha svanasana. It is my duty as a yoga teacher to tell my students the right posture to get into or to know what to feel and what not to feel and to offer adjustments if/when needed.

There is a reason that in yoga teacher training courses Anatomy and Physiology are compulsory subjects with a minimum number of hours dedicated to the study of the human body and how it behaves in certain yoga asanas. This is important knowledge for you to have, if you are going to go out into the world and be a yoga teacher.

We need to understand that most people start their yoga journey today in a yoga studio with an asana practice. Some practice once a day, some love it so much they practice twice a day with further self practice at home to achieve some asanas. That is a lot of physical practice - you might as well be doing it safely. So if physical asana practice is the gate that people are using to enter into this world of yoga, our responsibility as yoga teachers is then to make sure they don't injure themselves grievously while exploring this path. Because once they cross their obsession with asana, there are many more jewels awaiting them! Our responsibility also then lies in furthering their education about the holistic vision of yoga and encourage them to look beyond their asana practice. I understand all of this.

Why did I start this post with love? Because it's the one thing the yoga world needs a lot more of. I have been guilty in the past and sometimes I do it even now ( I am aware enough to catch myself though) of saying nasty things about yogis on Instagram, yogis who practice ashtanga, yogis who call themselves handstand experts. To deny that I have done this will be quite sad, because you can literally look up some really old posts of mine where I have called these schools and people out.

I have since then learnt to live and let live. If you love doing handstands and that speak to you - good for you, I am glad you found something you love on a yoga mat. If you are an ashtanga yogi, who loves to do the  primary, secondary sequences and working on your jump throughs and jump back - all the best, God knows I get a high when I nail a perfect jump through - it makes my day sometimes. So do it as long as you are safe and not breaking anything in your body. If being a very strict Iyengar yogi using props to get into a perfect alignment and feel exactly what muscles and parts of your body are engaged in a particular yoga pose - please go ahead and use props and become more aware of your body. BKS Iyengar will be proud of you.

I have learnt even from Instagram yogis (!) - and this is quite a feat for me, because I truly used to despise yoga being reduced to a picture online - an asana that the person probably fell out of the minute the picture was clicked. It was further related to my concerns about body shaming, and ideas regarding what an ideal yogi should look like - there are many issues I have about Instagram as a platform. But EVEN from those yogis, I have managed to learn a thing or two.  Yes, I should be treated to a glass of wine for getting over my stubbornness and managing to see good in even that!

Amongst many yoga schools, in many yoga studios, from many yoga teachers, I have often heard the words - this is not real yoga / they don't know what they're doing / we teach the best yoga there is.

This is scary. I understand if you are are speaking about scams like goat yoga or beer yoga - which decidedly is NOT yoga, but to use those words for schools like Ashtanga or Iyengar is quite a serious charge. You may not agree with their styles of practice - but BKS Iyengar, K Pattabhi Jois and Tirumalai Krishnamacharya have contributed a lot to the field of yoga. It is due to their practice & their efforts that yoga is known world over today, that millions practice it and that many more are just simply aware of the word "yoga".


These are all teachers who knew their yoga shashtras (scriptures), who knew what a particular asana felt like in the body and who also knew that in modern times teaching yoga will need to undergo certain changes from the way it was taught earlier. If not for their efforts, yoga would mostly have been a science known only to some in India, either in far away ashrams or high up in the mountains. To disregard the learnings and teachings of these teachers and the schools they have founded is disgraceful. It defeats the point of yoga. Which is why I ask, where is the love?

Yes it is widely known in the yoga world that ashtanga yogis are prone to many injuries, but only if they are not conscious of what they are doing, only if they put the asana over their body and mind. Only if they look at yoga as competition and not as self growth. I have a brilliant teacher who I attribute many of my "wins" on the yoga mat to, and he is an Ashtanga yogi and I have never seen him injured - touchwood. He is also one of the most dedicated yogis i know when it comes to his Sadhana and scriptural learning.

We can definitely criticise, I believe that a lot of good comes from constructive criticism. Yes there needs to be a lot of improvement in how we train teachers, how we speak of alignment, the aspects of yoga we focus on, the amount of attention we pay to safe teaching practices & the kind of Instagram accounts we celebrate etc. We can criticise these aspects and work as a community to correct them, so that yogi/nis that come after us will have a safer asana practice and a wider knowledge of what yoga really is. But to hate on each other, to call each other names, to downplay the importance of certain core aspects of asana and to disrespect teachers that have contributed immensely to the world of Hatha yoga as we know of it today, is to miss the entire point of being a yogi/ni.

I'm not saying jump from school to school - because someone once told me, if you want to further your spiritual practice, find a school and stick to it. If you keep moving from one school to another, you will not go far in your practice. I do not know how much truth there is to that statement, but I do see some value in it. I have my peace and path in the Bihar School of Yoga when it comes to deeper learning in spirituality. But there are aspects of Iyengar Yoga I love, there are aspects of Sivananda Yoga I adore and I am grateful for the strength and dedication that Bikram yoga taught me when I began my yoga journey in Singapore. There is NO reason that I can not add those aspects to my teaching to and to my own practice.

Yoga, of all things in the world, should be the last that teaches us to divide each other into groups and communities - we are one Kula. It was meant to be a beacon that guides us in the path of love and union. We will do immense harm to it if we fail to appreciate all those who have come before us. So when you feel like hating on someone from a different lineage, stop and think about whether there is anything at all that you can learn from them and imbibe into your own Sadhana. Just stopping for a minute will make you realise that there is in fact no need to hate someone to prove your love for something. We can all co-exist, especially us yogi/nis need to show the world that co-existence is possible and is the need of the hour.

In support of all the schools that I respect, here are some of my favourite quotes from their founders/teachers:

The success of yoga does not lie in the ability to perform postures but in how it positively changes the way we live our life and our relationships. ~ TKV Desikachar 

It is through the alignment of the body that i discovered the alignment of mind, self and intelligence. ~ BKS Iyengar

The Ashtanga yoga system should never be confused with "power yoga" or any whimsical creation which goes against the tradition of the many types of yoga shashtras (scriptures). It would be a shame to lose the precious jewel of liberation in the mud of ignorant body building. ~  K. Pattabhi Jois

Surrender to yoga, for where is the conflict when the truth is known. ~ T Krishnamarcharya

namaste