Am I Actually Teaching Yoga?

I've stopped and asked myself this question many times over the years.

I'm painfully aware that, what I find myself teaching in a yoga class bears remarkably little resemblance to the yoga being practised 500, 1,000 or 2,000 years ago.

It doesn't necessarily follow that we modern teachers are all either deluded or fraudulent. Traditions evolve. Yoga has always changed as it has moved through different historical and cultural contexts.

But it does leave us, as teachers, with an important question:

What makes what we're teaching yoga?

It can't simply be the shapes.

If I teach a series of movements involving lunges, twists, balances and stretches, those movements don't become yoga because I give some of them Sanskrit names and finish the class with everyone lying in Savasana.

Without a philosophical and ethical framework, we may have created an intelligent, enjoyable and beneficial movement practice. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But is it yoga?I don't think it necessarily is.

It may look like yoga. But appearance isn't what defines the practice.

My body understood yoga before my mind did

Perhaps this question matters so much to me because I came to yoga through experience first, and philosophy much later.

I practised for nearly ten years before I really encountered the Yoga Sutras. By then, yoga had already changed my life.

I was a chaotic person when I first started yoga - I only realise that in hindsight. Yoga and meditation became an important part of a gradual process of healing and self-knowledge. Long before I knew words such as avidya, samskara or svadhyaya, I was discovering through experience that I could observe what was happening in my mind. In one meditation class, a teacher said, "If you can watch your own mind, you are not your mind". The penny dropped for me and changed the way I looked at the world forever.

My body knew this before I understood it intellectually.

When I eventually began studying the Yoga Sutras, in preparation for my foundation training course, there was a sense of recognition as well as an intellectual curiosity. 

I feel grateful that it happened in that order. When we encounter yoga philosophy before we've had experiences that give us some way into it, it can seem remote, overly abstract or even like a collection of ideas we're expected to accept as dogma.

The way I encountered is gave me a framework for something I had already experienced.

The Sutras gave me a language for understanding the relationship between perception and suffering; the patterns we accumulate and repeat; attachment and aversion; practice and letting go. Svadhyaya — self-study — described something that had already become central to my practice, even though I hadn't previously known its name.

Most significantly, the Sutras presented yoga as something much larger than physical practice.

And since I have understood that, it has underpinned my teaching, no matter how physically demanding, or wacky, or completely still, as it sometimes is. 

Philosophy gives us an anchor

This is why I think philosophy is fundamental to yoga teacher education rather than an interesting historical subject to squeeze in between anatomy and sequencing. Yoga philosophy gives us somewhere to anchor what we are doing, and offers us a touchstone that always brings us back to the original intention and connects us to the ancient lineage we are part of. 

The Yoga Sutras ask questions about suffering, perception, identity, behaviour, attention and freedom. They offer ethical foundations through the yamas and niyamas. They describe practices of attention, meditation and self-study. And, crucially, they have something to say about where all this is heading.

Without that larger framework, it becomes very easy for yoga teaching to drift towards whatever contemporary culture happens to value: physical achievement, appearance, productivity, self-improvement, even the creation of a more impressive version of ourselves.

Those aims sit rather awkwardly alongside a philosophy that repeatedly asks us to examine attachment, ego, identification and our habitual ways of seeing.

The approach to learning philosophy on our 200YTT course is very much rooted in our day to day existence as teachers and as humans. The assignment work does not ask you to produce the perfect essay or jump through intellectual hoops; it asks you, rather, to look inside yourself and question how these concepts have played out for you in your life. 

Yoga is both the means and the end

One of the central teachings of the Bhagavad Gita: yoga is both the means and the end. We practice yoga in order to cultivate a state of yoga. 

Asana isn't the destination. Neither is the ability to meditate for a certain length of time, recite Sanskrit, regulate the nervous system or execute an impressive sequence. In fact, for me personally, a fancy sequence only takes away from the practice - placing the importance on neat transitions which stop me from being able to observe what's happening on a more subtle level. 

Asana, mudra, mantra, pranayama, even meditation are practices. Vehicles. Ways of investigating experience.

Something isn't yoga simply because it looks like yoga - yoga can look like almost anything.

As teachers, the thing to come back to every single day, is whether what we are practising — and teaching — is taking us in the direction that yoga describes.

Why I begin teacher training with the Sutras

This is why the Yoga Sutras come early on our  200 hour teacher training, as does a thorough grounding in the history of yoga from the Vedas of ancient India to modern times in the West. 

Before we become too concerned with how to sequence a class, cue a posture or remember the names of muscles, I want us to establish what we think yoga actually is and what we're teaching it for.

That doesn't mean accepting Patanjali unquestioningly. The Sutras come from a particular philosophical and historical context, and there is plenty within them to question, interpret and debate. They inspire the conversation that allows us to come to an understanding of our own ontological landscape.

They allow a modern teacher to place a contemporary practice within a much longer tradition and ask: where are the continuities? Where have we departed from them? Which departures are useful? Which deserve more scrutiny?

For me, that enquiry has become more important, rather than less, the longer I teach.

What the Sutras gave me was a way to understand what I had experienced, a framework within which to continue exploring it, and an ethical and philosophical compass for deciding what I want to pass on to other people.

After nearly 30 years of practice, I'm considerably less interested in whether something looks like yoga. I'm much more interested in whether it leads us towards yoga.