Maybe the Pose Was Never the Point

My first experience with yoga was hot yoga.

Like many people who find their way into a yoga studio, I wasn't there because I was searching for an ancient philosophy or a deeper understanding of myself. I was there largely for the physical benefits. Yoga was something I did with my body to get healthier.

I didn't yet understand that the shapes we make on a yoga mat are only one small piece of a much larger practice.

Several months later, I found myself at Spirit Rock Meditation Center attending a silent Vipassana, or Insight Meditation, retreat. I arrived with very little meditation experience and almost no understanding of what I was stepping into.

At the beginning of the retreat, we entered into silence. This wasn't simply about creating a peaceful environment. By removing conversation, we removed one of the ways we continually turn our attention outward. Without the distraction of words, we were invited to pay attention to what was happening within.

And there was plenty happening. Thoughts arose. Emotions arose. Sensations arose. Memories, judgments and stories arose. The practice was to notice them.

Somewhere in all of that noticing, I began to experience something I had never understood before: I could have a thought without the thought being me. I could experience an emotion without the emotion being me. I could feel a sensation without the sensation defining me.

All of these things were happening within my experience. They were real. They deserved to be noticed and felt. But I was beginning to understand that they were experiences moving through me—not the entirety of who I was.

If I could observe all of these things coming and going, then who—or what—was doing the observing? 

I didn't have an answer.

During that retreat, I also had an experience that remains difficult for me to put into words. For a brief time, I felt as though I touched something I might now describe as a state of bliss or oneness. I didn't understand what had happened. I certainly didn't have the vocabulary for it. But I knew I wanted to understand more.

In many ways, the yoga journey I have been on ever since has been an exploration of those questions.

Yoga Is Not Really About Getting Better at Poses

This week, my Yoga Teacher Training students are reading Part I of Nicolai Bachman's The Path of the Yoga Sutras. As I've prepared to guide our conversation, I've found myself returning again to something I wish more people understood about yoga: Yoga has so little to do with how well we can put our bodies into particular shapes.

The physical practice of yoga—asana—has a purpose. It can help us cultivate discipline and concentration. It can teach us about our bodies. Perhaps most importantly, it can become a laboratory for self-study.

But the pose itself is not the point.

You do not have to be flexible to practice yoga. You don't have to be strong. You don't have to be young or fit. You don't need an expensive mat or coordinated yoga clothes. And you certainly don't need to be able to stand on your head.

You need a sincere willingness to know yourself more deeply.

In fact, I sometimes think the student who falls out of Tree Pose 47 times and chooses to come back into the pose has practiced yoga 47 times. The falling isn't the failure. The coming back is the practice.

The Yoga Sutras, an ancient collection of teachings traditionally attributed to Patanjali, offer us a framework for understanding what we might actually be practicing when we say we practice yoga.

But I don't think the Yoga Sutras are particularly useful if we approach them simply as philosophical ideas to memorize. Their power comes when we begin practicing them in our own lives and discovering their truth through our own experience.

There are many teachings woven throughout the Sutras. The following five aren't intended to summarize this vast philosophy. Instead, they are five threads I find particularly helpful for understanding what yoga can look like when we carry it beyond the mat.

Atha: Yoga Begins Now

The Yoga Sutras begin with a simple but powerful word: atha.

Now.

There is something I love about the simplicity of that invitation.

Yoga doesn't begin once we've gotten ourselves together. It doesn't begin when we're calmer, healthier, more disciplined or more enlightened. It doesn't begin once our hamstrings are flexible enough to touch our toes.

It begins here. With what is actually happening.

This is one of the things I have come to love most about yoga. The practice continually invites us into an honest relationship with this moment rather than the moment we wish we were having.

How am I arriving? What am I feeling? What is happening in my body? What stories are moving through my mind? Can I be here for this?

Atha.

Now.

This is where the practice begins.

Citta: Learning to See the Heart-Mind

Another concept explored in the Sutras is citta, which Bachman translates as the heart-mind. I love this translation because it reminds us that our inner experience is bigger than our thoughts alone. There are memories, emotions, sensations, beliefs, conditioning and patterns constantly shaping the way we experience the world.

Yoga asks us to begin noticing all of this. Not necessarily fixing it, but seeing it clearly. Because we cannot consciously change a pattern we have not yet learned to see. That distinction has become enormously important in my own life.

During my own yoga teacher training, studying asana helped me recognize a pattern I had carried for years. Whenever life became difficult, my instinct was to take on more and push harder. When I was already carrying too much, instead of allowing gentleness or giving myself grace, I would raise my hand for something else. Some strange part of me experienced pushing harder as a form of control.

And then I began to notice that I practiced yoga exactly the same way. When a pose became difficult and I could no longer breathe naturally, I didn't soften the pose. I tried harder. If 100 percent effort wasn't working, perhaps 140 percent would. Or 200 percent.

My mind could create all kinds of noble explanations for this pattern. I was capable. I was strong. I was helpful. I could handle a lot.

My body told a simpler truth. I was already working too hard, and my response to difficulty was to work harder. My yoga mat became a mirror. The pattern I could finally see in my body was the same pattern I was living everywhere else.

And that is when asana became much more interesting to me.

Ironically, the physical practice I had once mistaken for the whole of yoga became one of the places that taught me what yoga actually was.

The question was no longer: Can I do this pose?

It became: Who am I when I am in this pose?

And perhaps even more importantly: Is this how I meet the rest of my life, too?

Abhyasa and Vairagya: Practice and Let Go

The Sutras offer two concepts that belong beautifully together: abhyasa and vairagya. Practice and nonattachment. We keep showing up. We practice. We participate fully in our lives. We make choices and put forth sincere effort. And we also practice loosening our grip on what happens next. We can care deeply about an outcome without making our peace dependent upon getting it.

This is much harder than it sounds.

So much of our suffering comes from our insistence that something should be different than it is. We want this person to behave differently. We want our bodies to feel differently. We want the past to have happened differently. We want certainty about the future.

Yoga doesn't ask us to stop caring. It asks us to notice the grip. Over time, this practice has given me something I never imagined having: more space between what happens to me and how I respond. There is more room for pause. More patience. More steadiness. More freedom. Not because difficult things no longer happen. Not because I don't experience anger, fear, grief, frustration or all the other emotions that come with being human.

But I don't have to be pulled quite so completely into every reaction that arises. I can notice. And sometimes, from that place, I can choose.

Karma and Samskara: Seeing the Paths We Keep Walking

This is where the concepts of karma and samskara become particularly meaningful to me. Our actions leave impressions. So do our thoughts, reactions and experiences. As patterns are repeated, those impressions deepen. Eventually, certain ways of thinking and behaving can become so familiar that we stop recognizing them as patterns at all.

We simply think: This is who I am.

My tendency to push harder when life became difficult was one of those pathways. Yoga helped me see it. And seeing it didn't magically make it disappear. Awareness rarely works that way. But once we see a pattern clearly, something becomes possible that wasn't possible while the pattern remained invisible: choice.

I can still push too hard. I can still take on too much. I can still find myself believing effort is the answer to everything. But now I am more likely to notice myself doing it. And in that moment of noticing, another path becomes available. Maybe I soften. Maybe I rest. Maybe I say no. Maybe I simply take a breath before deciding what comes next.

This is why self-study matters. The goal isn't simply to become endlessly fascinated with ourselves. We learn to see ourselves clearly so that we are less unconsciously controlled by everything we find there. The pattern can still arise. The trigger can still happen. The emotion can still come.

But perhaps there is a little more space around it. And inside that space, there may be choice. To me, that choice feels a lot like freedom.

Parinama: The Possibility of Transformation

Ultimately, these practices create the possibility of parinama: transformation. And perhaps this is where my definition of an "advanced" yoga practitioner has changed the most.

There was a time when I thought advanced yoga meant advanced poses. The people who could balance on their hands, twist themselves into extraordinary shapes or move through complicated sequences seemed to have reached some level of yoga I had not. I don't see it that way anymore.

Today, when I think about an advanced student of yoga, I think about someone willing to continually arrive as a beginner. Someone who remains curious. Someone willing to see something about themselves even when seeing it is uncomfortable. Someone who knows there will always be another layer beneath the one they have just discovered.

An advanced practitioner isn't someone willing to suffer more. Perhaps they are someone increasingly able to stay present when the truth is uncomfortable—to remain curious instead of immediately defending, judging, fixing or turning away.

The sincere student isn't trying to perfect themselves. They are becoming increasingly willing to see themselves clearly. And perhaps, through seeing clearly, they become a little freer. Perhaps being advanced at yoga has less to do with how much we know and more to do with how willing we are to keep discovering what we don't.

The Yoga I Hope We Teach

This is one of the reasons studying the Yoga Sutras matters so much to me as I train yoga teachers. I want my students to understand the bigness of yoga. I don't expect them to become masters of yoga before they teach it. None of us are. They don't need to have resolved every pattern, understood every teaching or perfected every pose. What I hope they develop is a deep and sincere relationship with the practice. I want them to know where they are on their own path and be honest about it. And then I want them to teach from there.

Because teaching yoga isn't simply teaching someone where to put their foot in Warrior II. We are inviting people into a practice that has the potential to change their relationship with themselves. And I believe that before we can authentically hold that kind of space for another person, we have to be willing to enter that relationship with ourselves.

Maybe the Pose Was Never the Point

Today, practicing yoga means something very different to me than it did when I walked into that first hot yoga class.

Yoga is the ongoing practice of cultivating a relationship with myself that allows me to meet life with greater awareness, steadiness and freedom. Sometimes I practice through asana. Sometimes through breathwork or meditation. Sometimes I study philosophy. Sometimes I walk outside and pay attention. The particular form matters less to me than the sincere intention underneath it.

Am I willing to know myself more deeply?

Am I willing to see what is actually here?

And when I see it, can I meet it with enough awareness that I have some choice about what comes next?

Maybe the pose was never the point. Maybe the pose is simply one of the places where we learn to see. We put our bodies into shapes and discover what happens. We wobble. We grasp. We resist. We push. We compare. We become frustrated. We soften. We breathe. We notice.

And perhaps, little by little, we begin to see ourselves more clearly.

So perhaps the next time you find yourself on a yoga mat—or simply in a moment of your life that feels challenging—try asking a different question. Instead of How do I get this right? or How do I make this go away? become curious about what is here. What am I noticing? How am I responding? Is there another way I might meet this moment?

Not because you need to fix what you find. Simply because you are willing to see.

And eventually, we roll up the mat and realize that the whole of life has become the place where we practice yoga.

Atha.

Now.

This is where the practice begins.