Are you developing skill in your practice?

I've been thinking a lot about yoga culture and how that has changed since I was a beginner student taking classes. This past month of teaching inversions in my class, and the systematic method I use of teaching skills that support inversion practice made me think about the way I was taught yoga compared to how yoga is commonly taught today.

When I was a beginner to yoga the culture of yoga was more focused on discipline - not as in a punishment for doing something "wrong", but as a method of developing both attention to detail and skill. There was more strict focus on alignment, engagement of the body, where to hold your gaze, etc. And while I can appreciate that over the years yoga practitioners and teachers have learned more about individual and comparative anatomy, rendering some strict alignment rules obsolete, I think we've gone too far in the other direction. The current approach to yoga has become more lackadaisical, and in turn yoga has lost some of its powerful benefits.

There were fewer yoga teachers and and even fewer yoga teacher trainings 20 years ago. More teachers had a real connection to a real lineage, and not everyone was accepted into a training program. As yoga teacher trainings have proliferated in the last 20 years, and now you can’t walk down the street without bumping into a yoga teacher, the practice has gotten watered down, taken out of context, and lost some of its meaning.

"It's your practice" and "just do what feels good", have become common refrains of yoga teachers these days. I've noticed that rather than giving a set of instructions and helping students figure out how to implement the given instruction in their bodies, yoga teachers now skew toward simply giving you permission to do whatever you feel like doing, whenever you feel like doing it. But that's not what yoga is.

Yoga is a way to develop ekāgratā, or one pointed attention. Yoga āsana practice can be a powerful way to develop this one pointedness when done with discipline, and the role of the yoga āsana teacher is to guide the student toward that one pointed attention by keeping the student focused on the actions of the body and the movements of the breath. "You might want to do X or you might want to try Y", along with that endless array of options you can choose from actually scatters the students attention. Instead of developing the self-discipline to just do a thing, the student instead shifts from one option to another, stuck in their head, analyzing the options, with their attention jumping from option to option like a ship without a rudder - no clear direction and never able to reach a goal.

The disciplined focus I developed in my yoga practice has served me in a number of ways through my life. Not only has it helped me develop my understanding of anatomy and how my body works, it has also put me more in touch with the inner working of my body. The disciplined, one pointed focus I was taught as a young student of yoga has helped me be still enough and quiet enough to really tune in to what is going on around me and within me. Not to mention my ability to focus on a task to completion without distraction or or the need to multitask, or my ability to stick with something challenging and not run away at the first struggle. These are all lessons I gained from being taught to skillfully move my body in yoga practice rather than move it willy-nilly.

As a yoga teacher with almost 6 thousand hours of teaching experience, over 1000 hours of official training, and countless more hours of self learning I am skilled at marrying the disciplined yoga of my past with the current understanding of anatomy, the nervous system, and the current cultural environment to create a yoga experience for students that not only serves them for an hour on their mats, but also instills in them the skills they need for their life off of the mat - focus, equanimity, poise, how to move their body with ease, and how to stick with a challenge (because let’s face it - life is a challenge).

As yoga teacher Amy Ippoliti once said “yoga teachers and yoga studios determine yoga culture”. I am on a mission to change the current culture. I’d like to see yoga move back to its more disciplined roots. I believe it’s possible to honor and account for anatomical variations, variations in mobility, and variations in ability, and still maintain focus and discipline in practice. I believe that teachers can and should be able to give a set of instructions and guide students through figuring out those instructions in their own unique bodies (no more “just do what feels good” — instead “do this thing, given the uniqueness of your own body”). I believe that we can give students a deeper, more meaningful practice.