Yoga For Beginners - Can We Do Better?

 

All the media images of exceptionally stretchy people in crazy yoga poses, does little to build courage to try yoga for the newbie. So having "yoga for beginners" classes helps to taper the fear a bit. Unfortunately, it doesn't help the biggest problem in yoga today

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That's the problem which comes with carving yoga into levels of physical difficulty, which gives the impression that yoga is, in many ways, about how well flexible and strong your body is.

Just in case you didn't know, that is not what yoga is at all.

As a yoga teacher, you can imagine that I meet a lot of yoga enthusiasts. Rarely, though, do I meet anyone who is not still a yoga beginner. That includes a lot of yoga teachers these days too, who place way too much emphasis on the physical yoga exercises, and often tend to forget what their real place in within the vast science of yoga.

This blunder is so common now that the physical mastery of yoga exercises has become the gauge used to assess someone's "level" of yoga.

If physical prowess was the barameter of yoga achievement though, that would mean a lot of pro athletes and circus performers are akin to yoga masters too.

They're not though. In the overall science of yoga, those physical abilities don't really count for much... at least not on their own.

An advanced yoga practitioner is someone who can demonstrate impressive things with much more than their body. They can demonstrate an uncommon level of calm amidst chaos, and an unshakable poise while navigating through the challenging storms of life.

The advanced yoga practitioner is one who demonstrates, by example, what it means to live a dignified, compassionate and selfless life; things not so easily emulated by the average person, I agree... but someone who has reached the advanced level of yoga is no longer an average person.

On the flip side, most of the modern yogis I meet, the ones who can do lots of impressive things with their bodies, don't really seem to demonstrate much else. Often their personal lives don't seem to be devoid of any less drama than those of their students and neighbors.

The power of yoga to transform our lives is limitless, yet, like the human brain I suppose, 97.6% of that potential remains untapped.

We can access it though, but that has to start with yoga teachers taking a more fuller approach to their beginners yoga classes, introducing students to a more comprehensive view of yoga as a "way of life" rather than just a system of exercises.

If that starts to happen, then it could be the seed that might eventually lead to the emergence of a few bonafide "advanced yoga practitioners" into this world... which surely wouldn't be a bad thing at all.

Yogacharya is the Director of International Yogalayam http://www.theyogatutor.com
Editor of The Yoga News, and creator of The Yoga Tutor, a step-by-step online yoga training website. For your FREE TRIAL of The Yoga Tutor, visit http://www.theyogatutor.com
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