I Don't Love Yoga: Why I Practise
Photograph © Michael Vince Kim
I practise yoga every day. One thing that surprises many friends then is this: I don’t love yoga. Not in the same way that I love climbing, writing, dancing, singing, hanging out with loved ones and reading, anyway. Sometimes I like it. In particular: the atmosphere of the studio with its scent of frankincense and myrrh, the paintings and statues of Hindu deities such as Vishnu, Ganesha and Shiva adorning the walls; breathing and moving in unison with a room of people; hearing new perspectives on life from a variety of teachers; becoming conscious of my breath and feeling a connection to cetaceans (humans are automatic breathers!); the sense of direction and purpose; feeling good as I move into poses and noticing that poses are becoming more comfortable with time. Sometimes it is painful or tiring, a plea for rest we would all do well to listen to. But on the whole, I have found yoga hugely therapeutic over the years.
I first encountered it as a teenager, when my mum’s friend took me to a Kundalini class. The initial draws for me were exercise and flexibility. I was naturally bendy and loved contorting my body into strange shapes. I didn’t expect to find it so healing. Research shows that yoga can help foster positive body image, improve confidence, and reduce anxiety and depression. Crucially, and harder to quantify, it has the potential to offer practitioners a sense of a higher purpose and a sense of belonging to a community.
So I have been practising yoga since I was 14, on and off, and discovered the dynamic ashtanga flow aged 19 in Edinburgh, when Meadowlark was called Bristo Yoga. For some reason I couldn’t explain, the classes made me feel better, sleep better, hurt less. The repetitive, strong sequence meant that I could see and feel my progress, and slip into what I thought of as a moving meditation.
For many years, my main focus was ashtanga. I couldn’t sit still in meditation or quieter yoga practices like yin; ashtanga was fast-moving and repetitive. There was no time or energy to consider passing thoughts. If they arose, it was time to go deeper and work harder. Over time, I recognised the value in cultivating stillness and sukhah (the Sanskrit for ease). I resonated deeply with Buddhist monk Haemin Sunim’s book The Things You Can Only See When You Slow Down, who writes: “We know the world only through the window of our mind. When our mind is noisy, the world is as well. And when our mind is peaceful, the world is, too. Knowing our minds is just as important as trying to change the world.” In a bid to connect with this stillness, in the past decade, I have attended ashrams in Rishikesh, India, Radiantly Alive in Bali, Indonesia, as well as shalas in South Korea and Italy. I have stayed in Buddhist temples in Japan and South Korea and been on long pilgrimages. Still, I struggled with stillness, though could easily find inhuman focus on any doing task, be it yoga or a writing commission.
On my return to London, in 2018, I was recovering from various surgeries, including eye surgeries that forced me to look inwards. I returned to the painful experience of facing myself in stillness in Yin classes at Triyoga. But with time this practice became easier and I realised it was in part what I needed all along. I have heard it said that often people gravitate towards the kind of yoga that is not best suited to them. People with fast-paced lifestyles opt for dynamic flows where they might benefit from quieter practices, while those struggling with inertia might benefit from the discipline of a regular dynamic practice. That said, even this perspective might be reconsidered after reading Mathew Remski’s Practice and All is Coming, where he writes: “If we practice yoga with ideals of discipline, there might also be at least some part of us forever waiting to see the reward of what we ourselves will become.” Discipline in order to do … what? We may know this, and see a disciplined yoga practice as a complementary tool for helping us get there. Or we may think of discipline as some abstract higher ideal, and assume that it will better our lives. I think of Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer’s Day”: “I don't know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, … Tell me, what else should I have done? / Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? / Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Considering our own practice, we might do well to consider where we are in our lives, what we want from life, how we can be of service, what we need to find a comfortable balance between sthira (stability) and sukha (ease) in getting there. It is important to be ever mindful about why we’re doing what we do. We might also think about the three gunas, or three aspects of existence and see where we sit today (it’s always changing) and what we could benefit from:
1. Tamas: a dull mind, characterised by inertia, lethargy, sluggishness.
2. Rajas: an energetic mind characterised by anger, anxiety and frustration.
3. Sattva: a calm mind, capable of proper discrimination and self-awareness.
I know for a long time I was constantly living in a cycling between Rajas (overdoing) and Tamas (the consequence of burnout), disciplined and goal-orientated, but with little acceptance of—or enjoyment of—the now . The second of Patanjali’s Sutras defines yoga as: “yogas chitta vritti nirodha”—“yoga is the arresting of the fluctuations of the mind.” In stillness, I gradually came back here, to a still lake within my mind where nothing moved. I realised my ashtanga practice had become a mirror of my life off the mat where I was always doing, seldom being. Ashtanga certainly quietened those vritti—but it did so by replacing them with another kind of action—seldom coming back to stillness.
Yoga practice on the mat, alongside experience off the mat, have taught me that the human mind and body are more flexible than we often give them credit. I have learnt to eat intuitively when I thought it wouldn’t ever be possible again; I bounced back from eye surgeries and abdominal surgeries, and my practice has significantly reduced the frequency of my epileptic seizures, which for a time came happened almost daily. I still suffer from anxiety and depression (as so many of us do!) but I have come a long way since my teenage self. I am more confident, more conscious of my shadow side, more self-aware, and more compassionate, towards myself and towards others. I realise in many encounters and moments of life that I have a long way to go—we all do, particularly if we think we have it sussed. I am also aware that I contain a large fire that has both the power to burn me up and the power to create. We are constantly changing, throughout our lives. We accumulate samskaras, experiences, and memories that cloud our vision, but we also lose these through svadhyaya, or self-inquiry, creating new narratives for ourselves, by learning to sit through adversity on the mat we might become better at dealing with it off the mat.
As a householder, not a renunciate, yoga is here to support my life, not to become it. I don’t love yoga nor hate it, but see it as a necessary practice, a kind of mental and physical hygiene, if you will, akin to brushing my teeth in the morning. And I think this is okay: the sutras warn against the binaries of aversion and attachment. We can find a middle path. I still practise ashtanga today, but I balance it with plenty of yin and restorative yoga, and I try to be mindful of what Adriene Mishler says: “Find what feels good.” In a capitalistic system, so often we are told what is good for us, or distracted by shiny things. We look to others and to brands to provide us a sense of self. This has been an issue in the commercialization of yoga, too; guru culture exported abroad for financial gain has so often become toxic. I have found that daily yoga, whether that’s a dynamic flow or twenty minutes of pranayama, helps me re-centre and stay in touch with my own intuition, always coming back to the things that matter and helping me back onto my own personal dharma.
The more I find myself able to move into a sattvic state with ease, the more I feel a sense of atman, or purusa, an awareness of the interconnected nature of all things behind the egoic mind. This atman or purusa is often described as the witness that sits behind consciousness. When you find stillness, it is there, neither sad nor happy but everpresent, like a person who watches the weather from the comfort of their home. I resonate with this concept, even if I have grappled with differentiating it from disassociation and existential nihilism. Another goal of householders is to be both in the world and outside of it. Whether another mental illusion or not, this has given me a sense of purpose, a sense that I am part of something much bigger than myself. I practise yoga to keep this in mind, and resonate with many teachings from the sutras and Vedanta literature, which seem to naturally spawn from this awareness of interconnection. The first of the Yamas, or ethical codes of the Sutras of Patanjali, is Ahimsa: non-violence. In Jainism, this is understood as causing minimal harm to animals and plants, taking only what we need. In Hinduism, it is practised through lacto-vegetarianism, not eating meat or eggs. We all cause harm to other beings through our mere existence, though we all have inside ourselves an invisible belief system that demarks what is acceptable and what is not, and I suppose the goal here is to make this visible.
The threshold between what is sacred and what is not changes depending on food shortages and the need for survival of the self. In the modern world, things are even more complicated. From the clothes we wear to the technology we use, so much of what we consume has come through exploitation and violence against others. We do have a choice, however, to reduce the harm we cause. This is becoming even easier today, as so many of us are wanting to make kinder choices. I was raised vegetarian, which made the transition to veganism, six years ago, much easier. I think this is one simple lifestyle change we can all aspire to, to save the lives of animals, trees (much of deforestation happens to clear land for cattle) and to slow climate change, in a bid to keep world inhabitable for people in the global south and people of the future. Our duty is not to inherit the world, after all, but to protect it for other living beings that will come after us, a kind of cathedral-thinking we have largely lost in the last few centuries of colonialism and empire-building, where the Western worldview has become increasingly self-focused and narcissistic.
Asana practice, when an embodiment practice, can remind us of the myriad other forms beyond ourselves but connected to ourselves, all on the path of evolution. In adho mukha svanasana, for instance, how does it feel to embody the dog, or the wolf? To connect with our tailbone, a sign that our ancestors too once had a tail, and we are part of this wider family. In Garuḍāsana (eagle pose) and Bakasana (crane pose), we begin to take flight, reminding ourselves of our potential to one day take to the air, something so many of us have experienced in dream. When we breathe consciously, rather than automatically, we become more like our cetacean relatives, mammals who’ve taken to living underwater but still come up to breathe. Transformation is possible, inevitable even. We can have more of an active role in this transformation if we become aware of it. In understanding this process better, we can also be kinder to the shifting forms, of ourselves and the world. “Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu”—”may all beings everywhere be happy in free.”
My goal in life isn’t to destroy the egoic mind; this will likely happen anyway, when I die. The ego, when understood better, is like the shoes we wear in this life that carry us along our life path and best serve ourselves and the world of which we are an intrinsic part. There can be great joy in that journey, just as there can be much sorrow. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna: “Be steadfast in Yoga, O Arjuna. Perform your duty and abandon all attachment to success or failure. Such evenness of mind is called yoga.”
In January 2022, I will graduate from Meadowlark’s 200-hr teacher training programme. Upon graduating, I will offer accessible, modified ashtanga-inspired classes focussed on consent and self-acceptance, as well as vinyasa and restorative classes, and classes for writers. Sign up to my newsletter to receive updates.