Asana: Not the Best Part of Yoga

 Finally, my chance to write about Yoga! But first, let me tell you a story.

The other night, we were having a gathering of my Meetup group. I forget now how it came up, but the topic of my weekly Yoga class came up. We were trying to describe exactly what we do in there, and it was a little tricky.

See, I don’t teach traditional Yoga. Well, I do, actually. I’m a Hatha Yoga instructor, trained by some very skilled old school teachers. But I don’t teach *just* traditional yoga.

No, I seem to have gone off the rails somewhere, into the unknown. I find myself letting it all hang out in the Yoga studio. My…err…colorful mode of speech comes out. We have “booty blankets” to sit on, for example. I’ve been known to fistpump and I crack jokes constantly. One night we danced. More than once, we pulled out colored pens and index cards.

One of my students finally said that I’m teaching “renegade yoga”. I like it. And thus the name of this blog was born.

But I kept thinking. The word 'renegade' implies a certain level of rebellion. I'm not actually rebelling against the tradition of Yoga. I love an honor the traditions. In fact, my way of teaching is in many ways more traditional than what you will find at most Yoga studios today. But we are doing something different in my class. So finally, I renamed my class to 'Wild Freedom Yoga'. 

Anyhoo. Back to asana. Yoga is freaking awesome. But asana, or the physical poses, are far from the best part of it. Oh sure, they’re important. One of the purposes of asana is to strengthen one’s body enough to sit in meditation. And I love me some meditation.

But here in the US, we have gotten fixated on asana, and performing all sorts of acrobatic feats. We even have such a thing as Acro-Yoga now. Blame it on the media, blame it on our relentless type-a drive for perfection, physical beauty, whatever. I’m not here to dissect our social problems.

The fact is that the art and science of Yoga is broad and deep. There’s really something in it for everyone. Like serving others and the world? Karma. Devotions to God (no matter what deity/archetype/concept you worship)? Bhakti. Are you the scholarly type? Jnana.

And those are just the branches on the big tree of Yoga. On each branch are scads of practices. Me? I like to meditate. I like to chant. I like devotion. I like service. Luckily, the Yoga police aren’t out to get me. I can do just as I please.

A great teacher of mine once said, “Yoga is liberation”.

Indeed.