Additive vs Extractive
Your fundamental beliefs about yoga will always influence your relationship to your practice, so it’s worthwhile to examine what you believe.
The commercialization of yoga means that many of us encounter yoga as a product or service, which is sold and marketed in various packages: as relaxation, as self-care, as self-improvement, as fitness, as wellness. The techniques of a practice are positioned as something to purchase.
As a career yoga teacher, I obviously participate in this, so my critique includes my own actions.
Because yoga is not indigenous to American culture, for most of us, our relationship is initially understood by its commodification. This tends to frame yoga as an extractive and external object, when its an additive and internal process.
We tend to use yoga as a remediation for suffering, big and small. Bad day at work? Go to a yoga class. Going through a divorce? Sign up for a teacher training. We apply it like a balm to self-soothe.
I don’t see this as inherently faulty or insulting to yoga, as we live in an oppressively stressful world, and having access to comfort is essential. I believe that the techniques of yoga (asana, pranayama, etc) are wonderfully impactful and rely on them daily.
But it puts yoga outside of ourselves, and externalization makes it extractive: we have to approach yoga (a class, a teacher, a workshop) to extract the benefits. We look to yoga as the product we can purchase to make our lives better. We constantly seek the next teacher or studio that inspires us, we set our sights on fancy poses to challenge us, yoga teachers obsess over the new method, technique or prop to improve us. We perceive the source of yoga as outside of self, so when we encounter yoga, we are desperate to take from it.
A more yoga philosophically informed relationship would internalize the practice. This doesn’t mean we turn away from beloved teachers, classes or communities. It means that we re-focus the emphasis on learning the techniques from the inside out, emphasizing personal skills over esthetics. It means we adopt a more self-reliant stance on the need for inspiration. It means we view the techniques of yoga as just that: ways in which we understand our selves, and our world. It means that the underpinning of our interactions with yoga is a curiosity about our capacity to learn, rather than the need to achieve. We could see yoga as additive: that every practice, every soft breath, every text we read is held inside of ourselves, aggregating into a reliable internal process.
Most days, I contentedly -though wryly- participate in modern yoga, both online and in studios. I don’t think we solve misunderstanding and appropriation of yoga by eradicating it from our world, or reserving it for the most serious of seekers. Perhaps yoga teachers can let go of trying to optimize our students’ practices, and prompt more questions and experiments.
Lately, I’ve been reminding my students at the end of class about this additive vs extractive perception. After sitting up from savasana, we can settle into an appreciation of the sweetness of a yoga practice. It may be that the mind is calmer, the body feels renewed, that the breath moves deeply. If that, or anything else you sense, is a cherished outcome of an asana practice…can you view that as something you created internally, as opposed to something external that you extracted?