A few days ago, after I finished teaching a group class at a gym, one of the last people to leave the room was a woman who had taken my class for the first time. I try to check in with people who are new to my class when I can, just to make sure they feel welcome and that what I’m presenting is making sense. I asked her, “how’d that go for you?” and as she was rolling up her mat she sighed, “I suck at yoga.”

I admired the efficiency and the boldness of her statement, and of course, it’s a funny way to put it. But she wasn’t joking; she seemed legitimately distressed at her perception that she wasn’t good at the postures. I believe I said something supportive, genial, and rather boring, like “No one sucks at yoga.”

I really dislike my response because it positions me squarely in the territory of Blandly & Blindly Optimistic Yoga Teacher, and I do my best to avoid that godforsaken niche. However, in this case, I truly believe that statement, however audacious or absurd it might seem. It is possible to suck at yoga, but such sucking has nothing to do with physical proficiency, which is what I’m pretty sure she meant. Everyone who has tried to practice yoga asana has had the experience of feeling incredibly humbled (and possibly even mildly humiliated) by the postures: they usually require a refined combination of strength, flexibility, and subtle body awareness that hardly any of us have naturally. It is completely expected that we will fail at achieving their precise shape until we’ve practiced them literally hundreds of times, if ever; Sharath Jois, the current lineage holder of the Ashtanga Vinyasa tradition, has said that it takes the body a thousand attempts before it even understands an asana. That’s about three years of daily practice.

Oh Yogi, Be A Good Scientist

I don’t think we’re capable of practicing asana effectively until we can release the desire to perfect the poses; achievement of the ideal form of the postures is simply a side effect of continuous practice, and if it happens, it will happen gradually without our having to worry about it. When we start to fret about this, and I still do now and then, the effective response is to watch this aimless fretting with a gentle curiosity, like watching a toddler throw a tantrum. I’m very sorry to see you’re so upset, I like to say patronizingly to myself.

When I was in Boulder studying with Richard Freeman I was in the company of some incredibly physically gifted practitioners. A handful of them had very competent third-series ashtanga vinyasa practices, which in layman’s terms means that they could pick up part-time gigs in Cirque De Soleil if they so desired. In contrast my own practice seemed very stiff and remedial; I probably didn’t think, “I suck at yoga,” but some similar thought passed through my head several times that month. “I probably shouldn’t be teaching yoga” was one insidious variation that I found myself having to sit width.

During one of the afternoon workshops, Richard was detailing kurmasana and supta kurmasana, two of the deepest forward folds that I’m familiar with. They appear late in the primary series, and I need each and every one of those preceding postures to generate enough heat and articulation to get into them. We hadn’t done most of those preceding postures, and as we were working on kurmasana I found myself having an I Suck at Yoga moment, too much Tin Man and not enough melted Wicked Witch. Just then, Richard, in one of the countless instances of his extraordinary teaching intuition, reminded us that “you can practice kurmasana perfectly without fully getting into the posture, while you can be fully in the pose and get absolutely nothing out of it.”

That’s a paraphrase, as I can’t remember his exact wording. And it sounds like Yoga Teacher as Mad Hatter, right? Up is down and down is up. But within the context of his teaching, it is actually a very logical point. The primary content of a yoga practice is completely internal; it is not something a teacher can adjust you on, and most often it isn’t even something you can articulate clearly. Every time we attempt a posture, we’re just offering the body and the mind something to chew on, and our primary interest is in our response to that offering. We’re gathering data about the condition of the body, the way the body stores tension, and how exactly we are embodied in this particular moment. And we’re doing all this with the neutrality of a good scientist. It is awareness practice, and if “I suck at this” is coming up dominantly, then that is something we listen to. But never, not ever, is that statement a source of truth. It’s just one of many thoughts that will pass through the mind, and usually to be filed under the Pretty Dumb Ones section.

How To Suck At Yoga

If you’re really intent on sucking at yoga, make the achievement of idealized physical forms your primary intention for practicing. Ignore the sensitivity of your body. Use your time on the mat and your current capacity to perform advanced postures as a vehicle to critique yourself and assess your self-worth. Until you start doing that, I hate to be rude, but you suck at sucking at yoga.

I only needed one class to be convinced of the value of yoga practice. I was 19 or 20 years old, and I found my way into a drop-in class being taught at the university I was attending. I don’t actually remember what convinced me to step into the room; there were a couple of influential grad students I looked up to who practiced yoga, so perhaps that was the push. At any rate, what I do remember is being in a forward fold about halfway through class and being amazed at the palpable sense of relaxation I felt. It was a rare sensation for me at that time in my life, a time when I was accustomed to a psychological turbulence that resulted in a near-constant tension and anxiety.

Despite the immediate positive response, it would take me a full six years from that first class to consciously make the commitment to practicing regularly. SIX YEARS. I have no idea why it took me so long to prioritize yoga. Lord knows I needed it. But I suspect that I am not alone here; I imagine most students of yoga go through protracted periods of attempting to ground a practice. It is no small feat to restructure one’s priorities, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that such a restructuring would make life, well, better.

Who Has The Time?

The most obvious obstacle is finding the time. I know no one who has an extra 30 to 90 minutes in their day that they’re trying desperately to fill with a new activity. But I don’t think that this is the primary obstacle, or even a dominant one; the real obstacles to daily or near-daily practice might actually be much more interesting.

The Terror Of Not Suffering

One of the reasons that yoga works is that it lessens our sense of suffering. By this I don’t mean that it literally reduces the causes of our suffering (though it may do that too), but that it attenuates the intensity with which we react to our particular predicaments. Yoga practices ground us in the experience of ourselves with an immediacy that happens to make the mental chatter which pains us much less intense. And, as odd as it might seem, I believe that we are initially unnerved by this process.

Habituated as we are to letting things bother us, we may initially respond to the reduced suffering with a kind of skepticism and panic. Particularly for those of us who’ve gotten really good at suffering (I myself was the consummate professional) the sudden reduction, like the withdrawal from any addiction, may cause its own kind of discomfort.

Slowly but surely, we’ll get over this. With enough exposure to yoga, we become more drawn to the reduction of suffering than we are bothered by its sudden absence.

Attachment to the Novelty

When we practice irregularly, we allow ourselves the space to always be impressed by the physical and emotional release that yoga practice provides, what many people refer to as the “yoga high.” If we start to practice consistently, the contrast between the after-practice state and our everyday state of consciousness becomes less severe, and suddenly the effects of practicing seem less dramatic. Physiologically, we are no longer so easily surprised. This is initially a source of considerable disappointment, and might discourage us from continuing to practice frequently.

As practicing becomes part of our routine, not only will the endorphin rushes seem less dramatic, but the practice might give rise to other much less pleasurable sensations and states of mind. We will start to encounter our physical edges and limitations, and working with those boundaries will require a refined sensitivity and patience that we may not have developed yet. Our superficial ego will quickly find ways of inserting itself into the now-familiar form of practice, finding any and every opportunity to distort our earnest work on the mat into a pursuit of vanity, pride, and further suffering. It is here that I think exposure to yoga philosophy, if it has not yet entered the picture, becomes absolutely essential. Among other things, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali and other foundational texts predict some of the obstacles we’ll encounter on our path, and this reassurance gives us strength to persevere.

One day, not practicing will become harder than practicing. And I say that from the authority of my personal experience. It was 2006 when I started to practice regularly, and 2007 when I started to practice almost every day. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when the shift occurred, but I can honestly say that I now have a hard time going through an entire day without paying respects to my yoga practice, whether it be two hours of thorough immersion or fifteen minutes of touching base.

Gradually the momentum of daily practice generates its own power, and eventually the resistance to practicing is overwhelmed by this momentum. That is not to say that practicing becomes effortless — far from it — but showing up for it, at least, starts to feel like second nature.

Prana in Apana and Apana in Prana.

In the physical practice of yoga, our approach to the body becomes expansive and poetic. We allow our awareness to drop deep inside by considering the body to be a vast landscape, or even a universe unto itself, replete with the pull of physical forces and the interactions of elements. In various postures (asana) different parts of the body become stable as other parts become fluid; the vinyasa method involves (among other things) juxtaposing contrasting landscapes, training the body to become progressively more responsive and malleable. There are obvious biomechanical benefits to this: for example, any physical therapist will tell you that the key to keeping joints healthy is to keep them moving and well aligned. But there is also a less obvious functionality to training the body to be fluid and adaptable. Creating new positions and spaces for bodily movement has a corresponding cognitive effect: the mind also expands and becomes flexible. Yogasana increases somatic intelligence, and while I can’t claim that mastering downward dog will suddenly allow you to breeze through Kantian metaphysics, progressively refining postures and movements requires a parallel refinement of mental processes. It is an intelligence-building practice.

Vinyasa yoga is built upon, animated by, and governed by the breath. There is no physical aptitude requirement, and there is no expectation that an advanced practice involves more pretzel-like postures. When we practice we’re learning to understand the innate qualities of the inhale and exhale, and how those qualities relate to the particular posture or movement we happen to be working on.

I’ve been learning a lot about those innate qualities of the breath from Richard Freeman lately and I wanted to use this blog post to both process what he’s teaching me and also share what I’ve learned.

If I had to boil down my dedication to yoga to a single reason, it would probably be the grounding nature of the practice. As a moody artist-type I’m always in need of more grounding and stabilizing; before I found yoga I had no method of reigning myself back in from the psychological intensity of my creative practice, and I was suffering as a result. I’m far from a yoga master, or even an advanced practitioner, but years of practice have provided me with a great understanding of how to harness the practice to recenter myself, and I put that knowledge to work every day.

Now, about that grounding/centering. According to Richard Freeman, the inhale and exhale both have innate patterns associated with them. These are both physical patterns and subtle patterns — emotional and energetic patterns — that literally ride on the wave of the breath. It’s not quite as esoteric as it might sound. The inhale pattern is called (in the Asthanga Vinyasa tradition) prana, and the exhale pattern is called apana. One way to explain the goal of the physical yoga practice is the uniting of these two patterns. Since they are opposing energies, when they come together, they cancel out each other’s movement, resulting in a kind of stillness.

Within the context of asana practice, every physical position and every movement has a relationship with these prana and apana patterns. Most forward folds, for example, are intrinsically apanic: they are associated with the exhale pattern. Most backbends are inherently pranic, corresponding to the inhale pattern.

Prana, the inhale pattern, is expansive, building, lightening, and stimulating. When the light bulb goes off in your mind as you are hit with a novel idea, you inhale, right? The “a ha!” moment is pranic.

Apana, the exhale pattern, is reducing, contracting, solidifying, and grounding. It is inward turning. When a traffic cop stops your car, talks to you for a while, then decides to not give you a ticket, you exhale into your relief.

Where these patterns become interesting in the physical practice is in their conversation. As Richard says, prana loves apana and apana loves prana, and the work of the practice is to always bring them closer together, especially as you’re working on postures that emphasize one or the other. So in pranic patterns, the idea is to consciously apply some of the apana pattern to ground the stimulation. Likewise, in apanic patterns, the need is to lighten the grounding pattern by introducing some prana as a counter force. Without this cross-patterning, there is reduced sensitivity and subtlety and thus reduced potential for meditation.

The binding of prana and apana is also essential on an anatomical level: the inhale and exhale patterns also pattern the movement of the spine and the rotational spins of the limbs. Prana (inhale) puts the spine generally in extension, and apana causes spinal flexion. So even on an anatomical level, it’s important for the health of the body to work with both patterns. For example, in urdva dhanurasana, upward-facing bow posture, the pranic pattern expands the heart center and the rib cage. But unmitigated prana will also cause the lumbar spine to contract, a very common problem in this pose, that can result in stressing of the low back and sacroiliac joint. Applying apana from within the posture causes the coccyx (tailbone) to curl in, the muscles of the pelvic floor to tone, and the low back to stabilize. Richard humorously attributes the “spacy” feeling many people get from backbending to a lack of engaging the grounding apana pattern in these poses.

Like all topics yogic and ayurvedic, the prana / apana conversation is both universal and local in scope, and its application is a fine art. Since it’s ultimately about breathing, and we’re breathing all the time, cultivating the prana/apana relationship might be useful to any aspect of life. Our goal may not always be stillness, but if more grounding and centering is needed in any part of your day or aspect of your life, perhaps it may be productive to consider the relationship between these fundamental dynamics. For me, I often find myself becoming too pranic when I’m engaged in painting and other creative work; I get very stimulated, ideas start racing, and I have difficulty making real progress on the actual work in front of me. After a little while, I flame out, exhausted. Solving this problem is multifaceted, but part of the solution may be as simple as making sure I’m exhaling slowly and fully. And the brilliance of yoga practice is that, sometimes, it really is that simple.

I wrote most of this at the end of the first day of a month-long teacher’s intensive with Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor in Boulder, Colorado at the Yoga Workshop.

When reviewing the Sanskrit alphabet Richard spent some time dwelling on the first letter, a, which is like the long ‘a’ sound in English: “ah.” He explained that this is essentially the primordial human sound: it’s the sound we make when we are not shaping or organizing sound at all, when the tongue is relaxed and there is simply resonance in the vocal chords: aaaaahhhhh.

From here we build the intricate and complex Sanskrit language. By opening the mouth more or less, by moving the position of the tongue, the rest of the alphabet is woven from this initial sonic thread.

This basic process of building hierarchy from a root object is the fundamental way the mind structures meaning. This applies not only to language, but to everything we’re capable of exploring: we have a language to organize everything. For all subjects and phenomena there are associations between types of information, hierarchies, groupings, and so forth. Think about our perception of beauty, acceptable social behavior, visual aesthetics, architecture, family dynamics… it all has a language that we read, interpret, and write. Even our basic sense perceptions, as we perceive them, are almost instantly structured in a similar way.

This is the nature of the mind, and this is how thinking works. We exist in a world of impossibly vast mystery, but we live mostly by swimming through a sea of our own abstractions.

Yoga practice is, in this light, an antidote to our natural gravitation toward symbols and away from direct experience. As Richard put it, yoga is the end of language; it is a collection of methods which all attempt to take the practitioner to a place outside the realm of organization, structure, comparison and contrast.

Without attempting such a practice, it seems that language endlessly folds in on itself. We layer language on top of language and we begin to lose access to the power of perception. Our connection to direct experience becomes hazier and our habit patterns become more entrenched as the mind, always craving comfort and efficiency, follows the same worn routes to predictable places.

We don’t aspire to this concept-less state permanently; in fact, it would be extraordinary to arrive at the end of language for even a sliver of a moment. Perhaps even our awareness of arriving at this momentous End is the beginning of our return from it. We acknowledge what’s happening, compare it with past experiences, and before we know it, we’re resting comfortably back in our symbols. And this is just fine. Even if we can’t get outside of language at all, it will be helpful to momentarily shed a layer or two of abstraction, to close some of the distance between the moment and the mind. Wherever the practice takes us on this continuum, our return to language will be fresher, sharper, and a touch closer to what we might delicately call “reality.”

There is no definition of yoga more famous (or arguably more efficient and useful) than the first one offered in the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: yogaś-citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ. A rough translation: yoga is the restraint of the turnings of the mind. To put it still more simply: yoga is the cessation of thought.

This is a definition that functions like an ideal: according to it, most of us are not practicing yoga, we aspire to yoga. We learn and practice various techniques out of a desire to experience this stilling of the mind. There isn’t much to be said about what happens when yoga is achieved: it is a state beyond the rational mind, thus rendering language pretty useless in describing it.

Frankly, this definition of yoga doesn’t really come alive for me without yoga’s corresponding definition of the mind. It is a fundamentally different definition than the one we’re used to in the world of Western philosophy, which by and large positions mental cognition as a component of the essence of identity and soul. In yoga philosophy (or to speak more accurately, Sankhya philosophy, which is the philosophical system upon which yoga practice is built), the mind is something totally separate from the soul, or the pure consciousness, at the core of every being. The mind is like a subtle organ: invisible but nonetheless an anatomical structure that is intrinsically functional, not unlike the bladder, the nose, or the heart.

From this perspective, thoughts are vrittis, or “fluctuations.” As the beating of the heart is the movement of the heart, the generating of thought is the movement of the mind. So, although thoughts may at times be brilliant, powerful, even enlightened — they are always superficial to this mystical state that yoga postulates is beyond them. Whatever the highest states of samadhi or deep meditation are like, it is clear, according to Patanjali, that they do not involve thinking as we normally understand it.

As such, yogis tend to give thoughts — vrittis — a really bad rep. So many of us (myself certainly included) are at very early stages of practice, and yet we’re inspired by the mystery of the awareness beyond the mind, and in our rush to get there we essentially dismiss the value of thinking. Most damagingly, we may marginalize any and all of our thoughts as elements to be discarded on the path toward illumination. But this unwillingness to walk the path from point A to point B has dire consequences for each of us individually, teaching us not to use the power of our intellects, and catastrophic consequences for us as a community. A few years ago, when I was starting develop my yoga practice, I was certainly unnerved by this tendency in the yoga community to dismiss intellect (and I still am). Coming from an academic and artistic background, I was taught at an early age to love thinking deeply. Many of my most valued experiences in this world involve the encountering of wild, transformative thoughts and thinkers.

Fortunately and importantly, the problem is not with the philosophy, but with our flawed interpretation. As Richard Freeman puts it beautifully in his audiorecording The Yoga Matrix,

Even though the deeper states of yoga imply states of mind where thought has come to a point of cessation, it is not an anti-thought practice. And so, the discipline of yoga is not an anti-intellectual discipline; it is, in a sense, the perfection of the art of thinking, of inquiry… rather than just giving up [and thinking], ‘well, thought has gotten us into all of this trouble, so now we’re not going to think well at all.’ What is astonishing is how easily this is misinterpreted by people who find deep thought to be too much of a strain, and so they’re unwilling to wrestle with its paradoxes.

Yoga practice only became really meaningful for me when I began to gain awareness of its larger potential as a teacher and guide for the life I live outside of the yoga studio. I see my daily practice as a little “scale model” of the rest of my life: the changing conditions of my body and my mind as they encounter the problems of different postures and practices are metaphors for (and often preludes to) larger situations within the context of my work and my relationships with family and friends.

The only difference between having a meaningful practice and having a mechanical one, I think, is a shift in perspective. To have your practice become your teacher, all you really have to do is really pay attention to it. Perhaps you have to reach the realization that asana practice is basically a hamster wheel, and you have to get bored with the superficial struggle to gain ever more difficult postures (while realizing that, as you continue practicing, they’re undoubtedly coming your way). You have to be open enough to soften the focus of your gaze, to blur your vision and see these relationships across different contexts of your life. You have make room mentally, to clear some space amidst all the neurotic logistics for a little bit of expansiveness.

In a couple weeks I’ll be heading to Boulder, Colorado for a month-long intensive with Richard Freeman, a teacher I not only admire but appear to have some kind of magnetic pull toward. The first time I experienced Richard’s teaching in person was at a workshop in Chicago a couple years ago. One of the things that stuck with me was something he said in passing while discussing the physical practice. He was talking about how people arrive at yoga in very different physical and psychological states, and the need to acknowledge this. “Some people, you want to give them a cup of coffee,” he said, “while other people could really use a beer.”

He was joking, of course, but there’s truth in the humor. The coffee camp is more obvious: those of us who want to practice but have difficulty summoning the discipline, or are content to just go through the motions, always staying within our comfort zones. We need a little fire, a little kick in the pants, if the practice is going to ignite anything interesting or worthwhile in us.

But for those of us that are usually wound-up, that like to work hard and see the fruits of our relentless efforts, we have a tendency to overdo it. We caricature the physical practice, doing our best to turn it into a torture chamber, grimacing our way into our deepest binds and backbends. We could use the softening, the chilling out, the stop-trying-so-damn-hard. We have to find the delicate underside of the practice, become more receptive, and feel our way through instead of always pushing forward.

As for me, I’ve got a cup o’ joe in one hand and whatever’s on tap in the other. I need a little bit of both during my practice, sometimes a little bit of both within the same posture. My lower back needs the beer but my upper back needs the coffee. And so it goes off the mat: a little more of a kick here, a little more of a pat on the back there. I really credit the yoga practice with teaching me that there’s an art to how one applies oneself in any given situation, that not all goals or desires benefit from the same approach. Perhaps that’s an obvious lesson, but to a pitta-predominant type-A’er like me, it was something of a revelation.

Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and William J. Broad

Thanks to my local library I finally got my hands on The Science of Yoga, the first widely published book to investigate how hard science supports or contradicts the myriad benefits attributed to the practice of yoga. I’m only 60 pages in thus far, but I feel compelled to respond already. There is undoubtedly some interesting journalistic research that is very helpful and informative, and I don’t mean to undervalue that; I’ve already learned a good deal about how scientific studies have helped illuminate what yogic breathing actually does on a physiological level. But I really wish the author, William J. Broad, would have let the book’s narrative unfold from the integrity of his research instead of trying to dramatize things by alternately simplifying, exaggerating, or omitting information. His basic agenda  seems to be to champion scientists investigating yoga — and hey, I fully support this — but also to somehow emphasize this by disparaging yogis who claim benefits that they haven’t directly produced in a laboratory setting. It’s a little simplistic. Like so much writing motivated by a predetermined thesis, Broad sacrifices both his integrity and the integrity of the research to support his stance.

So far the one that really gets my goat is his dismissive treatment of Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya — you know, the teacher responsible for teaching so much of what we’re capable of understanding about yoga today. Krishnamacharya’s most prominent appearance in the first third of the book is as “the guru to the gurus” whose reputation for having extraordinary voluntary control of involuntary bodily processes is debunked by a 1961 study in which Krishnamacharya was asked to repeat his previously studied ability to stop his heart. He was unable to do so. According to Broad, Krishanamacharya “protested… he was too old” and then “finally, he relented.” A page later, Broad mentions this event as Krishnamacharya’s “humiliation.” HUMILIATION.

So, with a simple Google search I was able to easily find the PDF of the original study Broad is referring to, which was published in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation in 1961. You can download it here. In the introduction, the study states that Krishnamacharya, 67 years old at the time, claimed he was “too old to demonstrate heart stopping without a month or so of preparatory practice.” They apparently did not consent to giving him this time. Quoted directly from the study: “This gentleman was the one who had ‘stopped his heart’ for Dr. Brosse in 1935 but would not repeat the attempt for us. He finally consented to demonstrate the method he had employed, but with minimum apparatus attached… He said his radial pulse might stop, but his heart wouldn’t.” Later in the study, the results are confirmed: “He reported no absence of heart sounds but at one time the radial pulse was not detectable in either wrist.”

So, there it is. A 67-year-old man claims that at his age, he can’t spontaneously produce the same physical results of a practice that he could when he was in his thirties. And then he consents to show the technique because a group of physicians are badgering him about it, while clarifying that no heart stopping will occur though his pulse will be less perceivable. And that is exactly what happens.

And now, 50 years later, this event is canonized in American journalism by an esteemed science journalist as “the humiliation of [Iyengar's] own guru, Krishnamacharya.”

Now, why am I so bothered by this? Is it somehow important to my yoga practice that Krishnamacharya could have stopped his heart? Not at all. But Krishnamacharya is indeed the teacher of my teachers’ teachers’ teachers… he is the foundation of a lineage that flows to me and through me, just like thousands of others teaching and practicing today. As such, I would be incredibly hesitant to trash his reputation, a hesitancy that Mr. Broad, who according to his book jacket “has practiced yoga since 1970,” curiously lacks. In fact, the opposite seems true here: Broad seems almost too eager to attack one of yoga’s most luminous luminaries before the wide eyes of the American mainstream. And while I’m eager to finish his book, I’m saddened by Broad’s apparent lack of respect for the tradition he seems to want to prove is so valuable.

The definition (not to mention the efficacy) of yoga is very much up for debate these days in the United States, as it should be: the vibrancy and value of any discipline can be measured by the amount of debate it sparks amongst its adherents.

Additionally, just like any other sufficiently complex subject, yoga only grows more intricate and paradoxical the more you examine it. There is no stable foundation to reach for: the more you look, the longer the history becomes, the greater the proliferation of significant texts and paradigm-shifting teachers.

Despite the vastness, it is essential to understand what you’re practicing, even if that understanding changes dramatically over time. At every point in your practice, you should understand the intention of the methods, no matter how rudimentary or simplistic that understanding may appear to you when you look back on it later. Yoga is a science in the sense that each of its techniques have an array of expected results, but it is also a personal science: when you practice yoga you are, in effect, both the instrument and the patient. Not every technique will resonate with you and not every method will yield its expected results. An effective yoga practice is a constant evaluation, a gradual accumulation of the right combination of the right tools, and this kind of growth is only possible if there is comprehension at each step.

I’m skeptical of yoga traditions that privilege obedience above discourse, prop up teachers as masters, or glorify orthodoxy and codification in lieu of variation and adaptation. At the end of the day, you’re either interested in sharing yoga or you are not. This practice is for you. If you have a teacher who is evasive or mystifying, you may want to find another teacher.