The mainstreaming of yoga would have you think - with the right accessories - it is the way to calmness and serenity. Yet, what it fails to admit is this state of being comes at a price.
Forget the cost of classes, mats and fashionable outfits. Yoga is hard and messy work. In fact, I would say it is even violent.
For the past decade I’ve been practicing yoga in Toronto. I don’t need to prove “I am into yoga.” I see the lululemon manifesto as the marketing device it is and I don’t have an OM symbol tattoo.
It was during a Sunday morning yoga class when I discovered the yoga experience doesn’t add up to the propaganda.
The instructor was leading the class through a sun salutation series. The first round was over and I found myself back at the front of my mat in mountain pose – Tadasana – when I heard a quiet voice whisper, “I hate yoga.”
It took a moment before I realized the voice was my own.
At first, I kept the experience to myself. However, a few weeks later I decided to mention it to Catherine another instructor at the studio.
Catherine explained, as she made chattering motions with her hand, the voice I heard was a wise voice that emerged from the gut, not the usual interior voice of discursive thinking. I shouldn’t try to analyze it, just let it go.
Yoga challenges the mind’s hypnotic version of reality and has the power to lead us through some serious self-reflection. Sometimes a practitioner becomes pissed off by yoga because it introduces her to aspects of herself she would prefer to deny. Yet, although negativity arises as part of a yoga practice it is seldom mentioned.
There is the illusion that there might be an extraordinary guru or expert out there who lives in a constant state of bliss and that this should be our goal too. But this isn’t a real person with everyday demands to contend with.
This is also why I hate yoga.
Most people who seek out a practice like yoga are trying to find a way to better cope with life. To make it seem that balance and harmony are possible without the hard and messy part is deceiving.
“ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE,” reads the ominous warning above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. I think yoga studios should consider posting a similar warning over their doors.
