I teach a first year course on the philosophy and practice of yoga and t’ai chi. Every now and then, I have the opportunity to meet with the other professors who teach the class to discuss the syllabus and talk about how we each approach the course differently. A few years back, I was chatting with a colleague who said something that I have been thinking of since.
She said she only teaches bodies. Alignment. Postures. Shapes. Her class was exclusively physical.
I must have made a face because she immediately said, “Oh, I suppose you teach a bunch of spiritual stuff.”
I was taken aback. It had never even occurred to me that yoga could be taught purely physically. I don’t think there is such a thing as purely physical. Humans do not have a toggle by which we might exclude all things emotional, psychological, and intellectual in favour of things that are physical. Every physical experience is simultaneously an emotional one.
The next day in class, I told my students about this odd encounter and asked them if they thought what we were learning was “spiritual” or not. It led to a good class discussion revolving mostly around defining what is meant by that word, “spiritual.” And more importantly, it gave me an opportunity to introduce students to the work of Edward Said and his 1978 classic, Orientalism.
Said’s theory is that what we call “the East” is a creation of that thing we call “the West.” Western scholars and travellers thought of the Middle East and Asia as being radically different from their homelands. They imagined that “the East” was the opposite of “the West.” If the “the west” is rational, logical, and democratic, the “the East” must be mystical, emotional, and run by tyrants.
Western eyes wear tinted glasses when they gaze upon the East. They see a projected inversion of their own self-image. If a Western yoga teacher imagines yoga as something physical, then by default, they would imagine “Eastern” yoga as something spiritual.
This projection ignited a fire that has been burning in modern yoga for over a century. Yoga teachers in “the West” are forced into making a decision. Will they adopt a more “Eastern” identity by changing their name, their clothes, and their manner of speaking? Will they attempt to become more “spiritual”? Or will they teach an adapted version of yoga that is more physical and less mystical?
I believe that the story of modern yoga in “the West” is the story of yoga teachers grappling with that question and, ultimately, riding the struggle bus the whole damn time.
“East is East and West is West and Never the Twain Shall Meet”
The above line comes from Rudyard Kipling’s 1892 poem called “The Ballad of East and West.” In the poem, Kipling suggests that while the two points on a map are clearly different, that people are people no matter where they live. As Roman playwright Terrance said around two thousand years earlier, “nothing human is alien to me.”
From the Silk Roads to modern yoga, those categories of “East” and “West” have never been geographical boundaries but rather psychological and intellectual ones. The smallest little peek into yoga history should be enough to put those categories to rest.
Let’s start with Bishnu Ghosh. Ghosh serves as a kind of glitch in the “East vs West” binary. If the “West” was meant to be physical and the “East” was meant to be spiritual, it would seem that Bishnu Ghosh did not get the memo. The younger brother of Paramhansa Yogananda (author of The Autobiography of a Yogi), Ghosh was a proponent of what was called physical culture (what we would now call bodybuilding). In the 1920s and 30s Ghosh integrated hatha yoga postures with weightlifting and gymnastics.
Looking at Ghosh’s contribution to modern yoga, it seems clear that yoga teachers who want to “keep it physical” are just working within the framework of an Indian approach to yoga from the early twentieth century. There is nothing “Western” about teaching a physical style of yoga.
On the flip side, we might take a “Western” teacher like Ram Das, who was a leader in the 1960s countercultural yoga scene. Ram Das was not known for teaching postures; instead, he taught an approach to yoga that aligns more closely with bhakti (devotion). Like Bishnu Gosh demonstrates that there is nothing necessarily “spiritual” about yoga in “the east,” Ram Das demonstrates that there is nothing necessarily “physical” about yoga in “the West”.
It is curious to note, however, that Ram Das felt the need to change his name. He also changed his clothes and indeed his entire identity. This Western academic named Richard Alpert shed that skin and became an Eastern mystic. Why, we might ask, did he feel it necessary to stop wearing suits and grow out his beard?
Ram Das felt like he had to make a choice. He bought into that orientalist narrative that suggests “West” is rational and wears a suit; whereas “East” is spiritual and wears a robe.
As teachers of modern yoga, I implore you all to abandon these outdated and historically inaccurate choices.
You should not be forced into a choice between being a gym-loving fitness teacher who doesn’t teach spirituality or an enlightened mystic who eschews physicality. The reality is that, regardless of where you were born or where you teach, yoga is, and always has been, simultaneously physical and spiritual. Every meditation happens in skin, filled with bones, muscles, and organs. Every workout happens in the context of a complex, rare, and miraculous conscious human experience.
So, my fellow modern yoga teachers, where does that leave us?
We need to start teaching in a way that moves beyond the orientalist binary of the last century and moves us toward a future in which we might teach an integrated, whole-person approach to yoga. Yoga teachers who insist on dressing up and performing the role of “guru” are engaging in a kind of cultural cosplay that relies on the inherited authority of centuries-old traditions rather than building an earned trust and expertise of their own. Yoga teachers who abandon “all that woo-woo stuff” have co-opted and sterilized a practice that was never intended to be a biomechanical instructional manual. Both are parodies of a profession and are short-changing their students.
The Educator Model of Yoga Teaching
Please keep in mind that I too am healing from these outdated orientalist ideas and trying to forge a way forward. My intention is not to provide you with rules or instructions, but experiments. The real value of diversity is resilience. Yoga survives for millennia precisely because it is not an orthodoxy. There is no single “right” way to teach yoga.
Regardless of what kind of yoga you teach, be who you are. If you find yourself being somebody else when you get in front of a class, that is an indicator that you are wearing a mask. In reality, you are vulnerable. You are flawed. You are struggling through this life along with your students. They need to see that. If you find yourself exhausted after you teach, it is likely that you are performing rather than teaching. You may have developed a “yoga teacher” identity that is informed by outdated notions of who and what you are “supposed” to be as a yoga teacher. Very often, we are trying to be a yoga teacher rather than just being ourselves. The funny thing is that you don’t need to try. You don’t need to act. If you are teaching yoga…you are a yoga teacher. Just the way you are.
Rather than practicing saying things with a certain gravitas or ensuring that we look a certain way when we show up for our classes, we need to earn the authority that we seek. We earn that authority not by acting, but by learning.
Study, study, study. Do not stop learning. Keep reading. Keep taking classes. Challenge the things that you think you know. Learn about the things you do not know. Research things. Study anatomy and physiology. Study history and philosophy. There is a VERY good chance that your teacher training did not cover a great deal of the knowledge that you require to best serve your students.
I remember a few years ago, my teacher wrote an article about 200-hour yoga teacher trainings. In it, he pointed out that hair stylists typically require 1200-1500 hours of training before they start working with clients. Should yoga teachers not have at least the same degree of preparation and training as hair stylists?
We need to train and study. If those hours are not required, we need to require them of ourselves. That way, we will have the authority and expertise needed to earn our students’ trust.
If you want to teach about spirituality, you don’t need to talk about your own mystical experiences. You need to study. Explain to your students what those experiences represent and how to go about experiencing them. You may find yourself studying psychology, philosophy, religion, or neuroscience. Do not be intimidated by those disciplines. Start by learning some basics and then keep exploring. You will never find yourself without something interesting and rewarding to share with your students.
Finally, recognize that “spirituality” isn’t some separate, mystical thing that exists in some hidden realm accessed only by perfected beings living in ethereal realms. Spirituality is a natural outcome of teaching a whole person.
There are parts of ourselves that are hard to explain and even harder to quantify. Finding physical evidence and “hard” science behind aspects of the human experience is sometimes next to impossible. We know when we are in love, but proving that we are in love is nearly impossible. It is something you know when you feel it. The same is true of some things you experience in yoga. It is subtle. It can be mystical. We know we are having an experience, but we can’t put it into words or prove it. These experiences are very often termed “spiritual.”
Our students will have experiences in classes that sometimes go beyond what we can measure or point to in anatomy or physiology. We can talk about that. We can explore it together with our students without needing to be an authority on it. We can say “wow, that sounds like a really interesting experience” without needing to explain it, disregard it, or romanticize it.
When we stop trying to be “spiritual” enough, or sufficiently “grounded in science,” we are free to become educators. An educator does not need a Sanskrit alias or a degree in biomechanics to be a valuable and cherished teacher. If we commit ourselves to the thousands of hours required to become masters of our trade, we will no longer need to perform yoga. We will simply be practicing it. That does not mean that we don’t need to study – it means we possess the wisdom to offer resources when we can AND the humility to say “let me get back to you on that” when we cannot.
The East and West were never real boundaries. They were always just stories we told ourselves to make sense of our vast and ever-growing world. Our students don’t need us to be the keepers of ancient secrets, nor do they need us to be gym teachers with banging playlists. They need us to be informed guides who recognize that each breath on their mat is an act of both biology and spirit.
The Yoga Educator’s Toolkit
- Cite Your Sources: If you are talking about the Bhagavad Gita or the Yoga Sutras – bring along the copy you are referring to. Talk about the different translations and commentaries available. Why did you choose to use the one you are quoting from?
- Resist the Temptation to Define: The next time you find yourself starting a sentence with “yoga is…..” just stop. The word yoga is one of the largest entries in the Monier Williams Sanskrit-English dictionary. We are not going to define it. We could absolutely say “one of the many ways that people think about yoga is…” Acknowledging the breadth of yoga invites exploration and opens dialogue. Definitions are definitive and tend to result in endings, not beginnings.
- Use Real-World Examples: Pay attention to your day-to-day experiences and be on the lookout for exemplary moments that you could use to highlight elements of yoga philosophy. Buy Nothing Day to help talk about santosha (contentment), rising gas prices as an example of the ever-changing nature of prakriti (nature), or talking about volunteering as karma yoga (although as soon as you start talking about it, you are no longer really renouncing the fruit of your action).
- Research is Cool! The Journal of Yoga Studies is free online. Read it and find ways to integrate some new research into your classes. For example, in the latest JoYS there is an article about the history of sun salutations by James Dylan Russell. It is awesome. Your students might enjoy some fresh insights on the practice before doing a few of them to start their class.
- Provide Questions, Not Answers: Your students have an entire world of yoga in front of them. So many mysteries, so many stories, so much to learn. Help them by inviting dialogue and offering different perspectives. You can share your stories and offer insights based on your experience – but always encourage students to seek out more information on their own and to formulate their own understanding. Be a guide, not a guru.
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