Yoga and the big self improvement project
From the outside, yoga can seem like just another branch of the commercial wellness industry. Yoga is marketed here in the West as a way to sharpen our bodies and minds, becoming the optimum version of ourselves. Don’t just survive, but thrive, all with the help of the ancient practice of yoga, commercialised for the contemporary Western practitioner.
No shame, it’s this wider search for self improvement that can bring so many of us to the practice in the first place. That first class can often be a response to an itch to change our body shape or improve our health mentally or physically. This is no bad thing, and the positive impacts of these practices are real. But, we have to question what the practice feels like when it’s driven from a goal-orientated approach. Can we really rest into presence when we are constantly striving for improvement?
As you can tell, this definition of yoga as a means of self improvement feels a little sticky to me. And while there are histories in the practice which provide guidelines and frameworks towards better ways of living with a goal of enlightenment and ultimate escape from cycles of death and rebirth, there is also an alternative way of approaching the practice, where everything we do and feel is part of a wider and integrated whole. When we see ourselves as part of this web of wholeness, we’re already complete, just as we are. No need to improve, but simply to recognise all we already are.
Karma Yoga and the Bhagavad Gita
Throughout yoga’s varied and at times, conflicting, historical texts we find the word Karma. This word translates as action, with Karma Yoga being translated as the yoga of selfless action. The word is first noted in the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient but still so relevant story from the Indian epic the Mahabharata, where the third chapter centres on Karma Yoga and the confusing relationship of doing and non-doing, knowledge and action. The story begins with our hero Arjuna in crisis mode, stilled on the battlefield seeking advice at the feet of Krishna, the incarnation of Vishnu and therefore, the universe itself. This story offers Arjuna, and the reader, a guide to a yogic way of acting in the world.
“No one is free of actions even for a moment, because everyone is moved to do things by the qualities of nature. Whoever stills the body as if seated in meditation, but mentally continues to think about sense objects is deluded. Let go of all attachments and engage the body in Karma Yoga, selfless service.” The Living Gita, 3.5.
Here it is suggested to approach our actions with no attachment to the outcome. Without layering personal goals, aspirations and desires onto our actions they can simply be as they are, experienced in the present moment and of wider resonance and benefit to the universe as a whole. Seeing the world in this way dissolves the boundary between self and other, reminding us of an inherent interconnectedness and the ways we can be of service to others and the greater world.
A Contemporary Context
Contemporary yoga, sold as a means of self improvement, feels at odds with yoga’s roots in selfless service. As a teacher, how can I encourage an experience in my students that is focussed on selfless action, rather than selfish outcome?
For me as a practitioner, this comes down to curiosity, which in turn guides us to present awareness. If we are to have a motive, let it be curiosity. Whether this is in the physical asana or the playful movement of awareness. It’s this curiosity in our present experience that releases us from the goal orientated or self improvement mindset that may have led us to practice in the first place.
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced.” Rainer Maria Rilke.
How free-ing the mystery can be. Rather than punishing ourselves with asana, all movement becomes something new to notice and something uniquely felt in this present moment. And while the culturally imposed voice of ‘not-enough’ will often find its way in, just recognising it in this way can sometimes soften the grip.
The positive impact of yoga is manifold and felt uniquely by practitioners the world over. A clarity in our thought patterns, a development of patience and a remembering of primary movement patterns through purposeful yoga asana sequencing that can have a feeling of coming home to our bodies. These are all wonderful and things you may well experience after committing to a regular yoga practice.
However, gripping on to these impacts, as if they are goals to be achieved, can make our practice feel rigid and forced. We arrive on the mat desiring a particular feeling, go on retreat seeking a transcendental experience.
Instead, can we practice for the practice itself - the observation, the mystery. If we are arriving to the practice, again and again, with a specific goal of becoming ‘better’ at meditation or a particular shape in the body, we will at some point be led to feel a failure around these goals. When practised in this way, yoga becomes just another way in which we feel ‘not enough’ in our lives, especially when it is the repeated pattern we attune to each time we come to practice.
I’ve been considering how, as a teacher, I can better communicate this to students. I’ve definitely been guilty of marketing my classes through the potential benefits - whether this is mental calm or physical agility and while this is a classic marketing tool to get students through the door, there feels a necessity to remind my students of their wholeness, enough-ness and fullness through the ways we practice together. This means encouraging curiosity, not overly congratulating the physical-ness of the asana and teaching slower and more contemplative sequences. It’s a work in progress.
Most people are inherently good, struggling in a challenging world where we are taught to buy more and achieve more for the sake of perpetual self improvement. Purna is a word that describes our fullness, our wholeness. Resting in this wholeness is enough. When we feel this, the pressure to better ourselves softens and the after effects of living in this way are felt in our relationships to others, environment and the way we talk to and treat ourselves.
Further reading? I took inspiration from the The New Yorker’s ‘Improving Ourselves to Death’ which is full of contemporary further reading on the pitfalls of a culture of never ending self-improvement.