truth is a pathless land

So one thing I will never understand is how people confuse self righteousness with spirituality...or, to be more exact, dogmatism with liberation. Yoga is, in a most basic sense, union. That is, expansive, connecting with more and more and growing larger and larger. Yoga is the dissolution of the sense of separateness, disconnection, or fragmentation. Yoga is the practice and the goal, and yet all too often yoga becomes one more way to reinforce old patterns of belief and indulge/reproduce the very imbalances yogis seek to transcend.

Yoga isn't about collapsing into some narrowly-defined perspective about right and wrong. Perhaps even more importantly, I don't think the practices of yoga were meant to reinforce a hierarchy of difference, wherein those who live like you are good and right and those who live otherwise are, well, otherwise. It's a slippery slope, pointing fingers and drawing lines in the sand. Especially if you seek yoga, which is presumably about dissolving the lines in the sand. Be like me and you are of value? How is that any different than the identity politics most of us are trying so damn hard to challenge?

If you think there is a way or a lifestyle that makes you a yogi, I believe you are missing the point. You cannot separate from the Source, the Divine, nature, life, god, whatever you want to name it. The fundamental obstacle to yoga--as a practice and a goal--is avidya, the misidentification of oneself as separate, limited, and small. Avidya is thinking you are your thoughts or emotions or your job or your relationship status or your age or weight or diagnosis or GPA or salary. This klesha (to torment) gives rise to all others, and so it is the root cause of all suffering from a certain perspective.

So, what sense does it make to reinforce separation by acting as though there is A WAY to yoga? As if anyone is ever NOT already perfect, whole, holy, and divine? Yogis who get self righteous about their lifestyles are just addicts of another form--attached to their own conception of what is good/right/real, and doing everything they can to support that belief. I have known people who practice yoga every day, eat the perfect plant-based diet, eschew all things material and yet remain small-minded, dogmatic, arrogant, and self righteous. Not nice people. Competitive, fear-based, and judgmental. And I have known beer-swigging, junkfood-eating TV-loving people who embodied the principles of yoga more authentically than those who would claim they are "not on the path."

J. Krishnamurti said that truth is a pathless land...we aren't on some journey headed toward a better time or body or experience. We are and have always been in direct communication with and embodying life itself. The hiccup is in thinking we can somehow separate from it. This is avidya, and it is this same delusion that allows us to look at the lives of others and judge them. It is avidya that leads even the most amazing contortionists on the yoga mat to be assholes in life off the mat--to judge others and presume to know where they are in their "journey." We don't need more spiritual diagnoses, what we need is a true and sincere commitment to Self study--an enthusiastic inquiry into the BIG S Self. Start there, and I swear we have so little space and time to worry about what so-called others are doing right/wrong.

My teacher David Life told us once that yoga, as a practice/methodology was a choice we made...to get over the idea that others should think/act like us just because we chose this particular science. Everyone is headed toward enlightenment (remembering themselves as whole), make no mistake. The job of a yogi is not to judge--the job of the yogi is to love so unconditionally that we cease to see "others" and instead see and feel the One.

Too often I encounter people who contort the teachings of yoga to bolster ego--and I am talking small self, whether that means self aggrandizing or self deprecation, it's all small self stuff here. Yoga can become one more habitual thing we do, one more way of reinforcing the same old thought patterns and behaviors. For example, how one comes to their asana practice. On the mat, when the going gets rough and you are sweating and breathing is tough, and muscles feel like they might collapse, what you think at that moment and what you do at that moment, the moment you want to bail out or run or get pissed at someone or muscle through it to prove something or take a water break or bathroom break or talk to the person next to you...matters. One can use the discomfort to expand consciousness and watch the mind spin its web or one can go on autopilot and react like every other time things were hard.

And whether you bail out t0 just watch others from the sidelines, or fall out and say "I am not good at this, I suck" or grit your teeth and pull yourself up by your Lululemon straps and muscle through it or get angry about the temperature/music/sequence/lighting/teacher's voice or check out and just place all your energy into some future moment (the next asana, the next song, the hour after class, the right job, the better lover, the higher salary) or fight your way through it, it matters.

Becomes matter. The matter within you and the matter with you.

I watch students all the time struggle with the small voices that insist on remaining, well, small. Some of those voices echo the "I am no good, I am not of value" tune whilst others have something to prove, want to be adored/admired. But there is a sweet space where the smallness can be seen and heard without being obeyed or indulged. As a 30-something veteran of the "I am not good enough" camp, I know that my yoga practice has largely been a method for me to identify how and when those voices crop up and to bring some awareness to them so I might begin to untangle myself from the limitations that are so often mistaken for safety. But just as often I see the arrogance, which is no different from the low self esteem. The ones who perform their practice, deep down seek the same thing: validation and value. And whether you come at it from "I am no good" or "Look at me, aren't I great?" there can be no true satisfaction. Until we know we are already always whole, we will continue to act like holes and seek to be filled up by a world we refuse to get into--no matter how messy, uncomfortable, or hard that may be.

David Life also taught me that it's easy to hear OM and feel connected and One and blissed out when there are no challenges. On a mountain-top meadow in July, when the wildflowers are in full bloom and the only sounds around me are the trills of birds and the breathy gurgle of a river. But to listen for and seek union when you are in the midst of a civil war, collapsing under the pressure of scarcity, dealing with death or violence, inundated with the sounds of suffering or commerce or the painful silence of love lost--that is our practice.

And I guess my point is that it is arrogance to believe that enlightenment or liberation is only available to those who look and act like you.

The form itself will change.

The form itself will change.

The form itself is empty and will change.

It is what remains that is real, and what remains is that which animates the ever-unfurling forms.

The show-off on the mat whose only thoughts are of perfecting and proving and performing is no more yogic than the bartender who listens with genuine compassion to the hazy confessions of her patron.

Act like everyone and everything is god, and I am certain we will find that everything and everyone is god.