The Best Thing to Happen to Yoga in 2013

As I walked into the gym and began unloading my “stuff” in preparation for my regular Thursday noontime, corporate yoga class, there was a young guy – an employee of this tech company – casually shooting hoops. While I know many of the players at this firm, I had never seen him before.

He said, “Are you the yoga instructor?”

I replied in the affirmative.

He took a shot or two and added, “Yeah, my girlfriend does yoga, but I’ve never tried it.”

After another shot or so, he looked over at me, and somewhat contemplatively, yet very matter-of-factly stated, “You’re a vegetarian, right.”

Once again, I replied in the affirmative and thought, “This is the best thing I have heard all year.”

In the above interaction, we have a confirmed non-practitioner naming one of the standards of yoga. He himself was neither a yoga class participant, nor a vegetarian, but from talk around town, or from who knows where, he had the idea that those involved in the practice of yoga are vegetarians.

For me, it was a sign that the contemporary yoga movement in America might be moving out of its infancy and entering the next stage – the next level up.

To date, nearly every yoga superstar to hit the big-time in the US has taken a severe fall, due to an array of unsavory misdeeds, i.e. acts of indiscipline. Unfortunately, their lives were not grounded in the foundational tenets of yoga, i.e. yama and niyama: Honesty, integrity, sacrifice, selflessness, and the endeavor of attaining a high ideal etc. In result, they took a fall, and hurt others along the way.

In its essence, yoga is based on the practice of discipline, where the mind gains greater and greater control over the motor and sensory organs, known in yoga as indriyanigraha. And from that constant and persistent endeavor comes realization. Without that fundamental baseline of discipline, one’s progress on the path will be checked.

Here the point is that when a practitioner of yoga is identified and defined by their disciplined conduct, and not by their showiness or pizazz, then that represents the beginning of the maturation of a yoga movement. When the public holds yoga practitioners and instructors up to a particular standard, that means the ideals of yoga are being propagated to the extent that even non-practitioners have a basic expectation of how a yoga teacher should act; it also means that yoga instructors must be sure to live up to that standard.

To my mind, this signifies the real growth of the yoga movement. It is qualitative growth based on understanding and knowledge, not quantitative growth based on profits and popularity.

While so many attending classes in the US do so with a sincere interest to improve in some facet of life and feel better, that same sincerity and integrity has not always been reciprocated by “top” yoga teachers. More involved with their fame and following than any real practice or discipline, their lives are more representative of how yoga can be soiled by materialism than by how yoga can lift one from the depths of materialism. And this unhealthy approach has seeped into the various layers of the yoga movement. It has affected the definition of success in yoga in America.

A much needed solution to this epidemic is public awareness and expectation. The moment the public holds a particular sector of society – like yoga teachers – up to a certain standard, then that is a big plus point, all the way around. When food producers, athletes, writers, caretakers, and accountants, among others, are under public scrutiny to live up to the ethic of their craft, then that brings integrity into that realm of life. When the public is not aware of the standards of a particular field, like yoga, then there is little scope to hold the leaders of that field to a given and expected standard.

To date, that has been the central problem with the contemporary yoga movement in the US – and in other places where materialism abounds.

Final Thought

So when a guy shooting hoops during a 15min work break inadvertently crosses paths with a yoga teacher and innocently questions and confirms his adherence to that discipline by inquiring about his code of conduct, then that is indeed a step up for yoga in the US.

And that is why I felt that query was one of the best things I had heard in 2013.