Why do we asana?
Yoga's physical practice matters too
Yoga’s physical practice, or asana, is the least important aspect of a yoga practice. So I was told many years ago on my first day of yoga teacher training. Patanjali, considered the founder of yoga, mentioned asana only once when he was writing the yoga sutras; “Steerum, sukkum, asanam,” he wrote, which translates to “a comfortable, steady seat.” Because Patanjali’s sutras contain only these three words about asana, it follows that yoga’s physical practice should be low on our list of priorities. So says the conventional wisdom.
I’ve noticed this general feeling of dismissiveness towards asana permeating the yoga studios around the states where I’ve studied (as well as in the couple of European spots where I’ve studied). Teachers say things like “Yoga is not what it was originally meant to be, we focus too much on asana” or, “asana means nothing,” or, “without the bandhas, the practice means nothing,” or, (my personal favorite), “without an intention, we’re just doing gymnastics.” I find these statements pessimistic, trending toward nihilism, and diminishing rather than making meaning. (The latter one is also a bit rude to gymnasts. I would imagine that you can’t do a back-flip on a balance beam without an intention.) When teachers say things like “asana means nothing” in class, we dismiss the importance of physical postures while at the same time we spend a vast amount of energy on them. It’s super weird. I find it an odd form of self-hatred.
Of course—I would be remiss if I didn’t add—a person can have a wonderful, enlightened, authentic yoga practice without ever performing a physical posture. There are many paths to samadhi. Arguably, the path we tread is not even linearly in the direction of samadhi.
If asana is an important part of your yoga work, though, as it is for me, there are many valuable lenses through which we can view our physical practices. Here, I want to encourage us to find the sweet spot where we can both approach our physical practice by encouraging and supporting intelligent asana work, and at the same time reject the idea of objective attainment of postures. Asana means something. To me, it means a lot. Here are my thoughts on some more optimistic and nuanced ways to discuss approaches to yoga’s physical practice.
Why do we asana?
The mind and the body are not actually separate components
Humans love to break things down into pieces. We begin learning by slotting components into categories. Toddlers sort objects based on color or shape. Students classify living things; they distinguish between nouns and verbs. Yoga teachers discuss the mind-body connection.
At the end of the day, though, the breaking of ourselves into components is simply the beginning of the learning process. As we learn more about a subject, our experience leads us to integrate the pieces back together into a whole. In law school, we spent a fair amount of time deciding whether a motion or a ruling should be categorized as procedural or substantive. But the more I studied the idea of procedure versus substance (a lawyer would probably call substance “the merits”), the more I came to question whether there was actually a distinction between the two. In the real world, procedure and substance blend together. Similarly, a physical practice is an emotional practice is a breath practice is a mental practice is a meditation.
When we work on physical postures in yoga class, we create space in the body. If you’ve ever had a yoga teacher physically adjust you in class, you may have thought that they were helping you find more sensation, or a deeper stretch. Perhaps, like me, you thought the teacher was adjusting you because you were doing the pose incorrectly.
Asana practice is different. Yoga teachers who physically adjust students are not helping students find a deeper posture, more stretch, or giving them a correction. Yoga teachers give physical adjustments to support their students in creating more space in the body. Perhaps it’s a lengthening of the ribs in trikonasana, or a greater anterior tilt of the pelvis in paschimottanasana. All of a sudden, the posture feels like it takes on a new form with infinite possibilities. The space we find is not only space in the body, however, because of course the body, mind, heart, and soul are not actually separate things. Creating space in the body creates space in the heart, space in the mind, and space to hold empathy for others.
At the outer reaches of our yoga practice we must confront paradoxes, by landing in the place where one thing is true and its opposite is also true. Asana practice leads us to the spot where resistance meets acceptance, where grief bleeds into joy, where pulling ourselves apart means putting ourselves together, where the further we reach into ourselves the more strength we have to hold up others. We reach the point where we are the body, and simultaneously we are not the body. We find the place where two opposites meet. These paradoxes capture an infinite amount of space, and the physical practice of asana can create the space for us to hold those paradoxes. This takes time, of course, but it starts with that first down dog, that first trikonasana, that first sun salutation, that first yoga class. That’s why we asana.
The pose is not the prize, the process is the prize
One of the things that I love about yoga is that there is always something to work on. If you’ve done down dog long enough that your heels start to land on the mat, you scoot your feet back until your heels come off again and work from there. Eventually, your heels come down again and you scoot your feet back again. When you “finish” something, you simply move on to the next. There’s always more to do, which means that we’re never actually finished with anything. What a relief! Work that is never done means that there is always something to work on.
And there is. There is always something to work on. The point of asana is not that we’re achieving a specific pose, but that we’re intelligently, diligently, and steadfastly working on the pose. We listen to our teachers. We take feedback. We practice every day to build strength and lengthen muscle fibers. We’re patient with the process so that we don’t hurt ourselves. We understand that there are no shortcuts, no way forward except to conscientiously complete the work in front of us.
Sometimes, our work doesn’t take us deeper into the pose, it doesn’t give us more strength to hold the pose longer, it doesn’t let us float into handstand. Sometimes we don’t achieve the results we want. If you ask any longstanding yoga practitioner about poses that they can’t do, they will probably present you with a long list. That is ok. Not just ok, but good for us. The process of asana grants us humility. When we realize that we can’t always achieve the thing we want with diligent, hard work, it softens our ego.
The work of asana is not solely about disappointment, though, I probably wouldn’t stick with it if it was. Asana can also be a remarkably freeing experience. We can try a new pose, thinking we’ll never be able to do it, and realize that we can without too much trouble. Maybe we simply need a different entrance into the pose, a different way to think about the pose, or a different alignment cue, and, tada! We did it! Sometimes by tweaking the process, by reframing or reworking, we can find our way into something that we never thought we would be able to do. Talk about a good time.
The other thing that can happen when we’re in the process of working on asana is that our hard work pays off. A pose can feel really far away, we can be telling ourselves that we need to have patience, that this pose may take years, and then, one day, it’s there. It happens. It’s safe. It just works. All of the work we did and the patience we had was enough to make what we wanted happen. It’s so satisfying. We enjoy it for a moment, then we move on. This is the process that is the prize. That’s why we asana.
Our approach to asana mirrors our approach to life
Ideally, this process that is the prize is a mirror that teaches us about our broader lives. We are on our mats to notice our reactions. We’re there to see what sort of feeling surges within us when we’re in the flow, feeling strong, open, and aligned, or what sort of feeling comes up when we’re tired. How do we handle it when we feel like we’re “good” at something or “bad” at something?
We’re on our mats to see how we react when our practice just isn’t working, when we feel tired, irritated, or angry. We’re there to see how we approach a pose when we like the pose, or when we don’t. We’re there to notice if we avoid the things we don’t like, or if we avoid doing certain kinds of work. We’re there to notice if we’re open to new approaches, if we’re all right with being adjusted that day, or not. We’re there to notice whether we separate our feelings from our actions, or if we instantly react to something. We can see our patterns on the mat, and start to notice those patterns off the mat too.
The asana poses are invaluable teachers in and of themselves. The difficulty, variety, and ceaseless work required to practice allow the poses to teach us all of these things. That’s why we we asana.
Asana as a physical representation of empathy
When we’re in a workshop, private lesson, or other co-operative setting, we can all share in each person’s specific representation of each specific asana. I remember, when taking a workshop from Richard Freeman, I was watching my fellow students execute fancy postures. They were doing some seriously impressive things and I was pretty much just standing there with my mouth open. He said, “See, they do the pose, you have empathy for them, and then you did the pose. What a nice way to practice.” Each person’s expression of the pose belongs to all of us. How beautiful is that.
Similarly, I remember working on trikonasana in a private lesson with my teacher, Anne. While she was adjusting me, I noticed that my lower shoulder was shrugged up toward my ear and plugged it back in to the socket. She noticed me making that adjustment and said, “It’s nice to have two yogis working on one pose.”
One of my Ashtanga teachers, Martha, used to say that when one exits urdhva dhanurasana, one should take a few breaths on the back with a neutral spine before going into a counter pose. I practice urdhva dhanurasana most days. Martha passed away many years ago, but I still think of her every time I come out of that pose.
My asana practice is not only mine, it was created by every teacher I’ve ever had, every yogi from all of the generations back who handed down the practice, every person who’s ever enabled me to get to class, or have time on my mat. Asana definitely means something.
And that’s why we asana.