Yoga For Beginners - Are you taking the wrong approach?

Yoga For Beginners - Are you taking the wrong approach

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With so many images everywhere of extraordinarily pliable people in striking impossible yoga poses, advertising "yoga for beginners" does help to take the fear down a notch or two for the newcomer. Unfortunately, that hurts the image of yoga more than it helps it.

Carving up yoga into levels of physical difficulty, does not give the right impression of it. It sends the message that yoga is about how well conditioned and flexible your body is. In case you didn't know ... that has little to do with yoga.

Rarely do I meet anyone who is not a yoga beginner, actually ... and that goes for some extraordinarily flexible yoga teachers too.

The modern yoga class culture would seem to suggest that physical mastery of some yoga exercises is the gauge we use to assess a person's "level" of yoga.

If that were true, though, then we'd have to consider many athletes, world-class dancers and even circus performers as advanced yoga practitioners too.

But if we know what yoga is really all about, then we know that they are not yogis merely because of their physical abilities.

Being advanced in yoga means being able to demonstrate something extraordinary on levels far beyond the physical. It means being able to demonstrate a consistent level of joy and compassion through any circumstances of life.

It means living in a way that puts the needs of others ahead of one's own, and the good of humanity at the forefront of all that they say and do.

Of course, these things may seem far out of reach for most of us. But being able to rise to these hieghts of being is what advanced yoga practice means.

On the flip side, most of the modern yogis I meet, the ones who can do lots of impressive things with their bodies, don't really seem to demonstrate much else. Often their personal lives don't seem to be devoid of any less drama than those of their students and neighbors.

The power of yoga to transform our lives is limitless, yet, like the human brain I suppose, 97.6% of that postential remains untapped.

We can access it though, but that has to start with yoga teachers taking a more fuller approach to their beginners yoga classes, introducing students to a more comprehensive view of yoga as a "way of life" rather than just a system of exercises.

If that starts to happen, then it could be the seed that might eventually lead to the emergence of a few bonefied "advanced yoga pratitioners" into this world ... which surely wouldn't be a bad thing at all.

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