To a lot of people here in the west yoga is seen as a way of "stretching". Dancers do it to improve their range of motion, to warm up or cool down from a dance practice. Others go to yoga for stress relief. But there are times when yoga is more than a stretch and more than stress relief.
I've been through a lot of phases with yoga over the years. My relationship to yoga and to my body changed since I was a kid. Currently I practice Belly Dance more than I do yoga. And because I am clocking in so many hours of dance time or time with weights my yoga practice is usually for cooling down. Over the years I know from experience that this is not a very deep way to practice yoga. That it is a practice based on "stretching". Don't get me wrong, yoga for the sake of stretching to me is a good thing! I don't believe that yoga should always be about pulling back the layers. I believe that yoga is a process that unfolds to us as we practice and as we practice it is up to us to become present with whatever the process of yoga is presenting to us in that moment.
Today I did a particularly in depth back bend practice on daturaonline.com with Rachel Brice and Ashley Lopez which was challenging physically and emotionally to me. I am grateful that my lower back and upper thoracic spine can handle back bends way better than I could years ago. But I felt inner resistance. As I do when doing any kind of practice that is tough I press on while being aware of what is going on inside me. I breathe deeper and I watch and I listen. Sometimes when something comes up for me during an in depth yoga practice I absolutely know what it is. Other times it isn't so apparent.
Having been through a lot of trauma in my past I half expect something to come up for me whenever I do a more concentrated yoga practice. Sometimes it isn't about the past but about the present or the near present. Having also a background in unofficially studying Psychology I tend to approach things in that way sometimes. Sometimes it helps but sometimes you need yoga awareness. Which means to let it be and to unfold while you listen and watch rather than actively analyzing it. I think both approaches compliment each other quite well rather than one over the other.
I continued practicing but at a certain point I could feel I needed to stop. Not necessarily physically but something mentally and emotionally inside me really wanted to cover up and protect. So for the rest of the practice I laid on my stomach, did Downward Dog, Child Pose and Reclining Twists, hugging my knees in and Fetus Pose. Then I simply sat with what was going on and gently reflected. I felt a conflict of wanting to open up and expand while at the same time wanting to contract, protect and cover up. Aside from my not being used to such an in depth back bend Yoga practice I have been doing a lot to not be as "open" as I used to be with a lot of things. I have felt the need to protect myself from all of the bad going on in the world as I watch helplessly while all of it is going on around me. So, though I care very much about everything that has been going on politically, religiously, culturally and environmentally I have needed to distance myself from it in my mind and emotionally very much in order to cope. I know that if I am more open then I will think of horrible and terrifying things in the middle of the night when I wake up like I used to. I'll have more horrific nightmares like I used to. And I will have trouble getting all of these negative things out of my thinking throughout the day like I used to.
Yoga is a good thing and it's a good thing when people say that Yoga should not just be about "stretching" but I am perfectly fine with Yoga being just about "stretching" and being in my body. I totally believe in taking down metaphorical walls and opening up but I also do not believe it is healthy for Yoga to be the kind of practice where it is always taking down walls that all of us need in order to be healthy. Speaking from experience this is what is best for me. To create a balanced practice where Yoga is not always about accessing my emotions front and center and uprooting deeply inlaid trauma.
Looking back I can see how making one kind of practice dominant over another drastically changed my state of mind and ability to function as well as how that dominant practice affected my body. I have found that a strong and in depth practice of Belly Dance creates a strong foundation mentally for me. I believe it is from my current practice of Belly Dance for why I am more solid and more strong physically, mentally and emotionally than when I have made Yoga be my dominant practice. When Yoga has been my dominant practice I am in more pain physically because I am hyper flexible which means that my body is better suited to focusing on toning exercises and practices. And when Yoga has been dominant I have been more vulnerable and upset because an in depth yoga practice will for sure bring up stored emotions and memories at some point.
Trauma is something that never goes away. You live with it all of your life and with each person it is different how different things will affect them. When you mix Yoga or Belly Dance with a person you are creating a unique chemistry and that chemistry will differ with another person depending on their experiences and where they are coming from. So when everyone says how Yoga healed them and changed their lives I don't understand it very well. Because I did yoga from a young age and it did not "change my life". All of the traumatic things that happened within my family still happened and all of the traumatic things that happened in my early adulthood still happened. In my experience Yoga is not about "changing my life" or about making myself a better person. It's more about continuing something I learned through solitary Hatha practice in the eighties. To be with myself, with an experience or with another person because even if it's just a stretch it's still a listening to the body wisdom. So whenever I see Yoga being sold as a way of making yourself into a better person or that it should be about more than "stretching" in order for it to be real Yoga and to be more spiritual I don't understand. It seems overly "postured" to me. Of just trying too hard to be " the yogi" and fit into a magnificent awesome box that you don't mind being in because you can do all of these awesome yoga poses within it. I only understand Yoga to be a practice to be actual Yoga if it is without judgement. If people scoff at Yoga for being too on the surface if it is practiced just physically then they would scoff at something as wonderful as Yoga Therapy.
I don't believe that the body can be separated from the emotions at all, ever. So even if a practice is being sold as a practice to get a yoga butt or to lose weight, I may not like that way of selling it, but I know that the body wisdom that is inherent in people will wake up and way "Wait a minute...I want a practice that listens to what I have to say. Not one where one intention for yoga practice is God!" And people will naturally gravitate to what is healthier for them anyway because the body is wise even when it's being led by ignorance. Sooner or later we all wake up and I'm not a fan of yoga teachers who assert their dominance by making their students feel inferior when they talk or write excessively about how the only real yoga has a spiritual component added. And I say this being a fairly spiritual person myself. I don't try to make what I do spiritual. I don't believe that my yoga practice is more real if I add a mantra to a yoga pose or if I do yoga asana every single day. Yoga is not made more real by doing it on front of an image of Ganesh or any other Deity. And I don't consider a person is doing Yoga that is more real after they have read and studied the Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras. Yes, these are part of the history and roots of Yoga but so are other practices that have nothing and everything to do with Yoga Asana. Yoga is Yoga by a persons intent to be present. It isn't more real with a Headstand or amazingly flexible postures and it isn't more real by how often it is uprooting buried emotion. Yoga is something worthy of practice even if it hasn't turned your whole life around for the better. I can't say that practicing Yoga has ever done that for me but I still practice it and I am open to discovery rather than cementing into a tight knit box of rules.
To put anything into an inflexible set of rules cuts off the life and breath of an idea, an experience and or a practice. And without breath there is no growth and no life. To make strict and inflexible rules is to use the excuse of discipline simply for egoistic notions of mastery. And then when we form these ideas and cut off the air to them we set people up as idols and work ourselves towards being idolized which is anything but yoga. Because of this I see no one, including myself, as a "master" of yoga. It's simply a practice to get in touch with our humanity, to humbly see, hear and feel our own limitations and possibilities as well as others with compassion. So yes Yoga is more than a stretch. But it's also great when that's all it is because even when that's all it looks like on the surface it usually amounts to more anyway. It's all good.
People can go years practicing Yoga or Belly Dance as a means for performance and gaining respect but again I believe that the wisdom in our bodies is so strong and inherent that eventually a person practicing in this way will realize that they don't have to practice this way anymore. The simple experience of practicing Belly Dance or Yoga will call to a person subtly to reach for something more. So even if a persons original intentions were only to " be awesome" and to wow the crowd it's likely that the process of dancing or doing yoga will actually speak to them. An experience they did not call on with intent will visit them. Intent creates for a stronger practice no doubt about it. But it's absolutely wonderful that we can trust the wisdom in our bodies to reach out for a greater experience than the one we had originally intended.
In this way I feel that both Yoga and Belly Dance are both very magical whether they alter outside circumstance to perfection or not. I don't expect either practice to do this for me, to change me into someone else to change my life into something perfect. And I would not sell either practice to anyone to create these kind of results. Instead I encourage people to begin or to continue because deep down they need to even if they may not know it yet. I would rather a person discover that they are already awesome, already "The Yogi", already a "Belly Dancer". This rather than desperately trying to manufacture for years the kind of person they think they aren't already, the kind of person who is a "Real Yogi", "Really Spiritual", or a "Real Belly Dancer".
I trust that Yoga is always more than just a stretch and that Belly Dance is more than tricks deep down for everybody so I don't think anyone really needs to be preached to about how they can become more of a "real " anything. All we need to do is to let go of the idea that real is something that someone else discovered. Guidance is wonderful to receive and is needed but it should be the kind of guidance that truly points us towards our center because when we work from there that is the true integrity. Integrity cannot be manufactured by another person for us to simply piggy back onto to gain enlightenment. In that process of letting go of constant self manufacturing we become more real and let go of the self manufacturing process that has become so popular within all kinds of practices.
Yoga and Belly Dance are more than props, tricks, glamour or mystery. We may perceive that yoga and belly dance are a mystery if we haven't grown up practicing it or haven't practiced it for very long because it comes from another country than our own. In our culture though we are brought up to see our country and culture as " the best" we also tend to fetishise and objectify someone or something when we want to lay claim or own " it ". In this way we are attracted to what mystifies us but in that process we further distance ourselves from what taking part in practicing any of these things means. Being in touch with something deeper is a mystery to us because our culture fragments our sense of self. Spirituality and people who are in a stronger connection to the Earth are surrounded by mystery with the way we tend to look at people "over there". But when we do actually drop our cultural notions of what these things are and mean we could find that "they" are not so different than " we". We could find that the state of being which is strengthened by a Yoga or Belly Dance practice is not so mysterious because it's right here and just as real as what is over there and over there is just as real as what as here. And we also could find that maybe we don't have to ascribe mystery to something or someone in order to give value to it. Without mystery we could find that we have even more sense of adventure because we are open to discovery. When we plaster something like Yoga or Belly Dance with mystery we close off our ability to discover and grow because we have already decided what we think we know about it and we tend to not want to know anything more because that would ruin the feeling of mystery and adventure. But as a result we are distanced from what the practice actually is and separated from the roots from which it came.
If there are things that we do not like about our own culture, we should try to understand what we are hoping to discover when we become mystified by another culture and it's customs and it's way of life. We should understand that inherently deep down we were attracted to what a dance form or a yoga practice or to what a way of meditating means because deep down we are wanting to remember something that our own culture has forgotten. Some part of us knows deep down that a particular practice will help us to be in touch with.....something. Something we may not even know we are looking for, something we may have never known but that even so that we remember deep down.
I think it is very sad that a culture would fragment itself so much that it would steal, colonize and appropriate other cultures as well, hold racist views as well as fetishising a culture and it's practices. To keep seeing a country, a culture and practices such as Belly Dance or Yoga as "other" degrades the people and degrades the quality of our practice. Deep down all of us want more than this and I know that deep down we are wanting to reach beyond the experience of mystery and intrigue. I believe that we all can do better and more than a stretch and a wow. That we can try with our western minds to remember what the practices of Yoga and Belly Dance have the potential to teach us. We can remember this easier I think when we can remind ourselves that we perceive these things differently if we did not grow up with them as being part of our lives and or if we did not grow up with them in the culture where they originated where they have a strong history.
In the way that other cultures are viewed it reminds me too much of the way a lot, not all men, but the way a lot of men view women. We all know that a lot of men keep a distance between themselves and a woman to keep that mystery there and so it would be easier to objectify and fetishise a woman than to get to know what she is about. If he knew her too well then it would be more difficult for him to assume responsibility for how he sees her and treats her. It is similar to how our culture tends to view and treat other cultures. As long as a woman or an entire culture is held at arms length while we seek to have some kind of relationship at the same time, then we are not valuing a person or a culture. We are in fact dishonoring them. We act like we know all there is to know about a person or a culture and forget they even existed! Surrounding a person or a culture with mystery and then seeking to own it through whatever act and then forgetting it's existence is dishonor. For a culture to take on a style of dance or yoga without getting to know what it's really about and without committing to it for the long term is wrong. It's arrogant for an entire culture to assume it knows what something from another culture is about when it's only been part of one part of the culture for a century and then to forget and not practice it anymore because it's no longer hip. Women are still seen as primitives and cultures that are not western are seen as primitive and therefore lower on the evolutionary ladder than white men. I see racism, and cultural appropriation as not separate from issues of gender identity.
The idea of how to respect these traditions is very complicated and yet very simple at the same time. Though we have had a taste, we still have a lot to discover on our path to demystifying these traditions and a lot to discover on how to embody what these traditions actually mean to express.
If you read this entire blog entry good for you! It is certainly long and a lot of what I wrote didn't come to me on the yoga mat but just came to me as I was writing. So I didn't expect or intend for this post to be so long winded!
But a lot of what we intend rarely happens that way!
