Why you won't be taught classical yoga in our fitness clubs

Yoga in 90 minutes

Yoga for pregnant women, fat burning yoga, yoga for body shaping, yoga for a firm butt, yoga therapy, yoga for increasing IQ, yoga … Sorry, it's hard to stop. All these phenomena can be combined under one name - "yoga in Russia".

If you ask the average visitor to a yoga center why he does yoga, he will answer something like: "To keep the body and mind healthy", "For self-development", "To cope with stress." Or find some other excuse. And on the whole, he will be right: it was with this message that Indian spirituality was popularized, which swept over Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yoga centers began to grow like mushrooms after the rain, and the population of Orthodox Russia, who had become puffed up by the eastern curiosity, suddenly began to sing in chorus "Om, Shanti, Om", crossing their legs on glamorous thermoplastic rugs. After all, lotuses are beautiful.

To become a yoga teacher, it is enough to overcome a month's course of study: to become familiar with the Sanskrit alphabet and master the pranayama course for dummies.

After that, you can safely go to teach people, the lack of experience is unlikely to confuse the employer. Indeed, one should not invite an Indian guru when the demand for spiritual training services almost exceeds the supply.

Yoga centers are places where people without a teacher's certificate meet someone with a certificate. There they study the tip of their nose, chant words they do not understand, and do gymnastics. After the session, spiritually grown and attained inner balance, they are sent to the outside world, full of problems, stresses and factors destroying the achieved harmony. To repeat the cycle later.

In the USSR, there was an effective analogue of yoga. It was called charging. And he relieved stress effectively, and improved health, and harmony in life after exercise appeared. Some are even practicing now.

Read the classics, gentlemen

Why all this jerky pathos? The original teaching of yoga and those practices that have developed in Russia and in the West and are proudly called hatha yoga are two different things. Of course, it shouldn't be absolutized. Surely there will be isolated cases in which the teacher is trying to correctly place accents and convey an original idea to the public.

Classical yoga is the philosophical school of Ancient India. Her teachings are based on the Yoga Sutras of the sage Patanjali. Hatha Yoga is a late formation, but it is a continuation of the tradition of classical yoga. Hatha is really focused more on working with the body, but its theoretical positions do not contradict the original teaching, but are based on it. It is the lack of knowledge of the theory in the West, as well as its distortion, that make the very practice of yoga meaningless.

Serious philosophical questions are raised in the text of the Yoga Sutras. The world, in accordance with the teachings of Patanjali, is the result of the union of purusha (consciousness) and prakriti (nature). Consciousness is inactive, passive, but, speaking metaphorically, it is pure light. Nature is dynamic, but it works like an automatic mechanism. Their contact is described as the union of the blind and the legless: only together can they be realized.

The problem with the universe is that the purusha begins to identify with prakriti. He takes her manifestations for his own.

We believe that our body, thoughts, will, emotions are an unconditional part of our "I". However, it is not.

Consciousness is not a person. Neither physical things nor mental phenomena have anything to do with consciousness. It is pure light, a spotlight that illuminates what is happening on stage.

The task of a person in this situation is to recognize his non-identity with body and mind. They don't matter at all. These are crutches that you need to use to come to your "I".

Notice how much this is at odds with what is taught in yoga schools that cultivate the Western value of "a healthy mind in a healthy body." For a sage who has achieved the goal of classical yoga, it does not matter whether his body is healthy or unhealthy, whether it suffers from depression or whether it is happy, whether fat build-ups hang from his barrels or not, because there is no depression, no pain, not even fat in the mind no.

Imagine the sea at night. Waves shake the water, which is why the moon starts to move, reflected in it. But the reflection is not the moon itself, which is motionless and eternally calm. Similarly, a person takes the vibrations of the mind for the vibrations of his "I". The goal of yoga is to discover the self-sufficiency of the purusha, its complete independence from prakriti. That is, from fat on the sides. Why get rid of it if neither the flanks nor the fat are yours?

Through hardships to yoga

Thus, the goal of yoga is to attain absolute knowledge. In the text itself, Patanjali lists the elements of yoga practice, the main of which are the three stages of concentration. Asanas (postures) and breathing practices, which form the core of Hatha Yoga, are referred to as aids. These are only the first steps towards the ultimate goal.

Yes, in the process of practice, a person will feel positive psychophysical changes. However, this is only a side effect. It is impossible to practice yoga for the purpose of improving health. This is a complete perversion of the meaning of philosophical teaching. The means here becomes the goal. What should be abandoned here needs to be improved and developed. It’s like buying a chess set to use the board to light the stove and hang the pieces on the tree as decoration. Or go to Harvard University, then get a job as a janitor at McDonald's.

Yoga is not a path to healing and not even a path of spiritual development. It is generally about something else, and to understand this other, you need a certain intellectual effort.

Yoga originated in a completely different culture and religious tradition, built on different values. When elements of one tradition fall into a foreign cultural field, they immediately adapt to local standards of thinking, fit into familiar patterns. And, quite possibly, this is not bad. Still, yoga somehow helps pregnant women, clears the nasal passages, improves the figure. The only problem is that due to the widespread distortion of ideas, it becomes extremely difficult to find the way to real teaching.

Classical yoga can be practiced anywhere and anytime. To do this, you do not need a rug, or a person with a certificate, or a subscription to a special institution. Walking down the street and focusing on your consciousness, thinking about it, you will be closer to the yogic ideal than standing on your head in a stumbling lamb posture with an instructor controlling you.

Another question is how much you need this correspondence.

Classical yoga is the coolest life hack, it gives a solution to all problems, absolute knowledge and happiness.

But the price for it may seem too high to Westerners. You will have to sacrifice your ego and completely rework the value system.

In this article, I have very briefly outlined the teachings of yoga. If you are interested in the original teachings of classical yoga, I advise you to start with the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali with commentary by Vyasa.