The closing sentiment of a recent NY Times article focusing on donation-based yoga brings to mind a question often confronted in the modern philosophy of this discipline: "Who's to say what is yoga?" Two recent books, for example, entertain that question in various ways. One, by Los Angeles-based instructor Max Strom, A Life Worth Breathing, finds the answer in the very thing that is with always: our breath (not to mention a dedicated course of action undertaken in the yogi's daily life).
On the other side of that spectrum is Pierre Bernard, the subject of Robert Love's entertaining and informative work, The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. Bernard is the unrecognized champion of hatha yoga in America, promoting the physical benefits of asana practice even in the face of many popular yogis and movements--Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Vivekananda, the Theosophists--which claimed the physical practice useless. That the "Tantrik" Bernard also happened to be in charge of millions of dollars and high-end cars (for the 1920's), the nation's first fully functioning private airport, a team of baby elephants for his circus, a baseball league based in Nyack, New York, a chemical company that made alcoholic beverages poisonous, and a considerable harem of leotard-sporting millionaire heiresses, all made the self-affirmed, self-appointed mystic a bit questionable in the eyes of society at large.
While most Americans point to the titans of asana practice as the ambassadors of modern yoga, such as BKS Iyengar, Patabhi Jois, TKV Desikachar, and especially Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, Bernard's influence is irrefutable, not only in a cultural sense, but also a philosophical one. Yoga is an adjective that has been conveniently injected into our lives, liberally tailored to fit pre-existing norms. And while it often does help the earnest seeker push past prior expectations and beliefs, the anywhere-it-fits mentality is an unfortunate byproduct of the undisciplined mind.
If yoga does not seem to fit into any perfectly boxed category, that's only because no belief system does. Yoga is not about beliefs, but actions. The root of the practice may be Samadhi, or self-realization, but the field in which this practice is played is the everyday world, and there a clearly delineated lifestyle needs to be undertaken, dictated by the yamas and niyamas.
The yamas, moral observances, are the first limb of Patanjali's eightfold path. They are ahimsa (non-harming; this yama is the center of much debate in the yoga community regarding vegetarianism), satya (truthfulness), asteya (non-stealing), brahmacarya (chastity; another debated one, in that some claim celibacy, others properly guided relationships and not exploiting sex), and aparigraha (greedlessness). The niyamas, self-restraints, are Patanjali's second limb, and involve shauca (purity), samtosha (contentment), tapas (asceticism, or ritual practices), svadhyaya (study), and ishvara-pranidhana (devotion).
As Georg Feuerstein has noted, Patanjali's astha-anga"limbs" should not be understood as a ladder--the first does not lead to the second, and so on--but rather practiced as a circle, in which the yamas and niyamas, as well as the other six (asanas, postures; pranayama, breath control; pratyahara, sensory inhibition; dharana, concentration; dhyana, meditation; Samadhi, ecstasy), are undertaken simultaneously. They embody the yogic practice, and the aim is for the yogi to embody these practices.
There is obviously a lot of wiggle room here, often to the detriment of the practitioner. For a long time, yoga was "transmitted" from teacher to student; the yoga class with twenty, fifty, one hundred students is, like much yoga today, of very recent origin. When a student studied with one teacher for years at a time, the teacher offered handcrafted, personal lessons. As nice as the press by media entities like the Times is, we're talking about something altogether different.
As Joseph Campbell has often remarked, as in his recently released lecture series, A Brief History of World Mythology--specifically, The Function of Mythology--for a mythology to make sense it must be relevant to modern times. When a belief system is focused on the ideas of 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, there will be a neurosis created by the individual subscribing to that ideology. That neurosis becomes cultural, something clear and recognizable in border-demanding, culture-bashing America. Instead of a celebration of nature (external and internal), which the mythological rituals were created for, we focus on separation and exclusivity--today's catch word "terrorism" being applied to everything imaginable.
In his talk, Campbell discussed the seemingly incomparable minds of schizophrenics and yogis. Both involve a turning about of consciousness to the internal world, in which the individual's experiences are processed and understood, before returning to the outward world. Both "swim in the same waters," effectively denoting a form of consciousness, a way of viewing the world. The difference, he claims, is that the schizophrenic drowns while the yogi is able to swim.
So perhaps there exists in this a key for us to turn locks as we grow as individuals and nations: the ability to create a system of ethics and morals that is inclusive of many philosophies and ways of living, which simultaneously keeps us committed to benefiting as many people as possible. Of true importance are our actions, how we relate to one another as human beings, how we relate to the natural world we live in. As Strom writes in his book, "Complaining is usually followed by immediate and prompt inaction," something I can verify by personal experience.
I learned long ago and often the hard way that you cannot please everyone. Yet the discipline of yoga is not about pleasing, but learning--self-understanding, an inner blueprint for the outward structures of the planet we inhabit. The translations of what this means and how exactly it manifests will be spoken in different tongues for as long as we're here, but one thing remains clear: a conversation will always serve us better than a monologue.