The Vanity of Yoga

There are many, many benefits to doing yoga. All frequently reported on. You know, it's relaxing, helps reduce stress, and teaches mindfulness, strengthens and lengthens the muscles, improves balance, sharpens mental focus. Blah blah blah blah. You've probably heard it all before. There's even scientific articles to back up these claims. I don't really need science to tell me these things are true. I have practiced enough yoga to have, at the very least, scratched the surface of these benefits. They are usually evident and apparent to me- but to anyone else, that's another question. Especially to people who have recently entered my life. For all they know, I've always been this way (I'm not even sure myself what "this way" is). While I like to think I'm a good hearted, kind and compassionate person, I'm also a sarcastic and dry person. That being the case, maybe it's hard for others to exactly tell that I truly am an emotionally intelligent and aware person. Thus intellectually, perhaps, it's difficult to see my inner Buddha shining through. Really, would the Buddha drop the "f" word as much as I do? Or claim to hate things, like Uggs? Though I believe in the force, I claim to be a Buddha not.

 Do people really beleive yoga will change their lives? Especially people who know nothing about it, mainly those people that think it's all physical. So what then, if these more esoteric benefits of yoga are not so evident, brings new people to a yoga practice?

Vanity. And I think that's a fine place to start. But I don't really hear most people admitting that this has anything to do with their yoga practice. These articles speaking about the benefits of yoga, rare that they mention people like doing yoga because it sculpts their bodies and that makes them feel good. Beauty is only skin deep- there's more to it than that. By the time you get Madonna arms, you have probably reached a place where you realize there's so much more to yoga than that.

Remember Madonna arms? Sure she had a personal trainer, but she practiced Ashtanga yoga, a practice with about a gazillion Chaturangas, to get herself back into better physical condition after having a baby.  Adam Levine indicated he picked up yoga for the physical benefits.

I am not really sure why I started doing yoga, except that my lovely friend became a yoga teacher and started teaching us, her victims friends, Bikram yoga in her dining room. (Frani if you ever read this, I am totally just kidding about the victims part. It's just my cheeky nature to make such insinuations. Honestly, I have you to credit with my foundation of yoga. Who knows if I would have ever developed a practice without your disciplined and skilled guidance. Or your commanding nature and smoking hot body to challenge my edge and inspire me.) I'm not sure vanity brought me to yoga, I just didn't know any better. I figured if Frani and Madonna and countless other people in the city of Seattle, and world over were doing it, it must be worthwhile.  But at points along the journey, it, vanity, has inspired me to stick with it. I am, for the most part, not one who has ever been caught up in body image. I may have put on an extra few pounds in my 20's and out growing some favorite jeans may have been a bit disheartening ( it was totally the dryer that shrunk them). Even so, to a certain degree, I continue to be motivated by vanity.  But I believe vanity has a place at the crossroads of mind and body. For example, having incredible physical control. Like the kind necessary for piking into a hand stand. Or the pick up jump back. These movements are so much more tangible than say having more mental peace. Or the ultimate, reaching enlightenment. What does enlightenment even look like? And if you don't know what it looks like, how can you visualize that goal and make it happen? But then you realize you're doing things you would never have thought possible, because you visualized them with your MIND, and at some point decided it was possible. And now your physical BODY is carrying out the movement, the action. What was once challenging and difficult, and seemingly out of reach, is effortless. Wow.

The mental strength is seemingly much more slow to develop, because it's difficult to watch. If someone you see every day loses 10 pounds in a year. You won't really notice. But if you see that person at the start of their weight loss then again at the end, the difference will likely be obvious- though subtle. I think the mental strength and peace that evolves with a yoga practice is like that. It's such a slow development, that it's not something you take note of daily. Not at first anyway. I don't remember the moment I had this sort of mind / body connection revelation. It was probably at least two years into my Bikram practice when I realized staying in a 110 degree room filled with the humidity of sweaty people flinging their bodily fluids on you with each change of posture required little more than mental stamina for the average able bodied person. Then I started to realize that if I didn't practice, I did not feel as good. I did not deal with stress as well, I had never experienced another outlet that offered the same catharsis.

So now, 8+ years into my journey down the road of yoga, I understand asana as a step, a limb, one of 7 others that culminate in one final limb. The limb of enlightenment. The physical practice has taught me more about the more subtle mental practice than any book ever has. The books just put it into words I would likely not have found on my own. I mean, I'm just not a great writer, in case you didn't notice, but it's likely you noticed if you're still reading. So thanks, thanks for reading anyway. And thanks to the friend that aspires to have arms like mine. Your compliments make me feel good about the time and effort I put into my practice, but more importantly inspired me to reflect on and articulate (albeit clumsily) the place vanity has in yoga. If nothing else just click on the Adam Levine link to see him naked.

Now I'm going to go meditate on freeing myself from the maya, the illusion of myself, and letting go of my attachment to sculpted arms. Namaste.