An Idiot's Guide to Yoga

Lessons from the Mat

Ant on the mat

In Psychopolitics the philosopher Byung-Chul Han proposes the idiot as a utopian figure who can resist the present condition of compulsive connectedness. He uses the term idiot in the Ancient Greek sense, idiōtēs [ἰδιώτης]: a private individual who thinks their own thoughts rather than being swayed by public opinion. The idiot, says Han, is liberated from the tyranny of the like because they are “unallied, un-networked, and uninformed.”¹

When it comes to yoga, I am an idiot. I don’t have a regular teacher, don't practice the postures (barring two weeks a year at a retreat), don't follow yogis on social media, and rarely read books about it. But I do hear about it a lot from my wife, a dedicated yogini, and can see the benefits it gives her: equanimity, focus, and strength.

We live in a sick society. So many people are unhappy, unhealthy, and distracted. But the women (and it is usually women) in yoga studios tend to look significantly better than the general population. Now this could be due to what is known as the Swimmer’s Body Illusion, which is where people who are healthy are attracted to yoga rather than yoga making them healthy, but I have personally seen people transformed both physically and in their calmness and clarity.

So why don’t I practice it regularly? Perhaps because I am an idiot in the normal sense. I act against my own interests. I am lazy. I overthink things …

Yoga is a rich seam for linguistic pedants. When we say yoga we generally refer to yogic postures. But the word yoga means to yoke, as you would yoke a chariot to a horse. The horse is our wild mind, the chariot is that which directs it. Anything that helps still the mind can be considered yoga.

The pedant might respond “ok, do you do asana?” Asana is one of the eight limbs defined in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and refers to the postures we typically call yoga. Again, as with yoga, asana doesn’t mean posture but seat. For most of yoga’s history, the purpose of asana was to allow holy men to sit in meditative contemplation without suffering too much.

An ant that didn’t make it. Don’t tell Brian Tomasik!

My first encounter with yoga was from reading the Sivananda Guide. This was pre-YouTube. I would read the instructions, look at the pictures, and then try to copy the poses. It’s crazy that one should try to learn yoga from a book and I soon pulled a muscle in my shoulder. My second encounter was when Rosina Bonsu took a group of her students to Crete and I was taught Ashtanga Yoga, the type of yoga popularised by Sting, Willem Dafoe, and Madonna.

What particularly appealed about Ashtanga Yoga was that it claimed to incorporate the eight limbs of yoga in one vigorous practice. The shala (or practice room) was a heaving mass of sweaty bodies all breathing deeply. Instead of having a teacher at the front leading the class, there is a sequence of postures formulated into a series by Patthabi Jois. The basic idea is that you build up strength and flexibility with increasingly demanding poses. It is like a video game, with each student trying to achieve the next level, with the teacher observing and offering adjustments.

I was besotted and practised every day. There was a feeling that I was learning the incorruptible essence of yoga: thousands of years of wisdom, a time-tested method to bring enlightenment, until a chance encounter with a blog post about the origins of yoga made me a sceptic.

Danish Gymnastics of Niels Bukh

The book that inspired the blog post, Mark Singleton’s The Yoga Body (2010), showed that far from being an ancient practice of holy men, modern yoga was derived from the Danish gymnastics of Niels Bukh and the Swedish exercises of Pehr Ling, which even included the five breath count. Singleton searched for ancient sources of the standing sequence and found nothing. The Yoga Korunta, the ancient text that Krishnamacharya claimed as the source of the sequences was said, by Patthabi Jois, to have been destroyed by ants: the Indian equivalent of the dog ate my homework.

Does it matter if the yoga we do is not ancient? Perhaps not. However, the moment my wrist started aching from too many downward-facing dogs, I had something other than myself to blame. I returned to Crete the next summer with my sore wrists, hoping for a cure. That year I was injured by a teacher who pushed my knee out of alignment. Not good.

“Guruji” Pattabhi Jois

Then came #MeToo and a series of accusations against Jois (who died in 2009). He was seen in videos callously stepping on students and making inappropriate sexualised adjustments. The sense that this was the perfect practice taught by the perfect guru was utterly destroyed.

Kia observing students in the Mountain Shala

Kia Naddermier, whose yoga and pranayama retreat I’ve just attended, offers one possible route out of the impasse. She deconstructs the poses, slows them down, and encourages the student to cultivate their interoception. She uses the Ashtanga sequence as a map that can be explored, not an end in itself. We listen to our breath, follow our intuition, and experiment with bodily sensations. Kia and her assistants help by having a practical understanding of how muscle, bone, ligament and fascia interact. As I wrote last year:

Kia’s teachings may well be timeless truths, but she doesn't claim to be a guru. This is her research. We are invited to inquire along with her and embed as we choose. She asks us to feel how the breath changes with different alignments and to move from the Hara: your centre of gravity and the seat of your gut feelings.

This kind of inquiry is exactly that of the Ancient Greek idiot: the private individual who thinks their own thoughts and feels their own body.

Most of us want a quick fix. We don't want to take responsibility for our well-being. The injuries I've suffered on the yoga mat are a constant reminder of my lack of mindfulness. As one of the retreatants told me over dinner: “Yoga is not about transforming you into something else. It is about becoming who you are.”

1. Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler, (Verso, 2017), p. 82.