The Crisis of Meaning in Modern Postural Yoga
Three Historical Reckonings, the Deconstructive Attitude, and Reclaiming a Path of Wonder
In recent decades, there has been a global reckoning with the history and politics of yoga. On the one hand, the historical platitudes once pervasively taught in yoga teacher trainings – for example, that yoga is five thousand years old – has given way to the apparently disappointing and deflationary fact that postural yoga is much younger indeed. The fallout from Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body has led at least one well-respected yoga teacher to claim that Singleton should issue a public apology for the arguments he made in his book – namely, that modern postural yoga is largely an innovation of the last hundred years or so. Modern postural yoga, so Singleton’s argument goes, is not completely rooted in Indian history, but rather partly derives from a form of Swedish gymnastics that had been popular at the time of Krishnamacharya and his famous students, Pattabhi Jois and B.K.S. Iyengar. For those who saw their yoga practice as continuous with an ancient past, this historical detail was – in some instances – experienced as a kind of violence. Singleton, for his part, has responded to the various critiques and ad hominem attacks that circulated around his book with an introduction to the Serbian edition of Yoga Body that carefully points out the various ways his detractors have misunderstood his arguments.
The research behind Yoga Body and that of contemporary scholars who have taken up the historical and philological study of yoga has pierced through a kind of pervasive mythology about yoga’s origins – a mythology that, it turns out, was incredibly central to the relationship many practitioners had to their yoga practice. In the place of a mythologized history that emphasized the continuity between modern practice and an ancient past was replaced with a seemingly sober historical account of how modern postural yoga is – just that – modern. Instead of an emphasis placed on continuity, the emphasis was placed on the discontinuity between modern yoga and what came before it. In turn, the perception of a radical disjunction between the present and the past was used to characterize the practices of modern postural yoga as largely inauthentic chimeras of colonization.
As the historical record was being realigned, the guru/śiṣya (teacher/disciple) model of transmission was being overthrown in the wake of evidence that many high-profile spiritual teachers had engaged in various forms of abuse. It turned out that some of the Indian gurus who played such a foundational role in the dissemination of modern yogic teachings used their positions of power in ways that were deeply troubling. Sexual abuse, manipulation and exploitation were revealed to be pervasively present throughout many spiritual communities, and silenced or ignored through the exoticization of the so-called “East.” How those who survived these systemic abuses choose to interpret what happened lives somewhere on the explanatory spectrum between innocuous cultural differences, intentional exploitation, and full-fledged sexual assault. The historical record of modern yoga is being re-written as a result of this knowledge. The emperors of modern yoga’s history have been broadly overthrown. Whether or not these teachers will experience any kind of narrative comeback is unlikely, while the communities they engendered choose to either insularly ignore the accusations or rationalize them as the incomprehensible methods of what is sometimes called the ‘crazy wisdom’ teacher.
A third locus of historical reckoning that is worth mentioning enters under the banner of ‘trauma-informed yoga.’ Somewhat connected to the reckoning around abusive teachers, trauma-informed perspectives suggest broad-ranging implications regarding pedagogical styles, uses of language, and a general orientation of teaching that takes into consideration what may be upsetting – or ‘triggering’ – to a broad range of possible students. To simplify the primary impulse in a way that some may disagree with, trauma-informed yoga wants yoga to be safe for as inclusive a range of students as possible. Along with this increased attention to pedagogical styles that may be considered harmful comes a picture of yoga deeply informed by psychological principles and emerging cultural norms surrounding mental health. Following a historical period of reckless attachment to various dogmas and doctrines about yoga, this newfound inclusive respect for the lived experience of diverse practitioners is surely a mark of progress.
These forms of socio-political and historical reckoning amount to a kind of maturation – perhaps even an ‘awakening’ – with regards to what we are doing when we are practicing yoga. In a sense, the modern yoga world has entered adolescence, a period during which we begin to see that our parents are not divinely perfect, but human; they have flaws, and perhaps have treated us in ways that feel unforgivable. A mark of maturity includes thinking critically about our childhood assumptions and practices, and sometimes coming to terms with paradigms of injustice that we may discover we’ve been unintentionally participating in. As we grow up, we learn to distance ourselves from authority figures who operate in ways that reside outside our newfound ethical framework. And when we lose a faith that we recognize was always blind, we adopt the seemingly mature dispositions of skepticism and cynicism.
However, in our maturation process, I think we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We have mistaken the cultural and organizational mechanisms that disseminated the teachings of yoga with yoga itself; and as our faith has been broken by new historical narratives, acknowledgments of abuse, and mis-informed teaching, we have become stuck in an adolescent preoccupation with dismantling the artifices of our prior delusion. Stuck in a cycle of deconstruction, we lack a theoretical foundation on the basis of which we might build something new that is nonetheless grounded in the profound wisdom of yoga’s ancient past. If childhood is partly characterized by living in a playful fantasy that helps us cope with the violence we largely had no means as yet to escape from, then adolescence might be said to be similarly characterized by an inverse phantasmagoria that posits an ideal state of things on a horizon of futurity that is perpetually out of reach. The loss of innocence and the accompanying recognition that the world and its people are deeply flawed motivates a desire to recover what was lost. But in the process of picking up the pieces of a world broken in our imagination, we can easily get lost in a vision of brokenness, ever-deferring the building of something new to a future moment when every broken piece has been reconciled.
While unquestioned adherence to doctrines about yoga is to be dissolved, we must similarly relinquish dogmas of cynicism. While cynicism might feel like a responsible attitude in the face of widespread disinformation and disillusionment, it is ultimately a contingent existential mood that is limited in its breadth of creative vitality. If it is the aim of deconstructive enterprises to come to terms with unfortunate and uncomfortable truths, then the deconstructive project is incomplete if it fails to direct its interpretive apparatus to the conditions of its own thinking.
This deconstructive attitude is one that falls on the sword of one important contradiction. If it is true, as many deconstructionists claim, that there is no objective truth — and that all truth is culturally contingent — then the truth that there is no objective truth can not itself be objective. If everything is contingent, then the idea that everything is contingent must also be contingent. According to its own logic, if there is no foundation of meaning outside language or culture, then there is no discursive position by means of which one can establish an absolute truth regarding this contingency of things. That is, if language and its cultural expressions are merely an epiphenomenal faculty of human illusion, then there is no ground on which to definitively determine whether or not the idea that there is only human contingency is not itself an illusion.
This tradition of thinking, while useful in helping us think about the ways in which we’ve built a world on the basis of assumptions that have broad-ranging ethical implications, ultimately fails us in silently evoking a metaphysics of anti-metaphysics — a meaning defined by the lack of absolute meaning. To claim that there is no truth or meaning, one has to stand on a ground that is continuous enough to retain the consistency of such a claim. And if one can construct a sense of meaningfulness around a notion that nothing holds any meaning at all, then one has already assumed a foundation of meaning through the meaning assumed by its negation. For the claim that there is no ultimate meaning to function at all, it must be meaningful to the person or persons laying claim to it. And so, in the end, the cynic who adopts the claim that there is no meaning to anything ultimately animates the same impulse that humans have arguably always been impelled by. Human beings rely on meaning as spontaneously as they create meaning, because meaning is a foundational assumption and activity of life — including for those who’s sense of meaning denies the very ground from which it derives any sense at all.
Knowledge systems are like windows, giving us a view of the world that is circumscribed by the framing produced through its conceptual architecture. Within the framework of a single knowledge system, there are plenty of angles from which to position ourselves. We can sit to the left, center, or right of a given window, and construct for ourselves a slightly different view of the outer terrain. But if we extrapolate from one system of knowledge an assumption about the entirety of things, then we are as if assuming that this window is the only one in the house. And if outside this window we only see a beautiful valley with flowers and tall grass, we may understand something real about the earth, but we may never realize that there are mountains, oceans, and forests to discover. And if we become comfortable with our situatedness — our circumscribed view through the window —, a certain existential mood arises. And if we start to feel safe and secure in our vision of things, when other visions are suggested or made available to us, instead of wonder we may experience stress, agitation, and sometimes rage.
In many instances, the ideas we take the most for granted are those in most need of questioning, because so much individual and collective health hinges on the degree to which we are socialized by these assumptions and subconsciously enact the world in accordance with them. The fundamental axiom on which we base a newfound process of affirmation is simple: that life is a great adventure of spirit that, when related to in a more holistic way, has the capacity to nourish and transform nearly every aspect of our lives, and the lives of those around us. This is truly the work of taking yoga “off the mat” – not as the simplistic (albeit important) injunction to “be ethically yogic” in the world, but to embrace even the most seemingly “un-yogic” of life experiences and attitudes as seeds of discovery and self-illumination. In the final analysis, we may discover this disposition as an altogether holistic one, in the sense that every object, every thought, every experience – every crisis, even –, is ripe with the possibility of being harnessed in the service of a great unfolding that ultimately serves the most meaningful and fulfilling opportunity of any human lifetime. This isn’t a commitment that bypasses the challenges of the world, but rather one that recognizes that our ability to cope and respond to those challenges must come from a deeper wellspring of wisdom and understanding. This affirmative attitude of practice that embraces the paradoxical expressions of life is the fertile ground for a new kind of relationship with yoga is one that is animated by a spirit of wonder.
To take up our place in the lineage of visionary yogins and yoginīs, and to pursue the path of wonder, requires an unshakable curiosity and profound courage. Going against the grain of socialization has historically meant that the yoga tradition was a marginal enterprise that very few would feel inspired to seriously pursue. The recent surge of yoga practice and its widespread accessibility in the popular form of modern postural yoga has meant that, with few exceptions, yoga has been shorn of its deepest teachings and domesticated by a cultural status quo that doesn’t accept the metaphysical teachings of yoga. The yoga tradition has been anaesthetized of its spiritual content in order to make it palatable to a capitalist world with no higher values than that of consumption and productivity.
If a modern yoga teacher makes the decision to become intimate with the subtle practices and esoteric wisdom teachings of yoga, and then aim to teach these perspectives alongside her modern postural teaching practice, that teacher may likely lose students. The ones who came to yoga simply to sweat profusely and alleviate some surface-level tension and stress along the way may decide this class no longer works for them. After all, not everyone is ready to plumb the depths of this deep adventure, and being a subtle yoga teacher means continuing to honour the diversity of ways that individuals are situated in their lives.
But if we boil down our teaching to the common denominator of maximal reach and accessibility, then the deeper teachings of yoga will always lose. Our culture is simply not set up to welcome this paradigm – at least not yet. But if gradually, one by one, every yoga teacher who feels called to teach from a foundation of wisdom begins to shift the meaning of their offerings in alignment with yoga’s deeper truth, then eventually this movement of subtle yoga will have a reverberating effect on the entire modern yoga community. What was once marginal will start to be more widely known, and the students who left a yoga class for lack of enough sweat will eventually be replaced by students who yearn for the kinds of insight and benefits that a yogic path to the Self can offer.
Much of this work to build a new community of yoga practitioners and teachers grounded in the deeper teachings of yoga is happening over at Embodied Philosophy’s Sādhana School. If you’re interested in learning more about the curriculum and schedule, go here.