It seems I've been talking to people about yoga a fair bit lately. As I mentioned, I'm doing my yoga teacher training at the moment, so go figure, right? Anyway, it struck me as interesting that multiple people in different settings and from different backgrounds came up with the same question:
Why would you go so far to find answers instead of looking where you are? You won't. It's too different from who we are.
I got the same reaction both from Christians and from people of no specified creed (but not practicing Christians, either). This pervading sense that it's wrong somehow for Europeans to go looking at Eastern creeds and belief systems. Unnatural. I've heard it said multiple times that the cultural differences are just too great to make something like Buddhism feasible in a European context and background.
I even heard the same views espoused while watching The White Lotus last night (please no spoilers for the last two episodes).
Now, the first time I heard it said to me, I thought sure, aren't we all the same, more or less? We're all human beings trying to make sense of things, and if someone came up with some good ideas, then would it be so bad to apply them to my own life as a European?
Also, in a way, I got it. After all, the West is awash in pseudo-awakened people who think all that means is mastering a few yoga poses and layering beads around their necks while behaving like scumbags. We have those, too. There is certainly a sense that "our" religion at home, namely Christianity, is passe and silly, balanced with an overwillingness to observe other religions with unwarranted reverence. You'll have noticed the way some Westerners hmmm and ahhh respectfully at singing bowls, talks of vibration and frequency, and mudras. It's often the same people who will sit and chant dutifully in a yoga class who scoff at the old ladies in the back of a church pew as ignorant and brain-washed.
That, indeed, seems strange to me.
So the first time I heard it, I thought what difference does it make? We're all the same anyway, but the more I thought about it, the more I started wondering if it's not a little bit like a shopping experience for us in the West. We're just gonna have what they're having, 'cause we sure know what a mess ours is, right?
Of course, the deeper I got into the whole training thing, the more I came to realize how similar we actually are. Much of what I heard in my training was similar with (if not downright the same as) things I've heard inside my own Catholic family. A lot of views about the world were similar, though of course if you tell either party "that's just the same as the other lot", you won't have a good time.
In the end, you'll find, most genuinely good people are simply trying not to muck everything up.
So I guess I stuck by my initial response in a way. So far, it all seems to be the same. So far, I don't personally feel closer to any one creed, though I understand, the more I live, the importance of ritual, of a shared faith, of belonging to a community.
And I wonder if that doesn't tie into the warnings I received. Don't go looking for a creed in India or China or wherever, it's not for you. And at first I thought, what, because they're so different from us, you mean? But now, I'm wondering if the heart of the problem isn't someplace else, entirely.
It's not that their religion won't work for me. It's that I'll never find my people so far from home.
While yoga is a rising trend across Europe, true Buddhism is not. We do have a lot of pseudo-practicants, as I say, and we do have a lot of people using it as (a very justified) rebellion against the religion they were born in. But that's not real, either. Not to say there's no true Buddhists in Europe, I'm sure there are, but not enough perhaps to create that place of stability, that going inward to center then outward that attending church realizes for most observing religious people.
If it doesn't afford you that community and that access to ritual, can it be enough? And where do you find that community and ritual in a world that doesn't observe them?
It's not what I think. I don't know what I think yet, but I'm trying to guess at why these people think this way and what it may mean for me. I'm at a seeking point in my life and I am thinking more openly about most of the major religions. And from that perspective, I do understand the concern this surge of concern towards my yoga. When I was younger, I would've brushed it off, would've said I can make up my own mind, thank you, and won't be easily influenced. Yet I look at myself and realize I am, in a way, see myself open to the many embodiments of religious practice, grow more aware and more open to the need for ritual and community that is in many ways achieved in organized religion, and I just don't know. But I know better than to wear my soul lightly through this search.
I realize increasingly I'm looking for something. That whatever it is I've had until now is failing to be enough anymore. Maybe that will change. Maybe I will.
