If you didn't know anything about reading and you saw someone reading a book, you might think reading was just about staring at paper. Similarly, if you didn't know anything about yoga and you saw someone practicing, you might think yoga was just about the poses. The pages are just a medium. The poses are just a vehicle. The process occurring underneath is where the nectar is.
Postural yoga is actually a relatively recent development. Up until a few hundred years ago, there were only basic seated postures. Sun salutes weren’t a thing until the 1930s. An even more recent development is the image of white people doing handstands in yoga pants representing yoga at large. To speak generally, this is what yoga has become in the west. Remedial gymnastics and $150 yoga pants. If you’ve got that, you’ve achieved moksha.
Western yoga’s obsession with image can be disheartening, but it isn’t surprising. The shoe fits. It makes sense in the context of our culture. Egoic preoccupation with image pervades every dimension of our society.
What is the ego? It’s the part of you that’s always measuring and comparing, trying to create and sustain an image of itself. It thrives off of fear. Fear of not being enough. It always needs more. It wants to be anywhere but here. The ego isn’t friends with the present moment.
But the the ego isn’t a concrete thing, it’s a pattern of thinking. I’m too big. I’m too small. I’m worth more than he is. She’s worth more than I am. If only I was there and not here. The constant self referential babble that’s chattering away in our heads, cycling through the same thoughts over and over. It’s madness - it’s all of us. This pattern of thinking informs how we engage with the world.
So it makes sense that the has ego crept its way into how we practice and portray yoga - it’s our conditioned default mode of operation. But what's particularly ironic is that yoga is a practice of self discovery. Of realizing what’s left when you strip away the image. A constant process of deconstruction, observation, acceptance, and learning to love yourself - kryptonite to the ego. But that’s not sexy. That’s not something you can sell.
The practice of yoga has been evolving for thousands of years. Inevitably yoga is going to be taught and practiced differently in the modern western world. That’s not a bad thing. I see it as a necessary and healthy evolution.
But when yoga becomes all about the image - attaining poses, instagram posts, sculpting the perfect ‘yoga body’ - it becomes counterproductive. Not only is it a repurposed yoga, it’s completely contrary to what the philosophy teaches. You can dress it up as some kind of new age spirituality, but really it’s more of the same ego stroking. We end up reinforcing the chains we’re trying to free ourselves from.