Radikal Freedom Yoga as realisation

“Practice your mistakes and you’ll get really good at them.”

We have a real problem of development arising from the misunderstanding of the purpose of yoga practice that is prevalent in the modern world.

Development: the psychological and emotional growth of a yogin. This development is a consistent growth through a deepening of both awareness and one’s perspective. This deepening of perspective, the place we are looking from, is what leads us to realisation of consciousness. For realised consciousness to naturally arise then the activities of the self-construct have to be curtailed and made transparent.

Understanding the self-construct is a really crucial aspect of the living philosophy of yoga. Putting this living philosophy into practice in daily life is essential as only this will test the quality of your insight and realisation.

Practice leads to realisation.

The ancient devisers of yogic practice methods really understood the developmental problems of a human being.

To circumvent these developmental dead-ends, preparatory methods of practice were set up to curtail the egoic tendencies of the practitioner. Within the cultural context of their times, they created the means to assist clear development.

Those methods have to be translated into contemporary understanding relevant to the modern context for them to still be effective. Given this contextual translation, then yogic practices can still serve to contain and thus liberate ego from its sad and unhappy illusion of being separate.

(I will come back in later blogs to look in depth at these methods. The purpose of this piece is simply to identify the problem.)

The masquerade

Much modern yoga practice has become devoid of any real containment of ego energy. This is largely due to the absence of two key components.

• Real engagement with the preparatory practices that are methods of ego containment.
• The absence of realized teachers.

Indeed modern yoga can easily become just another means to aggrandize one’s ego. In studios across the world we see people bending and stretching seeking mostly a fit and funky body; people seeking well-being only for themselves and forgetting the prime basics of yoga.

Yoga has become a way of preening the ego, grooming one’s sense of self and just feeling good, about me.

The I, the Me, and the Mine dominate modern life and easily dominate modern yoga practice.

• I become the sort of person who practices yoga
• The I is now just a yoga-practising I
• The me is now all about pure and healthy diet, wellbeing and how well I can ‘do yoga’.
• I now compare myself to others who I perceive as yogins; Can I bend more or less? Am I more or less enlightened than them?

• The mine is obvious in my practice, my studio, my teacher, my yoga friends, my mantra, my realization, my, my, my.

Yes, this is visible isn’t it? It is happening yes? We see the capacity to fold into shapes, put one part of anatomy on another become of crucial import. We see people sitting still cultivating generosity, feeling good on the inside then be mean and unkind to others. We can see folk ranking themselves according to their physical capacity, and teachers lauded for their flexibility and capacity to do funky moves. The least important aspects of practice have become the most important.

Are we brave enough to also see this happening inside of ourselves? Maybe we can see it clearly and smile at ourselves? Maybe it is still wrapped in shadows of delusion? But it’s here, isn’t it?

Until the point of full awakening we will engage in comparison, judgments, critical views and selfishness.

Being honest about our shadow is a key aspect of practice.

Truthing; speaking truth with kindness is a key preparation for practicing asana, a key preparation for training the mind and a key preparation for developing the realizations that allow us to step beyond ego.

To cure the condition, first we have to identify the disease.

What is the disease?

It is yoga practice that has devolved to become mere competitive narcissism. It is yoga practice that has become a tool for aggrandizing ego and not dissolving it.

(Next week’s blog: Realisation Practice  or How do we cure this disease?)