After class today, a yoga student and I were discussing the different ways that yoga is currently presented. He’s experienced classes where the teaching came across as shallow… insubstantial. I think I understood what he meant, but it made me think about my own teaching approach.
So much of what yoga teachers present involves the doing of asanas. I’m one of those teachers. Ninety percent of what I ask the students to do involves physical exercise. This could be seen as working only on a superficial level, and yoga, as we know, is a deep subject. Maybe some who come to my classes get the idea that what we’re doing only goes skin deep, but I do mean to convey more of the fullness of yoga.
I reflect often on the question: what is yoga? Sometimes I have an intuitive answer, sometimes none at all, and sometimes what comes up is the textbook definition. What the various pundits have said, and what the newbie teachers might profess.
What yoga is to me is not a foregone conclusion. Teaching would be so easy then. When I teach, I have to be in touch with as much of the breadth and depth of yoga as I understand now and transmit that through the physical poses. What I have learned comes from my yoga practices, from my daily activities and from how I relate to people.
It’s a big circle, I can see it now. I do my thing, digest the experience, and then it comes out in relationship to others, for instance in yoga class. That’s ‘what is yoga’ for the time being.

“What if our religion was each other?
If our practice was our life?
If prayer, our words?
What if the temple was the earth?
If forests were our church?
If holy water-the rivers, lakes, and oceans.
What if meditation was our relationships?
If the Teacher was self-knowledge?
If love was the centre of our being?”
~ Ganga White