I love Instagram and my feed is filled with pictures and videos posted by yoga teachers from across the world. I usually scroll through Instagram whilst sipping my morning pre-yoga coffee. I gasp at the asanas they can do, I sigh at the beautiful locations, but mostly, I listen and learn from the tips and advice that they generously share. These images inspire me before I roll out my mat to begin my own practice.
But I realise that these perfect images of perfect yogis in perfect asanas can also have a negative effect on a practitioner, especially a newbie to yoga. Whenever new students come to my class, I always ask them to just have fun in the first class and not to have any expectations. Despite this, very often, when I speak to them after class, the questions they have are disturbing. When will I become flexible? Why can’t I balance on one leg? How do you do a headstand?
I started practising yoga over a decade ago in a pre-Instagram and pre-selfie world. The result of this was that I had very few expectations of my first yoga class or even of my first month of practising yoga. I was thrilled when I learned the sequence of Surya Namaskar and not overly worried about how I looked while doing it. I was happy to touch my toes with straight legs after a few weeks of practice. I now realise that while Instagram, Facebook and YouTube have done a wonderful job of making yoga more accessible to everyone, there is also an unrealistic image of a yogi that is being established through these images.
I would like to share a few insights that should help students manage their expectations about yoga while still aspiring to slowly and steadily improve their practice.
It’s called a yoga practice. The word practice means “to do something habitually in order to acquire or polish a skill.” It is helpful to approach yoga in the same way that you would begin to learn a musical instrument. In this case, the instrument is the body. You don’t expect to sit at a piano and play even the simplest scale without a few lessons; in the same way, you cannot expect to walk into a yoga class and master a set of asanas in one session. Just as practising a piece of music over and over will help you acquire more skill, so practising an asana over and over will allow you to go deeper into that asana . The problem with Instagram posts is that you don’t see the hours of practice, or the fails, or the days when they had an injury or a cold. There will be more of these days than the Instagram-worthy day that they choose to post.
Real yoga doesn’t happen on a beach against a sunset. It happens at 5 a.m. in a yoga shala or room (if you are lucky) or wedged between a TV and a sofa, or next to a bed. It’s not glamorous and there is no one to ‘like’ your pose, to give you the thumbs up or any sort of acknowledgment. The gift is the practice and nothing else. And this is fine because real yoga is something that happens internally. Perfection in an asana cannot be captured in an image. Perfection is feeling good when in the asana ; it’s being able to breathe deeply with a calm, steady mind.
We are all different. This is a fact. Each person grows to have a different amount of strength, flexibility and stamina. This could be because of lifestyle, eating habits or dimensions of the body. It’s a simple fact that if your arms are long and your legs are short, then it’s easier for you to touch your toes. Sure, a regular practice begins to even out those differences but there will always be an asana that is tough for you and easy for someone else. The reverse is also true. Learning to let go of comparison is as important as achieving a headstand.
It’s unfortunate that we live in a visual world where external beauty is defined and glorified. The hundreds of pictures of lean, zero-fat yogis doing handstands against a beautiful sunset are testimony to this. And again, while I really enjoy and am inspired by these images, it would be nice to acknowledge the other yogis – the mother of four who sticks to her promise to practise half an hour of yoga a day, the older man with stiff hips who religiously tries to work his way into Padmasana , the tired yoga teacher who chooses to do a yin practice today, the menopausal woman who holds Down Dog through a hot flash and the arthritic student who learns to take weight on her hands.
I certainly wouldn’t stop looking at beautiful pictures of handstands against sunsets, but these would be my real heroes in the yoga world.
