As the time approached to start my yoga teacher training course I had a lot trepidation. Though the website application had said that all levels of yoga were welcome, I couldn’t suppress the fear that as I lacked the ability to put my foot behind my head I would be holding back the rest of the class. As a fairly competitive person, I often avoided doing things where I knew I would be at the back of the pack, and yoga was not something I thought myself to be good at. Also I only had one item of Lulu Lemon attire, a far cry of the almost required head to toe garb plus accessories to fit in the western world of yoga.

I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into with this training, I had decided to do the course more to have a structured yoga program than to actually become a yoga teacher in the future. For myself I find if I don’t have some type of structure I can very easily become distracted and not get around to do what I’m supposed to be doing (like writing this blog…). Also I figured if my plan was to do yoga and meditation anyways, why not get the yoga teacher training certificate as who knows, maybe one day I would change my mind and want to teach. I would soon find out that I was not alone in my reasoning for doing the teacher training course, the majority of the 12 people in the class were around my level of yoga and didn’t have any immediate plans to start teaching. We all seemed to have a few things in common that may or may not have influenced our decision to give up everything and practice yoga intensively for a month, 1)all but one of us was female, 2)all but three of us were born in the 1980’s, and 3)more than a few of us were at a crossroads in our lives involving recent relationships with the opposite sex.

Yoga in the western world may consist of Lulu Lemon, bending awkwardly, and contemplating how it can be so hard to do something as simple as focus on one’s breath, but we quickly learned that there is so much more to yoga than that, and in fact our yoga teacher performed jaw dropping postures without a stitch of lycra, rather bearing loose fitting cotton clothing. Our days consisted of 1.5 hrs of yoga before breakfast, 4 hours of classroom time covering philosophy, physiology, mantras, another 1.5 hrs of yoga, finishing with 1 hr of meditation. Oddly enough, philosophy would become the favorite of the majority of the class; maybe a function of the absence of religion and philosophy most 80’s western children grow up with or the lack of connection to religion resulting from the wordy and easily misinterpreted teachings of Christianity/Catholicism combined with a very mired  recent past, but we couldn’t get enough of it. We would often be found discussing through meal times the differences between the five pranas or how to apply yamas and niyamas to our daily lives. Conversations in the local cafes between strangers often migrated to these topics, a nice relief to the gossip and complaining that would be heard at a cafe in the western world (I will admit though, after spending 2.5 months in the area I might have gladly welcomed a conversation on Taylor Swift’s latest affairs).

In philosophy class we learned that the word “yoga” actually meant the union and balance of the mind, body, and soul, which could be achieved through practicing the eight limbs of ashtanga yoga. The physical body posture part of yoga we focus on in the western world was actually only one out of these of eight limbs, and it was slightly comical to realize that by having this unbalanced focus on only one of the limbs, we were achieving the opposite of the balance that yoga is meant to be. The practice of yoga consisted of the yamas (ethical practices), niyamas (self discipline and spiritual practices), asanas (postures that we focus on), pranayama (use of breath control), pratyahara (withdrawl of the senses from the outside world to within), dharana (concentration of ones thoughts on a single image or thought), Dhyana (complete awarness without focus), and finally samadhi (a state of merging with the divine and ecstasy).

Each limb is progressively more challenging, beginning with the yamas, similar to the ten commandments including truthfulness (satya), non-stealing (asteya), non-violence (ahimsa), non-hoarding (aparigraph), and living in moderation (brahmacharya), actions we can easily control. The niyamas are slightly more challenging, including purification of the mind and body (shaucha), contentment with ones life (santosha), putting full effort into any task (tapas), study of the self (svadhyaya), and finally complete faith/surrender of self to god (ishvara pranidhana). The third limb, the asanas or postures that often come to mind when we think of yoga, are not used as a tool to get in shape, but are used to focus the mind and bring balance to the physical body, which are skills important in some of the other limbs. The fourth limb is pranayama, the practice of breathing techniques used to clear and balance one’s energetic body as well as focusing the mind similar to the practice of asanas. The fifth limb is pratyahara, which is the concentrated effort of withdrawing ones senses from the external to the internal world, further testing the focus of ones mind gained through asanas and pranayama. The sixth limb is dharana, the complete focus of one’s mind on a single object, sound, or thought and the seventh limb is dhyana which is the complete unfocus of the mind, the state of thoughtlessness and complete awareness we are told to strive for in meditation. The final limb is samadhi, a state of consciousness impossible to describe, a merging with the divine, though the experience is nothing like what will come to mind when you think of merging with the divine, we lack words to describe it accurately. Samadhi is a state rarely achieved, even by those who practice yoga religiously for their whole lives, it requires something referred to as divine grace, better known as pure dumb luck.

The teachers in the course always amazed me at their passion for teaching yoga philosophy. They must have seen hundreds of clueless westerns come through, every month starting from scratch with new students, probably asking all the same questions as the last batch. It was typical of us westerners to think we had even the slightest grasp on yogic concepts by the end of the month course, when our teachers had dedicated their lives to the practice, for them it was a way of life, and for us it was something we scheduled into our day to do. I had to wonder what they truly thought of us westerners, full of ideas of yoga molded by western society and after just a few philosophy classes talking like we knew what was going on, I assume it might be something like this.