Has Yoga Become a Spectator Sport?
From the day I was reunited with yoga I realized that it was bigger than what I had learned to call, “I or me.” I like to tell people it was a reunion with yoga because I believe subconsciously I had been practicing yoga all my life, but never defined my lifestyle as “yogah chittivritti nirodhah, translation, Yoga is the cessation of movements of the mind.” But said realization was not as easy to embody as most yoga practitioners can attest to.
When I first began yogasana in a group setting I remember being very envious of other practitioner’s capability to achieve certain poses that I still to this day can only dream of. To be honest my “basketball ego” flared up yoga class many times causing my ego to overheat taking control of my feet and guide me out of class to cool off. Now that I look back at Oscar moments, Oscar the Grouch, however I am sure my teachers would they were acts worth of a Oscar Nomination, it was always headstand (heat generating asana) that lit the fire. This attitude began to fill my days outside of my yoga practice and is the reason I have not returned to the basketball court. But, basketball is a spectator sport. It is a sport that I can remember a past time that my father and I shared on a level that will never abandon me.
I share a visceral love for its art and with friends and family enjoy having “sports talk,” watching highlights of the games from the previous night, and looking at pictures of men elevate higher than 10 feet to put a orange sphere into a orange circle. But I don’t get that same feeling with yoga. Yoga has become a personal journey that I can talk about with others and their experiences, but I am the only one able to learn from this body’s experience and understand the philosophy of yoga in order to surrender to all that it has to offer both on and off the mat. And with that understanding I know it is only a morsel of what is to come on during this journey.
Words with Black Yoda 