Jul

Happy Yoga : Relearning The Joy

Once again I learnt quite a lot from Charat, an indian yoga teacher who never ceased to amaze me and inspire me in my practice. Every time I step into his class I learn something more than just poses. Somehow I feel always humbled and enlightened with his thoughts and insights on life and yoga.

This time, he wanted us to think of the variation in the yoga poses that we take as the action we take to make ourselves happy.

More often than not, people often think of variations of a pose as a lesser pose, in other words, "poorer" or "lesser". To many practitioners, if you do an easier variation, you are weaker and not so good. Don’t blame yourself if you do think that way. Many of us do that.

We think that if we do the easier variation, we are weaker, we are not as good as those who can do the super hard poses. And similarly many of us who can do the "advanced" poses, many times, we feel proud and with time, our egos grow as well. And so much so that our basic yoga poses tend to suffer as a result.

But looking from Charat’s angle, yoga variations are viewed differently. Yoga variations are now ways that we make ourselves happy, our body happy. Why struggle in the hard poses? Why scrunch our faces in torture in the hard poses? Take the variations that we are comfortable with and progress with that. Do yoga with ease, grace and happiness. Yoga when expressed with happiness and grace is truly beautiful and inspiring.