TREE POSE VARIATIONA lot of yogis insist that theirs is the One True
Path. It’s so silly, so tribal. Nothing puts you back
in high school quite like reading the comments
on a yoga blog. It’s a parade of students parrot-
ing their teachers parroting their gurus about the
unique and superior attributes of this particular
style or that one. “Real yogis don’t use mirrors.”
“In yoga there’s no ego.” “You can’t do real yoga
if you aren’t following the yamas and niyamas” (a
yogic analogue to the Ten Commandments).
All these “don’ts” don’t work for me. If you
even scratch at yoga history, if you open a single
book not written by a self-interested guru, you’ll
see that there is no single tradition. Yoga is
varied and vibrant and really, truly weird. There
are militant yogis, mercenary-assassin yogis, and
yogis who chained themselves to rocks for years
practicing austerity. There are plenty of meat-
eaters (to say nothing of urine-drinkers). And
so I have no sympathy for people who denigrate
other styles. I follow many of the yamas and the
niyamas as a way of life—nonviolence, truthful-
ness, self-study—but the fact that I don’t follow
them all doesn’t make my practice less “real.”
This quest for authenticity reflects where we
are right now. We don’t have a deep connection
to tradition, so the idea of ancient knowledge
is tremendously appealing. But a procession of
gurus passing down knowledge from one to the
next through the centuries, and then that get-
ting delivered to you in your Spandex on your
mat on an incense-scented Sunday afternoon—
that’s a pipe dream. Or a marketing tool.
This is not to say that I think yoga should be
an Americanized buffet where each person picks
though the history of yoga and cobbles together
their own style. Form, discipline, unity within
each posture and within an overall practice—
these seem like powerful vital concepts to me. I
don’t want to lose them.