Beyond the Poses: What Yoga Is Really Asking of Us

Yoga is a process of liberation.

The second sutra of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is often translated as, “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.”

I remember attending satsang at my Kripalu Yoga teacher’s house in the 1980s. I was a teenager, and my mind was filled with doubts and questions about life and about myself.

We would meditate and chant and sometimes watch a video of Yogi Amrit Desai. One teaching in particular stayed with me. He described the way we see the world through our own filter, or screen, of perception.

If that screen is painted with suffering or difficulty, then suffering and difficulty are what we are likely to see.

He explained that yoga could help us see beyond that screen, beyond the impressions and patterns, or samskaras, that color our experience of reality.

He was expressing something I had encountered in Patanjali, but through an image my teenage mind could understand. He gave me a glimpse of the teaching in a way I could digest.

Yoga was perceived very differently in the 1980s. It was alternative, a little underground, and certainly not “in vogue.”

And if I am truthful, at that age part of the appeal was that yoga made me feel different. I practiced because it set me apart. There was a part of me that thought doing yoga made me somehow special.

It took many years of practice and life experience for me to understand the irony in that.

Yoga is not ultimately about the postures, the breathing practices, whether we are vegetarian or vegan, how often we meditate, or any of the other outward signs we can collect around the practice.

Any of those things can become part of the very “screen” that distorts our experience and separates us from one another.

If our yoga becomes another way to feel superior, special, or fundamentally different from other people, then we may simply be binding ourselves more tightly to our own samskaras.

I still return to Yogi Desai’s words when I find myself caught in the quagmire of my own mind, and when I look at the many ways yoga has changed here in Pennsylvania and throughout our culture.

The landscape surrounding yoga changes constantly. The marketing changes. The clothing changes. The language changes. What becomes fashionable changes.

But the heart of the practice does not.

Yoga existed long before its modern popularity and will exist long after us. Beneath all the external trappings is a practice of self-discovery, connection, and liberation.

The practice can help loosen the places where fear holds us. It can help us recognize what is constructed, conditioned, or unreal and perhaps reveal something more authentic beneath it.

Our perception of yoga may change, but yoga itself continually calls us back to the same inquiry.

I could not have understood all of this as a teenager sitting in my teacher’s home in the 1980s.

I am still not sure I completely understand it now.

But after decades of practice, I keep returning to that image of the screen.

What am I seeing clearly, and what am I seeing through the accumulated impressions of my own experience? Where has practice helped me become freer, and where have I simply created a new identity to hold onto?

Perhaps that questioning is part of yoga too.

The poses matter. The breath matters. Meditation matters. Philosophy matters.

But none of them is the destination.

If yoga is a practice of liberation, then perhaps its deeper invitation is to see beyond the things we have mistaken for ourselves and, in doing so, recognize a little more clearly what connects us to one another.

By Tina Stroh BA, E-RYT 500

She started Just Plain Yoga in 2003 and has been a student of yoga for over 25 years and teaching for over 20 years.

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