Wednesday, May 30, 2001


recently i took a yoga class where the teacher asked, "who here is a beginner?" since i have only been doing yoga for a year, i definitely consider myself a beginner and i take beginner classes along the mixed level ones every week. today i received an email from someone asking about starting yoga and they asked how hard it was to be a beginner.

how hard is it to be a beginner? i find that a very thought-provoking question. because of course in many ways you are always beginning with your yoga, no matter how many fancy poses you have learned to do. this seems so obvious it must be a truism, right? what i like most about being a beginner is the enthusiasm of it; when yoga seems really exciting and important. that's a lovely feeling certainly worth nurturing, i think. wasn't it e.m. forster who said, "enthusiasm is beautiful?" but enthusiasm is a feeling worn lightly; it doesn't seem to weigh you down. so being a beginner is easy and fun, in my view. it's not hard at all!

sometimes it seems to me that people consider themselves beginners if they don't have a "serious" yoga practice. i'm not sure i know what that is -- i've met yoga teachers, people who've been teaching for several years and who spend hours a day involved in with yoga, but in all honesty and with all due respect, after taking class with them, it seemed like they could just as well been teaching junior-high gym or ballroom dancing. they had no enthusiasm or sense of discovery. do they have a "serious" yoga practice? i might say not, that the curious person who shows up once a week for a month just to try yoga out might actually be more "serious" in an important way!

this reminds me of something erich schiffmann recently wrote:

"the thing I think is especially fabulous about Yoga is that it takes one beyond the fitness-only mentality. the more Yoga you do, the more you experientially understand that it's about the development of religious feeling. religion, remember, means re-linking, coming into the realization of our inseparable oneness with the Infinite. getting fit is more about realizing where/how you fit in, how you are linked with the Oneness, than how long you can stand on your head or how far over you can bend or how physically well-conditioned you are."

in this sense, the open-minded beginner is definitely more serious than you might at first think! even if someone only did yoga five times with an open mind and then went on to experiment with six weeks of charismatic rolfing or whatever, i would say they were serious. an interesting statement from ramakrishna paramahamsa seems a propos here:

"yes, one should courageously follow many sacred paths - practicing every authentic religious discipline, recieving every powerful initiation, enjoying every mystical attitude. yet how few are ready to plunge into the ocean of supreme knowledge.they learn a few phrases and immediatley begin delivering lectures. why? because Mother's Delight is in continuing the game. she does not liberate all the players. the playful Goddess instructs the human mind: 'go forth and experience every possible aspect of manifestation.' can one blame the mind? awareness can be disentangled from conventional, habitual experience only when the Wisdom Mother, through Her ineffable Grace and Attraction, inspires the mind to investigate its own intrinsic nature, which is Her reality."

although ramakrishna's way of life and his experiences seem extreme to most of us nowadays, i don't think this dilutes the wisdom of his insight above, do you?

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