The Sacredness of Boundaries and the Yoga Love Affair

I lost myself in the ritual and when it was over, found myself alone once again.

Part of the allure of a yoga class is similar to that of dancing with friends in a crowded club, it is the ecstasy of a flow state saturated with non-verbal communication that is affirming, stabilizing and energizing.  I’m not talking about a slow, precise, Iyengar inspired alignment class that fixates on adjusting minute aspects of joints to be within centimeters of elusive perfection.  I’m referring to a class in which there’s loud rhythmic music and a harmonic blend of postural guidance and esoteric symbolism flowing out of the teacher’s lips. In this class the proximity to other students is surprisingly intoxicating.  Why am I enjoying this so much?  It’s because it isn’t really a class, it is a ceremony that delivers a direct experience of otherwise abstract ideas about the illusory self and the unifying power of spiritual reality.  In this ceremony I am sprinting up mountain peaks and then soaring weightless through the air into the valleys below, I am in one moment placid at the bottom of the ocean and in the next being thrown back onto the shore by a powerful wave.  It’s as though my body has remembered its elemental origin and I am beginning to harness the forces of fire, water, earth, air and ether.

But when the ceremony is over there is no chance that the teacher’s reminder to take the lessons of this practice out into the world is going to change how let down that I feel for having to exit it.

I think many yoga practitioners in today’s western world have had a similar experience to this and that it is in part because modern day postural yoga in the west has a boundaries problem.  If you look at the way in which yoga has been taken up in the west from a 3,000 foot view then it is obvious to see that there are vast cultural disparities between India, yoga’s country of origin, and the western countries.  A point I’d like to focus on in this post is that the cultural context in which yoga originally emerged has an entirely different relationship to “sacredness” than we do in the modern western world.  Here in the U.S. in 2024 I perceive there to be a sort of “implied sacredness” which we come across in certain areas of life.  This “implied sacredness” emerges from a reversal in order from the traditional way in which a sense of sacredness tends to be conveyed.  For example, the traditional way of denoting sacredness would be for a community to build a church somewhere centrally located and with the intention that anyone who entered it would immediately know that it was a sacred space. This would make it more natural for the church to host members of the community in ceremony and facilitate their having a spiritual experience.  The intention to provide this quality to the church would have been built into the designs, the construction, the decoration and truly every aspect of its journey into creation. This same deliberate attitude permeates traditional cultures and enables there to be clear ways to indicate the physical and temporal locations of sacred spaces.

In contrast, it seems to be the case today in the west that sacred experiences happen somewhat randomly and not always, or even often, within the confines of spaces and times which are designated as “sacred.”  One might describe a transcendent moment while listening to a song in their car, the bliss of a cool rain shower that cuts through the heat of a summer day or the sweetness of holding an infant for the first time.  Experiences such as these are not housed within a formal sacred context yet nevertheless they are sacred and inform the way in which sacredness is thought of.  I will go even further to say that many of us are less likely to experience something sacred within a house of worship due to the negative associations that we have of churches, mosques, synagogues etc…

The reason that spontaneous and non-contrived experiences of sacredness are relevant to modern postural yoga has to do with the way in which yoga studios have become semi-sacred spaces for the communities in which they are situated.  Studios have done this in part by drawing from the innate desire within most people for a spiritual connection, yet also by positioning themselves such that they are not situated within a formally religious context.  Furthermore, the yoga ceremony affords practitioners an experience of sacredness within their own bodies which can promote a sort of spiritual autonomy that is highly attractive given our cultural suspicion of organized religion.  It is obvious to me that there is a deep and inherent positive quality to the sacralizing activity of a yoga ceremony, however after years of leading and participating in yoga ceremonies, it also has become clear to me that this process is not without its hazards.

Despite the fact that the canon of yoga philosophy contains some of the deepest and most sophisticated teachings on psychology and spirituality that the world has ever produced, yoga in our modern western context has not sufficiently married that philosophy in a pragmatic way to the experiential ceremony (aka yoga classes).  This is certainly not for lack of effort on the part of many forward thinking and intellectually astute yogis such as those involved with organizations like Embodied Philosophy and Yogic Studies (just to name a couple).  I could not put my finger on any one or even a basket of reasons why there is such a noticeable and problematic disparity between the popularity of yoga practice and that of yoga philosophy.  However regardless of the reason, the consequence is that many yoga practitioners are finding themselves bewildered by the transcendent experiences they are having.

This leads me to the idea of “The Yoga Love Affair”

A pattern which I see and am too often painfully affected by is the yoga love affair.  A truly transcendent yoga ceremony is a beautiful experience that may rock the very foundations of one’s sense of self and is not entirely unlike falling in love.  Not only does yoga provide the opportunity for its practitioners to experience this type of ceremony, the philosophical writings that bolster the practice provide an ample intellectual foundation in which to contextualize such a potentially disruptive experience such that the practitioner can indeed draw inspiration from it in order to positively impact their lives.  

This phenomena, in the yogic terms of the gunas, might be characterized as such:

• The practitioner, prior to finding yoga, is tamasic.  They are solid, firm, stuck in their ways and unable to generate a shift.

• The physical yogic ceremony is rajasic, it fires them up and places them within a powerful stream of transformative energy.

• The philosophy that is woven into the ceremony and remains as poignant in the practitioner’s mind afterwards is sattvic, it helps them to contextualize the transformative experience such that they begin seeing the world in terms of the revelation within the ceremony.  The philosophy also helps guide them towards a healthy and balanced relationship to their practice and to their teacher.

These three elements are interdependent and as the reader can probably already begin to see, serious issues which may begin to emerge if the third element is missing or is too anemic to have real impact (as I believe to often be the case). There may be cultural reasons why the philosophical strand of the braid is insufficient in modern western yoga contexts, yet with good reason or without, the consequences of the insufficiency is deeply problematic.

Proposing some Solutions

I’d like to turn to some ideas from Buddhism to propose three possible solutions to the shadow side of the “yoga love affair,” and specifically to the three jewels:

Buddha - The Awakened Being

Dharma - The Teachings

Sangha - The Community

The Buddha in this case does not have to be a highly developed yogi coming down from a Himalayan cave, it can simply be a good-hearted yoga teacher who has spent enough time working on him or herself to be helpful in offering some guidance.  It is the relationship to that teacher which is most essential because it becomes a context for spiritual growth.

The Dharma is the technical substance of the yoga practice, meaning the postures, breathing, sequencing, concentration practices etc…  This also does not have to be an obscure, thousand year old treatise from ancient India, it simply has to be an effective methodology.

The Sangha is a group of fellow students who are co-participants in the ceremonial and philosophical process of spiritual growth.  I’d like to emphasize here that friendship is the most spiritual form of connection that I can think of.

The last suggestion I’ll offer for yoga practitioners is to adopt a personal practice in which to microcosmically embody all three of the jewels.  Discover the inner Buddha by tapping into embodied, intuitive wisdom.  Unveil the technical qualities of posture, movement and attention that are latent within yourself.  Be good company to yourself, learn to be encouraging and forgiving, the way you would to a close friend.

There is a way out of the yoga love affair, I’m looking for it just like you are.  Let’s find it together.