How can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

A fascinating conversation with a long-time student and friend yielded the following contemplation:  What is the purpose of cultivating diversity in asana practice, apart from impressing your friends and intimidating your enemies?  L-TS&F was pondering why they [apologies for the third person plural, but there we have it] felt naturally drawn to certain families of poses and not to others, and wanted to know whether the overall intention of Anusara Yoga was the most well-rounded practice possible.

See, this is one of those conversations that seems pretty simple on the surface and then the bottom drops out.  I pictured the Anusara Syllabus poster in my mind, which is basically a Mandarin All-You-Can-Eat Buffet of yoga asana and so of course I’m thinking right off the bat, Yes, the overall intention of Anusara Yoga is the most well-rounded asana practice possible.  Sounds good, right?  A part of your nutritious breakfast.  Philosophically speaking, we are taught that it is through diversity and expanded experience that the Divine comes to know itself better, and by creating more forms, we create more consecrated expansion of the Supreme Spirit.  Phew.  Not bad for a morning’s work.

Then we get into it and they say, Well, if that’s so, why do I experience resistance to certain poses or groups of poses, and why do I delight in others?  Should I be choking down these other forms because they’ll be good for me [the Broccoli Theory of yoga] even though they make me not want to practice, or bum me out?  They told me that they used to be “up for anything”:  that is, the novelty of their practice ensured that there was a little adventurous spark and receptivity in every single class, and now that their sensitivity and self-honouring was increasing it was becoming more and more challenging to acknowledge the good in classes that favoured these less-pleasant poses.  Sure, they could window-dress it in the dowdy frumpiness of classical philosophy:  discipline and mindfulness and all that other bushwa, but if they honestly addressed their inner condition [which presumably a seeker is being asked to do], it wasn’t the same and it wasn’t pleasant.

At the time I think I babbled some more about creative-diversity-through-form and some anatomical stuff, viz. if you keep practicing the same families of poses over and over again, those parts of you will get stronger and the other parts, maybe the parts that NEED more attention [since you don't want to do the Broccoli Poses] get abandoned.  That seemed like a good solid yoga teacher thing to say.  I realized going home, though, that I actually had just tarted up the Broccoli Theory in softer tones:  I was still basically saying that the inner prompting needed to be squelched, in honour of some external abstract criteria.

The next phase of my contemplation took me back in time, remembering all the times that I thought I knew what yoga was all about and that I didn’t actually agree with most of it.  Turned out that in a way I was right [although of course I was overly hostile and feisty about it all]:  maybe we WEREN’T being taught in a relevant way that reflected our current realities, maybe we were stuck with the impossible task of transcending the body while still in the body, using the body….wait, what?  how is that supposed to work?  If I’d trusted those inner impulses, calmed down about them, and used them in a creative and positive way, maybe I would have been able to create a shift both in my own heart and also in those around me.  Instead, I perceived the status quo as being rigid and unchanging, and mad at me to boot.

So if L-TS&F just stopped taking their medicine, and did what they wanted to do, what would happen?  Would they drift towards imbalance and extremity?  Would they give up practice entirely without the Ghosts of Practices Past dogging their steps?  If you eat what you want for dinner, and what you want is pizza, and then the next day you ask yourself what you want and you still want pizza, and this happens for two weeks or so, will you become morbidly obese?  Or will you one day wake up craving sushi?  If you believe that relaxing the strictures on your behaviour [either in diet or in practice] would result in catastrophic results and entropy, what does that say about your self-esteem?  Or, to put it another way, do you trust your body to make good decisions or is it a burdensome, goopy albatross that you are constantly concerned with caring for and feeding?

I really didn’t realize how little I trusted my body and my intuition until I started thinking about this question.  Sure, we’re told to “listen to our bodies” but when our bodies come up with unsexy answers we say, “Thanks anyway, bod…you’ll have this salad and like it!”  And culturally we are most definitely not encouraged to honour circadian rhythms [weather, sleep, menstruation &c. ] because how we participate in the world is linear and we get Monotheistic Suffering Points for sucking up our intuition and doing stuff we don’t like [e.g. taking Contac-C non-drowsy to slug through a day's work, contaminating everyone you see, because to legitimately stay home sick you have to have lupus, or people start thinking you're not a Team Player].  In fact, even typing this seems edgy and weird because isn’t it just common knowledge that this skin-bag needs constant vigilance and policing, a balanced diet, a diverse asana practice, or otherwise we would simply dissolve into hedonistic anarchy?  How Freudian/Hobbesian of me.

Instead, howsabout a recognition that our TRUE nature will take us towards an elegant balance that is unforced and born of delight?  Who knows why we are drawn to certain forms and not always to others?  I know that when I bang out as many backbends as I really want to do [and there are a lot!] then arm balancing seems natural and sweet, instead of choking them down.  I used to define my delight in backbending in a negative way, that I was “too organic” i.e. lazy and fat, and had to artificially create balance with these other poses because I was a good l’il yogi.  Now I know that backbends are actually the perfect thing for me, both philosophically and physically, and MY BODY KNEW IT.  I wanted what I wanted for a reason, and don’t need to torque those reasons into some semblance of pious virtue.  One of the great McInnis snacks is pickles and cheese.  Not very trendy, is it?  Not very Downtown.  When I went veg the first time around I fell in with some neo-macrobiotic insanity that eschewed pickles and cheese and I thought to myself, “Well, this seems so challenging and bizarre it MUST be doing me some good” and therefore pickles and cheese were off the table for *years*.  Imagine my surprise and chagrine when, years later, various health practitioners recommended probiotics:  commonly found in [hell's bells!] pickles and cheese.  Why do we second-guess our own natures?

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