I’m currently working through Michael Stone’s book The Inner Tradition of Yoga, a text I’ve chosen for the Pranalife Yoga Teacher Training Module II: Living Yoga reading list. I adore Michael’s writing style and have done meditation work with him in Toronto over the years. He’s deeply intelligent, insightful and well-versed, and as a psychotherapist he’s incredibly attuned to the art of asking poignant questions.

Now halfway through the book, I’m contemplating why people would go through the effort of making this life-altering commitment to align to a yogic philosophy and practice. It’s not always easy. One tends to become aware of a lot of one’s crap previously and conveniently hidden. Blech.

Michael presents the answer yoga offers: Practicing yoga can end our suffering. Yoga tells us that suffering is due to ignorance, misapprehension, fear of death, and a constant clinging to desires or resistance to aversions. If we can shed light on these sources of suffering in our own lives (become ‘enlightened’) then we can liberate ourselves from that cycle of suffering. Sounds pretty good, no?

Becoming enlightened involves a practice of becoming aware of habitual behaviours, detaching from hardened ways of being, and adopting a new perspective on life that encourages us to see the things we previously thought of as permanent (our bodies, our habits, our relationships, ‘the way life is’, etc) as in fact impermanent, always changing, fluid, transient. By the practice of yoga we bring flexibility back to all aspect of ourselves and reintroduce the opportunity for change because we realize that elements of life are actually always changing. 

But moving from old habits to new ones means going through a process of seeing our ignorance, fear, clinging and resistance for what it is. The stories we tell ourselves about why our ways of being are justifiable cease to work. We come to realize that we’re just kind of full of crap. This part can suck.

As a psychotherapist, Michael offers us a helping hand for this stage: Psychotherapists, like yogis, understand that we became who we are because we needed to function in the world before we really learned how. As creatures of habit, we tend to repeat what we’ve already done and thus reinforce the behaviour, so even in the face of new information we tend only to see what we expect and do only what we’ve done before. Yoga calls this samskara - the continual re-grooving of a pattern. Neuropsychology calls it neural patterning - the strengthening of certain neural pathways in the brain, often at the expense of other pathways that atrophy over time without use. The dog you feed grows stronger, if you will.

In other words, I am not inherently broken or bad. I’ve just been using my tools over and over without skill.

And the same goes for you. You are not broken or bad. You have just been using your tools without skill.

This realiziation can have a dramatic effect on how you can interact with yourself should you decide to take this yogic path. As you practice there will be such a strong temptation to be disappointed in some way with the gap you perceive between who you are and who you want to be. Understand this: Who you are (or who you perceive yourself to be) has come about because of genuine misunderstanding and lack of proper information. Don’t let this concept void your responsibility: You need the ability to respond to the change you will encounter. Instead, allow this understanding to help you see yourself with infinite compassion.

You formed most of your perceptions and coping skills as a child, so incredibly ill-equipped and inexperienced in the world. Forgive yourself for your stumbling thus far if it has fallen short of what you would like to be. Start now to let go of habits born of ignorance. Every movement towards compassion you make creates the possibility for liberation - for you, for anyone, for everyone. We all fell short. Exhale and let it go. Inhale and start anew.