We Cannot “Do” Yoga

No matter how hard we try.

Photo by Katee Lue on Unsplash

Have you ever heard someone say they do yoga? Or maybe you are that someone. My hand is in the air. Consider me that person until I studied yoga. It was easy to join an online training programme to learn how to become an instructor, not to teach yoga to others, but to educate myself. I wanted to become more aware of the impact yoga can have. I loosely knew it was an ancient practice; what I didn’t count on was spending the first couple months with a gaping mouth.

I thought yoga was thousands of years old. Actually, let me go back a couple of steps. In my ignorance or is it naivety, I thought yoga was a bunch of poses you do to get flexible and put yourself in some Zen state. While this is true to some extent, what shocked me the most is that asana practise has been around for less than one hundred years.

Honestly, I thought that the poses that made up asana practice were centuries, if not millennia, old. Can you imagine my disbelief? I felt strange. I felt slightly robbed that I had completely fabricated the truth I had in my head. It was an assumption I had made; I hadn’t read it somewhere; I wasn’t told it. I had merely assumed that yoga is an age-old practice. And it is.