I taught my first chair yoga class last week. Afterwards, one of the students asked, “What kind of yoga was that?!” 😉
I hesitated to answer because it wasn’t yoga at all.
Yoga is a meditative practice intended to quiet our mind and help us distinguish between mind and consciousness. The practice was memorialized in a 200-line poem, “The Yoga Sutras”, by the legendary Patanjali some 3,000 years ago.
What we did in chair “yoga” class was primarily a mix of Chinese Qi Gong and Japanese Karate warm-up exercises intended to maintain/improve the range of motion of our major joints.
The good news is the class was well received, and the students (average age 77) experienced a version of what they were expecting: a seated, low-impact exercise class.
The aspect of Patanjali’s yoga that caught on in the US in the 1960’s was the third of eight “limbs” of the original practice.
Patanjali’s eight-fold prescription for peace of mind can be summarized as follows:
The first and second elements address our behavior, which has the greatest impact on our state of mind (e.g., if we avoid behaving in a manner we’ll regret, we’ll have a clearer, calmer, quieter state of mind going forward).
The third element of Patanjali’s classical yoga practice (now widely referred to generically as “yoga”) simply addresses sitting still and comfortably to facilitate concentration.
Specifically, Patanjali said:
- “The posture for yoga meditation should be steady, stable, motionless, and comfortable.
- The posture should be relaxed and allow attention to merge with endlessness or the infinite.
- From the posture there arises an unassailable, unimpeded freedom from suffering.”
Somehow those three lines of Patanjali’s 200-line yoga sutras have morphed into the ubiquitous exercise classes renowned for downward dog and warrior poses.
Don’t get me wrong; “yoga” is my favorite form of exercise, I just wish it had been called what it is, “asana” [the Sanskrit word referencing the three lines of Patanjali’s poem above] – so that it hadn’t become conflated with Patanjali’s deeply-fulfilling, life-altering holistic practice.
The fourth thru eighth elements of Patanjali’s yoga sutras address breathing (to further quiet the mind) and four progressively subtle levels of meditation.
I love all forms of yoga (well, maybe not hot or goat yoga), and every opportunity to share my passion for something that dramatically changed my life, even if Patanjali wouldn’t understand today’s singular focus and interpretation of his instructions to simply sit still and contemplate infinity.
Allan “Skip” Dowds
skip@rajamarblehead.com
