Greetings Friends!
Over the next couple of weeks, to prepare, for our year-long dive into the yamas and niyamas, we’re going to look at the history of yoga to understand the context within which Patañjali wrote the Yoga Sutras.
Maybe this sounds like the most boring thing ever. ‘History? In a newsletter? If I wanted to learn something boring I’d go back to school’.
I hear you! Why bother learning what happened thousands of years ago when we know that most of what we learn in yoga classes now has been created in the past 150 years.
To explain why I think it’s important, let me tell you a story about another spiritual tradition I’ve been following for most of my life.
(A note: this is a long post, so if you’re reading in email it may be cut of by your email provider. You may wish to scroll to the bottom and click ‘view message in browser’ for an uninterrupted experience.)
Our story begins in year 7 religious education, in a suburban Brisbane primary school in the early nineties…
In Australia in the early nineties, RE, or religious education, in state primary schools was delivered by members of the local churches. And when I say churches, I mean Christian churches. We learned about Judaism only through what was talked about in the Bible, and other religions or spiritual paths were perhaps hinted at in social studies.
Religion meant Christianity, and it meant well-meaning members of our local churches coming in and teaching based on cheaply printed magazines filled with cartoons of bible stories.
At my school, the best RE teacher was Mr Kerr, the youth minister at the local Uniting Church. He only taught grade 7 (at the time, the senior year for primary school) and from about grade 5 onwards you were hanging out to get into Mr Kerr’s RE class because he handed out pen licenses for neat handwriting, which meant you were allowed to fill out your booklet IN PEN, in a world where only pencil was still allowed, even in grade 7.
He also did fun quizzes and surfed and made art in his spare time, so you knew he was the coolest RE teacher.
By grade 7 I was already fascinated by religion and spirituality, and by that I mean that from the age of eight or nine, if there was a choice of what we could do a project on when studying different countries in social studies, mine would always be religion.
I was fascinated by spiritual beliefs, and how they seemed to shape the culture of each country. I loved how they created community and a sense of belonging, and even then felt what they were calling to - the energy of that something greater.
Of course, it had everything to do with being raised in a house where religion was right on the edge of being a taboo topic of discussion. Mum & Dad had been raised Catholic and Dad was pretty mad about the whole experience. Before I was born they’d agreed that their kids wouldn’t be raised in any church tradition.
Which didn’t stop my extended family from showing up at the airport the first time my parents took me to Melbourne and saying ‘Surprise! We’ve organised a baptism! No take backs!’
(An interesting (?) aside: I am the only one of my four siblings to have been baptised, and am the only one to have any interest in religion or spirituality. Coincidence? I wonder!)
But effectively, aside for not eating meat on Good Friday and celebrating Easter and Christmas like the majority of white Australians - with chocolate eggs and Santa Claus - religion played no part in my upbringing.
Friends of ours were religious, and I was always begging to be allowed to go to church to see what it was all about. The few occasions I did, the awe I felt at the tradition, the ceremony, and often - the architecture, filled me up in a way I couldn’t explain at the time.
Which is how I found myself, in grade 7 RE, my head bowed and eyes closed like all the kids around me, fervently making the commitment to be a Christian we were invited to do every so often.
Dear Jesus,
I am sorry for the things I have done wrong in my life. Please forgive me.
Thank you for dying on the cross so that I could be forgiven. I commit myself now to you and living as you would want me to live. Please fill me with your Holy Spirit to guide me.
Amen
From that moment on, I considered myself a Christian. Even though I never went to church, even though I didn’t even own a Bible, ‘Christian’ was a part of my identity and I tried to live my life in accordance with this - as much as I could with my seven years of RE and no other real knowledge about the whole thing.
Mostly I just treated other people the way I would want to be treated - it seemed like this was pretty much the core of what Jesus had to say.
It would be another ten years and many, many choices, actions, relationships and behaviours that were not in alignment with Christianity before I would finally go to church and start seeing what it was really all about.
It was a truly incredible chapter in my life. After years of feeling desperate to belong somewhere, to be cared about and cared for, I found it in the people of the church I attended. I made wonderful friends. I had a chosen family. Elders of the church cooked me meals and prayed for me.
And I thrived. I joined the band, became a pastoral leader, eventually becoming a worship leader and lay preacher. I was right on the verge of commencing study to become a minister when a small voice inside me (god? My inner wisdom? Is there a difference?), told me to wait. More was still to come.
I travelled to Kenya to volunteer, my years of Bible study and practice of ‘Christianity’ in my back pocket and saw how little it all meant in the face of historic, deeply entrenched injustice, poverty and corruption. I saw massive cathedrals being built next to houses made of mud, signs out front calling for people to donate more to complete the building. I walked with starving children. In government office renewing my visa, a small girl smiled at me and I smiled back, playing with her. Her mother took me aside and asked me to take her child back to Australia to give her a better life.
Where was my god in all of this? Where was the Jesus I’d been taught about in my safe, comfortable, middle-class, western church?
I came home mad. The only Jesus I knew during that time was the one who raged through the forecourt of the Temple with a whip, overturning the tables of the money changers. When I preached it was for action. It was to point out all the ways we weren’t living the gospel, all the ways we were falling far short of Jesus teachings.
Unsurprisingly to me now, but devastatingly to me then, my words feel on the deaf ears of the mostly middle-aged and elderly white, middle-class privileged congregation to which I belonged.
They’d been happy to support me to go and ‘do your missionary work’ as they called it (it wasn’t, not by any stretch of the imagination), but they didn’t want to hear about it when I got back, beyond hearing that the money they’d given me had helped.
After a while, they just didn’t want to hear from me anymore. I was disturbing the peace too much. They had hoped that my Kenya trip would be the thing I needed to do in order to just settle down into the life of being a suburban minister. They wanted to go back to planning the yearly church fair & plant sale, and the outreach service to retirement villages and RE classes and the combined Pentecost service and continue to congratulate themselves on what great Christians they were.
And I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d seen it with my own eyes - the god they had taught me didn’t exist in the world beyond the borders of our neighbourhood, and the Jesus they knew wasn’t the one I’d seen.
And the scales had fallen from my eyes and the things I’d glossed over before now became hugely important. The way the church treats women, and LGBTIQ+ people. The church’s silence on institutional sexual violence and treatment of children and other vulnerable people.
And all the questions I’d asked in Bible study and Bible college continued to bubble to the surface - what about the women? There were women in Jesus story, why don’t we know more about them? Why don’t we learn more about them? Jesus says nothing about homosexuality, why does the church make such a big deal about it?
‘Oh it’s the CONTEXT’, my teachers would tell me. ‘Jesus was a product of his time. So of course women weren’t given a seat at the table. Of course he meant that homosexuality was a sin’.
And here, friends, is where we get to the point of the story.
I was taught that Jesus’ context was extremely important to his teaching. You couldn’t understand what he said without understanding why he said it.
Which, as a matter of fact, is true. It’s actually the whole point of this post.
But wouldn’t you know it? It just so happened that the sources of the context that the church used to explain Jesus’ teachings (ie. the Old Testament), happen to agree with all the things that the church approve and disapprove of.
For example:
Female Ministers - Bad
Male leadership - Good
Homosexuality - Bad
Traditional marriage - Good.
And so forth and so on.
This is not an accident. This is by design. The sources the church relies upon to give authority to its teachings were specifically chosen for this purpose.
More importantly the sources which undermine these teachings, which give voice to a more permissive version of christianity, were deliberately excluded.
More on this in a bit.
For years after leaving the church, I continued to believe in Jesus - as a human who had some cool things to say about being a good human - but turned my back on Christianity as a religion.
It was during this time I found yoga, and discovered that no belief in a higher power is necessary in order to find all the things I was looking for - community, belonging, something greater, ethical guidelines. I could find everything I’d ever wanted right here in the meat-sack I call home.
A few years ago something pulled me back to that be-sandalled carpenter from Palestine. I started studying Christian theology again, this time from the outside. Not studying the Bible and its context, but rather the context in which the Bible was created. This meant looking at the books that didn’t make it into the Bible. It meant looking at the first two centuries post-Jesus and seeing all the versions of Christianity that didn’t make it.
Like the Christianity that invited people to create their own families based on shared values and beliefs, regardless of gender identity - queer Christianity.
The Christianity that promoted the voices of women, that allowed them to be leaders and patrons and teachers - feminist Christianity.
The Christianity that was less about church and more about community - socialist Christianity.
The Christianity that reflects the teachings of Jesus outside of the narrow context of the Bible.1
Context matters.
Don’t worry. Here is not where I talk about yoga as a tool to practice Christianity. About all the synchronicities between yoga and Jesus teachings and how effectively it’s all the same thing.
(I could, because it’s true! But I won’t.)
I recognise that many people have a fractured or painful relationship with Christianity, and most others are simply not interested in a religion in whose name countless atrocities have been, and continue to be, committed. (Can I get an amen?)
The point of sharing this part of my history is to give context.
Context to me, and how I came to be a person interested in the teachings of yoga more than the poses of the asana practice.
And context to why I believe understanding the context of what we learn and practice is important.
Because we could simply go to our weekly classes and absorb yoga philosophy through whatever short teaching our teacher is able to offer over the course of a one-hour class.
That would probably begin the cogs turning of understanding the satya, the truth of yoga and perhaps beginning to make changes to align with them.
But the context of our teacher’s teaching is also important. What is their context? What have they learned? What baggage are they bringing along with their teaching? What is their tradition? Are they teaching from a solid foundation of understanding the history and context of yoga? Are they bringing their own interpretation to it?
And we can’t ask or answer any of these questions without our own understanding of yoga’s history & context, without our own framework for understanding the philosophy.
We can and should understand how the context each one of us brings to yoga influences the way we experience it.
I came to yoga as an exile from a tradition that had probably saved my life and which had profoundly harmed me.
This shapes my experience of yoga. I long for experiences of the divine. I chafe at accepting the authority of someone else over my body and beliefs. Asana is the part of yoga I care about least, because the other limbs provide me with everything I’ve been searching for since I was eight years old.
Without understanding this about myself, I wouldn’t realise that notwithstanding my lack of care for it, asana is perhaps the most important part of yoga for me, because it’s the part I most easily push aside. This context allows me to get curious about that pattern, and go deeper into yoga and ultimately, myself.
Over the course of this year we’ll be examining the first two limb’s of Patañjali’s eight limbs of yoga based on the Yoga Sutras. In the western yoga world, the Yoga Sutras are effectively the be-all and end-all of yoga philosophy. Yes we know there was yoga before this, and lots of teaching, but your average 200 hour yoga teacher is going to be relying on the eight limbs to give structure to their teaching.
And there is nothing wrong with this! There’s a reason Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras are the core of yoga teaching two and a half thousand years later. They’re good! The provide structure and clear guidance to what is, ultimately, a very broad set of yogic practices designed for spiritual evolution and self-realisation.
But as little as we know about Patañjali (and it isn’t very much!), we do know he wrote the Yoga Sutras in response to what was going on at the time.
So we need to look at what was going on at the time, and what had happened before, in order to begin to understand why the Yoga Sutras are what they are.
I don’t consider myself an expert on yoga history by any measure. Yoga philosophy too, for that matter.
What I do have is ten years of experience: as a sādhaka - a seeker of liberation2; as a person who has had many and varied vocations and employment which required a talent for research; and as a person who loves to learn and convey that learning to others who are interested.
So that’s what we’ll do here, throughout the year. We will learn together.
What we learn together will be the briefest dip into the pool of knowledge, and probably flawed in some areas. It won’t be the whole story.
But then, it’s not supposed to be.
What we learn together is designed to be a starting point, a springboard, allowing us to dive deeper into our own learning, our own understanding, our own knowing.
What a privilege and a joy to take this journey alongside you. I am grateful.
An invitation
Over the coming week, I invite you to consider your context with yoga.
What brought you to yoga? What was that experience like? What kept you interested? Why do you continue to practice? Who are your teachers? What is their lineage? How much do you know about the origins and philosophy of yoga? Why is that?
I invite you to approach this exercise, and indeed, all the time we spend together over the weeks and months of this year, with a playful and curious heart.
You may have resistance to looking at the context you bring to yoga - maybe it brings up difficult memories, or feelings you’d rather keep buried.
You may turn your nose up at learning the ‘boring’ stuff, or the ‘dry’ stuff, or the stuff beyond what gets you through your practice on the mat or your day or your week.
It’s no problem. You are not wrong or bad for feeling this way.
Like discomfort arising in utkatasana (chair pose), or a persistent thought bubbling up in meditation: Notice it. Allow it to be present. Examine it. There is nothing to change.
See if you can look at it through the lens of curiosity. Of playfulness. Ask questions. Wonder a lot about it. ‘I wonder what this resistance has to teach me?’ ‘I wonder what it would be like to know more about the history of yoga? I wonder what that might change?’
Learning is better in community
Over the course of 2023 as I was completing my 200hr yoga teacher training with The Mindful Yoga School, one of our tasks was to reflect on one of the yamas and niyamas each week.
In fact, this was the inspiration for the ‘curriculum’ for 2024 - writing my reflections each week and reading those of my other teacher trainees was easily one of my favourite parts of the experience.
And the key here is that reading what my fellow trainees wrote was what made it special.
Sure, sitting down to do my own reflections was great and I learned a lot more about myself and each of the philosophies in doing so.
But when I read others’ responses the most wonderful thing happened. I realised I wasn’t alone! That we all struggle with similar things, and even if our specific experience is different, there is always a kernel of something to which we can relate.
When we share our experience and how we have moved through it, others who are at a different stage on their journey can use what we’ve learned to guide them on the path. And we can collaborate to create completely new ideas on how to move through life in alignment.
So my second invitation is to come be in community and share what is coming up for you each week.
Each month I will set up a thread in the Embodiment Yoga chat on Substack for the topic of the month, and invite you to come contribute.
It doesn’t have to be right away, but perhaps you make a note to check back in and post on a Wednesday, after the Caesura email, or on a Friday, after spending a week reflecting.
Come and be seen and held by community, and witness and hold others in their journey. Come learn and be learned from. Come be both student and teacher.
Come be community.
It’s so simple - just click the button and follow the prompts.
Our first thread is titled Connect and is an opportunity to come introduce yourself to your community.🤎
With ever more love,
This Substack is free to all subscribers - an offering from my heart to yours, with love.
However, if you received value from this post and are in a position to contribute, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription of AUD$2.50 per week (billed monthly) to support the creation of this Substack and the community around it.
If you’re interested in reading more about the early Jesus movements, I highly recommend After Jesus Before Christianity. It’s a truly remarkable read, and very accessible, ie, without academic or theological jargon!
I recently claimed this descriptor for myself after reading this lovely piece by Harshada Wagner on his Substack The Big Heart: The Goal of Spiritual Work
There is so much here Erin! My Sunday School upbringing taught me just enough to be dangerous. After a thousand prayers for the grown people in the house to stop fighting I finally realized that I needed to search elsewhere for help. I like the story of Jesus. He seems like a good person and I think there are many like him who have and continue to roam the planet. I don’t think he would want a war started over him and that’s what I like best in my version of the story. Like your parents, I did not send my child to church and ironically he is the most ‘religious’ of all of us! I consider myself spiritual. The book, A World Lit Only By Fire talks a lot about the use of religion to control the masses. It reads like a history book and I have found it useful.
I look forward to studying Yoga Sutras with you. I will dust off my brain from YTT and look deeper with you. I can’t say what brought me to yoga but I have always had the feeling of wanting to ‘do’ yoga since my early teens and that was before classes at the Y or video were invented. I knew if a loft ever opened in my town that I would be taking class there. In 2002 a loft opened and I haven’t looked back. This was a co-op of teachers and a tightly knit community of people. We were lucky to have the space for 12 years and then the building was sold. I’ve taken classes other places but then C hit and I find that I am happiest practicing on my own now. I practice to close the door on the world, to breathe, and to listen to my body and soul. I have a giant infestation of ping pong balls ( in my head) right now so all of this is more difficult than it should be. 😂Thank you so much for all you do. You are loved and greatly appreciated. 💗💗🙏🏼