What are the voices of your yoga?

When I was a high school English teacher, I was endlessly interested in helping students develop voice in their writing. To cultivate and express voice in writing, the “sound” of your words on the page, you must first have a sense of yourself. Voice comes, in large part, from understanding your own truth and nuances.

In the past week, I have been thinking about the voice of my yoga. How do I use my yoga to discover and connect with my truth and to help me share that truth with the world? What voice do I express with my yoga poses? And how do I even know what the voice of my yoga is?

An advanced yoga practice is defined less by our ability to get into difficult poses than by the skill to feel subtleties in our alignment and make refinements as well as by a deeply mindful approach to oneself and others. Similarly, the voice of one’s yoga is defined more by how we respond to ourselves (and others) than by the actual states and abilities of our physical bodies. For example, if I am presented with physical tightness and shakiness when I come to my mat, then that is what I have to work with, but the voice of my yoga does not have to be tight and shaky. I can align with consciousness and be accepting and compassionate with myself in my tightness, and therefore express a graceful, fluid voice. (It is also likely that if I am graceful, soft, and accepting with myself that my body will open more and become less tight as I practice.) On a day when my physical postures are wobbly and unbalanced, I can allow myself space to be shaky, thus creating a steady, compassionate voice out of my yoga, regardless of the actual steadiness of my posture.

Amy Goodman, host of the popular radio show Democracy Now!, says that it is the role of a journalist is “to go to where the silence is and say something.” I think that is the role of the yogi and yogini to go into the silence within, align with the greater consciousness, and then offer what we find there through our poses and through the way that we live our lives.

Shadow Voices

As a student of Tantric philosophy and a shadowwork practitioner, I do not believe that yoga is only about acknowledging and expressing the sweet, kind, and pretty parts of ourselves. I believe that yoga gives us an opportunity to look at and be with our shadows, too.

The shadow is a concept from Jungian psychology that refers to the parts of our personality that we hide from others, and often from ourselves. Through the process of acculturation, we learn to put forward the parts of ourselves that we have deemed are acceptable and push into shadow those that we have learned are not. Many of us push anger, shameful relationships with money, and feelings of unworthiness into shadow. But it is also common to deny our leadership, our gold, or our joy. Perhaps we were told that nice girls don’t laugh very hard, or we are afraid of being too big or too loud. . .

In order to be whole people living full lives, we need to reclaim our shadows — to go into them, to acknowledge them, to honor them, and to find appropriate ways to give them voice. I believe that yoga can help us do that. For example, if I am feeling anger when I come to my yoga mat, rather than pushing the feeling away (MYTH: real yogis and yoginis are blissful creatures who never feel anger), I can stay present to that feeling as I practice. I can be curious about it and notice how it feels in my body, and notice my thoughts. I can use the fiery energy of the anger to do poses that require strength and tapas (or tapasya, meaning “heat” or “essential energy”) such as handstands, arm balances and backbends.

Usually, when I stay present to my anger without pushing it away, I am able to, in time, see beneath it. I usually find fear or sadness underneath it, and then my yoga is to stay present to these feelings, too — to be curious about them, to notice how they feel in my body, and to stay open to whatever insights I might have into them.

The grand purpose of yoga is Citananda. Cit means “universal consciousness” and ananda means “bliss” or “pure delight.” We practice yoga to know ourselves, to align with the universal, and for the sheer delight of being alive. However, consciousness is not always ethereal and pretty. Some of the deepest experiences of consciousness can come from journeying into our shadows and exploring that dark, rich, and very fertile terrain. And delight does not mean all smiles and peace, though hopefully a regular practice of yoga will produce more of both of these. But I believe that we are meant to delight in life, and that means all of it. I certainly do not take pleasure in suffering (though I can see the potential for some interesting shadow exploration there as well), but I do delight in the very experience of being alive — amd the whole spectrum of emotions that come with that. Embodiment is messy. It is the joys and the bliss. And it is also the scraped knuckles, the scars, and the tears.

And yoga can help us go into all of it. To go into the silence and listen to the voices of our shadows, to align with universal consciousness, and to make mindful choices about how to express our authentic, whole, beautiful, and graceful voices through our yoga poses and in our lives.