It’s funny how once I start thinking about something, the theme seems to reappear throughout my daily experiences.
Not long after I started working on my last post about the western feminine gender polarity of yoga, I was in a class with Tony Briggs at Turtle Island Yoga in Marin County.
As is often the case, Tony was teaching a very detailed Iyengar-based class that focused on the deconstruction and repetition of a handful of poses. We were building up to a powerful Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I). This lunging, reaching pose also has a heart-opening lift and arch of the spine based in a grounding of the rear leg. Without enough grounding and lift, many people will experience compression and discomfort in the low back while in this pose.
In explaining the energy and lift required, Tony explained that the pose offers a representation of a story in an ancient Vedic text that tells of a warrior, in battle. Lunging forward, he is faced with attack from an enemy soldier, and in his final moments, he reaches forward to pick up a broken cart wheel, and raises it over head with the intention of driving it downward, striking his attacker. At that moment, with pure intent, his heart center is open and vulnerable, and he receives a mortal blow.
Tony was quick to point out that this, among many stories, may make pacifists uncomfortable, and he spoke briefly about his own considerable experience with pacifism. And, he said — to his predominantly female class — some students may feel that they’re too gentle, too “wussy” for the masculine energy required by this pose.
That, he said, is the point. “In yoga, there is no gender. We’re just working with the equipment we were given this time around.”
Namasté.
p.s. In these posts about gender, I have used links to the Yoga Journal pose finder because it’s a useful way of showing the poses. The irony of the site’s very feminine presentation of these poses hasn’t been lost on me.
This is a wonderfully articulate post. And the interesting thing that it brings up for me, and I am a femme lesbian so do not experience what a butch woman would, is that yoga or the ‘appearance’ of it in many circumstances has come to mimic something like SELF Magazine.
As a woman with a history of body image struggles and an eating disorder at a young age, I find it disconcerting that there is an unwritten rule, at least here in Marin, about what you need to look like and wear to yoga. That bodies’ get judged by fellow practioners as well as by teachers in some cases based on the surface appearance. And while I do not experience this as something ‘overt,’ I do feel there are unspoken rules around what is acceptable and those that transgress could be made to feel uncomfortable.
I do not think that Patanjali had the perfect outfit in mind when he composed the Sutras. It could be partially related to the commodification of the practice and that it now has an ‘image’ that is available to the public at large. And this image was mostly created by the straight boys who think yoga should be practiced in tiny white shorts and bras.
Excuse my overgeneralization. But your post made me think about how yoga is represented and how I experience the public practice of it.