What If Women Created Yoga?

I’ve been thinking about how men have dominated the planet for the past 200,000 years. Government, religion, education—systems that were created by men—would be different if they had a healthy balance of feminine and masculine influence.

So, I thought it might be fun to think about how yoga would be different if it had been created by ancient female sages. Here’s what I came up with:

• We would do Tadasana with feet hip-width apart.
• The Yoga Sutras would be much longer.
• There would be more comprehensive guidelines for pregnant and menstruating yoginis.
• We’d have time to do asana, pranayama, and meditation daily because some wise woman would have figured out how to do all three at once.
• The West would be filled with masses of men doing Iyengar yoga.
• The serious yoga students would be doing vinyasa-style yoga at a remote school in India with a female guru.

Please, feel free to add to the list.

Removing the Pedestal

Yesterday was the best Valentine’s Day of my life. I spent Friday evening and Saturday at the Washington National Cathedral with over 1,000 spiritually engaged women from all sorts of religious backgrounds.

Elizabeth Lesser opened the day with a message of love and empowerment. As the author of several books and founder of the Omega Institute, Lesser has hob-knobbed with her fair share of spiritual leaders and celebrities. But you know the biggest lesson she’s learned from all that? There is so much disparity between walk and talk.

That may sound depressing, but she went on to explain that it has been vastly empowering to take the “wise” and “smart” ones off the pedestal. She told us that the true power lies within ourselves—that it is up to us to walk the talk in the mundane and intimate tasks of daily life.

Bit by bit, I’ve been noticing this phenomenon specifically in the yoga world. We have created our own yoga celebrities and flock to their workshops with more enthusiasm than we have for our own simple, daily practices, which we can’t find anywhere in the world beyond the borders of our own sticky mats.

I propose that as dedicated yogis we approach our solitary down dogs with as much openness and receptivity as we would approach a private session with the one yogi we place on the highest pedestal in our minds. That is the only place we can find the substance to sustain a lifetime of practice.

I leave you with an Om I managed to capture in the cathedral nave:

Organic Farming of the Self

I just finished listening to the audio version of Light on Life by B.K.S. Iyengar. The most interesting thing he said in the book is that yoga is like organic farming. In yoga and farming it’s easy to label things as good and bad. Open chest—good; collapsed chest—bad. Whole apple—good; apple with a wormhole—bad. But if you think about it, it’s natural for a worm to eat an apple, just like it’s natural for your chest to collapse after sitting at a desk all day.

There is no right and wrong in yoga. We are simply trying to avoid being the apple that is rotted from the inside. That’s why we practice asana daily, explore pranayama, and engage in self-study. We are cultivating ourselves, just like the organic farmer prepares the soil with compost, plants basil next to the tomatoes, and pulls weeds before they have a chance to take root.

Isn’t that a beautiful analogy?