Submission and Yoga Practice
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 6 years before Feb 13, 2017
MiBeloved 6 years ago
Willingness to practice yoga is directly connected to the willingness to be a small-time nobody.
For the practice of yoga, it will be necessary to submit to someone who is advanced. It is not that the teacher needs honor and superiority. The process of learning itself, with or without a teacher, requires submission. Even in cases where a person discovered yoga techniques without the presence of a physical teacher, that person has to submit to the revelation or inspiration, in order to be empowered to utilize it.
For genuine submission one has to be willing to take a student’s posture and it does not end at some point in the future, since as one advances one has to submit for higher instructions either from the same teacher or from others.
Many who come to study yoga do not want to submit to a teacher. They have the notion that yoga is a process which is free from the need for student submission. But actually this in incorrect.
When I was studying the use of computers and their related publishing software, I did not have a physical teacher. I used books written by teachers. I learned in that way. But still even though no teacher was physically present, I had to submit.
neil 6 years ago
This is very true what you say Michael. But I would like to add that it is also important to submit to one's self - the body and the mind. So many people are attached to their body and their mind, these two things are who they think they are. I find that it is very difficult for many people to become free from this attachment and to simply let their self go during yoga practice. I mention almost in every class to move with complete freedom from the controlling mind and just let the body move on its own with the breath. "Let the body and the breath become one" I often say, but still after over ten years they continue to struggle with the supreme union of body and breath. I also thought that many of my yoga students would be interested in a meditation practice but I find this is not the case. They seem to want to come to yoga just for the stretching and what little exercise it may give them. It may sound like I am complaining and maybe I am but this is what I am observing in the people who come to yoga classes. I also see this in many classes taught elsewhere by other yoga teachers, some of whom are well renowned. There are a few yoga students who are interested in the adventure of joining themselves with a higher self but not many.
