Einstein or Monet?

I’ve asked this question in class a few times, but usually y’all can’t answer because you’re balancing on one leg with your left knee over your shoulder and looking behind you… 

Who understood light better, Einstein or Monet?

Now Einstein, he understood the whole wave-particle duality issue.  He figured out how finite energy quanta can be fixed in a point of space, worked out the speed of light in space.  I mean, the guy knew his light.  He had the equations, the formulae…he had the c-squared working.  Monet, on the other hand, never bothered with what light is…he just wanted to know how it works.  I think we’d all agree that he figured it out.  Monet learned how light reflects off of different surfaces, how it shimmers and draws out color, the tricks it plays.  Scientists are now figuring out quantitatively what guys like Monet intuited – how your eye and your brain process light.  How light feels, for lack of a better descriptor. 

So who understood it better?  The fact that this question can be so easily argued from both sides is illustrative of the concept behind manydoors yoga.  Every so often, I come across a student or a teacher who believes in the one true yoga.  There’s often a sense of fundamentalism about it – my yoga is the only path to enlightenment.  My guru is the one true guru.  Mine is right and yours is wrong.  If you aren’t coming to yoga with intention X or intention Y then you shouldn’t bother.  I even had one bozo tell a class I was in that you can’t say you’re doing yoga until you’ve mastered fifteen specific poses. 

It just makes no sense to me.  The great thing about yoga is that you can start anywhere.  You want to practice ‘cause Madonna or Sting do and you think they’re cool?  Fine.  You want to do it because you just read the Ramayana and you know the poses are named after some of the characters?  Ok.  You want a tighter butt?  You want to go because your attractive neighbor goes?  You want enlightenment?  You want better concentration?  Better breathing?  Rehabbing an injury?  Need time away from your kids?  FINE.  The thing about yoga is, the reason you show up is kind of irrelevant because of the way it works.

Where you start is almost never where you end.  Yoga is just so dynamic, confronting, and comprehensive that it’s almost impossible to not be exposed to more than you bargained for.  If you show up because you want to tone your body, you’re still going to get exposed to better breathing, to meditation or if not, at least to concentration.  You’re going to see changes outside of the ones that brought you in there and then you face the choice that all yoga students eventually face:  the red pill or the blue pill.  I’ve got students of mine who have come for years just for the workout.  Along the way, they’ve improved their breathing, they’ve improved their concentration, they’ve learned how to disassociate hard work in the body from strain and stress in the mind.  They’ve learned to pay more attention to what’s going on in their bodies.  They’ve learned to cultivate a bit of calmness in chaotic situations.  All that is just gravy, though.  They’re there to sweat and get stronger.  I don’t understand why that’s worthy of ridicule. 

I’ve got other students who use their practice to get closer to God, and they define God in many different ways.  For them, the physical work is a tool.  It’s about getting the body to help quiet the mind, and using the quiet mind to contemplate the divine.  That’s not worthy of ridicule either, whether you believe in their god or any god.  Don’t you think?

Others come for any number of other reasons.  Sometimes I know what they are and sometimes I don’t.  If I know, and I can provide some support to that goal, I will.  If I don’t, I just try to offer a place for them to explore it.  Some will tell me that this approach isn’t teaching yoga.  That I need to confront students in their comfort zones, push them to new levels, drive them down the well-trodden path to enlightenment. 

In yoga there are a number of stories about how the student begins down the path, goes through trials and tribulations, and ends up back where he started but with a new appreciation for his place.  Coming home again.  Basically, the story is that what you’re looking for outside you already have inside, but you need to go through the journey in order to discover it.  That makes me think about the “one true path” as well.  The message is that I’m looking for something I already have.  If I lose my car keys, I’m not going to walk in a straight line through the house and out the door and down the block until I find them.  I’m going to walk around, try different places, different approaches, circle back maybe and make sure I didn’t overlook them.

So one man’s advice.  Don’t get too hung up on someone else’s path.  Support them.  If you have some good advice from personal experience, maybe you offer it.  But this divisiveness, this elitism, it just doesn’t seem to me that it serves anyone.