yoga teacher

no need for comfort

In this episode of the Received Wisdom series, I want to talk about a particular moment. It was with a yoga teacher, the first time I was in India. I went to the Shivananda yoga Ashram at Nayar Dam in Kerala, as soon as I arrived in India. I felt that a good dose of yoga was the place to start when it came to immersing myself in India.

And there, during the yoga classes, everyone was using a yoga mat, except for me. The area we practised the yoga was covered with bamboo mats anyway. It was perfectly adequate. I could see how we use a yoga mat as a sort of comfort blanket. We claim our territory with it. And it's home for the time of the yoga.

I felt it was not necessary. Until, that is, the day came when we were to do a head stand. I had never done a yoga headstand before, and I felt the whole body weight pressing down on my head, on this thin bamboo mat: it's going to be painful. So I folded my headscarf into a little pad and placed it on the ground. But just as I was about to place my head on this padding, the yoga teacher whipped it away.

I paused for a moment, and looked straight into her eyes. Nothing was said, but the message was clear. "You don't need it. 

You don't need that extra comfort."

So I did the head stand on the bamboo mat without my comfort blanket. And it was fine, of course.

I recount this little episode because, although it seems tiny, for me it did somehow sum up my own spiritual path. It's not one of taking the comfortable option. It's strange, in many ways, I live my life exactly as I want to, doing whatever I want. And yet, in another sense, that's often not the comfortable thing to do. I'm often sleeping rough outside, walking instead of taking motorised transport. In some ways, my life is often rather rugged.

And for me, I see this is of significance, especially on the spiritual journey, It's all too easy in life to take the comfortable option. It's so tempting. And in spirituality, the most comfortable thing is to avoid it completely. Don't even go there. Just numb out with TV and alcohol.

But if we do engage in a spiritual journey, there's another comfortable option that many people take. That is to find a guru and become their disciple. It's great. You've shifted all the burden onto the guru. They're going to do the work for you.

Well, you can go so far with such a tactic, but really it's the comfortable option. And there's a deep difficulty with comfort. Comfort is non-changing. The urge towards comfort is the urge towards more of the same. We don't test ourself. We don't go to the boundary. We don't go to places we fear. We don't go to the uncomfortable parts of our being.

So when we take the comfortable option, usually we're just avoiding something. And that avoidance means we don't deepen. We don't deepen into our being.

And in the end, taking that comfortable option stops us from realising our deepest potential. And somehow all of this was summed up in that little moment with a yoga teacher all those years ago. My path is one without a comfort blanket.