Finding a Path After Bikram's

Historical Posting. Originally written on January 29, 2011.
This post was written about nine months after I had graduated from my teacher training program. I was teaching occasionally, and the very force of teaching was stirring things up. The beginning of my own personal practice was arising.

I sit looking at about five linear feet of yoga books, beautifully sorted and presented like personal treasures. Some of these are absolute wonders, full of wisdom. I keep buying these damn things, hoping to absorb what they have to offer.

I know that in the end, it’s all about practice, about making things real for you. “All is coming. Just practice. All is coming.” I believe this is the essence of Pattabhi Jois’s teachings. Just practice, everything will flow from there. There’s only so much book-learning that a person can undertake. I can see why Jnana Yoga is regarded as the most difficult of the paths of yoga (the philosophical or intellectual approach to spiritual evolution).

I read and read and read, and yet only so much sticks and even less comes through in my teachings. Indeed, I simply need to teach more. Teaching has become part of my practice, and I don’t do it often enough. Either that or I’m simply being impatient.

My teaching and my practice are trying to get closer to one another. I’ve relied on the Bikram’s practice for the past seven and a half years, and yet my teachings are outside the rigid framework that Bikram prescribes. I need to bring my practice closer to my teachings. I need to practice what I teach and teach what I practice.

Bikram, as much as I love it, is not my path. I find it too constraining, too limiting, too dogmatic. I’m always struck by how Bikram’s teachers so staunchly defend the man and the practice. There’s so much more to yoga than the rantings of a self-obsessed body-builder. He can only take you so far along the path of Hatha yoga, and then he needs to be abandoned. I have to forge my own path.

Paths at Kripalu, 2011

My own path ... there’s the key. I have to get amazingly good at “Guy Friswell Yoga” before I die. I need to make my practice my own. I’ve been looking out there for my path, for my teacher, when it’s always been right here, with me. The saying is that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”, or some such thing. But perhaps the teacher is me.

This is my life, my practice, my path. I’m the author of this story, the director of this play, and the main character. I will and must keep manifesting this truth.