“The objective of Power Yoga is to strengthen the benevolent and eradicate the malevolent.” ~ Bryan Kest
One of the founding teachers of power yoga is Bryan Kest, a student of Ashtanga Yoga from the age of 14 under the direction of David Williams in Hawaii and K. Pattabhi Jois in India. I attended one of Kest’s weekend workshops and remember him speaking about the name “power yoga.” He whimsically considered whether he should have called it “Grandma Yoga” all those years ago, so that people would have a less confused understanding of the practice.
Sometimes I consider changing the name of my classes, too. For me, power yoga is about cultivating the power to be a bright light. It gives me opportunity to practice the power of choice, making wise decisions that directly effect my own experience and subsequently the experience of those around me. It’s true that the power of physical strength is a core component of the practice, as strength of body fuels our confidence and our sense of agency, as well as our sense of being alive and our ability to thrive. But there’s more to power yoga than that. There are other aspects of the practice that inspire me every time I’m on my mat ~ benevolent, life-giving practices like the power of gentleness, the power of self-compassion, the power of non-attachment, the power of suspending judgement. All of these attributes echo teachings we find in the writings of St. Paul in the Bible, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and the practices of Mindfulness Meditation. In my experience, power yoga offers a safe space for me to practice being Christ-like, to practice sitting in the sacred space of God’s presence, to practice loving myself so that I understand how to love others. The hope, of course, is that I can get up from my yoga mat to care for my husband and children as Christ would, that I can go out into the world serving others as Christ’s hands and feet, and that I can pass through my door carrying the undiminishable torch of Christ’s love everywhere I go.
Do I succeed at this? Occasionally. None of this is easy, which is why the power part is so important. I pray for God’s power every single day, for the Holy Spirit to wash over me and fill me, move me and breathe me. A mat-based power yoga practice helps me to do this, too, this achingly beautiful thing we call prayer. Sometimes I can’t bear the thought of being Christ-like, but I can bear the thought of Christ moving within me. My power yoga practice helps make room for him at the center of my being, and it gives me the space and time to love him with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. Then I’ve nothing left to do but go out into the world and give my best.
This is what it means to practice as the catholic yogi.*
*This is the first essay in the series Identity: Living as the Catholic Yogi
If love is kind, it is not cruel . If love is not jealous, it is content. If love is not pompous, it is humble. If love is not inflated, it sees rightly. If love is not rude, it is enlightened. If love is not self-seeking, it is generous. If love is not quick-tempered, it is tranquil. If love does not brood over injury, it is reparative. If love does not rejoice over wrongdoing, it offers compassion. If love bears all things, it does not turn away. If love believes all things, it does not deny. If love endures all things, it does not cede. If love never fails, it always triumphs.
There are jewels to be found throughout ancient scripture, and in this exploration, we’ll look to both Western and Eastern wisdom traditions. In the Christian tradition, the New Testament offers one approach to love and to loving. When we look in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, a scholar of Jewish law asks Christ, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus says to him in reply, ““What is written in the law? How do you read it?” The scholar responds with what we know as The Greatest Commandment: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus replies to him, “You have answered correctly; do this and you will live” (Luke 10:25-8).
From this quick exchange it seems our purpose on earth is simple, our mission, obvious, and the answer to the question of inheriting eternal life, a short one: love. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.
However, as simple as love appears to be, isn’t it simultaneously complex? What, exactly, is love?
In his first letter to the Corinthians St. Paul articulates clearly and beautifully what love is and what it is not, what love does and what it does not do. And he acknowledges that our actions can be either devoid of love or infused with it. We can serve in bitterness and resentment or in humility and compassion. Even our most helpful of actions can be empty of love, performed in a negative spirit that crushes our own and that of the recipient. St. Paul even goes so far as to proclaim that love is the greatest of all virtues, greater than faith and greater than hope: “Love will remain even when faith has yielded to sight and hope to possession” (USCCB Commentary).
Thankfully we can look to these guidelines and explanations of love to give us a starting point, a kind of pathway forward, but I know how much I stumble and wander about aimlessly, how often I fall and clamber in the dark of my ignorance, for even though I hear the encouragement, “love one another as you love yourself,” it is as if I do not have ears; I still find myself begging to understand how.
The Greatest Commandment, love one another as you love yourself, assumes that we already know how we are to love ourselves.
Zen priest and founder of the Center for Transformative Change, Angel Kyodo Williams, describes love as space: “[Love] is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are — that is love” (OnBeing interview with Krista Tippett).
If love is space, it is not a vacuum; it does not pull all things into itself but expands and allows people to be who they are. Love makes room for the full expression of the human experience. Unfortunately, there have been many times in which I’ve been loveless. I’ve had a habit of pulling all things into myself, making myself the center of the multiverse, sucking the life out of life, leaving no air left to breathe, not even for myself. I have been selfish, prideful, vain, and vacuous, full of disdain, contempt, and self-righteousness, as I suspect most of us have at one time or another. It is a crushing cycle to find oneself in, as it hurts others, as well as ourselves, and on multiple levels.
It’s good to remember that love is not passive; it’s an action. To love is an act of the will; it is to choose, and we can’t make choices without awareness. To be aware is to choose to see rightly, to see ourselves as we really are, without quite so many labels, inherited or created, without stories in which we are always the protagonist; but instead, to choose to see ourselves simply as children of God worthy of love, worthy of forgiveness, by our sheer existence. Awareness can help create this space to see, this space in which we can choose, this space to act in love.
All this takes practice. When we work on our yoga mat to create space in the body for healing, we do so with awareness. When we work on our meditation mat to create space in the mind for choice, we do so with awareness. And when the mind is able to choose, we are able to work in our daily lives to create space in the spirit for loving, ourselves. The hope is that if for a moment we can focus on the newly budding leaf, instead of the tree trunk, perhaps we will be able to notice for even an instant our constant spirit, instead of our changeable thoughts and emotions, and from inside this space, this separation between ourselves and our thought-feelings, we will find compassion for ourselves, for our families, for our friends, and for each person we encounter.
Creating space isn’t easy. It requires openness of mind and heart. This can be unnerving and can seem irrational. As human beings we strive to protect ourselves from the possibility of physical, mental, and emotional harm and to fulfill our basic needs. This is survival mode, and it causes us to lose touch with others and even with our truest selves. As we frantically search and scan our surroundings, our circumstances, we become absorbed with negativity. When this is our baseline functioning, we run the risk of closing in on ourselves, forgetting who we are, and who we are in relation to those around us.
But we can try, little by little we can try to find that necessary spaciousness. What can we practice letting go of to make space for something else, something like welcoming, like embracing? Making space for ourselves, and making space for one another are true acts of love. Even paying close attention is loving, for where we place our attention, there also is our love. Bringing our awareness to the present moment, including the people and events within that moment, and allowing space for the moment to be what it is, is living in love.
Our practice will lead us to the answers. We’ll figure out what needs letting go of through practice, as it is truly our own best teacher. Yoga instructor Bryan Kest speaks of a yoga practice on the mat as being like a mini-day, or a mini-life in which we encounter obstacles and challenges, and we practice being with them with equanimity, so that when we go out into the world we function from this baseline of non-reaction, with gentleness and self-compassion as our default mode. It is only practice that teaches us, only practice that creates in us the capacity to grow in wisdom and expand in love. It is when we retreat, when we hide, when we close in on ourselves through fear that our chests tighten, our hearts constrict, and our capacity for love diminishes. Kyodo Williams encourages us when she says, ” for people who are not monastics, the world is our field of practice.”
So we get on our mat every day; we let go of reactiveness, harsh self-criticisms, vanity, and greed; we start to create space for healing, for choosing, and for seeing rightly. Then we take that spaciousness off of our mat and into the moments, the circumstances of our lives, and we practice some more, and we practice again, and unceasingly, like prayer.
Love is not cruel; it is supportive and humble. Love sees rightly and is enlightened. Love is generous, tranquil, forgiving, compassionate, courageous, honest, eternal, and triumphant.
Love bears all things because love is spacious. When we understand this and put it into practice by giving ourselves the space to be who we are without judgment, we will be able to give this same nonjudgemental space to others. From this place we will hear the encouragement, “Love one another as you love yourself,” and we will know.
Space is ever-expanding. So is love. Love never ends.
As Hatha Yoga practice has grown, blossomed, and spread into hundreds of varieties throughout the West, I find it increasingly more complicated to answer the moderately curious acquaintance when she asks me questions like, “So, what do you think about Hot Yoga?” Or, the even more complicated, “What’s your yoga class like?”
After some bumbling attempts at a coherent, clear, and concise answer in the grocery store, the random text bubble, or the school drop-off line, I’ve decided that in the face of complexity, the simple answer is best: “Hot Yoga’s not for everybody,” and “You’ll have to come to a class and find out!”
While it’s true that no one yoga class or style of yoga works for everybody, it is also true that there is at least one yoga practice that will work for each of us; it just takes some searching and seeking before we find it.
A quick internet search will turn up thousands of websites, articles, and posts regarding new yoga trends, yoga philosophy, the history of yoga in the West, and traditional yogic lineages. As you begin your yoga journey, it is good and wise to attend a variety of classes and workshops in different traditions and with different teachers within those traditions. You will quickly learn what works for you and what doesn’t. You might also find that what works for you during one phase of your life won’t help you during the next.
But the beauty of yoga is that it adapts. We don’t have to bend and twist ourselves to fit the yoga; the yoga can extend and untwist to fit us. So even if you trained and studied in one tradition, that doesn’t preclude you from dipping your toes in the waters of another. When you find what works for you, embrace it. There will be aspects of different styles that speak to us in different ways, and some will stay with us forever, throughout all our transformations. There will be other practices that served us well at one time but not longer fit, and still others that never fit in the first place, and we finally realize we can let them go.
Understanding ourselves is an important part of yogic practice; in Sanskrit it’s called svadhyaya, self-study, and is one of the five niyamas, or observances. However, when we study ourselves mercilessly, it is easy to get caught up in an endless cycle of striving toward an imagined future self, a constant and relentless “self-improvement.” We can easily apply this destructive habit to our yoga practice, or make our yoga practice itself a part of this negative striving. Self-study is important and necessary, but it is not a directive to hold ourselves to unrealistic expectations, on our yoga mat or off. It is a draining way of life to be consistently telling ourselves we can do better, instead of relishing the moments in which we do so very well. We deplete ourselves more and more with each I need to, I should do, and if only I could. We deceive ourselves when we repeat, I’m not good enough, I’ve not done enough, I don’t produce enough, I am not enough.
Instead, reflecting on ourselves positively, or with non-attachment and a suspension of judgement, can uncover our uniqueness. In our yoga practice, this means we give ourselves the freedom to let go of some poses or breathing practices and embrace others, to modify certain postures or theories and experiment with new ones. We never stop being curious, so we never stop learning. If we can do this on our mat, the hope is that we can do this in our lives. We can learn our strengths and our weaknesses so that going out into the world we ask for help when we know we need it, and offer help where we know we can serve. In this way we can be a force for good in the world, giving others the opportunity to love us, and acting on opportunities in which we can love another.
The magnitude of discovering who we are and then actually being ourselves cannot be overstated.
There is an old Hasidic tale that expresses the importance of being who we are, of being who we have been created to be:
When the great, sweet Rabbi Zusia of Hanipol was on his deathbed, his students gathered all around him. The Teacher said to them: When I get to the Next World, I am not afraid if God will ask me, “Zusia, why weren’t you Moses, to lead the people out of this land where Jews are so oppressed and beaten by the people?” I can answer, “I did not have the leadership abilities of a Moses.” And if God asks, “Zusia, why weren’t you Isaiah, reprimanding the people for their sins and urging them to change their ways, to repent?” I could answer, “I did not have the eloquence of Isaiah, the Great Master of powerful and dazzling speech.” And if God should ask, “Zusia, why weren’t you Maimonides, to explain the deeper meaning of Judaism to the philosophers of the world, so they would understand the Jews better and perhaps treat them better?” I can answer, “I did not have the vast intellectual skills of Maimonides.” No, my students, I am not afraid of those questions. What I fear is this: What if God asks me, “Zusia, why weren’t you Zusia?” Then what will I say?
Indeed, God will not ask us, “Why were you not your neighbor or your friend? Why were you not your sister or your grandmother?” So why are we striving to be what we are not, and ignoring all that we are? Why do we hold ourselves to such exacting and incredibly damaging expectations?
If God will ask us, “Why were you not yourself?” then let us study with a tender heart to uncover our truest selves, to seek and to find the yogic lineage that fits us best, even if that means we create a new one, a mosaic that we piece together over a lifetime, a magnanimous collage of all that is benevolent and kind?
My dear friends,
May we offer ourselves the same compassion we offer our friends,
May we love ourselves as we love others,
May we discover and embrace our truest selves, and
May we finally be the person we have been created to be.
Know that my gratitude for your continued dedication to your practice cannot be overestimated. You are an inspiration to me.
for my husband and children as Christ would, that I can go out into the world serving others as Christ’s hands and feet, and that I can pass through my door carrying the undiminishable torch of Christ’s love everywhere I go.
Generous Wisdom | Spacious Heart 