A Case for a Hot Practice, exploring a yoga trend.

I was speaking with one of the new teacher trainees at the studio recently, asking how her first day of teacher training went.  Her reply deeply resonated with me, bringing me back to my first days encountering the sheer size of the yoga tradition.  She said, "I have just realized how very little I know about yoga".

Oh yes, the realization of how vast yoga really is.  How very little, especially as westerners whose exposure to practice has been primarily asana practice in a studio setting, we know about the tradition of yoga can be overwhelming, exciting, terrifying all at once.  Especially if you've just decided to undertake the role of teaching  this ancient tradition.  How can one possibly learn to teach all of THIS?

And even to this day, I'm struck with the occasional yogic existential crisis. "Am I teaching yoga? Can you even teach yoga?  Am I teaching a fitness class? Am I offering authenticity? Am I being driven by ego to fill this darn space with bodies? Am I even a yogi?"

The classes I have found myself most driven to teach are classes that encourage students to meet their edges, to practice on the periphery of comfort.  One could say I teach fitness or stretching, because,  I do.  I primarily teach vinyasa, hot yoga & yin.  These styles of yoga are currently filling classes, they are trendy, and offer the students a "brand".  Something that allows the student a pretty good idea of what they are getting into before they head to class.

And hot yoga is the trendiest of them all.  Something about a ridiculously hot room, lots of skin, lots of sweat, a challenging vinyasa practice, and a dimly lit room is vastly appealing to yoga practitioners.

But, is this yoga?  Is this "real" authentic yoga?

Well, according to this website - no, it isn't.  I'm willing to admit, in the most traditional sense of the practice,  hot yoga is not real yoga.  Modern consumer culture likes to co-opt traditional spiritual practice.  We dumb it down, and take out bits and pieces that resonate to make something that is marketable, and then sell it as something authentic.  Hot yoga is very much the result of this practice.

One of my favorite quotes from Sharon Gannon, co-founder of the Jivamukti School of yoga has become part of the foundation of my own practice as well as my teaching.  Allowing me to find authenticity amidst the "brand" we currently teach as yoga.

"You cannot do yoga.  Yoga is your natural state.  What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state."

And this is how I reconcile teaching trendy/marketable yoga classes.  I teach my students to look for moments of presence, moments of connection, moments on the edge, moments of humility, and moments of pure joy and then to look at where they are limiting or resisting those moments as well.

Those moments certainly exist within a hot class.  Hot yoga connects the yogi with a profound experience of the senses.  It is difficult to ignore how you feel when you are practising postures in +38 degrees C.  And that connection with the sensory world may be what draws people back to hot yoga classes again & again.   For, it's that very connection that is missing in our modern lives.  We have disconnected with the natural world, and we are becoming fatter, sicker, and depressed because of it.

In a recent  post, "A plea for the body", the Exuberant Animal blog explores the modern human body and how we have disconnected with our natural state, with the sensory world, and have begun to use devices to participate in the world around us.  This is one of those must read blog posts for anyone interested in health & wellness.

Just as cars and chairs cripple our bodies through muscular disuse and atrophy, so too do electronic devices cripple our senses. So-called “smart phones” act as prosthetic devices for the healthy nervous system, leading to sensory atrophy. Just as muscles degenerate with disuse, so too do our primal powers of observation, sight, hearing and touch. Only a couple of generations ago, almost every human on the planet was physically engaged. Today, only athletes, dancers and blue-collar workers experience the world with their bodies. In the space of a few decades, we have gone from being robust, physical animals to disembodied observers, digital voyeurs and data miners.

 Our minds & our bodies are still primal.  We crave the experiences of the sensory world, we crave being on the edge, we crave experiences that unite us with our bodies & the world around us.  Hot yoga provides us with this very real experience but in a safe, controlled & fun way.  It is not a replacement for being in nature and connecting with the earth.  But, it can be a little oasis in our technologically enhanced lives that brings us back into our body & mind in a very obvious way.

It seems that humans have long recognized the value of heat & sweating.  Ritualized ceremonial practices involving sweating are practised cross culturally in Native North American, Baltic, Eastern European and Scandinavian cultures.  The extremity of the sweat is a spiritual practice.  I certainly would never be so bold as to equate my hot yoga class to a ceremonial practice of sweating, but I think that there is clearly precedence in our history of intentionally seeking this experience.  It feels good, it feels cleansing, and in the end we feel rejuvinated.

One thing worth mentioning is the claim that hot yoga detoxifies the body.  After researching the topic a little bit, I've concluded that there is little proof of this claim.  Yes, the skin is an organ and we do remove toxins from our bloodstream through the skin.  There is little evidence that this process is accelerated by increased sweating.  However, yoga in general, can improve lymphatic flow which assists the liver & kidneys in removing toxins from the body through urine & feces.

Given the above reasons why we are drawn to, or may find value in practising yoga in the heat - one might say that the "cleanse" we gain from our practice could be more of an emotional or spiritual nature.  As practitioners, we innately feel this and continue to be drawn back to that sweaty mat, over and over again.  Because, at some point during our hot practice we might find ourselves profoundly in the experience.  Where we are fully immersed in the sensory world, where the everyday chatter of the mind stills, and it's just the breath, the body and our experience of those things.  Perhaps, that moment, is yoga.

And if that moment is yoga (union), then one would have to reason that even the trendiest of yoga classes offers the potential of providing students with an experience of oneness.  In the end, knowing very little about the tradition of yoga is okay if you come to the mat to explore, to practice, and to learn where you are resisting your natural state of oneness. Maybe every once in a while, you'll get a peek at the yoga you hold within.

Doesn't seem quite so overwhelming after all.