Q: What makes Yoga Spirals Traditional Vinyasa different?

A: Ashtanga Yoga is a method of self knowledge that includes a system of breathing and movements linked together. We teach this system, along with the remaining limbs of yoga that are often left out of yoga classes.

While nearly all yoga practiced today came from the teachings of the great Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989), much of what is currently taught in yoga classes across America is missing key aspects of the practice that are important for the overall development of the practitioner. In observation of this aggressively shallow style of yoga, some traditional Indian teachers have referred to the American style of yoga as “the circus”.

Yoga dates back thousands of years to a culture of people who practiced the art of living in balance with nature, and within themselves. The original yogis developed yoga as a way to bring harmony to life. This is why yoga is so perfect and beneficial to people of western material culture, but if we do not practice it in authentic ways, we can lead ourselves into samsara, a repetitive cycle of addictive imbalance.

Today, many of those teaching yoga in the USA have no formal training in traditional yoga and do not have a source of yogic knowledge within a real lineage of yoga practice. While they often have the best intentions, they are teaching yoga on a very superficial level that can actually be more harmful than helpful.

As many modern yoga teachers lack depth of understanding and experience of yoga philosophy, many American yoga teachers default to include aspects of some Brahmanist religious customs in their teaching, while yoga is of non-Aryan, non Brahmanist origin, with its philosophical foundation being in the ancient tradition of Samkhya. Finding a yoga school that teaches authentic yoga practices while understanding its philosophy is rare. There are consequences to following a system of yoga without roots in the proven, rational, and well researched ancient traditions. Many great yogis of history rebelled against the caste system; some giving their lives to preserve the teachings of yoga. The philosophy and practice of yoga has always defied the caste system, and the rigidly patriarchal society of the Brahmanist traditions that many American yoga teachers propagate in their classes.

Not the least of consequences of practicing yoga without roots in tradition is egoism, or the self identifying “I” that removes our ability to perceive reality correctly. As mentioned in Yoga Sutra 2:6, the Sanskrit term “asmita” (English “ego”) is actually one of the 5 kleshas (root causes of suffering) that yoga was designed to destroy. Can we say that any teaching which amplifies ego is yoga, at all? The great masters of yoga warned us for good reason against taking up practice from yoga teachers who did not train in the lineage, and who teach “pseudo-yoga”. Today people are teaching the art of yoga, which is borrowed from the ancient people of India, in studios located on ancestral homelands of indigenous people, without knowing the history or traditions of either.

The Yoga Spirals yoga school exists in an effort to create space for to research, practice, and experiment within the structure of true and researched yoga practices that have been handed down to us by the yoga tradition of T. Krishnamachara, the “grandfather of modern yoga”. We hold the discipline of truth (satya) as one of the most important aspects of our practice. Before we can be real with each other we have to be real with ourselves; our practice is about removing what is fake from our lives, and being legitimately real about our pain, our suffering, our trauma, our frustrations, and our limitless joys that are woven through this experience. In pursuit of finding a practice to fit each person at their present situation in life, we improvise, adapt, and adjust our methods to suit each individual, just as was taught by the great master. This is the gift that we of knowledge and experience. We see each person as an equal, with an equal opportunity to find peace and equanimity through practice. It is our mission to find a practice that suits each individual. We honor the past, as it is what got us here, but we live unabashedly in the present. We are different because we do not seek to recreate the wheel in an ancient established practice, we seek to rely on what we know and use it to empower our community in a way that is legitimate, lasting, and real. We pursue yoga as a practice of bringing harmony and balance in terms of strength and vulnerability, assertiveness and receptivity, and overall spiritual, material, social, and personal internal balance. We are always taking new students who want to learn an authentic form of Ashtanga Yoga from a teacher who has walked the path.