I had a student in class yesterday ask me to clarify what is 'Vinyasa Yoga.' It was a great question that lead to a great discussion. With so many marketing terms and niche dividers in the yoga world, all the different terms can get fuzzy. Because I choose to label the class she had been coming to for several months "yoga," she wasn't 100% sure if we had or had not been doing vinyasa. We had, sometimes. Even if I had snuck the word 'vinyasa' into the class when introducing the movements, so very often a term doesn't really drop into our awareness until the moment we are ready to understand it.
The titles and adjectives that come before yoga have an interesting history. Way, way back in the context of yoga there were teachers and students. Sometimes students were selected by the teachers, sometimes teachers were paid to take students, sometimes it was happenstance. A teacher, in some regions called gurus, would generally not take more than 20 students at a time in various ages and stages of their training. As I understand it, due to some of stories in the Upanishads, it was not uncommon for a student to begin studying with their teacher when they were very very young. Of course this was not always true as we learn from the epic tale of Rama where he found one of his teachers during exile later in life. In most cases, wether the student started with the teacher at a very young age, or later in life, the student continued to study with the teacher diligently until the teacher felt they had passed on all they could to the student.
All of this implies that studying the science, techniques, philosophies, and practices of yoga was done in a very individualized fashion. It was so highly individualized, that some of the better known modern yoga lineages all stem from one great teacher - Krishnamacharya - and now each those 'styles' of yoga are considered vastly different. One teacher, four individual students - BKS Iyengar, Indra Devi, Patabhi Jois, TKV Desikachar - that each, when complete with their studies had very different ways of discussing and disseminating the science of yoga. Why? I surmise that because Krishnamacharya was an attentive and wise teacher, they knew that what Iyengar needed was not the same thing that Indra Devi needed and adapted their teaching accordingly. This is still, by-in-large, the reason for so much variation in teaching of the same yoga principles. Certainly there are different theological and philosophical texts and teachings as well AND each one drives back to the same principles at your center.
As a student in a contemporary yoga era, this means that you now are given the opportunity to choose between thousands and thousands of teachers and classes that may, at their core, drive you back to the exact same center. (What is that center? Ah, that is a topic for a later blog). It is less common for many of us contemporary yogin to stay with one teacher for the complete duration of our yoga studies. What may be more common is to study with a teacher that resonates with us during a particular stage of our life/growth, and then to move on in our self-exploration and in our exploration of various different yoga teachings and styles.
Which one do you pick first?
Another good question, which I shall (aggravatingly) answer with a new question: Who do you feel that you can trust?
I will offer this answer to 'Which one should I pick first?' - why not learn about them all and see which resonates? Which finally brings us around to the original topic - what style of yoga is Complete Yoga? We believe that all yoga is transmitted in various contexts (times, place, cultures, beliefs, technologies etc) and understanding each of those contexts within the intention of the designated style allows the practitioner to better understand the reason to do it. So, my friend, we teach as many yoga styles as we know and invite other experienced teachers to come and share what they know. Not all at once silly! That would be chaos. We have designed the curriculum around principles and themes so that you can understand the style of yoga in snippets that will help you to contextualize them for your life (place, stage of life, personal past, personal beliefs, modern scientific understanding). Ultimately, knowing more helps you understand what can help you. You help you with the tools you learn. That is why yoga is a practice. It is also why it is appropriate that at some point you will no longer rely on your yoga teachers, but you will have enough knowledge to choose your individual style of yoga which is, in the end, what each yoga style is - it is the individually styled practice of one teacher passed down to their students.
Call it what you will - each style or technique of yoga is a shorthand marketing tool to signal that a teacher resonates with a particular type of yoga. For us, we call it complete yoga.
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