A Vision of Yoga for Our Time II — Creating a Yogic Culture
Yogic practice and culture are designed to work as interdependently to bring about lasting change in the internal and external environment by optimizing the factors of both nature and nurture. This science was clearly understood by the ancients, and if we learn to peer deeply into their intent, we can design yoga training, yoga spaces and yoga culture in a way that transforms both individuals and the culture at large.
In the first part of the series I had mentioned how this seeming stray from yoga's original intent may have been part of Nature’s evolutionary trajectory. To understand this statement I asked myself “What is Nature’s intent in having yoga spread around the world”? The answer I arrived at is that it is clearly part of a zeitgeist that involves the evolutionary trajectory of the planet. The task for us is to connect the dots and help yoga to help us be all that we can be.
This article looks at how the question of culture is at the root of the inquiry of how contemporary yoga can mature to help fulfill the vision of a transformed world.
Indeed, this has always been Yoga’s vision: to create the optimal conditions and available pathways for humanity to discover limitless nature and thereby create a beautiful world inspired by higher consciousness.
A science that can work
Quantum physics, advances in molecular biology and new findings in cognitive neuroscience have all been validating the teachings of the ancient yogis. While the intent of this article is not to dive into these discoveries, science is revealing that we are indeed instruments of pure consciousness living in a completely interconnected universe, capable of shaping our reality through our body-mind-spirit connection. Yogic knowledge consists of a range of practices and ways of living that can help us translate our scientific discoveries into real-world applications — not just in terms of new gadgets but as an inner technology to shape consciousness and culture.
As the need for systems change has become more pressing than ever before, we are coming to realize that changes in structure without changes in consciousness do not hold water for very long. We need both to work together for lasting change, and yoga is a practice that works on both levels simultaneously by changing our physical and mental structures from within.
The next level of the yoga movement may happen on the cultural level, which parallels the developments in our understanding of fields such as epigenetics. A great deal of research is showing that the environment is absolutely critical in determining the activation and mutation of genes within the cell. The same analogy can be drawn for the practice of yoga. The spaces in which we practice and the culture that supports practitioners are of great importance in sustaining and enhancing the benefits of yoga — beyond just what can be done with the physical movements.
While there is a growth of evidence supporting how yoga practices aid and heal our body-mind connection in countless ways, there is little research to show how yoga spaces and yogic culture have an impact on the depth of individual learning, transformation and integration. This is because we are just beginning to allow yoga to shape us as a culture, and if we want to really reap the benefits of all that yoga has to offer, creating a yogic culture within a modern context is the next step in our evolutionary dance with this ancient wisdom.
Creating a yogic culture
“The invention of culture was a huge innovation for Homo Sapiens: creating language and a shared cognitive web of understanding that transcends any individual’s knowledge and life span — and that can be drawn on as needed and passed on to new generation…Each of these domains can be shared, and those who have the deepest reservoir of understanding in each are the guides and teachers of others.”
- Daniel Goleman (bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence)
Culture is a touchy subject. Observing the growth of yoga around the world, it is apparent that much of its popularity has come from the fact that the exported product has been stripped of its cultural identity and packaged to meet the market in an ideologically non-threatening way (there are of course numerous exceptions to the rule). This is natural, and according to the general thrust of this article, a necessary adaptation for the DNA of yoga to be spread. In addition to the traditional forms of yoga i.e. karma, gnana, raja, bhakti, hatha etc. we now have “yoga for stiff guys”, “pre-natal yoga” “hot yoga” “power yoga”…the list is only limited to the human imagination. The common denominator in all of these is the word “yoga”, and soon it will sink in that this word carries with it a deeper spiritual and cultural force that is waiting to enter modern society — indeed it is already underway.
In the West we have a young culture that is seeking to develop a new pathway, a new dream, and in the process are looking for principles and roots to sink into. Meanwhile, many of the old traditions that offer these very things are being threatened by modern values and need to be grafted in a way where the roots are preserved and provide the foundations for the new emergence. It is a perfect match (if we know how to bring them together correctly) and the yoga movement is a great opportunity to learn how to bridge tradition and modernity.
Evolving the Yoga Studio
What if more of our yoga studios become centers of learning and service like some of the ancient ashrams? Instead of just strengthening the body, they could produce yogis who are trained in the outer and inner yogic sciences such as natural health, astrology, creative arts, energy medicine, spatial design and natural sciences. What if our schools begin to bring more than just an occasional yoga or mindfulness class, but began exposing children to a broader range of yogic subjects? What if these were taught by yogis who perceive the interconnections of the art, sciences and spirituality?
Many young adults come to yoga teacher training programs looking for something real in life — hungry for spiritual knowledge and transformation. A yoga teacher training is a crash course that promises some spiritual transformation combined with the possibility of making a living doing something that helps rather than harms the planet.
What if a yoga teacher was seen in a similar capacity as a psychologist or a holistic health practitioner? Their training would be far deeper and we’d produce yogis with a remarkable synthesis of knowledge and practices that address more than just physical strength and flexibility.
Yogis trained in this way can really help individuals and communities to design their lives and systems in accord with its cosmic principles so that they experience the benefits of a more harmonious and balanced life. Imagine a society in which yogis, who are holistic practitioners of the most ancient spiritual technologies in the world, are respected and supported members of our culture at large?
A yogic education actually creates a whole human being, providing an inner self-regulating mechanism that teaches anyone how to integrate their personality with their higher self nature. The various subjects of a yogic culture prepare one to become a systems thinker that sees patterns and relationships between humans and the environment, enabling us to read the book of nature in a way that reveals its underlying intelligence. Great educational thought leaders such as Daniel Goleman, David Orr, Rudolf Steiner and many others agree on the importance of an education that fosters the whole human being as absolutely essential for ensuring a thriving future for our planet.
For this to happen we will need spaces designed not with the intent for profit alone, but with the intent of whole-scale cultural and spiritual renewal. This was the role of the temples and ashrams in our past — they formed the environment where the individual human cells could flourish. Such spaces were where young yogis were trained and people came to balance and renew themselves on all levels. They were places of art, knowledge exchange, meditation and ritual, all for the psychological, social, material and spiritual well-being of their communities. Having non-denominational spaces like this today is essential as a culture if we are to work together towards the regeneration of the Earths human and ecological body.
Abraham Maslow, one of the most important American psychologists, was the man who coined the term self-actualization:
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we may call self-actualization… This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one idiosyncratically is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
Over the course of his life he became fascinated by not only how individuals could self-actualize, but how the cultural conditions might be created for this to happen. He recognized that without the right environment, individual self-actualization was very rare. His dream was for each person to realize the very best in ones nature — the same goal of the yogi and the intent of the yogic cultures of lore.
I recently came across an expanded version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which is actually in the form of a tipi and used by the Blackfoot people of native America. Maslow visited the Blackfoot and was very influenced by their culture in a way that made him universalize his vision and ideal, throwing cultural relativism out the window. Looking at the Maslow’s Hierarchy from the Blackfoot perspective gives a beautiful understanding of how self-actualization is in fact at the base of a communal pyramid, with the goal being cultural perpetuity. The ultimate goal is not self-actualization in isolation — individuals must share their wisdom to enrich the culture of their community and ensure that it is passed on to future generations.
If we look at the society as an organism and the individuals as cells within in it, a yogi becomes a white blood cell in the body of society — a force of knowledge, healing, spiritual unity and potentially, social action. The role of a yogi in such a culture is more than helping people to get a strong body or a moment of silence amidst their otherwise chaotic lives — they can help people to self-actualize by realizing their inner potential. They can become innovators of inner and outer processes that create cohesion, expansion and awakening within communities. These are the yogis that the future will need.
When this happens yoga will go from being just an outward movement to an inward-driven revolution. As Paul Hawken has stated, what we are experiencing now is Mother Earths “immune response” to the ills that afflict her life systems. Such spaces and yogis who are trained to steward and serve through them are an integral part of this response.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Beyond the Mat
Global statistics reveal that the diseases of today are rooted in the mind — depression, anxiety, social isolation, over-eating, technology addictions and more. The physical ramifications of these are immense, evidenced by the fast rise in suicides, particularly among youth. It is the human capacity for caring, inclusiveness, and spiritual evolution that creates a ground where the seeds of these diseases cannot take root.
We cannot produce individuals that are able to thrive in joy, harmony and abundance in a culture that is based on negative images, fragmented thoughts, material attachments, lack of beauty and disconnection from nature. The training of a yogi, first and foremost, is to learn how to become an integrated human being that can transmute a negative self-image into a positive one. This involves taking responsibility for ones physical and mental well-being and leads to becoming a guiding light for others and the culture as a whole.
For the first time in remembered history, we are at a turning point in our culture where the youth are being turned to as the source for the solutions for the significant problems of the day. We are seeing a democratization in learning, cross-cultural exchange is more alive than ever before, and the growing interest in both science and spirituality has prepared our emerging generation to pick up the threads of ancient wisdom and weave them into an evolving world. Build it and they will come, the saying goes. If we create the opportunity for it to happen, we will see a new generation of yogis emerging from our youth.
This is the wish and the blessing of our yogic ancestors, illuminated beings who revealed and developed these gifts of sacred knowledge over many millennia.
Spreading the message
Every awakened yogi will have an immense impact upon the consciousness of humanity. Individually, each of us can discover bliss within ourselves, finding flow in our lives so that in the midst of chaos we can retain an inner clarity and calm. An integrated yoga practice can offer this to us, something we experience when we arise from our shavasana and in the words of William Blake, “ [our] doors of perception are cleansed, [and] everything appears as it is, infinite”.
This simple and profound gift of yoga — to cleanse our doors of perception so that the play of light on a leaf, the sounds of the city, and even the frown on someones face are revealed to us in all its beauty. For yoga is not asking us to be perfect, but rather enabling us to realize life’s inherent perfection while we work for personal and collective betterment.
In the process we become more inclusive in our interactions as we begin to realize that our minds create our reality and thus the causes and conditions of happiness and suffering. This helps us take responsibility for the situations in our life and our world as we recognize that life itself is a gift and that this body and mind were given to us so that we may experience the world and come to know the truth of who we are.
It is from this space that the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible will be created.
If the yoga movement becomes about creating this space in everyone it touches while empowering our younger generation to receive and transmit the true gifts and purpose of yoga, then we will see the greatest revolution in the history of humanity. This may be only true revolution that is possible — one that stems from within and moves out into the world through whole human beings. Let us set this example in our practice and spread the message to others about the immense possibility that this tradition represents.
May we navigate the tides of change into our uncertain future knowing that we are never alone, and that the presence and the support of our ancestors from all corners of the globe are still available to us whenever we open our hands with reverence and say, “yes”.
Namaste,
Zamir
About the author:
Zamir Dhanji is a dharma artist who expresses through yoga, arts, activism and mysticism. He graduated with a concentration in Spiritual Economics from New York University. His colloquium titled “Holism and human evolution” explored holistic thinking and how we use it to design with Nature’s intelligence for conscious evolution. Former program director for the Teen Journey Society, founder of Akasha Arts, and a disciple of Ati-yoga under the Buddhist Wisdom Master Maticintin, he is currently on pilgrimage to bring the next level of his work to the world.
