Performance, Art and Ritual of Yoga

Despite the term generally being considered derogatory, all yoga practice and teaching is “performative.” The fundamental nature of yogic learning requires the performance of some act of mind, posture, word or deed. There is nothing inherently superficial or disingenuous about a performance. In fact, it is precisely the performance element that invites access to the liminal space most conducive to discovery and creation.

In our current culture, distorted by mainstream tv and social media algorithms, we have become conditioned to appreciate only that which is easily digestible to the psyche. Art and poetry have been largely devalued and few still celebrate their vital role in society. Yoga is generally associated with physical fitness more than seen as a vehicle for existential questioning, and has been dumbed down to make it scale rather than being utilized to challenge outdated beliefs. Reclaiming the mysterious art and ritual of yoga as a tool for personal empowerment is one way we might tap the reservoir of human potential needed to meet the daunting challenges before us.

What if we stopped thinking of yoga as fitness or science and embraced it as art?

For a long time, many of us have been doing our darndest to make yoga “legitimate” in the eyes of the mainstream. Scientific research into the effects of yoga practice has become the evidence by which we gauge the value of yoga, at least that which might be measured by a double-blind placebo study. While almost everyone who has ever had direct experience with the benefits of yoga would acknowledge that the process encompases more than what science alone can explain, there is still reluctance to assert the metaphysics at work. In the same way that no one asks for scientific evidence to explain why a piece of art moves someone, reliance on scientific explanations for one's experience of yoga diminishes its potential.

Most people understand that choosing to be an artist means the likelihood of struggling to make ends meet as you attempt to live your passion, the pandemic has made it obvious that the same is true for yoga teachers. The notion that yoga teachers are comparable to therapists or doctors more than painters or sculptors is perhaps at the heart of the commodification that has undermined so many good intentions, and the misperceptions that create so much heartache and shame. If yoga is just physical fitness then why bother calling it yoga? If yoga is science then it becomes bound by the same restrictions. Perhaps the process by which art is created, and serves to heal, is a more accurate frame, for it allows the transmission of yoga to remain in the realm of possibility inherent in the unknown.

What if Yoga postures are sigils for practicing ritualistic magic?

In Yoga, we pose and perform with our bodies to encourage awareness and healing through an embodiment of the life that animates our existence. This use of symbols to represent spirit and shape the mysteriousness of phenomena is the definition of a sigil. Yoga is essentially a practice of magic whereby we employ an alchemy of intention and skillful means to bring about a desired outcome of well-being or deeper understanding. In much the same way that magic can be reduced to card tricks and sleight of hand rather than the materialization of human imagination and potential, so yoga can either be diminished to strength and flexibility or an elevation of consciousness, depending on the frame we choose.

I am proposing a type of magical thinking. And yes, it's a slippery slope. To be clear, I am not suggesting that anyone abandon rational thought or reasoning and I am a strong advocate for fierce discernment and radical transparency. At the same time, there is a perfectly rational case to be made for engaging in activities that allow our experience to explore imagination and feeling in a way that might placebo-effect ourselves into a more harmonious and healthy reality. If done consciously with a sense of playful wonder and freedom, these rituals of practice can become the vehicles for commanding our individual and collective will that so many of us have always hoped they would be.

What the world needs now is not more of the same.

A predominance of rational mind in determining our perspectives and behaviors has not only rendered a deficiency in our ability to tap into emotional realities, but has also dimmed our sense of what is possible. By reclaiming the yoga practice space as a vehicle for experiencing aspects of ourselves that are not bound by our rational thinking, veering into the poetry and mystery of our lives without needing to funnel them through an empirical lens, is perhaps the most revolutionary act we can take in redesigning our future. The time has come for yoga professionals to reckon with our complicity in further perpetuating models that run contrary to an understanding of interconnectedness at the heart of yoga’s purpose.

Our lives have been abruptly disrupted and the underlying dynamics of extraction and inhumanity, which have always been present but successfully obscured, are more fully on display than ever before. In the face of what feels like impossible odds against us, what is feeding our souls with the resilience needed to carry on? Is it science? It is data? Or is music, poetry, and art? When the artifices are stripped away and we sit naked before our hopes and fears, it is the expression of our spirit that remains. Creating rituals of our own design, where we allow the delineations between us and everything else to disappear, is the radical act of having a yoga practice that matters.