We constantly rush about and either try to achieve the ideal, or — to accept and understand ourselves as we are. Why is it so hard for us to connect with ourselves? Perhaps the reasons are in the modern Western worldview, which takes us further and further from the naturalness of life.
I have been practicing yoga for many years. Traveling around India and studying with various teachers, I realized a paradoxical fact: yoga, an integral part of Indian culture, has become a widely demanded social phenomenon in the West. Doing yoga is a good form, and even Hollywood stars admit that they perform asanas twice a day.
Of course, the techniques of working with the body, called yoga in the West, are only a part of what is called yoga in India. Physical aspects are paid much less attention there: ordinary people come to class no more than once a week.
The need to perform asanas daily is surprising to them: this is considered necessary only when a person is sick. The exception is yogis, people who have made yoga their profession, way of life, the basis of existence. In the eyes of an Indian, a yogi is a spiritual person.
Why do “Western” people have such a craving for bodily practices? And why yoga? Year after year, I asked myself this question, watching different people doing asanas next to me. The first thing I discovered was the difference in my relationship with my own body.
Most people in Western culture do not have the freedom of movement that is characteristic of any Indian. The owner of some shop, who practices once a week, without much preparation, sits in the lotus position or makes a bridge. Perhaps his large belly prevents him from bending forward, but otherwise the level of body control is amazing.
Everything is more difficult for us. We need hard training in flexibility, coordination, muscle control in order to reconnect with a body that already barely obeys us.
What makes a person of the western formation so problematic? What deprives him of his integrity and makes him seek a connection with himself all his life?
Perhaps the reasons are in the modern Western worldview, which takes us further and further from the naturalness of life? The man of the East feels himself a part of the world. He is part of a family, a caste, an ethnic group. Western man lives by opposing himself to the world.
Only after giving birth to a child and gaining a special experience, I realized what exactly we correct in ourselves by practicing yoga. After all, a lot begins at birth.
When a child is born naturally, without medication, in the family circle and immediately receives a breast, a certain picture of the world is formed in him: the world accepts him, surrounding him with love and care. Another thing is if the baby falls into the latex-covered hands of a doctor and, separated from his mother, does not feel her warmth in the first days.
The hostility of the world is imprinted in his unconscious, and therefore in his body for life. A little later, the child studies the genitals, explores himself. Diapers make it difficult to establish a connection with this area of the body, and this is how he realizes his gender.
The women of the primitive tribes carry the baby, tying it to themselves — we put the child in the carriage. If he cries for attention, we give him a pacifier or a toy. Instead of human warmth, which he needs, we surround him with objects.
When such a child grows up, he will show his love precisely through things — expensive cars and other “toys”, a deep emotional connection between a person and a person will be alien to him. Fascination with things is the distorted equivalent of love. We do not understand how people who have only a minimum can be happy — for example, Indians living in poverty, under a canvas awning. And why are these people always smiling and not experiencing aggression.
The practice of yoga is designed to soften the militant individualism, to extinguish the internal conflict. We can come to harmony with our own body, feel the reunion with nature, the world around us. This is what Body-Oriented Therapy and Yoga are all about. And this also explains why Eastern practices have become so popular.