Being a Yogi is an Action, Not an Achievement

Want to know what makes you a yogi? It’s not the ability to do a headstand. It’s not a particular number of hours of practice (or teacher training). It’s not who your teacher is. It’s not how long you can meditate for. It’s not how calm you are. It’s not even how well you know yourself.

It’s the fact that you do some yoga. That’s all.

The asana (postures) you do might be sweaty vinyasa, slow yin, or chair-based. You might practice it every day, every week, or intermittently. You might meditate or practise pranayama (breathwork). You might practise ethical codes of conduct from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, such as ahimsa (non-harming) and santosha (contentment with where you are). Perhaps you do all of these things. 

The point is that you have a dedicated practice which is never finished. You won’t ever ‘complete’ yoga, no-one ever has, no-one ever will. You are simply dedicated to keeping on going, to keep reflecting, learning and trying new things. There’s no graduation in yoga. When you’ve held a headstand for a really long time or discovered the meaning of life, there are no medals, you just carry on. 

I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to hold a headstand, or meditate for longer, or become calmer, these are great goals and if you practice yoga you are likely to achieve them over time. Goals keep us motivated and help us to track our progress. However, the reality is that once we achieve something like a headstand, that’s the moment we stop learning from it, so we will always be looking for the next challenge to learn from. Therefore these goals do not (or should not) define our identity, or our practice. 

Ask any long-term yogi and they will tell you how drastically their practice has changed over the years. I find it somewhat troubling that this is sometimes accompanied by a sort of eye-rolling smirk at what we used to be like in our yoga practice. ‘I can’t believe I used to practice Ashtanga’ I hear, with a blend of embarrassment and glee. I think this stems from an idea that we are on a path of constant improvement and therefore anything we used to do differently must have been wrong. If what we do now is right and enlightened, then what we did then we must have done because we were too naive or misguided to know better. I don’t think this is a helpful mindset (for anyone), so I like to think of it a little differently. The yoga we do now is the yoga that is right for us now. The yoga that we did then was right for us then. 

If you are new to yoga, don’t be put off by seasoned yogis claiming that the early days of their practice were all wrong. Your practice is not wrong, it is yours, it is subjective, it is not up for debate. It is important to get comfortable with this idea because it feeds back into the larger notion of achievement in yoga. If we always see what we did then as worse and what we do now as better, we’re still buying into the idea that the more yoga we’ve done the better a ‘yogi’ we are. I think it’s better for us to acknowledge that a yoga practice is continuous, ever-changing and diverse. It will change as much as we change over the years.

I think we should keep this in mind particularly when we observe (and inevitably compare ourselves to) others in their practice. Theirs is not better or worse than ours. It is simply theirs. We cannot know the whole story simply by watching someone. It is only when we can truly understand this that we can let go of the idea that being a yogi is something we can achieve. If we do away with the hierarchy of yogas, we get back to the diversity of yogas, which is much more interesting and nourishing.