Peter Crowley Licensed Social Worker & Yoga Instructor

At home, in a square bedroom bordered by white walls and a bank of large windows, I do my daily yoga practice. An architect by education, I developed an early awareness of context and environment. In this room, in my modern house, I focus this sensitivity inward. I spend mornings moving from pose to pose — or just sitting still. In self-study, I formulate an internal inquiry

What is it? What is happening? In the most secular of terms, yoga is the process of staying attentive to an object or pursuit, undistracted, for some amount of time. It’s an ever-evolving renovation of the mind and body that incorporates breath, postures, and concentration practices. Time in a physical posture is time well spent studying the network of strength and space that exists below the skin. With an awareness of these sensations one can construct a mental map, a meditation on where body and breath feel effortless, and where there is struggle. Sites of conflict need attention because they can hold captive physical or emotional scars. An immersion in this ongoing process demands patience. By quelling reactivity and shedding self-imposed expectation, we learn to be better, more up-to-date versions of ourselves.

Who do you want to be? Since I was six, I planned to be an architect. In my childhood bedroom, I spent many solitary hours fashioning models of famous buildings out of cardboard. I would construct a crude likeness, then break it apart to build it better, with ever more exacting standards. This iterative process resulted in whole cities I would lay out on my floor. I told myself stories about them, connecting separate narratives with construction-paper roads and rivers. At one point, the entire perimeter of my bedroom surrounded me with fantasy architecture. Years later, in design school, I aimed to entice the most critical of my peers and professors by posing a thesis and provoking a response.

How does this feel? Under the burden of professional demands and personal challenges, my early 20s were physically and emotionally painful. A dear friend suggested yoga to ease the reactive revolt taking place in my disordered body. At the urging of my first teachers, I studied what held me back, what locked me up. Why was my body shaking? The postures, crude in their initial execution, helped me examine, liberate, and redevelop the structure beneath my skin. My

job as a yoga teacher is to present and pass down what I have discovered. Holding space for my students to immerse themselves in self-study, I use narrative to describe a journey through the body. I pose a thesis, and yoga provokes a response. Students comfortably sit with an internal space of their own design.

Who designed that? Turning concepts into felt experience plays out in every yoga practice. The best architecture develops out of a streamlined thesis and a cumulative body of knowledge. Discipline and love for development through process reveal themselves in the design of a great building or a focused approach to yoga practice. In my body and in that of others, experience and repetition help lay these foundations. By paying attention, we feel tension dissipate, as strength and space support our structure. We dwell in the body, confident in our creation, comfortable with our circumstances.

For fifteen years, I have studied some aspect of yoga philosophy. Since 2002, I formed consistent ongoing relationships with several influential yoga teachers. As my values evolved, yoga revealed useful paths forward and my teachers changed. Setting a personal course for practice is challenging and rewarding, but finding an appropriate teacher is necessary. 

My initial understanding of yoga stemmed from a common construct that asana was central and essential to the practice.  The metric with which I first measured my progress on the yoga path was the ability to perform the poses better and better.  How does one perform a yoga pose better?  Is there a trustworthy way to deduce the rights and wrongs of asana? Where should these standards come from? 

My teacher Tom Alden defines yoga as the practice of spiritual wellness. After two years of study with him, I understand that spiritual wellness involves observing our experience and responding well from the calm and uncluttered part of our being. The undercurrent of all consciousness, our essential nature, is peace, kindness and intelligence. This essential nature is spirit. These days, having been influenced by my teacher Barbara Benagh, asana practice is a laboratory to conduct and repeat conscious observation. The asana organizes our ongoing inquiry while providing useful insight. Yoga practice allows us to inquire with calm curiosity while compassionately responding to these insights, whatever they may be.

 A curious and disciplined student can find a teacher that will effectively assist in honing the skill of practice.  Practice is repetition.  Repetition reveals experiences that evolve to be trustworthy and comfortable. Over time, an effective teacher helps a student access the universal intelligence that is our essential nature. This wellspring of intelligence merges between student and teacher in the transmission of yoga philosophy. Wisdom is passed on. A student can take this wisdom and

 experience its truth in practice. Effective practice encourages further learning. This inspiration allows the teachings to flourish.  One can teach when some element of yoga experience is grounded in the assured undercurrent of one’s essential nature, leading to meaningful and useful outcomes. 

 What does all that mean? Teaching requires practice and practice takes time. One can’t teach an essential practice without awareness of essential nature.

After completing my first 200-hour training in 2003, I had about sixteen months of asana and some recreational pranayama experience. I set out to teach without a cohesive relationship with a core teacher of my own. Memorizing what I remembered from other teachers, reading the pose books and participating in classes with visiting master teachers, I wanted all the answers sixteen months in. The alternative was ignorance and that was uncomfortable. 

Like one might collect precious objects and artifacts to display in closed glass cases, one might curate knowledge of yoga poses.  "Where should the back foot be? Where should my shin be?  What should I feel? What is right?  Please don’t say I’m wrong.”

Through this challenge, I learned that my ability to perform poses and pay for a teacher training wouldn’t guarantee me a seat in quietly observing the truth of my ongoing reality. In fact, I was unable to sit still. I couldn't be with myself in stillness. My experience was not grounded in universal peace, intelligence and kindness. The fear of failure, internal chatter and self-defeating comparison to others, distracted me. With two years of practice under my belt, I was a credentialed yoga teacher who couldn’t teach.

In gathering other people’s yoga truths, I forgot to integrate my own sensitivity with mental activity. Being busy and business minded robbed me of the process of stabilizing in the awareness of my physical self. The search for quick answers never

allowed me to turn my attention inward. I performed without sensitive intelligence and lived life with little self-compassion. Learning this was the key to unlocking the potential of yoga in my life. A decade later, I began arriving at a definition of yoga and a methodology for practice that, at its best, is an ongoing aspiration for spiritual wellness.    

I share this because I see this all the time.  All information given by teachers is purely hearsay until we can consciously stabilize in our own experience and learn our own truth. So many students practice the yoga truths of others. In an effort to stay stable in whatever yoga information has been conveyed, practice stays at the level of hearsay, becomes static and loses potency. Evolution is stifled in favor of comfortable consistency. The relationship to practice becomes antagonistic as students become disenchanted. The demands of teaching innovation outweigh the necessity for clarity of values and tuning to essence. The magic of practice is lost.  Practice stops.    

Among teacher friends, it’s often said that the more one learns, the more one realizes how much they don’t know. I resonate and no longer lament this truth. The books can convey information. Continue reading. Our teachers can encourage us to compassionately accept our ignorance and guide us in practice. One will always need a teacher. Our own practice reveals our truths. We must maintain our practice. In practice, information is filtered through our intelligent and compassionate nature.  We are able to meet our reality with greater clarity of purpose, trustworthy techniques for proceeding, and an aspiration for improvement.  We won’t know everything, ever, but we can know our truth more confidently day by day.

How do we face the unknown? We face it together. Follow your path. Take a turn here or there. Get lost a little. I’m here to walk with you.

Let me ask you this: 

Who is your yoga teacher? How have they influenced you? How is your practice evolving? What have you been taught? What is yoga?

Life in our bodies on this earth is at once precious and a paradox. In practice, yoga teaches that we not only aspire for kindness, wisdom, and love, but that our true essence reflects those most divine qualities. How is it then that life is so wrought with difficulty and dissatisfaction?  If we are being more honest in our inquiry, we might wonder why we struggle with such profound fear in this life. Why do we suffer?

Our innate ignorance is the source of suffering. There’s much we don’t know and yoga can help us see what we need to learn. Paradoxically, what looks like yoga can also be the source of maintaining the status quo or prolonging patterns of suffering. It’s normal and okay to be ignorant, by the way.  Learning is a gratifying product of practice.

My teachers have taught me that the cravings and aversions we use to cope with and avoid difficulty are in fact the source of ever more compounding difficulty. Much of my time, and most likely yours too, has been spent in the pendulum swing of not wanting for something or wanting for something else. If we are ignorant to the truth of the craving and averting mind, we live in a constant “gotta get it done” and “wish I was somewhere else “ mentality.

As a regular practitioner of meditation and asana, my pendulum swing has become far less severe.  This is certainly true for others and it will be true for those who begin to engage in a meaningful dialogue with the parts of self that are suffering. So… we should all practice yoga!  However, it’s not so cut and dried.

One of the reasons I came to yoga was to REMOVE physical difficulty from my experience. I’m sure it was promised at some point in those early days. I learned quickly that what was uncomfortable in my body was inextricably linked to my mind. A feeling of intensity was all that was needed to react with aversion and stay stuck in a cycle of mental reactivity. Over the last fifteen years, I have grown to trust that intensity is not to be feared but that it’s a part of me.  It’s a guide.

It’s also taken me much longer to learn that difficulty is never going to be removed.  Fear is not ever going to go away.  Sadly, the human qualities that are born from fear are with us to stay.  Our knee-jerk reactions to these qualities can be minimized as our minds become less avoidant and more consciously responsive.

Yoga as a practice of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness asks us to

start with ourselves. We become familiar with difficulty and suffering in the form of intensity, or distraction, or emotional and physical pain.  Yoga gives us tools to apply useful awareness techniques to cultivate an attitude for healing and wellness. We are then on a very different trajectory aspiring for more positive outcomes.

We will still sometimes disagree.  We will still sometimes be angry. We are still human.

We must remember in our activism, quiet or collective, that we are all part of one collective kindness.  We are one wisdom.  We are, at our essence, love.  We must face the obstacles that prevent us from realizing our true essence.  We must also be angry if we are angry.  We must feel sadness and fear if that is what we feel.  

Yoga will help us see clearly the gift of life in our bodies, as a self, part of the whole, beyond the paradox.