week 11/24

This week I again used a youtube video on Iyengar yoga. However, as much as I like the actual exercise of going through the motions of Iyengar, I feel like I can’t get deeper now knowing how commodified it has become. It’s really lost is luster for me, it just seems so inauthentic that all of the spiritual bullshit they speak of feels so forced. 

I guess you could say that yoga is similar to meditation. You need the dual focus of movement of the body and the breathing. So in that sense it’s comparable to meditation. However I feel as if meditation and yoga are two different things. Maybe it’s because I’m a novice, but when I’m sitting down and meditating it feels much different then doing yoga postures. I also feel as if the purpose of meditation is to be still, and to focus on creating oneness of mind rather than going through yoga postures. Yoga is also a group activity, and I feel like meditation at least for me is something that requires solitude.

On top that, maybe my opinion is biased seeing how I’m annoyed with yoga in the west for being so capitalist in nature, but western yoga seems to just play with what real yoga in India actually is for sake of seeming “deeper”. Yet it just seems so falsified to compare meditation which is used as something for religious purposes, (Buddhism & Hinduism) and compare it to yoga which only claims to be something spiritual in order to sell to people who feel lost in their lives. 


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