Beyond Asana, with Baron Baptiste
Teacher: Baron Baptiste
Host: Colleen Saidman Yee
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When your students are yearning for a deeper “experience of yoga, beyond just the form of more poses,” what do you do? In Baron Baptiste’s case, as he tells our host Colleen Saidman Yee, he was compelled to write his latest book, Perfectly Imperfect, to help students reach beyond asana.
“Asana is one limb and there’s such an emphasis nowadays on the one limb…[but] all the other limbs are meant to be experienced and practiced within the one limb of asana…Through asana, we come into a pose – what else of yoga is available, the other seven limbs, to be realized, to be experienced?” Colleen and Baron use the example of triangle pose, trikonasana, to demonstrate how a “pose is a microcosm of the macrocosm of your whole life” and how you can get to an experience of santosha, contentment, where all is well.
Colleen and Baron also talk about how, with the increasing popularity of yoga, people are bringing their “achievement oriented context of life to yoga practice” – but how there is another aspect of yoga beyond performance: the acceptance of ourselves and our bodies, that we are all perfect, and that our “imperfections have their own kind of beauty.”
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