Going Forward With Ashtanga: Tradition, Myth, And Community

It’s been an especially difficult time for Ashtangis in recent years. Between teacher abuses, COVID, and Sharath’s death, we’ve experienced a number of losses. We’ve been forced to reckon with what Ashtanga tradition is and how we want to sustain it in a new way.

In years past, a couple of things made the Ashtanga practice more sustainable. Community support and connection to a lineage, history, or tradition shaped an idea that the journey was worthwhile, meaningful, and that others would be there alongside us in the process. There was accountability and engagement around the practice that we shared. In the larger scheme of things, I think many Ashtangis felt the loss of Mysore as a place to return to with the acknowledgement of Pattabhi Jois’s abuses and Sharath’s death. Something was lost in having to let go of a particular myth of tradition, a source of community and connectedness, and being part of something larger than ourselves.

Doing a practice is hard

The Ashtanga practice is hard, but not necessarily because of its physicality. We can make the practice more or less dynamic, drop poses, shorten it, etc., to shape what we do on the mat. The Ashtanga practice is hard in the way any practice is hard. It’s intended to be a practice, not entertainment. A practice is something that you show up to even when you’re tired, bored, or distracted. That’s the nature of practicing anything: yoga, a musical instrument, a sport, or underwater basket weaving.

The point of a practice is multi-layered. We can only reach mastery of a craft with many years of repetition. But alongside any ideas of mastery is the understanding that the real learning happens during the journey of showing up for a practice day in and day out. It forces us to meet ourselves in all our incarnations.

Community and connection

One thing that can make any practice more sustainable is social support. Finding community and social support helps maintain sustainability. Community engagement provides a connection to people on similar trajectories and shared stories of the journey that resonate because fellow practitioners are along on a similar ride. It offers an opportunity to feel seen, understood, and like we are part of something larger than ourselves.

Community in Ashtanga

In years past, Ashtangis were creative about generating community even when most practitioners did not have the resources to travel to Mysore, India. They connected on the old Yahoo forum and through the “cyber shala,” a loose collection of blogs where practitioners shared personal notes and home practice logs. We formed informal in-person practice groups, and for some, met in local Mysore classes with resident teachers. With the shift to social media interactions, it seems something about the nature of the connections has changed. The COVID landscape shaped how we connect as well, moving many remaining in-person connections to a distance through both led classes and Mysore online.

While community can provide support, accountability, and connection, it can also be a social pressure in a negative sense. Without a real dialogue about what the practice is and how it evolves, there can be negative social pressure around showing up in the community with the practice that we actually do. Experienced practitioners modify because otherwise they wouldn’t have a sustainable practice.

Our research shares that decades into practice, practitioners arrive at some version of primary, second, and maybe some third mixed together that works for them. So, what kind of changes can we make, and honor that sense of tradition and lineage of teachers and practices, and still feel welcome showing up in the community with our real practice?

What is traditional Ashtanga anyway?

Tradition is how we share things we think have some value. But if traditions are too rigid or rest on a single individual, they won’t last. Any benefit will be lost. It’s past time to have some good conversations about what we mean by traditional Ashtanga yoga. With respect to our Ashtanga practice, what parts of the tradition are beneficial and worth carrying forward, and what should we drop? What still works, what is resonant, and what should we discard in order to let tradition breathe and evolve?

Tradition and myth

In some ways, tradition and myth are inseparable when we’re talking about yoga. The long tradition of yoga is embedded within myth. When we try to tease the two apart, it gets a little messy and complicated. Was there really a Yoga Korunta document carefully lettered on banana leaves and eaten by ants? Does it matter? Story is how we convey larger truths.

The truth? Yoga in some form has been around for a while. Something about it seems to connect to people from different times, places, and cultures, as people have reported experiencing benefits from yoga in the past and reporting benefits today. Taking on a practice that has been around for a while adds some sense of trust that there’s something interesting to explore there. If it were ephemeral, it would have died out.

What does it mean to do Ashtanga?

Is it a sequence? No, but it does have a structure. Without the structure, it’s not Ashtanga. There’s the most traditional version of the structure, which I think we should attempt, within reason, to do for some period of time, to understand it. But the core of the practice is not the sequence. I think it takes a lot of time and practice before we really understand that. There is a difference between evolution and dilution. How much change is still Ashtanga? This is the question. There’s no single answer.

Going forward

So what now? Practitioners are the lineage of Ashtanga yoga. Everyone who’s been showing up on their mat, day in and day out for decades, has been on a journey. They’ve learned things. The physical shape of their practice has changed if they’ve sustained it for that long.