Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

benefit from doing only the breathing techniques. I met a teacher who began bedridden with paralysis, started only with breathing, progressed to walking, and eventually mastered many postures. There is no perfect yoga body—yoga is perfect for every body. Nature in her wisdom creates myriad forms and none have overall superiority. The Adonis body may be best suited for one task and the weakling another. It takes all kinds.
    When I opened my first center, the Center for Yoga in Los Angeles, the very first student through the door was a man named Charles Hobby. I didn’t know then that Charlie was to become an important teacher for me. He was a court reporter, the best in town, with hischoice of all the top trials. I was twenty-one and he was forty years old, short and stocky with a great deal of stiffness aggravated by the necessity to sit and type for at least ten hours a day. “I am very stiff and I sit all day. Will I be able to get flexible and do all those poses if I practice diligently?” he asked. “Of course,” I replied with conviction, for I had heard many testimonials and anecdotes from my teachers. I had only been teaching a few months when he arrived. I must admit I had plenty of doubts, but I didn’t want to discourage him. “I’ll do it,” he said, “as long as I don’t have to get into spiritual mumbo jumbo.”
    Charlie practiced more regularly than any student I had known. He took pride in attending class every day, six days a week. When he started he couldn’t touch his toes and he could hardly twist. Backbends were but a distant hope. His progress was barely noticeable for a long while, but he started getting benefits right away. His tension, aches, and pains diminished by the day, so he kept on. He would often ask if he really would ever attain the flexibility to get into the most basic postures. After several months he could touch his toes. After a year and a half he could fold in half in his forward bends. He was elated and radiant. Now he was asking if he could ever do the Lotus and backbends. Again I answered in the affirmative, with my lingering inner doubts. In a few more years Charlie was doing the Wheel and Camel backbends. I’ll never forget the day he walked in front of the class, smiled, and slowly pulled his legs into the Lotus posture. I looked at him that day and realized it was as if he had reincarnated into a different body from the one he came in the door with years earlier. He was still short and stout, but now he was muscular, leaner, and he had a glow around him. He was full of health and vitality and his aches and pains were now the distant memory. To my astonishment, Charlie then announced that he wanted to learn about meditation and the spiritual aspects of yoga. Getting the stiffness out of his body changed his outlook. Now he could also bend his mind. Charlie taught me the power of patience and perseverance and showed me that all things are possible.

There Is No Such Thing as Perfection
    We have a natural tendency to create and project images and goals of perfection. Some branches of Eastern philosophy even describe attaining perfection as the goal of life. Seeking perfection can be counterproductive in one’s yoga practice. It can bring struggle and conflict. I had the good fortune to study science and physics in college, and I learned a principle then that proved useful when applied to life. In a sense, there is actually no such thing as perfection. We can create mathematical equations for a straight line, a perfect circle, or a perfect sphere. But in reality these perfect forms do not exist. There are no straight lines, no perfect circles nor perfect spheres in nature. In fact, space is curved and time is warped. Although we perceive linearity in nature, upon closer inspection or by breaking physical measures down to the lower levels, we find deviations from linearity. Everything seems to contain at least small imperfections. Even evolution, it is interesting to note, progresses through error, mutation, and selection.
    A look at art also underlines this insight. The most striking art is full of imperfection. The most boring art is a dull reproduction. If you tuned a piano to perfect frequencies, an exact octave, for example, it would sound dissonant and some say it might damage the instrument. That is why piano tuners have to seek the slight imperfections in the frequencies so chords and octaves sound right to the imperfect human ear.
    We waste too much