People often ask me what brought me to yoga. Where did I start? The honest truth is that I started so far away from yoga it should really just have been called another form of dance or body movement. My mind translated the asanas into choreography that I was striving to perform to perfection. And so my body would mimic the shapes of my teacher, my eyes were fixed firmly on them, and if at all possible, (if mirrors were around) on myself too.

It took me years, many of them, to begin to understand that I had it all wrong. Years after I studied and even into the beginning of teaching it, I was still unconsciously falling back to what I knew: The outside.

This is why today, I hate watching myself in a mirror during my practice ( in fact I deliberately place myself behind a pole if possible!). It is also why I find social media’s boom of yogis (celebrity and otherwise), and the churning out of more and more yoga selfies, grating on my nerves. People say it’s inspiring and motivating. Sure. But mostly, it’s magnifying the idea that yoga can be experienced simply by creating the right shape in a pose.

If I were to have someone try and capture a photo of me doing yoga, I would have to capture the moment in the dental chair when I breathe and unclench my fists and soften my muscles. Yoga today was listening to my body and lying down in the middle of the day. Sometimes it is that moment when I recognize a feeling in my body and I just stay in it. These moments are internal.

Yoga selfies as with any selfie, we need to acknowledge, are coming from a place of ego. This isn’t inherently bad, and as long as we are honest with what is happening, I have no issue with the selfie moments we capture. But it is our ability to recognize this involvement of ego that is important.  Sure, it could be that you want to share pointers or tips on how to do something, or your journey to find the strength to get into a pose, or whatever else, but when we cut down to the heart of it, ask yourself how it is possible for ego to not be involved? It is still the part of us that wants to be seen, or recognized, validated, or heard.  I’m not saying it can’t be inspirational and informative, or beauty for the sake of beauty. I’m sure in many instances people have been drawn to yoga through these very images, but I guess what I’m getting at is this: they are not seeing yoga.  So the tricky thing now, is when we filter through images way faster than we read heavy books and texts, the understanding of what yoga is has been diluted. It has been shortened to exotic poses in exotic places and quick one-liner inspiration quotes.  What we lose in this mass marketing is the deep truth.

Yoga is our work to rid ourselves of the separation with our truest nature. Our true nature is not found in our ego. It is not the small ‘s’ self, it is Self. It is the Divine within us, and that has nothing to do with rocking an amazing handstand on a beach somewhere, or being able to balance on your finger tips. Those things are fun, and amazing, and they can even be some of the tools we use to understand ourselves and our bodies, but all of it is in an attempt to learn who we are at our essence.

So no, you won’t find me posing regularly and showing off my “super amazing yoga practice”, because my practice is happening constantly and continuously, and it is a humbling one, and those random shapes that I may sometimes put my body in, are learning vessels, and the learning can’t be achieved by “seeing” the pose, but rather by inhabiting it.