Does Yoga make you a better person?
Once I sat in a beautiful Yoga studio with a beautiful teacher. She said that it was great we were doing Yoga because it would make us better and more loving, and that we would take that love back to our families and our communities to spread positivity throughout the world. She looked beatifically at us mortal beings basking in her gaze. Shaking her lovely head ruefully she wondered why the world couldn’t be run by yogis.
I didn’t buy it.
Sometimes I come across people like this teacher who believe in Yoga as a force for moral good. They share their opinions and beliefs with the conviction of the righteous.
But I do not believe practicing Yoga necessarily makes you a better person.
Yoga offers us incredible things. It offers physical practices to care for our body and ways of thinking about life and human experience which may be helpful and might be transformative. You might find you develop more perspective or ways of understanding yourself better. This might lead to more compassionate communication and relationships.
But Yoga is not a cult of the slightly better than everyone else. It is a magical practice with which you can engage on a number of different levels. Want to go to a class and breathe and move? Brilliant! Want to to engage in a rigorous and sometimes confronting meditation practice? Great! Want to be part of a community? Wonderful! There are so many jewels to be found if you take the time.
But don’t labour under the illusion that doing these things makes you better or more worthy than another.