On Knowing Yoga: Does having a style matter?

I have a delightful new colleague in the philosophy department named Trent. Trent is an epistemologist, which means that he considers questions about the nature of knowledge, kinds of knowledge, what we are doing when we make claims about knowledge, what it is possible to know, how we justify knowledge, how we know that we know, that sort of thing. In terms of philosophical interests and training, we are on fairly opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Not that I'm uninterested in such questions. Plato had a great deal to say about such issues, but I typically concern myself with more historical and literary questions about philosophical texts, which do often, like most things, lead to questions within the domain of epistemology, but I am definitely not "an epistemologist."

It turns out, however, that Trent and I do have yoga in common. As I always do, when I find out that someone does yoga, I asked him, via Face Book, what kind of yoga he does. (More on why I ask this question as the post continues). He eventually responded, via Face book, that he practices regularly and flips through Yoga Journal to find poses that will help him with lower back pain and bike riding which is another passion of his. That was sort of the end of the conversation at that point.

Yesterday, I was in the department and Trent told me about a recent encounter he had on the airplane with a hardcore yogini. My first thought, was oh wow, I wonder if he ran into Christina on the plane, but then I realized I probably would have already heard about the story if that were the case.

Anyway, Trent started a conversation with the yogini and in the course of the conversation, Trent said that he did (and sometimes taught yoga to his friends and students, just sort of come to the gym and roll out a towel.) The yogini hears about his experiences with yoga and says "BULLSHXT you can't know anything about yoga if you don't do yoga within a tradition." Trent was somewhat taken aback, but, being the epistemologist that he is, he started to ask himself what kind of knowledge claim she was actually making. Surely, it seems false that we can know nothing about yoga without a tradition. Does she actually believe that? I don't think Trent actually engaged her in this conversation, but he recounted the conversation to me and so the conversation got started and eventually this post emerged.

My initial response, as is often the case, particularly when I don't know quite what to say, was to laugh a bit. On the one hand, surely Trent is right that we can know a good deal about yoga without having any association with a method, but on the other hand, I kind of know where the incensed yogini is coming from. I do think having a method matters a lot and you will come to know a lot more about yoga once you learn yoga through a particularly methodological framework/ tradition.

Part of the reason I ask people what kind of yoga they do is a way of gauging what kind of conversation we are going to have about yoga. If a person says, I don't know, just basic Hatha, then I know they aren't learning a method of yoga and our conversation will be fairly general. If they answer a method other than Iyengar, then I know our conversation is going to have to navigate some different, often difficult waters. Often people have a pretty negative association with Iyengar yoga, and generally they feel the need to tell Iyengar people about it. If they say Iyengar yoga, then great, we are off to the races. To be fair, I ask the same sorts of questions about philosophers too. I have to find out what kind of philosophy they do and that navigates the direction of the conversation.

Anyway, Trent's story got me thinking about how we know yoga differently if we have a method of yoga. Again, I think we clearly can know yoga without a method.

One way of looking at the question, would be a level of knowledge thing. For instance, if a student has taken an Intro to Philosophy class, they know some philosophy. If they are a philosophy major, they know more, a graduate student more still, a professional academic, more still. I do think aligning with a method is like choosing a major and the more deeply you go into the method, the more it is like upper level study. I spent as long studying for my Iyengar certification as I did my PhD in philosophy...

Another way of getting at how we know differently has to do with having a more systematic approach to acquiring the knowledge of yoga. The subject of yoga is vast, even if one restricts an understanding of yoga to asana alone, one could spend a lifetime, even many lifetimes studying the nuances of that single limb of the eight fold path. A method of yoga gives you a lot of help along the way. You can benefit from the collective wisdom of the tradition about the best way to learn. There's much more to say here, but basically, without a system you are reinventing the wheel and in all likelihood the wheel you invent yourself is not going to be perfectly round. The value in not reinventing the wheel was particularly clear to me once I began teaching Iyengar yoga. For a while, I taught methodless yoga, I might have even played soft music...and I really just did yoga with the students, I didn't teach them anything. I also never really had much of a plan and often didn't really feel prepared to teach. Once I started learning Iyengar yoga, I also started learning how to teach yoga. First of all, I had more to teach because I was learning more about yoga and Second, I learned how to teach yoga, which is another sort of knowledge base. Student can learn just from the sharing of experience, but they learn more when they are actually being taught in a systematic way and most methods will also teach you how to teach that method.

Another way I thought about it was in terms of religious/spiritual experience. Most religious people I know think it is important to practice a particular religion. They tend to be suspicious of people, who just sort of believe in God or Jesus, but don't affiliate with a particular church. So if you are a religious sort, it might be helpful to think about how your denominational views affect your religious belief and practice. Having a method of yoga is a bit more like that.

Another way I thought about the question has to do with philosophical training. We typically don't just learn philosophy, but we learn a way of doing philosophy. For instance, I was taught to read Plato in the way that I read him, with attention to historical context, dramatic and literary detail.. Others are taught to read Plato different, with an eye toward examining the arguments and their various implications. How one is taught shapes how we experience Plato. How we are taught to do yoga shapes how we experience yoga.

So is my knowledge/experience of yoga different than someone who doesn't have a method or who has a different method? Absolutely. Are we all knowing and experiencing yoga? Absolutely.

More another time on the value of navigating the differences between methods and the disadvantages of having a method.