When Everything Is Yoga, Nothing Is
Wine Yoga, Yoga with weights, Yoga with props, Yoga for whatever, yoga with whatever.
It is just an enthusiastic declaration about innovation, expression, and transformation. The issue is not the wine, nor weights nor props. But ignorance. Because when ignorance wears a smile, even confusion feels like liberation.
The issue is the certainty with which these practices are presented as authentic Yoga. The issue is that questioning that claim makes you rigid, old, sectary, not inclusive.
Fake culture
This fake culture of wellness has replaced the clarity coming for the Yoga practice. You are no longer seeking for truth; you are avoiding it.
That is not Yoga.
Yoga is not physical fitness with just spiritual branding. Yoga is a Darśana, a philosophical vision, not a playlist of experiences.
Yoga is Yama, Nyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratihara, Dharana, Dyana… all leading to the final step of Nirvana. Which is not a place to go, it is a mind state free from attachments and rejections, just to make it simple.
If a practice doesn’t engage with these pillars, it’s not Yoga. It is just a misunderstanding dressed in euphoric tone.
In Yoga freedom, as understood here in the west, is not the starting point. It’s the result, the end point. A path that includes discipline. It is structured, well structured, not random. It was born from centuries of refinement across language, ethics, and metaphysics. It does not need enhancement. It needs understanding.
Pleasure does not equal liberation. And the practices that seem light and inviting, often distract us most from clarity. Yoga honors lightness, but not the kind that avoids challenges, pain, suffering and unpleasurableness. True lightness is what emerges once we’ve passed through all that.
Wine yoga won’t take you there. All the “Yoga with” and “Yoga for” won’t take you there.
Yoga does not need any “with” nor “for” but the willingness to see clearly. To feel clearly. No to avoid or superimpose on what you feel.
What a courage you need to do that, right?
Yoga is not built on mood. It is a method that begins when we address the causes of suffering, not just escape them.
Discernment or Judgemental
To tell which is which is being able to discern. It means having Viveka. It is not being judgmental. It’s knowing what leads to freedom and what doesn’t. When you try to combine concepts and practices with Yoga that have nothing to do with its foundation, you are not renewing anything. You are only demonstrating your inability to understand what is before you. You are not strengthening anything. You are upsetting the balance with the arrogance of being the ones who bring it about.
But the most shocking step is another.
Just because someone say “It is Yoga” and dresses up their ignorance with kindness and you mistake gentleness of tone for depth of vision and you mistake tranquility of approach for solidity of method, you are not doing Yoga.
Nowadays, anyone who does not submit to indiscriminate acceptance is considered judgmental. Anyone who dares to say “this is not Yoga” is seen as closed-minded, harsh, and divisive.
But the truth is that calling everything “Yoga” is not compassion: it is an lacking of discernment. Lacking of Viveka.
It is ignorance claiming knowledge, maybe disguised with smiling, maybe attractive,
Yoga doesn’t ask us to be good. It asks us to be lucid.
It is a freer, but freedom in Yoga is never a starting point. It’s a point of arrival, and to get there you need discipline.
It requires a perspective that recognizes that not everything that brings pleasure liberates us. Indeed, often it is precisely what attracts us with lightness that holds us back the most in confusion.
But Yoga is not against lightness. But true lightness is not that which avoids weight: it is that which arises after crossing it. Facing the edges within to understand we are otherness from all that we feel. But we feel.
And this crossing does not happen with a bottle of wine or a mug of beer, for what we call Yoga with wine and beer…. (I am smiling at it)
The association of all this with Yoga makes the topic serious and misleading. So it is not the existence of bizarre practices but the association with a well established system that leads you to real freedom.
Any element that you take and you combine with Yoga, wine, beer, dance yoga, it is not innovation nor openness to the new. It’s ignorance in disguise with modernity and innovation.
Here the point is not prohibiting but recognizing Yoga. It’s not rigidity. It’s responsibility.
And freedom, in the yogic context, arises only from the precision with which one observes and names reality for what it is.
Be true to yourself without following the pack and there should be no confusion within you. You know exactly what must be done and what you should choose to devote yourself to the on-going journey of self-exploration and love.
Only by feeling yourself and honouring yourself you will be true to yourself. Shakespeare wrote: “This above all: to thine own self be true”. If you are true to yourself, you cannot be false to others.
Sasy