How does yoga make you a better person?: One of the biggest misconceptions on the spiritual path is that yoga is going to somehow going to improve you or make you a happier person. The problem with this equation is that we come to yoga with something we want to improve ourselves with. If we come to it from a place of feeling broken or i’m not already a good person. I’m lacking something. I’m screwed up somehow and I need the external thing to make me complete. This mode, this way of operation is doomed to fail, right. If you come to yoga or any spiritual practice from a place of deeply aligned, plugged in, wholeness, fullness and then yoga seems to call you to as a practice to enrich or enliven or illuminate that practice or that deep connection, that seems sustainable. You don’t become a better person. You become a more aligned, connected, authentic person, perhaps, through practice. That’s all it is.
How do you define yoga?
That’s a tough questions because we’ve already borrowed so much and reinterpreted it. But we can put it in the broadest sense. Yoga is a collection of tools of practice and philosophies by which the yogi can practice that connection and reveal to himself or herself ongoing continuously, as a lifestyle but also a way of being. Not just a practice you do but something you become and embody through everything you do.
What is a common mistake you see yoga students making?
In the West, a misunderstanding is that we come to yoga as a practice for the physical body. It’s all about physical movement and athleticism. And that’s just one, tiny sliver of it. The misunderstanding is that it’s all about the external. And really, all we’re trying to do is aim inward and find that deep, still place in ourselves. Through all our practices- through asana, meditating, chanting, sweating, praying, eating right, whatever we can do is tonify and get this body healthy so that we can have more access to the deep layers within us that is free of or uncorrupted from the monkey mind and the emotional body and sense. So our practices guide us inward and once you find that connection and hold it with reverence, then you offer back out and reengage with the world and it seems more supple. Not a physical practice, a way in.
One of the Bay Area's premier yoga instructors AND most provocative writers, Mark Morford has been leading fiery Vinyasa classes, workshops and retreats in SF and around the world since 1999. He’s also an author and an award-winning senior contributor at the San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate (since 1997), a contributing writer for numerous publications (HuffPo, Yoga Journal, Sex+Design, many more) and author of 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism,' as well as the Apothecary iOS app. More recently, he created the ‘Yoga for Writers’ and ‘Everyday Sorcery for Urban Mystics’ programs for inspired yogis. He was raised by long-eyelashed callipygian wood nymphs and spoon fed dark chocolate, raw pomegranate seeds, Shaiva Tantra mantras and artisan bourbon until he could fly. Mark’s yoga is both physically challenging and acutely reverential, a sinuous combination of the body’s most ecstatic cadences and Tantra’s most lucid metaphysics, all designed to tonify the body, guide the frenzied Self toward liberation and burn off toxic text messages and reckless illusions. Simple, really.
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