I. Recognition
It is on those rubber squares that we show up to meet ourselves as we are, with gentle intention to lean into physical discomfort, expanding what’s being met physically, and the one who does the meeting.
Over time, as practitioner-teachers, we find ourselves on a journey of continuously showing up for ourselves. ‘On the mat’ becomes a catalyst for outside of it. Frictionlessness and stillpoints into and around effort develop. A sense of equanimity grows.
The beauty of this process is how our progress can be grasped through direct experience and understood through intuitive felt sense and self-awareness. Something feels different – in the body, in the room, in how people receive us. Our call and inspiration to teach follow from that shift.
It is by means of the ease and competence we are embodying that we change how we show up and are being received - to ourselves and by the world. The effortless integration of more regulated states of consciousness results in more effortless self-leadership. And for many people that results in some form of recognition, either leading to various social expressions of leadership throughout the various circles in which we are communing or actively seeking it in the role of a teacher-practitioner of the very same method that catalyzed our own self-development.
Embarking on the journey of becoming a Yoga teacher, modern teacher trainings are offering us a platform to deepen our understanding of the set of Asana we aspire to teach and to gain a degree of physical mastery.
We can also learn some basics of anatomy and a bit of philosophical background of Yoga. What makes these training journeys land so well is how readily they meet the intuitive and practice-forward understanding us modern practitioners already trust. Throughout the industry, the intuitive-somatic lens remains the standard paradigm.
Asana dominant Yoga systems (that largely dominate the field) understand the body as the primary site of experience and regulation. In that context, traditional religio-philosophical concepts from Upanishads and Yoga Sutras, if touched upon at all, are framed in a way that maps well upon the psycho-somatic lens as well.
The most common somatic, process oriented lens sees the body as primary site of experience and regulation. Every day (every moment even) feels a bit different and progress (or any experience, really) integrates through many iterations of sensory input into an open ended feedback system in which the self is open towards its environment.
This experience of an expanding felt sense of the environment imprinting on us maps well onto what the tradition calls the koshas - increasingly subtle, layered sheaths of embodied awareness. What the somatic paradigm calls neuro- and interoception (the capacity to sense inner states and the environment with precision and without reactivity) are forms of what the tradition calls svadhyaya (self-study); like the felt sense that something has settled; that the breath has found its own rhythm; the notion that physical sensation can be met without immediately becoming narrative. These are very old discoveries arriving in new language.
The neuro-scientific understanding follows a similar processual logic. Repeated practice of more regulated states of consciousness reinforce corresponding neural pathways. The default mode network (the mind’s idle circuitry and the generator of self-referential thought) quiets measurably in periods of focused attention towards the body. Over time, the window of tolerance widens. The stress response axis can recalibrate. Cortisol curves flatten. The autonomic nervous system finds a new resting point. What the practitioner experiences as growing equanimity, the researcher can trace in the body’s physiology.
What the traditional lens adds, and this is where the map becomes genuinely more complete, is directionality and context. The somatic and neuroscientific frameworks are extraordinarily good at describing what is happening and how to support it. What they do not offer is an understanding of where the process is going, other than more of that and less of this. So where are the this and thats pointing to, eventually?
The settling of mental movements, the quieting of the default mode, the widening of the window - all of this is the nervous system becoming capable of holding and experiencing with ease what it previously could not without contracting around it. Conceptually as well as experientially the equanimity cultivated on the mat is pointing somewhere. The flattening of excitation curves cultivates an increasingly steady and subtle awareness, which is pointing to the experience of Yoga as a consciousness state.
Integrating and embodying a traditional map of Yoga is not so much about knowing Sanskrit words and concepts, as teaching from a contemporary somatic place is not about speaking about fascia, ligaments and nervous system states. Its main effect is not being more articulate. It is the co-regulation offered by a nervous system which has regular contact with least excited states of consciousness.
We will always teach from what’s true for us and that truth lives inside our bodies more than in our words. It was a shifting of our own experience (gained on the mat and in teacher trainings) that laid the base for us becoming teachers - the spark from which knowledge could flow. It’s really the terrain traveled and mastered that makes a teacher and this goes beyond technique and anatomical understanding.
The process that has unfolded throughout our personal journey as practitioners shapes the width, breadth and quality of the process we invite people to. The more complete it is, the more of what we are teaching has landed in our embodiment - and we will hold the room from that place, naturally. The frameworks we embody are not in tension. They are in conversation. And that conversation can create a quality of presence that students feel before they can name it. There is a sense that the person at the front of the room is not performing an understanding but living inside one.
I want to present the argument that alongside embodying the intuitive process, the non-dualistic experience of Yoga is what creates this effect like no other means out there.
II. Orientation
At the heart of modern Yoga practice is the Yoga Sutras - a text that provides an open, remarkably durable and easy to interpret process logic. This makes it a natural historical blueprint for the somatic paradigm most of us were trained in. The caveat is, that this logic can be understood differently depending on the contextual lens through which it is read.
There are roughly three distinct ways of approaching the eight limbs.
The sequential approach treats the limbs as prerequisites. We first stabilise ethical life, then the body, then the breath, then the senses, and only then can the mind be trained toward Samadhi. Patanjali’s text seems to support this reading - the earlier limbs create the conditions for the later ones. The problem is that strict sequentialism can become an infinite (mental) deferral: “I haven’t perfected ahimsa yet, so I can’t meditate.” Few traditions practice it this rigidly.
The Asana-centred approach is largely the modern Western inheritance. Contemporary Hatha Yoga and its descendants (Iyengar, Ashtanga, Vinyasa, etc) treat the physical practice as the main vehicle. The higher limbs are understood as states that emerge from Asana and Pranayama - we cultivate ourselves into into meditative awareness rather than practicing it separately. This is pragmatic and the widely accessible line along most of us learned Yoga.
The Samadhi-centred approach (found in Kashmir Shaivism, Advaita lineages, teachers like Ramana Maharshi or Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) approach the limbs from the highest-first principle. Samadhi, the deepest, unwavering state of consciousness, is not a destination reached by working through the other limbs. It is the already-present ground that the other limbs simply clear the obscurations of or they just unfold spontaneously. We don’t build toward Samadhi. We want to tap into it effortlessly, favouring the shortest route. The limbs are not rungs on a ladder but descriptions of what naturally happens as the self-sense expands. They are conceived as spontaneous expressions of the consciousness state of Yoga rather than deliberate practices leading toward it.
All three use a similar taxonomy but build quite distinct maps, with different ideas about which direction you are travelling (or whether we are travelling at all).
There is an important distinction worth naming here. Yoga studios offer a wide range of modalities to experience stillness but not all of them are means of cultivating lasting traits. For a nervous system trait to develop, we need a practice - effortful, repeated engagement. The nervous system being acted upon by inducing restful states from the outside is not learning to act differently itself. Experience that create the conditions for stillness through external means will induce a temporary experience of depth and equanimity.
Funnily enough, from all the practices that cultivate lasting traits, research has shown that the ones in which you do the least yield the quickest results. The more a practice aims at being, as opposed to doing, the more we are equanimity maxing. This makes sense when we look at the idea of the Koshas, in which the more expressed parts of ourselves are correlated with more more superficial states of awareness. The subtler a practice is, the more potent it effects our system from the root up.
Beyond the somatic paradigm and its historical counterpart the Yoga Sutras, the non-dualistic traditions produced not just philosophies of consciousness but reliable methods for direct experience of it. Turiya (pure, essential awareness) is not produced or developed. It is recognised and to practice is to refine that recognition.
The Asana-centred paradigm, which most of us practice and teach from, has carried us far. Integrating the Samadhi-centred understanding is where the process really opens and Yoga starts to be rooted in being rather than a sequence of doings.
Experience shows that the further the processual notions of the Sutras are embodied and integrated into lived experience, the more effectively they transmit through the teaching person. Students have a better experience in class when that is the case. The map becomes more complete. The teacher becomes more complete.
It’s when we stop trying to create the conditions for something to happen in the room - and start being the condition.
III. Invitation
There are two ways to work with this directly. One is through direct experience - a practice that takes us there. The other is conceptual delineation of that experience, producing a more complete map, held alongside what we already know. Both are available. Both change what we bring into the room. Ideally they complement each other.
The Sutras say: Yogas-citta-vritti-nirodhah. Yoga is the stilling of mental fluctuations. Integrating the experience of Samadhi (what the Vedic tradition calls Turiya, the background awareness that underlies all other consciousness states) into everyday awareness produces a measurable change in the nervous system. A de-excited, highly adaptive baseline. The mental fluctuations that once required active management simply occur less.
Since mammalian nervous systems are wired for co-regulation, the state we are carrying is directly picked up by everyone else in the room. A Yoga class is an awareness-forward space, a feedback system in which the least excited state sets the baseline for everyone else present. In a body-to-body learning environment, this translates directly into more efficient transmission of whatever we want to transmit. The wider and more unwavering our baseline, the greater the ease with which people tune into shared experience with us.
The word Yoga also means union - of the one making an observation and the thing being observed. The more we carry a unified, fully integrated experience into an encounter, the more our presence becomes an invitation to that same experience. It is the deeper experience that draws others in - the larger container, the opportunity to experience more joy with more ease. This is how we are wired.
To a certain degree, the teacher we are is a role we play. However, the less we perform it, the more we are simply being, the less energy goes toward questions of authenticity. Acting naturally evokes a concern around how well the act is received, on some level or another. But when our embodiment has integrated a genuine sense of equanimity, we are no longer performing stability. We won’t be occupied with how the act is perceived when our being carries a lively sense of unity consciousness. And that distinction is immediately felt by the people in our room.
We can speak about equanimity, stability, and surrender in our classes. But as long as they are performative they remain superficial values. The more they become effortless traits, arising spontaneously as a reflection of the need of the moment, because of who we are, the more they resonate with those who come into contact with them. People notice. In our classes and outside of them.
So teaching from an embodied consciousness state of Yoga adds an unprecedented depth to classes. Students take more away from it. There is a quality in the room and a connection beyond the words that is not per se facilitate-able - because it is not rooted in a doing. An essential Beingness is present in those who have it.
Greater attunement follows. Better solutions arise from intuition rather than effort. More precise cueing. A fuller presence. Less performance. More transmission.
As teachers who embody both mental maps, carrying a widened window of tolerance and a living sense of the nature of awareness, we are not just more credible. We are more complete. Not as an accumulation of knowledge or technique, but as an embodied reality that students feel before they can name it.
The equanimity our practice has been cultivating is not the destination. It is the pointer. And what it is pointing toward is accessible through a structured encounter with the ground that was always already there in our consciousness.
Jai Guru Deva.
🐬