Learning to swim in the deep waters of ashtanga yoga

Yoga is a personal practice. In fact, in the past, it would have been considered to be something that one did in private. Each individual student would have had a personal relationship with his or her teacher and would not have shared any of the things that they learned with the outside world unless they were directly instructed to do so.

These days, many of us share the minutia of our everyday lives online, including our yoga practice, posting videos or photos of our practice online and sharing our thoughts and feelings on the subject of yoga with anyone who'll pay attention. Never before has our relationship with our own yoga practice been in as much danger of being based on achievement and external validation.

I'm not going to labour this point today, though; we've heard it all a thousand times.

What I'm interested in exploring today is this personal relationship between teacher and student.

We know that ashtanga yoga is a personal practice. We learn the basics from our teacher and, slowly, over decades, become more and more adept and independent.

It's a lot like learning how to swim.

At first, when learning to swim, we need a lot of support. We need a sympathetic teacher who is there to help us overcome our total lack of knowledge. We need floats, and we need to hold onto the side of the pool, or the hand of the teacher so that we don't get into trouble. We're totally reliant on external help.

As we go through the first weeks and months of our swimming lessons though, we start to need these external aids less and less. We spend less time at the wall of the pool and more time swimming in the middle of the pool. We're still reliant on the teacher for guidance, to teach us the next step, or to refine what we've already learnt, and we might prefer to stay in the shallow end so that we can put our feet down whenever we need to, but we become a little more independent.

Eventually, after many lessons and lots of practice, we become completely independent of the teacher, and we're able to swim all of the basic strokes without too many problems.

Next, though, we decide we're going to enter some swimming competitions. We need the teacher again. We need a training plan; we need to refine our technique further and make it more efficient; we need to build fitness and stamina; we might even need someone to help us with our mindset and our approach to training and competing.

Just like yoga practice, as we progress through the levels, we realise that there's more to swimming than just learning the basic strokes, and we need someone who is able to guide us on that journey.

Through practice and dedication, we learn a lot about swimming, and we achieve a very good level. We need very little input from our swimming teacher because we've achieved the level of expert.

But then we decide that we're going to swim across the Irish Sea. What do we need? The teacher again. Somebody who has maybe done it before, who has walked (or swum) that particular path.

Even if we decide that we can figure out how to train, plan, and execute the swim on our own, we'll still need support. We can't swim the whole thing without stopping, or without eating or hydrating, so we'll need somebody in a boat to support us on the crossing, and we'll probably need to hold onto that boat, or even get into the boat when the weather gets too choppy.

So at all stages of our journey, from beginner to world-class swimmer, we need a teacher, a coach, or at least a support team.

Yoga is much the same.

Yes, it's an individual practice (and that's the beauty of Mysore-style ashtanga yoga - you are encouraged to work towards becoming independent from day one of your journey), but you will always need someone who has expertise or knowledge that you don't yet have. Even when you have all the knowledge (which will be never!), you might still need support, guidance, or advice from a teacher who has been practising for their whole life, or even just the support of a community of other practitioners.

Yoga is an internal journey, but at each stage of our development, we will encounter new challenges, and it helps to have someone who's been down that road before and who can help us avoid the pitfalls and problems that are bound to arise.