There’s No “I” in Yoga:

Reconciling the Essential Oneness with American Individualism

Leah Filler

Lesley University

“A person whose self is integrated by yoga sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self.” Bhagavad Gita (6:29)

Introduction

            The image of a solitary person sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, palms resting on the knees has achieved near universal recognition as an iconic appropriation of yoga practice.  The symbolic value of this pose, siddhasana, is ancient; indeed, the classical Indian text Hatha Yoga Pradapika (HYP) describes it as the most important of the asanas, physical postures, in its arousal of a higher state of consciousness (HYP). This search for higher consciousness within the Self is considered across many schools of thought and practice to be the fundamental purpose of yoga (Ravindra, 2006).

The scope and proliferation of contemporary yoga has expanded the practice from its ancient roots in Indian tradition, to a global phenomenon of transcultural interpretation. Like the game of telephone, yoga takes on new meaning as it flows across borders, languages, and cultures.  Here in the United States, yoga’s ultimate search within the Self has confronted an American conception of the Self that is entrenched in a cultural identity of individualism.  While the ascent of Self-realization in yoga can be highly individual, when infused with the American construction of self-actualization through separateness, the result has been a yoga industry structured in a capitalist hierarchy of competition.

A review of conceptions of the integrated Self in the Eastern origins of yoga compared to the construction of a separated Self in American cultural psychology will explain how through its flow from East to West, yoga’s core synthesis of the body, mind, and spirit disintegrated into a merely physical practice vulnerable to the American corporate capitalist values of consumption and competition.  This disintegration intensifies Americans’ need for the essential, holistic balance of yoga, yet such Self-realization is not possible through the isolated branch of physical posture; this simplification reinforces the cycle of individualism, instead of achieving oneness.

The Essential Oneness of the Self

            The etymological root of the word yoga is “yuj,” meaning to yoke, unite, harness (Ravindra, 2006).  This union is interpreted across yoga traditions and philosophies, both classical and contemporary, as a holistic integration of the body, mind, and spirit.  Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, of raja yoga, discusses the union between Atman, the divine consciousness within the individual, and Brahman, the one consciousness that is the source of all things, and in the hatha yoga tradition, the Hatha Yoga Pradapika (HYP) presents the integration of Shiva (consciousness) and Shakti (energy) (HYP).  Indeed, the term hatha is interpreted to symbolize the union of prana, the vital force (ha) and mind, the mental energy (tha) (HYP).  The Vedanta school of Indian philosophy recognizes the oneness and sacredness of all reality, that there are no others (HYP).  This idea of oneness is supported in the classic yoga text, the Bhagavad Gita: “Yoga is primordial.  It has existed whenever and wherever human beings have attempted to be connected with the All or the One.  The longing. The search for, and the realization of this essential oneness is yoga.” (Ravindra, 2006, pg. xii)

Primarily influenced by the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, Ravi Ravindra in The Spiritual Roots of Yoga presents an explanation of yoga, as an integration of the many levels of Self, in the realization of this essential oneness of the highest self (Ravindra, 2006).  This Self-realization, as expressed in the Yoga Sutra, is the ultimate aim of yoga (Ravindra, 2006).  In the story of the education of Indra by the teacher Prajapati in the Chandogya Upanishad about the nature of Atman, Indra realizes “the Self which is present in the body, but which is not the body; which sees, but is not seen; which hears but is not heard; which knows but is not known” (Ravindra, 2006, pg 64).  The connection of Atman and Brahman, the consciousness within the individual with the absolute reality, was a philosophical development in yoga that raised the question: “How is one to know this higher Self?” (Douglass & Tiwari, 2006).  The Self, across schools of though and methods of practice, is more than the physical body, more than the consciousness of the mind.  The Indian tradition generally maintains that the central aim of yoga is to harness the entire body-mind to the purposes of the spirit (Ravindra, 2006).

America’s Rugged Individual

            The roots of American society also involve a philosophical discussion of the Self, through the deep inquiry the founding fathers made into the nature of the individual and the state, tapping into a revolutionary conception of free will and self-actualization.  Through individual rights and personal freedom, limited government and equal opportunity, Americans have been enjoined to value “life, liberty, and happiness.”  Linked in literature to a range of factors, including Protestant influences, Puritan values, the founding fathers, the birth of the market economy, and the vast American frontier, Americans from the beginning have conceived of themselves as separate individuals, isolated from others (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeyer, 2002).  Oyserman et al. (2002) argue that the fundamentally individualistic American worldview that “centralizes the personal – personal goals, personal uniqueness, and personal control – and peripheralizes the social” (pg. 5) has psychological implications in our values of positive sense of self and personal success, and in the personal orientation of cognitive tendencies.  The “rugged individual” is the quintessential construction of American cultural identity, independent and separate from others.

Yoga and the Separated Self

The implication of the isolated American individual is a separated Self, a psyche disconnected from situations both internal and external. As such, the separated Self is constricted by a narrow, self-centered view of the world in which, unlike Vedanta’s denial of otherness, everything is other. The ego-self, Ravindra (2006) explains, is occupied with ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it,’ trapped in a domain of ‘I-me-mine.’  Krishnamurti (1999) describes a divisive sense of duality within us: “the controller and the controlled, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experienced, the thinker and the thought… There, there is duality: light and shade, dark and light, man, woman, and so on” (pg. 32). This internalized dichotomy, reinforced in the separated Self, is the filter in which American culture interpreted and processed the cultural flow of yoga.  The essential oneness of yoga – the integration, the union - was imported into a divisive American dichotomy of mutual exclusion: spiritual or practical?  Magical and mystical, or medical? (Douglass, 2007).

Such are the frames in which yoga was introduced in the United States.  In the 19^th century, the holistic system of yoga was met with resistance along religious lines – Christianity or yoga; faith or infidelity (Douglass, 2007).  Swami Vivekananda (1863-1909) was a practitioner credited for alleviating the tension of religion – by re-framing yoga in the medical approach of its health benefits (Douglass, 2007). Yoga was a spiritual practice, or a medical one, but not both.  In a poem titled “The Critical Juncture,” another disseminator of yoga knowledge, Swami Sivananda (1887-1963) pointed to the opposition of religion and science, proposing that an imbalance in favor of the latter was the source of the world’s evils, and linking Western science to the development of a materialistic fixation and a subsequent decline in health (Strauss, 2002).

Indeed, the yoga perspective views illness – both physical and mental – as caused by the disconnected view of self (Douglass, 2007).  A constricted mind becomes absorbed with itself, struggling to control both situations and objects for one’s own benefit, and resulting in a loss of one’s prana, the vital energy essential for maintaining health (Douglass, 2007).  The inner fragmentation that results from a self-centered life-style of competitiveness and domination intensifies the need for the integration of body, mind, and heart, a need that is pronounced here in the United States (Ravindra, 2006).  Yet the fragmented type of yoga that has proliferated in the US further feeds the ego, the separation of Self, and the cycle of external pursuit.

Levels of Self and Hierarchies of Domination

This is the reinforcing feedback loop that the dominant American interpretation of yoga has become trapped in.  Through its cultural reduction via divisive dichotomies and a biomedical construction of health, yoga in the United States is most commonly identified as hatha yoga, though in practice largely focuses on asana, the physical postures, as a system of health and fitness (Singleton, 2010).   Traditional hatha yoga involves a complex process of physical purification in order to purify the mind; once the system of the physical body, mind, and energy, or the ida nadi (the negative flow, or the flow of consciousness), pingala (the positive force, or the flow of vital energy), and suchumna nadi (the neutral force, or the flow of spiritual energy) reaches absolute balance and union, kundalini, the primal energy at the base of the spine, is awakened (HYP).  The awakening of this central force is responsible for the evolution of human consciousness, the realization of the Self, and thus moksha, or freedom, which is the aim of the practice of yoga (Singleton, 2010).  Freedom, interpreted in the American aspiration as limited government or permissive indulgence, is from the yogic perspective, less a freedom for the Self, and more a freedom from the Self (Ravindra, 2006). 

To remove any of these flows from the system is to disrupt the functioning of the entire system; the exclusive focus on processes of physical development bolsters a construction of evolution within a paradigm of isolated, physical pursuit. The distinctly American corporate capitalism, which not only stems from, but fosters “a set of values based in self-interest, a strong desire for financial success, high levels of consumption, and interpersonal styles based on competition” (Dittmar, 2007) have set the terms of the ascent according to an idealized image of the material good life, the perfect body.  The realization of the higher Self remains constricted by the limited terms of the separated individual, who instead spirals in disjunction, grasping at external materials rather than integrate with oneself for fulfillment (Krishnamurti, 1993). In his discussion of self-realization, Ravindra (2006) distinguishes it from self-consciousness, which “presupposes a separation between the self which is being observed and the observing self” (pg. 62).  From the rugged individual was born the self-conscious suburban bubble, where rising walls of material consumption maintain the physical separation of Self. 

The physical self, the focus of American yoga, is but one of many levels of Self, all which are necessary to experience in order for the highest Self to be realized (Ravindra, 2006).  The projection of the yogic Self of many levels onto the capitalist hierarchy of competition has produced a capitalist practice of yoga, where the individual is separated and commodified (Fish, 2006).  One example is the case of the Bikram Yoga College of India, the controversial Los Angeles yoga franchise that launched a legal battle claiming ownership over the intellectual property of its school of yoga practice (Fish, 2006).  This is Bikram’s effort to bind his production of knowledge to his individual labor, evidence that knowledge that has been so separated by hierarchies of competition and domination that the essential oneness of traditional yoga is lost (Fish, 2006).  Or there is the example of the yoga gear retailer, Lululemon Athletica, who released a line of bags printed with the question, “Who is John Galt?” the opening line of the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged, published by Ayn Rand in 1967 (Austen, 2011).  The book presents Rand’s free market philosophy of Objectivism, which promotes the idea of individuals living for their self-interest (Austen, 2011).  Again, the self in this self-interest is separated from the selflessness of the highest Self, adhering to a capitalist structure of elevation.

“Self is the friend to the person whose self is by the self controlled, but for the person bereft of self (anatmana), self will act as an enemy indeed.” Bhagavad Gita (6:6)

Conclusion

At the intersection of the Eastern origins of yoga tradition and its contemporary Western production exists a fundamental identity crisis: a conflict of self-realization vs. self-consciousness, the integrated Self vs. a separated self, oneness vs. individualism.  In the transcultural production of yoga, the essential truth of oneness has become diffracted, consumed by separated individuals in an unbalanced interpretation of the ancient tradition.  The asymmetrical American yoga, heavy with physical postures and little to no attention to the mental and spiritual flows of the Self, leans into the negative habits and myths espoused by American corporate capitalism, instead of harmonizing with the sound and stable ascent to Self-realization.  The irony is that the balance of yoga offers healing and restoration to the afflictions of this separated individual; yet such a balanced yoga is an illusive search in the American landscape of physical fitness and capitalist competition.  Yet, of course, balanced yoga cannot be “found” through a survey of yoga studios or franchises; the ultimate search is within the Self.

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