[QUOTE=Tor_Hershman;80949]Who taught the first
Hatha?
I think it was Shiva
Cheers
[QUOTE=Fixed;80953][QUOTE=Tor_Hershman;80949]Who taught the first
Hatha?
I think it was Shiva
Cheers[/QUOTE]
Yes, that is why he is also called Yogeshwara- The Lord of Yoga
ZenGuy:
But how does one find great instruction?
That is the question isn’t it? I guess you don’t know how long you have to search until you find it. I think that if you make the observation that the teacher seems to be a “square dance instructor”, you haven’t found a good teacher yet. So continue the search, and stay focused on the path. It was probably always the case that it was hard to find good teachers (except for Fixed, lucky b*****d). We are blinded by the shiny stars of the Internet, but fools gold always came thirteen to the dozen, I think.
[B]Do people acually /B [B]try to learn yoga at home without a real teacher ?[/B]
Would the great sage Patanjali have so eloquently recorded the Yoga Sutras if he thought it was not going to point?
Good example is the birdman he experimented and came up with a cure to the incurable. He read books and had birds in cages in his cell. Experimenting to find a solution.
Reading and experimenting. He became greater than most birdpeople, but then he had time also.
When I first started yoga there was no teacher available to me for the first two years, with the exception of a free class taught every few months at the university (which I eventually took over after she left). When I finally moved somewhere that there were teachers, I found that none of the classes gave me the same peace I could find at home. They were all very physically based and the many teachers I tried seemed too inpatient and careless with the needs of their students. It was almost another year before I traveled to India and finally found a group of people who could answer the questions I really needed help with. Nearly eight years after my first yoga book, almost all of my practice has been done on my own outside of the many month-long intensives of YTT courses. I do have a mentor/teacher, but I only see her once or twice a year, and her best role has been just to help me gain perspective and guide me through any obstacles I haven’t been able to traverse in our time apart. I travel a lot and live in different cities, and I sometimes daydream about joining in an every-day class and having a teacher who can guide me daily and maybe take the burden off a little, but at the end of the day I know that the best clarity can always be found just by kneeling down into balasana three feet away from where I sit right now. I really have been my hardest and greatest ‘real’ teacher and while I am grateful to all of the other teachers who have crossed my path, I wouldn’t trade my worst self in for anyone else.
Except maybe Vivekananda. If he were alive, I’d say he was my teacher for the first 3-4 years. Normal yoga classes couldn’t hold a candle to his teachings for me.
Just wondering it would seem like walking with your eyes closed imho
When I was a little girl, my father told me that when he locked the house up at night, he would deliberately shut all the lights off and find his way upstairs to the bedroom with his other senses, so that he would have have the tools to find his way someday when his eyes weren’t there to guide him. I was about nine and thought he was completely mad for fumbling around in the dark, but many years later this activity teaches me something new every day. So don’t knock it till you try it!
I started yoga 9 months ago, lil by lil learning from the internet, yoga books, YT etc, I practice daily at home, each day I have been learning new things which once I thought I’d never be able to do. But its not limited just to the poses. I like my home & self practice, maybe some day I’ll find a teacher, but as of now I enjoy the awarness my practice brings & all that I have been able to learn in the process. Teacher can always be helpful in the process, but If I’d rely on that I’d never have come so far. So Yes one can definately learn yoga without a teacher.
Reading the posts one wonders whether we are straight-jacketed in associating a ‘teacher’ with a ‘person’. (The same habit that makes it so hard for us to think of God as a ‘gender-less, color-less, form-less, yet all-pervading principle’)
We further expect this ‘teacher’ to be the ‘giver’ of ‘skill/ knowledge’ as if it is a tangible quantity. Tor asked a right question, ‘who taught the first teacher’. That should make us think more.
At the root is ‘learning’; teacher is a facilitator, a guardian of that process. In order for the learning to happen, more essential elements are (1) intense desire to learn, the driver (2) learning to learn, the process and (3) learning till the objective is fulfilled, the target.
If these 3 things are present, learning at home is feasible, and the video/ audio/ a book/ self-evaluation/ learning by errors/ innovation etc are all teachers.
Eastern term a ‘guru’ is significantly different from the Western concept of a teacher. Guru is first “allowed” by his/her guru to teach only when sufficiently elgible. Guru is completely responsible for the student not just for the learning but the living. Then, a student earns no right to shop around for a guru, in exchange of fees. It is the guru who chooses a student. Each guru is well aware of his tenure and would pass over a student to another guru if and when needed. Finally, one’s inner guru is a ‘teacher of teachers’.
Why invent the wheel if it has already been done
We stand on the shoulders of our teachers teachers teachers teachers …
But nothing wrong with doing things your own way either imho
To me When you think you have something just right ,the teacher says that is not quite
right ,
Ego check when a nail sticks up hammer it down …another teacher duty
It seems fine to have a little faith in what an outer guru/teacher points to remembering verification through trial, error and direct experience comes from the inner guru.