My Favorite Yoga Student

The pursuit is an excerpt from Eoin Finn’s upcoming book, Yoga Optimized. You can see it through to publishing day by supporting it on Kickstarter here!

If you’ve overly taught anything, you know the joy of those moments when the line between teaching and learning is blurred.

I want to tell you well-nigh my favorite yoga student and what I learned from him.

In 2002, I taught at a private school for boys in Vancouver, British Columbia. In this matriculation of eighth-graders, one of the students was blind. I had to put braille on his yoga mat so he could unchangingly know where he was in space.

Watching him practice filled me with delight. He wasn’t a contortionist or a bendy social media yoga superstar. He was, in fact, quite stiff.

Yet plane in a tight body, he was self-ruling of what I consider to be the biggest wrong turn we all take on the road to happiness: the need for the clearance of others.

Because of his blindness, he had no idea what anyone else could or could not do, or how they looked in a particular yoga posture. Because he could not see outwardly, he had no ways of comparing himself to anyone else. This gave his practice a stillness and a presence that it can take years for us to proceeds on the yogic path.

His poses emerged from within himself without struggle. They were soul poetry; and his squatter reflected the pleasure of creating shapes that released previously stuck tightness.

In Warrior Two, he was well-appointed in his skin. He taught me how yoga and our lives could squint the day we stopped seeking the clearance of others. He moved with a relaxed vapor showing no effort to prove anything. Comparison to others was not the thief of his joy.

In all aspects of our lives, we think the validation of others will make us happy, but it constrains us in the prison of our minds.

As I watched him settle into poses that felt good to him, I saw a living example of what life looks like when we realize that contentment is a key that unlocks the prison of comparison.

If we learn this lesson on our mat, we indulge this quiet, steady happiness to flourish in every other speciality of our lives.

Comparison is an unconscious download installed into our mental operating systems at an early age. We tend to compare everything to others and then grade ourselves accordingly. What does my car squint like relative to others? How well-nigh my body? My social media likes? My hair? In an era where our social media feeds overdraw the ego’s need to see where we fit in on the tintinnabulate lines of victory staying content on and off the mat is easier said than done.

Since we all tend to squint virtually and compare ourselves to others, we need a remedy. The comparison is not just on the yoga mat.

The need to make the poses squint good to get the clearance of others is a cul-de-sac on the road tabbed discontent. It leads to joyless striving for future attainment rather than the simple yet profound joy of the miracle of vapor filling our being.

—

Eoin Finn is a globally renowned yogi, surfer and Blissologist who has been scarification his original tracks through the metaphysical worlds of yoga, philosophy and movement since 1989.

Lauded by Yoga Journal as the “Thoreau of Yoga” for his eco-activism and dedication to connecting yogis increasingly tightly to the spirituality of nature; and by Oprah as “one to watch,” Finn’s Blissology Yoga style centers on the simple idea of sharing happiness.

While rooted tightly in the therapeutic and transformative structuring and physiology of yoga, Finn’s lanugo to earth, modern insights on spirituality refresh like tomfool water and he firmly believes that to find kicks you must “seek quiet solitude in nature.”

A passionate ocean-activist, he started the Blissology EcoKarma project in 2014 raising aid and sensation through yoga and activism for the world’s precious but imperiled coral reefs.

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