You’re being ripped off. Possibly. No, make that probably.

For the fact is that the vast majority of us are not getting near the value from our yoga practice that we should be. We’re leaving heaps of money (code for physical, mental, and spiritual transformation) on the table. Consider:

• Driving a Ferrari Enzo—in a school zone
• Riding in a Boeing 747—on the interstate
• Using a wad of hundred dollar bills—to start your barbeque

All of the above examples have one thing in common: immense untapped potential.

And you can add these to the list above:

• Using yoga to lose weight
• Using yoga to become more flexible
• Using yoga to banish stress
• Using yoga to improve balance
• And even using yoga to get better at yoga

Each in their own way misses the point, and leaves the same kind of immense potential untapped.

Let’s face it, getting the most out of life is what we are all wired to do: it gives us satisfaction, it makes us feel good, it helps us to find fulfillment and empowerment in the world. So, it’s only natural for it to seem a shame when potential is wasted. Stumble upon any of the examples above in your daily life and it would likely leave you shaking your head in disbelief.

But here’s the thing. While the misuse of a Ferrari, a jumbo jet, or a hundred dollar bill is immediately evident to most of us, the same cannot be said when it comes to the misuse of the practice of yoga. And this goes for many long-time practitioners and, yes, even teachers.

Here’s a fact: Most of us simply don’t know how to get the most out of the practice of yoga—and don’t even realize it.

Consequently the vast majority of yoga practitioners haven’t even come close to tapping the full potential of their practice. It’s all because of a simple misunderstanding and, like remaining blind to the Ferrari’s speed, the jumbo jet’s ability to fly, or the hundred dollar bill’s value, it keeps us from accessing something of immense value.

Now, please don’t misunderstand. This is not an indictment of yoga teachers or yoga practitioners; it’s simply a commentary on what has been lost as yoga has migrated westward.

Here’s the raw truth: The secrets to tapping the full power of your yoga practice have been lost.

They are simply not being taught and this is true even among many of the most respected yoga teachers, training academies, and ashrams around the world.

It’s true that yoga practiced even without these secrets can yield huge benefits. From improved health to increased flexibility, from enhanced strength and improved balance to weight loss and stress relief, yoga seems to offer it all. But there’s more, much more in fact, more than most of us can even imagine.

So here you go, courtesy of all of us at Yoga Pura: The Lost Secrets of Yoga. Bring them into your practice and you might just be shocked at what happens.

Secret #1: Yoga has nothing to do with yoga

I see it all the time, people practicing yoga—sometimes for five, ten, or more years—as if the goal was to get good at yoga, as if perfecting a yoga posture was some sort of holy grail, as if somehow, when they are able to do the perfect triangle pose, the perfect headstand, or perfect elbow balance, then their lives will be magically improved. The fact is that there was a time when I couldn’t even touch my toes. Now, I can touch my toes, stand on my head, and whip out a whole library of fairly impressive yoga postures. The number of problems this has solved in my life? Precisely zero (although trimming my toenails has gotten a bit easier).

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that performing yoga postures has no value—on the contrary. There are inarguably benefits to be had from forward folds and back bends and balancing postures and others. What I am suggesting is that performing these, and other postures, is an opportunity to do much more than merely improve your yoga practice.

This is why around Yoga Pura we like to say yoga isn’t about yoga, it’s about your life. More specifically it’s about understanding and transcending the unexamined limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging mental tendencies that have been poisoning your life for years. The truth is that somewhere on the upside of 80% of life’s misery is self created. It’s misery that is generated not by circumstances, but by our dysfunctional relationship to circumstances. And striking at the heart of this dysfunctional relationship, forging a new and harmonious way of relating to life’s circumstances is what the true power of yoga offers us.

The good news about this kind of misery is that because it is self-created, it is also optional. Great frustration, anguish, and anger don’t necessarily follow right along with all of life’s challenges. Just look around you. We all know people who seem to be masters of surfing easily over the waves that are life’s difficulties and believe it or not, this isn’t an innate gift that is reserved only for a chosen few; it’s a skill that can be developed—through your yoga practice.

Revealing the process through which this optional misery arises in our lives is at the heart of a mature yoga practice. Through practice and experimentation, yoga reveals the real causes and conditions through which this unnecessary suffering is invited into our lives, and empowers us to step into a new kind of harmonious, skillful, and fulfilled living. Surf’s up!

Secret #2: Yoga is not about getting what you want.

Bummer of a secret, right? While I know it seems so, before you chuck your practice out the window in favor of something that will get you what you want, let me explain.

While your yoga practice is not about getting you what you want in the conventional sense, it is about getting you what you want in the ultimate sense. It’s about getting what we all want—to be happy, fulfilled, and empowered in life. But the way yoga goes about this is a bit unconventional. Here’s the thinking: no matter what you think you want, what you really want is to be happy. And that’s true whether you’re chasing after a new car, a better body, or a promotion. The only reason you’d want any of these things is because you believe they will make you happy. So there it is: happiness is what you really want.

So here’s a question: aren’t you already happy when you get what you want? Aren’t you already fulfilled, satisfied, and joyful when things are going your way? Of course you are. In the moments when you are getting what you want, everything is puppies and butterflies. You don’t need any help there. But on the other hand, when life throws you a curve ball—when the job goes away, the spouse walks out, or the disease prognosis is less than hopeful—it’s then that all of us need some help remaining if not happy, at least relatively peaceful and at ease. And this is where your yoga practice can pay off in spades. At the risk of oversimplifying things, instead of helping you to get what you want, your yoga practice is designed to help you want what you get.

And this is one of the most powerful gifts that anyone can offer us. Can you imagine how much more fulfilling life would be if when you didn’t get the promotion at work despite how hard you worked, you were still fulfilled; if when your partner didn’t appreciate you despite all of the work you put in around the house, you still felt satisfied; if when your car got broken into despite your effort to park it in a safe place, you still felt in harmony with things? Think about it. This one little gift could radically transform your entire life.

All this is available to you, and more. All that is required is the sincere willingness to use the techniques of yoga to examine unconscious patterns and experiment with a new way of being. With just a little bit of understanding and clarity, your yoga practice, properly employed, can radically shift your relationship with your life…which brings us to our next secret.

Secret #3: The yoga postures you can’t do are of more value to you than those you can.

So many yoga practitioners are focused on gaining the flexibility and strength and coordination to be able to master the postures of yoga. And while this might be a rewarding endeavor for the ego, it misses the point regarding some of the most important aspects of your yoga practice.

You see, while there is indeed value in achievement—it can help us feel empowered and capable contributors in the world, for example—there is also much value to be had from encountering our limitations, from coming face to face with what we cannot do. That is, when it’s done consciously and with the right understanding.

As we’ve already seen in Secret #1, the optional misery in our lives is caused not by circumstances, but by our less than helpful relationship with circumstances; with Secret #2, we saw how our yoga practice can help us to find relative ease and satisfaction, even when things aren’t going our way. Secret #3 invites us to stop and consider how our limitations may not be limitations at all, but rather opportunities. More specifically, to contemplate how the limitations that we’ve been fighting against our entire lives are the very opportunities that we need in order to increase our mental and emotional capacity for peaceful and relaxed living.

Let me explain: we all know people who remain relatively unruffled no matter what life brings. Whether they’re facing an argument with a spouse, a work conflict, or a five-mile long traffic jam, they seem undisturbed. It’s a peculiar trait that makes us want to know what these people have that we don’t. And here it is, in a word: capacity. These are people who possess an expanded capacity for life’s challenges; some seem born with it, others have had to developed it, but no matter it’s something that allows them to make space for things, even when they aren’t going their way. And it’s something that we can all create for ourselves. Not surprisingly, your yoga practice is the perfect place to make it happen. It works like this.

Think of how you build physical capacity in the gym. You do so by encountering physical challenge; for example, by lifting weight. When we challenge the body to do just a little more than it can comfortably do, over time the body adapts to be able to meet the challenge. By lifting weight consciously and regularly, we deliberately expand the body’s capacity to lift weight.

The same process works with our mental and emotional capacity. And to a large degree, this is what your yoga postures are designed to do. Think about it. A well-crafted yoga practice asks us to do all manner of things we can’t do (at least not perfectly): we are asked to bend in difficult ways, stand in uncomfortable positions, balance in impossible shapes, but—and this is the important insight—we do so not to master such things, but to expand our mental and emotional capacity.

In the same way that you need physical challenge to make your physical self stronger, you need mental and emotional challenge to make your mental and emotional self stronger. And when we encounter what we can’t do in a yoga posture, the mental and emotional weight of frustration, disappointment, and irritation arise. And it’s here, lifting this mental and emotional weight, where we can make our money with our practice.

So how do you lift emotional weight? Simple, you relax with it. Once our yoga practice has created the mental and emotional weight (the so-called negative emotions), our job is to relax with them. We face our disappointment with our lack of balance, we meet our frustration with our inflexibility, we stand toe-to-toe with our irritation about our inabilities of all shapes and sizes while making space for them, while giving them permission to be. It’s through this process that the mental and emotional weight is lifted; it’s through this process that we rewire the nervous system to relate to life’s circumstances in a new and more healthy way; it’s through this that we grow our mental and emotional capacity for life.

With this key insight, we can see how a pose done perfectly offers no mental or emotional weight. We do the pose, pat ourselves on the back and move on. And while this may be the ideal scenario for the ever-difficult ego, from the stand point of growing our ability to remain at ease with life’s difficulties, it’s not particularly valuable. Like lifting three pounds in the gym, it makes you feel strong, but it’s not really offering you the opportunity you need to grow.

So it’s here that the invitation becomes to recognize the opportunity inherent in what you can’t do—and perhaps most importantly to notice your tendency to waste the opportunity by believing the limitation to be a problem or obstacle. It’s in this way that your capacity to remain calm and engage with all sorts of life circumstances will grow to allow you to smile, even when life throws you one of those curve balls.

Secret #4: Practice is NOT enough

All yoga techniques, from postures to meditation, breath work to chanting, are nothing more than tools. Though admittedly they are powerful tools proven effective in creating monumental shifts in people’s lives, they are simply tools nonetheless.

Funny thing about tools though, no matter how effective a tool is, it can be misused—even to the point of moving you away from your goal instead of towards it. Think of a hammer. It’s a fabulously designed tool with a great many uses. But understanding how it’s designed to work empowers you to use it in a way that optimally serves you. For let’s face it, you can swing a hammer using the handle or you can swing it using the head, you can hit something with the claw or you can hit something with the face, you can use it to build an adorable cottage or you can just as easily use it to bash one to smithereens. And its no surprise that the way you swing the hammer is directly related to your knowledge of how it’s designed to do what it does. Without this all important information, you’re at risk of tearing down the very thing you’re wanting to build.

The same can be said of the tools of yoga. And sadly, the tools of yoga are more often than not used without this key piece of information. To be clear, we’re not referring to how to perform a posture (which is more like what to do, than how its designed to work), but instead we’re referring to how the posture creates immense freedom, fulfillment, and empowerment in your life. How the posture creates meaningful shifts in virtually every aspect of your existence? How, in other words, does standing around in funny shapes lead to spiritual liberation?

Unfortunately, this crucial question is one that few yoga practitioners are equipped to answer (and just so we’re clear, it must be answered without reliance on blind belief, faith, or other black box rhetoric that is too often used as a smoke screen to obscure a lack of real understanding).

So here we are again: practice alone is not enough—that is if radical transformation is what you’re after. To be optimally effective, your practice must be mixed with an equal measure of understanding. Understanding about how the tools of yoga are designed to create these powerful shifts, as well as an understanding regarding the ways that we are likely to misuse these tools. Armed with this, you’re practice—and your life—will be propelled to new levels.

Secret #5: Mastery can be yours

Mastery can be yours, and not only over your yoga practice, but more importantly, over your life. All that is required is a bit of guidance and the right forum to learn how to put all the pieces together. And this is precisely why we created Yoga Pura’s Advanced Studies & Teacher Training program.

This year-long journey has been specifically crafted to deliver life-changing practices together with the understanding you need to put them to use in a way that is at once rewarding and empowering. This combined with the personalized guidance you’ll get from our staff of seasoned teachers, will have you tapping your full potential in ways you’ve never imagined—and will prepare you to help others do the very same thing.

But even so, we understand that this amazing journey isn’t for everyone. So it’s important to remember that no matter who you are, you can benefit greatly simply by practicing sincerely with these lost secrets in mind. Do that and you’ll see amazing results. Guaranteed.

Many Blessings,

E

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