Yoga in the World
The last part of Tree of Yoga by BKS Iyengar deals with certain ways we may encounter yoga in the world. As students of yoga, we may approach it as a philosophy, a physical practice, or a spiritual endeavor. But yoga is also an art! As teachers, we may just want to share what we know, but we also have to keep learning along the way!
Yoga viewed as an art opens up a depth of the practice that leads beyond merely physical acts into spiritual pursuit, imagination, and intellectual inquiry. Yoga covers every art form – spiritual in its search for union with the Divine, architectural in that each posture is an archetype of shape and form, healing in its ability to transform the body and mind of the practitioner for the better, and performing in the beauty and harmony of the asanas.
With yoga as an “art in action”, we all become artists in our practice. We must develop our aptitude and love, and utilize creativity and imagination as we sustain our practice over time. Yoga Sutra I.33 reminds us how to nurture our art of yoga by “cultivating friendliness, compassion, joy, and indifference towards happiness and sorrow, virtue and vice”. These qualities provide support as we dive deeper into our journey (nivrtti-marga). They provide balance between the external pleasures we seek (bhoga-kala) and the “true, auspicious, and beautiful” divinity within that yoga-kala provides. With only bhoga-kala, we get stuck in the mundane sensual pleasures of the art. With only yoga-kala, the benefit to our everyday life is lost in such elevated divine aspiration. This combination of enjoyment of the external practice along with divine inspiration is what illuminates our consciousness for yoga.
For so many, this illumination is what drives us to want to teach and share yoga with others. The list of qualities that BKS Iyengar lists in Tree of Yoga for the teacher of yoga makes me smile, and it is no mystery why he takes one of the longest chapters in the book to describe his thoughts on how we might go about teaching.
“It is relatively easy to be a teacher of an academic subject, but to be a teacher in art is very difficult, and to be a yoga teacher is the hardest of all, because yoga teachers have to be their own critics and correct their own practice. The art of yoga is entirely subjective and practical. Yoga teachers have to know the entire functioning of the body; they have to know the behavior of the people who come to them and how to react and be ready to help, to protect and safeguard their pupils”
Tree of Yoga, published in 1988, was likely right around the beginning of the boom of yoga’s popularity in the West. BKS Iyengar was seeing the rise of yoga teachers who had short training and may or may not have a committed practice themselves. He saw how the claims of knowledge and expertise were being shared falsely and without merit, seeing class-only students becoming teachers of the art. His system of mentorship and assessment to become a “Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher” (CIYT) grew from this observation. And through this process his hope was to develop practitioners of yoga that study themselves first and foremost in order to share their aptitude, love, and creativity with their students.
This relationship between teacher and student is a two-way street. The teachers must learn to be “compassionate as well as merciless”, to challenge the students at their level through observation and exploration, to know when to push them and to also know when to stop. The student in turn must inquire and study their teacher as well. Students deserve a studied and practiced teacher for this studious and practical art. There must be support and care in this relationship to overcome obstacles, but distance for clarity of growth and independence within practice.
Creativity and a willingness to make mistakes, admit when you do not know, and be a continuous learner along the path are imperative to the continuation of Iyengar Yoga as an evolving art and not a static subject. Though this was not the last writing of BKS Iyengar’s life by a long shot, he leaves us in the Tree of Yoga with a beautiful end…
“The first thing for a teacher to remember is that all the pupils who stand in his presence are as important as himself. Those who have trained under me become my children. Now my problem is how my children are going to look after my grandchildren!”
Speaking of grandchildren … it is a great time to remind all devoted students of Iyengar Yoga that 2026 is a year of a convention! ALL students are welcome to learn and study under Abhijata Iyengar, BKS Iyengar’s granddaughter. She is the embodiment of “peace, joy, and delight” that BKS Iyengar speaks of in this last chapter and she is an amazing light on all of our paths of yoga! LEARN MORE HERE.
