flow v. hold -- yoga as dance?

Like most of us in the US, I started and mostly continue doing yoga following the vinyasa approach, which incorporates a lot of movement from pose to pose, and frequently doesn't hold the pose very long, sometimes hardly at all. This is far and away the most popular kind of yoga in the states. Other types of yoga, like iyengar technique, and bikram, and many others, emphasize holding the poses for quite some time, and don't really worry themselves about transitioning between one pose and the next. In general it seems that people refer to this latter kind as "hatha", although I believe hatha yoga really refers to any type of physical yoga. (As opposed to the various other types of yoga such as bhakti yoga, karma yoga, mantra yoga, etc., etc.)

For most of us americans, when learning the vigorous flowing types of yoga, we sort of assumed these were "harder" and so more serious than the slow approach of holding poses for a long time. We would get out of breath and soak our t-shirts in sweat and think, oh, yeah, I'm really doing something here. I certainly felt that way, and so did many of my friends.

So maybe this was Stage One of my thinking about yoga. Move fast, do as much as you can, push your body. Slow yoga is for old people, or people with low physical vitality.

But as i started to do more yoga on my own, I realized I wasn't that interested in doing these flowing sequences at home. Instead, I would just do a few poses, and hold them for a really long time, and sort of explore them. Or really, explore myself and my body in its reaction to the pose. And this is really interesting work, something you need time for, which you usually don't having in the flowing vinyasa classes. Sometimes these poses were strength challenges -- just try holding warrior 2 for five minutes. But most of the time they were more mental challenges.

So maybe this was Stage Two of my thinking about yoga: Find the challenge in the poses by taking the time needed to work with your own limits. Slow is intense, fast is for posers who can't be bothered really trying to understand what they are doing.

And just lately I've been thinking about yoga as dance, and maybe i'm finding a Stage Three in my thinking. I think vinyasa yoga is a lot like dancing. And, hell, dancing is fun. We humans like to dance, and we especially like to dance in a group. And lord knows, we don't do enough dancing in our lives.

So, these vinyasa classes kind of give us an opportunity to do some dancing with the others in the room. And make no mistake about it, one of the great appeals of these flowing vinyasa classes is the group dynamic. We are all doing this together, we are moving together, there is a communal energy in the room. That energy can be powerful, it can motivate us in ways that we just can't motivate ourselves. And that's the beauty and the power of these classes -- they motivate and energize. And on a purely physical level, it feels good to move.

So, no surprise, Stage Three of my thinking on yoga is that there's room for every approach. It depends where you are, and what you need, and what you're interested in. The fast-and-hard approach is not 'better', the slow-and-deep approach is not 'more serious', they're just different approaches, suitable for different people with different needs and interests.