Yoga isn’t meant to make You Happy

Yesterday someone I follow on Instagram was having a bad day.  She said she’d been through a lot - gotten sober, lost over 100 pounds.  She does yoga, she meditates, she’s working on self-love and self-care.  And, even with all of that - she isn’t happy.  Or, if I’m understanding her words - she isn’t happy all the time.    She still struggles with life and she felt deflated by it all.  

Her post was met with plenty of understanding and supportive comments from kind-hearted folks.  I bet by the end of the day she felt at least little bit better.

But it stuck with me.  Mostly because it’s true, none of those things can guarantee your happiness.  In fact, I think it’s a huge misconception folks have around yoga and meditation.  It’s the whole “Rainbows!” “Unicorns!” “High Vibes Only” “Love & Light” message that is ever-present in superficial depictions of mindfulness practices.  I mean, sure yoga is great for depression but it was never designed to make anyone happy.

Yoga isn’t for Happiness

Is that shocking? That yoga wasn’t created to ensure anyone’s happiness? My guess is that happiness probably didn’t enter the yoga discussion until Westerners infused it with our ‘pursuit of happiness’ mentality.

Yoga is a technology that is less interested in your happiness and way more interested in your awakening.  Yoga is a practice that is wholly devoted to you waking up and remembering who you are.  In my understanding of Tantric Yoga waking up includes every possible kind of experience.  So my Instagram friend will experience great highs and happiness, but she must also experience lows, anger, and frustration.  In Tantra, one experiences their humanity as Divine.  All of it.

Becoming Sensitive

What happens for folks when they start practicing regularly is that they become more sensitive.  One becomes sensitive to body parts and sensations that they ignored before.  One wakes up to habituated thoughts and to the ongoing commentary of the mind that they never heard before.  With greater sensitivity life can feel chaotic, and loud.  It may seem like things are worse than ever before.  

Without awareness of this process, one can get stuck here.  Yoga and meditation felt good at first but with this deepening suddenly it’s not so great anymore.  But take heart, increasing sensitivity is a good sign.  It means you’re ready to dive below the surface.

There’s something MORE

The more sensitive you become the more you can attune to something else, something more.  You’ll put yourself into the shapes -  a dog, a boat, a triangle - but you’ll realize there’s something that’s not taking new shapes.  There’s a part of you that isn’t changing, isn’t moved, isn’t shifting.  

That’s what yoga wants you to be sensitive to…..

In the invocation I chant there is a word: Niralambaya.  It holds the connotation of abiding.  It means that this unchanging part of you abides.  It needs no support from the outside and yet it remains steady and constant, unchanged for all of time.  

Abiding in the Heart

The abiding Consciousness could be called the Self, the Heart, the Seer.  This is what yoga points you towards.  It’s not worried about your happiness because it knows that surface-level happiness is fleeting, temporary.  Only when you turn and return to the Heart can you know deep experiences of joy, peace, and love.  

So to my Instagram friend, I would recommend sticking with yoga but looking below the surface.  The simplest way to get there is to close your eyes, and feel for the part of you that has always been there.  Since you were born there has been a part of you that has always been, that never changes.  Turn towards that, your Heart.  

The more you turn to your Heart and view the world from there, paradoxically the happier you become.  It’s sneaky because it isn’t happiness that is dependent on anything or anyone.  It’s the ānanda - unconditional Joy - that yogic sages say is the core of each of us.  That means you’ll still have challenging situations and utter heartbreak.  You’ll just experience it all from the abiding spaciousness of the Heart.   And your Heart is big enough to hold and transmute every experience into Love.

Enter anytime

So remember, especially if you are suffering: wherever you are, whenever you are you can always drop back into the abiding part of you.  No, yoga can’t guarantee your happiness.  But I can tell you even if you don’t reach enlightenment (even if that’s not your goal) every moment spent in your Heart is a moment of goodness that will stabilize you when life comes with all it’s life-ness. For me, that’s worth it.