From Dogma to Direct Experience

There was a period where the yoga practices I was immersed in stopped feeling alive to me.

The classes still happened. The postures were still practiced. The chants were still sung. The philosophy was still quoted. But somewhere underneath it all, something started to feel rehearsed. Repeated. Inherited rather than directly lived.

I spent years around structured systems and traditional approaches, including spaces deeply influenced by Jivamukti Yoga. And I’m genuinely grateful for parts of that path. Discipline mattered. Devotion mattered. Practice mattered. There was sincerity there. There was beauty there too.

But over time I noticed something difficult to ignore.

The closer these yoga practices became tied to identity, image, hierarchy, ideology, and social performance, the further they seemed to drift from the very union they pointed toward.

There began to feel like an invisible checklist around spirituality. A subtle pressure around what an “authentic yogi” was supposed to be.

What you should wear.
What products you should buy.
What political positions you should hold.
What activism you should publicly support.
What lifestyle you should adopt.
How you should speak.
How you should present yourself.
What identity you should perform.

Something ancient and deeply inward slowly started feeling increasingly externalised.

I noticed how easily the practices could become another extension of ego rather than a dissolving of it.

The curated spirituality.
The performative compassion.
The subtle moral superiority.
The branding of awakening.
The spiritual consumerism.
The endless pressure to appear conscious, ethical, evolved, or pure.

Even the commercialisation became difficult to ignore. Teachings originally pointing toward liberation often sat beside luxury products, expensive retreats, image-building, and identities people felt pressure to maintain. Spirituality sometimes felt consumed the same way modern culture consumes everything else: as self-enhancement.

And I include myself in this too. I’m not standing outside it pretending I was beyond it.

At some point I realised I had unconsciously turned the practices into self-improvement. A movement toward becoming “more spiritual.” More pure. More awakened. More complete.

Yet the more I tried to evolve spiritually, the more subtle the feeling of deficiency became. Practice no longer felt like resting into wholeness. It quietly became another attempt to repair what I believed was incomplete in me.

So again I found myself asking:

If yoga points toward union, who exactly is the one trying to become something else?

Not intellectually.
Not philosophically.
But honestly.

Because beneath all the practices, identities, teachings, and ideals, there still seemed to be a subtle movement away from what was already here.

That question quietly dismantled a lot for me.

I stopped becoming interested in preserving an image of spirituality and became more interested in truth, even when it disrupted the structures and identities I had become attached to.

The deepest moments in practice were rarely the impressive ones.

Not the advanced postures.
Not the perfect philosophy.
Not the performance of serenity.

Usually it was something much simpler:
A breath fully felt.
Silence without needing to escape it.
Emotion finally allowed.
The body softening after years of holding.
A moment where someone stopped trying to become somebody for a second.

That slowly changed the way I taught Sunday mornings.

Over time, the classes evolved away from performance and toward honesty. Less about mastering postures and more about meeting ourselves directly through movement, breath, stillness, and inquiry. Less about building a spiritual identity and more about seeing what remains when identity relaxes altogether.

The space became more human.

People arrived carrying grief, anxiety, exhaustion, pressure, overstimulation, loneliness. And instead of offering another ideal to strive toward, the practices became an invitation to stop striving for a moment.

To breathe.
To feel.
To listen.
To stop performing.
To stop trying to transcend being human.

Ironically, that felt closer to the heart of yoga than ever before.

Now Sunday has evolved into something much simpler and much deeper to me. A shared space where movement, meditation, inquiry, philosophy, breath, and community all meet ordinary life. No need to pretend to be spiritual. No need to adopt beliefs. No need to fit inside rigid systems or perform a particular worldview.

Just an honest exploration of what it means to fully be here.

I think many people quietly feel this shift happening. A movement away from rigid dogma and toward direct experience again. Away from image and toward sincerity. Away from collecting teachings and toward actually living them.

For me, the yoga practices stopped being about becoming somebody spiritual.

And started becoming about relaxing out of the struggle to become anybody at all.If something here resonates, you’re welcome to join us on Sunday mornings at Yoga Studio Ely, 9am. A space for movement, meditation, breath, inquiry, and honest practice grounded in direct experience rather than performance.