You Do Not Have to Be Calm: When Practice Becomes Control
When I am teaching yoga in primary schools, the room is filled with laughter, movement and a buzzing energy that could easily be mistaken for chaos. Children run, wriggle and shout as they explore playful poses and imaginative movements. I often get comments from teachers passing by, awkwardly mentioning that they thought yoga was meant to be ‘calm’. Sometimes, they even tell the children off on my behalf, requesting they be quiet for the ‘nice lady’.
Children come into their bodies naturally alive and expressive. They do not begin life as calm, composed or regulated beings. Their energy is spontaneous, vibrant and often noisy. When I teach, I attempt to work with this natural vitality rather than trying to suppress it in the name of calm or control.
This experience reminded me how early in life many of us learn to equate stillness with quietness, control with goodness and calm with success. This conditioning often follows us into adulthood and into our yoga or meditation practice. We arrive seeking peace, clarity and balance, and yet the very practices designed to connect us with the present moment can become a source of pressure and performance.
We may find ourselves striving to be the quietest person in the room, the one who holds the most controlled breath, or the one who goes the ‘deepest’. Yet presence is not always peaceful. It is not always still. Sometimes we must be present with our inevitable rage, grief or deep discomfort. No matter how much we practice or work with consciousness, we are human beings with life experience. Embodiment includes all of this, not just the parts that look composed from the outside.
Iyengar once said, “At one time I was asked to become a sannyasin and renounce the world, but I declined. I wanted to live as an ordinary householder with all the trials and tribulations of life and to take my yoga practice to average people who share my life with me—the common life of work, marriage and children.” In essence, he suggests the work is not to escape but to bring the practice into the heart of ordinary life. Not to leave the world, but to live in it, more fully, more honestly, more embodied.
Despite this, many of us try to push away or control these sensations. Breath is used to quell anxiety rather than to feel it. Movement becomes a way to ‘work out’ emotions instead of inhabiting them fully. Stillness is employed as a distraction from what is uncomfortable or painful. I have done all of these things over the years. They are not wrong, they do help with regulation and the creation of space, but it might be more useful to work with all of our experiences rather than just the good ones. Otherwise, acceptance, love, compassion or whatever it is you’re working with becomes conditional on being a certain way.
Danger arises when practice becomes about control rather than connection. When presence is reduced to a specific look, feeling or state rather than an honest meeting with what is. True practice is not about achieving calmness, it is the willingness to meet whatever arises without judgment or avoidance.
This means staying with the sensations when your heart races. Staying with a pose when there is discomfort or resistance. Sitting with eyes wide open while feeling the storm inside. This is all yoga. This is presence. This is embodiment.
As Iyengar reminds us, “The pose begins when you want to leave it.”