🤔Are You a Yoga Student or a Yoga Consumer? 🤔

This was the chapter that couldn't wait to be written. It's such an important message, I believe, for anyone wishing to deepen their yoga and certainly anyone who teaches it.

This single shift of mindset, from approaching yoga as a client, a consumer, or even simply a practitioner, to being a student of the practice. Well, it changes everything, don't you think?

From Chapter 2, "Evolving Your Yoga: Ten Principles for Enlightened Practice":

"Among the many skills we develop in yoga, the skill of being a student is perhaps the most important. It’s the meta-skill that encompasses all the others.

Unlike most other subjects, being a student of yoga is not only about the knowledge we gain or the skills we sharpen. It’s about being a student of ourselves, our life, and our consciousness.

Studentship in yoga is a vast and awesome undertaking that runs the gamut of inquiring into the most mundane aspects of our physical body to investigating the metaphysical, existential questions of life.

What makes someone a student of yoga and not simply a consumer, a client, or someone who “does” yoga?

A CONSUMER...
-- is a person who consumes something.
-- shows up to receive.
-- seeks out goods and services.
-- enters into a transaction based on consumption, one that may or may not require their contribution or active participation.
-- pursues short-term satisfaction with the services, products and experiences that are packaged and delivered to them.

A STUDENT...
-- is a person who studies something. 
-- shows up to learn.
-- seeks out knowledge. 
-- enters into an interactive process of learning and discovery that requires their engagement as an active participant in order to be successful.
-- pursues learning, growth, and is invested in a fruitful and cumulative engagement with the subject that expands over time."

What does being a student of yoga mean to you?