Yoga is art.
Higherford Mill, where Pendle Wellbeing Hub lives, is full of creative studios: painters, photographers, potters, musicians.
It’s a historic building with loads going on below us. There are open studios every so often, and you can find out more on the Facebook page.
As I return from maternity and spend more time in the building, I do feel a sense of belonging. It feels like the right place for us and I’ve been thinking more and more about why that is. I thought I’d put it into words today.
What even is art?
Apparently, for most of human history, the word art meant skill. The art of cooking, the art of medicine, the art of conversation.
It wasn’t until the 18th and 19th centuries that we get the narrow definitions we think of now. I’ve picked out a couple of ideas below but there are 100s of theories on what makes art.
The act of communicating a feeling
Leo Tolstoy is quoted as saying that art is “the act of communicating a feeling from one person to another.”
This is yoga: connection and communication, in Sanskrit “to yoke”. To unite the mind and the breath with the body, using these tools to work towards meditation and samadhi, the absorption of the self with everything in consciousness.
We might communicate feeling and seasonality in yoga through planning classes around the chakras, or the time of year.
We often work intuitively, scanning our class at the start of the session and scrapping the class plan if we feel we need to bring more energy into the room, or take it down a notch and encourage rest.
I plan whole retreats around the elements of the earth where I weave in breath, movement, ceremony and write meditations to invoke the feeling of fire, earth, air and water.
We have art in order not to perish from the truth
This one especially rings true with the news recently. Nietzsche believed that art is our way of making sense of existence and transforming the chaos of life into something meaningful and beautiful.
In a yoga class, we are switched off from the constant chaos of screens and stimulation, and we develop mindfulness skills that help us to make sense of the world. We experience beauty and/or truth in stillness.
Nietzsche described two forces in creative practices:
The Apollonian — order, harmony, discipline, structure.
The Dionysian — instinct, movement, energy, and ecstasy.
I believe yoga contains both.
Some traditions, such as Ashtanga or Iyengar yoga, emphasise discipline and careful alignment.
Others - like Vinyasa flow, Yin or Pregnancy yoga - feel more fluid and intuitive. Teachers ask you to ‘feel into your body’. Sequences unfold organically, sometimes the asana practice can feel close to dance.
Just another medium
As a yoga teacher, when we design a session or event, we’re not just selecting a sequence of poses. We think about the experience and the narrative of the class.
Sometimes this is connected to the turning of the seasons: the balance of the equinoxes, the quiet inwardness of winter, the energy of summer.
Breath, pacing, lighting, music, and language all contribute to the atmosphere of the room. It is a composition.
Instead of paint or clay, we work with breath, attention, and movement.
People leave feeling different after a class: after receiving the teacher’s energy, moving through a carefully created sequence edited live, achieving a flow state, or just sharing a quiet and beautiful room in community with others.
And in a place like Higherford Mill, surrounded by people creating things in many different ways, we feel grateful to be part of that creative landscape - just working with a different medium.
Charlotte xx
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