Drills vs Vinyasa Krama

It seems like I'm seeing "drills" EVERYWHERE anymore! Yoga drills for arm balances, or inversions, or core strength, or, or, or...

Do you know what's much harder to come by? Vinyasa Krama. Maybe it's because we're immediately familiar with the idea of a drill. Do this thing and you will develop the particular and appropriate strength, or flexibility, or balance, or whatever in order to achieve your yoga goal! Just fifteen minutes a day and YOU TOO will be able to <fill in the blank>!

I'm gonna start with the issues I see with that approach before I loop back to Vinyasa Krama and yes, I'll define that for you. Patience!

Besides the infomercial vibe I get from these drills (and the way they're marketed,) there's the issue of whether pairing "yoga" with "drills" is appropriate in the first place. Yoga and asana are not the same. Asana is the physical practice of poses (individually or as a series or flow,) while yoga is a larger, richer practice that involves not only asana, but how we treat ourselves and others, working with the breath, meditation, and ultimately a sense of being fully integrated with and not at all separated from the rest of the world.

So thinking of drills as a means of "getting better at" yoga is incomplete at best and misleading or even harmful at worst. Sure, you might be able to nail that handstand if you do those drills, but is that the object of yoga? No. It is not. As a matter of fact, there's this pesky little piece of the yoga puzzle that is often forgotten. In the Bhagavad Gita, it says not to renounce your work, but to renounce the fruits of it. What does that even mean??

You might have heard the expression, "the end justifies the means," meaning that whatever you do is okay, because you get the result you are looking for. In yoga, and particularly when practicing Karma Yoga, the means is the end. Let me repeat that: the means (what you are doing) is the end (why you are doing it.) So the point of your physical practice (to come back to asana) is not to achieve particular poses, but simply to practice. That said, you may certainly achieve those poses through your practice. There's nothing at all wrong with that! It's the striving for those poses as your end, and only using your practice to get you there where we get into the weeds.

Marketing yoga drills as the way to get "better" at yoga is harmful in its way, too. It presupposes that physically capable people are going to get "better" at yoga, and that those who can't do the drills have lesser practices. Not at all! This marginalization of all the other aspects of yoga is a problem that has arisen from the Westernization of the practice. Now, I'm a white woman. I am practicing yoga, which derives from the Indus Valley civilizations. I'm sort of the poster child of the Westernization of the practice. But as we learn more, we can do better, and that includes my blog post here.

Circling back, because I can get on my soap box and get wordy pretty easily. Where does Vinyasa Krama fit into this? Vinyasa Krama is the deliberate step by step progression towards a goal. So for example, if you're doing a heart opening practice, you'll take small steps with poses that work towards increasing heart opening, culminating in what's commonly called a "peak pose." You might work through Cobra, Up Dog, Bridge, Camel, and finally find Wheel through the sequence of the practice.

Here's the difference, though: yoga drills are solely for the attainment of that pose, while Vinyasa Krama focuses on the progression towards it. So the difference is that yoga drills focus on the "ends" and Vinyasa Krama focuses on the "means" (and if you never get to that peak pose, it's no biggie, since you're still working with direction and intention.) There are still issues with Vinyasa Krama on occasion, as some teachers have co-opted it to essentially be a drill with a Sanskrit name (Westernizing again!) and there's still that focus on the physical aspect of yoga exclusively.

Do drills if you want, but this is here just to remind you that the means is the end, and if you never nail that pose, you are still getting the benefits of your practice!