Paul Cotner

All the media images of exceptionally stretchy people in crazy yoga poses, does little to build courage to try yoga for the newbie. So having "yoga for beginners" classes helps to taper the fear a bit. Unfortunately, it doesn't help the biggest problem in yoga today...

That's the problem which comes with carving yoga into levels of physical difficulty, which gives the impression that yoga is, in many ways, about how well flexible and strong your body is.

Just in case you didn't know, that is not what yoga is at all.

As a yoga teacher, you can imagine that I meet a lot of yoga enthusiasts. Rarely, though, do I meet anyone who is not still a yoga beginner. That includes a lot of yoga teachers these days too, who place way too much emphasis on the physical yoga exercises, and often tend to forget what their real place in within the vast science of yoga.

This blunder is so common now that the physical mastery of yoga exercises has become the gauge used to assess someone's "level" of yoga.