The Darkness in Yoga: Why Kali Matters More Than "Love and Light"

The following thoughts 🧐 and opinions are my own and won't reflect what you might read elsewhere. Just a heads up 😵‍💫👀

If my words don't quite make sense please let me know and I will try to elaborate. I try and write without the assistance of Ai as I want it to come from the heart. But the downside to that is my words can appear a little jumbled 🙏🏽🫶🏽

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When yoga made its way to the West, the philosophy had already got there ahead of it. The Eastern idea of going beyond what it means to be human (nirvana, samadhi, enlightenment) had been translated, scrutinised and commented upon by European scholarship decades before B.K.S. Iyengar ever set foot in the Europe. Much of that translation, in my opinion and in the opinion of many people I've met on my travels, carries some form of bias.

The Eastern philosophies were respected from afar but translated poorly and understood even worse. The European academics doing their best to explain the East to the West often looked down on the people of the Indian subcontinent as poorly educated imbeciles who needed Europeans in order to understand their own philosophy and religion.

Famously, as I quote in our teacher trainings, J.L. Brockington wrote in The Sacred Thread (which infamously sits on my bookshelf) that it's fair to say the people of India had little understanding of their own religion until European scholarship 🫨. Imagine saying that 😵‍💫.

And that brings me to the concept of darkness 🌚. The external darkness that pervades existence is seen in the same light (poor use of words) as the darkness within. What do I mean by that? 👇🏽

Well, the darkness that surrounds us as we look up into the stars ✨ is endless and defies time. There is no beginning and no end. Light has a spark, an ignition, a moment it started. Darkness is ever present. We see through light, but what exists beyond the superficial reach of that light is darkness. The creative Eastern minds called this darkness Kali. Or Mahakala. An all encompassing void, the size and magnitude of which is beyond the mind. We cannot fathom it. But we know that this vast emptiness pulsates with life. It contains everything and anything. Nothing is beyond it or equal to it.

It is said that the same darkness exists within us all, and it's the darkness we fear or don't want to look at that really defines who we are. Not the western wellness idea of "love and light". Our struggles and our battles and our trauma are all our darkness. Our genetic makeup, forged by our ancestors and carried in our cells, makes up so much of who we are, from the way we act and react to how our bodies hold trauma and fear. All of this is the darkness we carry.

But when we stop fearing and start understanding, we see beyond the conditioning of fear and into the vastness of what actually is. If the darkness in the sky above was something to be feared, man would never have ventured towards the stars and would have stayed oblivious to the awe inspiring existence that surrounds us. If man fears looking inside at our innate darkness, we become the sum of our trauma, frightened of what is and of who we might become. But when we go inside, when we take this path of self reflection and self discovery that is yoga, we start to understand what is, and we start to see the potential for everything we are.

Back to what I said earlier. When Western wellness culture tried to understand yoga, it took what it didn't understand or feared and kept only what would sell. Love and light 💡. And it neglected the thing that matters more. The darkness inside all of us. We all have our battles, yet each day, by doing something simple like reading a book, or a blog, or rolling out a mat, we refuse to become the sum of our trauma. We are not fighting our darkness. The path of yoga helps us understand it so we can learn to be with it.

And that's the one thing I've learned more than anything else since opening the studio in 2013. Everyone has their own battles. For teacher trainees, that's an important one to understand. Our job isn't to heal anyone, or to advise on which of their imaginary chakras might be blocked 🫣. It's to recognise the strength in each person who, despite whatever they're carrying, showed up for class today 🧘🏽‍♀️. Just knowing how hard it can be for someone to walk through that door. That's all it needs to be.

I appreciate that I can appear to not always the most sympathetic 🙃🧐. I know that about myself. Often I'm exactly as I always am, making sarcastic comments and being my usual acquired taste, when I should perhaps be a little less me.

But when I'm taking the mickey, I'm not saying you aren't struggling. In my head I'm saying you don't need my fake sympathy. Sympathy makes you a patient. It puts you at arm's length and reminds you that something's wrong with you, which is the last thing you or I need when we already know. What I feel you need is what I need. Someone who, for an hour, treats you completely normally. Someone who reminds you that whatever's going on outside these walls, in here you get to just be yourself again.

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Namaskar

Zahir Akram

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