The First Yogi: What Devi's Basic Poses Teach Us About Mastery

Jun 25
4 min read

Legend has it that Parvati, also known as Devi, was the first student of yoga. And before she could ask Shiva, the first yogi, the question that would go on to spawn a thousand philosophies and religions, the question that might just be the reason you and I are here today, she had to earn it.

You know the question. "O Shiva, what is your reality?" But a question that profound demands a mind ready to receive the answer. So Devi did not ask it straight away. She prepared and initiated herself into the physical yoga poses first.

The mind, Devi reasoned, is slippery and impossible to hold. So she did not start with the subtle (the mind), she started with the gross. She started with the body.

Through the poses Devi slowly found her own nature. She stripped away the doubt and the borrowed knowledge until she could stand in front of Shiva as an empty slate, uncontaminated by anyone else's ideas.

The best example of this is the Buddha. Gauttam Buddha was not full of knowledge. He was empty of man-made philosophy. And the moment he dropped his conditioning, he was awake.

The myth of Devi and Shiva reveals why repeating simple yoga poses, not chasing new ones, is where real practice and mastery begin.

At first Devi needed guidance and direction with her poses. Someone to tell her where to put her hands and feet. But then came the harder part. She had to learn to trust herself. To disregard the rules learn to listen to the whispers of her own body. Which is why, legend has it, Devi did the basic yoga poses over and over again. Not because she was stuck, but because she was being reborn in them.

Devi was unconditioning herself, one breath at a time.

It holds up in a modern context too. You cannot do a pose today the same way you did it a year ago, because you are not the same person who did it a year ago. You are a dynamic, ever-evolving process.

Which is why it has always struck me as odd when teachers tell me they have stopped teaching the certain old school yoga poses. One teacher even asked me, with a straight face, "do people still teach Warrior 2?" I am not here to judge anyone, we all have to find our own path, but I did wonder whether all that "eclectic" shape-chasing was scrambling her brain 🧠. Forever hunting the next new and fancy pose.

It took my mind rushing back to basics. I thought about Shiva teaching Devi, and the discipline of staying with the simple things. And, of all people, Bruce Lee turned up in my head. "I do not fear the man who has practised ten thousand kicks once. I fear the man who has practised one kick ten thousand times." That is the discipline. Always going back to basics.

Back to the story. Shiva started Devi with just a few poses. As I have written about in my book, one of them was the seated forward bend. Paschimottanasana. Devi reached, strained, forced. And Shiva, never one to miss a teaching moment, teased her. "How do you hope to reach for the stars?, when you are so busy grasping at what is already right in front of you? The closest thing to you can feel the furthest away. So stop reaching. Surrender to the process. Do not grasp. Just be. Feel the life force that carries you forward (your breathing) without any input from you."

This is why going back to basics is so powerful. On one level it is simple science. Repetition refines the motor patterns in the brain ,🧠 and the pose becomes easier and more available over time. But on another level it is almost radical. By embracing that simplicity you unlearn the bad patterns, and the natural expression rises up from within instead of being forced on from outside.

The mystics of the east were also often suspicious of yoga poses for exactly this reason. They warned that asana can curdle into something imposed, a suppressive act that splits the personality and becomes an empty gesture with no depth behind it. They warned that we can lose our sense of worth in "the doing". We turn the pose into a competition, performing and overthinking and stacking one new shape on top of another until there is no yoga left behind.

Going back to basics, doing the simple poses well, over and over again and with real attention, returns us to something like Devi's innocence. Not by collecting more techniques, but by letting simplicity, naturalness and inner awareness lead the body. The pose matters far less than the quality of being it expresses.

Devi returned to the basics over and over again. And that became its own philosophy.