So, is your balance any better? Or at least not deteriorating like it had been? If so, then the yoga isn’t pointless, regardless of any psycho-spiritual benefits you do or don’t get from it. If not,accepting that it’s not serving your purpose and filling that time with something more suited to your needs isn’t weakness or failure, it’s pragmatism.
Sometimes people can’t see the benefit of an activity unless they experience it for themselves. I don’t know what yoga is like, but meditation is a good example. I can describe how meditation trains my body to relax, but most people won’t understand unless they try it themselves.
That’s why people want you to stick with yoga until you see the point. However, that doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it forever until it yields results. If you’re not seeing benefits, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something wrong.
If you’ve been at yoga for a year, then I think you’ve put in your due diligence. If people want to criticize your yoga effort, then they should point to something specific that you’re doing wrong. If they can’t, then you can safely assume you’re doing everything right and yoga just isn’t for you.
It’s getting worse.
The yoga brings the worsening to my attention. Which I suppose is kinda good, because it’s like getting a status report from my body. But noticing this naturally brings with it sad emotions, and feelings of hopelessness and other bad things. I keep waiting for the feelings to go away and be replaced with blissful nonchalance. It’s strange; I can approach this state when I’m doing everything else in my life. But yoga is the one area where I don’t feel that peace.
I’ve decided I will finish out the yoga class I’m in now, which still has five or six more sessions left in it. I’ve been feeling a little depressed lately, so maybe my perception of everything is being tainted.
Then my understanding of discipline is even poorer than I thought. I was taught that it means doing whatever “people are supposed to do” to achieve a goal - period. No one ever said it had to be satisfying or even good for you short-term.
I am totally on your side with this. If you keep doing it, pointless or not, unless you aren’t eating right or are sick or something you are going to get ‘better’ at it in some way. You want to compare yourself to yourself rather than others, I think that’s right. Better balance (ask your instructor for a ‘root chakra’ class. Laugh now, believe me later). Maybe you’ll be able to do a pose you couldn’t do before. Now it looks like your progress is accelerating, but looking back the classes where it didn’t seem like you were getting anywhere were the ones worth the most.
Which probably is only going to bug you, sorry. Ok, there’s more:
You’re right, you are too “Western”. But you are wrong, people aren’t (all) ‘forgetting that yoga is a religious discipline’.
There is a philosophy associated with it, but what we’re doing in yoga class is only a very small part of that. For me it is at heart a physical fitness program. There is more if you care to look, but you can also stay in the physical fitness section and make all the decisions for yourself in other phases of your life.
A good original source of yoga philosophy is Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Not just the vocabulary but the cadences and structure are all ‘foreign’ from a ‘Western’ point of view, so being ‘too Western’ could get in your way. (Western thought depends on dialectic. Non-duality is an alternative that you oughta try at least once). Apparently the Pentecostals are the closest thing in Western culture, but don’t quote me on that.
Of course it’s only going to bug me, especially when I just posted that things are getting worse, not better.
Yoga is not supposed to be a physical thing for me, primarily. It was recommended to me as a way to feel better about myself…to learn how to be less self-judgmental and just accept life for what it is. “Progressive neurodegenerative disorder” or not.
Telling me that I’ll see improvement if I just work harder is at the root of the anguish, because it conflicts with what I know intellectually: my motor skills will not get better. The best that I can hope for is that they stay the same, but even that is a fantasy. So every time someone tells me to keep working so I’ll see the guaranteed improvement–from their perch of good health and optimism about the future–I just want to fling myself off a bridge. It reminds me of all the bad things that I try so hard not to think about.
I know. 
I think the idea is to just be where you are. So if where you are is bored and uncomfortable or feeling competitive with yourself just try to be ok with that. I’ve done a lot of yoga, and I never really felt any of the stuff your friends are describing, but I wasn’t looking for that so as long as it felt like a good workout, whatever.
Recently I’ve found that other activities do give me that ahhh feeling, and I enjoy them more than yoga, so this year my new years resolution was to stop pretending I like yoga 
Now I try to run. It’s really hard and I can’t go very far and I feel like a total wuss when I’m doing it but I hear that’s pretty normal for a beginner. For some reason running makes me feel better even when it sucks. If that’s what you’re looking for I’d say you haven’t found it at the yoga studio and it’s ok to keep looking.
Well I can totally dig it. Doing yoga brought me into contact with the fact that there is
/switching modes
something totally fucking unacceptable
/switching modes back
about my physical form.
Well, I called it, so call me Babe Ruth. You’re sick. I’m sorry, but you are going to have physical problems. That doesn’t make you a bad person at all. In fact, in your favor people are likely to sympathize with you more and notice all the good things about you. I think if you keep doing yoga you will slow your decline.
I know.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know your age or anything else about you, but I offer this: be careful. Be smart. My sister has always been in excellent physical condition with lots of strength, flexibility and stamina. She loved to run and did it for years.
Until, at the age of 53 she needed a double hip replacement.
monstro, some of us are just not people who enjoy yoga. There is nothing wrong with your being one of us; we are not a bad crowd, really. Even if we are “too Western.” (I’ll do some bastardized versions of poses here and there as part of my exercise mix, but being in the moment? Well where else can I be, but I guess not in that way.)
Why not just keep doing some poses here and there as part of your exercise mix that is helping you preserve as much function for as long as possible? And do a simple pose with breathing exercises as the focus for the meditative aspect?
That’s really good advice, thank you. I can assure you that I am the slowest runner on the planet and also have less stamina than anyone anywhere 
Don’t fling yourself off a bridge; fling the sanctimonious fucks who are working your nerves. You’ll be doing the world a favor.
About a year ago, I did Bikram yoga every day for 9 weeks. 63 days in total. A 30 or 60 day challenge is kind of a standard thing for that kind of yoga and people who do it say that it changes them and they never can imagine not doing yoga ever again and now it’s a part of their lives.
What I got out of it was 1) I have the discipline to do something for 63 days and 2) when I say “I don’t have time” for something, I’m really full of it, because I was able to make time to do a 90 minute yoga class daily and it really wasn’t that big of a deal. Inner peace? Not so much.
Since day 63, I haven’t been back to Bikram at all, and I think I’ve gone to any kind of yoga 2, maybe 3 times? Maybe? I don’t miss it. I don’t dislike yoga (well, I hate sun salutations) but if it’s not doing it for you, stop. Do something (or nothing) else.
One thing with this - I know that my body changes from day to day, from hour to hour even, and what it was capable of yesterday at 3pm is not necessarily what it is capable of today at 8am or next Thursday at 9pm. And some of those changes are going to be for the better and some are not. So, when I did a pose, I compared it to what I could do right then rather than what I happened to do the week before (when I might have been more rested or less tired or more hydrated or whatever). Its knowing what I feel like at my limits and comparing myself to that feeling.
I went to class today and I spent the whole time thinking about the positives.
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It gives me something constructive to do. It keeps me from laying about in my PJs for most of the day.
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It keeps me from spending the whole weekend by myself. I am not a chatty kathy, but I will say hello to the receptionist and the instructor, and exchange a smile with someone who happens to glance my way. Also, one of the guys in the class invited me to a showing of his artwork last week and I actually went to it. He wasn’t there when I was there, but I had a conversation with him about it today. He seemed bowled over that I came, even though he has tons of friends in the class and they all came as well.
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If I just open my eyes a little, I can actually see that I’m not the worst student in everything. For instance, when we raise our hands up over our heads, I can keep my arms straight. This isn’t easy for some people, I’ve noticed. It’s a little thing, but it’s still something that I should be grateful for.
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I am compassionate. When I see someone not doing a pose “right”, I’m not so quick to think, “They aren’t even trying” or “Why can’t they see how wrong they are?” Not that I think I was ever this way to a major extent, but at least I don’t see myself ever being this type of person.
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I’m doing something impractical for once in my life. I need to get out of the habit of only doing something if I can see its utility.
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It’s unpleasant falling down and feeling wiped out, and then not even getting much relief during shavasana. But if you never feel bad, you can’t really appreciate the good.
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Maybe I am teaching the instructor as she is instructing me. She now knows that some people benefit from having a sandbag placed on their forehead during shavasana. It took her some trial and error before she came up with this technique for me.
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I was feeling depressed before class today, and now I don’t feel so bad.
So those are some reasons to continue.
I thought about it a little and have collected some of your quotes to respond to.
First, woo aside (I’ll get to that in a second), yoga is basically a gym membership. So if it is ‘not primarily a physical thing’ for you, you could have the wrong expectations. Not that that amounts to a reason to quit, but be aware of that.
That said, it is in the way you use it. The kinds of feelings I get from yoga mostly relate to endurance type stuff. For example, take a certain posture and I feel suddenly completely out of breath and I get the idea to Stop It Right Away! But I know perfectly well I am not out of breath, something about the pose sets off one of my body’s alarms- a false alarm. So the body can trigger ideas in the mind that don’t refer to anything except your posture, which, being ridiculous, is meaningless in itself. So, these kind of feelings get reduced to a sort of datum, noted but not something I need to act on. There is a lot of introspection to be had from this kind of thing, not a bad bonus for a trip to the gym, and I can borrow it if say I go for a long run.
But you are worried about weakness in your personality and ego, and the religious aspect of yoga, whether you are ‘too Western’, questions about ‘being in the moment’ and so on. ‘Too Western’ shouldn’t be a surprise. I assume you are an American, and yoga comes from India, so what did you expect? It is completely normal.
As for the rest- well, I already said I don’t understand how yoga works. I posted a link to the Yoga Sutras, but frankly those are a total whoosh to me. It just doesn’t make any sense, and I have studied plenty of philosophy and am pretty comfortable looking at weird ideas.
But there are more accessible explanations of what the Yoga Sutras are getting at which might reveal you are ‘getting it’ more than you think. This gets into woo, but you could look at the ‘ultimate point’ of yoga to be jnana, which is ‘realization’ of something they call ‘the Self’. Here is a book of interviews with a guy who entered a permanent state of jnana. Some relevant quotes:
It is still pretty hard to explain, but ultimately living in the moment is* jnana*. But it is living in THE moment. There is only one moment. As our friend Mr Maharshi would tell you, “There is only the Self”. Literally, in reality, there is only one thing, and you are it.
I hope I am not a nuisance will all this stuff. I just think it is kind of funny that you are having all these bad feelings about your self and your body and the weakness of your ego and all this makes you feel like you’re ‘not getting it’, when actually you have zeroed right in on it and don’t realize it.
You don’t need yoga to ‘achieve’ jnana. The Yoga Sutras ostensibly explain step-by-step how to do it, but it like I said it makes no sense to me. The subject of the book I am quoting didn’t do anything to get there, it just happened to him. I think it happened to me for about 1/2 hour once, pretty spontaneously, after getting totally exhausted running a half-marathon, then it wore off and I’m back to being a jerk. It was an ecstatic experience for me, one which was marked by ‘I don’t have an identity’ in my terms, and ‘There is no distinction’ (between this and that). For a short time I yammered away just like the guy in the book I’m quoting.
Well I don’t know how to go back to that. If I thought running around in a diaper like Ghandi while everyone pointed and laughed would do the trick, it would be totally worth it. But if yoga feels like you are running around in a diaper for nothing, well again what I suspect you may be looking for you don’t necessarily need yoga to get. But I think you are onto it or you wouldn’t spontaneously have all these issues about your ego and self, right?
Sounds a lot like the concept of Flow. Not a bad state to be in at all. It also doesn’t have to come from yoga. I get flow when I really get into a good video game.
Anyway, OP, anyone who tells you what you’re supposed to feel should be told by you to go bugger off. And, if you’re not getting the benefits you want out of yoga, try something else. There are many great things about yoga, but it’s not the be-all end-all. Go do something else you enjoy more.
that and that
The practice brings equanimity as we slog through life. And who doesnt love a good stretch. If you don’t sweat by the end of your yoga session, bump up a class.