My First (And Last?) Yoga Instagram Challenge
Pay no attention to that cameraphone over there.
Note 1 : This is not a universal denouncement (or defense) of yoga selfies — only a reflection on my own mixed experience.
Last summer, teacher training turned my unassuming, comfortable little yoga practice into something enormous and scary, then transformative (as enormous and scary things often become). This summer, I took a much smaller-scale journey outside the boundaries of “comfortable yoga.” I completed a pose-a-day challenge on Instagram in July.
Pretty simple, right? You know these yoga Instagram challenges. They have a cutesy hashtag and maybe a bunch of sponsors peddling overpriced clothing and questionable “detox” foods. The main event is usually a parade of scorpion/handstand/wheel variations, modeled (in the truest sense of the word) by very thin women with elegant, flowing hair, tiny bikinis, impeccable form, a smile, and an ever-present beach setting.
It’s like those ubiquitous “LIVE LAUGH LOVE” home decor pieces comes to life.
Okay. Maybe that’s harsh. Even the coldest critic of Instagram yoga has to admit that these pictures are lovely. The angles and curves of yoga poses often create aesthetically striking — even stunning — designs, resulting in true photographic works of art.
Unfortunately, there’s a very fine, troubling line between “inspirational” and “frustrating, alienating, and misrepresentative.” I see Instagram yoga as similar to a high-fashion advertising spread in a magazine. It’s attractive and artistically worthwhile, but most of us can’t hold it up as practical inspiration.
One of my core principles as a teacher is that yoga is for everyone. If most practitioners will never look like the Instagram stars in our poses, it’s discouraging to see these images dominate as “what yoga looks like” on the main social photography platform. Here’s the thing: Yoga doesn’t have to “look” like anything. It happens internally — in your body and mind.
Yoga photos as art may be beautiful, but they can turn off prospective students, beginners, and experienced students alike. Well-intentioned teachers with solid training and a generally healthy understanding of the practice aren’t immune. As a teacher-in-training and then newly minted teacher last year, I had moments where doubts would flicker about whether I was should even qualify as a yoga teacher because I wasn’t — and still am not — a calm, elegant, crop-topped contortionist.
Instagram yoga can also make complex poses requiring countless alignment subtleties seem deceptive simple. The risk to the participant, of course, is discomfort and outright injury, especially when an advanced inversion (or backbend, or arm balance, or… almost anything, really) is practiced in isolation for a photo challenge without an appropriate sequence of preparatory poses.
With these concerns, why join a yoga photo challenge at all, then? Peer pressure, for one thing. The challenge I participated in, led by the local studio where I take classes, was filled with friends (and promoted at every class). It was also unlike many other challenges: accessible, diverse in pose type, not tied to promotional sponsors, thoroughly instructional, and truly focused on safe alignment, including ample discussion of modifications and props.
The second reason was the idea of taking and sharing these photos made me personally uncomfortable enough to know that getting through it would probably feel rewarding (especially while trying to heal from a wrist injury) and that sitting out would be wimping out. Yoga teaches us that we have to push ourselves.
Plus, as an always-hobbyist, never-serious-enough photographer, I could use this exercise try to learn a little more (i.e., nerd out) about light, shadow, photo composition, perspective, and iPhone photography app filters.
So, 31 days of photos it was. Tossing out a public picture of yourself every day on social media is difficult. Especially when you rarely post photos of yourself at all. Especially when you’re clad in tight leggings and form-fitting tank tops and have to contort yourself into potentially awkward poses, made more awkward by a bulky wrist brace.
Fortunately, viewers were uniformly supportive. I’d prepared for rude alignment corrections, prop-shaming, and creepy objectifying “compliments,” but none arrived.
Friends and teachers cheered me on, and I loved reciprocating and offering support (in the currency of Instagram likes and comments) to them. A warm and fuzzy universal victory on the human connection front. My yoga family is truly top-notch.
The self-critic, on the other hand, dealt a harsh review. The nice thing about practicing in a studio without mirrors is that you don’t have to be confronted with how you look. You can be blissfully unaware of any inadvertent visual awkwardness and focus on what’s more important, with your alignment and form continually kept in check by your own physical sensations and the teacher’s watchful eye. For the most part, I’d managed to practice for more than three years without ever staring at a mirror, except maybe when experimenting with a brand-new pose and trying to follow an online tutorial at home.
But now, suddenly, here were these little square-cropped displays of how my practice has looked all this time. The photographs of some poses were pleasant surprises. Nice! I actually don’t round my lower back as much as I thought in uttansana! Other poses looked so clumsy that I wondered how anyone managed to appear delicate and graceful in them.
July dragged on, and with each photo posted, things started to feel weirder. Was this exercise turning into a twisted modeling contest, veering further and further from my original yoga intentions? Or was this just a natural evolution of an ancient practice into the smartphone age? Using yoga photographs to express yourself through fun clothing, mark pose victories, track progress and maybe even make some new yoga friends around the world, joined through a common hashtag, are all perfectly worthwhile, right?
Sure. But when August 1 finally rolled around and I stepped away from the camera, the relief washed over like a really great savasana. The root of the problem with the challenge? Rather than reinforce a daily habit, it wound up stealing from my actual yoga practice.
Committing to a pose each day could certainly be useful for developing a home practice and getting in the habit of doing yoga every day. No brainstorming what to practice or clicking around a menu of online lessons. Just do the pose in the picture — even if that’s all you do for the day (and it was, on many days), it’s better than nothing.
Yoga for a photograph is better than nothing.
But not once after completing any one of those 31 poses in July did I ever feel like I had just practiced yoga. One of my favorite teachers, Alexandria Crow, discussed this curious world of photographed yoga in an excellent, nuanced piece on the infamous yoga selfie.
“I’m not concentrating on doing what I’m doing wisely, I’m concentrating on making it look great for the camera,” she wrote, describing her extravagant, but highly mechanical, yoga photoshoots.
Practicing yoga (at least, in the most ideal form I’ve experienced so far) is a deliberate, repeated process of letting go and softening your self-awareness. It’s getting to that place of pure “blank mind” consciousness, or physically preparing the body to later enter that state through meditation.
Yoga for a photograph requires the opposite mindset. Even at home with a camera phone — a far cry from a professional yoga photoshoot — I could see that there was nothing freeing or authentic about it: doing the same pose over and over while flicking various lights in the room on and off, re-tilting the phone when it falls off its makeshift tripod, re-ponytailing, holding in shirt folds, thinking about cheekbone angles and planting a false grin, then applying filters, hashtagging, and bracing for feedback.
A wholly valid and fulfilling visual creative exercise? Absolutely. Taking photographs will always be fun. But yoga? Absolutely not, and that’s why I sat out the August challenge. You won’t see it on Instagram, but my personal challenge for this month has been #reconnectingwithunphotographedyoga.
