Instagram yoga accounts are huge. I should know, because I follow a bunch of them, and I kind of have one myself. (See my Instagram account. It’s got yoga and mini-donkeys. Just not together. Yet.)
There are Instagram yogis who are crazy famous, in the world of Instagram and beyond, all because of these pretty pictures. Some of them (Rachel Brathen would be one) have taken this fame and put it out there in the world to do a lot of good. Others, I don’t know, maybe. But that’s not really what I’m writing about here. The internet has made a lot of people famous, deservedly and otherwise. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
On April Fool’s Day, Bad Yogi put out this delightfully funny video about how to be Insta-famous. It was a joke, but it was still pretty much true. Wild poses with wild backgrounds go a long way, and you’ll get bonus points if you’re doing yoga in a bikini, which a surprising number of people seem to do.
But that’s still not what I’m writing about. If I still lived at the beach, I’d probably have a lot more bikini shots, too.
I’m writing about how Instagram yoga shows us really, really beautiful yoga pictures, mostly of really challenging poses. Challenging poses are great. I post some of those types of photos and videos myself. But what I never want people to think is that handstands and weird twists are all there is to yoga.
And I definitely don’t want anyone thinking that they shouldn’t try yoga because they can’t imagine themselves ever doing the poses they see in the pictures.
There is no ultimate yoga pose, no one physical goal that is the gold standard of yoga. As I seem to be saying in a lot of online comments lately, advanced physical postures aren’t what make you an advanced yogi–it’s the intention you have as you practice that makes you advanced.
When we do yoga, we never outgrow the poses. The asanas (see Yoga Vocabulary: Non-English Words) we do in a beginner’s yoga class will show up in the most advanced class, too. We all have something to learn from every posture, and there’s never a time in our yoga journeys when we say, “Okay, I guess I can do handstands so well that I never have to do easy pose or child’s pose again.”
If you’re new to yoga and you see these amazing, beautiful, incredible yogis on Instagram doing what they do best (and being really good at getting pictures of it, which I tend to fall short on), I hope you find it inspiring and not discouraging. Please don’t think that you’ll never be able to do this or that, because you’ll probably surprise yourself if you get started. There’s much more to yoga than handstand and eight-angle pose. I shared a short video of the latter recently, but the day before I shared one of kneeling cat. Every yoga pose is truly incredible and has so much to offer us.
So take Instagram yoga for what it is. Pretty. Educational. Well-staged. Full of lovely insight and teaching moments, if you take the time to read the comments. Join the many yoga challenges, where you post a picture each day of yourself in a specific pose with a specific hashtag as dictated by the challenge guidelines. Remember that you’re not seeing the hours many of those yogis have put in to be able to represent their practice with a difficult pose. Remember that they started somewhere else, maybe near the place where you’re starting, too.
Then get to your yoga mat. It doesn’t matter what any other yogi can or can’t do. What matters is your time on the mat and what it means to you.