#TheTIMPBalcony: today we salute Cosmin Yogi

Today we recover Timp’s balcony, we haven’t seen it for a long time.
Did you miss it as much as we did?
The truth is that we had no choice, since from there we have been chatting with Cosmin Yogi, practitioner and teacher of Ashtanga Yoga.

Cosmin teaches both in-person and online classes, and adapts all sessions to the physical and physiological needs of each participant.

My first contact with yoga was when I was a child, when I was diagnosed with asthma.
My doctor secretly gave me a yoga book to start practicing it and improve my health, it seemed something forbidden, since we were in a regime where any spiritual activity was illegal. Eventually I gave it up, but after a turbulent time after college I found balance again.

We are not in India, we are in Spain. The usual environment of a yogi in essence is in India. So I am not a traditional yogi.
I listen to reggae music and I have a family, I do different things than the life of a renunciant.

My teacher, Manju Jois, son of Pattabhi Jois, who designed Ashtanga yoga, comes from a Brahmin family, and yet he always stresses that “we take it too seriously”.
We have to adapt the practice to our environment, to our capacities, to our lives.

The image of the yogi dressed in white does not exist.
The real figure of a yogi was that of a renunciant, a shaman who lived in the forest and dedicated his life to experimenting with various techniques to enter into ecstasy.
If your intention is to live as a priest, to be a renunciant, then you will have to go to the forest and lock yourself in a cave to practice.

Yoga is sitting on a mat practicing, obersanvándose oneself, being with your “I”, observe how the mind works, the body and try to know yourself.

People look to yoga for healing, but it misses the point a bit. Healing is just a by-product. Healing happens, it doesn’t have to be its main product.

You can start like this because not everyone knows the real essence of yoga, but it is important to learn that it doesn’t exist just to heal ourselves and be happy with our body, because we are more than the physical body.

In the second half of the 20th century, a Sanskrit master, Pattabhi Jois, a student and disciple of T. Krishnamacharya and one of the pillars of the modern yoga renaissance, used this system as the basis for his teachings.

This was at the time of India’s transformation, when Hindus were searching for their nationality, rediscovering themselves after so many centuries of British occupation.

During that time, yoga teachers like Krishnamacharya were looking for the same thing, for people to reconnect with their roots, since Hindus after so long in the presence of the British were unaware of them.

As for the yogis, in India it was known of the existence of strange men who dressed like beggars and were recognized as holy men. They were held in high respect, but it did not go beyond that.
The true image of the yogi was that of a naked, dusty, wandering man. The image we know of the master dressed in white radiating light is an invention. But in the 20th century this stereotype was worked on to attract more people, who wanted to relate to a beggar?

Krishnamacharya was a very presentable man, a scholar: he had 7 doctorates, he could speak, explain and project that image of yoga to others.
Patanjali learned and did the practices with him, and then called them Ashtanga yoga.

To devote himself to yoga, he had to leave the Sanskrit school and start living as a poor man, however, it was very rewarding for him, as everyone turned to him for healing.

David Williams was one of the first Americans to study Ashtanga.
In his early 70’s he traveled to India, where he saw Pathabi’s team practicing yoga.
He quickly tried to contact Pathabi’s son Patanjali, who told him to talk to his father so that he could teach him.
That is how David Williams took Ashtanga Yoga to the USA.
When he came back from India and started teaching, everyone wanted to practice it because it made you feel so good. That’s how it became such a famous practice.

Many teachers began to use marketing strategies to make this practice more attractive. They told legends, they called it millenary….
But in reality it is not an ancient practice, it is modern and created by the genius Kkrishnamacharva.

Once it arrived in the West, it spread very quickly, as it was something different and very rare that made your body very fit and in a very good state of health.
Being such a physical exercise it was very well received.

At the beginning we always keep that, but there is much more, internal practices that are not seen, that cannot be put on social networks, because they do not have a body.
We live in a time when hedonism is at its maximum expression.
This time has to change, people have to understand that we are more than the body.

I would recommend everyone to practice Ashtanga yoga, but it is very important that they find a good teacher. The good teacher is the one who molds himself to his students, not the students to them.

Many people think that it is something rigid and that we have to adapt to the practice.
But it is just the other way around, any genuine yoga practice has to adapt to the practitioner, not the other way around.
A true teacher adapts to you and teaches you from your point of view.

There are no good or bad teachers, there are only experienced or inexperienced teachers. An accomplished teacher with a long trajectory will teach you in such a way that you will understand everything you need to take advantage of the practice.
But a teacher with little experience will tell you in a rigid way how you have to do things.
But that will not give you peace, on the contrary, you will be more in tension.

The most important thing is to teach from the heart, from one’s own experience, not to teach from a book.
As a teacher you have to show what you are.
In fact it is not about teaching, it is about transmitting.

When I am with my practitioners I consider that I am sharing what I like with others.
In the end the practice, the group meditation, makes sense but only up to a point.

Any serious practitioner of spirituality knows that real transformation comes from being alone. Speaking of this as a good thing, being happy in solitude is a blessing.