I personally see religion and spirituality as different. I don't think that most of us yoga teachers that are out there, I would say 99.9% of us aren't qualified to teach religion, or theology. So in that context, religion is not a part of yoga. There is a misconception out there in the world, maybe the United States, I don't know, that if you go to a yoga class, you will be automatically transformed into a Hindu or a Buddhist, and that's just not true. I have met some of the most beautiful Christian and Jewish people through my yoga training who are embracing the yoga sutras as a body of work to deepen their faith because the yoga sutras are not a Hindu body of work. It predates everything. It's about the transformation of the human's mind, the human spirit, and it takes you not off your path of whatever that is. It deepens your path; it opens the door to your path. So if you do your spiritual walk with Jesus, the yoga sutras are not going to interrupt that. They're going to deepen it. So what I try to do when I teach a class is just be a spiritual being and to give people permission to be spiritual beings, wherever they are. So, if you go into a yoga class and somebody's starting to tell you what your path should be, you should leave because they don't know you. Not really, in my opinion. No one should be pushing their agenda on you. Again, it's about them. It's not about the teacher. The teacher is in service to the student and one of the things that Krishnamacharya said is 'The physician should wear neutral clothing.' So we as teachers need to maintain a state of neutrality with our student so that we can really allow them to find out who they are without our influence. We're only there to just kind of guide and answer questions that we can answer. But we're not there to preach and pass an agenda on them, even a physical one, even structurally. It's not about what my body looks like in that posture. It's not about how that posture serves my body. It's about how it serves yours. And every body is different. Every spine is different. It's like a fingerprint. So you look at that condition of that spine and you say wow, there's not a whole lot of energy moving in this area. What posture, how can we adapt this to get movement and circulation in that space right there so that that person feels that?
