Are You Actually Practising Yoga? A Conversation on What Practice Really Means

Recently I sat down with my dear friend Harmony Slater on the Finding Harmony Podcast, for a conversation that I think many of you have been waiting for. Not about technique, sequences, adjustments or certifications. But about the real question underneath all of it.

Are we actually practising yoga?

It is a question worth sitting with. Because Patanjali is precise: yoga citta vritti nirodhah. Yoga is the falling away of the fluctuations of the mind-field. Which means that if that were truly happening, if the vrittis were genuinely dropping off, we would be way beyond the need to keep showing up to practice. We would be in Samadhi.

Which means we are all, at best, on the path toward yoga. Not in it. That’s s not a bad thing, it’s an honest understanding of what we’re actually doing.

The Monkey Mind, and its Four Layers

In the conversation, I shared a teaching that has stayed with me from within the living tradition: the mind is not simply a monkey. It is a monkey that has been stung by a scorpion, that is also haunted, and that is also drunk.

Four compounding conditions. Four levels of disturbance. And crucially, four specific medicines that the tradition offers in response.

Asana sobers the drunk monkey. Pranayama draws out the scorpion’s sting. Dharana dissolves the haunting. And through it all, the monkey remains, but now you can simply watch it, rather than being it.

This is the arc of practice. Not the elimination of the mind, but the transformation of our relationship to it.

Samasthiti, the Most Underrated Teaching

We talked about Samasthiti, the standing posture of equanimity that appears between every posture in the Ashtanga sequence. And how most practitioners treat it as dead space. This is a fundamental misunderstanding.

Samasthiti is the first pratyahara practice in every class. The moment where the question is asked: can you be here, without reaching for what comes next? The way a student stands in Samasthiti reveals more about their relationship to the practice than any advanced posture ever will.

The same principle lives in pranayama, in the kumbhaka, the pause between breaths. And in Vedic chanting, in what I half-jokingly call the Samasthiti of the tongue: the complete release between each syllable that makes clear sound possible.

Stillness is not the absence of practice. It is the condition that makes practice possible.

Spiritual Bypassing, What Good Vibes Only Actually Costs

We also went deep into spiritual bypassing, the use of spiritual practice to sidestep unresolved psychological and emotional material.

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali identifies dvesha; aversion, as one of the five kleshas, the root causes of constriction within our space (commonly said to be suffering). The compulsion to move away from what is unpleasant. And spiritual bypassing is simply dvesha dressed in yogic clothing.

Good vibes only. Premature transcendence. Emotional unavailability masquerading as non-attachment. The student who moves from teacher to teacher seeking recognition, not realising that no external recognition can fill the gap left by the unexamined inner wound.

The practices are designed to create the conditions under which genuine transformation becomes possible. Not to bypass the raw and messy material of being human, but to build enough steadiness in the system that we can actually stay with it.

What Healing Actually Requires

The deepest healing I have witnessed in twenty-three years of practice and seventeen of teaching has never happened in the posture. Never in the breath ratio. Never in the chant.

It happens when a person feels genuinely safe enough to stop performing. To stop being the advanced practitioner, the devoted student, the spiritual seeker, and simply be a human being who is struggling and does not need to hide that fact.

The spaces where healing occurs are the spaces where we are seen, accepted, and not required to be further along than we are.

This is what yoga is designed to create.

Listen to the Full Conversation

This episode covers so much more, the pancha vayus and what pranayama is actually doing in the system, the true meaning of guru in the Krishnamacharya lineage, the role of Sangha, and what Ayurveda tells us about living in rhythm with the natural world.

🎙️ Listen to Episode 318 of Finding Harmony with Harmony Slater here

Want to Go Deeper?

If this conversation opened something for you, if you find yourself wanting to study the Yoga Sutras properly, to understand pranayama as prana refinement rather than breathwork, to learn Vedic chanting within a living lineage, this is exactly what I teach.

Every week. Without interruption. For serious practitioners and yoga teachers who are ready to go beyond technique into genuine understanding.

→ Weekly Yoga Sutra classes: taramitrayoga.com

→ Vedic Chanting: taramitrayoga.com/en/chantingwithtara

→ The Mentorship Program: taramitrayoga.com/the-mentorship-program

Come find us. You are welcome here.