> Yeah I suppose you'll want to practice guruseva instead -- work for your instructor, such as cleaning his restroom, cooking, or going to the street begging fo

> Yeah I suppose you'll want to practice guruseva instead -- work for your instructor, such as cleaning his restroom, cooking, or going to the street begging for money on his behalf. No thanks, as much a traditionalist that I can be wrt yoga, some things are better the modern/western way. Why do you assume that? I learnt yoga for free without doing any of that. If you can't find a reasonable person to teach you, all the source material is available for free. There are some benefits to doing those kind of activities. People nowadays are too egotistic. Those things are a nice way of curbing that. Yoga was developed for spiritual reasons. That can't be denied. There have been people trying to remove its spiritual dimension through the ages. That can't be denied too. You can always use a church for just shelter. That does not make false that it was built for another purpose. You have a finite life span. Do you want to use yoga to get a better body to increase your chances of finding a mate (or something equally trivial) or do you want to transcend finiteness? I thought all this was drivel too, till I got terribly fat and sick and was forced to do yoga. The caution about being dogmatic applies to you too. Approach yoga with an open mindset while not thinking that the founders were complete morons when it came to spirituality. An analogy: just a few decades back almost everyone in the mainstream thought yoga had nil benefits. Nobody is stopping you from doing yoga on your atheistic mat. Don't belittle us by assuming so :)