What Makes Yoga So Metal?

Everything about Yoga is metal to me. If I start to think about Yoga or being a part of the Yoga lifestyle without it being Metal, I don’t want to be a part of it. This is because otherwise it doesn’t come with the fervor, authority, conviction, and sacredness that it has when it’s Metal Yoga.

Metal means it’s scary. Scary means it excites you, like going to an amusement park and getting on the biggest, fastest roller coaster. Good Metal music is like a scary roller coaster or like the real world event that the roller coaster mimics for the price of an admission ticket, and bad music is the kind that isn’t scary, doesn’t get your heart racing, feels like soft vanilla ice cream being poured into your ear canal. But keep in mind that amusement parks are for children, not adults. For adults, they are just there to remind us that life is the amusement park, and in life you scare yourself to live fully and to grow. So, Yoga is not easy. Yoga is also not about being soothed like during a Swedish massage. The soothing comes after you’ve done the work, and pushing your body and your mind will allow you to be soothed deeper than if you just floated on the winds of life like an autumn leaf.

Nature is Metal. Lightning, thunder, hurricanes, howling wind, tornadoes, the dead of night, fire, earthquakes, pestilence, death, these are all ideas out of which Metal is born, as are the many anthropomorphic deities that represent such things. Metal is nature, and therefore Metal calls upon that which is bigger and more powerful than man, and all that which man must be in accordance with to survive. If Pop Music is your thing, you always have the option of going here or there, being in accordance with nature or not, and you will ultimately not care what you are doing as long as you are happy and joyful in trends of what is popular culture. If this is your Yoga, you can easily see the discrepancy: this is the Yoga of trendiness, following Yoga as a fad, concerned with what mat and clothes you wear to a class, doing things so what others see and think about you is in accordance with what you want others to see and think about you.

This doesn’t mean you have to like or listen to Metal music. Not all Metal music is good, and with this understanding you can discern the good from the great and from the bad. Without previously understanding Metal or listening to it, your Yoga may be Metal without you knowing it, and being aware of it can make Yoga more effortless through simply extending your instinctual behavior if it is Metal Instinct. If you never understood Metal music, you would now after making the connection, and maybe if you are a musician you would have an idea of what great Metal music would be if you composed it. In this way we compose our lives instead of just sitting and watching life go by like a spectator sport.