Why I question what is taught in yoga today
I have always preferred the backstage to the show. What happens before the curtain rises, the origin, the source, the why — rather than the polished version presented to the public.
It is this curiosity that led me to the work of Indologists like Tara Michaël or Georg Feuerstein: researchers who translate and analyse the original Sanskrit texts without dressing them up to please a Western audience. It is not the same thing as the version circulating in studios.
There is something I have felt for a long time without always being able to name it: most of what is sold today under the words yoga, meditation or spirituality is pre-chewed. Packaged, simplified, decorated to go down easily — but emptied of its substance.
This is not a gratuitous judgement. It is a lack I have felt concretely, year after year, in teachings that hand out techniques without ever questioning where they come from or what they originally meant.
What was passed on to me
My meditation teacher did not only teach me techniques. She taught me to keep a critical mind about what I received — including from her.
Gururaj, whose teachings are at the heart of what I practise and pass on, said the same in his satsangs — those gatherings turned towards the search for truth. He did not want to be taken at his word. He told people to look elsewhere, to compare, to read widely, to check for themselves. A spiritual teacher who explicitly tells you not to follow him blindly is not that common.
I never wanted to follow a guide, whoever it might be. But that demand — to look for the answer yourself rather than receive it ready-made — marked me and continues to guide how I work with texts, techniques, and what I teach.
What it changes, concretely
It means checking a claim before repeating it. It means going back to the texts rather than settling for what has circulated for a hundred years without being questioned. It means accepting that an answer may take time to come rather than accepting a ready-made one straight away.
This is the approach I will follow in the articles to come: taking received ideas from modern yoga and meditation, and looking at what is really behind them — no glitter, no shortcut, and no need to convince you to take my word for it either.
That said, a small point of honesty: I get things wrong too. I have my filters, and they are not always very clear either. That is actually what makes it interesting — it is what opens the debate, rather than closing it.
Marjorie Mathieu — IFSU studio
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