The Importance of Honoring Roots and Tradition

The Journal · Tradition · Editorial N° 2

Every time I sit down to practise, I am not alone. There is a long line of people behind me: teachers, their teachers, and theirs. Most of them I will never know by name. All of them are in the breath I take.

We live in a time where yoga can be learned from an app, a 200-hour certificate can be finished online in a few weekends, and ancient practices are repackaged every season under a new name. Some of this is beautiful. Access is a gift. But something gets lost when a practice is cut from its roots, and I want to talk about what that is.

A river needs a source

In the Indian traditions, knowledge is not simply information. It is transmitted, from teacher to student, in an unbroken chain called paramparā. A mantra received from a living teacher is not the same as a mantra read on a screen. Not because the syllables are different, but because something comes with them: context, responsibility, the lived experience of everyone who carried it before.

Patañjali, in the Yoga Sūtras, describes the ultimate teacher as timeless:

sa pūrveṣām api guruḥ kālenānavacchedāt
That is the teacher even of the ancient teachers, because it is not limited by time.

Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 1.26 (own rendering)

Every human teacher is a doorway to that. Every lineage is a river, and every river needs a source. Cut it off, and what remains is a puddle: pretty for a moment, then stagnant.

What "guru" really means

The word guru has a complicated reputation in the West, and not without reason. We have seen enough abuse of power in spiritual communities to be careful. But the traditional understanding is far more subtle than "a person you obey."

A well-known traditional etymology, found in the Advaya Tāraka Upaniṣad and repeated in the Guru Gītā, explains the word through its syllables: gu is darkness, ru is that which removes it. The guru is whatever dispels the darkness of not knowing who you are.

In the Tantric tradition of Kashmir, the Śiva Sūtras say it in two words:

gurur upāyaḥ — The guru is the means.

Śiva Sūtra 2.6

Not the goal. Not the master of your life. The means: the bridge between where you are and what you already are. A true teacher points beyond themselves. And in the end, the tradition says, the guru principle awakens inside you.

My own line

I was initiated into the path at eighteen in an ashram in India, some years later I received śaktipāt initiation from Maa Gyaan Suveera in Rishikesh , who taught me healing, Vedānta and Śākta Tantra. Over the years other teachers shaped me deeply: Raghunath Cappo in Bhakti, Dharma Bodhi Saraswati in Śaiva-Śākta Tantra, Ana Forrest in Yoga, Tao Semko with KAP and Dan Brulé in the work with breath just to name a few.

And I name them on purpose. Not as decoration, and not to borrow their authority, but because everything I teach is informed by the tools, skills, knowledge and wisdom that was given to me by generous teachers. 

When I guide a class, I am passing on knowledge that I have metabolized, filtered through my own practice, my own body, my own mistakes and turned into wisdom. Naming the source is the most basic form of honesty in this work.

Reverence is part of the practice

Patañjali gives us a beautiful key for what makes a practice truly take root. He says it becomes firmly grounded when it is cultivated for a long time, without interruption, and with satkāra:

sa tu dīrgha-kāla-nairantarya-satkāra-āsevito dṛḍha-bhūmiḥ
Practice becomes firmly grounded when it is followed for a long time, without interruption, and with devotion.

Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 1.14 (own rendering)

Satkāra means honour, respect, devotion. It is not an optional extra. According to Patañjali it is one of the three conditions for practice to work at all. When we practise with reverence for where it comes from, something different happens in the body and in the heart. The practice stops being a workout and becomes a relationship.

Honoring is not freezing

Let me be clear: honoring tradition does not mean worshipping the past or switching off your discernment. Tradition is not a museum. The Tantric masters themselves were radical innovators. They broke rules, questioned orthodoxy and spoke of freedom, svātantrya, as the very nature of consciousness.

Honoring the roots means being in conversation with them. It means learning the philosophy before reinventing it. It means using the Sanskrit names with care, crediting your sources, and giving back to the cultures and communities these teachings come from. It also means keeping your viveka, your discriminating wisdom, awake. A real tradition never asks you to give that up.

A small practice of gratitude

Before your next practice, try this:

• Sit for a moment and bring to mind the people who taught you, your first yoga teacher, a book, a grandmother, a friend.
• Silently thank them. Then thank their teachers, the ones you will never know.
• Feel yourself as part of the river. Then practise, not to get somewhere, but to keep the water moving.

The roots are not behind us. They are underneath us, holding us up.

With gratitude to all my teachers,
Alexia

References

• Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 1.14 and 1.26
• Śiva Sūtra 2.6, attributed to Vasugupta (9th c.), with Kṣemarāja's commentary Vimarśinī
• Advaya Tāraka Upaniṣad 16 and the Guru Gītā, on the etymology of "guru"