Sixteen Years of Beach Yoga + Pratyahara

When I first started teaching beach yoga most people were baffled, by the beach part or the yoga part or the two together. It was 2007; beaches were popular. Yoga was sort of popular. Blending the place and the practice was a fairly novel idea.

And to be honest, I was pretty much winging it. I’d received my 200-hour certificate the previous winter and I was working as an interpretive park ranger at Cape Cod National Seashore. A gal in Chatham had started teaching her yoga classes on the beach a few years earlier, and I thought given my two “specialties,” offering a beach yoga class as part of the National Seashore’s summer programming made perfect sense. (And I was blessed with a progressive supervisor who was willing to give it a shot, although I think everyone expected it to fail.).

The program didn’t fail. It was a hit from the first class. In those early years, my participant demographic skewed heavily to the “national park visitor” as opposed to the “yogi.” Each week when I’d ask how many folks were new to yoga, multiple hands went up. It is not trite but true to say that it was an honor to be introducing people to the practice of yoga and to be doing it in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Whatever their lives are made up of, when people settle at the edge of the sea and are given permission to do nothing but breathe, something can shift for them. High-powered corporate execs, frazzled parents, politicians, confused college kids…everyone walks off the beach a little lighter than when they arrived.

Over the years I watched magic happen, both on the beach and in the water. A favorite memory is of a class blanketed in thick Cape Cod fog, dissipating upon our final bow like a gauze curtain being pulled back. We could see the water for the first time. Seals were swimming just off the beach and birds were wheeling overhead. There was a large pod of pilot whales close to shore porpoising and spouting – breathing alongside us. You might say that had nothing to do with yoga, but to my mind it had everything to do with it. If that isn’t yoking, or union, I don’t know what is.

Now I teach beach yoga in the summer months through a yoga studio. It’s gotten a lot more popular over the years, which is wonderful. Along with that, inevitably, have come people’s opinions on the activity. It is true that a yoga class on the beach is a very different experience from the studio. There is sand of course, as well the sometimes very loud sound of the ocean. People walk by, and there can be bugs. There is the changing tide and the uncontrollable weather: it is wet and it is dry; it is windy and it is still; it is sunny and it is foggy.

Of course, the yogis of old didn’t practice in climate-controlled studios with hardwood floors and an assortment of perfectly-dimensioned props. Which definitely is not to say that practicing on the beach should be some sort of ascetic experience (no way!), and I’m all about honoring people’s preferences in their yoga.

But I do ponder the question: if someone finds practicing on the beach distracting, is that due to the beach or due to the practitioner?

It is oh-so-easy to blame the source of the distraction for our distractedness, rather than turning the lens inward with a sense of inquiry. “I see that I am distracted by this and as a result I am not having the experience I expected or hoped for. How might I recognize this distraction as outward phenomena that need not dilute my inward experience? How might I use this distraction to inform or deepen my practice?”

This is pratyāhāra, the fifth of Patañjali’s eight limbs of yoga. Although commonly translated as “withdrawl of the senses,” it’s not about numbing oneself to the external world, but rather redirecting the sensory experience from the external (people are setting up their beach umbrella too close – how annoying) to the internal (this sense of calm has an undulating quality – how interesting). It’s not that we’re ignoring the cute dog barking at the water’s edge, but that we can hold space for that occurrence and also stay with our internal experience.

Because beach yoga classes are often less about the details of āsana, I used to tell folks that beach yoga was a “fundamentally different practice” than studio classes. Along with many other things I’ve learned through my years leading beach yoga classes, I’ve come to understand that this is incorrect thinking. Because actually, ideally anyway, the essence of the practice is the same whatever the physical space in which it occurs. And just as a spotless silent studio can open windows to deeper experience, so can breathing deeply the salt-laden air in the magical morning light at the edge of the vast ocean (even if you smell like bug spray).

(Photo ©NPS)