I see two gnarly sides to the debate on yoga pants: those who embrace (and sport) and those who dismiss and degrade.

I’m writing today to settle the score.

Yoga pants are the best things to happen to yoga since Bikram. And I have that on good authority (my own).

I get discouraged when I meet blossoming yoga teachers, or students eager to go deeper into their practice. Those looking “beyond the pants.” They come and ask me for guidance with meditation, vegetarianism, patience, forgiveness, and even solid business questions. These are the meager, the average, the base-est of yoga teachers. For these practitioners, yoga will be a continued struggle—a quest for something deeper within themselves, or something more universal among us all. These poor souls are really in for it.

Perhaps you’re reading this tongue-in-cheek, my friend, and I urge you to read on as I expound on the ways in which your entire yoga practice truly lies in your pants.

Below, an ode from the gusseted crotch-roads of my yoga pants:

1. If you’re at all like me, you have teeny, tiny root chakra issues. As in, you forget that you’re not in imminent danger 98% of the time. Yoga pants draw attention to your root, because they are bright and colorful, or sleek and slimming, or perhaps they have an intimately-placed hole. At the very least, they make your a*s look good and if you’re admiring your a*s, you’re obviously in a safe place.
2. Depending on your favorite brand (I have several), each pair you wear may actually be saving six square inches of rainforest, recycling something that was otherwise trash, or at least lining the pockets of someone who pretends to care on your behalf. No sanskrit required. Liberating!
3. Dharana, baby. Maybe this doesn’t work for you, but it certainly works for your fellow yogis. One. Pointed. Focus. You’re 6/8 of the way there!
4. If by some chance you’ve attempted advanced yoga poses in your pants, the pants remember! You don’t even have to do the pose the next time, you just say, “Go, go gadget HANUMANASANA!”
5. I’ve heard yoga teachers say that Sanskrit is a language where the most important thing is written first. So the first yoga sutra is nonviolence. If you’re not violent, you get to stop there and not even worry about the next one. Still working on it? Try telling the truth or not stealing. Still stuck? It gets murky in those sutras as you keep going… different kinds of wanting, barriers to practice. Really, you need a scholar and a year to get through this. But the great work-around is that sutra means suture. As in: stitch. As in: preempt the entire problem of slaving through the hard stuff. Step one: put on yoga pants. CHECK. Done.
   I rest my case.

~

Author: Kari Kwinn

Editor: Caroline Beaton 

Photo: Flickr