Yoga Competition - Oxymoron or Semantics?

I have 26 days before my plane takes off and I'm panicking a bit. Not very yogish but hey, I'm work in progress. I don't feel very prepared and think too much about the things I still need to do and not enough about the things I'm actually doing. Focus girl! Anyway, the other day I was net surfing and ended up on a discussion forum where the topic was about Yoga competitions.

We don't have yoga competitions in Finland and I'm not sure if we have them in Scandinavia either. In US and some other countries one can take part in Bishnu Ghosh World Cup where one has to deliver some mandatory poses from the Bikram Beginning series and then 1 or 2 asanas from the advanced series.These practitioners are quite amazing and you can find videos of their performances in youtube.

The article I was reading was about whether Yoga Competition should/could be an Olympic Sport. One of the replies was in short: Yoga Competition - Oxymoron. That got me thinking.

I personally think that there is nothing wrong with competing in yoga, if the definition is understood as who perfoms the asanas (postures) best. I do think howeve r that we misinterpret the meaning of competition. We see it more as a way of ranking people than focusing on pure performance - a benchmark as something we should aim for. A Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto wrote a book called Messages from Water. In the book he was studying how water responds to different words as well as music. He would fill a testtube with purified water and then voice or write or word to that bottle. He would then freeze the water and as soon as it started to form crystals he'd take a photo and analyze the shape of the crystals. He made some phenomenal discoveries - positive words such as love, thank you, please etc. affected the water in a way that it formed beautiful, balanced and even shaped crystals. Other words such as stupid, hate, anger etc. made the water to form ugly looking, disformed crystals. He also made an experiment with the word competition. On the contrary what one might think, the water formed a beautiful, shiny crystal. Why is that? Well, one of the finer attributes we humans posess is our intense eagerness to improve - ourselves, our environment, to make new discoveries, inventions etc.

So, competition can be something that makes us want to do our best, to improve as much as we can. It's only when we put our ego first and give ourselves permission to compare our performance to that of others in discrimination - I won, I'm a better person/human being or I lost I'm no good. That's where the competition starts to lose its magic.

The semantics play part in what comes to definition of yoga or should I say Yoga? Yoga (with a capital Y) is the perfect 8 limb Patanjali's definition where the Asana practice is only one part. That Yoga concentrates on one's personal development and experience, a sport that's too individual for anyone to compete in :) In fact, it's more than too easy to shoot oneself in the foot when thinking hey, I'm doing well in Yoga, I'm sooo advanced! No. It doesn't work that way. Judging oneself or others isn't yoga way - it's on yogi's way. But to compete in yoga is one beautiful way of showing what a human body can do when it's trained for thousands of looong hours. As long as we don't equal that advanceness with spiritual superiority, it's a good benchmark and not an oxymoron. Again, it's about our own perception of how we see and experience this illusion we call The World.