Beyond the Picture

Yoga and the Inward Gaze

What if a yoga image did not ask you to look at a teacher—but reminded you to look within yourself?

Anyone who knows me knows that I have never liked having my picture taken—not only now, and not only since social media became part of our lives, but for as long as I can remember.

It has never simply been self-consciousness. It is not that I dislike how I look—although, like most people, there are certainly days when I do. My resistance has always felt deeper than appearance: quieter, more instinctive, and somehow more contemplative.

When I was very young, perhaps six years old, I heard someone say that a photograph could steal your soul. I do not remember who said it or why, and I did not grow up believing it as a literal truth. But the words found something in me that was already there. Even then, I sensed that a photograph could capture the surface of a person while leaving the truest parts unseen. A face could be preserved in an image and still reveal very little of the life, spirit, or mystery within it.

Perhaps that childhood idea stayed with me because I have never wanted an image of me to become a substitute for knowing me—or, later, for experiencing the work I offer. When yoga became something I wanted to teach, that feeling took on a deeper purpose. The work was no longer only about my experience. It became about the people who might enter the room: the person who felt inflexible, uncertain, older, injured, restless, self-conscious, spiritually curious, or simply tired of feeling that there was one more ideal they were supposed to resemble.

I did not want my photograph to become the measure of what yoga should look like. I wanted what I shared to create a pause, awaken curiosity, and invite people into their own breath, body, questions, and inner life. I wanted them to come not because they wished to become more like the person in a picture, but because something within them felt ready to be encountered.

Writing this now feels like speaking a truth I have carried quietly for most of my life. Perhaps the healing is not in finally becoming comfortable with being photographed. Perhaps it is in honoring what I have always known: that a person cannot be contained in an image, and that the soul is not something to display, capture, or compare. It is something to meet.

The photograph is not the problem

A photograph can be beautiful, instructive, honest, celebratory, and deeply human. It can help students recognize a teacher, understand a posture, or feel welcome in a space. A teacher can appear in photographs without making yoga about appearance. The meaning depends upon intention, context, and the way the image is received.

My choice is personal, not prescriptive. I have never believed that refusing to be photographed makes someone more spiritual, or that being visible makes someone less sincere. I simply noticed that the kind of invitation I wanted to make did not require my image to remain at its center.

So when photographs are less personal here, it is not because the work is impersonal. In many ways, it is the opposite. I want the space around the image to remain open enough for you to enter it.

Yoga begins by changing the direction of attention

There is no single sentence that can contain every historical meaning of yoga. The traditions are old, layered, and diverse. Yet across several influential texts, yoga repeatedly asks what happens when attention is no longer carried helplessly from one object to the next.

The Yoga Sūtra opens its central teaching by describing yoga as the stilling or settling of the movements of mind. When those movements settle, the seer abides in its own nature; at other times, awareness is entangled with what it perceives. [1] This is not a command to stop seeing the world. It is an invitation to recognize the difference between awareness itself and every image, thought, reaction, identity, and comparison that passes through it.

That distinction matters in a culture of constant display. An image arrives, and the mind may immediately measure: more beautiful, less flexible, more successful, younger, stronger, happier, further along. The comparison can happen before we consciously choose it. Yoga asks us to notice that movement rather than automatically becoming it.

Why we sit, become still, and look within

Many yoga practices use a stable seat not because sitting is the whole of yoga, but because steadiness makes subtler observation possible. In the Yoga Sūtra, āsana is described through steadiness and ease, and it is followed by teachings on breath and pratyāhāra—the gathering or withdrawal of the senses from their habitual pursuit of objects. From there come concentration, meditation, and absorption. [2]

Pratyāhāra does not require us to reject beauty, photographs, or the senses. It teaches that the senses do not always have to lead. We can see without being pulled into comparison. We can encounter an image without turning another person’s body into a verdict about our own.

The Kaṭha Upaniṣad offers the enduring image of a chariot: the body is the chariot, the senses are the horses, the mind holds the reins, and discernment serves as the charioteer. When the mind is scattered and discernment is absent, the senses run without direction. When the reins are held with awareness, the traveler can move toward the deepest Self. [3]

The metaphor feels unexpectedly contemporary. Our senses now travel through an almost endless road of images, opinions, bodies, achievements, and curated lives. The ancient teaching does not tell us that the road itself is evil. It asks whether we are holding the reins.

Self-study is not self-display

The Yoga Sūtra includes svādhyāya among the niyamas, the personal observances. The term carries meanings of study, recitation, and study of the self through sacred teaching. [4] It is not merely thinking about oneself. It is the disciplined willingness to observe the patterns through which we construct identity: what we seek, avoid, imitate, defend, and believe.

Social media often encourages a different kind of self-attention. We may begin to see ourselves from the outside, asking how the body, practice, room, or life will appear to an audience. Modern research has linked appearance-focused social media activity with greater self-objectification and body-image concerns, while online social comparison is associated with poorer body-image outcomes. These findings do not mean that social media is inherently harmful or that every person responds in the same way. They do remind us that repeated exposure can shape where attention goes and how the self is evaluated. [5–6]

Yoga offers another experiment: instead of asking, “How do I appear?” we might ask, “What am I experiencing?” Instead of “How do I compare?” we might ask, “What is true in this breath?” Instead of using another person as the standard, we can become curious about the intelligence, history, limitation, resilience, and mystery already present within our own body.

The teacher is not the destination

A teacher inevitably becomes visible. We speak, demonstrate, choose words, create spaces, and bring our own humanity into the room. Complete neutrality is neither possible nor desirable. Relationship matters in teaching.

But the teacher’s visibility can still serve the student’s inward discovery. Demonstration can clarify without becoming an ideal. Personal experience can be shared without becoming a prescription. The teacher can point toward a practice while remembering that the student’s own direct experience is where the practice becomes real.

The Bhagavad Gītā places responsibility for practice within the practitioner: one is called to uplift oneself through oneself, recognizing that the mind may become either ally or adversary. [7] A teacher may accompany, encourage, question, and guide. No teacher can do the inward seeing for another person.

This is part of why I have been cautious about making my own image the recurring center of Samana’s presence. I do not want anyone to believe that the purpose is to become more like the teacher. The purpose is to become more honestly acquainted with oneself.

An ancient practice inside a culture of images

Yoga has always changed as it has moved through time, language, culture, and community. Photography and social media are now part of how many people first encounter the practice. They can widen access, preserve teaching, create belonging, and help small centers survive. We do not need to pretend that yoga exists outside the modern world.

But we can ask whether the medium is serving the practice—or quietly reversing its direction.

If yoga becomes primarily something to look at, the posture may eclipse the person practicing it. If the most visible bodies become the imagined definition of yoga, many people may decide they do not belong before they ever enter a room. If every practice becomes content, we may lose the private, unmeasured encounters in which nothing is being performed and no one is watching.

Traditional yoga does not offer a single rule about posting photographs. The ancient texts could not have anticipated an image-based digital culture. Any direct application is therefore an interpretation, not an ancient prohibition. Still, their questions remain alive: What directs the senses? What steadies the mind? What helps us distinguish the seer from what is seen? What leads us toward greater freedom rather than deeper attachment?

What I hope the images leave open

When I share a landscape, a flame, a quiet room, a symbol, a few words, or an image without a central human figure, I am not trying to disappear. I am trying to leave room.

Room for you to arrive without comparison. Room for the practice to mean something before it looks like something. Room for a body that does not resemble the bodies most often shown online. Room for your own associations, questions, discomfort, wonder, and recognition.

And when I do share a photograph of myself, I hope it can be received in that same spirit—not as an example of what anyone else should become, but as one human being participating in a practice that belongs to no single body.

I also love a wonderfully flamboyant photograph: a fun outfit, a funky mood, an unexpected expression, or a moment that feels especially glamorous. Those images are playful and celebratory to me. They capture a flash of color, personality, or joy—but only for a moment. They do not contain the whole of who I am, nor are they meant to. Sometimes a picture can simply be fun: a small celebration of being alive, without needing to become an identity, an ideal, or the deeper story.

What a Photograph Can Hold

A woman once told me that she regretted not having more photographs of her mother. She gently encouraged me to allow more pictures of myself to be taken because one day my children and the people who love me might cherish them. Her words stayed with me. I understood what she meant, and I still do.

I love looking at old photographs from days gone by. They allow us to see a face again, remember how someone dressed, or glimpse a moment we may have been too young to hold clearly. A photograph can become precious. It can preserve something real, and I would never dismiss the comfort it may bring.

But I also believe that something deeper carries our loved ones forward—something no photograph can fully hold or replace. Memory lives in the simplest and most unexpected places: a familiar scent, a change in the weather, the quality of afternoon light, or an ordinary object seen from a passing car.

Just the other day, I saw a water tower and was immediately returned to the long, wonderful walks I took with my grandfather as a child. The smell of fresh linens brings me back to hanging wash on the line with my mother. These moments do more than remind me of them. For an instant, I can feel them near me again—not frozen in a picture, but alive within the senses and within my heart.

I do not have many photographs of my parents or grandparents, and yet the absence of those images has never kept me from remembering them. They return through places, scents, seasons, gestures, and feelings I cannot always name. A photograph may help us remember what someone looked like in a particular moment. Love remembers in another way. It holds how it felt to walk beside them, to share an ordinary afternoon, or simply to be in their presence.

Perhaps this is the balance I am still learning: to let photographs hold the moments they can hold, while trusting that the deepest bonds of our lives have never depended upon an image. The people we love leave themselves everywhere. Sometimes all it takes is a water tower, fresh linens moving in the air, or a certain feeling in the weather—and they are right here with us again.  This, too, is part of yoga: learning to recognize presence without needing to possess it, and allowing an ordinary sight, scent, or sensation to return us to what has never entirely left us.

The invitation

Yoga asks us to look, but it also asks us to examine how we are looking.

We can appreciate an image without surrendering our worth to it. We can learn from a teacher without trying to become the teacher. We can participate in the modern world without allowing every outward reflection to carry us away from the life within.

If something shared here inspires you, I hope it does not end with the picture. I hope it becomes a breath you notice, a question you sit beside, a pattern you recognize, or a moment in which you return to yourself.

That return has always been the offering.

Namaste

Resources & References

Textual note: Sanskrit terms can carry several meanings, and translations reflect the commitments of their translators and traditions. The interpretations in this essay are contemporary applications, not claims that ancient authors were addressing photography or social media.

1. Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 1.2–1.4. See Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary. North Point Press, 2009; and Barbara Stoler Miller, Yoga: Discipline of Freedom. University of California Press, 1996.

2. Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 2.46–2.55 and 3.1–3.3, on āsana, prāṇāyāma, pratyāhāra, concentration, meditation, and absorption. See Bryant (2009) and Miller (1996).

3. Kaṭha Upaniṣad 1.3.3–1.3.13, the chariot teaching and the movement from senses toward the subtle Self. See Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation. Oxford University Press, 1998.

4. Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 2.32 and 2.44, svādhyāya among the niyamas and its traditional relationship to study/recitation.

5. Sarda E, El-Jor C, Shankland R, et al. Social media use and roles of self-objectification, self-compassion and body image concerns: a systematic review. Journal of Eating Disorders. 2025;13:192.https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-025-01353-4

6. Bonfanti RC, Melchiori F, Teti A, et al. The association between social comparison in social media, body image concerns and eating disorder symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Body Image. 2025;52:101841.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2024.101841

7. Bhagavad Gītā 6.5–6.6, on the self/mind as ally or adversary. For a scholarly translation, see Laurie L. Patton, The Bhagavad Gita. Penguin Classics, 2008. An openly accessible Sanskrit and translation of 6.5 is available at:https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/6/5/

8. Open-access Sanskrit and English presentation of the Kaṭha Upaniṣad chariot passage (1.3), consulted for verse numbering:https://www.vedaseek.com/books/katha-upanishad/3