Householder Yogis by Gabe Hopp

There is a term in yoga for someone who practices yoga, but also has a job/family/house to manage. They are called a “householder yogi.” What does this mean and why do we need a distinction for this type of yogi?

When yoga was in its early stages of development, several thousand years ago, it began as a practice for unattached men who were able to devote their entire lives to the pursuit of yoga. They often left society, living in caves outside of population centers. They intentionally separated themselves from what greater society was doing, in order to focus completely on the goal of enlightenment. Most of their practices were meditative/energetic in nature and they basically experimented on themselves. They tried to slow their heartbeats all the way down, deprived themselves of food, practiced breathing in a lot of crazy ways; all to figure out if it could get them closer to being “awake”. In order to dive headfirst into this type of lifestyle, they had to be unattached and unencumbered by people/possessions/careers etc. Doing the dishes and changing diapers isn’t exactly a direct route to being enlightened, let alone paying attention to yourself.

The ways that we practice yoga today couldn’t be further from its beginning stages. For one, yoga has become a practice dominated by women. For two, most yoga practices today tend to focus on the physical practice (which, for the record, was not really part of yoga until the 1500s, thousands of years after the origin teachings). For three, most of us who practice also have a job, a house to tend to, a family to care for and many many worldly possessions. We are (almost) all householder yogis today.

We are super lucky that the early cave-dwelling yogis hashed out all the practices and whittled them down to those that are most effective. Because, frankly, who has the time? It’s possible, maybe even likely, that you are not practicing yoga to achieve enlightenment, but rather to feel good in your body, to feel more grounded, to have tools to settle your nervous system. And that’s okay! The fact that you are taking time to practice at all is worth celebrating. So, let’s embrace our householder yogi status, squeeze practice into our busy lives when we can, and focus on being a better human to the people in our lives. As we all know, when we are better humans, the world is better for it.