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through sweating. These conditions allow a sort of burning, washing, and breathing out of toxins. This detoxification occurs whether or not we physically sweat, but there is a unique type of high and feeling of release of tension after a workout in which we break a sweat. Some students hold onto the erroneous concept that we should not work hard or sweat in yoga. They might confuse working the body with straining it. “Never strain,” they say. This is true, but strain means to overexert or go beyond your limits. Pain, shaking, or too much “efforting” evidences straining. Don’t confuse the principle of not straining with not working. We can work very hard and still not strain.
    Some believe that sweating or working hard may be appropriate for gymnastics or calisthenics but not for yoga. This is a foolish notion. Conversely, some teachers assert that you must work hard, sweat, and generate lots of internal heat in every session or you are not practicing properly. “No pain, no gain,” they may say. This approach, while energizing and invigorating, can also lead to imbalances. Practitioners who work with too much heat can develop a strained look about them. They sometimes have bags or circles under their eyes or look gaunt from the stress of too much heat. Nature does not behave in this single-minded way. Everything in nature moves in cycles, always balancing itself—inner to outer to inner, heating to cooling and then to heating, winter into spring, and on into summer into fall. The extremes of sweating all the time or of never working hard enough to sweat both miss thesubtlety of learning to work with the balance of hot and cold in the organism. Either principle, hot or cold, can be overemphasized and brought out of balance. Each of the various ways to practice yoga has its appropriate place and time.
    Once on a trip deep into the Himalayas, I finally caught up with a renowned magical yogi I had heard about for years. He had enormous charisma and seemed to have the power to know people from the inside. He was staying at a temple, and being a fire yogi, he sat by the sacred fire surrounded by many exotic
sadhus
, or renunciate wanderers. They would sing and chant beautiful ancient texts together for hours a day, making wonderful music and creating an extraordinary sight. I sat for a day and a half just observing the scene, and he never once looked at or seemed to notice me in the crowd. Finally, I decided I was ready to go up and meet him. At that exact moment he swung around in his chair, looked right at me, smiled mischievously, and waved me toward him. I went up, said “Namaste,” and we exchanged some greetings. He asked me what I did in America. I hesitated, anticipating his response in the midst of this extraordinary gathering of fakirs and yogis. But I stuck my neck out and said I was a yoga teacher. He gave me another bizarre look and said, “Okay, go give a yoga class to those men over there!” He pointed to a circle of the glorious and frightening men. They were mountain yogis, many of whom lived in Himalayan caves. Some had long matted locks piled on their heads, some were naked, some smeared in ashes from the sacred fire. They were muscular and severe looking, but friendly. They were yogis who had mastered the inner heat principle and could live in the freezing cold without clothing, going days without food. His message was obvious. There is much more to yoga than only the surface practices.

The Rhythms and Seasons of Practice
    We do not have to sit naked in the Himalayas to master yoga, but the Hatha yoga student would do well to learn about the play of opposites represented by the sun and moon. Start with something as simple as learning about heating and cooling in your body. Our practice needs to work with balancing these energies. A practice of yoga might cycle like the seasons. All things move in cycles of change. Spring brings blossom and growth. Summer brings more light and nourishment. The