After announcing the impending birth of my son, I received many messages of congratulation. Thank you! I know it is the convention to congratulate a parent on the birth of a child - it is a sharing of joy and good wishes. But congratulations should probably only be given when the task of parenting has been successfully completed - when the child becomes an adult and leaves home.

In this case, I wonder, maybe I had not graduated from the parenting stage of life, even after so many years and still had much to learn!

In the loving and sarcastic words of my teenage daughter: "You fail at most things in life but at least there is one thing you have succeeded at - you are a really good parent!" I wish it had always been the case. I was recently reminded of some not so good parenting.

Over the last couple of years I have been advocating for the victims of sexual assaults perpetrated by my former teacher Pattabhi Jois. It has been quite a stressful experience. In addition to the many messages of support and gratitude I received, I have also suffered sleepless nights, stress, worry and have been the target of anger and attacks both from defenders of KPJ and from victims. I have been stuck in the middle.

But I thought I was doing OK until one evening a few months ago I became completely enraged with someone close to me for no good reason. I very seldom get angry - it takes a lot of provocation, but when I do, it is pretty intense. Unfortunately my daughter was a witness to this and it took her back to her early childhood, a time when I frequently had intense arguments with her mother.

As I have been learning recently, in studying trauma and abuse, even when children are not the intended target of anger or other negative behaviors, just by being a witnesses to it, they can be deeply harmed. My anger, 15 years later, took her back to her traumatic experience of being a three year old seeing her parents fighting. And so I realized, I had not graduated from that parenting class with honors - I could still do better.

The incident also made me reflect on why the anger had come up. Although I did not become angry immediately, the more I was pushed into a corner, the more I could feel the inevitable uncontrollable rise of my response. Where had it come from? Was it just stress I had absorbed from my recent experiences or was there something deeper?

I went back into my own childhood to investigate. Was there trauma in my early childhood? I was extremely fortunate to have had an ideal family upbringing. But there was a period when I was two years old that my mother was pregnant and I was taken care of by another family member.

I know that she had suffered terrible traumatic loss and had an extremely controlling nature. Although I do not remember any specific incidents, without doubt, she had influenced my development at such a tender age in some way.

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One of my realizations from studying the phenomenon of trauma is that our whole society is infected by it. Trauma is contagious! Even many years after catastrophic events, such as warfare, have taken place, trauma continues to be transmitted through the generations.

Those who return from war have experienced horrors that permanently change them. The only way to cope, for many, is to dissociate, numb out or suppress their trauma through drugs and alcohol. They often struggle to return to intimacy with their families, since intimacy requires openness and vulnerability that can re-awaken traumatic memories and precipitate violence. As a result, warm loving connection is lost, children and partners suffer violence, abandonment and the loss of intimacy which is then sometimes found in perverse ways - such as the sexual abuse of children.

Those who have suffered trauma, unless they find proper therapy and healing, infect their own partners and children and this can continue through a chain of inheritance for generations.

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However much we try to be "good", sometimes external factors push us to extreme measures. Sometimes we make decisions for the wrong reasons and we end up having to deal with the consequences for years afterwards. Even though we may have evolved in the meantime, the consequences of those former decisions may put us in a place of stress even years later.

Even though we struggle to improve, can we ever be free of traumatic impacts in early childhood? Can we or should we ever be totally free of (detached from) external circumstances?

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A few months ago I met an old acquaintance at the airport. It turned out that we were on the same flight to the UK and we proceeded through security together and then to get some coffee before our flight.

He told me that his schedule had changed and that now he would be free to start coming to my yoga classes and offered to pay for my coffee. He asked me if there was anything else that I wanted, and since flying is dehydrating, I bought a bottle of water.

He looked at me totally askance in judgement as he took out his previously used plastic bottle to fill at the water fountain. "One expects a higher moral standard from yoga teachers," he told me with evident disappointment and judgement, to my embarrassment and chagrin.

In my defense, I never usually buy water, but always drink from the faucet at home and had recently even given up drinking coconut water out of concern about the environment. But it made me think more deeply about my environmental footprint and made me determined to be more responsible. There was still room for improvement!

In addition to minimizing the use of plastics and recycling all packaging, I also recently started composting. This is something I have been wanting to do for quite some time - but was not very convenient for a city dweller. I was simply shocked at how little waste I now produced!

I am sure that I am not alone in thinking that doing good in one sphere of life helps to get one off the hook in others. Is there such a thing as a good enough balance of virtue/vice? Should we not expect teachers to be human? But how human/how yogic?

Evidently none of us is perfect, if there could be such a thing, so is there a way to assess what is perfect enough, or should we constantly try to do better? Being called out is an obvious catalyst for improvement. No doubt, we get stuck at certain points in feeling a balance between virtue and vice, between extremes and compromises.

All of us come to yoga with imperfections and practice gradually helps us to improve, but maybe there is a certain point beyond which it seems unnecessary to improve further? Perhaps we even feel that certain yogic principles are in conflict with societal values.

I know I have felt discomfort over the years teaching the yama and niyama. I suspect many teachers also feel the same way. Some teachers suggest that we should set an example to students - but who has perfected all the yama and niyama to be qualified as a model example?

We are born into a society that celebrates sex, drugs and rock and roll, celebrates violence, greed and narcissism. How easy is it to relinquish these things and live the life of a yogi?

It is a process that takes time. As someone who has been addicted to many things - it has taken me years to let go of my negative attachments to sex, drugs, food etc.. There are still a few minor attachments - I can't seem to let go of coffee or the desire for the sweet taste. Perhaps these are constitutionally necessary!

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"Man is something to be overcome! I teach you the gospel of the Superman!" - Friedrich Nietzsche

Is there such a thing as human perfection? Is that what it means to be a true yogi? Does one have to first be a perfect human before one can become a perfect yogi?

Today the word yogi is often used to describe a yoga practitioner, someone who does some asana practice. But this is to severely denigrate the term: a yogi is one who has achieved yoga, not someone who is just an aspirant. An aspirant is called a sadhaka - a yogi has transcended sadhana (practice) and realized the ultimate.

A true yogi is a renunciant, someone who has reduced attachments to worldly pleasures and immersed herself in deep meditation and contemplation. But can a person ever achieve this without first having experienced life to the fullest?

Can one suppress or burn out desire through austerity? Or are there some people who naturally have no imperfections, no sensual desires, no ego, nothing to prove?

To achieve the ultimate, to achieve Self realization and liberation, a sadhaka has to first overcome ego, desire, aversion and all fear. That seems possible in theory - but who would desire to pursue such a path?

Students of yoga who become more serious about the path start to investigate these questions. One learns that excessive attachments, ego, fear etc. all lead to greater misery. Only knowing the true Self, one's true identity, can lead to deep peace and release of fear and stress. But does that mean relinquishing all desire, all attachment? Who is willing to test if this is true?

What about yoga teachers? Can teachers properly instruct students without having trodden the path? Are we not hypocrites, those of us who profess to teach yoga, who have not mastered our desires, our anger, our ego attachments etc.? What should we realistically expect of our yoga teachers?

Should we be perfect or should we pretend to be perfect? Students inevitably project perfection onto and have high expectations of teachers. Should we be held as an example? Should we even teach yoga as imperfect beings? Or maybe we should not call it yoga - maybe just therapy or exercise?

I always thought of my own imperfections and learning to transcend them as good qualifications for helping others. How can we help others if we have never experienced the common afflictions that affect most people? A paragon of virtue is not so much a teacher as an example? Someone to emulate.

Perhaps more important than being perfect, is the commitment to improvement. The beauty of teaching yoga is that rather than being qualified early in life and reaching a peak of success only to see decline and obsolescence in old age, the path of yoga leads to increasing perfection, joy, wisdom as life progresses. Teaching and practicing yoga can culminate in perfection rather than decline and irrelevance. Our skills and insight increase as life progresses.

But having said that, there is evidently also the possibility of getting diverted from the path and moving in the wrong direction. Just practicing without introspection and continuous assessment of one's progress, especially as a teacher, is fraught with danger.