Shalva "Shako" Beridze An Encyclopedia Of A Man

Shako Achieves Yoga Mastery After Watching One YouTube Tutorial, Twice

An article about Shalva "Shako" Beridze · Filed under: Enlightenment, Streaming · Yoga

Beridze sitting cross-legged on a black yoga mat beside a forest lake, sunglasses on, hands resting on his knees in a meditation mudra.
Beridze sitting cross-legged on a black yoga mat beside a forest lake, sunglasses on, hands resting on his knees in a meditation mudra.

Mastery, in most disciplines, takes years. Shalva “Shako” Beridze reached it on a Sunday afternoon, between lunch and a phone call, having watched a single YouTube tutorial from beginning to end.1

He then watched it again. This second viewing he refers to as “the advanced course.”

The curriculum

The tutorial ran eleven minutes and fourteen seconds. It was titled Beginner Yoga — Full Body Stretch. It contained an ad break at the four-minute mark, during which Shako has confirmed he did not pause, and which he therefore counts as “meditation under adverse conditions.”[citation needed]

The instructor said the word “gently” nineteen times. Shako has since adopted the word wholesale and now applies it to entirely unrelated activities.

Certification

No certificate was issued, because no certificate exists, because it was a video on the internet. Shako has addressed this gap directly, describing the absence of paperwork as “the truest form of accreditation” and pointing out that the old masters did not have PDFs either.

He is not able to name any of the old masters.2

Assessment of ability

Here the encyclopedia must be careful, because the joke has a limit and this is where it sits.

Shako Beridze does yoga. Genuinely. Regularly. Early, on a mat, without an audience. He is more flexible than the people who make fun of him, holds poses longer than anyone expects, and has never once needed to exaggerate this part.

Which is, of course, exactly why he exaggerated it — into mastery, into lineage, into a title with the word Tibetan in front of it that will be dealt with in its own article.

The eleven minutes, revisited

He has never gone back to the tutorial. He does not need to. He describes the material as “internalised,” and when asked to demonstrate a pose from it, produced one that was not in the video at all — performed well, held steadily, and named on the spot.

The name he gave it was not a real name. The pose was real. That ratio, roughly, is the man.

Footnotes

  1. Beginning to end is confirmed. The recommended-videos sidebar claims his attention was elsewhere for portions of it. ↩

  2. He offered “the Tibetan ones,” which is not a name, and which is also the subject of a separate investigation. ↩

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