NOT Doing Yoga

July 2, 2018—Prashant-ji’s Birthday                                            

You don’t DO yoga; you have to let it be done on you/ in you.

Prashant Iyengar has students coming to his class who have been coming for over 30 years. He began to teach in the late 1980’s when his father retired. I first became aware of him as a teacher during my 1996 visit to Pune. Today’s class was a perfect continuation of the message Prashant has been conveying since his beginning as a teacher: the breath is the marvel. Work with the breath in asana. Exhale more and more and more, go for the post-exhalative retention. Then inhale into compartments. OR, inhale more and more and more and go for the post-inhalative retention. Then exhale from compartments. He has guided us with and through and to the breath in thousands of classes with different asana sequences.

These days the classes are so full that we have to shift a lot. Some at the windows doing standing poses, others in the room doing seated poses, then switching. We began today with a long salamba sirsasana. He used this as an example of a stimulative asana, like having a cup of tea or coffee. Then he had us sit to bring the message about the “doing” culture into high focus. When you DO asana, you miss the experience of the asana doing you. You miss the possibility of your body/mind/breath complex responding to the yoga of the asana. You must be receptive, he says, you must finally give up doing.

Other asanas included trikonasana, bharadvajasana, parsvakonasana and upavistha konasana, virabhadrasana II and marichyasana. Then a choice of janu sirsasana, salamba sarvangasana or setu bandha sarvangasana. His point that if we are told in a class constantly where we fall short, where our limitations are, where we fail, we are unlikely to find santosha in savasana! Furthermore, if we as older practitioners fail to give space to younger people who become strong practitioners and then want to teach, we are doing life a disservice. Just as we do when we complain in our older years about “losing poses” we could do in our younger years. We are indeed missing the point.

The young are SUPPOSED to fill in for their elders, our bodies are SUPPOSED to be different when we are 70 than when we were 20 or 30.  Enough for today? He said—enough for me, maybe for you too. Then over a hundred of us lined up for Prasad from Prashant, after devotional songs were sung, including Las Mañanitas, the traditional birthday song from Hispanic countries. Guruji used to boast that he was doing a better job of bringing people together than the United Nations. His boast was apparent today. Thank you from my heart, Prashant-ji. May you share the light of yoga as long as you can, with my deepest gratitude.