Prashant’s final class of the week, July 26, 2018: “Defossilize the Abdomen”

We were disappointed to miss Prashant-ji’s Monday and Tuesday classes. A general, large (“maha”) strike (“bandh”) blockaded the highways out of Aurangabad, (where we had travelled last Saturday to see the Ellora and Ajanta caves Sunday and Monday), marooning us for an extra day and a half. Some local villages were protesting the lack of “recruitments” (government job offers) to their area. The protests resulted in the accidental suicide of a young activist. This is a long story that will be told another time. Nevertheless, we were happy to be present this morning to have at least one lucky class in pranayama with Prashant this week. Fingers crossed that he will continue with this fourth limb of yoga on Monday and Tuesday as well. He teaches it brilliantly. If his teaching interests you, I also recommend that you read my friend Sharon Conroy’s excellent article about her journey with his approach to Yoga in the latest Yoga Rahasya.

Here’s the sequence (very simple)

Rope Sirsasana or supine supported savasana

Supine supported savasana or supta baddhakonasana or supta virasana

Seated (most of us were in swastikasana) pranayama, focus was on viloma II

First and foremost, Prashant emphasized that he is not teaching and we are not learning. Perhaps better said, in an ideal scenario, we are engaged together in an educative process. I will refer to a comment he made in our session with him last week (I joined a small group of Mexican Iyengar students in meeting with him to discuss some questions we all had, more on that another time.) He said then that he thinks that his job, or his words were “our job”, is to empower us, the students here at RIMYI.  This empowerment cannot happen if we insist on a one-way street of only imbibing what he has to say. The concepts/precepts/insights he speaks of that are possible in yoga study have to be “rubbed and kneaded” into us through asana and pranayama practice.

He also discussed practice as the repeated doing of techniques that we can achieve with repeated efforts, OR we can go for deepening the EFFECTS of yoga. To deepen effects, we have to be sensitive to the changing dynamics of nature every day and of our body within nature every day. We are not the same person today as yesterday and will be different tomorrow. We have no age or gender when we practice. As he spoke about effects, my mind turned to a precept I’ve been working with recently. That is, as I’ve mentioned in previous poses, discerning acts, performed by thoughtful yogis, are needed in this world. We don’t want to increase our karmic debts, after all! The precept forced me to look at these nearly three decades of coming to Pune, studying yoga, philosophy, asana and pranayama, and see that Yoga is not an end, it is a means.

Yet, as Prashant continued today, emphasizing strong abdominal evacuations followed by strong brain evacuations, another angle on that precept occurred to me. The third of the “yoga” sutras in chapter II of Patanjali (II.47) states (in Iyengar’s translation): “From then on the sadhaka is undisturbed by dualities.”  So I was able to hold in the mind the apparently dualistic truth that “yoga is both a means and an end.”

During the session he made reference to breath as if it were water, flooding into every cell, and to the body as if it were under a vast ocean.  Precious jewels (“ratna”) exist in the depths of the seas, he said, and it is the same with the embodiment. We have to “mine” the body/mind/breath complex to have access to these pearls and diamonds. Or dive deep, in the case of pearls, and dig deep in the case of diamonds and gold. The breath, he said, is a pneumatic tool to drill deep into the body.

Toward the end of the session he spoke of his father, B.K.S. Iyengar, whose life we are celebrating all year, this year of the centennial anniversary of his birth. He called his father “unfortunate,” because he did not have an “opening” for his teaching of yoga to move beyond the body. His early students apparently were interested in yoga asana practice as a kind of fitness, according to Prashant. Recognizing this, said the son about the father, B.K.S. could only teach to their level. Again, we heard the phrase “You people,” referring to us foreigners AND veteran Indian students present in the class. He implied again that our expectations of what yoga is were, and perhaps still are, skewed.

Prashant will refer occasionally to ‘quack” yoga and “quack” yogis, who continue to feed this benighted desire on the part of casual students. Yoga cannot endure only as a fitness modality, another passing fashion. He gave an example of a husband who wants to please his wife, so he takes her to see a movie she had wanted to see. She enjoyed it thoroughly. The next day, again wanting to please her, he escorted her to the SAME movie, and so on for a week. Although she SAID she enjoyed it every time, my impression was that after a few times, her enjoyment was becoming less profound and genuine. The lesson seems to be that we need to romance our souls with practice, and a rigid, programmatic way of practicing will lack that element of spontaneous charm and romance.

Surely, though, the father sowed the seeds for the son to begin this truly extraordinary return to the roots of yoga and its noble beginnings. Being the study of consciousness itself, yoga practice and teaching can be a tool for deep transformation on the individual and collective levels. First, though, we have to get beyond the notion that we are each “only” this body, whatever gender, color or nationality it may be. Then, perhaps, we can move forward.

We rested in our final savasana. He spoke about closing our eyes to open our eyes into the inner world. “You close your eyes to OPEN your eyes.” Finally he told us quietly to come up, and always his last instruction is: “Clear the hall. Put ropes back, props away.” So we did.