The Academy, the Library, The Observatory, The Laboratory, The Classroom are within You

Distilling Prashant’s Teaching from the week of July 9 on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday—The Academy, the Library, The Observatory, The Laboratory, The Classroom are within You

It’s been a week with Prashant overflowing with wisdom for the practice of yoga as transformation. He keeps reiterating that he is not teaching us—he is rather creating conditions so that we can teach ourselves. “It is really a marvel,” he often will say at the end of class, “what you can learn.” That comment itself brings great joy to my heart.

The title of this blog came about when I was in the midst of an ongoing study of the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna’s dilemma, how or if to act as the warrior he was trained to be, was coming up in my thoughts with great force. The last decade in Texas has been particularly hard for many of us, for it seems that the state as an entity with power over women and families has wielded that power with greatly detrimental effects. What can I do as one individual, a woman, a yogi, a lawyer, a concerned citizen? Where is my Krishna/Charioteer to give me answers and guide me? How do jnana yoga, karma yoga and bhakti yoga play into my decision to act or not to act? Or do they? These are all questions I’ve been pondering for a long time, hence the name of the blog.

Now that I’ve heard Prashant, and to an extent Geeta in years past, point out that we as practitioners of yoga focus too much on the DOING and not enough on the KNOWING, I’m coming to realize that I’ve despaired long enough and that yes, indeed, it IS time to take action. The action must proceed from a deep space of reflection and meditation and practice. It must come from the heart and from these last 10-20 years of “stuffing” my dismay and despair. I will be a yoga passivist/pacifist no longer. There is a wise Latin saying that if you want peace, prepare for war. I am now preparing for war because I want peace.

Here are the sequences (remember, it is always a round robin, partly, I’m sure, because of the size of the class, easily 70 people attend):

Monday, 9 July:

Adho Mukha Svanasana where you are

Tadasana and

Urdhva baddangulyasana

Sirsasana in ropes or independent or setu bandha with brick

Switch and then bharadvaj after everyone does rope sirsa and ropes 1 (arms behind, standing with heels up) static, then with knees on bolster, arms behind, static

Then marichyasana III

Then ardha matsyendrasana

Then janu sirsasana or vip danda or sal sarv

Then paschimottanasana (hala ok also after sal sarv)

Tuesday, 10 July

Grill adho mukha svanasana with rope

Alternating with rope sirsasana or classic sirsasana

Alternating with baddhakonasana concave, upavistha konasana concave and turning

Bharadvajasana turning

*Urdhva prasarita padasana and pacing ( we did at different speeds—see below)

Standing backarch—(“NOW NOW you can discover something,” said Prashant. I did, but I have no words.

Thursday 12 July

Setu bandha or chair backbend or rope sirsasana

Eventually Padma, if possible, in setu bandha and chair dwi pada vip. danda

Eventually standing back arch and ustrasana and ekapad vip danda in chair

Salamba sarvangasana or viparita karani or janu sirsasana

Again, all Round Robin

In what follows, I’ve done my best to distill more of what Prashant exhorted us to consider while “being” in the asana sequences listed above during this week’s classes.

He spoke of  “inscribing” mind and breath on body, body on mind and breath. He declared “Your body is a book.”  He emphasized that “yog” is not so much about what you DO as a practitioner, but more about what you know and CAN know through the practice and its effects on body, breath and mind.

So, are we literate when we do asana? Are we articulate and can we inscribe the breath on the bodymind?

Literacy and sensitivity do not go together, he said. Sometimes the literate are not sensitive and the sensitive are not literate. (Two asides here: One from Geetaji’s class this morning: “The stomach speaks, the heart speaks, the leg speaks, but you do not listen.” Another aside from Abhijata’s pranayama class last night, a quote from B.K.S. Iyengar, “Feeling is the eye.”

Back to Prashant: “Listen here,” he said, “the body has an observatory, a library and a laboratory within it. Think of what the organs digest and excrete. That can become food for another organ, another place.” He spoke of new automobile technology which allows the byproduct of the consumption of the fuel to be recycled to power the engine anew.

He spoke of “The absoluteness of relativity, or perhaps better said:

The absoluteness of interiority, of our own inner relationship with mind/body/breath. To expand upon this idea somewhat: when someone views YOU in asana, that is a relative thing. When YOU view YOU in asana, that CAN BE absolute, when you are maintaining and finding ways to be ABSORBED in the pose (samyama).

Regarding pacing (see July 10 sequence above), he said that pacing changes your internal ecology. He spoke frequently about how asanas change our internal chemistry, how beginners learn to exhale for evacuation, but as we mature in our practice, we learn to exhale for purification.

He constantly encouraged us to “exhale further and further, extraordinarily deeper” in the asanas.  Every once in awhile he shouted for us to move “QUICKLY” when changing places in the hall for the next round of asanas.

He mentioned “tree-ads”, a word which I finally concluded must be “triads.” The triads referred to were “knower, knowing and known” and “doer, doing and done.”

He also referred to sound forms, and encouraged us to chant single syllable words internally while in various asanas. For example, he mentioned the words, “I, you, come, go,” and the numbers “one, two, three, and so on.”

He pointed out that if you ask a child to be aware of their thoughts, they are not likely to be able to articulate as much about what they are thinking as about what they are liking or disliking. They are emotional, whereas we can watch, witness, listen, and be sensitive to what we are thinking. He also repeatedly mentioned that there is a difference between connectivity and relativity. That is, in the triads mentioned above, it is not enough in yoga practice to be CONNECTED among body mind and breath, we must be related among the three parts of the triad. This requires more sensitivity (see above).

When we are able to relate mind to body and breath, body to breath and mind, breath to mind and body, the practice becomes adyatmik, another Sanskrit word which is basically untranslatable, but often rendered as “spiritual.”  He referred also to the vijnanama kosha, sometimes called the “intellectual sheath”, though again the words are basically untranslatable.

To bring this summary of week two, July 2018, in Prashant’s classes to an end, I’ll quote him again. Once we take on the inner investigation Prashant suggests, when we are brave enough and confident enough to be our own teachers, the “royal road of Yoga opens” for us. Prashant told us that we could assess his teaching if we want in the last class of the week. My friend Dean told him that he passed the assessment. I would heartily agree, but also add that this teaching is beyond assessment and not appropriate for our “system.” It’s for the ages—sarvabhaumah.

Prashant's Class on Cleansing

3 July 2018 

Although he did not call the development of “natural morality, natural conscience-ness” a cleansing process, that’s what I’m going to call it in this report from Pune.

What evolved as he threaded his ideas through the two hour YOGA class he taught this morning (it involved asana, but it was not an asana class as I know it), was the notion that the colon is not the only organ that can become constipated. The brain, the mind, the senses, even the consciousness itself, which includes all, can become constipated, clogged, stuck.

So we were encouraged to defecate from the brain. Even writing that phrase sounds odd, but after living my way through this morning’s session, my brain does feel lighter. He spoke of the brain as a very greedy organ, eating all the time from the moment it is awakened in the morning to the moment sleep comes at night. All that comes into it is certainly not worth holding on to and therefore needs eliminating. There may be “stuff” that comes into the brain/mind/senses that will “feed” a person, but there is other stuff that might need to go right out without assimilation.

The word discrimination has developed negative connotations over my lifetime, during which the US as a nation has struggled to recognize inequalities—in education, in the workplace, in the home. Women felt discriminated against for earning less pay for equal work, people of color felt discriminated against for not having educational and work opportunities equal to others. People in certain neighborhoods felt discriminated against for not having access to safe places to live, often based on their income or skin color. Yet the capacity of the mind to discriminate (the Sanskrit word is “viveka”) can be one of its great strengths. So in our democratic process, we proposed and passed legislation to make it against new laws to discriminate in the workplace, in education, and in housing. 

Prashant’s point about natural morality comes in here. He said that unless there is an inner understanding about yama and niyama, to impose the moral code they imply simply will not work. What we may be witnessing in these dark recent months in our national history is the truth of that statement. It might have to be understood in the gut that “all people are created equal” and that also is a radically deep metaphor.

The moment in class where Prashant mentioned that if we continue to impose our will, our obsession with “hard work”, our obsession with always doing and never reflecting, our ability to reflect (and therefore, I suspect, our ability to be truly conscientious) can be lost forever. He stressed that point mightily, so mightily that he nearly brought me to tears. I pray that many of us watching the nightmare in our country unfold can find some “reflectivity” and “receptivity” so that we can clear our minds, “defecate from our brains”. Only if this can be done, it seems to me, will we be able to move on beyond the recent giant steps backwards that our nation has taken. Public discourse, in my opinion, has plummeted to a level lower than which it might not be able to go. It is because of this very fact that I welcome a month of study because I’ve made a conscious choice to combine it with a total news “fast.”

At this point in time, I remain committed to practicing and teaching yoga because it is such a useful path for recognizing and acting from “truth” rather than from some preconceived notion of where we/one “should” be. We are in deep, dangerous waters. Why not use every means possible to find safe harbor?

Other ideas surfaced in this morning’s session—how karma can be formed in the mind, by speech and by the body, for example. Prashant pointed out with a smile that as yogis we are potentially able to REDUCE our karmic debt, not increase it. One of the many miraculous aspects of the breath is that by observing it, feeling it, working with it in asana and meditation practice, we do not become part of the legions of “DOERS” of yoga. We get what he called a “waiver” from the activities that might otherwise add to karma. I am hopeful that Prashant-ji will expand these ideas during his classes all month long.

I’m just talking about how it feels to have to tell people here that I am from the United States (shameful) and how much yoga can help us and has helped me see more clearly. I would not trade these decades of coming to study here for all the gold in Solomon’s mines.

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.

Pacific Yoga--Pura Vida!

Pacific Yoga

Sunset in Samara, an ocean village on the west coast of Costa Rica, our varied yoga teacher training group in vrksasana on the cliff above the beach (Costa Rica, Mexico, Texas, Switzerland, Poland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, New Orleans, Massachusetts and Virginia are represented!) and finally Sam Saladino Blackthorn and Peggy Kelley on that same cliff are reproduced for your viewing pleasure. These intense days of study and teaching and practice and sharing will be treasured memories for me, I can already tell.

It's always been the NAME of this great ocean off the west coast of North, Central and South America. that has entranced me--Pacific--the word itself is an inspiration to yoga teachers in training. Beginning a third decade of training teachers, I'm a bit amazed that this project of encouraging people with a passion for yoga to learn to pass the practice on to others has lasted so long in my life.
Back when I started to teach in 1976 or so, there were no yoga teacher trainings that I could find. Community schools in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia were looking for yoga teachers, so I applied for the jobs. I'd had some introduction to yoga in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I'd lived when my son was born. B.C. was where I went to college, and Austin has been where I have done this long work of developing techniques to train yoga teachers.

The topic is so vast and so unlike all else that I studied in colleges and universities. Marine biology, languages, education, law and literature were what I dug into then. On a parallel track I was reading Light on Yoga, The Autobiography of a Yogi, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the Bhagavad Gita, and Hatha Yoga Pradipika.  It's my parents I thank for a love of reading, and my father in particular for encouraging me to think for myself. This technique of testing what one reads in books or scripture against one's own personal experience could even be called the Heart of Yoga itself. We encourage student teachers to see how these philosophical buildling blocks (yama and niyama-- postures, pranayama, sense withdrawal, concentration, meditation and absorption) serve them in their quest to build a life of purpose, harmony and meaning.

The thoughtful people in the group present here at the Costa Rica School of Massage (and now Yoga), the hard work of my colleague Sam Saladino, the generosity of the other faculty and staff, all make this time possible. AND, most auspicious of all, we will be here for the International Day of Yoga. The plan is to offer a free class to the community, team taught by all in our merry band. Stay tuned for next week's blog post for further details on that happening!

This weekend it's off to tide pools, and getting to know each other better. There may be time for reiki, massage, personal practice, even laundry! The imperative that "it is more important to know oneself as a physical body is more important at this moment in human history than at any other time" has been with me so long that I honestly don't know if I made it up or read it somewhere. So long have I loved the way yoga practice brings me into this body and helps me rub the dust off the mirror of my consciousness to see the inseparability of body, mind and soul, that I run out of metaphors to explain the beauty of the path. As they say here--"Pura Vida!"

B.K.S. Iyengar's Birthday Celebration, Pune, India 2015

Guruji Iyengar’s 97th Birthday, 14 December 2015

We gathered at Govinda Gardens at 6 pm. The open-air theatre was beautifully decorated with malas of marigolds surrounding images of gods at the back of the stage, and then around busts of Rama\amani and B.K.S. Iyengar toward the front. A podium was to stage right, the family was seated in the front rows, along with the almost one dozen speakers from all over the world who had prepared speeches about their experiences with Guruji.

Rajvi Mehta was mistress of ceremonies, and gracefully introduced the many speakers one by one. Some obviously had significant time to prepare their talk, others (like Maria below) only a very short time. All, however, spoke absolutely from the heart, or so it seemed to this listener.

Leslie Hogya from Victoria, Canada, spoke first. She gave a careful summary of Iyengar’s visits to Canada, once to Vancouver and Victoria and once to Edmonton and Toronto., She had a wonderful story of Iyengar and his Canadian friends crossing the Georgia Straight (the body of water west of Vancouver between the mainland and Vancouver Island). Apparently at one point the owner of the boat commented that it was too bad that one could not practice yoga asana on a boat. “Nonsense,” declared Iyengar. He soon had everyone on board hanging from bunkbeds, standing with support of various available solid objects, and understanding that yes, indeed, yoga asana IS possible on a boat!

Leslie also recounted a serious shoulder injury which she suffered three or so years ago. She wrote to Iyengar to ask if she should bring herself to the medical classes with her problem. He answered yes, IF she was willing to put up with “almost unbearable pain.” She was, and attended the medical classes two years ago to receive his help. She demonstrated to all of us present the great range of motion she now has in her injured shoulder after Iyengar yoga therapy.

Next up was Faeq Biria, one of Iyengar’s longest standing students. Guruji stayed often with Faeq and travelled with him all around Europe. Apparently in the 70’s, even before Faeq had married his wife Corine, Iyengar stayed with him in his apartment for the long span of two and a half months. He had told Faeq that they would live together as two bachelors. Iyengar, after his morning practices, would walk the neighborhood, making friends everywhere. Even the baker obliged his dietary requirements, preparing breads and pastries without eggs for him to eat. Faeq was the first of many speakers who told of Iyengar’s love of speed. Many times he had his student/hosts in Europe and elsewhere take the speed of their cars way beyond the legal limit. Thank goodness the authorities were not around to make arrests, and thank goodness the hosts were good drivers!

My memory may not be serving me well to recount the exact order of speakers, but I am fairly certain that Xavi (pronounced “Chavi”) from Alicante, Spain was next. His strong Spanish accent made it a little difficult to make out every single word he said. However, it was clear again that Iyengar wanted to go faster when Xavi was driving him from one place to another, and once they even ran out of gas! Iyengar’s amazing calm became evident at this point. For an hour they had to wait on a deserted road for help to come, but Guruji had no anxieties. Xavi also mentioned that he had shown photographs of Iyengar in various postures to other spiritual masters, and all had verified that Iyengar was obviously deeply in touch with his inner/pranic body, and in fact, was a siddha (one who has mastered the powers—siddhis—mentioned in chapter three of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali).

In contrast, when Maria Flores spoke, she mentioned that she  and her husband John had taken Iyengar in their camper bus with their children to visit various places around Holland. The camper bus was, of course, very slow, and since it had a couple of bunks, Guruji was able to have a nice savasana on a bunk during one of  their journeys. In this case, understanding that the van was naturally slow, he did not request to be driven faster. Maria spoke of her studentship from the perspective of being a mother. Her sister Annemieke and her husband John were both devotees of Iyengar. Maria did what yoga practice she could while still looking after the kids.

Jawahar Bangera was the only one of Guruji’s senior Indian students to speak. He told of being literally dragged to a yoga class by his parents when he was a teenager. Everyone knows how much teenagers like to sleep in the morning, and it was an early morning class. I can only imagine how resentful he might have felt. But the yoga began to catch his interest, and today he is one of the most senior teachers and one of the longest-time students. He commented that many of the early students of Iyengar yoga in Mumbai were Parsee, for example Sam and Freny Motivala. Today of course, Iyengar students come in all shapes and sizes, are of all ages and stages, and live in almost every country in the world. 

Jawahar also mentioned that Guruji would sometimes get impatient with his students. At times like that, he would say, “I have taken the poison and the nectar from these asanas. I am giving you the nectar and you are only taking the poison.”  To me, this speaks to Iyengar’s generosity, and also to the fact that as teachers, we sometimes struggle to find the right words to convey the action in an asana, or the fine points of a philosophical principle.

Gabriella Giubilaro from Florence, Italy, spoke about her early classes in Pune with Iyengar. She apparently had some fear of him, for she described hiding behind any pillar or post that she could find so that he would not see her. Of course he had an eagle eye and saw everyone, hiding or not!  Apparently he had friends in Florence, so he visited her there. She, like many others, described driving him within Italy, I think to Rome, and being asked to go faster, faster!!!

Pixie Lillas from Australia described the early, much smaller classes at RIMYI in the seventies. She told us how intensely Iyengar would teach his students then, and how, just when they thought they were spent, he would come up with another asana or two to do. Even exhausted, they found that with his fire and encouragement, they COULD do more.

Stephanie Quirk spoke next. She has lived in Pune for twenty years, and helped Iyengar often with his writings (he would always write long hand, she said, so much transcribing needed to be done to bring out the 25 books he wrote in his lifetime!).  Among others, she mentioned how Guruji would study and meet with people downstairs in the library, and how much she learned about him as she watched him interact with students, teachers, journalists, other yogis, and famous people from all over. She described Iyengar as “an ordinary man, BUT…..”  He was one who understood the link between shraddha (faith) and virya (strength) so completely that he was liberated by that faith in his relations with all different kinds of people. Iyengar showed friendliness (maitri) to all. Established in his faith and strength, he never covered anything or held himself back. He was a man, she said at the end of her talk, who “held his ground.” He always impressed me in the same way in the few meetings I had with him, so much so that I think of his signature pose as tadasana, rather than natarajasana or hanumanasana.

Patricia Walden spoke about Guruji’s message about love. Many times she was asked to come to a platform at a mega class or at RIMYI to demonstrate a pose. One time she was asked to demonstrate paschimottanasana. He gave adjustments and verbal hints and then asked her what she felt. Thinking of the adjustments and words, she said, something like “I felt my thoracic spine move in and the sternum move forward.” Iyengar was not pleased with her answer. When the opportunity came up to demonstrate the same pose soon after, she reported that when he asked her again what she felt in the pose, her answer at that moment “bypassed her brain.”  She was able to answer that she felt “silence and space.” or words close to those. He responded that yes, that was what he wanted her to notice in the pose. She described how luminously he transmitted love, space, and silence, She said that Iyengar always maintained that love “cannot be taught, but only transmitted.”  Patricia declared that for her, his main message was about love.

Prashantji took the stage at the very last, and we were regaled with a glimpse of his new book, “Discourses on Yog.” already sold out at the RIMYI bookstore, by the way. He spoke of his father as both teacher and parent. I’m not sure whether it was Prashant or another speaker, but someone who spoke pointed out that Iyengar himself was a bhaktin of yoga, Geeta a karmin, and Prashant a jnanin. B.K.S. Iyengar played many roles in his life—father, husband, teacher, philsopher, author, artist. Clearly he is remembered in different ways by different people, and though he may from the outside sometimes have seemed sometimes ferocious, sometimes  ordinary, he was, in the end, truly an extraordinary, loving human being.

May we long live in his light, and may we share this light with generations to come!!!

Further Reflections on (International) Iyengar Yoga Assessment and Training, and Abhi on props

December 9, 2015
Pune, India

On Friday, I'll have been in India for two full weeks, and what full weeks they have been! We have a group of over 1200 who are now in the middle of learning from Geetaji at her second annual Yoga Anusasanam at Balewadi Sports Stadium. She is teaching asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana and dhyana. She has been in extraordinarily good spirits and has already given some amazing classes. My favorite so far has been this afternoon's pranayama session which included digital work in Brahmari in seated and supine positions. What a brilliant way to quiet the mind. We are surely in for more of this excellence in the days to come. The venue works well; the support staff are VERY helpful, and everyone from the whole wide world is getting along famously in the glow of Iyengar yoga.

In the afternoons, we are having sessions on Guruji's writings, his invention of props, and even a music concert.  Abhijata's presentation on props yesterday was especially enlightening. The first story was of Guruji working with the principal of Fergusson College, a local Pune institution. He was in his eighties, and could barely walk. Guru noticed that when he had the principal lie down to do prone poses, his legs kept coming together. So he saw a nearby bar and used it between his heels to help keep the legs apart. Uday imitated the old man very well.

 She told of her grandfather having her stand like Charlie Chaplin (toes pointing completely outward), being placed at the end of a trestler with a stool pressing her hips and legs into the end of the trestler and being told to bend backwards and hold the long bar. When she asked Guruji why, he said that turning out the feet had a better effect on her sacrum.

She had Raya and Uday show different versions of ardha chandrasana, to show that a prop could be used both to help a stiff student bring the lifted leg higher, and to help the one who goes too far to come down to the right place. In the first instance, the long bar of the horse/trestler was used for the lifted leg, and in the second instance, a rope with a weight tied into it was used on the upper leg to provide resistance.

She wound up by telling of Guruji's use of the trestler in eka pada viparita dandasana. He was using the stump to hold his sacrum/tailbone area up, and had his forearms bent and down on the wooden platform of the stump. His lifted leg was near the trestler. Abi heard him say several times to move the trestler closer, but when she offered to move it yet again closer, he said NO. He was trying to keep his leg AWAY from the bar of the horse, and finally did not want it moved closer. So here, the prop was used as a guide to stay away from, not to lift from.

The whole story of props was told in a previous blog. You can read it below if you are interested. I was especially fond of the story of the invention of the eye bandage!

A quick summary of the meetings of worldwide Iyengar Yoga Assessors and teacher trainers.  First: people involved in assessing and in training teachers should be kind and have "the human touch." Second: there is no need to race through the different levels of the various syllabi. Guruji himself thought that mentorship is a better method than teacher training group classes, apparently, and Geetaji and Prashanti echoed this opinion. HOWEVER, the word, which I'm sure everyone has heard by now, is that assessments will proceed in the year to come. Greta and Prashant did not put a stop to it, but rather gave us much food for thought as we go forward.

More from Pune in the next few days.