Going beyond

“One of the things that we have learned, having opened the heart of the atom, is that nothing happens in isolation, that everything in the universe is interrelated… And another thing [scientists have] discovered is that nothing can be studied objectively, because to look at something is to change it and to be changed by it.” —Madeline L’Engle ✨

Tug of war with the trestler?

Utthita Parśvakonāsana (“extended wide angle) in “Gentle” Yoga class with four strong men pulling the horse to make space in their lower spines. In Gentle Class at the Iyengar Yoga Center of Grand Rapids, students learn to access, face and address problems. Every week the class is unique. Often we use a lot of props, sometimes to support the poses for rest, but not always. The props don’t necessarily make each pose easier. Instead they can create awareness and drive the intelligence to the place where we are working. The students here are learning to pull the trestler to put the lower back in traction while releasing the groins and spreading the lower back region. This one pose was part of a sequence addressing lower back issues.

(These students gave their consent for this photo to be shared.)

Facing the difficult and even the terrible

Ganda Bherundāsana — pose facing the difficult/terrible side

 “Your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers — perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.” —Rilke

✨

Faith in yoga, faith in my teacher, and faith in myself grew slowly, gradually. Step by tenuous step.  We may think we are committed to a path, and yet follow  numerous twists, diverting ourselves repeatedly.  When experimenting in practice, perception is tested and trained when faced with physical reality. We learn and align our actions through the experience of direct perception. Long, regular practice is the way to still the fluctuations of the consciousness that distort the luminosity within. The doubts that may have been so insistent and persuasive before gradually fade. With dedicated practice and experience, the seeker grows in wisdom and clarity. ✨

“The most important thing is practice in daily life that is how we can gradually get to know the true value of whatever teaching we follow.

What we need is a good heart, a disciplined mind and a healthy body. We will not transform ourselves merely by making wishes, but through working hard over a long period of time.” —The Dalai Lama, in the Foreword to “Core of the Yoga Sūtras” by B.K.S. Iyengar.

Revealing the core

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

“To the yogi, the path toward spirit lies entirely in the domain of nature. It is the exploration of nature from the world of appearances, or surface, into the subtlest heart of living matter. Spirituality is not some external goal that one must seek but a part of the divine core of each of us, which we must reveal. For the yogi, spirit is not separate from body. Spirituality is not ethereal and outside nature but accessible and palpable in our very own bodies.” —Yogācārya B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, 2005, p. 18.

Right action

“Patañjali clearly states that free action, beyond causality, is his who acts without motive or desire – as if a kite were released in the sky, without a string to bring it back to earth.” Commentary on Sūtra IV.7,  Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali,, Yogācārya B. K. S. Iyengar

“...you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. “

—James Baldwin

Reflections on the Patañjali Chant

We begin our Iyengar Yoga classes with the Patañjali Chant, paying our respects to a lineage of teachers and a tradition that spans thousands of years.  My teacher has quoted Prashant Iyengar’s statement about the chant, that it is not a prayer, because we are not asking for anything.  We are acknowledging a source of the teachings that are being passed on.  One of my students, Daniel Hugger, shares reflections on this topic, drawing from his background as a scholar on religion:

 When I heard Prashant Iyengar's argument on why the Patañjali Chant was not a prayer (that it does not ask for anything), my thoughts immediately turned to St. Thomas.

St. Thomas was a 13th century Italian Dominican friar, priest, and theologian. He is honored in the Catholic tradition as a Doctor of the Church, a title denoting both sanctity and great accomplishment in learning. Among the Doctors he is especially important and bears the title Angelic Doctor. In other Christian traditions St. Thomas is often, although not always, also viewed as an authority but less so than in the Catholic tradition.

St. Thomas's greatest written work was the Summa Theologica. It is a very large but unfinished work which he hoped would serve as a guide for students of theology. It draws not only from Christian scriptures and tradition but from ancient pagan philosophers of the west and Jewish and Islamic philosophers as well.

It is composed in a scholastic style common to his time arranged by topics, questions, potential answers to questions, St. Thomas's answers, and then arguments against the potential answers St. Thomas rejects. Here is St. Thomas on the topic of prayer:

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3083.htm

To break it down St. Thomas sees prayer as having four necessary conditions:

1) It must be addressed to God directly or indirectly through angels and holy persons both living and dead. (ST II.II.83.4)
2) It must be an act of practical reason (i.e. having an end in view with cause and effect). (ST II.II.83.1)

3) It must ask for something, as Prashant Iyengar also argues. (ST II.II.83.5)

4) What is asked for must be sincerely desired (ST II.II.83.16)

I think Prashant Iyengar's argument is the clearest reason that the Patañjali  Chant should not be considered a prayer. I also think the Patañjali Chant as an exercise in skeptical reason (geared towards apprehending or remembering the legacy of Patañjali) rather than practical reason (having an end in view with cause and effect).

Dan  Hugger is a student of Iyengar Yoga through his teacher, Jennifer Beaumont, since January 2017. He works as librarian and research associate at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty. He studied history at Hillsdale College and earned a State of Michigan teaching certificate at Calvin College, where he completed a thesis on the role of the imagination in the writings of St. Ignatius of Loyola. For his work in history at Calvin he was nominated for a Lilly Fellowship. He has taught history, English, and economics at public schools in the Grand Rapids area and has lectured on Lord Acton.

Patañjali statue at the Abode of Iyengar Yoga, In San Francisco, California  

Sundararājāsana

“Nothing is fixed. All is in flux. ”

— physicist Alan Lightman

There is an international movement to honor Yogācārya B.K.S. Iyengar, in the way sages of the past have been honored, through naming a pose after him. Traditionally these poses were named after the sage's first name, such as the twisting Marīchyāsanas named for Sage Marīchi or Sage Vasistha, for Vasisthāsana (an arm balancing asana). The first two initials of his name stand for "Bellur" the small Indian village where he was born, and Krishnamachar, his father's name... S. is for Sundara. There are many ways to practice this asana, in Iyengar yoga classes, it is first introduced with the help of the chair.  There are efforts to rename this āsana, Dwi Pāda Viparita Dandāsana (two-legged inverted staff pose) in honor of beloved Guruji B.K.S. Iyengar, “Sundararājāsana”.  Join in the efforts here by signing the petition.

“One must develop super-sensitive perception in the senses while practicing, so that one earns knowledge and wisdom in order to bring parity from the center into either side of the body. First of all, we must learn and adjust what we can both see and perceive in order to develop this quality of observation. For example, our eyes can perceive the front body and correct its movements. However the back body cannot be seen, but it is only felt and conceived by the mind, so it must be adjusted and corrected by the mind. The key to doing this is to balance the senses of perception with the senses of conceptions—the mind and the intelligence— so that they observe together the changes that take place while adjusting the various facets of the body.
This means the sādhaka [seeker] must use the fire of vision together with the fire of the intelligence of the mind to co-operate and co-ordinate, and, by utilizing the fire of the seer, to witness and correct whenever and wherever such corrections are needed. Such presentation establishes harmony, removing the disparities between the front, back and the right and left sides of the body, and the nerves, mind, intelligence and consciousness. By ‘nerves,’ I mean the prana or energy flows in the nervous system....
This way of practice diffuses the flame of the seer so that it radiates throughout the body. ”

— Yogācārya B.K.S. Iyengar, Core of the Yoga Sūtras, 2012.

active learning

Dwi Pāda Viparīta Dandāsana ~ Two Legged Inverted Staff Pose (From Śīrsāsana and back)

“A life of making isn’t a series of shows, or projects, or productions, or things: it is an everyday practice. It is a practice of questions more than answers, of waiting to find what you need more often than knowing what you need to do. Waiting, like listening and meandering, is best when it is an active and not a passive state.”

— Ann Hamilton

“Dualities like gain and loss, victory and defeat, fame and shame, body and mind, mind and soul vanish through mastery of the āsanas....The path of Yoga is like the sharp edge of a razor, narrow and difficult to tread, and there are few who find it. The yogi knows that the paths of ruin or of salvation lie within [one]self.”

— Yogācārya B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga, 1966

Yoga to Cure and to Endure

  “Yoga teaches how to cure what need not be endured, and to endure what cannot be cured.” Yogācārya B.K.S. Iyengar

Playing in an indoor soccer game when I was 17, an opponent player slide-tackled me. My body was small and light  and flew up in the air and hit the turf covered cement and was carried off the field in agonizing pain. For a few days or a couple of weeks, I was unable to walk. I was medicated. I don’t remember much. There was sciatica, a herniated disk and stress fracture in L5. I began Iyengar Yoga one year later and the low back was working ok then but never really learned how to move deeply in backbends. After my second child was born, my back became weak and was injured again (L5 complete retrolisthesis—which means the vertebrae moved backward) and then it really had to be addressed through a ton of practice. Eventually my teacher taught me this pose, Bhujangāsana II, or cobra with no arms, at an Intensive but I wasn’t able to do it: my lotion covered legs slipped right out of my hands. Practicing it the next morning with props it didn’t seem that difficult and when I came to him and told him that, he laughed, and walked away. Soon I would realize why that was so funny. It took 13 months practicing to understand this pose before it was possible to do without support. All the prone backbends were studied deeply and relearned. Usually this pose was included in three practices a week—it took hundreds of attempts. Now it is still practiced regularly because just maintaining it is difficult and strengthening for my lower back in the right direction.

I’m really grateful to have a teacher who knows to teach something really difficult that will carry the student toward freedom if it’s pursued. It’s unusual in this day and time. Usually, what’s expected is hearing, it’s ok if it’s too hard and oh yes you were so injured it makes sense why you can’t do those things and to make that listener feel better about staying right where they are. I think that’s fine for our friends and family. But a true teacher shows what may be possible if we can dare to make some change. “You cannot change and stay the same.” Manouso Manos