When I look at the number of people that come through It’s Yoga, I smile thinking of how it started. I think back to the days when I knew little about yoga and Astanga was as foreign to me as life without it is now. Back then (almost twenty years ago), there was no world wide web so, unlike you, I had to resort to what now seems primitive – I picked a school out of the phone book. Call it serendipity, fate, luck or good karma, but through these very means I was able to find not only a good school but also the teacher who transformed my practice and by extension my life.
One day, when I was but a yoga novice, my teacher announced that K. Pattabhi Jois, the Sanskrit scholar and yoga master who created the Astanga system, was coming to teach at our school. Before he arrived, there was a veritable buzz about him. He had been, so I heard, a practitioner of yoga in various forms since the age of fourteen as well as a dedicated researcher of yoga texts. Sometime in the 1930’s, he had found an ancient manuscript at a Calcutta university, the Yoga Kurunta, from which he developed his own practice and teachings. At sixty-four, he was still as energetic as ever and fully committed to bringing Astanga to communities well beyond his native Mysore, India. After hearing all this, I thought he might be intimidating so I was pleasantly surprised to find him unassuming and generous in all respects. I was immediately taken by the fact that even though he spoke no English, he was ready to teach us the method and wisdom of Astanga. Perhaps because he had a way of moving that manifested the serenity, joy and alertness that the practice brings, he knew he could teach us the system by embodying it.
I noticed immediately that he was both lighthearted and earnest – he laughed often but he also expected a sincere and sustained dedication to the practice. As he learned some limited English, he was also able to share the specifics of his teachings. He made it clear that the transformative effects of Astanga were not to come without a great deal of hard work, patience and pain.
It was hard for me at first to move and breathe according to Astanga. Though at that time I was twenty-nine and full of potential, my body had began to develop aches and lapses of energy. Mine was a life of caffeine and pills I drank to alleviate a little pain here, a little discomfort there. So I was quite stiff when I moved into postures and I often felt as though my body would tear when I went into tight places. Just when I thought I would split open, Pattabhi Jois would call out “five” and I would let go of the posture with much relief. Often I would feel like a spring uncoiling from the inside. This feeling was very unsettling at first, but as I started to get the benefits of the practice, I became ever more willing to face its challenges.
With every practice, I created a heat in my body that oxygenated my blood, nourished my glands and internal organs, cleansed and purified my nervous system. With the deep rhythmic breathing and movement of Astanga, I began to access the most restricted areas of my body and to shed unwanted toxins. I began to experience the heat of the practice as an internal fire that allowed me to quiet my mind and to rest from my attachments. Overtime, I developed such a healthy glow that friends began to ask, “Were you just on vacation? You look different, have you been on a diet?”
But it took pain and patience to open my joints and it hurt, as I found out through Pattabhi Jois, because I was afraid. Whenever I insisted that my body was sore and could flex no more, he’d tell me that I had a fearing mind. “Bad man,” or “bad lady,” he’d say to his students, “body strong, mind weak.” It was such a revelation to me to see my mind as an obstacle rather than as a conduit to my self-realization. Whenever I would arrive at a tight spot or attempt an advanced posture, I would feel a surge of fright invading my body. My mind would say: “you are sure to hurt yourself,” or ” you cannot possibly do that.” At such moments Pattabhi Jois would encourage me to breathe deeply and let the lightness of my body unfold. By constantly practicing how to relax in a moment of tightness and how to let my body attempt what appeared impossible, I began to integrate the practice.
Yoga was to teach me how to trust my body, my intuition, my feelings and to operate from them. This was a lesson riddled with fright. To trust my intuitive sense, to foster it, to keep it healthy, tuned in and alive – this was the lesson I encountered and one which I was to extend beyond my daily practice. Yoga was not to be just a physical experience, but a method of bringing life and vitality to all my being, a way of bringing awareness to the inner parts of myself. This lesson ran so contrary to anything else I had ever learned, that I was afraid, at first. As I continued to practice and learn from the sweet and gentle old man, however, I became less and less fearful. The fact that he laughed a lot also helped. For him, there was joy in experiencing the mind, body, breath connection and he inspired us to follow his lead.
At the same time, he constantly expressed the need to have a six day a week practice. Repetition, he taught us, was the key to Astanga. Our bodies and minds could flex, expand, grow strong and calm if we could keep them in a constant state of movement and breathing. Taking more than three days off from practice, he stressed, would make the body regress into tightness and make the mind more susceptible to the burden of preoccupations. Our practices, he assured us, did not have to be perfect. It did not matter if we could not flex as far as he did for the function of our postures was far more important than our forms. The calming effects of our breathing and the release of tension in our body were the essence of the practice and not the perfection of our poses. So he urged us to keep our practices constant and focused.
The more Pattabhi Jois spent time with us, the more we looked at him as a spiritual leader. Some of us were eager to ask him questions regarding our human potential. But he knew that people need to explore their potential for themselves and so with his smile he would say “all is coming, all is coming.” It has taken me twenty years to begin to understand what that means for me, in my own experience.
