alan little’s weblog

moving beyond stretching

16th April 2008 permanent link

… if you aren't on your edge, the chances are good that your mind is wandering.
Steven Barnes on yoga asana practice

for some people – me, for example – being at some kind of personal physical limit seems to help with the focus.
me on yoga asana practice

cody on patanjali

1st February 2008 permanent link

I’ve been quiet lately I know. Sadly it isn’t because I’ve been working on my masterpiece.

Unlike Cody. Part Two of quite possibly the most helpful English-language version of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is published. Rejoice, and read.

one percent theory

24th January 2008 permanent link

“99% practice, 1% theory” is one of Pattabhi Jois’s famous bits of gnomic guidance on how to approach ashtanga vinyasa yoga.

I was sure this was just what I needed when I first started practicing yoga seriously. My life was down a pretty deep hole at the time, and I was convinced one of the reasons for that was too much reading and thinking and not enough doing. So for my first few years of ashtanga yoga, I deliberately concentrated entirely on practice and left the theory to be taken care of later. It was a series of philosophy lectures by B.N.S. Iyengar at a workshop in the summer of 2001 that finally convinced me it was time to start catching up on the one percent. So I bought Desikachar’s The Heart of Yoga, including his translation of and commentary on the Yoga Sutras, and read it. Pattabhi Jois says the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita are all the 1% theory you need.

Sooner or later one’s karmic burdens reassert themselves, though. My practice-to-theory ratio is sill reasonably healthy, but Amazon has figured out that the former academic historian in me is irresistibly drawn towards books by western academics attempting to make sense of yoga’s history, and relentlessly recommends them to me. Fortunately so far they are few & far between. Ian Whicher’s The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana seems like it will be interesting one day, but I haven’t really managed to get to grips with it yet. I ground my way painfully through much of Joseph Alter’s Yoga in Modern India. One of the reasons I never made it as an academic was my belief that the ability to write is a vital skill for a historian. This belief is deeply unfashionable or even heretical in contemporary academia, and Professor Alter clearly does not subscribe to it. Just arrived is Elizabeth de Michelis’ A History of Modern Yoga. Let’s see how that goes.

yoga homework

8th January 2008 permanent link

Apart from finally putting some serious effort into my Russian, the other thing I need to get finished in the next few weeks is my anatomy homework. In November and December I attended two very interesting anatomy for yoga workshops, one on the hips and one on the back, and I still have homework assignments to complete from both of them. (Written, not “increase your outward hip rotation by three degrees in six weeks”). So blogging will have to take a rest while I focus on those.

On that subject, an anatomy book that has been on my “to read one day” list for a while now is Anatomy Trains by Thomas Myers. In the course of researching my anatomy homework I found a series of very interesting articles by him on website of Massage Therapy Magazine. Here for example is the beginning of a series on the psoas, a muscle crucial to much of human movement and posture and the cause of much grief in the screwed up movement and posture patterns of so many chair-sitting, inactive people these days.

not yoga?

6th January 2008 permanent link

My son’s assessment of one of my two half-assed asana practices so far this year: “Daddy, what you just did – that wasn’t yoga”.

Out of the mouths of babes …

Son, you’re most probably right about that and thanks for the brutal honesty. But guess what. All those times I manage to pull off the Patient But Firm act when you’re resisting going to bed? They’re yoga.

christmas thank you

24th December 2007 permanent link

A Christmas thank you to Peter Horst, who dug out for me a current link to Donna Farhi’s excellent article on how to do lotus safely, to which my previous link was broken.

cody on lotus

9th December 2007 permanent link

Cody, author of quite possibly the most helpful English-language version of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (Part One), also has a useful discussion of knee safety in lotus.

My thoughts on the matter here. (I also have helpful advice on what not to do)

As Cody Rightly Says: be wary about taking advice from strangers on the internet!

vande gurunam

5th December 2007 permanent link

वन्दे गुरूणां चरणारविन्दे
सन्दर्शित स्वात्म सुखवबोधे
निःश्रेयसे जाङ्गलिकायमने
संसार हाला हल मोह शान्त्यै

Since we’re on the subject of understanding Sanskrit chants in yoga class, here’s something that will be of no help at all to 99% of my readers. I though I might as well post it anyway. alanlittle.org’s first page in German and Sanskrit is some notes on the opening mantra in honour of Patanjali that is normally chanted at the start of an ashtanga vinyasa yoga practice(*). I put them together last year for a beginners class I was covering for my teacher while she was away for a few weeks. And they might be of more use to somebody on the web than they are sitting on my laptop’s hard disk, so, waste not, want not.

English translation, and Sri K. Pattabhi Jois chanting with correct Sanskrit pronunciation, here.

(*) As an internet yoga cynic once put it, “like having to sing a song about Babe Ruth before you start a game of baseball”(**)

(**) By which I can only assume he meant “like having to sing a song about W.G. Grace before you start a game of cricket”

pat robertson not wrong

4th December 2007 permanent link

Spiros at souljerky is generally a smart and perceptive guy, but I’m not sure what point he thinks he’s making by quoting [right wing TV evangelist] Pat Robertson:

Well the truth is that yoga is a form of meditation in the Hindu religion. And [in] some of the mantras they give you, you’re actually saying prayers to Vishnu and Krishna and you’re not even aware of it.

The idea of stretching is great. I think stretching before you exercise is fine. And they have some stretches that are part of the yoga regime which are very good for you. But when you get into that other stuff, and you’re into a higher consciousness, and you’re supposed to merge with your spirit in with the ever-present god, and gods everywhere, it’s a form of pantheism. It gets really spooky and I just don’t think you ought to be engaged with yoga. But in terms of stretching, by all means stretch.

I doubt – from what little I’ve read about him – that I would agree with many of Mr. Robertson’s opinions, but this doesn’t seem to me to be self-evidently wrong or even particularly controversial.

Yoga originated and developed in a predominantly Hindu culture, with Buddhist and Jain influences, and is suddenly enormously popular in the United States of America, a quite strongly Christian country. Surely it is a perfectly valid question for a Christian to ask, whether the concepts and purposes of yoga are compatible with the Christian concept of God. I’m not suggesting the answer is necessarily no – I know intelligent and thoughtful Christian yogis, whose opinions I respect far more highly than Mr. Robertson’s, who clearly have answered yes to their own satisfaction. But to suggest there is no question to answer strikes me as intellectually dishonest.

you’re actually saying prayers to Vishnu and Krishna …

Indeed you are. Or Ganesha, or Patanjali …

… and you’re not even aware of it.

If you’re not aware of what you’re chanting, whose fault might that be? If you care, then you can find out quite easily by asking your teacher or doing a bit of reading. If you don’t ask, you have no right to complain. If you do ask, and you don’t like the answer, then it’s your decision what you want to do about it.

I enjoy a good chant. My sanskrit is sub-rudimentary but enough that I do usually have at least a rough grasp of what I’m chanting about. I am not a Christian and so don’t personally care whether or not yogic philosophy is reconcilable with Christian doctrine. I’m not a Hindu either, but I have no problem with expressing respect for the aspects of the human condition that the Hindu deities seem to me to represent. (I’d love to believe in reincarnation but haven’t managed to do so yet; and on the off-chance Ganesha really is listening to the prayers and assisting the efforts of sincere students, well, I need all the help I can get)

(Where Mr Robertson is actually wrong is about stretching before exercise. Static stretching as an athletic warmup is thoroughly discredited – it actually temporarily weakens the stretched muscles. You should do it some other time.)

masters

9th November 2007 permanent link

My colleague Kai and I – not masters, but we’ve met some – were swapping stories over lunch about his fifteen year judo career and my ten years’ yoga.

Knees, inevitably – Kai’s anterior cruciate ligament that he says is better than new; my torn meniscus that still gives me trouble, indirectly.

A class with a little sixty year old ju-jutsu seventh Dan where Kai found himself flying through the air, surprised, without even having felt the guy touch him. Ki.

Backbending in Mysore, the day Sharath was sick. Pattabhi Jois’s grandson Sharath had been working with me on my backbending. My backbending was very stiff and heavy at that time (nowadays it’s almost respectable, on a good day). Fit, strong thirty year old Sharath had been visibly struggling, according to friends of mine who were watching. Came the inevitable day when Sharath was sick, and Guruji, then 86 years old, walked over to me. Oh no, I thought, poor old Guruji is going to injure himself trying to lift me, and the whole yoga world will hate me. A couple of attempts later, there I was floating upwards, surprised, with just the lightest pressure from a couple of fingers behind my hips. Prana.

Ki. Prana. Just enough force and no more, at exactly the right place and time. Nothing supernatural, just practice. Lots and lots and lots of practice.

If you expect to become a martial arts master in a matter of days, you have a very long couple of days ahead of you.
Tyler Hass

The time scale for “mastery” is decades … the idea of someone claiming to be a “master” under the age of sixty is ludicrous.
Marc MacYoung

infinite yoga

7th November 2007 permanent link

One thing I have learned in the last four and a half years is that some people have the discipline and motivation to be parents of small children, have a day job and still practice a full ashtanga vinyasa yoga series every day – but I’m not one of them.

I maintain a reasonable level of practice most of the time: forty minutes to an hour most days, and a full series a couple of times a week. Last weekend I went to a two full days workshop and this evening I have Mysore class with Bettina, so I absolutely can’t complain.

However: an important part of a yoga practice is maintaining the difficult balance between being motivated to keep practicing diligently, and accepting the reality of where you are without value judgement. Tuesday is my wife’s yoga class night. I leave work early to collect my son from kindergarten, so I don’t have time to pop to the gym at lunchtime. Usually we go Boys’ Night Swimming, but yesterday was cold, rainy and dismal so we stayed at home and the neighbours’ little boy came to play. After I dispatched one small boy home and the other into bed, I managed about ten minutes asana practice and five minutes meditation before I fell into bed myself.

Which, as I always remind myself in my diary on days like this, is infinitely better than no practice at all.

yoga herx

31st October 2007 permanent link

Scott Sonnon explains the Herxheimer Reaction: apparently a common medical phenomenon among athletes who have recently stepped up the intensity of their training. Intense metabolic conditioning heats the body, like a fever, which kills bacteria, who then decompose and release toxins into the surrounding tissues for a while at a faster rate than the body can flush them out. Eewww. Result: fever, flu-like symptoms etc. a couple of weeks after you begin the new high intensity training regime.

This is interesting. Yoga teachers talk a lot about asana practice eliminating “toxins” from the body. I doubt if much yoga as commonly practiced is intense enough to bring on the sort of thing Scott is talking about – but ashtanga as practiced in Mysore probably is if anything is. And it was common folk wisdom among yoga students when I was there that “everybody gets sick in the first few weeks. After that you’re fine”. Guruji always greeted students returning to the shala after this initial sickness with a beaming smile “very good – big cleansing”

I was always in two minds about this. I always thought it sounded possible, not to mention encouraging – of course I want to believe my yoga practice is “cleansing” my body as well as my mind, who wouldn’t? But I'm wary of wishful thinking and pseudo-medical mumbo jumbo, both of which are all too common in the yoga community among people who at best barely half understand what they’re talking about(*).

Clearly we don’t absolutely need to invoke elaborate exercise-induced biochemical syndromes to explain western yoga students getting sick in India.

Take the Kavery Lodge Hotel in Mysore. A few years ago it was the standard starting point for newly-arrived yoga students. As such, it was full of people who not only weren’t adapted to Indian germs’n’diseases, but who also had no immunity to each others’. The place is a veritable petri dish of all the world’s pathogens; I saw no reason to assume I would be any more resistant to American or Australian strains of the common cold than I would to Indian ones.

As it happened I got through my couple of weeks at the Lodge with no more than a slight cold. A month later, though, after I’d moved into my own apartment, I was heavily knocked down for a few days by a dose of fever and diarrhea. Clearly I would have preferred all along to believe this was cleansing induced by the incredible intensity and devotion of my yoga practice, rather than something mundane like not washing my hands thoroughly enough one day in a restaurant, but until now I couldn’t prove it. After that I was fine.

Scott Sonnon seems like an interesting character. An American who studied Russian martial arts in the Soviet Union, he’s worked on combining modern scientific knowledge of exercise physiology and psychology – including a lot of soviet stuff that still isn’t widely known in the west – with things taken from yoga and other traditional practices. Some apparently smart and knowledgeable guys seem to be very impressed by him. I have one of his books, which I've so far found interesting but not earth-shattering. Until recently most of his writings on the web seemed to be small articles apparently intended mainly as marketing teasers for his books, DVDs and expensive seminars – fair enough, the guy has a family to support like the rest of us – but now he’s started a much more substantial blog.

(*) This absolutely does not apply to my friend Dr. Ron Steiner of ashtanga.info, whose hip anatomy workshop I am greatly looking forward to this weekend.

yoga teacher blogs

28th August 2007 permanent link

It took a month, and one email doesn’t constitute a flood, but thanks to Francisco Malonzo for drawing my attention to some yoga teacher blogs.

Here’s certified ashtanga teacher Alex Medin. Hey, I almost know him – I went to a few classes at the yoga school he used to run in London. Although he wasn’t there at the time – he was in India and a friend of mine was covering his classes, hence my visit. He’s a fellow contributor to Nama Rupa too.

Here too are Santa Barbara ashtanga teacher Steve Dwelley, who qualifies as “well known” because I’ve heard his name before although I don’t think I’ve ever met him; and Lisa Hill, who according to Francisco is well known in Chicago (Cara?)

yoga works

7th August 2007 permanent link

My PSA level: 0.6 somethings per whatever. Very, very low anyway. (In this case, low is good) And my prostate itself: right size; soft, velvety texture … healthy.

Long sit in janu sirsasana b this evening to celebrate. It wouldn’t do to get complacent. Broccoli for dinner. (“Cherries are supposed to be very good for those ‘male’ issues as well”, says Yogamum)

happy birthday guruji

29th July 2007 permanent link

Yoga master Sri K. Pattabhi Jois was born on the July full moon, 1915 (Indian tradition is that gurus’ birthdays are reckoned by lunar months rather than calendar months). He has been practicing and studying yoga since his teens, and teaching since the 1930s.

Anne Finstad has an excellent piece on ashtanga news on the atmosphere in Mysore these days. Guruji has had health problems recently and at 92 is no longer able to teach as actively as he was even up to only a couple of years ago. This was inevitable at some point.

My four months in Mysore studying with Guruji were one of the high points of my life so far. I fully intended to return, but within a year of coming home my plans changed abruptly, so I never did and now almost certainly never will. We all have our dharma. In any case, I knew what I was experiencing was the twilight of the old days of ashtanga yoga in Mysore. The old yoga shala where Guruji had been teaching for sixty years had been drastically overcrowded for years and was due to be replaced by a new, bigger, glitzier construction just across the road from his house. I had a look round the new shala while it was under construction (but forgot to take pictures) and it was obvious things were going to be very different there. In general I don’t like what I’ve heard about the huge, crowded classes there, and I wonder if I would have been disappointed if I had made it back there at some point in the last five years.

Which doesn’t diminish in any way my respect and affection for Pattabhi Jois. Happy birthday Guruji.

A note on the picture: I quite often get asked for prints of it, but unfortunately it was a grab shot taken in the dark with a manual focus camera. It just isn’t sharp enough to print; I’ve tried several times. I can only just get away with it on the web. Why was Guruji wearing sunglasses indoors in the dark? Because he was teaching a couple of days after a cataract operation. He’s like that.

those who can, do

20th July 2007 permanent link

It occurs to me, thinking about yoga and blogging, that I can’t think of a single well known yoga teacher who has a blog.

It’s just a thought. I don’t mean to offend or dismiss any of my fellow yoga bloggers who manage to write interesting and worthwhile stuff without being well known teachers.

(Godfrey Devereux was a regular on an ashtanga message board I used to frequent years ago, and Erich Schiffman seems to be pretty active in the ezboard discussion group for his style of yoga, but message boards aren’t blogs.)

If I had comments on my blog, people could now flood me with links to dozens of fascinating yoga teacher blogs. Emails are always welcome.

on learning caution

6th July 2007 permanent link

I did something really stupid a few weeks ago, and I’m going to come clean and describe exactly what it was so that everybody else can avoid doing it.

Due to karmic burdens, my right knee and hip are much stiffer than my left, especially in lotus or half lotus positions. Yoga is to a large degree about recognising and accepting the reality of where you are, instead of which I decided I was fed up with this after all these years and was going to take drastic action to “fix” it.

I thought about various techniques I’ve picked up for learning/improving half lotus. Two good variations are to take a leg that is in half lotus and, rather than letting it rest on the other leg, take the other leg away and let the half lotus leg make its way to the floor under its own weight. You can do this sitting, as recommended by Donna Farhi (in a very good article to which my previous link unfortunately appears to be broken) or lying down as recommended by Donna Holleman in a class I took with her recently.

I haven’t got to the stupid bit. Donna and Donna are two of the least stupid yoga teachers anywhere.

Getting slightly more stupid now: there’s a thing sometimes called double pigeon that a lot of people swear by as a remedy for tight hips. Other people I know and respect say it’s ok but you have to take great care with the foot and ankle positioning for it to be safe; others still say it’s just downright dangerous and you shouldn’t do it at all. I have always been suspicious of it, and find it exceedingly difficult & uncomfortable, so I don’t often do it. Plenty of the people who recommend it are reputable and non-stupid though, so we’re not there yet.

I’ve been (re-)reading some stuff lately about a stretching technique I actually first learned about in my climbing days, long before yoga, in which you strongly contract a muscle in a stretched position and then relax it again. A stretched muscle tends to tense up to prevent over-stretching and injury; this technique overrides that reflex. It is safe, effective, scientifically proven and definitely non-stupid. The stretched limb needs something to push against though. And here’s where it all goes horribly wrong.

Do not: lie on your back on the floor. Put one leg in half lotus position. Bend the other leg ninety degrees as in a double pigeon and place the outside of the ankle on top of the knee of the leg that is in half lotus. Use this leg to provide resistance while you practice tense-relax stretching with the half lotus leg. Because guess what: physics. While that ankle is pressing down on the knee, the knee is also pressing up on it with equal and opposite force. And that ankle is one end of a long lever, the other end of which terminates at the cartilage on the inner edge of your knee joint.

Damaging the inner edge of the knee joint by squeezing it together it is the most common injury that yoga beginners inflict on themselves by overenthusiastic premature attempts to sit in lotus. Practitioners with ten or more years of experience should know better, but they don’t always.

Fortunately, having been such an overenthusiastic beginner, I have years of experience in dealing with yoga knee injuries. I always knew that knowledge would come in handy for something one day, although I rather hoped it would be for helping other people not myself.

Still I’m learning interesting things this time round. Lotus on the left side is out of the question for the time being; I just need to be patient with that. I can do rehabilitive stretches with my left knee bent as long as I’m very careful about my ankle position and I go into them very slowly. It’s good mindfulness training – the slightest moment of inattention earns me a sharp stab in the knee. Another question presents itself too: if my hip isn’t open enough to get into half lotus without hurting an only slightly injured knee, then maybe it wasn’t as open as I thought it was in the first place. I must have been sitting in lotus with slight pressure on the knee all along. More work to do – it’s just as well I enjoy doing it.

I probably should take glucosamine/chondroitin for a few weeks too in case there’s any actual cartilage damage, although that’s very much secondary to working on hip rotation and careful foot positioning.

No Disclaimer This Time: really don’t do this.

random words of wisdom

27th June 2007 permanent link

Various random yoga quotes that I picked up here and there.

Bryan Kest (mp3) in an audio interview on yoga peeps:

the challenges are really just getting onto the mat … with a baby, and another one on the way, and a busy life, the challenge is really just showing up.

My friend Tara in Mysore:

Have you ever done your practice and not felt better afterwards?

Lou Reed on Tai Chi (and yoga, and music …):

Nobody can do your practice for you

Mark Twight:

What you know does not matter - what you do matters.

Steven Barnes:

Anything worth doing well is worth doing badly at first.

a kind of magic?

26th June 2007 permanent link

What is yoga asana practice for anyway? Part Four of a sporadic ongoing essay. (Part One, Part Two, Part Three)

This part originally began as Part Two of the series, but somehow it dragged as I was writing it and so ended up being last. This must tell us something. Most probably that I don’t personally find this part of the subject particularly interesting or relevant to my life and practice, even though plenty of other people seemingly do. Hatha Yoga as a way of raising kundalini, aligning chakras and so and so forth.

There is a certain tendency among gullible western yoga students of New Age tendencies to note and remember little bits of Patanjali and lots of the stuff about kundalini, chakras and the subtle body in mediaeval tantric yoga texts like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and not notice or care that those two bodies of learning represent quite different and to some degree contradictory perspectives. It is in the mediaeval tantric stuff that we find discussion of esoteric concepts like chakras and kundalini.

Patanjali is all about quite systematically analysing and learning to control one’s mental processes in order to learn that they are not Who You Are. Tantric hatha yoga was first documented much later – the Hatha Yoga Pradipika dates from about two thousand years after Patanjali. Those later texts may be documenting oral traditions that were already ancient when they were first written down, that go back to Patanjali’s time or even before. Or not. We may never know. And no matter how old, they are from a quite different tradition that is about quite different things than Patanjali.

Patanjali may have been aware of some of that stuff, but doesn’t appear to have regarded it as very interesting or important. In fact, he goes out of his way to warn us, at considerable length by his standards, that siddhis – supernatural powers or unusual abilities derived from the practice of yoga – are not what it’s all about at all. I have the impression that the authors of the mediaeval tantric texts seem to have somewhat overlooked that part. I’m not an expert, but I’ve heard Pattabhi Jois, who is, talk pretty dismissively about the Hatha Yoga Pradipika.

I don’t take it literally at all. That is, I don’t doubt that real, repeatable phenomena are being described by these texts; there are too many consistent descriptions of them, from too many independent sources, for that not to be the case. But I tend towards a sceptical/scientific/materialist view of them – not with a closed mind, I hope, but one that applies Occam’s razor and says: show me conclusively that these things can’t be satisfactorily explained as ordinary physical, physiological, neurological phenomena, then I’ll be ready to consider other hypotheses. I thought for a long time the standard explanations in old yogic texts of how and why these phenomena work were metaphorical or just downright wrong. Kundalini as the phlogiston of metaphysics.

While the original writers probably had a first person experience of what they were talking about that conformed to the basic laws of physics, all the baggage that has been attached because of misunderstanding has obscured the real knowledge to the point of fantasy.
Mushtaq Ali

Then I had some experiences, then I read a book.

Last summer I was working quite intensively on my backbending. I have a very stiff upper back, caused by … whatever. Rock climbing, desk job, unresolved emotional issues … it doesn’t matter. I have it. And when I started seriously trying to stop having it, one of the things that happened after a few weeks was that I started to feel little sharp tingles, like tiny electric shocks, between my shoulder blades. I put this down to nerve endings starting to get signals in places where nothing had moved for years, or something like that. Until one warm summer afternoon when I had just finished working on my backbends on the hill in my local park, and I got a huge jolt right in the mula bandha.

That was surprising.

Paul Grilley, about some of whose ideas I am sceptical, nevertheless has an interesting book entitled Yin Yoga. In it he cites the work of Japanese researcher Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama, who believes he has identified electrical currents flowing in the body’s connective tissue, corresponding to the chi meridians of acupuncture. Grilley describes and recommends a slow, relaxed yoga practice with long static holds in postures, that is designed to stretch and realign connective tissue rather than muscle fibres, in order to facilitate the free flow of these currents. (*)

Something else I learned in the last year, starting in some classes I took with Mark Whitwell: how, by chanting or doing breathing exercises whilst directing attention to the seven main chakras in turn, working up from the root chakra at the base of the spine to the crown of the head, to quite quickly get into states of deep inward focus – pratyahara – in which I feel a sense of great calm and contentment. This is nice. But does it mean I’m tapping into some kind of specal energy via my chakras, or are they just serving as a convenient focus for meditation in the same way that yoga asanas (see Part Three) also can? Different focus points can quite obviously have different effects – even for me with my limited experience, chakra-plus-breath meditation is different from breath alone, and very different indeed from heartbeat.

These techniques are real and powerful. But does learning to generate weird electrical impulses in your body or pleasant mental states have anything to do with actually becoming enlightened? Not as such directly, if we want to take Patanjali’s opinions on the matter seriously. At most we can take as a sign that we’ve learned enough mental and physical control to be able to direct and focus our attention in a certain way for a certain amount of time. Directed and focused attention is the useful skill that’s actually being learned here, not the coincidental and arbitrary things that we choose to use as the objects of our attention and focus when we’re practicing.

That was the state of my thinking/experience/understanding up to a few weeks ago, when I discovered the blog of science fiction writer, martial artist and all-round interesting thinker Steven Barnes. He has an interesting idea about the chakras corresponding to aspects of human psychology, similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs - the root chakra to physical survival etc. Also worth thinking about.

(*) I note here, without necessarily expressing a conclusion either way, that this would appear to go against a general medical/physiological consensus that stretching connective tissue is unhealthy and dangerous as it can lead to over-flexibility and unstable joints. Something some very flexible yoga practitioners would do well to think about. The ashtanga vinyasa series are good here, since you can’t get by without being both adequately flexible and strong. I’ve seen very flexible students cruise through primary series and the beginning of intermediate, only to falter in a big way towards the end of intermediate where serious strength starts to be required.

seven people

19th June 2007 permanent link

OK. Another list to add to Cara’s eight. Eight again? Turns out to be seven, corresponding coincidentally [?] to the seven main chakras etc.

Seven people I have encountered in my life who I would regard as authentic masters/geniuses.

Three yoga masters:

1. Sri K. Pattabhi Jois
2. Dharma Mittra
3. Bryan Kest

The ayurdevic masseur who healed my knee:

4. P. Vijayan

Two musicians I have heard play live, one in an arena, one in a bar; one extremely famous, one somewhat less so:

5. Neil Young
6. Steve Lafleur

Most Talented Rock Climber Of His Generation, all round mad genius, and the only person on this list I ever knew personally at all well:

7. Johnny Dawes

souljerky

7th June 2007 permanent link

You don’t need to read anything about yoga at all. As long as you get on your mat and do your practice on a (more or less) daily basis, everything else is secondary. Tertiary, even. Do your practice and all is coming.

However: if like me you still suffer from the morbid urge to verbalise and intellectualise everything, then you need to either get over it or read souljerky (formerly Sri Ganesha Tea & Book Stall). Easily the internet’s most intelligent yoga linkage and commentary.

seven

6th June 2007 permanent link

Seven main chakras. Didn’t Saint Teresa of Avila write about a castle with seven rooms? (Pardon my almost complete ignorance of Christian mystical traditions. There’s a guy on one of the yoga forums, a catholic and an advanced ashtanga practitioner whom I respect very highly, who could definitely put me right on this one)

Does the number seven crop up repeatedly in these matters because it is superstitiously regarded as an “auspicious” number in many cultures? Or is it regarded as an auspicious number in many cultures because it corresponds to something real, deep and important that has been recognised independently many times by advanced meditation practitioners in different cultures?

Or to something real but not especially deep or important? When I was a young software designer, I was taught as a cardinal principle that system design diagrams are primarily for communicating ideas to people, and that The Magic Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two is therefore the correct number of boxes-with-interconnecting arrows per picture, being the number of things a person can easily accommodate at once in their short term memory.

Would a hypothetical intelligent species with eleven short term memory registers instead of seven then have eleven mystical energy centres, eleven rooms in the Castle of God, etc.?

Or: do we have seven short term memory registers not because of evolutionary coincidence but because that is in some computational/mathematical/engineering sense the right number to have? And supposing we were in the realms of Mathematical Truth / engineering optima, then Truth = Beauty = God and voilà, we’re back to deep and important.

Alternatively … but no. If I pursue this line of “reasoning” (for want of a better word) much further, people might start to think I’m stoned. Which, as it happens, I’m not.

This is a spinoff from Part Four of my ongoing series of essays on “advanced yoga asana practice: what for?” (Part One, Part Two, Part Three), which has been dragging its heels for some time but which I will definitely have to get my finger out and finish now.

the yogi ain’t psychic

24th May 2007 permanent link

On the 'psychic' issue, one must understand that it does not mean that you are telling the future or anything particularly mystical. Like Ninjutsu it is simply a matter of seeing psychological events manifested physically and structurally. If you understand what you are looking at you can see what is coming and head it off even before it begins.
Nate Morrison on the Russian martial art Systema

Martial arts, sitting meditation, and yoga asana practice look superficially different. They key thing they have in common is this: they are all about paying attention to what is, not to what you want or expect.

In my brief and long-ago martial arts career, in which I reached the giddy heights of brown belt in shotokan karate, I at least had enough awareness to know that thinking too much was my problem when it came to sparring. Once or twice in kata competitions I have clear memories of a state where there was no outside world, no worrying, just the movement – but for me at the time that was just a gift that sporadically happened. I had no idea of how to systematically encourage or pursue it. High level practitioners, I imagine, are people who have learned how enter that state more or less at will.

Climbing was similar for me. Now and again I had no-gravity days where I could do things right at my or beyond my normal limits with complete calm, grace and poise. They are among my life’s clearest and most enduring memories. But again, they were rare and random. Also, they tended to happen most often when I put myself way out on a limb in situations where a mistake meant the hospital at least, and there are consequences if you play that particular game too often. The flow state isn’t guaranteed to come every time.

For me it took another decade of hard life experience, and the discovery that ashtanga vinyasa yoga felt right for me, before I was able to start learning to cultivate these states in a systematic way. Some very fortunate people find the practice that is right for them early in life. Other people like me find it later; we are fortunate too. At least we found it.

I will be adding Nate Morrison’s words to my collections of quotes, comments & thoughts on sutra iii.16 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali:

the touch of the wind

20th May 2007 permanent link

Somebody once told me, or I read somewhere, that the sensation of the wind on your skin can be a[nother] good thing to choose as your focus if you should happen to find yourself meditating outdoors.

Which I did today, so I did. I discovered that the technique has an interesting plus: if the wind should happen to stop for a moment, so might your mind for a second or two. Until you(*) blow it by noticing.

(*) “You” meaning who or what, exactly, at this point, since we just mentioned that our conscious processes appeared to have ceased a moment before? Big, big question.

toys for the mind

3rd May 2007 permanent link

What is yoga asana practice for anyway? Part Three of a sporadic ongoing essay. (Part One, Part Two, Part Four)

I disagree strongly with people who take the view that modern, asana-focused yoga practice is just physical exercise and has nothing to do with the other seven of the eight limbs of real yoga. I also disagree, although less vehemently, with those who say it is “only” a way to prepare the body for sitting meditation – although that’s important too. (I have no strong opinion either way at this point on the all tantra/kundalini stuff, about which more soon, maybe)

Check out this passage from a BBC radio interview of Sri BKS Iyengar by Mark Tully, starting at around 16 minutes (*):

[Tully]: Now Guruji is doing an incredible backbend. His head’s on the ground, it’s between his two bent arms. His back's arched and the other end of his body is only supported by his left foot. His right leg is pointing straight up towards the ceiling. [eka pada viparita dandasana; see also the man himself at 1:10 in this video on youtube] He must be concentrating incredibly hard to prevent him toppling over.
[Iyengar]: Now, you observe how I stretch my intelligence from the head to the foot, and from the foot to the head, so that the physical force and the mental force meet and bring oneness between body, mind and soul.
[Tully]: Now Guruji has literally flipped back onto his feet.
[Iyengar]: So that is my meditation. Because my intelligence did not waver at all. So I was present, my body was in the present, my physical energy was in the present, my mental energy was in the present, my intellectual energy was in the present – so the self is in the present.
[Tully]: So, for you there is no need for the ordinary form of meditation?
[Iyengar]: No. … My brain is relaxed. That is meditation.

Lately I’ve been practicing ardha chandrasana quite often (even though it isn’t in any ashtanga series). It’s a lovely position in many ways, but especially for me at the moment it’s a very challenging balance. Whether and how far I can turn my head to look up at the top hand is a pretty accurate gauge of how focused I happen to be on that particular day, how much or how little extraneous noise I’m allowing into my head. And, while one shouldn’t be judgmental about one’s own yoga practice (or anybody else’s), that is useful information. How many other chances in life do you get to quantify your level of cosmic oneness in degrees of arc?

Maybe when I’ve done ardha chandrasana a thousand times and got used to it, then I’ll need to move on to something harder to achieve the same effect.

The point – one of the points, at any rate – of yoga asana practice, is to give you something to do with your mind that’s difficult enough that you have to learn to control and focus your mental processes in order to be able to do it. It’s easy to get distracted by random thoughts flickering across your mind if you just sit and try to meditate, less so if you put yourself in a position where getting distracted means falling on your head.

If you’re in a position and fully focused on what your body is doing and how you feel in that position – not thinking about what you plan to have for dinner after class or the babe on the next mat – then you’re not just “preparing to” meditate – not thinking about your present practice as a means towards some future end – you are meditating.

You don’t necessarily have to be performing spectacular-looking “advanced” asanas for this to happen. But for some people – me, for example – being at some kind of personal physical limit seems to help with the focus. And if you spend time at your personal physical limits on a regular basis, they tend to move. Which can, as a side effect, result in you developing the ability to perform spectacular-looking “advanced” asanas. Which can be fun (I imagine – it has yet to happen to me), as long as you don’t confuse it for the object of the exercise or think it somehow makes you better than other people.

I don’t need to go to church – I am the church
Paul Chek

Ukrainian yoga master Andrey Lappa has an interesting and slightly different take on all this. He says beginners need a dynamic, vinyasa-style practice with lots of different asanas and controlled movement between them to give them something to focus their thoughts on. If you just ask them to sit still, they have so much random noise in their heads and no experience of how to control their thoughts that they will just be constantly distracted. Only later can more experienced practitioners start to move towards Patanjali’s ideal of a single stable, comfortable position for meditation.

(*) It should be illegal to publish audio on the web without a transcript. You can’t search it, it takes ages to listen to it, quoting from it is a laborious pain in the ass.

are you sitting comfortably?

3rd May 2007 permanent link

Yoga: what are all the fancy-looking body contortions for anyway? Part Two of a sporadic series. (Part One. Part Three. Part Four)

स्थिरसुखमः आसनमः
sthirasukhamḥ āsanamḥ

Posture should be stable (shtiram) and comfortable (sukham) is almost all Patanjali had to say about asana. But don’t underestimate what that takes. Arriving at stable, comfortable posture can be an epic journey.

Some people take the view that the whole point of all the other yoga postures (84,000 of them, according to some mediaeval tantric texts; a couple of hundred in regular use in current yoga schools) is “simply” (ha!) to prepare the body and mind to be able to sit in lotus position for long periods to meditate.

I’ve pointed out here before that getting the legs into into lotus position is only hard for westerners: Indians and others who grow up sitting on the floor find it easy. But there’s more to sitting for meditation than just being able to cross your legs. A few years ago I introduced an Indian beginner to ashtanga vinyasa yoga. [He lives in Mysore and now teaches Sanskrit at Pattabhi Jois’s yoga shala. I assume by now he probably has a way more advanced practice than I have, and will one day be famous as Sharath’s assistant. I hope he still remembers me when that time comes. Hi Lakshmish] Having grown up in a typical Indian village farmhouse with no chairs, he could get into all the lotus-related positions in the ashtanga primary series effortlessly (I at that point couldn’t do lotus at all, having injured my ankle a few weeks earlier.) His forward bending flexibility wasn’t up to much, though – and when I visited his college I noticed that most of the students there, although they could sit cross-legged or in lotus on the floor for hours, lacked either the core strength or the body awareness to sit upright. I’ve rarely seen so many slumped-forward torsos and rounded backs. That’s not conducive to meditation.

So what are the requirements for stable and comfortable sitting?

1. “Open” hips. What this mainly means, in this context, is the ability to rotate the thigh outwards relative to the hip. That’s what getting into lotus without putting undue strain on the knees and ankles is all about. The right balance of strength and length in the hip flexors – the illipsoas complex – is also important: strong enough to hold the lower back upright, but not so tight as to pull it too much forwards
2. A certain amount of strength and endurance in the core muscles of the lower torso. The abdominal wall and the spinal erectors need to be able to hold enough tension to support a straight and upright spine for a long time, but without straining or thinking too much about it. If the core muscles get tired, the lumbar spine will tend to sag either backwards or forwards, either of which is bad. This means you have to have developed both physical endurance in those muscles, and ingrained habits that train the nervous system to hold slight tension in them without having to involve the conscious mind all the time. (Moving nervous control of movements down from the conscious mind into the hindbrain and the spine is an important part of motor learning in all physical endeavours, from rock climbing to piano playing. It’s not for nothing that we talk about getting skills “wired”)
3. An open chest - the ability to lift your sternum forwards and up, your shoulders and shoulderblades back and down. (The opposite of hunching over a desk). Without arching your lower back to tilt your whole ribcage. In order to breathe freely, you need an open and upright thorax on top of your strong and upright abdomen

… whereas your typical chair-sitting, desk-hunching westerner has almost no ability to rotate the thighs outwards, short, tight hip flexors, weak core muscles, a rounded upper back with hunched forward shoulders – and a long way to go.

So in a sense all yoga asana practice can be seen as just a way to develop these abilities – even stuff that to most people looks fancy and advanced. For example the ability to get into lotus no-hands, especially upside down, is not just a cool-looking stunt but also an important benchmark. (It is possible to use your hands to assist in shoulderstand; rather less so in headstand or handstand) The no-hands bit tests/demonstrates good hip flexibility, and in general spending time upside down builds the core strength needed to hold the torso straight and requires considerable mental focus. I can’t, yet, at least not on a regular basis – have managed it a couple of times in shoulderstand, on occasions when spells of particularly assiduous practice happened to coincide with spells of particularly hot weather.

So is it absolutely necessary to go through years of yoga asana practice before you can meditate? No. Lots of people don’t. Yoga teacher Godfrey Devereux says he asked his zen teacher how people who haven’t done yoga manage it, and the answer was that is possible to learn to sit just by sitting, but for the average westerner it takes a long time and involves a lot of discomfort. Maybe a few years of diligent yoga asana practice is a short cut for lazy people?

acro yoga

1st May 2007 permanent link

I have some pictures from the Acro Yoga classes in Köln in April up on flickr.

I haven’t used flickr before. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of somebody else’s software automatically cropping my pictures to make thumbnails, messing with my colour balance etc. But a couple of people had asked about the pictures and were waiting for them, I haven’t touched my photo gallery pages for ages (should do something about that one day), and life is too short to edit HTML by hand. So I’ll see how it goes.

not yoga?

24th April 2007 permanent link

I was trawling my mail archives today looking for something else, and stumbled across these pointers that I sent to somebody who emailed me a little while ago. Just in case they might be of more general interest, the question was:

I was wondering how tight were your hips when you first started out? I'm trying hard to stretch everyday, but my knees are so high above the ground that I cannot sit crosslegged? Were your hips that tight?

I assumed/hoped the guy probably goes to a yoga teacher who can teach the standard stuff competently, so I thought I would try to be helpful and point out a couple of things I learned by myself / in other contexts. There’s probably no position the human body is capable of assuming that somebody hasn’t labeled as a yoga asana somewhere in the last five thousand years. Nevertheless these things are useful and not that often taught in yoga classes

I wasn't that tight. In some ways I was quite flexible - hamstrings for example - from years of climbing & martial arts, training for high steps & kicks. Other ways - hips, shoulders - extremely tight. I think if I hadn't had *something* I was good at from day one, I would have found the whole yoga business too discouraging and wouldn't have stuck with it.

I could sit cross-legged, although not with a very straight back - but in my early attempts at “lotus” my foot barely came above my knee.

Here are some hints & tips that you won't get in many standard yoga classes or texts:

- squatting. Surprisingly good hip opener, also good for quads, back etc. Very important to keep your heels down, with weight on them, and your feet turned slightly out with knees tracking in the same direction as the feet, not collapsing inwards. The closer together and the more parallel you have your feet, the harder it is to balance.

A good game to play (actually a Chi Gung practice) is squatting facing the wall, with your toes as close to the wall as possible. But trying not to touch the wall with anything but your toes - also not to fall backwards onto your ass. You can start a bit away from the wall, and only go down as low as you feel comfortable, and gradually work closer/lower. Then, if you have tight shoulders like me, doing it with your arms stretched overhead makes it *really* interesting.

-a gymnasts' stretch that I've not encountered often in yoga classes: kneel on your elbows & knees. Support your weight on your elbows and spread your knees sideways, keeping your legs bent. (Imagine from above you look like a frog). Go to a comfortable stretch point and stay there a while. (Try to keep your back straight and not let your lower back sag) Then tense your inner thighs as hard as you can, as if you were trying to pull your knees back together or push them down into the floor, but without actually letting them move. Then on an exhale, relax suddenly, and you may find you can go a bit further. Repeat a few times. A soft surface helps _ I sometimes practice this one in bed - on a hard floor it's very uncomfortable for the knees

Don't on any account let yourself be pressured into trying lotus or half lotus too soon, you can hurt yourself if you try to bend your knees & ankles into lotus when your hips aren't ready.

(So where did you learn that last one, Alan? The gymnast/frog thing? Well. I originally picked that one up about a quarter of a century ago, although I haven’t felt the need to try it myself on a regular basis until quite recently. [So I don’t actually know if it works yet. Check back in a few months. It feels like it ought to] I learned it in a university sports hall(*), where the gymnastics club – predominantly female – used to train on Monday nights. The climbing wall overlooked the sports hall. At eighteen-nineteen I presume the young ladies were pretty decrepit and superannuated as gymnasts, but somehow that didn’t prevent the climbing club – predominantly male – from turning up en masse on Mondays nights to, er, train seriously and at the same time pick up hints and tips on state of the art stretching exercises. Yes.)

(*) I believe this was also the place where – about as long ago then as then is now, although then it seemed like longer – Roger Bannister ran the first four minute mile. But I’m not sure and I can’t be bothered to google it just now.

backbending breakthrough

19th April 2007 permanent link

I’m a slow learner, Part Two. (Part One here)

More backbending wisdom: at the yoga conference in Köln I went to a backbending class with Iyengar yoga teacher Rita Keller. She’s really good. Iyengar yoga is a style I don’t practice and I haven’t found the few classes of it that I’ve tried congenial. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t good for a lot of other people or that Iyengar teachers don’t know a whole lot of useful things. Especially about how to to bend backwards safely. I’ve even seen normally really hardcore ashtanga yoga purists(<ancient link from some long-lost yoga message board long ago>) recommending learning safe backbending from Iyengar teachers.

The key to safe backbending: lengthening the spine, especially the otherwise vulnerable lumbar spine. There are two things you have to do to achieve this.

1. Pull the navel inwards & upwards. You don’t necessarily have to suck your belly in hollow – some ashtangis do practice & teach this way – but there has to be tension & intention in that direction. The navel is trying to be closer to the sternum than to the pubis.
2. At the same time, tuck the coccyx and the perineum down and slightly forward. Or, as Rita Keller puts it in lovely German, pull the “Sitzfleisch” down.

Quite apart from whatever esoteric effects these things may have one one’s prana, nadis and chakras, they lengthen and stabilise the lumbar spine in a whole range of important physical ways:

• the tight abdominal muscles act as a guy rope connecting the front and sides of the ribcage to the front and sides of the pelvis.
• they generate hydraulic pressure in the abdominal cavity (this I have known since I read it three year’s ago in David Coulter’s Anatomy of Hatha Yoga)
• they bundle the abdominal organs firmly against the spine, so they don’t cause strain by swinging about when you move (this I read a couple of weeks ago in Donna Farhi’s Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit)
• they lengthen the spine itself, so that there is more space for the vertebrae to bend back without pinching the disks
• when you go into a backbend, if the lumbar spine is stiff and stable then other places - the hip joint, the thoracic spine and the shoulders – have to produce some of the movement and the strain is spread evenly. Otherwise the tendency, especially for people like me with tight upper backs and shoulders, is that nothing else moves and the unsupported lumbar spine folds backwards and gets crushed.

Rita had us spend quite a lot of time at the start of the class practicing forwards and sideway bends with the abdomen held correctly. Why? I assume to get us used to moving with the torso as a single stable unit and the lumbar spine supported all the time, never letting excessive lordosis (arching) or instability creep in. When we did get into some standard backbends, with some important additional advice about generating tension the whole time with the legs rather than just pushing into position then passively staying there, I was both deeper into the positions than I normally get and more comfortable.

The relevant bit here with regard to my learning speed: every ashtanga teacher in the world tries to teach this slight-pelvic-tuck-and-abdominal-tension business to every beginner from Day One, under the title of mula bandha and uddiyana bandha. So people have been trying to get me to grasp it for ten years now. I’ve had a theoretical understanding of how the mechanics of it work at least since I read David Coulter’s anatomy book three years ago. And yet it took having it explained to me in this particular way in this class, for me to really grasp how to apply it effectively going backwards.

Maybe Rita Keller just happens to be the teacher who can explain this stuff in a way that I personally can grasp. Maybe my backbending practice has just now reached the point where I can usefully apply this information and I couldn’t before. Or maybe I’m just a slow learner when it comes to this sort of thing. Which would be fine. Yoga isn’t a race.

That Disclaimer Again: you may wish to consider whether or not taking advice about how to do difficult yoga asanas from random strangers on the internet would be a wise course of action.

maybe i’m just slow

19th April 2007 permanent link

Maybe I’m just slow, but these days in yoga classes I find myself again and again being told things again that other people told me years before, but now suddenly they make sense and I can see how they could work for me in my practice, where before I couldn’t.

Maybe I’m just slow at this kind of stuff. Maybe these people are are explaining certain things in a particular way that makes sense for me, whereas those other teachers before explained them in other ways that made sense to themselves and to other students but not to me. Maybe I was set for a long time in pursuing my practice in a particular way, and not able/ready to integrate other perspectives and new information – and maybe that was the right thing for me to to to build a base of solid understanding in my body and mind. Maybe after ten years of practice and study I now have some basis and context to understand things that were just random bits of information before.

It would be easy to get frustrated here and think oh, if only I’d understood this when so-and-so told me it eight years ago, then I’d be so much further on now. So what? There is no “further on” in yoga practice. Yoga practice is about being where you are and focusing on what you are doing now, not on what you may or may not be able to do in the future. Being able to perform cool-looking physical stunts is [great fun, but …] a side effect and basically irrelevant.

A couple of examples:

I have very tight shoulders, from fifteen years of rock climbing and more years than that of working sitting hunched over desks. I can barely lift my arms straight up over my head – which is a major disadvantage in things like handstands and backbends. Jenny Sauer-Klein was talking about how useful it is to have an extra margin of movement in the shoulders in handstand, and not to be right at the limit of your flexibility just getting your arms straight overhead. But Jenny, I said, I am right at my limit just getting my arms straight up overhead. She showed my a very simple little half downward dog stretch leaning against the wall, which she promised should do the trick fairly quickly. We’ll see. But I distinctly remember that a yoga teacher I went to for a short time when I first arrived in Munich tried to teach me the same thing years ago, and I tried it for a little while but it didn’t seem to do much and I didn’t stick with it.

Maybe now I’m more motivated. Certainly now I know a lot more about how to use my hips and abdominal muscles to protect my lower back in this stretch, so that I can be sure I am working my shoulders & upper back and and not just sagging harmfully into my lumbar spine.

(The other example got too long, so it’s coming later as a separate posting)

oh dear

16th April 2007 permanent link

In Dona Holleman’s class: “who here can do full lotus postion?”. A lot of hands go up. “And who can do headstand?”. More lots of hands. “Ok – who can do full lotus and headstand, but can’t get into full lotus in headstand?”

Oh shit. Suddenly my hand is looking awfully lonely up there.

“OK, you - up. Up!”. Dona has a very no-bullshit teaching style. Up into headstand I go, in front of fifty strangers, and she shows me how to take take the first leg into half lotus, then rotate the thigh back as far as I can so that the other leg has somewhere to go. I don’t get it this time but, as Jason Nemmer says: if the mind knows something is possible, the body will catch up sooner or later.

The smoothness of my lift into headstand did, however, impress at least one yoga chick who told me so over lunch. All suffering brings its rewards.

yogablogging

15th April 2007 permanent link

Wot, no yoga conference liveblogging? Nope. I did bring my laptop and I thought I might, but it’s just not realistic. When you’re doing seven to nine hours of yoga classes a day – mostly pretty physical, too, the ones I tend to choose – you’re not doing much else except getting as much sleep as you can, and walking the culinary tightrope between the scylla of needing energy and the charybdis of needing an empty stomach in yoga classes.

Typically after the last class you’re fairly wiped out. It’s back to the hotel for a shower and a clean shirt, then out for something to eat(*): enough for energy for the next day, because you won’t be eating much during the day, but not so much that you still feel full in the morning. By then it's well past nine o’clock and bedtime, because …

In the morning, you need to be up early to get a small breakfast in. Some don’t, but I feel I need it so I do, and then I just hope that the first class doesn’t involve too much by way of upside down or twisting. Shortly after breakfast comes the first of four or five classes for the day. Repeat.

I did take some notes, and I might post some of them over the next few days. I always learn enough at these things to last me through well over a year of trying to work out how they might fit into my own practice at home. I’m still absorbing lessons from my short visit to Ilya Zhuravlev in Moscow last year – sign of a good teacher.

(*) In Köln, I recommend the Govindam (Indian vegetarian) restaurant on Roonstrasse and Habibi’s Falafel on Zülpicherstrasse. There's also an Osho meditation centre that has a decent cafe that’s popular with yoga chicks.

yoga babes

14th April 2007 permanent link

Michael Blowhard is interested in women in yoga (preponderance thereof), yoga clothing and the semiotics of women dressing up. This one’s for you, Michael.

Something I noticed this evening, not for the first time: yoga chicks. Well duh. As I mentioned a little while go in a comment chez Russell, there ain’t a straight guy who does yoga who hasn’t noticed and been motivated by them to some degree at some stage. But today in particular: what they wear.

Yoga guys tend to have a dress theme of loose, lived-in cotton earth tones, plus matte black cotton lycra in actual classes – sorry Michael, it’s still the only viable answer. As my roommate in India put it: “yoga guys mostly dress ok, in an ‘I'm a traveling guy and I don't have many clothes’ sorta way”. I assume she was being kind. Yoga chicks – similar. Somewhat more colourful and elegant variations on the same basic theme.

It all changes when the sun goes down.

The guys: much the same. Clean shirts, hopefully. The girls: at least half of them suddenly resplendent in evening dresses, heels and full makeup. This struck me today in the foyer waiting for the German Yoga Conference post-classes concert in Köln, and I assume a high proportion of the thus-resplendent ladies were the home team with access to their full wardrobes. But I can state from personal observation that if they were living out of backpacks somewhere in the depths of rural India, that wouldn’t stop them either. How do they do it?

yoga teaching (again)

8th April 2007 permanent link

A couple of smart people whose opinions I respect: Michael Smith and my friend Jeff by email (UPDATE: and Lianne at yogalila) have drawn my attention to an article from the New York Times about young yoga teachers.

I say, hmm …

There are far too many people attempting to teach yoga these days with nowhere near enough experience to actually have anything to teach, well meaning and dedicated though many of them no doubt are. They should stop and get a few years practice in, then think about it.

Age is a red herring. I have no problem at all with the age of yoga teachers as such. Experience and commitment are the issue. Arjuna of ashtanga.info (and several other information-packed but design-challenged yoga websites, most of them in German) is much younger than me, but I have the highest respect for his experience, knowledge and dedication – and not just because he is super fit and can do amazing advanced asanas.

But somebody who, like one of the “teachers” mentioned in the NYT article, has ten months practice experience and then does a two month teacher training, knows nothing and should not be attempting to teach before they have actually learned something.

I have been practicing yoga for about ten years. Admittedly somewhat sporadically for some of that time, and somebody more dedicated and willing to put the hours in could have reached a similar level of physical practice in half the time or less. But. I’ve been though a lot of challenges and changes in that decade, and my yoga practice has been a thread of continuity and sanity through all of them. I've been content and inwardly at peace with myself for the first time ever in my life, largely due to the yoga. Why on earth would I consider trusting my valuable practice time to somebody who hasn’t themself been through something at least vaguely similar?

(Actually, I hardly ever go to classes these days anyway. I try to make it to my ashtanga teacher once a week when she’s not in India, just to make sure that I don’t stray too far from the straight and narrow in my own practice the rest of the time. A couple of times a year I go to workshops for inspiration and to pick up new ideas, the lessons from which I then spend the rest of the year slowly absorbing on my own mat at home. This is the next one. Encouraging students to have their own independent practice and not always be dependent on classes should be an important goal for every yoga teacher.)

I’ve written about this before, and now I find I don’t have very much more to say about it. Beware of well-meaning but underexperienced yoga teachers. A two hundred hour “certification” means very little - that’s four or five weeks full time work, folks. How much can you learn in four or five weeks? You need a teacher who shows clear signs of their yoga practice having been the central focus of their life for a substantial period of time.

heavy yoga

7th March 2007 permanent link

How to resume blogging after a long pause? Make a big song-and-dance about it, or just quietly pick up again about where you left off? Just quietly pick up, I think.

So.

Due to circumstances beyond my control – my wife’s birthday – I spent last weekend in a very nice spa hotel in the Bavarian countryside.

This hotel had, among other things, quite a well-equipped gym. And, for reasons to do with some stuff I’ve been reading lately, I thought it would be interesting to see if I can deadlift my own weight these days. I can’t quite, as it turns out. (But nearly. And I think it must be over twenty years since I last tried that particular lift)

Here’s something I noticed afterwards. There’s a moment when you start to pull and you think, oh shit, this is actually hard, the bar isn’t just going to come off the ground on its own. There’s a moment when you think ah, nearly there, I just need to straighten my back a bit. The bar presumably must have moved upwards during the bit in between where there’s no time, no world, no consciousness. Just like it sometimes is in yoga, if you’re doing it properly.

The gap between “outward” western activities like lifting weights, and “inward” eastern activities like yoga asana practice, is nowhere near as big as many people involved in the latter like to think. (See also this rather good article about meditation by a bodybuilder)

just breathe

19th November 2006 permanent link

Apart from the demise of my laptop in March, another reason for the dormant state of alanlittle.org lately is that I have been very busy and having a great time doing The Best Job I Ever Had.

At the start of the year I accepted an offer of an permanent job as technical product manager of the system I was previously working on as a consultant. It worked out well for a while – I had a really good team, interesting projects, and times were good. In the latest company reorganisation, however, my job – whilst retaining its title at least for the time being – looks like being stripped of much of its responsibility and interest.

The situation is nowhere near as bad of the demise of the previous Best Job I Ever Had, ten years ago, when the company I was working for was taken over shortly after the breakup of my first marriage. The beginning of my yoga practice was one of the main things I grabbed onto to keep my head above water through that particular shipwreck. This time round I have stable and happy home life, and still plenty of possibilities at work. Nevertheless, even a minor setback like this still has some important lessons to teach me about what matters in yoga.

While I was having a good time at work I was also enjoying my yoga practice immensely. Hey, I went to Russia and learned some cool new asana tricks. Hey, I more or less spontaneously learned to meditate on my chakras in order to see lights and induce feelings of bliss. This turns out to be both easy and fun, though probably without great cosmic significance. But so what? It’s only when times get a bit harder that you get to find out if yoga really helps.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to treat my setback at work as a chance to contemplate things like The Transient And Illusory Nature Of Material Things and Attachment As The Root Of Suffering – the bits of yoga that actually matter. And today I did a fairly intensive backbending practice – perhaps not the best possible idea in the circumstances. Backbending has a tendency to be emotional-turmoil-inducing at the best of times, let alone at the end of a weekend spent brooding on the Cruelty Of Fate. Even today, though, the peace that comes from just watching the breath going in, watching the breath going out, was there eventually. Even if it was only for the last four or five breaths of a two hour practice, that’s enough.

alan endorses …

24th September 2006 permanent link

[Seven weeks since I last published anything? How did that happen? Blogging without a laptop is proving very difficult indeed, I just don’t have the time at home. And I was away for three weeks – on holiday in the Italian Alps, visiting family & friends in Moscow, and attending various yoga events at which I learned vast amounts. Including …]

I’m on record as being sceptical of fashionable designer yoga. That includes anything to do with chic and glitzy yoga centres. The Ashtanga Yoga Centre in Moscow, as you can plainly see, isn’t one.

I thoroughly enjoyed Ilya Zhuravlev’s class there a couple of weeks ago.

Recommended for anybody who happens to be in town. Not for non-Russian-speaking beginners; but if you already have a practice and know the sanskrit names of asanas, and can work out the Russian for left and right, hand and foot (this takes at most half an hour to master), then you’ll be fine.

And if you do get lost, well, having an excuse to look at the beautiful Russian yoginis either side of you every now and again does no harm at all.

Ilya is the editor of yogamagazine.ru (English-language version coming soon, he says, maybe), who published a translation of parts of my Mysore Diary in their issue dedicated to Pattabhi Jois. And having met him and some of his friends, and seen just how dedicated and serious they are in their mission to bring authentic and serious yoga information to their country, it’s all the more an honour and a pleasure to have spent time in their company, both in writing and now in person. I’ll be back.

None

13th September 2006 permanent link

Einen Tod muß man in Marichyasana D sterben.
Bettina Anner

Is difficult to translate. Something like …

You have to die somehow in marichyasana D.

… were my yoga teacher’s kind and compassionate words of wisdom when I ventured to suggest that perhaps her adjustment of my Marichysana D today might conceivably be bringing my forward knee a little far from the floor.

but what is it for?

31st July 2006 permanent link

So what is advanced yoga asana practice for anyway? Possibly quite a few different things, which I’ll try to address one by one starting with this one:

for demonstrations?

A saying I‘ve seen attributed to various senior Indian ashtanga yoga teachers: “Primary series: very important. Intermediate series: fairly important. Advanced series: for demonstrations”

I also read somewhere, I think in Elizabeth Kadetsky’s book, that BKS Iyengar had that film made in 1938 as a marketing exercise when he was already planning to leave Mysore and set up his own yoga school in Pune.

In other words, demonstrating fancy-looking advanced asanas in public is at least partly grandstanding; but it’s supposed to be grandstanding in a good cause.

That seems to be precisely one of the concerns that the critics of the Ana Forrest demo have: advanced asana demonstrations will attract people, but they will be the wrong sort of people. They are mistaken. It doesn’t matter why people decide to try yoga. The vast majority won’t stick with it in any case, and the minority that stay, stay because they have discovered what it’s really about. I started going to yoga classes to keep fit, learn to do cool-looking things, and hang out with beautiful women – and I’m not the wrong sort of person.

Part One of a sporadic series. Part Two. Part Three. Part Four.

but is it yoga?

31st July 2006 permanent link

Yoga Journal has some footage of an advanced yoga asana demo by Ana Forrest at a recent conference, complete with a surprisingly biting comment thread about whether what Ana is doing is legitimate yoga or just ego and circus tricks. The people on the ego and circus tricks side should know better – yoga is about what’s going on in someone’s mind, the outward appearance of what they are doing has little or nothing to do with it: “spirituality is not determined by the practice, but … by the focus or intent of the practitioner” (David Swenson). Nevertheless it did make me think about what advanced asana practice is for anyway? Thoughts on that to follow; but first, some observation on this Ana Forrest comment thread and related things.

The comments themselves quickly degenerated, as these things do, into “that isn't proper yoga”. “Oh yes it is”. “Isn’t!”. “Is So!”

I, as will become apparent if it isn’t already, am uncompromisingly in the Is So! camp. The Isn’t! point of view isn’t entirely without merit either, though. There’s a well known and very vigorous expression of it in an article from a few years ago by vipassana meditation guru S.N. Goenka:

Patanjali has defined asana just by one phrase i.e. the posture in which one can sit for a long time, steadily and with ease. Only this very statement of Patanjali about asana has been elaborated up to 84 types of tiresome postures and all of them are now preached in his name. Poor Patanjali has been reduced to the status of circus trainer and he, who preaches to become aware of the inhalation and exhalation of natural breath, the intermittent stage between the two its elongation and its contraction, has been wrongly associated with the attempted and rigorous breathing exercise of pranayama. Breathing exercise too is not bad. It has got its own advantages but the same should not be ascribed to the name of Patanjali. Likewise different yogic postures too have got very good healthy impact over our body, but the same should also not be said as prescribed by Patanjali in his famous treatise. A sage who bestowed our country with a highly spiritual knowledge of yoga should in no way be allowed to be depicted as a kindergarten P.T. teacher who teaches asana or pranayama.

Something that is entirely without merit, though, is this comment by one of the Isn’t! school of thought regarding Ana Forrest:

Ana Forrest has only showcased her own body and not yogasanas. Yoga demos should be given to show the dynamism and purpose of yogasanas. She has, however, used asanas as a background to show her own contortions. None of the poses she struck were classical in nature and therefore have no names, purpose, or need.

Utter crap. If this person is so well educated about yoga asanas are “classical in nature”, then s/he knows very well that the Gheranda Samhita says there are eighty four thousand yoga asanas, although it only bother to describe a few dozen of them.

As to ones that are well documented common knowledge in our day: BKS Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, the best known modern yoga textbook in the world, describes two hundred. There are about a couple of hundred in the ashtanga vinyasa primary, intermediate and advanced series, overlapping largely but not completely with the ones in LoY. New York yoga teacher Dharma Mittra has documented over nine hundred. Yoga Dancer has online descriptions and photos of over four hundred and fifty.

(Actually, there are probably only a couple of dozen fundamental asanas, and all the crazy-looking advanced stuff consists of variations or combinations of these)

So, anything in Ana’s demo not in one or more of these well known standard compendiums? Nope. I found the comment so obviously egregiously wrong that I went back and looked through the first two clips again. All standard stuff, or obvious variations thereon:

• I.
• viparita chakrasana: one legged variation (= a gymnastics back walkover)
• virabadrasana 1
• eka pada galavasana
• adho mukhavrikshsana (handstand): variations
• ashta vakrasana
• eka pada sirsasana
• chakorasana: easy variation (leg over shoulder)
• supta trivikramasana
• tittibasana
• urdhva kukutasana
• tittibhasana again
• urdhva prasararita ekapdasana
• bhuja dandasana
• II.
• chakorasana
• bhairavasana (vinyasa)
• kashayapasana: supine variation; normally done prone
• hanumanasana
• samakonasana
• yogi dandasana: parivritta, dwi pada variations

… there were only three or four of these where I even had to pause to look up the sanskrit names.

And in the highly unlikely event Ana Forrest had managed to come up with positions of the human body that weren’t among the eighty four thousand alluded to in the Gheranda Samhita, instead of this collection of (slight variations on, in some cases) perfectly standard, well documented asanas – so what? Why would something not “classical” therefore have “no purpose or need”?

Until I find time to come up with thoughts about what advanced asanas practice is for anyway, you can see other videos of advanced asana practice here (more Ana Forrest), and, controversially but nevertheless easily the most impressive asana demo I’ve ever seen, B.K.S Iyengar filmed in 1938: Part 1, Part 2. Yoga Peeps has an interview with Ana. And if you want to study pictures of what nearly all those things I listed in Sanskrit look like, Yoga Dancer should have them, and ashtangayoga.info has the ones that are in the ashtanga advanced series.

link blogging

10th July 2006 permanent link

For Buddhists, the attainment of samadhi at its various depths is more a skill than a supernatural grace. Like piano playing or golf, it is something that can be learned reasonably well by most people with sufficient motivation and regular practice.

I don’t usually do pure link blogging – especially not when I'm hardly blogging at all anyway – but any remaining readers I may have could do a lot worse than go and read this wonderfully clear and concise article by Shinzen Young explaining basic concepts of buddhist meditation, with passing references also to Christian contemplative traditions and yoga.

Found via the 216 other people who had already tagged it under “yoga” on del.icio.us

asteya

1st June 2006 permanent link

Big news in the small pond of the Ashtanga Yoga web at the moment is that somebody has posted extracts of a film made in 1938 of famous yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar and his teacher Sri T. Krishnamacharya on youtube.

This film is a fascinating historical yoga document showing two of the last century’s greatest yoga masters in their prime. It’s well worth any serious yoga student’s time. Its quite well known and widely available from Iyengar Yoga centres all over the world. And, I suppose, if these clips make more people aware of it so that they go out and buy and watch the whole thing, that will be good. I do find myself wondering, though, whether I’m the only person who’s concerned about the asteya aspect.

Asteya is one of the yamas. Yamas, often translated as “observances”, are the first of the eight “limbs” of classical yoga as described in the Yoga Sutras. They concern basic precepts for how a yogi should live a morally acceptable life. Asteya is yama number three, and is usually translated into English as “non-stealing”. I take that to imply a broad interpretation of “not stealing”, possibly closely related to the Buddhist concept of Right Livelihood. So I take it to cover things like making an honest attempt to ensure my clients and employers get value for money. And not posting other peoples’ copyright material on the internet.

The guy who posted the clips is of the opinion that “the film is so old that any claim to copyright has expired”. I doubt if he knows what he’s talking about. I admit my legally-purchased copy of the video doesn’t carry any kind of copyright statement, and I Am Not A Copyright Lawyer – but from what I’ve read I understand that copyright at least for written materials is a number of years after the death of the author. I don’t know if that’s the same for film or if BKS Iyengar would count as the “author”, but if he does, he isn’t even slightly dead. Even if the content itself isn’t copyright, I’m pretty sure the particular physical manifestation of it in the form of the VHS videos sold by various Iyengar Yoga Institutes worldwide would be – so unless the guy on youtube either has the permission of the video’s publisher, or (unlikely) is using the original film reels with their currrent owner’s permission, I would be quite surprised if he’s as clean as he thinks he is.

It’s not like the video is difficult to get hold of once you know it exists. American (NTSC) and European (PAL) versions are available at the Iyengar Yoga Institutes in San Francisco and Maida Vale, London. Five of the top ten links for a google search on “1938 Iyengar video” are online shops where you can buy it in the States, England and Australia (San Francisco and Maida Vale are links nos. 2 & 4)

(How do I square my concern about this particular copyright grey area, with the fact that I am a regular user of legal-only-in-Russia music download service allofmp3.com? By not claiming to be completely consistent or in any way perfect, that’s how)

UPDATE: my comment on this issue on ashtanga news kicked off an interesting discussion on whether, and under what country’s law, footage filmed in India in 1938 may or may not still be copyright. I do remember reading something about by whom and it what circumstances this film was made; I think it was in Elizabeth Kadetsky’s First There Is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance, but as I don't have the book I can’t check.

the peacock’s tale

12th March 2006 permanent link

Bettina Anner demonstrates pincha mayurasana.

Pincha Mayurasana, the “feather of the peacock” position, is an elegant looking and quite difficult yoga posture in which you are balancing on your forearms instead of just on your hands. It’s a bit ahead of where I’m “supposed” to be in the ashtanga intermediate series but, like a lot of ashtangis, I do play around from time to time with asanas that are a bit more advanced than what I “should” be doing. Right now I have decided to do more than dabble with pincha mayurasana, because it requires a lot of shoulder mobility. One of my biggest physical challenges in yoga is that I have very tight shoulders from rock climbing and years of working hunched over desks (or, as I am now, sitting in half lotus on the floor hunched over my laptop). Pincha mayurasana should help.

I have always found it a daunting posture. Learning any upside down balancing posture almost inevitably involves a certain amount of falling over, and the further your head is from the floor the scarier that is. I learned to tuck my head and roll out of headstand years ago, but I always assumed it would be a lot more difficult and scary to do it from a position where my head wasn’t already on the floor. Not so, as it turns out, but for a long time I was put off by remembering my mate L learning pincha mayurasana in Mysore. (I will not name L in full here, on the offchance that he might not like his yoga students reading about his former foibles and failings). Every morning for what seemed like weeks, L would kick and flail his feet up into pincha mayurasana only to crash down, still kicking and flailing, onto the mat of the woman opposite, usually landing round about where her head was. As the days went by the poor woman started to look more and more nervous (quite understandably) as the moment for L’s attempt at pincha mayurasana drew near.

However, I have discovered that it actually isn't all that hard after all. Here’s how you learn pincha mayurasana in two easy steps:

1. Mess about with it sporadically for a long time, going up with your feet against a wall so you can’t fall over
2. Spend half an hour one afternoon practicing kicking up, tucking your head and doing a forward roll out of the position. This turns out not to hurt at all on the nice thick new yoga mat my wife got me for Christmas.
3. Now that you’re not afraid any more, get it in a week.

Step (1) is unnecessary.

I realise now that this is another thing I could have learnt years ago if only I’d been paying attention. At a workshop I went to once – admittedly in a session where I was taking photographs and not doing the class – the teacher had everybody practice the tuck and roll thing. The main thing that struck me at the time was that two of the students – my teacher and my wife’s teacher – were persistently doing it wrong. They were both so happy and comfortable in the position they looked like they couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to fall over from it; when they finally were persuaded to come down they had to be told off for elegantly arching over into backbends and placing their feet lightly on the floor instead of falling.

(Does this count as A Photo A Week? We’ll see)

That Disclaimer Again: taking advice about how to do difficult yoga asanas from random strangers on the internet may not be the wisest thing you could possibly do.

yegge on yoga

10th March 2006 permanent link

[people] prefer their current, very real pain to some imagined possibility of a different kind of pain.

Steve Yegge may not have realised that he was coming up with a piece of universal and profound human wisdom in an essay about (the programming languages) Scheme and Java. Or perhaps I underestimate him.

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.

Nobel prizewinning economist Amartya Sen (whose book The Argumentative Indian is high on my reading list) may well not have had yoga in mind either when he quoted John Donne in a review of a book about development economics, but it’s an admirable summary of what yoga is all about nevertheless.

priorities

28th February 2006 permanent link

Meandering towards a Tuesday Family Life Vignette.

if you want to get things done, you positively have to understand at any given point in time what is the most important thing to get done right now and if you're not doing it, you're not making progress

Says Joel Spolsky – a quote that has been at the top of my office todolist.txt file for some time now. Joel is talking about managing priorities on software projects. The point has some relevance to life in a broader context, although I think one would have to have an extraordinarily simple life for there to be one identifiable Most Important Thing one could be doing in most situations. As Paul Graham points out:

There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else.

I have also lately been reading Steve Pavlina’s blog. (I think I first came across Steve via a link from Joel.) Steve is also interested in things like priorities and time management, but would very much take the view that whether managing a software project is the right thing for you to be doing, is far more important than whether you are managing your software project effectively. He is right to quite a considerable degree.

Paul Graham, on the other hand, is wrong to a large degree when he rules out as Most Important Things

work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary. … there's a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes-- anything that might be called an errand.

As any Zen practitioner could tell Paul, for an enlightened person whatever you are doing at any given moment, if you are fully focused in that moment and living it without distractions, is the right and Most Important Thing you could be doing. Washing the dishes or sweeping the floor are perfectly good candidates. Sufficiently advanced washing up is indistinguishable from Lisp hacking.

See also the Bhagavad Gita, in which we learn (paraphrasing wildly) that there’s no point fretting about the situation you find yourself in, you are where you are and all you can sensibly do is do your best at the task you find yourself confronted with. This is taught in business schools too, as the concept of Sunk Costs. It also used to be called “Oriental Fatalism” by Victorians who believed it was the reason why Indians – whose ancestors were inventing philosophy and higher mathematics while the Victorians’ ancestors were still running around in the forest painting themselves blue – were a terminally degenerate civilisation doomed to be ruled forever by the descendants of blue-painted barbarians. Which turned out not to be the case.

One learns from yoga asana practice that the whole Bhagavad Gita thing makes complete sense. The point is just to be doing your practice, with whatever limitations you happen to have today, without seeing it as a means towards some distant end goal. This is a tricky one in ashtanga vinyasa yoga, and other outwardly physical-looking forms of yoga, where there are very impressive-looking advanced practices which, if we are honest, are a large part of the attraction to start sutdying these forms of yoga for a lot of people. Having cool-looking advanced practices for students to aspire to, though, is just one of yoga’s clever motivational tricks to encourage tapas – diligent, dedicated practice – and is fine provided you also manage to hang on to an attitude of aparigraha - non-grasping, non-attachment to results – and realise that developing the ability to perform cool-looking advanced tricks is an enjoyable side effect, not the object of the exercise. The object of the exercise being (ok, cessation of the fluctuations on the mind, inner peace, elightenment etc. etc.) to be doing your practice, focused on what you are doing and not worrying about other things. I never have any doubt when I’m doing my yoga practice, that what I’m doing is the right and best thing for me to be doing at that moment in time.

The point I am sneaking up on being: that by any conceivable standard [except Paul Graham’s, who is wrong] there can be no doubt you are doing the right thing, when the thing you are doing is escorting a nearly three year old boy on his first ever bike ride round the block, catching the last half hour of winter twilight as your Boys’ Night activity while mum is away at her yoga class.

treatment house

14th February 2006 permanent link

People email me from time to time to ask if I can recommend any Ayurvedic therapy centres in India. Until now I’ve always had to say no, but not any more.

This man, P. Vijayan of Kerala, generally known as “Vijay”, is an Ayurvedic masseur and one of a handful of true geniuses I have had the privilege of encountering in my life.

Vijay used to work in a beach resort hotel in Kovalam for the winter season when a lot of yoga students are usually there – Kovalam is a popular spot for western ashtanga teachers to teach their own winter classes before they go to Mysore. Outside of Kovalam in winter, though, it was difficult to track him down. I haven’t been in touch with him since I was last there in 2002.

A while ago a friend of mine whose family lives in the same part of Kerala was interested in getting in touch with him – I asked around on a couple of yoga message boards if anybody had his home address, but no joy. Then last week one of his students emailed to let me know he now has his own Ayurvedic therapy centre, Treatment House, in a village near the Kerala state capital Trivandrum. The address:

TREATMENTHOUSE
Center for Kerala Traditional Ayurveda & Vijay’s Foot Therapy

P. Vijayan
Athiralayam, Choozhattukotta
Malayam (p.o.), 695571 Trivandrum
Kerala, South India

Tel +91 471 2280774
www.treatmenthouse.com

I really can’t recommend Vijay highly enough. I should get on with my long-overdue story about how he finally fixed my right knee after surgery and physiotherapy failed.

Added to my yoga links page.

Alan on Ayurveda (Indian traditional medicine): I don’t believe Ayurveda’s explanation of how/why the body, and ayurvedic treatments, work. I don’t doubt for a moment that some of the treatements do work, and I certainly wouldn’t rule out the possibility that ayurveda has effective treatments for things western scientific medicine can’t deal with yet. It seems unlikely that highly intelligent and dedicated people would have got everything completely wrong for thousands of years. In particular I think the Ayurvedic approach of looking broadly at diet and health as whole has a lot to commend it compared to western medicine’s tendency to look for technological quick fixes for individual problems and ignore the bigger picture.

pain, no gain

25th January 2006 permanent link

If you think something’s supposed to hurt, you’re less likely to notice if you’re doing it wrong.

Words of [highly relevant to] yoga wisdom from Paul Graham.

See also ashtanga yoga teacher David Williams.

If it hurts, you are doing it wrong.

Compare and contrast quite possibly the worst advice ever put into writing by any senior yoga teacher:

People not used to sitting on the floor seldom have flexible knees. At the start they will feel excruciating pain around the knees. By perseverance and continued practice the pain will gradually subside and they can then stay in the pose comfortably for a long time.

BKS Iyengar, Light on Yoga, discussed here.

finding yoga teachers

20th January 2006 permanent link

Somebody wrote to me the other day:

Hello Alan,

I saw your web blog and thought this might be a question you could answer. I’ve been practicing yoga for about 15 years off and on. I practiced Hatha for a few years and now am on to Kundalini. It’s been brought to my attention by my fiancé who is Indian, that it’s difficult to find a good teacher in the West as it’s not so important in NA whether there is a lineage and whether that knowledge is passed down along with blessings to the next teacher. It seems we are not so serious here what with our oxymoronic power yoga centers and the like....

Originally I was attracted to Kundalini as it seemed to integrate a more balanced view of exercise that comprises spiritual teachings. But now I’m wondering if I’ve made the right choice. I want to get serious about yoga and find a practice that takes me through this life. I’d like to a) find a yoga that follows a lineage and is anchored in a tradition and b) be able to find that school in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Is it possible or necessary to find a teacher who has been taught by a guru and whose practice of yoga has been blessed. Any suggestions you might have would be received with great thanks.

Interesting question – the current western rash of well-intentioned but inexperienced and under-qualified yoga teachers, versus the Indian mindset about direct guru lineages (allegedly) dating back hundreds or thousands of years. My thoughts:

it’s certainly necessary to find a teacher who is dedicated and serious – I wouldn’t regard it as worth studying with anybody whose yoga practice wasn’t the central focus of their life. It’s also important to find somebody whose teaching style you personally are comfortable with and who teaches a style of yoga that suits you. That doesn’t mean it has to be all laughs all the time – nothing worthwhile is – but if you don’t basically like your teacher and mostly enjoy your practice, then you’re not going to be motivated to carry on for very long.

Direct guru lineage is a good positive indication of a teacher having the necessary qualities, but I don’t see it as a be and end all in itself. In ashtanga vinyasa yoga – the style I personally practice, – direct guru lineage is the norm; most (though not all) of the good teachers have studied directly with and are blessed/authorised by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois.

I’m very much a believer in the qualities of the teacher being more important than the content of the teaching. On yoga message boards I constantly come across people saying “well, I have a good teacher of Yoga Style X in my town and no teacher of Yoga Style Y, but I want to practice Yoga Style Y so which book/DVD should I buy?” (where Yoga Style Y tends to be the one I personally practice). I always say stick with the good teacher. Depressingly often that’s a minority opinion.

Even some of the “oxymoronic power yoga” teachers you seem unimpressed by are good and serious yoga teachers – admittedly maybe a lower proportion than in some other yoga traditions.

Something else to watch out for is that these days, yoga being so fashionable, there are far too many yoga teachers who are doubtless very dedicated, enthusiastic and well-meaning, but have started teaching far too soon and really don’t have enough experience and knowledge yet. I personally wouldn’t consider studying with anybody with less than about ten years regular and committed practice under their belt. “Under their belt” is a good phrase there: in many martial arts styles it’s possible for a dedicated student to get to black belt level in maybe five years or a bit less; but then it’s a big mark of pride among “real” black belts to have practiced so much that you’ve worn most of the black silk outer layer off of the belt and it’s well on the way to being white again. You should be able to detect signs of the same thing having happened in your yoga teacher – trickier to spot without the belt though. Yoga mats don’t last long enough to be a reliable visual indicator.

Lots of vague generalities there; I’m afraid I don’t know and can’t personally recommend anybody in Vancouver. I can say that in Canada any ashtanga teacher who has studied/trained with a guy called Darby in Montreal is likely to be good.

Steve Pavlina is of the opinion that “my writing time is better spent producing articles to be seen by thousands of people rather than individual emails to be seen by only one person.” Re-use, Steve, re-use. If something interests you enough to be worth writing a long/considered email response, maybe just write it and then decide to post it too.

dedication and determination

14th January 2006 permanent link

Many people say they lack the time [for daily yoga practice], yet they can eat, sleep, work, chat and sometimes even quarrel. What they really lack is dedication and determination, not time.
(well known Indian yoga teacher) Yogacharya Venkatesh of Mysore

sometimes details do matter

11th January 2006 permanent link

Sometimes, however, details do matter.

In one of the yoga DVDs I borrowed from my teacher, Pattabhi Jois is talking Sharath through a demonstration. They get to Marichyasana D. Most people find Marichyasana D the hardest thing in the ashtanga primary series. I struggled with it for years, and still don’t find it easy. So Guruji clearly thinks it is worth pointing out an important detail about how Sharath is doing it:

Your hips and feet one line you take, easy is coming. Your feet is coming touching here [points to knee] trying you – no. Not coming that asana. This method!

In other words (English isn't Pattabhi Jois’s first language, or even his second or third), the foot that is on the floor should be tucked back towards the buttock. Like S