Ashtanga Now
In a rather confusing ‘yoga’ world, with people asking “what is yoga, anyway?” I offer this profound advice: Just do it! The fact that yoga has come up for you as a consideration means, according to the sages, that you practised yoga in a previous lifetime. Whatever you think of that may be irrelevant, because if you are thinking of yoga, you are already hooked, and wondering how you can get some. It’s possible that you will try CDs, DVDs, books, and many classes, and not feel any ‘benefit’, though it is my belief that any minute you spend doing yoga is an investment in your ‘prana’ bank that grows exponentially.
I once read a book on how to mediate that suggested that smoking a cigarette could be a meditation, a kind of yoga practice. Yoga master, David Swenson, told us last week that as quickly as we fill our metaphorical buckets with prana, we may be allowing it to leak out through holes in the bottom. Cigarette smoking may be one of those unfortunate hole producing activities. But so is getting into a rage, or giving too much of yourself away, or drinking coca-cola.
My guess is that the reason we are drawn to practice yoga is to feel better. We want to be well, live among wellness, and feel that not too much really gets us down.
“Yoga is gardening – tilling soil, making fertile ground,” said David. “It’s what you plant in it that counts, and if you plant the seed of your ego in that rich garden, it could become gigantic!”
Many of us are thinking of yoga as enriching for our bodies, not our minds. But it is through ‘yoking’ mind and body that ‘yoga’ occurs. Mind is key in yoga – it has to be involved, but must keep respectfully silent. We can be doing one hundred yoga poses back to back, and if our minds are chattering, we are only exercising our skin and bones. On the other hand, if we are quieting our minds, and say, smoking a cigarette, then, technically, we are doing yoga, sort of.
I say sort of because yoga is a many-limbed wonder – eight, to be exact. Ashtanga means eight limbs, and in this philosophical yogic view, yoga practice encompasses all eight aspects: how we are in the world (non-violent, honest, to name a few) and how we honour ourselves: yamas and niyamas – these are the first two. The third aspect is asana, or postures, that develop our lines of energy; next, pranayama – how we breathe into those lines; fifth: withdrawing the senses so we can hear our inner sounds- pratyahara; sixth: dharana – concentration or focus; dhyana – meditation; and finally, samadhi – assimilation. These limbs are guidelines, of course, and provide a lifetime of study and practice.
But our guru of Ashtanga, K. Pattabhi Jois, said: “You do!” over and over. His mantra: “Practice, and all is coming” is what gets us to “the mat” or to “the tree”, wherever it is that we string together the eight limbs and leave our mind chatter at the door.
The eight-limbed approach is not the only way to practice yoga, but it is the way we have been directed to practice by the sage, Patanjali, who, thousands of years ago, wrote down the teachings that he had learned, that had been passed down from teacher to student before him, in the time-honoured tradition of “parampara”. The teachings are called the ‘yoga sutras’, and they give us insight into how to practice, and what we might expect as we do. These sutras remind me of the aboriginal ‘songlines’ – Sanskrit is a language of vibration, and the transmissions of the sutras were recorded in this sing song way. Committed to paper, we look to scholars to translate the messages into words, into many languages. The interpretations of the words are vastly numbered, and as we seek to intellectualize the information and process it, we are already breaking the rules – there’s that pesky mind chatter again!
Pattabhi Jois was fond of saying: “Yoga is 99% practice, 1% theory!”
Still, for me, a lover of philosophy and religious study, each translation of the sutras speaks to me in the same universal language. The sutras tell me that God is within, that we teach by example, that discipline, courage, faith, joy and love are all components of good living, and that when we believe our hearts rule, we are talking about deep heartfelt knowing and not the often flighty emotional goulash.
This teacher (me!) says – pause. Ask yourself: Is this a good time to practice yoga? If you have at least five minutes, then it is a good time. Begin by sitting, standing, lying down, swimming, painting, gardening. Realize you are practising yoga by feeling your mind and body as one, by being attuned to your breath, by being present in the here and now.
Taking time to tune body and mind in synchronicity, you will want to explore the energy that comes, and will find yourself stretching and breathing more fully, freeing restrictions that you inevitably discover as you move. A prescribed set of postures can give us a starting point, so we begin to feel left side and right side, moving up and moving down, moving out, moving in. As we bend, stretch, and fold, the blood moves in our veins with more enthusiasm, the oxygenated cells enliven the flow, the squeezing and restricting and releasing encourages rushing in and out of the body’s fluids, and we can feel power in us as we witness our inner river’s flow.
In this ‘flow’ style of yoga, the teacher is the conductor, giving the beat of the breath as a metronome, to which we feel our own music unfold.
Number one rule: just go to “the mat” and begin. Make it a daily occurrence for you to meet yourself in joyous embrace and celebration. It may be that you will go to ‘the mat’ as you are driving to work, or as you wait in a government line up, or as you are walking with your dog in the park.
Coming to the mat takes faith and discipline. We may get excited, and then we plateau: nothing is happening. We practice daily for weeks, and months, and everything is ‘the same’. You have opened the door, but are not walking through it.
I know well the difficulties of staying present with each breath, one by one, especially when I know what is coming, like in the Primary Series, which I do many times a week, month after month, year after year…the practice is the goal, not the outcome, and each breath we take, mindfully, fully present, is the practice. Breath by breath, we walk through the door, to nowhere, everywhere, here.
