our-yoga

If you practice Ashtanga, you will know that there are two major obstacles that we commonly have to overcome in order to have a wonderful practice. The first is getting out of bed (for tips on how to overcome the soft seductiveness of your bed on mornings when you just don't feel like getting up, see Angela Jamison's recent post). The second is what I call pre-practice doubt. This doubt often arises from certain physical sensations that we may have, or certain emotions that we may be feeling just when we are rolling out the mat. Common examples include: "I'm feeling a little down/angsty today, and I have, like, a million things to do today... maybe I'll skip practice today", "There is this funny sensation in my lower back. I think doing Surya Namaskars today might just be the straw that breaks this camel's back. Better skip practice today..." You get the idea. There is something very funny about that moment just before we step on the mat: It seems that every possible doubt, every possible reason we could have for not doing the practice surfaces at that precise moment. Wonder why? The simple answer, I guess, is that we are mere mortals who are trying very, very hard everyday to do this crazy practice that seems almost superhuman at times.

But there's hope for us mortals. I just read this very refreshing post by Sarah Hatcher, in which she shares a wonderful solution to pre-practice doubt: Invite your teacher to join you! Sarah writes:

"I too have my own struggles with my practice, yet with dedicated, concentrated, and uninterrupted effort and with devotion, this tears through much of my doubts and struggles... To turn the shakti fire back on, I used chanting to get me focused which set me back on track.

Invite Guruji into the room before you do your practice. And once you have chanted, "Vande gurunam..." and you know he is there, invite other teachers who have inspired you into the room as well. This will create a safe environment where you know you are cared for and not alone. Then it is not just you practicing, it is with them and under their guidance."

Very nicely said. Sarah puts into words what I have been feeling a lot whenever I do the opening chant, but haven't quite been able to put into words myself. I have always felt keenly that doing the opening invocation is a way to set a powerful intention for the practice, to remind ourselves that the practice is not just physical exercise, that the practice is really a practice that connects us to something greater than our intellects and egos. Sarah's words above bring out another dimension to the role of the opening invocation; as she puts it, the opening invocation is literally an act of invocation in which we honor and invoke the presence of Guruji and all the teachers that have helped us embark on this wonderful path of practice, so that with every practice, we are surrounded and protected by their wonderful supportive energies. 

Speaking of the practice being spiritual and more than just physical exercise, I can't help thinking about the Encinitas-School-District-Jois-Yoga-parents-concerned-about-Hindu-indoctrination controversy. My apologies for the long referent here; I just can't seem to find a way to refer to the whole thing that isn't overly sensational or that does not prejudice one party against another (I thought about variously calling it "The Great Encinitas Yoga Debacle", "The Great Jois Yoga Debacle", or better yet, "EncinitasGate", but all this just sounded too sensational; remember, I'm not a journalist who's trying to sell a story...). 

In any case, the Confluence Countdown, our de facto provider of all breaking Ashtanga news, has done a really wonderful job of covering the entire controversy in a lot of detail, so I won't rehearse the latest developments here. I just have two things to say about this whole thing: 

(1) It appears that there is a lot of talking past each other on the part of all the parties concerned. The aggrieved parents charge that Jois Yoga/the school district is indoctrinating their children in Hinduism. Jois Yoga and, more recently, the Universal Society of Hinduism (which has also jumped into the fray) respond to these charges by saying things like, "But yoga is good for your health! It helps with obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, and all that bad stuff that sedentary modern living does to our bodies."

Now, do these people think the parents are stupid (or--to use a word I've seen somewhere--idiots)? I mean, I'm pretty sure that these parents know that the physical aspects of yoga, like many other physical activities, can help with various health conditions. These parents, as we know, are concerned with the issue of the spiritual/religious aspect of yoga. More specifically, they are concerned that Jois Yoga/the school district have overstepped the Church/state boundary, and are indoctrinating their kids in Hinduism. And yet as far as I can see, neither Jois Yoga nor the Universal Society of Hinduism have done or said anything to address this issue. Or is their silence on this issue an implicit admission of guilt? Are they basically sidestepping the issue by harping on the physical benefits of yoga? 

Well, I don't have any answers here. But I can certainly see why these parents are pissed. I would be too, if I keep asking a particular question, and keep getting answers to a different set of questions.Oh well, but what to do? In this funny land of America, it seems to be common practice for politicians and public figures to avoid answering questions by deliberately talking past each other. Maybe this is what they teach politicians and public figures in Political Survival 101... who knows? 

(2) We keep talking about the spiritual and religious aspects of yoga as if they are one and the same thing. But are the spiritual and religious aspects of yoga really one and the same thing? I consider my practice to be spiritual in nature (I do the opening and closing invocations, I refer to the postures in Sanskrit, I see the practice as (hopefully) bringing me to a place that is beyond my ego and intellect, etc., etc.), but I haven't become a Hindu (at least, I think I haven't) just because I see my practice in this spiritual way. 

In any case, I really do believe that one can participate in something in a spiritually engaging way without being a part of the religious tradition from which that thing arises. As an example, consider works in Classical or Baroque music. Many of the works of Bach, for example, were originally commissioned and composed to be played or sung during church functions, and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" contains clear references to God. But most people today, I take it, would have no problem with accepting that we can enjoy, perform, and be profoundly moved by these pieces of music without having any particular religious beliefs. And if being profoundly moved by a piece of music is not a spiritual experience, well, I don't know what is. 

In a similar manner, perhaps we can also see doing the Ashtanga practice as being akin to playing a piece of music (actually, PJ Heffernan once used precisely this analogy to explain the practice to a group of beginners at the beginning of led primary). The primary series (or any other series, for that matter) can be seen to be a song which is composed of individual "notes" (the individual postures). And the vinyasa count is like the musical notation which tells you how long to sustain each note. And just as musicians often feel the spiritually transformative effects of the music they are playing even if they themselves have no particular religious beliefs, in the same way, Ashtanga practitioners also feel the spiritually transformative effects of the practice that is linked together by the vinyasa count and which opens and closes with the opening and closing invocations, even if they themselves have no particular religious beliefs.

In this way, Ashtanga, like music, is spiritual without being religious. Now I'm probably being very immodest here, but I really can't help wondering: If the Jois Yoga Foundation had conducted an information/dialogue session with the parents before implementing their yoga program in the school district, and had explained why yoga is spiritual but not religious in the way I described above, would things have turned out differently? I really don't know... I like to think they would have, but I'm also not inclined to be optimistic about this, with so many people being as emotional and set in their own views as they often are today, and with the prevailing anti-intellectualist climate in this country today ("Who has time for your fancy scholarly distinction between the spiritual and the religious? Besides, how do we know the spiritual isn't just a "gateway drug" to the religious? You know, start the kids out with yoga or Hinduism Lite, and then slowly bring them into more and more hardcore Hindu stuff; by the end of the year, they'll all be performing pujas to that elephant god, like any good Hindu...").

Hmm... I really don't know how to end this post, so I guess I'll just end here. (Moral of the story: If you don't know how to end a post, simply stop writing. Right now.) As always, if you have anything to say, I'll love to hear your thoughts on this.              

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Since I haven't posted for a week (why have I been so unmotivated to blog lately?), I suppose I'll start by saying a couple of things about my practice here. My strained trapezius (see previous post) is recovering slowly but steadily. I had to cut out chakrasana for a couple of weeks; a few days ago, I "regained" this beautiful transition pose. After not being able to do the pose for a couple of weeks, the sensation of rolling through the pose smoothly without the least bit of pain or strain on the upper back feels simply heavenly. It feels like getting to know and feel the pose all over again. From reading Ashtanga blogs over the past couple of years, I know that there are lots of Ashtangis out there who really dislike chakrasana: Many people think that it is very flashy and "show-offy", but is ultimately a useless pose that doesn't serve much purpose except get you from a supine position to downdog in a flashy, "show-offy" kind of way...

Well, I'm not going to mount any kind of defense of chakrasana here. I really don't know enough about the ins and outs and origins of chakrasana to say anything much about it. But I'll just say this: If something feels good, and also has the added advantage of making you look "cool" or "glamorous" or whatnot, why not do it? As it stands, very few postures in the primary series are really cool-looking or glamorous anyway; so why not take what you can get? :-)

But back to my injury recovery. As I was saying, I've pretty much re-introduced everything, except for the fact that I am still modifying chaturanga: I basically bend my elbows to whatever extent possible to lower into the pose, and then bring my knees to the ground to rise up into a modified updog. It seems that it will take a little longer for my arms to be able to bear weight with my elbows fully bent. The interesting thing is that, weight-bearing postures with arms straight (Bhujapidasana, Kukkutasana, etc.) are not a problem at all. Oh well. It is what it is.

Enough of my practice for now. I understand that there are folks in the blogosphere who think that blogging in detail about practice is not cool, not enlightened, or not-whatever. But with us Ashtangis, the physical practice is the starting point of the yoga journey. If one doesn't talk about the practice at least some of the time, one would risk throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, wouldn't one?

But maybe it is not a good idea to bore you with extended talking about the practice. Well, let's talk about something else that we do everyday: The opening and closing chants in Ashtanga. Over the weekend, I had a little discussion with a friend about the relationship between my Buddhist practice and my Ashtanga Yoga practice. One thing that came up was the issue of whether doing the opening and closing chants conflicts with the spirit of the Buddhist practice, which is essentially a practice that does not endorse the worshiping of gods or particular figures. I explained that the purpose of the opening chant is not to worship Patanjali, but to acknowledge, honor and offer thanks to him for making it possible for us to practice this wonderful yoga, and that the purpose of the closing chant is for us to set a clear intention to use this practice to do good in the world once we get off the mat. I'm not writing this because I feel any particular need to justify my practices, but maybe some of you out there may also face this kind of inquiry from curious friends. And maybe my experience here may be useful to you here in this regard.

Earlier today, I also read this article on Elephant Journal about making sense of Ashtanga chants. The author, Rocco Marinelli, argues that doing the opening and closing chants is not just a matter of going through the motions and getting it over with; what you feel when you do the chants can make a big difference to your experience of the practice. He writes:

"The opening chant is a prayer of gratitude and cultivating these feelings leads to more positive emotions. It sets a foundation of mindfulness and compassion on which we practice. We pause to give thanks to our teachers and to reflect on the poison of conditioned existence. Complementing this is the closing chant when we should be cultivating loving kindness and compassion.

It’s one thing to read a translation and to understand the words, but to recite it in class and to feel its meaning can be more difficult. If we become self-conscious because of a fear of correct pronunciation, we can feel ill at ease, doubt may kick in, rendering the chant vacuous...

The words we chant have as much effect on our mind as asana does to our body. They stretch the brain like utthanasana (forward bend) stretches the hamstrings. In that sense, if we’re not feeling anything as we chant then we’re not practicing at our edge."

Marinelli then goes on to suggest a Memory Palace visualization technique that involves bringing up certain images while doing the chant; images that can help us to cultivate these feelings of gratitude and loving kindness. Personally, I find this technique to be rather cumbersome and unwieldy; the whole idea of having to visualize particular images with particular lines of the opening chant strikes me as being rather tedious and mentally exhausting! But maybe it'll work for you: Read the end of his article for details about how to use this technique.

But I definitely agree with Marinelli's general point that "[t]he words we chant have as much effect on our mind as asana does to our body." Although time-wise, the opening and closing chants take up a much shorter proportion of our practice than the performance of the asanas, they are no less important on this account: They remind us that we did not invent the practice, and that the practice is ultimately more than just physical exercise, that we have a responsibility to use the practice and its benefits in a way that bring happiness to all living beings rather than the opposite. Easier said than done, I must say, but I suppose the chants are there to remind us to keep trying :-)          

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Yesterday afternoon, I got together informally with a couple of friends who wanted me to teach them some Ashtanga yoga. We know one another from our local Buddhist group. This is not the first time we have gotten together to do yoga; we have gotten together a couple of times in the past, and I had taught them Suryas A and B and a couple of standing postures, so they are not complete strangers to the practice (for more details, see this post).

At the beginning of practice yesterday, I decided to try introducing a new element into our session: I suggested to my friends that we try chanting the opening invocation. The last couple of times we got together to practice, we had just gone straight into the Suryas without doing the opening chant.

My suggestion immediately encountered resistance from my friends: They felt that there is no reason for a Buddhist to be chanting something that originates from a different philosophical tradition. Which is true, in a very significant sense: From the viewpoint of traditional Indian philosophy, Yoga is regarded as one of the orthodox schools (because it accepts the authority of the Vedas in spiritual matters), while Buddhism (along with Jainism and Carvaka) is regarded as a heterodox school because it does not accept Vedic authority. I tried explaining to my friends that this is just honoring tradition, and that chanting this invocation does not mean that you are becoming a Hindu or anything. But they still desisted: "Why don't we just do the yoga?" one of my friends said. Sensing that I wasn't gaining any traction, I decided not to push the issue, and so we just went ahead with the practice without doing the opening chant. The rest of the practice went very well, despite this initial hiccup.

I'm quite sure that this is not the first time in the history of Ashtanga in this country that people have had hangups with doing the opening (or closing) chant, to put it mildly. I'm pretty sure that those of you out there who teach Ashtanga in gyms or public recreational facilities probably face the same kind of resistance to chanting from your students. Am I right? In my experience, students in yoga studios tend to be more receptive to chanting, but again, this might be a generalization, I'm not sure.

To be honest, when I first started doing yoga, I was also rather uncomfortable with chanting: I think it is no exaggeration to say that for most people in this country, chanting is the form of physical expression that is most closely associated with religious devotion: For the average person, to do a chant in honor of something or somebody is almost certainly an expression of devotion to that thing or person.

Over the years, I have come to find a way to reconcile my personal religious beliefs (I'm a Buddhist) with doing the Ashtanga opening and closing chants. Personally, I see the opening chant as an expression of gratitude to Patanjali: If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be practicing this yoga. This being the case, it is only natural to begin my practice with a chant honoring and saluting him. And it doesn't bother me that it is in Sanskrit. I guess it also helps that I personally find Sanskrit to be a beautiful language... in any case, can you imagine how cheesy it would be to do the opening invocation in English, with all those references to a thousand white heads and the poison of samsara?

But perhaps more importantly for me, I really feel that doing the opening invocation sends an important message: It reminds us that the practice isn't just physical exercise. It reminds us that the practice is ultimately a practice in connecting to something bigger (and hopefully better) than our individual intellects and egos. Because of this, I can't help feeling that to do the practice without the opening chant is to remove something very important from it: Something which reminds us that we are more than our physical bodies and minds.

But maybe this is just me. Do you feel the same way? If you are a teacher, do you also encounter the same resistance to doing the opening and closing chants among your students? How do you handle such situations? Please share.

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I have been reading with great interest Ellie's latest post about the Ashtanga Yoga Opening Mantra. As we know, the first line of this mantra is "vande gurūṇāṁ caraṇāravinde", which can literally be translated as "I pray to the lotus feet of the supreme guru."

I can imagine that this line might bring up some anxiety among some Ashtangis. After all, one of the first things that newcomers to yoga learn is that yoga is not a religion, that yoga practice is compatible with any religious affiliation (or none at all, for that matter). Seen in this light, the idea of praying to the lotus feet of some dude called the "supreme guru" may be seen to be inconsistent with the idea that yoga is not a religion.

But there is a way to resolve this seeming inconsistency. Ellie writes:

'“I pray to the lotus feet of the supreme guru” is not necessarily a command to pray to the feet of an individual that we think of as our guru, but is a metaphor for the practice itself. By thinking of the practice as the guru, we surrender ourselves to it and look to it for guidance. In this usage, surrender is not a quality of weakness; rather, it means fearlessness, trust, and confidence.'

Thus, to "pray to the lotus feet of the supreme guru" does not necessarily mean to submit to a person or personalized entity. Rather, what we are doing is surrendering and placing our trust in the life-transforming process that is the practice, with the confidence that the process will lead us to a place of greater self-awareness and realization.

All this also brings to mind the concept of Ishvara Pranidhana, one of the five niyamas of yoga (the other four being Saucha, Santosha, Tapas and Svadhyaya). Ishvara Pranidhana is commonly translated as "Surrender to God". Which tends to bring up the same theistic anxieties for many yogis as the idea of praying to the lotus feet of some dude one barely knows :-) At her Yoga Sutra lecture at her Richmond workshop back in April, Kino clarified this issue by stating that Ishvara Pranidhana does not have to entail surrendering to some personalized deity. What it does entail is that one must place a certain fearless trust and confidence in something greater than oneself (see this post for more details). Kino also emphasized that such an element of fearless surrender is necessary if one's practice is not to degenerate into an ego-building, advanced-asana-accumulating exercise.

This is interesting, because if we put everything that has been said above together, then it seems to me that the Ishvara or "God" in Ishvara Pranidhana can actually be the practice itself. In other words, to surrender to God could entail nothing more drastic than simply placing fearless trust and confidence in the practice itself, and following it where it brings your life. I think this is pretty cool. Do you?   

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