Groundwork

It’s the New Year. 2017 C.E., the Year of the Rooster, the Year of the Sun, the dawning of a new epoch in American politics… The coming of the New Year could already mean a lot of things to you. Often times, the weeks leading up to year’s end can be a heavy mix of reunions, celebrations, and deep periods of reflection. Aspects of your life—habits, patterns, relationship dynamics—that you may have been ignoring or glossing over for the better part of the year come into focus, and the realizations can be harsh. There’s something about “The New Year” that glimmers like a portal. Once we have passed through, we will surely emerge reborn, resolved to become “better” in this way or that. We will clean up the ugly messes we realized we were making back in December.

And, it is something like that. January really can be a time to reset. It’s still the middle of winter, but we’ve gotten used to the cold. The days are getting a little longer, but there’s still the feeling that R&R is being encouraged by the cosmic clock. January is kind of like a good setup for a restorative pose; using all the bolsters, blankets and straps you can get your hands on, moving slowly and with care. It’s a time to design the pattern that will frame and support your life in the coming year, and it’s important to do it thoughtfully. Unfold the blanket completely so you’re not folding hidden creases into your shape, and right away, adjust the bolster until it sits just right, rather than brushing it off until it’s driving you crazy. Choosing to approach your resolutions right away, gently, knowing that at first it may all be awkward and effortful, will set the stage for an easier entry, and with time the edges will soften. Satisfactory preparation will offend self-judgement and criticism in the long run.

A teacher of mine said in her class recently: your body isn’t your temple. If it were, you’d only ever be there for ceremonies and there wouldn’t be room for the wilder, messier, less-than-holy journeys and experiences of life. Your body is more like your house. In our bodies, we live. We make messes, we survey the damage, and we spend a few days (or weeks, or months, or years!!) cleaning those messes up. This month, start cleaning out the basement. Decide to be still with the discomfort that so often precedes a habitual way of dealing with things, and see what arises in that stillness. The seasonal rhythm of the Earth is on your side now. So slow down. Take time to reflect, restore, and make room for new patterns to take shape.

Savasana

Once upon a time, I went to a party. There were a lot of other yogis in attendance, and after a good amount of apple cider and vegan carrot cake, merriment was at a high point. Someone asked, “What’s the hardest pose?,” and the challenge was on: One by one, the yogis proceeded to demonstrate their definitive answers, showing off really hard stuff — visvamitrasana, vatayasana, and mukta hasta sirsanana. (Look, Ma! No hands!)

Biding my time, I waited until the shenanigans had peaked, and then made my move. Ceremoniously, I lay down, feet a little apart, arms a few inches from my sides with my palms upturned, chin gently regarding my chest, ears equidistant to each other. Within me, I beheld my breath, and let my muscles fall away from my bones. As a finale, I disappeared completely. Well, so to speak. Recognizing a slam-dunk, the enlightened company at once exclaimed, “Savasana! Of course! The hardest pose of them all!” I rest my case.

As I write this, I am in England with my family. Too soon to coin it “recently,” my father passed away on October 11th. Safe to say, he has reached his final rest.

Today I wandered out on the Downs and lay in the grass. I arranged myself as comfortably as I could, including all of the asymmetry in my body, my mind, and my heart. I scanned from head to toe, looking for something other than the natural lop-sidedness of things. I was searching for a sense of evenness, or sama — a Sanskrit word that essentially means “same,” or “equal.” Since everything is marked by impermanence, and moment-to-moment the world spins, what is it that remains the same?

Savasana offers us a glimpse of an unperturbed place — in Rumi’s words, “Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing” — where we may subtly perceive the deep mystery of our being. We realize the miracle of our existence — a state of grace, actually. Lying on the earth under the sky, nothing added, nothing taken away. There is no more practice, no one to practice. You have arrived. You are the practice.

Still lying in savasana, I opened my eyes. Just above, a swarm of late-fall fruit flies circled my head, vying with each other for my attention. I pursed my lips and blew a long, reluctant exhale toward them. My breath, becoming one with the wind, dispersed the flies. I had a vision of being dead, and coming back to life.

Savasana, or mrtasana (mrt meaning “death”), also known as “corpse pose,” ultimately presents us with a chance to rehearse for our last curtain call, only without the drama. I think of words by the poet Shi Te, “Not going, not coming, rooted, deep and still.” This equanimity is savasana.

So savasana has everything to do with preparing us for death, yet it’s equally a powerful prescription for life. The pose promotes relaxation for mind and body, helps to alleviate anxiety, depression, and stress, and cultivates peace and calm, or, at the very least, acceptance. While the pose can help reduce fatigue and insomnia, it has nothing to do with taking a nap or zoning out after an exhilarating asana practice. If you do fall asleep, no need to berate yourself, just try to have an early night. But so you don’t miss the whole show, resolve to roll your mat out again in the morning.

Savasana occurs in that gap between coming and going. Richard Freeman says this gap is where “observed content is released and dropped.” In Buddhist terms, it’s shunyata — the awareness that all things are intrinsically empty. It’s reached when one is not attending to any themes. The paradox is that savasana, for many, is anything but empty; instead it’s filled with a sense of what B.K.S. Iyengar described as “illuminated emancipation, freedom, unalloyed and untainted bliss.” There’s room for it all in savasana.

But what if you aren’t one of the lucky ones who just plop themselves down in savasana and feel instantly at home? Trust me, I know where you’re coming from: I witnessed the catastrophic events of 9/11 firsthand while standing in the WTC Plaza with my infant daughter in a stroller. I was shaken and stirred to my core. But I continued to get on my mat — continued to lean in and take a closer look. For an entire year post-9/11, I practiced savasana with my eyes open. Sometimes I had to just sit up. An unexamined life, it is said, is not worth living. Sometimes that examination takes place with gritted teeth and blurred vision. Rumi, again: “When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.”

Anyway, you begin to see why savasana might be the hardest pose, don’t you? I mean, who in their right mind is going to voluntarily lie down on the ground, belly-up, heart exposed, eyes closed, in a room full of strangers, and hang out with absolutely everything and nothing? The physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual challenge of savasana is immense. As a yoga teacher, watching my students in savasana is humbling. It’s an honor to witness the human condition — vulnerability and valor side-by-side.

Savasana is generally suitable for everyone, though one size doesn’t fit all. Practice according to time, place, and circumstance. Try to position your body so that it feels balanced, neutral. Let the earth hold your weight, and simply notice that you’re breathing. No need to reach for anything, or push anything aside. Let the tongue rest on the bottom of your mouth, as though it, too, were in savasana. Relinquish the desire to speak, to see, to hear. Let your hands serve the sky, and your feet serve the earth. Relinquish the energy of your arms and legs. (You can place a bolster on the tops of your thighs to help with this, or under your knees, if you experience any discomfort in your back.) If you’re pregnant, elevate your head and torso. If you’re sad, keep your eyes open and your gaze gentle. If you’re scared, make sure you’re covered with a blanket, or near a wall.

Whatever you do, remember to practice for all sentient beings. Don’t be afraid to let anything that’s holding you back from truly living, die. Realize that (in Rumi’s words) “ideas, language, even the phrase each other, doesn’t make any sense.”

The Power of Vulnerability

Boo! This October, we’re inquiring into what scares you? What makes you feel vulnerable?

Although we may not like the feeling of being exposed for having weaknesses, it is often the cracks of vulnerability that allow others to fall in love with us. Perhaps strengths and weaknesses, courage and vulnerability are all entwined in the very core of our humanity.

Lena Dunham says, “It’s interesting how we often can’t see the ways in which we are being strong – like, you can’t be aware of what you’re doing that’s tough and brave at the time that you’re doing it because if you knew that it was brave, then you’d be scared.”

To expose some raw flaws (and inspire you to do the same), we’ve asked our teachers to share some lessons from their least favorite poses.

Maggan Daileader has some awesome insights into how to approach your most difficult postures. “Gomukhasana and I have never been friends, but I hope to be one day. In researching the pose, I found that 85%+ of write-ups concentrate on stubborn shoulders. Since this is not my problem, I had to dig a bit further to figure out why my legs and hips won’t cooperate to my ego’s content.

“Short answer: I have trouble with a simultaneous adduction and external rotation of the legs; sitting on a block alleviates some of this difficulty.

“Long answer: What is the actual pose? In most all cases the pictures of this pose shows a person sitting on the floor with knees stacked and the ankles on either side of the opposite thigh with the toes pointing out to the sides or even forwards. However, in Light on Yoga, Iyengar demonstrates the pose by sitting on his bottom ankle thereby lifting his seat (much like what is accomplished by using a block) and pointing his toes toward the back. With respect to the arms, many pictures demonstrate a matching top leg and lifted top arm, but there are plenty of examples of having the opposite arm lifted from the leg that rests on top. In LoY, Iyengar demonstrates using the opposite arm on top from the leg that rests on top of the other. Finally, this pose has often been demonstrated to me with a forward bend, however in LoY the instruction is to remain upright. There are typically many ways to vary one pose in order to illuminate different elements of the pose. However, for me, gomukhasana was another example of where:

I was trying to “follow” what I had seen rather than researching why it was so difficult;
I didn’t ask whether what I “saw” was really the intended pose to begin with; and
I didn’t investigate if there variations of the pose that may have been more accessible.

“Gomukhasana now serves as a good reminder to myself for all three of these blind spots.”

Chrissy Carter says, “Believe it or not, the hardest pose for me is Virabhadrasana 2. It’s a relatively simple posture in comparison to so many others, but if there’s one thing that yoga has taught me it’s that just because something is simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. I suspect there’s a structural source to my difficulty in this pose — something skeletal in my hip joints which makes the combination of external rotation, flexion, and abduction challenging for my body. But there are functional obstacles as well, namely weak abductors and external rotators and tiiiiiiiiight inner thighs. Like any challenge, Virabhadrasana 2 has taught me a lot, and like any devoted practice, it has revealed more and more of my own personal truth. I now practice this pose in a way that gives me a chance to perceive the big picture. I don’t bent my front knee to 90 degrees; I try to focus more on pulling up than on how far I can go down. I’m diligent about my back leg — that it doesn’t collapse into gravity or cave into the efforts of my front leg. All in all, I’m still not a big fan of Vira 2 but I’m learning to accept what is and work honestly what what I can do. Besides, that’s what the practice is really about.”

Terri Walker says, “My behemoth pose is Parivrtta Trikonasana. The lesson I learn from it every time I do it, is practice it more. This is the pose that telescopes every bind in my body and mind. I must take Parivrtta Trikonasana’s power into myself and not resist it’s teachings. Stand firm in my feet, be long in my “still “ walking-posed legs and tap into the potential energy there. Find balance in my hips, change directions in my torso, soar with my arms, look up with my gaze. Smile! Love myself more, accept the moment, and resist looking for physical, mental, and emotional scapegoats.”

Julie Ross says, “When I practice difficult poses I realize that I am over-working areas that are already strong and underutilizing muscles that are weak or tight. I’ve also noticed that I have my own mental resistance at play. Alas, I have to make peace with the poses that are troublesome to me instead of letting them frustrate me. Sometimes, these difficult poses are just what my body needs to address my physical imbalances. The poses that are the most irksome, can be our greatest teachers. I can’t avoid them, I just need to work through the difficulty, which in turn, builds my confidence. I parlay this nugget of wisdom from the mat into the real world. For me, yoga is a means by which I try to befriend myself and come to a place of self-acceptance, instead of trying to control outcomes to perfection. It’s empowering!”

Now, we want you to join the inquiry! Let your teachers know your least favorite poses, and see what insights they might have for you. Follow us on Instagram to catch your favorite Shanti teachers in their least favorite poses, and little mini Shanti Sequences they do to help them prepare. Share a photo of your least favorite pose with the #AsanaNemesis, and you enter to win a free private lesson at YSNY to help you work on your asana nemesis. The winner will be announced on Halloween.

We Ride on the Backs of Giants

T.K.V. Desikachar died on Monday, the 8th of August, 2016. He was one of the great influencers of Yoga in the 20th century. Desikachar was the son (and student) of the great yoga master T. Krishnamacharya. Krishnamacharya was also the teacher of Patabois Jois, B.K.S. Iyengar, and Indira Devi. Desikachar completed a lineage that is largely responsible for how we practice yoga today in the 21st century.

One of the indicators of the extensiveness of T. Krishnamacharya’s Yoga knowledge is the diversity and profundity of his four main students. Any person who has had the honor and privilege to study with one of his students realized that there was no cookie-cutter methodology. Each one of these four had the thread of devotion and refined inquiry, but much to T. Krishnamacharya’s credit, they each expressed it in radically different teachings and styles. Each one of these masters showed us a different facet of the practice and let the wisdom and light shine through the window of different personalities and perspectives.

How will YOU express the teachings as you ride this river of Yoga? Your special and unique boat is important and is not duplicated by anyone else. We are trained and influenced by our teachers, colleagues, students and by the world at large but from where you float or swim in the river is a perspective that is occupied only by you. The ability to relax significantly into who we are and yet feel and listen to the whole is a magnificent gift of Yoga.

The story of the five blind people describing an elephant as they touch different parts (one on the trunk, one on the leg, etc.) is a way to remember that one’s truth may be relative to one’s perspective and that we must loosen our own point of view enough to listen and truly inquire about the whole.

Do It Anyway

“We have to do our best and at the same time give up all hope of fruition. One piece of advice that Don Juan gave to Carlos Castaneda was to do everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn’t matter at all.” — Pema Chodron

This quote by Pema Chodron is analogous to Mother Teresa saying, “What you spend years building could be destroyed in a day — build anyway.” Or when Buddhist monks spend weeks creating beautiful mandalas only to destroy them as an offering. At any moment, someone or something can take away your credibility or undermine all your hard work, but that shouldn’t stop you from doing it anyway. If there’s something you’re passionate about — something you believe in wholeheartedly — you must do it, even if in a second it could be gone.

And if what you love goes away, be able to honestly and gracefully let it go, and begin again. Impermanence is a part of life, and if we don’t practice accepting it, it will consume us. If we spend our lives afraid to pursue anything because of the fear of failure, condemnation, or upheaval, we’ll become stagnant. This is one thing yoga aims to prevent — stagnation. Yoga liquidates the stagnant places in the body and mind.

Pursuing what matters to you — whether it be a love, a career, a cause, or a journey — is as yogic as practicing headstand every day, knowing that one day no matter how great you are at headstand, you may fall and break your leg. (If you fall and break your leg you won’t be able to practice headstand for a while, but when you recover, you’ll get up and start again.) This perseverance in the face of impermanence is a training of both the mind and body, but most of all it’s a training in resilience. It will train you to react to the world in a way that is realistic but hopeful and impactful. By living this way, you might not know it, but people will notice, and they’ll see that they too are capable. By trying to do our best and accepting the successes and failures, we are telling those around us, “You are enough.” (As my mother and Jason Isbell would say.)

As some of you know, I’ve begun following in my mother and Rodney’s footsteps, and it’s terrifying for me. For a long time, I didn’t teach for fear of being weighed against (and weighing myself against) their success. Eventually I realized that this story I’d been telling myself wasn’t completely true — yes, it’s true, I will never be my mom or Rodney; and, yes, I don’t know half the things they do about the human body. But I’m only 20 — if I let the fear of my ignorance keep me from learning, I’ll stay ignorant. So I’m working hard at learning all I can about the human body (and the human condition) in order to help my peers as best I can.

I love yoga, I love people, and I want to help people love themselves. I’ll be able to do that in ways that my mom and stepdad can’t because I have a different perspective on the next generation — because, hey, I am the next generation. Even if I don’t succeed as a yoga teacher, I’ll be happy if I bring one person a little bit more peace. I’m taking the destination out of the equation to focus on the path.

Last fall a studio opened in Isla Vista, California, where I go to school, and I took it as an opportunity to start my own teaching practice. This gave me a little space from my parents’ reign to explore how I feel about teaching. Turns out, I really enjoy it. I realized that I miss having a yoga community when I’m not involved in one.

I’m still terrified. Every time I get up to teach or answer a question in teacher training I have voices in my head saying, “You have to do this correctly; you know who your parents are.” But the truth is, it’s all in my head — nobody else expects as much from me as I do. This will subside as I become more confident in my teaching and my knowledge. The harder I work and the more honest I am with myself and my students (so weird that I have students now), the more all of us get out of the experience. Yoga and life is teaching me this. I’m petrified of failing, but that’s exactly why I’ll succeed.

Maybe I won’t continue on this path of teaching (in which case, I’ll do something worthwhile, and I’ll do a great job). The acknowledgement of the impermanence of everything allows for resilience. Fear is impermanent, joy is impermanent, success is impermanent, and failure is impermanent. I find the resilience to continue to do anything — even brushing my teeth when all I want to do is fall asleep — by remembering that whatever I feel right now will pass.

I picked this teaching by Pema because it reminds me to let go of my story and follow passion with as little hesitation as possible. It’s a reminder to enjoy the beautiful balance of hard work and no agenda because, even if nothing comes to fruition, the work was inherently beneficial to your human situation and the situation of those around you. Just by living your truth, you inspire others to do the same.

200 Hours

Colleen and I both look back at the first teacher trainings that we took (she at Jivamukti and myself at the Iyengar Yoga Institute of San Francisco), and remember that we each went in wanting to learn more about yoga with no intentions to teach. A common trajectory of yoga learning in this country goes from taking public classes or doing video programs, to attending yoga retreats, and then right into a 200-hour teacher training program. Often the teacher training is the spark that ignites a genuine home practice or a launching pad for taking more classes per week. This is a fine evolution of a yogi, but it doesn’t really qualify one to hang up a shingle and start a teaching career. Two hundred hours in any subject is a drop in the bucket – an introduction, a pillar to a foundation.

The long time yogis in this country are recognizing this and are setting up continued education and looking toward creating more stringent certification processes. We all love teacher training programs and love how practitioners get turned on and set on fire. We love when students begin to see the rich history and the infinite body of knowledge and the unlimited realms of exploration that are possible in this beautiful art of yoga. The only difficulty is when the 200-hour teacher training is seen as a completion or a sign of mastery.

So then, what is being taught in these 200 hours and what is possible in such a curriculum? A good introduction and some essential foundational aspects can be covered. Some essential questions that can last a lifetime can be served up. But let us not demean a 2500-year old art form that includes some of the most brilliant human thought and experimentation by thinking you can become a yoga teacher after 200 hours. Instead come and have your mind blown open, your heart cranked wide, and your liver cleansed, and get introduced to your new life as a curious and beautiful sentient being.

Balance

When I was six years old, I loved the balance beam. I felt so proud of myself, and brave, when I walked across without falling. One summer, my dad made me a balance beam out of 2 x 4s. I got a ton of splinters that summer, and quite a few bruises, but by August, I was joyfully skipping rope up and down the length of the beam.

For most of us, balancing around center is a fickle and fleeting experience. But the quiet steadiness found when we do balance around center is sublime. As a physical skill, balance diminishes as we age, and yet is increasingly important as we get older. Luckily, due to the brilliance of the human body, the ability to balance can be improved with practice!

When we practice balancing postures, we gain a visceral understanding of the fact that balance is not a fixed point. Rather we wander in and around center, and then we fall. Sometimes we fall quietly and lightly; other times we collapse in a heap on the floor. At the moment, the cycle of falling out of center and then finding center again is most interesting to me.

I like things (a.k.a. my life!) to be steady, even, and tempered, so that the emotional feeling of balance is never too far away. I imagine that many of us of us feel that way. Thankfully, life doesn’t cooperate with such safe, and sometimes lifeless, plans. For example, I had a baby in August. So I am now the mother of a five year old and a four month old. Needless to say, I’ve lost my habituated sense of center.

So day after day, now, I recalibrate and begin anew, the delicate dance of navigating equilibrium. I’ve heard “center” described as the place from which we can fall in all directions, and that is ringing true for me lately. Sometimes I am literally balancing the baby on one arm while playing with her older brother. Other times I am quietly wandering the depths of my heart, in search of the place from which I can love fully in all directions.

The Still Point

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only dance.
—T. S. Eliot

S. Eliot’s poem, which has haunted my yoga practice for decades, came to mind recently at a London dance performance called Dust, Akram Khan’s contribution to Lest We Forget, a collaborative tribute to those who had suffered the pain of World War One. There was a moment in Dust when all the dancers moved as one body, and it created one of those magical seconds of intense hush in the audience where there is no past and future, no dancer no audience—just breath.

As yoga practitioners we know these moments, when stillness becomes movement and movement stillness, the ego mysteriously evaporating. But we also know times when no matter how adept our craft of asana is, it can become limiting, externally oriented, and performance-based, losing the quality of our original intention to practice.

How do we cultivate this quietness in movement, this presence? Fortunately, in yoga we don’t need massive orchestras and the grueling regime of rehearsal to bow to the sacred! Instead, in the middle of an asana, we pause, and come back to the breath—to the moment of being rather than becoming. Yoga helps us in the everyday of our mundane realities: walking down a busy street, doing the laundry, engaging in a challenging conversation, we come into the center of our bodies and experience ourselves from an embodied, compassionate place.

Most of the time, we live on the rim of the wheel of existence, getting battered by the rocks and mud of the road on which we travel. But through a meditative approach, we can come to the center of the hub of this wheel. Ajahn Chah, a well-known Buddhist teacher in the Thai Forest tradition, talks about “still, flowing water”—the place where nothing moves, but everything happens! For me, this image, remembered in asana, reconnects me to my breath, my core, the reason I came to yoga in the first place. It allows me to access the center of my physical being—my belly, my hara, my womb—and invites the movement to arise from a fecund, fluid reality, beyond my dry left-brain-dominant universe.

Did you ever as a child play with the light switch, trying to find the place between off and on? Perhaps not, but I did, and probably drove my parents crazy in the process! I see now that I am still playing with that notion, curious and enchanted by moments on the mat, in nature, in both deep trauma and the nuttier details of life, in great art, and the simple cyclical rounds of being, where the world stops and yet keeps moving—moments that are neither off nor on, neither flesh nor fleshless, neither from nor toward, reminding me that I am part of something so much bigger than that little “I,” where there is only dance.

Bridging The Gap

When Rodney and I were students in the three-year teacher training course at the San Francisco Iyengar Institute in the early 1980s, we learned the backbends include both “babies” and (though the name wasn’t made explicit) “adults.” Among the former are Locust (shalabha), Sea Monster (makara, usually mis-translated as something like Crocodile, Alligator, or worst of all, Dolphin), Bow (dhanu), and Bridge (setu bandha), though there was some suggestion that this one is no longer a baby but more of a tweener, like a teenager. Most of us typically enter Bridge by lifting off the floor, but in Light on Yoga (hereafter LoY) it’s is achieved by dropping back from Shoulder Stand (sarvanga), thus its formal name, setu bandha sarvanga.

Setu is a very interesting word. We usually translate it as “bridge,” but it also means “dam.” It appears in at least four of the vedic upanishads (the brhad aranyaka, chandogya, mundaka, and the maitri) as a synonym for and two-pronged symbol of the atman or essential Self (with a capital S). As a dam, the setu is said to keep our sorrow-full, mundane world separate from what’s called the brahma-world, the “happy-full” heavenly realm. But as a bridge, it provides the way for us to cross over from here to there, and “upon crossing that bridge, if one is blind, he becomes no longer blind; if he is sick, he becomes no longer sick….[and] the night appears even as the day, for that brahma-world is ever illuminated” (chandogya 8.4.2). To be more precise then, the setu is a causeway, which is a raised bank of earth between two irrigated fields that serves a dual role. On the one hand it keeps the water contained in each field, just as the Self divides our world from brahma’s; but on the other, it allows the farmer to walk between fields without getting wet, just as the Self offers safe passage between the worlds. So what do you think? From now on should we translate setu bandha as the Causeway Pose?

This message is very familiar in the yoga world: What binds us is also the means of our liberation. In all schools of yoga the key that opens the door is the answer to the $64 question: Who am I? (for those too young to have lived then or too old and absent-minded to remember, the “$64 question” is a popular catchphrase from the 1940’s, referring to a question or problem that’s especially difficult). There’s nothing else we ever need to meditate on, no mantra, no image, no breathing rhythm, but this seemingly simple question. As the Indian jnani Nisargadatta Maharaj advises us from his own experience, “Give up all questions except one: ‘Who am I?'” Paradoxically though it’s extremely important that we don’t try to answer it for ourselves, that would just lead us back to our same old self (with a small s). All we need do is hold the question in our consciousness as much as possible as we go through our days, without any expectations, without even any hope of success. When the time is ripe, when we’ve been sufficiently “baked in the fire of yoga” (as Gheranda tells his student, Canda, whose name means “glowing with passion”), the answer will make itself known.

But be prepared, it will come as a shock, not because it’s so entirely new and alien, but rather because, in fact, the answer was staring us in the face all along. As the Sufis say, It was hidden in plain sight (in this regard, read the short story by EA Poe, The Purloined Letter). We’ll stop here for now and save the rest for another newsletter.

An Interview with Patricia Sullivan

I had the privilege of speaking with one of Rodney’s first teachers, Patricia Sullivan, last week while she was still glowing from a recent trip to Hawaii. Patricia is going to be teaching at Yoga Shanti at the end of this month, so I was hoping to get to know her a little, in order to make a genuine introduction to all of you. Her kindness and warmth allowed us to feel like fast friends. More and more, as we advanced in the conversation, I understood the depth of her knowledge and experience. Yet the tone of her voice carried nothing but kindness, humility, and curiosity. She shared her journey with me—with us—but she also inquired into what we are doing here at Yoga Shanti.

Patricia Sullivan: In a certain way, it’s hard to combine [the traditions of] alignment and flow in one studio, unless you have teachers of both traditions who welcome the other. I had been doing Iyengar yoga for years and years (and years), but the approach was getting so strict and patriarchal…. Being an old hippie, and coming from a background of questioning authority, I started having a hard time with a teacher who was so authoritarian. And yet I learned so much by approaching yoga in that way; not in the way of following the rules, but in the way of looking deeper into what detail and precision can bring to a yoga practice—how it trains the mind to really become more and more intimate with itself, with the body, and with the heart. If you’re open to that—if you want to engage in a thorough, life-changing practice, and surrender to that level of detail in your asana practice—then everything can flower from that. If you’re not taking it as a way to just do the pose better. It may improve your posture from the outside, but really what’s happening is the total alchemical transformation of the whole being. It can sneak up on you.

So, anyway, at some point, I was turned on to ashtanga. I guess it was sometime in the Eighties with Richard Freeman, and I quite liked his approach. Then, years later, I was living in Hawaii, and Eddie Modestini and Nikki Doan introduced me to the practice. They knew that I was a sculptor and an artist. They called me because they wanted me to do a portrait of Pattabhi Jois because it was coming up on his eightieth birthday. I took class with Nikki, and I appreciated her more gentle approach to the practice.

Joyce Englander: So what are you working on in your practice now?

I often start out with some breath work—something that centers me and allows me to settle into meditation. Working with kapalabhati, and following that with jalandhara bandha and breath retention.

I teach kapalabhati in a very slow way. There are a whole lot of people who can’t relax their belly for the in-breath if they do it too quickly, so I started slowing it down, and then slowing it down more. Now I can see that everyone in the room is keeping pace and their belly is actually relaxing so that in-breath can actually flow in without effort. Then we add the jalandhara bandha, and it’s really quite blissful. It’s a very simple way to begin the class, and bring everyone together.

Then I start working on floor poses, where I’ve found a marvelous unwinding effect on the back. The first few poses are more still. We hold. Then we might start doing some repetitive twists, that might last for 5-10 minutes—but I’m changing the way I’m doing it every few times I go back and forth. You end up using a lot of different parts of your body to stabilize and stretch and mobilize everything. My students seem to really love this. Then from there it changes. We might do sun salutations, but they’re slow, with lots of details. We do a couple of standing poses, sometimes more.

I have also studied a lesser-known postural realignment therapeutic methodology for people who have chronic injuries and chronic pain. It adheres with yoga nicely.

What’s it called?

It’s called Egoscue, after the man who started it. He was a marine in the Vietnam War. He was shot. He had a long recovery, and even after he recovered he couldn’t get comfortable in his body. He looked in yoga books and anatomy books, and he noticed that he never looked like the drawing of an anatomically perfect man: you know, where the ears line up over the shoulders, and over the pelvis, and over the knees, and over the ankles. He realized he didn’t look like that, and he wondered if he did, would he be out of pain. Then he started taking exercises from yoga and the marine corps and physical therapy, and he mixed them up, to try and get the parts of his body that weren’t working to turn on or off accordingly. He started helping people in the marines, and then through word of mouth, and going to the houses of people who were in pain.

You have to see people’s asymmetries. Where are their rotations? What do they do when they aren’t in tadasana? Then what do you do about it? For many of us, doing yoga is enough. However, this work can be very therapeutic for people with longstanding injuries, or big asymmetries like scoliosis.

So in a sense you have become a specialist over time. You’ve gone beyond being a general practitioner.

You think when you do yoga that your whole body is awake. But that’s not true. There are plenty of ways we can be fooling ourselves, or be asleep. Opening the heart and mind is a lifelong journey, just like the asana practice.

What brings you to Yoga Shanti?

Rodney and I have known each other for a really, really long time. We attended classes at the [Iyengar] Institute in the Eighties together, along with Richard Rosen. We were on the same trip to India together in the mid Eighties. His path was East Bay, and mine was San Francisco. I was leading teacher training at the Iyengar Institute there, starting in about 1987. I started teaching at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Training Center when they realized how helpful yoga could be for people who are sitting in meditation.

When I came to feel like I didn’t want to teach at the Iyengar Institute anymore—when I felt it was becoming too confining for me—I had just resigned, and I received a phone call from Rodney. He wanted me to teach in an advanced-studies program that they were beginning at the Piedmont Yoga Studio. So that began our deeper relationship. It was such a well-thought-out eighteen-month, 600-hour teacher training.

After Rodney moved, I kept my relationship up with Richard, who popped in on one of my classes in Ojai last year. After that was when he recommended I come to teach at Yoga Shanti.

If you could describe your teaching style in three words:

Awareness, acceptance, and self-love.

What are your daily rituals? Daily routines?

The way I start my day? In front of my altar with pictures of my loved ones who have passed away, and other inspiring people. I light a candle before I sit down. That’s really taking the larger world into my practice. I often read a few pages from a book for inspiration before I began my breath work, meditation, and practice. Those are the constants. Where it unfolds from there, I don’t really care so much—although, I love being able to end with some kind of longer inversion.

Whenever I cook, I have a figure (that I made, actually) on my stove, with a candle; so I always light a candle when I start cooking. I just do a little bow to her. She’s my kitchen goddess. You know, so that there’s a sense of connecting with everything, and kind of blessing the activity, because it can seem so mundane and so boring.

Sometimes I chant. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of dhrupad—it’s a form of classical Indian singing. I took a class in it because, you know, I bring chanting into my classes, and I wanted to know more. I don’t chant so much before I practice, but more in the evening, while I’m cooking—and, boy, that helps. It opens the subtle body. It’s very calming to the nervous system. The nadis are more open and you’re more grounded, so that which can seem to be a chore is suddenly part of another expression of being fully in the moment. You forget that, if you don’t light the candle and do the chant. But it’s not like I’m standing still while doing the chant. I’m working. I’m bringing it into the rhythm of the work. There are a lot of moments in cooking when you don’t have to be thinking, you know? So bringing in a chant can be very helpful.

What guides your food choices?

Nutrition, of course. But I live in an area here in California where you can get organic everything; grass-fed everything; pasture-raised, humanely treated chickens, so that if you eat eggs you know that they’ve been out in a pasture, etc. I like things that are light and easy to digest, but I’m very light myself, so I have to be careful not to eat too light, because I get too vata. I have to eat grounding foods. I like to make things that I can at least have one day later.

What trips you up? In some ways it’s the things that trip us up that keep us practicing.

Doing too much, and not leaving time for just being: that cultural disease. I never would have been drawn to Iyengar yoga if this wasn’t true, but I’m a perfectionist. That’ll trip you up. I always wish I could let good enough be good enough. Excellence can arise out of good enough. You know there is that saying, “Perfection is the enemy of good enough,” which is like saying perfection is the enemy of satisfaction. So I work with contentment, which I find comes from gratitude. When I remember to be grateful, I am content. It’s amazing how effective that can be.

Sculpture artwork by Patricia Sullivan