My response to a comment on yesterdays post THE BOX :BEING INSIDE LOOKING OUTSIDE:
AN ASHTANGA STORY by Norman Blair only really makes sense if you read the article first.
Hi Y.
I've just read it for probably the fourth time, lots in it.
Personally I don't think it matters why anyone practices. Ramaswami talks about this in an interview when being asked about gym yoga and I tend to agree, it's all good. Whatever kind of practice someone does and for whatever reason, chances are, somewhere along the line, they might look for something more within it and if not, well that's fine too.
However, Ashtanga and Ashtangi's do often tend to take themselves and their practice quite seriously (occasionally judging and being judgemental of other and others practice), guess the question is whether it delivers on it's own terms or if it's lost it's way somewhat. Is Norman suggesting that he thinks it might have or be in danger of that ?
I read the article again after reading this letter from Jois in YogaJournal that's doing the rounds. I know he's talking about Power yoga (Beryl Bender Birch in particular, though didn't they make up?) but he could almost be talking about modern Ashtanga, sounds very much like something Norman is saying in the second half of his article don't you think? Here it is.
A letter from Sri.K. Pattabhi Jois to Yoga Journal, Nov. 1995
"I was disappointed to find that so many novice students have taken Ashtanga yoga and have turned it inot a circus for their own fame and profit (Power Yoga, Jan/Feb 1995). The title "Power Yoga" itself degrades the depth, purpose and method of the yoga system that I received from my guru, Sri. T. Krishnamacharya. Power is the property of God. It is not something to be collected for one's ego. Partial yoga methods out of line with their internal purpose can build up the "six enemies" (desire, anger, greed, illusion, infatuation and envy) around the heart. The full ashtanga system practiced with devotion leads to freedom within one's heart. The Yoga Sutra II.28 confirms this "Yogaanganusthanat asuddiksaye jnanadiptih avivekakhyateh", which means "practicing all the aspects of yoga destroys the impurities so that the light of knowledge and discrimination shines". It is unfortunate that students who have not yet matured in their own practice have changed the method and have cut out the essence of an ancient lineage to accommodate their own limitations.
The Ashtanga yoga system should never be confused with "power yoga" or any whimsical creation which goes against the tradition of the many types of yoga shastras (scriptures). It would be a shame to lose the precious jewel of libiration in the mud of ignorant body building.
K. Pattabhi Jois, Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute, Mysore, South India
He's talking about the full Ashtanga system, all eight limbs and suggesting that that is absent from power yoga but one assumes is present or was present in the system he was teaching and received from his teacher krishnamacharya but where are those other limbs? Sharath has made a point of saying the the breath in Ashtanga is just breath with sound, that it's not ujaii, not pranayama*, nor is drishti pratyahara and the focus/concentration of Ashtanga is not, can't be the same as seated meditation.
Where's the yoga in Aashtanga?
I get the feeling recently that there are a number of senior Ashtanga teachers who are trying to reincorporate those other limbs, perhaps in workshops or stress their importance.
Just thinking out loud here as always, not critical for the sake of it and perhaps these are just personal questions though I suspect everyone asks them or something similar at some stage of their practice.
I love Ashtanga but is it taking me where I want to go? Can it? How and in what ways do I need to broaden it's focus? Can I retain something of what I love in Ashtanga through, say, a kind of Ashtanga Vinyasa Krama approach or do I, personally, need to abandon Ashtanga altogether and just focus on Vinyasa Krama, on later Krishnamacharya, on incorporating the other limbs, a more integrated yoga practice?
* yes I'm aware that pranayama apparently gets taught to some long term students, supposedly when you get to third series but how many never get past the first half of second series or even Primary
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11 comments:
Grimmly, personally, I think it's ok to come up with your own system and if it benefits someone else, too, then why not? Isn't that how Matthew Sweeney's krama sequences came about? He's not pooh-poohing the traditional system, but the fact that he recognizes that everyone is different was enough reason to come up with something that not only benefitted him, but a lot of people worldwide, too.
And you're right. From where I am now, I AM A LONG WAY to the third series. Does that mean I will never learn about pranayama? I hope not. I'm counting on people like you and Matthew to make it more accessible to people like me.
Thank you.
In a workshop I attended last year, David Robson said that 95% of people who start Astanga never make it past the Primary Series - and of the 5% who go on to Intermediate, only 5% of *those* people move on to the third series. If you really want to practice Pranayama in the Astanga system, the odds are bit like playing the lottery!
I agree with what you're saying here, Grimmly. It concerns me that the current teachings out of Mysore seem to downplay seated meditation and pranayama. I believe there needs to be room for those limbs in a daily yoga practice.
Based on the number of Astanga practitioners who seek instruction in meditation and pranayama outside the tradition, I believe that a daily Astanga practice actually cultivates interest in these other limbs. Why is Sharath discouraging it? And if we're already practising hours of yoga every morning, where do we make room for these other important practices, if not in, or as part of, our daily yoga round?
If this is a 'practice for householders', how is an expanded understanding of all the limbs of yoga accomodated?
And yes, Guruji and Beryl worked out their differences. Beryl went on to write a great little book on yoga philosophy called 'Beyond Power Yoga' and she talks about the Yoga Sutras and the eight limbs in her classes and workshops.
Keep in mind, the letter from Guruji was written in 1995. I'm sure Guruji's views shifted over the passage of years, just as Astanga continues to evolve.
Thanks for keeping these discussions alive on your blog. I think it's important that they be discussed, especially in light of the new teachings coming out of Mysore.
i agree with you and cory and kaivalya. not sure why would we need to get to the 3rd series to deepen/ broaden the practice. i don't mean to be a party poohper here but some of the things that have been said/ written by different teachers are quite at the opposite ends and contradicting. all yoga - not only ashtanga should be a spiritual thing that is flexible and embraces all people who want to have a spiritual dimension added to their lives.
ivana
I've had a different experience with teachers, I guess. The authorized teachers I've practiced with have been very high on sitting practice. Do you guys not count ujjayi as pranayama? I came to Ashtanga from zazen, which is taught as simply attending to the breath (often counting each breath) -- this traditional form of meditation/breathing is more like ujjayi (without the sound) than like the pranayama practices that go along with third series. So is the third series pranayama better for enlightenment than ujjayi?
My ashtanga teacher told me that the real yoga happens once you have finished the practice, and I tend to agree. Ashtanga is not a meditative practice in itself, but the practice of it at certain times in our lives, when we need it, makes us ask the questions we need to ask in order to make the changes in our lives which need to be made.
When I gave up smoking using the Allen Carr book method, he said that once you have decided on the path (to not smoke in this case) you should never question that path. I stopped smoking before I found ashtanga, but looking back on Allens book, I can now see that it was the first yoga book I ever read :o)
My biggest problem with Ashtanga is that the focus, for many doing it and also some who observe it from the outside to see if it is for them, is it is very physically challenging and therefore some would say this is not yoga for everybody. I have also noticed that unless a teacher encourages the other 7 limbs, some students are not interested because they remain in the physical of it all the time. I studied a tradition years ago where not only were the 8 limbs all explored but so were the four paths of yoga, including bhakti yoga and so there was a lot of chanting. As an Ashtangi these days, I have noticed that other than the opening and closing chants, not many are interested in devotional chanting for its meditative aspects...and in fact seem afraid of it as if it were going to change their religious belief system :)
When the letter you quote was published in Yoga Journal in 1995, there was big controversy whether it was really written by P. Jois himself or by somebody else who just signed using his name.
The arguments for it not being by him were many and very powerful, including P. Jois' lack of command of the English language and the very direct and un-Indian way it is written.
In other words the odds for it being a fraud are quite big.
i understand what Roselil is saying, but Guruji might have expressed his thoughts to someone who actually did the writing and corrections. the early rift between Beryl and him existed. so i don't think it's fraudulent. when i lived in San Francisco and in Florida, i had to find the spiritual limb of meditation outside of ashtanga - in Zen. luckily in the bay area people practice both meditation and asana - so it's a good influence.
This pair (the long critique you just posted before and the SKPJ power yoga paragraph) has been making the rounds, pretty much back-to-back the way you've posted them here. It's tempting to read them as a pair, but of course they're a decade apart and so we shouldn't do that.
As far as the physical practice of ashtanga vinyasa, I was just cracking into the meditative aspect (not samadhi or anything, but having the physical poses on autopilot enough to have "breathing" practices), when i began hitting the "you get 2nd or you don't" line, which was given to me by various teachers in totally contradictory ways. This messed up my sort of psycho-emotional relationship to the practice for a long time.
More recent developments like becoming a parent and losing one of my parents have pulled me away from physical practice, and then the Swenson program in Austin was of the spirit, "Hey if you want to do 2nd, go ahead, and we're going to do the first three classical kumbhaka (retentions) each day too" and so it just knocked down all of the barriers (drop-and-stand, take the heels, raise the Duck, etc etc etc).
This perhaps was "criminal" as they'd have put it in the old days, but there was a definite liberation to it. That said, I'm not rushing to the limits and doing a whole Intermediate and a pack of pranayama. It's as if having the permission to do more practice also permits me to do less. Magical stuff.
I read the SKPJ piece as criticizing the loss of the chanting/meditative/pranayama angles in the American scene, and if we were going to defend the Mysore practice, I suppose we'd have to say that the physical practice is "building the strength" for the later pranayama, rather than body-for-body's sake. This of course looks suspicious when you can't learn anything about said pranayamas. It's like the line in the NB piece where he talks about the guy who was doing third and "nothing happened." I think that guy is misled.
So I don't buy the bit on "the practice is all physical body" because the premise (isn't it?) is that one uses the body as a way to understand the cosmos (ripped that one from Freeman's latest book, really). It seems that it's THIS premise which is the crux.
Thanks you all for your comments on this post, been running around a bit the last couple of days and haven't had the chance to sit down and respond. Have been reading them with interest when they came in though on the new smartphone. Hopefully I'll have the chance to sit down and look at them again in a couple of days, thanks again.
I agree that ashtanga as taught to most people by most teachers is essentially the asana and little else, although there are people who supplement their practice elsewhere with meditation classes, etc. And, worth noting that in our shala at least, the teacher gets pretty shirty if people don't do their 'take rest'/savasana which I for one regard as a kind of meditation.
The point I really want to emphasise though as someone else referred to above is that the physical practice does become a kind of meditation once you have the sequence down - I think Jois may have also been referring to power yoga messing this up in his letter, with its variations from the series as he taught it (although the constant changes from Mysore which seem designed only to make people pay attention to them as the fount of all wisdom perhaps take away from this argument a bit). You can get into a meditative state while doing the asana in my opinion - although you have to do the poses for their own sake and not be doing them to show off to the other students or get attention from the teacher (as the other students and the teacher should become invisible).
There are other examples of meditative practice that use physical repetition (of a sequence of movements and/or walking a long distance) after all - Tibetan Buddhism, Shugendo, martial arts kata (arguably), etc. Meditation doesn't have to mean sitting still or chanting.
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