Book Review: Imagine If by Rajvi Mehta, Laura Potts

Book ReviewImagine If

by Rajvi Mehta

Dr Laura Potts

Rajvi Mehta is known to many IYN readers for her generous and vastly knowledgeable teaching on visits to Britain, and for her work on the Yoga Rahasya journal. In this short book, she invites readers to imagine lives different from our own, through telling accounts of people she was invited to meet who are practising Iyengar yoga despite disability, chronic disease and huge disadvantage; people who, as she says, ‘had extraordinary problems’. The book is clearly inspirational in tone and intention: a tonic to shift the reader from complacency and petty grumbles. As such, it belongs within that tradition of writing intended to uplift and change attitudes. To read it as a teacher is to have rich opportunity to reflect on how better to communicate with students at their own level, how to make imaginative use of everyday items, such as props and supports (as both prisoners and someone on chemotherapy show), how genuinely to respect students, rather than impose on them, how to judge if it is appropriate to touch and adjust, how to teach when students have sensory or learning disabilities. But to read it as a student may be to be over-awed by the accounts of everyday heroism, to feel rather inadequately feeble and small. Walking that fine line between courage and caution, as Guruji urged, is sometimes not a clear path but a zigzag that leaves most of us, for the most part, just getting by.

Contentment and adaptation through yoga

By recounting how the people she met were learning and practising yoga in such difficult circumstances, she invites us to practise compassion and empathy, and to learn from them not to ‘make these problems larger than life’. She reminds us ‘that pain and suffering are subject to how one looks at them, how one accepts and how one handles them’. Throughout these stories a common theme is revealed: the acceptance of personal reality, circumstances and limitations on life, and ‘whatever life has in store for you’. With that attitude, the yoga practitioners she meets are finding opportunities to learn, with the support of teachers open to creative self-effacing ways of working to support their particular needs. They are moving on, moving ahead, as she tells it. Reflecting on the life and practice of a woman she meets in Israel, Shirly, who lives with multiple cancers, she asks: ‘I wonder whether any of us has a right to complain about life. All we need to do is develop the perspective to accept, to focus on areas that are not problematic and see adversity as a new beginning, a new way of life’. Other qualities she observes in the practitioners she meets, and which are, she suggests, lessons for the reader, are contentment and adaptation.

It’s questionable, however, how useful this attitude is in making life better and fairer: how will our huge problems with inequality, climate change, violence and damage to people and land, ever be remedied unless we take action to change the status quo, rather than accept it? Rajvi helpfully picked up on this point in the recent IY(UK) Yoga Space event, reminding us that yoga also teaches us to be discerning, not to tolerate what is bad or mean in life. The book has contemporary salience, making reference to the Covid-19 pandemic which has changed so many people’s lives. For a few, this current adversity may have been a new and positive beginning. Rajvi offers the valuable sequences Guruji devised for trauma and immunity, and explains how they may work effectively. One US student’s response to the former, used after the 9/11 attacks, could sum up what so many experience: ‘the amazing strength and power of yoga…to heal’. Many know this from their own experience; many from working as yoga teachers and observing it in students; a privileged few of us from helping in medical classes at RIMYI.

Why anecdotal evidence is not enough

We as an Iyengar yoga community are not, however, serving the contemporary world well enough if we solely rely on experiential accounts of the efficacy of the practice. We are at a point now, with all the other revolutionary changes in organisation, teacher training, online learning, to step more courageously into the world of health related research. Iyengar yoga will never have the public legitimacy and status it deserves if we complacently say ‘well we just know it works, we see it work’. There is a very limited range of high- quality research papers that mention Iyengar yoga, or have trialled it in specific contexts, measuring its effects, working out how particular practices are specifically beneficial. When I taught medical students, their assessment for the module was twofold; firstly to document their own learning and its effects on their own health and well being, and secondly to explore a chosen health topic through published research findings in relation to yoga. There was pitifully little for them to draw on for this second assignment, and those few studies were often small and not robust and so the conclusions weak and unconvincing. Often the remit had to be broadened to look at all yoga therapeutic interventions, in order to have any material to discuss. Recently, a small group of teachers have been working to establish a pilot study offering Iyengar yoga to people with Long Covid. We have been supported in this by Lois Steinberg in the US, who has undertaken valuable work to demonstrate the effectiveness of programmes for specific health problems. So we have a modifiable sequence that we can offer people with Long Covid; the ten week pilot project starts in early October; over 100 teachers have volunteered, providing support to over 50 students. Unless, however, such work is properly evaluated, as we hope it will be, there is no chance of opening that opportunity up more broadly, making it freely and fairly accessible to anyone, not just those already practising Iyengar yoga. We need to be able, for instance, to access social prescribing processes within existing health care delivery services, and that will only be possible if we can provide evidence of the effectiveness of the programme. At the Yoga Space event Rajvi responded to a question about the need for evidence, not just anecdotes, by asserting how important it is to demonstrate just how and why Iyengar yoga can be effective. The methodologies, systems and sequences we can offer differentiate the teaching by qualified therapy teachers from that of ‘yoga’ as it is commonly understood – as about just flexibility, breathing and relaxation. These robust structures offer something valuable in the context of contemporary evidencebased medicine and, as she urged, it is important that we document this work and make it public. The stories she tells in Imagine If inspire us but we need then to be karma yogis – just as she emphasised Guruji was a man of action. Imagine if we as IY(UK) embraced the opportunity presented by the pandemic to engage in publicly-funded research and to collaborate with academic and health researchers, and reach out with that authority and legitimacy to the wider world.

Imagine If: Stories of Ordinary People with Extraordinary Grit, Westland, Feb 2021. Laura first attended Iyengar yoga classes in 1977 and began teaching yoga in 1994, with a particular interest and expertise working with people with mental health problems.