YOGA AND SCIENCE PART II: LAYERS OF UTTHITA TRIKONASANA BY SIEGFRIED BLEHER AND JARVIS CHEN
Siegfried Bleher
Jarvis Chen Photo: Travis L. Kelley
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ntermediate Junior III Iyengar Yoga teachers Jarvis Chen and Siegfried Bleher continue their conversation in the second of three parts, this time on the many layers a practitioner can touch in Utthita Trikonasana . In Part I, they spoke about the different ways of knowing that characterize science and yoga, and whether there is a place from which the deepest experiences of yoga are amenable to scientific study. Next time, in Part III, they will consider whether the experience of Samadhi and the deeper changes in qualities of consciousness that emerge from the experience of Samadh i are amenable to scientific study. Jarvis Chen: I thought we should start by recapping what we covered in the last conversation: ways of knowing, ideas about the inward inquiry of yoga, in terms of our individual subjective experience of yoga versus making predictions about the everyday world around us with a more externalized inquiry. And we talked about that interesting experience when we are practicing asana, and having cultivated intelligence to a great degree, where there are flashes of intuition that we know what we know in a very deep way. Do you agree with that? Siegfried Bleher: Yes, and I guess one thing I wanted to add to that is that we arrived at a way for making the conversation practical. In that regard, the topic for the current conversation arose. Even though we may focus on Utthita Trikonasana, on the different layers we can touch in practicing, we may still connect with what we covered in the last conversation, in particular, the different ways of knowing. For example, how do the different ways of knowing inform how we might practice Utthita Trikonasana, or any asana? One thing I would like to cover in our current conversation is how the practice of Utthita Trikonasana, as we’ll talk about it, intersects with the research question: Are the different layers that we can experience in the practice of Utthita Trikonasana amenable to research? JC: Right. And what kind of research? And there is the way in which the practice of Utthita Trikonasana fundamentally changes the questioner. As we penetrate through the layers, and we go deeper into the subjective experience, we come right up against the fact that to even practice Utthita Trikonasana is to transform the questioner or the instrument of questioning. In some ways, that’s where the magic of yoga happens. In all of the things we learn about points and precision— learning principles of alignment in the physical body that are observable—we find principles that can be translated to different individuals and bodies. For example, as the Iyengars teach us, how we turn the knee, how we plug the femur into the hip socket, how we elongate the spine, how the spine receives
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the actions of the arms and legs, in some ways replicates the idea that there are truths about the physical world. That the ways different parts of our embodiment relate to each other are in the realm of replicable physical phenomena. So we can probably conduct a study where we observe what happens to a variety of bodies when they do Utthita Trikonasana using the back leg in a certain way: Does pressing the outer edge of the back foot elongate the spine, or does turning the root of the thigh out of the front leg help to create proper articulation in the hip socket? And we can probably phrase questions about how those are done, and how they can be refined, that are replicable across a population of practitioners, even as they might be individualized as they adjust themselves to maximize the utility of the pose for them. These questions are still in the realm of physical phenomena that are observable, that can be correlated and replicated. So I think that’s the first layer, or these are the outer layers, and as we go deeper into Utthita Trikonasana, other qualities of experience might come to the forefront.
We are taught by more senior teachers how to see issues in students, and how to respond to these issues. SB: Along the same lines as you describe, I would like to recall a study I participated in that Kimberly Williams designed on low back pain [published in Spine Journal in 2008]. In that study, we took every participant through the same 24-week protocol developed by Lois Steinberg. When we deliver the intervention, there is some responsiveness on the teacher’s part to the individual differences among the participants. Part of that flexibility in the delivery of the intervention is based on what is seen from the outside by the teacher, and part is based on a certain sensitivity to what the participant is experiencing subjectively. But even for a general yoga class, there is still the need for a mixture of observation of external information seen by a teacher and internal response from the participant. So, to some degree, we can distinguish between some generalized Yoga Samachar Fall 2015 / Winter 2016
