10 minute read
From Habit to Liberation Tori Milner and Denise Weeks
from Yoga Samachar FW2017
by IYNAUS
ABHIJATA’S TEACHING AT THE 2016 FLORIDA CONVENTION
BY TORI MILNER AND DENISE WEEKS
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In May, many in the Iyengar Yoga community gathered in beautiful Boca Raton, Florida, to usher in a new era in Iyengar Yoga. It was our first U.S. convention since Guruji passed away. Geetaji had been planning to come but was not well enough to do so, so Abhijata Sridhar, Mr. Iyengar’s granddaughter, came to guide us. The convention was tribute and celebration both, with insightful teaching, poignant memories, and a lot of laughter. This reflection on the Florida convention, using many of Abhijata’s words and stories from just one incredible session, will allow those of you who couldn’t attend the convention to get a flavor of the wonderful event— and will allow those of you who were there to recall some of her fabulous teaching.
The Saturday morning session was especially memorable for me because of how skillfully Abhijata was able to both teach and tell stories at the same time. With personal photos that were projected onto the large screens around the hall, Abhijata told us what it was like to be Guruji’s pupil. At the same time, to recreate for us the experience she had with him, she asked us to do certain poses during the presentation. She gave us a small taste of what it must have been like to sit at the feet of master teacher B.K.S. Iyengar for so many years.
Simulating an experience she had one day in the practice hall, she led us through a short sequence that she remembered doing: Adho Mukha Svanasana, Uttanasana, Tadasana, Paschima Namaskarasana, Tadasana, Ardha Chandrasana, Parivrtta Ardha Chandrasana, Tadasana, Ardha Chandrasana, and Parivrtta Ardha Chandrasana on other side, Tadasana, Vrksasana, Tadasana, Vrksasana, and then she told us to sit down. Abhijata said, “So I was doing something like this, and then I was practicing Marichyasana III as he had taught me the previous day. And in my mind I was going through all of the points he had given me to a ‘t.’ Guruji came into the hall and asked me, ‘When will you learn?’ I didn’t know what to answer, what the correct answer should be, so I just smiled.”
At that, there was an audible chuckle in the audience, as many had either been in that same situation with Guruji or had at least witnessed it happening to someone else. “‘What are you doing?’ he asked me,” Abhijata continued. “‘I am practicing the Marichyasana III you taught me yesterday.’ ‘What you did yesterday? You are doing the same thing today?’ Again I was stumped; I didn’t know what to say. Then he said, ‘Why doesn’t yoga go into your head?’ And he was angry. Then he walked away, and that is a rare thing. Whenever he would teach, he would teach completely. He wouldn’t just leave you like that, so I knew it was serious. And then he retraced his steps and came back and said in a voice with so much concern and with so much intensity, ‘Habit is a disease.’ And Photo: James Greene
then he walked away. I was stumped. How can habit be a
Abhijata Sridhar in the convention hall. disease?”
Abhijata then began to answer her own question with insights she gathered from a variety of sources, having us take different poses to illustrate the discoveries she made as she struggled to understand her grandfather’s words.
At one point she had us roll two blankets for Virasana, one to go under the knees and one to go under the toes, and then told us to sit down on the floor between the feet. She explained that one time her grandfather had her do this with wooden bricks under her knees and metal rods under her toes. “‘Sit!’ he commanded me,” Abhijata said. “I tried, but couldn’t sit. ‘Sit!’ he said again. There was no choice; I just sat. ‘Now, how is it?’ he asked. ‘It’s painful,’ I said. ‘Who is asking you about the pain?’ he asked.” Then she told us to come out of our much softer version of Virasana. “It hit me hard. There in that fierce situation, all I could think about was the pain. And here he was asking me, ‘Who is asking you about the pain?’” Abhijata went on, “How do we look at pain? We want to avoid the pain and eradicate the pain. But for Guruji, pain was an altogether different concept. He wanted us to look beyond that.”
Later she showed us a slide of herself in Padmasana over a Setu Bandha bench and asked us to sit in Dandasana on a narrow wooden brick and to go forward into Paschimottanasana. “Come to the edge so it pricks the buttock bones,” she said, and then noticed that some students had foam blocks instead of wooden ones. “Those with soft foam bricks will be missing the point! When something becomes painful, you don’t want to stay in that position.” Referring back to the slide, she said, “He was pressing my knees. It was painful! ‘Don’t resist!’ he said. I wish now that I could have done that, and even then I wished that. I was thinking, ‘I wish I could obey you.’
“I don’t know whether it was actual pain or the fear of the pain. He said, ‘You are resisting so much. You have barriers everywhere.’ Once I was out of the pose I realized it is an intensely difficult phenomenon to break a barrier. The problem is… we fail to see a barrier as a barrier. System, safety, security… are we getting imprisoned by what we see as our safeguards? We never perceive a barrier as a barrier. When something is easy, we like doing it, but the moment it takes a turn toward inconvenience, we want to stop. Habit is indeed a barrier, which stops us from seeing what truly is. My Marichyasana of yesterday stopped me from seeing the Marichyasana of today.”
Throughout this combined class, presentation, lecture, story, Abhijata wove her understanding of Yoga Sutras, instructions for the poses, and even corrections. She maintained incredible poise and focus, keeping us all engaged in how she interpreted and worked with Guruji’s words and teachings.
She said, “From this whole story… what I am coming to is: Do we learn? Do we really learn? Guruji one day told me, ‘You should learn to use memory properly. Owing to memory, you stop your progress. You remain stagnant.’ He once told me to do Paschimottanasana, and I was doing it to the best of my ability. ‘Let go of your memory.’ He said, ‘[You are] limited because you only work from memory.’ He said, ‘You work from memory; I do not use memory.’ ‘You don’t use memory?’ I asked him. ‘What do you use?’ He said, ‘I use my intuition. Memory is limited. Yoga is infinite. You cannot reach an infinite subject with a limited resource.’”
Abhijata bridged the gap between the incredible wisdom of her grandfather’s teaching and the average student’s experience in any given pose. Another of the many points that struck me for its profound truth and simplicity was what she said about our “checklist mentality.” She showed a slide with five empty checklist boxes and then had us take Adho Mukha Svanasana. Right after, she challenged us on our approach to the pose, saying she was sure that we all had a checklist in our head of what we needed to do in the pose. She said, “If we perform in this checklist manner, how are we going to go beyond the
Abhijata instructs students in Sirsasana. Photo: James Greene
known? How will we go from known to unknown? We are only going from known to known to known. Do we really learn?” She paused and looked into the 1,100-plus person audience, filled with both beginners and some of our system’s most senior teachers. She continued, “What I feel is that we borrow Guruji’s language and experience. We term this transaction as learning and this system we call studentship. There is a barrier. There is no thought process on our end. So how are we learning?”
In a final, dramatic example of how her own habit and memory got in the way of learning, she shared with us the story of how one day she was practicing backbends when Guruji came into the hall. “‘Come here!’ he said. He made me stand like Charlie Chaplin between the wall and the horse with my sacrum on the horse. I was trying to arch and it didn’t happen. He came over and pushed the horse into me and pushed on my diaphragm and my whole back went down onto the horse. Because he was there, it happened. The pose came beautifully, and I stood up and my back was fine. But I was not fine.”
At this point, Abhijata expressed what I’m sure many of us in the hall were thinking. “I had been taught all my life that the thighs should roll in,” she said. “I was perplexed by a backbend that turned the feet in this manner since he himself had taught me to roll my outer thighs up and inner thighs down. I said, ‘What is this, Tata, how can this be correct with the feet turned out?’ And he said, simply, ‘It works on your sacrum better.’”
In telling us these stories, Abhijata opened up the whole system of Iyengar Yoga— the yoga that her grandfather B.K.S. Iyengar lived, breathed, and taught— for our exploration, reflection, and growth. Her words were both challenging and liberating, a gentle rebuke as well as an invitation. “Take the system of alignment,” she continued confidently. “Our whole principle is based on the concept of alignment. … For us, it has become a dogma, a rigid structure. This man, who created our system of alignment, was open to exploration. We are not open to exploration; we have a boundaried system.”
She then told the story of how, in China, Guruji held up a chumbal, a small, doughnut-shaped prop, saying that it was better to sit on the round props because the buttocks are a round structure. I was not fine at all! I wondered why my grandfather, Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar, had to go to China and go up on stage and admit that he was wrong for so many years! He could have said it was an improvisation, that it works better. No, he had no qualms about admitting he was wrong. That was the man who gave us this system. A man who was open to experiment, always open to new thoughts, new ideas, and in the moment. It was not from memory, not from habits, not from attachments. How many of us would be able to go up on stage and admit we were wrong? That honesty could come because he was open to what was in the moment.”
As we neared the end of this one incredible session with Abhijata, she circled back to the question of habit. She had already shared so much and had touched so precisely on the convention’s theme of moving from the periphery to the core and back again. But here she was, ready and able to give us the final gift of her experience. “What is the answer to come out of this disease of habit?” she asked. “The answer is to be open and to be sensitive. Sensitivity can come in where there is intelligence and vice versa. The answer is to open our minds and eyes to practice, to allow the intelligence to come forward… and to practice with the same openness that Guruji did for all his life. That way we will understand what yoga is; that way, we will understand what asanas truly are; and that way, we will change our way of living.”
She beamed, and we gave her a wholehearted standing ovation. We were proud of her. We were inspired and humbled by her honesty, and we knew that the future of Iyengar Yoga was indeed in capable, poised, calm hands.
