Overcoming Fear of Flying in Iyengar Yoga EXPLORING THE PATH OF PRACTICE AT THE 2019 NATIONAL CONVENTION BY KIRSTEN BROOKS
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s I took the flight to Dallas for the Iyengar Yoga USA National Convention 2019 in April, I could sense lurking within me the dvesha klesha (source of frustration known as “aversion”) to the unknown I was about to experience. I had never studied with any of the Iyengar family before nor attended a national convention, and quite frankly, I was nervous about what the tenor of a gathering of our nationwide community would be, especially given the upheaval and conflict of the past year. I could also sense the opposite klesha, raga (attachment), standing directly beside the aversion—I was thrilled to see my friends and have six whole days to devote to simply being a student of yoga.
Arriving at the Sheraton, I was giddy. My presence at this convention was due almost entirely to generous benefactors— the IYNAUS Scholarship Committee and donors, and my teacher Sue and dear friend Sally who let me share a room with them—such fanciness is generally far out of my league. Sue and Sally, having arrived earlier, had gone to soak up some nature at the Audubon Society, so I deposited my bags in the room with a glorious view from the 29th floor, and headed out in search of coffee. As I walked past the reception desk on the main floor, I spotted a face coming toward me—a face I recognized, a face I had seen in photographs and videos. Suddenly realizing the face was Abhijata Iyengar’s, I beamed in involuntary delight and greeting. Abhijata smiled back! Her smile stunned me. It wasn’t the fact that she smiled—it was the quality of that smile. She didn’t smile with the tight-lipped formality used for strangers we pass on the street. She didn’t smile with the practiced cordiality of a celebrity being recognized in public. She smiled like you smile passing a school friend in the hallway between classes. She smiled a genuine smile. Over the next week of study with her, I learned that everything Abhijata does or says comes from a place of profound honesty and genuineness. Classes began Friday morning with strong standing poses and deep hip openers. She asked us to examine what our top thighs were doing—and did we even know where our outer thighs were? She asked us to consider how memory was leading us to relay a certain narrative about the poses, to “choose a thread” of a storyline and base our response to the situation, the pose, on that story. As we grunted and struggled to isolate the action of the outer hip and sacral area in a prone Vrksasana, she lucidly articulated one of the most essential and possibly least understood aspects of Iyengar Yoga: the idea that asana and pranayama can lead to citta vrtti nirodhah because they teach how not to make Yoga Samachar Spring | Summer 2019
I was thrilled to see my friends and have six whole days to devote to simply being a student of yoga. that choice in narrative. She encouraged us to become aware of the gap between the thoughts (stimulus) and the “thread” (response), and she stressed that in knowing the gap, there is the possibility of experiencing the atha, the NOW. It was stunning to witness how effortlessly she wove together the teaching of 900 students of all different levels with accessible and brilliantly expounded philosophy, as well as moments of teacher education for good measure. In this first class, she urged us, as practitioners and especially as teachers, to thoroughly understand the networking and connectivity in the asanas—how one part of the body relates to another in all variety of poses, not just the ones that are usually grouped together as belonging to the same family. That way, we will understand how to instruct our students to practice so they improve. The key, of course, is practice—constant, devoted, honest practice. “If you are strict with yourself,” she told us not-so-jokingly, “I will be compassionate with you. If you are compassionate with yourself, I will have to be strict with you.” We laughed and so did she, but she was clearly not referring merely to how many repetitions of the prone Vrksasana we had attempted. Each afternoon began with a tribute to Geeta shared by one of her students. It struck me as particularly significant that in the first of these tributes, Chris Saudek said the only time she could recall having seen Geeta smile was when she was playing with her nieces and nephews. There is a certain kind of bond in family relationships that is incomparable, and there is a certain 21
