Overcoming Fear of Flying in Iyengar Yoga Kirsten Brooks

Overcoming Fear of Flying in Iyengar Yoga

EXPLORING THE PATH OF PRACTICE AT THE 2019 NATIONAL CONVENTION

BY KIRSTEN BROOKS

As 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 the possibility of experiencing the atha, the NOW.

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 improve. The key, of course, is practice—constant, devoted,

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 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

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

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 about the poses, to “choose a thread” of a storyline and base

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

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.

kind of bond in the relationships we form in yoga that also has no peer. I can only imagine the intensity of the bond within the Iyengar family and how heavily the loss of Geetaji weighs on all of them, particularly Abhijata. She even told us during the convention, “This is the first of these trips where I cannot afterward call my aunt and talk to her. Where she won’t ask me, ‘What did you do? How did they do?’” But that first afternoon of classes, it wasn’t only the loss of her aunt that was weighing on her. Taking the podium upon the completion of Chris’ tribute, she bade us, “Come close.”

“So,” she said with a hint of a smile, “what’s the plan? What am I going to do now? … I just want to talk with you all. Basically, I want to pour my heart out.”

And she did. With respect, with firmness, with dignity, and with intense love, she referred the Iyengar Yoga community in the United States back to her grandfather and, beyond her grandfather, to Patanjali as the cornerstone for what yoga is and must be. She stressed the need for asuddhiksaye, the burning away of impurities, and vivekakhyateh, knowledge of discernment, in our lives, in our practice, in our teaching, in our touch. She shared her personal experiences with both trauma and healing; she called us all her family.

The call she issued each and every one of us to hold ourselves to the highest standards is something that we are each accountable for in the deepest places of our hearts. I am accountable, as it says in sutra II.34, for all my own “violence, whether done directly or indirectly, or condoned.” In his commentary on this sutra in Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, B.K.S. Iyengar lists three types of disease, pain, and distress: those resulting from deliberate overindulgence (adhyatmika), those resulting from nondeliberate habits and behavior (adhibhautika), and those that are of genetic or hereditary origin (adhidaivika).

It seems to me that many of my shortcomings, as well as many of the struggles within our community and the issues facing our society and planet, stem from fear. Fear of falling, as in the airplane, fear of failure, fear of death. Fear of discomfort. Fear of being judged. Fear of losing what I have. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of being wrong. Fear of not being good enough. These are a few of my biggest fears. Maybe you share some of them; there are many others.

In her keynote speech, Abhijata described fear as the greatest obstacle to practice, illustrating with a David Attenborough clip of a goose chick making a dizzying plunge from a cliff top to its parents below. This harrowing drop is the rite of passage for every chick of its kind—if it does not step off the cliff, it will starve. She described how her fear and the “thread” of the story she had chosen to tell herself about a particular pose had formed an obstacle in her practice. It was not about whether or not she could physically do the pose but about the mental blocks and excuses she constructed for not attempting it. She related Guruji’s practice to a boy who follows the song of a bird into the jungle: The beauty he sees and experiences around him is only seen and experienced because he is following the song of the bird.

For the remainder of the week, Abhijata encouraged us to follow the song of yoga—not to stay outside the jungle because of fear nor to focus merely on capturing the bird, but to explore, innocently, whole heartedly, honestly. She also encouraged us to ask ourselves difficult questions and to be prepared to make changes when we find their answers.

On the next to last morning of the convention, I stood looking out that 29th-floor window. Normally I would be afraid to look straight down, but I wasn’t. Suddenly a bird swooped from immediately above our window, plummeting toward the pavement like the goose chick in Abhijata’s video. It was as though I was falling along with it. Then just as suddenly, it swooped up and off to the roof of a nearby building. My gaze shifted, and up the center of the vista came an airplane taking off from DFW, framed by skyscrapers on either side. I smiled. My fears about the convention, the future of our community, and the future of Iyengar Yoga, were assuaged. Abhi is flying this plane. We can breathe again.

Kirsten Brooks (CIYT Intermediate Junior I) started practicing Iyengar Yoga in Bethlehem, PA, in 2008. After moving to Ann Arbor, MI, she began mentoring with senior teacher Sue Salaniuk. Kirsten now teaches in Iowa City, IA, where she lives with her family.