ON
Pranayama
The Essential Elements BY JOHN SCHUMACHER
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n the first issue of The Light, I wrote about “Laying the Foundation,” which postulated several conditions important for the practice of pranayama: a regular asana practice, a conducive lifestyle, and an inspiring teacher. I promised to speak about the importance of the teacher in this next article and to lay the groundwork for beginning to practice. A knowledgeable teacher can save us a lot of time and struggle by guiding us away from the numerous pitfalls that pepper our path and toward the light of yoga. We Iyengar students are all Guruji’s pupils, either directly or indirectly, so we know the value of the teacher. We can, of course, study and practice asanas without a teacher. I practiced from the courses in the back of Light On Yoga (LOY) for five years before my first Iyengar Yoga class. I learned a lot on my own. I could drop back, drop over, put my feet behind my head, and stand on my hands. How little I actually knew, however, became evident in my first class with an Iyengar teacher. That class rocked me with a realization of the vastness of my ignorance and prompted me to study with Iyengar teachers whenever and wherever I could. Pranayama is different. Both asana and pranayama are exquisitely deep and profoundly subtle, and both involve the totality of our being—physical, emotional, mental, intellectual, and spiritual. The difference lies in the degree of depth and subtlety of pranayama as compared to asana. In pranayama, the clues to right action are trickier to catch, the effects more gradual and ethereal, the nuances more elusive. I liken it to playing the flute. In playing the flute, you must learn how to hold the instrument and what fingers create what notes. You must learn where and how to place your lips to make a sound. All these details are important; without them you can’t play the instrument. Much refinement in these skills is possible and necessary. This is like asana. Without knowing how to position the body and how to adjust the various parts, you can’t do the asana.
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Once you can make a sound with the flute, the quality of your breath, your understanding of and feel for the music, and the depth of your emotions and consciousness determine the power and sweetness of the music. This is like pranayama.
To bring the poetry of the practice to life, even the avid student of pranayama requires a teacher. It is the poetry of the practice that takes it from the mechanical to the sublime. You can certainly read Light On Pranayama (LOP) or some other book on the subject and begin to practice pranayama. Unlike my experience of learning asanas from LOY, however, by the time I read LOP, I had taken numerous pranayama classes with the Iyengars and senior teachers. The book contains remarkably extensive and subtle information, but in retrospect, without previous instruction, I would not have been able to understand much of it. I would have understood the words, but the experience they were meant to convey would have been a mystery. Knowing what sensations to look for and what to avoid, knowing what adjustments to make, that level of discrimination would have been missing. It’s a little like searching for a sequence for diabetes in Appendix II in the back of LOY. Try giving your diabetic student Akarna Dhanurasana or Mayurasana. However, the list of poses in the various therapeutic sequences contains clues as to ways to approach a particular issue. The experienced teacher will know how to use these clues and adjust them to the needs and capability of the student. LOP gives important clues about practicing pranayama, but an experienced teacher is necessary to translate those clues into meaningful and effective action. Just as the instructions in LOY about the asanas are basic, so the instructions in LOP are relatively bare bones. They describe the mechanics of pranayama. To bring the poetry of the practice to life, even the avid student of pranayama requires a teacher. It is the poetry of the practice that takes it from the mechanical to the sublime. The inspiring pranayama teacher must be, in
The Light | Spring – Summer 2021
