LIGHT ON YOGA - A PORTRAIT OF B.K.S. IYENGAR
(from a reprint of the portrait in The East West Journal, June 1983)
Once hailed by Yehudi Menuhin as his "best violin teacher" and once challenged by the Queen of Belgium, who at eighty-four told him, "If you can't teach me to stand on my head, you can leave," (he met the challenge), B.K.S. Iyengar is now considered to be the foremost authority on and teacher of Hatha Yoga in the world.
From every corner of the globe, students flock to study with him in Pune, India, where his Ramanmani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute is located. He is the author of one of the best and most popular practical manuals of yoga, "Light on Yoga", as well as another important guide to breathing techniques, "Light on Pranayama". Iyengar has been teaching yoga for close to fifty years, introducing the health benefits and the 'poise of soul' of this Indian philosophy to millions of people.
Often referred to as both the lion and the lamb, Iyengar is at once a severe task master in class (whose precision and pedagogical techniques have caused people to refer to him as the Martha Graham of Yoga), and a charming, humorous and playful personality outside of class. He is the father of five daughters and one son and at sixty-four has an energy and magnetism which few men can match. Above all, he is totally and unconditionally himself at all times - probably one of the main reasons he is so loved by those who know him.
I first met Iyengar in Pune in the summer of 1970. I had gone there with no expectations, but had simply heard his name while I was studying yoga in Mysore earlier that year. As with the meeting of any remarkable human being, it was a seemingly insignificant incident which nonetheless left an indelible impression. We had been asked to do the shoulder stand, and as I was attempting to put myself into the posture, Iyengar came over to me, folded my legs into a lotus position, then bent them over first to the right side of my head so that the knees touched the floor, and then over to the left in the same manner. He grunted sternly. "Ah, tell me now, has any other yoga teacher made you to work like this?" There was obviously a challenge in his voice and I responded meekly, but truthfully. "No Sir, not at all". As I tried to undo the knot he had put me in, I wondered exactly what I was doing there. But after class, when I went out into the sticky night air, I was overcome with a sense of elation. I had received a big challenge, one I was determined to meet.
The next time I encountered Iyengar was in London in 1972. He was giving a seminar there and I rejoiced when I heard he would be in Europe as I was living in Paris at the time. This second time the challenges were even greater, the sense of excitement and newness even more enhanced than that first class in Poona. That moment had established something for me in my mind forever. I kept thinking about a quote I had been reading in one of Carlos Castaneda's books about what a true warrior was. Don Juan was chiding Castaneda: "I once told you that the freedom of a warrior here is either to act impeccably or act like a nincompoop. Impeccability is indeed the only act which is free and thus the true measure of a warrior's spirit."
It was this word impeccability - without flaw or fault - which kept ringing in my ears as I would think of working with Iyengar. Impeccability and freedom, freedom and impeccability. I learned, during subsequent years of study with him that this, coupled with the initial sense of challenge I had received in the summer of 1970, were the hallmarks of his teaching.
My last encounter with Iyengar came this past January when I went to study with him at his Institute in India. It was to be the last teacher's training course he was to give. There was a group of over forty students, mostly from the United States, but some from Holland, England and South Africa.
I had been to the Institute four years previously, but had forgotten the long, arduous flight from Boston to London, to New Delhi, to Bombay, to Pune. Fortunately, upon arrival, I found a comfortable hotel to stay in overnight to prepare myself for again studying with Iyengar.
The next morning, as I climbed into the rickshaw to go across town, the dust hitting my eyes from the early morning traffic, I was overcome once again with a quiet peace and joy that I would soon be working under the sharp eye of my teacher. I almost failed to see the iridescent beauty of the blue-gray swampy waters below the bridge I was crossing, or the sparkling colors of the saris in the early morning sun.
We pulled up in front of the Institute in ample time and I noticed outside the gates the familiar sight of the scooters belonging to his students, mostly Indians, but also some foreigners from the seven a.m. class. As I walked towards the building which rose up into a pyramid at the top, I had time to catch a glimpse of the lush flowers and perfectly trimmed garden lining the path to the entrance way. Very shortly the students from the early morning class descended the stairs and though there were some familiar faces amongst the group, there was little time to chat. Upstairs the students mingled or began to warm up, careful to avoid any complicated postures for fear of Iyengar's reprimands about 'showing off.'
The clock struck the hour, which brought a hush in the room as people found positions on the floor for themselves. Iyengar appeared, dressed in a white cotton Indian shirt and dhoti with his bright colored yoga shorts underneath. On his forehead was the familiar descending red line going from the root of his hair to the middle of his eyebrows. His hair, which was a silver gray, had grown somewhat longer since I last saw him and perhaps he had put on a little weight. Except for that, the same energy was there, the same expansive smile, the same sonorous quality in his voice, the same sternness - all was intact, and even though he was sixty-four, he appeared as alive, as vital as full of fire as ever.
After catching the eye of all of us, he started in immediately, even before the minute hand had gone beyond the hour of nine: "All right, everybody take their place." Coming around to each of us, he placed us in a particular position in the room which we would maintain throughout the seminar.
"What's happening in your right foot? What's happening in your left? Your right thigh, left thigh, spine, right side of the back, left side of the back?" he challenged us. We immediately became totally aware of our bodies, descending our awareness to each and every part, each and every cell. The posture was tadasana, which means mountain, and it is the very first posture he teaches.
"How can you learn to stand on your head if you can't even stand on your feet?" he chided us. For Iyengar, a student must know how to do the simplest posture with the greatest amount of awareness and intelligence before he or she can execute complicated asanas (postures). It is like working on the limbs of the tree without having strengthened the trunk. Some of us were secretly awaiting the more difficult postures, the ones which would make us 'work,' but it was not up to us. Gradually we became aware that Iyengar fully intended to bring us back to zero again before he went on, to help us understand the essence of the pose and not the pose itself.
As the days passed, the group continued to grow together, sharing each other's victories and each other's setbacks. We knew we had not come to be flattered, because, according to Iyengar, once he flatters a student, that student will no longer work to the maximum. We realized as well that we had not come for new techniques either, but rather, to receive the flower of Iyengar's forty-seven years of experience as a teacher in India, Europe, Africa and North America. We had come to learn, moreover, what it means to experience that which Iyengar tells us over and over again, that "Yoga is precision in action," that only through precise action does freedom flow throughout the body.
"Stephan," he once yelled at me from the other side of the room, as I was doing a sitting pose with my back to him, "I can tell form the dullness of your hair that your posture is dull!" "Keep the candles of you cells on fire!" he cried out at another time as we moved into difficult balancing postures. As we tried to execute the poses with the greatest amount of awareness, we would feel the energy of his voice running throughout the veins and arteries of our bodies to our brains and then back to our toes again.
Taking a class with Iyengar, one sometimes gets the impression that he literally has eyes in the back of his head. When questioned on this, he answered, "When I'm teaching, I have to watch hundreds of times those bodies and in that observation of one minute, I may be seeing twenty or thirty times what you may never see. So my eyes, in a split second, are moving everywhere." At a later time he commented, "You see, it's like fire. Fire has no limit, does it? It just lights everywhere. So when I'm teaching, I'm nothing but fire."
Anyone who has had the opportunity to study with Iyengar is aware of this Iyengar energy. There is an almost electrifying atmosphere in the classroom which lasts from beginning to end. It keeps students so tuned to the moment that though the mind may wander from time to time, caught by the piercing cry of the chick pea vendor in the street or the sight of the brilliant red flowers on the trees outside the classroom, the energy itself brings one constantly back to the present. In fact, as a one time senior pupil of Iyengar's, Angela Farmer commented, this can act as something of a drawback.
"He has a special kind of energy and part the response is to that energy and not to his instructions," she said.
Though many students come for help with mental problems as well as physical difficulties, Iyengar feels that the most important thing is to work first with the body. In fact, at different times, he has referred to himself as a gardener: "As the gardener gives tremendous attention to the tree, how to clean it, how to keep it healthy, what to do, what not to do, where to look and as he removes the weeds so that the plant may not be destroyed, so each individual is a gardener in this divine body."
This perception of matter as being also divine has its roots in the Indian philosophy of Vishnuism which Iyengar follows: "In the philosophy of Vishnuism, nature and spirit both are eternal. Nature changes, but the spirit does not change. Whereas some think that the world is illusion or 'maya', and that all things which exist are 'maya', you should not be attracted to that illusion. So naturally, if everything is illusion, even to realize the soul becomes an illusion. But the Vishnuite says, 'no both are eternal, but transformation takes place, and though matter is eternal, it is also changeable - changeable, but not an illusion.'"
It is out of this philosophy of the concrete that Iyengar has set himself the task of understanding how yoga asanas are able to work as a therapy as well as a spiritual discipline. Hence, over the past several years, he has developed not only the art of teaching and practicing the asanas, but also the science of applying them to difficult nervous system, circulatory system or spinal problems. For the past six years he has held weekly medical classes at his Institute which are attended not only by people who need help, but by many of his student reachers as well.
Iyengar can often spot a student's physical weakness as soon as he or she walks into the room, but some of the problems are more apparent than others. Students have come to him with a wide range of difficulties, including muscular dystrophy, acute arthritis, stroke, cancer, slipped disc, hernia, migraine headaches, and insomnia. In each case, the therapeutic method he employs is unique. He makes use of ropes, benches, bolsters (thick, heavy pillows), bandages which he ties around the eyes to create an immediate sense of relaxation, weights and chairs. Every "patient" works on a series of exercises which he or she has been taught, often being helped into the postures by Iyengar and his assistants. Iyengar prefers to use the props to support the students so that they can work independently. He feels that it is essential for students to develop their own will for the healing process to take place.
The asanas interact on the body producing multiple effects on various parts. Mary Schultz, M.D., a pathologist from Tennessee, who is writing a book on Iyengar's medical work, had codified and documented this medical work over the past four years, showing how yoga affects simultaneously the relaxation response, the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems as well as the respiratory and circulatory systems.
Iyengar believes that the circulatory and respiratory systems are the "gauges of our existence." If these two gauges are not kept very well, the rest of the system will never function at all. Through these systems we develop tremendous vital energy, which is absorbed into the blood stream. We 'irrigate' different areas of the body with various postures and we have to observe which posture is going to act on that area. So the yogi says 'un-focus the blood in one area and bring it to another area, then the organ is supplied sufficiently and improves from the disease.'"
Iyengar feels that the most important quality of any teacher, especially when working with sick people, is to learn "how to put your body into their body and bring it to the place where you yourself are." For him it is absolutely essential to break down the barrier between the teacher and the student.
"The most essential quality for a teacher is to be sincere and to treat the body of whomever you are teaching as if it were your own body. Then only does the oneness between the teacher and the taught come," he says.
Iyengar admits that he has no system when it comes to his medical cases. He works more by a sense of empathy and a direct, intuitive perception of what must be done from moment to moment. That is why it is difficult to imitate his work in this his area and most teachers who go to study with him, although they may observe and sometimes help in the medical classes, will concentrate on healthy students back home.
In the normal classroom situation , among students training to become yoga teachers, Iyengar becomes not only the true pedagogue, but the true artist as well. Working simultaneously with a detailed analysis of the body and poetic imagery to help understand the movement, he takes the students from one posture to the next with a myriad of details to help them understand how to execute the pose.
Some people in fact have often wondered what The Iyengar technique really means. Is it any different from standard Hatha Yoga? The difference has been in the interpretation of how to execute the postures, not the postures themselves. With Iyengar's flair for precision, a sense of perfection in each movement, an undaunted awareness of every cell and muscle of the body as you flow through the postures, and a meticulousness in observation which he instills in each and every teacher, there has necessarily developed a certain approach which distinguishes itself from others. As Iyengar comments:
"Yoga belongs to a civilization which is 3,000 years old. It cannot be my yoga or somebody else's yoga, but as everything has to have a common brand, my yoga has a brand."
Iyengar will reprove students very quickly if he senses that they have been practicing or working mechanically. "Do not perform the asanas mechanically," he says, "with the mind wandering elsewhere. Perform them with total movement and involvement. Penetrate the intelligence from one end of the body to the other - vertically, horizontally, circumferentially, as well as cross-wise. This will bring uniformity and harmony to the body."
Although some students tend to get caught up in the specific details, Iyengar eschews this gravitation towards the specific without grasping the whole. More and more he encourages his students to learn how to observe, not so much what to observe. He himself is constantly changing and the details which he gives for a posture one year may be totally changed the following year.
"As a teacher, knowing that the student cannot catch everything from one angle, I show the same point in hundreds of ways. Some students cannot follow it exactly as you are doing it, so you have to change. If you go from top to bottom, you go from bottom to top."
As one student observed, "There is nothing new in Iyengar except that he is always new. Before it was difficult to catch what he was doing. He taught the postures very rapidly and it was sort of like Lord Shiva's dance. Although he was under control, his students would go and try to teach like him. Now he's been refining a method which is very safe and can be given out step by step to large numbers of people. His own work has reached such a level that he's got to give it out in a very organized way.
"Fun loving and curious about almost everything, when Iyengar used to travel to the various countries to teach, something he has ceased doing since the inauguration of the Institute in 1975, he spent his leisure time going to museums, concerts, meeting heads of state, or just sipping a coffee with some of his students. He is simple, authentic, and warm and believes that it is very important to be part of life, not just some yogi meditating in the Himalayas. His wife, Ramanamani died in 1975 and left him five daughters and one son. Geeta, his eldest daughter and his son, Prashant are teachers in their own right and will be handling the future teacher training seminars while Iyengar takes time out to write a book on Patanjali, the founder of modern yoga.
Iyengar has also been the teacher of such celebrated people as Yehudi Menuhin, the Queen of Belgium, and Krishnamurti. Menuhin, in fact, was the principal force in bringing Iyengar to the West. It was precisely while he was in Gstaad, Switzerland, working with Menuhin in 1965 that Iyengar received a phone call from another of his students, the Queen of Belgium. She had just suffered a stroke. He flew to her aid and within a few days taught her to regain some movements so that she could once again hold a fork with her right hand. Then as he was about to leave, she held her right cheek to him saying "kiss me." He did. She held up her other cheek saying "the other side, too." As Iyengar kissed her, tears rolled down the cheeks of the 92 year old Queen. A short time later, the Queen died.
The day I was to leave Poona for Bombay, I had to see Iyengar on some urgent business regarding his daughter Geeta's book on Yoga for women. I had come to say goodbye as well, but had not realized when I asked his son Prashant if I could see his father, that Iyengar was resting. I said that I would return later, but no sooner did I begin to put on my shoes to leave, then he appeared at the door. Dressed in his white cotton dhoti, slightly rumpled from the nap, he came out to the garden and sat next to me on the bench. After discussing the business matter, I proceeded to thank him for the challenging remarks he had made to me during the seminar. I told him that upon reflection, I was able to understand what he meant and that it had changed, once again, my relationship with my yoga practice.
He looked at me with a mysterious smile, one which combined that of a knowing father with that of a stern task master and said, "Just make sure your practice is continuous and constant and everything will go well for you in life. All problems can be overcome, even the difficult ones."
And then folding his hands on his chest in the gesture of namaste, he bid me farewell. Hopping the rickshaw from the Institute to the airport, I was no longer nervous about getting somewhere on time. I, like he, knew exactly why I had come.
