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Summer 1996

NAMASTE,

I was recently reading an article in Yoga Journal about menopause (“Menopause – the Yoga Way,” YJ Feb. ’96). More and more of my students are reaching the stage of their lives where menopause is something to be considered. And since my experience in this area is obviously going to be primarily objective, not subjective, I try to get as much information as I can by reading and talking to other students and teachers.

I found the article informative, but I was especially caught by a few paragraphs toward the end of the article that didn’t relate to menopause directly, but spoke to different issues. Judith Lasater was speaking and was quoted as saying, “Yoga has been presented, in some sects, as a way of controlling the body and mind so that one can reach a state of higher consciousness. I think that’s a male viewpoint that the body is something to control.”

The author, Ellen Sander, wrote, “Instead, says Lasater, women can experiment with practicing yoga in a different style—softer, more open, less focused on control and more focused on exploration.”

A little further on Judith was quoted as saying, “Maybe the spirituality that women need is openness, diffuseness, chaos, not order, closed rigidity, or directness… This is a time to truly find our spirituality through our own American female yoga. Not Indian yoga, not male yoga, not Hindu yoga, but American female yoga.”

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I found these comments extremely thought provoking. The subject of control is one that has been stewing in my brain for a long time, and Judith’s words served to stir the stew a bit.

Clearly those of us who practice Hatha or Raja Yoga have to deal with the issue of control. After all, we make the time to practice, we organize the practice, we even practice when we don’t feel like it (which is sometimes a good idea, sometimes not). We are doing asanas (postures), which means putting our bodies into particular shapes or positions. Even if I am in a passive pose, I have placed my body in that position; it didn’t just happen. And if I direct my attention toward my breath, as in relaxation or pranayama, that direction is controlling my attention. Directing one’s attention is, of course, dharana, or concentration, the sixth limb of Patanjali’s eight limb of Raja Yoga.

The question of control may be particularly interesting to those of us practicing Iyengar Yoga. Perhaps more than any other method, we Iyengar yogis are often seen as “control freaks”. This arises, I suppose, because we try to adjust the body very precisely, in microscopic detail. The process of adjusting the body is for us also a process of controlling the mind. It is my experience that for the practice to be balanced and harmonious, we must direct our intelligence as we direct our body. In this manner we explore the path of understanding the mind/body continuum with ever deepening intimacy through the fine tuning of asana and pranayama.

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I think we also get this label because the method sometimes draws people who, for whatever reasons, are controlling every possible aspect of their lives and the lives of everyone around them. And the subtle control practiced in the Iyengar method provides such people with just another opportunity to succumb to that compulsion to try to control it all. Observers sometimes mistake the method as the source of that particular pathology rather than just another occasion to manifest it. Unfortunately, unless there is successful intervention, the practice when begun from that standpoint may very well tend to amplify it, but it doesn’t cause it.

As a teacher I have observed that it is extremely difficult for such practitioners to let go, to soften and open up. Theirs is indeed a practice of closed rigidity. They may adjust, but they adjust from their brains, from concepts, rules. My experience is that these students tend to make little or no progress in their practice. They also often injure themselves, since they’re trying to dominate rather than co-operate with their mind/bodies. They often injure their students as well. Moreover, because of the dominating and rigid quality of their practice, they and, if they are teachers, their students are often joyless. Actually this is quite contrary to the Iyengar method.

The method, at least as I understand it, is based on the openness to observe what is really going on and the courage to explore what works and what doesn’t. In The Tree of Yoga, in speaking about asana, which he calls the branches of the tree, Mr. Iyengar asks, “Are you working from the body to get the factual feeling of the pose, or are you doing the pose because you have read in books that it is going to give such-and-such an effect? Are you caught in the experience of somebody else’s written word, or are you working to know with a fresh mind what type of new light is cast on the pose by your own experience while performing it?”

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Interestingly, it takes control of an entirely different order for those folks who practice from their heads, for whom the poses are rigid, whose breath is hard or held to let go of the attempt to control everything. Part of what they must learn is that domination and control and are not necessarily the same thing.

It’s not unlike playing a musical instrument, say, a piano. You have to control your fingers to be able to play the notes you want to play, to get the sound you want. And yet, as long as you are thinking about moving your fingers, the music will always sound stilted, stiff. There has to be enough technical control so that the mechanics come without thought. Then the attention can be directed toward shaping the sound to effectively express the feeling behind the music, the soul of the music, if you will. This shaping is a letting go of control, a control without control. It takes getting out of the way and, at the same time, getting in the Way or in the groove, the flow.

Actually, according to Patanjali, the practice of asana and pranayama themselves can resolve questions concerning control vs. exploration, soft vs. rigid, rhythm vs. chaos, male vs. female, etc. In the Yoga Sutras he says, using Mr. Iyengar’s translation, “Perfection in asana is achieved when the effort to perform it becomes effortless and the infinite being within is reached. From then on, the sadhaka is undisturbed by dualities.” (II.47, 48) And, “The fourth type of pranayama transcends the external and internal pranayamas, and appears effortless and non-deliberate.”

Control and release, effort and relaxation, doing and not doing, internal and external – the ongoing play of balancing these apparent opposites in our practice, our lives, is the very stuff of Hatha Yoga, the union of the sun and the moon, the right and the left, the male and the female. As Judith says in her new book, Relax and Renew, “Prana, the masculine energy, …Apana, the feminine energy,…Restorative yoga balances these two…”.

I wish I had more space to play with these ideas further, but alas, I’ve not. I do invite your ideas and comments. May your practice bring a sense of balance, harmony, and joy this summer and beyond.

       

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