Death of a Legend, Transformation

Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, Amy’s guru and an inspiration for countless others, passed away on Monday, May 18 at the age of 94. This man was huge in the yoga world. Like, he was the Barak Obama of yoga. He developed the Ashtanga system, a 4 series (or 6, depending on who you talk to) sequence of poses meant to cleanse and purify the body and mind. It’s a very powerful system and one that I’m just now starting to become familiar with. Amy was authorized by him to teach the Ashtanga system and she leads classes in the primary series. As part of our 35 classes that we are required to attend, 5 must be in the Mysore format. Mysore is named after the town in India where Pattabhi Jois taught, and where his grandson Sharath will now teach. In a Mysore class, students work through the Ashtanga sequence but the class is not led by a teacher. Students instead work at their own pace within their own limits as advised by the teacher. The teacher will also go around and give adjustments.

I attended my first Mysore class on Sunday, the day before Jois’s death. I was expecting to work through the entire primary series but Patricia, the teacher, thought otherwise. Even though I had been through 3 led classes in the primary series before, she advised me to only work through the sun salutations and the standing poses, and then maybe do the standing poses again, which equates to about 1/3 of the entire series. In talking with her it was apparent that she was recommending doing a little each day, starting at the beginning and working to where I feel comfortable, or to where I can go from memory. And even though what she was suggesting would be another time commitment and more work, I didn’t fight it.

I didn’t go with it either. I’m not sure why but on Monday and Tuesday I didn’t do any yoga at home, although I did do 10 minutes of meditation which I’ve been doing almost every day for about 3 weeks now, and I did attend Rich Logan’s class which is fantastic (the guy is brilliant and funny and frankly everything I hope to be in a yoga teacher). It wasn’t until Tuesday in training that something clicked for me. We took some time away from learning poses to watch a documentary about Pattabhi Jois called Ashtanga, NY, and in it one of the students said something about how Ashtanga isn’t something to dabble in. You’re either in, or you’re out. Well that struck a chord with me because I’m really feeling the need to give more of myself up to this yoga journey, and this is the perfect way for several reasons, not the least of which being that I have Amy as a resource, someone who knows a thing or two about Ashtanga.

So for the past fews days I’ve been waking up and doing sun salutations. There is some protest coming from a small voice in the corner of my mind but I’m not allowing it to dominate. Once it settles down a little I’ll work in some standing poses and see where this thing takes me. It’s funny because I thought that starting my yoga training would give me all the direction I needed but in fact the opposite it happening. I’m finding so many open paths in front of me and I’m trying to figure out where to go and how to proceed.

There are two sort of conflicting priorities in my life right now. The first is to immerse myself in a yoga career, which would include further study in either yoga therapy (a combination of psychotherapy and yoga) or massage therapy. It may also include an extended stay in India at some point. The second is to get out of working for the man and instead teach yoga for a living (preferably outside of Chicago), which requires saving as much as possible over the next few years in order to pay off my debts and have a slush fund for emergencies and adventures. The real issue is money, mainly not having enough of it, and deciding how to prioritize things to get to where I want to be.

I guess I shouldn’t focus so much on all that and instead just pay attention to the journey itself. This is always sage advise, and it’s also one of the many things I took away from my most recent read, and probably one of the best books I’ve ever read, which was “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. She is also the author of “The Last American Man”, another one of my favorites. This book gets a bad rep as being a “girly book”, which it would be if she only focused on her relationships with men, which take up just a small portion of the book. The rest is filled with profound insights and intelligent humor as Gilbert recounts her year of travel in Italy, India and Indonesia, meant to bring her out of a terrible depression caused by a failed marriage and bitter divorce. She is a brave spiritual seeker who refuses to settle or take things at face value. She questions everything, least of all her own beliefs and assumptions, with an intense and unrelenting passion for truth and freedom. I see a lot of myself in her. This book was truly moving and I wish my writing skills could do more justice to the experience I had reading it.

Another moving experience that I had recently is the sweat lodge ceremony that I took part in on 5/9, the night of the full moon. A sweat lodge is a native american ritual, but this one was conducted by an african american man in the sauna at the yoga studio. Rubee Blackriver, who might call himself an urban mystic, led me, Emily from teacher training, and 5 other people through 3 rounds of intense heat lasting 15-20 minutes each, with a 5 minute break in between. The purpose of it was to cleanse and purify (a major theme lately). The second round was easily the most intense. Rubee walked us through the 7 chakras, pouring one scoop of water on the coals for the first chakra, two for the second, and so on, until I swear it felt like the skin on my upper arms and shoulders was on fire. At one point he said “Oh we are outside our bodies now, can you feel it?” I did feel it but maybe less so than the others. I’ve felt such intense pain and exhaustion during Crossfit workouts that I long ago learned how to disengage mentally from the physical body in order to stay on track. So this was sort of just more of the same, but that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it or wouldn’t do it again. Like so many things related to my yoga teacher training experience, I can’t seem to get enough.

East Meets West

There’s a documentary out called “Enlighten Up”, and it comes to Chicago next month for a couple of weeks. It’s about a 29 year old journalist from New York who is skeptical about yoga and who is taken on a journey around the world to learn about yoga and the teachings and at the end I believe he has been “converted”. I’m very excited to see this not only because it involves what I hope to be my next career but because I still see some of myself in the 29 year old journalist.

Most class sessions I am very open, receiving the teachings without judgment and often finding them very enlightening and interesting. And after a good yoga practice I have sensations that I can’t get anywhere else. But every once in a while that little skeptic in my head will chime in with his point of view. This usually happens when we’re working out the finer points of a pose. He’ll say something like, “Really? This is what enlightenment is all about? Twisting your torso in that particular way?” Other times he’ll roll his eyes when we’re chanting in Sanskrit or talking about body cleanses and raw food diets.

Having that little voice around doesn’t bother me, and I’m not anxiously trying to rid myself of it. In fact I think it’s a healthy thing to have around. In a way it inspires me to keep working and learning, and to remain open to everything going on around me. And there has been a lot going on lately. Besides the classroom learning I have experienced the following throughout the last few weeks:

--Kirtan, performed by Krishna Das (very famous for this)
--a two-day workshop called Spirit Tracking, with Rubee Blackriver
--a lecture on the emergence of Buddhism in India
--Gong Summit, a musical performance in a music instrument warehouse
--a gong bath, performed by Richard Rudis
--a workshop on healing herbs and spices
--a lecture/workshop on Ayurveda and Yoga Nidra

One thing that fascinates me and that I’m always trying to learn more about is the merging of eastern and western philosophies. Put briefly, science is more and more arriving at theories of the universe that validate and reflect the ancient teachings of the east, including teachings found in yogic texts. Seeing these two seemingly different approaches to truth coming together is like seeing the timeline of human history and thought as humanity having a conversation with itself. Seen from this perspective, the skeptic is a necessary and vital point of view to have in order to reach and prove what one feels instinctively to be the truth.