How does personal experience shape academic writing on subjects like yoga? As I’ve discussed in previous posts (e.g. here and here), subjective and objective perspectives are difficult to reconcile.
One exception is the specialist discipline of “auto-ethnography”, which makes an author their own anthropologist. I’m by no means an expert in its intricacies, but I once wrote an essay combining outsider and insider understandings. Or to be more precise, here’s the question I answered (as part of an M.A. in yoga studies):
“Assess the meaning of your own practice from an emic and an etic perspective, and evaluate the concept of ‘habitus’ with reference to that practice.”
The first part of my response is attached (with a link to the rest). It explores my engagement with Iyengar yoga. Stripped of an insider’s rationalisations, it might sound stark. As discussed in last week’s podcast, I fell out of love with the method’s pedagogy over the years – though I still learned a lot from it.
I’ve found it helpful to bring some critical thinking to my own practice, but I wasn’t a fan of anthropological jargon, so I mostly ignored that part of the question. Needless to say, this didn’t get a great grade, but I had other priorities…
That experience shapes what I offer in The Path of Knowledge, a year-long immersion in yogic wisdom that starts in September. The course ends with a project, but there’s no need to write a formal essay – never mind get it graded. Instead, you can develop something practical that helps you make sense of things in your own way.
I discussed that in a recent chat with Matthew Green (and in a separate Q&A, which is available here). You can find out more about the course via the button below – if you have any questions, just send me an email.
And scroll on for the essay!
From the archive1
Iyengar Yoga and Me
By Daniel Simpson
To uninitiated foreigners used to yoga in gyms, or giant heated parquet studios, the Patanjala Yoga Kendra in Rishikesh can resemble an esoteric torture chamber. Its stark white walls and marble floor reflect an icy pre-dawn wind, which whistles down off Himalayan peaks through open windows. At 7:30 a.m., in mid-winter fog, devoted yogis start arriving. None are Indian. The only locals in sight are two women who polish the entrance, a departing night watchman and the pot-bellied manager, who opens the door to the hallowed practice hall. Minutes later, this room is strewn with weird equipment.
Some of it might be familiar to fitness enthusiasts: hard foam blocks and buckled straps are workout staples, and an angular frame by the doorway looks like a female gymnast’s beam. But what to make of the sandbags perched on a woman’s outstretched thighs, or the barbell plates she keeps adding to pin her hamstrings to the tiles? From the grimace as she folds her guts across the weights, transcendent bliss seems some way off.
And so it should be, according to the “Rules & Regulations” on the yoga centre website, which decree: “neither freedom nor beatitude is possible without discipline.” A walk-in cupboard is packed with contraptions that enforce it. Among the racks of blankets, mats and bolsters stand less cushioned sorts of objects: thick metal bars, broom-handle poles and wooden slatted boxes with curved-contour tops that might be sauna cures for hunchbacks.
Perhaps the strangest of these items is the “stump”: a couple of feet’s worth of two-by-four lumber screwed into a base plate. A wiry German hauls it out towards a wall, against which he kneels and grinds his hipbones. Arching back to wedge the stump between his shoulder blades, he rolls his deltoids further down towards his heels to make the posture more intense. His temples bulge until a stopwatch beeps in mercy.
“My God!” screams a middle-aged woman by his side. Her lilting English has a strong Swiss accent, although the last 30 years of her life have been spent in India. “Really,” she exclaims, giving each word equal stress, “I don’t know what you think you are doing in your practice!”
It takes a while to digest that these comments are aimed at me. I am balanced on my head by a wall, trying not to fall over. I realise that the speaker is a teacher; I first came here the previous evening for her class. She gave blizzards of detailed instructions in simple poses, which we held until I shook. Then she told us to come in the morning for “self-practice”. I had hoped to avoid her piercing gaze; instead, she prods me in the ribs.
“Everything puffing here,” she says. “See what has happened to his back.” To my horror, a group of students gathers round: half a dozen of the keenest run their eyes along my spine.
“Compression,” nods a young Israeli with a buzz cut. He thwacks a palm against the small of my back to make his point. The others grunt to show assent.
“Now look at the elbows,” the teacher continues.
“They’re not in line!” the Israeli scoffs.
“Not at all,” she says. “Everything crooked, all the way from the ground.” She switches focus back to me. “I don't know why you want to start with headstand when you don't know what is straight. Come down.” I obey with a thud.
“You know what Guruji is saying?” she enquires. I glance up blankly. Her eyes are sparkling. “Crooked body, crooked mind.”
“Guruji” is B.K.S. Iyengar, whose ramrod form adorns the walls in faded photos. Several of these are culled from Light on Yoga: a handbook of poses first published in 1966. Yoga Journal calls this text “the ultimate reference manual,” because “when teachers refer to the correct way to do a posture, they're usually alluding to the alignment Mr Iyengar instructs and expertly models.”
He taught the woman in front of me personally, and his method forms the basis of her own. I struggle to say I was upside down at his suggestion. When I quibbled the night before, she slapped my head.
I had been trying since I woke to obey her injunction that “one should establish the habit of moving one's bowels every day in the early morning.” The “regulations” alerted me to drawbacks of not doing so: yogic postures “do not come smoothly and subtleties are not grasped.” Wary of seeking assistance from caffeine (another rule bans tea and coffee: like drink and drugs, they “create confusion, weaken the energy and destroy the sense of discipline”), I had consulted Light on Yoga. Iyengar informed me: “Topsy-turvy poses help bowel movement,” so “if the student is constipated [...] start with Śīrṣāsana [headstand].”
In exchange for protesting, I get my headstand ripped apart. The Israeli takes personal charge of this endeavour. He straps a pole between two wall hooks as a plumb-line, and hems my elbows in with weights. A debate breaks out about wonky-looking shoulders: which joint in my weaker arm must be at fault? The Israeli says all of them. He opts to fix this with a splint, strapping two rods of iron across my left elbow, and tightening a belt around the same bicep to roll the shoulder out. This rules out headstands, so I try doing poses with straight limbs. Within minutes, a student laughs. “His hand is blue!”
The teacher looks up from contortions on a chair. She dismisses this objection with a wave. “Let him work,” she says. “For now it is OK.”
“How blue would be too blue?” I ask. No answer comes. Eventually, I take off the belts and go for breakfast. The Israeli remains for the full four hours of practice time…
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