Home-Alone (Iyengar) Yoga

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Elizabeth is back in New Jersey, recovering from jetlag after six weeks in her true homeland, Greece. Original columns will resume next Monday. This column first ran in April of this past year. As the photograph bears out, however, her back has recovered fully, a year and a half after spinal fusion surgery, and she has returned to practicing and teaching Yoga . . . in the style of her Guru, BKS Iyengar.

TEANECK NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—10/24/11—After a decade of balancing (gracefully if insanely), like a half-century-old angel on the head of a pin, practicing and then joyously teaching Yoga, my spine broke, between its 4^th and 5^th lumbar vertebrae, I underwent spinal fusion surgery, and came out on the other side of that experience . . . a stranger in my own achey-breaky flesh.

The pain in my lower back (where titanium pins, apparently, are cutting into the muscle, itself sliced through and through to insert the cage and bone and metal that now support, yea, verily, comprise my spine), is relentless: a new and demanding companion, sleeping and waking.

And now, on the four-inch heels of that pain, comes mononucleosis, an old, old friend, when spring is finally upon the land, and I had (only just) returned to Yoga class.

Shit does happen, Gentle Reader. And more shit happens when one is old.

Still, a decade ago, having practiced “generic” Yoga since the early 1980s, I gave myself over to one teacher of verrrry non-generic Yoga, a man I will never meet, but whose words have guided me through every asana, every thought, every breath on my Yoga mat, since I discovered his work. B.K.S. Iyengar: a man himself well acquainted with adversity, illness and sorrow.

He’s seen it all—starvation, privation, degradation, disillusionment, shattering injury, and loss—and he is the world’s greatest living Yogi. Still. At 93.

“In my life,” writes Guruji Iyengar, in Light on Life, “I count among my greatest blessings my early ill health, poverty, lack of education, and the harshness of my guru. Without these deprivations, I might never have held on so faithfully to yoga. When everything else is stripped away, the essential is revealed [italics mine].”

Well, pretty much everything, within my body, has been stripped away, as I write. But, like the limbless knight of “Monty Python & The Holy Grail,” I’m still hopping on my stumps, apparently. I come from stubborn stock.

My mother, another Elizabeth, who died in 1972 of Stage IV colon cancer, said something in the last months of her life that will always stay with me, blow me away, and inspire me (in times like this). Dying, and pretty damned horribly, she thanked her Creator for her cancer, without which she said she would never have learned certain, to-her-essential lessons.

Oy!

With teachers like Beth and B.K.S., how can I let a mere broken back and, Pshaw!, case of mono stop me?

Well, until this morning, easily, apparently: I’ve been lying in bed on a heating pad, full of Advil and angst, mightily pissed off at the world.

Today, however, something shifted for me, I washed down one of my innumerable Yoga mats with Lysol, got out my props (chair, blocks, belt, bolster—I’d need all of them) and did approximately six asana (before retreating to my heating pad).

Halleluiah: a home practice!

In point of fact, because it involves sitting in an evil, “Western” chair—and sitting, in and of itself, is THE anti-asana nonpareil)—I can only type what I’m writing to you here in short bursts. So, this column is not so much a column, as a congeries of paragraphs.

And my home Yoga practice, even on this first day, lasted about 10 minutes.

A congeries of precisely five asana.

Still, I did it. I did about half of one of Iyengar’s suggested sequences of asana especially designed for fatigue: Viparita Karani, Supta Baddha Konasana, Supta Virasana (a bitch, today!), Adho Mukha Svanasana, and “Chair” Sarvangasana. Then, I gave up the ghost for a while.

I’ve been doing Iyengar Yoga for so many years, in classrooms—where I unabashedly love the shared energy, the great gift of being-in-asana with other human beings, and, when I’m the student, the being taught even more, the being corrected—that, to roll out my mat at home, alone, especially in my weakened, pitiful and whiney current state is just especially hard.

But, and here’s the kicker, if one does not establish (or, in my own case, re-start) a home practice, one does not, in essence, do Yoga. That’s me, Elizabeth, speaking. Not Iyengar. But it’s something I’ve come to believe fully.

Like meditation, like prayer, it’s the Yoga one does in private, the deep, daily work with no one but God in attendance, that moves the body towards the spirit.

B.K.S. Iyengar has written so many divinely inspiring books. I think I have them all here in my Yoga library. They’re broken-spined and underlined: Light on Yoga, Light on Pranayama, Light on Life, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, The Tree of Yoga, etc., etc., as well as the “Iyengar spin-off books,” written, with Guruji’s approval and participation, by certain advanced students.

The book I use, at home, and in teaching beginners, is Silva, Mira and Shyam Mehta’s Yoga: The Iyengar Way, because it is portable, beautifully organized, has lots of clear, instructive photographs, and includes four full “Courses” of asana, plus “Remedial Programs,” which cover the gamut of what I can do, at home, or on the road, without a rope wall or an advanced Iyengar teacher.

After all these years, my body knows many, many of the necessary “moves.” I’ve absorbed, in my cells, “the teaching.” But only practice, practice, practice can, might, restore flexibility and health, now.

I’m a year—a long year—away from the spiritual athlete I was on 19 May 2010, but I still believe I can work my way back to an approximation, a rough, rough approximation, of what Mr. Iyengar embodies for me, still, at age 93.

The man is 93, and still makes almost all of us look like kindergartners on the mat.

On Page 1 of Light on Yoga, Iyengar quotes from the Bhagavad Gita, one of mankind’s holiest texts. He writes: “Sri Krishna explains to Arjuna the meaning of Yoga as a deliverance from contact with pain and sorrow. It is said: ‘When his mind, intellect and self (ahamkara) are under control, freed from restless desire, so that they rest in the spirit within, a man becomes a Yukta—one in communion with God. A lamp does not flicker in a place where no winds blow; so it is with a yogi, who controls his mind, intellect and self, being absorbed in the spirit within him. When the restlessness of the mind, intellect and self is stilled through the practice of Yoga, the yogi by the grace of the Spirit within himself finds fulfillment . . . . There is nothing higher than this. He who has achieved it, shall not be moved by the greatest sorrow. This is the real meaning of Yoga—a deliverance from contact with pain and sorrow.’”

Amen.

And, if you’ve spent years and years and years assuming asana and pranayama, you know Iyengar’s practice can accomplish all these things.

The trick is, simply, to do, to do, to do, and do yet again . . . to return to the mat, alone and, perhaps, in pain, weakness and illness; to remember who you truly are (and could be, God willing, again).

And now, I’m getting the hell out of this chair!