Good Ashtanga thoughts

I'm seeing this as a companion post to 'Bad Ashtanga Thoughts' posted by dtw on eightlimbsyoga this morning.
(although I've rambled on a bit and don't get around to the connection until the end)

dtw writes

"The problem:

I love Ashtanga, I want to continue practicing it as intended, but over the past few months, I have had nothing but old injuries reappearing, new injuries popping up, constant colds and exhaustion to deal with. My body is shouting at me every time I practice. I know with a young family it is difficult to get the energy to work through a series with all those vinyasas, especially when you are hardly getting any sleep, but I've been pushing through anyway and I think it has finally pushed me over the edge.

The result:

I have ended up searching through my original yoga book - Light on Yoga. I initially wanted to look through Iyengar's advice on routines for fatigue, colds, joint injuries etc... but I ended up looking at how he structured a practice for a typical week and I really looked forward to trying out a practice with no vinyasas for a change, and I'm curious about starting a practice with 10min sirsasana and 10min sarvangasana.

The thought:

Is there a point in you life when you need to make the decision that all those vinyasas and the constant repetition of the same Ashtanga sequences over and over again is no longer suited for you and your lifestyle? Is it time to move on to a different style or take a completely different approach to my practice?

The answer:

? ? ?"
eightlimbsyoga

It feels the opposite for me this week. Over the last couple of years I appear to have moved further and further away from Ashtanga, recently I even wrote about letting go of the practice even Friday Primary, which had stayed constant despite all my ...departures...excavations.

It was simple, I'd had ....a crisis of faith : ) , questions/concerns about some of the perceived or imagined dogma that had seemingly built up around Ashtanga, and at the same time I'd come across Ramaswami's Vinyasa Krama book.

The slower pace of Vinyasa Krama, the longer stays and variations of postures made quite an impact, practice seemed more....profound somehow. That led to trying to find consistency between Krishnamacharya's early and later teaching... well, there is no early and later teaching. We can see all those shoulderstand and headstand variations in that 1938 B&W documentary video pretty much just as we find them in Ramaswami's book. We know Krishnamacharya adapted his approach for Indra Devi and no doubt others. In Yoga Makaranda 1934 Krishnamacharya is writing about long stays in postures, exploring kumbhaka (breath retention ) in postures, just as he is presenting jump back's between each asana and each side of a posture.

When we think about Pattabhi Jois's lineage of practice we look back to his teacher Krishnamacharya and forward to his students and his students students.

By looking back to Krishnamacharya and his Yogasanagalu we can see that he had grouped postures into Primary, Middle and Proficient groups, these contained key postures but from Yoga Makaranda we can see that there were many variations to these postures and that many of the asana could be approached differently, staying for longer, repeating, employing breath retention, exploring variations, these where all options, to my mind they still are.

Krishnamacharya writes of key postures that should be included in daily practice, and given enough time to practice it can be assumed that many of the key postures in the primary group would be included daily. One can see how such an approach to practice develops into a relatively fixed sequence.

I've been practicing Vinyasa Krama for a couple of years now but once I'd learned the sequences of postures, the asana familes ( asymmetric, seated, lotus inversions etc, my Vinyasa Krama practice still ended up having a similar shape to the Ashtanga Primary or Second series I was most familiar with, there's an internal logic to it. My practice is more flexible perhaps, I might stay longer in certain postures and include some variations but it's shape is the same.

Keeping all that in mind we can see pedagogical benefits of a fixed sequence, it's more easily transmittable and you know where you are when your practicing it, each posture leads to the next, that routine too, helps with discipline, a godsend when practicing at home.

And yet at home, once we are familiar with the sequence, we are perhaps free to explore other aspects of the practice, variations perhaps, lengthening the breath even kumbhaka (breath retention), staying in a posture longer we can explore the subtleties of a postures. This strikes me as  part of the lineage, the tradition. Yoga is one of the 64 arts of India after all, it is a skilled and creative exploration... an examination.... investigation.

Practical Philosophy.

But I digress...

This week I've gone back to my Primary and 2nd series after a few weeks of exploring Krishnamacharya's Yogasanagalu and Yoga Makaranda approach. I'm attending Richard Freeman's Workshop at the end of the month so thought I'd better brush up on my Ashtanga. I've practiced along with Richard's DVD's a few times on my days off, and has anyone else found this, there seems so much time in every asana. Perhaps it's the pace of his voice, actual runtime isn't that much longer than any of the other DVD's, there seems time to spare to actually savour the postures (actually I find this a little in Sharath's, one of the quicker runtimes at 60mins yet it never seems rushed).

I've also been watching a few of Mark Darby's video's and taking the time to explore the internal work going on in some of the postures, Breath with Richard, bandhas with Darby or breath with Darby and bandhas with Richard for that matter.... and I'm reminded how rich Ashtanga is in teachers, what a wonderful thing the certified teacher system is, what a glorious accident. 

David Swenson said something in the section of the Wild Yogi interview I posted

"To understand Pattabhi Jois you need to look at my generation of teachers, because we are parts of Pattabhi Jois" (do look at the context to this statement in yesterdays post).

Certification is like tenure, you can't be fired, you get to investigate and explore the practice, rediscover aspects that were passed on to some but perhaps not all and in different combinations, some got this, some that it seems, or teaching that was misplaced, or implicit in the background teaching passed from Krishnamacharya to Pattabhi Jois.

And I'm particularly interested in how those certified and senior teachers have developed their relationship with their practice over twenty, thirty years and more.

Practice as rediscovery of practice.

One of the things I mentioned earlier about coming back to Ashtanga was that it felt easier than I expected, the long stays in the 'Ashtanga Rishi approach' I explored, the variations in Vinyasa Krama, the pelvis and bandha work I'd been exploring with Richard's teaching it all helped, and no doubt a few years experience under my belt, technique a little more polished, shifting weight better, that kind of thing, helps avoid strain. 

Exploring other approaches to practice can be a good thing, if you come back to Ashtanga, you'll bring things back with you as well as a broader perspective, travel is always an education (was that James or Shaw).

But the point as to why I consider this a companion post to dtw's ( finally getting there ), is that the Ashtanga is feeling good.

The Osteoarthritis thing I suffer from now, Ashtanga seems to manage it quite well suprisingly. I start off my first Sury hardly able to touch my knees and in a great deal of pain. I spend a little longer in downward dog ( Krishnamacharya talks of 15 minutes here on occasion but I'm just taking a few extra breaths in the first one, 10 or so) by the third I'm no longer stepping back, by the fifth no longer stepping forward but beginning to float. By the end of the Sury B's I'm moving much more freely. The extra heat generated helps no doubt but perhaps it's also something to do with upward and downward dog and this follows through the whole of the series. I revisited Ashtanga to prepare for Richard's workshop but I may well stick with it again because it seems to be suiting my body. 

Also I have this niggling pain in my right knee from an operation back in my 20's, Ashtanga Primary helps, just as Vinyasa Krama Asymmetric did, but again with the added benefit of a little more heat generated by the practice, England is a cold country ...even in the middle of summer this year.

And you don't have to be all chop chop to keep the heat up, intensify the ujjayi, include some kumbhaka perhaps and you can take a little longer in any posture you wish and still keep the body warm.

So physically Ashtanga seems to be working for me but there's something else.

It seems to be ...disciplining my life more. And this I don't understand. I have a disciplined practice, three hours of asana, pranayama and mediation every morning and another hour, hour and a half in the evening and yet ever since I came back from Santorini I've been eating rubbish, drinking a couple of glasses of wine or martini where as before If I drank anything at all it was so watered down it was like Ribena. A week of Ashtanga and I'm automatically watching what I'm eating, drinking more, it's all very curious. Something to do with the focus of the more fixed routine perhaps?

The problem of course is pranayama. Where does Ashtanga leave my 80 pranayamas. I've gone the pre practice route, doing 40 there before the Sury's and then including them in my inversions at the end of practice which sets me up nicely for a short mediation practice, still not ideal, more thought required.

After the workshop I'll explore shorter Ashtanga practices again, one day up to navasana, the next day the second half of Primary, day after that say 2nd to the end of backbends etc. Still Ashtanga but less postures so I can still practice them as I may want to, longer stays, variations, Kumbhaka occasionally but with more time for pranayama and meditation practice, an integrated practice.

I quoted dtw at the beginning of this post

"Is there a point in you life when you need to make the decision that all those vinyasas and the constant repetition of the same Ashtanga sequences over and over again is no longer suited for you and your lifestyle? Is it time to move on to a different style or take a completely different approach to my practice?"

You could move on to a different style but no doubt sooner or latter will find problems/issues/concerns there also, it seems likely that no style suits everyone all of the time and I've never agreed with 'fitting yourself to the style'. 

Seems to make sense to explore your approach and find compromise (ashtanga is all about compromise, why this posture rather than that one, why this many asana rather than more or less). Ashtanga Vinyasa Krama has enough depth that the approach to it can be adapted one way or another to anyone. You can practice it full-on as a health and fitness, physical transformation exercise or as a concentration/meditation discipline and of course as both together with balanced or changing emphasis.

David said we should get on and practice rather than speaking about it...he has a point, time for practice.

and some Rilke

The Departure of the Prodigal Son (New poems)

To go forth now

from all the entanglement

that is ours and yet not ours,

that, like the water in an old well,

reflects us in fragments, distorts what we are.

From all that clings like burrs and brambles—

to go forth

and see for once, close up, afresh,

what we had ceased to see—

so familiar it had become.

To glimpse how vast and how impersonal

is the suffering that filled your childhood.

Yes, to go forth, hand pulling away from hand.

Go forth to what? To uncertainty,

to a country with no connections to us

and indifferent to the dramas of our life.

What drives you to go forth? Impatience, instinct,

a dark need, the incapacity to understand.

To bow to all this.

To let go—

even if you have to die alone.

Is this the start of a new life?