What does Intermediate and Advanced Series Standing look like? Sharath, Tim Feldmann, Joey Miles.

Sharath

UPDATE: This post doesn't really work, the idea was to show just the Sury Namaskara's and Standing sequences of  practitioners who are practicing Intermediate and Advanced series.

Rather than focus on the advanced series postures themselves I wonted to focus instead on how an 'advanced' practitioner approaches their standing, the same postures we practice everyday whichever series we happen to practice.

But that's still not it, not really what I was after. What I would really like are videos of those who have been practicing for thirty, forty years rather than (merely) ten or twenty, even if they are now only practicing Primary again or even better have only ever practiced Primary. Would love to get my hands on a video of Tim Miller's current Sury or Standing or Nancy's, David Williams, Chucks"s say, or how about Richard freeman's current, day in day out, meat n potato Standing sequence, those would be nice to see. It's hard to find a video that doesn't stress/feature the floaty Matrix jump back to standing, seems to appear in our sury's around the ten year spot (guilty as charged) my guess is that after twenty years or so you drop that again and go back to the most efficient sury you've ever practiced.
There's sharath of course, never one to worry about the fancy flourishes nor seemingly distracted by an obsession with alignment, his videos are for me are about efficiency ( and any alignment arising naturally from the breath).

Anyway here's the post as I wrote it last night

Pattabhi Jois

Jessica Walden and what she does with the breath almost makes me want to reconsider my position on the Ashtanga Advanced series, almost but not quite. I very much doubt I'll bother practicing it again (never say never), come to think of it I barely bother with the second half of Intermediate anymore....  or much of Primary for that matter, around ten postures a practice taken long and slow seems plenty at the moment (except for Fridays obviously). This isn't so much because I'm getting older but more because of my interest in slowing the breath, introducing kumbhaka and longer stays, there's just less time if I want to follow my practice with pranayama, pratyahara and a sit. There's precedent it seems, so perhaps not so strange....

Manju Jois: Well for us it was fun to see my father doing yoga, putting himself in all these postures. You know it was really amazing. He used to pick a posture sometimes and he would like to stay in that posture for a long time. And that’s how he used to practice. And that’s how he started telling us to do that. There’s no need to do millions of postures, just try to master one at a time then you can go to the next one. I really enjoyed watching my father doing yoga. Sometimes we all used do it together too: me and my sister and my father.  LINK TO FULL INTERVIEW HERE

Above Krishnamacharya teaching Standing postures

Supposedly Pattabhi Jois said

"Primary series is for everybody, 2nd series for teachers and Advanced series for demonstration."

It's probably the only saying of his that  doesn't cause me to inwardly groan when I hear it repeated, usually to justify a lazy position or lack of argument. Still, those who end up practicing Advanced A or 3rd  series have usually been practicing for quite some time, I might not be that interested in the series proper but how they approach their Standing, now there's something I like to see. I'm not talking about the floaty Marix bits but the approach to standing of somebody who has been getting on the mat day in day out for years, whichever series they end up practicing. Nice then of Purple valley to divide their videos up so we can settle down and  focus on standing, here practiced by David Robson (with commentary), Tim Feldmann and Joey Mills.

krishnamacharya from Yogasanagalu

The music in the latter two though, really, was that necessary? Call me a purist but what was wrong with the breath, it's a breathing practice after all.

First up David Robson

 

Tim.

LINK

And here's Joey

Sharath in his advanced DVD ( filmed in Movember perhaps), Sury's and Standing run up to 13 minutes then you might want to skip to the 54 minute mark for a look at his finishing.

Krishnamacharya, some Standing postures

What practice feels like: John Cage ASLP ( As slow as possible) and played as fast as possible

Practice, today feels a little like this

but used to feel like....

A Primary and Middle group asana practice along the lines of...

is probably about right (for me personally).

 ''The cadences and everything disappeared, but the flavour remained. You can recognise it as eighteenth-century music; but it's suddenly brilliant in a new way. It is because each sound vibrates from itself, not from a theory.'' John Cage

*

Advanced reminded me a little of Calder ( in a good way).

Note: in the 1930/40s ( Mysore years) Krishnamacharya presented asana in three groups Primary, middle, Advanced http://grimmly2007.blogspot.jp/2012/05/complete-asana-table-from.html

Pattabhi Jois' ongoing relationship with Krishnamacharya - PLUS Workshop Conference with Saraswati

If Krishnamacharya was giving giving Saraswati a teaching certificate based on an examination of the Vinyasa count in 1975 it suggests that Krishnamacharya continued to see this as a relevant approach to practice and that he was supportive* of Pattabhi Jois' teaching methodology. 

I stumbled upon an interview withPattabhi Jois' daughter  Saraswati where she mentions that she received a teaching certificate from Krishnamacharya in 1975. I must have come across mention of this several times but it only just registered, it suggests an ongoing relationship between the Jois family and Krishnamacharya after Krishnamacharya  left Mysore. This shouldn't be a surprise of course Pattabhi Jois had been one of Krishnamacharya's senior students and if we take Hassan into account, no doubt his oldest. However, the only mention I had  come across of their ongoing relationship was a story from Manju where he mentions His father taking a couple of his western students to meet Krishnamacharya ( trying to remember who it was), Manju had come along and mentioned that Pattabhi Jois had pretty much snubbed them.

After a little digging it turned out that Pattabhi Jois' wife Amma, his first 'student', had also been given certification by Krishnamacharya, a pattern emerges. Had Manju also been to visit Krishnamacharya to receive certification I wonder, and was that why Pattabhi Jois had taken one or more of his early Western students along to Krishnamacharya, in the hope of them being offered certification or was that perhaps the interpretation Krishnamacharya had come to (whether correctly or incorrectly) and why he appeared to snub Pattabhi Jois and the students. Had Krishnamacharya considered it inappropriate, was it after this that Pattabhi Jois began to offer certification himself?

Here's the certification mentioned by Saraswati in the interview as well as the link.

“In 1975, my father taught me to teach. I also took examinations with my father's guru Krishnamacharya, and received a certificate. When my family first went to America, I stayed home and cooked”.

http://www.yogacitynyc.com/articles/WeeklyDetails/255


And here's mention of Amma's teaching certificate from Krishnamacharya as mentioned on the KPJAYI website.

“Amma was Guruji’s first Yoga student, and, according to him, she learned up through the advanced series very well. Krishnamacharya himself once tested her on the specific vinyasas of the asanas, calling out the numbers, which she had then to demonstrate quickly. Very pleased with her performance, he gave her a teaching certificate”

"They had three children – Manju, Saraswathi and Ramesh – each who became great yoga teachers themselves. Amma was Guruji’s first yoga student, and was also given a teaching certificate by Krishnamacharya".

http://kpjayi.org/biographies/k-pattabhi-jois

But it gets better, I found a barely viewed video ( or rather audio attached to a slideshow) of a workshop conference Saraswati gave in Kuala Lumpa where she again mentions the certification. later she's asked about the examination, remember this was in 1975 when Krishnamacharya was teaching Vinyasa Krama to Ramaswamni, Desikachar... Mohan. Saraswati mentions that the examination Krishnamacharya gave her was based on the names of the asana as well as, get this, the vinyasa's to and from them. Krishnamacharya supposedly asked her to do Navasana say and then asked her the number of vinyasas and which vinyasa she was in at the time etc. Here's the video I'll see about transcribing the relevant parts in the next couple of days but there are two mentions in the first fifteen minutes.

I'd asked Ramaswami once about the vinyasa's to and from an asana and he said that even though in Vinyasa Krama one might move form one asana directly into the next variation of the asna, leading inot another asana in a series or rather subroutine, the vinyasa cound was always implied, suggesting that one could still take any asana and begin and end at standing.


If Krishnamacharya was giving giving Saraswati a teaching certificate based on an examination of the Vinyasa count in 1975 it suggests that Krishnamacharya continued to see this as a relevant approach to practice and that he was supportive of Pattabhi Jois' teaching methodology. 

*Of course this only tells us that Krishnamacharya was supportive up until 1975 when Pattabhi Jois was still teaching in the old shala (small, 8-12 mats) and hadn't yet travelled abroad to teach. Krishnamacharya may perhaps have disagreed later with the extent and manner in which Pattabhi Jois was teaching non Indians.

It does however suggest, as suspected, that both the early and latter teaching approaches/methodologies seem to be constant with each other and no doubt complimentary.

Here's then a link to an earlier post

One approach to learning the Ashtanga Sanskrit Vinyasa Count..... Sanskrit Numbers and Vinyasa chart with states of asana indicated plus 'meaning of asana'

Encountering T. Krishnamacharya

Krishnamacharya teaching - photo unrelated to post below.

from Revisiting T. Krishnamacharya – founder of modern yoga _ Radhika's blog

"The modern, professional-looking and bustling Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram set up in his memory is a far cry from the spartan house in Gopalapuram (in Chennai) where I first encountered Krishnamacharya, and yoga. I was a young teenager on my summer vacation after my first year out of high school, when I was appointed by my father to accompany my invalid mother, who had suffered successive accidents that had rendered her virtually immobile and almost always in pain, to Chennai. There, Krishnamacharya, whom my father knew through a common friend, was going to use yoga to help her heal. For a young teen to be asked to spend her annual vacation in a city with no friends, and with nothing to do but to escort an infirm parent to some old healer every day, was not the most attractive deal. But my authoritarian father was not one to be questioned, and I resigned myself to my fate.

Every day, once in the morning and again in the early evening, my mother and I would take a taxi from our hotel to Krishnamacharya’s home for an hour’s instruction. He always appeared remote, wrapped in some self-sufficient world that did not require communication with visitors beyond classroom instruction. His was not a severe face; indeed it was a handsome sharp-featured one, with large luminous eyes and an enigmatic smile that lit up his features, although the reason for its existence did not seem to be to enhance social interaction. I don’t remember him ever make small talk, or even show the slightest interest in us beyond addressing my mother’s ailments. But he gave us his undivided and intense attention while teaching, and taught my mother with great gentleness.

Within a couple of days of starting her instruction, he seemed to notice my presence, and commanded me to take my place on another mat. I complied wordlessly; his voice did not give me a choice. For the next two months, every morning and evening, he taught me yoga with the same attentiveness that he showed my mother, even though teaching me was not part of the original understanding with him. He also taught me how to assist my mother in performing her asanas. He demanded the slowest of breathing and movement, and his hawk eyes never left me for a minute, making sure that every movement was executed absolutely correctly. I learnt to be terrified of him, as he was as ferociously strict with me as he was gentle with my mother. But I could also sense his restrained pleasure in seeing me respond easily to the instruction, young as I was and unhampered by ailments; and the perfection that he expected from every movement, and his unrelenting supervision, motivated me to try harder to come up to his expectations. By the end of our time with him, he had even taught me the Sirasasana (head stand).

At the end of the two months, our relationship with Krishnamacharya terminated as abruptly as it had begun. My mother had improved vastly. And I had discovered that I had a naturally supple body. We went back to our lives in Bombay and in due course, I stopped doing my yoga practice and forgot all about the old man who looked, lived and behaved like an ascetic, and who had introduced me to what was potentially a whole new world, a significance that I did not grasp at the time".


from later in the same post

"I was in Pune with my family on holiday, and we happened to drive past a signboard on a gate announcing the B.K.S. Iyengar School of Yoga. On impulse, I hopped off telling my family that I would meet them back at the hotel. It was an intriguing looking campus, with complex yoga postures sculpted along the walls of the compound. I had never been in quite such a place. It looked a bit weird. I saw some lights on the first level, and my excitement mounted as I took the curving flight of stairs going up. I couldn’t believe that I had actually found the ‘source’ of the global phenomenon that was Iyengar! All those people in all those distant foreign countries waiting for him to turn up for a Master class… And here he was, in my own home, so to say…

At the top of the stairs I stopped short in total astonishment. On the wall to my left was a larger than life black and white portrait of Krishnamacharya, hands folded in namaskar, his luminous face and enigmatic smile exactly as I remembered it. I hesitated for a moment, staring at it …after all these years… what was the old man doing here? I raced across the hall to the lone person sitting behind one of the many empty counters.

“Excuse me”. He looked up with the blank clerical face that you see behind every counter in every office.

“The office is closed. Come back later”. And he went back to whatever he was doing.

“I need to know…Who is the man in that photograph?”

No reply.

“Who is he? And what is his connection with this place?”

He looked momentarily startled by the urgency in my voice (and probably as much by my question). But his clerical instinct bounced back. “I told you, no? Office is closed. Come back in the evening”.

I stood my ground and repeated my question twice more before he could bring himself to answer what he clearly thought was a lunatic woman.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because I know him.”

He looked at me unbelievingly.

“Please tell me… why is he here? “ I was almost pleading for a reply.

“He is our guru’s guru”, was all he said.


I felt faint as I turned to leave. Here I was, full of admiration for B.K.S. Iyengar. And of course, for all the right reasons. But, we had actually shared the same guru! How much more unworthy could I have gotten? That, in all those intervening years I had not recognized the value of the instruction that I had received, or the person who had taught me, dismissing him as a crochety old man who had been a friend of my father’s?"

"Why then has Pattabhi Jois presented the practice of asana/vinyasa differently from what his teacher taught"?

I was asked the above question on fb, here's my short fb answer/guess with some links.

"Why then has Pattabhi Jois presented the practice of asana/vinyasa differently from what his teacher taught"? 

I've put up posts about the four year syllabus Pattabhi Jois was asked to teach at the Sanskrit college around 1940 based no doubt on the Krishnamacharya's Primary, middle and advanced group table that turned up in Yogasanagalu(1941).

See this post: Complete Yogasanagalu asana table .

As a syllabus it needed to be relatively fixed. He seems to have found it a useful teaching model so essentially kept it and taught it to the western students when they came. he gave Nancy and David a copy of the syllabus in 1973/4.

Page 1 of 4 See this post : The 'Original' Ashtanga yoga Syllabus given to Nancy Gilgoff and David Williams by Sri K Pattabhi Jois in 1974 Mysore

It's curious re Kumbhaka, I can find no evidence that Pattabhi Jois ever practiced it in Asana other than perhaps kukkutasana (where nauli is mentioned). Manju is adamant that his father didn't and went so far as to say it was wrong.

See this post Manju TT Q and A

It's possible that Krishnamacharya never taught kumbhaka in asana to Jois or the boys of the palace other than perhaps having them chant while holding a posture (which would involve breath retention - see the Manju TT Q and A link above).

Chanting while holding an asana can be considered kumbhaka,  See THIS post

Krishnamacharya may have saved kumbhaka for his private students and patients.

Surely though Pattabhi Jois had Krishnamacharya's Yoga Makaranda on the table beside him as he wrote Yoga Mala, he surely would have explored it himself after reading Krishnamacharya's text, and yet decided not to include it, for whatever reason, in the Yoga syllabus he was teaching at the sanskrit college.

He doesn't even seem to have taught it to his children although it's something I would love to ask Saraswati.

Pattabhi Jois does seem to have mentioned long stays, the Rishi series for example ( David Williams asked what/how to practice after Advanced B) where ten postures are supposedly held for fifty breaths, also Manju says his father would stay for long periods of time in certain postures.

See this post : The Ashtanga Rishi Series

We also know that Pattabhi Jois talked about very long and slow breathing, 10, 15 even 20 second inhalations and equal exhalation.

See this post: 1988 Yoga Journal Ashtanga yoga with Pattabhi Jois interview/article inc. 10 second inhalation, 10 second exhalation

Pattabhi Jois was a realist however and understood that practicing this slowly and with longer stays would take hours, he seems to have been more attached to the fixed sequence and thus happier to compromise with the length of the breath and the number taken in a posture, at least with beginners.

See this post:Research: Full Vinyasa Primary, 10 long slow full inhalations and exhalations in every asana. How Long?

Pattabhi Jois was also flexible with the sequence if the need called for it and in the beginning....

See this post: Flexibility within the system of Ashtanga ; Pattabhi Jois' Yoga Mala

he seems to have encouraged pranayama after asana practice (although adapted the criteria for this perhaps as the numbers visiting KPJAYI increased).

Pattabhi Jois teaching pranayama to Richard Freeman

Afterword.

So some small difference in presentation perhaps but essentially the practice is the same (although personally I suspect kumbhaka to be essential but that's just my own prejudice),

*Movement follows breath, stay for a bit, repeat.

The fixed sequence is a useful pedagogic tool but a wise teacher will no doubt respect your exploration of different options and approaches to your practice over time, which may include taking longer, slower, inhalations and exhalations, staying longer in certain postures practicing half a series to allow time for such explorations of the breath and why not perhaps introducing kumbhaka and seeing how that fits for you.
The teachers job, as I see it, is merely to expose you to these options, especially when they come from within the tradition, to be available for you and allow you the space, hold the space, for you to grow your practice.... even if this means moving away from the approach to practice the teacher may themselves hold dear.

*

* How fast you move will depend on the breath, it's natural to explore, "What if I breathe more slowly, what if I breath more quickly?" as well as to notice the pause between the inhalation and exhalation, the exhalation and inhalation, the natural, automatic, kumbhaka, "What if I hold it longer, what if I try to eliminate it altogether"? And while you stay for a bit, what do you do, read a book, think about whatever comes up, look around the room or continue to follow the breath, to fix one's attention either externally or internally. " ...and how long should I stay in this and what of this...what if I stay longer here, less time there?" And how long to keep repeating, if the rajas, the agitation, is less then perhaps I can repeat less and stay here for more than a bit, for longer, much longer and just follow the breath or focus on an object, the absence of an object. 
And then repeat, daily.