In gratitude to B.K.S. Iyengar (1918-2014)

The news of the death of B.K.S. Iyengar yesterday just reached me.

In 1979, when I was 29 years old, I began taking yoga classes taught in the tradition of B.K.S. Iyengar by Ingela Abbott who had taken classes from him in India.  He was her first yoga teacher.  For many years I took classes from her and then took classes from other teachers she trained to teach in the yoga school she opened in 1987.  Gradually, I developed my own home yoga practice that has continued to this day.  I have taken classes in other yoga traditions in past years, but Iyengar yoga is my foundation.  I have heard teachers in other yoga traditions say that they can easily tell which students have learned the yoga poses in the Iyengar tradition.

My first exposure to yoga -- a positive experience -- had been a single yoga class in the San Francisco Bay area in 1970.  As I recall, that class was taught in the tradition of  Swami Kriyananda -- Ananda Yoga.   My vague goal in the early years of my interest in yoga was to get out of my head and back into the rest of my body.  Unfortunately, I also had eating disorders at that time and most of my focus began to be on trying to lose weight and achieve what I perceived as a "perfect" yoga body.

Yoga taught me about humility and gratitude.  No matter how hard I have practiced, there have always been poses that I cannot do well.  I simply do the best I can and enjoy what I can do.  In the photo below, taken in 2012, I was holding a pose that I believed I could not do at all and suddenly realized I could do when I was 57 years old.  B.K.S. Iyengar said that yoga is for everyone.  I look forward to some form of yoga practice for the rest of my life.  I will never be too old for a yoga practice.  At the end of each yoga session, we practice the corpse pose, and I think of George Harrison singing The Art of Dying.  Yoga on my deathbed.

I was introduced to yoga in the Iyengar tradition at a low point in my life.  In the years after starting yoga classes, I returned to college and finished my degree in English Literature and Art, left a marriage that wasn't good for either of us, created 200 paintings, and began my recovery from eating disorders and alcoholism.  Yoga has played a major part in my healing, teaching me to respect and honor myself and live in relative peace with myself and the world around me.

How can you know God if you don't know your big toe?
(B.K.S. Iyengar)

Yoga is not a religion.  Mr. Iyengar describes it as an "art and a science." That is its great appeal to me.

Thank you, Mr. Iyengar.

Yoga with the Camera and the Birds

The photos were taken during my morning yoga practice a few days ago.  For the last few weeks, because I was not feeling well, I did not spend any time on my yoga mat.  It felt good to be back on my yoga mat. While I was performing the asanas, the sun was rising, and I was unable to resist interrupting the asana practice in order to grab my camera from the table and take some photographs while standing on the yoga mat. The second photo was taken through one of my windows, using the zoom function.  I resumed my yoga practice.  Then the moment came when I couldn't resist leaving the yoga mat and going out on my porch to take some black and white photos.  This is the best of those photos:

Again I returned to the yoga mat, but soon a flock of bushtits arrived, and their wings were illuminated by the rising sun.  Once again, I reached for my camera as I stood on the yoga mat:

If you turn the sound up, you will hear something from "Chants of India," by Ravi Shankar and George Harrison.  My camera is part of my yoga practice this time of year when it is light enough in the early morning to see outside.  There is more and more early morning birdsong as spring approaches.  

Looking east late yesterday

"It is helpful to realize that when we are stuck, blocked, or hurting, there is usually a very good reason. And because there is usually a good reason, we would be wise to uncover it at a pace that is in keeping with our ability to integrate what we uncover. What may appear at first to be a jungle of useless weeds may be weeds that stabilize a slope."

(Donna Farhi), from Bringing Yoga to Life)