Rethinking Our Thinking About Asanas
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RETHINKING OUR THINKING ABOUT ASANAS By Garry Appel I. Prologue. Asanas are one of the eight limbs of Yoga. Yoga is a vast and enormous subject, one I am just beginning to learn. Even the smaller topic of asanas and asana practice is itself multifaceted and quite broad. My aim here is modest – to propose a new way to think about the factors we typically use to associate one asana with another – that is, to categorize the poses. Thus, the work is of limited scope. It does not deal directly with how individual asana are performed or taught, although it may have implications in that direction that I will touch on later. Also, while I recognize the physical body is just a part of the asana practice, I am not sufficiently knowledgeable or experienced to convey any useful knowledge or insights about the subtle body aspects of this topic, although I will touch on this topic in the last section of this work. Finally, this work does not deal with how to arrange asanas together in a sequence or flow; although, again, it may have implications in that direction. When we are experienced in a subject, we inevitably bring our biases and prejudices – our attachments and aversions – to other’s ideas about the subject. Sometimes, the more experienced we are, the more entrenched our ideas become and the more resistant we become to thinking about things in a new way. It is therefore perfectly normal (and often useful) to view ideas critically and with skepticism. Recognizing that, I ask you to consider what I have to say with an open mind, a beginner’s mind. Allow the ideas to develop and then please take what, if anything, you find useful and disregard the rest II. Introduction. In Sanskrit, asana means to sit down. As the third of Patanjali’s eight limbs of Yoga described in the Yoga Sutra, asana was the practice of sitting still to engage in meditation and breathing (pratayama). Patanjali did not describe any specific poses in the Yoga Sutra and little is definitively known about the asanas that existed in the most ancient times. Yoga texts written after the Yoga Sutra mention eighty-four asanas, although only about fifty have been specifically identified. Other texts mention as few as seventeen asanas and as many as 8,400,000. The number of asanas regularly utilized in practice has certainly increased over the last century. Today there are hundreds of listings of yoga poses that can be found on the internet, with most being fairly similar to one another. Most list between one and two hundred basic poses. For example, Yogajournal.com lists about 80 basic poses.1 Yoga.com includes about 200 poses.2 At About.com, you can find more than 100 poses.3 Yogaglo.com illustrates about 100 poses.4 And the list goes on and on. 1 http://www.yogajournal.com/pose-finder/ 2 https://yoga.com/poses 3 http://yoga.about.com/od/yogaposes/ 2 Yoga was barely practiced in India at the beginning of the 20th Century and the reasons are fairly clear. From the mid-1500’s Jesuit Portuguese monks traveled to India as missionaries and strongly condemned yoga. The Portuguese inquisition in India followed the monks and sought to convert the largely Hindu population to Christianity. During this period, which lasted into the mid-1700s, the practice of yoga was banned and, if discovered, often resulted in the practitioner being burned at the stake. British colonial rule, the 200 year period from about 1750 to 1950, followed. Yoga was seen as part of pagan Indian culture which the British endeavored to replace with their own values. It is thus a small wonder that yoga survived at all through this long period. Born in 1888, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya would revive the lost practice and take it in new directions. Influenced by a movement during his youth to revive Hindu culture and traditions, Krishnamacharya studied the ancient practice of yoga from an early age. As he told the story, he went on a pilgrimage at sixteen to an ancestor’s shrine and had an extraordinary vision: “He found an old man at the temple’s gate who pointed him toward a nearby mango grove. Krishnamacharya walked to the grove, where he collapsed, exhausted. When he got up, he noticed three yogis had gathered. His ancestor Nathamuni sat in the middle. Krishnamacharya prostrated himself and asked for instruction. For hours, Nathamuni sang verses to him from the Yogarahasya (The Essence of Yoga), a text lost more than one thousand years before. Krishnamacharya memorized and later transcribed these verses.”5 The roots of Krishnamacharya’s teachings are found in those verses. Beginning in the early 1930s, Krishnamacharya developed Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, which incorporated gymnastics brought to India by the British colonizers with the asanas (perhaps two dozen, according to most accounts) Krishnamacharya had learned as a young boy. The result was a flowing and dynamic practice that was coordinated with specific pranayama and drishti. These early practices consisted of three series of poses, primary, intermediate and advanced. Students were required to master a series before moving on to the next. Students of Krishnamacharya included Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi (author of first best-selling book on hatha yoga, Forever Young, Forever Healthy), B.K.S. Iyengar and Krishnamacharya’s son, T.K.V. Desikachar. Although each of these students is responsible for introducing modern yoga to the West, it is Iyengar’s contributions that are the most recognized. With regard to the asana practice, Iyengar is perhaps best known for his detailed and precise descriptions of individual asana. We as a species have a deep love, and probably a deep need, to categorize things that are complicated. The yoga asanas have not escaped this human proclivity. Over the years various efforts have been made to catalog the asanas. During the latter half of the twentieth century, 4 http://www.yogaglo.com/poses.php 5 http://www.yogajournal.com/article/philosophy/krishnamacharya-s-legacy/ 3 several well-known yoga teachers published lists of the asanas, including Swami Vishnu- devananda’s 1959 compilation of sixty-six6 poses and Sri Dharma Mittra’s 1975 Master Yoga Chart of 908 Postures. Mittra’s Master Yoga Chart Detail of Mittra’s Master Yoga Chart 6 These are listed in an appendix to his book, the Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga, published in 1960. 4 The advent of the internet and the information exchange it has fostered has greatly multiplied details about individual asanas. We now have instantaneous access to thousands upon thousands of pictures, drawings, videos and written and oral commentary about each pose. The thousands of websites providing information about asanas necessarily result in categorization as a way of accessing information about individual poses. The categories used on the websites result from how yogis have thought about the poses. In other words, the asana categories you see on a website give us a direct glimpse into how the author of the website categorizes the poses in their own mind and that, in turn, tells us a lot about how yogis in general think about the categories. When the categories everyone uses appear to be the same, which seems to be the case, it tells us we have general agreement about how the poses should be categorized. Websites, with near uniformity, divide asanas into standing poses, seated poses, forward bends, back bends, twists, balances, and inversions. This is not very surprising because that appears to be the same categories used before the ascendance of the internet. What seems not to have been questioned or explained is why these particular categories have been employed. While I recognize the categories may be based in part on factors beyond the scope of my topic, like the effect of the pose on the subtle body, this categorization nonetheless strikes me as odd. It seems to be based on a mash-up of sometimes inconsistent factors, including body position (back bend and forward bend categories), what body part is weight-bearing (standing or seated categories), the body orientation (standing and inversion categories) and other factors (twists). Also, most poses fit into at least two categories and many fit into three and some fit into none at all. Let me illustrate by giving some examples. Let’s begin with Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I). It is most often categorized as a standing pose. However, it is also a back bend and a balancing pose. Balasana (Child’s Pose) is a forward bend and an inversion. Trikonasana (Triangle Pose) is typically categorized as a standing pose. However, it also involves a high degree of balancing. Ardha Chandrasana (Half Moon Pose) is a standing pose, but also clearly a balancing pose. Revolved Half Moon and Revolved Trikonasana are standing, balancing, twisting poses. So, exactly what factors are we using to place a pose into the traditional categories? No one seems to know the answer to that question and it’s frankly not possible to figure it out by examining how poses are categorized. Is a standing pose one where your feet are on the ground? No. Chakrasana (Wheel Pose) and Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose) both qualify on that count, but no one would categorize them as standing poses. Then is a standing pose one where only the feet are on the ground? No, Vrikshasana (Tree Pose) is a balancing pose, not a standing pose, and Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog) and Prasarita Padottanasana (Standing Straddle) are standing poses even though both have hands and feet on the mat.