(First published 8/3/2008)
Following on from the last chapter, which introduced the third limb of hatha yoga, asanas.
Learning how to perform asanas does take time. I started learning yoga in India, at the start of 1995, and I saw the teacher every day, and would practice in my room every day as well. In the first six months I noticed a big shift in myself and my body, and then as the years rolled by there would be more shifts, some were very subtle. What was clear from what I experienced, and what I had been told by teachers, is that a yoga practice works deeply, gradually, and powerfully. Give it respect and it will respect you.
I was fortunate enough to have the free time to do this, and I do realise that those of you with family and work commitments will find time is limited, but do not lose heart, you will always make progress however much time you can spare to a yoga practice. Though, its worth adding that a few minutes daily, or frequently, is better that doing nothing for a length of time and then suddenly doing a blitz. See it like brushing your teeth, most of us have trained ourselves to brush the teeth daily, and don’t think twice about it. A few minutes of conscious exercise and breathing daily really is recommended.
Renowned yoga teacher BKS Iyengar talks about the stages of performing an asana.
He says we begin by scratching the surface of the yoga posture. Our work is peripheral and this is known as conative action – conatus means an effort or impulse – and the conation is the active aspect of mind, including desire and volition. The first stage, conative action is simply physical action at its most direct level.
The second stage, cognitive action, comes when we are physically doing the posture. When the skin, eyes, ears, nose and tongue – our organs of perception – feel what is happening in the flesh.
Iyengar calls the third stage, communication or communion, when the mind observes the contact of the cognition of the skin with the conative action of the flesh, and we arrive at mental action of the asana. At this stage, he says, the mind comes into play and is drawn by the organs of perception towards the organs of action, to see exactly what is happening. Here the mind is the bridge between the muscular movement and the organs of perception.
When the mind has come into play, we begin to discriminate with the mind, which is the fourth stage. The discriminative mind observes and analyses the feeling of the body. This is called reflective action.
And finally, the fifth stage, when there is total feeling in the action without any fluctuations, when conative, cognitive, mental and reflective actions all meet together to form total awareness, from skin to self, and self to skin, this is spiritual practice in yoga, says Iyengar.
This might sound very difficult and time consuming, but as I mentioned above, it is important to realise that the journey is just as important as the destination. Every little bit of effort helps.
Although it is possible to experience all these stages even as a novice in yoga, this is probably just in one position, at one moment in time, and a fleeting experience of connection and clarity.
Through time, practice and experience one develops the ability to reach the total awareness of practice at will. Though few of us are perfect in this and that is why we call yoga a “practice”. And asana practice is a very useful technique of using the body to practice yoga. And vice versa.
To be continued…
