For me, Yoga in the West began when I showed up at Patricia Walden’s studio in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the mid-1980s. Walden was not yet the yoga superstar she would become when she made Yoga Journal’s Yoga for Beginners blockbuster videos. She was, however, an amazing teacher, and I knew it. Nonetheless, I developed slowly as a yoga student. It was a hit or miss relationship for a long while. I would go to a class, try to do some yoga at home, watch Patricia’s tapes once in a while. I liked yoga—liked it well before Madonna or Gwyneth or Sting. But I was busy living my 20s and then my 30s, and consistency wasn’t my strong point: who had time?
Eventually, and for many reasons, I developed into a serious student with a daily yoga practice. I began to pay attention to the things that happened on the mat: how my body worked in this pose or that. When my mind wandered. When I gave up, and why. I struggled with poses—particularly with my bête noire, backbends. And I struggled, too, to figure out how I was supposed to get better at backbends if I was somehow also supposed to be “non-attached.” And, finally, in the middle of all that attention and struggle, I found my teacher.
I do Iyengar yoga and my teacher is John Schumacher. To name and claims one’s teachers is a common practice among serious yogis, a sign of respect. As a professor, I’m very impressed by this. For me, claiming John is also a statement about commitment; I’ve spent ten years in his classes, and I’m not going anywhere. John, however, is not my guru. He doesn’t do guru. And that’s one reason he’s remained my teacher; I don’t do guru either. What I do is listen and learn. And practice. And practice some more. And again the next day.
John is a particular kind of teacher, one who says relatively little about yoga philosophy directly, channeling pretty much everything through the poses themselves. Funny, sardonic, a little bit reserved, he is brilliant at structuring a class sequence. He demands attentiveness, and he offers attentiveness in turn. He also offers correction and advice, helping all of us avoid injury and commit to our practice. In the remarkably demanding hours I spend in his class, I learn a great deal, but my emotional state is usually a strange combination of fearless jubilance and despair of my own inadequacy. (Iyengar himself is famously a hard ass; don’t let his winsome smile fool you.) John is a generous presence but a hard teacher. He is not a warm and fuzzy cheerleader for my empowerment. He does not begin class by reading a yoga sutra or end it by reading a poem. I am deeply grateful all of these things.
See, I don’t want to be part of a yoga world of happy talk about unending potential and perfect happiness. I don’t have much time for the kind of self-impressed platitudes that give yoga a bad name. Like so many of the secular, health-oriented, somewhat prideful members of my clan, I do yoga to quiet my brain, not to fill it with nonsense. And yet nonsense abounds. Last month, I dropped in on a class at another studio. As class began, the teacher offered her thoughts about the goodness of the world and its benevolence toward us. “If you just reach out with your intention,” she said sagely, “the universe will rise to meet you half-way.” I almost walked out. The earthquake in Japan had happened the day before.
A few weeks ago, John also took the time to offer some thoughts. There is generally an opportunity at the beginning of class for us to ask questions, but these mostly involve things like where to put your elbow in a seated twist. This time, someone asked a question about the meaning of a yoga sutra. The sutra (II:3) states that “clinging to life” is an obstacle, “a pain-bearing obstruction.” In response, John said that “clinging to life” does not refer to what we do when we fight off an attacker or get surgery for cancer. Instead, clinging is the refusal to accept the reality of our own deaths, not just intellectually or abstractly, but fully and profoundly. To avoid clinging is to avoid the mistakes we make, both quotidian and profound, when we live without a recognition—an embrace—of our own mortality
If this sounds like the yoga version of The Bucket List (or, worse, Tim McGraw’s maudlin country hit, “Live Like you were Dying”), it wasn’t. The point is that the practice of attentiveness—the fundamental practice that yoga cultivates—should lead us to contemplate the full reality of our life, which includes its inevitable end. As the yogi Richard Freeman puts it, “Yoga is a rehearsal for death.” That is the universe rising up to meet you.
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