I know Bob wasn’t talking about yoga, but what do we mean when we describe an asana practice in this way? We might mean that a class is suitable for beginners, or for people who lack confidence in their body’s capacity to move, or perhaps for people who have injured themselves or are living with pain or illness.
Seen in this way, we might understand the words simple and gentle to mean easy and unchallenging. If we believe that to make progress in yoga means to do more difficult postures, we might think this type of practice is not for us.
Many years ago, I went to a class with a teacher I had not met before. He was teaching as part of a summer school organised by a group of local teachers, among them my beloved regular teacher. A different guest teacher led the class each week, and we were introduced to some really interesting and varied teaching styles and themes. The classes were large, and there were lots of unfamiliar faces. This particular week, a student got up and noisily left the class after about 20 minutes, complaining it was not what she had been expecting, it was too easy, she didn’t know what she was doing there. I found this a little shocking as I would never have dared to leave a class in such a loud and public way. I could also see that class had not met some important expectation she had of what a yoga class should be like. However, the teacher remained calm and unflustered and asked if anyone else wanted to leave, as it would be a good time to do so.
Years later, and with some experience and hindsight in hand, I can admire his calm response, his belief in the value of what he was teaching, and the way he used the situation to clarify his approach. His style of teaching was slow, requiring care and attention, and the practices were simple, subtle and deep. He used the interruption to explain with great clarity that yoga is all about awareness, and that this is an internal process. So you could be doing something tiny, unremarkable, and be practising yoga, because you were absorbed in it, alert and present to the experience. Whereas something that looked more obviously like a yoga pose, and was beautiful and impressive from the outside, would not be yoga at all if the practitioner’s attention was elsewhere.
He wasn’t a Scaravelli teacher, but it brings to mind Vanda Scaravelli’s instruction: “do not kill the instinct of the body for the glory of the pose” - a reminder that performative practice, where we strive to get somewhere, takes us away from body awareness - and risks injury. Indeed, sometimes yoga can be a dangerous pursuit, and there are plenty of practitioners - and teachers - who have hurt themselves by trying to get into a pose before they are ready, or by repeatedly pushing their bodies to the limits of tissue tolerance.
What I’m getting around to saying is that how we treat our bodies, and how we understand our asana practice is really worth investigating. If we see progress solely as our ability to access more difficult and challenging poses - often called advanced postures - or as an ability to hold longer or go deeper, really we are subscribing to a belief that it is the making of bodily shapes that is key, and we are better yogis if we can do more advanced poses. Perhaps even to a belief that this is essential to progress on the path of yoga.
Don’t get me wrong, bodily strength helps us feel robust, and able to meet life from a basis of physical confidence. (Strength is currently a bit of a buzzword for many movement modalities - and I’ll explore it as a topic in its own right in a post soon!) I am profoundly interested in helping people learn to move well, to be more at ease in their bodies, and to be able to develop their physical skills.
The difficulty is that all bodies have limits (variable and changing from body to body, day to day, and over the course of our lives too), we will all have physical difficulty from time to time, we might become ill and have to contend with a reduction in our physical capacity as we age and, in the end, our bodies will die.
So what might progress in yoga really mean?
Noticing change, learning to perceive nuance, improving our ability to feel ourselves clearly and accurately - these are important skills, born of awareness. They are useful in our asana practice and in daily life, as we interact with others and the world. These skills rely on paying and sustaining attention.
The Sanskrit word “yoga” means connection and one aspect of yoga practice is this connecting with our bodies: we build a relationship with ourselves partly through movement and through the living, changing and unique reality of our own bodily experience. If we see our asana practice in this way, it becomes less important whether we can “do” a pose, and more important that we develop the relationship. We then learn to feel our way our way, listening to the body’s communications with us, without rushing, or straining for a result. This is really the key to progress in our practice: our ability to pay attention and, over time, to deepen our awareness. The miracle of the body is a means, but not our end.
Here I am practising my balance in crow pose: simple, yes, but not necessarily easy. You’ll see that I am taking it slow :)
Very interesting to hear a more detailed approach to your practice Frankie, inspiring
Lovely start the day read - thank you x