B. K. S. Iyengar, Light On Pranayama: The Yogic Art of Breathing, with an Introduction by Yehudi Menuhin (New York: Crossroad, 1985) ("Aims in Life (Purusarthas): 12. Man has four aims in his life: dharma, artha, kama and moksa. Dharma is duty. Without this and ethical discipline, spiritual attainment is impossible. Artha is the acquisition of wealth for independence and higher pursuits in life. It cannot give lasting joy; nevertheless, a poorly nourished body is a fertile ground for worries and diseases. Kama means the pleasures of life, which depend largely on a health body. As the Kathopanisad says, the 'self' cannot be experienced by a weakling. Mosksa is liberation. The enlightened man realises that power, pleasure, wealth and knowledge pass away and do not bring freedom. He tries to rise above his sattvic, rajasic and tamasic qualities and so escape from the grasp of the gunas." Id. at 9. "4. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika (I 16) mentions the six destroyers of yoga practices; over-eating, over-exertion, useless talk, undisciplined conduct, bad company and restless inconsistency. According to the Bhagavad Gita (VI 16) Yoga is not for those who gorge themselves, starve or sleep or stay awake too much. The Yoga Upanisads include bad physical posture and self-destroying emotion, like lust, anger, fear, greed, hatred and jealousy." Id. at 47.).
B. K. S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga, Revised Edition, with a Foreword by Yehudi Menuhin (New York: Schocken, 1977).
B. K. S. Iyengar, The Tree of Yoga, edited by Daniel Rivers-Moore, and with a Foreword by Patria Walden and Manouso Manos (Boston: Shambhala, 2002) ("Though yoga is often considered in the West to be only physical, it is also a physio-psychological and psycho-spiritual subject. It is a science which liberates one's mind from the bondage of the body and leads it towards the soul. When the mind reaches and merges with the soul, the soul is freed and remains thereafter in peace and beatitude. If a bird is kept in a cage, it has no possibility of movement. The moment the cage is opened, the bird flies out and seizes its freedom. Man attains that same freedom when the mind is released from the bondage of the body and comes to rest on the lap of the soul." Id. at 5-6. "The problem with many of us is ambition. You want to perform the asana as you see me perform them, but you forget that I have been practising yoga for more than fifty years, whereas you are just beginning. An ambitious or impatient approach will bring you illness--physical illness or mental illness. So treat the practice of yoga as part of your life, allowing it space within your normal activities." Id. at 28. "Yoga cannot be learnt through lectures. Yoga has to be taught by precept, and in teaching, practical things are involved. . . . " "There is very little value in teachers' certificates. The value is in the teacher's way of approaching teaching. The world is pure, atman is pure, but unfortunately the people living in the world are very corrupt. As yoga became more popular in the West, many people started teaching yoga, claiming to teach the Iyengar method. Some used my name, and unfortunately still use it, to teach things which I myself never taught. . . . [T]he important thing is not the certificate. What is important is whether you are compassionate. You have to be compassionate as well as merciless. The two have to go together, but you must know where to be compassionate and where not to be compassionate in order to help the pupils with their problems." Id. at 163-164.).
Leslie Kaminoff & Any Matthews, Yoga Anatomy, Second Edition, illustrated by Sharon Ellis (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2012).
HOWEVER, TRUE YOGA IS NOT MAINLY ABOUT ASANAS/POSTURES. "THE TRUE AND ENTIRE PURPOSE OF YOGA IS SPIRITUAL IN NATURE." FOR ME, THIS WILL BE A VERY LONG, ENDLESS (EXCEPT BY DEATH) JOURNEY. AS THEY SAY, 'IT IS THE JOURNEY, NOT THE ARRIVAL, THAT MATTERS.' AMERICANS, GENERALLY SPEAKING, MAY BE A RELIGIOUS PEOPLE RELATIVE TO, SAY, EUROPEANS; BUT AMERICANS ARE NOT A VERY SPIRITUAL PEOPLE. MOREOVER, AMERICANS ARE AN ANTI-INTELLECTUAL PEOPLE; AND, IN MANY CRUCIAL ASPECTS, THE "ENLIGHTENMENT" NEVER REALLY ESTABLISHED STRONG ROOTS HERE AFTER THE NATION'S FOUNDING GENERATIONS [E.G., THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION IS, FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES, A CONSERVATIVE, COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY DOCUMENT.] IN THE CONTEXT OF YOGA, MOST AMERICANS ATTRACTED TO YOGA HAVE LITTLE INTEREST IN THE SPIRITUAL OR HIGHER ASPECTS OF YOGA. RATHER, THEIR INTEREST DOES NOT GET MUCH BEYOND MERE ASANAS AS PHYSICAL FITNESS. I AIM TO GET BEYOND THAT, AND INTO THE SPIRITUAL, AND STRIVING TOWARD GREATER CONSCIOUSNESS. THE ASANAS--OR, TO BE MORE PRECISE, THE PRACTICING OF THE ASANAS--, THOUGH ESSENTIAL, ARE MERELY THE PLATFORM FOR PURSUIT OF THE SPIRITUAL.
Richard Rosen, Original Yoga: Rediscovering Traditional Practices of Hatha Yoga, illustrated by Evan Yee (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2012) ("What is modern yoga all about? Traditional Hatha Yoga is what might be called a 'full-time job'--time-consuming, strenuous, physically dangerous, and morally objectionable to mainstream standards in more ways than one. If the practice was to appeal to a popular audience, corners had to be cut so that the average householder-practitioner could fit a practice into her busy schedule, and dangerous or objectionable exercises had to be modified or excised altogether. When the dust of renovation settled, there really wasn't much left to do, so exercises were imported from outside sources--Indian wrestling and Western gymnastics--to beef up the practice. They were given Sanskrit names to make them seen 'yogic'; in this way, modern Hatha Yoga became asana-centric, or more precisely, it became equated with asana. In fact, most 'yoga' classes, . . . books, and videos nowadays are 'asana' classes, books, and videos. I'm not here to criticize this development, a many traditionalists do; I actually believe that the modern 'asana-ization' of Hatha Yoga was a good thing, a way to draw hyper, body-image-conscious Westerners into the fold and get them hooked. According to both the Hatha-Yoga-Pradipka and Gheranda-amhita, the first-stage of traditional Hatha Yoga isn't the behavioral injunctions--the yamas and niyamas as it is in Patanjali's yoga--but asana. What we Westerners have been doing for the last sixties years or so is just that, practicing the first traditional Hatha stage, preparing ourselves for . . . what?" Id. at 3. We have been preparing ourselves for NOTHING ELSE--the asanas have become the end-goal of westernized/American yoga. We are stuck in the first stage, not really wanting to explore the truly deeper and spiritual aspects of traditional or to strive toward higher consciousness. After all, doing such would be detrimental to, and inconsistent, with a life geared toward materialism and making a buck. Traditional yoga is inconsistent with the American Dream.).
SO, WHAT IS A PERSON TO DO? ENGAGE IN A TRUE YOGA PRACTICE!
T. K. V. Desikachar, The Heart of Yoga: Developing A Personal Practice, Revised Edition (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995) ("The practice of yoga gives us the chance to experience the many different meanings of the word yoga. We have already described yoga as a movement from one point to another, higher one that was previously beyond our reach. It doesn't matter whether this shift comes about through practicing asana, through study and reading, or through meditation.-- it is still yoga." "In our practice we concentrate on the body, the breath, and the mind. Our senses are included as part of the mind. Although it theoretically appears possible for body, breath, and mind to work independent of one another, the purpose of yoga is to unify their actions. It is primarily the physical aspect of our practice that people see as yoga. They will rarely notice how we breathe, how we feel the breath, and how we coordinate our breathing with our physical movement; they tend to only see our flexibility and suppleness. Some may want to know how many asanas we have mastered or how many minutes we can stay in a headstand." "Much more important than these outer manifestations is the way we feel the postures and the breath. . . . " Id. at 17. "Yoga cannot guarantee us this or that particular benefit if we practice diligently. Yoga is not a recipe for less suffering, though it can offer us help in changing our attitude so that we have less avidya and therefore greater freedom form duhkha. We can understand the whole practice of yoga as a process of examining our habitual attitudes and behaviors and their consequences." "What suggestions does yoga make about our interaction with others--our behavior toward those around us--and about our attitude toward ourselves? The attitude we have toward things and people outside ourselves is called yama in yoga, and how we relate ti ourselves inwardly is called niyama." "Yama and niyama deal with our social attitudes and lifestyles, how we interact with other people and the environment and how we deal with our problems. These all form a part of yoga, but they cannot be practiced. What we can practice are asanas and pranayama, which make us aware of where we are, where we stand, and how we look at things. Recognizing our mistakes is the first sign of clarity. Then gradually we try to bring about some changes in the way we show our respect to nature or relate to a friend. No one can change in a day, but yoga practices help change attitudes, our yama and niyama, it is not the other way around." Id. at 97. Or, as one of my teachers puts it: "What we do here on the mats carries over into what we do off the mat." From T. Krishnamacharya's Yoganjalisaram: "SURRENDER TO YOGA, FOR / WHERE IS THE CONFLICT WHEN THE TRUTH IS KNOWN? / WHERE IS THE DISEASE WHEN THE MIND IS CLEAR? / WHERE IS THE DEATH WHEN THE BREATH IS CONTROLLED?" Id. at 220.).
YOGA (AND BUDDHISM) ARE CHANGING MY LIFE. OR, RATHER, I AM CHANGING MY LIFE THROUGH MY YOGA PRACTICE (AND MY PRACTICING BUDDHISM).
