Tag Archives: Yoga

Lo, the novel arrived, fully formed, in Sirsasana

How bittersweet. My first book, of narrative nonfiction, is about to be published, and I should be thinking only about that.

And yet, about 2 years ago, I had a great idea for a novel. I ignored it, but the idea kept coming back. (As it happens, that is how I winnow idea wheat from idea chaff: I pay serious attention to ideas only once they reassert themselves.)

So yesterday, I was in Sirsasana (headstand) when the entire novel arrived. In my head, as though shaken down by gravity. All at once, fully formed, with idea, characters, plot and twists. Title. Beginning. End. The whole dang thing.

I like it. Love it, actually. And I reckon, now that it has presented itself, I could write the thing in a few good weekends.

But as I said: I should be talking only about Hannibal and Me. And yet, my imagination really wants to go that new place already….

The Buddhism of Christmas

1973

Tis the season when my wife and I, as we behold our children reacting to packages and presents arriving in the mail, exchange knowing glances and mumble something about how “Buddhist” Christmas is.

Spouses, as everybody knows, use a sort of shorthand that is unintelligible (and thus usually misleading) to everybody else, so I will translate. It means something like:

Christmas, like all existence but perhaps more so, torments people through the subtle and insidious mechanism the Buddha first described.

Oh, and what was that mechanism?

As is my wont, I will get gratuitously intellectual about all that in a moment, but let’s start with the actual scenario.

Scenario

Christmas is a time when presents show up unannounced. This is otherwise known as stuff. Uncles, aunts, and other acquaintances send the stuff because, well, it’s Christmas and that’s what one does, whether anybody wants stuff or not.

So the packages arrive — in a household that contains children. In fact, the stuff is meant mostly for those children, and the children know it. How do the children react?

1973

Definition of “child”:

I have read enough academic papers to know that one must, whenever a text threatens to get interesting, interrupt with definitions. Herewith:

Child (noun; plural = Children): A human being who is exactly like an adult but has not yet had sufficient time to practice the adult skill of feigning indifference in most situations of ordinary life.

Back to scenario

Where were we? Oh yes, the presents that are arriving at the door. How do the children react, in the first instance and over the next hour or so?

Exactly as both the Buddha and his contemporary Patanjali (my favorite thinker) would have predicted:

  1. Child A, arriving first: A momentary thrill. ‘Here is something that promises to suspend my boredom. No, I wasn’t actually bored, but now I would be if I do not immediately rip this package open.’ Rips package open.
  2. Child B, arriving split second later: Another momentary thrill. Then: ‘But wait. Sibling has got a head start. She can’t have more thrill. It’s my thrill. Must have.’ Attacks package.
  3. A & B: Conflict. Hair pulling. Tears on A. Time Out for B.
  4. A, having played with toy (because it’s already open anyway, so what can you do?), loses interest. Returns to previous activity and temporary balance/bliss.
  5. B, emerging from Time Out, gets his turn with toy. Notices that A has lost interest and returned to previous activity. Also loses interest and returns to balance/bliss with A.
  6. New package arrives. Repeat cycle.

Sanskrit: duhkha and sukha

Both the Buddha and Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras (as far as I’m concerned, original Buddhism and authentic Yoga are exactly the same philosophy), describe our minds as causing us near-permanent discomfort in precisely the way these toys are tormenting my children.

The word both the Buddha and Patanjali use for this mental discomfort is duhkha.

T.K.V. Desikachar, a great yogi, translates duhkha as restricting or squeezing in this excellent book.

This is noteworthy, because duhkha is usually mistranslated as suffering. Thus, you’ve probably heard the first Noble Truth of Buddhism expressed as follows:

All life is suffering.

Well, actually, the Truth says that all life is duhkha. And suffering is a bad translation (with the effect of turning many Westerners off before they’ve even begun to absorb the rest), because, manifestly, not all life is suffering.

Duhkha is more subtle, so let’s investigate as we usually do: by looking into etymology.

Etymology of duhkha

The Sanskrit roots of duhkha relate to its Indo-Germanic nephews German and English as follows:

duh ≡ du(nkel) ≡ da(rk)

and

kha ≡ ka(mmer) ≡ cha(mber)

In other words, duhkha is, or feels like, a dark room, an oppressive space.

Its opposite is sukha, a happy, good or light space.

The goal of Yoga, Buddhism and all other Indian philosophy is to exit the dark room and enter the light room.

Remember that this entire time we are talking about our minds. Our mind constantly shoves us into the dark room (duhkha) by conjuring disturbances (called “fluctuations” in the Yoga Sutras):

  • distraction,
  • fear,
  • anxiety,
  • anger,
  • craving,
  • jealousy,
  • disgust
  • boredom
  • etc etc

This does not have to be very profound. If you’re a child, the arrival of a package suffices.

In the Bhagavad Gita, all these disturbances are represented by the Kauravas, the vicious cousins of my hero Arjuna.

The Kauravas of Christmas

Christmas is — aside from a time for cosiness, festiveness and so forth — an intense agglomeration and onslaught of mental disturbances.

For the kids, each package creates an expectation of thrill, quickly leading to a disappointment (= duhkha).

Or to a pang of jealousy (= duhkha).

Or simply to distraction from the activity the child had just been absorbed in (= duhkha).

And for the adults?

Definition of “adult”

Adult (noun; plural = Adults): A human being who is exactly like a child but has had ample time to practice the skill of feigning indifference in most situations of ordinary life.

Adults don’t run to the package and rip it open. They put it under the tree. And they don’t pull your hair when you’re opening your package.

But they walk around all December with that jingly-jangly music in the stores and those trees in the windows and they feel … that they should — shouldn’t they? — be somewhere special, with someone special, feeling special. And is the person next to me special enough, is all this special enough,….?

So they yearn, and they crave, and they’re lonely, and perhaps they envy or regret, and they’re in the dark chamber of duhkha.

Sukha

But there’s a jail break.

One strand of Buddhism/Yoga invites you to discipline your mind (ie, meditate) for years so that your mind becomes still, thus setting you free.

Another strand, called Zen, guffaws at the hilarious inside joke of it all and simply says: ‘Snap out of it — now!’

That can be easy, it turns out: You put away the packages and the toys, and you tickle the kids, and you all roll around under the tree, in the beautifully light, comfortable room of sukha.

1973

Patanjali in a lab coat

That modern science is somehow “catching up” with Eastern philosophy (logos uniting with mythos, as it were) is an old idea.

At least 25 years old, if you date it to Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, a good book then which could be even better if written now.

In my mind, this convergence redounds to, rather than detracts from, both science and Eastern philosophy. (It does, however, make the “Western”, ie monotheistic, religions look ever more outdated.)

I will state the premise thus:

The millennia-old traditions of India and China express in metaphorical language concepts that we are today corroborating in scientific language.

Definitions:

  • By “Indian” traditions I mean Vedantic philosophy and all its offshoots, from Yoga and Ayurveda to Buddhism.
  • By “Chinese” tradition, I mean Taoism and Chinese medicine.

(Zen, for example is thus included, for it is basically the Japanese form of the Chinese version of the Indian tradition of Buddhism.)

This premise yields a rich genre of research and inquiry. Here are three examples:

  1. one from within our bodies,
  2. one from the workings of our minds, and
  3. one from the entire cosmos.

1) In search of qi

A dear friend of mine is a successful Western doctor who is now also certified in Chinese medicine. In our conversations, we spend lots of our time “translating” Eastern concepts such as qi (prana in Sanskrit) into “Western” medical vocabulary.

Usually the medical vocabulary is less beautiful and less elegant but also less threatening to people in the Western mainstream, and hence useful. Qi, for example, is simply the (measurable) bioelectric energy in our bodies.

Once translated, seemingly occult claims by Eastern medicine offer themselves much more readily to scientific experimentation. The needles in acupuncture, for instance, are nothing but tiny antennas, which can receive, re-transmit and amplify electro-magnetic vibrations — in other words, qi. We should be able to measure this.

Ditto for the chakras. I’ve written before about how the chakras correspond to Western psychological concepts such as those of Abe Maslow. But in essence, they are simply the swirls of bioelectric energy you get in the ganglia along our spine where many nerves (ie, many little antennas) converge. Again, we should be able to measure and observe them.

2) The monkey mind of misery

You might recall that I awarded the prize of “greatest thinker” in world history to Patanjali, a contemporary of the Buddha in India and the author of the Yoga Sutras. His insight was that happiness, balance and unity (= yoga, loosely) are products of only one thing:

A still mind.

The rest of the Yoga Sutras are, in effect, an analysis of how things go wrong when our minds wander, and a manual of how to return the mind to stillness. (That’s all Yoga is, really.)

Buddhism and Zen aim to do the exact same thing. Our slightly modish concept of “flow” is also the exact same thing. Total absorption into any one thing = stillness of mind.

The opposite of a still mind is often depicted as a monkey mind in Eastern tradition. It makes us miserable.

Now two boffins at Harvard — Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert — have developed an ingenious experiment using (what else?) an iPhone app.

(Thank you to Mr Crotchety for forwarding their article in Science Magazine.)

The app, at random moments, asks people questions such as:

  • How are you feeling right now?
  • What are you doing right now?
  • Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?
  • If yes, something pleasant, neutral; or unpleasant?

The huge sample of data shows, as Killingsworth and Gilbert put it, that

A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

Specifically, our minds (ie, the minds beings sampled) wandered about half the time (46.9%). And it did not matter what people were doing at the time! If they were doing pleasant things, their minds wandered just as much, and not necessarily to pleasant thoughts.

Furthermore, people were less happy whenever their minds wandered, even when they were thinking pleasant thoughts. (Obviously, unpleasant thoughts made them even more miserable than pleasant thoughts, but the point is that any mind-wandering discomforted them.)

And Patanjali said all that in the second sentence. 😉

(However, there is a fascinating twist — a benefit of mind-wandering — that touches on a subject dear to my heart: creativity. I’ll save that for a separate post.)

3) The cosmic parade of ants

In Indian tradition, there was not just one Big Bang. There have been infinitely many. That’s because the universe is born, expands, collapses and is reborn in an eternal cycle.

In metaphorical language,

  • each creation (or Big Bang) is the work of Brahma,
  • each expansion that of Vishnu, and
  • each collapse that of Shiva.

But these three are all part of the same underlying reality (Brahman). Metaphorically, Brahman is inhaling and exhaling, and each breath is its own spacetime, as Einstein might put it.

Because this is hard to grasp, even gods need reminding of it. Hence, for instance, the story of Indra and the Parade of Ants.

Indra

Indra was haughty and summoned a great architect to build a splendid palace. He kept adding requirements so that the architect was never done. Brahma (ie, also Vishnu and Shiva) decided to teach Indra a little lesson and appeared to him as a boy.

Boy: Will you ever complete this palace? After all no Indra has ever completed it before.

Indra: What do you mean, “no Indra”? There were other Indras?

Boy: Oh yes. When twenty-eight Indras have come and gone, only one day and night of Brahma has passed.

And just then, an endless parade of ants filed in and through the palace. Each one, said the boy, was once an Indra.

Our science currently tells us that our universe started (in earth time) 14 billion years ago. But now I read that Roger Penrose, a famous British mathematician, and V. G. Gurzadyan, a physicist, have found patterns in the microwave radiation generated by the Big Bang which suggest that

our universe may “be but one aeon in a (perhaps unending) succession of such aeons.” What we think of as our “universe” may simply be one link in a chain of universes, each beginning with a big bang and ending in a way that sends detectable gravitational waves into the next universe.

The beauty of Ashtanga Vinyasa

Pattabhi Jois

Pattabhi Jois

It should be obvious, but just to make it explicit: I love Ashtanga Yoga and still practice it as often as fatherhood and a day job allow. That’s about three times a week now.

My obituary in The Economist of Pattabhi Jois, the founder of this yoga style, actually reflected that, even though a lot of people have chosen to interpret it as critical.

(Good writing is about coloring in characters in all their rich complexity, not about churning out hagiographies, as I hope I made clear when I wrote about the creation of this piece.)

Anyway, I came across these old videos of Jois teaching some of his students. And I was struck by the sheer aesthetic beauty of the flowing postures.

Here are excerpts from the first (or “primary”) series. There are nowadays six never-changing series of postures (one for each day of the week, with Saturday being a rest day).

And here are excerpts from the “intermediate” series. I find that this usually gets a laugh out of people: If this is intermediate, then what is advanced?

The students in the video, by the way, have since aged and become yoga celebrities in their own right. They are:

(Here are other posts in my thread on Yoga.)

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Arjuna, our inner hero

Here I am playing with Arjuna, the greatest hero of the East, in the form of a wayang puppet I bought in Solo, Java.

Wayang is an ancient Indonesian theater tradition in which the shadows of puppets are cast onto a screen. Solo is its historical center, so a few years ago I went there to watch. Here is what a play looks like from the audience side:

And what story do the Javanese, nominally Muslim today, most like to perform?

The story of Arjuna and his brothers, the five Pandavas, pictured above. It doesn’t matter that this epic, the Mahabharata, is what we would consider a “Hindu” story. It is for Asia what the Iliad and Odyssey and other Greek myths are for us in the West.

This makes Arjuna the Achilles, the Hercules, the Odysseus, the Theseus, the Jason and the Aeneas of the East.

And what does that say about the East’s view of heroism, which I have been exploring in this thread?

1) Arjuna as warrior

At first blush (and deceptively, as you will see), Arjuna’s heroism looks familiar to us in the West.

He was a great fighter, an ambidextrous and precise archer, indeed an Indian Apollo with arrows. He practiced in the dark, the better to hit his victims during the day time. He won the hand of his wife, Draupadi, in an archery contest remarkably similar to the one Odysseus won against the suitors at Ithaca to regain his wife Penelope.

Arjuna was also the biggest hero in the biggest war of mythological India. What Achilles was to the Greeks at Troy, Arjuna was to the Pandavas at Kurukshetra (Kuru’s Field) in northern India.

The Pandavas were leading a huge army in a righteous cause against their own cousins, the Kauravas, also with a huge army. The Kauravas had stolen a kingdom from the Pandavas in a rigged game of dice, humiliating Draupadi in the process. The Pandavas went into exile, but then came back, seeing their duty as fighting to reclaim their kingdom and honor.

For eighteen days, battle raged. Millions died and fewer than a dozen men survived. Blood turned the field of Kuru into red mud. Arjuna and his brothers shot so many arrows into one of their enemies that the man fell from his chariot and landed not on the ground but on the arrows sticking out from his body like the quills on a porcupine.

But Arjuna also lost his own loved ones. His sons and nephews died in the battle, just as the Greek and Trojan heroes lost their friends and family.

2) Arjuna’s fear and duty

But the part of the story that is most famous — rather as the brief episode of Achilles’ wrath in Homer’s Iliad is the best known part of the story of the Trojan War — is a poem embedded into the Mahabharata just before the fighting began. And that is the Bhagavad Gita, or song of God. (Try one of these translations.)

On the eve of the battle, with the two armies already lined up against each other, Arjuna and his charioteer steered their war chariot into the space between the two armies to contemplate what was about to happen. The charioteer was Arjuna’s friend and adviser, Krishna.

As Arjuna gazed from his chariot at the two armies, he suddenly lost his will to fight. He was afraid. Afraid not only of losing his own life, but also for the lives of his “fathers, grandfathers, teachers, uncles, brothers, sons, grandsons, fathers-in-law, and friends.” Because this was a war within a family. He had loved ones in both armies.

Compare Arjuna’s fear to Aeneas’ despair in Virgil’s Aeneid:

As I see my own kinsmen, gathered here, eager to fight, my legs weaken, my mouth dries, my body trembles, my hair stands on end, my skin burns.

Arjuna dropped his bow and arrows and collapsed on the floor of his chariot, sobbing.

***

And now Krishna began to talk to Arjuna. Gently but firmly, he reminded Arjuna of his duty. The Sanskrit term here is dharma, and it seems (in this context) pretty close to Aeneas’ Roman virtue of pietas (“piety” derives from it but has come to mean something different).

3) Arjuna’s mind

What follows in the Gita is history’s most fascinating dialogue about how to yoke (as in yoga) the human mind into harmony with its situation.

Arjuna tells Krishna (as we all might say every day about our own minds) that his mind is

restless, unsteady, turbulent, wild, stubborn; truly, it seems to me as hard to master as the wind.

Krishna in turn teaches Arjuna how to make his mind calm, as a coach might try to get an athlete into “the zone”. (As it happens, Krishna’s advice is the same as Patanjali’s, which is why those two texts together are considered the foundation of Yoga.)

What, in a nutshell, does Krishna tell Arjuna?

To “let go”. To let go his fears of what might happen the next day, to let go the worries, the anxiety, and also the hopes and anger, and all the rest of it. In fact, Krishna wants Arjuna to

let go of all results, whether good or bad, and [to be] focused on the action alone… [to] act without any thought of results, open to success or failure. This equanimity is yoga.

4) Arjuna in your mind, my mind

And this is the essence of Arjuna’s heroism: He shows us, with the help of his divine “inner voice” of Krishna, how to make our minds calm so that we can go on with life whenever it seems to overwhelm us.

Arjuna’s heroism is, like Aeneas’ but more so, an inner victory.

In fact, this applies at an even higher level. Here is how Mohandas Gandhi explained why he, a proponent of non-violence, saw truth in this story of war:

Under the guise of physical warfare it described the duel that perpetually went on in the hearts of mankind, and that physical warfare was brought in merely to make the description of the internal duel more alluring.

Arjuna, it turns out, is meant to be a part of my mind and your mind and everybody’s mind. It is the clearest and best state of mind, called buddhi (as in: Buddha).

His brothers correspond to other positive states of mind (the ancient Indians were very precise on the subject), And all five were married to Draupadi, whom yogis understand to be Kundalini, the coiled feminine energy at the base of the spine. Freud called it libido, the Greeks called it Eros.

The Kauravas, the evil cousins, are the negative states of mind — anger, hatred, greed, vanity, envy, arrogance, fear and so forth.

So there it is:

  • Kurukshetra is the battlefield of our own minds, every day.
  • Arjuna’s struggle is our daily struggle to let the noble in us prevail over the base, the serene over the angry, the courageous over the fearful.
  • Arjuna is the hero in us.
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On English (and other dialects of Sanskrit)

I mentioned en passant in the previous post that the Sanskrit word vira, hero, is related to the Latin vir, man, and thus to our virtue and virility. And, of course, to the Modern Hindi vir, brave. (Thank you, Susan.)

Well, that sort of thing brings out the language geek in me, and I can’t help myself. There is something beautifully mysterious in this common Indo-European heritage (pictured above just after the fall of the Western Roman Empire) of our Western languages and this Eastern Ur-language, Sanskrit. It is like visiting very distant relatives and suddenly seeing a nose, a toe, a tilt of the head or an allergic sneeze that is exactly like your own and makes you imagine the stories of the past that unite you.

So indulge me in some word play.

The easiest way to compare languages is by counting to ten in them. Look how incredibly similar most of these word roots have stayed across millenia and continents:

Sanskrit
 Latin French German English

ekam
unus un eins one

dve
duo deux zwei two

trini
tres trois drei three

catvari
quattuor quatre vier four

panca
quinque cinq fünf five

sat
sex six sechs six

sapta
septem sept sieben seven

astau
 octo huit acht eight

nava
novem neuf neun nine
dasa decem dix zehn ten

But the real magic starts when you compare more meaningful words, because then you see not only their etymology but the genealogy of concepts and meanings (this used to be a hot field, called philology, and is how Nietzsche arrived at his philosophy about the evolution of morals).

Maya

Since I used the word magic, let’s start there. It “comes from” the Sanskrit word maya, whence the Latin magicus, French magique, German Magie.

Of all these, the Sanskrit word is by far the most interesting and nuanced and deep. It points to a philosophical and religious concept. Maya means magic in the sense of cosmic illusion, the metaphysical head-fake that our senses play on us. We think we exist in our mortal bodies in this changing world, but if we pierce the magic (maya) by making our minds completely still, we realize that there is only pure energy (Brahman) and our soul (Atman) merges into this void.

Bonus: Compare that last word, Atman (soul) with the German atmen (breathe).

Yoga

Yoga not only means, but is the root of, union. But it gets more interesting. Yoga is also related to the Latin junctio, French joindre, English join.

Its Germanic descendants resemble it even more closely: German Joch, English yoke. (English, as is its wont, gets the root twice, once via Saxon and once via Norman French.)

A yoke at first does not seem very yogic. But if you think about it, that’s a matter of technological connotation. We yoke an ox to a cart, thereby imprisoning him. But in yoga, you yoke (connect, join, unite) your breath to your mind, thence to your soul (Atman), and thence to one-ness or union (Brahman), thereby liberating yourself.

Maharaja

Maharaja means great king in Sanskrit. So it has two words: maha (great) and raja (king). Now recognize:

  • maha → Latin magnus (great), French majeur, German macht (might), English might & major
  • raja → Latin rex/regina (king/queen), French roi, German Reich/reich/reichen (empire/rich/reach), English rich, reach, regal, royal

And so it goes on and on and on…

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Stupid yoga, smart yoga, and life

David Williams, 1970s

That’s David Williams, who went to India in the 1970s and met Pattabhi Jois, becoming the first non-Indian to learn Jois’ entire system of asanas (postures), now called Ashtanga.

Today he lives in Maui, halfway up to its spectacular volcanic crater, and that’s where my wife and I caught up with him a few years ago. We were in Maui and called him. He said ‘come over’. We went to his house. He showed us some pictures of himself in pretzel positions during the 1970s and 80s.

Then he chased out his three Bernese mountain dogs and we threw down our mats in his garage, where he taught us Ashtanga yoga for the next couple of hours. Later, we went to get some Vietnamese food and heard his yarns from yonder.

He told us a lot that day that my wife and I still talk about. With his thick Carolinian drawl, David is simultaneously wise and funny. One issue that he has strong opinions about is hurting yourself.

Western yogis today–the kind you see with tight Prana pants stretched around their firm buttocks, mat under one arm, Starbucks Venti Latte in the other–hurt themselves a lot. All the time, in fact. I have hurt myself.

‘Of course,’ you say. ‘Yoga is stretching, so sometimes you overdo it and hurt yourself.’

Wrong!

As David put it to us: If you went to a ‘real’ yogi on some Himalayan mountain top and told him that you had injured yourself, he would not understand. He would look at you as though you were crazy. It would sound as stupid to him as it would sound to your pastor if you told him that you had hurt yourself praying.

The dumbest and most dangerous “yogi” in the world

Which brings me to this article in the New York Times about “yoga competitions” and to a man named Bikram Choudhury. I wrote about Bikram in The Economist a few years ago, but that was in the Business section and I had to give it that kind of slant. Today, let’s talk about something more important.

Bikram is an extremely smart businessman–he has made Bikram, a specific series of asanas in a hot room, into a big brand.

He is also an unbelievably stupid and dangerous “yogi”. He’s not a Yogi at all, really. And you need look no further than this nonsense about ‘yoga competitions’, which–surprise!–was his idea. He and his wife want to make yoga an Olympic sport, in fact.

Introducing: Satya and Ahimsa

As regular readers of The Hannibal Blog may remember, yoga is really about stilling your mind, as Patanjali described it.

Yes, in order to do that, you might want to prepare yourself physically–ie, with asanas–because, as the Roman poet Juvenal said, mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body. But you want to spend just as much time and effort on the other seven of the eight limbs (= Asht-anga) of yoga.

The first, and most urgent, of these limbs is yama, or ethical guidelines. And two of these are:

  • satya, truthfulness, and
  • ahimsa, non-violence.

Now let me explain to you what, for most people, happens in the first five minutes in a Western yoga studio:

  1. They look around at all the other, fitter, slimmer, lither bodies and get competitive. Their ego (one of the naughty things that Patanjali warned us about) flares up. They lie to themselves: ‘I can do what he can do; I can get into Lotus.’ By lying, they have already dropped satya, and are thus no longer eligible to move on to a higher limb such as asana. They should really leave the room.
  2. Having lied to themselves (and the others in the room), they now become violent toward their own bodies. They pull, push … and hurt. Thus they have dropped ahimsa as well. Now they really should leave the room. But they never do, because everyone else is doing the same thing.

Back to David…

So save yourself some time, money and above all hurt and ignore Bikram. Please.

Instead, find yourself a real yogi, such as David.

When my wife and I met David, he no longer looked like the dude in the 1970s picture above. He looks like a middle-aged guy with long hair–less boring but otherwise as physically imperfect as the average guy his age. And yet (why “yet”?), he loves yoga as much as ever. That’s because he decided years ago that stretching is not what yoga is about.

He wrote an open letter about it. He begins:

… First, and foremost, I hope you can learn from me that in your practice, “If it hurts, you are doing it wrong.”…

Eventually, he gets to this issue of competition (or even comparison):

…I am occasionally asked if someone is “good at Yoga.” I quickly respond that the best Yogi is not the one who is most flexible, but the one who is most focused on what he or she is doing… It is with some sadness that I have observed people “competing with their Yoga practice.”…

After all, he continues, what good is yoga is you only do it while you’re young and fit–ie, “good”–and then stop when you get older and stiffer?

… The key is being able to continue practicing Yoga for the rest of your life. … those who continue are the ones who are able to figure out how to make it enjoyable… The others, consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously, quit practicing. It is my goal to do everything I can to inspire you to establish your Yoga practice not just for the few days we are together, but for the rest of your life….

…My goal is to convey the idea that the greatest Yogi is the one who enjoys his or her Yoga practice the most, not the one who can achieve the ultimate pretzel position… what is really important is what is invisible to the observer, what is within each of you….

… and onward to life

Now take everything that David and I have said above and replace the word yoga with … whatever you please.

How about sex? Do you ruin your enjoyment of it by competing or comparing yourself? Do you sacrifice satya and ahimsa to pretend that you’re a superwoman/superman? Do you “quit”, or want to quit, when you get older and less responsive?

How about friendship? Are you competing with others and comparing yourself based on how popular you are? Are you investing in acquaintances merely to nurse your “network”, even at the expense of other, real, friendships?

How about… [insert whatever is on your mind]

If that sounds familiar, you have sacrificed satya and ahimsa and are not ready to move on to the higher stages of being alive (= yoga). When you rediscover satya and ahimsa, in a garage in Maui or wherever else, you remember what you’ve been missing.

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From sex to enlightenment in six small steps

ChakraDiagYou’ve heard of the seven chakras mentioned in the Yogic texts. They are energy centers along the spine often depicted as wheels.

I hesitate to bring them up because, well, the topic gets a bit touchy-feely and new-agey. Suffice it to say that one does, during pranayama (breath control) and the higher four of the eight stages of Patanjali’s Ashtanga yoga concentrate intensely on these chakras, perhaps visualizing them in their rainbow colors.

In this post I will not try to prove or disprove that the chakras exist. Instead, I would simply like to point out that Western culture seems to have the same concepts, especially if one views them more metaphorically than literally, as more mythos than logos.

Compare the hierarchy of chakras in the human body to the left to the hierarchy of needs as described so famously by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow to the right. Remarkably similar, aren’t they?

450px-Maslow's_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg

I believe the idea is the same.

In the yogic vocabulary, the root chakra above the anus (essentially in the male prostrate) and the sacral chakra just above it (near the female ovaries) govern our most basic drives: individual survival (eating, excreting etc) and genetic survival (sex).

Maslow lumped these together in his ‘physiological’ needs at the bottom of his pyramid. He believed that if somebody is choking you and you are not getting oxygen, breathing is the only need you care about. Once you can breathe again, you may notice that you are thirsty. Once you have drunk, you may notice that you are hungry. Once you have eaten, you may notice that you desire. And so on.

The next chakra (going upwards) is the yellow solar plexus just below the navel. In the yogic conceit, this governs our will to power. (So I sometimes think of the sacral chakra as Freud and the solar plexus as Nietzsche.) Maslow calls these “security” needs, but you notice that they involve what we consider the trappings of power: money, property, status, and so on.

Now we get into the higher or ‘nobler’ chakras.

In the yogic vocabulary, the first of these is the green heart chakra, which governs deep, selfless, non-sexual love (not Aphrodite but Hestia, if you will). Maslow calls these the ‘love and belonging’ needs for friendship, family and intimacy. Even the color corresponds. (Which is interesting: Green = envy in the West but love in the East.)

The blue throat chakra in Yoga governs intellectual clarity, the ability to communicate, creativity and so forth. This is where artists, scientists, writers and orators draw their inspiration. Maslow calls these ‘esteem’ needs, which is the reward of such things.

Yoga then distinguishes between two more chakras: the third eye behind the brow which is indigo and the source of inner peace and meditative calm; and the crown (depicted in the Western tradition as a halo) just above the head which is the area that is energized during enlightenment (ie, very rarely for most of us).

Maslow lumps them together under “self-actualization”, which is arguably the goal of life and the definition of success. Maslow studied biographies (as I did for my book), and developed a theory about what sort of qualities people have who self-actualize. Perhaps that’s why they called his approach “Jewish Buddhism” at Esalen. 😉

More about self-actualization anon.

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A peek inside editing at The Economist

Pattabhi Jois

Pattabhi Jois

One ongoing thread on The Hannibal Blog concerns the art of writing per se, and thus automatically also the art of editing. In this post and perhaps a few more, I will give you an inside view of what the actual process of editing and re-writing can look like at The Economist.

To me, observing such changes to a narrative and to words, seeing the huge differences that can spring from the subtlest tweaks, is more riveting than the most suspenseful whodunnit. Those of you who like to write may feel the same way. But the rest of you, be forewarned: This post is long, and if you’re not totally sure you’re interested and would rather watch cat videos, you’re excused.

To business:

One of my pieces in the new issue of The Economist is an Obituary of Pattabhi Jois, a yoga guru. A few observations before we look at what actually happened to the “copy” (as journalists call text):

  1. For years, I practiced the style of yoga that Jois taught, and was immersed in the quasi-cultish subculture that is Ashtanga yoga. This is why his death meant something to me. At the same time, I knew that this put me in danger! The only thing more dangerous to a writer than not knowing what the heck he’s talking about is knowing too much and being too close to the topic.
  2. This was my first Obituary. I’ve written tons of other types of personality profiles, and love doing them (indeed my forthcoming book is essentially a story built upon character studies). But the Obituary page is the domain of Ann Wroe, one of our best writers and editors, and it is her job to preserve a style, tone, cadence on this page that is just so. It’s as though a chef were being invited into the intimate kitchen and home of a tight-knit family of foodies and told to cook “you know, something we will love.” Is it more important to cook your best dish, or to know the family?

What happened is that I sent one version, heard back from Ann with suggestions, and then sent a very different (!) second version. Ann then did something that is rare at The Economist (usually an editor will change only one or two words in my copy): She wove my two versions into a new third version. Something very interesting happened in that process:

Version 1 (my raw copy)

Pattabhi Jois, a yoga teacher, died on May 18, aged 93

YOGA has entered the mainstream of Western society, at least the urbane bits of it, and one sure sign is that its practitioners have splintered into separate and sometimes competitive tribes. In spas, resorts and studios from Byron Bay, Australia, to Big Sur, California, and wherever else one might also expect Priuses on the roads and organic kale on the tables, the question is less likely to be “Do you do yoga?” than simply “Ashtanga or Iyengar?”

If the answer is Ashtanga, that has everything to do with Pattabhi Jois. The word, meaning “eight limbs”, causes some confusion. Properly used, it describes the stages which all yogis need to traverse to reach enlightenment, only one of which, asana or “postures”, involves the physical stretches and balancing poses that Westerners associate with yoga. These days, however, Ashtanga means simply the style of postures taught by Pattabhi Jois.

For it was his luck, as a twelve-year-old Brahmin boy in the 1920s, to see those postures demonstrated most beautifully by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, a charismatic yogi who performed them in a flowing series that was stunning in its grace, ease and power. Jois, able-bodied and strong, became Krishnamacharya’s student the very next day.

They called this vigorous style of yoga “vinyasa” because each movement was synchronised with one inhalation or exhalation. Each practice session began, usually at day break, with sun salutations toward the east until Jois was sweaty and hot. Then followed a never-changing sequence of standing postures to loosen up the joints.

Fully warmed up, Jois then began one of several series—progressively more challenging on each day of the week–of “seated” postures. In fact, there was precious little seating, for Jois strung each posture to the next by seeming to float, supported by his arms alone, into another sun salutation, then wafting effortlessly through his arms again and into the next posture. Each practice ended with backbends, shoulder and headstands, deep breathing in the Lotus position and meditative rest.

Jois soon went off to make a living by teaching this style of yoga to other Brahmins in relative obscurity. Meanwhile, Krishnamacharya had other students. One was B.K.S. Iyengar, Krishnamacharya’s brother-in-law.

Iyengar’s situation was the opposite of Jois’s, which may explain the intense and well-known, if rarely acknowledged, dislike between the two men. Whereas Jois was strong and vigorous, Iyengar was sickly and frail, recovering from malaria, tuberculosis and seemingly every other malady that India offered. Over time, Iyengar turned Krishnamacharya’s lessons into a very different style. His yoga was to be medicinal and bespoke for each student, depending on ability. Instead of sweaty acrobatics, the emphasis was on precise, almost mathematical, alignment.

Neither Jois nor Iyengar, however, was the first of Krishnamacharya’s students to become famous. That honour went to a Latvian woman who had the gall to burst into Krishnamacharya’s male, Indian, and Brahmin school, demanding to be taught. To his credit, Krishnamacharya did. By the late 1940s, this “First Lady of Yoga”, known as Indra Devi, had ecletic types from the Soviet Union to Hollywood breathing in the Lotus position.

By the 1960s and 70s, with summers of love and Eastern chic, the West was ready for the real deal: Brahmin men. Iyengar arguably got off to a head start, with the publication, in 1965, of “Light on Yoga”, often called the “bible of yoga”. Jois continued to teach his never-changing series of acrobatic postures until a few daring Westerners discovered him. One of them, David Williams, a hippie with a Carolinian drawl and spaghetti-like ligaments, brought Jois to California for a visit. His style and fame spread from there.

In time, the two branches, Iyengar and Ashtanga, became cult-like and easy to caricature. Iyengar studios drew the middle-aged women, who spent an eternity at the beginning of class simply spreading their toes properly while standing, then built complex poses with straps, blocks and chairs. Ashtangis were younger, more likely to have tattoos and rippling stomach and shoulder muscles. They began by chanting for “Guruji”, as they called Jois, then went into their hot sweaty routine, all doing the same exact sequences but at an individual pace.

The old teacher, Krishnamacharya, found plenty to frown about. He would live to the age of 100 in 1989, going ever deeper into the spiritual depths of yoga and now teaching his own son, T.K.V. Desikachar, a much gentler, more restorative style of yoga called “viniyoga”. He was not entirely happy with the cult-like aspects of the rival yoga camps in the West.

Jois, in particular, is said to have received a chilling sermon once when he met his teacher in later life. What had happened to the yogic principle of ahimsa, non-violence? In Jois’s yoga school in Mysore, it seemed, a good portion of the eager young things from the West were constantly limping around with injured knees or backs because they had received “adjustments” to yank them into Lotus or a backbend. And there were tales about the females receiving altogether different adjustments than the males.

Jois’s older students smiled at his foibles and were discreet about his contradictions. It was well known that Jois was estranged from his sons. One died young, the other emigrated to America and taught yoga, but kept his father’s movement at arm’s length for a long time; Jois’s grandson carries on the tradition instead. Most intriguingly, whereas Krishnamacharya, Iyengar and Desikachar all continued to practice what they taught, Pattabhi Jois long ago stopped doing his kind of yoga himself.

As you can see, the focus or “angle” I chose in this version was the amazing story of the heritage of yoga in the west, which goes back to one single teacher, Krishnamacharya, and has since branched out into different “tribes”. The unity of the origin and the rivalry and tension between Jois and Iyengar were what I thought might be most interesting.

As you can also see, I agonized over all those readers who were not already familiar with yoga. Hence what I would call an indirect opening, in which I was trying to give readers something familiar, before taking them into the arcane world of Brahmins to follow.

Ann wrote back and noted that the piece as it stood was “more about yoga than about Jois; as far as he’s concerned, it’s rather thin. The rivalry needs to be in the background, and J. in the foreground.”

I took this to heart, and completely turned the piece upside down. Preserving the length, I cut out almost everything about the lineage as such, and now went with a direct opening. Starting and ending with the man himself, with only a few side-trips along the way into yoga, would keep the focus squarely on Jois, as it should be. So I sent me second version:

Version 2 (my raw copy):

Pattabhi Jois, a yoga teacher, died on May 18, aged 93

A SMALL, smiling, potbellied Indian man in his undershirt and Calvin Klein shorts, Pattabhi Jois stood at the head of his yoga classes and counted, using Sanskrit numbers and broken English commands: “Ekam, inhale; dve, exhale; trini, inhale; catavari, exhale.” Before him, the lithe, mostly young and slim bodies stretched and balanced and swung through the air to the rhythm set by Jois, or “Guruji” as they affectionately called him. Their breathing was deliberate and audible, like Darth Vader’s; their perineal muscle flexed; their gaze fixed; their sweat dripping in rivulets.

This was just how Jois liked it. The ultra-athletic style of yoga he taught, known to his students as Ashtanga, was about generating intense internal heat to purify and cleanse the body. Jois disdained the fastidious and perfectionist alignment of postures that some of his rivals practiced in chilly yoga studios. To Jois, yoga was “99% practice and 1% theory,” as he liked to say with his squeaky and mischievous voice. Do the same sets of poses again and again, he believed, and the body will, over time, supply its own grace.

The yoga poses came in sets and sequences that never varied. They did not change when he taught his daughter’s son, whom he was grooming to carry on the tradition after losing one son to death and growing distant from another. Nor did they vary for new, pale and stiff arrivals from the West to Jois’s school in Mysore, India; nor for the Hollywood celebrities, from Madonna to Sting and Gwyneth Paltrow, who made the pilgrimage to catch Guruji on one of his world tours.

What changed was only how many of the six sequences—in theory, one for each day of the yoga week–the student was able and allowed to do. Each set had a theme. The first, with many forward bends, was cleansing and calming; the second, with lots of back bends, was very stimulating, and so on. Even the first series had its acrobatic moments, but the later ones began looking otherworldly in their contortions. It was said that only a handful of people in the world could do all six.

Jois first saw these yoga postures performed in one connected sequence in the 1920s, when he was twelve, as he was watching a demonstration by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, a charismatic guru who would teach all the major yogis who later brought yoga to the West. Jois was electrified. He became Krishnamacharya’s student the very next day.

Jois was young, flexible and strong, and Krishnamcharya wanted to challenge him physically to keep him from getting bored. So they developed their style and called it “vinyasa” because each physical movement was synchronised with one inhalation or exhalation. Each practice session began, usually at day break, with sun salutations toward the east until Jois was sweaty and hot. Then followed that day’s sequence, and then shoulderstands, headstands, deep breathing in the Lotus position and meditative rest.

The word Ashtanga was not originally meant as a brand for this, or any, particular style. Meaning “eight limbs”, it came from Patanjali, the ancient sage of yoga, and described all the stages which yogis must traverse to reach enlightenment, only one of which, asana or “postures”, involves the stretches and balancing poses that Westerners associate with yoga. Krishnamacharya never in the hundred years that he lived lost sight of the other seven limbs, and was quite hoping that his students would not either.

As Jois went off to make a living by teaching what he had been taught—initially in obscurity, and only to other Brahmin men—Krishnamacharya had other students. One of these was B.K.S. Iyengar, his brother-in-law. Iyengar’s situation was the opposite of Jois’s, which may explain the intense and well-known, if rarely acknowledged, dislike between the two men. Whereas Jois was strong and vigorous, Iyengar was sickly and frail, recovering from malaria, tuberculosis and seemingly every other malady that India offered.

So Iyengar developed a very different style. His yoga was to be medicinal and bespoke for each student, depending on need. Instead of sweaty acrobatics, the emphasis was on precise, almost mathematical, alignment. From the 1960s onward, Jois’s and Iyengar’s styles would both spread forth and multiply in the West, but take the form of very different subcultures. A caricature of an Iyengar class might have middle-aged ladies spending an eternity studying how to spread their toes properly while standing, before building complex poses with straps, blocks and chairs. The “Ashtangis” might be younger and more likely to have OM tattoos and rippling shoulder muscles.

Jois and Iyengar also had opposite intellectual inclinations. Iyengar’s is a deep intellect. He is a prolific writer and his 1965 book “Light on Yoga” is sometimes called the “bible of yoga.” Jois, by contrast, only smirked when asked about the deeper reasons for his methods and quirks, looking bemused to some, evasive to others. Why, for instance, did he insist that one must enter the Lotus position right leg first? “Practice and all is coming,” Jois would say, leaving it at that.

Among his followers, Jois inspired a loyalty that became cult-like. Authentic “Mysore-style” Ashtanga classes in the West begin with Sanskrit chanting to a picture of Guruji. But some of his students have become estranged over the years and alive to ironies and contradictions.

What happened to the yogic principle of ahimsa, non-violence? A good portion of Jois’s students seemed constantly to be limping around with injured knees or backs because they had received “adjustments” yanking them into Lotus, the splits or a backbend. Or the yogic principle of brahmacharya, sexual continence? There were rather a lot of tales about the females receiving altogether different adjustments than the males. Most mysteriously, why had Jois himself, to all appearances, stopped decades ago to practice the yoga style that he was teaching?

As you can see, there is now much more about Jois, some direct speech, and still quite a bit about the contrast with Iyengar, because I thought that contrast brought out the character of Jois (who was not exactly an open book).

I personally much preferred this second version, including its opening, to my first and was quite confident that Ann would go with it.

Instead, she wove paragraphs from the two together, and put in smatterings of information that she had picked up on her own. Most interestingly, she opted for my original opening. And thus you have the piece as it is now published:

Version 3 (edited and published):

Pattabhi Jois, a yoga teacher, died on May 18th, aged 93

ONE sure sign that yoga has entered the mainstream of Western society, or at least the urbane bits of it, is that its practitioners have splintered into separate and sometimes competitive tribes. In spas, resorts and studios from Byron Bay, Australia to Big Sur, California, and wherever else one might expect Priuses on the roads and organic kale on the tables, the question is less likely to be “Do you do yoga?” than simply “Ashtanga or Iyengar?”

If the answer is Ashtanga, that has everything to do with Pattabhi Jois—“Guruji”, as his disciples called him. The word Ashtanga, “eight limbs”, originally meant the eight stages yogis must traverse to reach enlightenment, only one of which, asana or “postures”, is the sort of thing Westerners associate with yoga. But used in Mr Jois’s way, which is how most Westerners understand it now, Ashtanga meant stretching, balancing and swinging to the relentless rhythm set by a little, smiling, potbellied man in an undershirt and Calvin Klein shorts, crying “Ekam, inhale! dve, exhale! trini, inhale! catavari, exhale!”, until every member of the class was breathing like Darth Vader and running with rivers of sweat.

This was just how Mr Jois liked it. The intense internal heat generated by his sort of yoga was meant to purify and cleanse the body. For him, yoga was “99% practice and 1% theory”, as he liked to say in his squeaky, mischievous voice. Though he was the son of a Brahmin priest, and knew the teachings, anyone asking him for deeper philosophy would get a smirk in reply, or a scrap of his famously broken English. Why, for instance, did he insist that one must enter the Lotus position right leg first? “Practice and all is coming,” Mr Jois would say, and leave it at that.

He disdained the fastidious and perfectionist alignment of postures that some of his rivals practised in chilly yoga studios. He scorned Iyengar, the careful and medicinal branch of the art which, like his, arrived in the West in the 1960s, in which middle-aged ladies spent an eternity studying how to spread their toes properly while standing, before building complex poses with straps, blocks and chairs. His Ashtangis were younger and fitter, more likely to have Om tattoos and rippling shoulder muscles, and to start their exercises with a chant of “Guruji!” to a portrait of him pinned up on the wall.

His yoga poses came in sets and sequences that never varied. Do the same sets again and again, Mr Jois believed, and the body would, over time, supply its own grace. The poses did not change when he taught his daughter’s son, whom he was grooming to carry on the tradition after losing one son to death and growing distant from another. Nor did they vary for new, pale, stiff arrivals from the West at his school in Mysore, in India; nor for the Hollywood celebrities, from Madonna to Sting and Gwyneth Paltrow, who made the pilgrimage to catch Guruji on one of his world tours.

What changed was only how many of the six sequences—in theory, one for each day of the yoga week—the student was able and allowed to do. Each set had a theme, and they got harder and harder. The first, with many forward bends, was cleansing and calming; the second, with lots of back bends, was stimulating, and so on. The later ones were otherworldly in their contortions. It was said that only a handful of people could do all six.

Saluting the sun

Mr Jois first saw these yoga postures performed in one connected sequence in the 1920s, when he was 12. He was watching a demonstration by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, a charismatic guru who would teach all the principal yogis who later brought yoga to the West. Electrified, he became Krishnamacharya’s student the next day. His teacher made him start at daybreak, with sun salutations towards the east until he was sweaty and hot. Then followed postures, shoulderstands, headstands, deep breathing in the Lotus position and meditative rest. Strong, flexible and easily bored, the boy had found a discipline that challenged him.

After running away from his village with two rupees in his pocket, Mr Jois eventually managed to study at Mysore and then began to pass on what he had learnt. At first he taught in obscurity, in one small room with a grubby carpet, and only other Brahmin men. But from the late 1960s onwards, as the perfume of joss sticks drifted over Western civilisation, yoga caught on there too. A hippie fan brought him to California for a visit in 1975, and his fame spread.

Among his followers, Mr Jois inspired a cultish devotion. But his students were not unaware of their teacher’s contradictions. What had happened, for example, to the yogic principle of ahimsa, non-violence? A good number of Mr Jois’s students seemed constantly to be limping around with injured knees or backs because they had received his “adjustments”, yanking them into Lotus, the splits or a backbend. And what about the yogic principle of brahmacharya, sexual continence? Women followers, it was said, received altogether different adjustments from the men. Most mysteriously, why had Mr Jois himself apparently stopped practising his sort of yoga decades ago? Was that another instance of the wisdom of the East?


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Forgetting to breathe

So here I have been, waxing philosophical about Patanjali, the great sage of Yoga, and his fundamental insights about the human mind.

Well, I’ve been a hypocrite. Because, as I have been noticing all this week, I am barely remembering to breathe. And breathing properly is the way to calm and clear the mind, as Patanjali taught us. So my mind, you can infer, is anything but calm and clear. I am too worried (about something that I may or may not share anon).

A few years ago, I took videos such as this one seriously, and actually did pranayama (breath exercises).

But paying attention to breathing is amazingly hard work. So, because I’m lazy, I gave up.

Then life pitches you a few tough ones, and off you go, breathing like a dog: shallow, top-of-the-lungs, in-out. You become a wreck.

It’s a pity that breathing, or the concentration that it requires, is such hard work. Otherwise, I might actually learn the lessons by Patanjali that I like to tout. Ironic.

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