A Tribute to BKS Iyengar
Venture from the known to the unknown. - BKS Iyengar
That is what he did one year ago, at around 3am August 20th, 2015 (India Time). Guruji left his body and ventured a new plane. I'll start this with a disclaimer that I'm not an Iyengar teacher, nor, would I even say I'm a dedicated student of the Iyengar tradition in a studio setting. But he was my first teacher. I will say that I have read all of his books, listened and watched as many interviews as I have been able to get my hands on and always had the fantasy to meet this man in India just to get a glimpse of what embodied, truly embodied yoga, looks like and feels like to be near. Fantasy unrealized.
When I started my journey into yoga well over a decade ago, I had no teacher to point me in any direction. I was from a small town in the middle of nowhere and this was before the internet was a part of our every day. Somehow, in some way, Yoga The Iyengar Way made it into my hands and has been a fixture in my yoga library since. Before there were studios on every corner, videos to download at the click of a button, there was this book, that took me through my "stretches" and made me feel good when I focused on my breath while doing it.
Little did I know at the time, this book, this man, resonated so much more within me than I even knew or gave credit. The book rested on the shelf for more years than it was opened for a long time, only being removed from said shelf when packed away to move into a new dwelling.
Fast-forward to about six years ago when I was just developing my teaching style. I strayed away from Iyengar's teaching methods, my own Hatha training, and stumbled my way into Vinyasa. And it was fabulous. But after a couple of years here, I realized something was missing. It felt very Westernized, like we couldn't be still enough, slow enough, contemplative enough. And one day in class, we stopped. We savored each pose. We moved into the fire of our bellies, the quivering of our thighs and I realized, THIS was something more!
After that class I rushed home to find my book, or any book by Iyengar for that matter and sat down to read "Light on Yoga" and "Light on Life" cover to cover without getting a single wink of sleep that night. Somehow in the morning, I did a headstand, ran out the door for class and felt as if I'd slept the entire night. I went to a studio I had just started teaching at in Denver and had no one show up for class. I thought, "Perfect, I can practice!" And so I did. I ran through my sequences I had prepared for the week and started to recognize pauses for what was necesarry in asana, but that which vinyasa was leaving behind. This little pause was my chance to invite in alignment and inner awareness, far beyond what could be brought by constant flow. “By drawing our senses of perception inward, we are able to experience the control, silence, and quietness of the mind, ” Iyengar says in Light on Life.
From that day forward I was able to cultivate that which I was constantly seeking in my practice. Only now, I didn't have to look for it. It came to me. In those slow quiet movements as I feel my shoulders move into the socket, as I feel my thighbones reach to sky, and as I feel my breath unlock an awareness of tension I didn't even know was residing in my lower spine.
I'd like to say that I am now a dedicated Iyengar teacher after such an enlightening experience in my practice but I'm not. I'm still a vinyasa teacher. But I believe in the principles of alignment that find their way in through the breath. My classes are more mindful now in the sense to find alignment and then flow into a deeper connection of the movments, the vinyasa of linking one breath with one movement. When we find stillness and truly allow that space between the breaths to become part of our practice, that space between the ribs starts to let go. That pause of the breath changing directions is a moment suspended in time where all is still, at peace and well with the world, if only for a micro-moment.
BKS Iyengar may have moved on to the next realm of existance. My fantasy of practicing alongside other sweating and breathing bodies in the Indian heat with him as my guide is never to be. But he was my first teacher. As he said in Light on Life, “There is a universal reality in ourselves that aligns us with a universal reality that is everywhere.” So my teacher is now embodied in me.