The RIMIYI Iyengar Yoga Institute Pune
and in an adjacent street
https://soundcloud.com/isabelandgeoffreyindiayoga/cuckoos
We’re sitting on our rooftop balcony, Geoffrey has made friends with the house dog, and a bird, the red eyed greater coucal. It’s one of the cuckoo family- but does not move into another birds nest, a pair build it together. You’ll hear a flavor of the sound here in the recording taken from our roof top 5 minutes from the Ramamami Memorial Iyengar Yoga Institute. Geoffrey was the first to spot the bird and has learnt it’s call! Apparently seeing the coucal is very auspicious.
Geoffrey is cooking in the kitchen and night is upon us, it’s sunday and we have the day off today so we went for a fascinating walk in the streets near us in Model Colony. We saw a pig with 3 piglets and a crow sitting on it’s back just wandering along.
Just copying an excerpt from my email sent below to Polly this morning, who is practicing at home in our studio….
14th Dec 2014
I think we’ve actually adjusted, the smog has lessened as we had a monsoon level of rain on friday evening – we walked through it and later could hear the sounds of torrents of running water below – the little lavada style canal made from concrete expanded 20 fold to take the water. Our flat is on the top floor with a roof area, so luckily we were out of the floods on ground level. It’s all died down now and we have had a lovely sunny day today.
On thursday we began the first of our 21 days at the Ramamami Memorial Iyengar Yoga institute, a different timetable and more relaxing than the big convention, as it’s only 5 mins walk from the flat. The institute was built some years ago in the garden of the Iyengar family house. It’s an old but lovely half hexagon kind of space on 3 floors going up to a peak like a tipi, with windows all around the back and a balcony going round packed with yoga equipment, stools, back archers, trestlers, the pune horse, bricks, viparita karani stools, setu bandha benches ….you name it. The room is a faded cream with old green tiles in places, and all around on the walls are black and white photos of Guruji (BKS Iyengar) these are the ones taken of him for Light on Yoga. We place our small bags in a high shelf going round the room and get a mat and blanket from the prop store in the corner. We settle down, it’s 6.50am and the room is nearly full so Geoffrey and I find a place near the back, he windows are open and you can hear the flow of constant traffic and the horns outside, but as the room moves in a half arc towards a raised stage/platform where the teacher is, it’s easy to concentrate. There are around 100 people in the space, and the feeling there is powerful. We wait seated in svastikasana for our teacher Prashant, Guruji’s son to instruct us. The class begins with his Aum and we respond, then the invocation, the sound fills the space, and it’s incredible strong. He begins the class and the traffic appears to go quieter as we focus on listening.
Prashant uses the word ‘traffic’ to describe what is going on in our heads, and how we must practice asana through appropriate actions or ‘kreas’, a process of precision and total absorption to still our consciousness.
I found this image of stilling the traffic in my mind very powerful and won’t forget it because we are here studying in India. For me one of the most shocking things is the sheer volume of traffic. It’s like the M6 and spaghetti junction and the blackwall tunnel rolled into one, but full of motorbikes, auto rickshaws, fancy flash cars with dents, open trucks, carts, buses, and people trying to cross the road, all going in completely different directions, no lanes no distance between just the sheer volume of people and sound. When there isn’t room it’s easy – just turn round and go back the wrong way. The horns are used purely to alert another driver or pedestrian that you are there, not used for a long duration more of a pip, but the volume builds substantially because of the sheer number of horns. Amazingly the traffic actually moves, people cross the road and even more amazingly there is no road rage just a few gentle hand signals and sideways nods of the head. Prashant’s image of ’traffic’ is strong: imagine the physical traffic now as the fluctuations of the mind, going in all directions, past, future, sideways, slow, fast, darting,constant,moving, and then the arresting thousands of images going on in the imagination, and the feelings fear of crashing, relief at not doing, excitement, regret, and then the sounds cropping up over, under, behind and all around us. This is the mind disturbed, unfocussed and completely taken over, where the influences of the outside world affect our inner being in every waking moment. How does one still that inside oneself? This is of course what we are here to study. For me I think, understanding the immense challenge of the task is part of the solution, and here Prashant helps us. He talks about the tools we need, he describes how it takes the right knife to slice a tomato, and of course in England we know it takes a bread knife not a carving knife to slice loaf of bread. And so we learn precision, a blunt instrument does not do it, so the ancient art of Yoga teaches us how.
First one must occupy ones mind totally in the task to still the traffic.
Geetaji explained that the 10 day convention was called ‘Yoganusanam’. This means:
‘in the present moment is the teaching of yoga’
After class we had a restful day. Judith took me to a local wonderful batik place where a husband and wife team make clothes from their back garden – it’s hard to tell if they would work in England somehow as I’ve gone all ethnic but they are happy to make anything at all for us; trouzers, T shirts, table cloths, shawls, bolster pillow covers etc and they make a lot of yoga props so we can start to kit out our new yoga studio!!
For lunch we went to a wonderful restaurant; it’s so good to find such fantastic vegi food everywhere. We had lovely coconut dips, and dough balls and green lentil dal, they do ‘paratha’ a kind of nan but lighter and layered somehow and extremely fresh and lovely. There are loads of limes so one of the drinks we like is lime juice and soda, but another drink I really like is Lassi, which you can have with any fruit. I’d always thought you could only have it as a salty drink but I had a fresh pineapple one which is my current favorite.
Each day we have a 3hr slot allotted to us for our personal practice in the yoga hall, as well as our 2 hour daily class and any observations. The practice time is flexible and it’s wonderfully quiet in the hall as people get on with their own study. These sessions are attended by everyone including Geetaji, Prashant, Abhijata Iyengar, and when he was alive Guruji. He went each day himself even in the week he had to go to hospital before he died. Apparently even in that week he saw a student upstairs by the window who needed help and he got a message sent up to the student to help correct their problem. So the tradition is for us to practice side by side on an equal basis, to work on what we have learnt in the 2hr class we have experienced that day. It’s very much about being a student of yoga and that never changes however advanced we become.
There are about 20 sets of ropes, most are free hanging, and then metal bars going horizontally all the way round by the windows to raise legs up onto etc about lower rib height for me. The windows look down over a small courtyard where we leave our shoes, arrive etc, and just a few feet across leading into where the Iyengar family live, it’s very simple and you can see them around the table sometimes. Nothing ostentatious or even modern. BKS Iyengar and the family have donated their income for some years, to Bellur which is the very poor village where BKS Iyengar came from originally. Building 2 schools there, the children also learn yoga too as well as their regular lessons.
We’ve kind of realised that Geetaji and Prashant, 2 of Iyengar’s children, never left home, or married they looked after their father and have dedicated their lives to teaching here. Both have had to cope with disability. There is a lot of emphasis on working with disabled people here which is interesting and good. Somehow in England Iyengar yoga appears to be for the yoga elite, but here they have daily groups of disabled people coming. Geoffrey and I have permission to observe and learn from these remedial classes which will be very useful.
On friday evening we were taught by one of Iyengar’s other Indian senior teachers who was absolutely brilliant. Her name is Navas and she talked about how to expand the sides of the armpit chest in 2 horizontal directions from the side to the front and the side to back, and also how to open the centre of the chest once lying down on a 2 x 3fold blankets for pranayama, with a little roll laid lengthways under the 9th dorsal vertebrae. The affect was wonderful, especially for my stiffer neck area. We also learnt how to do forward bending in the same manner, without narrowing the chest – the key is to start with the standing symmetrical forward bends e.g. Prasarita Padottanasana the 5 point pose, or Uttanasana, then go down slowly, widening the chest, with arms in a kind of -‘guns and holsters’ like chataranga position to help start the coiling action in the chest, then once at 90degrees, straightening the arms wider than usual and bringing finger tips down onto the floor slowly thinking of opening not going down. This work was a re-iteration of Geeta’s work with us last week and the results for me are powerful, as I could feel that my neck and shoulders were wide, and the centre of the chest from the back open as though the little roll at dorsal 9 was there. I know this imprint will stay with me now and I’ll be going on about it in future classes!! More difficult with the seated forward bends – I need to practice a lot more on that.
It would have been Guruji’s 96th birthday today 14th December 2014.
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