Written for the China-India Yoga Summit newsletter
A Master Class For Beginners
By Daniel Simpson
I’ve been practising Iyengar yoga since 2004, never dreaming I’d meet the man who taught my teachers. Although he told us in Light on Life that he’d “never retire”, Mr Iyengar had already stopped giving public classes. I thought the nearest I’d get to experiencing one was YouTube, until a lucky encounter one Friday in America.
Visiting San Francisco for work in April, I dropped into the Abode of Iyengar Yoga, run by Manouso Manos. Waiting outside for a class, someone said he’d heard that Mr Iyengar would be teaching this summer, in China. “If you’ve come all the way from London to the Abode,” he quipped, “maybe you’re the kind of guy who’ll make it.”
For a couple of weeks, at least, I thought he was joking. Then I found myself scouring the Internet for details. The airfare seemed prohibitive to start with. Freelance writers don’t make lots of money, and taking time off means earning even less. Having spent a year writing a book, which hasn’t been sold yet, I felt I couldn’t justify the expense. And this seemed a terrible reason not to go.
As Faeq Biria put it to me later, in a wonderful chat that we otherwise wouldn’t have shared: “sometimes in life, you know you have to be bold.”
Everything still felt uncertain, even once my place was confirmed. Teachers back in London weren’t encouraging. “It looks quite a big event,” one mused. “I hope Guruji will make it.” Another wished me luck, but wasn’t tempted. “Mass yoga doesn’t appeal to me,” she sniffed. By the time my plane took off, I had few expectations.
Having passed through Guangzhou 15 years ago, I found it barely recognisable. So much had changed, and so quickly. From Eminem rapping in taxis to ubiquitous smartphones, on the surface urban China looked more global. It reminded me that everything’s in flux, and the deeper one goes the more this grows apparent.
At times, there were glimpses of chaos at the summit, despite the best improvisations of the organisers. Our youthful hosts smiled valiantly, as waitresses served up endless cauldrons of meat. Despite some disgruntled spluttering, we made do. There was rice and greens. And the next three nights, our food was vegetarian.
In the daytime, the feedback was screeching: it took multiple changes of microphone to find one that worked, and an echo made several voices barely audible. None of this deterred Mr Iyengar. At 92, his focus was intense. Every one of his classes overran, and only once did he show his frustration with the P.A., his torso spinning, hands on hips, as he fixed an offending speaker with a glare.
The senior teachers in his entourage got off less lightly. “They are all close to me,” he lamented, while they demonstrated postures on the platform. “They all learn. How pitiable it is they cannot show.” Such comments were sometimes phrased to reach the rest of us, particularly young Chinese, most of whom in attendance were under 40.
“This is the mentality of the computer mind,” he tutted through his headset, observing someone’s failure to spot misalignment. “Soon your brain will be like a stone. This brain has absolutely no understanding at all. No sense of balance, no sense of ideas. One elbow is far away, one close. This is how we do and we continue, not knowing.”
If his message had an underlying mission, it was to teach us how to know ourselves in practice. Combining philosophy with heartfelt depth of insight, his classes were aimed at beginners, and yet were profound.
Elements, sheaths and gunas were all demystified, by explaining them in the context of postures, and working progressively. When asked if this made his method physical, Mr Iyengar’s response was instructive in itself. “All the various aspects of yoga are hidden even in tadasana,” he told a reporter, “provided you know how to do it.”
As he reminds us in The Tree of Yoga, newly published in Chinese: “Gandhi did not practise all the aspects of yoga. He only followed two of its principles – non-violence and truth, yet through these two aspects of yoga, he mastered his own nature and gained independence for India. If a part of yama could make Mahatma Gandhi so great, so pure, so honest and so divine, should it not be possible to take another limb of yoga – asana – and through it reach the highest goal of spiritual development?”
After all, to quote his conclusion in Guangzhou, “using the power of the body with a skilful brain is nothing but surrender to God.”
His gift has been to make this more accessible, to the largest nation of practitioners on Earth. For now, the engagement of many is superficial. As in the West, they’re mainly attracted by the side effects: the prospects of looking attractive and feeling calm. And so we were urged to go deeper, to find the “beautiful unalloyed bliss” that lies within.
“It is natural to make yourself work to keep your beauty,” our teacher conceded. But in future we should “practice yoga to experience the inner beauty and inner light, and not for the external beauty only.” In three days, he recalled before departing, “I gave you all the knowledge of yoga, which may take maybe 10 years for you to digest.”
And to think I almost missed it out of fear. Thankfully my leap of faith paid off. I’ve had several features commissioned on the summit, and together they’ll cover the cost of going to China. But what I really gained is priceless: devotion to practice, and the teacher who inspires it.
In the midst of his walkabout oration on the second afternoon, Guruji wandered past my mat. His presence helped absorb me in a twist. Surfacing later, I heard Manouso Manos. “Do you see what I mean now?” he shouted at one of his students. “About him being the best yoga teacher in the world? You can’t explain that, you have to experience it.”
