For now it’s a work in progress, but I’ll be writing more there soon about my book, which is due to be published in 2012. To read a preview, visit roughguidedarkside.com.

In the meantime, I’m posting articles at Elephant Journal.

By Daniel Simpson

India isn’t just another country. Sometimes it can feel like a parallel universe. Here’s a scene from the State Bank of India in Rishikesh.

Check the reading matter of choice on the foreign exchange desk. Among traders at a Western banking behemoth, that might be a glossy lifestyle mag, or even cruder forms of porn. But this guy’s got a list of twenty commandments, beginning with one to get up at 4 a.m., and put in three hours of God-realization before the day job.

The text, composed by Swami Sivananda, instructs devotees to meditate cross-legged (if they can’t sit in lotus or siddhasana), and finish their practice with headstand and a shoulder-stand, followed by “twenty pranayamas”.

The impact on banking business is unclear, which suggests surprising parallels with the West. Take Europe’s biggest bank, HSBC. Its last boss was a priest, dubbed God’s Banker. He even authored books with spiritual twists, which according to the Financial Times “sought to reconcile serving God with serving Mammon.”

This didn’t stop his firm from stashing $11.5 billion in the first few months of 2011, while firing a tenth of its workforce to maximise profits.

HSBC prides itself on its “social responsibility” (though this is corporately illegal). Its adverts once said: “collective action will be required from governments, businesses and individuals to stimulate the adoption of energy efficiency and clean-generation technologies to stabilize CO2 emissions.” But it’s done little to turn that talking into action. Because of our addiction to oil, coal and gas, cutting carbon means cutting the profits that bankers depend on, and the future wealth and pensions people dream of.

As an FT headline screamed a couple of years ago, our collective “Drive for growth ‘will ruin planet’.” Though it was quoting UK government advisers, their words were buried away as news in brief, to vanish down the corporate media memory hole. After all, they warned big business would destroy us, and that’s not what sells papers to the rich.

Fast forward to the start of this month, and the latest attempt to pretend that the world plans to do something to avert a “climate catastrophe”, while ensuring any such prospect is impossible. Leading the wrecking crew at UN talks in Durban was the world’s fabled “largest democracy”: India.

“How do I give a blank check signing away the livelihood rights of 1.2 billion members of our population?” asked its environment minister, refusing to sign up to legally binding emissions cuts, unless richer nations stopped polluting first. It’s an echo of infamous lines from 20 years ago, when the U.S. conspired to torpedo other summits: “The American way of life is non-negotiable.”

India claims to want solutions based on “equity”, but it’s obsessed with rampant economic growth, which does little for hundreds of millions of its poor. Like the sixth of Americans classed as “food insecure”, they don’t really count. While politicians and journalists froth about “India Shining”, farmers steeped in debt commit mass suicide, and starvation and malnutrition are endemic. The government leaves its surplus grain to rot, or exports it at subsidized rates that the poor are denied.

As one Indian writer observes: “Corporate Globalisation needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably authoritarian governments in poorer countries, to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. It’s called ‘Creating a Good Investment Climate’.”

The finest climate today is in Gujarat, where the economy basks in double-digit growth, and ministers give investors what they want, like access to land and resources (no matter who lives there). Home to roughly one in twenty Indians, Gujarat produces a quarter of exports. And it’s run by a Hindu hardliner, who oversaw genocide. The Economist seems to hope he’ll run the country. “He has yet to shed his polarizing image,” it coughs diplomatically, “but he has at least built up an enviable record on the economy.” All hail the Slumdog Billionaires!

So what of the words on the desk in Rishikesh? It’s fair enough to focus on transcendence, but unless we resist injustice we’re complicit. “Never fail to fulfil your duties,” says the Swami. If he doesn’t mean following orders, I agree.

The following article appears in the Winter 2011 issue of Yoga International, which is now on sale.

This extract gives a taster of the gist:

Beneath the surface of its rapid transmutation, the country is troubled. While a few get improbably rich, a billion others struggle with inflation, unemployment, and migration. These widening inequalities breed resentment and despair, which drive increasing numbers to suicide.

“There’s an urgent need here,” says Chen Si, a journalist working to promote more classical yoga teaching. He organized a conference this summer that brought Iyengar and a dozen of his protégés to Guangzhou, China, face-to-face with 1,300 students. Billed as the China-India Yoga Summit, the event was endorsed by officials in New Delhi and Beijing, whose relations have been strained since the 1950s, when India opposed China’s seizure of Tibet and gave refuge to the 14th Dalai Lama. Border wars promptly ensued.

Trade has diminished their hostility, culminating in a visit to India last December by Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, who paid tribute to Gandhi, quoted the Upanishads, and waxed lyrical on how Buddhism shaped China. To top it off, he announced that his daughter practiced asana.

Unlike the Dalai Lama or Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline banned in China, yoga is being embraced by the state. Chinese authorities talk it up as a force for “harmony,” echoing their counterparts in India. “There is a growing social conflict due to our relentless pursuit of material objects,” an Indian diplomat told the summit. “Yoga can be a useful instrument for promoting social harmony. After all, only individuals at peace and in harmony with themselves can build a peaceful and harmonious society.”

By inviting an Indian master to teach, Chen aimed to empower the Chinese to practice yoga more deeply, and thereby foster social change. While these are sensitive issues in a one-party state, he feels fairly secure. “China has a tradition of embracing foreign cultures and making them its own,” he says. “That’s why it’s been so vibrant.”

The full text is available below.

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The New Yoga Superpower
By Daniel Simpson

When China’s first yoga studio opened nine years ago, its founders were a couple of women from California. Robyn Wexler had been teaching asana in the gym of a luxury Beijing hotel while looking for a space more conducive to holistic practice. Her partner, Mimi Kuo-Deemer, took photos for a living but was eager to devote more time to yoga instruction. Together, they decided to create what they had sought in vain: “a clean room with a simple wooden floor.”

“We got the idea on holiday in San Francisco,” Kuo-Deemer recalls. “I mean, how hard could it be to create that in Beijing?” They found it in a Qing Dynasty residence. Secluded from busy traffic in a quadrangle, Yoga Yard was a haven of tranquility. To Wexler, it epitomized “consistency, stability, and continuation in a city undergoing so much transformation and change, building up and tearing down.”

Initially, classes were in English. Though Kuo-Deemer and Wexler speak Mandarin, most students were expatriates. That didn’t last long. Across Beijing, Shanghai, and other metropolises, more and more gyms were offering yoga, hiring instructors who’d learned from DVDs and hyping it as the hottest trend in fitness. Practicing was the acme of modernity: a way of channeling energy to succeed. “It’s a symbol of the outside world,” Kuo-Deemer explains. “Like thin women on the beach.”

In less than a decade, yoga studios have sprouted all over China. They’re dotted along urban sidewalks, and classes can even be found in the hinterlands. They’ve spread so fast that no one’s keeping count. Estimates suggest that 10 million Chinese now practice regularly, compared to about 16 million Americans. Long before it displaces the U.S. economy, let alone its military, China will be the world’s new yoga superpower.

“Yoga went to China via America,” explains Faeq Biria, one of B. K. S. Iyengar’s leading disciples, who’s been visiting Beijing to train teachers since 2008. “They see it from an American point of view. At the beginning, they’re attracted by the byproducts: to be handsome, to be pretty, to digest well, sleep well, have a nice body, be intelligent, unstressed. It’s hard work to take them toward the deeper aspects.”

A burgeoning industry tempts them with distractions, hawking figure-hugging sportswear on models with Westernized features. Most styles of yoga are available, although the emphasis is squarely on physical practice. It’s often an aspirational activity: the price of a class in Shanghai can be higher than in Los Angeles.

But there’s more to Chinese yoga than meets the eye. As Biria observes, there are internal connections to indigenous arts, from Taoist tai chi to traditional Chinese medicine. “The moment you connect to the energetics of yoga, they catch it so fast,” he says. “Their eyes shine and they grasp it, because it’s in their culture.”

For now, most young Chinese neglect this heritage. It’s out of sync with their urge to consume new products. But that materialism is only skin-deep. Beneath the surface of its rapid transmutation, the country is troubled. While a few get improbably rich, a billion others struggle with inflation, unemployment, and migration. These widening inequalities breed resentment and despair, which drive increasing numbers to suicide.

“There’s an urgent need here,” says Chen Si, a journalist working to promote more classical yoga teaching. He organized a conference this summer that brought Iyengar and a dozen of his protégés to Guangzhou, China, face-to-face with 1,300 students. Billed as the China-India Yoga Summit, the event was endorsed by officials in New Delhi and Beijing, whose relations have been strained since the 1950s, when India opposed China’s seizure of Tibet and gave refuge to the 14th Dalai Lama. Border wars promptly ensued.

Trade has diminished their hostility, culminating in a visit to India last December by Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, who paid tribute to Gandhi, quoted the Upanishads, and waxed lyrical on how Buddhism shaped China. To top it off, he announced that his daughter practiced asana.

Unlike the Dalai Lama or Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline banned in China, yoga is being embraced by the state. Chinese authorities talk it up as a force for “harmony,” echoing their counterparts in India. “There is a growing social conflict due to our relentless pursuit of material objects,” an Indian diplomat told the summit. “Yoga can be a useful instrument for promoting social harmony. After all, only individuals at peace and in harmony with themselves can build a peaceful and harmonious society.”

By inviting an Indian master to teach, Chen aimed to empower the Chinese to practice yoga more deeply, and thereby foster social change. While these are sensitive issues in a one-party state, he feels fairly secure. “China has a tradition of embracing foreign cultures and making them its own,” he says. “That’s why it’s been so vibrant.”

A FINE LINE

But it’s not always that clear-cut, for reasons the Communist Party stressed in July, when it marked its 90th anniversary. “Since British invaders launched the opium war in 1840, the Western capitalist powers came one after another to China, and China was thus reduced to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society,” an official exhibition declared. Visiting London later, Wen added: “This has taught the Chinese never to talk to others in a lecturing way, but to respect nations on the basis of equality.”

Fearing unrest, the government is wary of outside ideas, especially if they mention liberation. While Communist regimes were crumbling in Eastern Europe in 1989, non-violent protestors were massacred in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. A decade later, Falun Gong was denounced as a cult, its followers tortured for meditating en masse. Yoga proponents have had to walk a fine line, demonstrating that the practice enhances individual well-being without undermining collective order.

In the early days of the yoga boom, teachers felt watched. “We had some very awkward stiff men who’d appear in class,” one remembers. “Like totally out of context, with fake leather belts.”

This mutual suspicion has subsided, as China adapts to a breakneck pace of change. Falun Gong’s popularity horrified hard-liners, who thought it was building a network beyond their control. In contrast, yoga studios have been slow to form a national federation. The government seems to see them as allies, not as hotbeds of subversion, apparently hoping they’ll calm a restive populace. Booming business also helps. At the summit in Guangzhou, most discussions were focused on marketing.

Yet as recently as 2009, officials shuttered a Chinese version of Yoga Journal, citing political objections. Editors are confused about what happened, and some say other factors were involved, such as jockeying for power at the magazine’s state-run media partner. Regardless, everyone was fired. “It was an immediate reaction,” says John Abbott, Yoga Journal‘s former publisher, who set up the venture in China with government backing. “It was closed and we were notified.”

Abbott was told that an anonymous “rogue website” had been discovered, hosted in Singapore, and “titled something like Yoga Journal Against China.” It apparently listed references to Tibet in the U.S. edition and included photos. “I understand that one of the photos was me in a quasi-embrace with the Dalai Lama,” Abbott says. Yoga Journal says it’s “in the early exploratory phase” of plans to reopen.

According to Wang Zhicheng, a philosophy professor at Zhejiang University: “We basically have religious freedom in China, unless somebody uses religion to stir up tensions.” Yoga, he adds, is “more like a spiritual-mental practice, a way of thinking, or a way of keeping healthy and happy,” and “Chinese culture very much appreciates the ‘cultivation of character,’ which is basically a humanist idea.”

It’s also at the core of Confucian ethics, which held sway, at least in theory, for over 2,000 years. Order was defined in terms of moral standards, to be upheld by everyone from paupers to the emperor. Mao Zedong exploded this ideal, saying power derived from the muzzle of a gun. In their efforts to reconcile commerce with control, his successors have revived the spirit of Confucius. “The state strengthens the building of socialist spiritual civilization through spreading education in high ideals and morality,” reads the Chinese Constitution.

This amounts to propaganda, at odds with the yogic goal of shedding illusions. But state “ideals” are hard to instill in practice. Despite placards extolling “a peaceful society,” there are protests all the time in modern China, in places few outsiders ever hear of. Farmers riot when land is grabbed for factories and apartments, as urban sprawl eats badly needed crops. In the cities, migrant workers fight police, and polluted water and smog trigger rants at apparatchiks.

The government tolerates limited dissent. Critical blogs are prolific, yet comments are censored. Letting off steam is tacitly allowed, but cross the line into rallying resistance and you’re in trouble. Journalists sometimes get beaten and activists jailed. Minorities are enemies within. Talking about devolution is taboo. And the number of people executed is classified. It’s said to be more than the rest of the world combined.

Most people’s lives are full of challenges: affording food as prices soar; finding wives when men outnumber women, thanks to sex-selective abortion and a one-child policy; securing jobs; and surviving grueling hours without the right to unionize. Workers at Apple’s Chinese supplier have dived to their deaths from factory windows. Women often kill themselves by drinking pesticide. Domestic violence is rampant.

“What we call modernization brings so much mental and physical stress,” says Chen Si, the yoga summit organizer. “Compared to drugs and psychiatry, yoga is a much better tool for social harmony.”

But is it reaching the masses, or just urban elites? So far, it’s mainly the latter, though as people explore connections with Chinese arts, more might practice by themselves.

A BOOMING MARKET

China’s largest chain of yoga studios, which boasts more than 20,000 students, has a two-tier price plan. In big cities, Yogi Yoga charges $1,000 for unlimited access for a year—a quarter of average annual income nationwide. At provincial franchises, fees drop to $10 a month. Yogi Yoga made $4 million last year, including earnings from teacher training and equipment sales. Revenue has quadrupled since 2005.

“There is a big market,” agrees Birjoo Mehta, a visiting teacher from Mumbai, “but what happens if the brand doesn’t meet its promises?” Addressing Chinese businesses at the summit, he urged them to develop their understanding of yoga and present it more authentically: “Do not restrict yourself with the technology you have. There needs to be a continuous technological development.”

When Yogi Yoga opened in 2003, it promised to “bring pure yoga from India.” This arrived in the form of Yogi Mohan, a teacher from Rishikesh. But when he settled in China, he was shocked: people asked if he’d studied yoga in America.

To educate them, he and his partner at Yogi Yoga, the Beijing publisher Yin Yan, translated books. They began with Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, then a couple of texts by Swami Kuvalayananda. In 2005, they invited Iyengar to teach. He declined at first but sent several senior pupils. Workshops by foreign yogis have grown more common, as have 200-hour teacher-training programs, some with Yoga Alliance accreditation.

Priorities are starting to change. Indian teachers are now in demand, and those who are willing to emigrate get paid well. “People have become more appreciative of what yoga is really about,” Yin says. “They’re not just working on the physical level.”

Away from better-run centers, however, instruction varies wildly. Some teachers claim to be qualified when they’re not. “I’ve basically been crossing their names off a list,” says a woman who lives on the coast, north of Shanghai. “These days I mainly practice at home alone.”

Meanwhile, countless companies cash in. The premier Chinese sports brand, Li Ning, is launching a yoga line, while some of the attire sold by rivals looks fit for the disco. Built-in push-up bras are popular among practitioners, most of whom are women under 35. Other products also prize form over function. A thick towel-like variant on the sticky mat is slippery when dry. Meanwhile, premium goods are shipped abroad, supplying the likes of Lululemon, which sell at a markup. Once Chinese firms master marketing, they could export directly.

“There’s more interest in yoga because of celebrities like Madonna, but it’s also because yoga is well marketed,” Yin says. She ought to know. One of her ventures is a free online magazine called Yoga Digest, which has 200,000 readers compared to the 30,000 who bought Yoga Journal, which she also edited. Like its forebear, Yoga Digest plugs her studios. Marketing “makes a strong force to push people into practice,” she says.

Traditional Chinese disciplines work differently. “Tai chi stays in a relationship of master to disciple, so there’s nobody to push it,” Yin says. That doesn’t stop millions of pensioners meeting in parks at the crack of dawn to glide gracefully through such movements as White Crane Spreads Wings and Swallow Skims The Water. The scene plays out daily from Beijing to Hong Kong, where yoga took root before Britain surrendered its colony 14 years ago. Nowadays, hip Hong Kongers would rather splurge $35 on a flow class than flow with their grannies.

Even so, some young Chinese still do wushu, the collective name for hundreds of martial arts, including “supreme ultimate fist,” as tai chi is known. Like yoga, it aims to balance mind and body, working on posture to circulate energy more freely.

To Vicky Wong, who practices both, they’re complementary. “The two disciplines merge quite beautifully,” says Wong, a Hong Kong native who lives in Beijing. “Doing asana helps my whole body wake up, and tai chi mind-set techniques help me focus internally.”

When Iyengar taught in China, he drew upon a tradition the Chinese know well: Buddhism. “The mind has to be absorbed in the pose,” he told students. “If you use your mind it is a Zen mind.”

Zen resonates widely in Guangzhou. Roughly 15 centuries ago, an Indian monk came ashore there. Known as Bodhidharma, he is considered a direct descendant of the Buddha, and he worked his way northwards through China, disseminating wisdom. Legends of his feats abound. It’s said that he stared at a wall in silence for almost a decade and trained Shaolin monks to use kung fu. Primarily, he practiced meditation, and the sect he inspired was a fusion with Chinese arts. Called chan, it spread as Zen to Japan (and as seon to Korea), teaching experiential awareness of transcendence.

Iyengar’s arrival was hailed as the second coming. “Is it wrong that we compare him to Bodhidharma?” Chen Si asked the summit. “Guruji manifests 5,000 years of civilization on the subcontinent. China will take yoga to heart, like we embraced Buddhism. Who will be the next masters of this tradition? Let’s wait and see.”

For three days, participants were stretched. Lined up in a sports hall, most looked bendy. But they were told they’d “just come to the base level, and there’s a Mount Everest in front of you.” At 92, the Lion of Pune stood for hours on end, vowing to show “how to start from scratch and aim for the ultimate.”

He described “how to listen to the so sound of your inner voice” by observing how the senses distract you and “moving closer to the center.” The five mahabhuta (elements) and koshas (sheaths) were demystified in the context of adjusting imbalances in poses. “Alignment leads to enlightenment,” he said. “Using the power of the body with a skillful brain is nothing but surrender to God.”

For now, many people’s engagement is superficial, even if they smile while doing the splits. “It is natural to make yourself work to keep your beauty,” Iyengar conceded. But we should “practice yoga to experience the inner beauty and inner light, and not for the external beauty only.”

His parting words were blunter. “I gave you all the knowledge of yoga,” he said as they garlanded him, “which may take maybe ten years for you to digest.”

Chen believes the master’s visit was timed to perfection. “China is mad for success,” he says, a throwback to the “greed is good” 1980s. But there’s also a yearning for more on the spiritual level and a tradition of seeking new ideas next door. One of China’s classic novels is Journey to the West, known abroad as The Monkey King. Revived of late as an opera, it’s a quest for sacred Indian inspiration.

“Yoga is such a wonderful gift from India to China,” Chen says. “Chinese society is ready to understand another oriental philosophy. What you saw in America is nothing compared to what will happen here.”



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Before he moved to London and took up yoga, Daniel Simpson worked as a foreign correspondent. He resigned from The New York Times to run a music festival, which got him embroiled with gangsters in Belgrade. This inspired him to leave the Balkans and write a book. Nowadays he mainly writes about yoga.

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.”

The image below (click to enlarge) is from an article in the September issue of Yoga Magazine, which is now on sale.

It’s billed as a “special feature on the life and works of B.K.S. Iyengar”, and it explains how he shaped the practice of yoga.

I’ve written before about its impact on my life. Here’s a personal sample of the bigger picture:

At first, I was struck by his size, or the lack of it, apart from a barrel chest. Flanked by his two most senior American teachers, both relative beanpoles, he looked like Yoda sporting a knee-length golden kurta. His silver winged eyebrows and mane lent him the air of a mad professor crossed with a God. Though he calls himself an artist and philosopher, Iyengar prefers to see teaching as a science.

Yoga, he said, is “an investigative instrument”, doing “research work from the skin to the self.” Although it merges “the individual self of the head with the universal self of the divine heart”, it’s subtle work, not blissing out with candles. “I teach spiritual yoga, not sensual yoga,” he told us. But minds can get distracted by the senses, and by what we think we know.

“You are all speaking of information technology,” Iyengar crackled through a headset. Most of the assembled throng were under 40, and brandishing smartphones. “I am giving you technological information. This is far superior.”

The article can be downloaded here. A text version follows.

–

Enlightened Yoga With Iyengar
By Daniel Simpson

Of all the yogic pantheon of swamis, gurus, babas and celebrities, no one living is respected as widely as B.K.S. Iyengar.

Half a century after he published Light on Yoga, his debut book is still known as “the yoga Bible”, a posture manual referenced by teachers everywhere. Although his name isn’t dropped as frequently as Bikram, or the trendier Anusara or Jivamukti, Iyengar’s method brought yoga to the masses, and shaped how other styles are taught today.

But it doesn’t always get the best of press. To detractors, it’s too static and precise: poses are held for minutes, while people fret about where to place their little toes, without necessarily seeing a bigger picture. Classes can be blizzards of instructions, citing body parts unknown to most anatomists, from the chips of the knees to the dorsal and armpit chest. It’s perfectionist, and sometimes unforgiving.

“What’s the knock on Iyengar yoga?” one of its senior teachers asked recently. “We are rigid. We are harsh. We are boring.” Though peers disagreed, he was posing them a challenge: to embody Iyengar’s example more wholeheartedly.

At 92, their mentor still inspires, perhaps even more so than ever. In his twilight years he’s retreated from public teaching, and focused on grooming a granddaughter to succeed him. But he’s lost none of his zeal, or clarity of insight.

His last book, Light on Life, was a yoga memoir, on “the countless blessings of a life spent following the Inward Journey.” It distilled more than 70 years of self-analysis, offering guidance with philosophy and frankness. “I am old, and death inevitably approaches,” he wrote. “I do pray that my ending will be your beginning.”

Nevertheless, Iyengar swore a vow: “I have not retired and never shall. I will always keep the inner fire burning.” On the book’s release, he travelled to America, to give a master-class to teachers from all traditions. In 2009, he made a similar trip to Russia, as a “gift for posterity”. Then in June this year he crossed the Himalayas, for what was billed as a “China-India Yoga Summit”, and his final foreign tour.

Iyengar’s take on finality was different. He said he’d teach “how to start from scratch and aim for the ultimate”, a holistic approach that’s rarely shared in practice. “I think the responsibility is mine,” he declared, “to show how you move from the body to the mind to the intelligence, and finally to the consciousness and psycho-spiritual body.”

Over three days in a sports hall in Guangzhou, he did just that, with the largest group of beginners he’d ever taught. A decade ago, there weren’t any yoga schools in China. Now there are tens of thousands, and they’re more popular than traditional Tai Chi, at least among the urban middle classes. Practising is an aspirational lifestyle choice: a way of remaining in shape and feeling modern. Yoga came to China via the West.

There are nearly as many “yogis” as in America, and an industry has sprung up to sell them clothing, DVDs and equipment. But what they need above all are teachers with experience. Iyengar’s aim was to show them what this meant.

TECHNOLOGICAL INFORMATION

Along with 1,000 Chinese and 300 others, from as far afield as Australia and Europe, I went to find out. Although I’m a committed Iyengar practitioner, I thought I’d never see the maestro who taught my teachers, let alone feel what ignited their devotion.

In India, there’s a two-year waiting list at his institute. Officially, he no longer teaches, unless you’re one of his longest-standing students, or his fresh-faced heir apparent, Abhijata, whom he trains and sometimes helps in women’s classes.

At first, I was struck by his size, or the lack of it, apart from a barrel chest. Flanked by his two most senior American teachers, both relative beanpoles, he looked like Yoda sporting a knee-length golden kurta. His silver winged eyebrows and mane lent him the air of a mad professor crossed with a God. Though he calls himself an artist and philosopher, Iyengar prefers to see teaching as a science.

Yoga, he said, is “an investigative instrument”, doing “research work from the skin to the self.” Although it merges “the individual self of the head with the universal self of the divine heart”, it’s subtle work, not blissing out with candles. “I teach spiritual yoga, not sensual yoga,” he told us. But minds can get distracted by the senses, and by what we think we know.

“You are all speaking of information technology,” Iyengar crackled through a headset. Most of the assembled throng were under 40, and brandishing smartphones. “I am giving you technological information. This is far superior.”

He started by holding up a leaf. Either side of its spine, it looked uneven. “Your body misguides you,” he warned. We imagine our postures are balanced when they’re not, as the teachers in his entourage revealed when asked to demonstrate onstage. Iyengar showed their legs weren’t quite aligned. “To bring these two together, that is yoga,” he explained. “You will know that alignment is there when mind does not wander.”

One by one, he took pupils and postures apart. “Learn to be humble,” he told Patricia Walden, who’s worked with him since 1976. “You are misleading them.” She wasn’t alone. “How pitiable it is they cannot show,” he sighed, having called another protégé “a beginner”. Then he thrust his arms bolt upright, as if transposed from grainy photos in Light on Yoga.

Iyengar was master of ceremonies each morning. Scheduled to teach for two hours, and offered a chair, he stood and overran by 90 minutes. “That’s his tempo,” laughed Faeq Biria, who runs an institute in Paris, and trains teachers in China. “He’s really connected to the cosmic energy. He can go on hours and hours and days and days.”

He doesn’t eat much food to fuel his stamina, “because my energy is flowing in my body.” At home, he has a strict routine: pranayama on waking, then coffee and three hours of asana. The caffeine hit is a single spoon of grounds, with milk and sugar.

This habit dates back to his youth. Beset by illness as a boy, he took up yoga at 16 to make him stronger, while living with his brother-in-law. Tirumalai Krishnamacharya was a taskmaster, and Iyengar struggled until he learned that coffee helped. Were his teacher not quite so demanding, what the world knows as yoga today might not exist. Krishnamacharya and his pupils, who included the late Pattabhi Jois of Mysore, were responsible for systematising postures, and connecting them sequentially.

ALIGNED AND ENLIGHTENED

“If person says pose not for you,” Iyengar cautioned, “he is not a real teacher. He’s a money maker.” We all have restrictions on mobility. What matters isn’t what we can do, but how we do it. In his eyes, “alignment leads to enlightenment. It guides you to new light and freshness in the pose.” Many find this lightness is elusive. Rather than watch people strain, he gives them props, to imprint the outlines of poses on “cellular memory”.

In Guangzhou, he used blankets, bolsters, bricks and a crash barrier, among other improvisations. “That’s how I made yoga to reach the masses,” he said. “This much they can take,” until “intuitive intelligence” develops.

Nowadays, he also takes support, turning backbends into lengthy meditations. But he scoffs at the notion props are his invention. “Are you not using the floor as a prop?” he asked, referring sceptics to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and the injunction that “the posture should be stable and comfortable.”

Disputing his method’s entry in the dictionary, Iyengar defines it as: “pure traditional yoga, from our ancestors.” If it’s characterised by anything more, it’s him.

Having delegated afternoon classes to Birjoo Mehta, who told us “the message of my guru flows through me,” Iyengar intervened on the second day. He wasn’t satisfied. “Observe,” he chided Mehta. “Teacher should teach from what students are doing.”

He took over the session, and stalked us with a microphone. “Imitate what I say,” he boomed as he walked. “Do not do what you do.” Cries of “Move!” soon snapped one woman into line. Another was adjusted by big toe, while Iyengar balanced on one leg to administer the prod.

I found his presence was enough. Time melted to treacle as he neared. Focused on trying to equalise my posture, I felt muscles hugging bones to twist my torso. My breathing slowed as the concentration deepened. My mind was blank, unfettering awareness. When he’d passed, I saw the mat was drenched in sweat.

Behind me, I heard the voice of Manouso Manos, a 35-year student of Iyengar’s. “Do you see what I mean now?” he shouted, at one of his own trainees from San Francisco. “About him being the best yoga teacher in the world? You can’t explain that, you have to experience it.”

His ultimate conclusion was more sober. “None of us can fill Guruji’s shoes,” Manos confided. Compared to Iyengar, “the rest of us are pretending.”