I often joke I was born a slab of concrete and chiseled into the shape of a man – well, a baby if you’re going to be pedantic – I’m that inflexible. Of course this wouldn’t be true since most babies are born as limber as Cirque du Solei contortionists. But you get the picture.
Reluctant disciple
Over the years my wife has tried to persuade me to give yoga a try to help soften my hard body. Until recently I’d been reluctant but in August 2014 I caved in and went along to a beginner’s course at our local Ashtanga studio in Wellington, New Zealand, which Rebekah had been attending for 12 months. She was adamant it would change my life – not just physically. I wasn’t sure. A year later I had made it to Marichasana C, which I suppose is pretty good considering I hadn’t been able to touch my toes beforehand.
It took even more convincing to get me to agree to come to Mysore, the home of Ashtanga Yoga. This was because I had my reservations about traveling within India and wasn’t sure Ashtanga Yoga was something I seriously wanted to pursue. But come we did and for two months I was pushed to my mental, physical and emotional limits at the Shri K Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute, to the point where I’m still not sure how I feel about my time there.
In pain we trust
You see Ashtanga isn’t easy – I want to end that sentence with ‘for me’, but I suspect it isn’t easy for you either. In all honesty, along with Vipassana, it’s one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done – and continue to do. Every time I practice I'm outside of my comfort zone. There’s pain. Always pain. Stiffness. Comparison. Sweat. Oh my God, is there sweat. So much there’s a moat of it around my mat when I’m finished. Sometimes there’s frustration and anger, even sadness – why is it so hard for me when it looks so easy for you? There’s always a little niggle – usually my right knee. At the moment there’s a dull pain on the left side of my neck and corresponding shoulder. Sometimes it manifests all the way down my arm. I think it’s from a backward roll. It could be from putting too much weight on my left forearm when I do headstands. I know this is incorrect technique, but right now, it’s the best I can do. My lower left back hurts after I practice, too. As long as we're practicing yoga, there's going to be pain, says our teacher, Mike Berghan.
Living with imperfection – yours and mine
In Mysore all the things that I struggle with, which is pretty much everything when it comes to this practice, were magnified. At times I felt out of my depth as so many of you lifted and floated yourselves into positions I could only dream of achieving. There only seemed to be one kind of body type – perfect. There was a focus about you that at first intimidated me. I felt out of shape and out of place. Didn’t realise I would have to wait in the foyer for my turn or sometimes have to practice in the changing room for the led class. I quickly got over this. There were some aspects of my first Mysore experience, though, that took me by surprise and a little longer to come to grips with: the push and shove to get into the shala before the led class, the refusal of some students to move over when there was enough space to fit one more body in and the contradictory behaviour of a couple of teachers I had contact with or observed. I won’t lie: this kind of bummed me out. Maybe it was unreasonable, but I had expected more of my fellow students. Instead, I was left feeling disillusioned and not sure what I had got myself into. Isn’t Ashtanga – and yoga in general – about something much deeper and unifying? Shouldn’t the inner transformation so frequently spoken of be reflected in the way we treat others? Sometimes I wasn't sure this was the case.
Even though my feelings towards this practice were conflicted for a time, I don't want to dwell on it here. I think I wanted to stay angry and resentful, point a finger or find some kind of backdoor or excuse not to practice. And focusing on the imperfections of others gave me that. But with a little space and time between Mysore and I, I've realised it doesn't matter. Besides, it didn’t discourage me from turning up to class. Well, that’s not entirely true. There were moments where I half-heartedly considered dropping out. But as fresh as I am, I know this much: despite the pain, sweat and negativity, my body, mind and life always feel better after I've finished; I wasn’t about to give up something so obviously good for me so quickly. So what if my expectations of how I think you should behave in and around class don’t measure up; I’m not the Ashtanga Police and shouldn’t hold you up to be anything other than what you are – human, like me; fallible and full of weird and wonderful idiosyncrasies. Union is there. Sometimes my mind is too busy seeking distraction and separation to see it.
Broken yet bound
You’d think after all that, I had a terrible time in Mysore. Quite the opposite. My stay in this little spiritual bubble is something I’ll treasure for a very long time. Without looking for it, what I found was a community of genuine, friendly and committed people who I had more in common with than I thought I would before I left New Zealand. It's strange, but at first I think I didn't want this to be the case. There's always a part of me that doesn't want to acknowledge the truth, or keeps me at arms length from what's best for me, turns away from connection rather than towards. It was difficult to do this in Mysore. Many of you were so goddamn nice! You tolerated our endless questions as we fumbled our way through our debut. Played with our daughter. Let your children play with her – just the other day Selva was 'writing' letters to her Mysore friends, which made me smile but at the same time feel sad since she doesn't really have any here in Chiang Mai. You let me go to the front of the queue when we were all waiting in the foyer to practice (parents get priority and I didn't exercise this 'right' until the second month because for some reason I didn't think it applied to fathers) when I felt so uncomfortable doing so. One of you even shared your fireworks with us during Diwali when you were desperately missing your own family back home. To a larger or lesser degree, one of the main things we had in common was a desire to live outside the parameters of what society deems normal. Obviously there were a great number of yoga teachers, but there were also a lot of people involved in ‘alternative/holistic health’, a fair swag of ‘digital nomads’ working remotely as they traveled and some who had thrown in their jobs just to practice yoga for the one to three months we're allowed.
I don’t know what draws us to this particularly demanding practice. I’ve heard Ashtanga was initially used as a form of therapy by Pattabhi Jois to help heal patients sent to him from the local hospital. There definitely is a restorative aspect to it but in rooms like the one I practiced in in Mysore there was a healthy/unhealthy – depending on which way you look at it – homogeneity to the bodies cycling through asanas. This doesn’t mean our minds are anywhere near as homogenous, or fit. Recently, I sat in on a talk given by a long serving and well-known teacher. When he was asked why we’re attracted to Ashtanga yoga he drilled an imaginary hole into his temple with his index finger and said, “You have to be a little broken to want to begin practicing this kind of yoga.”
But maybe this is what connects us, too. Despite my early misgivings, I felt intrinsically linked to many of you who were practicing at the same time as I, even if not one word was uttered between us. Why was that? My theory – and there's no evidence to back this up – is that at some conscious or unconscious level we’ve acknowledged we’re a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Of course, we probably have a lot more in common than that, but perhaps this is one of the two more profound aspects that binds us. The other being Ashtanga yoga, which quite possibly is our means for rearranging, restocking and rounding out the hamper.