Six weeks out. Christmas Eve dawn at DTW, heading back to the west coast.
This is the end of my 24th year of ashtanga practice. It’s the beginning of my 48th year of living. Feels like the weirdest possible halftime show. Halfway into this no-going-back decade, and into this life. Half of that life in the yoga.
Does daily ashtanga practice even make sense for multiple decades? Suddenly people are asking me this, like there’s a surge of doubt in the method, or just a mis-definition of ashtanga itself.
Yes, the yesest yes. Continuity is the course, for me personally. Yoga methodology is the reliable source of clarity and truth that I know. And this is just getting started, for me. I don’t always even know what Yoga is, but do sense that it knows me. It is in a process of knowing me, now more than ever. And giving that clear knowing back to me, a glimmer at a time.
I experience the same doubt about ashtanga and teeth brushing. C’mon. Worth interrogating. Teeth brushing takes time; it’s repetitive; we’ve already done so much of it. It’s kind of a kids’ thing really. Why not try something else?
For me personally, some physical intensity is important. Genetically. Not just asana, but in work and daily life. Asana itself is slow and careful for me now, unlike in my 20s. Of course. It’s 25 degrees below freezing. I do glorious working class labor in the Mysore room, run around the forest on frozen ground most afternoons, and have been lifting weights since 2021. Not the life you choose if the goal is an easy Natarajasana. But this life, strangely, is what my heart chose. The asanas serve this particular life.
I’ve contacted the parallel Angela who doesn’t know Yoga. She seeks intensity and truth through ultra high stakes work, as a journalist in Gaza or Ukraine, her freedom to intimately connect with others limited by sensory overwhelm and social anxiety. (I was a political beat journalist for the main newspaper in Oregon by the age of 20.) I admire that person, but the difficult thing yoga s-l-o-w-l-y made me know is that my soul path is quiet service. Service to our animal selves, nerd intimacy, life relationships, digging one deep knowledge well and translating the findings down there into a different kind of “news.”
A day without formal practice does feel similar to skipping the toothbrush. Moss grows on neglected teeth, in the folds of the untrained mind, as well as the kapotasanaless psoas.
So, yes. I will be rising early to practice on my family’s bathroom linoleum this week. After cleaning the teeth.
Sure there’s a hygiene thing here – conditioning my discernment, expression and embodiment. Mind, speech and body. But what interests me now is how my experience in yoga is fueled by a mystery. Why does the method hold such mystique, still?
Yoga philosophy is practical; analytical mind should be able to put it a box with and tie it just-so with a bow. But no. The generator for practice lies very far from my rational mind, somewhere in the outer dark unconscious – whispered through from future selves, or past ones, or other beings entirely. This unknown where the drives reside, it is source of extreme creativity. The more I turn into it, the more energy there is to connect with others, share the practice itself, create weird stuff, make weird choices, and just keep letting go and letting go of the concepts and identities that got me this far. Practice isn’t so much a discipline now. It’s a mystery, and an entrancing sweet smell that draws me because it’s making me more alive to living itself.
Back to the weird question – whether ashtanga sadhana makes sense decade upon decade.
This is urgent. The existence of the question is urgent. It suggests to me that we’re teaching wrong somehow. That Patanjali’s Sutra 1.14 isn’t the immediate take on someone like me: of course she is just getting started. Do people not know 1.14?
Is there a fallacy of misplaced concreteness? An idea that “ashtanga” means a concrete set of moves and vinyasa counts? That it’s one single man’s idea? Again so strange. Ashtanga is a path in eight limbs. Five can be taught; three can be caught. (I’d submit that the 6th one can be taught too.)
The asana practice is the entry level. It’s there to train the senses, to make us know how to move our energy, and yes to get us super clear – and super freaking skillful- with the physical body that supports the mind on the spine. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay razor’s edge present for 120 minutes of flowing movement than 120 minutes of raw flowing mind; but it’s all ashtanga if you’re on this path.
The body piece is thrilling. Being excellent technicians, of a physical art. Pursuing the (self-) knowledge to inhabit the forms brilliantly.
How to bear load on the arms with the exact joint rotations and muscle movements that are right for your shoulder girdle. How to jump while also exhaling or inhaling. How to feel the three arches of the foot with such clarity that energy rises through the knee joint, flows over the adductors and dives into the center of the cervix or prostate. How to draw the subclavius lightly down around the collarbone so the humeral head rests at home in the joint and the breath blooms right into the intercostals. How to gaze on the nose in a backbend in a way that feels like you’re looking right at the tip of the tail, releasing the meat-hooks of the sub-occipitals in gravity as the piriformis spreads like a hammock and the spine fills with liquid light.
THIS is the entry level practice. I’m doing it every day and rarely not delighted by the dance party in the cells of self and other. No more or less special than brushing the teeth devotionally. My god, the way of continuity – and the value of doing the thing for a long time without a break. It was set up like this from the start.
This post ran 4 pages, with ideas we could teach in the first 100 hours of the practice, to set up others in stable way from the start. To correct for the wrong knowledge that ashtanga is for kids. So that each one knows how to make the practice their own, how to cast a line out into the mystery and begin a continuous relationship (only if they are so inspired) with whatever it has to offer them. Individually. But this plane’s boarding so I’ll trim that off for some other time.
Happy New Year, everyone. 2025 may not be less weird, but we do have resources to meet it.