I have never considered myself an “Iyengar girl”.  Nita Spielberg used that term when she visited in November to teach us anatomy, though she didn’t use it in relation to me.  I think; What in the hell is an “Iyengar” anyway?  This guy, right there, that’s him.

He teaches yoga and, I have heard it said, Iyengar practices about four hours a day.  Apparently, he also smacks students to get them to open energy centers and vortexes, too, but I’ve not experienced this firsthand so I cannot say for sure.  Of course, I have been known to say, “That son of a bitch would hit me one time, one time…”  as I wag my index finger in the air.

Back to this guy, Iyengar.

First, let me digress, because that’s one of my favorite things to do and I know that’s what all ya’ll come here for, anyway.

Having read my last post about Dr. Kausthub Desikachar http://icyexhale.com/2012/01/02/the-moon-is-always-male/  you know I got to sit in a three-day lecture with him and then pick his brain for my future writing career.  The Dr. is a yoga therapist and a generational yoga teacher.  He’s not the first yogi-type in his family like yours truly.  They are an old family, like yoga mobsters, and I love him.  He is large, warm and someone I could hug forever.  So what I’m about to say is nothing personal.

His job is yoga therapies.  I had the opportunity to have a “private” with him in front of the class, which would have cut the cost down by like ninety percent.  But I have had acupuncture and I know what can be done with simple pulse diagnosis and looking at my tongue.  I can hear it now, “Tell me, Madam, why is it you can’t sleep without a woobie, have chronic anxiety and drink wine on every other Tuesday?  It seems like you have smoked one million and forty-seven cigarettes in your lifetime.  Is this true?”  Oh, no, you’re not getting me with that one.

So I respectfully decline to have my yoga therapy session in front of peers and colleagues, friends and future frenemies alike, because I don’t have the heart to be splayed open like fresh caught squirrel on a taxidermist’s table.  I believe in what he does that much.

In a completely un-related topic; he doesn’t care for yoga butts at all.

You know what I mean.

Let’s face it; people who practice yoga with any sort of vigor over a period of time develop this apple like appendage hovering just over their upper thighs.  Yoga pants manufacturers prey on these asses, crafting over-priced pants to further accentuate the derriere many warrior poses will develop.  Yoga will give you a nice ass, nice abs and carved arms if you let it.  But that’s not all yoga can do.

This is where the good Dr. and I agree.

In his world, the yoga butt phenomenon is almost an insult, my words not his.  In fact, this isn’t based on too much he said during his visit, it all comes from my own crisis of faith that I entered into, unfortunately, while he was in town.  He arrives the week before Christmas, which means just in time for my annual falling apart during the after Christmas hub-bub.  I get depressed in January.  I can’t help it.

Yoga is like medicine.  There are plastic surgeons and there are cardiologists.  There are breast augmentors and there are emergency room physicians.  Dr. Kausthub considers himself (I am assuming) to  be the latter of the two groups and he is not mistaken (if this is the case).

I don’t know what an Iyengar is at the time, but I know that when I began practicing yoga many years ago, “Iyengar” was a name I heard often, though it took me a while to even figure out it was really a name for a person.

The history is that Iyengar was Krishnamacharya’s student before Iyengar moved too far away to travel for sessions.  So Iyengar, sickly and desperate to cure himself as a young man, carried on his training.  A free subscription to Icy Exhale for anyone who can tell me who said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

I know how this goes.

I am an aspiring Shaolin Kung Fu student.  I have achieved some rank and have a title “Pre-Disciple” which means I can teach, have run of the school, have taken top scores in competition and perform in demonstrations.

We are practicing the bo staff form in the parking lot outside the school in Mobile.  My teacher, Shifu Liu of old China, is standing within a hairs breadth of me.  I ask, “Hey, sir, is there such a thing as a horse form?”

I ask because I have always had this thing about horses.  I worked at a stable when I was a child, not as child labor but I just took lessons and they couldn’t get rid of me.  I washed horses, fed them, walked them and rubbed the fragrance of saddle oil all over my clothes so I could take it home with me.

I am also taken with Rocky Balboa, the Italian Stallion, and think what an inspiring form The Shaolin Stallion would be, if there was such a thing.

My Shifu answers, “Nah!” and walks away.

And in my guts and mind a great serpent of independence rises up and says, “Then I’ll make one up on my own.”  Which I did times two; I went home and wrote up a draft for a psycho-spiritual dissertation on the advantages of being the underdog and then I made up a kung fu horse form with my kung fu education.

Nothing ever came of it.

However, when Iyengar decided, for all intents and purposes, to make his own horse form, he really sort of kicked off a yoga revolution.  Everyone in the west who practices yoga practices something inspired by this guy.  And his former teacher.

So yoga butts don’t fix deeply imbedded traumas or long rooted angst?

When I started practicing yoga, I had the ass of a kung fu athlete.  I didn’t need any help in that department.  But there was something about my teachers instructing, “Inhale and bring your right foot to the front of your mat, exhale bring your left foot to the front of your mat, fold over your legs.  Inhale, sweep your arms out and up allowing your hands to meet over your head.  Bring your prayer to heart’s center…”

They breathe for me without taking my breath away.  Move my foot here, there, align my ankle beneath my knee, open my hips and arms and welcome to warrior two.  These cues are not only sculpting a firm body.  In joining with a flow of yoga students and practitioners that goes back as far as yoga is willing to go, stretching as far into the future as we need to take it, there is union in the moment we exhale, really only bringing us into communion with our very own selves.

Something happened to me on the inside in flow classes.  I opened to the possibilities of yoga therapies because of flow classes and my healthy respect for Chinese medicine.  But I didn’t get into this yoga thing to be a doctor, I got into this to offer the very things that saved my life.

Breath.

That small space on the floor my sticky mat takes up that is all mine, on which I can wallow, stretch, burn and melt.

Friends I’ve met along the way.

God.  Yup, I said it.

And I believe that one day I’ll meet my highest and best self, because we all know her ass is sitting right here with me, but I’m still en process of wallowing.  That, too, is another post.

Dr. Desikachar said, in so many words, that yoga is supposed to make you feel better.  If it doesn’t help you, you’re not doing yoga.  If it helps you, it’s yoga.  Doug Keller said the same thing, and so did Swami Jaya Devi.  To hear something and then experience it are two different matters.

If a sculpted ass is a by-product of power vinyasa, the shit I’ve been doing for almost ten years, then god help me but I like it.  And if brief moments of stillness in this rocket fire mind of mine is a by-product of power vinyasa, which is really still only yoga, then whatever in the hell it is I’ve been doing is yoga, because I’m a better person both physically and phycho-spiritually for it.

Iyengar inspired instructors are the ones who brought me to where I am.  Their alignment principals have kept me safe, the directives have taught me how to work with and heal a sore back, mis-aligned bones and out of whack muscles.  I cannot argue with these concepts, I cannot besmirch the fork in the road that brought Iyengar into his line of work.

I also cannot disagree with the therapies that Dr. Desikachar prescribes, because they work as well as the Chinese acupuncture that saved my emotional and psychic life many years ago.  He is that for real, he may as well have put a whole bunch of needles in our skin and turned out the lights for three days.  But I cannot reconcile in myself that what I have been doing for almost a decade is diminished because, also, it’s sort of scripted and a punchline and makes my butt look ever so taught.

Because yoga is a punchline (I know you’ve seen the S*it Yogis Say video; it’s worse than Jenna Marbles) and sometimes it might seem scripted, especially if I’m teaching and feeling particularly defeated like I do every January, and yeah, my butt is ever so taught.  But to quote someone ever so wise and inspired, that shit works.  It doesn’t matter if you approach via yoga therapies, as about half my instructors have, or through Iyengar, which is most familiar to me.  It works, and no matter who we fall under and decide to learn from, eventually we’re going to have to make our own form.

Everything we learn is only a seed for our own greatness, and to water those little seeds sometimes we just need to go with the flow.