Local School
Had a looong practice this morning and a restful afternoon (by ‘restful’ read ‘long snooze’ – I feel guilty mentioning this as I know just how hard my partner at home is having to work while I’m away). Headed into Raya’s class knowing it would be busy, as Prasant’s normal class this morning was cancelled and his huge following was redirected to Raya this evening.
As we were sitting waiting for class to begin, I was contemplating my current headstand troubles – the last time I was in Pune in 2014 I had to rebuild it from scratch as I had got into the habit of doing it completely incorrectly. In the words of Stephanie Quirk “The single most important thing you can do to improve your organ health is to improve you alignment in Sirsasana”. After 6 months or so of practicing against the corner of a column to learn to realign myself I found I had completely ‘lost’ my headstand. Two years later it is still a daily struggle and currently I am using the wall to draw the buttocks and front ribs in before balancing. So there I was thinking it was probably about time to bite the bullet and resume going up in the centre of the room again, when Raya started the class with headstand and stated that nobody was to use the ropes or the wall. It was either balance in the centre, or lie down in supta baddha konasana with the menstruating ladies! Decision made then!
18 minutes of headstand with padmasana, pindasana, parsva pindasana, virasana, urdhva dandasana later I was (literally) on my knees. In some ways it was very much a Prasant style class – very little instruction and long periods of listening interspersed with some advanced asana.
He spoke about how our minds flick from one thing to another. He talked about the effect of what’s app, facebook, news bulletins with 3 different layers of text streaming across the screen; how this is making the mind flick about and us become impatient always wanting action, sensory input. And then when we are in a pose we are wanting that constant stream of instruction to hold onto. The subject is too vast to give a comprehensive list of instructions to – like trying to give an instruction book on parenting, when every child is so different and has so many aspects. Especially those of us who only come and study in Pune for a month, understand that you are nowhere near to getting the whole picture – don’t think you have understood everything there is to know about yoga, that you’ve “got it” – he said none of us (including himself) fully understood what Guruji was trying to impart. The subject is vastly more complicated than we have understood – he made reference to Guruji pointing to the stars and the universe and instead of us beginning to take in the sheer wonder of what Guruji was showing, we become fixated on the finger that is pointing – how straight, how perfectly aligned that finger is. The asana is the method and while we have to practice asana we should not think that it is everything.
As my children will tell you (cos I often bang on about it), the subject of how smartphones and screens make the mind flicker about is one that is close to my heart – and actually I think some of my current difficulty with headstand does stem from that. We finished with a very long stay in Halasana (to balance the long sirsasana) and here he said we should be able to feel the layers of texture in the asana . He spoke about the important aspects of asana – not strength, glamour, external appearance etc but the most important aspect is sensitivity. Guruji said he had to use his mind strongly, forcefully to get into an asana but then the mind has to withdraw. One of my personal favourite Guruji quotes that often comes into my mind when I am really trying to get an action is “Nothing should be forced, receptivity is everything”.
After class as I was putting equipment back I heard a couple of local indian men chatting and mixed in with the Marathi I thought I heard the word Hockey, which immediately stuck out as it’s my surname. Slightly puzzled I continued on, thinking I’d probably imagined it, but a few minutes later the gentleman approached me and said (in thick local accent) “You’re Tamara Hockey right?” I’ve been following your blog!!” Ha! It’s getting about!
I was quite dismayed on trying to retrieve my much loved (birthday present from my sisters) Birkenstocks from the shoe racks, to find someone had taken them home and left me a similar pair. I looked around to see if I could spot them and was told by a number of people that they have developed various strategies to stop this from happening – separating the pair, hiding one beneath the rack or putting them right out of reach on the top shelf. Any blog readers here in Pune, these are the similar pair, see pic below.
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