Yoga - CD/SD

Also, I want to try out pilates, which has been described to me as yoga inverted, all backwords with the breathing.

Some of it may have some health benefits, but I think it should be remembered that it wasn't primarily developed for health reasons (let alone keeping slim--check out the guts on some famous yogis).

There was a very good article about competing yoga schools in New York Magazine (2/2/98).

Comments I have made elsewhere re: Yoga.

I am not anti-yoga, but I don't think everyone's body is compatible with all asanas (sp?).

I do not stand on my head, nor do I do handstands. These things are okay when you are 30kg and bouncy (i.e. a child) but if poorly executed when 70kg and flab+flaccid+brittle (i.e. an adult) they are plain dodgy. Being inverted with minor risk rocks though! Like hanging or walking up walls with hands on the floor.

People who do Bikram yoga (in a 100F room!) are crazy. The head supposedly makes it easier to stretch, but i would die from dehydration and heat exhaustion if I ever tried it.

That is all.

I don't know, but they were weird.

I did my first Astanga class on Friday night - previously I'd done a couple of "power yoga" classes (hurt for 3xdays afterwards), 1x hatha class (snoozeville), 1xpilates class (ridiculous). I liked it! And the teacher is a foxxx. It is VERY popular! Bring on the trend!

The breathing, is a bit, wack.

I would like to talk to T about yoga!

I COULD BE IN THE PUB YOU KNOW I JUST CHOSE NOT TO

(today i walked for more than two hrs becuz i wanted to check out yarn shop. i'm completely bonkers.)

I moved on to a Hatha Flow class that was also pretty intense, but mostly manageable for me. I liked it a lot and got into fairly good shape.

But that was a long time ago. Now I just sit on my ass and eat fried food dipped in Ranch dressing.

The odd thing is that when I actually tried Ashtanga I liked it way more than Iyengar. So now it is practitioners of Bikram Yoga (TM) that I scoff at as trend.

I think kundalini sounds pretty intense! The breath control appeals to me for singing reasons. There's a studio 2 minutes from my house that has a donation-based class, but despite those two compelling reasons I've not gone because fuck if I'm going to chant IN ENGLISH with a roomfulla flakes! (in this class they make you chant in Sanskrit and English). See, my heart is too calcified for such a discipline!

Pilates to thread!

-- Graham (graham), Thursday, 19 September 2002 11:24 (5 years ago)

oh ffs.

HELP!

ARRRRRRRRRR

oh sorry

Pirates?

Sheesh.

hehe

yoga is classic but there is a lot of super dud yoga out there that i wldn't even call yoga

it puzzles me when people are like, "i want to try yoga but i don't want to do funny breathing or chanting, or do any meditation. " in that case, you probably just want a sculpt & tone class.

otm omg

Meditation is a tool of Satan, BEWARE, BEWARE!!

is BEWARE BEWARE your mantra?

Just kidding. But I remember some lovely alarmist rabidly Christian fiction series that posited that Satan and his minions would try to get meditation and "spirit guide" programs into schools as a front for possessing our children if we didn't surround them with the protection of Jesus' blood.

Which is just to say that there's a lot of misconception and um...probably unnecessary concerns about some elements of yoga.

i want to take ballet

do they have beginning ballet classes for adults??

I'm sure someone does.

i thought if i entered a question in this box, the internet would tell me

We are all the internet.

I don't know the answer to the thread's question, but let me say that I love that Namaste Yoga they show over-and-over on the Fit TV channel. It's like the old 20-Minute Workout on HBO in cable's early days. Hott.

Funnily enough I tried this power yoga class run by an Indian teacher yesterday.

Looked him up and he has a decolonising yoga project and he seems really left-wing (judging by his twitter). He is very much into demystifying yoga for complete beginners.

I'll go now and then as we don't often get to practice arm balances in Iyengar yoga.

Anyone got recommendations for YouTube yogis? I can’t see myself going back to class for a while

A couple of teachers I know are doing zoom classes. Not ideal but this is all that is available to me.

I have used this time to actually practice using the sequences at the back of Light on Yoga. First time I have really engaged with it, the photographs of Iyengar doing advanced postures always put me off.

I started doing yoga for the first time ever to counteract the effects of working from a kitchen chair all day, just using that Down Dog channel. It's ok, I like it fine, nothing overly challenging and it's easy to follow. I have nothing to compare it to though.

Anyone got recommendations for YouTube yogis? I can’t see myself going back to class for a while

― badg, Thursday, 2 April 2020 bookmarkflaglink

A lot of studios are doing online classes. Do you mean specific YouTube only ppl?

I believe the place I had been going to, Black Swan Yoga, has a daily livestream on YouTube. Can't vouch for their quality. They also have an app you can subscribe to that has a bunch of content.

"Black Swan Yoga" is a bit on the nose, no?

I like EkhartYoga and Fightmaster Yoga on YouTube. I avoid classes with music (just no) and instructors I find irritating (obv).

There's a lot that's unfortunate about their branding, tbh. I'm hesitant to fully endorse them because their vibe is a little offputting in general, but I at least get solid workouts from their routines.

xp

I avoid classes with music (just no) and instructors I find irritating (obv).

yeah i'm permanently scarred from having a beck song come up on some instructor's playlist.

The studio where my wife teaches is streaming live throughout the day On IG and archiving on FB. I highly recommend a Bikram class with Gary or Power with Claudia.

https://m.facebook.com/ashrambellevue/

I use this for Ashtanga:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJzfZ6w0s4g

Though there's also this class from K Pattabhi Jois too, which I haven't checked out.

I like this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Krp4W0TlAU

yeah i'm permanently scarred from having a beck song come up on some instructor's playlist.

Lol! This happened to me too w Beck but it was a free class my coworker was giving and I let it slide, she’s nice and I like her. The only music-containing yoga class I’ve enjoyed that wasn’t self-directed within the last 15 years was a metal yoga class. I love the immersive loudness and now I just do metal yoga at home.

Strongly recommend the track “Catharsis” by YOB bc it’s 23 min long (perfect for warmup) and has a spectacular ending.

Most of the non Ashtanga classes I've attended have had some kind of music, ranging from unobtrusive to painfully cringe inducing. The best ones lean heavily towards balearic bliss. I will credit one teacher, who mostly had terrible taste, for once having a playlist that featured "Tears in the Typing Pool" into "Parallelograms".

I sort of expect & enjoy fairly cheesy songs at class but an instructor played Bill Callahan once which was a pleasant surprise.

Thanks for the recommendations they were exactly what I was looking for.

We just tried a Yoga app that used Nick Cave’s soundtrack from The Road, which was a little on the nose.

I like Yoga with Adrienne. She can be cloying but I like the pacing and she’s good (speaking as an amateur) at explaining the moves. And she has a cute dog.

Though there's also this class from K Pattabhi Jois too, which I haven't checked out.

― Triceratops Vowell (Leee), Thursday, 2 April 2020 bookmarkflaglink

It's a notorious demonstration in that community but it isn't for beginners.

Adrienne uses the word “yummy” too much for me bit otherwise I think she is a good teacher.

I've been using Yogiapproved.com for classes since before this started.

no annoying music so far, but they have a 30 day free trial and a lot of classes so its fairly mindless to open up the app and decide on something.

I mainly use the same 3/4 classes. but I have no issues with the range.

they also do something called 'outlaw yoga' which I have a strange fascination with, it seems to be yoga for aging bikers, but with a dude playing guitar in the background to take the edge off...

I've watched the trailer loads in weird fascination but can't bring myself to actually open one of the courses.

Adrienne uses the word “yummy” too much for me bit otherwise I think she is a good teacher.

Disgusting
No one should be describing anything as juicy or yummy during a YOGA class? No.

Juicy gets used a lot, it's a problem

you mean like "a deep juicy stretch"? yuck.

Ms. T. and I used to go to a studio that catered to "angry screenwriters and suspicious IT workers" years back and ran across the Yoga With Adriene videos at the beginning of the pandemic. Her teaching style works well with us, especially since it's just the two of us at home watching a YouTube video, and I'm somewhere between ambivalent and not-giving-a-shit about her adjective choices.

I knew my posture was bad, but I didn't know just how bad it was. Twenty months of daily practice (yes, daily) later, I'm totally shocked to discover that I gained almost a centimeter of height back.

Amen to Yoga With Adriene, I'd let my regular yoga lapse since my old Y membership expired but a friend recommended her videos last year and I'm back to at least several times a week. I really like her range of classes, that you can pick one for just neck and shoulders if those are sore or whatever. And her patter's generally pretty likable. Anyway, yes to regular yoga!

Just thought I'd draw your attention to the journal of yoga studies. All open access.

There has been plenty of scholarship on the roots of modern yoga but this is something else. Papers on yoga and its relationship to dance, Indian martial arts. Yoga in China and Tibet. I am making my way through it so will read some articles and say anything as and when.

https://journalofyogastudies.org/index.php/JoYS/issue/view/2023.V4

Sickening.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/india-modi-yoga-whitewash-crimes-use-how

Though I will never practice Ashtannga at a Shala with a shrine to Patthabi I found this interview (from 2009, before the abuse surfaced) fascinating.

https://www.integralashtanga.com/mind-medicine/2024/9/7/interview-with-brad-ramsey

I had been meaning to try Bikram for a while now after years of various flow and corepower on stop-and-start basis. Went to my first proper Bikram class a couple of days ago and loved it. Just the right pace and the instructor was super cool to this newbie and my daughter. The intensity of the heat felt great rather than punitive as it does at Corepower, even though the Bikram room is 10 degrees hotter. Will go back.

Been reading Elliott Goldberg's "The Path of Modern Yoga" which comes after Mark Singleton's "Yoga Body" (which it argues with at times). Really informative in the first place: looking at the way Indian teachers like Yogendra expanded yoga by putting on classes (before this it was always one-on-one from teacher to student, which is ofc not commercially viable), then Swami Kuvalayananda propagation of Yoga as health/quackery, building up to Krishnamacharya and Iyengar..though I've yet to get to that bit.

While I partly agree with the thesis of these books there is an undercurrent of Western journo/academics hounding Easterners for not citing everything they say; its a journalist-thing in trying to get at the truth except its not a corrupt politician but just some random Indian bloke trying to get by with what sounds like good intentions of helping other ppl. Its too text based, when old books on yoga (which they cite and I'm reading rn) weren't books or even manuals but read like teacher to student class notes. Transmission was oral, and a lot of it is to be practiced with a lot of trial and error on the student's part. So any changes and innovations were organic.

The other undercurrent is of this sort of liberal politics of feeling aggrieved or cheated somehow. Like yoga was sold as this thousand year old indigenous practice, and now it turns out that what's being taught today is a modern take. There is almost a relief that their yoga mats can be stored away and you can go to a gym or do pilates now, they have the license.

I do think this feeling 'aggrieved or cheated' is an odd take on yoga. A bigger problem feels like the rampant commercialisation and 'life-styling' of modern yoga practice (for example the Lululemon 'yummy mummy' yoga accessories) rather than Yoga's historic authenticity.

How authentic are the Boxing/Boxercise/Fixboxing/non-contact boxing classes that are offered in many gyms?

Well I am talking about the mindset of those writers and how some of those books were positively received at the time in reviews. It feels like they are having a go at some more recent takes on genuinely interesting variations of Hatha Yoga just because it isn't noted down.

I have no idea about boxing but I guess some of the yoga equivalents could be things like acro yoga and so on. But yes the expansion and commercialiasiation (like the way its been absorbed into a fitness) can bring its own set of problems for sure.

In traditional martial arts, it's common for instructors and students to be strongly invested in questions of lineage and history and to claim that their forms of practice are more authentic than others. The same phenomenon is not unusual in yoga schools.

Recent historical research has documented how much these disciplines as they exist now were shaped by Western ideas of pedagogy in the 19th and 20th centuries. There's been a lot of resistance to acknowledging this two-way influence, mainly because the folklore of thousand-year-old traditions is so useful for appeals to authority. There's a strong element of Orientalism in these attitudes.

None of this historical controversy seems very relevant to doing yoga or martial arts today. Over time people always find new ways to teach and organize physical practices, that's good not bad! Many of these traditions would have disappeared if they hadn't been modified in ways that have allowed millions of people to experience them.

Teachers who use bogus historical claims to assert their personal authority can be bad actors, but not necessarily; that's probably better judged by the quality of their teaching and practice than by the oral history they like to share.

That last point is really true.

But there was a lot of anger from the Indian yoga people that were interviewed for these books and felt like what they said was distorted.

In Goldberg's account of Krishnamacharya and his work in Mysore (which basically laid the foundation in how yoga is taught today in the West) there is an assertion that he must've seen contortionists because the deep back bends are similar to contortion. The pictures don't lie but I think the assertion is faulty.

I read K's biography/remembrance written by one of his later students (Mohan) and I gotta say there's no way he would've attended a circus show. Goldberg does say he has no evidence so its just speculation. Whereas K was probably capable of inventing deeper backbends given what children are capable of when young, and many of his students in Mysore were kids...the best thing would be to say that we don't know; there is no evidence of East-West information exchange, in that one instance.

yoga is materialism, that is all

That's right.

(Funnily enough I was going to type up a big-ish series of posts on all the yoga books I have been reading since Xmas)

This Ashtanga Vinyasa teacher gives a brief talk, tackling spiruality in materialist thinking in that somewhat annoying academic manner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkSNg9IET7g

Putting some notes together as I have been actually reading as much as practicing and thinking about the bigger picture of what yoga **is**...sorry this is a ramble I just need to get this out of my brain and process it out.

There is Hatha (Physical = what you do with the limbs + the breath(Pranayamas)) yoga and a philosophy attached to it. This is what differentiates it from exercise/callisthenics, even now. That you reckon with a metaphysics in an exercise class..

There are two eras, if you like:

Year 500 - 1900s: Where you have the Samkhya philosophy circulated (starting with Patanjali but its basically a dual/non-dual split, and a further split in India alongside the Brahminical/Tantra axis (which integrates with Hinduism and Buddhism too))

Alongside this you have Hatha yoga texts where the number of asanas steadily increase from four or five to about 100, from the 10th century to the 19th:

With these texts (and others like Gorakṣaśataka, which I haven't got hold of as yet, but you can read 'Roots of Yoga', which is a great Penguin compilation of all this and so much more, and a starting point for all):

- Gheranda Samhita
- Siva Samhita
- Dattatrayayogasastra
- Hatha Yoga Pradipika (the most well known of these manuals) (lots of commentaries but Krishmacharaya's is key, as I talk about further down)
- Khecarividya
- Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati

There are: NO pictures (except the odd painting and many sculptures in temples that is all the visual document we have from those times, but ofc nothing like photographic material you attached to texts today), NO detailed instructions and (apart from Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati) NO sequencing.

There are physical methods taught but these texts mostly feel like teaching aids (and ofc what were books in medieval India?) The culture was v much that these were (guesswork here) consumed in a one-to-one setting, that students were accepted (cults but a very different feel to what they are today), and that these were practices for goals beyond the mortal not mere physical wellbeing.

The physical was a path to the spiritual, which is where the notion of Chakras and Kundalini can also come in.

The Elliott Goldberg I talked about before (as well as 'Yoga Body' by Mark Singleton) goes into good detail as to the development of 'Sun Salutations', how asanas intersect with bodybuilding and physical culture and culminates with 'Light on Yoga' where the level of detail, sequencing (there are six years worth of sequences from beginner to advanced, which is the core of the book for me) and how the asanas should look in the end (as detailed by photographic material), for two hundred of them, while the number of pranayamas (breath manipulations) are static, and you only have about a dozen.

Light on Yoga was a sort of quantum leap for the documentation of Asana practice, and its what I learnt, which is at first based on what Iyengar learnt at Krishnamacharya's Shala in Mysore in the 1930s as a teen. And in between the Hatha Yoga texts and Light on Yoga there is K's work (he also published Yoga Makaranda in the 1930s, which was a fine book but nowhere as good as LofY) and chief innovation: Vinyasa, where you link the body's movements with the breath (actions on inhale and exhale, how many breaths and manipulations). Whereas Iyengar often dispensed with this, where the instruction is to "breathe normally", which is actually brilliant for most people who will struggle to even straighten and stretch their legs.

When it comes to the 1920s onwards the question often becomes: how to propagate this stuff to enough people so that you can sustainably live in the world as a householder -- yoga teacher as a job -- instead of a renunciate who would teach one-on-one (you can't make money, you don't pay rent, no societal respectability).

In a class you have students who are living in the world and who wanted yoga to feel better (healthier, etc.) as opposed to only doing the spiritual work, to attain liberation, or to learn to manipulate energies within the body (Kundalini). There might be esoteric interests but in a class setting no one has to get initiated to a sect, they just need to pay for the class and if you want to learn the esoteric stuff its highly unlikely it could be legally done in a class setting.

Its very much my sense that Kundalini, and techniques like Khechari Mudra (where you roll the tongue back against the palate and enter the nasal cavity and er, eventually attain immortality through this), or cleansings as detailed in the Hatha Yoga corpus clash with a more philosophical approach that was undertaken in Iyengar's later teaching. "Energies" are invisible, they can't be quantified (the Western mind will balk at Chakras) whereas a phiosophical framework that leads to Samadhi is -- while weird -- has a structure with which to attain it: prepare the body to sit quietly, or training to meditatively move, which can be observed by demonstration of accomplished yogis.

Throughout then there is like a gains and losses column:

Patanjali: seated practice (no more than 10 postures, probably less) leading to Samadhi, but beginning with living in a highly controlled ethical way (Yamas and Niyamas), which is highly respectable householder living in the world practice.

Hatha Yoga (up to 1920s): Physical practice (30-100 asanas documented), Pranayama, Mudras, Bandhas, cleansings to prepare for seated meditation.
Liberation is also the point but the focus is on the practices that could get you there. No Yamas and Niyamas, though the role of diet points
to a way of living which is way off the track (controlled diet, but also when, how you eat are important). Taken by ascetics/renunciates.

1920s onwards: increase in Asanas with the Vinyasa technique, Pranayama, less Mudras and Bandhas. The focus is on asana and Pranayama
to prepare different bodies that now are seated in chairs all the time so that they can sit on the floor + Patanjali-like respectability.
(Krishnamacharya's commentary of the Pradipika is funny where he is v against Khechari Mudra, and looks down on Kundalini, wild Tantric renunciate
stuff which clashes with the respectability of a Brahmin householder, which is what K was)

Light on Yoga: Further expositions of Asana and Pranayama are the core of the practice with alignment of body (which means highly detailed instruction), some Mudras and Bandhas. Acknowledgment of cleansings, meditation, Kundalini, Chakras, the yogic diet but it all feels like paying lip service to the history of Hatha Yoga whereas what's important is Asana/Pranayama and Patanjali's work. A mish-mash of Hatha and Samkhya
that began with Krishnamacharya is further extended to here by one of his students.

The only thread truly connecting it all is: Abhyasa (Practice), Tapas (heat/fire/intensity) and Vairagya (detachment/dispassion). Yoga as an intense process, which is practiced fiercely, whether 'results' come or not. In this sense, a religion-like aspect...

I want to carry on with some of Iyengar's students (or some of the people that were with him, many of whom stayed but some who left to pursue other avenues). They wrote books and reckoned with this material and went back in history. More pluses and minuses.

very cool, thanks for the info. i need to get light on yoga.

Its good for a good look though its hard to get into without a pracitce, and its a specific type of book which really shook things up. People like Sivananda (as well as his students) and Dhirendra Bhramachari had to come up with their own versions of that kind of thing (as I see it), where the focus shifted from Bhakti Yoga (in Sivananda's case) or the interesting forms of Hatha DB seemed to be going for in his first book (Yogic Suksma Vyayama) to a Light on Yoga copy, by getting some young flexible thing to do the hardest poses in the photos. What's impressive about Iyengar (without being some kind of yoga rockist) is that he was doing the hard stuff by himself into his 60s, and as his body aged he was still practicing hard poses with the help of props. The videos on YT from the mid 70s are pretty remarkable as performance theatre.

Before carrying on with some more observations I thought I'd post some more on Krishnamacharya. Like I said he wrote the Makaranda, he hated Light on Yoga -- but he had a love/hate relationship with Iyengar and its hard to not see some of this as jealousy. Other than that he was the one coming up with some of the photos and early videos and trying to propagate what he was doing. Once he was sacked from Mysore* he moved to Madras and acquired new pupils, and lived quietly. His religion/sect affiliation didn't allow him to travel outside India (unlike Iyengar he didn't break that rule) so he was confined to that. There is a video on YT of his 100th Birthday celebrations (he died a few months after that).

I was going through his essay this morning and it's really interesting to have all that knowledge squeezed into (its published online somewhere) a short number of pages.

- Salutations to the Teacher and the Eternal One

His other devoted pupil in Madras was AG Mohan, he wrote a remembrance (Krishnamacharya - His Life and Teachings), which is a beautiful book (I posted about it on ILB last year, and its an all time great yoga book, it kind of led me on this path of reading more and more yoga books despite some of their dubious qualities as prose lol I do miss reading novels)

Mohan also translated one of the two books that are in a category of their own:

- Yoga Yajnavalkya
- Lalleshwari - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalleshwari, https://www.penguin.co.in/book/i-lalla/

The Yajnavalkya is a dialogue between husband and wife and is thought to have been written just around the time of Patanjali and before Hatha Yoga really got going. It describes the Eight Limbs of Yoga and goes through a few Asanas and Pranayamas and I think Krishnamacharya found this to be a really, really useful book.

There aren't many women in yoga in medieval India that have their own voice. Lalleshwari was different and this books of poems (which also contain yogic teachings) from a non-dual Saiva perspective are really remarkable.

*as detailed in this podcast with Ashtanga** Teacher (and Mysore researcher Andrew Eppler: https://harmonyslater.com/finding-harmony-podcast/2021/11/2/andrew-eppler)

** I won't talk that much about Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga since forms of this kind of flowing yoga are the cornestone of what's practiced in the West today. I do a lot of Jumpings and rollings in my Iyengar practice, but I need the detail otherwise you can easily get injured if you don't have the openings in the shoulders, writs, hips, hamstrings etc. Certainly encountered a few people who switched to Iyengar because they got injuries in Ashtanga, but I don't really know the practice well enough to comment. But I really like BNS Iyengar (no relation), the guy is 100 and still alive and he is still teaching. I would be tempted.

I have never formally practiced Hatha Yoga; it was always Hatha via Iyengar's method. When I started I asked my first Iyengar teacher what Hatha was an she said its 'general' yoga and while that's kind of true its more that its the physical form that its written about in the older texts. Physical Yoga as a way toward meditation, whereas Iyengar tried meditation when Krishnamacharya said to him (when he turned 60) to stop asana work and focus on seated meditation.

He did, for three months, and as he tells it this did not work for him. He needed to get back into Asanas and he never stopped till he died at 95 (he died the year I started yoga classes). Iyengar reasoned that Yoga asanas were his prayers, that you could reach all eight stages of yoga in any yoga pose; that yoga was a moving meditation; that this was Patanjali's yoga. That account does need some critique, but it was his yoga, and his path.

Anyway, the problem with Hatha is that (as I said yesterday) these were sort of manuals, and the audience could sit on the floor like we sit on furniture now, so the hips back then are healthy and the legs are used and the spine isn't hunched but straight. Poeple could squat. I spend much of my time sitting on a pillow for the last few years while working from home, so I get to use my legs. For ages it was difficult, it still is but I am getting better, and so is my practice.

The books below try to flesh out what Hatha Yoga could be. Rosen was an ex-Iyengar student but here he writes about the 32 asanas in the Gheranda Samita, and he tries to fashion a practice out of it. Theos Bernard is kind of fascinating. He wrote a manual based on his experiences of learning Hatha Yoga in the 30s (see the wiki). Lysbeth is a Belgian who tries to cut down Hatha's techniques to what is essential for Westerners, trying to deal with how the physical postures can be used in the modern day. The Bernard is the most interesting to me because he tries to fit a square into a circle by going into the techniques the most.

Richard Rosen - Original Yoga
Theos Bernard - Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theos_Casimir_Bernard)
Andre Van Lysbeth - Yoga Self-Taught

Iyengar and his yoga have propagated throughout the West, parts of Asia, Russia, South America, South Africa, Australia and Israel too. There are national associations that bear his name in about forty countries. Currently there are four levels of certification with L4 being advanced. Iyengar wrote four core books (besides Light on Yoga), his daughter Geeta wrote a book on Yoga for Women. They wrote a brilliant manual for teaching it. His pupils in the West and India are propagating and teaching what they have learnt from him without much deviation.

And then there are students who did intensives in India, or stayed with him for many years then left him, the association, its politics (as all politics it gets ugly and tiring). I went through a lot of those stories (and heard a lot of them through yoga podcasts) and some of it feels like an abusive relationship; some of it is an amicable split. The below is a sample of the books (downloaded from Anna's archive/material (podcasts and Youtube Videos; the internet is great) I have collated by the pupils. A lot of the books have been collated in the last few months and I haven't finished most of them, but have read parts.

You can read a lot of the names writing a short essay about their time with Iyengar here.
BKS Iyengar - The Yoga Master (ed. Kofi Busia). This is a collection that celebrates Iyengar's 80th (or 70th, one of those) birthday. From there you track it down.

One of those guys is Zhandor Remete, who was with Iyengar for many years and then went on to form the Shadow Yoga school.

He has written a book on it Chaya Yoga and I've started practicing it. The site is here:

https://shadowyoga.com/

There is a great podcast with one of his early students who went onto study swordmanship full time
https://www.yogapeeps.com/2008/episode-47-john-evans-audio/306

What I like about it is that it goes deep into the old texts:

https://shadowyoga.com/recommended-texts

It goes for a reconstruction of Hatha Yoga (meditation in seated postures) but recognises that the Western body can't sit on the fllows, that shoulders/wrists are fucked so you need PREPARATORY work. So from that lighbulb moment I got to collate a lot of that work, though I am taking some Shadow Yoga classes.

The video below is an example of prepatory work. Anyone who has has bad knees (or injures like I do sometimes) will appreciate the Circling movements of the limbs and how circulation is bought back:

#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK7GnP8kIeA

It has a series of dynamic squats like this one - if you can't squat you can't sit.
#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdJZTZCylTc

A lot of yoga could align (just looking at the shapes here) with dance in its controlled movement; some Yoga has squats and push ups and squats in common with Indian Martial Arts, such as Kalari. This is something that Shadow Yoga makes use of. Here are some Kalari demonstrations:
#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KCRgW88Emw
#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JqqX6vRYc0

Iyengar went through phases in his teaching. As Noelle and Donna Holleman say he used to teach a small number of students (before he achieved fame and got enough money from sales of Light on Yoga to establish his institute in Pune). They came to India and he would get them through three hours in the morning and three hours in the evening for months; the body would get stronger and flexibility would come. You can see him helping her out here (https://www.centeredyogadonaholleman.org/en/centered-yoga-en/).

Donna distanced herself from it in the 80s and then wrote a book about her own yoga.
Donna Holleman - Dancing the Body of Light

One of Iyengar's early student (who also taught Donna) was Vanda Scaravelli. You can see her doing amazing asanas well into the 80s (https://www.catherineannisyoga.co.uk/about/vanda-scaravelli-yoga/). She was taught by Iyengar (and Desikachar too). There was some sort of falling out, but from there she developed some kind of methodology which she passed on to a few students, which is called 'Scaravelli - inspired' yoga. Having read their books there are some indications as to what it could be. These are like the hints in the Indian medieval yoga books. Hints, with a lot of work to be done to discover for yourself.

Vanda Scaravelli - Awakening the Spine
Sandra Sabatini - Like A flower: my Years with Vanda Scaravelli/Breath: The Essence of Yoga
Diane Long/Sophy Hoare - Notes on Yoga: The Legacy of Vanda Scaravelli

In the book by Diane Long there are some sharp words against Iyengar's work -- especially the use of props -- which is really interesting as Iyengar developed these as students were getting neck injuries in shoulderstand, for example. It certainly led me to play with shoulderstand without a pile of blankets and its an ongoing thing in my personal practice, as the use of props (even within the Iyengar community) is something that you need to discourage students from using unless they really can't get anywhere with it at the beginning.

The best video demonstration of Scaravelli Yoga is in this yoga channel. Its very much like trying to intuitevely discover your way into a yogic posture, whereas Iyengar is v much school of hard knocks with ruthless repetition and practice, practice, practice with fire and no let up.
#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBajK5u9jFE

Another early student is Noelle Perez-Christiaens; she was a hairdresser from Belgium and she compiled Iyengar's sayings. This is actually the thing that really captures what an amazing teacher he was and its a brilliant read.

Sparks of Divinity - The Teachings of BKS Iyengar from 1959 to 1975

So: Shadow Yoga, Scaravelli Yoga, what else? Will come back in a bit..

Thanks for these notes, xyzzzz__. For me they're very helpful in filling out the ideas in Yoga Body about the evolution of these practices in the era of mass media and Western-style pedagogy.

The video of Shadow Yoga warm-up exercises is great! Sedentary people generally aren't prepared to begin many forms of practice, and sometimes instructors don't have good tools to address that gap. Those exercises seem to meet that need well. Many people would gain significant mobility just from doing those warm-ups regularly, whether or not they went on to more challenging asanas.

Andrey Lappa, who started practicing yoga from a copy of LonY in the Ukraine in the late 80s is quite a weird character. He came up with "Universal Yoga" and runs intensives for half of the year and then the other half is spent meditating in the Himalayas. He wrote a fairly hard to read book (PDF is online) (https://www.universal-yoga.com/)

There are a few people who do some of the sequence demonstrations on YT, which combine classical asanas with Ashtanga Yoga Vinyasas. Don't particularly care for them but I think the prone shoulder openers are really good preparatory work.

The Demonstrations in this YT channel were good and I learnt it from this student of his.
#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwJfV04vuQc

He came up with something called "shiva nata", which are these arm movements. This would take a good year to learn.
#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDIEqvLj018

Nicky Knoff is an Australian teacher who was a prisoner of war survivor when young (there is a podcast where she tells her story) and then went to Iyengar and then Ashtanga intensives but basically came up with "Knoff Yoga". This 'Bhumi Namaskar' sequence is another excellent preparatory sequence of sittings and squats
#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RciVFQigvHE-

Eric Schiffmann - Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness
Eric (as he tells it in inteviews) basically would write letters to people in India/elsewhere and ask whether he could come and teach stuff. They would say yes and off he went. He met Krishnamurti, Scaravelli, Iyengar and Desikachar. Then he met an American Hatha Yogi who was pretty much self-taught -- Joel Kramer -- who wrote some terrific articles on creating energy lines to achieve proficiency in asanas. Eric has such a kind hippie vibe. His YT channel is dormant but the videos are up and in this one he talks about Iyengar and Kramer. Eric's book basically is a great mish mash of both Iyengar 'alignment' and Kramer 'energy lines' explained. Read it apart from the final section on meditation, which I'll get to next.
#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU-JWABImOk

Joel Kramer died a few years ago but his site is still up and the series of articles he wrote on yoga technique are really important to me - https://www.joeldiana.com/?page_id=14
He wrote a book called (The Passionate Mind Revisited) which I have but not really gone through just yet.

Ramanand Patel was a senior Iyengar teacher and sort fell off due to Iyengar Yoga Politics surrounding certification etc. He did a series of interviews (instigated by a student of his) where he talks about all sorts of yogic aspects (this was a covid type project). I pull out his chat on 'yoga and sound'; his talk on Savasana is really great too, but they are all worth a listen.
#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfb7tttqTHE

Simon Borg-Olivier and Bianca Machliss also learnt a lot from both Iyengar and Ashtanga. They combine a very Western approach to Anatomy, Physiology and nutrition (while paying lip service to yogic anatomy and diet in their book Applied Anatomy and Physiology of Yoga) (PDF is again online), which is not my jam as I don't care for Western anatomy as a subject but it has a great appendix on 'generating Bandhas'. Like Lappa he is one of those ppl that does a lot of workshops and there are plenty of podcasts he is on to promote them. Again don't particularly care for what he often talks about but he'll come up with something now and then. In one podcast he talks about helping out a Prof Bhim Dev in his demonstrations, and I'll end these posts by linking to this demonstration he gave on a TV talk show. Yogic magic powers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSuWtF-MVxk

xp - no worries. I am 95% Iyengar (will be looking to teach the stuff should I pass the exam this year or next) but am now seeing some areas where my body really needs other stuff to compliment it as well.

Pretty good interview that touches on class, gender and cast between the Brahmin and Tantric approaches to yoga.

https://wildyogi.info/en/articles/tantra-there-are-no-castes-no-gender-interview-vagish-shastry

A couple more podcasts.

This is by Joel Kramer who I talk about above.

Self taught from books...just doing and discovering. He was a trained philosopher and started late.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/podcast-yoga-peeps/id121950220

Paulie Zink was a martial artist who then found yoga. He explains how he invented Yin yoga by accident. The practice is quite far from what it's thoughts but like Iyengar it's long static holds. But it's mostly a seated practice.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/paulie-zink-monkey-kung-fu-master-yin-yoga-founder/id1607750857?i=1000585190005

Paulie and Joel are American Yoga at its best. Just highly independent of anyone, very isolated, both never published a book. Paulie has a YT channel so you can see him in action too.