The Yoga Teachers' Recurring Dream

Dreams are elusive. Shape-shifting. People and places in dreams melt, become something else. To articulate a dream is often puzzling. Bizarre. In those brief moments after waking, we sometimes make efforts to palpate our dreams. Reaching for a glimpse of subconscious clarity.

Most of my dreams feel conical, like a funnel though which I pour all my anxiety and unspoken fears. Mostly, I am running from something. Or the world has turned liquid and everyone is swimming. Sometimes I'm crossing rivers filled with alligators or mucking through jungles hoping not to meet the fangs of some poisonous snake. Occasionally, I have yoga dreams. Some where I am learning and experiencing. These are the rare ones, full of beauty and the brink of enlightenment. Frequently, though, I dream that I am teaching yoga. Teaching to crowds of students who don't want to listen. Who roam off in clusters, oblivious to my efforts. This must be some deep-seated fear, for it has never happened.

Back in May, at a yoga conference, I decided to survey some of my peers. What were their yoga dreams? This was by no means a formal study and it did invoke a lot of laughter. Below are the tellings of three yoginis' dreams and as you can see, we are all cut from the same neurotic cloth.

Britta's Dream:

I am teaching standing poses at the wall. The students are fairly close together and the lighting is dim. I am concentrating on the students, close-in, they are new. I step back to get an overall look at them and realize we are crowded into the corner of a bar! Now I am aware of loud music, crowds of people, flashing lights, and the smell of beer. It is Friday night and business is at its peak. I am finding it difficult to teach in the midst of this mayhem and make an effort to communicate without shrieking. Then, I realize this is a loft style bar and there is a smaller second floor that can be seen from below... and there are students crowded into a corner up there, too! At full speed, I jostle through patrons and their drinks up the stairs and that is the end of my dream.

Karen's Dream:

A few months before my Intro I/II assessment, I had a dream I was walking with my mother through a beautiful landscape. We walked along a path flanked by old trees with thick trunks and many branches. There was a golden light permeating everything. The path led to a house and the next moment my mother was gone and I found myself teaching in that unfamiliar place. Inside it looked like a gym. I could still see some of the beautiful trees through the windows.

I was teaching a large group of beginners. All of the people in the room where strangers to me. We were sitting in Sukhasana (crossed legs) and as I was looking around the room there was one student in the front row who was doing Eka Pada Sirsasana (head stand with one leg down) instead.

In my dream, I found this quite unsettling and wondered why such an advanced student would be in a beginners' class and how to handle the situation. At that moment a group of people entered the gym who started to practise some kind of sport in the midst of all the yoga students and then all of a sudden the yoga students all disappeared at once and only the sporty people were still there.

Krisna's Dream:

I arrive a little late, finding myself in a room with a large group of yoga "students". Not your typically attired "shorts and t-shirt wearing" students, but people with running shoes on, bulky jackets, and blue jeans with belts. The crowd is waiting for the class to start, but not terribly interested in what they are about to experience. There is a somewhat boisterous group of young folk in the corner, but the age of students ranges from teens to 80s. The room itself is a ridiculous space for me to teach yoga in, but I give it a go. I try to position myself to be able to look around the thick pillars and corners... trying to see and inspire all of the students.

Turns out, I have to rush to one section, give them an instruction, rush to the next and repeat the instruction, and then to the next section, repeat. By the time I get back to section one...they have not maintained the pose, they are standing around or lying on the floor talking again. I try to inspire them, to get their attention. Is this is some sort of test? I want them to see me demonstrate but the vantage points are nil and "gathering round" cannot be done, because each of the 3 sections of the room are too small to have a gathering! After 20 minutes or so of a planned hour, the class slowly begins to disband itself and I am left wondering what else I could have done.
I had a similar dream where I taught in a hockey arena, in the stands...around the tiered rows of folding theatre-type seats that you can barely squeeze between. "You folks, gather here in this little open area off to the side"..."three of you- down one level in the narrow passageway"..."triangle to the right side!" My voice got louder and louder as their attention waned and the impossibility of the situation waxed. Then, I woke up. A big sigh, thank-God it was only a dream. But I sure needed some rest.

Slack-tide

It is midsummer. The stuff of dreams, really. Blue skies embrace the landscape and time turns to liquid. Nothing is pressing. Nothing is important.

I have taken this time away from my family, spent forty-five minutes on a passenger ferry to arrive on Lasqueti Island with friends, Joanna and Elyot. Jenny greets us down at the dock where we load up the back of her pick-up. Two of us ride on top of coolers in the back as we drive along unpaved roads to her homestead. From there, it's wheelbarrows and footpaths down to the idyllic dwelling that perches on the edge of the bay.

I love this piece of the planet.

The next few days we live here, cloistered away from the rest of the world. On the deck that overhangs the water, we play scrabble, stretch and exchange stories. In the kitchen, we prepare delicious, fresh food from Jenny's garden: fava beans, artichokes, beets and peas. A bounty.

The tide slides out, the whole bay empties and becomes a perforated mud bed. My feet are delighted to walk across this yielding surface, to have mud ooze through my toes, wrap around my heels. At high tide, the sun mellows and water laps below the deck, inviting us to swim.

I marvel at the extreme nature of these tides. How low. How high. It is an amazing thing -- to witness the emptying of a bay. We discuss the poetics of this movement and Jenny tells us that there are some tides that have you walking way, way out, beyond the bay. Joanna says that in other parts of the world, tides are minimal, small two-step dances. Here, ebb and flow mean something.

Elyot reflects that there is a moment between tides. Three minutes. Where the tide is neither moving in, nor out. Slack-tide. This word loops in my mind like a long rope that is no longer taut, no longer strained from motion, only loose in the waiting. I wonder why I have never learnt this before, this simple beautiful fact: the ocean pauses. Slack-tide is the earth's khumbaka; the ocean is the planet's wide, soft diaphragm.

As the water draws into the bay for high tide, it is the breath entering the body. The pause -- slack-tide. Then, the tide empties, the way our body releases the breath. Again, slack-tide. And so the process goes. On and on for millennium.

Slack-tide is a non-moment and life is filled with these. Happenings we deem insignificant, irrelevant to the more important events in our lives. Like doing dishes. Or, dangling feet off the end of a dock. Or staring up at the sky.

When I first became aware of the internal slack-tide, I was drawn to it. Pause between my breaths? Space between my thoughts? I'd never thought of these things before. Soon enough, I discovered it isn't even a thinking thing. More like a quiet happening that presents itself in pranayama, in meditation, in asana.

Or, even on the edge of Lasqueti Island.

For the rest my time here, I embrace the poetry of slack-tide, the joy and beauty that dwells in those fleeting moments of stillness. The four days are over too quickly, but they have been a pause in and of themselves, nourishing me.

The ferry jostles us back to what Lasquetians call “the other side”. Here we disembark to smells of creosote, sounds of boat traffic and gulls. We haul our emptied coolers, our sacks of clothes and books from the dock to Elyot's truck.

I climb into the passenger's seat, lean back into it, grateful for my time away. Elyot starts the engine. It growls, then lurches us forward.

I think of the slack-tide and breathe in.

Ready for home.

Yoga for the Mind

Yoga has gone mainstream. It is in our everyday vernacular. It sells cars. And cereal.

Whether or not you've tried a class, you have an idea of what yoga is. To most people, yoga is a way of stretching and becoming more flexible. For others, it is a means toward relaxation. For others still, it is a fitness workout.

All these elements may be attributed to yoga, but yoga has a broader base and higher purpose. With origins dating back at least two thousand years, yoga is an ancient spiritual practice. Its intent is not to stretch the hamstrings, but to bring quiet or stillness to the fluctuating thought waves that disturb the mind. The word yoga means “yoke”, inferring to the union of body, mind and spirit.

The reason that asana practice is popular in the West, is that it appeals to our sense of working the body, giving us something to “do”. Besides, there are a myriad of health benefits in performing yoga poses. Depending on how they are taught, the sequence they are taught in and the skill of the teacher, asanas can bring about relief from much physical discomfort – alleviating anything from back pain to PMS. And this is a good reason to practice yoga. But it is not the only reason.

If you sit around and watch your mind for any given five minutes, you'll notice a turbidity of thought. Carol Shields called it “the longest conversation of your life”. The inner dialogue that is crammed with endless opinions, admonitions, desires, fears, justifications, observances plus an assortment of mundane and intriguing ideas.

Yoga aims at quietening this mental noise. And the brilliance of BKS Iyengar, a living yoga master, was that he perfected alignment of the body in the yoga asanas in order to penetrate the mind.

Say, when you go to a yoga class and are asked to work in triangle pose, your feet are spread wide, your arms extend from the shoulders. Then, you are asked to lengthen and bend to the side. But the pose isn't over. Many actions are required to sustain this pose: the feet must press into the floor; thigh muscles roll outward to align the knee joint; quadriceps contract to further the stability of the legs. Then the spine lengthens and the torso revolves upward. Then, of course there is the matter of the breath – you must breathe.

While you are working, the mind -- which is usually preoccupied with thoughts of dinner, or the argument you had with X, or the seeds you'll plant this summer, or the weather -- is harnessed close in to the body.

Even for one fleeting second.

After that second, you may become aware that you feel discomfort in the pose, or you want to come out, and then the instructor reminds you to contract your thigh muscles. So your awareness returns to the thighs. Then, she reminds you to breathe, so you realize you've been holding your breath and you let it go and you breathe. For a moment, your mind is freed up again.

And so it goes.

This is not to say that you'll become enlightened after one class, or even after twenty years; however, the awareness gained on the yoga mat, through the body, can be applied to daily life. You begin to recognize how the body affects the mind. For example, slouching forward closes the chest, it brings about a depressed mind. Opening the chest invites life into the body, nudges the mind into a state of well-being. When your life feels out of control, standing poses bring about stability. Forward bends, tranquillity.

The beauty with the practice of yoga is that awareness deepens over time. As you practice the asanas, the body becomes more open. But more profoundly you learn to move you past your thoughts and into the essence of your own Being.

Introductory Musings : Number 2

For over a decade now, I've been working on, refining and teaching uttitha trikonasana (triangle pose). Often, especially if I've been away from my practice for a few days, it feels like coming home. So why, when at a workshop with Maureen Carruthers did I run up against resistance in this pose? It wasn't a physical obstruction either.

Maureen asked us to enter trikonasana (triangle) in an exploratory manner. To move slowly, deepening our relationship to our centre. I found myself wanting to go into the pose the way I always did, with some awareness, sure, and with a definite swiftness. So, I had to stop and ask myself: did I need to go into this triangle the way I did yesterday's triangle? Did I think if I didn't do it the same, I'd somehow lose the pose? Maureen encouraged us to put aside our competitive nature and, as we moved into the pose, to seek joy.

Joy. Right. That's why I do this practice. For the love and joy of it. How could I forget?

All This Space

When I was pregnant with my second son, I took my first son to stargaze in our backyard. World affairs had me rattled – the US had begun their anti-terror campaign by bombing Afghanistan. I often thought of the Afghani women who were pregnant like me, having to flee their homes, or giving birth as explosions blew apart their country.

The night was clear. It was late Fall and we were returning home from a dinner out. Above us the Milky Way twisted through the sky. Recently, I'd read that the Milky Way is home to as many stars as the human body is to cells. I recounted this to my son. “Come on,” I told him. “Let's lie down and look at the sky.” He ran inside for blankets and an old yoga mat we could throw on the ground. Had he ever done this? Reclined over the earth and stared at the night sky? It had been so long since I had, I could not remember.

Lately, he'd been asking questions about space. Planet sizes fascinated him, as did the length of time to orbit the sun. What was the Milky Way anyway? And how long would it take to fly to the moon?

It was the perfect night for stargazing.

We snuggled into each other, holding ourselves against the cold. I started to point out the few constellations I could recall. Big Dipper, Orion's Belt, Three Sisters. Then I rambled on about what I thought was Andromeda and how astrological signs were somewhere up there, but I couldn't really tell him where. I told him we could check out astronomy books from the library. Then, I asked if he'd be interested in a star chart.

He gave a little grunt and I realized he hadn't been listening. He didn't care for the names of constellations, they were all there above him, nameless and magnificent. So, I stopped talking and let myself release into the cold embrace of earth. Quietly, I shut down that part of myself that needed to pin names onto each star. Miraculously, the cosmos began to open up. The sky became deeper, it breathed and pulsed like a living thing.

Beneath this immense display, the relevance of human dramas diminished. There is all this space, I thought. The universe is more vast than our minds can comprehend and we tend to close in, become tight and constricted. There is all this space and still, we war over territories.

We are like this in our minds too. Closing in on perceived problems or opinions, fixating on what we lack, what we fear, how to win -- and reacting over and over -- to these obsessions. We want our lives to be solid and predictable. We want to claim the sky for our very own.

One of the precepts of yoga is ahimsa or non-violence. Violence goes beyond blatant warfare and is understood, on subtle levels, as non-aggression. We become aggressive in countless ways: our need to win an argument, to clutch onto an opinion, to deepen a yoga stretch by shear will. We, all of us express aggression in a variety of ways. And each time we do, we contract – physically and mentally. We pull the sky down around our ears, refusing to offer space to ourselves or to others.

So we study ourselves in our asana practice, we begin to notice when we are pushing ourselves in aggressive ways. Are we trying to touch our toes at the expense of straining our backs? Are we clenching our jaws, holding our breath because we just want to do it right? Can we recognize this tendency and create space around it?

Letting go of the need to “win” the pose, we learn to work without strain. And when we learn to work with ahimsa on the mat, we learn to weave it into our daily lives.

Staring at the wide open universe, I knew that, too often, I closed of from its immensity. Wasn't this what I was searching for? This spaciousness in both my body and mind, this living connection to the universe.

I pulled my arm around my son, felt my baby kick within my body. I wanted to offer them a love, a peacefulness as wide as the sky above me.

Even wider.

Mystic Tea House

A sign leaned into the window of the Mystic Tea House. It could have been there forever. The sign, that is, not the tea house which just showed up one day. No one could recall the transformation from bike shop to tea house. Yet, there must have been some indication. Papered windows or piles of lumber. The fanfare of an opening day. But there was nothing, only the recollection that something else had been there and now this, a tea house in its stead. Curious, people thought, trying to remember the time between.

The sign was scrawled on a piece of parchment as ancient as a desert landscape, in

letters that appeared to be Sanskrit or Arabic, but as you approached they gelled hesitantly into English. A clunky call-out for sacred work: “Ecstatic Poet Wanted.

Apply Within.” Ecstatic, you might wonder. Ecstatic?

Beside the sign was a brass lamp. Its spout lengthened out, beckoning like a long forefinger and made you think of whatever you knew of Aladdin. Furtively, you'd want to hold the lamp, to rub it with your palm, to wish those three wishes which, without even thinking about, you were already muttering. Not the new car, but something more poetic. Like love. Or time travel. Still, it was foolish to hope for a genie, let alone expect one, though a thousand had probably done so before you.

If you pressed your forehead against the window and peered beyond the fog of your breath, you'd see dozens of carpets covering the floor, the walls. They looked as though, at any moment, they would rise from the floor and swoop into the air. In fact, there was speculation that these carpets and their owners had been spotted over Seal Bay Park some months ago, fishing at dawn. The riders hovered above the water, rods pitched over the edge of a sixth century Persian weave carpet. The source was unreliable and, when questioned, the couple just nodded and shrugged.

Perhaps you'd be enticed to enter the Tea House. There might be hesitancy, or a flutter of excitement in your belly. Should you enter, you would be somehow changed. Affected. And we, as a species, always get a little nervous about change...

Interview with Father Joe Pereira

Since 1996, The Yoga Studio on Rosewall has been host to an annual weekend workshop with Father Joe Pereira. Those who are privy to his teachings are always delighted by what he has to offer – a weekend rich in asana, sequencing, physical and mental surrender and an undercurrent of gratitude for the beating of one's own heart.

Father Joe is a Catholic priest who has had the privilege of working closely with Mother Teresa and studying yoga regularly with BKS Iyengar in Pune. (He often refers to Mother Teresa and Mr. Iyengar as the “yin and yang” of his spirituality.)

Father Joe's formidable work as a yoga teacher is conveyed by his deep understanding of the subject. He adopts precision in the performance of the poses and evokes the fire hidden beneath the physical aspect of the body to awaken cellular consciousness. This is the key to addiction recovery, which is why he employs yoga in recovery programs in the organization he founded, Kripa (www.kripafoundation.org).

We spoke to Father Joe about this transformation, about this ability of Iyengar yoga to wake up the body and bring you closer to your own essence.

Sadhana: When I think about you, your workshops, you teach a lot to the heart. When you teach asana you're teaching on a physical and spiritual dimension. Today, you said: seek the wisdom of the body and discover God's grace. Could you explain how this epitomizes yoga for you?

Father Joe: Yoga has a beautiful explanation for faith because it lifts you up from the physical and psychological into the trans-rational, the dimension of experience, not just the convictions, but the experience.

In the West, there is prejudice that feelings can emanate from thinking, thinking comes first. Actually, many modes of therapy have this bias. In India and in yoga, it's not the thinking that matters first. What comes first is the cellular consciousness. In dealing with addiction I have seen that if we change the cellular consciousness of patients recovering from addiction, their response to treatment shifts from compliance to surrender.

S: How is it that Mr. Iyengar's teaching wakes up cellular consciousness? I know it does from my own experience – but how?

FJ: Iyengar yoga works on a process to bring a person from the peripheral level of awareness to the centre. Even when you talk about the sympathetic nervous system and all that, through the autonomous nervous system, leading to the central nervous system, this is a gradual journey. And an inward journey. This is unique in Iyengar yoga. Nobody explains yoga is such a journey. When you go through the various kosas – annamaya kosa, pranamaya kosa, manomaya kosa, vijnanamaya kosa, anandamaya kosa ** -- you discover you are not just a physical being. Something more.

The exercises of breathing bring about pratyahara (withdrawl of the senses) and create within you a certain attitude of dispossession. This is a spiritual phenomenon.

(** Kosas are the sheaths, or layers of Being. They are described at length in BKS Iyengar's book Light on Life)

S: What is the importance of dispossession?

FJ: That is spirituality. Once you experience dispossession... It's like the gospels. Yoga has taught me to seek God's Kingdom first. Everything else is getting added unto you.

Yoga is a meeting point for me. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” It's a beautiful saying by Jesus, but it is yoga that taught me how to discover this Kingdom of God. Which is: the basic reservoir of well-being that is within us.

This transcendence is a beautiful experience because in that transcendence each one discovers their centre and their identity and, in that identity, they discover that their centre is also the centre of the universe.

S: How does this translate into the work you do with addiction?

FJ: Many people who come for recovery don't know we are going to make them do yoga. But we have them take a good look at their body. We work through simple restorative exercises that may help them to feel good. And that attracts them.

S: Is it a faith in yoga?

FJ: Faith is a journey. You will go through a lot of darkness and even doubt. But knowing that Guruji has gone through those moments of darkness and doubt, we trust what he has prescribed definitely works. I broke my back. He gave me twenty-six asanas, one more painful than the other. I had to work on them for one and a half hours everyday. It took me two and a half years to wipe out the pain. So that is faith.

S: In the West, how do we get people beyond the idea that yoga is a workout? Connect more to the essence of yoga?

FJ: In the West, religion has died. You have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. You are afraid of using yoga as a religious tool. So, in that, I can understand the reactive behaviour. But any authentic yoga instructor knows that this is not just a body workout. It has to do with soul.

Unfortunately, because people these days are health and body conscious, yoga is used compartmentally for that. Which has its own benefit. But its like, you know, the story of the six blind men and the elephant. There are all these yoga schools and some are just reading the trunk, some are reading the ears of the elephant, the legs of the elephant... they're all having their own experience. Yoga is much more than that. Some come up with different names for yoga. Even Iyengar yoga is not correct. As soon as you label yoga from a particular aspect, you have lost understanding of its spiritual.

S: In what way?

FJ: You're just taking one dimension of a beautiful teaching that is all about wholeness and holiness and stripping it to a practise of exercises or a practice of a certain technique.

S: For you, is wholeness and holiness the essence of faith?

FJ: Faith is definitely a gift from God. But as Mother Teresa said, “God makes it happen, we are to let it happen.” There's a whole dimension of the individual in relationship to the universal Self. Yoga, in that sense, brings the individual to understand what it is to “Know Thyself”.

Because that is the essence. “Be still and know that I am God.”