A bunch of wild flowers

Yoga is not the architecture of postures. It’s what happens in the encounter with them. This process of meeting is designed to bring to light our conditioned responses (known in Sanskrit as samskhara-s), and it’s here that we are invited to offer our attention. A yoga mat is a very revealing place to be. How we show up there is how we show up as a whole human being – not just the parts that we know about, the ones in full light and plain sight, but the mysterious dark and floating ones that lie below the waterline.

As beginning ashtanga practitioners, most of us are very interested in who’s doing what, and whether we can do it as well or better than they can. We may rate ourselves on our ability to jump, bend and perform technical tricks, as if we were in some kind of yoga Olympics. At the same time, in many yoga circles, the obverse view is de rigueur: practitioners with the capacity for very physically challenging postures are slated for their prowess, as if being able to balance on one hand makes them in some way not ‘serious’. Actually, neither being ‘good’ at asana nor being ‘bad’ at asana is an index of spiritual attainment. It just isn’t about that.

From the teacher’s point of view, in the Mysore room I don’t see ranks and levels, I see nature arising. Each person who steps into the shala brings with them a unique ashtanga vinyasa, one specifically adapted to their own body, life experience, age, temperament and so on. These multifarious ashtangas do not exist on an ascending scale, they exist within a broad field of arising. In a Mysore shala, as in any environment, we need our biodiversity in order to cultivate a balanced ecosystem.

I think that ashtanga can be much more interesting than the dogmas of a fallen guru, the wizard revealed behind the screen. It can be about Dorothy and Toto, the Tin Man, Glinda, the Cowardly Lion, the Munchkins and the Monkeys with wings. It can be the story of each of us, different and individual but gathered, like an armful of wild flowers. Then it feels various and inviting. Then it feels like something I want to be a part of.

I have been teaching ashtanga since 2003. You can find me at Greenwich and Woolwich Mysore. Go to Embody | yoga + dance.

This article is part of a book in progress about the intersection of autism, ashtanga, dance movement practice, and teaching in my life.

Reflections on Practice

Thursday 17 June 2021: second series

Like a day in heather with a clear sky and tussocky grass.

Like a clear run.

You weren’t expecting this when you woke up muscle-sore from yesterday’s endeavours and intending only to glance over the surface. But then you surrender and the possibilities expand. You know it works like this, but still it always comes as a surprise. When it’s a trick you try to play on yourself it never works – not quite like this – although playing injured, even when not, was a way you made this practice tractable again, malleable, like a good dough. And then you were in, away and laughing.

The edge is always going to be a challenge – sitting just so on the rope, the pole finely balanced, not a teeter left nor a totter right. Even now, with all that you know, you still have to have just a taste out of Daddy Bear’s bowl – just the littlest bit – though it’s Baby’s porridge you actually eat. And you’re always the littlest bit burned.

If nothing was burning, if there was not this low tide of pain ebbing into sensation, so you don’t quite know the name of it, really, this hum … If not, would you know you were alive? It stands in for the missing proprioception. Comforting. Reminding you that you are in this body, that it has boundaries, that there is you and not-you, and other people can see. It reminds you that you are still coasting the surf of this wild sea. By some extraordinary grace. Today you are here.

Texture

Reflections on an ashtanga practice at nearly 58 …
Ehlers-Danlos … and how it’s all getting better and better

The texture has changed. This is what strikes me this morning about my ashtanga practice – the weekly full series. Like an ordinary miracle, all the body conditioning, weights, pilates, ballet barre – and of course not doing yoga every day (but rather a bit of this and a bit of that) has organised my tissues. I don’t feel so much like two pieces of knotted spaghetti (overcooked), more like a body of solids and fibres, levers and springs – calibrated.

Equation
Muscle density > proprioception > embodiment: the felt sense that I am here in this body, filling it, pushing through its pores, not just joints and bones and a few ragged sinews.

History
There’s a reason they call it ‘the change’. It becomes impossible to go on in the same direction. And from that surrender, that willingness to throw in the towel, came an invitation into something that turned out to be miraculously expansive. First there was the expansion of completely giving up: the exhalation, and the utter freedom, the wide open skies. And then the expansion in capacity. Followed by: the resurrection of fallen structures, old abandoned postures … an architrave becoming usable here, a surprising buttress, columns, pilasters, even the curly Corinthians standing up out of the rubble. It was impressive, and it had foundations.

Pandemic
Praise be also to pandemic life for the finishing touches: relief from choices, stimmuli, days that start in the small hours, running from pillar to post; for releasing me from exhaustion, first, and then into … energy. There’s no going back from here.

* * *

I’ve written so much in this place about aging with ashtanga as a process of reduction (or at least that’s my memory of what I’ve written): injury and pain and hypermobile tissues. And in the end, of course, all we have is only on loan. Eventually, the ticket’s up and we have to hand the whole lot back in. In the meantime, though, who knew there could be so much exponential increase, so much enjoyment, so much power, aged 57 (nearly 58) with Ehlers-Danlos? It isn’t a story I’ve heard anywhere else. But it’s the one that’s happening to me now.

Ashtanga vinyasa, wild horses and me

In any long-term relationship there are times of affinity, utter and complete, and there are times when you are like planets spiralling into different solar systems, and you feel you must leave – you must. I did think I would leave ashtanga, in the storm of menopause. Or I thought it would leave me. There were times when I hated ashtanga; it hurt me every which way, and none of my old strategies worked. At the same time, in another storm, Pattabhi Jois was being outed as an abuser, and a teeter-totter tower of bricks was tumbling down. I’ve never been to Mysore, and I knew nothing about the sexual abuse, but I knew about triangulation of power structures and injurious adjustments. I knew that I had internalised voices that told me what to do and how to do it, and that these overlords didn’t know about connective tissue differences or autistic learning styles – how we set out alone in the little boat to the anchorite isle.

So I started gathering my own stones, from this place and that, also sticks, small animal bones and pieces of strangely degraded plastic, oddments of shape and colour that pleased me and which served the architecture inside my head, and I began building foundations again.

If a yoga practice doesn’t help you to move well in daily life, something is surely out of kilter, but that is not enough for me. It’s sufficient to walk functionally only if you are slow-walking into a song that your body is singing. The definition of yoga can be whatever you like, but for me it is that I am poised on the brink of creation, and I am thinking, what can I form from my clay? How can I throw my pot, temper my steel, spin my yarn into a bright cocoon in which the parts join up and it is more than the sum of the words?

I no longer bleed, but I still practise ashtanga, and it is both the same and utterly different. Wild horses did not become less wild, but I whispered in their ears and together we slipped the traces and set out. We’re listening and we’re weaving in threads of many different weights and colours, but we are maverick, and you cannot tell us what to do. Or what to think either. Well, you can, but we are not listening.

Pain: a post about holding on and letting go

These days when I get on my astanga mat, even my bones hurt. Call it what menopause does when it gets intimate with Ehlers Danlos, or just being 54. I turn it up this way and that, convinced that somewhere, if only I can locate it, there must be a feasible, pleasurable way to do this thing, to make it pliable, as I have always somehow managed to before. But my bones feel like china. They feel like fever, tender and vibrating in the marrow. My muscles fist, and my joints screech and twang like a poorly strung violin. So I’m thinking about cutting loose.

I know how it’s done. I did it before. I gave up ballet. It’s easy and it’s not. Of course, it’s a question of your identity and the patterns your body knows, how they hold you securely in being – and, in this case, of how I make my living. But, when the moment comes, you slip like a fish. That’s my experience anyway.

It’s the part before the moment that’s difficult. The gripping and shuddering and letting go and holding on. I do not like transition. I do not like the small blind jumps when you sense the abyss yawning lazily beneath.

For all that I know the instinctive flow that arises from under the heavy top-most layers of brain – the simple joy of it, and how it is just ‘right’ and easy – some other eternally stubborn and recalcitrant part of me really just wants to be in control. I’m autistic and borderline OCD; I have eating disorders, managed to greater or lesser degrees (it’s hard to know what that really means any more), and I’m human. When you’re 54, you know that these are just givens, and all that makes a difference is how you hold the small frightened animals in your hand, how gently and capaciously, which tends to calm them down.

My astanga practice became this writing, Saturday morning, 25 November 2017, resting on the whetted edge of cannot and do not know.

A community of elders: the sustainable astangi

“When you work with what’s available, the restrictions aren’t limitations, they’re just what you happen to be working with.”—Robert Rauschenberg

When I was young, I thought it would be dreadful to let go of things I experienced in my body as capacities, but actually it’s a relief, a relaxation. Every yielding creates a space, and every space invites a new becoming. It’s gentle and reassuring. There’s an easing of surface that allows the underlying texture to press through – roots, beetles, mulch, stones – something subtler, richer, more varied and surprising. None of this is easy – astanga is a practice – but it is rewarding. It offers a different kind of substance, and an expanded capacity for being.

At 53 and hypermobile, I often have a more or less adapted practice. I could fight for old territories, but I don’t want a war in my body. It isn’t exactly about no longer being able to accomplish physical structures – they approach and recede from day to day; it’s more about holding all of it lightly. This is impermanence here now, at home, in my body, and it requires me to be fluid and responsive. Sometimes a posture floats back into my ambit – and another one floats away. It’s funny, it’s unpredictable. It’s all so bloody liberating!

There’s a view out there in the astanga group-mind that this practice is about transcending our limitations.¹ For me, it’s always been about meeting mine. There’s a softening that goes with acknowledging the inherent limits involved in being human. Expansion comes when I can recognise that less is more here, and it’s most helpful to pause, rest, backtrack, let go, relax into the cyclic process of begin again that has for me been central to creating integrity of structure in a hypermobile body. But, of course, we are not talking just about bodies here. Within the framework of a somatic practice, we are never talking just about bodies.

We’re all in a process of motion, and sometimes astanga is only a staging post in a life’s trajectory. You can move on or you can stay, and you can take what you learned and apply it elsewhere. This is good and healthy and alive. Me and astanga, we’re in it for the long-haul, as far as I can tell. Gymnastic ability, on the other hand, is a time-limited commodity. It will definitely diminish and sure as hell eventually cease. If the capacity to perform physically demanding sequences of asana is what we think astanga consists of, we’re all looking forward to exile from the warm circle of the tribal fire.

As a teacher (and I know I’m not alone in this), I’m invested in creating inclusive practice settings, where astanga vinyasa can flourish in the unique and different forms in which it arises in different people, with different bodies, at different stages of life. When practice is flexible and adaptable, it can be sustainable, for everybody, all the time, and our Mysore rooms will not only be galvanised by the energy of young people, but also grounded and stabilised by the presence of elders. We need this. We all do.

Namaste!

1. Try googling ‘ashtanga transcending limitations’ and you’ll see what I mean.

NB I love this article by Anthony Grimley Hall on how experience modifies the practices of astangis.

Tissue paper and glass

I once heard an interview with a hypermobile contortionist whose act involved fitting himself into tiny boxes.¹ He explained that he had learnt how to dislocate and relocate his joints at will when he was a child. This seems to me a very clever neurological adaptation, because in my experience dislocating is like touching fire. I’m out of that place much faster than I can think. My body knows where its parts are meant to be, even if it’s sometimes a bit rubbish at keeping them there.

Three days ago, I made an awkward movement while adjusting my left foot in ekapada sirsasana. There was a big clunk on the right side that felt an awful lot like my SI joint subluxing. The immediate feeling was a kind of suspension: a long second or two of grace before sensation surged in, and with sensation testing and assessing, seeing what I could move and working it out. Grace addled with fear really. I know those clunks. I know what they mean. I know that pain and immobility arrive like a caravanserai, slowly, throughout the day, one camel at a time.

What’s difficult about writing for a public space – so difficult that I rarely do it – is creating form and structure. Form and structure are really protective distance – between me in the nakedness of the experience and the person reading about it. I’d much rather sketch, in a few scant lines, but going straight in, deep. I’d rather silk spooling out of spinnerets, easy, casual, letting myself down, winding myself up, and down again. But it’s exposing.

For the rest of the day I felt skinless. I could hardly bear the shiver of feeling. Sounds were acute, grazing, shocking. Inside was grey, grainy, gauzy, like the spaces through a very old net curtain … like winter trees scribbling across the sky, cross-hatched and mobile. Still, now, that membraneous feeling comes and goes. It’s a bit like having very bad flu: tiny sensations are enormously expanded, clean sheets like an iceberg; turning over, the revolving of a planet from night into day.

At present I’m somewhat hobbling. My right piriformis is in spasm, and I’m starting to think my right foot problem may be a stress fracture. I often feel as if I’m made out of tissue paper and glass. But when I’m in the thick of practice – at the deep beating heart of it – I feel melted into a fluidity in which all my parts coalesce. There’s a sense of resolving into an entity that isn’t about surfaces but coheres from the centre outwards.

I really believe in moving, no matter what. The more limited I am, the more important it feels to me to get up and move what’s here. As I get older, I see how well this has served me over the years. For one thing, I’ve seen what happens to hypermobile people when we don’t move. It isn’t, for the most, part a pretty picture. More significantly, sites of restriction, injury, places where continuing feels utterly impossible … these have been the loci of the most fundamental repatterning for me. This sort of recalibration happens in my body but not just to my body. It’s a whole-person event.

Practising, for me, isn’t about pounding away – same old, same old. It’s about feeling into the subtle differences, becoming awake to the more functional in the new. In my personal experience, occasional injury is inevitable when I’m practising on this edge. Partly because I have Ehlers Danlos, but more fundamentally because, by definition, I’m working – out of a secure foundation of established practice – into a territory where I don’t totally know. It’s risky.

This hypermobile body teaches me about impermanence and the inherent fragility of that. It’s brave to step up and inhabit this precariousness, but there’s also a kind of freedom in living there.

1. The contortionist is Captain Frodo. You can read an interview with him here. He also sounds a tiny bit autistic.

New mats / old mats: a shala story of feeling, speaking and gratitude again

At Stillpoint Yoga London, where I practise, it’s been getting busy lately, which has prompted a rearrangement of the mat layout. The way the mats were before, I could be pretty much anywhere in the room and have my back to a wall and the door in my sightline, and I could see everyone in the room. There was no unpredictable movement behind me and no surprise engagement with teachers. None of this is so any more.

When I first arrived at Stillpoint, I think perhaps some time in 2011, I’d been practising alone for the previous few years.¹ My longtime teacher had moved away from astanga, and my other trusted teacher in London was too far away to get to for early-morning practice. It was also clear to me that in the context of a teacher relationship I was not able to articulate – or most of the time even feel – my own needs or clearly hold my own boundaries. At that point, I had also recently become aware that I was in a state of ongoing low-level traumatic stress, and I had started to find ways of creating a more fluid and responsive relationship between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, but I didn’t yet have any useful awareness of autism and I didn’t understand why it was that that the cat had got stuck up a tree and needed the fire brigade to get it down.

So in 2011 or thereabouts, just stepping into the room at Stillpoint felt like – and was – a huge risk. It was possible because Scott told me he was willing to have me practise without offering any teaching or adjustment. He did what he said, so there was a basis to trust the situation, and we started from there.

•

Most people don’t notice that I’m communication impaired, but I really am. Several years ago, I lived for a while with an autistic partner. We started out on opposite sides of the Atlantic, so we did a lot of emailing. But even when we were sharing the same house, we continued to email each other when we had something important to say, or just because we wanted to. When I told neurotypical people about this, they often thought it was funny, but many of us on the spectrum communicate a lot more easily in writing than in speech. It’s called hyperlexia. My capacity to think verbally, and then actually to articulate the words, has increased exponentially over the years, but there are still woolly, strawy things that get stuck in my mouth and will not enunciate. Incapacity to speak creates panic, and panic creates more incapacity, which creates more panic … and in extreme situations I can end up completely mute.

I was reading an article earlier this week called How to Explain Autism to People. The article lists several communication differences of autistic people, but I was particularly struck by this one, as it’s very significant for me and I’ve never seen it named before.

• Difficulty expressing needs and desires.

And it occurred to me that when it comes to self-advocacy, this one is such a double whammy.

Self-advocacy is hard. It requires a big vision and a willingness for something like delayed gratification, because in the short term it’s much easier to suppress, hide, conform and look as if you’re coping – don’t rock the boat: the sharks are out there circling – than it is to acknowledge and communicate real feeling. But I know from experience the cumulative effects of decades of containing and managing and never expressing a need or asking for help. it’s a world made of of hard surfaces. You shut down. You become a series of infinitely smaller images receding inside yourself. I have made a commitment not to do that any more, because it’s highly self-destructive, and I actually want to inhabit myself fully and openly, not fizzle like a Disprin or go away and live in a cupboard. This means, one, that I can no longer ellide my difficulties; I can no longer look obliquely and think I’m doing OK; and, two, that I have to find ways, ongoingly, to communicate my actual experience to other people and negotiate for what might make things a little more workable.

Which is why, even though I didn’t want to do it, some kind of communication around the New Mats at Stillpoint felt like a necessary act of presence. As in: I could (a) sit down and shut up and erase myself a little bit further or (b) actually speak something that feels true. So I did (b), I’m not sure whether well or appropriately (this kind of ongoing self-doubt is part and parcel of being autistic and therefore not very atuned to social cues) – or actually what doing it ‘well’  or ‘appropriately’ would look like. I don’t know yet what, if anything, I need to emerge in this particular situation in practical terms. But I think none of that really matters if there’s a genuine mutual intention to deepen relationship and expand understanding. Relationship is always kind of clunky, and it’s process, not a resolution.

If I looked disabled, I think in some ways advocating for myself would be easier. I often feel as if people think I’m making it up. Sometimes even I feel as if I’m making it up. I’ve written a lot already about passing. Studying and mimicking neurotypical communication styles became a survival mechanism for many of us with autism before we were old enough to be cogniscent of what we were doing. Passing is a form of self-displacement – we pass successfully when we cannot be recognised as ourselves – and it’s invidious. It also generates a state of chronic anxiety. We’re always waiting for the mask to slip, and at some point it inevitably does. The sanction for slippage is public humiliation and being left out on the mountainside for the wolves.

I’m actually rather good at passing, but it’s that cupboard again, and it’s small and claustrophobic. At this point in my life I’m choosing instead to cultivate my capacity for agitation and crying and losing the words and letting all the joins show. It feels like an honest and direct way of talking to you that I think some of you can understand.

Or, at least, I’m trying. It’s like restoring an old work of art. I no longer know really whether this bit of the picture was originally blue or green. I’m lifting off tiny flakes of paint one by one with tweasers, but the painting is so old to me now that I don’t always recognise the original any more. I don’t know how I really speak, or when I don’t, or whether that is a distant clutch of trees or there’s a bird, or is that an accidental splodge or a much later traveller another artist entirely painted in?

The elemental force of my reaction to New Mats was huge and overwhelming and barrelled in completely left field. It picked me up and shook me around, and I had no idea when it was going to put me down or whether it has yet. Fundamentally, though, I trust the relationships I’ve developed with Scott and with Andy enough to risk letting myself be. One of the themes of my writing lately has been saying thank you to people who hold space for me in the realms of the body and somatic process, so I want to say thank you – very much – to Scott and Andy. I’m way beyond grateful when someone is willing to stay with me and witness what’s evolving, even when it’s itchy and antsy, because if it’s real, it often is. For me, teaching yoga isn’t so much about instructing asana as it is relational. We are all learning how to be more fully and honestly with ourselves, with each other and in community, whether in the moment we are in the role of teacher or of student. At Stillpoint, this feels embodied in the teaching and in the relationships within and around the shala. And that’s why, even though I don’t like New Mats, I’m trying to work with them.

Stillpoint: Old Mats. I am foreground right. © SYL.

1. There’s a lot of essential learning in being your own teacher that you can’t get any other way. I wrote about it here.

A Cascade of Epiphanies: in which I put my foot behind my head and end up writing about injury again

Recently I’ve been again in the strange and exquisite process of injury. I didn’t volunteer. I don’t always feel grateful. It’s almost a cliche that injury is a gift, but the gift is another of those bad-fairy ones: you-didn’t-want-to-sleep-for-a-hundred-years-but-in-the-end-you-get-the-prince kind of thing.

It feels like about a hundred years ­– easily – but despite a cascade of tender little epiphanies, I haven’t got the prince yet. And since I’m still in process with this one, I’m not going to write about particularities. Seeds need to germinate in the dark.

Practice without epiphany would be an odd kind of practice to me, but injury seems to act as a particular kind of awareness cluster – an escalation, an intensification, also often a redirection, a refocusing and re-envisioning. It’s a call to pay attention, an opportunity for a kind of meta realignment, which contains biomechanics – signposts for practical physical restructuring – but is also much bigger, carrying personal mythopoeic meanings with the potential to unravel, rewind and reorient. It speaks to the occluded histories of my body, to ways of being in the world so familar as to have become transparent to me, and through all of this to the potential for fuller human becoming.

My practice is cyclic. I’ve been fortunate in that hypermobility deprived me early on of any illusion of linearity in these things. There are times of more; there are times of less. Over-arching this one-step, two-step in the realm of performative physical capability, is a boader pattern of integration, enlargement, attunement on an increasingly subtle level. What seems to arise is on the one hand a more precise and intuitive faculty of discrimination ­– viveka – and on the other, the slow inexorable seepage of love.

A long time ago, I put myself in apprenticeship to my body; it’s the teachings that emerge from being a body, and from reflecting on and as that body, that really inform me. I have little interest in abstract yoga philosophy. I’m sceptical about enlightenment and the ‘higher’ states of awareness: samsara as something attainable, something ‘over there’. What’s happened to me is more like a slow settling, a sifting and shifting, like an old house on friable ground. The more it settles, the more the walls crack. The situation is essentially imperfectible. It’s the humanness of this that absorbs me.

After 33 years, I feel that my practice is really just beginning to get interesting. Maybe I”m a slow starter. Matthew Remski’s WAWADIA project has produced quite a bit of discussion of a kind of asana plateau, which happens, apparently, somewhere around three to five years into practice – like the yoga version of the seven-year itch. Maybe this has to do with the limited attention span of neurotypical people (a source of ongoing amazement to those of us on the spectrum). Autistic people are orientated to detail and pattern. We will happily do the same thing every day for years and years, because it never is the same thing. Repetition is revelation: my practice is always full of surprises.

I think it also has to do with an essential human resistance to change. Few of us embark on a yoga practice with a knowledge of how deep and thorough-going will be the transformation it requires of us. We expect yoga to be contained in the magic one hour or ninety minutes. We expect it to be pleasant and enlivening. We don’t expect it to crack out of stasis our old habituated patterns, or to surface deeply embodied historical trauma. The most commonly given reasons for coming to a yoga class by my beginning students are: to get fit, to increase flexibility, to lose weight and to relax. When practice starts to require of them much, much, very much more, they frequently slide silently out.

I know that many schools consider two years’ practice to be sufficient to embark on yoga teacher training, but to me, two, three or five years is scarcely a beginning. To me, a practice becomes a practice when it’s seen you through at least a couple of generations – through births, deaths and marriages, love and loss. It seems to be symptomatic of the Tesco superstore mentality afflicting our culture that we jump ship so readily. If there’s always another product on the shelf with another promise of youth, fitness and vitality, why bother to negotiate inconvenient and difficult obstacles? Why bother to learn anything at all?

Matthew reckons that most people enter yoga in search of some kind of therapeutic outcome. I’m not most people, so I don’t know whether this is true or not. I started practising yoga when I was eighteen, I didn’t have any physical parts in obvious need of fixing, and I couldn’t have told you why I was doing it. In retrospect, it’s clear to me that I was hungry for embodiment. I was autistic, anorexic and out of my depth, and everything was a last-ditch stand. No habitat I could locate felt vast or wild enough to reflect my internal experience. I was desperate for a sense of containment, of physical integration, of the parts adhering to the whole. I urgently needed to discover some kind of coherent centre. I suppose that, in a very broad sense, this could be seen as a therapeutic motivation, but really I viewed it more as an artistic mandate, in which I was both the art and the artist. I still do see it that way.

Most of my life I’ve lived to move, not moved to live. I tumbled head first into astanga vinyasa because I was enthralled by the movement and captivated by the preoccupation with edge. I wasn’t all that interested in what it could do for my health and wellbeing. It turned out that many of the arrows pointed in both directions, but I can’t in honesty say that all of them do. The ongoing challenge is to nudge the situation into some form of do-ability. As I’ve tipped over onto the descending flank of the hill, my orientation has shifted – a little bit. The materials are in slow metamorphosis. They are gradually producing a different kind of art and a different kind of artist. At 51, I know that each day of astanga vinyasa is a day of grace. I know that one day the practice will spit me out – not, I hope, before I’ve been thoroughly chewed up by it. I’m going for complete mastication. I’m giving it my all.

It takes a village to keep a hypermobile body in something like working order. I would like to thank Darren Higgins at Vanbrugh Physio. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been looking for a physio I can actually work with – found one! I would also like to thank my wonderful osteopaths and much – very much – loved companions on the path of the dance Indi Ajimal and Cyprian Londt. And where would I be without Scott Johnson and Andy Gill at Stillpoint Yoga London? Lots of love, guys.

 

 

On the edge: wire-walking for beginners

If we were to reduce yoga down to the bones, it’s breath, movement and attention that would be left at the bottom of my saucepan. When I say ‘yoga’, these three in union are what I mean. And whenever we breathe, move and attend to experience, we generate an encounter with a fourth thing, usually called in yoga ‘the edge’. In a beginning practice (especially a dynamic one), it’s not uncommon to equate ‘being on the edge’ with ‘going to the limit’. They are not the same. The edge is how I want to place myself in relation to a particular sensation, emotion or memory arising from embodied experience. It requires sensitive cultivation and implies what feels like an infinite number of possible responses – there are certainly a lot. I think we all know what ‘going to the limit’ means.

My practice, astanga vinyasa, is a gymnastic form, and is often considered to be the most physically challenging style of postural yoga. It consists of four (or six, depending on how you divide them) progressive series, demanding escalating degrees of strength, stamina and flexibility. It’s in the nature of this kind of practice to attract people, like me, who love to dance on the brink of the precipice. It may be only when injury or exhaustion forces us to re-evaluate how we are engaging with our practice that we begin to question the wisdom of habitually hanging on by our finger-nails. As we start to explore our physical, psychological and emotional experience more subtly, we may discover that the brink is not the only edge.

When we speak of edge, we are talking actually not of a singular position but of something more like a spectrum. Eric Schiffmann describes it like this:

Each pose has a ‘minimum edge’ and a ‘maximum edge’, as well as a series of intermediary edges between these … [The maximum edge] is the point where the stretch begins to hurt. It is the furthest point of tightness beyond which you should not go. If you were to force yourself beyond this point, you would definitely be in pain and might hurt yourself or pull a muscle. The minimum edge is where you sense the very first sensation of stretch, the very first hint of resistance coming from your muscles. (The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness, Pocket Books, 1996).

Eric’s words imply that the edge is actually the middle: the centre point – or multiplicity of centre points – between too little and too much. What constitutes too little and what constitutes too much will vary from person to person, posture to posture, day to day, moment to moment. There will be times in your practice when you feel the need to press into your edge, and times when you feel the need to draw back. In other words, edge is not one location or a final arrival; it’s never discovered, mapped, done and dusted. Edge is an ongoing process, an endless dance of shifting experience. Nor is the edge really separate from us. There’s no thin black line out there against which we in here pit ourselves. Edge is intrinsic, a unique product of the interplay between our individual body and psyche with a particular posture in a particular moment in time.

Eric’s explanation might seem to imply that edge is all about extension – how much we stretch. Of course, it isn’t only. While, in the popular mind, yoga may be a form of esoteric contortionism, those of us who have practised it know that yoga postures engage us in contraction as much as extension – we breathe in and expand; we breathe out and find the tensility that enables us to maintain and stabilise. So edge arises also in our relationship with holding and contracting, as well as in the balance between holding / contracting and expanding. Since yoga is fundamentally about gradually enlarging our capacity to stay present to any and all of our experience, then feeling into how much of my own anger / frustration / grief / joy / excitement / inertia I can tolerate without dissociating – that’s also edge.

If the edge is the new middle, perhaps we can lift it out of its geometry altogether. When I’m teaching about edge, I often reframe it as ‘the expansion zone’. This feels to me richer, more plastic and more pregnant with potential. The expansion zone connotes that state of receptive witnessing where unanticipated changes can self-arise, organically, without me forcing the agenda. If I fall just short of the expansion zone, I’m too slack, too comfortable; if I push past it, I’m too strong, too urgent. What we’re aiming for here is that just-right feeling – not too sweet, not too sour; not too hot, not too cold; not too hard, not too soft. The one that when it emerges seems quite naturally to meet the moment.

When I offer mindful attention to my edge, I’m less likely to injure myself as I practise, and that’s important. Beyond that, though, my relationship with edge on my mat has everything to tell me about how I meet with edge in the rest of my life. If I practise yoga constantly at the outer limit of my endurance and on the verge of pain, this is a reflection of how I pitch myself in life. If I reflexively back away from challenges on my mat, choosing postures I find easy and non-threatening, the odds are that I am remaining in the shallows, emotionally and physically, in the rest of my life. Many of us go on habitually redrawing the same patterns in the sand and wondering why they never look any different. As we familiarise ourselves with these patterns in the laboratory of our practice, we become gradually more able to recognise them in life and can slowly begin to choose new trajectories.

Astanga vinyasa involves a process of dynamic surrender. ‘Dynamic’ means going for it, offering the best of our energy and our sense of direction, hanging on in there and staying wide awake. ‘Surrender’ means letting go into what’s really happening in the present moment – which may be that we don’t have much energy, we’ve lost our way and we’re falling asleep. Learning to walk this edge skillfully requires a lot of practice – which is why astangi’s practise every day. The more we practise, the more we find there’s space around the edge to play. We develop finesse and audacity. We may choose to lean back and take it easy; we may choose to take a risk – not out of habit or compulsion but because we’re feeling into what the moment uniquely requires.

Philippe Petit wire-walks between the Twin Towers