When I teach astanga vinyasa, I spend a lot of time talking about form and technique – about about the ‘how to’ aspects of the practice. How to align the body correctly and safely, how to move it more deeply into this or that posture, how to modify this or that posture to make it more accessible or comfortable ... This might give the impression that form and technique are the astanga practice, but, for me, this is not the case. The truth is that what we usually refer to as ‘yoga’ – getting into and out of asanas – is just the scaffolding. The actual yoga exists somewhere through and beyond this superficial stucture and is far less easy to encapsulate or define.

Another way to see ‘yoga’ – the practice of asanas – is as a husk. The husk is important, because without it the seed inside is unable to ripen, yet at the same time the husk is just a container. There comes a point where we as practitioners start to push our roots down through the husk and into the fertile soil of ourselves. This is where we begin to encounter yoga – the real thing.

For me, one of the beauties of practices that consist of set forms, as astanga vinyasa does, is that once the form is bedded into my body’s memory, I can let go of thinking about it and drop down onto a deeper level of awareness, simply riding on the wave of the movement while I notice what’s happening – in my mind, in my emotions, in my body and in the subtle energy channels that criss-cross it. I can notice my stories, my rationales, my critiques, my projections, and – sometimes – drop a few of them, so that increasingly I enter into the stillness that persists underneath the chatter of all my small-mind neuroses.

There’s a lot to be said, too, for a practice in which we simply follow our body, allowing it to find its own routes, without any fixed destination. However, astanga vinyasa isn’t that. In astanga we are following a road map. The pattern of the practice is externally imposed. There’s value in this. The way I see it is that the astanga series (whichever it may be) is a kind of practice-ground for life. In life, as in astanga vinyasa, I have no choice about many of the crucial events that I meet: love, loss, supta kurmasana ... But I do have some choice about how I respond to what I encounter. Just as I cannot refuse loss when it crosses my path – be it the loss of a job, the loss of possessions, the loss of status, the loss of a loved person – in the astanga practice I cannot refuse supta kurmasana ... or kapotasana or mayurasana or any of the other challenging events presented to me. But I can endeavour to respond sensitively and creatively, in such a way as to erode my ignorance and unconsciousness. I can opt to invite whatever crosses my path to expand me, to become a means of increasing my understanding so that as I continue on the road, I see with increasing clarity.

Astanga doesn’t allow us to bypass anything. Whatever we find tricky or intractable it presents to us again and again. In other forms of yoga, I was always able to avoid my nemeses, but astanga vinyasa just keeps confronting me with them until, gradually – perhaps – I transform them into something workable. Being a practice of the body, astanga reveals our current limitations to us on a physical plane, but, of course, that doesn’t mean that the body is the only – or even the main – place where these limitations operate. In my experience what is revealed in the body always has a psychological / emotional corollory. I can work with this material from just a physical or just a psychological / emotional point of view, but the process is much richer and more rewarding if I make it multi-faceted, open and encompassing of the totality of who I am and how I manifest in this body now.

As I get older I find that the structure of my yoga practice is slowly disintegrating. I could put anything on my mat and it would become yoga. Similarly, yoga does not happen only, or even mainly, in asanas. In a sense this isn’t a new departure. The boundary between my practice and my life has always been permeable – this is just the nature of yoga – but the lack of distinction now feels more radical. It’s as if the bones are being stripped out of my practice, collapsing it into my life. This doesn’t mean I no longer practise asanas or that I have literally abandoned the structure of the astanga series (although I do play with these structures more, I do feel into their plasticity, and I do allow for more reciprocity between them and my body). What it does mean, I feel, is that my sense of the interconnectedness of everything has become more experiential and less conceptual. I am less attached rigid forms and more ready to embrace the totality, the indivisibility of all that exists. My world is dissolving and my sense of self with it, so that I experience myself less as a discrete entity defined by thick black edges like a paper cut-out doll and more as a momentary whorl of atoms in a big atomic dance.

People sometimes object to astanga vinysasa on the grounds that it’s responsible for a lot of injuries. There’s some truth in this. Inexperienced teachers who adjust over-enthusiastically, coupled with A-type students who try to force their bodies into postures, can make for a high-risk combination. Wherever aggression and will predominate over readiness to surrender, there is potential for harm. However, my friend Angela suggests another way of looking at all of this. She says that the gift of astanga is to reveal to us the places where our body is weak or out of balance and then to offer us the opportunity either to heal these places or to create a state of chronic discomfort there. My own experience of practising astanga vinyasa bears out this view.

In Sanskrit the name for the primary series is yoga chikitsa, which is usually translated as ‘yoga therapy’. But yoga chikitsa isn’t therapy in any simple sense. In order to be truly therapeutic the primary series requires of us that we practise it with a little wisdom. Fortunately – paradoxically – a function of yoga chikitsa is that practising it grows our wisdom. That is to say, you may enroll for an astanga class with the intention just of firming your buttocks or feeling a bit less stressed, but quite soon you find that you are learning things about yourself, about your habits and your motivations. You begin to see where you are living in a way that does not truly serve you, and – almost without your willing it – you begin to choose more skillful ways of being.

At one stage I used to refer to my practice as ‘the path of pain’. I was joking, but only a bit. The path of pain was nothing to do with masochism. I tried really hard not to hurt myself, and I got intensely frustrated when I hurt myself anyway. Initially, I did my best to ignore my pain, hoping it would go away. (I had been involved in classical dance, so this way of dealing with discomfort was second nature.) However, the more I tried to ignore my pain, the more it waved its arms around. I have Ehlers Danlos (hypermobility) Syndrome, so it’s quite easy for me to injure myself. I didn’t like this. I would watch more robust types pushing their bodies apparently without deleterious effect and resent the fact that when I tried to practise in a similar way I ended up with chronic tendonitis, strained ligaments, subluxations and a torn meniscus. The more I tried to push forwards, the more – in my eyes – I was forced backwards, into a practice increasingly ‘limited’ by injury.

Pain became a path when I started to understand that when I am injured, injury is the practice. Knowing this was one of the key transformational moments of my practice. We work with what is, not with what we wish it were or the way it was yesterday. When I completely embrace the way things are, a shift happens in my orientation. I am on the road of reality. Here, now, step by step, moment by moment. And when the practice is what is, it's no longer just about injury any more. Everything becomes the practice.
That injury is a great teacher is almost a truism, but it took me a while to understand how profound these teachings can be. They are not simply biomechanical in nature but have also to do with how we are in our whole life, as we manifest in our body. Yoga is the mirror that reveals to us the truth about our way of being. The way we hurt ourselves on the mat is the way we hurt ourselves in our life.

For this reason, it seems to me particularly important that we keep practising when we are injured. By this I don’t mean that we should carry on regardless, denying the pain or trying to ‘breathe through it’ – which will only exacerbate the injury. There is no place for this in yoga. Going ‘through’ the pain (in this context, anyway) signifies going beyond, that is, overshooting the place where the work is. It means missing the point and is often a form of avoidance or a symptom of attachment to the practice as a demonstration of physical prowess.

What I do mean is that we simply continue to step onto the mat, with our injury and with our mindful attention, and find appropriate ways of interacting with whatever is happening. This may involve modifying or completely changing our practice. Well, that’s OK. We change or we modify and we embrace all of that. Which means also embracing our reaction to needing to change or modify – our genuine reaction, including the nasty bits that we’d rather sweep under the yoga mat: our anger and our resentment and our sense of loss and our fear ... or whatever it is. If we just stop practising until the problem has (we hope) gone away, we remain forever ignorant of the knowledge that it has to communicate to us. Since this knowledge is always something that we really need to know, the pain will continue to recur, in one form or another, until we pay due attention to it.

Working with injury demands our sensitivity, our honesty and our patience. It demands that we love our injuries, spend time with them, respect them, listen to them. This is what’s happening now; this is the pathway. This is the teaching.