Why can I not get on my mat these days?

It seems that ngondro first thing in the morning is one straw too many for this poor old camel. So I’ve dropped it from my early-morning practice. It’s now relegated it to the cracks between the paving stones – the interstices in my day – where actually it’s flourishing pretty well, because its new situation better reflects my real priorities: moving practices first. It also does away with that little lurch that I experience in the instant transition from a Tibetan Buddhist practice to an Indian yogic one, though I suppose the lurch is still there implicitly. The fundamental disjunction, if it is a disjunction – Buddhism / vedanta – still exists. But that’s another trajectory and I won’t take off on it now.

Pat, just like that: a solution. Not really. Human nature is more complex. I don’t for one moment think I’ve cracked it, that next week – tomorrow even – the bucket will still hold water. Nevertheless, it has some value in its moment.

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.

Why can I not get on my mat these days?

It isn’t just inertia. It isn’t just the season and the urge to hibernate. It’s something deeper and less graspable in my consciousness. It’s something about where my practice came from, way back, long before it was a practice ... about the need to flee my mother’s house and how I have been running, running all these years, and how lately I have gradually slowed down and risked looking over my shoulder. But my practice grows out of many roots. Only some of them are fed by fear and flight.

I thought I would burn our old love letters. Not in a grand funereal pyre, or each individually with its own match. This isn’t grief or the dramatic gesture. I was thinking more pragmatically, of kindling for the fire. Liberated ... all those nails we drove into the floor, all those words, all those little black platoons marching purposefully across the page like ants. Of course, we couldn’t nail down anything. You never can. Or maybe I’ll use our letters to line the compost bin. It pleases me to think of all those big emotions mulching down, re-arranging themselves into the anatomy of worms.

For me, there’s nothing personal about the dance. It isn’t emotion put into movement; that’s back-to-front. The dance looks like me when it comes through my body, because it assumes my lines and forms, but it isn’t me – not when it’s good anyway. It’s something larger and more organic, something more like compost, building up and breaking down. It’s something more like burning old letters, unravelling the stories, returning meaning to source. And when I try to nail this too in words, of course it slips through my fingers and I’m left with just another story. Words close on nothing; there’s just the one hand clapping.