A Lighter Union
Robert Wood on B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga (1966)
I was born with perfect shoulders. But when I moved to Philadelphia, they told me I had a chip on one, the size of ‘Australia’. I let it stay. When I moved on again, to Paris then to Berlin, they told me it had grown to be the size of the ‘colonies’ together, coming as I had from America. I came home to rest, returned to the family suburb where I grew up, took my breath and gathered strength, on country, from country. When I moved again to Melbourne, they told me the other shoulder had a chip the size of ‘Perth’, the city of my birth, and somewhere that they vaguely knew, located as it was on the frontier.
Only when I reached Kochi in Kerala in India did I begin to heal my shoulders. Kochi has palms and it has waves. It has a bookstore called Idiom with sloping shelves and mouldy page turners. It has a lilt and a breeze, is a port connected to a languid world, where the tide comes up again and again. There is a quadrangle where cricket players kick up the dust, and people lounge on scooters, where there are dogs lazing on the road, and a water tower inscribed by children. There is a ferry service that shuttles you back and forth, and a bridge that connects this isthmus to the mainland. There are stories and books about Kochi, all the way back to when Pliny the Elder wrote about the decline of its neighbour, Muziris. There are fish sold on the street, their eyes looking out at a warm, tropical, place.
While there, I had Ayurvedic treatment, ate my traditional food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I did yoga. It did, of course, help my posture. This was where I began to practice salamba sarvangasana (shoulder stand). In my sequence, like all the sequences I was taught and told, it comes after sirsasana (headstand). The book that I read in Kochi, and that I share with you now, is Light on Yoga. BKS Iyengar writes:
The importance of sarvangasana cannot be over-emphasized. It is one of the greatest boons conferred on humanity by our ancient sages. Sarvangasana is the Mother of asanas. As a mother strives for harmony and happiness in the home, so this asana strives for harmony and happiness of the human system.
Iyengar’s book began to be a guide of sorts, a reference, an encyclopaedia, a path to knowledge, a journey inwards from the outside world through words. Iyengar became a friend and uncle. I had practiced yoga in Philadelphia, Paris, Melbourne. I knew that the postures mattered, that one did physical exercise (asana) to get in shape to do breathing routines (pranayama); that one did breathing routines in order to become ready to undertake meditation (dharana); that one did meditation so as to become enlightened (moksha); and then to return from below to share the lessons of one’s process (guru). It is a lifelong practice, if not to smooth the chips, then to transcend all the places that made them.
Light on Yoga is an instructional book of 200 yoga poses, with 600 black and white photographs of Iyengar demonstrating them. The reader is guided from how to stand on their feet, to how to stand on their head. The book is divided into three parts—a technical introduction to yoga, which is theoretical and historical; the yoga poses that people can follow; and the breathing exercises after this; with an appendix of courses that links a sequence of poses together. There is a difficult course in the appendix that can last for up to six years, all of which feeds back into thinking about how we take breath and stand in a place.
It is a book mainly about the body, but it is also about how that connects to the mind and spirit, about what we can see and change in our daily habits and practice. Readers are guided through how to sit, stand, bend, inhale, exhale, jump, lean, walk, move, sit, and reflect. Iyengar speaks to beginners and experts, considering along the way what it is to practice if not perfect postures and thoughts. It is about training and getting better with Iyengar himself as a teacher, benchmark and example, and is revered for its wide gaze that looks inwards and outwards.
Light on Yoga is one of many books by Iyengar, but it is my favourite and the one my mother follows as well. She meditates every morning and over the years has come in and out of lessons given by others. But Iyengar has always been there. I have books like this, books that matter, books I return to, that have yet to give up the ghost. There is the Tao Te Ching, which I am always reading, if in different translations and for different meanings. There is Tarruru, an anthology of Pilbara song poetry, which helps me understand that country, and my brother-in-law and my nephew and niece. There are my own books, which I turn to on occasion, out of embarrassment and to spite my younger self, to spur me onwards if not quite upwards. But Light on Yoga is the book I share with my mother. The first copy I owned was a gift of hers with well-worn pages falling out. It is a book with photos of people who could be my relations, with knowledge that comes from our communities, that is about our location. It is about generations.
Iyengar learned his yoga practice from his brother-in-law Krishnamacharya, beginning when he was fifteen in 1934. His light left this world in 2014, and, in the final years I am told his asana practice was three simple and masterful poses—dandasana (backbend), sirsasana (headstand) and salamba sarvangasana (shoulder stand). He held each of these postures for thirty minutes and focused his yogic practice on pranayama and dharana. All of Iyengar’s practice in this stage was passive, meaning he held those poses once he was in them and did so without props. This is to slow the heartbeat and to work deeper, go inwards. Yogis say that the turtle lives longer than the rabbit because his heartbeat is slower, and Iyenar was a turtle until the end. But maybe the turtle also lives longer because he has no shoulders and cannot be strung upside down with a shell that is so protective.
I still have Light on Yoga on my bookshelf, even as I have given away many texts that no longer serve me from my moments abroad. I have not lived in Kochi in Kerala in India for five years, and since then I have slowed my breathing, and learned what it is to simply be in the middle of parenting. I hope one day that it is a book my daughter takes with her when we all return to our homeland; that what she carries on her shoulders is different from mine, a choice made from desire and knowledge, that each step shared on this journey all the way back to when the world was soft, is something that she can do with confidence, respect and courage. Her grandmother, my mother, has shoulders that are broad and have carried me so far, to these shores as a guest, as a worker, as a teacher. They are rounded with love and surely sore, but I think I want shoulders like that, think that it is better to be a chip off the old block than to forget what it is to go on or for what one stood. When everything seems like it is upside down, Iyengar helps me with that vision of the world. He helps me see my mother from the right way up, as well.
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Robert Wood is a poet. He is interested in dream, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean. He lives on Noongar country in Australia.