I wrote an Instagram post recently about a fairly insightful comment I made to a student. The student was complaining their practice didn’t feel good that day and some of the postures were difficult. My reply was this -Ashtanga Yoga doesn’t make sense when you think about it ie when you look at the practice via the lens of how good or bad your practice is then all bets are off. Ashtanga Yoga is not here to make your practice good or bad. Also when you start going down the rabbit hole of why is this posture here or that posture there in the sequence then again , thinking thinking thinking , forget about it you’ll just get lost and it’s a super boring conversation. (But hey people make a career out of talking about stuff like this, yawn).
It doesn’t matter , who cares.
I was lucky enough to spend a week with my pal Luke Jordan at his Ashtanga Summer School in Portugal last Summer. Luke is a long time practitioner of Ashtanga and has a very deep devotion to the practice and some of it’s component parts chanting ,Sanskrit , Philosphy etc . He’s a heavyweight ! He’s like the Mike Tyson of Ashtanga Yoga. I’m more like the Frank Bruno (or maybe the Frank Spencer , come and decide for yourself). But Luke is from Belfast and with myself from Manchester there’s always a good combination of top bantz in-between the inhale and the exhales. It is a unique friendship , we can go from talking about consciousness to ‘yo mama’ jokes in the blink of a drishti (Ashtanga in joke!)
Any road – it was a fun week where I got to see Luke in his full flow of extraordinary teaching(s). Go see for yourself sometime. During one of his many conferences he showed up with two seperate pieces of paper – ‘It doesn’t matter’ was written on one piece and ‘who cares’ on the other. These slogans formed part of his talk as answers to the many different variations of basically one question – how can I get my leg behind my head , how do I stand on my head etc etc – basically folks getting their chakras in a twist about the visible – the physical yoga postures. Which ~I guess we all do at some point – it feels like it’s in our DNA – ever since the fabulous Jane Fonda announced ‘No pain , no gain’ in the seventies we’ve all got too infatuated with our bodies.
A great way to get out of the head is to get into the body , a psychologist mate of mine told me years ago , ie to stop (what seems) like an incessant stream of (bad) thoughts, move your body – and asana (yoga postures) is a great way to do that. Or is it – have a quick ganders for yoga postures on da gram and you’ll find an endless supply of every tom , dick and Deidre usually in brightly coloured lycra ( another Jane Fonda invention ?!) ( and when I say brightly coloured I mean you need sunglasses or you’ll get a headache looking at them). Anyway I ADHD digress , again. Now where was I and what point am I actually making ?
Ashtanga Yoga is called a practice for good reason , its something you do. As Mista Luke says , it’s a system and there are postures in a sequence that forms part of the system. We have a choice to follow that system , or not too. It’s that simple. And I’m sure there’s some naff spiritual cliche that I can roll out here about digging for water, and if you don’t dig deep enough you’ll spend a lifetime digging shallow holes – and that my friends is a bit of a dead end – ask all the hot yoga folk ( calm down calm down hot yoga fans , I is just jokin init!) With Ashtanga Yoga ya gotta dig DEEP ya hear – DEEP. And have a quick butcher’s at the cartoon above, and it’s the same principle with this practice.. standing on your head , or getting your legs behind your head is actually not the reward , doing the practice is the reward (or naff spiritual cliche #2 The journey is the destination init ).
Over n out.
* nicked the title from top Advaita geezer Sailor Bob Adamson – or I reworked it from the original SB quote ‘What problems have you got unless you think about them’ – go have a non think about that today.