Iyengar Yoga Around The World
Andrew outside the gates of RIMYI
Hello Everybody,
You may or may not have realised it, but I’ve been away. I’ve been on the road, studying and practising with fellow teachers and students across schools in India, England and Switzerland (and soon, Taiwan!). I have been welcomed and received with care, humour, and kindness, by our worldwide fellows. I’m extremely grateful that our practice of yoga comes with a community that sees all of us as connected.
I am currently writing to you from Pune, India. I’m halfway through my third month of studies at RIMYI, the global home of Iyengar Yoga. You have probably heard that other teachers at CYS are huge fans of the institute, and I’m certainly part of that chorus. If a visit to RIMYI is something that’s even remotely on your radar, I’d suggest having a chat with some of the teachers to find out more.
The international exposure has made for many opportunities to observe, compare and contrast different yoga practices. What’s remarkable to consider is how much is the same. Instructions call for clear and specific action, every blanket pile has prim and proper folds, and no one is ever getting away with a loosely rotated front leg in trikonasana!
However, it’s the slight quirks, the subtle gradations in form and manner, that have been some of the most interesting things to see. At Maida Vale in London, the classes are quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Rather than being used as a driver, the breath here is expected to be managed on a tight rein. It got to the point where more than once, one of the teachers, Marco, would turn his wry grin to me in the apex moment of a challenging pose, and say “Andrew, is that you breathing?”
The RIMYI practice hall is a place where the confluence of past and present energies feels almost tangible. Nothing in the room is shiny or new. The high ceilings give you room to breathe. The marble floor is cool and immovably solid. Scores of photos of Guruji’s poses frame the walls. The loose crowd of diligent practitioners at work on themselves gives the room a humble and reverent hum. The eclectic range of props is extensive enough to confuse, and in a move that at first feels bizarre, but which you come to appreciate as clever, is composed almost entirely of non-identical sets. For example, there are probably over a dozen halasana boxes, but each one is a different size, each able to give a slightly different accommodation for a student.
As an outsider, you have to accept that for a while here, you’re simply lost at sea. You don’t know where things belong, and when a teacher asks you to fetch a certain prop, for a while you'll repeatedly be bringing out the wrong one (I think there are around 9 different options for foam bricks in the store room… and has anyone else ever used a “pregnancy box” before?). You’ll return, arms outstretched, and get not much more in return than a shake of the head. Someone will get the right item, and you’ll hence understand one more thing about how things work than you did earlier.
Rather than getting stuck with things, you just start dealing with them, and little by little, you find your groove. Things get easier, and mistakes don’t bother you anymore. You don’t even realise you’re absorbing all these little lessons, but you are. When I’d been there for a while, someone told me that they were finding it disorienting that there’s no “straight” direction in the hall, and I laughed because it was true (there aren’t really any parallel or square edges in the hall) and yet it had never bothered me enough to notice.
In fact, after a bit of time there, you start to see the entire room and all its idiosyncrasies as one giant prop system. There’s a specific ceiling rope which, with my height, lets the crown of my head come to rest with precise and even pressure on the hard marble floor in rope sirsasana. I know this distance so innately that I can swing down almost loosely with smooth, fearless speed, in a way that could make an onlooker panic. I also know that with one folded blanket next to the window, and with my leading leg chocked to the corner of the wall and floor, I can have both the window grille and the window ledge as leverage points to power a strongly spiraled and elongated bharadvajasana twist.
The tricky thing about habits is that they form without you even realising. I think a big part of what we are trying to cultivate in a yoga practice is the mindful development of good habits, not just on the physical level, but moving all the way through to the subtle points of our being. I’ve been blessed on this trip to gain so many new experiences for reflection, and the point I’d implore everyone to consider is that we have to continually be testing our own tendencies.
Where are you gripping: physically, intellectually, emotionally? What sort of preferences, aversions, and ideas have you let solidify into an identity?
To use yoga as a means of transformation on any level requires constant pursuit of more refined understanding, and engagement with new ways of surrender and release. It requires something more than willpower, it requires an intelligent and trusting faith: knowing what needs to be activated, and what needs to be pacified. What needs to be sought, and what needs to be released.1
My travels and experiences these last few months have been a rich opportunity to reflect and live through many different presentations of some of the above questions. Reflecting back, some of the changes are so pronounced that this episode feels like a metamorphosis, and it has only affirmed my belief and faith in this subject as a noble study in the art of self-transformation.
My best wishes. Be seeing you again before too long.
Andrew Lim
Andrew's engagement with Iyengar Yoga began in 2011. He has been practising at Central Yoga School since 2013, and attained teaching certification under James Hasemer's mentorship in 2018.
Read Andrew’s articles on yoga here.
