An Approach to Ashtanga that Supports Aging & Fatigue
Below, is an email exchange I had with a friend in the Ashtanga community, someone who is struggling to find a way into her practice such that it supports her fatigue and depression. I share it because I have the sense that many practitioners silently struggle with these very issues, and I do not believe that the teaching community adequately speaks into these issues. Often the instruction students receive is, “Keep practicing. It will change.” And so many fatigued and frustrated Ashtangis, just keep doing the same practice over and over hoping for a different outcome. Many, however, quit. Ashtanga is a powerful practice, but there can be an ethos within the community that is unforgiving. There isn’t a lot of space for those who need to deviate from the standard practice. It is not uncommon for students to essentially get the message: “You either do it the way it’s taught in Mysore, or you’re not welcome in this room.”
I share this dialogue for those people who have not been able to find the space within the world of Ashtanga to know that an Ashtanga practice does not have to look just one way and that there is a way for the practice to support you, no matter where you are in your life.
Dear Chad,
I have had chronic fatigue for many years, and used to find my Ashtanga practice helpful with my energy levels, but lately, I’ve been struggling with the intensity of the practice and have been asking myself, “What the heck am I actually doing?” I do think the Primary Series is very detoxifying, but it wasn't until I went back on antidepressants that I had any kind of ability to maintain my practice. I have been off of them again for 1 year and want to keep it that way.
However my fatigue returns when I try to expand my practice, and my self-practice at home is never very energized. I feel I need the energy of others in order to really push through my energy issues. And now that I’m in my mid-40’s, I’ve been asking myself, “How am I going to maintain this practice?” Lately, I am always on that line of questioning because it seems that without the pills I cannot maintain my energy, and I am committed to keeping myself off medications.
At this time the support of a community and teacher would be so helpful, but I cannot seem to find it; in fact, I have been greatly disappointed by folks within the tradition who I admire, people I thought would understand and point me in a particular direction. They’ve neither been kind nor helpful. If you could offer me some advice on how to proceed I would be very grateful.
Thanks,
T
Dear T.
Many within the tradition we come from, unfortunately, promote the notion that we should be able to maintain a vigorous practice no matter what stage of development we're in, no matter how healthy or unhealthy we are. And that's just not a viable, life-long approach to practice. The practice that suited me in my early 20’s, for example, no longer fits for me in my 40s. A mature perspective on practice recognizes that yoga should support our health and well-being no matter where we are in life.
When I first started learning the practice, I was 19 years old, so it helped me immensely to have a place to direct all of my energies, both positive and not so positive. Without it those anxious times might have been met with a lot more self-destructive patterns, like drinking, drugs, and self-loathing. Having the structure to get up early each morning, to show up on that mat and practice strongly each day was the perfect solution for all that anxiety, self-doubt, and agitation that seemed to be central to my 20s and early 30’s. But as I’ve gotten older, practicing like that zaps me.
I’ve recently stopped practicing Advanced A. I find that it stresses me out physically and emotionally. As I transition into my early 40’s, I notice that all of the arm balances make my neck, shoulders, and upper-back ache and tax my energy. I am at the stage of life where I want to have enough energy to give to my wife, our family, my clients, and my community, and it is a lot to manage. At some point in the last few years I woke up to the fact that I did not want to keep giving all my energy to my practice. I wanted my practice to be able to support me, to support my life, to support my pursuits.
And these days, I’m just starting to be okay with the fact that my practice might look different each day. I tend to stay on the six day per week schedule, but I no longer beat myself up if I don’t get to it that often. If I, at the very least, get on my mat four days a week, I feel like I’m on track. After all, I’m not trying to “kill it.” I’m not pushing into the next pose or the next series. I’m maintaining my health, vitality, and clarity to face my life. While I practice primary and intermediate series most of those days, I may or may not complete the whole series of postures. I usually jump back between sides, but when I don’t have the energy, I don’t push it.
I especially don’t push it when I have an injury, am sick, or don’t get enough sleep. Melissa, my wife was up all night with the flu last week, which meant that I was up, too. When I got on my mat the next morning, my head was spinning. I wasn't sure if I was coming down with the flu, myself. So after the Ashtanga Invocation, instead of starting Suryanamaskar A, all I had the energy to do was to take padmasana; do ujjayi pranayama for about 30 minutes; and then take a 45-minute savasana. Yep, that was my practice. And, yes, I still consider that Ashtanga Yoga. I did not, in fact, get sick. I had eight clients that day, and had I not taken care of myself, I would have been a mess.
It is my sense that the practice continues to evolve as we get older. When I was in Mysore in 2005, I was told that someone I was practicing with in the shala in his mid-50’s was taking anti-inflammatory drugs in order to continue practicing Advanced A and B. His practice looked quite acrobatic for someone his age, but was that practice supporting him or was he supporting it? What’s clear to me is that as the body evolves, so should we.
Krishnamacharya, Pattabhi Jois’ teacher, divided yoga practice into various categories, called krama, which means a step used to achieve a particular goal. As we get older, our orientation moves from athletic perfection (siksasana krama) to maintaining our health and preserving our youth (raksasana krama). Eventually, our orientation moves to adhyamatya krama, or spiritual matters. (1) We tend to move our practice in this direction in the time of life we in the West tend of think of as retirement. It occurs in our culture when we are in our 60’s or 70’s. Our focus turns toward questions about the meaning of life. And so the orientation is less in the way of getting and staying strong and flexible in the body. I am not suggesting that it is unimportant to maintain health and vitality as we age, but that the 60’s onward are about developing wisdom, and that comes about primarily through stillness practices, like meditation. (2)
I cannot personally speak about this stage of development because I am not there. I do know several Ashtanga practitioners in their late-50’s and 60’s who do not keep the same practice they kept when they were in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, but they’re not very public about how their practices have changed; in fact, about a year ago, I asked an old friend who has been practicing since the 70s if he would be willing to be interviewed for this very question, but he declined. He did not want to expose himself to criticism. I completely understand his perspective. When someone speaks about altering the practice to even the slightest degree, some people who have elected themselves to be the “yoga police” within the community launch in with vitriolic abuse. Nevertheless, I do sense that it would be very healing for all of us to learn how our teachers and mentors evolved their practices to account for the physical, emotional, and spiritual changes that occur with aging.
As far as I can see, T, you can take the practice we're taught and break it into component parts that support you energetically and spiritually. Maybe one day you skip all jump-backs and jump-throughs to prevent fatigue from setting in. Maybe on another, you practice only a few postures paying particular attention to your breath and bandhas and only go as far as you can keep your attention. When you notice it flagging, you stop. Maybe on another day, you wake up feeling ungrounded, so you just do the standing sequence, holding each posture for 10-20 breaths. Or maybe the mood needs lifting, so you focus on back bending, chest openers, and emphasize inhales and inhale retentions. The variations are endless. What’s required is the willingness to take the dive, to experiment.
Yes, it can be helpful to have a teacher who has already walked down this path, someone who can show you the way, and it can also be extremely helpful to have a place with group support where your experimentation is welcome, but there are not many Mysore rooms or teachers that are ready for a student like you, not yet, at least. So you have to be willing to develop a home practice and then also be equally willing to take risks, read, and just keep showing up on your mat with curiosity.
In closing, I recently heard about this experiment called the Asch Paradigm where they put 10 people in a room. 9 of the people were shills. 1 was not. They showed all 10 cards with lines of different lengths. Two of the lines were clearly of equal length (Exhibit 1 and B) while the other two (A and C) were not.
The researchers asked the nine shills to claim that two badly mismatched lines (B and C) were actually the same, and that the actual twins (Exhibit 1 and A) were total misfits. The one person who was not a shill almost always went along with the other 9 members. Why? When they quizzed the victims of peer pressure, it turned out that many had done far more than simply go along to get along. They had actually shaped their perceptions, not with the reality in front of them, but with the consensus of the multitude. (3)
In short, what I'm suggesting is that you're not weird or unusual in your experience of the practice. That you're fatigued from it is pretty common. My question to you is whether you have the guts to trust your own intuitive sense that something is off and find an approach that supports your well-being and that supports your mood. That can be a huge challenge, especially if you're used to the support of the Mysore room to carry your practice as well as the support of a teacher and friends who share a mutual love for the system. It's hard not only to stand on your own, but to trust your innate knowing when everyone around you is telling you that you’re crazy when, in fact, you’re not.
I hope this helps.
Chad
Footnotes:
(1) So for example, B.K.S. Iyengar reported that “In 1978, after my 60th birthday celebration, my guru (Sri T. Krishnamacharya) advised me to devote time to meditation and to reduce my physical strain.” (Iyengar, B.K.S., Astadala Yogamala. New Delhi: Allied Publishers Limited. 2001)
(2) I’m not suggestion just because one has reached a certain age, they should stop doing the Ashtanga series. If someone has the inclination, time, and energy to devote to progressing through the series and they’re no longer young, by all means, I think it is important to follow that urge. It can be incredibly life affirming to practice advanced postures and to push the limits on what’s possible in this human form.
Five Element Series Part 6: Fire Element
Fire brings heat to the body, mind, and spirit. The range runs from warmth to desire to rage. In its milder forms it shows up as the warmth and generosity we bring to the people we love. In its stronger forms it's aggression, tension, hostility, lust, the whole scary end of being alive.
Some spiritual teachers have an awkward relationship with this element. Where the teaching aims at transcendence, students get told to overcome passion through suppression rather than transformation. And suppression produces a particular character: the aspirant who is pretending to be blissed out and is, in fact, furious. Ram Dass called the sexual version the horny celibate. The bliss is a performance, and the anger underneath is what the performance costs.
The fear of fire is fair. We've all watched a sentence said in rage end a relationship. People who kill say, I was in a fit of rage, I wasn't in my right mind. Playing with fire takes skill. But if we never learn to use it, we lose a whole side of life: expression, warmth, passion, adventure.
Here is where it gets practical. Anger is the signal that a boundary has been crossed, a boundary marking something we cherish. A value, someone we love, ourselves. Handled with some proficiency, that signal becomes the capacity to say no and mean no. Without it, we say yes and mean no, and then we feel ripped off and used. The no we swallow doesn't disappear. It comes back as resentment, and anger expressed from resentment creates more chaos than the clean no would have.
Repressed fire also finds vices. Coffee, spirits, cocaine, pornography. The addictions give the fire somewhere to go. They just burn us and the people around us without transforming anything.
The yogic tradition takes fire seriously. The fire in the belly, agni, metabolizes food and experience alike. Tapas, the heat of practice, is the capacity to stay with discomfort long enough to see into it. The practice builds that heat deliberately: moving quickly between postures, more sun salutations, a louder exhale, an arc of intensity that peaks and then comes down into ground and clarity. On the other side of expression there's usually both.
When there's too much fire, water balances it. Sadness, longing, the deeper and slower feelings cool the hot ones. So does simple kindness turned inward, the metta phrases: may I be filled with peace, may I be safe and protected.
But the first move is smaller than any of that. Notice where you said yes this week and meant no.
I wrote a book about that. I’m Chad Herst, a coach and licensed acupuncturist (LAc) in San Francisco. The first chapter is twenty-eight minutes, read in my own voice. Enter your name and email and I'll send it to you.
The Age of the Guru is Over…Now What?- Part 1
This afternoon I’ve been perusing various Youtube videos on Ashtanga Yoga looking for inspiration when all of a sudden I got what I was looking for. I came across this video in which Richard Freeman, a well-known Ashtanga Yoga teacher, is speaking on a panel at the Urban Zen Well Being 2007 Forum. What struck me about that clip was that he was making the point that “it’s no longer the age of the guru;” in fact, a new model is being born in the West in which the relationship of student to teacher is one of “equal partnership on both sides.” In this article, I intend to explore what the traditional guru-disciple relationship was like; how it is no longer valid in this day and age; and what we might replace it with.
The Guru-Disciple Relationship
The role of the guru dates back to the period of the Upanishads, around 1000 B.C.E. Prior to this period, Hindu spirituality was expressed in the act of sacrifice to the gods. The gods were thought to be outside forces that needed to be manipulated in order to maintain order. The Brahmans (priestly caste) were in charge of maintaining the spiritual order in the form of sacrifice.
But by the ninth century, a new revelation began to be expressed. Instead of gods, like Shiva or Brahma, dwelling outside, the gods were considered inner experiences, inner energies that could be met and used for personal transformation. Anyone could, now, have a direct access to the gods. It wasn’t just the Brahmans (priestly caste). The term "Upanishad" derives from the Sanskrit words upa (near), ni (down) and şa (to sit) — so it means to "sit down near" a spiritual teacher to receive instruction in discovering these powers within.
The role of the guru was to illuminate the shishya (disciple) from the darkness of illusion through esoteric knowledge. Gu means to dispel. Ru is the darkness of ignorance. In order for this new revelation to be expressed, the guru’s knowledge needed to be vast. He needed to have been someone who had already awoken from the dream of maya (illusion), awake to the direct experience of the purusa (indweller, soul). Additionally he needed to have been a shishya of a guru, himself and to have received his guru’s blessing to impart the wisdom.
Hierarchical Roles
The role of the shishya’s was primarily devotion, commitment, and obedience. In exchange, the guru taught through discourse, through silence, through medicine, and through imparting esoteric practices. The guru offered what he could to illuminate his disciples into the truth, knowledge, and experience within. But the role was hierarchical. The shishya was in the hands of his guru. If the guru took advantage of his position, then that was the risk the disciple took.
In Aṣṭadaḷa Yogamālā: Articles, Lectures, Messages by B. K. S. Iyengar, the author describes the brutality, at times, of his guru, T.K.V. Krishmacharya, how “his moods and modes were very difficult to comprehend and always unpredictable. Hence, we were always alert in his presence. He was like a great Zen master in the art of teaching. He would hit us hard on our backs as if with iron rods. We were unable to forget the severity of his actions for a long time.” (Iyengar, B.K.S. Aṣṭadaḷa Yogamālā: Articles, Lectures, Messages. Mumbai: Allied Publishers Private Limited, 2006. Print. p. 53)
And in an interview I dug up in my files dating back to 1993, Pattabhi Jois says this about his guru:
My guru was a very difficult man…One example of his callousness, which I tell about is this: on the Sanskrit College’s anniversary day a large celebration was staged which the Maharaja attended. We were to give a demonstration on the ground…There was no podium so my guru told me to do kapotasana (an extreme backbend) and stood on top of me for 10-15 minutes giving a lecture. There was a small tree coming out of the ground that had been haphazardly cut several inches from the ground. The sharp end of the stick stabbed into my shoulder and stayed there, penetrating more and more deeply as the lecture went on…After the lecture I stood up and was covered with blood…For 15 days I could not move my arm. ~Pattabhi Jois
Imagine the lawsuits that might have taken place had Krishnamacharya been teaching at the local Yoga studio these days? Clearly, times have changed.
'The Age of the Guru is Over…Now What?' Series
This is one part in a three-part series. In the next posting, we will explore how this relationship is no longer valid in this day and age. In our final posting, I will posit some ideas of what I think might replace it. Be sure to check out these other posts over the next few days, either by returning to this blog or by subscribing to our blog on the upper left corner of this page.