At first I hesitated to watch the documentary on Kalaripayattu - an Indian Martial Art.
"What does this have to do with yoga?" I asked. But after an hour of googling for better yoga videos, and finding it way past 1 am, I decided to watch the documentary to finish the night.
Astounding and wonderful realizations flowed, once I got into the four part series, which shows the unity between yoga, kalari, and Indian classical dance. What's more, all the fighting masters are also doctors of Ayurveda and therefore marma.
The video also shows the mutual origin of the Surya Namaskar, at once a worship of the sun and total body stretch, and as we find out - also the basis for a fighting sequence that consists of worshipping the Gods and Goddesses.
Before google video or youtube, back in 2002 I guess it was, I had started doing Ashtanga yoga practice at a yogashala called Atlanta Yoga. The owner at that time was Adele Gale. She encouraged me to also share what I knew about Patanjali's Yoga Sutras in a workshop.
I had been raised spiritually with the image of Swami Satchidananda as a yogi - not Mr. Iyengar, Sri Pattabhi Jois, or certainly any of the powerful yogis of today. My background was in the spirituality of the yoga system, and I wanted to show the students at the yogashala what a yogi probably looked like - and what the practice looked like, at the time of Patanjali.
I found a documentary at the Decatur library on VHS that had the original footage shown below on youtube. I had been doing digital video at the time, so I had a video card and transferred the VHS tape to AVI video, put it in a PowerPoint along with the rest of my presentation on the Yoga Sutras, and did a sweet workshop that year.
Recently I found a clip of this yoga video on youtube, so I decided to put it in Yoga Video Blog. The video clip starts with a few seconds of other stuff, and then displays the yoga exposition of an unknown sadhu in Benares.
The thing that struck me when I first saw this yoga video clip is how devoted the sadhu is, as seen by his little namaste's peppering his practice. He never looses touch with his spiritual focus, while he performs the asanas with economy, efficiency, and speed.
Today I look at him and am amazed at how unattached to the asanas he is. There is a sense of dharmic duty and he flows from one to the next without relishing the asana. I suspect that he is making an offering of the asanas, and once they are struck, he offers the next, perhaps to Shiva, the lord of yoga.
I wonder what kind of meditation he makes at the moment each asana is formed. Could he be merging in that moment, the seer, the seen, and the process of seeing?
Patanjali said, "At the time of concentration the soul abides in the state of a spectator without a spectacle." (Yoga Sutra 1.3).
We have so much invested in our yoga asanas. Our yoga is a spectacle of effort, breath, style, and expectations of all kinds of results that we imagine will bring us happiness. And not that yoga won't bring happiness - for it's a far more sublime art than many other things. But what baggage we bring to the practice is in the end the "story of our yoga".
On a hot day in Benares, 1500 years ago or more, even stretching back to the first sunrise of yoga, the students of Patanjali have performed yoga as a duty, and an offering, not as a spectacle.
The quiet beauty of this yogini's practice makes me think of the art of yoga, which expresses an intimate organic choreography, yet this yogini also possesses an air of such inner silence, I can only presume her devotion is complete.
Our modern yoga is filled with words. Instruction after instruction, pose after pose: "Now do this, now do that! Okay, now just be!"
I used to listen to darshan lectures by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I still call him that instead of Osho. The tapes had the sounds of birds chirping, and occasionally an Indian train whistled by in the distance. But Bhagwan's voice was a study in silence. The way he trailed each word, was as if it disappeared into a whisper.
There are words which lead to silence, such as Aum.
It is said Aum has four sounds: A, U, and M - and then the silence that draws you inward.
What is yoga without silence?
The Yoga Sutra allows only the sound of the breath after asana: pranayama. After that, in the silence, you practice.
When the breath alone is transformed in the mind and experienced as pure prana, we hear the real Aum, which rings the hour for us to disappear, floating away into samadhi. Aum shanti, shanti, shanti....
At 44 seconds into this video something happens. The sadhu stands up and if you listen with your heart, you can hear the silence of his prayerful and meditative mind.
Sure, the video starts out with his legs a little wobbly. And, sure, the modern western methods of combining strength training, or the South Indian methods of strength training, make him look slightly frail by comparison to our juggernauts of physical strength and yogic prowess.
But how can we know what his frail legs have stood upon? What mountain passes and snow clad heights his bare feet have trod? His meager diet and exposure would fell the mightiest of us, I would admit.
Take a look again at the way he stands. It's not a "full expression" of the pose... or is it? Yes - his head is slightly bend down, showing perhaps some lack of "flexibility" or "openness" in the hips. But note the demeanor in his face, and the humility of that slightly down-turned bow. Namaste....
