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.
