Reflections on Old-school Hatha Yoga
In a sea of yoga styles, I continuously return to Hatha yoga. The poses are a decades long narrative that becomes evermore nuanced as time hurries my body onward. Sometimes I see my reflection. My alignment feels blissfully internalized, and I can feel life force flooding my limbs. Other times I am adrift with frustration disrupted only occasionally by surprising fractals of awe.
When my students come to class I try to share this deeply personal aspect of my practice but it isn't easy. It's not something that can be conveyed in words to those who have not yet experienced these things. I want share how it feels to meditate in these different positions, how different currents of energy move in the body and how a timelessness spills over into breath and being.
Sometimes I stay in poses for a really long time--10 minutes or more--because what's happening inside the pose is so layered that to move on to the next feels like a wasted opportunity. I might be shaky and tired and a bit slippery with sweat, but the learning is well worth it. Profound heat and healing happens and a change in my expression of self is palpable.
In modern life it is so rare that the body gets to be sovereign unto itself in an uncomplicated way. The yoga space has the potential to be one of them. The postures knead the dough of our flesh as the leavening of our breath transforms us into what? a baguette? a pretzel? a boule? It can feel so serious when attempting to process the rigmarole of alignment cues but underneath that is a much lighter space where the interplay of awareness and novelty meet.
When yoga got consumed by workout culture, the ideas around body image, athleticism, fashion, and manifestation changed the shape of yoga into something different than what I had come to cherish. I stopped teaching in group settings. It just felt too disheartening to have a practice so personal and profound be treated like a vehicle for just about everything except a deep relationship to the mystery.
I am reflecting on these experiences because I have a big job to do. I must find a way in my current teaching to help new students find their own articulation of the practice. Eventually the mind quiets, the body strengthens, and the inner experience of self becomes stable, even quietly joyful. And when the issues are just too much and yoga class is an impossibility, we can shift into the therapeutic modalities of craniosacral therapy and IMT, which can hold an even stronger container for healing and growth.
It is a tender moment, starting again post-lockdown but one that makes me clear that craniosacral therapy is my medicine, yoga my stethoscope, and listening my apothecary.
I hope to see you here in Athens for class someday and if enough hands are raised, online, too.
With folded palms,