Health, Heal, Hypocrisy : the convinced yogines
I was in London a few days ago. I had a desire to practice strong. I get an interesting link from who was spending those days with me. A school, as there are many, with a fresh, captivating site. Away, one goes, without even thinking too much, about a beautiful yoga session.
Inside the bus, under a sky that was held tight behind the scenes, the sun and clouds that released a pleasant breeze, three damsels that turn in a certain way difficult and insensitive to the driver. They have three sparkling mats under their arms; I smile thinking that if they had been French, they might have had baguettes .
I am looking for a precise civic and, listening to the question that they posed hysterically to the driver, I understand that, yes, we are going to the same place. The little girls look around, look at each other in the windows, look at their nails, update their facebook status, make a fake laugh, they hate each other below, it seems.
Nothing that, after America, I'm used to this type of subject. The human prototypes should not be put in a precise category (it would be that of the 3 h, as I call them, - health, heal, hypocrisy - they do everything according to the first, they always talk about healing something or someone, they act following the conduct of the third ), but there are practitioners with certain "formular" attitudes, who come back, heck. Those who take yoga as a serious, performative workout that sculpts your buttocks and makes you sweat.
They want peace in the world and they kiss the figurines of this or that guru, but they don't slam him a bat from the nearby rug (unless the competition takes place, which has little to do with yoga but which in them shelters so much ). They study massage and it's easy to be raw.
The "convinced yogines" know the Vedic chants by heart, they talk about empathy all the time and wipe out the ego from yoga, but if you ask them to pass you the mat smiling, saying you don't get it (hopelessly true, I'm often high - we also say that in my case it is easy to find higher ones - besides being superhumanly firm), they look at you with a certain disgust and tell you that, behind the corner there were still others that you could have taken by yourself (obviously I had not seen them, I often go without lenses to practice, which makes me exquisitely vulnerable). It is a judgment, and as such it is not clear what to do with it. But unfortunately it would be a description of a sample I have been studying for some time.
The episode of the mat had already happened to me and it happened again inside this London studio, with not too huge spaces, but certainly treated up to the smallest detail, complete with photos of the very tattooed founders who exhibit the supreme string of the most upside down asanas and cakes, not really, take any anatomical atlas of yoga, identify the most advanced and here you find them there, with their raised positions like never before, beautiful faces and bright smiles towards the lens (poor C1, C2 and via below).
Together, of course, on merchandising shelves, packets of dried fruit, creamy creams with the trademark of the firm, well-trimmed mats, books, rubber bands, clothes. It would be naive to be scandalized, yet it still has some effect.
Yoga, stereotypes and mystifications
Yoga as a workout
If the teacher reflects the trend, and the first little words with a rhythm are those of those who practice and teach yoga done as in a rubber bubble, of those who push all of us little humans to become even more monads right now to whom we should be less than ever, here, the serious trouble is there. Because the lesson has just begun, the radiators are a ball (the new fashion, sweat sweat, sweat - until death, I would add), and the little voice of intuition among the meninges presses: "Oh no, what a pain, another performative lesson . "
You also feel lucky, for having found teachers who do not do so, having found them along the way, thanks to the stretched hands of a friend like Alice Frantellizzi or by virtue of chance, which is never the case, or at intersections, which are often produced by some strange form of intent traffic.
At this time, while conceiving the practice of tai chi chuan at a collective level (ITKA) as useful, while recognizing that even in yoga, often in Santa Fe or Gubbio I found myself practicing with some members of a real community (Moga Dao Yoga), here, despite everything, I'm still thinking about yoga about the actual superiority of a direct and individual teaching. The more I read, the more practical, the more I receive from Antonio Olivieri (Sooryachandra - KHYF according to the tradition of T. Krishnamacharya and TKV Desikacha r), the more it seems to me that the power of a "tailored suit", of a change that occurs from inside and which requires breath, silence, individual practice and then, perhaps, perhaps, but only after years, doing the same thing for someone else, with someone else. And for the transmission of the Dao or Yin Yoga that respects its complementary principles, I think the same way.
But for a while there has been this horde of purple bricks, iridescent mats, bright smiles, retreats, an ad hoc estate to practice. If we enter the dense sense of practice, we move a lot, a lot. The Surya Namaskara sequence is also done 20 times in a row (the shirt is already soaked).
It moves so much and so quickly that the breath suffers and this is what really is serious. He suffers in the sense that breathing is not included and if we do not include breathing, it is not so different from killing abdominals but all done in apnea.
Still remaining on the raw practice, which we really like a lot, these teachers are the first to repeat phrases like "let go of what the rug neighbor is doing", "think of you", "don't worry about what it is more flexible than you ". With three dire consequences:
- for the logic of the jar of jam, you come to look at the neighbor ;
- if, a minimum minimum, it is a day that you do not feel particularly rooted and centered, you go out frustrated very much or with a strange feeling of emptiness to explain that you vent on the food or on those around you, poor them;
- the "first of the class" (I refer to the perfect " Halasana plows", the "trees upside down" Adho Mukha Vrksasana without spot and without fear, the proud warriors in all their variations) go gloating and even more enclosed in their imperfect inner garden and continue to push hard hard, even when, as I often see, the legs tremble, the veins on the meninges come out, the muscles show weakness, the neck becomes taurine and rigid. With the risk of getting hurt . And with getting hurt you mean not listening to yourself . Which then comes boldly not to listen to the rest of the world .
Just like on the sidelines, I add that so far I have gone through all three possibilities more than once and I believe it will happen again.
Like any fashion, if yoga also falls, it will be good. For those who work there seriously too. I know it sounds like an assertion from those who shoot themselves in their feet, but perhaps it is not so, as a very ingrained man I listen to had already mentioned to me.
Perhaps a sincere question will remain, to which an informed offer will respond. Or maybe I am under the illusion. And let us return to the old history of the order of the physical world as we know it. And the thirst to know the power from which the material world radiates increases. Not that we should go back to studying Schopenhauer, but it's always nice to know that some things live inside and manifest themselves outside. And that someone has found the words to verbalize this continuous exchange, whether or not reference is made to the Veil of Maya.
