A few years back I was teaching yoga classes and developing a small following of students. One of the ways that is done is by practicing some advanced, beautiful poses. But, for an obvious reason I couldn't quite grasp I always had little injury or two so I was always searching for better techniques. In my search I came across an intriguing article about an elderly woman by the name of Vanda Scaravelli who had developed an intuitive approach to yoga.
Vanda was an Italian aristocrat who knew many of the luminaries of the mid 20th Century. Close friends with BKS Iyengar, one of the instrumental figures in the transmission of yoga to the west, and philosopher, Jiddhu Krishnamurti who had been identified at a young age as a spiritual leader. Groomed to be the leader of a world religion called the Order of the Star, Krishnamurti took the unusual step of gathering his followers together in Mexico City in 1927 where he rejected his position with a now famous speech title "The Truth is a Pathless Land. He spent the rest of his life criticizing systematized thinking and encouraged people to rely upon their own intuitive abilities rather than the authority of others. Vanda blended insights from Iyengar and Krishamurti to create a unique style of yoga based, she said, on "undoing," a descriptor I found both cryptic and intriguing.
I had recently attended an Iyengar workshop which I considered rigidly militant in its approach, quite opposite from what I gathered that Vanda might have taught. Fortunately, the article included a link to Vanda's principle student, Diane Long from whom I hoped to get some answers. I emailed Diane and she told me that she had a young student, Brooke Welsh, who was interested in traveling and teaching. I contacted Brooke and invited her to the studio where I taught.
We held a workshop with Brooke and many of my students attended. I never saw any of them again, which turned out to be a good thing because I had no business teaching yoga. Working with Brooke provided a total deconstruction of my yoga practice. I began the weekend an expert and teacher but I ended it a beginner without the slightest idea how to practice yoga.
The workshop also ended my search for new forms of yoga. Since that time I have only taken a class or two a year with either Brooke or Christine Borg, who lived too briefly in Dallas and now resides in Edinburgh) and one class with Diane herself. Between classes, I've worked on my own which has been challenging and funny. I have a memory of Christine gazing searchingly into my eyes and telling me that the practice is "really, really simple."
And it is very simple. My ambition to become a great yogi had been interfering with any awareness of what my body needed. The Scaravelli inspired yoga gave me, not a system, but an invitation for to slow down and allow my body to teach me how it wanted to practice yoga.
Ironically, I'd been practicing meditation for about 15 years by this time, obviously quite selectively.
It might be regrettable, but it is actually somewhat funny that someone like me would begin a supposedly spiritual practice like yoga without bringing any awareness to the enterprise. But that's life, a stumble from one incredible self deception to the next, usually with no awareness at all. There is no reason to expect that spiritual practices would be free from self deception. The satisfying thought that you are a following a wholesome, beneficial path might make this considerably more rather than less likely. The straight and narrow path is about following a path that can be ground into a well worn trench, which was Krishnamurti's exact and only point.
We hope that the spiritual path will deliver us from suffering and the hope to escape suffering is the agenda that blocks awareness. Actual spirituality require the faith that we can to drop the effort to escape and survive the pain of life without self protection and without going mad. It is this that allows awareness of the subtle suffering that created the agenda in the first place, the pathless land of which Krisnamurti spoke. He described meditation as "the understanding of what is without trying to change it or make it go away."
The Buddha described what is succinctly- suffering, impermanence, and the selfless impersonal nature of it all. The wonder of awareness is that when we acknowledge suffering without trying to change it or make it go away, we just begin watching. In watching we notice impermanence. Suffering comes and goes and there is nothing at all to it. It is completely impersonal.
This isn't so easy for us. WH Auden summed it up nicely with these lines:
"We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.