Doing It RIght
In the book, “How Yoga Works,” Miss Friday is working with her student, the Captain. The Captain comes to yoga as a lot of us do, to help us get out of pain; in this case back pain. He has been working with his teacher for a little while and he is pleased with the progress he is making. But, as he practices Miss Friday sees that he is cheating in Pascimottanasana (Seated Forward Bend). He is feeling a little pride in his practice because he can already touch his head to his knees in this seated forward bend. But Miss Friday stops him. He doesn’t understand why she stops him. But she tells him that he is cheating because he is bending his knees and rounding his spine in order to get his head to touch his head to his knees. (a common cheat) She warns him that his both his back and legs are supposed to be straight. She describes the correct bio-mechanics of hinging from the hips and not folding at the waist. She tells him that they are doing the practice to make his back healthy again, not to make sure that he can touch his head to his knees.
Y.S. I.14 Your practice must be done correctly, for then a firm foundation is laid.
Miss Friday tells the Captain: “You see, the point is not what the pose looks like in the end. It’s the process of the pose as it goes on; it’s what it does inside of you, how it works to begin to straighten and open your channels. These are the channels of how energy flows in the body. (More about that in another post!) Miss Friday goes on to say: “But if you don’t do the pose right, if you cheat, if you try to trick the pose and get around it just so you look good, then the pose doesn’t work on you the way it is supposed to.”
She asks him to do the pose, again, without bending his knees, which he does. It’s a beautiful pose, his back is straight, his legs are straight and he is hinging at the hips. But the Captain is unhappy because his head is about 2 feet from his knees!
We are often like the Captain, impatient in our progress and mistaking what it not important for what is important. Often a student sees someone do a very advanced Pascimottanasana and sees that their head is touching their legs, so they think that is important, but what they don’t see is the straightness of the legs and the long, almost straight line of the back. It can take a long time to get to that stage of practice with a lot of hard work and true understanding of what is going on in the body.
One of the things I love about the study of yoga and the stories and mythologies that it uses to teach us is that we are meant to see ourselves in every character of the story. Can you see yourself as the Captain? Can you see yourself as Miss Friday? Sometimes it is hard for us to recognize ourselves as the Captain, especially if we don’t like what we see. But, we are also meant to see ourselves from a different perspective. That way we can see if we are cheating ourselves and examine why. Pride? Envy? Impatience? While Impatience is not one of the Seven Deadly Sins from Christianity, or the Six Enemies of the Heart from the Yoga Sutras, as are pride and envy, it still has a way of blocking the channels and stopping progress on the path.
In the Iyengar style of yoga that I study and teach, the focus is on doing the poses correctly, to open the channels of energy in the body to create an optimum flow of healing energy. It's a method that has worked for me.