In her father’s light – Interview of Geeta Iyengar

 

For me a healthy yoga addiction is better than other addictions. The fire of yoga must remain burning without smoke in the spiritual heart throughout the practice, the sadhana. The interest of the practitioner, sadhaka, needs to be affirmative and dynamic. However, this interest should not be a wildfire burning down the forest; the interest in yoga should not be disoriented and disarrayed.

Often the seeker goes to different teachers and different schools of yoga without having the proper aim or background. Instead of getting a solid footing on the path and its subject matter, he acquires knowledge in bits and pieces. The body, mind, and intelligence remain muddled. Going to a new teacher before allowing oneself to practice and digest the methods learned from another teacher leads one toward more confusion than clarity. Learning first with one teacher and getting well-established in practice makes one able to discriminate with maturity.

Often pains, problems, discomforts, doubts, misunderstandings, and misconceptions arise because of lack of understanding. This further leads toward lack of inner penetration into oneself. Learning yoga cannot be like eating junk food. One has to stick to the method in order to absorb and assimilate the sadhana precisely and properly. Remember the adage, “The rolling stone gathers no moss.” It is the same with the roving yogic sadhaka.

Yoga has become popular as a healing method since it has curative and preventative value. But its scope is wider than this. The healing and therapeutic value is a kind of positive side effect of sadhana, a by-product. From this healing process, the urge to go further, to go close to the unknown, may start sooner or later.

The interest and the vision of the sadhaka should not be limited only to therapy. Certainly one has to practice having in mind the disease one suffers from. The practice should not be antagonistic to the healing process. One has to know how to deal with one’s own body and mind so that problems are solved and diseases are overcome. One cannot neglect demands for health from the body and mind.

But at the same time one should not divert one’s attention from the basic yogic approach and the goal: to be closer to the core of being. To let the intelligence touch the inner body also. One has to learn to look inside oneself to find one’s emotional and mental state as well as one’s intellectual capacity. One has to learn to see the problems of mind, intelligence, I-consciousness, and egoism, which often need to be corrected to stay on the path of self-awareness anywhere and everywhere. One cannot remain eternally stuck at the physical pains and problems and physical well-being only.

While correcting the posture of the body in asana or the breathing method in pranayama, it is not merely the muscles, bones, or breath that we correct. We touch our consciousness in order to know its moods and modes. The involvement of consciousness in asana is articulated in such a way that the flow of consciousness remains sober and pure.

Dr. Geeta Iyengar

[Interview by Colleen Morton/ Yoga Journal October 2001]