MyLifeYoga

Imagine you are the author of a Sutra. Why would cutting down one word give you immense pleasure? To understand this, and to understand what is a sutra continue reading.

The word sutra is derived from the verbal root siv, meaning to sew. The medical word suture also comes from the same root. The word sutra is meant to potray the idea of a “thread holding together” a collection of paragraphs to form a manual conveying a single idea.

Sutras are also related to brevity and conciseness. The idea is to pack as much meaning in as few words as possible. Why is this so? To understand this one has to go back thousands of years when the sutras were composed. Paper was not invented then and text was written on dried leaves. This was not only time consuming and expensive, but also viewed as unreliable. Text written on dried leaves was prone to destruction or decay. War, famine, floods, mass migrations, plague, and other disruptions made it extremely difficult to carry around elaborate texts written in long form on dried leaves, and preserve these across generations.

A better way had to be found to convey and preserve ideas over a period of thousands of years. A system was invented whereby ideas were written down in extremely short form and these were then memorized and passed on from generation to generation. Brevity was hence of the essence. Every word was a burden that had to be carried on by subsequent generations. Consequently the authors of a sutra spent enormous energy in condensing their idea in as few words as possible. It is said that if the author of a sutra could cut out one word from his sutra then he got as much pleasure as he would get on the birth of his first son!

Besides being short, the sutra had to be complete, unambiguous, and logically consistent. It had to describe the subject completely in as few words as possible while being structured in a logical and consistent ways so that there was no need to refer to any other text to understand the subject.

The way sutras were learnt was that they were first memorized. After the complete text was memorized only then the teacher would explain the meaning of each stanza one at a time. The process of memorization was that the teacher would chant one whole stanza and the students would then repeat after him multiple times. Once the teacher was satisfied that the stanza was committed to memory he would move on to the next stanza. The pronunciation and meter of the recitation was important. Mispronunciation could render the meaning of the words to be different from what the author intended. That is why a lot of care was taken to make sure that the rendition was accurate and faithful to the original. The author of the sutra had to take care that the sutra was composed in such a way that it made it possible to chant and memorize it.

Sanskrit language was also part of the system. (Though this was not the only language in which sutras were written.) The language was created to be mathematical and precise. The idea was that the meaning of the words would in themselves convey the idea rather than rely on context that can change with time. It can be debated on how successful this was as commentators on the various sutras debate on what the original authors meant. But the fact that we can still talk about and largely understand what was composed thousands of years ago speaks to the success of the system.

Lucy

In our yoga practice animals inspire us in our asanas—pigeon, peacock, frog, cat and cow. As yogis, in life they inspire us, too. When I recently had a woman in class who had a yoga mat with cats on it I had to tell her how much I liked it. Yoga mats now have so many choices and designs but I had never seen that one. I told her how we had cats at our yoga retreat in Maine and that it had never presented a problem; even our allergic guests dealt with it. She said she thought every yoga studio should have a pet. One of the places I study in New York City (Genny Kapuler) does and I love it! One particularly allergic guest at Sewall House had no problem when it came to Lucy (“I wish I could hug her!”) and our “non-cat” people embraced her as well, sending us photos of her sitting on their bed.

Our first mascot at Sewall House was Westy, the subject of many of our guest’s camera shots. Guests would send us CDs with photo studies of dear old Westy, who was already 10 when he escaped the city in the summer months to his “country home” where his favorite activities were porch-sitting, jumping in laps for as long as he wanted and walking to his wooded outdoor bathroom as a daily routine. Like all of us, Westy had a personality and let you know when he had too much of whatever it might be, or not enough if he wanted a piece of your muffin! As he grew older he gradually became blind with cataracts and had hyperthyroidism. But he did so well, still engaging in his favorite activities, even if moving a little slower. He continued to slow down, hanging in with us until right before our Thanksgiving Retreat in Maine 2008. Sadly we reported his leaving us in our newsletter and received sympathy cards and emails about dear Westy. I had him 18 years. We had seen and done a lot together.

As Westy was preparing to leave us another life walked into our lives. I was teaching a full class over Labor Day weekend. Kent, my husband, had gone down to the lake to do some work on the cabin. But he never made it. At the head of the lake he was greeted by her so he came back, interrupted my class, and simply said “Can I speak with your for a moment?” He never interrupted class so I know this must be important. Continue reading →

Every night space,time, and light come together in a union that creates our night sky. Every night the universe is singing to us. Are we listening?

Cameras that open their shutter hundreds of times a night create these images that are later stitched together to form a movie. This is what you would see when you turned your head up to peer at the sky from locations where the sky is clear and where there is low light pollution.

This is what the night sky looks from Hanle in Ladakh, India. Also home to the world’s highest observatory. If you like the video you may also like this.

If you were to Google “Yoga popularity” you will find pages upon pages of articles talking about the popularity of yoga. So the question this article asks is: Is yoga really popular? The answer that this post comes up with may surprise you.

Before we jump into answering this question we should clarify by what we mean by yoga. In this article the practice of yoga asana or the yoga of postures is referred to as yoga. The practice of all 8 limbs of yoga as defined by Patanjali would reduce the numbers of yoga practitioner to be quite marginal.

Let us look at the raw numbers. As per Yoga Journal survey in 2008 there are about 16 Million people practicing yoga in the US. This translates to about 5% of the population. If we were to take this number world-wide we have to first eliminate half the population. It was estimated in 2005 that about half the world lived in poverty at less than $2.50 per day. For the people fighting a daily battle to bring bread on the table yoga is not on their list of priorities. We then have to accept that yoga has poor penetration in China, most of Africa, and Middle-East. Even in India, the asana yoga practice is not very popular and it would be safe to say that the popularity is no greater than that in the US.

If you were to do the math you will probably conclude that no more than 2% of the world does yoga. Even this is probably a wild over-estimate. So the question then arises: can we claim that something practiced by 2% of the population as popular?

The point of the article is not to stir up controversy or engage in a mindless statistical exercise. The point is to illustrate the work ahead. Because of the low penetration of yoga the benefits to society has been on the margins. Yoga can help bring down healthcare costs and also improve productivity of the working population. Yoga can also help improve education. It is not difficult to imagine that reduction of anxiety and stress can greatly improve learning. The resulting benefits from improvement in education to society would be quite phenomenal.

Yoga can also help pacify and calm down society. If yoga were to be practiced by 90% of the population you may see the need of less policemen and jails. And as yoga spreads to a majority of countries you may even see a reduction in wars and conflict.

Unfortunately the practice of yoga within the “at risk” community is pretty insignificant. Thus the people who can benefit most from yoga are not the ones practicing it. This is why the tangible benefit to society from yoga has been marginal at this point and that is why work done by people like Lisa Danylchuk is so important.

It has been close to 100 years since Krishnamacharya started his epic quest to popularize yoga and we have reached about 2% of the population in that time. Even if we were to see a geometric increase in the number of people practicing yoga, we are talking about many decades before yoga reaches say 25% of the population world-wide. It is probably only at such levels that we should first start seeing direct benefits accrue to society. When this happens that would be a “tipping point” for yoga. An earlier post talked about the foundation of sacrifice on which yoga has spread. What this post is trying to say is that Krishnamacharya’s work remains unfinished. Only when society sees direct benefit accrue to itself, only then yoga teachers will be justly compensated. Till then the wagon of yoga will have to be pulled by the force of sacrifice.