perfidy

A few years ago I thought I was on the path to enlightenment. No kidding; it's true. I had just gotten out of grad school with an M.A. that I wasn't sure I'd ever use and was keeping body in soul together renovating apartments for a property-management firm while living in the houses I was fixing up. My food budget was $12 a week and all I had to my name while all my crap was in (free) storage was a bag with some clothes, a Purdy paintbrush, a yoga mat, a blanket, a tiny portable stereo and a dozen cds. I also had Light on Yoga.

Light On Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar is probably the most influential book on yoga of all time. Iyengar, whose personal devotion to the art helped him overcome severe childhood illnesses, wrote the book in an effort to systematize the ancient discipline in order to eliminate what he considered the confusing, obstructive, or simply pointless accoutrements that had built up over time. Framing yoga as a comprehensive road to enlightment and inner peace, Iyengar presented a rigorous and exacting course of study that focused on asana (yoga poses) and pranayama (breathing techniques) as the first steps on that journey.

Over the course of 500 pages, Light on Yoga presented more than 200 poses ranging from the simple (mountain pose or tadmasana, in which one simply stands perfectly erect and concentrates on the energy flowing between head and floor through one's feet) to the ludicrously acrobatic (Tiriang Mukhottanasana, in which one bends over backward from a standing position and grabs one's ankles - from the back - while touching the floor only with the soles of the feet) to the nearly impossible (corpse pose, or savasana, in which one simply lies on the floor with the mind perfectly still and yet perfectly alert). Each pose was described in short pithy phrases describing the alignment of the body, and the last 50 pages comprised a sample six-year course of study that, Iyengar claimed, would allow the dedicated student to master the contents of the book.

Like many aspiring yogis, I was drawn to Iyengar's no-nonsense approach to the art. But after several years of on-and-off study and eighteen months of intensive daily work, I found myself unable to progress beyond "Week 17." This was somewhat frustrating; Week 17 was highly physically demanding, and I found myself working ever harder at yoga (both poses and meditation) even as I put off the realization that I had no future plans, no prospects, and counted as my "domicile" a post office box in Amherst, Massachusetts. I eventually moved to a new city and a new job and let the change of circumstance be an excuse to let my yoga pratice wither. It turned out that I was not on the path to enlightenment. I was on the long road to an unheated basement apartment in Queens, New York. Much different.

Now, I understand that "Iyengar: the book" is different from "Iyengar: the class." In classes, Iyengar is famous for his energy and fierceness, even going so far as to strike students to (as he has it) stop them from making mistakes that could injure them. Certainly he has been successful- his strenuous and highly precise style of yoga is now taught around the world and he stands as possibly the world's foremost practitioner of the art. His more recent books (Light on Yoga was first published in 1966) find him introducing props such as blocks to help beginning students properly align their bodies while not stretching as far as advanced students, and expounding at greater length about the spiritual foundations of his art. His life's goal has been to help people achieve enlightenment by joining the mind to the body ("yoga" comes from the Sanskrit for "to yoke"), and the physical efforts are, in reality, secondary to the inner journey students undertake. In fact, the first section of Light on Yoga, the part without helpful pictures and such, is really more important to Iyengar's presentation than all the twisty acrobatics. That was something that, for all my serious aspirations and meditation, never sank in.

A former student of Iyengar explains the difference well. In the introduction to his book Yoga, The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness, Erich Schiffman writes,

"His methodology worked. Many people attempt to discredit him by saying his yoga is not spiritual. But here it was! Spiritual in the most practical, grounded, obvious way. And it was equally obvious from what he said to me that his intent all along was to impart the experience of yoga - not just put everyone through the paces, physically speaking. The whole point of this physical, hard work - and it was very physical and very demanding - was to get into a deep meditative state. . . .

It took me a while before I was able to describe what had happened, but as I look back, I can see that this is when yoga finally became mine. I "got" yoga....

In Iyengar's classes, for example, he would say "Move your little finger this way " or "Stretch the skin here" - and I would, and it always felt right.... But I had no idea where he was coming up with all this marvelous information, this detailed insight into how the poses worked. But when [a colleague] taught me to create a line of energy [e.g. down my arm], suddenly all the intricacies that Iyengar had been talking about began happening by themselves.

Although some of my trouble with yoga - why I "failed" - had to do with the fact that I was poor, broke, directionless, and pretty much an untogether cat, more had to do with my inability to read between the lines of Iyengar's pithy words to get at the unhinted intricacies below.

The new Light on Life is probably Iyengar's last book, as he is now by my count 87 years old (though he can still stand on his head for half an hour). It is a hybrid - part inspirational biography, part manual for living, and part philosophical text. In it, Iyengar goes into detail about the philosophical underpinnings of yoga and how students can use yoga to navigate the path to (possibly) eventual enlightenment.

Light on Life is divided into five sections, each corresponding to one of the yogic kosas, or bodies - Stability: The Physical Body, Vitality: The Energy Body, Clarity: The Mental Body, Wisdom: The Intellectual Body, and Bliss: The Divine Body. Iyengar also describes in detail the eight petals of yoga (a subject touched on briefly in the introduction to Light On Yoga); ethical disciplines (yama), internal ethical observances (niyama), poses (asana), breath control (pranayama), sensory control and withdrawal (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana), and blissful absorption (samadhi). If this all seems absurdly recondite, well, it does start that way.

But Iyengar is a deep thinker with a lifetime's experience to draw upon and over the course of the book explains the place for all these frankly bizarre concepts within the larger context of the yogi's search for samadhi. Even for someone like me (who is not a particularly spiritual person), Light on Yoga contains some important pearls of wisdom. While reading Iyengar's section on the need for detachment from worldly things, I understood for the first time grief as a selfish feeling - being sad for one's own loss, not for the departed, who are beyond caring.

In short, Light on Life presents, like Light on Yoga, a rigorous and demanding course of action for improving the body and mind of the practitioner. But where Light on Yoga was terse and pithy, Light on Life is circular and discursive, allowing Iyengar to dwell on topics he feels most important to the reader, such as the slippery nature of dharana, dhyana and samadhi.

Those who will get the most out of this book are aspiring yoga students who are prepared to accept the spiritual (or more properly, inner) aspects of yogic philosophy. Without that context, Iyengar's words are, for all their unpretentious charm, just another self-help guide on how to live a richer life. This is not necessarily a bad thing; some people find solace in Chicken Soup For the Soul, some in the Bible, and some in the Baghavad Gita. It all depends on what brand of wisdom your mind is ready to receive.

A notable difference between Iyengar and Chicken Soup for the Soul and Dr. Phil, however, is that Iyengar repeatedly reminds readers that self-improvement through yoga is difficult, indeed often seemingly impossible. When is the last time that the self-help guru of the week told someone honestly, "this is going to take a very long time, and will often suck a ton. But you're going to have to stick with this if you want any reward?" This is a sentiment more often reserved for drug-treatment programs or prison, but Iyengar readily applies it to the simple aim of wanting to live one's current life more completely. This is refreshing, and if the payoff is that at 87 years old you can smile and laugh, share wisdom with joy and humility, and stand on your head for 30 minutes, then there are probably a lot of people willing to try.

Iyengar's love for life is evident in every page, and the rich intellectual and spiritual rigor he brings to the book makes it a fitting companion, even an extended prelude, to Light On Yoga. Although much of the book is beyond me, probably forever, this is a required text for any serious student of yoga. And even if the deeper explorations of yogic spirituality don't resonate, there is a great deal here worth reading. If yogic spirituality does happen to be your path, then there is much here that will smooth the rocky path toward eventual enlightment. Not that you'll probably ever get there, but as Iyengar stresses time and again (in an affirmation of life worthy of Camus), it's not the getting there but the journey that counts.

This review also appears on blogcritics.org.