04/08/2024
Two years ago I started attending an Iyengar Yoga class. On the first year I used to attend the class once a week. That was more than enough for the week considering that after the class I was soar and very tired. However, at the beginning of the second year, the ease of the discomfort and the experience of better allignment, strength, balance motivated me to join a second class and at times some workshops. My teacher -Sheila Haswell, - and her mother learnt the approach from Iyengar himself in Poona in India. Sheila, in her early seventies now, has truly inspired me. She is very dedicated and passionate to the practice, she gives great attention to every individual in the class, she has so many stories about Mr Iyengar. The analogies she uses to promote right action helped me to engage with muscles and parts of me I didn't know were there.
Nowadays I practice almost everyday. I started to develop a kind of "body intelligence". I am curious about my allignment, the way I sit and walk. I am looking for engagement not only with the body, but with the force of gravity: the force that keeps us grounded on the Earth - and no floating in the air - and that if we learn to use it enables to operate on the natural laws and to experience our body part of the planetary structure.
The yoga practice taught me to better respect my body and its needs in order to experience health and wellbeing. However, this body intelligence frees me from attachment to the body itself. I am aware of the process of ageing and dying. As Ajan Sumedho, the founder of the first Theravada Buddhist monasteries in England, says "birth is the cause of death". Death is a necessary part of life. Your body to be healthy needs to have certain cells dying off. They have done their bit, they have fulfilled their function, then they activate their programmed off switch. Some serious illnesses can be cuased by cells of our body living too long.
The more I treasure, honour and experience my body and the more I accept its natural processes, the more I feel alive and able to navigate the challenges I encounter on my way, the more I feel compassionate towards myself and others and finally, the more I trust the mystery of life that unfolds slowly moment by moment and that as anything that starts at the right time will end.