Day III: Opening the Eye of Intelligence
I hope we're not breaking the rules here by blogging at all. Mr. Iyengar began the day asking that we not comment when the classes are over. "Yogis should be very careful not to comment immediately," he said. "Please take it [the instruction] and work on it. You are fit to comment on it after experiencing it, not before."
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"I am practicing yoga even now," Mr. Iyengar assured us today, reminding us again that he is 87--and has been practicing without interruption for 70 years! You can see it in his vitality. He has been alert and present to details so minute--the direction the skin is moving during a pose--that the rest of us might not ever have noticed them. For every minute of class, he has channeled his energy into the instruction, into the room, into his students, with the ferocity of a tiger. While he never unrolled a mat and demonstrated a pose, he showed us in the most powerful way possible what it means to fully engage in practice. By never allowing his attention to waver from his teaching, by showing us the unimaginable specificity with which he attends to movement, he gave us an unparalleled example of what yoga is.
"It has not been easy at this age to do the work I've done these three days," he said. "I think I've worked more than all of you put together." There were peals of laughter--and a recognition of the truth. We'd been prepared for him to guide his teachers to teach us, not for him to lead class; we'd expected that he might miss a few hours of class. Instead he came even when we weren't expecting him (to the afternoon pranayama sessions and the evening performance) and flooded us with as much instruction and experience as we could absorb in three days--certainly more than we could ever dare have hoped for. "What little I know, I have given," he said. "If it has opened the eye of intelligence, please take it."
We so often talk of teaching by example, but rarely do we get such examples.
