Yoga and faux yoga on International Yoga Day

Most people who do yoga probably delude themselves, if they do not follow the Iyengar school of yoga

I am a fan of yoga, but not of the International Yoga Day. Yoga proper is hugely beneficial for the body and the mind of the practitioner. Mass posturing on the International Yoga Day is beneficial, too — but for the healthcare industry, particularly its orthopaedic wing. For those who feel obliged to turn up as a member of a performative yoga crowd on this occasion of supposed celebration of India’s soft power and proceed to contort their bodies into unaccustomed positions, the results can range from transient bodily pain to damaged ligaments and strained tendons.

For the benefit of those who know that ligaments and tendons are both tough, stringy lengths of connective tissue but don’t know the difference between the two, let us note that tendons connect muscle to bone, while ligaments connect bone to bone.

But why assume that the yoga performed en masse on International Yoga Day is not quite the real deal? The picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi performing yoga that has been splashed out on the cover page of several newspapers today offers some insights. The PM is sitting in vajrasana, on folded legs, knees together and heels together. His arms come up to the front, to let his hands do the traditional, joined palms greeting. So, what is wrong?

The PM’s shoulders are hunched, instead of going down to the sides and pushed back to widen the collar bones, and the chest, while a depression forms between the shoulder blades. The base of the palms should join at the base of the sternum and the palms should point away from the body at a fortyfive degree angle. Such a posture allows the lungs to fill up the entirety of the thoracic cavity and perform deep breathing.

How do I know this, and presume to know yoga better than Narendra Modi, who claims to have been doing yoga for decades? I first learned yoga when I was 15, and discontinued the practice after a year. Then, again, I learned yoga while a student in Delhi, in my early 20s. Then, in my middle age, I chanced upon Iyengar yoga. Now, I know that what I used to perform in the name of yoga in my youth was not really yoga, but just some bending and stretching to attain physical positions that resembled classical yoga poses.

Unfortunately, faux yoga is what most self-styled yogaacharyas perform. Some of these clowns perform calisthenics in front of huge crowds, but the size of the crowd does not alter the fact that what they do is not yoga at all. Occasions like International Yoga Day promote such clowns and help them misguide thousands of people.

What marks Iyengar yoga out from the rest is the focus on the right alignment of muscles for every pose. It is more important to get the muscles aligned right, than to achieve the pose itself. This approach allows for the extensive use of assorted props, ranging from belts, bolsters and pillows to ropes, rings fixed on to the wall through which to loop the ropes, bricks, benches, foldable chairs, and custom-built wooden furniture. The novice is eased into a pose, relying on the props in the beginning, but with the right muscular alignment at every stage. The props are changed, reliance on the props is gradually reduced, till the student finally attains the pose without assistance.

This approach permits the student of yoga to discover for themselves the significant difference in impact achieved by minor alterations to how the body is positioned, such as when the toes point inwards rather than outwards, when the body’s weight is shifted from even distribution on the big toe mound, the small toe mound, the inner heel and the outer heel to just the toe mounds.

The ultimate goal of yoga is to bar activity of the mind –chittavritti nirodha: chitta mind, vritti actions or conduct, nirodha prohibition. This can only be achieved by great proficiency achieved through years of earnest, mindful practice. In the interim, yoga explores the interplay between muscle and bone, between the stimulation different organs of the body receive from different postures and the fruits of discipline, between poses and muscle groups.

The student cannot and should not still the mind. The student should listen to the yoga instructor. It was my good fortune to be in the yoga class of Neeru Kathpal, one of the finest teachers in any subject that I have had in my embarrassingly long career. I, of course, am in no position to rate her yoga skills in relation to other teachers — she herself stresses that she is still a student — but in her desire to make her students learn what she teaches, and the effort she puts in to that end, while always managing to remain cheerful, she is probably in a class of her own. On international yoga day, I pay her my respects, and remember BKS Iyengar, who deconstructed the yoga pose to help students reconstruct it at their own pace, taking and shedding the assistance of props on the way.