January 2005

A Quest for Truth About Yoga

First There is a Mountain, by Elizabeth Kandetsky

Review by Malcolm McLean, RYT

Here is a powerful tale of a yogi's quest for truth:
- The truth of her own life, revealed in her own body, accessed and then uplifted though yoga.
- The truth of her guru BKS Iyengar, clouded in legend and rivalries, and here pierced with the eye of a conscientious journalist.

Kandetsky has woven a rich tapestry from the threads of her own life, her yoga practice and experiences, and the story of yoga.

She paints an intimate and candid portrait of life at the Iyengar school in Pune. She describes the tremendous power of yoga practice in this setting, as it worked on her own life at every level. She does not flinch from showing the tyrannical, often capricious attitudes of Iyengar and his daughter Geeta, and son Prashant. She shines light on the petty rivalries between Iyengar and other great yoga masters, on their roots in nationalism and other struggles for patronage and prestige. She investigates the origins of yoga, and raises sincere doubts about the legends of its antiquity.

From this clarity of unrelenting objectivity combined with the understanding in her own cells, she offers a powerful validation of yoga. Despite the contradictions and falsehoods around yoga, she shows how it meets her needs -- and the different needs in India and the West, as it continues to grow, mutate, and reach millions of people.

Towards the end of the book, she describes her last class with the master -- after she had admitted learning another system - the Ashtanga system of Pattabhi Jois, his lifelong rival. She was challenged to perform the scorned series in front of Iyengar, who nevertheless could not resist, as she went along through the despised "jumpings", teaching it to her as he saw it might be done. She described the experience as a great healing of her own sense of fragmentation, as a child of divorce and family rivalry, knowing that her great teacher still loved her even though she had, as one person put it "danced with another and then told him he liked it."

It brought me back to a day in Ashtanga class, the elaborately attacked error of placing my hand alongside the foot in triangle (Iyengar style) rather than grasping the big toe. Or in another kind of workshop, breathing ujjayi in good Asthanga style, to the complaint of an imperious workshop leader, about "this business of breathing like a horse!" Or indeed, the moment when arms outstretched and rising up to express a sense of wonderful, and allowing innate goodness to shine through an open heart, were impatiently ordered to proper alignment, parallel to the floor.

Like every human endeavour, yoga has its political divides and ingracious feuds. They can be expressed in the placement of a foot, the bending of a knee, a different kind of chant or a different attitude - and sometimes, focused on the quest for the self, an insufficiency of "otherness". But the yoga itself, flowing with the intelligence of the body and diverse inspiration of generations of teachers and practitioners, transcends all of this.

Though I have never met him, I thought of how BKS Iyengar had cast his light and his attitudes into my life, through teachers who learned from him directly, or indirectly themselves, and through his books like Light on Yoga, my first point of reference on any particular posture. Now, thanks to this lucid and powerful book, I feel privileged to know Iyengar more deeply.

* Please note these reviews are written by individuals, and in no way reflects the view of Yoga in Canada.