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Journal Post
I don't typically write reviews for these letters-in fact I've never written one here before-but I have a new book hot off the press that needs and deserves all the hype it can get. Last Fall I was fortunate enough to be invited to a yoga conference at Cavallo Point, just on the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge, a beautiful spot (with a great restaurant) if you're ever looking for a retreat location. The gathering was billed as "An Opportunity to Consider an Authentic Voice for Yoga Today" three days of talks on topics like the relationship between yoga and buddhism, yoga and art, and yoga and tantra ... well, what did you expect yoga people to talk about when they get together?
, the highly regarded Yoga teacher and Buddhist practitioner, was interviewed by The Agony Column's Rick Kleffel on her new book Insight Yoga: Integrating Yin/Yang Yoga and Buddhist Meditation. In this excellent interview they discuss Sarah's unique approach to yoga practice which she developed through her wide-ranging personal explorations into Yoga, Buddhism, Chinese Medicine, and Transpersonal Psychology. As one of today's most authentic, grounded, and spiritually mature voices in Yoga, this interview with Sarah is not to be missed.
At the end of February we left off with one foot in the door of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, one of the oldest surviving Hatha Yoga manuals. Hatha Yoga emerged sometime in the 9th or 10th centuries CE, strongly influenced by both Hindu Tantra and Indian alchemy. The Pradipika was written four or five hundred years later, though remnants of these ancient disciplines are still evident in this text and others like it. The Gheranda Samhita for example, a companion text that's a few hundred years younger, calls Hatha Yoga the "Yoga of the Pot" (ghata yoga), "pot" here referring to the human body (or more precisely the torso) which is compared to an alchemical vessel.
Traditional Hatha Yoga, as it's described in the school's oldest surviving instruction manuals, is an odd-looking duck, at least to our modern Western eyes. Take the granddaddy of these books, Svatmarama Yogendra's Hatha Yoga Pradipika (literally "Light on the Forceful Union-Method"), which is a venerable 600 years old, possibly older. It consists of 389 verses divided into four chapters on asana, pranayama, mudra ("seals") and bandha ("bonds"), and samadhi or enstasis. We moderns might expect the longest chapter would be on asana. And why not?
The idea of "monkeys building a bridge" comes from the Ramayana, one of India's two epic poems and one of its most loved stories. It tells of Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, and his wife, Sita, who is kidnapped by the demon king, Ravana, and carried across the ocean to his fortress city on the island of Lanka. The storyline then centers on Rama's efforts to find and rescue Sita. He is aided by his loyal brother, Lakshman, and an army of monkeys; foremost among them is Hanuman, a monkey with not only amazing powers and unbelievable strength but an intense devotion and love for Rama.
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