Anyone Can Cook
“You must be imaginative, strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work, and you must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from. Your only limit is your soul. What I say is true —anyone can cook… but only the fearless can be great.”
—Chef Auguste Gusteau, Ratatouille
I have spent many hours practicing yoga in my living room while my kids watch movies on a battered laptop. Instead of listening to my seamless, oceanic breath, the rhythm of my vinyasa has followed the antics of animated characters and Disney musicals. Though it sounds kind of awful, I am grateful for these Sunday mornings, sick days and long stretches of summer when the children and I separately pursue what we love in a shared space; in these moments we remain as inextricable as mothers and their children will always be, yet we inhabit discrete worlds: they in Madagascar and I in Surya Namaskar.
These Pixar and DreamWorks practices have also reminded me of the genius of story, any kind of story, and they have given me the chance to make unusual connections (often in unusual positions). At a low point with my husband, The Incredibles helped me understand my own marital rut and even imagine a way out of it. When I felt trapped and depressed after my daughter was born, the movie UP! inspired me and my son to fly tiny paper houses with bunches of helium balloons. Just as autistic children have taught themselves relationship through Disney characters, these movies have turned the sometimes oppressive intimacy of life with children into another classroom of human experience. At the very least they have allowed me to practice through the rigors of motherhood and at best they have given the truth an appreciable shape, an outline as recognizable and complex as only stories can provide.
So it was, listening to Pixar’s Ratatouille on a Sunday morning in supta kurmasana that I started down a path of inquiry into one of the great bugaboos of modern yoga.
Ratatouille is the story of Remy, a French rat who loves food. Always on the lookout for gourmet scraps in the garbage, Remy lives in the thrall of flavor and its myriad combinations. Misunderstood by his fellow rats and fascinated by humans, Remy studies haute cuisine with Auguste Gusteau, the best chef in Paris. As he progresses in his culinary expertise, Remy becomes the incarnation of Gusteau’s famous motto: “Anyone Can Cook!” Like many modern yoga practitioners, Remy has never met his guru, but he watches re-runs of Gusteau’s cooking shows and reads his cookbook on the sly. Like many modern yoga students, Remy develops an intimate relationship with his teacher—-although the great chef is dead—and they have revelatory (if imaginary) conversations. In moments of crisis, he also questions why he has undertaken this activity so unlike that which he was raised to pursue (not unlike Western practitioners who find themselves worshipping eight armed-deities). Through a twist of fate — or karma — Remy ends up cooking in Gusteau’s restaurant in Paris and becomes, in the words of the eminent food critic Anton Ego, “the finest chef in France.”
This scenario is, of course, impossible; it’s a story created for the entertainment of children. But like many fairy tales, fables and religious parables it is also hugely instructive.
Cooking is an important yogic activity. Traditionally defined as discipline or austerities, tapas is one of the niyamas and part of Patanjali’s tripartite definition of kriya yoga (the yoga of action). Etymologically, Tapas comes from the Sanskrit root tap, which means to cook. While different texts will define tapas in different ways, the basic idea is that we refine ourselves through the heat of practice, no matter what school or style of yoga we undertake. Many teachers use the metaphor of melting gold to remove its impurities. In practice we “cook ourselves” to remove both our inner and outer dross.
Tapas requires effort and dedication, but many modern yoga masters would agree with Chef Gusteau’s declaration that “anyone can cook.” Pattabhi Jois liked to say that Ashtanga Yoga is for everyone: the old, the young, women, men, but not the lazy. Through the use of props, B.K.S. Iyengar helped amputees practice even challenging poses like Ardha Chandrasana. Krishnamacharya was known for his willingness to teach asana to people with a variety of debilitating illnesses, and Pattabhi Jois worked with quadriplegic students. All of these great yogis, however, were sticklers for discipline and constancy, for showing up every day and doing your very best. Tapas doesn’t work in thirty seconds in a microwave or by dropping in to your local studio once a week. It requires the slow and steady burn of years and years of practice. As all chefs know, brief exposure to high temperatures will sear the outside of meat, while the inside remains raw (this method is fashionable but also more likely to give you food poisoning); but traditional recipes like pot au feu simmer ingredients for hours to bring out their hidden flavor and juice. Similarly, talent and desire alone do not turn Remy into a great chef. Hours of practice and apprenticeship lead him to mastery. Like most of us, he undergoes crises and doubt, relying on his teacher and his practice to understand the alchemy of heat, substance and skill.
In Ratatouille, Chef Gusteau is famous for his creative genius and maverick flair. After his death, the other cooks in his restaurant dedicate themselves to “following the recipe” and replicating Gusteau’s trademark style. The movie’s villain capitalizes on Gusteau’s name by selling frozen dinners to supermarket chains, but the rest of the kitchen staff remains faithful to their former master. Colette, one of the sous-chefs, explains this ethos to the novice Linguini:
Colette: I know the Gusteau style cold. In every dish, Chef Gusteau always has something unexpected. I will show you. I memorize all his recipe.
Linguini: [writing in notebook] Always do something unexpected.
Colette: No. Follow the recipe.
Linguini: But you just said that…
Colette: [interrupts] No-no-no-no. It was “his” job to be unexpected. It is “our” job to…
Colette, Linguini: [together, as Linguini rewrites the advice] … follow the recipe.
This simple exchange highlights one of the great tensions in the teacher-student relationship. Who is the innovator? Who is the replicator? Should students reproduce what they have been taught or should they add their own insight? Who gets to do the unexpected? Who should follow the recipe? This debate is a fierce one in the modern yoga community and sparks both anxiety and ire in many quarters. What does it mean to “have a lineage” and to be part of a tradition? Who or what gives us the authority to pass it on? What kind of certificate or experience deems us worthy of representing revered teachers from different cultures, many of who are now dead? Has the West expanded and enriched the practice of yoga or has it interrupted the line of transmission, unleashing a generation of children who do not even know their parents’ names?
In the past, Indian students often had to beg for the privilege of studying with their gurus and many endured considerable trials (cold, hunger, poverty, physical pain) during their indenture. Often, they were initially refused and had to show great perseverance in their studies. Today, Western training programs churn out yoga teachers after 200-hour intensives and let them loose on the world. Although some of these courses have an application process, most require only a deposit online. Many practitioners study with multiple teachers from multiple schools of practice; some do not have a clear sense of the lineage that connects them to the yoga tradition. Other Western teachers have crafted their own styles after years of experimentation (Ana Forrest, David Life and Sharon Gannon, Maty Ezraty, John Friend…). The global proliferation of yoga studios—as opposed to military training camps—is undoubtedly positive for humankind, but what is really happening here? At the 2014 International Symposium for Contemplative Studies, David Germano asked what it means to take Buddhist practices out of their original context and insert them into the West through mindfulness programs in hospitals, schools, prisons and a plethora of other non-Buddhist environments. He did not challenge the positive effect these initiatives have in people’s lives, but he asked us to consider the complexity of transplanting ancient practices from a specific cultural surround into our modern world.
The international boom of yoga and mindfulness represents an unruly experiment which gives us both the chance to transform our lives and to misunderstand: what we are doing, where these practices come from, what is at stake. Unlike the Eastern guru-disciple relationship, many Western yoga students bypass the years of apprenticeship traditionally considered requisite for any spiritual advancement, let alone teaching. The environment in which we practice and that in which these practices were born are so stunningly different that it is hard to appreciate. How did we get from the caves of sadhus to strip mall yoga studios? Are we selling TV dinners with famous names on the package or are we respectfully transmitting something vital, real and (dare I say) authentic?
Authenticity is a slippery idea, often used to market products, politics and identity. Sometimes we can intuitively recognize the difference between something “fake” and something “authentic,” but claiming authenticity is a dangerous enterprise. Dictionaries offer: “of undisputed origin,” “real or genuine,” ”made or done the same way as an original,” “not false or imitation” and “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” Within the context of yoga (Patanjali’s eight limbs, mantra, mudra, dualism, non-dualism, Tantra, yantra), who is a genuine teacher/practitioner and who is not? Who gets to be the judge? Can anyone cook?
Traditionally, the Hindu notion of parampara has safeguarded the transmission from guru to disciple, ensuring that the practice is “made or done the same way as an original.” Parampara is defined as “proceeding from one to another” and ensures that knowledge is “not false or imitation.” If the student is faithful to his teacher, then he will hand on the teachings as he received them, like a bucket of water passed from hand to hand, starting at a single well and extending into infinity (I write this in the masculine, because historically paramapara didn’t contemplate female disciples). One-on-one guru-shishya relationships in India have honored this system for centuries, but the global yoga craze has spawned far-reaching tangents from the original line. To borrow from Iyengar’s language, the “tree of yoga” now has numerous branches growing in all directions. Do these offshoots bear any relationship to their roots? Or has it all become a meaningless tangle?
The roots of the yoga tradition are deep, vast and complex. To plumb them is the work of lifetimes, both paramount in our study and impossible to achieve. Some trace the history of asana through the millennia, while others situate its birth in the Middle Ages; recent work claims that “modern postural practice” is an invention of the 20th century. I urge anyone with curiosity to read the scholarship of Georg Feuerstein, Mircea Eliade, Elizabeth de Michelis, and Mark Singleton. I, however, am not an academic nor an expert. My only goal is to raise questions that might help us become more honest practitioners. So, in that spirit, I will bypass the Yoga Sutra, Bhagavad Gita, Hatha Yoga Pradipika and Gheranda Samhita (important texts in the yoga tradition that discuss asana). I will leap over thousands of years of history and land in 1888 in a tiny town called Muchukundapuram, Karnakata State. For it was in this place and time that Tirulamai Krishnamacharya was born. Just as Dostoyevsky claimed that he and all other Russian authors “came out of Gogol’s overcoat,” most modern yoga practitioners have emerged from the robes of Krishnamacharya. Both a traditionalist and an innovator, he is part and parcel of our lives as practitioners — though many of us don’t even know his name.
Born to a respected Vaishnava Brahmin family, Krishnamacharya studied with spiritual masters from an early age, had mystical visions and mastered all six schools of Hindu philosophy, achieving something equivalent to several PhDs. After studying the Yoga Sutra and asana for years in a Tibetan cave with Ramamohan Brahmachari, Krishnamacharya returned to Mysore to teach asana (at his teacher’s request) and become a householder. For five years, Krishnamacharya promoted yoga throughout the Mysore area with his now-famous demonstrations of advanced asana and assorted siddhis (supranormal powers like stopping one’s pulse for minutes at a time). Although he could have taken a comfortable academic position, Krishnamacharya respected his guru’s wishes and continued to teach hatha yoga, a distinctly undistinguished activity at the time. This period in Krishnamacharya’s teaching was marked by poverty and the hardship of an itinerant life. At one moment, according to his son Desikachar, Krishnamacharya’s only piece of clothing was a loincloth made from his wife’s sari.
In 1931, Krishnaraja Wodeyar, the Maharaja of Mysore, changed everything, both for Krishnamacharya and the rest of the world. Wealthy, progressive and eager to improve his health, the Maharaja asked Krishnamacharya to teach him asana. He also invited the learned yogi to lecture at the Mysore Sanskrit College, and two years later he gave Krishnamacharya a wing of the nearby Jaganmohan Palace as a yogashala (or yoga school). This is perhaps the best-documented moment in Krishnamacharya’s life. As many scholars have noted, despite Krishnamacharya’s fame, longevity and contact with students, myth and conjecture surround his biography. His son, T.K.V. Desikachar has written about the difficulty of recounting his own father’s life and separating that which is “of undisputed origin” from fantasy. In response to entreaties from Desikachar, Krishnamacharya agreed to tell his story, but after four days of dictation, the octogenarian refused to go on. When he died at 101, mystery still shrouded much of his past.
What we know for sure is that during the 1930’s and 40’s Pattabhi Jois and B.K.S. Iyengar both studied with Krishnamacharya in Mysore. Close on their heels was the Latvian Zhenia Labunskaia, known to the world as Indra Devi. These three students, along with Desikachar, went on to found the schools of practice that have inspired what we understand as “modern yoga.” Although they studied with the same teacher during roughly the same period, they all went on to teach unique approaches to asana. Pattabhi Jois spent many years studying with Krishnamacharya and said that the dynamic vinyasa form now known as Ashtanga Yoga was what he learned from his teacher. B.K.S. Iyengar enjoyed a much shorter stay in Mysore — only a year — and developed a radically different style, incorporating the props and permanence in asana that distinguish his practice. Despite this brief apprenticeship, Iyengar said of Krishnamacharya, “I am grateful to my guru, who sowed the seed of interest in me in his own rough and tough way.” Indra Devi, who was friends with the Maharaja of Mysore, entreated Krishnamacharya for the privilege of studying with him (and the Maharaja had to exert his own influence as well), but finally the master relented. Devi became one of Krishnamacharya’s senior students and a major exponent of yoga in the West, teaching Hollywood celebrities and authoring the bestseller, Forever Young, Forever Healthy. In Argentina, were I live, many people discover yoga through the centers that bear her name. For a Brahmin to accept a European woman as his student was a shocking departure from tradition. The fact that modern-day women predominate in yoga classes all over the world is a direct consequence of Krishnamacharya’s boldness. I do not think that it was any less stunning for Indians to find a white, European woman doing asana at the Mysore Palace than the gaping surprise of Anton Ego when he discovers that a rodent has cooked his dinner.
Tiny in stature, Krishnamacharya was an intellectual giant and a fearsome master, so fearsome that people scurried out of his way on the street and few students remained at his yogashala for long. Iyengar once said that Krishnamacharya would have been a saint were it not for his terrible temper. Pattabhi Jois spoke with devotion about his teacher and also of the terror he inspired. Desikachar writes that his own mother was frightened of her husband until the day she died. But in addition to his ferocity, Krishnamacharya was a great bhakta and devoted to his Vaishnava lineage; he traced his family’s heritage to a ninth century sage called Nathamuni whom he met in a vision and from whom he “received” a lost text called the Yoga Rahasya; he also acknowledged Patanjali and Ramamohan Brahmachari as his gurus. Reverential to both his teachers and lineage, Krishnamacharya was equally adamant about safeguarding his own independence; and he often refused money from patrons in order to preserve his freedom. Desikachar quotes him as saying, “I will serve my guru. In this world I will be a slave to nobody, work under nobody.” Despite this stalwart attitude, he was willing to adapt his methods to the needs and particularities of his students. Desikachar recounts how his father taught different religious groups yogic precepts in the language of their individual faiths. He also demonstrated his siddhis in public to inspire people to practice yoga. To this day, millions have followed his inspiration, but what inspired Krishnamacharya?
The origins of his teachings are mysterious and contested. In 2010, Mark Singleton, a British academic and yoga practitioner, published a controversial book called Yoga Body; in this work, Singleton documents the cross-cultural pollination of Krishnamacharya’s methods with both European physical culture and the Indian nationalist agenda of the 1930’s. Singleton’s book challenges many practitioners’ beliefs about the “undisputed origin” of asana and its pure or at least purely Indian history. Other senior practitioners from different lineages have made the same observations, though in less detail, and it is well known that the Maharaja of Mysore concurrently employed European physical culturists, Indian wrestlers and Krishnamacharya. These men saw each other on a daily basis and shared similar interests. They were peers and colleagues, working with a small cadre of Brahmin boys. Norman Sjoman’s book, The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, offers a careful study of this time. These academic and historical narratives stand in strict opposition to another tale, that of parampara and a series of sacred texts “recovered” and “received” by Krishnamacharya.
The Yoga Korunta is a mystery at the heart of Krishnamacharya’s legacy. Krishnamacharya said that he studied this ancient text with Ramamohan Brahmachari in Tibet, but the Yoga Korunta (authored by a sage called Vamana Rishi) was supposedly lost or destroyed, and no one alive has seen it. Pattabhi Jois affirmed that the series of postures now recognized as Ashtanga Vinyasa proceeded from this text. According to legend, it was written on banana leaves and after hundreds of years it disintegrated or was eaten by ants (which sounds like a yogic “the dog ate my homework,” but is also entirely possible). Paramaguru R. Sharath Jois, who has inherited the parampara of Ashtanga from his grandfather, also credits the Yoga Korunta as the origin of the series of postures. To make matters more complicated, all of these gurus (Krishnamacharya, Iyengar, Jois, Desikachar) look to Patanjali as a primary teacher. Modern scholarship disagrees on Patanjali’s dates (ranging from 2000 BCE to 600 CE) and no one knows who he was: half-divine or fully human, a single author or a composite of sages united under one name. Something like the Shakespeare of yoga, Patanjali’s identity is a palimpsest of myth and guesswork, just as the commentaries on the Yoga Sutra have overwritten the original text.
Yoga always presents us with claims that we cannot substantiate and experiences that sound impossible or too mystical (Autobiography of a Yogi comes to mind) to “prove.” Will the top of our heads really blossom with a thousand-petaled lotus when the Kundalini awakens? Did Nathamuni appear to Krishnamacharya and dictate the Yoga Rahasya or did he “receive it” through his life-long study of sacred texts? Did Patanjali fall from the heavens into the hands of a barren priestess? Did the Yoga Korunta ever exist? We can see these enigmas as a stumbling block, but they are also a great opportunity. They are the tradition’s own way of reminding us that experience will always trump information. To know anything, we must be willing to shed our received ideas and dive head first into reality as it appears before us, just as the movie Ratatouille reminds us. A rat cannot be a gourmet chef, and yet a rat cooks the best meal Anton Ego has ever eaten. A European woman became one of the select students of a feared Brahmin master in the 1930’s and then a global yoga ambassador. European scientists documented Krishnamacharya’s ability to stop his pulse, but they could not explain how he did it. Ratatouille is just a story; the Bhagavad Gita is a story.
But whether you side with Singleton’s scholarship or the Yoga Korunta, it’s clear that Krishnamacharya was both dedicated to tradition and a great innovator, a man who knew the recipe but was willing to change it at any moment. As Desikachar says, “While my father had enormous respect for teachers of the past, he was not simply a receptacle. He explored, experimented, reflected and willingly altered or discarded anything he felt was distorting, misleading, harmful or simply wrong.” This apparent contradiction is at the heart of his teachings and also informs the methods of his major disciples. All of Pattabhi Jois’s senior students report that he modified the “fixed” series of postures of Ashtanga Vinyasa to suit the needs of individual students. Like Krishnamacharya, he considered yoga an essentially therapeutic process and worked to “heal” his students, adjusting the prescription as needed. During Jois’s lifetime, his yogashala was called the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute. Though Jois was emphatic that he was following Krishnamacharya’s recipe, the “research” element in Mysore was ever present and things were often in flux. When Lino Miele began documenting the vinyasa sequences for his book, Jois changed the order repeatedly, even at the galley stage and then after publication. Jois exhorted his students to “teach it like I taught you,” though he established no formal authorization process. Jois gave verbal permission when he considered that students were ready to begin teaching, usually after prolonged periods of study in Mysore. Today, Jois’s grandson has established a more structured authorization system that requires multiple, extended visits to Mysore and official certificates. His title, Paramaguru, indicates that he holds the lineage of his family’s tradition. The waters divide around these visits to Mysore, and authorization has become both a contested and valuable currency in the insular world of Ashtanga.
Jois’ fellow student B.K.S. Iyengar was a one-man yoga revolution — both in the tradition of his teacher and departing from his teacher’s tradition. Weakened by childhood illness (tuberculosis, malaria and typhoid), Iyengar exerted a will upon his body that rivaled his own guru’s discipline. The story goes that Krishnamacharya all but ignored the young Iyengar (who was also his brother-in-law) until the master’s star student went missing the day before an important demonstration. He called upon Iyengar to step in, and the teenager practiced so diligently that even Krishnamacharya was impressed (this also apparently involved tearing Iyengar’s hamstrings in hanumanasana). After a year of instruction, Krishnamacharya sent Iyengar to Pune to teach. Without his guru to assist him, Iyengar piled pieces of rubble on his legs in baddha konasana and bent over steamrollers to perform urdhva dhanurasana. So began his great period of innovation. A master of precision and alignment, Iyengar perfected the use of props over time, slowly acquiring students and building his yogashala. He helped the violinist Yehudi Menuhin to overcome tendinitis in his hand, and this relationship brought Iyengar to the West in the early 70’s. During this time, he published Light on Yoga, an event as portentous for modern yoga as Krishnamacharya’s inclusion of women. Seekers from all over the world began studying yoga just as Remy studies cooking: alone, with a book. Iyengar went on to establish the most rigorous (and, in many ways, rigid) system of certification in the yoga world. Not only was Iyengar capable of igniting and transforming global yoga practice, but he systematized the revolution. I recently congratulated a friend on becoming one of the few senior certified teachers in Latin America. She smiled at me wanly and said, “Oh, they’ll always invent another level.”
And so it is that we end up back in the kitchen with Colette and Linguini, with dedicated disciples following the recipes of great innovators. As students of Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois, we are exhorted to “teach what [they] taught” and with as few alterations as possible. The recipes have been written down in books and studied and revered. We question those who change the formulas and add their own condiments. We trust orthodoxy, even when heterodoxy made it thus. Krishnamacharya, Pattabhi Jois, B.K.S. Iyengar, Indra Devi and Desikachar all showed great devotion to their individual teachers and yet the manifestation of their paramapara is radically different. As Westerners, we are taught to value innovation. As students of yoga, we are taught to honor tradition. How can we negotiate these seemingly dialectic ideas?
Perhaps the secret resides in what Gary Krafstow (one of the few living Western teachers who knew Krishnamacharya) likes to say: “It’s not what we know, but how is so.” Perhaps the key is parampara itself, not the method or technique we learn.
Judith Hanson Lasater became a Senior Iyengar Instructor many years ago. But she did not move through the 13-level certification process. Iyengar bestowed it upon her. After years of personal contact, of close and ongoing relationship, he recognized her intelligence, dedication and excellence as a teacher. In other words, she earned it. The Western pioneers of Ashtanga lived in Pattabhi Jois’s house and ate with his family. They left Mysore with a deep, human connection to their teacher, not a piece of paper. Richard Freeman has said that, “The guru is practically the key to the whole system… with a teacher, you develop a relationship, and something right at the heart of that relationship carries the essence of the practice, and so the various techniques that you might learn, even the various philosophies you might learn, are placed in an immediate context by the guru. The context is simply one of complete, open relationship, complete presence.” Desikachar writes that Krishnamacharya always accompanied his students to the gate of his house after a lesson because he considered this moment to be the last vinyasa in the practice.
Westerners like to doubt the “guru principle.” We are afraid of surrendering our intellectual independence and personal authority. We are more comfortable with method than with a master; but if we resist this “complete, open relationship” we miss out on true discovery. Parampara gives us the chance to stay with one teacher for long enough to see ourselves reflected back in great detail. If we are always on the move from one teacher to the next, we will never see ourselves. It’s like trying to figure out if you have spinach on your teeth by catching your reflection in a storefront window as you hurry past. And if this spiritual dilettantism is the basis for our teaching, we are indeed selling TV dinners.
Towards the end of Ratatouille, Remy is locked in a cage in the trunk of the unscrupulous fast-food selling chef. At this low-point, Remy has a conversation with Gusteau.
Gusteau: [Remy is locked in a cage] So, we have given up.
Remy: Why do you say that?
Gusteau: We are in a cage, inside a car trunk, awaiting a future in frozen food products.
Remy: No, I’m the one in a cage. I’ve given up. You… are free.
Gusteau: I am only as free as you imagine me to be. As you are.
Remy: Oh, please. I’m sick of pretending. I pretend to be a rat for my father, I pretend to be a “human” for Linguini. I pretend you “exist” so I have someone to talk to! You only tell me stuff I already know! I know who I am! Why do I need you to tell me? Why do I need to pretend?
Gusteau: [chuckles] But you don’t Remy. You never did.
To be in relationship with an accomplished and honest teacher tells us who we are. To be in relationship with a bad or dishonest teacher also tells who we are. To see ourselves clearly, this is the great boon of yoga. It’s not necessarily why we started practicing, but it’s what we discover if we stick with it. As Judith Lasater says, “We understand that the job of the yoga teacher is to mirror back the inherent goodness and wisdom in the student. We become the teaching.” Surely ‘becoming the teaching’ is more important than accumulating certificates or lengthening our hamstrings.
Lino Miele has described the fixed series of poses in Ashtanga Vinyasa as “a cage.” Miele argues that you have to spend a long time inside the cage in order to free yourself from its restrictions. Richard Freeman takes up this same theme, adding that you have to pour yourself into form in order to liberate yourself from form. If we are lucky, this attention to detail will help us realize that we have “nowhere to go,” as Lasater says; only then can we use the heat of tapas to melt the boundaries between our practice and the rest of our lives.
In 2014, I attended the Ashtanga Yoga Confluence and listened to some of the world’s most senior teachers describe their experiences with Pattabhi Jois. After thirty or more years of practice, they all are clearly “out of the cage” and yet their devotion to their guru is alive and enduring. They are all teaching what they were taught and what they have learned as teachers and practitioners. When someone asked the panel (Dena Kingsburg, Dominic Corigliano, Tim Miller, David Swenson, Richard Freeman and Manju Jois) about the issue of authorization, an uncomfortable silence settled in the room. Manju, Jois’s son and the living reality of parampara, spoke up. “Teach yoga,” he said, “Teach from your heart.” His sister, Saraswati Rangaswamy, decided to teach men and women yoga together in Mysore after a trip to the West. At the time, this was a significant departure from tradition; “I wanted to see what would happen,” she said, “for if my mind and heart were strong, where is the problem?” Chef Gusteau gives similar advice, “You must be imaginative, strong-hearted.” Lasater argues that for a lineage to be alive it has to breathe through the filter of each one of its representatives. Krishnamacharya writes, “Knowledge is not only memory. Every day there must be something new.”
There is no easy solution here, no simple formula to understand the past and to pass on its richness “as it is.” There will always be those who disregard tradition and those who live too dearly in its thrall. Those of us graced with a teacher and a lineage can do our best to “teach what we have been taught” and to honor our own insight, to follow the recipe and do the unexpected. Dena Kingsburg, a senior Ashtanga teacher, cautions that:
“I think it’s best not to be obsessed with anything. Particularly believing that you have it right… Perhaps the idea that it should be “this way,” this standard way, is emphasized to protect the purity and integrity of the practice so that it will not be diluted or lost in translation.”
The purity and integrity of the practice is something we can experience every day in our own lives. When we honor what we have been taught, we receive a gift. When we listen to our own insight, we stoke the fires of our own tapas. Innovation, it appears, is part and parcel of parampara. Krishnamacharya said, “Whatever place, whatever time, the ancestors have framed the practices to suit them all. Only the attitudes and circumstances of human beings change. Time and space do not change. The same sun shines as ever.” Parampara is a chain, a line, a passing of the torch lit by a force that remains powerful and vibrant.
Let’s not shy away from the tension between tradition and change. Let’s never ignore information because it conflicts with our idea of how things should be. And let us be knowledgeable, standing in representation of those who have gone before, reverent to the feet of our teachers and the paths they have walked.
Towards the end of Ratatouille, Remy says to his father, “I know I’m supposed to hate humans, but there’s something about them. They don’t just survive, they discover, they create…I mean, just look at what they do with food!” Richard Freeman has said that attention and dedication to form can turn us into artists — in our work and in our yoga practice. Perhaps this is how we can avoid selling TV dinners and mechanically repeating what we have learned “cold” — which is, of course, the opposite of tapas. And when we have forgotten what we believe, let’s remember the power of stories to remind us, even unlikely stories that weren’t written on banana leaves thousands of years ago. Let’s remember that in the practice of yoga, anyone can cook.
