Medicine, Mastery and Mystery
An Interview with Paul Harvey by Joseph Le Page

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JL: One point of focus in your presentation from this morning is that Yoga practice must be appropriate for the needs of the individual depending on their age, intention, their starting point and other factors. Could you address the issue of how to adapt yoga to the individual.

PH: I can approach that from two directions, one is the chronological starting point and one is the psychological starting point. I will take firstly the chronological starting point which is the age at which people begin Yoga studies. There are three stages of life, three kramas . The first is the stage of growth, of expansion. This is the stage to develop the body, to be exposed to asana, to practice asana and obviously with very young people the interest is going to be more on using a range of sequences, using challenging sequences, jumping sequences. This is the context within which, perhaps, Mr. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois would have studied. This stage will take you up to the age of about 24, at which time you then move into family life.

When you are in family life, who has time to practice asana three hours a day? There is a priority change. There is a text about this called Yoga Rahasya which says that when you are a family person you have to look after you family, your work, your relatives, the priest, the beggar, and what time is there to look after yourself? During this time one practices yoga for protection ( Rukshana ) in which you do not lose your energy, and the need now is more psychological than physiological. It is the time to develop a practice of pranayama. There is a developmental shift, you’ve got the asana under your belt, so to speak, now the priority is to maintain your energy. The physical health is supported by your early training, now it is time for maintaining the psychological vitality and so pranayama becomes the primary practice.

The third aspect to this model is when you come towards the end of your life. The priorities have changed and we are now in the evening of life. In Jungian terms one would call it a mid-life transition. It is no longer the outside, it is the inside that is of interest. This is the time for exploring the movement inwards. The children are grown, you don’t have the same ambitions in your work, the question is how to support that. Where as in the first stage the priority is physiological, in the second stage the priority is psychological, in this third stage the priority is spiritual. So in the third stage, asana and pranayama are still there, but the focus would be much more around the idea of dhyanam (meditation); inquiring into the question of death, coming to terms with death before dying. So the metaphor I use is the idea of the young bud on the tree, in the early years it is rich with sap, with potential, and then in the middle years it is in full bloom and in the last years the bloom will wither and fall off the tree. This third stage is a time to come to terms with death.

This is the chronological model. In the West, if we apply this model, we already have a problem since most people come to yoga in the middle years. People are coming from a different viewpoint. They are not coming to yoga for growth, they are looking to yoga to repair the breakdown. Like going to the car mechanic, the body is getting a bit cranky and so we need to have it repaired. So from the starting point we have a disturbance such as stress or back pain. So we come to yoga in these middle years predominately with psychosomatic, psychological difficulties, our need is to support our busy life styles. But the question now arises, what forms do we use? The body has not been built up and it is breaking down due to poor habits, poor diet, not growing up healthfully. So there are two problems for Yoga students in the West: one is the age at which we are coming to yoga and the other is the reason we are coming to yoga. That is, many are coming to repair the breakdown without having established a foundation of health.

So, people are coming to Yoga to for repair but using practices which are perhaps more suited to someone who is more fit, more healthy, with much more time and energy. This is a question that needs to be addressed, what to do when people come with this situation? There is this issue of where to begin with people, where to begin in a group situation. This is where another model may be helpful and this model informs us that yoga needs to be taught according to the starting point of the individual student. This model has three aspects. If there were no obstacles, limitations, restrictions, it doesn’t matter if the person is 14 or 24 or 34 then the practice can be taught in Shikshana way. If this were the case then you could go ahead and teach the asanas in their most intense forms with all the nuances of bhandas, gazing and so forth, but this requires that the person has enough energy in their bank balance. One cannot think that I can boost my bank balance with this technique and that is why we must be very careful.

The second stage of this model is a yoga practice that should protect us. We have health, but we are careful to avoid making our yoga a stress, ending up with yoga stress. This is Rukshana, the yoga practice that protects us. Here we aim more at maintaining health, maintaining strength, but not going to the extreme of the postures in such an intense form, we presume that the person has certain limitations, limited time and adapt the practice to meet this need. The third aspect to this model is where one’s health account is well overdrawn, your account is overdrawn and you are completely in the red. As we all know if you are overdrawn, the first priority is to get rid of your overdraft. It is important that when we are looking at students we find out which of the three is important to them. If somebody comes, and they have energy, money in the bank, then they can spend it, invest it, they can develop it. If someone comes and they are not overdrawn but they do not have extra money, then we want to make sure that they maintain what they have and do not become overdrawn. If someone comes and they are completely overdrawn energetically or in terms of health, they are not thinking of anything but of removing the overdraft. A skillful teacher could apply the same practice for each of these three possibilities.

JL: In many schools of Yoga today, it seems that just the opposite is true, that the students must fit themselves into the system . Where does the system or method of teaching come into this?

Any transformative process needs a map, but the map is not the journey. The teacher needs a system of possibilities, a map, but the needs of the student need to be considered in first place. In allopathic medicine, for example, it has become all about the map and not the traveler. So quite often when you go to an allopathic you are perceived as a problem, not a person. But if two or three people come to me with a problem, they are not just a problem they are people with a problem so each person needs a map. I know that if I work with two people with the same problem, perhaps sciatica in the same place, I would perhaps prescribe two completely different practices for them because their intrinsic natures are very different. They could be a happy person with sciatica, or a depressed person, or a person who has encountered a lot of failure, or a person who has high or very low self esteem. So, yes a map is necessary, but if the teacher is teaching skillfully it will be as Krishnamachrya says that you should teach what is inside you, but not at it applies to you, but as it applies to the other. So I respect that we need maps, we need models but we must not become bound by them.

Yoga must adapt itself to the person and the person must also adapt himself to Yoga in certain ways. The question is how do we balance these two. If the student is not willing to practice some Viyoga, to give something up, to make space for something new, to make changes, then the practice is never going to work for them. The student needs to be prepared to practice, but the teacher needs the insight, the overall view to see how the practice can be adapted.

People need to have a core practice, they need to be taught a core of asanas. The question is, how do we choose, respecting all the hundreds of asanas and yet prioritzing. I know from my own work that for the bulk of people, I would use about 30 asanas and adapt and modify these asanas for the different needs. If somebody has the health and the time they could draw on perhaps another 100 asanas and develop them but we need to be sure that those students are coming with a clear idea. I have seen students coming who want to learn to do difficult postures and their health is not strong enough. So what do you do? A student came who wanted to do very difficult postures but you can see he’s stressed: a busy job, a new baby, and he’s trying to get up at 5:00 in the morning to practice and then asking me to teach him bhandas! So I say, okay, I will teach you bhandas but first you must be able to inhale for 10 counts and exhale for 20 counts in nadhi shodhanam for ten breaths with no disturbance of the pulse. So as teachers we have to sometimes think of strategies to meet this part of the student, to give them a piece of what they want and a piece of what they need. We know that a long exhalation will relax him, and that having to do 10 breaths will require him to be still for a certain amount of time which will be good for him.

JL: Should yoga always on some level include a focus on the mystery, the spiritual?

PH: I can’t say that when I first came to yoga I had any focus on the Mystery, it was more based around my desire to meditate and discovering that I couldn’t sit, and so I began at a very practical starting point. I feel that when we talk about yoga being applied as Mastery, Medicine and Mystery, The Mystery aspect is just coming to know more of who I am. I see the Yoga Sutras as the primary text for exploring the mystery of who I am. There are four aspects to this exploration:

First is knowing the mind; knowing that it has habits which are helpful and unhelpful and that there’s a part of my mind that appears to be a mystery for me.

Next is appreciating that I can refine the mind, to work with it, to influence it.

If I refine the mind with a certain care, a certain guidance, then, I can direct the mind, get it to work for me rather than against me.

The fourth aspect of this model is going beyond the mind.

From the Yoga perspective, it doesn’t matter whether we say that God is beyond the mind or whether we say that there is a deep place within me, a quiet place. Yoga is very skillful, it doesn’t say that we have to take God as that which is beyond the mind. This is perhaps where there is a distinction between Yoga and Vedanta. Vedanta is concerned with the question of what is Brahman, while yoga is concerned with who am I, what is the mind? What is this mind that takes me to such wonderful places and yet gets me into such hell holes at the same time? Yoga is about how to know, and if you have a personal inclination about knowing God, that’s fine. What does develop from our Yoga practice is a sense of reverence, reverence for what’s around us, our relationships, for what we eat, for different societies. We become more tolerant of different cultures and different attitudes.

To conclude this view of Yoga adapted to the needs of the individual we can summarize it into three terms and this is a teaching from Krishnamacharya.

Shakti krama is the idea of practicing yoga in order to gain mastery over things, to gain power through postures, to gain power over the body, to learn difficult postures and breathing techniques and, it is a very valid possibility.

The second aspect is called adhyatmika, where people are more concerned with the mystery of life rather than the mastery of life. adhyatmika means to go into myself, inquiring who I am, why I am. I am looking into the mystery of myself. The teachings of the yoga sutras are very important here.

The third aspect is called chikitsa krama. We all get sick from time to time, and therefore there is the need for yoga as medicine. Here the yoga would be certainly linked with the ideas of ayurveda. In the classical Hatha yoga texts, they talked about the benefits of the postures in ayurvedic terms such as, this technique is good for vata, good for pitta, good for reducing kapha. So it is a way of seeing where there is an imbalance whether it is chronic or acute.

To summarize, a practical way of looking at the possibilities in yoga is this: Shakti Yoga is to gain power, develop power, but one must remember, that which I am using to gain power, the mind itself, is getting more powerful, and this can kick back on us, so then we need some reflection on the mystery of life rather than the mastery of life. I need to come closer to the source of what life really is and where the source of this story is. Finally, how can we live without some form of medicine.