A Kind of Yogic Quest for Viveka - Mark Singleton on Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

T he long lines of white light, high ceilings and the sprung wooden floors of The National Ballet School of Canada are, for a single weekend in August, the hub of Yoga Festival Toronto. I had a keynote conversation with Mark Singleton, author of Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice at Yoga Festival Toronto, 2011. His book Yoga Body has accrued a devoted and loyal following, and it’s rare to meet a practitioner with little to say about the book's articulation of modern yoga’s complex postural history. So by the time we were all gathered together, bodies and silhouettes were stacked against the walls, a few festival-goers still circulating in and out, as the room came to a slow hum.  Behind the ballet barre the sightlines was vertiginous: a steep sky, static and pale, hovered quietly as a few small feedback squeals from microphones introduced our conversation.

Mark Singleton has a Ph.D. in Divinity from the University of Cambridge. He has written extensively on yoga, notably the books Yoga in the Modern World, Contemporary Perspectives (the first ever collection of scholarship on modern yoga) and Yoga Body, the Origins of Modern Posture Practice, (which Yoga Journal said “should be on the reading list of every serious student and teacher training program"). His current work focuses on the translation of early Sanskrit hatha yoga texts. A new collection, entitled Gurus of Modern Yoga, will appear with Oxford University Press next year. He is a certified yoga teacher in the Iyengar and Satyananda traditions. He teaches at St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

(Mark Singleton, author Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice)

As perhaps some of you in attendance might recall, Mark and I had an engaging encounter in which he declined comment on the presence of religiosity in his own personal practice. I admitted to Mark - after our interview-, that I wasn’t sure why I had pressed the issue. I suppose I wanted to know what it might be like to be a scholar that gets up in the blue light of morning to do asana/vipassana. Or maybe part of me thinks scholars, (not just their books), are worth studying. In any case, Mark and I have since been back and forth on my assumptions and his answers. Needless to say, like any yogi, I’m answering my own questions. But I thank Mark for the sharing his conversational circuitry. In our conversation, Mark weaves a narrative of postural practice that intersects with modernity’s emphasis on muscular physical culture, and addresses a few popular misconceptions about his book’s key points. Moreover, he shares fond memories of his early days conducting research with the Indic Institute at Cambridge University, and how writing the book was a manifestation of a “kind of yogic inquiry”, its impetus, a “search for viveka”.

(Mark Singleton at Yoga Festival Toronto 2011)

(Mark's cherished reading room at Cambridge University)

Yoga in Practice: In and Out of the Labyrinth with Historian David Gordon White, Phd

I think it was W.H Auden who said, "a real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us". This may be truer still for anthologies, short stories and collected fables. At every angle, the collection, in its gathered meaning, looks slightly different. And so you get in closer to read between the lines, only to realize the book demands answers of you...and you'd swear it was no longer a collection of words but a riddle of skin and bone sitting on the shelf.

That's the closest I can get to describing my still rather new relationship with Yoga in Practice, David Gordon White's brilliant and beautiful anthology of primary texts on yoga. Built out of the vitality of yoga's fractured, hybrid history, Yoga in Practice gathers a diverse collection of texts from India, greater Asia and the West into a jumbling whole. And in the process of reading its chapters, you're reminded just how fluid yoga's history is, shapeshifting with colossal dexterity over the yugas. With solid contributions from twenty-six yoga scholars, and sources that span four major religious traditions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism), Yoga in Practice has been sitting on my desk, the manuscript bull-dog clipped on certain chapters and and dog-eared on others, as I returned to it over and over again over the last few months.

David Gordon White is the J. F. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He received his Ph.D. in history of religions from the University of Chicago in 1988.  He is the author of Myths of the Dog-Man (1991); The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India ( 1996); Kiss of the Yogini: "Tantric Sex" in its South Asian Contexts (2003); and Sinister Yogis (2009), all published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the editor of Tantra in Practice (Princeton UP, 2000). Myths of the Dog-Man was listed as one of the "Books of the Year" in the 1991 Times Literary Supplement; Kiss of the Yogini was the cover review of the Times Literary Supplement of May 21, 2001.  He has been awarded three Fulbright Fellowships for research in South Asia, in 1984, 1993, and 1999.

I interviewed David White last summer in late August. I had just started to settle into one of the last remaining tables at a Pete's coffee in L.A when David darted in the back door half looking like he wasn't quite sure who he might find. His scanning gaze seemed to settle a bit when I stood up and motioned over at him. He had walked in free-handed except for some loose pages in his right hand, the table of contents from his manuscript for Yoga in Practice. As we got to talking it became clear that White was alarmingly alert, as quick to speak his mind as to critique and laugh, argue and persuade. I should have expected as much - imaginative and tactical, affable but provocative, it's clear how David White skillfully writes his way in and out of yoga's historical labyrinth.

What's more, however, is that I wasn't the only one asking the questions. He prepared a fountain of questions aimed at practitioners. In particular, he seemed curious about the verbiage of our contemporary practice, and specifically, why we rely on Patanjali's yoga sutras to anchor the practice. I did wonder why an historian would direct these questions at practitioners... Why was he asking me about this? It seems that despite his many contributions as an historian of yoga, David Gordon White still has a vivid curiosity about what it means to practice modern hatha yoga.

"I realized that there are a lot of other ways to read these yoga texts and combine them. And there's not a right and wrong. It's a chaos of traditions. There's just no way to make them all fit together nicely, because they never did." (David Gordon White)

(David Gordon White, ed "Yoga in Practice")

Lululemon and the Coles-Notes of Atlas Shrugged

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."

 (Ayn Rand)

B y now most you of you have already been apprised of the seemingly misinformed Lululemon campaign. While I'm not really one to proselytize, I do find this particular attempt to hijack an idea quite funny. And to be honest, it smacks more of a Coles-notes reading of Rand than of a conspiracy. Oh Lulu when will you learn?? A book ain't just words, it's a whole world...each letter weighing more, meaning more with context. By the time you add up this book's words and calculate all their possible meanings, a single page can deliver quite the load. This 'John Galt' bag does not travel light.

Your Mind was Made for More than Thinking: Getting Online with Erich Schiffmann

(Erich Schiffmann)

"Don't make up your own mind. Use your mind to get online. Listen for what to do. And when you listen for what to do, the online knowing registers with you as being your common sense." (Erich Schiffmann)

"D o you think it's straight?"

My husband seemed to be asking in earnest as he stood about two inches away from the five foot shelf that ran lengthwise across the back wall of the study. Since I started school, there's been an increased effort to contain the books in my study with a library shelving system. And so building shelves has been a project of some importance. But it was clear to me that this shelf needed some structural help...and maybe even some inspiration. But I think he knew it too because he stood up before I had a chance to answer and said,

"I think there's no point working on this anymore today. I just can't seem to get online with it".

Erich Schiffmann's phrase 'Get Online' had clearly made an impact around our house. My husband loved Schiffmann's analogy of getting online as a way of understanding the silent mind, and has since adopted the phrase into his own vernacular. And we're not the only ones that have found that Erich's ideas stick. An internationally renowned teacher, Erich Schiffmann is a dedicated practitioner whose subtle classes are a reflection of a skillful, meditative silence, and an immediate, spontaneous approach to movement and group practice.


Erich Schiffmann is an accomplished American Yoga Master widely known for his award-winning video, Yoga Mind & Body, featuring actress Ali MacGraw. He is the author of a best-selling book, Moving into Stillness. He has been teaching yoga for more than thirty five years. At age 18 Schiffmann sent a handwritten letter to Jiddu Krishnamurti and was accepted to study with him in England. He deepened his practice of yoga with Desikachar and BKS Iyengar in India, and with Dona Holleman and Vanda Scaravelli in Europe. Yoga Society president Leighanne Buchanan called Schiffmann one of the "innovators" in Yoga Journal's fall 2000 issue. He has produced numerous yoga instructional videos and conducts yoga workshops and teacher training throughout the United States and internationally.

I stopped in on Erich, his wife Leslie Bogart (a registered nurse/yoga instructor) and their dog Bella at their home in Santa Monica, where Erich has a lovely yoga sanctuary off the back garden of the main house. Given that Erich is a maverick filmmaker, I should have known that our interview would likely be captured to dvd. A few of those clips are featured on the left hand sidebar of this site. Erich and I had a chance to chat about what it means to get online, free-form yoga, his years of study with Krishnamurti, Iyengar and Vanda Scaravelli, and everything else including discipline, creativity, surfers and Christ.

"Yeah. Well, my older brother gave me a yoga book for my birthday. And I remember thinking, what a stupid birthday present." Erich Schiffmann [laughing]

(Erich Schiffmann teaching)

"After about 10 years of disciplined practice, I just found myself not enjoying my yoga anymore. And I didn't like not being in love with it the way I had been. And if only someone had just said things aren't going wrong, things are going really right! It's that the discipline is working! The discipline builds your sensitivity... And once the sensitivity has been built, the discipline begins to dissolve." (Erich Schiffmann)

A Force Like No Other: Improvising the Tradition with Ron Reid and Marla Meenakshi Joy

(Ron Reid (left), Marla Meenakshi Joy (right)

"R eally?" I hesitated..."I'm not sure I want to do ashtanga".

"Ok but honestly just check it out. You'll love it. It's like free jazz or something!"

Free jazz?? That was an unusual thing to say...I was nursing a green tea at the Golden Turtle on Ossington St. with Gary, a Toronto filmmaker and ashtanga yogi who knew a thing or two about jazz. And it was clear he had a distinctly fierce reverence for one of Toronto's most treasured yoga instructors Ron Reid and his "yoga jam" class. Sure, I'd heard of Ron Reid's virtual Jedi status - an uncanny ability to work with the "force" of hatha yoga - for years. But I was skeptical about taking the class.

And who could blame me?? 
How could I know that the deeply musical sensibility of Ron Reid and his wife and musical collaborator, Marla Meenakshi Joy could summon a kind of ashtanga that was skillful enough to accomodate improvisations? Or that a vigorous ashtanga practice in intelligent hands could morph into something that was always intuitively subtracting from the strenuous?

(Ron Reid)

Sure enough through slim sightlines at the back of Downward Dog's upper story room on Queen Street West, I watched as accomplished musician/composer, yogi, co-owner and co-director of Downward Dog, Ron Reid unfurled a masterful series of yoga postures that made a free and adventurous approach to experimentation appear deceptively simple. And more than that, he allowed people in the room to feel like it was easy. There was a distinct air of possibility and generosity that filled the room and circled unmistakeably around the otherwise elusive and introspective Ron Reid.

That's not suprising considering Ron Reid has been practicing Yoga for over 30 years and teaching since 1988. Ron has studied with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois and Sharath both in India and North America and was one of the first Canadian teachers to be authorized by Pattabhi Jois.  In addition to regular classes at Downward Dog, he conducts workshops and teacher trainings in Canada, Europe, and the U.K.

And if that weren't enough, Ron Reid makes up only half the equation in a story of a greater partnership. Marla Meenakshi Joy first traveled to India in 1988 to study meditation and the philosophy of the Vedas with Swami Shyam, as well as other learned scholars in the Himalayas.  She is a Certified Meditation and Yoga Philosophy teacher from the International Meditation Institute in Kullu, Himachal Pradesh, Himalayas. She was involved in Downward Dog’s first teacher training program in 1999, as both a teacher of Philosophy and Sanskrit, and as a student.  She has over 500 hours of Teacher Training with both Ron Reid, Chuck Miller and Maty Ezraty, among others, and is a Yoga Alliance Certified Teacher. She currently teaches Ashtanga Yoga, Swaha Yoga, Restorative Yoga, Yogadance, Meditation, Yoga philosophy, Sanskrit, and Chanting privately and in yoga studios in Canada, the U.S. The UK, Europe and Asia. 

(Marla Meenakshi Joy)

Marla Meenakshi Joy's classes have a parallel ability attract a devoted following of students drawn to her deft and subtle practice, her extensive teaching experience as well as her instinctive, exuberant personality.  But it was when Marla closed her class with a chant so conversational and intimate that I recognized a similar cadence of fluid creativity and exploration as I had experienced in Ron's Yoga Jam.

Ron and Marla are life partners whose deep bonds were forged from a musical synergy. That unique chemistry led to the creation of Swaha, Ron and Marla's kirtan band, who just returned from a high profile performance at Bhaktifest in Joshua Tree, California. And as you will see in our interview, the relationship between music and posture practice is so intimate for Ron and Marla that there may as well be no verbal distinction made. In fact, it's a curious thing that in this interview disciplinary distinctions seem to disappear. Ask Ron or Marla about music, postural practice, the cycles of life, astrology, or ayurveda and you'll get the same sense that all things are but limbs of life; all things are ashtanga ("eight limbs")... And if you learn to use your limbs well, you inevitably extend your reach back to your best self. In the following interview, Ron and Marla offer valuable insight into the history of the their own ashtanga practice, raise critical concerns about ashtanga's evolutionary blindspots, and throw the spotlight on what it means to work within a tradition whose very existence is based in innovation.

"You see people try to say "No this was the original practice intended by the yoga sutras". Well that's just absurd. I'm sorry! It never was. You know it was just a very specific practice and it's from a particular time. And I think once you know that, it's liberating. To me, it's liberating. It makes a lot of sense... And so the practice that Pattabhi Jois developed based on what he was taught by Krishnamacarya was his own practice specific to his constitution and context." (Ron Reid)

"Our joy is to be able to allow the soul to grow and feel its own levity and its own unlimited nature. And so our teaching style, hopefully, reflects that...We've seen it time and time again in those teachers that have made the choice to do traditional ashtanga, what that's created in their teaching style, their method and also their adjustments. The way in which some of those teachers touch people violates the very first yama of non-violence." (Marla Meenakshi Joy)

(Mysore class with Ron and Marla)

And the Right Answer IS....Yoga and The Dreaded Multiple Choice Question: Mark Singleton at Yoga Festival Toronto

S o we've all received questionnaires in our lives and those of us that like our lateral thinking don't usually appreciate their bent. They're pushy, presumptuous, know-it-alls, so sometimes I don't even check off boxes. I have refused, squirmed out-of, and refused again to answer any question that limited my options.

So when I put the multiple choice question, “Is your postural yoga practice, - in your personal experience -  a) spiritual, b) religious, or c) secular?" to Mark Singleton, the author of the pivotal and influential book on modern yoga, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice at Yoga Festival Toronto, I expected no easy answer. I mean it's the kind of question anyone dreads unless they never quite got enough of multiple choice exams, or are by nature incredibly dull. So I was glad when Mark hesitated. I mean hesitation has the potential to be truly exciting. As blogger for Think Body Electric Carol Horton noted in her wonderful commemorative post on Yoga Festival Toronto, it was a great moment, and it tapped into a collective fear of the three dreaded words (religion, spirituality and secularism) as the giggles subsided and a nervous hush spread through the room...

As I remember it, in that moment things got very still. It was stunning - in the most literal sense of that word. I saw Mark's right pupil open, slow-motion, wider than widescreen. The audience could have palpated that moment like a seized muscle as I listened, leaning in even closer to grasp the precise hesitation in his tone, and savour the rationale for not being able to categorize yoga practice precisely into any one of the suggested categories.

Mark's explanation was subtle and nuanced with a careful knowledge of yoga's historical relationship with those words. And as such, his did in fact answer the question with a number of salient points which I'll get to talking about when I write up the transcript of that interview next month.

But Carol Horton did raise an interesting issue with regard to a sense that practitioners do not relate to these words in general. What does it say about us that we are aware of our inability to  communicate the nature of our yoga experience in these common categories? I'm not suggesting this difficulty is news. Dance scholarship, for instance, is rife with discussions about the challenges in communicating the experience of embodied practice with reference to these ubiquitous terms. But that is what makes any environment interesting.

And it's also why we've created new words/theories for gaps in all kinds of disciplines: somaesthetic, "the peak experience", "flow theory"...In Bharatanatyam dance terms, the ineffable experience associated with bhakti yoga (the way of devotion) has sometimes been called "svarga", a kind of blink-of-an-eye "heaven", formless and without qualities, from which we must unfortunately return.

(Mikko Kuorinki, Wall Piece of 200 letters installation)

(Simeon the monk on a pillar in Syria for 37 years)

And in not finding categories that apply, some of us turn to art...submitting even before we start that language has its limitations.

But is the inability to answer this question an indication of an ineffable experience, or a contemporary struggle with the complex, baroque weight of those words "religious", "spiritual" and "secular"? Are some of us saying that yoga practice is equivalent to the wordless experience mystics have described? Or is it this a contemporary category that has yet to find a name? And even if hatha yoga practice did not evolve via these succinct categories should we still not ask how these words are impacting practice now? What's going on with our practice today that we read about sectarian struggles in yoga classes and yet a good number of us don't feel these categories even fit?

Okay... so if you're a real mystic and you've been standing on a pillar desert-fathers-style for 40 years, then maybe you can opt out of this discussion. Because you clearly don't care about the outside world and the perception of the meaning of your practice in the world of the entangled. Fair enough, maybe your very contribution is the statement of your standing there for goddamn-ever...

(anti-Christian anti-muslim riots, India 2008)

But it is necessary for practitioners and writers to glance at those words again and again in order to understand what our current categories are, and to address them in whatever way we can so that the practice is better understood and documented. It may be a car crash, but if you want to say you were there, you gotta take a look.

And we should consider ourselves lucky that this, and most yoga discussions, are not multiple choice exams. Unlike a mutiple choice question, you can take as much time and space as you'd like in order to answer the question. You could even answer with a koan or a performance piece. And so in this case, the oversimplified question is a deliberate strategy, a reduction of possibilities by way of question, designed to create a storm in your citta "consciousness/perception" (but as ancient Indians might map it, in the physical location of your heart).

So you tell me spiritual, religious, secular....what is this yoga thing for you?

There are no categories in life that are simple. And certainly I don't think everything that exists needs a name. But when the existing categories appear so insufficient as to evade answers altogether, then it's worth asking what needs to change. And as yogis, making change, alchemical or otherwise, is our greatest trade secret.

~
I will be posting a full transcript of that interview at Shivers Up the Spine hopefully in a month's time. I just started my PhD this week, so needless to say, my time's been eaten with the usual back-to-school routines of buying loose leaf and making sure my new school bag is up to the task.

Shivers Up the Spine Interviews Mark Singleton: Keynote at Yoga Festival Toronto

I want to warmly invite all Shivers Up the Spine readers to drop in on the keynote interview with scholar Dr. Mark Singleton which will take place in Toronto on Saturday August 20th from 4:30pm - 5:30pm. This would be the very first public interview that Shivers up the Spine has ever done; and the fact that this interview is being hosted by what's possibly the coolest independent yoga festival around makes it that much more special. Oh and did I mention we'd be improvising around Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, Mark Singleton's book about the history of hatha yoga?? Considered a radical re-examination of hatha yoga's postural roots, this book has been one of the most influential publications to study the hatha yoga narrative by the refracted light of our modern practice. It's nothing short of a global positioning device. So if you don't know it, and you consider yourself a yoga expeditionary, I suggest coming down. It's easy enough, and it's free to sit and listen... Ok so here are the details:

Beautiful Bodies, Broken Bodies: Hatha Yoga's Tricky Lineage and Physical History: 

Shivers Up the Spine Interviews Dr. Mark Singleton

 at the National Ballet School, 400 Jarvis Street

Saturday August 20, 2012

4:30-5:30pm

(Free to the public)

Beautiful Bodies, Broken Bodies: Yoga's Tricky Lineage and Physical History

Mark Singleton's book, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010) has been cited as a reference time and again by scholars, researchers or practitioners looking to understand their relationship to asana and its tricky lineage. This conversation will give people a chance to explore ideas of yoga's slippery narratives through the shapes that we have come to know in asana practice. Broad themes include: "The Yoga Physique: Bodies Perfected by Posture", "Superman: Yoga and Nation Building" and "Yoga and Sexuality". What aesthetic values are embedded in our physical practice? And how does our understanding of yoga's history impact its continued transmission on North American soil? Attendees are welcome to join in on the chat which will be transcribed and published online here at Shivers Up the Spine!