B. K. S. Iyengar

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all Light on Yoga (1966), Light on Pranayama (1981) and The Tree of Yoga (1988).

The tree of yoga

B. K. S. Iyengar pictures Patanjali's eight limbs as one tree. The restraints, yama, are its roots; the observances, niyama, its trunk; the postures, asana, its branches; breath control, pranayama, its leaves, which bring air to the whole; the drawing in of the senses, pratyahara, its bark, which protects it; concentration, dharana, its sap; meditation, dhyana, its flower; and absorption, samadhi, its fruit. The seed is the person. Practice of any part, rightly done, feeds the whole tree, and the fruit cannot be had without the roots. The limbs themselves are taught in the branch The eight limbs.

Precision

His method is exactness. Each posture is learned part by part: how the feet are placed and pressed down, how the legs are firmed and the kneecaps lifted, how the spine lengthens and the chest opens, how the two sides of the body are brought to equal length and equal work. The attention is spread evenly through the whole body, so that no part is dull and no part strains; he speaks of the intelligence reaching every part, and of the skin as a sense that tells the student where the body is. Aligning the body, in his teaching, aligns the breath and the mind with it.

Props

To bring the postures within reach of everyone he brought in props: wooden blocks, belts, blankets, bolsters, chairs, benches and ropes fixed to the wall. With them the stiff, the old, the weak and the injured can hold a posture rightly and long enough for it to work, and the strong can learn what they skip. The prop is a teacher too: it shows where the body sags, collapses or overworks.

Order and timing

Practice has an order. Standing postures come first, because they build the strength, steadiness and sense of alignment on which the rest depends; forward bends, twists, inversions and backbends follow as the body becomes ready. Holdings lengthen with practice, and a posture held long and attentively becomes, for him, a meditation in action. The headstand he calls the king of the postures, and the shoulderstand their mother.

These are the postures most often done badly, and the tradition's caution goes with them: inversions are learned only from a teacher, with props, and not by anyone with an injury of the neck, high blood pressure, glaucoma or a heart condition without a doctor's advice. Pain is a signal to stop, and no posture is forced.

Breath after posture

Light on Pranayama teaches that breathing is learned only after the postures are steady, because the breath needs a body that can sit still and a chest that can open. The student begins lying on the back over a folded blanket or bolster, the chest supported, at first only watching the breath and then deepening it; later the student sits with the spine erect, the chest lifted and the chin lowered toward the notch between the collarbones. The first practice is ujjayi, a long, even breath with a soft sound at the throat; then viloma, the breath taken in or let out in stages, with pauses; and only much later the practices that guide the breath with the fingers through one nostril or the other.

His cautions are the tradition's. The breath is never forced; holding it is left until long practice has prepared the body, and is not done by those with heart or blood-pressure troubles; the eyes and the brain stay soft and passive; and if the breath grows rough, the head hot or the mind agitated, the student stops and rests lying flat in the corpse posture.

From the skin to the soul

In his later books the practice is a journey inward through the five sheaths of the Upanishads: the body of food, which is the anatomical body; the body of energy, moved by the breath; the body of mind, of feeling and the senses; the body of discernment and wisdom; and the body of bliss, nearest the soul. Posture works from the outermost sheath inward and breath from the second, and when all are brought together the practitioner lives from the soul out to the skin, and from the skin in to the soul.

Effort and its ending

Reading Patanjali in the light of his practice, he teaches that a posture begins with effort and is complete only when the effort has become effortless: firmness in the body, delight in the mind and strain nowhere. That state is not reached by forcing but by long, attentive repetition, practice joined with detachment from its results. A posture done this way, with the whole attention, is already a meditation.