Yoga practice and our patriarchal conditioning

My last blog was exploring patriarchy and the effect on our conditioning and began to touch on how this might have influenced our approach to yoga, and whether this has been healthy, especially for us women. 

What I mean by that, is whether the style of yoga we practice, whether a trend or not, is harmonising any energetic imbalances, especial from a divine masculine/feminine perspective and helping to set up free from our conditioning and perceived limitations which literally limit us and keep us stuck in more of the same.

My favourite quote of all time as many of you know is by Henry Ford,

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” 

I have become increasingly curious whether repeating the same approach to practice over and over again helps or hinders and whether repeating someone else’s approach to practice – yin or yang - allows us our freedom. 

As I explore this further, I have found it helpful to remind myself of the origins of our modern day approach to yoga and I share a little of this now. Please note that I am not a historian and am relying on information shared with me by my teachers and by what I have read previously. 

It all started with Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (18 November 1888 – 28 February 1989), who was an Indian yoga teacher, Ayurvedic healer and scholar, often called the ‘Father of Modern Yoga’. He is seen as one of the most important gurus of modern yoga for his wide influence on the development of postural yoga. Like Yogendra and Kuvalayananda, he contributed to the revival of hatha yoga because of their emphasis on the physical. 

Krishnamacharya’s students include many of yoga’s most renowned and influential teachers, notably Indra Devi (1899-2002), K Pattabhi Jois (1915-2009), BKS Iyengar (1918-2014), and his own son, TKV Desikachar. As is the traditional way, Krishnamacharya taught each student depending on their individual needs, which is the reason that they each went on to teach quite differently and yet had a massive influence on the yoga that we know today, probably infusing the style of yoga that you yourself practice. 

For example:

Indra Devi – was a pioneering teacher of yoga as exercise, having been the first woman to study under Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace, alongside BKS Iyengar and K Pattabhi Jois. She went to India in her twenties (born Eugenie Peterson in Latvia) and became a film star. 

She was invited later to a wedding in Mysore where Krishnamacharya lived and worked, and she asked him if she could study with him but he refused, stating that he did not teach women or foreigners. Indra was disappointed but determined and she approached her friend, the Maharaja, Krishnamacharya’s employer, and he directed Krishnamacharya to instruct her. Krishnamacharya hesitantly took Indra as a student. Apparently, he was strict and difficult with her in the hope that she might quit.

Krishnamacharya ordered Indra to follow a strict vegetarian diet and a difficult daily schedule. To his surprise she showed dedication studying asana and pranayama for eight months alongside Iyengar and Jois.

Krishnamacharya gained increasing respect for her and his son, Desikachar, said later that Indra changed his father’s viewpoint, with Krishnamacharya later saying that “women are the future in yoga and for yoga in the West”.

While Indra started teaching in China, she moved to the US and set up a yoga studio in West Hollywood in 1947, where she taught celebrities including Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and Gloria Swanson. Here she earned herself the nickname, “first lady of yoga”. Her biographer, Michelle Goldberg, wrote that Devi “planted the seeds for the yoga boom of the 1990s”. 

Michelle also commented that for most of her life, Devi’s only goal was to bring yoga to the West, which certainly has been the case and she played a significant role in helping to make it a predominantly female pursuit, even if the yoga that has become popular is much more vigorous than the style Devi taught – and note that the style she taught, is not the style taught to her by Krishnamacharya, she developed her own style to teach to Westerners.  

K Pattabhi Jois

Krishnamacharya started teaching Jois, an Indian, when he was only 12 years old. At that time he needed a practice that promoted his growth and vitality through his teenage years. Apparently Krishnamacharya researched an ancient text he called the Yoga Korunta in 1924 and he shared this with Jois. He claimed to have learned the text from his own teacher named Rama Mohan Brahmachari on a supposed seven year stay in the Himalayas. The practices included asana (postures), vinyayas (connecting movements), pranayama (breathing exercises), bandhas (core muscular and energetic locks) and drishti (visual focal points). Jois systemised this approach and went on to share it as Ashtanga yoga.

This is the style of yoga that first drew me in. I was very much in my masculine energy, playing competitive sports and working my way up the career ladder, competing with the men for managerial positions, wearing suits to boot and seeking perfection in everything I did. It’s perhaps not surprising that I wasn’t happy, never quite living up to my idea of perfection, suffering from eating disorder, depression, PMS and a strong dislike for myself. 

I was out of balance and yoga was a gift which entered my life at just the right time. While Ashtanga yoga is not inherently competitive, it did allow me to apply my competitive nature to it, because it follows a set sequence and one cannot progress to the next level until all the postures in the first level have been mastered. I was competing with myself as much as I was competing with everyone else in the room. 

I had been taught by my patriarchal conditioning to achieve, to prove myself, to progress in some way into a future where I would be successful, perfect, and finally experience happiness. Obviously this is an illusion but I bought into it and invested in it because I knew no different, and yoga was now offering me another path to this end goal of success, perfection and happiness, just I’d do it on my mat now. Ha.

Not only that but the athletic nature of the practise, with its emphasis on strength and flexibility, came easily to my body, it was used to me working out and pushing it. I loved that I could practice many of the strengthening postures comfortably while others struggled, and that my flexibility could be enhanced by really pushing it – I could quickly see the ‘results’ and it didn’t take me long to establish a dedicated daily practice to further ‘progress’. In reality I was really caught up in my masculine energy and had the shoulders to prove it!

This is not to say that things weren’t changing, they were. Yoga by its very nature changes things. Only that this approach to practice allowed me to bypass a lot of my body issues, making me even more obsessed about the external, feeding my obsession with it, and encouraging more of the same in my mind, increased rigidity and emphasis on a linear ‘progress’ approach, and left me frequently disappointed when I still found that I didn’t really like myself very much, despite my trying to perfect my practice. 

A year into my yoga practice, I ventured to Byron Bay, the yoga capital of Australia at that time to immerse myself in yoga. Here I discovered what was called dynamic yoga, a combination of Ashtanga and Iyengar, which I had not practiced previously.

Iyengar yoga arose from BKS Iyengar, another Indian student of Krishnamacharya, who also happened to be his brother-in-law. Iyengar had been very sick as an infant and throughout his childhood he struggled with malaria, TB, typhoid, fever and general malnutrition. Krishnamacharya asked Iyengar to join him in Mysore and improve his health through the practice of yoga postures. During a two year period, while Krishnamacharya only taught Iyengar for about 10-15 days, these teachings had a positive influence on Iyengar and when he was 18 Krishnamacharya sent Iyengar to Pune to spread the teachings of yoga. 

Iyengar’s approach to yoga postures is focused on strict alignment principles, this because he was coming at it from a health perspective and was very specific about how a student should place their body to improve their health. This of course, a different approach to Jois, who had arrived to yoga, not through ill health, but with a need for a practice that promoted his vitality during his teenage years. Both of them, Jois and Iyengar, shared the same teacher, but the practices given to them were very different and what they did with those teachings was also very different.

The way they were taught was also different. I won’t go into this now because it’s a whole massive subject all of itself around heart and compassion and the manner in which yoga influences us on that level. From what I gather Krishnamacharya was tough on his students, easily criticising them and especially Iyengar. It is said that Iyengar never really recovered from the criticism he received, and it was not unusual for him to bark at his students and be hard on them too, sometimes slapping them to wake up a part that may have been unconscious. 

Iyengar attracted his students by offering them just what they sought – usually physical stamina and flexibility.  He conducted demonstrations and later, when a scooter accident dislocated his spine, began exploring the use of props to help disabled people practice yoga. Propping in yoga has continued to this day, albeit this is not something that is used in the Ashtanga tradition. Here Jois was renowned for giving intense adjustments taking students beyond their physical and psychological comfort zone that at times caused injury in his students, and now we are aware that he was sexually abusing them too. See, a whole other subject about ethics and morality, for another time perhaps. 

Here in Australia the dynamic yoga classes sought to combine the two approaches, namely the precision of bodily alignment and the focus that this demands, (the perfection one might say) and the movement of the body linked with the breath through set patterns. Both systems promoted strength, stamina, flexibility and balance. 

I was quickly hooked not least because I felt infinitely better for the practice, but simply because of my obsession with perfecting and advancing my yoga practice and here was an approach that not only fed my need for physical workout but also fed my need for perfection, because the strict alignment principles now gave me something to work with – a right way or a wrong way, black or white. This regardless of my body and its needs, or whether putting my body in such a strict shape was healthy for it or not. That didn’t matter, my body needed to fit the pose, not the other way around. 

I was soon practising up to six hours a day with two male teachers mainly, feeding an eating disorder by living on fruit alone (I wanted to have the perfect yoga body, which I believed to be very light and lean) and it is perhaps not surprising that my periods stopped. I was jubilant, no menstruation getting in the way of my practice, but really what it showed was that I was not healthy, feeding my masculine energy, which was out of balance in the first place.

It took me a long time to let go of this approach to yoga which I taught for many years and was well received by my students because they too were often caught in the patriarchal conditioning of exercise, perfection and achievement.

Even when I found my teacher who tried to untrain me and open me up to a more feminine approach to practice, I would still find myself practising in my old masculine way, after our lessons together, because in my mind I had to push and jump around my mat if I hoped to see change. What I failed to realise, was that the greatest change, at least on the inside, would come when I let go of my yoga practice having to be a certain way – the way taught to me mainly by men previously. 

There was one other influential student taught by Krishnamacharya, namely his son, TKV Desikachar, born in Mysore in 1938. Desikachar had a formal education which cumulated in a degree in engineering. However, shortly after beginning his career in this field, he decided to become a yoga teacher after a realisation of the great skills and knowledge that his father was offering.

He asked his father to be his teacher and guide and stayed at his side and learned from him until his death at 100. Desikachar founded the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai in his father’s honour.

Early in Desikachar’s yoga teaching and studies, his father asked him to teach the famous philosopher, Krishnamurti. This led to him accompanying Krishnamurti on a lecture tour of Europe and began his involvement with Western students, many of whom then committed themselves to 2 to 3 years of practice with him in India. As they in turn returned home, they set out to spread the teachings to a wider western audience with the main message that yoga practice needs to be tailored to suit the individual, more like bespoke tailoring that “off the peg”.

This was very much the approach of his father, Krishnamcharya, who considered every student as "absolutely unique" and incorporated his knowledge of Ayurveda working with his students on a number of levels including adjusting their diet, creating herbal medicines and setting up a series of yoga postures that would be most beneficial. Krishnamacharya particularly stressed the importance of combining breath work (pranayama) with the postures (asanas) of yoga and meditation (dhyana)) to help them heal and reach their goal. 

Furthermore, he believed that the most important aspect of teaching yoga was that the student be "taught according to his or her individual capacity at any given time". Thus, for Krishnamacharya, the path of yoga meant different things for different people, and each person ought to be taught in a manner that he or she understood clearly.

I am now very fortunate to have two wonderful female teachers in my life who very much adopt this approach. I met both ladies by chance – thank you synchronistic nature of the universe - when I was stuck in my dynamic vinyasa practice when my boys were little. That approach to practice had taken me so far, and I am grateful for those teachings, but as I have mentioned, it got to a point where it was merely feeding more of what now needed to be healed and shifted and I absolutely needed to begin to let go of my patriarchal conditioning and find a more feminine approach to practice instead to set me and my students free.

The first to come in was Helen, who is a TSYP teacher, this the Society of Yoga Practitioners who follow the teachings of T Krishnamacharya and TKV Desikachar. She has taught me Vedic chanting, philosophy, especially the teachings of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and asana and pranayama. Her approach has always been about what I most need and while it has been difficult at times, calming and slowing things down, I can now really appreciate the benefits of practicing in a way that is so very different to the dynamic vinyasa approach.

I was also led to Louise who is a Scaravelli-inspired teacher. Vanda Scaravelli, an Italian yogini was taught by both Iyengar and Desikachar as well as being good friends with Krishnamurti. She never wanted a lineage named after her, albeit she does have a following of students who will align with her as Scaravelli-inspired teachers. She developed an interest in the breath, gravity and the spine and her work has influenced the teachings which I receive, on a one to one basis mainly, to give me what I most need. Practicing like this has been life changing, no longer does my body have to fit the pose, the pose finds expression through my body. 

And maybe that is where I was getting to with all this. Because my teaching has inevitably changed in recent years as I have connected with parts of myself that were previously not allowed expression, the parts that I rejected because they didn’t fit my patriarchal conditioning, but which were desperate for my attention. It is in this way that my body has healed and my relationship with my menstrual cycle and what it means to be a woman and my sexuality and creativity have improved exponentially as I have reclaimed more of my feminine energy. 

Not only that but some of my fundamental core beliefs about the world and my place in it have changed as I have progressively let go of some of my conditioning and rigidity of mind, seeing through a little bit more of the illusion in the process. The joy of the Scaravelli-inspired approach to practice is one of energy and working with the body not against it. The joy of the TSYP approach to yoga is one of truly connecting with the breath and allowing more calmness because of it. Both approaches have helped me to let go of the notion of things having to be a certain way on my mat – black or white – which has been increasingly reflected in my life.

There is always more practice to be done, more to learn, and more to let go of in the process, more undoing, resting, being and trusting, but one thing that stands out as I approach 20 years of almost daily practice, is the need to honour our needs and what we most need in any moment, not because it is a trend, or someone has told us so, but because we are being increasingly honest with ourselves and the way we are living our life and what might then need to change. 

As a society it seems to me that we need less power and fast and push and rush and external, and more slow and gentle and inward and letting go and being and accepting and receiving. It’s about wholeness essentially and taking from the practice what enhances this rather than takes away from it. It’s an ongoing journey, an imperfect one at that, but this is the thing, life is perfect simply because of its imperfections and our honesty and authenticity. 

This exploration has been helpful because I can more clearly see why we have gotten to where we have gotten to these days as yoga begins to lose some of its popularity, this because people were sold more of the same – perfection, yoga body and endless calmness, happiness and joy. We have to be realistic. Life is messy and chaotic. We cannot expect a continuous state of being. Even enlightenment comes in flashes. 

Hopefully this sets us free from the patriarchal conditioning of perfection and achievement even on our mat and allows us to be more accepting of each moment as it arises and passes. We are part of a whole. My previous blog post explored this. Always a death leads to a new beginning. To try to maintain a linear approach is merely feeding more of what is out of balance in this world. Honouring our own nature is essential, so too our natural constitution. 

Practising in a way that creates greater harmony, encourages more of our whole is perhaps where the emphasis should be nowadays. This requires discernment and the courage to be true, to sift through our conditioning which runs deep. We have grown up in a patriarchal world and it has affected not only our world view but our relationship with our self and – at times – our choice in our approach to yoga practice. We need to be conscious of the effect our practice has on us.