When I introduce the subjects of breath and bandha in my immersion and pranayama courses, I begin with a description of three different layers of internal feeling and experience to which we can attend and move from during practice. These three layers of our experience of posture and movement are body, breath and bandha. These layers are functionally intertwined and inseparable in their roles within the experience of the whole organism, so rather than thinking of them as separate “things”, I prefer to frame them as different perspectives or lenses from which we can view the whole of our experience of posture and movement.

We can consider different asanas and movement patterns as dynamic “forms” which we attempt to mould ourselves into. Backward bending, forward bending, twisting, inverted postures, etc. all have different types of shape or form. When a beginner to movement practice first attempts to perform asanas, he instinctively attempts to copy the forms that he sees with the form of his own body. For someone with little experience in consciously embodied movement, this layer of external form is the main layer of awareness from which he instinctively attempts to perform asanas. The external shape or form of the asana could be considered as the most superficial layer from which we can practice.

If we compare an asana to a building, this superficial layer is analogous to the shape and form of the building – whether it is low and flat like a strip mall, high and narrow like a tower, or elongated and curved like an arched bridge, etc. We can also note details such as whether the surface of the building is made of wood, concrete, metal, etc.

The asanas of a beginner can tend to look sloppy and unrefined when compared to those of an experienced practitioner. The beginners’ posture may resemble the general form of a particular asana; however he may also appear (and feel) strained and lacking in the fundamental qualities of stability and ease — or sukha and sthira — which an experienced practitioner of the same asana often exhibits. The beginner will also lack alignment, stamina and resilience. He may fatigue quickly and be unable to incorporate even minor adjustments in form without losing his balance and toppling over.

In contrast, the asanas of an experienced practitioner will hold the same general form as the asanas of the beginner, but he will exhibit (and feel) the added qualities of alignment, stability and ease. An adept practitioner will be able to sustain a longer practice or hold particular asanas for longer periods of time without excessively tiring. He will also have the resilience to change certain features and details of the posture if he is asked to, without losing the fundamental essence of the posture. The postures of the adept practitioner will look and feel “aligned, relaxed and resilient”, as rolfer Will Johnson describes in his book of the same title.

How does the progression from the unstable and strained forms of the beginner to the aligned, relaxed and resilient forms of the experienced and adept practitioner occur?

When a beginner applies the techniques of Ashtanga practice on a regular basis – especially the vinyasa system of moving body and breath in a co-ordinated and concentrated flow – he will eventually begin to experience the asanas from a deeper layer within himself than the external shape and form of the postures and movements. Over time, he may begin to feel as if there is something that is supporting these external forms and movements of his body from a deeper place inside himself. He may begin to reduce emphasis on applying instructions and directions which originate from the outside intellect to the form of his body, and he may start to give precedence to an intuitive and embodied intelligence which guides and moves his body from the inside.

Some experienced practitioners say that this internal force or intelligence is the breath, and that at a certain stage of maturity in Ashtanga practice, the breath becomes the primary force in shaping and moving the body through the postures and vinyasas of the practice. There is certainly some validity in this statement, and the breath is the second layer from which we can perform and experience the asanas and vinyasas. The layer of breath is deeper and subtler than the superficial layer of external shape and form. For an experienced practitioner, the sound and sensation of the continuous flow of elongated, smooth and deep breath can pull him deeper inside himself and it becomes the most prominent feature of his embodied experience of the Ashtanga practice. At this stage in practice maturity, the superficial structural layers of the form of flesh and bone become more of an adjunct to the experience of the form of the breath.

An important discovery that some practitioners make at this layer of experience is that the breath does indeed have a shape and form to it, just as the external body has a shape and form to it. One important feature of the internal form of the breath is that when correctly applied, it remains relatively constant regardless of the variety of different external forms (such as backward bends, forward bends, twists, inverted postures, standing postures, supine postures) that the body can take in the practice. That is to say, regardless of the variation in external form of the body in the practice, the internal form of the breath should remain within one basic pattern. I call this form “the tree of breath,” and will return to it later.

Returning to our analogy of a building or structure, we can think of the layer of breath as the infrastructural elements, such as the main posts and beams, which support the external structure and form of a building. The infrastructure is usually not obviously visible in a finished building, but beneath the external layers, it is what supports and holds the entire building up.

We can continue to probe deeper into the forces which support and move us in the practice. Just as the internal form and movement of the breath support the external form and movement of the body, some practitioners eventually discover that there is an even deeper layer which supports the form and movement of the breath. I call this the layer of bandha, and it is the deepest and subtlest layer from which we can experience and perform the forms and movement patterns of asanas and vinyasas.

In this particular context, I define bandha as the energetic dimension of our relationship with our environment. This vague and abstract definition will become clearer if we return to our analogy of a building: The effectiveness of the infrastructure of a building in supporting the form of the structure is highly dependent on how the infrastructure is arranged in relationship to the field of gravity and to the terrain of the earth that it is built upon. The way the structure of the building will relate to the earth below it and the space around it is the most important consideration to take into account when planning the construction of the building. I don’t know very much about architectural design, but as far as I understand, the features of the environment which the building is to be built within and how the building will relate to these features are the foundations of everything that comes afterwards in the planning process. A building which works with gravity in a constructive way will be strong and stable and more likely to withstand any kind of disturbance that it might encounter during its lifespan with minimal damage. An arched bridge that is built with effective distribution of natural forces from its center will be a bridge that is safe and stable to travel upon for many years.

Urdhva Danurasana by Allen Enrique

Bandha is the energetic patterning which manifests in the way we move in relation to the earth below us and the space around us. This energetic movement occurs in both static asanas as well as dynamic movements of the body. When we practice in a state of embodiment and tangibly work with our relationship to the environment around us, bandha can be intuitively understood, and becomes the root and foundation of our entire practice experience. As embodied beings who are functionally and physiologically intertwined within – and inseparable from – the planet earth, this energetic relationship between self and environment is occurring every moment that we are alive. Formal practice is a place and space within which we can refine and cultivate the intricacies of that relationship to its maximum potential for harmonious exchange, but the actual relationship of energetic exchange between self and earth does not stop when formal practice stops. This fact can shed some light on K. Pattabhi Jois’ famous statement that mula bandha should be applied 24 hours a day.

The energetic form of bandha in our postures and movements can also be understood by examining how it manifests in trees. We tend to think of trees as static entities, but a significant amount of movement takes place as a tree communicates with and relates to its environment. We share more than half of our genes with trees and the common ancestor that we share with trees is relatively close on the phylogenetic map of life, as shown in the diagram below. Though trees and humans have evolved some very different ways of relating to gravity on the planet earth, we also share some fundamental qualities, including the movement of bandha.

In order to see all of the movement patterns that a tree engages in, we would need to view it in time lapse, and also be able to see what is happening underneath the earth. We would also need to be able to see the chemical signals that trees exchange with one another and with animals and other forms of life. Trees form vast interconnected networks with their roots through underground fungal filament networks, which some modern ecologists have likened to the dendritic connections that are made between neurons in a mammalian brain. Trees also communicate with their peers, and with other life forms, by absorbing and releasing chemical signals through their leaves. This has led some ecologists to suggest that trees behave less like individual entities, and more like nodes in a vastly interconnected forest and planetary network. Trees are more like cells which contribute to the health and functionality of a whole forest organism, and their behaviour can be more appropriately understood when viewed from this perspective. Humans, as a part of the web of life, also have this degree of connectivity with our environment. Unfortunately, centuries of the Cartesian legacy of the illusion of separateness has led us to repress and ignore this fundamental aspect of human nature. Bandha can only be effectively understood and felt if we allow ourselves to drop into embodied sensitivity and to feel and move as if we are connected to and communicating with our environment as participants within a network of relationships within a greater whole.

The fundamental movement of bandha is a co-engaging of two complementary or opposite qualities or movement patterns. In the present context, we can discuss the complementary forces of dropping downwards into the earth, and of lifting upwards and expanding outwards, away from the earth.

The rooting force of dropping downwards into the ground is the part of the movement of the tree that we cannot see with our eyes. The germination of a seed actually begins with the sprouting and downwards movement of the root. The stalk which grows upwards towards the light and air doesn’t appear until after the root of the seed has already established itself. For a tree to have any degree of stability and reach its potential to expand and grow upwards and outwards, it must have space to grow downwards, penetrating ever more deeply into the earth. A tree which is kept in a pot or in a confined space where its roots have nowhere to grow, will never reach its potential to fully mature in its upwards and outwards expansion. A tree’s roots are powerful. The movement of the roots happens slowly, relative to our perception, but this movement is epic in deep time. The roots of trees can eventually crack and destroy rocks, concrete foundations of buildings, roads, and other structures which are located a surprising distance from the actual trunk of the tree. If all the humans on the planet earth died today, it is the roots of the trees which would immediately begin to spread and proliferate that would reduce all of the concrete structures of our civilizations to rubble within a few decades. These deep and powerful underground movements give trees the strength, stability and longevity that they are known for, and as previously mentioned this is also where the trees become physically connected with one another through their fungal “synapses”.

Humans also have the capacity to move downwards into the earth. Any action that a human wishes to perform will be executed more effectively and efficiently if the part of the body that is touching the ground first reaffirms and deepens its downwards movement into the ground prior to attempting to engage the actual lifting, pushing, pulling, or whatever the intended action is. Imagine you are standing beside a large boulder and wish to push it. You place your hands on the boulder, but before you start to push with the strength of your arms, you instinctively step back a little bit, bend your knees, and then you anchor yourself and press downwards into the earth with your feet. The earth responds to your gesture, and a reactionary force comes back up out of the earth, ripples through your entire body and you harness this force that is given to you from the earth and channel it through your arms and hands as you begin to push against the boulder. Imagine how much less effective your efforts to move the boulder would be if you didn’t make these initial rooting connections to the earth through your legs and feet. This rooting action, and the subsequent channeling and harnessing of the complementary gesture from the earth is the essence of bandha: Bandha cannot be understood in this example without considering it as a function of our relationship to both the earth and the boulder.

Humans can also increase their sensitivity and connection to the rest of the web of life through the earth, just as trees do. Carl Jung is famous for having said: “It is quite possible that India is the real world, and that the white man lives in a madhouse of abstractions… Life in India has not yet withdrawn into the capsule of the head… It is still the whole body that lives. No wonder the European feels dreamlike: the complete life of India is something of which he merely dreams. When you walk with naked feet, how can you ever forget the earth?” I feel it is necessary to insert the caveat that this statement may have been true in Jung’s time, or in his idealized vision of the Indian culture. In my own experience, modern India is as much of an abstracted madhouse as the West. My reason for sharing the quote is that, irrespective of culture or geographic location, engaging with the ground through bare feet, in an embodied state of perceptive awareness, is the only way to actually feel our connection to the earth and to the rest of the web of life. Without this embodied feeling, there can be no connection. Modern scientific discoveries and ecological movements which emphasize the interconnectedness of all of life on the planet earth are important, but unless we cultivate the ability to feel these connections with our living breathing body, as animist cultures have always done, then there is no possibility of authentically feeling our relationship to the rest of life, and no possibility of feeling bandha. I once watched a world-famous and celebrated ecologist speak at a public event. This man understands the nature of the web of life on planet earth as well as any other living human does – at an intellectual level. He has undoubtedly done very important work for the world and for encouraging humanity to understand our appropriate place in the world. Yet, when I watched him speak, as a yoga instructor I watched his body. His body was full of tension and was not connected to the ground beneath him at all. There was no bandha in his lived experience of the earth – at least while he was giving a public lecture.

Most modern humans are unaware of the extent of the loss of communicative skills that has occurred through our trajectory of disconnection from the earth over the last few millennia. The abstract technological universe, within which we communicate solely with other humans, has severed most of our reciprocal perceptual exchange with the more-than-human world. Though we are not able to escape our interdependence with the more-than-human earth, we operate under the illusion that we have done so, resulting in a great void and a profound lack of deeper meaning in life, not to mention the very real possibility of the collapse of all of the earth’s living systems, including our own human civilizations. The few remaining extant societies of indigenous humans have spoken about the ease and regularity with which they communicate with plants, other animals, dead ancestors, etc. Modern humans tend to disregard these tales as myths from a primitive and uniformed worldview, but for those who cultivate embodied sensitivity, the richness of the network of reciprocal perceptual exchange that is possible between the human and the more-than-human becomes apparent. To perceptually inhabit these pathways of exchange is a fundamental element in experiencing the essence of human nature.

Elephants are known to communicate with each other through seismic vibrations that are picked up through their feet. I recall reading about a study which found that elephants emit low frequency vocalizations, which other elephants can receive vibrationally through sensitive receptors in their feet – up to 10 km away! If such a massive and hulking animal can be capable of such sensitivity, there is little doubt that human beings can also be this sensitive, and that our ancestral human forest dwellers also communicated with their environment through their feet.

I attempt to keep my feet open to earth as much as possible. Living in a warm climate, it is natural to keep my feet bare and free of any footwear for most of the day. The only time I put on shoes is when I walk or drive outside. A few years ago, I began to wear Vibram barefoot shoes, which allow one to retain a surprisingly large amount of tactile sensitivity with the ground. Once I became used to wearing this type of shoe, I found it very difficult to return to using regular soled shoes as the degree of tactile communication with the ground that is lost with conventional shoes becomes very apparent. Now, the only time I wear conventional shoes is when it is too cold for barefoot shoes, or if I am hiking with a backpack that weighs more than 10 – 15 kg. I’ve even considered attempting my next trekking expedition with a backpack in barefoot shoes. I’ve climbed all of the highest mountains of Bali in barefoot shoes, as well walked through numerous other challenging terrains. Why? Because I prefer to experience the connection of bandha as often as possible.

My first yoga instructor was an Iyengar teacher. He gave extremely effective training in the rooting foundation of posture, without ever using the term “bandha”. A good portion of the 3 – 4 hour classes were spent doing standing postures on thinly carpeted flooring without the use of sticky mats. Perhaps 50 times per class my teacher would emphatically tell us to “pound your heels into the ground.” And so, we learned how to connect to the ground with our feet. I spent over a year learning intensively with this teacher, and the instinctive ability to initiate all movements and forms of my body by pressing myself into the ground is something I have never lost. I’ve done my full Ashtanga practice without a sticky mat numerous times, as I have little need to use the sticky mat for traction. The main purpose of the mat is to provide some padding for rolling movements or movements where more sensitive parts of the body would become bruised by pressing hard against the ground. I had no idea that I was learning bandha in those early days of my practice. When I asked my teacher about the concept of bandha, he would smile and tell me, “It’s happening, you just don’t know it yet.” Bandha begins with embodied movement into, and communication and exchange with, the earth beneath us.

The complementary force in the tree-shaped energetic patterning of bandha is upward lifting and outward spreading. This movement arises as a response to the downwards rooting force. We can think of it as the feedback that the earth gives to us when we communicate with it by dropping down into it. To understand how this force manifests, we can observe that the trunk of a tree lifts straight up out of the earth in alignment with the force of gravity for some distance, before the first branches appear and begin to spread outwards. Occasionally, we may find a tree with a split trunk, such that there are two main trunks which have split from the root trunk very close to the ground level. This can happen for a number of reasons, but trees which exhibit this feature are much less stable and doomed to a shorter lifespan in comparison to their “normal” peers who have a well-defined main trunk which grows upwards in harmony with gravity. There are two trees of the same species which stand on either side of the front door of my house here in Bali. One tree has been harvested by my landlord several times. He cuts the branches back very closely, and I believe it is for this reason that it has a split trunk. The other tree has never been harvested (to my knowledge), and its trunk is much stronger and more stable than that of its sibling. Sometimes, after a torrential rain, these trees become weighed down and bent beneath the weight of the water that has accumulated on them. The tree with the split trunk becomes much more deviated from its usual growing pattern after the heavy rainfall, and takes longer to return to its usual pattern thereafter, compared to the tree with the stronger trunk. It is clear to me which tree has stronger bandha. Other animals have made the same observations about these two trees. There is a lineage of white rumped munia birds which nest in the stronger tree every year that I have lived here. These birds always choose the tree which has the more developed bandha to build their nest in.

Trees with a stable midline – that is to say, a strong and well-aligned trunk, also have much greater capacity to spread their branches and leaves outwards in all directions. Supported by the stability of the main trunk, the branches can elongate and reach much further outwards without compromising the overall stability of the tree.

I’ve already spoken about the mobility of trees through the growth and connections of their roots beneath the earth. This mobility is also apparent above the ground. Over deep time, trees can grow in whichever direction and orientation will best serve them in their quest to absorb maximal sunlight through their leaves for photosynthesis. When sunlight conditions change, the growth patterns and orientations of trees change in response. Different species of trees living together in a forest also cooperate in various ways to allow each other to capture all niches available for sunlight absorption.

A minimal amount of breeze can be enough to excite all of the leaves on a tree and even cause the thickest branches of a large tree to sway back and forth lazily. In the event of a great storm with gale force winds, the branches and upper trunk of a tree exhibit a huge range of motion and will bend in harmony with the wind, without resisting the extreme forces that assail them. These movements of the branches and trunk of a tree always look very relaxed to me. The tree is so confident in the rooting aspect of its bandha, that it has no fear or need to hold rigidity in its branches and leaves. Rather, the tree understands that allowing relaxed and resilient movement in the peripheral parts of its structure is the path of least resistance and greatest harmony in its relationship with its environment.

Humans can also manifest the lifting and spreading aspect of bandha in a way that is similar to trees. Once we have established a firm and sensitive rooting movement into the earth, we can harness the force of gravity and allow the complementary lifting and spreading action to move through the rest of our body. “Harnessing” and “allowing” are terms that I have selected carefully. Bandha is not an active gripping or clenching of the muscles around the pelvis or lower belly. Many practitioners who have been erroneously taught to do so are not experiencing bandha at all. By attempting to clench abdominal and pelvic muscles without actively soliciting an embodied relationship with the ground and with gravity, these practitioners generate excessive tension which inhibits their ability to harness and allow the energy of the earth to flow freely through their bodies. The result is a state of tension and disconnection, rather than a state of bandha.

Just as a tree seems to relax and allow the wind to move its branches freely, relaxation and release are necessary for humans to allow the force of the earth to manifest to its full potential and move through us uninhibitedly. Once we have effectively “plugged in” to the energy source of gravity by rooting into the earth, we then must cultivate conducive receptive space for this energetic response from the earth to move through us. When we succeed in this, we can manifest movement patterns which are both rooted, stable and powerful, and yet relaxed, resilient and expansive. In this state, we are in the most harmonious and balanced possible relationship that we can have with the earth beneath us and the force of gravity around us. This represents a state of engaged bandha.

Effectively engaged bandha feels effortless, intuitive and meditative. When we cultivate embodiment and give authority to the intuitive animal intelligence within our soma, we experientially understand that the essence of posture and movement is that of reciprocal and active relationship with nature. When practicing from the layer of bandha, the sensations and embodied feelings associated with the “central axis” or “midline” of the body communicate reciprocally with the field of the earth and these sensations become a meditative focal point which can be carried through all of the postures and vinyasas of our practice. If we are able to feel the dropping and rooting force actively co-ordinating with the lifting and spreading force through the central axis of the body, and this “core alignment” is being actively solicited in every posture and vinyasa movement that we place our body and breath into, then we are successfully holding the form of bandha in place throughout our practice.

Allow me to emphasize again that “holding bandha” has very little to do with holding the anus, pelvic floor or lower abdominal muscles in an engaged state. One might ask why these particular muscle groups are so often associated with bandha. It is because when we do harmonize our midline with gravity and activate the tree shaped energetic pattern of balanced rooting/dropping and lifting/spreading movements, some of these “core” muscles will naturally and instinctively respond to this energetic patterning and alignment. The muscular engagement is a product of the energetic alignment of bandha. The muscular engagement is not the cause of bandha. This is an important distinction to understand.

I generally encourage practitioners to focus less on the science of anatomy and physiology in their yoga practice, and more on phenomenological and embodied feeling. Focusing on anatomy and physiology in isolation of engaged relationship tends to lock one into the illusion of a separate self and results in one becoming trapped in the labyrinth of abstracted mirrors which the modern human race is lost within. Moving in phenomenological and embodied relationship with the earth is something that our species has been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, and something that the ancestral lineage to our species has been doing for millions of years. I have little doubt that our hunter-gatherer ancestors moved through the forests and savannahs intuitively, as if the environment was an extension of their own bodies, and were more skilled at movement than most of us are today. I am also sure that healing from injuries was an equally intuitive process which they were also skilled at. Needless to say, intellectual study of anatomy was not a part of this paradigm. Embodied sensitivity and felt relationship with one’s environment provides the vast majority of the confidence, sensitivity and experiential understanding necessary to work with bandha, and to move safely and efficiently. The majority of injuries do not arise from a lack of knowledge in the field of anatomy and physiology. They arise from a lack of embodied sensitivity and focus in one’s bodily attunement with the environment.

The tree shaped movement pattern of the layer of bandha also manifests in the layers of breath and external body.

As I mentioned near the beginning of this article, the three layers of bandha, breath and body are not functionally separate from each other. The form of the tree should be consciously cultivated from all three layers simultaneously. I think of the relationship between bandha, breath and body like the concentric rings in the trunk of a tree. Bandha represents the innermost layer of rings, breath the middle layers of rings and the body the outermost layer of rings. Although it is possible to identify these three layers of rings as distinctly separate things, it is meaningless to think of them as being able to function separately from one other. All three layers of rings are part of the structure, form and movement patterns of the tree.

In the tree-shaped breathing we use during Ashtanga practice, the exhalation represents the downwards movement of the roots of the tree probing into the earth. In this context, the earth is our pelvis and we apply an intentional force to push the exhalation down into the bowl of the pelvis, or into the earth. In a refined breathing practice, this downwards push is not aggressive. It is subtle, yet powerful. It is possible to have power without aggression. It is also elongated. Think again of the roots of a tree, elongating in deep time down into the ground at their glacial pace, and yet with enough strength to gradually crack and move through concrete or rocks. A fully developed exhalation similarly pushes its way through all of the layers of tension and blockage in the belly and pelvis, opening them up, until it eventually connects into the floor of the pelvis itself.

The inhale begins where the exhale finishes, and represents the lifting and spreading pattern of the trunk and branches of the tree. As previously discussed, most tree trunks grow directly upwards, away from the earth for some distance, before the first branches start reaching outwards to the sides. In this context, we can think of the lifting movement of the inhale up and out of the pelvis and through the lumbar spine/abdominal region as representing this straight part of the tree trunk; and we can think of spreading of the breath through the thoracic area, including ribs and shoulder girdle as representing the spreading branches of the tree. In Ashtanga practice, when we begin inhaling upwards from the bowl of the pelvis, we do not breathe outwards into the belly. Instead, we draw the breath straight up through the lower abdominal cavity, until we reach the upper abdominal and diaphragm area. At this stage, we allow the breath to spread outwards through the entire rib cage as it continues its journey upwards. An adept breathing practitioner will eventually be able to lift and spread the inhale through the entirety of the rib cage, including the front, back and sides – all the way up to the sternum and along the width of the collarbones at the front, up to the top of the thoracic spine and between the scapula at the back, and into the armpits at the sides.

When we apply the tree form to our breathing in this way, we sometimes find that the lower part of the abdomen does stay drawn gently inwards, due to a natural negative pressure that is generated in the abdominal cavity. Once more, I will emphasize that this negative abdominal pressure is not due to a conscious and rigid tensing of the abdominal muscles. Just as actively gripping these muscles will inhibit the free flow of energy in the state of bandha from manifesting, it will also inhibit the free flow of breath from manifesting. Sharath Jois says that we should apply “free breathing with sound” to our practice. I have also heard him define bandha as meaning “to lift up.” Sucking in and holding the abdomen muscularly will not contribute to free breathing or to lifting up. When we are able to find relaxed and natural alignment with gravity and we can breathe freely from the roots of the floor of the pelvis to the tips of the branches at the outer reaches of the upper ribs then a natural negative pressure manifests in the abdominal cavity and “lifting up” happens naturally and with relatively minimal effort.

Finally, we can return to the layer of external structure and form of the body. We can examine samasthiti as a basic example of how the form of the tree manifests at this layer of our practice experience. In my immersion and pranayama courses, I like to do a simple but effective exercise to demonstrate this: Standing in samasthiti, a partner comes behind us and uses his hands to press down on the tops of our iliac bones, with a fair amount of force. This usually feels pleasantly “grounding”, and allows us to feel the downwards rooting aspect of our posture. This downwards movement begins from the bones of the pelvis, and moves down through the bones of the legs and feet and into the earth. A second partner then rests his hand lightly on the crown of our head. We can then attempt to actively channel the energetic response of the earth from the downwards pressure being placed on our pelvic bones into an upwards growth and expansion through our central axis, spine and rib cage. When we succeed in this, we are able to lift straight upwards through the crown of our head. Our second partner will actually feel the top of our head growing upwards into his hand. During this exercise, most students find that they can tangibly feel the structure of their body growing taller.

Samasthiti by Allen Enrique

If we learn how to engage with gravity and the earth through the three layers of bandha, breath and body in every asana and vinyasa of our practice, we actually will grow taller over time. I spent 4 years away from my native Canada when I began my yoga practice in India in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. When I finally returned home, my friends and family who had not seen me during those years all commented that I had grown taller. Though I did not understand it as such at the time, this was due to long-term cultivation of the pattern and form of bandha in the structure of my body.

We can examine the tree-shaped movement pattern of the external body in any other posture or vinyasa movement that we choose to engage with. Utpluthi can serve as another example: When I give instructions for this posture at the end of a led primary series class, the first thing I say is: “Place your hands on the ground and connect deeply with the earth.” Then, I say: “Press down and lift up.” It is the same principle as in samasthiti. Lifting up cannot happen effectively unless pressing down happens first. Utpluthi is a strenuous posture, but it is most effectively and least strenuously performed by working primarily with our energetic relationship with the earth, rather than muscular gripping. When I am holding utpluthi for a longer count and I begin to tire, the first thing I do to recharge the dynamic process is to re-establish the contact of my hands with the ground, and press down more. When I do this, my pelvis and torso immediately lighten and lift up higher with less effort. There is no conscious clenching of my belly or pelvis in this application of bandha. While the core muscles in that area certainly do engage, this engaging is a natural by-product of the cultivated relationship patterns between my body and breath and the earth. Lifting up to jump back to chaturanga dandasana from a seated posture follows identical principles.

Utpluthi by Allen Enrique

To experientially understand the tree shaped movement in bandha, breath and body, it is necessary to work with our reciprocal relationship with our environment from an embodied, phenomenological place of tactile feeling and sensation. Every gesture and movement of body and breath generates a response from the ground and from the space around us, and we need to be receptive and sensitive enough to feel that response from the earth. When we are able to accept, feel and transmit this response through our own body and breath, this informs the next gesture and movement that we make. This reciprocal feedback loop between the self and the environment builds up in intensity and focus over the duration of our practice as body, breath, bandha and earth become intertwined in an inseparable web of reciprocal communication and exchange. The vinyasa system of co-ordinated and concentrated flowing movements of body and breath is one of the unique features of the Ashtanga practice, and is indispensable in order to experience bandha in this way. In a deep experience of bandha, the boundaries between self and environment – body and earth – begin to dissolve, and we begin to experientially understand the fundamental truth that we are not separate from our environment. We begin to identify less with the abstracted, isolated conception and experience of self and more with the felt reality of an embodied organic organism embedded within a rich web of relationships of reciprocal exchange that is the whole of the living, breathing earth.

Acknowledgements

• Thank you to Allen Enrique for the “made to order” drawings.
• Thank you to Clayton Loizou for helpful editing and suggestions about the article.
• Thank you to Richard Powers, whose novel “The Overstory” provided inspiration for me to finally translate some of the concepts and ideas that I have been carrying into words on a screen.

Translations

• The Chinese translation of this article can be found here. Thank you to Yanyun for the translation.

One of my favorite fictional characters is John Oldman, from the “The Man from Earth” movie series. In the second installment of the series, John is a university professor of religious studies. Having had 14,000 years of experience to hone his discernment, he makes a particularly effective and popular teacher. Some of his students discover that he is 14,000 years old, a fact that he tries to keep hidden from the world. One of these students is particularly enthusiastic and frames John as the next messiah, asking him to share his message with the world. Having had plenty of opportunity in his lengthy life to experiment with different ways of sharing his massive accumulation and assimilation of knowledge and experience, John has learned from his past mistakes and he dispels his student’s hopes that he will be willing to fulfill the role she has envisioned for him by telling her: “I’m a teacher, not a preacher.”

That particular line stood out for me, as it encapsulates an important distinction between two very different ways of spreading and sharing information. This distinction is something that I have become increasingly aware of over the 20 years that I have been teaching yoga.

During the initial years of my time as a yoga teacher (and in the years before that), I had the habit of assuming that whatever “truths” I had discovered and benefited from would naturally apply to all other people in the same way they applied to me. Enthusiastic to share my insights, I was fond of doing so by telling people what they should or shouldn’t do in how they lived their lives. In other words, I had a habit of preaching.

My definition of preaching is: Giving another person instructions, based on the assumption that one understands that person better than that person understands himself, and is therefore more capable of making personal life decisions for that person than that person is himself.

Preaching is a common feature of human cultural pedagogy, and includes any solicited or unsolicited lifestyle “recommendations” that one imposes on others. Examples of this include: What religious or spiritual teaching to follow, what political beliefs to hold, what types of thoughts to think, what types of feelings to have, whom one should or shouldn’t have sex with or marry, what style of yoga to practice, what type of clothing to wear or what to eat for lunch on any particular day.

As a young adult, I frequently noted how widespread the habit of surrendering one’s autonomy and capacity to make informed personal decisions about one’s own life to an authoritarian figurehead was – whether that figurehead was a doctor, a parent, a priest, a scripture, a god, or a teacher. It perplexed and frustrated me that this habit was so widespread. I had always avoided this habit by considering the opinions and information given to me by those whom I perceived as “experts” in their particular field; but using that information as a part of my own decision-making process, rather than blindly accepting the information given to me by those experts. I noted many examples of instances when authority figures had made mistakes in their analyses, and I learned to hold my own understanding of myself and my own ability to make decisions for myself as being of the highest authority. It was extremely rare that I ever made a decision or choice that could potentially affect my well-being simply because someone told me to do so, without considering how I actually felt inside, in the realm of my own embodied experience, about that decision.

I also noted the plethora of intrapersonal and interpersonal effects that resulted from the surrendering of one’s personal autonomy and authority to an external authority and I recognized this as one of the main ills of fragmented, broken people and fragmented, broken societies and cultures. This unfortunate ill runs through all major societies and cultures of our world today. In “The Guru Papers – Masks of Authoritarian Power,” Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad recognize this ill as being one of the main symptoms of our species’ failure to mature in our process of cultural evolution. They suggest that we are trapped in a state of adolescence as a species, reliant on authority figures to inform us how to live, rather than taking responsibility for our own lives and our own decisions.

By cultivating critical thinking, discernment and embodiment throughout my life, I have largely avoided falling into the trappings of this ill on an interpersonal level. Nonetheless, by engaging in preaching myself, I was spreading the same ill on a cultural level by sharing my own personal truths and understandings with others in a way that undermined their autonomy. Once I began to realize that sharing my own insights in this way was contributing to the propagation of a deeply rooted human cultural dysfunction, I began to consciously shift the methods by which I shared my knowledge and experience. This shift was gradual, but a key point in this process came when I read the aforementioned “Guru Papers”. The implications of this book on my life were profound and it initiated an immediate and drastic shift in my worldview which percolated into the embodied experience of my life and actions in the world. I can pinpoint this as the time that I clearly and unequivocally understood the dangers of preaching. This was also the point where I ceased to identify as a Buddhist, which was the worldview that I had identified with (and preached to others) for the preceding decade. I also abandoned the delusion that any person, group of people, scripture, or organization in the world had any kind of special access to an irrefutable and universal “truth”, with respect to the nature of life, existence and morality.

In the time since then, I have been increasingly careful in both my personal life relationships and in my professional life teaching Mysore style Ashtanga yoga and pranayama, yoga and Buddhist philosophy, and embodiment to avoid preaching. Instead, I attempt to teach and share my experience in a way that empowers others to make more informed decisions about themselves and their roles within their relationships with the world, without the need to defer to an authority figure in that decision-making process. In my professional role as a teacher, I am careful to confine my teachings to technical aspects of the practices, and to avoid presenting conjectural opinions as if they were facts. I emphasize that the aspects of the practice which I teach can be used as tools to deepen one’s process of embodiment and subjective observation. This process naturally enhances one’s ability to make life decisions based on one’s own phenomenologically felt reality, rather than on the dictates of a scripture, teacher, culture, religion, etc.

My definition of teaching is: Sharing techniques or information in a way that allows and empowers a person to use those techniques or information to make their own informed personal decisions about their life.

A key dimension of the difference between preaching and teaching is the effect that the method of information transmission has on the recipient’s sense of trust and confidence in himself. If the information has been transmitted through the process of teaching, the recipient’s sense of confidence in his own subjective feeling based level of experience (which I sometimes refer to as animal or intuitive intelligence) should be strengthened. If the information is transmitted through preaching, on the other hand, it can have the opposite effect.

A key element of mind control is the undermining of the confidence of the subject in the accuracy of his own subjective experience. Once the subject is trained to stop trusting his own perceptions, and therefore his own decisions, his mind is ripe for the taking. This technique has been used by leaders of all sorts for millennia. Preaching has a similar effect. If the message of a preacher is in conflict with what one experiences at the phenomenological, sensation-based level in one’s intuitive animal intelligence, then one experiences an internal dissonance. In order to alleviate this dissonance, one must either reject the message of the preacher, or reject the phenomenological experience of one’s own intuitive intelligence.

A person’s subjective, internal experience can be mistrusted and rejected in favour of the message of a preacher, but it cannot be completely removed. If one chooses to reject one’s own intuitive intelligence and subjective experience, it becomes relegated to the background, where it lurks and exerts itself unconsciously. The self therefore becomes fragmented, with the conscious, adopted message of the preacher struggling continuously against the unconscious subjective intelligence of the self. This is how Jung’s “shadow self” is formed. The shadow self is sometimes mistaken to be the composed of only “negative” qualities, which one prefers not to acknowledge. In reality, the shadow self includes any aspect of the self, including positive and healthy aspects, which are not consistent with the preaching of one’s family members, teachers, peers, culture, or religion. Because these aspects of the self are not supported by the preaching of one’s greater social body, one banishes and suppresses them into a “dark” unconscious corner of one’s psyche and being.

One of the “goals” of yoga practice is to bring about a “union”, and so it must avoid any type of fragmentation or rejection of any aspects of the self. Any form of practice or preaching which promotes rejection or mistrust of some aspects of the self cannot possibly contribute to the process of union through yoga. When yoga teachers and other types of social leaders preach, rather than teach, they contribute to this process of fragmentation of the self and deepening of the shadow. This is unfortunately common in yoga and spiritual communities of today. We frequently see practitioners and teachers presenting themselves as an embodiment of a certain set of ideals which are fundamentally in opposition or conflict with what they are actually experiencing (and repressing into the shadows) inside themselves. The result of this fragmentation is inauthenticity and it leads to intrapersonal breakdown and many of the dysfunctional interpersonal dimensions that we can observe in today’s spiritual and yoga communities.

The importance of embodied, felt experience cannot be overemphasized in the process of authentically integrating and assimilating knowledge and understanding. A “truth” cannot be authentic unless we are actually feeling it in the body at the sensation-based phenomenological level; and doing so without giving preferential attention to certain feelings while rejecting other feelings. Embodiment means being aware of and immersed within everything that we feel at an organic, sensation-based level. Being embodied means BEING those sensations and feelings—not as an objective, disconnected observer, but as a subjective living, breathing and feeling experiencer.

One of the major fallacies of Buddhist practice is the assumption that it is possible for consciousness or awareness to remain objective and disconnected from the experience of sensation and feeling. Buddhist practice is often portrayed with the imagery of a battle, where objective awareness struggles to remain detached from the “enemy” of the subjective experience of volitional formations (sankaras/samskaras) around the field of the sensations and feelings of bodily experience. I have observed that many long-term Buddhist practitioners end up living a disembodied existence, with a deeply rooted—and sometimes carefully hidden—quality of self-loathing. The dualistic worldview of Buddhism—where the self paradoxically struggles to deny the reality of the self—ultimately produces a deeply fragmented and wounded sense of self.

Modern science falls into the same trap that Buddhism does, by working on the flawed premise of the possibility of objective, detached observation of the environment around us, without accepting that we are necessarily a subjective participant within a living, breathing, feeling environment. The result of this centuries-long experiment has been to propagate a struggle against more-than-human nature—rather than accepting that we ARE a subjective participant in the whole of nature—in the same way that the Buddhist struggles against his own volitional formations around his sensation and feeling based experience—rather than accepting that he IS a subjective part of his own sensations and experiences. The fragmented self-denial of the Buddhist is not unlike the broken relationship that we have with our dying planet, which we have created through our own deluded attempts to separate ourselves from being a part of the process of nature. Preaching—which asks one to deny one’s own subjective, sensation based experience—propagates this same process of fragmentation and disconnection from the truth and authenticity of the self.

Questions are sometimes raised about horrible atrocities, such as the mass genocides which have taken place throughout the (often ugly) history of our species. People often wonder how those who committed those atrocities could have done so. Even if they were “just following orders”, how could they not have known what they were doing was wrong? How could they not have rejected the orders? The answer is that they stopped themselves from feeling. Only by cutting themselves off from being embodied and conscious in their deeper somatic feelings could they follow the orders—or preaching—of those commanding them. Interviews with those who have committed these types of crimes confirm this.

We are doing the same thing in our relationship with more-than-human world today. The murder and destruction of the living, breathing biosphere of the planet earth is no different from the horrific crimes that we have inflicted upon members of our own species. The preaching of our modern cultures, such as the primacy of economic growth at all costs, necessitates cutting ourselves off from the embodied experience of what it actually feels like to destroy and demolish everything around us as part of achieving that goal. For one who allows oneself to feel everything, the cries of pain of the embodied earth can be tangibly felt inside one’s own body as one moves through the landscape of the human induced destruction of this living planet, and participating in this destruction becomes an impossibility.

The preachers of “green technology” and “sustainable growth” also fall into the dualistic trap of separation. For these people, the more-than-human biosphere is still perceived as an objective, lifeless object which is to be integrated into the structure of our current social paradigms. To place “economic value” on forests, species or ecosystems or to refer to anything as a “resource”, does not help us to develop a connected, living, feeling embodied relationship with the more-than-human world. It is only through removing the dualistic separation of self and others, by subjectively feeling and participating in the embodied experience of the whole living earth, that true healing and union can take place.

Indigenous human societies (most of which are extinct now) cultivated intimate, feeling-based relationships with the more-than-human world around them. Those relationships were necessarily carried out at the embodied level of experience. Plundering and destroying the environment around them was unthinkable, because it would have felt as wrong as plundering or murdering their closest human relatives. If modern humans are to salvage a sustainable and respectable existence on this planet, we must reconnect to our own embodied feelings of aliveness and by extension of that, cultivate an embodied feeling based relationship with all that is around us. Only then, can we truly and authentically understand the nature of our lives and the appropriate ways to conduct ourselves within the network of relationships that constitutes the living system of this breathing planet.

Embodiment avoids the fragmentation of dualistic traps. Our sensations and feelings that we experience in the embodied state of aliveness are the closest thing to “truth” that we can access. When we accept all that we feel in our own embodied experience, there is nothing to reject and an authentic process of true integration takes place. Embodied experience can only happen here and now, in the present moment. This is the place where our deepest form of intelligence—the embodied, organic animal intelligence-resides and this is the place that any teaching must be assimilated and integrated into, if it is to be fully processed into a living, breathing, authentic truth. When our knowledge and our actions are integrated at this level, we are the most whole that we can be. The true experience of union and the deepest understanding of any teaching can only happen in the subjective state of embodied aliveness.

When teaching the yama and niyama of Patanjali or the panchasila of Buddhism, I attempt to do so in a way that encourages empowered decision making based on one’s own internal experience. Most religious and spiritual teachings contain some form of a list of “dos and don’ts”, and they are often preached as a list of commandments. Telling someone “not to kill” or “not to steal” seems reasonable enough, but if we do it in a way that promotes blind acceptance, without integration of that understanding at an embodied, feeling based level, then we still fall into the traps and dangers of preaching.

Interpretations of ethical teachings vary considerably and interpretations are necessarily rooted in the cultural conditioning of the interpreter. To avoid killing or violence, for example, seems simple enough on the surface, yet when we examine it more deeply, it becomes somewhat ambiguous. The process of being alive involves the consumption of other elements of the web of life. This necessarily means that we are involved in killing and violence on a daily basis. Is it acceptable to kill animals for food? What about plants? Or fungi? Is it okay to kill trees to use as building material for a home? What about to use as toilet paper? Should we kill bacteria that thrive on our soiled dishes and would make us sick if we consumed them and allowed them to proliferate inside our bodies? Where we draw the line to discern which forms of killing and violence are morally acceptable, and which are not, is somewhat arbitrary. Should we allow the preaching of a particular culture, scriptural interpretation or preacher dictate where this line is drawn for us? Or should we allow ourselves to be informed by our own internal sensation based intelligence in terms of which actions are appropriate or inappropriate?

The late ecophilosopher Arne Naess discussed a similar type of dilemma his book, “The Ecology of Wisdom”. He described the situation of a person struggling with the ethics of an act which is perceived to be morally wrong in the context of his cultural conditioning. This person struggles deeply against his subjective feeling based intelligence, which wants to engage in the act. He ultimately wins the struggle and stops himself from engaging in the act. He then consoles himself that he can “sleep well at night” because he “did the right thing”. But, did he really do the right thing, by suppressing some aspect of his own intuitive intelligence and wisdom so that he could remain in line with the moral preaching of his culture? Naess goes on to make a distinction between “acting ethically” and “acting beautifully”. He defines “acting ethically” as shaping one’s behaviour to be in line with the ethical standards of one’s culture, regardless of whether this honours and acknowledges the intelligence of one’s embodied subjective experience. He defines “acting beautifully” as allowing one’s own embodied feeling based intelligence to inform one’s behaviour, regardless of whether that behaviour falls within the parameters of the ethical expectations of one’s culture (I’ve paraphrased his definitions to fit into the context of this essay). The question then becomes: “Did you act ethically, and therefore preserve the preaching of your culture at the cost of repressing and denying the teaching of your own embodied intelligence? Or did you act beautifully, and follow the wisdom of your own embodied intelligence, regardless of whether you received the approval of your culture for doing so?”

Preaching prioritizes the dictates of a cultural or social entity over the subjective intelligence of the individual entity. Teaching prioritizes the subjective intelligence of the individual entity over the dictates of the cultural or social entity. Ideally, the two would be in balance, where the needs of an individual, as informed by his embodied sensation-based intelligence are somewhat consistent with the needs of his culture or social body. If there is excessive dissonance between the embodied intelligence of the individual and the standards of the social organization or culture, then it is likely a sign that the individual needs to bring about some bigger life changes in his interpersonal relationships, so that he can find a situation where the truth of his own intuitive sensation-based intelligence is more balanced with the standards and expectations of his culture or social body. In turn, the culture or social body can also attempt to harmonize their expectations and standards with those that are experienced at the feeling-based, embodied level of its individual members. If a culture or social organization can succeed in doing this, then it can be said to be teaching its members rather than preaching to them.

I attempt to teach yama and niyama as tools of embodiment. For me, they are not a set of rules to be preached or blindly followed, based on someone else’s interpretation of how they apply to our personal life situations. In my interpretation, yama and niyama refer to potential situations in our ongoing relationships with our environment where we may need to bring more embodied awareness to how we feel inside, at the sensation-based level, when considering how we should conduct ourselves within those social relationships. Rather than preaching a black and white / right or wrong approach, I suggest a process of deeper sensitization and allowing one’s felt experience to guide one’s actions in the world. In this way, we take responsibility for our actions and relationships by continuously staying in touch with how we feel inside, and we use this embodied awareness as feedback for modifying our actions and relationships. How yama and niyama apply to our personal life situations is always going to be contextual, and we should be able to make our own decisions, informed by our subjective, embodied intelligence with confidence.

Ultimately, being taught will promote a union of the layers of the self, with the new knowledge consolidated and assimilated in the subjective intelligence at the embodied, feeling level of experience. This generates empowerment and wholeness of the self and leads to healthy and functional relationships with the world. Being preached to will promote fragmentation of the self through a rejection or repression of one’s embodied, feeling-based experience. This leads to disempowerment of the self and propagates the dysfunctional social structures that rule human societies today.

Acknowledgements

• Thank you to Clayton Loizou for helpful editing and suggestions about the article.

“I’ve been studying low back pain for the last 50 years of my life and if anyone says they know where low back pain comes from, they’re full of shit”

– Alf Nachemson, quoted in the above video.

I agree with the message of this video completely. After watching it, I felt compelled to write more about my interpretation of pain, injury, pathology and healing, especially in the context of the Ashtanga Yoga practice.

The structurally transformative process which arises from correct, long term application of the Ashtanga Yoga system of practice necessarily involves some experience of discomfort. Many practitioners don’t understand the inevitability of these unpleasant phases of the Ashtanga experience. Rather than accepting and patiently working through the discomfort using the method of practice, some practitioners immediately seek help from outside modalities in an attempt to eliminate the pain or discomfort as quickly as possible. Fortunately, the treatment they seek is usually not as dramatic as surgery, but the surgical tourism industry in countries like India does serve a number of Ashtangis who want a quick and easy diagnosis and treatment solution for their knee pain.

When a student reports pain to me, my general advice almost always falls along the lines of “Continue to practice. Back off somewhat, perhaps we’ll need to temporarily modify your practice, don’t push into the pain, but continue to practice.” Depending on the characteristics of the individual situation, I’ll probably have some more specific advice to go along with that, but in general terms that about covers it. With continued careful practice, if the pain doesn’t get worse, or it moves around to other areas of the body, or it spreads out, or it slowly improves, then I generally feel confident to tell the practitioner that they don’t need to do anything else. They shouldn’t seek other forms of manual therapy, nor do they need to consult a doctor and have medical scans. With continued intelligent and aware practice, it should work itself out and resolve itself.

The pain which arises out of daily, long term Ashtanga practice often represents a deeper reorganizing and recalibrating of the tension and structural patterns of the bones, tissues and fascia. This reorganization is actually a sign of correct practice and is a desirable result. Those who don’t want significant internal transformation shouldn’t practice this system of yoga.

Tension is an inherent property of a healthy human being, and of any stable structure in the universe. Tension is a necessary condition for life itself. Disorder and chaos are the path of least resistance (and least tension) in the universe. For a complex structure (whether it is a molecule, a human being, a society, or a solar system) to remain stable and not degenerate into chaos and disorder, some organized force – involving tension – is an essential property of the system. Complete elimination of tension is therefore not the goal of our practice. A human being that is free of all tension is a human being that has experienced death and disintegration. The component parts of the dead human being are free to disintegrate into chaos and disorder, until they are absorbed by other stable structural systems. Death is the only true state of freedom from tension.

The goal of our practice is to reorganize and recalibrate the tension patterns in our body-mind system so that we can have a more functional and stable relationship with the environment which we live in and are a part of. The state of bandha could be considered as the optimal state of tension for the human being. When opposing forces are balanced in bandha, the tension moves to the deepest “structural” layers of the body, such as the pelvic floor and the key supportive muscles for all of the joints, which are “designed” to hold us steady and stable in relationship to the earth and its field of gravity. In bandha, the tension is largely removed from the sleeve muscles, which are “designed” to be free and ready to respond to the need for movement. Hence the state of bandha is a dynamic balance between the forces of tension and release (or, bondage and freedom). This creates healthy and functional tensegrity patterning within the human structure. For me, this functional repatterning is the goal of asana practice.

We can think of ourselves as having two temporally distinct, but interconnected postural states. One of these states is the transient postural state which we happen to occupy at any given moment in time, throughout our daily lives. This is a relatively superficial and temporary postural state, and largely reflects a relatively temporary and superficial action (or inaction) of the muscles and tissues of our body. It is also reflective of our emotional state at that given moment. The other postural state which we can consider is the long term postural tendency, which reflects the deeper structural habits and patterns that we have adopted over our entire lives. This postural tendency is a cumulative result of the habits we generate through each of our transient postural states throughout our lives, along with the genetic tendencies which we are predisposed to from birth. This long term postural tendency could be thought of as a deeper and more crystallized (though not impossible to change) state of tension patterning within the human system.

Postural states reflect tensegrity patterns which organize the forces of tension and release within the body-mind structure. The momentary transient and the long term postural states influence and inform each other in a reciprocal relationship. Each momentary transient postural state provides an input into the human system which influences the more crystallized form of the long term postural tendency. If the transient state is similar in nature to the long term tendency, then the input of the transient state will strengthen and support the structure of the long term tendency. If, however, the transient state contains aspects which are different in nature from the long term tendency, then the input of the transient state will tend to induce a shift or change in the tensegrity patterning of the long term tendency. The causal relationship between the two types of postural state also flows the other way. The patterning of the long term tendency will also influence and inform how we hold ourselves in each momentary transient state.

In my view, the role of asana – vinyasa practice is to use conscious awareness in the transient postural states of each asana and vinyasa that we occupy during our daily practice, so that these transient postural states provide tensegrity patterning inputs which are healthier and more functional in nature than the patterning of our long term postural tendency. When this happens, the transient states of each asana and vinyasa of our practice encourage and induce a shift and transformation towards a healthier and more functional posture in the long term structural tendency.

When we do this day after day, using muscular strength, flexibility and awareness to provide the same repetitive tensegrity patterning inputs of the particular Ashtanga series that we are working on, the tensegrity patterns of the deeper structures of the human system, which reflect the longer term postural tendencies, eventually must shift and change in order to support the new transient movement patterns which we are regularly engaging in.

If we practice each posture and vinyasa with some degree of the balanced energetic state of bandha in place, then over time, our long term postural tendency will also tend to reflect the properties of bandha more naturally and readily. In a state of bandha we are in a more harmonious and functional relationship with the field of gravity. For example, when we stand in samasthiti with bandha in place, we tend to stand somewhat taller and more effectively spatially organized than we would if we were simply standing around, unaware of our posture. Practitioners who apply bandha well in each of the transient momentary postures (asanas and vinyasas) of their daily practice will actually grow taller over time. I have experienced this myself. My natural resting posture is now at least several centimeters taller than it was before I started daily yoga practice. I have also observed this happen in some long term students of mine.

This process of shifting and changing the long term structural tensegrity patterns of the body through asana practice is where the transformational pain arises, which many long term practitioners experience from time to time. The long term effects of shifting the deeper tensegrity patterns are healthy and beneficial, but the short term experience of getting from here to there can be uncomfortable. Imagine what has to change deep within the structural organization patterns of your body for you to grow taller. It is unlikely that this would happen without some pain or discomfort along the way.

Continued practice through these periods of discomfort is the best (and often the only) way to resolve this discomfort. By continuing to provide the inputs of the transient postural states of our daily practice, we encourage the patterning of the long term structural tendency to continue to evolve, until it eventually reaches a new stable conformation. There is an “intelligence” and functionality in the pain we are experiencing in this transition period. If we halt the process by stopping practice, or confuse the process by adding other, different inputs (such as resequencing the asanas, bodywork, manual therapy, surgery, etc), then the process gets sabotaged and in some cases this can make the pain worse, or simply transfer it to other parts of the body-mind system. If, however, we continue to provide the familiar inputs of our daily practice, the evolution in our long term postural tendency will continue to move with the intelligence of these familiar inputs of the Ashtanga series. Eventually, the longer term postural tendency will settle into a new, stable conformation. Once this new stable conformation is reached, the transformational pain generally subsides naturally. Sometimes the pain subsides gradually, getting a little bit weaker each day as the body continues to shift and stabilize into its new structural state. Sometime the pain disappears instantaneously, perhaps during some movement in our practice or perhaps while we are at rest later in the day.

Whether the pain dissipates gradually or instantaneously, it is continued practice (ie. continuing to provide the same transient structural inputs which have induced the shift) which will bring about this resolution. This advice can be counter intuitive to what many practitioners (and the general population) tend to believe. Upon experiencing pain most people tend to feel that they should A) stop practice for a while and B) consult a physician.

A physician will almost always prescribe rest and recommend avoiding yoga practice until things get better. For the reasons I have already mentioned, this will not likely provide effective long term resolution. A modern physician may also order x-rays and scans, which may confirm disc degeneration, herniation, or ligament, tendon or cartilage tears. As the above video states, a significant percentage of the “normal” population also have some or all of these “pathologies”, yet they don’t have any significant pain symptoms. Some degree of structural “pathology” is actually “normal”. Yet, if an Ashtanga practitioner (or anyone, whether they are a practitioner or not) who is in pain receives the news that their scans have confirmed some structural pathology, then the person will necessarily create a network of physical and psychological labels and restrictions around their pain. They will likely limit and restrict their practice and general life movements based on intellectual theories, rather than on phenomenological experience. The movements which they do allow themselves to perform will be done with fear and trepidation, with the anxiety of making their fragile condition worse. This mentality and set of physical restrictions will not promote healing in most cases.

Ashtanga is a systems oriented type of practice. It is therefore important to try to understands its effects from a systems oriented perspective. The systems perspective of nature and the universe has begun to develop and evolve relatively recently. It is slowly gaining traction in the scientific community, and I believe that it is an accurate and realistic way to understand life and and the universe. It trumps the reductionist methodology which has been the pervading feature of both Western and Eastern approaches to understanding reality for most of the past several thousand years.

Reductionism attempts to understand something by breaking it down into its component parts and then examining the properties of those parts. It looks to the properties of the parts as being the root causes for the properties of the whole. This is what Western science has done for hundreds of years, and this is also what Eastern religions and philosophies, such as Buddhism, do. While both Western science and Buddhist philosophy have yielded accurate, valuable and useful perspectives on reality, they have not effectively explained everything that we experience.

Reductionism is also frequently used to analyze and understand asana practice and its effects on the human system. One of the most well known asana reductionists was BKS Iyengar. Mr. Iyengar took the Ashtanga system, which he learned from Krishnamacharya, and analytically broke it down into its component parts. He took the asanas out of their systematic relationships with one another through the vinyasa system, and turned each asana into a system of its own. He then took each individual asana, and broke it down into its component parts of the actions of each individual muscle, bone, etc. He then noted the effects on each individual body part in each individual asana, and how these effects contributed to the overall functioning and health of the human being. Not surprisingly, Mr. Iyengar’s work became of great interest to the modern medical community, which operates on the same reductionist paradigm.

Mr. Iyengar was a great innovator, and his work certainly yielded some valuable results and perspective. However, some important results and perspective were also lost through his abandonment of the systems view of Ashtanga Yoga. My own personal journey, from being trained as an Iyengar practitioner and teacher to becoming an Ashtanga practitioner and teacher, is that the systems perspective and experience of Ashtanga practice is deeper, richer, and more encompassing than the reductionist Iyengar technique. I value my experience with Iyengar Yoga. I am glad that I had it for four years in the beginning of my yoga journey, but there is a reason that I have been a daily Ashtanga practitioner for the subsequent 14 years. People sometimes tell me that they are drawn to me as teacher because I have an “Iyengar background” and they want that focus on alignment. My response to them is that the two systems are actually incompatible, and cannot be practiced together. I don’t use any alignment principles, props, or techniques from my Iyengar training in my Ashtanga practice and teaching. Alignment is certainly a feature of the Ashtanga system, but it is a very different perspective on alignment. In the Ashtanga practice, alignment is integrated into a systems perspective and experience.

Returning to pain and pathology, an example of a reductionist approach to pain experienced by an asana practitioner might be to obtain medical scans or use other diagnostic methods to find some pathology in one particular muscle, joint, ligament, etc. Upon discovering (or theorizing) some localized pathology, the experience of pain in asana practice would be understood to be directly caused by that pathology. The treatment would then be to remove that pathology – either through surgery, or less dramatically, through some form of deep tissue release or targeted manual therapy. There would also likely be a number of significant changes made to the person’s asana practice, based on the diagnosis of pathology in some body part.

Another reductionist approach in asana could be exemplified by a teacher telling a student “your knee pain is caused by your tight hips”, and to then prescribe a set of supplementary “hip opening” exercises to be done in conjunction with the regular asana practice. I’ve seen numerous practitioners who believe that “opening the hips more” or “opening the shoulders more” will be the cure to all of the issues which they face in their practice. I am frequently asked by students who are struggling with some particular asana “which body part” is stiff or stuck or needs to open more, and is therefore responsible for their inability to perform the asana.

A more Eastern influenced form of reductionism would be to characterize all aspects of bodily pain, tension, or “blockage” as being psychological in origin. In this view, the mind is seen as being the root cause of all bodily experience and any pain in the body is reduced to some dysfunction or blockage in the psychological realm. The poor student is then left to haplessly believe that their bodily torment is due to some mental issue which they have no real way of addressing.

The key theme in all of the above examples, is the reduction of the holistic experience of the state of a person’s body-mind to a single root cause, and then to assume that the holistic state of the person’s body-mind can be “fixed” by simply changing or fixing that one root cause. This is the essence of reductionism.

A human being is an extremely complex system. There are 11 organ systems in the human body (skeletal, muscle, nervous, integumentary, endocrine, circulatory, lymphatic, digestive, respiratory, urinary, reproductive), as well as various layers of “non-physical” experience, such as the cognitive, emotional, energetic, etc. All of these systems and layers of a human being are interconnected and coordinated in an unfathomably complex network of dynamic relationships and feedback loops.

When this human body-mind system places itself into the transient postural states of a particular asana or vinyasa, there will be an effect of all of these physical, and non-physical systems of the human being, as well as in the network of connections and relationships between all of these systems. The overall effect is a shift in the entirety of the state of the human being. This shift in the whole being is known as an “emergent property” and it cannot be explained by looking at the properties of any of the component body-mind parts, or by looking at how the asana affects any of those single component parts. Emergent properties of a dynamic and complex system literally “emerge” out of the complex dynamics of the relationships between all of the component parts. The key point to understand is that the emergent characteristics of the whole are a result of the properties and dynamics of the relationships between the parts. The emergent characteristics of the whole are not features of the parts themselves. These emergent features can only be understood by looking at the system as a dynamic whole.

A single Ashtanga series, from ekam position of surya namaskar A up to utpluthi, should also be thought of as a system. Practicing any of the Ashtanga series in their entirety will give certain effects, features and results, which cannot be found or explained by looking at the characteristics any of the individual asanas in that series. They cannot even be explained by looking at all of the individual asanas in the series. The effects that one experiences by practicing a particular Ashtanga series are emergent properties which emerge out of the relationships between all of the asanas and vinyasas in the series taken together and they can only be understood by perceiving the series as a complex and dynamic system which is a whole in itself.

A system can vary in its relative stability. When the dynamic relationships between the parts of a system are changing or shifting significantly – such as when the long term postural tendency is undergoing significant shifting – the system can be said to be unstable and in a state of transition. Whatever emergent features – such as pain – the system is experiencing at that time should be thought of as properties of the whole system, not properties of any of the parts of the system. The pain is a property which emerges out of the restructuring of the relationships and feedback loops between the parts of the system, as the system transitions from one structural state to another structural state. The pain is not a symptom of any one root cause or “dysfunction” of any component part of the system.

I suggest that in many cases of pain or discomfort experienced through long term Ashtanga practice, adopting this perspective is the most accurate way of understanding and dealing with what is taking place. The system of the Ashtanga series is exerting an effect which is causing a shift or change in the tensegrity dynamics of the relationships between the parts of the system of the whole human being. The pain is something that emerges out of the shifting of this complex and dynamic set of relationships. The pain is not a property of any one part of the system and should not be attempted to be addressed through a perspective of linear causation.

This brings us back to the quote from Alf Nachemson which I put at the beginning of this article. No matter how learned one may be in anatomy and physiology, I don’t think that anyone can conclusively say that they understand exactly where a person’s pain is coming from – especially in this type of situation. This is because the pain is not due to any one root pathology in any one part of the body. The pain is simply a reflection of the shifting relationship dynamics between all the parts of the whole human system. How these patterns are structured, and how they are changing, is far too complex for any human mind to completely understand.

The resolution to the pain necessarily involves retaining a systems perspective. In cases of “transformational pain”, the system of the Ashtanga series should continue to be practiced with as little modification to the dynamics of the system as possible. This way, the inputs that the practice is exerting on the human system remain consistent, and the intelligent reorganization process which the practice is inducing retains some stability. The human body-mind system will eventually imbibe and embody the transient daily inputs of the Ashtanga series in the more stable long term postural state which it is moving towards. Continued intelligent movement will resolve the pain. Restriction and reductionist oriented intervention probably will not.

In my 18 years of daily yoga practice (14 of which have been Ashtanga), I’ve gone through many periods of pain, which have lasted anywhere from a few days to the better part of a year. Some of this pain has been severe, and accompanied by serious mobility restrictions. In most cases, these periods of pain were a by-product of a deeper restructuring/recalibration of my body’s relationship to gravity, as I have described in this article. Most of the time, the pain could be localized to a general area of the body, but usually not to a specific structure (ie. a particular muscle, tendon, bone, joint, etc). My approach to dealing with these periods has always been the same: Pull back to a more basic version of my daily practice. Often this would mean a less advanced series, or even a partial series. I would practice as much of the series as felt energetically sustainable, even if it was still accompanied by pain or discomfort. Often, my decision on which series to use “therapeutically” or how much of the series to practice was intuitive. I find that decisions based on systems thinking often feel more intuitive, because they require a different form of cognitive understanding than the more analytical reductionist approach which we are habituated to in most modern societies around the world. Generally, if I had to modify more than one or two postures or vinyasas in that series which I had chosen to practice, I would stop my practice at that point and go into the finishing sequence. Using this method, day by day and week by week, I would always see a gradual improvement. Improvement is defined as an increase in mobility and a decrease in pain and (equally importantly) an increase in a sense of confidence and mental/energetic stability and vitality. This could also be simplified by saying improvement is defined as a movement towards stabilization in both body and mind. As my condition improved, I would add postures and series back to my practice until I arrived back at my standard normal practice again. Some days, it might be just one inch more of space in one particular posture that could be taken without inducing pain, but if I paid attention, there were always some signs of improvement and usually on a daily basis. The pain would often move around, shifting to different places in my body, spreading out, until eventually it would disappear completely. Other times, it would happen more dramatically. I have had experiences where very serious pain completely vanished from the body instantaneously, after performing a particular posture or movement in the course of my practice that day. Whether the “recovery” was gradual or sudden, the technique was the same: careful, aware and embodied movement, to whatever degree of capacity I had at the time, encouraged and actively led to the eventual resolution of the pain.

One particularly interesting experience came during my first few months of my Ashtanga practice in 2004. I had a lot of energy and enthusiasm at that time in my life, and I was practicing with an older style teacher who generally didn’t stop practitioners at the asanas they couldn’t yet perform fully. Due to my Iyengar background, I could already do many of the postures, so within a few months of beginning Ashtanga practice, I was doing all of primary and all of intermediate series as a 3.5 hour daily practice. Needless to say, I was in a significant amount of pain and experiencing dramatic structural changes. I watched the coming and going of different pains and the resulting structural shifts in my body with great interest and curiosity.

When I had begun practicing Iyengar yoga some four or five years prior to that, I learned how to practice dropping back from a standing position into a backbend on a beach in Northern Goa. I wasn’t ready for that movement, but after watching a flexible girl in our class do it, I wanted to try. My teacher obliged and encouraged me to try. Through sheer will power, I managed to arch back and land successfully in a backbend. It was exhilarating and empowering. Two days later, when our class was “working on” backbends again, I wanted to try dropping back again. I managed to succeed, and this time my teacher came over and pulled me back up to a standing position. We went on to practice standing postures, and I felt a pain in between two vertebrae of my lumbar spine. The pain grew stronger over the course of that day and ended up staying with me for the rest of my four month stay in Goa that year. It also brought up a lot of negative emotions. Eventually it resolved itself completely.

During the first few months of my Ashtanga experience in 2004, my nemesis became kapotasana. It was very difficult for me to catch my heels, and every day when I was about to arch back into kapotasana, my teacher would appear in front of me and pull my hands directly to my heels from the air. It was always terrifying, but once it was done it felt exhilarating. It happened every day. My teacher could be on the other side of the room as I was preparing, but as soon as I started to arch back, he would magically appear in front of me and pull my hands to my heels. The transformative effects of the practice on my entire being during that time were profound, and that one particular daily experience of kapotasana seemed to be at the heart of everything that was going on. Sometimes, I would sit in meditation later in the day, and spend an hour with my eyes closed, meditating on my experience of kapotasana. Over and over again, I would replay in my mind, in my nerves, and in my body what it felt like to have one hand, then the other hand on my heels, my elbows down and then…boom…that rush. Like a tape looped on repeat, over and over again. It was all part of the deeper integration of the experience into every layer of my being and the transformative process that was taking place.

Eventually, I started to feel some minor back pain between the same vertebrae that I had hurt years before in my Iyengar beach drop-back experience. Day by day, the back pain grew worse. I began to reexperience the same emotions which I had felt when I hurt my back in Goa, and I grew increasingly fearful and anxious when I prepared for kapotasana each day. Still, the energetic rush that ensued after being pulled into kapotasana made it all okay. One morning, I woke up and my back was very sore. It felt exactly like it had after the injury in Goa, and I also felt very depressed. “Great”, I thought. “I’ve arrived back here. At least four months of back pain….” I forced myself to go to class and practice, but I made a strong and solemn determination that I wouldn’t perform kapotasana for some days. “When he comes over, I’ll tell him I can’t….”

I kept an eye on my teacher as I practiced the postures leading up to kapotasana. Sure enough, when the time came he appeared in front of me. “No, no, not today”, I said firmly. “Just go. Breathe”, he replied. “No, my back, it really hurts…”, I said. “Go!”, he commanded impatiently. I sighed and started to arch. I felt the familiar pain between my vertebrae and he went to grab my first hand to pull it to my heel. I panicked and managed to yell out, “No!” I resisted his pull and tried to come back up. “Shut up and breathe, don’t cry”, he hissed from above me. He kept pulling and I panicked even more and started flailing around until I had wormed my way out of the posture and out of his grasp and collapsed in a heap on the ground. It was such a scene that everyone in the room had stopped practicing to look over and see what was going on. My teacher stood over me shaking his head disappointingly. Another teacher who was practicing close to me called over, “He needs to squeeze his legs more so that he doesn’t get back pain.” My teacher looked up and responded loudly so that everyone could hear, “Huh! There’s nothing wrong with his legs or his back, he’s just got a WEAK MIND today, that’s all.”

His technique worked. From my collapsed and disempowered state of body and mind on the ground, I suddenly felt a rush of anger and energy surge through me. How dare he call me weak minded! I’ll show him! I quickly got back up and muttered “All right, I’ll do it!” He smiled amusingly and stepped back to watch me. I took the preparatory position and unhesitatingly started to arch back into kapotasana. Instead of fear and trepidation, I felt a strong sense of pride and confidence. There was no back pain and I reached back and caught my heel with my first hand without help for the first time ever. My teacher then stepped in and gave me a tiny bit of help on the second hand. I put my elbows down. “See?” He said from above, “Now what was all that crying and fussing for?” The pain between my vertebrae had completely vanished and it never returned.

The above example is dramatic, and I certainly don’t recommend or apply these kinds of methods in general. Nonetheless, it shows how quickly and suddenly the tensegrity state of a system can shift and change, and how many different factors there are which contribute to the internal relationship patterns in a particular state of body-mind. In this particular case, the shifting of a mental and energetic perspective contributed strongly to the crystallizing of a new and healthier physical structural pattern in my body.

Movement heals. Fear and limitation do not. I’ve also experienced this outside of the yoga practice. When I was in my early 20s, before I had started practicing yoga, I injured my left groin while on a multi-day backpacking trip. A friend and I were attempting to cover what seemed like a never-ending amount of distance over a particularly challenging section of terrain on the West Coast of Canada. We had already taken several hours longer than we had anticipated to cover the distance required to arrive at our next destination. The only way I could will my body to keep going was to imagine that my legs were like powerful pistons, pumping up and down into the earth. Somehow, the image allowed me to ignore the muscular fatigue that had set in long before. We finally arrived near dusk at the beach where we were to camp for the night and we both threw off our heavy packs and collapsed in a heap on the ground. We lay still for a long time, enjoying the flood of endorphins rushing through our systems. When I finally got up some time later, there was a deep ache in my left groin. The pain got worse as the evening went on, and it was still there the following morning. I had no choice but to strap on my pack and walk again the following day, as our feet were the only way to get back to civilization.

The injury stayed with me for some time, and I began to grow concerned. I had plans to soon embark on my first trip outside of Canada, and I had a flight to Indonesia booked for a few weeks later. I’d never experienced such a persistent pain at that point in my young life. Eventually, I went to see a doctor. The doctor didn’t order any scans or tests, and after a brief examination told me that I would be fine in 6 – 8 weeks. I expressed my concern about my upcoming trip to Asia, as I planned to be very physically active. I wondered out loud whether I should “limit myself and rest more”. The doctor grinned broadly at me and replied “Iain – Never limit yourself, you’ll be fine.” Those words had a powerful healing effect, and filled me with confidence. I went home in a good mood and happily continued to plan for my trip. Though the pain was still there, I no longer focused on it or thought about limiting myself because of it. A few week later, I had landed in Bali and the pain in my groin was completely gone.

Over the next months, I traveled through several of the Indonesian islands and eventually flew to India and began to travel around the subcontinent. I kept up my usual habit of vigorous physical activity, and the groin injury seemed to be a thing of the past. I never thought about it. I eventually wound up in Hampi. One day, I was lying on one of the giant boulders in the late afternoon, enjoying the sensation of the heat that still radiated out of the sun-warmed rock and into my body, even though the sun had faded into the horizon some time earlier. I was completely relaxed and at ease and peace. Suddenly, I felt a “sproing” in my groin and the pain returned, just like that. I was stunned. I hadn’t been very active at all that day, and in the moment that the pain returned, I was lying down, completely relaxed, enjoying a nice heat radiation massage from the rock. I walked back to my guest house worried, and my concern grew as the pain persisted over the next few days.

I immediately defaulted to the dogma of limiting my activities again, figuring that resting my body would be the wisest thing to do. I decided to make a beach my next destination, where I could really relax. I had plans to go to the Himalayas a short time later, where I hoped to do a lot of hiking in the mountains. I also had plans to return to Canada following that, where I would work as a treeplanter for several months, saving up enough money to travel again the following year. Treeplanting had been my main source of income for the preceding 3 or 4 years. Treeplanting in Canada is a particularly intense and grueling job, both physically and mentally. It involves living in a tent in the Northern Canadian wilderness for months at a time, spending 10 – 12 hours each day planting saplings in areas that had previously been logged. A good planter could plant up to 3000 trees every day, and earn a decent amount of money doing so. Of course, to do this required a healthy and strong body. An injured leg would be a big obstacle to my plan.

I took my plans to relax on the beach seriously, and for one month I did extremely little aside from lying around, and occasionally swimming. The condition of my leg changed very little during this time. I was growing more and more worried, and pictured myself returning home with very little money and an inability to work at my job of choice, which was necessary to continue with the lifestyle I wanted to live. It was not a happy vision. My anxiety around my physical condition grew.

Eventually, I decided to travel up to the Himalayas even though I didn’t feel much better. The hot season was setting in, and I wanted to move to a more comfortable climate. I stopped in New Delhi on my way up and visited a doctor. The doctor gave me the standard advice of resting completely and taking painkillers. He was quite adamant about his advice and I left his office feeling even worse. I ignored his advice and carried on up to Dharamsala and made my way up to Dharamkot village, where I would ultimately spend the better part of the subsequent two years.

Dharamkot village is perched on the side of a steep mountain, and at that time was accessible by foot path only. Moving anywhere, for any reason, meant walking up and down the steep slope. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my leg felt no worse for this dramatic increase in activity. The mountain environment was fresh and intoxicating to me and I was filled with vitality and energy and a desire to hike and explore deep into the mountains. I began to gather information about some of the nearby trekking routes, while also bitterly reminding myself that I was in no shape to tackle them.

After some time, I heard about a famous practitioner of Tibetan Medicine in Dharamsala named Yeshi Dhonden. Curious and hopeful, I went to his clinic one morning, took a number, and sat in the crowded waiting room. When my turn came, I went in to see the doctor. I described my groin injury to him via his translator, and he took my pulse and then placed his fingers on my groin. “The doctor has found a lump”, reported his translator. “A lump?” I asked. “Yes, an energy lump, something is blocked”, The translator replied.

He wrote a prescription for a collection of Tibetan herbs, dried and rolled into little pill shaped balls, gave me instructions on how to take them and to return for a check-up in two weeks time. He also adamantly explained “And – You must remain VERY ACTIVE while you are taking this medicine!” “Active?” I asked, “Like, walking?” “Yes!” he replied, “You must walk a lot. This will keep energy flowing into the wound, and the medicine will work much better.” I couldn’t believe this wonderful news. “Can I go trekking up the mountain?” I asked. “Oh yes”, he said, “That would be very good.”

Just as when the doctor in Canada had told me not to ever limit myself, I left the clinic of Yeshi Dhonden in a wonderful mood. I felt empowered and confident. I had my bag of Tibetan pills and immediately made plans to go trekking up the mountain. I spent the next six weeks in Dharamsala, hiking, trekking, and also practicing yoga for the first time in my life. I visited Yeshi Dhonden for a check-up every two weeks and would receive a new bag of herbal pills and the news that the doctor was very happy with my progress and that I would soon be completely cured. By the time I flew back to Canada, with enough herbal pills to last me for another month, the pain had vanished. When I started the difficult work of treeplanting a short time later, the pain reemerged briefly and jumped from my left groin over to my right hip for a days, but then it disappeared and never returned, and I continued on my journey as planned.

In the above video, Mr. Lehman describes one important reason that I don’t obsess over what I call “micro-alignment” principles in teaching yoga.

There are some branches of yoga, as well as some outspoken teachers within the Ashtanga fold, who strongly insist on very rigid and dogmatic postural alignment. Some of these teachers tout their training in fields such as physiotherapy, kinesiology, etc, as giving them greater authority to dictate how the traditional postures should or shouldn’t be performed. They generally take a “one size fits all” approach to postural alignment, believing that there is a right way and a wrong way, and that everybody must conform to what they have decided is the right way.

I had the misfortune of working with one of these teachers for a number of years, and it was neither a healthy or pleasant experience. I experienced deep physical trauma from being forced into rigid and unnatural alignment patterns. And, I was much less subject to her dictates than most of the other students were.

As a teacher, I observe the practices of other students who come from extensive training with these types of teachers, and the tendency I see is that they don’t have any less pain than other students. In fact, in many cases they have more pain than others, and their movements tend to be rigid, stressed and lacking in freedom or fluidity. Their approach to the practice tends to be intellectual, rather than intuitive or embodied. They tend to have very little confidence in their own practices or their own bodies, often because these teachers have spent a lot of time pointing what is wrong with their bodies. Mistrust is a key feature in their practice experience, and probably also in their experience of life.

We humans come in all different shapes and sizes. One of the most beautiful things about the Ashtanga practice is witnessing how people of different body shapes and sizes, strengths and weaknesses, can all find their own unique way to move through the standard postures and vinyasas of the Ashtanga series. My goal as a teacher tends to be to see how I can stimulate and inspire people to have enough confidence in themselves to find their own way though the postures and movements using the tools that they naturally have, rather than pointing out what is wrong with, or what they have to change about their bodies.

When I do adjust alignment, it tends to be an attempt to bring them into a deeper experience of one of the bandhas, or to change very inefficient movement patterns. I don’t necessarily see them as “corrections”, but more as a suggestion to try a different way of moving. When a student complains about pain, I will sometimes make more extensive adjustments in alignment, but as Mr. Lehman states in the video, this is often more to break up a chronic pattern that has become stuck, rather than judge any particular pattern as being absolutely right or wrong.

We will tend to feel most healthy when we are practicing, and moving through life in general, with a sense of embodiment, self – confidence and freedom to be who we are and to honour the instinctive and innate patterns of our own unique and natural body structure.

Other language translations

• The Russian translation of this article can be found here. Thank you to Anna Glinko for the translation.

This article was originally published on my Spacious Yoga facebook page in March, 2017.

Bandha naturally emerges within a person when the two polarities of the spectrum of any given aspect of our existence are in relative balance and communication with one another. If we stand in the middle of a high mountain ridge, we can clearly see what lies on either side of the ridge. Similarly, in the balanced state of bandha we can easily feel the qualities of either end of the spectrum of our potential experience. From this vantage point, we have maximum freedom and spaciousness in our perspective and in our energy flow. From the middle ground, we can move in either direction at will, and hence have the greatest range of options available to us.
The above photograph of Trikonasana B (which is not staged and was taken during a regular practice session) illustrates the physical dynamics of mula and uddiyana bandha nicely. This is one of my favorite postures for feeling the dynamics of bandha at work.

Mula bandha arises when the opposing forces around the pelvis are in a dynamic balance with one another. In Trikonasana B, the pelvis and the spine are oriented parallel to the ground. The legs do the work to pull the pelvic bones backwards, away from the camera, along the axis of the earth. The right hand and the deeper muscles of the torso work to pull the spine and torso in the opposite direction, culminating in the crown of the head reaching towards the camera, along the axis of the earth.

If you look carefully at the above picture, you can see that the crown of my head and my pelvic bones are well aligned and connected with each other, are moving in opposite directions and the movement of this force is parallel to the axis of the earth. There is maximum length and space through the midline of my body. This is mula bandha.

The internal feeling that arises in this state is one of traction and suction through the midline. The pelvic floor comes online without any conscious effort or squeezing, and feels as if it is naturally being “suctioned” towards the crown of my head. This frees up energy to flow through the center of my body, along what is also known as the sushumna nadi. This energy flow can be tangibly felt, especially when the breath is slow, deep and full, which serves to brighten and deepen the subtler internal sensations.

An important point to understand is that the tone in the pelvic floor is a natural result of the geometry of the posture. There is no conscious engaging or squeezing of the muscle, and doing so would actually inhibit or block the free flow of energy and breath.

Uddiyana bandha manifests when there is a dynamic balance between the opposing forces around the core of the upper body. If you pay attention to my arms in this picture, you can see how this is achieved. The arms are working perpendicular the axis of the earth, along the axis of gravity – so uddiyana is manifesting in the opposite plane that mula is manifesting, if we consider the reality of the body in two dimensions.

My right and left arm are well aligned with one another, are working along the axis of gravity, and are moving in opposite directions. The right hand is making a full and firm contact with the ground, and the rebounding/reactionary force of the ground is being transmitted up my right arm, through the core of my upper body, and into the left arm, which is reaching up towards the sky. The energy between my right hand and my left hand flows freely and without blockage. This is more difficult to attain than the flow of energy in mula bandha, as it does require an ability to release tension in the shoulders and upper back, which is typically where the flow of energy between the arms would get blocked.

The release of tension is the key concept to understand in both mula and uddiyana bandha. In Trikonasana B, I see many people using force and strain to attempt to crank the upper arm and shoulder backwards, instead of simply letting it relax and naturally lengthen along the axis of gravity. Once we are able to tune in to the flow of energy along the axis of gravity, and apply the downwards pressure into the earth with the bottom hand, the rest of the work is simply about letting go and creating space to allow the energy to move through. This ultimately feels relaxing and….spacious.

The net result of uddiyana bandha is that we have maximum expansion and spreading of energy in the upper body, perpendicular to the axis of expansion and spreading that mula bandha generates.

Mula and uddiyana bandha ultimately work to create space and expansion in opposite planes in our two dimensional model of the body. They are both attained through correct geometry and harnessing of the natural forces that arise between our bodies, our breath and the earth. They work together reciprocally (mula will enhance uddiyana and uddiyana will enhance mula), and they ultimately communicate with each other via the medium of the flow of relaxed and deep breathing. When mula and uddiyana are both in place, the body is free of all unnecessary tension (whatever is NOT necessary to hold the posture or state of being), the nerves relax, the breath naturally slows down and expands, and we are at the peak of our physical, mental and energetic potential as living organic beings on this planet.

Other language translations

• The Russian translation of this article can be found here. Thank you to Anna Glinko for the translation.

Other language translations

• The Korean translation of this article can be found here. Thanks to Min G Noh for the Korean translation.
• The Russian translation of this article can be found here. Thank you to Anna Glinko for the Russian translation.
• The Vietnamese translation of this article can be found here. Thank you to Hương Trang for the Vietnamese translation.