I'd been doing half-Intermediate (that's up to Eka Pada Sirsasana) all week, and struggling with the core postures (Pasasana, Kapo), which is my usual score on Intermediate. When I was doing the whole thing a year ago, I struggled with the other two core postures as well (Dwi Pada Sirsasana, Karandavasana).
Yesterday afternoon I was racing down the basement stairs to feed the cats and trying not to leave the child alone too long, and some hip spasm raced through my right side, making it very difficult to walk, squat, or do much but hobble and/or lie down. The paranoid reading is "too much Intermediate series, young Jedi!" but I see no reason for that to be true. Sure, there's a whitish-electric opening in the right hip in particular in all twists from Parivrtta Parsvakonasana and especially in Pasasana, but I had that a year ago too and it didn't tweak the hip. I prefer to see this as simply one of those random "ow, yipes" things that happens like when you "sleep wrong" on one shoulder and wind up all hung up in the midback the whole next day. It's better today but sore all throughout that hip. We'll see if it permits a Primary with Kino a week from tomorrow.
*********************
On Tuesday I'll be 41 years old. Age doesn't confront me personally, because it's low in my identity mix, but when I think about being 41 with a two-year old, it's weird, in large part because Indiana is a "get married by 22" state, and so most people with 2 year olds are my undergraduates' age. Now I'm told that even in-state, the trend is for parents to be my age, and I know that's true nationally as well. Still, it does something to my sense of myself, which I think is turn up the volume of my chronological age versus my "felt" age which is still somewhere around 26 or so. Maybe Timiji is right about that: if you want to feel 25, you take practice. I hope I can take practice tomorrow, I already miss it. And yeah I know it's Saturday, but when you're doing solo parenting over the weekend and missin practice from injury, you take it when you can take it.
**********************
The Indiana scene is changing again. I think I already introduced the players: Carol is the root of the ashtanga here, then there's me and there's Amanda, who learned in part from me (she's one of THOSE YOGIS (hahahaha!) who has a dance background and a vinyasa practice, and she's taken to ashtanga in a very fish-to-water way). Carol and Amanda teach full time, multiple classes a week. I teach two classes a week (one ashtanga, one Rocket) because I'm an art historian for money, and at four classes a semester, two yoga classes a week is pushing it, and J frequently reminds me of that.
Carol's classes are bigger than mine, and Amanda's outdoing me in press, and particularly in Facebook press where I can see this happening. I am of two minds about these things. One, my class has always been this quiet thing, sort of sitting there on "community Sunday" for whoever shows up. Make no mistake, it has regulars, it's been a dozen all month long, but sometimes when I get nervous about it, I think that it lacks Carol's more mellow "at peace" approach (even though she teaches handstands with Navasana, it's not like a "chill" class) and Amanda's more "gonna git you sucka" approach (people ask me, does she drink a lot of caffeine?).
So one voice in me is saying "be more chill or be more hyper, get with it" and another voice in me directly resists that. I do the chants (and as far as I know, I'm alone in that) and I hand out cheat sheets and I encourage people to do the whole thing when they feel ready. Last time I was leading three people and about ten people were marching through Primary with cheat sheets.
It's important to me that traditional practice be developed (insofar as I understand that, through exposure to senior teachers, of which there's not much). This means when I sub the Mysore room on Monday nights, I almost want to say, "Stop there, go to backbends" but Carol doesn't do that when she teaches, so it's a negotiation that has to be approached somehow. The scene in the city however is led most-of-Primary, which is, again, how I learned it. Not traditionally, one-at-a-time.
Some people like the chants, some try to come in late to avoid them. It's amusing. I also without fail, both in my ashtanga and my Rocket classes, close with a lesson or story or some kind of introduction to something. I'm reading the Ramayana right now (thanks Timiji) and so sometimes I will talk about dharma and being a parent; sometimes I'll talk about the silly things my kid does, and how freedom and the social co-exist; sometimes I'll talk about koshas or energy; sometimes I'll tell a story about the history of the practice or how to practice more regularly.
A thing that itches at me is that I feel a physical proximity--what you might call an intimacy--with students, particularly long-term students whom I can adjust more authoritatively because I know their practices and tendencies better, but this intimacy flees when the class ends, and I wish it wouldn't. I remember stories of the old days when Owl was with Dominic, and those conversations post-class, and THAT's the model I want, that sort of communication. Maybe I cannot channel the shakti the way that model worked, maybe I'm pipe-dreaming in that respect.
Another thing is that I've lost a hunk of practice to parenting, just in terms of energy and time, and so my "pose-garnering" is SECOND TIME, not first time, and it simply does not have the DRIVE that first-time acquisition too-often comes with. The energy with which I practice, the intention, is not that with which so many of my students practice, and the levels are different, feel different. I wish we could cross this, talk about it, really communicate. More desire for that intimacy.
People in my room who have been practicing a long time (let's call my seven years a long time, even though it isn't) have often been doing simply the same set of vinyasa moves, and haven't had the structure and demand of an ashtanga practice, so I can (as they put it) "out-pose" people with more years yoga than I have. And when that happens, I simply say that there are two things: one, the ashtanga practice sets a high bar on physical skill, and two, it asks for regular practice. Those are the two things that most often set my practice apart from others with a non-ashtanga long-term practice.
And we're back at aging. But now, aging in practice. Seven years and that all-important "loss" of ego-drive and pose-gimme, really puts some distance between me and my students. Amanda completely lacks this kind of aging mechanism; she's something like 28 and she is all drive all the time. When she does Eka Pada Sirsasana in the Monday night class, she also folds it into both Buddhasana and Kapilasana, both sides. It's pretty WOW! but also totally criminal of course. And Carol is all affirmation of everything everyone does, she has the best energy ever. So drive and affirmation are something like the two "feminine poles" of ashtanga in town, and I'm like this strange masculine pole of reserve and classical practice. I drop a few "bad lady" and "bad man" riffs in class, but mostly I don't affirm people except newcomers (because I want to ease off the sheer challenge of the movements) and I don't drive people to do the next one, I'm much more likely to press people to breathe and slow down.
Time to run to class, but this is (well, if you're me) compelling to keep processing. One's role and identity as teacher, and as parent. Parenting gets in your everything, changes completely who you are, how you are.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Monday, April 11, 2011
More and different Illness, Swenson and Teaching the Yoga
Nearly three years ago a college friend of J's was diagnosed with "3b" breast cancer (I understand cancers are numbered 1-5 in advancedness), which is well-advanced, and the type was apparently some kind of "sheeting tissue" that's hard to spot and often fatal. A double mastectomy and a bunch of chemo beat it.
At the start of April a check found cancer in her bones, and treatment began to build up ammonia in her brain, which was no good, so treatments were changed, but nothing was responding right, so they abandoned treatment and said, "You have 1-3 weeks to live." That's pretty intense; I've heard that kind of line on TV shows but never regarding anyone that I know in real life. That wound up not even being true; three days later she was gone.
J and another college friend had made plans to fly up to the northern midwest to say so long, and at 3 am the departure morning, they found out that they'd have to say goodbye to the body and not the whole person. Intense.
J said it was unreal to go in and see someone you know, who's only 42, and who has an eight-year-old, as a body in a bed. Hell even I've never had that experience.
So this changes our April. For J it ramps up her anxiety about breast cancer, predictably, but for me it gives a weird clarity on mortality (death always does that for me), it kind of clarifies my values a bit, polishes the mirror for a few days before regular life clouds it all up again.
These are the same people who put me up during the Matthew Sweeney adventure of 2008, and apparently my presence in the household is well-remembered, even by the then-six-year-old. We wrapped him up in my mat as a "yoga burrito" and we played outside with pool noodles and such and it was good times. I am remembered as the guy who integrated the yoga into everyday life, and apparently I cranked up meditation practices in the household, and I had no idea of any of this, but I like it.
So contact's going to be kept there. But what an incredible, massive sadness. The language of course is "she was taken before her time," but no Buddhist would ever say that except perhaps in euphemizing sympathy. But to reckon with being in your early 40s and having an eight-year-old, that's a world changer. What is it to die ON TIME and have THAT be what that means? Most people I know cling to an idea of "being finished" or "being just," you know, having justice. Like death "makes sense," and of course it doesn't. Not Western sense anyway.
No, I think that instead, death has to be reckoned with as always possible at any moment. My kid could be run down by a car, and that could simply happen. Any one of our airplanes (May, or mine in June, or ours later that summer) could crash and that would be it. But then one runs the risk of becoming an "oh what the hell" relativist, and that's not the point. It's a matter of setting functional ethics in the middle of that seeming relativistic nonsense.
Life does not come with justice; it comes with mortality. Any number of lessons proves this true. So our ethics, I have been saying for almost two decades, should be based on mortality. But they're not, in practice. We pack all kinds of money into the Pentagon and we melt the polar ice caps. And that's fine because it is what it is, but it doesn't help anyone suffer less.
J says that Buddhism is monastic, but I have found that all of this householding has been the best ground EVER for a Buddhist practice. We do not see eye to eye on this. J still wants fulfillment--camping, hiking, time in the Pacific Northwest. But for me, becoming a parent destroyed my whole notion of fulfillment, of escape, of play: all of that is dead and gone. "The Myth of Freedom," indeed.
And it's worth saying that my daily experience is creeping out from under that big binary: I used to want moments of play to "come back" and now more and more (but I have to balance it just right, sort of let myself get out of the way), the householding is kind of playful. Washing dishes with the child is a game, like Owl posted a while back about the headstand counting. The yoga becomes householderish, regular, sort of a "thing to do," a bit like homework. Climbing walls becomes an interesting flashback to an old skillset I hardly remember building, but it feels good to use my hands, manipulate my weight, move in space. Our love life is mediocre and spotty, and it's largely the kind of "eh" experience I used to go out of my way to avoid. But now it's par for the course; this is normal. And because it's not spectacular, not "out of the ordinary," its very ordinariness is no different from any other housework that I do.
I no longer crave the special, the unique, the far out, the "eternal buzz" via some intense experience. And I can't tell if that's because all of my intensities have been "ordinarized" or because my ordinary is quite extraordinary.
And all of that has Chogyam Trungpa written ALL OVER IT.
********************************************
Swenson. The summer yoga vacation is two weeks, Mysore-style and a weekend workshop, with four night classes (two of which are things called "Ashtanga's Greatest Hits," with poses from series 1-4). Austin Texas, end of June. Same time that Timiji's training runs, but about five hundred bucks less cash.
This and the Freeman-Swenson talk and QandA posted not long ago on Richard's site have me in good spirits about doing the yoga with Swenson and Shelley.
Traditional teachers have been something of an inspiring roadblock to me. First it was "you must drop back and stand up" which took my two years to set up, and then it was "Kapo to heels is a basic standard," which took me an additional year on top of that to set up and I'm STILL not there.
Swenson seems, all the time, to be based in people enjoying the yoga. If I can get regular practice going again, I can get the tightness out of my lateral hips and get my twists back (just like before), and I'm hoping that in Austin I can do something like Intermediate-to-Karanda. Right now it's impossible to estimate my practice: it's all over the place and pendulum-ing back and forth wildly. Some days it's only standing, but then I have an on week and recover my drops-and-stands and most of my Intermediate poses. But then I have a baby-and-work-heavy week and suddenly I can't finish Primary again. But then a Saturday class will be warm and full of people and I can bind Marichyasana D and get adjusted into a Dwi Padaish Supta Kurmasana. It's insane.
Anyway: Swenson said a pack of interesting things in that closing talk with Freeman. I'm going to paraphrase some nuggets in my own lingo: Ashtanga yoga as breathing practice: indeed, what ARE we doing the yoga for? Does it REALLY matter if you can tripod headstand, when death comes? Are you going to get extra points? What IS THIS FOR?
Sacred "activities": they seed the ground for a practice, any practice. Chanting? Bending? Pranayama? Great, all good. I think that what Swenson said was that you choose a practice that will inspire you to keep practicing, to keep sort of seeding that ground. And in that sense, who gives a damn what pose?
But I can't still let go of the idea that I have all of Intermediate in me, and so I want to be able to practice most of it when I have a yoga vacation. Silly, silly person.
***********************************
Classes remain 10 or more, every Sunday afternoon. I like this. Indianapolis also has a brand new Mysore ashtanga class, our former second series Monday night. It's 7:15, so it's the late show, but that's when some regulars were coming in, and so that's going to be our seed class. I'm in charge of that room for the next two weeks. Most everyone is doing Primary, and people are not quite sure how the room works. Carol ran it as "choose a series, I'll help you with it," which was really good last week for the first time. I'll run it, I think, the same way at first, with notes to each practitioner about where they would stop and backbend. I'll also do opening chant (as I do on Sundays anyway) and probably look to see where people get lost, where the breathing vanishes, where the bandhas run and hide.
It's damn difficult to move people from "get the full expression" to "keep breathing; if you're not breathing, it's too much pose." People REALLY fixate HARD on "I can do the whole pose" rather than the larger (if you will) "vinyasa" of breathing in and out.
Something else Swenson said is that you hit a plateau in practice, and this means not that the practice isn't working, but that you've hit a sort of "level of brilliant health" and you just stay there as long as you keep practicing (until, of course, mortality or life changes that (haha, same thing!) but that's a wholly separate vinyasa, eh?).
This just reminded me that I need to print off some cheat sheets (eventually we'll abandon them, but this is how I get newbies and shy practitioners in the door).
Over the summer I'm going to take Sweeney and Maehle's respective books and learn the vinyasa count for Primary (I think they probably disagree in places, per Kino's famous story that Guruji used to count differently in different practices, making a project like listing the vinyasa count a true lesson in chitta vrttis, hah!).
Because Indy is a vinyasa town and there are a lot of teachers with yoga blogs (and this is in large part why I keep my last name off mine and don't publicize it, although people find me by Googling "ashtanga indianapolis" which is fine), there is a lot of blog chitchat loosely about "self discovery" or some kind of feel-good message, which as my regular readership knows, is not my thing. Neither the one nor the other.
One of the things that I find in reading yoga blogs is that there's an idea that one becomes a teacher by studying with "great teachers," and I think that's problematic. What makes a great teacher, you know? Probably something different for each great teacher. What then can we learn from sampling? Do you take the mean or something? Do you take bits and pieces? Well then how do you not compose your own yoga as a sort of jigsaw puzzle, a postmodern collage? How then are you ever certain that you're accessing any kind of "yoga" or in any depth if you surf teacher to teacher? I don't mean this as criticism, I mean it as HONEST INTERROGATION.
And I'm speaking this as an ashtangi, of course. In short: how do you access "yoga" if you have no consistent system? Can that be done?
This is one of those perennial questions that too often leads to "my yoga is better than your yoga." SIGH; SO BORING.
That's in part why I want to learn the vinyasa count: that's LITERALLY breath to movement. Hop right foot out, exhale Trikonasana, one! That sort of thing. Again from Swenson, you do your pranayama during the practice.
Even during vinyasa classes, when I practice, I take what needs to be taken, I'm still thinking sequence. Thus vinyasa schools that offer classes on "sequencing." In a way I feel like vinyasa classes HAVE to be taught in a larger eight-limb framework, or to be taught by people who are hip to that. Otherwise, to riff off the Huffpost caption, "are you doing yoga-flavored exercise?" And I don't mean that you have to say, "This hip opener is good for your pratyahara." Ashtangis know that the physical body is the site where it all happens. Freeman is also ALL ABOUT THIS in his great _Mirror of Yoga_ which I really loved reading.
Through the physical body you can understand the cosmos. So I tell students to turn the outside of the back foot down in Virabhadrasana I because it gets in the hips and it prefigures backbends. Physical adjustment (well, vocal adjustment) to think more physically deeply (hip flexors from foot) to then access the emotional stuff that gets stuffed in there, and breath cues, and then students can take that (eventually) to life on the street, life at the breakfast table. Yes, the yoga is about your life. Any parent knows this.
A studio room should be a moment of sangha, not a moment of aerobics. There's a big difference between saying that and making that happen, making it possible. It takes awareness on the teacher's part that a studio room can BE a sangha, to create it as such. Lighting, welcome, interaction: even what you SAY matters to that creation.
And then we are far from poses, and I think that's essential in teaching the yoga. If you can't talk about more than poses when you're teaching, something's not done all the way yet.
At the start of April a check found cancer in her bones, and treatment began to build up ammonia in her brain, which was no good, so treatments were changed, but nothing was responding right, so they abandoned treatment and said, "You have 1-3 weeks to live." That's pretty intense; I've heard that kind of line on TV shows but never regarding anyone that I know in real life. That wound up not even being true; three days later she was gone.
J and another college friend had made plans to fly up to the northern midwest to say so long, and at 3 am the departure morning, they found out that they'd have to say goodbye to the body and not the whole person. Intense.
J said it was unreal to go in and see someone you know, who's only 42, and who has an eight-year-old, as a body in a bed. Hell even I've never had that experience.
So this changes our April. For J it ramps up her anxiety about breast cancer, predictably, but for me it gives a weird clarity on mortality (death always does that for me), it kind of clarifies my values a bit, polishes the mirror for a few days before regular life clouds it all up again.
These are the same people who put me up during the Matthew Sweeney adventure of 2008, and apparently my presence in the household is well-remembered, even by the then-six-year-old. We wrapped him up in my mat as a "yoga burrito" and we played outside with pool noodles and such and it was good times. I am remembered as the guy who integrated the yoga into everyday life, and apparently I cranked up meditation practices in the household, and I had no idea of any of this, but I like it.
So contact's going to be kept there. But what an incredible, massive sadness. The language of course is "she was taken before her time," but no Buddhist would ever say that except perhaps in euphemizing sympathy. But to reckon with being in your early 40s and having an eight-year-old, that's a world changer. What is it to die ON TIME and have THAT be what that means? Most people I know cling to an idea of "being finished" or "being just," you know, having justice. Like death "makes sense," and of course it doesn't. Not Western sense anyway.
No, I think that instead, death has to be reckoned with as always possible at any moment. My kid could be run down by a car, and that could simply happen. Any one of our airplanes (May, or mine in June, or ours later that summer) could crash and that would be it. But then one runs the risk of becoming an "oh what the hell" relativist, and that's not the point. It's a matter of setting functional ethics in the middle of that seeming relativistic nonsense.
Life does not come with justice; it comes with mortality. Any number of lessons proves this true. So our ethics, I have been saying for almost two decades, should be based on mortality. But they're not, in practice. We pack all kinds of money into the Pentagon and we melt the polar ice caps. And that's fine because it is what it is, but it doesn't help anyone suffer less.
J says that Buddhism is monastic, but I have found that all of this householding has been the best ground EVER for a Buddhist practice. We do not see eye to eye on this. J still wants fulfillment--camping, hiking, time in the Pacific Northwest. But for me, becoming a parent destroyed my whole notion of fulfillment, of escape, of play: all of that is dead and gone. "The Myth of Freedom," indeed.
And it's worth saying that my daily experience is creeping out from under that big binary: I used to want moments of play to "come back" and now more and more (but I have to balance it just right, sort of let myself get out of the way), the householding is kind of playful. Washing dishes with the child is a game, like Owl posted a while back about the headstand counting. The yoga becomes householderish, regular, sort of a "thing to do," a bit like homework. Climbing walls becomes an interesting flashback to an old skillset I hardly remember building, but it feels good to use my hands, manipulate my weight, move in space. Our love life is mediocre and spotty, and it's largely the kind of "eh" experience I used to go out of my way to avoid. But now it's par for the course; this is normal. And because it's not spectacular, not "out of the ordinary," its very ordinariness is no different from any other housework that I do.
I no longer crave the special, the unique, the far out, the "eternal buzz" via some intense experience. And I can't tell if that's because all of my intensities have been "ordinarized" or because my ordinary is quite extraordinary.
And all of that has Chogyam Trungpa written ALL OVER IT.
********************************************
Swenson. The summer yoga vacation is two weeks, Mysore-style and a weekend workshop, with four night classes (two of which are things called "Ashtanga's Greatest Hits," with poses from series 1-4). Austin Texas, end of June. Same time that Timiji's training runs, but about five hundred bucks less cash.
This and the Freeman-Swenson talk and QandA posted not long ago on Richard's site have me in good spirits about doing the yoga with Swenson and Shelley.
Traditional teachers have been something of an inspiring roadblock to me. First it was "you must drop back and stand up" which took my two years to set up, and then it was "Kapo to heels is a basic standard," which took me an additional year on top of that to set up and I'm STILL not there.
Swenson seems, all the time, to be based in people enjoying the yoga. If I can get regular practice going again, I can get the tightness out of my lateral hips and get my twists back (just like before), and I'm hoping that in Austin I can do something like Intermediate-to-Karanda. Right now it's impossible to estimate my practice: it's all over the place and pendulum-ing back and forth wildly. Some days it's only standing, but then I have an on week and recover my drops-and-stands and most of my Intermediate poses. But then I have a baby-and-work-heavy week and suddenly I can't finish Primary again. But then a Saturday class will be warm and full of people and I can bind Marichyasana D and get adjusted into a Dwi Padaish Supta Kurmasana. It's insane.
Anyway: Swenson said a pack of interesting things in that closing talk with Freeman. I'm going to paraphrase some nuggets in my own lingo: Ashtanga yoga as breathing practice: indeed, what ARE we doing the yoga for? Does it REALLY matter if you can tripod headstand, when death comes? Are you going to get extra points? What IS THIS FOR?
Sacred "activities": they seed the ground for a practice, any practice. Chanting? Bending? Pranayama? Great, all good. I think that what Swenson said was that you choose a practice that will inspire you to keep practicing, to keep sort of seeding that ground. And in that sense, who gives a damn what pose?
But I can't still let go of the idea that I have all of Intermediate in me, and so I want to be able to practice most of it when I have a yoga vacation. Silly, silly person.
***********************************
Classes remain 10 or more, every Sunday afternoon. I like this. Indianapolis also has a brand new Mysore ashtanga class, our former second series Monday night. It's 7:15, so it's the late show, but that's when some regulars were coming in, and so that's going to be our seed class. I'm in charge of that room for the next two weeks. Most everyone is doing Primary, and people are not quite sure how the room works. Carol ran it as "choose a series, I'll help you with it," which was really good last week for the first time. I'll run it, I think, the same way at first, with notes to each practitioner about where they would stop and backbend. I'll also do opening chant (as I do on Sundays anyway) and probably look to see where people get lost, where the breathing vanishes, where the bandhas run and hide.
It's damn difficult to move people from "get the full expression" to "keep breathing; if you're not breathing, it's too much pose." People REALLY fixate HARD on "I can do the whole pose" rather than the larger (if you will) "vinyasa" of breathing in and out.
Something else Swenson said is that you hit a plateau in practice, and this means not that the practice isn't working, but that you've hit a sort of "level of brilliant health" and you just stay there as long as you keep practicing (until, of course, mortality or life changes that (haha, same thing!) but that's a wholly separate vinyasa, eh?).
This just reminded me that I need to print off some cheat sheets (eventually we'll abandon them, but this is how I get newbies and shy practitioners in the door).
Over the summer I'm going to take Sweeney and Maehle's respective books and learn the vinyasa count for Primary (I think they probably disagree in places, per Kino's famous story that Guruji used to count differently in different practices, making a project like listing the vinyasa count a true lesson in chitta vrttis, hah!).
Because Indy is a vinyasa town and there are a lot of teachers with yoga blogs (and this is in large part why I keep my last name off mine and don't publicize it, although people find me by Googling "ashtanga indianapolis" which is fine), there is a lot of blog chitchat loosely about "self discovery" or some kind of feel-good message, which as my regular readership knows, is not my thing. Neither the one nor the other.
One of the things that I find in reading yoga blogs is that there's an idea that one becomes a teacher by studying with "great teachers," and I think that's problematic. What makes a great teacher, you know? Probably something different for each great teacher. What then can we learn from sampling? Do you take the mean or something? Do you take bits and pieces? Well then how do you not compose your own yoga as a sort of jigsaw puzzle, a postmodern collage? How then are you ever certain that you're accessing any kind of "yoga" or in any depth if you surf teacher to teacher? I don't mean this as criticism, I mean it as HONEST INTERROGATION.
And I'm speaking this as an ashtangi, of course. In short: how do you access "yoga" if you have no consistent system? Can that be done?
This is one of those perennial questions that too often leads to "my yoga is better than your yoga." SIGH; SO BORING.
That's in part why I want to learn the vinyasa count: that's LITERALLY breath to movement. Hop right foot out, exhale Trikonasana, one! That sort of thing. Again from Swenson, you do your pranayama during the practice.
Even during vinyasa classes, when I practice, I take what needs to be taken, I'm still thinking sequence. Thus vinyasa schools that offer classes on "sequencing." In a way I feel like vinyasa classes HAVE to be taught in a larger eight-limb framework, or to be taught by people who are hip to that. Otherwise, to riff off the Huffpost caption, "are you doing yoga-flavored exercise?" And I don't mean that you have to say, "This hip opener is good for your pratyahara." Ashtangis know that the physical body is the site where it all happens. Freeman is also ALL ABOUT THIS in his great _Mirror of Yoga_ which I really loved reading.
Through the physical body you can understand the cosmos. So I tell students to turn the outside of the back foot down in Virabhadrasana I because it gets in the hips and it prefigures backbends. Physical adjustment (well, vocal adjustment) to think more physically deeply (hip flexors from foot) to then access the emotional stuff that gets stuffed in there, and breath cues, and then students can take that (eventually) to life on the street, life at the breakfast table. Yes, the yoga is about your life. Any parent knows this.
A studio room should be a moment of sangha, not a moment of aerobics. There's a big difference between saying that and making that happen, making it possible. It takes awareness on the teacher's part that a studio room can BE a sangha, to create it as such. Lighting, welcome, interaction: even what you SAY matters to that creation.
And then we are far from poses, and I think that's essential in teaching the yoga. If you can't talk about more than poses when you're teaching, something's not done all the way yet.
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