Yogic Menage a Trois, Restraint and Creativity

[Image taken from here]

The fire restrained in the tree fashions flowers.
Released from bonds, the shameless flame
dies in barren ashes.

Rabindranath Tagore

Somewhere in the second half of primary series during practice this morning, these words from Tagore floated into my mind. I can't remember exactly where and in which posture these words came to my mind. This is probably not important anyway, but if I have to hazard a guess, I would go for either Baddha Konasana or Upavista Konasana (or one of the other Konasanas that dot the second half of primary); deep external hip rotator releases usually release correspondingly deep and interesting thoughts. 

Why did these words come to mind? I'm not entirely sure (do we always know why particular words or thoughts occur to us at any particular given moment?), but again, if I have to hazard a guess, I would say that it probably has something to do with this conversation that has been going on lately in the blogosphere about whether Ashtanga is sufficient to meet all our physical (and maybe even mental and emotional) yoga needs, about whether it is "healthy" to "see" other yoga at least some of the time... Well, here's an idea: How about a menage a trois? You know, like maybe you see Ashtanga in the morning, and then go see another yoga in the evening? Actually, isn't this what Grimmly does? Except I think it's the other way around for him: He sees Vinyasa Krama in the morning, and Ashtanga in the evening. So Grimmly is actually a practitioner of yogic menage a trois! Who knew? Ha! Count on me to take cheap shots at Grimmly while he is on his two-week practice/study retreat :-) Moral of the story: Don't leave your blog unattended for two weeks? But really, I don't mean any of this in a bad way; one has to do whatever it is that rocks one's yogic boat. After all, life is too short not to do Whatever Works.  

Btw, I highly recommend this movie.

[Image taken from here]

But coming back to those words from Tagore that occurred to me this morning... over the last few years, I have heard so many people complain about how rigid or "incomplete" Ashtanga is, and jump ship to some other style of yoga (for some reason, Anusara seems to be a common ship to jump to; I'm not sure if this is still true today, though...). One common complaint is voiced in the following way: "I dislike/hate Ashtanga! It's so rigid! Why do I have to do these postures in this particular sequence, and no other? I hate forward bends and hip-openers! Why do we have to do so many of them in the primary series?"Another kind of complaint, which typically builds upon the foregoing one, is that Ashtanga (or at least the primary series) is imbalanced, that its emphasis on forward bends and external hip openers overdevelops certain muscles at the cost of others (a commonly cited example is the psoas and other front-body muscles needed for backbending), that its repetitive nature is probably bad for the knees/wrists/shoulders if practiced over a long period of time. And there are probably many other complaints about Ashtanga, too many to go into here. 

 

I'm not here to try to defend Ashtanga against these complaints. If nothing else, I'm quite sure my fellow Ashtanga Fundamentalists in the blogosphere have already done a very thorough job in this area, one that I cannot hope to surpass. Rather, what I would like to do here is to draw our attention to the spirit behind the seemingly rigid and constraining outer form of Ashtanga. I would like to suggest that the seemingly rigid, repetitive and "boring" nature of Ashtanga practice actually fosters freedom and the blossoming of the spirit rather than restrict it. When one has to get on the mat and do the same series of postures day in and day out for what seems like an eternity, without the option of doing some other postures that one would prefer to do, one is made to stay in the present moment and face directly the challenges--physical, mental or emotional--that these particular postures throw up in one's path. When one is restrained by a limited number of options, one has to find creative ways of working with those options. And it is this creativity that is the flowering of true freedom. I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that even if one were to jump ship to a different style of yoga, one would still have to devise a productive practice structure to "restrain" oneself and work within. Because without these restraints, one is left without boundaries. And without boundaries, the flame of creativity has no space within which to express itself productively, and runs the risk of exhausting itself and dying in barren ashes.