The Iyengar approach to yoga, founded on the teachings of BKS Iyengar, a living Yogacharya who turned 90 in December 2008, and carried on today by his daughter Geeta and son Prashant Iyengar at their Pune Institute in India, is classical Indian yoga.BKS was the eleventh born to a working poor south Indian family and suffered from influenza, malaria and typhoid as a child. After his parents had both died the physically feeble and orphaned BKS went to stay and study yoga with his uncle Krishnamacharya in Mysore. One of the ironies of Mr. Iyengar’s youth is that he did not finish high school due to failing English and not having the money to retake it; today he is a prolific writer and international speaker with numerous published books including “Light on Yoga” (LOY), regarded as the landmark treatise on yoga. On my first visit to RIMYI (The Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute dedicated to BKS deceased wife) in Pune, Prashant Iyengar walked us around the room to look at pictures of Mr. Iyengar taken from LOY, he asked us to study his face in each pose; I noticed a dynamic inward focus conveying equanimity and fortitude no matter the degree of difficulty of the asana - “Perform each asana as a mantra and each pose as a meditation, then the light will dawn from the centre of your being” BKS Iyengar.
RIMYI is an institute where both international and local students attend daily classes and open practice six days a week. International students must be recommended by a senior teacher, have a minimum of eight years of experience and go on a wait list. I love wandering the heavily treed sidewalks of Pune to class. Classes are taught in English by Geeta and Prashant; Mr. Iyengar, who is no longer teaching classes, is always present doing his own practice and he cannot stop himself from injecting his pearls of wisdom into the classroom. His enthusiasm for yoga is mesmerizing, imploring us to see through to the depth of his understanding with intense eyes that express his seventy years of uninterrupted practice. At RIMYI general classes are for teachers, there are also beginner, children’s and medical classes.
Props typically seen in yoga studios around the world today were invented by Mr. Iyengar. In the book “Iyengar, His life and work” he describes how in 1948 he picked up a brick from the street to help him work with Baddhakonasana and later in 1975 when RIMYI opened he advanced his exploration of how props help adapt the asana to the student without losing the integrity, the inherent seed of wisdom and vitality embedded within each asana. Anyone who uses a block, chair, rope, wall, bench or countless other innovative props can thank Mr. Iyengar for this gift.
The Iyengar method focuses on alignment, action and sequencing of asana for health and vitality and on self-study, svadyaya, to take the student deeper inward. Classes are taught in levels, beginning with the introduction of asana for strength, flexibility and stamina and graduating into more complex asana, study of the yoga sutras, chanting and the weaving of all eight limbs of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras into the practice. A student may stay an experienced beginner and enjoy the health benefits or delve more deeply into the study by attending higher level classes and connecting with the spiritual teaching and as Prashant would say, “Plowing, irrigating and cultivating the Self”
Today Iyengar teachers are required to attend two to three year teacher training followed by two sets of national assessments (taking two more years) to become certified. Teachers must be familiar with asana, Sanskrit names, The Yoga Sutras, pranayama, human anatomy, pregnancy, common health matters, and of course have an established practice.
