Extract of my MA Thesis on the Embodied Self in Iyengar Yoga Practice

A New Form of Embodiment: The Exploration of the Embodied Self

The bodily consciousness developed through Iyengar practice leads to discovering a new form of embodiment. Together with experiencing physical changes (better posture, increasing flexibility, relief of tension and pain if there was any, improvement in physiological processes such as sleeping, breathing, etc.), the practitioner is confronted with the awakening of a ‘new body’ by feeling new bodily parts, new possibilities for its movements and unknown details of its forms, qualities, depths and asymmetries. This becomes a powerful discovery particularly in contrast with their previous form of embodiment, which could be characterised, following Leder (1990), by the notion of ‘absent body’. In this sense, I quote anthropologist Michael Jackson whose account of his own Iyengar Yoga practice speaks for itself:

Until I was in my mid-thirties, my awareness extended into my body only to the extent that I grew hungry, experienced lust, felt pain or weariness, and did not resemble that somatotype of popular advertising. My body passed into and out of my awareness like a stranger; whole areas of my physical being and potentiality were dead to me, like locked rooms. When I took courses in hatha yoga (under Iyengar-trained teachers) it was like unpicking the locks of a cage. I began to live my body in full awareness for the first time, feeling the breath, under my conscious control, fill my lungs, experiencing through extensions and asana the embodied character of my will and consciousness. (1989:119)

Jackson’s words clearly express the new form of embodiment that emerges through practice. The participants’ accounts show that they develop a new relationship with their bodies where these are perceived as more than mere physical and biological entities. The non-dualistic character of Yoga practice allows them to work with their bodies as physical object, and at the same time to realize in an embodied way the body as a source of subjectivity. The interviews reveal that the objectification that Iyengar method entails are not opposed to the subjective experience of the lived body. In this sense, this practice offers a paradigmatic example of a kind of experience that allows accessing the embodied self within the perception of one’s own physicality, demonstrating what has already been argued within phenomenological research (Legrand and Ravn 2009).

The prominence attributed to the lived experience during the practice helps the practitioner perceiving Iyengar Yoga (both its discourse and techniques) as a method that, along with providing the necessary knowledge for developing a safety practice (in terms of physical and mental health), offers space for a personal exploration of one’s embodiment and self. In this sense, rather than being perceived as a foreign doctrine, Iyengar Yoga practice is experienced as a source of infinite tools for embodied self-knowledge. An example of this is revealed in the way the practitioners experience asana. Reports show that, beyond the technique that defines the ‘correct’ performance, what is most important is to explore one’s own lived and kinaesthetic experience in order to be able to work from this within the asana. In this regard, the asana is more than the image or form that is portrayed in books or that can be seen in the teacher’s demonstration; it is a sensible exploration of one’s ‘inner’ body. Thus, the practitioner draws attention toward her/his body not just to achieve the expected physical form, but more importantly to attend to her/his own embodied experience within the posture.

Since asana is an experience of the embodied self, it is not static but changes in relation to the practitioner’s mental, emotional and physical states. Thus, the experience appears as a dynamic process, where the engagement with one’s embodiment transcends the technical and biomedical indications of what is regarded as the correct performance. In the account of two practitioners:

“I visualize it [her body], from bones and muscles, to skin and organs. I connect with a range of sensations produced by the asana. I see it as a different journey every day. Even if I repeat exactly the same sequence, the challenges are always different. Occasionally new layers of difficulty are added, perhaps due to tensions that were not there the day before. There are also days in which either mind or body intercept one’s pursuit. Other days, when things seem to be on one’s side, the body frees itself, the mind no longer floats and one is able to enter a wonderful interconnection state” (Sandra).

“Asana practice is something totally alive. It is even more alive as I practice more. When I practice, there is generally a sensation that I want to reach something else, go deeper, penetrating even more with the intelligence of my body. It does not always feel good. When I have a lesion I am very frustrated, especially when I don’t understand what’s happening to me, and that brings the worse out of me. Then, when I understand my mistakes, the sensation is more one of tenderness and love toward the injured part of me” (Ana).

Making (Embodied) Sense of the Practice

These accounts highlight the fundamental role of subjective experience in making sense of the practice, something which had already been noted at the New Age practices of the holistic milieu (Heelas 2006, 2008, Henrichsen-Schrembs and Versteeg 2011, Newcombe 2005) and at alternative and complementary health practices (Barcan 2011, Sointu 2006). This study found that the participants associate different meanings with the practice according to their own experiences, and that these meanings tend to change in relation to the moment of their life in which they practice. In general, Iyengar practice seems to be valuable because it offers exactly “what I need”.

It is worth mentioning that despite personal differences, all participants coincide in recognising Iyengar Yoga as more than just a physical practice. All of them describe their experience in terms of transformations involving physical, mental and emotional aspects. Some of them even indicate that Iyengar Yoga has radically changed them, transforming them into totally new persons.

A phenomenological approach explains those transformations. If we conceive embodiment as the existential condition for the self (Csordas, 1990) or as being-in-the-world, we may understand that Iyengar body techniques can produce changes not only in the physicality of the body and the way the practitioner relates to her/his embodiment, but also in the way she/he experiences and perceives others and the surrounding world. Moreover, Csordas’ (1993) notion of somatic modes of attention helps us understanding that Iyengar practice both cultivates a conscious somatic attention towards one’s own embodiment and enhances the ability to attend to the embodied presence of others, hence potentially changing one’s sensory engagement with the world.

The previous discussion raises the question of how it works in the context of Iyengar bodily practice. How does the work upon the body transform the self? As described earlier, Iyengar practice offers an access to experience the body’s subjectivity while working on its physicality. This means that performing asana involve encountering both physical limitations and challenges and mental and emotional constraints. It involves realizing the way in which our mind and body connects or disconnects from each other and what our mental, emotional and physical ways of being are. The practice brings awareness to all these aspects that would otherwise remain unconscious. In this sense, it implies an exploration of the lived body in its complex biological, cultural and subjective constitutions. Thus, exploring and working with the challenges and difficulties encountered within the practice is experienced as a form of embodied knowledge that is meaningful beyond the concrete time and space. Iyengar practitioners live their embodied practice as a process of self-knowledge and self-development that enable them to live better.

Next, I will demonstrate that these transformations in the embodied self should be understood in relation to the experience of the lived body that Iyengar techniques promote rather than simply a result of the inscription and reproduction of contemporary discourses upon the body. In this sense, the role of the body is not metaphorical but rather concrete as it enables the exploration and expression of one’s subjectivity through the body’s physicality.