Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Poses can be too tense or too dull

The old yogis described the quality or attributes of anything as the gunas. Rajas is very active, muscular, or high energy. Tamas is relaxed, dull, or quiet. Sattva is the balance in-between rajas and tamas, that of spaciousness, grace, and skill.

In everyday life, most people have a dull [tamasic] posture where they collapse into flat feet, locked knees, tilted pelvis, forward pelvis, overarched or flat low back, rounder upper back, and forward head. This causes compression in specific joints and disks. Eventually this results into structural changes as joint surface degeneration, spurs [ostreophytes], herniated [bulging] disks, as well as compensatory soft tissue tensions and constrictions.

Then in a yoga class, students become rajasic in attempting the poses. They rely on muscle work to impose the position , the shape to the pose. This rudimentary understanding of the poses is superficial, ineffficient, and not what poses are all about. Western culture values strong effort, willfulness, goal orientation, essentially the masculine principle.

Asanas [poses] are intended to be sattvic. Patangali cites the sutra "asanam stiram sukham". Poses [Asana] are to be easy, comfortable, relaxed [sukam] and at the same time, steady and grounded [stiram]. This demands the poses not be muscular, tense on the surface. But if one relaxes muscle, dull happens. The skill of grounding, centering, and lifting into gravity happens with a sattvic quality. These skills are the inner actions using of breath, imagry, and kinesthetic [body sensation] awareness. According to the femine principle, the surrender, release, and receptiveness allows poses to slowly evolve from an innner body movement of energy.

A student has to figure out how to do a pose relaxed but not dull, yet light and lively but not tense. A student has to walk the middle path between collapsing into joints and imposing some surface shape with muscle tension. When one can balance the quiet steadiness of tamas with the effort and action of rajas, there is graceful, fluid, steady sattvic movement of Hatha Yoga.

Happy Yoga [Yogas Sukham],

Stan