The practice of Iyengar’s yoga: Tatiana’s journey

I left hatha yoga classes because of pain. I was doing (or rather, attempting) one of the most basic poses of hatha yoga, ardha-mukha-svana-asana (downward facing dog), and I was in pain. My neck and shoulder muscles were silently screaming at this torture. And worst of all, instead of the graceful “V” that all other students were making with their bodies, my lower back was humped up, more like a cat arching than a dog stretching its back. “You have no feeling for this pose,” said my then yoga-teacher unfeelingly and walked away, leaving me to my misery. I walked out of that Iyengar yoga class in Pitanga and never returned to one for almost a decade.

I came back to yoga because of pain. Yet another bike injury (the bane of our life here in Auroville) had resulted in chronic pain in my lower back. And someone told me that there was a new yoga teacher, Tatiana, who held individual consultations for people with lower back pain. I sought her out but learnt that due to pressure of work, she no longer worked with people one-on-one. She asked me to join one of her beginner’s classes, and I reluctantly agreed, resigning myself to one and a half hours of misery.

And yes, of course, minutes into the class came that dreaded pose ardha-mukha-svana-asana. “Arms straight, legs straight, rotate your upper arms from inside out, and from the arms and legs, pull your pelvis up,” reeled out Tatiana, striding down the rows of seasoned practitioners, until she came to me and stopped. I think my knotted face and scrunched neck muscles told her more than I could have explained verbally. My arms were not straight – my elbows jutted out – but at least, that way there was no pain in the arms. “Put your hands further out,” she said, “and grab the edges of the mat.” That simple step of extending my arms further out and widening the gap more than shoulder-width did wonders: I was no longer in pain, and my back, if not fully straight, was not so obviously humped either. After that experience, I faithfully returned to Tatiana’s beginner classes, twice a week. I haven’t yet mastered the dog-pose, but at least now I know where to start my journey towards that full mastery of an asana. And, a few hours of yoga with Tatiana each week ensures that I don’t experience back pain on a daily basis.

It turned out that it was back pain that brought Tatiana to hatha yoga. As a young mother in Moscow, due to injuries suffered in childhood, possibly exacerbated with childbirth, Tatiana had severe back pain. The doctor she consulted, however, shared with her a startling insight: he said that back pain is the price that the human species has had to pay for evolution. Biologically speaking, the geometrical frame of our body has still not fully evolved to support the heaviness of our head to ensure that we can stand and walk upright. So unless one consciously works to support the spine, back pain is inevitable for most.

That insight led to Tatiana to start working with her body. An avid reader, one of the first books Tatiana picked up as an aid in her quest was B. K. S. Iyengar’s classic volume Yoga Dipika or Light on Yoga, translated into Russian. According to Tatiana, since the turn of the nineteenth century there was an opening in Russia to understand the wisdom of India from the perspectives of science and psychology. And good translations of the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, and other Indian spiritual literature were easily available in Imperial Russia.

Under the communist regime, hatha yoga was a punishable offence, but a few people practiced it in secret, and the tradition never died out. At the end of the 1980s, the situation started to gradually change. Thanks to the support of several academics and scientists, yoga came out from underground. The Russian Ministry of Health sent a psychologist, Elena Olegovna Fedotova, to India to study altered states of consciousness. Elena travelled widely to different ashrams and yoga schools. But she was most highly impressed by B.K.S. Iyengar, whom she subsequently invited to Russia in 1989 for the first Conference on Yoga. The event marked a new era in Russia.Yoga devotees could at last meet openly, and the tradition of Iyengar Yoga was planted in Russian soil.

Tatiana took to Yoga Dipika like the proverbial fish to water. This was in 1995 when Tatiana, in her early twenties, was experiencing personal change and the political socio-economic changes that had been ushered in with Perestroika. A housewife out of choice, Tatiana (she holds a degree in Chemical Engineering) could afford to take classes only once a week at the hatha yoga center in Moscow. But she studied and practiced on a daily basis at home, diligently following the sequential guidance of asanas offered in Yoga Dipika. At that time, she was married to a man who encouraged her in her quest, for he, like her, was attracted to the mystic. Her ex-husband, in due course, became the first certified Asthanga Vinyasa yoga teacher in Russia.

Tatiana’s journey as a yoga-teacher began in 1998 as a substitute-teacher, but soon thereafter she started offering her own classes at a yoga centre in Moscow. “The first class that I taught happened to be on Guru-ji’s (B. K. S Iyengar) birthday,” says Tatiana, smiling at the synchronicity. “And I,” she continues, “witnessed the spread of Iyengar yoga in Russia. Yoga classes moved out from being offered off-hours in school gymnasiums to the yoga centres and health care centres that were mushrooming everywhere in the country. And soon after, Asthanga Vinyasa yoga became popular as well, with my husband being part of that movement!” It is interesting to note that, unlike the USA, where hatha yoga swiftly became a fad with the multiplication of new styles, in Russia there was a reverence for and an adherence to these traditional schools of yoga.

As a child growing up in the beautiful coastal city of Sochi on the Black Sea and as an adult living in cosmopolitan Moscow, Tatiana never felt the need to travel internationally. It was her pursuit of Iyengar Yoga that brought her to India in 2003 to the classes at Yoga Institute in Pune. Subsequently, she came each year to India to learn, to deepen her practice and work through the various levels of certification of yoga asanas as well as pranayama.

It was in 2004 that she came to Auroville on a chance visit, accompanying other Russian yoga-practitioner friends. “I had no expectations about Auroville, which was good,” she reminisces. “I had already come across Sri Aurobindo’s writings in Russia, but they did not make much sense to me. It was not Sri Aurobindo’s work per se but, as I found out much later, the early translations were very poor.”

About her first impressions of Auroville, she says: “There were two clear thoughts in my head. The first was, ‘What is going on here?’ The second, ‘I want to live here’. And when I returned to Moscow, I understood for the first time in my life what it meant to be homesick. I was homesick for Auroville.”

The ensuing years saw Tatiana caught up in the throes of transformational life-changes. Her classes were increasingly popular, but she admits that she was not emotionally mature enough to handle the added responsibilities of an increased class size. “People take yoga classes for different reasons. Only a few are dedicated enough to take the practice of asana to the true depths of yoga – the harmony of the body and the mind, the union of the personal with the transpersonal,” says she.

“And even as I was being appreciated by my students for my Iyengar Yoga classes, at home my husband, by now a celebrated Asthanga Vinyasa yoga teacher in Russia, was convinced that I was on the wrong path. The conflict was hard to bear.”

So in 2007, after separating from her husband, Tatiana along with her teenaged son joined Auroville. “It was a smooth transition, which gave me the reassurance that I had made the right choice,” she says about her entry process.

Gala, another Russian yoga teacher, introduced her to Andrea who was then managing Pitanga. “I was so shy at that meeting, I was totally terrified of taking classes in English for I barely spoke the language. Andrea wanted me to offer both yoga and pranayama, but I started only with yoga classes – I could not have explained the more esoteric details of pranayama in English back then. Even the yoga classes were challenging – I would spend 10 minutes before each class focusing on my breathing just to calm my nerves.

“I was just so insecure about teaching in this foreign language and having the vocabulary to explain all the details. But my students were kind and patient. I started teaching as a guest. When I came back on an entry visa, at the request of my students, within three days of my permanent arrival in Auroville, I was back in Pitanga teaching yoga.

“To me, teaching means allowing the students to learn for themselves. They have to experiment with the instructions that I give. Sure, it would be easy to be a popular teacher by not being strict in disciplining the students, either in their practice or in their use of the props. But that’s not the point. Yoga is not just about gaining flexibility and feeling good. Yoga is about sadhana, a committed discipline to work on oneself for individual change and transformation. And transformation has to be embodied in the body. Why speak about cellular transformation when our own experience is that cells follow repetitive patterns, lose their resilience, and eventually die? But we know from biology that the cells of the organs renew themselves perennially, and they follow well-established paths that are already there due to unconscious habits. So the new cells continue to exhibit diseased patterns. But if we try with a regular and conscious yoga practice to change our muscles and align our skeletal frame, then we begin to give new information to the cells. We start to inculcate new habits for the body to follow. And this practice can be taken quite deep.

“More than workshops, I like teaching regular classes, for then I can see the progress the students make. Also, each person is different; each body that is trying to do the asana that I have just demonstrated allows me to understand more about the structure and the biology of the human body. I gain an insight into the working of my own body and with this the knowledge to help others.”

Tatiana is not everyone’s choice for a teacher. Some of my friends dislike the stern flow of instructions that Tatiana rolls out in her Russian-accented English and the unique vocabulary of Iyengar yoga, which not only refers to the names of the muscles but also has developed terms for different parts of the body. “Neck of the big toe down, move your inner ankle in to lift up the inner arch of your foot,” would be a typical example of Tatiana trying to get her students to stand straight. But listening closely to her instructions, and aided by demonstrations or a physical tap from Tatiana, I have started to be able to feel and work with parts of my body that I could not consciously move before.

Tatiana concludes, “The mind is constantly tugged by different forces, but when it gives up and becomes silent, clarity comes. When I am troubled and don’t know what to do, I simply practise, and then the answers come. For me, Iyengar Yoga is a complete yoga that allows one to access all the 8 limbs of yoga, leading to Samadhi (deep spiritual trance) that Patanjali speaks of. You only have to practise!”