Note to my students

Dear All,

I have hugely enjoyed our yoga sessions together over the past few months. I sincerely hope you got something out of it too.

Yoga isn't for the faint-hearted. It can bring intense joy. But it may also present us with parts of ourselves we'd perhaps rather not see. But in the end, practicing yoga can help us become a better person.

So the key word here is practice. I've tried to emphasise this throughout the courses. This hasn't been my "thing"; it was recognised already in a 2,000+ year old seminal text on yoga through the concept of "abhyasa":

"Abhyasa means cultivating the lifestyle, actions, speech, and thoughts, as well as the spiritual practices that lead in the positive direction (rather than going in the opposite direction, away from the positive, and towards the negative)." [source]

I hope you feel that you have learnt more about some of the tools to practice yoga: movement, breath, and mental attitude.

As most of you are aware, I'll be traveling in India for 3 months early in the next year. I hope to see you again in the spring.

I will leave you for now with a few words that have been attributed to J. Krishnamurti. Interestingly, J. Krishnamurti studied yoga with TKV Desikachar, who has been hugely influential in the way that we've been practicing yoga amongst ourselves in Reading.

"We were saying how very important it is to bring about in the human mind the radical revolution. The crisis is the crisis in consciousness, a crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions, and continuing what the world is now, with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression and so on. Man is still as he was, is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive, and he has built a society along these lines.

What we’re trying to do in all these discussions and talks is to see if we cannot radically bring about the transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are but understand it, examine it, give your heart and your mind with a thinking out a way of living differently.

But, it depends on you not somebody else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil. There’s no leader. There’s no guru. There’s no master, no savior. You are the teacher the pupil, the leader, the guru of everything and to understand is to transform."

—J. Krishnamurti

Merry Christmas and a Healthy and Peaceful New Year to all of you.

Luc