Prashant talked a lot today. There seemed to be more people in the room and less asana done. He continues on his “exhale more and more and more and more” message today using the word evacuation to sum up this action. He encourages us to continue to explore the body as a laboratory to discover the self and see/feel/observe/learn what the connection between the breath and the body, mind, and self is. His rapid fire instructions “breath and body, breath and mind, breath and eye, breath and organs” begins to sound like what my colleague Alicia Rowe says, a rap.
Not only are there large photos of Mr. Iyengar on the walls, it seems like there is every photo in “Light on Yoga” reproduced in an smaller size hanging lower on the walls. There are five walls and on each wall there are three rows of photos, maybe 15 in each row, for a total of more than 125 photos. Prashant pointed out the photo of udyana and encouraged that sort of complete exhalation and exploring what that does for the pose, for the spine, etc. (insert rap of your own here).
More and more I can understand the words yet remembering the entire nearly two hour lecture without taking notes is entirely another skill set I don’t think I have ever had. Another topic was something about study and knowledge. Read, learn, know was, I think, part of it. He had a guy stand up and he said we know this is a human being. We know two things, he is a human and a man. He continued “If I say he is a father, you can also infer he is a husband and has a child. If I say he is a grandfather then one of his children has a child.” We know one thing, then we know two things, three things, and more things about the man.
The sequence went something like this:
Downward facing dog
Badanguliasana in tadasana
Group at the rope wall (so only ten at a time) doing rope bhujangasana, ropes one
Group in the middle of the room sitting in upa vista konasana, twisting to the right then left, then bharadvajasana, then marichyasana one.
Group on chairs doing chair bharadvajasana, sitting sideways, then through the chair
People cycled through these groups until everyone had been at the rope wall
Group on the mat ended class in janusirsasana, paschimottanasana
Group on the chairs did chair shoulderstand.
Savasana
