Nice to see that Lu Duong and team have turned the excellent Ashtanga Parampara interviews into a magazine/book.
As Lu indicates in the title, mission statement and opening greeting, these interviews are about a sharing, passing on of teaching, they are about the relationship between the interviewee and their teacher but also about the interviewee and their own students, about community, sangha.
And yet it also struck me that the cover and all of the pictures within except for those accompanying Anna Muzzin's interview are of solitary practice. The cover shows us a mat in an attic, those within are icon images of isolation, vast rooms, cliffs, the ocean, a doorway, home practice comes to us all sooner or later it seems. I'm reminded of an excellent picture of David Garrigues practicing in a cluttered narrow hallway (see end of post for a link to DG's new podcast on Ashtanga Dispatch).
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As Lu indicates in the title, mission statement and opening greeting, these interviews are about a sharing, passing on of teaching, they are about the relationship between the interviewee and their teacher but also about the interviewee and their own students, about community, sangha.
And yet it also struck me that the cover and all of the pictures within except for those accompanying Anna Muzzin's interview are of solitary practice. The cover shows us a mat in an attic, those within are icon images of isolation, vast rooms, cliffs, the ocean, a doorway, home practice comes to us all sooner or later it seems. I'm reminded of an excellent picture of David Garrigues practicing in a cluttered narrow hallway (see end of post for a link to DG's new podcast on Ashtanga Dispatch).
The magazine/book, Volume One, contains seven of the fifteen interviews currently on the Ashtanga Parampara website
Here then is the cover, the mission statement, opening greeting and contents.
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| LINK |
Lu's interviews are with Authorised teachers in the Ashtanga vinyasa tradition
I've tended to see Authorisation as an unnecessary evil, we have Pattabhi Jois' Yoga Mala and that strikes me as about authoritative guide to this practice as we need. A chart/table based on that book showing the order of asana and vinyasa (along with it's caveats), the drishti, where to look for the bandhas is all that we require that and it's practice, years of practice.
If we do want a teacher, help in this practice, than what we need to know perhaps is how long they have practiced with sincerity the methodology they propose to share.
There are great teachers out there, great guides to practice whether authorised or not, recognised or not.
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| Epstein's Jacob and the angel, ...what we wrestle against and what supports us the obstacles and their gifts |
Lineage is learning the practice, the methodology, however you may appropriate it and then passing it along in turn.
Tradition is something else altogether perhaps, the Hatha tradition and the Yoga tradition with which it's mingled, there are excellent scholars some who also practice, Krishnamacharya was such a man, Pattabhi Jois also perhaps... if we're lucky we may find a guide who is able to assist us in our investigation, reading, and practice of the tradition as well as of the lineage otherwise we may need to find a lineage teacher and a tradition teacher separately.
The tradition however is based on a simple insight that reaches back before lineages and traditions and across cultures. And we don't need to read any ancient text or visit any teacher to rediscover that first insight for ourselves.
Simplify your life
sit
focus the attention.
There appears to have been a lot of sitting before before the Vedas and the Upanishads, centuries of sitting before Patanjali collected his aphorisms and centuries more before the Hatha texts began to appear.
Krishnamacharya wrote Yoga Makaranda in 1934. Pattabhi Jois' Yoga Mala is from the 1950s. Norman Allan, David Williams and Nancy Gilgoff encountered Pattabhi Jois in Mysore the 1970s.
David Garrigues is excellent on lineage, tradition and parampara in the new Ashtanga Dispatch podcast, I highly recommend it.
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| http://pegmulqueen.com/2015/05/20/david-garrigues-2/ |
See also perhaps my follow up post