 
Reviews for Inez Baranay

Sun Square Moon

Inez is a writer. She is a yogini. She has traveled the world telling her stories and her story here, in sun square moon, her natal horoscope, is about her art and her yoga, it is about awareness, about creativity, and about her journey through those worlds. It's a story with a disarming honesty. She does not even avoid sex, dreams, drugs, retail therapy and money. She has indulged. But the theme of the book is practice, body and self. She is not brain dead. She scotches the rumour that yoga produces an empty head and a flaccid sex life. She brings her awareness from yoga to writing and takes it the other way as well. Ultimately there are no differences. This is one of the few books on yoga that is not trivia.

_Norman Sjoman, author of Yoga Touchstone and The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace._ <http://www.blacklotusbooks.com/links/gate.htm>

With The Tiger

Inez Baranay is very correct and vivid in her portrayal of India's flavours of vadai, coffee and the music season. She exposes the experiences India offers foreigners seeking 'nirvana'.

Deccan Herald

The Edge of Bali

Baranay writes evocatively of the Bali landscape, raising serious questions within vivid description. New myths jostle with the old.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Sheila Power: an entertainment

A rattling good read that defies that defies pigeon-holing into any one genre.

Sydney Star Observer

Pagan

Pagan is brilliantly written. As well as being very readable, it offers a highly intelligent analysis of the themes of Australia's 20th century cultural history.

The Advertiser

Between Careers

Like good sex Between Careers gets better and better.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Rascal Rain: a year in Papua New Guinea

Her experiences have resulted in a highly readable account of a world left behind by the 6 o'clock news.

Cleo

All titles by Inez Baranay will be available as ebooks by the end of 2011.

For full reviews and more please visit

http://www.inezbaranay.com

Sun Square Moon: Writings on Yoga and Writing

Inez Baranay

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Inez Baranay 2011

First published by Writers Workshop Kolkata in 2007

Discover other titles by Inez Baranay:

<http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/inezb>

To buy a beautiful hard copy edition of Sun Square Moon, with hand-woven sari cover and calligraphy, please enter Baranay or Sun Square Moon in the search box at

<http://www.writersworkshopindia.com/>

Cover design by Daniel Stephensen: http://springstreetworkshop.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

With his kind permission this book is dedicated to

Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar

our beloved Guruji

and to

Kay Parry

my long-time teacher

and

students of yoga
Contents

01 Introduction: Practice, Body and Self

02 Tadasana: One

03 Reluctance

04 Balance and creativity

05 Asana and the spiritual

06 Writing about the body

07 The yoga commodity

08 Four ways to be right

09 Tadasana: Two

10 The enemy of dreams: writing/dreams/yoga

11 Yoga and writing: one: stages

12 Tadasana: Three

13 Yoga and writing: two: practice

14 Paralipsis: drugs, money and sex

15 Tadasana: Four

16 Tradition and Authority

17 Tadasana: Five

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Afterword to ebook edition

1. Introduction: Practice, body and self

The writer needs a body to perform writing. The body is a text upon which yoga writes. The body is a text written by thought, experience, genetics, culture, performance, fashion, personality. The body is the self, the self is an illusion, the personality is one of its illusions. The writer creates a body of work, writings written by a person whose idea of a cohesive self is demonstrably illusory, whose conscious mind plays only a small part in what she herself does.

As I began to write about the process of writing - observing my own methods and approaches, the influences on my practice, the origins and history of writing a novel, the ways these matters can be written of, I would find myself thinking of all this while doing yoga. Well, strictly speaking, yoga requires the total absorption of mind in the pose, so I should say I was thinking of all this while attempting to do yoga.

For a long time I had thought of yoga and writing as two entirely different practices, belonging to two entirely different selves. I am used to considering my self to be a divided self. My natal horoscope shows sun square moon. Think of the sun as the outward self, the moon as the hidden self. The ninety-degree angle between them suggests tension or conflict. That's my self, always wanting also the opposite of what I want. To write or do yoga, to live the life of a writer or of a yoga practitioner: this at times has seemed to be an essential conflict.

But writing and yoga emerge as related practices. Yoga, a text written on herself, has a discipline that a writer might employ to inquire into writing practice, a language that a writer might employ to inquire into the writing of texts written by her self.

Once people know you have practiced Iyengar yoga since 1981, taught yoga since 1993, they usually make assumptions. That you're especially fond of crystals, dolphins, natural fibres, Indian handicrafts and angels. That you're vegetarian, that you're vegan, that you go on fasts, that you'd always say no to a beer or an eccie. That you don't swear, aspire to celibacy, and like a story to have a moral. That you read self-help books, and read them for self help. That you believe you create your own reality and that this means everyone chooses the conditions of their lives. That you think western medicine, science and technology are wrong-headed disasters. That you believe in re-incarnation, and might have an idea who you used to be. That you think a display of a figurine of the Buddha, of Tara, of a Shiva Nataraj is an indication of something spiritual. That the word 'spiritual' refers to a real and good quality that some people have and some places have and some objects have and some practices have, and the rest have less of it or none. That chanting is spiritual. That tribal people are more spiritual than others. That eastern religions are more spiritual than others. That you go to India because it is spiritual. That you really need to use the word 'spiritual'.

So yoga is seen as a homogenous sub-culture, part of an anti-intellectual New Ageism. Its aim of inner stillness makes writers anxious that it produces an empty head, from which writing cannot emerge.

There are assumptions made about writers, too, and their own sub-culture. Once people know you are a writer they might assume you can't resist alcohol and adultery. That you must have Inspiration to work. That you base your writing on your life, your narrator on yourself, your characters on your friends. That you live in a garret and suffer for your art; that you must have another job, a 'real' job. That you earn a fortune, frequent television talk-shows and meet celebrities. Or hunger for that.

Still, writing has been part of our larger culture – certainly in the West – far longer and more visibly than yoga practice and so the diversity of its practitioners and their lives and lifestyles is more recognised; fewer assumptions are generally made.

The differences and the congruities of yoga and writing can be located in a territory where practice, body and self meet. That is the theme of this collection of writings.

2. Tadasana: One

Stand. This is the first pose, the first asana. Stand straight, stand on your two feet. Feet together, heels and big toes touching.

We begin with Tadasana, standing straight on two feet, and we end our practice with Savasana, lying straight on your back. It sounds easy: stand up, lie down. Tadasana and Savasana reveal themselves as poses capable of endless refinement, poses regarded as among the most difficult to achieve.

Stand. Begin to bring your attention to the pose. Stand on two feet. Feet together, toes, ankles and heels touching.

Close your eyes for a moment. Is the weight of your body on the front of the feet, on the back, on one side of the foot? Do you lean more weight on one leg than the other?

Now adjust, balancing the weight evenly over the centre of each foot. Open the eyes. Look ahead. With the feet firmly planted, keep ascending, lengthening, growing taller.

Tighten the kneecaps and lift the knees. Keep the shinbones in line with the thighbones, and the front of the thighs pressed back.

Is the spine erect? Is the chest lifted?

Tuck the tailbone down and under. Lengthen from pubis to navel, compress the hips, narrow the waist, broaden the diaphragm. The spine ascends from its base to the crown of the head, sacrum and crown in line, neck in line with the spine. The arms are drawn downwards, fingertips drawn to the earth as the crown ascends. Keep the throat, mouth, jaw soft. And what has happened to the weight over your feet?

3. Reluctance

No matter how much devotion and determination are involved in the commitment to the practices of yoga and writing, the practitioner – sadhaka is the Sanskrit word used in yoga – can find herself reluctant to practice. Why isn't she doing surya namaskar (salute to the sun) the moment she arises? Why isn't she at work writing? Time, space, intention and experience have all been established. What obstacles can there be?

These obstacles are disease, inertia, doubt, heedlessness, laziness, indiscipline of the senses, erroneous views, lack of perseverance, and backsliding. (Iyengar 1996: 78)

So says the ancient sage Patanjali who lived some time between 500 and 200 BC and wrote on grammar, medicine and yoga: works that remain, in India, commentators say, the basis for these knowledge systems. The obstacles are found in physical, mental, intellectual or spiritual infirmities of the sadhaka or would-be sadhaka.

On a good day doing your practice is not an issue. It is what you do. On a bad day...

You feel too sick. You feel too dull. You hate yourself, your best work is behind you, you've lost your way, lost your voice, lost your gift. You're incapacitated by remorse. You'd rather go back to bed or lie dozing in the sun or see if that cute, friendly person wants to suck your toes. Oops, you spent yourself talking, ate too much, drank too much, had the smoke, decided to go out dancing. You don't have to practice today because, just because you don't have to do anything you don't feel like and you don't think you feel like it and also it takes too long to work out what you really feel which you feel you first should do. Plus, once they do suck your toes once, what then? Or now the problem is, you're just not getting anywhere so obviously you're no good, you're stupid, lazy, a fraud. Give up, who cares. You can't do yoga because it stops you from writing; you can't write because it stops you from doing yoga. Or today – what day is it? – what the problem is, if it is a problem, what it is, hang on, you were doing about ten other things.

How, with all these obstacles does the sadhaka get to sit at her desk, stand on her mat?

Practice demands four qualities from the aspirant: dedication, zeal, uninterrupted awareness and long duration. (Iyengar 1996:15)

Dedication. Zeal. Uninterrupted awareness. Long duration. Those four qualities. Obvious. And it is yoga itself that strengthens these qualities. Yoga gives you the discipline to do yoga. It is the routine of writing that makes it impossible not to write. It is the cultivation of habit that ensures these practices as habits.

That's what you have to do: cultivate the habit.

Adherence to single-minded effort prevents these impediments.

It's the practice of practice that makes practice happen.

4. Balance and creativity

With the increase of the popularity of yoga in the West many more writers are doing yoga. Usually the practice of yoga is taken up as a 'balance' to the work of writing which, physical and tiring as it is, is largely mental work done with little motion. Yoga is taken up for physical discipline, an alternative to or adjunct to going to the gym or going for walks. (You can go to a 'yoga' class in a gym, but if you were serious about yoga you probably wouldn't.) Writers famously like to go for walks too; a good walk is essential to the practice of writing in ways similar to yoga; a writer is someone who goes for walks. This affinity of writing and long walks is exemplified in the prodigious English hikes of Romantic poets like Wordsworth. Most writers I know like to walk.

The mind roams free on a walk; on the other hand in yoga the mind is concentrated in the pose. And it becomes clear that yoga is not only physical exercise, it is also mental discipline, though it might indeed be a 'balance' to the practice of writing.

In every Australian city – as in the cities of many other countries – yoga schools are mushrooming. Even the smallest towns are likely to have a yoga class in a local hall. 'I do yoga,' is becoming a very common declaration in private and in public. 'It's so relaxing,' people say. 'I feel so much better. It helps.'

Yoga asana is a bodily practice that has its effects on the whole being. A writer friend says to me, 'After I do yoga I can't write, I'm too balanced and peaceful, I can't just go straight into writing'. In this view, art – any kind of creativity – requires a kind of derangement that yoga works against. Or at least it requires to have a head that is not empty but vibrant with (creative) tensions.

People in creative work worry that if they were to loose their hold on craving, that if they were to still the agitated, desiring feeling-states that seem to produce work, that seem essential origins of work, that if all this were gone then they would become numb and catatonic. Or so serene and accepting that the creative urge would be evaporated.

But this is not what happens. In a book called The Embodied Mind, the authors point out that the practice of mindfulness/awareness (which is the point of yoga asana) shows that:

In fact, exactly the reverse is the case. It is the mindless, the unaware state of mind that is numb – swathed in a thick cocoon of wandering thoughts, prejudgments, and solipsistic ruminations. As mindfulness/awareness grows, appreciation for the components of experience grows. The point of mindfulness/awareness is not to disengage the mind from the phenomenal world; it is to enable the mind to be fully present in the world. The goal is not to avoid action but to be fully present in one's actions, so that one's behavior becomes progressively more responsive and aware. (Varela et al: 122)

Yoga is not a negation of creativity, not a stifling of creativity, but both an awakening of and a kind of creativity in itself.

In his book Creativity, poet and writing teacher Kevin Brophy discusses creativity as a changing value or knowledge in dispute between discourses. Psychoanalysis tells us that creativity is a kind of neurosis; Surrealism that it is a kind of revolution; the current mania for creative writing courses that it is a kind of therapy. In other recent theory, creativity is an effect of humans doing the work for memes, the culture's equivalent of genes, or viruses of the mind. We might say that 'doing yoga' has become a meme, in the way that wearing low-cut jeans or calling everything that pleases you 'cool' is. (Or was.)

The very term 'creative writing' gives equal emphasis to what is done and the quality of its doing. Creative writing in universities, a rapidly growing discipline, increasingly promotes the study of 'creativity' as much as the doing of writing: we do not only seek self-expression and artistry but to add to the knowledge of the processes and conditions that produce it. What is 'creativity'? Can yoga tell us any more about this vexing, necessary term?

In yoga, the experienced sadhaka is instructed to 'create' within each pose. Creativity in asana requires constant attention to and action on each element of the pose, and the endless refinement of understanding of what these elements are.

B.K.S. Iyengar discusses yoga as 'art' in his The Art of Yoga and says:

Yoga brought a new meaning to my life...and led me to search for the hidden truth and artistic essence in each asana. ...I found joy in bettering my best, finding new movements, meanings and aesthetic nuances in each asana, in learning, unlearning and learning again. ...Gradually, I became indifferent to the responses of the audience as my practice became artistic in itself... There was no fixed format for the asanas when I started. I therefore had to face the hardships of working in the unknown and experimenting with my body. Often this was painful...I laboured hard...I analysed every movement and adjusted every fibre and muscle of my body... (Iyengar 1985: 4-5)

Pain, joy, unlearning, experiment, analysis: the writer works on the text as the yogi works on the asana.

B.K.S. Iyengar's translation of and commentary on the sutras of Patanjali is suffused with his own experimental – creative – mindset, yet it leaves the original text for another reader more, and not less, readable and writable. The engagement of critical writing with a novel does the same. That is, the best critical writing extends, rather than limits, the possible readings of a text. This applies to formal critical essays or a piece in a journal or a letter from a friend urging you to read a certain book.

The writer is concerned with the mind, the life of the mind, the mind's passions and inventions. And inquiry into how fiction is written is illuminated by asana, the yoga of physical posture, the yoga in which the body is most clearly involved, most essential.

Yoga brings the attention of the mind to the body, stilling all other thought. The first sutra of Patanjali says:

Yoga is the cessation of movements in the consciousness. (Iyengar 1996:46)

The sutra has given rise to many translations and commentaries; the Sanskrit words it uses are capable of extensive exegesis, especially over the word 'citta', here translated as 'consciousness'.

It is interesting that yoga texts like these have many words in the ancient Sanskrit for aspects of mind and consciousness: 'buddhi': the individual discriminating intelligence; 'mahat': its cosmic counterpart; 'citta': consciousness; 'antahkarana': the thinking principle, 'ahamkara': the ego. Recent studies in consciousness show that Freud's theory of the unconscious was far from the last word on the workings of the mind. The creative mind, the creative self, the creative act – these phenomena are circled and approached in discourses of mind and self, and retain an essential quality of mystery. It is impossible to know all the factors involved. And there is that essential paradox: the creative mind is studying itself, a paradox pointed to by yoga. For, when all citta is stilled, when the endless babble of thoughts is silenced and you observe your own still, silent mind, where, then, is the mind; what is the true self? The observer or the observed? The reader of the self or the self that is read? Is the self the mind, or something else? What does it mean to say that body and mind can't be separated?

5. Asana and the spiritual

From time to time since I began studying the Iyengar method, I've come across the criticism that it is 'not spiritual enough'. 'I want to do a more spiritual form of yoga' I've been told. It is interesting, and not exactly clear, to work out quite what people mean when they say this. Most likely the sentiment arises from the puritanical idea, common in most traditions in both the West and India, that the body is an impediment to spiritual awareness and growth, and too much attention to the body puts you in jeopardy. Mortification or neglect of the flesh are meant to enhance, even be necessary for, a spiritual progress. It's an attitude difficult to reconcile with the idea of 'union' so basic to yoga.

Those who say they seek a yoga that immediately takes them into a 'spiritual' practice, a 'less physical' one, are, for instance, sometimes attracted to forms of yoga that ask them to pay close attention to the breath from the very start of their practice. In the Iyengar method, and in my experience, this distracts the beginner from the close attention one needs to the many aspects of asana – alignment , balance and so on – that, once taken care of, will create an essentially correct way to breathe in the pose.

Sometimes what people mean by a 'more spiritual' yoga is that is they'd rather do chanting, or rather do yoga where the idea is poses are meant to be easy and not challenging, or rather be allowed to drift off into dreams of white light, or rather not do yoga at all.

And for some, the path to the spiritual is, perhaps, Bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, and asana is not essential for, or even a distraction from, this; nor is it seen as essential for devout yogis involved in Jnana yoga, the yoga path of knowledge, or Karma yoga, the path of action.

The practice of asana can be carried out simply for the sake of its physical benefits. Arguably even this kind of practice, after sufficient time and done with sufficient integrity, will be experienced as, again, not 'merely physical'. Certainly the effect of the reduction of stress, and a better ability to relax, endure and concentrate, are hard to quantify as 'merely physical'.

A serious student does not only perform asana but studies their meaning and effects, reads yoga texts, and works on an increase in awareness and understanding. Thus the practice of asana becomes also a form of Jnana Yoga. Jnana, considered by, for example, the influential Swami Vivekananda, the 'highest form' is a path that can take you through whatever field your endeavours in the world happen to be located.

When I say I practice yoga I mean Iyengar yoga, the practice based on the work of B.K.S. Iyengar, the most influential teacher and writer of yoga – especially the yoga of asana, or physical posture – in our time. B.K.S. Iyengar's method and writings are based in turn on the yoga sutras of Patanjali – BKSI insists that the yoga he teaches is 'Patanjali yoga'.

Patanjali yoga is known as Asthanga, that is, eight limbs. The eight limbs are: Yama (ethical disciplines); Niyama (rules of conduct); Asana (posture); Pranayama (extension of breath and its control); Pratyahara (control of the senses); Dharana (stillness of mind); Dhyana (integration into object of contemplation) and Samadhi (the end of all duality.

By the way, 'Astanga Yoga' is a term commonly used for the yoga taught by Patabi Jois (like Iyengar a past student of Krishnamacariar, and based in Mysore). As in most of the popular forms of yoga, however, the emphasis is on asana, and Patabi Jois yoga is known for, and practiced as, a series of asana linked by continuous movement. Students learn a series – primary, intermediate, advanced – and practice them in the set order each time.

In Iyengar yoga, the practice of linking asana in a continuous form of movement is known as 'Vinyasa' (in a practice session these are informally called 'jumpings') and is only one of a range of ways of practicing and sequencing asana. This doesn't seem to be very widely practiced these days, in spite of its alleged superiority as a form of aerobic exercise with benefits equivalent to those claimed by popular yet 'merely physical' exercise such as jogging and various gym classes.

Asana implies, is based on, and leads to the other limbs. A diligent asana practice certainly will naturally lead to a practice of Pranayama and Dharana. Dhyana might follow, but even BKSI says he has not attained Samadhi. As for Yama and Niyama, the ethical practices, one might simply say that a diligent practice of asana ensures a prolonged association with an environment in which good behaviour and attitude are valued, and this will have its effects. Get to specific interpretations, and everyone's a theologian. I've seen Brahmacharya translated as both 'abstinence from sex' and 'honesty in personal relationships'. In the larger world, there is no consensus on the nature of the ethical sense, but a pretty widespread agreement that we need one. We do; you decide whether it's to please God or make the world beautiful or to make the world work. Etcetera.

To examine all this is outside the scope of what I'm doing here, but I will say that the implication of these other limbs in asana lead you right up against areas of belief, philosophy, how you think, how you live, the heavy concepts. They make you look at your beliefs in the realm of the spiritual or religious even if you are adamantly not religious and suspicious of the word 'spiritual'.

In my novel Neem Dreams three of the four main characters discuss this tricky concept:

'So wasn't Varanasi spiritual?' Pandora asked.

'It was all about death,' Andy said, 'if that's spiritual.'

'If anything has anything to do with what is spiritual,' Jade pointed out, 'it would be death.'

[...] 'If anything is spiritual,' said Jade, 'it's good food.'

It wasn't the same as emotional or mental. It wasn't religion, but religion had something to do with it. It wasn't believing in god because Buddhists had spiritual beliefs but no god. It was meditation and becoming ego-less. It was a social thing. It was the connectedness of everything, it was universal ecology. It was another oppression.

And later the authorial voice remarks:

If you knew what a person prayed to – rather than for – you would know something more secret than their carnal fantasies.

It is possible to consider writing as a kind of yoga, as an Indian writer Sesanarine Persaud tells us:

A short story has a life of its own. It is Yoga. It has different forms at different times, the same as the lives it brings to life. At one point in one's life the Yoga of meditation (Jnana Yoga) is more suitable than, say, Hatha Yoga (physical postures); at another time neither Jnana Yoga nor Hatha Yoga is suitable, but Karma Yoga (the yoga of selfless action) is. For me, all writing is Yoga. Art as Yoga is nothing new to Indians. (Persaud 2000:532)

Yoga, from the Sanskrit word 'yog', meaning 'to yoke', or 'union', can be defined as the union between the various aspects of self. Various aspects and meanings of the self emerge in the inquiry into the writing self too. Writing more apparently engages the mental and intellectual aspects of self, yoga the physical and perhaps spiritual. Maybe there is, after all, a use for that word, 'spiritual', one that expresses the sublime moments in each practice, as B.K.S. Iyengar says:

To live spiritually is to live in the present moment. When you are practicing, as long as no other thoughts come to you, for that much time you are spiritual. (Iyengar 1988:159)

6. Writing about the body

What is the self? The idea of the usual sense of self being an illusion has become wide-spread. I think we need a kind of double vision, so that we can use the idea of an individual self, or ignore it, depending on our purposes. As novelist Edmond White says:

I'm convinced that the self is an illusion, and that actually all we are consists of several piles, or, as the Buddhists call them, skandhas, of associations and memories and so on, that the way to enlightenment is to dissolve the illusion of unity and return all these elements to their original constituents, thereby ridding one-self of the notion of identity. Although all that appeals to me philosophically, as a novelist I don't believe it. As a novelist I believe there is a kind of smell that's very distinctive about each living creature, and I enjoy being a sort of sketch artist, like a sidewalk artist, who tries to catch a likeness – and I somehow manage to believe that there are likenesses, and that they do tell you something about people. (White 1994:266)

To know what it is that is distinctive about a person is, not only for a novelist, a way to see the real self, to see a kind of truth.

It's your mind that makes you you, isn't it? – your thoughts and emotional responses and all those skandhas that create your identity? What about your body? Are you the same self when your body changes? 'What I am is in here,' I remember a friend saying, pointing to her head, and meaning that she did not care to be judged or responded to according to perceptions of her body.

But in yoga we find that we are, in some way, what our bodies are: open in some areas, closed in others, flexible here and painfully rigid there, holding on to past pains one day, experiencing liberating release another. We talk about yoga making us stronger, calmer, energized. We change as our bodies change. And still to say that is to imply that 'we' are not exactly our bodies.

Yoga approaches the question of self by breaking down the binary of body and mind.

Yoga is not only done by the body, and writing is not only done by the mind.

A challenge to the idea that writing concerns only the mind and not the body has been posited in recent critical theory, notably the écriture féminine of Helene Cixous: a 'feminine' writing that is 'in tune with the body's needs and pleasures ... a writing committed to expressing the truth and deriving from and received by the body'. (Sellers 59, 183)

This is a notion that has met considerable resistance, and not only by patriarchal authority:

If there is any aspect of Cixous's thought that has been and may continue to be problematic for Americans – as it has been for some French women – it is probably the metaphorical system through which her fantasies are transmitted, specifically the complex conceit represented by the now widely used phrase 'writing the body'. (Gilbert:x)

Still, the influence of this idea has become widespread; no one associated with practitioners in writing, Theory or academia can fail to be aware how popular the idea of 'body' has become in relation to questions of writing and culture. (The large number of new academic book titles that contain the word 'body' might suggest the word's inclusion helps the chance of publication.)

When I wrote my first novel in 1979-1982 (Between Careers) I had not read Cixous, but it was a study of that novel, then part of her doctoral dissertation, by Alison Bartlett that drew my attention to some of the naming and development in ideas about bodily writing. I'd managed to live for years in ignorance of the literature of this exciting new theory. Ecriture féminine was introduced to me by Alison after I said, in an interview with her in 1993:

In knowing quite clearly that form and content are one, that a woman who knows her body as a woman writes from that knowledge, and similar things not articulated, I am helped by my study of yoga; it is a language that makes sense of such things for me, not only the writings of yoga but its practice. It makes me practice what I work for in my writing: that attention, that constant refining, that precision. And intelligence that is diffuse in the body. A yoga instruction might be to bring intelligence to the big toe. And you find you can. And your intelligence is then expanded. (Bartlett 1998a:21)

While it is hard to demonstrate that bodily consciousness informs acts of writing, the subject matter of writing in modern times has been drenched in aspects of corporeal reality that once were largely contained in silence. When I was a child I wondered why no one went to the toilet or menstruated in the novels I read; but I was already learning that it is in silences, gaps, absences that knowledge is found. In the same interview I said:

Speak the unspeakable, find words for what is not said. I love it when I see something that does that.

Writing from the body means that I cannot ignore the bodies of my character. In her own essay on reading, Alison says:

I glance at what you are reading. It is a book I have just read, by Inez Baranay [The Edge of Bali]. You are reading a chapter describing the narrator's menstrual cramps. I loved that chapter: the articulation of a common experience and the offering of knowledge on that experience. (Bartlett 1998b:92)

The passage she refers to is:

She wakes from this dream, cold, feeling so awfully cold. She has period pain, that cold, cramping pain, that dragging inside her abdomen and thighs. She might have been able to lie still, to sleep again, if it were either the cold or the pain. But both. She switches on the lamp, and pulls on the rest of her light, tropical clothes. ... She lies back with her knees bent, the soles of her felt pressed together: the supta-badakonasana position she had learned in yoga: good for period pain.

Bodily experience, physical existence, the corporeal: these matters cannot fail to intrigue me, as one who grew to understand the silences imposed on women, queer sexuality and ethnicity. There could also be the influence of my natal horoscope – most planets in earth signs, characterising an especial association to the material world and incarnate self. Then there's the effect of living in a time when these issues provide the philosophical troubles of astounding new technologies. Even just to hear about developments in technical advances and the ontological and ethical problems in, for example, the field of gene engineering makes all of us rephrase our questions of incarnation and mortality. You get used to organ transplants but why is someone else's lung or liver so essentially different from their brain? How many transplants can you have and still be you? What about pre-natal diagnoses of disabilities, of congenital diseases? What about parental selection of sex? What about 'designer babies'?

Will cyborgs do yoga?

And how can we talk of truth and real selves in a post-modern world of uncertainty, relativism, unstable identity? Yet yoga's ultimate question seems always to have been: What is the true self?

Is it the question that matters, or the answer, or your answer?

7. The yoga commodity

In a culture where 'retail therapy' is a serious proposition for emotional health, the true self might be found in shopping.

The ever-increasing popularity of yoga supports or creates subsidiary industry. Consider sales of leotards, mats, bolsters, benches and a range of other props. CDs, books, glossy magazines, videos. Master-class workshops. Classes in gyms. Trips to India.

A recent article in an Indian newspaper, describing the strident marketing of a vast array of 'yoga goods', the celebrity endorsements of yoga and the new entrants to yoga styles – Hot Yoga, Flow Yoga, Power Yoga – asks:

Was this one more example of Western materialism versus Eastern philosophical essence or was it a more general ancient high thinking with simple living fighting a losing battle with the modern branded-goods-for-every-activity obsession that makes moving from one activity to another also a feverishly-paced change from one set of clothes and gear to another, quite often eclipsing the importance of the activity itself. ...[T]he over-commercialisation of the notion of something spiritual being 'sold' is disturbing. (Ravindran 2002:1)

The yoga craze in the West is based on teachings originating in India, now being sold Western-style back to India. Watch out for YogaWorld or McYoga. Is this kind of selling a globalism?

I spent some months in Delhi in 2002, and newspapers and magazines were full of stories on yoga as a fashion among middle-class women. In familiar manner, various styles and schools are sampled and summarized by the journalist. Savasana, the pose of the corpse, a pose of complete stillness and release usually done at the end of every session, is deemed unnecessary by one fresh yoga adherent, as after all, she claims, we already spend so much time lying around watching television that it's a waste of time to lie around when doing yoga, we need only the active poses.

Commodification, ownership, patent and copyright, tradition and innovation, Westernisation and globalization: these are aspects of the intellectual property issue that was one of the starting points for my novel Neem Dreams. When patents were taken out on neem products \- products manufactured by multinational companies, based on the traditional knowledge systems of India which had long ago discovered the many uses of the neem tree in agriculture, medicine, household - many arguments arose over the accusations of 'intellectual piracy'. These arguments have parallels in the yoga craze.

In Neem Dreams, some Western travelers discuss their reason for being in India:

We have come to take further instruction, says Toronto, a stern woman in an embroidered pale blue waistcoat over blue; everyone has new clothes today. But he, says Norway, meaning the golden one, he comes only to network, to contact his contacts, to say I was in India. It is business, yoga, argues Toronto, let's face it, this is the 90s.

Some yogic thing for orientalisme, perhaps, thinks Jade, a book, if there were a yoga book better than the rest or

And why is he here, he wants to secure Guruji's name on the patent he has taken out for yoga props. With Jade between them they air their arguments. Patents on yoga props! Guruji never took out patents; he started with taking an ordinary bench, blanket or bolster, household items, and showing you how they can help you find your pose.

or if not the book, the blanket, the mat, some special kind of mat they lie on to do it, that would be the kind of thing, if there were one yoga prop that was the best you would find it in orientalisme or

And LA developed them further. His props are a new product, supposed to be better than the everyday benches and ropes, as they will be available in calculated sizes, and packaged with instructions. He goes too far, insists Norway; markets himself as a master, publishes his own book, presenting the method of teaching as his very own, with barely the slightest of references to Guruji to whom he clearly owes everything.

Yoga is not static, it develops, argues Toronto; Guruji doesn't own yoga.

or you could even find LA dream's props, he'd have a card, he could want another outlet or

Yoga is his, it's theirs it's not ours, says Norway. Her what, her faction, does not hold with putting yourself on a par with this Guruji who devoted his life, learnt from his guru in ancient lineage, made our learning possible and has more knowledge, experience, insight and wisdom than any of us ever will.

or maybe outfits they do their yoga in, not latex leotards, something from here or design your own line, stretch it out with Jade.

No-one can own knowledge any more argues Toronto.

In yoga magazines in the West, and in cafes adjacent to yoga schools, there is discussion over whether yoga teachers should charge for their classes, and how much. They have to earn a living, but should they rely on yoga for that? If they rely on yoga teaching to earn a living, does it compromise the teaching by the need to attract paying students, the need to make them feel relaxed and comfortable rather than challenged?

Teacher training is a prolonged, intensive and systematic – and constantly developing - program at the Institute in Pune where Mr Iyengar, and his daughter Geeta, son Prashant and others teach the teachers. The thorough instruction includes this advice: 'Do not get carried away by the words of appreciation or disapproval of the students . Remember your dharma is to teach the subject of yoga and impart it well.'

In today's world, yoga is business, yoga teachers advertise and compete, and claim superior authenticity for their methods.

In Australia, 'Writers' Centres' have been established in capital cities and large towns, and endlessly offer workshops and master classes that promise to reveal the secrets of getting published, managing your career, selling more of your work, make a living from your travel experiences or your traumas. The desire to write is represented as the desire to sell. I can't find one of the multiple advertisements in the Centres' newsletters that offers a workshop on writing because you love it, writing against the demands of the prevailing marketplace.

Universities in Australia, and elsewhere, are drowning under a tidal wave of neo-liberalism, universal free education belonging to the past and future. Creative writing courses are popular among fee-paying students. I am not against creative writing in universities; I teach it. Jobs for writers as teachers are created here, places for writers to be able to do new work are created here. The courses become a kind of general humanities course at undergraduate level, where discussions about culture and humanity take place as once they might have in literature courses. The fervent hope is uttered by teachers that they at least will create better and more committed, adventurous readers. (That so many creative writing students want to write and not read remains a baffling, even disturbing, fact.)

The market place, though, plays its inevitable part, with the number of students going on to publish commercially being the measure of any creative writing program's success, ensuring not only its prestige but its continuation, its funding. What sells becomes the measure of worth, and all this in a time when the conservatism, timidity, conformity and predictability of mainstream publishing are widely acknowledged in current discussions and writings on the publishing industry.

Still, this market-place mania, and the prevailing political climate are merely current contexts not lasting preconditions; they will have altered in the cycles and transformations of time. And we will still be doing our practice,

Take away the market place, and people will still practice yoga and practice writing.

And while yogis of old might not have had those great new lightweight yoga bricks available from the sports store at the mall, and you can do yoga without them, they can assist your practice; if you can get them, do it.

8. Four ways to be right

What is the true self? And how can we talk of truth and real selves in a post-modern world of uncertainty, relativism, unstable identity? In a world where gene studies and consciousness studies keep our sense of what we know of real selves and truth unsettled and subject to constantly unfolding findings? Can yoga shed any light?

In his essay 'Four Different Ways to be Absolutely Right', Walter Truett Anderson claims there are four distinguishable worldviews in contemporary Western societies, each with 'its own ideas about what truth is – where and how you look for it, how you test or prove it'. These are: the neo-romantic, the social traditionalist, the scientific rationalist and the postmodernist.

In the neo-romantic worldview, truth is found through harmony with nature and/or spiritual explorations of the inner self. In the social- traditional worldview, truth is found in the heritage of Civilisation; in the scientific-rationalist through methodical, disciplined inquiry, and in the postmodernist-ironist, truth is socially constructed. Each has its own idea about what truth is, how it is found, how you prove it. (Anderson: 107)

Yoga's fundamental question can be seen as what is the self? And the answer depends on how you find or recognise truth.

Following Anderson's model we could suppose there are four types of contemporary Western-style yogis. (The word 'yogi' properly refers to a master practitioner, but in McYogaworld anyone who is taking classes might call themselves a yogi (or yogini).) Each type has its distinguishable way of thinking about the 'true' self and how it is found in yoga:

The neo-romantic westerner finds her true inner self through introspective and meditative attention in yoga. There she is, an unmistakable reality, in the quiet observation of the flow of thoughts and the momentary stillness of the flow. There she really is in that fleeting bliss, the bliss of divinity, so much higher than the material world's mere pleasure. 'I love where yoga takes me' she might say.

She's the one likely to do her yoga among aspirational and motivational slogans (they've become a kind of religion of their own), and to believe that displaying sayings like 'believe it and you're half-way there' and 'angels are watching' make these things true, keep her true to their spirit, confirm her connection to an occult world of better feelings, kinder actions and superior ways of knowing. Ancient wisdom is a key concept. Neo romantic yoga is done to tapes of chanting or other 'spiritual' music, with incense burning and tea made from flowers to refresh you afterwards. A sense of connecting to beauty and harmony through yoga appeals, and yoga is part of an aesthetic that values handicrafts, Indian textiles and wind chimes.

The social-traditionalist finds her true self in obedience to the teachings of the widely revered guru and the widely respected yoga tradition 'What I love' she might declare 'is that this is an old tradition, there is a lineage'. She finds value in written texts that elucidate and validate the teachings. The theory is important to her, and she will begin to make a study of the Sutras, the Gita, and articles in yoga journals. Like the neo-romantic, she will be most likely to consider the chanting of Sanskrit words names, the burning of incense and greeting with a Namaste as elements of practice, but more as a demonstration of or homage to yoga's own traditional cultural origins than for personally uplifting and inspiring effects.

Similarly, the scientific rationalist, has a different relationship to the ancient teachings and the guru's scholarly exegesis: he concludes he can rely on their expertise, knowing that yoga has been subject to examination, testing, testimonials. 'It works, it's proven, it's scientific.' The true self is found outside, in objective facts and the tests of experts. He likes to know that patients are referred to yoga by esteemed psychologists, chiropractors and cardiologists. He likes to know he is doing his practice alongside mental health workers and successful lawyers and tough-minded business people, yoga's benefits under scrutiny, its benefits a matter of empirical study , attested to by sober professionals in physiology, oncology and immunology . Yoga's value is found in its alterations and development – evolution, even – following further studies and experiments, responding to particular circumstances and the interaction with a range of other disciplines.

The postmodernist yogi does not believe there is a single true self. Self is an illusion, and there happens to be an old Sanskrit word for that, 'maya'. The self is a construct, an idea; the self is nothing; the self is a game. Yoga is another way to play this game, a way to experience and consider the perfectibility and limitations and inextricability of mind and body, the meaning of creation and the creation of meaning. She can participate in the game of yoga, for example, for scientific rationalist reasons too, when she cares to, for truth itself is a construct not an absolute, although to say so becomes a declaration of absolute truth, but that only shows how tricky the question of truth is. Plus she can also do yoga just because it feels so amazing.

What's that? Post-modernism is over? There may be new ways to be right being formulated, but there'll be a way that yoga will find a way to be right amongst them.

Of course 'four ways' is not seriously a taxonomy to categorize and divide all yoga practitioners. Yoga practitioners are infinitely more various and the categories we inhabit are not exclusive and not entirely distinct. The point is only to wonder if yoga can say something about the various ways to be right or that ways to be right can say something about yoga. It's just another way to think about what we're doing when we do yoga, how to integrate yoga into the other discourses of our daily lives.

9. Tadasana: Two

Stand on your two feet. Lift the heels and stretch them backwards as you lower them onto the floor. Lift the balls of the feet, the toes, and stretch them forward. The toes are soft, not gripping the floor. The weight is over the balls of the feet not the toes. Imagine your feet bisected lengthways and crossways: your weight is over that central point. So the feet broaden as they provide the firm foundation. Now you have come to know the structure of the feet, take that knowledge to this pose.

The soles are firmly rooted into the ground, the floor, as the base of a mountain is rooted deep into the earth. The weight is even over the big toe mounds, the outer edge of the foot, the back of the heel. You grow long and tall like a mountain reaching up into the sky. From that firm base ascend, grow tall, stretch upwards.

Lift the inner ankles. The kneecaps lift into the quadriceps, the spine ascends to the crown of the head. Your shoulders are broad. The hands are drawn down into the ground as the crown of the head is drawn upward. Compress the hips, narrow the waist, broaden the shoulders.

Now what has happened to the balance of your weight?

Compress the calves as you lift the ankles, lift the patellas, lift the quadriceps, and keep the ascending action to the crown of your head. Take the navel inwards and upwards. Soften the diaphragm; there is no hardness there. Sacrum moving forward, sit bones drawn up in the body. The spine ascends, sacrum and crown in line. Do you have hardness in the jaw, the throat, the mouth? Soften; keep the face passive. The face is always in Savasana. Keep checking, refining, adjusting, the attention focused on the pose.

**10. The enemy** **of dreams: writing/dreams/yoga**

Dream diaries

Dreams remind us that there is a treasure locked away somewhere, and writing is the means to try and approach the treasure. And as we know, the treasure is in the searching, not the finding.

If I could, I would be jealous of my dreams: they are mightier than we are, greater in weakness and in strength. In dreams we become magic which is why if I could be jealous of my dreams – and I sometimes am – I would be. (Cixous 1993:88)

The first thing to write in the morning is the dream.

Or in the afternoon after the afternoon sleep, a snooze, a doze, a special kind of sleep, necessary to catch up on your dreaming.

I used to write my dreams in a separate notebook. A notebook kept by the bed. Sometimes an especially beautiful notebook, unsuitable for everyday jottings that are intimidated by beautiful paper: artistic covers forbid the uncensored spontaneous note-taking urges that everyday notebook writing relies on. But dreams deserve the special paper, the notebooks given as gifts, as if to defy or cure the dreams' ephemerality.

All these diaries full of dreams.

For some time now I have, instead, written my dreams along with those other jottings – a thought to record or re-consider, a quote, a reminder, an idea to work out, a moment to remember – in my regular notebook, usually a school exercise book I cover with a fabric scrap or brown paper or used gift-wrapping, or one of those black and red chinese notebooks you've always been able to get anywhere. But I write my woken thinking in this less often these days. Perhaps email has taken its place. Or I have less of the anguish and less of the ecstasy that demanded a pen. Or because my handwriting has changed. And so a larger proportion of my notebook is filled with the dream.

Still, every time I begin to write a dream, I know mine is only a clumsy and approximate translation; I feel I am betraying the original. Walter Benjamin says:

The narration of dreams brings calamity, because a person still half in league with the dream world betrays it in his words and must incur its revenge. Expressed in more modern terms: he betrays himself. He has outgrown the protection of dreaming naïveté, and in laying clumsy hands on his dream visions he surrenders himself. For only from the far bank, from broad daylight, may dream be recalled with impunity. (Benjamin 1978: 62)

'Betrayal', 'calamity': these words describe the feeling of trying to write, let alone interpret, a dream. Still, as a great deal of writing arouses a fear or suspicion of betrayal or calamity, to write one's dreams is to learn to face writing's darker dimensions.

The language of writing about dreams, the language of dreams

I am in this place that is and is not. Something like but not exactly. Like some kind of. The person is and is not. Now I think it was X but it was not. Just an image, my mother looking very pretty. Apparently. Seemingly. I wake making sounds of anguish. This weird unpleasant state. Something happens here. A sense of peaceful scented gardens. Some suggestion of. I was writing a sequel. In this dream I am asleep and dreaming.

Dreams of nakedness and of clothes: sarongs and a beautiful dress, silken. Dreams of loss and being lost. Of wonderful places, so very many wonderful places, places to remember and miss, places that are dream settings. Of children, and childbirth, many of these dreams over many years, the unborn and the newborn and the infants. Of old friends I am pleased to find turn up in my dreams. Of people I meet only in my dreams. Or a very creepy human-ish little creature I try to kill. Or yet another dream lover.

A woman who writes is a woman who dreams about children. Our dream children are innumerable (Cixous 1993:74)

Dreams about blood. Menstruating and blood everywhere, all over the stairs and splashing all over the walls, my blood.

Blood pouring from my eyes: a dream I record only with a drawing.

Looking at these accounts of my dreams. These wonderful phrases and images, marvels, marvellous moments. Yes, call it the poetry of the soul. No wonder writers want to publish books of their dreams. But don't. Don't tell your dreams. Please.

No one will experience your dream the way you did. You might say, no one will experience anything the way you did, but the re-telling of a dream is a stark experience of the limits of language's ability to communicate experience.

Dreams teach us

In order to go to the School of Dreams, something must be displaced, starting with the bed. One has to get going. This is what writing is, starting off. It has to do with activity and passivity. This does not mean one will get there. Writing is not arriving; most of the time it's not arriving. One must go on foot, with the body. One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward the dark. (Cixous 1993: 65)

The self, then. What dreams teach you is what dreams are. How could you bear to never remember your dreams, as some claim? The self is a creature that dreams and meets itself in these dreams. Yes, this is mysterious.

What comes up when you start writing are all the scenes of impotence, terror, or vast power. The unconscious tells a tale of the supernatural possibility... (Cixous 1993:77-8)

You learn to write by writing your dreams. You try and find the words, watch the dream change from a dream into something written. Write without commentary or apology.

Dreams teach us. They teach us to write. (Cixous 1993:79)

The writing lessons of dreams, says Helene Cixous, are these: 'Without Transition. Speed. The Lost Mysteries. The Magic Word'. But of course. You learn these first by writing your dreams. There is no explanation to take you from one scene to another, you do not need permissions or reasons or visas to enter the dream territory. You are there. Write like that.

In dreams... the feeling of foreignness is absolutely pure, and this is the best thing for writing. Foreignness becomes a fantastic nationality. (Cixous 1993:80)

A dream does not need to introduce and explain, does not need to set it up before it begins. You are there and it is happening. Write like that. There is an experience of the mystery you have forgotten how to see in everyday life. There are the magic words, the images or sounds that are the force of the dream, never mind why. Write like that. It ends when it is over. Write like that.

Dreams remind us of mysteries. (Cixous 1993:89)

Human existence, experience and selfhood have a dimension of mystery that the writer is well-advised to be well-acquainted with, so that the whole of her reality, not only the obvious and easily expressed, has a place in the world of her writing.

Dreams in fiction

I have found that in the world of dreams the complexity of characters as aspects of oneself are revealed.

I begin to write a new draft of my novel and I know. My novel will have dreams in the title. My novel will have dreams in it. My characters are dreaming their dreams and they are in my dreams. And then I read this arresting passage in an impressive new novel (Eucalyptus by Murray Bail):

Descriptions of dreams have a dubious place in storytelling. For these are dreams that have been imagined – 'dreamed up', to be slotted in. A story can be made up. How can a dream be made up? By not rising of its own free will from the unconscious it sets a note of falsity, merely illustrating something 'dream-like' which maybe why dream descriptions within stories seem curiously meaningless...turn the page... (Bail 1998)

And a friend comments 'this is the perfect statement on the problem of dreams in fiction'.

What problem of dreams in fiction?

Well, there is what Robert McKee calls 'exposition in a ballgown...usually feeble efforts to disguise information in Freudian clichés', there's the dream as messenger – answers, guidance and revelations handily popping up to solve a plot problem, and worst of all there are stories that end: '...then I woke up and it was all a dream'. So, yes, there are problems with writing dreams in fiction.

But that does not mean dreams in fiction have always to be problems. How could there be fiction without dreams?

Some authors will not show their characters dreaming, not even when they have acknowledged how large a part dreams play in human lives. E.M. Forster (one of my favourite novelists on writing novels) says:

On the average, about a third of our time is not spent in society or civilization or even in what is usually called solitude. We enter a world of which little is known and which seems to us after leaving it to have been partly oblivion, partly a caricature of this world and partly a revelation. 'I dreamt of nothing' or 'I dreamt of a ladder' or 'I dreamt of heaven' we say when we wake. I do not want to discuss the nature of sleep and dreams – only to point out that they occupy much time and that what is called 'History' only busies itself with about two-thirds of the human cycle, and theorizes accordingly. Does fiction take up a similar attitude? (Forster 1955:49)

I begin to make a note whenever a novel I am reading includes a dream. Nearly every novel I read includes a dream. It is more unusual for a novel not to include a dream. While I am thinking of this I begin to read Salman Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet: it opens with a dream:

On St. Valentine's Day, 1989, the last day of her life, the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara woke sobbing from a dream of human sacrifice in which she had been the intended victim. (Rushdie 1999:3)

Dreams make fictions out of our lives. Fiction is necessary to our lives as dreams are: it's as if that is what dreams prove. If we are deprived of dreams we go mad, this is science. All mammals dream, even before being born we dream, a foetus in the womb dreams, we dream before we experience the world. I am interested to discover that among the universal facts of dreams is the difference between big dreams and little dreams. Little dreams are the identifiable remnants of the day. And the big dreams: prophecy, knowledge, guidance, wonder. (A vast literature on dreams attests to these facts: see, for example, websites like The Dream Zone or The Dream Library.)

Old stories and bible stories were full of dreams. An angel spake unto [Jacob] in a dream; The Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream; A dream cometh through the multitude of business; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions; An angel of the Lord appeared in a dream How can we write stories and characters and life and not include dreams?

Ganesh wakes and stretches, stretches his four arms and stretches his trunk, his elephant trunk, and plays a few notes on his flute, walking and stretching and playing music beyond the wall where he hangs. Pandora watches herself submit to her dreams. Look who's here, oh no. (Neem Dreams)

I allow my characters to dream and allow my novel to be about their dreams and I allow my narrative agent to speak of dreams and of dreams in novels.

Disparate locations blend in the settings of dreams where disparate characters unite (old schoolmate, TV celebrity, someone you were reminded of yesterday). Dreams take place in their own landscape which you remember from other dreams (that same city that you pass and circle and sometimes even enter, over and over in years of dreams). (Neem Dreams)

In my novel I repeat the other novelist's warning that dreams in fiction are 'too fictional'. And the narrative agent, or author, of Neem Dreams comments:

Meaningless decrees an author who does not realise that the dreams of fiction arise from the same single source.

And, in my novel, as Pandora and Andy and Jade wake from their dreams and move around the Hotel Chandra and confide their plans and take leave of each other, the author's attention switches between the urgency of keeping an account of their significant movements and an urgent impulse to keep intruding, exercised by the question of dreams:

You wake glad to remember dreams of moment, strange emotions and queer occurrences and singular juxtapositions. Poetry! A dream is the poetic language of your soul or do you think of it as the clearing of mental scraps and garbage? Do you ever have real nightmares? Wake screaming, terrified, and must sit up and sip some water until the hideous dream has given up waiting for your return and finally slunk away and it's safe to go to sleep again. How about the terror of not being able to wake, not able to re-enter the world through your own body, have you had that one? And what about the way you can wake and know something you had not known: you realise or remember, solve the riddle fill in the blank space see the solution? A novelist counts on it. Do you ever know you're asleep and then can you direct your dream, compose it? Have you dreamt the dream of others, fictional others, as the author of a novel wakes to say that was not my own dream? (Neem Dreams)

It happens to me with every novel I write: the characters appear in my dreams and I feel affirmed. And then I have a dream and it is not my own dream but theirs, and this makes me convinced that I know, create, am this character, have access to their inner life, their unconscious processes, all that makes them 'real'.

Why your dearest friend shuns you, why you copulate with strangers or people you know far too well for that, why you wear clothes you do not wear, know people you do not know. Suppressed desires, some knowingly explain, a code for your unconfessed wishes. Or consult the dream books with alphabetical entries of literal and universal translation, so that anyone might look up shattered blue glass and see that it means the denial of your happiness or the end of your hopes for peace. Or the dream was entirely composed of aspects of yourself and you are to tell your therapist how you feel as the blue glass, the city street, the mislaid passport.

The novel reaches out to embrace the dreams dreamt in its writing. Dreaming for the novel and writing the novel become, if not exactly one, part of a oneness.

Do not interpret

'The dream's enemy is interpretation.' So Cixous reminds us, agrees with us.

The dreams interpreted by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams are all alike: ...the dreams are written by Freud. ...We must know how to treat the dream as a dream, to leave it free... (Cixous 1993:107)

Interpretation can also be the enemy of yoga.

It is not understanding that is the enemy. Yoga is the attainment of understanding. But understanding does not depend on interpretation, in yoga or in dreams.

In my novel Pandora goes to yoga school in Sydney and begins to trust her teacher Barbara:

But she wants a development and it comes. The muscles in her groin scream and her grief pours out of her. Barbara makes her do passive restorative movements. And she has to submit and do these during menstruation. What an outrage, to work 'on the side', she has always carried on as normal. But she obeys. She is made to feel her abdomen opening, her groin opening, to feel the internal stretch and the unlocking.

But I don't know why, she gasps through her tears.

That's all right, says Barbara.

Why not understand? Pandora thinks, I believe in understanding.

Because this is yoga, it means to experience griefs locked in the body, let them go. You don't have to tell stories about them, you don't have to analyse it, you know that everyone dies.

This was one of yoga's interesting lessons. I gave Pandora my memory, in the early years of classes, of a sudden pouring grief. And to my 'Why? Why? I don't understand' came the enlightening instruction 'That's all right'. Because what I had meant was 'I am not able to interpret this'. And then I did understand. And later tried to say it. There were all these therapies where you told stories, constructed meanings out of the stories you told about yourself, and there was always an explanation which stood for a reason which stood for your understanding.

The yoga body re-makes itself out of a deliberate practice of action and thought.

In yoga we sometimes have to work passively. We understand the difference between motion and action. There can be action without motion. Sometimes there is neither motion nor active action, only passive action. You must lie, for example, with your spine supported by a bolster and your legs bound in a lotus for a passive matsayasana. Surrender, let go; passivity is required, and is the experience of the pose. This is a form of negative capability, the necessary ability of a poet not only to act and create, but to be acted upon, be created.

As the impressions and images of the world might later be crafted into language, so might those of dreams. As the passive actions in yoga do their work to recreate the self – the dreaming, writing, understanding self – so might those of dreams.

11. Yoga and writing: one: stages

By nature, the art of creativity is a painful process. Each act of creation has its own pangs. It requires preparation, mental flexibility, sometimes hard diligent labour. Phases of fear, discomfort, tension, frustration and dejection invade the mind of the artist and kill his interest. These have to be accepted as unavoidable accompaniments on the hazardous and arduous journey of artistic creation. Unshaken, the artist must continually labour long (nirantarabhuasa), and use his own ethical code (yama and niyama), sensitive intellect (buddhi), right reasoning and judgement (savicara and vivecana) to reach the desired goal. Then his intuitive intelligence (sahaja jnana) and inner vision (antardrsti) attain the highest order of clear perception. (Iyengar 1985:9)

Beginning

You enter the yoga room. You see people doing their practice. They stand on their heads, stand on their arms, turn their bodies in improbable twists and bends. You think I can't do that! and the thought is a despairing one. And then your teacher says, 'Once, they couldn't do it either.'

You start. You do a little, do what you can. Next time you do a little more. It's obvious, isn't it?

You start. You stand in the first standing pose, Tadasana. Just stand. Stand straight. Stand straight and still. And begin to learn all the adjustments you can make – balance, symmetry, alignment, ascension. The adjustments you make even in this pose, the awareness you bring to it, can be refined infinitely.

You only need one asana to understand asana as you only need one poem to understand poetry.

You start. You remember what Hemingway said: All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know. You write a sentence. You rewrite the sentence. You write the sentence another way. You begin to know the ways just one sentence can be written.

Commitment

So you have taken the first step and another step. And then one day, the next step crosses a line. Yoga says, 'You can't just 'try it and see' any more. It won't work until you dedicate a portion, a part, of your life.'

This is the moment of choice. This is the commitment.

Why is she in a crowded yoga room with stained ropes and wooden blocks and black rubber mats and strange people? She thinks of it with dread.

But if it is Monday Pandora does not go to her bus when she alights from the train between her city job and her beach home. She walks past department stores, buses grinding to a halt, to a doorway next to a toyshop, climbs the stairs. Men and women are stripping off their day clothes, some struggling for modesty as they pull on tights and T-shirts.

Sometimes an odour remains from the previous class, a smell of endeavor and anxiety, wafted away in clouds of lavender oil. Barbara is a high priestess in here and the pictures lining the top of the wall above the ropes, they show, you can't say a god, something more than a teacher. A guru. Astounding in each of sixty-four asana. (Neem Dreams)

Once upon a time writing said to me, 'Get serious! We can't have an on and off relationship, waiting for your other jobs to give you time. You might need to earn less money for now, I need all of you. One day I'll look after you but I can't tell you how long it will take.'

Your guru is your practice

'So, are you a guru?' I asked Mr Iyengar. I had been going to Iyengar yoga classes for three years, and B.K.S. Iyengar was visiting Australia for the first time. I was making a one-hour program on yoga for ABC Radio and interviewed the great master. He replied, 'Your guru is your practice.'

The greatest thing a guru could ever say.

You learn to do it by doing it.

Yoga is learnt in the practice of yoga and writing is learnt in the practice of writing.

Then what is learnt in the classroom?

Teachers

A writer is taught what thought and language are capable of through reading, conversation, reading, life, reading. Yoga is taught through practice, example, readings.

A teacher of writing or of yoga shows you what more you can do, what you haven't noticed, where you are cheating yourself by holding back.

You teach by learning, you learn by teaching, and each time you find that out it seems like it's news.

Masters

Beyond the teachers there are the masters. There are writers so great that you fall to the floor while reading them. If you are not intimidated you are inspired. Shakespeare – as near indisputable as a writer ever gets – shows you a kind of perfection. Mr Iyengar shows you a kind of perfection, a vision of what is possible, a sense that we are participating in something...I want to call it divine, I don't want to call it divine.

Discipline

Once a week to begin. After a while I'd get up and go to the early morning class even if I'd had a late night, had a hangover, left someone in my bed. Even if I didn't feel like going I'd find myself showered and dressed and on the early-morning street on the way. After a while I wasn't having all that many late nights anymore, drank on fewer occasions and there were more blue moons than shared beds.

Once a week, then twice, then more. During my last few years in Sydney I went to my yoga school six days a week, for a two-hour practice or class.

You get the discipline to do so much yoga from doing yoga.

Writing begins with irresistible urges. It continues with practice. It's not only when you feel like it, not only when that rare angel inspiration comes calling, not only when you're needing to say something or needing to find what you will say. Now it's every day. Now it's the set time and place and no, you're not free to go out for a drink and no, it's not okay to come by without phoning first, even you, darling. Because I write. I write every day. I don't always feel like it. It is what I do.

You can't always leave the phone to ring and the door to rattle and the others to have their long boozy lunches without you. Have a life. Life calls, go to it.

In a lecture given in 1997, Mr Iyengar says:

Even such great yogis, who practiced and mastered yoga, kept these two main pleasures of the world – artha, which means economy to lead a pleasurable life, that is finance which brings joy to a person and kama, the lust, the sensual joy – within the border of right living. These are two of the four aims in life as passed on by the Rishis of yoga. They have not said 'Renounce'. Unfortunately what you hear from the neo-yogis is the word 'Renounce'. But the geniuses have not said 'Renounce'. On the contrary they have said to enjoy the worldly joys with discipline, limiting them within the banks of right living – dharma on one side and the liberation from that sensual net – moksa, on the other side. (Iyengar 1999b:8)

Eventually your discipline is not forced and it is not denial. It is your priority, not your sacrifice.

Never-ending refinement

You never get there. There is always some refinement possible. (A poem is not finished, it is abandoned.) No creative work is finished; it only ever is abandoned.

Plateaus

You are not making any progress. Nothing happens, nothing improves, nothing changes. You can't even do what you did before. Demons called Frustration and Despair crash the party.

This is a stage. This is necessary. This you can learn from. This is where you are, so be here. Back to basics. Learn again just to stand still and straight. Remind yourself of all the simplest adjustments.

You can't write a new sentence worth writing. So look at the sentence you already wrote. Take it apart and put it together again.

As a woman approaching menopause I am learning that I can't expect to make any obvious progress in my yoga practice. Simply to maintain is a kind of progress, as it will be into age. And while the progress is not outwardly obvious, there is still a deepening, a refining of the practice, more levels of understanding. Writing should always get better.

Flexibility, instinct

Discipline does not mean rigidity. When are there rules and when are there no rules?

It's backbends week but you have your period so you had better do passive poses. It's forward bends week but you need the particular energy released by backbends. You had a sequence planned but the weather has dramatically changed and it will be better to find a new practice suitable for today's conditions.

B.K.S. Iyengar says:

...if the body refuses then I will work some other way. I make my body to be friendly with me. That may take 20 minutes, 30 minutes. This is the time or duration in which one has to watch the state of one's self, in order to awaken that intelligence of the body... Never miss or drop the practice. You have to find alternatives ... (Iyengar 1999b:16)

You are stuck in this story, it is just not happening. Are you really going to force yourself to sit at your desk until one o'clock because that is your rule? Today you need to go and sit under a tree. You need to write at night instead, write somewhere else, write something else, not write at all today. You are not missing or dropping your practice, you are finding alternatives. Write a letter. Write something you would never show anyone. Write as if you were someone else. Get drunk, talk to a stranger. Fall asleep and dream.

Risk and reward, aim and by-product

It's all risk and no reward at first and then once again and undoubtedly some more. All you can do, should do, is get better at what you do.

In the Bhagavad Gita we are told over and over that we must perform our actions for the sake of the action and not for the fruit of the action.

The reward is not the day you do a headstand at last. It's getting there, it's the importance of each step, each decision.

The reward of writing is not publication. (In fact it has been more truly said that publication is the price you pay for writing.) Anyway, by the time publication comes, the questions of some new work are what is absorbing you.

You may begin to do yoga for the sake of better health, calmness, to lose weight, because your girlfriend does it:

[Y]oga is not a therapeutic science at all. Yoga is a science for liberating the soul by bringing the consciousness, the mind and the body to a state of integration. But when a factory [makes] a certain product for marketing, fortunately or unfortunately many other products may incidentally be produced, and may also have market value. So it is possible to forget the original...and produce only the by-products to sell on the market. Similarly, though the aim and culmination of yoga is the sight of the soul, it has lots of beneficial side effects, among which are health, happiness, peace and poise.(Iyengar 1988:85)

Writing has what we may call its side effects: publication, major or minor fame, invitations to read at conferences. You may earn enough money to buy a fabulous house or you may earn enough money to buy a new typewriter. No doubt these rewards are in the sights of many writers especially, or maybe only, as they begin.

Now, I'm not going to say that the real aim of writing is the sight of the soul. Ask writers why they write and they will tell you the answers you can find in all those books of interviews we collect. We write because we must. We write because we can. As for the soul, well, we don't have to talk about the soul. Actually we may have to. I will get to the soul later.

But you go back to Hemingway's first lesson, Write one true sentence, and you may find that to do so becomes the quest of a lifetime.

The Shadow, the unknown

You are discovering the shadows cast by the light. Who are you trusting when you keep discovering you distrust? Pain and tears! Just when you thought it was getting to be fun, just when you imagined life was sweetness. So it is because of the bitterness and darkness. Not without them. I'm not sure I'll ever quite understand this, the way 'it' – the reason we do it, the reward for doing it – is found in imperfection and not only in perfection.

The body; body and mind; union

The writing body is a body held too long in unnatural positions, cramped, still, hunched, and sacrificed.

Sacrificed to the life of the mind. The body is a poor tortured instrument.

It has become commonplace to criticise Cartesian dualism, the separation of body and mind, and our health practices and cultural theories continue to develop from the premise of a desirable integration. We understand the body as discursively produced, its actual physical being and the understanding we bring to it as a product of culture.

Yoga in its way also understands the body as a product of past thoughts and experiences, and its practice re-shapes your experience of your body through a deliberate set of new experiences and thoughts. These are known as samskara: the accumulated residue of past thoughts and actions.

Think of the body as a text written by yoga, and the self as a text written by your writing.

This is not how you begin the study of yoga. Patanjali talks of four stages: In a beginner the mind will always run on the surface, which is the physical body, and in this first stage you work with concentration and determination, looking only at parts of your body. It is only later that the mind begins to feel the action, then become more intimately acquainted with it, and looks at both the parts and the whole.

When that happens, the experience of yoga's famous union between mind and body begins.

And do you glimpse the soul?

It is extraordinary to experience your self as other than the chattering mind, as other than mind. If the mind is stilled, what or where is the self? If you are observing yourself, who is observing, who is being observed?

Writing depends on the flow of thoughts from the unconscious a great deal, and you might wonder which is the truer self, the unconscious or its servant who takes its dictation then edits it. Writing learns from dreams, and dreams tell us we are mysterious to ourselves. Somewhere in this arena we need an idea we call the soul, that part of us that connects to the mystery.

Transcendence

The very first yoga sutra of Patanjali says, 'Yoga is the cessation of movements in the consciousness' or, in another translation, 'Yoga is the inhibition of the modifications of the mind'

This seems contrary to anything writing could possibly aim for, where movements of the mind are very much what it's all about, and what you really want is for your mind to move right into some wildly wonderful new space of language.

But in the absorption of the self into the act of writing there is a kind of stillness in the frenzy, and who has not read over a piece of writing they have produced and said, awed, Could I have done that, my god where did that come from?

Transcendence cannot be an aim. It is like Zen Archery, hitting the target when you're not trying too hard to hit the target. It disappears with the thought that you have attained it.

12. Tadasana: Three

Stand in Tadasana. Are you drawn up and ascending or is there collapse? Where? Where do you want to give in? Inner leg as well as outer leg is drawn up, inner leg drawn up into the groin. Roll the upper legs inwards, as you move the sacrum down. Remember, you have learnt effort management: that greater effort does not always yield greater result.

Which asana have you just performed and which asana are you about to perform? Feel that the previous asana and the next asana have their effects on this Tadasana. Tadasana prepares us for other poses.

You need to both stabilise and open your pelvis by lifting your spine. Notice how you must use two apparently contradictory actions to do so. One, grip your tailbone with your buttock muscles; your buttocks tighten and become firm. Notice that your sacrum draws in and down, lengthening your lumbar spine, and that the back of your pelvis narrows, creating a squeezing action that lifts the spine. Release. Now, rotate your thighs inward, so your inner thighs move backward. Your sacrum will broaden and your groins will soften. Again, release. Now do both actions simultaneously, gripping with your buttocks as you internally rotate your thighs. The soft openness of your pelvis frees your spine, while the firmness of your buttocks lifts and supports it. When you do a head-stand – Sirsasansa - these actions in the pelvis and thighs keep your pelvis from sinking into your lumbar spine.

Now, keeping the lift in the spine, the lift in the rib cage, the length in the breastbone, drop the chin into the chin lock – called Jalandhara Bhanda. Notice that the back of the neck is not pulled to do so, and that the shoulders remain the highest point in the back. When you do a shoulder stand – Sarvangasana – you keep this lift and length in the chest,, again without compressing the front of the throat, without protrusion of the seventh cervical, without bearing weight on the neck rather than the shoulders.

And Mr Iyengar says:

I do Tadasana. I observe all parts of the muscles and joints and adjust as if each one is doing Tadasana. For example, when I do Tadasana, I measure the length of my back of the lower legs and front of the lower legs. Similarly, length of the inner side and outer side of the lateral parts of both the legs. While doing Urdhva Dhanurasana I maintain the length of the inner legs as in Tadasana. Whereas when you do Urdhva Dhanurasana, your outer leg may extend longer and inner side may contract and appear shorter... The mind's job is to acquaint one part of the body to the other part of the body. (Iyengar 1999b:17)

There is a lifetime of work contained in the mastery of Tadasana. You follow instruction from your teachers and then you must find the pose yourself, experience its infinite complexity, learn from it how you are today, who you are today, where you have come from and where you are going, how to be entirely in the moment, absorbed in the asana so that you are the asana. The work of this asana shows you that there is no clear boundary between your work and your self; just as you create the asana and you create your work, asana remakes you, your work remakes you. You think your legs are straight, now straighten them.

13. Yoga and writing: two: practice

1 Reluctance: the alternative self attempts

The reluctance is mysterious: we just don't know ourselves. I have never regretted a yoga practice, I usually experience agreeable sensations when practicing, I have always felt in some sense 'better' for having done a practice. But if there is a disturbance to my routine then there is reluctance. I don't do my practice. I put it off, as if it were something to dread, then only endure.

There is the self I might have been if I had not taken up yoga...and this self, as if existent in a parallel universe, insists it would have been the better choice. This alternative self might be asserting itself, keeping me from yoga, attempting a coup d'état of the overall self. This other self wants to be more indulgent and escapist, more sociable and socially active, sexually prolific and reckless, to be known for mixing a perfect martini and have a reputation for closing the bar, to have a fiery creativity that manifests in intense spurts of concentrated, rapid and blazing productivity, balanced by dangerous binges. It is not interested in yoga's control and balance, and is willing, even keen, to risk sanity. It longs for entropy, or at least trouble; for dissolution or at least some fracture.

The reluctance is mysterious. It is a necessary relief to lose oneself in writing. It is a necessary drive. I cannot regret all the time I have spent writing. It's good when you're really on. I have always felt in some sense 'better' for having done some writing. But there is reluctance. I don't do it. I put if off, as if it were something to dread, then only endure.

There is the self I might have been if I hadn't taken up – been taken up by – writing...and this self often insists it would have been the better choice. It might be asserting itself, keeping me from writing, attempting a coup d'état of the overall self. This other self wants to have a career that is understandable, be a lawyer, keep regular hours and get a regular salary, be an academic, work more for other people, do some good, think about real people more, have investments to manage, know a lot about something that matters.

2 You practice anyway

There is a bodily sensation of need. The body needs the poses; that's what you're aware of first, how you long to stretch and open and turn and balance, and then you feel the need for the effects of the poses.

If you were going to do mindless physical activity you'd go for a walk – mindless, that is, in that it frees the mind in the body's motion and deeper rhythmic breathing, refreshes the mind by physical exertion. You can do asana like this, like a calisthenics or gym class. But it's not yoga.

In writing, the need is also embodied: not so specifically physical, but you become aware of a need. You can't concentrate on anything you read, nothing attracts your attention fully, you are restless and dull, you take up and drop the TV guide and the movie guide and fashion magazines and the unsatisfactory novels... Then you realise you have been trying to ignore words, phrases, images, insistent words, words that you should listen to, words that you suddenly want to concentrate on, that attract your attention fully, that dictate to you. You find yourself making odd little notes on this file and that post-it and on cards and on blank pages and manuscript pages. And suddenly you are on, closing in on this idea that's been brewing, this world you need, this phrase that is the way to put it, this chain or web of association you are tracing through these haphazard pages. You stop going out, retreat from the world, sometimes before you've quite decided to.

Had that been distraction or all the work being done subconsciously for a while? As you begin to write you do not feel but are a channel for feeling as you become focused and stilled.

3 Missing practice

It's not only the episodes of the mysterious reluctance...that reluctance that feels like the denial of the true self. Sometimes there are reasonable reasons not to write, or not write as much, or do less yoga, or none of either today. Though there are those who claim never to miss, up at 5 a.m. absolutely daily in any conditions in any place.

No. You are in the world. There are days when the routines and usual circumstances are altered: travel, illness, guests, fun, conferences. There is a different energy around you and you want to pay attention to that, or be part of it. This is life and you are in it.

And then after a while, you can't bear to be away from your practice. You find that you just do it. In any circumstances. So don't worry if you're missing it, you won't miss it for long. So you learn to trust yourself. Or at least accept your own rocky way, the way you keep the practice dangerous by flirting with abandoning it.

4 Aging

You will die and if you grow old enough first you will first decay; you get stiffer and slower and you can't do what you used to.

Do yoga and you will prevent or postpone, temper or soothe some of age's afflictions. But don't forget the difference between the aim and the by-product. B.K.S. Iyengar says:

Even at eighty-one I can say with confidence that I am bringing out the best... The quality of keeping up the well-being of my earlier days was definitely on the physical plane, which I was using with great intensity.

Today my well-being is not from the physical level but from the mental and intellectual level. Naturally, first the body decays, matter decays and the gross body decays before the finer body decays... In order to keep the mind in fine tune, I have to tone and keep the gross physical body expressing the dynamic vibrancy latent in the cells by attending to each and every fibre of my body.

A friend writes to me:

Yoga points to a continuity beyond physical death, isn't it a preparation for transmigration, a preparation where the trauma of death does not erase the progress of this life and the awareness is able to function in and beyond this moment of death?

Some will say that through yoga you will attain the kind of spirituality that defies the belief that death is the end of you, but I can't vouch for that. Hard to believe the world would be worse if people didn't believe in some kind of post-death existence or afterlife.

I agree with novelist John Fowles:

I feel I have three main politico-social obligations. First to be an atheist. Second, not to belong to any political party. Third, not to belong to any bloc, organisation, group, clique, school whatever. The first because if even there is a God, it is safer for humankind to act on the assumption that there is not (the famous Pascalian pari in reverse). (Fowles: 9)

The second and third, says Fowles are because 'individual freedom is in danger, and as much in the West as in the East'. But it is the refusal of belief in any one God that is relevant here: as Fowles says, 'I know by reason that there cannot be a God; I [feel] it with my whole being... Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation' Like many other atheists, I find it a logical absurdity and a moral outrage to believe a God is both all-powerful and all-good in a world full of atrocity and suffering.

I find it an obscenity when a God who cannot or will not stop famine, war or child abuse is thanked for an Oscar, a gold medal or fine weather for a picnic.

Still we must pay attention to a dimension of life that we must call spiritual. In Neem Dreams, the narrative agent remarks:

Pandora was an atheist who believed in an immanent spirituality. Jade was an atheist who believed in a transcendent divinity. Andy was an atheist who admitted you couldn't explain everything.

The character Jade remarks:

If anything had something to do with what 'spiritual' means, it would be death.

The present writer can offer little more. There is a spiritual dimension to yoga, a glimpse of the ineffable and eternal. Although I do not, most yoga practitioners call this 'God' or 'the Lord within'. To glimpse this is yoga's ultimate aim, yet it is achieved by a complete attention to one's practice.

If you grow old enough and keep on writing it will be better; you must get better, how can you not, though many do not. But you don't aim for that, your only aim to keep on keeping on, you will never stop and never go away. You may be read by fewer and fewer people, interest fewer people, but this is what you do, you can't change that, you think you want to sometimes but you don't really, you need readers but they can be few. You will still grow old and old writers are uninteresting to the younger. Or maybe old writers are uninteresting to the other old, I'm not sure how this works.

Some will speak of immortality. 'Your books will exist when you are gone,' they tell you, but whatever can it matter? Everything turns to dust. Entropy rules.

Then what makes daily practice worth doing?

5 Doing it yourself; teaching

You enter the pose, and parts of you begin automatically to make the adjustments, parts remember to make further adjustments, parts will need reminding.

Now it is not only parts of the pose that you bring to consciousness, it is now the whole, the configuration.

Now there's only you, there is no one there to diagnose and click you into shape, pushing or coaxing, giving you the precise instruction.

Yoga is DIY maintenance. Taking responsibility for your body.

It is a feature of Iyengar yoga that the teacher gives precise instructions to adjust in the asana and also physically corrects the pose, touches you to do so, pushes, pulls, or just lays a hand here, a finger there, to bring your attention to an aspect you now adjust.

In various writings and talks on his study of yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar talks of the experiments he made to discover the effects of poses, and tells us that to really know yoga we too must experiment.

This is how a teacher learns; they learn their own body.

When you begin to teach yoga, you need to pay attention to the asana, to understand what you are doing and devise ways to communicate this. You examine what it is that you do, you research it and reflect on it. The book might tell you tuck the sacrum in but how can you pass this on unless you have learnt to tuck the sacrum in and feel how it alters the pose, gives it stability and strength and a centre? You can't pass this on until you know your body well enough to be able to see when another body needs this instruction.

When you begin to teach writing, you examine what it is that you do, you research it and reflect on it, and you tell your students. They can find a book to tell them, for example, read your work over before you sleep but how can you tell your students this unless you read your work over before you sleep and can report on how this affects – effects, even – the writing when you wake and begin?

Sometimes you work passively, I tell the students. That's what I learn from yoga; sometimes you are active, dynamic, you do, you do the pose. And other times you surrender, you just be in the pose, just be.

When I'm deep into my work, I read it last thing at night, so that my dream time is dedicated. Negative capability.

Quoting an earlier commentator, B.K.S. Iyengar says:

Yoga is the teacher of yoga; yoga is to be understood through yoga. So live in yoga to realize yoga; comprehend yoga through yoga; he who is free from distractions enjoys yoga through yoga. (Iyengar 1996:8)

Similarly, writing is the teacher of writing; writing is to be understood through writing.

6 We do it because we can not do it

I can apparently perform asana because I've been at it for years, and it looks to a beginner as if I can 'do yoga'. But I tend to live in my head, my body wants oblivion, distraction, I find it difficult to advance in my practice, to know what my left little toe is doing as I pay attention to my neck. I do yoga because I can not do it, because the moment of awareness has barely been glimpsed, because I love this in between territory, in between doing it for the process and for the product, in between endeavor and accomplishment.

I've published a few books, write every day, teach writing. So a raw beginner might look at me and think I can 'do writing'.

But often I think I am a writer not because words come easily to me but because they do not.

Italo Calvino says, 'I am a Saturn who wishes he were a Mercury'. And I think, Me, too, Calvino, exactly.

[T]he temperament influenced by Mercury, inclined toward exchanges and commerce and dexterity, was contrasted with the temperament influenced by Saturn, seen as melancholy, contemplative and solitary. Ever since antiquity it has been thought that the saturnine temperament is the one proper to artists, poets and thinkers... My cult of Mercury is perhaps merely an aspiration, what I would like to be. (Calvino 1996:52)

Saturn is the planet of discipline, deepening, delay. Mercury is quickness, lightness, mental facility. In my own natal chart Saturn is nearly conjunct Mercury, making (I don't mean causing, I mean synchronistic with) the effect of lightness hard-won. I rarely can write a sentence worth writing at first thought, but must sit over it, pencil in hand, re-arranging, adding and subtracting, testing the rhythm. The work of writing is in re-writing, just as the work of asana is not in striking the pose, but in the adjustments you make to it. The asana is rewritten, the sentence is refined. The work that has gone into the final effect usually remains secret; at best the clarity and precision achieved make this effect appear natural and inevitable.

14. Paralipsis: drugs, money, sex

Examining my own practices of yoga and writing raises questions about the self. If the self is seen as the life, if the life includes all of experience, what, then, would you not write about?

Don't talk about drugs

There are things you had better not speak of. There are words that cannot be heard without a jolt of attitude. There are words that are laden with prejudice and experience.

Don't talk about drugs. Don't even wonder if without certain drugs you would not be who you are, would be, that is, worse, lesser, diminished. You think that drugs saved you, in a way, but don't talk about that, saved you from strictures internal and external, saved you from being locked away from those doors.

You became a teenager and you began to experience yourself as yourself, separate, that is, from your family, very separate, very different, disagreeing, disagreeable. Rebellion, so called. It was the 60s and you devoutly listened to the music. Well of course you began to smoke pot, as who did not, and you liked it. Actually, you were an early adapter, no one you went to school with had tried it, you were queer, different, scandalous in your silly little schoolgirl world. You had to go to the city to find the people, it wasn't everywhere like it is now, no one then started really young like they do now.

In Malaya you smoked for the first time. You took to marijuana like a duck to water, the way it slowed you right down while it speeded you right up, the way it made you pay attention. Attention, that's what it taught you, attention to the way music is made, attention to the intricacies of the taste of an apple or a lover's mouth, close attention to sensation, including the sensation of thought. People can seem very silly, can be very silly, when they're stoned. People will say that pot makes you stupid. Drinkers will say that. You really do want to know when to stop, when to give it up, when it's not the time or the place. But you also knew when to say yes.

There was speed, a couple years of methedrine and benzedrine weekends when you didn't sleep, and then that time after days of it that you hitchhiked from Sydney up to where your parents were living and then screamed and howled, it was called coming down, you scared them, you scared yourself maybe, I don't know, I don't remember. You didn't stay with the speed. It's not a good drug for very long. At least you know. You know when you eventually, decades later, write a character who loves her speed. (You should know your characters' drugs like you know their dreams.)

And then there was acid. Acid way back then. LSD when it was a new and truly psychedelic thing, mind-expanding, mind-altering. There was Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which, Leary told us, miraculously – synchronicity, meant-to-be – became available to us at precisely the time that Tibet was closed off from the West, closed off, you probably thought, ignorant as you were, because it chose to be, keep its purity or something, keep on being Shangri-La. You read your Leary and your Huxley and your Watts, you were a believer, such a believer, you took your LSD like the holiest of sacraments and in the doses they had back then, kids of today don't know. You went off to the country – there was always some fabulous house in the country to go to – with a reverend basket of fruit and bread, and worshipped the revelations of the natural world. It was only later that you found, how strange, that you could take it in the city, how tough, how gritty, how real, walk the gutters of the inner-city, go back to a city house and play Velvet Underground.

There's two kinds of people, those who took acid and those who didn't. It's a deep divide. You didn't miss out on the particular camaraderie of drugs, the particular humour. I really think you'd be so much more ignorant if you had missed it. I wouldn't want to know you.

All that matters is can you write, did it help you?

What drugs really taught you is how they're the excuse for the greatest amount of hypocritical bullshit.

But don't talk about it. Remember interviewing Neville Drury in the late 1980s for a series of features on the New Age, and he said that he refused to believe his revelations were somehow not valid because they were acquired by the use of drugs.

Certain kinds of drugs, it was understood, and definitely not certain other kinds.

You quite agreed, although you didn't take acid any more, that ended years before, in the 70s, and you've only taken it once since, for the Sleaze Ball – along with Mardi Gras the big social event of the year for gay culture in Sydney – in 1989, something your eternity in a grain of sand days had not imagined.

At this age, mostly coffee provides alteration enough.

The attraction to yoga is not entirely unrelated: in the curiosity about and desire for expanding the limitations of the everyday mind, even if you don't think your mind was remarkably limited. Yoga's discipline demands care for the body and through the body the mind and, er, soul. Care of the body entails close attentiveness to what affects it. Drug use and yoga are seen as opposite or opposing paths, never mind the Indian saddhus with their chillums, or that 'ayurvedic' or 'alternative' medicines are practically considered sacraments. (Prescribed substances are medications, chosen ones are drugs.) Mostly, a serious yoga practitioner does not take drugs and those that do generally keep it secret in yoga circles.

Don't talk about money

In my later twenties and early thirties, I went through a period of several years when everything I touched turned to failure. My marriage ended in divorce, my work as writer foundered, and I was overwhelmed by money problems. I'm not just talking about an economic shortfall or some periodic belt-tightening – but a constant, grinding almost suffocating lack of money that poisoned my soul and kept me in a state of never-ending panic. There was no one to blame but myself; my relationship to money had always been flawed, enigmatic, full of contradictory impulses, and now I was paying the price for refusing to take a clear-cut stand on the matter. (Auster:5)

You can say that when you're Paul Auster. You can call your autobiographical writing Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure when you turn into a celebrated writer like Paul Auster. Don't even think about talking about your own flawed relationship to money if you haven't turned into Paul Auster, don't say, 'Me too: enigmatic, full of contradictory impulses'. Don't begin about the price you paid. Don't read this as a sign that you can talk about the place of no money money no money in your life.

You cannot talk about money. You cannot talk about its lack. Not even when you suspect this struggle reveals your failings and fears, your misfortunes, mismanagements and ineptitude.

Don't start telling about those years, long after you'd left your student years behind, long after your peers had made successful careers, some of them; others were in the same boat, writers too, or actors or musicians (and don't even start with questioning the equating success with income) – years where you still couldn't go anywhere you couldn't walk to and made excuses to turn down invitations that meant bringing a bottle of wine, or at least a rose, or getting a taxi home, or even a train over there. Invitations you accept lead to new invitations, invitations you don't accept don't.

No one wants to know about the time, only too typical, you had only a few potatoes and some muesli to eat for three days and you wet the muesli with tap-water. Then a friend rang and said she'd be able to pay back the ten dollars you'd lent her – there were a few of you living this way. Next morning you walk from your flat near Kings Cross to the Roma Café near Central and steamy fragrant cappuccino and pastries break your fast. With the change you could get some fresh food and the bus home and some other money was due, soon, some would always dribble in. It didn't kill you, never was going to. You feel rich so easily.

You are a grown woman in your thirties, you could have made different choices, you had choices, could have kept on working in television, say, you had the chance; but leave it out about the kind of life those people have and how you turn away from it over and over.

Keep silent about the humiliations, you can't even remember them most of the time. Shut up even about the lessons of all this, the things you know that you might not have known, the times you've noticed how expensive it is to be poor, the times you've noticed how generous we are to one another, us on the same boat, it's like if you weren't ever on this boat you can hardly imagine what friendship is. You give and you take, which is not always that easy or that natural, and having a life where you have to give and have to take is a blessing among all your blessings.

Then there was the New Age that promised a new era of spiritual values. A useful idea about the way we create our reality through our interpretation of experience became a dogma that says, at its worst, and it is swiftly this worst, that everything in your life, including your parents, your birth and all your circumstances, is a choice, a free and precise choice, that you, an individual, have made, including the degree of your wealth and success. You don't have it? Too bad, learn to choose it. You have it? You're good at the one thing that counts, choice. New Age materialism seemed an ugly form of self-serving notions to justify greed and the refusal of compassion.

Keep it to yourself, too, that you have days like today, when you have everything you want, if you only be here now. There've been all those times when you had everything, you travelled, you ate at fabulous restaurants and danced at sensational parties and drank at the openings of shows and you were reading the very books you wanted. You've always been lucky. And you have always known that you have always been among the richest people in the world, there was always a roof and a bed and hot running water, and when there wasn't there could have been.

No one wants to know about your bargains with god or fate. No one cares, and it would be worse if they did.

One thing only matters: can you write, did it stop you, did it help you, can you write?

You wrote because you couldn't go out, couldn't go shopping, couldn't afford a shrink, a holiday or the best drugs. You wrote instead and you wrote to make the life you had intense and layered and unfolding. Maybe you'd have bought that instead if you could have.

You read many accounts of the poverty of writers. When you were younger, you knew this poverty would become something in the past, you knew that the writer's future always held recognition and rewards.

Hemingway's last words in A Moveable Feast: '...we were very poor and very happy'.

Later you knew something different. There are writers who die in penury and obscurity: Kafka, Christina Stead. Henry Miller had published seventeen books when he sent out an appeal to all his friends to help him out. So it can happen like that too. You, too, you have passed that point where you believe that if only you keep on working all this will pass. It may never pass. And you decide, again, just to keep on working. Miller wrote to his friend Lawrence Durrell:

Notice that one always thinks he must do something because he must earn that money which was involved. But that is nearly always a clever excuse we make to ourselves. We usually can do very well – even better – without that money. The only thing that truly nourishes is the doing what one wants to do. I tell you, everything else is crap, and futility, and waste. Let the angel be your watermark. (Durrell and Miller: 105)

At this age finally you have faith in your survival. Not forgetting that luck and randomness are always unquantifiable factors.

Yoga is not unrelated to this. There are values implicit in the dedication to its practice, values explicitly named in yama and niyama, the first two of its eight limbs – ethical disciplines and rules of conduct.

We charge money for our yoga teaching, as we must, partly as cultural marks of professionalism and value.

In his autobiographical work and interviews, BKS Iyengar writes of his early years of struggle, where he had no money and was only beginning, slowly and painfully, to find pupils and make his name as a yoga teacher. There was a long period of struggle, of few students and no apparent prospects. One thing that struck me was his story of having only eight rupees left (this was in the late 1930s). Those exact amounts are recalled, years and decades later, by those who have faced dire financial lack. That eight rupees. The ten dollars, the three dollars. Even such an acclaimed guru does not forget exactly what it was like. Pertinently, I believe, BKSI has no material greed, has always lived in relatively modest circumstances, and turns down innumerable invitations that could make him a wealthy superstar.

Eventually we find our way to live, the balance between various desires. You don't always get what you want but you get what you need, that's how you know you're on the right path. Sometimes you get more than you could ever have wished for.

Don't talk about sex

Sex and yoga are not unrelated, if you want to look at it that way, in the promise of transcendence at best and at least of some release or exertion. The best of sex and yoga are often said to be 'not merely physical'.

There is an intensely powerful puritanical force that seems to operate in ways both overt and covert in our society, so that it seems a kind of blasphemy to talk of sex and yoga together. The Hindu culture in India, by the way, is particularly puritanical in its contemporary manifestation, famous erotic temple sculptures notwithstanding, and while it is not in the scope of this work to interrogate this, one might note the influences of the very modernity and globalism that political or fundamentalist Hinduism deplores as corrupting. In the Hindu tradition from which yoga derives, the esteemed practice of bramacharya is mostly translated as celibacy, that is abstinence from sexual activity; at best, as I understand it, also the elimination or transcendence of sexual desire. 'Being celibate', in the Western urban cultures I know, is often a phrase that means 'haven't lately met anyone I want to or can sleep with' or 'having a break from sex'.

After some time at a regular yoga practice I declared it 'very sublimating'; the cultivation of regular yoga coincided with a relative quieting of a once troubling sexual restlessness.

There are certain movements in yoga, once obtained, that are said to quieten or eliminate sexual desire in the body. Such desire is the source of a great deal of pain and joy, inspiration and ruin, accomplishment and failure, so much so that it's as if there would be no art without it, to state the obvious.

There are yoga circles, not Iyengar ones I should mention, where prolific sexual activity is part of the ethos; those in other circles declare this a sign of a lesser practice, lesser purity perhaps. In this arena one feels there is only too much or too little to be said.

So it is better not to talk of sex.

Even if they keep telling you you should write about sex. They tell you this because, they say, that is what you do write about.

You are not interested in writing an account of the first time you had sex or the last time nor in about why you're not interested.

All that matters is: can you write, did it stop you, did it help you?

From the earliest time you wanted to be one of those women who did it which in those days was rare and rarely admitted.

It was the way to adventure. It was the way to get inside, inside other people, their language their houses their bodies.

And get outside of yourself. Lose yourself. Lose language.

Sex gave you something to write about, gave you ways to see people real close up and naked. Ways to release thought to sensation.

Gave you apparently endless pondering on sex and the creative and the spiritual all in such close embrace you couldn't tell where one ended.

It gave you a way to know the intimate and the strange simultaneously.

It gave you the world of people who did it. Sex opened doors, a novelist loves to look into other people's bedrooms and bathrooms. And the doors in yourself, the senses and sensations a body can discover, create. The total absorption in the present moment that is part of life's other best moments – the best conversations, yoga, writing.

Don't talk about sex because you've already said anything you have to say:

Writing is the most demanding of lovers, the most obsessive. Writing is the object, subject and creator of desire... All gender, all practices and no restraints are available to you... How will it be today? At the moment you wake up you reach out to it to resume where you fell asleep. Perhaps in your sleep you have been united for it will enter your dreams, change them and direct them, confuse them or clarify them, your dear wicked writing... You are ready, it is ready, you turn to each other, and with the long history of your deep connection you unite at once. You enter it, it enters you. It is never the same, rarely what you expect... When it is how it is meant to be there is no division between you and it...in this union you glimpse the spiritual or the transcendent ... (Baranay 1994b:6–8)

As for love.

15. Tadasana: Four

Stand in Tadasana.

Observe the adjustments you have learnt to make. There is never an endpoint of achievement of the pose; the pose is a never-ending project of creation.

Observe the breath, as you do in Savangasana, the pose of the corpse done at the end of every practice, lying with complete release throughout the body, the only movement the breath. In Tadasana, though there is no motion, there is the constant action of adjustment, and the mind is occupied with that action. But without losing the pose, observe the breath, the unconstrained and even inhalation and exhalation, the flow to each part of the body, conveying consciousness, connecting with the many aspects of Tadasana you recognise, placing yourself in each present moment with each new breath.

This simple, preliminary pose reveals new aspects as your ability to penetrate the pose increases.

What has not ever been shown is what it is to do the pose exactly here, exactly now, by you.

You have studied, investigated, described, and performed Tadasana innumerable times.

And you have studied, investigated, described and performed your self innumerable times, a self of which a part is the study of Tadasana.

Complete absorption in the pose is meditation; and mediation and yoga are said to offer a kind of complete answer to life's anguish, anxiety and pointlessness, creating instead the happiness, or contentment, of quietness. You do not wish to kill your instinctual drives nor your questing nature; the meaning you create from the pose is still in the process of formation.

The value and meaning of the pose is sometimes experienced in the doing, sometimes in the effect, sometimes in the consideration, sometimes in the teaching, sometimes in other poses or in walking or in sitting, sometimes it is forgotten or neglected. But to do this pose, and to aim for perfection in the pose, has become part of your being, a mix of habit, and discipline.

Interrogate and penetrate every aspect of the pose, every component of the pose, as far as every cell of the body.

As your awareness enters every aspect of the pose, it dissolves in the pose.

Be Tadasana.

16. Tradition and Authority

The idea of yoga's worth and value, its spirituality, is usually inextricable from the idea of its being an ancient practice

How ancient is yoga? And in what sense does the yoga we do today derive from its ancient form?

Certainly yogis of old did not wear leotards, carry coloured sticky mats to their classes, practice to DVDs of celebrity teachers. But they basically did what we do, didn't they?

Well, apparently not. Yoga as we know it today is largely a construct of recent times. The name yoga has become generic for a wide range of practices, especially those with an emphasis on physical movements and postures. The meaning of these, the attention to these, the attention to the meaning of these vary according to various teachers and schools. But they are all 'yoga' if they call themselves yoga .

If they have any common agreement, it may be that yoga isn't 'just physical'. What else is yoga and what else is it not? Is there anything else everyone involved in yoga agrees on? The idea of 'union', for that's what yoga means. But let a thousand flowers bloom. Else what will settle this argument? The loudest voice, the most followers, or an appeal to a higher authority? What authority? Is that authority 'tradition'?

Yoga as widely practiced today is largely the practice of asana. Some say this is because the West is so body-oriented, materialistic. There is also a wide-spread practice of 'meditation' although exactly what this is and how it is done has its variants. In Iyengar yoga – or Patanjali yoga, as BKS Iyengar prefers to call it (for yoga exists in other traditions) - meditation is an advanced practice that requires sufficient preparation, beginning with complete attention in the asana. This attention in asana leads to Dharana, concentration on a single point, also defined as stillness of mind; and when this continues for a long time it becomes Dhyana – meditation, also defined as integration into the object of contemplation.

In other popular practices, yoga aspirants can begin with various forms of 'meditation', and this can mean complete relaxation, or absorption in chanting or prayer, or sitting in still silence, or goal-oriented visualisations and so on.

Studies of tradition and the idea of tradition reveal that a great deal of what is unquestioningly accepted as tradition – as a correct and proper practice of lengthy provenance - was invented. Certain national costumes, religious customs, a church's strict doctrines, styles of painting in tribal communities, and similar matters – including rules of grammar, the meanings of words, and what is proper language - a range of cultural practices - are thought of as rooted in ages-old practice, and therefore tested by aeons and beyond human interference, but a little research shows that they were created at a specific moment – not always very long ago and often by identifiable persons. Google 'the invention of tradition' and you'll get hundreds of references.

There's the pattern of religion involved in the whole phenomenon of the yoga craze: a prophet's teachings are passed on by disciples, followers, whose different emphases and interpretations spread and multiply, forming themselves into factions, cults and denominations around new leaders, becoming established with hierarchical organizations, jealously guarded power structures, new decrees and doctrines, conflicts and even rivalries between and within them.

I've often heard it claimed that all religions ultimately say the same thing. But I can't find a consensus on what this one thing is. Seems to me a religion says whatever anyone says it says.

Yoga has its own equivalents of popes and bishops, mullahs and rabbis, celebrity spokespeople, claiming correct interpretations of doctrines and decreeing the revealed truth, insisting their own way is the best or only true way.

Since I was a child I've been bemused at the antics of public christians who seem to act in a spirit quite contrary to the sayings of the prophet Jesus with his tolerance and golden rule. Great revolutionary thoughts apparently all eventually become co-opted, enculturated and assimilated into our well known mainstream structures.

What is the original divine word? Who or what was the original prophet from whose teachings all yoga derives? In the Bhagavad Gita (the highly regarded poem that is often read apart from its larger context, the ancient epic Mahabharata), Krishna tells Arjuna to do yoga, and the apparent contradictory paths of various kinds of yoga – action, renunciation, knowledge – are declared to be known by the wise as a single yoga. Innumerable translations and commentaries lead to a range of conclusions. Do your duty is doubtless sound advice, but to know quite what your duty is, is a far from straightforward matter; and, the goal of acquiring detachment has an apparent wisdom though extreme detachment is pathological. The point of works of wisdom such as the Gita, it seems to me, is not in taking them as works of definitive prescription, but of endlessly yielding interrogation of the basic human drive to create meaning.

Similarly, the aphoristic nature of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali lend themselves to considerable variation in translation. Patanjali was said to live some time between 500 and 200 BC. His Yoga Sutras, a rich source of the prescriptions and philosophy of yoga is a text made up of 196 sutras, or aphorisms; they cover matters to do with conduct, knowledge and the nature of the self. He does not specifically describe any asana, although Asana is named as one of yoga's asthanga, that is 'eight limbs'. Patanjali's words are held to be of divine provenance and his own existence relies on legend; he is magically cited as both source and last word when it comes to tradition. BKS Iyengar's own translation and commentary are lucid and scholarly and enunciate the depth of the theoretical basis of his own work, which reaches a considerable distance beyond instructions for asana and their sequencing, and has continued to develop since his pioneering Light on Yoga (1966).

Contemporary practitioners feel free to choose which if any aspects of tradition they will adopt, perhaps as someone renovating their home in a 'Tudor' or 'outback homestead' style will still install a modern bathroom.

The idea of tradition becomes inflected with the idea of history and customs and antecedents. Is tradition any more than that? What is its worth? A common idea of tradition is of an authoritative precedent, of validation and prescription, implying the forbidding or discrediting of what does not conform to it. Tradition becomes invested with the sense of the absolute.

In the India where yoga originated, the tradition was of absolute obedience to the guru. The disciple or sisya did what the guru told him to. The guru was not questioned. If you wondered about the reason for the instruction you might find it out by doing what you were told.

The yoga tradition was of great secrecy. It was not easy to find a guru. Part of your work as a disciple or would-be disciple was to find a guru and convince him to take you on. John Brunton's influential book of 1934, Search in Secret India, is an account of how difficult it was to investigate yoga. 'It may be' Brunton says early in the book 'that the secrecy in which [Yoga] was carefully enshrouded succeeded in killing all spread of this ancient science. When Brunton finally finds a Yogi:

'Does a Rajah keep his jewels on the highway for public display' he asks. 'No, he hides them in the treasure chambers deep in the vault of his palace. The knowledge of our science is one of the greatest treasures a man can have. Is he to offer it in the bazaar for all and sundry? Whoever desires to grasp this treasure – let him search for it. That is the only way, but it is the right way. Out texts enjoin secrecy again and again, while our masters will reveal the important teachings only to tested disciples who have been faithful to them for several years at least...

'But there is a branch of our science about which I may to talk to you more freely. It is that wherein we strengthen the will and improve the body of beginners, for only so can they be fit to attempt the difficult practices of real Yoga.... We have nearly a score of body exercises which strengthen the different parts and organs, and remove or prevent certain diseases ...' (Brunton:14)

This branch of yoga science – the bodily exercises usually known as asana - is now usually considered sufficient and complete. And in our commercial world if you don't offer what you know in the bazaar (the market) who could believe it has any worth? Brunton found the notion of a yoga master in his time 'combining a Yoga discipline with a daily life based on Western ways and ideas' an 'astonishing and interesting notion'.

These days a guru or teacher has students rather than disciples. Students of today are expected to question, to experiment, to challenge. This is our Western tradition, and it infuses the practice of yoga. A student asks why we do something, and the teacher is expected to give reasons. If a teacher is reputed to have 'disciples', or call himself a 'master', the implications of authoritarian control and blind obedience are not complimentary and possibly sinister.

Whether it was because of the traditions of secrecy and obedience, or because of lack of interest, or lack of access, the idea of yoga being something bizarre and an interest in it marginal did not change until that disruptive decade, the 1960s. Pop versions of Indian thought, dress and music entered the counter-culture which swiftly became mainstream, and yoga teachers and schools, at first slowly, emerged. Yoga had a paradoxical appeal: the newest thing was the oldest thing.

It's not only tradition we like. Some things in our culture are good because they're new; their newness gives worth and value. So that many will seek out the 'latest' teacher or form of yoga, and the 'newness' and 'latest' aspects are cited as self-evident advantages.

In today's world though it's hard to know whether newness or established practice – novelty or tradition – is the value being claimed, as in the assertion, for example, that Bikram Yoga ('Hot Yoga') is over thirty years old. In this form, yoga is done in heated rooms, and attempts to patent or copyright the yoga done here are under dispute. The forms of yoga may be old, Bikram asserts, but the sequences he has devised are his intellectual property.

If they are interested at all in the historical bases of their work, if they look to antecedents for validation, yoga students are largely left floundering (or fantasizing). There is no textual basis for modern practices.

In Hindu tradition, lineage gives credibility to a teacher, guru or swami.

Both BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois learnt from Krisnamacarya and they, along with Krisnamacarya's son TKV Desakachar who teaches in Madras (now officially called Chennai) between them account for the greater numbers of foreign as well as national yoga adherents. There are no indications where Krishnamacariar originally learnt yoga.

In his enlightening study The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, N.E. Sjoman points out an essential difference between linear traditions, oriented toward accumulation, and dynamic tradition, vitally initiated by introspection:

Dynamic tradition seems to imply openness to change, rapid adaptation and experiment – survival for other reason than being 'tradition'. By natural selection, certain aspects of tradition become prominent as a response to change environment and aspirations. In the case of the yoga asana tradition we can see that it is a dynamic tradition that has drawn on many sources – traditional yoga texts, indigenous exercises, western gymnastics, therapeutics, and even perhaps the military training exercises of a foreign dominating power. And that says nothing in regard to the ideologies that make a culture or the ideologies of the foreign element to be assimilated. These too are part of the processes of change, enrichment and loss. (Sjoman:51)

BKS Iyengar firmly places himself in the tradition of Patanjali; still he is the exemplar of dynamic tradition; his ground-breaking work was, among other things, to re-arrange asanas into groups - standing asanas, forward bends, backbends, twistings, hand balancings and inversions. He introduced ideas of precision, penetration and introspection into the asana system. Perhaps better known for his introduction of 'props', now widely considered an essential component of practice, he was perhaps most revolutionary in opening up the practice of yoga to everyone (at least in principle).

Yet I know many yoga students like to imagine they are part of a lineage of essential teachings reaching back into the mists of time.

BKS Iyengar is indisputably one of the greatest influences on yoga in the world. A great deal of the practices in denominations of yoga not known as Iyengar yoga also have their origins in his teachings. This is, if not quite esoteric knowledge, not essential knowledge for students and even teachers. That is, while he is widely recognised, the extent, originality and importance of his influence seems to be lost as it is spreads. His work is not always acknowledged where it is copied or adapted. I believe him to be a rare genius – as well as, by the way, a man of intensely impressive luminosity; a joy to be around.

It's like it would be 400 years ago being around Shakespeare and listening to him and to the language he heard – but you'd have to have come from this far into the future to fully dig it.

Imagine if Shakespeare had authorities around him to say – and imagine if he had listened to them – 'that's not proper English, we don't say it like that, that's not a real word, you can't just make up new words'.

But what is certain is this: that not BKS Iyengar nor Krishnamacharya are not able to prescribe to the world how to do yoga any more than the Queen of England prescribes to the world how to use the English language.

English, by the way, being the de facto world language, has to a great extent become also the language of yoga, especially as some teachers take their classes and workshops to various international settings. Sanskrit words are employed to name the various asana, and used more or less commonly depending on the school of yoga. In Iyengar yoga, we are taught the Sanskrit names from the start and encouraged to use them. Some of the names are, although made of actual Sanskrit words, neologisms, to name asanas that themselves are new variations – or newly named components – of the fewer basic asanas known in times before.

In some yoga schools and studios, pictures of Hindu deities, perhaps displayed on some kind of shrine, and the use of incense operate maybe as a tribute to yoga's antecedents, maybe as a kind of superstitious idea that it gives extra credibility or blessings to what is practiced there. In classes of experienced Iyengar students, we begin with a Sanskrit chant, an hommage to Patanjali, who not only is the putative author of the Yoga Sutras but also of ancient treatises on grammar and medicine.

In my view this works best as tribute and as a mechanism that operates to establish focus and intention. At worst it brings superstition and religiosity to practice. I admit it is with dismay I find that to this chant other chants have been added, invoking the name of Hindu gods. Or, as some would have it brahminical gods. Western yoga students are sometimes offered 'information' on the 'Hindu' religion to which, some imagine, they now have a special affinity. Such information is, perhaps necessarily, usually scant and superficial: names of gods, festivals like Diwali, wearing a tilak. The fact that the promoted version of 'Hinduism' is critiqued by outstanding writers on the perniciously abiding caste system as the exclusive religion of Brahmins is not known nor desired knowledge. (See for example Dipankar Gupta's Interrogating Caste or Kancha Ilaiah's Why I Am Not A Hindu.) In fact, some Western yoga students will say that the caste system is based on wisdom and goodness (because it is a Hindu tradition, because there is a correct metaphysical way to understand it).

No, I am not one who finds tradition an appealing idea. I'm more convinced that usually 'tradition' means safety in numbers, doing the same thing as everyone else, that its appeal is to a conformity closely allied to the refusal of skepticism or unconventionality.

In writing, too, tradition is cited as authority in language, especially when changes in, like, you know, English are deplored and new expressions taken up twenty-four/seven or whatever. But tradition as authority is antithetical to the inquiring, even disruptive spirit of writing, its spiritual drive.

We are not the same kind of humans, not in many ways, as those in the mythic or historic times of Patanjali, we have different relations to our bodies, our texts, our bodies of work. (We can plan to become a yoga-practicing, text-producing cyborg.) Still, a writer is aware of antecedents and influences, a history from which we emerge. As far as I can tell, this is what people mean when they insist we write 'within a tradition', such insistence being usually trotted out to censure beginning writers who do not read the classics, or teachers of writing who set contemporary texts for their students.

It seems to me that anyone serious about writing will eventually read their predecessors, and usefully wonder whether there is anything new to say, and what that might be; whether the exciting changes in everyday language might be enriched by disused vocabulary; what wealth of references you can share with others who also read texts that have been around a long time and what qualities keep a book current well beyond the context of its creation; how a chain of influence binds us to the practice of literature; what deep pleasures can be found in stories, language and thought from that strangest country, the past.

But we do our writing and our yoga inquiring into the present, shaped by contemporary developments in both practices , and attaining the spiritual by being absorbed in the present.

17. Tadasana: Five

Stand in Tadasana.

Notice the natural and automatic adjustments you make. Now you make not only adjustments of particular and separate parts, you are working to a single configuration, in which you perceive each part in relation to each other part.

As you adjust for balance, for expansion, for sensitising, note the refinements you bring to your adjustments.

The Tadasana you do at the start of a practice is not the Tadasana you do at the end.

Just as Tadasana has taught you how to rotate the thighs, move the sacrum, extend the trunk, open the groin, align the body in Sirsasana (head-stand), so has the practice of Sirsasana taught you how to do Tadasana. You stand in Tadasana to learn how to work your spine in headstand, and your headstand has shown you more about standing in Tadasana.

The Tadasana you do before Trikonasana (triangle pose) is not the same Tadasana you do at the end of Trikonasana.

The Tadasana contains all the other poses that contain Tadasana. The chest from Trikonasana, the spine from Sarvangasana, the legs from Urdhva Dandasana and so on.

Each and every one of the asana leaves its traces and its influence in Tadasana, just as Tadasana leaves its traces and its influence on each and every other asana.

This pose of beginning contains the cycle of poses, changes them and is changed by them.

And still, in every beginning, you start here. Stand. Stand evenly, straight and still. This is where you begin.

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Acknowledgments

Original edition

'The Spiritual Body' published in Griffith Review (Winter 2004) contains a version of parts of this work.

Chapter 14 'Paralipsis' was first published in an earlier version in the online journal TEXT Vol 6 No 1 April 2002

'Yoga and Writing: Stages: One' had its beginning in an article published in the Iyengar Yoga Association of Australia Newsletter, 1987.

Thanks to Alison, Jan, and Nigel for readings of early drafts, and to my editor Saugata Mukherjee at Rupa for his good work.

Earlier versions of parts of this work were written for the dissertation for a Doctor of Philosophy in Writing, awarded by Griffith University in 2003. I thank the School of Arts at Griffith Gold Coast for its support during that time.

My thanks go to all my yoga teachers: to Yogacharya BKS Iyengar, who has taught us all and kindly allowed this book to be dedicated to him and permitted the extensive quotations from his work; to Geetha Iyengar and Prashant Iyengar; to Kay Parry and all the teachers and long-time regulars at Bondi Junction; to all my other teachers in Australia, USA and India; and to all the students who have also taught me.

Thanks for permissions to quote to:

B.K.S. Iyengar for his Commentary On The Yoga Sutras of Paranjali and other works, N Sjoman for his The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace and Alison Bartlett for her Jamming the Machinery; M.I.T. Press for Varela, Thomson and Rosch's The Embodied Mind, I.B. Tauris for Helen Cixous' and Catherine Clement's Newly Born Woman, Random House for John Fowles' Wormholes and Salmon Rushdie's The Ground Beneath her Feet, Routledge for The Helene Cixous Reader.

All efforts have been made to contact copyright holders. Please contact the author if any have been overlooked or unobtainable.

http://www.inezbaranay.com

New ebook edition

Thanks to Daniel Stephensen for the cover and all the moral and practical support as I convert my books for ereaders. http://springstreetworkshop.com

Afterword to ebook edition of Sun Square Moon

A few remarks:

Having this little book accepted for publication by Professor P Lal at Writers Workshop Kolkata was possibly my happiest publication experience.

I found this little book has appealed more to writers and others involved in creative work than yoga practitioners particularly.

I retain my deepest gratitude and respect for BKS Iyengar, our beloved Guruji, and his extraordinary impact on our world, and continue to return whenever I can to do classes with my long-time teacher Kay Parry, while seeking out Iyengar teachers where I can on my travels.

I hope that the wide and deep appreciation of yoga's lessons and gifts will resist the trends to deny history to the practice and spread of yoga. The chapter on Tradition and Authority in Sun Square Moon deals with this. It's some years since I completed this book and there have been some very good and interesting studies of modern postural yoga published since, and since N Sjoman's history. I recommend Mark Singleton's The Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice which in turn refers to important works by Joseph Alter and Elizabeth de Michelis.

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