Understanding Yoga

Facilitated by Melissa Remark & Christian Whittall

• Starts: Wednesday, May 18
• Time: Wednesdays, 6:30pm - 8:30
• Place: Dupont & Christie (exact location to be given upon sign up)
• Contact: melremark@yahoo.com to sign up as space is limited
• Please add the following information in your sign up email: Your knowledge/level of yoga practice (if any), points of interest, injuries or health concerns.

   Success comes to him who is engaged in the practice
   How can you get success without practice;
   For by merely reading books on yoga, one can never get success.
   Success cannot be attained by adopting a particular dress.
   It cannot be gained by telling tales.
   Practice alone is the means to success.
   This is true, there is no doubt.

                                Lines 67-68. Hatha Yoga Pradipika

In its popular modern use, the word yoga has come to designate a system of physical exercises designed to promote health, relaxation and fitness. In many people's minds, however, it also denotes some vague connection to the esoteric and forbidding religions of India that fall under the catchall of 'Hinduism' and its confusing pantheon of gods, rites and ceremonies.

Caught amid this ambivalence of meaning, yoga has found its most natural expression in our Western culture more as an industry trademark than anything else. In the past decade, yoga studios, videos, books, clothing lines and various other gewgaws have catered to an exponentially growing consumer base naturally desperate to re-commune with their physical bodies. Divested of its cultural roots and transplanted uncritically into our own culture, yoga has been allowed to maintain its promise of liberation even while the ties between its gross physical practice and the much vaster, integrative literary/philosophical/spiritual systems of thought that bore it have been severed.

The word yoga simply means 'to bind together', to 'yoke', a word to represent the unification of the spirit out of its fragmented and dispersed day-to-day condition. As an ascetic technique or a system of meditation and postures, yoga is practiced as a vehicle to enlightenment. What those exercises, called asanas, or 'seats', represent is the complex elaboration of only one of the eight limbs, or ashtanga, of yoga outlined by the classic Hindu text on yoga, the Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali written roughly 4000 years ago.

What this class offers is hands on instruction in the foundation of the actual practice of Ashtanga Yoga by a certified yoga instructor within the context of an open and textually informed discussion of the ideas, theories and beliefs that give the practice its depth and meaning. Hopefully, our class will provide an opportunity for Western minds to openly broker the translation of Eastern traditions of thought without having it first filtered through preconditioned categories such as 'fitness', 'philosophy', 'religion', or 'culture'. To this end, the first half of the class will be devoted to reading directly from translations of important Eastern texts that directly pertain to the practice of yoga. In this course, these will be the Upanishads, Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali and some of the Tantras. The second half will include meditation, chanting and asana practice with guidance on technique, anatomy and breathing.

In the end, yoga's difficult relationship with the West could be explained by its resistance to being something that can be understood. It is rather more of a process of understanding – understanding yoga.

Tentative Course Outline

• Week 1 - Introductions, Meditation, Brief History of Yoga, Pranayama, Sun Salutations

• Week 2 - Meditation, Yoga Sutras Discussion, Chanting, Standing Postures

• Week 3 - Meditation, Yoga Sutras Discussion, Chanting, Standing Postures

• Week 4 - Meditation, Yoga Sutras Discussion, Chanting, Standing Postures

• Week 5 - Meditation, Upanishads Discussion, Chanting, Balancing Postures

• Week 6 - Meditation, Upanishads Discussion, Chanting, Seated Postures

• Week 7 - Meditation, Upanishads Discussion, Chanting, Seated Postures

• Week 8 - Meditation, Tantras Discussion, Chanting, Seated Postures

• Week 9 - Meditation, Tantras Discussion, Chanting, Closing Sequence

• Week 10 - Meditation, Tantras Discussion, Chanting, Full Led Primary Series