Conscious Choice: Iyengar Yoga

November 2002 | Body & Mind Health

Iyengar Yoga

by Darlene Paris

Twelve years ago Patrina Dobish went to India to study yoga. But when she returned to Chicago that same year, Dobish gave up her asana practice.

"I was already working hard during the day as a carpenter and the yoga poses did not make me feel any better," she says. "They were too intense and my body was already very tired."

Then she heard that yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar was coming to Chicago from India and would be demonstrating poses at Lincoln Park High School, which wasn’t too far from her home.

"I was always intimidated by Iyengar yoga because the students seemed physically oriented," Dobish says. "Since my trip to India, I had been doing more of a seated practice. But I decided to go anyway."

When Dobish saw Iyengar working with the students on stage, she was mesmerized by the way in which he worked.

"He was very egalitarian in his approach," she says. "He was going around to each student and describing what was going on with their poses and how they could improve them. All they had to do was use their mind, not their physical strength, to do it."

The demonstration was enough to propel Dobish back into a regular asana practice. She began to study this style of yoga with certified Iyengar yoga instructor and director of Yoga Circle, Gabriel Halpern, and noticed that her asana practice became less painful.

"When I was doing yoga before, I didn’t get any useful feedback," explains Dobish who is now an Iyengar yoga instructor at Yoga Circle, Eight Limbs Yoga Center, and Lakeside Church in Evanston. "Studying the Iyengar method, I got good feedback on how to improve, and my asana practice began to provide relief rather than pain."

Direct instruction is one of the hallmarks of Iyengar yoga. "The teachers are rigorously trained to use their powers of visual discrimination," says Halpern. "Their ability to articulate instructions clearly and offer hands-on correction helps Iyengar yoga teachers stand out from the rest."

Another reason this style of yoga is unique is that it utilizes props, belts, blankets, bolsters, ropes, and chairs, which allow students to execute poses with less difficulty.

"The use of props has made yoga available to more people than just those who are young and flexible or who have the personality type to keep going with their practice and persevere," Halpern says.

"We use props for different purposes," says Paul Fowler, who teaches beginning Iyengar yoga classes at Yoga Circle and Moksha Yoga in Chicago. "Sometimes we might lay over a prop or sometimes we’ll use it in an active way to help students get deeper into a pose," he explains.

"We might even use it to teach different actions," Fowler continues. "For example, in the mountain pose the inner thigh should move back. We would take a block and put it between the thighs and then have the student move the block back so they can see the action in the pose. Then we would take the block away and have them do the same thing without the block," Fowler explains.

Critics say that Iyengar students might get addicted to the prop and never learn to perform the poses without assistance. Not true, says Fowler. "It’s not about depending on the prop, but it’s about using the prop in an intelligent way to teach a particular action," he says.

Iyengar yoga is not all about asana. In the advanced classes, students also learn about the Yoga Sutra, an ancient Indian text on yoga that was codified by a man referred to as the father of yoga, Patanjali.

"We start our classes with an invocation to Patanjali to quiet and center ourselves," says Lois Steinberg, certified Iyengar yoga instructor and owner of the B.K.S. Iyengar Yoga Institute of Champaign-Urbana. "Then we chant the eight limbs of yoga, which are found in the Yoga Sutra. We also talk about the yamas (practices to avoid) and niyamas (observances)," Steinberg explains.

If it were up to B.K.S. Iyengar, who is now eighty-four years old and occasionally teaches classes at the Ramamani Memorial Yoga Institute in his hometown of Pune, India, he wouldn’t have called his method of teaching Iyengar yoga. "There is no Iyengar yoga, only yoga," he says.

Iyengar’s students created the name because they needed a way to distinguish his brand of yoga from the other styles. "There’s no reason to label any of it," says Steinberg. "We’re all seeking self-enlightenment and freedom from suffering."

Dobish adds, "When people come to an Iyengar yoga class a lot of them are relieved because they are actually instructed on how to do things. And then they go home and practice to see if those things they learned in class really worked."

Darlene E. Paris is a freelance writer, teacher, Reiki Master, and the author of Healthy and Natural Living in Chicago: The Best Alternative Resources in the City and Suburbs (Chicago Review Press, 1998).

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