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The Lion of Pune is dead. So many accolades have flooded the web. I\u2019ll review some of these sentiments and their tensions, and then finish with a tribute of my own, which will be somewhat different.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been moved by the respects paid by people who didn\u2019t know Mr.\u00a0Iyengar, but felt blessed by him nonetheless. For\u00a0some he lived in a distant temple of the mind, radiating\u00a0promise and\u00a0nostalgia. A benevolent general, armed with every answer, should\u00a0you ever have\u00a0the courage to approach him. This, all while you carried that fading copy of Light on Yoga<\/em> around for years, battered and held together by rubber bands, as it helped to hold you yourself together, through all of the skidding disasters of your life.<\/p>\n (What a book! To stumble upon it in one\u2019s twenties, perhaps a decade after the end of childhood sports and un-self conscious pleasure in movement, after one\u2019s body had become an object of pubescent shame, adolescent melancholy, sexual tentativeness and the repressions of working life. To crack it open and be told Your body is sacred, look how it can move, look how it can breathe. Your body is a temple: hold your head high.<\/em>\u00a0What an incredible relief. And bombastic\u00a0medical claims to boot! Who wouldn\u2019t love the author?)<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the poignant, if less effusive, testimony of folks who never practiced his method or displayed his portrait on their personal altar. Thousands acknowledge the profound impact of his teaching, even at several degrees of separation, upon the very possibility of \u201cyoga\u201d showing up on their radar. If you came of age in the postural yoga world from the 1980s onward, it is impossible for you to have avoided Iyengar’s\u00a0influence and brash promises, bellowed to an increasingly disembodied world. Everybody who heard his call seems grateful, even if they didn’t follow it.<\/p>\n Next come the senior students, who offer tender and personal memories of his kindness, generosity, commitment and zeal. Many say he healed them directly of various ailments, just as he healed himself in his youth. Because of him, they\u2019ve gone on to lives of great service and prominence within the ragtag hierarchy of yoga education. They bear his name on their letterhead, and owe much of what they do to the proclamation of his authority. Conditions both professional and psychological conspire to scrub their public gratitude free of the ambivalence so natural to long-term intimacy with someone as difficult as this man\u00a0was.<\/p>\n His ornery excesses are\u00a0forgiven with a smile that hides some strain, I think. Sylvia Prescott writes<\/a>: \u201cIt\u2019s true he might give somebody a slap, but that slap would wake up that part of the body so you didn\u2019t forget it.\u201d<\/p>\n Well I\u2019m glad that worked out for her. But I wonder: what did it wake up in others that they couldn\u2019t forget?<\/p>\n Judith Lasater writes<\/a>,<\/p>\n He was renowned for his impatience<\/em>. This stemmed, I believe, from his passion for giving to us everything he had learned, from wanting so much to help us avoid the mistakes that he had made, from his desire to help the world be a better place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019m sure that\u2019s partly true. But altruism can never fully explain impatience, or the anxiety beneath it.<\/p>\n The elegies of senior students tend to conceal how much they themselves reject or modify Iyengar\u2019s mood in their actual teaching. It’s no secret: they\u2019re almost all nicer<\/em> than he was. No one today punctuates their knowledge with as much pomposity and violence as the master did. Those who try to mimic his wrath are marginalized \u2013 perhaps not quickly enough \u2013 as upstart pretenders. You\u2019re not the master, <\/em>they are told. You have no right to be that cruel.<\/em> But for the vast numbers who carry his torch more gently, it seems their devotion has taught them as much what not<\/em> to do, as what must be done. I always wonder if and how they consciously decided that they would\u00a0not be as dictatorial as the person they wanted to emulate in every other way.<\/p>\n The point of my homage is this. We learn in at least two ways from people. These two ways\u00a0mirror the stress\u00a0of parents-and-child constellations. We learn through people, and we learn against people. The senior Iyengar teachers I\u2019ve taken class with seem to do both at the same time, but they hide the against part.<\/p>\n I remember being in an intensive with Aadil Palkhivala in Chicago over ten years ago. He told a story about how \u201cGuruji wanted to teach his ego a lesson” one day, and so asked him to hold full handstand in the middle of the room for twenty minutes. Iyengar strutted around the quivering young tough, describing to the crowd how poor his form was. When Palkhivala came down, his shoulders were in pain, and then frozen and useless for several months afterwards.<\/p>\n Like a character from Chekhov, he\u00a0smiled as he told the terrible story, warm at the memory. I was confused about everything but this: it was clear that at least at that time Palkhivala would never do the same to me or anyone in that room. He was telling the story of a great encounter with a great man, but definitely that era was over. A few days ago, he wrote<\/a>\u00a0of his guru: \u201cHe taught me with intensity and with kindness.\u201d I knew\u00a0Palkhivala would never teach us with the same intensity. The paradox is that he clearly understood it was wrong, but he was expressing gratitude nonetheless. Or was he asking for empathy, under the guise of reframing and normalizing abuse?<\/p>\n There are many who got close to Iyengar’s intensity and learned just as much, if not more, by turning the other way. You will not readily find their tributes to the master, because it\u2019s harder to write about learning against someone. The hagiography machine drowns out the nuance.<\/p>\n Of my thousands of yoga contacts on social media, there\u2019s only one westerner I\u2019ve seen dare to voice an openly conflicted response to Iyengar\u2019s death. Denise Benitez, who studied and taught Iyengar yoga in the 1970s and 80s, expressed gratitude for the master\u2019s \u201ckeen eye and passion for precision\u201d, but was mindful of his \u201cpatriarchal, old-school guru\u201d persona, known to \u201chumiliate, bully, and shame his students\u201d. Speaking to the necessity of learning-against, she recounts:<\/p>\n In the 80’s, one of his senior male teachers was inappropriately touching women in classes. I was one of those women. When this was told to Iyengar, he said that all of the women who had reported this were lying. So on the occasion of his death, I am left with an unsettling mix of emotions — the passing of an era, the jewel of yoga that he brought forward, his narcissism and ferocity, the fact that he had been homeless, sickly and lost as a boy, and that yoga saved him, as it has saved so many of us. All I can do is wish his spirit well, with all my heart. May his soul rest at ease.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There\u2019s no telling how many Benitez speaks for, but I imagine it\u2019s a lot. So where is she now? What lemonade has she squeezed out of the 1980s?<\/p>\n She runs a studio in Seattle. It\u2019s beautiful and warm. Maternal in a way, which speaks to the changing gendering of yoga pedagogy. The ceiling of the main room is festooned with dozens of hanging lights cloaked in enormous amber silk spherical shades. There\u2019s no sense of a lurking\u00a0father ready to interrupt, assess, judge, banish, prescribe\u00a0or\u00a0authorize. You don\u2019t get the feeling in this room that you will be instructed in the yoga of what somebody else thinks you should do, or how somebody else thinks you should be. I think we could call it a feminist space.<\/p>\n There are darker stories than this you may or may not be aware of. It’s unlikely you’ll hear them while the cremation coals are still warm. People clam up at funerals, and it\u2019s hard to interrupt the choir. None of the stories are new or controversial. There are people who were injured in Pune, and elsewhere. People who were slapped with a flat hand across the face, or kicked in the head. People who were told repeatedly they had no intelligence or did not listen. People who couldn\u2019t stay around for long enough to feel the man\u2019s rumoured tenderness. People who could not stay because they knew they didn\u2019t feel safe in his presence.<\/p>\n What did they go and do when they left his sphere? Happily,\u00a0many nurtured their own creativity in response to having been shut down or shamed by someone who taught his own program with such strange fury. They left Pune, or the baroque certification process, and went to teachers who were softer, or masters of other disciplines. The second major wave of globalized modern postural yoga \u2013 featuring improved biomechanics, psychodynamic intelligence, and even books on non-violent communication (!) \u2013 seems to be riding on the injured bodies and minds of the first.<\/p>\n