PRACTICE 1

How do you experience repetition and performance in the practice?

I think of this in terms of temporality.

Every practice is in of and for itself – it is its own reward, and therefore a thing quintessentially of the present moment. And yet, every practice, you imagine, is for the future, meaning that you hope it will improve the challenging bits, improve your postures, flexibility, strength, stamina, appearance, if not the nexttime, then, by iterative process, in some time to come. As such, the practice is a product of its past – the script (the sequence) you perform with increasing familiarity and, ideally, competence and ease. Not always so – how many times (times!) have I got stuck – when my practice has plateaued or gone backwards.

When I am not sticking to the repetitive aspects of the practice, I know I am taking it easy on myself… copping out. The paradox is that this not sticking to the script, not undertaking the repetition is a kind of marking time. There is no improvement, no forward movement when you avoid the sheer hard work – the stamina aspects, the tough postures, the element of boredom – of the practice-as-discipline.

What is the significance (or insignificance) of rituals?

The colloquial sense of little repeated actions we perform to prepare or orient ourselves for an activity. A marking off and sealing of the time-space of the practice.

For anthropologists, a ritual is something that induces a change in condition of the person or community undergoing it – as such, it is a ‘liminal’ or threshold period.

What are the indications that the ‘event of the practice’ begins and ends?

Typically, a sitting quietly, or the stretching of the areas of the body that feel unready for the practice. Putting on certain clothes. Ensuring you have a towel and cloth mat. Laying out the mat/stilling the mind/or just launching into it. This sounds like prayer?

I like practicing in noisy or crowded gyms so that the focus kicks in but it then becomes a performance you’re trying to disavow: ‘practice like no one is watching’.

How do the above questions and reflections change as you repeat the practice and writing exercise?

Context.

PRACTICE 2

How do you experience repetition and performance in the practice?

There’s something about the immersion in repetition when the practice is going well (I mean from session to session) or when your life permits enough time to do the practice as designed. When things are going less well I notice that I tend to do an improvisatory practice – what the disapproving refer to as ‘free styling’. So this evening, the vinyasas, the sequence, all came not easily but readily.

What is the significance (or insignificance) of rituals?

The pointless stretching or relaxation at the beginning is something I only do when I’m in a shala – in a gym I wouldn’t, I’d just get to it. Why do it then? Just the typical human reluctance to start something hard? The shala itself is a ritual space. Gyms too I guess, but of a different ‘register’

What are the indications that the ‘event of the practice’ begins and ends?

For me, to begin, it used to be that I’d focus on switching to ujjayi breathing. Maybe I even used to do the chant to myself. Now it’s just that first sun salute. The action of starting is the start.

When is it finished? Again – I used to be more ‘ritualistic’ or at least slower about this. With years of practice (but not much progress), I have just come to either stop early because of fatigue, or do a short savasana – shorter than once upon a time, that is. In general, I’m observing much less the letter of the textbook and of teacher instructions (often, after all, given the weight of dogma when they may have been contextual or whimsical). The practice, or life-and-trying-to-practice has made me less ritualistic and more pragmatic.

How do the above questions and reflections change as you repeat the practice and writing exercise?

The context of writing. Firstly, with Lisa there, now on a train. Both times a little ‘precarious’ in terms of attention or ability to think without distraction

PRACTICE 3

How do you experience repetition and performance in the practice?

Practice 3 was Ashtanga second series. Reprise of practice I did with greater ability some years ago, although what I tend to remember is the ‘grumpiness’ with which I tended to perform it, or the satisfying ache in my back from Kapotasana.

Conversations about 2^ndseries before I learned to practice it with those who did, or about those who did. I remember a conversation in Mysore itself with an advanced practitioner I saw do the led 2^ndseries who was exasperated with the Gokulam shala. I remember Reena telling about a Hamish student who was doing protein shakes he reckoned he needed to master 2^nd. I remember the myth that you supposedly suffered headaches while learning the seven headstands at the end of the series.

So: it’s a memory of the performance whereby I am reminded of my mood and the contexts and the teachers I previously had. I remember learning from or being taught by: Marie in Lower Briggate in Leeds; the teachers at Lino Miele’s shala in Rome; Kristina Ireland at a workshop in some community hall in Oxford (first time I did 2^nd); Mark singleton in Cambridge; Matt Ryan in Leeds; Joey in Leeds. Also, teaching it myself — in Cambridge and in Leeds.

Always, then, the presence of the past of the performance, where you hope with the repetition to make this or the next performance a more achieved thing. A memory that is accessed in the doing—a physical link to the past in the performance. A palimpsest of sensation associated with moments, people, and other sensations in turn.

What is the significance (or insignificance) of rituals?

The practice itself is the ritual. Is this one reason Ashtangis resist modification and props?

What is a ritual you haven’t learned – or haven’t yet ‘embodied’? This is 2nd series for me. And I suppose it’s the sequence as a whole – there’s always the next thing to learn. Again – the temporality of ashtanga: repetitive, for the present(the nowof the practice), for the future: what you can achieve, get better at, progress deeper with by immersing yourself in the discipline of iterative now.

Yesterday we did the chant after a discussion about it in our joint blog post and then a chat outside the practice room in Aarhus. There was no sense of strangeness in the room, but it meant there were quote marks around the activity. I was scrupulously careful about not jeering or mocking or ironizing my own participation

What are the indications that the ‘event of the practice’ begins and ends?

Nice about Mysore that the practice starts at different times for different people, as they arrive or ‘warm up’ with their own physical (stretching) or meditation rituals. Why nice? I like the sense of work that goes on even as others chat and laugh. There’s a sense of equality too – the advanced person is giggling over something outside, while the beginner is ‘seriously’ getting on with it.

Do I not have much time for ritual? The ‘ritualistic versus the strategic’ — this was an opposition I used in my own university work, to encourage colleagues not to waste time (on ‘ritualistic’ activities). But I have never been very strategic about my own practice — never hugely interested in making any more than incremental progress. So, the practice itself has been the ritual. I have often described it as a ‘friend’. So, just as you don’t meet a friend for self-improvement – rather to connect with the world, mark a week, have fun…. simply to be, healthily…

How do the above questions and reflections change as you repeat the practice and writing exercise?

Have been careful to do different practices each time. Don’t know if these have affected the content or texture of the reflections – will have to look back and consider when they’re done.

PRACTICE 4

How do you experience repetition and performance in the practice?

I tried in this practice – standard 2^ndseries – consciously to ‘re-enact’ the same series I did on Thursday – being aware of the postures I found challenging (the usual 2^ndseries difficult ones) and observing if they felt different today. Not perhaps exactly following your instruction to practice ‘without the components that you find are the key rituals of your yoga practice’, but at least being very aware of the dimension of difference within repetition.

It’s not important how the postures felt difficult—more that aspect of same with variation that is the key ‘ritual’ of the ashtanga system.

The key difference (though again it’s a banal circumstance): a mild injury: a bruised but painful left kneecap. It affected my whole practice.

What is the significance (or insignificance) of rituals?

Is the practice itself ritualistic? Certainly, it gives a focus or centre to the day or to the week. We used to say that even a day you have done nothing but watch Big Brother in is redeemed if you've done a practice. (I’m uncomfroatble with the judgemental tone of that statement.) maybe we need a ‘Keeping up With the Ashtangis’? Certainly, there’s an as aspect of soap opera both to the culture of the Ashtanga shala, and to the character of the practice itself, with its never-ending structure and fascinating trivia.

Need to define ritual to answer my own question. Anthropological definition says a ritual is a liminal/threshold moment which implies that the participants are ‘transformed’ by the end of it. Perhaps this sometimes happens, but the transformation in our practice takes place over the longer term – over the accumulation of practices.

One thing that might be described as ritualistic, or at least a part of routine, is the fact that a teacher will tend to adjust in the same postures from practice to practice. These might be the notoriously difficult ones, or ones that you personally find tough, or one that you are currently working on.

Marie has been helping me in bekasana, kapotasana, suptavajrasana, a couple of moments in the practice involving hand stand, (dwipada) leg behind the head, karavadasana, and interestingly today, parigasana. As a student, you might expect these and certainly await them – with positive expectation (so that you can sometimes feel neglected if you don’t get the adjustment you expect) or even anxiety – an adjustment usually (though not always) means you have to work harder. Or might hurt.

What are the indications that the ‘event of the practice’ begins and ends?

I don’t understand this question. Oh, maybe you have in mind the ‘does the practice feed into the rest of your day’? Certainly, I experience it as giving me the resources to live better. My stamina, concentration, ability to confront pain and discomfort. I believe all of these are improved by the practice even in my daily life.  But I am not a ‘routine’ man. Maybe it’s only the practice itself (and flossing my teeth?) that constitutes a routine in my ordinary life?

How do the above questions and reflections change as you repeat the practice and writing exercise?

I don’t know that they have become more profound – the opposite I think. I wonder have I exhausted my deeper reflections by the 2^ndor 3^rdpiece of writing. Maybe these are things we have talked about very often in the past. not sure I have or had much to add.