Light on Iyengar

Named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time last year, B.K.S. Iyengar has had a huge impact on yoga in America. In his new book Light on Life, he reveals how the practice can change your life.

By B.K.S. Iyengar

No matter what style of yoga you practice or where—whether it's Ashtanga at the Yoga Workshop in Boulder, Colorado; Yee Yoga at Yoga Shanti in Sag Harbor, New York; or Anusara at Yoga Sangha in San Francisco—your yoga has been influenced by B.K.S. Iyengar. The huge popularity of yoga in the West can in large part be attributed to Mr. Iyengar, who first introduced his style of yoga to the United States nearly 50 years ago. Many of his innovations are standard features today: He molded the way we think about alignment and developed anatomically precise terms to convey it; pioneered the use of props as learning tools; and taught how to minimize esoteric Hindu trappings without sacrificing the yoga quest for union of body, mind, and soul. One of his most significant contributions, however, has been the use of yoga as a therapeutic tool. His discoveries have provided evidence of yoga's power to deal with a host of maladies, and the results of his work have raised the credibility of yoga in the scientific and medical communities.

Mr. Iyengar's book Light on Yoga, first published in 1966, has become a classic and is considered the ultimate reference manual of asana practice; when teachers refer to the correct way to do a posture, they're usually alluding to the alignment Mr. Iyengar instructs and expertly models in his book. In fact, at Yoga Journal we wouldn't think of doing a photo shoot without a copy of Light on Yoga on the set.

"The popularity of yoga and my part in spreading its teachings are a great source of satisfaction to me," Mr. Iyengar says. "But I do not want its widespread popularity to eclipse the depth of what it has to give to the practitioner." He shares his understanding of what constitutes the full yogic journey in a new book, Light on Life (Rodale), to be released in September.

Rather than present the yoga postures as he did in Light on Yoga, Mr. Iyengar reveals in Light on Life the "heart of yoga" that he personally discovered through more than 70 years of disciplined, daily practice. He explores the yogic goal of integrating the different aspects of our existence (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual), the role that yoga postures and breathing techniques play in our search for wholeness, the external and internal obstacles that keep us from progressing along the path, and the precise ways that yoga can transform our lives and help us live in harmony with the world around us. In the following excerpt from Light on Yoga, Mr. Iyengar explains why asana practice is important on the yogic journey, but is not the end goal.

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The purpose or goal of asana is to align and harmonize the physical body and all the layers, or sheaths, of the subtle emotional, mental, and spiritual body. This is integration. But how does one align these layers and experience integration? How does one find such profound transformation in what from the outside may look simply like stretching or twisting the body into unusual positions? It begins with awareness.

We think of intelligence and perception as taking place exclusively in our brains, but yoga teaches us that awareness and intelligence must permeate the body. Each part of the body literally has to be engulfed by the intelligence. We must create a marriage between the awareness of the body and that of the mind.

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