Three Weeks with B.K.S. Iyengar

In Yoga Journal’s Archives series, we share a curated collection of articles originally published in past issues beginning in 1975. These stories offer a glimpse into how yoga was interpreted, written about, and practiced throughout the years. This article first appeared in the July 1981 issue of Yoga Journal. Find more of our Archives here. 

Students who have experienced B.K.S. Iyengar’s teaching of yoga know that his method is incredibly exacting in its precision, sophisticated in its understanding of the human body, challenging in regard to the stamina demanded of its practitioners, and humbling to its students’ egos. The yoga student who feels he has mastered the asanas is likely to be taken aback by the whole new set of challenges to be faced when beginning to study Iyengar’s teachings. If these challenges appeal to him and he continues to work, he begins on a path that is likely to involve him more and more deeply in the study of the art. For most serious students, the question of whether to study with Mr. Iyengar himself eventually arises. After studying Mr. Iyengar’s teachings for six years, and hearing stories about the man for nearly as long, I was finally so overwhelmed by curiosity that I flew over halfway around the world to meet and study with him personally at the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in Poona, India. I write now to share my experience of B.K.S. Iyengar and his teachings.

Meeting Iyengar in India

If one is surrounded, as I was, by people who have previously met and studied with Iyengar, one realizes that more than physical preparation is necessary for the trip to India. One of my teachers described the experience as an “initiation by fire,” to be recommended only to those who have a profound need which cannot be satiated elsewhere. If you talk to 20 students who have studied together with Iyengar, you are likely to hear 20 different stories about that class. One student will tell you he is a genius, a teacher who knows exactly what each student needs and what his limitations are, a man of tremendous compassion and profound humility; the next student will tell you Iyengar is a cruel man who pushes students mercilessly and screams at them when they do not perform well enough, an arrogant sadist with no compassion whatsoever. I heard various reports that my time with Iyengar would be the most wonderful experience of my life, that it would be terrible, that India would be hot and depressing, that India would feel like a second home, that I would get sick, that I would feel better than I ever had in my life. From nearly everyone, I heard the most incredible stories of what was expected in class: “So then we did a 20-minute Headstand followed by 50 backbends. Oh yes, that was the same day we did an hour of jumpings.” Perhaps most tantalizing and frightening were the accounts I heard of how those three weeks could change my entire life. I knew people who had come back and made massive life changes: moved across the country, started a family, gotten a divorce…It seemed India might change me to the point that I’d hardly recognize myself. I remember talking with one woman who looked deeply into my eyes, when I asked her how she thought I’d get along, and said: “While you are in India, you will confront yourself more starkly than you ever have in your life.”

Before I left, I made out my will. I wanted to be prepared for all contingencies.

We left New York at 10:45 p.m. on Friday, January 4. Our plane was two hours late departing; we had an additional delay refueling in London, an unscheduled stop in Delhi, and arrived in Bombay six hours late, at 5:30 a.m. Sunday, January 6. Sunday was spent traveling from Bombay to Poona. For some reason, I couldn’t sleep Sunday night, and therefore I first met B.K.S. Iyengar, at 8:00 a.m. Monday morning, having had about five hours’ sleep over the previous three nights. I remember thinking, as I staggered down the street on the way to the Institute: “How am I going to perform all these superhuman feats when I can’t even put one foot ahead of the other?”

In the next few hours, I learned my first lesson of the trip—namely, that the human body is more resilient than we dream, that much of fatigue is mental, and that exhaustion can be a divine state in that it reduces us to the bare essentials. It was suddenly obvious that nervousness and intellectual speculations were a waste of precious energy, so I moved into an internal state of quietness and surrender. And I liked Iyengar from the beginning.

Studying with Mr. Iyengar is like being hit by lightning; so much happens so fast that one becomes dazed by it all. It took me only minutes to realize that this man’s understanding of the human body dwarfed the expertise of anyone I had ever encountered. Every 15 seconds or so, he tossed out a new idea on how to work a part of the body, a single instruction so sophisticated that one could spend a month of daily practice assimilating it. But there was no time to even file it away; Iyengar was already off on another point of awareness, then another, and another. I tried to take notes after class, and often broke off with an emotion halfway between frustration and humor: out of the 50 or so new pieces of information I had just received, I could only remember one or two. Studying with B.K.S. Iyengar can make you feel very stupid very fast. Eventually I remembered and followed the approach that Diana Clifton, one of his English students, had suggested. She said she just allowed her body to take the instruction, and didn’t try to understand it so much with her mind.

Iyengar’s Out-of-Body Approach to Teaching

It was interesting to me to hear Iyengar say that even he is not always conscious of what he is teaching. He says that sometimes “…in my teaching I am completely out. I do not know that I am Iyengar. I do not know that I am uttering those words…The moment I stop teaching, the I-ness enters in me. The moment my work is over even if my student asks me [for clarification or some instruction that was given], I say I don’t know what I have given you. That…awakening of consciousness disappears the moment I stop teaching.” It is as though Iyengar is the transformer for some super-high voltage of electricity, which flows through him and into the bodies of his students. It is Iyengar’s job to keep the electricity flowing. It is the students’ job to make body and mind capable of handling 220 volts on a line which was previously only set up to handle 110.

We had three weeks in which to try to take it all in. Iyengar taught two classes each weekday (a total of three to four-and-a-half hours of daily instruction). He was helped by seven teaching assistants, including his daughter Geeta and his son Prashant. Six classes each week were devoted to instruction in asana and four to pranayama practice. From the beginning of each class to the end, there was rarely any letup. The clear expectation was that each student at every second would be putting out 100 percent effort. (Iyengar once remarked on the saying, “Genius requires one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” His idea on the matter was that there is no reason to devote less than 100 percent inspiration and 100 percent perspiration to one’s subject.) He has stated regarding his classes that, “The maximum of what you did yesterday becomes the minimum of today.” This philosophy sets the tone for his classes. Rarely did he show any satisfaction with our performance, so we stretched farther and farther toward an elusive, eternally receding goal. Although one point might be understood, 15 more still lay beyond our grasp. One never realizes the inexhaustibility of the field of yoga more than when one is with Mr. Iyengar.

Throughout our three weeks with Iyengar, his fabled temper was much in evidence. Within moments after a class began, he would be off in a tirade about how many of us were “stupid” and “not interested to learn.” He maintained that our attitudes had sent his blood pressure up to 200. Apparently it stayed there until the last two days of class, when he grudgingly admitted that it had finally come down “to 150.”

All this I had expected from the man. Certainly the stories of his temper and his inexhaustibility are legion enough that a face-to-face encounter with them cannot prove a complete surprise. What I did not expect was how different these isolated behaviors would seem when placed in the context of the whole human being. Mr. Iyengar’s arrogance is more than compensated for by a very genuine humility, his rage is continually balanced by a wonderful sense of humor. Somehow it was difficult to take his tirades seriously when they were so often followed by a twinkle in the eye and a deliciously humorous remark. He had me alternately chuckling and quaking in my boots. The man is like a chameleon, his moods changing continually. Hence any statement or action of his, when taken, out of context, does not convey the reality of the situation one experiences when standing in front of him. I imagine his students choose what they wish to remember of a given class, according to their own propensities, hence the descriptions of him which range from “saint” to ”sadist.”

Lessons Iyengar Taught Me

So what did we learn in India? One general thing I remember is that poses are refined through movement of the skin. He talked far more about this than he did about working the muscles. Iyengar has maintained that, “The skin is the sense of knowledge.” The skin, to Iyengar, is the barometer of the inner body. He himself is so attuned that he can tell how well the joints and muscles are working merely by glancing at the surface of the skin. He sought to develop this capacity of observation in us, and the ability to work with our own poses in this way. (He has said that, “It is from the spinal column that all the nerves come and each ends in a pore of the skin. You must control each nerve and each centimeter of the skin.”) Therefore, we were continually given instructions to rotate the skin this way or that, to allow it to thicken, or to stretch it until it became thin and shiny.

To those not familiar with this form of yoga, such instructions might seem unnecessarily detailed or even downright peculiar. After all, who cares whether the skin on the inner left thigh rotates up or down in a particular pose? But, to Iyengar, one can only awaken the full potential of one’s Self by awakening the full potential of one’s body, and the skin, the largest organ in the human body, is a big part of that Self. The body, breath, and mind are seen as expressions on different levels of the one underlying reality. So, “Asanas should not be treated as a physical part of man. There is no physical part; there is no mental part; there is no intellectual part; there is no spiritual body. They are all one,” Iyengar told us. He urges his students to “awaken the dormant intelligence even in the minutest fibre; this will help its neighboring fibres to revitalize, to realize their functions, to act, to experience the creation created by you.”

In trying to bring awareness to all parts of the body simultaneously, the practitioner is developing his “power of concentration,” or dharana, to a tremendous degree. Eventually, “the atma has to cover the entire universe of its own, which is the body. This universe [goes] from the bottom of your feet to the top of your head, with all the organs, with all your senses, with all your joints, your nervous system—6,000 to 8,000 miles long—and your lungs, which are as big as a tennis court. So you can just imagine the size of this big universe, a tremendous, vast frontier.” For most of us, concentration begins with awareness of a single area at a time. Iyengar described our practice this way: “When you stretch your hand, you forget your leg. If I say stretch your leg, you forget your spine. If you stretch your spine, you forget your chest, is it not? So memory is just oscillating from one place to another place. When you are stretching the right hand and the left leg, you don’t know where the mind is because the mind is in space…When memory is perfect, the space and place are one.”

In a way, I could say that working toward that universal awareness sums up much of Iyengar’s teaching. As beginners, students are learning that just because the right foot is turning out, away from the midline, this does not mean that the left hip has to rotate forward. Awareness can come into both simultaneously. By the time they reach India, students are more aware of what effect a stretch of the little toe away from the midline has on certain vertebrae of the spine. The awareness moves onto subtler and subtler levels, but the basic principle—that of total attention—remains the same. In a sense, this yoga is like Zen practice—the mind being focused on only a single target. Yoga with Iyengar enhanced my understanding of this concept by making me realize just how much there is to be aware of within any single target.

In retrospect, what I think Iyengar was trying to teach us, more than anything else, was to have an eternal sense of curiosity in our practice, so that new points of awareness could be found daily. He has said that, “To a yogi, the body is a laboratory, a field of experiments and perpetual researches.” He tried to give us a sense of newness, of freshness, of discovery in performing asanas most of us had done thousands of times before. He berated us endlessly for what he called our egotistical practice—his feeling that once we had achieved a certain level of technical correctness we were content that we had mastered the pose. Our practice, then, had become dead. He has commented that, “Usually when a person has mastered a pose, it becomes uninteresting for him. That is why you can see many people doing mechanically the same thing over and over again, but their mind is elsewhere. It is not a way of approach. People think they attained the end. How can they know? It may be only a beginning…or it may be nothing at all. You must always see if you can go further.” And he did spur us on further. Countless technical points began with the query: “How many of you have ever asked yourself… ” In a lecture, he gave the practice of Virasana (which he says is the simplest asana) as an example of how yoga practice is to be approached:

When you are doing Virasana, you just bend your leg in a gross form and when you have done you say I can sit. But how many of you when you are doing it just turn your head on the right and the left to see how the right toe is facing, how the left toe is facing. …The moment you see a doubt has set in: why this foot is like this, why that foot is like that…you have to penetrate further…then by trying and training discrimination sets in…The foot may be straight at the back, then you may see the toe is all right, but if you penetrate a little more you may find that one inner edge of the heel is extended outward, another edge of the heel may be inverted. Then you find another doubt: “What is this? I look at it, one ankle is thick, one ankle is thin. One side you feel is stretching, the skin is pulling; the other side you don’t feel. In the beginning doubts are always enormous; clarity is very little. But as you go on progressing, your intelligence, which moves in the space of your body, starts touching those areas. The moment they touch those areas, then that intelligence wants to penetrate a little more. The moment it starts penetrating, your discriminative faculty increases.

In Iyengar’s own practice as well one has a sense of his eternal curiosity. From the way he spoke, from the way he taught, I felt that Iyengar came to his practice each day as a beginner—eager to discover new things, ready to be taught by what he observed. He has said, “The more I work, the more insignificant my efforts appear to be. I have to be content with this divine discontent that drives me on.” To us, he spoke with enthusiasm of the changes that have been occurring in his practice lately: “This year I have already been practicing more…than what I used to do before. I am practicing with a new mind, not with an old mind that [says] once upon a time I was doing [it] like that, so I will continue to do that. That chapter has closed. Let me see what new avenues open in my practice.”

I have the most profound admiration for Iyengar’s openness to learn and grow, and for the depth of his knowledge. The man’s entire life is an impressive testimonial to what can be achieved from dedication, force of will and concentration. Iyengar spent years on the fringes of starvation while he was working intensively on his practice. He says now that, “I cannot put into words the suffering I underwent. My hard practice caused agony to my body, nerves, mind and to my very soul. There were occasions when I had a plate of rice once in two or three days. The rest of the time I had to fill my belly with tea or tap water.” At one point, he had only one student and would walk 18 miles daily to teach him yoga. His only payment was lunch. Today, almost 40 years later, students stand in line to come to him—from all over the world. I feel after meeting him that I now have a sense of the truly awesome dedication which is required of a person who wants to stand at the top of his or her field, whatever it may be.

Coming to Terms With Iyengar’s Contradictions

Much as I admire Iyengar, there were times in India when I was annoyed or downright angered by his manner. I never could get used to the pace at which classes were conducted. The material was presented so fast, that it was impossible to ask Mr. Iyengar to slow down, repeat something, or explain it further. He maintained that a willingness to repeat something over again is the mark of an inferior teacher, but that has never been my understanding of how people learn new concepts. I felt that I missed so much by not being able to receive clarification on points that were entirely new and which I had not totally grasped. Iyengar and his assistants’ harsh and impatient manner frequently made me so frightened of doing something wrong that I would make even more mistakes. To be in the spotlight of his attention can be terrifying, so one hesitates to ask for help even on those days which are set aside for questions and answers. Certainly, if one asks for Iyengar’s assistance, help will be given. However, that help is frequently accompanied by a lot of yelling, some derogatory comments about the person’s practice, and a slap or two. I feel that the next time I study with Mr. Iyengar, I will be more ready to throw my fear to the wind and ask for his attention more often. This first time, though, I had to work up my courage to open my mouth. (No assertiveness training course could teach you more than going to India and engaging Mr. Iyengar’s attention—or even, God forbid, disagreeing with him.) It saddened me that this person who has so much to offer in the way of knowledge has a manner of presenting it that creates a less-than-optimum climate for true learning.

Still, even as I write these words, a part of myself rises to defend the man against my own criticism. Iyengar maintains that the teacher who is sattvic in his approach creates tamasic energy in his students. A rajasic teacher is more able to bring his students to the state of sattvic equilibrium which yoga is meant to create. To use an everyday example: it can be difficult to stay alert through even a good lecture when it is presented in a calm, rational, well-organized manner, but when one listens to a fiery orator who displays tremendous verve and enthusiasm (even if we disagree with the arguments), the speech will focus and inspire our attention. Likewise, in Iyengar’s classes one is never bored or lethargic. I found it difficult after I left Iyengar to create for myself the same degree of energy and motivation in other classes which I naturally had while I was with him. It was also good for me personally to see that I could be around someone that powerful and not crumble to bits. I feel stronger for having gone through the experience, and would not have missed that opportunity to learn about myself in that way.

Furthermore, I have to admit that I liked Iyengar for his sheer lack of artifice. He does not profess to be a guru; he does not act like a saint. (He has said, “I am not a yogi; I am on the path.”) He can be totally outrageous and completely infuriating. He is a very real human being who does not seem to make any effort to hide either his talents or his faults. His personality is out there for everyone to see. You can either accept him or reject him; he will not try to win you over. I think it takes courage to be this way.

I came away feeling that there were many things I liked tremendously about B.K.S. Iyengar, and some things I didn’t like at all. There were many things I could get from him and some things I could not get from him. But ultimately one could say this about one’s relationship with anyone. And it is after all childish to expect another person to answer all of one’s questions or fulfill all of one’s needs.

Viewing Iyengar as a saint or a madman moves him out of the realm of normal human relationships and into a narrow framework where he is either perfect or perfectly horrible. To me, Iyengar is a cantankerous genius who knows more than anyone I’ve ever met about a subject in which I am deeply interested. To gain some of this knowledge, I had to surrender to some of his idiosyncracies. In the end, I look back on the experience as being one of the most marvelous of my life. Would I do it all over again? In an instant!