“Let her
scream!” Raya insisted, as a student’s yells pierced through the yoga hall
during a medical class. A Senior Teacher was lifting the student's shoulders in Dwipāda Viparīta Daṇḍāsana while another
teacher was lifting her hips waaaay
up.
Raya’s
comment was shorthand for: She is
experiencing intense sensation in an āsana that will heal her. Don’t let her
stop doing the pose just because she is paining, complaining, or fearful. Indeed,
the seasoned teachers did not stop, kept her in the pose, and repeated it
several more times.
Although we
are typically coached to “keep our cool” in yoga practice, it’s not unusual to
hear grunts, moans, and an occasional scream in the practice hall, especially
during the medical (Remedial) class, with students coming with sometimes quite
serious injuries and illnesses.
Usually
they don’t even realize they are making such sounds, and they have no control
over it. Occasionally when I have received very strong adjustments, a sound
will simply pop out, absolutely involuntarily. It’s not a scream of pain. It’s
a response to an intense sensation, an arrival at a place I’ve never been
before, often a surprising place and experience. Typically we are not even
aware that we are making noise, and are so deeply absorbed that we are
oblivious to what is going on outside of our intense inner experience. Even
those who are rather reserved, quiet individuals will have the occasional,
seemingly out of character outburst, during an āsana adjustment.
Sometimes
the teachers will do a strong adjustment to “test the waters,” seeing how much
a “patient” (as they refer to the students in the medical class) will tolerate,
how far they are willing to go, how determined they are to heal, and how much
they are willing to trust them and trust Iyengar Yoga. They want to see if they’re
going to be worth their time.
Immediately
after that medical class, Rajlaxmi led a beatific Prāṇāyāma session. She
commented on how creating space in the body is making room for the spiritual
body. She described how subtle space is—ākāśa, and how we are actually
welcoming spirit into our physical beings. She talked about the inner light we
all contain, but that it’s covered up with the emotional body through the
kleśas, and mostly invisible to us. We worked all through class in creating the
space in ourselves for spirit, and to let the inner light through.
It reminded
me of eurythmy, a movement art based on sound, in which every vowel and
consonant has an expressive archetypal gesture. We all intuitively understand
the relationship of movement and sound. We can’t help but say “Ahhh” at the
sight of a beautiful waterfall or rainbow. We coo “Ohhh” when we see a little
baby, and “Mmmmm” when we see delicious food. Sounds just come out of us, both
from intense pleasure and displeasure and everything in between.
Rajlaxmi’s
poetic observations and the outcries I heard in the medical class made me
realize we are actually welcoming or expelling spiritual forces and energies
through our vocalizations. When we silently utter “Om” as we do at the
beginning of each of Prashantji’s classes, we are shaping our vocal apparatus
around the syllable, even if the sound is unheard. When we work with the sound
forms in Prāṇāyāma in his classes, I am finally understanding that we are
shaping the ākāśa within, and as such, manifesting God in that inner space.
So I’m also
extrapolating that the vocalizations we occasionally make are an expulsion of
negative spirit within. That perhaps Abhi and Raya are wringing out the demons,
so to speak, that keep us bound up and in pain. That the grunts and yelps and
yelling are elements of a yoga exorcism of sorts.
I am trying
not to go woo woo on y’all. I’m trying to keep it super-grounded real. So
whether one is atheist or a fundamentalist Christian or anything else, I hope
you can relate to my observations, that the Iyengar Yoga practice is to drain
ourselves of what no longer serves us, and to create space for the next stage
of our evolution. You could say, we’re ridding ourselves of our former selves
and making way for our higher selves. We’re constantly creating ourselves anew.
“Why does
it sound like you are all having childbirth pains?” scolded Geetaji in an
intense backbend class some years ago. We are frequently coached to keep our
focus within, stay calm, and breathe through the intensity instead of grunting
and moaning our way through a challenging class. I understand this and practice
this, but sometimes the sound pops out, completely involuntarily and
unconsciously, like a cough or a sneeze. Maybe it sounded like childbirth
because we were actually giving birth to ourselves on some level.
Not that
every yoga class should be punctuated with screams. But we must expel our inner
demons, whatever it takes, those forces that hold us back, that keep us stuck.
May we, with sensitivity and self-compassion, tune into our ākāśa, and make space
for the inner Divine, whatever it takes.
