This is the transcript of a talk given by Peter Thomson during a yoga intensive in Singapore on 16 December 2014.
Just from your emails and things, I am interested in questions of culture and that is where I am going to start working with you from. For most of you who know me, I am fairly loose and easygoing –right? Yes : ) but you know also, I am a practitioner and so therefore also, I am not – loose and easy going – you should be clear about this, I am loose about some things but not loose and easy going about some things, like practice- or about where it comes from. To some extend I have to be loose about some things because if I am the way I am about practice with everything, I would be impossible. But I am interested really in something – I don’t know but I am going to chance my arm. But I am interested in the faithful heart. I am interested in you coming from your heart. I am interested in you not coming from your heads. I am interested in you coming out of your commitment to practice, not coming out of things, which are convenient. I am interested in you standing in your practice and standing in your practice in terms of what your practice needs, and also what you need to put in place to support it. I am interested in you standing in that place with courage and integrity. I am interested in you putting things in place and not being sloppy with arrangements? And you can come at this with a whole lot of different angles and this is in some ways an extension of the headstand and shoulderstand conversation that I have been engaged with you here. In relation to your sitting posture, yes sometimes you might be sitting and you might be loosely in the room and I am okay with that. But sometimes also there is classic Zen style and there is a reason why that is important. Hence, the lines. Hence the lines but also, hence the posture. In a way your posture needs to reflect your commitment and it needs to reflect your heart. So from that kind of a place, you know –it is not a posture, which is built around your preferences, or you convenience. It is a stand, which you take. To be a practitioner, it is a stance, and it is a stance around what you are going to learn from it, how you are going to learn, where you are going to position yourself, what is important to you and what is not. It is also a stance around your willingness, one- to stand in that place where things are uncertain, in the context of practice, you take the stance, part of the point is you don’t know what is going to happen next. Of course in normal life, you scheme and plan to know what is going to happen next and then we think we know what is going to happen next. The problem is – life confounds? us. But the practitioner has a different aim, the practitioner’s aim is not to control, the practitioner’s aim is to stand in that place of our karma really. And to stand in the face of it and then to learn from what happens, not to control what happens, but to learn from what happens. You put yourself in an asana, you don’t know what is going to happen. What then becomes important, the person who is controlling the outcome, then becomes concern about the outcome, they are not concern about what they are bringing to the situation. What the practitioner’s concern is investing in himself or herself, as the person who creates, as the place from which the outcome is created. In that sense, the practice is simply a mirror, backed into how you need to adapt, how you need to adjust, learn, what you need to change, what it is saying about you – how are you going to respond? Not – are you getting what you want. To be living in that question and to some extent, to be living in that uncertainty, of course, it is courageous, and it demands a lot of integrity, but from that place also, it is really clear, that those people who are controlling the outcome, just think that they are controlling the outcomes, they don’t actually control the outcomes, they just think that they are, and they don’t actually control the things from which those outcomes are created, so actually really, they have no influence over the outcomes, but they think they do. And that actually, as a positioning, sets you up for really the outcomes that are going to arrive, are outcomes over which you have no influence. So, it’s kind of like a cosmic trick. And if you do want to be able to influence the outcomes, you are going to have to invest in yourselves and you are going to have to give something up – in order to have that influence. Practice is saying that it is about the means, rather than the ends. And if you go into the ends, you are not going to be able to influence the means, so while you think you have control, actually you have no control. This is the ‘my karma run over my dogma’ joke - which is not really a joke, it’s tragic. It is really in the face of practice, given the difficulties and the uncertainties, given what it asks of us, it is then really important that you give to yourself everything that you possibly can to support your endeavor. And some of those things that you give to yourself are going to cost you convenience, for one thing and may to some extend, they will cost you your autonomy. In other words, culture then become important, your community becomes very important, your group of yoga friends becomes very important, because they are part of what supports you in what you are trying to do. And sometimes they are going to demand things of you and they are not going to be convenient. You know, you might not want to practice, every whatever it is –Friday morning? And you might be having difficulties with Friday and you might be having difficulty with so and so or some other kind of difficulty, with new boyfriend, old girlfriend, ex-wife, mother or father, someone somewhere, sometime – you need to be clear. And can I say also in relation to that, you need to be really clear about your communication structures, especially with me – I send an email out – you respond. It’s like, I am kind of loose, I don’t want to be the most important person, but when I send an email out about your practice, that is the most important thing that is happening to you at that time. Otherwise, this practice is not going to survive. It is really understanding something about how you put the things in place that really goes to support you in what you really want to do. And you don’t want what you really want to do displace by…. – similar to you’re your sitting. In your sitting, a thought can come to your mind and it might be a trivial thought and when you are sitting, it can be really really important. And it displaces everything and you are sitting and you are having this thought and your life has been swept away. There needs to be something there against which you are not going to be swept away. Practice is what gives you that thing. In relation to the practice, we then know where we are. We know what is important to us, we know what our direction is. We know the sort of life we are trying to create. And we know how it is important to us and we are clear about our decisions or alternatively, we can just get swept away by the latest thing that blows through the door. And then there is no stability and then there is no posture, no base of the spine. How am I going? Do you understand – you have to have a mind which is worthy of what you are trying to do. Practice is not just a convenience. Practice is being a person who is worthy of the practice, who is up for the game. And practice is those things and it is coming out of the intention. Of course we fail, of course when we sit, our spine flops, and we forget ourselves, of course, of course of course, but you have an intention. It is not that you justify and you rationalize and then explain, and go into agreement with. It’s oh, it is what you are noticing, then start again. And each time you start again, that quality in you gets stronger and stronger and stronger and each time you don’t start again, you go into agreement with it and you justify and excuse and also from there, the next step is blame. And it is not very far before you are really involved in a passive-aggressive paradigm as that is going to be the next step, and that’s what gets stronger. It’s like what are you practicing? What are you cultivating with your mind? What are the seeds that you are sowing and what are the plants that you are watering? So – is that good work for the week? Just in relation to your posture when you are sitting, from that kind of place, it is a stance – you practice the posture, you work with the posture, sometimes you will be in a bad way, just finding the posture – fixes it. Just like that. If you are practicing, you have a resource. Your feeling is there, you can come into the posture, you hit the sitting bones, the legs, the spine is there and your mindset changes. But you have to have a practice to be able to expect something like that might happen. You don’t have the expectation, if you have the expectation, it won’t happen. If you have the posture, it can happen. So that support, the legs, the sitting bones, the spine, you need to be in that place, this is not going to work (spine slumps). I am also really interested in the way the structure of posture shapes, conditions, trains and the way it trains on a subliminal level. And these are not things that you can conceptualize, things that you can know and therefore you can agree to. Again, you have to put yourself in that place and you got to do it over and over and over again. and then what comes is going to come, when it comes, when it wants to come, as it wants to come – you don’t control that, we just put our hearts forward and we invest and we enroll and it starts to come. So there is a reason why I am starting with the sitting this time round. And it will be a recurring theme, but regardless of what is going on, you can’t have the intention till you restore or reclaim the posture. I also want to say posture works, asana works, it works in ways that are not necessarily reasonable, rational or in a way where you can calculate - I am saying on some level it cuts through to something subliminal, something sub-conscious, something intuitive – it trains something in us. Almost like an instinctual response and you need to be positioning yourself for that possibility. It is not like calculating and if you try to calculate that, you are going to sabotage. You are also going to make for yourself a lot of distress and a lot of pain. You get onto a yacht, part of the joy is the freedom of engaging in the unknown, the unpredictability, the unimaginable possibilities. Practice is in that domain. Don’t suffocate it. so, we will be coming back to the posture again and again and again. So, a lot of your questions are coming out from your emails…. (Audrey in Vadjrasana). Audrey: My observation is that my right knee is behind my left knee and I thought maybe it is my right hip going back or my left hip is coming forward or none of the above and it is a structural problem. PT: How is she going to work with this question? Prasahant’s word for this is ‘Practicise’. As oppose to ‘intellectualize’. It is a practice question or a method question. It is really important that you are putting yourself in the right place for the practice responses to come to you. and I am saying this in terms of your practice, not just this is for everything in your practice but also I am talking about some of the questions you are facing in your teaching, and your whole situation, really, in relation to what has to be some kind of a choice. To be a practitioner, to be a teacher of this practice, is to be putting yourself in a place where you can get learning responses to the problems that everything is throwing at you and your students are throwing at you, your life and your choices are throwing at you. How can you find responses that are going to allow you to meet? So on a practice level, what do you notice in this? In what she is presenting? That might be a way of addressing these questions? A practiced based approach, not an intellectual approach. What is happening? See where her spine is? You see this point here? Above this point, it is on this and below this point, it is on this. So you see then from there, this is down and this is up. So you see, if this is down, weight is coming on to the right shinbone but this being up means the weight is not coming on to the left shin bone. So if the weight is not coming on to the left shinbone, how can the weight extend? But this weight that is coming on to the right shin bone, is not feeding the extension, this weight coming on to the right shin bone is falling, so what you are really looking at is that there are problems coming up in here which reflects the differences in the right shin bone and the left shin bone, in terms of their length and their extension. This is a method problem so it is a practice problem. Question is how is she going to go about addressing this question as a practice question? You see, you want to have the intellectual answer – is this forward is this back but can I say that none of that helps you. It doesn’t give you anything in a practice sense for you to actively do. It doesn’t resolve anything. It just means you now feel like you have got an answer. But really for her to address this problem, she has to go back and re-build the asana from the ground up perceptually. And only really then when she is sure about left shin, right shin, right thighbone, left thighbone, the positioning of the spine is she going to get any real sense of what the problem is. And I think all that you are getting here is something that is reflecting the difference between left leg and right leg and how that is affecting feeling in the legs. This is kind of like a compensation with a degree of difficulty in the left shin. So that is what you are dealing with and are you going to be able to deal with it effectively in vadjrasana? And to actually know the answer to that question, you are going to have to go back and really carefully re-build, re-build in terms of the vadjrasana, in-step, shin… because for example, you have that difficulty in the left shin, and the right leg does not have a problem, but the right leg is not catching, so we don’t know what is possible until the things which can do are doing what it can do. Also, the stiffness in that left leg and the inaccessibility of it is throwing it to the right and the right has to catch but when it catches and it throws back to the left, maybe the left can’t carry at that height, so then is the blanket height adequate in supporting at that height? It might be adequate for the right but not adequate for the left. My point is that you have to go back to and investigate – something has gone wrong with my method, let me go back and check my method. You go back and you check the method and maybe the problem is not there anymore. But you don’t want to convert that problem into the way that you work with it. where you could be developing your method and making of it more sophisticated, clearer, more powerful, more effective, more capacity would be building in you, more support for your practice would be building in you, more for yourself would be building in you and in the face of that, what might be happening is that you come up with an intellectual answer. This is also an example around supportive conditions and I have talked to you a fair bit about supportive conditions. Again in relation the thing Audrey is talking about – certain level of methodological clarity is possible with certain conditions. But if you want to get deeper than that, it is not just a question of trying harder, question is you might want to get better supportive conditions. I can talk to you with the windows open, sitting and traffic noise but when it comes to something that I really want to talk to you on a certain level, like the first talk, those conditions don’t work for me anymore, that’s why I have to close the windows. Because that point I can’t have any fluctuations. This is where sometimes you can be teaching in class and you can have people do different things and you can let them do it. At other times you would say no, I don’t want anybody moving because I don’t want any movement. Because when there is movement, there is too much fluctuations in the observational process and it doesn’t support the degree of penetration that we are trying to achieve. And this conversation is easier, so I can afford to have some noise going on. So in relation to your practice, you need to be putting in place those things, which are appropriate, to what you need, supportive conditions. So when you first start, well yes, half an hour a week of practice, yes, and maybe you do it in the kitchen while dinner is cooking, that could be okay. But that is not going to be okay now. And also regarding some of the things I was talking about you about your creative investment, now things are changing and we are getting to be quite long into the process, you need to be responding to the demands of the process according to the conditions that need to be in place to support you. And can I say again, these are questions of practice method and a lot of the time, people are not doing what their practice asks of, what is necessary for their practice, and then they have a whole analytical conversation, or story or narrative going on. like an intellectual response about what is wrong with this or what is wrong with that, but actually there is nothing wrong with anything, it is just practice. Do you understand that a lot of the time when people have problems, and they are beat-ups and they are not anything other than just the practice is working. And a whole story gets pitched around it and actually most of the time really it is just asking for a clearer observation around the practice. And can I say around that, a whole of conversation goes around stuff and it is really just distraction and often it not just distraction, it is just ?? mechanism and we don’t really have to respond, instead we have a story going on, a drama going on. some kind of conversation, intellectual discussion in us about what is right or what is wrong, who is at fault and who is not, who is to blame and who is not to blame…. Whole lot of stuff is going on and all the practice is saying is that knuckle down and apply yourself. And I can say I probably would not have any emails if that were our culture. Maureen’s question: I have a student who had a by-pass heart surgery and he is new to yoga and he is about 50+ years old. I was asking Peter about what are the asanas that can benefit him, more important is what are the asanas that he will not be able to do because of this heart surgery. And he is diabetic. I feel sad for him. Peter’s response: This is also the teaching dilemma, basically you feel sad for all your students, don’t you? That’s why you have to find ways of responding, otherwise you can drown in your sadness. And also drown in your ineffectiveness. And so we need to find a way of working with our problems, if not we just drown. But also that becomes our motivation for learning. you probably heard me tell the whole drama around teaching – like 35 years of teachings, classes and classes and students and students, and things not working and blah blah blah and not knowing what to do and sleepless nights and you know, like feeling totally inadequate.. you have demands and because you are a practitioner, you stay and you stay and you stay and little by little you learn, you learn, you learn, and then a little bit becomes more and more and more and you start to get some kind of a momentum and you start to believe that maybe you might start to get to the point where what is coming in and what is going out are matched. And this is also what I am saying to you in terms of the faithful heart. Do you understand that this learning process of being in that place, you have got to have a faithful heart and in the face of that you can say, well, just give me the answer, and you might get some kind of an answer, but the answer actually ends up in disappointment, and meanwhile, your faithful heart is not being confirmed and affirmed. That is why I am asking this question, the question is not just a question of what to do and what not to do. The question is where do you position yourself in relation to the situation? Now if you have someone who is diabetic, (do you know how long they have been diabetic?) 6 years? 6 years of diabetes, diabetes is the result of something that has gone long before that, so it is a consequence of something. And 4 years into diabetes, they have a heart attack. Do you think that might be a relationship between the diabetes and the heart attack? So then how is that going to reflect itself in their physical structure? Stiff? Where stiff? Upper back, shoulders, upper spine is going to be stiff. What is the relationship between the stiffness of the upper spine and the diabetes? Now you have to think creatively here, it is not a straight question. And this is also what I am asking of you, that you have to start thinking creatively in relation to your practice and teaching, with a lot of application and a lot of expansiveness and not in simple straight lines. What else do you think might be manifesting or what might also be in that relationship? Liver issues? Maybe? The liver is also going to be expressing something. What is it expressing? Anxiety? What might be the relationship between anxiety and diabetes? Stress … and also then what? How is one going to be triggering the other? Just a possibility, I am not sure. Feeding the anxiety? That is what you will get in most situations, that it is one feeds something, and the other feeds that back. So you then get spiraling, momentum building, and exponential development. So as soon as you get one thing happening, and the other thing starts, the thing that conditions starts to follow those causes. So it gets bad quicker. But how do you think he might be managing that anxiety? Eating? Basically on some kind of level, excessive consumption, manic consumption, driven consumption as a way of dampening down anxiety. And this is also a classic case, if you eat to control your anxiety, what happens to the anxiety? It gets more. And then what are you going to do in the face of that anxiety? Eat more. So if you eat more, what is that going to do for your anxiety? Maybe initially when you are full, your anxiety is less, but the next morning then your anxiety is more. If anxiety is there, what are you going to do with your upper back? Hold. Upper back goes hard, because holding is there. Because holding is there in the chest – what then does that do to the heart? Tightens…and compresses it. And also blocks off circulation to the heart. How might this affect how you relate to the student? How are you going to be working with the student? Do you have the experience to work with the student? Another question is not what you do or not do with that student. And this is why the experience element is particularly important, because it is not what you do or do not do with the student but how you with the student. And this is also what I am addressing with you in this conversation, that the questions around heart, and the questions around supportive conditions, and the questions around skill and understanding reflect our questions around how you do. Anybody can know something about what to and what not to. But it takes skill and understanding to know how. And I tell you that the most important question is not what but how. And this is also why in your learning process, you have to get yourself into the place, it is built in, where you have to take on questions that I am asking of you because you have to get to the place where you understand something about how, nuance, textures of understanding. So in relation to questions on how and texture, what is going to be important in relation to the situation? What else are you going to be expecting of him? This person has a lot of anxiety, so you are going to be encountering? In their emotional landscape? and also in their ideology? Their life philosophy. Anxiety is there, so resistance is likely to be there, likely to be not particularly open, likely to be sluggish in their responses, likely to be defensive, putting things outside of themselves, they are likely to be saying, this is not about me, this is about something else, you should just fix it – these things could well be there, but other things are also likely to be there. What else? In their thinking, what is likely to be there? Negative – yes… what are they going to think is important? The look, presentation, the fix… certain answers, results…. Expectations.. what sort of expectations? Around their life… doesn’t need to change, because they know what is important. What are they likely to think is important? Comfort? By extension to that? how are they going to support that comfort? Money… successful… material wealth and wellbeing and they will say that is what is really important. So how are they going to look at people who don’t have that? losers… they are not going to show a lot of compassion for anybody who doesn’t. So if they have diabetes and heart attack, how are they going to maintain this image of success? They are going to feel defeated, loss of control, they might feel possibly desperate, amazing huge levels of despair and possibly depression and also a real inability to do anything about that because that is something they traditionally have judged and criticize in others, but so here they are now in that situation. But in the past that sort of person was the sort of the person they have judged, so what are they to do now? So they are probably beating themselves up to hell. And they are probably in great pain and in great distress. And some people in that situation, will look at that situation and say I am being an idiot and now I have to look at myself and some people will change, mostly people don’t and they get to have another heart attack and another heart attack and another heart attack but still nothing is changing. So when you ask me what to do and what not to do, do you see what is going on in my head? and I am suppose to write an email response to that? That’s why you have go to have the ability to think – do you understand? This is not intellectual thinking. This is like looking at situations and people and this is what is happening, and so from that, this is what is happening, so those associations are there. This is what I would be expecting to encounter in a situation like that. Maybe maybe not, of course, then you have to look and investigate. But if that is the situation you got on your hands, then some questions come up and are you up for it? and if your answer is yes, then what are you to do? What are they going to need? What sort of response are you going to give? And also if you take the question of what can you not do? It is not a question of don’t do this asana, don’t do that asana, there are more serious questions, what can you not do? Don’t add to their stress and anxiety. Don’t scare them. Don’t force changes on them. Don’t judge them. You can’t create stress so you can’t push, you can’t lead them into a culture where they think they should be pushing, like it is about willpower. So obviously, you don’t put them classically into urdhva dhanurasana but gentle backbending is probably the best thing for them. What is possible? Starting from the beginning, supported lying down pranayama but not even the pranayama but the support for the chest, the basic breath awareness. From there you can monitor what sort of response comes then you can gradually feed through the steps and testing each step along the way. It is a question of method, not a question of answer. It is not like what you don’t do. Of course there one thing you don’t do, is to have them in headstand dropbacks. So what is it that you do has also built in the same kind of methodology. And the methodology is to start small, test everything that you go, to see if it is digestible for them or not and proceed very gradually step by step, testing as you go. And wherever you are going to be getting that stiffness in the upper back showing up, then what are the ways of working with that? for example, the bench can be helpful for something like that, but it needs to be really really gentle and subtle in the beginning and getting them to the point where they are fully going over the bench might take some years. These are questions of approach, method. Gets back to the same thing that I was saying about – you understand how to work with this, out of understanding of how to work with that. can I say also you don’t understand any of this, without practice. We couldn’t even have a conversation like this if you didn’t have some sort of practice first. So how to understand how to respond to these things has got nothing to do with what anyone tells you, it has got to do with practice. And in the face of practice and the demands that it makes, people want to know the answer. And if you give them the answer, they wont do the practice. There is something I was looking at this morning – in this context, you need to be coming at this practice, this whole process in a creative invested, enquiring, engaged kind of a way. You need to be coming at your students with that degree of investigation. Do you understand that it is very difficult to come at your students with this degree of investigation if you are not invested in your practice. To actually even know what to do in a situation like this. Knowing what to do arises and grows out of an invested practice. If you don’t have an invested practice, you are not going to know what to do. And if people don’t want to practice or don’t like their practice, they will say, tell me what the answer is – well that is not going to fix anything. The problem is their practice and why are they not enjoying their practice? And again why they are not enjoying their practice but loop back to a whole ideology which is not too different from the ideology of the student that you were talking about – with the expectations of success, material well-being, all sorts of variations on that story. So it might be all those things have such a hook on their mind that they can’t practice. What I am saying to you is you have to think. I am not talking about intellectual thinking-brain thinking. I am talking about ‘I can think, I can wait, I can fast’ – thinking. You can’t be a blip thinker, a superficial thinker, you have got to be a practice thinker. You know you talk to people sometimes, and it is always mechanics that come to mind that people hear problems, if that creativity is not there, people hear problems according to whether they know the answer or not. If they don’t know the answer, they can’t hear your problem. They can’t even listen. It is already that their mind is shut. When you go to a mechanic, if the mechanic, knows the answer, they just give you the answer, they don’t even listen to what you are saying anyway. If they don’t know the answer, they don’t listen to you either. Unless you find an authentic mechanic, if you find one, they want to hear what your problem is because they want to see if they can solve your problem, a problem they don’t know, through their methodology. So they apply themselves to the problem, so every problem that comes to them, it is like a challenge, a test to their skill. So also in relation to your practice, you may not know the answer, but you have a method. And the method stands you in good stead in relation to you and the problems that come to you in your practice. The method stands you in good stead in relation to your student. It is not just kind of like, oh this is a student who has this problem, where do I find the answer to this problem? Oh it must be written somewhere, or do this workshop or that workshop, maybe they will tell me the answer. I spent my whole time over the last years, trying to teach you a method to solve your problems and also to solve the problems of your students and around that, you need to invest in the problem solving methodology, not just in the answers. Also there is a very strong relationship between your practice and your ability to invest yourself in terms of your energy, your creativity, your stamina, your vitality, having the resources to be able to meet problems is very related to how you are in your practice. And even just like where I have been going with you on the headstand and shoulderstand, do you understand what a resource the headstand and shoulderstand is in these terms? You know, you have a problem with a student, what is these answer? Well one thing that might be the answer, do your headstand and shoulderstand and then let’s talk about the problem. Another thing might be sit on it and then see what your mind throws up. You have a problem, get to your cushion. Sit on your cushion, don’t think about the problem. Sit on the cushion, watch your inhalation and exhalation. Look after your posture then see what comes up after that? and maybe then, something will surface in your mind. If you are not prepared to do that kind of work, then what the hell are you doing? If you are not going to do the work and you just want to get the answer, why are you doing this practice? and that kind of place demands a faithful heart and the courage of the faithful heart. And that is the line from crouching tiger… the faithful heart makes wishes come true. And that was the title of my talk. Do you understand how it works? You don’t have to be smart, you have to have a heart. Do you also understand how much of the time heart attacks are around a broken heart – I have a very close friend of mine, very much in this situation, I know the career details and the betrayal that went on for him. And I know that the heart attack that they ended up with and from there the loss of purpose and meaning and direction and the depression that they now live in and the desperation to try to escape from that. It is the broken heart, you have to look after your heart, not just the anatomical heart. You have to look after your spirit heart. And there are a lot of things that compromise that spirit. This is kind of like a practice for big heart. Big heart, not little heart. The important thing is to stay out of the ideology, so just get to your mat and listen, and if you listen, something will come to you…somebody or something is whispering and then it will move. And it is not even like making yourself do something, it’s just stop thinking and listen. And that’s probably a good place to start – Adho Mukha Svanasana. About Peter Thomson
Peter is one of Australia's most senior and most experienced teachers and practitioners and has been heavily involved in the development of Iyengar yoga both in Australasian and more recently in South-East Asian region. This is so in terms of basic teaching but also in terms of teaching training and certification processes. Peter’s particular interest in the practice and teaching of yoga is the depth of perception, inquiry and understanding that sustained practice can develop and in making that understanding directly accessible to students so they can claim it as their own in their practice and in their lives. |
