What is Real?

“We often think that ignorance means you don’t know the capital of Albania. What yoga means by Ignorance can perhaps best be translated as ‘nescience’, which simply means not knowing. …. What don’t we know when we are ignorant?

The answer is this. You don’t know what is real and what is not real. You don’t know what is enduring and what is perishable. You don’t know who you are and who you are not. Your whole world is upside down because you take the artifacts in your living room to be more real than the unity that connects us all, more real than the relations and obligations that unite us all. Perceiving the links and associations that bind the cosmos in a seamless whole is the object of yoga’s journey of discovery.” BKS Iyengar, Light on Life” p. 191

How do we know what is real when we practice? Is a pose difficult because there is an intrinsic issue in our body or is it something we just haven’t touch upon yet, that we don’t understand how to move or adjust? I think both are a type of ‘real’ but one may be enduring and the other not. Practice, by its nature will help us understand. But only if we approach it with an attitude of exploration rather than with a preconceived attitude of what our limits and capabilities are. Watching my 9 month old grandson explore his world has been a good lesson. He approaches everything with wide eyed wonder and tests everything again and again to see what the reaction is. Every time he drops his toy, it falls even though he expects it to happen he is delighted in seeing it as if for the first time. Then he tries to make it happen in a different way, off the other side of the chair, with a back hand flick or just letting it slide out of his hand. This kind of practice is teaching him what is permanent.

I often watch the adults in class react to the name of the next pose with a kind of groan; an anticipation and expectation of what the experience will be like, rather than that open anticipation of my grandson when he repeats an act. I catch myself doing the same thing in practice; the internal dialogue telling me not to move a certain way, or the emotional expectation of experiencing a difficult movement, or the emotional expectation of relief or a sense of well done. When I become aware of this I try to make myself more like little Alex with his naive eagerness to experience and learn from my next movement.