Yoga starts with moral principles

He might say that he’s a yoga newbie, but only a few minutes with Jawahar Bangera will tell you that that’s far from the truth. Having studied the discipline from the legendary B.K.S. Iyengar himself since 1969, Bangera is a senior yoga teacher and one of the trustees of the Light on Yoga Research Trust, which runs the Iyengar Yoga schools in Mumbai. He was in town for a workshop recently and t2 caught up with him for a chat on the essence of yoga over cookies and coffee. Excerpts from Bangera speak... 

Yoga comprises several aspects, but of late the health aspect has taken precedence over everything else, and whatever we are doing for health we are calling it yoga, which is really a misnomer. What you should be saying is we’re doing an asana class, not a yoga class. The moment you say it’s a yoga class, it means you’re covering all eight aspects of the subject, from yama to samadhi. 

Interestingly, yoga starts with moral principles. So it talks about truth, non-violence, non-stealing, self-control, and non-hoarding. And then it speaks of individual princi-ples like cleanliness, contentment, austerity, introspection and, finally, surrender to god. So unless these two are first met, one is really not qualified to study the subject. But today what is happening, for example — not to criticise any school — people straightaway start from, say, ‘We’ll teach you pranayama’ or ‘We’ll teach you meditation’. Now, meditation is the seventh aspect of the subject. What happens to the earlier six? Similarly, pranayama is the fourth aspect. What happens to the earlier three?

In our system — what guruji (B.K.S. Iyengar) has taught us — we take in the student, though the student may not be qualified, and start introducing them to asana so that they start getting the health benefits. See, once you have a health benefit, why would you want to destroy it? Therefore, you start maintaining your health, and in the process your mind gets cultured. 

The culturing of the mind is also done by understanding what the principles are, moral as well as individual, and then the progress is faster. So, indirectly,  we cover all the aspects from yama to samadhi. But it cannot be covered in one or two days. Essentially when a person comes to the yoga class today, they don’t come out of a desire to study the subject. They come with some baggage. They have some problems, they have some health issues, they have some mental or emotional issues, and they want to get rid of it. They may have tried other methods, gone to other professionals — not necessarily yoga teachers — may not have been successful, or may not have had the results they were hoping to get.

And then as a last resort, they come to the yoga class. Now the problem here is this: they expect that all their problems should be solved in a jiffy. It doesn’t work like that. This is a study that takes a lifetime.