Teaching as Pratyahara

Almost 5 years ago I took a 3 hour workshop with Leslie Kaminoff at Black Dog Yoga that opened my horizons on how I see and experience the body. Since then I've devoured everything I could find online and in print doing self-study as much as possible. This weekend I had the privilege of further in-person study. Reflecting back, the experience feels like a form of Pratyahara as Iyengar defined it in one of his books as the withdrawal from labels or naming things. The exercise he gave was to go out for a walk and refrain from using names for anything and everything you see - such as "oh that's a tree, there's a flower, a mailbox, etc." The idea being that by not labeling you can actually continue to see what's in front of you. The survival mind uses labels as a form of dismissal. Once it can name something, it assumes it already knows what it is so it doesn't have to continue to look and inquire as to the essence of the thing. For me, this is what drew me into Leslie's teaching and keeps me going back. His teaching methodology invites students into further inquiry rather than a self-satisfied sense of "ok I got that...now on to the next thing." The context in which I experience Leslie's teachings is that anatomy is a microcosm, a gateway through which we may discover the function and flow of the ever-expanding universe we're part of and that our bodies express. I just glanced down at my notes to see one thing I wrote that will be with me for the rest of my life -- "Mastery should always be a verb, never a noun." #lesliekaminoff #youandthemat #yogaanatomy #blackdogyoga