AshtangaNews Ashtanga Yoga Matters (as taught by Sri K Pattabhi Jois)

It’s been awhile since we shared our geeky fascination with numbers with you. See Yoga Trends on Google and Ashtanga Grows 100% in 4 Years (at least) for examples. In that post, we estimated that the Ashtanga yoga student population had grown by 100% since early 2002.

Here we take a close look at the trend in Ashtanga yoga teachers during the past four years. It looks like the number of Ashtanga yoga teachers, authorized or certified by the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute grew by 179% from February 2002 to December 2006 (which means that we underestimated student growth earlier).

Not only that, but it also seems that the rate of teacher authorizations is increasing.

Number of teachers authorized or certified by AYRI
Do you detect a trend?

This data comes from Ashtanga.com’s monthly newsletters which publishes new teachers’ names every month - we looked at all the newsletters from March 2002 until December 2006.

The total number of authorized Ashtanga teachers was 176 (including 34 certified teachers) as of December 29, 2006. Since early 2002, a total of 113 new teacher authorizations have been announced on Ashtanga.com.

The world of Ashtanga Yoga

A lot of the “travelling teachers” moved to Asia.

Japan had an especially impressive growth in Ashtanga teachers with 5 teachers authorized since early 2002, compared to one 4 years earlier. Ashtangis in Japan definitely seem enthusiastic about Ashtanga as evidenced by some of our recent posts:

• Interview of Ashtanga Practitioners in Tokyo,
• The Ashtanga Role Models of the Future,
• Yoga Fest Tokyo 2006, and
• Govinda Kai’s Vision of Yoga in Japan.

The 2 countries with the most new teachers are the United States with 62 (40 newly authorized) and the United Kingdom with 18 (12 newly authorized).

Matthew & Dominic Corigliano in Toronto, Canada
(We can’t have only graphs in this post. Boring!)

Women and men teachers are equally represented. As of December 2006, 53% of teachers were women, and since early 2002, 63% of newly authorized teachers were women. But wait! Only 10% of female teachers are certified, while 29% of the men are.

Ashtanga.com, by the way, gives the best explanation of the meanings of authorized and certified.

We had to make some assumptions to come up with these fascinating tidbits (especially those in the next graph). If you want the gory details about the assumptions, email me at yogini @ ashtanganews.com.

Growth in teachers by region…
complicated by changes to the definition of “travelling” teacher

And finally, thanks to Ashtanga.com for continually keeping everyone up to date on Ashtanga yoga as taught by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, and without which, neither of our geeky numbers posts would have been possible. Also, all the teachers listed on Ashtanga.com are authorized to teach Ashtanga yoga by AYRI.

Ancient Scriptures at the Academy
of Sanskrit Research, Melkote by Dr Vivek M

I’ve always been fascinated by languages, and while listening to an excellent book-on-tape on the History of the English Language, I discovered that modern English and Sanskrit both stem from a common language: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It is believed to have been spoken in Central Asia six to nine thousand years ago.

PIE is the common root for Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. Later on, English aquired many words from both Latin and Greek, so there are many words in common between English and Sanskrit.

When we learn the Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga system, we are strongly encouraged to learn the Sanskrit name of all the postures, and to learn the beginning and ending chants. That’s already a vocabulary of more than a hundred words, so by learning Ashtanga, we are also beginning to learn Sanskrit.

Some of these Sanskrit words, as used in Ashtanga, still have recognizable traces in English and other European languages.

Let’s start with the numbering system as called out in a led class (Sanskrit in bold, English meaning in parenthesis):

Dve (two): the “w” in two is the “v” in dve. In Dutch, a friend told me the pronunciation of two is almost the same as dve.

Trini (three): this one is obvious.

3-D Bamboo Mandala, Burning Man 2006

Panca (five): Panca and the Greek pente have the same root, hence pentagon.

Sapta (seven): that’s where the “p” in the Fench sept comes from, and in heptagon.

Ashto (eight): the same ashto as in Ashtanga, in English “sh” became “gh”.

Nava (nine): the ending “v” sound still exists in French as an “f” in neuf (”nine” in English).

Dasa (ten): French again, dix, and in English the root of decade, decathlon.

Samasthitih (equal standing pose): the meaning of “sama” still exists in the English word same.

Padahastasana (foot hand pose): the Greek podi and French pied for foot still exists as podiatrist. Hasta is very similar to hand but I don’t know if it’s related.

Trikonasana

Trikonasana (triangle pose): Tri is three as mentioned above, kona means angle or corner, which is pronounced almost the same.

Prasarita Padottanasana (spread out intense foot strech): the last part of this name is a shortened version of uttana, meaning intense stretch.

Prasarita Padottanasana
from namaste yoga

A few years ago I attended a workshop with Bhavani Maki where she pointed out uttana still exists in English as attenuate, to thin out. A lot of other postures have uttana in their name, and it is a consistent principle behind the Ashtanga practice. Bhavani is very interested in language by the way, and I highly recommend her workshops.

Ardha Baddha Padmottanasana (half lotus bound standing forward bend): baddha and bound have the same root.

Virabhadrasana at an Ashtanga workshop in Brazil
with Matthew Vollmer

Virabhadrasana (hero pose): Virabhadra was a super being created by the god Shiva, and vira means hero. I don’t know if there is an official connection, but vira and hero sound very close.

Tiriangmukhaikapada Paschimottanasana (one leg folded back): tiriang means and sounds like transverse.

Janu Sirsana (head of the knee): Janu, as knee, still exists in French as genou, and in English as the root of genuflect, to bend the knee or touch one knee to the floor or ground, as in worship.

Marichyasana in Brazil

Marichyasana (posture of Marichy): Marichy is a sage, son of Brahma and patron saint of all Mexican Mariachi bands (only kidding!).

Navasana (boat pose): Nava means boat, which still exists in the French navire and as the root of naval and navy.

Kukkutasana (rooster posture): could kukku be related to the French cocorico, the equivalent of cock-a-doodle-doo?

Om in Bloomington, Indiana
from a ideolector’s Street Art set on Flickr

Ubhaya Padangusthasana (both big toes): Ubhaya means of both, and to me these sound very similar.

I’ll leave you with one last one, Amen, sorry, I mean Om.

the BKS Iyengar video

Three very old videos have surfaced on YouTube.com, the main site for video sharing on the internet. Apparently, they were shot in 1938, and MCPetruk, who uploaded them, told me via email that he obtained them as part of the footage from an Iyengar Institute VHS.

Thank you to Dipita for the tip and to MCPetruk for sharing.

Links to the 3 films (one of the actual films is at the end of this post):

• Krishnamacharya in inversions, nauli and various advanced pranayama techniques (4:32)
• BKS Iyengar part 1 (3:11)
• BKS Iyengar part 2 (3:26)

After hearing and reading so much about him,



Krishnamacharya at 50

it is amazing to see Krishnamacharya on film. And what a film it is. In these short 4 minutes, you get a glimpse of a total mastery of the body, the postures and the breathing. The stories about Krishnamacharya stopping his heart become much more believable. His legendary strictness is apparent, too.

I tried to remind myself as I was watching that Krishnamacharya was 50 years old when the film was shot. He does not look a day over 30.



Iyengar in Upward Dog
in the middle of a vinyasa (!)

Iyengar is also very impressive doing what seems to be a modified version of the Advanced A Series of Ashtanga. He is actually doing vinyasas! He must have been around 20 years old during that time, before he decided that vinyasas were “too much jumping”.

Krishnamacharya practicing yoga in 1938

Every now and then, Google will come out with a service which inspires wonder. Last time they did that for me was with Google Earth.

Now they’ve done it again with Trends: a way to compare the world’s interest in different search terms. You can enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

So what does that have to do with Ashtanga Yoga?

How about looking at which yoga style is most searched for? Here’s a chart comparing Ashtanga, Bikram, Iyengar, Vinyasa and the relative newcomer, Anusara:

yoga syles the online world is interested in

Google Trends show that Bikram is most popular, and Ashtanga and Iyengar are neck to neck. Anusara only starts to register in 2005. From the regional information, the top 3 countries who search for Ashtanga are Ireland, Singapore and Sweden. At least now you know where to set up your new studio. I wonder where India is though.

How about yoga compared to other types of activities? Here’s the chart of yoga compared to pilates, meditation and stretching:

yoga more popular than pilates

Yoga clearly comes out on top. But you can also see the seasonality in the interest, as both yoga and pilates peak at the beginning of the year. The January Effect with its New Year resolutions, as it is known in yoga studios around the world, is reflected here.

And India appears as the first country for yoga searches (at last!).

Here’s one more. Draw your own conclusions.

Brad is seasonal too

[For an interesting development about this post, see Asteya Redux: A Grumpy Post -Ed.]

Leave it to America to take something which is literally thousands of years old and alter it into a commercial entity in just several short decades.

Craig Snyder wrote a piece called the Circus of Yoga on his new blog, thecraigsnyder.com (thanks to SoulJerky for the tip). Craig is a photographer of the skateboard culture, but, as is apparent from his writing, he knows a lot about yoga.

Alan “Ollie” Gelfand
by Craig B. Snyder

Snyder’s inspiration for the title of his post was a cover of Yoga International magazine that referred to a story about how yoga had been incorporated into Cirque du Soleil.

Craig took this thought a little further and offered an often critical overview about how yoga has been transformed in the West - particularly Florida, where he lives - over the past decades.

Snyder feels that yoga has been reinterpreted by the West, and that the quality of teachers is at the root of the fact that students are often misled about the intended benefits of yoga practice.

This is similar to the thoughts expressed by R. Sharath Rangaswamy in a recent interview in Lime, that you have to know yoga to teach yoga.

Sharath adds that it may take ten years to become a yoga teacher, in contrast with some yoga teacher training courses, which give teacher certificates after a weekend. Here’s the extreme of that genre: an online certificate you can buy for $50…

I think that if you look for it, there are plenty of places in the west where you can find yoga which follows the original tradition. This is especially true of yoga styles like Iyengar and Ashtanga which try to stay close to their roots.

Coming back to Snyder’s post, he lays down what he believes to be the meaning of yoga:

Yoga is many things, but it is not one. Yoga is not exercise, but contains exercise. Yoga is not a religion, but contains an awareness of religion - whether it is your preferred religion or someone else’s, or even none at all. Yoga is not about being a contortionist with the body, but being a contortionist with the mind. It is about settling the differences with the mind that get us into so much trouble. It is simply about loving yourself, something which many people find difficult to do.

Yoga (and meditation) is many things, but it is not one - it is about becoming one. A unified, living being, who lives without duality in their life, who lives without the chaos and confusion that creates harm to ourselves as well as others.

But yoga is not the answer, it is merely a way to discover the answer.

These thoughts resonated with me. An inspiring article well worth a read.

Namarupa Issue 3 Fall ‘04

Namarupa magazine recently made its wonderful article — 3 Gurus, 48 Questions: Matching Interviews with Sri T.K.V. Desikachar, Sri B.K.S. Iyengar & Sri K. Pattabhi Jois — free for all to download. The article is an in-depth interview of the three living yoga masters conducted by Alexander Medin over a period of months in Madras, Mysore and Pune.

Alexander asked the same questions of all three gurus, but their answers were wildly different. These differences highlight each guru’s unique approach to yoga and teaching.

The connection between the three gurus is Krishnamacharya, their legendary teacher. Each has a very different relationship to him:

Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya

• Desikachar is his son
• BKS Iyengar is his brother-in-law
• Pattabhi Jois is his disciple

It is often striking how each has a totally different take on Krishnamacharya’s teachings:

Did Krishnamacharya teach everybody the same way?
Iyengar: “No”
Pattabhi Jois: “Yes”

What was the most important thing Krishnamacharya taught you?
Desikachar: “Humility.”
Iyengar: “What he taught me was only a few asanas. That seed was what he gave me and I developed it as well as I could.”
Pattabhi Jois: “When he left for Madras he told me, Make this yoga method the work of your life.”

Krishnamacharya later in life

What are the criteria to become a good yoga teacher?
Desikachar: “Faith in God.”
Iyengar: “One has to work really hard and show the qualities of sincerity, honesty, and virtue.”
Pattabhi Jois: “Be a dedicated student for many years before you even start to think about teaching.”

What is your personal yoga practice like these days?
Desikachar: “Next question, please.”
Iyengar: “I will not boast. Everybody will tell you that I am still practicing. I do my sadhana [meditational practice] and still do the postures. I do all the postures you see in Light on Yoga and do them every day.”
Pattabhi Jois: “I continue to practice pranayama and recite the Vedas for an hour and a half to two hours every day.”

TKV Desikachar

BKS Iyengar’s opinion of Ashtanga Vinyasa also emerges out of the interviews:

I had to question the jumping and vinyasas [synchronized movements and breath] and see what they were…What Pattabhi Jois was taught in 1934, he is still teaching now. I’m not saying this is wrong—I also taught it—but the people I talked to said it was nothing but physical movement, callisthenic-style. But now, today, the very same method is spiritual, according to some people. I don’t understand the mentality of humans.

BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois

But as you can see from the photo, he’s made up with Pattabhi Jois since.

This article is such a rich and valuable record that I cannot possibly do it justice here. If you want to find about more about how yoga came to the West and what its foremost teachers think of it, 3 Gurus, 48 Questions is a must-read.

So much material came out of these interviews that the work is being expanded into a book. We’re looking forward it!

We have recently heard news of an imminent merger between two of the most popular styles of yoga, Bikram and Ashtanga. The purpose of the merger would be two-fold:

• With hundreds of yoga styles available, the industry is ripe for consolidation
• To take the best of each style and leave the rest

The merger will involve combining the Bikram series with the Ashtanga Primary Series to create Bikshtanga Super Yoga or BS-Yoga. It is rumored that unpopular postures such as Kurmasana will be dropped from the series, and much more Savasana will be introduced between postures to increase the appeal.

Bikram and friends celebrating the merger

Apparently negotations about which poses to drop and include in the new combined series went deep into the night. A spokesman for Bikram said: “I believe that we found the right balance between the two styles”. One issue remains unresolved: the temperature of the room. It is a sticking point as Bikram’s representatives insist it should remain above 105 degrees, and Ashtangis maintain that “heat is created internally”.

Here’s the press release

I came across YogaConnect (tagline: where the yoga culture meets online), the

premier online destination where the yoga culture can interact, explore, share ideas and create conscious relationships of all kinds, with other yoga-minded folks

The registration process feels a lot like a Match.com for yogis. They ask what kind of yoga you practice — including the Svroopa and Not Sure styles. You can also choose Alternative Interests and Diet — pollo vegetarian (?), and extend your profile with more in-depth questions (My sacred space is…).

After some surfing around, it looks like there about about a thousand members as of March 2006, with 250 associated with Ashtanga.

The forums are somewhat inactive at this point. As an Internet startup, it’s not MySpace (yet), but given the rapid growth in the Ashtangi population, maybe it will be.

Reading other yogis’ profiles is interesting and the YogaConnect profile is well thought out. It’s also free. A quick search of people in Tracy’s demographic resulted in many southern Californians, so if you’re in southern California, this site’s definitely for you right now.

Maybe a good way to meet someone who has no night life because they get up at 6:00 am for Mysore practice?

Write in and tell us about your yogic connections!

Find your Atman mate

It looks like the Ashtanga yoga student population has at least doubled in the past 4 years. And it seems to be speeding up!

I’ve been a subscriber to the Ashtanga.com newsletter ever since the first one in March 2002 (see my prior post about the newsletter).

On this fourth anniversary of Ashtanga.com’s newsletter, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the growth in the popularity of Ashtanga by looking at prior listings on Ashtanga.com itself.

Asthanga Yogawerkstatt in Cologne, Germany

In 2002, there were one or two teachers (if that) authorized every month. In the recent issue, there were 6. Similarly with workshop listings, the average back then was about 15 per month. Now, it’s more like 90!

This does not imply a six-fold increase in the number of students around the world as some of the effect is also partially caused by the increasing use of websites and the Internet by yogis.

Beate of Ashtanga Yogawerkstatt

Using the wayback machine to dig a little deeper, I took a look at the numbers of schools listed on Ashtanga.com in Asia for August 2001: 6 in 2 two countries, India and Malaysia. As of March 2006, there are 11 in 4 countries. More dramatically for Europe, in January 2002 there were 15 Ashtanga studios in 7 countries. Now there are 40 studios in 11 countries.

These photos are from Ashtanga Yogawerkstatt in Cologne, Germany - a studio that was not listed in 2002.