why Iyengar

Liam, age five, likes to do yoga with me. Its effect on the quality of my pose is apparent.


The kind of yoga I study is Iyengar. I'd tried other kinds, but when push came to shove, it was only Iyengar, which stresses healing rather than glamour, which helped me.

In Illinois I lived in a town where you had two choices for yoga. One was yoga lite, with a teacher who was good at marketing.

The other choice was a woman with a formidable reputation who tended to be irritable with people who didn't just do the poses. She was an Iyengar teacher. She had--has--a Jewish name which sounded kind of jarring for people looking for sonorous Sanskritty sorts of names. At first she rejected me for a university study she was doing. I was injured badly but it was uncertain if my injuries fell within the parameters of the study. At the last moment I was taken on.

For a year I was skeptical. I'd tried thirty-five different alternative treatments. The surgeons were standing by keeping their knives sharp. I'd even done yoga on and off for years, but it hadn't helped me when I'd woken up one morning with a leg that didn't work. It was a bizarro injury. I couldn't walk properly, but I could sort of run because I could tip the leg forward if I hopped. My teacher stopped the running, and things seemed to get worse. For nine months the most I could do was hobble. I was in her therapeutics class, and there were people in there worse off than me. A beautiful young woman died of cancer. There was another woman tipped forward ninety degrees. Victims of various accidents. It was like Dante's inferno, that class. Made you look straight at things.

In the end, my leg came around. I have a letter from my partner, Eva-Lynn, who wrote in the middle of that period that I would walk again, and even climb mountains. I didn't believe it. It seemed unlikely at the time. But a couple of years after beginning Iyengar I did a thirteen mile hike along the Appalachian Trail.

I hope that, deo volente, Bad Yogi can be a sort of continuing exploration of myself and of Iyengar. My teacher is named Lois Steinberg. Unfortunately we've moved to England and Lois lives in the U.S., so part of Bad Yogi will probably be the story of my grouchy search for another teacher. [p.s. November 2005 note: I'll be seeing Lois as she teaches in different parts of the world: hopefully in Poland at the end of this month and in France in April.]