Extracts from: "Guruji - A Portrait of Sri K Pattabhi Jois Through the Eyes of His Students"

Extracts from: "Guruji - A Portrait of Sri K Pattabhi Jois Through the Eyes of His Students"

Thursday, 29 April 2010

For more info on this book please click here: http://www.aysnyc.org/ Guruji is tremendous, he is amazing at getting people to go beyond where they think their limits are. It’s a little scary sometimes. I’ve seen looks of panic and complete terror on people’s faces and also tremendous breakthroughs. As a teacher—I’ve been teaching for thirteen years— watching Guruji is amazing. I don’t feel confident to do the same thing that he does. He’s got sixty years of experience teaching—he’s seen a lot of bodies, he’s put a lot of bodies through this practice—and I feel like I need to be much more conservative than him. I’ve seen him put people in full lotus, and get them into garbha pindasana, kukkutasana that I would have never believed possible. And what it gives them is tremendous and you can take that and from that develop the discipline and love for doing the practice, which is something that does happen through that sense of accomplishment. - Chuck Miller www.chuckandmaty.com In the Room with Guruji I remember writing in my diary, sitting on the bench in front of the Lakshmipuram police station waiting for class. He had told me to come at 6 a.m. I wrote, “This man, he is going to kill me, he is adjusting me so strongly.” I was afraid I was going to be broken from his strong adjustments. He was on top of me in every asana and I was feeling, “Oh my God, he’s going to kill me,” but instead of that he was healing me. His adjustments were very good. He treated me with such love and care on that first trip. It was superb. When I went to India, I had fear of getting sick again. India felt very big and I felt very small. I had fear of food, fear of touching anything, everything was dirty, India was just huge. And when I came out after those first two months with Guruji, I had the feeling that I was huge and India was small. I had the feeling that the prana was huge and I was not afraid of getting sick again. - Tomas Zorzo http://www.yogashtanga.com/ Ashtanga Yoga Method Yoga is a scientifically based technology that gives us certain techniques by which we can awaken or uncover our inherent spirituality. The idea is that we are inherently spiritual but that there are perceptual blocks to our realization of that. I look at yoga as a way of removing the obstacles to a perception of our true essence. It’s what Patanjali talks about in The Yoga Sutras: yoga, chitta vritti nirodhah—yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness. When that happens then: Tada drashthu svarupe avasthanam—then the true nature of the seer, the inner being is revealed. So yoga is all about techniques for removing the blocks to our true perception of ourselves. It’s a scientific method for the realization of the fact that we are spiritual beings. In that sense it’s obviously a spiritual practice. For me it’s been a long process of recognizing the value of the yamas and the niyamas, the process of making yoga real in my life, how it affects my relationships with other people, my relationship with myself. You’re only on the mat for, at best, a couple of hours a day. What are you doing the rest of the time? You can’t practice yoga for two hours and then go out and act like a jerk the rest of the time. I mean, I suppose you could and people do, but I can’t see the point in that. Ultimately, one needs to—especially if one’s a teacher—one needs to set some sort of example. - Tim Miiiler http://www.ashtangayogacenter.com/