At the heart of the mountain

“So, does anyone have any questions?” the teacher turned her face to look around the room, deliberately taking everyone in, no-one excluded. That’s her way.

There was a silence. Perhaps the other students were as blown away as I was. We were on the last day of a week’s retreat, with 4 hours of yoga teaching each day. Each session a masterpiece of charm and grace, erudition from experience, her autobiography inspiring our present individual enquiry: emotion, intellect and body all engaged in an increasingly subtle experience. Did anyone have any questions? It was surely impossible not to, yet almost equally difficult to pull out some tangible aspect that could be formulated succinctly in that moment.

But I very rarely pass up the opportunity to ask a question!

Her response to me was to offer two hours exploring the mouth and throat from hyoid to scalenes, the inside of the body and the outside, before transferring our attention to the upper back, encompassing muscles and their innervation, the effect of posture and facial expression on nervous system tone, and eventually arriving back at Tadasana, the foundation of all asanas.

Throughout I was as attentive as I could be; this was sparked by my own question after all. But later my thoughts turned to a student of mine with whom I lately had a brief conversation about Tadasana, why I used to hate and fear it, and that she still does. I have been considering how to teach this pose better. I have some grandiose notion that if I were a more adept and skilled teacher (or indeed if I had more than the weekly 45 minutes for a corporate lunchtime flow class!) I could weave my way in a nuanced fashion through the body and the nervous system, establishing a more subtle proprioception in my student as we garnered her fullest sense of confidence in her own ability, until finally, almost imperceptibly, we would arrive at a Tadasana where she might feel stable and secure and grounded, yet soft enough to be moveable and adaptable to meet whatever might arise. Life skills, not asana accomplishment.

I am not yet that teacher and I don’t for the most part have students who would be ready for it in any case. And I should steer clear of teaching as a targeted remedy to anything I think I see in my students: I am not there to fix them and I remind myself also that things often resolve in the fullness of time.

And there’s a deeper lesson that sits behind the best teaching: we don’t always teach what we plan to, want to or expect to; we teach what is needed in the moment. It’s a million miles away from the crass social media debates of whether one needs to plan a vinyasa sequence or just make it up each time on the spot! It’s a question of fully seeing the student, intuiting their needs or something of their underlying direction at least. It’s about having a wealth of experience, deeply felt and understood, and a long time nurturing of the skills of observation, communication, compassion.

I don’t know if this teacher had any idea of the reason for my question, or even if I did in that brief moment of opportunity: “Does anyone have any questions?”

There is so much I want to ask, always. Yet I’m always shy of imposing myself, ashamed of my need for knowing (which is really a need to feel known by another), or fearful that I’ll ostracise myself in class by appearing teacher’s pet or too nerdy and keen. So much narrative behind my style of asking: keep it brief, give minimal context, and get it asked quickly so I can disappear as soon as possible back into the ranks and not stand out.

Of course behind each particular question I choose to ask there is always a further narrative. It might appear a seeking after facts, but that’s just the surface. As I asked about how to relax the tongue I did truly want to know how to carry out this instruction (a favourite with this teacher, often repeated but never explained) and I was interested in the anatomy of mouth and neck that she presented. But the real enquiry was much deeper than this. It was a question about ease and clarity of expression, in mind and body, and in speech. A question about truth maybe.

I have recently started on a long and expensive course of dental work, involving some exploration with my dentist to address the significant impact of missing teeth and create better balance in my mouth. I have talked with my physiotherapist about physical and emotional trauma and the effect this might have on neck and upper back imbalance. I have talked with my GP about grief, hardening of the palate and discomfort in the throat. Years ago during teacher training I talked with my yoga teacher about how to speak clearly to a room of students and over many years as his student we explored how to voice what I needed, satya and kindness, personal needs and boundaries; he helped me find an embodied answer to my fears about standing up for myself and trusting my body to hold me, finding the earth beneath to support me, and then the sky above to lift me up and fill me with an increasing sense of joy.

We always came back to Tadasana and the ability to stand, bright and clear, a middle ground of assertion of one’s own self and place in the world, with humility and human vulnerability. Truly Tadasana is the foundation of everything.

And as I look back at this thread of personal enquiry over nearly a decade, I see there is a continuity and a flow to it. I still feel the abrupt separation from my long term teacher some 18 months ago, with confusing feelings of abandonment and severance. Yet I see that the teachings are the same, presented in ways that are endearingly personal and unique to each teacher and my relationship with them, yet pointing to the same essential truths.

The retreat teacher who had an actual ‘guru’ for many years of ashram living told us of her own abandonment by her teacher, leaving her with the words “where am I not?” to indicate that the guru principle was not limited to a particular form manifesting at a particular time, but was rather the pure essence of earnest spiritual enquiry and available in all situations if we can see it. My own teacher would never have classed himself as a guru and would have avoided any such aphorism that centred him at the heart of my experience. Yet I see his teachings everywhere too and come to an increasing recognition that this is joyful and it is enough, that I am indeed ready to find my way onward, beyond the limits of his capacity to teach me.

Enquiry never ceases. We simply refine our way of perceiving the world and our place in it, our wants and needs achieve a greater clarity through a natural process of distillation. My Tadasana evolves.

Later on, the yoga retreat group had film night. We watched Strictly Ballroom — inspired by our teacher’s lesson on not living in fear and dancing your own steps/feeling the pose for yourself not for performance. Quoting this film was a bit tongue in cheek, one of those light-hearted yet profound lessons she delights in offering! So “Son, I lived my whole life in fear!” was the line we were all listening out for, but what caught my ear in this romantic comedy was one of the blustering self-important characters mixing his aggrandising Latin tags into ‘status quo vadis’ (mashing up status quo and quo vadis). My years of studying Latin heard Tadasana in this also:

status is at the root of samasthiti, another name for Tadasana – the verb to stand is in both the words

quo vadis meaning where are you going

status quo vadis — in my mind, I translate “now you can stand in your mountain pose/poise, where will it take you?”