Yoga: Rules for "the game of life"

BOSTON - Technically, B.K.S. Iyengar was at the Cutler Majestic Theatre Sunday on a book tour. But this is not a man who needs to promote his new book -- at least not to the people who came to see him.

Adoring fans and yoga devotees snapped up tickets to the Boston event and those in five other American cities. Iyengar, after all, is the biggest living name in yoga, widely credited with bringing yoga to the West, and revered even by those who depart from his style of teaching. Time magazine featured him last year on its list, "100 People Who Shape Our World."

This is Iyengar's first visit to the United States from his native India inn 12 years. He's said it will be his last.

Although autographed copies of Light on Life (Rodale, 2005) were for sale, Sunday's event celebrated Iyengar's life more than it did his new book. Like yoga itself -- which combines elements of exercise, religion, meditation and philosophy -- the show had a little bit of everything. It opened like a religious service, with an invocation to Patanjali, author of the yoga sutras, a sacred yoga text. There were tributes to Iyengar, a short documentary about his life, a question-and-answer session and musical performances.

Professors from Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Medical School extolled him. "Because of you, our breath is stronger. Our posture is straighter," the Rev. Thomas J. Mikelson, the divinity school professor, said. "We dance more lightly on the earth."

Musicians who played a sitar and a tabla - Indian string and percussion instruments, respectively -- sat onstage for the event's duration, but Iyengar himself sat humbly in the audience whenever he wasn't speaking.

Looking at Iyengar, with his approachable, grandfatherly air and legendary bushy eyebrows, it was hard to believe he'd developed a reputation for being very stern with students. Upon accepting a citation from U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (delivered by a yoga-practicing judge -- Kennedy himself was not there), Iyengar held the citation up to the audience with a look of supreme amusement, as if to say, "Isn't this wonderful?" He seemed to be laughing at life the way only someone who's seen 86 years of it can.

Iyengar still directs a yoga institute in Pune, India, although his son and daughter have taken over most of the teaching duties. He oversees a charitable foundation working to alleviate poverty in Bellur, India -- the village where he was born. (Proceeds from Light on Life go to this foundation.)

IYENGAR WAS PRONE to illness as a child. As he good-naturedly put it in the film, he suffered from "influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid and so on and so forth." He began practicing yoga for health, and was soon wowing people in India with his acrobatics.

In one clip from the movie, a youthful Iyengar sat in lotus pose, which is challenging in itself: One sits cross-legged, but the bottom foot comes up to rest on the top shin, requiring major flexibility in the hips and knees.

Effortlessly, Iyengar put his hands down in front of his legs and shifted his entire body weight onto his arms. It was like he was doing pushups, but with his feet off the floor.

It took celebrity appeal to make Iyengar famous in the West. In 1954, he visited England to instruct Yehudi Menuhin, the Jewish-American violin virtuoso who became so taken with yoga that he once conducted the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony while standing on his head and directing the orchestra with his feet. In 1958, Iyengar taught the 85-year-old queen mother of Belgium to stand on her head.

In 1966, he put his poses down on paper in his first book, Light on Yoga. Many call it the Bible of yoga; a recent Yoga Journal article noted that the magazine never does a photo shoot without a copy handy for checking the models' body alignment.

AS IYENGAR AGED, his books' focus turned from yoga's physical aspects to breath and energy, and now to life philosophy.

Light on Life leads readers on a journey through five layers of the self -- physical, energy, mental, intellectual and, finally, divine -- moving from outermost to innermost, from lowest and most basic to highest. It is a self-help book, but it is also Iyengar's reflection on his own life, his look back at 86 years in the world.

In the introduction, he answers the question so many Americans still struggle to understand: What is yoga?

"Yoga," Iyengar writes, "is the rule book for playing the game of Life."

The book takes aim at the reasons for some Americans' suspicion of yoga -- for instance, that it endeavors to replace religion.

"Yoga has faith in the existence of God," Iyengar writes, "but it does not see God as a puppet master, pulling the strings of a trillion marionettes simultaneously. The world as we experience it is connected to and imbued with the reality of Cosmic Soul. But it is not directly manipulated by it."

By discerning this divine force at work, Iyengar writes, humans can discern the right course of action. Yoga becomes a way to get closer to living religious beliefs of any stripe. (Iyengar does not discriminate. "Krishna, Buddha and Jesus lie in the hearts of all," he writes.)

THESE FEW SIMPLE principles, taken from the rule book of yoga, become guides for all spheres of life. Just as theft is stealing, so is overeating -- taking more than one's share of food -- and driving a gas-guzzler -- using more than one's share of limited energy resources.

The corporal aspect of yoga is a mere gateway to the spiritual: Getting rid of bad habits in the body, such as slouching, can teach a person how to get rid of bad habits in the mind, such as negative thinking and self-defeating behavior.

Because yoga often does not look like hard work , many Americans think it's a waste of time. They would rather burn 700 calories in an hour on the StairMaster. In yoga, there are no flashing displays to tell you how you're doing. Technically, even watching the clock to see how long you've held a pose is missing the point.

Still, yoga clearly has a physical payoff. Iyengar turns 87 in December, yet he appears the picture of vitality. In Boston, he sat in a chair onstage, barefoot and clad in cream-colored robes, with one foot behind the other, resting on its side at an angle that most people would find uncomfortable if not excruciating.

He did not demonstrate any poses Sunday, but the film showed him practicing recently, and he said he's still able to perform 70 percent of the poses in Light on Yoga.

Perhaps paradoxically, to attain yoga's benefits, one needs to get away from "the cult of the body," Iyengar told his audience, who listened with singular focus, as if meditating.

When a person can integrate mind and body in perfect awareness, he said, "the self flows."