Being BKS Iyengar: The enlightened yogi of yoga

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The result of a lifelong study, yoga, its most famous teacher says, has given him the gift of life. He says if he hadn’t found it, he simply wouldn’t have been alive. This week on Being Legends, CNN-IBN’s Anuradha SenGupta meets BKS Iyengar at his Pune residence.

Anuradha SenGupta: Your first book Light on Yoga, your latest book Light on Life – these two titles pretty much sum up uyour changing attitude towards yoga, isn’t it?

BKS Iyengar: Yes, right. As I practised, something started striking me. How my body functions, how my nervous system functions, how my mind functions, how my intelligence reacts, how my consciousness behaves. So as the stages developed and people asked me what more had I learnt, I had to add. So from Light on Yoga, I wrote five-six books till Light on Life. Light refers to the light that dawned on me.

Anuradha SenGupta: You started out practising yoga purely for its physical benefits…

BKS Iyengar: For gaining health.

Anuradha SenGupta: Yes, first for gaining health, then as a means to gaining a livelihood and then to a higher level. And you keep stressing this to people, isn’t it?

BKS Iyengar: This is the way. Life’s like this. Someone masters something. After mastering, one shares. So naturally, earning starts. Then later, one wants to know better than what they knew. Then the last stage is experiencing self hidden within oneself.

Anuradha SenGupta: At various pints of time in your life, you have lost your hold or mastery over yoga. 1956 was one such point. Why do you think you lost it?

BKS Iyengar: I was, no doubt, practising very well. I did not know what happened to me but I was not getting any feedback on my presentations. There was no imprint on my mind. And I was worried that what was the use of doing when nothing can be felt. I was becoming desperate, there was disappointment and frustration but I thought: should I just continue or should I work out? I had to purge my body, my mind. I had to make my mind penetrate further to where something was missing, in order to establish a connect between the mind and the asanas. At that time, I was in Switzerland and I said: No, whatever happens, I won’t be disappointed. I will work out and find out the reason for it. I wrote a letter to my guru and also to Swami Shivananda because they all knew me. I said, ‘you have to give me the reason for the emptiness that I feel. Saying you are married and have children and it was different when you were young is something I don’t believe. Art cannot be destroyed. Art is art’. I said I will not stop but let me see how long it will take for me to come back to the stage where my mind will communicate.

Anuradha SenGupta: How long did it take?

BKS Iyengar: It took me about a month and not only that, while I was doing, I kept getting blackouts. Then I started doing backbends. When there was complete blackout, I would stop. So I increased my ability to deal with blackouts and limit their frequency. Soon, both blackouts and emptiness disappeared.

Anuradha SenGupta: So basically you kept at it. You have credited the fact that you are a healthy 90 today because of yoga. Yoga has give you a fresh lease of life, right?

BKS Iyengar: Yes. That’s why I am practising even now. That’s what gave me intelligence. How can I stop it?

Anuradha SenGupta: So does the fact that yoga is accepted today for its therapeutic value give you great satisfaction about what you have managed to do with it?

BKS Iyengar: When I started teaching yoga, in India it was not respected at all. Not even in the Western countries. Classical yoga was not attractive to people, no one was interested. They were all saying, ‘I am healthy’. So I thought in order to make yoga more popular, I will have to take to its remedial side. I started working on asanas that work on various ailments. Then I gave them the pros and the cons. That’s when I started succeeding very fast because I started giving them relief, faster than allopathic treatment in Western countries. They had a lot of money in those days so they knew only wine, women and wealth. Transforming them was not easy. So I used to tell them in their own language, ‘Enjoy if you have to. But have the power to enjoy. You have no strength. What is the use of simply tempting yourself?’