How to forget, the shape and the colour of your body? Why not try Savasana, the corpse posture.
I sometimes find it hard to relax at the end of a class, as I keep thinking how to add to my teaching the things I’m being taught…. But last Sunday, I practiced at the Iyengar Institute in London with French Yoga teacher Christian Pisano.
We worked hard on backbends and I felt like starting all over again while pulling my arms back, using ropes tightly screwed in the wall, taking my chest out and tucking the tailbone under.
I enjoyed the workshop and liked hearing Pisano’s muted voice at the end, asking us to let our body go , “shapelessly”. Forgetting the shape, letting the body melt completely into the ground helped me sinking in the final posture.
Christian Pisano coruns The Nice Iyengar Institute with his British wife June Wittacker. Both were in London to run the workshop on Sunday. He was talking through the postures and she was either demonstrating or helping the students. There were about 40 of us in the room.
Pisano reminded us about discipline, tidying up and moving in the space carefully. That was much clearer than the beginnning of the class, when Pisano and Whittacker started reading English translations of Ancient sanscript . Texts extracts that are already hard to understand when you read them yourselves, but become completely obscure when someone tries to read loud.