Perhaps because for years I studied and tried to understand the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, which through increasingly subtle and profound approaches seeks to bring about an understanding of reality ever more aligned with the way it actually exists, rather than the way it appears to us and we perceive it.
Perhaps because I had to learn how to let the contradictions within me coexist as an organic, coherent, serene and functional whole (and let me say this hasn’t been a linear journey, and I don’t think it’s over yet, but maybe we’ll talk about that another time).
And perhaps because I have always seen value in simplification: not by chance I often remind myself to “keep it simple,” having by nature a tendency towards perfectionism…
These and other paths have led me to understand that one of the ways I can explain Yoga is by comparing it to a melody.
If you think of a song, of any piece of music, what makes it unique, what distinguishes it from any other and becomes in some way its DNA, is its melody. The same piece can be played on different instruments: this means that for each instrument it will be necessary to arrange it differently, perhaps changing the tempo or some parts of the musical structure, but if you hear it and recognise it, it means the melody has remained the same. And so too if we think of changing the key of a song, playing or singing it higher or lower — in this case we are literally changing the notes we play, but the song is the same, because the melody is the same.
Coming to Yoga, we can then say that when a practitioner or a teacher is able to “play the melody of Yoga” — that is, to embody its teaching, to breathe its principles and live them in daily life without effort, naturally — in that case the difference in arrangement does not change the melody.
This means that following one tradition of Yoga over another, if the purity of the teaching is maintained, makes no difference at all.
In the world of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, for example, the dogmatic attachment to the practice of asana falls away. Don’t misunderstand me — before reaching this understanding I went through much more “purist” phases. I myself was part of the Ashtanga Police at the beginning: an exact number of breaths, millimetre-precise positions — yes, the mechanical engineering background led me to a very detailed analysis of the asanas.
But now I understand: if today in Janu Sirsasana you take your foot instead of your wrist, this will not slow your journey of growth towards samadhi. The melody does not change.
A rigid, doctrinal approach separates people, creating crystallised, immutable and divisive truths, rather than promoting individual expression and growth. The full expression of ourselves as human beings must go beyond traditional and restrictive methods, which can certainly be useful, if not necessary, in other phases of our journey.
This touches, in my view, one of the paradoxes of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga: the beginner needs to modify the way they perform the postures, but doesn’t yet have the knowledge to do so. The advanced practitioner no longer needs to modify them as a beginner would, but has acquired the knowledge of how to.
To know and play the melody implies accepting that other maps besides the one we are following can lead to the same result, that the path to my happiness and the path to another person’s happiness can very well be different, that if your truth differs from mine this does not make it less true, nor does it threaten my position. To embrace the melody means being able to recognise it in someone playing a different arrangement from ours, and not saying “mine is right and yours is wrong.”
Of course it is not always easy, not always immediate, especially when the steps along our path have cost us time, energy and effort: it is human to feel attachment to our own journey, to what we have reached. It is a further step to understand that the different path of others does not diminish what we have achieved, nor our worth — at most it is yet another opportunity for growth.
Buona pratica
Om shanti
