Sharathji’s Legacy: Living Yoga Beyond the Mat
by Sam Glannon
On October 26, when I was in Miami practicing with Sharathji, and as I was coming out of the bathroom having changed my clothes after led class, Kino approached me and asked if I had any good questions I could submit to ask at the conference. She explained that there weren't enough questions and she wanted me to ask something that Sharathji could really engage with. I wrote one down and submitted it. As it turns out, this was the last conference Sharathji ever gave before he died.
I know many people who read this will not have known him, and may not feel a connection to him personally, yet I want to distill from what he taught some things that could be more generally useful for everyone to hear, regardless of any individual connection to Sharathji as a teacher.
There were a few things which he said again and again over the years that I think are important for us to remember.
I asked what made the practice a spiritual practice as opposed to just a mundane one. In asking this, I had in mind the idea that for some people, our Ashtanga yoga could become materialistic in the sense that people might become attached to the postures, thereby losing the original intent of the yoga.
Sharathji responded by saying - “it's about the way you live your life.” He explained about the significance of living your life in accordance with the Yamas and Niyamas. In a way this is a very simple teaching, but at the same time this makes it easy to forget about.
It might be very good to do advanced asana, but what good is it if at the end of the day, you still treat people and the world poorly?
In other words, spiritual practice should transform you. It should transform your actions and your perspective. It should give you a tool with which to work on yourself and become a more self-actualized individual. If it isn't doing that, or if on the contrary it's making you more egocentric, what's the point?
“Yoga is for twenty four hours” was another way he expressed this same idea.
He didn't mean that we would have to hold Kapotasana for twenty four hours. Thank goodness he didn't mean that.
Occasionally in the led class, I thought maybe he had this in mind, but that's another story.
He meant that if your practice was making you more self aware, more kind, more moral, then you were living the yoga. Your practice didn't end at the end of the asana practice, it was always going in the way you lived moment to moment. It showed in the way you treated people and the way you lived in the world, and if this wasn't part of your practice, you didn't have much of a practice whether you did third series or not.
One thing that he said again and again over the years that I always loved and that I always tried to get him to say was “this is not yoga.” When he said this, he was trying to point out that someone who was claiming to be a yogi was in fact behaving in a way which was worse than people who didn't claim to be spiritual at all.
You have to keep in mind that in Mysore, there are a lot of people who have a truly incredible practice. There is such a concentration of people doing advanced postures in a group of only a few hundred people.
It's easy for people observing from the outside to get attached to these shapes in their physical form, and for people participating in this group at a high level to become egocentric and to become attached to these shapes for their beauty and because they are dramatic.
But there is a sense in which this is utterly anti-spiritual - in the sense that spirituality is about transcending our individual ego selves and seeing a level of existence and of our own being which is beyond that ego level, to become attached in this was is to fail in the project of yoga.
Sharathji didn't care if you were doing the advanced postures. What he cared about was what the practice could do for the students.
He always used to emphasize that if the yoga was transforming you into a better person, healing you, and making you more aware, then it was working. He paid as much attention to the people who couldn't bind in Marichyasana D as to those who did fourth series.
If you were only doing primary series but your attention was good and your breathing was good, that was more deserving to him than someone doing advanced postures for show.
Lots of people put many photos of themselves on the internet these days to show off their asana practice. Lots of people who spend time in Mysore go all over the city doing this. He used to say “this is just circus” - meaning you're no longer doing this for the right reason, you're doing it to show off. It's just a demonstration, it's no longer a meditation. We should be careful not to allow our practice to become “just circus”.
So much, then, for these few of his many pithy sayings.
One final thing I would like to point out about Sharathji is more a matter of deeds than of words.
In his life, he was completely committed to yoga and to teaching his students. He was getting up at 12:30am, doing his own practice, and then teaching the rest of us from 4 until 11 or 12pm.
Many times over the years I have been teaching, someone has told me that they couldn't come to the class because it was early, or because they had to travel to get there, or for some similar reason.
In those instances, I could only think of Sharathji.
If you are sufficiently motivated to learn, the possibility is there, even though the effort required may be great.
As he is no longer here, it now falls to the rest of us who are still present on this plane of existence to continue the work. This yoga is not an abstract thing. If no one learns it or practices it, while it may still exist in some potential form, it is dead as a real human practice.
It is the duty of every generation not to allow this yoga to die. At the beginning of the practice, we say a chant acknowledging Patanjali in particular. Patanjali is here standing in for the whole long list of individuals who had to do the work for us to get this practice in the first place.
If you stop and reflect on it, the fact that such a practice has been handed on, generation after generation, for thousands of years, even before people were literate and could pass it on in writing, is nothing short of miraculous. There must have been innumerable instances wherein the chain of transmission could have been broken. Yet here we are in the modern era, still doing this ancient thing, the gift of our ancestors.
If we want it to continue, we now have to live up to the efforts they made and not prove to be insufficient to the task of keeping alive the flame of yoga.
If you love this yoga, don't sit at home and think about how much you miss the community, come in and be present on the mat and in the room. The only way you can be sure the yoga is continuing is if you make it real for yourself in your own mind, in your own body, and in your own field of awareness.
Don't reflect fondly on the great deeds of past yogis - like Milarepa, who lived in a cave for many years and turned green from eating only lichens, all so he could practice intensely - who achieved great results from their practice, seek what they sought and actualize in your own life a similar result. Maybe you can skip the lichen part.
But don't just sit there and think that this yoga will always exist in the Yoga Korunta, in the Akashic Records, in the Platonic realm of forms, or in the Well of Sheshna. Didn't the great religious scholar Rufus Thomas say “you got to go to it, ‘cause to it ain't comin’ to you”?
