2001
UK
Godfrey Devereux
01:28:55
English
This video Godfrey Devereux shows, together with pupils Simplified first sequence of ashtanga. This video can be useful for those who are not able to perform all the asanas of the first sequence, but is willing to work in this direction. This video can be used as a trial or introductory, courses in a dynamic practice for beginners.
About Godfrey Devereux in his words…
I discovered yoga at 16 years old in 1973, and spent the next five years practicing from a very informative and well written book based on the Sivananda approach. It was not until I finally attended a class that I realised the neck and back problems I had developed were not the result of bicycle riding but faulty yoga practice. I had stumbled into an Iyengar Yoga class, and for the next 12 years was to seek them out whenever I could. As I familiarised myself with the subtleties of alignment in standing postures, inversions and simple floor postures I lost the ability to put my feet on my head, my leg behind my neck. At the same time I lost the pains in both my neck and my back. So I was neither complaining nor concerned.
Eventually I stumbled into an Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga class in Hawaii. All of the 55 postures were familiar to me but their context was not. The breathing method, the bandhas, the jumping style, the physical and psychological continuity, the sweat, the surrender provided a context in which my body began, at last, to express more fully and deeply the alignment my Iyengar teachers had been trying to instil in me. The effect of the vinyasa practice on me was to shift that knowledge from my brain to my body. At last I felt I was practicing yoga.
Having discovered vinyasa my passion was to get the better of me. I was soon doing varied sequences of up to 300 asana in six hour practices. It was not long before my leg was behind my neck, my feet on my head again, as I floated in and out of handstands in between. However I completely abandoned the nourishment of inversions and the settling of stillness. Eventually I became dehydrated, depleted and physically exhausted. Worse, I was psychologically exhausted, and lost the ability to recognise the imbalances I was creating. Until finally, at the point of breakdown I stopped. My body refused to allow me to practice any more, and insisted that I sit in meditation, or lay myself over a chair in supported postures.
In the respite my body imposed I took to exploring. Especially what I had been taught were the bandhas. It soon became clear that impetuosity had not been my only problem. By tightening my anus and pressing my abdomen back for up to six hours a day I had generated a deep and tenacious hardness in the core of my body. I took my explorations to my students, and the teachers I was working with. It soon became clear that my understanding of the bandhas was wrong. So began a long, relentless exploration in my own body and those of my students. It began with clarifying what mulabandha and uddiyanabandha were not. It took a few years more to clarify what mulabandha really is and does. Even more to clarify exactly what uddiyanabandha is and does. On the way jalandharabandha was also clarified, and padabandha, hastabandha, merubandha and sarvangabandha discovered.
The first thing that became clear was that there is nothing mysterious or esoteric about the bandhas. They are nothing other than specific sets of muscular contractions. Though not involving the large motor muscles we are so familiar with they remain elusive to anything but the deepest and most honest enquiry. What eventually became clear was that the bandhas are simply the muscular response of active vertebral verticality to gravity. Without them the vertical integrity of the human spine, and of breathing would be impossible.
My Iyengar Training had made it clear that the periphery of the body directly affects the core: either hindering or supporting it. It was not a difficult step to recognise that the structural and energetic dynamics of the bandhas were required in the arms and legs to support the spinal and respiratory integrity that is an expression of the core bandhas. In this way hastabandha, padabandha and sarvangabandha made themselves known to me. Finally the word yoga had direct and unavoidable practical implications. Sarvangabandha is to activate and integrate (unify=yoga) the whole body on the dynamic of the bandhas. After a while it became obvious that this is how the human body perfers and tries to function.
This step by step journey was simultaneously reflected in my teaching, which became more and more systematic, and more and more based around the activation of the bandhas in the whole body. So it was that the Dynamic Yoga Training Method emerged spontaneosuly and organically from my explorations. When my students, or I myself, practice yoga the grace of Iyengar alignment is there to be seen. At the same time the dynamic continuity of ashtanga vinyasa yoga is present. While in my teaching the step by step progression of vinyasakrama, so fundamental to vinniyoga, is obvious.
Yet the DYTM approaches the bandhas, alignment and progress in a unique way. One that reveals the bandhas as the key to approaching alignment dynamically and from within. An approach that utilises and expresses the unity of yoga without needing to accumulate linear information, nor define alignment by abstract geometrical principles that have no organic relationship to the way the body actually functions. This makes the Method remarkably and satisfyingly effective for practitioners of all levels and styles.
This journey has been deeply fertilised by years of Zen Training, dedicated meditation and jnana yoga with contemporary Advaita masters. This his given the Method a deep, internal orientation that is nevertheless grounded entirely in the body and its relationship to mind and spirit. This has prevented my understanding of yoga from remaining stranded in the hocuspocus and wishful thinking that reduces yoga to exercise or fitness training marketed with a meaningless esoteric soundtrack. The power and beauty of the DYTM rest in it being based on actions and attentiveness grounded in that which life, as nature, has given each one of us, as our bodimind.
http://www.yogadarshana.com/downloads/YOGA%20SUTRAS%20COMMENTARY.pdf
http://www.godfridev.com/index.php
Download File Size:651.38 MB
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