Neglected Methods? – James Russell

And yet, obviously, in the modern world, certainly in globalised yoga teaching, they are barely talked about.

And, in fact, some of the most influential sort of pioneers of modern postural yoga, including Krishnamacharya, whose students popularised Ashtanga and Iyengar yoga, among many other systems, he basically said they weren't there prior to medieval times, therefore they're not that important.

And if you're going to do them, maybe there's one or two that are worth focusing on, but...

I'm not particularly a fan.

And I spent a lot of time in the Iyengar world where people were very disparaging about them.

And it's interesting to see that that's not always the case, particularly in India, as you were alluding to.

There are ways in which they are still foregrounded.

But I wonder if you could say something about the actual nature of some of these techniques that might explain why people are a little bit averse to what they entail.

So I'm just going to track back there and I'm going to push back a little bit on that because I know in Krishnamacharya's lineage and certainly with Iyengar and also Joyce, I believe as well, although I have heard that he did some careers, they certainly weren't a part of the system of yoga that they were teaching in the 1960s and the 1970s.

Krishnamacharya is interesting and it seems to be not so clear cut.

So if you look in Yoga Makaranda, which was his main book, which I think was first published about 1934, maybe 1936, he actually has quite a lot of kriyas and some of them are quite obscure as well.

So he did have quite a thorough knowledge And he does include them within that early formulation of his yoga, which also included vinyasa krama.

So I think he was practicing them and probably teaching them too.

Because if you look at the video, which I'm sure a lot of your listeners would have seen, of Krishnamacharya and Mr. Iyengar practicing, doing some quite advanced asanas, an old black and white film, you know, from the 1930s.

Then if you look at that, Krishnamacharya, he is actually doing Nauli and Uddiyana Bandha and things like that.

And it looks like there are some kriyas being sort of integrated into the postural practices that he's doing.

And then later on within that lineage, they seem to have diminished, um in in their practice and their prevalence but to go back to outside of india as i think you said you hardly really see them at all you might get some kapalabhati maybe a bit of nauli um and you have the water neti um but some of the other practices you don't really see them very much um within this globalized transnational yoga um If you go to India, so I've done field work last year at Kaivalya Dam Yoga Institute, and I was interviewing practitioners there, visitors there, and also senior teachers there.

And the impression that I got from that is that they are still practiced in India, certainly more than they are, I think, here.

but I think they're less well-known outside of a kind of specialist environment.

So often when I was interviewing people who were visitors to Kavaya Dam, who were there to do a yoga program, most of them hadn't really heard of the Kriyas before they arrived.

And the few that had, they knew about Neti and they knew about Kapalabhati.

And most of them had heard about those things through televised demonstrations by a guy called Ramdev, who's quite a controversial figure.

So I think they, even in India, I think they're probably less... prominent than they were certainly in the early 20th century when modern yoga was really beginning to gain momentum.

And this is really what I'm looking at at the moment because I'm working on a chapter on Sri Yogendra.

And then I'll be looking at Kuvalayananda and also Krishnamacharya as well and looking at what they were doing in the 1920s and in the 1930s.