Geeta adjusts Linda in Sydney
By Linda Apps
“Have you got it?” Her large dark eyes seem to occupy the whole stadium, missing nothing, in spite of her 74 years. “The actions should be melodious and rhythmic,” she says, “like music.”
Geeta Iyengar, the second pillar of the Iyengar Yoga community, is teaching backbends at the centenary celebrations for her beloved father, Yogacharya BKS Iyengar, at Pune’s Balewadi Stadium in India. It’s December 2018.
And she is giving it all she’s got, in this last class of the convention, to ensure her father’s work is understood and passed on.
“Now arch back from Tadasana (Mountain),” she says.
“Feet separate, first hands on the buttocks, legs straight. Then when you can’t arch any more in the chest start to bend the legs!”
The 1300 students, of which I am one, excel themselves in their efforts, standing and arching backwards towards the floor. Each feels she speaks to them directly.
Her voice is strong and vibrant. For five days she has made the case for the importance of asanas (postures) to unite the body, mind and soul.
“Yoga is meant for the soul. You can’t work directly on the soul, the vital energy is important, you need the body to be under control…What you search is in the prakriti (nature), it is mental, intellectual, physical…then you reach the soul.”
Back on the mat we are arching backwards further than ever before, searching our souls.
“Don’t be stingy in your movements, now dorsal in and open the ribcage. Front has to be corrected from the back. See Guruji how he opens the chest in the photos in Light on Yoga. And he could open more later with the years. Almost impossible to improve but he did it, he improved with the years. First sadhana (practice) should come. It can change, it can be transformed.”
The experience of transformation is what has brought Iyengar students back to India repeatedly since the 1970s. Many at this convention have been learning from the Iyengar family for 30 or 40 years, some for only three. Geeta has been the main teacher at the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute (RIMYI) since 1984, when her father retired.
The class ends and there is much clapping and cheering. Geeta can be fierce, funny, confronting and challenging.
“Of course I love you!” she told us on her birthday, “and that is why I can shout at you…how it has to be done…because it comes from my heart that you should get the whole information…having half-mindedness and learning something is not acceptable to my heart.”
She is widely respected and loved for her dedication to yoga and her ability to bring about change in her students from all over the world – 56 countries are represented here.
We settle down for two days of celebrations, talks, films and yoga demonstrations by the children from Mr Iyengar’s birth village, Bellur.
The celebrations conclude on 14 December, Mr Iyengar’s 100th birth anniversary, and we begin to make our way back to our countries, confident that we’ll soon be able to return and learn from Geeta again. Her spirit seems so strong, in spite of her physical frailty.
But no, two days after the celebrations end, on December 16, Geeta Iyengar passes away early in the morning from a heart attack. It is quick and painless and she is cremated at 3pm that day. We are in shock.
Her death eerily echoes that of her mother, who died three days after the celebration to lay the foundation stone for RIMYI.
Geeta had been talking to students until 8.30pm the night before.
All year, plagued by ill health, she had been saying that she would make it to December 14 to honour her father, then whatever happened would be in “God’s hands”.
“She was prepared for it. We were not,” her friend Navaz says.
Mumbai teacher and editor of Yoga Rahasya Rajvi Mehta agrees.
“She warned us but we didn’t believe it. She taught a lot in her last year, she wanted to give and give and give, in the hope that Guruji’s teachings would not be lost.
“Is it possible to live by willpower alone? Is it possible to have that strength and power and fire that she radiated by willpower alone?”
Although her exact health problems were never explained, she was likely dealing with degenerative arthritis and connective tissue disorder as a result of her childhood nephritis.
Senior Australian teacher Pixie Lillas said Geeta had been dealing with ill health since 1991, but she taught regardless.
“Every time she taught,” says Pixie, “even when she was unwell, she would grow in energy as she taught.”
Whether presiding over the thrice weekly medical classes at RIMYI, teaching classes there, helping Mr Iyengar with his many books or travelling the world, Geeta just kept going.
Indian teacher Zubin Zarthoshtimanesh wrote:
“Here was someone who showed us how to align a life to the teachings of a Guru, how to align a life to the learning of an art, how to align a life to the responsibilities of a sadhaka (practitioner), a teacher and a pillar of the yoga community.”
Geeta Iyengar dedicated her life to ensuring her father’s teachings were properly understood.
“She articulated and explained his teaching and taught us how to sequence, how to teach beginners, how to address problems and look after women during menstruation and menopause,” says Pixie Lillas.
Peter Thomson, another senior Australian teacher, started learning from Geeta in the 1980s.
“She was a great, great teacher and taught us how to teach powerfully and effectively.”
Geeta had an ability to teach a large class in such a way that we each felt she could see into our soul, and teach us exactly what we needed.
As Rajvi Mehta says “She took us to the core within that we all share, regardless of nationality.”
Humble and happiest out of the limelight, she didn’t want her birthday to be celebrated by the students while her father was alive, as being on December 7, she thought it would distract from his celebrations on December 14.
When asked if she felt she was in her father’s shadow Geeta famously said: “I consider myself fortunate to be in my father’s light, not his shadow.”
She opened her teaching at the convention saying “Life is problematic, body is painful but the answer is in yoga. You can solve many problems if you have freedom of body, mind and intelligence.”
She would know. In her six decades of practising and teaching yoga she faced many obstacles.
For her, childhood was a “nightmare”.
“At the age when children go plucking raw mangoes or tamarind on the sly, the sick-bed was my companion,” she writes in her book Yoga, A Gem for Women.
She was a sickly child, contracting typhoid, jaundice and diphtheria. At the age of nine she lost a kidney to the nephritis that rendered her unconscious for four days, kept her breathless, medicated and ill for two years and almost killed her.
She started practising at 10 at the insistence of her father, who could no longer afford the expensive medications she was prescribed. She concedes she was not very dedicated.
“Later, when foreign students came to study Yoga from my father I felt ashamed. I thought, if foreigners spend a lot of money to derive benefits from Yoga at the hands of my father, surely the least I could do was become sincere and regular.”
She took to her practice religiously and resolved to become a teacher.
According to her brother Prashant she made great progress, attained the asanas (postures) quickly and became second to Iyengar within two years.
Geeta, the eldest, was very close to her father and had implicit faith and belief in what he said and taught.
“These were the concrete and steel foundations of her life,” Prashant says.
Blessed with a strong visual memory, she accompanied her father in the early days when he visited his private students including Yehudi Menuhin and Krishnamurti, and remembered the adjustments her father made to help them.
While still a teenager Geeta began teaching classes in Pune and substituting for her father when he was on international tours.
In 1961 the Governor of Bihar asked for a teacher to teach his wife and daughter. Geeta had just finished school and her father delegated the job to her. She was 16 years old and travelled to Patna by train, a 50 hour journey.
In her biography of BKS Iyengar, A Life of Light, Rashmi Palkhivala says Geeta grew to be:
“…an exquisite looking eighteen-year-old, dressed in a white saree, devoid of any jewellery, except for a slim watch on her wrist…When Geeta was a child, the Iyengars had taken her to an astrologer. He had told her astounded parents that this child would either become a scoundrel or a saint. Geeta seemed to have made the choice.”
In the Hindu tradition the eldest daughter should marry first. Geeta chose to become a Brahmacharya (celibate) and took the vow of celibacy so that her younger sister Vanita could marry without waiting for Geeta to marry first. She preferred to devote her life to yoga.
“My mind was all the time in yoga,” she says, “and that is why getting married never occurred to me. My mother saw there was a genuine interest and gave me her permission.”
Indeed, when she was young, she told her aunts she intended to run away to an ashram to become a yogi. “I was always on the yogic path,” she says. “There was no question whether I should be in it or not.”
In December she told us, emphatically, that she prayed to God to keep her on the yogic path in future lives.
She taught one on one private lessons before she taught classes, so when she began teaching groups she had to learn how to articulate the movements and the parts of the body. Educated at a Marathi medium school, she also had to learn to teach in English.
When her mother died in 1973, Geeta was 29 and she took over the cooking and the care of the family, as well as teaching classes at RIMYI.
She published her first book Yoga, A Gem for Women, in 1983. Her mother, whom Geeta also considered her guru, had given her the confidence and encouragement to write the book before she died, and it’s inscribed “The debt to a Mother can never be repaid.”
With a doctorate in Ayurveda, Geeta combined her ayurvedic and yogic knowledge to develop ways of working with women that respected and supported the menstrual cycle.
“A woman, being oriented for reproduction, has to take care of herself. When we sow a seed in the field, we take care of the field first,” she wrote.
“It is important to understand that during the menstrual period, because oestrogen is going up, you feel active and you think that you can do everything. But the same oestrogen that will be reaching its peak in the next four days can be utilised for the right purpose. The subsequent energy fall needs to be avoided. You should not create an imbalance in the hormones. If you preserve energy during menstruation, and if you use that energy after menstruation, it will help you improve your yogic sadhana (practice).”
The teaching schedule at RIMYI was demanding. In the 1980s she began running intensives for people from different countries – the Russians, the Australians, the Israelis.
In 1996, at 52, she made her first trip abroad, to teach a convention in Australia. She travelled extensively to North America, South Africa and Europe and returned to Australia on two more occasions.
She published the first of her “Yoga in Action” series in 2001, the second in 2013. In 2010 she published Iyengar Yoga for Motherhood, an invaluable guide to yoga in pregnancy.
In later years she was made a member of the Indian Government Yoga Advisory Board.
On her last trip to Australia in 2009 she spoke of retiring from teaching. We were dismayed, and always encouraged when we heard reports that she was back teaching again at RIMYI! Her devotion was such that she could not stop. She maintained that we don’t ‘do’ yoga, instead we are ‘in’ yoga, and it never ends. She really wanted us to get it, to understand the enormity and potential of the practice.
“You cannot just take a course like studying for a masters degree and say, ‘I am a yoga teacher.’ It is a life-long subject.
“One should not divert one’s attention from the basic yogic approach and the goal: to be closer to the core of being. To let the intelligence touch the inner body. One has to learn to look inside oneself to find one’s emotional and mental state as well as one’s intellectual capacity. One has to learn to see the problems of mind, intelligence, I-consciousness, and egoism, which often need to be corrected to stay on the path of self-awareness.”
Simplicity was key to her, both in lifestyle and teaching.
American teacher Lois Steinberg says “She reminds me of a quote from Rumi – ‘You are not a drop in the ocean, You are the entire ocean in a drop’.”
To continue the ocean analogy, this poem evokes Geeta for me:
“I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall –
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”
Mary Oliver, ‘I Go Down to the Shore’
Like the long suffering ocean, Geeta got on with the work, regardless.
References
Iyengar, G, Yoga, A Gem for Women, Allied Publishers Ltd., Mumbai, 1983
Palkhivala, R, A Life of Light, The Biography of BKS Iyengar, Harper Element, India, 2017
Oliver, M, A Thousand Mornings, Penguin, New York, 2013.
http://articles.latimes.com/print/2001/jun/08/news/cl-8045
https://web.archive.org/web/20111107130817/http://www.ascentmagazine.com/articles
http://www.yogachicago.com/jul01/gita.shtml
https://web.archive.org/web/20150416155034/https://www.iyengaryoga.org.uk/mi-client/media/documents/practice_of_women.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20151222082948/http://www.ayl.com.au/pdf_docs/Geeta_Iyengar_25.pdf
This article first appeared in Australian Yoga Life.
Linda Apps is an Iyengar yoga teacher and has been teaching and practising for 35 years. She runs The Yoga Nook in Dulwich Hill, conducts teacher training and teaches retreats and workshops in Sydney, the Hawkesbury and Queensland.
“…we don’t ‘do’ yoga – instead we are ‘in ‘ yoga, and it never ends.”
Happy heavenly birthday Geetaji and what a privalege for us to learn from teachers such as Linda who carry on a direct lineage – honouring it without any shift from the essence.