My Yoga

In memory of my Yoga teacher

My Yoga

I have long been drawn to the chaos and cacophony that is India but also to moments of exquisite stillness when finding myself (literally) in Yoga at the Lodhi Gardens.

My paternal family’s involvement with India is dubious. Records show the family moving to India in the 1700’s from England. My father was born in Lucknow. My paternal ancestors were part of the East India Company’s colonisation. My grandfather and great grandfather were military doctors in the Indian army. Before that, my ancestors oversaw the pilot boats that worked the Hooghly River, a service that was a branch of the East India Company. My great Uncle was a professor of Sanskrit at what is now known as the University of Mumbai. Some of my earliest memories are of my father talking about growing up in India, of my father cooking various curries, of his love of cricket. India is in my blood. That is the only thing that can explain the dark complexions of some of my forebears.

So I was drawn to Yoga as a young man.

My first and most important teacher was Colonel DIM Robbins. He had studied under Iyengar in India. Dim was a wonderful man. He won the Military Cross with 4th Wiltshires in the 1944 North West European campaign, during which he was wounded three times. D.I.M. stood for Derek Ivan Mathie. His parents seemed to have been myopic. Anyway, I met Dim in Muscat (Sultanate of Oman) in 1978 when I was living there. Dim was there representing the Ministry of Defence. The thing I remember about his teaching was that it was so light-hearted, peppered with awful jokes. But he was very serious about his own practise and about his students.

At the time I was practising Yoga almost all the time, trying to incorporate its principles into a normal day. Asanas and Pranayama were reserved for outdoor locations in the desert or shore line.

Dim became President of the Wheel of British Yoga. A specific mention appears in a 1977 article he authored:

“All students of Yoga should try to learn at the feet of as many different teachers as they can. There are so few really good teachers, and the great masters are indeed rare. However, if you are lucky enough, and indeed deserving enough, then you will surely find more than one really good teacher in your lifetime. In this way you can be helped to achieve a balanced understanding in an unbiased awareness of what yoga really means. Then it is up to you to find the methods which best suit your one body and your one mind. This alone, through your endeavours will lead you to the ultimate and only worthwhile goal of that ever-desired union between your spirit and the cosmic consciousness.”

This was published in an unlabelled article titled "D.I.M. Robbins writes for us of his further Indian experiences", and the clippings are in the files of the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute (Volume 2​).

I have not been so lucky as to find great teachers, but that may be my own fault. I think Yoga has often meant something different to me than to the various teachers that I have met. Yoga is such a personal thing that the learning context is everything. The thing that I have found off-putting has been the almost total bastardisation of the practise to physical culture or, worse, ‘keep-fit’ or ‘technique’ (to counter anxiety, say) or gym culture. Not all schools are like that, but most seem to be. The whole of Yoga needs to be covered and not merely a part of it. This is because each part of Yoga is essential to the whole. Of course, Yoga cannot be taught. It is a path, if I can use a tired metaphor. I won’t elaborate here.

There is a hint of irony here.  It was the periods of colonialism and fin de siècle exchange in Bengal that caused the reframing of Yoga into a Western/European enterprise. My family being present in Bengal at the time may have been involved in that.

My disappointments have meant a rather patchy relationship with Yoga over a lifetime. Indeed I have found more in the disciplines of Aikido and Shiatsu that ‘speak to’ Yogic principles than I have found through attending Yoga classes.

One of the consequences of caring full-time for a loved one with early-onset Alzheimer’s is that you are thrown back upon yourself, largely because of the isolation. So my Yoga practise has once more become important to me.

But I doubt many people would recognise it as such, as much is now internal.