Reflection on the teacher-student relationship

'What you look at hard seems to look at you' 

Geeta Iyengar

Burnishing

-The ground within-

'Relation' may be an old-fashioned word, but a good one. What is my relation with my yoga practice, my teacher, my God/ creator? 

What is the knitting that connects us. Do I have a relation?

Geeta Iyengar was a teacher who was affecting, who would unexpectedly, draw out what lay within, hidden, not yet known. I started yoga in Australia, and then I met the Iyengar family. First BKS, who had a power and intensity that I had not met before, and then his daughter. They were the alchemic ingredients that started the Yoga process within. Geeta touched people and I think some of that was that she lived the Gita. 

Alchemy does not usually happen in a casual meeting, but in something that is sustained, in regular meetings, in regular practice. So that a kind of burnishing begins. We are rubbed, enabled, pushed, amazed, angered - many things. 

I have learned about burnishing from working with clay. Clay will move here and there, like our bodies, but clay needs to made stable and compact. Again like our bodies and mind in the practice. Some sort of commitment to turn up, place a timer under our eyes which will decide when you are finished. BKS said 'yes very nice you stayed your ten minutes in Headstand, but what did you notice?" Indeed, what did I notice?

The lumps in the clay have to be burnished, no matter how amazingly artistic the shape is that is being made. Until there is a burnishing there is only movement from one thing to another. A dancer works and works and a shining appears. A poem, gone over and over many times, sings into your soul. When I watch Iyengar performing his asana I feel a quickening, I am not watching a performance but something other. 

Collecting experiences, or making memories is not the same. Lovely at times, exciting, but that inner work is not pulled out. The relation or the engagement is thin. Nothing much of us is asked. 

You have to go over and over the clay so that it becomes compact, not rough and unbroken down, but integrated with itself. Able to hold its own weight, keep a shape, function with its 'isness'. The clay begins to shine. It holds your eye and a transmission occurs between you. 

Geeta burnished me, year after year. Coming back, each year wondering had I had learned anything in that last year in my practice. Sometimes there was application, real enquiry, sometimes not. Sometimes only high drama. 

'What you look at hard -seems to look at you.' Gerard Manley Hopkins no doubt talking about his faith life with God. 

This is the ground within. Full of paradox, full of beginner mind, full of openness and enquiry, full of emptiness. Full of high drama and injury. And so the relation, taking the eye off the outcome, the disappointments, the achievements. This is the place where the burnishing happens. Over and over again, rubbing - aware of wanting the next thing, but staying here. Now. Rubbing. 

Warmest,

Caroline