How the Most Intense Form of Yoga Became Mainstream

Yoga Journal’s archives series is a curated collection of articles originally published in past issues beginning in 1975. This article about Ashtanga yoga first appeared in the January-February 1995 issue of Yoga Journal.

In the rainy winter months before she quit teaching yoga, sold her car, and bought a one-way ticket to India, my housemate used to wake up every day before dawn to practice Ashtanga. Through a thick fog of sleep I’d dimly hear the creak of the stairs, the meow of the cat, the cough of her Honda starting up in the dark driveway. If I pried my eyes open to peer at my bedside clock, the red numerals would stare implausibly back at me: 3:47, they’d say, or 3:51.

By the time I’d join her at the Mill Valley yoga studio for the class she taught three hours later, Karen’s practice session would be finished. The thermostat was set at 80 degrees, the studio windows were dripping with steam, and the room smelled—not unpleasantly—of sweat. As the pale morning light streamed in, we’d tightly draw the venetian blinds (at the insistence of the next-door neighbors, who apparently found it unsettling to witness Ashtanga’s acrobatics while they ate their breakfast). A handful of yoga students made desultory conversation as they peeled off their sweatshirts and spread out their sticky mats in two facing rows, as if lining up for the Virginia Reel.

As I stepped to the front of my bright purple mat and folded my hands into prayer position, I always felt a combination of exhilaration and dread, like a kid stepping onto the high dive—since pride forbade backing down the ladder, the only way down was a head-first plummet into the water. Ahead lay two hours of hard practice—a yoga that one Ashtanga teacher described, in an interview in Men’s Journal, as “the most kick-ass variety there is.”

Ashtanga yoga—along with its various spinoffs—is getting a lot of that kind of press these days, in venues ranging from Newsday to Good Housekeeping. It’s being celebrated as “power yoga” —aerobics with a meditative flair, the hip new way to burn off calories, sculpt your buns, and sweat away the flab around your waist.

When reporters call me at Yoga Journal to get leads for their Ashtanga stories, they usually refer to it as “non-traditional” yoga—you know, not the usual gentle stuff. “We’re looking for something that’s a real work-out.” While women’s magazines have published a barrage of articles on all styles of yoga, Ashtanga is the first to draw the attention of major men’s publications as well: As a writer for Details, a magazine targeting young men, informed me, “The softer stuff won’t fly with our readers. I’m interested in Ashtanga because of its bootcamp flavor.” Such calls may only increase in number with the January publication of Power Yoga, a comprehensive guide to Ashtanga by New York instructor Beryl Bender Birch.

I try to explain to inquisitive journalists that, in fact, Ashtanga is a traditional form of yoga, with a lineage that some practitioners claim goes back thousands of years. I tell them that, like all yoga, it’s not primarily intended as a fitness system—its fiery series of vinyasa (flowing postures linked by the breath) are intended not only to detoxify, stretch, and strengthen the body, but to stoke the fires of prana (life-force energy) and channel the amplified energy up the spine, creating a state of meditative bliss. If they’ll stay on the phone long enough, sometimes I’ll even explain that the Sanskrit word ashtanga simply means “eight-limbed.”

For centuries, the term “ashtanga yoga” has been used to refer to the eightfold system of practice prescribed by the sage Patanjali in the second century A.D., whose “limbs” include moral codes, physical exercises and breathing techniques, and meditation. The particular school that’s suddenly in the limelight—whose reigning guru is 79-year-old Mysore yoga master K. Pattabhi Jois—is just one extremely vigorous approach to the asana (posture) and pranayama (breath control) components of classical ashtanga. (To make that distinction clear, some people have begun referring to Jois’s system as Ashtanga vinyasa yoga.)

Such subtleties aren’t particularly interesting to the mainstream press, despite their enthusiasm for a workout whose meditative flavor they find palatable—even trendy—in the wake of Little Buddha. What they might find more intriguing is the celebrity roster of practitioners. Sting does Ashtanga. So do Kris Kristofferson, the Janet Jackson dancers, and basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Brian Kest’s popular “power yoga” classes in Santa Monica—a modified version of the traditional Ashtanga sequences—are frequented by fitness-video queen Kathy Smith and celebrity trainer Todd Person. And recently, San Francisco Ashtanga teacher Larry Schultz went on tour with the Grateful Dead, to teach the demanding form to guitarist Bob Weir, drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman, and bass player Phil Lesh.

In an interview in a Deadhead magazine, Lesh credits Ashtanga with having “a real effect on the music on this tour” and giving him personally “a new feeling of centeredness.” Says Lesh, “This has opened a whole new world for me.” Such acclaim is not uncommon. Ashtanga yoga typically provokes one of two powerful reactions—evangelical enthusiasm or equally passionate condemnation. Those who love it insist that it’s the ultimate whole-body, whole-mind training system. They rave with starry-eyed fervor about its rigor, its discipline, its camaraderie, its efficiency, its demand for total commitment. At this point in the conversation, you almost expect them to burst out into the Marine Corps Hymn.

Those who hate it assume a grim expression, purse their lips, and mutter darkly about injuries and machismo. To hear them talk, you’d think Ashtanga was the yogic equivalent of Russian roulette, as foolhardy as tight-rope walking without a net or making lemonade with Ganges water.

My initial response fell somewhere in between. As a Buddhist practitioner, I loved Ashtanga’s sustained, meditative concentration on the breath; as a former cross-country runner with a sedentary job, I loved the sweaty, head-to-toe workout. But I had some misgivings about a system whose rigorous “introductory” series with its jump-throughs, arm-balances, and multiple variations on Lotus and Half-Lotus seemed hopelessly inaccessible to the average beginner. How was it possible, I wondered, to nourish the yogic values of mindfulness and goalless practice while pursuing such a staggering level of athletic prowess?

The Origins of Ashtanga

The answer to that question, I discovered—like everything else in Ashtanga—only comes by actually doing the practice. One of Pattabhi Jois’s favorite slogans is “Ashtanga yoga is 99 percent practice, one percent theory.” As David Williams, an Ashtanga teacher on the Hawaiian Island of Maui, explains, “Before you’ve practiced, the theory is useless. After you’ve practiced, the theory is obvious.”

The core Ashtanga practice consists of six progressively difficult series of linked postures, each requiring between 90 minutes to three hours to complete. A student is required to display reasonable proficiency at one series before moving on to the next. First and second series can be learned in the group classes that are increasingly available; if you want to learn third or beyond, you’ll probably need to find a tutor. Only a handful of practitioners have ever mastered all six.

According to Ashtanga lore, the Ashtanga vinyasa series were developed by hatha yoga adepts hundreds—possibly thousands—of years ago. Some go so far as to insist that this is the original form of hatha yoga, the meta-system of which all other schools are incomplete fragments. (Pattabhi Jois sometimes refers to it as “Patanjali yoga,” implying that this was the form of asana practice with which the ancient sage was familiar.) However, all knowledge of this system had been lost, the story goes—until one day in the early 1930s, when the yoga master Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (whose influential students would include B.K.S. İyengar, Indra Devi, and his own son T.K.V. Desikachar) and his young disciple K. Pattabhi Jois were perusing Sanskrit texts in the musty archives of a Calcutta university library.

The head of the Maharaja of Mysore’s yoga institute at the royal palace, Krishnamacharya was both a renowned scholar of Sanskrit and yoga philosophy, and a master yogi who had spent many years studying with a hatha yoga adept in Benares. But even he was astounded by what he and Jois discovered that day: a collection of verses on hatha yoga written on a bundle of palm leaves. The manuscript, entitled Yoga Korunta, appeared to be between 500 and 1,500 years old; the verses were in a form of Sanskrit that indicated they might reflect an even older oral tradition. The text reportedly contained hundreds of sutras describing different postures and how they should be linked together—a level of detail that makes the Hatha-Yoga Pradipika look as sketchy as liner notes.

Working from the manuscript, Jois and Krishnamacharya laboriously reconstructed the six series that are now known as Ashtanga yoga. Although Krishnamacharya simply incorporated this newfound information into his already vast knowledge of yoga technique, he encouraged Pattabhi Jois to devote himself exclusively to the practice and propagation of the newly uncovered sequences.

Some skeptics charge that this story—a sort of yogic version of The Celestine Prophecy—is apocryphal. (Hatha yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein, for example, asserts that the sort of practice presented in the Ashtanga system—and the detail with which it is reportedly described—would have been highly anomalous in any text prior to the 19th century.) The Yoga Koranta is not available in English, and not one of the senior teachers I spoke with has seen even a Sanskrit copy (although many have read extended quotations from it). One rumor holds that the original manuscript has been eaten by rats.

However, even if these series merely represent the fruits of Krishnamacharya’s lifetime of yogic research or the oral transmission of an ancient lineage, they are undeniably potent. “The structure of Ashtanga makes you repeatedly go through an entire spectrum of postures, some of which are displeasing or difficult,” explains Richard Freeman, an Ashtanga teacher in Boulder, Colorado, and the star of an instructional video presenting Ashtanga’s primary series. “Usually that brings out your shadow side, your weak areas-both physically and psychologically.”

“The series work like a combination lock,” adds Williams. “If you do the right poses in the right order, the mind and the body automatically open up.” Each series unlocks a particular aspect of the body and mind. The primary series—called yoga chikitsa, or yoga therapy—is said to realign and detoxify the physical body, particularly the spine. It also builds a foundation of considerable physical strength, especially important to balance out the overly flexible students who are often drawn to hatha yoga practice. The intermediate series (nadi shodhana, or cleansing of the nadis) purifles and strengthens the nervous system and the subtle energy channels that link the seven chakras.

The four advanced series (originally taught as two series, but subdivided to make them more accessible) are collectively known as sthira bhaga, which roughly translates as something like “divine stability.” These awe-inspiring sequences take to new heights the strength, flexibility, concentration, and energy flow cultivated in the first two series. “It’s like testing gold,” explains Freeman. “You’ve made the connection to your breath, to the root of your body—now you test that connection every way you can. Because you’re not sure it’s gold until you’ve tested it.”

Taken as a whole, the series are said to draw the prana up the sushumna nadi—the central energy channel in the spine—to the crown chakra, where it produces radical changes in consciousness that culminate in the ecstatic meditative state called samadhi. It is this state—not gymnastic accomplishments—that is the ultimate goal of Ashtanga.

A Typical Ashtanga Class

Although every teacher brings his or her unique perspective to the practice, the high degree of standardization means that whatever class you attend—assuming the instructor is reasonably qualified—will match the same officially sanctioned template. Drop in on any Ashtanga class anywhere in the world, and you’ll be able to speak the language.

Your class will begin with the intonation of a Sanskrit prayer dedicating the practice to the sage Patanjali. When the chanting dies away, your teacher will probably remind you to deploy the three central techniques in the Ashtanga arsenal: ujjayi breathing, mula bandha, and a variation of uddiyana bandha. Ujjayi breathing—literally, the “victorious” breath—is a classic pranayama technique in which the breath passes across the back of the throat with a sibilant hiss, like the rushing of waves on a beach or the approach of Darth Vader. Used throughout the Ashtanga series, it keeps the breath steady and controlled and draws the mind’s attention inward, facilitating meditation in motion.

Mula bandha—”root lock”—is a traditional hatha yoga energy-raising practice, although most schools don’t employ it during asana practice. It involves contracting and lifting the muscles of the pelvic floor, including the anal sphincter and vaginal muscles. (As one teacher graphically put it, “Imagine that you’re on the freeway in traffic and you’re trying not to go to the bathroom.”) Mula bandha draws the awareness to the core of the body, intensifying and drawing upward the energy at the base of the spine. In physiological terms, it’s also a “static contraction” that stimulates physical heat, which increases flexibility and helps detoxify the system.

Uddiyana bandha—”upward lock”—kicks in almost automatically as a side effect of a strong mula bandha. The lower belly below the navel sucks inward, firming the abdomen and drawing the breath up to expand the rib cage, chest, and lungs. (The diaphragm, however, does not harden, but continues to move freely.) Over time, uddiyana bandha actually helps increase lung capacity.

All three of these techniques ujjayi breathing, mula bandha, and uddiyana bandha—are to be practiced continually throughout the Ashtanga series: in itself a challenging exercise in concentration. When the locks are engaged and the breath is steady, adepts say, you can sail through postures that would otherwise be impossible. And conversely, when your attention wanders from these key elements, it’s a good sign that you’re practicing too aggressively and need to back off and reestablish your meditative focus.

With the breathing established and the locks engaged, you’ll begin a series of Sun Salutations to warm up the body. One of the central principles of Ashtanga yoga is tapas, or heat: the more you sweat, the better. Studios are generally kept toasty, and the nonstop flow of demanding postures ensures profuse perspiration. The heat loosens the muscles, helping prevent injury and making it easier to melt into the postures. And the sweating purifies the body by removing toxins via the skin, the largest eliminative organ. On a subtler level, the physical heat and purification is intended to intensify an inner, spiritual fire that burns through ignorance and delusion, ultimately consuming the ego in its flames.

As you start to get hot, you’ll launch into a series of standing postures (ranging from fundamentals like Triangle Pose to bugaboos like Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana, in which you balance on one leg, clasp the big toe of the other, straighten your raised leg, and draw the shin straight up toward your forehead). You’ll synchronize your entries and exits with your inhalations and exhalations, holding each asana for five breaths before moving on to the next.

If you can’t perform the textbook version of a particular posture, you’ll just aim yourself in the right general direction, modifying the pose for your level of practice. (The emphasis in Ashtanga tends toward flow, not precision; it’s not uncommon to glimpse beginners in positions that would have an Iyengar teacher radioing out for emergency supplies of blocks, straps, and sandbags.) Your pace should be rhythmic and consistent, your gaze steady (each posture comes with a drishti, or prescribed point on which to focus the eyes, and your concentration unwavering.

If your teacher is of the more traditional variety, he or she will keep verbal instruction to a minimum, simply calling out the postures and ticking off the breaths like a metronome, while conveying postural information through hands-on adjustments. Others will keep up a nonstop patter to coach and cajole you from one posture to the next.

Once the standing poses are completed, you’ll be sufficiently warmed up to commence the sequences that are unique to each series. Although each series comprises a balanced workout, each has a particular focus: The 30-odd postures of first series, for example, concentrate predominantly on forward bends, while second series emphasizes deep backbends, foot-behind-the-head postures, and seven variations of Headstand.

To keep the internal heat cranked up, you’ll transition from one pose to the next via partial Sun Salutations. For example, if you’re sitting on the floor in Lotus Pose, you’ll lift yourself up on your hands, swing your crossed legs backward between your arms, and then unfold your legs and shoot them backward, landing in a push-up position. (Don’t get discouraged if you don’t master this maneuver in your first few lifetimes of practice.)

Then you’ll arch your chest up into Upward-Facing Dog, press back into the inverted V of Downward-Facing Dog, and jump your legs forward through your arms, landing in a ready-position for the next posture. Some particularly advanced practitioners will combine such jump-throughs with slow, controlled Handstands, lifting their feet toward the ceiling before gracefully descending into the next pose.

Every series ends with the same cool-down sequence of “finishing poses,” which includes Shoulderstand, Headstand, Bound Lotus, seated meditation, and a lengthy rest in Savasana, or Corpse Pose. Finishing poses balance out the body and return the metabolic rate to normal, allowing the nervous system to absorb the benefits of the practice.

The entire session is designed as a prolonged meditation—which, as anyone knows who has ever sat a Zen sesshin, is not necessarily an experience of unadulterated bliss. The practice demands not only physical strength and flexibility, but a dogged determination to confront on a daily basis one’s most glaring weaknesses, both physical and mental. In the fixed mirror of the series, the day-to-day fluctuations of the body and mind are reflected with painful clarity.

In any given session, I am besieged by all-too-familiar demons of envy, pride, laziness, boredom, judgment, and greed. In a nonstop subvocal monologue, I gloat over poses I do well and rail against those I can’t (most of which, I am convinced, are preposterous and shouldn’t even be in the series in the first place). I shudder in revulsion as my neighbor, for the third time, exchanges his sweat-slimed mat for a fresh one. I nurse the delusion that if I just could hook both ankles behind my neck, the rest of my life would be nirvana.

But then there are those moments that make it all worthwhile. I’m carried on my breath like a leaf on the wind: folding, arching, twisting, bending, leaping lightly from one posture to the next. My body tingles with energy; my mind is quietly absorbed in the hypnotic rhythm of practice. The poses seem strung on the breath like prayer beads on a mala; I enter each one to the best of my ability, savoring the silky stretches, the pleasurable ache of muscles taxed to their edge.

At moments like these, I think, I’m beginning to get a taste of what true Ashtanga practice might be like.

Ashtanga Comes to the West

The first Westerners to discover the Ashtanga vinyasa practice, in the early 1970s, were David Williams and Norman Allen, two 20-something spiritual seekers who had taken up residence in Swami Gitananda Giri’s ashram in Pondicherry, India. One afternoon, a visiting teacher named Manju Jois—Pattabhi Jois’s son, who had been practicing yoga since he was seven years old—gave a breathtaking demonstration of what the awe-struck Americans later learned was Ashtanga yoga’s primary series.

“I went to India as a detective, looking for yoga,” Williams recalls. “When I saw Manju, I knew right away that I had found what I was looking for.” Manju warned Allen and Williams that Pattabhi Jois—a traditional Brahmin—would never dream of teaching this sacred system to foreigners. Undeterred, Allen packed his bags and headed for Jois’s Ashtanga Yoga Institute in Mysore, while Williams returned to the United States to renew his visa for another trip. After Allen sat on Jois’s doorstep for weeks, begging for instruction, Jois relented—and Allen went on to spend years in Mysore, studying Ashtanga and earning a master’s degree in Indian studies.

The next year, Williams returned to India with Nancy Gilgoff, and the couple promptly followed in Allen’s footsteps to Mysore. In the first of what would be many Williams first began teaching in Encinitas, California, and quickly established an enthusiastic following.

In 1975, the burgeoning Encinitas Ashtanga community hosted Pattabhi Jois on his first trip to the United States. A steady tricky of practitioners began making the pilgrimage to Mysore; and new teachers began appearing on the scene, such as Brad Ramsey (initially a student of Williams) and Tim Miller (initially a student of Ramsey’s). Manju Jois, who had accompanied his father on his first trip to California, opted not to go back to India; instead, he established a studio of his own in Solano Beach.

Meanwhile, Gilgoff and Williams moved on to the Hawaiian island of Maui, where Ashtanga quickly became so popular that it was soon known simply as “the yoga,” or, off-island, as “Maui yoga.” The combination of the hot, humid climate (ideal for the sweaty vinyasa practice), the already flourishing ’70s counterculture, and the fitness-oriented Hawaiian lifestyle created an ideal petri dish in which American Ashtanga culture could flourish. Spontaneous Ashtanga communes sprang up, with live-in groups of students arranging their work and social lives around the requisite six-day-a-week practice. (“You had to do the practice in order to come to the parties,” Williams jokes and the parties, by all accounts, were great.)

The practice attracted local fanatics: One spiritual seeker literally emerged from a cave in the jungle to learn the series; a mogul skier and circus tightrope walker, drawn to Ashtanga because “it was the closest thing to bump skiing I could find in Hawaii,” began practicing first series on a tightrope set up in his front lawn. The Maui community spawned a whole new generation of Ashtanga teachers, including Danny Paradise (who counts rock musician Sting among his students), Gary Lopadota, and “power yoga” teacher Brian Kest.

In the meantime, Ashtanga pioneer Norman Allen had been punctuating his sojourn in India with brief stints in the United States, where he taught yoga on demand in Philadelphia and New York to students who included Power Yoga author Beryl Bender Birch. “But I didn’t want to be a gym teacher,” Allen recalls. “When it started feeling like that, I would split for India.” Nowadays, Allen—who “never liked to make money with yoga”—lives without electricity or phone on a mountain farm on Hawaii’s Big Island, where he grows bananas, papayas, avocados, and coffee. He invites students to practice with him for free each morning at the Golden Gloves Boxing Gym in Kona.

Both Williams and Gilgoff continue to teach on Maui. Gilgoff runs the House of Yoga and Zen, where daily Ashtanga classes are offered in a spacious cedar studio on land donated by a grateful student who claims Ashtanga saved his life. Williams—whose daily practice includes meditation, pranayama, the Ashtanga series, at least half an hour of snorkeling, and a good game of chess—teaches private tutorials to local students and a steady stream of visiting celebrities.

The Ashtanga Family

Perhaps because of these grassroots beginnings, the Ashtanga community has always been intimate and familial, a tight-knit fraternity whose only entrance requirement is daily practice of the prescribed series.

So far, there are no institutionalized teacher training programs—”certification” is a vaguely defined but rigorous process involving extensive personal study with Pattabhi Jois and completion of third series, at least, to his satisfaction. “Guruji has to have personally told you that it’s all right for you to teach,” explains Santa Monica teacher Jane MacMullen. And like any family, the Ashtanga community has its disagreements. Off the record, every instructor I spoke with had his or her own list of who was—and was not—a bona fide Ashtanga teacher: No two lists were exactly the same. Even the venerable Pattabhi Jois comes in for his share of criticism, from practitioners who feel that his method of firmly pushing students into the desired posture is risky or even violent. In some heretical Ashtanga circles, rumors abound about torn muscles, blown-out knees, and even crushed vertebrae resulting from overly forceful adjustments.

The more orthodox, however, vigorously defend Pattabhi Jois’s technique.

“If you surrender to it, it works very well, because he gets you to do things that you thought you couldn’t do. He’s an expert about helping you overcome your preconceptions about what’s happening in your practice,” says Freeman. “The posture is just a method to overcome your mental conditioning. But it’s very hard for people to understand that.”

“There’s a science to adjusting, and Guruji knows it,” corroborates Gilgoff, who claims her chronic migraines were cured through Jois’s skillful manipulations. “When I first started practicing, he had to put me into every pose, and lift me out again. Eventually, I could do it all myself.”

The real risk of injury, many teachers say, is not from expert adjustments, but from overly aggressive practice on the part of students eager to compete with more accomplished classmates. Traditionally, in fact, Ashtanga was taught not in groups, but individually, with new postures introduced one at a time as the practitioner was ready. In Western-style classes, in which the whole group moves in synchrony through the series, it’s crucial for students to stay cognizant of their own physical limitations.

“Opening your body is like opening an envelope—you can rip it, or you can steam it open without a trace,” says Williams. “I tell people to just enjoy the yoga totally—stretch, breathe, feel good. Concentrate on your mula bandha and your breathing, and you will open like a flower—not through tearing the flesh, but through stretching it.” Williams also stresses the importance of working closely with a teacher. “This yoga is so powerful that to partially teach someone and then send them on their way is like giving a child a loaded gun,” he says.

Changing the Series

Some teachers have sought to minimize the risk of injury by departing from the traditional sequences altogether. “Ashtanga yoga can be very goal-oriented. Everyone’s always trying to get to the next pose,” says Brian Kest, whose Ashtanga-influenced “power yoga” classes also draw on his recent training in vipassana meditation. Instead of staying with the traditional Ashtanga sequences, Kest—a 15-year practitioner who started studying Ashtanga at age 14—improvises modified series of poses based on the Ashtanga principles of bandhas and ujjayi breathing.

Modified approaches such as Kest’s (or the White Lotus flow series developed by Santa Barbara teacher Ganga White) make vinyasa practice much more accessible for beginning practitioners. But such experiments are frowned upon in more conservative Ashtanga circles. (As Kest puts it, “A lot of yogis diss my yoga.”). While even traditionalists agree that poses sometimes need to be modified to meet the unique needs of a practitioner, they maintain that the specific sequencing of the postures reflects a tried-and-true wisdom that may only be apparent after years of practice.

“In approaches that are not based on the traditional series, people just automatically gravitate toward what their mind thinks they should be doing. So it tends to become very self-indulgent,” says Freeman.

“When you start taking it apart, you run the risk of not being able to put it back together again,” warns Chuck Miller, an Ashtanga teacher and the co-owner of the Santa Monica studio Yoga Works. “You run the risk of losing something that is too subtle for you to understand.”

Eventually, the modified versions of Ashtanga may have a wider appeal than the traditional form. Although the Ashtanga business is booming at Yoga Works, co-owner Maty Ezraty says that in her opinion, it will never be as popular as less demanding styles. “Mass America’s not ready for Ashtanga,” she maintains. “Ashtanga’s not a quick fix. Some people may come just because they want a good workout, but they won’t stay with it. The ones who stay with it are the serious yogis.”

And ultimately, the most difficult challenge “serious yogis” face in Ashtanga practice is not the mastery of specific poses, but the mastery of the mind. What counts is not the ability to stand on the hands or drop into a backbend, but the ability to keep the mind steady and the heart joyful, no matter what posture you’re in. Says Freeman, “Ashtanga is about seeing God continuously, wherever you gaze.”

Most practitioners, admittedly, are a long way from achieving such a goal. But as Pattabhi Jois likes to say again and again, “Do your practice and all is coming.”