A Yoga Odyssey: An Interview with Patricia Walden

You were my first yoga teacher. I started practicing with your Yoga journal's Practice for Beginners video. I put it in my VCR and was immediately intimidated and inspired by your demonstration in Death Valley.

It's an extraordinary place. You should go there. It was five in the morning, and a camera crew of about twenty trekked into the desert in the dark. When the sun came up there were purple clouds around, because there was going to be a big storm. That special light lasted for about ten minutes. Fortunately, my body was warmed up, and I captured what I wanted. It was a perfect five minutes. It was wonderful.

The landscape inspired me to move. Yesterday, when I was doing backbends during a photo shoot, looking out at the sky and seeing the wide-open space helped me to open my lungs and chest. I can absorb space I see on the outside and internalize it.  But the desert was more than that. Not only this vast sky, but the beauty was so inspiring that I was having a beyond-body experience. I was energy. It was extraordinary.

How were you selected for the video?

I had to fly to Santa Monica and teach a spontaneous class in a city park. It was really fascinating. First of all, when you are performing and teaching, you are not terribly relaxed, especially when there's traffic going by and kids playing. As I was teaching, Steve Adams, the owner of Living Arts and producer of the video, wasn't looking at me. He was looking away from me with his hands in his pockets. I thought, "Well, I guess this isn't going very well. I don't think he particularly cares for me." He acted disinterested throughout the whole thing. Afterwards, he came up to me and said, "That was absolutely fabulous. That was extraordinary. This is just what I'm looking for." I was completely shocked because the message his body was giving me was totally different.

What role does age play in a yoga practice?

People in their twenties and early thirties have minds that are different than someone who is in their late thirties, forties, or fifties. At a certain point in your life, you have more desire to penetrate inward, to reflect inward, and to achieve stillness. Younger people really love yoga, but they like the movement. They want to do something that has a spiritual connection, something that's heartfelt, but they need to move. For most people, the quietness and the stillness comes later in life. I have been watching over the last five or six years. I look at people who do Iyengar yoga in a serious way and most of them are in their late thirties, forties, fifties, or sixties. Younger people don't want a teacher who says, "Come watch." They don't want to come watch. They want to do.

B.K.S. Iyengar's philosophy is that you must penetrate your being. He really wants us to understand how different actions in one pose fit together. You must be mindful. You are not just coming into the pose, inhaling, exhaling, holding for four breaths, and coming up. He wants you to feel how your arm relates to your shoulder. When you extend your arms to the maximum, he wants you to ask how it feels in your lungs. What is the feeling in your eyes? What is the feeling in your brain? What is the feeling in your feet? It's an external and internal journey. You are reflecting on what's going on outside and what's going on inside.

Iyengar wants consciousness to grace your entire being. It's not just holding a pose and waiting until it's over. Instead, it's really penetrating from your outer sheath, which is the physical body, to your psychological body. All the eight limbs of yoga are in one pose, if you do the pose with the particular attitude-mindfulness. It's really a meditation. You're doing it wholeheartedly, one-pointed. Iyengar calls it ekagrata state. Can I exist in my big toe? Can I exist in my lungs? Can I exist in my eyes? Can I exist in my ears? You really explore each part of the body in the pose.

The first workshop I ever attended was with Rodney Yee. He said, “Press down your baby toe." I tried, but nothing moved.  There wasn't intelligence there. Iyengar would say your toe has a mind. You hadn't awakened the mind, or the intelligence, of your baby toe.

The philosophy behind this is that you can't know your inner Self, the atman, if you don't know your outer sheath, the body. We learn to find ourselves by first finding and then knowing our own body, by understanding how my toes work, how my hands work. Why do the toes spread so freely on my right foot, but not on my left? It's easier to understand something you can see, rather than something you can't see. You learn in a gross way first. Then the journey goes inward from the gross to the subtle.

Do you have to conquer your physical body to fully delve into your spiritual body?

I wouldn't call it conquer. I would say understand it. I love phys­ical challenges. Some people love doing asana, but they don't like challenges. I love the challenge of doing a new pose. I decided years ago I wanted to do every pose in Light on Yoga. To find yourself, you don't have to do every pose in Light on Yoga. That's not necessarily going to bring you closer to yourself. My own experience has been that doing poses I never thought were possible, working through the tightness in my body and building strength, has brought me confi­dence, self-esteem, and power. It's more than conquering the body. Going to the unknown and doing things I never thought I was capable of doing have made me tremendously confident.

If you had a lot of fear as a child, you weren't athletic, and you didn't hang upside down on jungle gyms or do cartwheels, and then as an adult you are able to go upside down and do a full-arm bal­ance for three minutes, you can change your consciousness.  That is 'incredibly powerful. It's liberating. You would think that would stop at the physical plane, but it seeps into many layers of your being. You start to feel differently about yourself, and then people start responding to you differently.
I see so clearly in my students how the practice of asana builds self-esteem and makes them feel adequate. People in America suffer from low self-esteem and most people I meet feel inadequate. Maybe it's universal, but I see it so much in the United States.

Doing asana and doing savasana builds self-esteem. It makes you feel adequate, because it's an incredible form of self-care. When you learn to care for yourself, it really changes the way you relate to people. It's a wonderful gift that a yoga teacher can give a student­to help them realize they are adequate and full.

You are incredibly flexible. What was your level of flexibility when you started yoga?

I wouldn't say I was flexible. I was loose. Flexible is healthy. I didn't have control. There wasn't a balance of flexibility and strength. Strength came slowly. I can now stand on my hands for five minutes. It took me a year to learn handstand, because my arms were not strong. Building strength in my body has been toughest for me. When I first started doing yoga, I could do uttanasana and upavistha konasana. But I didn't have strength in my arms to do a full-arm balance or push up into a backbend.

How did you get into yoga?

I started reading books about yoga when I was ten. I was unusu­al in that at a very early age I had yearnings for God. I was always looking for manifestations of God. I remember writing notes to God as a child when I had questions that Mommy and Daddy couldn't answer, and imagining that He was answering me in different ways, like through the sun coming out. When I became a teenager, those yearnings departed for a while. In my late teens, they came back again. I was a sixties child. I feel very fortunate that I was a teenag­er and a young adult during the sixties, because that time was so good for questioning life.

I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, but I went to college at San Francisco State and got distracted by the sixties stuff. I was feeling lost and empty. I had these yearnings, and I had a certain awakening, but I didn't have a medium for it. I was involved for some time with a Sufi master called Sam Lewis. He taught Sufi dancing and Sufi meditation. He was my first spiritual teacher, and he had an extraordinary influence on my life. He called his dances "dances for universal peace." He introduced me to meditation. A seed was planted. He died about three years after I met him. I had feelings of emptiness and longing again. I tried many different things. I won't give you the long list, but since it was the sixties you can imagine. They gave me temporary fullness.

I was dancing a lot, and I always felt good when I was dancing. One day, the teacher brought in a yoga teacher to show us some relaxation techniques. At that time, I was reading existentialist authors. They made the empty feelings even worse, and I got away from them quickly. So I was already in this place where I was searching. I remember my first yoga pose I ever did-the shoulderstand. I thought, "This feels so familiar. I've done this before." I felt like I was coming home to something. For the first time I felt this wonderful feeling of fullness. It was extraordinary. That was a turning point in my life, although I didn't become a serious practitioner at that time. I found something I had been looking for a long, long time in the shoulderstand.

My interest in yoga had nothing to do with physical stuff. In the sixties, we weren't really embodied. We were more in our minds and wanting to change our consciousness. Physical fitness was not hap­pening then. My interest was in seeking enlightenment and finding a way to feel peaceful inside. That was my attraction to asana.

Did you begin taking classes?

Sporadically. I was young-twenty-one. I was still searching, and I tried different kinds of yoga. I really loved the yoga, but I wasn't consciously looking for a teacher. When I look back, I realize had I found a teacher, I would have started practicing earlier. Some people don't need a teacher. I really needed someone to ignite me.

In my late twenties, I finally met Iyengar. That was another turning point in my life. It was a real case of love at first sight. I met this man, and I immediately knew he was going to change my life. His eyes. The unexplainable. Some people have this tremendous light. There is something about the person that inspires you. Not their words, not their actions, but something about their presence is tremendously powerful. That happened to me. I met him in May of 1976. That following January, I went to India and I have been going every year since.

How long do you stay?

One or two months. I feel so lucky, especially as I get older. It was meaningful to have met a master. Not just a teacher, he's a master. As I get older, I feel so much gratitude to have met a master in this lifetime that suits me so well. It's really extraordinary. Some people can go through their lives wanting to find a teacher, but never finding that person. I am so fortunate that I met someone who has really taken me on. I have a really wonderful relationship with him. When I go to Pune, even when he's not teaching (and he doesn't teach much anymore), I practice with him. He was the lighthouse. He brought me to myself.

How did you meet?

He was doing a tour of the United States. It was his second visit. In the seventies, yoga was just becoming popular. It was the time when people who grew up in the sixties and took drugs realized, "If I keep doing these drugs I might not live very long. All my brain cells are going to get fried."

A lot of people like me did LSD for spiritual experience. We were reading Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley and were really interested in the transformation of consciousness. We thought, "Yoga can do this, too." We discovered that it did, although we had to work for it. The difference is yoga requires discipline.

Were you teaching when you met Iyengar?

I am embarrassed to say I was. I say I am embarrassed because I was self-taught. Today teacher training is very common, but when I started doing yoga in Cambridge, Massachusetts there were only a couple of teachers around. There was no place you could go and learn yoga, so I studied books. There were a few people around that had been doing yoga longer than me. I went to their classes. I really loved it. There was nothing I had ever enjoyed as much as doing yoga.

One day I decided, "I think I'll try teaching this." I taught a class in the Adult Center for Education in Boston. There were thirty people in the class, and I was paid nine dollars. I was still living in the sixties mentally, and I shunned money. I thought it was more important to do something meaningful that you loved to do. I didn't care about the money. I would have done it for free. When I think back-nine dollars! Thirty people and nine dollars a class!

When I think of the students that I taught in those days, I think, "Thank God they survived my teaching." I was an inspired teacher, and I loved what I did, but I didn't have a clue about how the body worked. I could demonstrate poses. I could talk about the essence of yoga. I had the feeling, but not a lot of understanding and refinement.

When did teaching become your livelihood?

I started making money at yoga in my early thirties. I have never had a nine-to-five job. I did a little waitressing here and there. I modeled and made a little money dancing. In the sixties, I lived in communal situations, so I didn't need a lot of money to live.

The age of thirty-six was a turning point for me. As I talk to other people, especially women, I see that is a turning point for them, too. I married when I was thirty-five and got divorced when I was thirty-six. That was a big one in my life. I really wanted the marriage to work. The man I was married to didn't like the idea that I had something in my life I really loved. He thought we would get married, and I would stay at home and do the wife thing. That was not me-I had never done anything traditional. The traditional path has not worked for me. I tried and it didn't work. We ended our marriage.

At that time, my relationship to yoga, though I loved it, was mediocre. I wasn't realizing my potential. After my marriage ended, I reached a low point in my life. I had moved out of my home. I remember sitting in my apartment and thinking, "You know, Patricia, you're either going to give this up, or you're going to do it wholeheartedly and give everything you have to this art." I decided that day to devote my life to yoga and that was a real turning point for me. That's when my practice really took off. My practice was okay before, but I had stuff going on in my life that I let interfere. It was during that period that I believe I had an awakening.

At the end of Light on Yoga, Iyengar talks about all the arm balances. Those were hard for me. I've always loved taking on something that is difficult. It is a form of tapas. You think, "I'm not going to be able to do this," but you make yourself. You say, "I know I'm going to feel so good after I complete this." One day I said to myself, "Go into your yoga room. You're not going to come out until you try every one of those arm balances." That was another turning point.

Iyengar says arm balances require more perseverance than any of the other asanas. They are the hardest physically and psychologically. I wasn't able to do them all, but such a wonderful feeling came from taking action. Iyengar says, "Take an action, no matter how small." He's not just talking about doing asana. If you feel stuck in your life, if you feel depressed, take an action. Even if it's a tiny action, it can change your consciousness. That was what I did. I knew I wouldn't be able to do those poses, but I could at least try. It's amazing how something like that can change your consciousness, change your feelings about yourself. When I work with people who are depressed, I try to impart that to them.

When you're depressed, the breath doesn't exist in your body. It's shallow. There's no life force moving. I have watched Iyengar work with depressed people. One of the first things he does is say, "Move your eyes up." Just doing that can change your consciousness. I was depressed when I was younger. I thought, "I wish I had met him when I was young." Iyengar gives people who are young and depressed backbends, and he makes them move really fast. "Open your chest. Go and get a block. Move fast. Keep your eyes open. Breathe deeply."

When you walk fast, your life force starts moving. When you do backbends, you're opening your chest. It's really hard to stay depressed if you're doing this action. His whole theory is "take an action, no matter how small." He stays on you, and he's really firm. When you're depressed, often you need somebody who is from the tough-love school of compassion to get you going.
How is your relationship with Iyengar's daughter, Geeta?

In the early days, it wasn't a great relationship. She did not take a liking to me. I think a lot of it was my American image-tall and thin. I really tried to win her love. One time in class, her father was having me demonstrate a pose. Geeta said, "This girl is just a line. You come to India and all the Indian women try to look like you. You're just a line." But over the last five years, she has seen my devotion and my loyalty to Guruji. I am there every year. She knows I am sincere and devoted. I am also devoted to her. She is one of my teachers. It was a relationship that I worked for. I had to earn her respect. The same was true with her father, but it took longer with her. Now we have a really wonderful relationship.

Did the Yoga journal videos present more opportunities to you?

The videos presented me with a lot of opportunities that I didn't take advantage of. For example, I had the opportunity to do a television program on public TV in Boston that could have become syndicated. I decided not to do that because it would take me away from my practice. I had a lot of opportunities to be on television and talk shows. I don't like things that take me away from my practice. When I did the videos, I thought, "I'll make enough money so I can take a sabbatical, live in India for a couple of years, and study with Iyengar." I am happiest when I am teaching and practicing by myself at home. I am more of an introvert.

But what about your responsibility to others since you have been placed in a messenger role?

That's a wonderful point. That's what I have been feeling. Although I am trying to do more things like the Yoga Journal conference, it goes against my nature. I decided to do more conventions that aren't just Iyengar conventions. I have an opportunity to introduce Iyengar's work to people who might not be introduced to it otherwise. That excites me. Eight years ago, when I first started doing videos, I was leading a very introverted and narrow life. Practice, teaching, practice, teaching. That was an important stage for me to go through-developing my practice and important years of reflection. I feel like I am ready to come out a little more.

One of the things to remember when you do yoga is that it's very different from other things you do in your life. Eventually, the yoga philosophy should be incorporated into the rest of your life. That will happen on its own. When you are practicing yoga, you want to cultivate an attitude where you are interested in the process, rather than "Can I bring my hands to my feet?," so that it doesn't become like other things you do in your life. What can I learn about myself from this process of trying to bring my hands to my feet? Can I be interested in the emotions that come up in this process? Can I be interested in the sensations in my hamstrings or my quadriceps? The journey of getting there is much more interesting and meaningful than putting your hands to your feet. The journey is the most valuable part.

The brain always wants to dictate. The brain always wants to lead. When you begin a yoga practice, you want to ask your brain to become the distant observer. Let the intelligence of your body rise forth. Let the body's voice lead you into the pose. That's a skill that has to be developed. If you are moving from your brain, there is a very different experience than if you are moving from the voice of your body. Your body has a voice. It's so rich in wisdom, but you have to become quiet to hear that voice. When you reach that place in a pose, you will feel relaxed and refreshed afterwards. Your consciousness will change. If you are working from your brain in a pose, when you finish practicing your body might feel good, but peace of mind isn't there.

What are the benefits of backbends?

They are my favorite poses. Backbends are not beginning poses. In 1991, Iyengar did a backbend intensive for his senior students. He talked about all the levels of backbending. I'll share some of that with you. First of all, according to him and from my own experience, backbends are the most powerful of all the poses on your nervous system, if they are done correctly. We were talking about depression earlier. There is something about opening your chest and spreading your lungs that has a positive and joyful effect on one's psyche. It's empowering. Backbends done twice a week in an intelligent way, using just the right sequence, can strengthen your nervous system. I can attest to that. When I began yoga, my nervous system was not strong. I was shaky and scattered. My practice of backbends, more than any of the other poses excluding inversions, has strengthened my nervous system.

The way to begin backbends is first to develop strength in your arms and your legs. You get that through dog pose, standing poses, and inversions. Then do supported backbends to open the doors to the armpits. The groin is another set of doors that have to be open. If you drink a caffeinated beverage, you get a lift. Backbends can give you that lift without the shakiness and without the side effects. It's the physiological effect of the backbend that gets your energy moving, but in a harmonious way. If you do a backbend practice and end with some wonderful full length poses like forward bends, or supine poses like supta baddha konasana, when you finish you feel powerful and energized at the same time. Quietness and awareness are running parallel with each other.

Backbends can take the place of drugs for mild depression, if they are done sensibly. I have seen people come out of depression from a good practice of inversions and backbends. Once a week, I do a hundred-and-eight dropovers from tadasana. Up and down, up and down, up and down. There is a tremendous feeling of space joy that comes into your being from that practice. It is beyond words. It is one of the most extraordinary ways to experience your body as boundless space. That's one of the things backbends has given me. It doesn't get better than that.

Patricia Walden has been practicing yoga for the past twenty-six years. Her first spiritual teacher was Sam Lewis, a Sufi master that she met in San Francisco in the late 1960s. In 1976, Patricia met B.K.S. Iyengar while he was visiting the United States, and immediately knew she had found her life­long teacher. She travels to Pune, India annually to study with Mr. Iyengar; his son, Prashant; and his daughter, Geeta. She has been teaching yoga for twenty years and has con­ducted workshops internationally for the past decade. Patri­cia is the director of the B.K.S. Iyengar Yoga Center of Greater Boston. Her special interests include Sanskrit, yoga for women, and classical Indian music.

Reprinted with Permission
Philip Self
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