More on adjustments

Posted in ashtanga yoga on 10/02/2008 09:27 am by karen

Susananda pointed out that some people adopt an adjustment into their body and change the way they do the posture, but others are very resistant. She noted that the teacher can tell them and adjust them every single day, and they will not budge from their habit / preferred way.

I wonder if the adoption of an adjustment, the real integration of an adjustment into an Ashtangi’s practice, isn’t all about timing. Over the course of a long-term practice, there will always be things that practitioner doesn’t (and can’t) know yet. Individual biomechanical details, and combinations of a number of biomechanical insights (physical gestalts). A nudge in the right direction (i.e., an adjustment) can certainly help. Either immediately (the practitioner can use it right away) or as another piece of the puzzle that’ll eventually kick in in combination with other previously stored and yet-to-be-discovered pieces.

To physically adjust, over and over, though — isn’t there a good possibility the student will just be desensitized? If the student can’t use the information in the adjustment, if the student can’t interpret and apply the adjustment, does it make sense to keep doing it?

I’m not suggesting that if someone doesn’t “get” an adjustment, then forget about the whole thing. I’d say, give it a few tries, then set it aside for later. Somehow this reminds me of when I discovered John Ashbery’s poetry as a teenager. There was something about it that appealed to me, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I set it aside and returned to it periodically. And one day, when I went back, there was that “eureka!” moment.

Or maybe it’s like the creative process: there are times when things just have to percolate internally. And there has to be *space* for that to happen. Where you can look at your intentions and connect emotionally with your actions. Where you can meditate on it.

Isn’t that where it all comes alive?

 

10 Comments

  1. I think there’s a lot of stuff at play with adjustments, no? We have some assistants in our Mysore room that I don’t particularly care for and I take absolutely nothing from their adjustments. That’s more mental on my part, I think? Their adjustments may be perfectly good (they’re not but that’s another story). But we have one asst. I love, and her gentle adjustments teach me all kinds of things. And it IS helpful in some of the more wicked poses (Marichis) to get pulled into them over and over again, at least it is for me.

  2. mmm, what LI Ash says rings true. There are people/assistants I’m resistant to having nothing to do with their adjustments – their approach to teaching, or their attitude about their own practice, turns me off so that I can’t/won’t take anything from them. That said, I trust my teacher implicitly so his adjustments tend to stay with me. Advice from good friends whose practices I respect is often what I’ll hear in my head. Thus, I wonder if it’s about timing as well as receptivity.

    And yes… my teacher also lets us figure a lot of things out on our own, and that discovery is fun. Discerning what subtle movements need to happen.

  3. Hi Karen… I agree with you that ‘the space has to be there’ for new body habits to be adopted. Sometimes the body isn’t ready to integrate something yet and it’s best to set it aside for awhile. And you have to be judicious in choosing what to adjust on a particular person.

    But with postures like downward dog and simple standing postures, it’s baffling that some people will continually place their feet the wrong distance, for example, day after day. They also get annoyed sometimes with corrections, but hey.. no preferences. I try to leave them to Cary. She pointed out to me a few ‘resistant’ students and I was glad to realise it wasn’t just me.

    This isn’t good or bad, it’s just part of some people’s progression.

  4. When people really talk about their experiences of giving and receiving touch in ashtanga, I love to listen. And yet I don’t have that much to say about it. I don’t know why, after all this time. Maybe I’m not sure which layer of experience I want to try to put in words? I dunno. But I love it when people write about this… it’s one of the central experiences of this practice.

  5. I don’t feel like the touch thing is “personal” — what I really love is that touch conveys so much that seems to transcend (or maybe just really has nothing to do with) the “personality” or practice or whatever of the teacher.

    I try to “clear the slate” of my feelings when I am adjusted — to just be open to the experience. (LOL! I try to do it in real life with people, too — it’s my ongoing zen-in-the-real-world experiment.) I just wonder about the usefulness of persistent adjustments.

    The really apt adjustments are certainly instructive, and some almost smack of shaktipat. I guess I wonder if some instructors get kind of rote. Those are the adjustments that I am suspicious of. I mean, how can you give a good adjustment if you aren’t clear and in the moment?

    Or maybe I expect too much. :-)

    Susananda, you sound like a most insightful teacher. I like the way you wonder about students. Matthew Sweeney kind of intimated that the “misalignments” people manifest aren’t just “not knowing” the right way, but more an organic physical reality. Actually, now that I think of it, he talked about this when he cautioned against overadjusting downward dog. He pointed out that someone might have their right hand further out than their left. Instead of fixing it, he advised observation: does the student also have the right foot misaligned in relation to the left? Is it because of some asymmetry of the hips, shoulders, etc., etc. Basically, he was looking for chains of causes for what was happening, instead of just puttering with one link. Very interesting!

  6. I agree with all of this. It’s all super interesting.

    Teachers do get really rote, especially if they see practice as “impersonal”–as in, not individual. But that is not what we mean when we say it’s impersonal… or is it?

    Can an adjustment be technical, absent the added emotional labor than so often students want, while also acknowledging a student’s particular boundaries and history (both emotional and physical)? Every exchange *is* sort of specific, in this sense.

    One thing that gives me pause is these “adjustment workshops” that happen so often in ashtanga when traveling teachers come to town. How much sense does it make to learn “the art of adjusting” on a Sunday afternoon from a teacher you just met? Maybe that’s perfect–it emphasizes the technical impersonality of things–or maybet it totally encourages people to run around fixing people’s practices without much self-awareness or understanding of individuals’ situations.

    For me, I know I’ve given a lot of ham-handed adjustments. But recipients have been so kind to me that I feel my awkwardness is forgotten and I have space to work on being receptive to people at a deeper level. Receptivity on both parts seems key… but is that still impersonal?

  7. I believe (and hope!) practice can be both very intimate and entirely impersonal. From a zen perspective, this is a totally do-able combo. Provided everyone puts down their idea of their “own” (and the “other’s”) personality.

    It’s possible to put down your personality and be totally invested in another (I guess you could argue it’s hard to be totally invested *without* putting down your own “self.”)

    I know you’ve seen me quote my favorite zen saying, Owl: “Not knowing is most intimate.” As soon as the adjuster thinks he or she “knows” (what the student is doing (wrong), what the “fix” is), the intimacy is compromised.

    So the ideal adjustment would be entirely improvisational and built in and on the moment? With a Miles Davis level of improvisational skill? Totally open to not-knowing?

    These are interesting ideas, but of course, humans almost inevitably gum them up when they try to apply in real life. ;-)

    Oh, and since I can’t seem to shake the MS-worship, I will note that he said it is one thing to travel around and interact with people for just a week, and another thing altogether to have the ongoing experiences he has with his at-home students.

  8. Yes, again I’m agreeing with you.

    About not-knowing, you are applying it to the sort of “end result” or “point” of a posture, asking for a kind of agnosticism about all that. Love it.

    But… there’s another kind of knowing that comes up in practice. And this is part of why I never know how to talk about adjusting–the sense that there are so many layers on which to experience and think about this stuff. Over time, if you are putting down your personality and seeing students, you pretty much know some some intimate stuff about them. Sometimes histories of abuse become clear before your eyes. That is a lot to take into consideration in a moment between people. It is a lot to put aside and not know. It’s possible, but there is a lot of intimacy and paradox in this.

    Or there can be. At the same time, some of the teachers who fancy their adjustments to be “mystical” and “magical” just seem to be getting off on the transference energy. Of course when you’re there to facilitate some student’s moment of opening, they’re going to bond with you. I’ve certainly bonded with those who have been there for the more intense backbending moments. It’s wonderful. But… for a teacher himself to mystify that as his own gift and get off on his abilities… come on. It’s just transference. You basically have to accept it (whatever its content). But it does give me pause when teachers themselves don’t realize that the student is the source of so much of the energy (good and bad) that gets attributed to the adjuster. :)

  9. Yup, I’m agreeing with you, too! LOL!

    And yes, not-knowing all the way down.

    A lot to put aside and all the intimacy and paradox in that. Ah, great stuff!

    If you can keep “putting down,” the intimate details will also melt. We have this idea that there is reality, then this deeper, more intimate reality, and that that’s the end. But it (the more intimate stuff) melts, too. And then there’s the paradox of intimate and impersonal and how they’re not the same or different.

    I have pretty much zero interest in teachers (or anyone in power) who get off on the transference. What better way to muck up not-knowing?

    So maybe this is a kind of aikido.

  10. This was such a great conversation and I’m sorry I wasn’t following along! Such a HUGE topic and so many good things said. I can’t address any of it now, I’m just going to bookmark this conversation till such time as I feel the need to blog about it myself..

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