The Elephant and the Five Blind Men

There is this parable from India that I am going to use to make a specific point although it has a lot more meaning than what I am presenting. I like these kinds of stories that teach us without being technical information. I think metaphor is a really useful language that can be used as a learning tool.

There are these five blind men and an elephant. The blind men want to know what an elephant is so they decide they will feel the elephant and see if they can determine its nature. The first blind man feels the elephants trunk and proclaims, "I now know what an elephant is like. It is like a long snake." The second blind man has taken hold of one of the legs and responds, "You obviously are mistaken. It is actually like the trunk of a tree." The third blind man is holding the belly of the elephant and responds, "I am not sure what you guys are talking about, but the elephant feels more like a gigantic barrel to me." The fourth blind man has hold of the elephant's tail and says, "Well from where I stand it feels much more like a whip, long, thin and bendable with a wisp of brittle hairs at the tip." And the fifth blind man, who has a hold of the elephant's ear, says, "How interesting. I cannot imagine how you all could be so mistaken, for, in my estimation the elephant is far more like a fine piece of leather, broad and flat, soft and pliable."

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Who is right? The story is obviously about perspective. In a sense all of these blind men have a point. The part of the body that they have a hold of is just as they have described. The flaw in logic is the assumption that each individual's perspective is the only one that is accurate. This short sighted tendency often holds us back in our own lives, from seeing a broader perspective, from seeing things from other people's perspective, and from seeing things from multiple perspectives.

In the category of styles of yoga, often people choose a particular style because it seems to work for them. However, it is interesting how often this is combined with the idea that this one particular style is what everyone else is supposed to do. Part of this is related to what I see as an unconscious process of indoctrination. I don't know if people realize this is happening or that this is what they are doing, but often the way information is presented is as though this one way of doing things is the only right way. That is the flaw. One particular way might work while another way might work differently but work never the less. So Iyengar's focus on alignment and Pattabhi Jois's focus on linking of postures might just be two separate ways of going about things. The Shivananda method of aligning the body in the postures, which is different than the Iyengar method, might work as well even if the method works a little differently. The more I practice the more I realize that if you go with a system as it is presented, you start to understand its inner logic and it starts to make sense. The trick to this realization would be to keep this realization without thinking one method contradicts the validity of the way things are done in another method of practicing.

So if you are in a yoga class and a yoga teacher asks you to do, say, triangle pose one way, and then you are in another yoga class and another yoga teacher asks you to do what is seemingly the same pose in a different way, they might just be different ways of doing the same basic pose that give you different nuances and different aspects of the work that is potentially available to a practitioner from that particular posture. It does not have to be an issue of one method being correct and therefore the other method having to be viewed as incorrect.

If you change the way you do a posture or a practice you will change what you get from it. If you hurt yourself you might have done something inappropriate for you at the time, but the same thing might be perfectly appropriate for someone else or it even might be perfectly appropriate for you on a different day.

It is worth broadening your perspective to try and understand ways in which different methods of practice are useful rather than narrowing your perspective and limiting yourself to only one way of doing, seeing and understanding your yoga practice and the living universe around you.

Peace. upsidedowncarl