Illustration: The Magazine of Yoga

Yogic Flying

The possibilities of physical bodies in a material world

BY MAGAZINE EDITOR SUSAN MAIER-MOUL

Consider this famous exchange between the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and the historian Charles Weiner.

Weiner, encountering with a historian’s glee a batch of Feynman’s original notes and sketches, remarked that the materials represented “a record of [Feynman’s] day-to-day work.”

But instead of simply acknowledging this historic value, Feynman reacted with unexpected sharpness:

“I actually did the work on the paper,” he said

“Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.”

“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?”

Gleick, 1993. Quoted by Andy Clark in Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension.

When Feynman snapped at Weiner in the anecdote above, he wasn’t merely quibbling about a metaphor. He was insisting on ontological clarity about where something happens; he was being as clear as possible about being in the act of knowing.

Working, Feynman said, isn’t done in your head. You need paper, not to record the work but to be doing the work.

This is the very premise upon which yoga is founded: it doesn’t happen in our heads.

Yeah, but that’s not the flying part of flying

When I’m lecturing or trying to understand where to expand my own attention, I often compare yoga to flight.

I don’t mean astral projection or metaphysics. I mean airplanes.

I’ve never heard of anyone looking into the sky at a jumbo jet and saying, “That’s not really flying.” or, “That’s not how the Wright Brothers did it!” or “That’s not what Da Vinci meant.”

Flying in planes is a way people in Paris get to New York. The idea took awhile to refine, and continues to both be improved upon and also to devolve. In yoga this is called spanda – it’s a kind of breathing.

You might think that what I mean by this is ‘anything goes’. So what if the plane doesn’t look like a kite anymore! Things get better, things get worse! It’s flying right?

But no. What I’m talking about are the fundamentals of flight. Not the right way to line up on the runway, not the cleaning crew. These are super important, I know. I’ve been in planes that haven’t been serviced. Still, when I was in those grungy planes, I was 10,000 feet in the air.

Flying. Getting there.

Sometimes it’s dirty.

The world is real for us, and that counts

I don’t know enough about airplanes to extend this metaphor responsibly (and we should all be relieved about that), but I have an open view from my desk toward La Guardia and JFK, and I do see those big old jet airliners flying by everyday, carrying people from one place to another.

Some things about flight have changed since da Vinci and the Wright Brothers; other things about the fundamental forces involved in flight have not changed at all. In spite of the forces themselves not changing, the way they act on aircraft does evolve with the changes in the planes themselves.

Our bodies, our lives, and what we’re doing are different from the bodies, lives and activities of people who lived one hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years ago. The forces themselves may not change, but the ways they act on us do.

What we do now with ease was once beyond imagining

Real flight – the kind that happens materially before our modern jaded eyes – happens in spite of the fact that aircraft keep changing in response to needs and new technologies.

747′s must be responsive to dynamic reality. They need to be adaptive to forces that have existed since the beginning of time, without nostalgia for Kitty Hawk.

Failure to evolve – relying on an outdated idea about the state of the craft – equals very short, sometimes very traumatic flights.

When I do yoga, I recognize that the shape I make with my body is nothing – nothing – without the lift, thrust, instrumentation, experience and flat out grokking the situation that thousands of hours of flight have given me.

One thing I know for sure is where the flying is happening. It’s happening in my body.

And my body is not a record of something I did in my head.

Kidnapped by what you’re here to do

Years ago when I was doing some graduate work at Harvard, I heard Eve Ensler speak at the Graduate School of Education. She talked about what amazing things happen when we do our work instead of thinking about our work; when we do our work instead of doing other things, including and especially those things that are easier to do, and generally, easier to justify because they make sense to other people.

She described how strangely her play, The Vagina Monologues, came into being. A conversation, one that, repeated, brought a trickle and then a flood of conversations.

She was, she said, kidnapped by her work.

Flight is what happens when an aircraft, doing what it was made to do, is kidnapped by the irresistible forces that fling aircraft away from the earth. At a certain point, by putting itself into play, the aircraft takes off, swept up in just the way Eve Ensler’s work with women at risk, those hundreds of thousands of silenced and violently assaulted women all over the planet, swept her up.

The day I heard her speak, she closed her remarks by begging us to stop asking ourselves all day if we’re fat. To stop asking each other, Do I look fat? Does this make me look fat?

Go out there, she said, and do what you came here to do. Let it kidnap you. Give yourself to it.

It doesn’t happen in your head

Where does you being you happen? In your head? Or in the way you figure out your relationships, your work in life – your problems and theorems and ideas?

I’m with Feynman, all the way.

I may not get my torso turned fully out in virabhadrasana, but I know how to find today’s prevailing wind and pitch the wings accordingly. The asana doesn’t happen in my head, it happens in my body. It doesn’t happen in the history of yoga, or the lineage of a guru.

It also doesn’t happen without rigor, without knowledge, experience, experimenting, adjusting, learning, crossing out some things; it doesn’t happen without the exchange of ideas, without solving for the variables, without allowing complexity and all of it with respect for the order of ignition.

It’s an alchemy made potent by doing, by living. Practice doesn’t happen in my head.

The possibility of flight, as Joseph Alter says, “is dependent on Life itself, as Life is experienced through the body by a person who practices Yoga.”

I need a body to fly.

© 2011, The Magazine of Yoga, LLC.