Like everyone else, I have good and bad days. I’m generally a very energetic and uplifting person, but some days I get up on the wrong side of the bed and it’s hard not to snap at the world. Usually, this happens when I’m hormonal, and while I am extra aware of the tendency and try to control myself, it doesn’t make it easier. If you don’t know me very well, it’s unlikely that you will notice, but if you’re very close to me, I may snap at you and really regret it later, whether it was or not justified (I tend to be very accepting even if things make me uncomfortable, but on these days my threshold goes dramatically down).

Recently, I was in a yoga rut. I had finally gotten rid of my SI pain and started working on my chaturanga dandasana, only to overdo it, and ended up reaggravating my SI pain. Great. Combined with my hormones going wild, which exacerbates the SI pain, and a general laziness, I was highly unmotivated to practice last week. I didn’t practice for two days, and had a lazy practice on two others (including my Thursday morning practice which is usually the most beneficial one) which made it the non-holiday week I practiced the least for years. Literally.

Thankfully, on my teacher’s advice, I had booked a workshop with Matthew Sanford in London for the weekend, and I was looking forward to seeing my friends that live there, and meet Matthew who my teacher had praised so much. The only things I knew about him before going were Hiske’s praise, that he was in a wheelchair due to a car accident when he was young, he was an Iyengar yoga teacher, and this quote “I came to yoga because I was tired of overcoming my body”. I had not read his book or researched him further. And I’m very happy I didn’t, for I went to the workshop without any expectations.

Funnily, anyone I told about the workshop reacted the same way “but how does he show the poses if he’s in a wheelchair?”. It kind of shocked/surprised me, not that it didn’t cross my mind at all, but I knew it didn’t matter. Still quoting Hiske during teacher training “I can make you become yoga instructors in six months. It’s easy to say turn out right leg out, left leg in, extend your arms, go down over your front leg. That’s not what I’m interested in. I want you to be teachers, not instructors”. Getting someone into a shape that resembles an asana IS easy. Furthermore, whoever goes to this type of workshop knows the names of the poses. You can just call the name of a pose, and the 20+ students will move to get into whichever shape you called for (and if they don’t, they’ll just copy what the others are doing).

So what makes the difference between teacher and instructor? I think it’s the same difference between yoga and gymnastics. A teacher won’t simply call out the name of a pose, he will get you to be in the present moment and help you connect your mind with your body. A good teacher sees right through you and gives you exactly what you need to go further, deeper at this moment (which doesn’t always mean going for the most advanced version of the pose, getting your hands or whatever else to the floor – like Matthew said “I’ve been to the floor and back, God isn’t there”). It can be making the pose easier, lighter, by a seemingly small adjustment. It can be getting someone to a new level of understanding, whether it is with words or by touch.

It’s a tough job, being a yoga teacher, but it is also incredibly rewarding. Even though I do not consider myself as a teacher yet (I wonder if I will ever feel anything else than a beginner when yoga is concerned… so much room for learning), I have had a glimpse of the reward while teaching my friends and seeing them connect with their body and understand how it works slightly better after I explained something.

But I digress.

All this talk to say that Matthew is one of the best teachers I have ever met. And that I met him at this moment of frustration with my practice could not have been planned better. Matthew teaches how to do asana using the inner body. His understanding of the poses, the alignment and the underlying energy guiding the poses seems limitless. Exactly because he cannot do the poses the way most people do, he has a knowledge of the core of the poses. Still, he teaches with compassion and leads you into a pose with grace and lightness.

“You cannot control the inner body. You can only let it flow where it wants to go”. He said something among these lines, I cannot remember the exact words – usually Iyengar teachers don’t let you take notes, Matthew didn’t seem to mind, but since I was used to this I did not bring a notebook to class. Anyhow it hit a chord with me, because I tend to do everything with sheer willpower, and it simply doesn’t work. Yoga is there to teach me that there are things beyond my control, and I need to/can/should accept it and let go of it. Here I was with this dude who has more willpower than anybody (and his book is a testimony of that) and yet he was telling me that the inner body is uncontrollable.

Matthew adjusted me in few poses, but each time he did, it felt incredible. Most of the adjustments concerned backbending, and something I know, which is that I bend too much from the lower back and not enough from the upper back. I didn’t know I was also doing this in Ardha Padangustasana though. And I’m not sure I understood exactly what I need to do to correct, but at least I can start playing with it.

And of course, I need to get my hips higher in Urdhva Dhanurasana. The fact that he chose to adjust me in that pose shows I am only just starting to “get” it, even if Hiske and our senior teacher tell me I am getting there. But more than his adjustment (I mean, I know I need to get my hips up higher, it’s just really hard for me to make it happen at this point -I’ve just only understood how to make it happen) what I will remember is him telling me “Feel the wheel”.

How often are we so busy acting, engaging this and that muscle, that we forget to feel? Furthermore, I have a special connection with Urdhva Dhanurasana. It’s after working on this pose with our senior teacher that I crumbled down crying on the floor, unable to stop tears. They were not tears of pain, they were tears of confusion, hard work, and disconnection from my body. Apparently it is quite normal to cry after deep backbending; before that day I had never understood it. The energy release which happened then changed my practice.

Matthew also taught us how to lift the sternum, not only the ribs, by using a belt very tightly tied around the chest under the armpits. Very effective. He had previously commented twice on my Tadasana, the first time when we were doing partner work to release between the shoulder blades, and he looked me in the eye, and told me “This is not how you were taught, am I right? But this is ok too.”. He was telling me that it was ok to relax, that not everything had be be hard work (I guess it’s pretty obvious which type of student I am…). The second time, he took me as an example of the classical way to lift the side ribs up (which he said I did nicely, and my ego went party in da cluuuuuuuuuuuuub) before he explained how to reach the sternum to lift the chest in a more graceful way.

On the gracefulness topic, he said “when you judge, you loose the grace of the asana”. How true and beautiful is that?

Recently, I have started thinking about asana in terms of arrows. I can’t draw, but arrows are still within my abilities, and I felt like it is easier to “get” the actions you need to do by using arrows which show the direction in which the energy needs to go. So I was pleasantly surprised when Matthew said, and repeated many times during the workshop “In any asana you need only two things: a center of gravity and a sense of direction”. So simple, yet very applicable.

To illustrate this point, he made us come up from Upavistha Konasana to Prasarita Padottanasana by pressing the hands in between the thighs and using the momentum created by the intention of forward direction to come up. He told us that it is not a question of force, and that only with force we wouldn’t manage to do it (he actually made us stop and look at someone who was trying to do it with sheer force (i.e. willpower) and she didn’t manage to get up). In my mind what she ended up doing looked more like Titibhasana. Anyhow, I got it on the first try, and it felt somehow light. I have to thank the person Matthew guided to demonstrate first because seeing it done made the mechanics of the transition much easier to understand. In any case, I was just thinking that it was probably easy because I had been working a lot during my SI issues on engaging the inner thigh muscles in Padottanasana. I was taken out of my reverie when I heard Matthew said that people who managed to get up were the ones able to engage the inner thigh muscles from their core. Hello Sherlock!

We worked on this sense of direction and boundaries, i.e. limits of our physical body (literally where does your body stop, not the tightness in hamstring or wherever) on many other poses, for ex. using a belt around the knees while sitting in Siddhasana (hello hip compactness!) and even by having someone slightly touch the outside of our wrists while standing in Urdhva Tadasana. The lightness is incomparable.

Matthew also said something I had noticed previously, which is that beginners work way harder than advanced practitioners. This is true because their work in a more clever way, i.e. their alignment is good which makes the pose lighter and easier to maintain without (too much) muscular effort since the energy is flowing freely through the body. Teaching is good reminder of this for me, since I tend to take for granted the fact that I can stay for a fairly long time in the Warriors or Downdog. When I teach, I am reminded that when I started, I too was dying after 30s in the pose. It is one thing that I most certainly gained muscles, but more than that I believe I gained an in-depth knowledge of the pose, and my pose is better if it feels lighter. For example I discovered not so long ago, during my teacher training, that my Warrior I can be so much lighter when I stop bending from the lower back. Had we not worked on adjusting with belts, I would likely never have felt that.

The way Matthew taught us about awakening the inner body, meaning finding this lightness in the pose, was often through partner work. He would get one of us in the pose, let us “suffer” for some time in the pose, then have the other person adjust (help give the body more reference points), have them release again so that we can feel the effect (he was very right to say that sadly, we feel the loss more than the gain) then change roles. Having your center of gravity shifted forward in Dandasana because someone is pushing your sacrum forward is incredible. The chest lifts up so high, the breath is so soft, it is rejuvenating. It was enough inspiration to get me out of my yoga rut for a while.

I’ll leave you with the quote with which Matthew left us: “Boundaries are the key to transcendence, whether it is in asana or in life”. Food for thought.