After Vanda had led me to my room and given me something to eat, she started to explain in an almost conspiratorial way that we were about to embark on an extraordinary journey of discovery and that I should forget everything I already knew about yoga. This I was psychologically eager to do but I was to discover that, however willing I was, my body had become dense with layers of tension and conditioning and will-power and old inherited patterns and that it was going to take quite a while to unravel itself. The journey of discovery I embarked on that day in Via Viuccia was not the ensuing ten days I spent with Vanda but the whole of the rest of my life! Yet, part of the paradox of this way of working is that it is possible, under the hands of a good teacher, to experience fleetingly the freedom that our bodies long for, even well before we have made permanent physical changes.
Vanda had the ability to cut through my usual habits, to bring me right to the 'heart of the matter', so that I felt my spine come alive and my body respond with a wholeness I had never before consciously experienced. Once I had tasted this freedom there was no going back. As Vanda says in her book 'Awakening the Spine': 'The gods are not merciful about our distractions or our absent-mindedness. When we have seen light in a certain direction, we have to go further with it and follow the grain until the end of the journey. When truth has been revealed to us, we cannot go back into the old pattern with our usual silly mistakes. No excuses can be accepted, no justifications can be offered, life is too demanding and we have to hold it in our hands'.
The first words in Vanda's book are: 'What is this new teaching? A revolution has to take place.' The response of the students at Lendrick Lodge took me back to this realisation. And that has been helpful to me because the revolution has to take place every time we practice, every time we meet ourselves on the yoga mat. It is paradoxical because over the last ten years my body has transformed itself, to the extent that there is no going back and my former self is almost unrecognisable to me now.
So I have evidently learned and understood something. Yet each time I practice, no further change is possible unless I am prepared to forget what I think I have learned and move into the unknown - to have the famous 'beginner's mind' of the Zen teachers. These phrases are not difficult to understand intellectually, but they are mere abstractions until we experience the reality that gives rise to them - the reality of our nerves and joints, of our sense of lightness and weight, of our breath, of our connection with the ground and the space around us, of the quality of our minute attention from moment to moment.
