The Progymnasmata of Practice

In her book, Yoga: A Gem for Women, Geeta Iyengar writes, "Yoga...is the art of knowing oneself and knowing the eternal truth" (9).

These days I am teaching a course called Classical Rhetoric to most junior and senior university students. In this past first week of the course, we discussed the constraints that modern education place on the pedagogy of composition. These constraints too often give students a series of elements that must be in or shape their text, like a rubric, but do not offer much in the way of helping students to understand how the composition of that text will transcend the boundaries of the classroom, how it will help them in other texts, other contexts. Ancient rhetoricians believed, however, that students should have copia, a wealth of skills and strategies to select from, so that in any rhetorical situation they can access the appropriate tools for making a case. They believed that the arrangement of ideas in the form of an argument was not a formula, but an art, and they asked students to engage in progymnasmata, or "preliminary exercises" in order to cultivate a great strength and flexibility with rhetorical knowledge.

As a professor of English, teacher of yoga, and yogi I see more and more connections between the teaching of writing and the teaching and practice of yoga. I used to see yoga as a formula. Put hand here, tuck tailbone, put foot here, inhale, exhale, move foot to here...there, doing yoga! Well, it does begin there, but the spirit of doing yoga is not about the what as much as it is about the within.

In Ashtanga, the art can become hidden in the sequence, in the edification of poses over time, in time, with breath, with the progress forward. Practice and mindfulness and — yes, conversation — about what happens to us as individuals in the practice helps to resuscitate the art. What it means to be in the practice and in the poses is what Iyengar is talking about when she insists that yoga is about "knowing oneself." The postures become tools — like words, like the progymnasmata — for excavating the many layers and corners of self. While the practice heals, preserves, chisels, and cleanses the body — indeed, I have seen that empirical evidence in my own body — the delicate, whimsical, dark, blundering, forceful art of who we are in the practice is the precious thread that is so hard to find, pick up, hold on to. Yet we learn many, many asanas — and relearn, and reshape — so that we can turn toward a pose as we might turn toward a path in ourselves.

As with writing — that is, the art of articulating what is in our minds — the art of connecting to ourselves in practice is less visible to the eye than it is visible to the heart. It has a kind of energy. And yet, we might know it when we see it.

Works Cited

Iyengar, Geeta. Yoga: A Gem for Women. New Delhi: Allied Publishers Private Limited, 2005.