Recently, we had a short break from classes. There’s something familiar and supportive about returning and re-entering the rhythm of class practice. Mind you, some of you have been able to carve out and set aside time for a more regular home practice – which is all a part of the exercise, when there’s a break from classes: finding your feet again in your own space.
Each week, I send out an email to the Mysore Class Students. I know that for a few people, these emails seem irrelevant or a chore to read. But from the beginning – over decades now – they have been part of Ashtanga Yoga Shala’s learning process. This is not a casual “turn up and stretch a bit” class. It is a yoga school.
And a practice needs a container: boundary markers, orientation, context, repetition, and a sense of shared direction. Without these, real change cannot occur. It’s something almost alchemical and I have I have talked about and sent emails for decades now about the alchemy of practice.
A Story From This Week: Sonabai Rajawar
This concept came up for me again this week. I was catching up with Maxine from class, on the phone, and in her work at the Art Gallery, she was excited to tell me about a particular artist from India, named Sonabai Rajawar, from a small village in Chhattisgarh.
Once married, as it turned out, Sonabai’s husband forbade her from leaving the house. For 15 years.
For 15 years she lived within the confines of her house, never to venture out. With her movements restricted due to the decree, and with no friends, no social contact, no training etc – she began to make small toys for her child, from the only materials available to her – clay, straw, natural pigments, cow dung, and bamboo. She created a new world, a whole universe of expression within her home. Over the years, the interior of her home became a living artwork: walls filled with playful animals, mythic scenes, joyous human figures, all shaped by her hands.
This was all discovered much later. Maxine shared a link – proving that there is also much good available there on YouTube, if you can sift through a lot of chaff and straw about people demonstrating their asana prowess. Stephen Huyler – a cultural anthropologist and art historian – who I like as an author – and his team, have produced a lovely documentary on Sonabai’s life – and I will share it here with those of you who may be interested. Check it out HERE. It’s titled Sonabai: Another Way of Seeing.
I watched that video about Sonabai while doing some menial office work. I thought about how her life might reflect something of the pursuit of yoga. Her work wasn’t for show. For her it was a necessity. She never sought fame, authority, or recognition. The power of her creativity simply radiated outward through sincerity.
She wasn’t creating to see herself on Youtube. But thankfully we can watch and marvel at what she did. Even though her circumstances were rigid, Sonabai’s artistic expression was gentle, colourful, and filled with joy. Her sculptures smile, Her animals dance, Her walls pulse with life. And this is remarkable, because isolation can often lead to bitterness or withdrawal. But in Sonabai’s case, it produced compassion, beauty, and playfulness.
In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali describes tapas as the inner fire that transforms difficulty into clarity and strength. Sonabai’s life is a perfect embodiment of tapas in action: Suffering did not contract her – it refined her.
One moment in the documentary struck me in particular. I think it was the artist, Squidge Davis, who observed: ‘her house was a canvas, so there was a container… I think that’s what it is. In alchemy there’s a vessel, and the magic has to happen inside of the vessel. If the vessel isn’t there, it doesn’t have form; so there’s a way that her house was that – it was kind of like an alchemical vessel which turned matter into spirit’.
This is the essence of practice.
The Ashtanga Yoga Shala that you enter each week, the sequence, the protocols, the boundaries, the language, the quiet, the talks, the repetition – even these emails – these are part of the vessel. Without structure, yoga dissolves into habit and random movement. With structure, it becomes transformative.
I share Sonabai’s story not to romanticise hardship, but because it illustrates what happens when boundaries, sincerity, and creativity meet: something luminous might emerge.
This is a part of what Ashtanga Yoga Shala offers – the container, the method, the space, and the teachings that bring it all together