Sophy Hoare

'Based in Clapham South, I organise regular classes and courses in London. I also teach yoga workshops and retreats in various venues worldwide'.

A Revolution

Each time I walked past the tea and coffee corner at Lendrick Lodge, where I was teaching a weekend yoga course, there was an animated buzz of conversation. During the weekend, several of the students told me that everyone was talking about the 'newness' of what I was teaching; for many it was different from, even opposed to, what they had been taught before. At first I was surprised at the strength of their reaction, and both surprised and amused that I had provoked such controversy. But it made me think again about the work that I have been engaged in for the past ten years or so and that I have been so absorbed in that I had almost forgotten how 'different' it is.

I remembered the first time I went to work with Vanda Scaravelli at her house in the hills outside Florence. She had invited me to take lessons with her when we had met briefly in London. This was my first visit to Italy. I had spent the previous six weeks studying "Teach Yourself Italian" and Vanda had told me not to practise yoga at all before I went but to rest as much as possible. Everything was so entirely new for me then that the moment of my arrival at her house is vividly and indelibly printed on my memory. At the end of my journey by plane and train and bus, I took a taxi from Fiesole which wound up into the hills, past groves of silvery olive trees with purple irises growing beneath them. When we reached the top of Vanda's unmade road the driver refused to take his car any further. I walked along the curving white track waiting for her house to come into view - a clump of cypresses, a simple stone farmhouse sitting comfortably, almost casually, in a landscape that was so perfect, so classically familiar yet so unreal that I almost did have to pinch myself to make sure that I was really there. I felt as if I had wandered inside the frame of a Renaissance painting.

A woman was sweeping the paving outside the house. She asked me when I approached her if I was looking for 'la signora' and led me round to the back of the house which overlooked a terrace covered with shrubs and trees in terracotta pots and a view which dropped away towards Florence in the far distance. From inside the house I heard classical piano music. With some trepidation I knocked at the glass door of Vanda's room. The music stopped abruptly (it was Vanda who had been playing) and she came to the door, greeted me and took me by the hand. Her first words to me were "It was a good idea of yours to come". My trepidation vanished. From that moment on I felt love, certainty, a dropping away of tension I didn't even know I had, a deep sense of security which came from some source which wasn't so much in Vanda but something she seemed to be in touch with - and an immense feeling of gratitude. That gratitude has stayed with me to this day and I sometimes feel that my teaching is a way of repaying what Vanda gave to me. But it's not a debt in the burdensome sense, just a desire to pass on an amazing secret.

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 that 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 and taut 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 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 practise, 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 barely recognisable to me now. So I have evidently learned and understood something. Yet each time I practise, no further change is possible unless I am prepared to forget what I think I have learned and move into the unkown - to have the famous 'beginner's mind' of the Zen teachers. Such 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 the unexpected movement of the breath, of our connection with the ground and the space around us, of the quality of our minute attention from moment to moment.

So what is this way of working, and how is it so different from other approaches to hatha yoga? Naturally it is very difficult to define in words. Sometimes I have said it is about experiencing the pull of gravity and its connection with the breath, sometimes that it is about bringing the spine to life, awakening the core while relaxing the outer body, which can become as imprisoning as a suit of armour.

Sometimes I explain that it is not about stretching but undoing the grip of dominant muscles to invite other muscles to come into play, giving better articulation at the joints and deeper, more subtle control. Or that it is about working from the outside in and the inside out, separating the parts of the whole so they can be pulled together in a new way. All these descriptions are true, none of them have real meaning until they are felt, some may even be misleading because we may try to apply them directly instead of inviting them through intuitive attention. At the moment I tend to say that it is about finding a wholeness of movement, involving the body as a an intelligent and harmonious whole in relation to its environment, which the body whole-heartedly and gratefully accepts. When we discover this, even for a moment, we are given a sense of freedom and infinity which takes us out of our small selves, transforming our emotional and psychological landscape, and which is natural, profoundly relaxing and therapeutic. From this perspective, many other forms of physical exercise, including much yoga stretching, appear fragmented and limiting, even stressful to the body.

Our intent changes, and with it the nature of our attention. Our primary focus is no longer to 'do' the posture or the breathing but to undo our body and its resistance, to observe and question and patiently unravel our habits, including the urge to 'do' itself; to undo, to discriminate, to invite, to find rest and rhythm. And as we clear some of the old debris away a new kind of life comes into the body which is vital, dynamic and sometimes very intense; muscles we didn't know we had start to work spontaneously. There are some parallels with other disciplines: painting, music, Tai Chi, Alexander technique, Feldenkrais, Zen, psychotherapy, Taost philosophy and aspects of classical Yoga. But it cannot be turned into a method or a technique, and as such it belongs to nobody and everybody. It is nothing to do with any particular individual. And I say that as one who is full of gratitude to two individuals in particular: Vanda Scaravelli and Diane Long, my two teachers in this creative and fulfilling work.

Sophy Hoare March 2004