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First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance

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First There is a Mountain, by Elizabeth Kandetsky,
Reviewed by Malcolm McLean, RYT

Here is a powerful tale of a yogi's quest for truth - the truth of her own life, revealed in her own body, accessed and then uplifted though yoga. The truth of her guru BKS Iyengar, clouded in legend and rivalries, and here pierced with the eye of a conscientious journalist. She has woven a rich tapestry from the threads of her own life, her yoga practice and experience with Iyengar, and the story of yoga.

Kandetsky paints an intimate and candid portrait of life at the Iyengar school in Pune. She describes the tremendous power of yoga practice in this setting, as it worked on her own life at every level. She does not flinch from showing the tyrannical, often capricious attitudes of Iyengar and his daughter Geeta, and son Prashant. She shines light on the petty rivalries between Iyengar and other great yoga masters, on their roots in nationalism and other struggles for patronage and prestige. She investigates the origins of yoga, and raises sincere doubts about the legends of its antiquity.

From this clarity of unrelenting objectivity combined with the understanding in her own cells, she offers a powerful validation of yoga. Despite the contradictions and falsehoods around yoga, she shows how it meets her needs -- and the different needs in India and the West, as it continues to grow, mutate, and reach millions of people.

Towards the end of the book, she describes her last class with the master -- after she had admitted learning another system - the Ashtanga system of Pattabhi Jois, his lifelong rival. She was challenged to perform the scorned series in front of Iyengar, who nevertheless could not resist, as she went along through the despised "jumpings", teaching it to her as he saw it might be done. She described the experience as a great healing of her own sense of fragmentation, as a child of divorce and family rivalry, knowing that her great teacher still loved her even though she had, as one person put it "danced with another and then told him he liked it."

I remembered the highly criticized error of placing my hand alongside the foot in triangle (Iyengar style) rather than grasping the big toe in Ashtanga class. Or breathing ujjayi in good Asthanga style, to the complaint of an imperious workshop leader, about "this business of breathing like a horse!"

Yoga, like every other human endeavour, shares the human attribute of yawning political divides, insufficiency of otherness.

Though I have never met him, I thought of how BKS Iyengar had cast his light and his attitudes into my life, since 1986, through teachers who learned from him directly, or indirectly. Now, thanks to this lucid and powerful book, I feel privileged to know Iyengar more deeply than I ever thought possible.

As a practitioner of yoga for about a decade or so, I've learned to separate the life-changing art of practicing yoga from writing ABOUT yoga, the latter of which tends to oscillate between the flaky and the just-plain-stupid. So I have to admit, I was a little skeptical when a yoga-practitioner friend of mine recommended Kadetsky's book. To begin with, I was instantly drawn in by her magnetic prose and lush descriptions of India, but as I read on, I also began to admire the subtle way she navigates between the foibles and sublimities of B.K.S. Iyengar, a man who is perhaps one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic teachers. Her thoughts on the connection between modern yoga and Hindu fundamentalism are well worth the price of admission. For anyone who has ever found their own quest for spirituality caught between the allure of an ancient past and the grittiness of the modern third world, this is a great book. My only complaint is that I didn't see what the subtitle, "A Yoga Romance," had to do with her book, since needless to say, there is no love-interest in this book.

Yoga is known in America and Europe primarily as a method for relaxation technique available to all, but in India this practice is not separated from a relationship of teacher and student. Miss Kadetsky's book is an excellent description of such relationship in the Indian environment. Also, I think everyone who reads this book will learn much about Yoga and its role in India's National History. I hope the author continues to write books about exchange between East and West.

I will most likely never travel to India. But, as a student of yoga, I was able to catch a glimpse of what a western yoga practitioner might expect and ultimately experience in India. Having read and studied about Iyengar, Krishnamacharya and Pattabhi Jois as yoga icons, it was fascinating to read of them as humans and sometimes tyrrants/rivals. Kadetsky's personal story lingered in the background...oozed out as honey from between the printed lines. I enjoyed the imagery and the human quality that Kadetsky imparted the reader.

Surprisingly, after the read, I felt new inspiration for my personal yoga practice. I am so grateful for the masters that have given us a sense of history, but am overjoyed that the practice ultimately becomes our own. Kadetsky illustrated that wonderfully.

As a relatively new reporter chasing a Pulitzer, Elizabeth Kadetsky did little to take care of her body properly though she ran a lot and practiced yoga. The problem was she was always on the run grabbing quick bites to eat that is when she even ate. Elizabeth physically felt poor but mentally worse as her life was journalism so anything outside that realm was a negative. Needing a change, Elizabeth, a yoga advocate, applied to attend a yoga school in India run by the renowned elderly Iyengar, who was one of the few experts to instruct Westerners.

Finally accepted as a student, Elizabeth learns that her yoga style is a westernized fake that is nothing like that taught by the Master. As a pupil, she begins to explore the boundaries between the physical, the mental and the transcendent spiritual bridge between the two parts that when in harmony make a whole. The reporter inside Elizabeth also explores her teacher's background and the sacred place of yoga in India as under Iyengar's tutelage she journeys beyond her past seeking her whole.

FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN in a tremendous account of west meets east on eastern terms. Readers will feel the love that Elizabeth Kadetsky has for her mentor, her trek from yoga the exercise mechanism to revering religious like the yoga transcend journey of the mind and body, and finally an insightful look at the past and present of yoga diagonally crossing the caste system. The audience will understand why Ms. Kadetsky subtitles her journal "A Yoga Romance".

Harriet Klausner

Kadetsky's vast research on the genesis of yoga is coupled with descriptions of her experience in Pune, and travels in India over five months. Both are chronicled with the sharpness of a surgeon's knife in this book.

With incisions that "unzip the viscera" she exposes not only her personal journey towards healing - as a child of divorced parents, the daughter in a mixed-marriage and the rigors of anorexia - to make sense of her own life; but also the exploration towards understanding the heartbeat and inner workings of the brilliant yet challenging experience it is to be at the source of Iyengar yoga in Pune, India.

As yoga is a process of awareness, she opines on the ebb and flow of daily life at RIMYI (the Iyengar Institute), reveals her personal interactions with B.K.S. Iyengar (who alternately takes on the role of father /friend /foe), and writes about the significant players involved in the global diffusion of Iyengar yoga, outside of his children who are the respected teachers Geeta and Prashant Iyengar.

This book described a backdrop within which my own remarkable experiences in Pune can be assessed. Kadetsky's analysis about her relationship to B.K.S.Iyengar and "Iyengar Yoga" reflects the incremental self-awareness she gained while in Pune. That is, by definition, the process for which we study yoga - to become more incisive and aware.

Kadetsky's personal journey through Iyengar Yoga is excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and enjoyed her use of personal memoir, spiritual pilgrimage, and research on the history of yoga in India, interspersed with politics and personal encounters with BKS Iyengar himself. She presents a honest picture of her experience and discovers some personal truths along the way. Excellent read!

I have just finished reading "First There is a Mountain," and having studied yoga 15 years ago I re-experienced many of the feelings and sensations Ms. Kadetsky so eloquently described. I picked up this book from a library shelf entitled "new releases" not realizing that it was telling me that I needed to return to yoga to begin my path again.
The everyday routines described in the Pune ashram so deliberately confer with a yoga practioner's struggles. Yoga is not a "state" which is an acommplished tour de force, it is a discipline that imbues a lifetime. For anyone who has studied yoga, this is a book that will speak to your practice. Read and breath.

Many 10 to 15 year practitioners of Iyengar Yoga categorize themselves as "rank beginners." What many Western students have to learn is that the practice of Yoga demands humility. There are cultural distinctions so foreign to the way in which we learn in the West, that one has to be open. Under a gifted and disciplined teacher, requirements include a deep surrender of the self. Kadetsky's study of the Iyengar's and her effort to delve into the richly complex background of Yoga in India are hampered by her own obstacles regarding self-understanding, humility and a surrender to discipline. She has skills of research, of following leads toward interesting discoveries in the evolution of Iyengar Yoga and the gradual refinement of the Iyengar family's present school and method. But, one reads this text feeling that she fails to see (or partially perceives) what some can gather from what she does not finish, from where she does not go. Her written experience is like watching someone encounter a breathlessly beautiful rose, which holds up the whole universe, inside and out, to the viewer. You can feel that she is drawn, entranced, yet torn by conflicting, unresolved problems of the self. She loves the beauty she experiences - even though eyes may be color-blind and the fragrance is barely registered. She knows this and exposes her limitations to all: as Iyengar pushes this realization into her, fully extending her into pashimotanasana - "the pose of the West."

"A Yoga Romance"? I think this book reads more like a yoga expose. A better title for it might have been "Guru Dearest." Ms. Kadetsky seems to have misrepresented herself and her project to many of the people she interviewed, with the ambition of uncovering the dirty laundry and politics of modern yoga. This is unfair. She effectively did a lot of quoting of people (and private correspondence to which she was privy) off the record to paint them darkly. What she manages to find are merely the usual contradictions and imperfections inherent in any human endeavor, and of course these strike us as more appalling when the endeavor relates to the spiritual in any way. She brings a Western attitude of superiority even to yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar, using the word "kitsch" in referring to his various honorary awards. She mocks the clothes that the Iyengars wear. She calls Geeta Iyengar "a bit player" in the Iyengar theater. But then, she also calls a yoga practice session "a workout," revealing a lot about her true interest in yoga, and she fails completely to discuss her own experiences and reactions in terms of the yamas, niyamas, or even karma. There is some good information in this book. Some interesting historical gaps are revealed and some are even filled for the average reader. But Kadetsky tries in places to be a scholar, and she is not one. No scholar would be so stunned at the lack of continuity in written works on yoga. India is well known for its undated, anonymous writings. As for her treatment of the question of why yoga is not more popular in India itself, this seemed superficial. It seemed she only wanted to point out that yoga is currently more popular in the West in order to discredit it somehow. The same goes for her treatment of the harsh methods employed by the Iyengars and some other yoga teachers. She could ask instead if at some point in the future those methods can be softened or if they are integral to yoga as a discipline (but she doesn't). In this book Ms. Kadetsky questions the motives of people who have worked to spread yoga, something she seems glad to have in her life, but she does not question her own motives in writing so unkindly about those people to the point that even her compliments of them seem backhanded. I wished the same material were in wiser hands. Then I would be able to recommend the book to friends.