On Thursday we arrived in our non yoga clothes and were treated to a talk by Geeta which I will write up tomorrow. Then we had a talk by the CEO of Deloitte and Touche – a successful businessman and student of Iyengar Yoga. He talked about how yoga has helped him with his position of managing a huge company. Here are a few of the highlights:
My least favorite pose is supta virasana but I do it: the long term benefits are worth the short term pains.
I try to balance out the auditing section of the company with the advising section. After the government instilled new laws restricting our license to perform audits, I had to figure out how to make the company work. You can’t just cut off a part that isn’t working – you have to look at it and integrate it. You can’t let you ego get away with you. For example, when you are balancing in Ardha Chandrasana – if you become smug and your ego takes over, you will lose your balance. You have to connect and communicate.
Greed is like holding an asana for longer than you should. Or wanting to do more asana, like wanting more money. Artha should flow in the waters of moksha – your wealth should allow you to be spiritually free.
Corporate dharma (duty) – to profit, and people and planning. Courage is not just about doing the right thing, but allowing people to speak out without fear.
in this world there is fear and insufficient empathy. Truth only comes at the grass roots level. You have to learn something new every day.
Prashant summed his talk up with this…which I thought was quite brilliant.
The Management of life:
- Passion management: desires, games, wants and needs
- Emotional management: relations, people and the world
If you don’t have passion and emotional management, your life will be a mess
- Intellectual management.
The part of ourselves that is the locus of our identity are the shoulders. They carry the crafty brain. It is not easy to manage the brain. Below is the heart and emotions, and below is passion. Each of these areas has polarities of likes, dislikes, hates, loves etc.
For one’s own management – not MAN – AGE – ment yoga has schemes to create compatibility and union of the head and heart. It is important for our worldly life. The Business of life has a CEO at the top of our embodiment. Sometimes the CEO is in the heart, or in the belly, but the third locus is the SPINE. The spine connects all three parts of brain, heart and belly. It relates them to each other.
You only consider the things that are in front of you, whereas the things that are behind you are unidentified. The spine is the same. Everything is in front of the spine. In uttanasana, you are facing forward but the pose identifies what is behind you – your spine. The spine is more circumspect. Neither the brain, nor heart, nor passion are circumspect.
In Yoga, the spine is given a position of CEO. THe spinal faculties and potentials coordinate and manage. We call a person spineless as a stigma of someone with not glorious potentials. The spine gives a pan embodiment sweep. Everything comes into its realm from ego to identity. We have a greater brain below the brain. Yoga knows this.