Amrita 6: Asana through the ages - Magazine - Page 67
Get up, Stand up
“We stood together in class, our
breath radiated it’s familiar pulse. I
reflected on what is really going on
when we think about standing.”
A few years ago I was invited to teach
yoga in Tanzania. We travelled,
camped and did yoga in the wild
amongst the animals. On dry river
beds, in forests, lakeside and savannah
grassland (The Serengeti National
Park). Not too far from one of our locations, a recent discovery of footprints have been found. Three sets.
From 3.66 million years ago. Significantly earlier than homo sapien had
previously been thought to stand up
on two feet. Analysis suggests these
are the marks of strolling.
Our ancestors left the forests for
the expanding savannahs and peered
over the tall grasses to look for their
predators and prey. If you were good
at standing you had a better chance of
survival. Overtime, getting up from all
fours into standing gave way to important anatomical shifts (there is
plenty to read about this elsewhere),
to becoming bipedal and ready to
walk, run, dance or stroll.
The poet W.H Davies in ‘Leisure’
warns us of the ‘poor life’ and what we
may miss if we ‘have no time to stand
and stare’. The dancer Isadora Duncan
wrote about her moment of standing
in 1927:
“For hours I would stand quite still,
my two hands folded between my
breasts, covering my solar plexus...I
was seeking and I finally discovered
the central spring of all movement,
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AMRITA Issue 6 / Spring 2021 65