2023-06-21 11:11:00
We choose to republish this interview with Emmanuel Carrère, on the occasion of World Yoga Day. When this interview was done, in 2019, he hadn’t yet written Yoga (ed. POL), a story, published in 2020, which discusses his practice of yoga and meditation to combat depression.
Point : How long have you been practicing yoga?
Emmanuel Carrere: A twenty years. I started by practicing karate, then tai-chi-chuan, two activities that have a martial aim that yoga obviously does not have…
A martial aim, tai-chi-chuan? We have rather the image of old people in the parks of Beijing…
Think once more ! Tai Chi can be dazzling! I remember my Chinese master who, one day, gave us a demonstration, a series of movements at an extremely slow tempo. It looked like a jellyfish unfolding in space in slow motion. In regarding twenty minutes he must have breathed twice: ten minutes for each sequence of inspiration and expiration. It was amazing. But when he finished, he said to us, very calmly: “Don’t miss the point, this is to kill…” So your image old people in the parks of Beijing is correct, but incomplete… Tai-chi must be practiced quickly and slowly. And even, that’s where it gets subtle, fast and slow at the same time.
You switched from tai chi to yoga because you didn’t want to kill anymore!
Simply because I moved and mightn’t find such a good tai chi class in my new neighborhood to go to every day – which I was doing at the time. But I found a good yoga class, it seems to me that it is less rare. You know, the disciplines are similar, and we practice them basically for the same reasons: to be in better health, to find and then expand a zone of calm within oneself. To gain a “strategic depth” in relation to the stress that gives the agitation of the world and the dispersion of thoughts that assail us and devour our consciousness. Yoga, says Patanjali who first codified it, regarding two thousand years ago, is the appeasement and then the cessation of thoughts. Well, I say that but although I have been practicing for twenty years, I do not feel that I have made great progress in this demanding path. I remain scattered, worried, even the desire for calm agitates me. Too bad, it’s like that, maybe something is happening without my knowledge, but even if we stick to a goal, let’s say minimalist, it is certain that yoga is very beneficial anyway, provided you engage in it with good teachers. As it is a very powerful and very effective discipline, you can indeed hurt yourself, even if you are flexible. Many people hesitate to do it saying “it’s not for me, I’m stiff”. However stiff you are, yoga will gradually make you more flexible, but being very flexible can be as much a handicap as being very stiff, because you feel less when you exceed the limit. Yoga always seeks the coexistence and balance of opposites. You have to do things that you believe a priori to be contradictory: it’s a bit like pushing and pulling a door at the same time.
In your yoga practice, what are the things that have marked you the most, that you might have learned regarding yourself, your body or your thoughts?
It is a work of awakening and widening the consciousness of the body, which sharpens as we pay attention to all its parts. Finger by finger, toe by toe, down to how the hair grows into your scalp. Ideally, yoga can bring you into awareness of yourself on a cellular and even molecular level. But that, I speak regarding it according to the stories of travelers, I don’t know how many lives I would need to reach it.
Does it happen through breathing?
Yes, without a doubt. The transition from a minimalist level of practice, where yoga is nothing but remarkable gymnastics, to the maximalist experience of the unification of body and consciousness, takes place through breathing. One cannot not breathe, at the same time it is the only vegetative procedure over which one can exert a semblance of control. In this infinitely subtle study of breathing that we call pranayama, we inhale, we exhale, we change the length of the inspirations and exhalations, we create retentions, we guide the breath in ourselves… The most difficult thing is what we accesses very gradually, it is to do nothing more than observe the breath, without changing anything. Yes, breathing is the royal way of yoga…
Which yoga school did you choose?
Oh, I practice several. I did Ashtanga yoga, which is very dynamic, I continue to do Vinyasa, which is a less athletic version of Ashtanga, more focused on flow, moving from one pose to another. I also practice iyengar yoga, which bears the name of a great Indian master. It suits me well because it’s a bit of a yoga for obsessives, where you spend years, for example, learning how to put the outer edge of the foot on the ground. I would say that I practice these different forms of yoga according to the mood… The aim of yoga is to balance forces, and following a while, everyone makes their own, à la carte…
Your yoga, you do it at what pace, at what time?
Ideally, I take two or three classes a week. And every day, when I get up, I do at least ten minutes of it: one of those sequences called Sun Salutations that are a wonderful airlock between sleep and the day’s activity. Finally, there is the personal practice, an hour, an hour and a half a day, alone at home. I don’t do it as often as I would like but from a certain threshold it’s what makes the most progress.
You were talking regarding discipline. Is it a form of asceticism for you?
Certainly. The problem is that I don’t have any great inclinations for asceticism. I am neurotic, worried, prone to addictions. But what do you want, we are all more or less screwed up, each in our own way, and we do yoga with what we are…
You, it’s been twenty years, but do you understand the current yoga craze? On Instagram, the hashtag #Namaste has almost 12 million hits, and the photos that people post of themselves in full posture are countless…
I don’t think this is recent. I rather believe that the importation of yoga in the West dates from the 1950s and that this peaceful penetration of Eastern thought into Western thought has only increased. Then, the time is quite hard, stressful, and it seems to me normal, and salutary, that human beings start to practice an activity which brings as many physical and psychic benefits.
You are a great specialist in Yi-kingthe ancient book of Chinese wisdom, which you quoted in The kingdom (“The supreme grace consists not in adorning materials outwardly, but in giving them a simple and practical form”) and from which you took a sentence to title your book It pays to have somewhere to go. Is the interest you find there related to that which you find in yoga?
The Yi-king and the tai-chi which is inspired by it are Chinese, yoga is Indian, but both aim at the same thing: to create a balance in the consciousness, to teach us to be in the flow, not to swim once morest the current of life.
What is your favorite pose?
Toni D’Amelio, with whom I have been studying iyengar yoga for quite a few years, has an expression that I like: from a posture that is easy to do, she says “you were born in this posture”. , implying that it is made for us and that we should therefore not practice it too much, because it is too easy. Me, I really like the posture where you stand on your head, with the help of your elbows which draw a triangle with it. If you manage to hold it even for five or six minutes, it is very beneficial because it reverses the process of blood circulation: that is why it is called “the queen of postures”.
Are you going to write regarding yoga?
I have tried several times, these attempts have so far failed. But I recently prefaced what is going to be a book, a long interview with my vinyasa yoga master, Peter Goss. He is a former dancer, a great choreographer, who started teaching yoga to repair injured dancers. I tried to talk regarding my experience as a student.
You recently told the Spanish daily The country your temporary lack of literary inspiration. From the long inspirations of yoga to literary inspiration, is there only one step?
Can you imagine that the title I was considering for a little book on yoga was L’Expiration…
Last book published: It pays to have somewhere to go (POL). Emmanuel Carrère has just won the FIL prize for literature in Romance languages, the most important in Latin America, which rewards “a life devoted to literary creation”.
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