Vanda Scaravelli was an inspired and inspiring woman, who came to yoga relatively late in life. Through her own explorations she realised something so simple yet almost impossible to fully understand: that the force of gravity is the very thing that supports us upright, and that if we are balanced, the wave of our exhalation elongates the spine.
Is that Scaravelli yoga? Vanda would be horrified to hear of such a thing – because to define it is to miss the point entirely. Perhaps a little history and some of my current understanding of the work can shed some light.
Vanda Scaravelli
Vanda played host to her friend Sri J Krishnamurti during his stays in Italy, and subsequently in Switzerland. He was a student of Sri B.K.S. Iyengar, and it was Iyengar who introduced Vanda to yoga when she was in her forties. She also took to heart the teachings of T.K.V. Desikachar, whose methods became known as viniyoga. She went on to teach yoga herself for many years, and shared her wisdom in her insightful book Awakening the Spine.
There was a kindness to her teaching that has been translated into the concept of working with the body’s tendencies in order to unravel them, rather than against them. This is a method successfully employed by osteopaths and rolfers. The value of working with gravity instead of against it is obvious. It makes sense philosophically as well as intellectually, allowing us to move away from the no-pain-no-gain paradigm towards a more Taoist sensibility of going with the natural flow of things.
The beauty of Vanda’s teachings burns bright in everyone she has worked with and inspired, but the revolutionary aspect was that yoga ceased being the passing on of a tradition, and became the beginning of an open-ended, ever-expanding exploration of what is going on right now.
