The violinist who kept coming back

In Bombay, one afternoon in 1952, a violinist of thirty six and a yoga teacher of thirty four met for the first time. The visit was supposed to last a few minutes. The violinist had a concert schedule, a plane to catch, and a reputation for punctuality that his handlers guarded fiercely. Instead he stayed for three and a half hours. Some of that time he spent lying on the floor in Savasana. Some of it he spent asleep. When he finally left, he had, quietly, rearranged the rest of his life around a stranger. The stranger was BKS Iyengar. The violinist was Yehudi Menuhin. What began that afternoon was not a workshop, or a course, or a set of lessons. It was a private teaching relationship that lasted forty seven years and only ended when Menuhin died.

The story of Iyengar that gets told most often is a story about scale. Books translated into many languages. An institute in Pune, opened in 1975 and named for his late wife Ramamani, that has trained teachers who now teach on every continent. A style of yoga with his surname attached to it, practised by millions of people who will never meet a member of his family. That story is true. It is also the wrong story for the coaches and instructors who use Another Session. The story worth telling here is smaller. It is what happened when Iyengar took one adult student, week by decade, and stayed inside the same private teaching relationship for the rest of that student's working life.

The Bombay afternoon

Menuhin had come to India in the winter of 1952 as a guest of Jawaharlal Nehru. Already one of the most famous musicians in the world, he was, by his own later admission, exhausted. Since the age of seven he had played in public. At the end of the war he had toured the liberated camps of Bergen-Belsen with Benjamin Britten. A sleep problem and a low ache in his shoulders had become part of his working life, and he could no longer ignore them.

Somewhere in the trip, in conversation with his hosts, he mentioned a book about yoga he had picked up in an osteopath's waiting room a few years earlier. A meeting was arranged. The teacher used a small room in Bombay from time to time and could squeeze in a short introduction between engagements.

Iyengar in 1952 was not yet the figure the West would come to know. He was thirty four, thin, hard to impress, and had been teaching yoga on his own since he was a teenager. In 1936 his brother in law and guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya had sent him to Pune to teach in a language he barely spoke, to students he did not yet know. By the time Menuhin walked into the Bombay room, Iyengar had, more or less, built himself.

The meeting that was supposed to be brief was not. Menuhin talked about not sleeping. Iyengar put him on the floor in Savasana, adjusted him, and left him alone. Menuhin fell asleep. When he woke, some time later, something in him had loosened in a way he could not fully name and did not want to leave behind. He asked, from the floor, when he could come again.

Forty seven years

What began that afternoon is easy to miscast. It was not a friendship that happened to include some yoga. It was a private teaching arrangement, held together by two people who understood their roles as teacher and student, and by an unusual amount of paper. They wrote to each other for the rest of their working lives. Iyengar prescribed sequences of postures for the specific muscular problems Menuhin brought him after long tours. Menuhin did the practice at home, in hotel rooms, on trains, in the greenrooms of concert halls in cities Iyengar would never visit. Every so often the two of them ended up in the same country and the private lessons resumed in person. In between, the work continued by letter.

In 1954, Menuhin invited Iyengar to Europe. It was Iyengar's first trip outside India. He stayed with Menuhin, taught him privately for weeks, and, at the end of the visit, was given a wristwatch. The inscription on the back read, To my best violin teacher, BKS Iyengar. It was a small joke and it was not a joke. Menuhin had understood, correctly, that what he was receiving from this teacher was not a set of exercises. It was the body underneath the violin. The breathing, the alignment, the ability to stand on a stage for a long evening and not be worn down by it. He had spent his entire adult life being taught how to play the instrument. He had never, until Iyengar, been taught how to hold the body that carried the instrument.

What a long private teaching arc looks like

From the outside, a forty seven year one to one arc looks like romance. From inside the room it is admin. Menuhin had a physiology that changed decade by decade, and Iyengar tracked it. The shoulder that was fine at thirty six was different at fifty and different again at seventy. The tour schedule that made three months of daily practice possible in one year made none of it possible in the next. Menuhin's hands stopped doing certain things and started doing others. Iyengar's job, quietly, was to keep the sequence honest to the body currently in front of him, not to the body he had first met in Bombay.

This is the part of long private teaching that no marketing page ever describes well. Most of it is memory. Not remembering the student's name, or their favourite posture. It is remembering the specific way they held their left ribcage in the winter of one particular year. The injury they mentioned in passing on a phone call some years after that stays too. So does the shape of the recovery they were still inside three years further on. A teacher who cannot hold that record inside their own head, and who does not write any of it down, will, at some point, quietly reset the student back to a beginner and start again. A teacher who does hold the record is the one the student returns to for forty seven years.

Why Menuhin mattered

It is tempting, in a piece like this, to make the story about the student. Menuhin conducted, taught, founded a school, and wrote about yoga in interviews and letters for the rest of his life. At the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey, where his students still do it, he made a version of the practice a normal part of the training. Iyengar's move west, when it came, was carried in part on Menuhin's shoulders. Without the introductions Menuhin quietly arranged in Europe through the 1950s, the institute in Pune would still exist and the books would still have been written. The arrival of Iyengar in London and Paris and New York would have taken longer and looked different.

None of that is the point of the story for a private teacher reading this. The point is that Iyengar did not treat Menuhin as a marketing asset. He treated him as a student. In the interviews Iyengar gave across his long life, there is no evidence that he leaned on Menuhin's fame as a credential. When asked, he mentioned the friendship. Building a practice on it was not something he did. He was already building one on the quieter version of the same relationship with dozens of other students, most of whose names never left the studio in Pune.

What the private teacher can take from this

Most yoga teachers, most private instructors, most one to one coaches will never have a Menuhin arrive in their studio. Few of them need one. What they will have, if they stay in the work long enough, is a handful of students who quietly keep coming back. The person who booked a Tuesday morning in the year they turned forty and who is still, on a Tuesday morning, showing up in the year they turn fifty five. A client whose left knee has been part of every conversation for a decade. A parent who first came in for their teenager and, four years later, has become a student in their own right.

These are the relationships that make a private practice worth staying inside. They are also the ones most vulnerable to the teacher's own forgetting. A student who has been coming for seven years does not want to explain their own history at the start of every session. They want to walk into the room and be met by a teacher who remembers what happened in the room last time, and the time before that, and the winter three years ago when the shoulder first flared. That memory is the difference between a teacher a student outgrows and a teacher a student keeps.

Iyengar kept Menuhin for forty seven years. Most private teachers do not need that number. Eight years is enough. Twelve. Twenty. The arithmetic is different, the discipline is the same. Notice what the body did this session. Write it down before the day gets away from you. Meet the person who walks in next time as the person they now are, not the one you first met. Do that steadily, for as long as the student keeps arriving, and eventually you will have built the kind of practice they do not want to leave.