If SKPJ were a blogger, he’d wave off all the Mysore chronicles and tell the story of your first trip on the south Indian mother ship in this sentence:

First month paining, second month tired, third month flying.

Encinitas this week felt like mobile Mysore – the jostling into and out of class, the two hour breakfasts, the living room floor laugh festivals every evening with my fictive ashtangi kin. One morning in conference, Sharath stopped while the Amtrak roared just behind the shala, setting off a car alarm. Then he dead panned: I feeel like I am in Innn-d-ia.

It is so odd to enter Mysore-style collective headspace while still on US soil.

But… there is something inimitably So-Cal about afternoon trips to the shot bar (like, they sell shots, for your bum, from a cocktail menu of vitamins and amino acids and sundry hangover cures), and about the quantity of kombucha and kale accumulating in my tissues.

I got wondering if a condensed version of SKPJ’s story applies when Sharath’s on tour: first day paining, second day tired, third day flying. This is because I was floored. Everything felt shockingly, stupidly hard. I’ve never had led intermediate be anything but fun, but I’ve also never jumped right into a week of it after a goddam dirga kala winter of teaching Mysore.

In a sense, it’s thrilling to see the tough side of intermediate series for the first time since the postures were new. It’s like the moment when a soft spoken friend grits his teeth and shows his backbone, because for once he’s encountered a battle that he’s gonna bother to fight. Complexity is intriguing. I like it that lovely, lilting mayurasana and his peacock feather friend do have one hell of an edge. Everything ached for 48 hours.

Then on Sunday, my grandfather died in Colorado. Ninety three and lucid enough to remember everyone’s birthdays and do his own taxes, thankyouverymuch, he told us he had no regrets and opted out early from a horrific six week prognosis. So intense, and peaceful. Emotion without drama. We should not have been surprised. I felt my father, in Montana, deflate into grief.

Sunday and Monday, my lungs, sinuses, eyes and center of the head went raw, hypersensitive to every thought and emotion… and also to direct transmission. My father, my father’s father, my teacher, my teacher’s teacher… the whole patriline got dissolved into one channel of constant awareness as I ached everywhere, and felt all chafed and bothered by existence, and kept the hell moving.

First day paining, second day paining.

Third day paining.

Fourth day flying.

Ashtanga is designed to turn us from talkers to doers. Talking about asana is for kids.

And really, talking about practice and about relationships with teachers is a dumb idea. It freezes habit patterns and moments of intimacy. Solidifies the ego’s perceptions. Mucks up the transmission. Makes everything about practice harder, and lonelier, than it oughta be.

But I relaxed the taboo on these things two years ago, because my practice is no longer just mine. It belongs to my students, albeit not to you. Speaking about practice activates my bullshit filter, because I feel the natural temptation to manufacture coherence, sharpen fuzziness, backslide into narrative, and otherwise lie my head off.

Interesting experience is bigger than words… so the move from practice to text is a reduction. The “smart yoga” movement tells me otherwise. Someone recently tossed out the Derrida canard, “there is nothing outside of the text.” Oh man. Honestly. Get a life. There is joy outside of the text.

I’d love to have words to talk about the flying, or about the series of patrilineal gut shudders as my grandfather faded out. But it is useless. Same for what it is like to sit, kumbhaka (not kombucha) buzzed, in a little circle with Sharath beneath a me-sized sepia photo of young SKPJ in mayurasana, chanting the names of the sages in the Shankaracharya line. There were also pre-practice walks on the beach below the gaudy gold lotus of the Self Realization Fellowship, the seedbud of Indian yoga in the west. And a constant feeling of being broken open from inside the center of the chest, to everything. Everything.

I will say that this whole Jois shala situation is as nice as it can be. Benign. Pretty. A little bit young and naive. And love is there. This scene is no threat to you, dear grassroots practitioner with your concerns about “commodification” and “elitism.” Relaaax. In case you didn’t get the memo, we are all in this together.

Eventually, everybody who keeps on practicing with real concentration gets a line on the awesome reality of pratyhara. And then on the surrender thing. And, from there, the ones who keep practicing get it through our thick skulls that we are all the same even though nothing stays the same. Billionaries and gurus and hippies are all just nobodies. Talk doesn’t help heal us when a patriarch dies; it is practice that works everything out.

I wanted some time alone with Los Angeles.

Twenty minutes after touching down, I’m in a black Passat going native. Accelerating down the ramp, merging in to car culture, touching the radio on….

They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said a no no no. Coked up Amy Winehouse flashes on the windshield in front of the churning metal in this northbound artery, and I punch it. Time to backslide? I decide: yes.

“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city.” That’s Brett Easton Ellis, and just now I disagree. But parts of Less than Zero are still in my head, memorized in high school. At the time I was trying overwrite Bible verses tattooed on my brain (my father’s term) with Shakespeare and other smut.

As if awareness were a palimpsest. But it is not. It’s a chameleon.

GOD. DRIVING IN LOS ANGELES. Carbon-loading’s a shit ton of sense pleasure. In sattvic Ann Arbor, all walk commutes and farm shares, I forget the apocalypse. I’m delighted to be back in the grit, on an edge, looking into dark sides I’ve forgotten in myself.

So much for fear of merging. I remember the first time I merged with my car like some sort of hypersensate cyborg driving down out of the Hollywood Hills after a week of silence with Shinzen. Imagining artificially intelligent nanotech mites crawling off the steering wheel and gas pedal, up my limbs, making the wheels and headlights and sleek hot engine an extension of self. (Yeah, I should just go watch Transformers. or something.) In the car today, my mulabandha thrums and my heart drops down and back into the corner of the pericardium, glowing in sideways gravity. Happy.

By then, a minute in to traffic, I’ve hit bottom with the gas pedal. The 405 north, to the ten west, to the 101 north at 82PMH. We drop down below the underpass that brings the old Route 66 to the ocean, finally, and I scream at the sight of the Hollwood Hills, blue tatters, zigzagging into the sea to the north. I see Peter on a new BMW motorcycle, running off the road, hitting a tree, dying when his neck snaps. Four years, and three months ago. I’m nothing the same now, except for the fact that that my system still knows this program.

This is the one big intimate relationship I’ve ended as an adult—the relationship with the city. But the thing is, Los Angeles doesn’t care. She’ll take me back. I could pretend I’ve grown since leaving, but that’d only be tempting if some part of me still wanted to be with Los Angeles and wanted to push those feelings down. But there’s no strong push or pull anymore. The creature that is of this place is just a collection of habits of mind, and ways of moving the body, a program that comes alive again in the time it takes to go from 0 to 80.

Anyway. This morning I woke up in a vintage air stream trailer blocks from the beach and thought: I will not stay in a hotel again. You used to have to buy the airstream to think that; now AirBNB’s enough.

My body’s wake-up time translates to just after midnight in LA. So in the day this morning, I lay next to the beach and re-noticed the way the sandy ground trembles here. When the sun came up, I bought branded healthy breakfast items at the Whole Foods. Two $20 kale salads in as many days: it’s the the west side, all right. Now I’m next to UCLA Café Profeta, the last place I wrote a real academic article. Back in an old grad school haunt, logging grades for yoga students at a University on the other side of the country. Funny how that worked out.

There’s a forest behind my house. Half pine trees, half huge deciduous trees, with the ground tangled up in brush and big downed branches. It produces deer and skunk and the odd woodchuck, and it’s teeming in squirrels. A rabid raccoon lived there last summer. Ghost Kitty threads in and out, marking and remarking the boundary of the woods. Ghost Kitty: the square-headed Scottish Fold who visits our cats by night at the kitchen window, levitating there and blinking huge blue eyes. I’ll hear a complete freak-out – dishes crashing and ungodly yowls and hissing – and run to the room only to see Ghost Kitty drop from his hover-height and tear across the deck and back to the woods.

I don’t go into the woods, nor does anyone else. But in the winter dark, I see the lights of houses on the other side, and most afternoons I hear the bells of the church on the next block. Emotionally, aesthetically, I rely on the place. It makes the indoors of my life here quiet and secluded. But come on, this is city life. I’m not gonna go there. Casing the neighborhood, I checked the woods out in city property files. It’s a stark little cut-out of valuable real estate three blocks off Main Street, owned by nobody, just sitting there in the middle of our block.

Saint Patrick’s day, we made an offer on the place two houses up the hill, with a long lot that touches the boundary of the forest. From bedroom window on the second floor, you can see the white domed church roof through the trees. The new house is at least 108 years old, and maybe as many as 112. The city can’t say for sure. It is made to last centuries, built in heavy wood and stone before this lot was urban… built when people were small and so were their homes. Works for me.

I’ll be the first in my family to own a home, and I’m reticent about the grounding effects of possessing a giant, immobile object. But this is how I live now. On this street; alongside these woods; atop this aquifier. It’s so obvious. The feeling tone of this block is something particular; and for now I am of it. So there was no question. I will keep circling the woodchuck woods for a while. I love how empty and wild they feel.

Sitting has been something like this. I do a technique until it does me back, pulling consciousness inside-out. Each inward-drawn sense (the seeing, the hearing, the feeling) untangles from the central perceiver-core of me. And then each sense, free-floating, just hangs there in a black, bright funnel that draughts upward and downward at the same time.

Nothing happens in the empty space, and nothing exists, but somehow it’s important. So for two years I’ve been following the instruction to let this void penetrate me. Moment by moment and cell by cell. “Let it know you, in the Biblical sense.”

Lately I set up for practice and this slightly disturbing image flashs on the backs of my eyes. It’s me circling a well. I’m perceiving in third person, from above. Weird. There I am, just walking around and around a hole in the ground. Then, that drops away and I’m practicing.

Today in the moment of settling-in, the image that flashed through was different –the big empty box at the center of Islam. The black box: the Kaaba. Not entirely different from the empty tomb at the center of Christianity, I guess; today being Easter, and Jesus’ disappearance being on my mind.

That is a very good ritual: forsaking your home and going through the self-stripping pilgrimage ordeal, all to circle (ecstatically) a big empty box. For the trouble, I wonder how well it works; I wonder what are the odds of falling in.

(Photo from the BBC. See also this.)

The 4am dance party is not subtle.

I haven’t known how to say what it’s like to walk half a mile, at 4:30am, when it is 7 degrees. It has been too exciting to talk about.

It doesn’t begin to make sense unless I mention something unmentionable: a baseline situation the past 18 months of feeling so, very turned on all of the time. The baseline has persisted amid the most intense physical pain I’ve experienced—during January 2012—and now through these short, dark days. Still, what ought to be the most annoying part of each day is instead a predictable peak experience. It’s weird.

In a sense Insideowl’s fuel was always the afternoon leftovers of early morning ecstasies. This journal began as a way of making the thrill for practice last a little later in the day: by commuting it from movement in to words, retracing my days’ first steps by other means.

So here goes.

I am awake under layers of fluff. Flannel sheets, Pendleton wool, goosedown, one or two cats, and the heavy night. In my great-grandmother Zang’s bed. A twin mattress might have suited couples three generations back, but at 6 feet tall, The Editor knows every move his three other bedfellows make. So I try to be stealthy.

When the excitement flips on, I lie there at the bottom of the fluff layers and don’t move at all. The kitties catch on anyway. Then we play a game of “who can be the quietest?” The whole time, I feel hot pin pricks in the ends of my fingers and toes, no different from electric shocks. The right middle finger or ring finger is usually the first to heat up, then two places in the left ring finger, a shock on the end of the right big toe, and so on. I lie there and feel this until one of the cats stirs and our big layer cake of fluff collapses from the top down.

Sometimes the Editor tells me to get up already. The other day, he said “I know you’re awake, ya know. It doesn’t matter if you’re not moving. You’re still putting your wakey all over me. Will you just get up?”

Well, yes. That’s the only thing better than staying in bed.

We live in a townhouse at the front edge of residentialalia, at the bottom of a hill covered with artists, healers and some of the best scientific minds of our generation. The place is called Water Hill because inside, it’s actually full of spring water.

This zipcode is the reason the magazines say Ann Arbor outdoes Berkeley and Brooklyn as the most creative and educated town in America, but when I trip out the door at 4:30 in the morning all I feel are dreams and seedy intrigue. The collective unconscious of this town. There are friendly ghosts, sleeping bums and deer, and maybe the tracks of the petty robbers who go around taking advantage of our unlocked back doors. So, brahma muhurta is not a big event in these parts. The closest thing to consciousness is the other ashtangis on their last cycles of sleep. Part of the excitement is feeling the dozens of them still cuddled under and peaceful within at most a mile.

Ashtangis, ghosts and thieves. It’s like that Cher song.

It is exactly a half mile to the shala. Like a dumb Angeleno, I drove it every day until the solstice of 2012. That day, the first snow came, and I saw reality’s edge clearly: spend 12 cold minutes warming up and scraping off the car, or 12 warm minutes walking in. So I put on a third layer of wool and rolled up in a humungus down coat. Then boots good to -25 degrees, perhaps because they weigh about 25 pounds. That first morning, I put Gui Boratto in the headphones to evoke the previous winter’s commute (by scooter to the KPJAYI at 4 in the morning).

God, so much excitement came up. By the time I crossed under the tracks between Water Hill and downtown proper, I was jogging. Rolled in to the shala more or less on fire.

It’s been like that most mornings since. The snow has piled deeper and the nights have gone below zero. Some mornings, it hurts to breathe, and I expend tremendous energy just warming the inhalation enough to extract some oxygen before letting all that warmth flow out of me again. This week, it’s been warm (20 degrees and up) and there have been piles of wet snowman-snow to jump through well before the shovelers hit the sidewalks. The warm snow lines the tree branches, and puffs up high on the seats of the bicycles still locked to parking meters up and down Main Street.

I put a section of Thriller on the playlist recently. The vampire song is perfect for the ghostwalk through Water Hill; and then I kick Beat It patterns in the sidewalk snow on Main. The track after that is Billie Jean.

It is interesting what M-J’s little orgasmic “eh!” will do to light up your jalandhara bandha as you jump up the shala stairs. There are moments of chin lock in his moon walk. That’s part of how he bounces and floats like that, from the inside.

This is all still strange, because I’d been under the impression that I hated the cold. There was a string of nights fifteen years ago when I lost the feeling in my fingers and toes. A group of us spent a January telemarking and snow camping in the Three Sisters Wildernees, and I brought only a sleeping bag good to 15 degrees, since (having been raised by a wilderness guide in Montana) I didn’t think much of Oregon winter. One of those nights we pitched camp in a gully alongside a frozen creek, amid a family of lodgepole pine that had burned. Just black matchstick trunks against puffy snow. Three of us snuggled down in our tent for 14 hours, to wait out the night and recover from the work of staying warm in the day. I think I was awake for most of those hours that night, as the temperature dropped well below 15… all the way to 0… and finally to -17.

I was 21 and committed to existentialism, with the memory of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” still too fresh from fifth grade English class. Progressively losing the sensation in my hands and feet was horrifying.

When feeling returned, it was not of the pleasant variety.

But, now it is. 

Dear Tasia and Karen and Chris. Dear Susans, Philip, Jimbo, PaulandJane, Dame Deva M. Dear DoctoRot.

Dear Shiva, in all your forms, from fixer to festival king. Dear Krishna Tailor, and the demure chin jut of a yes you give me every year on day one, when I ask for another bespoke meditation cushion. Dear Saraswati with your aura out to there and the eye roll to put American teenage girls to shame, and Usha with your easy no-BS wave of the hand, and wild son Sambhav-Spiderman with a cricket bat. Dear Guru early on Saturday morning when it’s just us at your coconut stand. Dear Mysore Carlos. Dear Three Sisters, chapatti mafiosas. Dear Sharath. Especially.

Dear big-eyed new kids, green as first graders, with your territorialism and your photos of the dye stalls at Devaraj market. Dear smug gorgeous cool kids, with your motorcycles and your shortlists and your esoteric Sanksrit knowledge, not to mention your knowledge of the location of Secret Breakfast.

Dear dusk-eyed ticket taker man at Dasaprakash, dear most beautiful chaiwalla son of the Amruth tribe, dear blond matriarch cow who guards the south entrance to 13^th cross and fears no 3am lone motorbike. Dear obscene pool scene at the hotel formerly known as the Southern Star; dear Green Hotel tandoori salad (no capsicum); dear toothless small woman in white, glaring at me in the low entrance of Jayashree’s home. Dear trail of Krishna wailers in the morning; dear Kumar with your Osho aura and your Jesus ringlets and your benevolent superfriend advice in my ear. Dear Sunday-school led intermediate, with your chakra-blowout forays into third. Dear coconut chutney from Sri Durga Bhavan on High Tension Road. Dear Violet, trusty scooter. Dear dust-laced soot-mist in the mornings, when I’ve been to insane perfect joy and back three times over since waking, and now it’s time for post-practice 6am chai.

Dear puckish ghosts of Contour Road. Dear humans whose ashes clog my lungs on the shortcut past the crematorium. Dear Chamundeshwari on full moon nights on your hill. Dear humungus pure white birds in the rice fields on the road to Srirangapathnam. Dear Mohammed, whose prayer wails sound out the segregated Gokulam boundary every morning at 3. Dear rickshaw noise, in the background of every experience. Dear sweaty walls of KPJAYI, the closest thing I know to temple.

Mysore, Do you care that I miss you? Four winters with you is not so long. For all you know, I stayed away this year because I lost interest.

Just as well. I’ll not describe the ache in my belly, which arises sometimes when I don’t wake up on 13^th cross. When I start counting the days until January 2014, I’m not going to mention it. Also, there is a very specific feeling that comes with the process of meditating on you every day, devotedly, and by choice: but again, that’s not for words to say.

To put words on this particular suffering would largely alleviate it. The second emotions like these get sentimentalized, they start to decay in to lies. Falling in love with a lifeworld on the other side of the world is so, very cheesy.

But it’s also sentiment that keeps me from saying more.

Because if I put this suffering into words, it will be outside of me. Then I will see it clearly, dis-identify from it, and it will disintegrate. Poof. Saying it will make it less true.

Some things are stronger when not spoken.

But I will tell you this.

That ragged edge on the upper inside-right lobe of my lung, right behind the big muscle that pumps my blood – that one raw edge that starts to vibrate and pull in on itself, and that becomes moist when the total sensory memories of you are strong… OH GOOD GOD so much pleasure flows into me if I just let that space stay open instead of contracting it down around the nub of missing you. Weird how that works. I'm going with it.

I would not miss this placetime that is here to me now for anything. Missing you makes this Ann Arbor winter so much sharper, cleaner, and more itself. There is something to that cliche about a little pain opening up the space for joy.

But there is little time to say it… because I’m off to bed. The alarm goes off at 3am here too. Mysore, you taught me to experience that as an art. 

Stop the self-congratulation train, I want to get off.

Talking to you, Elephant Ashtanga. And you, yoga teachers with bios written in the third person and featuring the phrase “is a dedicated practitioner.” 

Should we really be talking so loudly this about how our practice is so searingly honest, and so radically no-bullshit, and so relentlessly badass?

How badass is that? How much room is there for the hard questions in the, like, seventh- series- smug narrative? Vulnerability? The still small voice?

Let’s save the self-massage for those aching intermediate series quadriceps.

I’m remembering the history of the ashtang-o-sphere tonight. I can see four distinct eras and the rise of a fifth.

1.0 was a yahoo group. Burned up in a flame war featuring pre-crash hedge fund managers. Still out there, Senor Pinche Wey?

2.0 was the EZBoard, rising out of those flames. Solid gold, with a little snark on the side. This lurker read every word. And so can you. I suggest it. The ashtang-o-sphere was never better.

3.0 was blogs. Remember those? Blogspot all the way. Practice journals. Whole people. Big questions. Relationships. Much funnier flame wars. I visited fellow bloggers in Seattle, Santa Barbara, Encinitas, Portland, Boston, Scottsdale, Austin, NYC, London, Toronto… where else? Oh yeah, Ann Arbor. We called it the cyber-shala.

4.0 was when entrepreneurs figured out that posting every day could generate some newly coveted internet energy. And following the media experts’ lead, ashtanga teachers discovered the same thing. Bling. Content got more frequent, more shallow, more driven, and more naked. Not a bad thing. I just bore easily.

5.0 is coming. It is partly small groups in chat-rooms. Did you know? Yes, it’s totally happening. It’s the EZBoard with gate-keeping and way better technology. From cyber-shala, to cyber-sangha. Thank you, skype and google hangouts.

But, for all the sparks in the splinter groups, 5.0 will be more about what emotions… what driving questions… what thrills… what spiritual turn-ons… what images… what community slang… we bring out of ourselves in “public.” In the feeds anyone can see.

What are our values now?

I dunno. Let’s start again. Here’s what I’ve been missing around these parts.

Brokenness. Not-knowing-ness.

Slily-enthusiastic-awkward shit. Stupidcrazy openness.

Surrender to what is. And of what is not.

Like, don’t break your spirit. Do break your exoskeleton.

The jyotish charts say tonight is the end of an era allright. And goddam these crusty old yoga myths can be useful.

12.12.12 is staked out in the myth – from the best we can decipher – for a massive karmic burn.

Of old identities, old defenses, and especially old grudges.

Pull it out of the gut. Ughhhh. Yes. Write it down on a piece of kindling. Get a match.

Forgiveness is coming.

Have I mentioned my relationship with Denver airport? Tonight at sunset, we drove up to the circus tent terminal, past the homicidal horse. His red LED eyes were on fire, as was the sky out over the Rockies.

Eh, the sky over the Rockies is always blood red when you're on the 7pm direct to Detroit, as I've been thrice in 2012. This place is so Cormack McCarthy. But twenty days out from 12.12.12, it feels less menacing than ever. I want to pitch a tent here and call it a retreat.

On our way through security just now, my brother made that suggestion. Since it's the only place I've been able to write aimlessly since 2010, why not make Denver Airport a destination and stay here until a writing voice sputters back online?

Thinkin' about it. But last month, I turned the home-shala into an office when my brother dropped a giant apple screen in the mail for my birthday. I crack the sacrilegious laptop in that sanctified space and think of SKPJ smacking the wall open-handed and yelling THIS is god! Excel spreadsheets, workshop curricula, endless University administration… Boom. Light a candle and throw open the lid. THIS is god.

Still, Denver airport clears my head best. It's a massive vritti magnet; it's on the high plains in the middle of nowhere; it’s shaped by epic doomsday fantasies of a thousand dying Cold Warriors. Its form is undifferentiated gate after gate, gate, gate… tracing out a massive hash-tag on the land.

On each descent, I think of flying over the Nazca lines, and love this place a little more.

Anyway. My family just spent a day and a night soaking in mineral hot springs on Mount Princeton. (The neighboring peaks – some of the highest on the continent – are Mounts Harvard, Yale, Columbia. Apparently mountains can be derivative. Sigh.)

We rolled up the dark valley at 6 Thanksgiving night. It was hard to navigate; all we had were a bit of light (cabins) and sound (creek) bouncing off sheer cliff walls. There was a lot of empty black before the big stars opened up above, so apparently those walls went up a long way. We found something like a resort check-in, and, getting out of the Impala, realized the temperature had dropped 40 degrees in the previous 100 minutes and 2,000 feet. A beautiful (drunk) woman there treated us like locals. She said: just take the footpath and look for the dome.

The dome was far away but easy to find. First you just follow the glow, taking care to step in the crunchy, gravelly areas. Then the dome peeks up like a translucent pillow down the creek bed. It's a little bit Emerald City.

Turns out that “the dome” is just a white sheet, probably cut from the same stuff as the airport tents. It is pinned to the ground, and billows up over a very large swimming pool. The pool is heated to 98.6 degrees by mineral water that boils inside the mountain. Against the 20-degree air last night, the steam bloomed up inside the big white sheet. It looked like a glowing white hot air balloon, straining against its mooring. The only light anywhere filtered up from four bulbs at the bottom of the pool, but somehow diffused to make the whole balloon glow softly on the outside.

Inside, we couldn’t see our bodies. These were cold bodies in bathing suits, which had just skated barefoot on iced-over sidewalks. It took my dad the fire chief – turned – emergency room chaplain to figure out the door. It was heavy and wheeled, somehow suctioned back into the dome by the upward rise of the steam inside. The rest of us were a little distracted by being almost naked on icy sidewalks, in the dark, in 20 degrees, with nobody else around. Are we doing this right?

And then we were in the dome. Steamy dark above an expanse of water. The space and the pool had no discernable edges except for the one at our feet. Freezing, we waded in to the dark. But as soon as our bodies went below the water’s surface, they became visible. There was something about the light. It would not diffuse at all into the steam that crowded the surface of the water, but beneath the water, the light played freely. We became visible to ourselves and each other as we went under. My dad saw huge goosebumps on my shoulders disappear as my flesh returned to being the same temperature is my inner body.

The air is the same temperature as our skin, my brother said. Is there any difference between this and a sensory deprivation tank?

Yes and no. We floated away from each other, exploring the boundaries of that space, investigating to see if we were alone. More than 10 feet away from each other or the edge of the pool, the steam above the water socked everything in. The only stimulus, then, was warm condensation plopping onto surface of the nearby water and, maybe every ten minutes, right onto our heads.

We sounded the place out. Hello? Mom? Can you feel the bottom? We didn’t know who else might be in there, or what they might be doing.

The steam mostly ate the voices. I found a far edge and swam the perimeter, singing Canta, No Llores. Then singing started to strain my lungs, so I made anonymous words. Echo. Location. Echo. Location. Echolocation. Nothing came back but occasional signs of my nuclears. So, we were in there alone on Thanksgiving night. We stayed I don’t know how long, letting the hundred degree water do half the work of digesting our pie.

The boundary of above/below water was negligible. The air I was breathing was heavy with water, so eventually it seemed natural to stay under the surface for long periods of time. The weirdest images would come up to consciousness each time my head surfaced into the steam.

I’ve forgotten most of it already, like any of the random stuff that filters in from unconsciousness when we are in the sensory deprivation tank of dreams. It’s the same in meditation practice when consciousness gets a little gunky – it’ll throw up what Shinzen calls “image salad” as things clear out and quiet down.

But in the pool with my family, the edge of consciousness and the stuff beyond it was a little different in its texture and content. And in its sense of humor. I saw the Hobbit played by Tom Hanks, and popped up to the surface gasping and annoyed that my least favorite actor had rendered yet another holiday blockbuster unwatchable. Next, there was a quasi-dream of my cat with the head of an Elephant, sitting sphinx-like in front of a scroll. Also, pulling my body underneath the water, I suddenly felt I was a benevolent microbe inside my own body, treading through my blood.

But mostly I kept dreaming my primary relationships. Teachers and family and intimates – treading through dreams of them there in that bubble. Mother, father, brother, best friends, particular animals, landscapes, plants. (Airports.) Dominic and Jayashree and Narasimhan have come back in to my world in the past month, so their feeling was all ionized in my memory.

I guess it figures that my relational subconscious would bubble up so easily in a space that is all water and echoes.

There was a strong pull of personal responsibility in it. The emotions and associations would clarify as long as I could bear to stay under the surface. The echoes I created were my own, and the degree to which I wanted to attribute them to my intimates, my family, my teachers – that was up to me. I was the one actually making noise, blowing bubbles, diving through my own latent dreamscapes.

Mostly. Eventually, my brother floated up out of nowhere and bopped me on the head. We laughed. Then we ran out into the freezing cold, and toward a 110-degree pool with its surface open to the sky.

I started learning advanced with Dominic six years ago. Yesterday in his room, I did that same practice – same as I’ve done most every weekday since – while he held space for me and my students. Then we drove to Detroit. In the passenger seat, he talked about how ashtanga works primarily in the field of the subconscious, about the legacies of Ernest Rossi, about when to speed up or slow down in the process of “carving deeply into the nervous system.” The light in the falling leaves was perfect. Then we went to a museum and looked at a towering Giacommetti, an ironic sculpture of a wooden motorcycle (vroom vroom), suits of armour for Templar knights (those old warriors were itty bitty), and Diego Rivera’s apocalyptic frescoes of the auto industry.

Reposting this for those among us who have been talking with Dom this week about the subconscious. When I wrote this, I was just beginning to suspect that nonverbal instruction was more powerful than what the modern LA vinyasa scene had to offer. But I really didn’t get it yet. I was still dazzled by yoga words and yoga ideas.

_______________

FEBRUARY, 2007. LOS ANGELES.

I just transcribed my notes from last week’s class observation. When students were in a wide-legged forward fold with heads approaching or on the ground, the instructor said this: “Lift your thighs as you press the feet down. Dig the shoulderblades in toward the chest and, if you want come into tripod, come on up. Stay with your breath: the quality of your breath is the quality of your practice.”

With that unremarkable, almost parenthetical suggestion, one of the visiting dancers (whose 15-minute solo to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on Saturday night at UCLA put my date in near-ecstasy, though I found it it was a little emotionally overwrought) lifted up like nothing into a headstand.

With apologies to third-rate 1990s anthropology (the “texts read us” school), the action did her. It was at least as natural as breath. I wondered for a second if my friend and teacher T was doing a Milton Erickson number on the class or had spent some time with the offspring of the genius. (That would be Richard Bandler, who turned neuro-linguistic programming into something unhelpfully interpretive, John Grinder, who used its magic for ill and destroyed himself, or the next generation like ultimate lifecoach Tony Robbins, who has distilled NLP technology into riches and cheese.) NLP, which builds on hypnosis, the practitioner’s intuitions, and the beauty of the possible, is a way of getting people out of their own way. It shortcuts our dumb cogitations and resistant-tense realities by integrating radical suggestion so into the fabric of taken for grantedness that we act upon it. Through this radical, unselfconscious action, we change our meager selves.

Echo that this morning, when I was instructed to take up “Siva’s terrible aspect,” a posture in honor of the diety’s skull-amulet-bearing, fratricidal side.

Before putting myself into bhairvasana for the first time today—or rather, letting it take me into itself with another’s guidance—I had feared that it would be something of a long, slow trainwreck: a daily undertaking that could open up my sacroiliac joints to an unsustainable gape. Make me a bag of ligamentless bones by 50.

A year ago, maybe; but my body’s been tilled for for this and it’s simply a nice, new little habit that takes me to a previously unknown part of myself.

I can say this only because the way the posture was given made it second nature, if not downright natural. No big deal.

This is because my teacher understands the power of suggestion, and how to relate with a student in or near theta state to create an easy and beautiful reality out of our weirdest possibilities. Not only is this teacher on to the NLP (a comment about establishing rapport the first day made me suspicious), but he just doesn’t complicate the yoga.

It’s so easy for any teacher to revive and rehash her own students’ resistances to authority and needs for attention—the dynamics we learn with our first teachers, our parents—into the learning relationship.

This bit of baggage can be incredibly subtle, present in even the most beautiful student-teacher dynamics. Even after years of observing and draining the blood out of my bodymemory of being an authoritarian-preacher’s kid, I sometimes feel these seeds sprout up as I interact with my gracious mentors, or sit one of my own students down in my university office.

But this morning’s teaching was uncomplicated with such stumblingblocks, with which we sometimes decorate reality so-defined. This is a gift, one this particular teacher both exhibits and bestows.

Santa Monica. January 17, 2008.

The location was YogaWorks, Montana Avenue. Where American-style 200-hour yoga teacher trainings began. At the time, the YW corporation was buying out local, poor yoga studios all over the country; and it was packaging its teacher training program for distribution all over the world. The whole yoga market we now take for granted was building steam.

But a decidedly different subculture was turning the Mysore room to entropic ecstasy every morning. Straight lineage-limned shakti, though I didn't recognize its energy signature at the time. It was still another 14 months before I'd dig my toes into the dust and elephant dung out behind Wodeyar's Mysore Palace, and experience the grimy grit of said paydirt below. All we knew then was that Dominic was back in town and everyone wanted to be with us in that room. I'd just started apprenticing. After I wrote this, I listened to Prince while looking at youtube videos of mushroom clouds and thinking about Shiva.

Close to five years later now, the cycle comes back around. On the other side of the country. In a totally different subculture. With much less experienced practitioners who, oddly, have much stronger concentration. But the energy signature, it is the same. Same, same. Same. Hello, 2012.

……………………………………………………………………………….

Serious fucking alchemy. Can I say that?

Yes.

Breakfast with the ineffable again this morning. Probably, it is always this good, but my mind forgets to note it.

Oh who am I kidding? This is special. Serious. Fucking. Alchemy.

How many days in a row are we going to hit paydirt like this, kids? Are you wondering the same?

Yeah, you give up the digging of a thousand shallow wells. Choose a method and just mine it mine it mine it like a dirty methodical little drone…, and now and then you hit a vein like this.

Think you can take it to the bank? Want compensation for your efforts or your surrender? Want to buy in? Riiiiight. Not packaged for resale. It’s here and it’ll be gone soon. I’m too much my teacher’s student to hold it or him or us tightly, and this only increases the joy. Like contemplating death increases your living.

The room is packed to the point of a waiting line, because everyone in fifty miles whose value of practice edges out her compulsive need to be right is on a mat in that room. Post-political practice space, right here for the making. Get in! Carpe manduka.

Many days, there is no assistant. A few who have been at this thing a little longer will give a neighbor an adjustment in supta vajra or pachimo. I’ve been doing a pretty strict counted practice this week, and this highlights strongly the relationships that facilitate my rhythm and those that do not. One companion, I can come to the top of a vinyasa, shift over for his supta vajra, breathe him through it and take one step to the mat without ANY shift in mental state. He doesn’t reach for any talky talky connecting, doesn’t put some kind of lowly beta-level awareness on me. And I come back to the top of the mat just like I’d added a posture—supta vajrasana B—between chakorasana and bhairvasana. Two others on that same train in the immediate perimeter, but another who hasn’t quite caught on. I love her just fine, but if the greater good is to contribute to the collective rhythm that supports the alchemy, I have to let her wait for the teacher. Because his awareness, given which he’s doing and what he’s done, is less fragile than mine.

I got in the car and Prince's song Seven was on the stereo, loud. What I get for blaring Back in Black, from the Unholy Los Angeles Driving Mix cd my brother made a while back, because I thought it a good way to toast RPK this morning. Or at least so it seemed on the jaunt from bathroom floor pranayama to the door of my car, as the CDs live in a big cramped bookcase in the hallway. And it did work nicely for cruising Santa Monica Blvd in the dark, though I did frighten a homeless man at a stoplight. Anyway I took the high road (Wilshire) back here to the working class fringes of Santa Monica, rocking Prince's version of the apocalypse and definitely in a state unfit for operating a motor vehicle.

That’s a lot of apocalyptic Americana from twenty years back. But AC/DC and Prince never knew the shift in consciousness would look like this. This quiet, this early in the morning, and as much about working hard as it is about letting loose.

This morning, 4am. So hot, but unlike summer, no sign of dawn. The Huron River had particulated up over the shore, into the witching-hour mist that the drunks and I get to enjoy. Like a steam bath, but infused with mulch and possum dander instead of eucalyptus. When I turned the key in the Honda, the radio blasted aa-oooOOOOo, werewolves of London. Hello, mulabandha. Hello, fall.

It’s the biggest university in the country, and our town’s population just doubled. Today begins new academic careers (including the Editor, uh, Junior Professor’s), new research projects, new cohorts, new departments, new dorms… a new constitution. It is intoxicating.

For Mysore practice, the moons fall on the calendar’s Saturday free spaces all the way until mid-October. The Gregorian rhythm (Saturday rests) and the Hindu ritual rhythm (moon day rests) are moving in their biannual phase of alignment. Click. I love it when this happens.

 <From Friday 9/31, between Edinburgh and Paris>

Two matrices stacked under the sun on Normandy – earth level, cloud level. We just flew over France’s turquoise and white coastline, on a zigzag route from Edinburgh to Det-waugh via Chas de Gaulle. The bottom layer is the land, checkerboarded in evergreen patches and yellow fields – equal amounts and even distribution of each. How French of them. Above that, a layer of bright, boxy clouds imitate the land pattern. There is empty sky for each patch of trees, and a swelling little cumulus for each planted field.

Two hours ago: driving east through a full moon sunrise on Edinburgh. Cold and golden. The whole old city is crusty black stalagmite spires as potent and spiritually penetrating as any Mysore shivalingam.

Routed in circles by construction on 6am empty streets, we were stopped at a T in front of the Scottish Episcopal Cathedral. The sun was coming up. Fast, the 8 or 10-story face of the church turned from black to gold. We stared up at it from a robin’s egg blue Suzuki, and then got moving again; and then I was on this plane.

It has been one moon cycle in Edinburgh, flying in at the nadir of consciousness and the mid-August heyday of the dark side. New moon + the Fringe festival. I tossed in ashtanga and pratyhara and let that whole ball wax for two weeks.

I come here because it darkens my dreams. Six or seven years ago, my nightly dreamscape got cute. We’re talking candy canes and gummy bears that float like clouds, and beautiful (frequently edible) lakes and waterfalls against a backdrop of lush green. This year, a flock of floating possum-elephants—exactly 17 of them, every night—migrated to this dreamscape. They have zebra-striped stomachs and fly in the method of Bunjee, the cartoon character from a 1984 ABC Weekend Special. Owl Whisperer (O.W. is my shrink – all Mysore teachers should have one) calls it my happy place. But I don’t know. It’s borderline intolerable. 

Last night in my cold bed in Marchmont, I dreamed I walked in on a root canal op that the patient wanted to escape, because the doctor’s hands were morphing in to those of a monkey. As we left, a sign in the air said ZEN DENTIST. Later, there was a cluster of drunks in the doorway of a church made out of the rocks from Stonehenge – I saw the tissues of the drunks’ livers pulsing dark red and green under their ribs. Like E.T., but (thank Shiva) without a trace of cute. Wednesday night, a hairy film professor in a corset and floppy RenFair hat was afraid that a skating rink’s concession stand was selling poisoned currant pudding. Everyone was eating that pudding. He/she pulled me aside and told me to help track the suspect, Geoffrey Chaucer. Then we were desperately chasing Chaucer. On roller skates. And we were pissed.

Who knows why this happens in my mind here. But I appreciate that the Scots are relaxed about their darksides. And that the ashtangis here are the most honest practitioners I have ever met. They have grit, and modesty that smells like history. And milk; when I finish teaching I smell of milk. Sometimes their honesty highlights my Americanness– the ways this culture makes us our personalities a bit like fast food, with some aspects supersized, and plastic fluff mixed in with the shakes.

Other times, Scotland gives me a break from Americanness – there’s a sort of droll, dirt-under-the-fingernails refinement that begins to make sense. Royal decrepitude: the result of walking around all day on stone and bone, instead of concrete and carpet. Last week I dreamed about lizard people scratching homes and runes out of mulch-dirt; and later imagined those were my ancestors.  It feels like the bones of those people are ground into the land and sucked back up from there into the milk; so, although all milk that’s not Indian chai is a little gross, here I take a spot of it with my tea.

<from Paris>

Now “here” is an airport. We’ve begun the descent. All this verbalizing – I feel like I’m clearing the cobwebs from manomaya kosha. (Manomawhat? The verbal-analytical layer of a human. Know your koshas, yo.) 

In my being, mental talk follows from emotions, body memories, and intuitive tremors in the solar plexus and the lining of the lungs. Or the talk starts from a feeling of coming unhinged at the back of my skull, after a snap of the sacrum through the fifth lumbar (which, incidentally—after 17 months of ida nadi shitstorms—has healed). Yoga philosophy says the talk actually bubbles up from the void. I don’t know, but I’ve missed you, manomaya. 

After Scotland last August, I mostly stopped reading and writing. Something had to go. But now the Mysore room is giving more energy than it takes, like the coveted technologies at the heart of both this summer’s superhero movies. (Horribly, yes, Batman and The Avengers were the only films I attended this year.) So maybe writing will happen.

Either way, here’s a secret. Even if you experience torrents of compulsive internal talk, your verbal-analytical stream really can grow quiet. Why do you think the ancients bothered with this stuff? Practice can give you a fully functional off-button for the sound of the voices in your head. And not just by accident. There are purifications and techniques that summon stillness.

I’m not sure how many yoga practitioners actually know this. It takes strong concentration, a long attention span, and people who can tell you what to do because they’ve been there. There is not intermediate series. Oh sorry, advanced series. Come on, dear hunters of pidgeon, duck and that mythic pair of one-footed-crows. EXCITE ME. Is it not time to get some pose santosha and kick the mainline practice up to the next kosha?