What is Ahimsa? Or, How to be Sexy. · 12 January 2012

Chai craving. Starting in the pit of my brain stem, jumping through my throat to the base of the tongue, steaming phantom smells up into the sinuses and anticipatory pictures behind my eyes. Evidently, the addiction circuit is fully re-wired!

Full Mysore reboot successful. Estimated transition time: 13 days.

The particle transfer takes time. We trade out molecule for molecule, fading in as if onto the Holodeck.

At first, it’s a drug trade. Serotonin for melatonin – a few days of learning to get sleepy at 5pm, and wakeful at 3 in the morning. Meantime, my cells drain out pure Michigan tap water, pumping in coconuts, cows' milk and Kinley club soda.

My sinuses always crust over at first, trying to insulate the system from rickshaw exhaust. I give them a week to freak out, then go back to jalaneti. By now, one sinus-shower per day feels sufficient to polish the soot off my pineal gland. Though sometimes the amrit still comes down tasting like barbeque sauce, and then I hit the shat kriyas (ok, catvari kriyas) a little harder.

It is very, very beneficial to merge. Accept the air and the water into your organism (that is what we are, mostly: water and space); let yourself eat food that’s really from here (cooking at home is a great idea); walk on the streets filled with people who are always and only of this place.

In the meantime, the liminal period is buzzy. Feet way off the ground after practice, social interactions ecstatic but spacey, diffuse & directionless sexual energy. It’s insanely nice – there is so much gratitude and excitement. But, for most of us, the couple of weeks of transition also features huge amounts of more-or-less conscious suffering.

Today, ashtangis are stategizing about ways to beat jet lag. And I agree: be smart. (My complete strategy is: purchase at least 2 liters of water and drink it all, take 2 melatonin, and of course don’t eat). But come on. The confusion, disorientation and pain in our bodies upon arrival is directly reflective of the crap those flights generate for a bigger body called Earth. These flights are not free.

Our bodies are karmic hotspots. Yoga is here to make this conscious. It also gives us tools to turn down the heat - to become energy-efficient. As a part of this process, jet lag is extremely good information. Do not dismiss it, take it for granted, or drug yourself unconscious so you don't have to experience it. If you want to sensitize your nervous system to its inner and outer environments - i.e., if you want to use this for yoga - it's really interesting pay as much attention as you can when things get weird. 

If you are one of those practitioners really asking yourself "what is ahimsa" (as Sharath recommended last Sunday in conference), you probably get this already: jet fuel propels karma. There's no need to get moralistic or judgey about it: but you can simply use your body to get this information. The nervous system and the gut just start to tell you when things aren't quite right.

The ways my body-mind revolts after a long haul’s worth of radiation and recycled oxygen: well… that seems like the best information I can possibly find to inform future actions. I'll use the yogic texts too: a little while before the advent of internal combustion engines, they were telling yogis not to travel.

But my body is the primary source of my ethics now. Weirdly, the HYP says that's how it should be. Ethics are not conceptual, theoretical, religious. They arise naturally as the nervous system purifies and consciousness clears. When projections start to get out of the way, what we perceive is actually pretty good information about the internal and external environment.

Personally, here's my present feel for the situation. It's is a real pain in my ass (considering the way last week's Q-L surge has pinballed to the piriformis), but when I ask my gut about the bottom line of these winter retreats to Mysore, here's her response. "Owlio, I know you like to travel light, but it's going to take a LOT of future service to yoga to rebalance this energy."

Meh. Manifest reality is a drag. Relatively. 

I really connect with the long-term practitioners who have gotten to the point of admitting that lots of himsic (violent) activity (e.g. eating animals, indiscriminate use of natural resources) really can feel good in our singular bodies. No need to deny it. But, along with their internal body-awareness, these people’s self-definition has also grown. They are increasingly inter-connected with everyone and everything else. Since their “self” includes much of their environment (sensate if not insensate) their own human bodies aren't the only parts whose welfare matters. Far from it, considering that their bodies are extremely energy-efficient.

One confused ashtanga blogger is pushing caveman Cross-Fit morality on practitioners, advising that they deny carb cravings and consider gnawing on drumsticks because they need to "look good naked." This is so not hot. It's a magazine cover. It's a teen girl self-loathing project. It's an advertisement for diet products and everything else. It's a Protestant self-control cult.  Ultimately it's a morality that says consume whatever it takes. Me first. 

HOW unsexy. 

Having a body that only takes what it needs, and that resonates with animals and plants and cities and forests and the various layers of other humans: SEXY.

That's tantra, by the way. Building out your resonance, and building it in. It doesn't really matter what you do with that subtlety, and with the care and concern it creates in your heart. Eat meat if you want. Drink Pepsi. Put all kinds of chemicals down your drains. We all have to draw the line somewhere. Ahimsa is a sensitizing principle, for navigating an inherently violent reality. There is no pure ahimsa in the manifest realms.

But this is the thing with the long term practitioners. I watch as you keep pushing the envelope of your own nervous systems. Your "self"-awareness goes in deeper, and at the same time it extends out incredibly far. In a practical, horribly real way, plants start to feel sentient. The planet starts to feel sentient. 

Trippy.

Anyway. Each trip to Mysore, I try to pay attention to what I’m not paying attention to. What have I been making unconscious just to get by? Jadedness is a strong tendency in me. For now, this reminds me that I love Karen’s eyes. Today, she is like my taken-for-grantedness heat sensor. Though, of course, multiple exposures to Mysore would not fry her sensors the same way it does others of us (in some cases, people get jaded on Mysore without coming here much at all). But she is pretty zen. It’s fresh.

After all that rambling, my chai craving has died. But Karen is here for chai. Long live the chai!

Jai Mysore.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , integration , morality , self-deception

Garland of Skulls · 5 January 2012

So I don’t talk about my personal practice, or student-teacher relationships, or “my” pain. That specific kind of chit-chat is bad practice, and always has been. (Always, as in millennia.)  Besides, these things are intimate and fleeting. Clouds in the coffee.

And not to get you worried but… have you read the Hathayogapradipika? If not, I’ll paraphrase that and some other sages here. At first, the best places to read this stuff are Muktibodhananda’s translation of the Pradipika and some commentaries on Patanjali’s Fourth Pada. Here’s the big idea: getting very specific in talky talky about your relationship with your teacher, and your attainments, is bad juju. A sincere practitioner should be super-careful about attracting attention like that. It’s not that the techniques should be secret – by all means, let the esoteric shit be known! But in the meantime: Don’t pimp out your practice! Spiritual materialism = turning poses and such into “adornments of the ego.” But if we make the mala of postures in to a piece of jewelry, it’ll just decay into a heavy, rotting necklace of skulls.

(Insert Durvasa/ pirate accent) Arrrrrr!

I have rambled like this as a strategy to repel most readers before they get this far. For those still reading, I’ll now contradict it all by talking openly about my practice. Because this story turned into a topic of conversation at the coconut stand yesterday (re-told by witnesses), I may as well blog it out in service of something bigger (i.e., the definition at the end of the post).

So here’s the story. Monday, I’m in Gokulam, sitting on my hands. Except, not exactly. Because I’m at Command Central, sandwiched in middle of like a hundred ashtangis in the thick of practice, and while balanced on my hands my mulabandha is working its allotted five breaths of gravity-defiance while my left leg is wrapped around my head and my right foot is hanging up in the air in chakorasana.  And my teacher, Sharath, looks down on me from approximately the height of Mount Meru and says Noooooo! Intermediate series only, you do! After this, intermediate only!

And I’m like, oh. He just told me that I no longer practice Advanced Series. Ok. From now on, I practice Intermediate.

This is the practice.

When I first came to Mysore four years ago, I was practicing almost full Advanced, having learned it and practiced it four days a week for a few years with three different Certified teachers. And upon getting here, I practiced primary series.

That is how it works. We come here for the gift of having the world of the practice made new. To be reborn. To be relieved of our knowing, jaded, all-mine, me-me expertise. To see the strange in the familiar… and to take the time for the merely strange to become stranger still. (Which, if you make par for the course by changing your ticket to stay for that third month, it will. Usually, the spirit world waits until the third month to come alive in you. But that’s another story.)

The first year, Sharath taught me (and I do mean taught – the matieral was sparkly-new in this context) the first bit of intermediate. Then he left town. And his mother, Saraswati, gave me the entire rest of the series in a single day. I thought she was kidding, so for two days I did not do as she instructed. Finally, she yelled at me for practicing primary. So, ok. I practiced intermediate. Then the next year, to my surprise, I returned. And I continued as instructed. Then Sharath asked me if I’d learned the whole intermediate series from him. I said no, and suggested I go back to midway through the series so that he and I could work through it together. I realized that this was asking a lot of him – he would have to give me energy that he could give to someone else. But it seemed right for my practice – I wanted those few moments of pure transmission from him, when he would have to notice that my practiced needed to move on, and take the time to go through a new vinyasa with me. He said my suggestion was good, and in so doing gave me the opportunity to be shiny-new yet again.

Hey, it’s India. Have you read the Mahabharata? The whole dying thing is kind of sketchy around here. Time moves in circles. And it’s not that abnormal for Mount Meru to materialize in the middle of the shala, and then bubble under again just like that.

So anyway, on Monday when he publicly takes away Advanced Series, my  body responds by proceeding to backbends and finishing without the arising of entitlement, embarrassment, anger, et cetera. No problem. It wasn’t until happy hour at the Coconut Stand that I learned that many people in the room had noticed what happened and experienced empathetic humiliation as a result. They broached the topic as if peeling back the bandages of a horrible wound. As if I had been gored by an otherwise peaceful Mysore cow, as if they were gingerly, compassionately observing my mangled ego. They wanted to help me with the delicate work of self-reconstruction, as if Advanced Series were a vital organ and now I’d have to learn to live without it.

Thankfully, previous rounds of postural give-and-take inoculated me. Previous arbitrariness guards against the certainty of future loss. When old age takes the postures for the last time, well then maybe there will be some blood. But for now, having Advanced taken away loudly in the middle of the shala is THE PRACTICE. (Hilariously, Sharath called me into the vestibule and gave the poses BACK after practice the same day. So then they were mine again. And then two days later my quadratus lumborum took them away again. Today, the Q-L and ahimsa teamed up to take away the second half of primary series too.)

Anyway, this is an example of the deep ground of this method. It sets arbitrary constraints, and we let the ego balk at them until it can simply observe them. Then we continue accepting and just being with the reactions until there is no I/me/mine left to care at all.

Come to Mysore, and immediately these constraints are placed on the ego:

(1)   You must practice with the body you have today (practicing in a fantasy body of the past or the future = structural damage).

(2)   You must do the postures you are given (feeling entitled to more or less = pure, pitiful suffering).

(3)   You must come at the time you are given (cutting in front of other people = compromising their faith that this practice actually does chill us out).

(4)   You must clarify and simply the activity of the body and breath (doing otherwise will garner unwanted attention)

This aspect of constraint is so central to the method that I’d actually use it to define the practice. So while it is also true that Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is:

(1) …. a sequence of postures linked by blah blah blah.

(2) …. an asana program designed to heal and purify the physical, energetic blah blah blah.

(3) … an ancient practice transported from the Himalayas by confused leaf-cutter ants who accidentally blah blah blah.

            ...AVY method is also, in essence:

A SERIES OF CONSTRAINTS PLACED ON THE EGO.

Don't imagine you understand it if you're letting your ego run wild across the surface of some shapes, switching it up as the vrittis pull you this way and that, reacting to the reactions on reactions, identifying with the achievements, never letting any outside constraints put these machinations of the small self in check.

When it's taken as a practice, it is a process of working with the same constraints day after day, in relationship with teachers, community, clear method, and the physical body. These parameters (body, method, teacher, community) are wonderful, dependable, even semi-objective sources of feedback for the ego. Bless them, they are the providers of constraint. The method uses these constraints to create freedom.

This is a kind of simulation of enlightenment. It is not a dissolving of the ego. Rather, it is a set of practices that give us the opportunity to act as if the ego has already been dissolved.

Do it long enough, and yeah, maybe the skull necklaces we’re all wearing around here really will crumble to dust. That's when we'll know we're beyond method.

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Never not here · 25 November 2011

Today I woke up when a wand dropped in to my hand. Yesterday, same thing. I flicked my wrist, heard the wand hit the floor 3 feet down, and returned to sleep. Alone and prone in the bed, insulated from the sun and cold by flannel sheets, Pendleton wool and feathers, plus a feather pillow on my head. Just arms exposed: palms up, and one shoulder for each cat to use as a pillow. Zelda goes right, Lynxx left.

If contentment can be ecstatic—santosha as samprajnata—it is in waking up naked, two cats burying noses in your neck, warming your shoulders with their feather-soft chests, and bubbling their bellies in your armpits. They migrate to my lymph nodes, which are hormone and sweat centers. But does the bliss body—the anandamaya— also leak from these recesses? Are they portals for nervous system entwinement?

Cats purr to create and express emotions, playing them out up and down nature’s most wonderful spines. Biologists can’t explain it. They debate whether purring is about safety, or happiness, or love, or joy. As if a mammal’s nervous-emotional system has only one channel. There are many different ways to experience yes.

I wonder how many cat-people wake naked amid cuddles and flash on Annie Liebowitz’s photograph of John and Yoko in bed. Seen from above, do we look something like that? Could our interspecies entwinement feed a peace movement like the bed-ins of ‘69?

Back to waking up. This morning, the wand I’d flicked to the floor came back to my hand. Zelda Pingala must have been pushing it in to my palm. I stayed still, covered in blankets, but curled fingers around the wand like a baby building out its nervous system. Zelda is training me to play her favorite game—feather-stick—at all hours.

But I needed to sleep. I’d spent the two previous nights doing foot patrol in dark, 33-degree rain, searching for her runaway sister Lynxx. Last week, Lynxx hid my eyeglasses while I was in the shower with suitcases for Canada at the back door. I had to drive to Niagara Falls with old lenses. I returned Saturday, and was re-packing the luggage on Monday. As I slipped outside to double-check the house-sitter’s keys, Lynxx made a break for freedom. I cornered her against the house and she went feral, doubling in size and flying past me, though a neighbor’s yard, and beyond. Two days and a missed flight later, a hunting dog found her under a deck. She ran out on bloody white paws, through freezing rain, into the arms of the neighborhood butcher. He’s the new hero on a street of relaxed vegetarians. I’m paying my respects in butter cookies.

Meanwhile, fabulous, softly lit, winter Los Angeles is going on without me. There were practice and tea and lunch and party plans, love-soaked anticipation, and an incoming hit of Vitamin D. Missing these, what’s the diff? Not much. Working with Shinzen shows me exactly how much equanimity I still don’t have on the micro levels of everyday mind, but some of the big cognitive structures have remade themselves since I left California kicking and screaming two years ago. I still often experience who I am as continuous with where I am. But the wheres are somewhat harder to pin down in time and space. Different places and times appear as adjacent nodes in a net of associations. LA and A2 are never not exploding in to each other. Just as Mysore is never not here; Montana is never not here.

For now, it feels I am losing my sense of time the way I once, for four months, lost my sense of the ground beneath me. Circa 2004, Intermediate Series + PhD Prelims blew the doors off my nervous system. It was painful, transcendent, lonely, delusional, inspiring, and changed everything. A total lack of context, spiritual community or support drove me to theorizing (somewhat wrongly) about yoga, but what it took to understand what had happened was a lot more practice. A whole lot more practice. Last week, Shinzen said these things—dark nights, spiritual emergencies, kundalini sickness—should be discussed. People need support. Hmm. That's true. Yet I’ve never said a word about what happened except to my teachers and two close friends.

One thing I found when I went looking to explain the CNS power surge was that it actually doesn’t happen to most ashtangis. SKPJ was a kind of mad scientist; and his method is the most genius and radical healing regime I have ever found. Read the old scriptures. Tristhana is a classical kundalini kickstart. Just as Gopi Krishna found ways to keep that process from happening too quickly, I wonder if most westerners intuitively slow down their own transformation by half-assing the concentration, relaxation, diet or drste. At first, some rajas or tamas intake (emotional, dietary, mental) may act as insulation. Well… ok. There is no virtue or romance in losing the ground under one’s feet.

Without insulation, people who get the doors blown of their nervous systems sometimes land in a psych ward (DSM diagnosis: “Chi Kung – related illness”), or in India (social diagnosis: hippie narcissist). As much as society ridicules both types, something real is going on with these people. The process may be turning them into self-absorbed jerks (as it did to me), but if they work it out they’re apt to evolve beautifully. I suppose I can agree with Shinzen that we can learn from what these people go through. In this sense, having teachers who know the energetic practice is important. But there is not a word written about the energetic practice in ashtanga books, nor here. The good stuff is nonverbal, exchanged person to person.

Anyway. To Zelda and her feather-wand. This morning, after she returned it to my hand and my fingers grasped it, the feathers on the end of the wand fluttered up. She pounced, landing on my leg, which was under three layers of bedding. The next second, Lynxx’s heavier body landed on the other leg. I could see nothing, and my sleeping body would only consent to move my wrist. So I flicked it again. The cats popped up in response, landing on my hips. Then they walked all over the lumps made by my body, flopped their little hindquarters up and down a bit, and purred vigorously. It felt so good! Zeldowlynxx was happy. Cats got attention and play; human got to be 99% passive and receive a massage. We went on that way for ten minutes.

I wonder how else we might enjoy the ways we’re intertwined.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body

Jacks-O'-Lantern · 31 October 2011

We went to Detroit again for Devil’s Night, leaving before the fires appeared in derelict houses and brown-skinned immigrants and paleface hipsters linked arms to defend their neighborhoods. Sunday morning after so-called church, I drove east in to the city, listening to the soul station. Detroit 97.9 JLB: pronounced J, O, B.

The sky was the thin October celestine that transmits so much sound and sight. When the sky is like this, my Rocky Mountain and Pacific coast selves expect snow-dusted peaks in the distance. So my imagination projected Mount Hood, flickering up in the distance on top of Windsor, Ontario. I drove toward the mountain, through downtown, past the redundant bridge and tunnel to Canada, and past the 73-story GM Renaissance Building, which I hadn’t visited since the day they declared bankruptcy in 2009.

The day I rented the benignly haunted 1910 that’s now home. I’m sitting here now, under its huge schoolhouse globes, while people I know carry groceries down Spring Street. A cargo train is rattling the windows. The cats—Zelda Spoonbender and Lynxx Moonpie (a.k.a Falcour, or Pumpkinhead)—are sleeping in an open-hipped jumble on a chair. Zelda is a white witch, but Moonpie is a simple Halloween cat: in addition to the pumpkin-head, she has the black triangle nose of a scarecrow, and a habit of staring at candle-flames for hours.

Yesterday, the soul station took me as far as Detroit’s fantasy island: a half-abandoned, Victorian retreat in the River Rouge, once done-up for 19^th century family weekends. Belle Isle. There are crumbling Coney Island pavilions and a botanical garden. My phone thinks it is someplace else: every time I crossed an invisible line that bisects the baseball fields, it would chime with an SMS warning about the high price of roaming charges in foreign countries.

We joined recent-immigrant families, drunken Marxist urban planners, and Wayne State Lit profs for softball and hot dogs (or, alternatively, Oreo cookie dirt cake with plastic spiders and ghosts). One of the Marxists had just bought a house on the internet for 3,500 dollars. Empty freighters from Montreal limned the water-line between us and Ontario, sounding the Great Lakes Salute. A union plasterer and father of four talked to me about his mother-in-law, who speaks the ancient-otherworldy language of Nahuatl. When she refuses to talk the oppressors’ language (Spanish), he shakes his head and ups the ante: Whatever, he tells her.

Later, Hiram Bingham’s biographer told me about a bounty of Inca skulls he’s just found in a back room of the Smithsonian. They have an extra bone – the Inca Bone – a small, triangular puzzle piece at the peak of shushumna. The stories of ancient brain surgery are true: hundreds of these erstwhile heads had a bone-piece cut out by human hands. There is regeneration at the bone-edges: these Incas went on living after their skulls were opened.

Between games, I walked through overgrown paths in the island’s interior with an exquisite ashtangi who reports for NPR from all over the Latin American political labyrinth. She said Belle Isle felt like Jurassic Park; and she told me about The World Without Us, a book about what it’ll look like when nature re-takes the cities. For example, sea water will plug the New York subways as soon as the pumps shut off, and then the Atlantic will rise into the streets. With that image hanging, we ducked through a hole in a previously electrified fence and through a back door of the abandoned Belle Isle Zoo. The old tiger house is a cell block. Each room has a metal funnel in the center and a fake tree for scratching. From inside, we climbed a service ladder to an elevated walkway once used to view the cats’ fenced-in yards. We took this skywalk to a rotting pavilion, where trees were growing through floorboards and what was left of the broken glass had ground down to pebbles and dust. The ashtangi/foreign correspondent talked about how some days on the mat now her concentration surprises her, just whooshing in to suck all awareness into the breath body. Without effort, or self-congratulation. I said maybe when nature runs its course, entropy is not the only way. Maybe awareness can trip into a habit of self-organization.

Now, before attending the same early-exited Halloween party as last year, I will break the rule on advanced practice and massage. No really: it makes little sense to let someone massage your body when you are doing deep asana practice. My teachers told me to work out my own tension, same as they do. I never thought to do otherwise. But things in the body feel different with the introduction of 28.5 hours of physical instruction per week. A sweet little demon appears under the right jawbone and crouches down, the way it used to do behind the left ilium and then the right scapula. Over the last ten years, ashtanga has taken over this territory from the ground up, starving the cave-dweller and pushing what’s left of her to the edge. Now, she’s hanging on to the chin-jutting sternocleidomastoid, a muscle that sounds like a dinosaur and feels as sinewy.

So this afternoon, I’ll see someone who works the head as if it’s a body part. She approaches from inside, with gloves on. She thumbs my occiput between the vocal chords, opens up the sinuses by stretching the soft palate. Afterwards, my tongue rests on the salty part of my throat, above the top of the mouth. Sometimes it tastes like battery acid; sometimes like sex. The halo-line Kali would trace on my head just before she lopped off the top of my skull to make a drinking goblet: ecstasy bubbles fizz out of this fissure. My head feels like a space-travel capsule cracking a door that’s spent decades under pressure-lock.

Halloween tonight. I wonder if the cats will freak out. This night opens a portal for me every year: three liminal days for hunting demons and winking at hungry ghosts; and then it’s my birthday on the other side. This year, puzzle skullpieces are falling everywhere, and there are dis-em-brained pumpkins on the porches all over the Upper West Side. Last year, we had one cut out with the triangle of an Illuminati eye. This year, the triangle is kind of a peace sign.

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Categories: esoteric shit , evolution , having a body

Carnal Explosives · 16 October 2011

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Categories: esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration

Do you know the way to San Jose? · 31 August 2011

There’s this whole risk of the yoga bait-and-switch, right?

Going forward in the physical practice has this tendency to trip people on to an orthogonal pathway.

Their momentum starts pressing down, instead of forward.   

There are layers. Koshas or something. What I have seen, or heard about, in long-time practitioners is a patterned un-layering. Here’s a rough generalization of many cases. It’s going to sound vague, but these are the words I can find. I’m not using any of them lighly.

Breath-posture + bandha + drste weirdly (and usually unexpectedly) synthesize into OneSinglePractice. I saw someone with crazy natural ability find this within a year once. But it often takes takes thousands of hours of practice (1) with a good teacher and (more importantly?) (2) alongside practitioners who are more subtle than oneself. There are people for whom this has not happened after 10 or 20 years of rigorous practice. Who knows; maybe these folks are actively blocking tristhana with compulsive thinking or emoting. Maybe they just don't accept that drste is as central to the method as breath.

Anyway, if tristhana finally arises, what this seems to deliver next is the subtle body. Somehow. Which eventually, somehow delivers exquisite awareness of the emotional body. Or sometimes this might come before subtle body. Whatever. People have different experiences. After subtle and emotional layers are awake, there’s pretty soon some new information about the shared nervous system of all humans. Then a lot of information on this. And then not just humans but everyone with a nervous system. And then, if the medium of experience becomes some finer sort of energy, it starts blipping on everythig without a nervous system too. (Sometimes weird stuff happens here: a few people have described going from love of all breathing creatures to love that's less mammal-centric. Or, time and space become sort of fluid because energy’s unevenness is apparent.)

Somewhere in there, the unmanifest starts showing up. Even though it’s not supposed to show up. Not supposed to exist. By definition! But the unmanifest, it might send emissaries. Ghouls, for instance. Some people get nicer emissaries. Or just direct feelings of nothing. 

Whatever shows up, it slow-mo chases a person into the perfection of the unmanifest... and straight through it into THIS. Experience as it is, here, now, enough. Where a person is whole, because the apparent opposites have been unified.

That's actual yoga, right? Some people have gone the distance and now have yoga going on most of the time. I am not among them. But I have practiced with and alongside them; and I am following them. These humans are both complete and transparent. They do not have big holes in their lives, nor do they have dark rooms where they keep parts of themselves.They are more able to give, less defensive. More grounded, less sure of what that even means. They are energy-efficient beings. Most of them aren't somebodies, because they don't waste energy advertising themselves. They have a little less skin in the game.

Unlike ALL THE REST OF US, they are not using practice to fight off the unseen, the unwelcome, the unwanted, the unknown. 

When the layers open up like that, a person lives with not much tension or resistance. It shows in the way they move, relate, breathe, speak. Their yoga feels strangely natural, highlighting the force, and neurosis, and negativity other humans to leverage ourselves through each day. 

Let's say entropy runs the universe, but it’s not alone. Signs point also to self-organization. Evolution. Autopoiesis. Nature running its course leads to death, and at the same time to life. The sophisticates who have done the work and then just let their awareness open up... who are have the discipline to stay open and let stuff continue to happen to them... these are the ones who are more alive than we are. If we are halfway-awake, we know when we are sitting next to one of them. What they produce in us is not the anxiety that celebrity or latent daddy/guru issues calls forth under our skin, but a presence and ease that tamps down any tendency to worship them or make them into gods. Maybe a deep intelligence in us gets the feeling of not knowing.

We do not know what death is. Maybe we do not know what life is either.

There is a safe, effective method for preventing kosha prolapse. To avoid Union and its attendant hazards for your personal identity, moral superiority, grasp on reality, coherent metaphysics, secure personal ontological status, and “dedicated” commitment to getting the next pose and (the same thing) getting authorized, do the following:

Know things. Act knowing. Be circumspect. Know what’s next. Know how it works. Know your anatomy and physiology and astrology and psychology and theology. Know who is the enemy. Know who to belittle. Know what it’s all about. Review the knowledge. Know the correct vinyasa for sarvangasana.  Know the words to Nicki Minaj songs. Know the way to San Jose.

Knowing will keep the rational mind (and physical body) contracted around the self. Knowing will keep the heart from getting too big. Knowing will make it easy to assert power over the practice, other people, and over the environment. Knowing is what seals over the kosha rabbit hole.  

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Trans - lucent · 4 July 2011

Here’s one of the pictures I see when I look for the people I’ve been. A long line of tents, lean-tos, forts and tree-houses out to the west. There’s a creaky fortress made out of books (a teenage self), an ivory tower (a self I lived in the first two years of grad school), different houses of worship, several porta-potties.

Seeing this is not self-alienating. It’s beautiful. I love the richness of this line of experience. It decays so well, becoming translucent but oddly clear. The past is in its place. The Editor’s been talking about what he calls rejoicing in the free fall of life. This life we’re in: we get so much of it if we just relentlessly love the phase we’re in.

Anyway. Every summer feels like a big round tent. I inhabit it and simmer inside. Fourth of July is the central axis. My favorite holiday because it’s a nothing day. People don’t alter their lives to celebrate it: they celebrate it with and through whatever life they’ve got going. They satisfice. The ways we “make do” say everything about the real life we’re living.

So if all I remembered was the tent-poles of all the last Fourths of July, I could remember around them the lives they expressed. The whole tents. Ritual isn’t about getting out of who we are. It’s the most simple expression of who we are.

I was a kid in Montana. We lived on a Ranch, where we grew a hundred people’s worth of vegetables and fruits, and fifty head of cattle, and boys. Yes, what happened there was that boys grew up. Two hundred acres of fields, outbuildings, lodges and giant gathering spaces for a hundred orphans and delinquents: refugees from the Crow Reservation, victims of the horrible things that happen in farm families, and the tenderest, heart-breakingest gangsters, who a Cook County judge thought could be saved from the Chicago Crips-Bloods war. So much sadness, anger and abandonment, but multiply that by a hundred childhoods in Montana summer and what we had was a party.

On the 4^th, my dad would climb the water tower, up its pitch-black inside tube, and hang the biggest flag ever from its water spout. Then we’d drive the fire truck at the head of a parade around the Ranch while my mom made Orange Crush ice cream for everyone. We had a bike race, a three-legged race, a jump-in-the-potato-sack race, and toy boat race down the irrigation ditch.

Then we’d turn the fire hoses on the big hill above the Canyon Creek, and have a slip-‘n’-slide on the grass for hours, careening down the hill, charging up to the top again covered in grass stains, diving to avoid the heavy spray of the hose, or pushing someone else in front of it. Then, sitting on square hay bales outside the dining hall, we’d down 25 watermelons from the garden, 100 ears of early platinum lady on the cob, and 99 hamburgers that used to be someone I knew.

Yesterday, Exxon Mobil dumped a black slick of crude into the Yellowstone River 8 miles from the Ranch. The town there is called Laurel. In the 1980s, it had the highest alcoholism rate per capita, a Burlington-Northern rail yard, and the Exxon refinery. The NYT photos of the spill wrench my insides like a tourniquet, the solar plexus half-collapsing to a black hole, sucking my heart inside.

Not heart-break, but rather heart-drain… that’s the feel of oil killing the river. And it only feels like this because the more I practice the ashtanga yoga, the less the body lies, the less it hides, the more translucent it becomes. Today the huge ganglia in my belly and chest are held together, and held apart, by what’s left of a six-year-old girl in braids. She’s drinking that river from a fire hose, stretching out her little body on the hill she loves and sliding/flying down it to the creek bank.

The creek keeps sliding, winding through friends’ cornfields and past the elementary school, meeting the Yellowstone a half mile below the Exxon spill. The girl, the river in the girl, me in them. I wish I could throw up; the oil spill is so draining.

Tonight Laurel will shine. It’s never better than on the Fourth. If you park at the edge of the cemetery above the hill over the high school (the cemetery was just improved with a Federal grant, because it houses dozens of new dead bodies from the Iraq War), you can still hear the chorus (and who needs to hear the lyrics, anyway) of Born in the USA when it plays for the finale of the fireworks show down at the high school.

The emcee will be drunk, and before every explosion, he will announce which local business or family donated each particular pyrotechnic. The night will be warm in a way that sinks deep into the skin without making you sweat. It’ll smell like black earth, grass, sex, silage, gasoline and gunpowder.

Everyone will be holding each other, pressed close, sexy and loving, grateful, so high on the emotion of freedom and the beauty of the falling lights, and (except for the dogs and six-year-olds) a little drunk. The drive back to the Ranch, on an untraveled back route, will be the beautiful. Headlights for ten miles out Laurel Airport Road, flowing, marking the base of the sandstone bluffs we call The Rims. The light-stream will pass the one little cairn that marks the Nez Perce’s flight through these fields in 1877. Other days, nobody drives this way.

Here, 2011's modal Summer Monday. Practice; three privates that fill me with inspiration the method channels away from words and into raw energy for even more teaching; and the only evening of the week I’m home with the Editor and the Meepers. And tonight, a fire pit around the corner on (yes) Hiscock street, a hot tub, winecoolers nobody will drink, S’mores and sparklers. Room for ten around the embers makes five ashtangis, four people from my grad program, seven professors, and nine residents of the Upper West Side. Of Ann Arbor. Hari OM. 

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Wait without thought · 22 May 2011

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,


The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,


The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters…

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.


And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,


Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.


I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you


Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,


The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed


With a hollow rumble of wings,

with a movement of darkness on darkness,


And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama


And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—


Or as, when an underground train, in the tube,

stops too long between stations


And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence


And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen


Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

Or when, under ether,

the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—


I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope


For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;

wait without love,


For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith


But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.


Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:


So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing…


 

You say I am repeating


Something I have said before. I shall say it again.


Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,


To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
   

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.


In order to arrive at what you do not know
   

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.


In order to possess what you do not possess
   

You must go by the way of dispossession.


In order to arrive at what you are not
   

You must go through the way in which you are not.


And what you do not know is the only thing you know


And what you own is what you do not own


And where you are is where you are not.

_________________________________

As read after group meditation today, by Shinzen, on a scratchy conference call, to 30 of us all over the world on headsets and mute phone lines. It’s the third section of T.S. Eliot’s second quartet.

 

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Categories: arbitrage

Hello pain. Let's go for a ride. · 29 April 2011

Pain without an energy signature. Or at least without a pattern I’ve seen before. Nerve nails, muscle rugburns, tendon ache, the way bone moans when it’s inflamed down to the marrow: understood. I’ve used that plus ten kinds of non-painful sensation to map the hard, soft, subtle and empty places in the spine. I have compared this map of my own inner body with the self-reports and of others’ interiorities. I have contrasted these subjective maps with the objective maps that science (from physiology to old Indian texts) provides. Suddenly useless research. The present pain defies the maps! I do not understand it, can not predict it, and am not in control.

To try to get control, I could go cause-jumping like usual. Or reduce it to a revisit from the pattern of 2007. I could wrap a lot of words and MRI tape around it to solidfy everything. But six days in, it honestly still feels weeeeird. It’s got a kind of foreign, impersonal "new car” smell to it. So… I’m driving it around as such. God knows where we'll end up.

I went through an injury and opening in the sacrum in Spring-Summer, 2007. I’ve thinned this blog’s archives, but some of the posts from that time are still up. In any case, yes, it was both. The “injury or opening?” question seems useless. Calling openings “injuries” is just the mind stuck in talky-talk beta state turning sensation into a problem. That’s what beta state does—it creates and solves problems outside the body. Beta state can wire a house, but it can’t wire a nervous system for shit. But, on the other hand, calling injuries “openings” is the dumbed-down devotional heart denying that yoga causes physical harm. Hello, a torn hamstring insertion or a torn rotator cuff is not an opening… it is not the kundalini ripping you a new nadi.

I’m saying both narratives are cliché. Ashtanga soap opera! Maybe there’s no point in talking about pain at all? Talking about pain just whips gooey formless sensation in to a “solid” suffering merengue. Continued talking about pain bakes that merengue to a crisp… and then feeds that ashen, toxic, high-GI confection to whoever is has the idiot-compassion to eat it. [EDIT: Meringue. See comments.]

Ok. Overstatement. Talking about pain patterns can be really useful. Great. But talking about patterns in certain ways can also solidify them and slow down their interesting, useful changes. This is because the way we talk when we talk about pain is mostly (1) inventing causal narratives or (2) amping up emotions, all while (3) not watching the breath. Maybe that’s totally necessary sometimes for getting protection—both from oneself and from teachers and intimates. But beyond that causal narratives and emotional amping do contract the mind-body around certainty and knowingness. Kinda hafta reify to protect. Having a body is like that. It’s allright.

Anyway. From the very beginning of my yoga practice, I’ve distrusted my natural tendencies toward the three patterns I just described. But now that I am driving around this New Car of mine (the all-new 2011 Ashtanga Painintheass), I notice a few attitudes that have changed since 2007.

1. I am more interested in taking personal responsibility for my body – not just physical, but emotional, subtle, energetic, etc, layers of my particular embodied organism. I am watching myself for projections, denial, avoidance, and blame, and looking for practical ways to take responsibility.

Even without stories of how I picked up this pain as others’ psychic or emotional flak (two such stories are available), I’m constantly tempted to disown it by either (1) getting all spiritual (so my “self” is some kind of transcendent awareness that sees my particular body as arbitrary) or (2) talking in the second or third person. Falling in to addressing a “you” when I’m talking to myself (see the glitch I left in above) is the easiest place to see displacement. It’s funny to contrast this with my all-out willingness to step up to the me-ness involved in my body’s sense pleasures—kale, kittens, dopamine swings—of course. My favorite things are part of my personality, right? No harm in that.

Voodoo Kumar (the ayurveda teacher I called Woo-woo Kumar until enough people heard me wrong that Voodoo stuck) talks about this like his teacher Osho. This is dualistic as hell, but try it. We all arrive on earth in a space suit of a certain make. As we ambulate the planet in this suit, sometimes it gets dirty or damaged, and that’s fine. But any tears or stains in the suit—that’s the owner’s doing. The suit isn’t a victim of circumstance. Its strange condition isn’t mysterious… but if it seems so, this is explained by the suit-wearer’s limited self-awareness. Before it is possible to fix the suit (i.e., before any healing can take place) the owner has to take full responsibility for it and for whatever harm it has sustained.

2. I’m more up on how projection and transference work. Human beings are little opinion-tornadoes. We throw our energy around and suck it out of others. It’s old-fashioned psychoanalysis—getting really tough feedback from someone whose energy is clean—that shows me this best.

I am still an opinion-tornado, but psychoanalysis sensitizes me to the especially stupid part of myself that wants to project my body-pain on to you. Sympathy-fishing is really human. So is outright energetic sabotage that happens on a level subtler than psyche. Most people seem wired for it. At the moment, I’m interested in the really dark side of us all that wants to find kernels of our own particular suffering in others, either as a way of getting it out of ourselves or just not feeling alone. It’s kind of a beautiful weakness because so tender.

But it’s also stupid. Incredibly stupid; and we’re stupid when we fall for it. When there’s pain, sometimes the sheer intensity of it—and the urgency and desperation it can generate—makes it easy to see projection and transference at work. With that highlighted, it gets easier to give people space. To not onload the shit they want to displace (which is not nice for anyone), and to spare them our own shit. Energy awareness, yo!

3. My perception of the physical difference between anguish and body pain is a little more clear.

4. I might not hate pain. I do dislike suffering really a lot. Suffering is the combined product of pain and resistance, and that’s something I pretty much want to go away for everyone and every thing for ever. (So sue me: don’t some people or prophets you admire feel the same?)

But pain—raw, non-narrative, present sensation—is this something to hate?

The year before SKPJ died, I tracked down Mark Whitwell and started asking him to hang out with me. He has a really strong transmission from both Krishnamacharya and UG Krishnamurthi, and at the time ashtanga was hemorrhaging shakti in internecine warfare. I didn’t want to do a practice that had lost its transmission, and Mark renewed my faith and connection to the tradition by telling me I was vata-imbalanced, trying to get to god by “works” instead of grace, and generally beating myself with the right-handed path. That ashtanga was obsessive, isolating and ungrounded. He was right for that dark time, but I still didn’t believe him when he said that pain is a nuturing force. What a bunch of freaky Krishnamurthi horror.

But yeah. Maybe pain could be a nuturing force. Maybe letting pain run a certain course—especially if I’m not hurting myself on the level of muscle and bone and psychological structure—maybe it’s got something to give. And not just “character.” Rather: awareness, balance, actual nervous system change, I dunno. And I won’t know unless it actually does leave something I didn’t know to look for.

Something that has not changed from 2007…

I get on the mat at the same time as usual, for the same amount of time as usual. There’s just no question. For me, this is because I’m still testing out this method—my organism is a case study, that’s all—and I don’t want to screw up the science. I expect 10-20 more years of using this method before I can say whether it works.

Practice is something that’s done for a long time, without interruption and with devotion. That’s a weird, obnoxious thing to say, but what else do you expect from a mythical shaman with a thousand white heads and a halahala distillery?

Anyway, daily practice has built up a bunch of triggers to shift my focus in to contemplative awareness of the inner body’s rhythms. Sitting alone and watching my pain is pretty easy once I push the usual buttons.

Tuesday, the shape of practice was entirely unrecognizable as ashtanga. The pain was nauseating and felt like it filled the room. At one point, I lifted my arms and blacked out, collapsing to the floor. That would have been perversely enjoyable if I could congratulate myself about how hardcore and intense I was acting. But it wasn’t hard or intense. It was… unglamorous, tiresome, absorbing, and vibratory. The pain literally felt encouraging. If I had opened up to discursive thoughts during practice, they would have included: Hello, if this is a taste of my worst nightmare, maybe I can let go of some of the primal anxiety. Also, wait, my body is more spacious inside and out than I realized. And damn, that nervous system packs a punch. Nice work, nadis!

Today, during a crumpled Utthita Hasta, I felt an influx of the feeling and ability in the occiput, soft palate and inner jaw that I’ve been striving for the past 3 years. And striving is the right word… I have been somewhat obsessed with Rudra Granthi. For now, I feel like I can knuckle down for a fast “comeback” to go back to what I think is normal. And, by contrast, I can also let this pattern do its thing more gradually, on the off-chance that new developments I want (even though I have no clue what they are) may come.

Ashtanga is really good with the paradox that Shinzen says shows up in every spiritual practice—the question of when to bear down and when to let nature run its course. This is because just getting on the mat in the morning and going through the motions takes care of a lot of bearing down. In the context of really clear method, once there’s a sort of “do your practice and all is coming” take on it, grace pretty easily comes in all the empty space the structure holds. Why dismantle that structure as soon as its straight lines get squiggly? It doesn’t matter what it looks like.

There may be no opening coming, no grace. Just pain and chaos. My mind may always manufacture something to hope for, even on a barely-conscious level, even if all that I’m hoping for is equanimity. For now I’m curious enough to set aside the option of mandating my body to calm this down and risk the most scary possibility—that I won't learn anything from this pain at all. This leaves me smack in the middle of a big don't-know mind, with a nervous system ping-ponging in indescribable, untrackable sensations. For now, not at all a bad place to be.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , science , spirituality

Ghosts of Mysore - 1 · 25 April 2011

Cold rain this morning. Cherry buds dead on the tree branches, daffodil heads hung low by last week’s snow. Sidewalks were slippery en route to practice. I spread toes to shuffle my boots, and shuffled the music.

Randomizing gave me Major Lazer - Hold the Line. That song was heavy rotation in the month of March, for my one-woman 4:15am dance party upstairs in the ladies’ at the KPJAYI. I blared it every morning that last wrung-out week of the season, when (after years without coffee before practice) I also got a moka pot and a bag of questionable espresso.

Hold the Line is the same song here as there: the subtle body trills from the triple-diamond diaphragm at the root of the pelvis, crashing in to the second diaphargm that separates hydraulic from pneumatic systems in the center-thorax, trilling lightly past the third and fourth diaphragms, and finally setting a bliss wheel spinning right around the atlas bone freed on its axis. Similar to how it feels to be a moka pot, I suppose.

The song goes Imakeya imakeyaimakeya — yeah — Imakeya jeansvibratelikea nokiaaaa. Raw emotion revving. The emotion is an immanent, ecstatic yes to EXISTING—a yes that bubbles over as more specific feelings: delight to practice, gratitude for con-spiracy, love of all particulars. The feelings come in even stronger now, in dreary Ann Arbor, than in the root experience the song recalls.

Especially because the root experience—the dark Mysore mornings of March—is laced in horror.

The emotion of yes-to-existence feels like a buried river in me. From it, other yeses come in waves, surging on whatever serotonin or dopamine is aspin in my spine on any given day, due to asana-pranayama-dharana-dhyana.

I can see the little yes waves sort of clearly because they differ from the rebellion, resentment and anxiety waves that dominated my sense of self a decade ago.

This is one of the small freedoms that practice has created over time. There are a few more choices around how to experience experience. About what to take as a self. About places I can relax into receptivity rather than wasting energy pushing the world away. I like this yes skillset, and so am disturbed to feel the rebirth of a no. A sizeable no.

Like, no to Existence. I mean screw off, Existence. You and your tree buds, yeast rising, puppies everywhere I go. A lot of cavalier manifesting, is what you’re up to. But you know, unlike the action of your nemesis Nothingness, sometimes it’s just tacky to go out and exist. Existence, Nothingness could quaff you without even moving; or it could send in its raptor fleet and annihilate all your work in blooming dust clouds; whichever it prefers. But, Existence, you are a one-trick metaphysic. Always doing this something-from-nothing game. Even when that sucks for the somethings you bring in to the world. How about some Manifestation Planning for once? You’re never going to beat Nothingness, ever ever ever, but you sometimes try so hard that I doubt your sincerity. I mean really: cherry blossoms before a snow? Kittens who won’t live a week? Nothingness is following you with an eraser, so closely you can’t even write down a whole sentence. You can make life, sure. But when you get sloppy all you make is suffering.

These are the thoughts. It feels like my central theory that existence is wonderful is getting pulped by a dialectical force.

So… stuff me in bad Advaita and call Krishnamurthi (not the nice one, but U.G., who saw humans as machines and called his enlightenment the catastrophe). It’s a real question. Why exist when you can be nothingness?

I’m not talking as the black-haired girl who gazed darkly out her dorm window between pages of John-Paul Sartre. Like most people who take bachelors degrees in philosophy and deconstruct too much too soon, I lived those years like a novel. Nineteen got a title, even: Embracing the Void. It took a lot of Portland hipster affectations (especially Hegel and cigarettes) to get the idea of nothingness into my system as more than a concept. But the experience of nothingness seems to have required another fifteen years and kittens. And a succubus; possibly two.

If this is a dialectical undoing, may as well hang out in the space between (A) Existence and (A’) the Nothingness that’s now demanding representation. Between the two is a kind of black hole—a swirling dark column that goes from the bottom of everything to up above the light.

It’s really weird inside this black hole. A half-nothing place filled with whatever won’t die but also won’t live, all floating around like Willy Wonka and the blueberry girl. Sometimes it reels out a crop of frost-bitten cherry blossoms, or a pack of hungry ghosts. It plays boomerang with doomed kittens. I don’t know if the possessed butterflies come from that place or not.

More of this presently.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , having a body , integration