Monthly Archives: June 2007

Been thinking my hermit-thoughts, of empty rooms and silence. But then they were reading Guantanamo detainees’ poetry on the radio, as I shuttled between the beautiful quarters where my days play out—the gorgeous little shala in Santa Monica and my Bel-Aire-adjacent campus idyll. Poetry about the insides of prison cells, the taunting of the sea, and us free rich […]

On the edge of a breakthrough here; and it’s a sensitive time. My spine’s been talking back to me all week—a long last protest before she submits to something like alignment after embracing chaos for 10 weeks. Just stand up from my deskchair, and the accordion plays. I love it. My vertebrae aren’t quick to […]

Finally… 5. The future. What are your practice goals for the future? Of course I want the present conditions to last, but I know that someday relatively soon practice will be often alone. Maybe that will be two years from now, and maybe ten: at the moment there sits before me a hilarious range of possibilities […]

Number 4 of 5 in the series… 4. The history. Describe the development of your practice and history with teachers since then. It got so my Sunday class was Led First Series Astanga. I took it for months but never learned the series. That would have required thinking, and I didn’t want to clutter up my […]

Following up on last Thursday’s #1 and #2, here is #3 of 5. 3. The addiction. How/why did you get hooked? Just as the class up at SunsetCanyon concluded, I settled oh-so-compliantly with the insurance company of the driver who had nearly killed me. Receiving a large check changed several things for me, given my history: peasant-class […]

Time’s out of joint today. Sat vipassana at a new center, where they have begun a cycle of daylong retreats. Very normal Buddhists, these people: so normal, the director’s packing the exact same degree from the exact same department where I am currently doing my thing. It’s good to sit with people: when keeping your awareness […]

Coming to have a practice defied my previous experience of life as flowing forward from my will—a product of my own decisions. With that caveat, here’s a description of my YogaStory for Tim’s album. Just another data point in the revolutionary Astanga Yoga Research Experiment. 1. The start. What brought you to yoga? A Honda Civic. Which […]

Wherof we cannot speak, thereof we must… Ack!  No; no; noooooo. I’ve been making a case for yoga as a demystification project, yet here I am avoiding straightforward questions of how it rooted into me. Here I am falling back on the raised eyebrow and the shrug that are my writing at its most flirtatious and, as […]

Self-loathing is here. She’s so uncommon in these parts that I barely recognize her, but this being the dissertation year(s), I should expect that symptom to arise now and again. It’s just an emotional state, an emotional state, an emotional state: don’t reify it, girl. You don’t need that shit.   But GAWD. She—the symptom—showed up […]

…As I was saying just before sleep the other night night: Lots of meditation teachers warn that it is easy to hide inside your mindfulness or contemplative practice; and the same is true for asana. Many of us feel this practice to be a refuge—a beautiful, true stroke of luck in our tragicomic lives. Even at […]