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.
16 Comments
Body, basis for ethics. Love that whole section. We would say the same thing differently (which is, I think, as it should be).
I swear, this morning I woke up and started to write on the same topic.
I remember, at Yoga Works, us going over yogic philosophy and learning about the yamas and niyamas, and the riot of people saying ‘don’t eat meat, meat is bad— see, AHIMSA!’, and my little overthinky brain going ‘wait, that doesn’t make sense.’
Anyway, yes, I agree with you- body is now my ethical gauge too. It’s come to the point where I feel people imposing their will on me as violent and it makes me angry. It’s never really been so much about humans and animals to me, as is about energy and the space and life around us. Yes, the earth is sentient, as are plants and minerals, and rocks sometimes say the loveliest things… to draw the line at meat, for me, was both unhealthy, and making my own judgements about the value of sentience in different forms. Harder, in my opinion, to be aware at every moment what it is your body needs to survive, and to make choices and then deal with the consequences and full ramifications of said choices. If looked at from the perspective of causing death or suffering, then life, by nature, is violent- one can’t help but cause suffering in some form or another (please refer to previous post about nice Buddhists). Ahimsa, to me, is more about knowing what I do with my energy, and not inflicting it on others without agreement. I’ve had plenty of violent hugs in Santa Monica from well meaning folks who took it upon themselves to bless me with their spiritual presence
. Energy and containment. Knowing all of yourself and what it’s doing while you’re not looking.
I miss those chais. I tried to make them when I got home (as with Indian coffee) and it just didn’t taste right, because it was out of context
.
chai ho!
chai chai!
Lovely post. Travel and by consequence jet-lag tells us so much about our bodies. How often we forget Ahimsa when we are tired or have been traveling. I think I will have some chai and reflect:)
Blech, chai. And coconuts. Double blech.
Sonya, so I can have yours? Specifically, is that a request for one chai and two coconuts? Ok… I just took care of that at the coconut stand.
ESJ, over drinks I was approached by a woman named Natasha who used to work the front desk at MT and now lives in Sweden. She is visiting town for the day from her new digs in Bangalore. It took me a while to remember her, but she remembers you and me very well and says hi.
Dosad, (raises glass).
Anamaya, woah, nice place! During the year I lived in Nicaragua, I used to spend long weekends up the coast at San Juan Del Sur.
Patrick… this ethics coming from the body is a theme I want to find specific ways to write about. I agree that you are finding something like this too.
Rebecca, come here. Also, the thing about that “give me a new identity” training is that it is fundamentally characterized by moral anxiety. If it is possible to conclude strongly that certain actions and attributes are bad, then this becomes the new topic of conversation. I am wondering if an honest morality that comes from the body can be a solution for anxiety-based morality.
Time to do laundry…
Dear Owl, this ethics of the physical body intrigues me…it’s so biological. Omnivore tries a new food and gets sick to its tummy – won’t do that again. Just subtler and broader. Recent work by that eminent ecologist i mentioned a while ago postulates pleasure as a proximate cause for cooperative behavior (ultimate cause is still increased fitness, of course, but pleasure provides a feedback on a shorter, behavioral timescale). Perhaps same idea works here for negative feedback by stress hormones or some such, if you’re tuned in… For those that aren’t tuned in, I am getting an image of Dorian Gray.
sweden – santa monica- mysore axis reverb.
watched this a few times
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12025?sponsor_id=1
go to Stanislas Dehaene’s discussion for some very interesting stuff at 20:35
Are our bodies separate from other bodies? I mean, in the big picture, holographic universe sense. Cross-species and everything! It’s really crowded here.
Ethics start with my body.
So simple.
What a diamond.
That kind of puts into my frontal cortex what I suspect you have been putting into my causal mind (wherever she may be) for these years.
This explains why I am at David’s rolfer and am taking a macrobiotic cooking course.
I like Dogen’s statement: enlightenment is intimacy with all things.
So the math then is: ethics is intimacy with all things?
Powerful chai that.
In the absolute/all things sense, where is the space for ethics? What’d we be mediating between?
Ooh, attack of the p0rnbots!
Pesky p0rnbots! That’s what I get for putting the word “sexy” in the headline.
Karen, I know! It’s crowded.
In the “absolute” sense which you mention, can there be any ACTION? I mean, like vairagya sort of doing-shit action?
I feel like the minute we’re putting a foot on the floor, moving in space and time, then discriminating awareness and choice enters in. At a raw level, what turned into morality might be just the accumulated cultural crust around the choice dynamics Wombat describes. Having a body is challenging! Especially when the warm crispy offerings from the gobi cart turn out to be dipped in formaldehyde and rancid oil! (Yep.) Then there is a good/bad emerging.
This notion used to make me really uncomfortable, Wombat. I read some of the evolutionary justice literature a couple of years ago – it’s coming out of medical ethics programs and a bit of biological theory. It freaked me out because it really obviated culture and art as realms of legitimate value. Now I’m a little more integral about it – body-based ethics don’t have to be reductionist. Don’t have to be artless or loveless or purely functional. Eh Gregor?
Because of the p0rnbots (who are dive-bombing this post) I wrote a new post to get this one under the radar. However, that post is bat shit crazy! Kind of like my version of this
So I refrain…
Meantime, except for Ellie and hopefully some people I’m not reading, the Mysore February blogosphere has been a serious let-down. The content goes down as the stats go up. Very NYT.
Well, until your next post (after listening to that Alan Watts track, I’m particularly looking forward to it!), I’ll just comment down here with the p0rnbots.
I think I understand the discomfort with the evolution of morality stuff. It is reductionist in principle, except that we can’t figure out how it reduces. But I particularly like the pleasure intermediary for cooperation because it opens up space for all kinds of diversions and signalling to evolve (like art!). Once social pleasure exists, it can be co-opted.