Ok, I think I've got it... · 6 October 2008

What is the relationship of authoritarianism and intimacy?

This was the question I was trying to find. Questioning patriarchy isn’t a demand for gender-bending. People express their genders in so many different ways. It’s great! This has to do with personal history; and it has to do with your hormonal profile (seriously, this is fascinating: variations in hormone levels and intimate self-expression.) The energy in my self-expression is more dopamine than anything, equal parts serotonin and testosterone, and kind of low on the estrogen. And I wear high heels and, as they say, lipstick. Anyway. Gender is beautiful.

What I’m bringing to light is this very difficult, basically unseen masculine domination. I’m only doing this because I’m trying to understand a very wise teacher’s insight that yoga is going nowhere as long as it remains patriarchal. It’s pretty interesting, knowing me, that I’ve left this topic alone until now… but that’s why patriarchy continues. We’d rather not bother.

It’s like the editors of Ashtanga News, when I wrote to them about this mind-blowing article exactly a year ago. I asked, privately, why in the world they’d post something so old-school patriarchal and they said “we were just repeating what the previous woman had posted.” Yes. Exactly. This is how masculine domination gets legitimated! It’s passed on as if it’s just great and something to celebrate, and the non-critique is justified by saying it’s not our responsibility. At the time, I let it go. That is kind of bullishit on my part and all others, now that I think of it. Check out the comments on the post, too. It’s pretty amazing there was no real discussion there—only a few women expressing shreds of angst. Great illustration of the barriers to looking at this but also the fact that it's right here in front of our faces.

MM said that patriarchy is more evident in women teachers in this scene than in men. That’s true to my experience as well. In my experience authoritarianism is women’s effort to claim lineage-based authority—that is, authority within a still fundamentally patriarchal lineage. So in its manner, its still patriarchal. I could go all Pierre Bourdieu to argue this, but I have a sense that people will agree. Authoritarianism is pretty much a patriarchal thing. Yeah?

If practice is more about obedience than about self-exploration, what’s the point again? Reproducing domination seems to me to be a really large barrier to inside-intimacy as well as relational intimacy.

Sorry this is all scattered. My head’s in three places. Thanks for the patience as I try to find some traction on this topic… this blog is not normally such a haphazard scene. But it seems like a really good idea to figure out how to talk about this specifically in the context of ashtanga practice, and given the abysmal starting point here, I’m a bit at a loss for how to begin.

BTW, check out the penultimate post at Budismo e Yoga—in the article on ashtanga, there’s this wonderful discussion under the heading “Dharma en el Corazon.” The author writes that it is a great blessing to be able to use the practices of self-study without having to wrestle with the inherited baggage of a Guru system and the superstitions and self-denials this entails. I wrote to this guy to ask him if I can do a better translation of the article since the auto-translation probably isn’t great, and he said he'd be happy to work on that with me. but he did not write back. I’d go ahead and translate it anyway, but that’s a bit imperialist. A certain meaning is always lost in re-interpretation and I hesitate to take liberties with the author’s native language without his permission. I'll try to work up an English version when I have time.

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Categories: astanga yoga , social theory

Owl-Mouse · 2 September 2008

Or, Physiology of Letting Go.

It is fall. I should let go of the intermediate series. All of it, all at once, traditional-style, bam. I started this practice on the first of a September, and may as well end it in like manner.

I put it off. The crazy long practice was beyond good all summer, practicing with friends, the rhythmic ease of the programme on my body. Why the hell would I quit something that is so effortless and takes such good care of me? Something I love so much? Is there some master narrative of “progress” and “moving on” and “letting go” or some nonsense that progress in these dumb series is supposed to map and reproduce? Pish. I’m good with what works, and what works is all of second and third to the twists.

Good reasons for changing nothing.

The weather has turned and the students are returning and my asana teacher is back in town.

Yeah so whatever. Last Wednesday we hacked it off, like I did 50 weeks ago with 2 feet of hair.

Preliminary report: everything sucks.

I know that I’m a weird case, because I don’t get worn down by practice or need very much recovery. My body is hilariously soft (someone bought me a massage and the therapist said: “you looked so quiet and mousy when you came in, but there’s this strength in all the deep tissues”—yes, that’s “quiet and mousy”) but there’s weird strength in the area of stamina. Intermediate series is like brushing my teeth, and creates a focused momentum that makes advanced-A sort of easy.

Then again. Without intermediate, advanced is HARD. Oh my god. Soreness. Pain. Tension. Loss of flow. The shorter programme makes me ache and leaves me wondering what in the hell I’m doing to my body with this ashtanga nonsense. Can my upper body take this shit? I caught myself actually whimpering inside one day. Total loss of perspective there.

It’s pretty funny that I experience muscle ache as a form of fatigue. In my mind, I apparently conflate dull pain with energy loss… but maybe this is accurate. Maybe the resistance in my body is making me work harder and creating tiredness. Or maybe I’m physiologically depressed because I had to say goodbye to my friend the intermediate series. Maybe my normally open and giddy personality is a mere side-effect of intermediate series and now I’ll get all intense and gloomy… find the dark side in a new way. Sitting here, I could find other explanations too. For example: American politics. Whatever. Oh and by the way, I dreamed of book The Giving Tree. Daaaaark.

I wish there were something I could say to decrease the third series intrigue that afflicts some people. Since I’m in this mood, here’s my best shot.

The “exclusivity” of the experience is in its dailiness. Not its difficulty or intensity. Lots of people can make these shapes—they’re nothing special in isolation. But… not a lot of people do this practice regularly. Though I wish they did so I’d feel less isolated by it.

For people who think it is beautiful, consider that it’s normal to gain weight while you build up crazy core strength. Also, perhaps especially if you eat meat to do that, your shoulders will become large. (Noted because interest in having a beautiful practice seems to correlate with scheming about marginal fluctuations in weight.) If it seems like it’s powerful and you will have power if you do it, consider that some people become disempowered by practicing this series. It gets so practitioners have energy for these postures and little else. Is it better to create a daily metaphor for power by putting your body into a certain shape, or to invest your energy in other forms of creativity? This stuff stops being glamorous when it’s your daily practice. I love that. It may seem glamorous if you’re contorting yourself into position every so often for the thrill of it. But that’s not ashtanga—it’s also perhaps not safe (not really for me to say; I have no experience out of context), and might not be particularly intelligent on a subtle level.

I grant that it’s a wonderful programme in some ways. Knowing me, I will gradually fall more deeply in love with it as I find its quirks and the little tiny details and variations in our relationship. (Today I realized I was already very intimate with the postures themselves, and that they're more interesting and finegrained now than a year ago. As with the Editor--here exactly ten years now, since under a willow tree outside the library he drew me into intense, fateful conversation about Bill Clinton bombing Afghanistan--these recognitions of relationship get me all tender and thankful.)

Or maybe I’ll just learn to do backflips and that will put a finishing layer of EZ-Cheeze on top of everything. I don’t know. It’s also just this mundane thing. Really.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Dispatches from the twilight zone · 2 September 2008

First Day of School, Pop Quiz. Short Answer. Please define the following in 40 words or less.

New Age Spirituality:

Use of exotic practices and churingas to (1) decorate the ego or (2) flee the self. Based in fear, irrationality. Potentially transformational if (1) creates community or (2) induces peaceful altered states. Creates psychosis when repressed issues return.

A ha.(colloq., Boulder, CO):

A moment of unanticipated grace in the flow. E.g., In third series, consider that SKPJ’s edict “straight arms!” means a straight ninety-degree angle. Suddenly it’s about sucking into the solar plexus and letting yourself float, not just building linebacker shoulders to muscle through.

Campaign Themes:

Dems—Come Together “God to be good looking cos he’s so hard to see”

GOP—Stop Children, What’s That Sound “It starts when you’re always afraid”

Privacy; a.k.a. “family matters are not political matters”:

When women and men get to make own decisions about pregnancy and birth control. When a certain young woman “makes the decision on her own to keep the baby.” Diametric opposite of what John McCain and Sarah  Palin want for you.

Vagina Police:

Focus on the Family; abstinence-only education; I would “oppose abortion even if my own daughter was raped;” etc. Giving new meaning to the Sept 2 holiday of VJ Day.

Cynicism:

A woman candidate chosen to reaffirm patriarchy at the highest level; “call for action” instead of taking action when own party controls government; making this NOT ABOUT THE WAR; pre-emptive protester arrests; being anti-polar bear; climate change is natural

(0v0), Ovo:

An OK combination in times of hard physical work, but only if (0v0) is showering after practice. For three days and three night after ovo, (0v0) experiences “BO.”

BO:

Not sure. Ask the Editor.

The Editor:

Earning his name one high sign at a time. Making up for it with qualities which have been edited from this document.

September:

An intensely beautiful, spare, quickly fleeting species. Further classification incomplete.

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , spirituality

Shaky Ground · 30 August 2008

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.    

-William Hazlitt

I use this word, grace, sometimes when I really mean it. But maybe I don’t even know what I mean. Above, grace = directness, congrousness, unflinchingness and ease, all in action.

Rather, is it about containing difficulty and unease, but acting anyway? A light touch where you could have gone with a bold proclamation, kind of thing. (In the Christian tradition, grace is forgiveness by God of our fundamental sin nature despite our own inabilities to ever redeem ourselves by action. Right. Good to watch for that old narrative creeping in.)

Someone called the recent criticism of the Ashtanga lineage holders “graceless,” and in a way I agreed--though, also, fear of critical thought and extreme emotional involvement in these politics to the point of being very upset by them are graceless as well. Yes? Grace allows someone to observe it all a little peacefully.

What I agreed with was this: to be graceless is to forget you’re always on shaky ground. It's losing your gratitude, or at least your circumspection. Become uncircumspect, fall down.

Hazlitt’s grace is fearless, which I like; but it's surfacy. Not for itself or necessarily conscious of uncertainty--that is, countervailing laws of physics, the provisionality of all metaphysics, when death will come, imperfection of teachers, and such.

Seems like with respect to what we do, if there is grace, it may be a quality of consciousness … though at the same time one of breath, of a capacity to be direct in movement, in an ability to rest the eyes time and again on nothing in particular.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , spirituality

New Age Not Same As Yoga · 27 August 2008

Or, Marxist and Marketing Exec Unite. Ohhh! I am not blogging any more. I keep deciding this. Must redirect those little “I'll journal that” impulses. But… I listened to CP while chopping vegetables for lunch and here I am. Today he’s making the case that New Age Spirituality is a far greater source of bullshit for yoga practice in the west than is consumerism. We got on this topic here recently as well.

What’s the difference between New Age and Yoga? This is off the top of my head, so please add suggestions or disagreements in the comments.

  NEW AGE                                    YOGA

Self-affirmation	Self-study
Reincarnation	This incarnation
Chant and pray to spirits and gods for the promotion	Do your best and let go of expectations for the payoff
Ritual	Practice
Superstition	Equanimity
Scorpio, Cancer or Virgo?	Bhakti, Karma or Jnana?
Bliss	Mysticism
I’m too sexy for my shirt	I’m too sweaty for my shirt
Yoga Journal Ad pages	Namarupa
ancient wisdom	Science and research
The Law of Attraction	The Yoga of Action
Consuming Ethically	Consuming Less
Self-adoration	Self-transformation
Asana shows me how much I can accomplish	Asana shows me how much I can let go
Asana makes me feel like a sexy beast	Asana makes me care less about being a beauty object

Oh and by the way, it’s weird that the CP-Owl relationship has dissolved into a love fest. Now that we’ve broken bread together, it’s probably irreversible.

The ancient history of the CP-Owl relationship wasn’t so great, you know. I got into writing here because I had an axe to grind and stuff to “figure out”; he got in to writing for the laughs. We disagreed about everything. I thought he didn’t get advaita; he thought I was I a punishing meanie. I thought his progressive politics were a sham; he thought I was angry and overly threatened by benign western culture. I thought he lacked tapas; he thought I lacked middle pathway moderation. I thought he should get his ass to India; he thought (perhaps) I had something I was running from. He while claiming to be a jerk treated me with respect; I while claiming to love everybody lost my temper repeatedly.

Me: an uncompromising person who critiques western culture for a living. Him: a compromiser who produces western culture for a living. What’s going on? Why do we keep agreeing?

Yoga oughta worry about this. If it’s trafficking in beliefs so empty that both the Marxist and the Marketing Exec can see through them and thus stop arguing and combine energies, there might be real trouble acomin.   

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Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , self-deception , spirituality

Demystification, cont. · 23 August 2008

Exerpts from an interview in the Ottawa Citizen. The speaker is some guy named Richard Freeman.

…That's why I'm still fascinated by yoga, because I think people can cultivate these deeper states of mind without having to join any particular religion or sign up for anything or pretend they know something when they don't know something.

In 2007 you wrote, "Can our yoga survive the remarkable rate of its own expansion? Will the potent and ancient tradition live through its commercial success?" What is it you fear?

I fear it's being watered down to please the crowd. Teachers naturally want to have large classes, but are they willing to water it down so much that they don't actually confront people with themselves and their own minds? Because it's easy to reduce yoga to an exercise system and that way people don't, at any point, discover the programming of their own minds. At that point, yoga just builds up people's egos and gives them the sports experience rather than the mystical experience.

I think we're always in danger of it slipping into that category.

Why should people take up yoga?

Because it will definitely give you the opportunity to become happy and then it'll also give you the opportunity to make others happy. When you become happy, you become a little more skillful in dealing with other people and you're no longer trying to get things out of them so much.

It'll also help you with a lot of physical problems. It won't make you immortal but it will certainly help with everyday aches and pains -- spinal problems, postural problems, fatigue. And then of course, all the related psychological difficulties we experience every day.

Yoga helps you gain insight into how your own mind works and in doing that you become a little more compassionate. Also your sense of humour improves. (Laughs). I think that's how it works actually.

Why do you specialize in Ashtanga yoga?

It's a particular approach to yoga that combines a lot of different levels of the practice in which you are concentrating on your breath and through concentration on the breath you learn to open up different channels of awareness inside your body right along the central axis.

Based on that, you move the body sequentially through postures, all based on the breath and the workings of the sensation patterns in the core of the body. It's actually a very advanced and challenging approach to yoga. I'm surprised it's as popular as it is. It's often not practised very well, but often, if they're young, practitioners have a lot of fun trying.

A lot of what I do is I go around and try to slow people down in their Ashtanga practice and tune them in to what is really happening inside with it, so that the practice leads very naturally to meditation practice and into deeper states of yoga.

I've heard some yoga teachers refer to Ashtanga as "junk yoga."

That's because it's not understood by a lot of its adherents. But it has lots of restorative practices in it. It's just that a lot of people have never studied enough to learn them. A lot of the popularization is done by teachers who are actually neophyte Ashtanga students and it's a little bit embarrassing for me.

What do you most hope to leave your Ottawa students with?

I want to leave them with an experience with how their breath works and how, by carefully observing its cyclical patterns -- as they sit and then as they do the postures -- they can actually learn how to do the postures. In other words, they can learn to teach themselves by learning to observe closely the equipment they already have.

A lot of the function of the teacher is to point people back into observing their own internal process, because that's the actual teacher.

SATURDAY LINKS.

 * Ashtanga Rwanda. They really want teachers to visit them. Bindi's saying yes. Get in. Link to the paypal donation in the top left. It's the least that we can do. Don't ignore this, loves.

 * Tabby writes yoga poetry. I may offend him by linking, but he'll transcend his anger on contact. Poof.

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Categories: astanga yoga

Ashtanga and Imperialism · 16 August 2008

CP wrote this post yesterday—one that’s difficult for many of us to handle. I’ve been waiting and hoping for just that kind of sacrilege out of him, and he delivered. In the comments (which are a terriffically honest and interesting conversation about the future of ashtanga), someone asked me the following:

For those of us who are long finished school but are still interested in these matters, what theoretical perspective has replaced tired 1990s neo-Marxism [and 1980s post-colonial theory]? I am serious. Please save this practicing lawyer from the tedium of her daily life by discussing some theory!

Ok. Trying to make a short answer. I’m just going to freewrite a bit and post whatever comes up off the cuff. Because if I try to make a coherent I’ll spend hours! It would be so delightful to build a study group or seminar discussing different philosophies’ and social theories’ perspectives on the moral, cultural and spiritual puzzles that the east-west meeting of ashtanga creates. I have a background in philosophy and social-political theory but rarely work in these literatures because they’re disconnected to real life. The mind likes to be bound; and I like the constraints of doing research on the ground—theory can say anything it wants without the discipline of real-world data. Abstract rhetorical wars are too easy.

Anyway, I should clarify that neo-Marxism and post-colonial theory have not effectively been replaced by something called post-modernism. Postmodernism is a disposition rather than a theory, and as much as it’s intellectually dishonest and stupid if taken to extremes it’s also the condition in which we all live. It’s just a suspicion of metanarratives (Lyotard’s line), or an awareness that all knowledge is situated in someone’s perspective and some matrix of power relationships. Postmodernism at its best is a background question of Oh yeah? Says who? It doesn’t stand alone as an interpretation and it explains nothing.

For me, by far the richest node of theory and research about culture and social philosophy now is in the little subfield of the sociology of culture. A lot of the subfield is bad, but the good stuff expresses what to me are the there most important aspects of what is now good theory: (1) non-essentialism, (2) a bit of self-aware empiricism, and (3) an attempt to synthesize all the modernist (Marxist and other) binaries like material/ideal, economic/cultural, structure/agency.

Briefly, non-essentialism (1) means that you don’t think race, nationality, culture, etc have any transcendent reality. They are social phenomena, or ascribed and acquired characteristics. This is huge—it takes the neo-Marxists’ critique of reification and follows it to its logical conclusion that culture itself is socially constructed. It means you don’t buy the idea that someone with brown skin is “naturally” a soulful dancer or the idea that someone with south Asian ancestry has a “natural,” superior claim to yoga. People are just people. Cultural artifacts are just artifacts. Which is not to say culture does not go deep—the ways in which we grew up, for example, determine our understandings of the world perhaps more than previous (non-empirical) theory could recognize! Culture may not be real on an “essential” or transcendent level, but the ways it shapes personal knowledge appear—based on research—to be very deep. As culture becomes increasingly complex and fast-changig globalized, this just becomes all the more interesting.

So (2) empiricism is the sense that social theory that isn’t rooted in examination of the world is probably BS. Seriously, how do we know that cultural traits are socially constructed? Well, for example consider how race works in Brazil vis-à-vis how it works in the US. Totally different ideas of what is blackness and whiteness, what characterizes race, how many races there are, etc. (Yet at the same time, some things are common: racial hierarchies priveliging white skin, the possibility of becoming more white as socio-economic status increases, local beliefs about the essential qualities of different “groups,” etc.) It’s complicated. The sense now is that even universal pronouncements about social construction have to be made in reference to something real. Pure theory is a joke. Even in philosophy, the richest areas of development are empirical—biomedical ethics, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science. For me, my hero of empirical social theory is Pierre Bourdieu. He makes me think, first, that pure ideas without social research are boring and, second, that living one’s life as a kind of social theorist—always considering the theoretical presuppositions and implications of action—is a rich and beautiful form of practical self-awareness.

The third characteristic I see in present-day theory, a valuation of synthetic work (3), is both the most interesting and the most difficult to summarize. For a while in the 1980s and 1990s, theory was obsessed with “difference” and “play” between the supposed binaries of male/female, dark/light, material/idea, structure/agency, objective/subjective, inside/outside, etc. etc. etc. And, since Hegel, the idea of the thesis-antithesis dialectic of consciousness has been encrypted within much social theory. To be brief, now there is a sense that theory does not have to be just about structure or agency, not just leftist or rightist, just about material or ideal, just from the subjective or objective point of view. In fact, theoretically insightful empirical work SYTHESIZES these apparent opposites. This is a dangerous idea, because it resonates with the wacky Integral people with their fourfould AQAL framework, and because it sounds an awful lot like eastern mysticism, what with yoga being the “union of apparent opposition” and all that. In my own work, I strive to synthesize whatever oppositions I find in the world, and not just settle to oscillate from one side to the other. Incidentally, this is why I find it difficult to take a hard line either way in the present debate on the regulation and commodification of ashtanga.

I have saved my withering remarks for the ashtanga mercenaries for the end, so hopefully they will be missed by anyone who will find them offensive, and only read by people who understand the lightness of heart— but also the impatience with self-deception —with which I write.

Anon’s critiques of the cultural imperialism of Cody’s market analysis, and righteous indications that Cody has transgressed against Edward Said, indicate little more than that Anon got a fancy western education before s/he went off to India and discovered huself. If Anon and likeminded western practitioners who see themselves as guardians of the Eastern authenticity (oh essentialist modern concept!) are the true guardians of the lineage, it is only because they’ve performed another level of the cultural appropriation of which they accuse others. They are, as Bourdieu would say, the cultural imperialists par excellence, both appropriating the tradition and then pretending to be its owners and protectors.

In case anyone out there didn’t quite catch it… Yes, traveling to India to practice ashtanga yoga is “imperialist” for both ideational and economic reasons, both material and ideal, both personal and collective. If you are actually concerned about “imperialism” because you think (erroneously, I’d say) that culture belongs to particular nationalities and races, than you really have no business traveling to India nor raging against anyone else for being imperialist. Because to the degree that you think you own ashtanga, you are the biggest “imperialist” of all.

The same people who are out to defend the integrity of the tradition are those who are extremely identified with it and fantasize that they own it, through all manner of superficial language study, celebration of holidays they actually know little about, professions of love for certain kinds of cuisine. But do these people really understand the culture they are appropriating? Do they see only light and spirituality in India—do they fantasize (ultimate Imperialist self-deception) that the beggars have equanimity or that Indians themselves are simply “more spiritual.” Do they recognize that they are using India as a playground where their currency and passport buy easy living and implicit international protection? Do they see that they see “spirituality” because it’s an easy life where they don’t have to deal with a more grounded spirituality that comes from their own early experiences, don’t have to deal with the economic pressures that give so much value to their dollars, don’t have to look their own history in the eyes but can instead vacation in an alternate spirituality with rituals that are easy to love because they’re different and new, and seem to offer an escape from all that is too real and too dark and to dirty to examine at home?

I’ve departed from social theory to psychological theory here at the end, but if we are honest with ourselves, isn’t this the terrain for examining this particular war over who owns ashtanga? The “imperialist” slur is a red herring, is it not? I suspect that when we westerners tangle over who owns ashtanga and whether it’s ok to see the practice from a (creepy but not at all irrelevant) marketing perspective, we are fighting at a deep level with ourselves.

Apologies for the incoherence and doubtless typos all over this post. I wanted to respond to Monkey’s question, but also am not going to take the time to make the response shorter.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , science , self-deception , social theory

Further Research · 15 August 2008

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Categories: astanga yoga , science

Instrumental Rationality · 12 August 2008

Fussy. Sorry, internet. Here goes.

Remember the ashtanga energy market? This is related, in a way. 

When you love a practice—sociology or ashtanga—being around careerist people is sometimes really hard. That’s been the main distraction of letting academia draw me in on a professional level, as is now happening. And I’m transparent, so my feelings about this are inconveniently obvious.

Instrumental rationality is useful for getting things done and can coexist along with more value-based motivations. Actions can be partly instrumental and partly value-driven; people ourselves are some of both.

But god is pure instrumentalism tacky. It’s so apparent when someone asks “what can I get out of this?” with respect to every relationship. Yes—I see the little wheels turning. Right there.

It’s also obvious when someone is obsessed with social hierarchies and institutional power and jockeying for their own position in the web. When some self-promoter wants to be close to the energy, the power, the money—even if they have no energy or real intelligence of their own to contribute.

For two years I’ve considered writing an anonymous piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed on the tragedy of professional success for grad students whose egoes are too fragile to take it—how this creates a slithering kind of professionalism and dissolves community. Today year I’d actually do it if I had the time. It would start with a discussion of how many people now practice yoga to get through their dissertations, and an exhortation to ethical arbitrage: bring the karma-yoga ethic of Arjuna over to your professional life. Put a little soul in your soulciology.

Anyway. It seems obvious that my love of true believers grows out of this exact shadow—my despair when I see the “what can I get out of this relationship?” mechanism churning. Userism. You don’t have to be a player to be in the game, and you don’t have to hate the game even if the players make it ugly. “Networking,” and some bit of instrumental rationality, are natural to professions and networks and social life.

But it’s people who actually have little energy or love or inspiration or intelligence to give, and who play for the get, who seriously damage the practice. Stop that, ok?

Here’s more free-association from the world of Evangelical music. It’s all coming back to me these days from my subconscious. You people listening to Madonna and Wham! in your misspent youths, oh what you missed without Sparrow Records. Good thing you read this blog. As a reward for getting through this post, here’s something hilarious. It's not a parody.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , social theory , sound

There are different kinds of trees · 9 August 2008

A client is learning to trust himself—literally, he’s putting himself in situations that show him that he is already rooted and stable. Yesterday we began and ended a session with tree, using the shape of it as a measure of the body before and then after practice. He keeps having these moments of recognition in practice, and I realize that as much as I’m there for it I don’t exactly understand.

This morning I skipped dance because I wanted to keep my wits about me. In dance, I let my wits spin out at great distances, give all my energy away, play with boundaries of self until I’m exhausted. It takes an hour afterwards to click back over into writing mind and writing body. So today I rolled out the kitchen practice mat but brought my dance mind rather than ashtanga mind to the moment.

Oh my god. Ok. That was easy and hearteningly good; and shifting in to the mental-bodily state for some kind of ‘practice’ was shockingly automatic—maybe because it’s just what my organism expects to do when Saturday morning rolls around.

I don’t even remember what kitchen practice consisted of this morning, but at one point I decided to hang out on one leg and find out everything that is possible when that one variable is held constant. I thought of the student who had his tree realizations yesterday, and experimented with what it would take to find the limits of my own one-legged stability. Suprising how much is possible, how much stability is here.

And you know what? It’s all in the backbend principles. Grounding down through four corners of the feet, sucking the arches up a whole line of energy into the pelvic floor, slight inner rotation, microbend the knees, work the quadriceps and even the hamstrings strongly, steer the hips toward even. Do the backbends from the ground up and strongly, and crazy standing stability is coming. Treelike stability, even if you’re doing all manner of spontaneous branching with the other limbs.

It is good to set aside the container of fixed practice and play. The consciousness of this morning, in my challenging kitchen space where I am so used to the deepest requirements of focus, was so much in the body. Usually I’m focused on cultivating the deepest possible mental state, so the stipulated practice sequence is nothing more than a regular mantra for supporting that. Today was not in the mind but out of the mind. Ec-static. Expressive, moreso than contemplative. Really happy and satisfying, but absolutely not the same as a practiced mental state whose intention is one-pointedness. And I can only say that vis-à-vis experience of regular meditation practice and ashtanga.

So this morning also made me a little sad, considering what’s missing from the “wild art” practices that are primarily ecstatic and expressive (and also sad about the outright poverty of concocted American yogas that grasp for "happiness" and self-congratulation as a way to simulate ecstasy or run from pain). I move in order to make myself happy, it’s true. The energetic outcome is guaranteed. But with ashtanga I move in order to find out what I really feel—to observe rather than to create or express.

The common complaint that ashtanga is not fun is about this. It’s because the style is built for contemplation rather than for gratification. For me it incidentally delivers sort of indecent joy on a daily basis (sorry, it always happens to me--the trees do clap their hands even if they're made in contemplation), but the texture of that is interestingly different from the joy of dance.

I don’t know. There is much more to find here. The neurologists can hook electrodes up to my head and find out that the brain is doing totally different things in ashtanga and dance, but is that even interesting? The real researcher here is me, finding out how all these different mind-body states operate, how you get into them, how deep you can go, and what kind of consequences they have. My two practices are such a great contrast— two extremes on the control/spontaneity or contemplation/expression spectra. I’m so grateful that I can investigate both practices better through the contrast.

There we go with comparative logic again. Funny that comparative logic itself doesn’t operate in either ashtanga mind or dance mind, but here, in front of my computer, in discursive mind. Which is good for something too. Good for a lot, actually.

And for now that’s an additional question. Which mind-body practices and state-cultivations add depth, intensity, intelligence, cleanliness, speed and integrity to my everyday discursive mind?

 

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

House Like a Lotus · 6 August 2008

First foot I set in Boston was in step with CP who, like Ee in SF, met me in the lobby of the Hiton. CP walked me through the Back Bay with a secret ebullience that comes as easy as his not-so-secret wit. He paused and got wistful down in the street below the shala.

-There is really nothing like the smell of this place...

-The smell of transformation, yes. I like that.

-I don’t know that it’s transformation... gesturing to the seedy first-floor pizza establishment and the seedier kids on its threshold. More like pizza.

The Editor, sleuth that he is, followed the scent all the way to the source. A good large New York style slice, it turns out. The late night bites I took Monday fueled practice eight hours later from the inside, at the same time that the subtle—almost tasteful?—wafts of lightly burnt cornmeal crust and days-old marinara marked my senses. Is the anise-tinged dry decay of the Nag I burn each morning at Brentwood much different?

At Back Bay they spin to center with heads facing in for Savasana, though being myopic it took me three days to notice. This morning, head to center, I woke up looking in to a stained glass lotus hanging exactly above my head. An old fashioned pizza parlor light, like the one over the Editor’s and my living room table the year we were dirt poor in Seattle. Maybe the pizza essence is not wafting up from two floors below but just left over from times days this was the restaurant’s banquet room?

Waking under the lotus, pretending to take my mind back up inside it, I just thought house like a lotus.

That’s a book I read late in August the summer I checked out all the Madeline L’Engle titles at the public library in town. I was maybe 11. I think the book begins on the Acropolis in another cradle of civilization, narrated by a confounded young girl who definitely confounded me. Oh if my parents had known the things I read in the children’s section of the public library. But at the time I finished the book without really understanding the imagery or meaning of the eponymous lotus.

This morning I looked into the lamp thinking ­house like a lotus and sort of recovering that little seed of my apostasy. My explanations for my migrations away from the poor rural country and for my losses and gains of faiths tend to rely on luck and personality. But as the more buried history comes up, the accidents that began my own deviating line of experience seem to be located earlier and earlier. What was the unremembered accident that even oriented me to that book? What are the limits for explaining the growth and change, the evolution and homecomings, of humans when my own history is so forgotten or lost in my unconscious?

I don’t know. My historywriting ambitions, of self and others, get humbler the more I try to explain. But they have also been so hilariously, totally inspired by the impossibility of explaining anything. Especially this week.

Why is it that even as a deep non-believer in all the systems I love best, I take so much heart from the true believers who have the virtuosity and intelligence to do their practice with extreme skill? But the true believer sociologists are all undoing their premises from the inside out too, and the interesting ones know it and see the discrete steps of this process rather than throwing up their hands in a weak boring mutiny on “truth.” This week a few of them made me remember this whole vocation makes sense for me in whatever history gets written. Of course I’m an historian. It’s right there, so obvious, in my own history. Funny I had to go back inside the lotus, here in America’s little cradle, to remember again.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , integration

Research · 29 July 2008

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Categories: astanga yoga , science

'Til we grow beards get weird and disappear into the mountains--- · 29 July 2008

Something about these crazy arm balances, I tell you. I went into the hip-hop archives of the Owl House CD shelves Sunday, and drew out The Eminem Show. I cannot endorse this record because it exhibits high levels of misogyny, pandering to children, preening rhymes so obviously non-spontaneous he probably copped them from a songwriting dictionary (but who doesn’t), and, sort of, the dreaded cultural appropriation. Also: it’s good. Sorry, embarrassing; but yes. I thought about stemming my habit on Monday, but it’s been the Show all week here. In my fragile 5:40 am state, it’s true that I can hew to the lowest common denominator.

The record was already two years old and tired four summers back when I was learning the first series. But I stayed in a similar can’t-quite-change-the-record groove for days on end at exactly this point in late July that year, and it worked. The rhythm was a little different: the Editor and I would go to campus around 8, and for two hours I’d write notes in preparation for my upcoming field exam in Economic Sociology. At 10:10 I’d sneak back up the parking garage, and secret through the backstreets of Beverly Hills listening to that record loud like a white university-schooled fool while the middle-aged men from Michoacan and San Salvador trimmed trees and hauled grass clippings at the curbs. I’d cut back to Wilshire at Comstock, where the country club forces you back into the big arterial, and hit just a couple of lights before landing at a now-bought-and-decommissioned (thanks, YW) beautiful little studio in the heart of downtown Beverly Hills. Park in the free garage on Beverly drive and take a manduka and change of clothes from the trunk, in time to be on the mat with hair braided up at 10:30.

Interesting that these are still my practices—Econ Soc, astanga, driving my Civic—and that a return to this place in the annual cycle shows me how much it is the same person now and then. Also, the country is weirdly the same one that the record—with its backwards E evocative of financial crisis and much to say about clueless White America and horrible wars and dirty Dick Cheney—addresses: will we throw everything away as manaically as we did in Fall 04? It took the dense evocations of Eminem’s bad but good record to see me and us in this light again. What’s different? Some edges softer and some harder, I guess, a shift in sense of humor and ideas about this and that. Maturity in some areas, loss of orthodoxy in others. Oh, and an even more obvious alternative come November. On both levels, this year’s shift in context will be a little dramatic. The four-year cycle is concluding.

In aught four the Eminem show ended when I parked the car for a week and flew to another city for the annual disciplinary meeting. Same this year. When I come back, it will almost feel like fall.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , sound

Some notes on Mysore Style · 24 July 2008

I. Working a room. It helps to have waited tables for a long time. It helps to have great peripheral vision developed over years of sophisticated driste practice. Does a teacher understand that the first key is to coordinate, and intensify, the energies of the individuals? Or does she make the huge mistake of letting her energy pool in certain parts of the room, or—worse—periodically honing in on single students in a way that the rest of the room falls into darkness for several minutes? Driste—one pointedness, but the environing universe is still present and in motion. Teachers who don’t get this—and who can’t handle being service persons/facilitators—should do some time in the hospitality business.

Related: once I went to work at Amnesty International for a summer, taking three months of my waitressing job. Came back and tried to serve the same-sized sections on day one. DISASTER. Took many nights before I could play the table service video game again with any kind of skill.

Also: So can my working class service skills jump the hierarchy to working the rooms at the dozen giant cocktail parties I have to attend in Boston next week? Even though we’re talking rooms of very powerful, smart people who have things I—from my spot at the veeeery bottom of the hierarchy—want? Or will I let my energy pool in corners, stay occupied with those I know, fail to engage with the whole space? I actually hate this question (I never use that word). Working a room from the bottom, where you don’t have a prescribed service role but instead are doing self-promotion, requires a sense of entitlement or just another level of connected charisma I don’t possess. Bravado I can do, but essentially I hate the spotlight. It’s a question of whether I’ll decide to hone a high-brow version of my middle class skill. Such an annoying, creepy prospect, but if I can see table-waiting as just a video game…

Thoughts to develop some other time---

II. The dynamic between what you know what you’ve been taught, and the way this shows up in how you engage a student. And how this dynamic shapes the degree to which a teacher is able to teach an individual or teach a system.  

The first “teach” is a transitive infitinitive verb. The second is intransitive. Both have value. I am biased toward the first.

III. Holding a space, or owning a space. How this relates to a teacher’s feelings toward her own now-absent teacher. How teachers’ authoritarian vibe relates to her own projection process, specifically to whether she has followed this process to its resolution by recognizing that her teacher/therapist is a human.

What’s the teacher’s own relationship to authority? Has she seen her own teacher as such an authority figure that practicing without the teacher is still very mournful and makes her feel abandoned? (One way to tell that is if she tries too hard to fill the shoes of the departed authority: sometimes the heaviest-handed teachers are filled with nostalgia for the imagined heavy-hand of their teacher and trying to fake it in order to comfort themselves.) Often, put-on authority is rooted in sadness for the departed teacher, and for the fact that the young  teacher herself can no longer be observed as a good student and act out of submission and compliance. Lots of karma yoga in moving from compliant to first-person active.

IV. Ritual—what is it there for?

Between (a) mind-containing structure and (b) grasping for meaning…

in other words, (a) understood as arbitrary or (b) understood as magic.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory

Process mindset, release of expectations, peripheral vision, problematizing documentation · 20 July 2008

All those terms have the same meaning here.

A client who is also a personal coach says she chose me as a teacher in part because I have a “process mindset.” This disposition “makes everything ok,” and turns experimentation and “failure” into play. It doesn’t give a shit about accomplishment. Doesn’t think about “results.”

This student, who describes herself as “fixed mindset” and “goal oriented,” has the, well, goal of becoming process-oriented. Because it seems like someone goal-oriented is less able to experience flow, does not experiment or learn very much from foul-ups, is less happy in general, and is more attached to getting things.

Ok. This is a useful conceptualization. Process and fixed mindsets. And I guess for YOGA practice, a process mindset is pretty helpful.

But what if you’re a writer? What if you’re a scientist? What if you want to contribute something for godsakes?

Not so helpful: this spontaneous, flow-oriented, “screw accomplishments” sensibility. Let me just confirm that.

Should I really be immersing myself in a practice that makes me even more process-oriented and even less interested in objectifiable results?

There’s the rub. This whole personality-definition just legitimates my endless playfulness. At a time when fixating on results would particularly annoying and painful.

Here’s what I’m thinking. If I can generate results as a byproduct of happy but sincere action, staying in process-mind is possible and—this I can verify—way more fun. I don’t swear off or denigrate results, but as long as they keep coming, they can stay parenthetical. They can be at the periphery of my field of vision. Just like my body parts when I put them in an asana. This is ideal, though. An anti-goal that is really a goal. I'm not there, when it comes to the writing-practice. It means being good. 

Here is what else I’m thinking. Of the blogger called CP. Cody Pomeray, Dean Morarity: alternate names for the man who catalyzed a whole movement of obsessive thing-creators. But what did Neal Cassady himself create? Enthusiasm, relationship, life. His life was his art. That it got documented is an accident: how many other artists- detached- from- product never made the history books? What unwritten, unpraised current lies there?

But then… getting praise isn’t the point, in that current.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , science , social theory , spirituality

Between ADD and OCD · 17 July 2008

I am really ok with a little open disagreement. Seems like healthy exercise for not taking things personally—and not making them personal. Also, it ups the ante on figuring things out and makes for quick learning.

That said, this last thread on whether ashtangis practice something beyond asana is the most elementary thing this blog has ever seen. Conduct the primary series one thousand times and make your own brilliant deductions, Watsons.

Meantime, time for the semi-annual confab on the next tagline for ashtanga yoga. Everyone here? Here are some new ones to surface in recent weeks.

Ashtanga Yoga. Yes We Can! (From Katie, who just got Ekapadabakasana.)

Ashtanga Yoga. The breathing practice with guts. (A quislingism of 0v0 and the LadyGoverNess.)

Certified Teachers. Emotionally secure. So you don’t have to be.

Authorized Teachers. Preserving the letter of the law. So the spirit may live on.

            Or on second thought,

Authorized Teachers. Preserving the letter of the law. Whatever that is.

The one we settled on last time was just

Ashtanga Yoga. Shut up.

But my favorite is still

Ashtanga Yoga. Reviving the grail quest one true believer at a time.

Back to the authorized teachers taglines, maybe the first one would help all of us to accept these legalistic souls who are hyper-identified with the ashtanga brand and anxious to have you know they have "the blessing," like to talk about the (um) sacrifices involved in being a yoga teacher, and incidentally will have you know that’s not the correct vinyasa for Prasarita C. Authorized teachers are the footsoldiers of the code, the Knights Templar to the Certifieds’ Illuminati. It falls to them to keep the faith intact in a sea of anus-shiva-power-xtn yoga, which can manifest as a sea of maya. Brave quixotic knights, they are. Their generation has difficult role to play.

What do you do? Somebody’s got to fixate on the individual trees in the forest. What we tend to think of as insecure legalism also keeps the lineage coherent. In this sense, the “authorized” vibe is our Julia Butterfly. 

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Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

The Anusarian and the Ashtangi · 14 July 2008

Excerpts from an exchange I’ve been conducting with Dale, an Anusana practitioner in Austin, over the last couple of weeks. Chez Liz.

……………………………………………………………….

DALE: My "moon days" in the sense of adventure and release from tension that you project are -- most days. Most days I have the wonderful freedom and opportunity of being able to choose what kind of yoga I do. And I find the same sense of unleashed adventurous joy in that as you obviously do when unchained from the work for a day.

Obviously, I'm not very dedicated :-).

Have you thought about tasting a different style of yoga on your off days/Saturdays?

……………………………………………………………...

(0v0): I'm not sure about yoga “tastings”? A little anusara, for example, does taste nice in terms of sensation, but if it were just about the feeling in my body... um... for me that is not what it is about. When I choose every day what yoga to do, the mind takes over and has a field day. :)

……………………………………………………………..

DALE: Well, it's quite true that I'm not a dedicated Ashtangi :-). I last had a stable practice schedule 4 or 5 weeks ago, but at that time I was doing 1st series or a half-primary 2 or 3 times a week, 2nd series once or twice a week, Shiva Rea vinyassa a couple times a week, and sprinkling in a few flow classes.

Wow!! How dedicated! NOT. I am about as dedicated to yoga as I am to chocolate (mmmmmmm, chocolate). In reality I am merely as bad a glutton for yoga as I am for chocolate (mmmmm, chocolate).

So when I sound like I'm "try[ing] to show [you] all the real way," it's just like saying "I know you like Baby Ruth, but dude! try a Snickers."

I practiced all last week at a Baron Baptiste studio. It was alot of fun - nothing earth-shaking, but I learned some different ways to put flows together. And practicing in a 90F room was interesting. It was enough to keep me from losing heat, but not so much that I felt like I was being heated from the outside. I think that the external heat did contribute to some overwork that I did (& made me painfully sore), but I've done similar things in unheated practices, so I can't blame the room. Fun! You ought to try it (or not :-). Because it is fun! Fun celebrates the unquenchable joy of the Divine. Go grab a blue cowboy and dance!!

And yeah, I think that it would be a good idea for everyone to try some other yoga activities. Why just do the same set of poses, in the same order all the time [rhetorical question...].

Is it ok for an Ashtangi to lift weights? How about go for a bike ride? Ok to do aerobics? To go dancing? To take a different style of yoga class? To swim or run?

If one of these is not like the others, why??? Why would swimming be ok for an Ashtangi, but not a Baron Baptiste vinyassa class?

You mentioned my love affair with Anusara. Well, it goes beyond that. I have become an Anusari in the fundamental sense - I do everything in the Anusara style. Vinyassa, Ashtanga, lifting weights, whatever - I do it all in the Anusara style. I actually do very few Anusara classes anymore, because I'm having too much fun doing various styles or vinyassa these days. But the heart of Anusara isn't any particular sequence or activity or set of poses. The heart of Anusara is a way of doing - a way of being and a way of doing. So when I do vinyassa or Ashtanga or Shiva Rea or whatever, I do it in the Anusara way. Whatever I am doing with my body, the principles of alignment apply, and the mental/spiritual/emotional practices apply.

I wonder if there is a heart of Ashtanga that transcends which series you are working on, or whether you are practicing Mysore or in led classes. To me, the heart of Ashtanga might be something like maintaining the integrity of the breath and the breath-movement connection. I think that Ashtanga also teaches patience, nonGrasping, truthfulness, meditative mind, and the magic of "rinsing the spine," as your teacher describes it :-).

Could you swim or run in the Ashtanga way? Certainly. My swimming would have as its goal proper breathing, and then adjusting my swimming motions to be maximally in tune with my breathing. I would swim with the intention of mastering the form, but without grasping for the outcome - after all, if I just practice my swimming, all will come.

And can you practice freestyle vinyassa in the Ashtanga way? Why not?

Oh, and I don't hate Ashtanga. Remember that I've been practicing Ashtanga on & off for about 6 years. I got totally bored with primary series for a long time. But about a year ago, I started working on second series, and eventually that get me started back doing primary occasionally. But this time primary is fun, because I do it with specific things that I want to work on in order to improve my second series work.

Next in the Ashtanga realm, I think I'll tart working on The Rocket. It doesn't depend on increasing your flexibility in certain ways like 3rd series does, and it emphasizes strength and agility. And it looks like a blast :-).

…………………………………………………………………

(0v0): Cool comment. I think you're on to something with your insight into the different dispositions of different schools.

Is it accurate to say, following the chocolate metaphor and your earlier comments on tasting, that your practice focuses on enjoying the sensations in the body? There's attention to the delights of the senses (and embodied experience) and the beauty of symmetry? There's attention to dileating a path to joy?

These are valid principles for sure. Ashtanga's personality is something different. Hmm.

Maybe I'll try to write about this later.

…………………………………………………………….……..

DALE: Interesting.

Yes, I practice purely for the love of the practice. I enjoy the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of the practice, but I do not practice for any other reason than that I groove on it.

Considering yoga, if you practice because you love the practice, then you need look no further for the reasons that you spend so much valuable time and energy on it. Your desires and actions are aligned.

But let's say that practicing is not your most favorite thing, or even one of your top 10 favorite things. Then why practice? As David Swenson says, "It's only yoga."

Perhaps it is to achieve some healthy physical or psychological results: losing weight or gaining strength or a better range of motion or better balance or concentration or stress relief. Cool !!

Maybe it is training yourself to overcome difficult obstacles, to persevere, to see yourself physical capabilities clearly, accept yourself utterly, and then make improvements in a determined yet nonHarming way. Groovy!!

Or maybe your practice is like sitting meditation in Zen - you do not practice with any expectation, but only because you know that it is good for you. I can't argue with that.

Or maybe you practice in order to have some sort of religious or ecstatic experience, like the dervishes. Well, that's alot healthier than peyote :-).

And if you practice as a religious discipline, that's wonderful, too. I think that a person's religion is their business, and as long as their religion doesn't tend to make them mean people, I think it's wonderful.

If you want to say that Ashtanga's personality is different from enjoying the practice, then consider this - is there a standard & necessary motive for practicing Ashtanga? If someone has a different motive or a different experience in the practice, then are they doing it wrong? Is it no longer Ashtanga? Is Swenson wrong when he says that it is only yoga?

I think that one can practice for many reasons, and have a variety of different experiences, and still be doing great yoga. I have students who are growing in their yoga, students who want to get stronger/faster/better, students who are trying to age more gracefully, students who are recovering from breast cancer and need to accept themselves more completely, students who just want to have a good sweaty time, and students who come to class for the companionship. Who is wrong & who is right? Maybe each person's practice has their own personality.

I do not see a fundamental difference between Ashtanga asana practice and other yoga asana practice. In fact, I do not see a fundamentat difference between traditional asana practice, and applying those same principles to running, swimming, or basketball. Each of these can be practiced using the same principles that illuminate our asana practice.

So - why do you practice? Is it a mixture of "love it" and doing it for other reasons? How is your experience of Ashtanga practice different from other yogas?

What do you think of the idea of doing other things in your life in the same way that we do asana?

…………………………………………………………………

(0v0): Dale, Thank you for thinking through this with me.

I wonder if your idea of “enjoyment”—defined as being “my favorite thing to do” and something that “tastes good” and associated with sampling/tasting varieties, and physical feeling-good, and understood as being intrinsically self-legitimating according to a “do what feels good” ethos—is particularly tied to the ethos not of living life to the fullest but of consumerism.

The metaphor of eating connects to a larger sense of pursuing happiness through inputs of sense experience. There’s a lot of mental fluctuation in the sense-seeking, chocolate-savoring, variety-loving practice you describe. Which is great fun, but what’s this really doing to the mind? (Perhaps the character of practice you describe is oriented to pleasing the mind, whereas my own orients to quieting it.)

What you describe are wonderful immanent joys, but are they transcendent? Do they connect you to the peace that passeth understanding? (What is their relationship to the fifth-eighth limbs of yoga—or are these not a part of Anusara’s personality?)

That said, I am intrigued by your implicit argument that Anusara-style practice is an end in itself. That’s sweet. It can be done for any apparent “motive” but is a whole experience in and of itself. I wish I had an interesting or noble answer for my own motivations for practice—moral improvement, increasing my love, knowledge of reality. These are real side effects of any devotional practice, but if the reason I get on my mat every morning is a combination of love and inertia.

I dunno. What I can tell you is that every morning my sweetheart asks me, “How was your practice today?” And I often have to say say, year in year out of my routinized and not always physically blissful ashtanga life, “Amazing. It was the best practice EVER.”

Each day is different, in content if not in form. Because I hold the form constant (which many would expect to be boring if they hadn’t tried it for a while), I’m able to observe/experience my self—breath, subtle body, mental states, and more than anything the increasingly accessible edges of my unconscious mind—with a pretty crazy level of subtlety.

Is that possible in any physical activity? Maybe. You can do mindfulness practice in a lot of contexts. (There is a difference between saying “it’s only yoga” and “it’s only asana”—I believe you mean the latter.) But I find certain pretty special rarefied states of consciousness are possible when you combine mindfulness with vinyasa and the extreme kinds of nerve-cleansing that this method particularly brings. Ice hockey or flower arranging or most asana will not necessarily work the subtle and emotional bodies quite to the brink in the same revealing, wonderful way, even if we want to say—ever so nondualistically—that all methods are the same. Maybe that’s fine. Ultimately, it’s only chitta vritti nirodaha.

When I say today was the best practice ever, this does not always mean that practice has been gratifying. Sometimes it’s taken me to the places that scare me; usually I’ve cultivated too deep a state of trance to register “fun” or any delight in my own physical capacity; sometimes I’ve practiced with colleagues who are actively, deeply suffering on their mats beside me. The joy is about something other that the more sense-oriented idea of fun. It may even be tinged with sorrow, and always contains a sense of my own smallness in the greater scheme of things. It’s actually really humbling to devote yourself to a routine in this way, and just let the routine take over. It’s not about what I can do or achieve; this is why ashtangis sometimes say the yoga does us rather than we it.

Though in fairness, I have to admit that part of my delight in practice IS purely immanent: because I do the exact same thing every single day, over time my body has become somewhat gravity-defying, open, and strong. You don’t get to practice intermediate or advanced ashtanga if you approach practice as a sampler or “achiever,” but only by just giving yourself over to the routine. Sampling this practice leads to suffering and injury—it’s just too difficult otherwise, and I’ve seen a lot of people torture themselves with inconsistent practice. The method only really opens you up to the degree you are fully capable if you follow it every day for years, and even then only if you’re lucky enough to have a healthy body and avoid serious injuries on the way. Maybe that’s really boring. Maybe ashtangis are boring people. The kickback is an indescribable chemical cocktail—especially from the crazy backbending while riding the breath—that no other physical experience I know can touch. You don’t get that kind of experience by sampling, just because so much is required in terms of skill and physical development that you must have a super-intelligent, repetitious method.

And even that passes. The crazy thing is that, as this practice passes in to its third generation and we see the first wave of American teachers do intense physical practice into their sixties and the living “guru” of the system turn 93 this week, it’s becoming pretty clear that the outgrowth of this practice is that joy becomes independent of sense-based physical enjoyment.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , integration

Camelots · 8 July 2008

Ask not what your practice community can do for you… but what you can do for your practice community.

Rolling on toward Camelot as we are this summer, and with the ashtangi follow-the-energy vritti at its height, I just got to make the above suggestion.

Forget about consuming others’ energy. How much can you give?

There is an energy market in ashtanga. On a social network graph, I could map its shifts and pulses around the world and within key cities. The expansive tendency is to follow the energy, but involution requires putting down roots. Evolution, I have a feeling, begins with the first but shifts quickly to the second.

What’s it going to be? Changing your life at crucial times in hopes of shaktipat-grace, ok; but day-trading in the endless energy market…?

I love the practitioners who take a love the one you’re with approach to their home space. Everybody loves those practitioners, actually, so (in addition to being the most content) they end up receiving more energy than they lay down day after day.

That’s the funny thing. When you stop chasing the energy, you start being the source.

Yoga practice appears to be a pay-for-service kind of thing, but it’s really not. Sorry. You pay and you serve.

(And gain the world in the meantime.)

         <<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>

Incidentally… will Camelot-the-Sequel be routed? Why are Warren Christopher and James Baker (not exactly someone outside the blood-for-oil winners’ circle) moving now to limit the executive’s powers to take the country to war? I will not mention the crazy internet predictions false flag events at the DNC or the fact that my beautiful grandmother lives blocks from this year’s convention center. But I don’t trust the trans-national blood-for-oil conspiracy for anything and if James Baker of all people is worried, we and Iran should be too.

         <<<<<>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>

Also incidentally, the Angels and Demons people are still crawling all over this place.

Super-dreamy: the quad, now slanted over in the best golden light of evening with its grass all vibratory and the rocks of Royce aglow, is scaffolded in giant spotlights. A tall dweeby guy with big hair is lurching around the outlook in the distance, pausing, hands-on-hips, to interact with someone behind a camera 10 feet away. Periodically, someone runs after the tall guy with what appears to be hairspray, as if the hair weren’t already well fortified.

They should have cast anyone else. Ed Norton, Ed Harris, Willem Dafoe (she wishes). Give the nerds a better face, with less air in the head and more fire in the belly. Clear-minded intensity (Obama, JFK, King Arthur, source-yogis present and past) can be dreamy too.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , markets-networks-society

FBHII · 2 July 2008

Leave it to the comments function to hiccup when my writing's most nonsensical. If I mangled the subject of auto-pretzeling, or it raised questions, fine to drop comments here.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [39]
Categories: astanga yoga

Sex and 3S, or, a post about putting your feet behind yo