Paydirt · 9 March 2010

Injury or Opening?

              Circus Ride or Red Stupa?

                                          Rabbit Hole or Paydirt?

Don’t confuse yourself, lady: just change the ticket.

So yeah.... to my dismay, it started last week. People hitting a vein of something-I-know-not-what. Some are getting anxious and getting the hell out… others are sitting on the line to Cathay Pacific, Air Emirates and BA, paying the fee for the fickle.

I've been of one mind in each place. The heat is ridiculous and my friends are gone and I am in certain ways very done.

But there is this deep pull factor. It's not so much the seductions of the practice high and life of leisure. Those are cancelled out by the ennui and the dirty suffocating heat. Underneath those, something here seems to get in your system and make you want to keep with it. For me, it's the resonant combination of shakti and curiosity. 

Got to be back in Ann Arbor for sure in a couple of weeks. Meantime, I phoned Air France for a stay. The man on the line had definitely heard this one before.

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Categories: astanga yoga

Nadi Shodanites · 2 March 2010

Here in Mysore for two weeks yet. One more moon cycle, beginning Sunday and concluding a week from Friday. Then it’s Bangalore-Paris-Detroit.

Will be writing more these two weeks, since I am semi-awkwardly shifting back in to verbal-mind. It’s funny: now that the sentences are starting to shore up again in my stream of thought, I’m thoroughly amusing myself. It seems that words return quicker than wits, so at this point I believe myself to be very funny even though likely I'm really not. Dullness has its virtues. But I am keeping myself interested, so it’s perfect.

I’ve been sort of flaky in recent weeks, but if there’s a void in your in-box where my response is supposed to be, maybe you can feel the half-formed intention I’ve sent in its stead? Consider yourself emoticon’d. A dear friend's cancer diagnosis has jerked me back in to being able to be present to something other than vinyasas and sutras and lassis, though. Jesus. Kali is coming... I'm bringing a piece of her back from here. 

Anyway some things are still open and tender. I’m in no mood for bullshit since I’m taking extra special interest in my own, so how about let’s do this super-oldschool. List-serv style :-)

Drop email to insideowl-AT-gmail-DOT-com if you’d like to be on the recipients-list for this two weeks of occasional metablogging.

oxo 

(0v0)

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Categories: astanga yoga

Offswitches · 23 February 2010

Lights cut out in the shala this morning. I was upside-down in a prasarita as the raft of us went under. Then after a moment the generator bellowed so strong I could feel it in the floor, and the glass of Sharath’s new office flickered. The terraced chandelier and the sconces relit, and we were back in motion. Nothing different, no ruffles in the fabric of reality, no jokes about Samadhi in the gaps.

Two weeks ago, on Shivaratri, Narasimhan was discoursing about abhinivesa in the noon heat. We began to hear a marching band from the street (at least I think I wasn't the only one who heard it...). The band turned a corner and zeroed in on our location, but he spoke right through the din. The rest of us stayed with him. The band oompaed past the opaque windows behind his head, and still he made no reaction. Nothing. At that moment, the beeker-shaped bulb on the wall flickered and went, the fan cut out, and the suddenly power-deprived water purifier in the next room started to whine. Narasimhan stayed on discourse like the TMer he is on mantra, preempting the self-referential humor or differerance that would have made “abhinevesa” the joke instead of the subject.

I did get pretty far out on the limb of dharana this past couple of weeks. Lots of bhakti, and then the first and second padas sort of took up residence in my Circle of Willis and wouldn’t leave. Woo hoo, mind transplant! Best vacation! The usual cognitive tics replaced with rhythmic Sanskrit wisdoms. It is very good to go there for a period of time, to break old thought-cycles and find out how my heart responds to the energy savings.

But also, creativity surges in the gaps that the new rhythms plugged. The way writing usually happens is like this: I’ll be walking down a staircase or cutting a vegetable or washing my hair and three or four words will make contact with a feeling, and then together they’ll hatch some paragraph. This is a good process, and one that stops when the Sutras are staging a sit-in.

Today I remembered Franny, from Salinger’s book, which I read in college while tending the front desk at the library. She gets her cognitive function snagged on the Jesus Prayer and, both absorbed and unmoored, goes from bliss to misery to bliss.

Depth at the expense of complexity? I dunno. But my friends the hashtangis are a warning to me: empty mind not same as quiet mind.

The last few days I have fumbled around for the off switch and found it, gotten back in to work. It seems my subconscious is willing to get behind that decision, more or less. That said, I love a little steam of devotional babble. Maybe there is something to the notion of praying without ceasing.

But anyway, about the subconscious, such as it may be. Twice this week I’ve dreamed of a huge airplane filled with many rooms. A flying arc. The hallways are filled with friends in the shapes of animals: a heron, a mayura, pidgeons and crows. Birds inside a bird, I guess.

But the image that comes most nights is of a huge cylindrical monument on the side of a mountain. It’s red with gold at the edges. Sometimes the edges are covered in small yellow light bulbs. The sides are scalloped and the base rises to a high point in the middle. The monument is able to spin in circles on an axis that drills down from the center in to the ground, and at times it can also tilt from side to side. The first time I dreamt it, I thought it was just a stupa—like the crazy Vajrayana monument at Gampo Abbey, overlooking the Nova Scotia sea. But it is also like an upside-down top or dreidl, the spinning children’s toys; and when it tilts it is exactly like The Round Up, a greasy carnival ride I used to take at the fair between roller coasters.

Mostly what is happening in the dreams is that we are hiking up to the red stupa circus ride, or just standing there looking on it against the backdrop of some Himalayas, but also sometimes painting it, and sometimes dangling off it over a cliff. The sky in the dreams is enormous, and there’s a vast ocean as well as incredibly beautiful, mysterious mountains.

Sometimes people come and jump on the red stupa and it spins like crazy, until they stumble away and throw up. (One time, I was spinning and someone I love threw a breaker to shut it off.) Sometimes they worship it.

And, sometimes… they use it to illuminate the rest of the landscape.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit

Embodied knowledge · 3 February 2010

Narasimhan was a delight today, commenting on Sutras 42 and 43 of the first pada (this Sanskrit business is great for my foot fetish, incidentally). Since reading Daniel Ingram and later picking up on the whole Wilberhead/Integral discussion of states and stages of being, I have become kind of sucker for maps of the refinement of consciousness. It’s really obnoxious, but fascinating. 

I have kind of rolled my eyes at the Sutras’ map of consciousness, because there’s just not much there compared to later and more articulated traditions—traditions which speak to more complex modern beings who possess, I want to believe, a greater capacity for rapid refinement and growth.

But… then Narasimhan brought it to life today. He didn’t do what I, dumbass, would do: create a giant grid comparing vitarka, vikalpa, savitarka and savikalpa to other descriptions within the samatha/vipassana model and whateverthehell else I could root up. No… he talked from informed experience. Like this:

At first, the mind believes itself to be stable. It sees the world outside as chaos, and tries to defend itself against the chaos. The boundary between self and world is strong.

Then, once one begins to practice yoga, there’s a recognition of the inner chaos. The world itself appears to be relatively stable—what varies are the inner reactions to the world.

Then, one learns to hold the mind itself stable. That stability becomes a fulcrum for investigating the fluctuations that continue—taking the mental changes as objects to be investigated.

After that, he got necessarily vague and mystical, talking about the re-dissolution of the boundary of self-against-the-chaos. I appreciated that part less well, given my own lack of refinement.

It’s amazing to learn Patanjali from a mystic. So much for my idea that this version of classical yoga offers a merely mechanical philosophy of mind. And so much for my depending on books to learn a  living philosophy, to be honest. It really helps me to get in the presence of people who travel the dharana-dhyana-samadi street regularly and understand their experience as such.

I guess Narasimhan and Jayashree, and Sharah for that matter, have seen a lot of us logocentric, sort of uptight westerners pass briefly through their spaces. We think we can learn yoga from books; and we are mistaken. This compulsion around book-learning and “Do it self” (my first spoken sentence, as a little one) must be the background agaist which Sharath says, again and again: Spend as much time with your teacher as you can. You have to learn through experience (implicitly, your own and that of your teachers’ teachers’ teacher...).

Monday Jayashree did a miniature head-wobble and gave a huge smile. ("She's just a bucket of love," said J, my first yoga teacher, who taught that Friday night class years ago at UCLA and who's here now, coming along to Sutra class at my urging.)

Jayashree said: You don’t have to always follow along in the book… we have a sense that if there is a text we can be in control. (And Narasimhan, beside her, echoed about the false sense of control in book learning).

Then, together, they said: YOU HAVE TO LET GO OF THE TEXT.

And she, again and again, repeats: Listening is learning. Listening is learning. Listening is learning.

Learn to depend on me for the words. Watch me chanting and imitate me.

Still I cling to the text, and am learning the Devangari script so I can read the Sanskrit rather than the English pages (weren’t you guys supposed to support my in resisting that project??? So ridiculous!) Here’s what Jayashree has written on the back cover of the book:

Srutiparampara dates back to Vedic period and has a tradition of approximately 5000 years. It evolved as the best means of preserving and transferring knowledge acquried by Sages and Scholars. Sruti means listening and Smrti means memorizing. The Guru (Teacher) used to recite and the Sisya (Student) used to listen, repeat twice or thrice and then store it in his memory. Then propagate the so acquired knowledge from Guru to Sisya through generations. Even today the Sastras, Music and the fine arts are taught in a traditional environment in the above system. 

The knowledge is embodied.

Duh.

No wonder Yoga Mala is so thin.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , sound

Moon Day Pieces · 29 January 2010

Camera’s busted! Purchased it around my birthday – extravagant little thing, supersmart, red and shiny, with many good tricks. Its last capture was my brother and me at he Eiffel Tower. Fumbling over the delicate buttons with stupid fingers, I dropped it and messed up the lens. Possibly repairable, but not around here.

Usually, I feel kind of awesome when something precious breaks or data are lost. But here’s the funny thing: the camera still works a little bit. No flash, messed up shutter, no image export. I have space for about 200, though it’s not clear they’ll ever be extractable from the device. So… shall I carry around the gimpy Canon, snap bad images at key times? Just in case? At first I thought: I would rather have no pictures than bad ones… but maybe, in a way, bad images have much better emotional tone than good ones. 

Anyway, some recent captures by even less accurate means…

-I’m sitting on the outer room without my glasses, seeing the shapes inside as I wait to begin. Then Saraswati materializes right beyond the door, to backbend-assist E, a giant Brazilian ectomorph. He drops without waiting, holding himself firm on legs so long, then she hefts him all the way back to standing at the end. She stands there facing him for a second, waiting for him to exhale. Her head is the height of his xyphoid process.

-Two bricklayers have been rebuilding the orphanage wall all week. Are masons next of kin to renunciants in this culture too? They’re saddhu-spindly, with heavy, sun-baked skin that folds over their cheekbones and necks. They dress in dirty white cloth, wrapped around the middle and up over their shoulders, and their hair is long and grey. I’d say they’re in their sixties, but could be off by decades. They crouch alongside the road and paste concrete out of a bucket right on to the wall using small triangular trowels. One works steadily, absorbed; and the second, coming along behind, divides his industry between trowel and a bidi. He drags on the smoke like a rock star, with a limp wrist and body fingers, and gazes along the wall at what they’ve done. So far, they’ve worked west from the front gate, around the corner and halfway along the northbound wall. Long way ahead.

-I finish practice just as the Gokulam elementary school kids are leaving their houses. At the top of a hill, I stop for a motorcycle piloted by a man in a starched white shirt and brown dress pants. There’s a small girl on the seat in front of him, and behind, a boy and a girl who are maybe twelve. All the kids are dressed in crisp white shirts, with dark plue pinafore/skirts or pants, hair wet and combed, staying in place as the bike bumps over a hole in the road. I turn the next corner and a rickshaw is taking off in a grey belch of exhaust. It’s leaving a superfancy three-story quasi-colonial (houses in Gokulam are crazy, creative studies in concrete, porcelan and glass—easy to ignore because lacking the greenery and yards that usuall catch my eye, but actually beautiful with their funny-shaped windows, idiosyncratic balconies and extra rooms, or arches, or columns added here and there for effect). A little boy of about five sits up straight in the back of a rickshaw, a black ski mask covering his head, some kind of insulation from the exhaust.

-End of led primary at the end of the first week, and I’m a little weary. Pick up from baddha padmasana in to uth pluthihi, and search for a drsti. I usually take ubahya in hopes that looking up will keep the padma aloft, but the other day Sharath stood in front of me in uth plu and put his finger to nose-tip (not the first time he’s instructed me to humble it down a notch from ubahya or brow center to nasagrai drsti). So there I am, crosseyed and hoping he’ll hurry up and count, and two feet come in to the distance beyond my nose. It’s his feet, larger than I’d expect, and spread wide like they’ve spent a life outside of shoes—or just done a hell of a lot of standing postures. They’re half-hanging off the edge of the stage, and both big toes are wrapped in athletic tape. Classic.

-I find myself walking down Contour Road in the power-out pitch dark on a weekend night. Every few seconds, a two-wheeled vehicle passes and shines a beam marking the way, but then I come up short on two steamrollers blocking the road. They each have miniature light illuminating the ground right in front of them, and I wonder if a biker might plow right in to great iron cylinders on their backs. Two men are trying to move the vehicles, but don’t seem able to get them out of first gear, so are inching around in circles there in the dark. They look like ancient Transformers (as in the movie Transformers, which I gleefully watched on the plane along with Terminator Salvation—OMG—and two other versions of the same movie, none of which The Editor would ever let me waste time on back home), or like 1970s childrens’ toys: all iron, no paint, no wiring… just grinding cogs and gears. Further down the road, a fresh shipment of tourist-coolant is rolling in to the coconut stand in the dark of night. A big old rusty truck, its flatbed built up with wooden sides, drives almost straight in to the tree that shades the stone benches in daytime. So many coconuts! The sweet green ones this time, a little smaller than the pale salty ones I’m learning to like. How do they even stay on the truck? The coconut guys unload them in to a kind of awesome pyramid they’ve already got going, using the woody nubs at the bottom to balance them against each other.

-And then Sambhav, the great-grandson, is just more than I can describe. He’s two and tiny, with long thin legs emerging from diapers and a fuzzy ponytail shooting three inches straight up from the top of his head. He toddles, and gurgles in a high-pitched mixture of Kaanada, Sankrit and English. Giant lemur-eyes, peaceful and curious, taking up most of his being, and a swirl of soft fuzz covering the teeny forehead. He comes in to class some mornings and warbles to his father and grandmother, saying words I don’t know and a few I do: “Trini! Pancha! Come!” Wednesday I finished on the stage, and there he was right in front of me, helping his dad squash my friend A in pachima. Yesterday, his helper, P, brought him to the park to watch some slackline. After a while, this tiny person wobbles up and puts a hand on me, waving me off when I bend down to say hi. He holds my pants-leg to balance, brings a foot up to ardha baddha, removes a sandal, then repeats the same on the other side before toddling off and extending two hands for a boost up on to the line.

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Categories: astanga yoga

Wanting it all, dedication, belief · 25 January 2010

Or, Faith in Faith Itself. Moment in conference yesterday:

An American guy in the back raises his hand high at the end of the Q&A. He’s agitated, passionate and confused.

-I want to know, how much am I supposed to sleep? …When do I sleep? ... How much do you sleep? Because I’m going back home and I want to know, how am I supposed to take my practice with me? Am I supposed to get up at 4 o’clock? Cos I live in New York, and you know, it’s hard to go to bed early…

-S chuckles. Yes, hard to go to bed early, especially in New York (smiles… he loves New York). Many distractions…. It is not easy. It takes dedication. What do you do?

-Me? Do? I’m a consultant. A financial consultant. (Audience sighs.)

-Aah. I take some tips from you later… (he laughs… then everyone else laughs)

-So how much do you sleep?

-(pausing, in what seems like reluctance to say) I am sleeping four hours. Sleep at nine, one o’clock I do my practice. Then teach… I almost don’t leave the house. Only difference is go upstairs, go downstairs. (laughter) At twelve o’clock I sleep for exactly one hour.

-How do you get energy for your family, teaching, practicing…?

-Read scriptures! Always study…

This is a paraphrase, and likely the ordering of sentiments is inaccurate.

Afterwards he expanded on this topic of dedication, and talked for a while about doubt. Doubt mostly serves to distract you from your practice and reduce your energy.

That is why you have to believe in what you do. If you do not believe the method will work, no matter what it is, it will not work.

                                    ……………                      

Been feeling that lately, a lot. I identify as a skeptic, cynic, and critical thinker. I would prefer to operate as if without a "hard core" belief system, theology, ideology, whatever: understanding the endeavor is niave, but at least trying to be so free.

But somewhere between Kirkegaard’s leap of faith and the dirty truth of the placebo effect, it did occur to me that I’d given myself to this practice despite myself.

The fact that this has been true for years—that my actions have outpaced my critical mind—is only now coming home to me. But so it is: practice two hours or more a day, outsource the dirty work (the gross physical structure) to a teacher, dive in to meditation, commit most other cognitive resources to professional things… then, not as much room left for compulsive questioning.

That’s not the same as subscribing to a belief, but now I realize I’m already living as if I’ve taken the leap of faith. It’s so weird. At this point I really don’t have a problem placing faith in faith itself.

In fact, I sense that doing so is a lot more effective than my default way of doing things—treating everything as an amusement, an experiment, or a piece of my worldly education.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution

Slackline · 21 January 2010

Spent a lot of time at the desk this week, so today I blew off and was a yoga bum. Here’s the schedule. It’s what every day looks like for many people I know, with the exception that most people drive their own scooters instead of rickshaws, and skip the walk to go out for a delicious south Indian dinner.

4:00 Get up, do a little email and skype

4:30 Regina starts chanting downstairs, rumbling the whole house. Get on the mat for abbreviated asana practice, plus pranayama and a short sit.

6:20 Walk 10 minutes to the shala, take a seat among the others in the entry way, watching practice in the big room. Listening to the billows of breath and the occasional calls for “One more” from Saraswati and Sharath. This is the most conscious 40 minutes of my day, an opportunity to enjoy incredible energy of the whole community, and a powerful Shinzenian sight-flow meditation. But I’m often tempted to let the eagerness to get in to the room take over the experience. Each morning, I’m getting better at letting the wait be an end in itself, and am going earlier and earlier to enjoy just sitting there, watching the shapes move inside the room and feeling the rhythm at which the practice in there moves.

7:00-8:30 Practice. Enough said.

8:30-8:45 Drink coconut (still don’t like the ritual, but the electrolytes feel like a good idea and they’re starting to taste good to me), watch monkeys play in the trees, sit around and talk to some practitioners outside the shala

8:45-9:30 Run home, shower, talk to housemates, drink wheatgrass and weird fermented energy tonic with housemates

9:30 – 11:00 Go to coconut stand to meet some sociologists on vacation. Take them to silly ashtangi breakfast joint where we sit in a beautiful courtyard alongside my Indian friend S and several other acquaintances. Eat fruit salad, an omlette and ginger-lemon tea: the exact same breakfast I’d order at any of four identical restaurants in the neighborhood. The bill is scandalously expensive for Mysore: $3.20.

11:00 – 2:00 Do some admin and writing, lunch with housemate.

2:00 – 5:00 Rickshaw over to the Regaalis. Lie out on the grass with some Brazilians and Canadians, Germans, an Austrian and a Portuguese. And an erstwhile American who has just moved permanently to Mysore (from Detroit). Swim intermittently. Read Cosmicomics  and laugh out loud (thanks, G.) Others are reading: Murakami, Svoboda, Patanjali. Thank god no Shantaram or EPL. Chodron’sThe Wisdom of No Escape is lying around, unread, under a beach chair. Hahaha.

5:00 – 5:15 Take the hottest shower in town at the hotel changing room, pick up some baked goods at the Regaalis restaurant, catch the best rickshaw in town back to Gokulam. The young driver asks if I would like music, and in response to a yes, blares Bhangra out of speakers behind my head. Yes, the ride is equipped with a pair of sub-woofers. They change everything.

5:15 - 6:15 Quick-change and run out to slackline practice with the regulars at the park. First day of slackline – at one point I get six steps in a row. Frustrating but intriguing. Slacklining. Second only to working on the tan as afternoon business for the Mysore regulars.

6:15 – 6:30 Check messages, change clothes.

6:30 – 7:30 Evening walk

7:30 – 9:00 Skype, blog, meditate, good night.

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Categories: astanga yoga

Mandala manduka · 15 January 2010

There is a breeze this afternoon, and high clouds. Kids chasing their dog in the park, men turning off the engines of their motorbikes to coast the last blocks down the Gokulam hills to their homes. Yesterday was the new year, and today the threshholds are still painted in the bright mandala tessellations the women made yesterday morning – using the colored chalk you always see in photos of Devaraj market. The lazy velvet cows, too, are still covered in dye, all their white spots made yellow. This afternoon I encountered a brown one, whose coat was too dark to color, but whose horns—two little crescent moons curved to point at each other in front of his eyes—had been painted celestine blue.

It’s also the day of the solar eclipse – something I’ve heard both locals and ashtangis use as an excuse for strange behavior—as well as the moon. I’m a little stunned to realize it’s the new moon—that a certain cycle is over. The last new moon I spent on the far end of the west. Slept in, caught a vinyasa flow class in Venice, took a walk along the Pacific, and went to my favorite raw food restaurant for a burger made of marinated vegetables pressed between slabs of dried onion. Packed up the car to leave the next morning for Ashtanga Across America, an eastbound roadtrip of nine states and nearly 3,000 miles, depositing us—my brother and me—finally in the frozen north. Then settling in to Michigan, holidays, work. Then a day in Paris, followed by three spacey, joyous days in Mysore – time I’d describe as blessed if that were a word I could use.

William Gibson says that souls get left behind a while, and take their own time to re-integrate with bodies after a long trip. I’d say my soul was still far out west, making its way east, if soul were a word I could use.

This morning in bed, I read a heterodox article in a neuroscience journal, arguing that consciousness arises not only from the brain but also from culture and one’s environment. Then the first pages of The Razor’s Edge, Maugham arguing in 1944 that environment largely determined character.

Not sure where that leaves me, for the moment. I have not slept much at all this week– am still flighty, disjointed, and a bit lost. I may have re-subscribed to the local gossip feed by way of adding the coconut stand and certain cafés to my ambit, but still feel out of touch with the surroundings. Maybe some good nights’ sleep and more long walks will do it.

Did a long, slow practice this morning in my apartment – more an auto-bodywork session than anything outwardly resembling yoga. My body is both open and very achey. This has never happened before; I thought the two conditions were not supposed to coincide. Like stagflation. From the outside, everything is flowing. But as I practice, it feels like the stiffest day ever. Since the bend is already there, I’m not sure what to do to disperse the ache. Maybe nothing. Maybe let it ache. It is, at least, interesting to remember in body the days when I felt like this most of the time.

Took a walk this morning, too, down unfamiliar back streets of Gokulam, up and down its hills, out to the edges of town. Two consecutive days off mean the ashtanga crew all wash their mats and hang them, alongside a towel, out windows and over balconies. Who know such-and-such a building had a student apartment upstairs? And is that tiny place a residence?  Purple or blue mats, and rugs in every color, hanging out like flags to announce expatriate residence and yogi leisure. Most buildings in the neighborhood boast either a mandala or a collection of mats, but a few on our street have both – a mandala in the street and a manduka flying from the apartment above.

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Categories: astanga yoga , integration

Intimacy & Equanimity · 8 January 2010

On Sunday, icicles began to grow on the windows of the little practice room. Today they’re a foot long. The heat is dry and patchy. It’s a bit grey in the sky and the ground are covered in four inches of the puffiest soft snow. In the morning it’s crisscrossed with squirrel, cat and deer tracks; and sometimes at night the fluffy white possum who lives under the neighbor’s stairs will roll out and squint at me. My sinuses ache, all the way up to the center of my head; and there’s something in the air that makes me sneeze powerfully at times. In Los Angeles, I feel the rhythms of my environment and move accordingly; here I have moved from euphoria to slight familiarity. My core is warm, but there’s a light contraction in the deep muscles. At all times, they are working harder here—navigating a new environment, adjusting to the dark, dry cold.

I had doubted whether it would make sense to continue 3S as a practice in this environment. Is it sensible to keep the body so open when it’s so cold and brutally dry? Will the Nordic climate and culture, the absence of vegetarian items at decent restaurants, the amazing fish market at Kerrytown, and the proximity of the lake cause me to crave fishmeat? (If so, wonderful! But for some reason I don’t feel right about using animal flesh to drive extreme yoga, and would ramp down the practice if creatures were my usual fuel.)

I had questions about context. The practice seems suited to very energetic, very open people in warm environments, with the support of other people who have decades of experience and dozens of colleagues who know how the series works. I wondered if doing it here, in a cuddly-cozy, hyperintellectual, neurotic scholarly-powerhouse of a town, would only serve to keep me out of touch with my environment, fighting reality with sinewy sentimentality. The opening and the work of it, I thought, require so much surrender and so much will that doing it every day would be a self-punishing struggle. Advanced stuff suffers no fools, and I worried about disrespecting it by taking it out of context. I might need to find a more “supportive programme,” I thought.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, blah. Turns out my body is context enough. This self-questioning was the same as all the other doubts that one has– about practicing while pregnant, practicing while female, practicing while over a certain age. (Doubts usually suffered by women, I’d note.) So it’s winter. So what? So I do what I always do. This machine has been meticulously constructed and, like the Honda, it runs just fine on difficult terrain.

The weird thing is that the old programme is better than fine here. My hips tend to tighten up against the cold, and the opening section of the practice is full of strong re-letting-go work. The strength work warms me up and, together with the backbends, generates a great deal of positive energy that will probably shelter me from the neuroticism that is par for the course for young academics in these parts. (Michigan is smack in the center of the stress belt: statistically, people here are far more anxious and depressed than elsewhere; and the institution seems to take for granted that new arrivals will experience a mental breakdown upon moving here.)  Because the practice is so in-my-face, I can’t sit around and look at my toenails or take 10 extra breaths in postures. Otherwise, it might be much more difficult to learn to practice by myself after years of community support.

The solitude is mostly allright, though at first I tended to get very emotional in the backbends, remembering how much I missed my previous home. I had forgotten the potency of ashtanga yoga… if there is an emotion I’ve hidden under the surface, some level of bending will eventually bring it out. The hardest backbend was urdvha dhanurasana – the one in which my heart is completely exposed and the psoas has to both lengthen and engage to bring me to stand. All the others—even natrajasana—have some element of protection of the chest, and did not leave me so completely exposed. After a week of bailing out of dropbacks, I talked to a home practitioner who is pretty systematic about not bailing out and who takes notes every day on what he did in the backbends. The next day, I practiced through the sadness and fear. Sort of awkward. After three or four more practices, the block went away. Now my body remembers what it’s always done.

I have often wondered if it might be better to practice advanced series alone. It’s so confrontational and intimate, and sometimes a distraction to others. I don’t know about shalamates who have to live with advanced practitioners, but for my own ego it is somewhat liberating to get away from the sense that I’m any different from everyone else. No matter what series you're doing, ashtanga’s all confrontational and intimate—which becomes obvious, again, when there are no eyes or cameras or mirrors. In this sense, the crazy programme has never made so much sense. It seems natural that, after cleaning up all the vinyasas with a teacher to keep me present, I should learn to clean up the distractions and drama that want to undermine me when I do the same practice alone. It was a little messy and exasperating at the first, but now there’s also a feeling of rebirth. Of greater intimacy with my own experience, and much "better" conditions for figuring out that thing about equanimity.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration

Equanimity · 4 January 2010

From the Bhagavad Gita: 

Attachment and aversion by sense organs for respective objects are natural; let no one come under their sway; they are his foes….

Notions of heat and cold, of pain and pleasure, have a beginning and an end, are impermanent in nature…bear them patiently…be contented with whatever comes.... 

Hahahaha.

Another way of saying the same thing:

 

Practice and all is coming.

 

Hahahahaha. Yes. Loss gain praise blame pleasure pain love hate. All.

What did we think he meant? Durvasasana, fame, sex and cupcakes?

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Categories: astanga yoga

Signs of Bikram Yoga Dependency · 31 December 2009

-You start to think of your morning ashtanga programme as your “cooling” practice.

-You see idiosyncracies in the script—exhortations to lock out the knee so hard it bends backwards, specifications of an upturned palm with “Imagine the hand is full of money, so much money,” grammatical errors such as “pull more harder” and the dropping of articles—as carrying vital historical context. (Phase two: the idiosyncracies point to hidden meanings. They are esoteric.)

-You believe the teacher when she says that the postures should only be done in correct order if one is to receive all of the health benefits.

-Working your edge starts to mean seeing how big a lunch you can eat and still hit the 6:30 class without throwing up.

-You experience feelings of great tenderness toward first-timers, hoping they will be welcomed with the same words the desk clerk used to greet you on day one: Welcome to the torture chamber of love.

-You get increasingly excited about new ways to get very fucking cold: leaving the mat in the car so it’s half frozen when you roll it out in the room, eating snow after practice, freezing your water bottle. (There’s luxury in such contrast. But don’t worry: otherwise Bikram torture is bhoga-free.)

-The smell stops bothering you. Really.

-Other people dripping sweat on your mat begins to feel like friendly energy-exchange.

-You experience Stockholm syndrome-like trust and comraderie feelings toward teachers, even though they speak in monologue, don’t touch you, display no facial expressions, and say the same thing over and over and over like broken 1980s pull-toys.

-A bikini seems like a totally normal thing to wear for yoga. In fact…

-You devise a SYSTEM. The SYSTEM codifies the minimal number of strokes of the snow shovel, layers of clothing, and runs of the washing machine required to get your fix every day.  You become a sleek yoga machine, slithering unencumbered and without advance planning through the freezing night and the piles of snow. In to for your fix and out again as if this all makes some kind of sense. Once this level of rationalization sets in, the behavior is likely to continue unless there is an intervention.

:::::::: If symptoms manifest swiftly and intensely, residential care in an approved institution may be required. Optimally, the subject shall be sent directly to the KPJAY Institute of Mysore, India, and attended to by Saraswathi and Sharath, the greatest physicians in the land. A minimum stay of two months is strongly recommended.::::::::

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , integration

Gone · 14 December 2009

Sitting in my old autoshop on Santa Monica Boulevard, while the Honda gets its spine adjusted and lymph cleansed. On the fiberglass chair beside me a pile of exams – final grades signed, sealed and delivered.

Yesterday my least woo-woo friend, Greta, hugged me on the Palisades and said Your drive across the country is going to be so cleansing.

This had not occurred to me. The cleansing quality of driving hundreds of miles through the should-be-Mexico desert, hundreds more through Texas hill country, then even more hundreds up the Mississippi silt corridor and in to the gorgeous, tragic hills of Tennessee, then another couple hundred along the jagged knife edge of Illinois, cutting right in to Michigan as the solstice turns over. All that territory passing through the windshield, from the front to the back of my mind, while I do Shinzenian “sight-flow” and see how the body works as it becomes ever more a sub-mechanism of the Honda.

It is cleansing, though not like a juice fast. It occurs to me to distinguish between gross body and subtle body layers, and suggest that it is easier and easier to contact the subtle if you just practice practice practice. And eventually, for long time practitioners, major body changes might be as likely to originate in the subtle as in the gross layer.

If you meditate long enough, just sitting there, the body goes to pieces. Excruciating disformations. But then(!), the old monk’s frame reorganizes from the inside. Shinzen’s students call it opening the central channel. Nonsensically tantric for a bunch of empiricists, but maybe all that quiet puts them in contact with an inner force.

The new openings in my body the past couple of years did not result from physical interventions. I don’t take much interest in muscle relaxants or stimulants (though Excedrin is excellent for a migraine), have stopped doing organ cleanses (though the gall bladder thing would be great if I had the time), and (though I could use major restructuring in the traps, scalenes and atlas/axis) don’t get bodywork. I don’t take breaks from practice or change up the programme. So… the patterns in the physical layer are routine: a seven-day cycle, within a moon cycle, within an annual cycle.

If my body opens, it’s because I let go of a stagnant emotion or stupid story, or dismantle a wall against some person or type of people.

The way I figured this out was doing Five Rhythms dance every week. Go in to some kind of theta state in that setting, and good things happen. One nervous system becomes integrated with all kinds of others. Negative emotions get really fluid and want to disintegrate.

Other ways the subtle body seems to get moved: gratitude/listening; allowing certain conflicts to erupt and settle, even if this is mortifying; being good to my parents without a fucking agenda; spending time with the Santa Barbara ashtangis, especially their teacher; sitting Vipassana retreat; meditating on the body for a long damn time, until it drops away; using sociology to see the ways humans war against each other with the use of mental categories and identites.

The hard sell is that doing this shit improves my backbends. On the level of vanity, it works as “subtle body massage” (though who knows if it would still work if I were doing it with the intention of getting better backbends). In any case, the kundalini gulag in LA has figured out the effectiveness of subtle body intervention. (And I’m surprised this is not of interest in the blogosphere—there’s no reason that the internet should confine us to gross body awareness of practice). In certain parts of Cali, it’s just as likely that you’ll go to an aura reader or a chakra healer, rather than taking a salt bath or getting a massage, in order to open the body. Recognizing that the subtle body is real and totally changeable doesn’t mean you’re all spiritual and shit, but it is fascinating and rewarding.

Anyway. This morning I woke up late after an intense bedtime phone talk and realized/decided that the sad is done processed. The way my grandma, who came of age in the Iowa dust bowl and moved west after her husband survived the war, would say done finished.

Went to practice late, very tired from whatever processing I’d done in my sleep, but so much lighter in spirit. Realized/decided that fear of kicking my feet up off the earth in Viparita Chakrasana was the exact same stuff as this fear of picking up and leaving home that I carried for more than a year. And, today, by way of this noticing and deciding, it was true that the block was no longer there. (This was also true because day by day I have built the muscles and opened the spine, and gone right to this edge and looked at it day by day as well—all of this is in the context of rote practice.)

Well holy shit. Sealed the deal by going through the motions of Viparita Chakrasana, for the first time. And then, immediately, did it again a second time, and a third. OMG !  !  !  Ok then.

Bridges of sinew, waters of grief: this fear has gone.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception

Prana · 1 December 2009

Explanations change.

A long time ago in ashtanga years, a woman on her cycle was dirty. Shamed in to second class status and a sense that her body was profane, she was all out shunned on certain days of the month. Signs were posted. Don’t compromise us with your stink. Don’t profane our rituals – be they puja or asana – by participating in them when you are unworthy.

Consciousness grows. The old belief is recognized as a pillar of patriarchy. We react to it, analyze it, mourn it, let it go. Slowly, the background beliefs that maintained the boundaries and the hierarchies are disavowed.

But do we find other ways of making them true?

What is the New Age belief system but a set of superstitions and justifications, codes of fear and prejudice interlaced with little liberations?

The idea that a woman is dirty has been replaced with woo woo physics. Woo woo physics has replaced the English words “up” and “down” with “prana” and “apana.” Somehow if you use a different word for these things, it’s more meaningful and you can make lots of fun claims.

I remember the lanky guy in my first ashtanga workshop, interrogating Richard Freeman about vatayanasana: Is it pranic or apanic? Which? Which? What is the physics of the thing? Tell me! 

Dude. It’s not just one thing. We are all upward and downward moving at the same time. Whole postures and PEOPLE don't fit in to your cute orphan categories - prana, apana, kapha, vata, pitta, sattvic, rajasic, tamasic, &c. &c. &c.

But according to the most simplified New Age physics, prana and apana are important because that’s what differentiates men and women. And it’s especially what characterizes a woman’s cycle. That is her apanic – downward moving – time. Once she becomes more "in touch" with the rhythms of nature, she will learn to “respect,” “honor,” and “surrender to” apana when it is “her time.”

We are living an sort of wonderful contradiction here.

As one goes deeper in to this practice, one does start noticing that those women who are, in fact, "aligned with the rhythms of nature" will cycle together. That collected rhythm shapes our life together, tied like everything else we do to the moon cycle. But do the orphan categories really explain our experience?

More to the point: if the women’s cycle is so exclusively “apanic,” then why do the sensitive ones tend to menstruate on the full moon? 

 

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

Having a Body · 12 November 2009

Things were never the same after the long weekend at Cabinas Ramirez—the $8 a night shacks on the shores of Manuel Antonio. Still the most tranquil cove I’ve swum in, but there was something just not right in the monkey swamp we crossed in reef sandals and cut-offs. A few weeks later I finally went to the student clinic at the University of Costa Rica to have someone look at the scaly, blotchy entity that had grown over a toe and the side of my right foot and was starting to inch up the outer calf. I didn’t think much of it: healthcare is free and direct in the country, even for foreign exchange students, and whatever pastillas they gave me more or less did the trick. With an exception… three toenails were never the same again.

That was 14 years ago, and ever since I’ve more or less ignored the situation. When toe-gazing became something I did intently, in a “self-studying” mood, for hours each day, I was practicing at Yogaworks—where some ashtanginis sport manipedis, get bodywork for every tweak, hail adjustments, apply essential oil before class, and wear very cute expensive clothing. At the time, I saw these as strategies for avoiding the body as it is.

So it seemed important to be overtly unfashionable there. (Of all the places my aesthetic resistance, borne of Pacific Northwest indie rock and dubitable thrift store fashion sense, would not be understood.) Anyway, in addition to resurrecting my gym clothing from junior high (my mom never throws anything out), part of me, in that setting, began to appreciate those old long-decayed toenails. I cut them to the would-be quick and just acted like they were as precious as any pedicure.

But after a few years in that scene I left. Because even though the physical instruction there was very helpful, the obsession with form started to feel not just distracting but self-punishing. I just needed a place I could tap some deeper mental states and learn about loving community. Loosening up to that kind of supported practice generated a lighter attitude to having a body, and among other things I started painting my toenails pale pink—and later bright red—on Saturday nights.

Underneath the polish, the fungus grew like, well, fungus. I didn’t really notice until a couple of months ago when someone lovingly called my pedicures “patriarchal” and I stripped it all off in curiosity. Oh, holy! There was the warped and mushy, not unscented, yellow decay of nastiness.

I felt a kind of pride that my organism could generate something so putrid all by itself, and thought of calling people who have asked me to pose for yoga pictures to say I was available for some FBH shots. I thought of the yogis in the charnel grounds, meditating on decay, and realized that the fungus was actually a resilient life form that I might contemplate in awe. Surely a tool for realization.

Ummm. That got me about a week before committed inquisition and purgation set in.

What are you, vile creature; and who gives you the right to squat on my feet?

For the first time, I looked online to see what the rest of the world is doing about these things. And wow. There are a lot of crazy methods out there.

It turns out that there are several varieties of toenail fungus: I suppose whatever I had was relatively savage, given its origin and longevity, so maybe what works to kill it would be easily effective for domestic varieties. Hard to say.

On the internet, there are people who recommend immersing the affected member in a solution of hydrogen peroxide and bleach. Then follow up by covering everything in vaseline. Great formula for a chemical burn there. Said burn is guaranteed to make previously fungal toenails look healthy by comparison, but can’t be good for the bloodstream or one’s organism in general. Too painful.

There’s also a lot of discussion online about prescription and over the counter drugs taken by mouth. Sounds like a great way to use the digestive system to screw the liver while only distally accessing the ends of the toes. Too inefficient, not to mention expensive.

But then there are some more benign home remedies: I started experimenting and settled on a hybrid approach. It’s just my folk concoction of DIY, OTC and the placebo effect, but, weirdly, it works.

It’s a four-fold method. First, before I started, I filed the whole sorry fungified nails clear off, everything, and scrubbed the whole sorry mess in Dr. Bronner’s. That made everything even uglier, but seemed obviously helpful. In subsequent weeks, if any toenail appeared that was not fresh, tender and baby-pink, I hit it again with the emery board and the Bronner’s.

Second, I picked up some tea tree oil for a couple of dollars at Trader Joes. After practice and after work, I use a Q-Tip to cover all three nails with the stuff. I do wonder if I smell of that barky antiseptic now everywhere I go, but on the rare occasion it gets too pungent for me I just cover it with a little Scent of Samadhi—the pricey perfume powder distilled from the urin of cave saddhus. (You think I’m kidding about that, but Scent of Samadhi is actually a New Age favorite around here, and I quite like it. Those saddhus probably drank their pee several times over before making it in to perfume. I can only hope that my own waste materials will one day be so sublime.)

Third, something weird. At night I lay a little Vic’s Vapo Rub (who knew it still existed?) right in to the nail bed and cover it with band-aids until morning.

Fourth, naturally, is the woo-woo component. I don’t know. Any attitude might work here. Personally, I just put some happy affection on the new little toenails. I do not envision them being fully grown and perfect; and I don’t think bad thoughts at the old fungus. I just sort of tell the new little growths that they are very sweet and adorable and welcome. Kind of how I would talk to kittens. Only, I do this silently in my head right before practice. And, ok, sometimes also at night.

I thought about growing new toenails quasi-scientifically, but there was the problem of having four treatments and only three toes. Also I didn’t have the patience to leave one of the three as a control-toe and work out the other treatments one by one. Furthermore, how does one administer the woo-woo treatment to one toe while ensuring others are not affected? Woo-woo is messy. Not good science.

Bottom line: toenail fungus did not help me stick it to the man when I practiced at Yogaworks. Nope. Not an effective political statement. Also: having a body is gross. And yet, happily, toenails do not have to look like death. At least not for now.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , power of suggestion , science

Question · 2 November 2009

Under what conditions does yoga make a person

1) more egotistical or

2) less kind

than one was before?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [21]
Categories: astanga yoga , morality , self-deception , spirituality

Who are the whistle-blowing yogins? · 18 October 2009

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit

Natural Death · 14 October 2009

This morning a mentor asked: Is your Mercury in Scorpio? Translation: Damn but that’s a sharp wit you have. Not sure if it’s planets or too many years on the debate team, but the quick-draw retorts can have a self-generative power. This is not a part of myself that I like—she’s grown boring—but for a long time I was all about being her.

Arrogant academics don’t make me bristle if they are actually smart, but the occasional status-obsessed academics with no real love of understanding or history are the worst. The Scorp-Merc wants at times to make them feel stupid. That’s very gratifying; and it seems to put my professional world back in order. Almost as tempting are lonely ashtangis trying to construct a self out of the sect, and lording their faux expertise over others. Viscious inquiries, preening disclosures: there is the possibility of giving them a withering look, or shining a little light on the utter emptiness of their so-called authenticity.

Pretty deep reactions; and I guess I can see them today because I am holding back from acting on them. Instead of feeling a release, though, there’s some bitterness. The words I am eating would have tasted good to say.

It has become tricky. Repressing the strike forces the energy of it to take a hairpin turn and make me annoyed at myself: God! I could have said the perfect thing! How could I have been so stupid as to let the other go about their stupidity?

The bitterness is strong enough that it sets my stomach on edge, puts a little curl in my lip.

And it’s funny—there are one or two intimates who enjoy this side of me, who love the irritability. Is this energy actually benign—a little charming? Or is it just gratifying to see my dark side? I don’t know.

If I had an established habit of making and then silencing smartassedness, I’d probably be self-directing a bit of irritation all the time. The bitterness I’m feeling today would be so normal I wouldn’t notice. That’s no better than just being a harsh smartass. Maybe, even, it’s worse. I’d be full of repressed, unconscious negative emotion.

There’s got to be a better way to use the arrows when they appear in my hands. Maybe something like acknowledging them, recognizing that they were useful for many years that I was a carnivore, and then putting them down. I don’t know. But otherwise there’s no point in behaving all nice and shit when the harsh witticisms come up. I’d just be faking myself out and trying to pass off mechanistic self-directed bitterness as humility. Striving to preserve a positive inner state because I’ve enjoyed so much of it and lost patience for anything else. Sounds like a good way to fill my unconscious world with strife.

So this is my tongue’s edge: repressing the action, but not repressing the feeling. Not allowing it to multiply, but allowing it to die a natural death. The allowing seems helpful.

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Categories: astanga yoga , morality

Soft Focus · 6 October 2009

Funny, apart from the hippie reclamation project that is Venice’s Church at Ocean Park, last week in Santa Barbara was my first practice in an actual church.

Sunday morning I drove down the mesa at five in a cloud. The way the ocean is shaped up there, it presses close in to the land, and heavy mists cover the earth’s whole surface, land and sea, dense with the smell and feeling of both. Since, like the rest of the state, SB is not big on streetlights, a visitor could get lost in that morning fog. But when it burns off the whole town still feels blurred at the edges and soft lit, like Santa Barbara the soap opera, filmed in earth tones and pastels under a romantic 1980s filter.

The yoga center—bold and colonial—was originally a Methodist church, and for that it’s on the National Historic Register. But in the meantime it was a beauty salon and spa—for which I suppose all the luxury detailing, private recesses and lofts, discreet staircases, and curtained side-entries with good feng shui were installed. The old sanctuary, with its beautiful scarred floors—including a bizarre, repeating burn pattern in the shape of a small 8-pointed star, and skylights that must go 30 feet up—is bifurcated in to the ashtanga space and the hatha space.

I started early-early, in a darkness and silence that drives the brainwaves down in to theta, and pretty well blurs the boundary between waking and sleeping dreams. When the flow kids trickled in next door at eight, they playd new age spiritual music more gospel than kirtan. Long time sun, Ain’t gonna study war no more… melodies I recognize from the car stereos of kundalini junkies and the marketplace around Ammachi. Church music. At nine, the surviving neighborhood church rang its bells and the sound of it filtered in over everything else.

Four years ago, I decided to sanctify (i.e. secularize), for myself, the sanctuary where my dad preaches back home. It’s a huge dark echoey cavity, made to feel like the hull of a ship tossed upside-down and cracked across the top with a line of high windows to the enormous white Montana sky. I sort of associate it with the set of Goonies as seen by eight year old eyes. What I cared about then were simply its excellent floors—hard on the surface and soft underneath—sitting on an enormous diamond-shaped foundation poured down in to a slow bend in the creek and fortified with scalloped layers of rosy sandstone than my dad helped lay in when he was 22.

I walked in to the chapel that afternoon and I guess I lost consciousness from the weight of the trauma. God. What was I thinking? All I remember is that no practice happened, and for days after the belly and heart had no possibility of softening open.

But I feel a little bit confident that eventually I’ll be wrung out and awake enough to take advantage of those floors. Hell, they’re just floors.

Last time, I could not perceive the difference between the physical church, and my own pain tracers, and the big pet rock of resentment I like to lead around. It was just a solid knot of awful. And there was also the emotional piece: at ground zero, equanimity is a high stakes game. I means diving straight in to the philosophy and hilarity of the specific personal history I’m tempted to take so brutally to heart.

The old church is just an object sealed off in distant time and space: a hard, scary thing preserved from the meaning-decaying banalaties of actual life. If I regularly took meals inside, let my dog piss in its gardens, filed my nails on its sidewalk, gossiped in its foyer, took calls from the pews, all its sharp edges would get blurred. Not in to shadow I hope, but in to mist. For me now, mundane life seems to want to tease apart all that “meaningful” stuff into wispy bits—soften them up with everyday static of TV commercials, toenails, hairspray, throw-away lines and dead-end plots. Lived experience wants to fracture the narrative and let the characters grow silly and inconsistent. For now it feels like everyday routine is a force of purification, not of tranquilization.

And unlike the old drama queen, who was complexly, grindingly unconscious and loved to stay closed in certain small rooms of emotional hell, I want this too. Playing my fierce, edgy old drama straight—as if it’s still good theatre—has become so much kitsch. You know?

I want the soft filter of practical life to take the edges off my monuments, and decay building after building on my Personal Historic Register. Eventually, maybe no old monument will be so overwhelming that I can’t see its potential as a day spa.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body

I know that I know that I know that I know · 3 October 2009

“The difficulty is to recognize the groundlessness of our believing…. But justification comes to an end.” – Wittgenstein On Certainty 166; 192

                               ____________________

What is the impulse inside a person that compels her to reach out and tell someone she’s not doing it right? I don’t care if said correction is fundamentalist or anti-fundamentalist, since the energy in it is the same. Same effect of disturbing someone’s focus and security.

Why do this? Desire to feel right?

Is it possible to practice in a way that subverts this impulse? That makes you more uncertain, not more certain, as you go on?

                               ____________________

For me… the more emotional confidence and security I have—the more grounded I get—the more comfortable I can be with radical uncertainty. And when I’m kind of rootless and lonely, then I pretend to know things I don’t… for better or worse, that’s when things become faith-based.

                                ____________________

I’ve noticed that people who have gotten some insight as a result of practice hide their views about method—if they even have opinions left. It’s interesting. As a result, they are very sweet company, and they don’t screw over others’ yoga by messing with their minds. If a fellow practitioner (thinks she) knows what she is doing, what’s the problem? Let people focus.

                                ____________________

Here’s the joke. The asana is always changing. That’s the point. You can’t pin it down and make an object out of it.  

It feels good to reify and feel certain. Practicing brings that grasping after authority right to the surface, and maybe begins to replace the judging and fear with a sense of humor.

                               ____________________

To the idea that current method is perfect… Of course it is! It’s perfect because it’s the object that the collective mind has settled on for now, and thus we can shut up and just do it without insane shuffling between other ways of doing. It’s perfect for focusing.

And at the same time it’s not perfect because it’s a part of the manifest, physical world—a world characterized by specificity and suffering. Look around… the physical world cannot be perfect: it is laced with death and pain.

                                 ____________________

The practice offers this decoy, this MacGuffin… this Rosebud. And I focus on it for a while so that I can get quiet. So at intervals, it’s actually the best possible thing to just do a set thing and take a break from the background mental insanity of “What do I want to do now?” The mind loves that focus once it settles in to it, even if history and the body do not allow for the physical method to stay the same forever.

                                 _____________________

If you’re grasping for an ultimatum how about this one? Support others’ peace of mind. Once that becomes the intention, you’ll stop giving a shit what they are doing with their bodies and actually be an encouraging, sweet presence yourself. As long as your vibe is self-prooving, all-knowing, judging, argumentative, and hardcore certain, people around you will feel that discomfort with uncertainty—that rigidity—and as a result they will never really open in your presence. 

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Categories: astanga yoga

Regarding my ass · 10 September 2009

Last week I did light practice and spent the rest of most days moving heavy objects. This week, there’s a deep ache in the piriformis, the glutes, and the quadriceps. As somebody said, hurts so good. The leftover tension is from power work in external rotation, rather than the internally-rotated lifting I’m used to in ashtanga. Back in my yoga boutique, where I do this extremely specialized, insane thing called advanced series, having a tense ass looks like a limitation.

But the fatigue is satisfying for now; and the sensation of opening it back up again is intense and helps me understand why students love the feel of hip-openers. I could not care less if the backbends are half as deep.

Isn’t it absurd to practice to the end of increasing flexibility? If one actually uses her body (which, being a cog in the the information economy, I do rarely), it will become fatigued and achey. If one happens by some accident of nature to age, then fatigue, degeneration, and pain will ensue. If something so inevitable as the weather changes, the body will change with it.

(Incidentally, how offensive is it if I curse?)

What I am trying to say is: Why not look for the byproducts of practice in a less limited plane than the body?

Stop fucking measuring inches already. I'd like to get down to brass tacks in the territory where we can actually find happiness, satisfaction, and love. I mean, if we are going to be OCD taskmasters, why not find some better tasks?

Don’t measure inches-- measure the miles of acceptance, or generosity, or thankfulness, or fucking whatever it is that becomes possible on the much less limited plane of the self when you practice every single day. This is still specific, still subject to inventory. Fuck backbends. Exactly how many breaths can you quiet the mind? Then, how many bad cognitive and emotional habits have you mustered the strength to burn? Which exact patterns have been identified and immolated? And once that number gets big, how much love has been created? Can it be generated for not just the easy people but the strangers, and the enemies? Which enemies? Exactly how much happiness have you created that you can give away? In terms of calories expended, hours of the day, groups you are willing to see as kin?

Or if concentration, love and happiness seem too trite, choose a metric that’s in between the trivial inches of fucking backbend and the miles of ego release: eight digits. 12345678. Eight breaths. Over and over until accidentally you shut the mind up for a few years and then the acceptance of having this human life creeps up on you despite yourself, and opens you up whether you like it or not to some genuine, deep fucking cornball sourceless conditionless happiness and love for others.

Flexibility my ass. When did this get misdefined as yoga? 

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , spirituality

Ashtanga Ann Arbor · 4 September 2009

Monday I drove Pico Blvd from Santa Monica toward downtown, straight toward the wildfire smoke roiling in the east—smoke so dense that for days it generated its own precipitation, perfect white cumulonimbus billowing over the greys and ashen browns of the destruction. For once I sympathized with the forward-thinkers, the Editor among them, who say the dream is dead and life here is a mindless pillage of resources long depleted. It was earthquake weather this week; and gas was well over three dollars a gallon. The state is closing parks and libraries and selling off its treasures, its many-jeweled crown of the University of California is putting professors on furlough and grad students in the gutter. Apocalypses and lost causes rather turn me on, but I thought I’d come out to Ann Arbor for a while anyway.

The flight was horrible—a red eye next to a woman suffering hot flashes and large enough to need more space than just our armrest. What do you do but defer to the good mother? She blasted the air and I folded myself up like a beatle (thank you, ashtanga) and froze through the night, sleeping never and marring my record for idyllic air travel experiences. Using Shinzen's practice of finding the image stream and disentangling it from emotion, the mini re-traumatization showed me the seeds of the bitter hate that I have for cold: two incidents in my early twenties that have left an abiding, personal anger toward weather under 60 degrees. (One, a monthlong ski-camping trip during which I frostbit my right toes on riverside subzero nights, and the second a night on the shores of Lake Ometepe with nothing to keep warm but a bottle of Nicaraguan rum. It’s funny that, for all the trauma I witnessed as a child, the main scars in my body were collected late in life. And they are in a sense trivial—almost comic moments of fun taken too far. Still, I can almost not bear the cold—emotions of victimhood and fear overwhelm me.

By the time we landed in the pink sunrise over Lake Huron, I was fully, bitterly dissatisfied, albeit grateful that the loathsome circumstances would deepen my love for Detroit the second I stepped out in to its 80 degree heat wave. But then I didn’t. It was fifty degrees on the ground—cold enough to chill both produce and owls in T-shirts. The subliminal voices telling me to run back to California began to scream and I slid from regular dissatisfaction (a loss of equanimity) in to the swamps of despair (dissatisfaction + drama). But the Editor—now Professor to the likes of us—doesn’t have the option of leaving. He’s faculty now in one of the finest departments in the country, so even as I remain professorly free labor in the original sense, I am going to have a more than passing relationship to this place.

The chill-induced hate and fear hollowed out depths that have, in the days since, been filled beyond capacity with delight and pleasure. This exaggerated ambivalence is the calling card of culture shock: and it still happens, no matter how jaded I pretend to be, no matter that by now I’ve lived in four countries and eight states. When I’m in culture shock I get a temporary case of borderline personality syndrome—in which every one and every thing is either perfect or from hell, and every new experience is a new up or down vote in the referendum on the new culture.

Sound like your last trip to Asia? In the first days, Ann Arbor’s approval rating pendulumed between zero and 150. Characteristically for my manic body politic, the euphoric, delighted, yes side wants to annihilate the dissatisfied side. Though ultimately, if joy is to win, I don't want it to happen through dishonesty or repression. But at some point, I guess I’ll just learn to let satisfaction resume her natural place at the wheel.

Last night in the front yard, the sleekest, cutest creature of black and white wrestled imaginary playmates in the grass (this morning I found a beehive she’d unearthed in the front bushes—poor bees). Who knew skunks were so beautiful? The light of the streetlamp—yes, this is downtown Ann Arbor, we’re four blocks from Main Street even if this place has an enormous back yard that feels like a campsite on the Olympic Peninsula—made the fluffy blinding-white of her head and stripes shine out as she tumbled and undulated her potent, gorgeous fan of a tail. The creature rolled over and over, batted the air, danced and jumped, burrowed in to the grass. She made what felt like eye contact with me as I stood in the beveled lead-glass front windows of this ornate old house—but like the other creatures all over this zone, she views humans as benign. I thought of my first grandfather, a mink farmer who killed himself when furs became unpopular and he lost the farm… does my chest of inherited furs contain no skunks because consumers associated the most gorgeous pelt ever with skunk perfume? Very good… I’m happy I will never have the option of throwing one of this girl’s own grandparents round my shoulders when Ann Arbor gets bitter fucking cold.

Meanwhile, I’ve acclimated to 50 and it takes next to nothing to steam up what is surely the finest solo practice space that is. The Editor would lure me here with this; and it is better bait than any. The building is a restored townhouse, maybe 90 years old, with knotty pine floorboards and engraved brass fixtures, heavy mouldings, a clawfoot tub, and blue tilework in the kitchen. The practice space is about ten feet by twelve, with a north window that looks into pine trees and a west window opening up over the roof to the forest out back. It’s so motherfucking juicy in there I don’t understand it. What could be the power of this little room? It may be that the space is the perfect size for one (I could fit three, if the locals—who tend to like a lot of mat space—can pretend to be New Yorkers), or that the previous resident—an artist for Google—was very good at clearing spaces to make energy flow. But I suspect there is something deeper and older going on around here…I don’t understand this town yet, but it has some weird power and grace, and some kind of intelligence that has nothing to do with its having the highest social capital in the country.

I rolled in with a paltry mess kit: seven tealghts and a stick of incense superstitiously lifted from the home shala, doubts about Ann Arbor, and samskaras about the cold. But on Wednesday I woke at 5 (2 o’clock in LA; and having not slept the previous night) drawn to the little room’s gold floors waiting across the hall in the dark. The heavy walls—a whipped plaster just painted pale yellow—echoed breath back to me; one of the floorboards creaked loudly under each jump-back and crashed when I fell out of a handstand.

This space will make me quieter. Working the echo in the floor, getting light enough to make its reverb disappear, letting whatever forgotten history and strong energy this place contains lift me out of the dark and the confusion.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga

Dangerous Incantation · 23 August 2009

Last night I lived in a floating bungalo off some wild green islands away in the Tropic of Capricorn.  A dream vivid enough to have its own barometric pressure—dialed up high along with the color saturation—with promising deep blue thunderheads off to the north. Friends were visiting—several of you included. We had Thanksgiving dinner on the lanai and then you drove off over the ocean in trucks I lifted from The Grapes of Wrath. My teacher sailed up and we decided to practice. We spent a long time lolling around, watching the beautiful clouds and feeling their mounting winds, deciding to practice. We were in the water, swimming around in a space enclosed by a little walkway, about to go to the studio and take asana together the same way others take tea. Then the sun came out and we said to each other: Why don’t we just do it here?

So then we were in the water, twisting in to pasasana, becoming compact little weights sinking down to fish-level, where the sunlight filtered around so brightly we could breathe it. Krounchasana was a problem—where is the leverage?—so we released it, tried to catch some other fishes… though none of them really came together until the lord of the fishes halfway through the series. It was all vaguely frustrating—we could not understand why shalabasana just would not work in the water—but we stayed out there because it was so beautiful. The light, shadow, color, fish and happiness were so strong… stronger than if we’d have fronted the cash and the carbon credits to get our incarnate asses to Tulum.

He’s actually moving right now, packing up an apartment after years and heading cross town. And so is my first asana teacher ever, who practices with us and is currently teaching me how to adjust her. And so are my grandparents, who abruptly called the assisted living facility last week and are collapsing their beautiful twelfth-story Denver condo, asking me of all people to take on their antiques. These last two weeks of August, beginning with Thursday’s new moon: I’m calling it a cycle to end a larger cycle: seven years on the ground here coming to a close. My apartment and all the routines and comforts it contains—the base of Maslow’s pyramid and the chakra scale well rooted for years—bam! Disintegrating around me. Movers arrive on Tuesday to pack what’s left across the contintent and from there I turn back from a house dweller to a nomad. Don’t ask me the details: what’s of interest now is the unknown, not the sketches that are known.

I rolled in to the shala late this morning, keys and beloved mat both lost to the black hole that is sucking in my life. (Later, Bad Driste Betty returned the keys I misplaced on Friday: "Sometimes having no driste is good!" I kissed her and agreed.) Between the communal mats laced with hamburger sweat and the hard damn birchwood floor, I chose the floor.

Q: But I can’t do this shit without my mat!…A: What’s easier, birchwood for your ground or the open sea? Recognize a gift when it's right under your nose. I thought of Shinzen—“Equanimity is radical non-interference with your own nervous system”—and set up. A process which entailed folding a sweat towel and taking up 0 position, giving SKPJ a wink, saying my secret thing, and launching in. And it was great. The shalabasana-parsva dhanurasana sequence will leave a mark on the hip points (I suppose dung floors are softer than birch, and 14-year-old boy ilia don’t crest like a woman’s) but otherwise it was just practice, albeit  without clearly demarcated personal space or a soft place to put my head in the inversions. Which is exactly what I am doing in life starting now. Technology and creature comfort are good, but maybe I can keep my shit together and thrive without.

I just flashed on myself at 20, driving a Dodge pickup 17 hours cross country to college, listening to Tricky singing about hydroponics just as the Columbia Gorge opens right up at The Dalles, both it and me barreling down to the Pacific.

Anyway, today is Ganesha Chaturthi, the birthday of the elephant god. I told the Editor some people do a little puja, bring the avatar a flower and ask for some obstacle to be removed. Being actually rational, he finds this and my own daily intention of late—a simple but apparently hazardous saying of I consent or, worse, Bring it on the last outbreath before practice—perfect nonsense.

“So is that why you brought flowers in to our home?” He asked. “You wanted Ganesh to remove the obstacle of this apartment from your path?”

Well, fuck.

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Categories: astanga yoga , sound

Strength Receiving · 16 August 2009

Listen here: Mark Whitwell, asking ashtangis to please just understand the yoga…

…Yoga has been branded as something that a slim, white woman can do… yoga is participation in the nondual… intimacy with the ordinary… connection…

…Spine, breath, sex…

…You could finally admit that what you wanted was sex, was intimacy…

… connection to rocks and ground and each other…

…Daily, actual, natural, not-obsessive practice… such a gift to know how to practice without obsession as a pleasure… it’s a little bit of work because relationship IS work: you have to turn up…

…We need to put Patthabi Jois’s [and Krishnamacharya’s] principles [back] in to the ashtanga vinyasa practice. …Just learn the principles [of Krishnamacharya] so that you are playing with a full pack of cards so that it can become the nondual practice of abundance nurturing continuity healing…

…You’ve got these obsessed exercise fanatics feeling buzzy and putting it out there as if it’s YO-GA, and they have the body types to do it… don’t be seduced by the orthodoxy that want to tell you that you know less than their text, their gymnastics, their effort to get to a future state… [but] you stand in your own ground as strength receiving…. And in time you might be called on to teach what you know… the principles of hatha yoga… PUT IT in to Ashtanga Vinyasa, in to Iyengar, in to Anusara, in to Bikram…

It’s difficult when you meet the orthdoxy and they claim generational authority… “my guru said, my forefather said”…

…You are a yogi [because] you are feeling what you’re feeling…

…The whole body becomes relaxed and absorbed in its own condition… intimacy arrives in that condition… this ability for you to feel as the whole body is there… self-generated practice… re-generation, not our parents’ generation… having your own generation and empowerment… even your mother wants you to go beyond her conditioning… become committed to practice, not obsessed with practice… but daily, naturally… you can actually do this now…

…And I DO want you to enter in to a friendly, diplomatic dialogue with the orthodoxy, with the power-holders who have their strict ideas…

…what’s needed is intimacy… meditation arises from intimacy… in relatedness…

…put the five basic principles back in to your Ashtanga Vinyasa Practice…

--Body movement is breath movement: the breath begins and ends each movement

--There are four parts to the breath: inhale, retention, exhale, retention

--The inhale is from above as receptivity the exhale from below is strength

--Asana creates bandha and bandha serves the breath, in that order

--Asana creates pranayama and pranayama allows for meditation and clarity of mind

…We want the ordinary conditions to be participating in their source, to be acknowledging their source… that is what bandha is doing… acknowledging the whole body participation in asana…

… witness consciousness of “I am not the body, I am witness consciousness” is not a yogic point of view. It is a religious dogma. Yoga is the acknowledging of individuation and all relatedness… you have the Eckhart Tolles out there expressing “awareness” as being the point… and people read the book and they fall in to the point of no-relatedness as a kind of satori and then they try to get back to that place… all this has become a substitute for what we really want, which is intimacy… yoga is a tool to enjoy your life now… intimate connection now… you can connect now, inhale now… I’m quite certain that moving and breathing as strength receiving… it can create a crisis of people feeling stuff of hidden stuff they have hidden in the back… releasing what we don’t need…

…intimacy that heals… the immediate connection to our own body… intimate connection is god-realizing which has been denied us because relationship has been denied… the dogmatic version is the denial of the ordinary life… telling you there is something wrong that you have to conquer… it’s just politics, power structure… that’s all it is...

...continue your daily practice which is intimate connection with source... THIS life, THIS body, THIS sex... AAAAH! When discontent is there, just honor it and continue to practice... in might take months or even years but it HAPPENS, this reduction of concern...

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Trinities · 13 August 2009

I am discovering the most beautiful coincidence.

Breath-Bandha-Drste = Talk-Feel-Image

Two systems, Vipassana and Ashtanga, mapping each other one to one. I didn’t plan this—my own designs are not so elegant.

When the pairs integrate, what I have is three streams of being—Talk, Feel, Image—and three perfectly-fit drainpipes for diverting or even shutting down those streams at will.

Breath covers talk... as bandha covers feel... as driste covers image.

Breath-Bandha-Drste is the holy trinity of the ashtanga practice—the places you lodge the attention so it doesn’t spin off in to something stupid. Breath is what is is; bandha is the deepest movements of the inner body--pelvic floor lightly and diaphragm subtly lifting; and drste (or, if you like, driste) is the gazing point, whatever it may be for the posture.

Eureka! SKPJ's triple esoterica corresponds to Shinzen’s somewhat arbitrary triad—the three major vectors he uses to deconstruct subjectivity. I’ve talked about his model at length in the comments the past month, but here is an outline. Like any map, it is imperfect. But I’ve been rolling with it because, well, because it works and I especially love the number three.

So, say there are three kinds of experience-of-self: emotion in the body, talk around the ears, imagery projected around the head. The shorthand for it is: Feel-Image-Talk.

A sense of "me" arises when the the streams of feelings, mental talk and images come together as an apparently solid thing. For those who have not asked, like William James, “What are the elements of me?” this clog of inner experience appears to be solid much of the time.

Go through life experiencing your self like this—as a pulsing undifferentiated goop of 1) emotions and 2) visualizations and 3) mind chatter—and thus be enslaved as their multiplicative product. For example, mind chatter ramps up emotion, which is in turn exploded by visual fantasy. And so on. But! Part the streams—perceive how the three move together and apart and only flash alive in the briefest moments—and find some home in the chilled-out space between them. Emotion minus image is just body sensation. Talk minus emotion is just words passing. Image minus talk is an artful silent film. Living with space—living spaciously—is still a life. It’s just a life easier to understand, control (no joke), love and enjoy. This is Shinzen's model.

So anyway, I roll out of bed every morning with little use for all this epistemology-ontology Vipassana stuff. Breath-bandha-driste, that’s it. It’s habituated and it’s all I need. And now I’m realizing that all along I’ve been using this system to stem the triple tide of subjectivity. It is a fairly elaborate little tool for keeping quiet: like a Swiss army knife with not only a blade, but a corkscrew and a pick.

In the mornings, what fires up first is the talk-stream. I wake at 4:30 ready to write a thousand words; and the practice is to put that on pause for another four hours. The key for me always is to listen in to the breath and follow it like a passionate devotee. But of course It covers my otherwise dominant auditory thought-stream. If the object in “talk space” is the sound of my breath, the sound of my thoughts fades to the background and increasingly—with time—goes blank.

Image and Feel spaces work the same way. If something triggers a fantasy of any kind, taking the driste from peripheral to harder focus usually makes its imagery fade if not give up and die. It’s so obvious, but I am only now learning to watch that happen. Just try to conduct a good fantasy while you’re devoting your attention to the tip of the nose.

Same for being caught up in emotion. My emotions travel around my chest, belly and jaw. But in the midst of some drama, if I just place the best of my loving attention, I stop being so convinced that those feelings are “me.” If experience is what matters, well, the pelvic floor is equally me; and so is the gazing point; and so is the breath.

The key is this. Breath-bandha-driste are relatively neutral, objective streams of experience. I can hear, physically feel, and actually see them. They are, in a sense, manifestly “not me.” But mental chatter, emotions and imaginings—they are made of unalloyed mindstuff. They feel like my special little creations and are easier to mistake for “me.” As such, they are far more highly charged. Much more likely to high-jack the attention and take it for a ride.

Just compare the energetic charges. Which one of each pair is more radioactive? Breath/Talk, Bandha/Emotion, Driste/Imaginings.

The so-called “tristana” is chill, while its rambunctious twin the subjective triad is anything but.

This ashtanga practice is complex, as humans are complex. This practice doesn’t just throw you a blank wall and ask you to focus on the void, or give you a single mantra and let you dissolve everything in to that. Rather, it provides its bizarre breath-bandha-driste trinity.

It is built for flexibility and the flow of several single points. It is prone to insight. It has the power to create space.

For a long time I thought that this bewildering instruction to focus on many things was too much to ask. But suddenly, knowing myself better, I find that it is and always has been so much to offer.

God it’s a beautiful system. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration , sound

Addiction machine · 31 July 2009

I flatlined on about eight dimensions Friday after practice. What would the medics see? Blood sugar in the red, muscle responsiveness withered, concentration out of service, analytical clarity nil. But from the subjective side of things, it felt great.

I stumbled in the door and let my body arrange itself in to a little pile on the floor. The Editor offered to get me some coffee or other stimulants and, deliriously declining, I said “So THIS is why people get addicted to triathlon…”

Getting back in to teaching after two months off, and doing it on top of everything else, is a lot. Wednesday and Thursday, I got through the arm balances not on passion but by giving up on all fronts of opposition. The traps, jaw and especially mind—had to be undemocratically denied the vote. It felt like too much exertion so far as simply working out goes—why work this hard and get this sweaty and set myself up for soreness tomorrow? Unlike most ashtangis, I find extreme sports mystifying and have little taste for awesome feats or conquering inanimate foes like mountains or race tracks. Lucky that. Probably the reason I was a poor athlete—that and I didn’t understand the particular peace that passeth understanding which arrives with sheer exhaustion like I tasted this morning.

The doorbell rang a few minutes later, when my 9:30 appointment arrived a half hour early. Somehow I got my shit back together and kept it together for three more hours, after which sleeping and eating seemed a little incidental. The marathoner’s second wind, or something like it. I was tempted not to break my nearly daylong fast when I finally had the chance. I was on the edge of some kind of farther-out zone and of course was tempted to get that much closer to whatever it was that Jesus saw in the desert or the mystics see in their caves or the Everest-climbers describe.

But also, there was kale in the fridge. Almonds, apples, quinoa, red cabbage, olive oil, cinnamon, ginger. And kombucha. I feasted, and then walked to the store for a chocolate bar. I should keep kale at the ready to combat future urges to take a spontaneous spirit quest.

Speaking of states the nervous system trips on and then demands on repeat—the really addictive patterns—anger. I on-loaded a strong hit of it mid-week—my own and others’. And being back in the classroom softens my mental and emotional boundaries right up. This is not something we discuss in yoga, but even the least woo woo bodyworkers take it for granted. Bodyworkers get superstitious and fearful about “bad energy” (I just discovered a whole literature on it), but then, bodyworkers don’t usually have nadi shodana. Is anger always bad energy? Unconscious anger—likely. Addictive anger—for sure. Harmful intentions—super yes. But with the nadi shodana a little strong, maybe you can begin to see through the content of anger and work its energy. (Again, this means bracketing “issues,” looking at thoughts as energy vectors rather than meaning vehicles.)

Unlike my inner life from ages 5-25, I don’t get a lot of raw anger now. So I enjoyed it this week and actually felt that, through it, others were giving me their energy rather than taking mine. When it got harsh, I’d stop everything and watch. Here’s what I found out.

At first, it was this rush of sensation in the chest and belly. Strong. If you really want to know, there would be a not unorgasmic spike from the belly a straight up to the brain stem. It vibrated strongly, lighting up the pleasure center… like a freaky nadi massage. Lasting maybe 3 or 5 seconds—a long time in terms of brain activity.

After that first flash of climax, the anger would settle back in the chest. In a few seconds, the chest would go back to normal as the intensity wore off. And that is when the images would start. I was not even conscious until this month of the fairly autonomous image stream that I am constantly generating in and around my head, so now when I remember to look clearly at what’s happening there, it still tends to trip me out.

In the case of this anger, first what would arrive were images of physical violence inflicted to my chest. My mind would see that punches or knife stabs were landing down on my body, in my heart. It would see this in order to try to keep the anger alive, because it felt so good in the body. But after another few seconds, the climax would really be passing away, and that is when another kind of image would start. Not just random, video game violence, but meaningful violence.

My guess is that my organism was realizing that just straight violence imagery wasn’t sufficient to sustain the high, so it went in to the psyche to mine for past trauma. Or maybe it was innocent, the nervous system saying “Wait, we know this song! Here’s an old version that used to be popular back in 1983!” And then, roll tape, I’m back in the schoolyard in first grade, and Renae the tomboy with two big brothers is wailing on me while several little farm boys in overalls look on. What is this world of my inner child—some dystopian version of the Apple Dumpling Gang?

Slapstick samskaras… got to keep them in syndication somehow.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Pratikpaksha Bhavanam · 29 July 2009

What if all teachers are actually robots? It’s true. The first time you say the chant in front of a group, your brain is suddenly transformed from squishy grey matter to an empty supercomputer.

So actually, any particular instruction means nothing. It has as much “meaning” as much as the temperature in the room, the ambient sound and the quality of the floor. The instruction is part of the furniture.

Maybe the furniture in a room is more conducive to those wonderful, focused practices; maybe it’s more conducive to rapid, deep opening of the hips; maybe it’s a little disorienting like waking up in a hotel room with bad feng shui. Now and then, there is a room that feels like home due to the taste in furniture. That's good. If the furniture causes backaches, not so good.

In any case, the furniture says nothing about the interiority of the teacher. She is not a bad person. She’s also not some genius with some kind of “gift.”

Neither critic nor healer nor blithering idiot nor magician. None of it. Just a cipher for you.

So in this situation you just work with what you encounter in your environment.  With the furniture.

The more you practice, the less you give a shit about changes in the furniture. You just adjust accordingly, don’t make up stories, avoid founding yet another new religion, and keep moving. Paying more attention to the rhythms inside and around you, less attention to the robot in the corner. Robots don’t have intentions, plans, viewpoints, biographies or psyches. You don't have to wonder what hidden meaning or feeling lies in their actions, do not have to interpret anything or look for signs.

If right foot is changed to left foot, or forward bending is changed to back bending, or long vowels are changed to short vowels, whatever. Arbitrary. It’s just one of infinite ways to hold that room solidly together, so it doesn’t fly to pieces in the astral winds of chaos.

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Categories: astanga yoga

Easy Question, Hard Question · 14 July 2009

What is yoga?

Come on, you know this one.

But RF is filmed in aporia over the question, as if he’s just been asked What is the universe? What is life? What are you? As if yoga, this ridiculous, historically specific creation of modern humans, is itself the mystery.

Five years I have cast about inside my mind and through texts ancient and modern, cast my legs over my shoulder and my tongue right up toward my brain; and still I write this journal to idle with the question. I let the question idle, let it mix with my waste and give off fumes. Useless.

And as long as I remain mystified about the nature of my practice, I disattend to a much better question: What is existence, life; what am I?

Our life is a faint traicing on the surface of the mystery allright, but I’ve just realized that I’ve substituted an easy mystery for the hard one. Because… the hard one is hard; and… the easy one is easy.

What is yoga?

It’s a stupid question!

I did a “teacher training” years ago: it opened with a sharing circle in which 40 people went around the room, reciting their names and their personal, precious answer to the easy question. Each question equally vacuous, emotive, a performance of self, a display of ignorance. Equally shallow. Mine included. All 40 definitions equally right in our happy, non-confrontational, SAFE pluralist world in which everyone is equally insightful, equally deep, equally qualified to teach. (As long as you can cough up the grand).

Here's an old bromide to dissolve the other 40:

Yoga is the calming of the fluctuations of the mind. Its goal is samadhi.

And, according to Gotama Buddha and about every aspect of mainstream eastern practice since, Samadhi is the basis for insight in to the nature of reality… it’s the starting point for answering the big question. (This is the interesting part…)

Technically, the old school definition of yoga is relatively wrong now because the 40 teacher trainees are relatively right. There are as many yogas as product brands and self-identity projects: choice and relentless, obsessive self-expression and affirmation are the logic of capitalism. Democracy and easy credit (not Nagarjuna) are why we say that everyone is already equally enlightened right now.

I am not nostalgic for the shores of the ancient Ganges; and I do not assume that Patanjali-era humans were deeper or smarter than we are now (they actually sound kind of facile, and didn't have good abs). But what if we "trainees" had been humble enough to set aside our little stretching hobby and take an interest in the simple project—the concentration project? Humble enough to let it just be that? Educated enough not to be mystified by the easy questions?

I don’t know.

Also: what if we didn’t mystify this “samadhi” as something irrelevant—restricted to the ancients and to RF—but actually just got our shit together and DID it?

That I do know, accidentally; and many people reading this know it too.

Or so I have been instructed this past week. Let me suggest, as per these instructions from various first-person mind researchers, that samadhi is a one-pointed concentration that anyone can learn simply by practicing it in a regular, dedicated fashion. Someone with the dedication to do asanas every day already has the baseline scheduling and tapas in place, and can choose to add mental training to her workout. It takes hundreds or thousands of hours or whatever to find samadhi, but then you’ve tasted it and can recognize it the next time. You can get back in to it within ten or fifteen minutes anytime you set your mind to it. It’s so accessible, even, that there is a whole modern literature and research programme dedicated to it: the work on flow states. And so common that all kinds of meditation teachers have a term for it: access concentration.

(Search term: "ACCESS CONCENTRATION".)

For what it is worth, this is not only a basic teaching that seems to be implicit all over the place; it’s also accurate to my experience. So is the first part below.

Two things about access concentration.

One: if you go there consistently, you will unwittingly open yourself up to even deeper states of absorption. In a mostly forgotten literature, these are called jnanas. On which more later. I can’t believe I’d never even stumbled over this old framework before, but it is incredibly grounding, comforting and inspiring. If MB is the key to the queendom, the jnanas are a crude interstate map.

Two: once you’ve learned absorption—not a particularly hard project if you consider ashtanga yoga itself doable and if you give it as much time as you give your backbends and stuff (or, I would assert to much disagreement…do it during your backbends and stuff) —there is something that comes after. Something to which this concentration yields access.

Most yoga hobbyists don’t want the next step because they’re doing the sense pleasure thing. That is completely ok. It's also why the ashtanga world is the insane, sometimes vapid, party it is. But for those who want the next step, or who cannot say no to it for stupid reasons they don't understand, there seems to be a specific (beautifully specific) way to use refined concentration to ask the hard question. The one about the nature of reality and who am I.

And, for someone who is already a super-skilled concentrator, the hard question is weirdly tractable. Workable. Askable.

Having open hips doesn’t hurt either.

::::EDIT:::: If you just got all the way through that and are wondering what I'm smoking today, that's cool. I just re-read it and am wondering the same thing. Not sure what to do with this, but since we've already generate a comment thread, I'll try to, er... play it as it lays. Good practice in recognizing the effort I am always putting in to doing-being-myself and looking like a unitary character here and elsewhere.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science , self-deception , spirituality

Over and Out · 5 July 2009

Back from Encinitas with a head full of this and that, just now realizing I have a hundred pages to read tonight and at least an hour of memorization before settling in tomorrow morning for retreat. The readings are hilarious—exhaustive categorizations of all possible experiences that will arise on the cushion, and all possible ways of relating with it. Aristotle meets Vipassana by way of a Shingon (Japanese Vajrayana) teacher with—evidently—more than a casual connection to Zen. At the beginning of the readings, it says that on some level, you don’t know experience until you can apprehend it precisely. I love that. It’s like what my Marx teacher used to say to students who claimed they could understand the work but just couldn’t put that understanding in clear and distinct writing: you don’t know it until you can describe it. Types, kinds, classes… Aristotle all the way. At least Shinzen’s idea is that you classify and classify until—poof—everything goes up in smoke. I don’t have to take the classifications as real, just inhabit them.

Speaking of which, I’ve been reminded of all the scholars in my life who are so busy hating the society around them that they cannot participate in it. It takes a special fundamentalism to believe that The Fourth of July means one thing and one thing only, and that only fellow PhDs understand that true meaning, and that all others are ignorant, nationalist louts. If my friends understood their own concepts, they would realize they have all the flexibility in the world to use the day of festivities to mean whatever they choose (for example, to celebrate their own unique lives), that the historical content is not the only content.

This is a big puzzle for me: that often, education is not freedom but a set of new taboos, enslavement to old ideas, over-investments in the past. Being educated, in a lineage or in a discipline, becomes such a selfhood project one feels driven to pay constant homage to her pedigree. So that she knows who she is. To the point of driving out experience.

Anyway, may I recommend Fourth of July at La Jolla Cove? Surprisingly, the most ethnically diverse group I’ve been a part of this night in years. A navy brass band playing Dixieland jazz, old people holding hands on the bluffs, waves crashing in to land as hundreds of people snap cameraphone images of loved ones mashed together with the big sun sinking in to the ocean behind them. This morning I practiced in the great mini-mall shala that is the sentimental home of so many ashtangis. Ran in to several people I’ve known in other cities, other countries and online… it's always surprising who is there. I felt presumptuous to drop in for an advanced class—led 2s—but a comeuppance about my dyslexic dwi pada was a good welcome. Tim not only led practice but did it alongside us, which I loved. And there were some extra things that made both kapotasana and the padas much more… natural. I’m writing this post because I thought some people out there would find this helpful. Here’s what I remember (you can figure out where we put them): eka pada bhekasana, supta virasana, viparita dandasana, vrksasana (handstand ver.), single pidgeon, wonky parsvokonasana (head coming to ankle, maybe behind foot)-to-vasisthasana (the one with one leg on the arm) [this is great], supta raja kapotasana (single pidgeon on your back), kashyapasana, forearm vrksasana.

There’s a new email in my in-box about how we might not be able to get to the retreat center tomorrow. It’s up in the mountains to the north, in Encino, on Hayvenhurst Drive. Friday the radio was going on about how Hayvenhurst has been a mess all week, because Michael Jackson’s mom lives there and fans won’t stop building shrines and doing vigils there. Now it turns out that our retreat center is the property adjacent to the Jackson residence and retreat organizers are concerned we may not be able to get past the police barricades and crazy fans! I wonder, are they blasting Thriller out of ghetto blasters, as they were down at UCLA Medical Center the day of Michael’s death? Will I have the opportunity tomorrow morning to do some mindful vulture driving, or mindful giving of the finger? I bet if the cops just told the mourners that we were trying to meditate next door, they would chill out and join us in silence. Ommmmmmm over and out.

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Categories: astanga yoga , social theory

More Equations · 28 June 2009

Summer indulgence: driving all the way across the city to practice with my alchemy teacher in a juicy, complicated space. Sixteen point zero miles in as many minutes—blasting blues rock on the freeway as the cylindrical US Bank Building and its lesser neighbors grow large in the opaque white smog of June. Singing something that wakes up the pelvic floor, I approach downtown from the west as the sun comes toward it from the east, infusing the fog until it glows bright in my eyes. It becomes near-blinding just as I touch the brake and swing north from the 10 to the 110 at the Staples Center. A pretty intense little kriya—why wake up with nauli when you can have sixteen dangerous minutes alone on the Santa Monica freeway?

So… time = distance, shala = kitchen floor, inhale = exhale. The balance of my mantra, SO ABOVE SO BELOW, also reminds me that nothing much is free. What you do = who you are. I do freeway penance in 36 minutes of slow-going on the other side, east to west, sixteen point zero miles of stop and go, listening to Iran news on BBC radio. East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet, until…

Practice is incredibly sweet. The space is full of symbols left wide open to interpretation: every time you lose your drsti there’s some other image in your grill, just asking to be incorporated in to the arbitrary symbolic lexicon. The giant photograph of a teenaged SPKJ taking adho mukha in shades of purple: I gaze blearily toward that inverted skull and let it pull 25 long ut pluthihi breaths out of my tired lungs.

Most subversive, though, is the ceiling devised by whatever perverted architects threw this mini-mall together decades ago. Beautiful crossbeams above the main space meet in a perfect X, and if you align your own body with that X you realize the great cylindrical ventilation duct just above it is nothing les than a shiny silver lingam to the strong white supports of the X. One might think Siva and Shakti were missing from the shala’s pantheon, but they’re only disguised as neutral background architecture, laughing down on us as we drift in and out of alchemy on the floor.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration , morality

Equation #1 · 25 June 2009

1 = 1

A = A

Inhale = Exhale

How many ways and times has this formula been offered to me? Sometimes as if it’s a secret-in-plain-view, only known to the half-dozen true flying lizards of Mysore; sometimes as if it’s the most boring ever baby pranayama; sometimes overheard from my own mouth instructing the first samasthithi of a private.

This morning everything was d-e-n-s-e, far more than usual. Weird. Is this what 60 will feel like? A few minutes in, I went inner-schizoid and hosted a full-blown dialogue:

So, J, if you were alone right now, would you make it even a surya further?

No. I would fucking bail. [Sorry, just playing back the tape.]

What if this actually were a kitchen-practice? What is the same? Is it fair to draw the juice for your entire work-out from these others… to consciously use them while pretending to be riding your own discipline oh-so-sincerely?

Ok, so I will put myself in the kitchen right now. Draw a practice up out of its dusty linoleum. Shala = kitchen. So west, so east. Same same same.

Fine then yes, here we are in the kitchen. Making it not different from the shala.

It doesn’t mean don’t be strengthened by the group in the abstract. Just don’t suck these four people’s milkshake. Gurglegurglegurgle. It’s not yours and you don’t need it anyway.

It was a useful little trip: practice was extraordinary. Albeit a little weird because I kept seeing that linoleum and remembering I need to swiff. But extraordinary because air-cushioned.

What makes shala practice = kitchen practice on a dense Thursday is one key. That key is not: pushing, churning it out on a performative, exhale-driven autopilot. It is valuing the inhalation as an equal.

Counting it. Literally. (Why is the default to count the exhale or the little space thereafter?) Today I bracketed the exhale—it knows how to do its thing—letting the inhale come to balance. Instead of dying out on the floor as the others in the room inhaled for me. If in doubt today, I inhaled even more.

It is so easy when I allow myself to know this, something that others have tried to give me but I become too unconscious to do when I get tired. Ridiculously easy.

Oxygen. Who knew?

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

Pathologies of Los Angeles · 29 May 2009

People aren’t afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles, actually. They merge like fast little fish made smart by evolution. Especially on the weekends and at night, because it’s no longer about getting to work; and especially in June, when the cool cloudcover from the bay makes for perfect driving conditions. People deplore this town for its car-ness, and the atomizing socio-environmental catastrophe we have created here because we insist on driving. But there is something nobody admits: driving here is great. We go as fast as we like on the freeways at night, listening to trip-hop or bad Britpop, windows down, exiting smoothly on to thoroughfares made for the rich countryside that sat here 50 years ago.

The bad word on the city is that we spend absurd proportions of our income on high-end cars because it’s socially normative to drive a Porsche even before you make it big. That’s true. But also, it’s just nice to have a fast car on roads built for sport driving. At night when it’s empty out and a little bit humid from the gloom, I’ve been taking the long way home on the Sunset hairpin curves, the ones immortalized by the Beach Boys and mortal for many daredevils since. I understand that this way of living is actually a choice to do environmental violence by staying unconscious, but it feels so right! We need new bass-driven ballads for this dirty guilty pleasure. Los Angeles, I need to get over you, forget it could be good like this. I love you for the wrong reasons...

Anyway, Friday evening. Alone after-hours in the art school café, leaning back in a wooden folding chair. The dashing professor for whom I graded Ancient Greece exams years ago just trammeled through on the way to the hilltop parking lot, looking increasingly like Johnny Depp-as-historian-of-the-esoteric. June gloom, eucalyptus, sycamore and pines outside the wall of 20-foot windows before me. This morning when I taught a client about the relationship of the arches and the adductors, asking he root down in to the earth to draw some kind of strength up, he scrunched up his nose and said, “So like… I am getting this… but what would be, like, the next logical step?” Seriously? Ok, forget trikonasana, do you want to learn about a place called the pelvic floor? A few minutes later I heard myself say the words "second chakra" to a soccer jock.

Well, he asked for it. But… here’s another pathology of Los Angeles: the world of anti-form that tries to compete with the world of hyper-materialism. In my mind, secretly I used to call it kundalini gulag. The KG is the tendency in some of us to get hyper-reactive to LA materialism—the worship of cars and youth that forms the spiritual center of this town. In trying to be anti-materialistic, we buy straight in to spiritual materialism, for a yoga that’s all about feeling energetically superior. A practice that’s about coming off as the most psychically gifted, and sexually potent, and “humble” person in the room. Ok. This is still power yoga! It’s still all about proving oneself and being better than other people, just this time on a post-material level. Spinoza said somewhere in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect that there is no one more arrogant than the one who is caught up in his own humility. And this is the essence of the kundalini gulag—a display of humility that barely masks energetic elitism. Too bad you can't have aura contests and chakra-offs down on Venice beach. That would take care of all of this craziness.

I have gone in for some of the metaphysical arrogance too. Caught myself making a harsh joke about the “superficial” OCD factor of Iyengar the other day. Hmmm. Am I starting to believe the pseudospiritual pablum numero uno— that the “world of form” is an "illusion"? That lived experience is “all in the mind”? Riiiiiight.

So I’m thinking some Iyengar this weekend. Hopefully as OCD as I can find. Thing is, the class that works schedulewise is one of the only advanced sessions in the city, and it’s taught by a SCARY little German man who, with his jaunty grin and spiky hair, is just adorable enough to get my guard down before he kicks my ass. But I need to remember that there is nothing adorable about an advanced Iyengar teacher, not even this Mr. C with his funny shorts and strangely beatific expressions. I wonder how mad he’ll be at me for showing up at class with nothing but a lot of the other guy’s yoga under my skin. And under the wings of my kidneys and the eyes of my elbows too.

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

Guru on the move · 19 May 2009

Another earthquake today. I was in my office, retrofitted, secure. Like the quake in ’00 in Seattle—I was five stories up in the Casy building at Seattle University—watching the quad sway back and forth while the psych professor next door screamed that we were all going to die. Strange. Today the sociologists all said, “Oh it’s nothing. There’s nothing new going on here.” That’s what they always say. Conservatives.

But do you feel it? A little shape-shifting in your universe?

In addition to the super-evolved identity-snatching spam bot, there is also a Fed-Ex poltergeist here this week. The delivery guy rang three separate days and I let him in, only to go downstairs to meet him and find the courtyard empty.  So finally I picked up and asked him, “Where ARE you man?” He named an address a half mile away and I told him that under the circumstances I’d be remiss to buzz him in.

Not to grasp too much for meaning, but in my personal symbolic lexicon, action at a distance means SKPJ is on the move. Wonderful soul! What is it like out there? Is there any resonance of our love and loss, any power whatsoever in our pujas?

I am not suggesting one take the Tibetans literally, but it’s interesting what they say about the bardo. A being might take 42 days to cross over, they say; or much much more… but in any case those first days are crucial. This is the first big opportunity, they say, but most souls miss it because frozen by fear.

This passage is from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a.k.a. The Art of Dying a.k.a. How Not To Do It Again. Listen how beautiful.

First of all there will appear to you, swifter than lightning, the luminous splendor of the colorless light of Emptiness, and it will surround you on all sides. ...Try to submerge yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self, all attachment to your illusory sense of self…

Buddhas and Bodhisattvas will for seven days appear to you in their benign and peaceful aspects. Their light will shine upon you, ... Wonderful and delightful though they are, they may frighten you. Do not give in to your fright! Do not run away! Serenely contemplate the spectacle before you! Overcome your fear! …Realize they have come to receive you into their realms….

But if you miss this realm, you will next be confronted with the angry deities, threatening you and barring your passage…. All these forms are strange to you.... They terrify you…  and yet it is you who have created them. Do not give in to your fright… flee them not! They are but the contents of your own mind... If at this point you should manage to understand that… you will find yourself in a kind of paradise.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body

18 May 2009 · 18 May 2009

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

DIY and Not-So-Private Minds · 10 May 2009

Somehow between Cross-fit and the apocalypse, I’ve got this idea that I need skills. I admire people with skills. You know… CPR, vegetable gardening, computer hacking, lock picking, multiple languages, fire-building, kombucha homebrewing. You never know when you’re going to be lost in the forest or trapped in a burning building or get a flat tire in downtown Detroit.

A first batch of kombucha is burping away under cheesecloth in the kitchen. I’m taking care of the little guy while his owner is away for the summer. No other way to refer to the soft rusty half-shell kombucha blob with its light eau de vinegar: it’s…he’s… very much alive, and happy to culture some tea for you as he goes about his business of cell division and just sitting around. Nice of him. He’s already beginning to split off a little twin, a little mini-blob that will be equally happy to render the human-addictive substance as a by-product of his unassuming kitchen-shelf existence..

I love domestic chemistry, playing with fermentation. It’s disgusting! The blob is just slippery, ugly raw information that has to be tended and fed and allowed to reproduce itself if it’s going to live. I massage him under a warm faucet before sliding him back into his brine, talk to him, let him split and send the new little guys on to another and another.

What’s this little guy’s kombuchu parampara? Does his lineage go all the way back to the grow-yr-own fermenters of the 60s, or was he brought to life just recently for the Californians with their panoply of celebrity fountain-of-youth practices? Can he trace his progenitors all the way back to that very first kombucha sage-gods? I do hope I’m drinking the original, immortal nectar of the ancients here.

Mmmm. I am also, ridiculously, switching to Mac. Why did this not happen a decade ago? The machine is one sleek piece of aluminum, tricked out with extra RAM and already a better extension of my self than the long-suffering Inspiron ever was. And god so beautiful on the inside, too. Yes, I don’t just love her for her looks. I’ve been waiting for this little machine a long time, asking the universe for just the right file structure, aiming to manifest the perfect processor. And thank god, it all feels so right now, nevermind the chunk of first-home-savings I'm down. But... what if I get stranded somewhere without wifi...?

...Speaking of DIY, or not so Y… when we get together I can see your thoughts. So can anyone. Not to unnerve you or anything. But the line a thought makes across the body as it travels, tiny tensing like a snake under the sand, the way the neck flexes, the drop in the breath.

If your attention is on a sound or motion beside you, this is the way the body registers it. If a new emotion shows up, it moves through the head, neck, shoulders, low back. An emotion is by definition a bodily event, but very often thoughts are too. A thought is not just content--the thing that is thought--but also a wave in motion.

I say this because of the aspect of practice that is about isolating myself from the thoughts of others. Some teachers, (even if they’re not getting the petty clairvoyance that pranayama seems to bring up) experience a mysore room kind of like air traffic control. The trick seems to be to kill the volume. Allow and trust the planes to fly themselves, don’t take the controls of every one who radios in for help.

But for students who claim nobody can know their motivations or thoughts, that it's a private matter whether they’re actually focused, ummm. The mind is really not that private.

Especially not in the company of body-workers or anyone who is very intelligent below the belt (or even below the neck, for that matter). In the case of teachers, yes, some are not perceptive. But chances are they've just gotten good at pretending not to see others' thoughts, both out of respect for and to protect themselves from all the static.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , science

Stealth Shala · 5 May 2009

It works like this. Mail the director 10 days in advance, asking for permission to drop in and directions to the shala. When he does not respond for four days, ask a student of his—who is also a friend of yours—to put in a word for you. Day five: send another email. Day six, find out a client of yours has been friends with the elusive director since elementary school and has just written to him to share the news that you are her teacher. Day seven: get a cell number and call him. When he answers and immediately hangs up on you, call back. When he answers again, cut in and keep him on the line, have a great conversation. Day nine: receive a .pdf map of the street corner where the unmarked building is located, and where to find the unlocked back door, where you should enter not before 5:00 but not after 6:00. A “before-hours joint.”

Day of: drive a concatenation of dark, empty freeways and city streets, right past the destination. Circle back, spot a full lot in this lower-middle-class commercial zone and pull in. Notice this place used to be an auto repair place or small factory. Notice the non- motor-city parking stock of Hummers, BMWs, a Volvo, plus several beater sedans and pickps; take the very last spot with your rented silver mazda (note: for a reconnaissance mission, do not rent a vehicle with a turning radius the width of three lanes of traffic).

Go to the back, find the metal door with the numerical lock and the small red Ganesh that one might mistaken for a painted rose. Appreciate the crisp hat-and-scarf kind of morning (even though it's already May). Inside, feel the warms. See sneakers and Ugg variations orderly along the walls, billowing silk alongside changing rooms, two graceful women taking your hand between strong, very soft palms to ensure everything’s in order with you and you know you’re at home.

In the dark, hear that a wood stove roars at the end of the short hall leading down to two barely-lit rooms—one for practice and one equally large for finishing—which will brighten as the sun comes in the old skylights. Next to the stove, glance an old porcelain clawfoot tub full of dry, yellow corn kernels, with a foot-long rough wooden scoop lying in the bottom. Art? Something referring to grist for the mill?

And then practice. Appreciate the darkness, good breath, silence, the tall teacher who laughs at my backbends and has nothing to prove to either the two brand-new students, me, or the many everyday people. Afterwards make some laidback talk on random topics—jewelry-making, convection systems, Colorado—sitting on the church pews by the stove. Find out the tub of corn is just a good clean heatsource. And take this little kernel he tosses at your feet: “There are some conscious pockets around here. They're hiding. But something is going on.”

 

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion

Careful what you ask for · 30 April 2009

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

So I’m cornered.

If practice in recent years has been a drilling down through a little sandstone, oil shale, hitting an aquifer or natural gas cave here and there…, well, this week I hit a vein of something black and opaque. Something that bites back.

I finish as usual and find, re-engaging, that I am destroyed. Just after practice, for a while, and again at night. It’s some kind of desolation, some colorless dark. It’s not emotional but it is. And, too, it’s an intuition of all the stuff we don’t, mistakenly, want to happen. And it’s thoughts of dark. Shiva calling on all levels, and not in a joking mood.

It’s impossible not to notice, because this condition is so different from the one in which I awake. It’s also dramatically different from my idea of my internal experience. And… it’s too large and immobile to dismiss. So these days I’m getting on the mat understanding there may be aftermath.

A weird thing is that others don’t see it. Usually I have a transparency problem: could not fake you out if I wanted to. But somehow, with this, I have to volunteer the information for people to know it. At least this inscrutable demon-dark is pretty well-bounded, whatever it is. It’s not something good to put on anyone, so I won't dwell too much.

It’s not a practical problem—I have certain habits built up and can cruise on them while being sort of ok with what’s going on emotionally. My idea is: do not allow the emotion part of this to take control by generating its own (1) self-pity forcefield or (2) “I’m not feeling well” excuse for behaving creepishly. And yes, as I was advised: don’t give this thing any weapons.

A month of vacationing with ashtangis highlighted how analytical we all can get about this practice. I gained 5 pounds because of X. I lost my Mari D because of Y. The teacher scratched his nose while looking at me because of Z. Therefore I need to do A, stop doing B, chant to Ganesh for 40 days, and see my astrologer, and do a cleanse. Practice becomes a project of problem-finding and problem-solving.

Because I’m such a sucker for causal analysis, I’m tempted to disallow it altogether right now. Most if it is the mind grasping for something to explain, or trying to get out of what’s actually the case in the present moment by turning what’s right here now it in to a problem. Making experience a problem and explaining it away.

Still, ok, I do see that the dark is in the jaw, the neck, the occipital region. I’ve been dwelling here so much lately, letting go of this old, hard anger that lives there. If I were dreaming and you asked me, “Owl, what is your jaw made of?” I might say obsidian.

Or mercury. It does feel like the old morphing mercury bead I’ve been consolidating from all over the body and tilting to the back corner of my consciousness is trapped now. I finally am at a point of either stopping because it’s terrible or going on because that’s what I do. This is not the same as a severe back injury or chronic SI inflammation. It’s more scary and ugly but also more interesting than that.

And ok, it might be relevant that I’ve been working the ganda bherunda in a new way, relaxing the jaw there (relaxing most everything, actually), allowing the atlas to move back far on the atlas in a way that feels like it’s healing a neck that I didn’t know was unwell. The posture is, finally, a hideous pride-killing tongue stretch, one that leaves that hidden deep muscle relaxed and long enough to snake up and rest on the soft palate without even working to stay there.

It’s not about working chest now so much as it’s about smashing the jaw into the earth until it gives up. I don’t get to grit my teeth and press on. I get to discard that reflex at the moment I want to rely on it. Or not. I could always go back to 2S, recognize that this is all pointless suffering.

Nah.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Practice notes, these days · 29 April 2009

Relaxing the jaw and tongue

Anna Wise found that even zen masters couldn’t take their beta waves down from active chit-chat mode until they relaxed their tongues. It seems that when the tongue is unrelaxed, the part of the brain that does discursive thought (i.e. spoken or unspoken speech) goes pretty nuts. However, zen master who relaxes tongue quiets mind.

The implication of this for rooms in which there is much verbal instruction (or in which students actually talk--I hear that happens sometims... odd...) are noted.

Relaxing the head

There are three different stretches that I can give to the muscles inside the head (or is it the optic nerve?) when I’m looking to the third eye. It just depends on how far out I gaze (even if the eyes are closed). There is one area within this range that, when I rest in in for a few seconds, causes the hip flexors to tingle and let go. Further supports this idea that there may be a jaw-hip connection.

Bodymaps

In the past I’ve thought that the kosha model of body “layers’ was tedious. Eastern philosophy is full of lists—at its worst it feels like arbitrary nominalism rather than illumination. But lately the gross-subtle-causal model of body layers seems too coarse. The kosha model divides subtle and causal into two sub-levels, in an interesting way. Recently Susan also reminded me that gross-subtle-causal is often seen as being crowned by turiya. And somewhere Ken Wilber reminded me that in the Tibetan imagination turiya is followed by a trans-personal “body” called turiyatita. Whatever Anyway, both five-layer models—the Indian and the Tibetan—now seems to be kind of useful for interpreting experience. Or locating it.

Manifestation

People keep asking me about what I want to manifest. You mean like The Secret? I could manifest a Ferrari? Awesome!

Riiight. Boring. Listening to Shinzen a while back, I loved his chuckled aside when he was discussing the clairvoyance and petty mind-control stuff that happens to people who meditate a lot in a certain way. There’s the spirituality of powers, he said, and the spirituality of liberation. Powers are fine. “But those are the—heh heh heh—lesser gods, shall we say.” 

My favorite metaphysically unstable feline puts it best: there is the spirituality of getting what you want. And the spirituality of wanting what you get. I guess I’m more interested in playing with the internal situation—what is wanted—than with the Ferrari situation—what is gotten. Maybe if The Secret worked for Lexus coupes rather than Ferraris...?

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body

You can't have it · 24 April 2009

Good old commodities: iron ore, wheat, petroleum, labor power

These are capitalism’s creation, the stock in trade of markets. On the market, unit of Wyoming petroleum = unit from Kuwait. The commodity is brought in to existence for the reason of sale. Its key qualities are uniformity and exchangeability. Gold from Potosí = gold from Anaconda. Sneaker assembly in Vietnam = sneaker assembly in Mexico. X = X = X.

Commidification is good: it greases the world. Commodification is bad: it denies the differences between places and humans and puts in thrall to the market, only capable of thinking in terms of objects and exchange.

Modern commodities: RAM. Carbon offsets. Human hearts and kidneys. Yoga postures.

All made of the same stuff and therefore transitive. For the getting and the selling.

The yoga industry has come into being because of a massive buy-in to the idea that a yoga posture is a thing.  (It’s also, to a lesser degree, commodified “inner peace” and now sells it in 90 minute units, but that’s another story.) A teacher must advertise herself in the form of some god-awful contortion for all to see because this is the product she has to offer. She has to work on these terms: it's the language everyone speaks. Either you can consume her posture or, better yet, have it for yourself.

Ooooh… arm balance. I want that.

Yeah, you’re smart readers already. You know where this is going.

Commodification is what it is and it works, but there is a lie inside it. On a deep level, postures aren’t transitive. The body itself pushes back against the tide of commodification. Jack’s trikonasana is not Jane’s, neither internally nor insofar as anyone can “consume” it from the outside.

And, beyond that, doing trikonasana a bunch of times might natrally lead you from consuming that experience according to the rationale and valuations of capitalism… to just experiencing the experience.

Most of the teaeching and doing of yoga is locked inside the capitalist mindset. This is how it has to be. It isn't bad: consuming spirituality is still a kind of spirituality. It's oookkayyy: to rage against commodification is self-defeating and unintelligent, itself a denial of the way in which nobody fully escapes capitalism (for now). The capitalist mind is fully formed and sucks everything it touches in to its machine so that it can continue to function and expand. Reification is everywhere. It wants to be the only way, thinks it is the only way.

And yet!

It is in this context—the context so environing that we barely crane our necks to see it—that these Indian guys drop comments about the “purity” of traditional practice. It initially sounds like a rehash of the Puritanism that scares and repels us, but no. Purification is central to any mind-quieting spiritual practice, as Shinzen discusses at length. Purification is sweet and changes the nature of experience. It introduces new degrees of freedom.

Commodification will reduce humans and the planet to meaningless dust if it ever becomes complete. But that will not happen. The roots practices—humanism, environmentalism, traditionalism—are always here to push back, to create islands of “purity” vis-à-vis the logic that wants to dominate. And to offer options for the future.

To resist commodification in yoga is to fight that good fight, which has been in process for millenia and will never be lost. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re going to do traditional practice, recognize that it is a non-commodification practice. It is an island of non-capitalism. Rich, "pure," and not for sale. Not for sale because this yoga resists commodification, is too individal for it, too cool for it.

Because it operates on the logic of liberation, not the logic of get get get.

The paradox is doing non-commodified practice in the form of ashtanga. Because ashtanga, due to its systematic nature, due to the temporary things it makes and unmakes in the progress of a series, mistakes itself as a commodity all of the time. If you do it with your capitalist mind, you want postures, you show off postures, you lust for postures, you conspicuously consume postures for others to watch. Ditto for yoga abs and the nice ass. And the piece of the celeb teachers, the special relationship, you want for yourself. It’s all in the get. And it's in the uncritical participation in turning teachers into CEOs, and not calling them on it or providing some pushback when they act like extreme capitalists.

You don’t have to do traditional practice, but if you do, at least understand its power and participate in that rather than selling it out.

It’s simple: someone else’s posture is not a thing. You can’t have that. And your posture is not a thing. You can’t have that either.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society

Space · 19 April 2009

So it’s glorious here. Forgotten fruit in season, a bike valet at the farmers' market, friends happy together, people saying “President Obama” on the radio. Spring quarter on campus, deadlines that ask for integrity and not acts of sleepless masochism, actually good art everwhere, Wolverine looking intense on billboards, the most perfect weekend playing on repeat, my hair turning weird strawberry blonde again as the 6-week brunette washes out, an appointment for contact lenses because I’m ready for cheap sunglasses and finally tired of the wire rims between me and people I’m teaching. Artists talking about how it’s time for high stakes creation and academics having the economic stakes raised in a sort of useful way. Let it be a little tougher for a while; let us get a little more serious… Serious can still be light.

::: It has been given to me to live this life; and it’s  allright for that living-out to be beautiful and fulfilled no matter the conditions.:::

No more apologies for being complete. Nor distrust of beauty, for that matter.

In this, these particularities, what makes Los Angeles itself? What makes me different when I am here? Three people have said that it feels like I am closer, reading here now compared to reading here a month ago. Isn’t that funny? The intimacy is increased, even as there’s nothing different about the url or where you sit as you read, and even though I never email personally anymore because my inbox has grown over in vines and stubbornly refuses to open anymore.

Space is a category of the understanding. No: that’s not Sri Aurobindo or some shit. It’s Kant. It’s good phenomenology too.

But in any case it’s interesting… to observe that space comes in to play in perception across a flat screen as much as it comes in to play in chopping kale, merging in to freeway traffic, scratching a dog behind the ears. And it’s not just in your head; it’s in mine too. I feel closer too. More cradled by taken-for-granted meanings, supported by relationships that have some age and meat to them, at home in the arts and the sciences I practice. Less en thrall to huge amounts of new information flying at high speeds into my grill.

In a sense, it is freeing to be able to take the perspective of the culture you inhabit. The more you move around, the more languages you speak, the more you understand intuitively that every history and culture is accidental. The more you can see from the integral meta-vista. But even so there is a richness to being able to participate, in a grounded way, as yourself, wherever you are, without compulsively translating everything in to some previous worldview or language. Hold steady, little scientist. There will be time for translation when the space changes.

I’ve been ruminating on PJ these days, feeling what space he occupies in the categories of my understanding. Early-early practice in the dark alone, a happy crooked-toothed version of him on the floor, propped against the wall. I light a candle that casts a shadow above and behind the photograph, a dark space in the shape of Teotihuacan or one of the other flat-topped Mexican pyramids. And PJ’s inside the pyramid-shadow, buried, preserved in middle age, seeing me through the dark. As he passes over, it’s easy to imagine he would pass in to this space even more strongly if that’s what I ask. I don’t think that I do ask that—other avatars resonate more strongly with me—but right now he also feels, well, closer than before.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , integration , science

Fertilizer · 16 April 2009

It’s said that yoga—the practices and mind maps of the Ganges shamen and the northern cave recluses, and later the loinclothed attaches’ of Karnatakan princes—slows the aging process. If this were true, by what mechanism would it work? Though processes that increase the heart rate, speed breathing and generally put stress on the body? Or through processes that subsequently slow dooooooown body functions and remove stress from the system?

If one wanted the muscles to become longer, more optimally functional, more able to relax when not working, and ultimately more open... would the way to achieve that be by force? With pushing and pulling? Or... would an element of conscious, focused, skillful  l e t t i n g    g o  probably need to be involved?

How long do you have to stand on your head before the buzz sets in? Three minutes upside down? Maybe five? How long does it take for the chemical-metabolic-systemic-whatever switchover to initiate in conscious relaxation? Did you know that conscious relaxation was a chemical process?

(Maybe that's a little sexier than go home take rest.)

(Conveniently, playing dead is easier than standing on your head.)

I can take rest in form, but not always in content. A month of really easy living helped, but things are different here of course.

The body is so chatty when I lie down. Itchy toes, out of kilter shoulder blades, uneven hands, all chatting up a storm for the first minute or two I lie there. Fine. Watch the body talk.

The kundalini and white tantra people do their crazy shaman rites on wool blankets because they believe that fiber alone insulates you from the strong energy of the earth. Well, this week I’ve been getting closer to the earth at the end, covering head to toe in an old wool blanket, cutting off from the room around me and making like fertilizer. The wool is heavy and dark, a little mulchy, and holds down the heat of my body. I imagine it’s the first layer of earth on the coffin, relax the tongue because Anna Wise seems to be on to something, and meditate on the boundary between the teeth and the jawbone until I’m out.

Coincidentally... I’m closer to acknowledging that this practice is beautiful. That it leads sometimes to grace and poetry.

A graduate program director has asked me to do yoga intervention for a group of art students who are collectively freaking out as they bring their MfA theses to completion. Yoga for art’s sake, for the sake of flow, for contacting the higher creative intelligence and not letting the jitters undermine artistic purpose. He can cover 60% my usual fee and that is all good—I know a little something about the special grad student rate. So yes; this is a cause I can support. But I need to be a focused, eeeeasy, high integrity presence myself in order to do them any good.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , power of suggestion

Inverted World · 12 April 2009

(Post Heavily Revised. My mind seems to be in transit...)

He is risen!

He is risen indeed!

For less Christian call-and-response, there was some kirtan in Santa Monica last night, but despite my claims to have conquered jet lag (perhaps with the help of my new titanium wrist band or a 22-hour tarry in London that softened me up for the second flight), I passed out early and missed it. Oh well, probably best to feel some Judeo-Christian mind today. It’s the biggest holiday of the year for my family, after all: I felt my dad issuing that old greeting to the congregation at the same 9:00 moment that I sat down for breakfast with the yogis after practice. Just before, I held extra breaths in mukta hasta sirsa C, imagining myself to be not the Tarot’s hanged man but Saint Peter himself, and called that good enough. (Actually, turns out I’m only 20% Peter but 90% Jude.)

Hanged man is about right,  though: still feeling a little spacey here. Maybe it’s that my ability to sleep at roughly appropriate times belies the still-inverted circadian rhythms; or it’s the daytime lucid dreaming techniques I’m putting in to practice (no results yet…); or it’s hangover from the intense dreamlife that bleeds in to wakefulness in Mysore. Ask anyone: your subconscious turns Technicolor and barrels straight at you night if not day in that place. I cannot explain this, but find it both revealing and relaxing.

Relaxing because, for now, whatever pulls me out of the super-beta front of my head, back in to peripheral vision, back into dream consciousness… this is what begins to dissolve the tension that is most interesting. The knots along the upper inside of the jawbone, in the eye sockets, temples, roots of the teeth, center of the forehead. Habitual flexion in the tongue. Funny, this is where the yoga thing began—a neurosurgeon saying “take responsibility” for releasing the post-car-accident tension in a jammed TMJ. A Thai massage therapist two weeks ago said: Your body is free from the neck down.... The chakras in the head are another thing.

Why, yes.

I received much this month for a girl who just went off to pay her respects and get a little perspective. Strength in practice, a sense of history, rational explanations for some aspects of traditional practice that have long disturbed me (don’t tell me rationality isn’t important: it’s key), first hand experiences that fill me with gratitude for the institution and the greater practices of yoga to which it leads, and the inspiration of beautiful people who have kept this as a practice long after the asana-learning was exhausted. But, maybe it all becomes even more juicy after asana gets boring. Mysore is a good place to peel off to the next layer or two of the onion.

When I started writing about this practice years ago, the only thing that annoyed me more than chatty Yogaworks formalism was the identity crisis of colleagues who left that school for eight weeks in Mecca… and came back with hennaed hands and bindi’d brows, having gone in for the decoys of currently correct vinyasa and the perfectly imitated chant as if those were static aspects of some fundamentally “perfect” system. I never did write about Post Mysore Syndrome; and it’s probably too late now since it no longer pisses me off.

Looking around, it seems that, no matter who you are, there is some senti-mental and energetic effect of even a brief period in that zone. Post Mysore Effect is: really nice, strong energy and focus... especially apparent in an uptick in tapas during practice or teaching. I don't know anyone who hasn't come back with a strong hit of something still in his system, as well as a nostalgic sweetness of regard for even the most absurd, uncomfortable memoris. PME turns to PMS, though,when it has to be reactive. When it rejects one's original life and self and practice as somehow inauthentic and dirty. This is the result of the traveler believing the energy hit and the nice memories are her possssion or souvenir, that others are a threat to continued identification with the experience, and that anything except for the (itself weirldy manufactured) experience of Mysore is corrupt.

Some signs that someones PME has turned to PMS:

● Talking in broken English. E.g., telling a student, “Five breathings” or “you do;” or dismissing class with “go home take rest” even when students just TOOK rest (which you don’t get to do after led class at the KPJAYI, thus the command).

● ALSO: A bizarre new wardrobe, involving the weirdest pants, and bright flowing silks everywhere, and—yes—bindis. Exclusine consumption of  Indian food. Defensiveness of the institution, even for things that should not be defended. Decoration of practice with various displays of Mysore-ness. Refusals and rejections of all sorts. Metonymy of India and Mysore, e.g., “I’m going to India," to mean actually "I'm going to Gokulam." Starting  most sentences with, "Well in Mysore, they...."

● Rarely (worst case scenario): conversion in to a Sharath-head. Sharath-heads exhibit (1) a groupie mentality filtered through a pseudo-religious “he’s my guru” justification scheme, combined with (2) misattribution of a level of realization that he would never pretend is the case and that isn’t necessary for him to be a good teacher.

Causes: 

Lack of contentment with everyday life at home. Lack of previous travel experience, especially experience in poor countries. Desire to impress others or feel superior. Mistaking new worldly sophistication with some kind of spiritual progress. And in general:  just identifying with the experience.

Cures:

More experience. More practice. Compassion from people at home. Rarely, a talking-to from someone who's been through it.

Benign indicators of PME that has not escalated to PME:

● Resolutions of self. These may seem to be born of a delusional mindset but actually seem to be pretty stable. There is something to be said for taking a long time away from your old patterns and for getting really relaxed.

● Missing terribly the experience and the friends made there. Yes, it’s a college dormitory level of sociality, but it can be very good quality sociality with extraordinarily sweet people. There’s nothing delusional about loving this even if it’s highly manufactured and impossible to reproduce back home.

● Increase in respect/ decrease in cynicism for the institution. When you see that it is just a family business run on a skeleton staff, suddenly the humility and the grandeur of the enterprise come forth. Of course crazy edicts are issued to manage the spoiled hoards and of course instruction is variable and enormously expensive. Westerners are breaking down the gates, even more crazily expecting the family to be our geniuses or even gods. We did this—we imagined it and created a whole Mysore world out of it. The KPJAYI is just giving us—so generously—an anchor for us to go on creating this oddly wonderful experience.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , integration

It has been said... · 5 April 2009

Practice not changing: students forgetting.

Everything is god.

Lokhasamasthasukhinobhavantu.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , integration

Dear Blogosphere, · 2 April 2009

No lie: practicing here is heaven to me. The shala has gone from crowded to quiet; my practice has moved from 7:45 back to 6; the teacher was Sharath for three weeks and now is Saraswathi; the weather has gone from temperate to hot and mosquito-laden; some days it’s Mysore style and some days it’s led. I don’t care. These are not the details I notice.

What matters to me is the way the building breathes when I deposit my shoes on the steps in the dark. The quiet of every other student in the room, the way that being here matters enough to each of them that they’d go to all the trouble to get here. The textures of the rugs and the hard cool sheen of the marble, the bendy humidity, smell of good clean multiethnic sweat, the way the bodies on all sides blur in to windmill rhythm of vinyasas. And not just the five senses but the sixth, if as the Buddhists say the mind is a sense organ. Most everyone in that zone can dial it right down to one pointed focus, especially in that context. Multiply that by a hundred with others waiting in the foyer or doing headstands in the bathroom, and you’d have to be Democritus not to feel the energy of transformation.

Sorry! Have to drop the t word. Even if all it means is morphing temporarily into a focused, strong, body-ecstatic practitioner. When you’re here, you save your best energy for your 4:30 am date with the janga le kayamane. What else?

I am not going to write about my practice, but wanted to offer some reasons why someone might be interested in practicing in this one shala, despite the list of reasons he has for why things here are bad and wrong. I don’t have time to edit this down, so pardon my overstatements, redundancies and awkward phrasings.

● Come in to contact with a teacher who teaches asana as just a micro-process of engaging and dispelling fear. Don’t worry; he’s not scary.

● Practice with teachers you would never dream of pestering, on whom you have zero claims for attention or love, and who could not care less about your performance (and are bored by asana flash, as Laruga puts it). Teachers who don’t see your body with western eyes, don’t speak much English, will not engage people’s stuff—who live on a different cultural planet in which marriages are arranged and a caste system determines where you sleep and eat. Do this day after day after day until you stop feeling entitled and stop caring about your own performance and stop waiting to be noticed and given attention. Do it around a bunch of other people in the same situation. Until the distinctions stop mattering so much. See how this cultural distance from the teachers changes your interior experience. See how it creates emotional and mental space.

● Find out how funny and naïve some rooms back home feel after experiencing this for a while. Feel the difference in teachers who have internalized this experience in their bodies and ways of seeing.

● Esprit de corps.

● Experience asana practice that has no pretensions whatever toward psychotherapy or physical therapy. Asana that is just for the sake of breath and quiet and doesn’t need to sell itself as menial self-help.

● Be in a room where the student who receives the attention is the one devoted to Mary C, not the one perfecting some upsidedown balancing nonsense. Where there is no sexual tension—none—from the teacher.

● See how hard Sharath and Saraswati work. Ask yourself what would happen if they did not. Wonder what else they would do with their lives and their significant wealth, if they didn’t care.

● Realize this is still just a modest family business with the same foibles and benefits of any little organization, and that the expectations you had about what it all means were way overblown. Feel dumb for doing things like throwing around the word nepotism or (speaking from experience) trashing the asana instruction here.

● Realize that resentment about succession is built on the same inflated ideas of what it all means, and that the grandson talks like an everyday family guy, looks out the window with a nervous chuckle, and works too hard to have energy to play guru games. See that this is a different scene entirely from the one the old teachers—some of them struggling bitterly over the end of an era—experienced. That the institution is much different now, but something good of its own once you see it clearly.

● Meet people. Is the social scene a bunch of distracting dissolution? Yes, in some ways. And in other ways, no. This is where the incipient politicking can be leavened, the imagined snobs with their perfect bodies and lives of leisure befriended (once you realize you’re nothing less than one of them already), where you find yourself with a network of friends in every city, where your Facebook feed will be irreparably and hilariously warped, where you can watch Russians and Swedes and Brazilians and Peruvians and Thais and Australians—all with vastly different bodies and histories—comparing notes about long term practice, and be inspired by the possibilities for what it’s like to be a lifer.

● Even as the practice is suddenly “less yours” because you’re doing some apparently easier programme and have nobody to consult about it, you will possibly find your self-practice strengthened. Being ignored helps. The less it’s about achievement or performance or getting particular tricks, the more energy there is to focus on yourself and your immediate experience. Whether or not you choose to take the teachers here as your teacher in the long term, there’s a kind of personal responsibility that might be fortified here as you figure out that your own strength and flexibility hold it all together.

● Have an experience of energy. Whatever that means to you. It doesn’t matter your world view or epistemology. Whatever grid you’re on, there’s going to be seismic activity.

If this sounds meh, that’s great. For many people, practicing here would not be useful or enjoyable. And believe me, there are too many tourists in this town already and too many students wishing for a piece of the teachers: and opting not to join them is probably a great idea. Meanwhile, there are many other more structured, more personal, more beautiful, less crazy places to learn about yoga (and I don’t mean Fiji or Tulum).

But these are the ways in which the KPJAYI does still have a heart, and a few other nadis besides.

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Categories: astanga yoga

Go home take rest · 28 March 2009

More fragments from Narasimhan. They come in like traces of dream, which makes sense since I’m in a bit of a trance sitting there in the Anantha library.

And speaking of dreaming, he reminds me that there is this whole business in Patanjali about the import of the dreamstate and the pursuit of dreamless sleep as a kind of samadhi. N says: Samadhi without knowledge is sleep; Samadhi with knowledge is evolution.

Admittedly, that doesn’t make much sense to me intuitively.

We think of sleep as our relaxation time, but in yoga, this is in a sense a time to leave the body. You sleep on the left side to let the right side of the brain—the house of the imagination and creativity—have some space. Relaxation is a conscious endeavor, the way N talks about it, and the way savasana is taught… if it is taught… in ashtanga practice. When you exit savasana, and when you get up in the morning, you roll to the right because that puts the left side up and engages your rational mind. When you get up from savasana or from sleep, it is time to engage the world and use the rational mind.

N: sport, unlike yoga, is as likely to excite the mind as to relax it. What is the purpose of it? Sometimes in the west, athletic endeavors reveal a great, delusional absence of purpose. People are lost, so they go bungee-jumping. But yoga has a clear purpose.

And again, the purpose of asana is to work the nervous system—to purify it. This actually happens after asana, during Savasana. You consciously feel and relax the nadis. How do you know nadis exist, and that there are 72,000 of them? Well, it’s the best we know for now. It was a revelation—just like the old revelations about the structure of cells or the speed of light, which practitioners gained without the benefit of scientific instruments. The chakra system is different from the nadis—it’s a different map of similar territory. Research now on the multiple nerve-junctions throughout the body also finds there are about 72,000 such branching-points.

It is a wonder that for all the study and advancement of Indian society, basic technological developments never happened here. Not only were there no scientific measurement devices, but also no economic advances like mass production. It was in the west that the great curiosity about the external world and how to know and shape it was gained; and by the same token in India the best understanding of the mind—it’s structures and how to work with and reshape them—has been developed.

There was a long, light-hearted discussion of the idea of dharma, and how it’s as much a structure of freedom as a fate-given constraint or duty. If you recognize what is given and work within it, your mind is free from fear or doubt and you simply know how to act. It’s as simple as following the rules of the road: if you are outside of the law, you must always look over your shoulder, worry about being caught. Inside it, you know your way and can travel it freely.

When it comes to one’s relationship to practice, arrogance and fear are two sides of the same condition—insecurity. If one is secure in his practice, there is no need to defend it with arrogance. Often the superiority that practitioners express is not even related to the claim of one’s own prowess but rather the inferiority of the content of others’ practices. So one’s supposed superiority is not based on her own wisdom or skill but simply on the imagined existence of others who are said to be without skill. There is a kind of dependence on others to be inferior so that the insecure practitioner can feel less fear and more superiority.

Oh, and I remembered that the four kinds of student classification maps on to Krishna’s commentary in the Gita on the four kinds of “men” who pursue God. There must be commentary on this in a variety of places. The classification is a little bit interesting, but again, it’s transitory—intended to describe rather than create social structures. One may pass through each of these states and therefore require different kinds of practice or teaching as she changes, but all conditions, including the "lowest," are those of a person who is dedicated to learning.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory , spirituality

At the Anantha Research Foundation · 26 March 2009

So… some strong resonance coming in with this guy, MA Narasimhan. He opens up his office each day from 10-12, plucks in on bare feet in threadbare white cottons and a Brahmin string, and speaks expansively in response to whatever bumbling questions are offered. It makes no sense to morselize the experience because it’s about becoming immersed in an historical Indian perspective on the evolution of consciousness. But then, Narasimhan himself morselizes—from Freud to John Dewey to Joseph Campbell to his teacher Maharishi Maharesh—so here are a few pieces while I have them.

I will not write about the way that he reads my mind, or the way that he answers the question you meant to ask rather than the one you managed to blurt out, or the fact that my inveterate questions suddenly go to seed in that room because my mind sometimes feels so satisfied when he talks. But I will say that this person is a fine scholar—as learned as any great intellectual—whose feel is all heart. The first day he laughed and looked at me and said that the sociologists and the anthropologists will never really change the world because they are trying too hard, because they preach. But the gurus are the ones whose students really believe them—the ones, ironically, whose credibility goes deepest, who change their students most, and thus who make the most difference in the world. Without trying. Just by offering what is asked of them when it is needed.

Anyway, some stuff he’s mentioned in passing, sitting in lotus without leaning forward, lauging easily, gesturing with long thin fingers to enumerate this classification scheme or gesture toward that clarification.                            ……………………………………………………………...........….

There are four kinds of student, and for them four kinds of teacher. The first kind of student, the artharti, merely wants relief. They are desperate, looking for miracles and proof. Only for this kind of student are so-called miracles (about which he himself remains agnostic) useful. They simply grant relief to doubting, grasping minds. They also facilitate a new belief in the paranormal, which is useful for them later on when they become students of a more advanced type.

There is a constant split and re-split in yoga (and in religions) between the letter and the purport of the law. This is because it’s difficult to retain both the structure and the meaning of practice. In the traditions which hew to the letter of the law, eventually the life is lost. This happened, for example, in Christianity as it excluded mystics.

Siddhis are just a benchmark of your consciousness. They tell you where you are. Keep them a secret because if others learn of them, you will be drained by their need for them. There’s nothing necessarily gratifying in the paranormal—it is immature and often destructive to use the paranormal in this way. All of yoga can take place within the realm of normal consciousness.

Through practice and philosophical study you go from believing that the physical world is what is true and imagination/thought is all false, to believing the exact opposite. So in this way, philosophy is negative—like a photograph’s negative. Eventually in philosophy you never know what is true but it is all good anyway.

Don’t worry about going to a cave to find your meditation. They went to caves because they didn’t have air-conditioner or sound-proofing. It’s much easier now!

Don’t confuse Vedanta and Patanjali yoga. Both are covering the same territory, but from different directions. Vedanta doesn’t care about dharana-dhyana-samadhi because from the top looking down all states are disturbances. Vedanta is view; Patanjali yoga is the path. From the perspective of the latter, dharana-dhyana-samadhi are practical steps. (So nice to hear the notion of ascending and descending spirituality articulated in this way by an Indian philosopher. Patanjali yoga and Vedanta are not contradictory. Rather, they’re just very different perspectives on the same concerns.)

In the past, gurus did not accept students easily because they believed that once they entered into a relationship with a student, they were bound to them for as many lifetimes as it took for the student to progress. So if the student was lazy and fell away from practice, the teacher had to work with them to re-institute the practice again and again in subsequent incarnations. Now teachers do not fear this. Gurus’ work now is to be tour-guides.

A compassionate teacher knows when to tell a student to leave. When a student is not progressing because she is so attached, when she is not realizing her own self-responsibility, then she is stuck. To accept the student’s anger at being released is something that a good teacher can do. A selfish teacher will do the opposite—facilitate students’ neediness and attachment.

Traditionally, one needed a teacher for three services: to create a desire to evolve, to destroy obstactles of fear and doubt, and to sustain the student on the path. If you could find a teacher could be the creator, destroyer and sustainer all in one, it was great, although you could get each of these ingredients from different teachers. Now it’s not on this model. We don’t have a single teacher to fill every need. Instead of gurus there is only the passing state and role of gurudom.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , spirituality

Around · 23 March 2009

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society

Led · 22 March 2009

Strangest sight in town: 3:30 in the morning, pitch dark and cool, rounding the neighborhood corner occupied by the KPJAYI. In the street are 30 foreigners sitting like ivory chess pawns in four perfect rows facing out from the gate. Dead silent and still, just sitting, so serious, looking down at the ground. They are covered in clothing and shawls, so only their solemn faces are visible.

Friday I slept through my alarm and missed all this, instead sprinting across Gokulam at 4:15 (4:30 shala time), certain I’d be too late. But I ran right in to the back of a clump of ashtangis pressing themselves into a single-file stream up the stairs to the shala. No space anywhere—Sharath was off to Bangalore to pick up a visa so the two led classes had been collapsed in to one—so the last yogins scuffled to stake matspace in the lobby, or tiptoed through the mat-to-mat main room to pitch down in the changing rooms. Somehow I caught the eye of a svelte young Mexican rolling out on the marble stage a hair’s breadth from Guruji’s big chair. Is there space here? Yes yes. Of course, come in. By the end of the big yogi shuffle, there were six of us up there flanking the chair, facing each other perpendicular to the others.

Saraswathi was brilliant—a deep alto chant strongly enunciated, and no hesitation. The first thundering moments of my first led class were obviously magic, especially since they were up on the stage, inches from her and that chair, with all the giant photos of this practice’s history angled down right over us.

She counted in English at first but switched to Sanskrit when the numbers went above five—except at the end, when we finally got to hear her call Yeeeight in sarvangasana.

In Prasarita C, she called Waaan, Toooo, (slap!) Treeee…. And I imagined everyone in the room wished they too could take the liberty to kill mosquitos mid-posture. A lot of people were being eaten alive, no doubt—though like everywhere else I travel, in India the bugs have no interest in me.

In parsvo, it occurred to me that this was going to be the most effortful, grueling practice of my life. There was no oxygen in that room, and once we got to the floor it felt like we were doing the vinyasas on Jupiter. What do they call that… apana? So much effort demanded to move the body. The insane difficulty was part of the delight and solidarity of it all right from the start.

But then I got an out. In MaryC, a breeze wafted down through the cracked window right next to me. Amazing: I instantly felt the oxygen strengthen the muscles and make my body light. Practice became easy again, in a way the others out in the dense middle of the room, probably could not imagine.

This morning, also a led class, was a smaller group—many of the winter retreatants and scenesters left town Saturday, and others peeled away for the led 2S given after the 4:30 primary. So it was a merely full (not bursting) room for Sharath.

I settled in to the second row with the cotton shala rugs making lumps under my mat and the smell of tiger balm coming at me from four directions. Sharath is a shy, glassy-eyed trickster, tired but good humored, with a clear strong voice and a great economy of movement and speech. He set up a folding chair behind the throne-chair, took padmasana and called the standing postures from there. Later he circled the room, and returned to call finishing from a seated position on the floor at the front. In ut pluthehee he stood in front of me on my mat for counts 6-10 and dryly said Don’t cry as he made the 9 and the 10 last approximately forever. (This level of efforting past me edge feels like having a personal trainer… and what is it with me and him and ut pluthehee?) The big chair itself stayed empty throughout.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Courtyard Containers · 20 March 2009

I’d have to be a poet to say anything suitable about this moment.

It is evening. The air is skin temperature and the light is dimming shades of perfect. I’m in a quiet garden sheltered between quiet buildings, though I suppose there is the life in the street making sound down the hill. The tropical plants climbing the walls, pressing out from the alcoves—banana, palm, bougainvillea and a dozen others a Californian can’t name—are quiet though. I sit at a soft-burnished old slate table alone, feeling sheltered by the shape of the huge green leaves and the way they bend in towards me, letting this comfort help bring me out of the uncanniness of this afternoon’s dreams.

How could a westerner become identified with this absurd foreigner's existence? Decide to stay here, build a life out of it? How to generate the will to turn the hyper-reflective repose of this subculture around in to something self-sustaining?

Maybe I can see it. Right now, yes. It’s like any old decision to expatriate, really. A combination of alienation and openness, laziness, gumption, liberalness but also lack of certain old bonds, an ability to create yourself from scratch.

Anyway, imagining in to the lifeworlds of those who have really gone native does overwhelm me, as do the depth and intensity of social life here. People throw themselves in to the bubble until they pierce its membrane and find themselves bouncing around inside. You almost can’t not do it this way.

It’s not easy to collect the recent days’ experience in to thoughts. And I don’t want to but think I should try, if for no other reason than to use the old practice of writing to get a little bit grounded. I’ve been on a fast train through some weird headspaces, plucking bits of good information on the way.

Am I an ethnographer or a retreatant? It is funny to be a person who always has to be both.

The experience is designed to trip you out. Too many resources, too many beautiful and open people, far too much privilege and time on your hands. Where else to go but in to self-involvement (coded as “self-study” since that’s  one of the yamas of course)? You can have any experience you want here: lose the self or go deep in to the self, if there is a difference. Choose anything from dissolution to devotion, if there is a difference.

Today was another intense stream of doing nothing, and will continue late in to the night if I bring myself to leave the house again. I slept in and almost missed led practice—should try to write it to you as a Mysore vignette because it was all so rich. Then coconuts, then breakfast with Eeyore and an amazing Russian businesswoman, then second breakfast at Tina’s with a billion people I’d never met before (except by browsing Facebook photos—always a weird prelude for community you’re apt to build eventually) but who all knew each other intimately, then some kind of intense bodywork followed by fresh squeezed watermelon juice, a walk down the hill, some shopping after a fight with the ATM (oddly, the only ATM in Gokulam is attached to the shala), then a much-needed shower and a freaky 2-hour crash.

Wayne, an old-timer here with roots in the same studio where I too came to this practice, was unlocking the pain in my knee. By force of “poverty,” I’ve got an un-needy body for an ashtangi. Tweaks and soreness always arise, but I don’t ask about them and rather just assume that they will pass. There doesn’t need to be an explanation or a fix. But sharp little pain inside the knee, right at the inner meniscus, is a different thing. I’d never felt such a thing, but the first two practices here something was not right. Strange, there was a knot in the Sartorius and a bunch of tension right over the lymph node, sending the torque from the padmas right in to the knee. The work helps me understand what other people go through, and how it’s key to work all the contortion from the center.

Anyway, after I collapsed in protective, reactive (but newly educated) laughter over the deep work in the leg, we rooted around the shoulders a bit. That’s when the hallucination came up. Yes, there it was, just waiting in my right armpit under the lymph node. A simple collection of sensations from a morning 12 years ago: an interior courtyard at the University of Costa Rica, my second or third day in the country. The emotions and sounds came in first, and strongly; and then there was what seemed like perfect visual recall—shocking since it’s so rare for me to think in pictures.

Later in the shower I realized that I am now in that place. Second or third day in a new country, finding comfort-containment in vine-covered courtyard, with traces of both excitement and stark-serious uncanniness—the Heideggerian uncanniness—playing at the edges.

I thought a little Shinzen would be edifying, so put him on the ipod and lay down to massage my feet. Next thing I knew the phone woke me, the caller telling me she’d been ringing all hour and where had I been. In the meantime it was like my body wasn’t mine at all. I was wrestling against the way it held me in sleep, and against the way it brought me out of the states Shinzen was describing. I was feeling death, the disintegration of my muscles on the bones, just wishing I could get back to what I meant to do in my life, see the people I love.

It was upsetting. Terrifying. An experience of a barrier I suspect will resurface if I take quieting the mind more seriously, and take Shinzen’s method all the way. I would submit that ashtanga can’t do this by itself. The best you can do is trip yourself out by mixing it up in Mecca, but that is a good thing too.

Is it true some people are ever-beset with the aloneness and latent existential terror of uncanniness—constantly taken hostage by this? The way to escape it, from what I can tell by watching, is to surround oneself with life and history and memory. Keep your context dense.

But a little radical decontextualization and aloneness are no problem for a person who feels at home in solitude and open spaces, so maybe uncanniness is harder for me to find. Oh but yes, here it is. Leave it to Mecca to get this out of me one way or another.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

Emptiness, Form, Spaceyness · 17 March 2009

Or: Keanu Trifecta

In addition to sort of fulfilling my plans to read classics on the first plane and treat the second as a floating meditation retreat (air travel as an ideal samsara, make it your bodhi tree and keep boarding flight after flight until you’re realized?), I also managed to execute a  Keanu trifecta on the LAX-LDN-BAN causeway.

It started, I am embarrassed to tell you, with The Matrix Revolutions. It’s still a bad movie, but I didn’t realize before that it’s a tight screed on bad advaita. On one side the manifest world: fleshy humans sweating, politicking and making love inside the earth. On the other, the digital unmanifest, its machine envoys out for blood. Humans seamlessly, easily “jack in” to the transcending realm and temporarily lose the specific immanent body, yes; but when that virtual world wants to be the only world, well then there is a problem. The hate and terror, the simultaneous numbness of mind and heart, of the machines’ war on earth and the body are nicely done. The nihilist Smith, in embodied manifestation, gives sputtering, blood-curdled voice to the machines' crusade, telling Neo between punches that mortal flesh is disgusting, weak, must be cast off entirely.

But in the film's world, the manifest and the unmanifest are mutually dependent, which the machines only admit at the end, faced with annihilation. The bomb, global warming, Hitler: forces this evil take out the physical world and reveal that without it, there is no unmanifest. (What would happen to Spirit if we erased Earth?) Advaita that wants to flee the manifest is actually a pathological psychokiller.

Exactly.

Charmed by the message, I moved on to Dangerous Liaisons, in which Keanu plays the same character he did in the Matrix. But DL is actually good, so I continued after that to The Day the Earth Stood Still. Keanu’s an otherworldly naïf with open-featured woodenness in that one too! But the film is so, so bad that I will dignify it with no more of a response. After watching it, remorse set in and I realized I should have just stayed quiet and watched these I’m-excited-to-be-on-vacation chemicals circulate my body the whole time.

Later, back on planet Earth (supposedly), I turned my head at a communal table and there was Eeyore. Yes, he’s been missing for a year but I found him without even trying and one of the first things he told me was that he’d been having Keanu problems too.

“Is this the astralplane?” I murmured so the others wouldn’t hear.

“Yes.”

Later I saw him carrying around I Am That, the old take-you-straight-to-the-astralplane book I’ve been avoiding for years. Turns out it’s a heavy tome!

“But Robbie why is it so big? Shouldn’t it be a lot shorter? How many times can you write Everything is One?”

“No no, it doesn’t say anything. You are just supposed to look at the colors. Black and white page after page until it becomes a blur.”

So then I was confused. I thought the internet was the unmanifest, the world of 1s and 0s. And that earthly life was the manifest. But then clearly, Mecca is the real astralplane and he and I are both jacked in, making contact with I am That just by tossing around its weight.

That’s when I realized that lucidity might be a good idea. Ate a piece of toast and started trying to find my body again, to ask it if it wouldn’t mind submitting to a night of sleep.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , spirituality

Here to Mecca · 13 March 2009

Blue-dark mornings of daylight savings: driving the long curved road that leads from my house to the shala under a brilliant waning moon, early enough to catch the roosters waking in the country-sized estates that line San Vicente. Jasmine is just starting to push through the morning cool; when I return it’ll be heady summer and the moon will look the same.

I’m in a weird space. Work has been amazing, but also shitty. That’s my practice more than practice. These advanced theories that practice is suffering and self-noting, that it’s just mental and physical hygiene that prepares you for more important practices… to be brutally honest, I’m just not there: and the theories feel so outside of anything like participating in nonduality or just being on the breath. Maybe it is more interesting to hold back from saying what yoga is. But work… this is indubitably a field of loss and gain, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. What "arises" in that space is way more revelatory of where I’m at in my maturity. It is useful in that sense. But the point is also that I become useful. It is nice, not distracting or bullshit delusion, if unsustainable to become absorbed like this.

What if I brought the principles of practice to my work? Get out of your own way, follow the rules, just do it systematically with all the energy and focus that you have. Well… I’d never have a creative thought. But still, might reduce the less useful fluctuations.

So, packing today. Let’s see:

manduka,

bikini,

vitamin C.

I think that’s everything.

Oh, download Shinzen Young for the ipod. And gather together the many items I am supposed to courier to Mecca—so much for taking care of the ounces so the pounds take care of themselves. And practice disguising the bend, so nobody gets the big idea to slam me to the thighs in chakra bandasana.

Otherwise, I’m happy to surrender to what will be and don’t much care what that looks like. Am I excited? Nah. But interested, yes. And content about it. So after a long-awaited memorial service tomorrow, I’m off. Time now to write a little speech for that other pending goodbye.

A couple of little feathers that have drifted by recently and stuck to me, from the following sources. First, a speaker at the business school in a lecture I watched to update myself on developments in the “strategic management” literature, absurd capitalist self-help regime that it is. Pretty good insight though. Second, a distillation of Christopher Titmuss’s discussions of relationship. And third, a reading of Shinzen Young.

Making decisions prematurely is the mark of an amateur. 

Lovingkindness is a practice, not a feeling.

Live your own life, not someone else’s.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga

Justification Machine · 3 March 2009

In school when the tribe really wanted to insult me, they’d call me by my bad name. Ms. Why.

By the end of eight years together (school started in first grade—before that we were feral), the 17 of us knew all each other’s buttons. We were 13 boys and 4 girls, children of corn and beet farmers with a few shadow children whose parents were constantly avoiding the law and wouldn’t be noticed or hassled coming around our isolated county school. And me, a preacher’s kid imbricated in frontier farm society for reasons I’m still not supposed to tell.

Anyway, I never understood why Ms. Why was supposed to be such a bad thing. The more affectionate nicknames based on body size were much more annoying. It was  my curiosity coupled with extreme luck that eventually made me one of the two of us 17 to escape and attend college. I like the Mrs. Why in me, and like the But why? vibe in others too.

But I understand that it can become annoying. We had a little hiccup last week over whether we should chant in a teacherless room. People coming from different perspectives, considering reasons for and against an arbitrary, senseless, beautiful, meaningful, crucial, empty, formational act.

As a public service, I am trying to think up a justification for every belief system that an ashtangi might hold. (There are reasons not to do it for every belief system too. Haha.)

Why chant to invoke the jungle physician with his thousands of gleaming white heads? Well that depends. What’s your belief system?

Proto-nationalist/groupist: You want to be a member, don’t you? Chanting is an inclusion-rite.

Magical thinkers: It’s a mystery. Nobody really knows how the spell works but let’s not risk not doing it. I hear that if you practice on moon days you get really bad injuries, too.

Mythic: We are speaking the unconscious in to existence!

Psychological: Chanting establishes rapport between teacher and student. Chanting without a teacher present calls that rapport to mind and helps us feel supported by the teacher’s. It re-engages the transformative energy of transference.

Scientific: The cadences and vibrations of the chant initiate a shift in brain wave frequency. This is especially true as students reinforce the practice until it becomes a trigger to shift mental states.

(Reactionary Postmodern: Science is the control-myth of the powerful. We liberate ourselves into the randomness, by doing something irrational. Fuck you, science.)

Postmodern: But isn’t it more beautiful that way? (And beauty’s all we’ve got now that we have temporarily deconstructed truth and goodness.) Do what thou wilt, but do it in style.

Postpostmodern: All of the above. With maybe some extra love on the side.

I am learning to appreciate the mindfuck of substituting in a different belief system’s answers to arbitrary questions. So, for example, the Encinitas/Carlsbad shala is our knowledge center for moon days. The dominant belief system of the shala is mythic—they’re a good bunch of practically minded Hanuman-worshipers down there—but the reason they give for refraining from moonday practice comes right out of the Farmer’s Almanac: our bodies are mostly water so like the sea we respond to the moon. That’s science, not myth. Woah! Are you saying it’s about molecules, Tim?

Swapping justification schemes on people is likely to piss them off: it can be harsh to tell a therapy head that transference is empty and we babble like idiots merely to celebrate randomness.

It can also be dangerous: in ashtanga, groupist and magical thinkers like to use “science” for false power. They tell students not to question authority, but instead of stating their true reasons—that they dislike noncomformity or think the chant is magic—they justify their own unconscious power plays by telling students that the system is a perfect science and cannot be altered. That’s a pretty hilarious misunderstanding of self-conscious science, which is thoroughly experimental. This self-contradicting delusion—that ashtanga is a science and therefore is perfect—used to show up a lot. Thankfully, our culture seems to be mostly over it as practice turns us from quack scientists in to real ones. (Admittedly, in addition to the mythic belief system, the scientific one is my favorite.)

Despite the drawbacks, a good sleight-of-ideology mindfuck can create empathy, inspiring a person to shift between belief systems. Sometimes it’s worth taking the risk.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , morality , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Liberation · 27 February 2009

What if it is mainly in the minds of Americans that ashtanga is a rigid law? Is that because it’s what we need it to be? So that then we can break free of it and find our liberation?

We are so much more interested in catharsis than practice. We turn everything into a liberation struggle, but are so shallow that we keep running on the American cliché that liberation is to be found by fighting the system. I do it to. Less so now than in the beginning, but it comes up.

But the System is no big deal (blows on fingernails). Smash patriarchy on your time off. Work out the alternatives to authoritarianism in your sleep. We only tilt at that windmill during practice to avoid the liberation struggle that’s closer to home. We have thoroughly confused internal peace and freedom with abstract liberation struggles fought against imaginary authorities.

I guess it is kind of more fun to obssess about some mean old people out there who want to take away our practice. It also feeds the catharsis addiction and gives us material for the eternal power struggle we must fight in order to feel free. Mavericks. Individualists.

“Don’t put some pre-conceived rules on me.”

What? Conceived where? What’s the issue?

This practice is so full of criminals and outlaws that there’s almost nobody to do us the favor of representing the law. The ashtanga police? Who is that? We want to imagine “they” care about what we’re doing, want to fantasize that we are wild west cowboys throwing off their oppression. Well…good chance “they” are more concerned about (1) paying the rent and (2) managing your projections without collapsing. We should send them a check for being strong rocks in the shifting sands of our daddy issues.

The cult of the law-breaker is a rehash of the commercial myth of noncomformity, and strikes me as especially immature in a time when we could be realizing how intimately and practically all our fates are connected. Instead we just liberate ourselves from some phantom system, and then re-liberate ourselves from imaginary dictates, and then proclaim ourselves liberated to form a maverick collective, and then unite to go get some more liberation.

Liberated Americans: united in noncomformity!

Individuated.

Free.

OM.

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Categories: astanga yoga , self-deception

Security Camera · 22 February 2009

Practice with others, no teacher. What I'm doing.

I sense, again and again, that practice brings together three streams, known variously as:

Energy---Method---Community,

The Truth---The Way---The Life,

Buddha---Dharma---Sangha,

&c.

The first--some kind of God-energy, a sovereign Spirit--is what we map on to the person in the teacher or therapist role. Easily. But where do you source a sense of consciousness… a seer… the receptacle of all-knowing… when there is no teacher to fill the space?

Right now we are insourcing the seer. Going without a teacher is incredibly sweet, everyone tapping self-reliance they’d forgotten is there, strengthening it, and in the weaker moments keeping it together for the team if not oneself. Sometimes it’s easier to stay on target if you feel you’re doing it for the benefit of others. Some people who have less understanding of the practice don’t even show up to join us because there’s no teacher to care for them, and that’s actually a benfit to us.

Everything is stiller than ever. The energy is not even that of witness-cultivation (which you seen in the quieter practitioners in a sort of chatty room) so much as just being there and letting it be enough. Of dropping the flight away from it just being exactly like this, and finding joy in the thisness. Without a teacher but with high stakes conspiration and strong fidelity to a taken-for-granted method, the possibility of nondual states in practice seems much more obvious to me. This can be easy, with simple strong support.

Afterwards, the other day, I remembered the bitter existentialist line from Saramago…

How often have we shown ourselves as we really are, and yet we need not have bothered, there was no one there to notice...

Ah the resentment of the baby atheist, the anger of the lonely young post-Christian! Poor child, realizing your own end-in-yourself. We in the room are so over it.

That said, it never hurts to throw a security camera up in the rafters even when it’s not rolling tape. There’s some part of us together that turns on even to the imagined dialogue with some vaguely-felt seer in the machine. A dialogue that wants to collapse in to mutual participation, and does so more easily because the fact that the camera (or statue, or photograph) is lifeless is perfectly known and no kind of secret.

The hanging SKPJ on the wall and lighting the candles to Ganesha. So here we are surface-level atheists, post-projectionists; but there’s still an ongoing participation in that which cannot be discussed. And some part of experience that lights up even in deeper in theta state if the unspeakable is mirrored back in ritual. Let the ineffable try to take form as photo or statue or security camera—it’s always a lost cause but the incompleteness of trying still creates a resonance, makes us all a little stiller, sometimes even makes it feel that we’re held by something. In a suspension. Weirdly ambulant in time and space by the grace of whatever.

I had forgotten about that for some years, during bitter post-Christian teenagerdom and the activist and grad school years of seeing it all as just atoms and the void. It’s nice to recover the security blanket. Even if now it’s just a tiny thread not backed by anything at all, it still feels warm.

One of the least ritualist, most self-reliant, among us is Lily, a clockwork-methodical practitioner who has her "own interpretation of practice.” She has no interest in some larger subculture around ashtanga, in anything at all religious or philosophical, and no need to participate in owl-typical what’s-it-all-about inquiries. The other morning as we began and found SKPJ out of order she stamped a foot ruefully and said,

Listen I don’t care if it’s a pain in the ass to put it up I’ve got to have the damn picture. I can’t do it without the picture.

Brilliant. She cracked me up.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , spirituality

Ribcage Ache Revisited · 19 February 2009

Still no tock. I may crack my heart right open for tryin’ though.

This is difficult to talk about, this auto-body work. But I felt two new sensations in recent weeks and think they might be useful to a very few readers out there.

Everything went black this morning when I fell out of scorp back in to a bend, because somehow the falling went right in to the chest, bending it deeply backward in the air as the feet went back to the earth where the hands were already gripping.

I know what vertigo blackouts are—the ones that come from tricking the body in space. The kind of inner ear loss of orientation where the needle just goes spinning off in to the abyss… and for a moment the body disappears while the brain tries to find something like true north.

But this morning was something different, like an aorta tourniquet. I think this little departure from the body resulted from suddenly constricting bloodflow to the heart. So odd. So physical. Visions of the open heart surgery I once observed: wrenching the chest open with a turnkey to render two gaping raw sides of ribs—and the physician reaching in to squeeze the heart in her little gloved hands.

The endocrinological work in this practice usually works by constricting blood flow to a gland and then flushing it with body fluids on the release of a posture. And I find that in twisting I apply the same sponge-action to the organs below the ribs. Squishing around the hydraulic system inside the peritoneum like so much ketchup and mustard in a plastic bag (remember that kids’ diversion?) is one thing.

But the chest? Well… I’m not so sure about working the same way with the pneumatic system that sits atop the hydraulics. If backbending is a drawn out dialectic between (I) heart opening and (II) leg/pelvis educating, it’s now time for me to bring the work back down to the lower registers again.

My god! Bored yet? I can’t believe I’m writing so much about the chest cavity. Better get out now because there’s even more…

Hm. You’re still reading and somehow I’m still writing. As we were. So: I think I have a clue to the “ribcage ache” question that according to google brings a lot of people to this blog’s archives.

This last phase of chest-opening, for once I do feel what may be the ache that some people have described in the chest and rib cage. For me it’s a swath of tissue that tightens and almost tries to contract across the front of the chest. I know what a torn intercostal feels like and have a sense from pranayama of the sensation possible in the lungs themselves. This ache is neither.

If what I’m experiencing is what others experience, I think it’s the peritoneal pleurae straining strongly against the insides of the ribs. There are two connected layers of pleurae around lungs, so they may even be pulling against each other.

One theory: There is a pleural space between the two layers of this chest membrane and usually the space is filled with fluid. The ache may result from fluid being presses out of the space and the two layers of membrane pushing in to each other. I am just guessing this might happen if the ribs themselves grow large; or maybe if you press so strongly in to your chest that the fluid between the membranes rushes out. The pleurae in the chest are full of nerves, so the loss of the fluid in the space between them might feel intense in a not very pleasant way.

According to Gray’s, the ribcage membrane is similar to the membrane around the lower, hydraulic system—the visceral pleura. But the lower pleurae don’t have many nerves. So even if there’s just as much (or more) friction below on a regular basis, there’s less sensation-based freak out. Thank the sage Matsy for that.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

No Tricks · 15 February 2009

Let’s say Sherilyn Fenn is god. And the cherry stem she ties in a neat little knot using an inscrutable play of the tongue—the cherry stem is some particular human folded impossibly over and through in to purna matsyendrasana. The full maht-see. A supple knotted plaything hidden in the mouth of god.

Not everyone is a stem though. I’d always thought the full, prop-free matsyendra was for these ropy, worked-over guys. Leggy ectomorphs from the outset, beat and pulled and warmed over in to nice fruit leather from years upon years of the practice.

I’m not a fruit stem. Rather: soft not sinewy, with open but tweakable joints and legs so short my feet run right into my head in a forward bend. The distance from my bottom ribs to the crests of the ilium is... between two and three inches. Just not much length to tie up.

So I never expected to take the full expression of the matsyendra, with non-lotus heel firmly hooked on the outer quadricep and that foot fully grounded, the top-leg ischcial tuberosity equally pressing the ground, and the twisting arm torqued all the way out to a bind at the big toe while the other palm, its arm snaked around the back, rests easily on the inner thigh.

Ok that paragraph makes no sense. And besides I always feel somehow vulgar breaking these things down. For the kids playing along at home… don’t. It’s more or less Marichysana D on crack, with the added benefits of an assault on the inner meniscus, the possibility of snapping your arm off, and a “massage” of the liver and stomach so powerful that any sketchy food or drink you’ve so much as gazed upon the past 24 hours will be instantly and mercilessly recalled.

I’ve been practicing purna m for a year or something, with all the “benefits” listed above and a receeding wave of post-posture sponge syndrome (the gasp of relief a sponge takes when you stop wringing it), but without ever expecting the full expression. Taking it as an asymptotic function, because once I fold in the full position it’s impossible to also stay grounded. I just list over toward the up-knee hip and tumble into a mess of small limbs.

But then the other day, there was a sage ambush. Mmm? There were some misgivings about the arrival of the full expression because I felt tricked. There are no tricks to getting this maneuv, unless it's: “choose a major body hinge, and break it.” There is no purna matsyendrasana workshop or teacher who can give you the keys. You just fucking practice and let it be.

But… the ambush makes sense now. I’ve been teasing apart bits of hip flexor and lats, learning to let the liver be pushed around, finding a kind of balance from letting go in strange small places while pushing strongly in small others. The matsy, in my body, is something about being simulatenously the action and its reaction—until I cancel out the wobbles and become suspended for a few moments in space. The metaphor for union of opposition is obnoxious but inescapable: I bet RF has a field day with this one.

But… it’s still asymptotic. You have to breathe, have to let cells die and regenerate even as the pretzel locks in to place, have to realize there with the heel in the gut how many ways the body is still always in flux. The full expression is nice, but not something so new. A tiny difference; and now that I’m in it, I can still scarcely pin it down.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

AWOWL · 7 February 2009

Long days at the desk, this term. I love it. I’ve rigged my little paper lamp near the window where, having finally won the game against the motion sensors, I sit otherwise in the dark. For a week it has rained, a static-dampening pour that sent my focus a little more inside and left the walkways around the quad still covered in sheen and flecked with new drops in the lamplight.

Campus Crusade for Christ meets at night: they wail next door in Josiah Royce Hall, echoing down the sandstone neo-roman colonnade where I watched Tom Hanks stalk back and forth, back and forth, for regrettable Angels and Demons takes that were supposed to be set in Italy. Their hollering, a good saccharine match for Dan Brown adaptations if a defilement of the building’s namesake, Royce, sounds an awful lot like Counting Crows. Shame what’s happened to Christian music these days: if they were still singing Old Time Religion maybe I’d sneak in the back and join them. I do miss singing with others; maybe that’s why part of why breathing with others means so much.

And so, in that spirit…. BAW accepted a large sum of skymiles and I’ve made cover to disappear from here for spring break and then some. I want to go far, to MY State of lOst childREn, to take a long view of my life from here forward. Given the options that have opened and those foreclosed, which drives and duties will I satisfy, and which will I cast off? How much does the collapse of the markets change everything, and how much do the old shoes thrown in to the cogworks just give me cover to contemplate the nothingness that I wouldn’t have time to notice otherwise? I don’t know; but soon I will.

Meantime, for all my allergies to the little imperialisms of LOHAS, it is time to pay my respects. Because come on. I love SKPJ and the thing he’s made. The first time I met him the foot-touching line made me shudder in revulsion, so here I am dumping horrible tons of carbon into the atmosphere and shirking my work to honor the system and its professor-methodologist while he’s still on this side of living.

I know it’s the hot season, but I’ve spent a year in a cardboard and zinc shack in one the most deforested zones of the Americas’ tropics. I know it’s the party season, but it’s ok if that’s what my spring break is about.

Meantime: much to do, in ways that reveal how much I’d love the scholar’s life if I can hold out in this deluge long enough to secure it. I don’t really want to think about spring break until I get there in another month. Everything's excellent here now and, in a way that feels right, I have a ton to do. But I'm mentioning the plans here in order to ask we not chat about it—at all—on the FB. My efforts to bring my life together there in a single digitized identity have been tested by this and found wanting. Too many professors friending me there, and I’m wouldn’t even know where to begin explaining the fact that I am going to Mecca. Hey! It's for research purposes!

Sort of. I’ll have enough trouble as it is explaining to you, let alone myself.

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society

Camera Shy, Superbowl Sunday · 1 February 2009

Must post before Karen does something rash! I tried to film some actual ovoporn in honor the Superbowl and Seven Veils tradition. But this is how it started.... Oh well.

 

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Viparita Chakrasana, &c. · 28 January 2009

John 5:8

And Jesus said, Arise, take up thy mat, and walk.

Luke 7:22

Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk… the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.

Gautama Buddha

A man on his journey comes across a vast river. No boat goes to the other side, nor is there a bridge for crossing over. He then gathers grass, wood, branches and leaves to make a raft, and crosses the river with the help of the raft. After crossing safety, he leaves the raft at the shore and goes on his way. In just the same way, I have taught the Dhamma similar to a raft; it is for crossing over, not for getting hold of.

Ashtanga 3:2

And the ashtangis said, cast off thy crutches and practice. Hast ye so little faith in method? Doest thou fear the way so much thou wouldst flee thy breath and thy temple of the holy of holies, binding them in Hugger Mugger straps and beating them back with foam blocks? Doest thou love thy crutch more than thine body on the breath? More than the great river of I Am? The moment the crutch hast fulfilled its purpose, cast it down, that it take form of its master and slither back unto the rocks. O come ye and enter the church of flow.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion

Act like you've done it before · 27 January 2009

From Ryne’s Sandberg’s 2005 acceptance speech at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Smarmy conservative David Brooks quotes this in today’s sort of beautiful column on social reproduction.  I’m for trusting your experience as the first and last word. But: doing that within the context of others’ experiences over time. Institutional structure and tradition are crusty-sweet old romantic gifts.

[Wo]man makes h[er] own history! But not under conditions of her own choosing.

I have to admit this gives life meaning, and offers to prevent one's becoming a self-congratulatory ass. Here's Sandberg:

“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect…. If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game ... did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

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

Projection Junction, What's Your Function? · 19 January 2009

Here is a radical (or maybe just a grown-up?) theory of learning...

What if the big story of “lessons” to be learned in a practice room (or wherever) is: that the knowledge is always already ours for the taking? What if all the lessons are just freely available and free of charge? What if the learning you do is NOT the genius orchestration of some other (or “the universe”) pulling strings on your personal behalf? What if there is no cosmic babysitter, or even a technical babysitter?

What if the lessons learned were simply those you have identified out there in your environment when you were ready and, in a self-responsible fashion, finally took in to yourself? What if the unifying factor isn't another's omniscience but your intelligence?

I know it’s radical, this personal responsibility thing. I'm stating it in the extreme. But if you are at the other extreme then perhaps you need to be paying your teachers roughly $150 an hour to carry all your projections.

I hereby hail a new era of personal responsibility. 

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , self-deception , spirituality

Things We Burn · 1 January 2009

Or, Secret Society Solitaire

Last night began with Dom Perignon 1985, a kind of woody downtempo bubbly that looked like brass. There is this brilliant guy, friend of a friend, who has been saving that bottle for years until his novel went to press. Since the publishing industry is as fucked as sociology this winter, his ballast against namelessness—the bottle—came out last night. I apologized to be drinking up his wine of immortality-achieved and he said No, I’m letting it go. Gave me a beautiful smile and real eyes I’ve never seen since I met him ambitious, steely and 7 years younger. The Dom would have meant something else in a different year, but he’s not saving it anymore. Tomorrow we die, published or not, so tonight we drink. I loved that.

I drank more after, and a third, and ate many good things. Nothing much unless you can't hold alcohol and you’ve promised the fervent ones you’ll join them at sunrise for secret practice. The shala was closed today, but the keys have gone and proliferated so many times, passed around like Dead Poets Society talismans, and so the kids in early 2S plotted to sneak in for New Years contortionism. Reminds me of stealing in to the golfcourse-edge pool at the country club on Montana summer nights, when I was a teenager who could hold her liquor.

I love ashtangis who, after several years’ habit-building in first, are getting in to the backbends of second. They are the most religious. The passionate belief that causes and results from survival of this phase is exactly the mood that gives ashtanga its good rep: it’s what makes this practice the intriguing, glowing dead poets society it appears to be. Yes: we do meet secretly in caves; we do recite love hymns, we do make ritual sacrifices and trade secret objects and hand signs. The 8:00 start at the Silverlake shala across town was TOO LATE for these people today, so I was in the shower while maybe still drunk-ish at 5. I’m not so fervent now—I’d have drawn out a slow if willful kitchen practice around noon if not for wanting to support the new backbenders sneaking in for a dip. They sort of twisted my arm into playing teacher; and I sort of relented because it was a different kind of day, despite my rule against teaching mysore, because it felt like a conspirational morning outside of authority-space.

E o anonovo, o nove—the new, the zero-ninth—so the Brazilians who practiced on my left and right had me know over post-practice chai.

Dear god! Old year gone.

There is no logic out there, no meaning that one moment carries over any random other, but damn if I not a ritualist little owl.  I didn’t even know it until I started writing this thing… but turns out I love the cycles of time, am a celebrant. I thrill to be living inside of history; and this is why I write. Life is as sacred as we make it.

Last new year in Ojai with the SB ashtangis… we each wrote down a secret and at midnight threw it in the fire. Something to burn. You know my secret? IVORY TOWER RESENTMENT. (I just remembered: earlier that day cursing as I drew my card-of-the-year out of the tarot deck. The Tower. In retrospect: that’s completely obnoxious.)

Disdain for academia had turned from healthy skepticism to a heavy trip, and scholarly good faith into an assumption that colleagues were incurious, brain-in-jar, normal-science bores: I burned it up, innocent of the institutional crisis that would pin us new scholars to the ground in 2008. I’d be sunk right now with that lodestone.

Last night just before we went out I remembered this reverse-resolution ritual and felt thankful for what my life has been because of it. But shit. The chance to make more meaning was greater than my desire to preserve the beloved thing that had to die. I squirmed, contemplating my secret 2008 weight: Spider-Solitaire.

I am immune to television, role-playing games, gambling, celebrity news, and all sporting events. But solitaire. Criminy. I wanted to jettison the corny yogi ritual rather than the Solitaire… which only increased the resistance and the meaning and the delight of my trivial act. I marched to the Editor’s laptop (Solitaire cannot live on my laptop—it is too potent!), went through the motions to delete, then sealed it in with a dump of the recycle bin.

So. 2009 is an experiment in solitareless living.

I am not as monkish as I once was. I can turn large amounts of food and small amounts of alcohol into a light, easy practice on 3 hours’ sleep, if rarely. The body is, for now, more forgiving now than it was when I was a new backbender. Getting off easy is sometimes a false experience, but this year, I’ll take it. 2009 is already kind.

From Gosia Janik, whimsical ashtangi artist in Poland.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body

These are a few... · 20 December 2008

...

Envelope breathing. Begin the inhale just before the arms rise. Complete the movement then let the inbreath conclude. Exhale a tiny moment, then the arms move, following the breath. And so on. If I must breathe in order to move, I follow the breath. This is something MW teaches-- not easy but over time it’s wonderful. The mind is a muscle. Not training it during practice is the same as skipping jump-backs.

Potato eyes. Close the eyes in a precarious position. Hard to balance. But what if you then open new “eyes” looking down into the ground? I’m not sure if I mean looking-eyes or more of a potato eye with a root coiling down into the earth. I have heard Viniyoga people say the foot has one root-point at the top of the heel. For me there seem to be four eyes like wheels, looking down so the arches can suck up out of the ground. Makes me think of beanstalks and golden eggs and secretly alchemical fairy tales.

Paganism. A yoga mala (108 suryas) on the solstices. I don’t know how this became routine—but a lot of people in SoCal do nonsense like this. I find it sets a background rhythm. If daily practice puts me in touch with the cause and effect of daily activities, bi-yearly practice highlights the tilting of the planet, the strengthening process, the aging process, and cumulative changes in my mind and breath. The mala is also just beautiful—a particular mental state comes with motion so repetitive. Tomorrow I’ll do it in the dark before the others arrive.

Self-soothing.  I wonder if sometimes ashtanga becomes your boyfriend or girlfriend because it’s such a good cuddler. The deep massages of the paivrittas, a snuggle into bakasana. Embroyo-in-the-womb. Good teachers note the tendency to grasp after sensation—they ask for aparigraha at that moment. But at the same time, the solace that comes from self-cuddling feels primal—not just sensation-seeking but self-care. Especially a long child’s pose… being held by the earth, looking in to the earth. More on self-soothing.

Pressure points. Related, there seem to be points that stimulate a dramatic, chemical-feeling relaxation response. In me, the best two are placing the crown of my head lightly on the ground (in the prasaritas, and in the first few DD’s if nobody’s watching) and squashing my thyroid glad but good in shoulderstand.

Playing dead. I think this is where the building happens. Whether it’s from something like theta healing, or because the body thinks it’s sleeping and secretes some extra growth hormone, I don’t know. But over years I have observed the people who don’t really engage the finishing postures and who don’t take Savasana. They seem to be not laying down the proprioceptive wiring, or the neurons, or SOMETHING that is required for fluidl asana practice. They seem to be slowly draining themselves.

I sometimes get a restless lying there consciously, and either count out the relaxation or move my consciousness around the body making each limb feel alternately heavy and light—first pulled down into the earth and then floating up to the sky.

Something more interesting, on days when am still jumpy, is to find a boundary in the body and trace it. This is a self-hypnosis technique—I think I found it in Edgar Cayce years ago, but it might have been the freaky 50-year-old yoga nidra cassettes I once brought in on Inter-Library Loan. Focusing on the boundary between the eyelids, or the where the skin meets the air, or on what might be the moving edge of the peritoneum confounds the mind like a good koan. If yoga is the union of apparent opposites, this is a yoga The mind is a distinguishing machine, so it is funny that you can crash the system by asking it to do what it does best—draw boundaries. Or maybe you don’t crash the system so much as you take it to a different level, one that mental training and asana practice makes possible.

More favorite things:

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body

SLVI: The Present · 19 December 2008

When you wrap the presents, just wrap the presents.

Or listen to these.

Six minutes with Pema Chodron. This is about staying with the breath. About “non-life-threatening” distractions, about how quieting the mind is piercing holes in the clouds of the sky. No habit nor bowl-cut can repress her growing adorableness. Especially that moment when she pretends she's just waking up.

Twenty minutes on neurolinguistic programming and bigger prizes with an ashtangi Zen master who lists SKPJ in the same breath as some Rinpoche. Yes: there is an ashtangi Zen Master. In WISCONSIN.

Intriguing, yes? I almost kept it for myself. Here is more of Hollow Bones and Junpo Denis Kelly. And something small about NLP in a Mysore room.

I’m going ice skating this weekend. In a T-shirt, under palm trees. And supposedly seeing It’s a Wonderful Life in the theatre. And doing some weird solstice ritual. Interesting times.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state

The hazards of seeking sage advice · 16 December 2008

Last summer I got to feeling it was time for wise feedback. For a nonpartisan perspective.

I went and found MW, Krishnamacharya’s western student. I would have sat at his feet but he’s so far beyond that nonsense. He levels comfortably, like his other teacher, U.G.

We spent some time, established something ongoing. Hilarious guy, both reverent and fully irreverent: in him, those two attitudes enclose each other multi-dimensionally, as if his personality is an optical illusion. Nothing I know is so comforting as his jokes about everyday life—this sage’s goofy impressions of Average Joe twisting up his face and saying, “Oh fuck, the economy is fucked!” In a group he is more serious: nobody walks in to a room like this his Immanence (again, not to be confused with Eminence.)

We talked about practice, that is, about life. He said this style of practice is fundamentally harmful, that its basic structure is (1) patriarchal and (2) obsessive. It makes us that much more alienated from the feminine, and that much more obsessive. He made his eyes piercing, over a cup of coffee, and told me to quit this addictive behavior and this beating myself up with vinyasas. Stop practicing this form.

I smiled. He pierced some more, drank, blinked, cleared his expression.

He was speaking truthfully in a way that added to my knowledge while also requiring that I trust (and, not so easily, assert) my own faith and intelligence over his patriarchal directive. For me this was a way of finding out how to go on; and it was exactly the bracing support I had sought out.

Later we talked about my work on global supply chains, and my ideas about fostering a sense of connectedness among consumers to the third world producers of our stuff: about the impossibility of this project, and the uselessness of it, and the lost cause aspect being that which makes the action possible. Best scholarly feedback I had received in months. You don’t save anybody (yourself included) in eastern paradigms: you recognize your task cannot be done… and thus set out to accomplish it in every detail. I suppose this form of paradox began with the whole boddhisatva thing. But it also mirrors the means-ends paradox in the Gita: one becomes absorbs in skillful means as an end in itself. The Gita is not about getting somewhere (some thing) even though it is about action. Does ashtanga get this; does it teach this?

The charges of obsessiveness and patriarchy were like little drops of dye in my bloodstream, highlighting the patterns of my days. I had to ask: are these neuroses really structured into this practice, in a way they are not in other forms? Six months on, I think the answer is sort of yes. If this practice really doesn’t work for a person—if they pretend it’s a renunciant’s cave but really just get lost in some deadend catacomb—maybe it is because one of the neurotic streams takes over.

I see now that the critiques of this practice are two aspects of a more fundamental trouble—a kind of confusion between immanence and transcendence. We tell ourselves ashtanga is immanent because it’s a “spirituality” rooted in the body, but at our worst we are still totally without what he would call Mother. Because we behave toward practice as work; we focus on doing it correctly. As if that’ll get us somewhere (even when we deny that’s part of the rationale). We believe that if we transcend, it is because we did the work correctly, in the right order, with the right teaching. And we’re really quite interested in transcendence.

Well yes. I don’t like looking at it in those words, but this is all present (sometimes unconsciously) in what I do. If that’s the core of this practice, then it actually is impoverished. Then we’re scriveners who don’t understand the practice except for with some latent work-ethic spirituality. We recite new age bullshit about being “always already perfect,” about a “sense of oneness flashing forward in moments of quiet.” But recognition of action that does nothing—or whatever archetypically immanent, grounded, “feminine” traits—I’m not sure that is necessarily built in to this practice on a macro level.

If the overall structure is oriented toward getting somewhere, toward work, toward transcendence, I think the practice survives the critique if it finds balance in the interstices. Some practitioners understand this, and have taught me this slowly, just by being near me for a time. Have taught me this by the way they act more than what they do. It’s something I’ve only found among those who have practiced for decades or are prematurely wise. Other teachers totally fail to understand this, and so do their students.

I pretty much always knew that the root paradoxes of action and introspection were also present in ashtanga. That’s why I knew what to do with the bold instruction to quit. But I couldn’t articulate it before now; and even here my writing is damn incoherent. Or maybe that’s just because my mind is at its limit. Who said mind is limitless? This mind, right here now, is toast.

Time to call it a night.

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Categories: astanga yoga

On Madness · 7 December 2008

I wanted to keep myself sane in my practice. Like in Solaris, the Tarkovsky film, wherein a cosmonaut journeys far to a planet where something has gone very wrong among a crew of explorer-scientists. A mysterious presence, some animus in the planet’s living ocean, has driven them mad; and our new explorer must find the reason while himself withstanding the hallucinatory pulsing of that ocean.

I had seen the advanced windmill-tilter ashtangis, longtime in league with durvasa and the nataraj, lose their shit in a variety of ways. (How many not-crazy advanced practitioners do you know?) So I think that is what I was doing here all summer: charting a course through third series that would allow me to stay grounded and rational, capable of taking others’ perspectives, emotionally even keeled. I wanted a firm-enough reign on my unconscious that its contents would not populate my everyday experience unbidden, would not run rough-shod over my conversations in the ways that freak out the rationalists. (I love free-associators and intuitives, but post-rationalism doesn’t play in social science cocktail parties at all.) I also wanted to push back the veil into my shadow on my own time, rather than forcibly unifying the known and unknown only to have the latter take over the show like it has among the many egomaniac-libertine "gurus" of this world.

I did find a few techniques in my effort to keep it together. Little practices for counterbalancing the aggressive nature of this programme, for grounding myself in the midst of a growing dis-position toward wild-eyed, hypervata butterfly-sage. Envelope breathing, various embraces of earthen feminity, a focus on the roots in the feet and pelvis, self-cuddling. These are very good. I will write about them if others would find them useful. But they’re nothing more than sandbags against the tide of the Solaris sea.

What I’m seeing more clearly now is that practice creates personal insanities—there’s no  intensive practice disorder we can write up for the DSM. There is just a systematic removal of your defenses, a revealing of sharper parts of the personality and darker parts of the shadow. People who claim practice makes a person angry are mistaken: practice simply tends to remove barriers to the expression of buried anger. Same for terror, narcissism, vanity, whatever. Don’t tell people practice will make them feel a certain way: experience is specific.

On Solaris, what ultimately drives you mad is the way the universe reflects back to you your own desires. The planet knows your neuroses and projects them right into three dimensions.

I see now how it is Quixote upon Quixote to try to save myself via technique from the 3S Crazy. Serious crazy is in more or less in you, though perhaps the greater proportion of those who self-select into this practice do have copious serious crazy latent. Removing defenses isn’t necessarily a good idea: often, it is functional to leave them in place. In removing them, I feel it’s more urgent than ever that I care for my psyche as more of it comes in to view. I want to say that this is enough, but it seems like there is another small thing.

Solaris comes from Stanislaw Lem’s story about humankind’s two-sided inadequacy: both to understand the human heart and to understand the universe.

It seems something happens as you become very aware with the body. The physical does not always require full attention as you go on, so you learn to follow other trails of experience in the breath and the subtle body (&c.). As you do this, the subtle body techniques that never made sense physically start to yield new experiences. They’re still just techniques, but as the body itself becomes refined the techniques start to engage something… else. You almost don't have a choice about this happening, if you're advanced contorting every day with a refined, fluid exterior and the mind focused if not clear. My guess is that this is how people become not little-kuckoo crazy but instead go knocking on the door of the Universal-Kuckoo. I have no idea what it’s about. Do we need a modern wizard school where we can learn to integrate the mystical stuff back in to the constant stream of experience? Cervantes meets Tarkovsky and Philip K. Dick. It’s such camp, this third-eye-gazing, spinal-breathing, psychic mula-jalandhara connecting nonsense. And I guess that’s why it’s safe to have it out here, because it’s just pre-modern nintendo for people in caves with nothing to entertain themselves but the stringy little muscles in their underfed bellies. It’s not dangerous or esoteric so much as it’s useless. And then suddenly it might not be useless. Without Hogwarts or spaceships I don’t know how to keep it from turning me weird other than to normalize it, laugh with the experience. And ultimately, again and again, come back to relationship as the true ground of practice.

Here is the Doctor, now resident on Solaris and cautioning the arriviste savior-scientist:

Science? It's a fraud! No one will ever resolve this problem, neither genius, nor idiot! We [space explorers] have no ambition to conquer any cosmos. We just want to extend Earth up to the Cosmos's borders. We don't want any more worlds. Only a mirror to see our own in. We try so hard to make contact, but we're doomed to failure. We look ridiculous pursuing a goal we fear, and that we really don't need. Man needs man! [sic]

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , science

Field of Battle, Song of God · 30 November 2008

Hrmmm…Thanksgiving. Up—dinner outside right over the ocean, salt breeze and corn-celery-sage stuffing and that slanting yellow glow you get south of the California boot spur. Sneaking off Friday to US Ashtanga central headquarters, now located in an elite outdoor mall and dripping mint condition prana all down the quick-decay façade of Anthropologie. Everything about the California myth is true.

Down—semidistant relatives who are aching for more of me, in more ways than one. They consider me a little package of culture and refinement (hey, they’re bored) and feel edified by what little I give them of myself. But one little package of me just isn’t enough for these SoCal consumers—what they really want is babies and as I pass into my 30s they have ceased clucking and begun to hiss. Nevermind the inoculations I’ve issued since the carnal beast awakened in my 13^th year: no children. Not doing it. Swearing off children was the only way to freedom in a world where the culture wars are fought in the uteruses of the female young. Christian fundamentalism, from abstinence to anti-abortion to homophobia, exists to control female sexuality. This time, there were remarks about the importance of my ceasing all other activities next year to move to the boondocks and “make babies.” (Not ideas, not books, not a world of my own: just babies.) About my “not understanding feminity” and my “unused uterus.”

Seriously. I meet the family on their level, traversing all the distance of this field of battle that is my uterus. It’s many leagues from my side of the uterus to theirs, and once I arrive at their camp it can be difficult to remember that my own ground—my own politics and self owenship—have substance. I have transcended this culture but I also include it, and when the venomous loved ones entangle me there’s an icy deflection that only later reveals itself as a hard little gem of anger.

And soon shatters in to a joke. How funny to have a whole clan fighting to regress my selfhood sixty years, and to do that specifically in the field of my body. It doesn’t really work for a girl whose spiritual practice is grounded in that body. Thank god I have traced every inch of this pelvic girdle of bone and sinew, catching and releasing it with the breath; owning the hips happily; thank god this practice whispers you right through any fear of the subtle body.

The families do make battle on the field of me, but my field is wired with secret powers. The master key shouldn't be a secret: is so simple. It is like Krishna, holding the reigns. Greedy relatives can’t get much traction in lower chakras armored (or just enlivened?) with the master key.

My actions can be my own without being self-defensive. Who knew? I wish all the young women being told not to possess their own bodies could find this buzzing little forcefield.

I don’t think unmoved movement would be possible without a practice that gives my pelvic floor back to me in a way that is immediate, lightly entrancing, crass and transcendent all at the same time. This is the secret of the practice, whatever practice is. It’s simple.

Anyone can hold an unmoved mover in the belly root, can keep space with that, can begin and end all action from that. Om tat sat.

This is the easy way.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Soul Mat · 19 November 2008

I keep seeing the yoga mod squad tooling around Bentwood, a pride of golden lions at rest, bespectacled in oakleys and low-riding their surf shorts. They drive a screaming yellow new Land Cruiser, loaded with racks and mirrors and sporting a logo.

"www.yogamatic.com: your custom yoga mat company"

Fine. I just checket it out. They have a credo and everything.

We believe that one’s 12 square feet of floor space… should truly reflect one’s individual spirit and interests. After 18 months of research and development… we arrived at a formula that finally enables people the freedom to express themselves, whether that be in the creation of their own mat, or in the adoption of YM’s unique artwork… Your “soul mat” is sure to be found here.

I think I need to start an award. The Yoga Consumerism trophy. The Seriously Not Getting It medal. Kali Yuga Luminaries.

But I’d rather laugh than cry. They are having a good time with their venture capital:

 

What would the ashtangis put on their mats? “NO EXIT”? Rosebud the sled? Durvasa? A black hole?

Don’t say SKPJ. Don't even.

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society

No mountain · 17 November 2008

Durvasasana is Pattabhi-drste, if I’m in range. I’m myopic, so this only works out on days I go for front row contorting, near the photograph centered up on the wall. (We are non-territorial people—different spots on different days as flexibility ethic.)  Today I was up close, a little to the left.

Toss in to eka pada—left leg standing—inhale up—look for it. Rascally guru: three feet to the right of where my craning neck would prefer.

I’m standing there on the left leg with the right foot behind the head, comfortably incarnating a ridiculous evil flamingo, but also listing to the right because reaching to gaze upon the photograph.

At which point all the following information jolts in:

an image of PJ’s open palm slamming the empty wall before me,

a bellow of “THIS IS GOD!”

and the comic twitter of Donovan singing “then there is no mountain, then there is.”

I guess it’s my Christian subconscious that has the sky opening up, birds being released, divine bellowing from on high and hands sort of writing on the wall, but on its face it was all very 1970s for a moment. Remnants of the acid I’ve never dropped loosening from my spine in a tender moment.

But that is a real story, you know. PJ losing his temper years ago, smacking a sweaty shala wall with open palm, bellowing: “THIS IS GOD!” Nondualism, you idiot westerners. It needn’t take a lot of explaining.

Caught between the photo and the adjacent wall slammed by the phantom hand, I realized: what do I need some photograph for in this moment? Some outer witness to witness? Duh. Dial back to the left, gaze to the wall, see god to the echoes of aurally hallucinated panflute, exhale release.

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Categories: astanga yoga , sound

Strange in the familiar · 12 November 2008

Full moon ashtangi date: flow class in Venice and lunch next door at “Rawvolution.” Give me a break already: it’s a Wednesday; it’s gorgeous; I’m working from home and the full moon is strong on the tides of the Pacific and my hyperactivity. Also my companion’s been exiled to Florida for months, working the Obama ground game: even winning campaigns leave the rank and file with PTSD (I would know), so she needs all the asana and raw roughage she can get this week.

I walk in to the grand old flagship studio of YogaFranchise. The room is vast and airy, full of sea air and lit with skylights. The front row, with an empty space waiting, is a line of cheating ashtangis, easing their rippling flanks toward the sklights like Amazons before the hunt. Horrible! What the hell are we doing here? We’ll frighten the natives for sure. Alone this would be ok but I’m not the only one in the tribe unstill this fullmoon Wednesday.

Class is fine, taught by someone with his own firslast.com website stocked with acting stills, a hometown boy bio and many, many, many headshots. Got to make your name in YogaFranchise land like the rest of em, if that’s your game. (When an artist purchased my firstname-lastname.com to sell “energetic portraits” featuring enneagrams and shaman imagery, I guess my own window for yoga namesmaking closed. That website is NOT ME, I swear! I don't do energetic portraits, phrenology or entrail readings. No.)

YogaFranchise is just a business—it works by its own rules and generates its own culture. Fine. But, returning there, I perceive all the strange in the familiar. There’s a churn in the room—a grasping involvement in glamour and wanting-it-ness. Seen from a distance, it’s just the froth of cresting scensterism, but on the inside there is added an eros, anxiety and great expectation in it that jack up the emotion and all-out WANT. People wanting to “make it,” people wanting to have each other as part of that project, people tense to be magazineready.

So normal, right? But also: not normal. The selfhood of demi-celebrity has a special anxiety: it is a shared eros and vanity pulsing in the sticky-sweetness of that old room where decades ago CM first taught ashtanga in this town. For me, there is a sensitivity to the content of the minds of others that I may or may not gather the fortitude to document here: the churn is not my projection but part of the scene as other minds are creating it. Wish I could write it off as the former, but no. :)

Susananda has me thinking that demystification of the “false awakenings” is good: the new kind of knowing and the times you can play with your energy are wonderful but also nothing important. No need to rely on stupid magical thinking nor self-flattering elisions to (not) speak of them. No need to leave these things locked inside Himalayas and hierarchies, shrouded in mystery and ice. But moving out of that is scary and I might mess up or attract the usual kali yuga idiocy.

At Rawvolution the woman at the counter, who wandered around confused for a full five minutes before taking our order, exclaimed my name. What? “Remember me from two years ago? Well I’m raw now.” Yes I see. She had lost much of the fleshy contours of the old face and easily 10 sizes. And a little something more than that, like the raw PB&J we ordered (more like wilted apple slices on a delicate layer of particle board, and a good thing we went back to the kitchen to retrieve it because it tasted like pie and gave me a buzz that made mid-day freeway driving a little too fun). My old acquaintance was pretty good at gathering subject, verb and predicate into sentence-size utterances, so she’s doing better than my dear Sarah P. But the trick of corralling a complete thought—something she did so adroitly and with critical wit in 2006—has dissolved with her adipose tissue. Scary. I came home and ate oatmeal before I got back to writing. Sorry to say, but while the lightly machinating Venice angels may hate or fear the complex bulk-bin carb, it’s what keeps my world immanent and rational mind online. Immanence and rationality—strangers in Venice's good old sun-drenched familiar. I would have gotten lost if I had not regained them in a yoga that’s more pathway than roughage churn.

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Categories: astanga yoga

Too Intense? Part II. · 26 October 2008

Someone asked if there's a magic bullet that’ll resolve the contradictions we generated on this topic. Maybe I could argue it's the red thread of kundalini...? Alas, sorry. :)

There is a refinement within and radiating from the body some old practitioners—I won’t try to deny that. And I can’t say what it’s about.

For what is at stake here, though, I think there is an elegant principle that resolves most of the antinomies. I usually hesitate to go integral, because the first layer of the theory (the fourfold table) is nothing but a compass with no intrinsic explanatory power; and the second layer (the map of the evolution of human consciousness) tends to either piss people off or reduce everything to evolutionary pissing contests. So I’ll ignore the second layer. But… the parsimonious, four-cornered map does organize the different kinds of concerns everyone raised about the prospects of this intense physical-psycho-emotional-whatever program. According to this map, every "moment" of existence (for example, me here now = a moment) can be seen from four angles at once. Inside and outside, collective and individual.

1. Inside-Individual (psyche, subtle body)	2. Outside-Individual (behavior, gross body);
3. Inside-Collective (Culture, shared values)	4. Outside-Collective (social structure: class, ethnicity, nationality, gender)

It’s not as obnoxious as it looks, I swear. When you hit a conundrum with the integral light saber, it explodes it into four. Who knows if this makes things more tractable or multiply more complex.

Is this bizarre practice suitable for a person: 1. Can the individual body hack it? 2. What about the individual psyche? 3. What are the shared cultural limitations and implications? 4. Is it possible and good within whatever social organization?

One, about the body (the exterior of the individual), sounds like a conditional yes. As V said, body type matters, and there are a lot of factors this comprises.

Question two, about the psyche is maybe more interesting. This practice is so intense! It forces a person into even more intimate contact with weird parts of her psyche and forces her to either make peace with them or “vomit them out” in service of an obsession. Sonya mentioned she’d seen people do this practice and be warped, sadly, into selfish jerks; Holden’s heard these rumors of the 3S programme leading to the vomiting of shadow elements… anyone else have a worst case scenario on a psycho-emotional dimension? Maybe Gopi Krishna isn’t so out of bounds after all. :)

Is all this just myth and mystification? The only generalization I’m comfortable making is that even the most neurotic, selfish 3S practitioners—the ones who maybe have been internally disfigured, though that is for their teachers, hopefully, to see—know their own minds very well. Better than most. The common allegation that advanced ashtanga creates bipolarism intrigues me: have these so-called ashtanga victims been unmasked by a truth-telling process or simply traumatized by their own poorly-chosen practice/teacher?

Maybe I should be open—later—about what that process has been like for me. For several kind of complicated reasons. I’m amusing the shit out of myself lately, moving through paradoxes of obsession/dedication, shadows/love. Something old Mr. MW has given me recently, in his deconstruction of my practice, is the criticism that ashtanga is hopelessly, blindly obsessive. To the point of generating collective body dysmorphia and chemical addiction. Rather than pissing me off or making me want to reject his teaching, this criticism endeared me to him and freed me to see the insanity in what we do. I’m not on a mission to prove him wrong, but I would like to circumscribe the cases in which he’s right and chart a way through this tradition that acknowledges the depth and truth of my own experience.

The third point of view, about what is shared but subjective, is I think what has made this conversation so tense. When it comes to beliefs about womanhood and what is socially appropriate, we carry feelings that seem so personal but are the more powerful because they’re culturally received and because we see them reflected in others. There is a pressure to reproduce the shared ideas… or a pugnacious urge to subvert them. Mircea Eliade wrote beautifully if perhaps unreliably about yoga as a deconditioning process—both of an individual’s hangups and of his [sic] cultural baggage.

People in this particular orbit seem to agree that a powerful, quasi-traditional, shamanic, contortionist breathing and meditation practice—while uniquely absurd in our context—creates women in a good way. Maybe even a very good way. The openness, independence, groundedness, self-awareness, bravery and strength of this programme may conflict with old school ideas about weak, soft, receptive feminity that "belongs in the home" because men's responsibility and because the owned female body should not be seen. But the residual tension of the last few generations’ problematic ideas about womanhood are part of what makes this practice vital. It is a very good challenge: to see what was good, beautiful and true in the old female archetype and carry that forward without being caught up in reactivity (as if we ever de-condition ourselves of culture altogether). The new culture that this practice creates around femininity—is there a degree of liberation in it? I would say, very often, this is so.

The fourth perspective is social context. Ashtanga is almost a hopelessly Brahmin activity—in the west as well as the east. Its first 1.5 generations were also hopelessly patriarchal and light-complected, as at least a good number of readers agree.

But yoga, once it becomes a lifestyle, manifests this counter-trend of quasi-freeloading authorized and certified teachers unencumbered by material things, who justify their bohemianism (sweetly, if deconstructably) with a glance to the cell-phone saddhus of the east. This is hippie-renunciant-ism, and insofar as this kind of yoga garlands the enormously privileged subculture of ashtanga, it keeps things interesting and a little more honest. There are, as a result, two cultures within ashtanga itself—the diamond-studded gold-chained householders with professional degrees and property, and the people who have given everything to the practice, and ironically carry on their lithe bodies a special contortionism-capital (kapotal, it's been called) to which the propertied folks pay respect. (The coming global slowdown will, I think, bring these two strands within ashtanga closer together….)

But I’m getting distracted. I think the social-structural perspective on women doing advanced practice has to consider both social class (for what women is this feasible, energetically, if they also have modern social responsibilities?) and this notion of staying fecund for the tribe. Can the social organization of the world we’re living in cope with women doing this shit—on a practical level? Does the change in women’s work, and potential for authority, and capacity for élan actually benefit us all when women start emerging as practical masters of psychological, physical or even spiritual practice? Do we need women taking it to the edge? Yeah, I think so. Actually, maybe this is the best argument for women who have the time, opportunity, and a certain physicality and the mental stability to take it to that level if they’re so inclined. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it is funny to take a ridiculously elitist practice and reveal—over the course of just one generation—that being a woman, and being poor, actually can increase the likelihood of at least physical “mastery.” Is that trivial? I don’t think so.

Here’s my shoulders and me, looking at myself, against the background of Butterfield 8 Liz Taylor as a sacrificial, transitional woman under some man's objectifying gaze. (Admittedly, I am grateful enough for what she represents to pin her up in my bathroom.) Things change—a few decades is a long time when cultural and cellular exchange becomes as highly entropic as it is now. Apologies if my navel is TMI for you—that’s just your boundaries talking, pre-entropy. :)

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality

Too intense for a woman? · 21 October 2008

A few years ago, an authorized teacher told me that “as a woman” I don’t “need” to practice the full vinyasa for upavista konasana in the first series.

Yes, the maneuver is mysterious and possibly dangerous. Just like my femininity.

A few people asked a while ago about the relationship of women and third series. Should women take on such an intense program? I wrote a response and didn’t post it. (I barely journaled before I began this blog, but now journal offline all the time. Strange.) I sensed the moment had passed and that the discussion would only amplify women’s self-doubt. But… it seems to be coming up. Here are some of those earlier thoughts.                                         ……………………………………………………............................

This question of women practicing third illustrates what I’ve been trying to say about gender archetypes.

They’re great interpretive tools. Actual people are not archetypes—people contain multitudes. If we allow each other.

Many teachers have an opinion about women practicing third. It’s can be a place to locate their (more or less unexamined) beliefs about gender. Not to pull a CP snarky yoga smackdown, but these opinions may say more about the specific teacher than they do about the practice.

I’ve learned the series from two senior men—one who sees it as grounding for women in an intense, really good way. And one who simply sees it as the best program ever, for any body lucky enough to find it. But others think that the transformations third brings are unnatural or unhealthy for women—it maybe be difficult to get them to say this explicitly, but sometimes you can sound it out. Which, “as a woman,” I try to do. A few duck this topic, reinforcing patriarchial taboos about discussing women’s bodies—taboos in both folk and scientific cultures which have kept women from being the real experts on our own bodies.

Bring out the smelling salts—the girls are doing ekapadabakasana.

Well, whatever. The advanced stuff is delightful for some people; and I submit that a penis is not necessary for going upside down. So enough mystery already around intense physical practice. There is no feminine mystique that is endangered by handstands.

Still, ok, the program has practical drawbacks, distributed unevenly across body types and personalities.

First, it’s sort of a drug—the endorphin release is large. But I’m not convinced that being an endorphin junkie is all bad. As long as you can work the habit without becoming a compulsive, self-centered freak. (Koan-ism?) In any case, this “risk” has nothing to do with gender, but a lot to do with personality.

Second, it can be ragged-breathingly aggressive if you’re bad at it. Otherwise, it’s just intense and focused. Some would see that as “masculine.” Intensity and focus are archetypically masculine traits, but there’s much of them in real women.

I’m not trying to kill the archetypes. Old dualities (passive/active, creative/receptive, masculine/feminine, whatever) aren’t all bad. And since they’re out there, we may as well use them for meaning-making. Instead of letting them lead us around or using them artlessly to divide up the world.

Third, while there’s no unfeminine essence in this string of postures, women do face two practical problems—shoulder/wrist trouble and the string bean factor. Men face the same challenges in their own way.

Shoulder or wrist trouble might be more likely among tall people, those whose center of gravity is in the belly or pelvis, or anyone with delicate joints. I fall in to one of these categories—low center of gravity—but I’m small and have the very sturdy wrists and shoulders of my mongrel Irish father. So, despite lacking a penis, my anatomy is still well suited to this program in a key way. (The one person I know who had serious shoulder trouble in third was a tall man.)

As for the tendencies toward lizardlyness, women who get really skinny doing this programme—because it is easier when the hips are light—might stop menstruating. (Ignoring old-school whispers about woman's "essence,") there’s dispute over whether that’s a problem for long term health. I figure, for active women, it’s a genuine problem due to loss of bone mass and a damaged metabolism. Nevermind the malarkey about cycles bringing women into transcendent gaian harmony with the universe according with their receptive reproductive fate—just for practical reasons, not cycling is a dramatic edge to be playing.

The masculine/feminine archtypes are spare abstractions, not something strive to embody. One way to use them is to interpret the notion of balanced practice. Let there be creativity and receptivity, will and surrender, exhales and inhales, process orientation and goal orientation, all of it. I figure they can balance any practice. If in our community third has been seen as hypermasculine, then maybe we only understand the half of it.

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Categories: astanga yoga

More Pieces · 14 October 2008

The beach at dawn is full of bums wrapped in Army/Navy surplus. I drove right past the shala and out to the pier this morning, under a huge harvest moon made orange not from the dust of tilled-under cornstalks but the ash burning luxury homes. There are fires in the hills and it’s just as well—gives local news something to distract the masses from calling their brokers. (That's what you get when you let riffraff like me invest.)

I walked a few miles on the beach, toward Malibu, which was all pink with a glowing haze like in soap operas, thanks to the fire ash. As the sun came up the oversize bum-caterpillars spread across the beach started moving, packing up, trudging in across the sand.

Great place to be homeless, in some ways. I wonder how many people will slip out of the middle class this year. I wonder if I will get a snot-nose job and slip in to it.

I was shocked to hear Dr. Doom on the morning news. Usually the financial media pretend he doesn’t exist—how odd it would be if this wing of the journalism profession practiced the compulsively “balanced,” phony two-sided reporting of the "objective" politics reporters. Roubini, because he sees an end to this, actually makes me feel better, given that the credit markets are still locked up and the DOW is full of puckey. Amazing to watch it oscillate.

To hedge that possibility—of slipping from the bliss-following margins and in to the middle class—and because I just about outed myself today (and in so doing got a large insulin spike—sad to see I still need subselves hermetically sealed off from professional life), I’m anonymizing this owl. If you’re here already, eh, you know me and I love your being around. But I’m not all that excited about new lurkers and am short-circuiting some of the routes to my house. More self-expression, less identity-construction. That’s the idea.

They say the moon is the time to observe the attachments and ridigity we form around practice (and also around compulsive non-practice—ever notice that there’s as much authoritarianism and superstition about You Shall not Practice on Moon Days as about You Shall Practice Correct Vinyasa?) To that end, I want to say that I’ve been disillusioned by rigid ashtangi refusals to think critically. Is it refusal, though... or inability? I never know whether some people shallow for life or if it's fair to say shallow a choice. But... it does seem to be shallowness that enables us to believe that subservient, unreflective expressions of this practice are deep. Ommmm....

It is wonderful to work within and negotiate a tradition, but this week I've been aware of ashtanga's fear-laced gullibility and ways in which it is not about going into our own immediate experience. The specific ways we use ashtanga to avoid our inner experiences.

Sonya of Long Island sometimes moves me very much, when she hits me with unadorned honesty that is not even looking for approval or agreement, when she shows her ability to just sit in the flames of her own experience and wonder what the hell it is about. By contrast, it seems much of what we do is approval-seeking, or neurotic self-control, or just using the body as a driste-suck on others.

I was stunned, in retrospect, that it took until the fifty-fourth comment (blisterkist) in the AshtangaNews thread for someone finally to call out the superficiality and self-fleeing nature of this ashtanga fantasy of having a so-called guru (the guru tradition is something so different from this beguiling culture clash), together with our failure of critical thought when it comes to the life-or-death matter of our own practice. Sometimes I give tradition itself too much weight and respect—trying to act compassionately but perhaps just avoiding disagrements. My wish is that we masses could have both beds in which to lay down our heads and brains to occupy those heads. This world is too beautiful to inhabit halfway outside of what's real to us, drifting between other people's mumbo jumbo and their competing assertions of rightness. Wide-eyed redulity is for summer blockbusters, but it just takes the edge off self-inquiry.

I worry this practice will dull itself with its fearful authority-worship and its repetition of arbitrary rules as if they were magic. If that is all there is, then of course we will turn outward, to performance and recognition, for rewards. I'm starting to wonder if any aspects of practice that take us out of our experience are a waste of energy.  

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , self-deception

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. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [53]
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.

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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 your head · 1 July 2008

The discussion from 28 June just keeps going. I tried to end it with a kick in the teeth from Chuck Norris, but then the questions got really provocative in a good way. So carry on down there.

Meantime… they say women in third cannot get enough.

I wouldn’t know anything about that.

Nevertheless:

Hypothetical explanations for the observed increase in sex drive among female third series practitioners:

H,a: Doing that practice requires you to go to bed stupid early, so you never go out, never get laid, and therefore become pent up.

H,b: The arm balance stuff puts a woman in touch with a certain aggressive she-wolf vibe that western society represses, and the reconnection with her viscera restores that lost shade of self-expression. You know, dominatrix energy? Catwoman stuff?

H,c: Putting your foot behind your head constricts blood and lymph circulation to the lymph nodes in the groin, and those same glands are flushed with energy when one exits the posture. Over time and repetition this gland cleansing and shift of energy creates some, well, intense feelings.

There’s probably something to each of these, with H,a being not insignificant. But to focus on H,c—the foot behind the head (FBH) thing.

Who wants to put their foot behind the head? This is preposterous.

I said that I’d try to write about this, but I don’t know how much I can contribute usefully since I have not studied many bodies in any variety of FBH. Here’s a scattering of thoughts, for what it is worth.

● When ashtangis talk about FBH, one of the first considerations is anatomy—especially openness of the hips and relative length of torso and legs. There’s also the matter of flesh around the hips, which does make a difference here. I wonder, where do 14 year old Indian boys fare in these matters? From the spindly images I’ve seen, Krishnamachya was probably working with a whole different anatomy when he put together these FBH sequences. (Yes I said that.) One for which FBH was not as preposterous.

● For the people I’ve known, FBH is a big body-transformation that comes in phases. It’s as extreme, and as progressive, as are the back bends… but perhaps we focus on FBH less because it doesn’t look as dramatic as bends bends, because the emotional experience is internal rather than expansive, and because the postures don’t include the intense bonding experience with a teacher that can occur in back bends. But one could consider that FBH is just as big a deal as back bends.

● As several people have said, there are two ways to practice FBH—one that emphasizes external rotation of the femur, and one that incorporates a bit of counter action and is less about getting the whole leg behind the back than it is just hooking the foot behind the head. Susananda has a good discussion of this. I wonder if the more externally-rotated, baddha konasana approach is especially good for people still working to deepen the intermediate FBH—deep external rotation is pretty much a pre-requisite for beginners who are also opening the muscles of the legs. Meanwhile, as the hips become more open and the work is to stabilize them with the pelvic floor and any leg muscles that can be activated, there is somewhat less emphasis on external rotation. For me, this approach also helps keep the IT band from becoming agitated and begins to counteract would-be trouble arising from a mobile sacrum.

● Sometimes, I will practice a deeper leg-behind-the-back kind of thing, especially in more passive postures. But this is, in the context of third, not really for me about letting go. If I happen to be adjusted in either nidrassana or kashybasana, actually, there’s often a feeling in the next many breaths that the entire stability of the sacrum and pelvic floor could be lost. I’ve once irritated my lower back quite intensely this way—by releasing entirely in the passive posture, then beginning to move before strongly re-engaging the pelvic floor. I know they say the mulabandha is a subtle practice, but in order to stay safe in deeper FBH for me it is not too subtle. It’s the center of the awareness in those postures merely to keep my SI joints from gaping open and my sacrum from turning into a plumb bob in a windstorm. Or something. I don’t know that I would be working so close to the edge of instability if I were a skinny long-legged Indian boy, but in my case doing so much FBH requires using the pelvic floor to pull back from the edge.

● A final reason I am interested in less externally rotated, more counter-acted FBH (as long as I can keep the neck clear) is that it’s possible some days to get all the way there on an inhale. This goes to my main question for FBH: What if third series were led? What’s the FBH technique then, what are the ways to sublimate it to a single breath, but in a way that’s structurally sound to the point of supporting a durvasa?

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Chuck · 30 June 2008

A man named Dale said this on the internet.

● There is a yoga pose named chucknorrisasana. Only Chuck Norris has done it - and lived.

● When the Universe overcomes its fear, it seeks to become one with Chuck Norris.

● What is the sound of one of Chuck Norris' hands clapping?

a) the sound of the other hand breaking something,
b) a sonic boom,
c)Chuck Norris claps with his feet.
(I can't decide)

● The first time Chuck Norris did a headstand, the universe flipped upside down to avoid disappointing Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris kicked it right-side up again.

● What is Chuck Norris' favorite yoga pose? Kickyourasana.

 

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Categories: astanga yoga

Cheez-it® · 25 June 2008

Last friday I walked into the living room and I smelled Nabisco. What?

He wouldn’t do this. Not Nabisco, flagship of American obesity and mindless addiction? Not this level of anti-wellbeing and all-out trash in our home?

I opened a few cupboards and file drawers, looked behind the sofa. The smell of deep-fried salty cardboard, refined flour, congealed corn syrup burnt into dessicated brown bubbles and marketed as “food” was unmistakeable. I tipped over the guitar amp behind the chair and there it was: a large box of Cheez-it® crackers.

A "food" with a registered trademark. A "food" comprising 26 ingredients, among them partially hydrogenated soybean oil and something identified as TBHQ. A substance brought into my house for the purposes of ingestion.

Ok then. It’s either me or him.

Sometimes this contrarian imp comes out—the imp that’s curious just how much shit the practice can neutralize. The imp who’s angry at parents (not mine, bless them thank god) and a culture that teach children to find comfort in “food” with trademarks, and who wants with spite-tainted curiosity to take it on myself. The imp who thinks she can neutralize all shit.

I reached in and took a monkey-fist full, sat down on the floor like a primate and crunched. Cheez-it, for all that oil and salt, tasted exactly like cardboard. Did nothing for me, not even an insulin rush (thanks to the spinach and cauliflower on which it landed). Tasting and feeling nothing, I took several more monkey-fistfuls before returning the Cheez-it® to its hiding place, knowing I’d soon be in more trouble with the Editor than he was with me. Can’t I leave anything a secret? Can’t even the space inside his guitar amp be free from my ideas about clean living?

The next morning the solstice hit and I made 108 sun salutations in the most peaceful quiet home studio in Venice. As I raised my arms for number 20, a severe wave of nausea drew me down.

Gawd. I have to do 88 more of these? Maybe I can get through one more before my first trip to the bathroom. Nice of them to install this beautiful bathroom right off their studio, though. I really hope I don’t throw up.

On salutation 21, a bead of sweat formed on my brow. And all I noticed for the next two salutations was the droplet gaining volume and momentum as it ran up and down my nose. On the 24^th, I waited in ardha uttanasana while it rolled to the tip of my nose and flicked it like a frog, rose up quickly, and checked in with the nausea. Gone.

Did I neutralize Cheez-it®? Conquer and assimilate?

Would the anti-human evil of Cheez-it® in my body have even been observable were it not for the practice?

I will write more about food in the next post, about what I actually eat even though I sense that this is not even useful or interesting to anyone because eating is as much play as it is science. Or, at least, should be.

For now here is one idea that might useful across the board.

If you want to begin to hear your body correctly, put the screws to your workout.

If you are having trouble tapping in to good intuitions about how to eat, honestly: ramp it the hell up.

From what I have seen, straight cardio won’t do it. From what I have seen, in order to clarify the messages, and increase their urgency, you want to start making your body build finetuned strength, balance and nervous-system endurance. If you tell it that it has to build smart muscles, excellent proprioception, all kinds of new balance and movement skills: under those conditions, the body will demand what it needs to do that efficiently. It will respond to the trauma of a dramatic increase in exercise by getting smarter.

I say this because, time and again, I see new practitioners realize that they have been doing something wrong with their diet. Of course they are: they live in a Nabisco world. Astanga is the most they have ever asked of their bodies, so it’s no wonder new practitioners try every kind of new eating regime in response to all the new feelings.

You always have the option of making an intellectual decision to nourish yourself “right,” based on nutritionists’ research. But this shortcuts old habits while putting the new ones up to a higher authority.  

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Crim, Again · 20 June 2008

A client offered keys. She lives in Venice and the home studio is a silent wooden nest for my 108-beaded Saturday solstice mala. It ain’t Stonehenge, but the space sure is pretty.

I feel like a hippie, having you know I have a thing for the solstice, but I promise my enthusiasm for the longest day of the year long predates the yoga. Yonder up the 49th parallel in the land of my birth (Big Sky Country, Montana), there’ll be no more than 5 hours of shuteye, with the long days pulling the sweetcorn up knee high by the Fourth of July. Or more like chest-high these days, thank you Monsanto. Glad I no longer live in the flightpath of either cropdusters or testflight B2 bombers, thanks.

Here in godless LA we get a close to 7 hours of darkness tonight, but I’m still sun-stoned and loving the light. Did I mention the Editor tends to have business in South American archives? Winters in Buenos Aires or Porto Alegre… would I be an unbalanced person if I double-dipped the longest day and ducked out of the yule?

For now, everybody in town is having a party this weekend and I actually feel like doing something about it. Some dancing, party or two, breakfast with and old friend. Tonight, Billy Wilder and backrubs. 

By the way, can somebody tip me to fast new summer music (electronic, hip hop, dub, bachatta, rock?) before I start taking the new Bonnie Prince Billy all seriously or succumb to these nagging memories of Jane’s Addiction, Danzig or (further back) the Beach Boys?

I’ll come down out of this feeling eventually. I do keep meaning to write about food and feet behind the head. Those thoughts have got to go somewhere.

Completely random Saturday links:

*Laksmi is normal, 8limbs and all.

*Fun with gender. Nagging isn’t female, it’s just what you do if you’re the less powerful one in the relationship. Excellent use of comparative- sociological method.

*I stopped reading the NYT and the smartmags. Which sucks. But this is what ABD looks like.

* Via Julian Walker's good blog, Andrew Harvey talking about how huge the shadow really is and how much it's in the body. I haven't listened yet, but will probably get to it during the usual Sunday night kale-washing ritual.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , sound

WWND, Moon Play, Streams of Practice · 18 June 2008

What would Nietzsche do is a concentrated question. Use sparingly and apply only to the affected area. Yields extraordinary mental clarity! But may cause will-to-power-disease if taken incorrectly.

It was a WWND day.

First thing in the morning, I went out the Santa Monica pier and skated north to Malibu and back. A summer idyll—waves big, sun clear, light salty breeze. Me and the runners—tourists don’t show up until later. Listening to Tropicalia and, after that, David Byrne.

It’s indecent to have access to this picture any old day.

Afterwards, still hyper, wrote for a while. Then I hit the asana class NYT billed as “most advanced in LA,” to let the teacher know I still love her. Received some amazing personal instruction (very helpful), was told to take lotus in handstand (ok, interesting that’s possible), and might (as a result) have frightened one or two students. A surprisingly, sweetly internal class for that venue, opening and closing with instruction on pratyhara (which calmed me down the way a few sun salutations and standing postures cannot). This deviation from the tradition is “damaging yoga”? Really? Damaging the monopoly, yes. But a scene like this is so different from ashtanga that the two do not need to fear each other the way they do. I wish they would stop trashing each other. Soon, we need different words to refer to the two kinds of practice: they have little in common and neither is going away.

Anyway.The thing about the ashtanga teacher, the one who does primary before a moon, is that he doesn’t go in for arbitrary rules. He’s got too much positive instruction on tap to need to frame his room in negative instructions. It's different, but there are a lot of reasons one might specify first-only before a moon: my guess is that he knows he attracts physically intense students whose minds could use a super-internal practice at regular intervals on random days. No kidding: this guy is the best asana instructor I have ever encountered. This shocks and amuses me. He is gifted in physical intelligence and has made third easy yet particularly intense for me. And my back, which has been trippy for 16 months, has undergone some kind of healing this spring, in a way that I might try to explain later.

I am still not very “physical” about this stuff—thinking and talking about asana is unbearably tedious, especially where my own body is concerned. I’m interested in the head-trip, energy, culture, history, spirit, emotion—ANYTHING but mechanics. Which is why a very physical teacher, who has mastery in the area I avoid, is a great benefit.

This brings me to something Gregor and I put together in a thread the other day. I think he was drunk when he brought it up but the idea makes sense if you stay with it. Say there are different streams of mastery—physical, mental, spiritual, maybe another. If you’re going to practice something, you’ll probably be drawn to focus on the stream in which you feel most competent. Too, maybe you feel insecure in one of the other streams and try to avoid it. High school athletes (who might claim to be non-intellectual) find a physical practice; introverts (usual klutzes) turn to meditation; mental people (who say "quieting the mind" is a stupid idea) pursue intellectual athleticism.

Would it be possible for a single practice to work in all three streams simultaneously, and actually harmonize them over time? A practice in which you may get in for the appeal of, say, physical mastery, but soon find you have to work with equal intensity in other less familiar streams in order to pursue that supposed strength?

Ashtanga has the potential to be that. A kind of practice that balances the streams.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , morality , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Apex · 17 June 2008

Here’s the deal with your teacher. You do it their way as long as it won't hurt you; you honor that relationship for the sacred thing it is; you keep it clean and loving because your practice depends on it and their service to humanity is better than your own. Or my own anyway… heh. If they value loyalty, I deliver because it keeps everything clear and creates even more mutual understanding. If they have particular rules, I reproduce them to the point of being mechanical about it. Yes. Obedience is just engine-grease for the big machine that is a Mysore room.

Mechanical machine, not kidding.

The rules are just there to allow me to shut down the monkey. A container.

The mind likes to be bound. Even if it is, like mine, a big preacher's-kid rulebreaker in other contexts.

That said, this whole rule of primary-only on the day before the moon is a drag. Criminy. Especially if the moon is smack on a wednesday; and if it’s not new but a buzzy hightide action-packed full moon; and if it’s the week of the solstice for godsakes.

Come on. I practiced primary-only this morning and am bouncing off the walls. And I’m supposed to skip practice tomorrow altogether, on this day when sun and moon are both pulling me off the earth and in the meantime I’ve got to find a way to trick myself into looking at a computer for most of the day? I’d fast or something, but my experience is that fasting makes me even more hyper.

This is just ridiculous. I’m tending strongly toward criminal behavior tomorrow unless I stap on some rollerblades instead. 

It is the apex of summer and time for many forms of realization. We are all ripe. Can you feel it? This is it! Put on a dress (you too), climb up something, dance in your livingroom, read Nietzsche and the Bhagavad Gita.

Go create. Go!

 

P.S. Topics  for later, possibly: N's question on the what postrationality can give to rationality (nice); S's question on putting your foot behind your head; and A's question about what in the hell I eat. I don't have answers, but might try to document some ongoing experiments.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

An Example of a Bold Conjecture · 11 June 2008

People who do this practice are allergic to fakey-fake peace and love not because they hate the idea of love but because the fake stuff cheapens the unavoidable, inconvenient, uncalled-for all-out love that practice begins to generate. Practitioners get the idea that this seemingly hard-won love is special, and get pretty good at spotting its cheap imitation. They get a little secretive about this aspect of their experience, because it is the best part and feels worth protecting.

So for all the salience of resistance, insecurity and frustration—for all the sharp edges—in the ways we talk about the yoga, the mainspring of practice is the addictiveness of the inimitable, irreducible high it generates.

And, ultimately, the experience that speaks to our intuitions to tell us we are doing something right is nothing other than embodied love.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Is ashtanga like bad sex? · 3 June 2008

Ok, tempering the ashtangelism….  

People who dance often tell me the practice makes them feel beautiful.

People who practice ashtanga often tell me the practice makes them feel fat.

The median dancer is 20 years older and 40 pounds heavier than the median ashtangi. 

Other differences in form, state of awareness, and possibilities for expanding boundaries of “self”:

Ashtanga: lotus binds; pick-ups; strong boundaries around individual experience.

Culture of “working on myself.”

Mental states: advanced practitioners (regardless of place in the series) cultivate trance and practice meditative contemplation through tristana, while it’s key for earlier students to focus on the physical forms. Energetic thread is lost when posture takes over and movement stops. Weak correlation between mental state and physical posture because you can’t really deduce mental state from posture.

Dance: free form; spontaneous; weak boundaries around individual experience. 

Culture of deep introspection, acceptance, self expression.

Mental states: most people pretty instantly go in to trance with the pulsing rhythm and the energy of a large, sophisticated group. It seems like they go into either a gut-level, emotion-rich undifferentiated consciousness (a sort of primal state?) or a sophisticated, contemplative state that feels a lot like the open-inquiry stages of vipassana. If they stop moving, it may mean they’re “not feeling it” or that they’re in a trance state in which stillness brings even more depth than motion.

Does ashtanga make one feel fat while dance makes one feel beautiful, regardless of actual body-looks? What’s up with this? If good sex is partner-merging and bad sex is body-critical and self-conscious, what does that make ashtanga?

Also…

What’s the best place for the “self” within an altered state—front and center or “forgotten”?

If you experience emotion as “not mine” and “not-me” in dance, does that limit the possibilities for it to be a “transformative” thing during which you process your own shit and finally, personally, letting it go?

Does ashtanga give you less of an escape from difficulties of transforming the psycho-emotional stuff in your own body… is it more difficult in this respect than other embodied practice? More transformative?

Why don't ashtangis really dance?

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , spirituality

Advanced practice · 31 May 2008

People keep sending over this article from the NYT about how a sharp increase in yoga converts the past three years has led to a watering down of the intensity of practice. The writer doesn’t quite trace out the mechanism (increasingly superficial teaching, therefore increasingly superficial students, and advanced yoga’s inherent resistance to commodification because it is so weird and demanding) because she only sees "supply and demand" at work, but she does capture the effects. The gaps she leaves open are pretty thought-provoking.

Anyway, at the end of the article, the NYT lists advanced practice options in LA, NY, Chicago, Miami and Boston. Well, they get Miami right. In LA, they list Yogaworks 2/3 Flow yoga as the advanced option.

Really? Vinyasa flow, perhaps especially at YW, is inherently intermediate practice. That is great, and exactly right for many students; but it puts yoga in a poor light to market 2/3 vinyasa flow as "advanced."

In vinyasa flow, a 90-minute synchronized, led format is the pinnacle. This is a very good format, but no matter how much art and technique it packs, it is always going to deepen the student’s dependence on the teacher. Which is the exact conundrum the NYT article addresses. In terms of institutional history, many would say YW karma is all about not trusting students with their own bodies. The teacher is taught to consider “risk” above all else; and the original creator of the TT program publicly says that most people who finish the YW TT “have no business teaching.” Distrust until proven otherwise is the name of the game both of teachers and of students in relation to their own bodies: an ethos that makes good sense in an environment where everybody wants, a little too much, to be a teacher.

By its nature, vinyasa flow contains no transmission of old knowledge and certainly no initiation. It's dance-infused, post-aerobics group exercise, after all. It’s a very good way to begin practicing yoga, but those who want "advanced" the deeper challenges of advanced practice are just not available within that format.

Vinyasa flow is great--exactly what it should be. YW is a franchise, and should not be doing initiation. The majority of its students want not to be fully trusted, want to be told what to do. Some of its prominent teachers are known for claiming to be students of the lineage (when legitimacy is needed) even as they publicly ridicule ashtanga and students who practice it past a certain age (too dangerous; too demanding; created for teenage boys). That is fine too, but encouraging fear of and hostility to advanced practice is not exactly the mark of an institution where one can learn advanced practice.

And as everybody around here can verify, research shows ashtanga is amazing for practictioners at every age, given that practitioners have been initiated as their own teachers. Without initiation, yeah: ashtanga would be hazardous over the age of 14.

It feels, to me, like the main reason to ridicule ashtanga publicly and tell people it’s physically too hard is that when adept students find out it’s a place where they can finally get away from talking teachers and learn the deeper dimensions of tristana (when they discover it is advanced practice), they will take their pretty postures elsewhere. Ashtanga is so beautiful and badass that it dominates the flow experience, even on the more superficial level of asana. So students get protected from advancement, even though their own teachers probably at some point used ashtanga to nurture their personal home practices.

You can’t even begin to think about “advanced practice” without some kind of initiation into the tradition and self-possession of your own practice. You have to be trusted, and taught to trust yourself. Following the breath and quieting the mind is a whole new game when you’re not dependent on a teacher for every move.

Also, it’s not like you practice supta kurmasana and kapotasana in vinyasa flow. Pish posh on this whole "advanced practice" thing. Don’t deny yourselves.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , markets-networks-society

Retrograde, Schmetrograde · 26 May 2008

I propose the following: believe beliefs that are useful and uplifting, that keep you transforming and creating and happy.  

Drop the rest of the beliefs. Minimal belief systems are most elegant.

From Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 16, “Outwitting the Stars”

Astrology is the study of man's [sic] response to planetary stimuli. The stars have no conscious benevolence or animosity; they merely send forth positive and negative radiations. Of themselves, these do not help or harm humanity….

The message boldly blazoned across the heavens at the moment of birth is not meant to emphasize fate—the result of past good and evil—but to arouse man's [sic…& seq.] will to escape from his universal thralldom. What he has done, he can undo. None other than himself was the instigator of the causes of whatever effects are now prevalent in his life. He can overcome any limitation, because he created it by his own actions in the first place, and because he has spiritual resources which are not subject to planetary pressure.

Superstitious awe of astrology makes one an automaton, slavishly dependent on mechanical guidance. The wise man defeats his planets—which is to say, his past—by transferring his allegiance from the creation to the Creator. The more he realizes his unity with Spirit, the less he can be dominated by matter. The soul is ever-free; it is deathless because birthless. It cannot be regimented by stars.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , science , spirituality

SLIV: Scylla and Charybdis · 25 May 2008

How do we resolve the conflict between shapeliness, or control, and our sense that we are never entirely in control, in that we can never entirely close the gap between the work we envision and the work we create? Hoagland writes that “control exacts a cost too: It is often achieved at the expense of discovery and spontaneity.” He writes in praise of unsubordinations against the dominance of “repression as a useful agent in creative shaping.” The call is not to let anything go, but to allow for passionate excess, and the irrational… Do we admire the Navajo basket, not only beautifully designed but also so tightly woven that it can hold water? Or do we prefer nonfunctional pottery, the howls of the Beats, the delirium of Dada, the splatters of Pollock? Do we have to choose? (A glance toward the dance floor: The Talking Heads sand “Stop Making Sense” to a perfectly rhythmic beat.) Can’t we admire… Flaubert’s meticulously considered Madame Bovary and mark Twain’s uncivilized Adventures of Huckleberry Finn… the wilde-eyed riffs of Moby-Dick and the canny constructions of Borges? We can, and will—so long as, whatever its temperament, every map, every story or poem, persuades us of its purpose and justifies its methods.

-Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination, p. 21

Around here, allowing for vices, letting the little irrationalities have their space: I am finding a kind of sanity in fennel seeds, chewed slowly the way an old man chews his pipe. And an herbal coffee substitute called Teeccino, discovered on Friday at an environmentalist conference where the very fine catered lunch did not have a vegetarian option (they eventually brought me a plate of steamed broccoli) but did feature un-coffee.

Dissertation today. I will not see what the rest of you did yesterday—the film about the anthropology professor whose off-campus, esoteric adventures do wonders for his sex appeal. But after I crashed yesterday there was this wonderful old BBC program; and tonight I hope to get to Steve Dwelley’s latest, which will doubtless be a subtler and more true discussion of what I’ve been trying to say about the letting go, and the training, of the mind during yoga.

Letting go is: deferential; humble, intuitive.

Training is: intense, expert, intentional.

So: intuition and intention. Both in meditation practice; and in writing practice. Or:

Will without surrender is a tight-ass; surrender without will is a wuss.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , spirituality

Still More PDA · 22 May 2008

Its feels almost too late to write about EPB. I am through the figuring-it-out phase during which new sensations stand out against an empty background of non-experience, in which the mind works through things because the body lacks the knowledge.

Tacit knowledge has sort of taken over.

If I were capable of teaching this posture—which would take years of empathetic work with others and a stronger visual sensibility than the one I’ve got—I would be less locked in to tacit knowledge and more able to describe it in bodies besides my own. That is an aamazing skill (the two people who have offered me the best verbal instruction do not have bodies like mine—one is a male vinyasa teacher maybe twice my weight)—one I’m not given naturally and have not cultivated at any depth.

Anyway.

I said earlier that initially EPB starts as a hybrid with galavasana, with the bent-leg calf listing to center like a rudder, and then you gradually bring it into alignment with the arms in the sagittal plane.

That is the slow road and I can say that the first little way of it is easy if you already practice galavasana. I ended up taking the fast road and finding it more interesting in ways I’ll try to explain.

The fast road requires a big strong teacher whose kinesthetic intelligence, knowledge of ashtanga and attention to your practice are ridiculously keen. How likely is it to find skill and teacherly service like that? Pretty much impossible, which is why the slower road is all good.

In my case, for a couple of weeks, I had someone create a base for my upper arm and gently guide the knee to a place where it could stay, parallel to the same arm, without wobbling free. So I rested part of my bodyweight on that base--two stacked fists--while I found the point of balance and, gradually, learned that this posture is more about balance than strength. Once you’re in, the force between the knee and the tricep is the fulcrum, and if you bend the arms it’s actually easier to hold (once you’re actually up) than galavasana. To begin, it was fine for me to bring the knee sort of close to the elbow, though now each day I inch it closer and closer to the armpit.

With the earlier method, I was concentrating on straightening the back leg, lighting up the quad to counterbalance the weight of the head. Now I don’t even know what is happening in the leg, but I’m definitely not concentrating on making it straight or heavy. When the calf is in line with the arm, it feels like it’s only a balance around the strong knee-arm fulcrum. More precarious than effortful. I keep the elbows bent and each day play with moving the knee closer to the armpit.

Once I’m up, it’s easy. I play with bending bent knee even more sharply, finding out what that does not only to the rectus abdominus but to the hollow spaces below it. I think they call that uddiyana bandha. Alternatively, it works to play with the pelvic floor rather than the stuff around the diaphragm, but for right now I actually feel like the roots are a bit relaxed.

Which is funny, because now that I’m working a little deeper in to the series (practicing four of what I have been told are seven arm balances—if there’s more than this, do not tell me because I benefit from not knowing what is next) I am finally—after a year and a half—starting to feel grounded. For the first year I hoped for big stiff guys to practice near me, and finished practice feeling relatively spacey. The shift away from those more ethereal feelings makes me wonder if at this point I’m using the pelvic floor more than I realize… or if the brute physical force of all this lifting is turning me into a more solid kind of creature. For now.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration

Precarité · 21 May 2008

 

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams—the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.   

-Robert Southey

My brother’s first installation piece was a humungus white vaguely-sexual paper lamp pieced together with papier-mache and maverick wiring chops. It was terrible and mesmerizing and completely improbable, and may still glow in a young people’s art collective in the San Juan Islands.

You’d walk in on it, in a room, and feel like you were accidenting on something not decent and not at all legal, this ramshackle orb somehow suspended and glowing and strangely not yet setting fire to itself.

That’s when the artist’s favorite word was awkward.

The piece is named Precarious.

Now I study the sociology of work and labor, and the French labor economists are only lefties I can find in a discipline full of people who have forgotten that markets foster exploitation and run on inequality (rather than being just amazing coordinating mechanisms, which they are also). Their word for life on the margins: precarité. Check it out. 

EPB is precarious.

Not strength.

Precarité.

 

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Categories: astanga yoga

3SH · 18 May 2008

I have been reordered down to the digits, and now the process that happened years ago to my toes is working in to my fingers.

Have you seen the hands of the women who have spent some time in third? Once-tapered fingers turn flat from making birds and sages.

It may not be conventionally pretty, but it is good, the odd strength in the hands. As I have been taught, you work from the base in this practice, contrary to Iyengar. So when you turn everything upside-down, how else will you protect the weird architecture of the shoulder girdle if not by rooting through every last fiber of the fingers?

Third series hands are not beautiful, but we seldom realize it when caught by their charms. In them are too sharply blended the delicate features of our ancestors with the florid outgrowths of ashtanga… Ok that’s enough shadow-mining. (What in god’s name is the first line of Gone With the Wind still doing in my subconscious? Ugh.)

Anyway, my mother’s mother had a sister, I think it was, who was a hand-model with straight tapered fingers and long pink nails. The “tragedy” of my line, which I look down on mirthfully every practice, is the slightly bent middle finger that my grandmother passed to my mother and my mother to me. No modeling contracts for these hands, at least not in a pre-photoshop world. That said, my mother’s hands with their crooked finger are perfect, smooth, and really beautiful, like everyone’s mother’s hands: I love the fineness of her fingertips the never-changing sharp curve of the nails, and the way they smell of middlebrow baby-powdery perfume.

I’m carrying the so-called flaw but both the tapering and the softness are gone. After 12 years of piano playing that taught me to cup my hands as if over a tennis ball—a habitus I transferred directly into my typing style when I had a laptop surgically attached to the ends of my fingers circa 1995—it took me another two to learn to flatten the palms into the floor in a way that would protect the shoulders in a handstand. (Two years ago, I had to re-train the first knuckle on the index of the left hand, because it did not know how to root and this was creating a kind of RSI in the shoulder. I talked to a Feldenkrais practitioner who made me realize the hands are extremely subtle but also re-trainable in ways that can save the rest of the body--otherwise the early impossibility of that process would have convinced me I couldn't change.)

The other thing about these hands that is not mine is everything on them. This morning three rings: a wedding band from out of the Stillwater Platinum Mine, the complicated diamond I’ve been wearing lately for Nietzsche and which comes to me by way of a suicide—one I need to remember—two generations back, and a silver and turquoise flower my great-grandmother picked up in one of her trips to Mexico and wore on her pre-mutation hands. I have small hands and that ring fits my right pinky, but I always wonder if hers were even more small and she wore it on the ring finger. I never saw her hands though, except insofar as I see them when I look at my own.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Ribcage Ache · 16 May 2008

I am hearing about ribcage pain from so many. It’s in the deepest forward bends but also the deeper backbends, a bony ache. Maybe it’s the intercostals; maybe it’s in the bones. I don't know if you're all experiencing something similar or not.

For one person I’m hearing there is a sharp catching in which might be the pleurae—the membranes that encase the lungs. Does anyone else get that?

I don’t know about the ribcage ache. I did, early on, snap an intercostal muscle right off—ping, just like that—the one of two dramatic ashtanga injuries I’ve sustained. And occasionally—if I have a big sublaxation high in the spine—I’ll get a sharp tug on a single intercostal attachment just like the sensation that preceded that tear. But that is another topic.

The people who tell me about their ribcages tell me the ache goes away eventually.

Meantime, if the ache is with you, something else for consideration. In anatomy, they say muscles do concentric and eccentric contraction. In sports medicine, there is talk of stretching and counter-stretching. So I am wondering, if you are stretching your ribcage in new ways that are causing stress, doesn’t it make sense to balance this by stretching it from the inside?

I have no idea, but here are two things that happen when I started pranayama practice two years ago. (Sama vritti followed by the first three ashtanga pranayamas.) First, my lung capacity increased dramatically in a short period of time. I had no idea of my lungs or what they could really do before I started lengthening my breath in sama vritti. The first few week were freaky, but control and depth came quickly.

Second, I came to ache for the inside-intercostal stretch of puraka kumbhaka (inhale retention). The same way the frontal hips or the groins ache to be stretched in the afternoons or evenings as the hips begin to open. The same feeling (!), but on the inside of the body. So where as a new asana practitioner I would sneak to my office to stretch the hips, as a new pranayama practitioner I would take these deep, long-held breaths while sitting at the Wilshire/Westwood stoplights or walking across the quad. Pranayama works on the mind-body boundary—all breathing is a play of "spirit," whatever that is. A lot of what is happening in that practice is facing fear, experiencing first-hand your raw love for your life and freezing it for a moment, playing with the heartrate, tripping yourself out on oxygen-deprivation. Nevermind that, honestly. It’s weird.

But the purely physical stretching of the ribcage from the inside is too nice not to experience. It is like being massaged by gentle water-balloons, inside and behind your ache.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Stop thinking (?) · 14 May 2008

This is a running joke in Vipassana retreats: a few days in you start to have the most brilliant thoughts. The desire to hold on to them, bottle them up for later, creates a hardness in your mind and your body. And keeps you from going deeper.

The reason it’s a joke is that your mind thinks these thought-objects are so brilliant because its cognitive standards have been reduced by days without speech or stimulation. A thought that seems genius in a cognitive vacuum is probably not going to be quite so great on the other side of retreat. You return to your journal a week later, so excited to rediscover the insights of your deeper mind at its most transcendent, and there is only this pathetic decontextualized scrawl, a notebook full of dried-up worms crunching in to dust. So much for your brilliance. (And the documentation of your transcendence, for that matter. Ouch.) 

There are exceptions. I think of conceptual artists who meditate because they want to push back the veil, who while in meditation might leave themselves breadcrumbs for later. Some images and associations out of the mind show up better when you dial down the cognition; and if you’re an artist you need this material. Meditation teachers who work with artists sometimes incorporate journaling in to practice… when the purpose of meditation is to create.

For me… am I practicing to generate thoughts? Should I telegraph the thought-lets that come up in practice to a future self who can write them down? Should I accept the little clamps in my body and mind that spring shut the second I begin keeping track?

Why get in to that habit? My god, the more I can dial down the “insights,” the more energy I will have for practice. “Insights” are, in my experience, a slow leak.

Just do your practice without becoming attached to the sensations that come and go in the body. Isn’t that such a kind way to come in to it? That simplicity, the low expectations… I’m not sure I’d feel so free or so in love with the raw experience of practice if I were tracking it with a journal.

I am just saying what my experience has been.

And I guess, in addition to my reactivity to form-obsessed Los Angeles, this is another reason I have difficulty writing about physical practice. I feel that the place I go in practice might be threatened by bookkeeping. Because it's easy, I revive my undergraduate critiques of reification.

So I guess this is an experiment. Can I reflect on physical practice—in a general way, that draws on cumulative, remembered experience—in the evening without having the thought “I should write about that” during practice?

I’m pretty sure. Insofar as I teach asana, I think I should be able to do this—to take a descriptive perspective on my inside experience without that making the immediate, already-gone experience less real. Or more real.

We'll see.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Parameter · 13 May 2008

Still my fingers on the keyboard the time is out of joint. The aught years have been hurricaine season in academe and even as one of the lucky I’m catching the gale. There is nothing cute about our governor of Kaleeforneeia. The hypermasculinization of the political sphere cracks me up—McCain rippling his jowls and telling Jon Stewart he’s gonna be Hamas’ “worst nightmare,” and the governor pumping up the collective state identity with weird biceps, a spray tan, and stuttering contempt for higher ed. What is a stupider windmill for the insecure boys of the daddy state—Hamas or the ivory tower? Am I making sense? I’m saying the posturing meathead politics of anti-education are monkey theatre and, when they play out, highly inconvenient to my life. Meh.

Ok that’s my best grousing. Fussing is boring, especially when its object (the Republicans’ onslaught of antisocial legislation, which is just the self- attacking side of the party's bellecism) is so insulated from your backtalk. Besides, the truth is I do better—so much better it’s funny—without a net. The truth is the current adversity is energizing and oddly sweet for me, even if I deeply resent the way it hurts saner loved ones.

Anyway. I’m all for using the web to bring my selves together, but for a while I’m going to use it—if at all—to clear my head.

What could be the most content-free, boring, potentially narcolepsy-inducing blog subject?

(this?)

Maybe I will actually write an ashtanga journal for a bit.

Topics coming up on that channel…: revising everything I said earlier about EPB; subscapular tendonitis (oh my god! The man needs yoga); stretching your intercostals from the inside (because people keep complaining about ribcage soreness?); stamina and ways I suspect it’s mental; how I’ve sort of put off going in to my shoulders and why I don’t get to put it off now; third series hands.

This could get literal and mechanical but fast, perhaps upping the ante on my impatience. For now, what is usually play takes a turn at being methodical. Writing can be like that, supposedly... but I don't feel like I ever do ANYTHING deliberately or step by step. Maybe I can still amuse myself within this rubric. Or subvert it, like with the practice itself.

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Categories: astanga yoga

SLIII: time to be small · 10 May 2008

Friday night I lay under the bath and listened to the echoes in the pipes and the footfalls in the outside corridors. Resonant under the hot eucalyptus water I was asking to seep into my trapezius and left levator scapula. I was out late and all excitable on Thursday night, and after I finally went to bed the left l-s, which has been touchy all week, cramped so hard it woke me in pain. Weird and so awkward, and it’s slow to release no matter who puts their hands on it or how quietly I ask it to let go. 

Notes to self: Fifteen months ago I shifted my atlas on the axis jumping into a bad tripod, and the sub-occipital ache and loss of cervical rotation the following week made me become protective of alignment in the neck. In finishing, I rarely put my head to the floor in sirsasana, and in the tripods of third I take most of the weight in my shoulders and hands. Great for cervical alignment, but oven time this overdistribution of work into the levator scapulae, traps and even the scalenes has grown a little harsh. A teacher asked me to step into forearm balances rather than jumping, I realized that in doing so I reverted back—in a good way—to using the base rather than the neck for support (makes sense: when I practiced by stepping up was back before I’d developed this intense mode of l-s/trap/scalene work). At this point I will learn to work inversions more from pure balance than weighting the base with so much contraction. I ask students what they need their traps for in standing postures as a kind of inquiry-based release mechanism; and it’s time to ask myself why I need them in arm balances. Meantime, the poor battered l-s is pulling my medicine ball head back and to the left in the stupidest way, causing an enormous energy drain, awkward lane changes, shameless neckrub solicitation, and a little Advil habit.

Under the water listening to the pipe symphony, and with my ear to the floor at the Masonic Temple listening to the dance of the accelerated culture, I feel small. Brian May, the queen guitarist who became an astrophysicist, was on the radio talking about the sublimity of contemplating his own smallness—how much more awesome to think on the stars above than himself as a star on a stage. I will bury myself in the bath; go to the weekend's parties without thinking so much about it; and see old art with our brilliant visiting friend Indiana that- belongs- in- a- museum Jones. Let the guitar lines from Interpol’s song play in the back of my mind day after day. Who says Angelenos are afraid to merge? I am looking for opportunities to feel small, because it is beautiful. Besides, there may be limits to the old strategy of breathing in to the muscle and asking it to release… oddly I feel that this time leaving the body might be a better release strategy than burrowing back inside.

Links: Brian May interview, NYT on building new habits.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , sound

Beyond the Pale · 8 May 2008

Los Angeles is segregated by ethnicity and by wealth. Very generally, the two residential indices of affluence are (1) elevation and (2) proximity to the ocean. The elevation peaks in the north and runs from west to east—along the raised spine from the Pacific Palisades through the Hollywood Hills, with some southerly heights in Mar Vista, Inglewood, Boyle, et cetera. Beachfront property is prime from north to south, though in general the money hugs closer and closer to the shoreline as one moves south away from the hills.

I will cop right now to the fact that my present studio sits on the most affluent, whitest commercial corner in town. Ashtanga ends before the Porsche SUVs quite fill up the valet parking, before the skinny ladies with their perfect children arrive to shop the kiddie shoe store housed in a quaint Tudor cottage, or the specialty chocolate nook opens in the back of the oh so provincial Country Market. We enter our own building before first light by a side door and, being ashtangis, tend to represent for the bohemians, the working professionals, the world-traveled, the somewhat ethnically and economically diverse, the hot chiseled bodyworker-yoga teacher service sector. So I’m sheltered from the full force of white Brentwood affluence, even as—when I leave each morning—I enjoy the deeply middlebrow string quartet that Le Pain Quotidien pumps into the building's passageways. The double provincialism of a restaurant calling itself “The Daily Bread” in French, for white people reaching for the sense of “the cosmopolitan” they find in packaged French country aesthetic is pitch perfect for this corner. Mass produced rustic benches, artisan nut butters packaged in China, lattes in ginormous (supersized) bowls. Which is not to say I don’t like le P.Q., which enfranchises within a block of any respectable ashtanga shala with a global clientele and has thus made itself—in London, New York, Santa Monica—an official home of the traveling  ashtangi meetup. Tasty, with chagrin on the side.

Anyway, why am I talking about geography of affluence and whiteness?

It’s Yogaworks, itseself franchising down in the South Bay in a way that crosses way, way, way over the line of getting off on your affluence. Fellas, I’m writing this so you will know what the seasoned people in the community are saying about you. People who know yoga, or simply know LA, who know your expansion is inevitable and are ok with this but nonetheless find the current wrinkle extraordinarily disturbing.

The new location is just off the industrial zone near LAX. Miles south of the east-west axis of rich that is the northern hills, down in the South Bay you find more economic and racial diversity, more quickly, as you move east from the oft-gated exclusivity that is Manhattan Beach. Indeed, the new studio in rent-cheap El Segundo sits midway between the health club set on the west and Inglewood on the east. Inglewood is an awesome, historically rich, cohesive zone—home to a lot of middle class people and, due to the heights on which it is built, some excellent real estate. There’s no major yoga studio there. Also, Inglewood is black.

Down the hill from Inglewood in El Segundo, Yogaworks—which in its other locations takes in its steepest revenue from drop-in students—is experimenting with a new visitor model (see another blog discussion here). Traditionally, Yogaworks franchises in exclusive zones: Manhattan, Santa Monica, Westwood. But again, El Segundo—with its unique geography and social diversity—is home to an innovative new model.

No drop-in students whatsoever are permitted. If you want to attend YogaWorks in El Segundo, you can buy a “membership.” So what is for sale is not exactly yoga instruction. It’s association.

Given the way I’ve laid this out, you now know exactly what people are saying.

Except, of course, for the corporate conservatives, who say it’s your “right” to pursue whatever markets you want or envision to be most “productive.” After all, the South Bay is an “untapped yoga market” and you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

But those of us who understand that markets are not asocial, amoral autonomous forces will tell you that every “market experiment” is a social experiment. There is no passive, inert “yoga market” waiting for you to exploit it. Rather, there is whatever market you choose to create for your business. You, mighty corporation, have the power. You have the freedom to choose how you provide your service and whether your “serve” anyone at all. For now, you have chosen… exclusively, affluently, whitely. And the tastemakers--who have every "right" to judge your matters of taste--think it’s creepy.

The “bottom line” in the sands of El Segundo, like in any market, will always shift: there is more than one way to make money in that zone.

When the experiment ends and you change the policy, let me know. I’ll be more than happy to post a follow up praising you for taking yoga back off the gated community model.

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception

Who are the virgins? · 29 April 2008

This post follows up on questions about my reference in Monday’s post.

Like I said, the virgins keep coming back. But it’s a good haunting now. Nothing sinister.

When I was small, they were phantoms of doom. The original story, from Matthew 25, is that they were ten. Five were wise, kept their lamps trimmed and burning like in the gorgeous old spiritual that turned into a blues song: Blind Wille Johnson version, Billy Childish version.

(The way the idea of waiting for the judgement plays in to the writing of this song I do not know, but the minor chords and the keening that come through the blues version—if not the dry, domesticated hymn I sang as a kid—make me imagine it was first sung in the fields of Dixie… pointing to a whole new, and better, idea of apocalypse. The tiiime is draaawing niiiigh….)

Unlike the wise virgins, the foolish five let their lamps go out. When a “bridegroom” comes to them he takes the wise five, marries them, and takes them behind the door. But he says to the others, who had let their flames go out: Verily I say unto you, I know you not.

Or more specifically: go to hell. So the straight interpretation of the story is obvious. Watch out because the judgement day is coming and if you don’t keep working out your salvation with fear and trembling you won’t get to have sex with Jesus like you know you want to. (Jesus is always having sex with the church in the gospels, and the clean interpretation of this is that it represents spiritual union of God and his community on earth). Given all this sex, maybe the judgement day version actually isn’t cut and dried like the mainstream church would have it...

In any case, all I care about anymore is the lamps and the flames they keep. Flame is “spirit,” whatever that is, all over the world all over time.

For example, staying with the Judeo-Christian tradition, here’s something wonderful from a book I do not like (Proverbs 20:17 KJV):  

The spirit of a man (sic) is the candle of the Lord. Searching all the inward parts of the belly.

...The fire inside?

...Keep your lamp trimmed and burning.

...Stay awake. 

That’s all it means.

I never thought of this simpler, more beautiful understanding of the virgins until I encountered Tolle talking about waiting as a kind if being present. It’s somewhere around page 60 of The Power of Now (which, please, is not the most amazing spiritual manifesto by a loooooooooong shot, but is interesting and a kind if inspiring so far as it goes). The satirical imp Tolle writes that the lamp’s flame is merely awareness in wait for the bridegroom of enlightenment.

Even that is more interpretation than I need, though. 

The spirit is the candle of the “Lord…” Searching all the inward parts of the belly?

“Spirit” isn’t something “out there” though when I think of the lamps now… it’s just awareness. Which is just the spark that is here if I bother to tend it. So there's not much of a story hanging on to the little flame image anymore, even if the virgins keep coming back by association.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound , spirituality

More PDA · 27 April 2008

So ok. I took the little animals to play at the store I have often ridiculed (more because of bad labor practices than cultural iconography, but see the footnote I'll post later I posted in the comments***). Did they get dirty? I don’t think they really did, even got as they rolled around on the floor of the yoga lifestyle mecca, temporarily seared with the post-OM loopdy-loop of the brand. If only chattel could remove their burned-in brands so easily as I did later, wriggling out of a corsetlike top that created the illusion of cleavage with my A-cups and left a line around my ribs where the elastic reinforcements had been.

The animals will probably get more dirty right here, as I confess I am mildly amused to have done this thing, and that it was pretty good practice.

So, this is the only remarkable thing: I had a deep practice, on a Saturday, on the floor of the Lulu store. I was expecting some kind of pre-performance jitters, but their edge was well removed by the experiences of earlier that morning, which left a kind of buzz that transcended even the apropos LCD Soundsystem record that accompanied my drive to the venue. I was expecting constant distraction and performance-awareness, but my experiences of practicing as a visitor in certain shalas has been far more outward-focused and performative than this.

When you visit a shala, you’re taking your goods in to a new house within your own community. The natives know the species of animal you’re offering up, and they know just how to evaluate it! Are the flanks in the right place, are the muscles of the belly indicating the right awareness, how straight are the legs here and do the hands reach the floor there? Edges edges edges.

In the land of pussy yoga (can I say that? No, really can’t say that), you have them from the transition to the first chatwari. Nobody has a vision of a Marichyasana D and there is no edge you can push there to impress make some mark on them. The animals themselves—sages, boats, turtles—probably don’t even count on that stage. Just the fact that you are moving on the breath is arresting, informative, interesting, maybe even educating… and least to the people who might notice in the first place.

I could write my best ethnographic fieldnotes here and fill you in on the most amusing details (which have to do with reinforced fabrics and a fussy assistant manager), but the details weren’t so important to the actual experience I underwent.

I lug my laptop to cafes all the time, because I focus better with a little ambient sound and commotion. I’ve always thought this is because movement around me reminds me of the passage of time—which gets lost behind the double doors of my office—and creates an urgency that makes me work better. Time is a shared category of the understanding, and the social nature of the now (the productive now, at least, is social) is unavoidable among others.

But after practicing deeply under a Justin Timberlake soundtrack and under the eyes of god knows how many passersby, surrounded by so much intensely overpriced lycra, I see that the social aspect of my focus in chaotic environments might be a bit more sinister. It’s that movement around me reminds me that the other is out there, and drives me to set the boundaries of my own attention very close. One-pointed, but in an almost protective—if not defensive—way.

Again, I come back to the mantra parable of the seven ten virgins who keep their lamps trimmed and burning.**** This is from the book of Matthew, which is why I resonate with the story so easily, but Tolle uses the story to talk about the ways you guard your awareness. Awareness is often depicted as a little candleflame in yoga and Buddhist commentaries, too. The preciousness of a focused presence, the cultivation it requires. But when there’s an external “threat,” at least in this case, it’s no trouble at all. Far more focused than most kitchen practices, in fact.

This disturbs me a little, but opens up some paradoxes about the social aspects of consciousness, the interaction of society and deeper layers self-awareness (below mere self-consciousness), and well, a certain—ok, limited—potential for doing contemplation in the marketplace.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , sound

SLI: Dirty Feet, Dirty Concepts, Ashtanga on Demand · 25 April 2008

Skipped work Friday and took my two-year-old niece to the beach. We rode the creepy carousel on the Santa Monica pier, me just zoning out to the nightmare calliope, staring into the spiraling mirrors, and waiting for it to end.

Then we rode it again. And again.

She’s so excited by her environment, her huge slate blue eyes beneath hair the same weird color as mine are wide, glinty, always hypnotically changing. She misses her mom and attaches to the thing that most resembles her… a big plushie owl. The intense, preternatural need in her, the rawness of emotion in this, her first transference relationship. Her trust and love for me, as perhaps with students’, come from other associations that map easily on to me. (I am not too maternal, but don’t throw up much static for someone who might want to see that here). It is wonderful to be there for it. I will be her Aunt her whole life. I feel myself reciprocating the bond, letting her pull me out to the water with my jeans on, even though there’s nothing I hate like dirty feet and sand in my things.

What else? This week, the longstanding rivalry between yogis and hipsters dissolved when Time magazine equated the two.

It’s not that a cultural boundary has changed so much as that both concepts have lost their crispness enough that the middlebrow milquetoast magazine can throw them around like nothing. As a notorious, maddening, extremely cute, French sociologist reminded me Thursday, our concepts are little animals and when we take them out to play, sometimes they get dirty. That’s when we bring them home and clean them up again for future use, so our thoughts become clear again.

I’m all for cleaning up “hipster,” restoring it as a properly circumscribed term of abuse. But maybe we’ll leave the concept of “ashtangi” a little more dirty?

Meanwhile, until the hipster/ashtangi boundary gets redrawn, I will celebrate yoga-hipster nonduality by publicly demonstrating the primary series, on a Saturday, at a yoga lifestyle store I often ridicule. (Turns out their labor practices are improving a bit). The friend who set up this event is upset that there is no ashtanga awareness in the culture this corporation is generating.

Ok. So I’m taking my manifestly nerdy ass over there in my anti-brand-name clothes. Will they dress me up in trademark garb to get a on my Marichyasana D?

It’s one o’clock Saturday at Lululemon, and don’t you dare bring a camera if you swing by. I’m feeling weird enough about it already, but I know two hours of secret Saturday ritual beforehand will mellow out the introverted awkwardness. Saturday after SS is when my wheels finally, briefly spin to a stop every week, so it’ll be interesting to see how public ashtanga-on-demand fits in to the energetic cycle.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society , social theory

"Decatur memos" · 22 April 2008

The first year, the question in play was What is this mental state am I experiencing every day?

I was all interested in neuro-linguistic programming from Milton Erickson through Bandler and Grinder to the self-help guy Tony Whateveritis. That was all about suggestibility and the idea that there was a sub-conscious mind. (Side note: the first day I practiced with my teacher and he said “just establishing rapport…” I knew he was hip to the NLP and probably an eclectic like myself… which of course turned out to be exactly right.)

In that line were yoga nidra of course, the intriguing Edgar Cayce, a lot of dimestore self-hypnosis New Age nonsense and cheap evolutionary theory á la Robert Anton Wilson, and finally a mysterious, ancient cassette tape I had mailed in from a distant archive like a character in Umberto Eco. On it a woman called Jasmine Riddle intoned the most potent yoga nidra sequence I’ve ever found, but I can’t tell you what’s in it because I never got past the second minute without my mind shutting off. It would return 50 minutes later, Ms. Riddle whispering to me to wake up. I guess I could try to crack her code but I don’t want to re-request the thing through ILL because my reputation with the university library is already sketchy (seriously).

At the same time, that first year, I was starting to explore Vipassana. Which, at first (shamatha practice) was all about concentration and operated on a simpler idea of the mind than the hypnosis people. For Vipassana, for a practical purposes the mind was just the house of “attachments” and “suffering.”

Together, the NLP and the Vipassana led to a relational question (usually the best kind question): what is the relationship of meditation and hypnosis? (And: which framework is better for mapping my experience, or do I need both?)

The Vipassana people will tell you meditation is not the same as hypnosis. Not the same! Of course they will say that: if it were the same, you could get the method without the metaphysics (the metaphysics being the belief system anchored in the Four Noble Truths, though they will also tell you that this is not a theory but a fact revealed by looking inside, like Socrates supposedly revealed geometry to the boy in the Meno). Over time I found a few very good answers from Buddhist scholars for why meditation and hypnosis are different (along with a lot of answers that made me suspicious), but none of the answers were so good that I remember them.

So now I am concluding the fourth year, and I am still not sure—experientially—what is the relationship of meditation to hypnosis. But what is different now is that I trust myself more as a first-order experiencer and when applicable a second-order witness of that experience. And, I’m a lot more interested in the tones, textures, and subtleties of altered states, and in the meaningfulness that seems to arise out of them after the fact. Also, there is the whole phenomenon of other minds (not the so-called "problem of other minds," thank you), and the ways groups actually share and collectively deepen altered states.

Outside/objective approaches would just quantify things: measure brain activity and be done with it. What if they found that the elecrtromagnetic map of asana (which I experience as meditation ranging from light to deep) is the same as chanting (which I experience as full-on hypnosis)? Would having it quantified externally as 1=1 answer the question?

Actually, yes. And no.

The problem with the subjective side is that once I’m in an altered state I’m not much fit to gather data. And since I love altered states my reflections on them are colored with the emotions of wonderment and joy that I associate with them after the fact.

Is there some kind of meditative-hypnotic spectrum that cannot be reduced to an electroencephalograph readout? Inside, there are other spectra in play:

-witnessing/nondual

-passive/active

-receptive/one-pointed

and others.

Just to mix it up, I practiced this morning with the Gayatri Mantra droning over and over in the background. Swaying right out of my body just standing up, but sharp and focused for the rest of it. It was pretty strange and delicious. Chocolate with chili powder.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Downshifting · 21 April 2008

Time stops in Ojai when the moon is full. I took my laptop and forgot to open it, my cell and was heedless of it. Early yesterday I looked at a clock and saw it was 3, shocked by the horrible existence of time, and reset my ticker to come home. Too relaxed to plan the coming day, or to regret the weekend’s complete unproductiveness. That depth of relaxation is amazing outside of time, and for now only available under that condition.

I’m reminded of a letter I wrote to my uncle and aunt when I was 19 and outside the US for the first significant duration. “The 18-year-old knots are falling out of my kidneys….” I’ve been embarrassed by that because it so exposes my motives for studying in Costa Rica: crass escapism. I projected all my fantasies about “freedom” and “finding myself” on to a country (of all things) because 876 miles away from my folks had not been enough to make them leave me alone. That is some serious imperialist escapism. But hey, I grew up a little that year, became somewhat less the ignorant and unconsciously superior American, and in the process realized that I had something like low back tension.

Anyway... why is it still true that I require a literal shift in time and place in order to relax fully? 

I’ve conditioned myself to downshift to a specific mental state for practice. So many resources for this—all the internal practices and external rituals which surround ashtanga and make it not only familiar but juicy. Plus, I tend to collect arbitrary environmental cues that remind me about my mind and slow it way down. This is all another conversation.

It is pretty great to be able to hypnotize yourself more or less automatically. But while getting in to surya state is relatively easy,  I'm less equipped for dialing down even deeper to let it all go. Lying there this morning I used an oblique strategy to relax the jaw: Body, I said, relax the teeth.

Brilliant. Who knew that tracing the boundary between the root of the eye teeth and the palate could knock you out? So here is one deep relaxation practice, ok. But I wonder if I could go there on another day, when time and the practicalities of productive life are closer at hand. And I'm not sure that I should, given I need and want to live intensely out here on the academic dancefloor and don't fool myself that this is possible in anything near delta state. Unless I can teach myself to shift in and out with a clean automaticity. Mmmm...

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion

What Today Was Like · 14 April 2008

Slept in til 5:15 when the Editor whispered me the time. Twilight and bird sounds were filtering through the large open windows to the porch—both for the first time since late last fall. Oops! Light out? Oh…, it’s not really late.

Feet to floor, enjoy the feeling of having calf muscles for the first four steps: the way they pull at the attachment, a crescent-suture around the curve of the heel. Sip water in the kitchen, where the smell of warmed-over paint—the aromatic sign of summer inside this place—is back, just slightly. Nauli, trying to rustle off the weird sleepfulness that means it’s Monday.

Torpor. The Monday effect: regardless of what combination of sleep, hiking, asana, kriya and (always exhausting) esoteric shit happens inside the weekend, ever since I quit taking a flow class Saturday mornings Mondays have been special. The universal Monday lag that continues all the way in to the first hour or so of practice. Preparation for aging, I take it.

Pick up email because I’m a little worried about a friend who has been struck by love and talking to me (of all people?) about how women supposedly relate. (Why do humans fall in love?) No word from the thunderstruck inspired one, but something from my 9:00 private: Husband is sick, can we reschedule?

Thank you yes! I mean..., Fine if you must. I try to respond neutrally so as not to congratulate anyone for skipping practice just because I’d rather work a bit less today. But I feel thankful and go talk to the E in his sleep for a minute before I trip out the door.

Shakira’s on the Latin pop station and her Honduras- roadtrip- reminiscent warbling suits me fine, so I don’t switch to the cheesy blues-pop that’s waiting in the stereo for the drive down Santa Monica Blvd. It’s actually a little too light out by 5:55 for my taste, and when I pass the hospital construction zone the crew is mostly across the street and disappeared into the recesses of the site. Them off to work, and me too late for the grins they usually give as I stop for their long parade through the crosswalk, when they remind me silently that ashtanga is anything but work. Tomorrow, up a little earlier to catch those two edges: the dawn and the more-serious-than-me 6:00 crew.

At practice, the Monday effect is in full force, especially for those who yesterday practiced led with the one who passed through and treated us with that weird conspiration ritual, complete with a lot of extended hail-Patthabi chaturangas. I light a candle in front of some brass statue, and at least it’s still dark enough for 15 minutes of ganesh shadow-dancing on the wall.

By the time that effect wears off I am still creaking through the Bs, eluded by ujjayi, and interrupted by the pesky thought that even a morning like this is beautiful… and is something I might want to read about years from now if I ever bother to archive the owl.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , sound

Saturday XLIX: Inner Dark · 11 April 2008

A secret reader sent the owls. How much does this delight me? Thank you. They brew a good daily sencha, too.

Also exciting: the Black Keys new record is hot! Yes. Even without headphones, I respond well to the rhythm and attitude of the Akron blues. It is even helping me get my mind off of Jack.

You know I have been madly devoted to Jack for the right reasons all along. But these smug, preachy-ponderous, oh-so-disaffected lyrics on the recent Raconteurs record. What are you saying, my Pasty Prince? I just wonder if you’ve been this way all along but I haven’t seen it. I’ve been blinded by your piano riffs and your swaggering hips.

As usual, the The One Who Will Not Be Named guides my listening. The OWWNBN threads my drive time with new sounds and, measuredly, fleshes out my understanding of the history in delicious ways. I am Potter Stewart—I know it when I hear it—to his Aristotle—types, kinds, classes: he sees all the patterns and shares as much as I can take of what he knows. Which isn’t that large a fraction, given my limitations.

I am mostly done with consuming culture, but only beginning to appreciate sound. This is big. Music is a big deal.

Anyway… I am the editor this weekend. I freelanced a lot of research and editing the first years of grad school, and still read final drafts for a scholar in Beijing and one in Tel Aviv. Today it’s the Jewish historian, who works on FDRs generous aid and asylum for children of the Holocaust and contrasts this with his refusal to do anything about simultaneous lynchings in the South. God that’s a hard side of FDR to see.

You might know, if you're close, last year I had a lot of dark weekends. Dark, I tell you. The different relationship to time on those days, the non- practicing on Saturdays, the dissertation-induced neuroses that threaten every PhD candidate… maybe these were part of what put me into disconsolate, angsty negativity. Because there are emotional-intellectual sources of that suffering, but also practical sources. What is different a year later, when weekends are perfect? Without trying, I’ve habituated some really nice routines—the esoteric stuff I’m hesitant to mention, plus concerted long sleeps. That's just about regulating my energy. But too, there’s this sense that the present era, which I love so much, might end soon. How could Saturdays and Sundays ever be so good without these specific routines, these specific people, this one place? Without my own life now? If these weekends were mine forever, and this little sadness for its eventual end were not in me, I am not sure I’d be quite so happy.

Links? Still doing this? Just three.

● Soros on what we’re in for. He predicted this in a book a decade ago, but says the conditions are even riper this time. And he’s more than a financial writer—his perspective is historical and sees the whole economy, not just the credit crunch. (Review.)

●This isn't The Road (phew), but it's what I'm finally taking from my nightstand-pile and reading this weekend.

● By the way, I keep forgetting to introduce you to Eliza. Eliza is a therapist-bot. I will leave it to you to sort out the implications.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [12]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound

Preachy Orange Little Men · 9 April 2008

My adviser loves the yes in me—yes to consulting gigs that walk the line of politicized research, yes to whatever small country’s labor history she suggests I learn, yes to upscale dinners with whatever intellectual heroes when they come to campus. She is the most passionate scholar I know, more excitable at 55 than the most supercharged undergrad, but also able to turn out a fine dense book in 9 months at the Sage Foundation, able to dive deep on a dime. Avidity and abundant good intentions, my provider and champion in this old boys’ patronage system: so when she sets a spread on her dining room table at 8 on a Tuesday, of course all I even want to say is yes.

Yes, in this case, to Brentwood’s idea of middle eastern cuisine: hello, garlic. Salad, grains and legumes and vegetables, cheese, dessert, tea. I didn’t even push away from the table until after my bedtime.

Something to be said for the force of habit. I was on the mat, doubled over, looking for something like my lower obliques with ujjayi as a flashlight before it hit me: what the hell am I doing here? According to ritual, my first move this morning is pasasana? Yeah. There was no fire to be found under all that baba ganouj… and there’s no way out of this sentence without using the ugly word bloat. I accepted the fact of the Oompa-Loompa practice ahead. Oompa loompa dum-pa-de-dum, I’ve got a perfect puzzle for you… What do you get when you guzzle down sweets…?

Somewhere in standing, an old teacher of mine walked in, set up across the way, and gently launched into a long programme. Nobody could have been a better support or loving witness to the reality of the Oompa-Loompa… the barely-conscious memory of all the times we’ve done this before underlined the force of habit and I went with it. We rolled those preachy orange little men into the canal.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Gratuitous PDA · 7 April 2008

I once attended a yoga class in Billings, Montana. Three students total: me, my brother, and the Editor. The instructor, who advised that the ultimate goal of asana was to scratch your third eye with your big toe in a seated forward bend, enthused about ashtanga yoga:

Is that the yoga where you pull all the power moves? 

The boys snickered. Nodded to each other as they implicitly incorporated "power move" as a regular term of abuse for the yoga.

Um. You must be thinking of "power yoga." Ashtanga's more contemplative.

Understated. Dignified.

Power moves pshaw.

So... I'm finally going to answer those questions about the power move now. Atha yoga ekapadabakasanam. You probably want to stop reading now.

The one-legged crow has this reputation as the hardest posture, in a sense. It’s the last in my programme and I pull it off, in terms of correct vinyasa, maybe one day in two. To the degree that I can’t do it, I guess I can talk out of my ass about it. Some day, when I incorporate eka pada bakasana, the words might disappear back up my ass again.

So! Before it is too late! EPBbullets. I honestly hope they are helpful for any connoisseurs of the power moves. It requires all my force of concentration to write explicitly about asana without going narcoleptic, so here goes.

● It’s just a combination of the previous two postures. No big deal. End of post.

● Well..., if EPB is not a big deal it’s only because the previous two postures once were. It took me the better part of a YEAR to make UKKB and even now my method is a slow 1-2 left- knee- then- right- and there’s not much lift on the exit. Entering EPB without a solid daily triplet of the UKK up-chickens would have been impossible. You could do planche training instead, but behold: careful with that shit. Mental injuries likely.

● Speaking of the triple-chicken, I ate eggs last month for the first time in a half-decade: apparently the bird poses like eggs (despite my reservations about the idea of fried embryo). Or better: if you are going to make birds, you might have to hatchet a few eggs.

● First time I did EPB I thought: Hello, my cranium is a medicine ball.

● At first I practiced more a hybrid of galava and baka (and still do this many days), with the bent leg’s calf listing in to center like a lazy rudder. That’s cool as far as I care, and delays a new cycle of tricep bruises as that calf comes in to parallel with the forearm.

Not to use stupid anusara-speak, but eventually the calf spirals back out and the shoulders accordingly lift, back leg electrifies like a damn lightning rod, and accordingly the whole core lights up. Key in my case is to lift the shoulders like in headstand and feel a sort of broadness across the clavicle; others with less of a medicine ball for a cranium might be more focused on working the straight leg. There is a light socket somewhere up there behind you and once you plug your toes straight in to it, you won’t have to tax your shoulders until you feel like Atlas sustaining the weight of the world.

● About those tricep bruises. Make friends with the patella and raise it toward the thigh to increase the surface area of knee-tricep contact. No duh, but I’m still working on this.

● If the knee wobbles on the back of the tricep and just won’t stay, I can only deduce that the solution is to reduce pressure on the tricep. Either by shifting weight into the hands, or sucking the knee up by some act of bandha derring-do. Yes that second instruction is an insult to Newtonian physics.

● The excessiveness of my verbal-ness here corresponds to a severe kinesthetic dopeyness. I may be able to read emotion/tension in a body, but have to work hard to understand mechanics. Nevertheless I guess the overall posture is dependent on the relative size of your head to the weight of your leg: I have a normal head (no, it’s true) but ridiculously short legs relative to a spaced-out spine. Thus without a counterbalance in the form of long legs there is a tendency to hold the head with the traps rather than with the core and back muscles.

This tendency is not beneficial.

● Also, the very possibility of EPB has something to do with the weight in the hips and ass: men and small-ass women might not understand the level of hardcore to which we curvier girls rise. Props to the curvy girls in third, right here. Talk to me, girls.

● In a room where play is kosher: I love to come in to EPB from a tight straight-arm bakasana. There’s a lightness in the easy-entry and a possibility of keeping the arms more straight. The lungs have more space and breath comes more softly. For me, this charts the territory to come, since the true entry is still effortful in the shoulders and my elbows remain far from straight. Apparently, there’s a freedom in the full expression that will take me a lot more practice to find.

● EPB lets me know just how much juice I have left. [I practice all of 2^nd and third to EPB 4 if not 5 days a week (stop your fingerpointing, my sweet loves; I couldn't care less for your critiques of this programme)—and this is not a big deal, at all, because I’ve built slowly—see below.]

● Having this as my last posture is such a nice practice. For me the only program as wonderful was finishing at karandava with no split. In both cases the crazy bandha stuff and the lift just before backbends creates a chain of strong alternating sensation. Too, long practice makes me follow a stricter vinyasa and eliminates the tendency to pause, fiddle and perfect throughout—because it’s stipulated that I will finish in under 2 hours.

If the strict vinyasa count that a long programme requires ravages your nervous system, then many experienced teachers will say you need to “build strength.” (If it takes your muscles longer to recover between practices, maybe that is a different deal entirely.) I’m still very much engaged with the second series, in which building strength refers not to muscle mass but to nadi stamina: it’s got to do with refining the nervous system, dig?

● For me, these postures are so much about using the subtle body and electric body-loops momentarily to defy gravity. So, the engagement of the nervous system and subtle body have NOT changed for me now that most of my energy is going in to third rather than second. Nadi shodana in the broad sense forges nadi stamina: and even more than muscle, this—the “secret” of second—is the source I am tapping for the EPB. Maybe that’s just me? Overall it's been observed by the experts that third can bring up a hard-chiseled brutishtess in us. I think this happens if we move from sheer upper body musculature and raw determination... but to see the suave feather touch of some women and men who are long-term adepts (yes, out there: you know who you are) makes me guess there is another, higher path through these woods.

That's all I got. This is a coarse dredging from an eka pada bakasana hack, so any refinements or parentheses, complementary experiences, questions and the like are most welcome.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [23]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

The Return of the Inapprpriate Yoga Guy · 3 April 2008

Sheesh. There’s sexual energy that sees itself… and sexual energy that is just desperate to be seen. 

Should be no surprise that an informal collection of teachers (of both sexes) counsel each other on the gender biases that we have inherited from past generations of yoga asana tradition. How to engage this legacy while acknowledging and gracefully altering that aspect? Important discussions, and ones which don’t quite need to have their energy drained away by continual public re-explanation that yes, folks, the tradition has been sexist. (This discussion good because of how easy it is to re-gender yoga, reactively, with an angular, uber-disciplined harsh-girl vibe... YJYW culture, with its ballet undertones, might hold the seeds of that.)

Some participants in that conversation about gender have made a commitment not to study with teachers who throw their sexual energy around a classroom. It’s not like it’s any secret who these teachers are. Some of them get famous because they are so very sexy. I don’t have a policy or go around investigating teachers' sexualities, but I understand the impulse to be mindful about this because, obviously, a teacher has access to what Steve calls your inner sanctum. Your "psyche" or (whatever you call the inner world of motivation and desire) is available to a teacher’s subtlest suggestions when you practice, so why expose it to someone whose sexuality/ creative energy is adolescent, dominating, or attention-hoarding? That’s sort of the definition of uncontained— wasted— energy.

If you find yourself doing your hair for yoga, tanning for your practice outfits, or getting nervous stomach… what’s that about? Is it coming from you, or are you responding to something?

How do you know if someone’s not self-possessed sexually? Well, there are the painfully obvious indicators. If they constantly, tenderly adjust students' hair (my favorite), or gingerly align waistbands, or breathe on you heavily, or seek out a lot of charged eye contact… well… give me a break. How tacky do you want your practice to get? Why not practice with someone who is more refined and alchemically sweet?

There is a part of us who wants to go back for the blatant mind sex (Oh yeah! Fun! They keep me mindful! They put me in an “altered state”!), and a part of us that sees this behavior for what it is. Adolescent.

Probably better for yoga to recognize it even if it doesn't recognize itself.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , power of suggestion , self-deception

Autocrackty · 2 April 2008

There is this shadow economy of bodyworkers ashtangis tend to use to fix the pains and misalignments we create in ourselves with practice. I do love to be touched and pretty much think of bodywork as the best entertainment that exists. No amount of adjusting, manipulation, palpation or deep pressure is too much provided the provider is in the 30% of humans who are intelligent with that stuff. (Yeah make your wisecracks—what are you, one of the people who don't like to be touched? That's another topic for another day.)

Being without bodywork resources for a good while and yet more sensitive than ever to the “ailments” that rolfing, acupuncture or garden variety massage would “fix,” I’ve been thinking about self-reliance and closing the loop of practice.

Recursiveness?

Which brings me to my T-8. One of the toughest vertebra to move, and mine is itchy to sublax left. This is ever since my sacrum shifted twelve months and a day ago. There’s a slight leftward rotation in the holy bone, and a way this triggers the Q-L and some erector spinae, and lets the T-8 slide at the most sensitive times.

Then it stays out for like three weeks while the standing poses rather inefficiently coax it back in.

Unless! Unless I’ve discovered I practice the standing postures COLD. Anything where the hips are square and the spine rotates is a candidate: paivritta triko, paivritta parsvo, arda matsy are the best I have found. Check it out.

I've been taking paiv-parsvo cold at the oddest times lately, keeping the T-8 in its place. Very exciting to find I can, to a degree, be my own chiropractor on this one.

I prefer having it done for me. But like the ideal and the availability of doing it myself.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [12]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

S.F.P. · 1 April 2008

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [12]
Categories: astanga yoga

Saturday XLVII: Complicated · 28 March 2008

Doing some kitchen-practice lately. Friday nice and simple, while the Editor sat at his desk in the adjacent room and, well, edited. His focus is amazing now—locked in, supersmart, mind on target.

On the new year I threw away my anger at the discipline—for its locked-up blindfolded inability to make good on its promises to my friends. But even from the perspective of gratitude, I’m still more realized on a mat than at a screen. It’s so clear when we practice this way—him with the words, me with the body. Each in our element, and sharing a certain clear-mindedness even if the elements are different.

As for my own scholarly-element. Practice sets a high goddam standard. What do you do?

My earlier work was quantitative: statistical modeling. Clean data, nice punchlines. The stuff I’m doing now is a mucky interpretive bunch of historical whatever. More information, not so much of the beautiful clarity.

This reminds me: emotions can be complicated. Holding more than one strong emotion—holding it in your body—about some idea, or action, or person. It’s better than feeling nothing, but what comes up is this impulse to cancel out enough of the conflicting emotion so that there can be a single, uncomplicated pillar of “I’m right.” I am, but also strive to be, a simple girl who knows her own mind and acts on it without sabotage or doubt. Reduce the noise between inner sensation and outer expression.

But.... There’s a lot of emotional complexity in my life now: many-sided subjects and people. Can I deal with that with soft eyes and some peripheral vision, and cope with the many-sidedness of things? I love clarity and minimalism inside and out, but sometimes I have to up and admit that I am complicated and even moreso is the world. What I’m doing here is more than solving for X.

Links:

● An ashtangi has been freelancing (see bottom left). Tova…?

● Do you have a cool walk? Laban movement analysis figures that out.

● NYT: Yes, running can make you high. Duh.

● Scientific American: Careful, Meditation can make you kind.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society

More Lists · 26 March 2008

Some possible marks of a developed subtle body
(everyday life version)

● The arches of the feet are sweet little tensegrity sculptures.

● When she walks or stands, the pelvis tends toward neutral. 

● When he speaks, the voice comes either from the pit of the belly (like Patthabi Jois) or resonantly from deep inside the head (like Richard Freeman).

● There is a self-possession of her sexual energy: she is not repressed and not rabid. She knows her power, and its limitations. 

● Nice posture: his bearing is both grounded and light because the body is anchored from the center.

● She is not a mouth breather.

● The body may register or transmit a variety of emotions in a visible way.

● He uses the breath to change gears mentally, to self-soothe, to play with and release emotion, to get sleepy, to wake up, to govern his sexuality, to establish rapport with others and to communicate. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body

It's 6 A.M.: Do you know where your bandhas are? · 24 March 2008

Ways to wake up your uddiyana bandha before practice:

1. Nauli kriya
2. Ahem----
3. Forward fold on pointe; fingertips to floor; bend the knees; straighten; light up the arches of the feet all the way to the pit of the belly.
4. Sing something wicked, bluesy, bassy and/or loud. The way Jack White inflects the word hips in the third line of The Denial Twist will take you there, for example. Don't hold back.  

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body

Saturday XXXXVI: Easy · 21 March 2008

Jenna walked in to my life on Wednesday in the form of a strong tiny manduka-bearing woman in the 5:45 am dark below my balcony. Wow that was easy. Practice was relatively internal for us both, but we both noticed a few times that our vinyasas tended to sync and our pacing was more or less the same. Not such a surprise. She is graceful and awesome even on a lactose hangover.

Nice when you don’t have to build context or set stages in order to see each other. I’m not sure if it’s her openness; or having shared the same corner of the blogosphere for a year; or just the sense that things that we both have learned in the recent years of practice show up in parallel tracks.  

Specifically: the crazy shit and the joy that comes from doing the ashtanga practice, going through the period when you’re coming to terms with the strength of what it does to you, and learning not to identify with that or with “being a yogi.” So nice to talk with someone who has dealt with the transformation and decided that gratitude, relationships, and letting life please you still matter. And that these things are easy!

Same kind of weekend as usual here, which means really good, though in addition to the SS/ ashtanga/ dissertation frame, RE is taking me for my first-ever manicure—something she’s been scheming for months.  

Anna, who knows nailpolish shades like she knows California contract law, suggests “East Hampton Cottage” or “Dune Road.” Ok.

Also, the neighborhood rental shop—the Video Store Named Desire—finally ordered for us the new Criterion Collection re-release of Alex Cox’ badass political film, Walker. It’s sitting on the DVD player right now, waiting. He filmed it in Nicaragua during the Reagan-funded civil war, loaded it with anachronisms, and cast Ed Harris as the grey-eyed man of destiny. Exciting.

No links today, but the levitating man is the dancer Sascha Radetsky. No strings or photoshop there: he is just falling nonchalantly.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration

Saturday XXXXV: Chaos on the Lockdown · 15 March 2008

I listened to Elvis on Friday on the drive through Veteran’s territory. The 405/Wilshire intersection slices the VA into squares like four corners in the desert: Federal Building/ Hospital/ Residences/ Cemetery. The passage through it each morning is slow: we sit in our cars checking each other out. So much makeup being applied, texts being typed, and me in silence with my bottle of hemp protein and third series fix.

I usually don’t get verbal until at least 10 am, but this week I’ve been trying to turn the words on earlier for dissertationly purposes. I despise the telephone, but even rang up a parent or a friend a couple of these past mornings to prime the system. Friday was a slow news day and I wasn’t brash enough to fire up my aging Razr, so I put on Elvis.  

GOODMORNINGLOSANGELES!!! Looking out over the wartime headstones in the cemetery, sitting in traffic, listening to Jailhouse Rock. The song always makes me think of the utter bound bliss of my asylum-based childhood—chaos on the lockdown. The mind likes to be bound! Don’t you forget it. That’s part of why we reign ourselves in with conventions, and (on another level) why meditation-mantra is so much easier than spacious awareness.

But do the boundaries we set up decay? I think about the kids dancing the goddam jitterbug to Elvis, and the unpredictable chaos of the dance I’ll make today with the wolf children at the Masons’ hall. What it used to take to make a film just 50 years ago (the rigid structure of Hollywood’s golden age soothes me), and how many of those rules are just elastic today. Of the yoga icons in this town who proclaim the ashtanga system finally cramped their creativity and they had to deconstruct it, make something new.

Genres divide. Is that the way it always is?

I am always the first to know when a solution has expired. I give credit to new ideas and welcome new perspectives to a fault. Mentors hate this because it’s no way to build a career; and friends who haven’t known me long enough take it as a mark of poor character. But it is this “openness” just the hungry ghost of the genre-divider in me?

Why don’t I do this with my practice—doubt it, decompose it, reduce it to chaos?

The mind likes to be bound.

Links:

● Intriguing. Limbs of Yoga, phase one of eight. Look in to the wheel. He’s watching you all and giving you this message. 

● Problematic. Aren’t Oprah watchers already doing nothing? Tolle’s great, but “live in the now; drop your problems” is a message the consumer-debt crowd has already appropriated....

● Accurate. Journal Issue researching bloggers is free til April. I like the piece on bridge bloggers, and always take note of Cass Sunstein’s well-tempered jaundice about this revolution we’re making with the internet. 

● All too human. Man thinks he can fly, gets off on his edge. Somewhere between awe-inspiring and just stupid.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [12]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , markets-networks-society , self-deception

Author's Notes · 11 March 2008

I am going to speak in a more personal manner, directly to you, for a second. Yes you.

I’m aware that this blog has a lot of readers, and I’m not sure why this is so.

Most of the feedback I get about my blog writing is that it’s

(1) impossibly dense,

(2) mildly crazy, or

(3) laced with objectionable ideas (about either science or spirituality, depending on who you are—I seem to offend in both directions).

So... I’m not sure why you come here. Is it the effort to piece together the story behind writer? The hopes of catching some oblique community gossip? The thrill of a new vocab word?

I write about a small subculture in an easily recognizable location, I and the subjects of my writing (myself included) are not terribly difficult to identify. 

I feel comfortable with this. I’m a trusting person and this has brought well-intentioned and generous people into my life. It is trust others, as much as strategy, that has brought me into the good life that I have.

But because I am candid here about my feelings and some of the thoughts I’m working through, as the readership grows I do worry that what I reveal here could do harm. Is this crazy? Well, the worry comes up.

There’s a lot I don’t discuss—specifics of asana, teacher-student relationship, my intimate yoga-person friendships. I’m trying to embed some modesty into an inherently public kind of writing. By keeping some things quiet I feel more freedom to talk openly about others.

Maybe this effort to protect the more sensitive aspects of this practice is actually keeping me from revealing good parts of myself and the most interesting aspects of my experience. Stuff that it would be good to work over in a journal.

No point to be made here. But I felt like giving you a little flicker of the self-awareness that this whole wonderous but also edgy and strange form of self-expression creates in me. Most of you are not at all comfortable with the whole concept of writing a weblog, and see it as a slightly discomforting thing.

But it’s not like that. It’s like this.

You are welcome here, but I am going to try to stop thinking about you and what you might think about me.

Yours as ever, (0v0)

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga

Narcoleptic · 10 March 2008

The body may be open, but this does not mean you’re all processed out. Or a nice person. Or whatever. Besides, there are a lot of places that asana cannot reach.

Which does not mean that yoga cannot reach them. No seriously: this is a practice of pushing back the veil into the unconscious.

It’s reassuring when I can catch an edge that I didn’t realize was there. Here’s the snag: reactivity about yoga practice that focuses on outer form rather than prizing the breath. An objection that’s completely legitimate. Except in this case it’s more like a little delivery system for my personal hangups.

How could I not feel this, coming out of a school where much of the teaching is to create cover-ready poses. I’ve been oppressed by form! Praised for “perfection” and taught such a thing is attainable in asana of all places. All while in a highly receptive trance state. This history’s in me.

Some artist-friends have this phrase for ambition: “He wants to be on the magazine.” But in my history, that is more than a funny turn of phrase. All this weird energy about being on the magazine.

And here I am, the contrarian who goes narcoleptic when people talk about physical practice, who says throw away the magazine, who won’t watch the DVDs or look at the practice manuals. Won’t do it! Let me out! I’m dying of boredom!

Seeing past form to breath and energy is all good and puts the focus in a deeper place… but, in me, also fosters this invisible hardness that I’m getting away with carrying. I can hide it because (1) the body seems open and I know how to act calm and (2) if I do talk about it, I can easily legitimate the rhetoric that the reactivity creates.

What I’m figuring is that the source of my asana-narcolepsy is this little nest of tangles. Trigger what I feel is obsession with form, anything that looks like perfect body OCD, and I immediately tune out. I can’t stay around for it. Just realizing this doesn’t make me ok with it. I’m still SO narcoleptic, and underneath that, annoyed by the superficiality of form.

This metaphysical fussiness doesn’t go in to any obvious places in the body, but the stupid truth is that it has a little trigger in my solar plexus. I’m somewhere between amazed and further annoyed that, due to the yoga, I can feel that quickening-tightening in the nerves.

I’ve got some peace to make here. If I want to chill out, it means accepting of and valuing form as not the enemy of spirit.

There is a huge amount of unhealthy obsession with bodily “perfection,” and with postural form, in western yoga. God. I am sure it’s nowhere worse than in this town. But I’m not in a place to see that clearly if I’m just letting the reactivity in the solar plexus do the thinking on this matter.

It’s a little funny to practice hundreds of asanas every day for years and simultaneously hold the belief that physical form does not matter. And ironic that the way I’m finding this edge is not by thinking about it so much as coming across physical and half-physical cues in the body itself. The latent fussiness about physicality actually has a body of its own.

EDIT: ANY READERS WHO KNOW ME OR SUSPECT YOU KNOW ME NEED TO SEE MY CLARIFICATION IN THE COMMENTS: IT'S COMMENT #14 BELOW. THANKS.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , power of suggestion , self-deception

Saturday XXXXIV: Joy · 8 March 2008

Brother is here now. You don’t even want to know the amazingness of him.

And you will not. He is too fast for internet documentation, and too handsome to be photographed. Also, too good for words.

Thus we are nonverbal. Always have been.

For now I function in eyebrow gestures, pinches, sighs, and single-word exclamations.

You should see the Editor, mister structured-thought man, starving for someone to utter a complete sentence.

Headlines:

● Still having trouble viewing this blog? It's a software issue: i.e., the site purposely doesn't function in that browser. Free firefox.

● The spirulina powder I mentioned two weeks ago: nope. My disgust only increases. It’s BAD. Does this mean I need to do spirulina practice? Did I transcend self-punishing Evangelical Protestantism for nothing? NO! Check it out: I’ve got a fresh $25 jar of this magic that I will happily give you if you live in LA and can hack the powder. Email me.

● Siddhis postcast! Ok, only listen to this if you understand it’s not serious. Great overview of different traditions’ orientations to magick. But overall, X-box is probably better than siddhis.

● Ok, what is serious is this. I’m not even giving you a warning. Read the 5-point manifesto, and the profiles. This is real.

● Daniel Goleman, the emotional intelligence guy, talks about childhood shit and transcending it though reflection and relationships with people who are good to you. Short, revolutionary message. [Via.] “Research absolutely demonstrates that if you take the time to make sense of what happened to you, then you can free yourself up to develop your own sense of security inside of you.”

● CP’s podcast on how to talk about yoga with normal people. First: do not tell them you dedicated a practice to them. Especially if they know you practice in the living room in your underwear.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , spirituality

Principles of Owl Anatomy · 3 March 2008

There’s this connection that is suggesting itself to me. Just a basic relationship of body parts—the hips and the jaw—and the way they hold feeling and tension.

I don’t understand what forms the connection or how deep it goes in the physical or subtle body, but I think I can use it. 

The hips are awake; the jaw is reactive and half-asleep. The hips are so open I tend to lose them; the jaw is carrying the crazy trauma of the car accident that pushed me in to this practice… and some nights it still sets to tapping the second I fall asleep.

Survey a mysore room, if you get the chance, and you might see someone open her mouth when she reaches a threshold of hip opening—this seems to happen when practice reaches into a pretty deep layer of subconsciousness. And too, there’s the beautiful response in scalenes and neck and trapezius that signals a certain layer of baddha konasana release—I can only guess there’s some cleansing of the giant trijiminal nerve going on at that signal moment.

When there is tension in the hips, I know this immediately and take it away. But the jaw holds pain and frustration chronically, without my even feeling it most of the time. My molars, the dentist tells me, resemble those of a woman of 40 or 50. I tell him vegetables take a lot of chewing, but he asserts I’ve been grinding away unconsciously for much of my life.

So I’m trying to create a new circuit. The jaw is silent, the hips are loud: is there a way to get the hips to alert me when their relative the jaw is all seized up?  

It’s actually working. A kind of twinge in the front hip flexors cues me to release the layers of tissue in this overdeveloped mandible. Makes me wonder if the hip-jaw connection is something true to the subtle anatomy of more than just owls.

There’s a thread here on “the hip/jaw connection,” but it feels like desultory speculation. These people are obsessed with talk of body parts and may have a “sphincter/little toe connection” forum for all I know. (Such a connection exists, actually, but that's a whole other topic.)

That’s all for the google, but I’m thinking of the craniosacral therapist who worked on me for months after I woke up from that life-altering concussion with my mandible smashed back in to my head and a bone chip sheared off my chin by the force of its blow on the pavement. This therapist may as well have been soothsaying for all I could detect of her micromovements and weirdly rhythmic breath. The fact that she spent so much time with her hand on my tailbone—miles from the pain in my head—annoyed me. And it was tough for her in the university hospital physical therapy offices—since colleagues thought she wasn’t doing anything. They’d walk by and make skeptical little comments.

But she was the only one—amid steroid treatments, massive doses of muscle relaxants and more movement-based physical therapy—that provided any relief, and just at the freaky point when the surgeon started talking about knives. I guess the university keeps her around because lost-cases like me respond, and she is cheaper than the invasive solutions. She was just a licensed physical therapist with exceptionally good hands and an interest in continuing education, and I suppose if I talked to her now and tried out my idea of kundalini getting sidetracked in the bottom corners of the head, she’d feel I was making light of her highly technical craft. Amazing that a western physician could feel in me a connection years and several ashtanga revolutions before I’d ever even begin feeling it in myself.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Starvation, Contortion, Self-Regulation · 29 February 2008

I almost broke my policy on comment non-deletion. There was something I said among friends—among ashtangis—a while ago, and later it caught the attention of another group of people and raised a bit of looky-loo, clicky-click. Oh yeah, it’s the internet. More than just your friends.

The comment had to do with the practice of intense calorie restriction, and what other people's "research" shows to be negative effects on sociability, energy and mind. As with ashtanga, some people have given their own bodies to this research, so we can know in physical detail how it works. But with both of these radical programmes (one of which is fun, one of which sounds to me like torture) :), I wonder if practitioners ourselves should be the only reporters of our research… or if feedback from the world would help to balance our self-reported results.

I commented along these lines because I was thinking of the simple but deep Being in the World chapter of Desikachar—a piece of writing I take as a praise for householder yoga along a middle path and a call to engage deeply in relationships as—among other things—a way to gain “objective” information about oneself.

With ashtanga, very strange desires are born—for lightness and flexibility of body—and images the world deems gut-wrenching become, to us, iconographic. We are only humans—we want to be the most and the best on the dimension we travel—and in the context of ashtanga this can lead to self-harm quite easily.

Starvation or contortion: choose your poison.

At the beginning, the striver-impulse is to look at others’ edges and seek to internalize them. This is such an easy way to avoid working from inside, and maybe to get hurt.

So we listen to the world when it tells us we are being crazy. Say, with the not necessarily bad ashtangi tendency to undereat. One becomes aggressive, hard, and one-track-minded for lack of food… or lacks the energy to keep up in conversation much less on a hike: we might not be able to see this directly but we can see it reflected through the eyes of others. Helps define the edge.

But that is an internal process. To dispel my personal regret about making any comment about a practice, CR, in which I do not even engage because I love eating and need a good lot of daily carbs to do intellectual work, I want to say that I’m sorry. I do have some objective data here, but no subjective data. Sociology tells me the former are enough; my gut tells me they are not. I overstepped.

There is such a fine line for me between honestly reflecting back to others what I see and actually reaching to participate in their self-regulation. Who the bejezus am I? Just another data point for you. Not your ultimate witness, not your judge. Screw me! :) I want to trust others to do their personal practice with honesty and grace, not intrude upon them. What's the use intruding?

All of this is about playing our own edges. This is what I do—consummately, compulsively; lovingly, excessively. It’s how some of us move and grow. Edges are scandalous and rarely pretty. The only way to work there for any length of time is if you can regulate yourself. I am remembering that for most people who are mindful self-researchers of this sort, they instinctively know themselves better than I ever can.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Adventures in Concept Formation: The Will, Part II · 21 February 2008

Headache yesterday. I got all dramatic about it too, after it made me throw up and gave me the chills. So wrapped-up in it, in contrast to the big one last August on Vipassana retreat, when I could just drain some of the ownership and anger off the sensation and watch it go in on my brain. Best meditation fireworks ever, that migraine (not that I go chasing spooks, but it’s nice to get transported unexpectedly).

Not this time. Yesterday, it just made me mad. Today, my actual brain was cavernous, damp and hollow like your sinuses after you get caught in the undertow for one too many revolutions. As I continue to recover now, it’s nice to have things slowed down a bit—takes some of the reactive, reaching edge off the usual spitfire. 

Punchdrunk; hanged woman; post-traumatic aporia. Good time for adventures in concept formation. So, as I was saying: The Will?

This section can bring a certain hardness for some women,  

--he said to me this morning, after he laid down the dreaded EPB and I shrugged and haltingly, gracelessly took it up. 

Hardness? My traps are mangled enough already. Let’s go back to stretching. I’m better at the surrender thing.

Monday night, the dispatch from the ashtanga field office came in—Patrick calling in with emergency concept-formation guidance. Get over the spectacle of defiance that poses as will, he said. That’s only a shadow of “will surging up from the full body of the earth,” the whole creative force in bloom that the angsty teenager cannot even fathom.  

Ok. Wow. Yes. Moving forward, I’d jettison not only the petty "strong willed children" but for that matter Nietzsche and his miserabilist twin Schopenhauer. But maybe not so fast with wonderful, lovey old Fred. Here’s on hardness and will and creative energy, from Also Sprach Zarathustra:

“Why so hard?!” said the charcoal one day to the diamond. “Are we then not near relatives?”

Why so soft? O my brethren; thus do I ask you… Why so soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your hearts? Why is there so little fate in your looks?

And if ye will not be fates and inexorable ones, how can ye one day— conquer with me? And if your hardness will not glance and cut and chip to pieces, how can ye one day—create with me? For the creators are hard.

And blessedness must it seem to you to press your hand upon millenniums as upon wax—blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass…This new table, O my brethren, put I up over you: BECOME HARD!

Honestly, this is just about as appealing to me right now as EPB:  i.e., not appealing at all. But why not?

It’s only obnoxious if I’m still conceiving will as adolescent, instead of as the cosmic backgrounding of Svatmarama and the yogis—the will that is beyond rationality (which Schopenhauer understood beautifully), which is contained within surrender; the will that gathers up and holds your surrender so it doesn’t dissipate into nothing but rather is directed…, and contained…, and ultimately quieted.

Nietzsche tried to talk about this a century ago, and people misunderstand him now as some egoic fascist. But I feel strongly that he was only trying to articulate the energy that, it seems, killed him, because he harnessed it without quite understanding its gestalt. Even though he’s so close here with the diamond and charcoal: creativity that is receptive, will that is beyond personality. If his western mind lost the reigns of the will some days (even though on others the will he described was so far beyond his own personal action), I’ve little chance for doing any better, for now.

I have no will to become hard. But the whole thing about this yoga stuff is that it blurs the location and ontology of the “I”—of the doer of all this very specific crazy shit. Will? Hell, I am too inside and given over to this thing to stop. So if outwardly for a little while it brings creativity and strength and even hardness to the fore, what can I do?

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , spirituality

Will as a Puppy · 17 February 2008

Third series home practice. Funny joke. Yeah, me in the kitchen standing on one leg with the other behind my head. Don’t miss a beat as the fridge clicks on, the phone rings, and the neighbor harumphs out on the balcony to holler the squirrels in for breakfast.

My kitchen-floor practice is growing little by little (Shambhala Sun calls it kitchen sink enlightenment, the practice that is done without constant community and teachers, but I am talking about my literal kitchen floor). I usually begin with the first half of primary. The surrendering series of forward bends, the series I’ve done over a thousand times, to the point that it does me more than me it. It’s all easier after I let that old lover, the first series, draw me down. I finally let go of the little distractions, the hanging-out, the laziness and the doubt.

But third series is not about the practice doing me. It’s not something to which I surrender. It’s something I do.

I’ve been floating this idea that you don’t home-practice the third series. It’s too ridiculous a practice. Built for exhibitionism, for godsakes. Who am I kidding that I’ll muster that kind of power of my own day after day in the kitchen? (V. joked that I should finally get a puppy, to keep me honest.)

Tried out the theory on my teacher the other day. No dice. And no excuses.

Third series is the will. It develops the will.

What? Will is for two year olds, I thought. Will is my first complete sentence (hollering): “Do it self, Mommy!” Will is leaving Montana, leaving a religion, leaving rural culture and leaving the quasi-peasant class. It's achieving shit. It’s everything I’ve softened in my personality as intuition and feeling and what feels like a deeper nature have come in.  

I’m supposed to go back? I left something behind back there in my adolescence? Something I need?

Maybe. Certain things are a struggle now. Staying present for everything, not just the things I like. Finishing the goddam dissertation, which is enormous (and which I extend in order to stay in the place that I love and because the job market is shit). Practicing third series alone in my kitchen, for godsakes. If I was still a willful one, I could muscle this stuff.

But is there a kind of will that just squashes the distraction and the difficulty, a kind of will that is less effortful? Can you harness gravity somehow as this insane discipline teaches you (supposedly) to fly? Can you have a willfullness whose character feels less like Do it Self, Mommy and more like a good puppy (ok, maybe a bull terrier or something) watching the play of consciousness?

I have no idea. But it’s been said, and not by me, that the time on the plateau is over for now. That it is time for building. I just hope I can do what is given to me without getting tough again, without narrowing myself down, and with a sense of humor.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Saturday XXXXI: Love Among the Ruins · 15 February 2008

Solidarity is not a product of time: it’s a product of shared transformation. Religious people know this, and summer camp directors and fraternity presidents, and the higher-ups in a good social movement. There’s a paper I’m not writing (because you don’t expose your friends like that) on how leftist social movements generate passion and unity by creating risky scenarios in which members undergo a collective trauma. But it’s beautifully surprising to see solidarity generated—and quickly—not in a situation where the group is doing ecstatic ritual, or political protest, or overt initiation rites… but instead just getting together each day for introspection. But it happens—you don’t mean to, but you do bond with your fellow travelers on a Vipassana retreat. Mysore practice is a little sketchier—different start times, more chances to dislike others and less opportunity, perhaps, to bond. But what I have seen these past weeks and months—it is collective effervence of a rarefied… but also a practical everyday… sort. And its sweetness has increased as the time grew short. I bet that, now that it is done and the distillation continues in memory, and the water drains out of this fruit we’ve been harvesting, its little pulp will get even more sweet. I’m not a sentimental girl, not so much (though is that changing?); but I feel like it’s ok to build up a memory like this to strengthen your practice as it goes forward, for a time. And that these students will return to the dried-up fruit of our memories when we need to, to eat some of the preserves and hopefully take strength from them.

Also. We watched the saddest movie on Valentine’s and then I slept on the sofa because the Editor’s new cold was at the height of communicability. Sad Editor. The movie is not supposed to be sad because it’s full of postmodern distraction devices and features an insincere, dislikable protagonist. But the Editor is so sophisticated that such devices don’t throw him off and he still gets moved by the most difficult things. He's post-jaded. That’s the problem after you deconstruct everything except for your heart: EVERYTHING might just transport you.

That’s the thing, I guess. 

Ok. Headlines. This blog is trying to get a little more personal, so some of these are, again, from my life.

● I blogged something about all the sociology papers I’m not writing during my time here at Anonymous Corporate Studio—papers with titles like Appropriating a Lineage: Classification Struggle and Karma in Marketing Someone Else’s Guru (a Bourdieuian analysis); and When Hierarchy Breaks Down: the Unmaking of Social Status and Discrimination in a Contemplative Community. But then I was a good owl and I did not post that entry.

● Obama links for internet-heads. Otherwise they won’t really be funny. One. Two.

● The higher being Dharma Mittra (who has a superstitious side, you could say) has a newsletter I don’t normally read. But today the first paragraph is this: “The cosmic wheel is sending rampant changes to all. Chances are you are experiencing or contemplating massive shifts in your personal world. Embrace the movement and flow with the forces of nature to your new destination.” Ok then. So maybe I’ll read it.

● Saw Deena Metzger speak this week at a memorial for Anais Nin. Deena’s like the Topangafied Ana Forrest of the diary-writers Anais so inspired. Imagining their life—in Silverlake, during the most myopic and materialist American moment thus far, breaking rules and living by their art, creating new forms and wild unexpected friendships—this transported me. The social values that are sold to us are soul-crushing! Wake the fuck up! What about personal experience, community, art, life of the heart and life of the mind? Forget your car payment. Stop buying shit. Whole worlds in this city live by creation and connection. They were post-materialist 50 years ago… why aren’t we post-materialist now?

● Oh, and I just want to say that Anna is dear and sweet and softer the closer she gets. She is bringing big gutsy changes to her world and it was kind of amazing to have her breeze through my life not once but twice this week. Thank you, Anna.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , science , spirituality

I Don't Want To Be A Goat, Nope · 11 February 2008

I want to think I churned down through another layer of sediment of my unconscious today, and that’s why I hit a whole oily-black vein of VBS songs. (VBS: that’s vacation bible school, for you non-initiates.)

I don’t want to be a phairisee, I don’t want to be a phairisee…

‘Cos the phairisees aren’t fair, ya’ see….

How many of these tics/ vrittis/ scary buried memories are left? I think we’re back to about 1982 at this point and I haven't glimpsed any of the fire and brimstone that must await down in the denser layers. It's going to take more than foot behind the head tricks once it's time to call in the diamond tip.

Ha ha! Scary scary scary. Really.

I just want to be a sheep, baaa, I just want to be a sheep, baaa

I just want to be a sheep, baaa.

This too shall pass. Meh.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XXXX: Family Jewels · 8 February 2008

Battered re-re-recycled box arriving in the department on Thursday: a stash of antique family jewelry, nestled inside the delicate old wool blanket I requested from the homestead (without disclosing I will use it for meditation practice, having wrapped up to read inside it as a girl).

Sweet mom. She loves her shit, but she lets it go so easy. She’d almost thank us for breaking priceless thises and thats when we were ruddy little nakeds running around the house in winter.

And what will I do with these (unfortunately unbreakable) preciouses I’ll never wear? Thank god I’m not responsible for the giant diamonds or the furniture or the china. Oppressive preciouses.

She comes from middling Denver beer barons but halfway abandoned that family history, and for good reason. The once thriving clan up and sank mid-century like a big tragic cruise ship in a drunken sea of skitzophrenia and suicides, its fragments parceled into lifeboats that drifted in all directions. I’ve re-forged some of the lost connections in adulthood, even as its physical detritus drifts in to my life here and there.

The waves of objects from some lost fantasy family are psychically heavy, but do make me feel slightly less alien in a working-class rural conservative clan that regards me with suspicion. I have the scrappy little physique of my dad’s Irish mongrels, but the increasingly angular aspect of the Bavarian brewmistresses in their old daguerrotypes. The best of both worlds, in some ways, now that it’s more or less clear my personality isn't going to split like the skitzophrenics' do in the early 20s.

Oh, wait.

Right.

It’s been three weeks since I posted on a Saturday, and links are stacked up. You know, Pema Chodron went on Ophrah; the TM yogi died; the aliens in Stephenesville just got more and more exciting. Also, an insightful teacher finally made the connection between fundamentalist yoga and the larger political moment (!), and CP kept the conversation going. And a lot of other stuff. But in lieu of links today I’m going to empty the cache and give you headlines from my life.

● Actually, despite the confusion, the “true” new moon was Thursday. How do I know? Because that’s the day the migraine hit. This is what I get for messing with my hormones. Lame.

● Wednesday I finally went in for the cheaper, more absorbable spirulina. The powder, rathen than the compacted little tablets. OH MY GOD! Why didn’t someone warn me? The color and consistency are sludge, and the taste…. God, if anything can inure me to pure unadulterated spirulina, it’ll be the next two months it takes me to get through the one pound jar of it. Curses! 

● No. I am not on Facebook. No!

● And yes, working for the ivory tower is still a tragedy. Two friends did get jobs, but on balance the market is busy crushing souls. Why do we humans do this—create these viscious markets?

● Yes there will be some kind of ashtangi gathering next week as things come to a close. Do send me your email if you’d like to be invited.

● Sunday I am finally making the first of many meetings with Anna from New York! The first agenda items is scratching the muffins. If you don’t know what that means, lucky you.

● With all these weekday outdoor breakfasts in the yoga idyll that is my life, my hair has turned a horrific strawberry blond. This might call for an intervention.

● People out there are actually running the google search: “Yoga three years suck your own dick.” Lots of people. I wouldn’t put that in print but they’re coming here anyway. Sorry, guys.

● Boys with sledgehammers are wailing on the pink concrete walls of my apartment building. Having a great dusty old time of it, day after day. Either the owner is replacing the plumbing or someone is pretty mad at him.

●The restlessness index climbed back into the double digits this week. Forecast cloudy.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Present Absence · 6 February 2008

Monday in practice, not seeing it coming, I went to a place I didn’t know I could go. Funny, that first experience of it. I went in to slight holy shit-mind for a second: the mind that says Oh this is a threshold. This is something.

When I came out of it (the holy-shit mind and the posture) the teacher was standing there. Not feeding back anything. Not approval, smirkingness, or it's- about- time- you- went- there; just a being there for it. 

--That was a no brainer.

--Exactly. 

Walking off.

A friend—I will call her Jedi Riverdance—said this looked like analyst-analysand in a traditional psychotherapy relationship. A truly processed analyst doesn’t take up space or cut the stream of consciousness by inserting much reaction. If they’re good, they tend not to privilege one moment over the other—there’s juice to be found as much in the mundane as in the apparent climaxes. If they’re good, they know exactly when to respond and otherwise they just sit, actively, and hold the space.

After I listened to Jedi Riverdance (trying just to listen and get her, without half-hearing as I jumped to telegraph a response), I thought of the monks at Deer Park. Their unnerving “mindful listening” thing. Active, but not re-active. Just being there to receive what another is saying, hoping their present absence of word or body language will open up more possibility for the speaker to go deeper into what she’s capable of saying.

A lot of times, that kind of being-there for people—without much obvious feedback—just freaks us out. We want cues to know how we are doing, and do not understand the highly cultivated, chilled-out silence of a mature teacher who is saying Go on, I’m good with whatever comes next. Just go on.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion

Pushing Back the Veil? · 23 January 2008

What is practice?

1. a self-soothing routine we use to build up a stable, continuous sense of self in the face of uncertainty
2. a forum for pursuing a vision of perfection
3. an arena for self-mastery
4. competition
5. PERFORMANCE, duh
6. a systematic daily pushing back of the veil between consciousness and the unconscious

Yeah. REALITY CHECK on aisle six!

Given the possibilities (and here are some other definitions of practice), isn’t it wildly self-congratulatory to say what we do is number six?  

What exactly does it take for any systematic action to be “practice” as self-inquiry? In other words, under what conditions can we actually honestly push back the veil into the shadowy places?

What energies (perfectionism, nervousness, sloth, disbelief, willful shallowness?) will sabotage practice and merely deposit new neuroses behind the veil?

Can anything (asana, pranayama, sitting, writing) be practice? What actions are most likely to make for good practice? What activities are least likely?

Oh, And is the new mantra of Yogaworks—“practice makes yoga”—anything other than a backwards double-double-entendre, spiritual materialism, and a craven appeal to the unconscious? Come on ladies: get a practice—everybody’s got one! Get perfect!

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , self-deception

Eeyore's Dream · 21 January 2008

Singers and dancers and running backs work it for a living, but ashtangis would make it a mystery.

It is hydraulic-pneumatic. It switches on and off. It exists in the world. 

It is the flopping fish in a wise man’s throat, and the Boschian flowers that sprout from his down-dog when the coccyx does the thing that brings delight.

It is the source of earthly bliss? (Is it more than earthly?) 

Some teachers will tell you it is the source of delusion! The maker of unconscious dead dreams. A temptress, perhaps?

It’s wound up in snake lore, for sure.

What is it?

...................................................................... 

Oddly today ESJ sent this:

The mind is like a serpent, forgetting all its unsteadiness by hearing the nada, it does not run away anywhere.

Hathayogapradipika 96

          ....................................................................                      

P.S. For those who have written to say that reading this journal makes you crazy: Well, writing it makes me sane. What do you do?

It's really not that weird. And if I open the text by force, it’ll become an energy drain for me instead of an energy release. You know how that works.

Don’t get me wrong: it is only hyperactivity and good intentions. No truth-claims! Nothing serious. And nothing suspicious except for other people's secrets. (Lauging.)

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body

Serious Fucking Alchemy · 17 January 2008

Can I say that?

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

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

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

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

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

The room is packed to the point of a waiting line, because everyone in fifty miles whose value of practice edges out her compulsive need to be right (hello: what is that hangup about except self-sabotage? It’s ok, we all get in our own way; but we don’t have to keep doing it forever) is on a mat in that room. Post-political practice space, right here for the making. Get in! Carpe manduka.

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

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

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

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception , sound , spirituality

For Those Who Would Yearn for Cave Retreats · 14 January 2008

I am the taste in water,

O Kaunteya;

I am the radiance

Of the moon an the sun, 

The sacred utterance

In all the Vedas,

The sound in space,

The prowess in humans.

-Vr 7.8

 

Yoga is not a reclusive meditation in some distant mountain hermitage; rather, the hermitage is found in one's heart, and in the hearts of others.

The ultimate yoga for souls is to attain a state of full-heartedness — a heart that offers itself in unremitting, unconditional love in response to the divine yearning.

This yearning, the greatest secret of all, is pronounced as "You are so much loved by me.”

…The Gita insists that human life is meant for hearing this innermost song of the heart. It behooves souls to search for this song, and upon hearing it, to listen to the divine love song as it resonates in everything, everywhere, and at every moment

—to hear it through the hearts of all beings and in all of life.

 

This is from The Bhagavad Gita: The Beloved Lord’s Secret Love Song

Translation and commentary by Graham Schweig, 2007, p. 109 and p. 278.

Emphasis mine. Gender liberty ("prowess in humans") also mine.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , spirituality

RIP, Sweet Voyeuse · 3 January 2008

So I am back on the pranayama. I let it go exactly a year ago because I had enough else to do. I initiated a 200-hour teacher training and, the same day, began practicing with a teacher who would bring a subtle deep attention, and another shade of tapas entirely, to the ashtanga.

I figured I had all the practice I could do without draining too much energy off the research project. Also: pranayama is scary. Good thing to avoid.

I only practice the first, second and last of the sixfold ashtanga sequence. The other three are beyond my security clearance, thankfully. Returning to my notes on ratios and reps over the lunch hour, I ran across this passage from Laura Huxley in an old notebook. I’ve been thinking of her the past two weeks since she died. Sounds like she was bright and wonderful, like she is below, all century long.

The passage is a little demented/fermented—one of the chewy fragments which Journey of Awakening, Ram Dass’ initial book on meditation, comprises. And it is accordingly sweet.

Voyage in peace, old girl.

It is easier for me to tell you about non-meditation than about meditation. I sit or walk looking at myself non-meditating—absorbed in dramas and melodramas, heart-gripping tragedies, loneliness, shabbiness, delights. As from another planet I look at them, through a telescope. Then there is a little space between me and my all-pervasive feelings. Nevertheless, I still feel I am my feelings, as well as whatever it is that elicits them, plus a third entity looking at the drama of separation between subject and object. Is that the Eternal Triangle? After a short while of looking at the show I take off to a more distant planet and with a more power telescope I look at myself diligently looking at myself. Surely this self-fascination is not meditation. I get up and do something pleasant, useful or beautiful.

Then once again the voyeuse, I go back to peering at my consciousness. It is garbage! Garbage!? The word inspires me because I use my kitchen garbage aesthetically and usefully… (to make compost). What about applying the same principle to the content of my consciousness? I decide to recycle every bit of it into a thought of goodwill for anyone or anything which presents itself.

It becomes a fun game to look at a thought-feeling and convert it into a blessing for the subject of the thought-feeling. Even science agrees now that “thoughts are things.” Surely if random thoughts are consciously converted into a message of goodwill, only something worthwhile can result….

I understand that meditation is to be undertaken in purity of intention and not for results. If viewed as a utilitarian project like the one I propose, then meditation becomes but another, although higher, achievement of that ego about which so many seem to be worried. The garbage recycling game, then, is not meditation because it is ambitious and it has goals and results: the improvement of relationships, ambience, digestion, wrinkles, etc. It is not meditation but by playing it lightly and constantly, and if “as luck would have it that God is on our side,” it could happen (why not?) that one day garbage, recycling, thought, thinker, devils, blessings—all of it becomes one, all separation vanishing in a moment.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body

Yurts · 1 January 2008

My brother is obsessed with Quonset huts. But he despises yurts.

Since we were kids, the Quonset has beguiled him. (If you’re following the pendulum, he just moved from Paris to Marfa, probably in search of more Quonsets, which do not often appear in Montmarte.) Back in our childhood, a Quonset was basically the most interesting thing on the rural Montana architectural landscape. Driving past one was the middle-of-nowhere equivalent to spying a VW Thing on the LA freeway. It’s a hassle-free, snowdrift-proof residence! It’s an echo chamber! It’s a grain silo cut in half! It’s a giant speedbump! It requires no special skills to erect!

Equal and opposite to the aesthetic delights of the Quonset is the aesthetic mistake of the yurt. After an unfortunate booking at the unfortunately named "Treebones" resort—made in the hopes that yurts would be something like Quonsets—he realized that yurts are not ok. Terrible feng shui in a yurt, especially with the circle-in-a-square relationship that comes from putting a bed inside. Gimmicks, yurts. Hippie novelty. Mindless design. Bad form.

So when I realized I’d be doing my new year’s yoga in a yurt, I had a doubt. Why amid the most incredibly beautiful land adorned only with gorgeous and lovingly appointed buildings would anyone plant this alien and inefficient structure? What misguided UFO aesthetic was infiltrating this immaculately cultivated zone? And how could I possibly negotiate bliss within it?

Actually, it was ok and better than ok, the yurt yoga. First, there was the Arthurian symmetry of practicing in a circle. Funny to see a few of us westerners feel strange pointing our feet at others (folk taboos also—just like lattes and ringtones and pubic hair fashion—travel across cultures in the days of globalization). But after we got comfortable with that, the little bolus of energy we created was perfectly shaped.

Second, our particular yurt had something called an “incinerator toilet” which burned its own contents rather than draining them off. So every time someone visited the loo, the yurt would be infiltrated with the scent of burning samskaras. Which was actually very nice, once I stopped worrying we were burning the yurt.

Third and best, though, was the window at the top of the structure. It was circular and convex. There facing the center of the yurt and practicing in the round, each time we would pull in to urdhva mukha and gaze to the tip of the nose, each crossed eye would pick up an image of that window. You see double with your eyes crossed, of course; and the double-vision of the circle window created for each of us a pair of giant, ephemeral, visionary spectacles looking right into the cosmos. Gazing inward to the tip of the nose; but at the same time picking up that beguiling image created by our own flawed but amazing senses.

So anyway. Yurt yoga is allright for these reasons.

I am back from ashtanga retreat with many new threads before me. And a sense that the year ahead will make a coherent and beautiful weave of them. Sealed off 2007 in the cold cold waters of Matilija Creek and 108 collective Aums; and initiated 2008 with a dawn-light jacuzzi soak and ashtanga.  But this is all for now.  

Happy new yurt.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body

Saturday XXXVI: Koans and Syncretism · 28 December 2007

How many unbelievable remarks can your MIL drop inside of a single Christmas?

Wait. Don’t answer.

It’s a koan. The answer is inside of me, but I am still working it out. It’s probably zero, but at the moment the figure I have is much higher.

I wonder which will happen first: I solve the koan or my head explodes. MsIL are like that. No, no. I mean koans are like that.

And in any case the sister cities Portland and Seattle are so beautiful to me—looking down from the Fremont Bridge in morning light, docking downtown on the Bremerton ferry—and it even snowed giant wet fluffs and R’s grandmothers were both hilarious. Truly and beautifully. So maybe I’ll add them and some more personal images to my flickr, but those images will be marked “for friends only.” If you are a friend and care to look in, make an account and tag me. Maybe later this year I’ll even break down and post friends-only asanas: something I’ve long considered not ok. Maybe not, though. But as you might have heard, I’m in a phase of prohibition-breaking....

Including “prohibition” itself. I broke the 5-year seal on alcohol consumption on the solstice, and that has been interesting. Do yoga and alcohol mix at all? To be blogged soon, even though it makes me uncomfortable in a way nudity does not.

But first, Ojai retreat for New Year’s ashtanga intoxication. The teacher who is hosting says I am on new-student probation (“We will put you in the yurt if you are bad”). The others I suppose are bodyworkers and therapists and all-around Pacifica sympathizers, so things might get a little syncretic. Transpersonal jungian astral analytic shamanic ashtanga? I hope so. Now shhhh. I think ashtanga can hold it together. It’s strong like that.

● Nice podcast about Rumi from last week. Rumi: “a world class thinker relevant to our painfully compartmentalized world… [for whom] the body is not an obstacle. It is a tool to be used for the journey.”

● My god, Laura Huxley died last week. The first thought I had was that she went before I could meet her, but that’s my problem. You can hear her syrupy hypnotic voice here, read her talking about her life here (read it); and the NYT obit is here.

● You already saw this if you read the paper: the dying Indian profession of letter-transcribing. Terribly romantic on multiple levels.

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Little Shift, for Pancake-Flip · 19 December 2007

A few years back, I started asking how-questions.

I was initially trained in statistical and formal modeling—ways of asking and answering why-questions predicated on a world constructed out of “things” also known as variables. Think Freakonomics: elegant pat-answers to elegant why-questions. Beautiful, but trite. The just-so stories of my formal training were appealing, but the non-recognition that they were analytical houses of cards collided head-on with my background in Continental philosophy. Because of all those dead Germans, I wanted more attention to the humanly-constructed nature of the realities at hand. And to the endlessly tactile, experienced, immediacies of the WORLD. Phenomenology, baby.

How-questions are messy and they pay less, but the process of answering them is more involving and the provisionality of their answers seems more honest. I like the idea of letting the data, or simply the world, discipline my big ideas. So it is: now I do ethnography and interview-based research far more than large surveys and statistical models. Even though it’s the models that get the phone calls: the world loves tight explanations. Close description, hesitant generalization: much less sciency and much less useful in our facts-you-can-use forward tilt existence.

Anyway, as I looked back the other day on the first year of writing in this space, I saw a hilarious predominance of why-questioning. God, do I know how to write 500 words without making an argument? What am I, Maureen Dowd-meets-Yoga Journal?

Well, hrmmm. To a degree I’ve been nicely trained that words are tools for putting together just-so stories; and this effects the structure of my thought down to the way I engage with ashtanga yoga and our weird modern cultures of transformation and quests for the sublime. Very 21^st century American of me. But the thing is, I have plenty of (equally western) resources for doing thick description and grubby worldfulness and how-questioning. And this year I’d like to light them up a little bit more, work closer to the ground, and grasp a little less for arguments and explanations.

More of the how, less of the why. As the big shift comes in on us (do you feel it? do you? our pancake’s just about cooked, you know), we will see what happens, and how interesting my boring can get.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , science , social theory

Saturday XXXV: SFOWL · 14 December 2007

The best thing happened! Which was that my brother added a stop to the round-the-world game and touched tarmac at SFO just a few hours after me. He’s pulling down a contract; and I’m rooting around the superdynamic market in carbon offsets. Lots of open threads in a dissertationly direction, and sibling catchup in the interstices. Good god the world is interesting.

Meanwhile, moonlighting ashtanga. Too much to tell. Except that AYSF is a dream and so’s Eeyore. Links from the past week:

● Thursday the 13^th: planes, trans and automobiles hugging the westcoast, business travelers’ noses in the Style Section with this article big and eyecatching on the cover. Thanks, New York Times. Presidential politics be damned, in some dimensions we the people really are living in the Al Gore era. I came within one degree of separation from the great gomer twice this week. Getting Americans to face the connection between their consumption and climate change: governments aren’t making this happen. Grassroots movements and marketmakers are. Which is why Gore is better as a pissed off subaltern insurgent who has faced his worst fear—losing—and moved on. And why this dissertation is on regulation from below.

● End of the year lists. Blame the internet and blame the accelerated culture: the lists are everywhere. Rex has the metalist here. The only one that really rewards me, now the third year going, is the Guardian writers’ individual favorites for the year. I always find one or two treasures in here, especially because it’s blind to genre and publication date and so not just a list about “keeping up” with the world. Delightfully, though, the man who has kept the tiny pleasure-readerly flame alive for me the past five years—with the occasional pitch-perfect tip—is now an official listmaker as well: I give you Matthew Korfhage’s holiday ménage-a-trois (readers here know MK as the Daily Miltonian). And apparently I also need to read this, this, and this.

● Oh! Deeper into geekiness: a podcast about scholar-practitioners. This is just nice: a meditator-professor discusses hyper-objectivity in religious studies, the peculiarly American tendency to divorce study from practice, and the possibilities for “contemplative educitaion.” For her, it was Chogyam Trumka who “ripped out the division” between study and practice. Some words from the talk:

If we only practice meditation we become stupid meditators, and if we only study we become arrogant scholars…. If you don’t have some kind of wisdom [e.g., reading of historical texts] dawning in your practice, then there’s a sense of “what is the point?” But if you bring some light [from study] into the practice… the thing that I hear over and over again from my longtime practitioner-students is that they feel completely re-energized.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , spirituality

More Shiva · 12 December 2007

Shiva, the god of eroticism, is also the master of the method by which the virile force may be sublimated and transformed into a mental force, an intellectual power.

This method is called Yoga, and Shiva is the great yogi, the founder of Yoga…. 

Assuming the various postures of Yoga, Shiva creates the different varieties of beings… Then in the posture of realization (siddhasana) he reintegrates into himself all the universe which he has created.

                Alain Danielou, L’Erotisme divinise p. 42

 

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Both And · 10 December 2007

Some sensitive came around today with the tip that active & receptive, will & surrender, are as Siva and Shakti: we contain both, and cheat ourselves in any reduction to one disposition or the other.

Which reminded me of the brilliant and controversial Wendy Doniger’s words on Siva as the embodied resolution of apparent opposites. Here.

 

[O]ne must avoid seeing a contradiction… where the Hindu merely sees… correlative opposites that act as interchangeable identities in essential relationships.… Tapas (asceticism) and kama (desire) are not diametrically opposed like black and white, or heat and cold, where the complete presence of one automatically implies the absence of the other.

They are in fact two forms of heat, tapas being the potentially destructive or creative fire that the ascetic generates within himself, kama the heat of desire. Thus they are closely related in human terms… opposed but not mutually exclusive.

The mediating principle that tends to resolve the oppositions is in most cases Siva himself. Among ascetics he is a libertine and among libertines and ascetic; conflicts which they connot resolve, or can attempt ot resolve only by compromise, he simply absorbs into himself and expresses in terms of other conflicts.

Where there is excess, he opposes and controls it; where there is no action he himself becomes excessively active. He emphasize that aspect of himself which is unexpected, inappropriate, shattering any attempt to achieve a superficial reconciliation of the conflict through mere logical compromise.

Indian mythology celebrates the idea that the universe is boundlessly various, that everything occurs simultaneously, that all possibilities may exist without excluding each other.

The myths rejoice in all the experiences that stretch and fill the human spirit; not merely the moments of pure joy that we want to capture, nor the great tragedies and transitions that transform and strengthen us, but all the seemingly insignificant episodes and repetitious encounters of banal reality which the myth… teaches us to sanctify and to value….

The conflict is resolved not into a static icon but rather into the constant motion of the pendulum, whose animating force is the eternal paradox of the myths.

                   Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic
                                                                pp. 35-36 & 318

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Will and Surrender 101 · 9 December 2007

I ran around last week saying, in conversations all over town, such things:

I’ve little patience for those who are mystified by their own emotions. Outsmarted by their own samskaras. Why be so involved in and fascinated by yourself? Why be so terribly intrigued when you catch a glimpse of your own interior? Know thyself already!

And it was an amazing week in connections and conversation. Fatigue and openness, everywhere. Boundaries and schedules and conceptions all softened, all over this town, and new interpersonal understandings getting forged in atriums and cafes and parking lots. My mind was not so much with my work. It was with this town and its yoga archipelagoes—the ones I usually avoid in my shyness and unavailability for lunch and off-to-campus professionalism.

These are some responses others gave to my hard sell of the soul.

Well, ok. But how can you pretend to know it all? Are you only protecting yourself, putting too hard a definition on what you are? You contain multitudes—why close yourself off from that?

There’s a great oscillation in this exchange, I suppose, between how much of myself is what I stipulate—what I make happen—and how much of myself is what I receive—what I let happen.

For many people I know—both the academics and the yoga practitioners—some form of creative visualization—some kind of setting of the intention and then being present for that intention to manifest—is key to getting through life. Intention-setting and manifestation is a disposition important to the western contemplative culture since long before the The Secret vulgarized it with so much narcissism, and one which exists just as strongly if less clearly stated in academia. Go back to Shakti Gawain for an early, useful articulation of the principle.

But it has dawned on me in recent weeks that this is not how I operate. Which is bizarre, considering that for many years my life was about making happen exactly what I wanted—the scholarship, the job, the relationship, whatever. This was especially the case in my late teens and early twenties, as I was leaving behind one life and methodically opening up options and adventures for a better one. Those years were all guts and muscle and willpower, and I would not change them. Intentionality saved my ass.

For those who have known me all along, it’s not surprising that these are the questions plumping out between the lines of our dinnertime and holiday party conversation:

What do you want? What are your plans? Come on! Have you distilled your intention already? We're waiting.

God these are hilarious to me. And I’m irritating certain old friends by not offering sharp answers and clean calculations. It’s just that they want me to be happy and fulfilled, and they worry at how often these days I say that I don’t know. At how often I demur when the future comes up. How can I know who I am if I am not actualizing some brilliant plan day by day?

But the weird truth is that I’m not even interested in creative visualization right now. Forward-tilting, active intentionality seems nowhere near as rich as receptivity.

I am not endorsing passivity—but simply talking about the condition of being really interested in the dynamics of my environment. About letting things happen through me, even, without jockeying or asking for them to happen a certain way. It’s about realizing that my intentions and visualizations—the ideas of a single person—are boring in comparison to the real environment just outside my head.

To even begin to sense what is there—what doors are sitting there open—I have to turn the volume on the willpower way down.

Now that I’ve written this out it seems so obvious. Will goes stale if you cannot turn it off and tap into your environment. I do every day this practice that is the simplest distillation of will and surrender—a practice that illustrates perfectly how it works to bring activity and receptivity into balance.

The owl who has no patience for those who mystify themselves is the owl whose self is drawn down into a tight little self-propelling trajectory. Sometimes you have to make yourself small and simple to move around and get into position. But, having done that, I’m in a place where I can not know for a while. I am not operating on a vision or with the power of my will. And, in that, I’m comfortable with a little more mystery, which I find by letting the boundaries of my identity go a little bit slack in order to allow the unknown to talk back a little more audibly.

At least for now. It’s not an unfrightening place to live and who knows how long I can keep my nerve.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

Yoga Is Dangerous IV: Christianity · 2 December 2007

Yogis everywhere linked last week to Pat Robertson discussing yoga on ABC.

Watch the short video, but here’s the central comment:

[T]hey have some stretches that are part of the yoga regime which are very good for you. But when you get into that other stuff, and you’re into a higher consciousness, and you’re supposed to merge with your spirit in with the ever-present god, and gods everywhere: it’s a form of pantheism.

I’ve been waiting for those links to generate commentary beyond the Look at That! impulse, so I can figure out why you all find Robertson’s words at all remarkable.

Not that I don’t understand gawking at fundamentalism. It is a freakshow at times, but this clip is relatively open-minded. He doesn't fear-monger or say yes to the question of whether yoga "has its origins in evil." This looks like a little opening in the black-and-white mind Christians took on during the culture wars.

It’s not like he misunderstands yoga at all. It is about “higher consciousness,” and “merging your spirit in with the ever-present god.” That’s why he has to object to it, ultimately: it really is hostile to his professed monotheism.

Fundamentalist Christians are always confusing themselves on the monotheism thing. Is that they should worship only one god or that there exists only one god? And what about the Devil? Is Satan an alter-god? Just a placeholder for the problem of evil? A minor angel fallen to earth? Are good and evil equal forces, or is it true that (as terrified Christians chant whenever doubt arises) “God is in control”?

I’ll tell you what Robertson taught in the 1980s: the universe is black and white. Every single action, thing, and thought is either good or evil; and there is a constant spiritual battle between darkness and light playing out beneath the surface of all reality. The world is just an illusion beneath which the true clash of angels and demons—the true contest of heaven and hell—is playing out. If this sounds odd, get yourself a Frank Peretti novel for some light holiday reading and thank me later. You’ll laugh your head off, but that’s the cosmology I’m talking about. Speaking from experience, it’s a fun and romantic worldview.

It’s also primitive and divisive. You grow out of it.

That Pat is not standing up equating Siva with Satan and that he’s giving Christian teenagers everywhere an out—it’s just stretching, Mom, don’t worry about me praising Ganesh or anything—is a beautiful step forward. It falls to Christians to become pluralists—to stop seeing other religions as just varieties of Satan Worship. This is a growing process, but many will go through it before they die. 

It's their time. I have escaped that world to ask you to be patient instead of laughing them back into their caves.

Fundamentalist Christians need this. If they can learn to quiet the mind and follow the breath without seeing that as a victory for the dark side, they’ll find their way out of painful delusion more quickly. Because here is the situation: Christian fundamentalists are terrified above all of their own minds. That is the blackest of black boxes, prone to co-optation by the devil, even as “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” Remember, we are the fallen. Earth is the precipice of hell, and we might fall further at any moment.

It’s impossible for me to convey the fear and self-distrust with which Christian fundamentalists live. Because they believe that quieting the mind exposes them to possession by Satan, they live in fear of contemplating their internal states. The person who gave birth to me has tearfully asked me that I never, ever “stop thinking” (i.e., quiet my mind) because nothing could be more dangerous.

The only escape for many is the rare experience of what they would call (n.b.) surrender to god—a state they reach in moments of praise or prayer. The minute those experiences end, though, they will clarify that they have not merged with god but merely given over to “him”—to be “cradled in the arms of the heavenly father.”

Enough of that back-door mysticism, though, and the fundamentalists start to open up. They start to realize that the experience of god is being generated in their hearts and minds, and they start learning to look inward to find it. They start inching in the direction that they have generated culture wars, and authority structures, and reams of scary bedtime stories trying to resist.

Yoga doesn't own the higher levels of consciousness, but it can give a person a break from the world of black and white. Nothing could be more dangerous!

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Saturday XXXIII: Tohu Vabohu · 30 November 2007

Him: How was practice this morning?
Me (matter of fact): The best of my entire life.
Him (blasé): That’s what you said yesterday.
Me: (shrug)
Him: And the day before that.

But actually, SS Saturday is quickly becoming the best of all. Yeah. Luxury, joy and beauty. I know there are those of you who do not approve. But excuse me: I live an extremely orderly life. Did you notice? O-R-D-E-R-L-Y L-I-F-E. Grant me my study in spontaneity.

Just so you don’t think me all sunshine, let me say that I am horrified that it is nigh on December. I am talking dark, existential, dread-laden horror. Time is satan. Dark and fleeting. Nothing happens, and then you’re old. You feel like the past is more real than today, the present is happening without even pausing to let you realize it and the future is going to crush you. Kill you slow and grind you to dust. It’s going to rush in and steal what you think you have as soon as it possibly can.

You feel like time is some human invention gone horribly wrong and all it has to offer you is darkness and dread. At least this is how you feel if you are me. I wonder if this is a basic existential condition… or a dissertation condition?

The only way to leaven it is to love what is. Love it like crazy because the dread makes you love. Sometimes looking into the existential maw, embracing the void, is the shortest route to living in the now. Lightly. XO

Links:

● Naked Indian bodies, manual labor, molten metal, and one terrible colonial product supply chain. I hesitate to link to Shakti Industries, because this stuff is just asking you to get off and there should be a question of why this is so aesthetically absorbing. But it’s a good story, and the slideshow will definitely make you respond.

● So, Sally Kempton. Dive-bombing the Esquire readership with feminist manifestoes in her 20s, dressing down a young Hefner on TV, and generally being smart smart smart and sexy in New York in the days of the new left. Then she accidentally has a peak experience in her living room or something. Shit. Meets Muktananda, goes east, disappears for a long time. Comes back integral and starts talking. Not about turning away from leftism, but about expanding it so it’ll actually work. Here she is in conversation with Ken Wilber about the oldschool hostility to any kind of interiority (even psychoanalysis) as somehow inimical to social change, about problems in the Dawkins-Hitchens agenda, about philosophical maturations that need to happen in order for the left to get itself out of its little old box. And with hints (in my interpretation) toward a spirituality that’s concrete—that’s not just about occasional altered states, but is practical and daily and not split off as woo-woo. (More.) 

● The wonderful thing Morgan Spurlock is doing has pretty well made the rounds by now. This is even nicer: Christians themselves calling out the greedy affluence, the grasping, and the nauseating amount of crap that will weigh down my own holiday this year in the heart of WWJB land. If you haven’t seen rich suburban American Christians, there’s a level of obsessive consumption disorder you’ll never understand. Lucky.

● You know the science writer Natalie Angier? Nice. Here she is elaborating two answers to the question: Why do we make art? There’s the sex answer—individuals create things to display what they have to offer genetically and to garner attention (this kind of evolutionary reduction is in these days... yawn)—and the communal answer. She loves the latter enough to put it beautifully. I like the hue this gives to the auteur-focused conversations we had here this week.

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Commodification and Pushback--Subcultures and Scenes · 26 November 2007

Bear with me here.

I’m back from utopia, where subcultures still hide in the hills and cityfolk come around looking for a piece of the enlightened ones, the creators, the real libertarians. Big Sur. You can feel the almost-serene pushback—a quiet self-preservation—from the people who get it as the San Franciscans in beemers come around for fine fine food and flickr-ready views. My guy Henry Miller (whose get-a-piece-of-me memorial library does its best to discourage women from inheriting him, what with all their sick, tired, parasitic man-on-man hagiography) has wonderful things to say about utopian subcultures and how terribly real they can get, but here is someone else who has interesting thoughts about NorCal enclaves. Wm Gibson via Warmhunting, from 2003.

You’ve been talking for a long time now about the demise of sub-cultures, that they’re co-opted by marketing forces before they become established. Can you give me an example?

Well, my model for that has always been how long it took to recommodify whatever it was that was happening in the 60s and sell it back to the people who were actually living it. It took three or four years. It was still relatively clumsy. By 1977, it only took about a year and a half for punk to be recommodified and sold back. And whatever was going on in Seattle with Nirvana — from its discovery it took about three months before there were models on the catwalks in Paris wearing clothing based on what these kids wore on Sentinel Hill in Seattle.What that says to me is that the future of that stuff is veal. It never gets to mature because it’s too valuable. And I suspect it’s because whatever that was was an organic function of industrial civilization. We are now post-industrial and we no longer grow bohemias in the same way. I’m wondering where they are? Where’s the new equivalent?

Well, utopians, bohemians, and ex-pats at heart: can we really get off the grid now? Has Gibson finally lost the pulse—failed to see that now subcultures engage in SELF-commodification (start a record label, trend-set in your own community, get yourself one way or another “on the magazine” as my brother the artist of information systems likes to say). Or are there still subcultures that are a refuge? Is ashtanga a place for self-production or, as the Miltonian might have it, for a kind of self-consumption? Is the market at our door?

Well, god knows plenty want to be ashtangis. Thanks, Gwyneth. But the funny thing is that once most people get on the mat they’ll never hack it. Boredom will get you if weakness doesn’t get you first.

So increasingly I swim in a soup of commodities and images and attitudes “inspired by” this practice. So what. It’s tacky, but do I have to buy in… and let my subculture be sold back to me as Gibson says?

One thing that’s coming up in the dissertation is that, as I see it, commodification in cultural fields is always partial. Yes, it is a pernicious devil of a tendency, but with apologies to my Uncle Karl there is always pushback. Not in a latent revolution: in the now. Yes the market gets the hell into our home lives and our relationships both to our families and to the land—there is always an economic side to these things. But at the same time, there is reclamation. Stillness, even.

There is the possibility of not re-buying—and not merely producing—ourselves. And I don’t think I have to go to some remote enclave place to get that. If I can show up and practice sincerely, finding community among the dedicated ones in a room full of all kinds of intentions and inside an entity leading the world in yoga commodification, as I did this morning, then there is definitely a self-contained-ness, and a power of non-grasping, that this practice generates. So interesting to practice contentment and stillness in a world that wants to package those qualities into things and sell them back to you as magazines and t-shirts. So interesting to see that there is a little bitty subculture that's not moved by it, sitting right there at the center.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Inverted, Again · 20 November 2007

I returned from Denver two months ago now, the night of September 17 and the week of the equinox. The next day, after 22 months of 6 am beginnings, I spontaneously shifted to an evening practice. (I was needing a shake in more ways than this, as has been noticed and remedied)

The change from a 6 am to a 5 pm re-set time completely inspired and supported my life. Hello, inverted world.  

Just before I switched, this is what was going on. Practice had become zero-sum. I was pouring energy in to it and into the room, but not getting energy out. Finishing with a dull mind. For a long time, practice basically increased my life by greasing down my bones, making my muscles into useful little things, and smothering me in endorphins. But suddenly this fall everything was off.

When I switched to the evening, this is what it was like. I’d get up when a little light came in the windows, and milk the practice habits of focus and freedom from food-distraction for a solid three or four hours. Right there at home. Have a late breakfast, then do whatever researchy administrivia until driving to practice at 4:30. I sealed off my office at school (where the Kandinsky pages stayed stuck on September and my old plant kept the faith somehow), and didn’t put on real clothes all fall. Dissertators are known to be neurotic little moles, so nobody got too concerned.

All this time, evening practice was fucking gorgeous. Much stronger and more focused than my predictive stereotypes—that evenings are tired, hypermobile and littered with the day’s thought-refuse. And I’ve gotten this biofeedback thing going with my evening teacher: her eyes are so good, and her empathetic understanding of what I need to heal and strengthen the systems of the pelvis is so accurate. She sees the smallest movements in the hips and belly—movements my proprioception either doesn’t catch or gets wrong—and feeds it back. And somehow creates a space where I can calmly work my ass off. Her method is to heal her students by strengthening them.

I’ve laid down more muscle this fall than ever—partly because I was stalking kukkutasana but also (maybe) because I was eating closer to practice. I didn’t have to catabolize or simply draw energy from the breath to lift in to this or that, but could feed off whatever I’d eaten a mere 6 hours before.

The space has been dim and mahogany and radiantly warm, with me and some regulars whose energy I now know better than most any other co-practitioners ever. A couple are super-transparent and subtly perceptive at the same time, and we’ve played with each others’ energy in ways that generated all kinds of heat and some good jokes. This is what led me to ask if practicing together is intimate: hearing my friend across the aisle chuckle when I licked sweat off my nose in a transition—knowing we’re in this together even though I cannot really see him for lack of lenses. Knowing he’ll catch my risen amusement in some sound or movement that is both part of my practice and a response to him.

Over the months, my energy shifted. When the time change brought earlier sunrises, I slept through them. The morning energy spike got dull, because the truth is that I love asana more than research. No shit. Dissertations are hard, and you try to get through them by running away from them. It can seem like a good strategy.

So I practiced in the morning last week, not because I wanted change but I knew the visiting teacher would tweak my vinyasa up to the most recent specs. Ok ok, whatever; The method is only an end in itself insofar as you have no life. But what does this different practice do for my work?

Well… it does a lot. It’s like I flipped over the hourglass a second time and clicked right in to a new writing phase. A little bit of unfamiliarity with my life sharpens my mind. Just a little bit. Too much unfamiliarity would be distracting.

It’s wonderful. I feel so much more awake and I have renewed passion for the questions at hand. I have to say yes to this.

I am all for consistency in asana practice, but writing has to run the show right now. Between relationships, practice and work, it is of course the latter that is least personal and least easy. I want to be in love with the inquiry on an intellectual level—and it’s the deepest satisfaction when I can move from that feeling—but this work is so warped by strategy and professionalism that the questions sometimes feel arch or facetious. When I merely take the questions at face value for the sake of contributing to knowledge: this is where the bullshit lives. When don’t give this thing the best of my energy, my motives can become overly pragmatic and instrumental in a way that makes me despise the game for telling me how to be.

I can’t do work that is motivated by competition and getting ahead. I can’t. I won’t. I will attack such things from the inside: the pattern is all to clear and I can’t say it’s a bad one. Ironically, this comes from many years as a wage-worker (clerking, sales, waitressing) where I could sign over my body but keep my soul to myself. The inverted-world man on my shoulder would be disappointed at that subservience. Still, when I feel a deeper part of me is owned by mis-motivated work, I get rebellious.

For all the instrumentalism, there are heroes doing social science—amazing people who are in it just for the desire to find shit out and not for the prestige or the security. I work with a few of them, one of whom is just autistic enough to be perfect.

The thing is that I can always create a meta-critique. This is my mode of self-deception, and a way to keep from fulfilling the work into which I have written myself—the work I’ve spent six years creating myself to create. In every subtlety and back room of my subconscious, I’ll tend to devalue my work on the micro level. So insofar as tweaking the vinyasa (otherwise known as the “order of putting things together”) on the macro level keeps me conscious, I have to do that.

This inverting pattern, for now, is the best thing I can figure out. A method for making practice give energy to my life, to make life more full than it would be otherwise.

Maybe there’s a clue here about why they’re always tweaking the vinyasa at the AYRI.

Hey suckers—made you look.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

Saturday XXXII: Stop Owl Commodification · 16 November 2007

I found the ecstatic grassroots movement I've been imagining. Uh oh. But I’m not going to tell you about it. Except to say it involves a secret society and does not involve naked yoga.

Returned to morning practice this week, which included Thursday contortions next to an intriguing New York ashtangi poet met through this medium. Somewhere between post-practice Fred Segal and Real Food Daily brunch, I realized I'd been charmed. Sometimes RL is so much better.

I have to admit morning practice and the rhythms it creates for me are what I love best, even though I have adored the evenings this fall. I’ve done six weeks of all 5:00 practices, milking the habituated morning energy spike for dissertationly purposes. Gradually over the weeks this has shifted my energy eveningward, and the mornings have slowed. The experiment has showed me so much about my choices in energy-distribution: between relationships, work and practice. About practicing to give energy to my life rather than letting practice be the main event. I’ll try to write more about this before it is gone.

● I am kind of excited about the little movie about bob dylan this week.

● Speaking of sentimental wonders: a re-realease of songs a decade old at the RJM Digital Archive. He never used to talk to me back in the days when he was making these recordings. I was generally pissed off and what people called "intense" while he was ethereal and lovey. Tendencies which have tempered on both sides. But one December afternoon after my shift at the library desk I passed him under the pine trees and asked for a cassette. Listened throughout the Christmas break, out there driving a Dodge truck on icy Montana roads. Up to the ski area for days alone on Red Lodge Mountain, and down to the bars in town for nights with my old nemesis—the only other one of us rural kids who escaped, albeit in her case to a worser fate. That’s where these songs go for me.

● What else? Well, here is some trouble. Some good discussion earlier in the week. If you come around, you better listen at least as sharply as you soapbox. We are so done with recycled opinions and 2004-era rants.

● Oh, and whoever sold my address to Yoga Pura also gave it to Anthropologie, whose catalog just arrived.

I tolerated it this summer when the outer hipstosphere switched from swallows to owls as their cute-but-disturbing bird of choice (ho hum). But now there are owl candles, an owl purse and (yes, Tova) an owl apron in the Anthro catolog. I mention this by way of saying to those of you who might be tempted: I don’t actually like owls. Please no owl things for the holidays. (Unless it's something really good, you know.) Otherwise, STOP OWL COMMODIFICATION.

That’s enough linking. I don’t care what else was being said in the world this week.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , sound

Saturday XXXI · 10 November 2007

Not much going on here. Taking the car to the shop. Taking the skates to the beach. Taking the Editor to a contemporary dance thing, which I don’t expect to understand all that well. No contortion today as there is a small piece of concrete occupying my stomach and making no signs of assimilating.

Last month I found an independent, spotless coffee shop with loose genmaicha and sturdy tables, where I’ve had a few excellent Sunday afternoons. But then I had my 2-year old niece and her folks meet me there last week. I am always overlooking distance, assuming that people experience the world in basically the same ways. But the truth is anyone in my family is so culturally distant that there are few public spaces we can equally share. Sad. I didn’t care that they were loud and filthy because delighted to see them, but the owner was horrified. I suppose my BIL rolling in and ordering “a Diet” and a mass of whipped cream in a cup for the kid didn’t set the best tone. The owner shuddered at the mess when they left.

The episode complicated our business relationship. Both because I felt rotten about it, and because I was disappointed at her lack of sophistication. Does it really have to spoil your aesthetic identity to have some simple people pass through your space (especially if escorted by your regulars)? I could ease up in that way too. A lot. Flirting with cultural boundaries (of inter-class mingling, food, and acceptable exercise forms) is the theme this week for that reason. Meanwhile, I need a place to work on Sundays.

After months of asana-free moondays and an abnormally grouchy afternoon, I broke down and took a flow class last night. Full on corporate flow, with music (Dntel, Radiohead, Elliot Smith and… this?). Interesting that mention or marketing of Diwali was nowhere to be seen at the corporate studio, which I suppose is a good thing. Very sweet and skilled teacher, although I see after a long break from the flow world, the distance between this and my practice is laaaarge. Still it did take the edge off the monkeymind. I think this is because the astanga method has trained me decently well: just assuming some postures does this pavlovian thing of mind calming and body releasing. But I doubt it would have that effect if I weren’t trained in a silent, contemplative, non-performative version of asana practice.

I’m wondering whether the American invention of Flow yoga might have more in common with ecstatic dance, modern choreography and pilates than with krishnamacharyan contemplative asana practice. Flow yoga is either self-expressive or transports you out of yourself entirely. Contemplative asana is different in the mind-state it cultivates and in its intention. Both are good. I probably need to dip into the strange subculture of spontaneous ecstatic dance—not “trance dance” (which sounds horrific, though please correct me if you like) but the grassroots stuff akin to raving—in order to understand better how it relates to this unique American creation of Hatha Flow.

Definitely a crack in my cultural comfort zone, that ecstatic dance stuff....

● Mary Taylor and Richard Freeman started a blog. When I lived alone last year, on rare (and I do mean rare) nights I’d want to hear the sound of another voice in my house. R's recordings are good for that. I have not yet listened to those archived here.  

● Junot Diaz is so good. So fucking good. There’s been a ton of press, including a boring interview with Terri Gross. But this week, Michael Silvelblatt (the national treasure) truly got him talking. About how reference-dense writing is encyclopedic of the world; about the fear of abandoning the OLD stories and the OLD masculinity because this means a man has to put his body out into the world and be so much more open to whatever experience is there for him. About Trujillo’s rape-dictatorship and the de-fetishization of sex. And about reading as a collective act. “Reading is a debt we owe to a collective even though we may practice it alone.” LISTEN. 

● For Norman Mailer, who is dead today. A short 1971 news story in which he condescends to feminists ("diaper Marxists") at Town Hall, with all the NY literati there to watch. A comic snapshot of the ideas and alliances of the day. “We broke our hearts trying to keep our aprons clean.”

● The Blog Readibility Test. I am Junior High School Level. Nice!

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [21]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body

My Two Curves · 5 November 2007

Curiosity : New Learning :: Nostalgia : Repetition

So it has been a long time since I advanced in the series. And people are starting to suggest it’s time I take on the next pose.

Nono noono nonoooooonononooo.

And sell myself out of one of my few remaining chances to participate in a ritual ashtanga moment? Chances are that I’ll add a posture another ten or at most twenty times in the next twenty or thirty years. Learning a posture is this obvious, almost comically obvious, moment of imitation shaktipat built in to the practice at intervals; and in my old age I’m coming to see it as a very sweet thing.

In a practice that is all about intense personal experience, that hinges on meaningful relationships of student and teacher (including where the student takes the method itself to be her teacher), advancing to the next pose is this no-duh moment of live transmission. It’s a mini-enactment of the whole method.

I did not always care about that at all. When the learning curve on the physical level was steeper, I had more curiosity for what was next and at the same time longed for challenges. But the curiosity has leveled off as the physical work becomes less about new openings and new powers and more about refinement. There’s a ton of work left before I’ll master my practice such as it is (hello, mayurasana), but it is quieter work than it used do be.

As I show up every day to repeat--and try to refine--what I know, my nostalgia for the method is a rising trend. It's pretty weird.

I don’t think the word for my condition is “reverence” or “submission.” It’s not that I’m afraid or feel wrong about giving myself a pose. It’s that the longer I spend in this practice the more I feel the strength and sweetness of its master, SKPJ, and the way he’s personalized the method by transmitting it individually to so many. I don’t have any pretention to a personal relationship with the man and don’t regret this, but do have an increasing gratitude for the whole tradition. For me it’s not that learning from a teacher is “correct”: it’s that it is awfully sweet. And because much of my practice during my life will be without someone steeped in the subculture, I’m pooling my nostalgia around the obvious symbolic touchstones.

So! There I go shrouding power in foofy cultural nonsense in order to legitimate a hierarchy. That is actually a great counter-argument to everything I'm feeling. There exists the following criticism of the ashtanga method: that teachers become old-school hoarders of the crucial knowledge. That they dole it out in ways that increase their own authority and students’ practical dependence and emotional subservience. I take the point. I’ve not been subject to this kind of thing, though I am sure it happens. But the possibility of a messy dynamic is what I accept for the benefits of not having to administrate the program myself. For someone like me who lacks the kinesthetic brilliance to practice spontaneously in a way that is both quiet and challenges physical boundaries, administration is annoying mindstuff. It’s a gift when someone will do that pain-in-the-ass thinking and planning and fussing for me. This is why I see teaching so much more as service than as control.

I suppose this knowledge-hoarding criticism is most valid to those who see ashtanga as a set of postures rather than as a living tradition. If it’s just postures, then the method should be Do What Thou Wilt When Thou Wilt.

But it’s not a set of postures. It’s an entire subculture. Subculture without postures is tourism; postures without subculture is pilates. Or something like that.

Ashtanga’s a subculture the same as punk rock or skateboarding. And while I used to experience it with a vigorous curiosity, now I feel more like a sentimental old girl who thinks that for all its neuroses and pathologies, the more traditional ways are meaningful enough that I’d like to re-enact them the same way I do any other received tradition.

Maybe this is just what happens to you when you do the same exact thing day after day for too many years. You fall weirdly in love with all of it.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XXX · 3 November 2007

On this date in 1976, a 28-year-old C.E.J. drove a white VW Beatle through the snowed-in cornfields of Yellowstone County, past the feedlot with the cattle billowing steamy breath in the cold, five miles down Airport Road past the hilltop cemetery, around the corner and down past the country doctor’s house into Laurel, MT, a railroad town with the highest national rate of alcoholism, if not poverty and Evangelicalism rates to match. She parked at the high school, home of the Laurel Locomotives, and hauled herself inside to the voting booths set up in the gym with their levers and their curtains. They cut her to the front of the line.

I like to believe she voted for Carter, but the truth is it was probably Ford… though the negation, as they say, was in her belly.

Later that day she had her first baby, and took it home to her fireplace-heated, century-old Ranch house under giant cottonwoods on a rise above Canyon Creek. And the two of them would pretty much stay there in that grove, safe and doing nothing but cooing and eating and rolling around in front of the fire or out under the trees, for the next three years.

Thank you, Mom. I’m sorry I don’t really remember it.

I was increasingly together this week, relatively clear in mind and action. Please let it be an emerging trend. And I practiced a little harder than usual. By Thursday the edges were finally pretty well burnished and I thought somewhere in standing, “Is this what it takes to get to surrender?” It feels nice to be spent like that on a Thursday, spent in a Friday way.

But then right at the end, without putting any particular try into it, I made a convincing UKK-B for the first time since GT knelt down and talked me into it in August. Hello. I wonder if that is a regular part of my world now? I told the Editor that I had a feeling UKKB was really miiiiine and he said not to be a pose-whore.

“That’s not practicing yoga—that’s just doing a couple of moves you can do.”

Moves. Hee hee. We’ll see what happens Sunday.

Today, birthday things. All day. First some links.

●New issue of Veneer is out. 

● I’ve always felt Sigur Ros were cheesy and trying too hard to sound “beautiful.” But just a second. Maybe it’s just that they can’t help it. Here is a trailer to some film they made about their home. Beautiful. Otherworldly. They are screening tonight and playing an acoustic set. Think I'll go.

● I received this record (Sally Shapiro, mysterious Swedish disco princess!) as a gift this week. Sad disco, nostalgic synth. I like its moody precision, and like how it accompanies a night drive on the freeways of this decrepit city. Here’s a video of one of the singles.

● Via Souljerky, David Lynch and Donovan are hyping a new university where TM training is required. With a lot less style and too many words, here’s the same arbitrage happening at UCLA. Good discussion in the second article of the history and practice of MBSR.

● Very intriguing. Techsattva is a podcast that wants to "make sense of several systems of thought at once.... By denying the completeness of any one system, Techsattva hopes to... get a view of connections that exist between them." Wonderful intention, but we’ll see if they can do much with it. The recent show is on the subjectivity of neuroscience. About time. Includes a discussion of the implications of new neural feedback (like biofeedback, but more finely tuned) for meditators' state awareness and state maintenance. Nice.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , science , sound , spirituality

Bait and Switch Yoga · 29 October 2007

Wow. Which yoga-consumer group sold my mailing address to “Yoga Pura” of Phoenix, Arizona?

They want me to come to their teacher training, a “journey of a lifetime,” after I have asked myself the following questions.  

Am I fearlessly committed to living happy now?

Do I want to understand—really, really understand—the mysteries underlying yoga and all great spiritual traditions?

Oh yeah. Happiness, and real, real understanding. That’s my bag, allright. But Phoenix is some distance from LA. Could I do this training by correspondence? Probably, because it turns out that Yoga is ANYTHING I want it to be. Check this ad copy, you poor, unenlightened readers.

Yoga is not about stretching. Yoga is not about meditation. In fact, contrary to what you may have heard, yoga is not even about yoga. And while it may be true that yoga involves all of these, it’s [sic] real potency and value lies [sic] in its ability to create something much greater: the transformation of your life. Yoga is about living your life to the fullest…. It’s about joy in the workplace and love in the home. Yoga is about the fulfillment of your life’s purpose with a… fulfillment previously unimagined [sic]. At Yoga Pura we’re unlocking the real secrets of the ancient science of yoga to help people do just that. More than a simple course in yoga postures… the Teacher Training… will immerse you in your own personal voyage of self-discovery and awakening—transforming you into a mature spiritual guide able to help others do the very same thing.

Classic yoga bait-and-switch advertising here. Not just “happiness,” “fulfillment,” and “real understanding” but the wisdom and knowledge to be others’ “spiritual guide.” Right. Right up until you get about a month into some kind of practice and realize how clueless, monkey-minded, and how not qualified to be another’s authority, you really are.

To me, this Yoga Pura type of thing is more painful than blatant yoga materialism that promises fashionable pastimes and a nice ass. Because this is yoga as candy apple “happiness” that represents a quick escape from the life you presumably want to change. Since there’s nice enough intention here, these corny promises make it easier to forget that yoga is just a practice and not an express ticket to some other self.

Nothing in this ad is about establishing a personal practice and using that as the field for transformation and understanding. Rather it feels more like they’re selling me into yoga charm school where I will learn to think like Tony Robbins and walk like Christy Turlington and speak melodically like Rodney Yee so I can go out and reproduce more of this brand of self-help/actualization. My new consulting gig: Insideowl Lifecoaching!

Well, bother. If it is this simple, what am I doing taking the toll road?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [20]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , markets-networks-society , self-deception

This is What Democracy Looks Like · 26 October 2007

● In the Authoritarianism is Old School news category, an MIT professor has issued a manifesto against bloggers commenting on papers presented in the workshop he organizes. Because, you know, we wouldn’t want the people reading online about what happens behind closed ivory tower doors in Cambridge. Academics have "rights."

Elitist.

Welcome to information age, Sir.

● In completely unrelated news, this week an ashtanga teacher quoted Sutra 1.11--

A yogi desirous of success should keep the knowledge of Hatha Yoga secret.

--to a blogging student, suggesting she not discuss her experience with others.

Nice try.

● Meanwhile in the ashtangosphere, there’s been excellent discussion this week this week about liberals and conservatives (boom boom boom boom). On this score I am a liberal who appears every bit the conservative. Others are true conservatives who outwardly look to be liberals.

In my case, I play along with the method in order to simplify my life and my mind, to support others on the same road without distracting them, and to respect a crazy brilliant tradition. Not because I believe the rules are true, or that people who follow them closely are better.

I take heart in this discussion because it shows how simple conversation denatures the sectarianism that’s strengthened by closed doors. The most liberal practitioners here in the post-authoritarian world have strong community with the most conservative.

Hello. 

The question for us is always 'how can we turn information into transformation?' How can we use the sacred texts to lead people into new places with God, with life, with themselves?

-Richard Rohr 

Let a hundred flowers bloom.              

-Richard Rorty

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , social theory

The Yoga/Hipster Problem · 22 October 2007

Dear Frustrated Young Men,

I understand what you are saying, guys. You’re getting hooked up on Match.com with apparently normal females who ten minutes into dinner explain they “can’t have” the bread-oleo because of a gluten intolerance recently revealed by their “amazing,” ayurveda-savvy acupuncturists. And then it’s off into their narrative of the post-grad self-discovery of “the breath” and “being in the moment,” and, oh, incidentally, getting really svelte and maybe, just slightly, more compulsive. (And, by the way, have you read Autobiography of a Yogi? It’s amazing.)

And it’s really all so vain and boring that thank god you can busy yourself on her half of the bread basket. You go home to your equally player roommates and discuss how the whole thing is nothing but a vanity practice for girls approaching 30 and determined to keep their whispiness.

Ok, great. But does whispiness really have to bring all this new cultural baggage? Lapses into darth-vader breathing in moments of intensity. Extreme experimentation with the diet—periods of veganism, rawfoodism, gluten-free-ism, non-alcohol-ism, non-sugar-ism. Disdain for soda. Loss of interest in rock music. Piles of CDs by old white guys named something-“Dass.” Classes in dead languages. Devotion to one’s “teacher.” New levels of credulity in astrology, moon cycles, and something called “doshas.”

I understand the worst thing is that the yoga enthusiast’s interest in her own body is endless. There can be no surfeit of acupuncture, massage, cleansing, rolfing, reiki, vipassana and anything else that involves lying motionless doing nothing. There is even a sense that changes in bowel movements mean something. And somehow, with all this self-monitoring and bank-breaking self-care and “healing,” they still need periodic “retreats,” “cleansings,” “renewals.” How can you be renewed from a life of incessant renewal?

With all life events manifestifesting in body as shoulder tension, tight hips or headache, and this Scientologic obsession on getting “clear” of these manifestations, is there no sense that an extreme mind-body connection can be really unproductive? Can’t these people just get over themselves sometimes and use their brains exclusively, regardless of whether this makes their asses sore?

And then there is the real trouble. Because where did they get the idea to run around town in frumpy fold-top cotton-poly pants and strappy little tanks emblazoned with “Be Present”? What happened to skinny jeans? And let’s not even start in on the “esoteric” dead-language tattoos on the small of the back (which they call “the sacrum”). And why in god’s name are their shoulders getting so sinewy?

I know, guys. The whole incorporation of the trappings of yoga into legitimate popular culture is openly hypocritical and just bad style.

It just makes you want to drink PBR and read Bukowski. (I mean Maker’s Mark and John Fahey—Bukowski is so 2005.) And in the meantime you want me to explain why any of this has to happen.

I’m working up a way to make it easier to cope with the yoga/hipster rapproachment, but I don’t have much to help you yet. The yoga thing is so experience-based that manifestoes don’t capture it. But I’ll get back to you on this.

In the meantime, you could try making friends with the inevitable. I’m not saying examine yourself to find the roots of the conflict or anything crazy like that, but just while I’m thinking about this, I would recommend taking a class. Forget about all the places with an ad in your local weekly. Don’t get anywhere near anything calling itself anusara yoga. Systematically avoid free events at the store called “Lululemon.”

Rather, ashtanga yoga is really your only option because of its high level of aesthetic tolerability. Ironically, to avoid the soft edges, bad pants, and branding that makes you cringe, you’re going to want more tradition, less popularization. So I recommend you take an ashtanga class. Notice the men (triceps? Interesting concept); notice (if I may) your breath; notice the pleasant soreness in your spine afterwards. Repeat that each day for one month and if you still wish you could purge all the trappings of yoga from popular culture, then, while I am still thinking this over, my next suggestion will be that you read Autobiography of a Yogi.

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

Eaten By Ants · 17 October 2007

Tonight, during Prasarita D, I had an urge more intense and crazy than anything I’ve ever experienced on the mat. It struck, and filled me with restlessness all the way to the brink of giggles. I pictured myself following through on the urge and had to scurry out of the room to stop myself.

It’s that I wanted to walk over to a fellow student, swipe his cheat-sheet up off the floor, and take a bite out of it. Then I wanted to chew it thoughtfully, look him meaningfully in the eyes, and say something like:

“Better hurry up and learn this sequence, because I’m taking a bite out of this paper every day ‘til it’s gone.”

The man is named M and I find him inspiring as hell. Of course we’ve never spoken, but I have overheard his amazing story. Something about a life of hardscrabble business dealings and incredible stress, interrupted early this year by a violent attack that left him barely more than dead. And now he’s starting a second life—one that includes yoga every afternoon. His body, covered in new scars, looks like it’s been through decades of hard, blue-collar life. He comes in when I’m towards the end of the standing postures and sets up next to me. He hums at first, which is great. Often he smells of a cigar, which doesn’t bother me because I'm too charmed by the guy. Other days, there is a vague nacho aroma. He has a bath towel and a basic blue mat that is usually rumpled, but that in the past two weeks he’s been lining up carefully parallel to our mahogany floorboards. Nice to see a little ashtanga analness taking root.

This is someone for whom you would want to make every exception in the world. He is still figuring out who he is this time around; he is visibly filled with gratitude and consistent in his practice; perhaps, too, he's still a little disoriented from the trauma. I figure you let the guy have his cheat-sheet, even for months if that is what feels right to him.

When I scurried from the room to stop myself from eating his paper, the teacher and my friend J were on the other side of the door. I was so freaked out and disoriented by the impulse and its strength that it showed on my face. When they asked what was wrong I wasn’t sufficiently ahead of myself to say anything but the truth.

I am usually reserved and methodical, so the little drama probably came off strange.

J nodded. I know exactly how that can be, when you get those urges. His paper must be yummy. The teacher took it all as a sign that I crave more starch in my diet and made me promise to eat root vegetables for dinner. Yes, ok: ketchari with potatoes and chickpeas.

I nodded at them both, flummoxed, and went back to practice. It was clear to me that the root urge was to play the teacher with M, not to eat, but I didn’t take the time to explain. Especially because it's not an unproblematic urge.

When I thought it through again after practice, I realized the joke my mind had been playing. There’s an old story SKPJ tells, about going to some library with his guru Krishnamacharya, and finding there the true ashtanga sequence written down on banana leaves by sages of old.

And where are the precious documents now? When asked this, SKPJ says they have been eaten by ants. And so: lost to the mists of time.

It appears that what I wanted in that moment was to do M the favor of being his ant.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body

Breakfast of Champions · 15 October 2007

The other day I called the great ashtanga tagline—do your practice and all is coming—a magical solvent for the removing of bullshit.

Someone came around and said no, it is just a koan. Because really: practice and what is coming?

Your baggage. All of it. To the surface.

Your relationships – some of them. To an end.

What is "all"? Quitting your job; weird pilgrimages; injuries nobody understands? Kapotasana?

I figure the line is a kind of dismissal, from the master who walks away in response to questions that are more about the showboating of the asker than the meaning of the inquiry. An old-timer told me once that SKPJ’s not-knowing of English has provided a crucial layer of insulation from all the stuff that western students would project onto him and would demand of him. I can imagine. Everyone wants a piece of him or of the heir. Everyone wants to claim a relationship that is reciprocated. Intimate, even.

Do your practice and all is coming is such a good non-answer to so many questions. You don’t even have to understand what has been asked, really. It also offers seven convenient reinterpretations: put the stress on a different word for each day of the week.

Maybe that is koan-like. Yeah kids: take that one home and meditate on it.

In any case, I like the line very much. And I actually do use it as a way to consider what it is that SKPJ meant by any of this, all of these years. The professor who finally left all the talk in the university and gave the best of his energy to this thing that only makes sense in silence: I won’t pretend that story doesn’t resonate with me in a large way.

I suppose that, product of capitalist society that I am, I’ve turned the old refrain into a bit of a slogan.

Ashtanga Yoga. Do your practice and all is coming.

Ashtanga Yoga. Do your practice and all is coming.

Ashtanga Yoga. Do you practice and all is coming.

Ashtanga Yoga. Shut up and salute.

Ashtanga Yoga. Shut up.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , power of suggestion , spirituality

Saturday XXVII · 12 October 2007

Minimalism, recently.

I’d say avant, but that would be obnoxious.

AF moved into a sleek LeCorbusier this week. I keep accidentally imagining myself there. But the flights to Chas de G are just stupid, and I’m supposed to be doing what DJ (the dissertation journal) says.

Reading My Paris as consolation (check it, U).

With Gui Boratto.

Eating Red Delicious. Which taste like something for once. 

Bad moon day on Wednesday. Moon days piss me off. I’ve been trying not to mention that.

Meanwhile, the secret planche is starting to show (phase one; oooooh Tristan—what you trying to do here? But thanks; and the bboy is something else). Take note if you are a 14-year-old boy or a female ashtangi. Related: I am showing a new interest in pressing up to handstand. Elusive. But it turns out I can hold an inverted L all day. Useless.

Also related: return of the desire to tattoo the arches of my feet. I know, I know. Guess it’s the collective unconscious talking. Sort of loudly.

Incidentally, there is no collective unconscious. Been ridiculing Jung’s bad metaphysics in the evenings. Can’t be helped, considering the October occult reading taking place in the Owl House.

However: I will be nesting alone in Eagle Rock this week while a dear friend plays CMJ. It is a writing retreat. Raising the question: to schlep to Santa Monica for practice, or moonlight closer to the temporary digs. Jury’s out.

And obviously, yes. There is a disturbance in the  force. I mean the collective unconscious.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound

Bad Hands · 10 October 2007

Had my blood drawn yesterday, as I do every few months. Went to the little window at the back of the clinic, to the phlebotomy man. Mr. S. He has soft grey hair, and his skin glows. He always seems so happy to see me and notes from the density of my forearms that I am "still working out."

He’s sort of an artist about the whole thing, drawing blood. Says my name and little else in his singing Indian accent: just some sounds to let me know to trust him: “ready… ok… breathe… yes… that is all.” I guess he’s done it thousands of times, this strip of little movements that he has turned into a dance.

He seems to love doing it perfectly. Just as I stand, he darts to the next room for two Motts apple juices, one of them refrigerated and one from his reserves. I used to try to refuse them—the irony of having straight corn syrup foisted on you after measuring for a lipid panel—but it’s clear he’ll feel wrong about the entire episode if I don’t take them.

He always says goodbye wistfully and with love, tells me he will see me in a few months. As if there’s some chance this is our last time together. He must think I have some tragic disease, wondering if each meeting is our last.

Or maybe he has known a lot of patients who one day just stopped coming in.

Yesterday, it was Mr. S who wasn’t there. I know he’s supposed to work on Tuesday mornings.

The young woman in his place was all wrong. Expected me to just know what to do, so nervous about her own movements that she was not at all able to cue me—with both voice and little body movements—through my part of the routine. No human connection, no response to my little weaknesses—the stopping of the breath—when the needle goes in. No emotional signals to let me know it is ok and finished. No food.

I turned on my cell later and someone was booking a private with me as a birthday present for a friend. How do you lead a stranger—stranger to practice, stranger to you—through her first sun salutation? How many times to you have to practice that strip of activity before you’re the master of that dance and your partner can just release into your guidance? How bad is it for her when you’re just thinking of your own movements so much that you’re not merging with hers? And how much of a difference does it make if you’re really there for it, really see them and feel them in a way that means something?

And where is Mr. S? Was he the one with a tragic illness… his emotional doubts about our meeting again more about his own situation than about mine?

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body

Fall · 7 October 2007

Textpattern went on strike this week. It’s a young program and still wily, but I like that. Having this outlet sealed off ought to have narrowed my life right down, but it did not. Turns out that I have a long way to go before I achieve sociological one-pointedness (thank god: I’ve witnessed what damage that can do to a person). Conclusion: it helps to have this bin for orthogonal thoughts.

Thanks to those of you who asked whether I was allright, fussed about the error message (for those who do not want to hear there are multiple errors in your root elements, maybe you need to work on that), and especially for the generous offer of server space.

Anyway. It is fall.

I keep taking people for walks on the palisades. It’s the time of year you can see Catalina Island in detail. I am listening to Bat for Lashes, eating pomegranates, and going tonight to the premiere of Control, the Joy Division biopic. Should be good and dreary.

Meantime, am looking for autumn-appropriate occult reading for bedtime. (I think it’s in A Whistling Woman where A.S. Byatt has the gorgeous tangent about November being for creepy fairytales, but I prefer the Editor’s version. A good scientist, he tends to go in for the dark side of rationalism in the fall. But he’s already advised me not to reveal what embarrassing creepy Alastair Crowley nonsense he’s been bringing home from the library this week.) This brings me to the questions DZM sent over, about books. So, ok: no playing around here.

In other news, my parents (who are obsessed with National Parks and frightened by The Urban—the first time they visited me in LA someone stole my dad’s Bible out of their car) just announced they have a conference week after next in San Diego. They asked if I’d meet them next weekend in my choice of the three following locations: Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree, Torrey Pines. Real difficult decision there.

Not that the Canyon and the Desert don’t have their charms.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Inverted · 1 October 2007

I’ve been a morning practitioner since before I remember. (Short memory, or more like short identity-horizon.) By now all the routines in my life are tipped toward 6 am, where I stop for half a minute. Then the mechanism rolls over into a new cycle. Click.

Week before last, my morning practice space was booked with a kind of class reuinion, so I shifted to the evenings. Class began at 5, doors at 4:30.

I was not particularly enthusiastic about the shift. Practicing in the morning is my idea of really living, in a way that I wouldn’t know how to describe. Also, I’m convinced that I cannot get my mind to perform well throughout the day if I haven’t first cleaned the slate… and that my body will make me crazy if I don’t spend down some energy and stretch out the worst of the tension first thing.

On the other hand, evening practice is suboptimal on many levels: mentally, you’ve got far more static to contend with; physically, there is the fatigue of the day as well as in my case too much openness in the hips; and digestively, you don’t have the significant calming effects of a 15-hour fast (yes, I do frequently skip dinner).

That’s what I knew two weeks ago. Thought I knew. After the first week of evening practices, I did it again. And now, I’m about to do it a third week. God, what am I doing messing with the machine I thought I had perfected… at a time I most want it to run like clockwork?

I don’t know. I guess I’m letting the machine run itself a little bit. And right now it wants to stand on its head.

I’m still working out all the ways this changes the rhythms and the functionality of my mind and my body, given the intense things I am asking them to do this year. But what I saw the first week is that if I take the energy I’ve trained to spike in the mornings and sublimate that back into sociology, my writing is more focused and less full of shit than it has ever been. It’s strange not to practice first thing. Moreover, I recognize that I’m milking a spiritual tradition not of my own making but now of my own body to feed the pursuit of western “science,” and I’m not convinced that science is worth it. But, maybe it is.

Finally, I don’t know how long I can keep it up.

More on this as I realize what is going on.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , spirituality

Unscientific Postscript to Yoga is Dangerous · 25 September 2007

I’ve thought over this matter in the past week, thanks to the many people who have emailed me. Thank you, everyone. Sometimes it amazes me that there is true community here, and that these are relationships where we work out aspects of our practice as much as we participate in creating a bottom-up side of astanga culture. We are creating this world as much as its authorities who we mostly revere, and that is sort of revolutionary.

So, two notes on the matter of petite brunettes with daddy issues.

One. If the desire to “put oneself out there” as irrevently funny trumps a sensitivity to the real power big men have over small women—if ego trumps empathy—then clearly this person has not gone through the process of self-examination of inherited gender conditioning, and radical affirmation of human equality, that I’d wish he had as a modern yogi.

To do that, to learn to be feminists (get over the word already: it doesn't connote female domination and you know it), most men need to have a transformative relationship with a fully realized woman.

In the same way, white people in this country don’t even begin to undo their inherited racism (even if they emotionally antd intellectually despise racism) until they enter in to deep relationships with people of color as equals. It's not just a matter of professing the right politics. Politics is surfacy, but race and gender are visceral. 

It is difficult to imagine someone who understands the process of self-transformation through relationship explicitly taking advantage of his gender and size to leverage a sexualized power over small women. Someone who’d sensitized himself accurately to any women’s subjectivity would have some idea of the almost primitive responses that would call up in her, and would respect her enough to give her space. (It's not like women don't create gender inequality just as much or more than men.)

I do hope this teacher will find this discussion, because maybe he truly doesn’t know that his conduct is symbolically freighted and viscerally affecting. It's so much easier to be lighthearted about this, and not see its serious side. But you are a powerful man, man. Have some respect for that power of yours.

Two. WHATEVER! Ashtanga yoga is about doing what is uncomfortable. That's it. End of question-period.

This practice is a process undoing fears through direct experience. I worry that I have made a “thing”—a personal mental obstacle—out of my feelings about this stranger.

"I won't go to that teacher because he scares me." Hmmm. Really!? Again, whatever. Doing your practice in the presence of fear is one of the few things about which SKPJ is explicit.

Most people are still sexist on some deep level. This behavior is common in the world I inhabit: people who get it are the exception. It’s just not up to me to care. Or correct. Though if I'm in a relationship that's messed up, of course I have to do some pushback and take responsibility for protecting myself. Doing that is itself just a part of facing fear.

So it looks like at some point I’ll have to track this joe down and practice with him. Not repeatedly or anything, but for the sake of it. I’ll try not to flirt with him, which is exactly what I would have done if I hadn’t seen that profile (because word is he is a funny guy, and I would have cued into that to take the edge off any potential authoritarianism). But I might have to do something that violates his sense of propriety on my way out of “his” room. Any suggestions?

Ha!

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , morality , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory

The Natives Are Restless · 23 September 2007

Ruth: [hearing chanting] What's that?
Dr. Moreau: The natives, they have a curious ceremony…
Ruth: Tell us about it, Edward.
Edward: Oh, it's... it's nothing.
Dr. Moreau: They are restless tonight.

                                                         -Island of Lost Souls (1932)

Yeah, the natives are restless. Phone calls. Email.

Politics. Or, as they say, shalatics. Schedule changes. All these teachers, all these studios: and nobody can manage to offer an even vaguely consistent schedule. Woah! Trouble in OCD land!

Seriously, though. The amount of schedule drama in this scene is stupid. The best I can do is get an annual pass at one place and just take it for granted that that's where my mat lives, come what may.

Here is my situation. Around the time the Iraq War began, I made a decision not to commute. It’s about gas consumption, and about family time. Also (let’s be honest): the fact that I don’t suffer bad drivers at all well. So: my yoga practice, and what there is of a weekday social life, live on the Westside. So it is. Gives me a chance to defend this zone to the hipsters.

I made a choice at the beginning to see west side yoga as a land of plenty. This was a way of choosing not to see it as ground zero of yoga politics. Of course it’s both: land of plenty and land of politics. Plenty generates as much politics as scarcity ever did.

I’m a student of politics and a lover of the tiniest details of interpersonal stories (it’s always being suggested that I write an ethnography book on this scene—and sometimes I like the idea, though thank god I’m not trying to pass off such total nonsense as a dissertation), so while making that choice up front saved me a lot of distraction, it also meant sacrificing a few excitingly gossipy potential friendships. Walking out of the ladies’ when I had one too many good things to add; shrugging like I didn’t have an opinion when really I did. Not asking the crucial little questions I knew would open floodgates. Letting stories stop with me even though passing them on would be an interesting experiment. On the surface, sometimes it’s been a drag.

Funny thing, though. Over time, I’ve found that acting like I don’t have an opinion on shalatics means to a large degree I actually don’t have an opinion. (Completely revolutionary finding.) And the process is self-reinforcing: the less I appear to care about shalatics, the less interesting I am to talk to about them. The less I know. The less I harbor opinions. The more I love to practice. &c.

Putting together a practice in this town gets difficult if you’re a divider, a person who has some teachers and other practitioners with whom you're just not ok. If you are, well, a hater. Or just afraid. Practicing hyperexclusivity makes you take yourself more and more seriously, and can make for a  spiral of self-isolation.

Then the voices in your head become deafening.

Yoga can make you so inflexible.

The shalatics have been so prominent recently that I’m getting sucked in. Gezus. My job is to take the best out of any teacher (myself included), any circumstance. Yet I have less ease in extending that attitude to a certain large corporation. When something actually gets under my skin, I see there are still traces of a political creature capable of getting stirred up and involved in it. At this gets so, so in the way of having practice as a refuge or as a time I set aside to be content and grateful.

Ah, well.

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Saturday XXV · 22 September 2007

I accidentally flew first class back into Los Angeles late-late on Monday. And for the first time after this restless desultory summer, it feels like a place I want to stay for a while.

So now I will go down to the workshop and construct a machine. This is my life for fall: practice, research, write, relate, sleep, repeat.

Clockwork is what I want. Small little interlocking orbits. From which novelty is meant to emerge.

I don’t know if the machine will work as intended. 

As for Colorado, I’m not going to write about my grandmothers whose selves are shrinking, my 87-year-old grandfathers who are becoming the sweetest caregivers, the avuncular difficulties (me too, ESJ), the good cousins plus the horribly criminal one, or the pair of ghosts that haunted all family events. The trip was a body blow, but not in a bad way. I need to get reality-checked like that sometimes.

Except I could have done without all the Nabisco. That’s the thing about working class roots.

Monday I practiced in Boulder, which contrary to my expectation did not make me want to ply the U of C for a job next year. So much for expectations. But my perfect brother and I did have a good lunch outside on Pearl Street after the rain, and then drove the Hyundai back to DIA. In the Avis shuttle I hugged him and his three bags of Telluride Film Fest paraphernalia, and sent him off to a three month artist residency in Paris. That part is always a little wrenching.

By the way, that last post generated more stats (189 distinct visits a day? Who are you silent people?) and more off-blog email contacts than anything heretofore published here at IO. Maybe it’s just the gossip factor, as Tiff experienced a while back. Or maybe there needs to be a support group on the subject.

Saturday links, for the first time in a while:

? So I keep watching the trailer for Southland Tales. Mike Davis apocalypse-ness with Wm. Gibson plot devices, Pixies soundtrack, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s flashy teeth, dystopic Los Angeles, choppy reality TV edits and gratuitous color saturation. And, if you are into that, a side of Justin Timberlake.

? Podcast for AF et al. Robert Spellman discusses the “key distinction between the theoretical and the yogic, and how that distinction relates to artistic practice.” Bear with the first few minutes of ham-handed metaphysics, because afterwards he discusses how practice can render a “clarity and accuracy of being.” Good thoughts about the different ways shamatha (one-pointed) and vipassana (insight) methods interact with artistic process. He quotes Chogyam Trumka that vipassana introduces the conceptual mind back into meditation after that mode of thought has been set aside for a period of time.

Spellman seems a reader of John Dewey, which is nice. This marriage of pragmatism and contemplative practice hits close to home.

If the above is inspiring, Anna Douglas has some talks up at Dharma Seed. I have not listened to them, but her understanding of meditation and creative process is interesting and sort of deep. She is a doctor of psychology who has practiced vipassana for 25 years and shows strong Zen leanings.

? I decided to link my Goodreads profile here (also in sidebar) in order to encourage myself to keep it current. Hey you: get in, be a friend.

? Funny entry in the geekipedia: Collins-Dawkins Faith Smackdown.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , spirituality

Yoga Is Dangerous, Part III · 18 September 2007

This is not a rant. Maybe it ought to be. 

This is a request for someone to help me find humor in a dark bit of tabloid-quality ashtanga flotsam.

This is not a rant because I’m trying to find a middle path between two thoughtful, true perspectives. One, Lax’s reminder that Astanga Yoga is a subculture which tends to cult-like boundary-policing. Yes, it is; and I don't want to be the police. But two, there is Cody’s ongoing meditation on the way in which teacher- student relationships are at least traditionally an integral, even "sacred," aspect of this practice. 

So here is the story. A friend was just surveying the ashtanga alternatives here on the west side of Los Angeles, and googled a local teacher neither of us has met. Authorized teacher. Well-connected guy about whom I have heard some good things. Has taken over the room built and nurtured for more than a decade by the philosopher-king Chuck Miller.

Google result: Myspace profile. Who he would like to meet, quote: "Petite brunettes. With daddy issues."

Dude.

Disturbed owl.

Very.

Maybe I’m being uptight. In general, I’m particularly uptight about professionalism, and about respecting teachers. Both those dispositions keep me from knowing exactly how to feel about this self-advertisement, but taking it as a joke feels like it legitimates a sad old sexist dynamic. (What if a female yoga teacher tried this? Now that would be funny.)

Some would say a teacher has a right to express all the beautifully complex and shadow parts of himself openly. That’s a really good argument. But it also would legitimate viewing a teacher as a person with multiple personalities, whereas an implicit goal and undeniable effect of this practice is that it brings the various parts of our selves together over time.

I’ve said before that yoga is dangerous. Because, among other things, it strips away conditioning: lets you see your own behavioral patterns and the power asymmetries in which you indulge, makes you aware of your own sexual energy and how you tend to use it. Yoga is incredibly dangerous, but this has me thinking that some times it is not at all dangerous enough.

I'm sitting here imagining walking into a room where this was the “secretive” intention. I cannot envision it without a visceral feeling of external threat. And that’s not the kind of danger I’m after.

I wonder how many women around here have done their research before class, found the profile, and decided to stay away.

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Categories: astanga yoga , morality , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Shadow Visitor and an Addiction · 6 September 2007

A migraine woke me at four in the morning last Saturday, three days into silence. The headaches started two years ago and I take them like the scrappy little Rocky Mountain pioneer my dad raised, but this time the entire tone of the thing was different. Intense. Hard-edged.

Guess that’s what it feels when you have zero options for migraine-distraction. Not even mental options.

I could feel the thing’s specific location in the physical brain, and the pain was both more intense and less horrible—the latter because this time I wasn’t angry at it for interrupting my day. What did I have to interrupt?

I usually take control by creating distraction. It’s a competition for which one of us—me or it—will determine the day’s activity. I win if I get on with it, even if I move around like the hunchback of Notre Dame and have to call my brother for sympathy. When I start losing, I fortify my position with Excedrin. Other women in my family bypass this stupid struggle and automatically drug up the first day of the month. They’re smart. But it was the men who taught me how to relate to my body, so I’m stubborn.

By 9 am, I had spent five hours in the fetal position, exploring the sharp edges of the pain but afraid to just go into it and know it fully. Hello, fear. That resistance was building up all over my body. The sensation was coming in waves, but the fear just kept getting harder and thicker brick by brick. No way was I going to sit my body upright and take my attention to the center of that space behind my right eye.

Admitting that, I hunchbacked down the hill to the kitchen, and asked if there were any caffeine on the premises. Yes, contraband was available, said the big angelic chef, but would I like to try some ginger tea first?

Here is what I thought: I want DRUGS, not SYMPATHY! Said: Thank you. I will sit over there.

She cut up a whole root and boiled it. A half hour later, still hunched over a table, I told her that I was probably hallucinating, but I could feel a blood vessel in the front of my head dilate and move the pain around. She said I wasn’t hallucinating.

I still didn’t have much awareness of anything except the place behind my eye, but after the ginger took the fear out of the pain, I felt interested in checking it out. So I went back to the cushion and mildly hallucinated for the rest of the day.

God it was trippy. Enough physical “pain” to keep me oblivious to the outside world, and so much inner entertainment that I got lost in it. For hours.

When I’m quiet enough not to need the anchors of breath or mantra to keep my insane mind from writing novels, I like to watch the light play on the backs of my eyelids. But this time it was a whole show. A little hawk or comet or dandelion fuzz—some kind of flying shadow—appeared and swooped all over. A shadow dervish. I had wild dreams that night—so much for Patanjali’s dreamless sleep—and then the dervish came back the next day and stayed until evening.

Sitting there out of time, watching it, had nothing to do with nothingness. There was a stable emotional tone of absorbed amusement. It didn’t feel profound or important: it just felt fun, like an innocuous game.

I didn’t want it to end.

Which must have been obvious, because on Sunday night an instructor climbed on the dais, before the pair of Buddhas (a dark male one and light female one) and said teasingly, “Well aren’t you good meditators! Let go of the sitting posture. Let go of the activity of medititating. Just be mindful. Just get up and leave.”

I went to bed scheming about how I have to do a month-long or more. And laughing at myself for the reaching: literally, this time, a reaching for nothingness. Is that why we invest all this time in sitting practice, for the bliss payoff? Maybe we’re just addicted to a mental state—and contemplation is just our method for getting there.

I don’t know. If my deepest motives are just so much spiritual materialism, though, I’m not ready to dismiss them as bad unholy desire. I am hungry for insight and pleasure. In love with the journey, seduced by the grail quest. All of it. Badly.

So I get attached to mental sates. If I didn’t, I’d have quit the astanga practice years ago. At least you can’t make too much trouble when you’re in a trance.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , power of suggestion , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXIII · 25 August 2007

I’m still smug for getting out of jury duty, though now people are telling me a royal flush of five days without the call isn’t all that special. Six years in this town, and not once have I done my part to uphold the integrity of the justice system.

Even if the dispensation isn’t so special, the whole past week felt like a free trip, a 53^rd week that doesn’t show up on the books: so it was with the out-of-nowhere commandeering of my practice by a benevolent pirate who’ll soon disappear, and with the five days of pure-empty lines on my varied little OCD (“GTD”) calendars.

I felt creative this week with energy and focus like I couldn’t believe: because nobody was keeping track. I play games to slack at the margins whet I think my other self isn't watching—skimming the almond butter, taking halfassed notes on my background reading, skimming time off from sleep to read the newspaper. Note this  occurs when I’m playing both the slacker and the tracker—I don’t try to skim off waiters, teachers, employers, whatever. Subtle self-sabotage, in conditions under which I feel divided against myself, is the main kind that interests me. Sometime I should figure out it’s not actually a fun game.

But this week I was in a void because I’d put my diabolical inner accountant on vacation, and it was faith-giving to see that when I shut off that shadow I’m always trying to outfox, I’m not full of shit. In fact, I function pretty well. Go figure.

This spate of relative clarity makes for a good moment to slow everything way, way down. I’ll be in silence Wednesday-Monday, over a long Labor Day. The Editor is off grocery-shopping for faque meat and other BBQ items right now (he loves soy dogs, the horror). Guess my own self isn’t the only one who sometimes needs a break from my overly watchful eyes.

Next time I do a links post I’ll be vipassana-ed and probably back in a post-political blogging disposition. So this week, in honor of the fact that the world is at war and 99% of the ashtangosphere (the 1%) could not care less, and in honor of the fact that we celebrate “Labor Day” three months late because FDR feared placing it on the the day that’s actually associated with honoring workers, here is: owl as political animal. 

? Start here. Your political compass. Take the test. (My results. According to the graph, a little left of the Dalai Lama.)

? Then go here. Take this test too. (My results: 38 for Kucinich. But that’s not true. I’m pragmatic.)

? Next, order the brand new paperback version of “Marxist- environmentalist” Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums. For people who want to solve everything with feelgood token environmentalism, well come on now. If you think individual carbon neutrality will save us, prepare for heartbreak at this picture of the relationship of most of humanity with ourself and with the earth. The guy is a good writer. 

? Next, read about the latest in the travesty of de-regulation and fake-regulation that is the neoliberal era. This time, it’s the re-labeling of irradiated almonds as “raw.” There goes a staple of my diet.

In less political links (or maybe these are the actually political topics in this post):

? Thursday’s NYT story on Inappropriate Yoga Guy. I keep writing commentary here and then erasing it. Hmm.

? Hipster Olypmics! Does this offend you? Withholding my comments here too.

? Yogaworks Westlake opens today with a full schedule. "This is yoga adapted to American culture," said Maggie Mellor, a veteran Conejo Valley instructor who plans to teach at YogaWorks.... Americans delight in choices. They want their 31 flavors." Ditto.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Pirates of the Air · 23 August 2007

If you’re going to be exacting, be exacting about the breath.