INSIDEOWL: beta state

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

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.

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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. :)

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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 :-).

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(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.

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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?

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(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

Fields of Perception. Inside & Outside. · 7 July 2008

I actually read a novel yesterday, on the plane. Long meditations on the narrator’s inner space, both despondent and lyrical. The influences are obvious, but it’s dumb to reduce to that so I’ll leave them unmentioned. The book also feels like a piece of a new genre—a kind of shellshocked post-9/11 novel that includes Pattern Recognition, Emperor’s Children, and even precient Underworld. A beautiful trance of a read, notwithstanding my complicated feelings about the protagonist.

Here is a bit that throws up his mindstate against the storm-shifting windows of the Chelsea hotel. So intimate and subtle, drawing a mind’s inner and outer space. Elements of both trance and fluctuation.

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…[I] didn’t look upon our circumstances from the observatory offered by a disposition to the more spatial emotions—those feelings, of regret or graditude or relief, say, that make reference to situations removed from one’s own.

At least twice a day I peered through the French windows and inspected the dirty, faintly glowing accumulation of ice. I was torn between a ridiculous loathing of this obdurate wintry ectoplasm and an equally ridiculous tenderness stimulated by a solid’s battle against the forces of liquefaction. Random mental commotions of this kind constantly agitated me during this period, when I was in the habit, among other strange habits, of lying on the floor of my living room and staring into the space under my brown armchair, a letter-box-shaped crevice out of which, I may have hoped, an important communication would come. I wasn’t especially troubled by the hours spent flat on my face. My assumption was that all around me, in the lustrous boxes thickly checkering the night, countryless New Yorkers lay stretched out on the floor, felled by similar feelings; or, if not actually poleaxed, stood at their windows, as I often did, to observe the winter clouds rubbing out—so, from my vantage point, it appeared—the skyscrapers in the middle distance. The magnitude of the vanishing was wonderful, even to a spirit such as my own, perhaps because it preluded the seemingly miraculous reemergence from the clouds of towers dashed from within with light.

… I was, it will be understood, afflicted by the solitary’s vulnerability to insights, so that when I peered out into the flurry and saw no sign of the Empire State Building, I was assaulted by the notion, arriving in the form of a terrifying stroke of consciousness, that substance—everything of so-called concreteness—was indistinct from its unnamable opposite.

Kicking a rock or patting a dog is, I suppose, enough to rid most people of this variety of bewilderment, which must be as ancient as our species. But I didn’t have a rock or a dog to hand—nothing but the glass of a window under assault from a storm.

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill pp. 93-95

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Categories: beta state

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

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

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

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

"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

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.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , power of suggestion , self-deception

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.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , markets-networks-society , self-deception

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

Digital Provocation · 27 February 2008

For emotional provocation, a girl with a piano is most powerful. A piano was my self-expression during the terrible years—high school—so maybe that’s got something to do with it.

But anymore, the strongest mood-shifter (mental state-shifter) for me is electronica. The Editor, bard to the core with thick icing layers of rock and jazz, protests: “It’s a wall. No movement in it. It is music that tells you to stay still.”

Yes, sort of. The monotony of digitalism is part of what sucks me in. All that space between the data shortens the distance between 0 and love. Shit, I mean 0 and 1. In a way it’s subversive when beeps render you bliss, but in another way it’s almost easier.

The experience is like this: I want to waltz to its monotony. Interpolate my body in to it while my heartbeat/brainwaves just do what the monotony tells them to do. (Somewhere here there's a connection to Karen's jazz practice... but for me practice music, if any, is devotional cornball stuff: the triggers to downshift and become rhythmic in that context seem to be more about supercalming content than about BPM/form.)

Zero/one. Form/emptiness. Yadda/yadda.

Specifically, yesterday I finally stopped listening to Hot Chip (who sing about bodhi trees--not burning trees!). A really nice wakeup record, in all its moods. Now there are post-digital, yet similarly Enoesque, musics in my stereo: and I don’t know if I should cringe at the signposts in the lyrics or just take it as a indication that we have a little bit more than 1 and 0 in common.

Robert Wyatt (Comicopera, Be Serious):

I reall envy Christians. I envy Moslems too. It must be great to be so sure as a top Hindu or Jew. And I don't believe in willpower; self-expression's such a fraud. I mean how can I express myself when there's no self to express? Be serious! Put a sock in it. Then put a lid on it. Do us a favor.

It's a little more convincing when it's sung.

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Categories: beta state , having a body , sound , spirituality

Control, Spokes, Scandalon, Obnoxious, Blog · 26 February 2008

Said to me in a ladies room: "I found your blog and would have never guessed you were such a tweaker! Look at that! You and your random expletives! If you were a man, I'd totally date you. You're a crazy girl."

The other night I re-read something written in my private journal back in December. For those who grok the tweak. Here.

ooO........................................V..........................................Ooo

I wonder if I could pull it off—some sort of practice of writing- from- behind- the- veil.

I say and I say and I say that I’m going to use the owlspace to write less analytically. And then it’s back to conclusions and punchlines and figuring-it-out mind. One trick monkey. Always got to narrow it right down to a sharp little point.

Mmmm. But one-pointedness is for non-thinking. Not for thinking!

My teacher, these past months, he spoke to me in free- association. We’d freewheel for hours and see where it went. It’s perfect for me, the unstructured structure. Conversation is only fun, really, with those open to tangents and awake enough to hold open eight topical lines… and, in the end, speak together their spoked connections. Simultaneous limbs….

Is there a subconscious, unconscious, darkside, whatever? Just look at the modernism of that notion—the old school dualism. Yet… anymore I am sold. Because what else are dreams, and the place lost details go, and the lines of poems or films or scripture that lodge a little while in the mind? Where do superstitions and space aliens live?

With the Jungians I think of a shadow, though not to say it’s all dark as in devious. More like dark as in harder to see.

Freewriting can get you there sometimes. If you don’t get all anal and weird about your process (as science has trained me, so intensely, to be).

Wm Gibson—who writes from his subconscious with some genius—said something about his first chapters, which tend to be opaque and aesthetically not-quite-right. First chapters are a kind of gate he finds himself setting out at the start. The little obstacle helps him find his readers--and encourages people who shouldn't actually be reading to put him back on the shelf.

How obnoxious of him.

Nice!!!!!

Does all of that make sense? I wonder how long I could continue in the back seat without freaking out and taking control back from the Blog. (The scientists would not approve of all this...)

Blog is in control.
Blob is in control.
Glob is in control.
"God" is in control.

As if.

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Categories: beta state , evolution , power of suggestion

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

Pushing Back the Veil? · 23 January 2008

What is practice?

a self-soothing routine we use to build up a stable, continuous sense of self in the face of uncertainty
a forum for pursuing a vision of perfection
an arena for self-mastery
competition
PERFORMANCE, duh
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

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

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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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

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

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