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

Tiramisu · 2 July 2009

What does the hidden consciousness look like? Those layers underneath: what neuroscientists call delta state and Patanjali called dreamless sleep.

Are they some vast wordless moon-ocean, a space odyssey, the primordial void described in every creation story from tohu va bohu to tabula rasa? Yes. Something like that. Something has opened in my skull: what I once saw was just homeless men catatonic on the Santa Monica sidewalk. New Age bliss monkeys zonig out at dance. Brain-fried dissertators drinking to oblivion. And, if they’re lucky, a ashtangis dispassionately, disinterestedly given over to the breath after a hard week in the manduka trenches.

Nothing but spent-down selves who could use some coffee or a blue plate breakfast. Nothing but “atoms and the void.” Now I don’t know. I look for eye contact with these wastrels and it’s not uninteresting in there, in the void. It’s huge and elusive. So beautiful.

And sitting right on top of it—the mascarpone layer of the Cosmic Tiramisu—it seems like there is pure fucking chaos. Feedback turned all the way up, wildness that flies nowhere with rushing unreason, or what my alchemy teacher widens his eyes in the back room and calls Big Energy.

I don’t know. I finish practice wanting not silence, as usual, but speed metal and solitude. Race home without malice, without an agenda, without any interest in anything directional much less reason or words, close myself inside for thirty minutes with the windows shuttered and the lights off. This lizard is dense, dark, heavy, fast. I would have dramatized it, freaked myself out, or gotten carried away by it a few years ago. Now I finally get that it’s not even mine, and know enough to give it a container. It’s fine; it's nothing to worry about; it's beautiful. Beyond that, there’s not much more to say.

Next week begins nine days in silence with Shinzen. Hilariously good timing. In keeping with the So Above-So Below theme that won’t go away, I’m doing the retreat much differently this time—in a way that will undermine my tendency to self-hypnotize and spend everything from day three in freaky primordial bliss, doing photoshop tricks on the lightshow that plays on the backs of the eyelids once you finally shut up and draw the curtains for a few days. (Try it).

But… I am more and more suspicious that eyelid fireworks have become just as escapist as those in the Magic Kingdom. Vipassana-for-siddhis is a nice vacation, but if that’s all there is, I may as well cruise down to Disneyland. At least there I can get a popsickle and a suntan.

We’ll see what happens. Shinzen’s map of and through consciousness is a lot more built out than our basically useless version: dharana-dyana-samadhi. (A map made even more useless due to the bizarre misinformation that refined states of consciousness will simply arise without effort or practice. Why claim this if you don't even know? Would hatha yogis take an interest in the intricacies of mind if offered instructions as complex as those we’ve invented for asana the past 50 years?) In any case, his method essentially is hatha yoga as I understand it, just with far more accurate and efficient instructions. I cautiously (!) anticipate a mindfuck of the most mundane, non-trancey, non-“transcendent”, non-special, pretty boring sort. What comes after the mascarpone layer? Oh yeah… a blanket of coffee-flavored heavy cream. Solid, right here now, worldly, awake, unmistakeable… still savory. Presumably....

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Categories: beta state , spirituality

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

Ammabots · 19 June 2009

They call them the Ammabots. I met the first one, dressed in flowing white with her pupils dilated big as dimes, just inside the Radisson. “Your first time?” I smiled yes. She peeled a blue dot from a strip of paper and stuck it not to my third eye (as I somehow expected) but the edge of my sweater. And then I ascended the stairs in to an incence-filled bot-populated marketplace that seemed designed especially for the hipster Village Voice and Salon writers who would be infiltrating on their funny-cynical assignments. Circus of snark right there, for anyone who would fixate on the level of cultural otherness that is the Amma roadshow.

The exoticist set pieces on the business of east-meets-west have been written already. Hopefully some such accounts of the Amma Show include the part about the red velvet umbrella emblazoned with gold OMs. Amma twirls the OM-brella above her head as she enters the enormous conference room every morning at 10 o’clock. The room holds its breath, bells clang, and an invisible invocateur booms OOOMMM from bass-heavy speakers. My dad has a hollowed-out horn of a bull that he blows in the sanctuary when he preaches the horrible story of Jericho: the amped OM is the same portentous tone and drives any beta state hangers-on straight in to trance. Amma has the beatific gaze down perfect, the large fleshy mass of her sways like seaweed and without question she glows. You’d have to be dead not to feel that aura. Or on second thought, maybe the dead feel it even better than the rest of us.

The day I was there, I was set to meet L and G. G is a retired special forces operator who knows even more than I know about counter-insurgency warfare, but not because he’s read about it in books. He finally left the military in his sixties after some bad years in Colombia, fed up with Clinton-era drug war tactics. He went the next level more badass, and joined the Vajrayana in Tibet. He later settled in So-Cal because it’s where the women are best looking and the weather kindest to his hard-trammeled joints. But his ‘Nam-era hatred of hippies has always kept him from going fully native here. L, a woman thirty years younger than G and five inches taller, is my kundalini collaborator and in her work life some kind of cult actress. Unlike G, she drinks many kinds of Kool-Aid. Yet she is too in the moment, every moment, to be a bot for anyone in particular. She is dialed in to Crazy on her own terms, and knows too well from the receiving end how empty every groupie becomes. She is as open as G is closed, but neither of them is signing up for anything.

I’d talked to them by phone minutes before I entered the great hall, and then there was the commotion with Amma’s arrival. I somehow found myself all the way at the front of the hall, within 20 feet of her, involuntarily entranced. I knelt to touch the floor, find my own inner body in an effort to ground myself against the force of Amma’s astral wind. A rope-bodied man in white robes looked to me with those giant pupils and drew me over to a space he magically created in the crush of seated devotees. Forgetting G and L, I decided it would be a good idea to turn off my phone. 

I sat next to the man as Amma settled in to her throne and the 5-hour hugging juggernat fired up. A little train of chairs was arranged, two by two, from the back of the hall all the way to the saint. Visitors would go to the back of the line when their number was called, sitting in pairs in the last seats. As those at the front of the hug-train received their squash and their chocolate kiss, each pair of visitors would rise and move up to the next seat in the procession. I could see the composure of self and body begin to break up as people got to the last four or five seats before the hug. The actually physical vibration (which several of us mistook for earthquakes in the 4 or 5 Richter range) began to shake them loose, cognition would fate, the body would become slack, sometimes tears would begin flowing. By the time they entered their embrace they were ecstatic mush, and moments later would stumble away dazed, blessed, briefly transformed, forever a little closer to the astral plane.

Holding a number that would not be called for several hours, I settled to the floor next to the man in robes. He glowed at me as I took up a lotus and faced Amma, “Have you ever been to India?”

Aah, the litmus test. Soon the man, a 55-year old Finn called Rishi who has been following Amma everywhere for 13 years, was telling me of his first meeting with his guru. The day he met saw in Helsinki, he knew. But he gazed upon Amma now as if it was the first time, wept and smiled to me as if I were also participating in his inner experience. I told him Amma had been in Mysore when I was there in March, but I skipped it. “ Aaah, it was not your time yet,” he said, and asked my name. I gave it and he looked serious, “So you are a blessed one, a saint as well.”

“Who are you calling Saint, Rishi?”

“Ah yes she gave me this name to give me difficulty. It is my task to live up to it…. You know, she cannot be understood. She is mother, she is love, but also… she is in ABSOLUTE CONTROL of everything here. She is fierce and everyone does exactly what she says. The task is for my tiny mind to manage that contradiction, of total control and pure love.”

Well, I suppose that’s one way to make your head explode. Put an end to the vrittis, allright. I wanted to ask Rishi about everything he’d forked over for this deal—the home, sexuality, creative life, personal love relationships, self expression… the energy-blooms of all the lower chakras given away so that he can stay in Amma’s delta-wave forcefield and sustain himself on the one glorious love-emotion with which she infuses it.

But living on mother-love all the time has consequences. You become an emotional if not spiritual infant, do you not? Emotional addiction, trusting too much, taking responsibility too little. The spiral-eyed vulnerability and, well, neediness of the scenester-level devotees to any guru… have you ever witnessed that side of bhakti…?

The connection of Rishi and myself was uncomfortably obvious. Through the portal that is Amma, he was giving his self, jacked to the matrix and pouring himself in. So with all the other bots, creating a caravan across the spiritual desert of planet Earth, hoisting the mother on their shoulders. And to that mother, through that awesome portal of her, myself touching in for a hit of shakti, faith, love, delight. A free hit, as long as I stay grounded and recirculate it in to my own ecology. It is good that the darshan is free… but in the greater energy economy it is not really so free. I go to the see he hugging saint, and to the degree she really moves me I am playing with her fire, taking it and spreading it somewhere else. It’s a little like the tapas-strong thread that snakes around the inside of AVY culture.

There at Amma’s feet, before L finally found me and dragged me to cognitive safety outside the 100-foot perimeter, one of my synapses half-fired off a thought about Mary and Martha. If Jesus were alive now, he’d have a road show at least this well produced. And where would I be? Facing in, taking the blessing like Mary, or bustling around keeping the business of spirituality in order like Martha? As with yoga institutions, insiders pay dearly for that “special association” they seek. Energy and levels of insight are drained off to feed the system, so that the more secure seekers can touch in, take the benefits, and get on a little bit better with their lives.

The benefits of the one-off chocolate kiss are not trivial, though. To see what heights are possible with human energy and consciousness: this inspiration is so great that it almost distracts me from this new little undercurrent of love that's been deepened in me by no effort of my own. 

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , markets-networks-society

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

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

The Perils of Eat, Pray, Love · 9 February 2009

I left a university library book in Budapest’s Hotel Andrassy a number of years ago, and lost another one last fall somewhere between Colorado Springs and Boulder. And I’ll probably risk university property and my own sketchy rep with the circ desk again next month—seems less a hazard than trusting whatever informal book exchange I’ll find in Mecca to keep me satisfied. I can just see it: lying in a hot, tiny-windowed room with indigestion, the power out, and nothing but 8 musty copies of Eat, Pray, Love. That plus a match: good for creating some light, but I'll travel with an LED anyway.

Ok. So it is awkward to own many books and I and am fanatical about packing light (Papa owl, the erstwhile backpacking guide: “take care of the ounces and the pounds will take care of themselves”). But given the probability of quiet non-electrified nights over there, and the fact that I can only do so much pranayam and metta meditation (careful, you might get appointed as a subject for that… you’ll know if I mist up when I see you later), I should probably put in a short order this week to Powells.com.

So I have no idea. I’m thinking 5-7 titles. Does anyone love any of these or think they’re meh? Or have other suggestions?

Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis (need at least one below-the-belt writer)

Ovid, need to decide which

I am That or One Taste (same diff.; or maybe just get both and squash head between the two?)

The Snow Leopard

Meetings with Remarkable Men or something else by Gur or Ous?

Some U.G.? (probably… but no idea what and shouldn't a few lines be enough? hilarious even have to read more than one book, or one sentence, on nondualism)

Krishna Dutta’s biography of Tagore

The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals

Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis, or Stone Junction by Jim Dodge (must have something like this)

Shankara and Indian Philosophy (SUNY Religious Studies Series) by Isayeva, or Feuerstein’s Yoga Morality: Ancient Teachings at a Time of Global Crisis

The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace by Norman Sjoman or History of Modern Yoga by Elizabeth de Michelis

Martin Buber’s edited volume, Ecstatic Confessions

Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, or Midnight’s Children

The Cambridge Concise History of Modern India by the Metcalfs (annoying as hell but CONCISE!), or Modern South Asia by Sugata Bose (good on political economy)

Something more beautiful… or just re-read Buber?

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Categories: beta state

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

For V. · 2 December 2008

Shoulda known it would come around to the master key eventually. It took almost two years, which is about right. But wow. What am I doing? Stop me now?

This’ll stop everything. Go grab a tennis ball, right now, and sit on it. Right in your perineum in the Janu-C style. Keep sitting on it.

Distracted yet?

Ok, see ya.

Hahahahahaa. It’s ok. Everything is ok. What does it take from the inside to be fully normal and ok with this? Keep sitting.

Talking about the MB is like talking about kundalini. You can answer the questions on several dimensions—physical, subtle and energetic, psyche/consciousness. And no matter what you say you feel like you might be delusional or at least inviting scary visits from the secret order of the Knights Patanjali, bound by blood and oath to guard the secrets of the lineage for eternity. Either that or you just can’t get the young Wittgenstein off your back: whereof though canst not speak thereof ye shall pass over in silence.

Note that in these hilarious conferences that yoga teachers give, answers to questions of MB and kundini are usually one-dimensional. Rarely integrated. So in the Yoga Matrix, RF says kundalini is the opening of the heart, but does not treat physical and subtle body aspects. (Maybe some people experience brilliant heart opening without light explosions, or chase monkeylike after light explosions but never learn to love: in part the non-integration of these subjects may result from the fact that our own experiences are specific and diverse. Right on.) In most ashtanga discussions MB is treated as either kind of mystical (an interpretation which either irritates you because it’s sort of BS, or has you intrigued if not obsessed), or simply as a muscle contraction, but rarely as play of mind and body. And hell, what I’ve been saying about the MB is specified to interpersonal relationships—o mejor dicho, to its effects on “transpersonal” awareness?—and that is even another aspect of the jewel. I’ll follow up V’s question about this interpersonal aspect to try to keep myself honest, but should say I’m not good at discussing the practical aspects. Many ashtangis are not good at this. Susananda is, though. Maybe a combination of personal experimentation/practice and reading clear descriptions is the best way to play with finding the MB. I don’t know though. I’ve never tried to teach it. Sorry, secret Illuminati knights; I’ll be silent after this. You don’t need to send out the assassins or anything. We're just sitting on fuzzy yellow bouncy balls. It's nothing.

For me there are two reasons the MB is in play in this specific situation. It keeps my shit together. And it makes me fearless.

First is just this aforementioned groundedness, specifically the ways this plays in relationships. Some Vipassana teachers instruct people to find a place in the body to "ground the awareness" whenever they're speaking and listening in conversation. The teaching is usually to select the place one feels MOST at home, most connected and secure. After people investigate and try different things, they often settle on the feet or chest as their home base. From that point forward, cultivating an awareness of that place amid relating with others is a practice—a practice meant to keep one from getting caught up in drama in a way that leads to abandonment of one’s moral precepts (in Vipassana, that would be right intention, right speech, and so on along the Noble Eightfold Path.). So here, being in the body shapes experience, providing space for specifically moral grounding. But that’s built on something more basic (and sort of brilliant): an always-peripherally-present technique for self-awareness and being in the moment.

I take the Vipassana teaching as suggestive in two ways. First, grounding awareness in the body may or may not be coupled with Theravada social morality. I think it’s nice if it can be, and I like the openness and personal responsibility vibe of the Eightfold path. But the yamas, also precepts for virtuous relationships, are good for that too. I dunno. You actually have to study (horrors) and be reflective and (if you’re me) get some outside advice to figure out what social virtues you need to practice. It’s all grounded in self-awareness and the MB doesn’t care what operating system you choose. Though godhelpyou if you go with Vista (i.e. clunky, narcissistic New Age “ethics”).

Something more interesting I see in this Vipassana teaching is the recognition that oscillating between interaction and specified body awareness creates a certain kind of mental state. Maybe it puts a theta wave into your otherwise excited beta state. Who knows. Experiment with it.

Meantime, what if your home base could be not merely the feet but the pelvic floor—a place in the apparently physical body that is directly responsive to your breath and awareness, that doesn’t even really exist for you without a bit of energetic contraction. The pelvic floor isn’t thoroughly physical, and this is why the purely material discussions of it are so unsatisfying and invite re-mystification. When you dwell there, all this useful distinguishing we do of mind and body or of physical/subtle/causal starts to get undermined!

It’s a physical/subtle/causal space, but only if you let it be. Some people experience it as just physical or just breath or just “transcendent.” That is interesting too. No matter what, taking the awareness to this space will probably induce a light trance. You may only notice if you already know your own mind quite well, and can detect when parts of it are slowing down. (Being a reflective person doesn’t mean you know your own mind: you have to meditate to learn to distinguish and deepen interior states). I don’t know why it works this way—why lightly engaging the MB would shift my consciousness. It actually makes no sense to me at all. But for us 21st century humans, it is nice—and useful in the 7^th series, which is family relationships—to have a constant inner mala of light trance to course through the tide of our collective ADD.

So the last thing, fearlessness. Intestinal fortitude. In my case, most of the way I relate to my family would remain in shadow if I hadn’t started becoming self-possessed in the lower body. I have this difficult inheritance, a big Christian Fundamentalist family. If a belief system would lead you to turn on your own young, perhaps it’s tragically flawed, not just old-fashioned. I’ve come out pretty easily for a lot of funny and weirdly interesting reasons I’m not allowed to discuss, but in general Christian Fundamentalist culture has disfigured itself in its fight against modern society. You think I was joking about the no-masturbation contracts? Anyway, like I said before, it has turned itself into a kind of “disease” of the lower chakras, a culture organized around the control of women’s sexuality and creativity. Members, and women especially, are systematically taught to fear everything that would fall in the “chastity belt” region. You don’t feel this area, don’t speak of it except for with a vague indication to “down there,” don’t look at it, and definitely don’t ground your awareness there.

Seriously, it is so weird to live in a world in which the women cannot even swivel their hips. And no wonder all the altos in the church choir get converted (as I was) to airy Soprano II: easier to rely only on the diaphragm (not the nether guts) if you don’t have to sing the low notes. I could go on, but this is getting too anthropological even for me. Suffice it to say that being in possession of the lower chakras—whatever that may mean practically, psychologically, interpersonally, whatever—can make for a major advantage in this crowd. They’re running on five cylinders; I’m running on seven. Is that unfair? Eh. We all play dirty sometimes.

Ok, enough. I see from my loquacity that this is the tip of some iceberg. Is it time for icebergs to melt…? For my part, I’m going to shut up now before this turns in to the MB blog. Horrors. So much for all the hard spook-work that’s been done over millennia to keep this stuff esoteric. God. Maybe this is the apocalypse after all.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , integration

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.

…………………………………………………………….……..

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

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.

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

…[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.

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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?

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

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 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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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , self-deception , spirituality

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

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

Knowing, Being Known · 24 October 2007

Is practicing with someone intimate?

You sweat with him, learn his breath, come to know the ways his energy changes and the ways it is constant across the days.

So what? In a way, I’m tempted to take the “shala solipsist” position on this question. That whatever’s visible in someone’s practice has more to do with how she was trained than with her essence. As someone suggested recently, central to the shala solipsist argument is the insight that the ashtanga atmosphere fosters rampant projection. You get no verbal or eye-contact feedback from others; thus what you think you perceive is very much about you. Besides, even to the degree you are perceiving others in themselves, what’s in play during practice is just one side of a person. And that side doesn’t really tell you anything about how kind they are, or how thoughtful or intelligent, or what motivates them or makes them laugh.

But I don’t know. Maybe it is just that I sort of hate conversation— the way people use it to bulldoze each other, hide from each other, or whatever: because there is so little listening that happens in most conversation. But I feel like a conversation-free zone is rich for sensing people in far more interesting ways than usual.

Not that what you are doing during practice is sensing other people. You’re just picking up on them, mostly. But I think that this can actually subvert our habit of projecting. When we are trying to figure someone out, we go straight into our own cognitive patterns. Being-with in practice is simpler, less goal-oriented. You are just creating some community, not struggling to reach an apparent understanding or establish a shared point of view.

I have a sense that students vary in the degree to which they project their inner experience out into the room. Some days we project, sure; but other days the agenda flickers out and we become incredibly receptive to the environment. Maybe too receptive. Some days we are just so damn self-conscious that we become ultra-present; some days self-consciousness advances to a state of cluelessness; and now and then a person will truly go tharn. Sometimes the will is strong; sometimes surrender is literal and fairly complete. It varies. But I feel that learning to ride that over time with certain people is intimate.

I don’t usually break the sound barrier with fellow practitioners. But when I do, it’s with someone I know I want to relate to in that way. And by that time we’re already so comfortable with each other that the sides of us that play the friend role engage easily and with a little bit of delight.

Is yoga practice ineffably personal? Are my own perceptions all I can ever know?

When I love someone a lot, I grant them mystery. I refuse to make assumptions about how they feel and what motivates them, and give them the power to reveal to me exactly what they choose.

Though for all practical purposes: give me a break. If you have any intuition at all, and a basic capacity to bracket your self-centeredness, other people are easy. You yourself are easy.

Practice is really not so serious or “personal.” Yes, it is about your experience. But as you spend time with others, the boundaries of that self become a little blurred. You’re not just a monad on the mat: if someone is beside you and you’re not blocking them out (which does need to happen sometimes), then in non-trivial ways your experiences will be part of each other. How is that not intimate?

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

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

Ornette · 27 September 2007

Ok. Holy Shit.

It was decided that I should be edified. By a sort of direct experience of free jazz, which in its recorded form can make me irritable. Ornette Coleman and his drummer son Denardo and three bassists played here, the premiere of Sound Grammar; and I figured that twenty years from now when I get around to appreciating free jazz, I’d be glad I’d seen it.

Seriously, it was amazing. What do you say? Ornette walks on stage looking like a brittle old stick in the shape of an upside-down saxophone, head permanently bowed and hands clasped. Iridescent turquoise suit and big white shoes. He is 77 and I hear he passed out onstage at a festival over the summer. The only thing he said all night was at the start, telling us to follow the note, but that the note would be the beating of our own hearts instead of the sound they were playing.

Corny. Except I think this is the best way to describe what happened next. Ornette took up his alto saxophone and undid all the dark thoughts I’d been thinking about old age since seeing my diminished grandmother week before last. The intensity, mastery, emotional clarity. And sweat. He actually is genius, not the sentimental shadow of past genius.

I was exhausted afterwards.

After our friends had gone, the Editor tried to explain something about the unplayed rhythm in the music, the irregular pulse along each 16^th or 32^nd note or something. I looked up and said I wished I had the concepts to appreciate it on that level, but I just didn’t perceive a pattern.

—Yes you did. You were moving to it.—

—Oh.—

—I  thought you wouldn’t like it but after you started moving I realized you’d think it was the same as yoga.—

Whatever that means.

Here is Ornette in the NYT last year:

The music he likes is simply defined: anything...  that is not created as part of a style. “The state of surviving in music is more like ‘what music are you playing,’ But music isn’t a style, it’s an idea.”… Mr. Coleman draws you into the chicken- and- egg questions that he’s asking himself…. Many of them are about what happens when you put a name on something, or when you learn some codified knowledge. Though he is fascinated by music theory, he is suspicious of any construct of thought.

Links: Free Jazz, Ornette’s Permanent Revolution, Seeking the Mystical Inside the Music

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , sound , spirituality

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

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

Sharpen Your Nerves · 4 September 2007

Last Thursday morning, Isaac Brock appeared to me floating in a cartoon cloud and hissed: “Sharpen your nerves!”

Then he cackled and grinned at me with a mouthful of teeth filed down to points. Screamed: “Sharpen your nerves! Ahh haa haa haa!!”

Fine Isaac. I’ll stop being a lazy ass, sitting here on the cushion layering interpretations on my immediate experience.

But I wondered: what if you took notes on a meditation retreat, to snag some of the really good interpretive thoughts before they flew away? Would it make it easier to let thinking go?

Turns out that no. It would keep your brainwaves a little spiky, because you’d need to whip up some focused discursive thought in order to write. And yet what you did write would be stupid and empty later.

I know this because the next day I tried writing a few things down. Stupid things.

Here’s from the notebook:

“There are turkeys! Large!”

“Wanting to hug everyone. Must practice non-hugging. Do not molest.”

“Ghee. God we’re weird.”

Now I’m surprised I had to preserve these words, and others which are dumb enough I won’t even transcribe them.

It makes me wonder if the deeper moments of awareness and sensation I experienced during the week week, moments which seemed tinged with the ineffable, were actually vapid nonsense. Probably. But just in light of my present state of mind. Trying to interpret, and evaluate, that state of mind with this one is problematic.

What’s salient there is trivial here; and the contrary is even more true.

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Categories: arbitrage , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception , sound , spirituality

Earthly Forces, Living Lightly · 3 September 2007

Oh it’s hot down the central valley, and just flat and bright and heavy as I drive back in to LA. (Beneath a banner in the East Bay: “Stop Driving the War.” Good goddam call, I concede.) Six hours on four cylinders and Eno & Fripp 1975 (graduating from MfA), and into this weird scorched world where gravity is a serious force. I'm thinking of the molten magnet inside the planet.

That’s a transition allright. Konk me upside the head with an iron skillet off the stove.

But not in a bad way. Heh.

The hidden Marin valley of the past week was something else: smelling like wet sage in the morning and burnt sage in the afternoon, with deer outside my window to wake me for practice, wild turkeys as big as me (but not as goodlooking, I thought when I was thinking), tiny little lizards splayed out fearlessly in the 6 pm warming hour. The sky at night was darker than I’ve seen in too long, and after I stopped needing much sleep (talking takes much out of me in a normal day), being out with such large stars and the droning crickets was pretty close to opposite of midday LA in a heatwave.

The Editor rented Fierce Grace and we fired up the AC and closed all the shades and caught up after a week without tickles. The film together with something DZ(M) said reminded me of this.

We can see that there are ways of inhabiting our roles without making quite so much of them. It’s really not necessary to take out lives quite so personally. “The man [sic] who knows the relation between the forces of nature and actions,” Krishna says, “sees how some forces work upon other forces, and he becomes not their slave.” Your body, your mind, your personality – that’s all just part of nature, it’s all just lawful stuff happening. Why are you getting so uptight about it? Let it be harmonious with its lawful manifestation, and don’t struggle against it so hard. Live your life more lightly, more impersonally; don’t get so caught, so trapped in your melodrama.

Ram Dass, Living the Bhagavad Gita (p. 63)

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Categories: beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , sound , spirituality

The Slacker Meditates: Some High Points · 27 August 2007

                                DAY 1: STATIC

Candy saaaaays…

I haven’t had a sexual fantasy today. Which can’t be healthy...

I’m gonna watch the bluebirds flyyy… ovah mah shouldah 

Who else in here is having a sexual fantasy? Maybe if I can find them out…

What do you think I’d seeeee?

If aliens bombed the White House, would the retreat directors tell us?

If I could…

I knew the Velvet Underground was a mistake this morning.

Walk a-wa-y from me…?

             DAY 2: DOUBTING THE METHOD, RATIONALIZATION, MIND-GAMES

Isn’t this being the witness thing a little jayvee? Why cultivate dualism?

I’m not sure about yesterday's sublimation of sexual energy strategy. Isn’t that more for the Vajrayana set? And Kornfield did give that lecture about not mixing methods…. 

If a sexual fantasy spontaneously arises in my field of awareness, isn’t meditating on it a form of Vipassana?

How many days until my awareness goes transpersonal? Maybe I can work some telepathy.

If the TM people think they can meditate together to bring world peace, could we raise the vibrational energy for regime change?

This is all so dualistic. It’s wallowing. I want realization. Screw practice. This just reinforces smallmind. What’s the sutra? With swift effort become wise… And that Kornfield line: “It’s not that we’re too greedy… It’s that we’re not greedy enough.”

This is boring. If my brainwaves don’t drop down tomorrow, I’m done. Why don’t they teach us lucid dreaming or something halfway interesting as long as we’re going to sit here all week?

What am I doing on the slow train? Maybe the diamond vehicle…. Maybe zen…

              DAY 3: OBSESSION WITH IMMEDIATE ENVIRONMENT

But the slow train is scenic! I’d forgotten. God this is good.

…And lunch will be even better…

Whose shoes are those?

Was that 30 minutes of dead air? Existence is beautiful. Emptiness is beautiful.

Are there really not any sexy people? Really?

They have heirloom tomatoes down in the kitchen. Tomatoes…

How many hours until asana practice? Maybe I will start earlier tomorrow. Sun salutations…. Ekam inhale… Dwe exhale…. Shit. The instructor just took the look on my face for a sexual fantasy…

Ok, I’m wasting time. I don’t have all millennium here. Let it go, let it go already….

That dead spot in my trapezius hasn’t gotten any smaller since last year.

Ekam…. Dwe…. Ekam… Dwe… Sat… Nam… Sat… Nam… that’s more like it already… Nam…

I think I have to go to the bathroom, but that might be more drama than I can handle.

I feel happy. Happy happy happy. Pardon me while I exploit his emotion. Get lost, witness.

If I’m going to reset my alarm before bed, I better rehearse that a few times in my head first. It’ll be the big event of the night… I’m already looking forward to it.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , self-deception , sound , spirituality

The Guru's Segway · 26 August 2007

Sitting in the MOMA café two Fridays ago, thinking about Helvetica, when the yoga people call. I’d left voicemail at the Dharma Mittra center days earlier, asking if they’d take a west coast irregular at the long Saturday night intensive. Thought I’d received the silent no, and meantime had made plans to be at the Puck Building (interestingly enough) on Saturday night, for a reception that would collect my favorite score of sociologists.

Mmmm. Priority conflict. For about two seconds. I clearly enunciated all my credit card information to the caller, confident the hipsters at the next table were less smart than they looked.

Next night, old men on the street in Gramercy Park were doing approachable old-man things, but rather than ask for directions I trailed a giant purposeful yogi a half-block north, moving quickly. Very many good tattoos fresh enough to refer to this phase of his life rather than (like mine) one previous, but both earplugs and dreads so large that he’d been working on them awhile. He was warriorish, and suggested I was in for a break from Santa Monica diamonds and matched Lululemon. He took the stairs two at a time, which I couldn’t follow without making a racket. And besides, I stopped at the first landing to check out the guru’s segway.

Then climbed in to a long thin room full of summer evening light and vegetarian sweat. People were politely staking claims, tucking glasses and cell phones into a bookcase full of Danskos.

Mister Plugs and I were early, but the last two of maybe 40 to arrive. I was glad for that, setting up at the back of the room where’s there’s a solid floor, rather on the front 2/3 that is covered with faded rose shag that could be as old as me. Right above my mat, 15 feet up, was a disco ball in an angular skylight. Ad-hoc feng shi.

To the right (beyond a tattooed over-50 man who had a strong war-veteran-ness about him and who would make repeated comments about my hamstrings as we worked toward yoga nidrassana) was an altar featuring Jesus, Aurobindo, Yogananda, and I think Hanuman. (Nidrassana-man would feel far less lecherous hours later, when the whole thing deteriorated into an ecstatic-chanting, posture-striking mess of bodies.) I only tend to care about altars if they contain a candle I can use to balance. But this altar interested me because it brought parts of my neglected heart together: never has the Jesus-Yogananda association been so clear. This would be the first time that my old relationship with the Jewish carpenter would seem at all relevant to my yoga practice.

The large window out over the street was crowded with more of this hindoo-hippie detritus of what Dharma Mittra (Dharma? Mittra?) later said was his forty years in this space—during which his first segway, and before that 14 bicycles, have disappeared from that stoop on the stairs. (All of this karmic payback for horses, and perhaps one elephant, he stole in past lives. He is glad to give up segways to settle his score.) In the window, plants only a mother would love, glass ornaments of rainbows, dusty candles, and a giant metal OM looking down oven the intersection at 23^rd and 3^rd.

We crowded in on the pink shag, looking up at him and up at the OM, and made the intonation for a very long time. Across the street a young man pulled off a tie (on a Saturday?) and dress shirt, and I thought of Edward Norton in Fight Club. Did this young capital- lackey know what he was getting in to when he rented the place? We OMed and OMed. I thought about the cardsculpture stacks of citrus fruits at the stand down below, wondered if we were creating a comedy streetscene by dislodging them.

Then, drawing in a little closer, I started to see the people around me: 30s, professional, uptight, white. Possessing triceps. I fit right in.

This was not what Mister Plugs had led me to expect. No surprise it would take this group a while to open up to the ecstatic yogachurch Dharma Mittra wanted to conjure.

But here it is paragraph ten and I haven’t even set eyes on the man’s face yet. We haven’t even taken the first sun salutation (or the second, in which he’d nonchalantly instruct us to take pincha from downward dog). 

Looks like I am recounting this at the pace to which I have to slow down in order to remember it, now that it’s more than two weeks past. I’ll try to speed this thing up and offer a proper workshop review. Later.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , sound

Pirates of the Air · 23 August 2007

If you’re going to be exacting, be exacting about the breath.

Fourth day of Mysore with Petri the Pirate. He doesn’t teach to poses so much as to the breath—although he finally busted my cheating supta urdvha pada today, for the split second I drop the toe as I roll past the elbow (locking my eyes, whispering “You have to DECIDE! The toe is YOURS. Decide every day. You WILL NOT DROP IT”), and when I took my own ankles in a backbend, “Tomorrow you do yourself, without me holding.” Here’s to the power of suggestion. Phhhhhhhhhhhht. But anyway, most of what we’re doing is exacting my vinyasas. Basically, this involves adding an extra exhale in a few places, and attempting to inhale-UP! out of most postures.

In theory, the extra breaths should make practice easier, but as it is, knowing he’s listening far more than watching, I’ve placed my attention even more on the breath than usual this week. I love practicing this way, and with this kind of awareness from a teacher. But somehow in this process I’ve lost a sliver of inhale, shortened it to match the exhale (whereas usually I'm a hair long on the inhale), so over the course of a 140-minute practice I slowly edge into the red. Some inhale-retention might be due later.

Half an hour after rolling out of rest, and my wrists are still atremble on the banks of my keyboard. Breath superslow, deep and greedy.

I have consumed an unbelievable 64 oz of water in the past 40 minutes (how is this even possible?), and am finally, as a result, feeling grounded. In savasana I practiced a bit of yoga nidra where the body becomes heavy, drawn into the ground like a block of lead, and then becomes light, weightless, air. Hearing Jasmine Riddle, from a secret hippie-magick cassette I found in the obscurest of university archives (and is now, eyebrow-raisingly, a regular line on my far-from-private library record) as she warps soundwaves with her warbling chant of “heavy heavy, light light.”

What’s with that about conquering gravity in the third series? I’m a long long way from such things, measuring by my urdvha kukkutasanas, but today there is such an spacey lightness that I’m not going to get a whit done until I refind the earth. Matthew Sweeney noted in a podcast recently that astangis tend to overemphasize lightness, I suppose to the point that we of the subculture becomes rootless and unsteady.

I just downed another 10 oz of lemonwater.

I think I’ll read a stack of book reviews before I try to do anything semi-important with my brain this morning. Tomorrow, primary series, close to the ground and counterbalanced with great inhalations.

That’s enough vinyasa talk for this owl.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , sound , spirituality

Music For Airports · 19 July 2007

The windchimes rustled in practice this morning. They’re soft and deep, and slow. Very Music for Airports in tone. (Their maker must have intended that—it’s too perfect to be coincidental).

They probably rustle often, but we don’t always have our window cracked like we did today, and I’m not always aware of sounds besides the background whispers of a teacher and the diswasher-like drone of the ujjayi chorus.

Today, the breeze touched the chimes little just as I entered tittibasana, ringing a subject-verb-predicate into something like my front-brain. Tell V. your method. This one’s for her.  Can you practice a posture as homage to someone—besides sages and wild creatures, that is? Anyway, I came home to email from V. asking for advice on just this matter, so clearly the chimes were telegraphing the same.

Music for Airports is a guilty pleasure for me. Guilty because corny, together with the rest of early ambient; and a pleasure because after about two seconds of listening I lose all self-consciousness about genre and cultural meaning and all that. A year ago, after a week of vipassana, I drove north out of Marin and pushed play on track 1 just as I made into the clouds that were hanging on to the Golden Gate. I hadn’t said a word in days, and figured the sound would ease the transition into Sunday morning Mysore practice on Divisadero. Really, the record is beautiful, and might have been written exactly for an empty morning drive in clouds across the Golden Gate, when you haven’t spoken or even much cogitated for ages.

I was the first one to arrive at Divisadero by a half hour, so broke the seal with some Sanskrit in a big empty room. Later C arrived and, to my horror, went to the CD player. No no no no noooo: please no music for yoga.

She played Music for Airports. Practice was amazing.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , sound , spirituality

New Machines for Expired Ideas · 11 July 2007

I’m looking at a headline: Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works.

And thinking: Nooooo. Brain scans reveal that meditation works. A map is not an explanation.

Now that researchers have FMRI machines, there’s a boom in research on the so-called “effects” of meditation practices on the brain... or "causes" of the brain's effects on the meditator (clearly, the research designers are confusing themselves). FMRI takes very cool pictures of parts of the brain lighting up. But that’s it. It’s cartographic--and primitive, in a sense. But since it’s new, it’s spawned literature on the “effects” of meditation—something forward-thinking neuroscientists have cared about since the Dalai Lama started talking to them 25 years ago and some innovative philosophers, economists and brain scientists set up the Mind and Life Institute.

Ok, that’s great. The new UCLA study I’m reading is typical. The scan shows that certain neurons light up when people “experience” negative emotions (produced by looking at other faces embodying negative emotions—I'm not even going to unpack the weird assumptions loaded into this research design), and that the brain’s emotion center calms down when a subject identifies and takes a distance from these represented emotions. According to one of the authors, “These findings… suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood....”

So ok, hold up.

First, the tautology problem. What’s the cause and what’s the effect here? They have essentially “discovered” that distancing yourself from bad moods… distances you from bad moods. The effect and the cause are the same. No wonder their findings are statistically significant.

Just because some neurons are involved does not make the neurons the “cause” of this whole process. They’re just part of the process—albeit the only part the researchers can quite recognize as real (and thus the one they identify as a “cause”).

The only reason the researchers think that the first phenom of mindfully identifying and detaching from an emotion is separate from the second phenom of the lights going dim in the emotion center is that they are crazy old dualists who believe thought is an gauzy ghost separate from the material “reality” of the brain. They imagine their finding is an instance of intention causing action… though any meditator could tell them that emotional experience and intention are inter-twined and mutually reinforcing. Sure, the meditator says: You can change your thoughts, but only after discovering how your thoughts are already changing you. One does not simply cause the other. And ultimately, thoughts themselves and the thinker’s immediate experience are not separate.

I wonder: if these scientists knew their own minds better from the inside, would the create more subtle, accurate concepts?

Second, and this is what irritates me, the main scientific excitement over this research stems from the assumption that experiential phenomena are only “real” if they have a measureable physical manifestation. Materialism 101. But thoughts and intentions are also real (I wouldn’t say they’re “things,” like The Secret says, but anyway). You can’t take pictures of intentions with FMRI machines, but on a practical, everyday, human basis, pretending thoughts aren’t real is some wicked reductionism. And that’s the thing: mind, subjectivity, interiority, thought—all these beautiful inner phenomena—do not reduce to neurons firing. Taking my cues from Bourdieu the master-synthesizer, I’d submit that the subjective (mind) and the objective (brain) sides of this picture are mutually constitutive and equally real. It’s just that you can’t take FMRI pictures of inner states per se.

The leading edge of western, and if I may, global, culture is rushing toward holistic understandings of mind-body. This shows up in social science’s sensitivity to embodiment, in athletes’ dedication to mental training, in the eastern-western culture of yoga, in the synthetic social theory that theorists of both mind and society are patching together, and in the dissipation (in certain cultural strata) of all kinds of mind-body practice.

Neuroscientists want to be a part of the revolution, as I’m seeing especially on the west coast—at places like the the UC Davis Shamatha Project, the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Since they’ve got the biggest budgets and the shiniest tools, they’re likely to get an audience in defining the 21^st century mind-body, but right now all they’re doing with it is advancing a new version of thought/brain dualism. This isn’t the same as reducing mind to brain, but it could easily go back in that direction.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Five for the Archive, Part IV · 21 June 2007

Finally...

5. The future. What are your practice goals for the future?

Of course I want the present conditions to last, but I know that someday relatively soon practice will be often alone. Maybe that will be two years from now, and maybe ten: at the moment there sits before me a hilarious range of possibilities for where I'll spend the coming decade, and under what conditions.

Therefore: part of what I’m learning here is both to set and to richly fertilize a me-sized piece of ground that’s fruitful under whatever conditions blow in. Every day. There will be easy years again, and harder ones after that. What I'm asking of practice is that it carry me through whatever, because I know that if nothing else I'll live more deeply and richly and honestly for that continuity.

So it’s all about cultivating the height of energy and the depth of focus that render practice powerful—the relaxed intensity and no-bullshit grace (moral grace, aesthetic grace, spiritual grace) that I’ve only seen a few in the over-50 generation pull off. And they pull it off consistently, not just on particular days—because the kind of strength I’m talking about is more in the synapses, and wherever, than in the muscle fibers.

So I’d like to keep practicing until the end of me, sensitive enough to adjust the knobs to make it sustainable on a daily basis. This is about supporting life that it should be more abundant, not about taking life to support practice.

Also: discover what I have to give to the larger project and to individuals’ practices (support, energy, whatever), and give it. Maybe do some research in the more scholarly sense on yoga as a system of science-morality-spirituality-art for our own time.

And probe the edges: today, that’s the primal fear that comes up in pranayama, the apparent practical obstacles to a deeper sitting practice. In asana, continue with the back-injury puzzle as it gradually works its way back to center. And if this makes any sense at all, I’d say in general I’m working from the ligaments. Mine don’t need to lengthen any more, and especially in the pelvic girdle/ hips and (when inverted) the shoulder girdle/ thorax, my aim is to render the ligaments stable for the sake of postural integrity and long-term strength. For me these days, this is where I’ll find balance and sustainability. These details, and the kinds of shapes I happen to be making with my body, will change every year, but I hope my inner life and relationships with the world will become more and more stable over time.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , spirituality

Five for the Archive, Part III · 19 June 2007

Number 4 of 5 in the series…

4. The history. Describe the development of your practice and history with teachers since then.

It got so my Sunday class was Led First Series Astanga. I took it for months but never learned the series. That would have required thinking, and I didn’t want to clutter up my meditative headspace with that kind of memorization. And, I was kinesthetically stupid (and still am, relatively).

Although my main teacher told me to learn to think with my body, I thought that was a special ability she must have learned as a dancer—an ability I simply didn’t have.

Then in March or April of 2004, YogaWorks cancelled the Sunday Led class. But there was something special about that particular sequence—god knows what I saw in it. But since I wanted it in my life, the cancellation meant it was time to go deeper—and become more a producer than a consumer of asana practice. On Tuesdays and Thursdays that quarter I had mid-mornings free, so skipped campus between 10 and 12:30 and sped down the residential streets alongside the country club to Beverly Hills for the erstwhile Sunday-teacher’s Mysore class.

Over the coming 2.5 years this teacher and another would baptize me with awesome fire and then with ice, and four others, after, with love and respect and space. All six were products of the specific school of astanga that Maty Ezraty and Chuck Miller built. Some of these students have tried to disown their first formations a bit, but both SKPJ and Maty-Chuck’s teachings are in me, directly through them. I only made it to Maty’s room a few times—the way the girls there acted brought up all my high school-outsider insecurities and it was not a sufficiently inward-focused place for me to hit and remain in something like theta state. If Maty and Chuck had not been mostly before my time, I would have found my teacher in Chuck, whose early-morning room (to recount my few visits just before he departed) was still and dim and totally electric.

As it is, for 2.5 years I learned from them and from their teacher, through the six students who became my teachers. I am grateful beyond words for each of them, in individual ways. Three have quietly watched me have a very hard year—two knowing the story and visiting this space, the other not—and they have held the ground open for me in a way most well-meaning friends could never know how to do. These people, inexplicably, show a kind of dedication to my practice—to practice itself. It is that they’re teachers, and all softened by years of this method. My experience would not be the same—would be nothing like what it is—without their ring of fire on the outskirts of this daily séance. Strong, steady mentor-friends. Thank you.

These six together took me through second. Then last summer Rolf came to town and taught me the first three pranayamas. Damn if that didn’t rewrite the whole equation forwards and backwards. Drat blether fret. Bother!

And then there’s my present teacher, who plans out the crude details of the thing so I do not have to trouble, who connects me directly to the master-student SKPJ, and whose holding of the ground resonates out in waves from our small room such that your awareness hits an air pocket and dives down fast as you walk up on the place. This is the model of teacher as Leah-Luke in the Deathstar trash compactor (why weren’t they doing Vira II?), or the wise child with the finger in the dike, or the shtirasukha serpent resting strongly on the elephant’s back. The teacher sets the ground, and we show up and rain down sweat and tears and, yes, a little blood. It’s a mutual creation, this addictive scene. Not that I would have expected something this good when I’m already here in the land of astanga plenty, but so it is. This era hasn’t been easy, but it is rich.

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

Five for the Archive, Part II · 18 June 2007

Following up on last Thursday’s #1 and #2, here is #3 of 5.

3. The addiction. How/why did you get hooked?

Just as the class up at Sunset Canyon concluded, I settled oh-so-compliantly with the insurance company of the driver who had nearly killed me. Receiving a large check changed several things for me, given my history: peasant-class people do no do yoga in this town, but I had already moved out of that zone culturally and now was also leaving it in an economic sense. I stashed much of the settlement in the market (likewise life-changing, considering my family view the owning of capital as sinful and the stock market as a bellweather for the apocalypse), bought a car (the first new car in the family, also viewed as transgressive), and listened to my partner when he said I should spend something on my own healthcare, given that the big check was a marker of the near-death to which I’d been subjected. I shrugged away the argument that I was entitled to something “for me,” but still followed my charismatic teacher to (cue horns) YogaWorks Beverly Hills, and took her 7:30 am class M-W-F for the summer.

The teacher started noticing me around August, but didn’t remember I’d been at the UCLA class the previous spring (“But I always remember the strong people! No way you were in that class!”) Apparently my body was changing, though I don’t even remember. I was showing up because I liked my teacher’s rhythm and playfulness. She had the ability simultaneously to make time both stand still and fly past. Class was an oasis. I also had a sense that if I kept going, the ill cognitive-emotional effects of that old wreck would dissipate and bring my sharp old analytical faculty back to roost in my pointy little head.

Oh yeah: I remember arguing many pinot nights on the balcony that practice made me smarter.

But that was mostly an excuse I made to my dense little clan of artists and academics for my frequent disappearing acts. I may have had to move up in the world to afford it, but my inner circle looked far, far down in the habit. They were beginning to suspect me. Not only was yoga manifestly narcicisstic—with the insufferable magazine covers in the Whole Foods line—it was unbearably corny. Did somebody say namaste?

As my tastes for alcohol, late nights, heavy food, loud avant rock, and intense intellectual banter diminished, my old garde both felt insulted and resented losing those pieces of me. My sweetheart started showing up at parties and shows without me, and quiet concerns arose. Years later, now that the adjustments for this new, jealous lover (i.e. astanga) have been made, my habits are viewed with irritation and pity.

For every one person who says my consistency is an inspiration, there are five who tell my partner they are sorry about what’s happened to me. The greatest misunderstanding is the popular story: after I got hit by the car, everything changed. I saw my own mortality—it is said, behind my back—and this changed me from an intense, complex and strong go-getter into someone who is less, who is weak, who is annoyingly like a hermit. What a pitiful story this is. But when a good friend’s fire seems to disappear, what else can you think?

The intensity hasn’t disappeared, you know. Just been redirected, in a way that ain’t so fun at parties.

That first summer of my practice, when I was still arguing it was all for the mental payouts, in truth I was showing up for my teacher because I just loved being there. I could drop right in to practice, focus and breathe: the simplicity of it was so beautiful.

The Beverly Hills scene was odd—so many sparkly-white leisure people and invisible brown ones cleaning up behind, the stupid dogs trained to be babies rather than cainines, valet parking in the city garage, Larry King cruising through in a Lincoln without stopping at the lights—but the studio itself was intimate and peaceful… an easy place to become a regular. At some point, I started taking a Tuesday-Thursday, and then a Sunday, class…. 

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Categories: beta state , evolution , having a body , integration

Saturday XV · 16 June 2007

Time’s out of joint today. Sat vipassana at a new center, where they have begun a cycle of daylong retreats. Very normal Buddhists, these people: so normal, the director’s packing the exact same degree from the exact same department where I am currently doing my thing.

It’s good to sit with people: when keeping your awareness together promises so much less fun that writing another story in your head (yes, narrative is where I live), you keep it together anyway for the sake of the group. Maybe all they’re doing anyway is deeply focused porn-visualization (which they tell me gets more vivid the longer you practice), but you tell yourself the energy would be different if they were cheating on you like that. And so you more or less keep it together.

Keeping your awareness together is so much to ask; and it is so little. Just this minute, take a half-step out of yourself and quiet one more level down. Not the next minute. The next minute you can get right back on the Circle of Willis express train if that's what you have to do. You can catch it any time.

Anyway, the little gong gongs and you realize an hour or two have passed and the GTD Saturday to-do list squaks at you:

What, you think you're the damn leisure class?

The world is happening. Get back in it.

So whatever. I’ve got revisions of an old paper to face up to tonight, after a walk with the Editor. A glance at the always-within-reach GTD blackbook says the summer lineup is a whole string of non-self-respecting Saturday nights like this one. Rock on: for some reason, this is a window in the week when writing’s easy—vipassana or no vipassana. So I’ll take it wherever I can make it work.

By the way, I met V. yesterday (right name for an international woman of astanga intrigue). She’s great, as some will soon know, with a quick chortle and light sigh, and the best British-Spanish accented English ever. We spent a few hours, with a stroll through the city’s Spanish-colonial founding spot: once a well and a Franciscan mission, now trinket stalls and burrito restaurants. Trinkets and burritos: welcome to California. 

No links today, since I took my desultory internet-head to the cushion and now straight down the work well.

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

Metaphysical Car Wreck, Part II · 7 June 2007

…As I was saying just before sleep the other night night: Lots of meditation teachers warn that it is easy to hide inside your mindfulness or contemplative practice; and the same is true for asana. Many of us feel this practice to be a refuge—a beautiful, true stroke of luck in our tragicomic lives. Even at our most sincere—when we’re not using the practice to construct a self-image that’s worked-out, insightful, balanced—we’re capable of practicing without looking at whatever it is we don’t want to see. 

Ok. So, it is easy to conflate practice and therapy. Personal time, quiet time, reflection time…, and the leavening sanitymaker, the place we air out the anxiety or the rage or the giddiness. 

Westerners are tormented by our selves, and we know it. The main way we run is by consuming. (Good thing for the capitalist elite, for now.) Meanwhile, floating around the ether are, let’s say, three broad entry-points to facing the pain: drugs, therapy, and religion. Let’s take all three treatments at face value, as if the do what they claim to do. So, drugs mainly go after symptoms. Nevermind all that: it’s not conceptually different from “retail therapy.”  

But self-analytic therapy and contemplative practice look for causes and, at their best, rip pain-sources out by their roots—the first by acceptance and/or release, the second by detachment. Contemplative practice posits that we have reactive habits which bind us; therapy posits that we split off, repress and project pieces of our inner experience in self-deceptive, painful ways.  

Both are accurate pictures of inner life, and both “solutions” are semi-successful. In fact, Western common-sense understandings of what it is to be a human are entirely shot through with everyday assumptions that both psychotherapeutic and contemplative theories of human experience are largely true. For pragmatists who define truth as “what works” (the Buddha; William James; me; you unless you’re a committed solipsist or other philosophical nutjob), then, the insights of each approach qualify the other’s status as any be-all-end-all solution. 

From this practical, non-fundamentalist perspective—cooking up nourishment with whatever happens to be in the kitchen—here’s the question of the day. What to do about anger—e.g., when a troll shows up in your community and both infuriates you and makes you act in ways you later regret? 

Here’s Ken Wilber taking contemplation and therapy on their own terms, and making them complements. When it comes to contemplative practitioners who use practice to transcend anger, yet have bits of anger they’ve previously split off and projected, he writes (IS, 129):  

Denying ownership [of anger] is not dis-identification but denial. It is trying to dis-identify with an impulse BEFORE ownership is acknowledged and felt, and that dis-ownership produces symptoms, not liberation. And once that prior dis-ownership has occurred, the dis-identification and detachment process of meditation will likely make it worse, but in any event will not get at the root cause. 

Does it work to rely on Integral thought here? Not that I don’t have a passel of doubts about this overall system: its central metaphor, the AQAL matrix, is one big philosophy-eating box plot. And its proponents seem to spend their efforts in forcing the world into its color-coded schema (I’d rather see them working to integrate the schema back into itself at the roots)—this focus leads to a lot of talk about the matrix, and less talk about experience. There is in this, unrestrained, the colonialist impulse of conquering-by-mapping (a trouble that Wilber, the original master mind, doubtless understands because his grasp of the last 30 years of social theory is awesome). And even though my hero Pierre Bourdieu deployed much of what I like best about Wilber’s sensibility decades ago, Wilber can synthesize like nobody’s business, in ways useful to people all over the epistemic-ideological-geographical-cultural map. In Chapter 6 of Integral Spirituality. He makes simple the complementarity of analysis and contemplation by describing pathologies in the ultimately more transcendent and interesting practice of contemplation (126): 

Once… repression occurs, it is still possible to experience the anger, but no longer the ownership of the anger…. I can practice vipassana meditation on that [disowned] anger as long as I want, where I… simply notice that “there is anger arising, there is anger arising, there is anger arising” – but all that will do is refine and heighten my awareness of anger [as a an object outside of me]. Meditative and contemplative endeavors simply do not get at… the fundamental ownership-boundary problem…. Painful experience has demonstrated time and again that meditation simply will not get at the original shadow, and can, in fact, often exacerbate it. Amidst all the wonderful benefits of meditation and contemplation, it is still hard to miss the fact that even long-time meditators still have considerable shadow elements. 

No kidding! Shall I name names, or will an awareness of our own shortcomings be sufficient? 

I love the idea of asana practice as a refuge, and in the past year of family trauma it has been nothing but refuge to me. I don’t doubt this or regret it: I’m just damn thankful. But if we think that having a practice means we don’t have to work on ourselves in other ways, it is a refuge from the world? Or, again, from ourselves?

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Metaphysical Car Wreck · 5 June 2007

Online community: live and lurk. I’ve lurked in the astanga online forum throughout the three years of my practice. It’s rich with information on how the practice of astanga yoga hashes and heals a person, and how these highly (but sometimes partially) processed people relate. Tracing back the impulses, I tend to click over when one of the following questions comes to mind.

  Either:

O god! This practice creates me destroys me. Owns me frees me. And makes me an alien for sure. Who can understand this?

  Or:

 Who are these aliens?

Some people go to the forum because they’re fascinated by the body as a geometrical thing, and want to discuss it like a house under retrofitting. Or they go for directions to RL islands of astanga. Or for philosophical banter. But whatever gets us there, participants both learn about and forge astanga culture. But oddly: most of us just watch, and let a small brave few do the making.

It’s an explicit zone in a practice that is mostly wordless— unspeakable even— and in the limit, ineffable. By contrast, communication in a Mysore room is made up of: intuition (the boundaries of the subtle body, once you find it, aren’t solid); and of history-revealing sweat smells (watch out: we become sommeliers of sweat); and of the not-so-subtle self-expression/ self-betrayal that emerges within the outlines of the choreography. A Mysore room is a huge store of community information, especially as the habit refines practitioners to transparency; but all that is offstage to your experience, peripheral to your driste—and it leaves out any information about how astangis behave when we’re not in, well, church.

So the online forum is a back porch walled in silent flies. Last week, responding to a troublemaker, I flew into the zapper. Something between stupidly taking his bait and sincerely trying to put something suggestive, oblique and understated—and thereby less directly reactive—into the stew.

On a single 337-post-long thread that lasted half a year, a non-astangi troll looked for something like love (attention) through a craven bid for community punishment (strict parents, eh?), and did a brilliant job of getting it. In drawing astangi ire, he gave us the perfect chance to see ourselves if we wanted. The last thing an astangi desires to be is angry and ignorant, and because he was every shade of both angry (bitter, fearful, raw, hurt, passive) and ignorant (willful, accidental, bigoted), he offered the full set of goods to mirror any one of us. And he was a hard worker: carefully responsive to each comment, never letting the thread go cold, consistent/believable in his tone.

Much of the conversation I saw (which was only a fraction of that insane number of posts) was just boxing around the ears, but at times it got good and raw. A few participated, but amazingly, dozens or maybe even hundreds watched. And questioned themselves for it. “It’s like a metaphysical car wreck,” one interjected. “I just can’t look away.”

Many said that the discussion was litter—community garbage that should just be deleted. Ultimately, yesterday, contributors decided to preserve the thread in a marginal location where it won’t generate any more heat. In the meantime, some said things they finally regretted—things that compromised their self-images in some way—and as the conversation died, they asked the moderator to erase those old comments or went back themselves to sanitize/edit them.

Yes; a lot of words and energy were wasted in this drawn-out altercation, but more than any other on the board it answers my question of who, as a community, we are. Insofar as you know a country by the way it treats its weakest members (o “illegal” residents), these 17 pages of acrimony are a rare arrow pointing to our dark side.

How could a virtual Diogenes generate so much heat among us? What was he doing right? And are we going to pretend that wasn’t really us getting worked up?

The claims that this conversation was meaningless noise, repeated calls to banish the troll for not being one of us, and especially the post-hoc editing call to mind the perennial problem of introspective practice and the repressed sides of the personality: you can’t reflect on the parts of yourself that you refuse to admit are in you. 

Lots of meditation teachers warn that it is easy to hide inside your mindfulness or contemplative practice; and the same is true for asana. Many of us feel this practice to be a refuge—a beautiful, true stroke of luck in our tragicomic lives. Even at our most sincere— when we’re not using the practice to construct a self-image that’s worked-out, insightful, balanced—we’re capable of practicing without looking at whatever it is we don’t want to see. So if it’s a refuge, is it from the world or from the parts of ourselves that we’ve disowned the same way we disown the troll?

I don’t think any amount of meditation can answer that. But for now, sleep. Part II tomorrow.

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Categories: beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday IX · 22 April 2007

So, some links for this weekend after all.

? Now you're telling me the Antichrist is a terrorist? That’s Guatemala’s excuse for canceling his birthday party.

? California deserts, an epically charismatic Peruvian, Powell library shamanism, pseudo-ethnography, suppression at the NYT, the politics at UC Press, and the whole trouble with anthropology. And all this before Carlos Castaneda turns into a creeeeepy religionmaker (with all the cult criteria: the sex, the suicide, the funny haircuts).

? Neuro-linguistic programming creative Philip Farber gives an interview about his understanding of the technology, and the old days with Milton Erickson.

? Jack Kornfield says that contemplative practice is radical, because it clears the ground for changing the world. (That’s the Spirit Rock center in the background.)

? Beware, dirty yoga men.

? NG recently sent me the best and most accurate version ever of the “Screw Leviticus” argument (for those who actually know people who use the Bible to condemn gay people). Those Humanists of Utah are fighting the good fight. An excerpt:

Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

? Clips from Yoga, Inc.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

The Emotional Lives of Yogis? · 2 April 2007

Here’s a little more essay-writing as I bring this winter’s teacher training class to a close. I don’t know if it’s my ancient history as a forensics nerd or just living in three non-overlapping value zones (yoga, sociology, Christian fundamentalism) that makes me question any question in the process of answering it. But so it is. Not that critical thinking doesn't belong in every zone....

How do the kleshas and the gunas effect your asana practice?

In yoga philosophy, kleshas are mental obstacles to enlightenment — specifically ignorance, egotism, attraction, aversion and clinging to life. Gunas are thee qualities of our prakriti—ignorance, passion and goodness—one for each of the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.

Yoga philosophy provides many lists such as the kleshas, and also frequently divides up the world into three essences. These are wonderful interpretive tools, especially for one living in India while practicing Hinduism and ayurveda. However, because I do not intuitively understand the samkya system of purusa and prakriti (or the tantric Siva-Shakti), and how it integrates the theory of karma, my understanding of the kleshas and gunas is still superficial. The gunas, especially, and the kleshas of “wrong understanding” and “ego” seem particularly subtle.

Though I need to study samkya philosophy to develop a practical understanding of these concepts, this does not mean that my yoga practice itself cannot inform me about my inner states. While wonderful tools, kleshas and gunas are not causal agents which actually “effect” anything. My mind loves to grasp after categories, to substitute a map for the territory and thus pretend to know the whole terrain. Thus, for me, categorizing my experience according to these new concepts, while it will be terrifically interesting, might do more to substantiate the categories themselves, as if they are exhaustive of the mind’s possibilities, than it will to show me what is in my mind. If I imagined these concepts as causal agents which create “effects,” I would be mistaking abstractions for reality, or treating as real that which is transitory. And, working with a definitional, non-integrated understanding of the concepts might lead me to confuse myself, rather than know myself better. Ultimately in practice I am hoping to attenuate conceptual, discursive thought rather than increase it.

Still, if kleshas roughly categorize destructive mental tics and gunas an approach to psychosomatic dispositions, my asana practice is subject to both. It has been almost three years since I began a daily astanga practice and so found myself meditating on the body. After the first year, curious about the nature of consciousness, I began exploring different forms of meditation. Last year, breath meditation inspired a pranayama practice. So far, these three practices illuminate one another: the resistance I experience in meditation—where discursive thought and deep emotions frequently cut in—and pranayama—where a physical-mental-emotional fear of death arises in kumbhaka—both highlight that my asana practice is relatively open and quiet. Asana practice supports the more difficult practices, even as the latter teach me to breathe rhythmically and sense my mind downshifting in asana.

In the first six months of astanga practice, remembering the sequence of postures and disciplining my body into their shapes required my best concentration. This was the yoga—linking the mind and the body. Once I had attained the basic union that resulted from settling the physical practice into my body so I no longer had to rehearse movement mentally or pause to query some isolated part of my mind, I was able to practice what TKV Desikachar describes as dharana in asana. In the beginning, nobody told me that thoughts or emotions were supposed to “come up” during asana practice, and my journals indicate that I experienced practice as a quiet, physically pleasurable “zoning in” as I dropped into meditation. (I am thankful that no one mentioned mindstuff to me in the beginning: had I gone searching for kleshas, I am sure I could have created habitual stumbling-blocks to fulfill that search.)

While I would like to have more to say about emotions that “come up,” or the way asana helps me manage distraction or energetic fluctuations, I have very little. Beautiful generalizations by writers like Joel Kramer and Stephen Cope resonate with me somewhat, but they say too much. I rarely experience a deep or intense emotion in asana, and find that even on the most heavy days initiating practice resets my psychosomatic disposition to the best clarity I can manage on that particular day. That quality of clarity is always a little different, but dissecting it too much leads me to grasp at false explanations.

Before I had been practicing a full year, I underwent what I can only describe as reordering of my nervous system that manifested as a kind of spiritual crisis. The peace, joy and equanimity I’d begun to find gave way to loss of patience with the world. Intense sound, food, light, or emotional expression made me shudder, and I withdrew from most relationships even as I became more intellectually acute and physically vivacious. It is not that I decisively rejected the world, but that I became hypersensitive to stimuli and craved quiet stillness in myself and my environment at all times. I wanted life to imitate meditation. During these months, I felt that practice was more real than the world. Rather than being in the world and letting it show me to myself, I wanted to renounce the world because it interfered with my preferred state of consciousness.

It took nearly six months for me to tiptoe out of that place, and initiate a much more messy practice of life as some kind of yoga. For the past year, I have sought to blur the boundary between asana practice—which is still a refuge—and daily life. Asana practice itself is still pretty simple and largely the same every day. As Kramer says, morning practice does put you deeply in touch with how you treated yourself the previous day. Yet I find that seeking explanation for every little internal variation is a fast track to self-confusion. The mind wants explanation for everything, but on a deeper level my nature is to love, and to die. I hesitate to analyze how these ever-present processes of love and death interact with my sleep, my emotions, my food, water, light, recovery time, proximity of my mother-in-law, and endless other variables to render certain experiences on the mat. Practice is a gift, not a performance. I hesitate to rank it.

Whatever my experience on the mat, practice does set a high standard for the rest of my life. I oscillate between using that standard as a measure of my daily inadequacy (as mental tics and psychosomatic modifications overtake me completely) and seeing it as an inspiration for what clarity, love and insight a holistic practice might bring in time.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , spirituality

Saturday III · 25 February 2007

Saturday morning is coming around late and abbreviated this weekend, but there are some photographs and some writers worth noting tonight. Almost didn’t get to this at all, as we’ve been without hot water for days… and I just spent 2 hours making a bath by betting the speed of my teapot against the slow trickle of my tub drain. End result: keeping with the luxury-in-contrast theme, 30 minutes in 4 inches of steamy saltwater. I wouldn’t have done it for school tomorrow or for the increasingly stringy-haired neighbors, but it was worth it for the psoas after the weekend of a hundred forward bends. 

 

Anyway: I’m excited about the young Daniel Alarcón. He’ll be talking in Los Feliz next week. Subversive radio stations, unnamed Latin American countries, universal tragedy of civil war. These tug pretty deep for a few in this orbit, yes? 

Good Magazine is awfully neoliberal and not hip. Similar to, respectively, the New Yorker and Ira Glass. However, this week Good writes on both, and nicely. 

NYTM lavishes Jeff Wall on the occasion of his opening at the MOMA. Do look at the slideshow.

Some readers were intrigued to rediscover the breath last week. I love this. Since you have asked for more, until we sit down together and do what a teacher of mine calls “polish ourselves” with pranayamas, here is my recommendation for a congenial, non-disciplinary, useful introduction. Anything else I’d note would land in the “esoteric shit” rather than the “verging on self help” category. But this CD is real nice. Hie and aquire it from your public library. 

Early adopters, go upload your photo already. (Not that I have either.) But tag me if you want an invite. 

 

Finally, he's no James, but Michael Wood writes pretty good. Before I turn to this excitement, his LRB essay on Richard Powers will be edifying if irksome company on Wednesday's flight up the coast. For Chris, I note it.

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

Neurolinguistic Programming and Siva's Terrible Aspect · 5 February 2007

I just transcribed my notes from last week’s 90 minutes of ineffability, that is, from observing T’s good old vinyasa yoga class. When students were in a wide-legged forward fold with heads approaching or on the ground, here is what he said: “Lift your thighs as you press the feet down. Dig the shoulderblades in toward the chest and, if you want come into tripod, come on up. Stay with your breath: the quality of your breath is the quality of your practice.” 

With that unremarkable, almost parenthetical suggestion, one of the visiting dancers (whose gorgeous 15-minute solo to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on Saturday night put my date in near-ecstasy, though it was a little emotionally overwrought for me) lifted up like nothing into a headstand.

With apologies to third-rate 1990s anthropology (the “texts read us” school), the action did her. It was at least as natural as breath. I wondered for a second if my friend and teacher T was doing a Milton Erickson number on the class or had spent some time with the offspring of the genius. (That would be Richard Bandler, who turned neuro-linguistic programming into something unhelpfully interpretive, John Grinder, who used its magic for ill and destroyed himself, or the next generation like ultimate lifecoach Tony Robbins, who has distilled NLP technology into riches and cheese.) NLP, which builds on hypnosis, the practitioner’s intuitions, and the beauty of the possible, is a way of getting people out of their own way. It shortcuts our dumb cogitations and resistant-tense realities by integrating radical suggestion so into the fabric of taken for grantedness that we act upon it. Through this radical, unselfconscious action, we change our meager selves. (Not that I’ve spent a lot of time in the self-help genre. Though I hear it has its charms.)  

Echo that this morning, when I was instructed to take up “Siva’s terrible aspect,” a posture in honor of the diety’s skull-amulet-bearing, fratricidal side. Before putting myself into bhairvasana for the first time today—or rather, letting it take me into itself with another’s guidance—I had feared that it would be something of a long, slow trainwreck: a daily undertaking that could open up my sacroiliac joints to an unsustainable gape. Make me a bag of ligamentless bones by 50. A year ago, maybe; but my body’s been tilled for for this and it’s simply a nice, new little habit that takes me to a previously unknown part of myself. It shows me to a minor place, in a sense, but a good and joyous one.  

I can say this only because the way the posture was given made it second nature, if not downright natural.This is because the teacher, my teacher for the season, deeply understands the power of suggestion, and how to relate with a student in or near beta state to create an easy and beautiful reality out of our weirdest possibilities. Not only is this teacher on to the NLP (a comment about establishing rapport the first day made me suspicious), but he just doesn’t complicate the yoga.  

It’s so easy for any teacher to revive and rehash her own students’ resistances to authority and needs for attention—the dynamics we learn with our first teachers, our parents—into the learning relationship. This bit of baggage can be incredibly subtle, present in even the most beautiful student-teacher dynamics. Even after years of observing and draining the blood out of my bodymemory of being an authoritarian-preacher’s kid, I sometimes feel these seeds sprout up as I interact with my gracious mentors, or sit one of my own students down in my university office. 

But this morning’s teaching was uncomplicated with such stumblingblocks, with which we sometimes decorate reality so-defined. This is a gift, one this particular teacher both exhibits and bestows. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound

Neglecting the Didjeridoo · 29 January 2007

Tonight made my fifth or sixth walk home from campus with The Knife, and I think some of the tracks – Pass This On, Silent Shout –are sufficiently in my body to go into heavy rotation for the morning drive. God this is a good band; and I don’t mind putting myself in overlap with Pitchfork’s (and probably everyone else’s) 2006 top ten to say it. 

It’s nice to get to the point of comfortable excitement with them, because I’ve been with Talib Kweli, Bjork (just Human Behavior, a perfect song) and the poppier TVOTR for many weeks, and it’s passing over from pleasantly zone-invoking to played-out. 

“When you practice a lot, you start to become very discriminating about what you expose yourself to—the food you put in yourself, the violence you’ll watch on screen, the music you listen to,” says a hilarious ISKON-punk-rock-hemp-ass yoga teacher so comfortable being himself, and so adept with the harmonium, that he delights me. (The notion of reacting strongly against bad nutriments contrasts, in a sense, with the Theravadan take that getting quiet dulls the edges of both your attractions and your repulsions—but said ISKON man is happy with dualism in many forms.) 

Anyway, to the annoyance of many, I know this bit about increasing discrimination to be true. It’s not pretentious moral fiat, but something that comes up from your viscera, as your nervous system gets sensitive. You can’t help it. You’re tuning in, for as big of a Leary hippie or Pantanjali junkie that this makes you. You don’t like talking about it. 

Admissions having been made, practicing a lot has also induced a new appetite in me for bad music, particularly between 5:46 and 5:55 on week days. In the dead of one morning last winter, the vipassana instructor who opened our practice space caught me in my car, in the dark, being loud with Missy Elliott. Then we went inside and I did my usual thing of not talking to her because I was, you know, in my space. Really inappropriate.

I should be refining my appreciation of the Steven Halpern legacy and didjeridoo solos, letting the rhythms take me straight into beta state during the 9 minute drive to practice. But somehow, and wrongly, this is so much more easily done with things like blues rock. Don’t Run Our Hearts Around by Black Mountain: love it at 5:46 sitting at an otherwise deserted stoplight. And I can’t even talk about the White Stripes without twitching. 

Lengthening your brain waves isn’t mysterious once you get a handle on your own inner rythms, like any good raver, marathoner, zen monk or fiction-writer. You love going there, and you create triggers to summon the first few steps of the descent. However, that the uneven syncopation and crass instrumentation of blues rock makes it particularly good for me is perverse and often baffling.

I’m concerned that it might just be my feelings for Jack White.

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