The hazards of seeking sage advice · 16 December 2008
Last summer I got to feeling it was time for wise feedback. For a nonpartisan perspective.
I went and found MW, Krishnamacharya’s western student. I would have sat at his feet but he’s so far beyond that nonsense. He levels comfortably, like his other teacher, U.G.
We spent some time, established something ongoing. Hilarious guy, both reverent and fully irreverent: in him, those two attitudes enclose each other multi-dimensionally, as if his personality is an optical illusion. Nothing I know is so comforting as his jokes about everyday life—this sage’s goofy impressions of Average Joe twisting up his face and saying, “Oh fuck, the economy is fucked!” In a group he is more serious: nobody walks in to a room like this his Immanence (again, not to be confused with Eminence.)
We talked about practice, that is, about life. He said this style of practice is fundamentally harmful, that its basic structure is (1) patriarchal and (2) obsessive. It makes us that much more alienated from the feminine, and that much more obsessive. He made his eyes piercing, over a cup of coffee, and told me to quit this addictive behavior and this beating myself up with vinyasas. Stop practicing this form.
I smiled. He pierced some more, drank, blinked, cleared his expression.
He was speaking truthfully in a way that added to my knowledge while also requiring that I trust (and, not so easily, assert) my own faith and intelligence over his patriarchal directive. For me this was a way of finding out how to go on; and it was exactly the bracing support I had sought out.
Later we talked about my work on global supply chains, and my ideas about fostering a sense of connectedness among consumers to the third world producers of our stuff: about the impossibility of this project, and the uselessness of it, and the lost cause aspect being that which makes the action possible. Best scholarly feedback I had received in months. You don’t save anybody (yourself included) in eastern paradigms: you recognize your task cannot be done… and thus set out to accomplish it in every detail. I suppose this form of paradox began with the whole boddhisatva thing. But it also mirrors the means-ends paradox in the Gita: one becomes absorbs in skillful means as an end in itself. The Gita is not about getting somewhere (some thing) even though it is about action. Does ashtanga get this; does it teach this?
The charges of obsessiveness and patriarchy were like little drops of dye in my bloodstream, highlighting the patterns of my days. I had to ask: are these neuroses really structured into this practice, in a way they are not in other forms? Six months on, I think the answer is sort of yes. If this practice really doesn’t work for a person—if they pretend it’s a renunciant’s cave but really just get lost in some deadend catacomb—maybe it is because one of the neurotic streams takes over.
I see now that the critiques of this practice are two aspects of a more fundamental trouble—a kind of confusion between immanence and transcendence. We tell ourselves ashtanga is immanent because it’s a “spirituality” rooted in the body, but at our worst we are still totally without what he would call Mother. Because we behave toward practice as work; we focus on doing it correctly. As if that’ll get us somewhere (even when we deny that’s part of the rationale). We believe that if we transcend, it is because we did the work correctly, in the right order, with the right teaching. And we’re really quite interested in transcendence.
Well yes. I don’t like looking at it in those words, but this is all present (sometimes unconsciously) in what I do. If that’s the core of this practice, then it actually is impoverished. Then we’re scriveners who don’t understand the practice except for with some latent work-ethic spirituality. We recite new age bullshit about being “always already perfect,” about a “sense of oneness flashing forward in moments of quiet.” But recognition of action that does nothing—or whatever archetypically immanent, grounded, “feminine” traits—I’m not sure that is necessarily built in to this practice on a macro level.
If the overall structure is oriented toward getting somewhere, toward work, toward transcendence, I think the practice survives the critique if it finds balance in the interstices. Some practitioners understand this, and have taught me this slowly, just by being near me for a time. Have taught me this by the way they act more than what they do. It’s something I’ve only found among those who have practiced for decades or are prematurely wise. Other teachers totally fail to understand this, and so do their students.
I pretty much always knew that the root paradoxes of action and introspection were also present in ashtanga. That’s why I knew what to do with the bold instruction to quit. But I couldn’t articulate it before now; and even here my writing is damn incoherent. Or maybe that’s just because my mind is at its limit. Who said mind is limitless? This mind, right here now, is toast.
Time to call it a night.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
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Oh, and isn’t it ashtangi of me to take a problem-solving approach to all this? Ha! I guess I could have just taken a “Oneness” cheap shot: Yes! All practice is fundamentally flawed! You gonna be a perfectionist about it?
Well… that line conceals more than it reveals, in this case. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 16, 10:09 PM · #
Come down for a bit. Without wanting to go all Zee on you, maybe you feel toasted because you are trying to express essentially simple things in ever more complex ways. That’s your day job.
Perhaps Whitwell or the EZ paladin ‘flushedaway’ are right about some rotteness at the heart of the Ashtanga Vinyasa set-up. It seems to me ,however, that if intentions and conditions are right, and there is a degree of a certain kind of intelligent receptivity, then it can be a rewarding life practice for some – though by ‘rewarding’ i DO NOT mean opening a so-called retreat centre in a sunny place and getting rich by fruitcaking the fruitcakes.
Otherwise, if one insists on clinging, wrangling, ‘defending’ etc past the pain threshold then, for sure, it’s breakdown time. Ubi sunt, Rosebud et al?
There is a point. Don’t be so bloody arrogant.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 17, 02:54 AM · #
hmmm. may take me a while to absorb…I’ll get back to you on this one. :)
Posted by: Laruga · Dec 17, 03:30 AM · #
“The Gita is not about getting somewhere (some thing) even though it is about action. Does ashtanga get this; does it teach this?”
Oh, it does if you look at the big picture that includes the fact that we will all lose our bodies! And therein lies the humor of practice (and the more devotedly physical the practice, the bigger the joke).
So just do it.
:-)
Posted by: karen · Dec 17, 04:21 AM · #
I’m ok, You’re ok – is the mountain
I’m not ok, You’re not ok, and that’s ok – is no mountain
I’m ok, You’re ok – is the mountain
The feminine:
“We all need a little tenderness, how can love survive in such a graceless age.”
Your teacher says the same as my analyst, and as Jung. We have to redeem the feminine. We spent too much time on our masculine, time for rebalance.
Posted by: Gregor · Dec 17, 05:45 AM · #
Wow! You’ve been dropping these little MW breadcrumbs for a while now and finally the whole loaf is revealed!
when I was a kid at summer camp we used to have frontier week, which was a competition that included building a campsite from scratch and cooking a “gourmet” meal to be judged. In order to keep the little kids away we used to send them on missions to find the ever-elusive “left-handed smoke shifter”. The younger you were, the more you believed in the smoke shifter until you reached the age where you knowingly sent your juniors out on the mission.
my point? I think hatha yoga practices probably work the same way. (I’ll tell you in 20 years if I’m right or not.)
Posted by: cody · Dec 17, 07:26 AM · #
Waaaaaait, ashtanga is obsessive? Thank goodness someone finally told me…..
Cody, that’s hilarious. And so true. I think I’m still the kid the teacher is sending to find the smoke shifter…...oh well.
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Dec 17, 10:29 AM · #
Now I know what interstices means.
I think Astanga is both exercise and meditation and that’s about it. I like it cause it’s fun & rewarding!
Posted by: boodiba · Dec 17, 11:30 AM · #
:)
Fun and rewarding… and obsessiveness and male domination? :)
CP, you never realized all those years ago that the smoke shifter is real???
I will confess this whole business threw me for a loop all this time! But was that not very good for me? I feel like I’ve been quite awkward and foolish about it (and humbled in the process), but also gotten to know the practice and myself in new, good ways. I feel honored he’d spend time and energy to challenge me directly, even if the way I’m working with that challenge has nothing to do with trying to please the teacher.
The physical practice does set us up to be obsessive and “masculine.” Come on. We here are the contemplatives, but look around, right? MW has known a lot of ashtangis. If I were on a certain path, he would have derailed me. That too would have been compassionate.
There’s this tendency in Vipassana for enthusiastic young meditators to talk at length about the HARD WORK, and about the need to do it correctly. (Hello, “masculine” vibe.) This is good—they are distinguishing skillfull from unskillful practice in some way, figuring out their relationship to Vipassana, and maybe justifying the fact that they’re not having peak experiences (yet). But all the talk about the HARD WORK of practice makes me wonder: are they missing the half of it? The simple being there for it? Are they recreating protestant anxieties and workaholism?
Of COURSE there is a point. :) Or, a point with two aspects that seem sometims to cancel each other out…. so then again there is no point. But then there is a point, and its complement, again.
If I am telling a tale about nothing, and I am, maybe it’s in the big sense. In the sense that practice is going nowhere but we go through every detail anyway.
Sorry if the details are so much madness though. I can chill out too.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 17, 12:23 PM · #
From someone’s email:
Jesus said ‘every hair on your head is counted’. Only a mother could say that!
This goal we have, it is such a strange thing, our need for closure. A mother never has closure of the development of her child. I want to be better at not wanting to be better.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 17, 12:25 PM · #
It’s a catch-22, isn’t it? If we don’t approach it all as problems to be solved, then we have to take somebody else’s word for the ways things work and that would be dogmatic and boring. But if we’re always riddling the meaning of things for ourselves then we usually see only the little pictures. Even the sagest of sage advice is contamination to a pure, unique mind, though, and we really have to do our own legwork. Sooner or later we each complete enough analysis that we can start working from intuition.
Posted by: Carl · Dec 17, 01:34 PM · #
Have you seen the MW vid, Yoga of the Heart or something like that?
All this talk of the Mother set me off on a Herman Hesse Demian flashback.
Well, that or Norman Bates, right? :D
I will have more to say in a post over at my place, sort of a mix of thoughts between this and the newest from the lanka leaper.
Posted by: patrick · Dec 17, 02:09 PM · #
Funny I was just writing to someone about Ashtanga and Work this afternoon. Something along the lines of how this morning I’d gone through primary happily riding the breath not particularly thinking about what I was doing but just going with it. Carried on into Intermediate then hit Kapo and it just became Work, hard work. Concentrating on getting in and out of Eka padas, landing Bakasana etc etc no longer a meditation but work.
Thing is I like work, always have even some of the hard dirty back breaking jobs I’ve done in the past. I like the word WORK and hate that everyone seems to want to do less of it. Work is engagement, involvement or should be. It’s not just about doing something correctly or producing something, getting somewhere. There can be Work for works sake. (yeah I know, is that still work?)
Heidegger talks about workshops and picking up hammers and using them. (this appeals to me as I repair instruments and use a lot of hammers. And if your making something a screw perhaps, while your making it you refer to it (the emerging screw) as THE work) You dont think about the hammer you just use it. You use tools when you work, you just use them. But it’s not just hammers that are tools. Your experience is a tool as is your judgement, everything that comes to bare on the work is a tool. The image of Zen monks comes to mind, watching them expertly sweeping leaves ( i don’t even have to mention they use a broom…that’s just what you use to sweep leaves)in Japan.
So in Ashtanga we have the Shala or your practice room , that’s the workshop. The mat is your workbench. The Asana your working on is the Work, what then are the tools? What tools do we employ when we work on our Asana. And can that work become part of the meditation, part of the practice. I often meditate when I’m working on an instrument at work why not when I work on an Asana.
Posted by: grimmly · Dec 17, 03:41 PM · #
well that’s the beauty of the left-handed smoke shifter isn’t it? when you think it’s real, it’s not, but once you know it’s not real then it becomes useful (and more real than ever!)
Posted by: cody · Dec 17, 05:57 PM · #
Off topic: Grimmly, do you repair MUSICAL instruments????
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Dec 18, 06:26 AM · #
Usually I’m not so big on thinking, but this comment thread is a really beautiful wave of thinking.
Posted by: karen · Dec 18, 08:55 AM · #
Yes, all the woodwinds but vintage Saxophones in particular.
Posted by: grimmly · Dec 18, 10:25 AM · #
Testing comment…? Hi are you working, little textpattern?
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 18, 12:03 PM · #
Grim, were you responding to LiAsh or to Karen?
I want to hear an ashtanga teacher say “I repair woodwind instruments for a living.”
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 18, 12:06 PM · #
I love the voices in these threads, Karen. They are all startlingly unique to me and often I don’t even know how to respond to a comment if it is already too perfect without my messing with it. People who come here mercifully put up with my figuring-it-out-mind. I’m rueful about it, but also don’t try to smash it when it comes around. But this entire half of the blog undermines that whole half-embarrassing, often mortifying way-of-being. I love that.
Gregor said, Evolution is chaos with feedback.
Ovolution is feedback with chaos?
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 18, 12:15 PM · #
hi (0v0)
sorry if your mind is toast; you’re probably just tired. But your constructs are architecture – “I think the practice survives the critique if it finds balance in the interstices.” now I’ll start thinking of interstitial levels of the practice. reading the sutras is one. practicing meditation is another. writing about the practice another. I’ll have to read up on your teacher MW. A few google searches and I figured out who you were talking about. One learns so much from you.
hugs
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Dec 18, 12:18 PM · #
And from you, Arturo. This comment is a great example of a uniquely autonomous voice. :)
CP, That is hilarious, considering I meant “real” as in a _real experience not as in a real fiction.
Grimmly, the more I play with the idea of work, and watch people work with practice as work, the more variation I see in the ways we all relate to work and to practice. That said, since I love Martin’s writings on tools—so practical and sensuous!—you have me thinking that at times in ashtanga body parts can be tools just as in monkish flow states tools become body parts. For a lone wolf practitioner, you have a dynamic of flow and “work” very well understood, it seems.
Fake Marxists (cultural marxists, critical theorists, etc.) like to pretend that work is suffering (Marx thought work was the best thing we have). Maybe they’ve never done honest work and are projecting their suffering at being academics (ha ha ha… pointing to the backstory of this blog right now). Shop floor work is actually quite meditative for many people. Sometimes I think ashtanga is easiest for working class people to learn, because they already know about low-blip rhythmic “work”... whereas the average bourgeois or trustafarian practitioner only knows about mental work or tries to experience practice as its alternative, “entertainment.” When people say practice is work, the first question I ask if it that’s a reference to semiautomatic factory-style mechanical work, or if it’s a way of saying practice is effortful struggle.
Discussions of practice as an effortful, struggling kind work do not resonate with me. At all. I’m not exactly sure why I bristle to them, but it’s probably that I’m still getting over the whole Protestant Ethic thing. MW’s idea that we are “beating ourselves up with endless vinyasas” seems worth considering… as much as I love vinyasas. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 18, 12:42 PM · #
yes responding to Liash. I’m a lone Wolf Ashtanga practitioner and I repair woodwind instruments for a living. Lone Wolf practitioner….think I can get a yogamatic mat with that on? Body parts as tools….making me think merleau-ponty, have to think about that. But think Martin wouldn’t have a problem with it he just never seem to take it there. I like.The Zimmerman you mentioned was that Confrontation with Modernity. Remember it coming out when I was at Uni but never read it, just bought it from Amazon….want to play around more with Work. Any other suggestions appreciated
Posted by: grimmly · Dec 18, 01:04 PM · #
“I have a world because I have a body.”
Merleau-P’s idea is of the body as a space suit?
Wittgenstein’s aporisms in On Certainty are kind of the last postcard from that edge. Some of them are potentially ambiguous, as the paperback version with the Russellian fuzzy hand suggests! (Err… do I have a body?)
I only know Z’s journal articles, though I believe the 2009 book is on environmental philosophy.
Also, I don’t know… for “sensuous human creativity” and the possibility of honest work, young Marx.
On work and practice, Bhagavad Gita with commentaries on karma yoga (other commentaries focus on bhakti, etc.).
Synthetic theory of practice that is continental and rooted in practical everyday activity: Pierre Bourdieu, maybe Outline of… Practice, Intro to Reflexive or Pascalian Meditations (yes, the last is a joke about Husserl!).
But… those are just a few of my favorites. I don’t have a syllabus or anything.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 18, 06:07 PM · #
Thanks for the book tips, Old friends with Wittgenstein but shame of shames never looked at the Gita.
been thinking perhaps I’m using Work in the sense of task. Hard to talk about Work without the feeling that the great bearded one is sitting on your shoulder whispering in your ear.
Posted by: grimmly · Dec 18, 11:50 PM · #
‘Shop floor’ work can be quite meditative for some people,myself included. But there are shop floors and there are shop floors. For ‘many’, shop floor work is a grotesque imposition on their humanity, though the company of other ‘over themselves’ workers can make up for it somewhat.
By ‘working class’ people [who find it easier to learn ashtanga], do you mean those people who have spent a significant amount of time (not ‘vacation’)engaged in hard, heavy and/or montonous labour? If so, you may be right, though not necessarily just because of some familiarty with rhythmic modes. It’s just that barrowing concrete through muddy construction sites day after day after day in all weathers, or harvesting ground-crops in the scorching sun (and then going home to feed the family) is much, much tougher than doing an Ashtanga practice. Oh those vinyasas doth abuse me so.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 19, 03:15 AM · #
Carl said: Sooner or later we each complete enough analysis that we can start working from intuition
Here is what my analyst says (in a nutshell): we learn to contain, the containment of the chaos, it alchemizes into our being able to cope with this chaos, the practice of containment strengthens the Ego. We need a very strong Ego to cope with meeting the ‘Self’. The practice of allowing the containment of this chaos reveals the ‘Self’, which is our unconscious self (the iceberg under the tip), and our ego must submit to sharing the space, The Self represents chaos to the Ego. Intuitively we do not know this, but we feel it. So we honor our feelings, and not continue our bias to thinking. Thinking is the servant of the Ego. Which is fine when in balance.
At least thats what I think he said! And of course we all are different icebergs!
Posted by: Gregor · Dec 19, 03:03 PM · #
wow wow wow… so much! so many great comments.
I’m with Gregor- I enjoy work too, but on my terms. If it’s something I love, then I can work like a dog. I see my practice as work (not all the time), but in a good way. I like challenge whether mental or physical. I can’t claim to be one of those Ashtangis who has a meditative practice. For me, the practice is a re-booting of my mind and body so that the rest of my life goes more smoothly. Sometimes during my practice, my mind is being wrung out- it goes crazy so that by the end, I’m whipped and happy to be so still and jello-like in savasana. Makes my body function better, makes my mind clearer, and gives me a model for discipline and hard work that I can follow in other areas of my life. I try not to torture myself too much in life, so I can’t relate to the “addictive behavior and this beating myself up with vinyasas” view of the practice. If I do beat myself up, I know it’s not right- and then I can carry that lesson of softening and forgiveness of myself over into other areas. Beating myself up over relationships, or my business, or whatever… it’s not good. It’s not productive and makes me less of who I could be.
I wonder how I’ll feel about this practice once I’ve been at it for decades? I’ve only been around the mat for 7 years. I’m a little remedial, so I might need an entire lifetime to start to get it. Another lesson in life: instant gratification ain’t always so great.
Posted by: Liz · Dec 19, 06:18 PM · #
Yeah seriously, Bolivian tin mining and Indonesian clothing manufacture are not what I mean. Or slavery, which the Dep’t of State verifies is huge worldwide, including in the US. The new age tendency to dismiss hotel room maid’s suffering as “all in the mind” forgets workers have BODIES. Have backs that get broken. Working conditions matter.
I’m not doing bad advaita when I say work is meditative. I’m just differing with bourgeois “leftists” who believe that anytime your surplus is being extracted by capitalists, you are necessarily suffering. Working conditions matter. My idea is that industrial work that allows for community (instead of designing to prevent it because community on a shop floor is dangerous) and for entering a trance state is relatively humane.
It’s really just the rhythmic mode that makes me say ashtanga is “working class.” But also: the absence of the constant questions “Am I having fun?” “What am I getting out of this?” “What do I want next?” These are very western middle class questions! And I don’t see what good they do for practitioners.
Karen’s self-description of practice as just something she does routinely and dispassionately is a pretty interesting contrast.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 20, 02:32 PM · #
Working conditions and slavery. The automation of work has created a dearth in our abilities, and the competitiveness of capitalism will never stop that. The constant need to ‘be the lowest cost supplier’ is one of the three pillars of competitive strategy. Beyond the sad mantra of shop floor community being dangerours, it is fundamentally necessary to have an engaged workforce, and the skills to develop such an environment are deeply needed – not to allow complacency from any side of the divisions in labour and management.
Time for a ‘we’ space, than an ‘us and them’ space. How dualistic and completely counter-productive to both camps!
Posted by: Gregor · Dec 20, 03:13 PM · #
Yeah. I study inspections in California and El Salvadoran apparel factories. I hate it when my findings lead to non-materialist arguments, but… workers derive a lot of satisfaction from being able to participate in the inspection process, independent of whether it leads to improved physical conditions. It’s like it’s easier to “submit” to the routine or adopt it with your whole physicality if you participated somewhat in setting it up from the beginning. I don’t know how to deal with the implications of this for “worker satisfaction” regimes other than to note that certain mental conditions are almost as important as certain physical conditions. In these literatures, the right wingers want to pretend that workers’ pain is purely mental (not capitalist’s responsibility), and the leftists are (pretty paternalistic) materialists who see any argument about “mental satisfaction” as a threat to worker revolution. I’m trying to do work that validates both minds and bodies, shares Marx’s appreciation for capitalism as an awesome if transient social form, and keeps sight of the fact that corporations are creative and efficient but also inherently greedy and exploitative of workers and the environment (whose interests aren’t always at odds).
This doesn’t seem irrelevant to the whole yoga thing. I know a lot of people would hate this idea, but what I am observing is: westerners benefit from a somewhat contractual relationship with practice.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 20, 03:42 PM · #
Indubitably!
Posted by: Gregor · Dec 20, 06:49 PM · #