Different logic · 10 September 2009
The next street over is called Hiscock. Nobody blinks.
They call our neighborhood the Upper West Side: the upper west side. Amused by the contrast, I’ll mention to the natives that other neighborhood of the same name. They shrug.
The central feature of the next town over, Ypsilanti, is a Shivalinga water tower, sitting on the banks of the Huron pumped full of water. It’s enormous, and more literal even than Lincoln, Nebraska’s, infamous capital building when it comes to representation. Every weekend of summer, they hold an auto show for vintage and muscle cars in the shadow of the tower. Nobody seems to question it.
Is it that people around here are more naïve than the rest of us, or more mature?
With respect to the yoga, to my surprise it’s the latter. Michigan makes Cali look so, so bad. Coastal chauvinist that I am, I’d expected things around here to be derivative. They’re not.
Here is what I’ve come to see as normal in yogaland: facebook friends who send me requests to become their “fans” and who share with me every one of their latest magazine photoshoots and extremely vapid guest columns in exercise magazines; female self-promoters who have airbrushed naked images—“art portraits”—of themselves to share with prospective male students; an instructor whose client gave her a new pair of extremely visible D-cups as a present; teachers who list their dance performance background as part of their credentials; outright divas who present themselves as experts of sequencing; men who envision themselves as producers, sending out each class’s audio playlist a day in advance; people who have changed their own names to words in some language they don’t even speak; people who give gibberish philosophy lectures because they have lost the real world working person’s ability to identify practical knowledge; people who have a .com after their names. Basically: people on the make. Either as wise men or as window meat for the Yoga Journal.
Among students in Cali, there is understandably a full disconnect between practice and life. A belief that work and family are outside of practice, inimical to it.
Details like these are so cringeworthy that I feel petty writing them down. But there they are. I think I wrote this blog for the first year or two just to try to make sense of how this stuff could grow like a fungus on a tradition so simple, humble, and intensively inward-looking.
What I didn’t realize is that, in this business, So Cal may not be all that much of a cultural center.
Last week I got a little lonely in my practice, even though the space here is such a vortex of good things; and even though once I enter that room each morning it is difficult to ask myself to leave. So I went to the funny Acropolis of Yoga—A2 Yoga—a renovated auto shop on a hill west of town. The small building stands alone overlooking several empty lots, a long hill, and the ring road that leads to the Big House (the University stadium). It is still very much an auto shop—one of the rooms still has a giant garage door for a wall, but it’s been sealed shut and painted white on the inside. But now it has columns, bold taupe plaster ones the length of the building, and a sign that makes “A2” look, adorably, more like “A squared.” The floors are the finest I’ve found: springy underneath, and made of some smooth, dark-stained hardwood.
The two teachers I met there were some of the easiest flow yoga company I’ve had the luck to find. One is a dissertator in mechanical engineering whose faux-hawk would not fly west of the Mississippi but whose alignment instruction is actually more intelligent than most I’ve heard (this town’s deep Iyengar influences seem to come in at the margins here in good ways). The second, someone with the skill, beauty, sophistication and charisma to “make it” if she thought yoga were about that, brought a battered copy of the Yoga Sutra to class, arriving tired since her day job as a fundraiser for cancer research had taken her to New York for the weekend. Every posture she taught had three versions to accommodate everyone in her large class; and the instruction drew on a thorough knowledge of Ashtanga, Iyengar and Anusara styles without any need to demonstrate fealty to any of them for the sake of solidifying her teacherly identity. She began and ended with pranayama and everyone loved it because she was sure of its value. Afterward we talked a bit, me just wondering if this creature—the cancer research champion with the night job as the town healer—was for real. She was mostly interested in jet lag, GTD, and the box of old funk records someone just gave her. But then she looked at me and noted casually that she understood: It’s exciting to have you join us… I know how it is. Sometimes I just need to practice with people.
How much easier it is to do that with a teacher who’s not trying to make you promote her, or turn you in to her devotee, and who isn’t packaging up your experience up to separate it off from the rest of your life and sell it back to you with a soundtrack.
So Cal is a wonderful life and I look forward to returning to it, but it's a pretty corny amusement park with respect to the yoga. Living there, watching the yoga industry happen, I’d always imagined the world beyond was watching us decide what western yoga was going to be. From this vantage in the middle of America, it looks more like we Californians have been the naïve ones, taking ourselves very seriously without realizing the rest of the subculture is much more mature.
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I love this. Somewhat reminiscent of when I first moved to NYC and went to a party. Everyone talked about their “project.” It was like a marketing convention. And me, quiet girl from Boston, thinking, “God, these people are so immodest!”
Posted by: Karen · Sep 10, 06:44 PM · #
owl – there’s someting to be said about naivity. holding on to that string of uncertainty keeping us from falling off the cliff. where every day is like it never ahppened before. some days the breath is strong and rhythmic, other days weak and chaotic. i think the deeper we go inside, the more conscious we become of others. the similarity. freightening as it is. until the other disappears. leaving us stranded in yogaville. there’s wisdom laying dormant in a poor man on the street. blabbering to himself on a city bus. or running from some imaginary corpse. his own. seeking shelter in divas and producers. and connersiers of enlightenment.
Posted by: charusheela · Sep 10, 10:13 PM · #
Karen—I TOO had that experience in NYC! “Life” is really “my current project is blah blah blah” (and at that time I too was from the Boston area).
Owl, thanks for the rant on the SC scene, which also shows up here in places, and which annoys me to the point that for a long time I’ve wanted to write what you just did.
Posted by: patrick · Sep 11, 05:29 AM · #
Wonderful perspective on the differences between west and mid-west, but as the kids on the internet like to say – this thread is useless without pics!
Enjoy the fall…it’s often the most beautiful season in cooler places.
Posted by: TAFKACP · Sep 11, 05:59 AM · #
Well … I wasn’t gonna say anything … but, we middle Americans are doing okay, lol. Wish u the best. When are you returning to Mysore?
xoxo
Posted by: Laruga · Sep 11, 06:53 AM · #
I am loving this.
Posted by: joy · Sep 11, 06:55 AM · #
Wow… thanks all. Mysore in January unless I decide to file the dissertation then. I will let you know as soon as I know… if you’re there, Laruga, it’ll be a strong reason to make it happen. Charu, you sound like you know whereof I speak!
TAFKACP, I’d know that voice anywhere. And you’re still CP to me! I have a half-written letter to you sitting in my drafts box, and that doesn’t include pictures either! More soon, meanwhile, ok.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 11, 07:18 AM · #
I say viva la naivete. It’s that Will Rogers quote: “I’d rather be the man that bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.” This sounds like a great place to rediscover some things. I’m actually a wee bit jealous, if you can believe it.
Posted by: RE · Sep 11, 08:43 AM · #
Having practiced in many different places, I have sometimes felt that in California and NYC it is a blessing to have so many options for practice… but I also recognize that, because of that, there is competition, and growing at least in part from this is the “industry”, self-promotion and ego that you have perfectly nailed here. For me, practice in other places often feels a lot more humble and modest, even when it is with extremely accomplished and experienced teachers.
Posted by: Sally · Sep 11, 09:45 AM · #
I cut my teeth in the LA flow world, and I guess I thought that level of vanity was normal. When I saw the main decider-diva at Yogaworks promote the most beautiful and young teachers rather than the experienced practitioners, it didn’t bother me because I thought that was just the natural logic of the flow world and in order to get real yoga you had to go deep in to ashtanga or iyenga. But shallowness is not the natural logic of the flow world. It’s the logic of a small number of yoga entrepreneurs with inordinately large platforms.
That’s totally cool. LA corporate yoga can be vain and chidlish. It makes sense. But with a few amazing exceptions these institutions and teachers have nothing to offer the rest of us. I mean, unless you are in the market for airbrushed “art prints” of naked girls doing contortions. I would die laughing if Yogaworks sent in one of its little imperial teacher training “satellite” programs led by some 29-year-old. But that’s what’s happening these days, along with the borg buyouts. Thank god the A2 Acropolis has held out so far, though I am sure it has not been easy. That’s probably their naive idealism on one level, but also maybe some cool midwestern grit.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 11, 10:28 AM · #
Hi Owl! Great reading… so well written and, well, juicy! Everyone gets stuck in his or her bubble, it’s hard to decipher what the “norm” is when it’s different in every direction. Laughed a lot while reading this- thanks. Happy to hear you’re settling in and have found a community to tap into when you get lonely.
Wish you’d visit Austin!
Posted by: Liz · Sep 11, 12:37 PM · #
By the way…I’d totally be all over Hiscock Street. That’s hilarious!
(And I meant the pictures of your airbrushed compatriots…)
Posted by: TAFKACP · Sep 11, 12:39 PM · #
Ah, this is lovely. Glad you’ve found a real, modest place to do some real, humble yoga. I decided to take the full-time office job and just teach a little on the side, because I don’t think yoga teaching can be my ‘career’ as I can’t bring myself to ‘promote myself’.. horrible…
Posted by: susananda · Sep 12, 03:11 PM · #
Oh I absolutely disapprove of these last two blog posts in as vociferous terms as one inclined to divine langour is capable of. And that’s what they represent, do they not? Utter laziness, ‘posts’ for the slinging of a (hemp) hammock between.
Let me remind you of a couple of things. ‘SoCal’ and NYC were DELIBERATELY selected to be the poles, the swinging hooks, the sticking points from which the great sine wave of AVY is to oscilate. ‘Woo woo’, like (the rather passe) ‘aum’ is simply the sonic manifestation of this process. Gymnasia and the ersatz dance studios known as ‘shalas’ (sic) were selected as the site for the promulgation of this practice precicsely because such locii do not brook any thought of ‘santosha’ (as overrated as ‘compassion’) but inculcate ye karmic stragglers with the urge to transcend the limitations of the flesh and sieze the right wrist with the left hand – think of it as a kind of ‘seal’ or mudra of performative attainment.
Consider also that it is VITALLY IMPORTANT that our instructors highlight their dance backgrounds in blurb’ring streams of seduction. On the one hand, this impresses on the potential student the necessity of the lissome- lined carcass but also shows the forgiving nature of the practice – though you may have failed to make the grade as a ballerina or a member of a bragworthy modern form, we’ll take you in, even so. Yoga is for everyone, after all, and though other body-based practices may have spat you out, AVY will drink you down to the remunarative sanctuary of our blue-throated list of the annointed. But you must, let’s be honest, look the part.
Like your posterior, the practice can be approached from several perspectives but the straight way, the ‘via smarita’ is best. Bend, bend and bend again. If it’s immolation you seek, braid your hair, don a beastplate and leap into the fire singing away in your best Flagstadian fashion. Otherwise, I expect you to get with the program and start posting video footage of your backbends, reinvigorate this blog in faux-devangari font and get some choice shots of your butt for all to see. Yum.
Posted by: catygay · Sep 13, 04:00 AM · #
“transcend the limitations of the flesh and sieze the right wrist with the left hand”
First laugh of this morning. And I just know I’ll think of it as I grasp my right wrist with my left hand tomorrow at practice. And laugh again.
Posted by: karen · Sep 13, 06:21 AM · #
Carlos Adonis, you limber God, being omniscient you do realize that Joan of Arc’s ass was far more lissome than mine, even if she could not stand on one leg with the other tossed behind her head. But you do seem to have missed the whole story of the fly-over states: it’s now time to zoom in much more closely. You obviously have your work cut out for you on the omnipresence bit.
I hate to tell you, but the via media is a vast fortress of 1970s-style pre-fundamentalism. People are still tucking their T-shirts in to their spandex and saying the chant in unison rather than the more melodiously subservient call and response style. I hesitate to blog about them because they’re quite the protected species, but suffice it to say that the scene at the Quaker Meeting House where the old-timers get together every weekend is downright (brace yourself) authentic. I will tell you that they’ve been gathering for decades, originally led by a student of your man K. Beginning before you were born, they met in the YMCA until some fundamentalist Iyengars chased them out, but these sibling rivalries are par for the course as you know.
Anyway, the problem with the vast middle way between the coasts is that there is too much Quakerism and DIY in the blood, and too little Baptism and Lutheranism and good old authoritarianism generally. Unlike the kids in the cities, those victims of modernity, they’re not looking for a surrogate set of father figures; and they have college football and fruit preserving to entertain themselves, so they’re not interested in your beautiful backbends either.
You really have your work cut out for you, honey muffins. Time to bone up on Book IV.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 14, 07:36 PM · #
As a natice midwesterner, I feel the need to weigh in here. Not cold, but shy. Not necessarily more mature, but pretty decent bullshit detectors. “Authentic” only in so far as no one even considers the question. Think Scandinavian and then lay on a patina of North American.
Posted by: KNL · Sep 15, 08:35 AM · #
That shaggy-chinned, Sinai-ensconced rascal (not Mr C Miller) has tapped out a template divinitas very deep into your copper-wired brain-bones that I strongly suggest you re-examine over your post-practice granola. Y oh Y oh Y do you keep conflating the being and the doing? Recognise the vulgarity of omnipresence and the tedium of omniscience – it’s not like keeping crazy Croats and belicose bots out of your blog – and who, this side of the Hamptons, wants that?
The irony of maid Jeanne’s demise should not be lost on you. Overdo the geo-political props and get tangled up on a fiery post. Had she been able to do the durva (as it were) then she’d been away with Gilles de Rais (as they say). Presumably she’d been side-tracked by some proto-fundamentalist Iyengis, rather than Iyengars (per se) who’d have pointed her the way of the Preserver.
Let me explain the swing-wire symbolism YET AGAIN. You’re a fairly adept bender because your substantial rump and your big noggin act as counter-weights, allowing the sushumna slinky in between to galoop-a-loop all over the place. This you have been granted. There’s no need to cuddle up to the fluffy pillows of the mouse-faced yoga failures of the dull and dusted out corners of your country. You didn’t ‘earn’ it – what (on earth) would my little pal Shiva Rea Leonard have to say about such Protestential prattling?
‘Boning up’...Well really! On my favoured Asparas, yes; on ‘books’ pertaing to practice? How ridiculous. And ungrateful, too. For I alone on the editoral board wanted to retain the original aphorism pertaining to the pupose of practice, being the stilling of the fluctuations of the perineum rather than that sanguinary, swami-suppurating strapline concerning ‘cittas choking’. If I’d had my way, you’d be shot of that shaft of the sadhana by now and could cash in, ‘concentrating’ on creaming your clients for of the convertible that you’re known to covet.
Instead, your stuck with Ashtanga Yoga ‘As it Is’, which it isn’t, after all.
Posted by: catygay · Sep 15, 09:53 AM · #
hey catygay, do you write your diatribes in english and then translate into tediumese or does the gibberish flow naturally?
Posted by: TAFKACP · Sep 15, 06:07 PM · #
Well!
Your willingness to offer ‘versions’ of texts written in languages that you do not understand, to comment upon states and practices that you have not experienced, envisioning (and describing) yourself as a humorist, a person with a .com after his name, offering gibberish, self-promoting marketing strategies for Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga because he’s lost the practical, real world ability to touch his toes. Basically: a (somewhat disingenuous) person on the make.
Details like these are so cringeworthy I feel petty writing them down. But there you are. It’s such a tragedy that one so obviously well suited to play a leading role in our glorious Cali Yuga cannot stay off the burgers long enough to have the run of our wonderful grass-fed meat market.
Where did it all go Wong?
Posted by: catygay · Sep 16, 01:21 PM · #
Did one of you mention he would be all over Hiscock? Maybe you should come scale World’s Most Phallic Building instead. Would burn off some energy since I’m not teaching vinyasa flow these days.
KNL, thanks. I have a lot to learn. I need native midwesterners to watch me closely though… if I regress to traditional leftist politics, get in to football, or start blogging about rutabagas, tell me to stop. (Though admittedly, I am doing the research on $300 down parkas. Gold ones.)
Meantime, Carlos, you don’t really want me seeking the consolations of high horsepower and a tight turning radius, do you? So much scrap metal. You’ll have to offer better temptation than that to scare me off this geo-political nonsense. Meanwhile in a goose-fluff coat I’m no renunciant, but you sound more like a power-hoarding British curmudgeon than a sleek Deccan god.
To wit: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience.” -Winston Churchill, West Essex Unionist Assn. (23 February 1931)
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 16, 02:11 PM · #
Catygay,
Guilty as charged on all counts except one – I was never disengenuous – it was obvious what I was selling from day 1.
But my question was sincere: do you write as you speak or do you tart it up for effect? If the former, wow. If the latter, then whose really the disengenuous one?
Posted by: TAFKACP · Sep 16, 02:13 PM · #
I have to acknowledge the British influence on the beefed up, de-fakirated, no-nonsense brand of Yoga you so enjoy. The jumps, for example, were pinched straight from Staff Sgt ‘Braces’ McKinley’s Book of Rigorous Gymnosophics for The Fin de Siecle Set (1897).
Having a fair dollop of Dhritarastra about me, I wanted to be honest and recognise this right from the off but, you know, we ‘ummed’ and ‘ahhed’ and ‘ahhed’ and ‘ummed’ for so long (by the count of your years, it’s true) that Partition came and went it’s woeful way and the aforementioned wizened warrior was worrying things up. It was felt, understandably, that certain ‘colonial’ tinctures should be left to wash gently through the mighty Gangetic wave of, ‘Ah Bharata!’ cultural assertion. But, you know, I’ve been proved right and things have come full circle.
Talking of which, there’s really no need to tempt you… a couple of pootles down Pacific Pallisades and you’ll be back in the fold ‘quick sharp’ as they say down in Colchester, with a nifty line in (sweat free) ‘Sociologists for Shavasana’ apparel. Tasty.
Posted by: catygay · Sep 16, 02:49 PM · #
We’ll see about that.
TAFKACP, this CATYGAY is clearly a bot of some sort.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 16, 05:45 PM · #
i would probably agree with what you said about the Cali yoga scene. i think your scene in LA was more touched by the entertainment industry, while it’s not so wild in SF. i hear, however, that there are more yoga practitioners in California than in India. so despite the quirkyness of some teachers, at least a lot of people are exposed to it and become interested in it.
now that i wrote that, i read the comments. wild. maybe the gay cat is a female reincarnation of someone? seems like this bot knows too much of your past writing…
Posted by: arturo · Sep 18, 06:09 AM · #
i’m slow tonight. TAFKACP. ha ha. how nice to hear from that dang ole’ cowboy.
Posted by: arturo · Sep 18, 06:14 AM · #
I am, ordinarily, content to observe the steady stream of white collar income into our coffers from simpering, delusional, middle-aged ‘practioners’ who have surrendered the respect due to that fine estate for the sake of acquiring the dispensation to perform arm balances (albeit it in a most ungainly fashion) without fear of official reproach.
In your case, however, the tenuous obligation I have to the Satyam department of our somewhat emaciated Faculty of Yamatic Arts compels me to remind you that there are establishments where you can be humiliated just as thoroughly but at a fraction of the cost. Perhaps you are familiar with one or two of them already? Don’t worry, the odd surreptitious vist will not make you any less of a yogi than you already purport to be.
I might also add that ‘restricting’ your calorific intake to the products of the felching process will not make you live any longer – it will just make your breath stink horribly. Not yum at all.
Posted by: catygay · Sep 18, 09:16 AM · #
Is it quite infuriating to see that when your fellow gods grow irritated by us humans, they can throw thunderbolds or summon a flood? Your friend Y, the god of Moses, has a whole repertoire! But you know how it is in the West: everyone wants his own personal relationship with the divine. What have we done right to get your all to ourselves? Your catalogue of my wants and weaknesses is complete: it feels so good to be seen. Carlos, you truly must be a god!
Though I imagine it’s a shitty assignment from your perspective. Exiled to the hinterlands with the would-be decent folk of Kali Yuga, set to rule us with both arms and both feet bound (in correct form) behind your back. What greater god has promised to set you free if only you can convince us to debase ourselves to the fullest?
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 18, 09:50 AM · #
‘Us’, ‘ourselves’, ‘assignment’, ‘convince’...what delightful impudence! You amuse me. Nothing more, nothing less.
Well, not quite. Durga’s having her nails done and she asked me to fill in for a while. She has very long nails.
In this respect our branch of the empyreal lags a bit behind the lads of the Levant (and hinterland). I do, it’s true, sometimes envy their proficiency in the progenically prudent practice of patriarchy. I almost wish I could do a Zeus and give the missus a punitive paddle before rolling over for a truly Olympian slumber. Then again, look what happens whilst the dull brute is snoring away!
No, I believe in a relationship based on trust and mutuality, rather than repose wrecking mutability. And, like all true alpha ashtangi’s, I am secure in my masculinity, confident that flutter of lissome Asparic lashes will waft away the grihasta harridan-induced headaches that even us immortals have to endure upon occasion.
But that’s enough from the divine dressing table – I shall now return to the entertaining, if occasionally onerous, process (for it is such) of keeping you on your temporal tenure track. No practice tomorrow – use the time to make ABSOLUTELY sure next month’s shala fees are enshrined in the hallowed lingam of direct debit. Things are looking a little shaky, what with the demise of the Ezboard Investment Group and, as you know, a bit of the old earth-bound lucre makes the soma taste all the richer. Y is particularly fond of such a cocktail. Yum.
Posted by: catygay · Sep 18, 11:41 AM · #
Aye aye aye, Allah’s ally’s alliteration always amazes.
Showoff.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 18, 12:37 PM · #
‘betty’
Posted by: catygay · Sep 18, 01:57 PM · #
Good point. Your prose is the exact textual equivalent of the purna matsyendrasana – viranchyasana sequence.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 18, 02:23 PM · #
For you it is, yes.
Posted by: catygay · Sep 18, 03:01 PM · #
Yum.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 18, 03:15 PM · #
I think this is one of my favorite posts you’ve ever written. Brilliant!!
I think that problems are bound to happen when art aligns with commerce. We so have our dramas here in NYC as everyone struggles to survive.
I’m glad you have some place good to visit when you need practice company!!
Posted by: boodiba · Sep 19, 06:30 AM · #