Fetishizing Balance · 23 November 2008
I. Got the best anonymous text message today: “I got the prana aligned right out of me in this workshop.”
(If you achieve perfect alignment, will you go poof in samadhi?)
II. Last week I met a friend at CityBakery for pumpkin pie. She said she’s always experienced me as vata to the nth degree, but has seen a kapha side of me since I’ve been practicing third. Told me I’m much more grounded now. I was all excited, until I started wondering about my pitta.
(If a person constituted herself as exactly 1/3 in each dosha, would she trans-substantiate to a fourth post-dosha dimension?)
III. I’ve been thinking about a crazy activist campaign I participated in exactly 5 years ago, and the anarchist lawyer who befriended me during that time. He consistently scored dead center on all four scales of the Jungian Myers-Briggs personality test.
(If a person beats the Myers-Briggs, does his personality spontaneously evaporate?)
P.S. Hahahahahaa. As experienced people know, constant alignment-obsession is the method quasi-ashtangis at YogaFranchise use to run away from intimate experience of the self. Also, pumkin pie is probably all wrong for my “dosha.” And mister anarchist lawyer? Most slithery-skilled manipulator I’ve encountered. He always laughed too loud and too long, like a sit-com character with a screwball secret.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: evolution
, social theory
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Perhaps we are neither here nor there, nor wanting to be there, and instead being here. But then again I was in the countryside north of Toronto at my friends and it was clear winter night, and saw all the galaxies, millions of years old, and sighed.
Posted by: Gregor · Nov 23, 03:12 PM · #
Galaxies bring out the thisness, in a sense?
Which reminds me, Sunday reading. Kaufmann is a modern Spinozist, someone I look at for conceptualizing “the environment” w/o falling back on images of forests and feral animals. Among colleagues, the environment is still seen as quaint and marginal to social life. Kids’ stuff.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 23, 03:22 PM · #
I think you hit all the targets, and so did the article. Its God enough for me. The thisness is our remedy and our agency. Its kinda perfect.
Posted by: Gregor · Nov 23, 05:55 PM · #
I love this. I just recently took the ayurveda test and came out Tri-dosha! Certainly doesn’t mean I’m in perfect health, it seems.
Posted by: joy · Nov 24, 01:40 AM · #
While you know I’m no fan of ‘YogaFranchise’, I wouldn’t call the originators alignment obsessed, more like injury-avoidance obsessed. And yes, I did have the prana aligned right of me too, and I’d go back for more if I could.
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Nov 24, 06:00 AM · #
The characterization of anarchist lawyer guy is positively wonderful; somehow reminds me of something out of Salinger, or maybe an apt critic talking about Salinger.
Posted by: patrick · Nov 24, 06:56 AM · #
Or Philip Roth impersonating Salinger, maybe? Boy, how bad does that guy wish he were. I read one of his books the other day and he had Franny and Lane as guests at a dinner party. (!!)
Anyway! ;)
Posted by: joy · Nov 24, 07:52 AM · #
Good call, Sonya. I’m wrong to imply that the YF founders use formal perfectionism to run away from contemplation. Everything I’ve heard suggests their shakti is really something; and the fact is I barely know them.
I think what’s sad is what has happened to YF method as a whole—the formalism packaged with “you should fear yoga” dogma. These teachers have forgotten the breath and all the other good inside secrets, and are passing on some shell of practice that their own teachers (if they even have teachers) would find bizarre. I accept what the franchise has become, but it pisses me off when these orphan teachers run around trashing those who are so much deeper and more knowledgeable. Trashing my own deepest teachers in ways that get directly back to me and to them… how sad and insecure. This makes it impossible for strong practitioners to have a relationship with YF, isolating the school from almost all experinced practitioners. What I’m observing in this case is that isolation makes otherwise lovely minds oh so rigid, and obligates novice teachers to take up the asana of authority. Imthebossasana? This asana always leads to injury! Very dangerous. :)
Anyway! Yeah, he seriously was an anarchist lawyer. Don’t get me started.
As for Roth, that’s funny. No wonder I never bothered with him! Well, I did read Herzog and it was brilliant. But I also thought: wow, that is some serious misogynist insecurity. I do judge the consciousness I feel behind prose—aesthetic license?—and I didn’t like that one at all even though I loved the book.
Is tri-dosh a kind of elite sorority? Pretty impressive!!! The whole ayurveda thing is a fun classification system if we don’t take it too seriously (when people are all literal abotu it, I always want to start counter-classifying by the equally archaic system of the four humors… how bilious of me). As I consider moving, I’ve been thinking about the ayurveda of places. Santa Monica is Vata-Pitta. My parents live in a Pitta-Kapha place where the kapha is suffering a serious imbalance.
Anyway! Working owl.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 24, 09:37 AM · #
I knew you knew, I just didn’t think everyone else did :)
YF scares me. Seriously.
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Nov 24, 09:50 AM · #
... vata to the nth degree… I’m much more grounded now… I was all excited, until I started wondering about my pitta.
That’s too hilarious!
Posted by: Carl · Nov 24, 10:24 AM · #
What a fun post to read- and the comments as well.
I find it so bizarre that yoga teachers feel the need to trash other teachers… seems, um, counter to what one should be practicing? Seems to go on everywhere. It’s here in Austin as well, that’s why I practice at the semi-secret shala!
Nice comment about the galaxies… I always feel like I don’t even exist anymore when confronted with the sky, it’s a nice way to feel.
Posted by: Liz · Nov 24, 05:27 PM · #
About the doshas, I just took another test to judge the dosha of the body (tri) and the dosha of the mind (pitta).
I come out tri-dosha because I upset their physical classifications, I really think so. This one scored me throughout so I can see how that is. For instance, the first questions are about hair and I’ve got Pitta quantitity and color, kapha type. Now I’m looking at a chart that shows the categorizations. Pitta weight, kapha strength, vata hunger. Kapha eyes with pitta color, vata digestion… it goes on like that.
Posted by: joy · Nov 24, 10:05 PM · #
What’s ‘YogaFranchise’?
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Nov 25, 06:55 AM · #
This whole ayurveda thing gives me doubts.
YF is the company that’s eating American yoga.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 25, 12:22 PM · #
I read, “This whole ayurveda thing gives me donuts.”
Posted by: patrick · Nov 25, 01:55 PM · #
Hi (0v0)
Your past date came with his own laugh tracks? It’s possible that the alignment obsessed quasi ashts might be trying to avoid the spiritual. It’s also possible that they embrace the spiritual outside the class. It reminds me of an early hatha teacher that was super obsessed with alignments and with what do with blankets, straps and blocks. instructions were handed out martinet style. however, i found out that she was really devoted to her guru, whom she visited yearly in India. her offstage persona differed from the onstage one.
hugs
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Nov 25, 02:26 PM · #
Hey some pitta can come in handy once in a while, just ask the anarchist lawyer.
Having been doing, ahem, extracurricular stuff on saturdays for the past six months or so, I can confirm a friend’s observation that “Iyengar is the rehearsal and Ashtanga is the performance.” One day they were talking about holding a magnifying glass to pictures in Light on Yoga so they could nail down some hand position or whatever. But to the extent that rehearsing is useful, I can also say there has been some useful information that you don’t get in orthodox Ashtanga circles. Also if the teacher knows to work you, the post-practice buzz is comparable to Ashtanga.
As far as YogaFranchise goes… if a corporate entity were to make its mission the offering of something authentic, they could do far worse than to become Iyengar-centric. Check out section 12, “Guidelines for Teacher Training Programs” in this document: http://www.iyengaryogacanada.com/teachers/procedures_2007.pdf
Posted by: jlafitte · Nov 25, 06:04 PM · #
I’m not Iyengophobic! Some of my best friends are Iyengar.
Damn, Stu… now I want to get back in to that scene. (Magnifying glass? Alignment buzz? I’m already amused.) There was recently an entire weekend Iyengar workshop… on trikonasana. Just trikonasana. The whole weekend.
Isn’t that sort of awesome?
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 25, 06:46 PM · #
That is awesome, sort of. Last month I attended a weekend workshop with a senior Iyengar teacher. She used me to demo trikonasana. I thought I had a pretty respectable Iyengar trikonasana, yeah rite. As soon as I started tilting over she stopped me and went into an extended talk about maya. It went over my head, but it sounded like something that will be obvious someday. Then she picked the asana apart as though like fifteen parts of the body are all doing their own simultaneous little vinyasas.
Her practice clearly went beyond asana. One incident that impressed me… there were several people frequently scribbling in their notebooks, which seemed to me the sort of Iyengi wonkishness that would be encouraged. So mid-day the teacher was making what she clearly thought was a crucial point but which was not getting assimilated. Still they went on scribbling. The teacher finally said “Get it in your body, not in your notebook. The essence of yoga is experiential. That is the gift of yoga to the other philosophical systems of India and to the world.” Not at all the sort of thing I expected.
Posted by: jlafitte · Nov 26, 06:56 PM · #