Field of Battle, Song of God · 30 November 2008
Hrmmm…Thanksgiving. Up—dinner outside right over the ocean, salt breeze and corn-celery-sage stuffing and that slanting yellow glow you get south of the California boot spur. Sneaking off Friday to US Ashtanga central headquarters, now located in an elite outdoor mall and dripping mint condition prana all down the quick-decay façade of Anthropologie. Everything about the California myth is true.
Down—semidistant relatives who are aching for more of me, in more ways than one. They consider me a little package of culture and refinement (hey, they’re bored) and feel edified by what little I give them of myself. But one little package of me just isn’t enough for these SoCal consumers—what they really want is babies and as I pass into my 30s they have ceased clucking and begun to hiss. Nevermind the inoculations I’ve issued since the carnal beast awakened in my 13th year: no children. Not doing it. Swearing off children was the only way to freedom in a world where the culture wars are fought in the uteruses of the female young. Christian fundamentalism, from abstinence to anti-abortion to homophobia, exists to control female sexuality. This time, there were remarks about the importance of my ceasing all other activities next year to move to the boondocks and “make babies.” (Not ideas, not books, not a world of my own: just babies.) About my “not understanding feminity” and my “unused uterus.”
Seriously. I meet the family on their level, traversing all the distance of this field of battle that is my uterus. It’s many leagues from my side of the uterus to theirs, and once I arrive at their camp it can be difficult to remember that my own ground—my own politics and self owenship—have substance. I have transcended this culture but I also include it, and when the venomous loved ones entangle me there’s an icy deflection that only later reveals itself as a hard little gem of anger.
And soon shatters in to a joke. How funny to have a whole clan fighting to regress my selfhood sixty years, and to do that specifically in the field of my body. It doesn’t really work for a girl whose spiritual practice is grounded in that body. Thank god I have traced every inch of this pelvic girdle of bone and sinew, catching and releasing it with the breath; owning the hips happily; thank god this practice whispers you right through any fear of the subtle body.
The families do make battle on the field of me, but my field is wired with secret powers. The master key shouldn't be a secret: is so simple. It is like Krishna, holding the reigns. Greedy relatives can’t get much traction in lower chakras armored (or just enlivened?) with the master key.
My actions can be my own without being self-defensive. Who knew? I wish all the young women being told not to possess their own bodies could find this buzzing little forcefield.
I don’t think unmoved movement would be possible without a practice that gives my pelvic floor back to me in a way that is immediate, lightly entrancing, crass and transcendent all at the same time. This is the secret of the practice, whatever practice is. It’s simple.
Anyone can hold an unmoved mover in the belly root, can keep space with that, can begin and end all action from that. Om tat sat.
This is the easy way.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, having a body
Previous entry: Field Recordings / Next entry: For V.
Still a pain in the arse, though.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 1, 01:27 AM · #
I follow the concept, but not the practicalities of it:
“a practice that gives my pelvic floor back to me in a way that is immediate, lightly entrancing, crass and transcendent all at the same time”
How does this happen? How do you think the mula bandha affects your owning of your body or helps you resist your relatives’ wishes for you? How does it all materialize?
Posted by: V · Dec 1, 02:40 AM · #
Freedom in discipline, indeed.
:-)
Posted by: karen · Dec 1, 03:56 AM · #
I’m right there with you. I’ve been stating ‘no children for me’ since I was in HIGH SCHOOL (well, ok, pretty much since I could talk) and no one in my family believes me, so of course they also don’t understand why, nor do they try.
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Dec 1, 05:55 AM · #
My partner would ask me the following question: well which is primary, bodily experience (even having babies is a bodily experience) or discourse? Does having a uterus really come down to language and to culture wars? (Note that I’m not actually asking said questions directly, but rather indirectly; precisely, in fact, I’m asking in free indirect discourse.)
Posted by: patrick · Dec 1, 09:41 AM · #
Ha! Hello, petitio principii.
Is it the body asking the question, or is it the discursive mind? The mind or the body or the question or the discourse… whichever actor makes this query inded packages dualism into the asking. Which is primary and which secondary? Indeed. :)
Sonya, every post-Christian I know had to start with opting out of reproducing nuclear fundamentalist families. Those who wanted out but got into the nuclear family business have been sucked back down with a vengeance and turned (like my young relatives) into the harshest moralizers of all. For me, working with the family values tyranny wasn’t a choice—if I actually don’t have kids, I want that to be my decision. Not a decision made vis-a-vis the tyranny.
It’s not like this bullshit doesn’t anger me. It’s just that I am working with it. What I see in myself is a desire to bite back but very little feeling of victimhood. So in my case the negative emotion is anger (both for myself and for anyone else who has to take this shit), not self-pity or sadness. It at least helps that the emotion is uncomplicated. :) I don’t want to move out of it too quickly or explain it away, but I’m finding that it just doesn’t go down all that deep now. Freedom in discipline, eh.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 1, 11:25 AM · #
I’m glad I don’t have any battleground anatomy over which my folks might fight with me. I’ve always been reluctant to bring girlfriends home and the one time I did bring a female companion home my dad commented that he “wondered” about me. As if I’m supposed to defend myself against that kind of nonsense. I wonder if he’s learned that he only gains more distance that way. Children are beautiful but so is a life of unhindered investigation. The two may not be mutually exclusive but the former at least make a bigger challenge of the latter.
Posted by: Carl · Dec 1, 11:26 AM · #
Looking around, I agree, Carl.
V, the very best that I can say is to try it out over many years.
It’s not at all a clenching, but a tautness.
I think there is more I can add that could be intresting or helpful. Will mull it over later today or tomorrow. This is a subtle practice that takes a lot of develpment… maybe there are advanced practitioners who can answer your question in their own ways if they are reading. Please feel welcome to chime in anonymously if you’re lurking… this is an important topic.
Susananda is writing about this too, beginning from the practical aspects. I’m trying to speak about aspects of the psyche and relationships…
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 1, 11:28 AM · #
Oh Carl, that’s what they do to my brother! To be anything but heterosexual would somehow be an insult to all of our family and my brother is wicked so he sometimes plays along and lets them think what they want. I guess my brother and I are the ‘odd ones out’ in my family!
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Dec 1, 11:57 AM · #
Like this so-called ‘ayurveda’ it all comes down to good digestion and a sound night’s sleep. Can’t help but think that this mula business was a lot more straightforward when ‘morning practice’ consisted of strong coffee, a bacon roll and, by way of finishing, couple of fags.
(Cigarettes)
Posted by: meniscusmerange · Dec 1, 12:21 PM · #
Way to demystify everything. Now I have to speak plainly. Heh. Later,
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 1, 01:15 PM · #
But aren’t there binaries all over the original model (as I read it anyway)? My body/Their discourse; isn’t that ALREADY there, and in fact, quite central to the whole problem? This uterus versus THAT uterus, THIS femininity versus THAT femininity, blah blah blah, so on and so on and so on? Mula bandha versus social conservatism? See? Isn’t it all just a big (anti-)feminist Western? Who’s wearing which (of the two) hats?
Posted by: patrick · Dec 1, 03:06 PM · #
Oh my God!!! You’re kidding. I’m exhausted tonight. A week behind in email and have faculty dinners or parties every night ‘til Sunday. Hrmmmm. Can I be playful for a sec? Ok.
The answer is I’m as much conflict theorist as I am Christian Fundamentalist.
Booooooring. Three hundred years of billiards with David Hume! Let’s leave this circular purgatory. Circle of samsara, Circle of Willis, cirle of… hell. And you know you like the Italian for Westerns too: no real white hats in Spaghetti because everything's noir.
Take the circular reading of the world (i.e., the “where’s the conflict?” peti-prince), stretch it out to a slinky. Trancend and include is code for synthetic theory with spirals (not to go Anusarian again, crap!). Let’s jump out of the tortured metaphysical games of chicken.
[Marx and Che see conflict theory and say: “I’m no Marxist! (Jesus says: “I’m no Christian!”) but it’s neofundamentalist to the root to notice these things. Oops.]
I’m no Marxist. Caw!
Nevermore.
:)
(Cue Minerva, eating chickens and ravens and whatever else is present-at-hand. I mean near to beak. Tag: CRYPTOHEGELIANISM.)
Time to catch up on daunte email. After a headstand.
(((xoxososleepyonovo)))
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 1, 06:23 PM · #
Apparently it is your ego consciousness disagreeing with their semi-social consciousness is all. Apparently ego consciousness is a pretty new thing. Our forefathers didn’t have much ego, and before that, just social consciousness. You are The One, Neo. Tell them you are a virgin and are waiting for Jesus to return – or do they think you might be madder if you say that?
Posted by: Gregor · Dec 1, 07:30 PM · #
Gregor, that’s wonderful (“tell them you’re waiting for Jesus”).
0v0, as you know, no malice intended. But I thought the whole post needed its bell rung, so I went for it.
You’re right, by the way, about the Spaghettis.
Posted by: patrick · Dec 2, 05:08 AM · #
Insane blatherings of self can often only be seen in retrospect,ie,later down the road of life. The simplicity of giving oneself’s to ovulation seems to calm the mind of truly seeking women. I hope you enjoy the challenge of your conundrum.
Posted by: OLDDUDE · Dec 2, 09:26 AM · #
‘Neo’ is Greek and, thus, too old school a name for a New Age Savior; ‘Neo’ is too ironic for the current age in which nobody really gets irony. How about if we call hir Nouveaux instead? Or New.Vox maybe, for its nifty marketing spin? But I think the French ‘nouveaux’ is sexier and more mysterious — two important qualities that saviors should have.
Posted by: Carl · Dec 2, 10:42 AM · #
I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something but isn’t that a standard demand from all families? Once my wife I were dating for 4+ years they wanted to know when we were getting engaged? Buying a house? Having a kid? Etc.
Some of the things I regret in life were the things that I didn’t do largely because others wanted me to and I didn’t want to give in to them.
(Plus, if you have a boy you can name it Cody!)
:)
Posted by: cody · Dec 2, 11:25 AM · #
Oh CHRIST.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 2, 12:07 PM · #
Gregor, yeah. Thanks. Individuation is threatening and this totally makes sense. Threatening not just to a sense of the collective but to the myth that a given culture is enduring. “Marriage has been between one man and one woman since the beginning of time!” This is what we hear from the fear-ridden Prop 8 people. Talk about the way we never were.
To clarify, none of this is about me agonizing over whether to have children. That for me is personal matter. What's in question for my family is not me having children but my doing so in their way--in the boondocks, without going on with public life, without working. Don't tell me that's not creepy nonsense for this node in the matrix that is me, my boys.
As for Neo, hilarious. I don’t like that Sophie Neveu is the sacred feminine character in the Da Vanci Code, though. That book sucks. And VOX by Nicholson Baker is also a poor specimen of a book. But Neveaux might move beyond all that…
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 2, 12:15 PM · #
Cody, I do agree. There are two things in play here. American nuclear family traditions is the first. The second is the ways in which Christian Fundamentalism is a disease of the lower chakras. I could tell you tales about this that would curl your ‘fro—chastity camps to instruct girls on the horros of sex, non-masturbation “contracts”, parents sending boys who like to cook off to anti-gay therapists. The latter is why this post is about the MB.
As for CP :), ok. My first big crush was not only Cody but Cody Cassady. Didn’t have beat parents, just a weird accident for someone marked in many ways. Cody was a hilarious redhead with a James Dean jaunt. A natural. God. He died at 18, slammed his car into a lightpole in the K-Mart parking lot in town, crashed through his own windshield, rolled down under the wheels. Wonderful kid. Sometimes I forget.
Now V’s original question… (got to email now—freaking email!— but later in the lunch hour…)...
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 2, 12:19 PM · #
“the way we never were”
giggle
“non-masturbation ‘contracts’”
positively dies laughing
Yes, it was obvious to me from go that this was all about this sort of rhetoric, and precisely, “doing it on their terms” or not.
Posted by: patrick · Dec 2, 12:46 PM · #
I’m still anxiously waiting because honestly, I don’t get it. Someone once told me that once you understood moola bandha, it was like you could finally SEE. And now you talk about secret powers. And all I’ve got out of MB so far is the capacity to hold pee longer than before. Hmpf.
Posted by: V · Dec 2, 01:17 PM · #
Don’t scoff, V, that’s an important power. :)
Posted by: cody · Dec 2, 02:32 PM · #
Very important!
I wonder if the person who said this to you had spent some years in a sort of dissociative headspace, doing a lot of spiritual practice that was transcendent and wonderful but at the same time avoiding the body. Hmm… sounds like the first few years of my practice—-big on transcendence, less interested in thisness. I think this is part of the flight toward the light thing in which some “spiritual” people get stuck, and which ashtanga MIGHT undo in certain cases whether one asks for it or not. Getting more in to the subtle body sort of changed my perspective or “seeing.” Maybe for the person who made this comment there was more than a prespective-shift but a little revolution. Who knows. Maybe there are times when it’s good become unmoored again. Sometimes I let it all go on purpose, and that can be interesting too (though often I walk around with a constant if peripheral MB awarenss… sometimes having lost it I re-engage and inhale strongly, and the Editor says “what was that?”). But anyway.
BTW, what if I did have children “in my own way” in Manichean reaction to “their way”? Talk about total bullpuckey.
We’d just wind up right back where we started, me with some Christian Fundamentilast kid who goes off to church with my parents. Kids can be smart like feral animals are smart: they smell insecurity and they know when you’re hiding something big in your own shadow. I’ve seen anti-fundamentalists wind up with fundamentalist kids, not just in Christianity but in ashtanga yoga. HELLO. Look at how one trip to Mysore turns people once devoted to their first teachers (if their teachers had unresolved issues with the tradition) into little fundamentalists. It only makes sense. Poor kids wanted to know the untold story of the world their own parents are so busy rejecting. Duh.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 2, 03:47 PM · #