INSIDEOWL: having a body

Owl-Mouse · 2 September 2008

Or, Physiology of Letting Go.

It is fall. I should let go of the intermediate series. All of it, all at once, traditional-style, bam. I started this practice on the first of a September, and may as well end it in like manner.

I put it off. The crazy long practice was beyond good all summer, practicing with friends, the rhythmic ease of the programme on my body. Why the hell would I quit something that is so effortless and takes such good care of me? Something I love so much? Is there some master narrative of “progress” and “moving on” and “letting go” or some nonsense that progress in these dumb series is supposed to map and reproduce? Pish. I’m good with what works, and what works is all of second and third to the twists.

Good reasons for changing nothing.

The weather has turned and the students are returning and my asana teacher is back in town.

Yeah so whatever. Last Wednesday we hacked it off, like I did 50 weeks ago with 2 feet of hair.

Preliminary report: everything sucks.

I know that I’m a weird case, because I don’t get worn down by practice or need very much recovery. My body is hilariously soft (someone bought me a massage and the therapist said: “you looked so quiet and mousy when you came in, but there’s this strength in all the deep tissues”—yes, that’s “quiet and mousy”) but there’s weird strength in the area of stamina. Intermediate series is like brushing my teeth, and creates a focused momentum that makes advanced-A sort of easy.

Then again. Without intermediate, advanced is HARD. Oh my god. Soreness. Pain. Tension. Loss of flow. The shorter programme makes me ache and leaves me wondering what in the hell I’m doing to my body with this ashtanga nonsense. Can my upper body take this shit? I caught myself actually whimpering inside one day. Total loss of perspective there.

It’s pretty funny that I experience muscle ache as a form of fatigue. In my mind, I apparently conflate dull pain with energy loss… but maybe this is accurate. Maybe the resistance in my body is making me work harder and creating tiredness. Or maybe I’m physiologically depressed because I had to say goodbye to my friend the intermediate series. Maybe my normally open and giddy personality is a mere side-effect of intermediate series and now I’ll get all intense and gloomy… find the dark side in a new way. Sitting here, I could find other explanations too. For example: American politics. Whatever. Oh and by the way, I dreamed of book The Giving Tree. Daaaaark.

I wish there were something I could say to decrease the third series intrigue that afflicts some people. Since I’m in this mood, here’s my best shot.

The “exclusivity” of the experience is in its dailiness. Not its difficulty or intensity. Lots of people can make these shapes—they’re nothing special in isolation. But… not a lot of people do this practice regularly. Though I wish they did so I’d feel less isolated by it.

For people who think it is beautiful, consider that it’s normal to gain weight while you build up crazy core strength. Also, perhaps especially if you eat meat to do that, your shoulders will become large. (Noted because interest in having a beautiful practice seems to correlate with scheming about marginal fluctuations in weight.) If it seems like it’s powerful and you will have power if you do it, consider that some people become disempowered by practicing this series. It gets so practitioners have energy for these postures and little else. Is it better to create a daily metaphor for power by putting your body into a certain shape, or to invest your energy in other forms of creativity? This stuff stops being glamorous when it’s your daily practice. I love that. It may seem glamorous if you’re contorting yourself into position every so often for the thrill of it. But that’s not ashtanga—it’s also perhaps not safe (not really for me to say; I have no experience out of context), and might not be particularly intelligent on a subtle level.

I grant that it’s a wonderful programme in some ways. Knowing me, I will gradually fall more deeply in love with it as I find its quirks and the little tiny details and variations in our relationship. (Today I realized I was already very intimate with the postures themselves, and that they're more interesting and finegrained now than a year ago. As with the Editor--here exactly ten years now, since under a willow tree outside the library he drew me into intense, fateful conversation about Bill Clinton bombing Afghanistan--these recognitions of relationship get me all tender and thankful.)

Or maybe I’ll just learn to do backflips and that will put a finishing layer of EZ-Cheeze on top of everything. I don’t know. It’s also just this mundane thing. Really.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Shaky Ground · 30 August 2008

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
-William Hazlitt

I use this word, grace, sometimes when I really mean it. But maybe I don’t even know what I mean. Above, grace = directness, congrousness, unflinchingness and ease, all in action.

Rather, is it about containing difficulty and unease, but acting anyway? A light touch where you could have gone with a bold proclamation, kind of thing. (In the Christian tradition, grace is forgiveness by God of our fundamental sin nature despite our own inabilities to ever redeem ourselves by action. Right. Good to watch for that old narrative creeping in.)

Someone called the recent criticism of the Ashtanga lineage holders “graceless,” and in a way I agreed--though, also, fear of critical thought and extreme emotional involvement in these politics to the point of being very upset by them are graceless as well. Yes? Grace allows someone to observe it all a little peacefully.

What I agreed with was this: to be graceless is to forget you’re always on shaky ground. It's losing your gratitude, or at least your circumspection. Become uncircumspect, fall down.

Hazlitt’s grace is fearless, which I like; but it's surfacy. Not for itself or necessarily conscious of uncertainty--that is, countervailing laws of physics, the provisionality of all metaphysics, when death will come, imperfection of teachers, and such.

Seems like with respect to what we do, if there is grace, it may be a quality of consciousness … though at the same time one of breath, of a capacity to be direct in movement, in an ability to rest the eyes time and again on nothing in particular.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , spirituality

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.

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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?

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(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

Sex and 3S, or, a post about putting your feet behind your head · 1 July 2008

The discussion from 28 June just keeps going. I tried to end it with a kick in the teeth from Chuck Norris, but then the questions got really provocative in a good way. So carry on down there.

Meantime… they say women in third cannot get enough.

I wouldn’t know anything about that.

Nevertheless:

Hypothetical explanations for the observed increase in sex drive among female third series practitioners:

H,a: Doing that practice requires you to go to bed stupid early, so you never go out, never get laid, and therefore become pent up.
H,b: The arm balance stuff puts a woman in touch with a certain aggressive she-wolf vibe that western society represses, and the reconnection with her viscera restores that lost shade of self-expression. You know, dominatrix energy? Catwoman stuff?
H,c: Putting your foot behind your head constricts blood and lymph circulation to the lymph nodes in the groin, and those same glands are flushed with energy when one exits the posture. Over time and repetition this gland cleansing and shift of energy creates some, well, intense feelings.

There’s probably something to each of these, with H,a being not insignificant. But to focus on H,c—the foot behind the head (FBH) thing.

Who wants to put their foot behind the head? This is preposterous.

I said that I’d try to write about this, but I don’t know how much I can contribute usefully since I have not studied many bodies in any variety of FBH. Here’s a scattering of thoughts, for what it is worth.

● When ashtangis talk about FBH, one of the first considerations is anatomy—especially openness of the hips and relative length of torso and legs. There’s also the matter of flesh around the hips, which does make a difference here. I wonder, where do 14 year old Indian boys fare in these matters? From the spindly images I’ve seen, Krishnamachya was probably working with a whole different anatomy when he put together these FBH sequences. (Yes I said that.) One for which FBH was not as preposterous.

● For the people I’ve known, FBH is a big body-transformation that comes in phases. It’s as extreme, and as progressive, as are the back bends… but perhaps we focus on FBH less because it doesn’t look as dramatic as bends bends, because the emotional experience is internal rather than expansive, and because the postures don’t include the intense bonding experience with a teacher that can occur in back bends. But one could consider that FBH is just as big a deal as back bends.

● As several people have said, there are two ways to practice FBH—one that emphasizes external rotation of the femur, and one that incorporates a bit of counter action and is less about getting the whole leg behind the back than it is just hooking the foot behind the head. Susananda has a good discussion of this. I wonder if the more externally-rotated, baddha konasana approach is especially good for people still working to deepen the intermediate FBH—deep external rotation is pretty much a pre-requisite for beginners who are also opening the muscles of the legs. Meanwhile, as the hips become more open and the work is to stabilize them with the pelvic floor and any leg muscles that can be activated, there is somewhat less emphasis on external rotation. For me, this approach also helps keep the IT band from becoming agitated and begins to counteract would-be trouble arising from a mobile sacrum.

● Sometimes, I will practice a deeper leg-behind-the-back kind of thing, especially in more passive postures. But this is, in the context of third, not really for me about letting go. If I happen to be adjusted in either nidrassana or kashybasana, actually, there’s often a feeling in the next many breaths that the entire stability of the sacrum and pelvic floor could be lost. I’ve once irritated my lower back quite intensely this way—by releasing entirely in the passive posture, then beginning to move before strongly re-engaging the pelvic floor. I know they say the mulabandha is a subtle practice, but in order to stay safe in deeper FBH for me it is not too subtle. It’s the center of the awareness in those postures merely to keep my SI joints from gaping open and my sacrum from turning into a plumb bob in a windstorm. Or something. I don’t know that I would be working so close to the edge of instability if I were a skinny long-legged Indian boy, but in my case doing so much FBH requires using the pelvic floor to pull back from the edge.

● A final reason I am interested in less externally rotated, more counter-acted FBH (as long as I can keep the neck clear) is that it’s possible some days to get all the way there on an inhale. This goes to my main question for FBH: What if third series were led? What’s the FBH technique then, what are the ways to sublimate it to a single breath, but in a way that’s structurally sound to the point of supporting a durvasa?

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Unscientific Postscript, again · 28 June 2008

I. Art/Science

Do practitioners treat eating as a science? Do chefs? Or do they learn the chemistry and then use it to experiment and create interesting variation and rich experience?

(Is ashtanga a “science” or is that reductionis bluster?)

What is lost when personal food choices, a chef’s creation of a menu, or a yoga practice is treated as science? What forms of inquiry, relationship and chances for sublimity?

II. Being Empty

Ashtanga generally feels and works better when you eat less. But… strong practice also kickstarts your metabolism and this, for some, can make it difficult to eat enough. Especially if you’re eating a clean, plant-based diet, given that these foods are expensive and high labor but also low calorie.

Does a person who eats less enjoy food less? (Does food taste better when you’re already full?)

Can one attribute too much or too little meaning to food?

Does it make sense to resent what we have eaten?

Are people afraid to feel empty? Is it correct to associate hearty eating with self-care, and what about western families might wrongly shape that association? Could allowing the belly to empty be a form of self-care… and what would it take to get the mind-body to believe that this was true?

III. Meat, etc.

Holy mechanized death Batman, why are people hostile or apathetic to questions about the morality of eating meat and dairy?

Is this not a moral question?

Are people afraid that if they start knowing about feedlots, animal welfare, and the big environmental picture they will have to take too much responsibility? Is it possible to know these things and still eat meat and dairy?

Have the dork-vegans and the sanctimonius-yogis captured the question?

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Categories: having a body

Cheez-it® · 25 June 2008

Last friday I walked into the living room and I smelled Nabisco. What?

He wouldn’t do this. Not Nabisco, flagship of American obesity and mindless addiction? Not this level of anti-wellbeing and all-out trash in our home?

I opened a few cupboards and file drawers, looked behind the sofa. The smell of deep-fried salty cardboard, refined flour, congealed corn syrup burnt into dessicated brown bubbles and marketed as “food” was unmistakeable. I tipped over the guitar amp behind the chair and there it was: a large box of Cheez-it® crackers.

A "food" with a registered trademark. A "food" comprising 26 ingredients, among them partially hydrogenated soybean oil and something identified as TBHQ. A substance brought into my house for the purposes of ingestion.

Ok then. It’s either me or him.

Sometimes this contrarian imp comes out—the imp that’s curious just how much shit the practice can neutralize. The imp who’s angry at parents (not mine, bless them thank god) and a culture that teach children to find comfort in “food” with trademarks, and who wants with spite-tainted curiosity to take it on myself. The imp who thinks she can neutralize all shit.

I reached in and took a monkey-fist full, sat down on the floor like a primate and crunched. Cheez-it, for all that oil and salt, tasted exactly like cardboard. Did nothing for me, not even an insulin rush (thanks to the spinach and cauliflower on which it landed). Tasting and feeling nothing, I took several more monkey-fistfuls before returning the Cheez-it® to its hiding place, knowing I’d soon be in more trouble with the Editor than he was with me. Can’t I leave anything a secret? Can’t even the space inside his guitar amp be free from my ideas about clean living?

The next morning the solstice hit and I made 108 sun salutations in the most peaceful quiet home studio in Venice. As I raised my arms for number 20, a severe wave of nausea drew me down.

Gawd. I have to do 88 more of these? Maybe I can get through one more before my first trip to the bathroom. Nice of them to install this beautiful bathroom right off their studio, though. I really hope I don’t throw up.

On salutation 21, a bead of sweat formed on my brow. And all I noticed for the next two salutations was the droplet gaining volume and momentum as it ran up and down my nose. On the 24^th, I waited in ardha uttanasana while it rolled to the tip of my nose and flicked it like a frog, rose up quickly, and checked in with the nausea. Gone.

Did I neutralize Cheez-it®? Conquer and assimilate?

Would the anti-human evil of Cheez-it® in my body have even been observable were it not for the practice?

I will write more about food in the next post, about what I actually eat even though I sense that this is not even useful or interesting to anyone because eating is as much play as it is science. Or, at least, should be.

For now here is one idea that might useful across the board.

If you want to begin to hear your body correctly, put the screws to your workout.

If you are having trouble tapping in to good intuitions about how to eat, honestly: ramp it the hell up.

From what I have seen, straight cardio won’t do it. From what I have seen, in order to clarify the messages, and increase their urgency, you want to start making your body build finetuned strength, balance and nervous-system endurance. If you tell it that it has to build smart muscles, excellent proprioception, all kinds of new balance and movement skills: under those conditions, the body will demand what it needs to do that efficiently. It will respond to the trauma of a dramatic increase in exercise by getting smarter.

I say this because, time and again, I see new practitioners realize that they have been doing something wrong with their diet. Of course they are: they live in a Nabisco world. Astanga is the most they have ever asked of their bodies, so it’s no wonder new practitioners try every kind of new eating regime in response to all the new feelings.

You always have the option of making an intellectual decision to nourish yourself “right,” based on nutritionists’ research. But this shortcuts old habits while putting the new ones up to a higher authority.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Also Apollos · 23 June 2008

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo

translated by Stephen Mitchell

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Categories: evolution , having a body

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.

Posted by (0v0) Comment [16]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , sound

WWND, Moon Play, Streams of Practice · 18 June 2008

What would Nietzsche do is a concentrated question. Use sparingly and apply only to the affected area. Yields extraordinary mental clarity! But may cause will-to-power-disease if taken incorrectly.

It was a WWND day.

First thing in the morning, I went out the Santa Monica pier and skated north to Malibu and back. A summer idyll—waves big, sun clear, light salty breeze. Me and the runners—tourists don’t show up until later. Listening to Tropicalia and, after that, David Byrne.

It’s indecent to have access to this picture any old day.

Afterwards, still hyper, wrote for a while. Then I hit the asana class NYT billed as “most advanced in LA,” to let the teacher know I still love her. Received some amazing personal instruction (very helpful), was told to take lotus in handstand (ok, interesting that’s possible), and might (as a result) have frightened one or two students. A surprisingly, sweetly internal class for that venue, opening and closing with instruction on pratyhara (which calmed me down the way a few sun salutations and standing postures cannot). This deviation from the tradition is “damaging yoga”? Really? Damaging the monopoly, yes. But a scene like this is so different from ashtanga that the two do not need to fear each other the way they do. I wish they would stop trashing each other. Soon, we need different words to refer to the two kinds of practice: they have little in common and neither is going away.

Anyway.The thing about the ashtanga teacher, the one who does primary before a moon, is that he doesn’t go in for arbitrary rules. He’s got too much positive instruction on tap to need to frame his room in negative instructions. It's different, but there are a lot of reasons one might specify first-only before a moon: my guess is that he knows he attracts physically intense students whose minds could use a super-internal practice at regular intervals on random days. No kidding: this guy is the best asana instructor I have ever encountered. This shocks and amuses me. He is gifted in physical intelligence and has made third easy yet particularly intense for me. And my back, which has been trippy for 16 months, has undergone some kind of healing this spring, in a way that I might try to explain later.

I am still not very “physical” about this stuff—thinking and talking about asana is unbearably tedious, especially where my own body is concerned. I’m interested in the head-trip, energy, culture, history, spirit, emotion—ANYTHING but mechanics. Which is why a very physical teacher, who has mastery in the area I avoid, is a great benefit.

This brings me to something Gregor and I put together in a thread the other day. I think he was drunk when he brought it up but the idea makes sense if you stay with it. Say there are different streams of mastery—physical, mental, spiritual, maybe another. If you’re going to practice something, you’ll probably be drawn to focus on the stream in which you feel most competent. Too, maybe you feel insecure in one of the other streams and try to avoid it. High school athletes (who might claim to be non-intellectual) find a physical practice; introverts (usual klutzes) turn to meditation; mental people (who say "quieting the mind" is a stupid idea) pursue intellectual athleticism.

Would it be possible for a single practice to work in all three streams simultaneously, and actually harmonize them over time? A practice in which you may get in for the appeal of, say, physical mastery, but soon find you have to work with equal intensity in other less familiar streams in order to pursue that supposed strength?

Ashtanga has the potential to be that. A kind of practice that balances the streams.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , morality , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Apex · 17 June 2008

Here’s the deal with your teacher. You do it their way as long as it won't hurt you; you honor that relationship for the sacred thing it is; you keep it clean and loving because your practice depends on it and their service to humanity is better than your own. Or my own anyway… heh. If they value loyalty, I deliver because it keeps everything clear and creates even more mutual understanding. If they have particular rules, I reproduce them to the point of being mechanical about it. Yes. Obedience is just engine-grease for the big machine that is a Mysore room.

Mechanical machine, not kidding.

The rules are just there to allow me to shut down the monkey. A container.

The mind likes to be bound. Even if it is, like mine, a big preacher's-kid rulebreaker in other contexts.

That said, this whole rule of primary-only on the day before the moon is a drag. Criminy. Especially if the moon is smack on a wednesday; and if it’s not new but a buzzy hightide action-packed full moon; and if it’s the week of the solstice for godsakes.

Come on. I practiced primary-only this morning and am bouncing off the walls. And I’m supposed to skip practice tomorrow altogether, on this day when sun and moon are both pulling me off the earth and in the meantime I’ve got to find a way to trick myself into looking at a computer for most of the day? I’d fast or something, but my experience is that fasting makes me even more hyper.

This is just ridiculous. I’m tending strongly toward criminal behavior tomorrow unless I stap on some rollerblades instead.

It is the apex of summer and time for many forms of realization. We are all ripe. Can you feel it? This is it! Put on a dress (you too), climb up something, dance in your livingroom, read Nietzsche and the Bhagavad Gita.

Go create. Go!

P.S. Topics for later, possibly: N's question on the what postrationality can give to rationality (nice); S's question on putting your foot behind your head; and A's question about what in the hell I eat. I don't have answers, but might try to document some ongoing experiments.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Another Letter to NPR · 12 June 2008

It saddened me to hear D**** W*** both begin and end his review of violin great Lili Haydn by emphasizing her small stature. He did not mention the equally below average body-size of Bob Dylan, nor the above average body-size of George Clinton, two of the many men whose relationships to Lili he uses to underwrite her cred as a real artist.

Indeed, it is interesting how much of the journalist's four-minute commentary is about Haydn’s relationships rather than her work. As a cultural analyst, perhaps Mr. Was is just playing to listeners’ expectations in a culture that evaluates women for their teamwork and men for their creations.

Be that as it may, what pains me is that W** didn’t glean the basic insight that every cultural critic with eyes saw during the thankfully-ended Clinton campaign: that commentators discuss powerful women’s bodies as a way of not discussing why they really matter to us: their all-out human creativity and might.

Posted by (0v0) Comment [11]
Categories: having a body

An Example of a Bold Conjecture · 11 June 2008

People who do this practice are allergic to fakey-fake peace and love not because they hate the idea of love but because the fake stuff cheapens the unavoidable, inconvenient, uncalled-for all-out love that practice begins to generate. Practitioners get the idea that this seemingly hard-won love is special, and get pretty good at spotting its cheap imitation. They get a little secretive about this aspect of their experience, because it is the best part and feels worth protecting.

So for all the salience of resistance, insecurity and frustration—for all the sharp edges—in the ways we talk about the yoga, the mainspring of practice is the addictiveness of the inimitable, irreducible high it generates.

And, ultimately, the experience that speaks to our intuitions to tell us we are doing something right is nothing other than embodied love.

Posted by (0v0) Comment [4]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Music For Airports, II · 7 June 2008

I held off from saying what I needed to say about dance for the earlier post to make sense. I did not clarify that I was talking about the kind of dance you do like nobody’s watching. The kind that maybe you do drunk at weddings, in dark bars, and definitely in unadvertised meetings of openminded healers in deconsecrated churches and temples in Santa Monica.

I don’t write about this because even if I can dance like nobody’s watching, I can’t write about dance like nobody’s watching. The truth is I’ve been dancing free-form every Saturday since October. It’s SO revealing. About modern spirituality (whatever that might be), about embodied practice, about the boundaries of self, about what’re the point and the possibilities of contemplation. About how groups form and how people really communicate. There’s just a whole anthropology of this little supercreative edge of culture waiting to happen. It's also in some ways old as it is new, like Susan said in the last comment.

This morning when I arrived in the huge old temple space, they were playing Music for Airports and for the few minutes before I stopped thinking about outside things I remembered the drive across the Golden Gate from Marin two years ago, after a first Vipassana retreat. That is music for breaking a long silence, in my experience. The theory of the Five Rhythms is that one of the tempos of life is stillness… this also makes MfA a good place to begin.

A woman was weeping in the corner and my friend Fred, a psychotherapist in his mid-60s, was holding her hand like a brother. Nobody was at all uncomfortable or self-conscious about her emotions; and nobody tried to resolve them too quickly. For the first 30 minutes the still tones of MfA would come up over and over under much faster music and some people would notice and slow way down. Me I felt good to mix in the associations I have for that music with more chaotic, high-energy kinds of experience. To find the Music for Airports when everyone around you is knocking on the door of the big kuckoo. As corny as that sounds. Both rhythems are just techniques for letting go.

I think I’ll stop trying to talk about any of this now.

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , sound , spirituality

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

Still More PDA · 22 May 2008

Its feels almost too late to write about EPB. I am through the figuring-it-out phase during which new sensations stand out against an empty background of non-experience, in which the mind works through things because the body lacks the knowledge.

Tacit knowledge has sort of taken over.

If I were capable of teaching this posture—which would take years of empathetic work with others and a stronger visual sensibility than the one I’ve got—I would be less locked in to tacit knowledge and more able to describe it in bodies besides my own. That is an aamazing skill (the two people who have offered me the best verbal instruction do not have bodies like mine—one is a male vinyasa teacher maybe twice my weight)—one I’m not given naturally and have not cultivated at any depth.

Anyway.

I said earlier that initially EPB starts as a hybrid with galavasana, with the bent-leg calf listing to center like a rudder, and then you gradually bring it into alignment with the arms in the sagittal plane.

That is the slow road and I can say that the first little way of it is easy if you already practice galavasana. I ended up taking the fast road and finding it more interesting in ways I’ll try to explain.

The fast road requires a big strong teacher whose kinesthetic intelligence, knowledge of ashtanga and attention to your practice are ridiculously keen. How likely is it to find skill and teacherly service like that? Pretty much impossible, which is why the slower road is all good.

In my case, for a couple of weeks, I had someone create a base for my upper arm and gently guide the knee to a place where it could stay, parallel to the same arm, without wobbling free. So I rested part of my bodyweight on that base--two stacked fists--while I found the point of balance and, gradually, learned that this posture is more about balance than strength. Once you’re in, the force between the knee and the tricep is the fulcrum, and if you bend the arms it’s actually easier to hold (once you’re actually up) than galavasana. To begin, it was fine for me to bring the knee sort of close to the elbow, though now each day I inch it closer and closer to the armpit.

With the earlier method, I was concentrating on straightening the back leg, lighting up the quad to counterbalance the weight of the head. Now I don’t even know what is happening in the leg, but I’m definitely not concentrating on making it straight or heavy. When the calf is in line with the arm, it feels like it’s only a balance around the strong knee-arm fulcrum. More precarious than effortful. I keep the elbows bent and each day play with moving the knee closer to the armpit.

Once I’m up, it’s easy. I play with bending bent knee even more sharply, finding out what that does not only to the rectus abdominus but to the hollow spaces below it. I think they call that uddiyana bandha. Alternatively, it works to play with the pelvic floor rather than the stuff around the diaphragm, but for right now I actually feel like the roots are a bit relaxed.

Which is funny, because now that I’m working a little deeper in to the series (practicing four of what I have been told are seven arm balances—if there’s more than this, do not tell me because I benefit from not knowing what is next) I am finally—after a year and a half—starting to feel grounded. For the first year I hoped for big stiff guys to practice near me, and finished practice feeling relatively spacey. The shift away from those more ethereal feelings makes me wonder if at this point I’m using the pelvic floor more than I realize… or if the brute physical force of all this lifting is turning me into a more solid kind of creature. For now.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration

A Pack A Day · 20 May 2008

Thinks are so weird here.

I am looking for a vice. Something about a little oral-fixative input seems to help me, and this is no time for undoing the primal reasons for that.

Up for consideration:

Gum
Decaf

Gum: Pros: fresh breath, totally enjoyable, nobody will see me in my office, I’m probably clenching anyway. Cons: low class and immature, jaw tension, sugar or aspartame (and creates a taste for extreme sweetness), I can’t eat just one piece (or just three, for that matter: I’m a pack-a-day gum chewer).

Decaf: Pros: it actually settles my stomach, approval from professors who see me sharing their addiction, non-verbal in-group bonding with fellow afflictees in line at the café, easier for me to kick than gum because I don’t truly like it. Cons: Rotgut. Drugs. Coffee breath.

Leaning toward Vice Number One. But taking suggestions.

Back to the regularly-scheduled physical turn the next time I check in here. I would like to revise what I said about EPB before the body knows it too well for the mind to say why.

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Categories: having a body

3SH · 18 May 2008

I have been reordered down to the digits, and now the process that happened years ago to my toes is working in to my fingers.

Have you seen the hands of the women who have spent some time in third? Once-tapered fingers turn flat from making birds and sages.

It may not be conventionally pretty, but it is good, the odd strength in the hands. As I have been taught, you work from the base in this practice, contrary to Iyengar. So when you turn everything upside-down, how else will you protect the weird architecture of the shoulder girdle if not by rooting through every last fiber of the fingers?

Third series hands are not beautiful, but we seldom realize it when caught by their charms. In them are too sharply blended the delicate features of our ancestors with the florid outgrowths of ashtanga… Ok that’s enough shadow-mining. (What in god’s name is the first line of Gone With the Wind still doing in my subconscious? Ugh.)

Anyway, my mother’s mother had a sister, I think it was, who was a hand-model with straight tapered fingers and long pink nails. The “tragedy” of my line, which I look down on mirthfully every practice, is the slightly bent middle finger that my grandmother passed to my mother and my mother to me. No modeling contracts for these hands, at least not in a pre-photoshop world. That said, my mother’s hands with their crooked finger are perfect, smooth, and really beautiful, like everyone’s mother’s hands: I love the fineness of her fingertips the never-changing sharp curve of the nails, and the way they smell of middlebrow baby-powdery perfume.

I’m carrying the so-called flaw but both the tapering and the softness are gone. After 12 years of piano playing that taught me to cup my hands as if over a tennis ball—a habitus I transferred directly into my typing style when I had a laptop surgically attached to the ends of my fingers circa 1995—it took me another two to learn to flatten the palms into the floor in a way that would protect the shoulders in a handstand. (Two years ago, I had to re-train the first knuckle on the index of the left hand, because it did not know how to root and this was creating a kind of RSI in the shoulder. I talked to a Feldenkrais practitioner who made me realize the hands are extremely subtle but also re-trainable in ways that can save the rest of the body--otherwise the early impossibility of that process would have convinced me I couldn't change.)

The other thing about these hands that is not mine is everything on them. This morning three rings: a wedding band from out of the Stillwater Platinum Mine, the complicated diamond I’ve been wearing lately for Nietzsche and which comes to me by way of a suicide—one I need to remember—two generations back, and a silver and turquoise flower my great-grandmother picked up in one of her trips to Mexico and wore on her pre-mutation hands. I have small hands and that ring fits my right pinky, but I always wonder if hers were even more small and she wore it on the ring finger. I never saw her hands though, except insofar as I see them when I look at my own.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Ribcage Ache · 16 May 2008

I am hearing about ribcage pain from so many. It’s in the deepest forward bends but also the deeper backbends, a bony ache. Maybe it’s the intercostals; maybe it’s in the bones. I don't know if you're all experiencing something similar or not.

For one person I’m hearing there is a sharp catching in which might be the pleurae—the membranes that encase the lungs. Does anyone else get that?

I don’t know about the ribcage ache. I did, early on, snap an intercostal muscle right off—ping, just like that—the one of two dramatic ashtanga injuries I’ve sustained. And occasionally—if I have a big sublaxation high in the spine—I’ll get a sharp tug on a single intercostal attachment just like the sensation that preceded that tear. But that is another topic.

The people who tell me about their ribcages tell me the ache goes away eventually.

Meantime, if the ache is with you, something else for consideration. In anatomy, they say muscles do concentric and eccentric contraction. In sports medicine, there is talk of stretching and counter-stretching. So I am wondering, if you are stretching your ribcage in new ways that are causing stress, doesn’t it make sense to balance this by stretching it from the inside?

I have no idea, but here are two things that happen when I started pranayama practice two years ago. (Sama vritti followed by the first three ashtanga pranayamas.) First, my lung capacity increased dramatically in a short period of time. I had no idea of my lungs or what they could really do before I started lengthening my breath in sama vritti. The first few week were freaky, but control and depth came quickly.

Second, I came to ache for the inside-intercostal stretch of puraka kumbhaka (inhale retention). The same way the frontal hips or the groins ache to be stretched in the afternoons or evenings as the hips begin to open. The same feeling (!), but on the inside of the body. So where as a new asana practitioner I would sneak to my office to stretch the hips, as a new pranayama practitioner I would take these deep, long-held breaths while sitting at the Wilshire/Westwood stoplights or walking across the quad. Pranayama works on the mind-body boundary—all breathing is a play of "spirit," whatever that is. A lot of what is happening in that practice is facing fear, experiencing first-hand your raw love for your life and freezing it for a moment, playing with the heartrate, tripping yourself out on oxygen-deprivation. Nevermind that, honestly. It’s weird.

But the purely physical stretching of the ribcage from the inside is too nice not to experience. It is like being massaged by gentle water-balloons, inside and behind your ache.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

Stop thinking (?) · 14 May 2008

This is a running joke in Vipassana retreats: a few days in you start to have the most brilliant thoughts. The desire to hold on to them, bottle them up for later, creates a hardness in your mind and your body. And keeps you from going deeper.

The reason it’s a joke is that your mind thinks these thought-objects are so brilliant because its cognitive standards have been reduced by days without speech or stimulation. A thought that seems genius in a cognitive vacuum is probably not going to be quite so great on the other side of retreat. You return to your journal a week later, so excited to rediscover the insights of your deeper mind at its most transcendent, and there is only this pathetic decontextualized scrawl, a notebook full of dried-up worms crunching in to dust. So much for your brilliance. (And the documentation of your transcendence, for that matter. Ouch.)

There are exceptions. I think of conceptual artists who meditate because they want to push back the veil, who while in meditation might leave themselves breadcrumbs for later. Some images and associations out of the mind show up better when you dial down the cognition; and if you’re an artist you need this material. Meditation teachers who work with artists sometimes incorporate journaling in to practice… when the purpose of meditation is to create.

For me… am I practicing to generate thoughts? Should I telegraph the thought-lets that come up in practice to a future self who can write them down? Should I accept the little clamps in my body and mind that spring shut the second I begin keeping track?

Why get in to that habit? My god, the more I can dial down the “insights,” the more energy I will have for practice. “Insights” are, in my experience, a slow leak.

Just do your practice without becoming attached to the sensations that come and go in the body. Isn’t that such a kind way to come in to it? That simplicity, the low expectations… I’m not sure I’d feel so free or so in love with the raw experience of practice if I were tracking it with a journal.

I am just saying what my experience has been.

And I guess, in addition to my reactivity to form-obsessed Los Angeles, this is another reason I have difficulty writing about physical practice. I feel that the place I go in practice might be threatened by bookkeeping. Because it's easy, I revive my undergraduate critiques of reification.

So I guess this is an experiment. Can I reflect on physical practice—in a general way, that draws on cumulative, remembered experience—in the evening without having the thought “I should write about that” during practice?

I’m pretty sure. Insofar as I teach asana, I think I should be able to do this—to take a descriptive perspective on my inside experience without that making the immediate, already-gone experience less real. Or more real.

We'll see.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body

SLIII: time to be small · 10 May 2008

Friday night I lay under the bath and listened to the echoes in the pipes and the footfalls in the outside corridors. Resonant under the hot eucalyptus water I was asking to seep into my trapezius and left levator scapula. I was out late and all excitable on Thursday night, and after I finally went to bed the left l-s, which has been touchy all week, cramped so hard it woke me in pain. Weird and so awkward, and it’s slow to release no matter who puts their hands on it or how quietly I ask it to let go.

Notes to self: Fifteen months ago I shifted my atlas on the axis jumping into a bad tripod, and the sub-occipital ache and loss of cervical rotation the following week made me become protective of alignment in the neck. In finishing, I rarely put my head to the floor in sirsasana, and in the tripods of third I take most of the weight in my shoulders and hands. Great for cervical alignment, but oven time this overdistribution of work into the levator scapulae, traps and even the scalenes has grown a little harsh. A teacher asked me to step into forearm balances rather than jumping, I realized that in doing so I reverted back—in a good way—to using the base rather than the neck for support (makes sense: when I practiced by stepping up was back before I’d developed this intense mode of l-s/trap/scalene work). At this point I will learn to work inversions more from pure balance than weighting the base with so much contraction. I ask students what they need their traps for in standing postures as a kind of inquiry-based release mechanism; and it’s time to ask myself why I need them in arm balances. Meantime, the poor battered l-s is pulling my medicine ball head back and to the left in the stupidest way, causing an enormous energy drain, awkward lane changes, shameless neckrub solicitation, and a little Advil habit.

Under the water listening to the pipe symphony, and with my ear to the floor at the Masonic Temple listening to the dance of the accelerated culture, I feel small. Brian May, the queen guitarist who became an astrophysicist, was on the radio talking about the sublimity of contemplating his own smallness—how much more awesome to think on the stars above than himself as a star on a stage. I will bury myself in the bath; go to the weekend's parties without thinking so much about it; and see old art with our brilliant visiting friend Indiana that- belongs- in- a- museum Jones. Let the guitar lines from Interpol’s song play in the back of my mind day after day. Who says Angelenos are afraid to merge? I am looking for opportunities to feel small, because it is beautiful. Besides, there may be limits to the old strategy of breathing in to the muscle and asking it to release… oddly I feel that this time leaving the body might be a better release strategy than burrowing back inside.

Links: Brian May interview, NYT on building new habits.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , sound

Friendly Persuasion · 5 May 2008

I don’t believe in internet memes! No! No! No!

No!

Except when I do. Jenna has tagged me. And because I have practiced with her, watched her cradle a cup of coffee (gently, like an epicure), and even eaten off her plate, I will give her whatever she asks. Which is just as well, because today I was going to spend lunchtime writing something really critical about Yogaworks’ nasty new race and class exclusion strategy. Lucky for YW, the vegetables win.

Here’s Jenna’s original epicurean take on this set of questions, and below are mine. Now back to my lunch, which is a large kale-spinach-broccoli-red cabbage-cucumber salad with hemp seeds, almonds, vinegar and oil, plus a thinly sliced gala apple with a little flax oil and an owl-teapot full of genmaicha green.

1. What food do you consider the best “date” food? In other words, what meal or food item do you think is sexiest to eat in the company of someone you would like to look sexy around?

Nevermind about me. Or about sexiness, seeing as how I’ve been on one date in my entire life (in 1997 a football player named Tad took me to Aladdin one Friday after I closed the store where I worked throughout high school: his Drakar Noir nearly suffocated me there in his battered Camry, and things just went downhill from there… as some of you know).

What I like is to observe is how someone relates to a drink that comes in a rounded glass or mug. Tea, coffee, cognac, brandy, wine. And how they eat food that comes in morsels—tapas of any kind.

But the most interesting is when someone first offers me a bite of anything they're eating, brings me food, shares a sip of their drink. How that is done, from what angle, the feeling it expresses, and how good it tastes.

2. What well-known person would you like to share a meal with?

Jon Stewart. Rebecca Solnit. Michele Bachelet. Arundhati Roy. John Coetzee. George Monbiot. Pema Chodron. Eric Hobsbawm. Bjork. Daniel and Juliet Schor. Thomas Pynchon. The Riverbend blogger. A.S. Byatt. Karen Armstrong. Errol Morris. Michael Ignatieff. Daniel Kahneman. Umberto Eco. &c.

3. What does your perfect breakfast-in-bed look like? (Food AND the details, please. Candles? Music? Flowers?)

Post-practice salt is a breakfast delicacy. Don’t ask me to elaborate.

Otherwise, small pieces of fresh apple, pear, cantaloupe, blueberry, almond and cashew butters, fresh coconut, and a very light, slightly aromatic jasmine tea.

Plus an ocean breeze and a footrub with sweet almond or coconut oil.

4. What do you consider the best application of whipped cream to be?

Obviously.

5. Oh-God-No, Biff, the yacht is sinking! You are sent to the galley to retrieve the food. What luxury food items do you snatch first? The champagne? The caviar?

Leave the bacon, it’ll attract sharks! All I care about is the