I know that I know that I know that I know · 3 October 2009
“The difficulty is to recognize the groundlessness of our believing…. But justification comes to an end.” – Wittgenstein On Certainty 166; 192
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What is the impulse inside a person that compels her to reach out and tell someone she’s not doing it right? I don’t care if said correction is fundamentalist or anti-fundamentalist, since the energy in it is the same. Same effect of disturbing someone’s focus and security.
Why do this? Desire to feel right?
Is it possible to practice in a way that subverts this impulse? That makes you more uncertain, not more certain, as you go on?
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For me… the more emotional confidence and security I have—the more grounded I get—the more comfortable I can be with radical uncertainty. And when I’m kind of rootless and lonely, then I pretend to know things I don’t… for better or worse, that’s when things become faith-based.
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I’ve noticed that people who have gotten some insight as a result of practice hide their views about method—if they even have opinions left. It’s interesting. As a result, they are very sweet company, and they don’t screw over others’ yoga by messing with their minds. If a fellow practitioner (thinks she) knows what she is doing, what’s the problem? Let people focus.
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Here’s the joke. The asana is always changing. That’s the point. You can’t pin it down and make an object out of it.
It feels good to reify and feel certain. Practicing brings that grasping after authority right to the surface, and maybe begins to replace the judging and fear with a sense of humor.
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To the idea that current method is perfect… Of course it is! It’s perfect because it’s the object that the collective mind has settled on for now, and thus we can shut up and just do it without insane shuffling between other ways of doing. It’s perfect for focusing.
And at the same time it’s not perfect because it’s a part of the manifest, physical world—a world characterized by specificity and suffering. Look around… the physical world cannot be perfect: it is laced with death and pain.
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The practice offers this decoy, this MacGuffin… this Rosebud. And I focus on it for a while so that I can get quiet. So at intervals, it’s actually the best possible thing to just do a set thing and take a break from the background mental insanity of “What do I want to do now?” The mind loves that focus once it settles in to it, even if history and the body do not allow for the physical method to stay the same forever.
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If you’re grasping for an ultimatum how about this one? Support others’ peace of mind. Once that becomes the intention, you’ll stop giving a shit what they are doing with their bodies and actually be an encouraging, sweet presence yourself. As long as your vibe is self-prooving, all-knowing, judging, argumentative, and hardcore certain, people around you will feel that discomfort with uncertainty—that rigidity—and as a result they will never really open in your presence.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
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So this is Owl’s Flower Sermon. I’m in. Or should I say, :-)
Posted by: karen · Oct 3, 03:04 PM · #
“There once was a gal who said though,
it seems that I know that I know,
yet what I would like to see is the eye that sees me,
that knows that I know that I know”
- Alan Watts
Posted by: yogasanas · Oct 5, 10:01 AM · #
Brutal!
:-)
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 5, 01:19 PM · #
Ha! I remember when I was struggling with a certain nemesis poses a couple years ago. I was just at the point I’d get it solo, most of the time, after some effort. I was working it. I wasn’t aware a shala mate had stopped her own practice, 3/4 mats away, to observe and judge, until she offered loud commentary. Not only did she pull me out of my practice head, but she disturbed everyone in between us as well.
Perhaps it’s competition. I was well ahead of her in the series-es, but she probably was doing that particular pose “better” and wanted me to know it? (I’m not sure, as I never observed her practice…)
People!
I gave her a dirty look and went back to what I was doing. I guess she got the point cause she apologized later. I didn’t care if she was watching me so much. I just could’ve done without the announcement.
Posted by: Boodiba · Oct 6, 08:13 AM · #
I totally just flashed back on someone watching me and doing a loud stage whisper from across the room: “You can do it!”
I’m sure it was meant as encouragement, but I was kind of appalled. It always surprises me when I run into people who are unaware that the humanoid-appearing puppets that share the world with them have an internal consciousness.
Does that sound cold? ;-)
Posted by: karen · Oct 6, 11:03 AM · #
Ashtanga yoga: reach out and touch someone.
Or rather: reach out and give someone unsolicited advice. Especially if you have no goddam clue what it’s like to be in their body. Especially then.
Sheesh. Total drag.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 6, 11:46 AM · #
Empathy is a skill, right? People can learn it if they try?
I am working this morning with two baby kittens in my lap. The penalty for givers of shitty unsolicited advice should be inundation with such creatures, being smothered by them, buried alive in baby kittens until one relents with the outpourings of one-upsmanship, friendly sabotage and yogier-than-thou-ism . WAR!!!
Ok the kittens are hugging each other and purring like crazy. I have to go.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 6, 11:53 AM · #
Awwww kitten love!!!
Posted by: V · Oct 6, 12:38 PM · #
Oh and speaking of shitty unsolicited advice… contacting other women in your shala to make sure they are taking three days off every month? Hello?
This law needs to be unwritten now.
It was instituted to protect men from dirty, profane women (which is understandable… at least they were conscious and open-minded enough to let women come in to their space at all!). It was never made for women, and we westerners should be sensitive to the power dynamics in play when “professionals” tell women to be quite and do what is best for them. Especially when reproductive health is involved.
I understand that for a while, westerners wrote the misogynist (big word, but accurate, sorry) rule in to their community standards because they didn’t know better and didn’t want to talk to women about their intimate experience. But at this point, there’s no excuse. It’s an elite taboo (and an invasive one—imagine writing a rule that banned all men from the shala for the first three days after they bring themselves off?) from one of the more sexist modern societies in on earth. India is changing—it has a vibrant women’s movement—and the rest of us can let go of its most damaging, repressive ideas as well.
Women’s cycles vary person to person just like every other aspect of their practice. The rule is not for them—in fact, acting as if one rule fits all damages women’s health and makes them doubt themselves rather than learning to lister to their bodies. Criminy.
I love how it’s women who do the dirty work of reinforcing sexism. Do they just want to make sure that others have to subject themselves to the same limitations they themselves have experienced and internalized? Sadness.
I might actually have to post about this nonsense. I can’t believe how many intelligent women are presently telling their girlfriends to shut up and do what they are told.
BKS Iyengar’s recommendation for menstrual symptoms: headstand. If he could drop the male-protecting rules to craft a yoga for women’s needs a few generations ago, Ashtanga can catch up now.
Fuss. How can asana people be so insensitive to the vicissitudes of having a body?
OK More kittens now.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 6, 02:58 PM · #
I’ve always thought of it as a recommendation and not a rule – in my shala there are women who take one, two or the three days off, and there are women who don’t, and I can’t imagine my teacher enforcing it as a rule, least anyone else.
Posted by: V · Oct 7, 02:52 AM · #
Very nice. There is this delicate balance between ensuring women that it’s ok to do what they need to do and nagging them to do what they don’t need to do. Sounds like you all have found it.
For our community, a key reversal is realizing that the formal rule was there to protect men, not women. Right now, we have a few women who for unknown reasons are enforcing the rule among others who have no use for it.
Hilariously, I’ve been asked to have compassion for those who experience jealousy or unconscious projection, and are accidentally acting on it. It’s a really good point, and I’m lucky to have someone who will give it to me. The anti-compassion enables me to get really fucking annoyed about this, and keeps me from getting to a place where I can share my perspective without just making things worse for the )(*&^%$#@ meddlers.
:-)
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 7, 08:34 AM · #
Oh and the kittens! They want to do exactly what they are supposed to not do, because those are the things that get the most attention. Thus, the repeated toppling of my plant, the scaling the lamp, the death-defying acts on the staircase. I locked them out of my room last night and when I turned on the light this morning early they started fishing their paws and arms under the door. Opened it, and they looked up innocently, huddled together. Picked ‘em up, and they started purring like crazy and insisted on huddling on my chest while I got ready to go. Kind of awkward for brushing teeth.
One day a week, misbehaving humans will be required not to speak and may only communicate by meeps and purring. The kitten police will enforce the rule.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 7, 08:57 AM · #
Thinking about it a bit more, I remember hearing someone say that she felt like she should be NOT taking any days off, because quite a few women at my shala don’t. Kind of competitive pressure to be “hardcore”.
Posted by: V · Oct 7, 09:26 AM · #
Yes, I guess it’s just like everything else in the practice. Competitiveness is there until it isn’t.
I guess the thing is for this woman to recognize that the others are not competing with her but rather are just doing what they do.
The solution to feeling competitive/anxious is, for some women, to make others stay home so that they themselves can feel happier about taking their own happy holiday. An interesting dark side of the whole “taking care of others” identity. On one level it’s well-intentioned, but the good intentions would actually be appreciated if directed back to self. Others don’t want them. :-)
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 7, 09:45 AM · #
Like the dieters that force feed you chocolate?
Posted by: V · Oct 7, 12:10 PM · #
!
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 7, 01:59 PM · #
The special rules for the ladies – I just ignored them. It helps that I am male. When I taught I never brought it up – how on this Earth could a male teach that which he has never experienced? And I do a bit of Iyengar classes and it just seems weird that they have to do a different sequence because of “ladies holiday”.. I don’t know for sure, but I would venture that uteri are smart enough to deal with an inversion or some jump backs just fine. There is this modern tendency to assume we know better than hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Posted by: e&sj · Oct 8, 07:33 PM · #