Suicide Newscycle · 25 September 2008
I keep wondering what David Foster Wallace would say. With the collapse of the (financial) system and all. Each day is more accursedly interesting, pushes what I thought was the the solid envelope of social dis/order. The boundary between believability and unbelievability is moving. In a sense I am meditating on that boundary, like other times I practice at the edge of mind and body, and still others hypnotize by finding the space that is the meeting of the eyelids or the place the skin meets the air around it.
The question is: how do we believe the unbelievable as it goes down? How do we update the definition of the situation? The movement between belief and disbelief is, I have to admit, partly projection. I’m under hilarious stress at work—stress that feels epic. I see the dread in Nancy Pelosi’s eyes and think I understand.
Really, I wish DFW were here and could see all this, the same way I wish Hildegaard could listen to The Photographer through my ears or Mark Twain could look out of airplane windows from behind my eyes. DFW’s been dead two weeks now and the eulogizing’s done and forgotten. The first long obits appeared within hours (prepared in advance by those reading the signs? I have to wonder) and were bumped down within a day. This is what clickability does. Slashes mourning periods right down to the blip-length of “news.” But I love the way that some people resisted that or even pushed back in to it, turned the internet into an historical repository of memory and place for a new level of shared loss. The comments on the LA Times obit are better to me than any flowers at a grave.
I remember somewhere DFW wrote that Wittgenstein was the most terrifying writer of his century, but also so inspiring because the philosopher concluded that solipsism was for the weak. Did DFW really say that? Maybe I’ve made it up. Because it seems ridiculous—for an autistic genius between the wars, of course solipsism was a problem. For DFW? No, empathy was the problem. Lobsters and all. The few obits I saw wanted to understand DFW’s suicide as the conclusion to some sort of philosophical problem. You know, make it all analytical and conclusive and hold the man to account for his mistaken computations of the problem at hand.
Isn’t this all a bit high-minded, making it a philosophical problem? Sadness and loneliness are universal if stronger in some—the sharing of that sadness at ad-hoc monuments that would be postmodern jokes if they weren’t so deep and human is what we do despite technology (and other forces) that want to slice us thin. Community is as much the default state as isolation and “self ownership.” If there was any narrative that DFW’s deep natural sadness affixed to for me, it was the tragedies of connectedness as much as of isolation. He had a way of making me meditate on that boundary—individuation and community—better than my own discipline, which is supposed to be rooted in just that synthesis. He is behind my eyes now whether he likes it or not. He’d probably think this historization and borglike absorption of his perspective to be imperial and somehow mistaken, but this is what you get for dying, David.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [26]
Categories: integration
, markets-networks-society
, morality
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.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [14]
Categories: astanga yoga
, having a body
, morality
, self-deception
, social theory
, spirituality
Beyond the Pale · 8 May 2008
Los Angeles is segregated by ethnicity and by wealth. Very generally, the two residential indices of affluence are (1) elevation and (2) proximity to the ocean. The elevation peaks in the north and runs from west to east—along the raised spine from the Pacific Palisades through the Hollywood Hills, with some southerly heights in Mar Vista, Inglewood, Boyle, et cetera. Beachfront property is prime from north to south, though in general the money hugs closer and closer to the shoreline as one moves south away from the hills.
I will cop right now to the fact that my present studio sits on the most affluent, whitest commercial corner in town. Ashtanga ends before the Porsche SUVs quite fill up the valet parking, before the skinny ladies with their perfect children arrive to shop the kiddie shoe store housed in a quaint Tudor cottage, or the specialty chocolate nook opens in the back of the oh so provincial Country Market. We enter our own building before first light by a side door and, being ashtangis, tend to represent for the bohemians, the working professionals, the world-traveled, the somewhat ethnically and economically diverse, the hot chiseled bodyworker-yoga teacher service sector. So I’m sheltered from the full force of white Brentwood affluence, even as—when I leave each morning—I enjoy the deeply middlebrow string quartet that Le Pain Quotidien pumps into the building's passageways. The double provincialism of a restaurant calling itself “The Daily Bread” in French, for white people reaching for the sense of “the cosmopolitan” they find in packaged French country aesthetic is pitch perfect for this corner. Mass produced rustic benches, artisan nut butters packaged in China, lattes in ginormous (supersized) bowls. Which is not to say I don’t like le P.Q., which enfranchises within a block of any respectable ashtanga shala with a global clientele and has thus made itself—in London, New York, Santa Monica—an official home of the traveling ashtangi meetup. Tasty, with chagrin on the side.
Anyway, why am I talking about geography of affluence and whiteness?
It’s Yogaworks, itseself franchising down in the South Bay in a way that crosses way, way, way over the line of getting off on your affluence. Fellas, I’m writing this so you will know what the seasoned people in the community are saying about you. People who know yoga, or simply know LA, who know your expansion is inevitable and are ok with this but nonetheless find the current wrinkle extraordinarily disturbing.
The new location is just off the industrial zone near LAX. Miles south of the east-west axis of rich that is the northern hills, down in the South Bay you find more economic and racial diversity, more quickly, as you move east from the oft-gated exclusivity that is Manhattan Beach. Indeed, the new studio in rent-cheap El Segundo sits midway between the health club set on the west and Inglewood on the east. Inglewood is an awesome, historically rich, cohesive zone—home to a lot of middle class people and, due to the heights on which it is built, some excellent real estate. There’s no major yoga studio there. Also, Inglewood is black.
Down the hill from Inglewood in El Segundo, Yogaworks—which in its other locations takes in its steepest revenue from drop-in students—is experimenting with a new visitor model (see another blog discussion here). Traditionally, Yogaworks franchises in exclusive zones: Manhattan, Santa Monica, Westwood. But again, El Segundo—with its unique geography and social diversity—is home to an innovative new model.
No drop-in students whatsoever are permitted. If you want to attend YogaWorks in El Segundo, you can buy a “membership.” So what is for sale is not exactly yoga instruction. It’s association.
Given the way I’ve laid this out, you now know exactly what people are saying.
Except, of course, for the corporate conservatives, who say it’s your “right” to pursue whatever markets you want or envision to be most “productive.” After all, the South Bay is an “untapped yoga market” and you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
But those of us who understand that markets are not asocial, amoral autonomous forces will tell you that every “market experiment” is a social experiment. There is no passive, inert “yoga market” waiting for you to exploit it. Rather, there is whatever market you choose to create for your business. You, mighty corporation, have the power. You have the freedom to choose how you provide your service and whether your “serve” anyone at all. For now, you have chosen… exclusively, affluently, whitely. And the tastemakers--who have every "right" to judge your matters of taste--think it’s creepy.
The “bottom line” in the sands of El Segundo, like in any market, will always shift: there is more than one way to make money in that zone.
When the experiment ends and you change the policy, let me know. I’ll be more than happy to post a follow up praising you for taking yoga back off the gated community model.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [17]
Categories: astanga yoga
, markets-networks-society
, morality
, self-deception
More PDA · 27 April 2008
So ok. I took the little animals to play at the store I have often ridiculed (more because of bad labor practices than cultural iconography, but see the footnote I'll post later I posted in the comments***). Did they get dirty? I don’t think they really did, even got as they rolled around on the floor of the yoga lifestyle mecca, temporarily seared with the post-OM loopdy-loop of the brand. If only chattel could remove their burned-in brands so easily as I did later, wriggling out of a corsetlike top that created the illusion of cleavage with my A-cups and left a line around my ribs where the elastic reinforcements had been.
The animals will probably get more dirty right here, as I confess I am mildly amused to have done this thing, and that it was pretty good practice.
So, this is the only remarkable thing: I had a deep practice, on a Saturday, on the floor of the Lulu store. I was expecting some kind of pre-performance jitters, but their edge was well removed by the experiences of earlier that morning, which left a kind of buzz that transcended even the apropos LCD Soundsystem record that accompanied my drive to the venue. I was expecting constant distraction and performance-awareness, but my experiences of practicing as a visitor in certain shalas has been far more outward-focused and performative than this.
When you visit a shala, you’re taking your goods in to a new house within your own community. The natives know the species of animal you’re offering up, and they know just how to evaluate it! Are the flanks in the right place, are the muscles of the belly indicating the right awareness, how straight are the legs here and do the hands reach the floor there? Edges edges edges.
In the land of pussy yoga (can I say that? No, really can’t say that), you have them from the transition to the first chatwari. Nobody has a vision of a Marichyasana D and there is no edge you can push there to impress make some mark on them. The animals themselves—sages, boats, turtles—probably don’t even count on that stage. Just the fact that you are moving on the breath is arresting, informative, interesting, maybe even educating… and least to the people who might notice in the first place.
I could write my best ethnographic fieldnotes here and fill you in on the most amusing details (which have to do with reinforced fabrics and a fussy assistant manager), but the details weren’t so important to the actual experience I underwent.
I lug my laptop to cafes all the time, because I focus better with a little ambient sound and commotion. I’ve always thought this is because movement around me reminds me of the passage of time—which gets lost behind the double doors of my office—and creates an urgency that makes me work better. Time is a shared category of the understanding, and the social nature of the now (the productive now, at least, is social) is unavoidable among others.
But after practicing deeply under a Justin Timberlake soundtrack and under the eyes of god knows how many passersby, surrounded by so much intensely overpriced lycra, I see that the social aspect of my focus in chaotic environments might be a bit more sinister. It’s that movement around me reminds me that the other is out there, and drives me to set the boundaries of my own attention very close. One-pointed, but in an almost protective—if not defensive—way.
Again, I come back to the mantra parable of the seven ten virgins who keep their lamps trimmed and burning.**** This is from the book of Matthew, which is why I resonate with the story so easily, but Tolle uses the story to talk about the ways you guard your awareness. Awareness is often depicted as a little candleflame in yoga and Buddhist commentaries, too. The preciousness of a focused presence, the cultivation it requires. But when there’s an external “threat,” at least in this case, it’s no trouble at all. Far more focused than most kitchen practices, in fact.
This disturbs me a little, but opens up some paradoxes about the social aspects of consciousness, the interaction of society and deeper layers self-awareness (below mere self-consciousness), and well, a certain—ok, limited—potential for doing contemplation in the marketplace.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [32]
Categories: arbitrage
, astanga yoga
, beta state
, having a body
, markets-networks-society
, morality
, sound
Fisheyes · 16 April 2008
In the ladies' after the yoga, some of the willow-women talking how fat they have gotten. Bitterness and self-revulsion. And some of the others, amazingly still, understanding what they are witnessing. But also not understanding.
The transcript replays in my head. It has knocked one of my tracking beams off course, sent my perspective of mind-bodies in to a removed third-personhood.
The bewildered side of wonderment.
What are we humans doing? What is the relationship of minds to bodies? How many different ways of being are possible, and how can you tell what they are?
Tripping myself out, watching all the undergraduates move around the campus like I'm seven, beholding brand new species on vacation at the Seattle aquarium. Giant eel! Hammerhead shark!
Where is the awareness in that one? How is she swimming through space? Why are all the ones coming out of the econ building all tilted forward and moving with their fists tight? How are these three moving together? What is the feeling in them? Do they feel? What are they seeing? What am I seeing? Won’t someone please make eye contact with me?
Maybe this is what it feels like to be tall.
Are we all equally trapped inside our own experience? Equally free in our bodies? Students are spacey, uncertain, late for everything. Ashtangis are deliberate, quiet, controlled down to the breath. But maybe just as clueless?
Liberal political philosophy is big on this idea of “self-ownership.” My body and my essence: they are mine. The whole autonomy thing. (You can argue yourself into a corner with it, but that’s true of all theory.) This assumption—the self-navigated boundaries of personhood—is the underlying left-liberal ethic of the day.
So go for it! You are free to dislike your own body and attack your own mind.
Or are you..?
Are you just your own? Do you have carte blanche to disrespect and fail to thank anybody else for this educated, fed, disease-free, safe, genetically refined self-body-mind regardless of who gave it to you and regardless of the circles of relationship in which you’re enclosed? Are you just yours to fail to care for, to isolate, to beat up? Is it personal? Or is trashing yourself fundamentally non-relational, ungrateful, falsely disconnecting?
I actually don't know. All I see just now is pretty fish.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [22]
Categories: having a body
, morality
, self-deception
, social theory
Apropos of Everything · 10 April 2008
It looks like Laurie Anderson is making all the connections. In Melbourne, they called her show the concert of the year. Tonight she’s at Royce Hall, so I’m cutting out early from Thursday faculty cocktails (where the cognac is free but one strange bird drinks only tea).
How amazing is she? Here’s an except from her talk with Wire and a piece from Homeland complete with wicked Oprah jokes, WMD riffs (at 3:45) and open talk on preemptive war (5:50).
There is no country called Terror that you can invade their borders or protect their borders or cross their borders. It's a war of phantoms and it will never go away…. And that is used to create a situation of control - and that combined with the absolute maniacal excess of late capitalism is very scary.
Our army is run by private companies who run it for a profit. The same with jails. Twenty years ago, there were 300,000 people in jail; now it is a privatised industry there are almost 3 million in jail. They're customers, unique customers - and you need customers for your war, which is waged as a business, as is healthcare…
It makes you remember that people literally don't know how their minds, how their brains work. 'Things are always going through my head.' But they don't know, they don't have a clue what they're doing or what they've been influenced by as well, so they are perfect targets for people coming along to tell them what to be afraid of or what to love or what to go for, how to be famous. For what? To what end? It's just like demagoguery was invented here and you watch it in motion when there is a lot of corporate heft behind it and it's powerful. And it can hypnotise people in poisonous ways, because people don't know how to use their minds. They don't know what they're doing. This is supposed to be the age of information!
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [8]
Categories: markets-networks-society
, morality
Thanks, Raul · 6 April 2008
I had the best talk last week with CP about the topic of dynasties. What a phenomenon. The whole ideological premise of the “America” thing is that there is nothing holy in royalty—no God running in the veins of a child just by dint of birth. My understanding is that Brahmin family ties are more political- economic than holy, so it interests me when I see Americans of all people attributing spiritual leadership qualities to children. Legacy is in nurture, not nature... I actually like the sociological shorthand on this one.
Anyway. The dynasty that is blowing my mind right now makes NO appeals to other-worldly legitimacy (given that they're a bunch of materialist athiests--ha!): just the thickness of blood. It’s an old Latin American Strongman anti-coup strategy to install your kid brother as chief of the military when you take over the ship of state (see especially Daniel Ortega); and in Cuba Raul Castro has been holding steady in the beta role for decades. (And I guess there's a little birthorder "nature" stereotyping in that: insofar as a Beta bro would likely be that must more trustworthy than the presidential Alpha in such a role.)
The NYT’s reporting on Cuba is just as odious as its coverage of WMD, but I actually don’t like Castro either. At all. I’ll hold off on the litany that starts with political executions round about 1959.
What’s getting me now is the bag-o-tricks that Raul’s dispensing on the populace to play the Good Cop now that the dynastic succession has taken place. At first there was the authorization of sex-change operations and the intimation of something like domestic partner benefits to come. (Cuba has been awesome on sex ed if your straight and non-trans, but that's a fascinating top-down expansion their unique version of the "human rights" regime.) Last week, Raul announced the legalization of cell phones (never mind that Cubans live on $25 a week—not a huge Verizon market unless you're specially connected) and the news that for the first time in 50 years the people will be allowed to stay in hotels. Also, Cubans can now buy and sell CDs and DVDs.
Is this a joke? Mind-blowing on so many levels.
Good luck keeping the Cubans appeased with stocking-stuffers until the northern beast takes notice and authorizes the CANF to strafe Havana with Big Macs. From my perspective it is ALL a drag if you're in Cienfuegos or wherever—albeit the near future will be worse than the present. We and Fidel have teamed up to screw these people over pretty badly for fifty years, but the few things Cuba has done right—mass education, sustainable agriculture, basic healthcare, some social equalities—are about to go bye-bye.
But hey, a tiny elite will very soon have a lot more stuff, and this is the story we’ll hear from the right-wingers at the NYT Havana desk when it comes time for capitalism shock-therapy.
Till then Raul’s symbolic but life-altering concessions may at least soften the blow that’s about to land.
Go spend some dollars there in the meantime… feel the last echoes of the epic twentieth century and help some humans afford phones. It is beautiful, fascinating country buffeted by so many storms--all the kind that brew offshore and descend as a cyclone.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [6]
Categories: morality
, social theory
Dith Pran · 30 March 2008
There was a little morning sea mist over Santa Monica the other morning. I saw it out the secondstory window, gathering up my things in a fix after our very early Sunday practice (shhhh...). The mist hung in between the big hairy tops of the palm trees all fifteen blocks to the ocean, sketching in the distance between me and them. The closer trees made a stark shadow against the heavy air, but the further ones were sketchier and sketchier until, maybe 14 blocks out, they just disappeared into white.
Looking out, stoned receptive on sun salutations and all that, I had the strongest jolt of recollection from a decade ago.
Sitting atop a hill in the middle of Cambodian countryside, between my brilliant boyfriend and a traveling partner very quickly losing her mind. January 1998. Dazed in heat and history, still reeling from Tuol Sleng. That hilltop covered in a fort from the war—turrets and everything—probably build to fend off the Vietnamese back in the day. It was the height of the currency crisis and weeks before Nate Thayer would find Pol Pot out in hinterlands not so far from there, speaking up to “set the record straight” just before he fucking bit it.
The palms in mist drew the sensations of that day back on me suddenly, slipping out of my spine like the remnant of some old “trip.” I was thinking, sitting on that hill, of a field of dandelions gone to seed—the nearer palms in a heavy outline, the farther ones marking off the short distance to obscurity. But not a fertile summer field beneath those “flowers”: instead landmines, the horror of a collectively-suppressed memory, corpses, maybe battle lines, little source of commerce or sustenance.
It is ridiculous, the beauty and the peace, the utter possibilities and joy that are in my life here. I don’t understand how hard it could be—don’t understand at all.
I wasn’t going ot mention this, but Anna told me Dith Pran died today. Read on.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [7]
Categories: markets-networks-society
, morality
Unedited · 18 March 2008
Also, Jonathan Raban in the LRB.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [8]
Categories: markets-networks-society
, morality
, social theory
Saturday XXXXIV: Joy · 8 March 2008
Brother is here now. You don’t even want to know the amazingness of him.
And you will not. He is too fast for internet documentation, and too handsome to be photographed. Also, too good for words.
Thus we are nonverbal. Always have been.
For now I function in eyebrow gestures, pinches, sighs, and single-word exclamations.
You should see the Editor, mister structured-thought man, starving for someone to utter a complete sentence.
Headlines:
● Still having trouble viewing this blog? It's a software issue: i.e., the site purposely doesn't function in that browser. Free firefox.
● The spirulina powder I mentioned two weeks ago: nope. My disgust only increases. It’s BAD. Does this mean I need to do spirulina practice? Did I transcend self-punishing Evangelical Protestantism for nothing? NO! Check it out: I’ve got a fresh $25 jar of this magic that I will happily give you if you live in LA and can hack the powder. Email me.
● Siddhis postcast! Ok, only listen to this if you understand it’s not serious. Great overview of different traditions’ orientations to magick. But overall, X-box is probably better than siddhis.
● Ok, what is serious is this. I’m not even giving you a warning. Read the 5-point manifesto, and the profiles. This is real.
● Daniel Goleman, the emotional intelligence guy, talks about childhood shit and transcending it though reflection and relationships with people who are good to you. Short, revolutionary message. [Via.] “Research absolutely demonstrates that if you take the time to make sense of what happened to you, then you can free yourself up to develop your own sense of security inside of you.”
● CP’s podcast on how to talk about yoga with normal people. First: do not tell them you dedicated a practice to them. Especially if they know you practice in the living room in your underwear.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [16]
Categories: astanga yoga
, esoteric shit
, having a body
, markets-networks-society
, morality
, spirituality
Breadcrumbs · 4 March 2008
I’m not saying anything.
Just dropping breadcrumbs. Which will soon decay but helped feed me because a few years ago I ate them at the right time.
Evolution of consciousness, glibly, could look something like this...
Humans love to go in to altered states of consciousness, but we interpret those experiences in dramatically different ways depending on the lifeworld we inhabit.
The blue meme is the middling stage of personal development in which one interprets an altered state of consciousness (be it waking/gross, dreaming/subtle, sleeping/causal or nondual) as confirming the singularity of her own path.
Most people here would dial in around green or turquoise on the spiral hierarchy, so would tend to reify altered states in ways that aren't so fundamentalist as the blue meme.
From Wilber, Pragmatic History of Consciousness: “[S]omebody at, say, the blue stage of development can have an altered state or peak experience of a subtle state—say… of interior Luminosity—but the person will tend to interpret that experience through the mental apparatus that has actually developed in his or her own case. In this example, the person will interpret the spiritual experience in terms of the blue meme, in which case we would see something like the fundamentalist's 'reborn' experience: this person feels, with utter certainty, that Jesus has come to him personally, and that nobody can be saved unless they accept Christ as their personal savior."
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [18]
Categories: evolution
, morality
Saturday XXXVIII: Sour and the Tower · 12 January 2008
So. Speaking of dead brilliant women whose not-unbrilliant husbands got in their names. Dead brilliant women who will be remembered because of—and yet also so forgotten because of—those husbands. Last week, Laura Huxley. This week, Alice Coltrane. She died a year ago today. Brilliant Alice.
I’m noting for the record that vocab around here has been getting ahead of itself. Tapas—Grenadine appetizers? Siddhis—the plural of Sith? Nadis—bad people? Oops. I forget how much of my idiolect is dead languages—Sanksrit for the yoga and Latin for the (ivory) tower.
Ridiculing the latter has become too easy for me, I realized on new years. A professor whose mind I love is stateside again and I’m remembering that, for what they’re worth, intellects can be machine sof beauty. His is light and tough, hungry and fast. Refined like an Oxford don, and decorated with poetry and anime and about a dozen fluent languages.
Apropo of the tower, maybe my drawing it two weeks ago out of the tarot deck is worth more than I know. Since then everything is noisy mismatch between my visceral expectations for 2008 (great great things) and my lived experience of it (strange inner bullshit). I feel like an ingrate for even noticing the bullshit, here in world-historical paradise. There is incomparable abundance in Santa Monica, California, 2008, as I sit around studying far-flung sweatshops and global pollution, with colleagues mired in the political violence and disease of one century or continent or the other. And here: lack of resistance, lack of real difficulty, lack of outer conflict. It’s weird that sometimes the ease it makes me feel lost and dark.
Trust your feelings? That’s a call to intuition, not to the reification of emotions! I will sort it out. Not that I’m all happy and shit about it just now. Not at all. Salty Saturday links:
● Supply chains in which slavery is happening now.
● So many books arriving in the mail. I strongly dislike owning them, but what do you do? There was a grant to finish off with the year, so now all this printed tonnage is arriving. Not a single volume of it fiction. So would someone please read this so I can live through you? I don’t know why I like Coetzee so much. He is something between a sick old man and a great human soul.
● Do we have a natural bias toward superstitions? Here are some evolutionary biogists arguing irrationality is evolutionarily efficient. Their philosophy reeks. And yet, the argument itself is almost good.
● You know about what goes on at Fort Benning, right? Today is the first large peace vigil to close the School of the Americas, the training camp for Latin American Paramilitaries. The annual peace gathering in Georgia is in two weeks.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [10]
Categories: esoteric shit
, evolution
, markets-networks-society
, morality
, science
, self-deception
, social theory
, sound
, spirituality
Zee · 10 January 2008
I called you and you answered, beloved. Now don’t be a jackass about this.
You tell me no drinking practice. It is too dangerous for me. I have too much chemical history and too much delusion. I become identified with desire and forget who I am.
But desire is good for me! I desire to practice! I desire to find an edge where something is revealed. And maybe someday, to understand something. (It is true that now I understand nothing, and all my analysis just deludes me more.)
Five years I have refrained from drinking, Zee. FIVE YEARS. I had no desire during these years. If the desire is the touchstone of the practice you describe—letting it arise and then simply sitting there and observing it (but not indulging it)—I actually have to drink to awaken the desire and keep desire active.
It is like sugar craving. If you stop eating sugar for 40 days, the first week is agony and then the desire fades. Afterwards, sugar-refraining practice is no longer practice. It is simply habit. There is no practice anymore.
But danger is good, Zee. I am strong enough for dangerous practice now. It makes me wake. Do not worry: I am not identified with danger. I conduct a quiet risk-free existence of physical exercise and mental exertion and meditation and organic food and plentiful rest and abundant sunshine and affectionate relationship. Boing. Danger is not my game—not usually.
In fact, my usual game is refraining. Austerity is too easy for me. The world feels heavy and I want to fly away from it (doing third series especially, you want to fly away if you are not careful). So I should do being-in-the-world-practice. Not refraining-practice. Isn’t it true?
Don’t pull a Maharajii on me Zee, like when you told my friend Ram Dass to “be completely honest” but also “love everybody” at the same time. It is too much, oh Thousand-armed One, Master of the Universe, oh Krishna. I will not grow this way.
I am lucky. I have craving in my veins. I can use this. My suffering is greater than if I had no craving, and the agony will drive me deeper and finally (some day) shake me into consciousness. Can it be?
In the end, what is the difference between being a "connoisseur of the breath," a connoisseur of the moola bandha, or a connoisseur of buzz? Do you not teach that it is all the same?
If not drinking practice, then what will be the method of my being-in-the-world practice?
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [17]
Categories: astanga yoga
, esoteric shit
, evolution
, having a body
, integration
, morality
, power of suggestion
, self-deception
, spirituality
The Shadow of Moroni, Part III · 9 January 2008
Ok, let's wrap up this series before we all get thirsty.
I started with the yoga the year after I stopped with the alcohol. And then when my first arresting ashtanga transformation occurred another year after that, a lot of ascetic tendencies got locked in. Stuff I’d put in my body, sensory stimuli I’d tolerate, the rougher-edged personalities among friends: the threshold of what I wanted in my world got pushed far, far back by the nadi shodana.
That’s another story, you know. You do this practice and at some transformation point your nervous system might get touchy and it might change your bearing on the world. It’s not easy for you or your loved ones; but revolution is like that. I’m not judging what was my process because I don’t regret it and I wouldn’t take it back. But I am experimenting with it now—seeing how much room I have for play in this permanent, radical revolution.
I imagine that if I had not quit drinking before the nadi shodana wave hit, I’d have done it then. For me personally—and that is all I can assess—I doubt that deepening a second series practice and initiating pranayama and meditation practices would have been possible at all if I had not existed in a simple, fairly non-toxic, environment. It just took too much inner focus and environmental support to build up those practices. Seriously: I think that without a certain level of monasticism, I would not have had the clarity or intensity I needed to set some foundations. Yes that is a bold statement to make about what is also supposed to be a practical, daily kind of yoga for the householding set. But there it is.
And also: it is easier now. The world does not feel like it might take me out of my practice the way it might have—would have—when practice was new and I lacked the force of habit. But practice can get so precious and isolated from the world, and I want to blur the boundaries between it and everything else. Get less monastic, not more.
Thus, contra monasticism: salmon in November. And like I keep trying to get around to describing: on the solstice I finally drank.
It tasted nice. Pinot noir is something I can sort of appreciate like the artisans and merchants who are closest to its roots. L and I worked in a Willamette Valley vintner’s restaurant throughout college, took some seminars and tours, and drank a great deal of what the rich valley silt had to offer up. Even a half-decent pinot to me feels nourishing; and a decent one feels like art.
As I wrote earlier, my body didn’t ask for wine the past five years at all; and in fact my first several attempts to drink failed by force of habit. New Years 2007: big disappointment. The Editor's 30th: foiled again.
Though suddenly when I opened up to alcohol again, it again became so easy to want. Now once I’ve had a drink, the greed for another is—suddenly—very strong. Maybe this is a small scale experience of falling off the wagon, though I don’t pretend to understand the intensity of chemical torture and dependency a severe alcoholic would experience. In any case, for me, “mindful drinking” (check on Choygam Trumpa for infamous interestingness) is going to be difficult if not bullshit.
Here's the experience. As soon as the buzz starts—which is now almost immediately—I want to use the sauce to go deeper into non-control. I actually don’t know how much of this is my immaturity—I have not grown past my 14-year-old relationship to alcohol—and how much might be chemical reaction. It feels more ornery than chemical. There is just a petulant fascination with moving quickly toward that point where the lights go out.
God. I don’t know how many people experience the process I’m describing. Yes: it is troubling. But—no kidding—I don’t know if it is entirely different from my desire to let go in practice.
Isn’t that odd? The edge here is not just attraction and not just repulsion: it’s a strong desire for loss. Not transformation so much. Just loss.
Greeeat. Well, coming off the solstice, a decent number of badly-selected wines greased down my holiday with the in-laws quite nicely (though seriously: it was reassuring to see that even under conditions of extreme desire and a handful of empties I won't waste myself on White Zin), and then I sat on the plane home feeling the greed for not one but three drinks. An obese man with a coalmine-quality cough and cracked grey thumb callouses a centimeter thick sat next to me and happily (sweetly) drank two little whiskey bottles straight. Yes, there I am. I let that grasping drain out of me as we flew back down the coast, and haven't gone in to it again.
I am wondering if "drinking practice" may be more trouble than it is worth unless I recognize on the level of my body that I’m no longer a confused kid in a cornfield, and that one more drink is not one of the ways--so far as I can tell--to the void.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [14]
Categories: evolution
, having a body
, integration
, morality
, self-deception
Saturday XXXV: SFOWL · 14 December 2007
The best thing happened! Which was that my brother added a stop to the round-the-world game and touched tarmac at SFO just a few hours after me. He’s pulling down a contract; and I’m rooting around the superdynamic market in carbon offsets. Lots of open threads in a dissertationly direction, and sibling catchup in the interstices. Good god the world is interesting.
Meanwhile, moonlighting ashtanga. Too much to tell. Except that AYSF is a dream and so’s Eeyore. Links from the past week:
● Thursday the 13th: planes, trans and automobiles hugging the westcoast, business travelers’ noses in the Style Section with this article big and eyecatching on the cover. Thanks, New York Times. Presidential politics be damned, in some dimensions we the people really are living in the Al Gore era. I came within one degree of separation from the great gomer twice this week. Getting Americans to face the connection between their consumption and climate change: governments aren’t making this happen. Grassroots movements and marketmakers are. Which is why Gore is better as a pissed off subaltern insurgent who has faced his worst fear—losing—and moved on. And why this dissertation is on regulation from below.
● End of the year lists. Blame the internet and blame the accelerated culture: the lists are everywhere. Rex has the metalist here. The only one that really rewards me, now the third year going, is the Guardian writers’ individual favorites for the year. I always find one or two treasures in here, especially because it’s blind to genre and publication date and so not just a list about “keeping up” with the world. Delightfully, though, the man who has kept the tiny pleasure-readerly flame alive for me the past five years—with the occasional pitch-perfect tip—is now an official listmaker as well: I give you Matthew Korfhage’s holiday ménage-a-trois (readers here know MK as the Daily Miltonian). And apparently I also need to read this, this, and this.
● Oh! Deeper into geekiness: a podcast about scholar-practitioners. This is just nice: a meditator-professor discusses hyper-objectivity in religious studies, the peculiarly American tendency to divorce study from practice, and the possibilities for “contemplative educitaion.” For her, it was Chogyam Trumka who “ripped out the division” between study and practice. Some words from the talk:
If we only practice meditation we become stupid meditators, and if we only study we become arrogant scholars…. If you don’t have some kind of wisdom [e.g., reading of historical texts] dawning in your practice, then there’s a sense of “what is the point?” But if you bring some light [from study] into the practice… the thing that I hear over and over again from my longtime practitioner-students is that they feel completely re-energized.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [10]
Categories: astanga yoga
, beta state
, esoteric shit
, evolution
, having a body
, markets-networks-society
, morality
, science
, social theory
, spirituality
Saturday XXXIII: Tohu Vabohu · 30 November 2007
Him: How was practice this morning?
Me (matter of fact): The best of my entire life.
Him (blasé): That’s what you said yesterday.
Me: (shrug)
Him: And the day before that.
But actually, SS Saturday is quickly becoming the best of all. Yeah. Luxury, joy and beauty. I know there are those of you who do not approve. But excuse me: I live an extremely orderly life. Did you notice? O-R-D-E-R-L-Y L-I-F-E. Grant me my study in spontaneity.
Just so you don’t think me all sunshine, let me say that I am horrified that it is nigh on December. I am talking dark, existential, dread-laden horror. Time is satan. Dark and fleeting. Nothing happens, and then you’re old. You feel like the past is more real than today, the present is happening without even pausing to let you realize it and the future is going to crush you. Kill you slow and grind you to dust. It’s going to rush in and steal what you think you have as soon as it possibly can.
You feel like time is some human invention gone horribly wrong and all it has to offer you is darkness and dread. At least this is how you feel if you are me. I wonder if this is a basic existential condition… or a dissertation condition?
The only way to leaven it is to love what is. Love it like crazy because the dread makes you love. Sometimes looking into the existential maw, embracing the void, is the shortest route to living in the now. Lightly. XO
Links:
● Naked Indian bodies, manual labor, molten metal, and one terrible colonial product supply chain. I hesitate to link to Shakti Industries, because this stuff is just asking you to get off and there should be a question of why this is so aesthetically absorbing. But it’s a good story, and the slideshow will definitely make you respond.
● So, Sally Kempton. Dive-bombing the Esquire readership with feminist manifestoes in her 20s, dressing down a young Hefner on TV, and generally being smart smart smart and sexy in New York in the days of the new left. Then she accidentally has a peak experience in her living room or something. Shit. Meets Muktananda, goes east, disappears for a long time. Comes back integral and starts talking. Not about turning away from leftism, but about expanding it so it’ll actually work. Here she is in conversation with Ken Wilber about the oldschool hostility to any kind of interiority (even psychoanalysis) as somehow inimical to social change, about problems in the Dawkins-Hitchens agenda, about philosophical maturations that need to happen in order for the left to get itself out of its little old box. And with hints (in my interpretation) toward a spirituality that’s concrete—that’s not just about occasional altered states, but is practical and daily and not split off as woo-woo. (More.)
● The wonderful thing Morgan Spurlock is doing has pretty well made the rounds by now. This is even nicer: Christians themselves calling out the greedy affluence, the grasping, and the nauseating amount of crap that will weigh down my own holiday this year in the heart of WWJB land. If you haven’t seen rich suburban American Christians, there’s a level of obsessive consumption disorder you’ll never understand. Lucky.
● You know the science writer Natalie Angier? Nice. Here she is elaborating two answers to the question: Why do we make art? There’s the sex answer—individuals create things to display what they have to offer genetically and to garner attention (this kind of evolutionary reduction is in these days... yawn)—and the communal answer. She loves the latter enough to put it beautifully. I like the hue this gives to the auteur-focused conversations we had here this week.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [10]
Categories: astanga yoga
, beta state
, esoteric shit
, evolution
, having a body
, integration
, markets-networks-society
, morality
, spirituality
Inverted, Again · 20 November 2007
I returned from Denver two months ago now, the night of September 17 and the week of the equinox. The next day, after 22 months of 6 am beginnings, I spontaneously shifted to an evening practice. (I was needing a shake in more ways than this, as has been noticed and remedied)
The change from a 6 am to a 5 pm re-set time completely inspired and supported my life. Hello, inverted world.
Just before I switched, this is what was going on. Practice had become zero-sum. I was pouring energy in to it and into the room, but not getting energy out. Finishing with a dull mind. For a long time, practice basically increased my life by greasing down my bones, making my muscles into useful little things, and smothering me in endorphins. But suddenly this fall everything was off.
When I switched to the evening, this is what it was like. I’d get up when a little light came in the windows, and milk the practice habits of focus and freedom from food-distraction for a solid three or four hours. Right there at home. Have a late breakfast, then do whatever researchy administrivia until driving to practice at 4:30. I sealed off my office at school (where the Kandinsky pages stayed stuck on September and my old plant kept the faith somehow), and didn’t put on real clothes all fall. Dissertators are known to be neurotic little moles, so nobody got too concerned.
All this time, evening practice was fucking gorgeous. Much stronger and more focused than my predictive stereotypes—that evenings are tired, hypermobile and littered with the day’s thought-refuse. And I’ve gotten this biofeedback thing going with my evening teacher: her eyes are so good, and her empathetic understanding of what I need to heal and strengthen the systems of the pelvis is so accurate. She sees the smallest movements in the hips and belly—movements my proprioception either doesn’t catch or gets wrong—and feeds it back. And somehow creates a space where I can calmly work my ass off. Her method is to heal her students by strengthening them.
I’ve laid down more muscle this fall than ever—partly because I was stalking kukkutasana but also (maybe) because I was eating closer to practice. I didn’t have to catabolize or simply draw energy from the breath to lift in to this or that, but could feed off whatever I’d eaten a mere 6 hours before.
The space has been dim and mahogany and radiantly warm, with me and some regulars whose energy I now know better than most any other co-practitioners ever. A couple are super-transparent and subtly perceptive at the same time, and we’ve played with each others’ energy in ways that generated all kinds of heat and some good jokes. This is what led me to ask if practicing together is intimate: hearing my friend across the aisle chuckle when I licked sweat off my nose in a transition—knowing we’re in this together even though I cannot really see him for lack of lenses. Knowing he’ll catch my risen amusement in some sound or movement that is both part of my practice and a response to him.
Over the months, my energy shifted. When the time change brought earlier sunrises, I slept through them. The morning energy spike got dull, because the truth is that I love asana more than research. No shit. Dissertations are hard, and you try to get through them by running away from them. It can seem like a good strategy.
So I practiced in the morning last week, not because I wanted change but I knew the visiting teacher would tweak my vinyasa up to the most recent specs. Ok ok, whatever; The method is only an end in itself insofar as you have no life. But what does this different practice do for my work?
Well… it does a lot. It’s like I flipped over the hourglass a second time and clicked right in to a new writing phase. A little bit of unfamiliarity with my life sharpens my mind. Just a little bit. Too much unfamiliarity would be distracting.
It’s wonderful. I feel so much more awake and I have renewed passion for the questions at hand. I have to say yes to this.
I am all for consistency in asana practice, but writing has to run the show right now. Between relationships, practice and work, it is of course the latter that is least personal and least easy. I want to be in love with the inquiry on an intellectual level—and it’s the deepest satisfaction when I can move from that feeling—but this work is so warped by strategy and professionalism that the questions sometimes feel arch or facetious. When I merely take the questions at face value for the sake of contributing to knowledge: this is where the bullshit lives. When don’t give this thing the best of my energy, my motives can become overly pragmatic and instrumental in a way that makes me despise the game for telling me how to be.
I can’t do work that is motivated by competition and getting ahead. I can’t. I won’t. I will attack such things from the inside: the pattern is all to clear and I can’t say it’s a bad one. Ironically, this comes from many years as a wage-worker (clerking, sales, waitressing) where I could sign over my body but keep my soul to myself. The inverted-world man on my shoulder would be disappointed at that subservience. Still, when I feel a deeper part of me is owned by mis-motivated work, I get rebellious.
For all the instrumentalism, there are heroes doing social science—amazing people who are in it just for the desire to find shit out and not for the prestige or the security. I work with a few of them, one of whom is just autistic enough to be perfect.
The thing is that I can always create a meta-critique. This is my mode of self-deception, and a way to keep from fulfilling the work into which I have written myself—the work I’ve spent six years creating myself to create. In every subtlety and back room of my subconscious, I’ll tend to devalue my work on the micro level. So insofar as tweaking the vinyasa (otherwise known as the “order of putting things together”) on the macro level keeps me conscious, I have to do that.
This inverting pattern, for now, is the best thing I can figure out. A method for making practice give energy to my life, to make life more full than it would be otherwise.
Maybe there’s a clue here about why they’re always tweaking the vinyasa at the AYRI.
Hey suckers—made you look.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [4]
Categories: arbitrage
, astanga yoga
, evolution
, having a body
, integration
, morality
, science
, self-deception
, social theory
Saturday XXIX · 27 October 2007
Thursday was the cursed full moon. Orange from the horrible ash of the horrible fires, but so beautiful for it. Like the summer moons back in Montana, when the dust from harvest hangs in the air for weeks.
That day in the sculpture garden, pent up and tense, I passed a professor for whom I worked in the fall of 2003. I corrected exams in Ancient Greek History in order to make my IRA contribution that year. We had catty workload issues at the beginning, him first year on the job and me a union steward with standards to set. Then I saw him lecture on the Peloponnesian War and oh my god. Co-opted owl, right there. In the years since, he’s gone gray (adorable, but shows we’ve both been here a while). He called out in the garden:
“You’re still here? Ha! Did they give you tenure yet?” (Very funny.)
No man. I just… added a second course of study.
Anyway. It’s Saturday. The truth is I’ve had two out of three disastrous weekends in October. Rolling around to a Sunday night walk and finding myself enervated and distant, feeling uselessness in what the previous 48 hours have been. Hmmm: I’ve structured the next two days so tightly that there’s no room for reflection, irritated or otherwise.
Am I trying to hide from something, or just taking the insight from practice that my mind sometimes likes to be bound, needs to be reigned in, and operates better with some structure?
Couplea links before I head out again.
● You know that they’re mutilating the women in Juarez, right? And in Guate. Horrible, sick terror. According to Amnesty, “almost 400 women and girls have been murdered in Mexico…. In Guatemala, 2200 women have been killed since 2001. Exceptional cruelty and sexual violence characterize many of the killings.” For the Day of the Dead (a more intense holiday than Halloween, where we use children to chase away death instead of celebrating it) lots of people are sending home-made crosses to the countries’ consulates, asking yet again for attention to epidemics both countries have basically ignored. Cool project.
● Anthopologists, who take themselves so seriously it hurts, love to issue referenda on this and that cultural issue. They’re guilt-racked, you see, given the disgusting colonialist legacy on which their analytical framework rests. This is why many of them have retreated into lame textual criticism. Anyway, this beyond-ironic thing is happening, and I can’t say I oppose it (for as much as I despise everything GWB has ever done, like the rest of you). Anthrpologists are going out with US troops in Afghanistan to “culturally sensitize” them as they go busting down doors. Of course they’re being pilloried by their colleagues. Here’s the balanced view of the situation I’ve been wanting.
● It looks like my people are in decline. Awwww. Large NYTM article on the Evangelical Movement. Now there’s a death I can celebrate, but it will have to wait until I actually read this article.
● Looking for a film recommendation for Tuesday night. Last year we went for a walk in the richer parts of Brentwood, where the denizens have had “their” gardeners deck out the houses in the latest and most ostentatious Halloween dress-up, and had “their” nannies do the same with the children. A great show, appropriately decadent. Then watched Terror By Night (1946) with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock. I don’t know what to watch this year. Any gore goes straight into my dreams and terrorizes me, so I’m more looking for artful suspense than horror. Also, for all my comfort with the dark side, there is still latent fear of Christian-style evil (namely, Satan) that just does not need to be primed until my sense of humor has full reign over my subconscious. Any suggestions?
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [10]
Categories: morality
, science
, self-deception
, social theory
Unscientific Postscript to Yoga is Dangerous · 25 September 2007
I’ve thought over this matter in the past week, thanks to the many people who have emailed me. Thank you, everyone. Sometimes it amazes me that there is true community here, and that these are relationships where we work out aspects of our practice as much as we participate in creating a bottom-up side of astanga culture. We are creating this world as much as its authorities who we mostly revere, and that is sort of revolutionary.
So, two notes on the matter of petite brunettes with daddy issues.
One. If the desire to “put oneself out there” as irrevently funny trumps a sensitivity to the real power big men have over small women—if ego trumps empathy—then clearly this person has not gone through the process of self-examination of inherited gender conditioning, and radical affirmation of human equality, that I’d wish he had as a modern yogi.
To do that, to learn to be feminists (get over the word already: it doesn't connote female domination and you know it), most men need to have a transformative relationship with a fully realized woman.
In the same way, white people in this country don’t even begin to undo their inherited racism (even if they emotionally antd intellectually despise racism) until they enter in to deep relationships with people of color as equals. It's not just a matter of professing the right politics. Politics is surfacy, but race and gender are visceral.
It is difficult to imagine someone who understands the process of self-transformation through relationship explicitly taking advantage of his gender and size to leverage a sexualized power over small women. Someone who’d sensitized himself accurately to any women’s subjectivity would have some idea of the almost primitive responses that would call up in her, and would respect her enough to give her space. (It's not like women don't create gender inequality just as much or more than men.)
I do hope this teacher will find this discussion, because maybe he truly doesn’t know that his conduct is symbolically freighted and viscerally affecting. It's so much easier to be lighthearted about this, and not see its serious side. But you are a powerful man, man. Have some respect for that power of yours.
Two. WHATEVER! Ashtanga yoga is about doing what is uncomfortable. That's it. End of question-period.
This practice is a process undoing fears through direct experience. I worry that I have made a “thing”—a personal mental obstacle—out of my feelings about this stranger.
"I won't go to that teacher because he scares me." Hmmm. Really!? Again, whatever. Doing your practice in the presence of fear is one of the few things about which SKPJ is explicit.
Most people are still sexist on some deep level. This behavior is common in the world I inhabit: people who get it are the exception. It’s just not up to me to care. Or correct. Though if I'm in a relationship that's messed up, of course I have to do some pushback and take responsibility for protecting myself. Doing that is itself just a part of facing fear.
So it looks like at some point I’ll have to track this joe down and practice with him. Not repeatedly or anything, but for the sake of it. I’ll try not to flirt with him, which is exactly what I would have done if I hadn’t seen that profile (because word is he is a funny guy, and I would have cued into that to take the edge off any potential authoritarianism). But I might have to do something that violates his sense of propriety on my way out of “his” room. Any suggestions?
Ha!
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [24]
Categories: astanga yoga
, markets-networks-society
, morality
, power of suggestion
, self-deception
, social theory
Yoga Is Dangerous, Part III · 18 September 2007
This is not a rant. Maybe it ought to be.
This is a request for someone to help me find humor in a dark bit of tabloid-quality ashtanga flotsam.
This is not a rant because I’m trying to find a middle path between two thoughtful, true perspectives. One, Lax’s reminder that Astanga Yoga is a subculture which tends to cult-like boundary-policing. Yes, it is; and I don't want to be the police. But two, there is Cody’s ongoing meditation on the way in which teacher- student relationships are at least traditionally an integral, even "sacred," aspect of this practice.
So here is the story. A friend was just surveying the ashtanga alternatives here on the west side of Los Angeles, and googled a local teacher neither of us has met. Authorized teacher. Well-connected guy about whom I have heard some good things. Has taken over the room built and nurtured for more than a decade by the philosopher-king Chuck Miller.
Google result: Myspace profile. Who he would like to meet, quote: "Petite brunettes. With daddy issues."
Dude.
Disturbed owl.
Very.
Maybe I’m being uptight. In general, I’m particularly uptight about professionalism, and about respecting teachers. Both those dispositions keep me from knowing exactly how to feel about this self-advertisement, but taking it as a joke feels like it legitimates a sad old sexist dynamic. (What if a female yoga teacher tried this? Now that would be funny.)
Some would say a teacher has a right to express all the beautifully complex and shadow parts of himself openly. That’s a really good argument. But it also would legitimate viewing a teacher as a person with multiple personalities, whereas an implicit goal and undeniable effect of this practice is that it brings the various parts of our selves together over time.
I’ve said before that yoga is dangerous. Because, among other things, it strips away conditioning: lets you see your own behavioral patterns and the power asymmetries in which you indulge, makes you aware of your own sexual energy and how you tend to use it. Yoga is incredibly dangerous, but this has me thinking that some times it is not at all dangerous enough.
I'm sitting here imagining walking into a room where this was the “secretive” intention. I cannot envision it without a visceral feeling of external threat. And that’s not the kind of danger I’m after.
I wonder how many women around here have done their research before class, found the profile, and decided to stay away.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [16]
Categories: astanga yoga
, morality
, power of suggestion
, self-deception
, social theory
, spirituality
Shadow Visitor and an Addiction · 6 September 2007
A migraine woke me at four in the morning last Saturday, three days into silence. The headaches started two years ago and I take them like the scrappy little Rocky Mountain pioneer my dad raised, but this time the entire tone of the thing was different. Intense. Hard-edged.
Guess that’s what it feels when you have zero options for migraine-distraction. Not even mental options.
I could feel the thing’s specific location in the physical brain, and the pain was both more intense and less horrible—the latter because this time I wasn’t angry at it for interrupting my day. What did I have to interrupt?
I usually take control by creating distraction. It’s a competition for which one of us—me or it—will determine the day’s activity. I win if I get on with it, even if I move around like the hunchback of Notre Dame and have to call my brother for sympathy. When I start losing, I fortify my position with Excedrin. Other women in my family bypass this stupid struggle and automatically drug up the first day of the month. They’re smart. But it was the men who taught me how to relate to my body, so I’m stubborn.
By 9 am, I had spent five hours in the fetal position, exploring the sharp edges of the pain but afraid to just go into it and know it fully. Hello, fear. That resistance was building up all over my body. The sensation was coming in waves, but the fear just kept getting harder and thicker brick by brick. No way was I going to sit my body upright and take my attention to the center of that space behind my right eye.
Admitting that, I hunchbacked down the hill to the kitchen, and asked if there were any caffeine on the premises. Yes, contraband was available, said the big angelic chef, but would I like to try some ginger tea first?
Here is what I thought: I want DRUGS, not SYMPATHY! Said: Thank you. I will sit over there.
She cut up a whole root and boiled it. A half hour later, still hunched over a table, I told her that I was probably hallucinating, but I could feel a blood vessel in the front of my head dilate and move the pain around. She said I wasn’t hallucinating.
I still didn’t have much awareness of anything except the place behind my eye, but after the ginger took the fear out of the pain, I felt interested in checking it out. So I went back to the cushion and mildly hallucinated for the rest of the day.
God it was trippy. Enough physical “pain” to keep me oblivious to the outside world, and so much inner entertainment that I got lost in it. For hours.
When I’m quiet enough not to need the anchors of breath or mantra to keep my insane mind from writing novels, I like to watch the light play on the backs of my eyelids. But this time it was a whole show. A little hawk or comet or dandelion fuzz—some kind of flying shadow—appeared and swooped all over. A shadow dervish. I had wild dreams that night—so much for Patanjali’s dreamless sleep—and then the dervish came back the next day and stayed until evening.
Sitting there out of time, watching it, had nothing to do with nothingness. There was a stable emotional tone of absorbed amusement. It didn’t feel profound or important: it just felt fun, like an innocuous game.
I didn’t want it to end.
Which must have been obvious, because on Sunday night an instructor climbed on the dais, before the pair of Buddhas (a dark male one and light female one) and said teasingly, “Well aren’t you good meditators! Let go of the sitting posture. Let go of the activity of medititating. Just be mindful. Just get up and leave.”
I went to bed scheming about how I have to do a month-long or more. And laughing at myself for the reaching: literally, this time, a reaching for nothingness. Is that why we invest all this time in sitting practice, for the bliss payoff? Maybe we’re just addicted to a mental state—and contemplation is just our method for getting there.
I don’t know. If my deepest motives are just so much spiritual materialism, though, I’m not ready to dismiss them as bad unholy desire. I am hungry for insight and pleasure. In love with the journey, seduced by the grail quest. All of it. Badly.
So I get attached to mental sates. If I didn’t, I’d have quit the astanga practice years ago. At least you can’t make too much trouble when you’re in a trance.
Posted by (0v0)
Comment [9]
Categories: arbitrage
, astanga yoga
, beta state
, esoteric shit
, evolution
, having a body
, integration
, morality
, power of suggestion
, sound
, spirituality
Earthly Forces, Living Lightly · 3 September 2007
Oh it’s hot down the central valley, and just flat and bright and heavy as I drive back in to LA. (Beneath a banner in the East Bay: “Stop Driving the War.” Good goddam call, I concede.) Six hours on four cylinders and Eno & Fripp 1975 (graduating from MfA), and into this weird scorched world where gravity is a serious force. I'm thinking of the molten magnet inside the planet.
That’s a transition allright. Konk me upside the head with an iron skillet off the stove.
But not in a bad way. Heh.
The hidden Marin valley of the past week was something else: smelling like wet sage in the morning and burnt sage in the afternoon, with deer outside my window to wake me for practice, wild turkeys as big as me (but not as goodlooking, I thought when I was thinking), tiny little lizards splayed out fearlessly in the 6 pm warming hour. The sky at night was darker than I’ve seen in too long, and after I stopped needing much sleep (talking takes much out of me in a normal day), being out with such large stars and the droning crickets was pretty close to opposite of midday LA in a heatwave.
The Editor rented Fierce Grace and we fired up the AC and closed all the shades and caught up after a week without tickles. The film together with something DZ(M) said reminded me of this.
We can see that there are ways of inhabiting our roles without making quite so much of them. It’s really not necessary to take out lives quite so personally. “The man [sic] who knows the relation between the forces of nature and actions,” Krishna says, “sees how some forces work upon other forces, and he becomes not their slave.” Your body, your mind, your personality – that’s all just part of nature, it’s all just lawful stuff happening. Why are you getting so uptight about it? Let it be harmonious with its lawful manifestation, and don’t struggle against it so hard. Live your life more lightly, more impersonally; don’t get so caught, so trapped in your melodrama.
Ram Dass, Living the Bhagavad Gita (p. 63)
Posted by (0v0)
Comment
Categories: beta state
, evolution
, having a body
, integration
, morality
, sound
, spirituality
Saturday XXIII · 25 August 2007
I’m still smug for getting out of jury duty, though now people are telling me a royal flush of five days without the call isn’t all that special. Six years in this town, and not once have I done my part to uphold the integrity of the justice system.
Even if the dispensation isn’t so special, the whole past week felt like a free trip, a 53rd week that doesn’t show up on the books: so it was with the out-of-nowhere commandeering of my practice by a benevolent pirate who’ll soon disappear, and with the five days of pure-empty lines on my varied little OCD (“GTD”) calendars.
I felt creative this week with energy and focus like I couldn’t believe: because nobody was keeping track. I play games to slack at the margins whet I think my other self isn't watching—skimming the almond butter, taking halfassed notes on my background reading, skimming time off from sleep to read the newspaper. Note this occurs when I’m playing both the slacker and the tracker—I don’t try to skim off waiters, teachers, employers, whatever. Subtle self-sabotage, in conditions under which I feel divided against myself, is the main kind that interests me. Sometime I should figure out it’s not actually a fun game.
But this week I was in a void because I’d put my diabolical inner accountant on vacation, and it was faith-giving to see that when I shut off that shadow I’m always trying to outfox, I’m not full of shit. In fact, I function pretty well. Go figure.
This spate of relative clarity makes for a good moment to slow everything way, way down. I’ll be in silence Wednesday-Monday, over a long Labor Day. The Editor is off grocery-shopping for faque meat and other BBQ items right now (he loves soy dogs, the horror). Guess my own self isn’t the only one who sometimes needs a break from my overly watchful eyes.
Next time I do a links post I’ll be vipassana-ed and probably back in a post-political blogging disposition. So this week, in honor of the fact that the world is at war and 99% of the ashtangosphere (the 1%) could not care less, and in honor of the fact that we celebrate “Labor Day” three