More Equations · 28 June 2009
Summer indulgence: driving all the way across the city to practice with my alchemy teacher in a juicy, complicated space. Sixteen point zero miles in as many minutes—blasting blues rock on the freeway as the cylindrical US Bank Building and its lesser neighbors grow large in the opaque white smog of June. Singing something that wakes up the pelvic floor, I approach downtown from the west as the sun comes toward it from the east, infusing the fog until it glows bright in my eyes. It becomes near-blinding just as I touch the brake and swing north from the 10 to the 110 at the Staples Center. A pretty intense little kriya—why wake up with nauli when you can have sixteen dangerous minutes alone on the Santa Monica freeway?
So… time = distance, shala = kitchen floor, inhale = exhale. The balance of my mantra, SO ABOVE SO BELOW, also reminds me that nothing much is free. What you do = who you are. I do freeway penance in 36 minutes of slow-going on the other side, east to west, sixteen point zero miles of stop and go, listening to Iran news on BBC radio. East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet, until…
Practice is incredibly sweet. The space is full of symbols left wide open to interpretation: every time you lose your drsti there’s some other image in your grill, just asking to be incorporated in to the arbitrary symbolic lexicon. The giant photograph of a teenaged SPKJ taking adho mukha in shades of purple: I gaze blearily toward that inverted skull and let it pull 25 long ut pluthihi breaths out of my tired lungs.
Most subversive, though, is the ceiling devised by whatever perverted architects threw this mini-mall together decades ago. Beautiful crossbeams above the main space meet in a perfect X, and if you align your own body with that X you realize the great cylindrical ventilation duct just above it is nothing les than a shiny silver lingam to the strong white supports of the X. One might think Siva and Shakti were missing from the shala’s pantheon, but they’re only disguised as neutral background architecture, laughing down on us as we drift in and out of alchemy on the floor.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: arbitrage
, astanga yoga
, having a body
, integration
, morality
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Relationship of White Stripes to MB
Alchemy teacher
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 28, 11:55 AM · #
have you found the difference, if indeed there is one, between the pelvic floor and the kitchen floor?
Posted by: e&sj · Jun 29, 08:37 AM · #
They are still different!!!
Objective/subjective, outside/inside, linoleum/electricity, mindless/mind.
But I will keep watching…
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 29, 11:17 AM · #
How does it taste, this Kool Aid that you’ve been drinking?
Posted by: Carl · Jun 29, 11:45 AM · #
Funny you should ask.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 29, 11:58 AM · #
Oh, screw it.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 29, 12:11 PM · #
Oh cool! Have you been doing this?
Have you been tinkering with your frenulum linguae?
Posted by: Carl · Jun 29, 02:32 PM · #
Is there really a photo of Guruji practicing in his teenage years? I’ve never seen that. I believe the iconic pictures of him practicing were when he was in his 40’s. However, I don’t recall the dates for certain and could be wrong about this.
Posted by: Jamie · Jul 2, 06:03 AM · #
Carl, yes. Trying not to tinker but to just turn it on and leave it though. It’s like anything in yoga… feels like Kool-aid for the first few weeks, then gets bizarrely normal once assimilated.
Jamie, the images are a surya namaskara sequence that seem to have been taken at this same session. Is he really in his 40s here? I was just assuming late teens. I realize now how likely it is that my guess is wrong—different time, different food, different health and life conditions, different class and gender behaviors, different ways of doing yoga practice… might all add up to a totally different way of showing age (or not showing it) in the body. Does anybody know how old he was in these photos?
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 2, 10:51 AM · #