My Two Curves · 5 November 2007
Curiosity : New Learning :: Nostalgia : Repetition
So it has been a long time since I advanced in the series. And people are starting to suggest it’s time I take on the next pose.
Nono noono nonoooooonononooo.
And sell myself out of one of my few remaining chances to participate in a ritual ashtanga moment? Chances are that I’ll add a posture another ten or at most twenty times in the next twenty or thirty years. Learning a posture is this obvious, almost comically obvious, moment of imitation shaktipat built in to the practice at intervals; and in my old age I’m coming to see it as a very sweet thing.
In a practice that is all about intense personal experience, that hinges on meaningful relationships of student and teacher (including where the student takes the method itself to be her teacher), advancing to the next pose is this no-duh moment of live transmission. It’s a mini-enactment of the whole method.
I did not always care about that at all. When the learning curve on the physical level was steeper, I had more curiosity for what was next and at the same time longed for challenges. But the curiosity has leveled off as the physical work becomes less about new openings and new powers and more about refinement. There’s a ton of work left before I’ll master my practice such as it is (hello, mayurasana), but it is quieter work than it used do be.
As I show up every day to repeat--and try to refine--what I know, my nostalgia for the method is a rising trend. It's pretty weird.
I don’t think the word for my condition is “reverence” or “submission.” It’s not that I’m afraid or feel wrong about giving myself a pose. It’s that the longer I spend in this practice the more I feel the strength and sweetness of its master, SKPJ, and the way he’s personalized the method by transmitting it individually to so many. I don’t have any pretention to a personal relationship with the man and don’t regret this, but do have an increasing gratitude for the whole tradition. For me it’s not that learning from a teacher is “correct”: it’s that it is awfully sweet. And because much of my practice during my life will be without someone steeped in the subculture, I’m pooling my nostalgia around the obvious symbolic touchstones.
So! There I go shrouding power in foofy cultural nonsense in order to legitimate a hierarchy. That is actually a great counter-argument to everything I'm feeling. There exists the following criticism of the ashtanga method: that teachers become old-school hoarders of the crucial knowledge. That they dole it out in ways that increase their own authority and students’ practical dependence and emotional subservience. I take the point. I’ve not been subject to this kind of thing, though I am sure it happens. But the possibility of a messy dynamic is what I accept for the benefits of not having to administrate the program myself. For someone like me who lacks the kinesthetic brilliance to practice spontaneously in a way that is both quiet and challenges physical boundaries, administration is annoying mindstuff. It’s a gift when someone will do that pain-in-the-ass thinking and planning and fussing for me. This is why I see teaching so much more as service than as control.
I suppose this knowledge-hoarding criticism is most valid to those who see ashtanga as a set of postures rather than as a living tradition. If it’s just postures, then the method should be Do What Thou Wilt When Thou Wilt.
But it’s not a set of postures. It’s an entire subculture. Subculture without postures is tourism; postures without subculture is pilates. Or something like that.
Ashtanga’s a subculture the same as punk rock or skateboarding. And while I used to experience it with a vigorous curiosity, now I feel more like a sentimental old girl who thinks that for all its neuroses and pathologies, the more traditional ways are meaningful enough that I’d like to re-enact them the same way I do any other received tradition.
Maybe this is just what happens to you when you do the same exact thing day after day for too many years. You fall weirdly in love with all of it.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, beta state
, evolution
, having a body
, social theory
, spirituality
Previous entry: That Was Embarrassing / Next entry: Moon Drag
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.
I completely feel the same way as you about this, and it feels nice that you wrote it out so well as always :)
I haven’t had a new posture in a year almost. Primary everyday, working on all those little things and comfortable with the familiarity of it all. The thought of adding a new posture after all this time makes me slightly nervous. Will it change the dynamic I so enjoy and love? Am I happy with what I have and should I just stay there? It is about moving on, not getting attached and that’s hard to do. The day I hear “Pasasana” may evoke mixed feelings.
With the teacher I think that trust is the major ingredient. I trust mine to help me look after my practice and guide me to the right places. I was once told that you don’t take the practice you are given it by your teacher. One pose at a time.
I hope I remember this, I like it: “Subculture without postures is tourism; postures without subculture is pilates.”
cj x
Posted by: CJ · Nov 5, 11:13 PM · #
LOL! Like an arranged marriage, this falling in love by daily familiarity and persistent unfathomable strangeness?
I love the teacher-student practice from the perspective of learning. I am immersed in (and make my living via) sophisticated digital learning methodologies/systems. All built to interact with and facilitate the individual learner. How sweet to learn something from a human, one-on-one. To have someone watch you and touch you and lean in to whisper suggestions, and watch again — invested in the outcome — and then explain more and touch more and whisper more. This is the very heart of learning. Human-to-human transmission. Doesn’t get better than that.
Posted by: karen · Nov 6, 03:20 AM · #
Over here in “barely-a-link-to-tradition-ville” Indiana, I think that I turned teacher in a way, to have this. I got 200 hours in a system which is famous for its “crim” factor, and yet the class I teach with the most consistent attendance is my Sunday afternoon Mysore-style gig. I feel the magic every time I hit “vande gurunam.” Tangents galore from “it’s like skateboarding”; more to say about that later.
Posted by: patrick · Nov 6, 05:31 AM · #
Well said, as always. I’ll speak personally, although I suspect that many may feel the same way; After a lifetime of consciously and aggressively rejecting authority I think that it’s a good practice to embrace and try to submit to authority. Our teacher relationships create that (hopefully safe) environment for this de-conditioning process.
Perhaps a reason that Ashtanga attracts so many type As is because on some level they crave a loss of control?
Posted by: cody · Nov 6, 07:25 AM · #
Why surrender to authority when you can surrender to yourself?
Yoga teachers (and therapists) have to play the role of authority figure a lot. I’m all for asking them to be the vehicles of transmission and the almost magic interpersonalness Karen describes, but asking them to hold the space of a full-on projection without a significant uptick in paygrade is problematic.
I have this feeling that as longer-term practitioners in the 21st century, it’s up to us to find Isvara in the way things are rather than projecting her onto an individual and making that person play at authority. That’s very effective for people just going through the paces, but over time a major psychological burden to those who are already expending themselves so much physically for our benefit.
As for locating “authority” in the semi-arbitrary method itself, uuuuugh. Works for a beginner to develop tapas if she can’t do it from within, but I feel that this too is a tyro mentality.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 6, 09:06 AM · #
Yes. I guess I was thinking more of the teacher as a role rather than an individual. But you’re right – that’s too much to lay on any one individual’s shoulders.
I’m not sure what you mean by surrendering to yourself – cultivating opposites? consciously reversing observed patterns?
Perhaps the key is to surrender to the process, not the method or the transmitter?
Posted by: cody · Nov 6, 09:17 AM · #
Patrick, maybe Vande Gurunam is an even more obvious moment for transmission of the tradition than the ritual of giving postures.
It’s explicitly about teachers’ teachers’ teachers’ teachers (placing the practitioner yourself in that line), and built in with an everydayness that every little pocket of the subculture iterates daily.
Collective effervescence! (Pardon my Emile Durkheim.) Imagined community! (Pardon my Benedict Anderson.)
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 6, 09:18 AM · #
Standing on the shoulders of giants…
Posted by: The Mindbender · Nov 6, 09:24 AM · #
I think it makes sense to say it is the process, Cody, yes. Although I love what Karen said, about the irreplaceable beauty of human interaction as a part of that process. I love the idea of interpersonal transmission of tradition. It makes learning so present and immanent.
You ask what I mean by surrendering to yourself. Uh. Is it clearer if I write it as Self?
It occurs to me, Cody, that for all your smart and sensible discomfort with the whole “surrendering to god” niyama that you simultaneously feel incomplete for not practicing, you might find a route to the same thing in the Tao. You are quite the determinist, after all. :) That idea of the “way of things,” or “the natural order,” has a great deal of spirit in it, but it’s naturalistic and unpretentious. Maybe there would be a kind of peace and insight if you used that as a sense of “god.” After all, didn’t your man Patanjali more or less say meditate on whatever works for you?
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 6, 09:28 AM · #
Yes, V.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 6, 09:30 AM · #
http://www.ordinarymind.com/koan_honored.html
Posted by: karen · Nov 6, 09:58 AM · #
Oh my god. This zen resonates again.
At the risk of deterring readers from that link, here:
“Dharma transmission isn’t a matter of giving and getting, but an acknowledgement of intimacy, an acknowledgement of One Mind…. [W]hat did I get from my teacher…? Simply a shared understanding of the nature and responsibility of practice.” ...
“‘Life as it is – the only Teacher.’ How do we receive transmission from that Teacher? ... Each moment of our lives, Life holds up a flower. Each moment gives us the opportunity us to accept or reject that flower, to smile or to turn away in ignorance of the moment’s teaching.”
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 6, 10:36 AM · #
What was that again? OLD AGE? You just turned 31!!!
Not even close to “old.”
Posted by: Carl · Nov 6, 10:42 AM · #
I SO agree with that. 31, old, muah-hah-hah!!! And, blog comment to blog comment, you got a pose by EMAIL? HTF does that work?
Posted by: patrick · Nov 6, 01:33 PM · #
Like this: Patrick, I give you karavandasana. Please email me when you have it all worked out and looking effortless. :-)
Posted by: karen · Nov 6, 02:08 PM · #
if I thought I could do it, I’d put all kinds of effort into getting that pose so it’d be all pretty if/when you and i get face-to-face in Minneapolis :D
Posted by: patrick · Nov 7, 06:29 AM · #
I admire your dedication to the tradition.
As far as being given poses, I was settled into Primary, not really thinking about Intermediate, when my teacher said I was “ready” and started giving me Intermediate poses. I trust her, and don’t have reservations, but left on my own, I probably would’ve kept doing Primary forever and never moved on!
Posted by: gartenfische · Nov 8, 11:08 AM · #
Thanks Karen, for the link to that koan. We just finished a series of teachings with a former Zen abbot and at one moment he spoke of this teaching in particular, the holding of the flower. Mahakasyapa smiled because he got it, it was a flower, and the Teacher and Student shared one mind. Our teacher said it was the first example in the Buddha’s teachings of a “transmission” and asked us what would have happened if at that moment all of the students would have looked confused and said, “huh?”. There would not have been any transmission of teaching. Another historical detail, he told us, is that Mahakasyapa had been a practitioner of meditation for a long time; he was not a neophyte.
Tomorrow I“m going to a daylong meditation with a former (all these formers this, former that) Zen monk, who now practices something I have forgotten what it is, but it is like “just living is your practice”; it’s sort of not worrying about having to meditate but just living a life that reflects that you practice. And we’re going do meditate on that for an entire day. LOL. I may have to blog about it.
Cheers,
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Nov 10, 04:16 PM · #