Narcoleptic · 10 March 2008
The body may be open, but this does not mean you’re all processed out. Or a nice person. Or whatever. Besides, there are a lot of places that asana cannot reach.
Which does not mean that yoga cannot reach them. No seriously: this is a practice of pushing back the veil into the unconscious.
It’s reassuring when I can catch an edge that I didn’t realize was there. Here’s the snag: reactivity about yoga practice that focuses on outer form rather than prizing the breath. An objection that’s completely legitimate. Except in this case it’s more like a little delivery system for my personal hangups.
How could I not feel this, coming out of a school where much of the teaching is to create cover-ready poses. I’ve been oppressed by form! Praised for “perfection” and taught such a thing is attainable in asana of all places. All while in a highly receptive trance state. This history’s in me.
Some artist-friends have this phrase for ambition: “He wants to be on the magazine.” But in my history, that is more than a funny turn of phrase. All this weird energy about being on the magazine.
And here I am, the contrarian who goes narcoleptic when people talk about physical practice, who says throw away the magazine, who won’t watch the DVDs or look at the practice manuals. Won’t do it! Let me out! I’m dying of boredom!
Seeing past form to breath and energy is all good and puts the focus in a deeper place… but, in me, also fosters this invisible hardness that I’m getting away with carrying. I can hide it because (1) the body seems open and I know how to act calm and (2) if I do talk about it, I can easily legitimate the rhetoric that the reactivity creates.
What I’m figuring is that the source of my asana-narcolepsy is this little nest of tangles. Trigger what I feel is obsession with form, anything that looks like perfect body OCD, and I immediately tune out. I can’t stay around for it. Just realizing this doesn’t make me ok with it. I’m still SO narcoleptic, and underneath that, annoyed by the superficiality of form.
This metaphysical fussiness doesn’t go in to any obvious places in the body, but the stupid truth is that it has a little trigger in my solar plexus. I’m somewhere between amazed and further annoyed that, due to the yoga, I can feel that quickening-tightening in the nerves.
I’ve got some peace to make here. If I want to chill out, it means accepting of and valuing form as not the enemy of spirit.
There is a huge amount of unhealthy obsession with bodily “perfection,” and with postural form, in western yoga. God. I am sure it’s nowhere worse than in this town. But I’m not in a place to see that clearly if I’m just letting the reactivity in the solar plexus do the thinking on this matter.
It’s a little funny to practice hundreds of asanas every day for years and simultaneously hold the belief that physical form does not matter. And ironic that the way I’m finding this edge is not by thinking about it so much as coming across physical and half-physical cues in the body itself. The latent fussiness about physicality actually has a body of its own.
EDIT: ANY READERS WHO KNOW ME OR SUSPECT YOU KNOW ME NEED TO SEE MY CLARIFICATION IN THE COMMENTS: IT'S COMMENT #14 BELOW. THANKS.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, beta state
, having a body
, power of suggestion
, self-deception
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I like this post!
Posted by: V · Mar 11, 01:39 AM · #
Great post.
Posted by: Guest · Mar 11, 02:24 AM · #
So maybe in the way Brancusi made “Bird in Space,” we are just using our bodies to make evocative shapes. Perhaps the asanas are just metaphors?
And then there is Eva Hesse: “Repetition 19” or “Contingent,” maybe… All about humanizing form, loving the material, humor, the underbelly.
Magazine form? A fashion of form. But not form itself.
Posted by: karen · Mar 11, 04:32 AM · #
I like it too, maybe because I understood it better! :)
Unfortunately, I have a different problem – my body freezes in narcoleptic stupor when people talk about things metaphysical, which saddens me to no end. :( I have a lot of reincarnations to look forward to.
Posted by: Alfia · Mar 11, 04:33 AM · #
Delurking? Thank you and hello.
I sense it’s totally accurate to compare my asana-narcolepsy with most people’s understandable metaphysics-narcolepsy. It has to do, sometimes, with our ideas about what’s “real” and what isn’t.
Karen, are you and Patrick the same person? I have to look up Eva Hesse…
It has been too easy for me to conflate the magazine with form. This is what is done here. More on this to come, I think…
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 11, 04:39 AM · #
Patrick is Frencher than I.
Eva Hesse rocks. Well worth a looking-up!
Posted by: karen · Mar 11, 04:53 AM · #
Being on the magazine..I love that. We perfect our asana for our teacher to see, for our shala mates to see, our bodies so that we would look like someone in Yoga journal, some even their whole lifestyle. If we have to live in a magazine society, we could instead say “she’s started her own zine”. You could reach outwards in true DIY attitude and have all the creative power.
Your zine would look totally rad.
Posted by: Susan · Mar 11, 06:05 AM · #
Aaaah, Owl, finally a post I (mostly) understand, I think because I know the players involved. And you’re right, I learned from a couple of ‘magazine’ people but I’m not sure that’s bad. I do many times try for the magazine look because it is what hurts me the least purely in the asana sense of practice. I’m all about the not hurting these days. But you’re right, I’m also (FINALLY) scratching the surface of how important the breath really is. The form is important to my body but the breath is important to ALL of me. Hopefully someday I can forget about the form and focus on what’s really important, hmmmm?
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Mar 11, 06:35 AM · #
I’m with Karen on this one; Eva Hesse is pretty cool. Hah, you know, I thought that same thing, reading these comments: damn, are Karen and I the same person? :D
Posted by: patrick · Mar 11, 06:49 AM · #
I like this post too. Maybe it’s my trying to make peace with a slightly larger body frame than I’ve been accustomed to, but my practice is much more focused lately on how it feels as opposed to how it looks.
Otherwise it all becomes unhealthy for me, and I’m sure unhealthy for others.
Posted by: Anna · Mar 11, 07:57 AM · #
Yes, wonderful post. Nama Rupa. Where you struggle with form, I struggle with name. What is real, authentic, appropriate? How much can we stretch concepts until we change their essence? How much stretching until we change ourselves?
Posted by: cody · Mar 11, 08:30 AM · #
What if perfection of form sometimes equates perfection of alignment? Is what allows the channels to flow?
I’m not saying it’s necessarily the case, but I think it sometimes is.
I hope I’m not repeating anyone. I read the whole post but didn’t read any of the other comments.
Posted by: Boodiba · Mar 11, 09:01 AM · #
Woah, just need to add this and then I have to disappear again: I love a lot of people who are on the magazine. Like, many of those people. I have learned all this valuable stuff from them, and at times given myself to them as a student and benefited from that very much. I would never second-guess even in my mind a decision to accept an offer from the magazine: teachers need to work and make money and foster reputations. Realpolitik, baby.
What I’m talking about is how the very existence of the magazine fucks practitioners up. This is because of the outright commodification of practice that the magazine seeks to create (while putting forth a some hysterical double-talk about how looks don’t matter), and the naive way in which we ourselves sometimes read it, internalize it, and thus strive to commodify ourselves.
Oh, and perfection schmerfection. Hee hee. Really! (The subtle body is NOT hard-wired to the physical body.) That’s what I’m saying, even if I’m softening up to the whole wonderful, difficult world of form.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 11, 09:35 AM · #
You never have offered a convincing argument that you truly are OCD.
Posted by: Carl · Mar 11, 10:06 AM · #
Alas Carl I am ADD, not OCD.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 11, 10:19 AM · #
i hadn’t bought The Magazine in 4 years, but the other day i picked one up while waiting for the person in front of me at the grocer, noticed that one of the teachers of my studio had an article, and there was a cheat cheat of the different americanizations of yoga. i would have put in back on the rack, but i was ushered forward and i thought it might be useful to have that spreadsheet if someone where to ask me the difference between this type of yoga and that type of yoga. that summary helps.
cheers, arturo
Posted by: arturo · Mar 12, 07:12 PM · #
Yes, I agree there’s a lot of good in there. The asana columns by J. Gudmestad and R. Rosen (available online) are helpful if I can get through them without falling asleep. And I love the column in which senior teachers give advice (I have it emailed to me). Some nonsense there, but everything by David Swenson and Anna Forest, for example, is super helpful to me.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 13, 09:32 AM · #