INSIDEOWL: Unscientific Postscript to Yoga is Dangerous

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)
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , morality , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory

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i have interacted with this man. not one on one, but i have observed him in a group setting, as a students. his presence was MUCH MUCH different than what one would gather of him from myspace or even from his stint in “Ashtanga NY”. he was much smaller than i imagined and had a very withdrawn and even insecure presence. this makes me even more creeped out by the myspace persona, because it makes me think he is grasping for some strength and authority that he might not really feel. and i don’t think i need to tell you what that kind of thing can lead to. BUT this is all conjecture on my part.

Posted by: Tova · Sep 25, 02:59 AM · #
Hmm. I am much smaller and more introverted than my online persona (a prototypical INFJ when I can get away with it), so maybe this would be an easier match than I’d imagined.

I’d thought I was going to have to pretend to be tough.

Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 25, 04:16 AM · #
I’m in the 190s/6 foot range and he was around the same size as me, so that’s certainly larger than your average Ashtangi.

You’ll be fine with him. As I mentioned offline, he was certainly good for my practice at the time, but then again, I’m not a petite brunette, so I’m coming from a very different perspective.

It’ll be fascinating to see how it goes now that you have all these competing preconceptions floating around in your head! Good luck. And report back SOON!

Posted by: cody · Sep 25, 04:48 AM · #
maybe it was his presence that seemed smaller than i imagined. really, he is 6ft? he hunched. maybe. i would be really wary owl. i just don’t think there should be ANY sexual overtones in a teacher/student relationship. it seems like he is looking to establish them. be careful.

Posted by: cranky housefrau · Sep 25, 08:16 AM · #
Well said! I get you now.

You’re an intuitive feeler so just go practice with him and figure out how to mindfuck him as the picture unfolds.

Posted by: Carl · Sep 25, 09:39 AM · #
cody, if you practiced more regularly, you would be a petite brunette, and if you have daddy issues, well then, your IN with that guy! Cranky, what are you doing over here? Do you have nothing but time, woman? Bake me a pie!

And owl, this is somewhat more intellectual than I usually like to get—it makes my head hurt to think too hard. But I think we have some of the same leanings if you’ve read my Debbie Gibson post on the Wanker’s blog.

Posted by: laksmi · Sep 25, 01:07 PM · #
Laksmi,

“YOU’RE” is the word that you’re looking for.

And I do the full 6, thank you very much.

And I’ve practiced with the aforementioned guy.

And I still love Debbie/Deborah Gibson.

Posted by: cody · Sep 25, 11:20 PM · #
Okay, sorry in advance for my not-getting-it-ness. I am a small woman and have always been around big men, as is my preference. Are they more powerful than I? Well, if you take power to mean the ability of someone to knock me over. A teeny, tiny woman could easily have more power over me than a big man, because “knock-over” power is the one I value least in this world. I mean, it’s just physical.

All the concern over size seems to have some implication of force, of physical violence and rape. (Am I reading into it too much?) Does physical violence go with big-ness? I suppose one could say the potential is there. But, quite honestly, a small woman has the potential to have a gun in her purse. And small men? Are they less powerful than larger men?

So still I’m not getting it, I guess. Not sure why bigger and smaller are fraught. I’d take him to task for using “teacher” power much more quickly than I’d call him on the size thing.

Posted by: karen · Sep 27, 04:50 AM · #
Oh, I’m sorry to make a big deal out if it. I didn’t mean to. It was that initially small size and psychological weakness were the two qualities the profile wants, possibly because both put the seeker in a powerful position.

That is just a symbolically powerful position. I don’t think there is ANY issue of violence or physically sexual weirdness here at all. All of it is symbolic.

But even where physical force isn’t in play, body size shapes relationships. I’m guessing You and I like the asymmetry between ourselves and the men we like (tall is definitely sexy to me) for, um, root chakra-related reasons that are connected to power and sex. Symbolic or physical, a certain domination thing might be in play, right?

I don’t live with much awareness of my size. My personality isn’t small. But sometimes someone will come right up against me and say, My God you’re short! In the rub, size matters. :)

I do think that body hexis is one of the main (if mostly unconscious and mostly “unintentional”) ways that people communicate. And the ways we control our size and bearing, the tiny ways we use our limbs and faces and flexibility in the spine, are loaded with habituated meanings and messages that communicate things about power and sexuality and class and intelligence and emotion and intention and all that stuff. Between intimates especially, so much of the communication is in tiny uses of the body. I wonder how all the ways the Editor and I relate would change, for example, if I suddenly grew a foot.

Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 27, 05:19 AM · #
Um, I mean “grew a foot in height.”

Though I suppose that if I suddenly grew a foot out of my torso or something, that would change our relationship too.

Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 27, 05:21 AM · #
...small size and psychological weakness were the two qualities the profile wants, possibly because both put the seeker in a powerful position.

Might you give us the MySpace ID for this guy? I’m really curious to see it now..

Posted by: Carl · Sep 27, 07:41 AM · #
Ok. I think I have to add something to this discussion, because I haven�t revealed enough about where I�m coming from. It�s not sociology, even though that�s what my reply to Karen might suggest. If I�m going to share my opinions this intimately, I think I have to share something more about where those opinions are rooted.

It�s that, although I grew up in a wonderful family and have no idea whatsoever what it might be like to be abused in any way, I also grew up in a very, and I do mean very, strange situation that put me in close contact with hundreds of young women who had been physically abused (I�d like to blog more about this, because it is so weird and hard for me to understand, but until my parents retire I can�t without hurting them). There are a lot of people in our society who have this experience of abuse, more than you might guess, and the degree to which an abused person might be affected by even the slightest symbolic gesture is surprising once you observe it.

So, what is in the back of my mind when I speculate on how women might respond to this profile is these many women, and some boys, from my childhood. How it would make them feel. I know that is setting a high bar. And it doesn�t correlate to how a smartass, relatively strong and independent person like myself (and like most ashtangis) would respond.

As I have said before, ashtangis are apt to welcome tormentor-sages. At the same time, I�m positive that there are many women and some men among us who have certain vulnerabilities a teacher really would not want to activate. And I like to think that mysore rooms will be available to anyone who needs them as a therapeudic space.

C, see email.

Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 27, 08:19 AM · #
nice one, cody. :)

Posted by: laksmi · Sep 27, 12:50 PM · #
Okay, now I get it.

Posted by: karen · Sep 27, 10:15 PM · #
Interesting stuff. I am familiar with this character ever since he waddled into my afternoon class to substitute some forgotten weeks ago. Qweek-Way comes to mind. The heavily inked and pierced survivor from ‘Moby Dick’. I am sorry to say that I do not beleive this fellow warrants such extended commentary. Seems to be a rather miserable creature with all due respect. Unhappy,heavy,slightly out of shape like a college footballer weaning himself off steroids. Sadly he managed to project his low self-esteem out into the room like so much bad gas propelled from the rear quarters of an ornery old hippo. I thought the entire experience that day was quite amusing, entertaining even. Then again I am puckish and irreverant in the face of illegitimate authority and this guy defines well what that is.

The subject is only worthy in my opinion because it engages the authoritarian instincts in our culture which have bred so much mindless violence and xenophobia. I recall how many incurious idiots listened to bush-the-lesser in the early years and genuflected. People often will do almost anything to enroll themselves in victim consciousness. This seems to be an abiding theme of collective tribal instinct and long traditions of very bad parenting passed down thru the milleniums. Many,many of the early biblical tales are authoritarian,rigidly dualistic and openly abusive in nature. “and God told Issac … yada,yada,yada.

So don’t fret about Queek-Way. He is only there to mirror ones awareness or lack of awareness around the central issue of authority,surrender of power and the various psychological fetishes they imply. best to all, Tristan

Posted by: tristan · Sep 29, 03:27 AM · #
Hello Tristan, you mortal heartbreaker. Is it really as bad as all that? I have a feeling you’ve typecast this guy too harshly. If I had to walk into a foreign room and start adjusting people, I might turn into a mouse and then god knows what people would say about my self-esteem. I saw one of your classmates at the Co-op last night, and she said that his adjustments and energy are nice.

But then, maybe she’s not puckish like me and you. I agree about child-sacrifice (God said to Abraham, Tristan: Isaac was the would-be victim) and how good an illustration this is of the pitfalls of looking too hard for Elohim or Isvara or whatever.

Your comments remind me of something I’ve been thinking about—something with which I guess you’ll agree. A relationship that raises a lot of paradoxes for me is that between surrender and authority. I have a friend who shies away from the devotional aspects of practice because he is athiest and anti-authoritarian. But I don’t think devotion and surrender have to be at all connected to an idea of an authority or god.

While it is simpleminded to think that surrender is what you do to a teacher in the room, I think that it’s bad form to challenge any teacher in “her” room. Let her steer the ship. Teach her how to teach you.

I pretty much think the idea is to practice in a room where you have space to surrender to what is, to your own situation. To commit our own shit to the flames. Too much authority from the outside can either make us abdicate our own responsibility for our experience (my guru says…), or create a lot of conflict / static that makes real surrender impossible. I too am a puckish one, but put me in theta state (i.e. mysore mindset) and I’ll pretty much hang from the rafters if you say so.

But maybe you know this? If you are up the hill, chances are we’ve practiced together under Chas’ former enlightened Friday benevolence. I was the early one with the braids.

Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 29, 12:01 PM · #
Nice to hear from you owl-girl. I train all the time with my friend Charles and all of us are now getting put thru our paces by Madame S. which is a very good departure for me since my sense of alignment has always been suspect and she displays prominent OCD alignment syndrone. And I do know the girl in the pigtails.Yes ofcourse it was Abe and not Ike, I will sometimes slide into noun dislexyia, sorry. Now about this authority thing.

Surrender is essential. I beleive a rather sophisticated embodiment of this sadhna is in Tibetan vajrayana. The practicioner fixes concentration on the image of a god or goddess, merges with the image as one and then dissolves the visualized image. A kind of beautiful game where the self is checkmated. Object ‘A’ merges with object ‘B’. ‘B’ dissolves so it follows that the problematic ‘A’ dissolves as well. What I’m trying to say is that there is no fixed small self to surrender there is only the ‘surrendering’. It is immediate,spontaneous,effervescent and not a thing or an ‘experience’ or an act defined by a word or words. Joko Beck hits on this frequently in her journal “Nothing Special”. I mostly just contradict myself when I try.

This practice becomes difficult to do around very rigid egos that may be stuck in early childhood phases like a little boy trapped in a man’s body who is obsessed with phallic imagery. The teacher we are talking about comes to mind.

I guess my hostility and disdain erupts around illegitimate authority. Most organized religious authority is brazenly illegitimate,patriarchal and abusive. The mix includes schlock yoga teachers spouting new age nonsense, Catholic priests on the hustle, an entire range of notoriously randy Zen roshis,etc. but more on all this later, gotta go practice. love to all, tristan

Posted by: tristan · Sep 30, 02:12 AM · #
Tristan, old love, old stranger,

Here are the people it is ok to insult on my blog: racists, sexists, economists, people who love “the free market,” and Pitchfork Magazine.

Also, in special circumstances, the manager of my apartment building. And a yoga teacher in Canada who sends me reams of obscene ashtanga hate-mail.

Otherwise, no straight out insults of anybody. I want to reserve the credibility to discuss authorities if they do things that we ought to question, and this means I cannot join you in making fun of anyone�s interest in phallic imagery. Besides, I myself have a strong interest in such imagery. For example.

The Vajrayana technique you describe is awesome and I am very excited to read this journal you mention. Funny, I have a dear friend whose guru taught her some “special,” “secret” (!!) visualization technique after years of good old shamatha in a Vajrayana abbey. But she couldn�t tell me the details because I didn�t have the, er, security clearance. Isn�t that a good bit of authoritarianism (the dispensation) and anti-authoritarianism (the method itself)?

As for Madame S, good to hear she is letting you have it! I have to guess that Chas told you of my secret identity here, but this doesn�t get me closer to knowing who you are. I am ok with the not-knowing. How Zen of me. For now.

Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 30, 10:10 AM · #
Yo pigtails! Doc Johnny D. blew your cover a few days back so I came on to see what this was all about. A while ago I was the yogi who recommended you practice with the roving,cycle-swami D. and i am happy to hear that that has gone well for you.

Now this authority thing-a-ma-jig. A monk over at ZCLA once told me that a good reason there were so many dozens and dozens of koans in the Blue Cliff Records was that the higher ups needed the students to keep coming back to maintain a healthy membership. I’m sure he might of been a tad bitter when he said this but the point doesn’t go unnoted nevertheless. To get established in the Vaj practices you are supposed to be rubbing eyebrows with a guru Lama who gives them to you by way of ritual introduction. Its akin i think to what Eckart Tolle says about all the people who come back for his satsangs again and again. Its not in the words its the vibe from which the words emanate. Therein is the rub. You can access some snippets on YouTube of him and they are precious. He is very funny and elfin. A Norse tree knome.

Anyway sorry if I crossed boundaries with my character assasination. Easy to do over the Net but thats no excuse. Peace to all, may all those in the Middle East be free of suffering,war and aggression. tristan

Posted by: tristan · Oct 1, 01:24 AM · #
Word.

Yes, I have gotten my ass nicely nailed with the roving swami. Thank you for the exhortation. I will not follow him to the ends of the earth, but jury’s out on whether or not your zone is indeed the ends of the earth. Ha!

Eckhart T. is hilarious and wonderful. I feel like a fool listening to The Power of Now over and over in my car. I think you’re supposed to get it the first time. Maybe I’m addicted to his gentle, giggling insults of my tendency to live in the parallel universe of my disgustingly vivid imagination.

I can’t believe DJ-D blew my cover. Bad man.

Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 1, 01:38 AM · #
Nice synopsis Tristan. The guy’s MySpace page kinda suggest what you say. It’s also really interesting that you compared him to Queequeg, who seems to exist mainly as a counterpoint to established Christian mores. I think you may have been a little too generous in comparing him to Queequeg though because Q is definitely not inwardly meek.

Posted by: Carl · Oct 1, 03:07 AM · #
Carl the comparison I made is based in appearances only. Said teacher is heavily inked and wears two immense ivory ear rings and this summons the collective unconscious that Melville tapped into. The meeting of strange creatures from distant lands. Dickens,Conrad,Homer and Will all cycle thru this stuff continually. That tacky one-eyed cyclops in “Hercules Unchained” with Steve Reeves that made the B circuit at the drive-ins in Iowa when I was a kid is a mere continuation of the theme.

Owl-girl I read that you are working with ‘chicken pose’ in 3rd series. I don’t know but you might find youtube curious here. Look up ‘planche training’ or ‘tuck planche’ or ‘handstand presses’ and it could present some ideas for conditioning. My theory on it is presumptuos but semi-logical. Early 20th century Indian yoga was influenced by imperial British gymnastics. This is reflected in Iyengar’s writing and in the angles of many of the more advanced asanas like those in 3rd. I would even include the handstand in this. The problem is that what is excluded in ashtanga is all the strength training inherent in Western gymnastics. For women i think this is critical. Why? Because many women most naturally have a lower center of gravity being fleshier and broader in the hips and more narrow in shoulders than men. So strength conditioning for shoulders and abdomen become critical in my humble opinion. Anyway the youtube reference is a kick especially when it spills out into break dancing feeds and B-boy the black break dancer from France who is on another planet entirely.

peace in all, tristan

Posted by: tristan · Oct 1, 03:46 AM · #
I practiced with “likes-petite-brunettes-with-daddy-issues Ashtanga Man” for months. I’m neither petite nor brunette, and I’m too lazy to consider my daddy issues. However, I will weigh in on the discussion with two notions: Projection and provocation. I found him to be a good teacher who enjoys playing the provacateur (which of course could leads us back to his daddy-issue thingy).

Posted by: knl · Oct 13, 03:21 AM · #
Interesting! Thanks for the note.

Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 13, 10:23 AM · #