Rockjaw, Leadbelly, Renewal, Decay · 27 October 2010

We’re over Kansas. Next to an electrical storm that's either humungus or riding up just alongside the plane and keeping pace. And I’m crying, in the dark, watching the light bounce around that stormcloud and occasionally strike down.

Turbulence. The pilot is diving and climbing all over to avoid it, so my ears, eyes and larynx are popping and collapsing with the pressure. How annoying. And odd that my crying would sooth the squishy recesses in my head. Good tears are silky like an Epsom bath. For some reason, I keep picturing the little caves in the lee of Haystack Rock, sloshing full of saltwater on Oregon’s high tide.

Riiiight. So some part of me feels that my head is an awkward, wave-beaten rock? Well, there is sort of a rock in the right jowl, twisted up in trijiminal nerves. Weird to know it’s been there without my awareness for many years. I’d call it a demon, but nah. It’s more a dead zone, old trauma. Inside, it feels like nothing and looks like blackness. To my hands, it feels like gristle. In photographs, it tilts my head to the right when I smile.

Now that I notice the unconscious head-tilt, I wonder how far this jaw-rock’s gravitational pull extends. Is there a relationship with the callus I have to scallop from the outer tip of the right big toe? Why does my car drift starboard when I stop controlling the wheel? Does it respond to weather, like rheumatism or headaches? Where does it fit in the feedback loops of my go-to negative emotions: agitation, remoteness, anger, despair?

The jaw-rock itself, or at least the emotions in which it’s looped up, was pretty active this trip. The annual reunion feels gutted by decay. I wanted renewal: on the surface, that’s the point of coming. Part of me expects year after year of renewal without equal parts of decay.

The last death was the most beautiful. I caught it on the way to the airport. Each year, we swing through the remains of early Denver, drop in to the old train station (now REI-ified as sporting goods store), and look in on the “family” brewery. This is the sentimental little pub named for the old brick building’s first occupant, my great-great grandfather Adoph. He crated his ale and made a frontier fortune in that building. At Prohibition, he cashed out and a second Adoph (Mr. Coors) took over the market. In recent years, the pub that used to brew its own deteriorated in a cultural sense: traded its gleaming microbrew barrels for sports décor and Coors on tap. This year, there are no remains at all. The building is now divided: one side a "Healing Center"—grand opening signs and new age drawings in the windows. The other half is Señor Sol (Mister Sun), a restaurant dedicated, I gather, to burritos and manipura.

It was beautiful when the brewmaster's mansion, where my mom spent early Christmases, was converted to a real estate office. And it's perfect that the last sign of my alternate history as a trust-fund beer princess has repolarized... in to carb-bombs and acupuncture. Dialectally speaking, what better way to to disappear?

The other endings this year are relatively horrible. I won’t say much.

But goddammit, the third weekend in October is engineered for predictability. Structured in dumb routines made precious by repetition, sealed up with positive emotions mixed in tasteful amounts. The generations between Adolf and us were epically demented—I won’t exploit their drama—but with this suffering in our DNA, we chose to choose. Marx taught me that humans make our own history! Ashtanga taught me the value of repetitions I can trust.  In creating this annual reunion, we just touched up the old materials with some trust and celebration. Created space. Came and went at the right times.

Why does doing the same thing, but on purpose, create this experience of renewal? Even as it measures decay?

Thursday, I learned that the half-cousin who saved up the vacation from his 15-year job as a night bellhop downtown has disappeared somewhere called the Superstition Mountains. He had nobody. In a sense, he did the greatest possible thing: chose not to decay like his uncles, alone, feared, and highly-medicated. Wards of the state, most of that line. Instead he found an alchemy myth in the most literal rendition: a story about a secret gold mine, forgotten since frontier days. The newspaper reassembled his obsession from the maps, old books, and years of journals left in his room. My belly wretches at my grandfather’s images of foul play. [Later the Editor offers that J was, in a sense, a legitimate grail seeker: he had seen, only too graphically, his few other options for life and death. And he seemed to want to transcend himself somehow. Also, Hiram Bingham’s biographer tells me he pictures my cousin in Baja with 24-carat rocks in his socks.]

Nobody will talk about it. So much less will they talk about my grandmother's suffering. I honestly did not understand until now how much energy denial requires.

I fear putting words on this. There must be skills around dying—skills consonant with my way of living—but I don’t have them yet. Her cognition is frayed and body mangled in pain. There is a shared thing... this feeling that as we wedged in together on her chair she was very intentionally giving me strength. I mean brute strength. 

No joke: I could not truly, inter-personally, sense her grief, and her love for me, until I relaxed my body. Some kind of resistance sat between until she finally calmed me down to her wavelength. But at first, I sat only feeling her (indescribable) hand in mine for an hour. During that time, the was so patient and warm that I didn’t get flighty. I just understood she had something to say, and stayed interested in breaking the code. Or maybe I just got desperate to connect. In any case, I gave in. That's when things happened.

My body is usually halfway-tense from the pelvic floor to manipura. “Keep the bandhas on when you’re just walking around” starts out as a project. It works like this: Take the deep muscles and the subtle energies in them, bring them across the liminal chasm, and wake it all up. Do some reading, everything from Gray's Anatomy to Sivananda, and spend hundreds or thousands of hours in close proximity to extremely refined teachers and colleagues. Practice every day. Let time pass.

But for me, even as the awareness deepens a decade along the line, the gross-level muscle contractions I initially used to wake up mulabandha still have not learned to release. They are the new unconscious. Meanwhile, my feet are usually cold; I’m intense about most everything; I sexualize flowers and lighthouses; and it takes me sixteen hours to digest a good lunch.

I dunno. But this experience is too bizarre to describe in specifics, and too foreign to come from my imagination. She's still sitting there now, so I wonder how horrible it is to have everyone else refuse intimacy and tell her she is fine. How do their fears reverberate? Sitting up here, I still feel shifted internally, and also sad, frustrated, weirdly fine. And, because of her, relaxed enough to get my first respectable cry in years.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion

Return · 8 October 2010

First, what’s lingering about beauty and rats. Then something new. A quest.

A large rat dislocates its bones to enter houses through holes the size of quarters - the circumference of its skull. This is front page news at the Detroit Free Press. All mice and bats need is a centimeter-crack in your foundation, unhinging tiny shoulder by toothpick-rib on their ways inside. I bet they have the most supple spines.

At our house, the only creatures drawing inside are the silverfish and centipedes in the bathroom. They shudder and bolt each morning at 5 when I turn on the light. All spine, these creatures. There’s also the longest-leg spider ever, who just hangs upside-down like a bud, there in front of the mirror. Won’t move for anything. Do spiders sleep?

At the ashtanga co-op, upstairs from the hippie grocery, the spider plant hangs exactly the same way, sagging dendrites. The plant’s going pale with the rest of us, blanching against the dark of fall. But at least the plant-spiders shudder with the vroom of the heating units on the roof outside. All summer the AC in those metal boxes vibrated my visshudha, but the heat is a much lower frequency. Now, it rolls the practice floor with the depth of a ship’s motor, if that ship were as big as the grocery store. That is the heating system talking the language of muladhara, right up through my feet and inner thighs and in to the pelvic floor. Good timing for root concerns: it is the season to make feral love and mulch the roots, chop firewood, plug holes in the insulation.

Every Wednesday after practice I’m at the farmer’s market, ogling the increasingly colorful riches and composing intolerable blog posts, each just as boring as this one. Do I really want to write about this beauty, which outdoes itself week by week? Or even talk about the kale? There are four local varieties, plus a beautiful, pent-up monk from the Detroit Zen Center who is even more obsessed (with kale) than I am. These monks, in their scratchy winter robes and hipster wool hats, turn out to be a bunch of yoga-loving raw foodists—who knew you could do that in a Michigan winter?

You should see what ecstasies beset the yoga monks when they talk about kale. They bliss in to attention at mulabandha, then wind up to a creative passion at the thought of fondling those leaves, and let loose beyond that to eye-rolling reverie with the memory of the eating. I guess that’s what happens in a sect without statues… you worship your own life.

Or maybe you start a kale cult.

This week I got a dinosaur kale salad with spouted quinoa and an almond-agave dressing, kale chips like the ones Karen makes, plus dried kale seasoning with aminos and tumeric (so that I can season other foods to taste like kale). I paid for these items less than the price of their parts. But how to you calculate the labor cost of a zen monk?

Anyway, a story is beginning here. It was this time of year, in 2002, when a woman on her phone ran a stop sign in front of my apartment in Los Angeles. I was also there, right in that moment, under a street light completely obscured by jacaranda leaves, with my own head wrapped up in thoughts of the seminar I’d just departed – something on macroeconomic cycles in the world polity. There was a wide-eyed moment of slamming my palm in to a red metal surface, though I still forget the impact that left an owl-shaped imprint on her hood. What I do remember is the EMT telling me not to struggle against her IV because my neck was broken and any movement would paralyze me: a threat my traumatized organism took literally for the rest of the night as it lay motionless in the ER. The jaw, with a new chin-chip floating freely from the bone, took several more days to move again. My neck convulsed and unknown head-muscles seized for months, while the doctors doped me on muscle relaxants and steroids and finally, in a last move to keep me from surgery, told me to “take responsibility for this tension” and do some yoga.

Well, that worked nicely.

And now, a cycle of autumns later, the tension patterns are back as whiny ghosts. It may be only my consciousness of them that has come back: maybe as as I’ve opened the body from bottom to top the original block has been here all along. Owl Whisperer has created an awareness of a certain reactivity to feelings of weakness, and identification with the story of vibrant health; but the headache that gently, cruelly pulled me down not just last Saturday but Sunday too was sufficiently long and muscular get my attention. Truth is I'm losing more and more afternoons to this pattern.

So... I’m going to engage this granthi with the resources I’ve got: consciousness and context. The subjective piece is a commitment to investigating that which has been avoided. The context is the University of Michigan, an industrial-era behemoth that runs on the logic of the gross body.

I think this is going to be about institutions and energy, science and spirituality, granthis, kundalini, trauma cycles, mysticism, and code-switching. Working my way through one of the most massive medical edifices that exists, finding the inner edges where the behemoth’s consciousness is ahead of itself. And the edge in myself, which for now feels like layers of memory fused on to bone.

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Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , sound

Gone · 14 December 2009

Sitting in my old autoshop on Santa Monica Boulevard, while the Honda gets its spine adjusted and lymph cleansed. On the fiberglass chair beside me a pile of exams – final grades signed, sealed and delivered.

Yesterday my least woo-woo friend, Greta, hugged me on the Palisades and said Your drive across the country is going to be so cleansing.

This had not occurred to me. The cleansing quality of driving hundreds of miles through the should-be-Mexico desert, hundreds more through Texas hill country, then even more hundreds up the Mississippi silt corridor and in to the gorgeous, tragic hills of Tennessee, then another couple hundred along the jagged knife edge of Illinois, cutting right in to Michigan as the solstice turns over. All that territory passing through the windshield, from the front to the back of my mind, while I do Shinzenian “sight-flow” and see how the body works as it becomes ever more a sub-mechanism of the Honda.

It is cleansing, though not like a juice fast. It occurs to me to distinguish between gross body and subtle body layers, and suggest that it is easier and easier to contact the subtle if you just practice practice practice. And eventually, for long time practitioners, major body changes might be as likely to originate in the subtle as in the gross layer.

If you meditate long enough, just sitting there, the body goes to pieces. Excruciating disformations. But then(!), the old monk’s frame reorganizes from the inside. Shinzen’s students call it opening the central channel. Nonsensically tantric for a bunch of empiricists, but maybe all that quiet puts them in contact with an inner force.

The new openings in my body the past couple of years did not result from physical interventions. I don’t take much interest in muscle relaxants or stimulants (though Excedrin is excellent for a migraine), have stopped doing organ cleanses (though the gall bladder thing would be great if I had the time), and (though I could use major restructuring in the traps, scalenes and atlas/axis) don’t get bodywork. I don’t take breaks from practice or change up the programme. So… the patterns in the physical layer are routine: a seven-day cycle, within a moon cycle, within an annual cycle.

If my body opens, it’s because I let go of a stagnant emotion or stupid story, or dismantle a wall against some person or type of people.

The way I figured this out was doing Five Rhythms dance every week. Go in to some kind of theta state in that setting, and good things happen. One nervous system becomes integrated with all kinds of others. Negative emotions get really fluid and want to disintegrate.

Other ways the subtle body seems to get moved: gratitude/listening; allowing certain conflicts to erupt and settle, even if this is mortifying; being good to my parents without a fucking agenda; spending time with the Santa Barbara ashtangis, especially their teacher; sitting Vipassana retreat; meditating on the body for a long damn time, until it drops away; using sociology to see the ways humans war against each other with the use of mental categories and identites.

The hard sell is that doing this shit improves my backbends. On the level of vanity, it works as “subtle body massage” (though who knows if it would still work if I were doing it with the intention of getting better backbends). In any case, the kundalini gulag in LA has figured out the effectiveness of subtle body intervention. (And I’m surprised this is not of interest in the blogosphere—there’s no reason that the internet should confine us to gross body awareness of practice). In certain parts of Cali, it’s just as likely that you’ll go to an aura reader or a chakra healer, rather than taking a salt bath or getting a massage, in order to open the body. Recognizing that the subtle body is real and totally changeable doesn’t mean you’re all spiritual and shit, but it is fascinating and rewarding.

Anyway. This morning I woke up late after an intense bedtime phone talk and realized/decided that the sad is done processed. The way my grandma, who came of age in the Iowa dust bowl and moved west after her husband survived the war, would say done finished.

Went to practice late, very tired from whatever processing I’d done in my sleep, but so much lighter in spirit. Realized/decided that fear of kicking my feet up off the earth in Viparita Chakrasana was the exact same stuff as this fear of picking up and leaving home that I carried for more than a year. And, today, by way of this noticing and deciding, it was true that the block was no longer there. (This was also true because day by day I have built the muscles and opened the spine, and gone right to this edge and looked at it day by day as well—all of this is in the context of rote practice.)

Well holy shit. Sealed the deal by going through the motions of Viparita Chakrasana, for the first time. And then, immediately, did it again a second time, and a third. OMG !  !  !  Ok then.

Bridges of sinew, waters of grief: this fear has gone.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception

Having a Body · 12 November 2009

Things were never the same after the long weekend at Cabinas Ramirez—the $8 a night shacks on the shores of Manuel Antonio. Still the most tranquil cove I’ve swum in, but there was something just not right in the monkey swamp we crossed in reef sandals and cut-offs. A few weeks later I finally went to the student clinic at the University of Costa Rica to have someone look at the scaly, blotchy entity that had grown over a toe and the side of my right foot and was starting to inch up the outer calf. I didn’t think much of it: healthcare is free and direct in the country, even for foreign exchange students, and whatever pastillas they gave me more or less did the trick. With an exception… three toenails were never the same again.

That was 14 years ago, and ever since I’ve more or less ignored the situation. When toe-gazing became something I did intently, in a “self-studying” mood, for hours each day, I was practicing at Yogaworks—where some ashtanginis sport manipedis, get bodywork for every tweak, hail adjustments, apply essential oil before class, and wear very cute expensive clothing. At the time, I saw these as strategies for avoiding the body as it is.

So it seemed important to be overtly unfashionable there. (Of all the places my aesthetic resistance, borne of Pacific Northwest indie rock and dubitable thrift store fashion sense, would not be understood.) Anyway, in addition to resurrecting my gym clothing from junior high (my mom never throws anything out), part of me, in that setting, began to appreciate those old long-decayed toenails. I cut them to the would-be quick and just acted like they were as precious as any pedicure.

But after a few years in that scene I left. Because even though the physical instruction there was very helpful, the obsession with form started to feel not just distracting but self-punishing. I just needed a place I could tap some deeper mental states and learn about loving community. Loosening up to that kind of supported practice generated a lighter attitude to having a body, and among other things I started painting my toenails pale pink—and later bright red—on Saturday nights.

Underneath the polish, the fungus grew like, well, fungus. I didn’t really notice until a couple of months ago when someone lovingly called my pedicures “patriarchal” and I stripped it all off in curiosity. Oh, holy! There was the warped and mushy, not unscented, yellow decay of nastiness.

I felt a kind of pride that my organism could generate something so putrid all by itself, and thought of calling people who have asked me to pose for yoga pictures to say I was available for some FBH shots. I thought of the yogis in the charnel grounds, meditating on decay, and realized that the fungus was actually a resilient life form that I might contemplate in awe. Surely a tool for realization.

Ummm. That got me about a week before committed inquisition and purgation set in.

What are you, vile creature; and who gives you the right to squat on my feet?

For the first time, I looked online to see what the rest of the world is doing about these things. And wow. There are a lot of crazy methods out there.

It turns out that there are several varieties of toenail fungus: I suppose whatever I had was relatively savage, given its origin and longevity, so maybe what works to kill it would be easily effective for domestic varieties. Hard to say.

On the internet, there are people who recommend immersing the affected member in a solution of hydrogen peroxide and bleach. Then follow up by covering everything in vaseline. Great formula for a chemical burn there. Said burn is guaranteed to make previously fungal toenails look healthy by comparison, but can’t be good for the bloodstream or one’s organism in general. Too painful.

There’s also a lot of discussion online about prescription and over the counter drugs taken by mouth. Sounds like a great way to use the digestive system to screw the liver while only distally accessing the ends of the toes. Too inefficient, not to mention expensive.

But then there are some more benign home remedies: I started experimenting and settled on a hybrid approach. It’s just my folk concoction of DIY, OTC and the placebo effect, but, weirdly, it works.

It’s a four-fold method. First, before I started, I filed the whole sorry fungified nails clear off, everything, and scrubbed the whole sorry mess in Dr. Bronner’s. That made everything even uglier, but seemed obviously helpful. In subsequent weeks, if any toenail appeared that was not fresh, tender and baby-pink, I hit it again with the emery board and the Bronner’s.

Second, I picked up some tea tree oil for a couple of dollars at Trader Joes. After practice and after work, I use a Q-Tip to cover all three nails with the stuff. I do wonder if I smell of that barky antiseptic now everywhere I go, but on the rare occasion it gets too pungent for me I just cover it with a little Scent of Samadhi—the pricey perfume powder distilled from the urin of cave saddhus. (You think I’m kidding about that, but Scent of Samadhi is actually a New Age favorite around here, and I quite like it. Those saddhus probably drank their pee several times over before making it in to perfume. I can only hope that my own waste materials will one day be so sublime.)

Third, something weird. At night I lay a little Vic’s Vapo Rub (who knew it still existed?) right in to the nail bed and cover it with band-aids until morning.

Fourth, naturally, is the woo-woo component. I don’t know. Any attitude might work here. Personally, I just put some happy affection on the new little toenails. I do not envision them being fully grown and perfect; and I don’t think bad thoughts at the old fungus. I just sort of tell the new little growths that they are very sweet and adorable and welcome. Kind of how I would talk to kittens. Only, I do this silently in my head right before practice. And, ok, sometimes also at night.

I thought about growing new toenails quasi-scientifically, but there was the problem of having four treatments and only three toes. Also I didn’t have the patience to leave one of the three as a control-toe and work out the other treatments one by one. Furthermore, how does one administer the woo-woo treatment to one toe while ensuring others are not affected? Woo-woo is messy. Not good science.

Bottom line: toenail fungus did not help me stick it to the man when I practiced at Yogaworks. Nope. Not an effective political statement. Also: having a body is gross. And yet, happily, toenails do not have to look like death. At least not for now.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , power of suggestion , science

Sex, Pie & Parkour · 9 June 2009

From what I can see, the first layer of my subconscious is about as complex as an episode of the Tele-tubbies. There was the past life regression guy who told me that what’s in there is recollections of my previous incarnation as an alienated medieval priestess who deplores religion, wears blue and silver robes, and walks around in minimalist cathedrals under really nice skylights. But I think he was sucking up, as they tend to do in he divination profession. In truth, what’s in there seems to be a whole lot of brightly colored objects that make me drool.

I’ve been trying to initiate lucid dreams from that place. Rather than fading in teleport-style from a half-dream, my idea is to recognize from within a deep, unshakeable dream that I am in fact asleep and therefore can mold that universe at will. Put a little will back in to the state of surrender, yes.

This is Stephen LaBerge’s method, which I’ve been loosely following since the grown-up acid trip that is a month in the Mysore social scene. It’s not that Candyland is a problem for me or (like many who are compelled to learn lucid dreaming) that I have demons who chase me at night. It’s just that I want to see what is beyond Candyland, and after that I want to with lucidity make all the dreams just STOP so I can find out if Patanjali’s version of Samadhi (conscious, dreamless sleep, right?) is really all that great. Is dreamed stream-entry still stream-entry?

After that, if dream-Samadhi happened to get boring, I’d just go back to Candyland and play. Hmmm… sex or pie? Every unenlightened lucid dreamer’s dilemma.

Or parkour.

But that’s the thing, at the moment. Most nights lately my dream-mind doesn’t understand the notion of “separate self” and thus won’t let me have a body. I’m not even a character in my own dreams, which is great in the moment if a little confusing in the morning. (Which I supposed is what you say after a rave, too.) So: mostly it’s just a disembodied float through Candyland. I suspect it’s not that I’m all merged with the world soul in there. More like I’m not even separated from the primordial ooze. (PTF alert, as with any and every spiritualization of lizard-brain.)

Last night it was purple Mike ‘n’ Ikes floating over a waterfall. They were dissolving in the water and nourishing the grass in a vast green valley bordered on the north by steep snowy mountains. Everything was in a warm golden glow.

Later a wolly mammoth wandered out from an opening in the mountains, swaying down in to the meadow where he ate chewy orange pumpkins whole, storing them in his giant hamster-esque cheeks. There was a lot of excitement about the mammoth.

Later, delightfully, more mammoths showed up and there were pumpkins everywhere. They kept swaying their big hairy heads back and forth like Stevie Wonder.

Then there was a flying diplodocus dinosaur, with a hot-air-balloon-like fire mechanism in its butt. The butt-fire would periodically ignite, sounding off like an air balloon on the rise. The diplo would float off, sort of like the inebriated snake in the old animated version of Robin Hood.

Apparently I got very excited about the flying dinosaur and started yammering about it in my sleep. I told the Editor the creature was floating and using its webbed feet to move through the air.

So go fly with him.

But I don’t have a body…

It doesn’t matter. Just fly.

But I need to have a body and I can’t find it. I’m trying to see my hands… (becoming upset)… I can’t find my body!

The Editor tired of my yammering and left. Meanwhile, back in the dream I was the dinosaur (I was also everything else, including especially the sky), but was also trying to manifest my human body. Why I wasn’t content to be a lucid dinosaur and fly around in that body I don’t know… maybe I didn’t like the fire-butt mechanism and wanted better powers before I went fully lucid. At least that was the excuse I was making in the dream. Maybe I was stalling.

So I struggled to manifest a body, growing an appendaged human on the back of the floating diplo. I think the strategy was to grow a dinosaur-human hybrid beast, then inhabit the human part and separate it from the dinosaur. But before that could happen, I woke up because my back was hurting as if someone was sitting atop me digging in her heels. In the morning I was scratched up between my shoulder blades…. It seems that floating-dinosaur-owl was trying to get nascent-human-owl off her back.

Which reminds me. There were also three monkeys; and they were wearing smooth golden hats. They were sitting on the side of the mountain, tilting their heads to the side and looking out at everything in a quizzical way. What do the monkeys know?

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Categories: arbitrage , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion

Stealth Shala · 5 May 2009

It works like this. Mail the director 10 days in advance, asking for permission to drop in and directions to the shala. When he does not respond for four days, ask a student of his—who is also a friend of yours—to put in a word for you. Day five: send another email. Day six, find out a client of yours has been friends with the elusive director since elementary school and has just written to him to share the news that you are her teacher. Day seven: get a cell number and call him. When he answers and immediately hangs up on you, call back. When he answers again, cut in and keep him on the line, have a great conversation. Day nine: receive a .pdf map of the street corner where the unmarked building is located, and where to find the unlocked back door, where you should enter not before 5:00 but not after 6:00. A “before-hours joint.”

Day of: drive a concatenation of dark, empty freeways and city streets, right past the destination. Circle back, spot a full lot in this lower-middle-class commercial zone and pull in. Notice this place used to be an auto repair place or small factory. Notice the non- motor-city parking stock of Hummers, BMWs, a Volvo, plus several beater sedans and pickps; take the very last spot with your rented silver mazda (note: for a reconnaissance mission, do not rent a vehicle with a turning radius the width of three lanes of traffic).

Go to the back, find the metal door with the numerical lock and the small red Ganesh that one might mistaken for a painted rose. Appreciate the crisp hat-and-scarf kind of morning (even though it's already May). Inside, feel the warms. See sneakers and Ugg variations orderly along the walls, billowing silk alongside changing rooms, two graceful women taking your hand between strong, very soft palms to ensure everything’s in order with you and you know you’re at home.

In the dark, hear that a wood stove roars at the end of the short hall leading down to two barely-lit rooms—one for practice and one equally large for finishing—which will brighten as the sun comes in the old skylights. Next to the stove, glance an old porcelain clawfoot tub full of dry, yellow corn kernels, with a foot-long rough wooden scoop lying in the bottom. Art? Something referring to grist for the mill?

And then practice. Appreciate the darkness, good breath, silence, the tall teacher who laughs at my backbends and has nothing to prove to either the two brand-new students, me, or the many everyday people. Afterwards make some laidback talk on random topics—jewelry-making, convection systems, Colorado—sitting on the church pews by the stove. Find out the tub of corn is just a good clean heatsource. And take this little kernel he tosses at your feet: “There are some conscious pockets around here. They're hiding. But something is going on.”

 

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion

Fertilizer · 16 April 2009

It’s said that yoga—the practices and mind maps of the Ganges shamen and the northern cave recluses, and later the loinclothed attaches’ of Karnatakan princes—slows the aging process. If this were true, by what mechanism would it work? Though processes that increase the heart rate, speed breathing and generally put stress on the body? Or through processes that subsequently slow dooooooown body functions and remove stress from the system?

If one wanted the muscles to become longer, more optimally functional, more able to relax when not working, and ultimately more open... would the way to achieve that be by force? With pushing and pulling? Or... would an element of conscious, focused, skillful  l e t t i n g    g o  probably need to be involved?

How long do you have to stand on your head before the buzz sets in? Three minutes upside down? Maybe five? How long does it take for the chemical-metabolic-systemic-whatever switchover to initiate in conscious relaxation? Did you know that conscious relaxation was a chemical process?

(Maybe that's a little sexier than go home take rest.)

(Conveniently, playing dead is easier than standing on your head.)

I can take rest in form, but not always in content. A month of really easy living helped, but things are different here of course.

The body is so chatty when I lie down. Itchy toes, out of kilter shoulder blades, uneven hands, all chatting up a storm for the first minute or two I lie there. Fine. Watch the body talk.

The kundalini and white tantra people do their crazy shaman rites on wool blankets because they believe that fiber alone insulates you from the strong energy of the earth. Well, this week I’ve been getting closer to the earth at the end, covering head to toe in an old wool blanket, cutting off from the room around me and making like fertilizer. The wool is heavy and dark, a little mulchy, and holds down the heat of my body. I imagine it’s the first layer of earth on the coffin, relax the tongue because Anna Wise seems to be on to something, and meditate on the boundary between the teeth and the jawbone until I’m out.

Coincidentally... I’m closer to acknowledging that this practice is beautiful. That it leads sometimes to grace and poetry.

A graduate program director has asked me to do yoga intervention for a group of art students who are collectively freaking out as they bring their MfA theses to completion. Yoga for art’s sake, for the sake of flow, for contacting the higher creative intelligence and not letting the jitters undermine artistic purpose. He can cover 60% my usual fee and that is all good—I know a little something about the special grad student rate. So yes; this is a cause I can support. But I need to be a focused, eeeeasy, high integrity presence myself in order to do them any good.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , power of suggestion

Security Camera · 22 February 2009

Practice with others, no teacher. What I'm doing.

I sense, again and again, that practice brings together three streams, known variously as:

Energy---Method---Community,

The Truth---The Way---The Life,

Buddha---Dharma---Sangha,

&c.

The first--some kind of God-energy, a sovereign Spirit--is what we map on to the person in the teacher or therapist role. Easily. But where do you source a sense of consciousness… a seer… the receptacle of all-knowing… when there is no teacher to fill the space?

Right now we are insourcing the seer. Going without a teacher is incredibly sweet, everyone tapping self-reliance they’d forgotten is there, strengthening it, and in the weaker moments keeping it together for the team if not oneself. Sometimes it’s easier to stay on target if you feel you’re doing it for the benefit of others. Some people who have less understanding of the practice don’t even show up to join us because there’s no teacher to care for them, and that’s actually a benfit to us.

Everything is stiller than ever. The energy is not even that of witness-cultivation (which you seen in the quieter practitioners in a sort of chatty room) so much as just being there and letting it be enough. Of dropping the flight away from it just being exactly like this, and finding joy in the thisness. Without a teacher but with high stakes conspiration and strong fidelity to a taken-for-granted method, the possibility of nondual states in practice seems much more obvious to me. This can be easy, with simple strong support.

Afterwards, the other day, I remembered the bitter existentialist line from Saramago…

How often have we shown ourselves as we really are, and yet we need not have bothered, there was no one there to notice...

Ah the resentment of the baby atheist, the anger of the lonely young post-Christian! Poor child, realizing your own end-in-yourself. We in the room are so over it.

That said, it never hurts to throw a security camera up in the rafters even when it’s not rolling tape. There’s some part of us together that turns on even to the imagined dialogue with some vaguely-felt seer in the machine. A dialogue that wants to collapse in to mutual participation, and does so more easily because the fact that the camera (or statue, or photograph) is lifeless is perfectly known and no kind of secret.

The hanging SKPJ on the wall and lighting the candles to Ganesha. So here we are surface-level atheists, post-projectionists; but there’s still an ongoing participation in that which cannot be discussed. And some part of experience that lights up even in deeper in theta state if the unspeakable is mirrored back in ritual. Let the ineffable try to take form as photo or statue or security camera—it’s always a lost cause but the incompleteness of trying still creates a resonance, makes us all a little stiller, sometimes even makes it feel that we’re held by something. In a suspension. Weirdly ambulant in time and space by the grace of whatever.

I had forgotten about that for some years, during bitter post-Christian teenagerdom and the activist and grad school years of seeing it all as just atoms and the void. It’s nice to recover the security blanket. Even if now it’s just a tiny thread not backed by anything at all, it still feels warm.

One of the least ritualist, most self-reliant, among us is Lily, a clockwork-methodical practitioner who has her "own interpretation of practice.” She has no interest in some larger subculture around ashtanga, in anything at all religious or philosophical, and no need to participate in owl-typical what’s-it-all-about inquiries. The other morning as we began and found SKPJ out of order she stamped a foot ruefully and said,

Listen I don’t care if it’s a pain in the ass to put it up I’ve got to have the damn picture. I can’t do it without the picture.

Brilliant. She cracked me up.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , spirituality

Viparita Chakrasana, &c. · 28 January 2009

John 5:8

And Jesus said, Arise, take up thy mat, and walk.

Luke 7:22

Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk… the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.

Gautama Buddha

A man on his journey comes across a vast river. No boat goes to the other side, nor is there a bridge for crossing over. He then gathers grass, wood, branches and leaves to make a raft, and crosses the river with the help of the raft. After crossing safety, he leaves the raft at the shore and goes on his way. In just the same way, I have taught the Dhamma similar to a raft; it is for crossing over, not for getting hold of.

Ashtanga 3:2

And the ashtangis said, cast off thy crutches and practice. Hast ye so little faith in method? Doest thou fear the way so much thou wouldst flee thy breath and thy temple of the holy of holies, binding them in Hugger Mugger straps and beating them back with foam blocks? Doest thou love thy crutch more than thine body on the breath? More than the great river of I Am? The moment the crutch hast fulfilled its purpose, cast it down, that it take form of its master and slither back unto the rocks. O come ye and enter the church of flow.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion

What (0v0) is About · 12 August 2008

Three days of search phrases. For Ash.

academia karma yoga
(punhunter)

orgasm mindfulness, cult of yoga
I want to be a sheep or a goat (or) I just want to be a sheep
How do born agains view yoga? (christianity intellectually impoverished)

Ashtanga yoga shut up sticker
(anusara deceptive)
theoretical archaeology group shit days and crazy nights 

AYSF anything you say: ruthless compassion chogyam trungpa
(eating cheez its makes me fat)
yoga false self platform step down (!)

beta state ego;
naked yoga;

ashtanga is dangerous
(Does the chest ache during growing pains?)
whipped after ashtanga

dith pran tilted arc; durkheim collective effervescence; hormiguita dylan Present absence; Owl departed human form

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Categories: power of suggestion

Is ashtanga like bad sex? · 3 June 2008

Ok, tempering the ashtangelism….  

People who dance often tell me the practice makes them feel beautiful.

People who practice ashtanga often tell me the practice makes them feel fat.

The median dancer is 20 years older and 40 pounds heavier than the median ashtangi. 

Other differences in form, state of awareness, and possibilities for expanding boundaries of “self”:

Ashtanga: lotus binds; pick-ups; strong boundaries around individual experience.

Culture of “working on myself.”

Mental states: advanced practitioners (regardless of place in the series) cultivate trance and practice meditative contemplation through tristana, while it’s key for earlier students to focus on the physical forms. Energetic thread is lost when posture takes over and movement stops. Weak correlation between mental state and physical posture because you can’t really deduce mental state from posture.

Dance: free form; spontaneous; weak boundaries around individual experience. 

Culture of deep introspection, acceptance, self expression.

Mental states: most people pretty instantly go in to trance with the pulsing rhythm and the energy of a large, sophisticated group. It seems like they go into either a gut-level, emotion-rich undifferentiated consciousness (a sort of primal state?) or a sophisticated, contemplative state that feels a lot like the open-inquiry stages of vipassana. If they stop moving, it may mean they’re “not feeling it” or that they’re in a trance state in which stillness brings even more depth than motion.

Does ashtanga make one feel fat while dance makes one feel beautiful, regardless of actual body-looks? What’s up with this? If good sex is partner-merging and bad sex is body-critical and self-conscious, what does that make ashtanga?

Also…

What’s the best place for the “self” within an altered state—front and center or “forgotten”?

If you experience emotion as “not mine” and “not-me” in dance, does that limit the possibilities for it to be a “transformative” thing during which you process your own shit and finally, personally, letting it go?

Does ashtanga give you less of an escape from difficulties of transforming the psycho-emotional stuff in your own body… is it more difficult in this respect than other embodied practice? More transformative?

Why don't ashtangis really dance?

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , spirituality

"Decatur memos" · 22 April 2008

The first year, the question in play was What is this mental state am I experiencing every day?

I was all interested in neuro-linguistic programming from Milton Erickson through Bandler and Grinder to the self-help guy Tony Whateveritis. That was all about suggestibility and the idea that there was a sub-conscious mind. (Side note: the first day I practiced with my teacher and he said “just establishing rapport…” I knew he was hip to the NLP and probably an eclectic like myself… which of course turned out to be exactly right.)

In that line were yoga nidra of course, the intriguing Edgar Cayce, a lot of dimestore self-hypnosis New Age nonsense and cheap evolutionary theory á la Robert Anton Wilson, and finally a mysterious, ancient cassette tape I had mailed in from a distant archive like a character in Umberto Eco. On it a woman called Jasmine Riddle intoned the most potent yoga nidra sequence I’ve ever found, but I can’t tell you what’s in it because I never got past the second minute without my mind shutting off. It would return 50 minutes later, Ms. Riddle whispering to me to wake up. I guess I could try to crack her code but I don’t want to re-request the thing through ILL because my reputation with the university library is already sketchy (seriously).

At the same time, that first year, I was starting to explore Vipassana. Which, at first (shamatha practice) was all about concentration and operated on a simpler idea of the mind than the hypnosis people. For Vipassana, for a practical purposes the mind was just the house of “attachments” and “suffering.”

Together, the NLP and the Vipassana led to a relational question (usually the best kind question): what is the relationship of meditation and hypnosis? (And: which framework is better for mapping my experience, or do I need both?)

The Vipassana people will tell you meditation is not the same as hypnosis. Not the same! Of course they will say that: if it were the same, you could get the method without the metaphysics (the metaphysics being the belief system anchored in the Four Noble Truths, though they will also tell you that this is not a theory but a fact revealed by looking inside, like Socrates supposedly revealed geometry to the boy in the Meno). Over time I found a few very good answers from Buddhist scholars for why meditation and hypnosis are different (along with a lot of answers that made me suspicious), but none of the answers were so good that I remember them.

So now I am concluding the fourth year, and I am still not sure—experientially—what is the relationship of meditation to hypnosis. But what is different now is that I trust myself more as a first-order experiencer and when applicable a second-order witness of that experience. And, I’m a lot more interested in the tones, textures, and subtleties of altered states, and in the meaningfulness that seems to arise out of them after the fact. Also, there is the whole phenomenon of other minds (not the so-called "problem of other minds," thank you), and the ways groups actually share and collectively deepen altered states.

Outside/objective approaches would just quantify things: measure brain activity and be done with it. What if they found that the elecrtromagnetic map of asana (which I experience as meditation ranging from light to deep) is the same as chanting (which I experience as full-on hypnosis)? Would having it quantified externally as 1=1 answer the question?

Actually, yes. And no.

The problem with the subjective side is that once I’m in an altered state I’m not much fit to gather data. And since I love altered states my reflections on them are colored with the emotions of wonderment and joy that I associate with them after the fact.

Is there some kind of meditative-hypnotic spectrum that cannot be reduced to an electroencephalograph readout? Inside, there are other spectra in play:

-witnessing/nondual

-passive/active

-receptive/one-pointed

and others.

Just to mix it up, I practiced this morning with the Gayatri Mantra droning over and over in the background. Swaying right out of my body just standing up, but sharp and focused for the rest of it. It was pretty strange and delicious. Chocolate with chili powder.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Downshifting · 21 April 2008

Time stops in Ojai when the moon is full. I took my laptop and forgot to open it, my cell and was heedless of it. Early yesterday I looked at a clock and saw it was 3, shocked by the horrible existence of time, and reset my ticker to come home. Too relaxed to plan the coming day, or to regret the weekend’s complete unproductiveness. That depth of relaxation is amazing outside of time, and for now only available under that condition.

I’m reminded of a letter I wrote to my uncle and aunt when I was 19 and outside the US for the first significant duration. “The 18-year-old knots are falling out of my kidneys….” I’ve been embarrassed by that because it so exposes my motives for studying in Costa Rica: crass escapism. I projected all my fantasies about “freedom” and “finding myself” on to a country (of all things) because 876 miles away from my folks had not been enough to make them leave me alone. That is some serious imperialist escapism. But hey, I grew up a little that year, became somewhat less the ignorant and unconsciously superior American, and in the process realized that I had something like low back tension.

Anyway... why is it still true that I require a literal shift in time and place in order to relax fully? 

I’ve conditioned myself to downshift to a specific mental state for practice. So many resources for this—all the internal practices and external rituals which surround ashtanga and make it not only familiar but juicy. Plus, I tend to collect arbitrary environmental cues that remind me about my mind and slow it way down. This is all another conversation.

It is pretty great to be able to hypnotize yourself more or less automatically. But while getting in to surya state is relatively easy,  I'm less equipped for dialing down even deeper to let it all go. Lying there this morning I used an oblique strategy to relax the jaw: Body, I said, relax the teeth.

Brilliant. Who knew that tracing the boundary between the root of the eye teeth and the palate could knock you out? So here is one deep relaxation practice, ok. But I wonder if I could go there on another day, when time and the practicalities of productive life are closer at hand. And I'm not sure that I should, given I need and want to live intensely out here on the academic dancefloor and don't fool myself that this is possible in anything near delta state. Unless I can teach myself to shift in and out with a clean automaticity. Mmmm...

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion

The Return of the Inapprpriate Yoga Guy · 3 April 2008

Sheesh. There’s sexual energy that sees itself… and sexual energy that is just desperate to be seen. 

Should be no surprise that an informal collection of teachers (of both sexes) counsel each other on the gender biases that we have inherited from past generations of yoga asana tradition. How to engage this legacy while acknowledging and gracefully altering that aspect? Important discussions, and ones which don’t quite need to have their energy drained away by continual public re-explanation that yes, folks, the tradition has been sexist. (This discussion good because of how easy it is to re-gender yoga, reactively, with an angular, uber-disciplined harsh-girl vibe... YJYW culture, with its ballet undertones, might hold the seeds of that.)

Some participants in that conversation about gender have made a commitment not to study with teachers who throw their sexual energy around a classroom. It’s not like it’s any secret who these teachers are. Some of them get famous because they are so very sexy. I don’t have a policy or go around investigating teachers' sexualities, but I understand the impulse to be mindful about this because, obviously, a teacher has access to what Steve calls your inner sanctum. Your "psyche" or (whatever you call the inner world of motivation and desire) is available to a teacher’s subtlest suggestions when you practice, so why expose it to someone whose sexuality/ creative energy is adolescent, dominating, or attention-hoarding? That’s sort of the definition of uncontained— wasted— energy.

If you find yourself doing your hair for yoga, tanning for your practice outfits, or getting nervous stomach… what’s that about? Is it coming from you, or are you responding to something?

How do you know if someone’s not self-possessed sexually? Well, there are the painfully obvious indicators. If they constantly, tenderly adjust students' hair (my favorite), or gingerly align waistbands, or breathe on you heavily, or seek out a lot of charged eye contact… well… give me a break. How tacky do you want your practice to get? Why not practice with someone who is more refined and alchemically sweet?

There is a part of us who wants to go back for the blatant mind sex (Oh yeah! Fun! They keep me mindful! They put me in an “altered state”!), and a part of us that sees this behavior for what it is. Adolescent.

Probably better for yoga to recognize it even if it doesn't recognize itself.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , power of suggestion , self-deception

Obliquity · 25 March 2008

● The old scorpio archetype is one I don’t mind measuring up against my personality as a kind of interpretive tool. There’s a freaky lot of resonance in that collection of traits. I’m less excited about the things said about the Aries moon, but the alpha debate geek in me lives on despite my fantasies that she’s just some adolescent growing pain.

● Nothing brings her out like sparring with the Daily Miltonian, which I did a little bit yesterday out of public view. Phew.

● Turns out one thing we can agree on is the way that boy-clubby creative communities—a piece of Americana all the way back beyond the Beats—make us both want to run for the fringes even as we recognize they have a kind of special creative greenhousiness.

● Which reminds me that one boy-centric orbit I romanticize and draw on is the whole decades-old Whole Earth Catalog / TED / Long Now Foundation Bay Area sensibility. Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Kevin Kelly, those guys. Can’t help it. Brian and his friends (other groups of them too, I guess) knock me out.

● All of which reminds me of the two suggestions that seem to be shaping my thoughts about blogging recently.

● One a blog post from Kelly: short is in. Nice! [via Rex.]

● The other Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards. A kind of chance-embracing, post-divinatory pack of trump cards meant for drawing on when you feel like making a fast creative change of tempo.

● Drew a card the other day, and it said:

● Ok. And then today the card said:

LOOK CLOSELY AT THE MOST EMBARRASSING DETAILS AND AMPLIFY THEM.

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Categories: arbitrage , power of suggestion

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)         Comment [17]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , power of suggestion , self-deception

Control, Spokes, Scandalon, Obnoxious, Blog · 26 February 2008

Said to me in a ladies room: "I found your blog and would have never guessed you were such a tweaker! Look at that! You and your random expletives! If you were a man, I'd totally date you. You're a crazy girl."

The other night I re-read something written in my private journal back in December. For those who grok the tweak. Here.

ooO........................................V..........................................Ooo 

I wonder if I could pull it off—some sort of practice of writing- from- behind- the- veil.

I say and I say and I say that I’m going to use the owlspace to write less analytically. And then it’s back to conclusions and punchlines and figuring-it-out mind. One trick monkey. Always got to narrow it right down to a sharp little point.

Mmmm. But one-pointedness is for non-thinking. Not for thinking!

My teacher, these past months, he spoke to me in free- association. We’d freewheel for hours and see where it went. It’s perfect for me, the unstructured structure. Conversation is only fun, really, with those open to tangents and awake enough to hold open eight topical lines… and, in the end, speak together their spoked connections. Simultaneous limbs….

Is there a subconscious, unconscious, darkside, whatever? Just look at the modernism of that notion—the old school dualism. Yet… anymore I am sold. Because what else are dreams, and the place lost details go, and the lines of poems or films or scripture that lodge a little while in the mind? Where do superstitions and space aliens live?

With the Jungians I think of a shadow, though not to say it’s all dark as in devious. More like dark as in harder to see.

Freewriting can get you there sometimes. If you don’t get all anal and weird about your process (as science has trained me, so intensely, to be).

Wm Gibson—who writes from his subconscious with some genius—said something about his first chapters, which tend to be opaque and aesthetically not-quite-right. First chapters are a kind of gate he finds himself setting out at the start. The little obstacle helps him find his readers--and encourages people who shouldn't actually be reading to put him back on the shelf.

How obnoxious of him.

Nice!!!!!

Does all of that make sense? I wonder how long I could continue in the back seat without freaking out and taking control back from the Blog. (The scientists would not approve of all this...)

Blog is in control.
Blob is in control.
Glob is in control.
"God" is in control.

As if.

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Categories: beta state , evolution , power of suggestion

Present Absence · 6 February 2008

Monday in practice, not seeing it coming, I went to a place I didn’t know I could go. Funny, that first experience of it. I went in to slight holy shit-mind for a second: the mind that says Oh this is a threshold. This is something.

When I came out of it (the holy-shit mind and the posture) the teacher was standing there. Not feeding back anything. Not approval, smirkingness, or it's- about- time- you- went- there; just a being there for it. 

--That was a no brainer.

--Exactly. 

Walking off.

A friend—I will call her Jedi Riverdance—said this looked like analyst-analysand in a traditional psychotherapy relationship. A truly processed analyst doesn’t take up space or cut the stream of consciousness by inserting much reaction. If they’re good, they tend not to privilege one moment over the other—there’s juice to be found as much in the mundane as in the apparent climaxes. If they’re good, they know exactly when to respond and otherwise they just sit, actively, and hold the space.

After I listened to Jedi Riverdance (trying just to listen and get her, without half-hearing as I jumped to telegraph a response), I thought of the monks at Deer Park. Their unnerving “mindful listening” thing. Active, but not re-active. Just being there to receive what another is saying, hoping their present absence of word or body language will open up more possibility for the speaker to go deeper into what she’s capable of saying.

A lot of times, that kind of being-there for people—without much obvious feedback—just freaks us out. We want cues to know how we are doing, and do not understand the highly cultivated, chilled-out silence of a mature teacher who is saying Go on, I’m good with whatever comes next. Just go on.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion

Serious Fucking Alchemy · 17 January 2008

Can I say that?

Yes. Breakfast with the ineffable again this morning. Probably, it is always this good but my mind forgets to note it.

Oh who am I kidding??? This is special. Serious. Fucking. Alchemy.

How many days in a row are we going to hit paydirt like this, kids? Are you wondering the same?

Yeah, you give up the digging of a thousand shallow wells. Choose a method and just mine it mine it mine it like a dirty methodical little drone…, and now and then you hit a vein like this.

Think you can take it to the bank? Want compensation for your efforts or your surrender? Want to buy in? Riiiiight. Not packaged for resale. It’s here and it’ll be gone soon. I’m too much my teacher’s student to hold it or him or us tightly, and this only increases the joy. Like contemplating death increases your living.

The room is packed to the point of a waiting line, because everyone in fifty miles whose value of practice edges out her compulsive need to be right (hello: what is that hangup about except self-sabotage? It’s ok, we all get in our own way; but we don’t have to keep doing it forever) is on a mat in that room. Post-political practice space, right here for the making. Get in! Carpe manduka.

Many days, there is no assistant. A few who have been at this thing a little longer will give a neighbor an adjustment in supta vajra or pachimo. I’ve been doing a pretty strict counted practice this week, and this highlights strongly the relationships that facilitate my rhythm and those that do not. One companion, I can come to the top of a vinyasa, shift over for his supta vajra, breathe him through it and take one step to the mat without ANY shift in mental state. He doesn’t reach for any talky talky connecting, doesn’t put some kind of lowly beta-level awareness on me. And I come back to the top of the mat just like I’d added a posture—supta vajrasana B—between chakorasana and bhairvasana. Two others on that same train in the immediate perimeter, but another who hasn’t quite caught on. I love her just fine, but if the greater good is to contribute to the collective rhythm that supports the alchemy, I have to let her wait for the teacher. Because his awareness, given which he’s doing and what he’s done, is less fragile than mine.

I got in the car and this was on the stereo, loud. (What I get for blaring Back in Black, from the Unholy Los Angeles Driving Mix cd my brother made a while back, because I thought it a good way to toast RP this morning. Or at least so it seemed on the jaunt from bathroom floor pranayama to the door of my car, as the CDs live in a big cramped bookcase in the hallway. And it did work nicely for cruising Santa Monica Blvd in the dark, though I did frighten a homeless man at a stoplight. Anyway I took the highroad--Wilshire--back here to the working class fringes of Santa Monica, trumpeting Prince's version of the apocalypse and definitely in a state unfit for operating a motor vehicle.)

That’s a lot of apocalyptic Americana from twenty years back. But AC/DC and Prince never knew the shift in consciousness would look like this. This quiet, this early in the morning, and as much about working hard as it is about letting loose.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception , sound , spirituality

That Was Embarrassing · 4 November 2007

Some of you will have read the nice story I told on Saturday, about being born the day they elected Jimmy Carter.

That’s my truth. It’s been my truth for years. 

Also, November 3, 1976, was a Wednesday. Election Day was the day before that. My mother did go off to the hospital after voting in the high school, but I didn't arrive until well in to the following morning.

Huh. At least learning this was not as large a disappointment as the actual Carter presidency, which began with such hope and populism with Rosalynn and Jimmy walking down Pennsylvania rather than taking the traditional Inaguration Day motorcade (or so the story goes)… and led quickly enough into gridlock with Congress, oil crisis and eventually hostage crisis, and laying of all the ground for the enduring horrors of the Reagan Revolution. Come to think of it, I’m so glad I wasn’t born the day they elected Jimmy Carter.

So much for peoples’ history.

We have some stories like this in my family, and I suppose the historian in me finds them a little too fascinating. There's a case to be made for letting the concealed things remain concealed, though I'm too interested in everything to operate that way. A true story worms its way to the surface every now and then.

Meanwhile, damn the blog and its auto-correction tendencies. When I start writing about my early years, I wonder what the hell is going to break loose.

There’s much to be said for “my truth” even when it doesn’t map on to the truth. The subjective side of history is as determinative of the present and of the future as is the objective side. (Or more determinative...? Naaaah, I'm too far to the left for that.) Both subjective and objective histories are alive; and insofar as my sense of destiny and possibility lives in the mindstuff, that Jimmy Carter thing has been ramifyingly true for years. Not trivial.

But it is nice to let it go.

Those of you silent ones who caught the mismatch and let it go again without saying… mmm… what am I going to do with you?

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Categories: power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory

Breakfast of Champions · 15 October 2007

The other day I called the great ashtanga tagline—do your practice and all is coming—a magical solvent for the removing of bullshit.

Someone came around and said no, it is just a koan. Because really: practice and what is coming?

Your baggage. All of it. To the surface.

Your relationships – some of them. To an end.

What is "all"? Quitting your job; weird pilgrimages; injuries nobody understands? Kapotasana?

I figure the line is a kind of dismissal, from the master who walks away in response to questions that are more about the showboating of the asker than the meaning of the inquiry. An old-timer told me once that SKPJ’s not-knowing of English has provided a crucial layer of insulation from all the stuff that western students would project onto him and would demand of him. I can imagine. Everyone wants a piece of him or of the heir. Everyone wants to claim a relationship that is reciprocated. Intimate, even.

Do your practice and all is coming is such a good non-answer to so many questions. You don’t even have to understand what has been asked, really. It also offers seven convenient reinterpretations: put the stress on a different word for each day of the week.

Maybe that is koan-like. Yeah kids: take that one home and meditate on it.

In any case, I like the line very much. And I actually do use it as a way to consider what it is that SKPJ meant by any of this, all of these years. The professor who finally left all the talk in the university and gave the best of his energy to this thing that only makes sense in silence: I won’t pretend that story doesn’t resonate with me in a large way.

I suppose that, product of capitalist society that I am, I’ve turned the old refrain into a bit of a slogan.

Ashtanga Yoga. Do your practice and all is coming.

Ashtanga Yoga. Do your practice and all is coming.

Ashtanga Yoga. Do you practice and all is coming.

Ashtanga Yoga. Shut up and salute.

Ashtanga Yoga. Shut up.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , power of suggestion , spirituality

Inverted · 1 October 2007

I’ve been a morning practitioner since before I remember. (Short memory, or more like short identity-horizon.) By now all the routines in my life are tipped toward 6 am, where I stop for half a minute. Then the mechanism rolls over into a new cycle. Click.

Week before last, my morning practice space was booked with a kind of class reuinion, so I shifted to the evenings. Class began at 5, doors at 4:30.

I was not particularly enthusiastic about the shift. Practicing in the morning is my idea of really living, in a way that I wouldn’t know how to describe. Also, I’m convinced that I cannot get my mind to perform well throughout the day if I haven’t first cleaned the slate… and that my body will make me crazy if I don’t spend down some energy and stretch out the worst of the tension first thing.

On the other hand, evening practice is suboptimal on many levels: mentally, you’ve got far more static to contend with; physically, there is the fatigue of the day as well as in my case too much openness in the hips; and digestively, you don’t have the significant calming effects of a 15-hour fast (yes, I do frequently skip dinner).

That’s what I knew two weeks ago. Thought I knew. After the first week of evening practices, I did it again. And now, I’m about to do it a third week. God, what am I doing messing with the machine I thought I had perfected… at a time I most want it to run like clockwork?

I don’t know. I guess I’m letting the machine run itself a little bit. And right now it wants to stand on its head.

I’m still working out all the ways this changes the rhythms and the functionality of my mind and my body, given the intense things I am asking them to do this year. But what I saw the first week is that if I take the energy I’ve trained to spike in the mornings and sublimate that back into sociology, my writing is more focused and less full of shit than it has ever been. It’s strange not to practice first thing. Moreover, I recognize that I’m milking a spiritual tradition not of my own making but now of my own body to feed the pursuit of western “science,” and I’m not convinced that science is worth it. But, maybe it is.

Finally, I don’t know how long I can keep it up.

More on this as I realize what is going on.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , spirituality

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!

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

Saturday XXV · 22 September 2007

I accidentally flew first class back into Los Angeles late-late on Monday. And for the first time after this restless desultory summer, it feels like a place I want to stay for a while.

So now I will go down to the workshop and construct a machine. This is my life for fall: practice, research, write, relate, sleep, repeat.

Clockwork is what I want. Small little interlocking orbits. From which novelty is meant to emerge.

I don’t know if the machine will work as intended. 

As for Colorado, I’m not going to write about my grandmothers whose selves are shrinking, my 87-year-old grandfathers who are becoming the sweetest caregivers, the avuncular difficulties (me too, ESJ), the good cousins plus the horribly criminal one, or the pair of ghosts that haunted all family events. The trip was a body blow, but not in a bad way. I need to get reality-checked like that sometimes.

Except I could have done without all the Nabisco. That’s the thing about working class roots.

Monday I practiced in Boulder, which contrary to my expectation did not make me want to ply the U of C for a job next year. So much for expectations. But my perfect brother and I did have a good lunch outside on Pearl Street after the rain, and then drove the Hyundai back to DIA. In the Avis shuttle I hugged him and his three bags of Telluride Film Fest paraphernalia, and sent him off to a three month artist residency in Paris. That part is always a little wrenching.

By the way, that last post generated more stats (189 distinct visits a day? Who are you silent people?) and more off-blog email contacts than anything heretofore published here at IO. Maybe it’s just the gossip factor, as Tiff experienced a while back. Or maybe there needs to be a support group on the subject.

Saturday links, for the first time in a while:

? So I keep watching the trailer for Southland Tales. Mike Davis apocalypse-ness with Wm. Gibson plot devices, Pixies soundtrack, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s flashy teeth, dystopic Los Angeles, choppy reality TV edits and gratuitous color saturation. And, if you are into that, a side of Justin Timberlake.

? Podcast for AF et al. Robert Spellman discusses the “key distinction between the theoretical and the yogic, and how that distinction relates to artistic practice.” Bear with the first few minutes of ham-handed metaphysics, because afterwards he discusses how practice can render a “clarity and accuracy of being.” Good thoughts about the different ways shamatha (one-pointed) and vipassana (insight) methods interact with artistic process. He quotes Chogyam Trumka that vipassana introduces the conceptual mind back into meditation after that mode of thought has been set aside for a period of time.

Spellman seems a reader of John Dewey, which is nice. This marriage of pragmatism and contemplative practice hits close to home.

If the above is inspiring, Anna Douglas has some talks up at Dharma Seed. I have not listened to them, but her understanding of meditation and creative process is interesting and sort of deep. She is a doctor of psychology who has practiced vipassana for 25 years and shows strong Zen leanings.

? I decided to link my Goodreads profile here (also in sidebar) in order to encourage myself to keep it current. Hey you: get in, be a friend.

? Funny entry in the geekipedia: Collins-Dawkins Faith Smackdown.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , spirituality

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.

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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.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , power of suggestion , sound , spirituality

Sharpen Your Nerves · 4 September 2007

Last Thursday morning, Isaac Brock appeared to me floating in a cartoon cloud and hissed: “Sharpen your nerves!”

Then he cackled and grinned at me with a mouthful of teeth filed down to points. Screamed: “Sharpen your nerves! Ahh haa haa haa!!”

Fine Isaac. I’ll stop being a lazy ass, sitting here on the cushion layering interpretations on my immediate experience.

But I wondered: what if you took notes on a meditation retreat, to snag some of the really good interpretive thoughts before they flew away? Would it make it easier to let thinking go?

Turns out that no. It would keep your brainwaves a little spiky, because you’d need to whip up some focused discursive thought in order to write. And yet what you did write would be stupid and empty later.

I know this because the next day I tried writing a few things down. Stupid things.

Here’s from the notebook:

“There are turkeys! Large!”

“Wanting to hug everyone. Must practice non-hugging. Do not molest.”

“Ghee. God we’re weird.”

Now I’m surprised I had to preserve these words, and others which are dumb enough I won’t even transcribe them.

It makes me wonder if the deeper moments of awareness and sensation I experienced during the week week, moments which seemed tinged with the ineffable, were actually vapid nonsense. Probably. But just in light of my present state of mind. Trying to interpret, and evaluate, that state of mind with this one is problematic.

What’s salient there is trivial here; and the contrary is even more true.

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Categories: arbitrage , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception , sound , spirituality

The Guru's Segway · 26 August 2007

Sitting in the MOMA café two Fridays ago, thinking about Helvetica, when the yoga people call. I’d left voicemail at the Dharma Mittra center days earlier, asking if they’d take a west coast irregular at the long Saturday night intensive. Thought I’d received the silent no, and meantime had made plans to be at the Puck Building (interestingly enough) on Saturday night, for a reception that would collect my favorite score of sociologists.

Mmmm. Priority conflict. For about two seconds. I clearly enunciated all my credit card information to the caller, confident the hipsters at the next table were less smart than they looked.

Next night, old men on the street in Gramercy Park were doing approachable old-man things, but rather than ask for directions I trailed a giant purposeful yogi a half-block north, moving quickly. Very many good tattoos fresh enough to refer to this phase of his life rather than (like mine) one previous, but both earplugs and dreads so large that he’d been working on them awhile. He was warriorish, and suggested I was in for a break from Santa Monica diamonds and matched Lululemon. He took the stairs two at a time, which I couldn’t follow without making a racket. And besides, I stopped at the first landing to check out the guru’s segway.

Then climbed in to a long thin room full of summer evening light and vegetarian sweat. People were politely staking claims, tucking glasses and cell phones into a bookcase full of Danskos.

Mister Plugs and I were early, but the last two of maybe 40 to arrive. I was glad for that, setting up at the back of the room where’s there’s a solid floor, rather on the front 2/3 that is covered with faded rose shag that could be as old as me. Right above my mat, 15 feet up, was a disco ball in an angular skylight. Ad-hoc feng shi.

To the right (beyond a tattooed over-50 man who had a strong war-veteran-ness about him and who would make repeated comments about my hamstrings as we worked toward yoga nidrassana) was an altar featuring Jesus, Aurobindo, Yogananda, and I think Hanuman. (Nidrassana-man would feel far less lecherous hours later, when the whole thing deteriorated into an ecstatic-chanting, posture-striking mess of bodies.) I only tend to care about altars if they contain a candle I can use to balance. But this altar interested me because it brought parts of my neglected heart together: never has the Jesus-Yogananda association been so clear. This would be the first time that my old relationship with the Jewish carpenter would seem at all relevant to my yoga practice.

The large window out over the street was crowded with more of this hindoo-hippie detritus of what Dharma Mittra (Dharma? Mittra?) later said was his forty years in this space—during which his first segway, and before that 14 bicycles, have disappeared from that stoop on the stairs. (All of this karmic payback for horses, and perhaps one elephant, he stole in past lives. He is glad to give up segways to settle his score.) In the window, plants only a mother would love, glass ornaments of rainbows, dusty candles, and a giant metal OM looking down oven the intersection at 23^rd and 3^rd.

We crowded in on the pink shag, looking up at him and up at the OM, and made the intonation for a very long time. Across the street a young man pulled off a tie (on a Saturday?) and dress shirt, and I thought of Edward Norton in Fight Club. Did this young capital- lackey know what he was getting in to when he rented the place? We OMed and OMed. I thought about the cardsculpture stacks of citrus fruits at the stand down below, wondered if we were creating a comedy streetscene by dislodging them.

Then, drawing in a little closer, I started to see the people around me: 30s, professional, uptight, white. Possessing triceps. I fit right in.

This was not what Mister Plugs had led me to expect. No surprise it would take this group a while to open up to the ecstatic yogachurch Dharma Mittra wanted to conjure.

But here it is paragraph ten and I haven’t even set eyes on the man’s face yet. We haven’t even taken the first sun salutation (or the second, in which he’d nonchalantly instruct us to take pincha from downward dog). 

Looks like I am recounting this at the pace to which I have to slow down in order to remember it, now that it’s more than two weeks past. I’ll try to speed this thing up and offer a proper workshop review. Later.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , sound

Pirates of the Air · 23 August 2007

If you’re going to be exacting, be exacting about the breath.

Fourth day of Mysore with Petri the Pirate. He doesn’t teach to poses so much as to the breath—although he finally busted my cheating supta urdvha pada today, for the split second I drop the toe as I roll past the elbow (locking my eyes, whispering “You have to DECIDE! The toe is YOURS. Decide every day. You WILL NOT DROP IT”), and when I took my own ankles in a backbend, “Tomorrow you do yourself, without me holding.” Here’s to the power of suggestion. Phhhhhhhhhhhht. But anyway, most of what we’re doing is exacting my vinyasas. Basically, this involves adding an extra exhale in a few places, and attempting to inhale-UP! out of most postures.

In theory, the extra breaths should make practice easier, but as it is, knowing he’s listening far more than watching, I’ve placed my attention even more on the breath than usual this week. I love practicing this way, and with this kind of awareness from a teacher. But somehow in this process I’ve lost a sliver of inhale, shortened it to match the exhale (whereas usually I'm a hair long on the inhale), so over the course of a 140-minute practice I slowly edge into the red. Some inhale-retention might be due later.

Half an hour after rolling out of rest, and my wrists are still atremble on the banks of my keyboard. Breath superslow, deep and greedy.

I have consumed an unbelievable 64 oz of water in the past 40 minutes (how is this even possible?), and am finally, as a result, feeling grounded. In savasana I practiced a bit of yoga nidra where the body becomes heavy, drawn into the ground like a block of lead, and then becomes light, weightless, air. Hearing Jasmine Riddle, from a secret hippie-magick cassette I found in the obscurest of university archives (and is now, eyebrow-raisingly, a regular line on my far-from-private library record) as she warps soundwaves with her warbling chant of “heavy heavy, light light.”

What’s with that about conquering gravity in the third series? I’m a long long way from such things, measuring by my urdvha kukkutasanas, but today there is such an spacey lightness that I’m not going to get a whit done until I refind the earth. Matthew Sweeney noted in a podcast recently that astangis tend to overemphasize lightness, I suppose to the point that we of the subculture becomes rootless and unsteady.

I just downed another 10 oz of lemonwater.

I think I’ll read a stack of book reviews before I try to do anything semi-important with my brain this morning. Tomorrow, primary series, close to the ground and counterbalanced with great inhalations.

That’s enough vinyasa talk for this owl.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , sound , spirituality

Holy Bones, Part II: Reading the Entrails · 31 July 2007

I mentioned over a week ago in this space that I would write out my dark night of the sacrum in the next posts. Interesting how the commitment has clammed me right up.

There is avoidance here, a wish to be able to speak of the thing in the past tense. And there’s also a hesitancy to “own” the thing. I don’t want to identify with it—and that’s for the better—but I also have a fear of granting that it is inside of me. That, in a sense, it owns me.

Ooh but we can be superstitious about our pains. I am looking for a way to face this that isn’t in the form of complaining but that also doesn’t dive hopelessly into pain-interpretation. Because it is possible to read the pain patterns with all the misplaced sincerity that a shaman reads chicken entrails.

I’m all for interpreting my entrails, but not as if they contain a big scary-serious message from the beyond. And on the other hand, I’m all for expressing that I’ve been stuck, but have a childhood-engrained disgust for whining that sometimes gets my tongue.

Meantime, groping about for honesty, here I am, talking about this “injury,” this “shifting,” this dark night of more than just the sacrum, as a “thing.” Interesting.

We are always creating objects. What’s up with that?

It’s ok on some level—completely ok. We objectify as part of the process of transcendence. It’s only nasty to objectify the wrong stuff, like the beings we’d do better to treat as subjects. But yes, we do turn processes into things. Sociology and Buddhism both criticize this rigorously: Sociology in the critique of reification (which grew out of Marx’s “fetishization of commodities,” through the Frankfurt school’s cultural nonsense and into the critical work of my hero Bourdieu), and Buddhism in the injunction not to treat feelings or processes as if they were “solid” when truly they are fleeting. Both disciplines are always on the watch for what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is part of why I feel at home (albeit on the margins of) both.

But sometimes there’s a place for concreteness. I’ve been excited this week about Hegel, the original owl-of-minerva curmudgeon who I never really understood. His theory of history, which I’m now learning is uncannily adaptable outside of western philosophy, is the “phenomenology of spirit.” Shit. What? Long story.

Basically, it’s something about how in the process of growing up and out—in the process of becoming our ultimate essence—we step up out of (Wilberspeak: “transcend and include”) certain stages. And then turn back and regard those stages as somewhat concrete, done-over-and-wrapped-up, elements of ourselves.

Maybe this is obtuse. But I’m caught in a liminal space here, between being wordlessly inside a process and being able to stand outside it and mark off its boundaries in words.

I will keep trying… even as I keep falling on my face in UKK-C. (A chicken pose, no less....) I plan on making it there eventually.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Holy Bones, Part I · 24 July 2007

Monday a teacher knelt by my mat and told me that nobody understands.

I felt so understood.

This teacher has worked with thousands of practitioners over the decades, so if he says the shift in my skeleton is something nobody understands, that’s something.

“You can’t even talk about it because nobody understands, I know,” he said, kneeling there. Then he told me that out there somewhere, an old friend is doing advanced practice on a shifted sacrum same as me, and after a year of holding out, his has just suddenly self- corrected. His friend says, “I don’t understand it. It’s just getting better.”

So, that makes three in the community of understanding the non-understanding of the shifted sacrum.

I haven’t had much to say here or anywhere the past four months that this complex has been upon me, but now that the demon in my low back has diminished from a self-replicating beast to one single, cowering little shit, I realize the time to write about this experience is growing short. I hope.

So for the next few posts I’ll write about this a bit, in an effort to reclaim the sacrum from the realm of the unknowable. In case it’s helpful to anyone, I’ll torture out of myself some documentation of the physical (for some reason, discussing my own physical practice bores me very much). But, apart from my suspicions about the first and second chakras, which I am not going to discuss, most of my reflections due to this injury have to do with the uses and misuses of body awareness, and the possibility of finding bliss in the presence of pain.

Of all the parts of the skeleton, it’s easiest to spiritualize the sacrum. The holy bone, the house of the serpent, the primitive remnant of a tail, or the super-evolved pyramid-tip of the plumb line that roots the spine. And I won’t say I haven’t experienced this injury as a kind of stitch in the spirit as much as a pain in the ass. But ashtangis easily get carried away spiritualizing our injuries—looking for stories to explain them, looking for blame-takers, seeking “the” solution. And the limited sense that one never quite knows what she thinks about something until she can put it in words, I suppose it’s useful to write about this topic even though part of me would prefer to let it all pass into vague remembering… at least until a new turn of the bone brought it all rushing back another 5 or 15 years from now. Maybe, too, this will be useful to someone else out there in the community of the non-understanding of the understanding of the shifted sacrum.

It is hazardous to think of the body as a self-correcting system. The body dies, after all. And yet damn if it isn’t also the vehicle for discovery and for bliss and for awakening; and I’ll be damned if when treated with indulgent, loving patience it doesn’t self-correct. Humans create our own pain very often, but we are also healing ourselves all the time. It may be what we do best.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , spirituality

What is fashion? · 13 July 2007

What is fashion?

What is it?

Throw me a bone, people.

I think I have 75% of the answer worked out, but what interests me is the remaining 25%.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , social theory

New Machines for Expired Ideas · 11 July 2007

I’m looking at a headline: Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works.

And thinking: Nooooo. Brain scans reveal that meditation works. A map is not an explanation.

Now that researchers have FMRI machines, there’s a boom in research on the so-called “effects” of meditation practices on the brain... or "causes" of the brain's effects on the meditator (clearly, the research designers are confusing themselves). FMRI takes very cool pictures of parts of the brain lighting up. But that’s it. It’s cartographic--and primitive, in a sense. But since it’s new, it’s spawned literature on the “effects” of meditation—something forward-thinking neuroscientists have cared about since the Dalai Lama started talking to them 25 years ago and some innovative philosophers, economists and brain scientists set up the Mind and Life Institute.

Ok, that’s great. The new UCLA study I’m reading is typical. The scan shows that certain neurons light up when people “experience” negative emotions (produced by looking at other faces embodying negative emotions—I'm not even going to unpack the weird assumptions loaded into this research design), and that the brain’s emotion center calms down when a subject identifies and takes a distance from these represented emotions. According to one of the authors, “These findings… suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood....”

So ok, hold up.

First, the tautology problem. What’s the cause and what’s the effect here? They have essentially “discovered” that distancing yourself from bad moods… distances you from bad moods. The effect and the cause are the same. No wonder their findings are statistically significant.

Just because some neurons are involved does not make the neurons the “cause” of this whole process. They’re just part of the process—albeit the only part the researchers can quite recognize as real (and thus the one they identify as a “cause”).

The only reason the researchers think that the first phenom of mindfully identifying and detaching from an emotion is separate from the second phenom of the lights going dim in the emotion center is that they are crazy old dualists who believe thought is an gauzy ghost separate from the material “reality” of the brain. They imagine their finding is an instance of intention causing action… though any meditator could tell them that emotional experience and intention are inter-twined and mutually reinforcing. Sure, the meditator says: You can change your thoughts, but only after discovering how your thoughts are already changing you. One does not simply cause the other. And ultimately, thoughts themselves and the thinker’s immediate experience are not separate.

I wonder: if these scientists knew their own minds better from the inside, would the create more subtle, accurate concepts?

Second, and this is what irritates me, the main scientific excitement over this research stems from the assumption that experiential phenomena are only “real” if they have a measureable physical manifestation. Materialism 101. But thoughts and intentions are also real (I wouldn’t say they’re “things,” like The Secret says, but anyway). You can’t take pictures of intentions with FMRI machines, but on a practical, everyday, human basis, pretending thoughts aren’t real is some wicked reductionism. And that’s the thing: mind, subjectivity, interiority, thought—all these beautiful inner phenomena—do not reduce to neurons firing. Taking my cues from Bourdieu the master-synthesizer, I’d submit that the subjective (mind) and the objective (brain) sides of this picture are mutually constitutive and equally real. It’s just that you can’t take FMRI pictures of inner states per se.

The leading edge of western, and if I may, global, culture is rushing toward holistic understandings of mind-body. This shows up in social science’s sensitivity to embodiment, in athletes’ dedication to mental training, in the eastern-western culture of yoga, in the synthetic social theory that theorists of both mind and society are patching together, and in the dissipation (in certain cultural strata) of all kinds of mind-body practice.

Neuroscientists want to be a part of the revolution, as I’m seeing especially on the west coast—at places like the the UC Davis Shamatha Project, the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Since they’ve got the biggest budgets and the shiniest tools, they’re likely to get an audience in defining the 21^st century mind-body, but right now all they’re doing with it is advancing a new version of thought/brain dualism. This isn’t the same as reducing mind to brain, but it could easily go back in that direction.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Metaphysical Car Wreck · 5 June 2007

Online community: live and lurk. I’ve lurked in the astanga online forum throughout the three years of my practice. It’s rich with information on how the practice of astanga yoga hashes and heals a person, and how these highly (but sometimes partially) processed people relate. Tracing back the impulses, I tend to click over when one of the following questions comes to mind.

  Either:

O god! This practice creates me destroys me. Owns me frees me. And makes me an alien for sure. Who can understand this?

  Or:

 Who are these aliens?

Some people go to the forum because they’re fascinated by the body as a geometrical thing, and want to discuss it like a house under retrofitting. Or they go for directions to RL islands of astanga. Or for philosophical banter. But whatever gets us there, participants both learn about and forge astanga culture. But oddly: most of us just watch, and let a small brave few do the making.

It’s an explicit zone in a practice that is mostly wordless— unspeakable even— and in the limit, ineffable. By contrast, communication in a Mysore room is made up of: intuition (the boundaries of the subtle body, once you find it, aren’t solid); and of history-revealing sweat smells (watch out: we become sommeliers of sweat); and of the not-so-subtle self-expression/ self-betrayal that emerges within the outlines of the choreography. A Mysore room is a huge store of community information, especially as the habit refines practitioners to transparency; but all that is offstage to your experience, peripheral to your driste—and it leaves out any information about how astangis behave when we’re not in, well, church.

So the online forum is a back porch walled in silent flies. Last week, responding to a troublemaker, I flew into the zapper. Something between stupidly taking his bait and sincerely trying to put something suggestive, oblique and understated—and thereby less directly reactive—into the stew.

On a single 337-post-long thread that lasted half a year, a non-astangi troll looked for something like love (attention) through a craven bid for community punishment (strict parents, eh?), and did a brilliant job of getting it. In drawing astangi ire, he gave us the perfect chance to see ourselves if we wanted. The last thing an astangi desires to be is angry and ignorant, and because he was every shade of both angry (bitter, fearful, raw, hurt, passive) and ignorant (willful, accidental, bigoted), he offered the full set of goods to mirror any one of us. And he was a hard worker: carefully responsive to each comment, never letting the thread go cold, consistent/believable in his tone.

Much of the conversation I saw (which was only a fraction of that insane number of posts) was just boxing around the ears, but at times it got good and raw. A few participated, but amazingly, dozens or maybe even hundreds watched. And questioned themselves for it. “It’s like a metaphysical car wreck,” one interjected. “I just can’t look away.”

Many said that the discussion was litter—community garbage that should just be deleted. Ultimately, yesterday, contributors decided to preserve the thread in a marginal location where it won’t generate any more heat. In the meantime, some said things they finally regretted—things that compromised their self-images in some way—and as the conversation died, they asked the moderator to erase those old comments or went back themselves to sanitize/edit them.

Yes; a lot of words and energy were wasted in this drawn-out altercation, but more than any other on the board it answers my question of who, as a community, we are. Insofar as you know a country by the way it treats its weakest members (o “illegal” residents), these 17 pages of acrimony are a rare arrow pointing to our dark side.

How could a virtual Diogenes generate so much heat among us? What was he doing right? And are we going to pretend that wasn’t really us getting worked up?

The claims that this conversation was meaningless noise, repeated calls to banish the troll for not being one of us, and especially the post-hoc editing call to mind the perennial problem of introspective practice and the repressed sides of the personality: you can’t reflect on the parts of yourself that you refuse to admit are in you. 

Lots of meditation teachers warn that it is easy to hide inside your mindfulness or contemplative practice; and the same is true for asana. Many of us feel this practice to be a refuge—a beautiful, true stroke of luck in our tragicomic lives. Even at our most sincere— when we’re not using the practice to construct a self-image that’s worked-out, insightful, balanced—we’re capable of practicing without looking at whatever it is we don’t want to see. So if it’s a refuge, is it from the world or from the parts of ourselves that we’ve disowned the same way we disown the troll?

I don’t think any amount of meditation can answer that. But for now, sleep. Part II tomorrow.

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Categories: beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XI · 5 May 2007

Today’s extra four hours of sleep brought to me by: the American Sociological Association, Air France (“please keep your eye cover, with our compliments"), and... the Quadratus Lumborum.

Managing to sleep past dawn is reason to celebrate, but there’s a large chink in my equanimity. It’s going on five weeks without the endorphin-levels I’ve come to take for granted: 15 or so deep backbends a day make a big difference when they go away. Practice is the province of a different body, which today has me in a strop. Anyway, a few Saturday links, as usual:

? Christianity catches The Secret.

This is truly amazing: conservative Christians were unlikely to buy into the “law of attraction,” both because it signals the dreaded “new age” thinking, and because it directly contradicts the “God is in control” cosmology. But I guess there is no limit to how far a self-serving idea will travel. And, if it brings on some gratitude practice, so much the better.

? Speaking of syncretism: punk rock yoga. More punk than yoga. 

? Vanity Fair has a spread of airbrushed photos of “leading lights” of yoga. A few of them are very nice, but overall: Godhelpus. Not linking it, so google at will. Apparently this is part of their championing of ethical consumerism, which culminated in last month's "Green Issue." Commodify your good intentions!

? Are you wise? A sociologist’s scorecard.

? TLS review of the new book Inequality.com, which critically examines the potential for the web to foster news kinds of democracy and social equality.

In a clever reading of McLuhan, the authors suggest that his famous term the “global village” should be read less as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of far-flung places than as a forecast of the 360-degree surveillance.

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The Emotional Lives of Yogis? · 2 April 2007

AUGUST 2010 NOTICE. ATTENTION YOGAWORKS TEACHER TRAINING PARTICIPANTS. YOU, LIKE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF SUCKERS BEFORE YOU (MYSELF AMONG THEM), HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED THIS WORTHLESS ESSAY QUESTION. YOUR TEACHERS HAVE SEEN MANY ANSWERS PLAGIARIZED FROM THE ESSAY BELOW.

BUT PLEASE, DON'T HESITATE TO USE MY IDEAS. AS YOU MAY AGREE, THE PHILOSOPHICAL VACANCY AND PRACTICAL IDIOCY OF THE QUESTION IS A PIECE WITH THE QUALITIES OF YOUR PRESENT "TEACHER," THE YOGAWORKS CORPORATION. AS A TEACHER, THE CORPORATION IS AS IMPOVERISHED IN YOGA AS IT IS RICH IN FEES. LET'S NOT MISTAKE THIS EXPENSIVE TRAINING AS PREPARATION TO TEACH YOGA. IT IS NOT AN INITIATION IN TO A LIFE PRACTICE. IT IS NOT A TRANSMISSION OF METHOD. IT IS NOT A REQUEST FROM A MENTOR WHO KNOWS YOU THAT YOU TAKE THE ENORMOUS STEP FROM LONG-TIME PRACTICE IN TO TEACHING.

Here’s a little more essay-writing as I bring this winter’s teacher training class to a close. I don’t know if it’s my ancient history as a forensics nerd or just living in three non-overlapping value zones (yoga, sociology, Christian fundamentalism) that makes me question any question in the process of answering it. But so it is. Not that critical thinking doesn't belong in every zone....

How do the kleshas and the gunas effect your asana practice?

In yoga philosophy, kleshas are mental obstacles to enlightenment — specifically ignorance, egotism, attraction, aversion and clinging to life. Gunas are thee qualities of our prakriti—ignorance, passion and goodness—one for each of the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.

Yoga philosophy provides many lists such as the kleshas, and also frequently divides up the world into three essences. These are wonderful interpretive tools, especially for one living in India while practicing Hinduism and ayurveda. However, because I do not intuitively understand the samkya system of purusa and prakriti (or the tantric Siva-Shakti), and how it integrates the theory of karma, my understanding of the kleshas and gunas is still superficial. The gunas, especially, and the kleshas of “wrong understanding” and “ego” seem particularly subtle.

Though I need to study samkya philosophy to develop a practical understanding of these concepts, this does not mean that my yoga practice itself cannot inform me about my inner states. While wonderful tools, kleshas and gunas are not causal agents which actually “effect” anything. My mind loves to grasp after categories, to substitute a map for the territory and thus pretend to know the whole terrain. Thus, for me, categorizing my experience according to these new concepts, while it will be terrifically interesting, might do more to substantiate the categories themselves, as if they are exhaustive of the mind’s possibilities, than it will to show me what is in my mind. If I imagined these concepts as causal agents which create “effects,” I would be mistaking abstractions for reality, or treating as real that which is transitory. And, working with a definitional, non-integrated understanding of the concepts might lead me to confuse myself, rather than know myself better. Ultimately in practice I am hoping to attenuate conceptual, discursive thought rather than increase it.

Still, if kleshas roughly categorize destructive mental tics and gunas an approach to psychosomatic dispositions, my asana practice is subject to both. It has been almost three years since I began a daily astanga practice and so found myself meditating on the body. After the first year, curious about the nature of consciousness, I began exploring different forms of meditation. Last year, breath meditation inspired a pranayama practice. So far, these three practices illuminate one another: the resistance I experience in meditation—where discursive thought and deep emotions frequently cut in—and pranayama—where a physical-mental-emotional fear of death arises in kumbhaka—both highlight that my asana practice is relatively open and quiet. Asana practice supports the more difficult practices, even as the latter teach me to breathe rhythmically and sense my mind downshifting in asana.

In the first six months of astanga practice, remembering the sequence of postures and disciplining my body into their shapes required my best concentration. This was the yoga—linking the mind and the body. Once I had attained the basic union that resulted from settling the physical practice into my body so I no longer had to rehearse movement mentally or pause to query some isolated part of my mind, I was able to practice what TKV Desikachar describes as dharana in asana. In the beginning, nobody told me that thoughts or emotions were supposed to “come up” during asana practice, and my journals indicate that I experienced practice as a quiet, physically pleasurable “zoning in” as I dropped into meditation. (I am thankful that no one mentioned mindstuff to me in the beginning: had I gone searching for kleshas, I am sure I could have created habitual stumbling-blocks to fulfill that search.)

While I would like to have more to say about emotions that “come up,” or the way asana helps me manage distraction or energetic fluctuations, I have very little. Beautiful generalizations by writers like Joel Kramer and Stephen Cope resonate with me somewhat, but they say too much. I rarely experience a deep or intense emotion in asana, and find that even on the most heavy days initiating practice resets my psychosomatic disposition to the best clarity I can manage on that particular day. That quality of clarity is always a little different, but dissecting it too much leads me to grasp at false explanations.

Before I had been practicing a full year, I underwent what I can only describe as reordering of my nervous system that manifested as a kind of spiritual crisis. The peace, joy and equanimity I’d begun to find gave way to loss of patience with the world. Intense sound, food, light, or emotional expression made me shudder, and I withdrew from most relationships even as I became more intellectually acute and physically vivacious. It is not that I decisively rejected the world, but that I became hypersensitive to stimuli and craved quiet stillness in myself and my environment at all times. I wanted life to imitate meditation. During these months, I felt that practice was more real than the world. Rather than being in the world and letting it show me to myself, I wanted to renounce the world because it interfered with my preferred state of consciousness.

It took nearly six months for me to tiptoe out of that place, and initiate a much more messy practice of life as some kind of yoga. For the past year, I have sought to blur the boundary between asana practice—which is still a refuge—and daily life. Asana practice itself is still pretty simple and largely the same every day. As Kramer says, morning practice does put you deeply in touch with how you treated yourself the previous day. Yet I find that seeking explanation for every little internal variation is a fast track to self-confusion. The mind wants explanation for everything, but on a deeper level my nature is to love, and to die. I hesitate to analyze how these ever-present processes of love and death interact with my sleep, my emotions, my food, water, light, recovery time, proximity of my mother-in-law, and endless other variables to render certain experiences on the mat. Practice is a gift, not a performance. I hesitate to rank it.

Whatever my experience on the mat, practice does set a high standard for the rest of my life. I oscillate between using that standard as a measure of my daily inadequacy (as mental tics and psychosomatic modifications overtake me completely) and seeing it as an inspiration for what clarity, love and insight a holistic practice might bring in time.

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Welcome the Tormentor-Sage · 5 March 2007

New wrench in the flow this morning. Unexpecting, I was instructed to stand on one leg with the foot of the other behind my head, press the palms together and look up. I long since went native on astanga yoga, so this doesn’t actually horrify me.

Still, that the posture’s called Durvasasana—for an ugly brahman blight and the worst houseguest in subcontinental history—is right unsettling. It’s like having your soccer coach name her secret strategy the “evil mother-in-law play” or “IRS audit play.”

Patthabi Jois’ first series of yoga postures is literally-named: pose to the east, to the west, head-to-knee, bound angle, upward angle, and so on. It is all science and supplication. In the second series, you play charades to make yourself into animals—heron, camel, firefly—then pass through a gate and make the sacred cow on the other side. The third turns out to be something between dirge and carnival ritual, a succession of tormentor-sages en route, it’s said, to the defying of gravity.

I’ve never been one to think of yoga postures as symbols—they don’t need to point beyond themselves to bear meaning. My position has been that there’s enough immediacy of being in Janu Sirsasana C that it’s a bit lame to reach beyond for an added poetry of meaning, as for example does Donna Farhi (2000:133): “Like the symbol of a spiral…, the spiritual journey is one in which the destination is reached when we return to the self…. These postures represent just such a return” (emphasis mine).

No, ma’am. Janu Sirsasana’s a gut-probing, hamstring-rending, toe-cranking surrender of the head to the leg. Let it be that. No need for theory. “Representation” and “symbolizing” create doubles, manufacturing extra culture where immediate experience should be sufficient.

Yet making nice with the extreme shapes in third every morning is re-shaping my drop-the-theory thing. I have to respect a posture named for an irascible god, and at the same time let it revive the poetry and the humor of what we do. For a while I’ve shrugged off my original motive to practice, which was a supersimple love for the immediate wholeness of experience in a Mysore room, rather than any prospective “yogic” inquiry into the nature of mind and being. But my origins may not have been so shallow: maybe I’m just new, but it’s hard to imagine getting any rewards from Durvasa other than (as he finally did for Krishna and Rukmini when he concluded his torturous visit) a release. 

Moments in this series can be bizarre, aggressive, and poetically unbeautiful. These postures need not point outside themselves to some “symbol.” However, inviting the history, the characters, and the stories in to the practice brings an awesome, particular texture.

This makes me think that when yoga can be as much about 1) intense inhabitation of the present moment as an end in itself as it is about 2) devotion to a progressing method-path-inquiry, then there’s not such a need to parse it between theory versus practice, or science versus art.

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Thought-rut Rotgut and the Problem of Evil · 14 February 2007

In the beginning was the word. 

No wonder it’s so easy to be superstitious about words! Language is the way we reify: humans’ method for making things things. 

There’s one moment of my yoga practice I strictly do not discuss for fear of reifying fear itself. Today, because I can see the other side and because it’s a day for laughing at fear, I’m going to go there. 

This is because the past three days have been much about the problem of evil, or rather: the problem of shit happens. (Shit happens to one you love beyond words, in this case.) Or again, by the subjective turn: (the "problem" of) the first noble truth. 

That topic is still raw. So for now I’ll bracket my interrogations of the idea that shit happening is good for you (see for example, the Apostle Paul, the Pali Canon). Are these rationalizations of the random nature of the universe? Legitimate narratives of liberation? In any case when the shit is on top of you, you either have the grace and grit to deal, as it is, or you crack up in storytelling or hysterics. The only reason I’m not doing the latter is that a younger and wiser person is my guide: stop explaining and do what you do. Sleep. Hugs. Vitamin Water. Ambient Eno. Gratitude. Backflips. 

So yeah. Beginning last summer, I had a mental block at Viparita Chakrasana. I said it. Did I just screw myself over? Give substance to a passing whisper?  

VC is this: having brought yourself from downward facing dog to a handstand and then dropped over into a backbend, one merely does the thing in reverse. Breathe in and arch the back deeply, kick hard in the legs, and bring the feet neatly back oven the head to some kind of standing forward fold. 

It was interesting to be mentally disabled. The relevant anatomy was the brain, which, having shut up for the first half of the maneuv., struck hard into soma each time I asked the feet to come back up. This requires the feet to precede the head, in a sense. And the body has the thing in the bag.

But for months the head wanted to decide: wanted to lead, not follow the feet. Cro-magnon tendency, again. In the moment of truth the false conviction would arise: the hands aren’t ready to take on footlike responsibilities! Flinging the feet off the floor means the hands must support the world (or merely the body…), but what if the hands fly away? What if the palms become light, stop holding me down, and then I’m stranded in air? The palms would then tremble and wilt. The feet would root to the earth, frozen in slapstick-comedy concrete. 

Months ago, Rolf N let me initiate the movement and wordlessly drove an index finger right behind my heart. The feet got it. This was before I learned to make a controversy over it all, turning it into foot and head competition. And then for months I coaxed, condescended a little. Took the body to the top of the doublediamond to gaze down it most mornings, made that moment playful instead of some routine little spat, and waited to see if she would give it up. She wouldn’t. 

These days my teacher tends to come over and cut any bullshit out of the equation. Everyone but a few renegade neurons knows this isn’t a big deal, so we collaborate on patching VC together without them. With practice, this is having the effect of gradually reconstructing the world, taking for granted the doability of asana in the way this teacher tends to do.  

There’s nothing exhilarating about it, because this is not achievement-oriented action. It’s just doing what you do, in a way that isn’t even worth remarking on except for to concede that for months I manufactured its ridiculuous, trembling remarkability into a big blind taboo.

I guess sometimes a thought-rut can be as real as words.

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Neurolinguistic Programming and Siva's Terrible Aspect · 5 February 2007

I just transcribed my notes from last week’s 90 minutes of ineffability, that is, from observing T’s good old vinyasa yoga class. When students were in a wide-legged forward fold with heads approaching or on the ground, here is what he said: “Lift your thighs as you press the feet down. Dig the shoulderblades in toward the chest and, if you want come into tripod, come on up. Stay with your breath: the quality of your breath is the quality of your practice.” 

With that unremarkable, almost parenthetical suggestion, one of the visiting dancers (whose gorgeous 15-minute solo to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on Saturday night put my date in near-ecstasy, though it was a little emotionally overwrought for me) lifted up like nothing into a headstand.

With apologies to third-rate 1990s anthropology (the “texts read us” school), the action did her. It was at least as natural as breath. I wondered for a second if my friend and teacher T was doing a Milton Erickson number on the class or had spent some time with the offspring of the genius. (That would be Richard Bandler, who turned neuro-linguistic programming into something unhelpfully interpretive, John Grinder, who used its magic for ill and destroyed himself, or the next generation like ultimate lifecoach Tony Robbins, who has distilled NLP technology into riches and cheese.) NLP, which builds on hypnosis, the practitioner’s intuitions, and the beauty of the possible, is a way of getting people out of their own way. It shortcuts our dumb cogitations and resistant-tense realities by integrating radical suggestion so into the fabric of taken for grantedness that we act upon it. Through this radical, unselfconscious action, we change our meager selves. (Not that I’ve spent a lot of time in the self-help genre. Though I hear it has its charms.)  

Echo that this morning, when I was instructed to take up “Siva’s terrible aspect,” a posture in honor of the diety’s skull-amulet-bearing, fratricidal side. Before putting myself into bhairvasana for the first time today—or rather, letting it take me into itself with another’s guidance—I had feared that it would be something of a long, slow trainwreck: a daily undertaking that could open up my sacroiliac joints to an unsustainable gape. Make me a bag of ligamentless bones by 50. A year ago, maybe; but my body’s been tilled for for this and it’s simply a nice, new little habit that takes me to a previously unknown part of myself. It shows me to a minor place, in a sense, but a good and joyous one.  

I can say this only because the way the posture was given made it second nature, if not downright natural.This is because the teacher, my teacher for the season, deeply understands the power of suggestion, and how to relate with a student in or near beta state to create an easy and beautiful reality out of our weirdest possibilities. Not only is this teacher on to the NLP (a comment about establishing rapport the first day made me suspicious), but he just doesn’t complicate the yoga.  

It’s so easy for any teacher to revive and rehash her own students’ resistances to authority and needs for attention—the dynamics we learn with our first teachers, our parents—into the learning relationship. This bit of baggage can be incredibly subtle, present in even the most beautiful student-teacher dynamics. Even after years of observing and draining the blood out of my bodymemory of being an authoritarian-preacher’s kid, I sometimes feel these seeds sprout up as I interact with my gracious mentors, or sit one of my own students down in my university office. 

But this morning’s teaching was uncomplicated with such stumblingblocks, with which we sometimes decorate reality so-defined. This is a gift, one this particular teacher both exhibits and bestows. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound