Pratikpaksha Bhavanam · 29 July 2009
What if all teachers are actually robots? It’s true. The first time you say the chant in front of a group, your brain is suddenly transformed from squishy grey matter to an empty supercomputer.
So actually, any particular instruction means nothing. It has as much “meaning” as much as the temperature in the room, the ambient sound and the quality of the floor. The instruction is part of the furniture.
Maybe the furniture in a room is more conducive to those wonderful, focused practices; maybe it’s more conducive to rapid, deep opening of the hips; maybe it’s a little disorienting like waking up in a hotel room with bad feng shui. Now and then, there is a room that feels like home due to the taste in furniture. That's good. If the furniture causes backaches, not so good.
In any case, the furniture says nothing about the interiority of the teacher. She is not a bad person. She’s also not some genius with some kind of “gift.”
Neither critic nor healer nor blithering idiot nor magician. None of it. Just a cipher for you.
So in this situation you just work with what you encounter in your environment. With the furniture.
The more you practice, the less you give a shit about changes in the furniture. You just adjust accordingly, don’t make up stories, avoid founding yet another new religion, and keep moving. Paying more attention to the rhythms inside and around you, less attention to the robot in the corner. Robots don’t have intentions, plans, viewpoints, biographies or psyches. You don't have to wonder what hidden meaning or feeling lies in their actions, do not have to interpret anything or look for signs.
If right foot is changed to left foot, or forward bending is changed to back bending, or long vowels are changed to short vowels, whatever. Arbitrary. It’s just one of infinite ways to hold that room solidly together, so it doesn’t fly to pieces in the astral winds of chaos.
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Categories: astanga yoga
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This morning one of my shalamates commented, ruefully, that our teacher doesn’t talk to her. She didn’t mean the kind of talk teachers do in a Mysore room — she was upset because he hasn’t—or won’t—establish a social relationship with her. I was surprised by her wish that he would.
He tries to help us every day. I have no idea what he’s thinking—if he wishes I’d learn things faster, if he gets bored in the midst of Mysore mornings, if he is pleased with our incremental victories. It doesn’t matter, though. He’s there every morning; I’m there every morning. We work together. I guess we help each other on our respective paths.
I’m better for the time we spend together, and I hope he is, too. We’re both doing the best that we can.
Posted by: Karen · Jul 29, 07:16 PM · #
Things get transpersonal enough in a classroom without our even trying! It’s already so goddam potent!
May as well create some sanity and solace by taking refuge in the mechanical. (But of course you’d like that… so zen.)
Practice is also, in a sense, just intense physical work. That can be really grounding, if we stop flying our projection helicopters and speculation kites all over the place.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 29, 07:55 PM · #
A robot walks into a bar
orders a drink
lays down a bill
The bartender says, hey we don’t serve robots
and the robot says, oh but someday you will
The Frontier Index by the Silver Jews
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 29, 08:28 PM · #
I think it is hard for a beginner to grasp/accept/believe that the teacher is just a robot, that there is no hidden meaning or feeling in their actions, that they do not have to interpret anything or look for signs in their teacher’s actions.
there is some needy-ness engrained in some of us, even though we know we are supposed to practice non-attachment, we get attached, we look for signs, we want to get some feedback from the ‘robots’ that give us adjustments in ways that sometimes involve rather close encounters between the body of the adjuster and the adjustee
Hey, that is just my neediness talking ;-)
PS. is that typo in your post title intentional?
Posted by: Fatou · Jul 29, 11:16 PM · #
should rephrase my PS, I tried to google what the title meant and came across a different spelling, hence my conclusion that yours was a type, or maybe there are just two spellings
Posted by: Fatou · Jul 30, 08:12 AM · #
Typo fixed—*pratipaksha bhavanam*.
P.B. is from the Sutras, a practice of cultivating an opposite perspective to neutralize thoughts (i.e. emotions/cognitions) that are particularly strong. At first I thought PB was all about self-repression, but in commentaries like Swami J I saw this side of it that is actually about self-evolution. Cultivate intensely weird new perspectives and learn to hang out in them a while. Then add that perspective to the mix of inner experience and let it chill things out. Really good practice… opens up options… transcends and includes the earlier self without repressing its most self-torturous inner aspects.
Then, who knows, with the new degrees of freedom (the spaciousness between alternate, contradictory perspectives inside you) maybe you brace yourself and go right back in to the torturous aspects and mine them for all they are fucking worth.
As for how it is hard for beginners… it is hard for everyone! Sometimes experience makes it worse because you get even more wrapped up in your emotions around a teacher. Bhakti practice can use that for good… but I’m not sure how much the western take on mysore style has to do with that. Bhakti is pretty detached and can just as easily (more easily?) be practiced with a statue.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 30, 08:39 AM · #
Yes, it can TOTALLY be practiced with a statue. Or with window blinds open JUST the right degree. I liked this, a lot.
Posted by: patrick · Jul 30, 08:43 AM · #
My teacher is a statue. I mean, robot. I mean, man.
Whatevs. :-)
Posted by: karen · Jul 30, 09:43 AM · #
As the young people say, Karen for the win :)
Posted by: patrick · Jul 30, 06:15 PM · #
I just coughed up 4 grand and signed up for a yoga statue training. That shits intense, I mean who can sit still for that long? But when I am done they say I’ll have a certificate and I travel the world as a yoga statue. If the truth be told, I want to be known as a “statue’s statue”.
Posted by: e&sj · Jul 30, 09:47 PM · #
By the way I already trademarked “Furniture Yoga” so don’t get any ideas. Oh wait a second, we already have that – its called Iyengar.
Posted by: e&sj · Jul 30, 09:50 PM · #
And the snark just keeps rollin’ in.
Posted by: patrick · Jul 31, 06:55 AM · #
Oh hello, listen to Boojum now…
I mean there’s totally no need to stick with one style of furniture at all. Somedays I love my Art Deco, sometimes Federal’s the thing and at others you just can’t beat a little Rustic/Louis XV fusion. Ok, so it would all get a little convoluted if bundled into the same space and you don’t KNOW how hard it is to get good domestic help out here in the sticks. What I do, therefore, is have a room apportioned for each – plus a couple empty so that, you know, I can be spontaneous and decor a la mood – it might even be a little Queen Anne, you never know.
The important thing is this. If you don’t like the way a given scheme turns out, GET RID OF IT! Junk the junk – there’s no way you should EVER have to put up with shitty furniture. I had this cane chair for, like, ever and it was so liberating to be free of is dogmatic fucking spindles once and for all.
Anyway, my friend in Manhattan has just put me on to this rather beautiful line of West African slouch chairs. Gorgeously therapeutic for my agonising fingernail sprain – wonderful! I’d like to fill our summer place with more of the stuff, but she’s managed to get hold of practically the whole last shipment! How unbelieveably selfish!
Bitch.
Posted by: YogaPickie · Jul 31, 08:00 AM · #
My dear, if you’ve been coming around here for any length of time, of course you know that b.i.t.c.h. is one of the three words you cannot say on my blog.
ESJ, it is difficult to sit still for that long. But this is the reason for asana practice. It’s all about the higher spiritual attainments…
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 31, 12:09 PM · #
[Well shit. Working with a library database, I just for kicks plugged “boojum” in to the search engine.
Looks like someone who knows the Psychology literature sees many more layers than I did…. For example. ]
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 31, 02:05 PM · #
I dunno. I think I sense the work of Pynchon here?
Posted by: Karen · Jul 31, 08:04 PM · #