Separation · 24 April 2010

Getting space in to the spine is a slow dialectic. Hips-heart-hips-heart-hips. And so on. Chakras bandasana are constructed, not born.

I’d have to tell so many lies to construct a narrative of how the spine has changed. I don’t even remember the subjectivity inside the early body, although it’s true that in the beginning my form was injured, unconscious and weak. The first shift I remember was in the frontal hips, walking across UCLA campus in slow, exaggerated strides to scratch the stretch-itch. A year after that, an intercostal snapped and the chest re-arranged.

At first, I worked the Yogaworks instructions: ground down, stabilize the pelvis… free your hips and the rest will follow. (Traditional mysore practice works the heart: get the ankles, and the feet will follow.) 

In any case, for me the foci of backbending awaress continuously oscillates between hips and heart. Usually every few months, I’ll be rebounded from one to the other. And yet… it’s not like chakra b is happening without full engament of both. The grounding and the opening. It just doesn't work unless both ends of the thorax can be open and strong at the some time. There's not just one key.

Root and rise. Will and surrender. Immanence and transcendence. Discipline and freedom. Masculine and feminine. Pffffft. Sometimes the separations feel so… 1950. Pre-postmodern. Pre effing cambrian. Booooring. Can’t we get some original material here? This project of construct our identites and the meaning in the world... it's getting old! 

It’s all kind of the same original dualism, isn’t it? Doesn’t the sense of polarity grow from the primal experience of having a body? We have discipline vrs. freedom, and centeries later science vrs. art, because the muscle fibers of the first humans had hard vrs. soft, contract vrs. release. Does that make sense? We have burdened Shiva and Shakti with the heavy mulch of every imaginable binary, splitting ourselves with the same spade.

I am beginning to suspect that there are ways to use the body—the original problem—to resolve primal separations gone awry. (Sociologists, who don't really have bodies, do NOT buy this. This is why I like to teach them yoga.)

I see that, at times, the old polarities coalesce. There emerge new, unstable little atoms of practice. Opposing camps. Competing schools. Whatever dinner party or part of the world I'm in, the two sides always feel the same. At their best, it is the mystics versus the masters.

At one pole, the mystics. Yoga is an art—the art of union in the here and now. The mode of union is surrender. Shakti is transformative: you are always already perfect. This pole is strong on ecstacy—no need to deposit all the consciousness in an earthy, deathly body when satori is eternal and now. Beauty reigns.

At the other pole, the masters. Yoga is a science—the science of purification for transcendence. There is a method for directing the fire—practice smarter, not harder. Willfully discipline the free-ranging play of the ego. This is Shiva is hanging out in the life-pulsing, embodied chakras, driving a strong machine. Integrity is key.

Do you hate one of these camps? What happens when you split one pole outside of yourself, attribute it to the Other? Aren’t you bored yet? Aren’t you interested in the “opposite sex”?

The way each person relates to the tradition—it is so personal. The intimacy of listening to someone’s critique of the other guys… it’s like palm reading, there’s so much karma packed in each small line. When someone spits out scorn for rules or rulelessness... there is sometimes a clamor of hurt child beneath the words. What is that feeling? Is it fear? Which parent is the offender? 

So here I am, teaching the new old school. Following a script. Using this historical accident that is vinyasa—a mysticism inside a gymnastics inside a mysticism. An English breathcount, enveloped by Sanskrit vinyasas, and within them a steady inhale, exhale, inhale. I thought I didn't even know the count, but then on Tuesday I said it aloud as a practiced, and both the Sanskrit structure and the English cadence are embedded with the postures as I take them. Does the Pledge of Allegiance come up when you put your hand over your heart? Or some Our Mary when you cross yourself? It's like that.

There's a hypnotic pathway from practice to the place in my subconscious where correct vinyasa is stored, but for now I can only find it by putting my body through an exact sequence of shapes. Wouldn't get me out of the Temple of Doom, but it'll get me in touch with the living ashtanga seed-bed when I need it.

Anyway, is this mysticism or mastery, art or science? Only a fundamentalist scientist would do the traditional scipt… anyone else would be open to creativity (says the mystic).

No! (Says the Master.) Only a flakey mystic would do the traditional script—sacralizing their ritual object and using it to lose themselves in the cadence.

I don’t know. I’ve run my body through that rosary a thousand times and more. It’s working on me from both sides—the ecastasy of love and the roots in the world. It’s slowly making me bored with the duality as it emerges over and over again, holographically, throughout the field of this global ashtanga practice that we share. No joke. The separation is tiresome. No longer a source of energy but a drag. Something to let go.

What if practice itself is doing this, decreasing the charge I used to get from blockhead fundamentalism and flighty mysticism? If the body is the ancient origin of the concepts of hard and soft, maybe it can also be the tool for showing that both rigidity and suppleness are passing properties of the same stuff. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body

Comment

1. Thanks for the help.

   Posted by: Karen · Apr 24, 07:17 PM · #

2. KABLAM!

   Posted by: Sara · Apr 25, 04:16 AM · #

3. Shiva sighting!

   Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 25, 05:11 AM · #

4. Ahhhh… I don’t know. I’m frustrated with my own obsession with this pose. Practice without the CB is beginning to seem like sex without an orgasm.

   Posted by: boodiba · Apr 25, 08:06 AM · #

5. Don’t the Sutras basically lay out the Big Samadhi as the one space which is beyond said dualities, and thus shouldn’t we, in a way, expect there to ALWAYS be these dualities (in many, many forms, deeper and deeper, onion-style) until we give up striving itself? Is the name of the game not “dualities until not”?

   That said, I’d take sex without an orgasm, these days.

   Posted by: patrick · Apr 25, 10:50 AM · #

6. Sex as the finger pointing at the moon? Silly yogis! Tricks is for kids!

   Posted by: Karen · Apr 25, 12:57 PM · #

7. Thanks for the help.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 25, 01:29 PM · #

8. I don’t know, though. I don’t want to theorize my future experience, or take the Patanjali all that seriously!

   But from the point of view of Continental philosophy, antinomies are always arising and passing away. They are… chemically unstable.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 25, 01:36 PM · #

9. Kind of random Jedda Krishnamurti passage that someone just emailed me…

   Yoga exercises are excellent; the speaker does them every day, for an hour or more; but that is merely physical exercise, to keep the body healthy, and so on. But through them you can never come upon the other – never! Because if you give them all importance, you are not giving importance to the understanding of yourself which is to be watchful, to be aware, to give attention to what you are doing, every day of your life; which is to give attention to how you speak and what you say, to what you think, how you behave, whether you are attached, whether you are frightened, whether you are pursuing pleasure and so on. To be aware of the whole movement of thought; for if you are and you are really serious about it, then you will have established right relationship, obviously. Relationship becomes extraordinarily important when all things about are chaotic – when the world is going to pieces, as it is. But when there is this establishment of total relationship, whole relationship, not between you and me, but human relationship with the whole of the world, then you have the basis. From there you can go on to behaviour – how you behave. If your behaviour is based on pleasure or on reward, it is not behaviour. It is merely the pursuit of pleasure from which fear arises. Relationship, behaviour and order, these are absolutely essential if you want to go into the question of meditation. If you have not laid this foundation, then do what you like – stand on your head, breathe in for the next ten thousand years and repeat words, words – there will be no meditation.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 25, 01:45 PM · #

10. This is interesting, and on topic.

    Start at minute 5…

    Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 25, 03:19 PM · #

11. Ok, still working through the backlog in my RSS feed and email.

    I haven’t actually listened to this, but here is a collection of B Alan Wallace lectures on Dream Yoga at Upaya Zen Center (where Joan Halifax is Roshi and Sara will be sitting but soon).

    Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 25, 03:36 PM · #

12. For the Daniel Ingram readers…

    That line, “meditators are really good at changing their brains,” is really useful…. Esoteric spirituality is some kind of hands-on practice where you really are changing the brain…. I like to say that spirituality is when you have an experience. Religion is when you talk about somebody else’s experience… This is always a problem in meditation circles. There are people who, with all good intentions, become enamored of the ideas. And as a meditation teacher, part of the job is to keep reminding people that ideas aren’t enough, that they can be a useful support but you have got to apply these techniques. This comes back to the idea of keeping yourself honest by having a feedback loop and sitting with a partner and proving it. Sit there and prove it for 30 minutes.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 25, 04:49 PM · #

13. Jedda’s relationship with his uncle Jiddu probably led him to this conclusion. God, they could both spin a yarn when the need (or the publisher) arose.

    Posted by: s · Apr 26, 06:41 AM · #

14. Tutti Shruti!

    Posted by: Gregor · Apr 26, 06:05 PM · #

15. can i just toss this reading rec into the duality rowboat? roshi joan halifax, being with dying. i slept with this book under my pillow every night. funny enough, the sun kept rising in the morning.

    Posted by: Sara · Apr 26, 06:07 PM · #

16. this is sort of a tangent, but I find that doing the occasional Yin Yoga practice helps me to overcome the YogaWorks-ification in my asana practice. I’m sure Ann Arbor must have a Yin joint in town. Otherwise the Paul Grilley dvd is good.

    Posted by: Liz2 · Apr 28, 12:04 PM · #

17. Weirdly, I now love the YogaWorks legacy that’s in my practice. Rather than feeling sort of tyrranized by it, as I did at times in the past. Maybe it’s a matter of balancing the mastery and the mysticism.

    Sara, I love that. And that you’ll be there with her. The Upaya Zen center posts tons of podcasts of discussions she moderates, and Eeyore knew Roshi when she was long-haired, naked Joan at Esalen in the 1970s. She’s exquisite, and I kind of quiver-shudder knowing you two will be embracing soon.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 30, 12:12 PM · #

18. come quiver in the middle of the action then….

    Posted by: Sara · May 2, 01:08 AM · #

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