Shots and drop-ins · 17 April 2010

Ann Arbor and I had our consummation this week – as in, I’ve been consuming all over town, and feeling all intimate and sated as a result. Paying for units of experience … the Kali Yuga strategy for “getting grounded.” Pretty efficient way to go!

I only notice that consumption is the medium of these explorations because the relations of consumption have been invisible to me as a tourist in India. As if yoga tourists can bear to know our place in the penumbra of energy exchange--the labor and the pollution behind our subconsciousness plumbing projects. In our weakness, we kind of have to insulate ourselves from full knowledge of the relationships we're in: too much consciousness all at once would freak us out and stop the machine. Who knows what facts the rag-pickers know? Let them keep those secrets, for now.

Anyway, here I am in the afterglow of ka-ching. I dumped the ancient MotoRAZR and now can ring you on a device that’s a stutter-step closer to the singularity. Got intimidated by record stores in town (intimidation is half of what you’re paying for in the market for vinyl). Sent $500 to Bangkok via Western Union, brilliantly located in the Ann Arbor bus station and outfitted in vintage, even though these days they average three transactions a week. Found a place where I can slip up to a bar and pound shots of fresh-juiced ginger for $1.89 while beat-up professor friends down the happy hour PBR. Very exciting.

The question is whether the ginger joint can stem what wants to be an IV for the new drug. Dirty bourgeois espresso 3.0. Oh my god. Had my first real shot ever on Monday, and afterwards in the car realized I was nowhere fit to drive. Stayed high clear through to midday, put in an up-do and a starchy dress to return to the espresso fetishists the following morning. And again today. I've decided the quota is three shots a week, and am wondering if caffeine-free living (which I’d lived until January, 2010) is a practice I'm ready to abandon. The ritual around this little espresso bar is so addictive and beautiful, feels like the essence of Ann Arbor 2010. I’m not even going to describe it because I’ll get worked up and it’s two days before I can consider going back. My father’s alarming 8-cup-a-day habit notwithstanding, surrender to this might be helpful for understanding this town and beyond that for merging with the bitter ground-up soul of academia. Hmm. Still, I have concerns about what this would to do to my way of thinking, to the sharpness of mind it creates.

People here are brain-tired at the end of a day, and—compared to Angelenos—more receptive to meditation instruction and less desperate to burn calories. (It’s hard to sensitize students to mindfulness of energy exchange when they're desperate to drive themselves deep in to energetic debt.) But that relative openness is the only constant in the few evening yoga classes I’ve managed to catch.

I went to Iyengar—probably the best verbal instruction I’ve ever received, delivered by a renowned teacher who (contrary to my idea of the lineage) has a warm smile and an extremely relaxed bearing. Also, she teaches in the sanctuary of a renovated church two blocks from my house.

(I guess there are good arguments against eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or seeing the next level of reality--in this case, the plane on which all asana practices are the same stuff. Oh well. Exploitation, espresso and Iyengar yoga all go together this week in my loss of Ann Arbor innocence.)

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Nia. I was all excited about this yoga-dance fusion practice because I thought it could soften my sad longing my old Saturdays at the Venice Masonic Temple. I love 5Rhythms dance—the spontaneity and self-expression if it, the fact that everything is permitted and so things get animally, interpersonally weird. But... I am not primal enough to understand Nia. Power to those tigresses for rendering me a robotic (thank you, Liz) wuss.

So that’s asana as self-expression. Asana as self-mastery (the masculine correlate of the self-expression school) is here too, maybe in its purest form: Power Yoga beta, taught by (it’s true) Bryan Kest’s kid brother Johnny. More to prove, less to prove it with. J They’re doing a lot of good things, honestly. Free childcare and genuine friendliness, for example. Still, I did not participate in any “power moves.”

Anyway. The gem this week was RussaYog. Start with EZBoard exposure to the mythical strength and contorting of the superhuman Russian ashtangis. Add to that my superficial web browsing: all I noted on the website were what looked like a spidery-supervillain’s torture chamber, with a few hapless humans tied up awkwardly in its recesses. In sum, when I ascended the dark, creaky stairs in to the cobweb chamber above a pizzeria and a vintage shop dowtown, I was expecting something quite other than a deeply meditative, hour ofequanimity led by a perceptive, warm, precise physics professor who hails from Pune and learned hatha yoga from his parents. I was expecting something funny, not a fully grounded, subtle practice that used the ropes not for tricks but for spine-stretching leverage and few invitations to light up the pelvic floor. My relaxed, energized, sort of disbelieving self drank the chai a student offered after class, sat by a windowseat overlooking a sidewalk strewn in pear blossoms, and talked to the teacher/owner about yoga’s place in the academy. Someone peeled off early from the prasad, leaned in shyly in to my visual field and said my name. “Welcome to our community.” I blushed. Can’t bottle that sincerity.

Thursday night I reviewed these adventures for Tim as he told me some of Ann Arbor’s yoga history and mused about holding an ecumenical Yoga Congress some summer. Unless I do power yoga, there is no place I can drop in to get congratulated for the narrow-eyed discipline and childlike physical abilities that any old ashtangi has to show for herself. But with respect to asana practices, when we considered the Tibetans and the Sivananda school also here, there’s stunning refinement and diversity in this town. Maybe a vortex is nearby. 

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Comment

1. Have you read this (Gladwell on caffeine)? http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_07_30_a_java.htm

   It’s been my excuse for years, now.

   Great that there’s so much yoga diversity there. It’d be a shame to grow parochial.

   Posted by: Karen · Apr 17, 02:32 PM · #

2. Ah so funny!!! Shots per day – it takes 3/4 just to get me out the door to the Upper West Side for yoga. And then I have a large latte after…

   So funny to compare experiences. You are branching out! I went to MYSORE, practiced in my room alone a lot & abandoned two teachers, then came back to NYC and got sucked back into the accustomed fold in a very big way.

   I can understand why you might like Iyengar sometimes. It’s SO cerebral.

   It’s all different! It’s all the same!

   Posted by: boodiba · Apr 17, 03:12 PM · #

3. Oh geesz… Iyengar is analytical. And to me it seems inelegant (physically and energetically) on the level of the body. But they are symmetrical about sinew! Ok… so I guess I do see it as a formalistic practice. The teacher suggested I would benefit by creating “internal resistance” (muscular?) to balance out my “natural flexibility.” It's true that she probably does see a certain lazy relationship to the floor in my standing postures, and her corrections there were really, well, interesting. But my interest in the practice… I have to admit it’s historical and intellectual.

   Coffee. A friend said that, according to Rudolph Steiner, coffee was for journalists. Created one-pointed focus. And tea for diplomats, fostering a mind that manages many views. My downfall as an academic is having too many views and not taking any of them as true, so coffee might be useful. But I hate what it does to my writing. My prose is turgid as it is… but this post is stacatto and full of way too many facts for the space it takes up. I did enjoy the caffeine buzz while writing it though…

   Will read Gladwell tomorrow, after practice, a private and … perhaps spin class with Tim. Funny. Spin can’t be more effusive than Nia….

   Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 17, 06:45 PM · #

4. Hmmm, how interesting what Rudolph Steiner says… I dont think coffee does anything other than add color to your writing, I always enjoy it… about the vortex of A.Harbor, do you think it might connect to the coconut stand? could we be magically transferred from the expresso to the coconuts?

   Posted by: Claudia · Apr 18, 02:56 AM · #

5. Caffeine and Iyengar yoga are two of my favorite guilty pleasures. And they go well together, obsessing over the musculature of the foot requires a shot or two. But beware, ‘tis a slippery slope (she warned as she dove headfirst into her third cup…).

   Posted by: Liz2 · Apr 18, 03:12 AM · #

6. Who you callin’ “beat-up”?

   Posted by: R · Apr 18, 06:12 AM · #

7. A spin class!!! Now you’re going somewhere I never would. Be sure to have a shot first! I’d take power yoga over that.

   So many adventures, love hearing about your loss of Ann Arbor innocence…

   Posted by: susananda · Apr 18, 10:28 AM · #

8. OMG I’d love to introduce you to my friend VOR and her spin class. Ha ha!! I bet you’d enjoy it.

   Actually I met her the first time… about eight years ago, when I blew off one of the night time led primary classes that I used to take Monday & Thursday nights. I just didn’t feel like it & so I decided to try a new spin teacher, and there began the romance!

   Posted by: boodiba · Apr 18, 11:41 AM · #

9. Oh, spin class was hilarious. This whole yoga taste test this week was inspired by my wish that something might be able to replace the joy and variety (and adrenalin rush) I used to find in Saturday dance class in LA. Nothing even comes close.

   Spin was funny because it’s this paradox of group and introverted experience. Like being on an airplane. You’re all together (Tim was right next to me, though we didn’t take note of each other until after class), but on these machines, and plugged in to headsets… it’s just weird. And very non-embodied. The perfect high-intensity workouts for people who have extreme mind-body separation. That said… I liked it. Very chic studio (clearly designed by someone nostalgic for SoHo), good music, and a “cardio” rush I haven’t really experienced in a long time. I understand how it could be effecient, and even trance-inducingly pleasant, for a certain kind of very hardworking person.

   I think I just needed to do a bit of reaching out last week. Diving in to intense solo practice all at once does bring up a loneliness… which in turn makes me chit-chattery in the mind. Being out and about beyond campus helps to feel more connected to the civilization around me… I kind of needed to know through experience that there are benevolent, mindful people in this zone.

   BTW, I said I’d teach a led primary at the Nia studio. Starts this weekend (Saturday, of all days). It will be so interesting to see who attends and how intense I can be with them. Also, now I am wondering if I should try to have less of a personality as a blogger? :-)

   Something beautiful from S
   Also…
   And, well…

   Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 19, 07:36 AM · #

10. Also, since I can’t post it as an FB status update:

    NO EMOTICONS IN EMAILS WITH COLLEAGUES. MUST REMEMBER.

    My New Year’s resolution to restrain the emoticons needs to be re-resolved.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 19, 07:53 AM · #

11. hi!
    What a fun FUN description of your week… makes me want to go to Ann Arbor. The pic is very professorial- nice beard!

    Glad you’re having fun and being so adventurous!

    Posted by: Liz · Apr 19, 12:34 PM · #

12. I am loving the “new” you: caffeine and no emoticons!

    Posted by: RE · Apr 20, 06:17 AM · #

13. :-)

    Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 20, 08:35 AM · #

14. another coffee v. tea paradigm: coffee is for cleaning out your closet, tea is for organizing your stamp collection.

    no surprise you dropped in to all these local locales, just as you dropped in on this lucky planet for an elephantine handful of deeply-noted spins.

    Posted by: Sara · Apr 21, 04:21 AM · #

15. Speaking of noted spins…

    the app I’m running this week. Minmatch writing music loops.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 22, 06:38 AM · #

16. Hoot! Hoot! Hoot! Hoot! I think for the time being, the remaining
    years of this century, we should limit our exploration
    of outer space and concentrate our creative energy and resources on
    taking care of our mother planet Earth and what lives
    here.

    Owls hoot in the early Montana evening when the
    air is very still and floats the scent of pine trees.

    I like this planet.

    It’s my home and I think it needs our attention
    and our love.

    Let the stars wait a little while longer.

    They are good at it.

    We’ll join them soon enough.

    We’ll be there.

    -RICHARD BRAUTIGAN, OWLS

    Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 23, 12:04 PM · #

17. okay, this is an off shoot, but consider hip hop…see what you get thru the u…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6QUtG6G25U

    mystic? hollaaaa!

    Posted by: Monica · Apr 28, 04:49 PM · #

18. Love it! Thanks, Monica!

    I just heard that the dance department here is one of the best in the country…

    Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 28, 05:44 PM · #

19. Oh. I’m late to the party.

    Two things, Ms. Owl:

    1. If you’ve never had espresso till 2010 then maybe you haven’t tried brewing your own coffee… and if you haven’t, then it’s cheap and easy and it will change the way you look at the coffee bean forever ;).

    2. Yoga is yoga. Presence is presence. Whether it’s in the instruction of an iyengar teacher, or the torture of a spinning bike, or with your legs behind your head doing pada-hada-somethingorother, it’s all practice. I mean, I know you know this. I know you’re probably rolling your eyes wondering what my point is. It is that the line is fine, and can only be navigated by an internal compass. I say this to remind myself more than anything…

    Posted by: Rebecca · May 10, 06:39 AM · #

20. Great to see you!

    1. I am learning to brew my own. But.. also I love the artisanal snobbery of the baristas as my local place, Comet. They behave very much as a guild, attend barista competitions, and have pretty well honed every last aspect of the making in to a sort of art.

    2. I feel like the biking is easily a ham-handed (ham-footed) thing. It’s easy to toss off form, and to huff dumbly rather than breathe with any awareness. But… finding good cycling form in breath and body is incredibly efficient and makes everything easy. And my dad just found my old road bike shoes (for clipless pedals) in the bottom of a basement closet…

    Posted by: (0v0) · May 12, 12:07 PM · #

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