More Pieces · 14 October 2008

The beach at dawn is full of bums wrapped in Army/Navy surplus. I drove right past the shala and out to the pier this morning, under a huge harvest moon made orange not from the dust of tilled-under cornstalks but the ash burning luxury homes. There are fires in the hills and it’s just as well—gives local news something to distract the masses from calling their brokers. (That's what you get when you let riffraff like me invest.)

I walked a few miles on the beach, toward Malibu, which was all pink with a glowing haze like in soap operas, thanks to the fire ash. As the sun came up the oversize bum-caterpillars spread across the beach started moving, packing up, trudging in across the sand.

Great place to be homeless, in some ways. I wonder how many people will slip out of the middle class this year. I wonder if I will get a snot-nose job and slip in to it.

I was shocked to hear Dr. Doom on the morning news. Usually the financial media pretend he doesn’t exist—how odd it would be if this wing of the journalism profession practiced the compulsively “balanced,” phony two-sided reporting of the "objective" politics reporters. Roubini, because he sees an end to this, actually makes me feel better, given that the credit markets are still locked up and the DOW is full of puckey. Amazing to watch it oscillate.

To hedge that possibility—of slipping from the bliss-following margins and in to the middle class—and because I just about outed myself today (and in so doing got a large insulin spike—sad to see I still need subselves hermetically sealed off from professional life), I’m anonymizing this owl. If you’re here already, eh, you know me and I love your being around. But I’m not all that excited about new lurkers and am short-circuiting some of the routes to my house. More self-expression, less identity-construction. That’s the idea.

They say the moon is the time to observe the attachments and ridigity we form around practice (and also around compulsive non-practice—ever notice that there’s as much authoritarianism and superstition about You Shall not Practice on Moon Days as about You Shall Practice Correct Vinyasa?) To that end, I want to say that I’ve been disillusioned by rigid ashtangi refusals to think critically. Is it refusal, though... or inability? I never know whether some people shallow for life or if it's fair to say shallow a choice. But... it does seem to be shallowness that enables us to believe that subservient, unreflective expressions of this practice are deep. Ommmm....

It is wonderful to work within and negotiate a tradition, but this week I've been aware of ashtanga's fear-laced gullibility and ways in which it is not about going into our own immediate experience. The specific ways we use ashtanga to avoid our inner experiences.

Sonya of Long Island sometimes moves me very much, when she hits me with unadorned honesty that is not even looking for approval or agreement, when she shows her ability to just sit in the flames of her own experience and wonder what the hell it is about. By contrast, it seems much of what we do is approval-seeking, or neurotic self-control, or just using the body as a driste-suck on others.

I was stunned, in retrospect, that it took until the fifty-fourth comment (blisterkist) in the AshtangaNews thread for someone finally to call out the superficiality and self-fleeing nature of this ashtanga fantasy of having a so-called guru (the guru tradition is something so different from this beguiling culture clash), together with our failure of critical thought when it comes to the life-or-death matter of our own practice. Sometimes I give tradition itself too much weight and respect—trying to act compassionately but perhaps just avoiding disagrements. My wish is that we masses could have both beds in which to lay down our heads and brains to occupy those heads. This world is too beautiful to inhabit halfway outside of what's real to us, drifting between other people's mumbo jumbo and their competing assertions of rightness. Wide-eyed redulity is for summer blockbusters, but it just takes the edge off self-inquiry.

I worry this practice will dull itself with its fearful authority-worship and its repetition of arbitrary rules as if they were magic. If that is all there is, then of course we will turn outward, to performance and recognition, for rewards. I'm starting to wonder if any aspects of practice that take us out of our experience are a waste of energy.  

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , self-deception

Comment

1. Slipping out of the middle class…check this. Heartbreaking, in a country that still remembers post-civil war hunger: http://www.elmundo.es/suplementos/cronica/2008/678/1223921530.html

   Posted by: V · Oct 14, 07:31 PM · #

2. Varangians at Byzantium.

   Beached army surplus.

   Blood and Honour badge of the most honourable order of the third series – as practiced.

   Maybe the unfortunate dove-tailing of ‘ashtanga yoga’ and ‘ashtanga vinyasa as taught by…’ is a consequence of this flight from critical thought. Perhaps a cause. Not sure yet.

   Some good exercises, though, that’s for sure.

   Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Oct 15, 01:44 AM · #

3. Come on now, you’re dying to join the backbend bourgeoisie! Surprising how much revenue a bit of Kapotal can generate when deployed in the sunny climes of S.E. Asia.

   Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Oct 15, 01:51 AM · #

4. ...or maybe, learn the rules, properly,
   ...so eventually we can break them? Dunno. A thought…

   Posted by: Laruga · Oct 15, 04:56 AM · #

5. I sometimes wonder whether we’ve merely substituted systems for gurus. Do the guru yoga rules still apply when we’re talking about approaches to asana instead of approaches to a spiritual life?

   Posted by: cody · Oct 15, 07:02 AM · #

6. Re: backbending bourgeoisie, heck yes! Do I have to start believing my practice is only practice when I’m in Asia though? WHTVR.

   Do ashtangis purposely conflate asana with the other seven? Is this a choice or just an indication of how little most want from the yoga?

   Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 15, 08:24 AM · #

7. Well CP, good q. Systems are such effective tools and when they change us there is this impulse to worship them for that. I see it in myself.

   But that’s the thing. When people move away from the fascinating immediate experience of practice in to fundamentalist reification of the system, don’t we leave our experience behind?

   I don’t object to rules or gods, but can’t avoid the irony of how they get used to disattend to what’s going on in the body.

   I agree with Laruga. This conversation is limited because in this community there’s not much haphazard, onanistic yoga. Thank god. We’d all be so annoyed by that, and it would make us more fundamentalistic, or at least sure about systematic practice. :) Of some sort…

   Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 15, 08:27 AM · #

8. On Cody’s q, I’d say that if we’re “moving away from the fascinating…to fundamentalist reification,” then we don’t leave our experience behind, we instead yoke it to the fundy view. All fascism that I can think of works in that way (not that all fundamentalism is fascist). When Wilhelm II was in charge of Germany, he stated famously that “we are all Germans” and those who didn’t see the nationalist embrace might well have gone for it. This metaphor is very clunky and wrong on a number of levels, but I can see a person “doing” yoga for the fundamentalism, and yoking her/his experience to that. It’s actually spookily easy to imagine, I think.

   To answer another of your questions, yes, I think it’s that people want so little from their yoga.

   Posted by: patrick · Oct 15, 08:55 AM · #

9. Aw shucks….I do seek approval though. Just not on my blog, LOL.

   Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Oct 15, 11:25 AM · #

10. hey ovo – thanks for sharing your ashtangi experiences. that’s one thing i miss about a self practice. it does have it limitations. but i’m wondering what aspect of the practice takes you “outside” yourself. i honestly didn’t think that was possible. unless we’re watching in the mirror. but as to rules, there’s no such thing as an “arbitrary” rule. maybe it’s the fear of rules and not the rules themselves that keep us harnested in the subjective. because conformity is in the end, just a commodity. wringing with ego. and maybe what we’re really afraid to let go of.

    Posted by: charusheela · Oct 15, 12:35 PM · #

11. :)

    This comment about fear of rules opens up a lot of paradoxes for me. A set practice sort of helps shut off the mind… but is it also something to strain against? Hmmm…. Yes and no, I suppose.

    By practice that takes me “outside” of myself, I didn’t mean anything deep. Just ways of instruction and relating to the tradition that devalue my own internal experience and tell me what’s most important is obedience or conformity. So for example, I spent some time in a school that was oriented to the appearance of postures, where I was praised for perfect form, or harangued for falling short of perfect form. This took me out of my experience in that I wasn’t really asking “What is going on in my experience here? What is my own intelligence telling me about how to move and how to be still?” I was asking “What does this look like and is the teacher looking at me?” And I see that everywhere in ashtanga... everytime someone gets obssessive about the "right" way to do a posture, &c., &c., &c. I wonder if ashtangis in general fear rules… or love them too much. :)

    Anyway, some community is nice, yes? With all the gazing inward we can get a little lone-wolf-like sometimes. I fuss about ashtangis, but I love them a lot.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 15, 01:14 PM · #

12. The mind (at least mine) definitely strives for rules – both for support and rebellion. I constantly catch myself inventing new rules (e.g. I’ll always practice this way on Mondays, etc.) to replace the now-disgarded Ashtanga rules.

    Out of body practice = savasana, baby!

    Posted by: cody · Oct 15, 01:59 PM · #

13. hey ovo – i hear you. like when we find ourselves practicing more for the form than substance. losing perspective of what the practice is about. but, that’s only how it appears. cody’s right. rules are absolutely necessary. not only as they’re taught, but as we learn to apply them. the best example is our practice itself. i hear the word “control” bandied around in ashtanga yoga. as though we had a choice, right? control your bandas, control your breath. control your life. i never understood what that meant really. i think they use the word to imply sovereinty over the practice and to impart the tradition of lineage in our consciousness. because we’ve all experienced that our best practices are those when we appraoch it with a true sense of humility and obedience to the form of the practice itself. so it’s a misnomer to say we can control our practice. it’s more like when we practice correctly, we disavow all attempts to control and learn instead to trust the rules that we’ve been taught. but it’s important to remember that there’s a big difference between the rule and the response to the rule. rules can be taught, but not their response. lastly, and best of all, rules free of us from having to think about which asana comes next.

    Posted by: charusheela · Oct 15, 10:17 PM · #

14. Is that your final ruling on the issue?

    Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Oct 16, 12:19 AM · #

15. Here we all are, shuddering at this ashtanga aporia: rhetoric says ‘you are here’; logic says ‘must go there!’. Or is it the other way around? I’m flummoxed, professor!

    Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Oct 16, 01:08 AM · #

16. Well! From zero to aporia in just fifteen comments!

    (Looking at stopwatch.) Our performance is improving. Nice work everybody! See you for practice again tomorrow, six a.m. sharp.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 16, 11:09 AM · #

17. Ashtanga yoga: from onanistic to koan-istic in one easy step.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 16, 11:11 AM · #

18. Not that easy, to be fair.

    Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Oct 17, 01:29 AM · #

19. You’d have loved Danny Paradise last night – thumbing his nose at tradition, teaching all manner of variations within the sequence, urging everyone to wake up their inner teacher and reclaim their practice.

    I find my relationship with ‘the tradition’ to be a kind of 75% affair.. in some respects I can be very pedantic, but I’ll always have freestyle practices, yoga tourism, schedule tweaks and to a certain extent ‘it’s my practice and I know better’.

    Posted by: susananda · Oct 18, 03:19 AM · #

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