Some notes on Mysore Style · 24 July 2008

I. Working a room. It helps to have waited tables for a long time. It helps to have great peripheral vision developed over years of sophisticated driste practice. Does a teacher understand that the first key is to coordinate, and intensify, the energies of the individuals? Or does she make the huge mistake of letting her energy pool in certain parts of the room, or—worse—periodically honing in on single students in a way that the rest of the room falls into darkness for several minutes? Driste—one pointedness, but the environing universe is still present and in motion. Teachers who don’t get this—and who can’t handle being service persons/facilitators—should do some time in the hospitality business.

Related: once I went to work at Amnesty International for a summer, taking three months of my waitressing job. Came back and tried to serve the same-sized sections on day one. DISASTER. Took many nights before I could play the table service video game again with any kind of skill.

Also: So can my working class service skills jump the hierarchy to working the rooms at the dozen giant cocktail parties I have to attend in Boston next week? Even though we’re talking rooms of very powerful, smart people who have things I—from my spot at the veeeery bottom of the hierarchy—want? Or will I let my energy pool in corners, stay occupied with those I know, fail to engage with the whole space? I actually hate this question (I never use that word). Working a room from the bottom, where you don’t have a prescribed service role but instead are doing self-promotion, requires a sense of entitlement or just another level of connected charisma I don’t possess. Bravado I can do, but essentially I hate the spotlight. It’s a question of whether I’ll decide to hone a high-brow version of my middle class skill. Such an annoying, creepy prospect, but if I can see table-waiting as just a video game…

Thoughts to develop some other time---

II. The dynamic between what you know what you’ve been taught, and the way this shows up in how you engage a student. And how this dynamic shapes the degree to which a teacher is able to teach an individual or teach a system.  

The first “teach” is a transitive infitinitive verb. The second is intransitive. Both have value. I am biased toward the first.

III. Holding a space, or owning a space. How this relates to a teacher’s feelings toward her own now-absent teacher. How teachers’ authoritarian vibe relates to her own projection process, specifically to whether she has followed this process to its resolution by recognizing that her teacher/therapist is a human.

What’s the teacher’s own relationship to authority? Has she seen her own teacher as such an authority figure that practicing without the teacher is still very mournful and makes her feel abandoned? (One way to tell that is if she tries too hard to fill the shoes of the departed authority: sometimes the heaviest-handed teachers are filled with nostalgia for the imagined heavy-hand of their teacher and trying to fake it in order to comfort themselves.) Often, put-on authority is rooted in sadness for the departed teacher, and for the fact that the young  teacher herself can no longer be observed as a good student and act out of submission and compliance. Lots of karma yoga in moving from compliant to first-person active.

IV. Ritual—what is it there for?

Between (a) mind-containing structure and (b) grasping for meaning…

in other words, (a) understood as arbitrary or (b) understood as magic.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory

Comment

1. There is a way of working a room that is not attention demanding or loud in any sense. Instead of entitlement, think comfortably about self-worth. Be that person that intrigues others, make them want to find out more about you.

   I feel your pain there as I take baby steps towards the same objective and try to not lose myself in the process.

   Posted by: V · Jul 25, 02:42 AM · #

2. First, so interesting: this theory of a teacher’s relationship to authority. Very cool.

   But anyway, yes. I think you should trust your working-class skills, Owl. I waited tables for a long long time, too. I know how to work a room, but I also know how to make the other want to ‘engage’ with me, and feel glad they did, afterward. It’s about more than being receptive, of course. I do a lot of networking (there’s a really yucky word for you) here, constantly having to promote myself and generate a little interest. (I work teaching English to employees of big companies. I’m always putting myself out there for consideration.) It would feel gross if it weren’t so human. The more interested I am, the more interesting. You have to be aware of everyone in the room, while still making the person you’re speaking to feel like it’s just the two of you. Those are the conversations that they remember, later.

   Entitlement not necessary, but charisma, yeah. Why do you say you haven’t got it?

   Posted by: joy · Jul 25, 07:45 AM · #

3. Interesting thoughts. I will think about the analogy of working the studio as a video game – it is very apt, especially if the game is a multi-ball pinball sort of thing, where you have to keep many balls in play. Fun approach to situational awareness.

   I believe that the teacher is the servant of the students, in many of the same ways that the waiter is the servant of the diner. The difference, of course, is that the teacher orders for the student, and helps the student eat. And of course, the teacher is working for the betterment of the student, not tips :-).

   The true authority to give the student any direction at all comes from true knowledge of the practice and the student, and the drive to serve the student’s best interests using yoga. So the teacher works to serve the student – she knows what the student needs, and how to meet thsoe needs with the practice. Kind of a high-level of abstraction, but I find it clarifying.

   Thus what is spoken by the teacher is simply the best advice for serving that particular student with the practice. True help, cooked with love, served with gentleness and patience, and garnished with humor and grace :-).

   A false authority comes from having completed a training course & been approved by other teachers to teach yoga. Unfortunately, this process only develops people who are technically proficient in the mechanics of teaching a mechanical practice. The true essence of the teacher, from which the natural authority of a teacher naturally and inevitably flows, doesn’t come from classes or approvals.

   So if your (anyone’s) teacher was authoritarian, I salute your struggle to reinvent your teaching as a more loving practice. An Ashtanga teacher who I know is dealing with this, & is slowly finding her own voice & the wisdom to be more responsive and less reactive. She is fndamentally changing her question from “how can I get this student to better yoga,” to “how do I serve this student.”

   She is becoming more humble and caring, and thus her brittle hubris of false authority is dying & being replaced by the strong, calm, humble, soft, confidence of being able to really see the student, really knowing the practice, and really being able to offer the student exactly appropriate help with their own personal practice. Very, very, very cool to watch.

   Posted by: Dale · Jul 25, 09:57 AM · #

4. Dale, you would need to do a lot—specifically, the primary series one thousand times—in order to repair the violations of trust and decency that you’ve done around here. I asked you to stay in your sandbox (the previous thread) because I do not want to ban you outright, but I will let this very long comment form you stand because, hey, it’s Friday. It’s tough to take your words about “truth” and “falsity” even at face value when you’ve already established that you don’t practice yoga and do recognize that we do either. Sorry, friend.

   It is in any case very, very difficult to see teachers clearly. What we as students read as “not worthy” (your words) or “brittle hubris” is very likely shaped strongly by our own projections and preconceived ideas about practice. Especially if we “believe” there is one “right” or “appropriate” or “safe” way to do things and the rest is “false.”

   There is more than one road that leads to life, and as many gates as there are people.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 25, 10:26 AM · #

5. Thanks for the thoughts, you two. V, you are right. I wonder if I could observe someone doing that without the discomfort about “networking” that Joy suggests—specifically in a professional setting. The way a room moves in an academic reception expresses both ongoing dyadic relationships and bigger hierarchies/levels of power, but personal magnetism matters too. It is what is is. I tend to see little more than self-promotion in play, but what else goes on in the video game?

   I say I don’t have charisma in a sense because I’m a relative little person in this world. Context matters. And I’m also just appalled by a lot of instrumental professional maneuvering: instremuntalism is inversely proportional to intellectual depth. Some people get ahead with the first, others (those who excite me) are oblivious to the former and focused on the latter.

   I like socially clueless sociologists. :)

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 25, 10:37 AM · #

6. Yeah. It’s kind of gross watching someone get by on schmooze.

   Posted by: joy · Jul 25, 01:23 PM · #

7. It’s sort of amazing to watch the young Ivy League work it. They are SO direct, connected, entitled. And actually less smart than the others, frequently. A weird, secretly recognized phenomenon (except Yale: they have wonderful minds). But you can’t talk about it out loud.

   Unless you have an anonymous blog that’s not really about sociology.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 25, 01:39 PM · #

8. socially clueless sociologists…
   That’s hilarious.

   Posted by: Liz · Jul 25, 02:01 PM · #

9. I like the video game analogy, think it’s appropriate for table and ashtanga service but harder to relate to the room of academics because, it is not always clear upon viewing the academics what needs to be DONE, that is, oh, Dr. Bloom needs help with mari c right now and he is quick so I will be able to do that and get to Helen Vendler for backbending before she gets annoyed.

   An aside: When ‘in charge’ of working a yoga room (which was very seldom for me, and only ever due to teacher’s absence) I thought I had a pretty good sense of who needed what, when, and of juggling it. But when directed by a teacher to adjust, I can barely ever find the person I am being pointed at. Strange.

   Posted by: katie · Jul 28, 08:56 AM · #

10. I read this post the first day it was up but I couldn’t relate so I didn’t think too far into it. Dale mentioned “situational awareness”, however, and this product comes to mind. The system probably can be adapted to allow use of situation-specific symbology to help a yoga teacher or sociology convention attendee stay on top of all proximate goings-on. The only drawback is that the umbilical would have to be dragged behind wherever the teacher or attendee should happen to go. It would be possible to assemble a completely self-contained system in a backpack but the requisite battery would make it heavy.

    Posted by: Carl · Jul 29, 08:51 AM · #

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