Starvation, Contortion, Self-Regulation · 29 February 2008

I almost broke my policy on comment non-deletion. There was something I said among friends—among ashtangis—a while ago, and later it caught the attention of another group of people and raised a bit of looky-loo, clicky-click. Oh yeah, it’s the internet. More than just your friends.

The comment had to do with the practice of intense calorie restriction, and what other people's "research" shows to be negative effects on sociability, energy and mind. As with ashtanga, some people have given their own bodies to this research, so we can know in physical detail how it works. But with both of these radical programmes (one of which is fun, one of which sounds to me like torture) :), I wonder if practitioners ourselves should be the only reporters of our research… or if feedback from the world would help to balance our self-reported results.

I commented along these lines because I was thinking of the simple but deep Being in the World chapter of Desikachar—a piece of writing I take as a praise for householder yoga along a middle path and a call to engage deeply in relationships as—among other things—a way to gain “objective” information about oneself.

With ashtanga, very strange desires are born—for lightness and flexibility of body—and images the world deems gut-wrenching become, to us, iconographic. We are only humans—we want to be the most and the best on the dimension we travel—and in the context of ashtanga this can lead to self-harm quite easily.

Starvation or contortion: choose your poison.

At the beginning, the striver-impulse is to look at others’ edges and seek to internalize them. This is such an easy way to avoid working from inside, and maybe to get hurt.

So we listen to the world when it tells us we are being crazy. Say, with the not necessarily bad ashtangi tendency to undereat. One becomes aggressive, hard, and one-track-minded for lack of food… or lacks the energy to keep up in conversation much less on a hike: we might not be able to see this directly but we can see it reflected through the eyes of others. Helps define the edge.

But that is an internal process. To dispel my personal regret about making any comment about a practice, CR, in which I do not even engage because I love eating and need a good lot of daily carbs to do intellectual work, I want to say that I’m sorry. I do have some objective data here, but no subjective data. Sociology tells me the former are enough; my gut tells me they are not. I overstepped.

There is such a fine line for me between honestly reflecting back to others what I see and actually reaching to participate in their self-regulation. Who the bejezus am I? Just another data point for you. Not your ultimate witness, not your judge. Screw me! :) I want to trust others to do their personal practice with honesty and grace, not intrude upon them. What's the use intruding?

All of this is about playing our own edges. This is what I do—consummately, compulsively; lovingly, excessively. It’s how some of us move and grow. Edges are scandalous and rarely pretty. The only way to work there for any length of time is if you can regulate yourself. I am remembering that for most people who are mindful self-researchers of this sort, they instinctively know themselves better than I ever can.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Comment

1. hi (0v0)
   i love you. and am i the only one to comment here? i really don’t think you offended anyone. it’s good to see people discussing these issues outside of my usual nutrition cronies. an educated opinion is good. what is not good is when people who don’t have an interest in nutrition and don’t read about it make comments that reflect their ignorance. your comments come from an educated point, even though you might feel you overstepped. i think that those of us sincerely interested in yoga and who practice it over a long time eventually gravitate to learning about good nutrition. and going along with what you’re saying, each person determines how they want to practice that nutrition – it’s sort of a self-experiment.
   cheers, arturo

   Posted by: arturo · Mar 2, 01:28 PM · #

2. Hey! Thanks for this.

   Readers have mentioned this post confused them; and that’s cool, because it just means that they don’t know what exactly I’m discussing. :)

   I am sure there are people out there who welcome direct criticism, and learn from it. But I’m not a person who is really built to deliver that kind of thing effectively. I went through a phase with my family, who are fundamentalist Christians but believe themselves to be “moderates,” of rooting out their deepest bigotries and superstitions and challenging them. Did this soften their bigotries or make them less fundamentalist? No! Just the opposite! They already saw me as representing a liberalism that scared them, and my going after them in this way just made them recoil all the more from any moderation.

   I feel like my way has to be to give people the resources and the support to be honest with themselves, not to try to tell them what I think. Who cares what I think?

   As this blog indicates, I still have some views and rants and manifestoes left inside me. I’m ok with that and don’t aim to kill off that line of growth before it’s done working itself out. But I do aim to soften my intentions.

   I’ll speak out about stupidity and injustice if it is time to do that, but as soon as other people are involved, I want to make sure that I don’t speak unless my primary motivation is love. (Possible remaining exceptions?: white supremacists, Latin American paramilitaries, Wal-Mart executives, classical economists, woozles, Dick Cheney.)

   This, I think, will keep me from getting hyperbolic and hopefully make my point of view more useful to the any people who might care about it.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 2, 02:19 PM · #

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