The Natives Are Restless · 23 September 2007

Ruth: [hearing chanting] What's that?
Dr. Moreau: The natives, they have a curious ceremony…
Ruth: Tell us about it, Edward.
Edward: Oh, it's... it's nothing.
Dr. Moreau: They are restless tonight.

                                                         -Island of Lost Souls (1932)

Yeah, the natives are restless. Phone calls. Email.

Politics. Or, as they say, shalatics. Schedule changes. All these teachers, all these studios: and nobody can manage to offer an even vaguely consistent schedule. Woah! Trouble in OCD land!

Seriously, though. The amount of schedule drama in this scene is stupid. The best I can do is get an annual pass at one place and just take it for granted that that's where my mat lives, come what may.

Here is my situation. Around the time the Iraq War began, I made a decision not to commute. It’s about gas consumption, and about family time. Also (let’s be honest): the fact that I don’t suffer bad drivers at all well. So: my yoga practice, and what there is of a weekday social life, live on the Westside. So it is. Gives me a chance to defend this zone to the hipsters.

I made a choice at the beginning to see west side yoga as a land of plenty. This was a way of choosing not to see it as ground zero of yoga politics. Of course it’s both: land of plenty and land of politics. Plenty generates as much politics as scarcity ever did.

I’m a student of politics and a lover of the tiniest details of interpersonal stories (it’s always being suggested that I write an ethnography book on this scene—and sometimes I like the idea, though thank god I’m not trying to pass off such total nonsense as a dissertation), so while making that choice up front saved me a lot of distraction, it also meant sacrificing a few excitingly gossipy potential friendships. Walking out of the ladies’ when I had one too many good things to add; shrugging like I didn’t have an opinion when really I did. Not asking the crucial little questions I knew would open floodgates. Letting stories stop with me even though passing them on would be an interesting experiment. On the surface, sometimes it’s been a drag.

Funny thing, though. Over time, I’ve found that acting like I don’t have an opinion on shalatics means to a large degree I actually don’t have an opinion. (Completely revolutionary finding.) And the process is self-reinforcing: the less I appear to care about shalatics, the less interesting I am to talk to about them. The less I know. The less I harbor opinions. The more I love to practice. &c.

Putting together a practice in this town gets difficult if you’re a divider, a person who has some teachers and other practitioners with whom you're just not ok. If you are, well, a hater. Or just afraid. Practicing hyperexclusivity makes you take yourself more and more seriously, and can make for a  spiral of self-isolation.

Then the voices in your head become deafening.

Yoga can make you so inflexible.

The shalatics have been so prominent recently that I’m getting sucked in. Gezus. My job is to take the best out of any teacher (myself included), any circumstance. Yet I have less ease in extending that attitude to a certain large corporation. When something actually gets under my skin, I see there are still traces of a political creature capable of getting stirred up and involved in it. At this gets so, so in the way of having practice as a refuge or as a time I set aside to be content and grateful.

Ah, well.

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Comment

1. Getting absorbed in politics – work, shala, family, etc. – seems inescapable in this life. People must crave the conflict. Perhaps negative interaction is better than no interaction at all?

   I think it comes down to intentions – are you in it just for the sport or to promote positive change?

   And as always the fundamental tension between ahimsa and satya remains.

   Posted by: cody · Sep 23, 11:20 PM · #

2. Practice is a refuge but paradoxically it is also the zendo in which the fires of ego get combusted or so said Eido Roshi once upon a blue moon. Ashes love to talk about their teachers, the great irony being that those figures approved and otherwise are a small element in the quantum experience. Pardon the cliche but the practice is the teacher or more specifically the comingling of effort,sweat,pain,injury,humiliation,exhaltation and fantastical elation that birth themselves continually and kaleidoscopically in this bear of a practice. The dance and tease and coitus of Shakti and Shiva is the teacher and student and observer all reflecting one another. As inefable energy begins to settle in the central channel words no longer suffice. On a linear timeline I look forward to this certainty somewhere out beyond my next 10,000 or so incarnations. best to all,Tristan

   Posted by: tristan · Sep 29, 04:33 AM · #

3. “Yoga can make you so inflexible.” now there’s a truism. perhaps even understated.

   Posted by: Janis · Oct 14, 12:51 AM · #

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