There are different kinds of trees · 9 August 2008

A client is learning to trust himself—literally, he’s putting himself in situations that show him that he is already rooted and stable. Yesterday we began and ended a session with tree, using the shape of it as a measure of the body before and then after practice. He keeps having these moments of recognition in practice, and I realize that as much as I’m there for it I don’t exactly understand.

This morning I skipped dance because I wanted to keep my wits about me. In dance, I let my wits spin out at great distances, give all my energy away, play with boundaries of self until I’m exhausted. It takes an hour afterwards to click back over into writing mind and writing body. So today I rolled out the kitchen practice mat but brought my dance mind rather than ashtanga mind to the moment.

Oh my god. Ok. That was easy and hearteningly good; and shifting in to the mental-bodily state for some kind of ‘practice’ was shockingly automatic—maybe because it’s just what my organism expects to do when Saturday morning rolls around.

I don’t even remember what kitchen practice consisted of this morning, but at one point I decided to hang out on one leg and find out everything that is possible when that one variable is held constant. I thought of the student who had his tree realizations yesterday, and experimented with what it would take to find the limits of my own one-legged stability. Suprising how much is possible, how much stability is here.

And you know what? It’s all in the backbend principles. Grounding down through four corners of the feet, sucking the arches up a whole line of energy into the pelvic floor, slight inner rotation, microbend the knees, work the quadriceps and even the hamstrings strongly, steer the hips toward even. Do the backbends from the ground up and strongly, and crazy standing stability is coming. Treelike stability, even if you’re doing all manner of spontaneous branching with the other limbs.

It is good to set aside the container of fixed practice and play. The consciousness of this morning, in my challenging kitchen space where I am so used to the deepest requirements of focus, was so much in the body. Usually I’m focused on cultivating the deepest possible mental state, so the stipulated practice sequence is nothing more than a regular mantra for supporting that. Today was not in the mind but out of the mind. Ec-static. Expressive, moreso than contemplative. Really happy and satisfying, but absolutely not the same as a practiced mental state whose intention is one-pointedness. And I can only say that vis-à-vis experience of regular meditation practice and ashtanga.

So this morning also made me a little sad, considering what’s missing from the “wild art” practices that are primarily ecstatic and expressive (and also sad about the outright poverty of concocted American yogas that grasp for "happiness" and self-congratulation as a way to simulate ecstasy or run from pain). I move in order to make myself happy, it’s true. The energetic outcome is guaranteed. But with ashtanga I move in order to find out what I really feel—to observe rather than to create or express.

The common complaint that ashtanga is not fun is about this. It’s because the style is built for contemplation rather than for gratification. For me it incidentally delivers sort of indecent joy on a daily basis (sorry, it always happens to me--the trees do clap their hands even if they're made in contemplation), but the texture of that is interestingly different from the joy of dance.

I don’t know. There is much more to find here. The neurologists can hook electrodes up to my head and find out that the brain is doing totally different things in ashtanga and dance, but is that even interesting? The real researcher here is me, finding out how all these different mind-body states operate, how you get into them, how deep you can go, and what kind of consequences they have. My two practices are such a great contrast— two extremes on the control/spontaneity or contemplation/expression spectra. I’m so grateful that I can investigate both practices better through the contrast.

There we go with comparative logic again. Funny that comparative logic itself doesn’t operate in either ashtanga mind or dance mind, but here, in front of my computer, in discursive mind. Which is good for something too. Good for a lot, actually.

And for now that’s an additional question. Which mind-body practices and state-cultivations add depth, intensity, intelligence, cleanliness, speed and integrity to my everyday discursive mind?

 

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , science

Comment

1. Oh, a Saturday link: Sociologist and Bioethicist James Hughes. This is the first of three podcasts. Another level of crazy shit. Have fun!

   Oh and yes I know Sufjan covered that song. The Gaithers are way better though. C’mon.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 9, 06:02 PM · #

2. Owl, you are a delight. (says will ferrel-as-james lipton)

   My struggle is trying to keep the dance mind at bay. Get back, vaganova method! Get out of my virabhadrasana II! Sometimes I tap into it for the standing leg lifts, though. In certain places there’s much more stability for me, more muscle memory and more oomph, if dance it. This is so weird, but sometimes, making it pretty makes it stable. What is that about. I feel as you describe, playing with the boundaries of the self, outside the results of regular hard and sweaty work. Almost like borrowing from some other energy that will do half the work for me.

   Posted by: joy · Aug 10, 02:54 AM · #

3. State-cultivation for discursive mind? The one that affects me most is diet. Interestingly, for most pointed discursive mind, it’s a diet that is perfectly NOT suited for yoga (i.e., lots of protein and fat, little carbohydrate).

   Been thinking about this lately: I consciously accept that my “yoga diet” makes me less pointedly focused in a corporate setting than the “bodybuilder diet” I kept while I was… um, climbing the ladder. I can afford to be a little more spacey now.

   Posted by: karen · Aug 10, 07:04 AM · #

4. I am taking my first Tango lesson tomorrow. I will report back. Ashtango anyone? :)

   Posted by: Gregor · Aug 10, 02:08 PM · #

5. In my younger and more vulnerable Sundays I used to do Chuck’s 2hr 10min led primary then hustle over to the fencing place for the freeform dance from 1130 to 130. Quite exuberant I was. Being so loose from 1st i would play with (at the time) forbidden and advanced forms and create a certain amount of gawking and a helluva lot of fun. I was physically spent and psychically stoked by sunday afternoon.

   Posted by: e&sj · Aug 11, 11:12 AM · #

6. Excellent. It’ll take me a while to digest all this. Would you please explain the following, though?

   ...sucking the arches up a whole line of energy into the pelvic floor...

   Posted by: Carl · Aug 11, 01:27 PM · #

7. Hi (0v0)
   Where does the video fit in?
   Funny, but the massage therapist that gave me a chair massage on Sunday, an advanced tantric yogi, told me yoga practitioners should dance once in a while. It seems like a wonderful idea. I just have very limited time.
   Hugs
   Arturo

   Posted by: arturo · Aug 12, 04:05 AM · #

8. Joy: borrowing from some other energy, especially for the balance. Talk about teasing apart the mindstuff. That is very interesting. Also, as we’ve discussed my dance-mind is different from your dance mind, since I’m doing the crazy, informal stuff and you are in an aesthetic point of view. But maybe the two have more in common than we thought. We could keep asking this is different ways…

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 12, 09:52 AM · #

9. Karen, affording to be more spacey— no kidding, right? Also, you’ve probably incorporated a lot of your professional bearing as implicit or tacit knowledge now, and you can do what you need to do within the system with lest cognitive push.

   For me, I particularly need MORE calories to do good discursive mind. I can fuel yoga practice on breath, but this is not true for analytical practice.

   ESJ: I’m so glad you told me this. I am following in your footsteps more than I realized. I usually limit myself to only dancing Saturdays (writing competes), but that Sunday circus is absolutely unique. When Michael leads, I have to be there. He is a mystic genius, with an energy and intuition unique even amid all my mind-body queries and meetings with very refined humans in recent years. I never think to strike yoga poses, but others who are silent readers here find their asanas come into their dance quite a lot. For me, it’s a great release from anything so formal as an asana.

   I wonder if the depth and heights of the Sunday circus grow out of the fact that many people have been in the room every week for years… all the way back to the days of Chuck and long before.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 12, 10:00 AM · #

10. Arturo, the video didn’t make sense?

    It’s a song from my childhood. SUCH a beautiful song, to me.

    The words are from Isiah, a passage on pursuing your own intentions and the ways the whole world conspires to support you when you are in your own right line of action:

    You shall go out with joy and all the trees of the fields shall clap their hands…

    I recommend looking it up. It’s a good piece of sacred text.

    I guess I was just thinking of dancing trees and this came up.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 12, 10:04 AM · #

11. Oh, Carl! Missed your question. Could someone else step in to explain this or do I have to post about it at some point?

    Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 12, 10:05 AM · #

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