But What Do you Do with a Samskara When You Find One?

Indeed.

Samskara (borrowing from the Yoga Sutras) is a habit, a repeated behavior. Some commenters say you can build "good samskaras" like long-term yoga asana practice.

One of the things I find compelling is that samskaras require me to plunge deep into all of the related terms, concepts and beliefs. For example, this sexual samskara I named last time, isn't (in my experience) from my current life. It's not from the Catholicism or the adolescence or the bad marriage (although any of those could, if we were speaking about me in a more Western system like psychoanalysis, be at the base of the compulsion which said samaskara demands).

In the Western view, this compulsion would be bound to repression probably (at least that's easy) and perhaps linked to early adolescent curiosity or to parental sexlessness (if there'd been such activity, I would have found evidence of it).

But that's somewhat boring, don't you think? And then psychological work or self-help-work would enable me to "overcome it" and "be a productive member of society." I'm already a productive member of society.

Now, in the Eastern view (and quoting one concept from the Yoga Sutras is, I admit, not at all the same thing as "Eastern view"), a samskara invites one to believe in or at least entertain the notion of reincarnation, and thence of samsara, the cycle of rebirths, and thence karma, actions, and thence, seeds of action sown, habits acquired in past lives, samskaras. One is, according to some commentators (and I'm often thinking of Gregor Maehle when I say "some"), INCARNATED based on samskaric energies, as if the samskaras are the LINES of your current figure drawing, and then you are, like all of Prakriti/creation/existence, incarnated from the gunas, our friends Tamoguna (inertia), Rajoguna (activity) and Sattwaguna (wisdom).

So what can be done with a Samskara? Let's say you know there is one, or can find one, or have come to believe that something is samskaric, has drawn your figure, has incarnated you energetically. What can you possibly do with that knowledge?

Most often when I am tempted to write about sex stuff here, it's about the exact difference in priorities between me and J currently, and I know those differences quite well. Now, such a narrative would probably be really informative to our imaginary therapist up above, but it does little to tell me or you anything about samskaric elements.

Other times, I am tempted to write about the nature of the compulsion, because it's quite different from what the West currently calls "sex addiction." Said addiction is, as far as I understand it, the idea that the patient can't achieve long-lasting satisfaction in any relationship or from any experience and must constantly move from partner to partner and experience to experience. Sounds like a made-up condition to me; any state college will provide hundreds of examples weekendly.

The compulsivity that I feel isn't about partners or experiences, it's about the qualitative nature of the experience, what the experience is (I feel) CAPABLE OF. And so this is not about some position or some numerical combination, it is about the potential of sexuality on pretty much a METAPHYSICAL LEVEL. Put short, it is as if my desire for enlightenment/heaven/plenitude is linked directly to my desire for interpersonal deep connection, and transgressive sexuality (remember, I was raised lay-Catholic, so all embodiment is transgressive by definition) is the link between the two.

Western language would look at that, see the Catholicism, see the transgression, see the riff on the mind-body problem, and then say that I'd internalized Catholic forbiddance, eroticized it, paradized it, and come out with a perpetually unachievable vision which leads to eternal frustration because it's unrealistic about sex, about humanity, AND about metaphysics. This is why the compulsion doesn't lead to a massive partner count; instead, it measures virtually all partners as failures and insufficient. And that's probably accurate. IN Western language.

But consider that a samskara in Eastern language, then it is a lifetime pattern created by the sprouting "seeds" of past karma, and currently incarnate in the three gunas as my present life. Gunas, however, can be managed; they make up the food we eat and the incarnation of everything with which we interact. Karma in the form of action exists in all actions we take: asana practice, interpersonal relations, and so on. In this worldview, I can AFFECT the samskara through action, through meditation, even perhaps through food choices, and certainly through choices in company. The primary flavor of this samskara for me is rajas, activity. The drive to GET TO THAT DEEP CONNECTION. Drive, desire, rage, rajas. But it also has tamas in it, stillness, inertia, refusal to engage. Every once in a blue moon, it has sattwa in it. Calm moments, reminders that there is something native about this, the absence of the desire to constantly be swallowing the next dose of action. Never satisfaction, but moments of contentment. But the nature of this samskara is to see fleeting satisfaction as incitement to desire, never as contentment. Rajas ever after, never santosha. That is what it urges, always.

In the Eastern version of this, santosha/contentment is a place that can be inhabited; the challenge is that this samskara demands constant motion. In the Western version of this, I have to surrender my imaginary paradise so that I can rejoin humanity (although it's damn tempting to imagine some mountain village where my cult lives, and we all have a ton of LSD and eternal carnality until, you know, the FBI burns down our complex or something).

The essence of this thing is that I'm refusing to enjoy what I've got, because I can imagine greater satisfactions, but those greater satisfactions aren't HUMAN anymore, they are superhuman. What is the point of trying to incarnate myself in the superhuman?

But see how bottomlessly trite it would have been to simply say, "I need to enjoy life as it is" or "I need to just be happy for what I have"? See how vomitously repugnant, how violently intolerable, that kind of trite life summary would be?

And even in the depth of my hate and disdain for language like that (and I summoned it on purpose, very much so), there is a demand that I be Dramatic, that my life be Important, that my Quest be Noble. Crystal clear.

"Attention! I am hereby suffering from Noble Frustration! Page, fetch me my sword and shield and let us write a novel!"

This, too, has to be accounted for.

That's why parenting is the Great Counterpractice.

Parenting introduces a positively terrifying level of everydayness into my existence. There's no nobility in it that can be established without camp: who should I be, the guy who was up two hours with a fussy but not sick kid? The guy who changes diapers? The guy who jumps off the plastic footstool with his kid because "we're jumping now"? The guy who reads train books to the compelled child? The guy who plays crossing signal while the child runs to and fro making train-chuffing noises? Yes yes, you'll say this is everyday hero-dom, and that's probably safe to say, but there is no TRANSGRESSION in being a parent.

I'm always tempted to own that word; it is my WEAPON. I become MYSELF when I transgress, and that Catholic background is endlessly productive for this. Because I internalized (Western view again) Catholic body-hatred, ANYTHING that I do that's embodiment (climbing, breathing, being ALIVE generally) can be seen as transgressive. Transgression powers up the ego, makes it feel strong, vengeance-dealing, against the old repressions, the long absences.

But how is rolling a ball to-and-fro across the living room, or giving a bath, or telling the kid about a vision of a black steam engine crossing a snowy road in Michigan, transgressive? It isn't. And most of parenting isn't, at least I can't think of a moment that is. And then parenting also comes with much less climbing, much less yoga, much less sex, much less embodiment (by which, here particularly, I always mean anti-Catholicism). The ego starves, grows pale, frays, grows fragile, breaks, cracks, begins to die, and freaks out. I've never been so concerned with the terror of mortality as I have been since I became a parent. And not "because I don't want to leave my child," but because I understand my own frailty now, I can't grab mortality and wield it like a rhetorical sword against Christian eternity and smash my fucking enemies in the face with it. Mortality has become HUMAN, FLESHED, VULNERABLE.

So this single samskara comes with ideals in me that contain all of my rhetorical overreaches, past my own humanity. It is the desire for everything that I can never have, not in San Francisco, not anywhere, nowhere human on earth. I sometimes say that I don't chase other partners because every relationship would be a failure, every relationship would wind up being disappointingly mortal, the energy always runs out, the depth is never sustained, someone always gets busy or sick or too tired or too preoccupied.

So parenting teaches me how to have a sex life (and not much of one at that, but a human one). It's frustrating, but more and more, life is not about this, but about changing what in the Eastern view would be called "destiny." I think it was Vasistha (this is probably in Maehle somewhere too) who said that for one of true determination, there is no destiny (no predestined karmic destiny). One can undo one's karma, like Milarepa apparently did (although he was still killed, apparently because of his own accumulated bad karma).

For all of its sexualization and neurosis, this samskara isn't about sexual behaviors or preferences or positions. It's about my great wish not to be human.

Not to be mortal, not to be frustrated, not to be daily, not to be mundane, not to be awake in the middle of the night comforting someone else. Not to feel, not to fear, not to be anxious, not to be in the moment, any moment.

Not to be human.

And the answer, in a sentence? Not join a threesome, not bring out the cuffs, not find a new orifice.

Be human. Be there. Be there now, be there then, be there.

Can I Do This in a Paragraph?

Now, the short answer is "no," because I can't often restrict myself to ONE paragraph. But I'm going to make it an exercise. Here's some groundwork for the thing: Tuesday morning last week I had a hard emotional-release practice (after one of February's VERY few Primary series practices that Monday night) and I got crystal clarity about how my relationship with sex stuff both generally and specifically then, with J, goes. Part history, part interpersonal, but really clear vision. Then this afternoon, playing with the boy and Play-Doh, I got the rest of it.

One paragraph:

Part of what makes me up (and I'm talking gunas here) is some kind of sexual samskara stuff; that's where a huge portion of my ego pain is, has been, and perhaps will be. Frustration, drive, anger, fear, like the whole Planet-Dagobah-training bit. "What's in there? Only what you take with you." In this incarnation? Long periods of frustration, focus, intellectualizing, processing fear, obeying it, defying it, achieving satisfaction, finding that satisfaction is inevitably unsatisfactory. Currently, a relationship that asks for a "simple sacrifice" of intimacy, but with a partner who doesn't realize how samskarically painful that "simple" sacrifice is, and therefore how "unsimple" it also is. "I didn't realize how big your ego was," she said, and I wanted to say, "Look, if you see a man running down the street with his hair on fire, the last thing you should call him is an egomaniac." But because this is perhaps THE problem, it is also THE solution. Read whoever--Sutras, Zen, Ingram, CTR, doesn't matter--and you see that realizing the ego as a costume is how you find enlightenment. So do kid care instead of climbing, bending, sexing, sacrifice what my ego says is my Whole Identity, to this day by day householding ordinariness? THAT IS THE PATH. And it's not EVEN the path. It's LIFE. The bottle of milk is the Guru. KAPOW!!

Sensory, Creative, Energy

There is a line in Maitland's MIND BODY ZEN that says, "we die and are resurrected thousands of times a day." I've only had time to read about eight pages of that book so far, but that's the line that sticks.

A long time ago I dreamed a hospice site where I was trying to calm and "send to rest" different avatars of my own ego. Young people, old people, men, women.

I'm in a phase where I don't really give a damn about asana anymore; I'm not practicing much because I'm doing the dharma, which for me means the schoolwork, the committee meetings, sending out the panel offer to that conference, spending time with the kid and the family. Even when I'm teaching the yoga on Sundays (and that's my most traditional room), my advice to students is about breathing, energy summoning, energy conservation, staying friendly with yourself, keeping the trance intense.

The Intro to Ashtanga workshop I did a week ago Friday had eighteen people in it (awesome!) and most of them were people I'd not seen before and haven't seen since, so I'm not certain what they took away. I took a question on the "eight limbs" (because there's 'ashtanga yoga' and 'ashtanga vinyasa yoga', right?) and I even suprised myself in the way that I was able to paraphrase the eight. In practice, I told students they would have to "make choices" (example: step up on breath pace in Surya B, or step up "high enough" and take an extra breath?) and that this can become, over time, an energetic and ego decision, ways to contain yourself, ways to expand yourself (nipping that one from Owl, who's been saying marvelous things of late, in two different locations).

Then the evening after that workshop, I got sick with something that involved barfing. It's not hard for me to barf when I need to, but I know people who agonize about it for an hour. For me, it's just "aha, this is gonna happen," and then it does. And then it's over and it feels good. Pretty simple, but of course, entirely abject. Something inside you becomes something outside you, and you want it even further away than it is. My abs, of course, are quite strong from all the asana and the history of wall-climbing, so barfing HURTS, because the abs maximally contract to make the action happen. It's like laughing hard for a half hour, but all contracted into about two minutes.

Sensory.

I went climbing for the first time in about 18 months up on the northwest side of the city, in a location that has been purchased by my beloved climbing gym in Bloomington. They also bought the whole School of Gymnastics space next door and aim, by summertime, to make it into a space that is capable of holding national competitions. The blueprints look awesome. Anyway. I still like climbing, but there was a fantastic nostalgia in hitting boulder problems again. The old days AS old days, as history, not recoverable. A love for them, mixed with an acceptance of their age. Not that I can not climb anymore or have lost something, but climbing now is not climbing then. Climbing then is history; the old knuckle swellings, the old injuries, the old ego fighting to transcend itself through achievement and failing. I pulled hard on a 5.11 route (unroped, so only about the bottom 10 feet of it) and felt the knuckles swell again into old pain, and so I backed off, stuck to simple bouldering (v0, v1, v2). In a way I said good bye by saying hello. I'll be back.

I've had outrageous amounts of work with the four classes, the search committee, and the interpersonal developments with J (all of which have been conversation). The conversation I mentioned in the prior post, I now remember as one question, about being a parent and the ego. Over a year ago, I said I couldn't "think" about parenting, couldn't get it to sort of "meet my strength." This conversation got me finessing that, rephrasing it. Parenting is not something I think about, not something I conceptualize, I can't make it part of my "ego possession," which I do about everything else, by conceptualizing my teaching philosophy, and my sexual practices and my energy management and everything else I do. Now, by this I don't mean "making it all bloodlessly intellectual," I mean, "trying to combine the tactile sensuality with high intellectuality so as to alchemize the binary." One could say, less accurately, why I teach, than that one statement. I sort of inhabit the mind-body problem (or if you like, mind-spirit/body-animal) problem so as to alchemize it from within, by both theatricality, physicality and French theory, trying to feel thinking and think feeling. BOOM!

In any case, what I was thinking about with parenting is that I can't "own" it, can't seem to make it part of "me" (ego as "me"). I can't put it into my alchemy mind-body project and make it play.

This is because it is too simple, too direct, and too obvious.

And MIND BODY ZEN took me back there instantly. Change a diaper, play with your kid, become a train when he wants to imagine you all chuffing around the house, do this thing, do that thing. Interact with and redirect a tantrum.

It SOUNDS like this should become all conceptualized metaphors about handling my own emotional stuff, and chewy wisdom, and of course parenting is also very abject, with all the barf and poop that you have to handle, but this conceptualizing NEVER HAPPENS.

This is KEY.

I understand myself, a lot of the time, as the mind-body-alchemy guy. It's in my abject art course (sensory through evil, cruelty as compassion), it's in my yoga teaching (is this adjustment sexual at all? well it COULD be understood that way, energy can be named, directed, made into shapes, but let's make the adjustment more about HEALTH, for example, and ta-da, the energy now goes THAT WAY, and now let's make the adjustment more about energy, and prana channels, and ta-da, the energy takes THAT CONFIGURATION), and it's in almost all conversation that I have with anyone who does physical movement or academics or both.

BUT parenting never goes there, seems never to PLAY THAT GAME. It's too simple, again, too direct. "Seventh series, highest practice!" I almost want to say "it's Zen, man!" but I don't know Zen well enough to say that, and so I'd offically like to call out KAREN here, to comment on this.

I operate as a parent, without all my conceptualizations, they're useless in parenting. It isn't meta-, isn't clever, doesn't appreciate my humor, doesn't need my darkness/lightness/alchemy mind-body magic. And so while it can make me suffer quite a bit (tantrums are PAIN), it's all very simple and it isn't anything beyond what it is.

In this way, the pain of parenting is sort of a "truer" pain. It doesn't MEAN anything other than what it is, either.

I should be grading instead of writing this, but there was this creative drive, and I needed to get the expression out. Creativity not as "making a thing" or working from inspiration, but as expression itself. I don't "receive inspiration" from without, I feel a need from within, actually quite like needing to barf or to get any other bodily product out. It is, in the literal sense, PRODUCTION.

I'm so wound up still with work tension and frustration with J and the fact that I can't go to the Confluence (because I can't, Abject Art calls, and I'm simply not going to cancel it for the weekend, I knew this in January) and the idea that I have no idea who "should" teach me (who is suited to an ashtangi who's basically indifferent to asana now?), that every practice is about breathing and energy, and release and challenge. Sadness or anger or quiet moments, it has barely anything to do with shape, the inner experience is so colorful, and mostly not pleasant, but whatever, I didn't get into this because it felt good, I got into this because I wanted answers, wanted some knife-edge clarity. I got some.

The great sadness of not being, you know, Aragorn.

But under the mythological hopes (of being Aragorn, of being a 5.11 climber, of being a Second Series practitioner, see all the layers, all the metaphors, one thing with a thousand faces?), there's this simple reality. I got some of it in climbing, too. The counter guys are young and I'm old, and they didn't recognize me AT ALL, none of my "five year setter legend" came with me, I am INVISIBLE. I feel them register my apparent age. Age is all about what other people think. My climbing skill set, which is still there, means WHAT now? Does it mean anything beyond itself?

And even in teaching, when I'm all theatricality (and much more loudly with art students than yoga students, but it does carry over), this performance is TO LIBERATE the people I'm teaching. Become physical, get in your body! Break up your conceptualizations! Combine a tone that doesn't fit, with a content: example, be snarky about how graduate education works, with the Capstone students. Yes, bite the hand that feeds you! But know when you can get away with it. Liberate the inner restraint and make it all external performance; don't become your job, your role, keep it juicy, keep it alive.

I fell for roles-outside-roles, back in the day. Went from frustrated husband guy to rad rock climbing guy, rad open relationship guy, and then found that reality even broke THOSE roles to pieces. Being alive doesn't mean just being physically radical, bending into wacko shapes and being able to hold your breath for three minutes and suspend yourself in a corner on two pieces of plastic twenty-five feet up. Being ALIVE and JUICY also means asking the crying, floppy child on the floor if he's a train.

But see how that isn't sexual, isn't bending, isn't RAD? This, sadly and joyously, is NONETHELESS being alive, aliveness itself.

Do still climb walls.
Do still want that time with J to be like that.
Do still bend, put that foot behind your head or whatever.

Those just Aren't You, is all.

This feels too simple, like I didn't dig deep enough, like I didn't get into transformation, psychedelia, didn't "take you on a trip." But in a way, this is the trip. Right now. "But nothing's happening." Yes.

Briefly....

J and I had a long conversation (and that NEVER happens, not even about work, most days) which was all about interpersonal relating, the parent-child bond, and introvert/extrovert tendencies, that I found quite enlightening on a number of levels. We used to have chewy thinky conversations like this all the time.

We did NOT talk about our own relationship, although I said and discovered a few things that were really informative about how we currently work together.

I bring this up because it helps me form links between what was true and untrue about my relationship with my own parents (see the post about the Thursday emotional death trip a few posts back), and what's true and untrue about my relationship with my kid (about which I don't say much, partly out of privacy and partly out of not knowing HOW TO, and now I know more about that) and partly about how we both (J and I, that is) manage relating to other people, which touches (if you're me) directly on my interest in affect and evil, because my classroom is nothing if not an interpersonal relating site (education is relational; ideas feel good; evil is tactile, is fleshed).

I've said various things in different posts that circle all around a sort of broader statement about energy and intimacy and power and communication and all of that. When I have time, I'll try to write out the bigger picture. One could go all the way back to the "crushing" post, too, that's in the mix as well (and as I said in that post when I wrote it, I'm not actually trying to talk about a specific energy, but a general one).

Abject Costuming, Emotions, Evil

Still reading Theweleit, Male Fantasies, while teaching Abject Art. Totally fascinating combination.

Rough day with J, as we're both work-stressed up to our earlobes and not as able to lubricate our sharp edges. Earlier this week, in closer and more affectionate times, a short conversation: should I just approach you whenever and however I want? I guess. Ok, well should I try for any kind of alright, beforehand, do you think that'd work? Nope. So I'll just go for it whenever I feel like it? Ok.

So that's how that works. Total darkness and obfuscation, and I'll just jump in now and then and see if anything good happens. Courage, as the French say.

This is one of those days when I'm just completely fucking annoyed with everything. For one, I'm on a search committee at the art school, and our weekend homework is to turn sixteen people into numbers using a five-item rubric, which isn't in my discipline (I'm an outside member of said committee) and I can't really understand how three of the five criteria are supposed to work or in what part of the dossiers I'm supposed to find things which to evaluate by those criteria. So that's doubly annoying, first because I'm really deep into the interpersonal right now (that's the Abject Art talking, in part), so "number-izing" human beings just annoys me as a tactic, and second because I can't figure out how the fucking obtuse rubric works.

It also sort of annoys me that, if you Google this city and "ashtanga" or "Mysore-style," you wind up here, because often the top two hits are this blog. And on the first page of search results, you get this blog 4-5 times. See? So as we grow as a community, THIS becomes, potentially, the voice of that community, and that's fine in that it's me, and I might well be teaching the class you walk into, BUT as the readership here knows, this blog doesn't advertise, doesn't stay "on message," doesn't write with my teaching personality (in any way other than that, yes, that teacher and I are the same person). But I NEED this outlet to pour out frustration and anger and struggle and interrogation and rants and raves and all that crap that I put in here.

So I'm not giving this up to adopt some "public face" that is more "polite" and "on-message" (getting snarkier with every smart quote), because if the yoga does anything to you, it should crack you open to your own and others REALITY and that's what happens in here.

Now, it's tempting to come up with one of those so-American "challenge invitations," you know what I mean, yes? I mean these rhetorical constructions: "Deal with it" or "Dare you to..." or "Can you keep up?" and things of this flavor. But I hate those, don't you? Aren't you completely turned off by someone who writes, "I'm looking for someone who can keep up" in a self-description? One expects "Deal with it" to be quickly followed by "I ain't changin'" and then a quick pull off a 40-oz bottle of malt liquor.

Those are *uncompassionate* things to say, claims to make. When reality cracks you open (because, actually, YOU'RE REAL, so it's not two actors, it's one), that's compassion. It doesn't probably feel compassionate, but waking up to your own emotions (and if we buy the idea of koshas, your emotions are a BODY, your body, you ARE, among other things, your emotions) is the very business of compassion, and this is why I never denied Chogyam Trungpa his metaphor about the physician who cuts you open with a sharp knife. "Oh, that's so violent!" you want to say. FUCK YOU. Have you ever FELT an unpleasant emotion, something that NEEDS to get out and you don't want it to come up? It TOTALLY slices you open. In fact I would go as far as saying that anyone who hasn't been sliced open by an emotion is either an almost impossibly open human being (although they probably do exist) or a total bullshit artist.

Did I mention that I don't take prisoners here? Have I said that yet?

(hey Patrick, didn't you just say that you dislike "challenge invitations"? what the fuck were THOSE?)

I suppose I would finesse an answer to that this way:

Once upon a time a student of mine asked about some blog I write, or something, and I said, "I can tell you where that is, but I don't pull punches when I write there, so it's not the regular happy-go-lucky guy that I play in the yoga room" and shortly after that conversation, which also involved a lot of "my life, your life" sharing of all sorts of things, I stopped seeing said student around, and I'm sure that something interpersonal got fucked up, and that experience largely makes me want to be "careful" here, so that I don't "offend", but then I think, wait, offend who, how? How careful do I have to be? Do I have to write around everyone's stuff? But how could I even know what sort of stuff my largely anonymous readership has? What the fuck kind of trap is that? And then I got angry, and then I pretty much decided, FUCK YOU and your stuff, if you bring your stuff here and you don't like what you see, you'll simply have to reckon with it yourself. And that is a real temptation to issue a "challenge invitation," that offputting rhetoric with its 40 oz in hand.

And sure, I know I'm stereotyping redneckery when I say that, but in 1994 when I used to go up to the north end of this city a lot, I saw all kinds of that redneckery, gettin' high in the park barefoot and wrestling in the fall leaves and throwing house parties that led to all kinds of Harmony Korine fuckedup shit.

Challenge invitations were offered left and right by that crowd, so I associate the rhetoric with them.

I really decided just to write whatever I wanted or needed to, because I am a person who needs to write; I talk to myself nearly constantly when I need to write, it's not some hobby that I have, it's got some kind of almost biochemical need. Like lecturing to people on the stuff I teach, that content isn't for the academy or for balanced education or for well-roundedness, it's for AFFECT, for RELATING, for TOUCH. But you say that and Westerners read "desperation" (because we think that we believe that wanting touch is desperation, as if all of us are always 14), but touch is a kind of compassion, even if the touch is a poke in the eye (rhetorically speaking).

That last image is the basic idea of Maggie Nelson's book THE ART OF CRUELTY, which I love to pieces (pieces!). Art has wanted to touch us for the whole 20th century, to come off the wall and interact with us. Thus all the installation, the body art, the performance element, the use of daily life objects, the art made from the unconscious, all of that. All of those tactics. "Break the line between art and life!" But a good portion of that art also wants to slap us, prod us, poke us in the eye or other locations. What's THAT about? In Nelson's short phrase, is there value in art that is cruel to us?

I for one LOVE cruel art as long as that cruelty is also smart. Dumb art is like dumb people or dumb books; I go out of my way to avoid that shit. Actually, I more specifically love art that is both SMART and EMBODIED. This can be as simple as Duchamp's urinal called "Fountain" (which is silly and gross, but smart and definitely gives me embodied ideas) or as complicated as a Catherine Breillat film where the heroine undergoes abjection (rape, alienation, rope bondage) to become a sort of embodied superhero by means of motherhood, but not the "mother as hero," instead the "body as hero," motherhood understood as abjection. KAPOW, and then your head explodes, especially with the P-Funk soundtrack over mother and child at the end, after they blow up the husband by leaving the gas on.

An article we recently read in Abject Art spoke about Kara Walker as "wanting to be a slave a little bit" (those are her words, quoted in the article). Kara Walker, so that we're all on the same page, is an African-American artist who works in paper cut-outs of (mostly human) figures, and most of the time we can identify 19th-century-ish-looking black women dancing or children on swings, or sometimes hanging bodies, and it's all sort of reminiscent of the history of slavery, and yet kind of happy and OK. However, there is a more abject Kara Walker, also, who does bodies in weird sexual positions, and sometimes just exploding forms with a leg and an arm, or three women all seeming to nurse, one one another, mouth to breast. And those are not just generally perverse or weird, they're also really hard to relate back to slavery.

Walker's idea, per her being quoted in that reading, is that being a slave is a site of DESIRE, like a costume you can put on. You can want things in it, sort of "use" its imagination, not just be someone else, but sort of create with someone else's imagination, tap the unconscious of some Other. Sounds like a fun movie to watch, hm?

Theweleit is also very much about this same idea, his insistence that we should not READ the fascist and his violence, but FEEL the soldier male, the fascist patriarch. To really understand the fascist is not to see him as a deviant or a perverse shadow version of "the good," but to GET IN THERE.

This, again, I would call a (weird) kind of compassion. And catharsis is not a goal here, but I'd allow it as an experience. Becoming a killer or a slave might result in enormous catharsis, of anything kept, held back, not let open to the sun. As I said earlier, in my body, energy doesn't keep its origin; if I have repressed a thing, it might be tapped by ANY sort of expressiveness which touches it.

In class I called this "abject costuming." It's maybe related to Judith Butler's thing on performative gender roles, in that one is "doing an act," but mostly what this sort of costuming does is to break the idea that "evil has an allure," the way it does for that kid in the Stephen King story: teenager with the usual sexual repression meets his old neighbor who was a Nazi, and the kid begins having all of these progressively violent and abject fantasies as he talks to the old man. Eventually he "sells out" to evil and ta-da, neo-Nazism. Nice material for a story, but not, to my mind, how reality works.

In LOTR, evil is part of the very matter of the world. Sauron wants to dominate all life, but the older evil dude, whose name I forget, and who is only discussed in the appendices to the book, wants to master the MATTER of the world. And it is from that evil, which is part of the very dirt, that more orcs come. That's why evil isn't at an end when Sauron is destroyed.

One could write several books on how evil can be various according to who is calling it that, but yet not relativistic. Let's take a messy but I think informative example, of sexual behavior. If you're some but not all parents, your kids doing that stuff before a certain age, is EVIL. If you're a by-the-books Catholic, doing that stuff three minutes before you're married, is EVIL, but doing it three minutes AFTER you're married is SACRAMENTAL, MAN!! If you're homosexual, some people think what you do is EVIL no matter how much love there is in it. If you're kinky, some people think how you do those things is EVIL! And so on. But this does NOT mean evil is relative (or that all of those people are ridiculous). To expand our notion of "evil" slightly so that it means something more sophisticated than "icky" and less intense than "genocidal," we start to see a certain HUMANITY in evil. Remember how disgustingly pitiful the Penn State abuse cases were and still are? "Did you abuse those children?" "Well, I, I, I enjoy boys.." EW! And yet, how human! You could see so clearly how the dude was struggling with his conscience or memory or desire (or all three or more things) so heavily that he forgot cameras were there. Total horrorshow, and I wondered where and how some part of social systemming had failed, either failed him or failed the children he was associated with; somewhere, something had failed, and there should be sadness, anger too, but sadness louder.

This is something like the way I felt the first (and so far only) time I saw Irreversible. The raping pimp dehumanizes her with language, and that was more terrifying for me than how he destroys her physically. I also had this during the first (and so far only) time I saw Antichrist. He's to blame, she's to blame, hell maybe even the boy is evil. So much masochism and anger. How have we failed here?

Or cruel art, much of it. Or Theweleit's too-human fascists. Not killers, but killers terrified of a "flood" that will drown them. Kill or be killed, trapped, and from that fear, that hemmed-in ego, desire and affect and industry and genocide, over ten million people dead. It's enough to make you terrified of your own hands.

But that sort of material makes me more aware of fantasies in my head and things my hands are capable of, more aware generally. Something about what Nelson calls "cruel art" has that "wake up!" function for me. The abject class talks a lot about revisiting psychotrauma (Vienna Actionism and the Nazis, Mike Kelley and male adolescence, Walker and slavery, et cetera) but the manifestations vary; some are funny, some we can hold at a distance, some I can tell, get under students' skins, and I think that sort of "abject costuming" (for that is also a strategy for dealing with this stuff) is very useful for being-alive lessons.

So much of identity asks us to forget humanity, our own and other people's.

Even something innocuous-sounding (by comparison, certainly), like "mature." Let's be "mature." Do we need to put away childhood for that? Do we do that at our hazard? What behaviors does "mature" create and value, what does it disdain and abject? Does it wake us up or put us to sleep?

Let's expand our possibilities---but wait, go far enough with that, and you get evil (assuming our base identities, like our reliance currently on industrial factory farming, to choose only one angle, aren't already evil, or bound to evil). So wait, let's shrink our possibilities---but wait, go far enough with that and you get frustration, or fascism (oh no, it's circular!), or incomplete, fractional humanity.

This is why we need to be as awake as possible to the whole world.

Tapasya, Pretty Much.

Now, what set this off is a comment out there in the blogosphere about "maybe the yoga SHOULD hurt us" and then a re-mention of the by-now-quite-well-known-as-overblown NYT piece.

I believe my "talking to the screen" reply was "No. No, no no, no, no no." And then I got determined to write this.

Tapasya: what is it, fifth in the niyamas? Somewhere in there? Satchidananda translates it in his commentary as "washing" although most metaphors have to do with fire, burning away. To be honest, Satchi's commentary compares it to beating one's clothing against rocks, a real physical washing process, getting the dirt out, which I think, even without the fire metaphor, gets the idea across nicely.

So wait, it's burning or else being beaten on rocks? Holy crap, did I sign up for your ashtanga workshop?

Right. Let's fix this.

Tapasya could be understood in asana terms as meaning, bending to the point of release. Nothing in that says pain (although, as I hope to say later, emotional pain is something I think is necessary in asana practice if an asana practice can be said to be WORKING). But also, tapasya could be understood in terms of discipline, so that it means, "getting to the mat six days a week" (or however often). And, tapasya can also be read in its "burning" sense, as being about breath and stoking the "inner fire" or, as so many texts have it, "digestive fire," and then it becomes about diet and breathing and pranayama, and I think that's also accurate.

The yoga does NOT need to hurt us on a physical (annamaya) level. Sure, I can see an argument about getting (as it was put elsewhere) that last little bit of Marichyasana D, but really? To expend all your attention (not labor, but ATTENTION) on the last inch of a bind? Do you have nothing more subtle to work with?

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Where ELSE can one find tapasya? What, you think the (ni-)yamas only exist on your yoga mat?

Nobody talks about ahimsa that way, like you're only non-violent when you're on your 2x6.

I've been referring (mostly to myself, for I am my own most common interlocutor) to the parenting and the householding as "following the dharma" for quite a few months. It feels right (and I'm nipping the idea of dharma from the Ramayana, mostly, as far as I can understand it, so any lack here is from my inability to grasp that book; as any writer says: the errors here are my own) and it feels like the reason I don't wander off and pursue my own thing or "fix" (which would mean "break" but that's a long and different post) my relationship situation.

Example:

How and why should I carry around the new child screaming in his sling for 14 hours a day, including 3:47 am, on some random night? Why did I do that for a few months?

I did that because that's what you do. Did I know it was coming? Nope. Did I wish it was different? Yep. Did I do it anyway? Uh huh.

This too is a kind of tapasya, discipline at doing the activities which constitute (but are not) the massive surrender of parenting.

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I do not have a LOT more emotional sophistication than my almost-three-year-old. I have a FAR more sophisticated emotional EXPRESSION, in range and depth, but I don't have a lot more CONTROL than he does.

When he cries for over ten minutes, I *still* feel like I'm in a burning building or like someone is trying to drive a nail into my ear. Red alert, a bit of adrenaline, a lot of annoyance, a desire to go walk around the block, a desperate wish for J to say, "I can get this." All of that, all of the refusal. Sometimes I will go get whatever it is (this often happens when he's going to bed, which he just does not want to do, so it's not as easy as "fix my train" or "I fell off the couch"; those are easy), and I'll go in there and try entertainment, then I will try singing Grateful Dead songs (he used to love "St. Stephen," really!), then I will try telling him about (so he will imagine) the big steam engine from Michigan, passing cars stopped at snowy street crossings. Sometimes he falls in with that, and sometimes none of that works.

As soon as I get his emotions under control, even a little bit, my emotions come under control a little bit. And I think that I have already exerted (or determined that I will exert) control when I wade in, to try to get that quiet that the household wants. Some nights annoyance waits for me to fail (funny how one splits like that, you see yourself being annoyed while you're also being consonant and patient, and it's definitely you being both, at once) and other nights annoyance vanishes as soon as I practice consonance and storytelling, and other nights, when that consonance fails, annoyance reappears with volume. But not every time: sometimes I just fail and walk off, like "oh well that didn't work" and I'm not really angry at anyone, it just didn't work, like not catching a frisbee.

Parenting is constant tapasya. Not that one has to "do the work" all the time, because sometimes you just chase your kid around the house and it's all laughter and goofiness, but because there are going to be moments of emotional tug-o-war and discipline that WILL HAPPEN and they will happen several times a day, but you can't ever predict how much or when on any given day so you always have to be BOTH slack and ready. All the time.

Now think of a 9-5 job in a context like that, and the schedule is MUCH more settled. You work, you have your anxious portion of the day (that meeting or that person or that news story or whatever), you have your chill portion of the day, you have the post-work commute (ahhhh horror!) and then your post-work beer (ahhh chilling) and so on and so forth. Emotions are settled by schedule, and in my case as a parent, they're also upset by the chaos of my schedule, I never can be certain which or how much of what kind of emotion I'll need to feel at any given minute, which is probably also similar to how my kid experiences emotions, as they happen.

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This is a nice segue point to emotional stuff in asana practice (nice combination of the two prior sections).

It used to be that certain postures would set off more frustration or more emotional release, and Parivrtta Parsvakonasana never quite does fail to be emotional, although I did have a good couple years with it, where I could just do it, make it very annamaya, and move on. Nowadays I'm getting quite a bit of emotional stuff going on and through my asana practice, even when it's really light (in fact, most-so when that's true, which is why that's true), and it's not set off by any posture in particular, nor is it about any specific thing, and so it's quite a bit, like, well, parenting.

Example first:

Thursday I had the most intense emotional practice I've had since at least June and one of the most so in my whole yoga history, and on the level of posture, nothing happened. No Intermediate, no wild developments in asana, it was just another practice day in the yoga studio's small room (all beige and orange, very hard balance for someone nearsighted, but that's part of the adventure).

9-something am, opening chant, sun salutations, and a practice that would take almost an hour to get to Utkatasana. Adrenaline, nervousness, tremendous anxiety in the Suryas. I had to sit for a while and really focus on the bandhas to get it to calm down. Not overcaffeination; I know what that feels like. Nice hip openings through the triangles, but anxious panic-attack-style breathing in the side angles, and particularly so in the revolved ones. I kept the posture, or came up standing, depending on how heavy the panic got, but I did not break practice. Something (like I said before about equanimity) sustained the emotional "work" as long as I stayed on the mat, sort of in-the-zone, even if I wasn't doing a specific asana. Panic-attack-style panting turned alternately into sobs and laughter, pretty wild interchanges from one to the other. If it calmed down enough for me to do a posture, I did a posture. That's how I did the Prasaritas.

I definitely wished, at least twice, that I'd never found this practice so I wouldn't have to feel this stuff. I actually felt the words "I don't want to be broken open by this" go through my head. Then I made myself accept that, chased those words down and owned them, because this IS why I got into this. You want to PRACTICE, right? Then practice this, too.

I bet it took ten full minutes of this weird hysteria before I could complete the first side of Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana. I kept the outstretched hand, two fingers extended, even with the foot unlifted. Again, the physical readiness somehow intensified the emotional work, gave it a sort of anchor; if I'd taken a seat, the emotional wave would have run away.

That's when I started seeing, in my mind's eye, the parking lot back at my father's funeral, bright sun, big black hearses from the agency, a lot of people who knew each other, all having stilted conversation because we had to talk around the main topic, even remembrance was done like that. Nobody was ready for it, that event, somehow. Like it was impossible, like it would never happen. And yet with all the arthritis and the exit from public politics and all, aging had taken this house-binding effect on my father (and as early as 1987, when I was 17), and he told the old stories with all the customary enthusiasm, but there was always a sense, to me, that that reduction, that shrinking from the public, was a black hole. Admittedly, he wasn't exactly looking down there and coming with wisdom for us, but I was suprised how friends and family also seem to have no idea, in a way, WHAT HAD HAPPENED. See how weird that is? It's like, "I live a thousand miles from here and ALL YOU LOCALS have as little idea what this is, as I do? Less, even? How the fuck is that possible?"

I tried like hell to dig into it with my eulogy, which included a Whitman quote I love and can't reproduce here with precision, something from "Body Electric" about "a man of character passes but infrequently..."

On the afternoon when my brother had told me, by phone, that the passing was likely to occur, I went out to the park by the university (again, in bright sun, blue skies--isn't May UNbelievably pretty?) and practiced with a friend, and I overtly dedicated the practice to my father. It was pretty great, not legendary, but consistent and great, and I was bending and breathing at the moment of his transition (1-something-that-afternoon?) and that was, I felt, the best thing I could have been doing since it wasn't going to work to go out there.

I think Christian funerals get it wrong. It's not this weird mortification of the body, it's being in the room at the moment of transition. Apparently my brother had been there, and they just left, after some mourning period, and I almost felt like saying, BUT YOU MISSED IT! YOU MISSED THE ENERGY!! but that would have been impolite, to put it lightly.

I'm going to try to be there May 23, on that anniversary, so I can at least try to do the "honor" ceremony that I've read (on Tim's blog) that children do for deceased parents. I won't do it traditional Indian, first because I don't know it and second because it's not my or his system, but I want to at least make an energetic show of trying to "get it right."

Part of what I was thinking, even when the emotional expression during that studio practice (back to 2012 now) was sadness, was, "What the FUCK, Universe? You half-paralyze my father when i'm SEVEN-FUCKING-TEEN??? You cripple our ability to have adventures and climb mountains and revisit important bars and all of that stuff?" I feel like they got to raise me and I didn't get to raise them back. My mom is losing her memory (I think in a fairly standard way, mid-70s aging, not a dramatic Alzheimer's thing) and she and my dad just retreated, through the 90s and since. It's ok, I suppose, but my divorce is about the last piece of ME that they got to process, and they never really understood who cracked out of that particular egg. Maybe we only would have gotten along so well, but I still wish I could have shown him, her, them, more about who I Really Turned Into. Or, hell, given some of those experiences and my Abject Art course and all the foot-behind-head, maybe that would always have been a bit much.

I have never believed that energy "re-manifests" as its causal moment; I don't believe that a particular hip tightness, say, IS because of a lost parent or a rough night with the kid or whatever. I think more that energy pools up in like a near-death-experience tunnel; it loses its genesis moment as it changes character, and when it's expressed, it's in a new body, new moment, like reincarnation.

I suppose, in that way, I don't really believe in ghosts.

When I called it a practice, I took a longish time just lying on the floor, and then sat up and crossed my feet (half-Siddhasana) and had a sort of meditional moment. Usually I ask to sit still and the mind starts monkeying and eventually the energy gets extroverted and/or I have to dash to a class or errand or get food. But this was continuing the mortality meditation, and I remember thinking, "These are not my feet." I'm going to be the father that leaves my son, sometime, and if that ceremony is Christian, then "I" will be the centerpiece, but "that" won't be me, these won't be my feet then, right? And they're not my feet now. "You are not your feet." Death is a wonderful enlightener. Or sometimes I remember that my kid can be run over by a car or eat a peanut and go anaphylactic (is THAT how you spell that?) and it could go the other way. And then every relationship becomes human and vulnerable and I'm happy to see everybody and eager to be around people but I also wanted to just cry for an hour because I couldn't handle any more of that line.

So I got up and went on with Thursday.

To come full circle, because it feels a bit rude to leave you all on that line, it's tapasya to keep practicing not just when you're sore, but when you have an hour's practice like that one. Friday, for the record, was much emotionally mellower and physically stronger. I wonder sometimes if I will ever be strong and centered again, these days are so random and temporary (so IMPERMANENT). Vulnerability comes almost with a kind of crumpling; it does become humanly strong again later, yes? After all, our friend Chogyam Trungpa makes his warriors out of a vulnerable sadness....

Window Yoga, Sore, and the Ego

On Saturday a little over a week ago (the 15th of this month) I went up (by invite) to the north-end Lululemon store to be their window yoga model. Your Lulu's do this too, yes? Just in case they don't, the idea is that yoga practitioners bend in the mannequin-window for an hour or more, doing whatever, basically functioning as inspiring moving advertisements (I got free gear from LL in which to bend).

Now, I see clearly how this is bold-face capitalism, and how it plays into a simplistic promise of "if I buy that gear, I too can bend like that!" Those are both silly. Nonetheless, I had a fantastic practice, definitely one of the best of the new year, in a window space that was maybe six inches bigger than a Manduka black mat, on each side.

I did Primary and up through Bharadvajasana, was able to drop back and stand up (but had to fingertip the glass as I still come up heels-up, which is a bit ballistic), and especially at the start of seated, had some of the biggest vinyasa take-it-ups probably ever in my practice history. Like this: from Tiriangmukha, direct to Lolasana, and then back. From Ardha Baddha Padma Paschimo, into a half-lotus arm balance, no leg contact. Freaky stuff. This vanished by the Marichis, but it's nice to know that it's hiding in there (ever suprising, this annamaya-pranamaya relationship).

There is a marvelous photo of me in a not-quite-full-expression Setu Bandhasana, with these two white teenagers outside doing the knees-bent, arms-wide, mouth-open gesture which I title "Can't Touch This!" They look so campily gangbanger. I doubt I'll post the photo in here, but it's pretty amusing and it's been shared between the store and me and Cityoga on Facebook. I like that it's not some arm balance or standing posture, you know? Setu Bandhasana is a posture that on the one hand doesn't look "advanced" but it's also so uncommon that it has a high "freakshow" factor: you're not gonna see THAT one in a ToeSox ad or a Yoga Journal cover anytime soon. Keeps people off-balance as to how to respond to it.

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So I am sore in a bunch of places: the left shoulder is sore right on "top" of the collarbone/shoulderblade connection. Two fingers pressing there sets off a nervy pain which, if I don't do vinyasa carefully, runs down the front of the shoulder joint where the pecs meet the shoulder musculature proper. Jumping back is pretty much precluded, which is fine.

I am also sore at the left sit bone, but I only feel that if I add in the Tim-Miller-style front splits after the Prasaritas, so I just cut those and I don't have to worry about this in any forward fold in Primary or Intermediate. Easy.

I am also sore, but only in Kurmasana, at about the third lumbar vertebrae, and this, I worry about. As I come down into Kurmasana, there's a bruised feeling, like someone hit me with something, right there at L3-ish. Supta Kurmasana also has this sensation. I've been trying to really extend the spine and sacrificing the straight legs in the first posture, to back this off. I've totally abandoned the Intermediate entrance to Supta and yesterday I only bound the hands and didn't even worry about the feet, but still had pain. Grr.

I figured this was from putting the right foot behind my head (because that's the ever-tight hip) but in the window yoga, I did a whole buch of Miller-inspired foot-behind-head preps, including a bent-leg reclining FBH (Kasyapasana mod) and Visvamitrasana (side plank compass pose; is it officially called Vasisthasana now in the ashtanga lineage?) and there was no pain in any of that, so it seems to be Kurmasana specific. How strange.

Finally, the right hip (samskaric business, chronic tightness a lot of the time) is really cranked up about something: it's not "sore" in the way that practitioners use that term, but it's really tight, as if the gluteus max is gripping the top of the pelvic bowl for dear life. This says "ego" to me, the way the ego death-grips whatever it is it thinks it needs to survive. Ashtanga practice is not ideal for stretching this, and I even feel it in Padangusthasana and Down Dog. Now that's WEIRD tightness. Pigeons and double-pigeon (particularly with forward fold) are the main stretches here, and those postures have ALWAYS been the main stretches for the specific ways my glutes tighten up.

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I've said here a number of times, that the ego is not an enemy, not something to be fought or destroyed or denied. I had a dream a long time ago, sometime when my kid was still under two years old (he'll be three, THREE, in May: time warp, anyone?), that dealing with the ego is like being in a hospice where you give comfort to all of the avatars of yourself, your old afraid self, your younger angstful self, all these selves, you have to ease them all into passage.

So the ego for me is about negative emotions, mostly, or at least that's where I see it the most clearly. The reputation of the ego in popular culture is aggrandizement, "egotism," we think someone "with an ego" is very self-inflated. Then we apparently love to see these people "fall," so we love political scandals or to see Donald Trump lose a deal or whatever it is.

This is all playing the ego for drama.

As I said in the "teaching and teaching" post, but obliquely, I get a sort of performance anxiety when in a workshop, unless I'm workshopping quite a bit, making exposure to senior teachers more "normal." When that only happens once or twice a year, as it's about to with Kino's visit here in March, I get all anxious about both
a) if the SCENE will represent, so we can (what? look cool? get famous?)
b) if my practice will BE THERE, so I can (again, what? look cool? get famous?)

And today, when I cut practice short after a really intense Parivrtta Parsvakonasana, with shoulder soreness acting up, I could feel the ego chattering away about how I won't be able to do my "whole practice" when Kino's here, so I'll miss some kind of opportunity, et cetera et cetera.

So I've decided to use this grasping-toward-fame (or whatever it is, grasping in any case) as a way to turn down the ego. It's nice that the ego in this case is so totally overt about what it wants, because now I know just how to go the other way.

It won't matter what or if I achieve; I'm sore, a lot of things hurt, some poses are giving me mysterious soreness that makes me a bit anxious (hi lumbar spine!) and I'm teaching well and people are coming to the yoga room, and the intensity of my practice doesn't affect that in any way I can discern.

I had this shoulder soreness when I was in Seattle in summer 2010, and as I remember, with light-to-no practice, it gradually went away, but it was around for a few months. I've had some shocking stretches in Kurmasana/foot-behind-head back in the day, but I don't remember this "bruised spine" feeling back then, so that's just taking care and maybe substituting for the full posture.

And that's where this all is, now. Proceed!

Another Step Toward Something Interesting: Abject Art, Asana, Interpersonal

I'm working toward a statement about body-as-ethics, where one no longer believes, but knows, gets an ethical decision not from the head, but from the body, instantly. No consideration necessary. It's as Maehle says in his Sutras somewhere: "one does not need to believe in one's right ear."

But I can't get the whole picture clearly yet. So I'm going to basically write to myself (the prior post on the two "teachings" is also a step toward this) and as I put this language here, it will process more and more deeply; the idea is there, it's solid, but I can't see it. So this is like a blog post defogger.

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I'm teaching, as I think I said, two sections of a seminar on Abject Art. If you remember college, this is 400-level. Abject art comes from the 90s, and it's very difficult to define, but it is essentially art that is about the excluded, the unmentionable, the drastically impolite, the traumatic. So it might be Mike Kelley's trauma-laden puppets, or it might be Kiki Smith's "anti-transcendent" Virgin Mary sculpture, or it might be Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ" or it might be Mona Hatoum's video installation which includes imagery taken by cameras scoping all of her available body orifices.

Abject Art, as a course, is the most recent branch on the tree of a project I've been pursuing. When I was married, I was also teaching a lot, and as the relationship grew totally confusing, I started researching it, first as a sort of private, domestic anthropology, but then progressively in terms of the French theory I was reading. The personal is political, indeed. As I've said, the shortest possible story is that I was married to a rape survivor who hadn't put her ghosts down. So I was trying to process a lot about gender roles and power and violence. But in theory terms, that turns into French feminism, Freud, phallic power, and all of that. More interestingly, I was also trying to process my own past with lay Catholicism (which had been laid upon me while very young, before I could properly interrogate it) and she had been raised by diehard Catholics, so there was a lot of "you should feel guilty" and "bodies are evil" and "desire is a necessary evil" and so on and so forth.

To keep it short and summary, I had an anti-desire religious background, a relationship that teased me with desire but punished me for feeling it (both with Catholic guilt and with "you're a man so you're a rapist" ghosting) and a bunch of theory that talked about the "revolutionary power" of "jouissance" (trans: orgasmic energy, ecstasy, incoherence, irrationality, meltdown).

I taught a whole bunch of courses between roughly 1997 and the present (continuing) that took on this situation a thousand different ways. One on the American Dream as an addiction (Requiem for a Dream, Fight Club), one on morals and madness in the 1970s (Cuckoo's Nest, Equus, Dog Soldiers--a book which was made into "Who'll Stop the Rain", Apocalypse Now), one on Marcel Duchamp and transgender political activism, one on the revolutionary rhetoric of avant-garde modernist art movements (Dada/Surrealism), one on postmodern irony and trauma (Ghost World, Amores Perros), one on avant-garde film and immersion and confrontational bodies (Schneemann's infamous FUSES, Eraserhead, and recently in that course, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and Enter the Void), one on video art and the abject (one week unit on Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthey in that one, along with Vito Acconci, Mona Hatoum, a hundred others), and, as I leave out a bunch of classes, this most recent one on Abject Art: porn, shit, blood, sinking into the maternal body, visceral aesthetics, fluids, excreta, violence, discipline (in the Foucauldian sense).

A lot of that is just exploring the American landscape as I experienced it (suburbia, religion, general "be good" doctrine) with the American landscape as I knew it to be experienceable: bodies, orgasm, perversion, darkness of every metaphysical sort, intense sensation (what some minoritized sexual communities re-name pain), schizoanalysis, and so on.

But this wasn't (as you already suspect or know) an honest interrogation, it was never anthropology. It had the same problems that Surrealism or a David Lynch film has: light AND darkness, not reality. Big, imagined binaries. THIS is good, and THAT is evil! Alluring sexy evil. Eh.

That is, of course, not how reality works.

When that all faded, I still had my interests, but they started to reveal themselves as a more interesting project, very much the way that you start asana practice wanting to lose weight, and then discover bhakti.

I like art (and film, experiences generally) to be BOTH conceptual and visceral. Not necessarily "dark" or icky or "evil," but definitely both something I can think about AND feel in my belly.

So it wasn't "evil" that I wanted, to sort of "balance" the good, it was more like mind-body resolution. To think AND feel, to feel thinking, to think feeling, to get beyond that pair, even.

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Now, yoga asana does not have "evil" in the way that art does. But as I discovered, yoga asana can give you a look at your own dark stuff. But at that time, it's not a conceptual evil, an imagined and alluring "evil" that looks sexy only because you're still locked into "good," the way I'd imagined it all to work.

When you confront your own dark matter, it doesn't come in Surrealist terms, all nice and Freudian, where it all leads to liberation. It's REAL terror and pain that doesn't obey the rules and terms of somebody's art project or somebody's book.

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Not long ago, I got a call for papers (submissions) that was called "Cine-Ethics." How can we understand "cruel" art or film as, or having, an ethical project?

For example: there's a movie from 2002 called Irreversible. It's a told-backwards story (like Memento) about two guys who take a girl (one's ex, the other's current girlfriend) to a party where the couple has a disagreement; she leaves, alone, makes a bad choice to take the subway, and is raped (for NINE MINUTES, of which we see every second) and beaten into a coma, at which point the two guys seek horrible vengeance on some random dude in a dark gay sex club.

It's a very very mean little film, although it does have fantastically beautiful cinematography.

So can THAT be or have an ethical project? Not to write an essay here, but we might wish to "reverse" what we see, to escape, and of course, we can't, not in the film and not in reality (reality as it unfolds, anyway). Or, differently, the old modernist project of "shock the bourgeoisie" is reincarnated here as an imperative to feel something, something beyond irony. Is pain the new sincerity? Is a film that can actually hurt us, a way to create a salutory post-ironic awakeness? I haven't, of course, written these out in depth here, but I think these are questions to be reckoned with beyond the "it's all shock value" argument.

Take asana practice, again. Take my practices with David and Shelley in June, for example. Every one of them cranked pain out of me, brought it right up for expression, whereas a Christian funeral really did not.

Yes, you're right, asana practice does not bring violent rape horror into your head (perhaps it does if you have that experience). Irreversible does things to us that are perhaps unnecessary, but I think that its end result, the intense sensations it brings, do have a salutory aspect.

In a way that is not that painful, I want to bring students in my classes this kind of visceral awakeness. Physical humor, gestures, quick associations, these are some of my tools. Create laughter, switch tones from stand-up comic back to authority figure, keep people off balance now and then. Awakeness. Art that is progressively more shocking, ridiculous, sexual, violent, campy, art that is, itself, visceral, immersive. And thus the progress toward the Abject Course.

In a yoga class, it's different. I don't nearly open the environment as much, because ideally students' own movements will bring that visceral awakeness. In this sense, and famously, "the practice is the real teacher." One teaches poses, or breathing, those details which make the "practice relationship" clearer and more straightforward, but really, the RELATING aspect of ashtanga vinyasa yoga is the student's.

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Finally (and a more heart-centered post would have begun here) one must say something about vulnerability, which does NOT mean revealing one's soft underbelly (only a culture of militarism thinks it does).

Vulnerability means being human, fleshly, heart-and-blood. In a teaching environment, vulnerability means being able to laugh, to say, "I don't know the answer to that," to fall out of a posture, to breathe along with the person you're giving a final squish to. It emphatically does NOT mean "I am vulnerable" except perhaps in the sense that we are all vulnerable, or in more interesting vocabulary, alive, able to relate, capable of the small sacrifice that is letting someone else make us laugh or elsewise relating to the rest of humanity. That lack of militant solitude is vulnerability, and again, only a militant culture rolls over and calls itself vulnerable. For the rest of us, it's simply humanity.

There is a theory, popular in film studies right now, called variously "tactility" or "touch" or such terms. The idea that one's body inter-relates with the bodies on the screen, that the cinematic movement (which is the essence of rolling film, "moving pictures") is in a physical relationship with our own moving bodies, skin musculature and viscera.

Or the idea, following Walter Benjamin, that "Dada art strikes the spectator like a bullet." In my classroom, anyway, that bullet is a very funny bullet. Or as the opening credits of Dusan Makavejev's 1971 film "WR: Mysteries of the Organism," have it: Feel. Laugh. Enjoy.

I titled a piece which will someday see publication (on Makavejev) by those intertitles.

This irrepressible movement to not just embrace, but to be embraced, to finally become my own moving picture, my own relationship, embodied, alive. This is the quest. It comes out as "meow meow I need more relating" but that is (as I will say later) a distraction. It's not the body that craves that attention, it's the mind. The body isn't evil desire and animality, it's just a piece of the cosmos, like an asteroid.

In my classroom, it's all, "Come on, take a dive! The water's great! We'll all swim together!" and that's not egalitarianism, but the idea that as I MOVE, as I do those gestures and commit the RELATING that is the teaching, I too make the sacrifice. Doesn't matter how many times I've taught the material. The idea isn't evil-body-immersion (although that is often the content), it's let's all relate about this material. Different levels of power and interest, sure, but what human relationship does not have those things?

Now, we see how it's all human, at long last, the conceptual project, the silly binaries, the narrative history, now it's all becoming flesh at last, even the concepts. Now we are in good position to write the "heart post" which should follow this so-heady one.

Teaching and Teaching.

I'm currently an art historian, but in grad school I was a film scholar, and before that I was a Russian major for three years in undergrad, and between that and the film scholarship I was thinking maybe I'd be literary theory guy. In high school I was good at everything (chemistry, english, math up to pre-calculus: EVERYTHING), so I never had any steady career idea of what I'd "do for a living."

So the path has been determined instead by life obsessions, questions I lived in.

This semester, at the art school, I am teaching a 100-level intro course on "contemporary art" (think Jackson Pollock to the Sensation exhibit: 1950 to 1997), a seminar for Capstone writing in the major (art history seniors), and two sections of a seminar in Abject Art (read: art of the disgusting, violent, and generally repellent).

Life changes every four months when you're an academic. There is September to December, January to late April or early May, and then "summer" which is May to about mid-August. The year "begins" in September, like some weird kind of culturally different New Year ritual.

I teach two late mornings (10:30-11:45) and three afternoons (roughly 12:30-3:30). On the afternoon days, I plan for morning practice, either at the studio between classes or up at the Y if I feel audacious (it's 6 miles away) or need a shower. Morning-class days, like today, I aim for afternoon practice, but of course there is syllabus design and paperwork galore which gets in the way.

Yoga-wise, I teach my well-established Sunday 12:30 ashtanga (Mysore/led blend, depending on membership; yesterday it was 16, with about 9 people Mysore-styling) and also a Friday morning, which is 75 minutes and thus more introductory, and I not infrequently sub the 11 am Saturday ashtanga (again, Mysore-led blend) and the Monday night (7:15 pm) which is billed Mysore but again, depending on membership, becomes Mysore-led blend.

I also teach Larry Schultz' "criminal" Rocket sequence at 6 pm on Thursday nights.

So I'm damn busy.

Today was the semester's first teaching day: intro to contemporary. Dada and Surrealism. Duchamp's famous urinal. A whole bunch of new students who have to acquire a taste for my tangent-laden lecture style and my comedy and my interactivity, which is not the clunky kind designed to "elicit answers" to leading questions, but is more generally interactive: Feel the art! Dig this thing! Be compelled, be repelled, BE SOMETHING!!

Tomorrow is the Capstone seminar, which is awkward to teach in that way. I often rely on biography instead, so I will probably tell my this-way-and-that grad school trajectory, which saw me do almost thirteen years of grad work while, with barely any guidance except at the end, where I was more-or-less pulled over the finish line, I somehow cobbled together a MA thesis and a PhD dissertation.

It's a game of "Who have I been" or maybe "How did I get here?". The Academy as Talking Heads song.

In the Abject course (Thurs and Fri, syllabi I should be finalizing instead of writing this), I have a lot of prior students, people who are expecting a deep and silly and scandalous tour of art that is specifically designed for "saucy content" (a phrase I have used for YEARS to describe art that is sexy, dark, conceptual and hot, my favorite mix of qualities for any life experience).

Different "weights" of me, different "dosages" of me, dispensed as by an apothecary. I also, am the apothecary. What can they handle? How big a dose of "how I run a class" do I give on the first day? How inspiring or offputting is that long rambling bio? How "saucy" are they expecting it, in Abject Art?

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The interface: I set the expectations but also meet them. This doesn't happen this way, not as overtly, in a yoga room. The levels of an imaginary binary change: one is expected to be more physical in the yoga room, less so in the educational room.

No one gets wrestled into a bind in an educational room.........do they?

I teach with physical humor, and I teach a lot of "tactile" art since that's a consistent method that artists have deployed for "reducing the distance" between the infamous (and apparently immortal) "art and life" duo. "Let's move around, let's go into the hall and pretend we're this art installation."

This is to keep people from falling asleep or zoning out. Some still do.

In the yoga room, there is a type of zoning (perhaps ZONING IN, exactly!) that is encouraged, that is discouraged in an educational room.

At the start, I teach the movements, hint at the breathing and the gaze, but am also trying to sell the students on this class, at this time, with this mode of practice. I become too interested, too invested, in whether or not they will STAY, whether or not they will go to Kino's workshop, and what? See the "realer" practice? Get the ACTUAL AUTHENTICITY?

This is what I'm trying to dig into with this post.

Do I not trust them to like it, to continue, to see an avenue, or at least some sort of highway-of-interest that might lead into what is currently darkness? I fall for the authenticity trap. "The certified teacher." Yes, obviously, Kino has practiced more rigorously than I have, given more workshops than I have. But is she BETTER at what I do, in this town? In one weekend? How can I phrase this question so that it gets at what I want?

Is it what she's providing or what my students can bring (and thence, whether they will bring it or not)? Obviously both. One could expand this to the Mysore question: what is it that one DOES GET THERE (or is it, BRING THERE)?

On a surface level, we get a workshop in our chosen practice, with an experienced soul. On a surface level, we get a Mysore-style class (and really, that's a thrill, it'll be our first with a teacher of this kind). And I feel that (again, on a surface level), IF WE REPRESENT, we can get a reputation as a growing scene.

That's where the pressure comes from.

But is it serving those yoga students to say....what? "Come to this, it's gonna rock"? "Come to this, it'll enlighten you?" "Come to this, it's better than my regular teaching?" See?

How can I invite the newer and yet enthusiastic students, to go to Kino without making it sound like HER Mysore-style room is magical while mine is somehow ordinary? See how that reflects not so much on ME as, in a way, on THEM? See how it becomes distasteful?

"Bring this woman your practice and she will change it." But that REALLY HAPPENED to me. Kino changed my backbending practice for EVER when I did the whole weekend in fall 2009.

But I don't want to promise them that, as if my room cannot also provide that, and most importantly, as if THEIR OWN PRACTICES cannot provide that.

THE PRACTICE ITSELF changes you. And teachers disappear, or better, go within. I still give MYSELF the "final backbend." I do it as Kino taught it to me: walk in, head down, creep, dig in with fingertips, LIFT! And I'm not sore, no matter how crazy far I walk in, as she said about Sharath recently talking about SKPJ's own backbend adjustments.

The teacher goes within.

How much do I have to be forward, and yet back off, how do I have to run my own room, so that this practice sort of slips into the students, so that they wade in and come out with watermarks up to here? I am not the sea; the practice is the sea. But demonstration hasn't gotten them here; lecture hasn't gotten them here.

It's always contingent. Trust them to enjoy the wading.

In the academic room, I press, I train, I make the move, say things, laugh at things. I TRAIN them how to do tactile, physicalized, how to get out of their heads and into an embodied relation with the art, as far as I can.

But in the yoga room, perhaps I sit back, like a flirtatious wallflower. Stop thinking. This, I have felt before. Less META-. Academic teaching, with its faculty annual reports and all of the self-maintenance, the conceptualization of oneself (the "statement of teaching philosophy!"), is constantly, insistently meta-.

But the yoga teaching does not love that. Don't CONCEPTUALIZE it, just keep breathing. Teach whoever comes, and LET THEM GO.

I missed a week of Mysore with Clayton back in 2007 because my cat died at random one night while I was in SF. "Sorry I've been gone," I said on my return. "It doesn't matter," he said.

Ok, so they don't "HAVE" to go. Well, better said, their interest in going is both to learn and to promote the scene, if they are so interested in doing. But in PRACTICE TERMS, they don't have to go at all.

It is not better, there is no guarantee of magic. But there is that possibility, but always that possibility. Even at home alone on the rug.

Something of a Detour: this "Wreck Your Body" bit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html?pagewanted=all. This (if that link works). "Yoga can Wreck your Body."

Real quickly, and primarily because there is a lot of Facebook babble on my feed about this piece.

Many yoga teachers have reposted this on FB, sure. Many students have replied with comments that fall into two broad stripes:

a) "thank you for teaching alignment, so many teachers don't!"
b) "thank you for focusing on the spiritual aspect rather than just asana!"

Now, the stereotype of ashtanga vinyasa (and other hard vinyasa practices) in the West is that alignment is overlooked and the "perfect pose" is preferred at any cost. Old ashtangis like Freeman and Doane are cited for their "interest in Iyengar yoga" as if ashtanga vinyasa is always taught without any regard for alignment AND as if Iyengar yoga is taught with safety while ashtanga vinyasa is not.

I'm told, by an Iyengar practitioner, that you hold postures for a long time. That can be as unsafe as rushing headlong from pose to pose. It's the Iyengar folks, remember, who like the long shoulderstand and headstand (and yes, I'm aware that SKPJ once said that you don't get benefits from headstand until you hold it for several minutes).

And this isn't about bashing "your yoga" or "my yoga" but about undoing stereotypes, which, as always, any journalism about American yoga tends to rely on.

What I do like about that article is this:

a) The line about "American yoga popularity is producing an abundance of yoga studios which have teachers who lack deep training." YES.

b) "People are rushing in, listening to the ego." YES.

The piece comes across, particularly in its title, as saying yoga is harmful, and only in those two sentences does it say, essentially, something much more accurate, which is that uninformed practice, egoistic practice, ignorant practice, and better, uninformed, egoistic, ignorant TEACHING, is harmful.

It's not the yoga, it's the idiocy.

And then the corollary is this likewise foolish binary that sets off "the spiritual aspects" and "careful alignment" from asana practice, as if all asana practice is both unspiritual and lacking in alignment, which I daresay is YET ANOTHER product of exactly the same American yoga that produces the criticism of these very qualities.

So American yoga journalism produces with both hands: from one hand you get "yoga heals whatever" (see any Yoga Journal cover for the healing-du-jour) and from the other hand you get "be careful, your yoga needs to be aligned and spiritual" (and again, see any Yoga Journal cover for the meditation-du-jour).

Have we no awareness of the eight-limbed approach?
Have we no knowledge, no (as I have harshly said before) DEPTH of the practice?
See we no links between movement and BREATHING?
See we no links between injuries and a "this sequence is really cool, I learned it from a magazine" approach?

Freeman said, this body is the piece of the cosmos through which we can learn anything.

Pattabhi Jois slaps a wall, THIS is God!

It should be obvious that just doing poses is like just doing any other exercise unprogrammatically. You'll probably get imbalance even if you do lose weight or whatever your big surface goal is.

But it should also be obvious that asana is a PROGRAM, and that's what American yoga journalism too often misses, and in fact much American YOGA (I would argue) also misses this point.

Safe and aligned yoga can still be nothing but exercise. "Spiritual" yoga can be nothing but seated "looking pretty" (as Sharath put it in conference on New Year's Day, a nugget I took from Kino's post about said conference).

I think that a truer blend of the spiritual and the asana is found in focused, aware movement. "You can do child's pose all day if that's your thing" says one FB comment. Physically, that's true, you CAN, but are you doing THE YOGA? And you'll reply, "Well 72 postures in 90 minutes isn't necessarily THE YOGA". Absolutely true. It is not WHAT is done, it is HOW is done.

This is why alignment/safety and spiritual/calm are not the answers. Those are WHAT answers, they say nothing about HOW the yoga is done, and this does not mean "HOW the posture is done," it means how THE YOGA is done, with what mind, with what breathing, with what presence that could be called spiritual?

The article's long discussion of how shoulderstand/headstand are harmful are WHAT discussions, asana discussions, "yer doing it wrong" as internet-ese would have it.

Doing THE YOGA, if we make it purely about asana, is about finding the point of FOCUS, not the point of pose perfection. THIS is what a skilled teacher should teach (and I've tried, and it's not easy).

Get in the zone and learn the ways that the Borders of the Zone flux and change.

From that, you modify the postures on a given day, or time of day.

This makes asana part of your life, and separation begins to blur.

This is how you learn what suits on a given day and what does not.

This is why a standard, repeated practice is useful.

And so on.

Energy Post 3: Crushing

The core of this post, which I'll probably summarize first and then write out in longer and more tangential form, is this:

"Crushing." Yes, in the sense of elementary school early romance (if one wants to say that crushing is romantic, in that sense; we should be careful here because our vocabulary can narrow our view and our understanding).

Perhaps related to my extroversion, I crush on people, particularly when conversation is good or even conversational *dynamics* are good. For example, people with genuinely novel gestures when they talk with their hands. I tend to crush on yoga teachers who give me marvelous adjustments. You'll see already where and how this post, weeks ago when I conceived it, begins to become very problematic.

Questions about "relating" in the yoga room, in and out of one's "relationship," all of that baggage wants to be opened up here. Is one or need one be "energetically monogamous"? Are those energies even the same? Need they be? How can we tell? A thousand questions open and challenge some of our big categories and particularly, some of our set limits (or, our history's or our culture's or our gender's limits, or some mix of those, personal and politic both).

But I don't want to go into all that mess at the top.

The essence of this is that I don't believe that this energy, let's call it "relating energy" rather than something already-reductive like "sexual energy" (how blase and tired-sixties would THAT be, you know??)----this energy is not unidirectional or even binary, but is AT ONCE and simultaneously multiple and uneven, tending rather than targeting. Imagine an amoeba somehow balanced on top of a broom.

The name of the game for me is not "restricting" any given attraction or crush, or "redirecting" that energy to another goal, but feeling out, prior to any gating off or channelling, fully feeling out WHERE the energy is, being aware of its shape and texture and even weight.

This will sound, of course, like some kind of woo-woo madness. "You feel the energy's WEIGHT? What the hell, Patrick? Put the crack pipe down, my friend."

So for me the great weakness of writing a post about energetic crushing is that we immediately reduce the scope of our energetic understanding by even NAMING this "crushing," because the energy is bigger than that, more interesting than that, although that is one tendency, one sort of magnetic pull on the broom-balanced amoeba. This is why no one on earth can write an interesting blog about "sexual energy" and the yoga practice. It all becomes, "I have achieved more balance in that domain"---yeah, exactly. BOOORRRRIIIINNNGGGG.

Things I do want to take up, a bit, with this, but later (and not in this order):

a. energy blindness. People can be receptive but unaware, which is dangerous.

b. manipulation. Energy connoisseurs (as Freeman once put it) have to be CAREFUL with the energy they manipulate, particularly when around the energy unaware, because "connoisseurs" are not free of energy unawareness. I think that many cults are run on a combination of the energy-blind in charge, along with the energy-blind over-devoted.

c. narrow vision. Crushing, which is a potential expression of energy, is more familiar to us than, for example, "feeling the energy's weight," and so what we feel is the Tendency To Move Toward Familiarity, rather than the Real Strangeness of Reality, which leads to accusations like "you made me feel this!" and then see danger, above.

d. the varying receptivity of yoga teachers to this kind of energy management. To use two examples: Kino is much more receptive to energy crushing than Swenson is. Swenson is a riot and you can tell when he respects and in a way loves your practice, but you are NOT getting close through that humor. Not in the sense of standoffishness, but very much in the sense of defending against simplistic energy crushing.

e. taking care of your own energetic business. THIS, in a way, I think, is a major goal (yes, I said goal) of long-term yoga practice. This should NOT be understood to say, keeping all of the energy clean and safe, because an energetic world that is clean and safe is also probably free from interaction with Reality, and that's not what we want. Ethical questions emerge IMMEDIATELY under the surface of this, and then we are properly dealing with real energy and real circumstances. In Trungpa-ese, we are handling what really matters.

Devotional Practice (sort of "Energy Post 2")

We're skipping over something I wanted to write about energy and "crushing" (yes, in the elementary school sense, but without romantic object) because it became so heavy and complicated as I tried to process a very simple statement, that I can't put any of it down here yet.

On Dec 1, Kino wrote about the value of the six-day practice week and said this: "One other crucial shift must happen in order to facilitate the transition into full immersion in the yoga tradition. You must make the transition from a fitness oriented approach to yoga into a devotional one."

Hm?

I know Nobel took this on, but I'd like to take it on differently. I don't read devotion as any kind of purifying practice besides that of transforming samskaric energies. For me, to read purification in the surface meaning of "don't take chemicals, caffeine, booze, et cetera" is really to not touch anything meaningful.

There is a teacher in town (student of mine, teacher of ashtanga also) who was cut loose from a job because she sponsored an event where booze would be served. She was told something like, "That's not how yoga people behave," and even Tim Miller (her teacher, to the degree that she has one) said, "Well what scriptures were they reading that said that?" to which she could only answer, "Well you know, THE SCRIPTURES" and I can imagine Tim's knowing nod in reply.

And that's how this is another "energy post." Purification not in annamaya terms, because that asks positively ENDLESS questions about should I eat this, drink that, how much of this, how many teaspoons of that, Ayurveda all simplified for Western culture which never works because that's not where it came from or was meant to be applied to, and then we all wind up doing "yoga for weight management." BORING.

**FROM a fitness-oriented approach TO a devotional one.**

I don't have a specific thing/deity/power to which I am devoted, but my practice, particularly since late November, has been moving away from "I can do this, can I do this?" (the sort of thinking that is achievement or anxiety-about-achievement oriented) and toward focused breathing, moving, stretching, feeling. An attempt to jump into a handstand pike or perfect a posture, or do one twice, doesn't modify this. That's one aspect of this change-over.

I did not discover "devotional practice" on purpose (that's also a theme in my last month or so posting here; I've become very anti-effort, again, see the "can't practice surrender" post, because that's where I most clearly hit this, at least I think so).

Too much ego pain, too much parenting, not enough time and space to use asana practice to nourish "myself," the self as ego, to take "time for me," as the commercial has it. So asana practice simply stopped being about me. It became brief, which at first was "I am so defeated by my stressy obligations," and then, particularly as I added closing sequence, no matter what practice had been (one day it was seven sun salutations), the asana practice became a way of focusing rather than answering-stress or achieving or even taking-time. Sure, those all sound the same, but they're not.

For a long time (since the early 1990s, at least), I have laid out flat on the floor when I need to chill. Many many living rooms have seen me do this, regardless of roommate traffic, pets, or other objects or people. It doesn't work if I use "my room" and make it a private thing; it had to be a PUBLIC focused "chilling" session. Roommates and partners got used to it. And it wasn't napping, it wasn't abjection, it wasn't meditation. It was sort of a public call of an end (however temporary, perhaps "a break" is a better term) to stressiness at that time.

And it let me recharge in somewhere between about eight and eighteen minutes. No breathing exercises, nothing fancy, just being on the floor and letting the monkey in my head run wherever he wanted. So in a way, it was a sort of instinctive reclining meditation, but I didn't understand it in those terms. And it was observative, but again, I didn't understand it like that either.

Devotional practice has become something like that. I do opening chant, and I really enjoy it. If I'm alone (i.e., at the studio and not at the Y) I do it loudly, so it bounces off the walls back to me. And something about the mindset makes postures easier, makes painful stretching (because I keep emotional pain in my fascia) easier also, even if I only do some sun salutations. There is a sustained mind "tone" (in the musical sense) that lingers between opening chant and closing chant.

And I used to have (still have, I suppose) an Intermediate-level practice, so some days (particularly when inspired by a Monday night practice) I'll do Intermediate up to Kapo or Supta Vajrasana, and then other days do partial or full Primary or just standing, or whatever. The "tone" of devotional practice is COMPLETELY EQUAL, and creates equanimity. The day this past week when I was fooling around with learning to tic (handstand dropover) was interesting in observational terms. I learned that that movement is, for me, essentially strength-based. I learned that that movement comes with pretty intense fear, which is oddly combined with intense concentration and stillness. So it's like "Hmm, here I am balancing on my hands, with my feet hanging over, and it feels like pretty far, and I'm terrified to let them drop, but I'm totally calm at the same time, hanging here. How interesting."

It's not that that is THE SAME, in physical/annamaya terms, as a sun salutation, because it isn't, and it's not energetically/pranamaya the same either, but the tone of practice, the "music" of practice, if you will, is EQUANIMITY.

Closing series is the series of equanimity, the great "smoothing out" as of bedcovers. Closing series is where I give up my hurrah and my aarrrrghhh and everything else, the great emotional quiet-seas, the breezeless open ocean.

Devotional practice may not reduce the ego in any way (about which I will say more in a later post), but it operates sort of parallel to the ego, on some different wavelength, isn't run by the ego, isn't operated and then carved up to specifically serve the ego's bipolarity where one either aggrandizes or fails.

And in this way, devotional practice is regular practice, because there's nothing to gain or lose. I still get sore (annamaya) but it's the energy management (pranamaya; and with it, hints of emotional management) that really happens. Annamaya contains, runs with, alongside, pranamaya, and it's more and more, now emotional energy that is cracked out of fascia, anger at my household situation, mourning about my father earlier this year, anxiety about the holiday travel with my family's chronic weird communication and suburbanity, other things. Practice is not ABOUT these things, but I am about these things, and I learn this in practice. I see my own noise better. I hear the jam band that is my emotional/physical/energetic state, over the bass note of practice's equanimity.