Each piece of news, in the job search, is good news:
Colby College has hired a Film and Literature person. Hurrah!
Wofford College admires me but does not think I fit. Hurrah!
Ursinus College also, admiration aside, didn't think that I fit. Hurrah!
IU Bloomington (to which I did not apply because they had no gig; nonetheless, as a graduate, I get email about departmental searches) has found a Renaissance candidate! Hurrah!
Every piece of news, no matter what it says, reduces ambiguity.
Die, ambiguity, die!!
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Check-in, heroes, and postmodernism.
How's the:
Job search? Today it's better; I'm angrier, but not overtly. Smouldering, on guard, properly guarded and suspicious about the whole process. Properly defending myself, and finally, not obsessing about it all day.
Teaching? Fair. I taught a decent class, interrupted by a fire alarm, and didn't get everything covered. Oh well, maybe that makes them an easier test. I still have at best disdain for, and at worst outright hatred of, contemporary art.
Yoga? None yet, but again, it'll be brilliant. I do have some anxiety about the coming 6 inches of snow, which is due to begin 2 hours before my evening class tonight, the class being a 40 minute drive in both directions, from here.
Teaching yoga? That's cool; again, anxious about attendance and driving, but it's fine.
I was thinking about my relationship to postmodernism (we don't get along, NOT AT ALL) and I wanted to start that conversation with a list of cultural and aesthetic heroes. Here are my heroes, in terms of art, culture, literature, philosophy, etc:
Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Tristan Tzara and all of Dada, Raoul Hausmann, Andre Breton and all of Surrealism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis-Ferdinand Celine (before he turned Fascist), Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Tom Robbins, Thomas Pynchon (consistently, but before Vineland is when he really rocked), Carol Queen, Pat Califia, Bob Flanagan, Virginie Despentes, Catherine Breillat, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Meret Oppenheim, Leonor Fini, Kathy Acker (I don't actually like her books, but I do like her project), Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor, Salvador Dali, Louis Bunuel, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol (but not his reception or much of the academic discourse which surrounds him), Guy Debord and all things Situationist, Carolee Schneemann, Guy Maddin, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Alfred Hitchcock, James Wong Howe (cinematographer), Gordon Willis (cinematographer), Ridley Scott (when he is at his very, VERY best), Robbie Muller (cinematographer), Jim Jarmusch (when he's at his most mythological), Henri Alekan (cinematographer), Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders (when he is understated and hits it just delicately right), Nagisa Oshima, Gregg Araki, A. G. Inarritu (in collaboration with Guillermo Arriaga, who is a GENIUS), Wong-Kar Wai (only when he tears loose), William Friedkin (at his most realistic), David Lynch, Willem Dafoe (when demented), Nicolas Cage (ONLY prior to "Leaving Las Vegas"), Kyle MacLachlan (when mysterious, and at NO OTHER TIME), Jack Nicholson (in the seventies, BEFORE "Shining" and "Terms"), Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Susan Sarandon (but only at her LEAST realistic), Clint Eastwood (only when he has "no name"), Bruce Willis (only when he's funny), Roland Joffe (only at his very, VERY grandest), Billy Corgan (only when he's trying to make it), Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix (at his most archetypal), Michael Hedges (in his legacy), Ry Cooder (as soundtrack), John Coltrane, Charles Mingus (at his most topical), and so on.
Do you see what I see? Every time I do this (and of course I self-select; so do you) I see bohemia, the avant-garde (I mean the REAL one, before World War II, not the tired, bullshit use of that term nowadays, when it means nothing), hippies, hitchhikers, ironic darkness, politics, feminism, and a series of geographical, temporal, and cultural "centers."
I define myself largely by the avant-garde, bohemian culture, and hippies. I like the 20s in Western Europe, the 60s everywhere, and the 90s in Seattle. I like the 70s in film, as well as some of the darker and/or more arthouse streaks that have appeared since the 50s. My taste in academia is EXTREMELY FRENCH. Numerous people have remarked on "what a Frenchie" I am, academically speaking. But it's more narrow than that: look at my "Frenchness." Even there, it's almost exclusively bohemia and revolution.
What do I NOT LIKE in the arts and culture?
It's actually almost as simple as ONE WORD: I do not like POSTMODERNISM.
The only realm in which that word means ANYTHING not immediately contradictory is architecture, where it refers to a reinvention of style which can be verified visibly.
In literature, how do you separate the "postmodern" from works like Joyce's _Finegans Wake_ or Picabia's Dada poetry? Multiple narratives? Um, Faulkner, anyone? Irony? Dada, anyone? It can't be done; it simply cannot. Feminist sexuality? Um, Collette, anyone? No, it can't be done. It's bullshit to try to separate some set of "postmodern" characteristics from "modern" characteristics. Hell, it's even impossible to ESTABLISH a set of "modern" characteristics that aren't entirely contradictory.
Theory? Let's try that one. How do you account for the fact that Derrida's project, in 1967, had political intent, and so did Baudrillard's, prior to about 1980? Not, of course, to mention Deleuze and Guattari, who are hardcore lefties all the way into the 1980s. Frederic Jameson, however, was always a reactionary, and most postmodern theory is seen as promoting moral relativism, by both the left and the right (of course, that's how the right sees EVERYTHING, so we're not suprised). How do you reconcile this particularly postmodern "post-Marxism" with a simultaneous hard leftism coming from some of "pomo theory's" heavy hitters? So what is this clearly defined beast called "pomo theory"? Often, people toss that out to mean "the theory which made everything complicated." Well, depending on who you read, you might find that (Baudrillard) you don't have your own subjectivity or that (Derrida) all of the words in the universe are interchangeable or (Deleuze and Guattari) you need to "abort" Freudianism from your head or (Foucault) bureaucratic power wants to penetrate the fibers of your body or (also Foucault) that the author doesn't exist (sorry multiculturalism!). Of course, even if we believe Foucault on that last point, multiculturalism ITSELF is ALSO postmodern! OOPS, sorry easy definition! Is my point clear now?
Do NOT get me started on postmodernism in the arts. Briefly, Jeff Koons is what postmodernism in the arts comes down to. Artist and porn-star ex-wife cast in rear entry position in porcelain. Quickly, New York art world! Better buy that one up before capitalism has to stop jerking itself off and calling it art!! NOT, of course, that I think it's the ART that is the trouble here. Pieces by Andres Serrano and so forth are still compelling and interesting. My problem with "postmodern art" is the SCENE of it, particularly the "big spender, acquiring the scandalous piece" scene that is nothing but capitalism pretending that it can still scandalize itself. I like scandalous art, any art which has the cojones to try to jump the fence. What I dislike in "postmodern art" is how commodified it is; it's the POMO ART WORLD which I wish would finally just choke on it and fall over dead. Twice.
postmodern politics/culture: Let's take up Frederic Jameson, that brilliant old reactionary bastard, for this one. In his "Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" he defines postmodernism as SOMETHING LIKE "simultaneously a form, a content, and a time period." I think that what he ACTUALLY means is something like THIS:
"Postmodernism is a word inequally and yet simultaneously used to describe certain notably uneven developments in form in the arts, content in the arts, and a time period (the exact beginning of which is completely impossible to determine) during which those developments might be said to occur. It should be noted for the record that arts develop at different speeds (architecture the most slowly; literature really quite quickly, and film faster than that) and that arts differ widely in their material-intensiveness (for example, film can be massively material-intensive, when blockbusters are under consideration; a book of short stories can be composed by one person and self-published; architecture is almost always very material-intensive, and so on). These characteristics of different arts make it RIDICULOUSLY IMPOSSIBLE to generalize ACROSS ARTS as to a consistent "post-modern" set of characteristics. Further, just in case you don't believe that, periodicity is never accurate until a couple CENTURIES after the period in question. Don't believe that? When was the latest period set in stone? That's right, it was REALISM, of which people like EMILE ZOLA are considered members, and that's roughly what, the 1860s? Sure, there's Surrealism, but that is a SELF-DEFINED and NAMED movement, NOT A PERIOD OF ARTISTIC PRODUCTION. We don't know WHAT the 20th century is yet, because it is STILL HAPPENING. Call us in 2200 and maybe we'll have a nice clean label for 1900."
postmodern "politics": Postmodernism, thanks to deflated Marxists like Jameson who have some reactionary "attack of conscience" or something and so give up doing anything actually ACTIVE politically (note that certain of his students, like Laura Kipnis, actually DO politics in interesting ways; time to take a lesson, Fred!!), would have you believe that postmodernism represents the "failure of the sixties," as if 1968 was some kind of "last inning for the home team" or something. Or as if the buzzer rang on the world, and so we had no choice but to all move to the suburbs and vote for Reagan. Thanks, postmodernism, I'm sure glad you arrived! Questions linger about "how to do effective politics" and whether or not global capitalism "can be stopped" and such. Well, here's my two cents: postmodern powerlessness and reactionariness brought you and me the Bush Presidency and lovely stuff like Abu Ghraib (are we making art about that yet, New York? Can't WAIT to put that on your living room floor for your rich guests, CAN YOU, you FUCKERS). Global capitalism is a powerful engine, but without ethics, it will result in global disaster (by carbon dioxide, perhaps, if not nuclear suitcases wielded by our many new enemies, right?). Politics really HAS become this edge-of-knife: ETHICAL behavior ITSELF is now a leftist platform. It has to be; all the right has had since the 1980s is the free market (which will lead to a really energetic, performative suicide on a global scale) and its ranting and raving about an imaginary Christian morality which never existed in any form outside that of totalitarianism (and which, if ever instituted, would immediately take that form).
Postmodernism, in a few words, then, is BAD FOR YOU. It is BAD for ME and it is bad for YOU. Time to abandon it and its apathy and its reactionariness.
A word about apathy and irony: this is also held to be part of the postmodern ethos. Let's take it in film. There is a brilliant piece by Jeffrey Sconce, called "The New American Smart Film." It's about the many very, very dark pieces made in the 1990s and the reactionaries' insistence on these films being seen as degradation and so forth. Sconce reads the irony of films by people such as Todd Solondz and Wes Anderson as political, in that it seeks a "third way" between what he calls "liberal therapeutics" and "right wing moral vengeance." I like that. He also closed with a line from Richard Linklater's _Slacker_: "withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy."
Job search? Today it's better; I'm angrier, but not overtly. Smouldering, on guard, properly guarded and suspicious about the whole process. Properly defending myself, and finally, not obsessing about it all day.
Teaching? Fair. I taught a decent class, interrupted by a fire alarm, and didn't get everything covered. Oh well, maybe that makes them an easier test. I still have at best disdain for, and at worst outright hatred of, contemporary art.
Yoga? None yet, but again, it'll be brilliant. I do have some anxiety about the coming 6 inches of snow, which is due to begin 2 hours before my evening class tonight, the class being a 40 minute drive in both directions, from here.
Teaching yoga? That's cool; again, anxious about attendance and driving, but it's fine.
I was thinking about my relationship to postmodernism (we don't get along, NOT AT ALL) and I wanted to start that conversation with a list of cultural and aesthetic heroes. Here are my heroes, in terms of art, culture, literature, philosophy, etc:
Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Tristan Tzara and all of Dada, Raoul Hausmann, Andre Breton and all of Surrealism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis-Ferdinand Celine (before he turned Fascist), Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Tom Robbins, Thomas Pynchon (consistently, but before Vineland is when he really rocked), Carol Queen, Pat Califia, Bob Flanagan, Virginie Despentes, Catherine Breillat, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Meret Oppenheim, Leonor Fini, Kathy Acker (I don't actually like her books, but I do like her project), Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor, Salvador Dali, Louis Bunuel, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol (but not his reception or much of the academic discourse which surrounds him), Guy Debord and all things Situationist, Carolee Schneemann, Guy Maddin, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Alfred Hitchcock, James Wong Howe (cinematographer), Gordon Willis (cinematographer), Ridley Scott (when he is at his very, VERY best), Robbie Muller (cinematographer), Jim Jarmusch (when he's at his most mythological), Henri Alekan (cinematographer), Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders (when he is understated and hits it just delicately right), Nagisa Oshima, Gregg Araki, A. G. Inarritu (in collaboration with Guillermo Arriaga, who is a GENIUS), Wong-Kar Wai (only when he tears loose), William Friedkin (at his most realistic), David Lynch, Willem Dafoe (when demented), Nicolas Cage (ONLY prior to "Leaving Las Vegas"), Kyle MacLachlan (when mysterious, and at NO OTHER TIME), Jack Nicholson (in the seventies, BEFORE "Shining" and "Terms"), Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Susan Sarandon (but only at her LEAST realistic), Clint Eastwood (only when he has "no name"), Bruce Willis (only when he's funny), Roland Joffe (only at his very, VERY grandest), Billy Corgan (only when he's trying to make it), Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix (at his most archetypal), Michael Hedges (in his legacy), Ry Cooder (as soundtrack), John Coltrane, Charles Mingus (at his most topical), and so on.
Do you see what I see? Every time I do this (and of course I self-select; so do you) I see bohemia, the avant-garde (I mean the REAL one, before World War II, not the tired, bullshit use of that term nowadays, when it means nothing), hippies, hitchhikers, ironic darkness, politics, feminism, and a series of geographical, temporal, and cultural "centers."
I define myself largely by the avant-garde, bohemian culture, and hippies. I like the 20s in Western Europe, the 60s everywhere, and the 90s in Seattle. I like the 70s in film, as well as some of the darker and/or more arthouse streaks that have appeared since the 50s. My taste in academia is EXTREMELY FRENCH. Numerous people have remarked on "what a Frenchie" I am, academically speaking. But it's more narrow than that: look at my "Frenchness." Even there, it's almost exclusively bohemia and revolution.
What do I NOT LIKE in the arts and culture?
It's actually almost as simple as ONE WORD: I do not like POSTMODERNISM.
The only realm in which that word means ANYTHING not immediately contradictory is architecture, where it refers to a reinvention of style which can be verified visibly.
In literature, how do you separate the "postmodern" from works like Joyce's _Finegans Wake_ or Picabia's Dada poetry? Multiple narratives? Um, Faulkner, anyone? Irony? Dada, anyone? It can't be done; it simply cannot. Feminist sexuality? Um, Collette, anyone? No, it can't be done. It's bullshit to try to separate some set of "postmodern" characteristics from "modern" characteristics. Hell, it's even impossible to ESTABLISH a set of "modern" characteristics that aren't entirely contradictory.
Theory? Let's try that one. How do you account for the fact that Derrida's project, in 1967, had political intent, and so did Baudrillard's, prior to about 1980? Not, of course, to mention Deleuze and Guattari, who are hardcore lefties all the way into the 1980s. Frederic Jameson, however, was always a reactionary, and most postmodern theory is seen as promoting moral relativism, by both the left and the right (of course, that's how the right sees EVERYTHING, so we're not suprised). How do you reconcile this particularly postmodern "post-Marxism" with a simultaneous hard leftism coming from some of "pomo theory's" heavy hitters? So what is this clearly defined beast called "pomo theory"? Often, people toss that out to mean "the theory which made everything complicated." Well, depending on who you read, you might find that (Baudrillard) you don't have your own subjectivity or that (Derrida) all of the words in the universe are interchangeable or (Deleuze and Guattari) you need to "abort" Freudianism from your head or (Foucault) bureaucratic power wants to penetrate the fibers of your body or (also Foucault) that the author doesn't exist (sorry multiculturalism!). Of course, even if we believe Foucault on that last point, multiculturalism ITSELF is ALSO postmodern! OOPS, sorry easy definition! Is my point clear now?
Do NOT get me started on postmodernism in the arts. Briefly, Jeff Koons is what postmodernism in the arts comes down to. Artist and porn-star ex-wife cast in rear entry position in porcelain. Quickly, New York art world! Better buy that one up before capitalism has to stop jerking itself off and calling it art!! NOT, of course, that I think it's the ART that is the trouble here. Pieces by Andres Serrano and so forth are still compelling and interesting. My problem with "postmodern art" is the SCENE of it, particularly the "big spender, acquiring the scandalous piece" scene that is nothing but capitalism pretending that it can still scandalize itself. I like scandalous art, any art which has the cojones to try to jump the fence. What I dislike in "postmodern art" is how commodified it is; it's the POMO ART WORLD which I wish would finally just choke on it and fall over dead. Twice.
postmodern politics/culture: Let's take up Frederic Jameson, that brilliant old reactionary bastard, for this one. In his "Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" he defines postmodernism as SOMETHING LIKE "simultaneously a form, a content, and a time period." I think that what he ACTUALLY means is something like THIS:
"Postmodernism is a word inequally and yet simultaneously used to describe certain notably uneven developments in form in the arts, content in the arts, and a time period (the exact beginning of which is completely impossible to determine) during which those developments might be said to occur. It should be noted for the record that arts develop at different speeds (architecture the most slowly; literature really quite quickly, and film faster than that) and that arts differ widely in their material-intensiveness (for example, film can be massively material-intensive, when blockbusters are under consideration; a book of short stories can be composed by one person and self-published; architecture is almost always very material-intensive, and so on). These characteristics of different arts make it RIDICULOUSLY IMPOSSIBLE to generalize ACROSS ARTS as to a consistent "post-modern" set of characteristics. Further, just in case you don't believe that, periodicity is never accurate until a couple CENTURIES after the period in question. Don't believe that? When was the latest period set in stone? That's right, it was REALISM, of which people like EMILE ZOLA are considered members, and that's roughly what, the 1860s? Sure, there's Surrealism, but that is a SELF-DEFINED and NAMED movement, NOT A PERIOD OF ARTISTIC PRODUCTION. We don't know WHAT the 20th century is yet, because it is STILL HAPPENING. Call us in 2200 and maybe we'll have a nice clean label for 1900."
postmodern "politics": Postmodernism, thanks to deflated Marxists like Jameson who have some reactionary "attack of conscience" or something and so give up doing anything actually ACTIVE politically (note that certain of his students, like Laura Kipnis, actually DO politics in interesting ways; time to take a lesson, Fred!!), would have you believe that postmodernism represents the "failure of the sixties," as if 1968 was some kind of "last inning for the home team" or something. Or as if the buzzer rang on the world, and so we had no choice but to all move to the suburbs and vote for Reagan. Thanks, postmodernism, I'm sure glad you arrived! Questions linger about "how to do effective politics" and whether or not global capitalism "can be stopped" and such. Well, here's my two cents: postmodern powerlessness and reactionariness brought you and me the Bush Presidency and lovely stuff like Abu Ghraib (are we making art about that yet, New York? Can't WAIT to put that on your living room floor for your rich guests, CAN YOU, you FUCKERS). Global capitalism is a powerful engine, but without ethics, it will result in global disaster (by carbon dioxide, perhaps, if not nuclear suitcases wielded by our many new enemies, right?). Politics really HAS become this edge-of-knife: ETHICAL behavior ITSELF is now a leftist platform. It has to be; all the right has had since the 1980s is the free market (which will lead to a really energetic, performative suicide on a global scale) and its ranting and raving about an imaginary Christian morality which never existed in any form outside that of totalitarianism (and which, if ever instituted, would immediately take that form).
Postmodernism, in a few words, then, is BAD FOR YOU. It is BAD for ME and it is bad for YOU. Time to abandon it and its apathy and its reactionariness.
A word about apathy and irony: this is also held to be part of the postmodern ethos. Let's take it in film. There is a brilliant piece by Jeffrey Sconce, called "The New American Smart Film." It's about the many very, very dark pieces made in the 1990s and the reactionaries' insistence on these films being seen as degradation and so forth. Sconce reads the irony of films by people such as Todd Solondz and Wes Anderson as political, in that it seeks a "third way" between what he calls "liberal therapeutics" and "right wing moral vengeance." I like that. He also closed with a line from Richard Linklater's _Slacker_: "withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy."
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
A series of check-ins (maybe this will be a regular thing)
Here's what I'm experimenting with adding, per post, just to see the trajectory:
Job Search: Depressing; still makes me want to stay in bed late.
School teaching: Could be better, but always improves after Tuesday is over.
How's the yoga: none yet today, but it'll be good, even if it's not; it always is.
Yoga teaching: Tonight is my usual "no one comes" class, which is a bummer, BUT next week it moves an hour later, and with new studio ownership, so that bodes well.
Job Search: Depressing; still makes me want to stay in bed late.
School teaching: Could be better, but always improves after Tuesday is over.
How's the yoga: none yet today, but it'll be good, even if it's not; it always is.
Yoga teaching: Tonight is my usual "no one comes" class, which is a bummer, BUT next week it moves an hour later, and with new studio ownership, so that bodes well.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
One more summary of the Academy.
No, not the Oscars Academy, the academic Academy.
Yesterday was one of the most intense struggles yet with job search/future anxiety and non-attachment. Only in the Intermediate class at night, did I get any relief from it. When I'm stressed about that stuff, I am NOT FIT FOR HUMAN COMPANY. It's unpleasant to have to sit still and wait for this to all figure itself out. So, in honor of the cosmic unpleasantness of the job search, I summarize the "math" thus:
Why am I in line for an academic job ANYWAY, if it's so full of stress and anger and terror?
1) I'm a talented teacher and I like it.
2) I'm an extrovert and public speaking, particularly about stuff where I'm knowledgeable, is a lot of fun.
3) I'm able and willing to research stuff, and that's also fun (less fun, but fun).
Ok, so what are the negatives?
1) I have sustained, violent hatred of all and any bureaucracy.
2) I find capitalism to be, at the VERY best, a necessary evil.
3) I find the whole idea of "career" to taste like grape-flavored cough medicine.
What else is involved?
1) A humanities dissertation is written in blood. It kills parts of you that never, ever return to life. It hurts in a way that cannot be recovered.
2) Graduate education, if you don't finance it smartly, can have you in debt up to your ears, well past your retirement age.
3) Getting a job in the academy is like praying to a God you can't help but believe in, but who never answers you or gives you any reason to keep faith, while at the same time, throwing down massive avalanches of challenges TO your faith.
So, how does this add up?
1) Bureaucracy: as paperwork-laden as an academic job WOULD BE, most other jobs would have equal amounts, as well as less enjoyable work. Sure, you could be a guy who rents canoes or something, but please see debt, below.
2) Debt: academic jobs, IF YOU CAN GET ONE, can pay substantially. Of course teachers are underpaid in the US, but most graduate students learn how to live somewhat happily at incomes between, say, 8 and 20-odd thousand dollars, annually. So, an academic job which pays, say, 36,000 a year, would be a MASSIVE increase in income. Some, depending on discipline, can even pay into the 50s or 60s.
3) "Earning it": this is the big one, I think. A dissertation puts you to death, and so in a way, it is only RIGHT that the Academy hire everyone who volunteers for such suicide. Of course, the irony is that you can commit dissertation on yourself and then WAIT for the Academy to give you a job and then NOT GET ONE. Now THAT is where you can almost (ALMOST, but NOT QUITE) hear some ironic agnostic God laughing at you. The problem with the whole "earning it" idea is that
a) You can't recover from a dissertation. It's like being a prisoner of war or getting divorced; you can change your life's direction, you can learn from it, but you can NOT put it away and just "become your normal self" again. A dissertation changes you for life, for ever. And it hurts; did I make clear how much it hurts?
b) Getting a job, I suspect, does NOT undo the "waiting" for getting a job and the corollary anxieties about "the future" and money and so forth and so on. Much like a dissertation, the wait for a job, the wondering and curiosity and panic, can't be undone. Find strategies for BEARING this variety of Chinese water torture.
c) Capitalism marches on. Loans accumulate interest; television continues to praise the free market. No one cares about the emotional pain involved in this or any other job situation; maybe you all should watch American Beauty (tm) again, eh? It is, in a fashion, as Marx diagnosed it: the workers produce products which bear the mark of their alienation from themselves. Writing a dissertation and then waiting for the job market to "play out" gives you a vision of the bureaucratic machine which is SO INTIMATE and SO RAW, so absolutely BALDLY TERRIFYING, that it's like some Kafkaesque nightmare from which you finally wake up before you lose your mind and go catatonic. I would go as far as saying that NO OTHER JOB ON EARTH gives you such clear vision of the intimate proximity of the autophagous capitalist free market and one's own interior life.
4) But then why not just become a secretary, or rent canoes, or something else?
a) In part, I don't want to abandon skills which I seem to natively possess.
b) I feel as if I "lose" if I don't stick this out. Not that "winning" is an option; it's like that line in Lord of the Rings about "No, we cannot win; but we will meet them in battle NONETHELESS."
c) In part, I WANT to fight on. I know it's all illusion and emotional pain, and there really IS NO FIGHT, but I want it anyway. You might say that I want to FULLY REALIZE the long streak of ignorant errors I have unconsciously made, I want to RUN MY IGNORANCE TO THE VERY, VERY FINAL ENDS OF THE EARTH. I ran to grad school to get away from temp jobs and the small, claustrophobic box of family traditions. And it has been a streak of marvelous, miraculous errors and stupidities, which now are being burned clean and clear, and it is pretty sustained terror and pain, but not without love and joy. In a fashion, WHO WOULD GIVE THIS UP?????
So there it is: sticking to this path provides, if you will, SUSTAINED TAPAS.
Yesterday was one of the most intense struggles yet with job search/future anxiety and non-attachment. Only in the Intermediate class at night, did I get any relief from it. When I'm stressed about that stuff, I am NOT FIT FOR HUMAN COMPANY. It's unpleasant to have to sit still and wait for this to all figure itself out. So, in honor of the cosmic unpleasantness of the job search, I summarize the "math" thus:
Why am I in line for an academic job ANYWAY, if it's so full of stress and anger and terror?
1) I'm a talented teacher and I like it.
2) I'm an extrovert and public speaking, particularly about stuff where I'm knowledgeable, is a lot of fun.
3) I'm able and willing to research stuff, and that's also fun (less fun, but fun).
Ok, so what are the negatives?
1) I have sustained, violent hatred of all and any bureaucracy.
2) I find capitalism to be, at the VERY best, a necessary evil.
3) I find the whole idea of "career" to taste like grape-flavored cough medicine.
What else is involved?
1) A humanities dissertation is written in blood. It kills parts of you that never, ever return to life. It hurts in a way that cannot be recovered.
2) Graduate education, if you don't finance it smartly, can have you in debt up to your ears, well past your retirement age.
3) Getting a job in the academy is like praying to a God you can't help but believe in, but who never answers you or gives you any reason to keep faith, while at the same time, throwing down massive avalanches of challenges TO your faith.
So, how does this add up?
1) Bureaucracy: as paperwork-laden as an academic job WOULD BE, most other jobs would have equal amounts, as well as less enjoyable work. Sure, you could be a guy who rents canoes or something, but please see debt, below.
2) Debt: academic jobs, IF YOU CAN GET ONE, can pay substantially. Of course teachers are underpaid in the US, but most graduate students learn how to live somewhat happily at incomes between, say, 8 and 20-odd thousand dollars, annually. So, an academic job which pays, say, 36,000 a year, would be a MASSIVE increase in income. Some, depending on discipline, can even pay into the 50s or 60s.
3) "Earning it": this is the big one, I think. A dissertation puts you to death, and so in a way, it is only RIGHT that the Academy hire everyone who volunteers for such suicide. Of course, the irony is that you can commit dissertation on yourself and then WAIT for the Academy to give you a job and then NOT GET ONE. Now THAT is where you can almost (ALMOST, but NOT QUITE) hear some ironic agnostic God laughing at you. The problem with the whole "earning it" idea is that
a) You can't recover from a dissertation. It's like being a prisoner of war or getting divorced; you can change your life's direction, you can learn from it, but you can NOT put it away and just "become your normal self" again. A dissertation changes you for life, for ever. And it hurts; did I make clear how much it hurts?
b) Getting a job, I suspect, does NOT undo the "waiting" for getting a job and the corollary anxieties about "the future" and money and so forth and so on. Much like a dissertation, the wait for a job, the wondering and curiosity and panic, can't be undone. Find strategies for BEARING this variety of Chinese water torture.
c) Capitalism marches on. Loans accumulate interest; television continues to praise the free market. No one cares about the emotional pain involved in this or any other job situation; maybe you all should watch American Beauty (tm) again, eh? It is, in a fashion, as Marx diagnosed it: the workers produce products which bear the mark of their alienation from themselves. Writing a dissertation and then waiting for the job market to "play out" gives you a vision of the bureaucratic machine which is SO INTIMATE and SO RAW, so absolutely BALDLY TERRIFYING, that it's like some Kafkaesque nightmare from which you finally wake up before you lose your mind and go catatonic. I would go as far as saying that NO OTHER JOB ON EARTH gives you such clear vision of the intimate proximity of the autophagous capitalist free market and one's own interior life.
4) But then why not just become a secretary, or rent canoes, or something else?
a) In part, I don't want to abandon skills which I seem to natively possess.
b) I feel as if I "lose" if I don't stick this out. Not that "winning" is an option; it's like that line in Lord of the Rings about "No, we cannot win; but we will meet them in battle NONETHELESS."
c) In part, I WANT to fight on. I know it's all illusion and emotional pain, and there really IS NO FIGHT, but I want it anyway. You might say that I want to FULLY REALIZE the long streak of ignorant errors I have unconsciously made, I want to RUN MY IGNORANCE TO THE VERY, VERY FINAL ENDS OF THE EARTH. I ran to grad school to get away from temp jobs and the small, claustrophobic box of family traditions. And it has been a streak of marvelous, miraculous errors and stupidities, which now are being burned clean and clear, and it is pretty sustained terror and pain, but not without love and joy. In a fashion, WHO WOULD GIVE THIS UP?????
So there it is: sticking to this path provides, if you will, SUSTAINED TAPAS.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Enamored of Intermediate.
Intro to Intermediate: late class, 7 people, warm room. Good numbers, good heat, good space. Not home, not being tormented by lesson plans about Warhol and the "job sit" as I now refer to it.
Bound Pasasana going right, tiptoed it going left; par for the course. Still want a shoulder adjustment in Bhekasana; had time to do each foot separately and then both together. Wonderful Dhanurasanas, including the Parsvas. Not quite a clean come-up in Laghuvajrasana, but that also has been par for the course since about late December. Kapotasana a mess, one I've seen before. Hands not close to feet, not comfortable to move in; hard to push up. 5 breaths pretending it was Kapo A; five breaths pretending it was Kapo B. Exhaustion coming. Head down, Supta Virasana exit. No real developments there; that's my Kapo, essentially.
Help in Supta Vajrasana, but not the big thoracic opening I'm used to. Hmm. Standard, deep twists. Easy vinyasa. Buildup breaths before the jump into Bakasana were unnecessary (don't think!). Eka pada on both sides, A B and C. Before B I took a reclining detour into Kasyapasana or whatever it's called (lie back in Eka Pada; first LBH pose in Advanced A, and also, I hear, the way that Tim Miller has his Mysore-stylers get into Eka Pada in class). That really helped open the hips.
STILL too round in Dwi Pada and Yoganidrasana. Cannot, without help, get the right foot clasped around the left and either balance or lift up. BUT: Full Tittibhasana sequence, no breaks! This was the superstar of the practice. Titti A, down to B, five breaths, C five steps up and five back, and then RIGHT TO D, feet come in, heels together, breathe, keep breathing, hands clasp, breathe, and RELAX! And it worked! The slight bend in the quads lets the incredible melt of the walk ease out, and ho, Titti A 5 breaths, Bakasana, vinyasa! Rawr! And I felt the most amazing nadi shodana after that; really humming; very very cool.
Pincha without the wall; five and down (I skipped the proper exit because I'm tired of crashing my big toe into the floor). Pincha again, right foot toward half lotus, with wall, and then left foot toward half lotus, with the wall. Balance difficult. But that's my modification for Karanda, for now. Slowly, slowly.
A Mayurasana which I fell out of, and then one I didn't, and then 3 pressup wheels from the floor, 4 kip-back-and-ups against the wall (the elbow-spring Matthew Sweeney dropbacks I've heard about; no wall-walking, instead bend elbows and spring up) and then closing.
Very very high after practice; nerves humming. Great contentment. Work to be done with Kapo (when is THAT not true) and Karanda; Dwi Pada coming. Spine longer!
And now, to prepare my Warhol lesson. Talk about "carry water, chop wood."
Bound Pasasana going right, tiptoed it going left; par for the course. Still want a shoulder adjustment in Bhekasana; had time to do each foot separately and then both together. Wonderful Dhanurasanas, including the Parsvas. Not quite a clean come-up in Laghuvajrasana, but that also has been par for the course since about late December. Kapotasana a mess, one I've seen before. Hands not close to feet, not comfortable to move in; hard to push up. 5 breaths pretending it was Kapo A; five breaths pretending it was Kapo B. Exhaustion coming. Head down, Supta Virasana exit. No real developments there; that's my Kapo, essentially.
Help in Supta Vajrasana, but not the big thoracic opening I'm used to. Hmm. Standard, deep twists. Easy vinyasa. Buildup breaths before the jump into Bakasana were unnecessary (don't think!). Eka pada on both sides, A B and C. Before B I took a reclining detour into Kasyapasana or whatever it's called (lie back in Eka Pada; first LBH pose in Advanced A, and also, I hear, the way that Tim Miller has his Mysore-stylers get into Eka Pada in class). That really helped open the hips.
STILL too round in Dwi Pada and Yoganidrasana. Cannot, without help, get the right foot clasped around the left and either balance or lift up. BUT: Full Tittibhasana sequence, no breaks! This was the superstar of the practice. Titti A, down to B, five breaths, C five steps up and five back, and then RIGHT TO D, feet come in, heels together, breathe, keep breathing, hands clasp, breathe, and RELAX! And it worked! The slight bend in the quads lets the incredible melt of the walk ease out, and ho, Titti A 5 breaths, Bakasana, vinyasa! Rawr! And I felt the most amazing nadi shodana after that; really humming; very very cool.
Pincha without the wall; five and down (I skipped the proper exit because I'm tired of crashing my big toe into the floor). Pincha again, right foot toward half lotus, with wall, and then left foot toward half lotus, with the wall. Balance difficult. But that's my modification for Karanda, for now. Slowly, slowly.
A Mayurasana which I fell out of, and then one I didn't, and then 3 pressup wheels from the floor, 4 kip-back-and-ups against the wall (the elbow-spring Matthew Sweeney dropbacks I've heard about; no wall-walking, instead bend elbows and spring up) and then closing.
Very very high after practice; nerves humming. Great contentment. Work to be done with Kapo (when is THAT not true) and Karanda; Dwi Pada coming. Spine longer!
And now, to prepare my Warhol lesson. Talk about "carry water, chop wood."
Friday, January 25, 2008
Practice/Enlightenment/Wisdom: don't forget how Funny It All Is.
Do not forget, when you're tossing around enlightenment, to CRACK YOURSELF UP.
I would go so far as to say, that if it's not, eventually, hysterically funny, you've missed it.
Example: I read a whole pack of comments (and dropped a few) over here yesterday and today. There is much that is good over there. But this afternoon in the car, coming back from a coffee shop, I was talking to myself in free indirect discourse (what, you never do that? You're missin' out, sister) and had the following conversation:
"Well, 'just be' is kinda silly."
"So what, then, change it to 'become aware of yourself just being'?"
"Dude, that's even MORE DISTANT *laughter begins*"
"That's great! 'Just be' kicks you out of just being! *laughter continues*"
And on it went, like that. Eventually it was spontaneous hysterics. I couldn't even USE the verb "to be" without losing it. It was marvelous.
I have a copy of an old book called "Zen Skeleton, Zen Bones" or something like that, and it's full of koans, like the story about the monks who gather to get lessons from the Zen master. They encircle him. He says nothing. They say nothing. Then they all get up and bow and go on their way. Hilarious!
By all means, throw down all the language you can. And read Karen's new thing before she goes private.
Throw down all that language, bend your head into funny shapes, and then make it all funny. Not cynical or sarcastic or exasperated funny, but sort of a harmless lemmings-off-cliff funny. Throw language at enlightenment and your understanding until you fall down, and you'll find you fall into something funny.
They say (I think actually this comes from Ram Dass' famous BE HERE NOW) that when you meet your guru, the two of you just laugh all the time. Yep.
I would go so far as to say, that if it's not, eventually, hysterically funny, you've missed it.
Example: I read a whole pack of comments (and dropped a few) over here yesterday and today. There is much that is good over there. But this afternoon in the car, coming back from a coffee shop, I was talking to myself in free indirect discourse (what, you never do that? You're missin' out, sister) and had the following conversation:
"Well, 'just be' is kinda silly."
"So what, then, change it to 'become aware of yourself just being'?"
"Dude, that's even MORE DISTANT *laughter begins*"
"That's great! 'Just be' kicks you out of just being! *laughter continues*"
And on it went, like that. Eventually it was spontaneous hysterics. I couldn't even USE the verb "to be" without losing it. It was marvelous.
I have a copy of an old book called "Zen Skeleton, Zen Bones" or something like that, and it's full of koans, like the story about the monks who gather to get lessons from the Zen master. They encircle him. He says nothing. They say nothing. Then they all get up and bow and go on their way. Hilarious!
By all means, throw down all the language you can. And read Karen's new thing before she goes private.
Throw down all that language, bend your head into funny shapes, and then make it all funny. Not cynical or sarcastic or exasperated funny, but sort of a harmless lemmings-off-cliff funny. Throw language at enlightenment and your understanding until you fall down, and you'll find you fall into something funny.
They say (I think actually this comes from Ram Dass' famous BE HERE NOW) that when you meet your guru, the two of you just laugh all the time. Yep.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Sometimes it's better just to
put on a Sonic Youth album and rock out to this track like the angsty goth teenagers we all know we are, somewhere inside.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Non-attachment, III.
I don't have this as well as I had it about 2 and a half hours ago, but here goes:
more non-attachment was called for. Let us be selfish with our contentment of mind, is what Satchidananda said in the Sutras.
I did about a 15 minute asana practice and got total emotional clarity about anger, fear, anxiety, job search. I knew that was what was behind the stress, but it was nice to see it in a brightly lit emotional "photo."
Then I took a long svasana to the accompaniment of a Krisna Das CD and got my act together about what is real and what is not. It was a sort of chant, but no chanting vocally was involved.
The job search is not real; jobs are not real; colleagues are not real; paperwork is not real; students are not real; money is not real; capitalism is not real; the bricks of the art building where I teach are not real; the door is not real.
It was all Prakriti and Purusha, and later, while eating a quite tasty ravioli, I "thought" (experienced? was there to witness?) a quick and not-accurately-conveyable "moment" (reluctant to call it a thought, that "cognitivizes" it and allows it to escape) where I "realized" (?) that this meal and this body, these eyeballs and this hand, all of this, is Prakriti. The seen exists for the sake of the seer. Purusha is confused, in the land of dark mirrors, with Prakriti, but is NOT Prakriti. And I saw myself see, and "I" moved, but "I" realized that Prakriti moved, and saw, and yet ALSO that Purusha saw. Does that make any sense?
"I" cannot be effectively applied to such a situation.
And as I later put this afternoon's realization to my partner (who, let's be honest with our metaphysics, also does not exist, as neither do the two cats; let's not be biased in our assessment of what is real and what is not), "the job market and process is agnostic, and so it is fitting and right, in fact, demanded, that one TREAT IT AGNOSTICALLY as well."
And so it does not exist. If a job should fall out of the sky, unpredictably like a cartoon piano, great. That is, quite without any metaphor, how it will ACTUALLY happen. Life IS, in fact, like a giant comic strip, as Jean-Luc Godard once said it was.
Achieving an academic post is VERY MUCH in the spirit of "seeing a ghost." A leap of faith, if you will. But not a leap, in fact I do not leap and I have agreed not to. Either, and now get this, wrap your head around it TIGHT: EITHER
1) God will appear, as to Moses and the burning bush, in the form of an offer
OR
2) a series of envelopes with polite refusals will arrive.
One does not push God, does not pull God, does not demand of God. After all, God is not listening. God appears or God does not, and all else is futility and comedy.
Envelopes will arrive or God will drop a cartoon piano on my head, and I will survive for the next cartoon adventure.
The job market is Ren and Stimpy.
more non-attachment was called for. Let us be selfish with our contentment of mind, is what Satchidananda said in the Sutras.
I did about a 15 minute asana practice and got total emotional clarity about anger, fear, anxiety, job search. I knew that was what was behind the stress, but it was nice to see it in a brightly lit emotional "photo."
Then I took a long svasana to the accompaniment of a Krisna Das CD and got my act together about what is real and what is not. It was a sort of chant, but no chanting vocally was involved.
The job search is not real; jobs are not real; colleagues are not real; paperwork is not real; students are not real; money is not real; capitalism is not real; the bricks of the art building where I teach are not real; the door is not real.
It was all Prakriti and Purusha, and later, while eating a quite tasty ravioli, I "thought" (experienced? was there to witness?) a quick and not-accurately-conveyable "moment" (reluctant to call it a thought, that "cognitivizes" it and allows it to escape) where I "realized" (?) that this meal and this body, these eyeballs and this hand, all of this, is Prakriti. The seen exists for the sake of the seer. Purusha is confused, in the land of dark mirrors, with Prakriti, but is NOT Prakriti. And I saw myself see, and "I" moved, but "I" realized that Prakriti moved, and saw, and yet ALSO that Purusha saw. Does that make any sense?
"I" cannot be effectively applied to such a situation.
And as I later put this afternoon's realization to my partner (who, let's be honest with our metaphysics, also does not exist, as neither do the two cats; let's not be biased in our assessment of what is real and what is not), "the job market and process is agnostic, and so it is fitting and right, in fact, demanded, that one TREAT IT AGNOSTICALLY as well."
And so it does not exist. If a job should fall out of the sky, unpredictably like a cartoon piano, great. That is, quite without any metaphor, how it will ACTUALLY happen. Life IS, in fact, like a giant comic strip, as Jean-Luc Godard once said it was.
Achieving an academic post is VERY MUCH in the spirit of "seeing a ghost." A leap of faith, if you will. But not a leap, in fact I do not leap and I have agreed not to. Either, and now get this, wrap your head around it TIGHT: EITHER
1) God will appear, as to Moses and the burning bush, in the form of an offer
OR
2) a series of envelopes with polite refusals will arrive.
One does not push God, does not pull God, does not demand of God. After all, God is not listening. God appears or God does not, and all else is futility and comedy.
Envelopes will arrive or God will drop a cartoon piano on my head, and I will survive for the next cartoon adventure.
The job market is Ren and Stimpy.
Grindstone: place nose here.
Yesterday was full of ambiguous, nameless stress, over.....SOMEthing. Shall we take some guesses?
It's late January 2008, what MIGHT I be stressed about?
Yep! Campus visits usually go down some time, as I've heard it, in late January and into February. Where are my calls for visits? Or, put the other way, where are my envelopes reading, "Thank you for applying but"?
In a word, where is my DEFINITENESS? Where's the CERTAINTY?
Oh, I'm sorry sir, you don't seem to realize that you've applied for positions in the academic job market. Please play Russian roulette daily for about seven months.
There is a wiki online about Film Studies jobs. It indicates that campus visits have been issued for three of four different colleges and/or universities that had expressed interest in me. That's not great news, but what, I'm going to trust a WIKI on this? Further, as I've said before, a campus visit means that that's a TOP candidate. Many, many schools will have similar top candidates. Those people can only take one job offer each. The rest cascade down the ladder; but the followup question is this, WHEN? WHEN, YOU FUCKERS????
Patience, in a word.
I can measure my psychological state fairly accurately by which CD's I bring into the kitchen when I go in there to cook, clean up, and so forth. I like musical accompaniment for those activities, and I've noticed that I bring my psychology with me. Today's offerings? Pink Floyd's Animals and the Doors' Morrison Motel. Now, my favorite track on that Doors album, even more than "Peace Frog," is "Land Ho."
How comic is that? Want to see how comic? Check these out:
Grandma loved a sailor who sailed the frozen sea.
Grandpa was that whaler and he took me on his knee.
He said son Im going crazy from living on the land
Got to find my shipmates and walk on foreign sand.
This old man was graceful with silver in his smile.
He smoked a briar pipe and he walked four country miles
Singing songs of shady sisters and old town liberty
Songs of love and songs of death, songs that set men free.
Ive got three ships and sixty men
A course for ports unread.
Ill stand at mast, let north winds blow
Till half of us are dead.
Land ho!
If I get my hands on a dollar bill
Gonna buy a bottle and drink my fill.
If I get my hands on a number five
Gonna skin that little girl alive.
If I get my hands on a number two
Come back home and marry you
Marry you, marry you.
Land ho!, land ho!
If I get back home and I feel all right
You dont baby gonna love you tonight
Land ho!
Sure, it's typical Morrison swagger, but really...a search for definiteness and the album I select has THIS TRACK on it? It'd almost make you believe in Freud or something.
Anyway: some tunes from that, and then "Dogs," "Pigs" and "Sheep," from the Floyd.
Bleating and bubbling we fell on his neck with a scream, ah yes.
At least I have realized that cursing patience like the lodestone it is, doesn't change it.
It's late January 2008, what MIGHT I be stressed about?
Yep! Campus visits usually go down some time, as I've heard it, in late January and into February. Where are my calls for visits? Or, put the other way, where are my envelopes reading, "Thank you for applying but"?
In a word, where is my DEFINITENESS? Where's the CERTAINTY?
Oh, I'm sorry sir, you don't seem to realize that you've applied for positions in the academic job market. Please play Russian roulette daily for about seven months.
There is a wiki online about Film Studies jobs. It indicates that campus visits have been issued for three of four different colleges and/or universities that had expressed interest in me. That's not great news, but what, I'm going to trust a WIKI on this? Further, as I've said before, a campus visit means that that's a TOP candidate. Many, many schools will have similar top candidates. Those people can only take one job offer each. The rest cascade down the ladder; but the followup question is this, WHEN? WHEN, YOU FUCKERS????
Patience, in a word.
I can measure my psychological state fairly accurately by which CD's I bring into the kitchen when I go in there to cook, clean up, and so forth. I like musical accompaniment for those activities, and I've noticed that I bring my psychology with me. Today's offerings? Pink Floyd's Animals and the Doors' Morrison Motel. Now, my favorite track on that Doors album, even more than "Peace Frog," is "Land Ho."
How comic is that? Want to see how comic? Check these out:
Grandma loved a sailor who sailed the frozen sea.
Grandpa was that whaler and he took me on his knee.
He said son Im going crazy from living on the land
Got to find my shipmates and walk on foreign sand.
This old man was graceful with silver in his smile.
He smoked a briar pipe and he walked four country miles
Singing songs of shady sisters and old town liberty
Songs of love and songs of death, songs that set men free.
Ive got three ships and sixty men
A course for ports unread.
Ill stand at mast, let north winds blow
Till half of us are dead.
Land ho!
If I get my hands on a dollar bill
Gonna buy a bottle and drink my fill.
If I get my hands on a number five
Gonna skin that little girl alive.
If I get my hands on a number two
Come back home and marry you
Marry you, marry you.
Land ho!, land ho!
If I get back home and I feel all right
You dont baby gonna love you tonight
Land ho!
Sure, it's typical Morrison swagger, but really...a search for definiteness and the album I select has THIS TRACK on it? It'd almost make you believe in Freud or something.
Anyway: some tunes from that, and then "Dogs," "Pigs" and "Sheep," from the Floyd.
Bleating and bubbling we fell on his neck with a scream, ah yes.
At least I have realized that cursing patience like the lodestone it is, doesn't change it.
Monday, January 21, 2008
It was all in the Baddha Konasana!
After Saturday's holy Primary, I was notably sore, specifically in the right buttock, very obviously the gluteus max. Surface muscle, palpable, definitely a muscle pull or overstretch, not a deep and/or mysterious nerve thing. And that was with me all day, and into most of Sunday too.
Sunday's pre-teaching sun salutations were SERIOUSLY restricted in forward bending, but everything else was fine (even down dog had to be modified a bit with bent knees). I did 5 sun A's and 2 sun B's, broke a sweat (yes, even at 59 degrees in the house) and then did standing and closing, including backbends. The glute said hello with some not-unpleasant stretching/twinges in revolved standing poses, and of course the forward fold of Prasarita Padottanasana, but was otherwise quiet.
I wondered if it was an SI thing (sacro-iliac, that most common of injuries from intense forward/backward bending...hello, Intermediate Series...). But I was able to backbend four times--not with arms straight or with that rubberized springiness and lift that I've had recently--with no pain in the glutes, so that eased the fear off.
Later Sunday night I came to realize that I felt overstretched not just in the glute but all the way down the right thigh (IT band) and also in the quads of both legs; something REALLY gave me a workout, and as I thought it through, I realized that it was the GREAT BIG baddha konasana (bound angle) forward fold that I took on Saturday. Had to be. Intense forward fold, spine extending out of the hip, great big lateral rotation in both hips. That, and I also engaged the quads hard in the Prasaritas on Saturday. Today it's much better; I'd like to practice earlier, and I might, but it's Intro to Intermediate night tonight, at 7.
Here we go again, Kapo. You and me. Was it Arturo who said that Matthew Sweeney's advice on dropbacks was to "spring" off the wall? Maybe I'll do that too.
Sunday's pre-teaching sun salutations were SERIOUSLY restricted in forward bending, but everything else was fine (even down dog had to be modified a bit with bent knees). I did 5 sun A's and 2 sun B's, broke a sweat (yes, even at 59 degrees in the house) and then did standing and closing, including backbends. The glute said hello with some not-unpleasant stretching/twinges in revolved standing poses, and of course the forward fold of Prasarita Padottanasana, but was otherwise quiet.
I wondered if it was an SI thing (sacro-iliac, that most common of injuries from intense forward/backward bending...hello, Intermediate Series...). But I was able to backbend four times--not with arms straight or with that rubberized springiness and lift that I've had recently--with no pain in the glutes, so that eased the fear off.
Later Sunday night I came to realize that I felt overstretched not just in the glute but all the way down the right thigh (IT band) and also in the quads of both legs; something REALLY gave me a workout, and as I thought it through, I realized that it was the GREAT BIG baddha konasana (bound angle) forward fold that I took on Saturday. Had to be. Intense forward fold, spine extending out of the hip, great big lateral rotation in both hips. That, and I also engaged the quads hard in the Prasaritas on Saturday. Today it's much better; I'd like to practice earlier, and I might, but it's Intro to Intermediate night tonight, at 7.
Here we go again, Kapo. You and me. Was it Arturo who said that Matthew Sweeney's advice on dropbacks was to "spring" off the wall? Maybe I'll do that too.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
A holy experience with Primary.
Sure, it's Saturday, and sure, that's a traditional day off, but as I said before, I'm having a non-traditional January, what with WoYoPracMo on the one side and job search hecticness on the other.
Plus, there's a led most-of-Primary on Saturdays, and who am I, missing a kula as I do, to skip it? Plus, on the business end, it gives me a chance to publicly show off my practice (be honest, that's what it does) and advertise to these folks for my Mysore-style class on Sunday.
I didn't know it was going to be a holy class: well, first I got up at 6, and went over to the studio to sub an 8 am vinyasa class for Chris, the guy whose Tuesday night class I adore to the high hills. That rocked: about 15 or 16 people, nicely full room, they and I got along, we did standing flows, a few seated, a few hip openers, some not-extreme arm balances, and then twists with "Jump into a handstand!" thrown in--thanks Larry! People seemed to like it. Hurrah!
And then I reappeared an hour later to do the 11 am Primary class with one of my main teachers in the city. I didn't KNOW it was going to be a holy Primary, and that's part of what was holy about it. In part, it was like being on autopilot, very much a "the yoga does YOU" experience. A little will here and there on my part, and it was like the gods answered.
There are many ways to evaluate a practice: I got pose X, I didn't. My breath was consistent, it wasn't. I was in my head, I was out of my head. But one way that I was NOT aware of, prior to this, about evaluating a practice, is the DURATION and INTENSITY of the post-practice high.
I had solid sun salutations; as is common for about the past four months, I am beginning to pick my feet up with my core, for the jump back to chaturanga; no knee bending is necessary. In standing forward bend, my hands are wide and flat. Press them down, feet come up; skate back. Chaturanga! I am also getting toward a really nice knee bend in Virabhadrasana in sun B: I feel the stretch almost instantly in the front thigh of the back leg. These are good developments.
Big toes in Trikonasana, both sides, and no overt effort extended; this cued me in to the fact that I was going to have a good practice. Easy transitions up, square, down, Parivrtta Trik. Like on autopilot. Fingers together; windmill, turn, second side, down, five, up, samasthiti, big toes touch. Auto-frickin-matic.
Standing poses were big throughout; I didn't QUITE touch the floor in Prasarita B, but my hair did (that's close enough). Chin to shin in Parsvottanasana (not uncommon, any more). It wasn't the DEPTH or the SIZE, it was the automatic nature of it, the way it all just FLOWED, not to be ashtanga-cheezy or anything. There were no obstacles; no anxiety, no mind chatter. Up, down, inhale, exhale, samasthiti.
Top arm over the ear in both Parivrtta Parsvakonasanas. I fell out of both sides of Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana, at the same place: swing back to center. I swung, I toppled, I got up and extended straight for five. Eye gaze to kneecap for both sides of Ardha Baddha Padma Padottanasana; nose to knee with left foot up.
The breath DID NOT BREAK, not even when I sat and chilled after Marichyasana D and again after Supta K. This also was part of it.
Jumpbacks, jumpthroughs: absolute CRISCO!! Who greased me up today? Some of the best, easiest, slickest, least energy-using jumps EVER. No sooner did I think "press up, inhale" then I was back. Quicker than the mind's eye! Riding the bandhas stallions around the wild veldt, man--crazy talk!!
I started doing take-it-ups between Marichyasanas, to save time (because the class is modified Primary) and only did 3 rounds of Navasana (the only thing I cut) and then had a fantastic, totally straight-up Bhuja and both Kurmasanas. I have discovered that in Supta Kurmasana I've started crossing the left foot over the right, and it should be the OTHER WAY AROUND. Maybe that's why I'm feeling that pose in the solar plexus, still. But Titti and Bakasana exits, both (again, that's not unusual).
A totally psychologically, emotionally, respirationally BEAUTIFUL Garbha Pindasana. I mean, an experience I wish I could bottle. Sure, my hands weren't to my face or on my head in the rolls, but the whole pose was PRESENCE. It was absolutely holy. There just isn't any other way to put it. I was speechless, thinking about it later. And of course it can't be explained, when the teacher didn't lead it (she lets me Mysore it up in that class) and no one else can do it.
Huge Baddha K; straight back fold had toes to chin. Round back fold had feet to lips. That's as big as that pose has ever been for me, except maybe ONCE in SF.
Thinking of Supta Padangusthasana as a strength move, "pulling the torso up," instead of a flexibility move, changes it completely, and for the better (that's Gregor Maehle's advice, folks).
Face to thighs in Urdhva Mukha Paschimo, but that, again, is not unusual. When I finished Setu Bandhasana, I wanted to take a BIG OLE BITE out of Intermediate, and that IS unusual. Often it's like, "Oh-kay.....BREATHE....Pasasana..." but today I was a freakin CROCODILE for that sequence; alas, it was not to be.
Three of the most suprisingly big, springy backbends EVER, and I mean, EVER. Sure, over the summer I had giant hot-weather post-teacher-training backbends, even one where I walked my hands past the shoulder line, but these were nearly effortless. It was like an act of will rather than of musculature. "Up," and KA-BOING, up I went. I smiled, I chilled out, I didn't walk my hands in (but could have) just because I didn't want to RUIN THE COMFORT. Comfort??????? Did he just SAY THAT??
One dropback hang, saw the back of the mat, comfortable, and then a handstand, vinyasa, forward fold with a wrist taken (that's also kind of uncommon), closing. Great, great practice. Marvelous stuff.
The most remarkable part of the whole thing was the mindbending post-practice STONING that happens; you know this, right? I mean, I could speak English and walk in a straight line, but I would forget conversations two sentences in. Some time or other, I put my necklace on, and DIDN'T remember it. Talk about living in the present, and feeling all of the blood in the body, from feet to internal organs, all over, all through. Time as physical experience. Movement, memory, emotion, temporality, all at once, and a group of people all somewhere in that neighborhood. Sometime, not now but later, I owe you all a post about ashtanga as a psychedelic experience, which, oddly, will probably reference the Moody Blues. Haha, how about THAT as a teaser, my friends?
HAVE a practice like this one. ASK IT TO HAPPEN.
Plus, there's a led most-of-Primary on Saturdays, and who am I, missing a kula as I do, to skip it? Plus, on the business end, it gives me a chance to publicly show off my practice (be honest, that's what it does) and advertise to these folks for my Mysore-style class on Sunday.
I didn't know it was going to be a holy class: well, first I got up at 6, and went over to the studio to sub an 8 am vinyasa class for Chris, the guy whose Tuesday night class I adore to the high hills. That rocked: about 15 or 16 people, nicely full room, they and I got along, we did standing flows, a few seated, a few hip openers, some not-extreme arm balances, and then twists with "Jump into a handstand!" thrown in--thanks Larry! People seemed to like it. Hurrah!
And then I reappeared an hour later to do the 11 am Primary class with one of my main teachers in the city. I didn't KNOW it was going to be a holy Primary, and that's part of what was holy about it. In part, it was like being on autopilot, very much a "the yoga does YOU" experience. A little will here and there on my part, and it was like the gods answered.
There are many ways to evaluate a practice: I got pose X, I didn't. My breath was consistent, it wasn't. I was in my head, I was out of my head. But one way that I was NOT aware of, prior to this, about evaluating a practice, is the DURATION and INTENSITY of the post-practice high.
I had solid sun salutations; as is common for about the past four months, I am beginning to pick my feet up with my core, for the jump back to chaturanga; no knee bending is necessary. In standing forward bend, my hands are wide and flat. Press them down, feet come up; skate back. Chaturanga! I am also getting toward a really nice knee bend in Virabhadrasana in sun B: I feel the stretch almost instantly in the front thigh of the back leg. These are good developments.
Big toes in Trikonasana, both sides, and no overt effort extended; this cued me in to the fact that I was going to have a good practice. Easy transitions up, square, down, Parivrtta Trik. Like on autopilot. Fingers together; windmill, turn, second side, down, five, up, samasthiti, big toes touch. Auto-frickin-matic.
Standing poses were big throughout; I didn't QUITE touch the floor in Prasarita B, but my hair did (that's close enough). Chin to shin in Parsvottanasana (not uncommon, any more). It wasn't the DEPTH or the SIZE, it was the automatic nature of it, the way it all just FLOWED, not to be ashtanga-cheezy or anything. There were no obstacles; no anxiety, no mind chatter. Up, down, inhale, exhale, samasthiti.
Top arm over the ear in both Parivrtta Parsvakonasanas. I fell out of both sides of Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana, at the same place: swing back to center. I swung, I toppled, I got up and extended straight for five. Eye gaze to kneecap for both sides of Ardha Baddha Padma Padottanasana; nose to knee with left foot up.
The breath DID NOT BREAK, not even when I sat and chilled after Marichyasana D and again after Supta K. This also was part of it.
Jumpbacks, jumpthroughs: absolute CRISCO!! Who greased me up today? Some of the best, easiest, slickest, least energy-using jumps EVER. No sooner did I think "press up, inhale" then I was back. Quicker than the mind's eye! Riding the bandhas stallions around the wild veldt, man--crazy talk!!
I started doing take-it-ups between Marichyasanas, to save time (because the class is modified Primary) and only did 3 rounds of Navasana (the only thing I cut) and then had a fantastic, totally straight-up Bhuja and both Kurmasanas. I have discovered that in Supta Kurmasana I've started crossing the left foot over the right, and it should be the OTHER WAY AROUND. Maybe that's why I'm feeling that pose in the solar plexus, still. But Titti and Bakasana exits, both (again, that's not unusual).
A totally psychologically, emotionally, respirationally BEAUTIFUL Garbha Pindasana. I mean, an experience I wish I could bottle. Sure, my hands weren't to my face or on my head in the rolls, but the whole pose was PRESENCE. It was absolutely holy. There just isn't any other way to put it. I was speechless, thinking about it later. And of course it can't be explained, when the teacher didn't lead it (she lets me Mysore it up in that class) and no one else can do it.
Huge Baddha K; straight back fold had toes to chin. Round back fold had feet to lips. That's as big as that pose has ever been for me, except maybe ONCE in SF.
Thinking of Supta Padangusthasana as a strength move, "pulling the torso up," instead of a flexibility move, changes it completely, and for the better (that's Gregor Maehle's advice, folks).
Face to thighs in Urdhva Mukha Paschimo, but that, again, is not unusual. When I finished Setu Bandhasana, I wanted to take a BIG OLE BITE out of Intermediate, and that IS unusual. Often it's like, "Oh-kay.....BREATHE....Pasasana..." but today I was a freakin CROCODILE for that sequence; alas, it was not to be.
Three of the most suprisingly big, springy backbends EVER, and I mean, EVER. Sure, over the summer I had giant hot-weather post-teacher-training backbends, even one where I walked my hands past the shoulder line, but these were nearly effortless. It was like an act of will rather than of musculature. "Up," and KA-BOING, up I went. I smiled, I chilled out, I didn't walk my hands in (but could have) just because I didn't want to RUIN THE COMFORT. Comfort??????? Did he just SAY THAT??
One dropback hang, saw the back of the mat, comfortable, and then a handstand, vinyasa, forward fold with a wrist taken (that's also kind of uncommon), closing. Great, great practice. Marvelous stuff.
The most remarkable part of the whole thing was the mindbending post-practice STONING that happens; you know this, right? I mean, I could speak English and walk in a straight line, but I would forget conversations two sentences in. Some time or other, I put my necklace on, and DIDN'T remember it. Talk about living in the present, and feeling all of the blood in the body, from feet to internal organs, all over, all through. Time as physical experience. Movement, memory, emotion, temporality, all at once, and a group of people all somewhere in that neighborhood. Sometime, not now but later, I owe you all a post about ashtanga as a psychedelic experience, which, oddly, will probably reference the Moody Blues. Haha, how about THAT as a teaser, my friends?
HAVE a practice like this one. ASK IT TO HAPPEN.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Often, the inside of my head sounds something like this.
A mention of mix-tapes elsewhere in the blogosphere set this off.
Stuff I hear in my head is wide-ranging and varied, but might well include some of the following:
Jane's Addiction goes instrumental.
Have no fear.
Indeed; git it now.
Sometimes aggression cures depression.
See?
Now do some shoegazing.
Did you think you were leaving my head without some trippy dippy?
Talk about music from space. Seriously, man.
I found these guys on YouTube and their version of this tune kicks BUTT.
Find Clapton's version of this if you can; worth a listen.
Did I mention I'm exactly old enough to have been conceived at this event?
A tribute to collegiate attempts at transformation.
Slowin' it down a bit.
Did you REALLY think you'd get out of my head without hearing THESE GUYS?
Not part of the Austin Powers soundtrack, but maybe this video should have been.
Boy buys guitar. Boy wants to learn how to look rockstar while ripping off instrumental solo.
It's total trash, and I ain't no cow.
Time for some more shoegazing.
A little ferocity always sells me.
This song and these images? No frickin' beatin' it.
We all wanna be free.
And you thought the 1980s were all about Michael Jackson.
Once again, no MJ.
And one more time.
Sometimes this is my theme music on the street.
And by the same composer.
One of my favorite things from very recently.
A billion apologies, in advance, for making you spend all day on YouTube :D
Stuff I hear in my head is wide-ranging and varied, but might well include some of the following:
Jane's Addiction goes instrumental.
Have no fear.
Indeed; git it now.
Sometimes aggression cures depression.
See?
Now do some shoegazing.
Did you think you were leaving my head without some trippy dippy?
Talk about music from space. Seriously, man.
I found these guys on YouTube and their version of this tune kicks BUTT.
Find Clapton's version of this if you can; worth a listen.
Did I mention I'm exactly old enough to have been conceived at this event?
A tribute to collegiate attempts at transformation.
Slowin' it down a bit.
Did you REALLY think you'd get out of my head without hearing THESE GUYS?
Not part of the Austin Powers soundtrack, but maybe this video should have been.
Boy buys guitar. Boy wants to learn how to look rockstar while ripping off instrumental solo.
It's total trash, and I ain't no cow.
Time for some more shoegazing.
A little ferocity always sells me.
This song and these images? No frickin' beatin' it.
We all wanna be free.
And you thought the 1980s were all about Michael Jackson.
Once again, no MJ.
And one more time.
Sometimes this is my theme music on the street.
And by the same composer.
One of my favorite things from very recently.
A billion apologies, in advance, for making you spend all day on YouTube :D
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Non-attachment, II.
Quite a long time ago I wrote a post called "Non-attachment."
Briefly paraphrasing Satchidananda's translation of the Yoga Sutras, I'm working this this, for non-attachment:
It is acting and then detaching oneself from the fruit of those actions.
The stress over job searching, the "future career," and especially the location of said career, has been making me physically ill. It will persist in doing this as long as the ambiguity persists. The financial "sword" which threatens to fall remains in place, and increases the anxiety substantially. None of this is under my control in any way beyond the sending of applications and other material, and the attending of interviews. That's it.
I can, of course, put my life in greater control by abandoning the academy wholesale and becoming someone's secretary, but let's try this first.
Non-attachment: send the applications, answer email, go to interviews. Detach from the fruits.
I will hereby live anywhere, teach anything, you name it. Leave it to God.
I will not spend my lack of control by exercising stress and illness upon myself. That is insanity.
Briefly paraphrasing Satchidananda's translation of the Yoga Sutras, I'm working this this, for non-attachment:
It is acting and then detaching oneself from the fruit of those actions.
The stress over job searching, the "future career," and especially the location of said career, has been making me physically ill. It will persist in doing this as long as the ambiguity persists. The financial "sword" which threatens to fall remains in place, and increases the anxiety substantially. None of this is under my control in any way beyond the sending of applications and other material, and the attending of interviews. That's it.
I can, of course, put my life in greater control by abandoning the academy wholesale and becoming someone's secretary, but let's try this first.
Non-attachment: send the applications, answer email, go to interviews. Detach from the fruits.
I will hereby live anywhere, teach anything, you name it. Leave it to God.
I will not spend my lack of control by exercising stress and illness upon myself. That is insanity.
Monday, January 14, 2008
That's quite enough nonsense, then.
Ok, the month is hard; practicing in January is difficult.
A hundred thoughts about discipline, practice, facing challenges, and so forth.
Is there more wisdom in sitting in this chair, working on my school stuff, in some hip-releasing cow-face-looking position, or hopping out of bed into a Primary that (might) be good for the cosmos but doesn't feel good in any part of my body? Hmm.
Voice 1: But what about the tradition?
Voice 2: Does the tradition account for teaching a 2-2 on stuff you really don't know terribly well?
Householding and practice, right?
Voice 1: "Well, you just quiet the mind, and then you practice."
Voice 2: And my hip flexors' tightness IS my mind, or not?
I know, with utter certainty, that as soon as I hear "come to our campus and meet people," my full practice will return the very same day.
How do I quiet the fear until then? I've been putting more energy into teaching and more time into pranayama and retention and uddiyana kriya.
On the "career" angle: the rhetoric that I recall as a kid was that you find something you love and then you make money doing that thing. I do NOT recall any rhetoric about "you'll write a proto-book, the process of which will make you want to die several times" and I ALSO do not recall any rhetoric about "you'll have to wait here to see if your career life develops or not. Please stand by."
But it wasn't working, to "duck under" the hard realities of mature life in a capitalist culture. That's why I did this, and now I'm going to resent the hard realities?
This work on patience takes too much energy for me to ALSO be anxious about whether or not I "do the full pose" or "get the full expression" or "keep the breath count." But in reality, outside of this kind of patience work, my asana practice does NOT make me anxious (aside from my tiny emotional war with dropbacks).
Again a choice: accept that this patience work transforms your practice (the same way illness and old age will), or don't accept that, and as a result, create more anxiety on top of that which you're attempting to manage.
Voice 1: The tradition says 6/week, up to your final given pose.
Voice 2: Not even sun salutations feel good. The poses I want to do for physical symptoms aren't sometimes in my "given" practice. I'm not claiming these various practices, omissions and re-emphases as an Ashtanga practice. Why aren't they fine?
Voice 1: They're not fine because you want to make your life into one that permits the full tradition, but what you're ABLE currently to make it into, doesn't allow that.
Voice 2: The householder question. How do you practice and hold house? How do you work dropbacks solo? How do you get the "next pose" with no teacher?
Voice 1: The same way you wouldn't, now, CHOOSE a debt like the one you've got. The way you wouldn't choose to live where you do. The way you wouldn't choose to have your future (possible future) on bureaucratic hold, which you know causes you great anxiety and makes your days very difficult to make pleasant.
Voice 2: That could be chalked up to past ignorance.
Voice 1: So what? So you can shout down past ignorance? Is it listening? And if it is, what do you expect it to do? Retroactively abort itself? Choose-your-own-adventure book, hey, let's flip back a few pages? Let's undo some choices?
Voice 2: Time to remember the point of a disciplined, regular practice. Go back to your Sutras, not just to your Yoga Mala.
Voice 1: What about teaching Ashtanga yoga here? Practice before teaching, all of that? What about anxiety over that?
Voice 2: Who's going to do it if I don't? Yesterday I dropped 3 people back; am I not to do that, just because no one does it for me? I don't CHOOSE to modify my practice, to leave "hard poses" out, it's not like I've modified the series to suit my whims. I modify my practice so that WALKING AROUND DOESN'T HURT today.
Voice 1: A sufficiently hard inquisitor would say that you're not rising to the challenge of maintaining your asana practice.
Voice 2: A sufficiently hard inquisitor can feel free to sit in the patience chair, wait for the bureaucrats, and feel the weight of the impending debt and the corollary desire to "Have a Career" even though he really doesn't want to partake in a system he finds suspicious. Only THEN do I want to hear such an inquisitor tell me that I'm not rising to the occasion.
Voice 1: How can peace be found?
Voice 2: Trust the modifications of, and departures from, the system. No guilt, ever. Guilt is counter-revolutionary. These are not modifications for my emotional comfort, because I "don't feel like it," they are modifications and departures made to maintain sanity and a measure of comfort under intense emotional duress.
Voice 1: How do you know you're not just avoiding the task?
Voice 2: If I can't spot my own self-deception (after such long experience with it, back in the day) and I can't undeceive myself (as I've become so talented at doing, in the past five years), who can, and who will? Shall I "undeceive" myself into earning sore hip flexors, like earlier in this week, to practice no matter what, despite what the physical sheath is telling me? Let it be the job of the devil's advocate, to create further peace, not further discomfort.
A hundred thoughts about discipline, practice, facing challenges, and so forth.
Is there more wisdom in sitting in this chair, working on my school stuff, in some hip-releasing cow-face-looking position, or hopping out of bed into a Primary that (might) be good for the cosmos but doesn't feel good in any part of my body? Hmm.
Voice 1: But what about the tradition?
Voice 2: Does the tradition account for teaching a 2-2 on stuff you really don't know terribly well?
Householding and practice, right?
Voice 1: "Well, you just quiet the mind, and then you practice."
Voice 2: And my hip flexors' tightness IS my mind, or not?
I know, with utter certainty, that as soon as I hear "come to our campus and meet people," my full practice will return the very same day.
How do I quiet the fear until then? I've been putting more energy into teaching and more time into pranayama and retention and uddiyana kriya.
On the "career" angle: the rhetoric that I recall as a kid was that you find something you love and then you make money doing that thing. I do NOT recall any rhetoric about "you'll write a proto-book, the process of which will make you want to die several times" and I ALSO do not recall any rhetoric about "you'll have to wait here to see if your career life develops or not. Please stand by."
But it wasn't working, to "duck under" the hard realities of mature life in a capitalist culture. That's why I did this, and now I'm going to resent the hard realities?
This work on patience takes too much energy for me to ALSO be anxious about whether or not I "do the full pose" or "get the full expression" or "keep the breath count." But in reality, outside of this kind of patience work, my asana practice does NOT make me anxious (aside from my tiny emotional war with dropbacks).
Again a choice: accept that this patience work transforms your practice (the same way illness and old age will), or don't accept that, and as a result, create more anxiety on top of that which you're attempting to manage.
Voice 1: The tradition says 6/week, up to your final given pose.
Voice 2: Not even sun salutations feel good. The poses I want to do for physical symptoms aren't sometimes in my "given" practice. I'm not claiming these various practices, omissions and re-emphases as an Ashtanga practice. Why aren't they fine?
Voice 1: They're not fine because you want to make your life into one that permits the full tradition, but what you're ABLE currently to make it into, doesn't allow that.
Voice 2: The householder question. How do you practice and hold house? How do you work dropbacks solo? How do you get the "next pose" with no teacher?
Voice 1: The same way you wouldn't, now, CHOOSE a debt like the one you've got. The way you wouldn't choose to live where you do. The way you wouldn't choose to have your future (possible future) on bureaucratic hold, which you know causes you great anxiety and makes your days very difficult to make pleasant.
Voice 2: That could be chalked up to past ignorance.
Voice 1: So what? So you can shout down past ignorance? Is it listening? And if it is, what do you expect it to do? Retroactively abort itself? Choose-your-own-adventure book, hey, let's flip back a few pages? Let's undo some choices?
Voice 2: Time to remember the point of a disciplined, regular practice. Go back to your Sutras, not just to your Yoga Mala.
Voice 1: What about teaching Ashtanga yoga here? Practice before teaching, all of that? What about anxiety over that?
Voice 2: Who's going to do it if I don't? Yesterday I dropped 3 people back; am I not to do that, just because no one does it for me? I don't CHOOSE to modify my practice, to leave "hard poses" out, it's not like I've modified the series to suit my whims. I modify my practice so that WALKING AROUND DOESN'T HURT today.
Voice 1: A sufficiently hard inquisitor would say that you're not rising to the challenge of maintaining your asana practice.
Voice 2: A sufficiently hard inquisitor can feel free to sit in the patience chair, wait for the bureaucrats, and feel the weight of the impending debt and the corollary desire to "Have a Career" even though he really doesn't want to partake in a system he finds suspicious. Only THEN do I want to hear such an inquisitor tell me that I'm not rising to the occasion.
Voice 1: How can peace be found?
Voice 2: Trust the modifications of, and departures from, the system. No guilt, ever. Guilt is counter-revolutionary. These are not modifications for my emotional comfort, because I "don't feel like it," they are modifications and departures made to maintain sanity and a measure of comfort under intense emotional duress.
Voice 1: How do you know you're not just avoiding the task?
Voice 2: If I can't spot my own self-deception (after such long experience with it, back in the day) and I can't undeceive myself (as I've become so talented at doing, in the past five years), who can, and who will? Shall I "undeceive" myself into earning sore hip flexors, like earlier in this week, to practice no matter what, despite what the physical sheath is telling me? Let it be the job of the devil's advocate, to create further peace, not further discomfort.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
A short, biased history of January.
Now, before I start saying thing that aren't accurate (to myself, about practice, about life, about preferences), I want to look at January:
January 2003: a month after the divorce, and the beginning of a big climbing gym habit. New friends, new life, massive emotional messiness. I don't eat much for this whole month.
January 2004: slow, sporadic, angsty dissertation writing. Massive emotional intensity, much desk sitting. Sporadic practice of Ashtanga yoga, studio classes. Intense climbing gym habit, tendinitis.
January 2005: dissertation writing; Bush's second term begins. Much unhappiness, much anger causing energy leaks. Brilliant, very positive relationship situation, but intense life stress over cash and writing and academics.
January 2006: A badly remembered month; dissertation writing. Ashtanga practice continuing, relationship continuing, happy bits sprinkled over intense writing and perennial anxiety about money.
January 2007: clearly seeing the end of dissertation writing; defense scheduled for February. Intense anxiety, realizing that, post-defense, "maturity" with all of its unmitigated, irresistible terror, awaits. Home practice for a few months prior to this and after it. Yoga, good. Relationship, good. Dissertation, angsty. Cash, ever-anxious.
January 2008: halfway through fellowship year. Cash perenially anxious; incredibly massive loan payments being made successfully, but making it impossible to live by myself in any independently sustained way (87 percent of my income goes to the Department of Ed). Studio yoga classes quite happy and powerful; home practice a tense, cold, fearful affair. Intense anxiety about job search, which means, basically, future relationship to money. All in all, however: yoga, good. Relationship, good. Future prospects, decent. Money, terrifying.
There are common threads to be found here: for one, I haven't passed a non-anxious January in five years. Most of that anxiety comes down to money, and that's not in the sense of "can I buy thing X," but much more of the school, "Holy crap how am I going to finance this life-crushing, sun-blotting, tsunami-crashing, certain-death amount of bullshit debt that my past ignorance allowed me to accumulate?"
So I should be wary of ever believing that "winter is bad for my home practice" or "I'm less flexible when it's cold" or "I'm seasonally affective" or anything like that. January is not, of itself, an "evil month" or anything of the sort. It is simply that the amount of evil bullshit in my life happens to increase around the time of January. And it's not even the bullshit proper, it is ANXIETY ABOUT said bullshit.
Here are the six most expensive things I've ever done/owned/bought/been part of:
1) Education. I have a BA, MA, PhD. Those have cost me, in loan debt ALONE, to say nothing of textbooks, housing, travel, and all other related expenses, THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS.
2) Knee ligament replacement surgery. April, 2004. All told in surgery, MRI, arthroscopes, and physical therapy, SEVENTEEN THOUSAND. My relationship with insurance from the big university where I work, was very happy. It paid for virtually all of that.
3) Automobile. January, 2003. It permitted me to be mobile, which really helped with emotional mobility; in addition, Indy is a driving town; you can't walk here and public transportation is so-so. Including repairs and my bungling of a car loan, probably FOURTEEN THOUSAND all told.
4) Yoga Teacher Training: close to TWO THOUSAND for the TT itself; two more for food and other expenses, and close to one more, for housing for the month. One month of non-stop all-the-time yoga and bohemian living in the Upper Haight? FIVE THOUSAND.
5) This laptop; purchased sometime in 2005? Maybe ELEVEN HUNDRED.
6) Nearly a tie for sixth: the recent suit (for conference interviews), complete with accoutrements such as ties and the pair of shirts, FOUR SIXTY. The old Guild hollowbody guitar from 1975, paid for in 1991 in West Hartford, CT: FOUR EIGHTY.
January 2003: a month after the divorce, and the beginning of a big climbing gym habit. New friends, new life, massive emotional messiness. I don't eat much for this whole month.
January 2004: slow, sporadic, angsty dissertation writing. Massive emotional intensity, much desk sitting. Sporadic practice of Ashtanga yoga, studio classes. Intense climbing gym habit, tendinitis.
January 2005: dissertation writing; Bush's second term begins. Much unhappiness, much anger causing energy leaks. Brilliant, very positive relationship situation, but intense life stress over cash and writing and academics.
January 2006: A badly remembered month; dissertation writing. Ashtanga practice continuing, relationship continuing, happy bits sprinkled over intense writing and perennial anxiety about money.
January 2007: clearly seeing the end of dissertation writing; defense scheduled for February. Intense anxiety, realizing that, post-defense, "maturity" with all of its unmitigated, irresistible terror, awaits. Home practice for a few months prior to this and after it. Yoga, good. Relationship, good. Dissertation, angsty. Cash, ever-anxious.
January 2008: halfway through fellowship year. Cash perenially anxious; incredibly massive loan payments being made successfully, but making it impossible to live by myself in any independently sustained way (87 percent of my income goes to the Department of Ed). Studio yoga classes quite happy and powerful; home practice a tense, cold, fearful affair. Intense anxiety about job search, which means, basically, future relationship to money. All in all, however: yoga, good. Relationship, good. Future prospects, decent. Money, terrifying.
There are common threads to be found here: for one, I haven't passed a non-anxious January in five years. Most of that anxiety comes down to money, and that's not in the sense of "can I buy thing X," but much more of the school, "Holy crap how am I going to finance this life-crushing, sun-blotting, tsunami-crashing, certain-death amount of bullshit debt that my past ignorance allowed me to accumulate?"
So I should be wary of ever believing that "winter is bad for my home practice" or "I'm less flexible when it's cold" or "I'm seasonally affective" or anything like that. January is not, of itself, an "evil month" or anything of the sort. It is simply that the amount of evil bullshit in my life happens to increase around the time of January. And it's not even the bullshit proper, it is ANXIETY ABOUT said bullshit.
Here are the six most expensive things I've ever done/owned/bought/been part of:
1) Education. I have a BA, MA, PhD. Those have cost me, in loan debt ALONE, to say nothing of textbooks, housing, travel, and all other related expenses, THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS.
2) Knee ligament replacement surgery. April, 2004. All told in surgery, MRI, arthroscopes, and physical therapy, SEVENTEEN THOUSAND. My relationship with insurance from the big university where I work, was very happy. It paid for virtually all of that.
3) Automobile. January, 2003. It permitted me to be mobile, which really helped with emotional mobility; in addition, Indy is a driving town; you can't walk here and public transportation is so-so. Including repairs and my bungling of a car loan, probably FOURTEEN THOUSAND all told.
4) Yoga Teacher Training: close to TWO THOUSAND for the TT itself; two more for food and other expenses, and close to one more, for housing for the month. One month of non-stop all-the-time yoga and bohemian living in the Upper Haight? FIVE THOUSAND.
5) This laptop; purchased sometime in 2005? Maybe ELEVEN HUNDRED.
6) Nearly a tie for sixth: the recent suit (for conference interviews), complete with accoutrements such as ties and the pair of shirts, FOUR SIXTY. The old Guild hollowbody guitar from 1975, paid for in 1991 in West Hartford, CT: FOUR EIGHTY.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Financial yoga, patience yoga, job yoga.
It's not, I think, nearly as sexy to write about yoga finances as it is to write one of those, "Dude, I got into Advanced Pose Q today!" posts, but this is what I've got.
Yoga finances: a financial balancing act really is a kind of yoga, in the widest scope. I'm living on fellowship money this year, and it has arrived recently, which means I will make another pack of successful loan payments until the days get longer. The summer, however, is another matter; that's the next cash mystery. This is all linked to patience yoga, which, as you know, is all about job yoga.
3 interviews in Chicago: the next foreseeable step in the academic job process is campus visits, for which I must be invited. That may happen by the end of January, or it may not. It can happen later. After all, I'm going to write two more applications today. Universities are likely talking to their top candidates now, and as those people accept gigs, phone interviews to me may arrive as late as March or April or later. So it is a patience game, not just for the end of January and up to February, but also all the way into April. Which committees are meeting, when, what are they saying? Who is available, taken, interested? This is a parlor game, a pointless one. Wait. Don't think.
Job yoga: a campus visit will be stressful but welcome. And if they don't happen by say mid-February, I'll assume that any campus visit I am offered is a GIFT, and so the valence will change completely. Right now it's a worrisome sort of "do I make the cut, am I going to be varsity (HAH!)" thing, but later it will be a present under the tree.
All this and an attempt to maintain a regular practice of some sort. January.
Yoga finances: a financial balancing act really is a kind of yoga, in the widest scope. I'm living on fellowship money this year, and it has arrived recently, which means I will make another pack of successful loan payments until the days get longer. The summer, however, is another matter; that's the next cash mystery. This is all linked to patience yoga, which, as you know, is all about job yoga.
3 interviews in Chicago: the next foreseeable step in the academic job process is campus visits, for which I must be invited. That may happen by the end of January, or it may not. It can happen later. After all, I'm going to write two more applications today. Universities are likely talking to their top candidates now, and as those people accept gigs, phone interviews to me may arrive as late as March or April or later. So it is a patience game, not just for the end of January and up to February, but also all the way into April. Which committees are meeting, when, what are they saying? Who is available, taken, interested? This is a parlor game, a pointless one. Wait. Don't think.
Job yoga: a campus visit will be stressful but welcome. And if they don't happen by say mid-February, I'll assume that any campus visit I am offered is a GIFT, and so the valence will change completely. Right now it's a worrisome sort of "do I make the cut, am I going to be varsity (HAH!)" thing, but later it will be a present under the tree.
All this and an attempt to maintain a regular practice of some sort. January.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
On seeing what's directly in front of you.
I'm still amused by how comically funny the obviousness of this was:
On and off for the last few days I've had some intense sensation in the front and outside of the right hip, and that's not uncommon, the right hip has always been the toucher, tighter, more irritable hip; it took me over 2 years of determined yoga practice to crack it open enough to do a comfortable lotus, and only this fall/winter, with over 3 years of practicing, am I flexible enough to touch my chin to my knee in Standing Half Lotus forward bend with the right foot up.
So for EVER, I have understood this to be my problem hip, and I've researched anatomy, done all kinds of reading, bothered online correspondees with questions by the dozen. A real quest. Last night I was experimenting, on the rug in the house, with pigeon lunges, raising and lowering the foot, playing with the hip flexion, and palpating the muscles and ligaments to see what I could learn about the tricky hip. Gradually my fingers crossed the nearly-invisible, barely-present line of my 1993 appendectomy scar, and the cosmic lights went on.
The realization was something like this:
Hey Patrick, do you think your hip might be tight from that INVASIVE SURGERY you had FOURTEEN YEARS AGO?
I'm still amused by the amount of attention I've poured into that hip, and how completely I overlooked this totally obvious factoid.
Take this as a lesson and may it be of use. Cheers!
On and off for the last few days I've had some intense sensation in the front and outside of the right hip, and that's not uncommon, the right hip has always been the toucher, tighter, more irritable hip; it took me over 2 years of determined yoga practice to crack it open enough to do a comfortable lotus, and only this fall/winter, with over 3 years of practicing, am I flexible enough to touch my chin to my knee in Standing Half Lotus forward bend with the right foot up.
So for EVER, I have understood this to be my problem hip, and I've researched anatomy, done all kinds of reading, bothered online correspondees with questions by the dozen. A real quest. Last night I was experimenting, on the rug in the house, with pigeon lunges, raising and lowering the foot, playing with the hip flexion, and palpating the muscles and ligaments to see what I could learn about the tricky hip. Gradually my fingers crossed the nearly-invisible, barely-present line of my 1993 appendectomy scar, and the cosmic lights went on.
The realization was something like this:
Hey Patrick, do you think your hip might be tight from that INVASIVE SURGERY you had FOURTEEN YEARS AGO?
I'm still amused by the amount of attention I've poured into that hip, and how completely I overlooked this totally obvious factoid.
Take this as a lesson and may it be of use. Cheers!
Monday, January 7, 2008
"Intro to Second" class....timely, eh?
I have a billion thoughts on Intermediate, having just done a pack of poses from it.
But those belong more to the highly intellectual me that I'll be again tomorrow, now that my Art History gig is back in session. It's all video and contemporary art surveys.
Standing to Vira B, vinyasa, Pasasana up to Pincha Mayurasana. Lots of extra breaths, but I hit everything with the exceptions of Kapo and Dwi Pada. Even the proper Pincha exit was willing to come; Eka Pada A, B and C, both sides. Completely soaked in sweat, very warm, very happy.
Svasana was all about gratitude: thank you yoga community (by which I mean my online folks out there), readers, advisors, commentors, thank you so very much.
But those belong more to the highly intellectual me that I'll be again tomorrow, now that my Art History gig is back in session. It's all video and contemporary art surveys.
Standing to Vira B, vinyasa, Pasasana up to Pincha Mayurasana. Lots of extra breaths, but I hit everything with the exceptions of Kapo and Dwi Pada. Even the proper Pincha exit was willing to come; Eka Pada A, B and C, both sides. Completely soaked in sweat, very warm, very happy.
Svasana was all about gratitude: thank you yoga community (by which I mean my online folks out there), readers, advisors, commentors, thank you so very much.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
13th round! Wrestling with the tradition!
I have written a version of this post I don't know HOW many times. Wrestling with the tradition. Here's today's installment:
Primary this morning, to Janu Sirsasana B, and then the lower back warning me that it'll go kaput unless it gets a backbend. Updog doesn't help at all; it wants baby backbends. What to do? Traditionally practice, finish Primary, then begin the baby backbends of Intermediate?
Or go right then and there? Is that crim? Does that matter? How do I know it does, how do I know it doesn't? Whose call is this? Does enlightenment care if I move, how I move, which series I do, and when? Or DOES it?
It's like Godard's narration in _2 or 3 Things I Know About Her_.
Anyway: I went, right then and there, to Intermediate. Pasasana was unbindable; I don't know what is going on in my outer hips, but twists have been really a whole new school of challenging since I got back from Chicago. Krounchasana was fine; Shalabhasana began the happiness; it was big and I was content in it.
Bhekasana only intensified this; I began to feel the white-bright sensation of muscles pulling open, and eager fear decompressing, a plasma liquid pour from compacted tissue. Even moreso in Dhanurasana, and of course, as usual, the biggest, the most intense, practically unbearable release, in Parsva Dhanurasana (as I've posted elsewhere: WTF?????).
It is as if the top of the quads rip apart from their connection at the front hip, and in that splitting open, compacted fear and anxiety pour out; everything that clogs up the sushumna nadi in Primary. Nadi shodana INDEED!!
With some added bridge poses and even a hand-supported bridge, the pouring continued, and the white tearing, releasing sensation moved all the way around under the iliac crest, from the rectus femoris to the gluteus medius (which is really where I think all of it is kept; that's my "usual suspect") and then into the upper fibers of the gluteus maximus. A little ring of stressholders, the tightest, most compressed, most anxious part of my entire body and soul.
Wouldn't/shouldn't this all be equalized by the dropback/standup, which by the way is what allegedly should/would keep me away from Intermediate?
Hahaha, that was a trick question: of sorts. I didn't get dropback practice with my first three years of Primary--does this mean I should catch up, or does it mean I'm "behind" as far as that goes? Wouldn't Intermediate, as Lisa has elsewhere argued, HELP me to develop this pose, which apparently I need to do in order to even GET Intermediate? Is the tradition paradoxical, or is my exposure to it? Does it matter? Do I take Intermediate or not?
I do, I did, I have. But I still don't feel right about it. But, on the other side, what am I supposed to do, do Primary and hope I finish it before the nadis clog with this gluteal fear, or do some Intermediate to clean that up?
It has nothing to do--nothing at all--with wanting to be "x level advanced" or to "get x pose." I could care less about "get the pose." In part that's because I let myself be crim whenever I want, and this desire isn't crim (I know what my desires for criminality feel like).
But how will I identify myself? Intermediate practitioner? Primary practitioner with some crim wrinkles? But wait, THIS? THIS is what matters, having my "Ashtanga Identity" at stake? WTF, do I think it's some kind of state-provided LICENSE? Are the cops going to pull me over and ask for ID and bust me for having a fake?
"Do what feels good, what you need to do." You hear this all over the yoga world, and in other worlds besides, and it's almost always good advice (maybe not for addicts and ascetics).
I'm attracted to the tradition, I really am. But I only have one month, and not even that, of traditional dropback practice and my body feels the unevenness. The answers seem to be this: take your Intermediate and call me in the morning, OR ELSE move to an authorized teacher's city and get evened out.
I can't move unless I want to throw my whole life out the window and get a new one.
Alright, then, Patrick, here's how you solve this algebraic equation: TAKE YOUR INTERMEDIATE. KEEP PRACTICING DROPPING BACK.
Whose permission do you need, to do this? Doesn't matter. Know whose permission you've got? Yours, only, ever. You're solo home practice guy, remember?
Would you revoke a student's wish to open her/his front body? I thought not.
MAKE PEACE WITH THIS!! NOW, DAMMIT!!
Primary this morning, to Janu Sirsasana B, and then the lower back warning me that it'll go kaput unless it gets a backbend. Updog doesn't help at all; it wants baby backbends. What to do? Traditionally practice, finish Primary, then begin the baby backbends of Intermediate?
Or go right then and there? Is that crim? Does that matter? How do I know it does, how do I know it doesn't? Whose call is this? Does enlightenment care if I move, how I move, which series I do, and when? Or DOES it?
It's like Godard's narration in _2 or 3 Things I Know About Her_.
Anyway: I went, right then and there, to Intermediate. Pasasana was unbindable; I don't know what is going on in my outer hips, but twists have been really a whole new school of challenging since I got back from Chicago. Krounchasana was fine; Shalabhasana began the happiness; it was big and I was content in it.
Bhekasana only intensified this; I began to feel the white-bright sensation of muscles pulling open, and eager fear decompressing, a plasma liquid pour from compacted tissue. Even moreso in Dhanurasana, and of course, as usual, the biggest, the most intense, practically unbearable release, in Parsva Dhanurasana (as I've posted elsewhere: WTF?????).
It is as if the top of the quads rip apart from their connection at the front hip, and in that splitting open, compacted fear and anxiety pour out; everything that clogs up the sushumna nadi in Primary. Nadi shodana INDEED!!
With some added bridge poses and even a hand-supported bridge, the pouring continued, and the white tearing, releasing sensation moved all the way around under the iliac crest, from the rectus femoris to the gluteus medius (which is really where I think all of it is kept; that's my "usual suspect") and then into the upper fibers of the gluteus maximus. A little ring of stressholders, the tightest, most compressed, most anxious part of my entire body and soul.
Wouldn't/shouldn't this all be equalized by the dropback/standup, which by the way is what allegedly should/would keep me away from Intermediate?
Hahaha, that was a trick question: of sorts. I didn't get dropback practice with my first three years of Primary--does this mean I should catch up, or does it mean I'm "behind" as far as that goes? Wouldn't Intermediate, as Lisa has elsewhere argued, HELP me to develop this pose, which apparently I need to do in order to even GET Intermediate? Is the tradition paradoxical, or is my exposure to it? Does it matter? Do I take Intermediate or not?
I do, I did, I have. But I still don't feel right about it. But, on the other side, what am I supposed to do, do Primary and hope I finish it before the nadis clog with this gluteal fear, or do some Intermediate to clean that up?
It has nothing to do--nothing at all--with wanting to be "x level advanced" or to "get x pose." I could care less about "get the pose." In part that's because I let myself be crim whenever I want, and this desire isn't crim (I know what my desires for criminality feel like).
But how will I identify myself? Intermediate practitioner? Primary practitioner with some crim wrinkles? But wait, THIS? THIS is what matters, having my "Ashtanga Identity" at stake? WTF, do I think it's some kind of state-provided LICENSE? Are the cops going to pull me over and ask for ID and bust me for having a fake?
"Do what feels good, what you need to do." You hear this all over the yoga world, and in other worlds besides, and it's almost always good advice (maybe not for addicts and ascetics).
I'm attracted to the tradition, I really am. But I only have one month, and not even that, of traditional dropback practice and my body feels the unevenness. The answers seem to be this: take your Intermediate and call me in the morning, OR ELSE move to an authorized teacher's city and get evened out.
I can't move unless I want to throw my whole life out the window and get a new one.
Alright, then, Patrick, here's how you solve this algebraic equation: TAKE YOUR INTERMEDIATE. KEEP PRACTICING DROPPING BACK.
Whose permission do you need, to do this? Doesn't matter. Know whose permission you've got? Yours, only, ever. You're solo home practice guy, remember?
Would you revoke a student's wish to open her/his front body? I thought not.
MAKE PEACE WITH THIS!! NOW, DAMMIT!!
Saturday, January 5, 2008
2008: teaching Ashtanga yoga.
I started teaching in July 2007, after my TT in May.
To date, I've collected almost 1200 dollars from teaching what used to be 5 classes a week and which now is 3 and one class to which no one comes. Soon it'll be just the 3 classes. If this keeps up for another six months, I'll recoup teacher training costs and then some.
Indy is not a big Ashtanga town--not like, for example, Columbus Ohio with its TWO, at LEAST, morning Mysore programs. What do they put in the water over there????
But I like it, now: I teach two "modified Primaries" a week, one on Thursday nights and one on Saturday mornings, in a west suburb of the city, and there is a good gang of regulars there, who still giggle when I introduce seated vinyasa; EVERYONE does the take-it-up asana before chaturanga, that is totally required in a Patrick class (although I tell people that if it's too much they can skip it at will, hardly anyone does). In the first two classes of this month, I've seen 11 students (4 in one class, 7 in the other). High attendance, for this extrovert, RAWKS!
I also teach a once-a-week Mysore-style class, modelled on the ones I took in SF in May, on Sunday afternoons. It's brilliant; we do opening chant, I adjust and advise in the way that I received in SF, and it helps me to carry some SF with me all the time; the energy in there is ALWAYS good.
On Saturdays at 11, one of my long-term Ashtanga teachers in the city leads a "most of Primary" downtown, and it takes me about 30-40 minutes to jet down there from my 9:30 am class, so I'm always a little late, but I hit it as much as I can, so that I can practice in a group, which I love, and also recruit for my Mysore-style class the next day. Today I had lunch with a trio of regulars from the 11 class, and they've said they'll "see me tomorrow"! Score! I'm pretty psyched about that, and I know my two non-US Mysorians will be back later this month (one from the UK, one from Finland; you two RULE!).
Teaching led Ashtanga is fun, but teaching Mysore-style is so, SO much fun as well. More contact, more intimacy, more attention; it's a real multi-tasker of a teaching environment, and I really, really like it.
I keep telling some online folks from Columbus that I'm going to get over there and hit a Mysore class or two...anyone want to put me up in their house?
To date, I've collected almost 1200 dollars from teaching what used to be 5 classes a week and which now is 3 and one class to which no one comes. Soon it'll be just the 3 classes. If this keeps up for another six months, I'll recoup teacher training costs and then some.
Indy is not a big Ashtanga town--not like, for example, Columbus Ohio with its TWO, at LEAST, morning Mysore programs. What do they put in the water over there????
But I like it, now: I teach two "modified Primaries" a week, one on Thursday nights and one on Saturday mornings, in a west suburb of the city, and there is a good gang of regulars there, who still giggle when I introduce seated vinyasa; EVERYONE does the take-it-up asana before chaturanga, that is totally required in a Patrick class (although I tell people that if it's too much they can skip it at will, hardly anyone does). In the first two classes of this month, I've seen 11 students (4 in one class, 7 in the other). High attendance, for this extrovert, RAWKS!
I also teach a once-a-week Mysore-style class, modelled on the ones I took in SF in May, on Sunday afternoons. It's brilliant; we do opening chant, I adjust and advise in the way that I received in SF, and it helps me to carry some SF with me all the time; the energy in there is ALWAYS good.
On Saturdays at 11, one of my long-term Ashtanga teachers in the city leads a "most of Primary" downtown, and it takes me about 30-40 minutes to jet down there from my 9:30 am class, so I'm always a little late, but I hit it as much as I can, so that I can practice in a group, which I love, and also recruit for my Mysore-style class the next day. Today I had lunch with a trio of regulars from the 11 class, and they've said they'll "see me tomorrow"! Score! I'm pretty psyched about that, and I know my two non-US Mysorians will be back later this month (one from the UK, one from Finland; you two RULE!).
Teaching led Ashtanga is fun, but teaching Mysore-style is so, SO much fun as well. More contact, more intimacy, more attention; it's a real multi-tasker of a teaching environment, and I really, really like it.
I keep telling some online folks from Columbus that I'm going to get over there and hit a Mysore class or two...anyone want to put me up in their house?
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Actual differences between ashtanga and vinyasa.
Most of the time, if you see a post with a sense of "ashtanga vs. name-of-yoga," it means, the author prefers the one to the other because of XYZ reasons, and it's much more about the person writing the "comparison" than it is about the two practices.
On Tuesday morning I went to a vinyasa class (one I like quite a bit) and wound up thinking about the actual physical differences between how it was assembled and how an ashtanga practice (a classical one) is assembled.
I find, often, that I want more dynamic movements, when I'm in a vinyasa class: hey, can we jump through, or back, or vinyasa between sides? Holds of poses for longer than five breaths don't bother me anymore--they used to. Of course, vinyasa classes differ, depending on who's teaching, but for the one I go to, these are the major differences:
1. The holds are longer than in an Ashtanga class.
2. There's vinyasa (chaturanga, updog, downdog) after each standing flow, whereas in Ashtanga you don't really do a "standing vinyasa" until the entrance to Utkatasana (chair pose) and the Warrior sequences.
3. There are seated flows, sometimes with (seated) vinyasa, but often without. In Ashtanga, it's a fairly strict pose/vinyasa, secondside/vinyasa, next pose/vinyasa pattern.
4. Vinyasa flows are organized to go from pose-to-pose-to-pose, then vinyasa (or return to standing, if standing), whereas Ashtanga is organized very much on pose-vinyasa (or samasthiti, equal standing) and then next-pose-and-vinyasa, next-pose-and-vinyasa. This means that in vinyasa flow you can get long sequences of balance or right hip work, for example, before you switch sides. In Ashtanga it's the sequence of poses, all separated by vinyasa, that intensify certain work on certain muscles (for example, the ten seated forward bends of Primary, or the seven backbends of Intermediate).
5. Most of the differences that are more subjective come from these: folks who're used to longer holds might have to adjust to the perceived speed of an Ashtanga class. Folks who are accustomed to Ashtanga's set series may have to adjust to the perceived "randomness" of vinyasa flow. Energy management is different when you are doing five poses in a row balanced on your right foot, from doing eight forward bends all separated by vinyasa.
6. Depending on with whom and in what context you do Ashtanga, there can also be more "get the pose, make the shape 'correctly'" rhetoric in Ashtanga than there is in vinyasa. For example, I've never been asked to "GET" standing split, in a vinyasa class, no matter how many times it comes up as a pose. It is enough to simply hold whatever version of the pose I've got. In Ashtanga, particularly in a traditional Mysore room, a teacher can (and did) request that I step my feet far enough apart in standing wide angle (Prasarita Padottanasana) to get my head to the floor in all four variations (and that's because in Mysore, India, touching the floor in that way is one of the gates to Intermediate). But this is not to say that in an Ashtanga class, everyone has to DO IT THIS WAY. I think that if I had been perceived to be incapable of pulling that move, it wouldn't have been asked of me. This is where certain of Ashtanga's teachers sometimes do it a disservice. There are stories about disrespect for students' limits, in Ashtanga, and this is probably where its reputation as "militant" comes from. I've never had a teacher ask me to do something that I can't, and I've had some big, BIG adjustments, but never beyond my limits (well, that is, never to the point of injury; I've had my "idea of myself" totally remade by Ashtanga practice).
7. Ashtanga also dislikes props (for example, David Swenson asked us not to have students use props, if we were teaching Ashtanga). Props are optional in the vinyasa class I go to: if you want a prop, bring it; if not, cool. The Ashtanga rhetoric on props, as I've heard it, is that they interfere with the energy of the practitioner, they're a distraction. It follows from this, that one isn't so much doing "the shape" of a given asana as much as doing the "energy" of it, and that's a very cool, chewy idea for me. The idea of doing a pose STRICTLY on breath count also feeds into this: for example, when was the last time I did Supta Kurmasana (forward bend, forehead to floor, feet crossed behind head, hands linked behind back) ON breath count? In vinyasa, the rhetoric of doing Supta K (which I actually HAVE been invited to do in a vinyasa class--how common is that??) is that it's an advanced variation you might do or might leave out; whatever, dude. The energy that is developed in a vinyasa class is a sort of inner endurance, a confrontation perhaps with one's own idea of self, and that goes for any yoga probably, but on Tuesday night's I hear that idea again and again: what ARE you capable of, versus what you THINK you're capable of? Have a look, see what you see...chill if you need to chill...
More could be said about this, but I'm pleased that I don't feel that I've been subjective here, stomping on one kind of yoga in favor of another. Perhaps that's what this was about, not the "comparative yoga essay" this pretends it is?
On Tuesday morning I went to a vinyasa class (one I like quite a bit) and wound up thinking about the actual physical differences between how it was assembled and how an ashtanga practice (a classical one) is assembled.
I find, often, that I want more dynamic movements, when I'm in a vinyasa class: hey, can we jump through, or back, or vinyasa between sides? Holds of poses for longer than five breaths don't bother me anymore--they used to. Of course, vinyasa classes differ, depending on who's teaching, but for the one I go to, these are the major differences:
1. The holds are longer than in an Ashtanga class.
2. There's vinyasa (chaturanga, updog, downdog) after each standing flow, whereas in Ashtanga you don't really do a "standing vinyasa" until the entrance to Utkatasana (chair pose) and the Warrior sequences.
3. There are seated flows, sometimes with (seated) vinyasa, but often without. In Ashtanga, it's a fairly strict pose/vinyasa, secondside/vinyasa, next pose/vinyasa pattern.
4. Vinyasa flows are organized to go from pose-to-pose-to-pose, then vinyasa (or return to standing, if standing), whereas Ashtanga is organized very much on pose-vinyasa (or samasthiti, equal standing) and then next-pose-and-vinyasa, next-pose-and-vinyasa. This means that in vinyasa flow you can get long sequences of balance or right hip work, for example, before you switch sides. In Ashtanga it's the sequence of poses, all separated by vinyasa, that intensify certain work on certain muscles (for example, the ten seated forward bends of Primary, or the seven backbends of Intermediate).
5. Most of the differences that are more subjective come from these: folks who're used to longer holds might have to adjust to the perceived speed of an Ashtanga class. Folks who are accustomed to Ashtanga's set series may have to adjust to the perceived "randomness" of vinyasa flow. Energy management is different when you are doing five poses in a row balanced on your right foot, from doing eight forward bends all separated by vinyasa.
6. Depending on with whom and in what context you do Ashtanga, there can also be more "get the pose, make the shape 'correctly'" rhetoric in Ashtanga than there is in vinyasa. For example, I've never been asked to "GET" standing split, in a vinyasa class, no matter how many times it comes up as a pose. It is enough to simply hold whatever version of the pose I've got. In Ashtanga, particularly in a traditional Mysore room, a teacher can (and did) request that I step my feet far enough apart in standing wide angle (Prasarita Padottanasana) to get my head to the floor in all four variations (and that's because in Mysore, India, touching the floor in that way is one of the gates to Intermediate). But this is not to say that in an Ashtanga class, everyone has to DO IT THIS WAY. I think that if I had been perceived to be incapable of pulling that move, it wouldn't have been asked of me. This is where certain of Ashtanga's teachers sometimes do it a disservice. There are stories about disrespect for students' limits, in Ashtanga, and this is probably where its reputation as "militant" comes from. I've never had a teacher ask me to do something that I can't, and I've had some big, BIG adjustments, but never beyond my limits (well, that is, never to the point of injury; I've had my "idea of myself" totally remade by Ashtanga practice).
7. Ashtanga also dislikes props (for example, David Swenson asked us not to have students use props, if we were teaching Ashtanga). Props are optional in the vinyasa class I go to: if you want a prop, bring it; if not, cool. The Ashtanga rhetoric on props, as I've heard it, is that they interfere with the energy of the practitioner, they're a distraction. It follows from this, that one isn't so much doing "the shape" of a given asana as much as doing the "energy" of it, and that's a very cool, chewy idea for me. The idea of doing a pose STRICTLY on breath count also feeds into this: for example, when was the last time I did Supta Kurmasana (forward bend, forehead to floor, feet crossed behind head, hands linked behind back) ON breath count? In vinyasa, the rhetoric of doing Supta K (which I actually HAVE been invited to do in a vinyasa class--how common is that??) is that it's an advanced variation you might do or might leave out; whatever, dude. The energy that is developed in a vinyasa class is a sort of inner endurance, a confrontation perhaps with one's own idea of self, and that goes for any yoga probably, but on Tuesday night's I hear that idea again and again: what ARE you capable of, versus what you THINK you're capable of? Have a look, see what you see...chill if you need to chill...
More could be said about this, but I'm pleased that I don't feel that I've been subjective here, stomping on one kind of yoga in favor of another. Perhaps that's what this was about, not the "comparative yoga essay" this pretends it is?
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