Hello, 2009.

I've never had any sort of ritual related to New Year's Eve. When I was a kid, there were animations that we'd watch, but they never quite had the mythological sort of depth of the Christmas variations or even the Easter ones.

Tonight I opted not to go to a party way, WAY up on the north side of the city, in white flightville. My partner's still there, and that's cool; maybe she'll stay through the turnover. I'll probably write this through the turnover, and that's fine.

Academics the world over know that the year does not turn over in January; that's HALFWAY through the year. The year turns over in JULY. You finish a year's teaching and work, you get summer vacation (over which, of course, you research, hah!) and the year turns over mid-summer. Nothing happens in January except for anxiety about whether or not your syllabi are prepared.

I am doing much better than in November, but it's still shocking to discover the absolutely impenetrable depths of solitude that living here in the winter can involve. In springtime and summer, my high seasons, my power seasons, I feel accompanied by every bud on a tree and every blade of grass. Everywhere I go, it's a chorus. Living here in the winter is like living in an iron lung. Breathe and listen for the echoes.

2009 will be, as every year since 2004 has been, steady steering through rough seas. There are, of course, moments of happy wonder and joy, but the main flavor of life since I decided to get my act together has been forceful steering against the wild. Willpower, intention, determination, patience. These are steeling years, hard years, harder work than any time ever before. They're worth it, but they're exhausting and they are far from over, as it looks now.

Three invitations to interviews last year; NOTHING this year.

I have a visiting gig from January to December. I will pay my bills in 2009.

This is not to be overlooked; I've never been sure about that EVER before, not EVER; not even ONCE have I been able to say that.

My Indiana stay either comes to an end (academic support seems to run out totally in December 2009) or it changes character (what job will I do?).

Something different this way comes.

I guess I'm not quite in the mood for festivities with people I half-know and their acquaintances, whom I don't know at all. It's a year of further steeling, and it's already upon me; it's been upon me since before fall semester ended.

A vacation, I think, is wherever I can put down the weight for an hour or two. A break isn't a vacation if the weights remain; neither is a party if the weights remain. Sit and breathe and disappear; that's a vacation.

Am I becoming an ascetic? Unattractive idea, except for Nietzsche's praise of it.

I did, in a more festive vein, put up lights around the fireplace, so that some holiday flavor can invade the otherwise Arctically sparse January.

2009'll be fine.

Kapotasana developments, hung between two big ruminations on Ashtanga vinyasa yoga.

There is this and that.

Two big ruminations by two big ruminators.

I like them both and find valuable things in each, and each responds in a way to my backbending "mission" (taken up in real earnestness this past summer). And so I shall try to hang a tightrope between them on which I will slackline.

In a Mysore room, you get dropped back, maybe every practice. Maybe from very early on. I wouldn't know, but I think it's well possible that a practitioner in a Mysore room develops dropbacks and standups before, say, Marichyasana D, or Baddha Konasana, or before the Primary asana are developed to the point where Intermediate begins.

Those people would do well to acknowledge how lucky they are.

I was not formally introduced to Mysore-style backbending until May 2007, which is very close to three years after the beginning of my practice. I was doing full Primary from day one, in that room. Mari D binds, both sides; Supta K bound hands, clasped feet. Dropping back, however, was not coming. Standing up? Surely you jest.

So I did Primary about 25 times that month and got rocked-to-and-fro and taken back and taken up I don't know how many times, but was never able to manage it by myself. "Intermediate is usually introduced when the student can drop back and stand up."

Now if you've been reading here a long time, you know that I undertook that statement as utter torture. How in the world was I supposed to internalize my assisted drops-and-stands from San Francisco, to Indianapolis, where there aren't any assisted dropbacks outside of, say, a workshop thrown by Desiree Rumbaugh? How the fuck was I ever supposed to "get" Intermediate? And more, FROM WHOM?

So I began working on it, with wall-walking, with laying over exercise balls, with whatever came to mind. I didn't know HOW to do it without a teacher, so I made it up, and I learned some things, and I overstretched some things, and I insisted too much and I made a thousand varieties of mistakes.

In May 2008 I decided that I would undertake a summer of backbending; I would learn how to drop back and stand up or else. Backbends or bust. I sent off an extremely agitated email to an advanced practitioner, who in reply quite cleanly dressed me down. "Do your backbends...you cannot cherrypick poses."

In an "Intro to Intermediate" class (which was designed largely for me), I began to do second up to about Eka Pada Sirsasana. I read and re-read a lot on the Ashtanga EZBoard. I began to practice the Kapo dropback against the wall.

"The poses you do not do will come back to haunt you." Indeed; very true. It wasn't that I had skipped my backbending, it was that I never knew what the full regimen (the classical regimen) of Ashtanga backbending WAS.

I took three different dips into backbends that summer: a Kino workshop on "how to backbend" told me to keep the quads engaged and the legs straight. A week with Matthew Sweeney taught me not to wall-walk and to feel everything in the front body. Most of a week in a Boston Mysore-style room taught me to simultaneously "find the legs," "push the floor" and "breathe" in Kapo. I was taken to my feet in the pose seven times that summer. I made something like 17 pages of notes on a yellow legal pad.

Work? Is, was, this, WORK?

Not exactly, no. It is challenging, but so is rock climbing, and that's not work. It's sweaty, but so is summer sex, and that's not work. There is no payment (no, metaphorical capitalists, not even metaphysical payment) and no exchange. There's not even, really, "use value." What would you USE your yoga practice for? Pretty photos? Income at workshops?

"You don't save anybody in eastern paradigms; you realize your task CANNOT BE DONE and thus set out to accomplish it in every detail."

Some people get neurotic about the practice; put another way, Narcissus falls into the pool of his reflection.

Those two statements didn't come from the same source nor do they aim at the same thing. The neurotic practitioner doesn't renounce, but emphasizes his/her own practice, separates the self AGAIN, fails the dualist test. Narcissus designs his own practice and avoids his weaknesses, sees only his own beauty, and fails to confront, if you will, "old age." Fails the test of temporality.

The task CANNOT BE DONE, and therefore will be undertaken in every detail.

Now, I want to thank that advanced practitioner for dressing me down HARD several months ago. What do I do for practice? I go to Kapo and I backbend, I half-bend or drop back, then I close. I've done that for months now, to the degree that I'm losing my leg-behind-head poses, and so what.

I finished my first Primary with Matthew in July and said, "What shall I do now?" and he asked, "What do you usually do?" I said, "I usually to go to Kapo and don't get it." He had me do the last two of Primary, was satisfied, announced, "Pasasana," and eventually had me drop into Kapo and took me to my feet in about 1.5 seconds. That was the first time, the doorbreaker. People talked about that adjustment all afternoon.

In Boston, K had me do Primary the first day, and I had a giant, spotlit, performing-for-the-cameras Primary, even with dropbacks. It was a showman's Primary. She said, "Add your other poses," (without me even having said what they were) and as soon as I hit Kapo the next day, she took me to my feet, and that was the formula for four days.

I've STILL never been given a pose. Not REALLY.

Two days ago I was practicing by myself, before a class that I was due to teach, but no one showed up, so I did the Simha Krama from Matthew's second book (I would have done Ashtanga, but I was going to base the class on Simha Krama, and so that's what I was doing pre-class, and so be it). I started adding Ashtanga poses and variations, and did a Kapo; drop back, walk in, scrape in, look toward floor, float hips forward, scrape hands under head, do it again, persist, and I TOUCHED MY FEET. True, I only tapped them a bit, like a nervous junior high school boy shoulder-tapping the girl he's infatuated with, but that is the FIRST TIME EVER that I've successfully touched my feet BY MYSELF.

Yesterday I did full Primary and Intermediate to Kapo, and couldn't get to my feet, but I did get a sort of energy release which was traumatic at first, but harmless to the anamaya kosha (physical body) and so apparently fine. This was followed by five rounds of the wheel, and rocking up, during which time I discovered that I tend to rock back and forth on my HEELS, which will never get me to standing.

I made a note to rock onto my fingertips and then to WALK IN and THEN to rock onto the balls of the feet and see if I come up. That was today's plan.

Alas, life has other plans.

Today I have had such obligations to the house, that I had to practice here. I turned the heat up to a ritzy 62 and put on an insulating underlayer, a t-shirt and my polar fleece sweatshirt. Shorts besides. 62 degrees is, you're right, GODDAMN COLD. I could tell in the balancing poses that I'd never make it through Primary; the hips would enervate before I got there. So I vinyasa'd down to Pasasana, which was too intense to bind (backbend focus has stolen my twists, temporarily). On and on to Kapo, which was a test even at the start, doing an Ustrasana position with my hands on my forehead. Nonetheless, I breathed into it, tried to hold a hang-back, landed quiet as usual, walked in, scraped in, concentrated on the tops of my feet, extended the hips well forward, and KA-POW, released some enormous surge of pure energy.

There are citations of people in Mysore talking, at the pool, about their "CATACLYSMIC openings" and such, and I've always thought that such citations were simply exaggerations of asana experiences by people who are just doing yoga for three months or whatever it is. Let me try to explain my surge of energy here.

It was not intellectual and had no emotional content; was not a flashback. It came from the muscles but was not physiological. It made me cry out in a loud and distressed way, but did not hurt me. It was profoundly NOT physical pain of any kind. I saw no images, relived no experiences, did not leave my body, and suffered no disjunctive experiences. So WTF was it?

I think it was some kind of physio-emotional release; it was certainly intense. I can't say that it was emotional, as I didn't FEEL anything specific (no anger, no fear, no joy, no love, at least not love as I recognize it), but it wasn't physical either, entirely anyway. There was some muscular reaction (all through the psoas and side glutes, fairly deep musculature) but it wasn't an overstretch or anything that locked into the "gross body."

Basically, it was unnamed energetic release. If you ever got to have the experience of orgasm before you knew what one was or how you were "supposed" to react to it, you've had this kind of energetic release. SHA-ZAM!!!!! WTF was THAT? And then you have to piece it together. And sure, I know that that kind of energetic release has physical consequences, but it's the purity of it, the sort of pre- or non-linguistic character of it, that I wanted to capture.

Now to return to asana specifics, I once again did not get my feet. I am, however, getting much better motion in the hips and I can feel the backbend of Kapo increasing. I only did three wheels, and no experimentation with standing up today, as the emotional "aftershocks" of the Kapo energy rush were working themselves out all the way into closing.

So is it work, toward a goal? No, not really. If it is, I'm not sure what the goal is. Transcendence? Huh? From BENDING? From MAKING SHAPES? First, I agreed with that idea (oh yes, transcendence; we love transcendence) but now, right this minute, that makes no sense. Even when I have some energy trauma in Kapo, closing mellows it out, and inevitably (nearly inevitably), I say, "That was a great practice."

I want to have some clarity about why I do this, but I don't have any. I used to think that I was going to channel all of that bad divorce/dissertation energy, but the energy has no name and no history and no images. It doesn't "belong to then."

I know what the symptoms of my practice are (clarity and ease of thinking, mellower demeanor, one-pointed focus during practice, "presentness" and this Fight Club physique and so on) but right now I have no idea WHY I do it, what the "big picture" is, but I'm also not going to offer some silly platitude about, "it feels good" or "the endorphins are worth it" or even "it makes sitting easier." I don't know what it does.

I feel indifferent to death after asana practice, sometimes.

Yes, the series holds the mirror. A sustained practice with a "go no further" Kafka gatekeeper pose at the end of it, holds the mirror. I LOVE Matthew's vinyasa krama practices, but they are more FUN, in a very important way, than Ashtanga vinyasa yoga is. I have great adoration for the Rocket series, but again, it is more FUN, in the same way, than Ashtanga vinyasa yoga is.

Over the summer, I was chasing these backbends; the barely hidden desire was "put me in that fucking shape!" I knew I wanted, would have said, "needed," to be put into Kapo in order to break the door to it. I think teachers read this off me, and gave me what I wanted, to show me what I ACTUALLY needed.

I think this difference is one of the main things the asana practice is about. That desire didn't break me, but it did break that desire. Now the desire is simply the practice.

Intermediate teaches me how it works.

Amazing practice. Warm Intermediate up to Tittibhasana ABCD, with company, on wood floor, at night, after grading exams for 10 hours today (probably only 6 hours of actual work) and most of the last two days.

Finish the exams, pack, drive, do two thirds of the Intermediate series. Now, I was anxious about the hip flexors, even though I'd changed my seated position from Tiriang Mukha thighs to pigeons to Janu A position and to a dozen other things in between.

The practice was amazing, and I can only put together, now 2 hours later, bits and pieces.

Kapo taught me that it is systematically developed in ALL of the prior backbends. Yes, we knew this, but it's different to LEARN it, to INTERNALIZE it. Locust powers up the low back; Bhekasana the mid-back (and cranks into the quads and hip flexors if you know how to ask it).

Dhanurasanas, on me, crank hard and deep into the hip flexors proper, and in particular, Parsva Dhanurasana makes those suckers light up.

This lets Ustrasana crank into the abs, really into the rectus abdominis line, from the solar plexus to the pubic bone. The problem I'm currently having with my camel is that I need about a full minute or two to recover from the intensity of the stretch from the side bows. With time, this will equalize; flexibility will develop.

Laghu then powers up the quads, MAJORS, as we know, and Kapo combines that power with the now accumulated flexibility of Dhan/Ust and the strengthening of Shala/Bhek.

So, my Kapo today: not easy, but progressively walking hands to toes, again intuitively learning that to lean the head UP (which is, toward the heels, not up toward the ceiling) and push the navel FORWARD (with the hips, like RAISING the navel from the ocean, NOT like pushing it with the glutes) is what brings the hands further up the feet and what powers up the quads, which with the progressive arch being brought by the gaze, increases the angle of the whole pose. I was down there for easily 12 breaths, working this. Adjusters (one on arms, one guiding thighs together, strong) were able to work me hands to feet.

Bharadvajasana can be brought more strongly by grabbing as much half-lotused foot as possible. Lower the folded-back leg glute, inhale TALL, and twist.

Half lord of the fishes, as Jason has said elsewhere, is much more a prep for leg-behind-head than it is a twist for recovery from backbending.

Foot behind head: I'm not working this as much now, and it shows. The glutes grab more intensely as the leg goes over, and it takes concentration and some struggle to hold A for five breaths (not standard, I know, but I do it anyway) and then fold. I lost the LBH on both exits (and that used to not be the case). This will improve when I take up the pose regularly again, just as it did before.

Legs are FAR too keen on slipping over the head, to even approach Dwi Pada. I tried it three times and got nowhere near an ankle clasp or even ankle contact. So be it.

Even Yoganidrasana gave me some fight, and that NEVER happens. Eh.

Tittibhasana: I still do not (even in Primary) jump straight into this, but I jump, feet down, and then lift up and hit it. Straight to B, straight to C, straight to a heels-together D, and then up to A for five more breaths, Bakasana and down. One of my yoga buddies and sometimes students said, after class, "Dude your Tittibhasana sequence tonight was EPIC." Ok. Concentrate, is the key. Breathe, move, and then it's over. If you stop to think about the quad burn or wonder if your hands will come apart, those things will grab you. Breathe, move, be liquid. Jump back.

I could NOT land a Pincha Mayurasana. The hip flexors were so juiced and squeezed and loaded with muscular effort (not tired, just loaded, very energized) that I couldn't hit the balance, and that hasn't been true for MONTHS. I can usually hit that pose in my freakin' SLEEP. And so be it, that was actually kind of exciting.

I often talk to myself when I do this class, with little encouragements and notes to self later (for writing here, which again is largely for myself), and so I noted, that ever since the HERON pose, this sequence had been about the quads. Someone else noted that a month or two ago too, and I forget who exactly. Quads in the backbends, quads in the Titti, quads hitting the inversion.

Anyway, I was talking to myself about how good the backbends were going to feel, since the hip flexors would finally not get a squish in some LBH or Titti sequence.

Indeed, the backbends were very big and juicy and really quite pleasant. I will take a shot at describing it: the flexors had really been squeezed, engaged, asked to pull and hold and endure. And from long practice and downright stubbornness in backbending, they have also stretched; they've gotten stronger and more forgiving. They have, in a sense, matured some.

So I pressed up into the first wheel and felt the hip flexors quite literally EXPAND, like these big pink pockets of muscle, working. ALIVE. Not steel, not plastic, not some weird inanimate cyborg interference that keeps me from happiness, but BELONGING to me, of me, me. I held it for six breaths and pushed up into a second one and held it for six breaths. There was action in the back and action in the abs, but nothing drastic. The flexors were getting the spotlight, really directing the action, expanding, breathing, performing.

I did five wheels in all, and held all of them for six breaths, except the last one which I held for ten. Thirty four breaths of backbends. There was no time for half-bending so I didn't do any (well, I did an easy two after rest, but that wasn't a serious attempt at dropping back).

It was brilliant. And everything feels marvelous.

Again bigger Primary; asana as semester detox.

Not that today's Primary (which had Pasasana tacked on) was bigger or stronger than yesterday's, but it was easier.

Both yesterday and today, under my bloodred stairs at the Y (which has now turned on the winter heat, up to 70! Decadence!!), I've really been rediscovering long breaths and, as Sharath says, "slow, slow."

When I was in SF in 2007, I would see the asana practice happen in slow motion, and I mean to a hallucinatory degree. I once saw a bead of sweat roll off my nose and take THREE FULL SECONDS to hit the mat. Real or imagined? Who cares? Real enough. It hasn't been that deep yet, but I've been holding every up or down movement until the breath is REALLY done moving, and it has totally mellowed out my practice. It's like, "Raise arms overhead. Hold em. Inhale pause. NOW lower." Simplest thing in the world, but total practice magic.

Not that I do the whole practice on breath pace, particularly around Marichyasanas C and D, but really doing "breathe first, move second" with intent, is very good stuff.

Everything was roses today in practice, until the just-too-intense-still Pasasana and then the backbends, for which I subbed bridges for wheels. Bridges got the white energy hip flexor stretch, without overcranking me in the abs/shoulders/whole body the way the wheel has been lately. It was fine. I did 4 and felt each one all over the hip flexors and quads, just where I want to feel a backbend.

You'll notice, if you've read this for a long time, that my backbending goes through these absolutely WILD cycles of high achievement and then massive reduction and then back and then forth, like some insane roller coaster.

That's always been the way. I think that because I keep all of my life stress and whining and whatnot in my hip flexors and glutes, that my backbending is quite literally a measure of my day-to-day life. Hour to hour, even.

Monday night nine days ago I got my feet in Kapotasana, and today I'm bridging four times? That's not physical restriction, that's sheer moodiness and life events.

This leads to that same, utterly tired, useless desire to "be" happier so that I can backbend in bigger ways. Silliness. More content in warm yoga room; Kapotasana. Less content with giant pile of grading under red stairwell; bridges. What shall I do now, go on the same future plan of moving away from here, finding Mysore room, finally landing some career stability, easing the insanity of socioeconomics so that I can crank into the insanity of advanced asana with both hands?

Of course that's what I want. Here, everything is backwards: my insanity is my base and my "sanity" (career, money, life) is utter chaos. That's fine, of course, because life permits everything, but I can keep expecting backbend randomness in these conditions.

I can just see the conversation: What's your final pose? Well, it depends on the part of the country I live in, my access or lack of access to practice space, the number of human beings in the room, capitalist socioeconomics, the weather and percentage humidity......

I'll still arbitrarily call it Kapo, but whatever. Practice day to day. It's not what you do, it's that you do.

Bigger Primary, no Intermediate yet; 1 final and 2 classes to go.

Much bigger Primary today; full expressions all over the place; really easy vinyasa, my regular big practice. Mediocre wheels, of course, but that's par for the course. Stressed, cold, anxious, not pleased about no-interviews-yet, blah. Winter. This means mediocre wheels.

Pasasana immediately sent up electric warnings and emotional displeasure, so I scrapped it and went to closing. No Intermediate yet; it'll return when I/it am/is ready.

Tomorrow I give a final; Composition classes meet Thursday and Friday and it's over.

Then I just grade 25 projects, 180 finals, my own 25 finals, and however many drafts and finals I get from the Composition gang (between the two classes, say 32).

And I wonder why committees haven't been calling me yet, right?

Too much life, and a really soft Primary.

Let me give some details as to how there is too much life currently (all Blade Runner citations are unintended: "What do you want, Roy?" "More life, fucker!"):

It is finals week, and this means that with the 180 exams that I pick up tomorrow, I will have over 250 (!!!!) documents to grade, consisting of exams, papers, and English composition papers and drafts. I will be amazingly and sustainedly busy all week with this.

All classes end Friday; the Friday night composition gig I teach is the FINAL ACT OF FALL SEMESTER. Yay!

I have no interviews so far, and this is making me believe that the academic job market is not for me. Whatever. I have a visiting gig until December 2009. No panic. Repeat. No panic. Come on Patrick, cooperate.

There are various life events I only discuss off-blog, which add to this mix.

SO THEN

What does an asana practice look like in the middle of exam proctoring and running hither and yon (four times to school and back today, for example)?

I went to my stairs at the Y, and did the softest Primary I've done since I was a beginner. The sun salutations HURT. This was uncommon. So I took a really light ujjayi, let the eyes hood a bit, and turned it WAY down; this was Primary at maybe 30 percent.

No full expressions--not in standing poses, not in seated--until, of all oddities, Garbha Pindasana. Jumpbacks to knees and then walk out to chaturanga. Jumpthroughs unaffected, until later when tired. Full expressions of Ubhaya Padangusthasana and Setu Bandhasana. Three wheels. Closing, but I spaced Sirsasana (what can I say, it's that kind of headspace). That was nonsense, because I have great love for Sirsasana. Oh well.

MASSIVE releases of anger, unhappiness, various displeasures. Very much related to things posted recently by 0v0 .

And then I drove across town and led a Primary. I have figured out--no, more like remembered--that EXPRESSION of emotions that swim to the surface is more important than "handling" them in any way. When it swims to the surface, LET IT BREATHE.

Ahhhhh that's better: Some o' Intermediate class.

Warm room, human company, great led partial Intermediate. Pure asana refreshment.

Three students from the university, one natively talented student that both Carol (who was teaching) and I have had in class, and me. Yellow light, class at 7 pm, warm room on wood floor.

Basically, sun salutations to Parsvottanasana, Pasasana to Eka Pada Sirsasana (and I got into Dwi, with help) and then backbends and a shortened closing.

Highlights: Kapotasana turns from Trapezoid Man into Pyramid Man, as Arturo told me that it would (he suggested some time ago that PM was a better name than TM).

I dropped back, hands to floor, as always, and was adjusted easily to hands to toes, and then I got stuck, head on floor but elbows down (I mean all the way down). Some breaths there. But the stuckness was bugging me, so I tried to process what it would take for me to move my head in/up/closer to my feet.

I THOUGHT that the order would be, hands closer to feet, or crawling up feet, and THEREFORE, higher arch. Not so. Hands could not move, due to head on floor. So what happened, was that I pushed "down" with my hands, my elbows came OFF the floor, and my head arched further "forward" so that my forehead, not the fore-crown of my head, was on the floor, and that made the hips much happier. The whole "triangle" sort of "picked up" from the apex, and the whole pose was higher, which let me work more energy into the thighs and more bend into the back. I only got about a half-centimeter further "up" my feet (basically still hands to toes) but I think I learned something very important about Kapotasana.

Directions are INSANE when you're backbent upside down and backwards. But essentially, I stopped trying to push Kapo from one corner of the triangle's base, and instead picked it up from the top. The base shortened. Ahhh geometry!!!

The exit, which was all assisted, left me feeling no panic, no belaboured breathing and no pain, not any pain of any kind, not even the big wringing sensations in the back muscles which were familiar from both Minneapolis AND Boston this past summer.

So all added up, this was probably my best Kapo EVER.

The students were MUCH more impressed with Kapo than with Eka Pada.

It took two people to wrestle me into an imperfect Dwi Pada, and so be it. The Kapo was the prize.

Backbending, FINALLY, was as I had gotten accustomed to. Big, straight-armed, all in the abs. Breathe, look at the tip of the nose, take five wheels. I did. Ahhh.

Three big hang-backs, arch increasing, arms straight out, mat visible in the second one and third, and I was assisted into a quick drop-and-up.

*****************

A studio practice is an absolute blessing in cold weather. In any weather, really. Those of you who have regular access to studios must remember to give thanks for this. Tis the season, after all.