Briefly: Primary, dropbacks, nutshell me this?

Primary, again at the Y. Concentration and attention on bandhas (my fave bandha is uddiyana, but that's a whole separate entry). They SERIOUSLY do make it all easier.

Dropbacks, just like last week. 2 prep hang backs, 3 dropbacks, the first one better (no head contact), the second one inadvertently heels up (and as I predicted, hands closer to feet), the third more fearful, head bounce with no harm, on padded gym mat.

Oddly, no dropbacks SINCE last week--am I only dropping back after Primary, then? Is this some kind of funny asana joke, universe?

And,

Can someone nutshell for me what it feels like, or should or will or might feel like, to rock up to standing? I can't seem to grok the proprioception or the concept, and so rocking to fingertips doesn't sort of jump-start me on the full rise. If I can imagine it better, I can approach it more realistically.

February dropbacks

Yes, I know I should have a video, like everyone else does :)

Well then: since the blogosphere just had an utter attack of dropbacks, tic-tocs and backbends of all sorts (hi Susan, Karen, Owl, and as always, Grimmly), I figured in Friday's practice that I'd go for it.

First, this has been a fantastic practice week. I did my 82 regular poses Monday through Wednesday, took Thursday off due to quasi-illness discomfort, and then did Primary on Friday.

Second, I find that if I do NOT write about my asana practice, it stays kind of marvelous and secret, whereas if I get extroverted about it, it seems inevitably to regress. Someone, somewhere, reported a teacher asking, "Well, if you practice, why do you write?" Exactly.

Backbends have been 2 sets of 3: 8 breaths each for the first three, and 5 breaths each for the second 3. In the second 3, I come down moving my head as forward toward my feet as I can, so that from the first backbend, I put my FOREHEAD on the floor, move my hands in, and press up. This feels good; I'd be curious to see how far, eventually, I get to my feet.

The 8 breath backbend is increasing my endurance, which means I can work more on the flexibility and strength aspects while I'm up. Right now, 3 backbends of 8 breaths has my quads on utter FIRE. I look forward to that getting easier :)

I have laid off hang-backs, wall-backs and dropbacks for a few months, letting my outer hips chill. It took WEEKS, like 3 weeks, for them to stop hurting, even with no hanging back. But as soon as they did, Ta-da, my twists began to come back. I regularly bind Maris C and D again now, and even a teeny tiny Pasasana bind on both sides has crept into the mix.

And so with fewer poses on Friday, I figured, hey, stand up and drop back, see what happens, you never know.

I'd done my 6 wheels in two sets, and I hung back, hands to chest, for 5 breaths, then up, and hung back, hands to chest, for 8 more. I could feel the lower back bend more, and the head drop some. I kept the legs as straight and engaged as I could get them to go.

Then I walked to the front of the mat, feet mat-width apart, and hung back, hands to chest then hands to forehead, and then hands reaching out, and felt, again, the muscles of the lower back scrunch, and the backbend increase, and the armpits pull open a bit, and the ribs expand, and I could see the back of the mat and then some, so I dropped.

Now it was a DROP, definitely; none of this beautiful controlled tapping the floor. My head tapped along with my hands and I pressed up instantly into a wheel and held it for 5. But, I practice on a gym mat (and a yoga mat on top of it) at the Y, so the surface was super soft and utterly safe. This is my first dropback since, I think, October 2008 or something like that. November maybe.

I did two more, taking about 10 breaths to hang back and let the curve develop. The second one was the best; no head contact. The third one was the clunkiest.

The post-dropback sensations were so intense that I thought the right lower back musculature might cramp up, but it didn't. I didn't play around with rocking up; I'll think about that when I can backbend more comfortably or when I'm more comfortable with this much sensation.

Then I closed, classically (25 breaths in the inversions, 10 everywhere else).

It's been a brilliant week.

My humble yoga class may be turning Mysore-style again. Chewy.

On Sunday afternoons, I teach a thing which on the studio flyers is called "Ashtanga/Vinyasa (mixed levels)." It has recently, along with all of the Sunday classes, become a $10 "community" class, which are billed specifically as being for anyone.

For a while I've been amused about this. I have the capacity to offer the city's most traditional ashtanga yoga, and I'm doing so in a community class where the maximum attendance ever (since July 2007 when this class began) has been, I think, 6.

Indy is simply a vinyasa town.

However, in the early days, when I was fresh out of SF, I did the opening chant, taught as needed, encouraged people to memorize, and sent students to backbends, the way that I had seen it done, and a few students were turned on by that, and so there has always been a very thin line of people attracted to my attempt to do this practice traditionally.

Sometimes the regulars would vanish and brand new folks would come to try the class out, and then, it became more led and intro Primary or even Sweeney-inspired vinyasa, which is why it now bears its "come-all" name.

But recently the regulars of old have been re-appearing, and so the class has been climbing back into the traditional mode.

It's really quite amazing to see the various things students can do easily, and the things with which they struggle. One struggles with lotus but does the Janu Sirsasana C feet with ease. One struggles with deep forward bends, but can fold into lotus at will and do jumps back and through.

I have a student who apparently went online specifically LOOKING for Mysore-style ashtanga, and who lives an hour north of here. That completely blows my mind. You live up in northern Indiana, the sparsest part of the whole state, and you not only know what Mysore-style IS, but you went LOOKING for it? Shucks, I thought only *I* did stuff like that! Anyway, said student has all the pieces of Primary but dropbacks and standups. I have to assist on Supta K and on Garbha Pindasana, but it's all there.

This is fun. I find, of course, that teaching dropbacks also inspires me to once again teach them to myself.

Happy and obvious discoveries.

The first Bloomington trip in I don't know how many weeks. Since early January?

First, I teach yoga at 8 am, subbing for the teacher whose vinyasa class I like so much.

Then an hour in the car, south.

Then reading chapters of other people's dissertations, and then two hours of discussion and coffee in a cafe. Real French sidewalk style. Delicious academic chewiness. Real live interaction, complete with comiseration about how fucking stark the job market is.

Then four hours setting routes in a climbing gym.

Then filling a half-gallon jug with tasty, so tasty India Pale Ale.

Leaving home at about 7:30 am; returning home at about 10:30, and EVERY experience within that time was delicious humanity.

Crowds, college town, energy, no obligations, discussion, energy, service, sweat. This, my friends, is LIFE. Of course, no, it isn't; I know what my daily life ACTUALLY is.

This, my friends, was vacation. Sure, some of it was work, but insofar as it was company, and not the soul-crushing solitude of Indianapolis, it was also life.

Admittedly, when I lived in Bloomington full-time, I climbed and did not write dissertation. Indianapolis is better for my patience-building, but patience-building is also incomprehensible agony.

When I have a really good setting day, when I am CHANNELLING body movement, it is as good as any asana practice has ever been.

I also, mostly to get the front-body work evened out, regularly backbend after climbing walls, and this has nothing to do with asana or series achievement. It's simply something that feels good and which counters the front-body intensive that climbing is. I took a batch of camels (sometimes one hand up and back) and found them deeper than they've been in organized asana practice ALL WINTER LONG.

I took a shot at Kapo and got as deep as I ever had in ALL OF JANUARY. I took three wheels and found them superior to many of my asana practice performances.

Exercise, you'll say? I doubt it. Mood; happiness; pleasure.

Again, the truth of the logical conclusion, which nonetheless DOES NOT APPLY to my daily life: IF I WERE HAPPIER, I COULD STAND FROM A BACKBEND. I know this to be so.

Nonetheless, that's EXACTLY the same as thinking, "If I were 16, I could, blah-blah-blah."

It is not about one's ACTUAL POTENTIAL; it is about one's ACTUAL CIRCUMSTANCES, and THAT, my friends, is the RUB.

A couple snapshots (not actual photos) and, thanks Karen, "Typealyzer"

Recently I was in the BMV (which you probably call the DMV) in the city, and a white guy who looked like your garden-variety businessman leaned over to me, while we waited in line, and said, "Look around; you're a minority!" Having noticed this, I said, "Yep," and he then made some gestures of upset, or disapppointment, or a general "wish for the old days." Puzzling stuff. I know poverty is raced in town, and that the city has a MASSIVE case of white flight to the north suburbs, but his reaction was downright strange. The BMV I was at, was in the 80s, which, true, is north endish, but the white flight end of town doesn't even begin until at least 96th street and doesn't really set in until over 126th. Anyway, he was a pretty memorable character.

I showed a rare film not long ago, called "Treatise on Venom and Eternity." There is a priceless line in there (and it's subtitled, not in the original French, but nonetheless, it seems to fit the film perfectly): "Hey existentialist! IN YOUR HAT!"

After asana practice, even one I think is mediocre, I get a serious case of mellow and good humor and well-wishes toward the human race, about 20 minutes after getting off the mat, and in some cases, it lasts for an hour after that. It's probably my favorite part of the day, whenever it occurs.

Today all it took to get mellow was demoing a few poses for a class I taught. I am the picture of multiple fronts of deep exhaustion: physical, emotional, intellectual. The last of these recovers most quickly.

Books picked up today, from a combination of libraries and Ebay deliveries, include Lipstick Traces, A Secret History of the 20th Century; Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensual Media; The Skin of the Film; Harmony and Dissent. These are largely about film theory and avant-garde art, which are also the subjects of the courses I'm teaching right now. I seem no longer to read fiction; the only books I can recall reading in the last few YEARS, for fictional narrative fun, are Life of Pi and....dang it. Something I can see the cover of, and recall the story of, but not recall the name. Whatever it was, it would make a great chick flick adaptation, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. This is not to say that I can live without fiction; it's only that I tend to get it from film, not from writing. Earlier this evening I finished The Third Man, which actually I'd never seen before. It's fittingly legendary; those canted framings alone are worth the price of admission.

From Typealyzer (aka, What is the Personality of your Blog?):

Your Blog is THE IDEALIST

The meaning-seeking and unconventional type. They are especially attuned to making sure their beliefs and actions are congruent. They often develop a passion for the arts or unusual forms of self-expression.

They enjoy work that are aligned to their deeply felt values and tend to strongly dislike the more practical and mundane forms of tasks. They can enjoy working alone for long periods of time and are happiest when they can immerse themselves in personally meaningful projects.
**************************************************************

Hahahahaha------could that POSSIBLY be more of a freakin' BULLSEYE?

Short form of the prior post (the same, but shorter).

Primary and up to Ustrasana today.

Primary felt GREAT; the glute cramp from a week ago is healed enough to permit toe-grabs in Trikonasana, and a deep prayer twist in Parivrtta Parsvakonasana. I rediscovered my Mari D bind on both sides, and even Pasasana could be bound on one side. Ahh, familiar. True, I paused in some places to nip some extra breaths, but the two week lag in January robbed some endurance. As far as how it FELT, though, great practice.

Those Intermediate backbends, however, felt like rubbish, right from Shalabhasana. I only went up to Ustrasana, really didn't enjoy it, and then took three hard-fought wheels, which is even fewer (and harder) than yesterday's five at 62 degrees (I was in the Y at a tropical 70 today). I'm confused about the devolution, but whatever, it's par for the course.

So I've been at this for four and a half years.

I consider myself to have learned Primary at about this time (March, really), 2007; that's when I finally could regularly half-lotus the persistently difficult right hip, and then Garbha Pindasana came, and that was Primary. True, I'm still refining it, but I could do everything in it, on something approximating a steady flow of breath, about two years ago. In May 2007 an authorized teacher let me do all of that same Primary, and so that's my "official" proof.

This means that for two years I've been trying to acquire and retain dropbacks-and-Intermediate-to-Kapo, and still haven't got it. As you faithful readers know, this struggle often reduces me to outright petty bitchiness.

Today I read myself the riot act. There are four choices:

1) Cheat. Pretend you drop back and come up, and further pretend you Kapo. Then do whatever you want. Sure, it leads to the Dark Side, but it'll get you past backbends, right?

2) Quit. Give up this ridiculous same-sequence-every-day nonsense. Sure; plenty of people have.

3) Move to a town with a Mysore program, over the summer, when you're at your power peak, and learn these motherfuckers once and for all.

4) "If you can't change it, you gotta stand it." Persist, much like Sisyphus, day after day, doing as much sequence as you feel you have (that is, to Kapo) and value the repetition over the achievement. This is, as you know, the HIGH ROAD.

I'm doing the high road right now, and it's so, SO SO HARD. Basically, it's impossible, but I do it out of the microscopic possibility that MAYBE IT'S NOT.

I don't want to do (1); there's no prize there. I don't want to do (2), in part because I've worked too fucking hard at this nonsense to do that. I can't do (3) because I don't have the cash or the time. (4) it is.

And then you have to insert a thousand pounds of bitchiness, exhaustion, whininess, pettiness and most of this blog's entire contents. There. That's reality. That's what's true. Hah. So be it.

Power and frustration or, seeing the big picture?

It is always and inevitably an error to think one sees the big picture. Let that be my opening statement here.

This morning, at 62 degrees, I practiced Primary to Marichyasana B, did 6 wheels and then closed. I wanted my "regular" (which isn't) Primary plus Ten, but did not get there.

Svasana mind-babble-as-meditation informed me that I feel perenially "stuck" at Intermediate's backbends because I'm not answering to my ACTUAL power, but instead pursuing a power which, even if I DO have it, isn't part of my big picture.

This information demanded, I thought, some more attention.

Here are the now-too-well-chewed-over meditations on my meditation:

Is it true that I'm a householder, by which I mean, in an intentionally binary way, that I'm not the man on the mountain who can, in silence and utter tapas, master his full potential? (This binary itself is, like all of them, erroneous)

Ever have I wanted to exercise my full potential, and ever have I felt various social glass ceilings on doing so. Witness my mysticism about being the witch doctor, about social revolution, about being a Surrealist, about climbing 5.12, about doing a more advanced (because it's IN ME) asana practice than I do. Witness the felt potential of writing books, changing the world, a thousand ways. Witness the answers, all impossible, to a frustration I have felt ever since I was very very small.

Of course no one but me can summon, see, and interpret a lifetime's experience. So the preceding paragraph is nothing but poetry, and that's fine. I doubt I can explain it. Perhaps one example...but which? Which one will serve to explain this without re-enacting the argument and falling into the perennial ditch?

It's difficult to separate "having talent" from the estimation of others: "You have talent." An existential answer is, "Do I?" Let us take the seated vinyasa as an easy example.

I jump back, when sufficiently warm, in every vinyasa in Primary. I also jump back from all the funky exits in Intermediate that I've ever done: that includes the leg-back Krounchasana, the twists (complete with legs folded), and the leg-over-arm exits from Eka Pada as well as the various Bakasana jumpbacks in both series. I also chakrasana directly to chaturanga dandasana. So yay me. The point of this, is that since that's not a skill Indianapolis yoga sees very often, vinyasa is held to be one of my "super powers." And so be it.

What SHOULD that mean? Do you see the question? Let me give some sample questions. Does this mean that I should make a "career" of yoga asana? Does this mean that I should teach? Does this mean that asana is somehow a PATH to my financial, physical, or other FULFILLMENT? And which, how, fulfillments?

I'm not, largely, interested in the financial angle, but I am interested in a question we can reach through a detour to the American Dream.

"Reaching one's full potential." America really likes this. We like to say or believe or at least pay lip service to the idea, that a successful person has reached his or her full potential. Olympic athletes. Even great humanitarians. They are "models" for us. We want to aspire to these heights.

Heights, then. Now more metaphysically speaking: is the POINT OF EXISTENCE, to live to one's MAXIMAL giftedness?

Let me be more specific: remember my "fantasy lifestyle" from last post? The tribe of culture-creating-by-the-moment, ever instantaneous, eternal-present nomads, trekking across the earth under the direction of their witch doctors who do primitive yet freakishly accurate astronomy and all of that? The kind of mythology on which thinking as widespread as Nietzsche's AND Fight Club's, turns?

I know, because I live with myself, that my vision of the tribal nomads is an answer to frustration and fear. It's not what I ACTUALLY see myself doing, it's a system which seeks to negate long-held fear and anxiety about self-expression, most of which anxiety comes to life in places like junior high school.

But that pathos aside, the metaphysical questions become something like this: why do I not, for example, still draw? Why do I NOT chase 5.12 with all my considerable climbing might? Why do I NOT just move to a city with a Mysore-style program so that I can figure out what sequence of poses I'm ACTUALLY capable of? See how the questions go? And of course, since I talk about yoga mostly here, it's the most pertinent-seeming question, but the drawing question is exactly akin to it.

Now for all of my life, grownups have answered those questions about potential with something like, "Well you can't always get what you want" or the beloved, "Well, that's how the cookie crumbles."

But I never accepted that and I still don't. Do you think that I was exaggerating when I found Guy Debord in 1995 and immediately started citing him chapter and verse for about two years, on and on about total agency and the realization of the spectacular dream in real terms?

It is like to me ever envision the most pleasing and fullest expression of whatever it is that I want or feel. When I was 13 and the lycanthropy of increasing testosterone levels began, I imagined ideal relationships and arrangements of every kind and began to see potential for this in the world. But the world answered with shyness and emotional instability and abstinence-only education and a thousand different obstacles and it made my ideal vision impossible. In many many ways, this model has been repeated ever since I was a kid.

Instead of accepting the world and the crumbling cookie, my response, over and over, in those same many ways, has always and consistently been to REAFFIRM the IDEAL. To step into the world's face and DEMAND that it live up to "its potential."

But that was never met, not ever, not in anything. Not in relationships, not in politics, not in art, not ever, not anywhere. But the dichotomy remains: I simultaneously see "how the world works" and at the same time, I completely refuse to accept that as how the world CAN ACTUALLY work.

Do you see how this is a formula for frustration? Idealistic and energizing one the one hand, for me and for others, but with absolutely CRUSHING potential for disenchantment and depression. And so be it.

Back to metaphysical questions:

Does one NEED to meet this "full potential"? Is THAT the "meaning of life"? When I began climbing I was in a period of INTENSE self-realization and it felt (wrongly, but sincerely) like a period when I would finally exceed the crumbling cookie, when I would once and for all crack the surface of "how the world works" and, as the Surrealists put it, "change life."

A friend said, "You ARE a revolutionary, but not the type you THINK you are."

That has wisdom in it.

I said, and I still occasionally say, that I want to KNOW what my full potential is. What asana series, what grade of route, what confrontation, what conquest of complexity, is my LIMIT? That's what I wanted to know.

So when I become "stuck" at Kapotasana, or at 5.11c, or at some other limit which I nonetheless perceive as NOT THE TRUE ONE, further questions emerge.

What IS one's "full potential"? How is this measured? Doesn't it flux and change? Isn't this whole quest in pursuit of it, completely absurd? But then, if we do not have ideals, how are we to want anything? And all of learning and making mistakes and acting with wisdom moment-to-moment, comes from that.

And in my rest-meditation today, came an odd way out of this binary:

I'm a householder. I have substantial indebtedness, and I cannot move, until I get a job in one of the riskiest, worst job markets in US history. I have material conditions: relationship, house, certain breed of yoga town, cats, a hundred other things. Reality exists, insofar as it does.

Not having access to a Mysore-style room might reduce my ACTUAL number of poses or my ACTUAL series, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with my ACTUAL potential. Let's assume for the hell of it that I simply do NOT have the strength to pull Karandavasana, in 2nd, and that that's my ACTUAL physical limit. So what? What does that mean? Does it mean accepting capitalism? Does it mean I can't draw with a certain level of skill? What does that REALLY MEAN beyond itself? ANYTHING?

Suddenly the whole line of thinking runs clear off the rails.

This business about "full potential" is what in the Yoga Sutras is described as mistaking the mindtalk for the capital M, mind. Dude, yes, you're not Tyler Durden. And you know what? NEITHER IS TYLER DURDEN.

But wait, let's not just chalk it up to eternal happiness and the nonexistence of things. That's what elsewhere might be called an Advaita Bromide.

Yes, I'm a householder. In camel-lion terms (another incorrect binary), I'm profoundly camel, but with an absurd degree of lion-soul injected into me for whatever reason (they say the gods have a sense of humor). What if skill is measured not in potential PER SKILL....what if, instead, skill is merely a manifestion of an extension of a sort of amoebic power, a Nietzsche-flavored amorphous and unspecific WILL to power?

Can one have SKILL at being a householder? Can one have POWER in householding? Do you see where this is going? Can one have these things at something one does NOT wish to do, something where one does NOT understand there to be a quest, something where one does NOT see an upper limit, where there ISN'T a search for what Kerouac called the Face of God?

See how the 20th century, at least in arts and literature, and particularly in Western European and American incarnations of those things, values what Robert Ray once called the "outlaw hero"? See that simple ideology in my ENTIRE ENTRY HERE?

See it in my archetypes, all the way back to childhood? Who the hell makes a hero out of freakin' KRAKATOA?

"What are you? I am the most powerful volcanic eruption of the 19th century. I was heard hundreds of miles away and I recolored the skies with ash."

What if "all is coming" means not a world socialist revolution or third series or 5.12 but LESS HATE, LESS DISDAIN, and things like that? What if it means GRACE UNDER ECONOMIC PRESSURE?

"But I don't want to be financially graceful, I want to be a fucking VOLCANO."

Wha? Why? Because a volcano is COOLER than financial grace?

And this is why, occasionally, I feel "myself" getting stronger, sort of UNDER another "myself" which gets stronger.

I complain less with each daily catbox emptying and each load of dishes washed; these things become easier with patience which it HURTS ME to acquire. But it is acquired, through dissertating, through householding, through these activities which literally BURN THEMSELVES into me, because I don't want to do them, but can't refuse them. Patience is a power which has to be FORCED onto me, but it builds, just like physical strength does.

And while that happens, I do all of my fancy showy vinyasa, and I still climb 5.11, and I still refuse to let the world get slack (which is yet another thing where I fail utterly, but I persist anyway; you'd think I was a big Sam Beckett fan or something).

I'm still physically strong, and I'm still bound and determined to at least tap 3S on the shoulder before I die, even though that means nothing at all. But there is simultaneously strength that I CLAIM as my ego-lion-own, which is true and not to be disregarded, and there is also strength that I do NOT claim as my own, a sort of undercurrent of subterranean strength, which flows along under "me." Householder strength; old age strength; mortality strength. And it sits, until maybe it's needed, and I may well never realize that it's there, and that I've acquired it. In a way, the louder, proclaiming, manifesto-reading "me" sits within that strength, and that silent strength is louder, truer, and more actual than all the strength the avant-garde manifesto-writer declares is so.

A lil' harmless yoga nostalgia for a February night.

I did no asana today, as the electric "look out!" from my left glutes seems to forbid it. But about an hour ago, I felt a long-ago and nearly-forgotten sort of roar from within and realized that this critter still has hunger, and power. "Tomorrow, we HUNT!" came the whisper, and everything was integrated again.

Something like tribal drums and hand-held camera in tall grass, quickly moving, follows that, but I lose track of the subjectivity of it all.

I sometimes--in the depths of November-to-January--doubt my super powers. So far I have always failed the grace test in late fall and winter, the job market test. I do not float the X-wing, and indeed, "that is why you fail." It is not "acquire a job or not," it is "weather this as if there is nothing to weather." To "just be," if you'll pardon the cliche, the same as in July.

But I remembered that, a long time ago, in a carpeted studio which has a handy-dandy webcam for setting off nostalgia trips like this one, I used to do BACK TO BACK Primary series on Sundays. One at about 6:30 am and the next one at about 9:30 am, and I would do full expressions (as many as possible) and jumps back and through for BOTH of those. Roughly three hours of asana in five hours, and probably seventy--count them, SEVENTY--jumps back and through in that time.

Who the hell am I kidding, that I don't have super powers? Those mornings when in sweats and at 60 degrees, I "don't jump back"? That's pure psychology.

I can't decide, sometimes, which life is real. I read studio reviews which say "come join us some morning" and I feel like I ALREADY HAVE, and that's for studios to which I have NEVER BEEN.

But there's never more than that; there's no career, no future, no past; there's just this intimation of community and power. Some kind of pure wisdom-seeking nomadic tribe with rituals and pipes and ways of reading clouds and a trippy Maya-style alphabet where you can create your own sign for different vowels and then integrate your calligraphy literally into a living, breathing alphabet (thank you NOVA for putting that information in my head).

Fantasy lifestyle: full creative power over tradition, instead of obeying systems of long-calcified traditions that haven't taken a breath in CENTURIES. What is wisdom, stays; what is merely habit, disintegrates as needed. I am thinking more here about capitalism than asana practice; in fact, I wasn't thinking at all of asana practice in writing that.

And where that's concerned, I'm not sure I feel the same way, quite.

So what is this turnaround, the famous turnaround, where I switch directions from some life of self-deception toward an honesty that, once novel, now seems awfully FAMILIAR? Which system of unprovability do I choose? Prior life experience becoming manifest? Samyana and siddhis? Reincarnation? Various "realizing oneself" ideals?

What IS the mechanism for sort of "deja vu" and more than vu? Is this a plugging into a Jungian universal mind, the "total being"? Is it, basically, visions of past (or future...does time still exist?) lives, granted as/by siddhis? Is it merely a self-realization? How is it possible that one lives in ignorance for DECADES and suddenly trips over the proper trigger? Is THAT how life "works"?

I said, not long ago--teaching a class--that the type of yoga I do builds all of the energy and wisdom and enlightenment and all of that, FROM physical practice. So the first thing we do is inhale, raise hands overhead.

It isn't the practice itself which is familiar, it's the physical focus, the same thing that is incarnate differently in films like ALTERED STATES, and in the promise that Travis Bickle makes to himself in TAXI DRIVER: no more poisoners of my body. Evey muscle must be tight.

After a few nights at Fight Club, a guy is made of wood.

A man unjustly in prison declares, "I will make my body into a weapon."

All of these (what--archetypes?) are in touch with it, or put me in touch with it, or represent my being in touch with it. A series of quotes and images, collected like totems, fetishes, symbols of the witch doctor's connection. Reminders. I wanted scars and a funky thing that I would wear around my neck to indicate my "station." Witness the seven scars, the tattoo of a one-line eight-pointed star, the other jewelry, the hematite necklace. Not proof; that would be nothing more than wearing pink to indicate gender allegiance (or deviance therefrom). Externalizations.

I feel--and frequently--and more as I get older--that I am INCARNATE in the life that was made of prior ignorance, and more and more, NOT that that life is or was MINE. More like, "I will handle these conditions." Am I just deceiving myself, sort of abandoning a passive responsibility for making my life conditions difficult? Ducking my own responsibility for creating, however passively and soaked in however much fear, what currently surrounds me? Or am I, in my taking up of the financial and the emotional and the other mantles, HEFTING THIS INCARNATION?

Down the line, will THIS BODY also become something "not mine"? In the same way? With the same growing equanimity?

I feel poured into this container. And I sense "myself" as the liquid, not the shape.

The slogans aren't about violence; they never were; it even does them disservice to say they were about focus and intent. They point the way; they were all, at some point early after using my egg teeth (heh!), things I aspired to. Now they are not. Landmarks now.

There is an utter difference between watching live music and dancing to it. Twirlers at psychedelic shows understand this implicitly. On a recent listen to the perennial "Voodoo Chile" (remember, Jimi said, "It's the new American anthem...about a cat buildin' himself up!"), I found that IT listened to ME and not the other way around. If I let the music play, it's just music, background noise. But there is something else to be done, what Whitman called "charge them full with the charge of the soul," and it's like every movement or thought or recall is a strike of Mjolnir upon the ground and cracks spread in every direction.

These same archetypes are everywhere I look, as far back as I want to go. Stomping Tokyo. Dosed with gamma radiation. Red giants. Krakatoa. Jimmy Page's "Heartbreaker" solo. If all of it from here looks like a roadmap toward realizing something, then all of it has to look that way.

That power hefts this incarnation. Don't be deceived by wondering what that power's social function is, as if there's nothing but the sun and a compass. "Who will I be?" It's dishonest even to get a five-year-old to play that rigged game. There's plenty to handle. "But my power isn't FOR that." Don't be fooled by existential agency, either; see the sun? See the compass? Now look around for what ELSE there is. That's right, nothing ceases to exist. And yet--and this is the best part and the hardest nugget--it is STILL TRUE that this power isn't for that!

If the world exists so the seer can see, then the world is imbricated with seeing. It's tempting as hell, but contradictory--and therefore impossible--to believe that only SOME of the world points toward vision. If we object that some of the world is suffering, then we have to accept that it ALL is. If we claim that part of the world points toward our vision and power, then ALL of it does.

The oddest things begin to happen. The hard lines between what makes us suffer and what brings us vision and power, blur. Not all of them, and not consistently, but they blur. One night doing the washing up brings power. One afternoon, strange elevator muzak brings vision. Repeated slogans tumble down and it's a sunny day in a familiar parking lot where everything is mundane and yet everything has an intangible but undeniable slightly over-exposed glow and synaesthetic feel-sound-taste. Then it's gone and we're on to lunch and evening plans or, no wait, nothing but the feel of two fingers coming slowly into contact.

One of those really dumb yoga injuries.

So, Monday night was my first led-some-of-Intermediate in three weeks, due to prior commitments. I was DOWN for it.

Kapo was mediocre, and extra breaths were taken all over the backbends, but it was a big powerful practice.

Krisna Das doing "Om Namah Shivaya" was totally leading us into Ardha Matsyendrasana. The power was there.

So I did Eka Pada on the right side, felt my spine curve over, and sat up and

SHA-ZAM!!

the left glute max spasmed, locked up, with an electric shock of ow! It mellowed out, though, so I did the left side, and that was ok, but Dwi Pada was out of the question.

So let me understand.

I basically had a yoga butt cramp? That's insane. But all day today, it was pretty freakin' painful, because the glute max plays into stability and bipedalism, and working an academic job which is part desk job and part standing lecture, is not easy on it.

Oddly and hilariously, the only thing that feels relaxing on this injury is BACKBENDS. Pigeon is also ok.

I'm hoping tomorrow that all of the electricity will drain out of it overnight and it'll turn into one of those nice friendly "sore muscle only" sensations.

I think it's a freakish one-time injury, because I've been putting my foot behind my head on and off for something like almost 2 years and this has never happened before.

And so be it. I'm taking today off, but aim to practice, as modified as I need, as soon as I can.

Also, today I sent an application off to a uni in the coolest city in the world. Just seconds before my local post office closed. It was cool. I don't think I'll get the gig, but you know the rule: write on the paper. Mail it. Forget about it. If someone calls, it's a miracle. Yippee!

Almost full primary; dropbacks?; the Who; fear and loathing.

How's THAT for a title line?

Today, true to life, I took the Honda to the Y for afternoon practice, in an aerobics room with a few random people stretching and doing that ab-workout-with-a-ball stuff that seems irresistible in all gym environments.

I had a great Primary, up to the second Baddha Konasana when a guy walked in and said, "You've got about ten minutes before we close." A quick conversation revealed that they were closing early for....some football game or something? Eeek. What is wrong with this nation, anyway? Yeah, I know. Game more important than the yogi finishing his own personal sport. So I took two sets of three wheels and once again have to build my backbends up from bent-arm strugglers. This is the perennial roller coaster.

Dropbacks: there is a 3-hour workshop in Columbus, Ohio, on the 11 April. Open to yoga teachers only. The woman doing this show used to be authorized, I think, and let her authorization lapse. In any case, Columbus is a big ashtanga town, and even has a running Mysore program (!). Maybe I'll make a weekend out of it. Columbus is 3 hours from here.

The Who: "Substitute" jumped into my head while I was preparing green beans and mustard dressing and a pan-fried potatoes, and it stayed there throughout food preparation. I've moved on to "The Seeker" for composing this and will likely throw in a "Baba O'Riley" before it's all over.

I've decided that when I can better handle my fear and loathing of America, of capitalism, of Indianapolis, then my backbends will finally come and stay. This insane roller-coaster where my backbends go from "give me Intermediate" quality over to "I'm a beginner" and then see-saw back from the one to the other, must come to an end. This isn't just solipsism--it isn't "my mind determines my reality." It's much more concrete than that. We say "bodymind" to get out of the mind body problem, dig? Well much of the time, and particularly six weeks on either side of the darkest day of the year (a span which crosses roughly Nov 10 to Jan 30), that I live here, I get into deep expanses of frustration and anger. About the desperation in which people live, about financial knife-edge living, about the bottomless depression that is the academic job market. Most broadly, about the fact that I cannot be the witch doctor; I can't be what I KNOW I am, and I can't use the skills I KNOW I have. That's been kicking me in the head since I was about 14. Too big a tiger in way, WAY too small a cage, and it's always been that way. Maybe now that my life responsibility is becoming my own, and my ignorance of how America and my personal life get along is diminishing, the friction will be reduced and fewer sparks will be thrown.

In any case, I am certain that my psychological state influences my backbends, as I keep all my stress-and-woe in my hips. The more pleased I am, the more contentment (even under high demand) I can muster, the better all things are. The more I dig into that long-running frustration, the more tension is going to crank into those hips.

So be it; once again, I learn that everyday life is, in a fashion, the asana practice. I did, however, hit every jump back and through today and did a number of full expressions, and even bound my tricky twists with a handful of fingers (all Maris C and D). It was good. The room was 70, which is decadent warmth for me, and I got a wipe-it-outta-your-eyes sweat on. Heh.

Now if they would just stop closing early for fucking sports events..... :D