These four poses provide an accurate emotional measurement of my whole life. They get into the psoas and outer hips (all of the same magical little muscles and fascia that half-lotus poses do), and that's where I keep all of my stressy business. If I'm practicing regularly and consonantly (there are days when Intermediate, for example, simply isn't consonant with my daily life), then these complicated fascial knots tend to let the energy move through more freely. If I'm either not practicing a lot and/or tied up with frustration about my existence (I'm talking to YOU, Patrick meets seventh series), these same fascial knots load up with dark stressy poison that is painful to acquire and hold and MANY TIMES more painful to then release in Primary during the Mari quartet.
So again today, as so many times before, it was one of THOSE practices.
It's not that I can't do the poses--touch face to shin, put head on floor, bind wrist in all four twists--it's that in stress-releasing poison-liberating practices, these poses release such disgusting emotional stuff that they make me feel like I'm going to actually be physically ill. Doesn't matter how deep the pose is. If, for example, I really ground down the bent-knee foot in Mari A, the psoas contraction gets more attention, and that squeezing is like wringing out a sponge. Out it comes, dark, angry, fearful, vomitive. Gross.
This will pass if I can practice through it for a few days. Rigorous scheduling, as I've said, helps. The summer is no longer a valid practice time. Seventh series rules and seventh series destroys regular practice; it's impossible. As the new semester progresses, I'll forget all about this summer, the same way that I don't remember a single solitary day of summer 2009.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Nice Little Practice, Heroism, Trungpa, etc.
What is doing less than your full practice like? I remember days when it's more like painful surrender: the next pose simply cannot be done. But I also remember days when it's not painful at all, but simply enough.
Through Marichyasana D today, without really any trouble anywhere, but simply sufficient practice. I still do Troy's "fancy exits" from Mari A and C and I try the handstand press, but those things tire me out. They feel like show, although the press is slowly coming. I can take nearly a whole breath with my feet off the floor, but I can't seem to get any more lift. That's interesting enough.
The reason that I work toward full Intermediate in practice is that a few times a week I know I'm simply not going to finish Primary if I start there. It's not that I can't do everything in the sequence, it's that there is too much life for me to take the long-practice-road day to day like that, traditionally. I've tried it, multiple times, and it just can NOT be done with seventh series. If someone out there can do seventh AND a full long practice, go ahead and make me jealous.
Immediately I hear in my head, "Well that's an ego fulfillment thing, right?" and I think that's insane. Who in their right mind would want HARDER poses, one after another, where modifications have to be taken, just, what, in order to say, "I'm this cool"? That's nuts. I think that when a bender wants to be "doing the next sequence" or "getting that pose," it's really a wish to BE SOMEONE who does that pose. It's not ego fulfillment, it's the hungry ghost realm.
As attached to it as I've been, I don't trust the "heroic leap into the impossible" anymore. The one problem I have with Tim's "We must be heroes every day" is that word HEROES. It's the Trungpa that's doing this; that and seventh series and the day-to-day and the deconstruction of what I've called the rockstar/mundanity dichotomy. So I don't see second as an ego fulfillment thing largely because I don't see it as impossible. The more possible, and the more ordinary, it becomes, the less egoistic my practice of it gets.
This will already sound argumentative, analyzable: aren't I just saying that I practice it in order to make it ordinary, when secretly, it's about massive ego aggrandizement? I'm justifying, right?
It's transformation, exactly of those terms: heroic practice to become unheroic, ego transcendence exactly INSTEAD of ego aggrandizement, right in the face of the invitation. Right now it's all defeat: lost the Pasasana wrist, totally lost the Kapo feet, losing the Supta Vajrasana shoulders, losing the breath pace. It's all disappointment.
In the midst of school and seventh series, there's no time to get into outer space from practice; it's got to be strictly contained within its "block" as time becomes rigid. Work stress holds off, bending occurs, bending ends, baby pickup or whatever occurs. Sure, I'll have my tight outer hips from backbending, I'll have those for months, like before, but the practice will become a THING, not a lifestyle. It will become, as Karen put it not long ago, "the work."
The poses will come. Just like before. I got a wrist, I got my feet (not just my toes either, but my damn feet), and so on. And then it's back to course prep or baby care or whatever it is. THAT's the ordinariness, right there.
In the summer it's too tempting to make practice this BREAKOUT activity, the one eruption of a whale from a clear ocean surface, the one high point, the moment of camera clicks on the otherwise somewhat boring trip. That type of heroism is to be done in. Also, the Kapo struggles, where that pose is the FINAL one, like the "final frontier" of Star Trek or the "It's full of stars!" realization from 2001, that's another heroism to be done in. The leap into the impossible.
Kapo's damn hard--harder than Karanda in my body--but it's not impossible.
That's why Intermediate: it's possible and it's potentially ordinary.
Through Marichyasana D today, without really any trouble anywhere, but simply sufficient practice. I still do Troy's "fancy exits" from Mari A and C and I try the handstand press, but those things tire me out. They feel like show, although the press is slowly coming. I can take nearly a whole breath with my feet off the floor, but I can't seem to get any more lift. That's interesting enough.
The reason that I work toward full Intermediate in practice is that a few times a week I know I'm simply not going to finish Primary if I start there. It's not that I can't do everything in the sequence, it's that there is too much life for me to take the long-practice-road day to day like that, traditionally. I've tried it, multiple times, and it just can NOT be done with seventh series. If someone out there can do seventh AND a full long practice, go ahead and make me jealous.
Immediately I hear in my head, "Well that's an ego fulfillment thing, right?" and I think that's insane. Who in their right mind would want HARDER poses, one after another, where modifications have to be taken, just, what, in order to say, "I'm this cool"? That's nuts. I think that when a bender wants to be "doing the next sequence" or "getting that pose," it's really a wish to BE SOMEONE who does that pose. It's not ego fulfillment, it's the hungry ghost realm.
As attached to it as I've been, I don't trust the "heroic leap into the impossible" anymore. The one problem I have with Tim's "We must be heroes every day" is that word HEROES. It's the Trungpa that's doing this; that and seventh series and the day-to-day and the deconstruction of what I've called the rockstar/mundanity dichotomy. So I don't see second as an ego fulfillment thing largely because I don't see it as impossible. The more possible, and the more ordinary, it becomes, the less egoistic my practice of it gets.
This will already sound argumentative, analyzable: aren't I just saying that I practice it in order to make it ordinary, when secretly, it's about massive ego aggrandizement? I'm justifying, right?
It's transformation, exactly of those terms: heroic practice to become unheroic, ego transcendence exactly INSTEAD of ego aggrandizement, right in the face of the invitation. Right now it's all defeat: lost the Pasasana wrist, totally lost the Kapo feet, losing the Supta Vajrasana shoulders, losing the breath pace. It's all disappointment.
In the midst of school and seventh series, there's no time to get into outer space from practice; it's got to be strictly contained within its "block" as time becomes rigid. Work stress holds off, bending occurs, bending ends, baby pickup or whatever occurs. Sure, I'll have my tight outer hips from backbending, I'll have those for months, like before, but the practice will become a THING, not a lifestyle. It will become, as Karen put it not long ago, "the work."
The poses will come. Just like before. I got a wrist, I got my feet (not just my toes either, but my damn feet), and so on. And then it's back to course prep or baby care or whatever it is. THAT's the ordinariness, right there.
In the summer it's too tempting to make practice this BREAKOUT activity, the one eruption of a whale from a clear ocean surface, the one high point, the moment of camera clicks on the otherwise somewhat boring trip. That type of heroism is to be done in. Also, the Kapo struggles, where that pose is the FINAL one, like the "final frontier" of Star Trek or the "It's full of stars!" realization from 2001, that's another heroism to be done in. The leap into the impossible.
Kapo's damn hard--harder than Karanda in my body--but it's not impossible.
That's why Intermediate: it's possible and it's potentially ordinary.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Being A/Your Teacher, Guru, Ego, Trungpa, Relational
Can you tell that I get a backup of delicious things to write when I hold off or get too busy?
Briefly: on teaching yourself and the tradition. On the idea of guru and spiritual friend. An ego simile. Probably a number of Trungpa citations (and more death). Finally, and throughout, "relational" (as opposed to discrete).
Here we go.
Ego first: recently I was thinking of the ego as in a situation of constant threat, an "I" that must always defend itself or conquer something. "High drama," if you will, is the mark of the ego "I." I envisioned it as a human being whose choice is to either grab a hot stove burner, or else release it and drop into a bottomless pit. You can't choose one without pain and you can't do the other without terror. There may well be more apt comparisons, but that one really sings for me. And you (the ego) can spin it: I am not falling! I win! Stuff like that.
This is somewhat related to what Trungpa calls "poverty" in "The Open Way" in CTSM. We envision ourselves as needing MORE, needing SOMETHING ELSE, needing some kind of outside nourishment or information or whatever it is. And don't just pass it off as bad Vedanta, with that stupid catchline, "We are already complete." Trungpa doesn't play this bullshit "complete" card (it's not Buddhists for Jerry Maguire, after all). What he says is, we are rich. We are so rich that compassion is native to us. Apparently in his Shambhala warrior text, he says that surrender for the warrior is a surrender of privacy--we are so busy giving to other people.
*************************
OK, so, as we all are wondering:
"Hey Patrick, WTF is your practice like these days?"
On vacation time from schedule and routine, it's TOTALLY random. When I can't get a box of time from seventh series in order to practice, I do whatever I can whenever I can, in as little time as I can. Most recently I've had something like a 30 minute block in which to do, well, "something." What? Do I do sun salutations? Try to rip off a standing-poses-closing-poses short practice? A Swenson short form? WTF should I do? How am I going to keep up my Kapo work? It's confusion itself.
So I do little blocks of work on whatever it is that I think needs or wants attention. I wanted focus and exploration one day, so I did seven sun salutations (5 and 2) and then the first six poses of Advanced A, which SERIOUSLY revved up some dizzy energy in my whole body. I felt like I was in an inversion for about 45 straight minutes after that. Another day I did four yin-flavored Venki hangbacks in standing, and then the backbends of Intermediate (with no other poses before). Other times I do sun salutations, some or all of standing, and then backbends (which are never quite full expressions with that little warmup) and closing if I have time. I try to include dropping back if I do a fragmentary ashtanga practice. Often I can get some drop-and-stands, but I get crazy aches in the outer hips at night while sleeping, when I don't practice those steadily.
When school begins and regimentation comes with it (and that's a week from today), blocks of time will appear by force. It'll be a very "do or do not" mode of practice, and there won't be time to mess around and half-ass it. I expect this for a schedule:
MW: practice after daycare dropoff.
TR: practice after teaching morning sessions (probably begin at noon).
F: practice after seminar (afternoon practice), then daycare pickup.
S: potentially studio practice.
Su: too much baby; no practice expected (although I do teach).
When it gets too cold to be in the house/outside, I will again retreat to the Y, just like last winter. Exhibitionism central, which it turns out that I enjoyed.
Tradition:
As anyone who reads here frequently enough knows, I have a MOSTLY traditional practice except for backbends, at which point there's a big wiggle-room wedge in how I treat the entire matter of "pose-getting" and all of that.
Primary to Laghuvajrasana is totally locked. All of those poses have been OK'd by the equivalent of a senior teacher. Dropbacks and standing are problematic; I wasn't able to pull a single standup, for example, in TL's room. In a classical (or, if you like, uptight) enough room, I might not be doing any Intermediate. The last time I had regular exposure to a traditional room, which was summer 2008, I was doing up to Kapo and stopping there. TL let me go to Ardha Matsyendrasana but didn't allow the forward bends of Intermediate until the backbends got cleaner. I think I could reasonably expect that to be a stopping point for a while.
BUT
In my actual practice (for example, over last winter and the cold part of spring) I was regularly pulling full Intermediate, with some un-full expressions, such as Kapo to toes or feet (not heels) and Karanda lowering without picking up, and without hands-free-balance in Dwi Pada. None of those really confronted me as impossible. It would simply be a matter of continuing to work, and sure enough, one day outside in White River State Park in June, I balanced Dwi Pada.
This is how my practice becomes untraditional, but that's how I learned Primary, and I know I'm not alone in that. You do the whole thing, modify the hard poses until they come, and build your endurance and breath and flow and then it comes. So I'm doing Intermediate that way, or at least I was. Who knows where my Intermediate will be after a whole scattershot summer of partial fragmentary practices.
With regular practice?
I was getting a Pasasana wrist bind; I was getting up my feet in Kapo; I was getting head to floor in Supta Vajrasana; I was regularly landing Bakasana B within two inches of the armpits and with straight arms; I was hitting full Eka Pada on both sides with a Chakorasana exit; I was lowering Karanda; I was getting knee within two inches of the foot in Vatayanasana on the tight side (touching, on the other); I even held the bind in SUPV a few times.
How open are my hips?
As I said above, twice I've done sun salutations and a little Advanced A. In the second of those practices, I was able to do up through Bhairavasana with lefty behind head and up to but not through that pose, with righty behind head. Extended leg is straight, but floating, in Kasyapasana; with lefty back, gaze is up/back; with righty back, gaze is upwards. Lefty comes to face in Chakorasana, when righty is back; rightly floats about five inches from face, when lefty is back.
Why then do I not fool around more with that sequence?
Advanced A does, admittedly, have a lot of what I'm good at, up front and early. I LOVE putting a foot behind my head and it's getting comfortable. FBH in my body is MILES easier than advanced backbending. So the Advanced A begins with a lot of complicated side planking and FBH, and then moves to arm balances, and it is well-known that I can balance on my hands all day long and into the night. Why then not just go for it? Because I know that when I hit a pose like Viparita Shalabhasana, it's going to be like crashing a car into a stone wall uphill. It's going to be IN-fucking-CONCEIVABLE. It'll be Kapo with interest.
So that's approximately where my practice is.
**********************
What is it to be your own teacher, for an extended period? This is different from extended home practice. If you have a traditional teacher you see once in a while, then I imagine (practices vary, of course) that you'd do what said teacher gives you and then either get more poses when you reappear in that room, or not, and onward you go.
I have no such situation. I have to teach this stuff to myself. How is that done?
One advantage is that I do have traditional experience, so when I get information from some text like Maehle's book or Kino's Intermediate video, I can sort of "translate it" into ashtanga-ese, rather than just saying "Hmm, so I bind the hands behind my back and then take a walk, how interesting...". When trying the new poses out (or trying out new advice in familiar poses) I can think bandhas-dristi-ujjayi and see how it all comes together, get some feeling of how it's hard, how it's easy, what the game of the pose is. This also, with experience, goes for sequences.
Physical sensation also goes a long way toward guiding me (by what you might call the "inner teacher" or even "the guru") to a specific day's practice. Are my hips just generally feeling gluey? Let's do Primary and then see at Setu Bandhasana if I want to add any Intermediate. Am I feeling light, translucent, and practicing regularly? Let's see if I can keep that through a full Intermediate. In this respect, the experience of six years of practice is really an informative guide. Are my dropbacks giving me intense night-time hip pain? Time to work less on the dynamic backbending and more on longer holds (this has, in the past, turned me from full Intermediate back to Primary-to-Kapo). Is Kapo jamming up in a way I can't solve? Time to work on longer, deeper Urdhva Dhanurasanas. And so on. This also brings "life" into the discussion of sequence choice and pose emphasis. I don't generally add non-ashtanga elements unless I'm injured or SERIOUSLY uncomfortable (in which case I might do a Sweeney sequence instead of classical ashtanga).
Doing ashtanga practice while you do seventh series can be done, with a nod to the fact that bad sleep or baby/relationship/life crankiness DOES get into your joints. But in my practice, I need a RIGOROUS schedule; there is nothing more fatal to my discipline than vacation and slack time, where the daycare isn't rigorous or daily and where classes/housework/all the rest of it doesn't have rigid boundaries.
I generally support the "same practice every day, no tangents" approach to practice, but doing that while doing seventh series in a two-job household with a hard-to-get-to-sleep kid and a lot of fucked up emotional stuff going on is not even like doing practice while sailing on rough seas; it's more like doing practice while being avidly attacked by a gang of street thugs. So I have totally surrendered the "tick tock by the clock five breaths, same sequence each day" approach. It simply is not something I can do with this much life action going on. No wonder, so I hear, Darby and wife took five years off from practice when they decided to have kids.
***************************
Trungpa's Chapter 6, "The Hard Way." Two things that are interesting to me. One, the metaphor about the "doctor with a sharp knife." Two, the piece about "love has darkness in it, and one must take an aerial view."
In short, I think Chapter 6 is the proper smackdown of which all vapid bliss junkies have had a desperate need. Your spiritual friend is this doctor who, for your own good and your very life, is going to cut the evil shit right out of you with a sharp knife and no anesthetic. It's not going to be pretty or nice, and this is surrender. Not some fluffy bullshit about "oh, let it go" with your face upturned to the sunlight.
No.
You cling to your evil shit, and you know you do. The ego with its hand on the stove burner. You can't just "surrender" into "bliss" and find inner peace. And you know why? It's because you DON'T WANT INNER PEACE, punk. You DON'T WANT IT. But now it's too late, and you realize, like Kafka's mouse, that you've marched right into the cat's mouth and now you're going to lose that bullshit you don't need, except you can't give it up; it's going to be taken from you. Peeling the ego's hands off that hot burner, and the drop is going to be pure horror.
But here's something I wrote on Facebook a while back:
"Neurotics forget that what they fear, isn't real. Asceticism takes the barest view of reality. Asceticism thus cures neuroticism basically by scaring it to death, which is, scaring it into reality. Because in reality there is no neurotic fear."
This is EXACTLY what my sex-relating samskara terror did.
It grew and swelled and crested over my world and put darkness into every corner of my life. It terrified me to pieces. And then it fell like the heaviest, blackest death you can possibly imagine, and it vanished. And that experience PROFOUNDLY killed something in me, which was the neurotic fear itself.
Or as a brilliant quote from Karen put it long ago, "You piss yourself with bone-shaking terror for a long time, until you finally realize it's all paper, and then you just lift it off."
This is why Chapter 6 ROCKS MY FUCKING SOCKS OFF: it's because it is honest, because it is precisely what we need to hear, and because it is fucking TRUE. He's not mixing metaphors. He is describing EXACTLY what DOES REALLY HAPPEN.
This "excruciating pain"?? That is NOT a fucking metaphor, IT IS NOT ONE.
Chapter 6 is not just advice, not just wisdom, not "to be chewed over" or some shit like that. Chapter 6 is a fucking DOCUMENTARY. I physically experienced, in real time, with my full bodymind, the events relayed in Chapter 6.
Ok.
The other bit about love and darkness? It says (as the whole chapter does) that we shouldn't expect the path to bring us nothing but bliss and joy. In fact, I like how Trunga so far consistently disses bliss. "Sure, you could generate bliss by focusing purely on your own experience, but by the time you achieved it, there would be no one to feel it." He doesn't seem to give a fuck at all about bliss, and I really appreciate that.
It's a bit of an axe to grind on my part. I've been surrounded for too long with "spirtual" people who just bliss out on "letting go" and will tell you at will how glad they are to have "let go" of whatever it is--booze, their past pain, wheat gluten, whatever. It's like Oprah Spirituality(tm). There has been a lot of painful seeking in me, in large part because of blindness, but that's how it has been. I have a thousand metaphors full of pain and drive; a lot of fire, screams, a lot of hell. But also relentlessness, violence, cage-rattling, boundary-breaking, defiance, rage. Endless rage.
And in both lay Christianity and bliss-junkie spirituality, there never seems to be a place for rage. No, that's not quite true. It's something you "grow out of," like the animal body. Or you "achieve union" and "feel peace" and such. No.
No, that's bullshit and I've always known it. Milarepa achieved peace AFTER his murders, not instead of them. He didn't deny them; he took an aerial view. His teacher pushed him to the point of suicide, ran his madness around in circles until it almost closed all the way.
"You find (anger's) true, living quality."
The aerial view is BUILT on a tower of darkness, rage, pain, blindness, frustrations, wrong paths, intentional intensifications of frustration. It is not this blissfest with sunshine-turned faces and empty platitudes that tell us with ease to do things that are, in fact, difficult. Like "letting go."
Through systematic terror--jealousy, fear, financial woe, job search patience, sexual frustration--I reach surrender. Not through some simple-minded "letting go." And it takes fucking YEARS of systematic terror, not just some unpleasant nights.
So Trungpa tells us that love has darkness, has a characteristic that is like other's anger, has "speed and aggression" in it. There is nothing that is, in itself, pure bliss. Fuck playing that game; take an aerial view.
************************************
Death is relational, not a separate, discrete thing. How? Death is a relationship between the ego and the body; the body changes and the ego does not (wish to). This is more useful to us than considering death a discrete thing, because discrete things exist by themselves, and relational things exist only in relation.
It's a philosophical question of sorts, phenomenology. Why is it useful to us? Relational thinking reduces easy dualism. You can take it to anything and it makes it possible to complicate dualism on contact. Us/them. Me/you. Hands/computer. Pose/poser. And because we are dualists (we like that, thanks Descartes), this makes easy material for relational thinking, it's always a possibility to see things in a more interesting way.
Briefly: on teaching yourself and the tradition. On the idea of guru and spiritual friend. An ego simile. Probably a number of Trungpa citations (and more death). Finally, and throughout, "relational" (as opposed to discrete).
Here we go.
Ego first: recently I was thinking of the ego as in a situation of constant threat, an "I" that must always defend itself or conquer something. "High drama," if you will, is the mark of the ego "I." I envisioned it as a human being whose choice is to either grab a hot stove burner, or else release it and drop into a bottomless pit. You can't choose one without pain and you can't do the other without terror. There may well be more apt comparisons, but that one really sings for me. And you (the ego) can spin it: I am not falling! I win! Stuff like that.
This is somewhat related to what Trungpa calls "poverty" in "The Open Way" in CTSM. We envision ourselves as needing MORE, needing SOMETHING ELSE, needing some kind of outside nourishment or information or whatever it is. And don't just pass it off as bad Vedanta, with that stupid catchline, "We are already complete." Trungpa doesn't play this bullshit "complete" card (it's not Buddhists for Jerry Maguire, after all). What he says is, we are rich. We are so rich that compassion is native to us. Apparently in his Shambhala warrior text, he says that surrender for the warrior is a surrender of privacy--we are so busy giving to other people.
*************************
OK, so, as we all are wondering:
"Hey Patrick, WTF is your practice like these days?"
On vacation time from schedule and routine, it's TOTALLY random. When I can't get a box of time from seventh series in order to practice, I do whatever I can whenever I can, in as little time as I can. Most recently I've had something like a 30 minute block in which to do, well, "something." What? Do I do sun salutations? Try to rip off a standing-poses-closing-poses short practice? A Swenson short form? WTF should I do? How am I going to keep up my Kapo work? It's confusion itself.
So I do little blocks of work on whatever it is that I think needs or wants attention. I wanted focus and exploration one day, so I did seven sun salutations (5 and 2) and then the first six poses of Advanced A, which SERIOUSLY revved up some dizzy energy in my whole body. I felt like I was in an inversion for about 45 straight minutes after that. Another day I did four yin-flavored Venki hangbacks in standing, and then the backbends of Intermediate (with no other poses before). Other times I do sun salutations, some or all of standing, and then backbends (which are never quite full expressions with that little warmup) and closing if I have time. I try to include dropping back if I do a fragmentary ashtanga practice. Often I can get some drop-and-stands, but I get crazy aches in the outer hips at night while sleeping, when I don't practice those steadily.
When school begins and regimentation comes with it (and that's a week from today), blocks of time will appear by force. It'll be a very "do or do not" mode of practice, and there won't be time to mess around and half-ass it. I expect this for a schedule:
MW: practice after daycare dropoff.
TR: practice after teaching morning sessions (probably begin at noon).
F: practice after seminar (afternoon practice), then daycare pickup.
S: potentially studio practice.
Su: too much baby; no practice expected (although I do teach).
When it gets too cold to be in the house/outside, I will again retreat to the Y, just like last winter. Exhibitionism central, which it turns out that I enjoyed.
Tradition:
As anyone who reads here frequently enough knows, I have a MOSTLY traditional practice except for backbends, at which point there's a big wiggle-room wedge in how I treat the entire matter of "pose-getting" and all of that.
Primary to Laghuvajrasana is totally locked. All of those poses have been OK'd by the equivalent of a senior teacher. Dropbacks and standing are problematic; I wasn't able to pull a single standup, for example, in TL's room. In a classical (or, if you like, uptight) enough room, I might not be doing any Intermediate. The last time I had regular exposure to a traditional room, which was summer 2008, I was doing up to Kapo and stopping there. TL let me go to Ardha Matsyendrasana but didn't allow the forward bends of Intermediate until the backbends got cleaner. I think I could reasonably expect that to be a stopping point for a while.
BUT
In my actual practice (for example, over last winter and the cold part of spring) I was regularly pulling full Intermediate, with some un-full expressions, such as Kapo to toes or feet (not heels) and Karanda lowering without picking up, and without hands-free-balance in Dwi Pada. None of those really confronted me as impossible. It would simply be a matter of continuing to work, and sure enough, one day outside in White River State Park in June, I balanced Dwi Pada.
This is how my practice becomes untraditional, but that's how I learned Primary, and I know I'm not alone in that. You do the whole thing, modify the hard poses until they come, and build your endurance and breath and flow and then it comes. So I'm doing Intermediate that way, or at least I was. Who knows where my Intermediate will be after a whole scattershot summer of partial fragmentary practices.
With regular practice?
I was getting a Pasasana wrist bind; I was getting up my feet in Kapo; I was getting head to floor in Supta Vajrasana; I was regularly landing Bakasana B within two inches of the armpits and with straight arms; I was hitting full Eka Pada on both sides with a Chakorasana exit; I was lowering Karanda; I was getting knee within two inches of the foot in Vatayanasana on the tight side (touching, on the other); I even held the bind in SUPV a few times.
How open are my hips?
As I said above, twice I've done sun salutations and a little Advanced A. In the second of those practices, I was able to do up through Bhairavasana with lefty behind head and up to but not through that pose, with righty behind head. Extended leg is straight, but floating, in Kasyapasana; with lefty back, gaze is up/back; with righty back, gaze is upwards. Lefty comes to face in Chakorasana, when righty is back; rightly floats about five inches from face, when lefty is back.
Why then do I not fool around more with that sequence?
Advanced A does, admittedly, have a lot of what I'm good at, up front and early. I LOVE putting a foot behind my head and it's getting comfortable. FBH in my body is MILES easier than advanced backbending. So the Advanced A begins with a lot of complicated side planking and FBH, and then moves to arm balances, and it is well-known that I can balance on my hands all day long and into the night. Why then not just go for it? Because I know that when I hit a pose like Viparita Shalabhasana, it's going to be like crashing a car into a stone wall uphill. It's going to be IN-fucking-CONCEIVABLE. It'll be Kapo with interest.
So that's approximately where my practice is.
**********************
What is it to be your own teacher, for an extended period? This is different from extended home practice. If you have a traditional teacher you see once in a while, then I imagine (practices vary, of course) that you'd do what said teacher gives you and then either get more poses when you reappear in that room, or not, and onward you go.
I have no such situation. I have to teach this stuff to myself. How is that done?
One advantage is that I do have traditional experience, so when I get information from some text like Maehle's book or Kino's Intermediate video, I can sort of "translate it" into ashtanga-ese, rather than just saying "Hmm, so I bind the hands behind my back and then take a walk, how interesting...". When trying the new poses out (or trying out new advice in familiar poses) I can think bandhas-dristi-ujjayi and see how it all comes together, get some feeling of how it's hard, how it's easy, what the game of the pose is. This also, with experience, goes for sequences.
Physical sensation also goes a long way toward guiding me (by what you might call the "inner teacher" or even "the guru") to a specific day's practice. Are my hips just generally feeling gluey? Let's do Primary and then see at Setu Bandhasana if I want to add any Intermediate. Am I feeling light, translucent, and practicing regularly? Let's see if I can keep that through a full Intermediate. In this respect, the experience of six years of practice is really an informative guide. Are my dropbacks giving me intense night-time hip pain? Time to work less on the dynamic backbending and more on longer holds (this has, in the past, turned me from full Intermediate back to Primary-to-Kapo). Is Kapo jamming up in a way I can't solve? Time to work on longer, deeper Urdhva Dhanurasanas. And so on. This also brings "life" into the discussion of sequence choice and pose emphasis. I don't generally add non-ashtanga elements unless I'm injured or SERIOUSLY uncomfortable (in which case I might do a Sweeney sequence instead of classical ashtanga).
Doing ashtanga practice while you do seventh series can be done, with a nod to the fact that bad sleep or baby/relationship/life crankiness DOES get into your joints. But in my practice, I need a RIGOROUS schedule; there is nothing more fatal to my discipline than vacation and slack time, where the daycare isn't rigorous or daily and where classes/housework/all the rest of it doesn't have rigid boundaries.
I generally support the "same practice every day, no tangents" approach to practice, but doing that while doing seventh series in a two-job household with a hard-to-get-to-sleep kid and a lot of fucked up emotional stuff going on is not even like doing practice while sailing on rough seas; it's more like doing practice while being avidly attacked by a gang of street thugs. So I have totally surrendered the "tick tock by the clock five breaths, same sequence each day" approach. It simply is not something I can do with this much life action going on. No wonder, so I hear, Darby and wife took five years off from practice when they decided to have kids.
***************************
Trungpa's Chapter 6, "The Hard Way." Two things that are interesting to me. One, the metaphor about the "doctor with a sharp knife." Two, the piece about "love has darkness in it, and one must take an aerial view."
In short, I think Chapter 6 is the proper smackdown of which all vapid bliss junkies have had a desperate need. Your spiritual friend is this doctor who, for your own good and your very life, is going to cut the evil shit right out of you with a sharp knife and no anesthetic. It's not going to be pretty or nice, and this is surrender. Not some fluffy bullshit about "oh, let it go" with your face upturned to the sunlight.
No.
You cling to your evil shit, and you know you do. The ego with its hand on the stove burner. You can't just "surrender" into "bliss" and find inner peace. And you know why? It's because you DON'T WANT INNER PEACE, punk. You DON'T WANT IT. But now it's too late, and you realize, like Kafka's mouse, that you've marched right into the cat's mouth and now you're going to lose that bullshit you don't need, except you can't give it up; it's going to be taken from you. Peeling the ego's hands off that hot burner, and the drop is going to be pure horror.
But here's something I wrote on Facebook a while back:
"Neurotics forget that what they fear, isn't real. Asceticism takes the barest view of reality. Asceticism thus cures neuroticism basically by scaring it to death, which is, scaring it into reality. Because in reality there is no neurotic fear."
This is EXACTLY what my sex-relating samskara terror did.
It grew and swelled and crested over my world and put darkness into every corner of my life. It terrified me to pieces. And then it fell like the heaviest, blackest death you can possibly imagine, and it vanished. And that experience PROFOUNDLY killed something in me, which was the neurotic fear itself.
Or as a brilliant quote from Karen put it long ago, "You piss yourself with bone-shaking terror for a long time, until you finally realize it's all paper, and then you just lift it off."
This is why Chapter 6 ROCKS MY FUCKING SOCKS OFF: it's because it is honest, because it is precisely what we need to hear, and because it is fucking TRUE. He's not mixing metaphors. He is describing EXACTLY what DOES REALLY HAPPEN.
This "excruciating pain"?? That is NOT a fucking metaphor, IT IS NOT ONE.
Chapter 6 is not just advice, not just wisdom, not "to be chewed over" or some shit like that. Chapter 6 is a fucking DOCUMENTARY. I physically experienced, in real time, with my full bodymind, the events relayed in Chapter 6.
Ok.
The other bit about love and darkness? It says (as the whole chapter does) that we shouldn't expect the path to bring us nothing but bliss and joy. In fact, I like how Trunga so far consistently disses bliss. "Sure, you could generate bliss by focusing purely on your own experience, but by the time you achieved it, there would be no one to feel it." He doesn't seem to give a fuck at all about bliss, and I really appreciate that.
It's a bit of an axe to grind on my part. I've been surrounded for too long with "spirtual" people who just bliss out on "letting go" and will tell you at will how glad they are to have "let go" of whatever it is--booze, their past pain, wheat gluten, whatever. It's like Oprah Spirituality(tm). There has been a lot of painful seeking in me, in large part because of blindness, but that's how it has been. I have a thousand metaphors full of pain and drive; a lot of fire, screams, a lot of hell. But also relentlessness, violence, cage-rattling, boundary-breaking, defiance, rage. Endless rage.
And in both lay Christianity and bliss-junkie spirituality, there never seems to be a place for rage. No, that's not quite true. It's something you "grow out of," like the animal body. Or you "achieve union" and "feel peace" and such. No.
No, that's bullshit and I've always known it. Milarepa achieved peace AFTER his murders, not instead of them. He didn't deny them; he took an aerial view. His teacher pushed him to the point of suicide, ran his madness around in circles until it almost closed all the way.
"You find (anger's) true, living quality."
The aerial view is BUILT on a tower of darkness, rage, pain, blindness, frustrations, wrong paths, intentional intensifications of frustration. It is not this blissfest with sunshine-turned faces and empty platitudes that tell us with ease to do things that are, in fact, difficult. Like "letting go."
Through systematic terror--jealousy, fear, financial woe, job search patience, sexual frustration--I reach surrender. Not through some simple-minded "letting go." And it takes fucking YEARS of systematic terror, not just some unpleasant nights.
So Trungpa tells us that love has darkness, has a characteristic that is like other's anger, has "speed and aggression" in it. There is nothing that is, in itself, pure bliss. Fuck playing that game; take an aerial view.
************************************
Death is relational, not a separate, discrete thing. How? Death is a relationship between the ego and the body; the body changes and the ego does not (wish to). This is more useful to us than considering death a discrete thing, because discrete things exist by themselves, and relational things exist only in relation.
It's a philosophical question of sorts, phenomenology. Why is it useful to us? Relational thinking reduces easy dualism. You can take it to anything and it makes it possible to complicate dualism on contact. Us/them. Me/you. Hands/computer. Pose/poser. And because we are dualists (we like that, thanks Descartes), this makes easy material for relational thinking, it's always a possibility to see things in a more interesting way.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Reader request: first round!
Ok, between my own life experience and responses to the prior post, it's going to be a little Anusara, a little illusion/reality/asana and a pack of seventh series.
Anusara: the best ranting about this that I've seen recently is here.
Good stuff on Primary and especially on illusion/reality/asana (and good stuff generally tends to appear here) can be found here.
There, that wasn't too hard.
Let's return to this "death" business that I've been going on about for a few months, but with some Trungpa added in. I'll write the teacher/guru bit after this.
Trungpa says that one unmasks; that this process is a continual set of painful disappointments. He also says that the spiritual path is like a doctor operating on your illnesses without anesthesia. These both speak to my seventh series experience.
Death: it isn't that everything in my existence has a funereal pallor; it's much more about the interior than the exterior. How did this work? I'm trying to recover the dynamic and it's just coming out a blur. In large part this is because my internal organs are still knotted up right now with the fallout of what might be a wheat allergy; on every occasion, about 36 hours of clogged organs. Gross.
Anyway:
What began in the latter half of 2008 as some sustained sexual frustration (when our pregnancy began) later picked up a whole entourage of demons from the past (samskaras, if you will), about being worthy (of love, essentially), about identity as a sexual being (which for me even in terms of heterosexual practice had a very "coming out" flavor to it and took me until my 30s to lock down), and quite a bit about relationships and sex droughts and miscommunication (read: bad marriage here). A LOT of demons came out of that.
Somewhere in here, probably four months ago or so, maybe more, there's a post where I get some discriminative knowledge about my drive for sexual experience and my own identity. Basically in that post I pull out the drive and look at it, see it as something different, not-me.
That began to crack the pain, sort of jnana-yoga-style. "Who is feeling?" and that variety of question. By April 2010 I was claiming "ascetic practice" as my own (and doing so in Facebook status updates, which perhaps only I understood, but that's ok, because I do love being obtuse). Some time around right now it's 700 days of sparse sexual activity and miscommunication and not having time for each other, although we do get in a good conversation (even if it's about etymology or something) now and then between baby care and work and running hither and yon.
So what is the "death" bit all about, then?
It's in part "identity loss," as my climber-yogi-lover triad had to give way, mostly due to time demands, to partner-father. I kept "yogi," I latched onto it hard, felt like a skiier going over a cliff reaching for the famous Warner Brothers cartoon branch down there, you know?
But it's also--and more interestingly--the knowledge that that triad was a mask that I wore, and now that I KNOW it's a mask, I can't put it on the same way, cannot believe the same things about myself, cannot BE the same person. This is opening, pretty much EXACTLY as Trungpa talks about it (or, if it's not, it's as close as I can imagine getting).
The surrender was agony; still is. But not as much. Not with as much confusion, not buried as deep in the demon hordes as before.
Where and how are the good things in my life?
Oddly, they are all still right there, where I left them. This is the magic of the thing, the sort of wonderfulness of "ordinariness."
If you just take ME out of the view of my life, if it were possible to see my existence without the FILTERS OF MY LOOKING AT IT, then it all does look quite fine.
I climbed in Seattle, and it was magnificent. I went back the same night and mastered some boulder problems that I'd tried out that morning. I used to see climbing as part of, well, not a "spiritual thing" but as part of my overall quest, mastery-unto-defeat, what I've earlier here called a "quest for the impossible."
The first thing that ordinariness (again, taking it from Trungpa) does is to reduce the stratospheric level of visions like that. So much of self-aggrandizement is built up like legends, like archetypes: Beowulf, Cuchullain, take your pick. Arthur. Or follow my 2003 poster acquisition into it: Durden, Bickle, and oddly (but not if you're me), Harry Dean Stanton from Paris, Texas.
Self-aggrandizement in ego terms is the nobility of all that happens to "I." I am suffering, I have had this bad relationship, I am conquering, I am liberating, I am getting the next highest grade of boulder problem or the next series of yoga asana.
Cracking those multiple layers of armor (what Trungpa says is "wearing cement") is real pain. Giving up the triad, the warrior face, which is built on the suffering face of the massive headfuck relationship, which was built on the past sexual frustration of adolescence, the determined face of "making the relationship work," of "living in the salad days." All of the layers of armor come from Catholic neurosis planted early, come from adolescence's reckoning with fire. And it's not a Freudian thing; one doesn't need to "go deep" to get INSIDE it, because one is already inside it. The armor layers are ACCUMULATED not installed, not interior. It's not a depth dive to the inner child; it's more like dropping a microphone down a well that the scared soul built AROUND ITSELF.
Or as Pink Floyd would put it, about cracking "some bugger's wall." Pigs on the wing.
Maybe someone young and scared began putting on the armor that became this brick house (hah!) but now as it cracks, we find someone older. Hands that cling to plastic holds, and calves that go behind the head. These skill sets are new. We will never find the "original," because the armor we put on is not a cocoon, it's not a caterpillar-butterfly metaphor.
Sure, I don't want to do the crying-baby-care or the 3 am bottle go-back-to-sleep ritual or for that matter, maybe I don't want to put up with the whole thing and the hard relationship or whatever, but that's ok, I don't want to go to jury duty or teach an auditorium full of first-year students either. But compose your ideal life in your head and you will STILL find things you don't want to do. "I don't want to sweep out the entry to the cave today." "I don't want to fix the holo-deck today." Whatever it is.
You take "want" or "I'm angry at" or "I'm upset about" and you find what Trungpa calls "its real living quality." He was writing about anger, I think in one of the Q and A sessions, when he said that. Don't judge it or refuse it, but instead find its real living quality. I love that sentence endlessly.
Let me give you an example: maybe a month ago I was giving the 2 am crying baby a bottle to get him back to sleep (because that's the only way it can be done). Crying hurts my ears, makes my nerves turn to knives; it's a thoroughly unpleasant noise and I REALLY dislike it and can't wait for it to end. So this night I'm trying to find a way to get over it, above it, past it, somehow around it. It occurs to me, "wait, what if this crying were the sound of the unenlightened mind? All the crying that those in darkness do, you included. Your own whining about this noise. Reinforces it." That came out of nowhere. And instantly it turned up compassion in me, not specifically for the boy, but for all of the unenlightened, for myself as unenlightened. It totally shut off distaste and don't-wanna and it turned on something else. And I put the boy down and went back to bed.
Now, I deceived myself there. One crying child is NOT, of course, the total sound of the unenlightened. But that doesn't matter; it's not the accuracy, it's the EFFECT. It made me compassionate, took me totally away from "I am pained, oh woe" to something else, something that serves better with no resentment.
Kriyananda would say that serving when you don't want to is a sattwic thing, you make the sattwic choice and this helps it become habitual so that you develop a, if you will, "sattwic habit." The real living quality of my wish not to do, is simply inertia. "I'm not interested in that, that's unpleasant." But climbing walls is hard and not always pleasant, and I'm interested in that. I'm even interested in showing other people how to do it, that's why I set routes. That's, more generally, why I teach. It IS, true, in part because "I" like it, but it's also serving.
So where is the good? All around. Everywhere. For example, I'm to water the garden this morning. I don't REALLY want to, but I'll just sunscreen up and go out there and do it. Living in ordinariness doesn't require desire. Say that again.
And I think that the world of death I've been so keen to describe and delineate is the replacement of a world of desire, of hard-earned gratification (I got to the top! I did the pose! I did thing Y in position X!), with a world of ordinariness. It'll require more unmasking to turn it all the way over. More unmasking is more pain, and more death. But there's life all the time all around it. Even a man buried in sixteen feet of cement armor (a man that un-naked, that heavily clothed) DOES things, can have a conversation with his partner, can water a garden.
Anusara: the best ranting about this that I've seen recently is here.
Good stuff on Primary and especially on illusion/reality/asana (and good stuff generally tends to appear here) can be found here.
There, that wasn't too hard.
Let's return to this "death" business that I've been going on about for a few months, but with some Trungpa added in. I'll write the teacher/guru bit after this.
Trungpa says that one unmasks; that this process is a continual set of painful disappointments. He also says that the spiritual path is like a doctor operating on your illnesses without anesthesia. These both speak to my seventh series experience.
Death: it isn't that everything in my existence has a funereal pallor; it's much more about the interior than the exterior. How did this work? I'm trying to recover the dynamic and it's just coming out a blur. In large part this is because my internal organs are still knotted up right now with the fallout of what might be a wheat allergy; on every occasion, about 36 hours of clogged organs. Gross.
Anyway:
What began in the latter half of 2008 as some sustained sexual frustration (when our pregnancy began) later picked up a whole entourage of demons from the past (samskaras, if you will), about being worthy (of love, essentially), about identity as a sexual being (which for me even in terms of heterosexual practice had a very "coming out" flavor to it and took me until my 30s to lock down), and quite a bit about relationships and sex droughts and miscommunication (read: bad marriage here). A LOT of demons came out of that.
Somewhere in here, probably four months ago or so, maybe more, there's a post where I get some discriminative knowledge about my drive for sexual experience and my own identity. Basically in that post I pull out the drive and look at it, see it as something different, not-me.
That began to crack the pain, sort of jnana-yoga-style. "Who is feeling?" and that variety of question. By April 2010 I was claiming "ascetic practice" as my own (and doing so in Facebook status updates, which perhaps only I understood, but that's ok, because I do love being obtuse). Some time around right now it's 700 days of sparse sexual activity and miscommunication and not having time for each other, although we do get in a good conversation (even if it's about etymology or something) now and then between baby care and work and running hither and yon.
So what is the "death" bit all about, then?
It's in part "identity loss," as my climber-yogi-lover triad had to give way, mostly due to time demands, to partner-father. I kept "yogi," I latched onto it hard, felt like a skiier going over a cliff reaching for the famous Warner Brothers cartoon branch down there, you know?
But it's also--and more interestingly--the knowledge that that triad was a mask that I wore, and now that I KNOW it's a mask, I can't put it on the same way, cannot believe the same things about myself, cannot BE the same person. This is opening, pretty much EXACTLY as Trungpa talks about it (or, if it's not, it's as close as I can imagine getting).
The surrender was agony; still is. But not as much. Not with as much confusion, not buried as deep in the demon hordes as before.
Where and how are the good things in my life?
Oddly, they are all still right there, where I left them. This is the magic of the thing, the sort of wonderfulness of "ordinariness."
If you just take ME out of the view of my life, if it were possible to see my existence without the FILTERS OF MY LOOKING AT IT, then it all does look quite fine.
I climbed in Seattle, and it was magnificent. I went back the same night and mastered some boulder problems that I'd tried out that morning. I used to see climbing as part of, well, not a "spiritual thing" but as part of my overall quest, mastery-unto-defeat, what I've earlier here called a "quest for the impossible."
The first thing that ordinariness (again, taking it from Trungpa) does is to reduce the stratospheric level of visions like that. So much of self-aggrandizement is built up like legends, like archetypes: Beowulf, Cuchullain, take your pick. Arthur. Or follow my 2003 poster acquisition into it: Durden, Bickle, and oddly (but not if you're me), Harry Dean Stanton from Paris, Texas.
Self-aggrandizement in ego terms is the nobility of all that happens to "I." I am suffering, I have had this bad relationship, I am conquering, I am liberating, I am getting the next highest grade of boulder problem or the next series of yoga asana.
Cracking those multiple layers of armor (what Trungpa says is "wearing cement") is real pain. Giving up the triad, the warrior face, which is built on the suffering face of the massive headfuck relationship, which was built on the past sexual frustration of adolescence, the determined face of "making the relationship work," of "living in the salad days." All of the layers of armor come from Catholic neurosis planted early, come from adolescence's reckoning with fire. And it's not a Freudian thing; one doesn't need to "go deep" to get INSIDE it, because one is already inside it. The armor layers are ACCUMULATED not installed, not interior. It's not a depth dive to the inner child; it's more like dropping a microphone down a well that the scared soul built AROUND ITSELF.
Or as Pink Floyd would put it, about cracking "some bugger's wall." Pigs on the wing.
Maybe someone young and scared began putting on the armor that became this brick house (hah!) but now as it cracks, we find someone older. Hands that cling to plastic holds, and calves that go behind the head. These skill sets are new. We will never find the "original," because the armor we put on is not a cocoon, it's not a caterpillar-butterfly metaphor.
Sure, I don't want to do the crying-baby-care or the 3 am bottle go-back-to-sleep ritual or for that matter, maybe I don't want to put up with the whole thing and the hard relationship or whatever, but that's ok, I don't want to go to jury duty or teach an auditorium full of first-year students either. But compose your ideal life in your head and you will STILL find things you don't want to do. "I don't want to sweep out the entry to the cave today." "I don't want to fix the holo-deck today." Whatever it is.
You take "want" or "I'm angry at" or "I'm upset about" and you find what Trungpa calls "its real living quality." He was writing about anger, I think in one of the Q and A sessions, when he said that. Don't judge it or refuse it, but instead find its real living quality. I love that sentence endlessly.
Let me give you an example: maybe a month ago I was giving the 2 am crying baby a bottle to get him back to sleep (because that's the only way it can be done). Crying hurts my ears, makes my nerves turn to knives; it's a thoroughly unpleasant noise and I REALLY dislike it and can't wait for it to end. So this night I'm trying to find a way to get over it, above it, past it, somehow around it. It occurs to me, "wait, what if this crying were the sound of the unenlightened mind? All the crying that those in darkness do, you included. Your own whining about this noise. Reinforces it." That came out of nowhere. And instantly it turned up compassion in me, not specifically for the boy, but for all of the unenlightened, for myself as unenlightened. It totally shut off distaste and don't-wanna and it turned on something else. And I put the boy down and went back to bed.
Now, I deceived myself there. One crying child is NOT, of course, the total sound of the unenlightened. But that doesn't matter; it's not the accuracy, it's the EFFECT. It made me compassionate, took me totally away from "I am pained, oh woe" to something else, something that serves better with no resentment.
Kriyananda would say that serving when you don't want to is a sattwic thing, you make the sattwic choice and this helps it become habitual so that you develop a, if you will, "sattwic habit." The real living quality of my wish not to do, is simply inertia. "I'm not interested in that, that's unpleasant." But climbing walls is hard and not always pleasant, and I'm interested in that. I'm even interested in showing other people how to do it, that's why I set routes. That's, more generally, why I teach. It IS, true, in part because "I" like it, but it's also serving.
So where is the good? All around. Everywhere. For example, I'm to water the garden this morning. I don't REALLY want to, but I'll just sunscreen up and go out there and do it. Living in ordinariness doesn't require desire. Say that again.
And I think that the world of death I've been so keen to describe and delineate is the replacement of a world of desire, of hard-earned gratification (I got to the top! I did the pose! I did thing Y in position X!), with a world of ordinariness. It'll require more unmasking to turn it all the way over. More unmasking is more pain, and more death. But there's life all the time all around it. Even a man buried in sixteen feet of cement armor (a man that un-naked, that heavily clothed) DOES things, can have a conversation with his partner, can water a garden.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Ok 20 followers and regular readers, what do you want to see here?
Let's be democratic about my blog writing for a while, shall we? I'll tell you now, you want to take advantage of this, because you know I have monarchic tendencies when I write :)
What do you people want to read here? Shoot, it's wide open. Here's some stuff that I regularly have on deck:
Chogyam Trungpa (reading quite a bit of that these days).
Kid stuff, family stuff, you know, "the stuff."
Practice stuff, asana porn (no, not actual porn, yeah, thanks spammers).
I could probably produce a rant about Anusara (c. NYT piece).
I'm open to suggestions.
On being a teacher/one's own teacher/home practice/guru-teacher/etc.
Warning: Trungpa piece is in the works, but I need time and a copy of the book computerside so I can quote from pages.
What do you people want to read here? Shoot, it's wide open. Here's some stuff that I regularly have on deck:
Chogyam Trungpa (reading quite a bit of that these days).
Kid stuff, family stuff, you know, "the stuff."
Practice stuff, asana porn (no, not actual porn, yeah, thanks spammers).
I could probably produce a rant about Anusara (c. NYT piece).
I'm open to suggestions.
On being a teacher/one's own teacher/home practice/guru-teacher/etc.
Warning: Trungpa piece is in the works, but I need time and a copy of the book computerside so I can quote from pages.
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