Got schooled by the Intermediate series, and only up to Karanda, too. Sure, I got an assist past the toes in Kapo, and the backbends were quite nice, but the bandhas were falling short from Bakasana on, and the outer hips were so busy processing long-term seated grading stress that they were useless in the Tittibhasanas, and I had to come out of that sequence, which hasn't happened in over a year. Hard to Pincha (which it NEVER is) and no Karanda lotus. And then I just did not have backbends in me, and that never happens.
This is all from not practicing much, although I did have a delicious studio Primary on Saturday.
Speaking of which,
Something complicated is going on with ego/other selfhood, pain, loss, and so on. A rephrase of the earlier "things are dying" complaint of the last two years, but it's messy because "I" both feel the pain and realize that the pain is felt SOMEWHERE ELSE. This is not a thing that can be intellectualized into sense.
If it were, I could just say, "feel over there" and make it better, but I can't.
It's like I said before, act of STEERING.
I feel pain, and I feel SOMEONE ELSE feel it. Partly in the ego, partly outside it (apparently; what the hell is OUTSIDE the ego anyway?).
And from the prior post on energetics: a loss of practice and practice time and energy, but of course, not a loss. Not really. An ego loss, the fading of a credential. But that's real. Or is it? In part yes, and in part no. And it's BOTH, both at once.
Western logic does not easily account for such things.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
The Energetics of Seventh Series
Let's take apart this idea that asana practice is separate from daily life. Ways that I've seen the two separated, usually come in rhetoric like "life gets in the way of my practice" in various formulations. I've certainly said such things many times here.
But also, let's take apart the idea that life "is the yoga." That's easy to say, but really, running hither and yon is not Janu Sirsasana B, for example. There is of course discrimination to be earned in everything from driving around to making food, and one can make any aspect of existence into "one's meditation," as Trungpa put it, but for ashtangis specifically, life is NOT the asana practice. The ASANA practice is the asana practice.
Then again we run into the first idea, separation, as if one's physical practice is never impeded or influenced by daily life (which, of course, it is).
**********************
This put me in a mind to try to discuss the "energetics" of seventh series. One of the main things about being a parent is that you lack free time in a way which non-parents ABSOLUTELY cannot understand.
When, for example, you're writing a dissertation, you might try to write every day, and you find good times of day and bad times of day (I'm good from about 7-10 am, those are key writing hours). But if you miss a day, nothing bad happens unless you have a deadline or a conscience that cares.
In parenting, you're on every day, no matter what. Fever? Still must parent, change diapers, drive that kid to daycare, whatever it is. Cold with sinus nonsense? No excuse. Still must act, persist, make it so. When you're writing a dissertation, you can usually take time off. In fact, I can think of NOTHING else that requires the on-ness that parenting does, simply in terms of time demands.
A usual weekday in my house goes something like this:
*rise 6:00 to 6:30ish, somewhere in there
*by 7:30, breakfast assembly, child woken and changed and dressed
*drive north 6 miles to daycare, maybe 2 more miles to practice, 9-11 am
OR
*go to school, give morning lectures, 9-12 pm
THEN
*drive north 8 miles, practice, 1-3 pm or thereabouts
OR
*go to school-or-home and tend email, recommendations, other business
*pick up kid between 3 and 5 pm
*give snack, play and entertain and enjoy, 4-6 pm
*give dinner, try also to feed the grownups, 6-7 pm
*bathe kid, read books w/, play and entertain, 7-8 pm
*put child to bed (if this is easy, 10 min; if it's hard, 1 hour)
*do any necessary life/work tasks, 8-10 pm
*crashing by 10 pm almost every weekday night
There is NO personal time in that schedule aside from asana practice, but that's also rigorously scheduled and constantly being pressured by email, work, grading and so on. I find that if I don't make any time to sit and relax and recoup, this quickly leads to hardcore energy burnout. It's very hard to surf that kinda rigor.
I also try to take a Monday night yoga class, I teach a 3-hour seminar on Tuesday nights, and I teach the yoga on Wednesday nights, which means J does often those three nights solo, so I come home at 8 and clean up yogurt and kitchen dishes and so forth, and housework simply takes up the spare time (to the degree that there was any).
*******************************
It is very hard to make asana practice just "doing the work," as I prefer to think about it (thanks Karen). Doing the asana work is surrounded, completely, by doing the housework and doing the grading work and doing the teaching work. It's nothing BUT work. But thinking of asana practice as "play" is deadly because then it has to be an escape from work, it has to be "leisure" and most days, Marichyasana D simply isn't quite leisure. Trying to advance the backbends as I try and fail to convince myself that Kapotasana is "just another pose" isn't quite leisure. I do enjoy it, but often, my asana practice has a certain level of stress in it. I feel this some days so keenly that I just give up early and backbend.
******************************
So on an energetic level, asana practice works best as a thing where I focus for as many poses as I can. Presentness and breathing. That also works best with housework, like washing dishes. Sure, there are ten thousand things I "should be doing" and of course I'm thinking about the sketchy educational possibilities for the kid in Indiana (47th, usually, in educational quality, nationwide) and how I need to kick up my research agenda so we can move to the Northwest, and all of that future business. That's a big, big stressor, "the future." One has to keep an eye on it, to set an intention, but one can't worry about it and continue to parent, that's madness coming.
********************************
"What am I going to do today, what will my practice be?" I'm determined not to ask that or even to worry about it. If I begin a practice with that, I can FEEL myself worry about bandhas, about how "good" a pose it. Bleh. I know better. Many memories of Troy's room summon that, actually. Is my back foot down in Virabhadrasana? Are my knees the same height in Ardha Baddha Padma Padottanasana? Did I pull the fancy Marichyasana exit? I really want to be left alone, I want to be simply adjusted, told where to stop, I want to be able to breathe and be left alone and do whatever the series is, however much of it there is. The type of awareness that Troy wants is very challenging, and I find that I just do NOT have the energy for it nowadays.
The Y is air-conditioned still, I don't know if it's from the recent 72 degree weather or what, but cold air blowing over you while you're doing Primary's seated, sucks. In a word, it does. It makes Garbha Pindasana virtually impossible. Studios are usually in the mid-70s or 80, and that's a sweatfest, easy, warm poses. An air-conditioned 70-degree environment with bikes and weight machines isn't ideal. It affects things, and I don't want it to, which adds more worry to "is the pose right, am I doing the same as I did on Saturday," blah blah blah.
I find that I don't want challenge in my asana practice, but I don't want comfort either. I want enough familiarity that I know where the right "window" for each pose is, but mostly I want quiet. So much noise. The future, the email, the grading, the close future, the distant future. When will I "peak" in asana performance, what pose "must I get to" before that happens. Hush!
******************************
I refuse to separate my asana practice from, say, how much housework we do over the weekend (and for the record, weekend schedules often look like this):
6:00-6:30 wakeup, because kid does
6:30-9:00 breakfasting, dressing, diaper, early housework
9:00-12 perhaps first field trip (zoo, etc) or housework and kid entertaining
12-2:00 perhaps first field trip (park, etc) or lunch, cooking, week preparation
2:00-5:00 perhaps second field trip (stroller walk, park, neighbor visit)
OR
2:00-5:00 housework catchup from the week when we were too busy to do anything
5:00-8:00 bedtime rituals (food, bath, dressing, reading, etc, as weekdays)
8:00-10:00 grading, work catchup, housework polishing off
And I usually teach the yoga on Sunday afternoons, and J tries to get a Y trip in (that's our 12-5 slot, pretty much) and I try sometimes to visit a studio class on Saturdays at 11, particularly if it's been a light practice week.
Again, it's tight and rigorous, and playing with the kid is fantastic, but it allows no asana practice and no homework or class prep, and only sometimes does it allow housework (i.e., one parent vacuums while the other entertains).
There is no personal time at any time during any day of any week, ever. Pretty much J and I have some conversation time on the couch or maybe we sip wine before bed, and I try to toss a few hugs into each day, but for real live relating time? Totally forget about it, that would just add more stress and peformance anxiety. And as I've said before, this is consistent with life since May 2009 and we haven't really had relating time to ourselves since we got pregnant in September 2008.
***************************
So sometimes in asana practice as I feel the practice ease into tight outer hips or shoulders, I just want to relax and lay out on the floor. Other times I have energy revved up from a good class or too much sitting and typing the day before and I have strong poses, but the energy is sort of "rebound" in the relationship sense, like I'm firing back at having worked too hard. Often I am worn out from the rigorous schedule, and I'm tired by half-seated and then Pasasana is just too much pose in my outer hips already tightened from the advancing backbending. In short, it is VERY difficult for me to get past Primary and to a "full program" that includes Kapo or even beyond it. That's a very challenging practice to do regularly with life scheduled this way.
******************************
I feel this in pranayama. Post-practice I try for some light ashtanga pranayama, which I currently understand to be 1) inhale and retain 2) exhale and retain 3) both with retention. I do 1) and 2); I could do 3) in Tim's workshop over the summer but can't do it now without panic.
2) tires me out, in the ribs, in the intercostals, like it's HARD to hold the bandhas pulled up for the retention. It's like jumping back used to be. Just tiring in the core body. I feel that too, during asana sometimes, like I know the bandhas are just not on high-rev some days.
I want to relax but I want to pursue the hard poses (i.e., the backbends) and I feel the contradiction but can't resolve it. I'm happier if I practice, if I break into the physical stress that I get from the schedule, but often that breaking-in doesn't itself feel good, so I'm trying to get the daily life schedule to "flow" but that means I have to stop being averse to things I don't want to do, and that's hard. It's psychological flow that greases physical flow sometimes (but again, sometimes with "rebound" energy, tightness brings flexibility, in a sort of union of opposites). Some days a dash of determination tinged with anger is just what I need, and other days, I really need detachment and letting go and to take the pose as shallow as feels good.
The major challenge is trying to maintain a single end point (let's say, Kapotasana) but to let the practice UP TO THAT POINT freely flex, while trying to keep the end point the same. STILL do Kapo even if you've had to modify all of Primary's hard poses. STILL do Kapo when you're having a weak bandhas day. STILL do Kapo even when you're exhausted in standing. But I can't do it. I haven't gotten a practice to REACH Kapotasana in two weeks. So again, I can't get what I want, and I think about attraction and aversion, but then I counter-think about tradition and discipline. I don't really WANT Kapotasana the way I used to, but I feel bound to practice UP to it, and then I can't get my energetics to permit that, most days.
So instead, I'm doing as much practice as I can and I'm doing pressup backbends and dropbacks-and-stands AS IF they were Kapo, I'm doing them with "Kapo intent." This still feels a lot like attraction, but it also keeps me from feeling that I'm failing the traditional discipline (which is based in a type of fear, fear of "losing the practice," of becoming "a parent instead of a yogi" as if those two are different) and it's all marked with negative emotions and I can't figure out how to overcome them.
I think it's stuff like this that "turns people vinyasa." I see the temptation loud and clear and I know that if I do some Simha Krama or Rocket, that the various asana practice worries will loosen up because those practices don't have ashtanga strictures, but they don't have a real system, either.
I still do opening and closing chant, no matter how little practice I do, and I do closing series as well as I'm able (that damn air conditioning isn't friendly for a long hold in Padmasana). And I feel this importance attached to "being an ashtangi" which again is something I'll abandon eventually probably, but now I cling to it because I feel like I'm going to lose it somehow and just DOING however much practice is for some reason NOT ENOUGH TO KEEP IT.
Maybe this is all just panic over loss that's not real, same as I've had before. Maybe it's all just another incarnation of that.
But also, let's take apart the idea that life "is the yoga." That's easy to say, but really, running hither and yon is not Janu Sirsasana B, for example. There is of course discrimination to be earned in everything from driving around to making food, and one can make any aspect of existence into "one's meditation," as Trungpa put it, but for ashtangis specifically, life is NOT the asana practice. The ASANA practice is the asana practice.
Then again we run into the first idea, separation, as if one's physical practice is never impeded or influenced by daily life (which, of course, it is).
**********************
This put me in a mind to try to discuss the "energetics" of seventh series. One of the main things about being a parent is that you lack free time in a way which non-parents ABSOLUTELY cannot understand.
When, for example, you're writing a dissertation, you might try to write every day, and you find good times of day and bad times of day (I'm good from about 7-10 am, those are key writing hours). But if you miss a day, nothing bad happens unless you have a deadline or a conscience that cares.
In parenting, you're on every day, no matter what. Fever? Still must parent, change diapers, drive that kid to daycare, whatever it is. Cold with sinus nonsense? No excuse. Still must act, persist, make it so. When you're writing a dissertation, you can usually take time off. In fact, I can think of NOTHING else that requires the on-ness that parenting does, simply in terms of time demands.
A usual weekday in my house goes something like this:
*rise 6:00 to 6:30ish, somewhere in there
*by 7:30, breakfast assembly, child woken and changed and dressed
*drive north 6 miles to daycare, maybe 2 more miles to practice, 9-11 am
OR
*go to school, give morning lectures, 9-12 pm
THEN
*drive north 8 miles, practice, 1-3 pm or thereabouts
OR
*go to school-or-home and tend email, recommendations, other business
*pick up kid between 3 and 5 pm
*give snack, play and entertain and enjoy, 4-6 pm
*give dinner, try also to feed the grownups, 6-7 pm
*bathe kid, read books w/, play and entertain, 7-8 pm
*put child to bed (if this is easy, 10 min; if it's hard, 1 hour)
*do any necessary life/work tasks, 8-10 pm
*crashing by 10 pm almost every weekday night
There is NO personal time in that schedule aside from asana practice, but that's also rigorously scheduled and constantly being pressured by email, work, grading and so on. I find that if I don't make any time to sit and relax and recoup, this quickly leads to hardcore energy burnout. It's very hard to surf that kinda rigor.
I also try to take a Monday night yoga class, I teach a 3-hour seminar on Tuesday nights, and I teach the yoga on Wednesday nights, which means J does often those three nights solo, so I come home at 8 and clean up yogurt and kitchen dishes and so forth, and housework simply takes up the spare time (to the degree that there was any).
*******************************
It is very hard to make asana practice just "doing the work," as I prefer to think about it (thanks Karen). Doing the asana work is surrounded, completely, by doing the housework and doing the grading work and doing the teaching work. It's nothing BUT work. But thinking of asana practice as "play" is deadly because then it has to be an escape from work, it has to be "leisure" and most days, Marichyasana D simply isn't quite leisure. Trying to advance the backbends as I try and fail to convince myself that Kapotasana is "just another pose" isn't quite leisure. I do enjoy it, but often, my asana practice has a certain level of stress in it. I feel this some days so keenly that I just give up early and backbend.
******************************
So on an energetic level, asana practice works best as a thing where I focus for as many poses as I can. Presentness and breathing. That also works best with housework, like washing dishes. Sure, there are ten thousand things I "should be doing" and of course I'm thinking about the sketchy educational possibilities for the kid in Indiana (47th, usually, in educational quality, nationwide) and how I need to kick up my research agenda so we can move to the Northwest, and all of that future business. That's a big, big stressor, "the future." One has to keep an eye on it, to set an intention, but one can't worry about it and continue to parent, that's madness coming.
********************************
"What am I going to do today, what will my practice be?" I'm determined not to ask that or even to worry about it. If I begin a practice with that, I can FEEL myself worry about bandhas, about how "good" a pose it. Bleh. I know better. Many memories of Troy's room summon that, actually. Is my back foot down in Virabhadrasana? Are my knees the same height in Ardha Baddha Padma Padottanasana? Did I pull the fancy Marichyasana exit? I really want to be left alone, I want to be simply adjusted, told where to stop, I want to be able to breathe and be left alone and do whatever the series is, however much of it there is. The type of awareness that Troy wants is very challenging, and I find that I just do NOT have the energy for it nowadays.
The Y is air-conditioned still, I don't know if it's from the recent 72 degree weather or what, but cold air blowing over you while you're doing Primary's seated, sucks. In a word, it does. It makes Garbha Pindasana virtually impossible. Studios are usually in the mid-70s or 80, and that's a sweatfest, easy, warm poses. An air-conditioned 70-degree environment with bikes and weight machines isn't ideal. It affects things, and I don't want it to, which adds more worry to "is the pose right, am I doing the same as I did on Saturday," blah blah blah.
I find that I don't want challenge in my asana practice, but I don't want comfort either. I want enough familiarity that I know where the right "window" for each pose is, but mostly I want quiet. So much noise. The future, the email, the grading, the close future, the distant future. When will I "peak" in asana performance, what pose "must I get to" before that happens. Hush!
******************************
I refuse to separate my asana practice from, say, how much housework we do over the weekend (and for the record, weekend schedules often look like this):
6:00-6:30 wakeup, because kid does
6:30-9:00 breakfasting, dressing, diaper, early housework
9:00-12 perhaps first field trip (zoo, etc) or housework and kid entertaining
12-2:00 perhaps first field trip (park, etc) or lunch, cooking, week preparation
2:00-5:00 perhaps second field trip (stroller walk, park, neighbor visit)
OR
2:00-5:00 housework catchup from the week when we were too busy to do anything
5:00-8:00 bedtime rituals (food, bath, dressing, reading, etc, as weekdays)
8:00-10:00 grading, work catchup, housework polishing off
And I usually teach the yoga on Sunday afternoons, and J tries to get a Y trip in (that's our 12-5 slot, pretty much) and I try sometimes to visit a studio class on Saturdays at 11, particularly if it's been a light practice week.
Again, it's tight and rigorous, and playing with the kid is fantastic, but it allows no asana practice and no homework or class prep, and only sometimes does it allow housework (i.e., one parent vacuums while the other entertains).
There is no personal time at any time during any day of any week, ever. Pretty much J and I have some conversation time on the couch or maybe we sip wine before bed, and I try to toss a few hugs into each day, but for real live relating time? Totally forget about it, that would just add more stress and peformance anxiety. And as I've said before, this is consistent with life since May 2009 and we haven't really had relating time to ourselves since we got pregnant in September 2008.
***************************
So sometimes in asana practice as I feel the practice ease into tight outer hips or shoulders, I just want to relax and lay out on the floor. Other times I have energy revved up from a good class or too much sitting and typing the day before and I have strong poses, but the energy is sort of "rebound" in the relationship sense, like I'm firing back at having worked too hard. Often I am worn out from the rigorous schedule, and I'm tired by half-seated and then Pasasana is just too much pose in my outer hips already tightened from the advancing backbending. In short, it is VERY difficult for me to get past Primary and to a "full program" that includes Kapo or even beyond it. That's a very challenging practice to do regularly with life scheduled this way.
******************************
I feel this in pranayama. Post-practice I try for some light ashtanga pranayama, which I currently understand to be 1) inhale and retain 2) exhale and retain 3) both with retention. I do 1) and 2); I could do 3) in Tim's workshop over the summer but can't do it now without panic.
2) tires me out, in the ribs, in the intercostals, like it's HARD to hold the bandhas pulled up for the retention. It's like jumping back used to be. Just tiring in the core body. I feel that too, during asana sometimes, like I know the bandhas are just not on high-rev some days.
I want to relax but I want to pursue the hard poses (i.e., the backbends) and I feel the contradiction but can't resolve it. I'm happier if I practice, if I break into the physical stress that I get from the schedule, but often that breaking-in doesn't itself feel good, so I'm trying to get the daily life schedule to "flow" but that means I have to stop being averse to things I don't want to do, and that's hard. It's psychological flow that greases physical flow sometimes (but again, sometimes with "rebound" energy, tightness brings flexibility, in a sort of union of opposites). Some days a dash of determination tinged with anger is just what I need, and other days, I really need detachment and letting go and to take the pose as shallow as feels good.
The major challenge is trying to maintain a single end point (let's say, Kapotasana) but to let the practice UP TO THAT POINT freely flex, while trying to keep the end point the same. STILL do Kapo even if you've had to modify all of Primary's hard poses. STILL do Kapo when you're having a weak bandhas day. STILL do Kapo even when you're exhausted in standing. But I can't do it. I haven't gotten a practice to REACH Kapotasana in two weeks. So again, I can't get what I want, and I think about attraction and aversion, but then I counter-think about tradition and discipline. I don't really WANT Kapotasana the way I used to, but I feel bound to practice UP to it, and then I can't get my energetics to permit that, most days.
So instead, I'm doing as much practice as I can and I'm doing pressup backbends and dropbacks-and-stands AS IF they were Kapo, I'm doing them with "Kapo intent." This still feels a lot like attraction, but it also keeps me from feeling that I'm failing the traditional discipline (which is based in a type of fear, fear of "losing the practice," of becoming "a parent instead of a yogi" as if those two are different) and it's all marked with negative emotions and I can't figure out how to overcome them.
I think it's stuff like this that "turns people vinyasa." I see the temptation loud and clear and I know that if I do some Simha Krama or Rocket, that the various asana practice worries will loosen up because those practices don't have ashtanga strictures, but they don't have a real system, either.
I still do opening and closing chant, no matter how little practice I do, and I do closing series as well as I'm able (that damn air conditioning isn't friendly for a long hold in Padmasana). And I feel this importance attached to "being an ashtangi" which again is something I'll abandon eventually probably, but now I cling to it because I feel like I'm going to lose it somehow and just DOING however much practice is for some reason NOT ENOUGH TO KEEP IT.
Maybe this is all just panic over loss that's not real, same as I've had before. Maybe it's all just another incarnation of that.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Why One-Year Olds are Cool.
Here's my attempt to redress (but only with reality itself) basically my entire post-load from 2009.
One-year-olds are cool because:
--they start saying baby versions of words you use, like "moo" for moon or "dow" for down or "nah" for meow (meow's hard to say, dude), and it's all in baby voice, so it's super cute and you're the kid's parents so you can't help but think that.
--they start aping things you do and say, all the time, so you get "mini-me" in places like shopping malls and while you're talking on the phone. Often this is hilarious. I often utter the word, "Dude!" in various intonations, and when I get an echo of "oooh!" I know it's the same thing. That cracks me up.
--they run around, sometimes for hours, in the house, and don't need your entertainment (although they welcome that as well). Just back and forth, running around, and cracking up.
--they climb on you, give you things, ask to be picked up, negotiate their own self-feeding (which is a crazy mess but as with everything, is funny), and are generally extroverted to the nines, which I think is a good characteristic that should be shared more widely.
--they develop certain games, like using the toy walrus as an action figure in the bath, or calling out "bubbles" (which sounds like bub-ooh!) and you know that means, "let's go outside and you'll blow bubbles while I chase them around and generally have a good time exploring the back yard"
--in short, they begin to manifest everything I wanted in year zero: more independence, more interactivity, more language, and more extroversion.
Well done. Year one does everything it can to make up for year zero, and it is superior in all ways.
If this picture posts, this is me and C in August 2010, in said back yard.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)