Daniel Ingram, when writing about Western meditation teachers who have "gone wrong," says essentially that these people become teachers because they really need to remain students, and that they wind up sort of sadly trapped in the inability to attain the very mysticism (or whatever it is one seeks) they claim to teach.
I'm seeing this now in the (local) Western yoga scene, and it explains things I was complaining about a couple posts ago: "combination of all of these styles" and so forth. In particular let's return to the commenter on the Norman Blair piece, who really set me off with words about ashtanga being dogmatic and so on. Some followup made its way to my eyes, and I think now that said commenter is dedicated as much (or more) to cardio and weight rooms as yoga, which means that all of the talk about "combination of styles" and "multiple traditions" is really just a kind of surfing, like research. "Oh, there are numerous pranayamas, they go like this."
There's a certain sadness to that, because it probably even extends to sacred texts (although one hopes it doesn't): and so you get blog posts on things like "non-dualism refers to not saying always or never, to being able to change your mind" (I'm not, for the record, making that up; that riffs on a real live blog post I saw this week).
And from this, we can feel the "general affirmation" mode of Western yoga, which is so omnipresent that I think I don't have to explain it. When David Swenson talks about being a yoga teacher, he says, "Don't be this guy, who says, 'welcome....to.....yoga!' like it's from another planet, you know?"
I think it's about a lack of intimacy with the practice, as when Sadie Nardini posts on Facebook that one should deepen the crease in the back hip of Warrior 2 and gets comments like "I love her, she knows so much!" Dude, hell, I WOULD TELL YOU THAT in my own damn class, but see the difference? If a celebrity you've workshopped with tells you that from a great electronic distance, it's like she cares about you, not like she's giving all-purpose good information to everyone over the widest spectrum. This inside-out intimacy is everywhere in yoga, and thus all the pithy quotes from everyone from Tolle to Kino to Mother Teresa and so on.
As a now-private blog once said, regarding people being afraid of the ashtanga, "Maybe they're afraid that it will ACTUALLY CHANGE THEM." It's like any intimacy with the self: an experience that REALLY TAKES YOU THERE will take you into the dark right after it opens the door. That's what awaits first. When Owl recently posted about people who are FINALLY over the darkness and the conquest and the conflict, she's talking about well-advanced practitioners, who truly have gotten past the darkness that awaits on the other side of the door marked, "SELF."
So I think that a lot of Western yoga invites us to go there "if we want to" but none of it really pushes us into that door. I can only speak for ashtanga practice, because it's what I do: the ashtanga will push you into the dark, but doing the practice is the only light, the only way to see, unless you have some other kind of life event or breakthrough. That said, seventh series taught me a thousand times more about darkness and transformation than ashtanga vinyasa yoga has.
When we refuse the intimacy of the dark (and is THAT perhaps in part what a Cormac McCarthy book is about? Or Maggie Nelson's recent ideas on the "art of cruelty"?), we refuse a certain intimacy with the self, and I think that that refusal colors a lot of Western yoga. Please note that there are teachers of every stripe who have this from either practice or life or tendency, and so they will maybe be able to tap it when teaching, and it will provide a real depth even if that depth does not come out in Sanskrit names or Sutras quotes or any typical, easy-to-spot "yoga" vocabulary.
Sure, you want to be affirmative and promise people happiness, smiles and joy, and so you can teach easy entrances to advanced postures, you know? But like any real depth in life, any REAL acquisition of intimacy with self or with universe (and the body is the tool we're given for cosmic understanding, no?), darkness lies just inside the door. Many times in looking through yoga blogs you can see practitioners hinting at this, something about self-discovery, and many times (certainly in my own writing and for almost all of my writing pre-divorce in 2002) you can also see the practitioner fall back to pithy quotes or rationality rather than walking in.
So one can hardly blame a given Western yogi for not having confronted the dark (or for not having processed the encounter as part of life), or for teaching in a way that is marked by shallowness of not having done that encounter to the bottom. I think that if you've had that encounter, you can tell instantly when a yoga teacher has and has not been there, or has been there and refused it.
For me there's something energetic, in presentation, in adjusting, that is marked, changed forever, by the encounter with the dark, this intimacy with the cosmic which is the self which is the cosmic. Type of yoga practice guarantees nothing: you can't just cross out vinyasa or choose ashtanga, you have to measure the teacher and yourself. It's like any other relationship, you can't just stereotype redheads or decide that skinny people are (whatever, any quality you want).
No amount of reading can create that intimacy if it's not there; neither (for my money) can bending, until that bending cracks open some emotional container (in a hip, a shoulder, et cetera) and that emotional breakout gets reckoned with, surrendered to, until the ride is taken.
Our problem, and not just on the yoga mat, might just be that we're not intimate enough with ourselves (personally, nationally, at work, in classrooms of all sorts, on every level).
7 comments:
Great post!
What I really love (to laugh at) are yoga video clips where the "presenters" come off as if they're auditioning for spots on some reality TV show. I was wondering if I was being bitchy, thinking that they came off as smarmy and ridiculous, but I sent some prime examples to a couple friends and...
Ashtanga (the postural stuff via Jois) IS Western Yoga, is it not? It’s not part of any Classical tradition. It's mostly modern calisthenics and gymnastics filtered through a very small set of "traditional" poses, many of which actually probably are Tibetan. It’s a total blend of all kinds of disparate things. And its a small subset of the total teachings of Krishnamacharya (who probably made lots of it up on the spot) and Jois changed up the sequences and poses as more and more Westerners can to his shala and demanded higher levels and more stringent codification (mainly in their drive to be certified in some way). Jois was happy to oblige and that is why it is practiced in the West. In that light, the discipline that we refer to as Ashtanga yoga didn't exist until Jois started teaching it to dippy hippie white guys. I don't have hard numbers, but I know that the amount of native Indians rigidly practicing Jois' methods pales to the amount of Westerners using it. That goes for all postural-focused yoga disciplines actually. So do we westerners actually have some sort of leg up over here then? Since more of us are Ashtangis?
And maybe Iyengar and Jois et al decided that the only way the hard charging Westerners could be brought into the fold was to appeal to their culture of physicality and sports. Maybe they were right, maybe asana is our only hope as an entry point, maybe. The only way for us to crack open as you say. But I can't tell if you are asserting that Ashtanga is the best way to do this, or if you are just lamenting that yoga teachers in the west can have a tendency not to go deep into a particular discipline with sufficient rigor. Which? And if the former, that Ashtanga is really is the best way to explore this "intimacy," do you think the importance is in the preciseness or the vinyasa krama or the daily discipline or what? What is the essence of the practice that pushes us into the dark that others don’t have?
And touching this darkness... what evidence do you have that Jois or Krishnamacharya (or whoever your ideal Eastern yogi is) thought this was part of the process? What are examples of Eastern yoga NOT refusing the intimacy of the dark? Can you remark about what the sacred yogic texts specially say about the "intimacy of the dark," or which ones? This whole confronting the dark bit - while it may be true, it sounds very Jungian and western to me. I haven't encountered that notion in Patanjali for example. So are you not doing some combining of yourself here? The self you are talking about very much sounds like the western self which, in my understanding, is the very self that is a result of ignorance and misidentification.
Fianlly, do you think that India or "the East" has this self-intimacy personally, nationally, at work, in classrooms of all sorts, on every level? You say "our problem"... you mean the west? Or do you mean all us people? If the east has this intimacy, gave you give examples of it, as well as how it was obtained?
I guess besides not exactly understanding some of your claims about Ashtanga and exploring our dark side, this post just seems to be chalking up a lot of "human" stuff as "western" stuff. I wasn't there, but I can assure you there have been yoga teachers misunderstanding core concepts, corrupting methodology and misleading students about the ease of their spirtual disciple at every step of Yoga history. Nothing to do with the West.
I like a lot of what you are saying here, just looking for a little more clarity about your claims. This is my first time reading your blog, so feel free to point me to past posts if I’m just crashing in on some longer thread in your writing.
Narasimhan's response to Singleton (who quotes him liberally without permission) is sort of a shake of the head. I'll paraphrase that as... "Geeze the western scholarly mind takes stuff literally. No wonder it's so confused."
Anyway.
Patrick, the whole fifth paragraph here is something new under the sun. It's helpful. Thank you.
I don't understand why anyone would try to teach ashtanga yoga to strangers through video clips. I don't watch that stuff. Ever. Why put that in between me and my teachers who actually know me? Sometimes I've seen students attempt to incorporate anonymous video chatter into their practices. It shows up as noise. Very unhelpful.
I honestly don't understand the motivation for putting stuff out there that will distract traditional students who otherwise would not relate to practice as a thing to consume.
Wait. Fuck it. I'm designing a Resisting Spiritual Materialism app. Quotable Trungpaisms and daily mini-practices. Totally not kidding. I'm doing this. It's time I got comfortable with consumerism....
Are you talking about video practice diary clips? I hope not! That's what I do but it's by no means an attempt to teach. I don't do cheesy voiceovers either. If teaching through video is a crime then people like Richard Freeman & Swenson are guilty, because they release instructional DVDs, but personally I think any intelligent person ought to be able to realize the difference between a video and a real teacher.
JF--wow, I think your questions outrun my post on several levels, but I'll post a re-comment to it and we'll see if it becomes a conversation.
Oddly, I don't mean to set "Western" against "Eastern"; most of the time that I use "Western" it means "that yoga which is discussed in Yoga Journal" and sure, my own practice is a Western practice because I've never, for example, been to India (not that that would necessarily Easternize it in any measurable way).
A post of this kind, specifically, almost always comes from my looking around at local (midwestern USA) studios, teacher bios and blogs. The lament I make when I write on this topic is very much of the "western teachers aren't getting the depth" variety. Again, it's not necessarily an Eastern depth I'm after, and here I throw in the interesting but tricky term "intimacy" to try to hit what I'm aiming at.
As far as ashtanga vinyasa specifically, I think one hits a wall of opportunity to learn about the self (dark or otherwise) when that "pose you can't do" comes, especially if it takes months or years to get said pose. I know that in my experience, said pose got all kinds of jealousy, echoes of past relationships, all sorts of weird shit activated. This is a learning opportunity, and in my case (and I'll say more about how much of me I write with in a minute) it's a dark spot to be encountered, dug into.
I write with a LOT of my personal history in my head, and try as I might to be scientific or clear, I know that my writing is shot through quite thoroughly with my emotional life at the moment, and so it's very likely that "Western" here also means "in classes I've been to" and also "teaching strategies that I see used" and so forth, which makes it much more personal and much less specific (unfortunately in some cases).
Right, exactly--for this reason I can't say a thing about how intimate or not the East is in its classrooms because I don't know.
Yes, "dark" in my usage does have a Jungian flavor to it, and it's also linked heavily to stuff that I've processed and modes of processing, all tied to my ideas about what culture (which is really slang for "my personal history") considers to be ok for daylight and that which it considers to be better left in dark shadows unspoken of. That personal light/dark colors enormous quantities of what I write and how I write.
So continuing from there, "Western" begins as slang for "Yoga Journal" and ends as slang for "that with which I grew up" which is no longer perhaps a clearly identifiable cultural phenomenon (this is typical, I'm afraid, of many posts here).
I've also tried to detach the dark/intimacy conversation from ashtanga specifically, because I really don't think that ashtanga teachers have any more ability to channel that than anyone else does, yoga teacher or otherwise. There might be an intimacy to be had in a classical Mysore room, in that you see the same sequence every day or maybe practice next to someone doing THAT SAME HARD POSTURE until he/she gets it, and then you celebrate, but I was thinking more of processing "human" stuff, interpersonal stuff. I think my conclusion about "us" is exactly on this level: one who has processed stuff like that, who has encountered it, not run away, and then drunk it down to the end and come out past it, that's a person I want as a teacher. Too many bios that I read, videos that I see, surf over this kind of depth, and won't provide it even if that person, in real life, has it. In a way (as Boodiba and Owl are hitting here), this post can be seen as a critique generally of video-yoga, magazine-yoga; a call for "greater humanity" in a way.
Hey Boodiba. No, of course not, darling! I just hear from students that they watched this or that video clip to try to learn how to jump back or whatever, and am struck by how counter-productive it is to try to give technical ashtanga instructions without any context in a student's practice.
Patrick, thanks for clarifying your usage of "Western." That really helps much, sorry for the deluge of questions. I feel like so many of the "oh that's so Western" dismals I hear in the yogasphere betray exactly the lack of deep, specifc thinking that you are complaining about. It can be a really lazy criticism (which I don't see here now).
I think your critique of slick youtube yoga and the teacher personas that populate them is right on the money for the most part, but I too have found the type of thing Boodiba mentions to be very helpful. Sometimes even more personal (in the way I think you mean) than my experience with teachers - especially when these clips are another practioner woodsheding a pose I'm also working on from different angles, with good commentary on where and why they are coming from. As long as they are conscious about being available for dialogue through comments or email, I think this sorto fthing is a positive contribution to modern practice. But it probably doesn't even begin to balance out all the way in which the magazine/internet encourages glossiness/surfing.
Picking through the rest of your blog now...
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