You Cannot "Practice" Surrender.

I'm pleased there are no comments on the prior post because I got ashamed of it quickly after writing it, but the penchant for honesty and straightforwardness in me, in all things written here, kept me from cutting it or any part of it.

So, new post, which has its own business to commit and is not (as so tempting, earlier) simply an excuse to bury the one prior.

Today I got an email from the dynamic duo who went from our Indy ashtanga scene to the Chicago Kino workshop. Many things were achieved: feet were grabbed from the air, and such. This morning in a pre-teaching practice, I clunked into a Kapotasana dropback and couldn't move my hands at all, could barely get my head to rise. No feet, not even close to feet. In fact, I didn't even get upright from dropping back, and I can at least usually do that. So I came up laughing, "Defeat! Defeated! Three and a half years!"

I'm kind of amused by Kapo's entire impossibility. And sure, I could "if/then" myself into a thousand different worlds of regular teacher, regular practice, no kid, blah blah blah, and who gives a damn. Apparently, in my current life, I can't get my heels in that posture. But I'll keep trying over and over and over, because that's what you do.

So I had this weird sadness, like "meow meow, you guys don't need me to teach you poses anymore," which first isn't true, because it's not like Kino is ALWAYS three hours from here by car. But in any case, the feeling was really curious. Sadness? What the hell is THAT about? First, it notably wasn't pride, it wasn't "HELL YEAH, those are MY STUDENTS, uh huh!" although I can always access that if I want. It was more like when Tim talks about getting older, it was almost what I think "child leaving the nest" might feel like, a bit of that.

I'm teaching a lot these days, as you've heard before. The current schedule is still four classes a semester (two classes 2x/week, another 1x/week, another 1x/week, I come in four days per week to teach all that, along with meetings and so forth), and then the yoga on Sunday afternoons and on Friday mornings (10 am, right before my 12 noon class at school that day) and then subbing Monday nights at 7:15 at least once a month, and then Thursday night at 6.

And processing the email sadness put me to thinking that I'm now teaching people, I'm like a guide of sorts, for everyone I'm exposed to. There's no level on which I sort of "actively exist." Let me make that clunky vocabulary make more sense, maybe:

When I was living with the New Zealander in 2005, we were peers. Similar politics, similar smart, climbing habits both, shared kitchen, a whole lot of similar and relating and funny stories, a real solid roommate situation. It rocked. And then on top of that, I was teacher to students, yoga student, a bunch of other relationships, but I knew "who" and "where" I was, in the sort of hierarchy of social life. Grad student, below faculty, above undergrad, that sort of thing. Skilled yoga practitioner, beneath the native backbenders (that's my own silly estimation) and above the new beginners (again, my own silly estimation; if we talk about who "breathes better" that hierarchy all goes to pieces).

In any case, errors or not, I felt that I knew "who and where" I was in the scale of my life. I actively lived in that apartment, acted with confidence in my relations, took pride in what I achieved, in my ongoing relationship, and so forth. "I, me!" Do you understand?

And now, largely but not totally from seventh series, there is a distinct fragility in my "I, me." With my father gone, I am the "outside man," the heat shield, and my son is the astronaut in the shuttle. I take all the direct contact with outer space, in a way. This also isn't a pride thing, it's keen awareness of fragility, mortality and impermanence. It's what separates the drunk-driving teenager stereotype from the older "person of wisdom."

Sure, I'm a standup comic when I teach, but I'm also discovering that people just want to pass, or they really want to see what they can squeeze out of the art theory I present, for their own work. Everyone is up to something, going somewhere, it's all transit, and education is in some cases optional. Can I graduate on time, can I get into this show, can I finish my thesis, can I blah blah blah? It's all transit, like people in airports. My "fan club" as some of the faculty call them (students who really like my stuff) is about to graduate (as last year's fan club did) and I'm not sure who replaces them, but now, I see the cycles coming. Students pass and I remain. I'm still confident, I'm still acting and teaching and giving them whatever I can (because that's how I roll) but it's all transitory, and I'm a memory outside of that so-brief and so-fragile present. And there it all is again.

It's not that I feel that I can't engage the present, it's that I don't belong to it anymore, have sort of "involved" as the Sutras put it, have drawn back, and never meant to, didn't intend to.

I mean, sure, I did the yoga, I do the yoga, but even in that, I never said to myself, "hey self, let's surrender our active egoist engagement with the world, let's actively give that up." That's crazy talk. I love active engagement with the world, really "feeling there!" at a bar or in bed with the chosen one or in class performing and such. I LOVE that shit.

So what the hell, then?

It was not that I gave things up. Sure, in the face of reticence and complaints and tiredness, I've largely given up chasing sexual intimacy in my relationship (although other forms are still pursued) because it's such an uphill climb and it's a pain in the ass, but I never gave up EVENTUALLY thinking and believing that we'd get that back.

So that's not surrender.

No, what happened instead is not that "I gave up thing X" but that "Thing X gave me up." We believe, I think, as I look around the yoga world and yoga blogs, that one gives up a habit the way people make New Years resolutions.

"Give up smoking, give up sugar, give up booze, give up coffee" or a thousand different examples. "I'm gonna give up being fixated on how my relationship used to be." Ok. But what are you going to do instead? See how the refusal becomes the fixation? At least in my case it does. The only way that I was able to give up thinking about bow-chicka-bow was to get SO BUSY that I couldn't, actually, focus and think about it at the same time. Thinking about it became a distraction. So no punishment and no "thou shalt" was involved. I didn't set myself a "do not" goal, I just set myself a "do other" goal.

So I didn't surrender a damn thing, I just stopped living in the wish for the world to be different. In fact, I stopped living in the fact of the world, where that difference was concerned, also. What I mean by that is that I stopped looking for and waiting for those three-to-forty minutes between when the child went to bed and we did, as the "anticipatory window." I became indifferent to the anticipatory window, and sometimes I'd be at work on an art slide show during it, or just be internetting, or reading, or up to something. I became indifferent to the very POSSIBILITY of "returning to the old" not out of spite, but because the only way I could get out of the habit of "gimme that, I want that, I'm gonna get that, mhm, hand that over, maybe it'll be this time" was to totally get out of the entire circuit of exchange.

In fact, tonight I am writing THIS during the "anticipatory window."

So I did not "give up thing X." I haven't given up on the relationship, but I have put a lot of other business in place of my blind hope (blind and often frustrated hope, which just deepens the whole complex) that things will "return to normal, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, oooh maybe, maybe...". Enough of that.

So nothing was surrendered, to my thinking. Instead, many things were done, and they were, precisely, done INSTEAD. The yoga rhetoric of "surrender" is "practice letting go" or "practice accepting it" or "practice surrender."

To me, it's always become I SURRENDER, I do the surrendering. I GIVE the thing away, or up, or whatever. Surrender as a transitive verb, carrying an object. I as the actor. That's the whole problem with what I heard and how I acted on surrender.

When I try to "surrender" or "let go" or "accept it," what I end up with is a big loud debate in my head, with either me or her or whatever it is that I'm trying to accept, and it's like a battle in the Senate, with filibustering and bluster and monkey mind to the nines.

You probably know the chatter: I'm going to accept this! No, I don't want to! This is bullshit! Ah but it's the truth. Not for long! It'll be back to normal soon! Come on, practice acceptance. No! Someone deceived us! This is nonsense! I'm acting to return the world to how it used to be!

It's all exclamations and declarations and manifesto-writing (if only it had the wonderful self-reflectiveness of most manifesto writing).

So for me, to capture my title above, I cannot "practice" surrender because when I try to actively surrender, I immediately trip over myself and then it's warfare and bluster.

The way I'm put together, the ego cannot surrender. My ego doesn't want to surrender a goddamn thing, and it's REALLY stubborn and strong. But take all those things from me in ways that I can't ethically recoup, which is (to be brief about it) how seventh series has done my ego in, and suddenly it's completely different.

Now, when I write about seventh series, most of the time I get caught up in my relationship frustrations, about which I'm very angry and frustrated, and then I use highly, highly perjorative language to characterize the whole affair.

I'm really getting tired of seeing myself do that over and over and over.

So then. When pregnancy denied us all sexual contact (and yeah yeah, you're going to say, wait, not all needed to disappear, and I agree, but she doesn't, and so it all disappeared, and I'm done debating whether it should or needed to or could have or blah blah blah, I'm done with all that), I freaked, and I could well have just said, "Look lady, certain things need to be maintained or else I'm not gonna do this" but that just was not ethical, at least I couldn't get myself to say that out loud.

Things are qualitatively better but quantitatively very, very, very sparse. September 2011 marked three years of this. During that time, I've tried to surrender desire, then to surrender anger, then to surrender imagination, then to surrender blah blah blah. You get the idea. Some interesting experiments got committed with energy, but I'm no Catholic mystic. I can't make holiness out of that contained energy; either I can't or I just don't know how.

None of the surrenders that I tried, worked.

So it wasn't that I gave up "wanting it" or gave up "being angry about it" but what happened, as I wrote above, is that "being angry about it" started to wander off from me. "Wanting it" wandered off a few times, sort of took itself for a stroll instead of constantly knocking at my door. And I didn't do anything to make this happen other than to STOP LIVING IN THOSE EMOTIONAL SPACES, which I did, by putting my energy ACTIVELY ELSEWHERE.

You'll say, but Patrick, that's surrender. No, I maintain, it isn't. I didn't experience that as any kind of surrender. It was more like the frustration got SO UNANSWERABLE that I just turned away, with a very "fuck this!" attitude, and put myself fully into work or research or kid care or beer or whatever else was available. And things got better.

My frustration and anger are still there, like seats in my car. If I sit there, I feel those, I inhabit them, they come fully to life and I become rage again, just like before. It isn't that I gave up anger, it's that anger gave me up, sort of released me from the seat. It's an ego thing. It's like anger, the ego that feels anger (for where, my friends, does one separate the feeler from the felt?), peeled off from me. I can see it over there, as I just called it out: it's like a seat in the car, OVER THERE.

Trying to surrender anger, for me, would be like trying to surrender my foot. Only when I am NOT MY FOOT can I surrender it, and by the time that my foot is no longer me, it has surrendered itself and I can no longer surrender it. The work is done, and not by me.

This active pride, active anger, inhabitance of the world, gives way to a fragility, a temporariness of everything, impermanence. Now, let's not confuse this with Bad Advaita. It's not that the world is an illusion (at least I'm not going that far with you), it's that the world, while marvelous and present and full of textures and sense appeal, is all impermanent. Everything makes one want to cry with its impermanence. One wants to be kind to the door frames.

A keen memory, that I now know is also about this, is a Chicago doorway, dark wood, pebbled surface like from drops of dried polyurethane. I put four fingers on it and told myself to remember, as if I could characterize what happened there (which was also more tender than I wanted it to be, and more painful) by that tactile memory.

Make no mistake, I'll certainly sit in those egoic seats again and receive the burn that awaits there, I've quite written enough from those locations.

"Practice letting go." No, I say: instead, practice everything else, anything else, and see if what you want to let go of, lets go of YOU.