Briefly (all posts are brief these days, although my regular readership knows that when I mean brief, I really don't mean anything and will often write my usual few pages here),
The Indy ashtanga scene seems to be authentically growing into something remarkable. When I began teaching in 2007, classes were 1-2 students for me and maybe as many as 8 for Carol (who is my teacher here and who remains the root of Indy ashtanga). If one of us hit double digits, it was some weird one-off miracle.
There were for a while, four of us that practiced regularly. FOUR. Two of those people are now either in their post-yoga phase or their vinyasa yoga phase.
But on Saturday in a led most-of-Primary, Carol had TWENTY SIX people. I can't even tell you how unheard of that is. The popular classes here, and by that I mean the MOST POPULAR of the whole week, get like 22, 24 people. An ASHTANGA class, getting twenty six??? UN HEARD OF. Like, seeing a UFO unheard of. Seeing a ghost unheard of.
But certainly welcome.
And then today I had 18. EIGHTEEN! And I haven't had anything but double digits since February, with the exception of one single week. This month alone, with one vinyasa class sub and three ashtanga subs, I taught 82 people.
So this is pretty amazing. I don't know if the practice is catching on, or if people are sampling around based on Groupon and LivingSocial coupons, or if a vinyasa teacher who is something of a devotee of mine is starting her own ashtanga cult over there across town (she'll be with Timiji this summer for two weeks while I'm down in Austin TX with Swenson; exact same two weeks, too; pretty interesting).
But as we're welcoming Kino here on May 7-8, this is all pretty cool.
*******************************
Ok, a progress report, finally: my dad began radiation on Thursday, and so far, he is fine and he's not getting the characteristic chemo exhaustion and so on. He's an extrovert to the bone (as I am), and so we think that it's actually energizing for him to be around so many people, with all those consultations and exams and procedures, and nurses, and extended family driving him in and out. He loves it. He riffs on the town he grew up in, with nurses from there, and it's hilarious. He tells stories about his kids, his youth, anything that'll do for conversation. And he's empowered by all of it. When we talk on the phone, it's more delicious than it's been since college. We're people who know each other fairly well, don't ask invasive questions, and who profoundly get along. Something about the distance (geographically) between us guarantees this, and in a way I look forward to going to see them with the kid at the end of May.
There is also no spreading to either his bladder or liver (whoohooo) although they're going to check the pancreas this week and that'll be done on Wednesday, they think. So we have good news so far and good energy. Hello springtime.
And that's that.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Real Quickly (and I mean in like One Sentence)
http://ask.metafilter.com/74397/Can-you-sustain-a-strong-marital-relationship-after-having-a-child
has some of the best stuff that I've ever seen on to what degree and how, that is or can be done. Sure, many of the posts contradict each other, but I think if you look through you'll see at least three that I nodded ALL THE WAY THROUGH, and they're not all just pure snark and negativity (although they are high on the latter regarding the post-child relationship, which is of course also my own experience, thence the nod).
Pregnancy began? September 2008.
Relationship? Still out on the horizon. March 2011.
has some of the best stuff that I've ever seen on to what degree and how, that is or can be done. Sure, many of the posts contradict each other, but I think if you look through you'll see at least three that I nodded ALL THE WAY THROUGH, and they're not all just pure snark and negativity (although they are high on the latter regarding the post-child relationship, which is of course also my own experience, thence the nod).
Pregnancy began? September 2008.
Relationship? Still out on the horizon. March 2011.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Two (Late) Cents on Sexual Energy/Creative Energy
I found this on the Mula blog (to which I won't link because I'm feeling lazy) and also on Nobel's blog (Dragon's Den, again..lazy) and then it echoed around with something I was thinking about yesterday, which is AGAIN different, and it deserves a quick post.
The short summary was this (note that in I am paraphrasing here and not yet writing my own opinion about this lingo): "creative" energy for something like mula bandha might be a commodified term because "creative" can mean making advertisements, it can mean coming up with a "creative" way to subvert union power in Wisconsin, et cetera. "Creative," it can be said, is owned already, it's taken, we can't have it.
"Sexual" is (again, giving a short summary) more personal, more sensory, more embodied, and so not as public, not as ideological, not as "commodified."
***************************
So then.
I would argue this almost entirely in reverse. For me, "sexual" is utterly commodified, consummately social, and completely ideological. "Creative" is so broad that we can use it for nearly anything; if there is a weakness to the term "creative energy" it is that the language is so thin it's almost transparent.
What's my problem with "sexual energy" as a descriptor for something like the mula bandha?
"Sexual" in the west is a specific characterization within larger categories, and for me it inevitably comes with a weird Christianization, where the body falls out as evil or bad or "to be wary of" and the spirit/soul/whatever is to be valorized and it's always in that opposition.
Violence/sexual violence.
Experience/sexual experience.
Energy/sexual energy.
Text message/sexual text message.
Clothing/sexual clothing.
Performance/sexual performance.
And so on until the end of time. It all turns "privatized" for me, not simply "private." Privatized, privated, and secret, open to only a few, a lucky few, how much envy we have! Oh if only we too were invited! To taste the secrets!
It becomes cultish, exclusionary, secretive, full of ego jealousy or ego achievement (to have done THIS! THERE! Under THOSE conditions! With THOSE/THAT people/person!) How exclusive! Bring a reality TV camera! Ooooh ahhh!
Bullshit.
For me, to call the "yoga energy" or the "body energy" specifically "sexual" is to confront the wide, long-running scandal-marketing of all things sexual. You call something sexual and you can almost HEAR the cash registers ring up. CHA-CHING!!!
***********************
So can this term be used? It can.
I try to sit in Siddhasana after I practice, just to sort of center for a minute or two before I go back into the wide world of workable craziness.
As the book MASTER KEY (on MB) will tell you, Siddhasana is a heel tucked in at the perineum (if you're a guy, anyway) and ideally the top heel at the pubic bone, which sort of holds the external genitalia between the two heels. It takes some pretty substantial hip flexibility to do the full expression.
The energy there, with that contact, especially if combined with some pranayama that turns up the sensibility of the MB itself (as the exhale sort of reaches down to "pull it up") is definitely reminiscent of sexual arousal, but it's asked for, not spontaneous, which is (for me anyway) a major difference. You summon it, instead of being subjected to it.
The question can thus be asked (as I believe it can't, really, with spontaneous arousal, or at least it can't be asked in any interesting way), "What Do I Do With This?"
What I usually do with that "sexual" energy is expand it to as much of the full body as I can. Feel my feet, feel my intercostals, feel the movement of the breathing as it happens, become PHYSICAL, experience EMBODIMENT, feel blood moving, feel skin warmed, feel ORGANISM.
My eyes often go into soft focus and cross slightly when I'm doing pranayama, so the floor that I'm sitting on gets fuzzy and if there's a light reflected on a wood floor, it doubles and gets blurry. Kind of like living in a mellow Stan Brakhage film. I'm nearsighted anyway, so that also helps (and nearsightedness is GREAT for pratyahara in asana practice, just for the record).
It's easy that way to go inside and BE inside, to really inhabit that body, feel its BODINESS. And oddly, that embodiment is good for feeling the non-bodiness, what the Sutras would call Prakriti/Purusha. In a way that is very chewily non-dual, I feel my body/Prakriti presence and FEELING it is also OBSERVING it, even though those two are opposites. I know that the observing eye sees, precisely BECAUSE that observing eye/mind is EMBODIED in me. It's marvelous and I can't explain it better without speaking in tongues, Haha!!!
Anyway.
This is no longer "sexual" energy in the commodified sense, unless we consider that blood pulsing through the body is "sexual" and/or that the movement of the intercostals hefting the rib cage up and down is "sexual." And I'm willing to go there, but "embodied" or even "tactile" energy is probably more accurate, unless we want to consider all of embodied existence as sexual, which would mean sort of body-relational, broadly sensuous, and profoundly unprivatized.
I sort of like that vision of "sexual" as no longer linked specifically to genitalia, but to embodiment wholesale. Such a world sees stroking a pet's fur as sexual, again in the broadest sense of sensuality (again, broadly understood). Relating would be sexual, which would finally free us of the clunky and stupidly reductive "sexual relationship" meaning genitalia bouncing to and fro. Sexual in that intimacy would be shared openly, at any level, between any people. Sexual as meaning social, a new definition of social, free of privatization.
But few Westerners can hold a vision like that in their heads. We're too well trained, and that's what started all of this in the first place.
************************
Yesterday I was thinking about a long, long ago important relationship, and I realized that it is the lynchpin of my narrative, my relating narrative, wholesale. And there is attachment and pain there regarding how clunkily I handled that situation emotionally, because I simply could not have done better. Didn't have the self-awareness to handle the energy that existed there. I've always regretted that, still do.
And I thought, if this became what Trungpa calls WORKABLE, I could let go of the whole story, REALLY let it go. I maintain a lot of silence and privation with old once-friends because of that relationship and the painful mutual silence in which it ended, had to end. Like the film NINE SONGS. We sort of don't see their miscommunication, and what they are missing, we are also missing, and even in what the film GRANTS us to see, we know that we are missing what we NEED for that footage that we do see. And the entire film is a weird nostalgia trip, even in its present. To be already missing the very person you're with, to be ACTIVELY missing them in the present, at the moment of togetherness. That experience hurts.
And I find that I want to apologize to her in the most profound way, but we've moved on and had lives (Facebook is great for finding out details like that) and this need and desire is MINE FOR ME. Who wants the affection and the "It's OK"? I do. Who provides it? I do. Circle closes, pain is released, attachment disappears.
I have friends (well, once-friends) who maintain this contact. I'm thinking that, as they've invited several times, I might restart those connections. Word travels. How am I doing? was always her question before we found it impossible to talk to each other or even be comfortably in the same room, ever.
I'm living at the height of my considerable powers.
The short summary was this (note that in I am paraphrasing here and not yet writing my own opinion about this lingo): "creative" energy for something like mula bandha might be a commodified term because "creative" can mean making advertisements, it can mean coming up with a "creative" way to subvert union power in Wisconsin, et cetera. "Creative," it can be said, is owned already, it's taken, we can't have it.
"Sexual" is (again, giving a short summary) more personal, more sensory, more embodied, and so not as public, not as ideological, not as "commodified."
***************************
So then.
I would argue this almost entirely in reverse. For me, "sexual" is utterly commodified, consummately social, and completely ideological. "Creative" is so broad that we can use it for nearly anything; if there is a weakness to the term "creative energy" it is that the language is so thin it's almost transparent.
What's my problem with "sexual energy" as a descriptor for something like the mula bandha?
"Sexual" in the west is a specific characterization within larger categories, and for me it inevitably comes with a weird Christianization, where the body falls out as evil or bad or "to be wary of" and the spirit/soul/whatever is to be valorized and it's always in that opposition.
Violence/sexual violence.
Experience/sexual experience.
Energy/sexual energy.
Text message/sexual text message.
Clothing/sexual clothing.
Performance/sexual performance.
And so on until the end of time. It all turns "privatized" for me, not simply "private." Privatized, privated, and secret, open to only a few, a lucky few, how much envy we have! Oh if only we too were invited! To taste the secrets!
It becomes cultish, exclusionary, secretive, full of ego jealousy or ego achievement (to have done THIS! THERE! Under THOSE conditions! With THOSE/THAT people/person!) How exclusive! Bring a reality TV camera! Ooooh ahhh!
Bullshit.
For me, to call the "yoga energy" or the "body energy" specifically "sexual" is to confront the wide, long-running scandal-marketing of all things sexual. You call something sexual and you can almost HEAR the cash registers ring up. CHA-CHING!!!
***********************
So can this term be used? It can.
I try to sit in Siddhasana after I practice, just to sort of center for a minute or two before I go back into the wide world of workable craziness.
As the book MASTER KEY (on MB) will tell you, Siddhasana is a heel tucked in at the perineum (if you're a guy, anyway) and ideally the top heel at the pubic bone, which sort of holds the external genitalia between the two heels. It takes some pretty substantial hip flexibility to do the full expression.
The energy there, with that contact, especially if combined with some pranayama that turns up the sensibility of the MB itself (as the exhale sort of reaches down to "pull it up") is definitely reminiscent of sexual arousal, but it's asked for, not spontaneous, which is (for me anyway) a major difference. You summon it, instead of being subjected to it.
The question can thus be asked (as I believe it can't, really, with spontaneous arousal, or at least it can't be asked in any interesting way), "What Do I Do With This?"
What I usually do with that "sexual" energy is expand it to as much of the full body as I can. Feel my feet, feel my intercostals, feel the movement of the breathing as it happens, become PHYSICAL, experience EMBODIMENT, feel blood moving, feel skin warmed, feel ORGANISM.
My eyes often go into soft focus and cross slightly when I'm doing pranayama, so the floor that I'm sitting on gets fuzzy and if there's a light reflected on a wood floor, it doubles and gets blurry. Kind of like living in a mellow Stan Brakhage film. I'm nearsighted anyway, so that also helps (and nearsightedness is GREAT for pratyahara in asana practice, just for the record).
It's easy that way to go inside and BE inside, to really inhabit that body, feel its BODINESS. And oddly, that embodiment is good for feeling the non-bodiness, what the Sutras would call Prakriti/Purusha. In a way that is very chewily non-dual, I feel my body/Prakriti presence and FEELING it is also OBSERVING it, even though those two are opposites. I know that the observing eye sees, precisely BECAUSE that observing eye/mind is EMBODIED in me. It's marvelous and I can't explain it better without speaking in tongues, Haha!!!
Anyway.
This is no longer "sexual" energy in the commodified sense, unless we consider that blood pulsing through the body is "sexual" and/or that the movement of the intercostals hefting the rib cage up and down is "sexual." And I'm willing to go there, but "embodied" or even "tactile" energy is probably more accurate, unless we want to consider all of embodied existence as sexual, which would mean sort of body-relational, broadly sensuous, and profoundly unprivatized.
I sort of like that vision of "sexual" as no longer linked specifically to genitalia, but to embodiment wholesale. Such a world sees stroking a pet's fur as sexual, again in the broadest sense of sensuality (again, broadly understood). Relating would be sexual, which would finally free us of the clunky and stupidly reductive "sexual relationship" meaning genitalia bouncing to and fro. Sexual in that intimacy would be shared openly, at any level, between any people. Sexual as meaning social, a new definition of social, free of privatization.
But few Westerners can hold a vision like that in their heads. We're too well trained, and that's what started all of this in the first place.
************************
Yesterday I was thinking about a long, long ago important relationship, and I realized that it is the lynchpin of my narrative, my relating narrative, wholesale. And there is attachment and pain there regarding how clunkily I handled that situation emotionally, because I simply could not have done better. Didn't have the self-awareness to handle the energy that existed there. I've always regretted that, still do.
And I thought, if this became what Trungpa calls WORKABLE, I could let go of the whole story, REALLY let it go. I maintain a lot of silence and privation with old once-friends because of that relationship and the painful mutual silence in which it ended, had to end. Like the film NINE SONGS. We sort of don't see their miscommunication, and what they are missing, we are also missing, and even in what the film GRANTS us to see, we know that we are missing what we NEED for that footage that we do see. And the entire film is a weird nostalgia trip, even in its present. To be already missing the very person you're with, to be ACTIVELY missing them in the present, at the moment of togetherness. That experience hurts.
And I find that I want to apologize to her in the most profound way, but we've moved on and had lives (Facebook is great for finding out details like that) and this need and desire is MINE FOR ME. Who wants the affection and the "It's OK"? I do. Who provides it? I do. Circle closes, pain is released, attachment disappears.
I have friends (well, once-friends) who maintain this contact. I'm thinking that, as they've invited several times, I might restart those connections. Word travels. How am I doing? was always her question before we found it impossible to talk to each other or even be comfortably in the same room, ever.
I'm living at the height of my considerable powers.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Or This'll Happen.
My father was diagnosed with colon cancer this afternoon. They're going to treat it (radiation and then try to remove).
Here's a list of non-hierarchical factoids that are asking to be set in motion in some way, although the Buddhism soak that I've been doing for the past two years (texts, acting, not reacting) is still the floor of the whole thing:
He's 73. I'm 40. I'm adopted. His father died of lung cancer (smoking) before I was born. Bill Viola's THE PASSING. My kid is 21 months old. My mom's getting memory trouble. There are discussions about home help or moving or moving them. They are attached to the house, just like her parents (my grandparents) were to theirs also. I just got my full-time job this year; I've only just arrived. I still have no savings. My brother and family are local; they will do the ground work. The only three funerals I've been to IN MY LIFE were for grandparents. There was a guy in college who up and died of meningitis but I didn't know him well, only his circle. One could have seen this coming, with years of bad diet and the recent month-long urinary tract trouble and then the blood that one night. Practically disabling arthritis began in 1987 and progressed through the 1990s. I went to college and got married in that decade. When I got unmarried the first family member I told was my dad. I feel like I'm supposed to freak and I'm not, I know better, have more security than to be so obliged. As Irish Catholics, no one will feel this honestly up there in the Northeast; it'll all be muddled with stoniness. Within the past month, to try to acquire "parenting" or whatever that would mean, I imagined eulogizing my two parents. Interesting to have done that, now. He and I have always had strange honesty; anger, too; he's a Leo and I'm a Taurus; we are made for stout combat or good cooperation. The presence of other family makes that impossible, it's a two-person thing. I can tell from right now that it's one of the major things I will remember, no matter what happens, because it's the one thing that I can convey to someone else and that they WILL NOT SHARE. I can tell the much-told stories or generalize a personality or derive my own extroversion from his. But that dynamic that we share, that is OURS.
It is important to see "what can be felt" and to know how it differs from "what is felt." I had this when my grandfather died; what should I feel, what MUST I feel? No, no, what DO I feel, live in THAT question, because only that one is about your life.
When people are mourning I tell stories and generate conversation and laughter; that's what I do. I make the peace alone, always alone, by myself, either with the one involved or at the grave. Maybe my relationship with my father is the Ur-case of that model. It's not that we "go deep" or touch most anything that I've been candid about in these pages; it's not the content, it's the FORM of conversation, the dynamic of it. We have shallow conversations deeply. An unspoken, un-meta'd, depth. A felt depth, a true depth, and one we don't live in, but silently acknowledge. In that, everything is fine.
Here's a list of non-hierarchical factoids that are asking to be set in motion in some way, although the Buddhism soak that I've been doing for the past two years (texts, acting, not reacting) is still the floor of the whole thing:
He's 73. I'm 40. I'm adopted. His father died of lung cancer (smoking) before I was born. Bill Viola's THE PASSING. My kid is 21 months old. My mom's getting memory trouble. There are discussions about home help or moving or moving them. They are attached to the house, just like her parents (my grandparents) were to theirs also. I just got my full-time job this year; I've only just arrived. I still have no savings. My brother and family are local; they will do the ground work. The only three funerals I've been to IN MY LIFE were for grandparents. There was a guy in college who up and died of meningitis but I didn't know him well, only his circle. One could have seen this coming, with years of bad diet and the recent month-long urinary tract trouble and then the blood that one night. Practically disabling arthritis began in 1987 and progressed through the 1990s. I went to college and got married in that decade. When I got unmarried the first family member I told was my dad. I feel like I'm supposed to freak and I'm not, I know better, have more security than to be so obliged. As Irish Catholics, no one will feel this honestly up there in the Northeast; it'll all be muddled with stoniness. Within the past month, to try to acquire "parenting" or whatever that would mean, I imagined eulogizing my two parents. Interesting to have done that, now. He and I have always had strange honesty; anger, too; he's a Leo and I'm a Taurus; we are made for stout combat or good cooperation. The presence of other family makes that impossible, it's a two-person thing. I can tell from right now that it's one of the major things I will remember, no matter what happens, because it's the one thing that I can convey to someone else and that they WILL NOT SHARE. I can tell the much-told stories or generalize a personality or derive my own extroversion from his. But that dynamic that we share, that is OURS.
It is important to see "what can be felt" and to know how it differs from "what is felt." I had this when my grandfather died; what should I feel, what MUST I feel? No, no, what DO I feel, live in THAT question, because only that one is about your life.
When people are mourning I tell stories and generate conversation and laughter; that's what I do. I make the peace alone, always alone, by myself, either with the one involved or at the grave. Maybe my relationship with my father is the Ur-case of that model. It's not that we "go deep" or touch most anything that I've been candid about in these pages; it's not the content, it's the FORM of conversation, the dynamic of it. We have shallow conversations deeply. An unspoken, un-meta'd, depth. A felt depth, a true depth, and one we don't live in, but silently acknowledge. In that, everything is fine.
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