All in the Triangles, Short Practices, Negotiation

I think Owl once said, "The whole practice is in the triangles." Maybe it's a misquote, it doesn't matter, I've let it be attributed or not.

Monday mornings, I try to go to the studio after dropping off the kid at daycare, and practice however much is appropriate (this, currently, means until white-energy-release happens, or if that doesn't happen, Primary and Pasasana).

Most days, particularly in the mornings, I am hung up in the outer right hip and in the right lower back. This, my friends, is the psoas, it's the only muscle (and of course it sets off attendant fascia) that goes from the lower back into the front hip. Have a Google Images search if you're not an anatomy geek.

I can tell often even from Samasthiti that it's going to be a "right psoas day" which usually means that I won't finish standing series. But the bonus of doing that little practice is that when I crack into the white-energy-release of the held stress of the psoas, I get a wonderful opening that lasts all day. Maybe it's not an "opening" in the sense of new flexibility, but it's certainly an opening as to not being shut up with stress, closed with negative emotions.

The adventure begins with the first Uttanasana.

Because the right lower back is tight, I immediately, on the first proper exhalation, feel a sort of vertical "bar" of tightness over there. Downward dog is also a like adventure in the right lower back.

But I work envelope breathing (breathe first, move second) because I am concentrating on the sensation, not on achieving a series, and this has really deepened my concentration overall, for things beyond the asana practice.

The Virabhadrasanas in Surya B are the next adventure: each dip of the right knee brings with it some cranking hip opening. The Urdhva Mukhas begin to get involved, as the front hip stretches and the low back, from repeated down dogs, begins to give.

Padangusthasana and Pada Hastasana are wonderful in that spine-lengthening release of the low back. I feel nothing in the hamstrings until I press into the toes, lightening the heels. But that right low back "bar" of tension, it stretches like an anamorphic image, pulls open, bleeds out psychedelically, like some wacko YouTube video.

And all of that from SIMPLE FORWARD FOLDS that we hold maybe, what, a MINUTE?

Then Trikonasana, consciously pressing the shoulder blades *backward* and pulling up on the big toe. The outer hip (top hip) engages a bit to pull up and loosens a bit to move the shoulderblades back; active release. Brilliant.

A lesson from my own yoga students in Parivrtta Trik: watch the ribcage and its tendency to shorten on one side and extend on the other. Move the front-leg hip backwards, and pull the top shoulder away from it. Uncurl those side ribs and the opening is immense.

Twists are the most impinged poses when I have a "right hip day." Twists, then backbends, and then forward folds. Really, nothing is ideal, but twists take the biggest hit, which also means that twists can give the greatest opening.

Same "shoulder and hip backwards" action in Parsvakonasana. With right leg bent, nothing, but with left leg bent, HUGE almost ripping sensations in the outer right hip. That fascia which binds pelvic crest to greater trochanter: IMMENSE.

Glowing energy hangover; could not go right to Parivrtta Parsva.

Even in that posture, I couldn't make the prayer twist, too deep, too big. Had to grab thigh with both hands and barely tuck the elbow outside it. Scrunching, squeezing, extending: crunch the right hip together on the first side, massively extend that stress-laden fascia on the second side.

And that was enough. I couldn't get energy to flow between my solar plexus and my foot on that side anymore. Big glowing energy jam in the right hip, all over.

So I took rest from that point, and let the stress sink into the floor. It takes about fifteen minutes on the floor for that work to calm down, and I was thinking, "This is no beginner's practice, no beginner can do this with energy" and that got me thinking about Richard Freeman who, in his most recent book the name of which I'm spacing right now, says that the body is the "piece of the cosmos" given to us that we might learn about all of reality.

Negotiation.

I've discovered that what I want relationship-wise with J is not so much "to get this" or "to avoid this" as to negotiate to certainty. Here's what I mean by that:

Sometimes in reply to any sort of affection (and this includes hugs in the living room) J will say something like, "I'm really busy and stressed." Now, this is true, but as a "reply" it doesn't answer anything.

For example: does that mean "I'm really busy and stressed, and if you want some attention later, you're going to have to try harder to persuade me?"

Or does it mean, "I'm really busy and stressed, so I think we should hold off all attention until break/summer/sometimelater?"

Or does it mean something else?

By "certainty," I mean a reply I can sort of "graph" on a yes-no line. J is a big fan of talking about her conditions without giving me any idea of what that means for interacting with her. I don't think that's directly evasive (although I did, for a while), I think it's that she's just not thinking of her life conditions in what I've just called "yes-no" terms.

J has what people-who-study-this-sorta-thing call "responsive desire," which means that she's very rarely going to say, "Hey, how about we do this?" and is much more likely to RESPOND to someone else's suggestion to that effect. This is why she can come across as hard to read, especially for someone who likes overt consent, the way I do.

This also means, I've discovered, that when she answers me with "I'm really stressed," I can proceed to be affectionate and suggestive until I get a solid "no" or "let's do this later" or some more CERTAIN answer about if when and how. In fact, the good thing about responsive desire and someone who does not easily say yes/no, is that I can keep suggesting this idea until it becomes a more ready priority, which is how the first five years of our relationship worked. Basically, J's reponsiveness got hooked directly to my more active model (I need consent first, but once I get it, I turn active), and our whole dynamic was as simple as "Mhm? Mhm. Proceed" for years. YEARS. Didn't know what I had in the old days. Oh well. Anyway:

The other cool thing about negotiation-unto-yes/no is that I realize that what I want is Certainty, not a particular outcome. This maybe plays into the long frustration of my former marriage, which was all headfuckery and lived in "Maybe" so that the whole thing became a perennial tease where I could be pushed and pulled to-and-fro at will like a cat toy.

Certainty precludes that: it's as if I can take my current level of interest, introduce it, get a clear response, and then either proceed or put it down, and then it's down, because I know EXACTLY how it fits into that moment of relationship. Yes is yes, no is no, and later it's the same choice between, and it's always like that.

Ambiguity and "maybe" is like a yes perenially ABOUT to fall, but I'm never sure when, so I always have to be ready for it 24/7, which not only takes an ENORMOUS amount of dedicated surveillance and waiting, but takes an ADDITIONAL enormous amount of waiting-ready energy ALL THE TIME. It can never go slack, because you have to be there CONSTANTLY so if that thing tips, you can pounce on it.

What a total waste of life energy that system is/was.

So really, this is all about energy: practice, life, relating. Energy.

New Content? And Followers Continue to Increase....

I wrote a longish essay-as-question on a friend's blog this afternoon and answered something for myself.

I'd have put that topic in different language if it had been written here, and I would have missed the answer I got from writing over there.

For this reason, I see that I'm going to have to open up the content I write here and get outside "the yoga or the relationship" which is my current dual channel here.

This will mean, talking about the stuff I teach more, the stuff I think with, the art, the film, the theory, all of that academic jazz. Now, in case that sounds super boring (which I don't think it often will be) or super esoteric (which is virtually guaranteed), I have questions for you largely-anonymous readers out there:

1. Should there be a new site for that? Wordpress or something?

2. Will you still read here if I tag posts things like "yoga" or "academics" or "shock value" or stuff like that? You know how I can get creative with a title. Basically, this place is going to have to go "life" versus just going "yoga" and yeah yeah you can say "those are the same" all day long, but you and I both know that's just Bad Advaita bullshit, so shut it.

3. How in the world is my number of followers increasing, when I hardly ever post anything on anyone's blog and I've more-and-more turned toward writing in the "I don't give a flying fuck if you read this or not" vein with precisely that attitude? Not that I mind. As someone in the NYT citing John Updike said this week, "No act is so private that it doesn't seek applause."

Note:

I would like ANSWERS to these considerations, particularly to the first one, where I'm wondering if I should open a new "all of me" blog or just write more broadly about all aspects in *this* location. Writing about all aspects is not optional.

Thanks everyone!

501 posts, Samskaric Business, and a Light Swat at the Secret et Al.

This is post 501! I had no idea we'd hit 500 last post, and really, I didn't care, and in fact, I kinda still don't :D

Ok, this is going to be one of those "hide the children" posts, but have no fear, it's going mostly for analysis, not some big ugly emotional trip from the closet.

First, let's take a light swat at The Secret, and things like it. I saw a Facebook post right before getting into this blog today, that said something like, "If you are having hostility in your life, know that it's in your state of mind." This, my friends, is our old buddy Bad Advaita.

Now, I do recall the Sutra (although I can't recall which one) that says something like, "Peaceful people become invisible to the angry" (that's a really, really loose paraphrase), but that's not the same thing as saying that "Your Inner State Produces Your External Reality." Let's leave that sorta thing to movies like THE MATRIX and DARK CITY (1996), ok?

Why the swat at The Secret and all that? It has to do with samskaric business and what "the mind" is.

I have samskaric business (about which I'll say more below) which happens "in my mind" but really doesn't affect my external reality at all, as far as I can tell, in any way whatsoever. It does, however, drastically affect my internal reality, sort of structures it, prioritizes it, gives occupation and distraction. Now, in terms of "The Secret" and "manifesting," what SHOULD happen is that this samskaric desire SHOULD create manifestations and satisfactions, because I'm often thinking so hard about it. Focus creates reality, right?

And yet, EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE occurs.

What I get is reality as haunted house, dreams and desires everywhere, hanging in the trees like spiderwebs, unrealizable, unreal, not there. Ghosting and haunting. External reality sits, and I imagine, but nothing happens except for distraction. It's like meditation on what you can't have, which produces a world of non-having inhabited by the always-everywhere ghosts of what you want and can't produce; you only produce what some would call the "spectacle" of your granted desire and the desire remains, and in fact remains more and more ungranted.

But at the same time, this isn't anti-enlightenment, it's like a keen enlightenment lesson wrapped up in frustration and towering desires that never meet satisfaction.

That alone is a lesson right there.

The great game of the Secret is that you have a clear idea of "What You Want In The World" and then "all you have to do is manifest it." To get peace, become peace, think peace and TA-DA, peace will result. Just like we said last time about Bad Advaita, boy howdy does that sound LOVELY.

But here, in my mechanism, the problem right away with that is that I do NOT have a clear idea of "What I Want" because there seem to be oppositional wants. Which one is louder, more sincere, more "true"? What basis for "true" would there be? Can one not do evil, wish evil, wish for a satisfaction that is fleeting, choose to live for the impermanent? See? It's all ethical confusion. The game that is "The Secret" relies on an idea of a one-directed mind (ekagra), which most yoga texts talk about having lost and someday re-achieving.

Put more briefly, we can't do THE SECRET because we're busy trying to achieve a state of mind which is taken for granted in that game from the start.

It's like this: what do you want to manifest? I want to manifest one-pointedness! Well, IF YOU HAD IT, YOU COULD MANIFEST IT. Moebius strip, and then KAPOW your head explodes.

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Anyway:

The desire that I most clearly feel/hear/sense in my head is something that I didn't put there, that's how I've always described it. It's been alien from the beginning, and yet so, so loud, so omnipresent, unless I'm totally preoccupied with some "flow" experience, like having a really on teaching day.

Like a computer virus. You're sitting there trying to do your word processing or whatever, and here's this virus telling you that you have to buy anti-virus software for seventy five bucks, or else. And it scans and then prompts the buy, over and over and over and OVER AND OVER AND OVER, and you're like, "HOW THE FUCK DO I TURN THIS FUCKING THING OFF?"

That's how it is.

And like I've said, I can throw satisfaction at this desire hand over fist, and nothing changes. I can throw frustration at it for years, and nothing changes. I can give in to distraction; nothing. I can get too busy to think about it; nothing. Total untouchability; one note, for ever, lifelong.

So, as I've said before, obviously this desire isn't organic; it's not human.

And through the years, I've tried to figure out "what to make of this." Should I try satisfaction? Because if this was economics, demand would be answered by supply, right? Increase supply and demand backs off. Nope; supply does not ease this demand. It might temporarily provide a flow experience that occupies my mind (sort of dissolves the mind into the ticking present, makes the mind fourth-dimensional), but as soon as that mind "reforms" in three dimensions, so does the prompting virus.

Should I try philosophy? I read all sorts of things, and I got a lot of ideas, in fact I've made courses out of most of those ideas, but none of this achieved any kind of "sublimation" of the basic repeating note, the life long alarm clock.

Should I try sublimation, sort of making enlightenment out of it? I have stored energy, I have played around with focus, energy and introversion (in an energetic sense) and those were all interesting, but nothing changed in the one-note voice in my head.

So eventually the big question became,

WHY THE FUCKING FUCK IS THIS THING IN MY HEAD? WHY, UNIVERSE??? WHY THE FUCK????

And I think, only after reading the Yoga Sutras many times (my first time reading the YS being April 2007, and I've read, in particular, the Maehle translation many times since then), did a possible answer set in.

Well, it's not about satisfaction or sublimation or philosophy or learning or creating the world or making my external circumstances fit some ideal model or about anything else, so

Maybe it's purely about OBSTACLE. Maybe it's simply a DISTRACTION.

Maybe it's, quite literally, nothing but an alarm in your head.

And this fits. It doesn't impair me, it doesn't enable me. It doesn't change, it doesn't satisfy, it doesn't have a volume switch, it's totally uninteractive.

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It does become quiet when I'm intensely involved in things like research, or standing on my head, or breathing and watching a class of yoga practitioners move. This, to shorthand it, is a "flow" state.

A flow state is an undistracted state; what Yogananda called the "sense telephones" (the idea being that the senses "dial out" to the world) are reined in, controlled enough to provide focus on a thing (the thing focused on is unimportant, just like meditation teachers say).

Now, our friends at The Secret would tell us that I want to "manifest quiet" and so I get quiet inside and it shows up. That's not how this works. I can want quiet all day long, but the only time I get quiet is when I'm not thinking about wanting it. It's much more in line with "do not think of an elephant" than it is with the Bad Advaita of The Secret.

And also, this is what I meant when I said a couple posts ago that you cannot "practice" surrender. Same idea. As soon as you "practice" surrender, you fuck it up. Surrender is the absence of practicing surrender; you can't surrender anything if you are "practicing" surrender, if you and surrender are two separate things with a verb between you.

So this endless desire-alarm that goes off in my head is a distraction which always and ever stands separate from me, makes me chase it all over the universe, knowing that it can never be caught, ever. That's monkey mind, right there, in a sentence.

And this is why I like Maehle's translation of the Yoga Sutras, because he is very keen on NOT translating "yoga" as "union." Read his Pada Two where he talks about the proper relationship between Purusha and Prakriti: to UNIFY those two is to make the Big Mistake!

One does NOT become "one with everything" (yeah I think that joke is funny, too). One becomes SEPARATE FROM EVERYTHING. Engaged, of course (since every part of "us" is Prakriti except for the shining consciousness of Purusha itself), but eventually separate as "we" sort of "in-volute" toward Purusha consciousness.

So this desire-alarm is really sort of a demonstrative metaphor for ALL OF EXISTENCE. A ringing magnet for the "sense telephones," pulling them outward, ever outward, toward an infinite and unreachable horizon of pure distraction.

And it also instructs about involution: not to REFUSE the senses, but simply not to gratify them. "Nah, I'm just going to sit here and meditate and do nothing; thanks for the offer, though." Likewise, this instruction goes for seated meditation: what is there to achieve? Any seeking like that can't be done, I think, at the start (or, at least for me, to "want something" from meditation wrecks the meditation; maybe I'm a Natural Born Zenster in that regard).

So in a way, thank you, samskaric business, you peaceless curse, you constant torment. Let us remember Maehle's Sutra 2:22 or 24 or somewhere around there: "To one of discrimination, even pleasure can be reduced to pain."