Energy Post 3: Crushing

The core of this post, which I'll probably summarize first and then write out in longer and more tangential form, is this:

"Crushing." Yes, in the sense of elementary school early romance (if one wants to say that crushing is romantic, in that sense; we should be careful here because our vocabulary can narrow our view and our understanding).

Perhaps related to my extroversion, I crush on people, particularly when conversation is good or even conversational *dynamics* are good. For example, people with genuinely novel gestures when they talk with their hands. I tend to crush on yoga teachers who give me marvelous adjustments. You'll see already where and how this post, weeks ago when I conceived it, begins to become very problematic.

Questions about "relating" in the yoga room, in and out of one's "relationship," all of that baggage wants to be opened up here. Is one or need one be "energetically monogamous"? Are those energies even the same? Need they be? How can we tell? A thousand questions open and challenge some of our big categories and particularly, some of our set limits (or, our history's or our culture's or our gender's limits, or some mix of those, personal and politic both).

But I don't want to go into all that mess at the top.

The essence of this is that I don't believe that this energy, let's call it "relating energy" rather than something already-reductive like "sexual energy" (how blase and tired-sixties would THAT be, you know??)----this energy is not unidirectional or even binary, but is AT ONCE and simultaneously multiple and uneven, tending rather than targeting. Imagine an amoeba somehow balanced on top of a broom.

The name of the game for me is not "restricting" any given attraction or crush, or "redirecting" that energy to another goal, but feeling out, prior to any gating off or channelling, fully feeling out WHERE the energy is, being aware of its shape and texture and even weight.

This will sound, of course, like some kind of woo-woo madness. "You feel the energy's WEIGHT? What the hell, Patrick? Put the crack pipe down, my friend."

So for me the great weakness of writing a post about energetic crushing is that we immediately reduce the scope of our energetic understanding by even NAMING this "crushing," because the energy is bigger than that, more interesting than that, although that is one tendency, one sort of magnetic pull on the broom-balanced amoeba. This is why no one on earth can write an interesting blog about "sexual energy" and the yoga practice. It all becomes, "I have achieved more balance in that domain"---yeah, exactly. BOOORRRRIIIINNNGGGG.

Things I do want to take up, a bit, with this, but later (and not in this order):

a. energy blindness. People can be receptive but unaware, which is dangerous.

b. manipulation. Energy connoisseurs (as Freeman once put it) have to be CAREFUL with the energy they manipulate, particularly when around the energy unaware, because "connoisseurs" are not free of energy unawareness. I think that many cults are run on a combination of the energy-blind in charge, along with the energy-blind over-devoted.

c. narrow vision. Crushing, which is a potential expression of energy, is more familiar to us than, for example, "feeling the energy's weight," and so what we feel is the Tendency To Move Toward Familiarity, rather than the Real Strangeness of Reality, which leads to accusations like "you made me feel this!" and then see danger, above.

d. the varying receptivity of yoga teachers to this kind of energy management. To use two examples: Kino is much more receptive to energy crushing than Swenson is. Swenson is a riot and you can tell when he respects and in a way loves your practice, but you are NOT getting close through that humor. Not in the sense of standoffishness, but very much in the sense of defending against simplistic energy crushing.

e. taking care of your own energetic business. THIS, in a way, I think, is a major goal (yes, I said goal) of long-term yoga practice. This should NOT be understood to say, keeping all of the energy clean and safe, because an energetic world that is clean and safe is also probably free from interaction with Reality, and that's not what we want. Ethical questions emerge IMMEDIATELY under the surface of this, and then we are properly dealing with real energy and real circumstances. In Trungpa-ese, we are handling what really matters.

Devotional Practice (sort of "Energy Post 2")

We're skipping over something I wanted to write about energy and "crushing" (yes, in the elementary school sense, but without romantic object) because it became so heavy and complicated as I tried to process a very simple statement, that I can't put any of it down here yet.

On Dec 1, Kino wrote about the value of the six-day practice week and said this: "One other crucial shift must happen in order to facilitate the transition into full immersion in the yoga tradition. You must make the transition from a fitness oriented approach to yoga into a devotional one."

Hm?

I know Nobel took this on, but I'd like to take it on differently. I don't read devotion as any kind of purifying practice besides that of transforming samskaric energies. For me, to read purification in the surface meaning of "don't take chemicals, caffeine, booze, et cetera" is really to not touch anything meaningful.

There is a teacher in town (student of mine, teacher of ashtanga also) who was cut loose from a job because she sponsored an event where booze would be served. She was told something like, "That's not how yoga people behave," and even Tim Miller (her teacher, to the degree that she has one) said, "Well what scriptures were they reading that said that?" to which she could only answer, "Well you know, THE SCRIPTURES" and I can imagine Tim's knowing nod in reply.

And that's how this is another "energy post." Purification not in annamaya terms, because that asks positively ENDLESS questions about should I eat this, drink that, how much of this, how many teaspoons of that, Ayurveda all simplified for Western culture which never works because that's not where it came from or was meant to be applied to, and then we all wind up doing "yoga for weight management." BORING.

**FROM a fitness-oriented approach TO a devotional one.**

I don't have a specific thing/deity/power to which I am devoted, but my practice, particularly since late November, has been moving away from "I can do this, can I do this?" (the sort of thinking that is achievement or anxiety-about-achievement oriented) and toward focused breathing, moving, stretching, feeling. An attempt to jump into a handstand pike or perfect a posture, or do one twice, doesn't modify this. That's one aspect of this change-over.

I did not discover "devotional practice" on purpose (that's also a theme in my last month or so posting here; I've become very anti-effort, again, see the "can't practice surrender" post, because that's where I most clearly hit this, at least I think so).

Too much ego pain, too much parenting, not enough time and space to use asana practice to nourish "myself," the self as ego, to take "time for me," as the commercial has it. So asana practice simply stopped being about me. It became brief, which at first was "I am so defeated by my stressy obligations," and then, particularly as I added closing sequence, no matter what practice had been (one day it was seven sun salutations), the asana practice became a way of focusing rather than answering-stress or achieving or even taking-time. Sure, those all sound the same, but they're not.

For a long time (since the early 1990s, at least), I have laid out flat on the floor when I need to chill. Many many living rooms have seen me do this, regardless of roommate traffic, pets, or other objects or people. It doesn't work if I use "my room" and make it a private thing; it had to be a PUBLIC focused "chilling" session. Roommates and partners got used to it. And it wasn't napping, it wasn't abjection, it wasn't meditation. It was sort of a public call of an end (however temporary, perhaps "a break" is a better term) to stressiness at that time.

And it let me recharge in somewhere between about eight and eighteen minutes. No breathing exercises, nothing fancy, just being on the floor and letting the monkey in my head run wherever he wanted. So in a way, it was a sort of instinctive reclining meditation, but I didn't understand it in those terms. And it was observative, but again, I didn't understand it like that either.

Devotional practice has become something like that. I do opening chant, and I really enjoy it. If I'm alone (i.e., at the studio and not at the Y) I do it loudly, so it bounces off the walls back to me. And something about the mindset makes postures easier, makes painful stretching (because I keep emotional pain in my fascia) easier also, even if I only do some sun salutations. There is a sustained mind "tone" (in the musical sense) that lingers between opening chant and closing chant.

And I used to have (still have, I suppose) an Intermediate-level practice, so some days (particularly when inspired by a Monday night practice) I'll do Intermediate up to Kapo or Supta Vajrasana, and then other days do partial or full Primary or just standing, or whatever. The "tone" of devotional practice is COMPLETELY EQUAL, and creates equanimity. The day this past week when I was fooling around with learning to tic (handstand dropover) was interesting in observational terms. I learned that that movement is, for me, essentially strength-based. I learned that that movement comes with pretty intense fear, which is oddly combined with intense concentration and stillness. So it's like "Hmm, here I am balancing on my hands, with my feet hanging over, and it feels like pretty far, and I'm terrified to let them drop, but I'm totally calm at the same time, hanging here. How interesting."

It's not that that is THE SAME, in physical/annamaya terms, as a sun salutation, because it isn't, and it's not energetically/pranamaya the same either, but the tone of practice, the "music" of practice, if you will, is EQUANIMITY.

Closing series is the series of equanimity, the great "smoothing out" as of bedcovers. Closing series is where I give up my hurrah and my aarrrrghhh and everything else, the great emotional quiet-seas, the breezeless open ocean.

Devotional practice may not reduce the ego in any way (about which I will say more in a later post), but it operates sort of parallel to the ego, on some different wavelength, isn't run by the ego, isn't operated and then carved up to specifically serve the ego's bipolarity where one either aggrandizes or fails.

And in this way, devotional practice is regular practice, because there's nothing to gain or lose. I still get sore (annamaya) but it's the energy management (pranamaya; and with it, hints of emotional management) that really happens. Annamaya contains, runs with, alongside, pranamaya, and it's more and more, now emotional energy that is cracked out of fascia, anger at my household situation, mourning about my father earlier this year, anxiety about the holiday travel with my family's chronic weird communication and suburbanity, other things. Practice is not ABOUT these things, but I am about these things, and I learn this in practice. I see my own noise better. I hear the jam band that is my emotional/physical/energetic state, over the bass note of practice's equanimity.

Energy Post 1: Anger, Alchemy, Annamaya

There are many, many aspects to the energy post, and thus (and I realized this especially this morning in and through practice) there is not one energy post, but more like a realization/development now congealed enough for me to post perhaps numerous times on it.

I was thinking today (again, in practice, sort of a weird meditation, to meditate on writing, but not about practice-reporting) about posts by Owl and Jason (a dynamic duo who never QUITE come apart in my consciousness, different as they are), and how my own writing differs from their respective styles. Owl puts us there, even if we don't know where "there" is. Writing as teleportation. Sometimes I am teleported into a grey fuzziness where I know nothing, other times to (and particularly) fall woodlands up north of where I live, other times other places. Jason I think digests an idea in advance and then speaks with considerable authority (or at least with the tone of such), even when he writes in a voice of interrogation or questioning.

This blog, and especially when I think it doesn't do this, tends to write in first-person. It is highly experiential, and it wants to communicate the DIRECT EMOTION, man, RIGHT NOW! This makes it amusing when I think I can write with dispassion and totally explain something in utter clarity, because my writing style has the muddiness of the immediate ON PURPOSE. I forget that sometimes.

So when you're reading here, you are much more likely to read my miscalculations and confusions and uncontrolled emotions, not to mention the fact that I like to purge here, I don't often write for explication as much as I do for catharsis: you are much more likely to get my fog and my darkness than you are my keen light on any given subject. But that (and I value this) is what it is to be alive.

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I used to be quite upset with both my new child (in his effect on my life as it had been) and my new relationship with J (again, in its effect on my life as it had been). Basic post-earthquake care (emotional earthquake). The blogging of 2009 and 2010 are full of this, and it's obvious and, I think, obviously purgative writing. I needed it.

I find now, that if I am angry about something in my life, it is almost ALWAYS the way that J's administrative job at the university eats up her life, my life, and our kid's life. That job is a big black hole of desktop bureaucracy that makes J so stressed that she can't even tell if she's ill or not. No time to exercise, to feed herself regularly, no time to prioritize, no time. None.

My kid and I are playtime and love and conversation and it's all fantastic.

But this job that J took, to get money "for C's future" and "so we can be comfortable" and all that? Hah! Financial comfort MAYBE, vast emotional DISCOMFORT for certain.

I think she acted out of fear: tenure deadline, needing international travel for research, not being able to get funding for said research; the job deferred research requirements and let her achieve tenure (yay!) without needing to panic about being "expert" in teaching or research; instead she's become something like expert in service. The deadlines were all met, the fear conquered, but the new payback for this achievement is HELLISH bureaucracy and stress combined with the very high dosage of Protestant Work Ethic that J's parents gave her, and so she has this weird un-makeable perfection that she is determined to achieve as an administrator AND as a parent, and it simply CAN NOT BE DONE, which adds to her frustration and her dedication to meeting the unmeetable limits, and it all just becomes anxiety and sadness and every time she chooses us over work or work over us, the "perfection desire" for the other group falls into disarray.

It's a horrifyingly bad emotional situation, and she's going to be doing this for probably two more solid years (2012 and 2013).

So rule one: NEVER, do not EVER, get a job in university administration.

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Now wait a minute, wasn't I going to talk about ENERGY here? When the hell am I going to get back on topic?

Ok, ok, ok.

Here's how it works: I get chronically tight in the right glutes (all three muscles there: not just the Maximus, but also the Medius and Minimus). This tightness appears then disappears, then reappears, then disappears, over and over and over again. Unlike, for example, my hamstrings, which have remained long, or my shoulders, which have opened a lot from the backbending I was doing in 2010, the glutes will occasionally get so stuck that I can't twist fully into a posture that I've been able to achieve for years, such as Marichyasana C.

I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure this out, and of course trying to back off and then advance practice, through this. In large part, THIS is why my practice has such wacko levels of advance-and-recede, and why I'm doing Intermediate to Karandavasana in June and then standing poses only, in November, and why that can change week to week.

My favorite explanation, from a trusted friend, was, "There is samskaric business in your right hip." In fact, that's a big part of what I mean this post to say.

The hip musculature is part of the annamaya kosha ("food body", the outer sheath, the grossly physical, accompanied by the more subtle layers of pranamaya, manamaya, vijnanamaya and anandamaya koshas, prior, apparently, to experiencing the Atman).

I came to believe, during my child's early days, that negative emotions, or more properly, my inability to clearly and calmly HANDLE negative emotions, caused more tightness in the hip. Or, less woo-woo, I got uptight about how my life had changed and this tension (predictably) had impact on my asana practice.

I've spent quite a bit of writing here emphasizing how hard the emotions are to deal with, and playing it light on the physical symptoms, i.e., how the hip actually feels. Time to reverse that, which I think will be much more productive.

Over the past two weeks of practice, which have suprisingly been very regular, I've been seeing that in the mornings, I am pretty tight and I really emphasize breath as I move through perhaps only seven sun salutations or, often, just standing poses and maybe not even a closing sequence. VERY light practice, but with big energy moving in and out of the hip, even in sun salutations. But sometimes in the afternoon, I'll get in a full Primary, or, this week, I'll do standing and Intermediate up through Supta Vajrasana and then I'll even be able to drop back and stand up three times. Again, yes, wacko levels of advance-and-recede, I know.

And somehow through these practices, I have learned very factual, easy things about the right hip, which I used to mythologize and wax very woo-woo about. For example: there are two tightness situations there. Glutes and Psoas. The most productive postures for cracking into that (let's say, when I get out of bed in the morning) are pigeon lunges and low-lunge psoas stretches, followed by either twists or backbends. Supta Virasana, in particular, is wonderful, as is Bharadvajasana.

It is as if the glutes tighten up, restricting all of the fascia that is related to any movement between the outer (and inner, but you can't palpate that) pelvic bowl and the greater trochanter of the hipbone. One can feel both of these bones with a hand on the outer hip.

So that's why I feel a weird glute stretch when I do Kapotasana. That's why my Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana (adduction/abduction, anyone?) is hung up on a tight day. That's why all half-lotus postures are difficult on the right side (again, on a tight day). That's why Virabhadrasana A, done with enthusiasm, can be just a CRACKING energy opener. That's why Supta Vajrasana can crank SO MUCH ENERGY out of me that I have to sob it out like a sort of panic attack. Even a forward fold like Padangusthasana can be intense when I have a tight glute day, because the lower back does NOT want to grant the hamstrings their full length. Janu Sirsasana A, when done with its proper slight twist, is VERY intense with the right leg bent. Again, this is why.

And it's uneven: left psoas and adduction and abduction is not affected and does not respond in kind.

So the annamaya kosha carries these symptoms: but symptoms of WHAT?

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Detour to emotions: plenty of times here, I've simply expressed my anger or sadness or whatever with (easy example) the pregnancy/new parents situation, and then been quick to blame whatever I don't like about life, on that situation.

I think that's a fairly typical reaction: you feel the negative emotion, you blame whatever's around you for MAKING THAT SO, and then if you're me, you try to analyze the situation in order to REDUCE THE NEGATIVITY (which always has some external cause).

Many things are not accurate there: the emotion comes from without, and is analyzed from without. No inner work, no inner experience except "ew, this sucks, make it stop!"

Repulsion of the negative directly upon experience.

Now let's return to asana practice to try to learn something: I know from the first Uttanasana that it's going to be a big hip day. So when I feel that, what's happened for the last two weeks, is that I really focus on breathing instead of the anxiety ("how much practice am i going to do, is this worth it, shouldn't i do something else to get into the hip first, so i can Finish A Series (etc, etc)") and I end up moving until I cannot, which means until I get a big energy release from that hip. And sometimes I had chased that energy release (for example, by cranking into the Vira A's of Surya Namaskara B), and other times I had sought to defer it by not cranking into Vira A or Padangusthasana or Prasarita A or some other pose.

The immediate side effect of this was to understand asana practice as a BREATHING FACT. SKPJ: "Ashtanga yoga breathing practice, all the rest just bending." That lesson. When I crank/break the energy tied up in the hips, usually what I get is a sort of white-pain flash, like cutting your finger but not quite as intense, because it's not an actual injury, it's like an energetic breakout rather than an annamaya slice. And usually when that happens, I just stop practicing, I feel and then try to process, try to FEEL what the sensation GIVES ME to think (in a way, I try to embody the brain, turn the nervous system's cognitive powers into sensory powers, try to DEVOLVE language into sensing, and yet STILL COME AWAY with a lesson that I can verbalize).

BUT

It became necessary to make myself do at least closing chant, or, as the week developed, closing series (including backbends) even if I'd sat down still and lost the breath and all of that. It became ESSENTIAL to properly close it as an ashtanga practice, rebuilding the breath, re-entering practice. This was an absolutely transformative decision.

The processing that happens when I practice-until-breakthrough-energy is all directly about the breakthrough energy, because that's the most immediate event.

The processing that happens when I practice-until-breakthrough-energy-AND-closing-series remains sensual, remains sort of IN THE CONTEXT OF body movement, and the breakout energy becomes integrated, becomes part of the full practice event, and sometimes I just do bridges because the hip is so hungup with energy-as-static it can't bear more stretch, but other times, the energy-as-static clears, and I have big backbends, and sometimes even drops-and-stands after nothing but closing series. But the further lesson is that what KIND of backbends I have, or their QUALITY as physical postures (big, deep, stable, dynamic, all of that language) DOESN'T MATTER, and I don't mean that in the too-often-seen sense of SHOULDN'T MATTER but rather with a real and authentic DOESN'T!

Because the asana practice has been established at the start as a breathing event, even when the breath is broken by the energy untied in the hips, the closing series returns as a breathing event, where pose quality doesn't matter, and there is an ALCHEMIC process by which cognitive estimation or anxiety ("will i finish? will i drop back? this posture feels good, that one feels bad, i'm not as deep as usual here, this pose is bigger than before, this means i'll get as far as...") vanish under the vinyasa breath count and especially under what I've earlier called "flow."

Flow could be translated as "skill in motion" (and I realize Grim has done some posting about skill and Heidegger and such, I'm taking this more from the book FLOW, which doesn't define skill in those terms, or at least I can't easily translate it to those terms).

Let us take this morning as an example of all of this:

I was aiming at 9 am practice in the studio (self-practice) with a student and friend of mine, but the child was constipated and J was being a stress-case about all her work to do and how she can't achieve highly at all of it at once, and how worrisome it is to have to give the child glycerin to get him, you know, "moving" and how that makes her a bad mother, blah blah blah, just so much stress and judgment oozing out of every pore of her, and then she had to go to work before the glycerin could take effect, and she asked, "is it ok if I leave you to do this?" with a constantly-present tone of "are you sure you can handle it?" that she has had with me for three solid years, and so I was NOT in a pleased mood with her, but soon the child got relief and I texted her directly, to tell her this (all stress reduction is good stress reduction) and then packed up the boy, contacted my student to let her know I'd be late, and got over there at 9:40 where we had to wait for the 10 am teacher to show (at 9:55) and then finally practiced.

Much irritation, prior to practice. Much backbending earlier in the week. Cranky outer hips. Difficult but rewarding Padangusthasana; knew it would be a "hip day." Could NOT, simply could NOT, stick the swing-out-and-back of Utthita Hasta. Impossible. Did a difficult Ardha Baddha Padma, and then called it a practice. Full of irritation at her and her stressiness and the mess she nearly made of my morning (classic format: blame the externals, then keep moving and all the blame goes away and turns into answers to your questions; alchemy!).

Slowly, slowly, moving into backbends. Two bridges, still anger, so keen to blame her for the stress and thus the "bad" practice (wtf does "bad" practice even mean? does anyone know?) A pressup to a wheel, easier than I thought it would be, and the anger just atomized. Its lightness suprised me.

Lightness: what I mean is, I used to think of anger as sort of yellowish, almost kind of hard, but moist, like thick phlegm. It sticks inside me, gets on things, can't be washed off, can't be scraped, either. But this, this anger, was like the psychedelic light you see in the film ENTER THE VOID (which I screened on Monday, so it's relevant to me, visually here), and it just atomized, POOF, lighter even than smoke, it turned literally into a scattershot blast of electrons in the great pinball game. I almost saw it do this.

People say, "just channel it," and silly things like that. I did not push into the backbend WITH anger, nor did I "turn it" into something else. As I've said about surrender (and that post about not doing surrender is really key, you should reread it if you haven't), the alchemy is not something that I DO, it is something that HAPPENS (perhaps if we wanted to include agency, we could say that it is the result of my actions or choices, but that I am not aware that my actions have this result and thus I "don't know" where said results come from).

I also did not "ignore" or "turn away from" anger. My experience was that I pressed up, suprised with the ease, and then looked down and breathed, again with good concentration of the breath, and anger simply ENDED, sha-zam, electrons running for the limits. Replaced with skill, not in the sense of praise ("he is so skilled!") but simply with movement that was not lazy and did not strive for the impossible. Movement that was smooth and easy and which was so, sort of OUTSIDE the mind. There was not cognitive governance, which I think goes hand-in-hand with the atom-smasher of anger. The mind's fixation was changed by the body's movement, the RECRUITMENT of the mind half of bodymind, by the breathing pressup arc.

Five more times total. A lot of already-rehearsed movement. Rock back and forth. Put head down as close to feet as possible and walk in. Done and done. Difficult dropbacks and standups, but they retained this coherence, this unifying bodymind element.

Then in closing, no more anger at J (this time; it'll be back, I'm sure). A move toward compassion for how intense her chosen workload is; even a move toward compassion for her choices, how tough the balancing act must have been, how spooky tenure-or-not is. A move toward acceptance of how hard it is for me to accept what she chose and what effects it's had. Not acceptance or compassion in the cheezy sense of "oh I understand" and pat-on-the-back for comfort, but more in the sense of unangry clarity, "compassion" the way that Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism would put it (the pre-Shambhala Trungpa). Clarity unclouded by emotional reaction unrestrained.

I'm not certain that the mechanism is that my anger (or other intensity, negativity) gets thus into the annamaya and my particularly sticky right glutes. That seems a bit too neat. But something woo-woo dramatic like, "Your right glutes are a samskaric inheritance, which manifests negativity from the past lives" is also not quite right (although that'd make a good movie, maybe). But in kosha terms (and I really only know the idea of koshas from the Paramahamsa commentary on the Gita, that one translated by his student), this whole situation seems to involve the annamaya (food body, the physical practice) and also the pranamaya (energy body, the energetic "breakout," and also something in my discussion of skill, above) and perhaps EVEN the next one, the manamaya (mind body, where emotions are, they say). It's not that I "controlled" the anger, but I definitely manipulated it, changed my relationship to it. And that feels just a little bit like being Neo in the Matrix, where he dodges the bullets, you know?

Deferring the Energy Post, Workshoppin' Around the Midwest

I've had an "energy" post on hold all week, with no time to write it. I could reproduce it here, but I think that tomorrow or Tuesday (because as with all weekends I have some delirious hip tightness that'll work out energetically over the next two practice days) it'll be more alive and more interesting. Right now it'd read like photocopy.

So that's coming. Soon. Really.

Otherwise:

There are workshops in the midwest of interest (you might think, well duh, that's always true, for every region), but the midwest does not see a lot of ashtanga senior teachers, aside from Chicago, and even then, it's Kino twice a year at Moksha if we're lucky, and then Richard Freeman's been making a tour through annually for the last two years at least, and Kino and/or Tim also like to hit the Yoga House up in Minneapolis annually, and Tim Miller of course does his Columbus Ohio thing in April.

I can find (and am interested in) these:

Mar 1-4: Ashtanga Yoga Confluence, San Diego. The first year of what Tim and company say will be an annual thing. Mysore or Primary, with workshops and with discussion and even a MC Yogi dance thing. Will it be fabulous, will it be overloaded, will it be something else? I think one has to find out.

Mar 9-11: Kino MacGregor comes to our humble Indianapolis. No schedule yet, so we don't know if she's Mysoring here, but that would rock. We have NEVER had an authorized or certified teacher do Mysore in Indy. EVER.

Apr 13-18: Tim Miller in Columbus Ohio, over at Yoga on High: his regular Primary and breathwork and adjustments weekend, BUT with a new three-day MWF program: 8 hours a day, each, sequentially, on Yoga Chikitsa, Nadi Shodana, and Sthira Bhaga. Can you call me CURIOUS? Yes you can. But I probably can't go, with scheduling and classes and so on.

May 4-7: Tim Feldmann in Edina MN (Yoga House) doing Mysore-style and then a four-day workshop dedicated ENTIRELY to Nadi Shodana. HAWT! This is directly after my 42nd birthday, and I might request that it be a present.

I don't know if there's an Austin TX program with David and Shelley yet or not, but I'm interested in doing that again if it's possible. Of course, the household will probably frown on doing more than two of these, but sometimes, the household must frown. J was at a conference for Kino's first appearance at Moksha, so I didn't go, and she'll be in France (for NINE DAYS) during Kino's second appearance at Moksha, so I can't go. I think the single-parent childcare can be balanced out.... :)