There's a lot of annoying stuff in the world. Take anything: Jeb Bush says he would "carefully consider" the vice presidency. Man eats other guy's face and has to be shot multiple times (apparently). Yoga blogs that "HuffPo" their way into sidebars by quoting other people's postings. What, are you just their publicity, or what? Yoga teachers who write provocative things but who have evasive, tell-nothing biographies.
For example.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alanna-kaivalya/yoga-history_b_1453403.html
This.
Yoga Korunta, Singleton, blah blah, "it is well known that postures have been added, modified..." as if this is a critique of the authenticity of the legend.
Now, I could put quite a bit of time and verbiage to beating this up, because for as many places as it is smart and insightful, it is later horribly ignorant and generalizing.
But what would the point of that be, really?
Or quoting the blogger who quotes Garrigues from a recent workshop, saying that breath/bandhas/dristi are the allies of the ashtangi? That's "first class long-term wisdom," yes? And no insult to Garrigues is meant there; repetition and rephrasing are how stuff gets into my bodymind, to be sure.
But are we not interested in DOING this yoga rather than telling everyone what someone we heard say, said? Is our knowledge of ourselves restricted to telling people some swami's recipe or pithy aphorism for seeking that knowledge?
Where are we keeping our LIVED EXPERIENCE these days? Why don't you tell us how long you've been practicing, Alanna Kaivalya? Oh yeah adjusting, sure; teaching, sure; but when practicing, and what? What year did you coin your own series? Our well-known ashtanga criminal Larry Schultz was always up front about what he did and why, as a counter-example.
Why all this fronting, and why all this feeble, quote-someone-else weak-ass fronting that isn't even aware of how much it fails to be as gangsta as real fronting would be?
Seriously: read a handful of yoga blogs and tell me that it isn't like reading fucking headlines on Yahoo news.
And I'm not interested in claiming that I do better or more authentic or blah blah blah, this is better than that, let's make a whole shitload of binaries so we can create more confusion for ourselves in all domains.
No.
That's what the title of this is about.
This is the attraction of the afternoon hours in the Sweeney immersion program: three hours a day for six days on chakras, subtle body and the relationship between asana/meditation and "the rest of life" (my paraphrase).
That's what I try to write here, it's the only thing I think is probably worth writing. And on that level, I suppose I consider my theory and teaching life to be the same as asana/meditation. I take these "knots in the cord," these energetic centers, and I try to feel out the whole rope, or in some cases I react to the condition of the rope versus what or how I wish the rope was, and I think that all of my struggles, overlaid with concepts and overthinking as they all are, are more interesting than some quote-fest of someone I never saw say the things I never heard.
A recipe, a request:
Please, HuffPo gang, quoters of the quotables, passers on of what someone said rather than how you felt, please dig into the moment and give us a little blood. Just a little, we're not vampires. A sudden kitchen nip on a knuckle, you're not even sure how it happened. A scrape on the elbow from the textured climbing wall; you never even felt it. Put us in the space just for a second. Tell us about the humidity of the room or the color of the walls. Tell us about the disposition of your sit bones while the quotables were spoken.
Give us a body.
This is why I find it so hard to write about the happy hours with the child, because it's one-sided to do that; it's the "parental obligation." We make a ramp out of the couch cushions and play "get me feet" as someone runs by (first I had the capture-feet, then he did). We go outside and water the plants, the rocks, the back steps, the sidewalk, and everything else. We play "predator dino eats Dinosaur Train!" We do all this and hundreds more things. We make "abstract paintings" (which from a Canadian TV show he already knows to define as "use all the colors!") with watercolor and markers. We cuddle in the bed by request (when he says "cuddle" he means, put an arm over me while I go to sleep in my room, and he gives directions, in case you're not draping the right way or far enough). He complains about The Cat in the Hat because "fish can't talk" and then I have to defend it in terms of fish being like humans and books being able to make anything happen. You constantly have to come up with language like that. The questions are unreal.
But at the same time I don't want to "counter" it with some "fair and balanced" bullshit about how he gets overtired after 9 pm and won't sleep for an hour no matter what kind of fun and joy he was having at 8:47.
And this is the same thing: I do not in the LEAST want any of my discussions about being a parent to be DIDACTIC, to aim to give you some lesson or some pithy "parenting nugget." I'd rather hang myself. Most of the affect, the "cloud of sensation" of parenting, at least in the early days, is struggle: with time, with selfhood, with sacrifice, with relationship, with managing the whole parenting shebang in America where there is no support system for parents. A brilliant piece not long ago by Katha Pollitt got ALL OVER THAT, linking everything from the idiotic "attachment parenting" fire-ants-in-your-pants piece by Time magazine, to hard-intellectual French feminism.
It's very much NOT "feel who you are," it's not about actualization.
Parenting in my experience isn't about becoming someone, it's about literal becoming, the atomization of past selves and all solidity, it's about becoming dust, a cloud, electrons. This is why it is so terribly, terribly difficult to write about, and the easiest avenue has always been "The person I was, suffers horribly from this!" That's easy, because it's the refusal to fall in with sudden impermanence. That can be written about for EVER.
But not to say anything more profound.
It's like I said to J probably a year ago: "I can describe this, but I can't think with it." She said, "Well then don't." I said, "Well yeah, but see I think with EVERYTHING; my whole UNIVERSE exists so that I can think with it. It is HOW I DO BUSINESS."
And what it's slowly becoming, which has been an odd mix of interpersonal-relationship stuff and academic stuff (those were never as far apart in me as one might wish they were) is AFFECT. This business not about emotions, but the "cloud," the sensations, lines and forces, that underlie emotions, that in a way make up reality.
It's like this:
There's me and you, me and the painting or the video, me and the class, always here and there, this and that.
Then there's affect, which is the whole set of forces and powers that exist between you, me and the thing, and everything and all of us. Very "Yoda."
Where is the relationship between me and you and me and the thing? In the video? In my eyes? In the hair rising on the back of my neck? Where is the relationship between me and you? In the language? In the eye contact? Where? What is relating? What is sensing? What is it to know something or even for there to BE A THING?
(phenomenologists know ALL of this, but they stop with the "flesh of the world," which affect says isn't flesh but is just force line and sensation)
This is affect. Is my hand me? Then why can it feel itself when it clenches? Am I in my hand or in my eyes or am I the "whole organism?" Then how does J feel anger come off me forty feet away? Am I that invisible emotion, too? Or is she her "radar field" of detection? How big is my body? What the fuck IS a body anyway?
Affect stops you from thinking in things, you just can't do it. It all becomes what art people call TIME-BASED.
Or, in the Buddhist parlance, those things aren't permanent, don't give pleasure, and aren't you.
I think this too goes to my distaste (hah, putting it lightly there are we?) for the Easternish "yoga nugget." It doesn't talk about the West, where we live. "Fifteen things for you to give up" and one of them is "striving." Yeah ok, sure, write me a freaking novel about how I'm going to make a New Year's resolution to "strive less." And everyone clicks the "like" button not because they CAN strive less but because it sounds good. "I'd vote for that!" Or no wait, maybe you can get a prescription or buy it on a supermarket shelf. Purity and enlightenment, let me get my checkbook!
But at the same time you can't just toss the history-and-legend baby out with the "yoga is being motivated by the West now" bathwater. Alanna.
So here is to time-based life. Or as people who are alive call it, life.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Six Posts In One: History, Nuggets, Family, Manomaya, Samskaric, Relaxation
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I should write more often, but I haven't been able to. This is literally six posts in one, and so I have set them all off with stars, as I've been doing for a while. I wrote these in order, in one big set, with a daycare conference and a yoga practice in the middle. There is a valid emotional "wave" to follow if you read all six in order, but this is LOOOOOONNNNNGGGG if you do it that way. Feel free to pick and choose.
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For a while now, I've had this idea of writing an "ashtanga history" in the state, which I billed as a family tree. Who taught whom, who took said teaching where and how? I think that as the scene here increases, this is a key document.
But many of the teachers who I consider to have started the thing are apparently too busy (I'd hope) or too disinclined. I sent out a pack of enthusiastic emails about this document a while ago and have one reply and no history. Perhaps everyone's busy. Or (and I suspect this more and more the longer I get silence) perhaps there isn't a notion of "family tree" beyond what you might call "my generation" of teachers.
I know that the seeds of ashtanga vinyasa in Indianapolis and Bloomington (and those are the two major sites) are Richard Freeman and David Swenson. But the creation in Indy of a bunch of Mysore-style practitioners is, I strongly believe, my doing. This is not an ego claim, it's how I am pretty sure the history works.
By 2006 I was adding in more poses to led ashtanga classes that were "as much Primary as we can do in 90 minutes." Winter 2006, I got Primary series together, Garbha Pindasana and all. When I knew teacher training was coming in April/May 2007, I got obsessed about learning everyone's sequences, so I scanned the Rocket rooms with their webcam (they used to cam all their classes publicly) and was researching everything I could about Mysore-style teachers in the Bay area.
And in classes every time I went (to ashtanga classes anyway) I'd do the whole sequence. As I've said here a bunch of times, even in my first Mysore-style room, I did all of Primary series from day 1.
Then in July 2007 when I started teaching in town, I wanted repetition-til-mastery, because that's how I'd done it and that was my understanding of How One Does It. It took, really, until 2010 for my "do full sequence" to begin catching on in town. But with that turn (when other students began to do fuller sequences because they could) we "took Mysore-style down from the shelf," we stopped talking about it as mastery and started talking about it as method itself, which it is.
And then classes in town began having people moving at different rates and doing their own sequence until they forgot it, so the "led" portion of the class would catch up to people as it went. But with time, large portions of classes began to do Mysore-style within the led context.
So as far as I have seen the history, this idea that you can memorize and "take practice" without the led class (or better WITHIN the led class) is my doing. Unintentionally at first; I never expected it to catch on, didn't care if it did. But that's method, and as people began to ask about it, I began to answer them about it, never noticing that that was itself a way of teaching.
This is yet another difference between ashtanga vinyasa and "vinyasa" or "flow" or the many many variations that practice now calls itself.
In ashtanga vinyasa, you move and you do, according to the sequence. Perhaps you "modify down" in a posture (i.e., Tittibhasana with bent legs, or a wrap around for Marichyasana C or D) or you "modify up" in a transition (i.e., handstands), but you do not have "levels one through four" in a pose, the way that flow classes will offer side angle OR bound side angle OR bird of paradise OR a foot-grab in side plank.
And yet both practices can say, "whatever you're capable of" (although with students who don't know what they're capable of, that's sort of useless instruction).
I hear, all the time, about vinyasa classes, that the TEACHER gets the credit for the great class. "Thanks, Name-of-Teacher, for a great vinyasa class tonight." This is fine, but the ashtangis ideally will relate TO THE PRACTICE ITSELF. Yes, there is an important matter of "having a teacher" and parampara (communication of method) BUT in comparison to vinyasa yoga and flow yoga, the ashtangis real relationship is TO PRACTICE.
So perhaps our senior teachers in the state are, themselves, names who teach the ashtanga. Perhaps this idea that we are all a living, breathing family tree is kind of alien. Not that they do not feel this, but maybe it's more like, "I'm just a person who teaches yoga here." Almost like a fear to claim any role in the communication of the method. And that fits with how intensely I have taken up communicator of method here. I feel like saying, "YOU PEOPLE HELPED ME GET INTO THIS, now HELP ME WRITE THIS HISTORY, DAMMIT." But perhaps that is much, MUCH more about me, than about the history of ashtanga vinyasa in Indiana. Perhaps I overreached.
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I am chronically annoyed with sunny yoga nuggets. We all know this. Recently on my Facebook feed, I saw "the darkness in you is so that you can find the light," which is lovely and affirmative and all of that, but it's also completely pointless in terms of the experience which it euphemizes so neatly.
For example, my seventh series practice has involved some serious ego reduction, ego clarification, radical improvement of my ability to comprehend and feel the workings of the ego. Seventh series has definitively been a step toward discriminative knowledge. And yet if you read most of what I posted here in 2009, you will see some extreme agony as that process happened (and don't read anything I put up in 2009, none of it is good for you, OK?).
I suppose I am saying that I believe that the progress toward discriminative knowledge (and I use that term because calling the goal "enlightenment" is both beyond me currently and paradoxical, since the final step toward "attaining" enlightenment is, according at least to Maehle's Sutras, to surrender all desire to attain it, right?) should be guru-student or experiential only or oral tradition or something. Basically I'm wishing that the whole process would be done experientially so that "wisdom" is always and ever embodied, and requires people (even in a Facebook status update) to LIVE IT rather than just posting some affirmative happiness.
Do I sometimes get a bit of insight from affirmative happiness nuggets online? Sure, so it's not a ban I want. I'm just so annoyed by the way in which "yoga people" can be clearly identified as such by the way they are always posting and saying quick little affirmations. It's like Christians who are constantly "thanking God" for everything from short lines at lunch to the fact that they weren't in the car accident they witnessed. THAT's what you use your faith and your practice for? THAT'S IT?
I'm glad that the yoga helps people get through things, but these things, these goals, seem at the same time so petty, so simple and shallow. "I am handling my financial business with greater inner peace because of the yoga." Yeah, ok. On one hand, yes, small daily matters are where all the work is. But on the other hand, how do we trust the writer of that? "Anger reduction." In Austin, Swenson said to someone who complained of anger after practice, that they should compare their anger NOW to their anger THEN, perhaps they're becoming LESS angry by means of expressing it! It's this idea that if you do a triangle pose, somehow you get better contentment. It's the shallowness of thinking that any amount of any kind of yoga, will make your life better, and maybe it DOES, man, but really? CONTINUOUS practice for a LONG TIME. And I guess that people who REALLY obtain wisdom from that long duration practice wouldn't talk about it. As the Zensters say: open mouth, first mistake.
It's a desire for community. In September the Indiana yoga scene (widest definition) is holding a two day conference so everyone can sample the many wonderful things that the scene (state-wide) has on offer. It's modeled a bit on a Yoga Journal conference, with classes and kirtan and a bit of everything, but I can NOT help but feel that it's this same "happy yoga nugget" shallowness in some part, and yes, I know that's overtly cynical of me (suprise). It feels to me like a "teacher market" where you come in and decide, oh I like that, I'll buy a membership. As if "loving what you do" can be bought and sold by means not just of people enjoying the yoga and communicating it, but also by means of being AROUND people who talk the talk. Most cynically, like a sort of Landmark training without the emotional beatings and nutritional deprivation. This classic of Bad Advaita: "Be around love and you will become love" or some stupid nugget to that effect.
I do WORK in my yoga, physically, emotionally, cognitively. I have PAIN in my yoga, real emotional pain, a lot of it sometimes. I LOSE parts of myself in my yoga, and it isn't often (almost never) happy "release and surrender." The ACTUALITY of my yoga is not sunshine and love and bliss. And these facts are WHY I KEEP PRACTICING.
Where is the conference for ME? Where is the yoga honesty FOR ME?
"But that wouldn't sell people on the yoga." I don't GIVE A FUCK. Is it HONEST? For fuck's sake. Getting into the yoga to "become love" is like getting a cat so you can stop feeling the pain of your breakup. And you KNOW you'll just use the cat (at BEST) as a confidant to talk out your "new self" and then you'll make the same fucking mistakes again and wonder why "men/women" are so fucked up.
Be quiet and feel something.
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I see that Kino has cancelled roughly the first half of her week-long workshop in Chicago at the end of this month. Family emergency. That sucks. I would not wish family emergency on anyone, ever.
Today is the one-year anniversary of my dad's passing. About two hours from now will be the precise minute (it's a few minutes past 11 am as I type this).
I was feeling well-powerless to either get out to Massachusetts or to find him by phone, as the complicated "are you family? Can you prove it?" bureaucracy almost kept me from any contact with him for the last weeks. A family trip to visit in May turned into a funeral attendance morning. All of the arrangements were run in an almost choreographed way by the funeral home guys, who were all family friends anyway. All of my cousins and family seemed stunned into a sort of weird shallow paralysis. Conversation (as ever at these events) was all story-telling and amusements, but with a notable lack of depth, a clear sort of "hat over heart" coverup, nerves not to touch, maybe not ever even to touch, oneself.
Recently my mom, who remains by herself in the house, has been confusing dreams with reality (her memory has been getting progressively loose since her 50s, and she's in her mid-70s now). A couple weeks ago she called to say that a long-term family friend had asked her to marry him, and this was shockingly weird news. But also great news for many reasons: that guy's well-established in town, has job and money, knows the family really well, could ease the problematic emotional and financial mess that moving out of the house would be (will be), could provide stability as things get emotionally messy with the increasing memory problems.
So as weird as it was, my household was pretty excited that this might be true. And I started wondering if my dad, whose imperative was, at the end, to "take care of his wife," hadn't maybe ARRANGED this, right then before the transition, which maybe he had accepted at that moment, right at the door. A last line thrown from a sinking ship, a plan, a vision of the future and the present, blinders lifted.
One moment of clear vision not buried in euphemisms and Catholic fear, a summary second of cosmic compassion, to take to whatever comes next.
But it was all just a confusion between dream and reality and there's no wedding and no saving grace from the sale of the house and the cutting of the emotional attachments to it and all of the financial confusion that will result from an estate sale of all of the weird knick-knacks mixed with authentic antiques in the house. She made it all up.
I had a practice so tight and sore that it folded me into a crying mess.
Return of the grey foggy unknown, unsure for ever about how or what or if he ever saw anything at the end besides fear, but I practiced that afternoon and I'll practice this afternoon and I'll send good wishes to virtually anyone that I know who ever has any kind of family emergency, ever.
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The same perennial tightness obtains, in the outer hips, making lotuses, twists and backends difficult. I'd been thinking that these were "emotional" tightnesses which then "devolved" into annamaya kosha tightnesses (as if the deeper and more subtle koshas manifest as the more gross koshas, the same way that incarnation apparently works). So some days will be "emotional release" days, but other days will be "work into the tight musculature" days.
I had one of each: Tuesday was a release day, but Friday was a "get in there and stretch!" day.
But then in looking up manomaya kosha, I found it defined as "mental body," not emotional body. It's not food-to-energy-to-emotions, it's food-to-energy-to-mental.
So I had to re-check my ideas about how everything worked, and in doing that, I googled "manas buddhi ahamkara" and got a great link written by some random swami that I'd never heard of, which went right from koshas to the Upanishads, and in particular to the Mandukya Upanishad, with its "nineteen ways to apprehend the world," with prana and apana and sense organs and also sense "processes" (like excretion) and it said, further, that one perhaps needed ONLY to understand the Mandukya. So I ordered it from Amazon (I still love Amazon Prime) and while it has yet to arrive, it also comes with the "Karika" of Gaudapada, and I know Gaudapada from Swenson's chants which he gave us regarding Pranayama. Really all I know about Gaudapada is that he's a sage to be respected, but so be it, more information is more information.
So an "annamaya" question (why are my hips tight?) turned into the Mandukya Upanishad. I freaking LOVE that.
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Samskaric business. A "Scorpio day" is what I recently referred to on Facebook (without any sense of definition whatsoever) as those days that happen now and again when I just can NOT get sexual activity off my mind, not unless I teach or bend or climb walls. Endorphins or communication can break the obsession, but trying to sit at a desk at work and write or grade or something? No amount of focus can break it.
Why Scorpio? Because the scorpion, astrologically, is the sign of what we politely call the reproductive organs...
(seriously: see how ridiculous that euphemism is? There is nothing FELT about those organs, or the various discourses regarding them, in the West, that is even remotely about reproduction; reproduction is all about biochemistry, about the FELT experience of growing new organs, growing life; in this, it is, in a fashion, CONSUMMATELY undiscursive in its sheer AFFECTIVE WEIGHT, which is probably why so damn much discourse is thrown at and over every part of it, eh? This includes the recent and stupid Time magazine cover about breastfeeding and nurture "scandal," which of course is just that pop culture rag re-popularizing a nurture-style debate that's been going on for at least a couple decades....rant over?)
...and also because I've always (since adolescence) been attracted to Scorpios (November birthdays, largely) and it has ALWAYS been a dramatic failure, like the emotional equivalent of the Hindenburg. Fatal allure; like the world's most beautiful stupidity.
So a "Scorpio Day" (Monday is the day I'm thinking about here, this week anyway) is a day when my samskaric business can't give up its fixation on having this thing, the actual having of which changes nothing, least of all the frustration that claims to be answerable (but never is) through experience. Just like getting involved with a Scorpio: it all looks great and it's all failure and flameouts.
Scorpio days make my hips tight, because I'm channelling all of this obsessive frustration and then trying to resist or indulge it and nothing changes the frustration, and it becomes a way of seeing the world, even of experiencing food. Memory as reality, wishful thinking of the impossible as the only possible. It's insanity, and it makes me feel like I should be locked up. Endorphins or extroversion are the only answers, and Scorpio days have a nasty habit of happening when conditions demand that I spend the day either by myself or just with the child (not that the child doesn't count as company, but I can't "sink" into play with him enough to unfocus and break the Scorpio spell, and the samskaric business pulls POWERFULLY from my relationship frustration to dominate me on those days, also).
These kind of days make me believe, more and more, that sexual desire is just a curse. It has elements of sharing and intimacy and joy in it, sure, but mostly, it's a curse. It's so unbearably complicated to get that experience in the West that I think that for myself and perhaps many other people, trying to get that "fix" of self-realization that the West promises from sexual experience, comes down to a permanent marker of disenchantment, but there is POWERFUL obfuscation about why or how this is disenchanting, and we are constantly invited to re-enchant ourselves (hello mass media culture).
And that's Foucault on sexuality in a nutshell: he says we're compelled to talk and think about it and to sort of put it on a pedestal for our subjectivities, as if it is THE SECRET, that thing which unlocks our innermost selves, AND YET at the same time it's very everyday and not at all sacred, although we TREAT IT discursively as though it's a sacred host or something. We are of two minds and two practices, and we refuse to see the contradictions, much less to ACTUALLY process them.
Recently J said that she doesn't "need" it. As is my habit, I immediately re-read her comment and translated it into what I think she "really" means. I think she means that, to the degree that sexual experience provides intimacy, she is currently full up on intimacy with her relationship with the child. That's totally fine, and makes sense, but her sentence ("I don't need it") is bullshit. I mean, seriously, nobody NEEDS it, it's not like sex is vitamin C and you get scurvy without it (although people do treat it like a life and death situation, myself included, when they have to go without).
So my new idea (which I haven't pitched yet) is that sex is like an olive, or a butterfly. Nobody NEEDS to eat an olive, or see a butterfly, and yet, these things DO HAPPEN IN THE WORLD. Olives are tasty. Every now and then, you have one. Butterflies are pretty and in springtime, they're downright common. But you don't like NEED to see them or else bad stuff happens. They're just pretty and you're like, "Hey, a butterfly, cool," and then you go on with your life.
But this is all psychobabble, because really, the core mechanism hasn't changed at all: she doesn't have the energy to spare for it, because she's overworked and over-devoted to parenting and can't spare any energy to even notice when she's sick. There's no way that she's going to throw me a few minutes of joy with all of that energetic commitment going on, so there's no puzzle there. Duh.
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WHAT, exactly, is relaxation?
I just had a yoga practice out by the art school, in the big park with all the nicely shadowy trees. It was horribly difficult with intense body-shaking emotional release which sucked, but which feels better now that some of those episodes are over. Like spontaneously needing to cry when you can't readily let yourself do that. Emotional release in my body is like barfing, and in fact I barf MUCH more easily than I emote sadness. Oh well. Practice makes perfect?
So what is relaxation? Is it lying there in the grass? Is it reading on the couch? Is it really in gross external behavior at all, or is it a subtle state of mind? Can you relax, for example, on a climbing wall? Can you relax while running? Does relaxation have to mean physical EASE or not? Is sex relaxing? Is getting drunk relaxing? WHAT IS IT?
As I've said, I love to just lie down on the floor and chill. But this is only in part about energy and stress seeping out of my sacrum into the floor. It's also a public display of "chilling" which means that my desire to chill can take over the space. Something about this is important to what it means to me, to relax. Taking over a space that is often devoted to work or to passage or to something that isn't relaxation. If I try to relax in bed, I fall asleep before I can do it (well, there is a degree of relaxation that comes with moving into sleep, but I can't, for example, sustain a meditation in bed, I just can't do it).
In the early days of my relationship with J, I had two "teams" if you will: the schoolwork and dissertation (the "bad guys" of stress) and then the climbing, the yoga and all the sex (the "good guys" of relaxation). I notice that I STILL have those categories, but now I consider them part of samskaric business. This is why I was drinking so much in March, to get the "relaxation" in the midst of all those committee meetings and all of that grading. But it didn't work, it just made me drunk a lot. One shouldn't take from this that it was all operation in the "gross" body versus the "subtle" mind or something like that. It's not a battle of gross versus subtle, because sometimes I can sip booze and really get that "on the floor" chill. But in March, I could not. That mode didn't work to get to that goal.
And nowadays, the old-days teams are totally complicated: when I teach a yoga class or a three-hour summer session of my beloved "Dada to Abstract Expressionism" course, I get a nice "in the zone" chilled out feeling. But when I'm trapped in a Scorpio day, any kind of sexual release just falls right back into stress, because a Scorpio day IS stress.
This showed me yet something else about samskaric business: it's not just "I can't have something," it is also all about having that thing at all, it is totally and completely about all relations of myself to that thing, and all ways in which I used to relate to, use, think about, conceive, and believe about that thing. All aspects.
Is lying on the ground with a still-twingy psoas muscle (because that's where most of the emotional release is), relaxation? Sort of. I don't think that emotional catharsis through movement is relaxation in any substantial way. It's relieving, but that's not relaxation. There are big questions about my RELATIONSHIP to the release, to be negotiated, and that's often where that physical/energetic sensation gets caught up in a fishing-line tangle. Physical or energetic release hit the MANOMAYA (mental) kosha and there are different puzzles.
How do you RELAX manomaya kosha?
This is also where orgasm stops being simple "happy relaxation." It's in the conceptualizing. Sure, annamaya kosha experiences a release, a catharsis, and so does pranamaya kosha, but MANOMAYA kosha, it conceptualizes those experiences: THIS is relaxation and THAT is not. This is why teaching becomes very interesting not as a physical task (although it is that; I've broken a sweat just teaching in an academic classroom before) or an energetic task (although it is that; that's what this talk about affect and emotions is all about), but as an intellectual task. What I aim for in part, with my classroom, is for the whole group to hit a Flow State.
Everyone in the zone.
I just discovered something in writing those two paragraphs out--this is one of my favorite parts of writing. Right: the orgasmic energy release DOESN'T DETONATE manomaya kosha, doesn't level it out the way it does pranamaya or annamaya kosha. Sure, I can't think for a few seconds or maybe most of a minute (it varies), but then reality comes back, and it comes back first (because I can't tap the innermost two koshas yet, so they're invisible/untouchable to me, right now anyway) in the Manomaya. This is also where the Samskaric Business comes back first, reasserts the whole incarnation, doesn't let me flow out into endless space but reasserts the tower of the ego, the security, the world seen from the same old view.
And in this way, I leave my Reichian (Wilhelm Reich, that is) tendencies for maybe my Deleuzian/Spinozan tendencies, which are really more about manomaya kosha in a way.
My prior long rambling post was written under the influence of needing to compose conference paper proposals for two different conferences, AND to manage all of my own panel papers and identities for the conference panel I am running in Detroit in October. So I was loaded on academic ideas and just throwing them hither and yon in a big monkey-mind soup. An unsatisfactory post, but accurate to my mental state when I wrote it, which is always something primary in my mind when I write: capture MYSELF in words, like writing-as-photography.
Quickly (hahahahaha, it always amuses me when I think I write that sincerely):
Reich said, among other things, that orgasmic energy was basically THE POWER behind human effort. You can make fascism out of guiding it through certain channels, and you can make world peace (perhaps) by guiding it through other channels. The long detour on "flow" taken by Theweleit in "Male Fantasies" is of a similar kind of thinking.
I was just reading Deleuze's book on Spinoza, two nights ago: "Spinoza: Practical Philosophy." It argues that the moral terms "good and evil" are more accurately ethical terms, "good and bad." So nothing is evil (apparently Spinoza ACTUALLY thought a world in which evil was impossible, the moral term anyway, the moral entity, instead substituting it with "bad," because certain things ARE bad for us--what a rad idea!!). So one has full choice, not and never a submission to a moral imperative. But this isn't amoral relativism (well, to a moralist it is), because ethical choices, which must be made with a body so that we can "know what a body is capable of," have results. One learns from those results and thence makes further ethical choices.
An ethics of bodymind education, using the world (and the bodymind is part of that world, pure immanence, everything existing in the world and nowhere else) as a sort of laboratory for ethical knowledge and perfection of "affect," which is acting and being acted upon.
Sounds to me, quite a bit like asana practice.
That which can be "added to us," which is coherent with us, according to Deleuze/Spinoza, makes happiness. That which is "incoherent" with us, reduces us, makes sadness. One tends toward happiness, which is an increase in the power to act, which means more to comprehend. This is knowledge.
Is that not, for one, EXACTLY what a book like "The Rock Warrior's Way" has to say? And is that not also Castaneda? And is that additionally, not far from how the Sutras talk about discriminative knowledge? One increases one's power, not over others, but personal power, discriminative power, one's LITERAL knowledge, or as Freeman put it, "this body is the piece of the cosmos you have, to understand everything."
Tangentially, Spinoza apparently said, regarding a question about "evil people," that SHOULD IT BE POSSIBLE that someone prefers suicide over his own living room, then that person, in the name of happiness, has an OBLIGATION to commit suicide (should such a "perverse human nature" exist, is Spinoza's language). There are tricky questions there about social power, biochemistry, medicine and such, but Spinoza's ethics are those of joy, and self-knowledge, acquiring ever-greater power to act (which to my mind narrows the choices of action rather than broadening them), are the results for which he argues.
Really, Spinoza will not admit evil. I suppose that we would have to believe that "evil people" are then made by our culture, and that's not hard to see: we are soaked in stupidity, passivity, every sort of reduction of our own power. I'm not in the least afraid or reluctant to smack Western culture in the face.
Increasing power to act reduces anxiety, creates confidence, relaxes confusion. Sets one free, really. That's always been my experience. As I become more certain of my own ability to act and the results which I wish to obtain, I also become more aware of the possibility of gaining them before I even act. This feels like union, like wisdom. I can surrender things that I "want" because I don't really "want" them; I'm looking at YOU, samskaric business. As I become more "powerful" in Spinozistic terms, I become less fascistic, less needful of a sexy acid cult of bodies. More willing and able to give and to be compassionate. Desire becomes something of a curse, the idea that one is incomplete without....
Increasing personal power feels like meditation. It feels like contentment, but not in that American "New Year's" way, where we WISH we were content, or we are content until the next breeze blows over our house of cards. Increasing personal power to act feels like a big room in which I sit. My own ability to act sort of "cordons off" desire, chills it out. "I do not need to need."
But I still like olives ;-D
I should write more often, but I haven't been able to. This is literally six posts in one, and so I have set them all off with stars, as I've been doing for a while. I wrote these in order, in one big set, with a daycare conference and a yoga practice in the middle. There is a valid emotional "wave" to follow if you read all six in order, but this is LOOOOOONNNNNGGGG if you do it that way. Feel free to pick and choose.
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For a while now, I've had this idea of writing an "ashtanga history" in the state, which I billed as a family tree. Who taught whom, who took said teaching where and how? I think that as the scene here increases, this is a key document.
But many of the teachers who I consider to have started the thing are apparently too busy (I'd hope) or too disinclined. I sent out a pack of enthusiastic emails about this document a while ago and have one reply and no history. Perhaps everyone's busy. Or (and I suspect this more and more the longer I get silence) perhaps there isn't a notion of "family tree" beyond what you might call "my generation" of teachers.
I know that the seeds of ashtanga vinyasa in Indianapolis and Bloomington (and those are the two major sites) are Richard Freeman and David Swenson. But the creation in Indy of a bunch of Mysore-style practitioners is, I strongly believe, my doing. This is not an ego claim, it's how I am pretty sure the history works.
By 2006 I was adding in more poses to led ashtanga classes that were "as much Primary as we can do in 90 minutes." Winter 2006, I got Primary series together, Garbha Pindasana and all. When I knew teacher training was coming in April/May 2007, I got obsessed about learning everyone's sequences, so I scanned the Rocket rooms with their webcam (they used to cam all their classes publicly) and was researching everything I could about Mysore-style teachers in the Bay area.
And in classes every time I went (to ashtanga classes anyway) I'd do the whole sequence. As I've said here a bunch of times, even in my first Mysore-style room, I did all of Primary series from day 1.
Then in July 2007 when I started teaching in town, I wanted repetition-til-mastery, because that's how I'd done it and that was my understanding of How One Does It. It took, really, until 2010 for my "do full sequence" to begin catching on in town. But with that turn (when other students began to do fuller sequences because they could) we "took Mysore-style down from the shelf," we stopped talking about it as mastery and started talking about it as method itself, which it is.
And then classes in town began having people moving at different rates and doing their own sequence until they forgot it, so the "led" portion of the class would catch up to people as it went. But with time, large portions of classes began to do Mysore-style within the led context.
So as far as I have seen the history, this idea that you can memorize and "take practice" without the led class (or better WITHIN the led class) is my doing. Unintentionally at first; I never expected it to catch on, didn't care if it did. But that's method, and as people began to ask about it, I began to answer them about it, never noticing that that was itself a way of teaching.
This is yet another difference between ashtanga vinyasa and "vinyasa" or "flow" or the many many variations that practice now calls itself.
In ashtanga vinyasa, you move and you do, according to the sequence. Perhaps you "modify down" in a posture (i.e., Tittibhasana with bent legs, or a wrap around for Marichyasana C or D) or you "modify up" in a transition (i.e., handstands), but you do not have "levels one through four" in a pose, the way that flow classes will offer side angle OR bound side angle OR bird of paradise OR a foot-grab in side plank.
And yet both practices can say, "whatever you're capable of" (although with students who don't know what they're capable of, that's sort of useless instruction).
I hear, all the time, about vinyasa classes, that the TEACHER gets the credit for the great class. "Thanks, Name-of-Teacher, for a great vinyasa class tonight." This is fine, but the ashtangis ideally will relate TO THE PRACTICE ITSELF. Yes, there is an important matter of "having a teacher" and parampara (communication of method) BUT in comparison to vinyasa yoga and flow yoga, the ashtangis real relationship is TO PRACTICE.
So perhaps our senior teachers in the state are, themselves, names who teach the ashtanga. Perhaps this idea that we are all a living, breathing family tree is kind of alien. Not that they do not feel this, but maybe it's more like, "I'm just a person who teaches yoga here." Almost like a fear to claim any role in the communication of the method. And that fits with how intensely I have taken up communicator of method here. I feel like saying, "YOU PEOPLE HELPED ME GET INTO THIS, now HELP ME WRITE THIS HISTORY, DAMMIT." But perhaps that is much, MUCH more about me, than about the history of ashtanga vinyasa in Indiana. Perhaps I overreached.
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I am chronically annoyed with sunny yoga nuggets. We all know this. Recently on my Facebook feed, I saw "the darkness in you is so that you can find the light," which is lovely and affirmative and all of that, but it's also completely pointless in terms of the experience which it euphemizes so neatly.
For example, my seventh series practice has involved some serious ego reduction, ego clarification, radical improvement of my ability to comprehend and feel the workings of the ego. Seventh series has definitively been a step toward discriminative knowledge. And yet if you read most of what I posted here in 2009, you will see some extreme agony as that process happened (and don't read anything I put up in 2009, none of it is good for you, OK?).
I suppose I am saying that I believe that the progress toward discriminative knowledge (and I use that term because calling the goal "enlightenment" is both beyond me currently and paradoxical, since the final step toward "attaining" enlightenment is, according at least to Maehle's Sutras, to surrender all desire to attain it, right?) should be guru-student or experiential only or oral tradition or something. Basically I'm wishing that the whole process would be done experientially so that "wisdom" is always and ever embodied, and requires people (even in a Facebook status update) to LIVE IT rather than just posting some affirmative happiness.
Do I sometimes get a bit of insight from affirmative happiness nuggets online? Sure, so it's not a ban I want. I'm just so annoyed by the way in which "yoga people" can be clearly identified as such by the way they are always posting and saying quick little affirmations. It's like Christians who are constantly "thanking God" for everything from short lines at lunch to the fact that they weren't in the car accident they witnessed. THAT's what you use your faith and your practice for? THAT'S IT?
I'm glad that the yoga helps people get through things, but these things, these goals, seem at the same time so petty, so simple and shallow. "I am handling my financial business with greater inner peace because of the yoga." Yeah, ok. On one hand, yes, small daily matters are where all the work is. But on the other hand, how do we trust the writer of that? "Anger reduction." In Austin, Swenson said to someone who complained of anger after practice, that they should compare their anger NOW to their anger THEN, perhaps they're becoming LESS angry by means of expressing it! It's this idea that if you do a triangle pose, somehow you get better contentment. It's the shallowness of thinking that any amount of any kind of yoga, will make your life better, and maybe it DOES, man, but really? CONTINUOUS practice for a LONG TIME. And I guess that people who REALLY obtain wisdom from that long duration practice wouldn't talk about it. As the Zensters say: open mouth, first mistake.
It's a desire for community. In September the Indiana yoga scene (widest definition) is holding a two day conference so everyone can sample the many wonderful things that the scene (state-wide) has on offer. It's modeled a bit on a Yoga Journal conference, with classes and kirtan and a bit of everything, but I can NOT help but feel that it's this same "happy yoga nugget" shallowness in some part, and yes, I know that's overtly cynical of me (suprise). It feels to me like a "teacher market" where you come in and decide, oh I like that, I'll buy a membership. As if "loving what you do" can be bought and sold by means not just of people enjoying the yoga and communicating it, but also by means of being AROUND people who talk the talk. Most cynically, like a sort of Landmark training without the emotional beatings and nutritional deprivation. This classic of Bad Advaita: "Be around love and you will become love" or some stupid nugget to that effect.
I do WORK in my yoga, physically, emotionally, cognitively. I have PAIN in my yoga, real emotional pain, a lot of it sometimes. I LOSE parts of myself in my yoga, and it isn't often (almost never) happy "release and surrender." The ACTUALITY of my yoga is not sunshine and love and bliss. And these facts are WHY I KEEP PRACTICING.
Where is the conference for ME? Where is the yoga honesty FOR ME?
"But that wouldn't sell people on the yoga." I don't GIVE A FUCK. Is it HONEST? For fuck's sake. Getting into the yoga to "become love" is like getting a cat so you can stop feeling the pain of your breakup. And you KNOW you'll just use the cat (at BEST) as a confidant to talk out your "new self" and then you'll make the same fucking mistakes again and wonder why "men/women" are so fucked up.
Be quiet and feel something.
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I see that Kino has cancelled roughly the first half of her week-long workshop in Chicago at the end of this month. Family emergency. That sucks. I would not wish family emergency on anyone, ever.
Today is the one-year anniversary of my dad's passing. About two hours from now will be the precise minute (it's a few minutes past 11 am as I type this).
I was feeling well-powerless to either get out to Massachusetts or to find him by phone, as the complicated "are you family? Can you prove it?" bureaucracy almost kept me from any contact with him for the last weeks. A family trip to visit in May turned into a funeral attendance morning. All of the arrangements were run in an almost choreographed way by the funeral home guys, who were all family friends anyway. All of my cousins and family seemed stunned into a sort of weird shallow paralysis. Conversation (as ever at these events) was all story-telling and amusements, but with a notable lack of depth, a clear sort of "hat over heart" coverup, nerves not to touch, maybe not ever even to touch, oneself.
Recently my mom, who remains by herself in the house, has been confusing dreams with reality (her memory has been getting progressively loose since her 50s, and she's in her mid-70s now). A couple weeks ago she called to say that a long-term family friend had asked her to marry him, and this was shockingly weird news. But also great news for many reasons: that guy's well-established in town, has job and money, knows the family really well, could ease the problematic emotional and financial mess that moving out of the house would be (will be), could provide stability as things get emotionally messy with the increasing memory problems.
So as weird as it was, my household was pretty excited that this might be true. And I started wondering if my dad, whose imperative was, at the end, to "take care of his wife," hadn't maybe ARRANGED this, right then before the transition, which maybe he had accepted at that moment, right at the door. A last line thrown from a sinking ship, a plan, a vision of the future and the present, blinders lifted.
One moment of clear vision not buried in euphemisms and Catholic fear, a summary second of cosmic compassion, to take to whatever comes next.
But it was all just a confusion between dream and reality and there's no wedding and no saving grace from the sale of the house and the cutting of the emotional attachments to it and all of the financial confusion that will result from an estate sale of all of the weird knick-knacks mixed with authentic antiques in the house. She made it all up.
I had a practice so tight and sore that it folded me into a crying mess.
Return of the grey foggy unknown, unsure for ever about how or what or if he ever saw anything at the end besides fear, but I practiced that afternoon and I'll practice this afternoon and I'll send good wishes to virtually anyone that I know who ever has any kind of family emergency, ever.
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The same perennial tightness obtains, in the outer hips, making lotuses, twists and backends difficult. I'd been thinking that these were "emotional" tightnesses which then "devolved" into annamaya kosha tightnesses (as if the deeper and more subtle koshas manifest as the more gross koshas, the same way that incarnation apparently works). So some days will be "emotional release" days, but other days will be "work into the tight musculature" days.
I had one of each: Tuesday was a release day, but Friday was a "get in there and stretch!" day.
But then in looking up manomaya kosha, I found it defined as "mental body," not emotional body. It's not food-to-energy-to-emotions, it's food-to-energy-to-mental.
So I had to re-check my ideas about how everything worked, and in doing that, I googled "manas buddhi ahamkara" and got a great link written by some random swami that I'd never heard of, which went right from koshas to the Upanishads, and in particular to the Mandukya Upanishad, with its "nineteen ways to apprehend the world," with prana and apana and sense organs and also sense "processes" (like excretion) and it said, further, that one perhaps needed ONLY to understand the Mandukya. So I ordered it from Amazon (I still love Amazon Prime) and while it has yet to arrive, it also comes with the "Karika" of Gaudapada, and I know Gaudapada from Swenson's chants which he gave us regarding Pranayama. Really all I know about Gaudapada is that he's a sage to be respected, but so be it, more information is more information.
So an "annamaya" question (why are my hips tight?) turned into the Mandukya Upanishad. I freaking LOVE that.
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Samskaric business. A "Scorpio day" is what I recently referred to on Facebook (without any sense of definition whatsoever) as those days that happen now and again when I just can NOT get sexual activity off my mind, not unless I teach or bend or climb walls. Endorphins or communication can break the obsession, but trying to sit at a desk at work and write or grade or something? No amount of focus can break it.
Why Scorpio? Because the scorpion, astrologically, is the sign of what we politely call the reproductive organs...
(seriously: see how ridiculous that euphemism is? There is nothing FELT about those organs, or the various discourses regarding them, in the West, that is even remotely about reproduction; reproduction is all about biochemistry, about the FELT experience of growing new organs, growing life; in this, it is, in a fashion, CONSUMMATELY undiscursive in its sheer AFFECTIVE WEIGHT, which is probably why so damn much discourse is thrown at and over every part of it, eh? This includes the recent and stupid Time magazine cover about breastfeeding and nurture "scandal," which of course is just that pop culture rag re-popularizing a nurture-style debate that's been going on for at least a couple decades....rant over?)
...and also because I've always (since adolescence) been attracted to Scorpios (November birthdays, largely) and it has ALWAYS been a dramatic failure, like the emotional equivalent of the Hindenburg. Fatal allure; like the world's most beautiful stupidity.
So a "Scorpio Day" (Monday is the day I'm thinking about here, this week anyway) is a day when my samskaric business can't give up its fixation on having this thing, the actual having of which changes nothing, least of all the frustration that claims to be answerable (but never is) through experience. Just like getting involved with a Scorpio: it all looks great and it's all failure and flameouts.
Scorpio days make my hips tight, because I'm channelling all of this obsessive frustration and then trying to resist or indulge it and nothing changes the frustration, and it becomes a way of seeing the world, even of experiencing food. Memory as reality, wishful thinking of the impossible as the only possible. It's insanity, and it makes me feel like I should be locked up. Endorphins or extroversion are the only answers, and Scorpio days have a nasty habit of happening when conditions demand that I spend the day either by myself or just with the child (not that the child doesn't count as company, but I can't "sink" into play with him enough to unfocus and break the Scorpio spell, and the samskaric business pulls POWERFULLY from my relationship frustration to dominate me on those days, also).
These kind of days make me believe, more and more, that sexual desire is just a curse. It has elements of sharing and intimacy and joy in it, sure, but mostly, it's a curse. It's so unbearably complicated to get that experience in the West that I think that for myself and perhaps many other people, trying to get that "fix" of self-realization that the West promises from sexual experience, comes down to a permanent marker of disenchantment, but there is POWERFUL obfuscation about why or how this is disenchanting, and we are constantly invited to re-enchant ourselves (hello mass media culture).
And that's Foucault on sexuality in a nutshell: he says we're compelled to talk and think about it and to sort of put it on a pedestal for our subjectivities, as if it is THE SECRET, that thing which unlocks our innermost selves, AND YET at the same time it's very everyday and not at all sacred, although we TREAT IT discursively as though it's a sacred host or something. We are of two minds and two practices, and we refuse to see the contradictions, much less to ACTUALLY process them.
Recently J said that she doesn't "need" it. As is my habit, I immediately re-read her comment and translated it into what I think she "really" means. I think she means that, to the degree that sexual experience provides intimacy, she is currently full up on intimacy with her relationship with the child. That's totally fine, and makes sense, but her sentence ("I don't need it") is bullshit. I mean, seriously, nobody NEEDS it, it's not like sex is vitamin C and you get scurvy without it (although people do treat it like a life and death situation, myself included, when they have to go without).
So my new idea (which I haven't pitched yet) is that sex is like an olive, or a butterfly. Nobody NEEDS to eat an olive, or see a butterfly, and yet, these things DO HAPPEN IN THE WORLD. Olives are tasty. Every now and then, you have one. Butterflies are pretty and in springtime, they're downright common. But you don't like NEED to see them or else bad stuff happens. They're just pretty and you're like, "Hey, a butterfly, cool," and then you go on with your life.
But this is all psychobabble, because really, the core mechanism hasn't changed at all: she doesn't have the energy to spare for it, because she's overworked and over-devoted to parenting and can't spare any energy to even notice when she's sick. There's no way that she's going to throw me a few minutes of joy with all of that energetic commitment going on, so there's no puzzle there. Duh.
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WHAT, exactly, is relaxation?
I just had a yoga practice out by the art school, in the big park with all the nicely shadowy trees. It was horribly difficult with intense body-shaking emotional release which sucked, but which feels better now that some of those episodes are over. Like spontaneously needing to cry when you can't readily let yourself do that. Emotional release in my body is like barfing, and in fact I barf MUCH more easily than I emote sadness. Oh well. Practice makes perfect?
So what is relaxation? Is it lying there in the grass? Is it reading on the couch? Is it really in gross external behavior at all, or is it a subtle state of mind? Can you relax, for example, on a climbing wall? Can you relax while running? Does relaxation have to mean physical EASE or not? Is sex relaxing? Is getting drunk relaxing? WHAT IS IT?
As I've said, I love to just lie down on the floor and chill. But this is only in part about energy and stress seeping out of my sacrum into the floor. It's also a public display of "chilling" which means that my desire to chill can take over the space. Something about this is important to what it means to me, to relax. Taking over a space that is often devoted to work or to passage or to something that isn't relaxation. If I try to relax in bed, I fall asleep before I can do it (well, there is a degree of relaxation that comes with moving into sleep, but I can't, for example, sustain a meditation in bed, I just can't do it).
In the early days of my relationship with J, I had two "teams" if you will: the schoolwork and dissertation (the "bad guys" of stress) and then the climbing, the yoga and all the sex (the "good guys" of relaxation). I notice that I STILL have those categories, but now I consider them part of samskaric business. This is why I was drinking so much in March, to get the "relaxation" in the midst of all those committee meetings and all of that grading. But it didn't work, it just made me drunk a lot. One shouldn't take from this that it was all operation in the "gross" body versus the "subtle" mind or something like that. It's not a battle of gross versus subtle, because sometimes I can sip booze and really get that "on the floor" chill. But in March, I could not. That mode didn't work to get to that goal.
And nowadays, the old-days teams are totally complicated: when I teach a yoga class or a three-hour summer session of my beloved "Dada to Abstract Expressionism" course, I get a nice "in the zone" chilled out feeling. But when I'm trapped in a Scorpio day, any kind of sexual release just falls right back into stress, because a Scorpio day IS stress.
This showed me yet something else about samskaric business: it's not just "I can't have something," it is also all about having that thing at all, it is totally and completely about all relations of myself to that thing, and all ways in which I used to relate to, use, think about, conceive, and believe about that thing. All aspects.
Is lying on the ground with a still-twingy psoas muscle (because that's where most of the emotional release is), relaxation? Sort of. I don't think that emotional catharsis through movement is relaxation in any substantial way. It's relieving, but that's not relaxation. There are big questions about my RELATIONSHIP to the release, to be negotiated, and that's often where that physical/energetic sensation gets caught up in a fishing-line tangle. Physical or energetic release hit the MANOMAYA (mental) kosha and there are different puzzles.
How do you RELAX manomaya kosha?
This is also where orgasm stops being simple "happy relaxation." It's in the conceptualizing. Sure, annamaya kosha experiences a release, a catharsis, and so does pranamaya kosha, but MANOMAYA kosha, it conceptualizes those experiences: THIS is relaxation and THAT is not. This is why teaching becomes very interesting not as a physical task (although it is that; I've broken a sweat just teaching in an academic classroom before) or an energetic task (although it is that; that's what this talk about affect and emotions is all about), but as an intellectual task. What I aim for in part, with my classroom, is for the whole group to hit a Flow State.
Everyone in the zone.
I just discovered something in writing those two paragraphs out--this is one of my favorite parts of writing. Right: the orgasmic energy release DOESN'T DETONATE manomaya kosha, doesn't level it out the way it does pranamaya or annamaya kosha. Sure, I can't think for a few seconds or maybe most of a minute (it varies), but then reality comes back, and it comes back first (because I can't tap the innermost two koshas yet, so they're invisible/untouchable to me, right now anyway) in the Manomaya. This is also where the Samskaric Business comes back first, reasserts the whole incarnation, doesn't let me flow out into endless space but reasserts the tower of the ego, the security, the world seen from the same old view.
And in this way, I leave my Reichian (Wilhelm Reich, that is) tendencies for maybe my Deleuzian/Spinozan tendencies, which are really more about manomaya kosha in a way.
My prior long rambling post was written under the influence of needing to compose conference paper proposals for two different conferences, AND to manage all of my own panel papers and identities for the conference panel I am running in Detroit in October. So I was loaded on academic ideas and just throwing them hither and yon in a big monkey-mind soup. An unsatisfactory post, but accurate to my mental state when I wrote it, which is always something primary in my mind when I write: capture MYSELF in words, like writing-as-photography.
Quickly (hahahahaha, it always amuses me when I think I write that sincerely):
Reich said, among other things, that orgasmic energy was basically THE POWER behind human effort. You can make fascism out of guiding it through certain channels, and you can make world peace (perhaps) by guiding it through other channels. The long detour on "flow" taken by Theweleit in "Male Fantasies" is of a similar kind of thinking.
I was just reading Deleuze's book on Spinoza, two nights ago: "Spinoza: Practical Philosophy." It argues that the moral terms "good and evil" are more accurately ethical terms, "good and bad." So nothing is evil (apparently Spinoza ACTUALLY thought a world in which evil was impossible, the moral term anyway, the moral entity, instead substituting it with "bad," because certain things ARE bad for us--what a rad idea!!). So one has full choice, not and never a submission to a moral imperative. But this isn't amoral relativism (well, to a moralist it is), because ethical choices, which must be made with a body so that we can "know what a body is capable of," have results. One learns from those results and thence makes further ethical choices.
An ethics of bodymind education, using the world (and the bodymind is part of that world, pure immanence, everything existing in the world and nowhere else) as a sort of laboratory for ethical knowledge and perfection of "affect," which is acting and being acted upon.
Sounds to me, quite a bit like asana practice.
That which can be "added to us," which is coherent with us, according to Deleuze/Spinoza, makes happiness. That which is "incoherent" with us, reduces us, makes sadness. One tends toward happiness, which is an increase in the power to act, which means more to comprehend. This is knowledge.
Is that not, for one, EXACTLY what a book like "The Rock Warrior's Way" has to say? And is that not also Castaneda? And is that additionally, not far from how the Sutras talk about discriminative knowledge? One increases one's power, not over others, but personal power, discriminative power, one's LITERAL knowledge, or as Freeman put it, "this body is the piece of the cosmos you have, to understand everything."
Tangentially, Spinoza apparently said, regarding a question about "evil people," that SHOULD IT BE POSSIBLE that someone prefers suicide over his own living room, then that person, in the name of happiness, has an OBLIGATION to commit suicide (should such a "perverse human nature" exist, is Spinoza's language). There are tricky questions there about social power, biochemistry, medicine and such, but Spinoza's ethics are those of joy, and self-knowledge, acquiring ever-greater power to act (which to my mind narrows the choices of action rather than broadening them), are the results for which he argues.
Really, Spinoza will not admit evil. I suppose that we would have to believe that "evil people" are then made by our culture, and that's not hard to see: we are soaked in stupidity, passivity, every sort of reduction of our own power. I'm not in the least afraid or reluctant to smack Western culture in the face.
Increasing power to act reduces anxiety, creates confidence, relaxes confusion. Sets one free, really. That's always been my experience. As I become more certain of my own ability to act and the results which I wish to obtain, I also become more aware of the possibility of gaining them before I even act. This feels like union, like wisdom. I can surrender things that I "want" because I don't really "want" them; I'm looking at YOU, samskaric business. As I become more "powerful" in Spinozistic terms, I become less fascistic, less needful of a sexy acid cult of bodies. More willing and able to give and to be compassionate. Desire becomes something of a curse, the idea that one is incomplete without....
Increasing personal power feels like meditation. It feels like contentment, but not in that American "New Year's" way, where we WISH we were content, or we are content until the next breeze blows over our house of cards. Increasing personal power to act feels like a big room in which I sit. My own ability to act sort of "cordons off" desire, chills it out. "I do not need to need."
But I still like olives ;-D
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Energy: Birthday, Budig, Backbends
I turned what I call "legal twice!" early this month.
If I hadn't posted six times in April (every one of which is the written equivalent, I think, of approximately a boxing match), I wouldn't be as curious as to "what May brings," because really, life isn't organized by months; months are organized by life.
On my birthday, I sent out acceptances for my MACAA panel called "Teaching Cruel and Abject Art," which was stimulated by my career-need (not mine, but my career's, and more about that later, how those aren't really two things, but also doesn't settle "one into another" either), and then at night went to the art school's Honors and Awards ceremony and gave a bunch of undergraduates some scholarship money. It feels good to give stuff to people, like the old Zen story about wanting to give the thief the moon.
MACAA is in Detroit this year; I've never been to Detroit. One thinks of the Michigan ashtanga scene and also the always-funny line, "Take him to Detroit!"
****************
Kathryn Budig was in town the first weekend of May, also. I missed Friday night but figured I'd go to "spice up your practice" and "flight of the yogi" on Saturday, and of course, I was expecting "here's your challenge posture, in steps, la la la" the same way that Kathryn does all of that online for Yoga Journal and such.
We could create two Kathryns: there's the (if you will) real person, who bears that name, and then also the "E-Kathryn," the internet personality (and Toe Sox model) who apparently has (is? has?) that same bodymind. All of us who have enough internet "personality" will split this way. This adds some teeth to the recent NYT (was it?) article about how social media and internetting have replaced the depth of "actual" conversation with a broader shallowness of half-conversation, little text-ese shorthands for conversation which prevents us from having deep connection. My original take on that article was that it didn't account for the ways in which internet personas come with a degree of anonymity which can allow for greater potential to break through privation (i.e., you can say stuff online that you can't in public--any chat room or 4chan is a great demonstration of this). But with greater "reality" (in the way that Skype has a greater reality index than, say, AIM messenger), we return to greater shyness, shallowness, as if the humanity of another person is now a screen, a tendency to "screen" (that is, digitize) our own fleshed interactions, but isn't that a question that's been around since the 80s, also? David Cronenberg certainly asked it in Videodrome, and J. G. Ballard (and Cronenberg again) in Crash.
So what was I expecting? I was expecting some "tricks" with jumping about and inverting and fancy entrances and exits and then a yoga rock star doing "greatest hits" for her likely-mostly-female groupies, you know? I stereotyped in my expectations. E-Kathryn very much brings that out, and of course it is not E-Kathryn herself that does this, but the culture of E-Kathrynization. WHO is she? No one can tell from just E-Kathryn, or put another way, there is a big grey area between Kathryn and E-Kathryn. Or, on this blog, you're certainly getting me, but if you know me, you know that this blog is a stripe of me, it's very much a frequency of me that I settle into in writing, and that when I turned "art historian" a couple months ago here, this blog opened more of my life and it opened more of my personality, my "e-me" became larger, deeper. Not how most "e-personalization" is supposed to work, eh? But I notice that when I meet people in real life who read here, I'm immediately terribly shy (well, unless I've corresponded with you for EVER in which case we're already close enough to communicate, right?), because "I" in real life am really NOT just the person who writes here, and I'm certainly not looking to establish THIS persona as a first impression, which is just to say that when I'm writing, I'm never thinking of people that I will meet in real life. I'm not looking at my readers as real people, and in fact, I'm not looking at my readers at all; I'm imagining readers (I love audience) so that I can write in this dynamic. It's not that I don't want people to read or don't care what they say; it's much more that I can't write to REAL people like this, it's too much at once. But if I imagine an audience that reads but at the same time doesn't know me, I can be much more honest.
Or readers who will know that this is a frequency of me, one level, and who know better than to think that's all of me or that I wear all of this up front. You need to be careful with me in real life if you first meet me here.
ANYWAY.
Kathryn was, predictably, much more real than she is online. The most obvious thing ever. And as Saturday proceeded, she got passionate with us about the yoga in ways that weren't "in the box"; she did not process a set workshop for us and just lead us through the paces (whereas online she is totally within the box). She admitted injury; she took questions and spent time with them instead of going to the next sequence; she took pose requests and didn't get to all of them. She taught with tangents and stories, much the way I do. And she lived deep in her ashtanga history, early on telling us that the "liftup" (Lolasana pick-up, Swenson-style) wasn't going to come easily and that she learned it in years of ashtanga practice. She did not master and control the room, but established chewy interpersonal energy, got into our space, invited us into her space. So completely different from her online persona, untouchable, boxed, packaged. I don't know how she deals with that online persona if THIS is who she "really" is.
In short, she was very alive and delightfully full of LA sunshine.
So I signed up for Sunday's "backbends" also.
***************************
Backbends.
Quickly, it was May 2007 when I got the ashtanga police memo to drop back and stand up. May 2008 I took a pack of notes on Kino's teaching of backbends. July 2008 I got put in my first Kapo-to-toes ever, and was basically taught how to drop back on my tiptoes (thank you, thank you, Matthew Sweeney, and more about you in a minute). August 2008 I got to try it out in one of Boston's ashtanga rooms for four days, and it worked. September 2008 my household got pregnant and that's another story. Somewhere in 2009 I taught myself to stand up (those infamous "throw face toward garage!" posts) and somehow in the first four months of 2010 I was walking my Kapotasana in to the arches of my feet.
Then I overcranked the right AC joint and couldn't even grab a foot in Dhanurasana for a while and then practice got spotty while I rearranged priorities, and then I gave up all the Intermediate and then I didn't practice much for these first four months of 2012. My backbends in Austin in June 2011 weren't spectacular; 2010's were easily as bendy and as deep. So there's really been no backbending breakthrough other than that I can almost always drop-and-stand, even after as little as just standing series. So maybe I have achieved depth rather than breadth.
Kathryn said to me Saturday afternoon that we'd do "the poses no one teaches," like King Dancer and the King Pigeon, lots of one-foot backbends and lots of wheels. Sounded tasty. I spent the whole night wondering about Kapotasana. To approach it, request it? See if there's anything in it? Or is that pose-grabbing? What to do, what to do? I didn't request it, didn't even try it on Sunday.
We did a lot of splits after a brief thoracic/shoulder warmup. KB says that splits are a great warmup for backbends. We did them on the floor and up against the wall (imagine pressing pelvis toward a wall rather than the floor). It was pretty freaking intense. We learned what KB calls "goddess hand," which is sending the elbow down and the palm of the hand up. THIS is what that tricky rotation which allows for the Natarajasana/Eka Pada Rajakapotasana grab is all about. Has to be elbow *down* and *forward* to send the hand back, NOT elbow *up* and *back* (that's fine for an elbow hook of the foot, but it won't work for rotating in the shoulder). I know that makes no sense, but imagine that you're a server and you're balancing a tray of food on your palm. Or that you're a goddess in some Renaissance painting. That position. That's what you use to reach back.
Let's use Eka Pada Raja Kapo as an example: reach back for the foot and try to grab the NAIL SIDE of the little toe. To do this, I often turn the elbow AWAY from me and the toes AWAY from me also. Then CREEP toward the big toe; this tightens the "loop" that connects shoulder to foot, and only when you have the big toe, do you then swing the elbow and foot IN AND UP and, as KB put it, "you try to put your bicep on your face."
Doing this, I got my first head-to-foot EPRK ever, with left hand on left foot. Couldn't quite get the height on the right side, but did get the hookup.
We did a lunge version of this also (Iyengar and KB call it "Eka Pada Raja Kapo II" and Matthew Sweeney includes it in his "Baddha Krama" if you have his Vinyasa Krama book) which was absolutely stars-in-my-vision "come to Jesus" intense in the psoas. This was done strapped; same with Natarajasana. KB's key advice in the standing dancer was to keep moving the chest UP, not forward, and to squeeze the elbows in; don't let them swing out in backbends.
Then as promised, lots of wheels. Toes in, elbows in. Solid advice also given by many teachers, and same as I tell my own students. Someone had requested an intro to dropbacks and someone else had requested an intro to "flip-flops" which was an amusing way to put "tic-tocs" so we got those too.
KB on dropping back is "drop back to a wall, holding the hang as long as possible," which is also very Matthew Sweeney. Again, good to echo things I've heard before. I like reinforcement versus reinvention where backbending is taught.
On tic-tocs, KB's method was this: press to a wheel, toes against wall. Step feet up wall, and press both arms and legs straight (half-handstand backbend, technically). Swing one leg up, bend the other knee and jump up and over. Risky. I tried this on Monday night, and buckled in the arms and fell onto the back of my head, but it was fine. The directional disorientation is pretty substantial. Anyway, if that works, you land in a downdog/forward bend sort of position. From there, jump back up, flop over and land feet on wall (as with all things, the softer the landing, the greater the control). Walk down to your wheel. Repeat as necessary.
That's so heading out to the side of my garage this summer.
******************************
Two things I said there'd be more on: first, I've paid for a Matthew Sweeney immersion (6 days) in North Carolina in July. Same place he's been doing month-longs the past few summers. Meditation and practice, 9 am to noon, then "subtle body" 2-5pm each day. Lots of meditation stuff, inner work stuff. Very attractive now.
Second, this business of opposites: let's use my interests and my career as the laboratory example. I'm running a panel based on my recent Abject Art course (and I find it funny that some of the Google searches that land people here now include "abject art", heehee). This is in large part because my "third year review" (halfway to promotion, which in my case will only ever be Senior Lecturer, not tenure of any kind) wants me to publish on teaching, to make a "public presence" on teaching. It turns out that what they mean is publication, not conferencing, but whatever, I'm conferencing because I misunderstood and because this is, after all, part of setting up a public presence.
But it crisscrossses borders that had been important to me: when I'm teaching something I really like, such as Dada to Ab Ex or Abject Art, my classroom is a SACRED SPACE. The community I try to found in there is a series of ritual interactions, interpersonal modes, a whole instruction in how to relate to the universe, to your own affects, to uncertain and in some cases massive interpersonal challenges: don't just put the art in your head, put the art IN YOUR BODY, really FEEL this stuff in the viscera. And then become it, take it to the hallways, the relationships, the filling of your car with gasoline, take it everywhere. "The cop who pulls you over is a Dada cop, and he gives you a Dada ticket."
So for that ritualism to suddenly "go public" in a disembodied intellectual space like a conference in a foreign city....is that OKAY? See how it feels almost like being colonized, like being e-bodied as I said above about KB? See how it could be seen as calling for me to fetishize my own performance, to become a marginal on a stage and a jaguar in a cage? And to do that to MYSELF? For promotion? See what ugliness can be excavated about that?
The relationship stuff I was posting throughout April is exactly this same dynamic, because one of the chief bureaucrats at the school who is imposing all of this promotion-need on me is the woman I live with, so this overlays very cleanly and with identical panic: wait, aren't we sacrificing our personal and our ritual, in order to have our public and our bureaucratic? (seventh series doesn't quite fit that mold; this is strictly about career versus the "personal" and I'm intentionally setting those two up as opposites; alchemy coming here in a minute)
On Monday there was what is politely called a "faculty retreat" and is more accurately an all-day meeting. Obviously, there can be no interpersonal energy at such a thing, right? There were in-jokes, "blue sky-ing" comments (brainstorming) and laughter, as well as the regular depressing news about income and a little bit of contentious argument about how to attract and keep more students, but the whole thing was interpersonal, energy levels changing, rising, spiking sinking and dynamically moving. It had me thinking of Gilles Deleuze writing about Francis Bacon: the blank canvas is full of cliches, and you have to "break" figuration before you can paint a Figure. When people in their 40s get drunk at parties, they still remain the drunks they were in their mid-20s. Parties become cliche, consumption becomes cliche. But meetings where there is ACTUAL "blue-skying" (I love that term; it's so ridiculous, yet it works) will create reinvention, not just of the terms of whatever subject is being discussed, but reinvention potentially of the SPACE itself, a dynamic energy is created which of course isn't given a LOT of roaming room, but becomes just a little loose and fast, just a little "deterritorialized," to use Deleuze and Guattarian language. Or in Foucault's notion of power, where power is not centralized but lies about everywhere, potential and kinetic, throughout the entire social field.
My own classrooms are all about this: I know what the "cliches" of classroom instruction are, and I load them with affect, use them as toys, foreground them as things that we could do and then change them affectively, so that in a way, my classes do "experiential learning" with the very SPACE of education itself, the very ENERGY of it.
Or as John Berger once wrote about relationships, "You want to appear everywhere; this is not about some acquisition of positions and other fetishes, it is about seeing yourselves reflected everywhere in the social." Words closely to that effect, from a book I reviewed (again as part of my service requirements for school) called Revisioning Europe: the Films of Alain Tanner and John Berger.
Fill everything with energy; be reflected everywhere. The desire to be a cosmos. Or in Deleuzian language, to roam the Body Without Organs, where you can as easily see a Salvador Dali-esque giant ear, as a volcano, as a bicycle, as a hole that opens up to a massive cave full of coffee mugs. Whatever, man. It's all there.
It's too simple (uninterestingly simple, in fact) to say, "Well you just get a job doing what you love." That doesn't even make any sense. It keeps "I" and "job" and it makes them separate by definition and then tries in this flimsy way to parallel them by overlaying one with the other. No non-duality is there, no alchemy at all.
Instead let's do this: where is interpersonal energy the highest, not just the most manageable, but literally the highest, the most anarchic, the most obvious? Where does it pick us up and take us out to sea? I'd say the answer is probably in flow states: when climbing walls, when high on whatever your high of choice is, when in bed with someone delicious. States like that. Now, where is interpersonal energy the most regimented, the most (what Deleuze fans would call) stratified, the most channelled and contained? The office, yes? The cubicle, yes? The public transportation? The job meeting? Even the playground? A Situationist critique of space, psychogeography: public spaces are closed, right? Not closed as in un-open, but with POSSIBILITIES foreclosed by their very arrangement, yes? Or to add a yoga example, your set sequence doesn't allow for PLAY, right?
Then how did the regulars in public transport in Austin last summer crack jokes? How then does my classroom do what it does? Why is there a chapter in the Affect Theory Reader specifically about life in the cubicle? It is because liveliness goes wherever things that are alive go. And chased far and hard enough (which can be done just by sitting still), any stable idea can fall to colorful pieces and dance around.
Then the directed-and-stratified and the flowing-and-delicious don't become opposites, and as long as we hold the in between (which can't be held, and is paradoxical, but those are the only things worth holding, yes?) we understand properly how reality works, I think.
I said earlier I would talk about the yoga here, and of course, tangents took over.
But about tightness: I tend to lose hip openers (and now, forward folds with differently positioned legs, like Janu A and Mari B) when I crank up the backbends, and my new idea after Monday night's practice is: no more "this/that," "my/your," no more of that language. Live instead in "What is happening?" Maybe the answer is, "This posture is very intense, this posture is not as deep as it used to be, this posture has run away" and then those answers can be finessed also. One learns about anatomy, about movement, about the annamaya kosha, about the pranamaya kosha, about the manomaya kosha, and answers, "I'm strung out about this emotional situation, and I'm slacking on rotating the femur bone internally."
Because what's happening is only on a very simple level about "the pose is hard."
It isn't hard to live like this, and it doesn't necessitate being the guy in the San Fran bus who pulled himself into a lotus upside down on the ceiling of the vehicle. But it's also impossible to explain: if I say, "you take agency instead of letting life do you" then it sounds like ego, but if I say, "you just surrender a bit and then manage the energy" it sounds like some relativistic go-with-the-flow hippie nonsense.
Find a way to manage energy. All is coming. Doesn't matter how or where you find a way to manage energy; soon it becomes all you want to do, all you see or sense anywhere.
If I hadn't posted six times in April (every one of which is the written equivalent, I think, of approximately a boxing match), I wouldn't be as curious as to "what May brings," because really, life isn't organized by months; months are organized by life.
On my birthday, I sent out acceptances for my MACAA panel called "Teaching Cruel and Abject Art," which was stimulated by my career-need (not mine, but my career's, and more about that later, how those aren't really two things, but also doesn't settle "one into another" either), and then at night went to the art school's Honors and Awards ceremony and gave a bunch of undergraduates some scholarship money. It feels good to give stuff to people, like the old Zen story about wanting to give the thief the moon.
MACAA is in Detroit this year; I've never been to Detroit. One thinks of the Michigan ashtanga scene and also the always-funny line, "Take him to Detroit!"
****************
Kathryn Budig was in town the first weekend of May, also. I missed Friday night but figured I'd go to "spice up your practice" and "flight of the yogi" on Saturday, and of course, I was expecting "here's your challenge posture, in steps, la la la" the same way that Kathryn does all of that online for Yoga Journal and such.
We could create two Kathryns: there's the (if you will) real person, who bears that name, and then also the "E-Kathryn," the internet personality (and Toe Sox model) who apparently has (is? has?) that same bodymind. All of us who have enough internet "personality" will split this way. This adds some teeth to the recent NYT (was it?) article about how social media and internetting have replaced the depth of "actual" conversation with a broader shallowness of half-conversation, little text-ese shorthands for conversation which prevents us from having deep connection. My original take on that article was that it didn't account for the ways in which internet personas come with a degree of anonymity which can allow for greater potential to break through privation (i.e., you can say stuff online that you can't in public--any chat room or 4chan is a great demonstration of this). But with greater "reality" (in the way that Skype has a greater reality index than, say, AIM messenger), we return to greater shyness, shallowness, as if the humanity of another person is now a screen, a tendency to "screen" (that is, digitize) our own fleshed interactions, but isn't that a question that's been around since the 80s, also? David Cronenberg certainly asked it in Videodrome, and J. G. Ballard (and Cronenberg again) in Crash.
So what was I expecting? I was expecting some "tricks" with jumping about and inverting and fancy entrances and exits and then a yoga rock star doing "greatest hits" for her likely-mostly-female groupies, you know? I stereotyped in my expectations. E-Kathryn very much brings that out, and of course it is not E-Kathryn herself that does this, but the culture of E-Kathrynization. WHO is she? No one can tell from just E-Kathryn, or put another way, there is a big grey area between Kathryn and E-Kathryn. Or, on this blog, you're certainly getting me, but if you know me, you know that this blog is a stripe of me, it's very much a frequency of me that I settle into in writing, and that when I turned "art historian" a couple months ago here, this blog opened more of my life and it opened more of my personality, my "e-me" became larger, deeper. Not how most "e-personalization" is supposed to work, eh? But I notice that when I meet people in real life who read here, I'm immediately terribly shy (well, unless I've corresponded with you for EVER in which case we're already close enough to communicate, right?), because "I" in real life am really NOT just the person who writes here, and I'm certainly not looking to establish THIS persona as a first impression, which is just to say that when I'm writing, I'm never thinking of people that I will meet in real life. I'm not looking at my readers as real people, and in fact, I'm not looking at my readers at all; I'm imagining readers (I love audience) so that I can write in this dynamic. It's not that I don't want people to read or don't care what they say; it's much more that I can't write to REAL people like this, it's too much at once. But if I imagine an audience that reads but at the same time doesn't know me, I can be much more honest.
Or readers who will know that this is a frequency of me, one level, and who know better than to think that's all of me or that I wear all of this up front. You need to be careful with me in real life if you first meet me here.
ANYWAY.
Kathryn was, predictably, much more real than she is online. The most obvious thing ever. And as Saturday proceeded, she got passionate with us about the yoga in ways that weren't "in the box"; she did not process a set workshop for us and just lead us through the paces (whereas online she is totally within the box). She admitted injury; she took questions and spent time with them instead of going to the next sequence; she took pose requests and didn't get to all of them. She taught with tangents and stories, much the way I do. And she lived deep in her ashtanga history, early on telling us that the "liftup" (Lolasana pick-up, Swenson-style) wasn't going to come easily and that she learned it in years of ashtanga practice. She did not master and control the room, but established chewy interpersonal energy, got into our space, invited us into her space. So completely different from her online persona, untouchable, boxed, packaged. I don't know how she deals with that online persona if THIS is who she "really" is.
In short, she was very alive and delightfully full of LA sunshine.
So I signed up for Sunday's "backbends" also.
***************************
Backbends.
Quickly, it was May 2007 when I got the ashtanga police memo to drop back and stand up. May 2008 I took a pack of notes on Kino's teaching of backbends. July 2008 I got put in my first Kapo-to-toes ever, and was basically taught how to drop back on my tiptoes (thank you, thank you, Matthew Sweeney, and more about you in a minute). August 2008 I got to try it out in one of Boston's ashtanga rooms for four days, and it worked. September 2008 my household got pregnant and that's another story. Somewhere in 2009 I taught myself to stand up (those infamous "throw face toward garage!" posts) and somehow in the first four months of 2010 I was walking my Kapotasana in to the arches of my feet.
Then I overcranked the right AC joint and couldn't even grab a foot in Dhanurasana for a while and then practice got spotty while I rearranged priorities, and then I gave up all the Intermediate and then I didn't practice much for these first four months of 2012. My backbends in Austin in June 2011 weren't spectacular; 2010's were easily as bendy and as deep. So there's really been no backbending breakthrough other than that I can almost always drop-and-stand, even after as little as just standing series. So maybe I have achieved depth rather than breadth.
Kathryn said to me Saturday afternoon that we'd do "the poses no one teaches," like King Dancer and the King Pigeon, lots of one-foot backbends and lots of wheels. Sounded tasty. I spent the whole night wondering about Kapotasana. To approach it, request it? See if there's anything in it? Or is that pose-grabbing? What to do, what to do? I didn't request it, didn't even try it on Sunday.
We did a lot of splits after a brief thoracic/shoulder warmup. KB says that splits are a great warmup for backbends. We did them on the floor and up against the wall (imagine pressing pelvis toward a wall rather than the floor). It was pretty freaking intense. We learned what KB calls "goddess hand," which is sending the elbow down and the palm of the hand up. THIS is what that tricky rotation which allows for the Natarajasana/Eka Pada Rajakapotasana grab is all about. Has to be elbow *down* and *forward* to send the hand back, NOT elbow *up* and *back* (that's fine for an elbow hook of the foot, but it won't work for rotating in the shoulder). I know that makes no sense, but imagine that you're a server and you're balancing a tray of food on your palm. Or that you're a goddess in some Renaissance painting. That position. That's what you use to reach back.
Let's use Eka Pada Raja Kapo as an example: reach back for the foot and try to grab the NAIL SIDE of the little toe. To do this, I often turn the elbow AWAY from me and the toes AWAY from me also. Then CREEP toward the big toe; this tightens the "loop" that connects shoulder to foot, and only when you have the big toe, do you then swing the elbow and foot IN AND UP and, as KB put it, "you try to put your bicep on your face."
Doing this, I got my first head-to-foot EPRK ever, with left hand on left foot. Couldn't quite get the height on the right side, but did get the hookup.
We did a lunge version of this also (Iyengar and KB call it "Eka Pada Raja Kapo II" and Matthew Sweeney includes it in his "Baddha Krama" if you have his Vinyasa Krama book) which was absolutely stars-in-my-vision "come to Jesus" intense in the psoas. This was done strapped; same with Natarajasana. KB's key advice in the standing dancer was to keep moving the chest UP, not forward, and to squeeze the elbows in; don't let them swing out in backbends.
Then as promised, lots of wheels. Toes in, elbows in. Solid advice also given by many teachers, and same as I tell my own students. Someone had requested an intro to dropbacks and someone else had requested an intro to "flip-flops" which was an amusing way to put "tic-tocs" so we got those too.
KB on dropping back is "drop back to a wall, holding the hang as long as possible," which is also very Matthew Sweeney. Again, good to echo things I've heard before. I like reinforcement versus reinvention where backbending is taught.
On tic-tocs, KB's method was this: press to a wheel, toes against wall. Step feet up wall, and press both arms and legs straight (half-handstand backbend, technically). Swing one leg up, bend the other knee and jump up and over. Risky. I tried this on Monday night, and buckled in the arms and fell onto the back of my head, but it was fine. The directional disorientation is pretty substantial. Anyway, if that works, you land in a downdog/forward bend sort of position. From there, jump back up, flop over and land feet on wall (as with all things, the softer the landing, the greater the control). Walk down to your wheel. Repeat as necessary.
That's so heading out to the side of my garage this summer.
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Two things I said there'd be more on: first, I've paid for a Matthew Sweeney immersion (6 days) in North Carolina in July. Same place he's been doing month-longs the past few summers. Meditation and practice, 9 am to noon, then "subtle body" 2-5pm each day. Lots of meditation stuff, inner work stuff. Very attractive now.
Second, this business of opposites: let's use my interests and my career as the laboratory example. I'm running a panel based on my recent Abject Art course (and I find it funny that some of the Google searches that land people here now include "abject art", heehee). This is in large part because my "third year review" (halfway to promotion, which in my case will only ever be Senior Lecturer, not tenure of any kind) wants me to publish on teaching, to make a "public presence" on teaching. It turns out that what they mean is publication, not conferencing, but whatever, I'm conferencing because I misunderstood and because this is, after all, part of setting up a public presence.
But it crisscrossses borders that had been important to me: when I'm teaching something I really like, such as Dada to Ab Ex or Abject Art, my classroom is a SACRED SPACE. The community I try to found in there is a series of ritual interactions, interpersonal modes, a whole instruction in how to relate to the universe, to your own affects, to uncertain and in some cases massive interpersonal challenges: don't just put the art in your head, put the art IN YOUR BODY, really FEEL this stuff in the viscera. And then become it, take it to the hallways, the relationships, the filling of your car with gasoline, take it everywhere. "The cop who pulls you over is a Dada cop, and he gives you a Dada ticket."
So for that ritualism to suddenly "go public" in a disembodied intellectual space like a conference in a foreign city....is that OKAY? See how it feels almost like being colonized, like being e-bodied as I said above about KB? See how it could be seen as calling for me to fetishize my own performance, to become a marginal on a stage and a jaguar in a cage? And to do that to MYSELF? For promotion? See what ugliness can be excavated about that?
The relationship stuff I was posting throughout April is exactly this same dynamic, because one of the chief bureaucrats at the school who is imposing all of this promotion-need on me is the woman I live with, so this overlays very cleanly and with identical panic: wait, aren't we sacrificing our personal and our ritual, in order to have our public and our bureaucratic? (seventh series doesn't quite fit that mold; this is strictly about career versus the "personal" and I'm intentionally setting those two up as opposites; alchemy coming here in a minute)
On Monday there was what is politely called a "faculty retreat" and is more accurately an all-day meeting. Obviously, there can be no interpersonal energy at such a thing, right? There were in-jokes, "blue sky-ing" comments (brainstorming) and laughter, as well as the regular depressing news about income and a little bit of contentious argument about how to attract and keep more students, but the whole thing was interpersonal, energy levels changing, rising, spiking sinking and dynamically moving. It had me thinking of Gilles Deleuze writing about Francis Bacon: the blank canvas is full of cliches, and you have to "break" figuration before you can paint a Figure. When people in their 40s get drunk at parties, they still remain the drunks they were in their mid-20s. Parties become cliche, consumption becomes cliche. But meetings where there is ACTUAL "blue-skying" (I love that term; it's so ridiculous, yet it works) will create reinvention, not just of the terms of whatever subject is being discussed, but reinvention potentially of the SPACE itself, a dynamic energy is created which of course isn't given a LOT of roaming room, but becomes just a little loose and fast, just a little "deterritorialized," to use Deleuze and Guattarian language. Or in Foucault's notion of power, where power is not centralized but lies about everywhere, potential and kinetic, throughout the entire social field.
My own classrooms are all about this: I know what the "cliches" of classroom instruction are, and I load them with affect, use them as toys, foreground them as things that we could do and then change them affectively, so that in a way, my classes do "experiential learning" with the very SPACE of education itself, the very ENERGY of it.
Or as John Berger once wrote about relationships, "You want to appear everywhere; this is not about some acquisition of positions and other fetishes, it is about seeing yourselves reflected everywhere in the social." Words closely to that effect, from a book I reviewed (again as part of my service requirements for school) called Revisioning Europe: the Films of Alain Tanner and John Berger.
Fill everything with energy; be reflected everywhere. The desire to be a cosmos. Or in Deleuzian language, to roam the Body Without Organs, where you can as easily see a Salvador Dali-esque giant ear, as a volcano, as a bicycle, as a hole that opens up to a massive cave full of coffee mugs. Whatever, man. It's all there.
It's too simple (uninterestingly simple, in fact) to say, "Well you just get a job doing what you love." That doesn't even make any sense. It keeps "I" and "job" and it makes them separate by definition and then tries in this flimsy way to parallel them by overlaying one with the other. No non-duality is there, no alchemy at all.
Instead let's do this: where is interpersonal energy the highest, not just the most manageable, but literally the highest, the most anarchic, the most obvious? Where does it pick us up and take us out to sea? I'd say the answer is probably in flow states: when climbing walls, when high on whatever your high of choice is, when in bed with someone delicious. States like that. Now, where is interpersonal energy the most regimented, the most (what Deleuze fans would call) stratified, the most channelled and contained? The office, yes? The cubicle, yes? The public transportation? The job meeting? Even the playground? A Situationist critique of space, psychogeography: public spaces are closed, right? Not closed as in un-open, but with POSSIBILITIES foreclosed by their very arrangement, yes? Or to add a yoga example, your set sequence doesn't allow for PLAY, right?
Then how did the regulars in public transport in Austin last summer crack jokes? How then does my classroom do what it does? Why is there a chapter in the Affect Theory Reader specifically about life in the cubicle? It is because liveliness goes wherever things that are alive go. And chased far and hard enough (which can be done just by sitting still), any stable idea can fall to colorful pieces and dance around.
Then the directed-and-stratified and the flowing-and-delicious don't become opposites, and as long as we hold the in between (which can't be held, and is paradoxical, but those are the only things worth holding, yes?) we understand properly how reality works, I think.
I said earlier I would talk about the yoga here, and of course, tangents took over.
But about tightness: I tend to lose hip openers (and now, forward folds with differently positioned legs, like Janu A and Mari B) when I crank up the backbends, and my new idea after Monday night's practice is: no more "this/that," "my/your," no more of that language. Live instead in "What is happening?" Maybe the answer is, "This posture is very intense, this posture is not as deep as it used to be, this posture has run away" and then those answers can be finessed also. One learns about anatomy, about movement, about the annamaya kosha, about the pranamaya kosha, about the manomaya kosha, and answers, "I'm strung out about this emotional situation, and I'm slacking on rotating the femur bone internally."
Because what's happening is only on a very simple level about "the pose is hard."
It isn't hard to live like this, and it doesn't necessitate being the guy in the San Fran bus who pulled himself into a lotus upside down on the ceiling of the vehicle. But it's also impossible to explain: if I say, "you take agency instead of letting life do you" then it sounds like ego, but if I say, "you just surrender a bit and then manage the energy" it sounds like some relativistic go-with-the-flow hippie nonsense.
Find a way to manage energy. All is coming. Doesn't matter how or where you find a way to manage energy; soon it becomes all you want to do, all you see or sense anywhere.
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