I drove back from Durham on Thursday, up to Columbus Ohio, and had a marvelous sweatfest of a practice at a yoga studio there (well, on Friday morning), with the "Morning Mysore Club" that had to have at least twenty people cross in, out and through over 2.5 hours. Amazing membership.
So Friday morning after maybe five hours of sleep, I did the yoga there, drove the nearly three hours to Indy, found out about the Aurora Colorado horrorshow, re-entered the householding, played a lot with the boy, and had what Matthew would call a "going high" energy experience, like spiky flames shooting up toward my head. This resulted in rapid walking about the house narrating stuff to myself while J and the child were playing outside. It got pretty intense and crazy and I chilled it out, finally, with kefir (dairy always seems to chill me out, provide comfort, ease heat) and then oily pasta supper (which coincidentally a friend would later recommend--the oily warmth particularlly--for vata imbalance).
Matthew said he always thought of himself as pitta but is apparently dominantly vata. I've never done any serious Ayurveda but I have done some unserious Ayurveda and I'm certain I'm vata-pitta or pitta-vata, it varies. I have pitta anger, heat and discipline, but vata wandering, breadth and contingency.
Anyway. My Ayurveda is quite half-assed and so I'm not going to pursue any insight with it yet until and unless I more full-ass it.
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Travel is a very uprooting experience for me. I basically go crazy before travel, and my loathing for packing is intense and long-lasting. But once I am off and away, it's all better. I would rather travel alone than with company, and I like leaving things out, because it helps me integrate with where I'm going; I sort of enjoy having to get stuff that I didn't bring along. Or at times, I just go without it, whatever it is. I get indifferent to old routines when I travel, it's very easy for me to give up an old routine when I'm not in my "home soil."
I also, and particularly when I'm doing yoga travel, very easily lose track of where I am, what it "means" (preconceptions, stereotypes), and what time it is. Travel really adds "space" to me, in the sense of spacing out, breadth, cosmic curiosity, astronautism. But rigidity in travel, particularly when imposed by other people: that creates RAGE. And that goes for almost any ridigity or even stabilizing of my experience: scheduling, telling me what I "must see," where I "must go," maintaining "who I am," all of that. Travelling with uptight people who need to be somewhere specific at some specific time and who have the trip all gridded out, just put me in a state of constant spark-throwing brain-grinding RAGE.
This is also why I don't like 9-5 jobs unless they come with opportunity for daydreaming and spacing out and applying imagination even to rote tasks (but I'm good at that, so it's rare that I TRULY HATE even a rote 9-5 job). I like open schedules, opportunities to run away, have lunch at 2 instead of 12, wake up too early, climb in the morning before class, whatever. Zigging and zagging so that no two days have quite the same energetic or colorful lines.
But at the same time, I love a certain type of routinization. I go through phases where the morning MUST BE coffee in the dark, the yoga, then yogurt with honey, and if that progression gets fucked up, my inner life turns into white noise. Same with my Sunday morning crossword: please STEP OFF and let me have my focus. But these routinizations are always ones that I choose; routinization from other people inevitably brings rage, huge flaming rage, destructive power, urge to annihilate with extreme prejudice.
Understandably, I think, control freaks and I are a relationship made in the deepest part of hell. We drive each other endlessly nuts.
J (who is an Aquarius sun, "the contrarian") will ask me, "How come you love routine if you're so revolutionary and all that?"
And I (who am a Taurus sun, the earth comfort sign) will answer, "Well they're MY routines, and that makes all the difference."
J: "But don't you do Someone Else's yoga?"
Me: "I do MY OWN yoga within someone else's pattern, yes."
J: "You're not submitting to an authority...?"
Me: "No...well....ok, if what looks like submission to an authority is actually providing a discipline which creates focus and ability to more clearly achieve one's goals, then that's not submission to an authority, it's following a method for greater focus of one's power."
J: "I'm not sure I see a difference there."
Me: "In this case, this discipline is good for me and has no payoff for the authority. So it's not authoritarian, which is always bullshit."
J: "I still think it's suspicious that you follow these authorities you don't even know."
Me: "Ok, but when it's disembodied like this, it's like there's no one there but me and the discipline, so there's no authority other than maybe that which I gain over my own business."
J: "Well why can't you just use self-control instead of having to do all of this obedience and discipline?"
Me: "If you can do that, then you apparently have what I'm working on, so, you know, congratulations!"
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Our hosts in Durham, Fran and Kathy, are magnificent. They're aging hippies who do all this woo-woo stuff like read astrological charts and talk about energy, but I think Kathy got well into Intermediate, and Fran 2/3 of the way into Fourth series, before trading the ashtanga almost entirely for Matthew's "Vinyasa Krama" sequences.
The last thing I did there, the afternoon after the last practice session, was have a chart consultation with Fran. He's a sales guy, in charge of people, and has marvelous energy personally: he's direct, enthusiastic, total go-getter. As he put it, "Never in doubt, not always correct." He's softening his edges and it's a good idea. Here's some of what he told me about the chart based on my birth date (down to the minute) and location:
I am a Taurus sun, Aries moon, and Capricorn ascendant. Taurus wants to sit peacefully in a sun-dappled forest. Contentment. Capricorn is the Elder, the Teacher, and the ascendant is your mask, the thing you wear for others. The moon sign is relational, so needs to be read in relation to other things.
The twelve signs (Aries to Pisces) are set into a 12-house circle, and the houses generally govern areas of existence or energy. There are houses of Home, of Death, of Friendship, and so on. Part of how you read a chart is seeing what planets (all of which have meanings) are in what sign (and those meanings) and then what HOUSE all of that sits inside.
Right off, Fran told me that my sun is conjunct (i.e., close to and friendly with) Mercury and Saturn, and that those three planets are in the House of HOME.
Home, seriously? I said, out loud. He said, "The House of your Sun is the Key to your Sanity. So HOME is where your sanity is."
The Sun is identity; Mercury is intellect, brightness, sharpness. Saturn is long-duration, depth, and often difficulty, but also introspection. So my House of Home is governed by "me-ness," introspection and intellect. And this is home in a metaphorical and literal way: the home I grew up in, the home I will set up, and also my "home," my Self-home, who I am. Fran said, you're smart, and Saturn means there is work to be done in your home that ONLY YOU CAN DO. You have a task in your home and you are the only one who can complete it. The shadow side of this is self-pity, self-doubt, surrender.
Then we went on: Mars and Venus are conjunct in Gemini. Gemini is communication; Mars is warriordom, Venus is love, beauty and aesthetics. These are in the fifth house, the house of CHILDREN. Also called the house of play. I'd told Fran during the week that I teach, and he ran with it. You are a WARRIOR TEACHER, he said, creative and readily able to communicate things. I nodded, because that's completely true. The shadow side of play is love affairs; the shadow side of Mars is anger and violence.
Then we hopped up to Pluto, which is in my eighth house, the house of DEATH (but also, and Fran didn't make much of this, the house of sex, money, and transformation). Pluto is, as Fran put it, "hell." Wherever Pluto lands, one feels a thing all the way, does the work, goes through hell and comes out differently. He said, "God of death in the house of death, and this is linked to the problem you're here to solve, the Wound, from a prior life. Your eighth house is square to (i.e., three houses away from: Ed.) your House of Children, and your Pluto is in Virgo, which is precision and self-confidence, so it's possible that in your prior life, you inherited a lot of shame and guilt, which is the shadow side of Virgo, about the death of a sibling or a child. That's what you're here to fix."
That was pretty intense. I thought about that for two solid days after. But then I started reading up on Pluto and the Eighth House and found out stuff like this: Pluto governs transformation, and I've been babbling on and on about "transformation, man!" since I was a teenager. It should be overwhelmingly, almost stupidly obvious, to readers here, that I have JUST A LITTLE hell in my sex stuff. And also, actually, I have hell in my money stuff too, look at all my loan debt and my perennial clusterfucks in all things financial. So with additional reading, I'm not sure it's so deathy-death-death. I think it's more about obsessive transformation with total darkness as to method, and I think it's about sex frustration and pain (which contradicts my Mars/Venus conjunction in Gemini, because that's all sexiness and alluring personality and interpersonal ease) and I think it's about money trouble. Extend that just a little and you end up with my always-ready critique of capitalism and capitalist culture, which ever since college has extended to sexual practices, commodifying others, commodifying the body and experience, and my long CHOSEN ascetic periods when I feel that sex stuff is too fucked up and loaded with commodity vibes. Add to that my lifelong demand that sexual experience GIVE ME THE GOD VIBES, be divinely transformative, provide a kundalini Shiva-Shakti cosmic reunion and healing of all (Catholic; hi, House of Home!) guilt and shame, alchemical healing of everything that has ever existed.
I'm not making that shit up; that's been my rhetoric for almost two decades.
So when I started to dig into Pluto and that Eighth House, I was like, "Holy fuck, this is my whole fucking life." Every manifesto I've ever written has been about shit in my Eighth House.
More about how seriously to take astrology, in just a minute. I'm not sold wholesale on this business, but I think it's key to give you an experience of my self-recognition in it before I step back and call it useful for respinning one's narrative. We'll get there.
Fran said that "the Wound" (which at that point started to sound really and truly Jungian) is the "South Node" and is the sort of site of past life pain. It has an opposite, the "North Node," which is directly opposite it on the chart circle. My North Node is in Pisces, a mystical water sign, in the Second House. Fran said, "Here's your North Node, man, and it means, abiding in the love of God." Now, the second house usually means "money," it is called "the purse" of the chart, but the only thing in it is my North Node.
Fran read my Moon, which is in the third house (communication) in Aries, as the "Key to Happiness." Your Moon sign and house show the key to your happiness, and apparently mine is "facing your fear." Looking around the chart for what is called the Midheaven and seeing Jupiter up there, Fran added this: "This is Jupiter, who is success, and that's your Midheaven, close to Jupiter, which is your public success, your career, so if you can Face Your Fear and take some public risks, you might have a big payoff."
All of that in my head added up to, "Ok, I'm going to introspect my Home to stay sane, face Fear to stay happy, perhaps have social happiness as a result of that, and I'm a born teacher with an unconventional method (Fran and I had seen unconventionality from Uranus, the sign of randomness--Ed.) which has to be cultivated intentionally to feed my creativity and perhaps children, and all of that is going to wind up in non-attachment and inner peace and divine abiding. WOW."
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Now then.
The astrological chart backs up a lot of my narrative as I tell it, particularly all the shit associated with that Pluto 8th. But it also emphasizes things that I'd seen as challenging, unsure what to make of them, by which I really mean the Houses of Home and Children. Those are major planet-filled sites on my chart; five of the nine available planets are in Those Two Houses and my Moon is right next to them and my North Node is right next to that. Waaaay up opposite all of that are the far planets (except Saturn): Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
Briefly: Uranus indicates non-conformity, randomness, what one writer calls "bolts from the blue." Uranus is opposite my Moon, directly, and this is interpreted by people online as emotional conflict, unsureness, tension and fear about self-realization as a weirdo. The moon in Aries is likewise spun this way: emotional pain, heart on sleeve, but perhaps also icy cold emotional control, inexpressiveness, over-rationalization of the emotional. Somewhere else, I read that Mercury in the fourth house is about emotional self-knowledge and Saturn in the fourth house is also linked to knowing the emotions, the emotional body.
So on that level, I also see a major challenge that DOES EXIST in me prior to the chart reading. The constant contest with emotions.
My Neptune is in Scorpio, in the 11th house, the house of Friends but also the house of Community. Neptune is abstract and dreamy, a sort of vague "being-space" and Fran said it was "interest in taboo shit." It is defined online (when in the 11th) as an interest in and great tolerance for darkness. Scorpio, of course, is the big sexy sign of the twelve. What do I see in my life based on this? The Abject Art course. The matter-of-fact way that I can talk about people peeing on each other for erotic thrill, and bloodletting, and body art and performance, and all of that. I mean, I used vomiting as an example of abjection on the FIRST DAY OF CLASS. Darkness of this kind and I are friendly, very friendly, because it's all about sensation.
So I can retell my narrative through this chart, I see a lot of things that echo, but what I did not see was that big ego-self emphasis on Home and Children, and sure, I could metaphorize that into "selfhood" and "play," but it just feels right to take those literally. What is my massive identity crisis about? Home and Children. What is my current dharma task? Home and Children.
Fran pointed out two things: at 42 years of age, because of the time it takes Uranus to make its orbit, everyone's Uranus is at a spatially opposite position from their natal Uranus, so you get an AUTOMATIC identity crisis. And he further said that right now, and probably for almost two years in either direction, Pluto has been in Capricorn, which is my ascending, which means that my mask has been going through some serious hell or as he put it, "fucking deep intense existential shadow work!" for a few years, and of course, that's entirely true.
I mean, irrefutably true. That's practically (broadly speaking) the only thing this blog ever fucking talks about.
But all the same, I think that astrological charting like this can be a useful tool, not some woo-woo revelatory thing you MUST commit to (although I have pretty much committed to karma and virtually to reincarnation, because they seem so informative in my understanding of how my shit works...).
Things to know: one, you NEED a chart-reader you can trust, if you do this. I trusted Fran to give me the two cents on my astrology. I think he cleaned up the Pluto a bit, but that's fine. Two, you need to go to astrology with an open mind which sits evenly between skepticism and clinging. In fact, it's good advice to go to most of life and certainly relationships, with that in-between mindspace.
Finally here, it's all relational. You can't do anything astrological with just saying, "This planet in that house means this!" That's just an amateur's beginning. To really do it, you've got to look at all your house and planet relationships, figure out which is stronger and weaker, and then even when you've got the messy relating of the chart figured out, then apply the day-to-day presence of the planets and other forces IN CONTEMPORARY SPACE and set up all of THOSE relationships to your natal arrangement. That's a hell of a lot of work and knowledge. Fran and Kathy said that they sometimes have workshops with Steve Forrest, who is THE yoga astrology guy, and he's their main astrology guru. I might well pick up one of his books.
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It blew my mind when I realized how the yoga teaching and the art history teaching are the same thing. But we cannot start here.
It begins with Matthew on sensation: he asked us in the Vipassana-style meditations to keep the mind on sensation, not the thoughts ABOUT the sensation, but sensation itself. Particularly in the full-body scans that began the afternoon sessions. Later in the week he would say that feeling sensation means that the sensations are "not us," because they can be observed, the same way that we can observe thoughts and so they too are "not us."
However, he also said that in the cosmic view, no sensation is "good" or "bad," because sensation is one of the roads to meditation and to universal love. Space is the other. So when he, on one retreat, had a sort of vibrating/humming take over his whole body (this is his bit on "we are blipping electrons"), they just said, keep meditating. Body as sensation, as blipping electrons, quantum body, manifesting body, alive manifesting/unmanifesting, Process Body. Matthew calls this the "on" switch and says it has a feminine character.
The alternative is the "off" switch, which is unthinking, turning the mind to, if you will, a blank movie screen. Darkness and quiet. I got a bit of this on the fourth day, I think it was. Space, masculine, Vedanta, Shiva.
Going back to the "on" switch, Matthew invited us to try to separate "the felt" from the feeler (NOT from the observer, but from the feeler itself) and we could not. Body not as a thing that HAS sensations, but body as a thing that IS sensations. Matthew said that we are having sensations all the time, in and out. Digestion, blood pumping, noise, ambient warmth or cold, a thousand sensations, every second, all the time. He said that with concentration you can feel your own liver or feel liquid dripping down each of the two urethras. So, ideally, when you are "feeling sensations," you move from the local and specific ("my hand, my eye, my knee") to the global, the whole body at once, the whole sensorium.
Wait, isn't sensorium the word that "tactility" people use in film studies to talk about phenomenology? And don't theorists of affect talk about the sensorium as at least the equal of the intellect in reckoning with a thing, like a red ship? How it feels is as important, perhaps more so, than what it is.
And I forget now where I was when I talked myself into this, out loud. In a car? On the road to Indy? In the house? Cannot recall. But I ask students to feel things, to experience the sensation of immersive film viewing, the affect of quasi-pornographic video in a classroom (because site matters, affectively). I ask them all the time to do this: Dada poetry is "made in the mouth." It's not inspiration and imagery but moving your face around. Abject art. Video immersion. All of that, over and over: FEEL THIS! FEEL the art!
When I first showed Paul McCarthy's video "The Painter" (you can find it by hunting around on ubu.com if they haven't taken it down or had to take it down), students were insulted, thinking that McCarthy's incoherent, murmuring moaning English was either a poke at cognitive disability or else that he was so disabled. This is the AFFECTive power of McCarthy's language in that video. So what you FEEL isn't always going to be pleasant; aesthetics don't always play nice, and it ISN'T always about beauty and light and spirit. This is, in a nutshell, the whole 20th century project in Western aesthetics.
But in the body, you don't always feel pleasure and spiritual uplift either. Not maybe unless you've read a lot of Georges Bataille. Matthew was making fun of the way that Americans say "restroom" while the Brits and Australians will simply say, "toilet." "I'm not resting in there," he joked. And exactly. Fran quipped, "Feel the sensations!" and that was both hilarious and completely on-target.
Because, right, exactly: this is abject art. What is it to make videos of your assistants making themselves barf, and videotaping it (Martin Creed, "Sick Film")? What is it to can your own shit (Piero Manzoni, 1961)? What is it to make Abstract Expressionist "zip paintings" out of blood (Andres Serrano)? Feel the sensations, because this is a body, and that's life. Ron Athey, Bob Flanagan, Annie Sprinkle, and so on and so forth. Watching a McCarthy/Kelley video. Or whatever.
And somewhere in the week, Matthew said that one could lay a Shiva/Shakti dichotomy on top of all of this: Shiva is the mind, is Space, and Shakti is the body, is sensation. The tailbone, the kundalini snake, the muladhara chakra, lower elements, the guts, the orange core that Matthew said "is also the divine." Feeling is "the Divine talking to us," he said. No matter what it says.
So when I had catharsis in the pressup backbends and Matthew said, "Let that move up and down the spine," it's Shakti, the divine talking. Tightness in right hip. Tweaky sensations in knee ligaments. Sweat in the eye. Shakti, shakti, shakti. But not the sensations alone, the divinity of them. Another case of revealing what is true, that we don't see at first. Sweat in your eyes during practice is like, "Gah, must wipe." But sweat in your eyes during practice as the divine speaking to you, is different, even if you wipe the sweat away. Something changes in awareness that way.
And that's it: something changes in awareness that way. I don't tell students that, you know, for example thinking it's hot to see some guy with a crystal penis putting it to use (because we saw that in the Abject Art course: Tunga, "Cooking," from the video "Destricted"), is The Divine Speaking To Them, but I do ask them to live in the affect, not to run, not to box it up. Let it wiggle around. Then let's be a community again, talk about it, share how it works, what it turns into, and by that, who we are, what we can become. And it's all interpersonal, much like talking about sensation or color or whatever, during our meditation sessions with Matthew.
And those are the same thing.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
About to start Matthew Day 5: Liberation by and through Your Shit.
One of my more amusing titles, I think, but that's what Matthew calls one's human negativity, one's "mess." Simply, "your shit." No nobility to a samskara or to a hindrance, simply that which is to be cleared away. It fits, I think. "Ah yes, ok, this is just my shit."
Here I mean to write a more proper workshop review. The pattern is this: morning meditation, 30 minutes. We do a Vipassana style sit and then a few minutes of Metta Bhavana (loving kindness) and then we bend. Practice window is until noon, and it takes me until at least 11:30 to get through Primary plus one. I've been moving slowly here, as I have, for the first three days, been dealing with a lot of "my shit" in practice and in the meditation sessions.
Afternoons are 2-5, meditation practice and discussion. Discussion has gone everywhere from not being the body, to feeling sensation being "female" while spaciousness is "male," to bhakti, devotion and how to deal with the word "God" (and as Matthew put it, "without bringing your shit to it"), to ethics and how feeling in the body is related to the Divine and thence to ethics (for example, eating various different things makes you feel different, and you can eventually make what are ethical decisions, based on how you feel, and even, eventually, how what you eat causes you to react (or not to react) to people), to the ladder of "sensing a thing, being aware of a thing, being able to choose how to react to that thing," rather that just reacting to a stimulus, right away. This is what Yogananda would have called the "sense telephones," being called all the time by the sense telephones.
A lot of it is interlinked, of course, and it's great, but it's hard to describe. In a way, getting all of this on meditation from Matthew is like when people say that listening to Richard Freeman will make your head explode.
Yesterday we got as close as we ever have, to chakras. Matthew told us that there are three sort of "sense centers" in the body: the core, the juicy pelvic sort of energy center, that maybe is golden in color (svadisthana chakra, although he never said that), you know, "the gut." Then the heart, inter-relations, relations with others (anahata). Then the third eye, the relationship to the Divine, and all of the sensations we have (even silence, non-sensation) is the Divine speaking to us. The body as Divine vehicle. And then Matthew went on to say that the granthis, the three knots, are ways that we prevent ourselves from having full sense of ourselves and thus sense of our Divine nature. And it easily and logically followed, once laid out like that, that we are the divine, not "the human" or "ourselves" or any idea of this kind. The divine speaks through sensation; a couple people in our group have even heard the "divine sound," which is a kind of friendly tinnitus (hah!) and so there was some discussion of that (I've never had that and can't speak clearly about it).
And all of that happened in about 20 minutes of a three-hour session. It's really really dense and pretty amazing, the stuff we cover. Some people tune out, it seems, but that's cool, you come, you listen, you see what you take away.
Yesterday Matthew had us concentrate on the upper lip, a concentration exercise that I find frustrating (it's easy, but I get distracted from it as easily, and it's our standard opener, so much of our meditation practice has been frustrating for me, which has become a sort of meditation on frustration) and then move to "the brain," and I actually felt my attention turn toward that organ, which was itself very cool, because the opening question is, "wait, where the hell is my 'attention' if I can turn it on my own brain? who the fuck is thinking here?" but it was unnecessary to answer that, so I didn't. I went with the exercise, which was to imagine that each thought was a bubble and to "pop it" as it showed up. I did this with relative ease. It worked MUCH better for me to do this "pop the thought bubble" exercise than to do "observe each thought," because my thoughts are colorful and graphically interersting and compelling and then I'm thinking and I've forgotten all about meditation. But to pop each one, a certain act of negation, THAT was easy. And in what seemed like a very short time, thoughts stopped appearing. Black, silent. Actually quiet. I lost track of my hands, my body, the people in the room, how big the space was. Totally lost all sense of orientation. But it wasn't dizziness or disorientation or drunkenness, it was just the weirdest quiet in the world. And then of course it was gone, but it was there long enough for me to compellingly recall it.
Matthew says that this sort of point is "space," which is the other "half" if you will of "sensation." Space is Vedanta, sensation is Tantra. One can overlay a Shiva/Shakti thing there, a male/female thing. And in the afternoon session yesterday, Matthew told us that the whole point here is not to detach, but to become aware. So don't get lost in the sensation or the space, just be aware, because really, you are awareness (Purusha, Brahman, and so on, all of those concepts). And then Matthew is really big on love, and says that love comes more easily (for him anyway) from the sensation road than the space road but that both go there.
Ah, and one spooky thing: Matthew said, about "space," about negating thoughts, that one of the ideas is that you can look into a mirror and annihilate the image. That's one degree of non-you that can be achieved. I liked that, not because it's "badass" (although I am drawn to things that are badass, that's what my love of spaghetti westerns is attached to also), but because it instantly reminded me of my long-term suffering here over identity and "2008 me" versus "now me" and in fact that's what I talked about when Matthew asked us for our "learning edges." I said that basically I wanted to be who I was and not who I am, and I'm cleaning up all kinds of pain and resentment and other shit. This would be over-narrativizing, but if you read here over the past, say, two years (since about mid-2010) you'll see a slow, painful progressive acceptance of this idea that I'm not that person and never was, even when I "was" that person, when I was merging deeply with that identity, climber/lover/ashtangi. I don't know if anyone reads closely enough here to see the progression, but I feel that since 2011, I've been on an identifiable line of thinking and realization; my writing and choice of topics isn't all over the place, but is sort of narrowing and focusing and working and reworking a thing, and it's in a way about this new identity that never solidifies, the idea that one's "being" is service, is teaching, is dharma, is householding, without ever becoming a sort of proud, "I AM A HOUSEHOLDER!"
And also (and I'm about to run out of time here as I'll have to drive over and meditate and bend) many many posts here are written in first-person agony as I deal with "my shit," that's what the first two posts about this workshop are.
All of my writing from 2009 is written in that mode; there might be a post or two, but not many, that are not loaded with pain, but most of them are written like that.
This "shit" that I'm dealing with is, as I put it in a Facebook post yesterday (and on that, I think that the 500-word window over there is a really good limit for forcing myself to condense, to really get to the point; I notice that my FB writing and my blog writing are of similar topics but different forms, and that's interesting, to the point that I've considered limiting myself to 500-word chunks here just to intensify my own writing concentration), is the very material of my liberation.
That's how I understand the ashtanga method, too: maybe just in my vehicle (I refer to body as vehicle, to sort of ease the "my" of it), emotional negativity manifests in muscles and fascia. When I'm uptight, I'm actually tight also. Negativity literally hurts me in practice, because it manifests in annamaya kosha. This is a gift, because as I move, and particularly as those things give way (and my mind gives way, in a fashion), a degree of liberation occurs through bending and through what is typically surrender, but a surrender that is ever forced on me (I do not seem able to voluntarily surrender; it has to be done through action, I sort of "force" surrender on my ego/identity/self by doing things it doesn't want to do).
So my idea is that ashtanga vinyasa can liberate me from my shit, BY my shit.
There is no escape there, nothing is ducked or avoided. But this isn't the same as "the only way out is through," that pithy nugget (did you think I would let one slip past? Seriously?) because to me that nugget implies that one GOES there, whereas since my shit is painful, the last thing I want to do is march full-face into it. There is a level of self-deception: I keep practicing ashtanga vinyasa because I think, every practice, that I will discover my wonderful full powers, my limitlessness, and I keep discovering my limits, I keep having tightness or pain or emotional agony or whatever, and now and then, I don't, but in those practices, I have shallower concentration (with rare exceptions where I seem to "magically" be able to focus on the breath or such). Pain is concentration, in my vehicle.
It's not far from there to say that pain is the way to moksha, not seeking pain, but experiencing it. Experiencing the pain that's already there, the pain of the self, the pain of the established ideas and constructions and histories and cellular presence of cultural assumptions and what Matthew called "centuries of karma."
One does not "go through" that, in an elective change-agent way. Matthew has been big on NOT being a change agent. Put simply, the ego cannot change itself, because it doesn't want to, that is its nature. As Matthew put it yesterday, we think we are MANIFEST and really, we are MANIFESTING. Those blipping electrons of quantum physics, or that spaciousness and shunyata (emptiness) that is form.
And so, of course. Of course.
Practice consistently shows me who I am not, what I am not. I go in thinking, full power, Godhead, and I don't get that. But I get pain instead, limitation, granthi, knots, negativity, ego, whatever, but I don't land there forever either, there is ALCHEMY in that pain, the confrontation with pain. Pain eases, postures re-approach (Pasasana, for example, today; we'll see), and as pain eases, self eases, self slips away, only to be reasserted later, where more alchemy can be committed.
If you have shit, if you have "the mess," you have the material of your liberation. Congratulations, you're incarnate.
Manifest-ING. Alchemy.
Here I mean to write a more proper workshop review. The pattern is this: morning meditation, 30 minutes. We do a Vipassana style sit and then a few minutes of Metta Bhavana (loving kindness) and then we bend. Practice window is until noon, and it takes me until at least 11:30 to get through Primary plus one. I've been moving slowly here, as I have, for the first three days, been dealing with a lot of "my shit" in practice and in the meditation sessions.
Afternoons are 2-5, meditation practice and discussion. Discussion has gone everywhere from not being the body, to feeling sensation being "female" while spaciousness is "male," to bhakti, devotion and how to deal with the word "God" (and as Matthew put it, "without bringing your shit to it"), to ethics and how feeling in the body is related to the Divine and thence to ethics (for example, eating various different things makes you feel different, and you can eventually make what are ethical decisions, based on how you feel, and even, eventually, how what you eat causes you to react (or not to react) to people), to the ladder of "sensing a thing, being aware of a thing, being able to choose how to react to that thing," rather that just reacting to a stimulus, right away. This is what Yogananda would have called the "sense telephones," being called all the time by the sense telephones.
A lot of it is interlinked, of course, and it's great, but it's hard to describe. In a way, getting all of this on meditation from Matthew is like when people say that listening to Richard Freeman will make your head explode.
Yesterday we got as close as we ever have, to chakras. Matthew told us that there are three sort of "sense centers" in the body: the core, the juicy pelvic sort of energy center, that maybe is golden in color (svadisthana chakra, although he never said that), you know, "the gut." Then the heart, inter-relations, relations with others (anahata). Then the third eye, the relationship to the Divine, and all of the sensations we have (even silence, non-sensation) is the Divine speaking to us. The body as Divine vehicle. And then Matthew went on to say that the granthis, the three knots, are ways that we prevent ourselves from having full sense of ourselves and thus sense of our Divine nature. And it easily and logically followed, once laid out like that, that we are the divine, not "the human" or "ourselves" or any idea of this kind. The divine speaks through sensation; a couple people in our group have even heard the "divine sound," which is a kind of friendly tinnitus (hah!) and so there was some discussion of that (I've never had that and can't speak clearly about it).
And all of that happened in about 20 minutes of a three-hour session. It's really really dense and pretty amazing, the stuff we cover. Some people tune out, it seems, but that's cool, you come, you listen, you see what you take away.
Yesterday Matthew had us concentrate on the upper lip, a concentration exercise that I find frustrating (it's easy, but I get distracted from it as easily, and it's our standard opener, so much of our meditation practice has been frustrating for me, which has become a sort of meditation on frustration) and then move to "the brain," and I actually felt my attention turn toward that organ, which was itself very cool, because the opening question is, "wait, where the hell is my 'attention' if I can turn it on my own brain? who the fuck is thinking here?" but it was unnecessary to answer that, so I didn't. I went with the exercise, which was to imagine that each thought was a bubble and to "pop it" as it showed up. I did this with relative ease. It worked MUCH better for me to do this "pop the thought bubble" exercise than to do "observe each thought," because my thoughts are colorful and graphically interersting and compelling and then I'm thinking and I've forgotten all about meditation. But to pop each one, a certain act of negation, THAT was easy. And in what seemed like a very short time, thoughts stopped appearing. Black, silent. Actually quiet. I lost track of my hands, my body, the people in the room, how big the space was. Totally lost all sense of orientation. But it wasn't dizziness or disorientation or drunkenness, it was just the weirdest quiet in the world. And then of course it was gone, but it was there long enough for me to compellingly recall it.
Matthew says that this sort of point is "space," which is the other "half" if you will of "sensation." Space is Vedanta, sensation is Tantra. One can overlay a Shiva/Shakti thing there, a male/female thing. And in the afternoon session yesterday, Matthew told us that the whole point here is not to detach, but to become aware. So don't get lost in the sensation or the space, just be aware, because really, you are awareness (Purusha, Brahman, and so on, all of those concepts). And then Matthew is really big on love, and says that love comes more easily (for him anyway) from the sensation road than the space road but that both go there.
Ah, and one spooky thing: Matthew said, about "space," about negating thoughts, that one of the ideas is that you can look into a mirror and annihilate the image. That's one degree of non-you that can be achieved. I liked that, not because it's "badass" (although I am drawn to things that are badass, that's what my love of spaghetti westerns is attached to also), but because it instantly reminded me of my long-term suffering here over identity and "2008 me" versus "now me" and in fact that's what I talked about when Matthew asked us for our "learning edges." I said that basically I wanted to be who I was and not who I am, and I'm cleaning up all kinds of pain and resentment and other shit. This would be over-narrativizing, but if you read here over the past, say, two years (since about mid-2010) you'll see a slow, painful progressive acceptance of this idea that I'm not that person and never was, even when I "was" that person, when I was merging deeply with that identity, climber/lover/ashtangi. I don't know if anyone reads closely enough here to see the progression, but I feel that since 2011, I've been on an identifiable line of thinking and realization; my writing and choice of topics isn't all over the place, but is sort of narrowing and focusing and working and reworking a thing, and it's in a way about this new identity that never solidifies, the idea that one's "being" is service, is teaching, is dharma, is householding, without ever becoming a sort of proud, "I AM A HOUSEHOLDER!"
And also (and I'm about to run out of time here as I'll have to drive over and meditate and bend) many many posts here are written in first-person agony as I deal with "my shit," that's what the first two posts about this workshop are.
All of my writing from 2009 is written in that mode; there might be a post or two, but not many, that are not loaded with pain, but most of them are written like that.
This "shit" that I'm dealing with is, as I put it in a Facebook post yesterday (and on that, I think that the 500-word window over there is a really good limit for forcing myself to condense, to really get to the point; I notice that my FB writing and my blog writing are of similar topics but different forms, and that's interesting, to the point that I've considered limiting myself to 500-word chunks here just to intensify my own writing concentration), is the very material of my liberation.
That's how I understand the ashtanga method, too: maybe just in my vehicle (I refer to body as vehicle, to sort of ease the "my" of it), emotional negativity manifests in muscles and fascia. When I'm uptight, I'm actually tight also. Negativity literally hurts me in practice, because it manifests in annamaya kosha. This is a gift, because as I move, and particularly as those things give way (and my mind gives way, in a fashion), a degree of liberation occurs through bending and through what is typically surrender, but a surrender that is ever forced on me (I do not seem able to voluntarily surrender; it has to be done through action, I sort of "force" surrender on my ego/identity/self by doing things it doesn't want to do).
So my idea is that ashtanga vinyasa can liberate me from my shit, BY my shit.
There is no escape there, nothing is ducked or avoided. But this isn't the same as "the only way out is through," that pithy nugget (did you think I would let one slip past? Seriously?) because to me that nugget implies that one GOES there, whereas since my shit is painful, the last thing I want to do is march full-face into it. There is a level of self-deception: I keep practicing ashtanga vinyasa because I think, every practice, that I will discover my wonderful full powers, my limitlessness, and I keep discovering my limits, I keep having tightness or pain or emotional agony or whatever, and now and then, I don't, but in those practices, I have shallower concentration (with rare exceptions where I seem to "magically" be able to focus on the breath or such). Pain is concentration, in my vehicle.
It's not far from there to say that pain is the way to moksha, not seeking pain, but experiencing it. Experiencing the pain that's already there, the pain of the self, the pain of the established ideas and constructions and histories and cellular presence of cultural assumptions and what Matthew called "centuries of karma."
One does not "go through" that, in an elective change-agent way. Matthew has been big on NOT being a change agent. Put simply, the ego cannot change itself, because it doesn't want to, that is its nature. As Matthew put it yesterday, we think we are MANIFEST and really, we are MANIFESTING. Those blipping electrons of quantum physics, or that spaciousness and shunyata (emptiness) that is form.
And so, of course. Of course.
Practice consistently shows me who I am not, what I am not. I go in thinking, full power, Godhead, and I don't get that. But I get pain instead, limitation, granthi, knots, negativity, ego, whatever, but I don't land there forever either, there is ALCHEMY in that pain, the confrontation with pain. Pain eases, postures re-approach (Pasasana, for example, today; we'll see), and as pain eases, self eases, self slips away, only to be reasserted later, where more alchemy can be committed.
If you have shit, if you have "the mess," you have the material of your liberation. Congratulations, you're incarnate.
Manifest-ING. Alchemy.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Matthew Day 3: Interpersonal.
I woke up with fear.
Nameless ancient fear that could be about or from the divorce or dissertation or the new parenting or whatever, could be from another life or from another planet. Nothing causal was invited, no narrative.
All through getting change to launder my yoga gear and rug, all through getting ready to drive over, all through meditation, all through at least half of asana practice. That's a long time to be afraid. Over three hours of ambient fear.
Longer than Cameron's film of TITANIC.
Ambient nervous fear. Let that sink in a moment. Over three hours of that.
Who am I? What is this?
In meditation, which we started directly at 9, the assignment to concentrate on the upper lip, and the desperate desire to run to mooladhara chakra, right to it. Not just to the ground, to groundedness, but specifically to the spinning red glow of the moola. I couldn't do it, I could NOT hold my attention up on my face. I let it run to the moola and breathed and panicked about nothing I could identity, disembodied, sourceless panic, that would not be unfelt. No interview, no date, no source. Panic in the body, no beginning, no end.
I hate meditation for that; I hate it with commitment and intensity. But I do it anyway because I couldn't change my sex life or my service commitments or my past karma or my anything. What, am I going to bring my shit elsewhere and have it be different? I am not. So hating it means nothing; just another fact.
You hate this; nothing. You love that; nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
We come out of the meditation. 25 quick minutes. Still terrified. 9:30ish. I've been afraid since 6 am. I sit until I can feel my calf again, and do opening chant. I am terrified. I raise my hands up and inhale. Fear so bad tears almost come. I force hands to floor, which mercifully is physically easy.
I jump back to chaturanga and Matthew fixes it, just like he did four years ago. Concentrate on hips up, arms straight, which reduces strain on shoulders. That's precisely what he told me four years ago. There is no time.
I make it through Surya A without weeping and take a second one. Soon it is a fourth one. I take an extra breath in the Vira transitions in Surya B. Terror, everything is terror, like wanting to run from an awkward date or a dentist's appointment. No explanation comes. Abject, sourceless fear.
Keep practicing, keep breathing. I concentrate on every movement, and each one feels OK, sometimes feels good or familiar, but every single solitary change of bodily disposition comes with terror. Quality of posture is a sort of incoherent stream that is running somewhere; maybe a river I can hear but not see.
I laugh when I fall out of Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana. Twice. It is crying but it looks like laughing and feels like it also. This is fine. Just as there is no source, there is no explanation. I have the expression, I am the expression. I do not fear the room's reaction, showing emotion in the room.
I am gasping in pain and release in the second side of Vira 1. I get it under control and do not surrender the pose. I do the fancy pickup exit from Vira 2.
Matthew says the vinyasa between Paschimottanasana and Purvottanasana is unnecessary; I skip it. The vinyasa after Purvo is hands to floor, head forward, hips come up 90 degrees from floor and float. Feet go back. Slow motion. Perhaps the toes touched through, I can't remember. All of the jumpbacks until closing series would be like that. Big, slow, static. Oddly physically easy, but done in terror, which brings presentness, insecurity, risk. Nothing is sure or guaranteed, and nothing that works can come with success or victory or pride. Jump back; OK; a fact.
Static, slow, concentration, jumping through. Inhale, come up in concentration, you did not die, exhale, fold. I am still. I have fear. 3. 4. 5.
Crying in Janu A. Both sides. Adjustment by assistant who later would worry she hurt me. "No, you release that stuff when you make that pose bigger," I say, hours later.
Terror at Marichyasana A, that pose that so, so often comes with intense emotional pain. It doesn't today, not either side. Face to kneecap. No longer the felt fear (I cannot think about that) but the expectation fear, a thinker's fear. There are different kinds. Remember that it wasn't true. Felt fear is true; expected fear is not.
Still wanting to plead for help, just for comfort, just for an end to this consciousness, this sensation, through Mari B and C. I bind both sides of Mari D. First time in so long that I can't remember how long.
Expected fear, again, at Navasana; will it be hard, too hard? It was too hard and I had to take extra breaths, but I was not afraid of that. Reality does not meet your expectations always. Even with fear. Even with negativity.
No crossing in Supta Kurmasana (which is standard) but no trouble at all in the entrance or exit from it or the arm balance. No trouble in Garbha Pindasana or Kukkutasana. No trouble in Baddha Konasana or Upavistha Konasana. In fact, no more trouble.
Just like yesterday: weird grace for the hardest part of practice.
Three pressup backbends and reclining, convulsive release, heaving breaths, Matthew says, "Let that move, up and down the spine." I do. I lie on the floor, still alive, and make myself reach up overhead and do again. He says, "OK?" I nod and press up and walk in three times. Light now, smooth now, I come down and kneel and set up to stand up. Less fear; a little now; did it vanish through seated?
Hangbacks are hard and not as deep as I want. Drop, arms bend, more ballistic than I want. I walk in, rock up, knees to floor, come up, do again. I stand on the second one, with a stagger. Matthew is taking me by the hip bones as I hang back for the third one. The left knee, hyperextended a bit by a bouldering fall, quivers as he makes the drop unballistic. It quivers again as we stand, hip flexors convulsing like eels having unpleasant experiences. We do one more, that hurts a bit in the low spine, left knee and hip flexors--not a physical pain but a resistance--and it's over.
Closing series is full in all respects; the room is hot, humid and crowded and physical limits are hard to come across. Rest is not restful; mind goes at a hundred miles an hour, processing.
I sit, processing, letting it settle in, and take a slow walk, like a drunk, like every motion is endorphin-producing, down to the Whole Foods. It takes a long time. By the time I am returning, I think that practice has been great.
In the meditation session in the afternoon, I can't concentrate for a damn. I sit and wait it out, feeling every possible kind of physical distraction. Asana took such concentration that I can't muster anything. I do the "body scan" and feel the front body colorful in primaries and blocks, like kindergarten. But shoulder blades and spine, down to the tailbone, is nothing but a pencil sketch on white pages. Even if I breathe to expand the ribs. Nothing. No sensation. Muscular expansion; no color.
More discussion about contact, contact styles. We are to start a conversation with a stranger about contact styles. I talk to Matthew's female accompaniment (part student, part more than that) and it's quite lovely. But later at the potluck at our hosts' house, it's nothing more than a workshop conversation; not even a formal hello. This, like everything else, is fine.
Matthew talks about our innate goodness and postures we love and hate, and I can't remember a lot more from today. Yes, bad workshop yogi, perhaps. That practice was intense and I still hate meditation, I hate it so, so so much, but I will do it again tomorrow to find out what else I can hate about it. These, after all, are all discoveries.
Nameless ancient fear that could be about or from the divorce or dissertation or the new parenting or whatever, could be from another life or from another planet. Nothing causal was invited, no narrative.
All through getting change to launder my yoga gear and rug, all through getting ready to drive over, all through meditation, all through at least half of asana practice. That's a long time to be afraid. Over three hours of ambient fear.
Longer than Cameron's film of TITANIC.
Ambient nervous fear. Let that sink in a moment. Over three hours of that.
Who am I? What is this?
In meditation, which we started directly at 9, the assignment to concentrate on the upper lip, and the desperate desire to run to mooladhara chakra, right to it. Not just to the ground, to groundedness, but specifically to the spinning red glow of the moola. I couldn't do it, I could NOT hold my attention up on my face. I let it run to the moola and breathed and panicked about nothing I could identity, disembodied, sourceless panic, that would not be unfelt. No interview, no date, no source. Panic in the body, no beginning, no end.
I hate meditation for that; I hate it with commitment and intensity. But I do it anyway because I couldn't change my sex life or my service commitments or my past karma or my anything. What, am I going to bring my shit elsewhere and have it be different? I am not. So hating it means nothing; just another fact.
You hate this; nothing. You love that; nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
We come out of the meditation. 25 quick minutes. Still terrified. 9:30ish. I've been afraid since 6 am. I sit until I can feel my calf again, and do opening chant. I am terrified. I raise my hands up and inhale. Fear so bad tears almost come. I force hands to floor, which mercifully is physically easy.
I jump back to chaturanga and Matthew fixes it, just like he did four years ago. Concentrate on hips up, arms straight, which reduces strain on shoulders. That's precisely what he told me four years ago. There is no time.
I make it through Surya A without weeping and take a second one. Soon it is a fourth one. I take an extra breath in the Vira transitions in Surya B. Terror, everything is terror, like wanting to run from an awkward date or a dentist's appointment. No explanation comes. Abject, sourceless fear.
Keep practicing, keep breathing. I concentrate on every movement, and each one feels OK, sometimes feels good or familiar, but every single solitary change of bodily disposition comes with terror. Quality of posture is a sort of incoherent stream that is running somewhere; maybe a river I can hear but not see.
I laugh when I fall out of Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana. Twice. It is crying but it looks like laughing and feels like it also. This is fine. Just as there is no source, there is no explanation. I have the expression, I am the expression. I do not fear the room's reaction, showing emotion in the room.
I am gasping in pain and release in the second side of Vira 1. I get it under control and do not surrender the pose. I do the fancy pickup exit from Vira 2.
Matthew says the vinyasa between Paschimottanasana and Purvottanasana is unnecessary; I skip it. The vinyasa after Purvo is hands to floor, head forward, hips come up 90 degrees from floor and float. Feet go back. Slow motion. Perhaps the toes touched through, I can't remember. All of the jumpbacks until closing series would be like that. Big, slow, static. Oddly physically easy, but done in terror, which brings presentness, insecurity, risk. Nothing is sure or guaranteed, and nothing that works can come with success or victory or pride. Jump back; OK; a fact.
Static, slow, concentration, jumping through. Inhale, come up in concentration, you did not die, exhale, fold. I am still. I have fear. 3. 4. 5.
Crying in Janu A. Both sides. Adjustment by assistant who later would worry she hurt me. "No, you release that stuff when you make that pose bigger," I say, hours later.
Terror at Marichyasana A, that pose that so, so often comes with intense emotional pain. It doesn't today, not either side. Face to kneecap. No longer the felt fear (I cannot think about that) but the expectation fear, a thinker's fear. There are different kinds. Remember that it wasn't true. Felt fear is true; expected fear is not.
Still wanting to plead for help, just for comfort, just for an end to this consciousness, this sensation, through Mari B and C. I bind both sides of Mari D. First time in so long that I can't remember how long.
Expected fear, again, at Navasana; will it be hard, too hard? It was too hard and I had to take extra breaths, but I was not afraid of that. Reality does not meet your expectations always. Even with fear. Even with negativity.
No crossing in Supta Kurmasana (which is standard) but no trouble at all in the entrance or exit from it or the arm balance. No trouble in Garbha Pindasana or Kukkutasana. No trouble in Baddha Konasana or Upavistha Konasana. In fact, no more trouble.
Just like yesterday: weird grace for the hardest part of practice.
Three pressup backbends and reclining, convulsive release, heaving breaths, Matthew says, "Let that move, up and down the spine." I do. I lie on the floor, still alive, and make myself reach up overhead and do again. He says, "OK?" I nod and press up and walk in three times. Light now, smooth now, I come down and kneel and set up to stand up. Less fear; a little now; did it vanish through seated?
Hangbacks are hard and not as deep as I want. Drop, arms bend, more ballistic than I want. I walk in, rock up, knees to floor, come up, do again. I stand on the second one, with a stagger. Matthew is taking me by the hip bones as I hang back for the third one. The left knee, hyperextended a bit by a bouldering fall, quivers as he makes the drop unballistic. It quivers again as we stand, hip flexors convulsing like eels having unpleasant experiences. We do one more, that hurts a bit in the low spine, left knee and hip flexors--not a physical pain but a resistance--and it's over.
Closing series is full in all respects; the room is hot, humid and crowded and physical limits are hard to come across. Rest is not restful; mind goes at a hundred miles an hour, processing.
I sit, processing, letting it settle in, and take a slow walk, like a drunk, like every motion is endorphin-producing, down to the Whole Foods. It takes a long time. By the time I am returning, I think that practice has been great.
In the meditation session in the afternoon, I can't concentrate for a damn. I sit and wait it out, feeling every possible kind of physical distraction. Asana took such concentration that I can't muster anything. I do the "body scan" and feel the front body colorful in primaries and blocks, like kindergarten. But shoulder blades and spine, down to the tailbone, is nothing but a pencil sketch on white pages. Even if I breathe to expand the ribs. Nothing. No sensation. Muscular expansion; no color.
More discussion about contact, contact styles. We are to start a conversation with a stranger about contact styles. I talk to Matthew's female accompaniment (part student, part more than that) and it's quite lovely. But later at the potluck at our hosts' house, it's nothing more than a workshop conversation; not even a formal hello. This, like everything else, is fine.
Matthew talks about our innate goodness and postures we love and hate, and I can't remember a lot more from today. Yes, bad workshop yogi, perhaps. That practice was intense and I still hate meditation, I hate it so, so so much, but I will do it again tomorrow to find out what else I can hate about it. These, after all, are all discoveries.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
"The Mess."
Technically this is a workshop review post; I'm two days into a six-day Matthew Sweeney immersion, morning 30 minute meditation and then asana practice, and then three hours of "subtle body in practice," which is our meditation practice and discussion.
Matthew does not teach in a conceptual way, not a sort of didactic, what he would call "heady," way. I mean, he brings up a ton of vocabulary and theory and concepts, but it's not about your head, it's about sensation and experience and FEELING things.
This makes it very hard (and also makes me unwilling) to break it down into conceptual chunks, because that's precisely what it isn't.
If I do that to it, I misconvey the very teaching itself.
Basically Matthew is teaching us in a Vipassana style (sit, stillness, insight, concentration, sensation) but he's also bringing up body sensation and tantras and male and female energy and quantum physics and bhakti and space and love and absorption and not feeling the body and so on and so on.
****************************
In the morning we sit for 20-25 minutes concentrating on the breath or that little area under the nose and above the upper lip. Strict concentration practice. Then we do Metta Bhavana (loving kindness) for a few minutes and then we're able to begin asana. I woke up this morning sore from sitting upright for 2 20-30 minute sits yesterday, really sore from right glutes to right shoulder blades. Figured it would be one of those sore practices, especially preceded by yet more upright sitting.
I was correct. Practice made me cry a few times. Not pile of tears on floor style, but just some sort of panting, laughing, incoherent emotional expression moments, particularly through the Janu/Mari stretch of Primary, which is the Emotional Road for me when I have one of those days.
Practice was sore, hard and painful, but had some nice graceful moments in (of all places) the Bhujapidasana-to-Setu Bandhasana ending postures. I could drop back but could not stand up, not four times. Onto knees, rock to kneeling, stand, do again.
A guy did a split of third series; many women did either full Intermediate or Primary and a hunk of it. So I was the little Primary-and-Pasasana practitioner in the corner. And I mean, ok, true, I never did traditionally get past Kapo, but I used to be a rock star.
Four years ago I was doing more practice than this, and this month, actually, in Minneapolis with Matthew. He taught me to drop back and he took me to my toes in Kapo, first time ever.
But not as deep a practice or as aware a practice.
In the meditation session we did a quick interpersonal thing, introductions, a thing you're working on in practice, and thing you're working on in life ("learning edge," Matthew called it). I said that my practice was eight years old this month (and it is) and that for five years I was being a hard-practicing rock star and then for three years I was being a parent and backing off, being gentle,learning how not to make things hurt, and so on, and then that the learning edge was trying to resolve my desire to be That Guy with my reality of being This Guy.
In the sit that preceded that exercise, Matthew invited us to do a body scan, just saying hello to all of the parts of the body, feeling them out, searching for blind spots. A couple minutes into the sit, I started getting intense painful (more emotional than physical; I can tell the difference now) sensations in the left hip and I couldn't get off it, couldn't move my attention. Pain, fear, aversion, terror at releasing some sadness, not sure how to do it, anxiety, pain. Sitting still. Wanting DESPERATELY to get up and run away. Literally run out the door and flee.
This impulse came HARD five times. I made the breathing bigger, easier to concentrate on. I tried to move into the pain and it just got more intense, but I stayed. Hands wanted to leap up, move. I mean, TERROR. Absolutely INCREDIBLE fear. Mind freaking out. Urge to feel tears, fear of letting them go. Energy in left hip swirling like a tornado-producing cloud. Begging it to stop, to go away, to back away, to run away from me, deviate, change course. Panic. Sitting still.
Silent, still, nasal breathing. Matthew said something, not an end to the sit, but something; I can't remember what it was, at all. By the time the sit ended, my bone marrow was shaking, but I wasn't. I opened my eyes and held the crossleggged position for most of a minute before stretching out; couldn't tell if my leg was asleep or not.
Later in Q-and-A I would ask about negative stuff (fear, panic) in sitting; I'm used to it by now in asana, but in sitting, I'm not. He said, "Well, humans have mess; this is entering the mess. But be careful not to turn FEELINGS, which are embodied and quite healthy, into EMOTIONS, which is how the mind ramps up feelings." I liked that. I like the idea of engaging the mess, and I've had this in asana for over two years. And I like this idea that sensation, feeling, is pure and healthy, while EMOTIONS are a sort of conceptualized feeling, the mind ramping up our feelings, sort of exaggerating them. Matthew also made it very clear: KEEP OBSERVING.
Which is what I did, through that horrorshow sit.
He made every attempt to get me into Pasasana, short of just twisting me into it. Strategies, discussion, interaction. I said that when I set up the twist, I get intense feeling in the outer hips, both, and then I usually quit. He urged me to at least send the bottom hand around the ankle, which about made me grimace unpleasantly but was ok.
Matthew watched me hang back in dropbacks (I hang back 8-10 breaths in three different hand/arm positions) and then drop, walk in a bit, rock up and fall onto my knees unballistically. He had no comments. I did not do any assisted backbending.
I was massively depressed after practice, because I really wanted the teacher-and-room to inspire better practice, but what they inspire instead is better HONESTY in my practice, which means deeper digging into the pain, into the mess.
Someone else would comment later that they can't tell FROM WHAT unpleasantness comes in meditation or practice, and Matthew said that that's typical. You don't get a source, and no, don't tell yourself a story, don't let the mind EXPLAIN your sensations to you, that only chases away the sensations.
With trying not to fall into it:
I really want to have my perhaps-imaginary big practice with me, but I don't have a big practice anymore. Right now it feels like I will never do Intermediate in this life, and maybe that's fine, I'll just reckon with the mess since that's where all the life is.
I mean, I can pull most independent postures from third (name the arm balance and I can demo it, from tripod and everything), but it's the SEQUENCE. The whole reason that I stick with the traditional system is because I know what I used to be able to do and it helps me get clarity on what I can no longer do. It precisely outlines the sensations of "the mess."
I didn't go near the relationship or the lost parent, in my interpersonal two cents to the group. Those have a "causal narrative" feel, and I've certainly spun them both that way, and it felt inaccurate to do that. I mean, for information, sure, you want that, but that's not what that session was about.
Matthew talked a lot, in the final hour today, about "contact," which he takes from Gestalt. How does one make contact, what is one's contact "style"? With a posture, with another, with a lover, with a stranger, with a relationship?
It got me thinking about what I perceived as my partner's great withdrawal from me (conversationally, physically, all other ways also) in our pregnancy and parenting, for those first three years. I called it a breakup and it felt like one. Not long before I set off on this trip, we were friendlier, and best of all, we had an ACTUAL CONVERSATION, not about our relationship proper, but sort of about energy, which is always what I've been keenly interested in.
I think she has it wrong (her rhetoric is "I'm broken, from giving birth" and my rhetoric, which I didn't say out loud, is "You're too damn busy and energetically over-committed to a job that is full of panic and worry, and simultaneously full of 'bad mother' guilt because you don't live in the Northwest and can't give your child kayaking and camping and natural food you cook yourself"), but I listened with full attention, because J *NEVER* talks about how she feels about relating or parenting, she just talks about what she's worried about at work and how cute the boy is.
I don't get ANY sex-or-relationship stuff in meditation, so for all my calling that the samskaric business, it has yet to make any appearance whatsoever, but maybe I've chilled it out with the past few years of progressively realizing that even when we have sex, it does NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING, to fix anything in my life, not energetically, not in relationship, not at all anywhere. It means nothing, has no effect. You make some noise and nothing happens. Nothing.
So this is "the mess." Four more days of it.
Matthew does not teach in a conceptual way, not a sort of didactic, what he would call "heady," way. I mean, he brings up a ton of vocabulary and theory and concepts, but it's not about your head, it's about sensation and experience and FEELING things.
This makes it very hard (and also makes me unwilling) to break it down into conceptual chunks, because that's precisely what it isn't.
If I do that to it, I misconvey the very teaching itself.
Basically Matthew is teaching us in a Vipassana style (sit, stillness, insight, concentration, sensation) but he's also bringing up body sensation and tantras and male and female energy and quantum physics and bhakti and space and love and absorption and not feeling the body and so on and so on.
****************************
In the morning we sit for 20-25 minutes concentrating on the breath or that little area under the nose and above the upper lip. Strict concentration practice. Then we do Metta Bhavana (loving kindness) for a few minutes and then we're able to begin asana. I woke up this morning sore from sitting upright for 2 20-30 minute sits yesterday, really sore from right glutes to right shoulder blades. Figured it would be one of those sore practices, especially preceded by yet more upright sitting.
I was correct. Practice made me cry a few times. Not pile of tears on floor style, but just some sort of panting, laughing, incoherent emotional expression moments, particularly through the Janu/Mari stretch of Primary, which is the Emotional Road for me when I have one of those days.
Practice was sore, hard and painful, but had some nice graceful moments in (of all places) the Bhujapidasana-to-Setu Bandhasana ending postures. I could drop back but could not stand up, not four times. Onto knees, rock to kneeling, stand, do again.
A guy did a split of third series; many women did either full Intermediate or Primary and a hunk of it. So I was the little Primary-and-Pasasana practitioner in the corner. And I mean, ok, true, I never did traditionally get past Kapo, but I used to be a rock star.
Four years ago I was doing more practice than this, and this month, actually, in Minneapolis with Matthew. He taught me to drop back and he took me to my toes in Kapo, first time ever.
But not as deep a practice or as aware a practice.
In the meditation session we did a quick interpersonal thing, introductions, a thing you're working on in practice, and thing you're working on in life ("learning edge," Matthew called it). I said that my practice was eight years old this month (and it is) and that for five years I was being a hard-practicing rock star and then for three years I was being a parent and backing off, being gentle,learning how not to make things hurt, and so on, and then that the learning edge was trying to resolve my desire to be That Guy with my reality of being This Guy.
In the sit that preceded that exercise, Matthew invited us to do a body scan, just saying hello to all of the parts of the body, feeling them out, searching for blind spots. A couple minutes into the sit, I started getting intense painful (more emotional than physical; I can tell the difference now) sensations in the left hip and I couldn't get off it, couldn't move my attention. Pain, fear, aversion, terror at releasing some sadness, not sure how to do it, anxiety, pain. Sitting still. Wanting DESPERATELY to get up and run away. Literally run out the door and flee.
This impulse came HARD five times. I made the breathing bigger, easier to concentrate on. I tried to move into the pain and it just got more intense, but I stayed. Hands wanted to leap up, move. I mean, TERROR. Absolutely INCREDIBLE fear. Mind freaking out. Urge to feel tears, fear of letting them go. Energy in left hip swirling like a tornado-producing cloud. Begging it to stop, to go away, to back away, to run away from me, deviate, change course. Panic. Sitting still.
Silent, still, nasal breathing. Matthew said something, not an end to the sit, but something; I can't remember what it was, at all. By the time the sit ended, my bone marrow was shaking, but I wasn't. I opened my eyes and held the crossleggged position for most of a minute before stretching out; couldn't tell if my leg was asleep or not.
Later in Q-and-A I would ask about negative stuff (fear, panic) in sitting; I'm used to it by now in asana, but in sitting, I'm not. He said, "Well, humans have mess; this is entering the mess. But be careful not to turn FEELINGS, which are embodied and quite healthy, into EMOTIONS, which is how the mind ramps up feelings." I liked that. I like the idea of engaging the mess, and I've had this in asana for over two years. And I like this idea that sensation, feeling, is pure and healthy, while EMOTIONS are a sort of conceptualized feeling, the mind ramping up our feelings, sort of exaggerating them. Matthew also made it very clear: KEEP OBSERVING.
Which is what I did, through that horrorshow sit.
He made every attempt to get me into Pasasana, short of just twisting me into it. Strategies, discussion, interaction. I said that when I set up the twist, I get intense feeling in the outer hips, both, and then I usually quit. He urged me to at least send the bottom hand around the ankle, which about made me grimace unpleasantly but was ok.
Matthew watched me hang back in dropbacks (I hang back 8-10 breaths in three different hand/arm positions) and then drop, walk in a bit, rock up and fall onto my knees unballistically. He had no comments. I did not do any assisted backbending.
I was massively depressed after practice, because I really wanted the teacher-and-room to inspire better practice, but what they inspire instead is better HONESTY in my practice, which means deeper digging into the pain, into the mess.
Someone else would comment later that they can't tell FROM WHAT unpleasantness comes in meditation or practice, and Matthew said that that's typical. You don't get a source, and no, don't tell yourself a story, don't let the mind EXPLAIN your sensations to you, that only chases away the sensations.
With trying not to fall into it:
I really want to have my perhaps-imaginary big practice with me, but I don't have a big practice anymore. Right now it feels like I will never do Intermediate in this life, and maybe that's fine, I'll just reckon with the mess since that's where all the life is.
I mean, I can pull most independent postures from third (name the arm balance and I can demo it, from tripod and everything), but it's the SEQUENCE. The whole reason that I stick with the traditional system is because I know what I used to be able to do and it helps me get clarity on what I can no longer do. It precisely outlines the sensations of "the mess."
I didn't go near the relationship or the lost parent, in my interpersonal two cents to the group. Those have a "causal narrative" feel, and I've certainly spun them both that way, and it felt inaccurate to do that. I mean, for information, sure, you want that, but that's not what that session was about.
Matthew talked a lot, in the final hour today, about "contact," which he takes from Gestalt. How does one make contact, what is one's contact "style"? With a posture, with another, with a lover, with a stranger, with a relationship?
It got me thinking about what I perceived as my partner's great withdrawal from me (conversationally, physically, all other ways also) in our pregnancy and parenting, for those first three years. I called it a breakup and it felt like one. Not long before I set off on this trip, we were friendlier, and best of all, we had an ACTUAL CONVERSATION, not about our relationship proper, but sort of about energy, which is always what I've been keenly interested in.
I think she has it wrong (her rhetoric is "I'm broken, from giving birth" and my rhetoric, which I didn't say out loud, is "You're too damn busy and energetically over-committed to a job that is full of panic and worry, and simultaneously full of 'bad mother' guilt because you don't live in the Northwest and can't give your child kayaking and camping and natural food you cook yourself"), but I listened with full attention, because J *NEVER* talks about how she feels about relating or parenting, she just talks about what she's worried about at work and how cute the boy is.
I don't get ANY sex-or-relationship stuff in meditation, so for all my calling that the samskaric business, it has yet to make any appearance whatsoever, but maybe I've chilled it out with the past few years of progressively realizing that even when we have sex, it does NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING, to fix anything in my life, not energetically, not in relationship, not at all anywhere. It means nothing, has no effect. You make some noise and nothing happens. Nothing.
So this is "the mess." Four more days of it.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Teaching Mysore-style (sorta), Travel, Training
So, my Sunday yoga room.
As I've said before: part of a major studio in town, 12:30-2 pm on Sundays, simply called "Ashtanga" and it's a community class for ten bucks instead of the studio's fifteen dollar drop-in.
In 2008 we quit the class for a while (I'd been teaching since June 2007) and reinvented it as an 8-week workshop on Primary series. Eight people signed up and we re-started the class that way. It got sporadic again and then suddenly got regular in 2010ish and then, as I've said here many times, erupted into a dozen regulars in February 2011. Hell of a long time for the ashtanga to really get going in town.
Anyway.
The regulars began memorizing, and that mode of teaching spread to a majority of the room, and now it's like this: 12 Mysore-stylers, 1 new person, 13 in the room total. Nearly everyone just inhaled up, ekam, dwe fold, and so on. Three people (at least, or was it four?) doing fractions of Intermediate on top of Primary, one doing Intermediate. Four people, at least, doing assisted backbends (sometimes two more slackers who opted out today, do them also). Only one doing more than drop-and-stand.
I talk more than some teachers do in a Mysore room, particularly when I have new people to lead and introduce. The dynamic isn't settled yet. When only the Mysorers show up (as 9 of them did a couple months ago, no one else), the room is dead quiet except for the occasional comment about a jump or a hand position. This goes on at least until seated. Most of my adjustments come with commentary (I'm chatty and extroverted and highly conceptual, so I like to explain) but sometimes I just make an adjustment (knee forward in some standing posture, arm extended, simple things like that, a hip bump forward, a Prasarita C arm press) and move on.
Do we call the class "Mysore" or do we keep operating sort of "secretly" almost, this weird enclave of afternoon Mysore-style practitioners? The membership is not, largely, leaping to morning practice. If this is the seed of a real program, it's not one YET. 2-6 in the morning 6 am room; nobody seems to have the powerful practices they have on Sundays. Community? Time of day? Just getting used to it? Probably all three. I think we don't "come out" yet; I think we stay in that studio, not becoming "a program," and I keep selling morning practice until people start to think it's a good (and a traditional) idea. It won't be anything but the tradition that sells it, even though practitioners THINK it's "practice more often, get better poses" that's selling it. Everyone who practices 5-6 times a week knows that the major developments of regular practice (maybe after the first few years) are not asana achievements.
It is both hard and easy to leave people alone. Easy because you see someone's flowing practice, this, that, next one, and you just leave it. Hard because it's tempting to adjust or fix or comment on a thing you see, check in to see if the practitioner knows that they do that thing that way. This is more tempting when I know someone *a little* and much less tempting when I know someone (well, that is, someone's PRACTICE) well.
I feel like I teach Mysore-style practitioners, which is not quite the same animal as teaching Mysore-style itself, or is it? I mean, whose room is it, is it the practitioners or "mine"? Who makes it Mysore-style, you know? This is in part a licensing question, a "do I qualify" question, at least for me to be a "suitable" teacher for a Mysore-style room, but then, if we reverse it, who is to teach the Mysore-style students? "Who will teach?" is what Larry said that Pattabhi Jois asked them on one US trip. Larry said, "I will teach!" and that is his teacher story.
I knew after my Mysore-style experience in SF that I wanted to do this, this way. Took four years for it to show up. But I wasn't interested in "becoming" a Mysore-style teacher, it wasn't about me, it was about students. Or more accurately, it was about students and method, and that quest to teach those people showed up in my practice. I started Mysore-styling in led classes, both because I could (and I'd done that prior to SF also), and because it was the only way to create it in the world.
The "Who Are You" question never gets me anywhere useful. I used to be an Intermediate practitioner, and when I was getting Kapo to my instep and some, solo, I knew a teacher could probably just pull me into it, and those are the days of 2010 that I was doing all of Intermediate, learning it "Indianapolis style," which is to do the whole thing and modify what you can't do until it shows up.
So I know I don't hold myself to a practice standard, but I do value reading sacred texts and knowing about breathing and emotional stuff in practice; I really value the "subtle body" stuff and the Sutras and the relationships between life and practice, all that middle ground. This is the stuff I teach from; life is the terra.
I don't claim any individual yet as "teacher" although my long stays with Swenson and (coming up) Sweeney and my repeated encounters with Ms. MacGregor indicate that I'm probably getting most of my teaching from one or a combination of them (firey personalities all, how typical of me, heh!).
For once I'm not anxious about if I count or if it's ok, to teach this stuff. I teach this stuff, who else will? My practice is still longer (years practicing, not minutes per practice) or more advanced than any of my students, and that duration is really where the ground of it is, that time with the method. The experimentation that I used to do with advanced postures has probably paid off too, but really the duration, just that long, long, deep soak in the method, that adherence to one way. Eight years this month, sometime in July I think. I forget exactly when my ashtanga birthday is, but it's summertime.
These days I'm often sore and have a lot of emotional whirlwinding and pain going on and that's fine. I do my Primary series and on good days when I have power and lightness, I add Pasasana and see how it is. When I have pain, I modify and chill out and sometimes shorten.
I am travelling a hell of a lot this year, all coming up: Durham NC in a week (starting out Thursday night actually) for six days of Sweeney immersion, then four days after I get back, off to Seattle with family for a week and a half, where I will check out Sarah Plumer's new thing "Ashtanga Northwest" (currently just a blog, and she'll be back only for the latter week of my stay) and then in October I'm doing these two conferences, one in Detroit which will see me drive an hour to Ashtanga Ann Arbor, and one in New York where plans are to join people at Ashtanga Yoga New York.
All of that, and Tim Feldmann is doing an exciting program at Yogaview in Chicago right in the middle of the month.
If I like Tim and I can maintain good savings in the bank account, I'll become a notch more interested in Miami Life Center's "Ashtanga Course" they do for two weeks over the summer. Miami, in July? Dude, the ashtangis like it HAWT.
Or wasn't Sweeney going to do certifications in Ashtanga Yoga, or were those just rumors (can't you just feel the fur flying now as I even ask that)? But his month-long programs are in Bali and India and Australia, not that we shouldn't take the boy abroad or anything.....
As I've said before: part of a major studio in town, 12:30-2 pm on Sundays, simply called "Ashtanga" and it's a community class for ten bucks instead of the studio's fifteen dollar drop-in.
In 2008 we quit the class for a while (I'd been teaching since June 2007) and reinvented it as an 8-week workshop on Primary series. Eight people signed up and we re-started the class that way. It got sporadic again and then suddenly got regular in 2010ish and then, as I've said here many times, erupted into a dozen regulars in February 2011. Hell of a long time for the ashtanga to really get going in town.
Anyway.
The regulars began memorizing, and that mode of teaching spread to a majority of the room, and now it's like this: 12 Mysore-stylers, 1 new person, 13 in the room total. Nearly everyone just inhaled up, ekam, dwe fold, and so on. Three people (at least, or was it four?) doing fractions of Intermediate on top of Primary, one doing Intermediate. Four people, at least, doing assisted backbends (sometimes two more slackers who opted out today, do them also). Only one doing more than drop-and-stand.
I talk more than some teachers do in a Mysore room, particularly when I have new people to lead and introduce. The dynamic isn't settled yet. When only the Mysorers show up (as 9 of them did a couple months ago, no one else), the room is dead quiet except for the occasional comment about a jump or a hand position. This goes on at least until seated. Most of my adjustments come with commentary (I'm chatty and extroverted and highly conceptual, so I like to explain) but sometimes I just make an adjustment (knee forward in some standing posture, arm extended, simple things like that, a hip bump forward, a Prasarita C arm press) and move on.
Do we call the class "Mysore" or do we keep operating sort of "secretly" almost, this weird enclave of afternoon Mysore-style practitioners? The membership is not, largely, leaping to morning practice. If this is the seed of a real program, it's not one YET. 2-6 in the morning 6 am room; nobody seems to have the powerful practices they have on Sundays. Community? Time of day? Just getting used to it? Probably all three. I think we don't "come out" yet; I think we stay in that studio, not becoming "a program," and I keep selling morning practice until people start to think it's a good (and a traditional) idea. It won't be anything but the tradition that sells it, even though practitioners THINK it's "practice more often, get better poses" that's selling it. Everyone who practices 5-6 times a week knows that the major developments of regular practice (maybe after the first few years) are not asana achievements.
It is both hard and easy to leave people alone. Easy because you see someone's flowing practice, this, that, next one, and you just leave it. Hard because it's tempting to adjust or fix or comment on a thing you see, check in to see if the practitioner knows that they do that thing that way. This is more tempting when I know someone *a little* and much less tempting when I know someone (well, that is, someone's PRACTICE) well.
I feel like I teach Mysore-style practitioners, which is not quite the same animal as teaching Mysore-style itself, or is it? I mean, whose room is it, is it the practitioners or "mine"? Who makes it Mysore-style, you know? This is in part a licensing question, a "do I qualify" question, at least for me to be a "suitable" teacher for a Mysore-style room, but then, if we reverse it, who is to teach the Mysore-style students? "Who will teach?" is what Larry said that Pattabhi Jois asked them on one US trip. Larry said, "I will teach!" and that is his teacher story.
I knew after my Mysore-style experience in SF that I wanted to do this, this way. Took four years for it to show up. But I wasn't interested in "becoming" a Mysore-style teacher, it wasn't about me, it was about students. Or more accurately, it was about students and method, and that quest to teach those people showed up in my practice. I started Mysore-styling in led classes, both because I could (and I'd done that prior to SF also), and because it was the only way to create it in the world.
The "Who Are You" question never gets me anywhere useful. I used to be an Intermediate practitioner, and when I was getting Kapo to my instep and some, solo, I knew a teacher could probably just pull me into it, and those are the days of 2010 that I was doing all of Intermediate, learning it "Indianapolis style," which is to do the whole thing and modify what you can't do until it shows up.
So I know I don't hold myself to a practice standard, but I do value reading sacred texts and knowing about breathing and emotional stuff in practice; I really value the "subtle body" stuff and the Sutras and the relationships between life and practice, all that middle ground. This is the stuff I teach from; life is the terra.
I don't claim any individual yet as "teacher" although my long stays with Swenson and (coming up) Sweeney and my repeated encounters with Ms. MacGregor indicate that I'm probably getting most of my teaching from one or a combination of them (firey personalities all, how typical of me, heh!).
For once I'm not anxious about if I count or if it's ok, to teach this stuff. I teach this stuff, who else will? My practice is still longer (years practicing, not minutes per practice) or more advanced than any of my students, and that duration is really where the ground of it is, that time with the method. The experimentation that I used to do with advanced postures has probably paid off too, but really the duration, just that long, long, deep soak in the method, that adherence to one way. Eight years this month, sometime in July I think. I forget exactly when my ashtanga birthday is, but it's summertime.
These days I'm often sore and have a lot of emotional whirlwinding and pain going on and that's fine. I do my Primary series and on good days when I have power and lightness, I add Pasasana and see how it is. When I have pain, I modify and chill out and sometimes shorten.
I am travelling a hell of a lot this year, all coming up: Durham NC in a week (starting out Thursday night actually) for six days of Sweeney immersion, then four days after I get back, off to Seattle with family for a week and a half, where I will check out Sarah Plumer's new thing "Ashtanga Northwest" (currently just a blog, and she'll be back only for the latter week of my stay) and then in October I'm doing these two conferences, one in Detroit which will see me drive an hour to Ashtanga Ann Arbor, and one in New York where plans are to join people at Ashtanga Yoga New York.
All of that, and Tim Feldmann is doing an exciting program at Yogaview in Chicago right in the middle of the month.
If I like Tim and I can maintain good savings in the bank account, I'll become a notch more interested in Miami Life Center's "Ashtanga Course" they do for two weeks over the summer. Miami, in July? Dude, the ashtangis like it HAWT.
Or wasn't Sweeney going to do certifications in Ashtanga Yoga, or were those just rumors (can't you just feel the fur flying now as I even ask that)? But his month-long programs are in Bali and India and Australia, not that we shouldn't take the boy abroad or anything.....
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