Ashtanga yoga and stuff.

Window Yoga, Sore, and the Ego

2012-01-24T11:32:00.000-05:00

On Saturday a little over a week ago (the 15th of this month) I went up (by invite) to the north-end Lululemon store to be their window yoga model. Your Lulu's do this too, yes? Just in case they don't, the idea is that yoga practitioners bend in the mannequin-window for an hour or more, doing whatever, basically functioning as inspiring moving advertisements (I got free gear from LL in which to bend).

Now, I see clearly how this is bold-face capitalism, and how it plays into a simplistic promise of "if I buy that gear, I too can bend like that!" Those are both silly. Nonetheless, I had a fantastic practice, definitely one of the best of the new year, in a window space that was maybe six inches bigger than a Manduka black mat, on each side.

I did Primary and up through Bharadvajasana, was able to drop back and stand up (but had to fingertip the glass as I still come up heels-up, which is a bit ballistic), and especially at the start of seated, had some of the biggest vinyasa take-it-ups probably ever in my practice history. Like this: from Tiriangmukha, direct to Lolasana, and then back. From Ardha Baddha Padma Paschimo, into a half-lotus arm balance, no leg contact. Freaky stuff. This vanished by the Marichis, but it's nice to know that it's hiding in there (ever suprising, this annamaya-pranamaya relationship).

There is a marvelous photo of me in a not-quite-full-expression Setu Bandhasana, with these two white teenagers outside doing the knees-bent, arms-wide, mouth-open gesture which I title "Can't Touch This!" They look so campily gangbanger. I doubt I'll post the photo in here, but it's pretty amusing and it's been shared between the store and me and Cityoga on Facebook. I like that it's not some arm balance or standing posture, you know? Setu Bandhasana is a posture that on the one hand doesn't look "advanced" but it's also so uncommon that it has a high "freakshow" factor: you're not gonna see THAT one in a ToeSox ad or a Yoga Journal cover anytime soon. Keeps people off-balance as to how to respond to it.

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So I am sore in a bunch of places: the left shoulder is sore right on "top" of the collarbone/shoulderblade connection. Two fingers pressing there sets off a nervy pain which, if I don't do vinyasa carefully, runs down the front of the shoulder joint where the pecs meet the shoulder musculature proper. Jumping back is pretty much precluded, which is fine.

I am also sore at the left sit bone, but I only feel that if I add in the Tim-Miller-style front splits after the Prasaritas, so I just cut those and I don't have to worry about this in any forward fold in Primary or Intermediate. Easy.

I am also sore, but only in Kurmasana, at about the third lumbar vertebrae, and this, I worry about. As I come down into Kurmasana, there's a bruised feeling, like someone hit me with something, right there at L3-ish. Supta Kurmasana also has this sensation. I've been trying to really extend the spine and sacrificing the straight legs in the first posture, to back this off. I've totally abandoned the Intermediate entrance to Supta and yesterday I only bound the hands and didn't even worry about the feet, but still had pain. Grr.

I figured this was from putting the right foot behind my head (because that's the ever-tight hip) but in the window yoga, I did a whole buch of Miller-inspired foot-behind-head preps, including a bent-leg reclining FBH (Kasyapasana mod) and Visvamitrasana (side plank compass pose; is it officially called Vasisthasana now in the ashtanga lineage?) and there was no pain in any of that, so it seems to be Kurmasana specific. How strange.

Finally, the right hip (samskaric business, chronic tightness a lot of the time) is really cranked up about something: it's not "sore" in the way that practitioners use that term, but it's really tight, as if the gluteus max is gripping the top of the pelvic bowl for dear life. This says "ego" to me, the way the ego death-grips whatever it is it thinks it needs to survive. Ashtanga practice is not ideal for stretching this, and I even feel it in Padangusthasana and Down Dog. Now that's WEIRD tightness. Pigeons and double-pigeon (particularly with forward fold) are the main stretches here, and those postures have ALWAYS been the main stretches for the specific ways my glutes tighten up.

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I've said here a number of times, that the ego is not an enemy, not something to be fought or destroyed or denied. I had a dream a long time ago, sometime when my kid was still under two years old (he'll be three, THREE, in May: time warp, anyone?), that dealing with the ego is like being in a hospice where you give comfort to all of the avatars of yourself, your old afraid self, your younger angstful self, all these selves, you have to ease them all into passage.

So the ego for me is about negative emotions, mostly, or at least that's where I see it the most clearly. The reputation of the ego in popular culture is aggrandizement, "egotism," we think someone "with an ego" is very self-inflated. Then we apparently love to see these people "fall," so we love political scandals or to see Donald Trump lose a deal or whatever it is.

This is all playing the ego for drama.

As I said in the "teaching and teaching" post, but obliquely, I get a sort of performance anxiety when in a workshop, unless I'm workshopping quite a bit, making exposure to senior teachers more "normal." When that only happens once or twice a year, as it's about to with Kino's visit here in March, I get all anxious about both
a) if the SCENE will represent, so we can (what? look cool? get famous?)
b) if my practice will BE THERE, so I can (again, what? look cool? get famous?)

And today, when I cut practice short after a really intense Parivrtta Parsvakonasana, with shoulder soreness acting up, I could feel the ego chattering away about how I won't be able to do my "whole practice" when Kino's here, so I'll miss some kind of opportunity, et cetera et cetera.

So I've decided to use this grasping-toward-fame (or whatever it is, grasping in any case) as a way to turn down the ego. It's nice that the ego in this case is so totally overt about what it wants, because now I know just how to go the other way.

It won't matter what or if I achieve; I'm sore, a lot of things hurt, some poses are giving me mysterious soreness that makes me a bit anxious (hi lumbar spine!) and I'm teaching well and people are coming to the yoga room, and the intensity of my practice doesn't affect that in any way I can discern.

I had this shoulder soreness when I was in Seattle in summer 2010, and as I remember, with light-to-no practice, it gradually went away, but it was around for a few months. I've had some shocking stretches in Kurmasana/foot-behind-head back in the day, but I don't remember this "bruised spine" feeling back then, so that's just taking care and maybe substituting for the full posture.

And that's where this all is, now. Proceed!

Another Step Toward Something Interesting: Abject Art, Asana, Interpersonal

2012-01-17T20:47:00.000-05:00

I'm working toward a statement about body-as-ethics, where one no longer believes, but knows, gets an ethical decision not from the head, but from the body, instantly. No consideration necessary. It's as Maehle says in his Sutras somewhere: "one does not need to believe in one's right ear."

But I can't get the whole picture clearly yet. So I'm going to basically write to myself (the prior post on the two "teachings" is also a step toward this) and as I put this language here, it will process more and more deeply; the idea is there, it's solid, but I can't see it. So this is like a blog post defogger.

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I'm teaching, as I think I said, two sections of a seminar on Abject Art. If you remember college, this is 400-level. Abject art comes from the 90s, and it's very difficult to define, but it is essentially art that is about the excluded, the unmentionable, the drastically impolite, the traumatic. So it might be Mike Kelley's trauma-laden puppets, or it might be Kiki Smith's "anti-transcendent" Virgin Mary sculpture, or it might be Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ" or it might be Mona Hatoum's video installation which includes imagery taken by cameras scoping all of her available body orifices.

Abject Art, as a course, is the most recent branch on the tree of a project I've been pursuing. When I was married, I was also teaching a lot, and as the relationship grew totally confusing, I started researching it, first as a sort of private, domestic anthropology, but then progressively in terms of the French theory I was reading. The personal is political, indeed. As I've said, the shortest possible story is that I was married to a rape survivor who hadn't put her ghosts down. So I was trying to process a lot about gender roles and power and violence. But in theory terms, that turns into French feminism, Freud, phallic power, and all of that. More interestingly, I was also trying to process my own past with lay Catholicism (which had been laid upon me while very young, before I could properly interrogate it) and she had been raised by diehard Catholics, so there was a lot of "you should feel guilty" and "bodies are evil" and "desire is a necessary evil" and so on and so forth.

To keep it short and summary, I had an anti-desire religious background, a relationship that teased me with desire but punished me for feeling it (both with Catholic guilt and with "you're a man so you're a rapist" ghosting) and a bunch of theory that talked about the "revolutionary power" of "jouissance" (trans: orgasmic energy, ecstasy, incoherence, irrationality, meltdown).

I taught a whole bunch of courses between roughly 1997 and the present (continuing) that took on this situation a thousand different ways. One on the American Dream as an addiction (Requiem for a Dream, Fight Club), one on morals and madness in the 1970s (Cuckoo's Nest, Equus, Dog Soldiers--a book which was made into "Who'll Stop the Rain", Apocalypse Now), one on Marcel Duchamp and transgender political activism, one on the revolutionary rhetoric of avant-garde modernist art movements (Dada/Surrealism), one on postmodern irony and trauma (Ghost World, Amores Perros), one on avant-garde film and immersion and confrontational bodies (Schneemann's infamous FUSES, Eraserhead, and recently in that course, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and Enter the Void), one on video art and the abject (one week unit on Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthey in that one, along with Vito Acconci, Mona Hatoum, a hundred others), and, as I leave out a bunch of classes, this most recent one on Abject Art: porn, shit, blood, sinking into the maternal body, visceral aesthetics, fluids, excreta, violence, discipline (in the Foucauldian sense).

A lot of that is just exploring the American landscape as I experienced it (suburbia, religion, general "be good" doctrine) with the American landscape as I knew it to be experienceable: bodies, orgasm, perversion, darkness of every metaphysical sort, intense sensation (what some minoritized sexual communities re-name pain), schizoanalysis, and so on.

But this wasn't (as you already suspect or know) an honest interrogation, it was never anthropology. It had the same problems that Surrealism or a David Lynch film has: light AND darkness, not reality. Big, imagined binaries. THIS is good, and THAT is evil! Alluring sexy evil. Eh.

That is, of course, not how reality works.

When that all faded, I still had my interests, but they started to reveal themselves as a more interesting project, very much the way that you start asana practice wanting to lose weight, and then discover bhakti.

I like art (and film, experiences generally) to be BOTH conceptual and visceral. Not necessarily "dark" or icky or "evil," but definitely both something I can think about AND feel in my belly.

So it wasn't "evil" that I wanted, to sort of "balance" the good, it was more like mind-body resolution. To think AND feel, to feel thinking, to think feeling, to get beyond that pair, even.

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Now, yoga asana does not have "evil" in the way that art does. But as I discovered, yoga asana can give you a look at your own dark stuff. But at that time, it's not a conceptual evil, an imagined and alluring "evil" that looks sexy only because you're still locked into "good," the way I'd imagined it all to work.

When you confront your own dark matter, it doesn't come in Surrealist terms, all nice and Freudian, where it all leads to liberation. It's REAL terror and pain that doesn't obey the rules and terms of somebody's art project or somebody's book.

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Not long ago, I got a call for papers (submissions) that was called "Cine-Ethics." How can we understand "cruel" art or film as, or having, an ethical project?

For example: there's a movie from 2002 called Irreversible. It's a told-backwards story (like Memento) about two guys who take a girl (one's ex, the other's current girlfriend) to a party where the couple has a disagreement; she leaves, alone, makes a bad choice to take the subway, and is raped (for NINE MINUTES, of which we see every second) and beaten into a coma, at which point the two guys seek horrible vengeance on some random dude in a dark gay sex club.

It's a very very mean little film, although it does have fantastically beautiful cinematography.

So can THAT be or have an ethical project? Not to write an essay here, but we might wish to "reverse" what we see, to escape, and of course, we can't, not in the film and not in reality (reality as it unfolds, anyway). Or, differently, the old modernist project of "shock the bourgeoisie" is reincarnated here as an imperative to feel something, something beyond irony. Is pain the new sincerity? Is a film that can actually hurt us, a way to create a salutory post-ironic awakeness? I haven't, of course, written these out in depth here, but I think these are questions to be reckoned with beyond the "it's all shock value" argument.

Take asana practice, again. Take my practices with David and Shelley in June, for example. Every one of them cranked pain out of me, brought it right up for expression, whereas a Christian funeral really did not.

Yes, you're right, asana practice does not bring violent rape horror into your head (perhaps it does if you have that experience). Irreversible does things to us that are perhaps unnecessary, but I think that its end result, the intense sensations it brings, do have a salutory aspect.

In a way that is not that painful, I want to bring students in my classes this kind of visceral awakeness. Physical humor, gestures, quick associations, these are some of my tools. Create laughter, switch tones from stand-up comic back to authority figure, keep people off balance now and then. Awakeness. Art that is progressively more shocking, ridiculous, sexual, violent, campy, art that is, itself, visceral, immersive. And thus the progress toward the Abject Course.

In a yoga class, it's different. I don't nearly open the environment as much, because ideally students' own movements will bring that visceral awakeness. In this sense, and famously, "the practice is the real teacher." One teaches poses, or breathing, those details which make the "practice relationship" clearer and more straightforward, but really, the RELATING aspect of ashtanga vinyasa yoga is the student's.

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Finally (and a more heart-centered post would have begun here) one must say something about vulnerability, which does NOT mean revealing one's soft underbelly (only a culture of militarism thinks it does).

Vulnerability means being human, fleshly, heart-and-blood. In a teaching environment, vulnerability means being able to laugh, to say, "I don't know the answer to that," to fall out of a posture, to breathe along with the person you're giving a final squish to. It emphatically does NOT mean "I am vulnerable" except perhaps in the sense that we are all vulnerable, or in more interesting vocabulary, alive, able to relate, capable of the small sacrifice that is letting someone else make us laugh or elsewise relating to the rest of humanity. That lack of militant solitude is vulnerability, and again, only a militant culture rolls over and calls itself vulnerable. For the rest of us, it's simply humanity.

There is a theory, popular in film studies right now, called variously "tactility" or "touch" or such terms. The idea that one's body inter-relates with the bodies on the screen, that the cinematic movement (which is the essence of rolling film, "moving pictures") is in a physical relationship with our own moving bodies, skin musculature and viscera.

Or the idea, following Walter Benjamin, that "Dada art strikes the spectator like a bullet." In my classroom, anyway, that bullet is a very funny bullet. Or as the opening credits of Dusan Makavejev's 1971 film "WR: Mysteries of the Organism," have it: Feel. Laugh. Enjoy.

I titled a piece which will someday see publication (on Makavejev) by those intertitles.

This irrepressible movement to not just embrace, but to be embraced, to finally become my own moving picture, my own relationship, embodied, alive. This is the quest. It comes out as "meow meow I need more relating" but that is (as I will say later) a distraction. It's not the body that craves that attention, it's the mind. The body isn't evil desire and animality, it's just a piece of the cosmos, like an asteroid.

In my classroom, it's all, "Come on, take a dive! The water's great! We'll all swim together!" and that's not egalitarianism, but the idea that as I MOVE, as I do those gestures and commit the RELATING that is the teaching, I too make the sacrifice. Doesn't matter how many times I've taught the material. The idea isn't evil-body-immersion (although that is often the content), it's let's all relate about this material. Different levels of power and interest, sure, but what human relationship does not have those things?

Now, we see how it's all human, at long last, the conceptual project, the silly binaries, the narrative history, now it's all becoming flesh at last, even the concepts. Now we are in good position to write the "heart post" which should follow this so-heady one.

Teaching and Teaching.

2012-01-09T12:52:00.000-05:00

I'm currently an art historian, but in grad school I was a film scholar, and before that I was a Russian major for three years in undergrad, and between that and the film scholarship I was thinking maybe I'd be literary theory guy. In high school I was good at everything (chemistry, english, math up to pre-calculus: EVERYTHING), so I never had any steady career idea of what I'd "do for a living."

So the path has been determined instead by life obsessions, questions I lived in.

This semester, at the art school, I am teaching a 100-level intro course on "contemporary art" (think Jackson Pollock to the Sensation exhibit: 1950 to 1997), a seminar for Capstone writing in the major (art history seniors), and two sections of a seminar in Abject Art (read: art of the disgusting, violent, and generally repellent).

Life changes every four months when you're an academic. There is September to December, January to late April or early May, and then "summer" which is May to about mid-August. The year "begins" in September, like some weird kind of culturally different New Year ritual.

I teach two late mornings (10:30-11:45) and three afternoons (roughly 12:30-3:30). On the afternoon days, I plan for morning practice, either at the studio between classes or up at the Y if I feel audacious (it's 6 miles away) or need a shower. Morning-class days, like today, I aim for afternoon practice, but of course there is syllabus design and paperwork galore which gets in the way.

Yoga-wise, I teach my well-established Sunday 12:30 ashtanga (Mysore/led blend, depending on membership; yesterday it was 16, with about 9 people Mysore-styling) and also a Friday morning, which is 75 minutes and thus more introductory, and I not infrequently sub the 11 am Saturday ashtanga (again, Mysore-led blend) and the Monday night (7:15 pm) which is billed Mysore but again, depending on membership, becomes Mysore-led blend.

I also teach Larry Schultz' "criminal" Rocket sequence at 6 pm on Thursday nights.

So I'm damn busy.

Today was the semester's first teaching day: intro to contemporary. Dada and Surrealism. Duchamp's famous urinal. A whole bunch of new students who have to acquire a taste for my tangent-laden lecture style and my comedy and my interactivity, which is not the clunky kind designed to "elicit answers" to leading questions, but is more generally interactive: Feel the art! Dig this thing! Be compelled, be repelled, BE SOMETHING!!

Tomorrow is the Capstone seminar, which is awkward to teach in that way. I often rely on biography instead, so I will probably tell my this-way-and-that grad school trajectory, which saw me do almost thirteen years of grad work while, with barely any guidance except at the end, where I was more-or-less pulled over the finish line, I somehow cobbled together a MA thesis and a PhD dissertation.

It's a game of "Who have I been" or maybe "How did I get here?". The Academy as Talking Heads song.

In the Abject course (Thurs and Fri, syllabi I should be finalizing instead of writing this), I have a lot of prior students, people who are expecting a deep and silly and scandalous tour of art that is specifically designed for "saucy content" (a phrase I have used for YEARS to describe art that is sexy, dark, conceptual and hot, my favorite mix of qualities for any life experience).

Different "weights" of me, different "dosages" of me, dispensed as by an apothecary. I also, am the apothecary. What can they handle? How big a dose of "how I run a class" do I give on the first day? How inspiring or offputting is that long rambling bio? How "saucy" are they expecting it, in Abject Art?

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The interface: I set the expectations but also meet them. This doesn't happen this way, not as overtly, in a yoga room. The levels of an imaginary binary change: one is expected to be more physical in the yoga room, less so in the educational room.

No one gets wrestled into a bind in an educational room.........do they?

I teach with physical humor, and I teach a lot of "tactile" art since that's a consistent method that artists have deployed for "reducing the distance" between the infamous (and apparently immortal) "art and life" duo. "Let's move around, let's go into the hall and pretend we're this art installation."

This is to keep people from falling asleep or zoning out. Some still do.

In the yoga room, there is a type of zoning (perhaps ZONING IN, exactly!) that is encouraged, that is discouraged in an educational room.

At the start, I teach the movements, hint at the breathing and the gaze, but am also trying to sell the students on this class, at this time, with this mode of practice. I become too interested, too invested, in whether or not they will STAY, whether or not they will go to Kino's workshop, and what? See the "realer" practice? Get the ACTUAL AUTHENTICITY?

This is what I'm trying to dig into with this post.

Do I not trust them to like it, to continue, to see an avenue, or at least some sort of highway-of-interest that might lead into what is currently darkness? I fall for the authenticity trap. "The certified teacher." Yes, obviously, Kino has practiced more rigorously than I have, given more workshops than I have. But is she BETTER at what I do, in this town? In one weekend? How can I phrase this question so that it gets at what I want?

Is it what she's providing or what my students can bring (and thence, whether they will bring it or not)? Obviously both. One could expand this to the Mysore question: what is it that one DOES GET THERE (or is it, BRING THERE)?

On a surface level, we get a workshop in our chosen practice, with an experienced soul. On a surface level, we get a Mysore-style class (and really, that's a thrill, it'll be our first with a teacher of this kind). And I feel that (again, on a surface level), IF WE REPRESENT, we can get a reputation as a growing scene.

That's where the pressure comes from.

But is it serving those yoga students to say....what? "Come to this, it's gonna rock"? "Come to this, it'll enlighten you?" "Come to this, it's better than my regular teaching?" See?

How can I invite the newer and yet enthusiastic students, to go to Kino without making it sound like HER Mysore-style room is magical while mine is somehow ordinary? See how that reflects not so much on ME as, in a way, on THEM? See how it becomes distasteful?

"Bring this woman your practice and she will change it." But that REALLY HAPPENED to me. Kino changed my backbending practice for EVER when I did the whole weekend in fall 2009.

But I don't want to promise them that, as if my room cannot also provide that, and most importantly, as if THEIR OWN PRACTICES cannot provide that.

THE PRACTICE ITSELF changes you. And teachers disappear, or better, go within. I still give MYSELF the "final backbend." I do it as Kino taught it to me: walk in, head down, creep, dig in with fingertips, LIFT! And I'm not sore, no matter how crazy far I walk in, as she said about Sharath recently talking about SKPJ's own backbend adjustments.

The teacher goes within.

How much do I have to be forward, and yet back off, how do I have to run my own room, so that this practice sort of slips into the students, so that they wade in and come out with watermarks up to here? I am not the sea; the practice is the sea. But demonstration hasn't gotten them here; lecture hasn't gotten them here.

It's always contingent. Trust them to enjoy the wading.

In the academic room, I press, I train, I make the move, say things, laugh at things. I TRAIN them how to do tactile, physicalized, how to get out of their heads and into an embodied relation with the art, as far as I can.

But in the yoga room, perhaps I sit back, like a flirtatious wallflower. Stop thinking. This, I have felt before. Less META-. Academic teaching, with its faculty annual reports and all of the self-maintenance, the conceptualization of oneself (the "statement of teaching philosophy!"), is constantly, insistently meta-.

But the yoga teaching does not love that. Don't CONCEPTUALIZE it, just keep breathing. Teach whoever comes, and LET THEM GO.

I missed a week of Mysore with Clayton back in 2007 because my cat died at random one night while I was in SF. "Sorry I've been gone," I said on my return. "It doesn't matter," he said.

Ok, so they don't "HAVE" to go. Well, better said, their interest in going is both to learn and to promote the scene, if they are so interested in doing. But in PRACTICE TERMS, they don't have to go at all.

It is not better, there is no guarantee of magic. But there is that possibility, but always that possibility. Even at home alone on the rug.

Something of a Detour: this "Wreck Your Body" bit.

2012-01-06T14:09:00.000-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html?pagewanted=all. This (if that link works). "Yoga can Wreck your Body."

Real quickly, and primarily because there is a lot of Facebook babble on my feed about this piece.

Many yoga teachers have reposted this on FB, sure. Many students have replied with comments that fall into two broad stripes:

a) "thank you for teaching alignment, so many teachers don't!"
b) "thank you for focusing on the spiritual aspect rather than just asana!"

Now, the stereotype of ashtanga vinyasa (and other hard vinyasa practices) in the West is that alignment is overlooked and the "perfect pose" is preferred at any cost. Old ashtangis like Freeman and Doane are cited for their "interest in Iyengar yoga" as if ashtanga vinyasa is always taught without any regard for alignment AND as if Iyengar yoga is taught with safety while ashtanga vinyasa is not.

I'm told, by an Iyengar practitioner, that you hold postures for a long time. That can be as unsafe as rushing headlong from pose to pose. It's the Iyengar folks, remember, who like the long shoulderstand and headstand (and yes, I'm aware that SKPJ once said that you don't get benefits from headstand until you hold it for several minutes).

And this isn't about bashing "your yoga" or "my yoga" but about undoing stereotypes, which, as always, any journalism about American yoga tends to rely on.

What I do like about that article is this:

a) The line about "American yoga popularity is producing an abundance of yoga studios which have teachers who lack deep training." YES.

b) "People are rushing in, listening to the ego." YES.

The piece comes across, particularly in its title, as saying yoga is harmful, and only in those two sentences does it say, essentially, something much more accurate, which is that uninformed practice, egoistic practice, ignorant practice, and better, uninformed, egoistic, ignorant TEACHING, is harmful.

It's not the yoga, it's the idiocy.

And then the corollary is this likewise foolish binary that sets off "the spiritual aspects" and "careful alignment" from asana practice, as if all asana practice is both unspiritual and lacking in alignment, which I daresay is YET ANOTHER product of exactly the same American yoga that produces the criticism of these very qualities.

So American yoga journalism produces with both hands: from one hand you get "yoga heals whatever" (see any Yoga Journal cover for the healing-du-jour) and from the other hand you get "be careful, your yoga needs to be aligned and spiritual" (and again, see any Yoga Journal cover for the meditation-du-jour).

Have we no awareness of the eight-limbed approach?
Have we no knowledge, no (as I have harshly said before) DEPTH of the practice?
See we no links between movement and BREATHING?
See we no links between injuries and a "this sequence is really cool, I learned it from a magazine" approach?

Freeman said, this body is the piece of the cosmos through which we can learn anything.

Pattabhi Jois slaps a wall, THIS is God!

It should be obvious that just doing poses is like just doing any other exercise unprogrammatically. You'll probably get imbalance even if you do lose weight or whatever your big surface goal is.

But it should also be obvious that asana is a PROGRAM, and that's what American yoga journalism too often misses, and in fact much American YOGA (I would argue) also misses this point.

Safe and aligned yoga can still be nothing but exercise. "Spiritual" yoga can be nothing but seated "looking pretty" (as Sharath put it in conference on New Year's Day, a nugget I took from Kino's post about said conference).

I think that a truer blend of the spiritual and the asana is found in focused, aware movement. "You can do child's pose all day if that's your thing" says one FB comment. Physically, that's true, you CAN, but are you doing THE YOGA? And you'll reply, "Well 72 postures in 90 minutes isn't necessarily THE YOGA". Absolutely true. It is not WHAT is done, it is HOW is done.

This is why alignment/safety and spiritual/calm are not the answers. Those are WHAT answers, they say nothing about HOW the yoga is done, and this does not mean "HOW the posture is done," it means how THE YOGA is done, with what mind, with what breathing, with what presence that could be called spiritual?

The article's long discussion of how shoulderstand/headstand are harmful are WHAT discussions, asana discussions, "yer doing it wrong" as internet-ese would have it.

Doing THE YOGA, if we make it purely about asana, is about finding the point of FOCUS, not the point of pose perfection. THIS is what a skilled teacher should teach (and I've tried, and it's not easy).

Get in the zone and learn the ways that the Borders of the Zone flux and change.

From that, you modify the postures on a given day, or time of day.

This makes asana part of your life, and separation begins to blur.

This is how you learn what suits on a given day and what does not.

This is why a standard, repeated practice is useful.

And so on.

Energy Post 3: Crushing

2011-12-29T17:01:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Devotional Practice (sort of "Energy Post 2")

2011-12-19T13:27:00.000-05:00

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

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

Hm?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Energy Post 1: Anger, Alchemy, Annamaya

2011-12-08T15:15:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

*************************************

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***********************************

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

Ok, ok, ok.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*********************************************

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

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

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

Repulsion of the negative directly upon experience.

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

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

BUT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deferring the Energy Post, Workshoppin' Around the Midwest

2011-12-04T21:29:00.000-05:00

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

So that's coming. Soon. Really.

Otherwise:

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

I can find (and am interested in) these:

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

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

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

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

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

All in the Triangles, Short Practices, Negotiation

2011-11-21T11:52:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

The adventure begins with the first Uttanasana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Negotiation.

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

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

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

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

Or does it mean something else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-11-14T16:14:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note:

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

Thanks everyone!

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

2011-11-07T11:22:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet, EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE occurs.

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

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

That alone is a lesson right there.

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

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

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

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

*******************************************************

Anyway:

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

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

That's how it is.

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

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

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

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

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

So eventually the big question became,

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

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

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

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

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

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

***************************************

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing That the Challenge is Worth it.

2011-10-31T22:04:00.000-04:00

There's a post or discussion or something, maybe it was part of a workshop that I missed and heard about, by Kino MacGregor, about "loving a challenge," specifically (in that context) about hard poses. Love that hard pose, see it coming, savor every bit of that struggle.

Now, it's easily possible to nutshell this into one of those "uplifting yoga nuggets" that might sound like this: "Every challenge is worth it." This sounds great and means nothing, like most "uplifting yoga nuggets."

It's like bad Advaita (the key paraphrase of which is, "everything is the creation of your mind, so change your mind and you change your everything"--and that SOUNDS LOVELY but can't be done, it's simply impossible). But actual wisdom isn't far from the language of bad Advaita, which is why I titled this post what I did.

Being aware of what a challenge has given you is entirely different from simply stating that the challenge is worth it. People with no idea what they're being challenged by or to, can say that it's worth it. Hell I've said that a billion times and not believed it; it's the statement of the leap of faith. "I know this is worth it!" If you say it enough times, God listens (or Whoever) and gives you the key, right?

So what am I thinking about, exactly?

Here's some of the local and nearby: today we had a sick kid, with barfing of all food and all liquids for about twelve hours. When he's sick, he regresses, but now that he's 28 months old, regression only goes back to about half that, so maybe 14 months, and he was fun at 14 months. Managing a lot of single words, a few phrases, lots of fun babytalk, managing to sort of verbally express some emotions. A big uptick in his "humanity" over say the first six months, when you could tell he was human but he didn't yet have the cognitive/emotional sophistication to show it.

So now, regression means he's still "a kid," whereas when he WAS 14 months old, he'd regress straight out of language and into pure emotional need and crying and the parents would have to get every tool in the kit out, to guess what would make it better (or if it could be made better).

And I cared for him all morning from the 8 am barf in his carseat in my car (yuck!) to the liquid lunch he also barfed up, and then went to school to do my screening for a class (film screening, that is) and then did more baby care tonight, and we were sitting on the couch watching kid DVD's and he'd lean over on me and it'd be super cute and snuggly and such (please note that you can count the number of times that I've used such vocabulary here, on one hand, easily).

And a couple hours ago I was thinking of that, and I realized, "Wait, THIS is the payoff of his first year, this is the degree of emotional care that I can give ON REQUEST now, without feeling at all put out."

When he was just a few months old, J said to me, "Well, imagine that he's a sick cat," and I said, "Ok, but NO SICK CAT IN THE UNIVERSE needs this much attention!" That's the nugget right there. It's HARD to give constant emotional and physical support to someone, especially if you're not used to it or haven't had to do it or your gender role says it's "not what you do" (and yeah of course I know gender roles are fluffy nonsense, but still, this isn't bad Advaita; you inherit both abilities and inabilities from what gender tells you before you learn to listen and select).

So that is clearly something that I learned and acquired from those days. I can give fairly intense emotional support, without anger, without resentment, without needing payback. This is something the first year of his life taught me to do.

Recently, despite huge life stress, J and I have been friendlier to each other (no, no euphemism hides in there, although if I chose to hide one, that would also be true). More (short) conversations, and not as much snippiness, not as much correction, not as much inability to figure out what the other one is saying, not as much friction generally.

Last Thursday J got an ambiguous mammogram result and this Thursday morning she will get a re-scan to see if it's all benign or not. Her two best friends from college have had run-ins with breast cancer; one died of it in March of this year. The other is clear right now. This seems to have pulled her back a bit from work-and-child-and-I-don't-see-you, which is how I've paraphrased her relationship with me since about 2009, and we've become a bit warmer and more human to each other, although her statement was, "I can't leave the child, I have to be ok for him" which is true but leaves me totally out of it :D It was ok, I was kind of amused by that.

So this is life, how interesting.

I wish I could clearly pull these parent-life-lessons into teaching the yoga and say something totally profound, but it's pretty fuzzy. I can't clearly say, "This affects my emotional handling of the room in blah-blah way" although I do have more support for my regulars than I used to have, but that could be just the depth that my regulars are putting in; it could be the teacher-student relationship alone, or in combination with the parenting lessons, combined in some algebra I'm not fully aware of yet.

Oh well.

In any case, despite the losses of Larry in February and our family friend in March and my father in May, 2011 has seen the Great Blossoming of the Indianapolis ashtanga scene, this is for certain. One can't shout it down as a year of painful lessons, not totally.

Fourteen people in my yoga room this past Sunday. Classes of 8-10 almost all year since February, with a low of maybe 4 a couple times, and then highs of 14-18. But I would say 8-9 is my regular crew, and it's a different crew from what Carol gets on Monday nights (some crossover, but not the same) and it's different from what Amanda gets on Thursday nights, and so our total regular ashtanga population is maybe even as high as 25 in town, and most of those people Mysore-style it, because we teach and encourage Mysore-style (well, a variation where you memorize/do Primary on your own, and take your best shot at the hard poses, so not classical "you stop here" Mysore-style, except in a few cases) rather than full led classes.

So there, that's what the Great Parenting Challenge brought me, at least, that's the first thing I fully realize, in practical terms and in full daylight, that it has brought. Everyone says it keeps bringing things. There is no doubt.

And I realize too, that what I want from J is just for her to be nice to me sometimes, a glance or a hug or a friendly conversation that's not about the upcoming university assessment. Nothing cosmic or hyper-intellectual (although those are both nice) is required, just some basic human affection and allowances to, as Rick Hanson put it once, "have a practice" (he wasn't talking about the yoga, but about Buddhist practice generally).

You Cannot "Practice" Surrender.

2011-10-07T22:43:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased there are no comments on the prior post because I got ashamed of it quickly after writing it, but the penchant for honesty and straightforwardness in me, in all things written here, kept me from cutting it or any part of it.

So, new post, which has its own business to commit and is not (as so tempting, earlier) simply an excuse to bury the one prior.

Today I got an email from the dynamic duo who went from our Indy ashtanga scene to the Chicago Kino workshop. Many things were achieved: feet were grabbed from the air, and such. This morning in a pre-teaching practice, I clunked into a Kapotasana dropback and couldn't move my hands at all, could barely get my head to rise. No feet, not even close to feet. In fact, I didn't even get upright from dropping back, and I can at least usually do that. So I came up laughing, "Defeat! Defeated! Three and a half years!"

I'm kind of amused by Kapo's entire impossibility. And sure, I could "if/then" myself into a thousand different worlds of regular teacher, regular practice, no kid, blah blah blah, and who gives a damn. Apparently, in my current life, I can't get my heels in that posture. But I'll keep trying over and over and over, because that's what you do.

So I had this weird sadness, like "meow meow, you guys don't need me to teach you poses anymore," which first isn't true, because it's not like Kino is ALWAYS three hours from here by car. But in any case, the feeling was really curious. Sadness? What the hell is THAT about? First, it notably wasn't pride, it wasn't "HELL YEAH, those are MY STUDENTS, uh huh!" although I can always access that if I want. It was more like when Tim talks about getting older, it was almost what I think "child leaving the nest" might feel like, a bit of that.

I'm teaching a lot these days, as you've heard before. The current schedule is still four classes a semester (two classes 2x/week, another 1x/week, another 1x/week, I come in four days per week to teach all that, along with meetings and so forth), and then the yoga on Sunday afternoons and on Friday mornings (10 am, right before my 12 noon class at school that day) and then subbing Monday nights at 7:15 at least once a month, and then Thursday night at 6.

And processing the email sadness put me to thinking that I'm now teaching people, I'm like a guide of sorts, for everyone I'm exposed to. There's no level on which I sort of "actively exist." Let me make that clunky vocabulary make more sense, maybe:

When I was living with the New Zealander in 2005, we were peers. Similar politics, similar smart, climbing habits both, shared kitchen, a whole lot of similar and relating and funny stories, a real solid roommate situation. It rocked. And then on top of that, I was teacher to students, yoga student, a bunch of other relationships, but I knew "who" and "where" I was, in the sort of hierarchy of social life. Grad student, below faculty, above undergrad, that sort of thing. Skilled yoga practitioner, beneath the native backbenders (that's my own silly estimation) and above the new beginners (again, my own silly estimation; if we talk about who "breathes better" that hierarchy all goes to pieces).

In any case, errors or not, I felt that I knew "who and where" I was in the scale of my life. I actively lived in that apartment, acted with confidence in my relations, took pride in what I achieved, in my ongoing relationship, and so forth. "I, me!" Do you understand?

And now, largely but not totally from seventh series, there is a distinct fragility in my "I, me." With my father gone, I am the "outside man," the heat shield, and my son is the astronaut in the shuttle. I take all the direct contact with outer space, in a way. This also isn't a pride thing, it's keen awareness of fragility, mortality and impermanence. It's what separates the drunk-driving teenager stereotype from the older "person of wisdom."

Sure, I'm a standup comic when I teach, but I'm also discovering that people just want to pass, or they really want to see what they can squeeze out of the art theory I present, for their own work. Everyone is up to something, going somewhere, it's all transit, and education is in some cases optional. Can I graduate on time, can I get into this show, can I finish my thesis, can I blah blah blah? It's all transit, like people in airports. My "fan club" as some of the faculty call them (students who really like my stuff) is about to graduate (as last year's fan club did) and I'm not sure who replaces them, but now, I see the cycles coming. Students pass and I remain. I'm still confident, I'm still acting and teaching and giving them whatever I can (because that's how I roll) but it's all transitory, and I'm a memory outside of that so-brief and so-fragile present. And there it all is again.

It's not that I feel that I can't engage the present, it's that I don't belong to it anymore, have sort of "involved" as the Sutras put it, have drawn back, and never meant to, didn't intend to.

I mean, sure, I did the yoga, I do the yoga, but even in that, I never said to myself, "hey self, let's surrender our active egoist engagement with the world, let's actively give that up." That's crazy talk. I love active engagement with the world, really "feeling there!" at a bar or in bed with the chosen one or in class performing and such. I LOVE that shit.

So what the hell, then?

It was not that I gave things up. Sure, in the face of reticence and complaints and tiredness, I've largely given up chasing sexual intimacy in my relationship (although other forms are still pursued) because it's such an uphill climb and it's a pain in the ass, but I never gave up EVENTUALLY thinking and believing that we'd get that back.

So that's not surrender.

No, what happened instead is not that "I gave up thing X" but that "Thing X gave me up." We believe, I think, as I look around the yoga world and yoga blogs, that one gives up a habit the way people make New Years resolutions.

"Give up smoking, give up sugar, give up booze, give up coffee" or a thousand different examples. "I'm gonna give up being fixated on how my relationship used to be." Ok. But what are you going to do instead? See how the refusal becomes the fixation? At least in my case it does. The only way that I was able to give up thinking about bow-chicka-bow was to get SO BUSY that I couldn't, actually, focus and think about it at the same time. Thinking about it became a distraction. So no punishment and no "thou shalt" was involved. I didn't set myself a "do not" goal, I just set myself a "do other" goal.

So I didn't surrender a damn thing, I just stopped living in the wish for the world to be different. In fact, I stopped living in the fact of the world, where that difference was concerned, also. What I mean by that is that I stopped looking for and waiting for those three-to-forty minutes between when the child went to bed and we did, as the "anticipatory window." I became indifferent to the anticipatory window, and sometimes I'd be at work on an art slide show during it, or just be internetting, or reading, or up to something. I became indifferent to the very POSSIBILITY of "returning to the old" not out of spite, but because the only way I could get out of the habit of "gimme that, I want that, I'm gonna get that, mhm, hand that over, maybe it'll be this time" was to totally get out of the entire circuit of exchange.

In fact, tonight I am writing THIS during the "anticipatory window."

So I did not "give up thing X." I haven't given up on the relationship, but I have put a lot of other business in place of my blind hope (blind and often frustrated hope, which just deepens the whole complex) that things will "return to normal, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, oooh maybe, maybe...". Enough of that.

So nothing was surrendered, to my thinking. Instead, many things were done, and they were, precisely, done INSTEAD. The yoga rhetoric of "surrender" is "practice letting go" or "practice accepting it" or "practice surrender."

To me, it's always become I SURRENDER, I do the surrendering. I GIVE the thing away, or up, or whatever. Surrender as a transitive verb, carrying an object. I as the actor. That's the whole problem with what I heard and how I acted on surrender.

When I try to "surrender" or "let go" or "accept it," what I end up with is a big loud debate in my head, with either me or her or whatever it is that I'm trying to accept, and it's like a battle in the Senate, with filibustering and bluster and monkey mind to the nines.

You probably know the chatter: I'm going to accept this! No, I don't want to! This is bullshit! Ah but it's the truth. Not for long! It'll be back to normal soon! Come on, practice acceptance. No! Someone deceived us! This is nonsense! I'm acting to return the world to how it used to be!

It's all exclamations and declarations and manifesto-writing (if only it had the wonderful self-reflectiveness of most manifesto writing).

So for me, to capture my title above, I cannot "practice" surrender because when I try to actively surrender, I immediately trip over myself and then it's warfare and bluster.

The way I'm put together, the ego cannot surrender. My ego doesn't want to surrender a goddamn thing, and it's REALLY stubborn and strong. But take all those things from me in ways that I can't ethically recoup, which is (to be brief about it) how seventh series has done my ego in, and suddenly it's completely different.

Now, when I write about seventh series, most of the time I get caught up in my relationship frustrations, about which I'm very angry and frustrated, and then I use highly, highly perjorative language to characterize the whole affair.

I'm really getting tired of seeing myself do that over and over and over.

So then. When pregnancy denied us all sexual contact (and yeah yeah, you're going to say, wait, not all needed to disappear, and I agree, but she doesn't, and so it all disappeared, and I'm done debating whether it should or needed to or could have or blah blah blah, I'm done with all that), I freaked, and I could well have just said, "Look lady, certain things need to be maintained or else I'm not gonna do this" but that just was not ethical, at least I couldn't get myself to say that out loud.

Things are qualitatively better but quantitatively very, very, very sparse. September 2011 marked three years of this. During that time, I've tried to surrender desire, then to surrender anger, then to surrender imagination, then to surrender blah blah blah. You get the idea. Some interesting experiments got committed with energy, but I'm no Catholic mystic. I can't make holiness out of that contained energy; either I can't or I just don't know how.

None of the surrenders that I tried, worked.

So it wasn't that I gave up "wanting it" or gave up "being angry about it" but what happened, as I wrote above, is that "being angry about it" started to wander off from me. "Wanting it" wandered off a few times, sort of took itself for a stroll instead of constantly knocking at my door. And I didn't do anything to make this happen other than to STOP LIVING IN THOSE EMOTIONAL SPACES, which I did, by putting my energy ACTIVELY ELSEWHERE.

You'll say, but Patrick, that's surrender. No, I maintain, it isn't. I didn't experience that as any kind of surrender. It was more like the frustration got SO UNANSWERABLE that I just turned away, with a very "fuck this!" attitude, and put myself fully into work or research or kid care or beer or whatever else was available. And things got better.

My frustration and anger are still there, like seats in my car. If I sit there, I feel those, I inhabit them, they come fully to life and I become rage again, just like before. It isn't that I gave up anger, it's that anger gave me up, sort of released me from the seat. It's an ego thing. It's like anger, the ego that feels anger (for where, my friends, does one separate the feeler from the felt?), peeled off from me. I can see it over there, as I just called it out: it's like a seat in the car, OVER THERE.

Trying to surrender anger, for me, would be like trying to surrender my foot. Only when I am NOT MY FOOT can I surrender it, and by the time that my foot is no longer me, it has surrendered itself and I can no longer surrender it. The work is done, and not by me.

This active pride, active anger, inhabitance of the world, gives way to a fragility, a temporariness of everything, impermanence. Now, let's not confuse this with Bad Advaita. It's not that the world is an illusion (at least I'm not going that far with you), it's that the world, while marvelous and present and full of textures and sense appeal, is all impermanent. Everything makes one want to cry with its impermanence. One wants to be kind to the door frames.

A keen memory, that I now know is also about this, is a Chicago doorway, dark wood, pebbled surface like from drops of dried polyurethane. I put four fingers on it and told myself to remember, as if I could characterize what happened there (which was also more tender than I wanted it to be, and more painful) by that tactile memory.

Make no mistake, I'll certainly sit in those egoic seats again and receive the burn that awaits there, I've quite written enough from those locations.

"Practice letting go." No, I say: instead, practice everything else, anything else, and see if what you want to let go of, lets go of YOU.

New Month, New Look, Practices, Hip, Western Philosophy

2011-10-01T15:30:00.000-04:00

So Blogger presented me with this series of new templates, and I like the current one enough to stick with it for a while. Hi! It's October.

A year ago on-blog I'd been just once in a while experimenting with the 3s foot-behind-heads. Yes, those were flexible days :)

Two years ago on-blog I'd been convincing myself that I stand up from backbends (I still do that once in a while, play this convince-oneself game).

Three years ago, in real life, my household was newly pregnant. That sure was the end of something and the beginning of something else.

Practices have been, this past week, nicely intense. Up to Ardha Matsyendrasana, not because that's where anyone particularly told me to stop or because I can't do Eka Pada Sirsasana, but because Troy Lucero (of all people) in summer 2010 told me that one can technically do up through AM and still get good backbends without adding the extra challenge of doing massive forward folds before you backbend.

I'd added in all my extra handstandy-sun-salutation stuff, so the week's practices were a bit more dynamic than my usual, harder to control (I can easily control a jump-back or -through in my usual "Bakasana" format, but the full half-handstand format is much harder). While I'm on this topic, by "Bakasana format" I mean that I usually "hop back and through" which is essentially a dynamic Lolasana. Particularly when jumping through, I lean way into the hands, shoulders even moving ahead of hands, which makes the jump briefly look like a Bakasana (and then I pull with the abs and look up and the hips swing on through and upward, the way Swenson recommends in his book). For the record, I often scrape a bit going both back and through, but I don't care and it's not a real foot-scrape the way some people talk about, it's a toe-slide, doesn't bother me at all.

Intermediate remains hard, but past work on it is evident. Kapo, of all things, is fairly deep for how spotty my practice of it has been this year. Toes regularly, even though I have to press on my gym-mat-under-Jade-mat trick at the Y to get myself to the feet.

Pasasana has run away, but if I put my heels on the raised gym mat and do a five-breath warmup with top of hand on floor outside the hip I'm facing away from, I can usually fingertip bind it.

Supta Vajrasana is impossible to estimate. I can bind both feet, but the "sit up bar" that I use for knee support is about a foot high, so my knees come WAAAY UP before I can arch back, which means I can't estimate anything about how far back or not I might go if my knees were pinned to the floor by a futon or a teacher's foot or partner's legs. But it feels good and I'm thinking "chest rising" as David and Shelley said, and I can tell when I sink into the low back; that feels like ass!

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In 2010 when I was doing some serious Kapotasana chasing (especially, as I recall, from about January to April), I'd get WICKEDLY sore in the right hip, actually in both outer hips, as the backbends developed. This has returned, but now it's particularly on the right side and really not on the left.

It feels like the glutes sort of bite into the pelvic bones and tailbone, like they are gripping for dear life. The psoas also gets involved, and when it does, I can't really jump to-and-fro, can't get the hips "swinging" as it were.

Poses that are delicious stretches for this include: Janu A and C, Mari B, Virabhadrasana A (right foot back), any twisted pigeon variation, any REALLY deep lunge (like those Nicki Doane lunges where you turn the front foot out 45 degrees), Baddha Konasana, Bhekasana if it doesn't hurt (it's either really good or not good at all), and slow, conscious Urdhva Dhanurasanas.

I find that I must consciously think, "Relax...those...glutes" as I come up in the wheel, and breathing into it is very helpful, with visualization even, inhale, muscle lights up with energetic life, exhale, muscle releases its teeth from the bone.

In any case, this also happened in the 2010 Kapo chase. I remember feeling this in that backbend and the UD's, and thinking, "I'm stretching my glutes in a backbend? WTF?" because that shouldn't be possible, right?

These days I don't think that it's strictly a muscle imbalance; I did have periodic aching there in my pre-yoga days, even back into my 20s, from things like standing in line a long time, but I'm a chronic "lean up against a post" guy at that time, weighting one foot and such when I stand, so I'm not suprised that I got uneven hips out of the deal. Gotta look cool, right? :D Art historians call that "contrapposto," when you've got that "Yeah I'm just waitin' to catch a bus" look. Uh huh.

Owl once called this "samskaric business" and I like that. This is the hip that wouldn't half-lotus, that wouldn't twist as easily, that wouldn't open as easily, that wouldn't let me take foot behind head as easily, but it's also the hip where the hamstrings are stronger (I've pulled a left one, never a right one) and where I can lift the foot in a "pistol" (think Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana squat). Like anything, it's got strengths and weaknesses. No one has a "bad hip/good hip," it's not like cops.

Because there is really energy in that hip, the same white energy, a sort of mass that I can almost stretch PHYSICALLY into, the right hip has me wondering about the koshas, particularly the physical or food body and the prana or energy body. Can the energy body MANIFEST blockages in physical terms? Can one STRETCH the prana body?

When I was with David and Shelley a month after my father passed, this hip was like the dark well of emotional energy, it's like the low geographical region of my body, everything "runs downhill" to there. Amazing agony, physical/emotional/more, came out of that hip, unreal stuff. If anyone tells you ashtanga vinyasa yoga can't help you channel that sorta thing, they are bullshitting you big time.

In 2010, I was able to clear the hips, or detach the "teeth" of the glutes, whatever the mechanism is. Maybe I was able to "purify the energy" I really can't say what happened, but I did get smoothness and cooperation out of that hip for a while. Then with more frustration and spottier practices it regrew, like warts sometimes do. Slow regeneration of tension, high expections for practice that didn't represent those priorities which life wanted me to have. Refusal plus difficulty equals more difficulty.

Last week for backbends I one day had to do some Venki hangbacks (which I first heard of on Linda's blog and have kept in my toolkit ever since), and I found that in the fourth hangback (which is feet mat-width apart, arms fully extended, and you try to hang back to 90 degrees or more), I could see a good piece of the mat after 15 breaths, and I mean like more than a foot of the back of my mat, so I dropped, and it was fine. I couldn't come up, that day (well, I could to my knees, but not onto my feet), but I learned a new approach to hanging-and-dropping, so I kept it for the next two practices.

I would do my pressups, come to standing, and then inhale up like in a Surya Namaskara (ekam!), and then hang back. The first exhale wants to go into the low back, so I inhale the bend into the front body, and I can't reall explain how it worked, but it worked. I think "no, abdomen, psoas!" and the stretch moves, it sort of "runs around the front of me." I guess that on a physical level, I push into the feet more, turn the thighs in more, do the basic backbending how-tos. Then it's something like 12 breaths the first time, 9-10 the second time, 5-6 the third time, and I was able to drop, walk in and then stand up, and on the third time, with my heels BARELY off the mat, which is almost standing up feet flat. I thought that was pretty cool, and it arrived by pressing with the feet and really thinking, "hips forward...forward...more forward...forward again," the way that Kino repeats those imperatives when she's doing a workshop.

This makes the hands land closer to the feet, which makes the high point of the backbend higher, which changes the center of gravity as one moves forward, and that's that. Hope I can duplicate it next week :)

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Sartre was famous for asking if existence (external conditions) preceded essence (selfhood, somewhat ambiguously defined) or the other way around. Some time ago on seventh series, I wrote (or at least said something out loud to the effect of; perhaps I put it on Facebook rather than in here, because I'm terse on there due to the word limit and verbose in here because of the non-limit), "Doing is more reliable than being. When seventh series totally mangled 'who I was,' I found that I could nonetheless do things, and I didn't need to be anyone in particular, not even a parent, not even 'the willing partner' or anything. Just do, who cares about being."

This doesn't translate easily into the Sartre, because even if you choose existence as creating essence, you still have this tricky "essence" to deal with, a self, an Actor, an Ego, or something like it, and my parenting description is both a complaint and a marvel, basically, "How am I doing things if I can't tell who I am?"

And then one is tempted to say that one is "existing" without a clear "essence" and that leads to bad thinking where maybe postmodern culture creates the self through advertising, or where parenting makes one egoless (it does and it doesn't), or where the whole universe becomes frustration because you don't have any free time and you never get laid anymore (and again, this is both true and not).

So "essence" is the problematic term. Many women that I know talk about parenting like it ITSELF is a sort of essential biological destiny, "I just can't imagine who I was before I was a parent," and it's all bliss and self-realization. I know one--count him, ONE--man who talks eagerly about parenting, but he's really into compassion for everyone and into relating and into humanity, so parenting is not an EXCEPTION to this, it's very much something social that he anticipates being challenging and doing well.

This has me thinking that there's a gender divide in how "self-realizing" seventh series is. For me, parenting is the most ego-killing, self-annihilating thing in the entire universe, certainly the most so of any activity I have ever committed or thought about committing. This is not to say that I don't like it--I do--but its challenge is absolutely superhuman, and its ego-killing powers are totally unmatched in the entire universe. I would put parenting EASILY up against chemotherapy or torture for ego-killing potential (and yes, this is my usual hyperbole).

The great trick of parenting is that for all of the ego death that it imposes, it's kind of a FUN and ENJOYABLE ego death (except for stuff like the 2 am barfing) eventually. I often, now that my kid is 2 (and this began when he was 1), don't mind the hardcore challenge UNLESS I want my "old life" back in which case the ego howls like an animal being beaten to death with a pipe.

So obviously, my "essence" isn't the "old days," because some sort of "new me" is doing all the parenting while my "old essence" dies off like a limb that I don't need as I evolve.

But also obviously, my parenting self isn't an "essence" since I had no idea at all that this was possible, and my new self involves the total genocide of my old self. "Essence" simply does not serve to explain this change/transformation/whatever-it-is.

More accurate, I think, is the idea from Deleuze and Guattari of the "dividual." One is not an "individual," that which cannot be divided, but exactly a "dividual," a dividing organism. You turn into this, then into that, you grow this, you add that, you subtract that, constant change.

My seventh series transformation is EXACTLY that of the "dividual."

Now what's interesting about that if we turn to Eastern philosophy (and I admit up front that my Eastern philosophy is a big mix of the Sutras, Chogyam Trungpa, a cup of Bhagavad Gita via Paramahamsa, a dash of Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and some bits that I've gathered from David, Tim and Kino),

we can say that the sacrifice of parenting is bigger than I am; it's bigger than my life. That's why I can sacrifice day-in and day-out and never break the surface. I'll never crack the surface of this ocean again, ever. That's the ego rage, the ego pain. It knows this is a death sentence.

But LIFE is a death sentence, because mortality is the truth. Something always was going to go this way, be it illness, sudden car crash, bad relationship, whatever. Something was going to totally dash the ego world, and that's just how reality works.

So once that purely existential horror is done (and you can see me live in that horror from about October 2008 until April 2010, solid), things mellow out. Because there's no escape and no return, life becomes the dharma. One always knows to sacrifice, one always knows to tend the kid, one always knows the work never ends.

Is that not, in a strange way (especially strange for the ego), a weird COMFORT? Provided that my household remain alive and un-sick for the long term, I never have to worry about work contingency or self-realization again. In a way, I always wanted this, even as a teenager. "Why are things so confusing?" Well, now they're not. Things are nicely busy and wall-to-wall. Teach, write, grade, parent. Repeat. Try to sleep now and then.

Everything has become very regular. Oh sure, there's still day-to-day randomness and the urge to procrastinate and be distracted, and that happens, but the work itself provides the model and the mode. Days go like this: ABCDE. Regularity, the way the yoga practice is (or should be) regular. Now if parenting would just back off a LITTLE BIT so I could actually DO my regular yoga, I'd have, you know, nearly a system.

All of it is impermanent, of course, but parenting establishes stability and a question-less-ness, and hands the ego all of the questions. It's a nice double: I have no doubt now of what it is I need to do, but I've also never gone through such incredibly agonizing hell in order to get this.

And that's exactly what Chogyam Trungpa describes in 'The Hard Way' in _Cutting Through..._ and what he describes differently in _Myth of Freedom_. Forgetting ourselves is also a big part of the _Shambhala_ book. Toss in the Gita's "acting and giving up the fruits of the action" (how'd you like parenting summarized in ONE SENTENCE, eh?) and the Sutras defining "essence" as basically the "shining Self," the One, the Purusha, the witness beyond all creation, then reality becomes simply doing. It doesn't matter a damn "who we are" or "who we were" but rather just that we did things.

The Mysteries of Core Strength and Handstanding

2011-09-16T23:04:00.000-04:00

We've just had a one-night workshop with Brock and Krista Cahill, who are basically a gravity-defying core-strength duo.

Now, usually when you get a workshop in handstanding/core strength, you get some warmup exercises and then a progressive introduction to arm balances and/or inversions. This was not quite of that type: right off, we were doing jumps to handstand pike (legs straight) in sun salutations. Also, the handstand transition (to and from various things) was not part of a "set" of inversions; there was not even talk of forearm balancing or any headstand, not even a mention.

And yet it wasn't a workshop "on handstand" either, because the handstand was simply given as an inversion option, sort of a demonstration of core strength principles. Now, you can apply core strength to anything: jumping back, Navasana, headstand of any type, Bakasana, you name it. But here, we sort of applied it to everything: Navasana sit-ups, Bakasana to handstand, switching legs in handstand and coming down to Virabhadrasana I, side plank pushups (mean!), handstand entrances to various Koundinyasana (scissors in non-Sanskrit) arm balances, etc.

There was some "first listen, then do" style of presentation, but mostly it was very "jump in and swim!" which admittedly gave little room for fear. "Jump and float!" I mean, YOU DO before you think and then you don't have time to freak out. Effective teaching of such challenging transitions. I know I tried stuff that I only think about sometimes in practice or vinyasa classes.

How "core strength building" and Patrick get along:

We don't, really, not well. This is because most core-strength-building exercises aren't yoga postures, but (to my thinking, about which I will say more below) more like gym workout moves. Now immediately we run into trouble here, because plenty of Ashtanga vinyasa movements build immense core strength (or require it and then build it), like jumping back and/or through, doing any headstand, doing any arm balance (like Bakasana or Tittibhasana to say nothing of the 3rd series batch) and even doing forward folds (our friend Kino defines them as pulling in the abs to lengthen the spine).

Typical core-strength-builders that I saw tonight and which I've seen before include things like this:

a) Navasana sit-ups: come into Boat, lower not to the floor, come back up to Boat.
b) Rotated Navasana sit-ups: same, but send legs out right and arms out left (or vice versa) and do sit-ups. These things burn me out to nothingness in less than 20 seconds.
c) Plank push-ups or (harder) forearm plank push-ups. These are particularly challenging as you try to pull the belly in and ribs "down" and lift the thighs without lifting the hips. Using what the Anusara people call "muscular energy" or "grabbing the bone with the muscle."
d) Side plank push-ups. Again, lower but not to the floor, keeping the arm straight (even in forearm variation). I find these to be FEROCIOUSLY difficult.

There are others, but these are what I saw tonight. Let me add one, that's technically a vinyasa yoga entry to a pose, but requires massive core attention:

From Down-dog, swing the right leg back and then dip it forward, right knee trying to touch LEFT TRICEP. That's right, criss-cross. If you can land it (and I can't, I'm too long and apparently not strong enough), you can lean forward into a Koundinyasana arm balance. Rad move, but burned me out to total uselessness.

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So my relationship with core-strength-building, with explicit CSB moves, is that I don't like them first because I can't do them well (ego complaint) and second because they seem to me to be "gym moves" rather than "yoga moves" and I prefer the latter to the former (probably because in my youth I hated gym and all of its over-masculine expectations and sporty skill sets which immediately turned into evaluations of one's possession of masculinity or not--and yes, it was the 1980s).

But a lot of what we did tonight with Brock and Krista reminded me of time in that OTHER handstand junkie's room, one Troy Lucero the summer before last.

So it seems to be a question: am I going to acquire this skill set and BE DONE WITH IT or am I going to leave it until the NEXT time I'm in some handstand-intensive when I'll have to do all this questioning over again?

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Let me try (and fail, in advance I know this) to explain how I both seem to possess and to lack core strength.

I can hit ANY headstand, static. Seven deadlies or not, name it (well, with the exception of a hands-free headstand ala Dharma). I can do any 3rd series arm balance, from tripod, the way you're supposed to. I can put a foot behind my head (that takes some strength, my friends). I can jump back 40 times or more per practice if necessary. I can forearm stand with almost total certainty that I won't fall over. And so on. All of which is to say, I've been at ashtanga vinyasa for a while and it has granted me these skills. Yay me, or whatever.

BUT

I can't hold a rotated Navasana sit-up, I can't even hold it WITHOUT the sit-up movements, it's so hard. I can't reliably handstand without wondering if I'll fall over (even when I hit one and timber to chaturanga, I'm never SURE it'll work). Side plank sit-ups burn me down like paper in hot fire. That twisted entry to Koundinyasana had me panting for air in about four seconds.

Now, I don't have the precise anatomical knowledge to be able to say, I have THIS strength and I lack THAT strength. One way out of this is just to say that the strengths are specific: handstands build handstands, Navasana sit-ups build Navasana sit-ups, and jumpbacks build jumpbacks. Then you close the case and move on.

BUT

Navasana used to burn me out badly in the outer hips (the much-afflicted outer hips, right?). Side plank pushups do the same, and so does that twisted Koundinyasana move. Same strain, same place, same burnout to failure. This happened to the point that I couldn't do a bunch of standing pose vinyasa moves tonight, but had to do Sweeney Lion Sequence outer hip stretches (Prasarita Padottanasana twists, and such). I absolutely HAD to stretch those adductors and external rotators, because asking them for more strength was just not going to do, it just wasn't possible.

The handstand jumps we did, and the attempts to take a knee up in a straight-arm Bakasana (let me ramble a bit here: taking a knee off your arm in a BENT-arm Bakasana is about a THOUSAND times easier than taking one off in a STRAIGHT-arm Bakasana; if you can do straight-arm Bakasana, try this out and see), really got me right in the BACK of the shoulder, under the deltoid. This is exactly where I'd burn out trying to do handstand presses in TL's room (and it still happens when I try them in practice). Another point of apparent weakness, or at least, a point where more strength than I've currently got is requested.

Finally, it seems that my oblique abs want more work in order to do things like that Koundinyasana twist. Same in rotated Navasana sit-ups. The abs just WILL NOT pick me up once I sink down toward the floor, I just could NOT get back up.

Someone writing an anti-ashtanga polemic would now claim that the practice doesn't work these parts of the body, but I'm not in the least interested in going there.

I think that THESE are three muscular areas that I could work on if I wanted to have floaty handstand transitions. The quest is clear, if I'm interested in it. Do more pike jumps in sun salutations, and try for handstand exits in Bakasana: that covers the shoulder. Do rotated Navasana sit-ups outside of your practice, and do them to failure. That takes care of the abductors and the obliques.

But my question is DO I CARE ENOUGH TO GET THAT?

Floaty handstands are probably cool, but they're a YouTube video stunt. Does my practice need them? Does my ego need them? Do I care if I ever get them or not? Or do I just want this dumb wall to fall over< JUST BECAUSE IT'S THERE?

I don't have any doubt that I could acquire this skill, but I wonder if I actually want it in any way enough to actually work on it. What are the plusses and minuses?

Plus: cool movement, potentially useful strength elsewhere (Karandavasana?)
Minus: takes time, might not enjoy the process (but maybe I might, too)

I can't tell if I should go out of my way to acquire this or not. Right now my practice (when I can do it) is largely about breathing: I'm gonna breathe, I'm gonna do some poses, I don't care how big the Updogs are because I don't care how big Kapo is (it'll come or it won't) and while I care whether or not I can still dropback and standup (I can), really I just want to so some focused breathing and movement.

Seventh series really killed my ego (and I didn't enjoy it) where asana achievements are concerned. Sure, I have a big skill set, but I don't do anything beyond 2nd series and I don't even do more than about half of that. But at the same time, seventh series opened my curiosity to sort of "living in the moment" when I'm opening cat food or playing with the boy and the train set or even walking down the street. So I'm not really in a "ooh ahh" state of worship of Jedi handstand transitions, but I'm also open in a sort of "hey, that might be cool" way to new stuff.

I think that, as the Gita puts it, my indifference to the achievement might be a good mode in which to pursue it.

One More Time on Western Yoga (followup)

2011-09-01T13:55:00.001-04:00

Daniel Ingram, when writing about Western meditation teachers who have "gone wrong," says essentially that these people become teachers because they really need to remain students, and that they wind up sort of sadly trapped in the inability to attain the very mysticism (or whatever it is one seeks) they claim to teach.

I'm seeing this now in the (local) Western yoga scene, and it explains things I was complaining about a couple posts ago: "combination of all of these styles" and so forth. In particular let's return to the commenter on the Norman Blair piece, who really set me off with words about ashtanga being dogmatic and so on. Some followup made its way to my eyes, and I think now that said commenter is dedicated as much (or more) to cardio and weight rooms as yoga, which means that all of the talk about "combination of styles" and "multiple traditions" is really just a kind of surfing, like research. "Oh, there are numerous pranayamas, they go like this."

There's a certain sadness to that, because it probably even extends to sacred texts (although one hopes it doesn't): and so you get blog posts on things like "non-dualism refers to not saying always or never, to being able to change your mind" (I'm not, for the record, making that up; that riffs on a real live blog post I saw this week).

And from this, we can feel the "general affirmation" mode of Western yoga, which is so omnipresent that I think I don't have to explain it. When David Swenson talks about being a yoga teacher, he says, "Don't be this guy, who says, 'welcome....to.....yoga!' like it's from another planet, you know?"

I think it's about a lack of intimacy with the practice, as when Sadie Nardini posts on Facebook that one should deepen the crease in the back hip of Warrior 2 and gets comments like "I love her, she knows so much!" Dude, hell, I WOULD TELL YOU THAT in my own damn class, but see the difference? If a celebrity you've workshopped with tells you that from a great electronic distance, it's like she cares about you, not like she's giving all-purpose good information to everyone over the widest spectrum. This inside-out intimacy is everywhere in yoga, and thus all the pithy quotes from everyone from Tolle to Kino to Mother Teresa and so on.

As a now-private blog once said, regarding people being afraid of the ashtanga, "Maybe they're afraid that it will ACTUALLY CHANGE THEM." It's like any intimacy with the self: an experience that REALLY TAKES YOU THERE will take you into the dark right after it opens the door. That's what awaits first. When Owl recently posted about people who are FINALLY over the darkness and the conquest and the conflict, she's talking about well-advanced practitioners, who truly have gotten past the darkness that awaits on the other side of the door marked, "SELF."

So I think that a lot of Western yoga invites us to go there "if we want to" but none of it really pushes us into that door. I can only speak for ashtanga practice, because it's what I do: the ashtanga will push you into the dark, but doing the practice is the only light, the only way to see, unless you have some other kind of life event or breakthrough. That said, seventh series taught me a thousand times more about darkness and transformation than ashtanga vinyasa yoga has.

When we refuse the intimacy of the dark (and is THAT perhaps in part what a Cormac McCarthy book is about? Or Maggie Nelson's recent ideas on the "art of cruelty"?), we refuse a certain intimacy with the self, and I think that that refusal colors a lot of Western yoga. Please note that there are teachers of every stripe who have this from either practice or life or tendency, and so they will maybe be able to tap it when teaching, and it will provide a real depth even if that depth does not come out in Sanskrit names or Sutras quotes or any typical, easy-to-spot "yoga" vocabulary.

Sure, you want to be affirmative and promise people happiness, smiles and joy, and so you can teach easy entrances to advanced postures, you know? But like any real depth in life, any REAL acquisition of intimacy with self or with universe (and the body is the tool we're given for cosmic understanding, no?), darkness lies just inside the door. Many times in looking through yoga blogs you can see practitioners hinting at this, something about self-discovery, and many times (certainly in my own writing and for almost all of my writing pre-divorce in 2002) you can also see the practitioner fall back to pithy quotes or rationality rather than walking in.

So one can hardly blame a given Western yogi for not having confronted the dark (or for not having processed the encounter as part of life), or for teaching in a way that is marked by shallowness of not having done that encounter to the bottom. I think that if you've had that encounter, you can tell instantly when a yoga teacher has and has not been there, or has been there and refused it.

For me there's something energetic, in presentation, in adjusting, that is marked, changed forever, by the encounter with the dark, this intimacy with the cosmic which is the self which is the cosmic. Type of yoga practice guarantees nothing: you can't just cross out vinyasa or choose ashtanga, you have to measure the teacher and yourself. It's like any other relationship, you can't just stereotype redheads or decide that skinny people are (whatever, any quality you want).

No amount of reading can create that intimacy if it's not there; neither (for my money) can bending, until that bending cracks open some emotional container (in a hip, a shoulder, et cetera) and that emotional breakout gets reckoned with, surrendered to, until the ride is taken.

Our problem, and not just on the yoga mat, might just be that we're not intimate enough with ourselves (personally, nationally, at work, in classrooms of all sorts, on every level).

Three Good Practice Days.

2011-08-22T18:03:00.000-04:00

Now, my right glutes and psoas haven't stopped being achy at all but nonetheless practice has been good (if uneven) for the last three days.

Saturday I went to Carol's ashtanga class, where I have been Mysoring a full Primary for months, and there were about fourteen (!!!) people in there, which is crazytalk. The week before, when I subbed it, there were six.

Anyway, it was great. Yeah, still tight in forward folds and twists, but I was able to bind both Mari C's, one Mari D, I was able to do Navasana with straight legs, I did face-to-floor Bhujapidasana and simply touched feet in Supta Kurmasana, but really, everything was great. Three big pressup backbends and three dropbacks with standup-to-knees. I completely did not expect such a practice, but like I said last post, that's what happens sometimes when you never know what to expect.

Sunday, I usually don't get to practice, because there's family stuff all day and my class happens during child nap, so there's no free time, and that's fine, but I leap at a chance to practice if one shows up. J took C out all morning (I think because I had him all day Friday, which rocked; we went to the children's museum and the zoo, with a nap and lunch in between) and so I practiced standing, but then decided, no wait, Intermediate today. Just to try it out. I had to modify a lot (hi Pasasana, hi Kapo) and quit after a hard-to-breathe Kapo hang, but the backbends were still good. I got one standup out of three dropbacks and was pretty psyched. There was good humidity in the house and plenty of sweat; reminiscent of the days when I could get high practice days in the summer.

Today I began teaching classes at the art school again, but I teach at noon or later on MWF so there's room for morning practice (knock on wood that I don't have to do meetings and such at that time, right?). I drove C to the childcare center right next to school (1/4 mile away) and then parked, got in, set up, checked some day readiness email, and then went out to the neighboring park and practiced. Hip was tighter, for longer; standing twists hard, Prasaritas a big stretch for the hip, half-lotuses ok but difficult for the left leg (odd repercussion of the right tightness).

So I wasn't in love with Primary, but at Mari A began doing five-breath updogs, which really helped get into the psoas before the glute tightness snugs it up with tension and then I can't vinyasa or do Bhuja or any of that. Janu A B and C were great release, and I did up to Mari D which also was great release, as if the sitting down into it eased the tension. I wen to Pasasana at that point, because Navasana just irritates my psoas when it's worked up to begin with.

And Pasasana was wonderful. I sat down into it and the glutes practically said "ahhhhh"; it wasn't COMFORTABLE really, but it was great feeling tension ooze out of the musculature. Backbends, from Shalabhasana all the way to dropbacks, were fantastic; just what the asana doctor ordered.

I went up through Ardha Matsyendrasana and was able not only to bind it (which often runs away when my glutes go crazy) but to get that same tension release in it. I LOVE Intermediates like that; sure, the poses are hard, but even KAPO releases tension from my psoas and glutes and I come out of the series feeling like a million bucks. I went through phases in 2010, practicing at the northside YMCA; I'd do Intermediate and the outer hips would snug up from all the backbending, then I'd try Primary-and-some-Intermediate, but that made the psoas all antsy, and then I'd go back to Intermediate and it'd be marvelous again.

Perhaps that's the seesaw, but I know better than to prescribe that. This practice seesaws wildly, along with seventh series, and seventh series is not as easy as "do this sequence, then that one, then the first again." It's not nearly that binary, and really, neither is life.

So I'll feel out each practice and do whatever it is that I think the bodymind would find most beneficial (that sounds like vinyasa rhetoric, but I mean ashtanga sequences only: maybe I do Primary up to whatever point, and then some Intermediate, and so on). The key to doing regular practice with this right hip is to respect whatever shape it's in: some days more backbends, some days less practice, some days slower or faster, et cetera.

Breathing Instead of Advancing.

2011-08-16T16:58:00.000-04:00

The last two days practice have been slow and modified. One to Laghuvajrasana, another just Primary. Many many things are backed up for comfort: Mari A with barely any forward fold, Mari B and/or D unbound, even Mari C unbound, Utthita Hasta with no forward fold, Janu C with hands barely to foot, all half-lotuses difficult but bound, Garbha Pindasana with arms wrapped around rather than through, Supta Kurmasana unbound in both places, and so on. Often only the third backbend has arms straight. No dropping back. And so on.

This is all just random, inexplicable yet factual tightness in both hips, particularly in the glutes. Twists are impossible in full expression, many standing poses threaten to crack open the white-electric pain-release of the glutes, and I want to practice, not to stop after the trauma, so I back poses off. Lunges not 90 degrees in Vira 1, for example. Prayer hands, not hand to floor, in Parivrtta Parsvakonasana.

I know this is coming from about the second sun salutation and I just decide that I'm going to modify for survival, not crank for release.

It's exactly like I told David and Shelley: "I used to have an Intermediate practice, and some days I still do, but right now it's modified and often painful some-of-Primary; I do what I can."

*********************************

There are huge differences between growing an ashtanga practice the first time, and returning to it the second time through injury or tension or whatever.

When you're growing (I'll use myself as an example), it's easy for the mindset to be "I'm gonna git you sucka!" You slightly overstrain but that's ok, you're gonna GET that pose, wrangle it down like a wild horse.

When you're returning to a practice, there's none of that at all. You listen, you decide that THAT's enough, whatever it is, and then you make as much of the shape as you can and you take a big happy five breaths. Ahh.

Practice can be dramatic when you're growing it, because maybe TODAY is the day you get that thing, reach that foot, bind those fingers, whatever. MAYBE TODAY! Whoo!

Practice can also be dramatic when you're returning, because in my case, I have no damn idea how a practice is going to go, until I step on the mat and make a few movements. I figure that if I keep practicing, ALL OF A SUDDEN my bound twists will come back (or not), and I have no idea at all when or if that'll happen. Every day is random and a little bit suspenseful, because this isn't an injury that will gradually heal or gradually worsen, it's part of an energetic rollercoaster called seventh series. Tomorrow could be full energy coming, or more crippled than today, and I'll have absolutely no way of even guessing, until I get on and move.

So it's kind of exciting. I don't have the SLIGHTEST idea what's going to happen on the mat until it's present and experiential. Talk about practical wisdom.

One is tempted to be cautious, but expectations can keep you from listening to the future when it becomes present, so I even abandon cautiousness until the body says, "Yes we should be cautious today." Maybe it'll say that and maybe it won't.

So it becomes largely a breathing exercise, and in today's Primary I was thinking, "all series can happen like this." Sure, not at the start, you're going to pant in those Intermediate backbends and Advanced arm balances, but still, it can all be like this.

The Simha Krama was great for cranking up my tapas for practice, but it didn't do anything to open my hips a great deal. I mean, when I'm in THAT SEQUENCE, I can prep a Kapo and I can drop back and what not, but when I'm in Primary series, I can't get a full forward fold and my backbends aren't nearly as big. This, again, is something that I'm sure has turned someone off ashtanga in the past. "But my other sequence lets me have bigger poses," yeah, it does, if what you want is BIGGER POSES.

Grimmly's video recently of Chuck Miller at Babylon Yoga is very informative: when CM is talking the woman through bridge-to-upward-bow, he says "Yeah we want to get the arms straight, get the next series, whatever, but what is that? It's nothing, it's empty."

And we all say that, right? "I don't care if I get whatever" but we know that we do. I've never stopped wanting to touch my damn heels in Kapotasana, as much as the pose seems OBVIOUSLY impossible, but in 2010 when I was getting halfway up the foot through rigorous practice, it seemed totally possible. This is a Bhagavad Gita moment: sure, crank into it, go get that posture, but then you give it up, "God doing." I see my own students do this: I want that, I want that; OH OK. Yeah when you get it, the skies do not open. Try to give up the wanter when the goal arrives.

On Practicing the Ashtanga, Micro-Rant, and Teaching the Ashtanga.

2011-08-04T15:13:00.000-04:00

Recent practices have all been junk, every single one of them.

There's a lot of knottedness (physically, emotionally; it's rarely, I think, just one of those, but both together, almost always) in the right hip, psoas and glutes, and I simply cannot get through standing sequence without some painful/sad release in that area, and as I've said before, I stop practicing when that happens unless I feel truly masochistic and want more of the same in half-lotus postures and twists.

The immmediate question is, why not practice something else? Take a vinyasa day, or take a long hold in pigeon or something. I do actually plan to do Sweeney's Simha Krama tomorrow, because historically it's the only thing that has ever cracked open the right hip tension to the point of release rather than defensiveness the next day.

So I still consider my practice to be ashtanga, even though it's not Primary, not Intermediate, but simply corresponds to a set of directions given traditionally: do this, then that, hold for this long, look here and there, breathe in this way. And that's really it. I do short little practices, stopping when I consider it necessary, and that's my ashtanga for now.

My asana practice has an "excretory" quality about it; the purpose of it seems to be a type of emotional purgation of friction.

******************************

Far and away the most popular post I've ever written in here is "Actual differences between ashtanga and vinyasa" which I think I put down in 2007 or 2008. It gets MASSIVE quantities of hits and far outnumbers anything else I've written. Many people apparently use "difference between ashtanga and vinyasa" as a search term, and end up here. Cool.

I like that post in particular, because I've written on that topic a few times, and that one post is my least snarky, least egoic take on the thing. I use a vinyasa class that I enjoy, as a counterexample to ashtanga and I simply compare them.

Let's have a micro-rant about the yoga scene in state again: sometimes I hunt around studios' websites seeing what's what and where's where, and also teacher bios, particularly if they say "ashtanga," and there is still a bunch of something I have historically not liked, and it's not shocking that it's still here:

Teachers will put the word "ashtanga" in a class description or a biography and perhaps (but not always) put a senior teacher down as an inspiration, but with no discussion of length of time with said teacher or duration of practice or regularity or with what (if any) understanding of the system. What am I to take from this? It's "Teacher Q has some ashtanga experience with Senior Teacher Z." Huh? Or "Teacher Q became an ashtangi and then discovered Yoga B by teacher X and now teaches a blend of all of these styles." Wha?

The phrase "blend of all of these styles" just irks me to pieces, and I should probably get over it but I simply cannot yet do that. Ok, in some cases, like ashtanga teachers who have a lot of Iyengar background, yes, I see how that's coherent (hi Nicki Doane, Richard Freeman, et al.). But the too-common yoga teachers (and this is related to stuff posted recently by Grimmly and Nobel) who seem to be random pastiches of who-knows-how-much-or-little of who-knows-how-many-types of physical movement (and you can add ANYTHING in here: kundalini, Sivananda, dance backgrounds, gymnastics, martial arts, Anusara, the always-ambiguous "hatha yoga", name-check vinyasas by, say, the Kests or Seane Corn or Shiva Rea or Moses or KBudig or any amount of ashtanga, often without but sometimes with a name check), those people just make me completely nuts.

Now, true, if you're working with a Kest-influenced teacher, you're probably getting powerish ashtanga-ish vinyasa with all the lotuses and headstands cut out. If you're working with a Corn-influenced teacher, you're getting vinyasa yoga with an occasional hard arm balance and a loud emphasis on ethics and activism. If you're working with a Rea-influenced teacher, you're getting flow and fluid and dancey moves in a vinyasa setting. Some of this, we know. But when you're looking at a class by someone who "teaches a blend of all of these styles," who the fuck knows what you're getting. Is it going to be three ashtanga sun salutes and then an Iyengar triangle and then an Anusara grab-the-foot-of-your-neighbor standing hand to big toe, maybe with some Hooping thrown in, and then a little Budokon movement and then some ballet-inspired jumps and then a vinyasa down to side crane and then some Kundalini breath of fire and then rest? Get it?

Your yoga should not be a smorgasbord. How the hell are you supposed to truly understand what any given practice is doing to you if you do sixteen different things per class and don't even do THOSE consistently?

This rant is now no longer micro-. You expected this.

Anyway: basically I'm irked by "teaches a blend of all styles" and I'm REALLY irked by teachers whose bios say crazy things like, "She has Yoga Alliance certification at the 200 hour level." HUH? By WHOM? In WHAT? And make no mistake, there are bios out there that say that, as if Yoga Alliance itself, a licensing body, somehow guarantees that you can teach someone something.

Tangentially, I'm also irked by "we will sample a wide variety from different traditions." SIGH. Imagine for a minute that you're teaching paleontology. If you try to use "different tools" in paleontology, you'll get less effective results, because paleontology has specific tools that are used and which serve it specifically as a discipline. "Wide variety...traditions" sounds good when you're taking a survey course in ethics or philosophical questions about the self, but it is no way to approach something that has tools and requires skill; all you'll learn with that approach to tool use is that different cultures have different tools for different jobs. Big freaking deal.

To become SKILLED in the actual use of a tool, you have to go DEEP. By serving up our yoga as a set of alien cultural practices from the great long-ago, we make our practice into theory; we alienate ourselves from it. By refusing to belong and to surrender some of ourselves to specific skill acquisition in a systemic way, we refuse to understand. There can be no systemic understanding (or critique) without this depth. So don't damn tell me you're going to offer a "blend of all styles" or that you're going to "sample many meditation techniques" or "focus on a wide variety of pranayamas." FIND OUT why some pranayamas are taught and in what order, and why others aren't, or FIND OUT why some traditions hold Triangle for fifteen minutes and some for forty seconds, or FIND OUT why some traditions do inversions first and some inversions last, and so on.

**********************************

I was a teacher before I was a yoga teacher.

I started teaching college-level classes as an assistant instructor in graduate school in 1996. I was 26; my oldest student in that class was 23. The small age differential made me nervous and the 20-of-them-to-1-of-me freaked me out. The next semester, I went for more confrontational material because I somehow figured that I could achieve mastery by making the confrontational into the educationally interesting. I still do that today.

I taught as a grad student all the way to 2005, before they stopped funding me, and there was slight overlap with my art school teaching career which began in summer 2004. Summers at first, then a fellowship (2007), then a visiting position (2008-9, three semesters worth), then a Lecturer position which is year-to-year but technically permanent (they've never let one go yet). I took a pedagogy course in 2000, and I almost always had carte blanche (free reign) as to course content, in large part because my department was using me as cheap labor to avoid having to hire a "real" professor who would have cost real money. I designed most of my own courses and syllabi, and I've exclusively designed my own stuff since 2000, with only two incidents of "here's a past syllabus" in those 11 years.

So I've been formally teaching for fifteen years.

I took up the yoga in summer 2004, and three years later, teacher training with the It's Yoga gang who were, in 2007, in San Francisco (now they're in Sonoma). As my skill set improved (and 2006-7 was when I got all of Primary locked down pretty well), I'd sub an occasional class for my own teacher and, in a way that's pretty common nationally, I went to TT because I had the skill set down. Very "those who can, teach."

As you know, in SF I did Mysore-style in the morning and then TT all afternoon, sometimes 3 classes a day. My adjustments are heavily influenced by the Mysore room, and barely influenced by what I learned in TT (two fingers only; suggestive adjustments; screw that).

I give Sanskrit names because ashtanga does; I stay on-sequence because ashtanga does; I try to get students to work the "core postures" before moving on, because ashtanga does; I do what ashtanga does, because it's what I practice and it's what I teach (I loosen up when I teach the Rocket, but actually my ashtanga students sometimes tell me they wish I'd count, so they could figure the breath pace better...hehe!).

My Sunday room, which is my more traditional room, is what I call a "Led/Mysore blend." New students show up, who don't necessarily know the sequence and who are sometimes a bit freaked by the "go on, do your practice" approach of Mysore-style, so I lead, I offer openly to lead. However, I have 4-6 regular students who either have cheat sheets or have the series (or series, plural) memorized and who Mysore-style it up very happily. I usually lead the It's Yoga half-Primary which is 40 poses in 60 minutes. We add on maybe Bhujapidasana or work vinyasa or work headstand or something, so it's 75-90 minutes. My regular time slot is 12:30-2:00.

Students come, as any teacher of anything will tell you, in three thousand varieties. I'm thinking of specific people in my room here: there are the stiff but determined, strong, guys, who love the stuff and will do their damn best with anything I call out. There is the insecure woman who has a much stronger practice than she thinks she does. I just have to give her directions and try to resist developing any meta-awareness on her part, because a wall of doubt separates her from any such meta-awareness. Leave it alone and let her become strong and fluid, let her reality teach her what's true.

There is the powerhouse lady with the insane practice, but who does not surrender except in moments where her guard seems unconsciously to drop; only in those moments can I slip in some advice or wisdom about a posture or breathing or anything. Other than that, she is a wall of steel, with all of the strength and weakness implied there.

So many students balance strength and doubt; if it doesn't LOOK right, it needs work. NO! Forgo that! How does it feel? You get it in the inner thigh, or the spinal flexors, or the hip flexors, or whatever, right? That's enough.

There is the lady who wants to do this a pose-at-a-time, who actively surrenders to the rules of my room, which means I have to make the rules of the room into a net (or a tightrope) for her, and I do. My adjustments, like magic, become more classical for her, my recommendations also. It is the closest to a proof that I've ever had, that the system works, that the system is like a PRESENCE in my room. I have such great, great affection for her practice, the mode of her practice. I never have to sell her on anything or be funny on purpose to keep people coming back; this is true of other people in the room as well, but it is an honor to teach this one.

There is the guy who will sink into breath and concentration, and wants this in a way that interferes with his getting it. The real discovery, the embodied reality, is still a shadow, and I feel like always encouraging, "Yes, follow your shadow; don't make your shadow follow you."

I occasionally say "bad lady" or "bad man" and I tell them what that is, and how it was used, and from whom I heard these stories. I can read faces, read energy in bodies (somewhat; that's a hard skill, one you keep gaining), can tell people when to breathe more, exhale the fear, or whatever's necessary. Once in a while a person comes in and simply doesn't like it, this isn't the practice for them, and I offer support and ways to make things easier without making it seem that they can't "do the poses." I offer "visualizing the vinyasa," which is Tim's way of putting "breathe but don't move, skip it."

People find my room to be "more advanced" than Carol's room, but that's an illusion, I think the differences are tonal. Carol is all generosity and praise, but she can work you as hard as I can. I am ironic funniness and straight directions and tangents and stories, and I like to challenge students. If I think someone can do something, I ask if they do it or have tried it and then I introduce it, particularly if it's spooky or frustrating(inversion, arm balance, vinyasa); I like to get into a challenge, break a preconception. In this respect, my room is "harder" than Carol's; her magic power is to talk people into ease, surrender, trust, and thence to the posture. I am much more, "you do; trust is stronger than fear; come up." Walk! Jump! Head down! Chaturanga! Lift! Whatever command is necessary to turn reluctance, doubt, fear, anxiety, into a more affirmative avatar. That also doesn't work with everyone; with people that are truly confused or shy, I'll explain how the pose works, modifications for it, make it a little discussion. I find that I also teach art history in exactly this way (well, without the hands-on adjustments, right?).

It's very difficult to lead-and-demonstrate while trying to also throw an eye over to the Mysore-style half of the room. But that skill also improves as I practice it. I tell them that my practices are very light these days; I talk about my kid, I talk about parenting and energy. People can forget that the yoga is part of life, you get in those little isolated rooms for seventyfive minutes and it's an escape but you also escape FROM your practice when you leave. No, integrate it, make it one thing.

I see the led students watching me putting someone in Marichyasana D or Vasisthasana or Kapotasana or taking a student by the hips up to handstand and then to dropover and stand up. I think that this is both inspiring (because my teaching mode in those circumstances is physical and verbal comamnd, especially if I'm basically pulling/pushing someone into a pose) and kind of terrifying for them, but it shows an engagement with the room, a sort of physicality that makes the room much less like television and much more like reality. Because you can (and I've seen classes like this) teach up front and just demonstrate and not touch anybody and then it's like yoga television. A Mysore-style room is a ritual space: it is senses and energy and sweat, vision and breathing and weird intimacy (and like all weird intimacy, you have to both engage and guard yourself).

Finally, I'm doing a classical Led Primary on the 26th of August (that's Friday night) at 6 pm. Sanskrit counting, chants, and we're also going to do the four chants Swenson gave in Austin and at least his "thumbers and breathers" exercise, and perhaps the first official ashtanga pranayama if the group is willing and able. You're all invited.

Confluence, Another Ashtanga Interrogation, Impermanence

2011-07-19T12:37:00.000-04:00

Now THERE is a title to live up to.

I've registered for the Ashtanga Yoga Confluence, organized through Tim's place and featuring Tim, Nancy, Eddie, David and Richard. I think the chitchat and storytelling will exceed the coolness of the Mysore classes (in my experience, the more time you have with a teacher, the better the Mysore situation, so senior teachers I've never studied with, isn't really turning me on for Mysore classes, but maybe I'll be happily mistaken). March 1-4, San Diego, registration currently open.

This:

http://freeliz.com/2011/06/04/the-box-an-ashtanga-story-by-norman-blair/

seems to have been making the rounds of late, although I only saw it posted by a friend on our humble Ashtanga Yoga Indiana group on Facebook (you all are welcome to join over there if you want, we take everyone).

Written fairly well without polemic, it's a respectable piece, but it asks, as I see it, some of the SAME OLD QUESTIONS. Can one achieve enlightenment by bending the body, without being caught in attractiveness/personal power/fame and glory/etc etc etc? Or this oldie goldie: Doesn't ashtanga hurt people? Or this one: Aren't ashtanga teachers all dogmatic proto-fascists?

Yes, it doesn't ask any of that as polemically as I just did, and it does offer some mediation (ashtanga helping to heal), but it doesn't really answer these questions in what I see as the easy way to do so.

Why not talk about the other 7 limbs of the 8-limb path? Sure, they get a mention, but most of this is complaints about asana, dogmatic students/teachers, and overenthusiastic adjustments ("one size fits all").

Still, I can't get myself to hate on the piece too much because it is written with a spirit of true inquisitiveness and I'm almost sad for its author, that he's apparently surrounded with such goal-seeking and physicality-for-physicality's sake.

A comment left on the original post in our Facebook group gave me a bit more ire, the essence of it being "yes, my problem with ashtanga is that it IS dogmatic and I wish you had written less passively, because since I am opposed to all dogma, I've chosen the freer vinyasa practice instead."

That comment, itself, is total and utter nonsense topped off with a bit of self-congratulatory arrogance and mediated only by what I hope is the misfortune to have run into a truly ignorant and militant teacher, because such people do us all a disservice.

In any case.

Let me offer my recent practices (and my recent life) in total and overwhelming counterpoint to that commenter's (and that article's) sense of ashtanga as dogmatic and injury-producing.

Today's practice was up to the first side of Virabhadrasana B. Yes, Warrior 2. Now I know what you're thinkin': hey Patrick, um weren't you doing like 2/3 of Intermediate three weeks ago? What gives? The answer, my friends, is that I'm tied up in the right glutes with grief and tension, and when it breaks out, I can't hold the breath and there are tears and catharsis. I don't practice beyond the point when that happens.

But I do continue my pranayama practice (first retention only, so far, until I feel that it becomes easy) and part of what I realize about that, is that now "the yoga" isn't just poses, because my "practice" is more than just doing poses and sweating and then taking rest. By doing a pranayama practice AND an asana practice, "yoga" no longer means just "poses." And this expansion turns to life too, since my life has so profoundly invaded my pose practice. Nothing is private, isolated, kept away. Such broadening helps me never to injure myself because I would have to injure my whole life; there is no line between an asana and everything else that I do. Anger at my kid or my partner shows up in my glutes and my asana practice; am I seriously going to overcrank a knee or a shoulder, then? I think not.

I haven't been able to figure out "what my practice is" since 2007, when I was already doing hunks of Intermediate, but not in the Mysore room. Even when I could stand up from a backbend two years later, I couldn't Kapo to heels and some teachers (MS) said it mattered and some teachers (DS) said it didn't. What to do, what to do, what to do. I sure didn't become dogmatic, because even when I tried that, it just made everything cloudier. Sure, my Kapo improved when I stopped at Kapo for a while, but that retained when I moved up to finishing at Dwi Pada or even doing more of the series than that, but then when I was overtaken by my life (which happens, and you give way to it or else), I kept practicing but couldn't get as far as I'd gotten. What to do? Become dogmatic? How? By not feeding my kid, by not going on vacation, by not spending time with the partner hoping to resurrect the relationship? What level of sacrifice for asana would have been APPROPRIATE? Life is, itself, anti-dogmatic.

People who find ashtanga yoga to be dogmatic aren't busy enough with living. Same with people who find ashtanga yoga to be boring.

I don't even call myself an ashtangi anymore unless I'm having shallow yoga conversation with someone and even then I'll say I practice ashtanga (hey now, going up to Vira B is ashtanga, you don't need to be doing half of 3rd series to say you practice, you dig?).

All of my past identities are past identities. I feel like waving off the whole statement "I am." One thing people say about parenting when they are old parents is, "They grow up so fast." Not-yet parents or new parents go on and on and endlessly on about how much love there is and such and how it's a big identity achievement and how it "completes them" but old parents know the truth: "it goes by so fast." Impermanence. It doesn't matter "who it makes you into" or anything like that. It matters that you do it because then you'll someday have done it, have done everything that you've done, and it'll be gone.

I give up identities left and right now, even as my ego more and more desperately grasps for anything, but life itself denies this. Denies dogmatism and grasping. You can grasp, but those glutes will deny you. No, no second for you today. No, no backbends for you today. Too much life. Better to just let go and do the pranayama and look within as you try to pull up the moola bandha. Let go, because you can't keep anything you catch anyway. Life is catch and release. And life releases you and tosses you back in the pond, too.

It is real and truly difficult to live with impermanence, because so much of "I" is based in denying that fact. I can tell there's a happiness and a liberation (not moksha itself, but A liberation) to be had in living in this, but I can't quite "get it" can't grok it, yet.

So I'm going to listen to some Coltrane and make a chocolate Guinness cake instead. Hah!

"Food Matters" and Consistency in the Practice

2011-07-07T15:12:00.000-04:00

I've decided--after posts on blogs and FB by Karen and Linda (whom you blogreaders know, I bet), to check out the various "food" movies. A short list would include "Food Matters," "Food Inc" and "Earthlings" (yes, I've been warned). There are others. I find that Googling "vegan documentaries" gives a good list.

Now, I'm not vegan and I'm not interested in becoming some slow-foods or raw-foods or whichever else kind of propagandist. But after cutting caffeine in Austin (back on it now, a little morning tea) and reading about the Spam factory in Minnesota where pig brains caused (apparently) autoimmune disease of immigrant workers' nervous systems, and from almost ten years of knowing a vegetarian who was raised by anti-factory-farming people, it's sort of hit a critical mass, and therefore the filmfest.

I know food creates heated argument; I'm really and truly not after that here. "Food Matters": 2008 documentary, lots of talking heads, basically arguing that health can be created, and doesn't need to be medically treated. Vitamins, lifestyle choices, raw food, vegetarianism, etc. The provocative bits are these:
*medical journals are sponsored by drug companies and won't archive mags that talk about nutrition
*cancer can be treated with megadoses of Vitamin C
*health can be managed by individuals (the health care system is broken)

It has a conspiracy theory flavor which is mitigated only by arguing that the health care industry and/or medical doctors *aren't trained* in nutrition and nutritional therapy, but still, "Food Matters" comes off a bit conspiratorial, as if medical institutions are taking money over "real" cures (if we believe that high-dose vitamins can do this). It is nonetheless an argument I keep thinking about.

On cancer: the provocative quote is "change the internal environment that gives rise to the cancer." I liked that. But again the advice is high-dose vitamins and "superfoods" that can be eaten raw (spirulina, et al.) because "cooked food causes an immune system reaction" (that, I found a bit suspicious, but ok). "Food Matters" argues that chemotherapy and radiation are basically carcinogenic. They change cells, kill cells, in a way that is, essentially, toxic. The documentary recommends putting patients on a raw-food, high-fiber diet with high vitamin dosage and does show some compelling before-and-afters of such treatment being effective.

This makes me think of my father's case: an early radiation burn in the treatment of his colon cancer created apparently uncontrollable diarrhea and he had to be put on IV nutrition for weeks. Progressive weakness came with the radiation and the liquid nutrition and long-story-short by the time it was over, he wasn't strong enough to fend off opportunistic pneumonia. Would empowering nutrition--healthful food--have changed this? He wasn't a guy to like fiber or eat many veggies and certainly not to take a multivitamin or that sort of thing. Maybe on a personal level it would never have worked. Still, it sure looks like it would have been a good idea, decades earlier.

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Where does consistency in the practice come from? Regularity, not overshooting for the hard pose, breath and bandhas?

Predictably, I had uneven practice with David and Shelley because I was cranking a lot of grief out of my glutes and hips, where emotional stuff tends to sink anyway. Wednesday and Thursday were the best practice days of both weeks.

But if you read around here, you'll see that I've had spotty practice whenever something emotionally intense happens, and that's been really on-and-off since 2007. Debt, relationship issues, childcare, child sleep insanity, dissertation, all that stuff. But I still have deep practice grooves, followed by shallow spotty ones.

Consistency, I think, relates to these things, it's not just marching through no matter what else you've got going on.

Yesterday I did a difficult Intermediate through Bharadvajasana (weird place to stop, perhaps, but Ardha Matsyendrasana was too much in the glutes) and had challenging backbends as well. Today I did up to Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana (figured I'd add it back in) and the side-swing work in the glutes was so much that I couldn't do it, and even in Pasasana, felt vomitously ill in the glutes and outer hips. So that was that. BUT I had much more brilliant backbends. What the hell?

I think that consistent practice comes from feeling these places out as they start to give signals. "Ahhh it's going to be a tight glutes day, feel that electricity over there" even in sun salutations. I know I can do this, I've done it dozens of times, but I want to get the whole practice in, so I reluctantly modify and then I get the white-shock treatment in the hips and somehow I pretend that's suprising.

This is living in the ego, that wants to "get the pose." And it makes practice hard and then the next day it's not something I look forward to unless I'm in an edge-play state of mind for weeks (which does happen) and then it's ok but only because I know that THAT's going to be my consistent practice. In March-April 2010 I was cranking as hard as I could into Kapo A and B and I got to straight arms and saw my feet and so on. The first adjustment in Kapo, the first Wednesday, with D and S, I got that deep, but I never got there again in the two weeks.

If I try to do that now--with things arranged as they are, childcare, relationship, parent grief--I think I'd probably break something. This is fine. The practice flexes; I'm pretty sure that consistency comes with MODIFYING WHERE NECESSARY (yes ego, you're going to have to surrender, again, a little more, sorry) to maintain the given practice or number of poses or whatever.

I called my practice "Intermediate to Karandavasana" but I haven't even gotten to Krounchasana in two practices this week. If it's consistency that I value (and some days it is and some it isn't, but my ego cries loudly if I don't do "all of practice" which is also something I don't necessarily need to obey every day), then I'm going to have to chill out some poses when/as they need it.

Some days there are suprises: poses are easier late in practice (hi backbends) when I've chilled out earlier. But some days if I slow down and take care (hi Marichyasanas) I can't re-pick-up the energy. These too, these sort of waves in the practice energy, can be sensed, can be known about. Then consistency can be built on the height or shallowness of the wave.

And suddenly this takes on a very Sutras flavor: self-knowledge, focus, not confusing oneself with THAT pose or IF you did that sequence. Abandon achievement. The practice of yoga asana becomes suspiciously like life, with its ambiguity and its unknownness (and yet it can be known, a bit...).

What these inconsistent practices have provided (and particularly in the Austin room) is the idea that I NEVER KNOW what I'm going to do on the mat. Oh, I have a plan, I have a sequence, but who knows when/if I'll have to modify what, or what pose will prove impossible, or what pose will suddenly show up. But as I practice, I will know. Feeling and moving provides the knowledge because IT IS the experience.

And while I see how that would have been frustrating even at the start of this year (because I like certainty), now it's liberating: what am I going to do (oh no!)? I'm going to breathe and make some shapes. If they feel good, I will make other shapes, and then more shapes. If they don't feel good, I will change the shapes a bit and/or make fewer shapes. This is what I will do. But it requires the ego to surrender, to live in the unknown, in short to become alive, to be part of life rather than the judge of all.

Something I first put on FB: "Keep it alive, keep it messy"

2011-07-02T21:54:00.000-04:00

This single post seems to have been VERY popular on Facebook, shared and copied by at least six people that I'm aware of. I think that's largely because it is seen as saying, "take it easy, you don't have to get the advanced series, and even if you do, you don't have to do those poses 100 percent correctly."

It doesn't say that, in those words; David was really emphasizing doing asana practice here not for its own sake but for "the rest of the day" and thus his question, "what does it help you do in the rest of your life?" The line about the "protractor" also amused a lot of people.

In addition, I'm going to repost the "what I learned about asana" list that I also posted on FB. Ok, here we go. Happy reading!
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"KEEP IT MESSY"
Yesterday DS was talking about advanced poses, and again said that in the early days they got bucketfuls, whatever poses you wanted. This is also in part because there wasn't authorization/certification in the old days (from which the Tim Miller story about, "Guruji can I get any kind of license to teach this?" comes). In DS' biography as he tells it, he went to Mysore in the late 70s, learned all the way through the Advanced B (basically learned the whole syllabus, and I've forgotten to mention here that the studio has the David Williams poster, showing every pose in the old syllabus for ashtanga yoga, and it's pretty fabulous) and then came back to Texas and just freaked out from the energy and went on a 12-year search for everything, having written Guruji a letter asking about the meaning of life and where to find God and such and so on. Heavy stuff to throw on a guy who's 22. So he reappeared in front of Guruji 12 years later, and in an assisted backbend, K Pattabhi Jois recognized him, and Swenson does this great impression, eyes wide, voice high like Guruji's was in suprise: "Daaaaviiiiid Swennnnnsonnnn!" Awesome. Matt Sweeney told us a like story about practicing next to Dominic Corigliano. Apparently Dominic had been away from the practice for some time, and Guruji was "hassling him" in every pose of Advanced A, as if he remembered not just who Dominic was, but of what poses he was capable.

Doesn't matter who you talk to from the teachers who consider K Pattabhi Jois their teacher--take Swenson, Tim Miller, Kino MacGregor, others--they all have this giant reservoir of love for SKPJ. It becomes very obvious in the storytelling, the comic impressions, the lessons relayed. Good stuff.

Swenson said, "You know, I don't care if my hands never see my ankles again in this life." I really liked that. Shelley had told us a story about the two of them getting side-by-side mats in Mysore, and how watching David now struggle with the Advanced A (her exact story was that DS was turning white, pink, green and other colors in Viparita Shalabhasana on the way to Ganda Bherundasana) was a result of a lot of traveling, of being in his 50s now, and of hefting a lot of people up and down and over and around in poses. They really shifted the discussion from "which series" to "how does the yoga manifest in your life," they've hit that note a couple times. I think this is both important to them as teachers and also an answer to a lot of conference questions from us about classical Mysore practice and advanced poses and such (see my earlier note on this, for example).

"How does it affect the rest of your day--does it make you a better parent, or a better banker or auto mechanic or whatever you do?" That was David's question back to us. "Keep it messy, keep it alive," he said, talking about how in the old days nobody cared how or if the pose was messy. "You don't need to get out a protractor to measure the lines," he told us, specifically using Yoga Journal cover poses as an example. Poses can be sloppy in Dave and Shelley's room; vinyasa can be imperfect. ALIVE. Exactly. Keep it alive. DS said to us that the yoga should be a thing you can enjoy, and you can make it into whatever you want: ashtanga doesn't need to be a hard bike ride uphill. It can feel like your grandmother's house with the smell of fresh-baked whatever. It can be--and make it--as pleasant as you want.

The slideshow last night was part David telling his story (which I've borrowed from above, the 12-year break) and then two early films of David in high school, doing the Intermediate sequence (parts of it) on a bedsheet in the back yard and his mom crosses through the frame with a cup of coffee, just hangin out watching her son do stuff. He told us a story about he and Doug being hassled by cops as they practiced yoga in the park in the early 70s, because some neighbor had called and said that these young men with long hair were "doin some devil worship or somethin." The cops came up with guns to the two yoga practitioners, asking, "What're you boys doin' here?" and as Doug told it a couple years ago, they said, "Ummmmm.....breathing?" Anyway, the slideshow was dedicated really to DS' and Shelley's time in India, a sort of retrospective on SKPJ as they knew him, with a lot of India photos. They used to have a house there by "the park," which DS said is a well-known location to ashtanga practitioners: there are cows in the park and guys with huge truckloads of coconut shells and all other sorts of business.

Intermediate series today and then I'm going to try to "keep it sloppy and alive" all week with the Intermediate because it felt good to do it on Thursday. Later I'll write about how the first adjustment in Kapotasana that I got here (Wednesday morning) turned fear and anxiety into more positive stuff even though I did not get the full expression.

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POSE STUFF
This is a combination of workshop information, adjustments seen and adjustments received. It's probably not complete, but it might give you ideas when you're practicing:

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Utkatasana and Virabhadrasana I in Suryanamaskar B: you want the shoulders externally rotated. If you're in a spacious room, coming up wide to the side does this. In a crowded room, raise your arms PALMS UP and it'll happen. This takes much, much less muscle energy to hold than cranking the arms up there straight from heart center.

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Padangusthasana, et al. (forward bends): send the shoulders down, and lean into the toes (actually Kino MacGregor was the first person to tell me to lean into the toes).

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Parsvakonasana: press the knee against the arm, and swing the top hand not up and over but under and down and then up (basically swing it from your side down to the floor and then up over your head; same external rotation as above).

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Parivrtta Parsvakonasana: grab the forward leg and twist against it, work the elbow down.

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Prasarita D: pull up, don't let the wrists hang on the floor.

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Utthita Hasta Padang'a: curl the toes around the fingers, grab the hip with the other hand.

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Virabha B: open toward the wall you face. Knees apart. Tailbone sinks. Then turn your head to the front hand.

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Dandasana: arms straight. This means you energize the posture. Try it.

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Janu Sirsasana all: it's a slight twist. Chest centered over front leg; don't just hook the side ribs over it.

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Mari A: reach Forward not Up. Bent leg is totally straight upright, not leaning to side.

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Mari C: when wrapping the leg, get broad across the shoulders and SIT UP; this increasing breathing space radically.

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Kurmasana: the key to lifting the heels is legs over SHOULDERS not over elbows.

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Supta Kurmasana: find ways to broaden the collarbones (like grabbing the ankles of a teacher who stands behind you and who then walks back slightly to pull the chest/shoulders down and broad). No hand clasp will occur until and unless the legs are Over The Shoulders.

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Upavistha: the feet are Upright, not rolling in. Also look out for that in Kurmasana AND Bhujapidasana: the legs do not "flop open" externally.

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Ubhaya and Urdhva Mukha Paschimo: the feet are pointed, not flexed. In 2007 in the first one, they were flexed. No longer.

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Setu Bandhasana: it is about extending the legs, NOT raising the hips off the floor.

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Matsyasana: arms are straight now. If you do this in lotus, this makes the pose much bigger in the lumbar spine than the thoracic. Get ready to feel a backbend.

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Sirsasana: it's legal to tuck the chin as the legs come over for Urdhva Dandasana. Makes it easier. I have also consistently been told to "make my elbows closer" to the point that the triangle base is very isosceles and not equilateral at all.

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Krounchasana: it's half Tiriang Mukha and half Urdhva Mukha Paschimo. Look at the foot and try to bring shin to chest.

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Ustrasana, et al. (backbends): a string attached to your chest takes it UPWARD. Only when you go upward do you go backward.

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Laghuvajrasana: keep thinking UP, UP, UP; even as you lower, imagine that you are LIFTING IT.

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Kapotasana: try to land the hands as close to your feet as you can. You can hang or walk, either's good, but hands as close to feet as possible.

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Supta Vajrasana: the exit is CHEST UP, not lower back lifting.

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Bakasana: the feet stay TOGETHER. In Mysore, this is entered from a Pasasana position (tight low squat). Even in B, try to jump with FEET TOUCHING.

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Eka Pada Sirsasana: it might be useful to look at the foot as it goes over your head. Look sideways, don't duck.

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Pincha Mayurasana: to keep from flipping over, keep one leg on "either side" as you jump up. One leg goes over your head, and you jump the other one up but keep it on your chest side. Sort of jumping into a short forearm split. Then raise BOTH legs to center, one from each direction. Tangentially, I taught myself to bunny hop (2 feet at once) into this after a workshop. Walk in as much as you can, bend legs, shoot them both up, hips over shoulders. When you get the hips over the shoulders, you can feel yourself stick the inversion. Then extend the legs and its yours. For the proper exit, David says, "Pull your hands back."

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Karandavasana: in lowering, think Shoulders Forward, and Look Ahead. But try to get legs to chest Before You Do That.

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Mayurasana: "think cleavage"!! :D

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Nakrasana: feet touch. All the way through. It's easier if you keep your arms bent rather than straightening them, even in the jumps.

Grief, Life and the Yoga.

2011-06-26T21:08:00.002-04:00

This could, with that title, easily be one of those posts that shortly ends with a euphemism about "making it through with the regular pattern of the practice" or somesuch. But in part because I'm writing it, it's not going to do that.

I haven't done the same practice twice yet, in David and Shelley's room. I've tried to, but I haven't managed it. Much the same as my current home practice. It's not that I make up sequences or do different series each day, or that I'm counting every little tic and modification. What I mean, specifically, is that I was trying to build a Primary-to-Intermediate practice back, and then when that didn't work, I tried just hopping right into Intermediate, but that too is subject to grief and energy in the hips, which makes (and always has, really) me cut practice short wherever I can't maintain the energy of it.

So this isn't really about "which sequence" or "how many poses" or anything like that, no consideration of "the method" or "classical practice" is intended or should be inferred.

Here's what I can recall about my practices in the Swenson Mysore room so far:

Sun: Primary and to Ustrasana, which hurt. Hangs but no drops.
Mon: Grief practice. Slow agonizing Primary to Supta Padangusthasana.
Tue: Even griefier practice. Primary to Janu C in almost 2 hours.
Wed: Primary to Navasana and Intermediate to Eka Pada Sirsasana.
Thur: Intermediate through Karandavasana. Dropbacks with standups.
Fri: Primary series, with one dropback which DS then turned right into assisted.

Sun: Intermediate to Ardha Matsyendrasana. Griefy practice. No drops.

There are many axes on which to cut up these practices, and we should be careful wielding that scalpel so that we don't kill the patient. Don't overanalyze.

1. The "best" days, strictly in POSES DONE terms, are Wed/Thurs of Week One.
2. The least griefy day was Thursday.
3. My best focus on breath and attention was Thursday.
4. Intensity of grief does not correspond to series done.
5. Practice does not get more difficult (griefwise) as the week goes on.
6. Practice also does not get less griefy as the week goes on.

So we cannot associate grief with a given pose or a given series. I walk into the room with it, either a little or a lot, and it's completely unrelated to day of the week or poses committed. If I'm having a griefy day, I have a griefy practice.

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Grief strikes in the psoas and the gluteus maximus on the right side. That's where it all always happened: the half-lotus struggles, the backbends, any pose struggle that I have had that's not as simple as "hamstrings longer," it's all been in that hip. Samskaric business lives in there.

Particularly here, and also at home since my dad passed, I've noticed tightness in the psoas where it attaches to the lumbar spine. It impinges my forward folds in sun salutations, and so I feel the grief physically, right from the first "dve fold" and then often I REALLY get it in "trini look up." Most days in the Mysore room, it takes at least two Surya B's, and more like three, to get it juicy, and I still feel it big time in poses like Parivrtta Parsvakonasana (more across the glutes) and in all of the Prasaritas.

The regular poses are a bit restricted: Padmasana, any twist, and backbends unless I can get some juicing of the psoas beforehand (that's why I'm currently loving the Intermediate and also taking a bridge pose regularly before my Urdhva Dhanurasana pressups).

It's also weirdly hard to breathe in the Mysore room, maybe because it's stupid hot, but I have to ask for it. For example in Prasaritas, I have to fill my head with the command, BREATHE, and then I feel my head touch. In Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana, same thing. BREATHE, ok now balancing. Once a series is underway, if it's not a slow, painful griefy practice with laughter/crying breaks, I can usually get the breathing pretty well in gear.

There are more unhappy practices than joyous ones here; feeling the grief exit my muscles is PAINFUL, but after that, it feels good, a sort of warm, enervating good, like the musculature will not contract. After Supta Vajrasana today got all over my psoas to a degree that I'd never felt before, I couldn't get my core muscles coordinated for Bakasana, I just couldn't get it together to come up. That's strange because I can Bakasana ANY time I want to, I barely even have to think about it.

So one question is, I lose the breath when the body expresses grief. How does or should that fit with "keep the breath"? Is it "ok"? See the questions? And no, let's NOT go into the whole "tradition versus individual" line. What I do in the Mysore room is breathe and feel until I can proceed. I'm not being overzealous in taking a given posture, I'm being overrun by the physical expression of an intense emotion.

Another question is, shouldn't I just take nicer, easier Primary? No, I've tried that for years since I became a parent. I can grieve in Primary as easily as Intermediate, and practice has to be cut short. Grief makes NO DIFFERENTIATION between say Kapotasana and Janu Sirsasana A. When it strikes, it's like a lightning storm outside while you're bending inside. The poses don't cause it, it's like a natural expression that coincidentally occurs while you're bending. Let's be clear: I do believe that the yoga makes it easier for the grief to find expression, but NO PARTICULAR POSE sets it off.

For what it's worth, I haven't had a grief attack in Kapotasana here, but I have had one in Janu Sirsasana A, and thus the comparison.

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On Kapotasana (and slightly off-topic): I got my first David adjustment in that on Wednesday, and I put my fingertips on the arches of my feet. On Thursday, I grabbed the sides of the feet well above the toes. This morning, I grabbed the pad of the foot over the toes. A bit less each day, and that's OK. My ego wants the heels, but I know that when I go back to cooler less-adjusted practice in Indiana I'll lose the heels even if I get them here, and so that doesn't matter. The ego is just a voice that likes to shout out its dissatisfaction with whatever you've got. Inner critic.

The first adjustment made me feel "valid" in the posture. It gave me the pose, to put it in classical terms. David didn't interrogate me, didn't give any comment or any vibe that I "shouldn't have been there." The pose was mine, I wasn't overreaching. I was afraid, and he said simply, "Relax," and we did the posture. He used to haul me up from B after 3 breaths. This morning he left me there for all five and let me come up myself.

So while I've yet to get the full expression, I feel very much that I "have" the posture, and what this does is back off a long-term questioning shame and anxiety about whether I should be doing Intermediate: not whether I CAN or not, but whether I SHOULD or not. I've known for YEARS that I "can" do Intermediate as long as I modify the core postures. But can doesn't matter when you feel like a spy sneaking the poses, doing some perhaps criminal home practice and you're never sure, you have to stay in the dark and throw down the Pincha exit.

David gave me security, almost like a license, and did it with that single nearly commentless adjustment. The ease is ocean-big.

I wish now that Good Will Hunting hadn't replicated the scene where Williams simply repeats "it's OK" until Damon's hardman character breaks. Now it's camp, we cite it and ruin the sincerity of it. But in accepting my grief (which ISN'T easy) and in accepting this sequence, there's a lot of "it's OK" and it's never far from tears that bring relief.

On Thursday I took three "Strikes" at Karandavasana and couldn't grok both the lotus and the balance; that's my hip-out-of-wack thing acting up. I used to be able to knit that bad thing and I even lowered it a few times without touching the knees to the floor. So I took my three strikes and asked David for an adjustment, which was quick, effective and marvelous, and then I went to backbends.

I feel like I know what to do; I feel like I know where I am in the ashtanga sequences, know "what my practice is." You know, if you read here a lot, how much I've worried about that, how I want a Mysore room to give me an answer and how it never has. This one adjustment locked it down.

David adjusts my core postures (currently including Pasasana which with feet flat I can barely bind going right but bind with relative ease going left) and I think that if I wanted to sample past Karandavasana that'd be ok too. But I feel like my official practice, one I can feel perfectly fine doing, is Intermediate to Karanda. This suspends for the moment the question of whether I can do those poses without needing a grief-out beforehand, but as I started here saying, that's not part of my practice as it stands; that's a part of my practice AS IT IS PRACTICED. The grief does not mean that I "should do Primary," it means that I'm going to have extra challenges with whatever sequence I'm doing, Primary Friday or not.

Something makes me cry or laugh here everyday, and I only mean that species of laughter which is actually crying. I told J on the phone that the yoga wasn't about advances or breakthroughs but about griefing it out, because I don't have to put my emotions "through my mind" when I'm bending, they can just come right out unannounced. That's what my practice here is about, that's what this vacation is about.

Soon I'll include some of my Facebook notes, one in particular seems to be getting quoted and handed around quite a bit on the 'book, where David talked about keeping the yoga alive and messy and not making it like a preserved nature sample on a wall (that last comparison is mine).

But thank you David Swenson, for that adjustment and for acknowledging that I'm dealing with a lot of stuff and it's going to come out most loudly in your Mysore room. Thank you.

359 pageviews today? Is that even possible? I'm going to assume you all want more info on Swenson, right?

2011-06-22T17:14:00.002-04:00

Hi (apparently) Everyone,

If the pageviews here are right, that's a RAAAAADICAL increase from my normal (although there are always more viewers here than I expect or am aware of, which keeps making me want to chill the content I post here, and of course I never do).

Ok, so two cents on Swenson. In part because it's easier and keeps my posting shorter, I've been putting a ton of this on Facebook.

The Mysore classes are hot and marvelous. Sweat pools on the floor by the time two and a half hours are over. A LOT of people do Intermediate in the room; I've seen ticktocks, easily six adjustments of Kapo and Karanda each, each day (and by now, three days in, too many to count), a handful of Advanced A poses, and today, about three feet from me, I saw David demo Karandavasana for a guy who somehow had the strength to try the pose like five times, after doing an Intermediate with full vinyasa (that's coming to standing after EVERY POSE). Amazing. David went up, came down, instructed all the way through, picked up the lotus, re-set his hands, and timbered. Just like that. Like it wasn't even a thing. His teaching for Karanda is "suck the knees into the chest, touch the chest with the knees," I've heard that numerous times around me in the morning.

My own psychological status totally colors my practice: the first day (Sunday) I was electric sore in backbends from the right hip, so I went to Ustrasana and quit and dropped back heels up. The second day I did a grieving Primary, cutting out at Supta Padangusthasana, letting the poses and transitions squeeze sadness right out of my body there on the floor. That was freaking intense. The third day I was having a lot of muscle soreness all through right glutes and psoas (the expression of sadness through that area leaves it hella sore the next day; I've noticed this for years, now that I know what to feel for) and couldn't fold forward in a sun salutation even to get my hands to the floor. I modified heavily and cut out after Janu Sirsasana C, a practice which still took me over 90 minutes to complete. I mean that was a Really Painful Practice, but it kicked up my caution, awareness and breath to pretty much unheard of levels, which was excellent. David gave me extra assisted backbending (I don't know if that's because the room wasn't being demanding at that time or not) and we did "fingertips down" dropbacks and come-ups. That's the most assisted backbending I've received here yet. Usually it's three arm-crossed hangbacks and one down for five and then up.

This morning I felt better, after going to a climbing gym yesterday afternoon where I basically prayed at my temple (because rock climbing got me alive from my divorce, helped me shed all my dead bits and bathed me in the flames of pure love), and I could jump in Surya's, but Primary again was heavy and grief-ful by late standing poses (example: do NOT underestimate the power of the Warrior sequence, which properly includes Utkatasana, in getting into your glutes and psoas; those three poses are freaking POWERFUL) and in Janu A, Shelley had to guide me breath by breath from hands-8-inches-from-my-foot to wrist-bind. Eventually the hips mellowed out, and as David and I had discussed about going to Intermediate, I went through Navasana and then hopped up for Pasasana.

Four rounds got me a six-finger bind. I simply turned to the side and put both hands down for five, and then twisted and snuck the bottom hand under, but did not bind, for five, then bound but could barely touch fingertips, for five, then I rolled up some rug under my heels and bound six fingers, both sides. Yes, I could have and should have just rung for an adjustment, but I somehow knew I could get the pose in that hot room, and Mari C and D had been difficult, and it was important for me to BELIEVE in the rock climbing magic, there was a certainty and faith that I could do that so-glute-intensive twist and do it on my own. Not Western "gonna git you sucka" ism but literal faith. I knew I could do it.

I had energy after that, all through Dhanurasana, which quickly sapped it. Parsva Dhanurasana was difficult and psoas-opening as it always is (don't underestimate that posture, either) and then in Ustrasana I just could NOT get the low back long enough to avoid some scrunching. Ew. This set me up for fear in Kapotasana.

I'm always a bit afraid of Kapo, even though really, it feels good more often than it doesn't. So I had to psych myself out of fear first. I said, "Do the posture to fingertips and don't die, and then you'll be more confident." So I arched, dropped (I like to walk in versus to hang, hanging doesn't get me open in the pose based on how I'm currently made) and walked in with suprising ease. I was able to pick up a hand and move it, without putting my head on the floor, then I finger-crept up to bump my toes, but couldn't grab them. I turned the elbows in and took five and then took five in a bent-arm B and came up. It felt good.

Swenson asked, "Are you waiting for help in something?" from behind me, as I continued kneeling there post-vinyasa, and I looked back and put my prayerhands on my forehead. In a minute he was there, no faffing: I arched back and he gave me the EXACT SAME Kapo adjustment that K in Boston gives (if you know her, you know who I mean): thighs press against the bender's thighs to keep the legs alive, hands come to wrists, and your hands go up "over" the top of your head and sort of "lead" the bend. Hands to arch of feet. "Relax," he said. Arms much straighter in Kapo B, which I held for three breaths. "That's enough" he said and took me up and was gone to his next adjustment. No fanfare, no celebration, just a pose. Another day in the yoga room.

We are doing three sets of retentions in the daily pranayama, and that session has also developed into a sort of combination storytelling and "conference" session where David (and sometimes Shelley is also there, but sometimes she takes off, to practice, she says, so I'm thinking they practice post-Mysore, not pre-) takes questions like "What's the difference between a yogi and a Guru?"

Ok, I have to go get my laundry out of the washroom so it can dry outside in the quite bright and very regular Austin sunshine.

I will, of course, have more to say. In two hours I'll be at a night class, "Breath and Bandhas" or words to that effect, and the night sessions are really good for info that I will teach my students.

Cheers!

I Have Returned.

2011-06-08T09:34:00.004-04:00

I got back to Indy on Friday, after spending a week with family after the wake-and-funeral (family is Catholic, well, loosely Catholic, so open casket and burial, no cremation) the last weekend of May--Memorial Day. My father was a Marine for a few years in the early 60s, just pre-Vietnam, and so there were Marines and "Taps" for his burial, which everyone thought was fitting.

I was wondering if I should/wanted to write a chronology of the week and a half, and I think I don't. It would talk about family frictions and postmodern novel kind of stuff and we should leave all that to Rick Moody and Don DeLillo and company.

The main effect that I can tell comes from now being the father in my family, a sort of assuming that mantle, is that I feel the role arrive in me for my own kid. What had formerly been all language and signification.

For this to happen while I was still fairly deep in adjusting to my own fatherhood is a weird blessing of sorts; it fits right in. Had this happened in 2002 it would have been totally and completely different, disorienting, incitement to even more chaos than happened. But now it's like a weird passing of the role, almost in a ritual way. It's strangely perfect.

I'm certain that I'm the only one in my family that feels this way, and I like that; that is how it's always been. Time is frozen there if you're me (by which I mean my personality in time), and people don't know me any more closely than they did in the mid-1990s and that goes, itself, back to the late 1980s; I tried to burn those bridges and failed, and the major side effect is that while I can talk to anyone and everyone's happy to see me like a strange midwestern Prodigal Gone Back, no one knows a thing about my inner life at all (and it took me a long time to realize that I'd done that and that it wasn't some failing on their collective part). But I knew that if I had not left to find something more satisfying than suburbia and lay Catholicism, I would have exploded with psychotic violence, and so that had to go.

That's how it's not a postmodern novel: in those situations, the rebels never get outside of power (which in itself is so, so postmodern), and so they live out their craziness within the system that constrains it, and you get pathos and suffering and then you sell a million copies and you get to bang the cheerleader or whatever it is, and we have American Beauty to tell us how that all goes deliciously wrong. No. I saw that fate coming and ran for the hills and now I teach Art History and yoga out here in Indianapolis and have family and kid.

In the teacher training for It's Yoga (and also, goodbye Larry, this same year: don't you think that's enough, 2011?), we made "dream boxes," little decorated cardboard boxes where you put dreams and wishes. Inside the top lid of mine is a little newspaper-print-looking sentence reading, "One day I escaped."

That sounds like it denies my beloved Kafka (ever engaged with the intricacies of power), but it doesn't. I grew into what suited me (well, as near as I can figure) and still retain contact with what doesn't/didn't. The two worlds don't communicate, not because they speak different languages, but because almost no one crosses the two. I do not retain contacts from high school or college, and all of my graduate school associates abandoned me when I got divorced in 2002. There is nothing but a black chasm between my "then" and my "now," and that's also why it's not a postmodern novel. Those books rely on a crisscross, constant friction between what one is and what one is thought to be. I have, in a way, freedom.

Yet I keep in touch with family, and they can tell that I have a degree of contentment now, after being billed through action and rhetoric as the firebrand for so many years that now that tag never leaves; some family still treat me like nitroglycerin that you shouldn't shake too hard. That's fine; if they cared more, they could learn how it really is, but they choose safe distance (noting of course that I basically forced them to do so) and I try to make my presence safer for them but they see their/my label before they see my reality, and I can only get so close to them without freaking them out. That's fine, I know I made it that way.

I continue to teach the yoga, and to practice. Aiming now--with kid in daycare and J at work--for five weekdays per week. Primary is again a struggle, but that's typical with ten days off and lots of complicated emotions snugging up the outer hips and psoas, I don't resent anything. I practice until I lose the breath, often in those handful of poses after Navasana, and then I backbend. Dropping and standing is still there, although it might need a lot of rehearsal before it gets smooth. It's all still there; I was rebinding Pasasana before I went to the Northeast.

Austin and Swenson in ten days. I'll be down close to a big lake and not far from a gigantic park. There should be early am buses to downtown, otherwise it's a couple miles and I don't mind that walk (although I'll probably have to get up at 4:30 to make 6 am practice). Six days a week, Su-F, with evening workshops each M and W, with a weekend workshop the first F night and into Sa morning, so it'll be non-stop morning asana and pranayama from Su straight to F and then an Intermediate workshop on Sa morning, then again straight through, Su to F and I fly out on F afternoon, the first of July. I'm going to intend to avoid both caffeine and booze while I'm there, and yes, I know what a boozy town Austin is. We'll see.

I have returned. Now, out to the park to practice.

Complications.

2011-05-22T21:41:00.002-04:00

There is periodic arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) along with new pneumonia, in my father's ongoing chemo. The chronic diarrhea that I mentioned is from some kind of radiation burn (which would suck anyway, but I think with colon cancer it sucks a bit more pointedly), which has had him on fluids all month, and he's (predictably) weaker from that, and everyone's been anxious about how/if he'll get through surgery, but the chemo goes on hold when arrhythmia appears, and i think it'll also be on hold for the pneumonia now.

My brother in a phone call this afternoon said, "It's starting to look like a stacking set of complications, and, you know, you may want to reconsider your travel plans."

My current travel plans are to go out there FRIDAY.

I'm ready for a perhaps-shockingly weakened character, and I know better than to wish for anything. With mortality you take as high a dose of Buddhism as you can handle.

It feels like "inhale, pinch nose and drop into the water" but that's the selfish way, the ego-defending way, insensitive, guarded. You go generous, giving whatever energy anyone needs, to anyone who needs it. Living in the strength of the past, the storytelling.

He said to me, many many times while I was growing up, "You put me in the ground, and then you throw a party!" He always hated the morbidity of so many Catholic funerals, but as so many, wouldn't give up the faith for that one complaint.

A party it is, no matter what sorts of hell we go through to get to it.

Wait, Maybe Parenting is a Practice Maintenance Phase.

2011-05-18T21:49:00.002-04:00

It's like me to want to know how far out a thing can get. I've done this with insomnia, booze/intoxication, literature (difficulty, post/modernism, Joyce, Musil, Pynchon, etc), film (again, viewing, not making), climbing walls, and even the yoga. How far down the rabbit hole can this incarnation go? What are my LIMITS?

There's a longish rambling post about how all of that, every bit of that "questing," is really just to try to overshoot internal things that need processing. How out of myself can I get, how far the fuck away from my stuff can I get?

And transformation: that's really, in my usage up to this point, new animals, new forms, new crystals through which to see the same things. There's something to be said for a new lens, but the inner material one sees through it never changes.

It feels empowering and sexy to be transforming/transformed, digging a spade into the earth and erecting ramparts and storming others' cities and all of that legend-making. But the stuff remains the same in the center.

Parenting denies all of the legends and makes all of the stuff clear. The alchemy worked by a very young person on a much older person is a sort of flashback, but it's not revisitation; instead it's confrontation and/or acknowledgement. You nod constantly when you're a parent and then you do the mundanity, and it's all acceptance, you never erect a rampart or storm a city with a barbarian horde. But it's fun to have those movies on tap so you can still, in your legend, in your own myth, blow up the Death Star or whatever it is you do.

Parenting is compassion and relating (well, even when it's done badly or done evilly, in which case it isn't very compassionate, I suppose). You can't add the child to your legend, you can't dominate the relationship that way, you can't USE your parenting for self-aggrandizement, not because it's immoral or you "shouldn't," but because that relationship between parent and child simply won't STICK to that goal, the way that something that's not magnetic just will not stick to the fridge no matter how hard you press it there.

And so your relationship to your child casts a light on all of your other relationships and it reveals in fairly unbearable clarity where you have overreached and where you have exaggerated and where you have sort of "taped over" the cracks and the unspoken places and the things you don't want to see and the places you don't want to go. Your relationship to your child is your UR-relationship and all others are situated underneath it in that merciless brilliance with their flaws so clear you cannot look away.

Your legend turns to stone in that light, cracked towering stone, no longer liquid mercury, shiny slippery and marvelous, subaquatic, escaping, Mariana-Trench-dwelling phosphorescent. Now trapped in incarnation, stone, climbable, cracked, revealed, visible, consummately visible, mapped, available to all.

And immobile now, the ego weeps, guilty, angry and powerless. Raging manacled, promising to pen a Hugo novel in your own juices.

This is what it is to be "ordinary," to be Trungpa ordinary.

In my practice since 2009, I have gained poses, lost poses, gained poses, lost poses, gained, lost, gained, lost, yes, no, yes, no, yesno, yesnoyesnoyesnowhat?

What? What sequence? What poses? What? Why? What am I doing? Whose world is this?

And for a long time nothing made any sense.

I decided today, after an unsatisfactory, cold, modified, rushed gym practice, that I'll just do up to Kapotasana, just like in July 2008. That was the last time I so-called "got" a pose (I've never REALLY "gotten" a pose) and I simply can't cross it. I mean, I can, but I can't keep anything, and the periods of loss are sometimes whole months of total practice loss. It's cataclysmic, and then my regains are like the Huns sacking Rome, and then they are likewise demolished. It's not good, that mad pendulum swing.

July and August 2008, back when I began a Kapo quest in earnest. We got pregnant in September. Then the world exploded and everything became very "ordinary." The child still doesn't regularly sleep through the night; he'll be two years old in thirteen days. We still have no relationship to speak of, although we do get a hug in once in a while; I'm glad in a way there's no sexual activity, because it was so awkward, cold and horrifying that I had to work hard to process it and really don't have any processing machinery to spare, so it's easier to simply be without it, more comfortable this way. I expect that'll creep back when the administrative job ends and when the child sleeps more regularly. Job ends MAY 2013.

Really, who can Gain Poses in these conditions? Who even wants to?

I still can't get the "magic" of the Parenting Kool-Aid, and I've been drinking that stuff non-stop all year. Make no mistake, I love my kid and he's awesome and hilarious, but parenting itself, the system of it, the set of obligations, the time demands, and really, when it comes to the core of it, the EGO DEATH of it, just makes me proof against pie-eyed star-gazing declarations like, "It's the best thing I've ever done!" I just can't say that, can barely restrain a cringe at even typing it.

My legend didn't have parenting in it, or maybe it did, but the parenting limb hadn't cropped up yet, hadn't developed yet. Too soon. She craved it--and didn't even, she wanted to have a kid because she was AFRAID that if she missed her chance, she'd REGRET IT LATER--and I didn't. Too soon.

So my ego was carved into this shape, the service life that is parenting, and again, it's all about relating. But a relating that is not grandiose, that serves no legend, that isn't Shakespeare, that isn't world revolution, that isn't Reich and Leary and Jodorowsky and Breton and all of that.

But it also isn't Moody and Delillo and even Acker, and all of that, either.

It isn't dramatic at all, it's so mundane that you can't write any kind of novel about it. But it's not a privatized mundane, and because of that, it's not a re-dramatized mundane, it cannot be made to play that game: not in indie film, not in postmodern novel, not in any form. And all of reality begins to look like it, echo it, be the same as it. And then no one has any legend, and legends are all told just to be legends, and suddenly books are books and people are people and ordinariness has this fabulous mystery that can't be expressed in any language and which has never been said except maybe in koans.

Not all parents feel like that; there's something about the love and the enchantment that all gets knit into something different, and I'll never understand it because I can't do it. But I somehow have enough language that I can sound like I'm part of that club, and so I don't have to deal with THAT alienation on top of the others.

I think that parenting beats any Buddhist retreat ever.

It has made me quieter, more reflective, less "active" (I would say violent, but that's not what I mean: my violence was always one of overactivity, grand gesture where none was required, presence taking up space, volume), sad in the way Trungpa talks about in Shambhala. That, and it has given me this relentless vision of every untrue thing that I've ever done or thought at any time, ever, which is like watching a private horrorshow of your own egotistical overreaches.

I think that finally when all of that comes to acceptance, when it stops being such a massively long-term soak in negative emotions, that it will turn into a happiness, a contentment, as stout as the negativity. A real recutting of the ego. That's why I say this is better than any retreat. This is the REAL surgery, the real thing.

Briefly: Kino in Indianapolis

2011-05-10T08:28:00.002-04:00

I wish I had more time to write about this and the followup launch of a thing that we are calling "Ashtanga Yoga Indiana" (more soon, but if you're Facebooking, look for us there), BUT this is the day when my grades are due so I have to do that first (well, second, after this "brief" post, right?).

Kino did really only 2 days here, three workshops total:
a. Led Primary, Sat morning; we did up to Supta K.
b. Arm balances for everyone (lots of Bakasana, partner work, some Sirsasana)
c. Karmic Fire, Sun morning; LOTS of yoga philosophy, pelvic floor, breath.

The Karmic Fire workshop, which I think is her newest, is really fantastic. We talked about samskaras, kleshas, burning with agni, and technically we talked about tapas even though she didn't say that word out loud. Basically, using the body as a sort of (what Freeman would call) matrix for intersecting with the spiritual/mystical. It was really pose light (well, except for the Navasana example) but just fantastic all the same.

In the led Primary, and I think in part because Kino still recognizes me from Chicago workshops, I got adjustments in Pada Hastasana, Prasarita Padottanasana C (in which I actually fell over my head--hilarious! Kino said, "We're doing judo here in the corner") and Supta Kurmasana. Easy Dwi Pada pretzeling with her help.

For backbends we did an ankle-grab bridge, and then two wheels, coming all the way down, then a set of three, coming only down to top of head, and then her infamous "walk hands in and push up" Chakrabandhasana builder. Awesome.

Every senior teacher does backbends differently. Timiji has us simply do two sets of three. Kino really likes to "ladder them" this way, bridge, wheel come down, wheel stay up, wheel walk in.

She asked me to play photographer for the "arm balances" section, so there might be a lot of fun pictures of people falling out of partner-assisted Eka Pada Bakasana and so on, when those show up :)

Now, my regular Sunday class is at 12:30, and the Karmic Fire session ended at 12, and Kino and the studio and I had talked about her doing a practice in my class. She and I talked about this on Saturday between sessions and I said that really, it's not led, a large portion of my class just takes a cheat sheet and marches through Primary as well as they're able. Kino got much more enthusiastic at that point and said, like Mysore-style? and I told her the class is sort of a wild and crazy mix of led and Mysore-style, and she said, that's how you build a program! Awesome.

So at 12:15 when the KF session had gotten out, about 9 of us, Kino included, just started practicing and three more students came in at 12:30 and I basically let everyone do the class Mysore-style, with lots of attention for the trio whom I knew hadn't had as much experience with that method. The space was really traditional-feeling, I don't know how else to put it. It's rare that I can get that vibe when I'm teaching, most days. There was less joking, and I was speaking more softly to one student at a time, not trying to direct the room, a totally different voice usage from a led class. Lots of UHP adjustments (the "foot cup"), lots of Prasarita C, lots of advice about jumping (Kino had advised people to walk back and through until it became smooth, but everyone loves to jump, and so that's going to be a massive retraining for certain members of my class).

Kino did a lovely Intermediate, as far as I saw only struggling with the Karanda lift, and then in backbends went handstand-feet-to-head, which was cool because I've NEVER seen a practitioner do that in real life. I think maybe I saw Kino adjust a couple people into it in Chicago, but I was in mid-practice so I can't be sure what my senses registered :D

We talked for about 30-40 minutes while another class ended on Saturday afternoon, and I think that if you're an authorized/certified teacher, it's probably refreshing to talk about ANYTHING that isn't "ooh how do I get into this pose?" We talked about creativity, orderly people versus messy people, the Midwest as the "new Encinitas," and a handful of other things. No posing, no transitions, no shop talk. Good stuff. Kino suggested that there be a thing, "Ashtanga Yoga Indiana," to build our new community, these mysterious classes of 12 or more that I've had for three solid months now.

So I started a Facebook group and wrote something of a Declaration of Vision, and people are excited about it. Turns out one of my students is a web design guy. Fortuitous things are coming about. There are apparently 25 different classes a week in this state which call themselves "ashtanga" (and sure, some are modified or based-on or inspired-by) but we now have the beginnings of a network which reaches from Bloomington down southwest to Indy and up even to Crown Point, which is practically Chicago. Time to get on the road and see some classes, get some human flesh-and-blood relating going on.

Ok, off to grade!

Just Workshoppin' Around.

2011-05-05T22:19:00.002-04:00

I try to keep an eye on the midwestern Ashtanga workshop scene, see who's coming where, when, and if I can potentially spare time and/or money. Things are getting interesting, as Owl says.

Yes, there is an Ashtanga Yoga Ohio (I believe its "yogaohio.com" online).

Kino, of course, will be here Saturday and Sunday. Our first ashtanga workshop in the city since a Dave Swenson weekend in....2006??? In a hell of a long time, in any case. We built this. Go us.

DUDE. Chuck Miller is coming to Chicago in August. Apparently four days of morning and afternoon sessions. I SUSPECT that I can't buy the time from J and family, after taking two weeks of Swenson in June, but I'm certainly interested in more info.

Kino's doing five days in Chicago in October, but I can't go because I'll be teaching classes. I could go Friday night but she'll be doing that workshop here this weekend, and Saturday's only attraction, really, is the inversion/handstand workshop, but for 50 plus 30 for hostel plus gasoline plus time commitment? I'm actually NOT COMPELLED :O :O :O

Timiji returns to Chicago in early November, and I'm just waiting for a schedule to appear so I can sign up, basically. After summer Swenson, that's the next thing that I feel I MUST do. Must see how our second meeting goes.

And then in May 2012 (well, end of May into June), Kino returns to Chicago and that, I CAN go to, because classes will be over. It's way, way out, but hey, good to know these things in advance. Nearly a week of Mysore, with workshops, probably, three hours away, in a town I know, with public trans that I know, that I can get to by car? BOOYAH. Hell I could even try to drag the family up there for some museuming and whatnot; the boy will turn 3 that Memorial Day weekend.

I might also, either voluntarily or by need, be in Boston at any time, in which case I MIGHT consider renting a car and staying in a city hostel, rather than out in the burbs with brother and family. That'd make the yoga easier and the independence way easier. Things are proceeding, with dad and the chemo and all, but he's basically living on an IV because the radiation gives him grotesquely chronic diarrhea. Lovely stuff. They say he'll probably have the tumor-removing surgery before we're there at the end of May. Every time I practice I dedicate some to you, old boy!

Hip, Older, the Indianapolis scene

2011-04-29T11:56:00.003-04:00

I'd been doing half-Intermediate (that's up to Eka Pada Sirsasana) all week, and struggling with the core postures (Pasasana, Kapo), which is my usual score on Intermediate. When I was doing the whole thing a year ago, I struggled with the other two core postures as well (Dwi Pada Sirsasana, Karandavasana).

Yesterday afternoon I was racing down the basement stairs to feed the cats and trying not to leave the child alone too long, and some hip spasm raced through my right side, making it very difficult to walk, squat, or do much but hobble and/or lie down. The paranoid reading is "too much Intermediate series, young Jedi!" but I see no reason for that to be true. Sure, there's a whitish-electric opening in the right hip in particular in all twists from Parivrtta Parsvakonasana and especially in Pasasana, but I had that a year ago too and it didn't tweak the hip. I prefer to see this as simply one of those random "ow, yipes" things that happens like when you "sleep wrong" on one shoulder and wind up all hung up in the midback the whole next day. It's better today but sore all throughout that hip. We'll see if it permits a Primary with Kino a week from tomorrow.

*********************

On Tuesday I'll be 41 years old. Age doesn't confront me personally, because it's low in my identity mix, but when I think about being 41 with a two-year old, it's weird, in large part because Indiana is a "get married by 22" state, and so most people with 2 year olds are my undergraduates' age. Now I'm told that even in-state, the trend is for parents to be my age, and I know that's true nationally as well. Still, it does something to my sense of myself, which I think is turn up the volume of my chronological age versus my "felt" age which is still somewhere around 26 or so. Maybe Timiji is right about that: if you want to feel 25, you take practice. I hope I can take practice tomorrow, I already miss it. And yeah I know it's Saturday, but when you're doing solo parenting over the weekend and missin practice from injury, you take it when you can take it.

**********************

The Indiana scene is changing again. I think I already introduced the players: Carol is the root of the ashtanga here, then there's me and there's Amanda, who learned in part from me (she's one of THOSE YOGIS (hahahaha!) who has a dance background and a vinyasa practice, and she's taken to ashtanga in a very fish-to-water way). Carol and Amanda teach full time, multiple classes a week. I teach two classes a week (one ashtanga, one Rocket) because I'm an art historian for money, and at four classes a semester, two yoga classes a week is pushing it, and J frequently reminds me of that.

Carol's classes are bigger than mine, and Amanda's outdoing me in press, and particularly in Facebook press where I can see this happening. I am of two minds about these things. One, my class has always been this quiet thing, sort of sitting there on "community Sunday" for whoever shows up. Make no mistake, it has regulars, it's been a dozen all month long, but sometimes when I get nervous about it, I think that it lacks Carol's more mellow "at peace" approach (even though she teaches handstands with Navasana, it's not like a "chill" class) and Amanda's more "gonna git you sucka" approach (people ask me, does she drink a lot of caffeine?).

So one voice in me is saying "be more chill or be more hyper, get with it" and another voice in me directly resists that. I do the chants (and as far as I know, I'm alone in that) and I hand out cheat sheets and I encourage people to do the whole thing when they feel ready. Last time I was leading three people and about ten people were marching through Primary with cheat sheets.

It's important to me that traditional practice be developed (insofar as I understand that, through exposure to senior teachers, of which there's not much). This means when I sub the Mysore room on Monday nights, I almost want to say, "Stop there, go to backbends" but Carol doesn't do that when she teaches, so it's a negotiation that has to be approached somehow. The scene in the city however is led most-of-Primary, which is, again, how I learned it. Not traditionally, one-at-a-time.

Some people like the chants, some try to come in late to avoid them. It's amusing. I also without fail, both in my ashtanga and my Rocket classes, close with a lesson or story or some kind of introduction to something. I'm reading the Ramayana right now (thanks Timiji) and so sometimes I will talk about dharma and being a parent; sometimes I'll talk about the silly things my kid does, and how freedom and the social co-exist; sometimes I'll talk about koshas or energy; sometimes I'll tell a story about the history of the practice or how to practice more regularly.

A thing that itches at me is that I feel a physical proximity--what you might call an intimacy--with students, particularly long-term students whom I can adjust more authoritatively because I know their practices and tendencies better, but this intimacy flees when the class ends, and I wish it wouldn't. I remember stories of the old days when Owl was with Dominic, and those conversations post-class, and THAT's the model I want, that sort of communication. Maybe I cannot channel the shakti the way that model worked, maybe I'm pipe-dreaming in that respect.

Another thing is that I've lost a hunk of practice to parenting, just in terms of energy and time, and so my "pose-garnering" is SECOND TIME, not first time, and it simply does not have the DRIVE that first-time acquisition too-often comes with. The energy with which I practice, the intention, is not that with which so many of my students practice, and the levels are different, feel different. I wish we could cross this, talk about it, really communicate. More desire for that intimacy.

People in my room who have been practicing a long time (let's call my seven years a long time, even though it isn't) have often been doing simply the same set of vinyasa moves, and haven't had the structure and demand of an ashtanga practice, so I can (as they put it) "out-pose" people with more years yoga than I have. And when that happens, I simply say that there are two things: one, the ashtanga practice sets a high bar on physical skill, and two, it asks for regular practice. Those are the two things that most often set my practice apart from others with a non-ashtanga long-term practice.

And we're back at aging. But now, aging in practice. Seven years and that all-important "loss" of ego-drive and pose-gimme, really puts some distance between me and my students. Amanda completely lacks this kind of aging mechanism; she's something like 28 and she is all drive all the time. When she does Eka Pada Sirsasana in the Monday night class, she also folds it into both Buddhasana and Kapilasana, both sides. It's pretty WOW! but also totally criminal of course. And Carol is all affirmation of everything everyone does, she has the best energy ever. So drive and affirmation are something like the two "feminine poles" of ashtanga in town, and I'm like this strange masculine pole of reserve and classical practice. I drop a few "bad lady" and "bad man" riffs in class, but mostly I don't affirm people except newcomers (because I want to ease off the sheer challenge of the movements) and I don't drive people to do the next one, I'm much more likely to press people to breathe and slow down.

Time to run to class, but this is (well, if you're me) compelling to keep processing. One's role and identity as teacher, and as parent. Parenting gets in your everything, changes completely who you are, how you are.

More and different Illness, Swenson and Teaching the Yoga

2011-04-11T08:39:00.002-04:00

Nearly three years ago a college friend of J's was diagnosed with "3b" breast cancer (I understand cancers are numbered 1-5 in advancedness), which is well-advanced, and the type was apparently some kind of "sheeting tissue" that's hard to spot and often fatal. A double mastectomy and a bunch of chemo beat it.

At the start of April a check found cancer in her bones, and treatment began to build up ammonia in her brain, which was no good, so treatments were changed, but nothing was responding right, so they abandoned treatment and said, "You have 1-3 weeks to live." That's pretty intense; I've heard that kind of line on TV shows but never regarding anyone that I know in real life. That wound up not even being true; three days later she was gone.

J and another college friend had made plans to fly up to the northern midwest to say so long, and at 3 am the departure morning, they found out that they'd have to say goodbye to the body and not the whole person. Intense.

J said it was unreal to go in and see someone you know, who's only 42, and who has an eight-year-old, as a body in a bed. Hell even I've never had that experience.

So this changes our April. For J it ramps up her anxiety about breast cancer, predictably, but for me it gives a weird clarity on mortality (death always does that for me), it kind of clarifies my values a bit, polishes the mirror for a few days before regular life clouds it all up again.

These are the same people who put me up during the Matthew Sweeney adventure of 2008, and apparently my presence in the household is well-remembered, even by the then-six-year-old. We wrapped him up in my mat as a "yoga burrito" and we played outside with pool noodles and such and it was good times. I am remembered as the guy who integrated the yoga into everyday life, and apparently I cranked up meditation practices in the household, and I had no idea of any of this, but I like it.

So contact's going to be kept there. But what an incredible, massive sadness. The language of course is "she was taken before her time," but no Buddhist would ever say that except perhaps in euphemizing sympathy. But to reckon with being in your early 40s and having an eight-year-old, that's a world changer. What is it to die ON TIME and have THAT be what that means? Most people I know cling to an idea of "being finished" or "being just," you know, having justice. Like death "makes sense," and of course it doesn't. Not Western sense anyway.

No, I think that instead, death has to be reckoned with as always possible at any moment. My kid could be run down by a car, and that could simply happen. Any one of our airplanes (May, or mine in June, or ours later that summer) could crash and that would be it. But then one runs the risk of becoming an "oh what the hell" relativist, and that's not the point. It's a matter of setting functional ethics in the middle of that seeming relativistic nonsense.

Life does not come with justice; it comes with mortality. Any number of lessons proves this true. So our ethics, I have been saying for almost two decades, should be based on mortality. But they're not, in practice. We pack all kinds of money into the Pentagon and we melt the polar ice caps. And that's fine because it is what it is, but it doesn't help anyone suffer less.

J says that Buddhism is monastic, but I have found that all of this householding has been the best ground EVER for a Buddhist practice. We do not see eye to eye on this. J still wants fulfillment--camping, hiking, time in the Pacific Northwest. But for me, becoming a parent destroyed my whole notion of fulfillment, of escape, of play: all of that is dead and gone. "The Myth of Freedom," indeed.

And it's worth saying that my daily experience is creeping out from under that big binary: I used to want moments of play to "come back" and now more and more (but I have to balance it just right, sort of let myself get out of the way), the householding is kind of playful. Washing dishes with the child is a game, like Owl posted a while back about the headstand counting. The yoga becomes householderish, regular, sort of a "thing to do," a bit like homework. Climbing walls becomes an interesting flashback to an old skillset I hardly remember building, but it feels good to use my hands, manipulate my weight, move in space. Our love life is mediocre and spotty, and it's largely the kind of "eh" experience I used to go out of my way to avoid. But now it's par for the course; this is normal. And because it's not spectacular, not "out of the ordinary," its very ordinariness is no different from any other housework that I do.

I no longer crave the special, the unique, the far out, the "eternal buzz" via some intense experience. And I can't tell if that's because all of my intensities have been "ordinarized" or because my ordinary is quite extraordinary.

And all of that has Chogyam Trungpa written ALL OVER IT.

********************************************

Swenson. The summer yoga vacation is two weeks, Mysore-style and a weekend workshop, with four night classes (two of which are things called "Ashtanga's Greatest Hits," with poses from series 1-4). Austin Texas, end of June. Same time that Timiji's training runs, but about five hundred bucks less cash.

This and the Freeman-Swenson talk and QandA posted not long ago on Richard's site have me in good spirits about doing the yoga with Swenson and Shelley.

Traditional teachers have been something of an inspiring roadblock to me. First it was "you must drop back and stand up" which took my two years to set up, and then it was "Kapo to heels is a basic standard," which took me an additional year on top of that to set up and I'm STILL not there.

Swenson seems, all the time, to be based in people enjoying the yoga. If I can get regular practice going again, I can get the tightness out of my lateral hips and get my twists back (just like before), and I'm hoping that in Austin I can do something like Intermediate-to-Karanda. Right now it's impossible to estimate my practice: it's all over the place and pendulum-ing back and forth wildly. Some days it's only standing, but then I have an on week and recover my drops-and-stands and most of my Intermediate poses. But then I have a baby-and-work-heavy week and suddenly I can't finish Primary again. But then a Saturday class will be warm and full of people and I can bind Marichyasana D and get adjusted into a Dwi Padaish Supta Kurmasana. It's insane.

Anyway: Swenson said a pack of interesting things in that closing talk with Freeman. I'm going to paraphrase some nuggets in my own lingo: Ashtanga yoga as breathing practice: indeed, what ARE we doing the yoga for? Does it REALLY matter if you can tripod headstand, when death comes? Are you going to get extra points? What IS THIS FOR?

Sacred "activities": they seed the ground for a practice, any practice. Chanting? Bending? Pranayama? Great, all good. I think that what Swenson said was that you choose a practice that will inspire you to keep practicing, to keep sort of seeding that ground. And in that sense, who gives a damn what pose?

But I can't still let go of the idea that I have all of Intermediate in me, and so I want to be able to practice most of it when I have a yoga vacation. Silly, silly person.

***********************************

Classes remain 10 or more, every Sunday afternoon. I like this. Indianapolis also has a brand new Mysore ashtanga class, our former second series Monday night. It's 7:15, so it's the late show, but that's when some regulars were coming in, and so that's going to be our seed class. I'm in charge of that room for the next two weeks. Most everyone is doing Primary, and people are not quite sure how the room works. Carol ran it as "choose a series, I'll help you with it," which was really good last week for the first time. I'll run it, I think, the same way at first, with notes to each practitioner about where they would stop and backbend. I'll also do opening chant (as I do on Sundays anyway) and probably look to see where people get lost, where the breathing vanishes, where the bandhas run and hide.

It's damn difficult to move people from "get the full expression" to "keep breathing; if you're not breathing, it's too much pose." People REALLY fixate HARD on "I can do the whole pose" rather than the larger (if you will) "vinyasa" of breathing in and out.

Something else Swenson said is that you hit a plateau in practice, and this means not that the practice isn't working, but that you've hit a sort of "level of brilliant health" and you just stay there as long as you keep practicing (until, of course, mortality or life changes that (haha, same thing!) but that's a wholly separate vinyasa, eh?).

This just reminded me that I need to print off some cheat sheets (eventually we'll abandon them, but this is how I get newbies and shy practitioners in the door).

Over the summer I'm going to take Sweeney and Maehle's respective books and learn the vinyasa count for Primary (I think they probably disagree in places, per Kino's famous story that Guruji used to count differently in different practices, making a project like listing the vinyasa count a true lesson in chitta vrttis, hah!).

Because Indy is a vinyasa town and there are a lot of teachers with yoga blogs (and this is in large part why I keep my last name off mine and don't publicize it, although people find me by Googling "ashtanga indianapolis" which is fine), there is a lot of blog chitchat loosely about "self discovery" or some kind of feel-good message, which as my regular readership knows, is not my thing. Neither the one nor the other.

One of the things that I find in reading yoga blogs is that there's an idea that one becomes a teacher by studying with "great teachers," and I think that's problematic. What makes a great teacher, you know? Probably something different for each great teacher. What then can we learn from sampling? Do you take the mean or something? Do you take bits and pieces? Well then how do you not compose your own yoga as a sort of jigsaw puzzle, a postmodern collage? How then are you ever certain that you're accessing any kind of "yoga" or in any depth if you surf teacher to teacher? I don't mean this as criticism, I mean it as HONEST INTERROGATION.

And I'm speaking this as an ashtangi, of course. In short: how do you access "yoga" if you have no consistent system? Can that be done?

This is one of those perennial questions that too often leads to "my yoga is better than your yoga." SIGH; SO BORING.

That's in part why I want to learn the vinyasa count: that's LITERALLY breath to movement. Hop right foot out, exhale Trikonasana, one! That sort of thing. Again from Swenson, you do your pranayama during the practice.

Even during vinyasa classes, when I practice, I take what needs to be taken, I'm still thinking sequence. Thus vinyasa schools that offer classes on "sequencing." In a way I feel like vinyasa classes HAVE to be taught in a larger eight-limb framework, or to be taught by people who are hip to that. Otherwise, to riff off the Huffpost caption, "are you doing yoga-flavored exercise?" And I don't mean that you have to say, "This hip opener is good for your pratyahara." Ashtangis know that the physical body is the site where it all happens. Freeman is also ALL ABOUT THIS in his great _Mirror of Yoga_ which I really loved reading.

Through the physical body you can understand the cosmos. So I tell students to turn the outside of the back foot down in Virabhadrasana I because it gets in the hips and it prefigures backbends. Physical adjustment (well, vocal adjustment) to think more physically deeply (hip flexors from foot) to then access the emotional stuff that gets stuffed in there, and breath cues, and then students can take that (eventually) to life on the street, life at the breakfast table. Yes, the yoga is about your life. Any parent knows this.

A studio room should be a moment of sangha, not a moment of aerobics. There's a big difference between saying that and making that happen, making it possible. It takes awareness on the teacher's part that a studio room can BE a sangha, to create it as such. Lighting, welcome, interaction: even what you SAY matters to that creation.

And then we are far from poses, and I think that's essential in teaching the yoga. If you can't talk about more than poses when you're teaching, something's not done all the way yet.

Indy Ashtanga, Dad and Radiation

2011-03-27T18:45:00.002-04:00

Briefly (all posts are brief these days, although my regular readership knows that when I mean brief, I really don't mean anything and will often write my usual few pages here),

The Indy ashtanga scene seems to be authentically growing into something remarkable. When I began teaching in 2007, classes were 1-2 students for me and maybe as many as 8 for Carol (who is my teacher here and who remains the root of Indy ashtanga). If one of us hit double digits, it was some weird one-off miracle.

There were for a while, four of us that practiced regularly. FOUR. Two of those people are now either in their post-yoga phase or their vinyasa yoga phase.

But on Saturday in a led most-of-Primary, Carol had TWENTY SIX people. I can't even tell you how unheard of that is. The popular classes here, and by that I mean the MOST POPULAR of the whole week, get like 22, 24 people. An ASHTANGA class, getting twenty six??? UN HEARD OF. Like, seeing a UFO unheard of. Seeing a ghost unheard of.

But certainly welcome.

And then today I had 18. EIGHTEEN! And I haven't had anything but double digits since February, with the exception of one single week. This month alone, with one vinyasa class sub and three ashtanga subs, I taught 82 people.

So this is pretty amazing. I don't know if the practice is catching on, or if people are sampling around based on Groupon and LivingSocial coupons, or if a vinyasa teacher who is something of a devotee of mine is starting her own ashtanga cult over there across town (she'll be with Timiji this summer for two weeks while I'm down in Austin TX with Swenson; exact same two weeks, too; pretty interesting).

But as we're welcoming Kino here on May 7-8, this is all pretty cool.

*******************************

Ok, a progress report, finally: my dad began radiation on Thursday, and so far, he is fine and he's not getting the characteristic chemo exhaustion and so on. He's an extrovert to the bone (as I am), and so we think that it's actually energizing for him to be around so many people, with all those consultations and exams and procedures, and nurses, and extended family driving him in and out. He loves it. He riffs on the town he grew up in, with nurses from there, and it's hilarious. He tells stories about his kids, his youth, anything that'll do for conversation. And he's empowered by all of it. When we talk on the phone, it's more delicious than it's been since college. We're people who know each other fairly well, don't ask invasive questions, and who profoundly get along. Something about the distance (geographically) between us guarantees this, and in a way I look forward to going to see them with the kid at the end of May.

There is also no spreading to either his bladder or liver (whoohooo) although they're going to check the pancreas this week and that'll be done on Wednesday, they think. So we have good news so far and good energy. Hello springtime.

And that's that.

Real Quickly (and I mean in like One Sentence)

2011-03-13T21:35:00.002-04:00

http://ask.metafilter.com/74397/Can-you-sustain-a-strong-marital-relationship-after-having-a-child

has some of the best stuff that I've ever seen on to what degree and how, that is or can be done. Sure, many of the posts contradict each other, but I think if you look through you'll see at least three that I nodded ALL THE WAY THROUGH, and they're not all just pure snark and negativity (although they are high on the latter regarding the post-child relationship, which is of course also my own experience, thence the nod).

Pregnancy began? September 2008.
Relationship? Still out on the horizon. March 2011.

Two (Late) Cents on Sexual Energy/Creative Energy

2011-03-10T10:54:00.002-05:00

I found this on the Mula blog (to which I won't link because I'm feeling lazy) and also on Nobel's blog (Dragon's Den, again..lazy) and then it echoed around with something I was thinking about yesterday, which is AGAIN different, and it deserves a quick post.

The short summary was this (note that in I am paraphrasing here and not yet writing my own opinion about this lingo): "creative" energy for something like mula bandha might be a commodified term because "creative" can mean making advertisements, it can mean coming up with a "creative" way to subvert union power in Wisconsin, et cetera. "Creative," it can be said, is owned already, it's taken, we can't have it.

"Sexual" is (again, giving a short summary) more personal, more sensory, more embodied, and so not as public, not as ideological, not as "commodified."

***************************

So then.

I would argue this almost entirely in reverse. For me, "sexual" is utterly commodified, consummately social, and completely ideological. "Creative" is so broad that we can use it for nearly anything; if there is a weakness to the term "creative energy" it is that the language is so thin it's almost transparent.

What's my problem with "sexual energy" as a descriptor for something like the mula bandha?

"Sexual" in the west is a specific characterization within larger categories, and for me it inevitably comes with a weird Christianization, where the body falls out as evil or bad or "to be wary of" and the spirit/soul/whatever is to be valorized and it's always in that opposition.

Violence/sexual violence.
Experience/sexual experience.
Energy/sexual energy.
Text message/sexual text message.
Clothing/sexual clothing.
Performance/sexual performance.

And so on until the end of time. It all turns "privatized" for me, not simply "private." Privatized, privated, and secret, open to only a few, a lucky few, how much envy we have! Oh if only we too were invited! To taste the secrets!

It becomes cultish, exclusionary, secretive, full of ego jealousy or ego achievement (to have done THIS! THERE! Under THOSE conditions! With THOSE/THAT people/person!) How exclusive! Bring a reality TV camera! Ooooh ahhh!

Bullshit.

For me, to call the "yoga energy" or the "body energy" specifically "sexual" is to confront the wide, long-running scandal-marketing of all things sexual. You call something sexual and you can almost HEAR the cash registers ring up. CHA-CHING!!!

***********************

So can this term be used? It can.

I try to sit in Siddhasana after I practice, just to sort of center for a minute or two before I go back into the wide world of workable craziness.

As the book MASTER KEY (on MB) will tell you, Siddhasana is a heel tucked in at the perineum (if you're a guy, anyway) and ideally the top heel at the pubic bone, which sort of holds the external genitalia between the two heels. It takes some pretty substantial hip flexibility to do the full expression.

The energy there, with that contact, especially if combined with some pranayama that turns up the sensibility of the MB itself (as the exhale sort of reaches down to "pull it up") is definitely reminiscent of sexual arousal, but it's asked for, not spontaneous, which is (for me anyway) a major difference. You summon it, instead of being subjected to it.

The question can thus be asked (as I believe it can't, really, with spontaneous arousal, or at least it can't be asked in any interesting way), "What Do I Do With This?"

What I usually do with that "sexual" energy is expand it to as much of the full body as I can. Feel my feet, feel my intercostals, feel the movement of the breathing as it happens, become PHYSICAL, experience EMBODIMENT, feel blood moving, feel skin warmed, feel ORGANISM.

My eyes often go into soft focus and cross slightly when I'm doing pranayama, so the floor that I'm sitting on gets fuzzy and if there's a light reflected on a wood floor, it doubles and gets blurry. Kind of like living in a mellow Stan Brakhage film. I'm nearsighted anyway, so that also helps (and nearsightedness is GREAT for pratyahara in asana practice, just for the record).

It's easy that way to go inside and BE inside, to really inhabit that body, feel its BODINESS. And oddly, that embodiment is good for feeling the non-bodiness, what the Sutras would call Prakriti/Purusha. In a way that is very chewily non-dual, I feel my body/Prakriti presence and FEELING it is also OBSERVING it, even though those two are opposites. I know that the observing eye sees, precisely BECAUSE that observing eye/mind is EMBODIED in me. It's marvelous and I can't explain it better without speaking in tongues, Haha!!!

Anyway.

This is no longer "sexual" energy in the commodified sense, unless we consider that blood pulsing through the body is "sexual" and/or that the movement of the intercostals hefting the rib cage up and down is "sexual." And I'm willing to go there, but "embodied" or even "tactile" energy is probably more accurate, unless we want to consider all of embodied existence as sexual, which would mean sort of body-relational, broadly sensuous, and profoundly unprivatized.

I sort of like that vision of "sexual" as no longer linked specifically to genitalia, but to embodiment wholesale. Such a world sees stroking a pet's fur as sexual, again in the broadest sense of sensuality (again, broadly understood). Relating would be sexual, which would finally free us of the clunky and stupidly reductive "sexual relationship" meaning genitalia bouncing to and fro. Sexual in that intimacy would be shared openly, at any level, between any people. Sexual as meaning social, a new definition of social, free of privatization.

But few Westerners can hold a vision like that in their heads. We're too well trained, and that's what started all of this in the first place.

************************

Yesterday I was thinking about a long, long ago important relationship, and I realized that it is the lynchpin of my narrative, my relating narrative, wholesale. And there is attachment and pain there regarding how clunkily I handled that situation emotionally, because I simply could not have done better. Didn't have the self-awareness to handle the energy that existed there. I've always regretted that, still do.

And I thought, if this became what Trungpa calls WORKABLE, I could let go of the whole story, REALLY let it go. I maintain a lot of silence and privation with old once-friends because of that relationship and the painful mutual silence in which it ended, had to end. Like the film NINE SONGS. We sort of don't see their miscommunication, and what they are missing, we are also missing, and even in what the film GRANTS us to see, we know that we are missing what we NEED for that footage that we do see. And the entire film is a weird nostalgia trip, even in its present. To be already missing the very person you're with, to be ACTIVELY missing them in the present, at the moment of togetherness. That experience hurts.

And I find that I want to apologize to her in the most profound way, but we've moved on and had lives (Facebook is great for finding out details like that) and this need and desire is MINE FOR ME. Who wants the affection and the "It's OK"? I do. Who provides it? I do. Circle closes, pain is released, attachment disappears.

I have friends (well, once-friends) who maintain this contact. I'm thinking that, as they've invited several times, I might restart those connections. Word travels. How am I doing? was always her question before we found it impossible to talk to each other or even be comfortably in the same room, ever.

I'm living at the height of my considerable powers.

Or This'll Happen.

2011-03-04T21:45:00.002-05:00

My father was diagnosed with colon cancer this afternoon. They're going to treat it (radiation and then try to remove).

Here's a list of non-hierarchical factoids that are asking to be set in motion in some way, although the Buddhism soak that I've been doing for the past two years (texts, acting, not reacting) is still the floor of the whole thing:

He's 73. I'm 40. I'm adopted. His father died of lung cancer (smoking) before I was born. Bill Viola's THE PASSING. My kid is 21 months old. My mom's getting memory trouble. There are discussions about home help or moving or moving them. They are attached to the house, just like her parents (my grandparents) were to theirs also. I just got my full-time job this year; I've only just arrived. I still have no savings. My brother and family are local; they will do the ground work. The only three funerals I've been to IN MY LIFE were for grandparents. There was a guy in college who up and died of meningitis but I didn't know him well, only his circle. One could have seen this coming, with years of bad diet and the recent month-long urinary tract trouble and then the blood that one night. Practically disabling arthritis began in 1987 and progressed through the 1990s. I went to college and got married in that decade. When I got unmarried the first family member I told was my dad. I feel like I'm supposed to freak and I'm not, I know better, have more security than to be so obliged. As Irish Catholics, no one will feel this honestly up there in the Northeast; it'll all be muddled with stoniness. Within the past month, to try to acquire "parenting" or whatever that would mean, I imagined eulogizing my two parents. Interesting to have done that, now. He and I have always had strange honesty; anger, too; he's a Leo and I'm a Taurus; we are made for stout combat or good cooperation. The presence of other family makes that impossible, it's a two-person thing. I can tell from right now that it's one of the major things I will remember, no matter what happens, because it's the one thing that I can convey to someone else and that they WILL NOT SHARE. I can tell the much-told stories or generalize a personality or derive my own extroversion from his. But that dynamic that we share, that is OURS.

It is important to see "what can be felt" and to know how it differs from "what is felt." I had this when my grandfather died; what should I feel, what MUST I feel? No, no, what DO I feel, live in THAT question, because only that one is about your life.

When people are mourning I tell stories and generate conversation and laughter; that's what I do. I make the peace alone, always alone, by myself, either with the one involved or at the grave. Maybe my relationship with my father is the Ur-case of that model. It's not that we "go deep" or touch most anything that I've been candid about in these pages; it's not the content, it's the FORM of conversation, the dynamic of it. We have shallow conversations deeply. An unspoken, un-meta'd, depth. A felt depth, a true depth, and one we don't live in, but silently acknowledge. In that, everything is fine.

What I Want To Be When I Grow Up

2011-02-27T20:20:00.002-05:00

I teach people for a living. No, seriously. I teach Art History four classes a semester (no summers, that's madness) and then I teach two yoga classes a week on top of that, and I have a kid, which is a constant teaching-learning exchange and becoming more interesting by the month. So I teach people for a living, both financially and in broader senses.

Today I taught 15 people in the yoga room (that's pretty freakin' big for Indianapolis) and then 8 people in my "jump through, jump back" workshop, and it all rocked. Six people of those 15 chose to be dropped back, which I've been offering every Sunday for over a month. Dropping back is REALLY rare in Indy; you don't get that in just any class. In fact outside of workshops I've only been invited to do it in ONE standard yoga class here. MADNESS.

There's a young guy (I mean like 21) who did the studio's teacher training, but on top of yoga, he climbs rocks, and is really into Budokon, which means he can float a jump through or back ALL DAY LONG. He came to my workshop and then talked to me for a while after, about how his teacher (Cameron something....Shayne? Is that how it's spelled? That's what's in my head...and how do I know that?) said that he would have to "find his voice," so he asked me if I'd be willing to share poses and moves, basically, some morning, and be sort of a teacher-mentor for this voice-finding. I said, yeah let's do that, and we negotiated Thursday morning.

I liked the idea but didn't want to do it, because I'm desperately pressed for time, all the time, but helping someone at 21 find his voice is something that SHOULD BE DONE, so in the name of imagining myself at 21 mentorless, I said yeah.

And everywhere, this realization is happening. I asked students to put in for a video art panel at the upcoming Womens' Studies conference and a few did. I am going to meet some MFA student next week to see if I want to be on his committee (and I probably do). I'm going to teach graduate Art Theory again in the fall, and my group of undergraduate "fans" (I lightly refer to them as the "fan club") are going to pursue me from Video Art to Avant Garde Film in the fall.

The boy speaks more and more English, and he listens to us all the time. 21 months tomorrow. He and I work on his walking on tilted couch cushions (to me, he looks like the rock climber of the future; the way he pulls up onto chairs, the way he adjusts his weight, develops proprioception...) and read books (TONS of books) and go outside to see and say "bird" and "snow" and all of the other things he knows.

So with Budokon guy, I was thinking, "I should be part of some studio's TT regimen." Not ashtanga specific, necessarily, but a few of my students come to my classes because they like how I teach it (they love the sequence too, but I have ARRIVED, in my teaching voice, which is another reason I said yes to that dude). So I feel like I should be some element in some kind of multi-instructor TT, maybe the way that It's Yoga did it. You had Larry sessions, Marie sessions, Katie sessions, Yariv sessions. I'm into that. But I don't know how it'd play out.

I like mentoring; I like education (although I do NOT like its bureaucracy, but that's a take-it-or-leave-it bargain, eh?); I like parenting best when it is a teaching-learning exchange, that's what I always wanted it to be.

And it's service. A long time ago I read Life and Gannon having said, "When you step on the mat, you are SERVING, don't think that it's for you," and it took YEARS before that made any sense at all, I just couldn't wrap my head around that. Parenting has opened my service economy, my service psychology. I end EVERY yoga class with some lesson that I learn from my one-year old. People DIG that, because in my head, which is a very synthetic place, the parenting blends with Freeman's book MIRROR OF YOGA (which is really great) and with all the Trungpa I've been reading, and it comes out as some weirdly authentic lesson, without me "trying" to make it authentic, which is precisely how you make something sound inauthentic. I try to speak to the real experience with the language I've got, the Buddhistness of parenting itself, and it comes out as a marvel.

It's all service; you serve people. That's what it is.

Chaos and Randomness

2011-02-15T11:18:00.002-05:00

These aren't two different things, and in fact, they're really two ways of seeing things rather than things, themselves, at all.

In my usage, randomness is, as Lennon put it, "what happens while you're making other plans." Randomness is a complaint that I make when life sidetracks my intentions.

Chaos is wide-open spaciousness, and by its nature doesn't really permit plans (it's inchoate; that's another way to put it), but it permits action. So as long as I'm willing to fit or surrender whatever it is, chaos functions quite nicely.

Here's an example of the dual application:

The kid sometimes sleeps through the night, but unpredictably. We're never sure if it's going to be 10 hours straight or three wakeups or what, or how long they'll go on or how easy or hard they'll be. Last night it was 2:48 wailing, up til about 4, and then 5:11 wailing, quick put down, alarm goes off at 6:20, the whole household slept through it til 7:20, and then J had to be at work at 8.

So my intentions were:
1. Child sleeps through night (that's always my intention)
2. Wake up, prepare household, take child to daycare at 8
3. Dart over to studio for 8:30-10 "open practice" space
4. Have fabulous practice
5. Go to work, finish grading, give test, get kid, go home
6. Proceed with lovely evening of entertainment, book reading, etc.

In the view of "randomness," I was rudely subverted by the universe on all levels. There was not all-night sleep, there was no daycare at 8, there was late practice (although I did go, I got there at 10), I had a sore, heavy 10 sun salutations and a headstand and a shallow lotus and that's all, I got to work and am about to get the list going, and we'll see how the evening goes.

In the view of "randomness," I can easily become upset and chronically irritated at how unpredictably being a parent governs and in many cases prevents "me" from doing "what I want." And this comes with the ego bleed and with pain and with frustration. Very unfriendly.

*************

In the view of "chaos," however, the universe handed me a total reinvention of my usual morning. A late start plus having to single-parent the kid creates a whole new and uncommon scene. The practice has to move or be surrendered or be adapted, work probably has to be delayed or compacted, and preferences have to shift wildly all over the place so that I don't back myself into a frustrating little corner.

In the view of "chaos," the first thing I do (and I knew this even at 4 am) is toss my intentions out the window, and if the universe happens to see them and read them and feels like respecting them, it'll open a door for me. Otherwise, I handled what there was--I handled what was on the plate rather than trying to choose what I want from the menu. I got the kid to eat breakfast (he likes to play "no" because "no" is interactive, and fun, rather like the way that Owl told us about counting-as-a-game recently) and then we read some books and played for a while and left the house at 9 instead of 8 (because that's how reality wanted it) and got to daycare an hour late, and I got to practice an hour late, and from bad sleep and spotty practices recently, had a mediocre practice, so I emphasized bandhas and attention rather than trying to do anything fancy, and then I went to work, an hour late, and I feel as if I have time to type this, so here it is.

No frustration. Sure, I have no lunch and I need to print out my tests and I probably won't get caught up on my grading for the other class, but whatever, that's just more of what's on the plate. Am I overwhelmed? Guess I better do some midnight grading like I did all last week. So be it. Things move; conditions change; one adapts and makes choices and the consequences become the "plate of tomorrow." I keep setting intentions and then throwing them out; it's hilarious.

There is a ludic character to being in the moment, and high stress forces one into the moment (well unless you go sort of catatonic playing video games or something like that). High-stress action is really weirdly ludic, and that shouldn't make any sense, but it does.

Half an Hour.

2011-01-28T10:03:00.002-05:00

Second post in January; 24 days between. In the old days, that would be uncommon, but these are the new days (all days are new, really) and it's pretty typical for the future as I see it. Perhaps this will mean infrequent high-quality posting (no guarantees, now).

Half an hour's practice this morning in an air-conditioned open free-weights room at the local YMCA. Second floor, basketball court below, again, lots of open space. 5 Surya A's, 5 Surya B's, Sirsasana, Padmasana. One jump through, one jump back to make the transitions there unclumsy. Sweeney said that to us in the summer of 2008: Sirsasana; Padmasana; enlightenment. So that's what I did. It worked, at least if changing one's concentration counts as "worked." Breath focus, depressive emotional energy changed, onward.

There are 3 YMCA locations in this town that I've frequented. This one is way out east of my already south-east corner house, so it's close, but not if I'm going to work, which is five miles west in the other direction.

The second is right between home and work, but it's downtown, so hard to get parking in (parking is free until 10 am in their lot, so I try to practice 8:30-10 and get out). However, their big bikes room is FREEZINGLY air-conditioned and it makes my hips lock up in arctic fear. Their downstairs free-weights room WAS warmer and open, but yesterday they were doing construction both high and low and I had to roll out a mat next to the CAUTION tape and go for it in tight space. I don't like that location; it's unreliable and cold, although it is close and well-placed.

The third is the northern Y that was up by daycare before the kid moved to the campus daycare. This space is now almost totally out of my reach unless I'm up there in the "white flight" suburbs doing shopping at Trader Joe's or something. It's too bad, because the amenities prove that the place has the money of its audience.

Anyway.

Today I got off the mat and a woman next to me asked if I practiced Buddhism; I said, not in any formal way. She told me about a temple (really? In Indy?) about fifteen blocks north of my house (she didn't know that) and said they do some chanting in Vietnamese and then have lunch, on Saturday mornings into the afternoon. Sounded both cool and potentially cultish. "Vietnamese" immediately had me wondering if they were Thich Nhat Hanh devotees, but there's so much cultishness in Indiana/midwestern belief that mostly what I got was alarms going off. Maybe it's fine. They use MeetUp, which Howard Dean's presidential run made famous, so I'll check them out that way and give the site a drive-past-and-see.

Midwestern belief comes in the form of these sourceless churches that are by definition non-denominational, with names like Lamb of God Ministries and Light of the Earth and promises of "non-judgment" and as ever, welcoming all comers, usually in wide and tall rectangular buildings covered with white paint. They're in my neighborhood, they're near one of the Y's, they're found all throughout the city except to a thinner degree in the arts district and of course less often up in the white flight suburbs (although they're still up there).

I used to go to a church like that in New Britain, Connecticut, when I was in college, because I was trying out my seeker urges (basically). Not to parody the site, but it really was a bit like the James Brown church service in the film The Blues Brothers. Very---but not exclusively---African-American, lots of witnessing, a dynamic sermon (always), a band with guitar and bass and drums, lots of "come on! Tell it! Uh-huh!" as the witnessing proceeded, laying on of hands, really wild stuff. Much more "alive" than the lay Catholicism I grew up with, which I experienced as just a set of disembodied "thou shalt nots" with hellfire for a punishment (equally abstract except for imaginations driven by heavy metal record album covers).

A guy who went there, regular white college guy, in fact the guy who brought me there first, was volunteering at a soup kitchen-and-shelter, and was so avidly trying to convert one of the down-on-his-luck guys there one night, that the dude stabbed him with a knife. The attack wasn't fatal but it was the last I formally heard of that guy, ever.

I was reading a lot of existentialism that year (along with interest in PIRGS and soup kitchen volunteering and this dynamic gospel soul edification, to say nothing of an ongoing Russian major in college and courses in international political dynamics and pre-calculus--what a mix), and so I was seeing all of this in a weirdly Camus/Dostoevsky light. The Dostoevsky was especially informative. Humanity, belief, tragedy, the fever dream that is reality. Dostoevsky is less clinical than the full-on modernists; only Kafka managed to put any blood in that clinical voice; well, he and Henry Miller, who induces a different fever dream, a language dream. Same with Joyce. Celine achieved it by ellipsis. Not speaking lets us feel. Soon this'll be Paul Celan. Anyway.

I was thinking not long ago that "doing seventh series" becomes an identity like any other. Valorizing suffering or bliss or whatever it is. I don't want to write from "inside" that identity box any more than I want to write from inside any other one; credentials and persona. In large part I haven't written here in three weeks and some because I was either whining about 7th series or about 1st or about something; it was all petty whining or petty whining and I got tired of my whole written life being petty whining so I quit it.

J and I had something of a fight and then something of a discussion, and the dynamic was more hearing each other than acknowledging each other, but we did both manage to speak our priorities out loud, and we both, I think, knew how that would go, but again I'll put it in Hanson's terms. She's all Team, because Couple and Self can wait, while Team is demanding. She said, "I don't want to miss my child's youth." I am, as you know, not about to totally surrender Couple and Self for Team because I believe that if Couple and Self aren't at least dusted off now and then, Team can't be done well. We didn't get as stupid as "agreeing to disagree," we just said our own pieces out loud and left it at that.

I asked J if we could have "3 minutes a day" where we just "like each other" and she agreed to this, realizing that most of our time is given to work, child care, and nagging and committed the nagged errands. So the most productive thing that came of our conversation is that I get 3 minutes a day of conversation or just non-nagging politeness (that's Couple, for now) and she gets to continue to do Team all the time except for those three minutes. That's a fair compromise, we both believe.

Yes, our child will be 20 months old in three days. Yes, I still think it's kind of hilarious when books talk about "men will find it hard to wait the six weeks after birth with no sexual activity." That's so, so funny.

I'm interested in Shambhala now; months ago I committed to a subscription of Shambhala Sun, which largely does whatever Pema Chodron is doing, with the regular high dose of advertising (which takes the ever-same ever-tired format of "got a problem with X? Try Buddhism" the same way yoga mags sub "try yoga" and beauty magazines sub "try cosmetics" and health magazines sub "try exercise"; yeah). Anyway, SS sells subscribers' names to things like the Shambhala Center in Colorado, so I got a retreat list (similar to those posted by Kripalu in Massachusetts). Trungpa again resurfaced in my life and I've decided to pay attention. First I up and buy a volume of his writings, and soon after that, Owl calls for an online reading of _Cutting Through..._ and then he reappears again? Time to take notice. So in two days I expect to win an Ebay auction and come away with a book by Trungpa, one by Hanh, and one by Bill Viola, and we'll see what all that turns into.

I put a deposit down for the Tim training in June. We'll see if money and time permit.

Happy 2011 and new stuff on non-attachment

2011-01-04T10:06:00.002-05:00

So I was busy getting beat up by the ashtanga Intermediate last night, and after finding that I just didn't want to do the FBH's, I was on the floor thinking, "Wait, I'm tired of this, all of this, the whole ego death meow-meow trip."

Now, pain and reflection are not two things that go easily together. Pain has to be fairly dilute (or long-term, or both) before you can still experience it AND reflect on it. Fevers are the best example of that. Most of the time, pain generates this instant loud, overwhelming nervous system response: AHHH TAKE YOUR HAND OFF THE BURNER! and such. You don't reflect on that, you do what the nervous system says, that instantaneous, involuntary response. Afterwards, you can reflect.

The early incarnations of my ego death trip were samskaric visitations from the past, which is really a type of emotional/memory pain. Don't underestimate that stuff; don't just go thinking that just because it isn't cutting yourself with a knife, that it isn't intense pain.

I would say that for easily all of 2009 and half of 2010, that was how it worked. Too intense, immersive, no time to reflect, no ability! Surrounded, underneath, waves and walls, sunk deep in some dark container. It was a swimmer's test, a climber's test, just to get EVEN with that madness, not to get away from it. Away from it was definitely not an option, there wasn't any distance. I used to have like panic when my wallet-emptying debts appeared just after finishing the PhD.

Anyway, with time, even if that pain persists, one gets used to it, and that's, well, I was about to say, "that's distance," but really, that's spaciousness, and spaciousness is different from distance. Spaciousness can have intimacy with pain and the sources of pain; distance, by definition, doesn't (sure, you can have a sort of long-distance relationship with your pain and be intimate, but for me that's not what Trungpa would call "workable").

So now, last night, I am "tired" of this. The relationship with all things ego has been one of seeing, feeling, being, attached/attachments. And that's what the ego does, it grabs for dear life onto anything/everything that can be used to make "I" coherent, even if coherence comes from drama and trauma.

I used to be able to do a full Intermediate, admittedly with much tiredness after hard poses, but still, the whole thing, day after day. Now I have tight hips that make my knees hurt in Padmasana, and I struggle with Kapo and with FBH and with a whole bunch of other things. This is due in large part to my "practice surrender" in December, the inner effects of which were worth it. I stopped stressing myself out about "being an ashtangi" and such, not that that has stopped completely, but I sat aware and spacious with it until I could see IT over there and ME over here, and that undoing, that separation, was the whole goal. Now to just KEEP it....

Anyway.

I want to feel better, flexier, more liquid, less "sticky" to stress, and for that, I want to practice more, more regularly, more intensely (so far as surrounding life and seventh series permit).

I'm damn tired of all of this surrender, loss, putting down. Yes, things have ended, things have been lost, identities surrendered through enormous pain. Hurrah.

E-fucking-NOUGH already.

It's not that I want to scale the mountain of old identities and shout it, it's that I want to STOP LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF THE GONE.

Here's a euphemistic parallel (I only say this is euphemistic because I have the language to be more precise and I'm intentionally going to be less so):

J and I made friends again on New Year's Eve, complete with dialogue and consent, which for me is always the most important part of friend-making. Sure, there were things done which I like, too (and like everyone I do like specific things more than others), but I feel like we forged a conversational model, a sort of "light of dialogue" in our long-term ambiguous darkness, and now that I have that light, I can see the way. Sure, there's too much work stress this week to probably have an encore, but now that I don't have to live in confusing darkness where my relationship with J is concerned, I don't worry as much about time off or frequency of whatever, because I know we can talk about/through these things if we need to.

THAT's what it took to end the long ascetic streak. Not action, but dialogue.

This is the same paradox: I want to practice even if I don't "become an ashtangi" or a "blah series practitioner." I want to relate with J even if we do not "re-find the salad days" or whatever.

And to answer a sort of un-asked question from last time's comments:

What is it to get space from the ego? Isn't wanting to become un-egoic, itself egoic? This is a sort of "spiritual materialism" question. If we like practicing, we give our practice to the ego, no? That's how it works, no?

I think that this contest (between DOING and sort of EGO-IDENTIFYING) is an option that we have at all times. The ego, by nature, grasps and holds, builds up. Trungpa gives us wonderful metaphors about armor, castles, thick walls. But that is simply what the ego does, and we can do other things. Do it and leave it. Or do it and don't identify with it. In yoga-ese, give up the fruits of the action. Take your favorite sacred text here: in the Gita, you give it to God. In the Sutras, you realize that pleasures are all pain and you surrender, you detach from the fruits of your actions. Non-attachment. It's not NOT ACTING, it's (to use my paradox above) not generating BEING from doing.

A thing has happened, a thing has been done. Then you leave it.

So what I want here is to LEAVE the surrender, leave the death. THAT TOO HAS BEEN DONE.

The Parenting, the Yoga.

2010-12-16T09:17:00.002-05:00

Periodically I'll attempt to answer Owl's chewy question from last time. I've been thinking on and off about this since last time's post, so here are some things.

1. I took a vacation from asana for about the last week of November and two weeks of December. A sort of surrender of the practice, of the mode in which I was practicing. I did this in 2008 too, and can't remember 2009, but I probably did the same there. The easy answer is that I have too much life, work, whatever, but this time it was also something different.

I practiced HARD over the winter of 2010, early this year, up to April when I busted a shoulder. This gave me a high level of physical skill, to be sure. Recently I was doing the Intro to Intermediate class and it kicked my butt, which made me think of April when I was regularly doing the whole sequence. Sure, with modifications, but I was handling that sequence several times a week. Anyway, "watch things appear and disappear." The point of this most recent asana vacation is that I realized that I'd practiced so hard early in 2010 (and throughout 2009) in order to preserve some sense of my life pre-parenthood. In short, that's practicing for the ego.

Now let's be clear. Most of the time when I read/hear people talking about "I was doing X for the ego" they mean overreaching in some pose, showing off; they mean EGOTISM not simply "the ego." And that's not what I mean here. The tremendous ego pain of transitioning from what Hanson calls "couple" to "team" (couple to parents, basically) was like any other death, real or imagined. You struggle against it; it's not yet native to simply accept those things. So hard asana practice was meant not to aggrandize or be showy, but to keep "I" alive, literally to serve as a handhold for the ego as it plunged off that cliff.

So I surrendered it for three weeks, asana vacation. Explicitly to make myself accept the loss of practice, to live through it, and to see how silly the handhold is, how silly the panic about "survival" is. It's like when Wile E. Coyote is tricked by the roadrunner, and off the cliff he goes, with his tiny umbrella, but what the frame of the cartoon hasn't shown us is that there's a little ledge there and when he extends a toe down, he stands.

You don't die when the ego loses something, when its grip is made to loosen. But suffering that lost grip is really infomative for seeing how locked into the ego we get.

2. French Buddhists. We had visiting French Buddhists (she's American; he's French; they've lived over there for ten years and we went to their Buddhist wedding in the woods of Georgia a couple years ago and it was very rad) for three days, probably three weeks ago now. Great conversation. Absolutely fantastic. I often talk about these conversations when I'm sending off students after yoga class; my closing sort of meditation often comes from this visit.

One of the things we talked about while they were here is how one moves from singledom-coupledom to parenthood. They are not parents. I said that often people just attribute it to magic, with this euphemistic "you just do it" Nike ethic. But in my experience, you get massively overwhelmed, but you do the thing anyway. The child must be carried around all night, the child must be changed, and so on. You can't negotiate with those needs, you just do the thing, catch what sleep you can, and you live hand to mouth. When you start to get used to it, you do the tasks, but complain about it a lot, because it's hard, and because "the way it used to be" was easier (really? a dissertation's easier than parenting, are you sure?).

But then you find out, with time, that you're doing more than you're complaining, just out of repetition, just out of EXHAUSTION from fighting it. The switch from being to doing cannot be over-emphasized. Being is so "Who am I," so "Who was I," "Who will I be." Doing is simply doing. And yeah, we can go all Foucault on it and talk about bodies and pleasures and then "being" but Foucault never wanted it to get existential like that. The idea is that you do, and you DON'T WORRY about being. WHO CARES?

BEING someone doesn't mean ANYTHING.

Right, there are followup questions: "Well then how do I know what to do if I don't know who I am?" The void in which that question is asked, never exists. That question is a parlor game for college students. There is always doing to be done, and as long as that exists, we'll never have the void where we need to confront "being" as something we need to do. The whole "game" of being is simply watching things appear and disappear.

I could say that lesson a thousand ways; it's really the primary thing that I've learned about myself from parenting so far, even though it, itself, is not technically about parenting at all.

3. Move stuff around. C began new daycare at the start of this month, which is a quarter-mile from the university where we work. This means that instead of a 6 mile drive north and then an 8 mile drive southwest, making a triangle from home to daycare to work (and then back, each day) we now drive 5 miles west to work, make that little quarter-mile dropoff loop, and repeat, when we leave. SO much simpler than the old commute. And with J's 8-5 schedule and my ever-changing class schedule, morning dropoffs and afternoon pickups are negotiable. For example, today I'll get the boy at 3:30 or so.

What this change of commute has meant is that I don't have easy access to that northside YMCA anymore, which means changing my winter practice time/space. A thousand questions. Do I go to the downtown Y, where parking is impossible unless I practice at 8 am? It is on the way to work, and I am teaching all afternoon classes in the spring semester. Do I practice in the cold house? Do I ask the yoga studio if they'd let me run a 2-hour "DIY room" five days a week? Thousands of options here. Of course, this interferes (along with family travel, which comes up next week) with regular practice, and I simply let it do that. Some days I don't practice, other days I'll do some sun salutations, other days I do a half Intermediate, etc. When it's fluid, I don't try to regulate it. I don't love how random it is right now but this is all about getting away from that "must do" mindset that was really just a fierce grip on "who I used to be" and "how I used to do." New routines will appear; right now, it's more important that it stay juicy and random.

Activities recede, become optional. I find that I don't really miss bars, movies, that sort of thing. Climbing gyms, sure, but that's loaded history, hard to let go of. Parenting is largely about negotiating between an external schedule (work, breakfast, those sort of "day to day" structures) and the child's curiosity and desires and native fluidity. C likes to see seals, dogs, cats, and other critters, even in movies and electronic greeting cards if not at the zoo. So many mornings, he will be slapping his thigh (which means, "dog"), and running to a computer, instead of wanting to eat breakfast so that the day can be gotten underway. I'm often willing to negotiate with him, and J is less so, more schedule-focused. So that's additional negotiation. She gets her (more scheduled) way, and already I can see that I'm going to wind up being "the parent who lets you get away with stuff." That's fine.

One of our French visitors said that a friend who is a physicist had said this about kids: "They open your heart more than anything else does, and they drop a nuclear bomb on your relationship." Totally agreed. I mean, cats are cute and fabulous, but a 1 year old beats just about anything for cute. Plus, they talk and interact with you in human terms, but need constant cautioning and chaperoning everywhere, so you really get deep lessons in caring, simply from DOING, not in any kind of distanced, imposed Hallmark way.

I grew up with pets, lifetime--my parents had dogs from before I was adopted and all the way through college and then some. So nurture has always been an element, and you can see it when I'm teaching people something that I dig and that they dig. But there's even more of it now. I never cared for parenting described as, "it makes you less selfish," because I don't see self-discovery as selfish. It's only the martyr-parents who talk about "selfishness," much the same way that it's only people with a certain degree of self-loathing who talk about "I was doing it for the ego."

Nurture's not easy if you're a boy, especially if you're one with good exposure to gender politics. Obviously, nurture is marked feminine in this culture. I was having lunch last week in the campus center and sitting near a table of about eight college guys: sporty, trendy, loud. The energy coming off them, the sheer extroverted testosterone, was absolutely tactile, touchable, visible. Instinctively, I didn't care for it, because those guys mocked me for years when I was in my teens, but then I re-looked at them, imagined them as guys who'd maybe gotten curious about the US yoga trend and walked into my room. And that changed everything; they became powerful bodies with curiosity, with shyness, and immediately I developed a sort of intimate empathy with them. Just to play with it, I let my view switch from one to the other, reinventing the human beings in front of me by means of different lenses. Then it became very funny and amusing and I turned someone that I used to be, into a tool in my toolkit.

Being is history, is memory, is samskara. As my new favorite book of the Sutras, book Three, tells us, samskaras of noise can be replaced with samskaras of stillness.

Kumbhaka (retention) is hard for me even when I'm practicing a lot, so what I've done lately is just to slowly "sip" as big an inhale and exhale as I can (this is separate from practice, often done just seated in the house). Inhaling until I can feel the in-breath sort of rolling just under the top of my head, swirling under the sahasrara. Exhaling until I can feel the whole body sink down to the mula bandha. It takes a LONG time to do that breathing, just that simple breath, and as Larry once said to us, pranayama makes time stop.

But what I also found in doing this is that I can move my mind, my sort of "sensing self" to a place just behind the palate in the roof of the mouth (like where the uvula is, but not in it, sort of above/behind it) and an energetic plumb line drops from that point DIRECTLY to the mula bandha. It's the keenest sense of the MB I've ever had, and I can't get to the "palate point" unless I do some of the breathing pattern that I was just talking about. This experience comes with pretty intense sense-withdrawal, very much a "being within" not a being without (or as Maehle's translation of the Sutras has it, involution rather than evolution) and it's easy to lose it, as soon as my attention turns outward again.

Dada sound poetry from the teens was described once as, "Poetry is made in the mouth," a physical act. This type of "being in my head" is not a cognitive thing but is a physical thing, literally BEING in the head, in the flesh of the head, but also the energy of the head, the body, thus the plumb line down.

These are some of the things that are going on.

Encinitas, June, 2011. Do I do this? Your vote...

2010-12-05T20:39:00.002-05:00

100 hours, my first stay in someone's Mysore room that's longer than 4 days, since the summer of 2010 and since May 2007 before that. It's hard to count Troy's room as a Mysore room in some respects given how non-traditional it is, but if we're talking pure facts, then yes, I spent 8 days there.

Reasons to do this:

1) Tim Miller, two weeks. A revelatory first meeting in summer 2010.

2) Pronunciation, philosophy, pranayama, 100 hours training. Deliciousness.

3) Two weeks in what is pretty certainly the most well-renowned Mysore room in the United States.

Reasons to be cautious, careful, and wary:

1) I get paid 10 months a year. When I get paid at the start of May, I don't get paid again until the start of August, or depending on how they cut the calendar, maybe even September. That's a LONG DROUGHT.

2) True, I've been paying off debt and paying for a new furnace, but right now, I have NO SAVINGS. Not one cent.

3) J doesn't know this plan of a plan yet. She's leaving in May for a week and leaving me with C for a long weekend in February, so there may be some balance as to who does how much baby care. She won't like the $1750 price tag, but she knows that I've sacrificed things I love to do this family gig.

4) $1750 is training alone. Plane, food, shelter, et ceteras?

Other things to consider:

1) Kino no longer visits Chicago twice a year, but she is coming to see us (Indy) in May, which rocks. Still, a weekend with her, while brilliant, is not two weeks solid and 100 hours.

2) Tim visits Columbus Ohio (3 hours from here, directly east) every April. I can't do the weekdays but I can do the weekend, April 8-10. Same as above, though.

3) A friend of a friend once offered me a bed in San Diego, approximately 40 minutes from Carlsbad (I asked her to check). That might solve housing but might require rental car. Hm.

4) June 18-July 1. This training sells out, every year. Interest forms are online. I'm tempted, CONSTANTLY, to fill one out. Do these dates interfere with family stuff (summer reunions in May, J's people)? Do these dates interfere with potential Seattle travel? When should I begin negotiating?

SO:

The main attraction is ashtanga ala Tim Miller. There is no debate about that.

The main worry is money, pure and simple.

I don't expect J to hate this idea except that it's two grand (probably three when all counted) over the summer in the middle of our poverty and we know that's coming.

THAT is what I have to solve if I can. HOW? Summer data entry? I already cannot teach over the summer, that schedule is long past.

Drop language on me.

This is how one academic would do the whole Jois Yoga thing.

2010-12-03T20:55:00.002-05:00

I'm not terribly interested in the Jois Yoga question/debate/whatever it is, but I am interested in what I've been reading and teaching recently, so here's this.

This isn't going to be (I think) partisan about change or tradition or really even about ashtanga vinyasa; basically what I'm going to do here is to take a cultural critic point of view (largely borrowed from a frame used by Laura Kipnis when she was still a hardcore post-Marxist and not the spectacle-manufactured soap-operette who wrote AGAINST LOVE, a book I liked) on the idea of marketing a subculture (yes, I just used that word).

Here goes. In art history, the word "postmodern" refers always back to "modern" (as it does everywhere else) and "modern" comes in part (I would argue in large part) from the work of Clement Greenberg, THE MAN who helped to make Abstract Expressionism the movement which seized the gold medal ("art capital of the world") from Paris and hung it around the neck of New York. Sure, Greenberg wouldn't have been able to do that solo, without people and contextual events like the Works Progress Administration and Peggy Guggenheim's love of Surrealism (and Surrealists, heh), but nonetheless, Greenberg's definition of avant-garde art as that which refers to and struggles against its own medium, became a seminal part of what it means for one to be part of "modernist" art history.

Greenberg wrote, in a much less systematized and useful way, about politics, hinting in usually contradictory ways that avant-garde art could somehow serve leftism and even save the world (as Tom Wolfe reminds us, Greenberg could get downright maudlin). Postmodernism is often seen as having either no politics, having sacrificed them instead for style, or as having frustrated or wishful politics, as in the work of what I call the "surrender post-Marxists" (I'm looking at YOU, Frederic Jameson, and your French cyborg clone, Baudrillard). I realize that there is political intent in Deleuze and Guattari and so on and so forth, but for purposes of not getting caught up in that to a totally impractical degree, I'm looking mostly as the post-1968 "eh, fuck it" attitude taken by many former Marxists and I am totally leaving out the third world (where politics never has taken up any kind of post-Marxist surrender as far as I'm aware).

In short, then, and this is already a generalization that I'm forcing myself to make so that I can get to JOIS YOGA without having to write a book of theory to do so, let us say that the postmodern in an art historical context is largely about multiple styles within artwork and is low on politics (there might be gender politics, or in relational art, there is an interactivity that's potentially political, but we are low on Ye Olde Grande Narrative politics, i.e., Marxism).

Kipnis is mostly known for her Hustler magazine analysis, or else, for AGAINST LOVE, her 2003 (?) book which attempted (so, so bravely!) to give us a properly Marxist and unsentimental analysis of what "love" is and means in American culture. Sadly she went for empathy, got human about it, and this cost her academic sharpness and now she's popular and disdained all at once and called things like "lonely." You start with Marxism and a sharp knife, and you wind up Oprahcized. Welcome to America, Laura.

Anyway.

In 1991, Kipnis wrote a piece called "Repossessing Popular Culture" in which she compellingly and with great complication (but that's academics for you) argues that we need to admit popular culture into a consideration of active politics and to forge a properly POPULIST leftist "popular culture." Why is this important? Greenberg, for example, separated the "avant-garde" (complicated art for elitists, to be snarky about it) from "kitsch" (easy to understand art for anyone), calling kitsch even "fascist." The avant-garde has promise for intellect, for politics, for everything; the avant-garde is PROMISE itself. Kitsch is sold, salesmanship, selling. Kitsch is basically prostitution and the prostituted (Jean-Luc Godard makes like criticisms throughout his 60s work before turning into an obtuse Maoist in 1968 and remaining so until 1972).

In short, avant-garde is promising and kitsch is sold out. Subculturally, a new scene contains the promise of whatever (getting a girlfriend, making a social revolution) and the old scene is sold out, commodified, "gone to the masses." We STILL operate in Greenbergian categories, which is part of why and how we see the postmodern as apolitical (well, that and its suspicion of "grand narratives" but then, you can still do politics ala Foucault and all that, but then you have to not only read but also understand that stuff....).

Kipnis shows that various different critics, even those writing on the avant-garde as a historically isolatable discourse, reproduce this high/low dynamic where high culture is potentially political, but elite, and low/mass/popular culture is basically pure sold-out capitalism. Her counter-argument is literally to repossess popular culture, to find a politics there, in fact to GROW a politics there.

What can this tell us about JOIS YOGA?

Much of this debate comes in a binary form, "tradition versus marketing" or words that are easily translatable to those. When Kipnis talks about high culture, she deploys the French to say that there is a sort of sanitary barrier that avant-garde erects around itself, to protect itself from icky capitalist pop culture. "Cordon sanitaire" is what she says. A sanitary fence, if you will. She then goes on to prove that the avant-garde isn't, in fact, free of the market, and in fact, it doesn't even WANT to be free of the market. But somehow there is some kind of magic line crossed where pop culture is TOO committed to the market. Where's the line between commodification and simply "selling to live"? Kipnis doesn't go there; for her it's enough to prove that high culture's "cordon sanitaire" is imaginary and that it's keeping us from reckoning with pop culture as something perhaps politically valid.

So why and how does "the tradition" think it is/should be free of the market? And how free does it need to be, exactly, in order to "remain" the tradition? How much sell out is too much? We can see answers to this in any of the "yoga debates" like the ones over TOE SOX. But all of that relies (assuming that my translation of yoga into art historical criticism is worth anything) on the MAINTENANCE OF THE CORDON SANITAIRE.

Say that "spirituality" replaces "politics" and that capitalism remains capitalism. There, is it clearer now? We segregate the "true" tradition--even to the point of naming particular teachers--from the "icky capitalism" of popularity. This is precisely what the JOIS YOGA debate is.

In Kipnis' terms, what we should do is GROW OUR OWN POPULISM in that capitalist soil. This isn't the same as that weak-kneed sellout "well it makes the yoga more popular and that's a good thing." Popularity ALONE isn't enough. Kipnis argues that we need not just to assume a populism will appear but to ACTIVELY CREATE ONE, basically to FORCE CAPITALISM TO GROW ONE. As Becky Goldberg once put it in her video on feminist porn, "If women demand feminist porn, even the most patriarchal market will have to provide it to them." That's some faith in the market, assuming that it underrides (and overrides) all. Hah--how MARXIST! :D

So the creation of a properly spiritual ashtanga vinyasa is a responsibility that lies with the teachers and probably most with THE STUDENTS. You want spirituality? Make the capitalists teach it to you. Force them to teach it. DEMAND that they teach it.

Quickly: Second, Ego.

2010-11-29T22:16:00.003-05:00

Got schooled by the Intermediate series, and only up to Karanda, too. Sure, I got an assist past the toes in Kapo, and the backbends were quite nice, but the bandhas were falling short from Bakasana on, and the outer hips were so busy processing long-term seated grading stress that they were useless in the Tittibhasanas, and I had to come out of that sequence, which hasn't happened in over a year. Hard to Pincha (which it NEVER is) and no Karanda lotus. And then I just did not have backbends in me, and that never happens.

This is all from not practicing much, although I did have a delicious studio Primary on Saturday.

Speaking of which,

Something complicated is going on with ego/other selfhood, pain, loss, and so on. A rephrase of the earlier "things are dying" complaint of the last two years, but it's messy because "I" both feel the pain and realize that the pain is felt SOMEWHERE ELSE. This is not a thing that can be intellectualized into sense.

If it were, I could just say, "feel over there" and make it better, but I can't.

It's like I said before, act of STEERING.

I feel pain, and I feel SOMEONE ELSE feel it. Partly in the ego, partly outside it (apparently; what the hell is OUTSIDE the ego anyway?).

And from the prior post on energetics: a loss of practice and practice time and energy, but of course, not a loss. Not really. An ego loss, the fading of a credential. But that's real. Or is it? In part yes, and in part no. And it's BOTH, both at once.

Western logic does not easily account for such things.

The Energetics of Seventh Series

2010-11-18T12:02:00.003-05:00

Let's take apart this idea that asana practice is separate from daily life. Ways that I've seen the two separated, usually come in rhetoric like "life gets in the way of my practice" in various formulations. I've certainly said such things many times here.

But also, let's take apart the idea that life "is the yoga." That's easy to say, but really, running hither and yon is not Janu Sirsasana B, for example. There is of course discrimination to be earned in everything from driving around to making food, and one can make any aspect of existence into "one's meditation," as Trungpa put it, but for ashtangis specifically, life is NOT the asana practice. The ASANA practice is the asana practice.

Then again we run into the first idea, separation, as if one's physical practice is never impeded or influenced by daily life (which, of course, it is).

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This put me in a mind to try to discuss the "energetics" of seventh series. One of the main things about being a parent is that you lack free time in a way which non-parents ABSOLUTELY cannot understand.

When, for example, you're writing a dissertation, you might try to write every day, and you find good times of day and bad times of day (I'm good from about 7-10 am, those are key writing hours). But if you miss a day, nothing bad happens unless you have a deadline or a conscience that cares.

In parenting, you're on every day, no matter what. Fever? Still must parent, change diapers, drive that kid to daycare, whatever it is. Cold with sinus nonsense? No excuse. Still must act, persist, make it so. When you're writing a dissertation, you can usually take time off. In fact, I can think of NOTHING else that requires the on-ness that parenting does, simply in terms of time demands.

A usual weekday in my house goes something like this:
*rise 6:00 to 6:30ish, somewhere in there
*by 7:30, breakfast assembly, child woken and changed and dressed
*drive north 6 miles to daycare, maybe 2 more miles to practice, 9-11 am
OR
*go to school, give morning lectures, 9-12 pm
THEN
*drive north 8 miles, practice, 1-3 pm or thereabouts
OR
*go to school-or-home and tend email, recommendations, other business
*pick up kid between 3 and 5 pm
*give snack, play and entertain and enjoy, 4-6 pm
*give dinner, try also to feed the grownups, 6-7 pm
*bathe kid, read books w/, play and entertain, 7-8 pm
*put child to bed (if this is easy, 10 min; if it's hard, 1 hour)
*do any necessary life/work tasks, 8-10 pm
*crashing by 10 pm almost every weekday night

There is NO personal time in that schedule aside from asana practice, but that's also rigorously scheduled and constantly being pressured by email, work, grading and so on. I find that if I don't make any time to sit and relax and recoup, this quickly leads to hardcore energy burnout. It's very hard to surf that kinda rigor.

I also try to take a Monday night yoga class, I teach a 3-hour seminar on Tuesday nights, and I teach the yoga on Wednesday nights, which means J does often those three nights solo, so I come home at 8 and clean up yogurt and kitchen dishes and so forth, and housework simply takes up the spare time (to the degree that there was any).

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It is very hard to make asana practice just "doing the work," as I prefer to think about it (thanks Karen). Doing the asana work is surrounded, completely, by doing the housework and doing the grading work and doing the teaching work. It's nothing BUT work. But thinking of asana practice as "play" is deadly because then it has to be an escape from work, it has to be "leisure" and most days, Marichyasana D simply isn't quite leisure. Trying to advance the backbends as I try and fail to convince myself that Kapotasana is "just another pose" isn't quite leisure. I do enjoy it, but often, my asana practice has a certain level of stress in it. I feel this some days so keenly that I just give up early and backbend.

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So on an energetic level, asana practice works best as a thing where I focus for as many poses as I can. Presentness and breathing. That also works best with housework, like washing dishes. Sure, there are ten thousand things I "should be doing" and of course I'm thinking about the sketchy educational possibilities for the kid in Indiana (47th, usually, in educational quality, nationwide) and how I need to kick up my research agenda so we can move to the Northwest, and all of that future business. That's a big, big stressor, "the future." One has to keep an eye on it, to set an intention, but one can't worry about it and continue to parent, that's madness coming.

********************************

"What am I going to do today, what will my practice be?" I'm determined not to ask that or even to worry about it. If I begin a practice with that, I can FEEL myself worry about bandhas, about how "good" a pose it. Bleh. I know better. Many memories of Troy's room summon that, actually. Is my back foot down in Virabhadrasana? Are my knees the same height in Ardha Baddha Padma Padottanasana? Did I pull the fancy Marichyasana exit? I really want to be left alone, I want to be simply adjusted, told where to stop, I want to be able to breathe and be left alone and do whatever the series is, however much of it there is. The type of awareness that Troy wants is very challenging, and I find that I just do NOT have the energy for it nowadays.

The Y is air-conditioned still, I don't know if it's from the recent 72 degree weather or what, but cold air blowing over you while you're doing Primary's seated, sucks. In a word, it does. It makes Garbha Pindasana virtually impossible. Studios are usually in the mid-70s or 80, and that's a sweatfest, easy, warm poses. An air-conditioned 70-degree environment with bikes and weight machines isn't ideal. It affects things, and I don't want it to, which adds more worry to "is the pose right, am I doing the same as I did on Saturday," blah blah blah.

I find that I don't want challenge in my asana practice, but I don't want comfort either. I want enough familiarity that I know where the right "window" for each pose is, but mostly I want quiet. So much noise. The future, the email, the grading, the close future, the distant future. When will I "peak" in asana performance, what pose "must I get to" before that happens. Hush!

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I refuse to separate my asana practice from, say, how much housework we do over the weekend (and for the record, weekend schedules often look like this):

6:00-6:30 wakeup, because kid does
6:30-9:00 breakfasting, dressing, diaper, early housework
9:00-12 perhaps first field trip (zoo, etc) or housework and kid entertaining
12-2:00 perhaps first field trip (park, etc) or lunch, cooking, week preparation
2:00-5:00 perhaps second field trip (stroller walk, park, neighbor visit)
OR
2:00-5:00 housework catchup from the week when we were too busy to do anything
5:00-8:00 bedtime rituals (food, bath, dressing, reading, etc, as weekdays)
8:00-10:00 grading, work catchup, housework polishing off

And I usually teach the yoga on Sunday afternoons, and J tries to get a Y trip in (that's our 12-5 slot, pretty much) and I try sometimes to visit a studio class on Saturdays at 11, particularly if it's been a light practice week.

Again, it's tight and rigorous, and playing with the kid is fantastic, but it allows no asana practice and no homework or class prep, and only sometimes does it allow housework (i.e., one parent vacuums while the other entertains).

There is no personal time at any time during any day of any week, ever. Pretty much J and I have some conversation time on the couch or maybe we sip wine before bed, and I try to toss a few hugs into each day, but for real live relating time? Totally forget about it, that would just add more stress and peformance anxiety. And as I've said before, this is consistent with life since May 2009 and we haven't really had relating time to ourselves since we got pregnant in September 2008.

***************************

So sometimes in asana practice as I feel the practice ease into tight outer hips or shoulders, I just want to relax and lay out on the floor. Other times I have energy revved up from a good class or too much sitting and typing the day before and I have strong poses, but the energy is sort of "rebound" in the relationship sense, like I'm firing back at having worked too hard. Often I am worn out from the rigorous schedule, and I'm tired by half-seated and then Pasasana is just too much pose in my outer hips already tightened from the advancing backbending. In short, it is VERY difficult for me to get past Primary and to a "full program" that includes Kapo or even beyond it. That's a very challenging practice to do regularly with life scheduled this way.

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I feel this in pranayama. Post-practice I try for some light ashtanga pranayama, which I currently understand to be 1) inhale and retain 2) exhale and retain 3) both with retention. I do 1) and 2); I could do 3) in Tim's workshop over the summer but can't do it now without panic.

2) tires me out, in the ribs, in the intercostals, like it's HARD to hold the bandhas pulled up for the retention. It's like jumping back used to be. Just tiring in the core body. I feel that too, during asana sometimes, like I know the bandhas are just not on high-rev some days.

I want to relax but I want to pursue the hard poses (i.e., the backbends) and I feel the contradiction but can't resolve it. I'm happier if I practice, if I break into the physical stress that I get from the schedule, but often that breaking-in doesn't itself feel good, so I'm trying to get the daily life schedule to "flow" but that means I have to stop being averse to things I don't want to do, and that's hard. It's psychological flow that greases physical flow sometimes (but again, sometimes with "rebound" energy, tightness brings flexibility, in a sort of union of opposites). Some days a dash of determination tinged with anger is just what I need, and other days, I really need detachment and letting go and to take the pose as shallow as feels good.

The major challenge is trying to maintain a single end point (let's say, Kapotasana) but to let the practice UP TO THAT POINT freely flex, while trying to keep the end point the same. STILL do Kapo even if you've had to modify all of Primary's hard poses. STILL do Kapo when you're having a weak bandhas day. STILL do Kapo even when you're exhausted in standing. But I can't do it. I haven't gotten a practice to REACH Kapotasana in two weeks. So again, I can't get what I want, and I think about attraction and aversion, but then I counter-think about tradition and discipline. I don't really WANT Kapotasana the way I used to, but I feel bound to practice UP to it, and then I can't get my energetics to permit that, most days.

So instead, I'm doing as much practice as I can and I'm doing pressup backbends and dropbacks-and-stands AS IF they were Kapo, I'm doing them with "Kapo intent." This still feels a lot like attraction, but it also keeps me from feeling that I'm failing the traditional discipline (which is based in a type of fear, fear of "losing the practice," of becoming "a parent instead of a yogi" as if those two are different) and it's all marked with negative emotions and I can't figure out how to overcome them.

I think it's stuff like this that "turns people vinyasa." I see the temptation loud and clear and I know that if I do some Simha Krama or Rocket, that the various asana practice worries will loosen up because those practices don't have ashtanga strictures, but they don't have a real system, either.

I still do opening and closing chant, no matter how little practice I do, and I do closing series as well as I'm able (that damn air conditioning isn't friendly for a long hold in Padmasana). And I feel this importance attached to "being an ashtangi" which again is something I'll abandon eventually probably, but now I cling to it because I feel like I'm going to lose it somehow and just DOING however much practice is for some reason NOT ENOUGH TO KEEP IT.

Maybe this is all just panic over loss that's not real, same as I've had before. Maybe it's all just another incarnation of that.

Why One-Year Olds are Cool.

2010-11-14T20:19:00.002-05:00

Here's my attempt to redress (but only with reality itself) basically my entire post-load from 2009.

One-year-olds are cool because:

--they start saying baby versions of words you use, like "moo" for moon or "dow" for down or "nah" for meow (meow's hard to say, dude), and it's all in baby voice, so it's super cute and you're the kid's parents so you can't help but think that.

--they start aping things you do and say, all the time, so you get "mini-me" in places like shopping malls and while you're talking on the phone. Often this is hilarious. I often utter the word, "Dude!" in various intonations, and when I get an echo of "oooh!" I know it's the same thing. That cracks me up.

--they run around, sometimes for hours, in the house, and don't need your entertainment (although they welcome that as well). Just back and forth, running around, and cracking up.

--they climb on you, give you things, ask to be picked up, negotiate their own self-feeding (which is a crazy mess but as with everything, is funny), and are generally extroverted to the nines, which I think is a good characteristic that should be shared more widely.

--they develop certain games, like using the toy walrus as an action figure in the bath, or calling out "bubbles" (which sounds like bub-ooh!) and you know that means, "let's go outside and you'll blow bubbles while I chase them around and generally have a good time exploring the back yard"

--in short, they begin to manifest everything I wanted in year zero: more independence, more interactivity, more language, and more extroversion.

Well done. Year one does everything it can to make up for year zero, and it is superior in all ways.

If this picture posts, this is me and C in August 2010, in said back yard.

Forget your Story.

2010-10-30T21:30:00.002-04:00

Briefly, stories involve origins and your story both shows who you think you are and keeps you that person. Who are you? You're this story.

This is why they call psychoanalysis the talking cure (although in Freudian usage back in the day, this was meant to cure physical symptoms with psychological origin, not to just recut your story).

Forget your story; abandon psychodrama.

It's to the point now that I can tell precisely where my ego is, by looking for where the pain stops. That border cleanly outlines the ego. And I can practically CHOOSE whether or not to live in that place. So two things of note: One, it's a place, that I can identify so cleanly that I can almost put my hands on it. Two, it's a choice as to whether or not to see the world through that lens.

This is something I didn't think would be possible say, a year ago, or even four months ago. There was this puzzle--well, ok, "the hard way", right? But what now? What am I going to progress to through this? Where does it lead?

First came some equanimity, but it wasn't solid. I could lose it, slip out of it, sink into pain, fear, rage, intense emotions. WTF?

Second, came this. Equanimity's still there, but it's optional. The ego pain is optional (well, not for the ego itself; better said, LIVING in the ego pain is optional).

So now it's a matter of STEERING.

**************************************

Forget your story; your story is your ego's story. The story of "you," yourself. The ego's story. It's not evil, it's not bad, you don't get enlightenment when you forget it. Hating the ego is as pointless as anything else; there's no need to do that.

But forget your story because YOU CAN LIVE WITHOUT IT.

How am I typing this right now, who is "I", who is doing this typing? I don't feel pain, although I'm aware that there is pain in me, which means that "I" am aware of the pain "my ego" feels. Who the fuck are the TWO OF US? See?

Of course the Sutras, for example, have clean answers for this. The quintessential clean answer: you're Awareness, not the ego. Congratulations.

Draw back from history, which whether you know it or not, TELLS you how to feel about things. Think about that for a minute. Here, I'll give you a moment's silence to think that one through.

***********************************

Draw back from history that tells you, for example, that this time's sexual frustration is an ECHO of all of the past evils of past sexual frustrations. There's NO NEED for it to stack up like that, and in fact, we lose all specificity and marvelousness, all PRESENTNESS, by letting the past dominate the present like that.

So forget your story, not because you want amnesia for those factoids and those beliefs, but because you want liberation from how they FORCE YOU TO THINK about your present day circumstances.

Forget it.

Do the Sutras say this? Of course they do. But it's a different universe to find this on your own, to put your OWN language to it from experience and then find it ECHOED there.

**********************************

Forget the ego's story and stop living in it, but keep living.

It's like looking up from a book.

"Put your foot on your ear."

2010-10-24T21:20:00.002-04:00

This was the final suggestion in Kino's Hips-and-Hamstrings workshop, which was dedicated to forward bending and external rotation. We covered Padangusthasana, Trikonasana, Parsvakonasana, Prasarita Padottanasana, Paschimottanasana, Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana, Ardha Baddha Padma Paschimo, Padmasana and then some various experiments and preparations which the Intermediate gang would recognize as steps toward Eka Pada Sirsasana and Yoganidrasana.

I can put my left foot on my (left) ear but have to lean my head up to get the right one to make contact with the respective ear (and in upright FBH, that's no good, man). That's ok: it's back to Backbending Days, so I'm putting the FBH on the back burner again (it'll come back quick, as it always does).

***************************

I did Mysore in the morning and Hips-and in the afternoon. I'd had a full week's practice (well, Tuesday and including Saturday, which is 5 days, so for me, that's a full week) and it had radically improved up to Friday, with the exception of less Kapo than Thursday, and then Saturday was a bit tighter and a bit slower, but with bigger breath and good focus, so I'm not upset about anything this week practice-wise.

The biggest Kapo was Thursday's hands-up-the-feet, beyond the toes. That's edging in on April 2010 territory.

The quickest practice was Friday's 95-minute Primary-and-to-Kapo-with-dropbacks, which is a personal record (I don't often go for speed, and also don't really care, but for those making notes, that's a personal record for that many poses).

My Primary totally straightened itself out over the practice week. From a modified unbound Mari D early, to full wrist bind on both sides, in four days. From a Supta K entry on the floor to my usual Dwi-Pada-ISH entry where the ankles hook over (not behind) my head (not "full" but totally sufficient for both entry and exit).

***************************

The Mysore class was freaking me out, just with anxiety about how a practice with a senior teacher would go. You know this tendency. Not just that you want to bring your big game, but that you want practice to be GOOD for that teacher, a sort of approval, almost like bringing a sort of weird gift (but one laden with psychodrama). But also, you want to be WORTHY of the final backbend or the next pose or even the good adjustment. You want to have EARNED it. There is all kinds of writing out there about where crap like this comes from and how to manage it. For me, it's much more common when I don't have any kind of regular exposure to teachers (read: most of the time, except for Spring 2007 and Summer 2008).

So mostly without my willing it, I cranked up the breath and moved really slowly. I mean to the point of feeling out practically every moment of the descent to Uttanasana in each salutation. REALLY slowly, which also brought really carefully.

I had nice power through standing, but started fading in energy late in seated, so was taking breaks between each Marichyasana and eight-finger bound the second side of D, which was a concession to said tiredness.

For Navasana I asked Kino about Troy's "press to handstand after each" and she said, "Can you do it?" to which I answered no, and she said, "Try it after the last one, after you've built the strength." I did, and I had a good and somewhat scary flying-up of the feet, but as usual, not as high as my hips, and while I can feel the START of a hip rotation, I can't beat gravity yet. When that comes, it's going to come ALL OF A SUDDEN some day.

The keys there are 1) fly the feet out WIDE 2) extend totally out of the shoulders 3) press hard into the hands and I'm now discovering 4) LOOK WELL FORWARD. Somehow that invites the hips to move up forward, and that's where lightness is.

The shoulders WILL come forward of the hands and yet by some miracle, you will NOT fall forward. This is exactly the same moment of terror as trying to learn the hips-beyond-head entry of Sirsasana or the hips-forward-of-feet movement in Prasarita Padottanasana, but it's in the shoulders, and your whole body is ABOVE the point of the pivot, and so that's where the suuuuuuuuuper terrifying extra bit is, in handstand.

**************************

Backbends are easier now, the baby backbends of Intermediate. In particular, I can breathe, think, be aware and even adjust, in Parsva Dhanurasana, which used to be an uphill climb with breathlessness. I'm still kinda beat and sometimes dizzy when I jump up for Ustrasana, but in the pose itself (Parsva, this is), I'm good. It's coming.

I'd lost the floaty-uppy of Laghuvajrasana but that made a nice return on Friday and Saturday. For me it's easier if I let the head JUST touch the floor, than if I try to muscle it and keep the head just OFF the floor.

Hands barely touching toes, in Saturday's Kapo. It was fine. No adjustment. Five down, five pressing up, pop to kneeling. I did six wheels (again, two sets of three) and then four dropbacks, and the standups were springy, easy and fun. THAT's damn unusual. Kino and I did two hangbacks (hands crossed), one dropback and then turned it into the walk-in "final backbend" which creeps toward Chakrabandhasana.

And about that:

When I drop back, I begin hands-to-tailbone and really crank the breath long and deep and get the spine as long as I can, and I take 2-3 breaths to GET back into a hang. Then it's at least three more breaths, hands to forehead, elbows close, then it's AGAIN at least three breaths, hanging back arms extended. I'm strong (er, tight) enough to hang back like that as long as I can bear it, but if I take too long and get the psoas too stretched out, it won't pull me back up to standing.

So when Kino simply did the swing-backs with me, I didn't get as deep as when I drop back, because there was not that "hang time" for the psoas to lengthen, which means that I started "final backbend" most of A FOOT behind where my hands had landed when I was dropping back (remember, my Mysore rug is striped, so I can tell things like this).

Kino had me walk in, and I did, but then I got stuck, so was finger-creeping forward, then came down forehead to mat and KEPT finger-creeping, and I have NO IDEA where my hands wound up but they were WELL ahead of my head.

Let me say a word about how I give myself the "final backbend" when I'm practicing: I drop, walk in, walk in again if I can, head down, creep, and I ONLY move the hands in enough to where I KNOW that I can press up, pop the heels if necessary, and then PUT THE FEET FLAT and hold a tight Urdhva Dhanurasana for five. Sometimes I'm so close that my arms go numb almost up to my shoulders for the five breaths.

In the Kino assisted final backbend, I pressed into the hands (and she said, "Use the fingertips!" which helped) but barely got my forearms to come up off the floor. Nowhere NEAR arms straight, and nowhere NEAR an Urdhva Dhanurasana. I'm so, so, so curious what the hell this pressup looked like, and again, I can't imagine where my hands were. Was I "close"? Were the heels "right there?" Not in the grasping sense of "gimme the chakra-b" but in contradistinction to my own "final backbend" where I really emphasize the ability to hit the wheel.

Kino said, "You're getting deeper in it."

The psoas stretch in my typical final backbend is VERY intense. The psoas stretch in my Kino assisted final backbend was not. I think this is because I didn't press up very much. BUT, that begs this weird question:

What is it, to emphasize the walk-in (closeness to feet) OVER the pressup (straightness of arms, intensity in psoas)?

How would it differ from emphasizing the pressup over the walk-in, which is how I currently do it?

If I could touch my heels without being able to press up, what would that be worth (aside from the, you know, gold medal you obviously get, HAH!!) as opposed to pressing up into a full and gradually tighter and tighter wheel?

I guess I'm asking, how do the classical ashtangis teach this progression?

Kapotasana is good for things.

2010-10-20T21:45:00.002-04:00

I'm back at the Y, which means gym mats under my orange Jade Harmony. The benefit of these, discovered last year, is that I can latch my fingertips onto the edge of the fat mats and use the ledge to push into a maximal Kapotasana B and I can hold it as long as I like.

The major benefit of doing that is that I can crank open the low back and engage the quads and then feel the abs and psoas get into the stretch, and it's marvelous.

And since I'm doing Kapo and then directly to backbends (my perennial classical practice, since July 2008), I am juiciness itself for the Urdhva Dhanurasanas which follow, of which there are still 6, in two sets of 3, and then three dropbacks/standups and one final "Kino backbend" with walking in and pressing up and then popping to standing. Kapo also nicely introduces the flexibility in the abs/hip flexors which make the dynamics of dropping/standing easier. Those two feed each other. I'm glad that I have ALL WINTER LONG to practice with my "mat ledge."

I WILL get to practice on Friday, barring any allergic response on the part of the boy, to flu vaccine which is grown in eggs (he's allergic to eggs and to peanuts).

So potentially a four-day week and then up to Chicago Friday night, and then Kino Mysore and Kino hips/hamstrings on Saturday, back to Indy, and teaching the yoga on Sunday and then it's back to school and yoga and seventh series and discipline, on Monday.

Tuesday's practice was tight nonsense, after the four days of altitude sickness and bad sleep in Colorado (with boy refusing liquids, and dehydration panic, and all that loveliness), but today's practice was suprising wonderfulness; sure, I'm still rebuilding the right hip in Mari D and Supta Kurmasana, but that's happened a hundred times, it's to be expected.

Practice, Equanimity, Energy, the Time Off to Come

2010-10-13T12:38:00.002-04:00

This article that I'm writing is due next Wednesday. We're going out of town to see family from Friday til Monday night. Tuesday is a day off (school's "fall break," which is naught but a long weekend), but basically, Thursday night is the deadline for this, my grading, all my life stuff, and everything pre-trip. It's intense.

So I didn't practice beyond Wednesday last week, and none over the weekend either (although I did sacrifice practice to let J work out at the gym, which is better for our overall relationship and certainly for her desk-boundedness these days, than my practicing is).

Practice returned on Tuesday and and today; I'll practice again tomorrow, and then take the whole weekend off as we negotiate family travel and altitude sickness at 11,000 feet in Colorado. Then practice will return (hopefully) again for TWR next week, and Friday we get the kid a flu shot and have to spend FOUR HOURS with an allergist to see if the kid is allergic to the egg medium in which they grow the immunization. Friday night I'll drive to Chicago for a Saturday with Kino at her Chicago workshop. HECTIC, October, is thy name. HECTIC.

But that'll all be fine.

What I politely and obtusely refer to as "long asceticism" on Facebook hit 750 days sometime in either late September or early October. I keep general track but I don't count days or anything. This is about relationship developments between me and J during seventh series. I think that we've had a total of something like eight sexual encounters (of any sort whatsoever) since morning sickness began, which was in the second week of September, 2008. That's over two years ago. Half of those eight belong to the nine months of pregnancy; the other four belong to the SIXTEEN MONTHS since then.

It's mostly that we both work and have no time. But J also found that business painful for the WHOLE FIRST YEAR of the child's life, so that wasn't any fun. On the one occasion between May 2010 and now (and there's been only one), she said, "It's starting to feel better." Well at least THAT's true.

Nonetheless, this type of superhuman asceticism (think I'm exaggerating? Try going touchless in your major relationship for 750 days. Go on punk, fucking try it, I dare you) is building equanimity. By that, I mean that there's been a progressive de-neuroticization of what one could call my sex drive (noting that current sexual science says that this desire is not a drive, any more than a desire for lollipops is a drive), and without that neurotic element, the desire can't stand by itself, it can't stand "independently of me," as it were.

I think that most people don't think about this as much as I already have. So let us proceed with some attention to how this works.

My awareness of desire came almost instantly with neurosis because it showed up in the midst of a lay Catholic ethical system which made the body "evil" or at least "to be disregarded" and puberty then made the body not only tactile, but irresistible. In order for me to exist physically without being committed to either self-hatred or guilt or both, a total metaphysical destruction had to be accomplished. Then I got married to a Catholic whose subjectivity had been undercut by high-powered maternal guilt tripping, and we had essentially no sex life for five and a half years. When that exploded, things got sexier and more interesting, pretty much straight from December 2002 to September 2008. I haven't been single in all that time, not for even one day. So that's been interesting.

But for all that time, desire was still neurotic, sort of linked to repression that it couldn't overcome, but instead sort of grew out of. Like a weird kind of Surrealism. It took the recurrence of asexuality, what I call asceticism, to break that neurosis, simply over time. April 2010 is when it really cracked open; perhaps if we're lucky, I put a post about that in here.

But when desire de-neuroticized, the whole idea of it also collapsed. On what could it be built now? It wasn't that I didn't find J compelling (or any number of imaginary situations as well), it was that I didn't know WHY or HOW I should govern said desire. Doesn't it just "show up" and then you either get some or get frustrated? Isn't THAT how it's supposed to work? Desire sort of APPEARS FROM WITHIN and then you act?

And this set of questions is powerful magic.

This fall--in teaching four classes--I've found that communication has a slight eroticism to it. Teaching has a sort of perfomative eroticism. Writing a paper on tactile aesthetics (and films which have overt sexual content, although it's also intellectualized and juxtaposed with images of disgust and horror) becomes a totally erotic exercise; learning has a tactile, a delicious, quality (Jane Gallop said that in one way; Gregor Maehle says it another, as he gives the example of letters being drawn in honey, so that the student learns that education is tasty).

Tactility took over my life (my research, if I love it, always does this). And it replaced neuroticism, sort of "spread out" my own tactility/eroticism, started finding it everywhere, in all PHYSICAL ACTS, more generally in ENERGY EXCHANGE (this is also how, for example, very smart people who talk about kink or polyamory, talk about those things).

And then equanimity becomes a sort of calm in the face of the continuing asceticism. Not a resentful "oh, it's ok" or an equally resentful "I can live with this," but an actual calm. Not quite an acceptance (doing asceticism for this long is itself an acceptance), but just a calm space. No emotional complaints, no joy, no pain....quiet.

Quiet.

I haven't had that at ANY point in the last two years, neither inside nor out.

And it's blowing my mind a bit. SO. MUCH. AGONY. And then suddenly at about the start of this month, equanimity. Out of nowhere. Perhaps unrelatedly, I'm not leaking any energy this month to sexual distractions. I can't tell if that has anything to do with it or not, but the equanimity makes it easier to not waste time (and perhaps energy) with all of that.

There is a self-possession that comes with equanimity, one wants to use metaphors of depth or containers filled with water; there is a reserve, a sort of deep gravitational power, to equanimity. One stands, one feels one's own weight. And as far as relating goes, I realize that I can either "do that" or not. And there's no punishment, no lack, and no pain, but neither "luck" or any of that, in making that choice. This has never happened before, never. I can ask J if she wants to go to bed, the same way I can ask her if she thinks we should have candy canes in the house, and without loss, without dread or anxiety. And I haven't yet, because I DON'T NEED TO, and I'm pretty much just hanging back enjoying not needing to.

So while this is still asceticism, the equanimity overrules it.
Coolest. Thing. Ever.

Real quickly...

2010-10-08T13:31:00.002-04:00

Rick Hanson's stuff rocks socks. Self, Couple, Team. Lack of balance in one throws the other two out of balance as well; a crystal clear way to see the effect of differing priorities.

I don't have my hands on any of R. A. Masters' stuff yet, but a praise of anger and whole books on confronting the shadow? HOT! Hot hot fire! I anticipate with eagerness.

No squishy feel-good stuff here, says an Amazon reviewer. Damn right!

Googling around led me to Bill Kauth's big work-in-progress, "We Need Each Other: On Building a Gift Community," which is very cool and in places touches the whole Situationist idea of play and community-building (but without all the Marxist idealism) and I'm digging that too.

Tangentially, a friend (and once student) of mine is really deep in the ManKind Project (which Kauth co-founded), and so that's also tangentially involved.

Finally, I was at a workshop this morning about "Eportfolio," a way of evaluating student work online, and this is important because the university where I teach is undergoing external assessment (read: big super terrifying evaluation) in 2012 and so all of the units want to get their assessment act together. This "Eportfolio" program could help the Art Historians to figure out how well and how many students pass what the university uses as "general education requirements" and further, to track students' development of those skills from course to course and even paper to paper.

The difficulty will be getting faculty to use the system and basically do double grading (one for the assignment proper, another for the "qualities" that said assignment engages) but this is my task right now, at least for researching, because of the big spooky 2012 assessment.

On the walk from the workshop to my class (where I taught Surrealism for three hours) I was thinking about how difficult this would be for faculty (what a hard sell it would be, that is) and how the workshoppers had said that the "altruistic souls" do it without prompting. Would it really take altruism? Wouldn't it just be a basic pain in the ass, like so many pains in the asses that we deal with? In fact, don't we chronically deal with pains in the ass all the time, is that not EXACTLY our work itself?

And then the world detonated, a rephrase of an idea happened and a wall crumbled and things looked different, like some flash of the whole self from _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_.

Wait, we deal with FRUSTRATING BULLSHIT all the time, right? But we do it anyway, right? We wash the dish, change the diaper, write the lesson plan, compose the recommendation letter, we do that sort of shit DAY IN AND OUT, yes? This would be just MORE of that, and we have skill! This is in fact PRECISELY AT WHAT WE EXCEL. We are SO WELL PRACTICED. It would, and in fact, would only be, NATURAL to do this, because it's just MORE OF OUR VERY SKILL SET.

And then I realized, experientially, that "frustrating bullshit" is just perjorative slang for REAL LIFE.

And the binary collapsed: call it what you will. Vacation versus work, labor versus leisure, day versus night, classroom versus bar, whatever you want. Travel versus domestic, fight club versus office, whatever. Call it whatever. It all went to pieces. And as the Buddhist monk says, "Sitting is just action, it is just REALITY."

I still see ways to divide the world and maintain the barrier, but I don't believe in it anymore.

This is the fruit of reading all that Trungpa and the fruit of PARENTING, of all things. Parenting is absolutely NOTHING IF NOT FRUSTRATING BULLSHIT, but that is to say, now, REALITY.

Pressure to "relax," to "find time," and such, dropped. Vanished.

Because now, it's easy. If I want to take a break from washing dishes, I do. If I want to engage some sort of labor, or something needs doing, I do.

Desire comes not from OUTSIDE; likewise OBLIGATION comes not from OUTSIDE.

It's like pulling my hand off the hot pan handle. Now I can do anything.

Shortest Post Ever (Maybe)

2010-10-05T20:35:00.002-04:00

1. Intermediate through Karanda, only because it felt so damn good yesterday. Right now I think this is the practice for a while.

2. Neurosis round 2, set off by friends who are working on a second kid. Suprising depth and intensity of anger, jealousy.

3. Kapo toes last night, footpad today. No months of work required. Cool.

4. Standing up is hard because rocking up intensifies the lumbar bend and psoas demand BEFORE the springiness comes from the thighs to the abs. In Kapo terms, it's because you do Kapo B before you do come up, even when standing from backbend.

5. Fully committed now to beating the neurosis once and for all. Victory here is literally moksha. I expect it to take all this lifetime.

6. Don't see it as an enemy (that just makes it reproduce) but put SPACE into relating to it. Take a BIG dose of Trungpa on this, before turning it into the Gita.

7. I can't tell anymore if desire belongs to me or doesn't. "I" is becoming even more permeable and a little bit irrelevant. This is unspeakably painful but good when I can see it clearly.

8. J wants me to read books about householding, about ordinary lives, so I'll be happier. You can't be the witch doctor and be happy with that. We negotiated that I will try to find books on parenting experiences (fiction or not) that are anywhere close to my own. I could use an echo, some company.

PRACTICE. Yeah thanks I needed that.

2010-09-29T14:30:00.003-04:00

Three for three this week, four drops/stands per, 12 for 12.

I believe it's time that I actually began BELIEVING that I bend backwards.

Determination simply hit a head, I'm not sure quite what happened, but I had officially had ENOUGH of my own nonsense for August-September, and practice just erupted out of that, no holds barred. Kid wakes up at 4 am and keeps us up until 6? Doesn't matter; practice at 9, ends at 10:30, and was brilliant. I SHALL NOT be stopped in this.

So what's it been?

M: Primary, backbends, close.
T: Primary, Pasasana (didn't bind), backbends, close.
W: Primary, Pasasana (didn't bind but got further), backbends, close.

I think right now that I'm going to rebuild Intermediate the "right way," because I am very confidently dropping-and-standing and so I have the "proper" Primary for Intermediate. Poses have retreated a bit from spotty practice: right foot up in Marichyasana D makes for one HARD twist, but it'll return. A year ago I was binding Pasasana to the WRIST, and that'll return. I can put lefty behind my head in an upright Supta K entry but CANNOT hook righty back there (that'll return too).

I take six wheels in two sets of three, then come down, and drop-and-stand three times, no misses, no aborted attempts. I then do a fourth and final backbend, Kino style, with two walk-ins, a fingertip creep-in and a pressup for five from which I then stand. It's intense, but basically it's Kapotasana in an Urdhva Dhanurasana position and it gives me confidence for ACTUAL Kapotasana which I'll add in later.

I take the long closing, 25 breaths in each inversion, 10 everywhere else.

There's a tweaky ligament inside my right knee, from doing Lotus the wrong way (too much up and not enough "outside") and I'm fixing that. The major pose I cannot do is Urdhva Padmasana in closing, without my hands. That's simple to fix. In a couple weeks this'll be healed and then it's REALLY on.

I'm not that sore. Some in the outer hips, some in the mid back, some in the shoulders. Not that sore at all. Outstanding.

Onward.

If it's lyrical enough, it's not obtuse.

2010-09-24T20:42:00.003-04:00

Last week I saw a former roommate get married in a town hall ceremony, and it's cool because he and his bride live in the UK now, and it's a hell of a long story why they chose Bloomington Indiana as a first marriage site, with legalese and visa trouble and all sorts of other loveliness including Jersey lawyers and a road trip to the South.

We got talking about Facebook (because we are friends there as well) and I said, "I'm terribly obtuse on there, but people who know me well enough can read between the lines" and he said, "Yeah, when Emily came to visit, she filled us in" which was actually shocking in its revelatoriness because Emily, very unlike me, does not pull punches and does not euphemize by means of lyricism and code like I cannot seem to stop doing (on Facebook, anyway).

I enjoy occasionally not pulling punches and not using code here.

I am friends with many current and former students, some faculty and staff, some family, and a bunch of other people besides (aren't we all a blend like that, in our Facebook friends?) and so I have to be VERY CAREFUL what I post there, given those widely divergent potential reading audiences, and so I code everything.

Most of the time what I write is a quote that I detourn (reuse) to my own meaning, which is probably obtuse in its original and is CERTAINLY obtuse in its reusage. This makes many people happy (numerous of my former students tell me that I write the chewiest and most fascinating updates of anyone they know) and everyone else leaves it alone. Sure, sometimes it's for communication that I'd like to have but am afraid of having out loud (on that, remind me to talk about photos again), but sometimes it's purely to have said a thing out loud without having actually said it in a way that people can recognize.

Tonight I went to a show at the main gallery on campus (which is in the building in which I teach) and the billing was all "these two artists have communicated between Chicago and Slovenia (I think it was) by email, Skype, and even occasionally in face-to-face meetings" which led me to think that the piece was going to be about COMMUNICATION. Sure, globalism, technology, blah blah. Let's have it.

Not so.

The installation is a whole collection of paper cloud pieces hung from the ceiling, tiny Buddhist peace flags with print on them, and a lot of wooden trees, again, covered with print. A massive paper Octopus occupies the central space and there is a fort of sorts with meditation cushions in it. Two artists collaborating on a Buddhist space. Brilliant. I was so misled about what I thought it was, that it blew my mind purely out of suprise.

I haven't been practicing much. 1-2 a week, maybe 3 when lucky, for about two months. J says delicate things like, "If you'd just do less yoga, you'd have more time for the family," to which I do her the honor of not responding. But it's ok, because she works roughly 8:30-5, five days a week, in an administrative office that has to handle both confusion down below (undergraduates) and confusion up above and mostly FROM above (authorities who are interested in programs that SOUND GOOD but without regarding what the human and/or financial and/or institutional and/or bureaucratic COSTS of what said programs will be). It's phenomenal stress. As I've said before, J privileges this and her kid over our relationship, and baby takes all of the hours between 6 and 9 pm, and then J tells me "well just come to bed when I do" which means that I get to watch her sleep but do not get to read my Trungpa or do any seated meditation. Frustration for free and no enlightenment. Thanks.

Almost all (and I'm not exaggerating) of my obtusities on Facebook are about that situation. The ego pain, the past, the dying, the frustration. For some reason--and I think it's reduced yoga practice--September has been the month of CEASELESS LUST and no gratification. It's been positively ADOLESCENT in its intensity. Un-freaking-REAL. So I intend to begin, 5/week, however little or much, on MONDAY.

Here's where that'll go wrong:

October 11 (Monday) there is no daycare, so I'll do babycare all day BUT, there's an Intro to Intermediate that night, and I'll go. Hopefully.

October 15 (Friday) we take a flight to Colorado to see family at over 11 thousand feet. It's gonna be four days of altitude sick and headaches and last time we were that high up, the kid didn't drink much, which made J insane and unbearable to be around. It'll be madness. We come back, probably well-beat and unrested from our short "fall break" on Monday.

October 22 (Saturday) I plan on being at Kino's Chicago appearance for morning Mysore and then "hips and hamstrings." This isn't purchased yet, and I should fix that soon so that it has a chance of happening. I'll probably do Primary and up to Kapo.

Thanksgiving, someone'll probably ask us to travel somewhere, and now, with a kid who is intensely peanut allergic (something we learned by skin test in the past month), I more and more just want to say FUCK YOU PEOPLE, YOU FUCKING COME TO SEE US FOR A CHANGE GOD DAMN IT.

Winter break, of course, we'll be asked to do some kind of fucked up travel that wastes all our time and doesn't let me practice. If we're in Boston and for long enough, I'd LOVE to hit K's room again and see if she remembers me. I had fantasized about a south Cali trip over winter break but I know right now that I can't afford the time or the money. Dang.

I'm going to revisit the Buddhist art exhibition (and actually sit on those cushions in the meditation "fort") as often as I can. Daily, if I need it. Chill AT WORK? Not often you get to do THAT.

They had an interactive "write your own positive message" thing at the end, where you could add a paper "flag" of your own.

I wrote,

"Unanswerable question. It's fine; let it be. Act around it."

On Having Too Much to Do and Advanced Poses

2010-09-22T09:20:00.002-04:00

As always, I have too much to do. Everyone does.

Having repeatedly failed to establish a practice in the house, I had planned to move to the Y (at the north end of town, same as last fall/winter/spring) and just set up the ritual early.

This of course did not happen (yet). There were days off daycare (and with no daycare run, said Y yoga is a waste of gasoline) and then there's a grandparental visit going on and that requires management of vehicles and which car is where when, and who has a carseat and who's doing pickups and at what time, and all of that alongside who teaches when and has to do what research and then suddenly time and space simply don't permit any yoga time.

So be it. You do, or you do not.

I still have an article to compose and no time in which to do it. I get two practices a week if I'm lucky, both at the studio, and so the yoga is also getting shortened, and the kid is often at daycare for an 8 hour shift. HOW can this be done? There's no time for anyone anywhere and everything is virtually overwhelming. It's like the new semester beginning, and you find that you must undertake what seems like an inconceivable amount of compression and productivity in order to move from summer to fall. It's a seasonal change, what Jim Bennitt, who was here two weeks ago, called a vata time (seasonal changes are vata apparently).

To paraphrase Ayurvedically, said flightiness requires more fire (determination) and more earth (groundedness). Precisely, if metaphorically. So be it.

***********************

Less than a week ago I did my "Intro to Ashtanga" workshop for the studio. I opened with a pose demonstration, modeled on and inspired by the ones that Kino does on her tour this year (I think of travelling yoga teachers as something akin to a Grateful Dead tour; you get groupies and discussion and "trading of sets" as it were, with all the videos that get bandied about).

Said pose demo had a pack of advanced poses in it, many of which look pretty in the photos which I arranged to be taken. But I'm not totally settled on this photography. Let's take a climbing detour in order to explain this ambiguity.

I used to set routes, when I had time. I like the combination of mental puzzle and physical movement, and so I set pretty hip-swingy technical-movement-oriented routes, which if I'm not there to give the "beta" (to hint to people what to do), are VERY hard routes to climb. Without my regular presence, people found these too hard, too challenging, and eventually frustrating, and then my "ratings" began to sink, largely because I was not there to teach. It's like taking a course that is very challenging and having the professor point you only to online lectures, without either translating the content or being around for questions and consultation.

Exactly like that. I was not there to consult, so people had to take their not-as-technical experience and confront my maze, and only Theseus was going to make it out alive.

So that ended.

A photo cannot teach you; it might inspire or it might frustrate, but it cannot communicate, and that's largely why I'm allergic to photography. I'm allergic to YouTube "teaching videos" for the same reason. A practitioner can only teach his or her own body, in a video, because the listeners are not REALLY THERE. If you're listening and your body simply WILL NOT DO what you see, then you're stuck, because the "teacher" is literally talking to him/herself. It takes some SERIOUS skill to be able to teach through a video (Kino has skill in this department).

So people have commented on said photos, mostly in the "wow, yikes, eek" vein, which is fine, but I notice that I want said photos to communicate, and they don't. I do like seeing what the inner experience looks like (how it manifests, if you will) but that's all for my own research, and I also like that the human spectators IN THAT MOMENT were able to have something that spectators of the photos were not.

How can one address the fact that an advanced pose in a photo is probably more offputting, more terrifying, than it is instructive and inspiring? How does one resolve the "Yoga Journal paradox"?

I have now succeeded in NOT posting during Mercury's retrograde.

2010-09-12T21:43:00.002-04:00

Hah!

They say that the past comes to revisit during the retrograde, and optimistically, that one can make peace with said past.

Nope.

Past too ugly, too ferocious, to make peace with. It's been head down, helmet on, charge, daily tasks, concentrate on the moment, survive, hope for Sunday night.

There have been relationship difficulties, massive communication clusterfucks, and a lot of seventh series pressure. A whole Mars-Venus thing (note: I give no credence, NONE, not even a subatomic amount, to essentialist gender crap like that, I'm simply referring to it to characterize the vast difference between the priorities that J and I hold and how we communicate about them).

And, I'm doing an Intro to Ashtanga workshop next Saturday (six days from now) and so I feel that I really need to get that regular practice going. I promised that I'd open with a pose demonstration and I need to confidently be able to FBH and some other stuff (although I'm not going to rehearse that unless I end up doing some Intermediate this week).

So the idea is, practice each day. As close to classical as I can get it. I've had decent drops-and-stands recently and on Saturday, a very pleasant full Primary. Everything's as I left it. Always good to see. Feet still duck some, and heels com up, in the drops/stands, but when non-regular, that's how they get. All is as it should be.

See ya later, Mercury.

Seventh Series Aphorism

2010-09-08T20:30:00.002-04:00

It is as if my life pre-seventh series is a wood-stemmed plant in the garden. A pepper plant, perhaps. A thing with age, generations, able to withstand the weight of the heavy fruit it produces. But that plant is dying, or dead, now.

And my seventh series life is a seedling; feels like it has just poked its head up. Unsure of its capabilities, new, vulnerable, shy even. But certain, and not to be destroyed, and in fact, invulnerable. In an almost Kafkan way.

So most of my experience is still death, simply because of time, because of memory, because of history, stories told. And the part that is life is still life, itself, but is new, is different, is a thing which will produce we're not sure what, yet.

When the seedling comes to greater maturity, there will be wonders and fruit and stories, and indeed, generations. But for now, the tiny green bud next to the tall fading browning powerhouse doesn't seem to be the most significant thing.

Now, on Rebuilding that Regular Practice, Right?

2010-09-03T20:42:00.002-04:00

I have at various times held a 6/week ashtanga practice. It's hard. But it's not hard in the same way as trying to build a 2-3/wk ashtanga practice BACK into a 5 or 6/wk. Here are some of the notable difficulties:

1. When I practice say twice a week, I have big powerful practices, because I have plenty of rest. However, I usually only have that power for the poses I know well and can retain on a level of practice that sparse. This is not a building practice, not something where I can try to deepen my dropback or something like that. Twice a week is a keep-what-I've-established practice. While doing intense seventh series, it's sufficient, but unless I'm highly stressed, I want more of it.

2. There's a question of going for the NUMBER OF DAYS or the NUMBER OF POSES. Do I try to do SOMETHING six days a week, or do I try for my "classical practice" (whatever that is) for as many days a week as I can pull it? I am a fan of trying the classical practice as many days as I can pull it, or at least as much of it as I can pull as many times as I can. This is not what many people choose. In particular, people who don't practice ashtanga (or who practice some variation of it that's not classical) will practice "something" each day, and that rules if you're doing a studio promotion where you have to "bend for 30 days in a row" or something like that. Do a forward bend and some nadi shodana pranayama and you're "done." However, if you're an ashtangi and you're classical about your practice, even solo at home as I often have to do it, then taking the "eh, I'll do sun salutations" or "eh I'll do a Swenson short form" isn't quite the magic. I find myself actively reluctant to cut my practice short unless I HAVE TO (for, again, seventh series or whatever). This has had the effect of actually making me NOT practice rather than do reduced practice (and that's dumb in its own way).

3. So you've chosen, "as classical as possible, as frequently as possible." Ok. When you try to do that from a 2/wk practice, the first thing you'll find is that you are SORE on that second day. When you move from rest day to practice day, the soreness is notable. It tends to limit my second-day practice. This is a roadblock I'd not expected, but one that I'm used to when I'm doing 5-6/wk. Sometimes you're sore, you do less or you do less well, and it's fine, because tomorrow you repeat. But when you're doing limited days of practice and are used to easy power, that soreness hurts the ego more than it hurts the annamaya, you dig?

4. Conspiratorial things seem to appear to halt your regularity. For example: seventh series means I can't practice in the early morning, ever. Baby wakeups are random and my sleep is shot enough as it is. So today with a 10:30-1:15 class followed by a 3:45 doctor's appointment for the kid, practice time just gets squeezed out. Sure, I could have stuck a partial in there, salutations or even standing, maybe. And I may have to. Weekends and vacations, I usually can't practice unless I can get into someone's Mysore room and in Indy, that's impossible because there is no such thing. And Monday is Labor Day and studios are closed and so is daycare, and the led part-Intermediate is on Monday nights. So no yoga, followed by no yoga, followed again by a double no yoga. These kind of situations have to be negotiated.

5. Increasing the regularity of practice often has the side effect of DECREASING the intensity of your poses. At the start, and maybe for a while. When I go to increase my backbending, my outer hips tighten up, and last time, it was for MONTHS, and that means more difficult twists. Also, take Kapotasana. At the start, with regularity, the pose gets HARDER all week. You have to get used to it, and not just to having a final pose or any of that, but simply used to practicing THAT MUCH. This means that if Janu A used to be easy, it might not be some day. If Mari C is deep, it might not be. Poses get REALLY fluid when you charge up the number of days you practice, and you WILL lose some of your "full" full expressions. This is not to be worried about. Another way to put this is, you've chosen NUMBER over FULLNESS. Again, the ego burns at this "loss" forgetting that regular practice is itself, a gain.

6. The ego demands that full-power, well-rested practice. In my bodymind, this takes the form of imagining "performing" for a Youtube video or a senior teacher, anything that will actually GIVE me performance anxiety. What I do to contradict that is imagine demonstrating for my students. That pulls me right into bandhas-dristi-ujjayi and it mellows out the us/them of performance. Really regular (and I mean 5-6/wk not just 4/wk) practice doesn't so much burn out the ego as just provide no room for it to do this revving-up, performance-anxiety show. Ego wants me to do bigger practices (i.e., Intermediate instead of a Primary-and-some mix) and to hit the poses more deeply (i.e., to showboat). Oddly--and I think we all know this--true showboatability comes from focus and what's elsewhere been called good energy management. But then you're not looking at being looked at, so it's not showboating, which is one of the marvelous paradoxes.

7. Memory, desire and wishfulness. "Last year the pose was deeper, it didn't take as long" and so on. I'm filled with a sort of light terror about this one where re-inventing Kapotasana is concerned. In April before my shoulder injury I was climbing up the feet in Kapo A and seeing my feet in Kapo B, arms totally straight, like Urdhva Dhanurasana straight. I STILL can't fully believe I did that much pose. And it shows that I don't believe it. The key here is to abandon all of that. You achieved what? Uhh, I can't recall somehow. It's like abandoning practice notes; first I kept rigorous track (and I sometimes still measure hand-to-foot distance day to day in backbends) and now I'm more and more reluctant to talk about it, to "put it down" over there, to make it a thing.

Onward! Let's see if I can slip some practices into this vacation weekend.

Marichyasana A-D

2010-08-26T15:23:00.002-04:00

These four poses provide an accurate emotional measurement of my whole life. They get into the psoas and outer hips (all of the same magical little muscles and fascia that half-lotus poses do), and that's where I keep all of my stressy business. If I'm practicing regularly and consonantly (there are days when Intermediate, for example, simply isn't consonant with my daily life), then these complicated fascial knots tend to let the energy move through more freely. If I'm either not practicing a lot and/or tied up with frustration about my existence (I'm talking to YOU, Patrick meets seventh series), these same fascial knots load up with dark stressy poison that is painful to acquire and hold and MANY TIMES more painful to then release in Primary during the Mari quartet.

So again today, as so many times before, it was one of THOSE practices.

It's not that I can't do the poses--touch face to shin, put head on floor, bind wrist in all four twists--it's that in stress-releasing poison-liberating practices, these poses release such disgusting emotional stuff that they make me feel like I'm going to actually be physically ill. Doesn't matter how deep the pose is. If, for example, I really ground down the bent-knee foot in Mari A, the psoas contraction gets more attention, and that squeezing is like wringing out a sponge. Out it comes, dark, angry, fearful, vomitive. Gross.

This will pass if I can practice through it for a few days. Rigorous scheduling, as I've said, helps. The summer is no longer a valid practice time. Seventh series rules and seventh series destroys regular practice; it's impossible. As the new semester progresses, I'll forget all about this summer, the same way that I don't remember a single solitary day of summer 2009.

Nice Little Practice, Heroism, Trungpa, etc.

2010-08-20T14:09:00.002-04:00

What is doing less than your full practice like? I remember days when it's more like painful surrender: the next pose simply cannot be done. But I also remember days when it's not painful at all, but simply enough.

Through Marichyasana D today, without really any trouble anywhere, but simply sufficient practice. I still do Troy's "fancy exits" from Mari A and C and I try the handstand press, but those things tire me out. They feel like show, although the press is slowly coming. I can take nearly a whole breath with my feet off the floor, but I can't seem to get any more lift. That's interesting enough.

The reason that I work toward full Intermediate in practice is that a few times a week I know I'm simply not going to finish Primary if I start there. It's not that I can't do everything in the sequence, it's that there is too much life for me to take the long-practice-road day to day like that, traditionally. I've tried it, multiple times, and it just can NOT be done with seventh series. If someone out there can do seventh AND a full long practice, go ahead and make me jealous.

Immediately I hear in my head, "Well that's an ego fulfillment thing, right?" and I think that's insane. Who in their right mind would want HARDER poses, one after another, where modifications have to be taken, just, what, in order to say, "I'm this cool"? That's nuts. I think that when a bender wants to be "doing the next sequence" or "getting that pose," it's really a wish to BE SOMEONE who does that pose. It's not ego fulfillment, it's the hungry ghost realm.

As attached to it as I've been, I don't trust the "heroic leap into the impossible" anymore. The one problem I have with Tim's "We must be heroes every day" is that word HEROES. It's the Trungpa that's doing this; that and seventh series and the day-to-day and the deconstruction of what I've called the rockstar/mundanity dichotomy. So I don't see second as an ego fulfillment thing largely because I don't see it as impossible. The more possible, and the more ordinary, it becomes, the less egoistic my practice of it gets.

This will already sound argumentative, analyzable: aren't I just saying that I practice it in order to make it ordinary, when secretly, it's about massive ego aggrandizement? I'm justifying, right?

It's transformation, exactly of those terms: heroic practice to become unheroic, ego transcendence exactly INSTEAD of ego aggrandizement, right in the face of the invitation. Right now it's all defeat: lost the Pasasana wrist, totally lost the Kapo feet, losing the Supta Vajrasana shoulders, losing the breath pace. It's all disappointment.

In the midst of school and seventh series, there's no time to get into outer space from practice; it's got to be strictly contained within its "block" as time becomes rigid. Work stress holds off, bending occurs, bending ends, baby pickup or whatever occurs. Sure, I'll have my tight outer hips from backbending, I'll have those for months, like before, but the practice will become a THING, not a lifestyle. It will become, as Karen put it not long ago, "the work."

The poses will come. Just like before. I got a wrist, I got my feet (not just my toes either, but my damn feet), and so on. And then it's back to course prep or baby care or whatever it is. THAT's the ordinariness, right there.

In the summer it's too tempting to make practice this BREAKOUT activity, the one eruption of a whale from a clear ocean surface, the one high point, the moment of camera clicks on the otherwise somewhat boring trip. That type of heroism is to be done in. Also, the Kapo struggles, where that pose is the FINAL one, like the "final frontier" of Star Trek or the "It's full of stars!" realization from 2001, that's another heroism to be done in. The leap into the impossible.

Kapo's damn hard--harder than Karanda in my body--but it's not impossible.

That's why Intermediate: it's possible and it's potentially ordinary.

Being A/Your Teacher, Guru, Ego, Trungpa, Relational

2010-08-16T10:09:00.002-04:00

Can you tell that I get a backup of delicious things to write when I hold off or get too busy?

Briefly: on teaching yourself and the tradition. On the idea of guru and spiritual friend. An ego simile. Probably a number of Trungpa citations (and more death). Finally, and throughout, "relational" (as opposed to discrete).

Here we go.

Ego first: recently I was thinking of the ego as in a situation of constant threat, an "I" that must always defend itself or conquer something. "High drama," if you will, is the mark of the ego "I." I envisioned it as a human being whose choice is to either grab a hot stove burner, or else release it and drop into a bottomless pit. You can't choose one without pain and you can't do the other without terror. There may well be more apt comparisons, but that one really sings for me. And you (the ego) can spin it: I am not falling! I win! Stuff like that.

This is somewhat related to what Trungpa calls "poverty" in "The Open Way" in CTSM. We envision ourselves as needing MORE, needing SOMETHING ELSE, needing some kind of outside nourishment or information or whatever it is. And don't just pass it off as bad Vedanta, with that stupid catchline, "We are already complete." Trungpa doesn't play this bullshit "complete" card (it's not Buddhists for Jerry Maguire, after all). What he says is, we are rich. We are so rich that compassion is native to us. Apparently in his Shambhala warrior text, he says that surrender for the warrior is a surrender of privacy--we are so busy giving to other people.

*************************

OK, so, as we all are wondering:

"Hey Patrick, WTF is your practice like these days?"

On vacation time from schedule and routine, it's TOTALLY random. When I can't get a box of time from seventh series in order to practice, I do whatever I can whenever I can, in as little time as I can. Most recently I've had something like a 30 minute block in which to do, well, "something." What? Do I do sun salutations? Try to rip off a standing-poses-closing-poses short practice? A Swenson short form? WTF should I do? How am I going to keep up my Kapo work? It's confusion itself.

So I do little blocks of work on whatever it is that I think needs or wants attention. I wanted focus and exploration one day, so I did seven sun salutations (5 and 2) and then the first six poses of Advanced A, which SERIOUSLY revved up some dizzy energy in my whole body. I felt like I was in an inversion for about 45 straight minutes after that. Another day I did four yin-flavored Venki hangbacks in standing, and then the backbends of Intermediate (with no other poses before). Other times I do sun salutations, some or all of standing, and then backbends (which are never quite full expressions with that little warmup) and closing if I have time. I try to include dropping back if I do a fragmentary ashtanga practice. Often I can get some drop-and-stands, but I get crazy aches in the outer hips at night while sleeping, when I don't practice those steadily.

When school begins and regimentation comes with it (and that's a week from today), blocks of time will appear by force. It'll be a very "do or do not" mode of practice, and there won't be time to mess around and half-ass it. I expect this for a schedule:

MW: practice after daycare dropoff.
TR: practice after teaching morning sessions (probably begin at noon).
F: practice after seminar (afternoon practice), then daycare pickup.
S: potentially studio practice.
Su: too much baby; no practice expected (although I do teach).

When it gets too cold to be in the house/outside, I will again retreat to the Y, just like last winter. Exhibitionism central, which it turns out that I enjoyed.

Tradition:

As anyone who reads here frequently enough knows, I have a MOSTLY traditional practice except for backbends, at which point there's a big wiggle-room wedge in how I treat the entire matter of "pose-getting" and all of that.

Primary to Laghuvajrasana is totally locked. All of those poses have been OK'd by the equivalent of a senior teacher. Dropbacks and standing are problematic; I wasn't able to pull a single standup, for example, in TL's room. In a classical (or, if you like, uptight) enough room, I might not be doing any Intermediate. The last time I had regular exposure to a traditional room, which was summer 2008, I was doing up to Kapo and stopping there. TL let me go to Ardha Matsyendrasana but didn't allow the forward bends of Intermediate until the backbends got cleaner. I think I could reasonably expect that to be a stopping point for a while.

BUT

In my actual practice (for example, over last winter and the cold part of spring) I was regularly pulling full Intermediate, with some un-full expressions, such as Kapo to toes or feet (not heels) and Karanda lowering without picking up, and without hands-free-balance in Dwi Pada. None of those really confronted me as impossible. It would simply be a matter of continuing to work, and sure enough, one day outside in White River State Park in June, I balanced Dwi Pada.

This is how my practice becomes untraditional, but that's how I learned Primary, and I know I'm not alone in that. You do the whole thing, modify the hard poses until they come, and build your endurance and breath and flow and then it comes. So I'm doing Intermediate that way, or at least I was. Who knows where my Intermediate will be after a whole scattershot summer of partial fragmentary practices.

With regular practice?

I was getting a Pasasana wrist bind; I was getting up my feet in Kapo; I was getting head to floor in Supta Vajrasana; I was regularly landing Bakasana B within two inches of the armpits and with straight arms; I was hitting full Eka Pada on both sides with a Chakorasana exit; I was lowering Karanda; I was getting knee within two inches of the foot in Vatayanasana on the tight side (touching, on the other); I even held the bind in SUPV a few times.

How open are my hips?

As I said above, twice I've done sun salutations and a little Advanced A. In the second of those practices, I was able to do up through Bhairavasana with lefty behind head and up to but not through that pose, with righty behind head. Extended leg is straight, but floating, in Kasyapasana; with lefty back, gaze is up/back; with righty back, gaze is upwards. Lefty comes to face in Chakorasana, when righty is back; rightly floats about five inches from face, when lefty is back.

Why then do I not fool around more with that sequence?

Advanced A does, admittedly, have a lot of what I'm good at, up front and early. I LOVE putting a foot behind my head and it's getting comfortable. FBH in my body is MILES easier than advanced backbending. So the Advanced A begins with a lot of complicated side planking and FBH, and then moves to arm balances, and it is well-known that I can balance on my hands all day long and into the night. Why then not just go for it? Because I know that when I hit a pose like Viparita Shalabhasana, it's going to be like crashing a car into a stone wall uphill. It's going to be IN-fucking-CONCEIVABLE. It'll be Kapo with interest.

So that's approximately where my practice is.

**********************

What is it to be your own teacher, for an extended period? This is different from extended home practice. If you have a traditional teacher you see once in a while, then I imagine (practices vary, of course) that you'd do what said teacher gives you and then either get more poses when you reappear in that room, or not, and onward you go.

I have no such situation. I have to teach this stuff to myself. How is that done?

One advantage is that I do have traditional experience, so when I get information from some text like Maehle's book or Kino's Intermediate video, I can sort of "translate it" into ashtanga-ese, rather than just saying "Hmm, so I bind the hands behind my back and then take a walk, how interesting...". When trying the new poses out (or trying out new advice in familiar poses) I can think bandhas-dristi-ujjayi and see how it all comes together, get some feeling of how it's hard, how it's easy, what the game of the pose is. This also, with experience, goes for sequences.

Physical sensation also goes a long way toward guiding me (by what you might call the "inner teacher" or even "the guru") to a specific day's practice. Are my hips just generally feeling gluey? Let's do Primary and then see at Setu Bandhasana if I want to add any Intermediate. Am I feeling light, translucent, and practicing regularly? Let's see if I can keep that through a full Intermediate. In this respect, the experience of six years of practice is really an informative guide. Are my dropbacks giving me intense night-time hip pain? Time to work less on the dynamic backbending and more on longer holds (this has, in the past, turned me from full Intermediate back to Primary-to-Kapo). Is Kapo jamming up in a way I can't solve? Time to work on longer, deeper Urdhva Dhanurasanas. And so on. This also brings "life" into the discussion of sequence choice and pose emphasis. I don't generally add non-ashtanga elements unless I'm injured or SERIOUSLY uncomfortable (in which case I might do a Sweeney sequence instead of classical ashtanga).

Doing ashtanga practice while you do seventh series can be done, with a nod to the fact that bad sleep or baby/relationship/life crankiness DOES get into your joints. But in my practice, I need a RIGOROUS schedule; there is nothing more fatal to my discipline than vacation and slack time, where the daycare isn't rigorous or daily and where classes/housework/all the rest of it doesn't have rigid boundaries.

I generally support the "same practice every day, no tangents" approach to practice, but doing that while doing seventh series in a two-job household with a hard-to-get-to-sleep kid and a lot of fucked up emotional stuff going on is not even like doing practice while sailing on rough seas; it's more like doing practice while being avidly attacked by a gang of street thugs. So I have totally surrendered the "tick tock by the clock five breaths, same sequence each day" approach. It simply is not something I can do with this much life action going on. No wonder, so I hear, Darby and wife took five years off from practice when they decided to have kids.

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Trungpa's Chapter 6, "The Hard Way." Two things that are interesting to me. One, the metaphor about the "doctor with a sharp knife." Two, the piece about "love has darkness in it, and one must take an aerial view."

In short, I think Chapter 6 is the proper smackdown of which all vapid bliss junkies have had a desperate need. Your spiritual friend is this doctor who, for your own good and your very life, is going to cut the evil shit right out of you with a sharp knife and no anesthetic. It's not going to be pretty or nice, and this is surrender. Not some fluffy bullshit about "oh, let it go" with your face upturned to the sunlight.

No.

You cling to your evil shit, and you know you do. The ego with its hand on the stove burner. You can't just "surrender" into "bliss" and find inner peace. And you know why? It's because you DON'T WANT INNER PEACE, punk. You DON'T WANT IT. But now it's too late, and you realize, like Kafka's mouse, that you've marched right into the cat's mouth and now you're going to lose that bullshit you don't need, except you can't give it up; it's going to be taken from you. Peeling the ego's hands off that hot burner, and the drop is going to be pure horror.

But here's something I wrote on Facebook a while back:

"Neurotics forget that what they fear, isn't real. Asceticism takes the barest view of reality. Asceticism thus cures neuroticism basically by scaring it to death, which is, scaring it into reality. Because in reality there is no neurotic fear."

This is EXACTLY what my sex-relating samskara terror did.

It grew and swelled and crested over my world and put darkness into every corner of my life. It terrified me to pieces. And then it fell like the heaviest, blackest death you can possibly imagine, and it vanished. And that experience PROFOUNDLY killed something in me, which was the neurotic fear itself.

Or as a brilliant quote from Karen put it long ago, "You piss yourself with bone-shaking terror for a long time, until you finally realize it's all paper, and then you just lift it off."

This is why Chapter 6 ROCKS MY FUCKING SOCKS OFF: it's because it is honest, because it is precisely what we need to hear, and because it is fucking TRUE. He's not mixing metaphors. He is describing EXACTLY what DOES REALLY HAPPEN.

This "excruciating pain"?? That is NOT a fucking metaphor, IT IS NOT ONE.

Chapter 6 is not just advice, not just wisdom, not "to be chewed over" or some shit like that. Chapter 6 is a fucking DOCUMENTARY. I physically experienced, in real time, with my full bodymind, the events relayed in Chapter 6.

Ok.

The other bit about love and darkness? It says (as the whole chapter does) that we shouldn't expect the path to bring us nothing but bliss and joy. In fact, I like how Trunga so far consistently disses bliss. "Sure, you could generate bliss by focusing purely on your own experience, but by the time you achieved it, there would be no one to feel it." He doesn't seem to give a fuck at all about bliss, and I really appreciate that.

It's a bit of an axe to grind on my part. I've been surrounded for too long with "spirtual" people who just bliss out on "letting go" and will tell you at will how glad they are to have "let go" of whatever it is--booze, their past pain, wheat gluten, whatever. It's like Oprah Spirituality(tm). There has been a lot of painful seeking in me, in large part because of blindness, but that's how it has been. I have a thousand metaphors full of pain and drive; a lot of fire, screams, a lot of hell. But also relentlessness, violence, cage-rattling, boundary-breaking, defiance, rage. Endless rage.

And in both lay Christianity and bliss-junkie spirituality, there never seems to be a place for rage. No, that's not quite true. It's something you "grow out of," like the animal body. Or you "achieve union" and "feel peace" and such. No.

No, that's bullshit and I've always known it. Milarepa achieved peace AFTER his murders, not instead of them. He didn't deny them; he took an aerial view. His teacher pushed him to the point of suicide, ran his madness around in circles until it almost closed all the way.

"You find (anger's) true, living quality."

The aerial view is BUILT on a tower of darkness, rage, pain, blindness, frustrations, wrong paths, intentional intensifications of frustration. It is not this blissfest with sunshine-turned faces and empty platitudes that tell us with ease to do things that are, in fact, difficult. Like "letting go."

Through systematic terror--jealousy, fear, financial woe, job search patience, sexual frustration--I reach surrender. Not through some simple-minded "letting go." And it takes fucking YEARS of systematic terror, not just some unpleasant nights.

So Trungpa tells us that love has darkness, has a characteristic that is like other's anger, has "speed and aggression" in it. There is nothing that is, in itself, pure bliss. Fuck playing that game; take an aerial view.

************************************

Death is relational, not a separate, discrete thing. How? Death is a relationship between the ego and the body; the body changes and the ego does not (wish to). This is more useful to us than considering death a discrete thing, because discrete things exist by themselves, and relational things exist only in relation.

It's a philosophical question of sorts, phenomenology. Why is it useful to us? Relational thinking reduces easy dualism. You can take it to anything and it makes it possible to complicate dualism on contact. Us/them. Me/you. Hands/computer. Pose/poser. And because we are dualists (we like that, thanks Descartes), this makes easy material for relational thinking, it's always a possibility to see things in a more interesting way.

Reader request: first round!

2010-08-09T08:21:00.003-04:00

Ok, between my own life experience and responses to the prior post, it's going to be a little Anusara, a little illusion/reality/asana and a pack of seventh series.

Anusara: the best ranting about this that I've seen recently is here.

Good stuff on Primary and especially on illusion/reality/asana (and good stuff generally tends to appear here) can be found here.

There, that wasn't too hard.

Let's return to this "death" business that I've been going on about for a few months, but with some Trungpa added in. I'll write the teacher/guru bit after this.

Trungpa says that one unmasks; that this process is a continual set of painful disappointments. He also says that the spiritual path is like a doctor operating on your illnesses without anesthesia. These both speak to my seventh series experience.

Death: it isn't that everything in my existence has a funereal pallor; it's much more about the interior than the exterior. How did this work? I'm trying to recover the dynamic and it's just coming out a blur. In large part this is because my internal organs are still knotted up right now with the fallout of what might be a wheat allergy; on every occasion, about 36 hours of clogged organs. Gross.

Anyway:

What began in the latter half of 2008 as some sustained sexual frustration (when our pregnancy began) later picked up a whole entourage of demons from the past (samskaras, if you will), about being worthy (of love, essentially), about identity as a sexual being (which for me even in terms of heterosexual practice had a very "coming out" flavor to it and took me until my 30s to lock down), and quite a bit about relationships and sex droughts and miscommunication (read: bad marriage here). A LOT of demons came out of that.

Somewhere in here, probably four months ago or so, maybe more, there's a post where I get some discriminative knowledge about my drive for sexual experience and my own identity. Basically in that post I pull out the drive and look at it, see it as something different, not-me.

That began to crack the pain, sort of jnana-yoga-style. "Who is feeling?" and that variety of question. By April 2010 I was claiming "ascetic practice" as my own (and doing so in Facebook status updates, which perhaps only I understood, but that's ok, because I do love being obtuse). Some time around right now it's 700 days of sparse sexual activity and miscommunication and not having time for each other, although we do get in a good conversation (even if it's about etymology or something) now and then between baby care and work and running hither and yon.

So what is the "death" bit all about, then?

It's in part "identity loss," as my climber-yogi-lover triad had to give way, mostly due to time demands, to partner-father. I kept "yogi," I latched onto it hard, felt like a skiier going over a cliff reaching for the famous Warner Brothers cartoon branch down there, you know?

But it's also--and more interestingly--the knowledge that that triad was a mask that I wore, and now that I KNOW it's a mask, I can't put it on the same way, cannot believe the same things about myself, cannot BE the same person. This is opening, pretty much EXACTLY as Trungpa talks about it (or, if it's not, it's as close as I can imagine getting).

The surrender was agony; still is. But not as much. Not with as much confusion, not buried as deep in the demon hordes as before.

Where and how are the good things in my life?

Oddly, they are all still right there, where I left them. This is the magic of the thing, the sort of wonderfulness of "ordinariness."

If you just take ME out of the view of my life, if it were possible to see my existence without the FILTERS OF MY LOOKING AT IT, then it all does look quite fine.

I climbed in Seattle, and it was magnificent. I went back the same night and mastered some boulder problems that I'd tried out that morning. I used to see climbing as part of, well, not a "spiritual thing" but as part of my overall quest, mastery-unto-defeat, what I've earlier here called a "quest for the impossible."

The first thing that ordinariness (again, taking it from Trungpa) does is to reduce the stratospheric level of visions like that. So much of self-aggrandizement is built up like legends, like archetypes: Beowulf, Cuchullain, take your pick. Arthur. Or follow my 2003 poster acquisition into it: Durden, Bickle, and oddly (but not if you're me), Harry Dean Stanton from Paris, Texas.

Self-aggrandizement in ego terms is the nobility of all that happens to "I." I am suffering, I have had this bad relationship, I am conquering, I am liberating, I am getting the next highest grade of boulder problem or the next series of yoga asana.

Cracking those multiple layers of armor (what Trungpa says is "wearing cement") is real pain. Giving up the triad, the warrior face, which is built on the suffering face of the massive headfuck relationship, which was built on the past sexual frustration of adolescence, the determined face of "making the relationship work," of "living in the salad days." All of the layers of armor come from Catholic neurosis planted early, come from adolescence's reckoning with fire. And it's not a Freudian thing; one doesn't need to "go deep" to get INSIDE it, because one is already inside it. The armor layers are ACCUMULATED not installed, not interior. It's not a depth dive to the inner child; it's more like dropping a microphone down a well that the scared soul built AROUND ITSELF.

Or as Pink Floyd would put it, about cracking "some bugger's wall." Pigs on the wing.

Maybe someone young and scared began putting on the armor that became this brick house (hah!) but now as it cracks, we find someone older. Hands that cling to plastic holds, and calves that go behind the head. These skill sets are new. We will never find the "original," because the armor we put on is not a cocoon, it's not a caterpillar-butterfly metaphor.

Sure, I don't want to do the crying-baby-care or the 3 am bottle go-back-to-sleep ritual or for that matter, maybe I don't want to put up with the whole thing and the hard relationship or whatever, but that's ok, I don't want to go to jury duty or teach an auditorium full of first-year students either. But compose your ideal life in your head and you will STILL find things you don't want to do. "I don't want to sweep out the entry to the cave today." "I don't want to fix the holo-deck today." Whatever it is.

You take "want" or "I'm angry at" or "I'm upset about" and you find what Trungpa calls "its real living quality." He was writing about anger, I think in one of the Q and A sessions, when he said that. Don't judge it or refuse it, but instead find its real living quality. I love that sentence endlessly.

Let me give you an example: maybe a month ago I was giving the 2 am crying baby a bottle to get him back to sleep (because that's the only way it can be done). Crying hurts my ears, makes my nerves turn to knives; it's a thoroughly unpleasant noise and I REALLY dislike it and can't wait for it to end. So this night I'm trying to find a way to get over it, above it, past it, somehow around it. It occurs to me, "wait, what if this crying were the sound of the unenlightened mind? All the crying that those in darkness do, you included. Your own whining about this noise. Reinforces it." That came out of nowhere. And instantly it turned up compassion in me, not specifically for the boy, but for all of the unenlightened, for myself as unenlightened. It totally shut off distaste and don't-wanna and it turned on something else. And I put the boy down and went back to bed.

Now, I deceived myself there. One crying child is NOT, of course, the total sound of the unenlightened. But that doesn't matter; it's not the accuracy, it's the EFFECT. It made me compassionate, took me totally away from "I am pained, oh woe" to something else, something that serves better with no resentment.

Kriyananda would say that serving when you don't want to is a sattwic thing, you make the sattwic choice and this helps it become habitual so that you develop a, if you will, "sattwic habit." The real living quality of my wish not to do, is simply inertia. "I'm not interested in that, that's unpleasant." But climbing walls is hard and not always pleasant, and I'm interested in that. I'm even interested in showing other people how to do it, that's why I set routes. That's, more generally, why I teach. It IS, true, in part because "I" like it, but it's also serving.

So where is the good? All around. Everywhere. For example, I'm to water the garden this morning. I don't REALLY want to, but I'll just sunscreen up and go out there and do it. Living in ordinariness doesn't require desire. Say that again.

And I think that the world of death I've been so keen to describe and delineate is the replacement of a world of desire, of hard-earned gratification (I got to the top! I did the pose! I did thing Y in position X!), with a world of ordinariness. It'll require more unmasking to turn it all the way over. More unmasking is more pain, and more death. But there's life all the time all around it. Even a man buried in sixteen feet of cement armor (a man that un-naked, that heavily clothed) DOES things, can have a conversation with his partner, can water a garden.