Embodied knowledge · 3 February 2010

Narasimhan was a delight today, commenting on Sutras 42 and 43 of the first pada (this Sanskrit business is great for my foot fetish, incidentally). Since reading Daniel Ingram and later picking up on the whole Wilberhead/Integral discussion of states and stages of being, I have become kind of sucker for maps of the refinement of consciousness. It’s really obnoxious, but fascinating. 

I have kind of rolled my eyes at the Sutras’ map of consciousness, because there’s just not much there compared to later and more articulated traditions—traditions which speak to more complex modern beings who possess, I want to believe, a greater capacity for rapid refinement and growth.

But… then Narasimhan brought it to life today. He didn’t do what I, dumbass, would do: create a giant grid comparing vitarka, vikalpa, savitarka and savikalpa to other descriptions within the samatha/vipassana model and whateverthehell else I could root up. No… he talked from informed experience. Like this:

At first, the mind believes itself to be stable. It sees the world outside as chaos, and tries to defend itself against the chaos. The boundary between self and world is strong.

Then, once one begins to practice yoga, there’s a recognition of the inner chaos. The world itself appears to be relatively stable—what varies are the inner reactions to the world.

Then, one learns to hold the mind itself stable. That stability becomes a fulcrum for investigating the fluctuations that continue—taking the mental changes as objects to be investigated.

After that, he got necessarily vague and mystical, talking about the re-dissolution of the boundary of self-against-the-chaos. I appreciated that part less well, given my own lack of refinement.

It’s amazing to learn Patanjali from a mystic. So much for my idea that this version of classical yoga offers a merely mechanical philosophy of mind. And so much for my depending on books to learn a  living philosophy, to be honest. It really helps me to get in the presence of people who travel the dharana-dhyana-samadi street regularly and understand their experience as such.

I guess Narasimhan and Jayashree, and Sharah for that matter, have seen a lot of us logocentric, sort of uptight westerners pass briefly through their spaces. We think we can learn yoga from books; and we are mistaken. This compulsion around book-learning and “Do it self” (my first spoken sentence, as a little one) must be the background agaist which Sharath says, again and again: Spend as much time with your teacher as you can. You have to learn through experience (implicitly, your own and that of your teachers’ teachers’ teacher...).

Monday Jayashree did a miniature head-wobble and gave a huge smile. ("She's just a bucket of love," said J, my first yoga teacher, who taught that Friday night class years ago at UCLA and who's here now, coming along to Sutra class at my urging.)

Jayashree said: You don’t have to always follow along in the book… we have a sense that if there is a text we can be in control. (And Narasimhan, beside her, echoed about the false sense of control in book learning).

Then, together, they said: YOU HAVE TO LET GO OF THE TEXT.

And she, again and again, repeats: Listening is learning. Listening is learning. Listening is learning.

Learn to depend on me for the words. Watch me chanting and imitate me.

Still I cling to the text, and am learning the Devangari script so I can read the Sanskrit rather than the English pages (weren’t you guys supposed to support my in resisting that project??? So ridiculous!) Here’s what Jayashree has written on the back cover of the book:

Srutiparampara dates back to Vedic period and has a tradition of approximately 5000 years. It evolved as the best means of preserving and transferring knowledge acquried by Sages and Scholars. Sruti means listening and Smrti means memorizing. The Guru (Teacher) used to recite and the Sisya (Student) used to listen, repeat twice or thrice and then store it in his memory. Then propagate the so acquired knowledge from Guru to Sisya through generations. Even today the Sastras, Music and the fine arts are taught in a traditional environment in the above system. 

The knowledge is embodied.

Duh.

No wonder Yoga Mala is so thin.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , sound

Moon Day Pieces · 29 January 2010

Camera’s busted! Purchased it around my birthday – extravagant little thing, supersmart, red and shiny, with many good tricks. Its last capture was my brother and me at he Eiffel Tower. Fumbling over the delicate buttons with stupid fingers, I dropped it and messed up the lens. Possibly repairable, but not around here.

Usually, I feel kind of awesome when something precious breaks or data are lost. But here’s the funny thing: the camera still works a little bit. No flash, messed up shutter, no image export. I have space for about 200, though it’s not clear they’ll ever be extractable from the device. So… shall I carry around the gimpy Canon, snap bad images at key times? Just in case? At first I thought: I would rather have no pictures than bad ones… but maybe, in a way, bad images have much better emotional tone than good ones. 

Anyway, some recent captures by even less accurate means…

-I’m sitting on the outer room without my glasses, seeing the shapes inside as I wait to begin. Then Saraswati materializes right beyond the door, to backbend-assist E, a giant Brazilian ectomorph. He drops without waiting, holding himself firm on legs so long, then she hefts him all the way back to standing at the end. She stands there facing him for a second, waiting for him to exhale. Her head is the height of his xyphoid process.

-Two bricklayers have been rebuilding the orphanage wall all week. Are masons next of kin to renunciants in this culture too? They’re saddhu-spindly, with heavy, sun-baked skin that folds over their cheekbones and necks. They dress in dirty white cloth, wrapped around the middle and up over their shoulders, and their hair is long and grey. I’d say they’re in their sixties, but could be off by decades. They crouch alongside the road and paste concrete out of a bucket right on to the wall using small triangular trowels. One works steadily, absorbed; and the second, coming along behind, divides his industry between trowel and a bidi. He drags on the smoke like a rock star, with a limp wrist and body fingers, and gazes along the wall at what they’ve done. So far, they’ve worked west from the front gate, around the corner and halfway along the northbound wall. Long way ahead.

-I finish practice just as the Gokulam elementary school kids are leaving their houses. At the top of a hill, I stop for a motorcycle piloted by a man in a starched white shirt and brown dress pants. There’s a small girl on the seat in front of him, and behind, a boy and a girl who are maybe twelve. All the kids are dressed in crisp white shirts, with dark plue pinafore/skirts or pants, hair wet and combed, staying in place as the bike bumps over a hole in the road. I turn the next corner and a rickshaw is taking off in a grey belch of exhaust. It’s leaving a superfancy three-story quasi-colonial (houses in Gokulam are crazy, creative studies in concrete, porcelan and glass—easy to ignore because lacking the greenery and yards that usuall catch my eye, but actually beautiful with their funny-shaped windows, idiosyncratic balconies and extra rooms, or arches, or columns added here and there for effect). A little boy of about five sits up straight in the back of a rickshaw, a black ski mask covering his head, some kind of insulation from the exhaust.

-End of led primary at the end of the first week, and I’m a little weary. Pick up from baddha padmasana in to uth pluthihi, and search for a drsti. I usually take ubahya in hopes that looking up will keep the padma aloft, but the other day Sharath stood in front of me in uth plu and put his finger to nose-tip (not the first time he’s instructed me to humble it down a notch from ubahya or brow center to nasagrai drsti). So there I am, crosseyed and hoping he’ll hurry up and count, and two feet come in to the distance beyond my nose. It’s his feet, larger than I’d expect, and spread wide like they’ve spent a life outside of shoes—or just done a hell of a lot of standing postures. They’re half-hanging off the edge of the stage, and both big toes are wrapped in athletic tape. Classic.

-I find myself walking down Contour Road in the power-out pitch dark on a weekend night. Every few seconds, a two-wheeled vehicle passes and shines a beam marking the way, but then I come up short on two steamrollers blocking the road. They each have miniature light illuminating the ground right in front of them, and I wonder if a biker might plow right in to great iron cylinders on their backs. Two men are trying to move the vehicles, but don’t seem able to get them out of first gear, so are inching around in circles there in the dark. They look like ancient Transformers (as in the movie Transformers, which I gleefully watched on the plane along with Terminator Salvation—OMG—and two other versions of the same movie, none of which The Editor would ever let me waste time on back home), or like 1970s childrens’ toys: all iron, no paint, no wiring… just grinding cogs and gears. Further down the road, a fresh shipment of tourist-coolant is rolling in to the coconut stand in the dark of night. A big old rusty truck, its flatbed built up with wooden sides, drives almost straight in to the tree that shades the stone benches in daytime. So many coconuts! The sweet green ones this time, a little smaller than the pale salty ones I’m learning to like. How do they even stay on the truck? The coconut guys unload them in to a kind of awesome pyramid they’ve already got going, using the woody nubs at the bottom to balance them against each other.

-And then Sambhav, the great-grandson, is just more than I can describe. He’s two and tiny, with long thin legs emerging from diapers and a fuzzy ponytail shooting three inches straight up from the top of his head. He toddles, and gurgles in a high-pitched mixture of Kaanada, Sankrit and English. Giant lemur-eyes, peaceful and curious, taking up most of his being, and a swirl of soft fuzz covering the teeny forehead. He comes in to class some mornings and warbles to his father and grandmother, saying words I don’t know and a few I do: “Trini! Pancha! Come!” Wednesday I finished on the stage, and there he was right in front of me, helping his dad squash my friend A in pachima. Yesterday, his helper, P, brought him to the park to watch some slackline. After a while, this tiny person wobbles up and puts a hand on me, waving me off when I bend down to say hi. He holds my pants-leg to balance, brings a foot up to ardha baddha, removes a sandal, then repeats the same on the other side before toddling off and extending two hands for a boost up on to the line.

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Categories: astanga yoga

Wanting it all, dedication, belief · 25 January 2010

Or, Faith in Faith Itself. Moment in conference yesterday:

An American guy in the back raises his hand high at the end of the Q&A. He’s agitated, passionate and confused.

-I want to know, how much am I supposed to sleep? …When do I sleep? ... How much do you sleep? Because I’m going back home and I want to know, how am I supposed to take my practice with me? Am I supposed to get up at 4 o’clock? Cos I live in New York, and you know, it’s hard to go to bed early…

-S chuckles. Yes, hard to go to bed early, especially in New York (smiles… he loves New York). Many distractions…. It is not easy. It takes dedication. What do you do?

-Me? Do? I’m a consultant. A financial consultant. (Audience sighs.)

-Aah. I take some tips from you later… (he laughs… then everyone else laughs)

-So how much do you sleep?

-(pausing, in what seems like reluctance to say) I am sleeping four hours. Sleep at nine, one o’clock I do my practice. Then teach… I almost don’t leave the house. Only difference is go upstairs, go downstairs. (laughter) At twelve o’clock I sleep for exactly one hour.

-How do you get energy for your family, teaching, practicing…?

-Read scriptures! Always study…

This is a paraphrase, and likely the ordering of sentiments is inaccurate.

Afterwards he expanded on this topic of dedication, and talked for a while about doubt. Doubt mostly serves to distract you from your practice and reduce your energy.

That is why you have to believe in what you do. If you do not believe the method will work, no matter what it is, it will not work.

                                    ……………                      

Been feeling that lately, a lot. I identify as a skeptic, cynic, and critical thinker. I would prefer to operate as if without a "hard core" belief system, theology, ideology, whatever: understanding the endeavor is niave, but at least trying to be so free.

But somewhere between Kirkegaard’s leap of faith and the dirty truth of the placebo effect, it did occur to me that I’d given myself to this practice despite myself.

The fact that this has been true for years—that my actions have outpaced my critical mind—is only now coming home to me. But so it is: practice two hours or more a day, outsource the dirty work (the gross physical structure) to a teacher, dive in to meditation, commit most other cognitive resources to professional things… then, not as much room left for compulsive questioning.

That’s not the same as subscribing to a belief, but now I realize I’m already living as if I’ve taken the leap of faith. It’s so weird. At this point I really don’t have a problem placing faith in faith itself.

In fact, I sense that doing so is a lot more effective than my default way of doing things—treating everything as an amusement, an experiment, or a piece of my worldly education.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution

Slackline · 21 January 2010

Spent a lot of time at the desk this week, so today I blew off and was a yoga bum. Here’s the schedule. It’s what every day looks like for many people I know, with the exception that most people drive their own scooters instead of rickshaws, and skip the walk to go out for a delicious south Indian dinner.

4:00 Get up, do a little email and skype

4:30 Regina starts chanting downstairs, rumbling the whole house. Get on the mat for abbreviated asana practice, plus pranayama and a short sit.

6:20 Walk 10 minutes to the shala, take a seat among the others in the entry way, watching practice in the big room. Listening to the billows of breath and the occasional calls for “One more” from Saraswati and Sharath. This is the most conscious 40 minutes of my day, an opportunity to enjoy incredible energy of the whole community, and a powerful Shinzenian sight-flow meditation. But I’m often tempted to let the eagerness to get in to the room take over the experience. Each morning, I’m getting better at letting the wait be an end in itself, and am going earlier and earlier to enjoy just sitting there, watching the shapes move inside the room and feeling the rhythm at which the practice in there moves.

7:00-8:30 Practice. Enough said.

8:30-8:45 Drink coconut (still don’t like the ritual, but the electrolytes feel like a good idea and they’re starting to taste good to me), watch monkeys play in the trees, sit around and talk to some practitioners outside the shala

8:45-9:30 Run home, shower, talk to housemates, drink wheatgrass and weird fermented energy tonic with housemates

9:30 – 11:00 Go to coconut stand to meet some sociologists on vacation. Take them to silly ashtangi breakfast joint where we sit in a beautiful courtyard alongside my Indian friend S and several other acquaintances. Eat fruit salad, an omlette and ginger-lemon tea: the exact same breakfast I’d order at any of four identical restaurants in the neighborhood. The bill is scandalously expensive for Mysore: $3.20.

11:00 – 2:00 Do some admin and writing, lunch with housemate.

2:00 – 5:00 Rickshaw over to the Regaalis. Lie out on the grass with some Brazilians and Canadians, Germans, an Austrian and a Portuguese. And an erstwhile American who has just moved permanently to Mysore (from Detroit). Swim intermittently. Read Cosmicomics  and laugh out loud (thanks, G.) Others are reading: Murakami, Svoboda, Patanjali. Thank god no Shantaram or EPL. Chodron’sThe Wisdom of No Escape is lying around, unread, under a beach chair. Hahaha.

5:00 – 5:15 Take the hottest shower in town at the hotel changing room, pick up some baked goods at the Regaalis restaurant, catch the best rickshaw in town back to Gokulam. The young driver asks if I would like music, and in response to a yes, blares Bhangra out of speakers behind my head. Yes, the ride is equipped with a pair of sub-woofers. They change everything.

5:15 - 6:15 Quick-change and run out to slackline practice with the regulars at the park. First day of slackline – at one point I get six steps in a row. Frustrating but intriguing. Slacklining. Second only to working on the tan as afternoon business for the Mysore regulars.

6:15 – 6:30 Check messages, change clothes.

6:30 – 7:30 Evening walk

7:30 – 9:00 Skype, blog, meditate, good night.

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Categories: astanga yoga

Back to Anantha · 20 January 2010

Returned today to see the professor-yogi, M.A. Narasimhan. Office hours this season are 11-1ish (and more like 2), so I’ll make the 15-minute rickshaw or scooter ride across town a couple of days a week.

Today we did an hour of Q&A on creatively east/west topics. For example: the physics of karma, comparative analysis of Freudian and Hindu maps of self, yoga as a process of becoming an unmoved mover.

Then, to my dismay, Narasimhan’s sister Dr. Jayashree came in and for a half hour we chanted the Samadhi pada. Noooo!!! From the wafts of her voice in neighboring rooms on my previous visits to Narasimhan, and the recordings I’ve accidentally heard in woo-woo bookshops and studios around the world, I knew this woman had my siren song. But there I was, sitting in the front corner of the room and unable to get out at all politely. Trapped in a tight lotus with the MB up to 11 to contain the Delhi belly.

Oh god. You guys, she is beautiful. I can’t even tell you. There she is, a foot from me, swaying as she leads a bunch of talentless, tone-deaf foreign aspirants. Nevermind her generosity, the gift of perfect pronunciation, and the genius of the way she teaches...

Her voice is killer. There are no words. I wonder if the inner experience of asana could ever be so blissful as what she feels when she turns in to that sound.

So it’s a problem. I have intended to focus on the practices I already have – asana, pranayama, meditation. None of this language and singing stuff, which is like crack cocaine to my little hyperverbal, hyperauditory mind. But… now that I’ve had a taste of her, I probably won’t be able to stay away. There is this empty space inside my head, between the ears and the pituitary gland, that aches for her voice. My toungue curls up in my throat trying to taste it. My Q-tip fetish is getting worse. Nothing but hearing her in person will satisfy.

And once I start going in for the bliss of her wail, it’s just a matter of time before I’m compelled to understand the nonsense itself. The few Sutras I do know are a nasty hook. I’m telling myself that this Sanskrit stuff is dead language. A language which has own ridiculously illegible script: a script which ought to remain illegible! Learning Sanskrit is not morally important. Not useful. Not informative. But… sooo beautifullll....

Anyway, phew! After a half hour of the chanting, my guy Narasimhan went back to doing his thing. If he were a character in Autobiography of a Yogi, they’d have called him the Professor-Saint. I didn’t take any notes, but hours later when I sat down to write about his talk, I found myself drawing it in symbols and pictures. There was a garden gnome to recall his discussion of Noam Chomsky’s early work, a sun shining on the gnome to remind me of R. Crumb’s representation of the Abrahamic god, a balloon in the sky to denote Narasimhan’s hand motions when he talks about the ego inflating and deflating, an infinity sign floating in the sky to remind me of the number 8, a cat on the ground under a basket to recall a funny story, etc. etc. etc.

Oddly, what had seemed like random Q & A was all connected—graphically and narratively—in my mind, waiting to be made in to working knowledge. Why haven’t all the other professors in my life inspired me to catalogue them with a variety of senses, not just the critical mind?

From last year, posts on Narasimhan: one, two, three.

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Categories: science , sound

Dividing Delhi B · 19 January 2010

I have, like they say, eaten too many chapatis. Actually, it was the “special” thali at Green Leaf: ten little aluminum cylinders of dals and squshes and beets and sweets my body didn’t recognize, plus three kinds of bread, rice and (oddly) coconut ice cream. When in South India….

But still. Woah. Too unfamiliar too soon, for a digestive system accustomed to apples, almonds, kombucha and kale. I’ve sat alongside two beautiful lunches since that thali, spectating while the belly rumbles and squeaks. Can we get on with it already?

During the first sun salutations this morning, I broke out in the wrong kind of sweat. Cold sweat. Greeeeat. Vision went black jumping out to triko, felt it going again in UHP. What does that have to do with Delhi belly? Why am I letting the lingering thali diffuse so far?

I had two good vrittis there at the end of standing. Where is sick? And everything is infinitely divisible.

The first is from a story Howie Cohn told on both retreats I sat with him. Journeying far into the mountains to see some nondualist teacher (Ajahn Chah, if I remember, but maybe not), he arrived on the tail end of a debilitating illness. Greeting him, the teacher asked "Howie, How are you?” And Howie, his identity fused with illness, launched in to a description of how awful he had been feeling, emoting with the words, “I’m so sick.” To which the teacher demanded, “Where is sick?” Howie found he couldn’t answer. Sick was no longer the case; sick was not him.

The second is something Robert Thurman says, describing the emptiness at the heart of reality.

So, transitioning from standing to sitting, there right in front of the humungus painting of SKPJ hung in garlands, and there between two very stable practitioners linking breath to movement like nobody’s business, there in a giant room filled with 75 deeply focused people and zero physical or verbal bullshit, I went about dividing the Delhi belly.

First I cut the DB in half, restricting it to the bottom half of the body. No more blacking out and wanting to fall over. Then I zeroed in and in and in… recognizing that the trunk was in general very dynamic, and actually so was the abdomen, and in reality so was the stomach itself. Large intestine… check. Small intestine... gurgling. But only part of it, some pits way down in the center. God knows how long that coil of mine would extend, but I divided and divided the pain until it was tiny. By the marichyasanas, real-life pick-ups were happening, and by the exit from bhujapidasana, the squinch up in to bakasana didn’t bother at all.

Weird. An hour later, someone asked me “How are you?” And I said, “Delhi belly.” Pfffffft. The identity will take over, and lead me to believe I am somehow not fine, unless I actively pursue the sensation down to the pit and isolate it there. Lying here on my bed in the evening, listening to the orphanage kids squeal across the street and feeling my breath recover from the walk through town, all I can find at the root of the so-called sick is my solar plexus pulsing a little more strongly than usual.

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Categories: having a body

Mandala manduka · 15 January 2010

There is a breeze this afternoon, and high clouds. Kids chasing their dog in the park, men turning off the engines of their motorbikes to coast the last blocks down the Gokulam hills to their homes. Yesterday was the new year, and today the threshholds are still painted in the bright mandala tessellations the women made yesterday morning – using the colored chalk you always see in photos of Devaraj market. The lazy velvet cows, too, are still covered in dye, all their white spots made yellow. This afternoon I encountered a brown one, whose coat was too dark to color, but whose horns—two little crescent moons curved to point at each other in front of his eyes—had been painted celestine blue.

It’s also the day of the solar eclipse – something I’ve heard both locals and ashtangis use as an excuse for strange behavior—as well as the moon. I’m a little stunned to realize it’s the new moon—that a certain cycle is over. The last new moon I spent on the far end of the west. Slept in, caught a vinyasa flow class in Venice, took a walk along the Pacific, and went to my favorite raw food restaurant for a burger made of marinated vegetables pressed between slabs of dried onion. Packed up the car to leave the next morning for Ashtanga Across America, an eastbound roadtrip of nine states and nearly 3,000 miles, depositing us—my brother and me—finally in the frozen north. Then settling in to Michigan, holidays, work. Then a day in Paris, followed by three spacey, joyous days in Mysore – time I’d describe as blessed if that were a word I could use.

William Gibson says that souls get left behind a while, and take their own time to re-integrate with bodies after a long trip. I’d say my soul was still far out west, making its way east, if soul were a word I could use.

This morning in bed, I read a heterodox article in a neuroscience journal, arguing that consciousness arises not only from the brain but also from culture and one’s environment. Then the first pages of The Razor’s Edge, Maugham arguing in 1944 that environment largely determined character.

Not sure where that leaves me, for the moment. I have not slept much at all this week– am still flighty, disjointed, and a bit lost. I may have re-subscribed to the local gossip feed by way of adding the coconut stand and certain cafés to my ambit, but still feel out of touch with the surroundings. Maybe some good nights’ sleep and more long walks will do it.

Did a long, slow practice this morning in my apartment – more an auto-bodywork session than anything outwardly resembling yoga. My body is both open and very achey. This has never happened before; I thought the two conditions were not supposed to coincide. Like stagflation. From the outside, everything is flowing. But as I practice, it feels like the stiffest day ever. Since the bend is already there, I’m not sure what to do to disperse the ache. Maybe nothing. Maybe let it ache. It is, at least, interesting to remember in body the days when I felt like this most of the time.

Took a walk this morning, too, down unfamiliar back streets of Gokulam, up and down its hills, out to the edges of town. Two consecutive days off mean the ashtanga crew all wash their mats and hang them, alongside a towel, out windows and over balconies. Who know such-and-such a building had a student apartment upstairs? And is that tiny place a residence?  Purple or blue mats, and rugs in every color, hanging out like flags to announce expatriate residence and yogi leisure. Most buildings in the neighborhood boast either a mandala or a collection of mats, but a few on our street have both – a mandala in the street and a manduka flying from the apartment above.

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Categories: astanga yoga , integration

Time Signature · 10 January 2010

It has been twenty four hours since I boarded an airplane in Detroit. That was three days ago.

Meanwhile, at the Pompidou, steamclouds billowing from a crack in a building, facing the wall of blue pipes of the great art monstrosity. Bikram Yoga Paris. A sweaty man hoists on his pea coat, says merci beaucoup to a woman who is leaning on the front desk, wearing a bikini and tipping back a water bottle. He lifts his head to open the door, looking up at the exposed blue waterworks through the cloud of steam that follows him in to the street.

Under the broad low curves of the Eiffel Tower, a holler, and suddenly twenty Algerians are running for the perimeter. They’re all dressed in black, carrying racks of hats for sale and giant metal keyrings strung in replica Eiffel towers. The cops mill as the tall running salesmen emerge from the crowd and regroup running north, their tower-keyrings jangling, weighing them down, and catching the light.

Filing in to Notre Dame, a sign picturing a human removing its hat, with the instructions to descubrirse. Please discover yourself. There are two confessionals in glass-walled rooms alongside the tourist din. The confessor’s back is to the sanctuary. He leans in to the table in front of him, making eye contact with the priest.

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Categories:

Intimacy & Equanimity · 8 January 2010

On Sunday, icicles began to grow on the windows of the little practice room. Today they’re a foot long. The heat is dry and patchy. It’s a bit grey in the sky and the ground are covered in four inches of the puffiest soft snow. In the morning it’s crisscrossed with squirrel, cat and deer tracks; and sometimes at night the fluffy white possum who lives under the neighbor’s stairs will roll out and squint at me. My sinuses ache, all the way up to the center of my head; and there’s something in the air that makes me sneeze powerfully at times. In Los Angeles, I feel the rhythms of my environment and move accordingly; here I have moved from euphoria to slight familiarity. My core is warm, but there’s a light contraction in the deep muscles. At all times, they are working harder here—navigating a new environment, adjusting to the dark, dry cold.

I had doubted whether it would make sense to continue 3S as a practice in this environment. Is it sensible to keep the body so open when it’s so cold and brutally dry? Will the Nordic climate and culture, the absence of vegetarian items at decent restaurants, the amazing fish market at Kerrytown, and the proximity of the lake cause me to crave fishmeat? (If so, wonderful! But for some reason I don’t feel right about using animal flesh to drive extreme yoga, and would ramp down the practice if creatures were my usual fuel.)

I had questions about context. The practice seems suited to very energetic, very open people in warm environments, with the support of other people who have decades of experience and dozens of colleagues who know how the series works. I wondered if doing it here, in a cuddly-cozy, hyperintellectual, neurotic scholarly-powerhouse of a town, would only serve to keep me out of touch with my environment, fighting reality with sinewy sentimentality. The opening and the work of it, I thought, require so much surrender and so much will that doing it every day would be a self-punishing struggle. Advanced stuff suffers no fools, and I worried about disrespecting it by taking it out of context. I might need to find a more “supportive programme,” I thought.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, blah. Turns out my body is context enough. This self-questioning was the same as all the other doubts that one has– about practicing while pregnant, practicing while female, practicing while over a certain age. (Doubts usually suffered by women, I’d note.) So it’s winter. So what? So I do what I always do. This machine has been meticulously constructed and, like the Honda, it runs just fine on difficult terrain.

The weird thing is that the old programme is better than fine here. My hips tend to tighten up against the cold, and the opening section of the practice is full of strong re-letting-go work. The strength work warms me up and, together with the backbends, generates a great deal of positive energy that will probably shelter me from the neuroticism that is par for the course for young academics in these parts. (Michigan is smack in the center of the stress belt: statistically, people here are far more anxious and depressed than elsewhere; and the institution seems to take for granted that new arrivals will experience a mental breakdown upon moving here.)  Because the practice is so in-my-face, I can’t sit around and look at my toenails or take 10 extra breaths in postures. Otherwise, it might be much more difficult to learn to practice by myself after years of community support.

The solitude is mostly allright, though at first I tended to get very emotional in the backbends, remembering how much I missed my previous home. I had forgotten the potency of ashtanga yoga… if there is an emotion I’ve hidden under the surface, some level of bending will eventually bring it out. The hardest backbend was urdvha dhanurasana – the one in which my heart is completely exposed and the psoas has to both lengthen and engage to bring me to stand. All the others—even natrajasana—have some element of protection of the chest, and did not leave me so completely exposed. After a week of bailing out of dropbacks, I talked to a home practitioner who is pretty systematic about not bailing out and who takes notes every day on what he did in the backbends. The next day, I practiced through the sadness and fear. Sort of awkward. After three or four more practices, the block went away. Now my body remembers what it’s always done.

I have often wondered if it might be better to practice advanced series alone. It’s so confrontational and intimate, and sometimes a distraction to others. I don’t know about shalamates who have to live with advanced practitioners, but for my own ego it is somewhat liberating to get away from the sense that I’m any different from everyone else. No matter what series you're doing, ashtanga’s all confrontational and intimate—which becomes obvious, again, when there are no eyes or cameras or mirrors. In this sense, the crazy programme has never made so much sense. It seems natural that, after cleaning up all the vinyasas with a teacher to keep me present, I should learn to clean up the distractions and drama that want to undermine me when I do the same practice alone. It was a little messy and exasperating at the first, but now there’s also a feeling of rebirth. Of greater intimacy with my own experience, and much "better" conditions for figuring out that thing about equanimity.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration

Equanimity · 4 January 2010

From the Bhagavad Gita: 

Attachment and aversion by sense organs for respective objects are natural; let no one come under their sway; they are his foes….

Notions of heat and cold, of pain and pleasure, have a beginning and an end, are impermanent in nature…bear them patiently…be contented with whatever comes.... 

Hahahaha.

Another way of saying the same thing:

 

Practice and all is coming.

 

Hahahahaha. Yes. Loss gain praise blame pleasure pain love hate. All.

What did we think he meant? Durvasasana, fame, sex and cupcakes?

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Categories: astanga yoga