WHAT IF>
this were NOT struggle, even eagerly anticipated struggle?
this were NOT a war to be fought with focus and intensity and marshalled forces?
it all grew back, organically and on its own, PEFECTLY HEALTHILY?
, contradictory to ALL of your suspicions and ALL of your experience and ALL of your theory, in short, contradictory to ALL OF YOUR ENTIRE LIFE, this happened?
something good happened WITHOUT you needing to rip American culture's fucking FACE OFF in order to obtain it?
in the midst of all of the evil and stupidity which you DO IN FACT accurately see, something good DID nonetheless grow, without the violence you customarily use to dig it out?
you could enjoy something without the VENGEANCE of not having enjoyed it before?
*************************
Well if that could, would occur, then it would very likely seem miraculous.
My default setting for cultural-personal scenarios (which in good second-wave feminist terms are intermixed), is "failure, decay, denial."
Through experience I have learned that self-knowledge in this culture is defiance of this culture, is war on this culture. The culture itself defined those terms to me, experientially.
What if something disobeyed these phenomena, these experiential rules?
Then I would have NO FRAME FOR IMAGINING THAT.
**************************
Precisely the point, no?
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Karma Show!
Yep, I'm going to talk karma here, and that means that I'm once again going to bring up stuff that perhaps many people would consider "too private, man"! Too freakin' bad. Processing demands it!
Practice: aimed for Intermediate this morning at 9, and got to Kapo and called it a practice. Low back crunching through the Bow poses (WTF? That never happens) and resisted urging to "lengthen" and "expand." By Kapo the scrunching was too intense, not painful, but uncomfortable enough not to press into. So I took a pack, a big pack, of psoas lengtheners and glute stretches (various pigeons and lunges) and tried it again. Hands to toes but with INTENSE panic, too much to even hold five breaths. That was enough. Long recline on the mat, processing psycho-physical-emotional-cognitive stuff, and then five slow wheels, fully coming down between each, one long achey hangback, and no standup. Quick little close and that's it.
Processing: immediately obvious that the very stressy weekend (trying to get time to grade with seventh series in operation, AND do all householding that got deferred during the always-too-busy-week) wound up in my hips. Nothing got done to satisfaction; things had to be rushed, multi-tasked, and as usual, the weekend is so demanding and hectic and such an incredible emotional wring-through, that it makes weekday work look downright refreshing. CONSTANT baby-chasing, tending, trading off for even minutes alone to do things like eat or visit the bathroom, bargaining for any free time at all, frustration, and no relationship tending. If our relationship was a plant it would be yellow and pale by now. MONTHS of this "no attention" garbage. Attendant anger, frustration, and then the karma demons come to make it all even worse than that (and yet, more enlightening than that, too).
The Karma Show: again, as before, it FEELS like it's all about extended sexual frustration. HOWEVER, I've decided that this "frustration" is not HUMAN, and by that, I mean that it's basically mechanically repetitive, and doesn't relate to my ACTUAL body or human subjectivity. As I put it before, it's like a techno beat inside me that never ends and never shuts off; nothing can turn it off, no matter how much "satisfaction" I throw at it. Therefore, it's not human, it's not mortal, it's not ACTUAL. Trying to answer it with my body is like trying to grab a hallucination in your hand. YOU SEE IT constantly but you CANNOT TOUCH IT.
Now wait a second:
Couldn't this have come from other sources? Here, I'll give you some examples:
1. You're an ex-Catholic, and we ALL KNOW that you people get such a massively toxic dose of body-hatred and sex-neurosis that you ALL turn compulsive.
Answer: Well that would be "human," would it not? I don't think that Catholicism, while I DO agree that it is a DEADLY TOXIN, can account for the weird a-physical mechanicalness of this. This "techno beat" has been consistent and unbroken for something like TWENTY FIVE YEARS, well-laid or not. What my body does makes ABSOLUTELY no difference to it.
2. What about the marriage or the adolescence, the long periods in which such compulsivity could have been ESTABLISHED?
Answer: Again, too human. The way this works is like my subjectivity ITSELF, my "I," is STRUCTURALLY INCLUSIVE of a non-payable debt, an ETERNAL hole that cannot ever be filled with anything, and LEAST OF ALL with what it seems that I "want."
3. Sounds like Lacanian psychoanalysis to me: mirror phase, ideal self we cannot acheieve, necessity of a fetish object in order to "complete" subjectivity, which is then always an illusion anyway.
Answer: sounds good but this isn't psychology, it's more like metaphysics. I forget about this best when I am PRODUCING things: teaching Dada, writing on Breillat, really buried deep in asana practice. No relationship partner completes it, no experience, no object, no fetish; there is no ACHIEVEMENT which causes it to end. This "karma ship" sails along PARALLEL to me, always. And unlike FIGHT CLUB, there's no Tyler Durden who "has the kind of sex I want," rubber glove or no. There is no ideal self for this, although I have dreamed up Situationist-inspired commune-style ideal lives which would allow for the end of privation, but privation is nothing more than my interpretation of what empowers this thing, and we'll recall that when I was in a non-privation-based relationship formation, this DID NOT CEASE.
Why karma, then? Why chalk it up to that?
As Karen's quote from a couple weeks back has it, when you confront your karma, "you piss yourself in a panic until you realize that it's all paper and can be lightly lifted off." THAT, my friends, is how it works; THAT is what this is. I remember panics from the early marriage and from the onset of seventh series, the same panic, the "Oh no" that did nothing but pick up in volume, as if certain death were coming but, in Kafkaesque fashion, I knew that, to my detriment, it precisely would NOT kill me, much as I wish that it would!
Karma because it is my REACTION to this panic stimulus that gets in my hips, not the stimulus itself. It's not that I'm processing what above I called "ACTUAL" or "HUMAN" sexual frustration (although there's that too), it's that I am processing my PANIC over the CONFRONTATION with this karmic HORROR. It bears similarities to financial panic when I was paying out EIGHTY SEVEN percent of my income, or job market panic when the DEADLY SILENCE might contain a job or might contain NOTHINGNESS.
And the symptoms in asana terms are ALWAYS and EXACTLY the same: tight right glutes, tight right psoas. Left side untouched except for corollary tightness.
Violence toward the past: sexual gratification, money and income, job and career.
I tease myself with imagined revolution against the "official establishment" of those things, in the form of marriage, family, compulsive heterosexuality, Pleasantville nonsense. I absorbed tons of dark art cinema and even darker Indiewood films, trying to set up an irony-defended gate around my own private minoritization into which those things COULD NOT COME. A basic repetition of the sixties "return to the land," but now, a sort of neo-cultural commune, with Marxist tools but not Marxist HISTORY, an ideological goal of REINVENTING what it is to be public and to be private, a REVOLUTION in what CITIZENSHIP would have meant.
Optional monogamy, indifference to all privatization, Situationist ethics. Absolute consciousness, a sustained and ETERNAL attack of all blindness and stupidity. But note, as has been noted before: what I think is stupid is basically CAPITALISM, CHRISTIAN MORALITY and ACTUAL LACKS OF INTELLIGENCE.
And then my hippie commune revealed its ACTUAL face, which is that of fascist takeover and domination of those things I hate, persecution of that which persecutes me. And the whole thing crumbled into the pretty illusion that it always was.
And so the money, the morality, the stupidity, those demons are MINE, not the culture's (although this could be debated), not the community's, not the world's. MINE. And THAT is why they are the karmic demons.
********************************
One BURNS karma; THAT is liberation.
My idealism would, in social practice, be fascism. Therefore, what pains me, IS NOT SOCIAL. I have to sink this into myself OVER and OVER and OVER, in order to get it to stick for even a fraction of a minute. NOT SOCIAL. NOT SOCIAL. NOT OUTSIDE ME.
To be confronted with this pain is A GIFT. When you unwrap this pretty horror, you can SEE IT, and then you can BURN IT.
Let me finesse that a bit, experientially:
I was reclining on the mat with knees up, just processing, feeling and thinking, sensing and generating sensations, checking it out. One of the things that I felt is that this "mechanical" sexual desire is REPELLENT, is ACTIVELY DISGUSTING, like a mouthful of sewage. This feeling did NOT come with body hatred or "ressentiment" of my "human" sex drives. That's RIGHT, check it AGAIN: finding the mechanical desire, the KARMIC desire, actively REPELLENT, served to SEPARATE IT PROFOUNDLY from the "me" that I call "mine."
Later in the car, still processing, I felt that at times I wish to abandon all of seventh series, the whole relationship, just to hit the road and get the fuck away from all this agony. But then I tried SURRENDERING the "salad days" of 2003-8, and turning all that I so love and desire, into PAPER. The ground turned to stone, all fertility vanished, and WITH IT, the HATRED and FEAR ALSO VANISHED.
The Yoga Sutras say something closely akin to, "The soul of discretion realizes that all pleasure is pain." Ingram's gloss (not specifically on that) is that one can never have pleasure because that which pleases us is just a cloud of temporary sensations that don't create anything solid anyway.
My lesson today has been, "Burn PLEASURE and you also burn PAIN." If you really want to get that mouthful of sewage OUT, if you want to SPIT IT, then spit all that it is ALSO MADE FROM.
*************************
Because this specific set of karmas is tied to what feels like sexual desire, and because we believe in large part that "sex" as a thing is tied inextricably to our PHYSICAL BODIES (when actually it's much more intangible than that, and is about relating and energy), what I'm going to have to do to BURN THIS KARMA is to basically BURN MY PHYSICAL BODY, discursively, experientially INSOFAR as I experience "myself" as a PHYSICAL TOTALITY. Put in simpler language, I have to learn to experience myself as QUANTUM PHYSICS.
What is good for this? You're glad you asked: here's Ingram again, AGAIN, on insight meditation:
"Reality turns into...three-dimensional television snow."
The pain of seventh series--which I have numerous times called "desubjectifying," a pain of dissolution, loss--is a GIFT! Sure, it's a bit of a gift the same way that being shot in the head with a fucking bullet is a gift, but that change in perception, that POTENTIAL TO SEE ONESELF OUTSIDE ONE'S SUBJECTIVITY, is a serious gift.
Practice: aimed for Intermediate this morning at 9, and got to Kapo and called it a practice. Low back crunching through the Bow poses (WTF? That never happens) and resisted urging to "lengthen" and "expand." By Kapo the scrunching was too intense, not painful, but uncomfortable enough not to press into. So I took a pack, a big pack, of psoas lengtheners and glute stretches (various pigeons and lunges) and tried it again. Hands to toes but with INTENSE panic, too much to even hold five breaths. That was enough. Long recline on the mat, processing psycho-physical-emotional-cognitive stuff, and then five slow wheels, fully coming down between each, one long achey hangback, and no standup. Quick little close and that's it.
Processing: immediately obvious that the very stressy weekend (trying to get time to grade with seventh series in operation, AND do all householding that got deferred during the always-too-busy-week) wound up in my hips. Nothing got done to satisfaction; things had to be rushed, multi-tasked, and as usual, the weekend is so demanding and hectic and such an incredible emotional wring-through, that it makes weekday work look downright refreshing. CONSTANT baby-chasing, tending, trading off for even minutes alone to do things like eat or visit the bathroom, bargaining for any free time at all, frustration, and no relationship tending. If our relationship was a plant it would be yellow and pale by now. MONTHS of this "no attention" garbage. Attendant anger, frustration, and then the karma demons come to make it all even worse than that (and yet, more enlightening than that, too).
The Karma Show: again, as before, it FEELS like it's all about extended sexual frustration. HOWEVER, I've decided that this "frustration" is not HUMAN, and by that, I mean that it's basically mechanically repetitive, and doesn't relate to my ACTUAL body or human subjectivity. As I put it before, it's like a techno beat inside me that never ends and never shuts off; nothing can turn it off, no matter how much "satisfaction" I throw at it. Therefore, it's not human, it's not mortal, it's not ACTUAL. Trying to answer it with my body is like trying to grab a hallucination in your hand. YOU SEE IT constantly but you CANNOT TOUCH IT.
Now wait a second:
Couldn't this have come from other sources? Here, I'll give you some examples:
1. You're an ex-Catholic, and we ALL KNOW that you people get such a massively toxic dose of body-hatred and sex-neurosis that you ALL turn compulsive.
Answer: Well that would be "human," would it not? I don't think that Catholicism, while I DO agree that it is a DEADLY TOXIN, can account for the weird a-physical mechanicalness of this. This "techno beat" has been consistent and unbroken for something like TWENTY FIVE YEARS, well-laid or not. What my body does makes ABSOLUTELY no difference to it.
2. What about the marriage or the adolescence, the long periods in which such compulsivity could have been ESTABLISHED?
Answer: Again, too human. The way this works is like my subjectivity ITSELF, my "I," is STRUCTURALLY INCLUSIVE of a non-payable debt, an ETERNAL hole that cannot ever be filled with anything, and LEAST OF ALL with what it seems that I "want."
3. Sounds like Lacanian psychoanalysis to me: mirror phase, ideal self we cannot acheieve, necessity of a fetish object in order to "complete" subjectivity, which is then always an illusion anyway.
Answer: sounds good but this isn't psychology, it's more like metaphysics. I forget about this best when I am PRODUCING things: teaching Dada, writing on Breillat, really buried deep in asana practice. No relationship partner completes it, no experience, no object, no fetish; there is no ACHIEVEMENT which causes it to end. This "karma ship" sails along PARALLEL to me, always. And unlike FIGHT CLUB, there's no Tyler Durden who "has the kind of sex I want," rubber glove or no. There is no ideal self for this, although I have dreamed up Situationist-inspired commune-style ideal lives which would allow for the end of privation, but privation is nothing more than my interpretation of what empowers this thing, and we'll recall that when I was in a non-privation-based relationship formation, this DID NOT CEASE.
Why karma, then? Why chalk it up to that?
As Karen's quote from a couple weeks back has it, when you confront your karma, "you piss yourself in a panic until you realize that it's all paper and can be lightly lifted off." THAT, my friends, is how it works; THAT is what this is. I remember panics from the early marriage and from the onset of seventh series, the same panic, the "Oh no" that did nothing but pick up in volume, as if certain death were coming but, in Kafkaesque fashion, I knew that, to my detriment, it precisely would NOT kill me, much as I wish that it would!
Karma because it is my REACTION to this panic stimulus that gets in my hips, not the stimulus itself. It's not that I'm processing what above I called "ACTUAL" or "HUMAN" sexual frustration (although there's that too), it's that I am processing my PANIC over the CONFRONTATION with this karmic HORROR. It bears similarities to financial panic when I was paying out EIGHTY SEVEN percent of my income, or job market panic when the DEADLY SILENCE might contain a job or might contain NOTHINGNESS.
And the symptoms in asana terms are ALWAYS and EXACTLY the same: tight right glutes, tight right psoas. Left side untouched except for corollary tightness.
Violence toward the past: sexual gratification, money and income, job and career.
I tease myself with imagined revolution against the "official establishment" of those things, in the form of marriage, family, compulsive heterosexuality, Pleasantville nonsense. I absorbed tons of dark art cinema and even darker Indiewood films, trying to set up an irony-defended gate around my own private minoritization into which those things COULD NOT COME. A basic repetition of the sixties "return to the land," but now, a sort of neo-cultural commune, with Marxist tools but not Marxist HISTORY, an ideological goal of REINVENTING what it is to be public and to be private, a REVOLUTION in what CITIZENSHIP would have meant.
Optional monogamy, indifference to all privatization, Situationist ethics. Absolute consciousness, a sustained and ETERNAL attack of all blindness and stupidity. But note, as has been noted before: what I think is stupid is basically CAPITALISM, CHRISTIAN MORALITY and ACTUAL LACKS OF INTELLIGENCE.
And then my hippie commune revealed its ACTUAL face, which is that of fascist takeover and domination of those things I hate, persecution of that which persecutes me. And the whole thing crumbled into the pretty illusion that it always was.
And so the money, the morality, the stupidity, those demons are MINE, not the culture's (although this could be debated), not the community's, not the world's. MINE. And THAT is why they are the karmic demons.
********************************
One BURNS karma; THAT is liberation.
My idealism would, in social practice, be fascism. Therefore, what pains me, IS NOT SOCIAL. I have to sink this into myself OVER and OVER and OVER, in order to get it to stick for even a fraction of a minute. NOT SOCIAL. NOT SOCIAL. NOT OUTSIDE ME.
To be confronted with this pain is A GIFT. When you unwrap this pretty horror, you can SEE IT, and then you can BURN IT.
Let me finesse that a bit, experientially:
I was reclining on the mat with knees up, just processing, feeling and thinking, sensing and generating sensations, checking it out. One of the things that I felt is that this "mechanical" sexual desire is REPELLENT, is ACTIVELY DISGUSTING, like a mouthful of sewage. This feeling did NOT come with body hatred or "ressentiment" of my "human" sex drives. That's RIGHT, check it AGAIN: finding the mechanical desire, the KARMIC desire, actively REPELLENT, served to SEPARATE IT PROFOUNDLY from the "me" that I call "mine."
Later in the car, still processing, I felt that at times I wish to abandon all of seventh series, the whole relationship, just to hit the road and get the fuck away from all this agony. But then I tried SURRENDERING the "salad days" of 2003-8, and turning all that I so love and desire, into PAPER. The ground turned to stone, all fertility vanished, and WITH IT, the HATRED and FEAR ALSO VANISHED.
The Yoga Sutras say something closely akin to, "The soul of discretion realizes that all pleasure is pain." Ingram's gloss (not specifically on that) is that one can never have pleasure because that which pleases us is just a cloud of temporary sensations that don't create anything solid anyway.
My lesson today has been, "Burn PLEASURE and you also burn PAIN." If you really want to get that mouthful of sewage OUT, if you want to SPIT IT, then spit all that it is ALSO MADE FROM.
*************************
Because this specific set of karmas is tied to what feels like sexual desire, and because we believe in large part that "sex" as a thing is tied inextricably to our PHYSICAL BODIES (when actually it's much more intangible than that, and is about relating and energy), what I'm going to have to do to BURN THIS KARMA is to basically BURN MY PHYSICAL BODY, discursively, experientially INSOFAR as I experience "myself" as a PHYSICAL TOTALITY. Put in simpler language, I have to learn to experience myself as QUANTUM PHYSICS.
What is good for this? You're glad you asked: here's Ingram again, AGAIN, on insight meditation:
"Reality turns into...three-dimensional television snow."
The pain of seventh series--which I have numerous times called "desubjectifying," a pain of dissolution, loss--is a GIFT! Sure, it's a bit of a gift the same way that being shot in the head with a fucking bullet is a gift, but that change in perception, that POTENTIAL TO SEE ONESELF OUTSIDE ONE'S SUBJECTIVITY, is a serious gift.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Five Days of Intermediate.
First time since the summer that I've done this. Then, it was my one, ONE week of vacation, between Summer Session II of school, and Fall semester. I went outside every day and did Intermediate all week.
Sure, I know it's "Primary Friday" but since my practice week starts on Monday, and there's a Primary class at the studio on Saturdays at 11 am, I figure I'll just shift the whole thing down a day.
This will be, if I pull the Saturday class, my first six-day-week in MONTHS. Seventh series is very, very stout, particularly in its time demands.
Odd and random factoids:
I was most sore on Wednesday, which was also a morning practice. Thursday I was loaded with energy, and today I also had good energy, but was terrified of doing Intermediate, so I just MADE myself jump into a squat after Parsvottanasana, and I went for it, and as Grim has written, it just HAPPENS.
Thursday I actually fell on my head and somersaulted out of the final Tittibhasana, trying to set up the feet from the walk. Should have put my hands down, but it was hilarious. I've never fallen out of that before.
Toes all week in Kapotasana; deeper, it seemed, EARLIER in the week rather than later. Hmm.
Urdhva Dhanurasana after Intermediate feels different from post-Primary. Does anyone else have that? It's easier to press up, and feels deeper, but my arms still don't look like they fall directly under my shoulders. Even when I walk in I can't seem to get the shoulder-hand line to be vertical. Will have to start taking photos to see what's going on.
The intensity in the pressups now I feel in the GLUTES of all places---WTF?? Also, it's now in the low, Low LOW abs, like pubic bone territory, psoas territory. The backbends (standing or pressups) are happening WAY DOWN.
Hangbacks before dropbacks are getting deeper, easier, taking less time to set up. I've experimented with different hand/arm positions. Usually I press thumbs to tailbone and arch, but now I've started just dropping the arms, driving the heels down, and arching back without the hands helping. Extend and arch, extend and arch. It works. I get a chunk of mat in my vision. But I can still massage extra length out of the hip flexors and glutes. There's a lot to go in there. I also usually hang back with hands to forehead for five, but I've experimented with reaching the arms full length back and over, and hanging for five. That also works.
My feet are beginning to turn out again, and I'm not sure why, but there it is. It's easiest to keep them in line when I extend the arms full back and "follow the hands down," it keeps me from getting anxious about my feet, keeps the attention on the drop.
Standups, however, seem to be getting spotty. It's still drop, walk in, rock, pop hands, land, rock, pop hands land closer to feet, rock pop stand, but now sometimes I collapse back on my butt or fall forward onto my knees. In part I think that my energy is arranged differently after Intermediate, and I'm not tossing the navel forward enough (rather, the knees, and that's why I'm "low" in the standup when I come up, and thus fall) and I also think that I'm starting to take these guys for granted and am simply not concentrating on coming up HIPS first, NAVEL first.
Also, I've noticed that I pop my heels when I rock up. In fact I've popped to standing several times ON TIPTOES. That'll go, eventually.
I've been adding in what Kino called the "final backbend." You drop back, walk in, walk in again if you can, pop the heels only if you can re-plant them, and then put your head to the floor, creep your fingers toward your feet like it's Kapo, and then when you can't get closer, you push the heels and hands down and come up as high as you can. SUPER hard. Thursday there was about 12-14 inches hands-to-feet and today I was so close that I could NOT push up, not at all, so I popped the heels (yeah, illegal, I know) and pushed up, but the "pedestal" of hands and feet was so tight that I couldn't hold the balance. It felt like an upside-down raindrop. Perhaps that's a beginner's sense of what Chakra Bandhasana feels like.
I'm quite enjoying the three sun salutation power moves of Intermediate. They're tiring and I can't do them on breath pace (there are extra breaths between each of them) but I like them.
I can lower Karandavasana, sort of. The lotus isn't tight enough, the knees aren't in the armpits, and I cannot in any way come up, but I CAN make the lotus, fold it, can feel the back bend and curve as the knees come down, and can plant the knees on my triceps without making floor contact. My mission there is: SLOWER. DEEPER.
Hips and shoulders are the game; Maehle says that too. I'm SORE in the shoulders, in a way that Primary simply does not provide. Also, Intermediate is working over my outer hips, like lateral hip flexors and TFL territory. I LOVE that. Parighasana is a favorite.
Today I also successfully landed SUPV with the left foot in half lotus. The secret for me was to STAY IN THE TUCK, to STAY ROUND until fully seated. If I straighten that spine before I'm basically knees-to-floor, the bound hand pops free and I'm all leaning back like it's some clumsy Virasana foundation.
In Kapo I'm going to have to push the arms straight several times as I walk in, if only to get the arms straighter in Kapo B. As I walk in, I can get the toes, but I can't press up, and I can't raise my head, and so the pose just jams there. Must get HIGHER when grabbing the toes, if I am ever to get beyond them. Kino said as much to me in October when I asked about the pose.
Finally, a funny story:
Many people see my practice, and they're starting to comment with things such as, "Dude you're flexible" and "Wow you're in some shape" and so forth, all of which are fine. When I was leaving the Y on Wednesday, an older woman stopped me in the hall and asked, "What do you DO?" I think I looked suprised, so she rephrased: "What do you do, are you a dancer or something?" I said, pretty much automatically without really processing it, "No ma'am, I teach art history for money; this is just a habit I picked up about six years ago."
Hah! Habit, eh? Like smoking, Patrick? Seriously? That was awesome.
Sure, I know it's "Primary Friday" but since my practice week starts on Monday, and there's a Primary class at the studio on Saturdays at 11 am, I figure I'll just shift the whole thing down a day.
This will be, if I pull the Saturday class, my first six-day-week in MONTHS. Seventh series is very, very stout, particularly in its time demands.
Odd and random factoids:
I was most sore on Wednesday, which was also a morning practice. Thursday I was loaded with energy, and today I also had good energy, but was terrified of doing Intermediate, so I just MADE myself jump into a squat after Parsvottanasana, and I went for it, and as Grim has written, it just HAPPENS.
Thursday I actually fell on my head and somersaulted out of the final Tittibhasana, trying to set up the feet from the walk. Should have put my hands down, but it was hilarious. I've never fallen out of that before.
Toes all week in Kapotasana; deeper, it seemed, EARLIER in the week rather than later. Hmm.
Urdhva Dhanurasana after Intermediate feels different from post-Primary. Does anyone else have that? It's easier to press up, and feels deeper, but my arms still don't look like they fall directly under my shoulders. Even when I walk in I can't seem to get the shoulder-hand line to be vertical. Will have to start taking photos to see what's going on.
The intensity in the pressups now I feel in the GLUTES of all places---WTF?? Also, it's now in the low, Low LOW abs, like pubic bone territory, psoas territory. The backbends (standing or pressups) are happening WAY DOWN.
Hangbacks before dropbacks are getting deeper, easier, taking less time to set up. I've experimented with different hand/arm positions. Usually I press thumbs to tailbone and arch, but now I've started just dropping the arms, driving the heels down, and arching back without the hands helping. Extend and arch, extend and arch. It works. I get a chunk of mat in my vision. But I can still massage extra length out of the hip flexors and glutes. There's a lot to go in there. I also usually hang back with hands to forehead for five, but I've experimented with reaching the arms full length back and over, and hanging for five. That also works.
My feet are beginning to turn out again, and I'm not sure why, but there it is. It's easiest to keep them in line when I extend the arms full back and "follow the hands down," it keeps me from getting anxious about my feet, keeps the attention on the drop.
Standups, however, seem to be getting spotty. It's still drop, walk in, rock, pop hands, land, rock, pop hands land closer to feet, rock pop stand, but now sometimes I collapse back on my butt or fall forward onto my knees. In part I think that my energy is arranged differently after Intermediate, and I'm not tossing the navel forward enough (rather, the knees, and that's why I'm "low" in the standup when I come up, and thus fall) and I also think that I'm starting to take these guys for granted and am simply not concentrating on coming up HIPS first, NAVEL first.
Also, I've noticed that I pop my heels when I rock up. In fact I've popped to standing several times ON TIPTOES. That'll go, eventually.
I've been adding in what Kino called the "final backbend." You drop back, walk in, walk in again if you can, pop the heels only if you can re-plant them, and then put your head to the floor, creep your fingers toward your feet like it's Kapo, and then when you can't get closer, you push the heels and hands down and come up as high as you can. SUPER hard. Thursday there was about 12-14 inches hands-to-feet and today I was so close that I could NOT push up, not at all, so I popped the heels (yeah, illegal, I know) and pushed up, but the "pedestal" of hands and feet was so tight that I couldn't hold the balance. It felt like an upside-down raindrop. Perhaps that's a beginner's sense of what Chakra Bandhasana feels like.
I'm quite enjoying the three sun salutation power moves of Intermediate. They're tiring and I can't do them on breath pace (there are extra breaths between each of them) but I like them.
I can lower Karandavasana, sort of. The lotus isn't tight enough, the knees aren't in the armpits, and I cannot in any way come up, but I CAN make the lotus, fold it, can feel the back bend and curve as the knees come down, and can plant the knees on my triceps without making floor contact. My mission there is: SLOWER. DEEPER.
Hips and shoulders are the game; Maehle says that too. I'm SORE in the shoulders, in a way that Primary simply does not provide. Also, Intermediate is working over my outer hips, like lateral hip flexors and TFL territory. I LOVE that. Parighasana is a favorite.
Today I also successfully landed SUPV with the left foot in half lotus. The secret for me was to STAY IN THE TUCK, to STAY ROUND until fully seated. If I straighten that spine before I'm basically knees-to-floor, the bound hand pops free and I'm all leaning back like it's some clumsy Virasana foundation.
In Kapo I'm going to have to push the arms straight several times as I walk in, if only to get the arms straighter in Kapo B. As I walk in, I can get the toes, but I can't press up, and I can't raise my head, and so the pose just jams there. Must get HIGHER when grabbing the toes, if I am ever to get beyond them. Kino said as much to me in October when I asked about the pose.
Finally, a funny story:
Many people see my practice, and they're starting to comment with things such as, "Dude you're flexible" and "Wow you're in some shape" and so forth, all of which are fine. When I was leaving the Y on Wednesday, an older woman stopped me in the hall and asked, "What do you DO?" I think I looked suprised, so she rephrased: "What do you do, are you a dancer or something?" I said, pretty much automatically without really processing it, "No ma'am, I teach art history for money; this is just a habit I picked up about six years ago."
Hah! Habit, eh? Like smoking, Patrick? Seriously? That was awesome.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Intermediate.
Simply a pack of reflections on that series.
First, it's hilarious that it's called that, probably because the more common yoga usage of the term "intermediate" here at least, is middling-practitioner. Not beginner, but not "advanced," whatever that is. This is the same hilarious deception as people who read "Primary ashtanga" and think they're getting a beginner class.
Intermediate is a WACKO sequence. Not wrong, not put together badly, just really far-ranging in its energetics as one practices it. This is, on one level, obvious just from looking at a pose list. Gigantic backbend, fairly shortly followed by gigantic forward bend. Hmm, wonder how THAT'll make me feel. There's nothing comparable in Primary.
What people who don't know Primary experientially tend to forget, is that it is HIPS, HIPS, HIPS. You look and see a bunch of forward bends, and it's possible to forget that those are complicated hip openers. Janu Sirsasana C? Nobody thinks that's a forward bend, early on. EVERYONE knows it's a hip opener. Marichyasana ANY? Hip opener. And then it's bandhas, jumps, coordinating those energetics.
And Intermediate DOES come in blocks, the "backbend, LBH, strength" blocks, BUT early on, it's madness.
Pasasana? Right off the top? SURELY you jest.
And then Krounchasana? With nothing but standing to warm up the hammies?
Now admittedly I don't find those two poses THAT hard (Pasasana comes and goes a bit), and I've liked Krounchasana for a few years, but just pretend you don't practice this sequence for a few seconds and LOOK at it. Then think about how, for example, your average vinyasa class is structured.
The ashtanga "fundamental poses," the opening standing poses, are largely about the inner thighs, hammies and outer hips (hi Trikonasana, Parsvakonasana, and revolved variations; hi Prasaritas, hi Utthita Hasta). There's none of this vinyasa standing pose-a-thon business where you go from Vira 2 to half-moon to revolved half-moon to Dikasana (Vira 3, as it's known) and then standing split and THEN down. There's none of that complicated, endurance-based hip burning. You're not JELLO by the time you're done with fundamentals in Ashtanga.
A vinyasa instructor would have to be MAD to go from that batch of standing poses, right into Pasasana.
That pose alone is the reason why you should build Intermediate on a long time with Primary.
I now think of all of the backbends of Intermediate as warmups and preps for Kapotasana, which I now believe is actively coming. That's pretty cool. For a long time that was my "Is that your final answer?" pose, and I'd sweat it out and wonder how it was going to behave, and sort of "not know the pose" well enough to be able to estimate my own ability. It became superstition, like "am I the right number of inches from the front of the mat? It matters, man!" Craziness. I did it twice today, and got my toes once and then the pad of the foot past the toes, the second time. Definitively cleared the toes.
Think of how complicated and impossible Supta Vajrasana must look to many yoga practitioners. You not only MAKE A LOTUS, you then bind your TOES (do you know how tight a lotus that takes?) FROM BEHIND with the OPPOSITE HAND, and then you BACKBEND and put your HEAD on the freakin FLOOR.
This was my second Intermediate this week, after doing the whole thing sans headstands on Monday night. I did it all today, headstands included. Similar but vaguely different practices: better bandhas yesterday, better Kapo today, better Karanda yesterday, better Dwi Pada yesterday, better Mayurasana today, easier to breathe and deeper in Vatayanasana today, deeper Yoganidrasana today, and so on. If one doubted Ingram's case about reality-is-flux-and-nothing's-permanent, simply looking at a week's yoga asana practice with sufficient detail, will tell you that it is ALL flux, man.
Foot behind head comes relatively quick in Intermediate; in a non-ashtanga class, it always (in my experience) comes toward the end. The same idea: you need to be jelly to pull somethin like THAT, man! In ashtanga that's not the case. Sure, Primary turns most people into jell-o by the time Supta K comes around, but in Intermediate, if you're jelly, if you're toast, you can't land that INTRO vinyasa. You've gotta have STRENGTH to swing the legs over-and-under for this pose's classical entry.
If I'm having a "thinky-can't-get-outta-my-head" practice, it vanishes with the vinyasa after Kapo. Something about finishing that pose and moving on requires me to get out of my head, and BEING out of my head (metaphorically and actually) makes the moves from Supta V to Bakasana to the twists easier, and then I'm almost always in my "yogi space" for Eka Pada. Aadil Palkhivala, of all people, once wrote, about a revolved Janu A variation, that one has to be "in a strange state of mind" to pull that pose. That's PRECISELY how I feel about Eka Pada.
I'm back in a "compass pose for five" prep phase. The left hip doesn't need it, I know that, but the right one does. I want to keep the toes pointed (harder on the knee, but much, much easier on the neck) and so I spend five-ten breaths cranking the hip back and open, and in my two practices this week so far, I've been able to get the leg STRAIGHT UP, not slightly bent, in the prep, and that extra give in the hamstrings makes a freakin WORLD of difference in Eka Pada.
New recipe for Dwi Pada: Knees OUT, spine UPWARD. I'd been raising the feet, along with the spine, and that just makes the balance HARDER, not easier.
Try to imagine a vinyasa class being led through Tittibhasana A-D (I'm using Swenson's letters there). Never seen it, eh? Neither have I. That is another sequence which is just NUTS. STAND UP with your head between your legs and wave to the mula bandha? Are you KIDDING ME? Now, true, I've also loved these poses for years (I was able to do a bent-leg Titti B in 2005--yes, that's two thousand and FIVE, people, after about 18 months of practice), but they look CRAZY. The bit about "take ten steps" sounds like a joke that yogis tell each other over ginger tea.
I've been doing "feet parallel" for the final Titti, and it works. Hands knit, shoulders back and under, hold for five. I also regularly hold the exit Titti A for five (that's an old Jason recommendation from the green board).
Today's Pincha was light and easy, as if someone actually lifted me by my feet. Felt GREAT. It's been months since I had one of those, and I think the secret is in the lats; as I come up to balance, my head/gaze moves from my hands to right between my elbows. I can feel the "banana" (which most bodies do as they do Pincha) straighten out, and often I can look directly behind me if I want.
Ashtanga practice seems to ready one for more advanced postures, more quickly. A brief peek at the sequences beyond Primary indicates this: Pasasana as an opener? Vasisthasana as an opener? Mulabandhasana, as an opener? I think we have a case. This speaks to what Larry once called "a science of sequencing according to breath, bandhas and dristi." Then it becomes more random, and one wants to live in the question instead of making assumptions about "my yoga versus your yoga." Maybe it's regular practice (particularly if it's 5-6 a week) that allows one to just drop into Pasasana, or into that side-plank compass-pose in third (which used to be called Viswamitrasana but might have switched with Vasisthasana). Maybe it's something IN THE SEQUENCING (and that's the sexy bit). Maybe it really DOES come down to "body flexible, mind stiff" and we can all take the Vedanta train over to "believe you're bendy and you are" ville.
A corollary question is FOR WHAT one needs bendy hamstrings, and so on. But that's beyond my scope here (although maybe it would be more interesting than this whole post).
In Karanda yesterday, I experienced the need for uddiyana bandha to carry one UP as one lowers DOWN. Otherwise, it's a plane nose-diving into the floor. It is LIFT AS YOU LOWER; I'm not precisely certain where or how, but it is definitely BOTH TOGETHER. Well I can say a piece: in the inversions (headstands included) my shoulders do not burn unless I'm collapsing out of the lats/side body and taking the weight in the trapezius (basically squeezing the shoulders/neck to firm up the base of the collapsing column). In Pincha it's easy for me to avoid this, as it's the first inversion and if I've had good bandhas in practice, I haven't taken the arm balances in the traps either. But in Karanda, especially if I can't quick-knit the lotus, that weight is ferocious, and I realized that I have to WILL the pose into the lats or I'll switch to the traps/neck out of insecurity and panic, which of course makes everything harder. As in so, so many poses, the key there is NOT FREAKING OUT. Karanda's fun because my gaze is just STONE in it, as my interior gaze dashes from lats to ribs to thighs to spine and back and forth, checking in with the whole body and on the multiple levels of lift, strength, proprioception, balance, and so on, and of course as the pose MOVES all of these change. It's a MASSIVE exercise in monitoring and organizing.
Yesterday the sun-salutation power moves turned me into toast. I did them all, but I was panting like a marathoner at the end of Vatayanasana. Today they were all much better. I learned today to bind the right foot when Vatayanasana begins, because otherwise by the time you finally vinyasa in to do the pose proper, your foot has slipped and you take it all in the knee. KEEP THE FOOT IN THE HIP CREASE.
I consciously think about extending the neck in Mayurasana (nod here to Grimmly's bit about "swan neck girl," who is apparently an ashtangi teaching in Seattle?).
I also, to come back to this again, think there is a certain "you do!" flavor in Ashtanga that isn't there in many vinyasa or Anusara or other classes. For example, the various third series arm balances are MUCH easier built from the floor than from tripod headstand, but if you're a classical ashtangi, "you do" the inversions. This comes down to obedience to/faith in the system. Is it about doing hard poses? No, not really. Maybe for some. But THE SYSTEM SAYS. It's not as doctrinaire as that. The reason Ashtanga isn't a cult is that it is only cultish about its most cultish aspects: do Eka Pada Bakasana this way! Do Tittibhasana that way! Ashtanga doesn't tell you what to eat in the way that Dharma Mittra once said that "eating meat turns your soul into a graveyard" and it doesn't tell you what to own or not own (although long practice may influence your choices) and it doesn't tell you who to hang out with or not (nod to celebrity yoga here). The only thing REALLY that Ashtanga can be cultishly uptight about is breath, bandhas, dristi and asana, and there wouldn't be much to Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga without those things, so basically the practice has a right to own its own territory.
This, in short, is why I seem to have freakish poses in vinyasa classes. You vinyasa folks over there don't have, if you will, a "faith" to follow which creates the desire to, literally, FOLLOW the system. No "superior/inferior" structure is intended here; there are plenty of vinyasa yogis who out-handstand me. But I think that most vinyasa yoga is much harder to internalize than ashtanga is, and that means less frequent body knowledge, more distance between the "yoga bodymind" and daily life. It's as if one only meditates in the studio. Better get to the studio a freakin' LOT, then, yo. Got a floor? Well then I can bring my "studio" with me wherever I go.
A long time ago I tried Supta Urdhva Pada Vajrasana and I GOT IT. But since then, I can't freakin' do it! This amuses me, and since I have other prior poses to master, I don't worry about it much.
Speaking of which: what the hell is my practice these days anyway? Can I just not decide between Primary-to-Kapo and Primary-to-elsewhere and full Intermediate? WTF?
Here's my two cents on that: with seventh series in operation, I can't get a week away, I can't grab a "yoga vacation" with (insert superstar here). I'm my own teacher, maybe for a few years. My last big yoga vacation was three parts of summer 2008. One weekend with Kino since then (which rocked socks, btw). So in a Mysore room, I'll probably still give Kapo as final pose. But in practice, and for months now, really I've only struggled with three core poses (Kapo, Dwi Pada, Karanda) and I'm achieving a half-level in all of them (Kapo to toes, Dwi Pada can be full if I'm adjusted, and I can now and then lower in Karanda, but not come up). Nothing TRULY evades me in Intermediate (although SUPV would be a good candidate, hah!) and so that's why I feel justified in sometimes putting in a week of it.
Intermediate also does more intense (and enjoyable) things to my hips. Primary establishes their base open-ness; I really experience Primary as a "reset button" as Maehle put it. But when that weird life-stressy right-hip panic hits, Primary's no good, and I often can't finish it. Intermediate gets deeper into the iliopsoas (I have to do dropback-standups to get something comparable in Primary) and into the outer hips too (Helloooooooooooo Parighasana, which is like Virasana sideways, freakin' BRILLIANT lateral hip stretch) and even Eka Pada is something like a backbend what with pressing back against the leg. There is a level of "oh yes, YES, baby RIGHT THERE" in poses like Bharadvajasana and Ardha Matsyendrasana and Ustrasana and Vatayanasana and Parighasana, which I simply cannot find in Primary outside of Janu Sirsasana A and sometimes C and Marichyasana A at times.
Am I going to go 5-and-1 (which with my weekends off due to seventh, would be 4-and-1) with Intermediate and Primary? Probably only SOMETIMES. I'm classical enough to know that that's not "how it would be," but I surrender my own teaching when I'm in someone else's Mysore room and that feels fair. But as I said, no extended Mysore room for me for who the hell knows how long.
I got my toes today, twice, in Kapo, without a Primary warmup. When I last did Primary to Kapo, I got my toes, firmly. Simha Krama tends to get me further in Kapo, but I'm not doing this practice just for the Kapo anymore. That IS my final answer, hah!! So in a way I don't LIKE that pose being my "final pose" that I have to get. I'm eager to do away with the "get it, don't get it, omg" business. Again, in a real Mysore room, I'll gladly do as told, that's fine. But on my own, I want to do it, breathe, move on. This is how I learned Primary; do the whole thing, get your ass handed to you in those eight poses, later only get your ass handed to you in those three poses, one day you don't really get your ass handed to you. EVEN IF you don't do the full expression (now THAT's some learning!). So when I enter a "full Intermediate" phase in my practice, that's the ethic.
Full Intermediate today took 100 minutes, opening chant to closing chant. I don't mess around, add crim poses (I own my preps where I add them), change the sequence, skip stuff. I feel like it's still ashtanga practice. That's why I do it instead of my "given" practice of Primary plus ten.
Ok, rambling long probably uninteresting essay now over. Hurrah!
First, it's hilarious that it's called that, probably because the more common yoga usage of the term "intermediate" here at least, is middling-practitioner. Not beginner, but not "advanced," whatever that is. This is the same hilarious deception as people who read "Primary ashtanga" and think they're getting a beginner class.
Intermediate is a WACKO sequence. Not wrong, not put together badly, just really far-ranging in its energetics as one practices it. This is, on one level, obvious just from looking at a pose list. Gigantic backbend, fairly shortly followed by gigantic forward bend. Hmm, wonder how THAT'll make me feel. There's nothing comparable in Primary.
What people who don't know Primary experientially tend to forget, is that it is HIPS, HIPS, HIPS. You look and see a bunch of forward bends, and it's possible to forget that those are complicated hip openers. Janu Sirsasana C? Nobody thinks that's a forward bend, early on. EVERYONE knows it's a hip opener. Marichyasana ANY? Hip opener. And then it's bandhas, jumps, coordinating those energetics.
And Intermediate DOES come in blocks, the "backbend, LBH, strength" blocks, BUT early on, it's madness.
Pasasana? Right off the top? SURELY you jest.
And then Krounchasana? With nothing but standing to warm up the hammies?
Now admittedly I don't find those two poses THAT hard (Pasasana comes and goes a bit), and I've liked Krounchasana for a few years, but just pretend you don't practice this sequence for a few seconds and LOOK at it. Then think about how, for example, your average vinyasa class is structured.
The ashtanga "fundamental poses," the opening standing poses, are largely about the inner thighs, hammies and outer hips (hi Trikonasana, Parsvakonasana, and revolved variations; hi Prasaritas, hi Utthita Hasta). There's none of this vinyasa standing pose-a-thon business where you go from Vira 2 to half-moon to revolved half-moon to Dikasana (Vira 3, as it's known) and then standing split and THEN down. There's none of that complicated, endurance-based hip burning. You're not JELLO by the time you're done with fundamentals in Ashtanga.
A vinyasa instructor would have to be MAD to go from that batch of standing poses, right into Pasasana.
That pose alone is the reason why you should build Intermediate on a long time with Primary.
I now think of all of the backbends of Intermediate as warmups and preps for Kapotasana, which I now believe is actively coming. That's pretty cool. For a long time that was my "Is that your final answer?" pose, and I'd sweat it out and wonder how it was going to behave, and sort of "not know the pose" well enough to be able to estimate my own ability. It became superstition, like "am I the right number of inches from the front of the mat? It matters, man!" Craziness. I did it twice today, and got my toes once and then the pad of the foot past the toes, the second time. Definitively cleared the toes.
Think of how complicated and impossible Supta Vajrasana must look to many yoga practitioners. You not only MAKE A LOTUS, you then bind your TOES (do you know how tight a lotus that takes?) FROM BEHIND with the OPPOSITE HAND, and then you BACKBEND and put your HEAD on the freakin FLOOR.
This was my second Intermediate this week, after doing the whole thing sans headstands on Monday night. I did it all today, headstands included. Similar but vaguely different practices: better bandhas yesterday, better Kapo today, better Karanda yesterday, better Dwi Pada yesterday, better Mayurasana today, easier to breathe and deeper in Vatayanasana today, deeper Yoganidrasana today, and so on. If one doubted Ingram's case about reality-is-flux-and-nothing's-permanent, simply looking at a week's yoga asana practice with sufficient detail, will tell you that it is ALL flux, man.
Foot behind head comes relatively quick in Intermediate; in a non-ashtanga class, it always (in my experience) comes toward the end. The same idea: you need to be jelly to pull somethin like THAT, man! In ashtanga that's not the case. Sure, Primary turns most people into jell-o by the time Supta K comes around, but in Intermediate, if you're jelly, if you're toast, you can't land that INTRO vinyasa. You've gotta have STRENGTH to swing the legs over-and-under for this pose's classical entry.
If I'm having a "thinky-can't-get-outta-my-head" practice, it vanishes with the vinyasa after Kapo. Something about finishing that pose and moving on requires me to get out of my head, and BEING out of my head (metaphorically and actually) makes the moves from Supta V to Bakasana to the twists easier, and then I'm almost always in my "yogi space" for Eka Pada. Aadil Palkhivala, of all people, once wrote, about a revolved Janu A variation, that one has to be "in a strange state of mind" to pull that pose. That's PRECISELY how I feel about Eka Pada.
I'm back in a "compass pose for five" prep phase. The left hip doesn't need it, I know that, but the right one does. I want to keep the toes pointed (harder on the knee, but much, much easier on the neck) and so I spend five-ten breaths cranking the hip back and open, and in my two practices this week so far, I've been able to get the leg STRAIGHT UP, not slightly bent, in the prep, and that extra give in the hamstrings makes a freakin WORLD of difference in Eka Pada.
New recipe for Dwi Pada: Knees OUT, spine UPWARD. I'd been raising the feet, along with the spine, and that just makes the balance HARDER, not easier.
Try to imagine a vinyasa class being led through Tittibhasana A-D (I'm using Swenson's letters there). Never seen it, eh? Neither have I. That is another sequence which is just NUTS. STAND UP with your head between your legs and wave to the mula bandha? Are you KIDDING ME? Now, true, I've also loved these poses for years (I was able to do a bent-leg Titti B in 2005--yes, that's two thousand and FIVE, people, after about 18 months of practice), but they look CRAZY. The bit about "take ten steps" sounds like a joke that yogis tell each other over ginger tea.
I've been doing "feet parallel" for the final Titti, and it works. Hands knit, shoulders back and under, hold for five. I also regularly hold the exit Titti A for five (that's an old Jason recommendation from the green board).
Today's Pincha was light and easy, as if someone actually lifted me by my feet. Felt GREAT. It's been months since I had one of those, and I think the secret is in the lats; as I come up to balance, my head/gaze moves from my hands to right between my elbows. I can feel the "banana" (which most bodies do as they do Pincha) straighten out, and often I can look directly behind me if I want.
Ashtanga practice seems to ready one for more advanced postures, more quickly. A brief peek at the sequences beyond Primary indicates this: Pasasana as an opener? Vasisthasana as an opener? Mulabandhasana, as an opener? I think we have a case. This speaks to what Larry once called "a science of sequencing according to breath, bandhas and dristi." Then it becomes more random, and one wants to live in the question instead of making assumptions about "my yoga versus your yoga." Maybe it's regular practice (particularly if it's 5-6 a week) that allows one to just drop into Pasasana, or into that side-plank compass-pose in third (which used to be called Viswamitrasana but might have switched with Vasisthasana). Maybe it's something IN THE SEQUENCING (and that's the sexy bit). Maybe it really DOES come down to "body flexible, mind stiff" and we can all take the Vedanta train over to "believe you're bendy and you are" ville.
A corollary question is FOR WHAT one needs bendy hamstrings, and so on. But that's beyond my scope here (although maybe it would be more interesting than this whole post).
In Karanda yesterday, I experienced the need for uddiyana bandha to carry one UP as one lowers DOWN. Otherwise, it's a plane nose-diving into the floor. It is LIFT AS YOU LOWER; I'm not precisely certain where or how, but it is definitely BOTH TOGETHER. Well I can say a piece: in the inversions (headstands included) my shoulders do not burn unless I'm collapsing out of the lats/side body and taking the weight in the trapezius (basically squeezing the shoulders/neck to firm up the base of the collapsing column). In Pincha it's easy for me to avoid this, as it's the first inversion and if I've had good bandhas in practice, I haven't taken the arm balances in the traps either. But in Karanda, especially if I can't quick-knit the lotus, that weight is ferocious, and I realized that I have to WILL the pose into the lats or I'll switch to the traps/neck out of insecurity and panic, which of course makes everything harder. As in so, so many poses, the key there is NOT FREAKING OUT. Karanda's fun because my gaze is just STONE in it, as my interior gaze dashes from lats to ribs to thighs to spine and back and forth, checking in with the whole body and on the multiple levels of lift, strength, proprioception, balance, and so on, and of course as the pose MOVES all of these change. It's a MASSIVE exercise in monitoring and organizing.
Yesterday the sun-salutation power moves turned me into toast. I did them all, but I was panting like a marathoner at the end of Vatayanasana. Today they were all much better. I learned today to bind the right foot when Vatayanasana begins, because otherwise by the time you finally vinyasa in to do the pose proper, your foot has slipped and you take it all in the knee. KEEP THE FOOT IN THE HIP CREASE.
I consciously think about extending the neck in Mayurasana (nod here to Grimmly's bit about "swan neck girl," who is apparently an ashtangi teaching in Seattle?).
I also, to come back to this again, think there is a certain "you do!" flavor in Ashtanga that isn't there in many vinyasa or Anusara or other classes. For example, the various third series arm balances are MUCH easier built from the floor than from tripod headstand, but if you're a classical ashtangi, "you do" the inversions. This comes down to obedience to/faith in the system. Is it about doing hard poses? No, not really. Maybe for some. But THE SYSTEM SAYS. It's not as doctrinaire as that. The reason Ashtanga isn't a cult is that it is only cultish about its most cultish aspects: do Eka Pada Bakasana this way! Do Tittibhasana that way! Ashtanga doesn't tell you what to eat in the way that Dharma Mittra once said that "eating meat turns your soul into a graveyard" and it doesn't tell you what to own or not own (although long practice may influence your choices) and it doesn't tell you who to hang out with or not (nod to celebrity yoga here). The only thing REALLY that Ashtanga can be cultishly uptight about is breath, bandhas, dristi and asana, and there wouldn't be much to Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga without those things, so basically the practice has a right to own its own territory.
This, in short, is why I seem to have freakish poses in vinyasa classes. You vinyasa folks over there don't have, if you will, a "faith" to follow which creates the desire to, literally, FOLLOW the system. No "superior/inferior" structure is intended here; there are plenty of vinyasa yogis who out-handstand me. But I think that most vinyasa yoga is much harder to internalize than ashtanga is, and that means less frequent body knowledge, more distance between the "yoga bodymind" and daily life. It's as if one only meditates in the studio. Better get to the studio a freakin' LOT, then, yo. Got a floor? Well then I can bring my "studio" with me wherever I go.
A long time ago I tried Supta Urdhva Pada Vajrasana and I GOT IT. But since then, I can't freakin' do it! This amuses me, and since I have other prior poses to master, I don't worry about it much.
Speaking of which: what the hell is my practice these days anyway? Can I just not decide between Primary-to-Kapo and Primary-to-elsewhere and full Intermediate? WTF?
Here's my two cents on that: with seventh series in operation, I can't get a week away, I can't grab a "yoga vacation" with (insert superstar here). I'm my own teacher, maybe for a few years. My last big yoga vacation was three parts of summer 2008. One weekend with Kino since then (which rocked socks, btw). So in a Mysore room, I'll probably still give Kapo as final pose. But in practice, and for months now, really I've only struggled with three core poses (Kapo, Dwi Pada, Karanda) and I'm achieving a half-level in all of them (Kapo to toes, Dwi Pada can be full if I'm adjusted, and I can now and then lower in Karanda, but not come up). Nothing TRULY evades me in Intermediate (although SUPV would be a good candidate, hah!) and so that's why I feel justified in sometimes putting in a week of it.
Intermediate also does more intense (and enjoyable) things to my hips. Primary establishes their base open-ness; I really experience Primary as a "reset button" as Maehle put it. But when that weird life-stressy right-hip panic hits, Primary's no good, and I often can't finish it. Intermediate gets deeper into the iliopsoas (I have to do dropback-standups to get something comparable in Primary) and into the outer hips too (Helloooooooooooo Parighasana, which is like Virasana sideways, freakin' BRILLIANT lateral hip stretch) and even Eka Pada is something like a backbend what with pressing back against the leg. There is a level of "oh yes, YES, baby RIGHT THERE" in poses like Bharadvajasana and Ardha Matsyendrasana and Ustrasana and Vatayanasana and Parighasana, which I simply cannot find in Primary outside of Janu Sirsasana A and sometimes C and Marichyasana A at times.
Am I going to go 5-and-1 (which with my weekends off due to seventh, would be 4-and-1) with Intermediate and Primary? Probably only SOMETIMES. I'm classical enough to know that that's not "how it would be," but I surrender my own teaching when I'm in someone else's Mysore room and that feels fair. But as I said, no extended Mysore room for me for who the hell knows how long.
I got my toes today, twice, in Kapo, without a Primary warmup. When I last did Primary to Kapo, I got my toes, firmly. Simha Krama tends to get me further in Kapo, but I'm not doing this practice just for the Kapo anymore. That IS my final answer, hah!! So in a way I don't LIKE that pose being my "final pose" that I have to get. I'm eager to do away with the "get it, don't get it, omg" business. Again, in a real Mysore room, I'll gladly do as told, that's fine. But on my own, I want to do it, breathe, move on. This is how I learned Primary; do the whole thing, get your ass handed to you in those eight poses, later only get your ass handed to you in those three poses, one day you don't really get your ass handed to you. EVEN IF you don't do the full expression (now THAT's some learning!). So when I enter a "full Intermediate" phase in my practice, that's the ethic.
Full Intermediate today took 100 minutes, opening chant to closing chant. I don't mess around, add crim poses (I own my preps where I add them), change the sequence, skip stuff. I feel like it's still ashtanga practice. That's why I do it instead of my "given" practice of Primary plus ten.
Ok, rambling long probably uninteresting essay now over. Hurrah!
Friday, February 12, 2010
Q: Right hip, A: Simha Krama.
It has been a LONG time since I have messed around with the Sweeney alternate sequences. But recently I had a resurgence of my "mystery tension" in the right hip, which makes backbending impossible and even finishing Primary unlikely. I'm not sure what causes that: I think it's set off by intense life stress, as it used to appear in times of financial duress and now seventh series can set it off once in a while. Anyway, the symptoms are intense tightness from the ilio-psoas all around to the TFL and minor glutes and big knotted sensations throughout the glute max. Evil stuff.
I modified practice to suit it, on Monday AND Tuesday, and then took Wednesday off. It's not often that this lasts more than about 36 hours, but this was sore and tight, night and day, for like FOUR DAYS.
Thursday I decided to put in an iliopsoas-intensive sequence, aka, The Simha Krama (Lion Sequence) from Sweeney's book. Think lunges, backbends, lotuses, cobras, a lot of camel variations, a lot of half-bound standing variations (i.e., reach one hand around, but other hand stays free; don't do a full two-hand bind). It's great, so, so good, in the outer hips and the psoas.
Friday I did it again, as Thursday night was the baby insomnia special. It feels fanTASTIC.
As Grimmly sometimes does, when fooling around with other sequencing, I added the biggies from Intermediate:
There are Kapo variations in the Simha Krama, but I did a regular Kapo and was able to walk my hands BEYOND my toes, outside the feet. Hurrah.
There's Pincha in the Simha Krama, but I knit a lotus and, with barely any control, did manage to lower it for a Karandavasana. Up, however, did not happen.
There's Eka Pada in the Simha Krama (well, in the advanced version of it) and I was able to Eka Pada on both sides, although the right hip complained a lot and needed three prep poses. But that's fine, because the S. K. is really a backbend-shoulder developer more than an Eka Pada prep sequence.
So it was good. I'm planning on hitting the 11 am Primary tomorrow at the studio; back at it!
I modified practice to suit it, on Monday AND Tuesday, and then took Wednesday off. It's not often that this lasts more than about 36 hours, but this was sore and tight, night and day, for like FOUR DAYS.
Thursday I decided to put in an iliopsoas-intensive sequence, aka, The Simha Krama (Lion Sequence) from Sweeney's book. Think lunges, backbends, lotuses, cobras, a lot of camel variations, a lot of half-bound standing variations (i.e., reach one hand around, but other hand stays free; don't do a full two-hand bind). It's great, so, so good, in the outer hips and the psoas.
Friday I did it again, as Thursday night was the baby insomnia special. It feels fanTASTIC.
As Grimmly sometimes does, when fooling around with other sequencing, I added the biggies from Intermediate:
There are Kapo variations in the Simha Krama, but I did a regular Kapo and was able to walk my hands BEYOND my toes, outside the feet. Hurrah.
There's Pincha in the Simha Krama, but I knit a lotus and, with barely any control, did manage to lower it for a Karandavasana. Up, however, did not happen.
There's Eka Pada in the Simha Krama (well, in the advanced version of it) and I was able to Eka Pada on both sides, although the right hip complained a lot and needed three prep poses. But that's fine, because the S. K. is really a backbend-shoulder developer more than an Eka Pada prep sequence.
So it was good. I'm planning on hitting the 11 am Primary tomorrow at the studio; back at it!
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Chewy conversation re: seventh series.
J and I don't talk much about seventh series because we don't think alike on it: different trajectories, different ideas about why we did it, how we're doing it, where it goes, what it's for, difference all around. Plus, the bad sleep we've gotten for EIGHTEEN MONTHS NOW and the BARE relationship we maintain while we dedicate ALL energies to work and seventh series, doesn't often make for brilliant conversation. Here are some language photos:
J says she spent years self-actualizing and then arrived in this part of the country which doesn't fit her at all, and really needed something "alive," something to dedicate herself to, besides work. Otherwise, life was descending down a narrowing tunnel. How to get "awake" again? I'm paraphrasing, with "alive" and "awake," those terms are MINE, not hers. She doesn't use the witch doctor vocab that I do, the modernist theater of cruelty vocab that I do. So for J, seventh series is very much about compassion, caring, deep dedication, a sort of "finally!" exhale after all of that work and teaching and bureaucracy. There was never any opposition perceived, intended or even noticed, really, between our lives pre-2008 and our lives post-2008. J always says, "that'll come back," as if it never left and as if she isn't in the least disturbed by its absence.
I, of course, you know well.
I had an EXPLOSION of self-actualization, a real birth, in 2003, when I was THIRTY THREE years old. DECADES before that, had been spent in lucky accidents and overt refusals of some stupidities, with necessary indulgence in other stupidities. I have a MASSIVE axe to grind against the world--specifically against capitalism and Christianity--for feeding me what I perceived then and now to be systematic ignorance of myself. My self-knowledge, my self-actualization, is a WAR ON STUPIDITY. And it comes with flames and sweat and redemptive violence.
Where J was lighting a lamp in a dark tunnel, with seventh series,
I instead experienced seventh series as a sort of cold-water splash on my rolling fireball of world conquest.
Her experience of it is very quiet, somewhat intentional, and simple, direct. Light candle, gain vision, proceed.
My experience of it is elemental violence, clashing, energies exploding, resisting, birth of galaxies, pangs of agony everywhere, primal screams, volcanoes, rains over the planet, steam bath for all life, invention of DNA.
HOW WEIRD is it that SHE's the one who gave birth to the child and I am the one with all the body rhetoric. That blood and violence and slickness and pushing and all of those wonderful gerundives? OBVIOUSLY, that experience should belong TO ME.
J prioritizes and structures the days to fit and accomodate seventh series. This is the number one priority and the world is built (barring the 8-5, five days a week work schedule) to fit it. If lust doesn't fit, it doesn't show. If anger doesn't fit, anger doesn't show. To me, external viewer, J seems to be the very PICTURE of emotional control, EVEN THOUGH she's the one that's full of hormones and was in the past subject to wacko spontaneous crying fits and all of that maternal essentialism (which freaks me the FUCK OUT) while pregnant.
I, who seem to identify MUCH MUCH more strongly with lust and sweat and the Lion god's territory (but notably NOT with maternal hormonal business, unless it's the deeply physical, pain-blood-and-sex of BIRTH itself, with which I really did identify), am a BOILING OCEAN of anger, lust, violence, fire, under a very very trickily maintained exterior. My apparent calm is UTTER VENEER and I KNOW IT. I hear a techno beat in my viscera, ALL THE TIME. That sexual frustration of the past seventeen months, NEVER leaves my conscious mind. Part of me sits by that door waiting for it to crack and then WE STORM THOSE MOTHERFUCKING GATES!! The easiest way for me not to lose my mind to this is to stay OUTRAGEOUSLY BUSY.
Seventh series is helping my "be present" practice, in that if I let my mind wander, frustration-as-anger IMMEDIATELY descends upon me, with roles, imaginations, conversations, and it's all gone, no emotional balance, no calm, no presence. And I know this. I get this in commuting ALL the time; if I don't rehearse a lecture, while driving, then the DEMONS COME.
This is how J can experience seventh as a very work-centric ARRIVAL and how I can experience seventh as a very work-centric TEST.
I'm trying to get myself to see my life with J from 2003-2008 as a PREPARATION for THIS phase of it. The invitation, of course, is to see this as a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE mistake which has completely derailed and made a flaming train wreck out of my beautiful, marvelous sweat-and-lust self-realization, which really, if we look at my life, is just a sort of JOYFUL VENGEANCE on the decade of life which preceded it.
I find it virtually IMPOSSIBLE to see our halted, stuttering sex life as anything other than an OPPOSITION to how it used to be. J is very instructive in this. She takes the pause as a pause, as if one is walking down a street, stops to look in a window, and will obviously keep walking, in about twenty seconds. That's how ordinary it is for her. It's not even faith. When she says, "It'll be back," she's speaking with the same factuality with which one says, "The sun will come out from behind that cloud."
What this becomes, is a lesson in HOW DEEPLY GROUND IN my neurosis is.
To put this in cloud-sun language, I'm the one who saw the sun vanish behind the cloud, and like some tribal character or maybe at best Dark Ages mystic, declared that the world was ending. Now imagine that you're on that same street, watching a couple stop to look in a window. She calmly window shops and he breaks into absolute and unfaked panic about the end of the world coming any second, complete with hands to hair, and falling down and thrashing upon the pavement. You're seeing some SERIOUS DEMENTIA. THAT's how serious my sex neuroses are.
I love having her for a mirror sometimes, to see shit like that.
So for J, seventh series became, even with the deep insomnia, the fever, the repeated illnesses, a fact. For me, seventh series became a BAD ACID TRIP. Complete with hallucinations, double realities, and ghosts and demons that aren't there.
I maintain as much yoga practice as I can, in the name of focus, and also and at the same time, in the name of touching some part of my "prior life." It's both, and that's fine, I need just a little illusion to make this pill go down.
I get the boy from daycare, I wash the bottles, I get as PRESENT as I can. That's the safe home turf. DON'T THINK. The more CERTAINTY I can have about what I'm doing or have to do or what needs to be done, the more COHERENT the LIST IS, the better off I am psycho-emotionally.
Seventh is, as I put it last post, a DESUBJECTIFYING PRACTICE for me. In fact, it DROVE ME to at least two Buddhist texts, one on "A Happy Married Life" and the other, being Ingram's thing (I realize he's not strictly Buddhist, insert long ramble that he handles better than any of us could, here).
And THAT, my friends, seems to be a good thing. What did seventh series do for you? It DROVE ME to begin an ACTUAL seated meditation practice. In the name of SURVIVAL.
Sure, there's no talk here about all the pretty bullshit you hear re: "You'll never surrender your kids for anything," "It's the greatest thing I've ever done," "I only realized myself as a parent," and all that. But you knew that from the summer, didn't you. Seventh series is I think not ITSELF painful (well, maybe aside from the birth and the insomnia) but it certainly SHOWS ME MY ACCUMULATED PAIN IN SHARP RELIEF. And what's weird is that I KNEW that much of my life was accumulating pain, like in my early twenties, but I COULDN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. I tried refusal of what I could clearly see was stupid, but "NO" is a strategy that ONLY GOES SO FAR.
And for the record? It fucking SUCKS to know you're in a world of pain and CAN'T GET OUT OF IT.
I undertook a LOT of voluntary pain in 2003: I acquired metal in nervy places, I got ink in another nervy place, I got (in a way) on stage for endorphin-laden performances, I played experientially with genderfuck, and so on. And I was climbing walls and then started to get well-laid and then I found Primary Series. I marshalled the body-as-reality with a sword of endorphins and declared war on exploitation and repression. But a pointless, personal, apolitical war of my own, on my own life, on my own history.
Seventh series' larger benefit is that it MIGHT be able to stop me from hating mysel(ves).
I feel pressure to "actualize as a parent," so that I too can say that pretty textbook bullshit about "It made me a full person," and so forth, the fucking Jerry Maguire of parenting or whatever the fuck. But it's not going to do that; it's a desubjectifying practice. I can say that it's about love, sure enough, because it is, but I can't say anything about "It made me blah" or "I realized blah." What I'm realizing through seventh series can't be put accurately in any fucking book.
J says she spent years self-actualizing and then arrived in this part of the country which doesn't fit her at all, and really needed something "alive," something to dedicate herself to, besides work. Otherwise, life was descending down a narrowing tunnel. How to get "awake" again? I'm paraphrasing, with "alive" and "awake," those terms are MINE, not hers. She doesn't use the witch doctor vocab that I do, the modernist theater of cruelty vocab that I do. So for J, seventh series is very much about compassion, caring, deep dedication, a sort of "finally!" exhale after all of that work and teaching and bureaucracy. There was never any opposition perceived, intended or even noticed, really, between our lives pre-2008 and our lives post-2008. J always says, "that'll come back," as if it never left and as if she isn't in the least disturbed by its absence.
I, of course, you know well.
I had an EXPLOSION of self-actualization, a real birth, in 2003, when I was THIRTY THREE years old. DECADES before that, had been spent in lucky accidents and overt refusals of some stupidities, with necessary indulgence in other stupidities. I have a MASSIVE axe to grind against the world--specifically against capitalism and Christianity--for feeding me what I perceived then and now to be systematic ignorance of myself. My self-knowledge, my self-actualization, is a WAR ON STUPIDITY. And it comes with flames and sweat and redemptive violence.
Where J was lighting a lamp in a dark tunnel, with seventh series,
I instead experienced seventh series as a sort of cold-water splash on my rolling fireball of world conquest.
Her experience of it is very quiet, somewhat intentional, and simple, direct. Light candle, gain vision, proceed.
My experience of it is elemental violence, clashing, energies exploding, resisting, birth of galaxies, pangs of agony everywhere, primal screams, volcanoes, rains over the planet, steam bath for all life, invention of DNA.
HOW WEIRD is it that SHE's the one who gave birth to the child and I am the one with all the body rhetoric. That blood and violence and slickness and pushing and all of those wonderful gerundives? OBVIOUSLY, that experience should belong TO ME.
J prioritizes and structures the days to fit and accomodate seventh series. This is the number one priority and the world is built (barring the 8-5, five days a week work schedule) to fit it. If lust doesn't fit, it doesn't show. If anger doesn't fit, anger doesn't show. To me, external viewer, J seems to be the very PICTURE of emotional control, EVEN THOUGH she's the one that's full of hormones and was in the past subject to wacko spontaneous crying fits and all of that maternal essentialism (which freaks me the FUCK OUT) while pregnant.
I, who seem to identify MUCH MUCH more strongly with lust and sweat and the Lion god's territory (but notably NOT with maternal hormonal business, unless it's the deeply physical, pain-blood-and-sex of BIRTH itself, with which I really did identify), am a BOILING OCEAN of anger, lust, violence, fire, under a very very trickily maintained exterior. My apparent calm is UTTER VENEER and I KNOW IT. I hear a techno beat in my viscera, ALL THE TIME. That sexual frustration of the past seventeen months, NEVER leaves my conscious mind. Part of me sits by that door waiting for it to crack and then WE STORM THOSE MOTHERFUCKING GATES!! The easiest way for me not to lose my mind to this is to stay OUTRAGEOUSLY BUSY.
Seventh series is helping my "be present" practice, in that if I let my mind wander, frustration-as-anger IMMEDIATELY descends upon me, with roles, imaginations, conversations, and it's all gone, no emotional balance, no calm, no presence. And I know this. I get this in commuting ALL the time; if I don't rehearse a lecture, while driving, then the DEMONS COME.
This is how J can experience seventh as a very work-centric ARRIVAL and how I can experience seventh as a very work-centric TEST.
I'm trying to get myself to see my life with J from 2003-2008 as a PREPARATION for THIS phase of it. The invitation, of course, is to see this as a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE mistake which has completely derailed and made a flaming train wreck out of my beautiful, marvelous sweat-and-lust self-realization, which really, if we look at my life, is just a sort of JOYFUL VENGEANCE on the decade of life which preceded it.
I find it virtually IMPOSSIBLE to see our halted, stuttering sex life as anything other than an OPPOSITION to how it used to be. J is very instructive in this. She takes the pause as a pause, as if one is walking down a street, stops to look in a window, and will obviously keep walking, in about twenty seconds. That's how ordinary it is for her. It's not even faith. When she says, "It'll be back," she's speaking with the same factuality with which one says, "The sun will come out from behind that cloud."
What this becomes, is a lesson in HOW DEEPLY GROUND IN my neurosis is.
To put this in cloud-sun language, I'm the one who saw the sun vanish behind the cloud, and like some tribal character or maybe at best Dark Ages mystic, declared that the world was ending. Now imagine that you're on that same street, watching a couple stop to look in a window. She calmly window shops and he breaks into absolute and unfaked panic about the end of the world coming any second, complete with hands to hair, and falling down and thrashing upon the pavement. You're seeing some SERIOUS DEMENTIA. THAT's how serious my sex neuroses are.
I love having her for a mirror sometimes, to see shit like that.
So for J, seventh series became, even with the deep insomnia, the fever, the repeated illnesses, a fact. For me, seventh series became a BAD ACID TRIP. Complete with hallucinations, double realities, and ghosts and demons that aren't there.
I maintain as much yoga practice as I can, in the name of focus, and also and at the same time, in the name of touching some part of my "prior life." It's both, and that's fine, I need just a little illusion to make this pill go down.
I get the boy from daycare, I wash the bottles, I get as PRESENT as I can. That's the safe home turf. DON'T THINK. The more CERTAINTY I can have about what I'm doing or have to do or what needs to be done, the more COHERENT the LIST IS, the better off I am psycho-emotionally.
Seventh is, as I put it last post, a DESUBJECTIFYING PRACTICE for me. In fact, it DROVE ME to at least two Buddhist texts, one on "A Happy Married Life" and the other, being Ingram's thing (I realize he's not strictly Buddhist, insert long ramble that he handles better than any of us could, here).
And THAT, my friends, seems to be a good thing. What did seventh series do for you? It DROVE ME to begin an ACTUAL seated meditation practice. In the name of SURVIVAL.
Sure, there's no talk here about all the pretty bullshit you hear re: "You'll never surrender your kids for anything," "It's the greatest thing I've ever done," "I only realized myself as a parent," and all that. But you knew that from the summer, didn't you. Seventh series is I think not ITSELF painful (well, maybe aside from the birth and the insomnia) but it certainly SHOWS ME MY ACCUMULATED PAIN IN SHARP RELIEF. And what's weird is that I KNEW that much of my life was accumulating pain, like in my early twenties, but I COULDN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. I tried refusal of what I could clearly see was stupid, but "NO" is a strategy that ONLY GOES SO FAR.
And for the record? It fucking SUCKS to know you're in a world of pain and CAN'T GET OUT OF IT.
I undertook a LOT of voluntary pain in 2003: I acquired metal in nervy places, I got ink in another nervy place, I got (in a way) on stage for endorphin-laden performances, I played experientially with genderfuck, and so on. And I was climbing walls and then started to get well-laid and then I found Primary Series. I marshalled the body-as-reality with a sword of endorphins and declared war on exploitation and repression. But a pointless, personal, apolitical war of my own, on my own life, on my own history.
Seventh series' larger benefit is that it MIGHT be able to stop me from hating mysel(ves).
I feel pressure to "actualize as a parent," so that I too can say that pretty textbook bullshit about "It made me a full person," and so forth, the fucking Jerry Maguire of parenting or whatever the fuck. But it's not going to do that; it's a desubjectifying practice. I can say that it's about love, sure enough, because it is, but I can't say anything about "It made me blah" or "I realized blah." What I'm realizing through seventh series can't be put accurately in any fucking book.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Quick fragments: practice, Seventh, Ingram.
My first half-assed practice in the exhibitionistic public sphere, this 2010. Marichyasana D. That was enough.
Seventh series long weekend: Fri-Sun. All contingency. I keep wanting a map, a plan, an achievable task, but it always comes down as "take care of" or "be good to" or "keep company." Pffft. Where's the DO-able; why all this general, ambiguous, contingent languageless chaotic nonsense? Sure, cute chaotic nonsense, but EVER contingent. Doing seventh series is like staring death in the face, not because I dislike it or because it's overtly unpleasant in it's ACTUALITY, but because it is DEADLY in its resistance to specificity, in its speechless, random, mood-switching schizophrenic utter contingency. In short, while some people get parental-role arrival and reinforcement and, in short, "find themselves," in seventh series, I find seventh series to be what elsewhere was called RADICALLY DESUBJECTIFYING.
Speaking of which:
Ok, ok, ok, I FINALLY sold out to the cushion and cracked a copy of Mastering the Core Teachings, which Karen hooked me up with MONTHS AGO. You know this text, yes? Then you remember how fucking HOT the opening bit on the three characteristics is?
Concentrate on SENSATIONS, one to ten PER SECOND. Turn experience and the wholeness and solidity of the world into, and I quote, a "three dimensional globe of TV static." HOT! Hot hot heat!!
What the fuck is in the water in the blogosphere right now? I feel like EVERYONE is taking up the cushion, and of course I resisted (I'm no joiner, man) but then I hit this and was like GROOVE ON THE SENSATE WORLD AND UNDO SUBJECTIFICATION, whooooo!
Man, if there was a pitcher of KoolAid with that written on it, it'd be empty.
And the bit where he says that he used to actually summon desires and neurotic thoughts SO THAT he could feel their edges, and made them "the bread and butter of his meditation practice"? HOTNESS!
Now, of course I see how it's a paradox that over in seventh series land, I LOATHE the desubjectifying contingency but over here in cushion-ville I CRAVE it. Yeah, I see that. Obviously, what's up regarding this is that I feel that I can CHOOSE THE LEVELS in the latter, but can NOT do that in the former. This, of course, is probably a deception.
The key deception handed down to me from I'm not clear whom, about seated meditation, is that "the world is an illusion." Everything Lion and Nietzsche in me says, "BULLSHIT" to that. Always has, and still does. It just doesn't make sense that the world is an illusion, unless EVERYTHING is an illusion, in which case the whole ship is just a tautology and we flip it over like they do in Pirates of the Carribean and suddenly we are NOT in a parallel universe, but right where we started.
But if the WHOLENESS of the world and ourselves in it were an illusion, THAT WORKS. It maintains the world but does in all of the illusions of me, around me, and connected to me (hi, capitalism!). By shattering me into a billion pieces and "the world" (which isn't the world) along with me, everything turns into freedom. I grok that, well, linguistically/conceptually, anyway. Can't speak to experientially yet.
I chewed on this stuff all last night and all during practice. That "concentrate on the sensate world" bit. That's so, so, so, SO hot. For a serious anti-Catholic with a motherload of body/sex stuff in his karma, the command to dig the sensate in order to achieve the enlightened is just crazy, crazy hot. Hotter than Tantra, even, because it doesn't have any "body politics" in it, just a sort of BODY ENTRY to shattering subjectivity. Anyone who's had a sufficiently long acid trip or head-bending orgasm has had a taste of what that might be like. And you can apparently even do it by FEELING THOUGHTS, although that's beyond me right now.
I'm going to try like hell NOT to have more to say about this as it proceeds. That, of course, makes sense.
Seventh series long weekend: Fri-Sun. All contingency. I keep wanting a map, a plan, an achievable task, but it always comes down as "take care of" or "be good to" or "keep company." Pffft. Where's the DO-able; why all this general, ambiguous, contingent languageless chaotic nonsense? Sure, cute chaotic nonsense, but EVER contingent. Doing seventh series is like staring death in the face, not because I dislike it or because it's overtly unpleasant in it's ACTUALITY, but because it is DEADLY in its resistance to specificity, in its speechless, random, mood-switching schizophrenic utter contingency. In short, while some people get parental-role arrival and reinforcement and, in short, "find themselves," in seventh series, I find seventh series to be what elsewhere was called RADICALLY DESUBJECTIFYING.
Speaking of which:
Ok, ok, ok, I FINALLY sold out to the cushion and cracked a copy of Mastering the Core Teachings, which Karen hooked me up with MONTHS AGO. You know this text, yes? Then you remember how fucking HOT the opening bit on the three characteristics is?
Concentrate on SENSATIONS, one to ten PER SECOND. Turn experience and the wholeness and solidity of the world into, and I quote, a "three dimensional globe of TV static." HOT! Hot hot heat!!
What the fuck is in the water in the blogosphere right now? I feel like EVERYONE is taking up the cushion, and of course I resisted (I'm no joiner, man) but then I hit this and was like GROOVE ON THE SENSATE WORLD AND UNDO SUBJECTIFICATION, whooooo!
Man, if there was a pitcher of KoolAid with that written on it, it'd be empty.
And the bit where he says that he used to actually summon desires and neurotic thoughts SO THAT he could feel their edges, and made them "the bread and butter of his meditation practice"? HOTNESS!
Now, of course I see how it's a paradox that over in seventh series land, I LOATHE the desubjectifying contingency but over here in cushion-ville I CRAVE it. Yeah, I see that. Obviously, what's up regarding this is that I feel that I can CHOOSE THE LEVELS in the latter, but can NOT do that in the former. This, of course, is probably a deception.
The key deception handed down to me from I'm not clear whom, about seated meditation, is that "the world is an illusion." Everything Lion and Nietzsche in me says, "BULLSHIT" to that. Always has, and still does. It just doesn't make sense that the world is an illusion, unless EVERYTHING is an illusion, in which case the whole ship is just a tautology and we flip it over like they do in Pirates of the Carribean and suddenly we are NOT in a parallel universe, but right where we started.
But if the WHOLENESS of the world and ourselves in it were an illusion, THAT WORKS. It maintains the world but does in all of the illusions of me, around me, and connected to me (hi, capitalism!). By shattering me into a billion pieces and "the world" (which isn't the world) along with me, everything turns into freedom. I grok that, well, linguistically/conceptually, anyway. Can't speak to experientially yet.
I chewed on this stuff all last night and all during practice. That "concentrate on the sensate world" bit. That's so, so, so, SO hot. For a serious anti-Catholic with a motherload of body/sex stuff in his karma, the command to dig the sensate in order to achieve the enlightened is just crazy, crazy hot. Hotter than Tantra, even, because it doesn't have any "body politics" in it, just a sort of BODY ENTRY to shattering subjectivity. Anyone who's had a sufficiently long acid trip or head-bending orgasm has had a taste of what that might be like. And you can apparently even do it by FEELING THOUGHTS, although that's beyond me right now.
I'm going to try like hell NOT to have more to say about this as it proceeds. That, of course, makes sense.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Check It!: the ideal practice post.
Thursday, far out practice; Friday, snow cancels practice; Saturday, good practice with so-so backbends. Anxiety results, predictably. A long rambling reflection is asked for, yes?
NOT!
All I can do with language is crank up my anxiety, and brainstorming it and trying to "see" backbends in Youtube videos is, as a guy in Austin Texas once put it, good for your misery.
So there shall BE NO POST. But this isn't an empty formalist exercise here, either. It's IMPORTANT to state that there ISN'T A THING.
NOT!
All I can do with language is crank up my anxiety, and brainstorming it and trying to "see" backbends in Youtube videos is, as a guy in Austin Texas once put it, good for your misery.
So there shall BE NO POST. But this isn't an empty formalist exercise here, either. It's IMPORTANT to state that there ISN'T A THING.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Quick one on backbending developments: K, DS, SU.
Toes on my own, in Kapo: yesterday and today. Monday: 3/3 dropping and standing, after Primary. Tuesday: 3/3 dropping and standing, after full practice (Primary plus ten). Wednesday: Primary plus ten, Kapo twice, 2/6 dropping and standing (six drops, two stands). Couldn't get it flowing. Unclear as to what specifically was different.
Desperately trying to chill the "omg Kapo" stuff going on in my head. Dreaming about it at night. Arms well toward straight today, after the second Kapo, and just barely off my feet, too. That's working toward full Kapo B, which our friend Maehle says is a bigger bend than Kapo A.
Yesterday's toe-grab was the second Kapo (I do two a day, the second one is magically much improved, so this seems the wise thing to do right now). I landed the hands and instantly, like in a sprint, spider-ran toward my feet. I FELT the hands move outside the feet, and beyond the toes, I KNOW it happened. But then I got tight and panicky and confronted the impossible, and I freaked, and went and grabbed the nice, safe toes.
Dropbacks getting bigger, dropping below ninety degrees in the hang. Here, brief and precise, is how and for how long I set it up:
Stand, inhale, uddiyana, spine tall. Thumbs to tailbone, exhale, arch. Take 8-10 more breaths, arching and lengthening and standing LEGS STRAIGHT, while hands move from quads up toward hips, turning thighs inward, massaging outer hips right under the iliac crests (there is GOOD release there). Lengthen spine, get TALL, legs remain STRAIGHT. Hands together, at forehead. Try to put forearms on head, not just thumbs. Five long breaths here, hanging back, full extension as possible. Inhale, arms straight. Exhale, follow the hands down to the mat. Feet DO NOT MOVE.
It's more of a drop than a bend, but right now, if I bend my knees, I also duck-out my feet, and since I drop onto a gym mat, I trust it. I go over like a breeze has blown me over.
Walk in, on contact. Inhale, rock. Exhale, rock back. Inhale rock, pop hands off. Exhale, land; try to land a bit CLOSER to feet. Inhale, pop, ask pelvis to carry you standing. When it works, it works. Three breaths to get upright. My heels pop up as I rock to standing, but it works, and since I at first dropped back with heels up (summer 2008), and then was able to do it feet flat, I trust that that'll happen here too.
More depth in dropping-and-standing seems to build more depth in my Kapo, even though my "garage drop-backs" in Kapo over the summers seem to have built my ability to drop back. Wonderful feedback loop like that.
Anyway, that's what's going on.
Desperately trying to chill the "omg Kapo" stuff going on in my head. Dreaming about it at night. Arms well toward straight today, after the second Kapo, and just barely off my feet, too. That's working toward full Kapo B, which our friend Maehle says is a bigger bend than Kapo A.
Yesterday's toe-grab was the second Kapo (I do two a day, the second one is magically much improved, so this seems the wise thing to do right now). I landed the hands and instantly, like in a sprint, spider-ran toward my feet. I FELT the hands move outside the feet, and beyond the toes, I KNOW it happened. But then I got tight and panicky and confronted the impossible, and I freaked, and went and grabbed the nice, safe toes.
Dropbacks getting bigger, dropping below ninety degrees in the hang. Here, brief and precise, is how and for how long I set it up:
Stand, inhale, uddiyana, spine tall. Thumbs to tailbone, exhale, arch. Take 8-10 more breaths, arching and lengthening and standing LEGS STRAIGHT, while hands move from quads up toward hips, turning thighs inward, massaging outer hips right under the iliac crests (there is GOOD release there). Lengthen spine, get TALL, legs remain STRAIGHT. Hands together, at forehead. Try to put forearms on head, not just thumbs. Five long breaths here, hanging back, full extension as possible. Inhale, arms straight. Exhale, follow the hands down to the mat. Feet DO NOT MOVE.
It's more of a drop than a bend, but right now, if I bend my knees, I also duck-out my feet, and since I drop onto a gym mat, I trust it. I go over like a breeze has blown me over.
Walk in, on contact. Inhale, rock. Exhale, rock back. Inhale rock, pop hands off. Exhale, land; try to land a bit CLOSER to feet. Inhale, pop, ask pelvis to carry you standing. When it works, it works. Three breaths to get upright. My heels pop up as I rock to standing, but it works, and since I at first dropped back with heels up (summer 2008), and then was able to do it feet flat, I trust that that'll happen here too.
More depth in dropping-and-standing seems to build more depth in my Kapo, even though my "garage drop-backs" in Kapo over the summers seem to have built my ability to drop back. Wonderful feedback loop like that.
Anyway, that's what's going on.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Ashtanga quiz meme thing: just curious.
These have probably been asked before, but out of curiosity, here goes:
1. How long have you been at this ashtanga business?
Five and a half years.
2. How regularly?
Somewhere between 1-3 (for the first two years) and then 4-6 (for the last three or so years) times a week. I take a week or in the case of Nov 2009, a month off, now and then, but I'm pretty regular, especially since 2007.
3. What's your practice scene like? (i.e., Mysore-style, home practice, etc)
With more and more rare Mysore-style classes, almost entirely led classes for those first two years, and almost entirely home practice for the last three years and some. I think my total Mysore-style-room experience would add up to about two months; I have to travel if I want actual authorized/certified Mysore-style.
4. Do you have a current "final pose"? What is it, since when?
I GUESS that my "final pose" is Kapo, but that's because in summer 2008 when Matthew asked me, "What do you usually do" after Setu Bandhasana, I said, "I usually go to Kapo and don't get it." A month later in Boston, I'd simply name Kapo as final pose, and it BECAME "what I do" in Mysore-style rooms. I have still, in all my practice, never been officially GIVEN a pose.
5. Do you care, re: final pose and pose acquisition, and all that?
Yeah, I care, and yeah, I know you're not "supposed to." Whatever, man. I want the full expression of Kapo, because I spent so long, years, thinking it was impossible and STILL nonetheless trying to get it. I'd love to have a complete Intermediate and currently I struggle only with the core poses: Kapo, Dwi Pada, Karanda.
6. What pose do you currently hate, consciously or not?
I still have to focus on breathing in order not to get some dread at Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana, but that's gotten MUCH easier than it was years ago. I regularly get a quick "Is this trip really necessary?" when I jump up from the post-Setu-Bandhasana chakrasana to do Pasasana. There's no pose I actively hate, however.
7. What pose do you lust after, if any, especially if you can't get do/receive it?
I ABSOLUTELY lust after Bhairavasana, the FBH side plank, I LOVE that pose. And on a good day, I can do it with the left foot back, classical entry and exit and all. I also used to lust after Eka Pada Bakasana, but now I can also do that, classical entry and exit and all. Neither of these, however, is done IN SEQUENCE, because I do not permit myself to mess with third yet (I don't need that). I have some serious interest in Parsva Bhuja Dandasana (from fourth), but that's just because it is so, so, so pretty.
8. If you've finished Primary, do you remember what came VERY LAST, what was the FINAL thing to arrive?
Well technically dropbacks, I guess, but the final POSE to arrive in full formation was Garbha Pindasana. Months of 6/week home practice FINALLY put my right hip in the mood to do it, on dark winter mornings in early 2007.
9. What was the last pose or transition to make you utter the phrase, "I'll never be able to do that"?
Wow, this has been a while. Probably "take your heels in Kapotasana," but that's boring, EVERYONE thinks that. I don't get big cases of "I can't/I'll never" anymore.
10. Do you still say, "That was a great practice" even when you flub stuff?
Yeah absolutely. If I can't bind a wrist in Marichyasana D but I keep breathing and practice, I still feel great. The super chill of having practiced, still comes. If I can't get the right foot to stick behind my head, whatever, breathe and move, and it's still all good. If I have to drop back six times to get three standups, whatever dude, it still rocks. One of the secrets for me in this is to take a LONG and CONCENTRATED closing sequence. Rinse out the disappointments and wishing, with it.
1. How long have you been at this ashtanga business?
Five and a half years.
2. How regularly?
Somewhere between 1-3 (for the first two years) and then 4-6 (for the last three or so years) times a week. I take a week or in the case of Nov 2009, a month off, now and then, but I'm pretty regular, especially since 2007.
3. What's your practice scene like? (i.e., Mysore-style, home practice, etc)
With more and more rare Mysore-style classes, almost entirely led classes for those first two years, and almost entirely home practice for the last three years and some. I think my total Mysore-style-room experience would add up to about two months; I have to travel if I want actual authorized/certified Mysore-style.
4. Do you have a current "final pose"? What is it, since when?
I GUESS that my "final pose" is Kapo, but that's because in summer 2008 when Matthew asked me, "What do you usually do" after Setu Bandhasana, I said, "I usually go to Kapo and don't get it." A month later in Boston, I'd simply name Kapo as final pose, and it BECAME "what I do" in Mysore-style rooms. I have still, in all my practice, never been officially GIVEN a pose.
5. Do you care, re: final pose and pose acquisition, and all that?
Yeah, I care, and yeah, I know you're not "supposed to." Whatever, man. I want the full expression of Kapo, because I spent so long, years, thinking it was impossible and STILL nonetheless trying to get it. I'd love to have a complete Intermediate and currently I struggle only with the core poses: Kapo, Dwi Pada, Karanda.
6. What pose do you currently hate, consciously or not?
I still have to focus on breathing in order not to get some dread at Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana, but that's gotten MUCH easier than it was years ago. I regularly get a quick "Is this trip really necessary?" when I jump up from the post-Setu-Bandhasana chakrasana to do Pasasana. There's no pose I actively hate, however.
7. What pose do you lust after, if any, especially if you can't get do/receive it?
I ABSOLUTELY lust after Bhairavasana, the FBH side plank, I LOVE that pose. And on a good day, I can do it with the left foot back, classical entry and exit and all. I also used to lust after Eka Pada Bakasana, but now I can also do that, classical entry and exit and all. Neither of these, however, is done IN SEQUENCE, because I do not permit myself to mess with third yet (I don't need that). I have some serious interest in Parsva Bhuja Dandasana (from fourth), but that's just because it is so, so, so pretty.
8. If you've finished Primary, do you remember what came VERY LAST, what was the FINAL thing to arrive?
Well technically dropbacks, I guess, but the final POSE to arrive in full formation was Garbha Pindasana. Months of 6/week home practice FINALLY put my right hip in the mood to do it, on dark winter mornings in early 2007.
9. What was the last pose or transition to make you utter the phrase, "I'll never be able to do that"?
Wow, this has been a while. Probably "take your heels in Kapotasana," but that's boring, EVERYONE thinks that. I don't get big cases of "I can't/I'll never" anymore.
10. Do you still say, "That was a great practice" even when you flub stuff?
Yeah absolutely. If I can't bind a wrist in Marichyasana D but I keep breathing and practice, I still feel great. The super chill of having practiced, still comes. If I can't get the right foot to stick behind my head, whatever, breathe and move, and it's still all good. If I have to drop back six times to get three standups, whatever dude, it still rocks. One of the secrets for me in this is to take a LONG and CONCENTRATED closing sequence. Rinse out the disappointments and wishing, with it.
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