On Death, and I Warn Ya, I Feel Contentious :)

This is another of those longish posts that several people may read but that I don't expect anyone to comment on (somehow in a very predictable way, that disclaimer up front tends to bring comments, and I still haven't fully processed the way in which my total indifference doesn't affect the way that this disclaimer ACTUALLY WORKS).

One of my favorite skills, for about fifteen years, has been the ability to write very long sentences without needing a period and without using extreme verbal gymnastics; in this, the semicolon and the parentheses are key tools.

In short, then, what the fuck is all of this life, life LIFE going on in the blogosphere, and especially where parenting and children are concerned? Does NO ONE, has NO FUCKING ONE, ever felt the way that I do about this, this deep dark soak in the darkest death you can possibly imagine without actually in any way confronting physical mortality?

With rare exceptions, I remain healthy, flexible, powerful; my appetite is unaffected, my hair does not grow feeble, the whole high-pro glow of healthy puppies is there. I'm life all over the place. I remain extroverted and ready to deal with people and even with unpleasantness; I change catboxes and wash dishes and even clean bathrooms on request. I tell you, I am life out loud.

What the fucking FUCK, then, with all this dark death stuff? What the FUCK is that all about?

Some fluffy identity-woe-is-me thing, some change that is so fucking slow in the acceptance...

That bit about the path to enlightenment being "extreme death," I loved that. Still do. But it's not a logic problem, and the converse isn't true. Just because I can't get any access to my endorphin-factory self of old doesn't mean that the whole world is death. But it feels that way, and feeling is being, isn't it? How transient or not is this long phase of dying/mourning?

And WHAT is it?

Can you ask that? Can you feel the question? My physical reality is brightness and power; so what the fuck is all this death bullshit? Which one's bullshit? You can live and die at once, right; I said that a post or three ago, yes?

About a kid: "Oh great, another reason to live."

I don't feel that in the least, but giving up was never my problem. Often my problem is and has been NOT giving up. Not giving up a relationship, an ideal dream, a pursuit. LET IT GO is what people have said to me for twenty years and I've said FUCK YOU I CAN GET IT. Climbing walls' attractiveness, anyone? Metaphysical proof, which of course is only physical motion and has nothing to do with metaphysics except for metaphors with which one can stoke the pride oven.

I'm attracted to "I can't" these days. Not the belief that I can't, but to things that ACTUALLY cannot be done. I think it's an examination of letting go, by virtue of trying the ACTIVELY IMPOSSIBLE.

Death shows up there; mortality, as Trungpa and others have put it (and a lot of the Gita is about it actually), is the key card, it's the ace, it's the only card that matters, really. And I've said that before, tried to found a counter-metaphysics to Christianity on it. Landed, eventually, on the Situationist International, but that's a long tangential story.

Like a desire to BE impossible. Not to find out what the limits of the possible are (although I've tried that too, most specifically in the line between inebriation and unconsciousness, operating there, trying to SEE IT), but to BECOME impossible. It can't be done, but the asymptote is out here, out in parenting and the death of the past identity.

Why is it "out here," why is this such a fringe thing for me? Isn't parenting terribly, TERRIBLY mainstream and mundane? Yes, in its day-to-day, in its catboxes and its diaper changes (funny how those two examples are excrement, eh? Bataille, anyone? Let's have a revolution! Bring me a diaper pail!), but in its emotional "place" in me, it's fringe territory, edge play.

There is something I no longer believe, when I practice asana or climb walls; there is a questing grandeur which is gone, which can't be stood any longer. I can still feel it, and believe it, under the influence of loud music (so loud you can feel it rather than hear it) or smell, but if I'm not pushed that close to tangibility and have any thinking room, it's gone.

And that is mundanity, for sure, the vengeance of housework, but it is also a kind of weird reality like that which Buddhists talk about. A wonderful ensorcelled warriorship and love and anger, giant emotions in quest narratives, is gone, is revealed to be paper. Something, some realization, I neither wanted nor pursued. Life brings one these things, too.

And the pain of that is not the pain of THAT but of losing that, of losing that mask. I doubt I will ever be able to clearly separate it from the relationship trouble or the insomnia or anything else, but the LOSS hurts, not the presence of any given thing that replaced it (although I certainly complained enough).

In a way, it's like a chronic illness took that from me, but I don't need it, didn't need it, not really. I did, of course; wanted that mythology, that sweat and quest derived therefrom, for twenty years, wanted it since I was a teenager. But I never NEEDED it, not seen from the reality of me now.

And one becomes quiet, but not really mundane. The binary crumbles: warrior/householder or however you'd like to put it. Mundanity is not a LANDING point; it is not the end-all of all kinetic energy and it's not a tomb, although we have I forget even how to count the number of writers who've actively or otherwise described it as such (American Beauty, anyone? Rick Moody? Hell, Hermann Hesse? See? And believe me, the list goeth on!).

But to break mundanity up into simple actions--to see it as a cloud of transient verbs rather than a solid anything--can NEVER be done by the warrior consciousness of which it is the other side of the coin, and for obvious reasons.

And the whole American shebang of the outlaw hero and the self-made man and that bit about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, has to go with it. Massive surrender. But a totally different kind. This isn't surrender to death at all (although it will feel like it, has felt like it, you've read the evidence which I did not fake); it's surrender to a world without a specific mask on. That's all.

I suppose that parenting can be a quest, a "point to life," but I didn't experience it that way; for me it pulled off the mask of the noble quest for power, Castaneda magic, warriordom, Conan-John McClane-you name it, the archetypes that I collected in posters, Travis-Bickle-Tyler-Durden, and insisted on mundanities first, and I think of something about the ecstasy and the laundry, which apparently I should read now.

This won't end with life becoming parenting, with me pledging my power to parenting; being a parent for me is a verb, transient like housework, exactly like housework. I'm not uncommitted (although I feel that charge come silently from J every day), I'm simply unmystified, not buying the magic, anymore than I am now allowed to buy the Conan magic. If I can't swing a sword with full belief, I'm not going to just substitute mythologies and push a stroller with full belief. The problem has been the pledge, not the direction.

Directly after that last sentence, the boy awoke in what I think is teething pain, and teething pain SUCKS, in case you wonder. So that's it; new directions now, old directions lost. The summary here that I like is, mundanity can't be taken apart (that is, won't fall apart, which we need it to do in order for the actions which are collected under it, to be tolerable for our so-American subjectivities) until the warrior consciousness which opposes it (is opposed to it, in the binary we can rarely question) also falls apart.

Death creates life, and it does so in a cloud of transient verbs.

The Myth of Freedom

"The attainment of enlightenment FROM EGO'S POINT OF VIEW is extreme death, the death of self, the death of me and mine, the death of the watcher. It is the ultimate and final disappointment. Treading the spiritual path is painful. It is a constant unmasking, peeling off layer after layer of masks. It involves insult after insult."

--Chogyam Trungpa, "Disappointment," approx. 4 pages into "The Myth of Freedom."

(capitalized emphasis, mine)

Shoulder. "Jois."

Two days ago I held the toes through an entire Supta Vajrasana and celebrated--shoulder healed! Today, sore as it was in May, no jumpbacks really, and still consistent soreness. Depression! Gotta love the emotional rollercoaster.

Primary only, and watching a woman back to my left do a pretty Intermediate. Jealous as hell, but noting it and passing it along. My vinyasa are more powerful, and some of my poses prettier, but she did a full Kapo and Dwi Pada (no preps) and lowered Karanda slowly and didn't have to take a batch of breaths after each of the strength poses as I often do. She has the superior practice (if we're counting that sort of thing).

TL gave me a cool shoulder rotation thing to do, which I liked, but in general I'm going to come away from practice here wishing that I was back in my private, traditional-as-I-wanna-be home practice. I've NEVER wished for that. So that's pretty interesting. I used to believe, just as policy, that instruction is better than home practice, and true, there are OCCASIONS when it is. The INVALUABLE instruction that I got on dropbacks from Matthew Sweeney in 2008, opened those for me and they have never shut since, although they are often difficult for me and they're never consistent.

The April shoulder injury, which backed up my Kapo from foot-creeping all the way back to effortful toe-touching, totally sapped the backbend quest out of me. I haven't had it since. I still care, but there's a big wide stretch of indifference in it now. Two obsessive years while doing various parts of seventh series. It just feels dumb to keep stoking both of those fires together, it feels unwise. Perhaps this is growing up. But, I invented dropbacks for myself in January at a YMCA and I was working well toward Kapo in February, in March, the next year, also in a YMCA. Who needs summer, who needs heat?

Leave me in my quiet little pond in the Midwest.

OR

What the fuck is this "Jois" thing that's opening in Encinitas? No insult intended, and the schedule's compelling, but they're opening an American KPJAYI in Tim's backyard (don't they recall how Islamorada went)?

I can fly for the opening led class dates for about 250 bucks. 50 per class, 150 for three (I'm thinking Sharath's led, opening days; school begins here on that Monday, the 23rd).

Do I have 400 bucks to spare, and can my contact in SD put me up then? Would that be stupid or marvelous?

Would it be suffocating or fantastic to be surrounded by who-the-fuck-knows-how-many ashtangis in one of the acknowledged power nexuses on Earth for this practice?

Yoda and Handstands

So, remember in EMPIRE when Yoda tells Luke, "You must unlearn what you have learned"? It's in sacred texts too: you are what you believe, you make your own unhappiness, and so on and so forth. And on top of all of this I finished ZAMM yesterday and so I have a ton of Pre-Socratic thinkers in my head telling me how to live well and how a physical production done with peace of mind is actually a spiritual reality. It's pretty far out in my head (well, really that was always true).

Today I did the whole practice and was done by about 8:40, which means I practiced for probably 2 hours and 20 minutes. TL's handstand lesson today was "the press." When he came over and told me that, instantly through my head went, "No fucking way dude, that's impossible," but with a head full of ZAMM now, that was immediately followed by, "wait, hold that, study it....impossible? why? for whom? let us investigate."

The lever that you lift is the legs. Same as in headstand. If you bend the knees, you shorten the lever; if you spread the feet wide (WIDE), you shorten the lever. Shortening the lever takes less effort in the center line, and especially in handstand (much moreso than in headstand), you don't really core your way up, you shoulder your way up. TL said vinyasa through (i.e., Navasana then Lolasana, jump sort of just behind your hands, come to Uttanasana) and then tiptoe, and then spread your feet wide and press up.

Experience: shoulders do come forward of hands. Engagement happens there. Hips ask to lift and don't, really; can't tell if it's a faith problem or a physics problem.

Assist: Gentle lifting by the hipbones. As the legs are WIDER (and as wide as possible, like side splits wide), this actually ISN'T that hard. "Tuck it through," he said--roll it back down, between, and into Navasana. I did, twice. Suprised the hell out of myself. The third time, I swung down ballistic, couldn't hold it. That was enough.

Nothing particularly noteworthy in Intermediate; I had bigger backbends than I expected and got a Kapo to little-toe-grab (which is where TL likes my hands to be; sort of firmly grabbing the base of my two outer toes on each foot) and then a great Supta Vajrasana assist, and I held the toes through the whole some-teen breaths of it, down for five breaths twice, with some singles in the middle. Score! That's cool because it means my injured right shoulder is REALLY healing now, returning to range of motion pre-injury.

During the handstand press lesson, TL gave me his central philosophical thing (so he said):

"I tell people, when they come in here, to just forget EVERYTHING they've been told, just let it ALL go. If you're not seeing the groovy shit all around you, you're just caught up in the concept, and it's move the right hip back and press into the heel and all of that, and that's valuable, but you're living in a concept, not in reality, you're not feeling the pose." Words closely to that effect (any miscommunication is my own).

Now, the adjustments that I've gotten in the room have all intensified and in many cases clarified how a pose works. Purvottanasana; standing pose feet; Vira 2 arms; Parivrtta Trikonasana; Marichyasana A; Marichyasana D; one great Supta K; one great Baddha K; Kapo; Supta V and a Bhekasana today that just blew my freakin' mind.

So it's not the case that TL just likes to sort of anti-sacralize the tradition, but he really is allergic to people doing rote practice. This is a very tricky tightrope to walk, for the ashtanga vinyasa method is a very rigid thing. Take this many breaths, look here, do poses in this order, and in a counted class, even "do this movement on this word." Wow!

So how can one sort of "anti-instruct", how can you get students to UNLEARN and yet keep practicing the same thing?

Now, true, I think the added "closed eyes tree pose" and the revolved hand to big toe additions are kind of fluffy, and sometimes TL does just throw a wrench into your practice to get you awake (and awake is really hard to handle if your trance state of five breaths-move-five-breaths-move isn't fully awake itself), but the wrench is not his main method.

RF said, quoted elsewhere, that when meditating, one must have the awakeness of just having had a triple espresso, combined with the calm of deep sleep. That resonates here. I think maybe it's not "unlearn what you have learned" (for one learns a sequence and continues to do it, although various people in the room are pulling half-moon pose and sometimes forearm stands and I don't know WTF those are for; they're not sequenced in any way I recognize; and even the one chick who does a beautiful and skilled Advanced A was later doing Karandavasana and Bakasana B and some of the harder headstands from 2nd, after her practice--wha?? Strength building for Vrischikasana??) but more like "be awake in your sequence."

Why is that a big deal? It's hard to say, if you don't teach people or aren't a VERY keen observer of your own practice. You can TELL when a student (or when you yourself) check out of a pose, when you do it on auto-pilot. This isn't at all the same as easy pose versus hard pose. Sure, hard poses wake us up and demand high attentiveness. No, it's different. I see students check out in warrior poses all the time. The bodies actually SAY "la la la, raise hands, knee bent, la la la", they practically SHOUT it across the room at me and I go over there and increase lunges and TURN ON that psoas stretch. People check out on their ujjayi. Flexible people get tired in Primary and check out in Baddha K, in Upavistha. No! Wake up! Keep it alive! TL actually said to me, in a Janu, "Keep this foot alive." Yeah, and that's it. Keep it alive.

Utkatasana: we've had numerous discussions about this one. Apparently it's a pose where I check out. That's not what I thought I was doing, but TL's case is that I take it too shallowly and need to crank it up for the warrior sequence; he asked me to think about it as a sumo wrestler placing each foot down, knee well bent, or Maori guys doing a haka. That's Utkatasana! So I tried it on, rather than, as he put it "just making the shape that the tradition tells you is right," and it does actually work; it changes the spirit of my Surya B's.

I think that TL's often hostile-seeming approach to tradition isn't to the tradition ITSELF but to the tendency to sleep in it. The potential for sleep, for not "seeing all the groovy shit that's around."

Pirsig would put it this way: abandon Platonic "forms," because it's not the ideal you want, it's the Good, and since we know that Plato nipped "The Good" from the Pre-Socratics, what we ACTUALLY want in practice is the QUALITY. If this is a practice that brings you to the present, that wakes you up to the moment, then it is in a way IMMORAL to check out while you're doing it. That's what bad mechanics do; they don't CARE about their work, they aren't UNIFIED with it, and they do it ROTE and then they screw up your motorcycle.

Sure, can you feel unified by doing what the authorities say? Make the shape, breathe, move; it works. I've done it. It does.

But not in this room; that sort of thing shouts and then it gets addressed. Keep it alive. How it FEELS over how it LOOKS. I keep telling students that. But as verbiage, it's useless. "Feel it!" you say, and what do you EXPECT as an answer? No, you have to touch people, you have to say, "Feel THIS."

It takes a hell of a lot of concentration to keep a set sequence alive, unless of course one is alive constantly, one is in a PRACTICE of being alive, which Pirsig would call a practice of living with Quality. I like that.

TL said, "do some handstands after backbends, before Paschimottanasana." I did three successfully; one was up and quickly down feet-side, the second was up for a full five breaths and then began to fall over-head and I somehow painlessly rolled out of it, somersault style, and the third was up for maybe three breaths and began to go radically over-head, so I walked on my hands, pad, pad, then lost it totally to the right, and BANG!! down on ankle, hip, shoulder. That floor is wood and I took big steps, so I was full on the hard stuff. It was fucking LOUD; people inhaled in sympathy pain. But as is my habit from falling out of things, I popped up and acted cool and ok in an effort to CREATE cool and OK (which sounds silly, but really does work), and TL said, "I'm ok with that, if you are" I nodded and took my forward bend.

I don't know that I'll do those things wall-free tomorrow, but I think we're going to do some ticking lessons before I leave here (why else the request to do post-backbend handstands?) so maybe I'll try falling into a backbend rather than on my bones tomorrow. TL and Larry have this in common: they like courage, even if it fails. What Pirsig would call gumption. The ability and willingness to doubt our "can'ts" and "impossibles." I've always had that. That's why I started climbing 5.10 again six weeks after my ACL repair.

Weird sickness, and Less Every Day

Yesterday in the early am's (i.e., the early 5 am's when I wake up potentially to go south for the yoga), I felt weird in the belly and head. The car then told me, in big red letters "STOP, TURN MOTOR OFF" as it was out of oil. An oil check a few hours later revealed NOT A DROP in there. No moisture whatsoever. So I didn't get the yoga done on Monday and it was probably a good thing. Then later I got properly sick, feverish, sleeping for 7 hours in the morning/afternoon, the real thing. Nothing gross, just uneasy sensations and chills and all that good business.

Each day that I make it to the studio, I do less. First day, well into Intermediate, with dropbacks and all. Second day, mightily sore, barely into Intermediate, no dropbacks. Today still with sore belly but without queasiness, only to Janu B and then the handstand festival, and then I backbent (no straight arms, no dropbacks) and closed. Not even jumpbacks or anything; it feels like if I clench my abs to pull my knees up, I'll toss my cookies, even though I've barely eaten anything in 24 hours.

Maybe in the future I will just go to different teachers' rooms and do whatever, with no expectations at all. In Indy I think of my practice as having a variable Intermediate stopping point: Kapo sometimes, Dwi Pada other times, Karanda other times, the whole thing other times. Here I've been OK'd for Ardha Matsyendrasana, but I can't seem to get to it.

Vacation with a kid means, basically, that you don't bring your work with you. It doesn't mean vacation. And having so much exposure to J and the kid means that I am getting a deep soak in how dead/on hold our relationship is, but I've also been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (for the first time ever, despite a thousand recommendations when I was in college), so many of my days here are spent thinking about the kind of crazy shit that well-meaning people can come up with and then have to live with. I wrote a whole draft of a post about my counter-vision of Western civilization, which as I said in the still quite-valuable "fascist tendencies" post, is all full of the same illusions as Western civ itself.

J sees the world through the lens of parenting: when she considers working out, it's never for her, it's so she "won't die young and leave the kid by himself." That sort of thing; a hundred examples. What she does, what she considers, even how she argues with me; it's ALL parenting, all the time.

I retained a split view; I remained "many" whereas J has, to the best of her ability, become "one" (parent). I still see myself as yoga guy over there, parent over there, interpersonal relating guy over there, and so on. But because J is locked strictly into parent mode, she can call my yoga "leisure activity" when in actuality it is a central element in my mellowing-out mechanism, which has on more than one occasion kept me from throwing her out a window, and she can call interpersonal relating "not the real thing" because being a parent is "the real thing." So basically we have no relationship, other than that we parent together. When we talk about intimacy, she says "well maybe you can find a certain intimacy in doing this hard thing together." When we argue about the relationship, she says that "we are responsible for this child, we have to make all of his choices." In short, J and I CANNOT talk about our relationship, because all she can see in any aspect of life, is parenting. In one argument, I said, "You treat me like I don't exist" and she said, "We both have to be on, all the time, to keep him safe."

How do those relate, you say? I was talking generally about how even when she leaves me "in charge" of the child, she is still the guardian. She doesn't trust me, at least not as much as she trusts herself. And also there was a clear note of interpersonal relating in there, because where that's concerned, there's neither me nor relationship. J was talking about child care, and whoever can be more cautious and more aware, basically "wins." She, of course, is always more cautious and more aware than I am because she has hormonal super powers where that's concerned and I do not. So I was trying to say that our relationship is wildly unbalanced and that I find that painful, and she was trying to say that the point of our lives is to be attentive parents. There's virtually no common ground there.

So it's all death. Grey skies, reduced yoga, belly sickness, parenting and relating being wildly unbalanced. It's all death and I don't even have any work with me so that I can escape it for a second to a world that's got less death in it. Well, there's Zen... of course, but that's just a story like mine, a guy with an obsessive and insane idea that he chases to the very, very end. I can't put it down, but it's hardly a comforting read.

Proprioception training

Seattle, 2.

Heat wave is off; kid adventures are planned (sculpture garden by waterside, including giant sweet Oldenburg piece), and I'm going to try to drag J to the art museum, which is, as she puts it, "all modern (sigh)". Yeah, but modern art ROCKS ASS, so that gets my vote. This is what happens when you pair a film student/Dada guy with a medievalist who likes Walden.

Climbers know all about proprioception; it's your self-awareness in space. Proprioception is Jedi stuff; you know where you are without needing to see what you're doing; it's sort of extra-ocular spatial orientation.

I got the "do tree pose, let your gaze wander, then shut your eyes and hold it" intro, and then UHP, where the gaze movement is there precisely to "make the pose harder" (i.e., to train yogis to get out of their eyes in balance poses).

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

I came here to get backbends (because I have gone EVERYWHERE to get backbends since 2008) and I'm not going to get them. TL said, "it's a continuum; some people lift their heels, some have short Achilles, some are very flexible, some turn their feet, it's a wonder that this part of yoga practice is so heavily policed." And that was that.

But I am going to come out of here with handstands.

Yesterday alone--and the handstands were the best part of a very VERY sore practice which was totally unremarkable in all other respects--it was handstands at the wall, on a short riser (maybe 8 inches high) and then on a higher one (maybe 20 inches?) and then (you gotta be KIDDING ME) on an even higher one, about 3 full feet. Here, try this. Put your hands three feet high, and then jump into a handstand. No, seriously.

AND THEN

The freakin RAMP handstand, hands downward facing, 45 degrees!!! I said, "Man, this is some Luke Skywalker stuff." He said, "Totally. Use the force!"

Now, being able to make geeky Star Wars references with your teacher is a total sale.

I said, "Is this going to be a regular thing?" He said, "Yeah, everyone gets a bit of this, but since you're here for a short time, it's gonna be an onslaught." I said, "Cool."

My yoga homework for this weekend is to handstand wherever it looks safe. Just pop into it at random in public. Hell yeah, of course I'm down for that, I'm an extrovert, let's remember. J is totally unthrilled with this.

So the height of my practice here is directly post-Mari-D. That's where the festival occurs. Then the rest of it is just "you do" until however much or little Intermediate I want (up to Ardha Matsyendrasana).

Gotta go be a parent now. More later!

Way too Brief: Seattle, 1.

This place is like a mix of Maine and San Francisco.

Currently it's heat wave central: 85 yesterday, 89 today.

Unlike Indiana's economy, in which businesses grow slowly and only with great determination, like succulents in sand, here it's a free for all. The economic flora is in a freakin' terrarium!

Mysore, day 1, just as planned. Kid and I awake at 4:48 am local (that's 7:48 Indy time, which is reasonable) and the sun's just coming up then. Yeah, we're north!

TL's adjustments--for this body, anyway--are anatomically precise and informative, and designed to maximize energy flow. The toes in standing poses are prana; the heels, apana. Fascinating lessons in Vira 2. The classical exit from Utkatasana must have NO jumping from the feet, not even a hint of it. Same in take-it-ups from Intermediate backbends. Taken to the ramp for Purvottanasana. Press the solar plexus up. UP! Higher! THEN plant the feet. Now that turns it into a backbend--felt that in my shoulder blades!

Navasana handstands: contrary to EVERYTHING I know and teach (!), extend up OUT of the shoulders; that's stability; you don't muscle it with the lats the way you do EVERYWHERE else. GET TALL.

Primary and Intermediate to Ardha Matsyendrasana. The backbends and twists (and even Bakasana) are all about the psoas, the outer hips, and so are fair game before backbending, whereas Eka Pada Sirsasana is something different.

Now, confronted with this practice, my ego says, "but but but this doesn't let me touch PRECISELY the parts of Intermediate that I'm finally any GOOD AT!!!"

Pffft, too bad, sucker.

How'd it go ,you're asking? THE pose? The nemesis of my asana career? Let's just say I did not do the full expression, not even with help. And that's ok, that was OK'd officially. Pressing up from the teacher's feet in the B version is freakin SWEET. Just that little ramp is soooooooo much delicious help.

"Fancy": TL recommended jumping both into and out of Marichyasanas (esp. A and C) with the bent leg. I said, some of my teachers call that the 'fancy exit.' He said, 'Fancy's cool.' Fancy is now a sort of running joke we will have for my whole time here. Tomorrow maybe I'll hit the official Eka Pada Bakasana from Mari A and C, simply because that's the full expression of the "fancy exit" and this studio's fun and non-traditional enough to allow it.

Backbends were good from the floor and good dropping back, but utter garbage coming up. I stood up from the first one and not from FIVE after that, not even with assistance. Head up too soon, hips not up far enough, crash and burn. So be it. Recommended to come up to knees. Hah! That's safe, and reduces the anxiety and rush, but man, that's what I was doing a fucking YEAR AGO. So be it. In April before I fucked up my right shoulder, I was getting good results on all fronts.

Doing two hours of hard yoga and then nine hours of hard kid care is fucking dumb, back to back. Just for the record. But I won't give up the one, and I can't give up the other, so onward!

TL said that it's funny that we do this opening chant to escape conditioning, and then we condition ourselves to mindlessly repeat the same thing. This, I understand, is central to his thinking on teaching this stuff.

A lot of generosity for a visitor's first day. Good stuff.

And I have coastline.

Gita, Gunas, Action, Parenting, oh and a Backbend Thought

Finished the Kriyananda-remembers-Yogananda-on-Gita commentary. 650 odd pages. Now THAT's how you get something into your head; you cram it like undergrads do before tests!

The gunas stanzas, late on, are MAGNIFICENT. Talk about an education. Like everything, this works better in application than in description: one is always made of all three gunas (sattwa/wisdom, rajas/action/fury, tamas/inertia), but what I found in thinking of my own actions and choices is that I have wavelengths which can enact ANY of those gunas. Let us take a familiar example: because lust in me does not exist independent of my intelligence and idealism, it has a sattwic streak which wishes all humanity to feel good and make wise choices and to indulge without stupidity (and if that's not to indulge, great). BUT, as we quite valuably saw a few posts ago, lust in me ALSO has fascist tendencies which are, as Kriyananda would put it, "evil." You'll simply have to trust me on my stated idealism above; I really do have a vision of how an ideal sexual world would work, and it would require people to do away with silly things like orientation and probably standardized monogamy as we know it (in brief, orientation is belonging to a group, which then allows you to hate other groups; monogamy is one of many arrangements (like binary gender) that we've standardized to a degree that we think it's biological, and then we've laid so much identity on it that we now understand it practically as a law from the divine rather than a mode of relating, and that, in a word, is why so many relationships are fucked up).

Anyway, my point here is that the gunas, which make us up, don't characterize us totally (even saints sleep, which the commentaries say is tamasic, and even saints commit actions, which are rajasic). Thus, ACTION can be characterized but really, a PERSON cannot. I've discovered this before: one isn't WHAT ONE DOES (western existentialism and identity); one is instead HOW and what one PRACTICES--or as I put it a number of posts ago, one is only verbs. There's no noun there.

Anyway (look at this tangent-fest!)

So, action. Action generates karma, always. The gunas characterize acts: tamasic acts, rajasic acts (the commentary says that the rajasic believes that action is its own reward, no matter what direction it takes; that's been familiar to me in the past), sattwic acts. One gets good karma (very generally, speaking, from selflessness) and bad karma (again, very generally, from selfishness).

The ego takes so, so much heat, as in "I was acting from ego! Oh, woe is me!" Pfft. Abandon this simplemindedness. The ego says, "I." That is what the ego does. The problem with the ego is that it wants to maintain its "I" even in separateness from everything, from Consciousness, from what Kriyananda almost always calls God. Thus, the ego will keep you from being enlightened. But the ego also likes to see itself as the agent. These two characteristics--agency and individuality--are the major problems with the ego, but you can't just up and do without them. You need them until you don't.

This is why the Gita says to surrender the fruits. You give up agency; true, you DO ACT (because even if you choose not to act, you "inact," if you will, and thus still act), but you don't claim it, it's not yours. In short, you don't grant the ego its prize. "God doing!" You dig?

Gunas-actions-karma-ego-God.

When I think about my parenting practice, particularly early on, I see the harshest ego beating in my experience. Sure, Kapotasana still kicks my butt some days, but it does NOT kick me around the way those days did. Did you see the fear, the pure ego terror? J still thinks that my problem was that we didn't have enough goodies. That is, indeed, the SURFACE problem, but on my end, that became identities, woke up marriage samskaras, and so forth, and terrifying weeds straight out of fucking LOVECRAFT grew in that swampy water.

I maintained the yoga practice, to maintain "I." It wasn't egoic in the sense of egotism ("I rock!"), it was egoic in the sense that "I" did not die. But I did anyway. The major thing that the early days (and the pregnancy) taught me is that "I" am not my ego. They taught me that better than any book could have. Experience over language; always.

Check it: I stridently announced that I would not be killed! And I wasn't! But I also was! AND I wasn't! How many freakin layers deep is this onion?????? The two ways in which I was not killed were NOT the same, and they didn't happen to the same PERSON. And that's not a matter of temporal transformation, but of actual SIMULTANEOUS LAYERING.

In a way that I immediately think is ridiculous, I envy myself those days.

What a crucible! To feel yourself die and STILL live, to live AS it's happening??? Dude! Not even an acid trip ever gave me THAT.

Anyway: action is social, in the same way (per my grad humanities degree) that human beings generate ideology. You can't be human and not secrete that stuff. Social beings. This means that the gunas are social (and of course they are: you can be tamasic, sattwic, whatever, in your relationship, in a conversation, in housework, anywhere, anywhen, with anyone). Think solo meditators get away with it? Not so. Sattwic meditation, rajasic meditation....

So it's all social. Gunas, action, karma. There is always a chance to rise (sattwa) and to sink (tama), over and over and over. Got housework? Great, you can get enlightened. I'm not being snarky there; the Gita pretty much says that.

"The sattwic person does what must be done, without like or dislike." That's in the gunas section. What did/do I do, with baby care, with housework? I didn't get a taste for it (I still don't really have a taste for it, although what I have is LESS AVERSION to it), but I did it. More and more of it, stopped fearing it, stopped seeing it as death, or better, didn't care if it was, stopped living in my dying and started living in what wasn't dying in me.

J says that since she lives here, she does the housework as a sort of gift, like self-maintenance. I said, I can see how that's true, but it doesn't work for me. The reason it doesn't work for me is that I don't want to affirm my selfhood like that.

What I love has brought me displeasure, pain, poison, so it is "what I HAVE LOVED." And what I loved was paired (but of course!) with what I've hated, and that has historically included housework because I've thought of it as suburban and bourgeois, and of course, no self-styling revolutionary can be seen at a sink washing dishes, unless that's being done with rock music or while in tree pose or some other radical shit like that (snark snarkity snark). Some of you will recall that I've discussed good shags in terms like the ones I just used here. Yeah, it's the same animal. Attachment/aversion/rockstar/bourgeois.

So with less aversion, housework becomes not more tolerable, but sort of escapes from this binary of tolerability. That's why it's not true for me to see it J's way, but it doesn't negate the truth of how she sees things.

I am actually, and in real time and space, less attached to a good shag these days. It's for real. I am also, in real time and real space, less averse to housework.

This Gita commentary (and the book itself, commentary aside) embrace everyone, whatever guna your operating within at the moment, and there are numerous overlaps with other sacred texts such as the Sutras. Prakriti consists of three gunas; knowing them well leads to God/Self/Purusha. Action, karma, suffering, ways to escape suffering, and then dedication. It's fucking compelling reading. Check it.

Backbend thought: there's a Cyndi Lee fest happening over at Yoga Journal, and one of the things she did an article on was dropbacks; the video model lands with feet and hands well separate. Am I trying *too hard* and thus *generating dissatisfaction*?

Primary, Wow, Give Up the Fruits

In brief:

A fabulous Primary, with power and depth and all of the goodies including dropbacks and standups (with duck feet, but that's ok as we are rebuilding).

100 pages left of _Essence of the Bhagavad Gita_, for the total 658 pages. Good stuff to have in my head all the time.

I make a point to surrender the fruits of each practice, to just give it up on the spot. So let us say that fabulousness was done THROUGH me.

Tomorrow I am opening the elsewise-closed studio for about 90 minutes, for group practice. Whoever, whatever, come breathe and bend.