Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered....
Henry David Thoreau

...I tend to meditate on the desire to do just about anything other than meditating...it’s easy to ascribe that to boredom...but, then, it seems unlikely I’d be a writer if I really found my thoughts so boring that I couldn’t stand sitting with them for half an hour...

We can as easily become a prisoner of so-called positive thinking as of negative thinking. It too can be confining, fragmented, inaccurate, illusory, self-serving, and wrong.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

...have said in the past that taking antidepressants without therapy...or otherwise deeply working on yourself...is like turning up the radio so you can’t hear the noise your engine’s making...

...now wonder if maybe most things we do, or own, or strive for, or tell ourselves, are simply an infinite variety of upward motions aimed at subtly manipulating internal volume knobs...ways to avoid the noise we know is there but don’t want to hear...

...not to mention the silence...

Summertime...and the Bloggin' is Lazy...

Summertime, and the livin' is easy...
Dubose Heyward

...anybody can get an ulcer working sixteen hour days on Wall Street...it take real skill to get one without doing much at all...been reading books by people like Chogyam Trungpa and Jon Kabat-Zinn...all about non-doing...which sounds good to me...though, despite all the time I’ve spent being lazy and not gettin' shit done, have never been too good at it...

...Kabat-Zinn says non-doing can arise within action as well as in stillness. The inward stillness of the doer merges with the outward activity to the extent that the action does itself...I tend to do the opposite...outer stillness merging with inward turmoil...which really doesn’t work out so well...so now I’m trying to meditate every morning...pre-coffee...and it’s been workin’ out...kinda...so far...wish me luck...

...right now sittin' on the front porch swing...we're finally getting some real heat this summer, though there's a nice intermittent breeze, at least...sweating and typing and listening to Summertime performed by Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin), Chet Baker, Herbie Hancock (featuring Joni Mitchell), John Coltrane, Miles Davis/Gil Evans, and Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra, as well as both live and studio versions of Summertime Blues by the Who, In the Summertime by Bob Dylan and Summertime Rolls by Jane’s Addiction...

...supposed to be getting work done, actually...but this weather makes me feel lazy...or, at least, that’s my excuse, today...

...been writing fewer blog posts lately...but that’s okay...couple months ago almost quit...wrote a rough draft of the final Yoga for Cynics post...had been putting an awful lot of time and effort into forcing myself to get one out at least every other day, only to look back at some really good earlier posts and think the blog was starting to suck...not to mention obsessing about blog stats that didn’t seem to go up no matter what I did...

...in the end, decided to quit checking stats and only write new posts when I feel inspired...or just happen to feel like it...or, like today, am too lazy to do anything else...and it's a lot better this way...

Angels and Barbed Wire

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
Emily Dickinson

...late this afternoon found myself in a graveyard... enclosed...trapped...unable to return from that earthy charnel domain to the fair country of the living...

...of course I knew it would happen, eventually...as it does to everyone...but, like most, I'd hoped there'd be more time...

...as is all too clear, life gives us no guarantees...

...fortunately, the groundskeeper's phone number was on a sign by the gate...right by another one reading Gates Closed 4:30 Weekdays...that was pointed out to me, with a bit of a lecture, before he opened the gate to let me out...

...anyway, I’d known that...but had been too caught up in what I was doing to notice time...biking around the cemetery, taking pictures of angels and barbed wire...


*special thanks to the grounds staff of Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, for making this post possible*

More Questions for Meditation...Or Not...

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
Steven Wright

...ever get an error message in your sleep....like, cannot connect to the unconscious right now...cannot display tonight’s dream?

...what exactly is the difference between a time honored notion and and a cliché?

...ever notice that an all or nothing attitude almost invariably leaves you with nothing?

Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you’ve been to some of those places, you think, “How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?”
Jerry Garcia

...ever think that, at times, confusion might be the clearest perspective?

...ever have one of those days when you feel like you have every reason to feel good...but you don’t...and that makes it worse?

...could it be that what’s really wrong with you might simply be thinking that something’s wrong with you?

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Lawrence Durrell


Contest Rules: readers who answer all of the above questions correctly* win: nothing...(my Zen Buddhist friends say it’s excellent)...


*note: there are no correct or incorrect answers to these questions...

Watery Reflections

...had a moment there in yoga class when this bead of sweat was dripping down the bridge of my nose...gradually making its way down to the tip...and I was doing one of those mudra things so didn’t want to lift a hand to brush it away...so instead just felt it there...imagining its glassy clarity...possibly reflecting the ceiling lights...or the entire room...like one of those beads of sweat William Blake didn’t write about in Auguries of Innocence...but probably would have if he’d ever attended a yoga class on a hot July day in Philadelphia...

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake

....afterwards was going to see this Shakespeare in the park thing...A Midsummer Night’s Dream...stopping for a while under a railroad bridge to wait out a lightning storm...the kind where being under a solid stone bridge doesn’t really keep a person or bike from getting wet...as sheets of misty rain entered horizontally...a couple of other guys were there at first...but gradually made their way away...to somewhere...I stayed, coming out once it stopped to a bright blue above, seeming to have thoroughly forgotten what it had been doing moments before...got back on the bike, dodging fallen trees, branches, and rainwater running down side streets like raging streams, making it just at the time the play was supposed to start...to see actors packing up their truck, promising a rain-date next week...

...clearly, there's more than one kind of midsummer dream...

Flowers In the Ruins...

These fragments I have shored against my ruins...
T. S. Eliot

...for a little while, worked on a trail crew in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia...where some hundred and thirty or so years earlier John Brown tried, and failed, almost single-handedly, to free the slaves....since it was late fall, rapidly turning to winter, the Park Service let us use an building in the old section of town...people crammed three or four to a room, and, when I showed up, the only available bed was in a room with an older guy who snored like a rhinoceros with a bad case of gas....as it turned out, though, there was another room...practically a suite...with its own bathroom...and a couch...empty in the basement...apparently somebody’d drowned a hundred or so years earlier, and everybody said it was haunted....I dragged my mattress down there without a second thought...

...we were dragging these massive slabs of rocks down a hill to build this great big staircase on the Appalachian Trail, right below an old graveyard overlooking the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers...where Thomas Jefferson said something really impressive...and, a few years after I was there, Bill Clinton and Al Gore pretended for the cameras to lay the final stone for the project we’d actually completed that winter....what I liked, though, was the way the ground was like waves, swallowing up the gravestones...just like they’d eventually end up swallowing our gigantic slabs...and all of Harper’s Ferry, and every last trace of John Brown or the guy who died in that basement, and me...

The first glance of this scene hurries our senses into the opinion that this earth has been created in time, that the mountains were formed first, that the rivers began to flow afterwards, that in this place particularly they have been so dammed up by the Blue Ridge of mountains as to have formed an ocean which filled the whole valley; that, continuing to rise, they have at last broken over at this spot and have torn the mountain down from its summit to its base.
Thomas Jefferson

...I’ve always had a thing for ruins...ghost towns...cliff dwellings...pyramids....is it morbid of me to find it kind of comforting to see peoples’ proudest accomplishments gradually crumbling into dust...the best laid plans of mice and men reclaimed by dirt and grass?

...when in Rome...this was the spring of 1987...I loved walking around the Forum...seat of the Roman Empire...where, according to Shakespeare...who I have no reason to doubt...Mark Antony, standing over the multiple stab wounds of Julius Caesar, yelled Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth...by that time, though, it was nothing but ancient ruins covered with wildflowers...revealing that, though sticking flowers into gun barrels may not have ended the war in Vietnam, flowers will, in the end, win out...

...it's all too easy to become anxious about being anxious...just as I can become depressed worrying about getting depressed...all in all, it all comes down to lingering remnants of the past....the question is, what kind of flowers am I letting grow out of my ruins?

Disillusionment Gets Pointless and Boring (After a While)

...back in the summer of 1959, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a bunch of kids were kicked out of a swim club on account of their skin color...a move defended by the club’s president, on the basis of concerns that they would “change the complexion” of the club...

...oh, wait...turns out that was the summer of 2009, in my home town of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...

...meanwhile, in India, consensual same-sex relationships have at last been decriminalized...but not without controversy...including some very vocal protests from an extremely popular and highly influential guru, Baba Ramdev...

...who, as it turns out, is one of the country’s leading proponents of...oh, good god...yoga...

Sittin’ in a park in Paris, France, reading the news and it’s all bad,
They won’t give peace a chance, that was just a dream some of us had...
Joni Mitchell

...West Mt. Airy (State of Gentle Inebriation, USA) is somewhat famous for how easily it integrated...it also happens to be in Philadelphia...the city where I was born and never wanted to live again...and wouldn’t have had it not appeared absolutely necessary two years ago....a friend said Mt. Airy seemed like it might be a cool neighborhood, so I found it on a map, took the infamously dangerous-though-lusciously-scenic Schuylkill Expressway to the even more dangerous-and-lusciously-scenic Lincoln Drive, then followed signs and parked in what appeared to be a deserted neighborhood...looked around a bit, feeling somewhat lost, before this young guy came along with sticks in his hands, drumming on air to music on his headphones...I asked him where I was...he asked where I was trying to go...I said I was thinking about moving to the area...he said I probably wanted to go a little further up the road, the way he was going...ending up having a lovely conversation with him for seven or eight blocks....a bit later, walked into a coffee shop called the High Point Cafe...the woman behind the counter asked what can I get ya?...I said I was more a prospective customer...thinking of moving to the area...she said you should definitely move here and started writing down names of apartment buildings and giving all kinds of advice until a long line of customers stretched out behind me...even though I wasn’t even buying a cup of coffee...and I thought wow...I do wanna move here...

...and, once I did, got back into the yoga thing...something I’d started and then stopped some years before...as many people do...but this time more seriously...started getting in with the serious yoga crowd...which made me nervous...suspecting they’d stop being so nice as soon as they found out I didn’t pretend to be happy all the time and wouldn’t use The Secret to wipe myself....as it turns out, though, that hasn’t happened....for that matter, when I started this blog, was actually kinda semi-looking forward to passive-aggressively nasty comments from self-righteous and dogmatic yogis disapproving of my attitude...and yet, the rare times the on-line yoga crowd criticizes me, it’s generally for being too hard on myself...

(...on top of that, in the past week, got blog awards from Tonya at When Life Gives Me Lemons, I Have to Take Prozac and a shout-out from Melinda, as well as a kind and badly needed reminder from Brooks that it's been five days since the last Yoga for Cynics post...)

...point being that, yeah, things are fucked up all over...including racist swimming pools and homophobic yogis...but, after a while, disillusionment gets pointless and boring...there’s really no need to choose between being a lobotomized Pollyanna and that guy dressed all in black and scowling at you over his dog-eared copy of L’Etranger on the subway...it’s possible to see, point out (in blog posts and elsewhere), and even act on things that suck without being dragged down by them....

...a special namaste to black kids in Philly who want to swim and all the gays and lesbians in India...

Is It Time?

...some time ago, when I decided to start doing the yoga thing everyday, was really gung-ho...impatient...so really started pushin’ it...and, in a couple weeks got myself to a point where I pretty much had to avoid anything involving knees or lower back, or twists...which, as it turned out, didn’t leave much...

...the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one...
Albert Einstein

To find our way, we will need to pay more attention to this moment. It is the only time that we have in which to live, grow, feel, and change. We will need to become more aware of and take precautions against the incredible pull of the Scylla and Charybdis of past and future, and the dreamworld they offer us in place of our lives.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

Time is making fools of us again.
J. K. Rowling

...more recently went to this class in West Philly with this teacher named Dhyana...getting a bit frustrated, as I tend to do...after all this time spent workin’ on this yoga shit...almost hurting my neck trying to force a tripod headstand...and the teacher started telling this old story....this guy goes to see a Zen master and asks him how long it’ll take to reach enlightenment...the Zen master says thirty years...the guy says I can’t wait that long...listen, I’ll do anything...just tell me how I can get it now...and the Zen master says okay then, seventy years...

The Real Downward Facing Dog—Revealed!

...one thing people look for in a blog with yoga in the title is...yoga...or, more particularly, instructions on how to do particular yoga poses...or asanas, for you Sanskrit nerds out there...which, until now, is something that this humble blog has not offered...as I’m still working on doing them on my own without hurting myself...and passin’ on the hurt isn’t exactly what that yoga thing’s supposed to be about...

...beginning with this post, however, I’m bringing in a series of experts...not only to provide practical yoga instruction, but to break new ground in giving far more authentic versions of asanas than are generally known...beginning with downward facing dog... adho mukha svanasana...featuring my canine yogini friend, Bella...pictured...

...one thing about canine yoga is that it just kinda occurs naturally...thus, I couldn’t get Bella to actually demonstrate the pose for the camera...instead, we have something that looks vaguely like a kind of slightly off center child’s pose...balasana...or, perhaps, puppy’s pose...anybody knows the Sanskrit for that, please leave it in a comment below..

...nonetheless, having studied Bella’s moves first thing in the morning, when I’m far too drowsy to get a decent picture...I can attest to a paradoxical aspect of the real downward facing dog...that is, one doesn’t actually face downward while doing it....you know how that eastern thought goes...paradoxes all over the place....instead, the nose goes forward, eyes slightly upward...looking at me....not sure where they are when there’s nobody watching...that's what's known as the observer's paradox, by the way...

...as importantly, the position of the legs is far different from that in what has traditionally been called downward facing dog...with both straight up, if not somewhat concave, butt sticking way back...

...it occurs to me at this point that, to do this pose properly, one needs to have pretty short legs and a very long spine...in fact, I think ya pretty much have to be a dog...

...so, guess that’s it for this lesson...namaste...or woof...or something...

...future posts in this series will provide instruction for authentic camel pose...ustrasana...and eagle pose...garudasana...soon as I find a camel and an eagle...