It Ain't Easy

These times of meltdown are precious.
Stephen Cope

...but it ain’t easy to write about it when yer in ‘em...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 31:922

...a woman at the rehab said she wanted to write her life story, send it in and get it published as a book...I said for now, let’s just write...and, in the last fifteen minutes before I went home, she came up with a good page and a half or so about age five, approximately, to age eight, stopping every sentence or so with questions...how to spell addict and dealer to describe her mom and the guy who moved in, respectively, whether she needed to write out Kentucky Fried Chicken or if k.f.c. was good enough to describe the place where she rooted through the dumpster for food, whether rape or molest was the best word to describe what happened when she was eight...I shrugged, glancing at simple sentences without punctuation or paragraph breaks, said either works, I guess...

...(when someone like Maya Angelou writes about this kinda stuff, the punch in the gut's devastating but lyrical...a resounding song of the phoenix....the cruder tune of someone struggling with everything she’s got to get above the flames is something else entirely...a view of an apocalypse that’s always right now)...

Mature in yoga, impartial
everywhere he looks,
he sees himself in all beings
and all beings in himself.
Bhagavad Gita

...tomorrow I'm supposed to teach a free yoga class to some friends...told 'em it's guaranteed...reach enlightenment or your money back...

Before Coffee

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...
T. S. Eliot

...trudged the grey half mile to the coffee shop after an unproductive morning hour or two at home...waiting in line, glanced at the soup of the day...Sacred Lentil with Spinach...felt impressed...though soon realizing it actually said spiced lentils...which was just as well....not sure if I’d actually want to eat sacred lentils...worrying, wondering whether contact with my dentally-challenged mouth would defile hot soup better offered up to a goddess......though that’s a bit metaphysical for me, particularly before coffee...

May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
Robert Frost

....unless it were an earthly goddess...the only kind of goddess I believe in, really...(for that matter, really don’t go much for ideas of the sacred that exclude my crumbling teeth)....and might be nice, I think, to buy her some sacred lentils, sip coffee at our little table by the window, and with her watch the first drops of rain make their way to the sidewalk...

An Alleged Yoga Hippie Goes to the Dentist

...the yoga streak ended at fifty-two days...number of weeks in a year...number of United States, if Washington D.C and Puerto Rico were admitted to the union...letters in the alphabet if you turn around at Z and go back...half a yoga mala if you take it easy and skip the last four....due to a toothache that led to four hours of intense dental work beginning at around 7:30 Thursday morning....which, could, of course, be seen as a very yogic exercise in maintaining stillness in the face of pain and discomfort...perhaps even contentment...but I ain’t there, yet...

...would I be a really bad yogi to point out the strikingly potent effects of practicing ujjayi and dirgha pranayama with laughing gas streaming in through the nostrils?...

...breathe in the nitrous, relax, feel, watch, allow...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 438:92

...complained to the teacher after last Monday’s kundalini class about her making us do that let’s-all-sit-in-a-circle hippie shit...she smiled, suggested I secretly like the touchy-feely stuff...(rumors, apparently, have been swirling since the month at Kripalu...when, allegedly, I hugged lots of people with minimal justification)...laughed and said ”go eat some granola”.....................(which, by the way, I do happen to have for breakfast most mornings...get it at the co-op...but really don’t see how that necessarily makes me a yoga hippie)...




* related matters are discussed in my latest post at Elephant Journal...Trials of a Yoga Cynic *

Forty Days in the Yoga Wilderness

...wouldn’t say I bit off more than I could chew, but definitely a lot that needs to be carefully masticated, tasted, and savored for a long time...allowed to sink in gradually and somewhat systematically into the bloodstream...

...(right now seems more a time for coalescing than conclusion)...(or maybe I’m just lazy)...

...a true transformational experience might be one that leaves you just the way you were, but just a bit more okay with that...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 300:978

...returning home from Shangri-La...however defined...is, it must be said, inherently difficult....leaving so many essential connections forged in such a short span of time....(including, missed perhaps most of all, those who relentlessly made fun of me when I got intense)....only to come home to farewell drinks...lots of farewell drinks...(particularly for a guy who’d been so good for a month)...with a close friend leaving town for good just as I returned....my ego still intact enough to overdo it and strain my back moving furniture...

Don’t try to transform yourself. Move into yourself. Move into your human unsuccess. Perfection rapes the soul.
Marion Woodman

In any case, directly knowing the way things are remains a very different matter than making sense of them. As in music, where silently analyzing the score of a symphony might be instructive but could never replace the actual sounds ringing in the ears, yogic practice must supersede theory.
Chip Hartranft

...though yoga class, certainly, has taken on new resonance...now in technicolor...3-D....IMAX...

...(which doesn’t necessarily mean much...hell, The Maltese Falcon and The Philadelphia Story were black and white 1940’s Hollywood studio product but near-infinitely better than Gladiator, Titanic or any of that plotless characterless glorified special effects trade show crap these days where ya hafta wear those stupid glasses and pay twice as much as ya do for a regular movie)...(but metaphors are never meant to be 100% precise)...

The time to make up your mind about people is never.
Katherine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story

...as of last Friday, I’ve been to at least one class...and, often, a whole hell of a lot more than that...every day since February 13...when I was busy cross-country skiing in the Rockies and gorging on pho noodles and bubble tea...making forty days in the yoga wilderness...(which, with its ironic Biblical reference seemed a perfect title for a Yoga for Cynics post a week ago, when I didn't get around to writing it)....on Sunday, that turned to forty-two...which I think meant something, or everything, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy...a couple days ago to forty-five...my current age...yesterday to forty-six, and later today it’ll probably be forty-seven...neither of which, as far as I know has any particular spiritual significance...except that it’s the day I finally managed to get this blog post up...which, really, might be all it needs...

...as I tend to think spiritual significance is where ya find it...would take a fresh baked biscuit over the clavicle bone of some supposed 13th century saint any day...

The scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
Walt Whitman

...and, anyway, what really matters isn’t so much what or how much you do as the consciousness with which you do it...and that, as always, is a work in progress...

...certainly, if nothing else, I’ve found an expanded sense of potential...which is a lot, really...though potential, of course, is worth exactly, only and always, what you do with it...