The Winter of Yoga's Discontent?

...the Vatican’s chief exorcist...yeah, apparently, they still have one o’ those...has called yoga satanic...meaning that, if there’s one thing fundamentalist Protestants, fundamentalist Muslims, and, now, the high orders of the Roman Catholic church can agree on, it’s that this ancient practice is bad, bad, BAD...and that’s not even mentioning the fundamentalist Hindus in India who object to westerners practicing yoga, or the many western yogis...at least in the blogosphere...who disapprove of most other western yogis....what was that about yoga meaning union???....Lululemon’s hawking handbags celebrating selfishness, a good friend and one of the best yoga teachers I know just made the #1 spot in a list of “locals we’d like to see naked” in Philadelphia magazine, and winter’s comin’ on....whatever...I gotta practice...

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...can’t complain too much about going barefoot on the beach the day before Thanksgiving...even in long pants, t-shirt and sweater under rain jacket, knit cap under hood...just a few drops falling, blown by wind that, along with the tides, has so dramatically shaped hills and runnels in the sand...clouds light, dark, and in between, seeming to move in all directions at once...a bundle of half deflated party balloons floating past unintentional driftwood sculpture into the waves as I move slowly along....finally deciding to turn, head inland, put shoes and socks back on to walk the road back....some kinds of beauty can only be taken in for so long...

Headlight On Wet Black Asphalt

...headlight light* on wet black asphalt at the intersection out the window from the coffee shop** on a grey late November morning...there and gone, then replaced, gone again, and there again with the slow movement of cars, controlled by STOP signs and crossing guard...if with a slightly different quality, angle, luminosity, each time...impossible to photograph***...seems all the illumination I’m gonna get, this morning...but, for right now, it’s enough...


* kind of a redundant-sounding, not very mellifluous description, I know...but “glare” really doesn’t do it, and “sparkle” would be way too far in the opposite direction...as, in a different way, would “luminescence” or any o' them there fancy-schmancy highfalutin' words...even “shine” seems a bit much...I’m just talking about a little bit o’ plain ol’ light here, folks, nothin’ more...

** High Point Cafe, Carpenter & Greene, West Mt. Airy, State of Highly Caffeinated Sadhana, U.S.A....

*** at least not with my cell-phone camera...****

**** or, at least not with my cell-phone camera operated by me...*****

***** especially not if I get the angle wrong, so the doorframe’s largely blocking exactly what I’m trying to focus on....looked right from where I was sitting when I took it...******

****** then, the picture’s not the point, anyway...*******

******* then, really, neither are the words...

Fallen Angels, Fallen Leaves

...had a series of dreams in which I was trying to get into or out of L.A...which is weird since, though I’ve been there a few times, it’s not a city I’ve ever felt much connection to...except through movies and T.V....and Joni Mitchell singing so evocatively about the city of the fallen angels, with its specific dance of dreams and disillusionment, opportunity and loss, sunny skies and air pollution....and, now thatcha mention it, Mr. Dreams, that might just be where I am right now...

...started teaching yoga semi-regularly at a shelter for homeless families....the first time, last week, thought I was just sitting in, checking out the scene, until the teacher introduced me...said this is Jay; he’ll be teaching with me tonight, and I thought okay......this week, a lot of noise was coming down the hall at the beginning of class, and one of the students said we can’t do yoga with all that noise....I said, actually, yes we can, that learning to be still with all the noise and chaos around us is part of the practice...


...as it turned out there were also a bunch of people in the room, who weren’t practicing yoga...it’s a busy shelter, and I guess there aren’t a lot of spaces to hang out....I kept having to avoid bumping into a woman reading a magazine, sitting on a couch just behind my mat while I was teaching...and remind myself, this, too, is part of the practice...

Autumn Spandana

THE soothing sanity and blitheness of completion,
The pomp and hurried contest-glare and rush are done;
Now triumph! transformation! jubilate!
Walt Whitman

Life is both dreadful and wonderful.
Thich Nhat Hanh

...was inspired to pick up a book called Adventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis, after seeing it mentioned in Yoga Bitch...(though, as it turns out, I got the wrong book...a sequel, I think, but that’s okay)...(everything’s a sequel and prequel to something or other, I suspect)...about an old-time wandering adventurer, doing’ his thing in the modern world.....inspiring, predictably enough a wanderlust in me...

...but, then, that’s typical for this time of year...the time for hunkering down, preparing to hibernate...a resistance to natural cycles I suspect may be every bit as natural as the cycles themselves...

...right now feeling ponderous and creative, if not with any particular object...wanting to be an adventurer of the mind, but with mundane work that needs to be done, in the service of bills that need to be paid......always that conflict between practical matters and the passions...vocations and avocations...and how easy to get stuck in the middle, not doing much of anything, stagnating...though that, too, might be one essential half of a pulse...spandana...

... have some tentative plans to get away this winter, along with the requisite financial insecurities making those inadvisable...and, anyway, right now they all seem so tame...not like working on tramp steamers of dubious legality or in haunted coal mines where I’ll have traumatic experiences that’ll leave me in the kind of deep, romantic despair nobody describes quite like those great Latin American writers, who understand so well that life is unspeakably funny and unbearably sad at the same time...

Imaginary Dogs

...Winston Churchill called depression his black dog....couldn’t relate to that at all when I first read it...thought what I was feeling, there in my mid-20’s, must be something far worse...more like an unstoppable white whale, swallowing, mutilating whatever tried to stand against it...nothing, certainly, small and domesticated enough to be held in a lap or walked on a leash...

...my metaphors have come a long way since then...no rainbows or unicorns, but still don’t quite get the black dog thing....depression’s more like a cat I'm highly allergic to, but know well...this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine....shedding all over clothes and furniture...dropping dead birds and mice to be found when I least expect them...that I push gently out the door but always seems to find its way back inside...

...sometimes, to calm my mind, I imagine a dog...when consciousness madly flips through topics, surfs fantasies, tells itself outrageous jokes, working with such frenzy that any attempt at following the breath or simply drifting away seems like tilting at windmills....

...floppy eared and friendly, gamboling calmly into the room...an older, wiser dog, most likely...perhaps sniffing around just a little bit before resting...seeking only quiet companionship and warmth...unconcerned with any of that...

In Which Dr. Jay Weighs in on the Anusara Controversy (Kinda, Sorta), and then Goes into a Most Entertaining Digression Involving His Head & Neck

...as mentioned a little while ago, I’m doing this anusara-inspired Align & Flow training*...in which I'm learning all about, among other things, principles of alignment...

...like, for instance, the way the skull loop interacts with the shoulder loop...(anusara lingo)...the latter beginning all the way at the upper palate, and including the neck....human anatomy, it turns out, is quite distinct from that of the bobble head doll...

...twenty years ago, in Boulder*******, long before I even thought about getting into yoga*********...(and, anyway, at that point far more interested in attaining higher consciousness by other means***********)...went to a meditation class with a visiting Zen master at Naropa, and somebody asked him about posture....he said something like it’s important to keep the head on top of the neck, and people laughed...but, I’ve since learned, he was actually describing something profound and difficult...particularly for those of us who’ve spent most of our lives walking around with a Charlie Brown droop in the neck*************...


*just as, it turns out, controversy erupts in and around the anusara yoga world**...

** when, already, certain yoga friends were warning me not to drink the kula-aid or lookin' at me like I said I was joining the Westboro Baptist Church, or something...which I don’t fully understand, nor, to be honest, care all that much about***...at this point, I’m learning lotsa valuable stuff, from people I like and for whom I have nothing but praise****...

*** and, yes, that was the official statement of this blog, its management, writing staff, shareholders, legal representatives, clowns, concubines, and corporate affiliates...

**** and not that creepy, semi-lobotomized dogma-reciting too-far-gone-to-see-the-contradictions “my guru tells me to think for myself” kinda praise, either*****...

***** as long-time readers know, I get creeped out by that kinda stuff far more easily than most yogis******...

****** so, trust me, when somebody offers me the profound honor of licking the holy perspiration off John Friend’s feet, I’ll head for the door...but, at this point, it seems highly unlikely anything like that's gonna happen...

******* right, that Boulder, home to Elephant Journal and all those self-important yoga hippies...though I was there when it was cool********...

******** not that there’s anything wrong with being a self-important yoga hippie, or anything...namaste, Boulder brothers and sisters...

********* and, thus, blissfully unaware of the all-important high-falutin' conflicts & controversies of the yoga world**********...

********** a state of innocence to which I’d quite happily return....I mean, seriously, I work part-time at this residential rehab for women, y'know, tutoring in reading and writing, and, sometimes, clients like to kind of rant to me about their frustrations...they say they feel they can talk to me precisely because I'm not a therapist...which is cool...some weeks ago, though, I got a bit irritated with one client who kept ragging on the other women there...I said something like come on...you're supposed to be here helping one another through your recovery and all you do is snipe at each other...I think it kinda applies...

*********** a state of experience best, I think, left behind************...

************ notably also preceding my lengthy academic period, when I learned the value of foot-notes, about which readers can make their own judgments...

************* also explored in a notable Arrested Development episode**************...

************** unrelated to which, but I wanted to mention it somewhere, the title of this post was originally a good deal longer, like a classic Tom Jones-ish 19th century-type chapter title, but it turns out there's a limit to how many characters can be in a blog title...thanks for squelchin' my creativity, Blogger...

You Can Tell the Troublemakers by Their Yoga Mats

...seriously, earlier this evening I was refused entrance to a prominent Philadelphia hotel, apparently because my yoga mat made me look like an undesirable radical trouble maker...

...there I was, having biked downtown earlier for yoga class, mat strapped neatly beneath my knapsack, heading to meet friends at a bar with what they told me was a surprisingly affordable Happy Hour ensconced inside a venerable hotel bordering Philadelphia’s lovely Rittenhouse Square...(where I was apparently stalked by a psychopath as a young child in the late 60’s, but that’s another story)...

...got there to find the place surrounded by cops, with a crowd of Occupy Philly people protesting the presence, apparently at some auditorium within, of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney...carrying signs reading Greed Is Good: Romney/Gekko 2012 (which, for what it’s worth, with no offense intended to any readers' well thought-out social and political sensibilities, I thought was clever) and repeatedly yelling REVOLUTION!!! (which, for what it’s worth, with no offense intended to any reader’s well thought-out social and political sensibilities, I thought was stupid)...

...so, I head for the front door, only to find a member of the hotel’s security personnel moving over to bar my way....he asked if I was a hotel guest, I explained that I was going to meet some friends in the bar, and he let me know it was restricted, and maybe I could come back in an hour...

...so, figuring that meant nobody was allowed in, apart from registered guests, and the location for our meet-up would have to be changed, if it hadn’t been already, I called one of my friends, Marge, who, as it turned out, was just around the corner, only to see another friend, approaching through the park...

...Marge said that she’d talked to yet another friend who was already in the bar...said maybe it was your yoga mat...a possibility she found amusing...so decided to go try her luck at the door...where the same guy who’d physically prevented me from entering, mere minutes earlier, ushered both her and our other friend in, without asking if they were guests, only to turn angrily to remind me that I'd already been denied entrance....I said I’m with them...and, apparently not wanting to offend my respectable non-yoga-mat-carrying companions, he let me in...

...notably, a bit later, after I’d told this story to people at the bar, a nicely dressed older woman walked up and said that she, actually, was one of the protesters, and had no problem getting in....then, she didn’t have a yoga mat...

Is This the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius? (Kind of a different perspective)

...got some big news, folks...courtesy of my ever-out-there-but-unfailingly-lovable kundalini friends....yes, even bigger than whatever the hell the Mayans predicted is gonna happen in 2012....I’m talkin’ about...are ya ready for this?...

...the Dawning of the Motherfuckin' Age of Aquarius!!!...

...like, seriously...

...no more patriarchy...

...no more wars...

...no more racism, sexism, or homophobia...

...cooperation taking the place of competition and strife...

...harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, no more falsehoods or derision, something-something dreams of vision, mystic crystal revelation and the mind’s true liberation...blissed out people dancing around naked...kind bud growing abundantly along the sides of endless networks of well-tended bike paths...unlimited free downloads of Grateful Dead and Phish shows...all that good shit...

Acid, incense, and balloons...
the Jefferson Airplane

...(yeah, I know, I thought that all happened back in the ‘60’s, too....guess that’s what happens when ya get yer news from pop songs instead of more reliable authorities)...(like Facebook)...

...so, anyway, it’s all supposed to start on November 11th...which all sounds cool, except............

...let’s face it: if yer gonna kick some ass, ya better do it now....seriously, people, if this thing's for real, that means there’s barely more than a week left to enjoy telling, flipping, or pissing people off...because, after 11/11/11, that shit’s gonna be totally uncool...

....may have to cut this blog post short, for that matter, so I can go elsewhere on the web and leave some gratuitously meanspirited political comments, since there's obviously gonna be no more of that...(hell, I don't even know if there are gonna be any political situations worth getting nasty about...just intimate circles of kind, open-minded earth-mother types gently reaching consensus on the best ways to love and nurture the general population)...

...namasmotherfuckingte, people...(oh, man, am I gonna miss saying that...)...