Bruce Springsteen's Shrink and the Overused Metaphor of the Lotus Flower

...was readin’ this New Yorker article about Bruce Springsteen...as usual with magazines, I read somebody else's copy, months after the fact....Ezra Pound said that literature is news that stays news...and, though old Ezra probably wouldn’t have thought so, the same might be said for the occasional magazine article about a rock star...(though probably not even the occasional blog post about a magazine article about a rock star)....anyway...

...apparently, back in the early 80’s, Bruce was suffering from serious depression...leading to some odd behavior...

For years, he would drive at night past his parents’ old house in Freehold, sometimes three or four times a week. In 1982, he started seeing a psychotherapist. At a concert years later, Springsteen introduced his song “My Father’s House” by recalling what the therapist had told him about those nighttime trips to Freehold: “He said, ‘what you’re doing is that something bad happened, and you’re going back, thinking that you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right.’ And I sat there and I said, ‘That is what I’m doing.’ And he said, ‘Well, you can’t.’”

...thinking about this, some of my own odd behavior makes a lot more sense....as if Bruce Springsteen’s shrink did more for me than some mental health professionals who’ve taken outrageous amounts of my time and money...

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce

Lost but not forgotten from the dark heart of a dream...

Bruce Springsteen, Adam Raised a Cain

 

...one of the most overused metaphors in the yoga world...where overusing metaphors is practically its own asana...is the lotus flower blooming from the muck...but, when muck is what ya got, there are really only two choices...stay down and wallow, or rise up...

Bullies and Warriors

 ...had just one student for yoga at the shelter last night...a teenage boy who’s become one of our regulars...nice kid...maybe a little too nice, my cynical, wounded self couldn’t help thinking last week when he said he’d just started eighth grade...and, last night, when asked how he was feeling, at the beginning of class, he said he was stressed...specifically, from dealing with bullies at school....which made me feel sad...and angry...
 

...decided to focus our little class on de-stressing...going slowly, lots of attention to breathing, loosening up the neck and upper back, where tension headaches are born....but also thought about something that was talked about a lot in teacher training, the importance of creating safe space...realizing that this means a lot more than not pushing students into difficult poses where they might hurt themselves...

...that this is what warrior poses are all about....that it’s all too easy for adults to talk about not taking it personally, or even fighting back, without actually having to face that daily ordeal of trying to get from first period to last, from bus ride to bus ride, with both body and sense of self-worth intact...that this is where the inner safe space and the inner warrior need to be cultivated and nurtured...yoga pants and yoga butts be damned, that this is what really counts...


image: Virabhadra Daksha

New Leaves in October

 ...went out n’ got me a house plant...

...which is a big deal...really...

...in the secret world of houseplants...(communicating through faint stirrings of leaves, one windowpane to another, down the street, across the world)...I imagine I’m whispered of, furtively, as he who must  not be named...or, perhaps, derisively, as The Black Thumb...or, maybe, I am simply called...........................DEATH...

...okay, that might be a bit melodramatic...but I don’t have the best track record...Raheem the rubber tree plant gone but not forgotten...along with others, gifts from former girlfriends, now not even Facebook friends...(but maybe that’s a story for another time)...

...now, though...moving in to the new place...trying to turn over a new leaf...(no pun intended)...(really)...seems fitting to try to cultivate life again, past failures left to the past, where they belong...and so...(see photo, above...actually had this post ready a couple days ago, but the camera was still packed away somewhere and I couldn’t find it)...welcome, Phil the philodendron...

...paradoxical as it might seem to talk about new leaves in October...