Yoga for Cynics

Livin' In Your Own Private Apocalypse

2012-01-29T23:08:00.007-05:00

When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Haruki Murakami

…2012 less than a month old, I’m starting to suspect the Mayans may’ve been right...but, apparently, they were just talking about me…

…have written up a couple of different versions of a post with this title...(apologies to the B-52's as well as John the Revelator)…decided the first was too dark, personal, and downright depressing…so, a week or so later, re-did it…before rapidly deciding the second version was also too dark, personal, and downright depressing…

…so, perhaps, it’s just as well my hard drive went kablooey earlier this afternoon...after yin yoga class and the Sunday morning meditation group....taking with it those attempted posts and some personal writing too miserable to even be considered for this merry-if-sometimes-mildly-sardonic blog...if not the thoughts and feelings that inspired them, though it does feel just a bit like an expensive and unexpected cleaning of the slate...along with, apart from some handwritten notes, most of the work done on a project I was hoping to complete this weekend, which I’m gonna be really busy re-doing for the next couple days...which, at least, makes me a bit grateful I haven’t been all that productive in the past few weeks since last backing up files...

...even seasonal depression, apparently, has its uses...keeping the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men modest...as well as providing an excuse to support my local Girl Scouts and scarf down an entire box of Thin Mints...

...and, who knows...maybe we could all use a little apocalypse now and then...

Yoga Cynic Koan #45987

2012-01-14T20:56:00.004-05:00

~ Is a kale smoothie still a kale smoothie if you add tequila? ~

Meditating Into 2012

2012-01-01T00:34:00.004-05:00

...sitting quietly on an old striped cushion I’ve found...Coltrane playing Greensleeves softly on the mp3 player, mixing suddenly with sounds of fireworks....I remain sitting a few minutes more...

...upstairs in mom’s house, where I’m spending the weekend, the house where I grew up, home to memories and dust motes that never fail to make me sneeze...last night mom told me about rolling Easter eggs on the White House lawn during the Hoover administration...she met Eleanor Roosevelt and Bette Davis, voted against Joe McCarthy, and said she was going to bed as soon as 2012 hit...

...2011 might be called my year of lots of yoga and not a hell of a lot else...yoga teacher training and, eventually, just a little bit of actual teaching, then more training, and a bit more teaching...and even more practicing...earlier this evening drove downtown for my last class of the year, two hours with the legendary Simon Park and a live DJ...mat so drenched with sweat halfway through I could barely move without slipping, but that was okay...felt like I died and came back more than once, and that was good, too...

...2012’s first sunrise yet to come and I’m seeing a lot of daunting challenges, probably some of the biggest I've faced in life, straight ahead...(and I'm not talking about Mayan prophecies)...walls to walk through, waves to ride....endless opportunities to breath, relax, feel, watch, allow...and repeat...

The Interweb Quote of the Year!!!

2011-12-30T09:43:00.007-05:00

One thing this blog’s kinda been known for is the quotations peppered through its posts...often making its original writing pale in comparison, but, then, so it goes...(Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five). Of course, in this, it's taking part in that greatest of postmodern practices, which has flowered so fully on the interwebs: using other people's stuff for lack of anything original to express. So, in honor of all that, the staff here would like to share the first (and probably last) annual Yoga for Cynics Interweb Quotation of the Year!

Certainly, in the year 2011, nothing else came close to the profundity, timeliness, or sheer ubiquity of:

Something I never actually said.
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thank you, thank you.

Runners Up include:

The timeless:

Something kinda new-agey I certainly didn’t say, and that probably wouldn’t really fit with my philosophy or beliefs, either...
Rumi, the Buddha, and/or Albert Einstein

And more topical:

Something I did say, but taken so far out of context that it seems to mean the complete opposite of what it meant in-context.
Barack Obama

And, finally, who could forget:

Of course we’re going to riot....What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?
Student, Penn State, November 9, 2011

Happy new year, folks...

The Yoga Cynic Speaks of Rivers* (and “Real Yoga”)

2011-12-19T09:34:00.004-05:00

It’s comin’ on Christmas, they’re cuttin’ down trees
They’re puttin’ up reindeer, singin’ songs of joy and peace,
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on...
Joni Mitchell

I am the river, and, therefore, a connecting thread between the living and the dead, just like the stories that speak to us in the night, I take on the likeness of past times and past events too, I am the river. But the river is just the river. Nothing more.
Javier Marías

...was in the café, post-meditation, imbibing that special kinda prana known as coffee...when this guy at the next table started talking about yoga...specifically, real yoga****...

...if you feel the need to brag about your practice, it’s probably nothing to brag about...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 451:968

...how great, generally, his practice is...how any real yogi is vegetarian...how much better ashtanga is than other kinds of yoga... how much better ashtanga yoga is than sitting meditation...since, y’know, anybody can sit in a dark room*****....somewhere in there, I turned my headphones back on...(one o’ those yamas or niyamas has gotta say something about eavesdropping)...

* apologies to Langston Hughes...**

** and, yeah, I know, apart from the quotes, the post really doesn’t have anything to do with rivers*** (that’s not even a river in the picture...it’s the Wissahickon Creek...though it did get pretty river-like last summer when it flooded)...

*** or maybe it does....whaddaya want me to do?!...explain my metaphors to you?!...

**** real yoga (noun): the kind of yoga I happen to practice. (antonym: whatever kinda yoga you happen to practice) (courtesy, the Yoga Cynic’s Dictionary)

***** leaving me thinking that, given how much difficulty I’d experienced sitting in a semi-lighted room for forty-five minutes, struggling with drowsiness, a laundry-list of physical discomforts, and a, one might say, river of past, present, and future troubles, a mere hour or so before, I may just barely qualify as anybody...******

****** which, now that I think of it, could mean I’m on the threshold of transcending individuation and a realizing ultimate oneness with the universe....have to look that one up...

The More Un-Yogic, the Better?

2011-12-08T12:15:00.006-05:00

What is here is elsewhere; what is not here is nowhere.
Vishva-Sara-Tantra

Folks, you know I’ve never been a fan of yoga. If I wanted to spend all day on the ground sweating in a contorted position, I would eat another gas station hot dog.
Stephen Colbert

...sometimes I arrive at yoga class in what might not be considered the most, y’know, yogic mood...at some strange juncture in a difficult day, full of anxiety, anger, and/or general misery, exacerbated by the trip to yoga class, driving through traffic in the rain or nearly getting plowed into by a truck on my bike...or nearly getting plowed into by a truck on my bike in the rain, the guy who nearly killed me though I had the right of way having the nerve to yell at me...you get the idea...leaving me tromping in and rolling out my mat in a an utterly wired and generally negative frenzy....really, there couldn't be a better time to practice yoga...

...making me especially grateful for these kind, calm, and centered teachers who help me to let go...

...though, of course, as I’m learning, now, it’s a bit more complicated...or maybe simpler, but more difficult...if, ultimately, more rewarding for that...when I am the yoga teacher...

The Winter of Yoga's Discontent?

2011-11-30T09:55:00.005-05:00

...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...

,

2011-11-26T12:41:00.003-05:00

...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

2011-11-22T11:53:00.004-05:00

...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

2011-11-19T09:32:00.008-05:00

...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

2011-11-16T15:36:00.005-05:00

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

2011-11-12T17:40:00.005-05:00

...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

2011-11-08T21:53:00.016-05:00

...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

2011-11-04T20:54:00.006-04:00

...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)

2011-11-02T13:45:00.014-04:00

...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...)...

Confessions of a Yoga Cynic?

2011-10-30T19:40:00.009-04:00

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl Sagan

Loneliness is not a problem. Loneliness is nothing to be solved.
Pema Chodron

...was briefly...(perusing the interweb news in a grouchy moment)...thinkin’ it might be time to start a new, less-yogic type o’ blog...specifically, one just to piss off people who piss me off....which I guess would be kinda like Cynicism for Cynics........whereas, here, I try more to simply acknowledge the negativity...give it its due, credit its often quite solid reasoning, rather than trying to dismiss it with empty feel-good sentiments...(that’s called repression, people—it only looks like positive thinking)...then, y'know, try to grow something reasonably funny out of it...(um, yeah...that is kinda like a lotus flower, now thatcha mention it)...

...I understand the ahimsa of biking- rather than driving-drunk...possess the self-awareness necessary to realize that running on a treadmill, loudest music I can find blasting through headphones, eyes wavering between magazine and TV screen, pushing myself to burn as many calories as humanly possible within the hour while doing everything imaginable to distract myself from the experience, is the complete antithesis of yoga, even if I sometimes do it anyway...just as I get that all these time-wasters I put so much energy into are merely flimsy, ultimately ephemeral, and ineffective bulwarks against a deep loneliness that’s always still there no matter how many empty distractions I throw at it, and yet, I love me some good distractions...

...at the same time, gotta admit my cynicism towards yoga tends to manifest itself more in theory than on the mat....teachers and others have, in fact, left me dumbfounded, remarking on my apparently prodigious energy...dedication...even the positive attitude they see manifested in my practice...like, seriously....sure, I might disagree with some, or a lot, or even most, of what they say...(see that totally snarky empty feel-good sentiments remark, above)...but, then, they mostly know that and don’t mind, so why should I?...(hell, the only real yoga arguments I ever get in are on-line...generally with people I've never seen up close, sitting in chairs and typing on computers)...and while, true, I don’t revere my teachers in any classic, Eastern hierarchical kind of sense, and don’t plan on starting any time soon, I do like them an awful lot...

Reptiles of the Mind

2011-10-25T22:34:00.008-04:00

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake

...thinking about stuff is generally easier than actually doing it, but less satisfying...unless, of course, you’re thinking about doing something really stupid...
Ancient and Venerable Yoga Cynic Sutra 16:731/2

...just wrote this review for Elephant Journal of a book called Writing Yoga...and, in the process, got kinda self-indulgent...which is what I do...without apology...(I mean, seriously, it’s not like I get paid for this shit)...(and, anyway, like to think I’m working in the tradition of the late great Lester Bangs)...(remember reading Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung while in grad. school, and thinking “why can’t I write literary criticism like this?”...probably shoulda known my days in academia were numbered right then)...

Some years ago, my yoga teacher told me about a retreat she was leading on a beach in Mexico, involving instruction in not just yoga but writing.** The yoga and beach-in-Mexico parts sounded awesome, but thought I’d probably skip out on the other in favor of more wandering-on-the-beach time—I mean, I got me a PhD in English, done taut reedin’ n’ ritin’ at the college level, for chrissake, completed a novel, and published all kinds o’ crap; so y’know, what could be more fun on a trip to the tropics than having somebody correcting my split infinitives and instructing me not to end my sentences with prepositions?**** As it turned out, the writing teacher, Ann Randolph, was more holy lunatic than didactic schoolmarm. Right from the get-go, she had us radically stretching, pushing boundaries, moving beyond comfort zones into all kinds of places I really wasn’t expecting to go.***** At the end of the week, when asked how I felt about the balance of yoga and writing, I said I didn’t feel it was a combination, per se. Rather, it felt to me like it was all yoga, the writing as much as the asana practice. And this, along with, according to what I’d read, a desperate need for writers these days to have something called a web presence, led me to create my semi-famous blog, Yoga for Cynics…(mentioned in Yoga Journal and yada yada yada).****** (And, when people point out that, often, the content isn’t really about yoga, I point out that writing the blog is yoga…and, at least fifty percent of the time, I mean it).

...(yes, in this blog where, in better times, I’ve shared the words of Whitman, Shakespeare, and Kinky Friedman, I’m now quoting myself...at length)...(you’ll have to read the actual article to see the hilarious snarky footnotes, as well as get to the point where I move beyond shameless self-promotion and actually mention the book I’m reviewing)...(and yes, this is also shameless self-promotion)...

Oh, help me in my weakness, I heard the drifter say...
Bob Dylan

...so, anyway, running through this bit of personal history, particularly the cryptic web presence thing, reminded me that part of what got me into the blogging thing...in addition to, y'know, becoming one with the blogosphere and spreading peace and contentment throughout the interwebs...was a need to market my writing...(for which I also need to work on the shameless self promotion thing...as I’m doing in this post)...specifically the novel I put the finishing touches on nearly four years ago, but still haven’t gotten published, Drifter’s Escape...(yes, the title comes from that Dylan song)....(what are songs and poems good for if not to provide titles?)...(note how well that Blake line fits with the pic from my trip to Costa Rica, up there...even if it doesn't have all that much to do with the content of the post....can't have it all)...

...though, as it turns out, Yoga for Cynics has kind of taken on a life of its own...and perhaps the strategy of continually planning on getting back to the process of querying agents really soon but never actually doing it might be reevaluated...though whether that means actually getting back to querying agents, or developing a different strategy...(and, y’know, actually implementing it)...is up to question.....more on this, perhaps, as it develops...

...trying to get shit published might be yoga, too...but we're not too sure about that...
Ancient and Venerable Yoga Cynic Sutra 121:97

There Could Be Worse Ways To Spend My Time

2011-10-18T22:25:00.008-04:00

...tonight the women at the rehab were in the living room, that legendary Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon mash-up playing on the T.V....I told ‘em you may be the most sober group of people who’ve ever watched this...

God knows, it’s sacrilege to waste the talent for idleness which I possess.
William Faulkner

...to get busy, first get organized...(sounds like something Sun Tzu would've said...or maybe it was me)...made myself a big to-do list...a series of bulleted goals to be accomplished...with, one hopes, a sense of optimism, hard work, and perseverance...in the coming days....and then, within an hour or two, started feeling a dry, crusty, utterly nasty feeling from the back of the throat to the sinuses, along with an overwhelming need to bundle up, lie down, and close my eyes at two-thirty on a sunny Saturday afternoon...

...that was more than week ago...the nasty sinus cold still lingering just a bit, but mostly, it seems, off on its way....that to-do list serving as a bookmark in the novel I tried to read in between blinding headaches, desperate noseblowing, endless games of FreeCell, and the latest seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Breaking Bad, watched from start to finish on the computer....so now, I’m starting over...

...and I went down to the demonstration,
to get my fair share of abuse,
singin’ we’re gonna vent our frustration...
Mick Jagger

...at least managed to get some yoga in, if far less than usual...including a vinyasa class on Friday, where, actually, not having biked for a week, I noticed a refreshing lack of soreness in the leg muscles...and, then, ever the glutton for punishment, got back on the bike for a ride downtown on Saturday....a pretty day along the river, except where I had to detour around a gathering of aryan nations-type people blocking the path....seriously....maybe ten beefy, angry-looking, Gothic-tattooed, generally goonish-looking skinhead guys holding flags, one speaking into a bullhorn...though whatever he was saying...(apparently something having do with the statue, there by the path, of Viking explorer Thorfinn Karlsefeni...no doubt muttering can’t you please just leave me out of this crap? in some ancient Norse tongue, somewhere beyond the grave, at that very moment)...was drowned out by a slightly larger, equally angry-looking, group of dudes, perhaps fifteen or so, dressed head-to-toe in anarchist black chanting “nazis suck,” while a couple of cops stood in between, simply looking miserable...

...and it occurred to me, thinking back on over a week of relative inactivity in the face of a long list of important shit to do, there could be worse ways to spend my time...

Sick Again

2011-10-12T11:17:00.006-04:00

...been sick yet again...(necessitating, yes, yet another horrifying Edward Gorey image at the head of the post)...a bad sinus cold, this time, though containing suspicious similarities to whatever that was a month ago...leaving me wasting away indoors during what were likely the last eighty degree days of the year, a perfect weekend for occupations or wandering aimlessly in the park...

...not to mention creating another regrettable gap in the ever-so-close-to-daily yoga practice...yeah, I know, but let’s face it, despite having learned a few timeless truths...(headstand while drunk=bad idea)...I’m simply not yogic enough, at this point, either to practice every day no matter what kinda toxic waste facility it feels like I've got lodged in my sinuses nor to not practice for three or four days and yet feel so centered-and-totally-okay-with-myself-and-the-universe-as-it-is-in-this-totally-sacred-as-fuck-moment as to not feel self-conscious about it...(though, admittedly, by this definition, I was never more yogic than in my first thirty-five years of life, when I never even thought about practicing yoga and, if anything, made fun of people who did)...(oh, these spiritual paradoxes)...

...so, laid the mat out just a little while ago, and got right into it...incense, Miles, and a strikingly satisfying post-neti-pot headstand...and, though, as it turned out, I wasn’t quite up for everything intended, actually found myself feeling better than I had in days, if, still, well below 100%...(yeah, you blissed out yoga hippie types out there, I hear ya...but you’re always 100%! you're always perfectly yogic!! you’re perfect just as you are in this moment, brother!!!...um, yeah, but, in a more practical sense, if I were really 100% right now, I’d have a snappy comeback...instead I just wanna blow my nose...again)...and in the mood to write for the first time since last week...so here we are...

...(meaning that, yeah, this post is ending up like one of those lame-ass movies about some stereotypical writer dork struggling to finish a novel and then, just before the credits, it turns out it’s actually the book the stupid movie’s based on!...bleah...like I said, not yet 100%)...

The Clinically Depressed Trickster Figure

2011-10-06T09:00:00.008-04:00

You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later...
Mitch Hedberg

...turning leaves, blankets and warmer clothing, and lotsa tasty stuff made from various forms of squash...shifting from that edgy, anxious spring-and-summertime depression to the more cozy, lethargic fall-and-winter variety...

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

a mystic looks at the universe and sees mystery...an existentialist looks at the universe and sees absurdity...I look at the universe and see absurd mystery...or mysterious absurdity...

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
Chuang Tzu

...would like to start a non-religion based around a clinically depressed trickster figure...offering annual, year-long retreats at the long-awaited Yoga for Cynics ashram...where the mountains kiss the sea and floppy-eared dogs wander among recycled building materials inscribed with inspiring words from Chuang Tzu, William Blake, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Mitch Hedberg....all specific commandments, sutras, and holy dogma written on any available outdoor surface in colored chalk, to be seen, or changed, or ignored, by anyone at any time, or simply washed away by the rain...

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
William Blake

*was looking for an image for this post and googled “trickster figure”...and what did I see but the cover of this obscure book of literary criticism called Trickster Lives, published a full decade ago, now, and happening to feature a chapter on a poet named Thylias Moss, written—in semi-fluent academic jargon—by none other than your humble author in PhD-student mode...never woulda imagined that was still in print...*

Learnin' n' Unlearnin'

2011-10-01T00:20:00.008-04:00

...it’s been...good gawd...over six months since the two hundred hour certification...during which I’ve kinda taught yoga five times...groups of one to three people...only one of whom insisted on drinking a beer while practicing...(as well as assisting with that class of, I’m told, two-hundred and fifty people)....meaning, ya could say, I’ve not been overly ambitious...perhaps lazy....or, maybe, to take a more positive view, simply humble...egoless...just too damned enlightened...

...at Kripalu, they said what we were doing was less about learning than un-learning...and I most certainly did that....still confused about those esoteric fancy-schmancy Sanskrit-derived terms...particularly that pesky pair: right and left....used, generally, in reference to something even more confusing: the human body...its anatomy, physiology, alignment...

...over a series of weekends, beginning tomorrow, I’m gonna be continuing my yogic education through a fifty hour Align and Flow training...based in principles of anusara...a Sanskrit term which, as I understand it, means something like don’t care how long you’ve been practicing yoga, your alignment’s waaaaaaay off...
...this time, it's only a twenty-minute drive away...(maybe a forty-five minute bike ride, if I could figure a route that wouldn’t likely leave me sprawled out on the blacktop with alignment off in ways all the king’s yoga teachers might never put back together)...with a great teacher I’ve known a few years, and at least one fellow student I know...who's an advanced teacher, too, actually....raising suspicions I could be one of the more unlearned persons in the room...the Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel of yoga...Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yogi...sittin' on my mat muttering downward facin’ dawg?! whut th’ heck’s that?!....I'm looking forward to it...

Two Reasons to Practice Yoga

2011-09-26T00:36:00.006-04:00

...gorgeous afternoons...rumbling Wissahickon and gently rippling Schuylkill reflecting vibrant greens and blues as the bike floats past with minimal effort, beyond sculpture garden and gilded greco-roman art museum, all the way to the studio...cheerful vinyasa and laughter with teachers and students, all friends...then fueling up at the Indian buffet place with samosas and malai kofta for the ride home...

...and those other times...grey and cloudy outside, but even moreso in....roll out the mat for lack of any better idea, thinking maybe just maybe this’ll get me through the day...and, somehow, it does....not so much providing an esoteric heightened state that can only be described in Sanskrit or with reference to something some semi-mythic incredibly enlightened person wrote in India or Tibet three thousand years ago....and not a spiritual orgasm to be translated into new age positive affirmations or old time religion or a marketing campaign for the latest Yoga for Rich People With Big Houses and Nice Butts© DVD series....but revealing at least a window...some little bit of space...not much, maybe, but enough...that didn’t appear to be there before...

Not Enlightened Yet

2011-09-21T23:26:00.015-04:00

I can’t be good no more...
honey because the world gone wrong...
The Mississippi Sheiks

...John Milton said they also serve who only stand and wait...but how ‘bout they who sit around getting in utterly needless nasty arguments with complete strangers in the comments under youtube videos?....

...had a bit o' road rage on the way to yoga class today...yeah, it’s happened before...this time in a car...somebody making it nearly impossible for me to merge, and I, quite unmindfully, flipped her the bird....then noticed she was driving a hybrid with all kinds of mellow, socially conscious bumper stickers, like that one with COEXIST made up of symbols representing the world’s major religions...and she seemed to be taking all the turns I was...occurred to me she could be heading to yoga class...possibly even the same yoga class I was...which could be uncomfortable....figured maybe I’d break the ice with something like actually, sister, the middle finger is an ancient Hopi symbol that means “the radiant earth crystals of my heart imbue you with their healing love energy"...and maybe she’d be really moved by that and we’d go out for herbal tea, vegan stir-fry, and the latest documentary about drinking water...

I had read everything I could find about enlightenment. But the more I read, the more despair I went into because these texts had nothing to do with me and my problems. Enlightenment? I just wanted to wake up without wanting to kill myself.
Ana Forrest

...some yogis have a real problem with that particularly potent and aromatic form of prana known as coffee....I point out that they didn't have it in ancient India...if they had, Yoga Sutra 1.1...atha yoga nushasanam...translated into the English dialect unique to Philly and Jersey as: yo, let’s do some fuckin’ yoga...would most likely be preceded by Yoga Sutra 1.0...first we drink coffee...

Creative Enough?

2011-09-17T15:04:00.005-04:00

If the roof doesn't leak, the architect hasn't been creative enough.
Frank Lloyd Wright

...heard a song in a dream, with a chorus that kept playing in my head as I awoke, a particularly nasal Bob Dylan-like voice singing...

you’re an interesting victim but you’re
in this way

...I have no idea what this means...

...sometimes feel like a drug addict without the drugs....a writer who goes days without doing any actual writing...a yogi who sees the sun go up and then down while failing to move beyond the I should stage toward actually practicing any yoga....the old crap, resolutely failing to crumble to dust and blow away under the light of awareness, lingers on...but so do I...

...one time overheard a conversation in a restaurant between two men in suits, one of them passionately extolling his credentials as the kind of original thinker any employer would die for, announcing to anyone within earshot...which, in this case, had to include dishwashers and maybe even people in the parking lot...I think outside the box!!!...to which the other responded, consolingly, I know you do....I could sympathize, but had to wonder if someone who'd use such a hackneyed cliché as thinking outside the box actually did...

What’s the one small step you can take to change an unhelpful pattern? If the answer is ‘Nothing,’ you’re not being creative enough.
Ana Forrest, Fierce Medicine*

* cool book...see my review here

Big Time Yoga

2011-09-10T12:35:00.009-04:00

...got asked to assist at the Philly version of this big worldwide yoga event called Salutation Nation...(9:00 this morning)...(really probably shoulda said something beforehand....but, well, y’know, focus on the present moment, don’t get too hung up on past mistakes, & all that positive life-affirming shit)...a huge outdoor class...(picture above taken when things were still getting set up)...so a major deal for somebody who’s never taught more than three people at a time...particularly since it started & ended with me sitting up on stage with amazing senior teachers on all sides....a friend was impressed...(maybe just a tinge sarcastically)...said you’re playin’ in the big leagues...and it did feel kinda like that...may have to start tellin' people to call me Swami Jay instead of Dr. Jay....well, maybe not quite yet...

...was gonna bike down there, as one eco-minded yoga blogger urged everybody to do...but, still recovering from some strange sickness...(think it may’ve started with smelling two week old garbage that’d been submerged in a flooded trash can since the hurricane)...(seriously)...(yuck)...decided simply showing up and helping people get that dog-tilt might be as much as I could handle...

...so, was drinking coffee in the car on the way down, and...just ‘cause it’s kinda what I do...spilled some on my t-shirt...which was a bummer...like, I’m gonna be one o’ the major yoga dudes at this thing & got brown spots on my duds....started wondering if assisting might merit some schwag...like, specifically, a shirt...

...as it turned out, one was waiting for me, thanks to the event's generous sponsor........meaning that I now own, and have worn, in public, a notably stretchy item of clothing with an ambiguously-spiritual-looking symbol on it....

...yes, friends, the 'til now reliably grungy Yoga Cynic has been spotted wearing Lululemon.......take it as you will...

Under the Weather

2011-09-07T21:45:00.005-04:00

...natural disasters past, apparently, for now...time to return focus to everyday, personal disasters...

...but, at this point, can’t do much about those, either...at least not the bigger, more long-term ones....home sick...actually not feeling too bad, lying in bed, propped up on pillows, laptop propped against belly...only when I get up do things get ugly...head feeling way too heavy...trying to concentrate or think too much doesn’t help, either....then, the head is always a problem...

...nothing to do, it seems, but drink lotsa liquids and watch episodes from season three of The Wire over and over...

...gotta keep the devil
way down in the hole...
Tom Waits

...keep thinkin’ I should do some yoga...work some toxins out...but, since even sitting up straight seems like too much of an effort, maybe, for right now, simply relaxing and letting it all go may be as close to yoga as I’m gonna get...

In From the Storm

2011-08-29T11:40:00.004-04:00

...Saturday night lights went out about 10:30...flickered back on for a second, then off for good...in a house with a well...meaning no electricity, no pump, no running water.. sweaty after a long day, would’ve liked a shower before bed...actually took a little while to figure out how to make that happen...moving in naked circles in near-pitch dark, crazed tropical winds blowing rain from all directions...

...following a night boxed in against the elements, though effected by them, anyway...morning yoga practice without music, any light or temperature control beyond what came through the windows, opened just enough not to let in too much remaining wind and rain...finding quietness, birdsongs reemerging through the waning waves of storm...

...booting up the laptop by candlelight...letting the internet keep up its busy rancorous thing without me...tree fallen across the lines blocking half a major roadway...the tree removal people said the power line’s still live...power company said could be two weeks...neighbors hope that’s just their standard answer...

Waiting for the Hurricane

2011-08-27T16:46:00.006-04:00

...once saw a personal ad specifying, among other things, no baggage...obviously not looking for me....which is okay, since, I suspect, a person with no emotional baggage would have be either perfectly enlightened or boring...

...or both....once, talking to a shrink, expressed concerns about possible ill effects of overcoming depression...particularly on musical taste...asked if I could end up trading in Miles Davis and Lou Reed for Britney Spears and Mandy Moore...(this was ten years ago...insert appropriate poppy upbeat 2011 equivalents if you please)....he laughed, but didn’t exactly say no...

...had a version of that high school anxiety dream it seems everybody has...(y’know, walking the halls during finals week, realizing I’ve somehow forgotten to go to class all semester, and, in fact, am not even sure what rooms my classes are in...meaning that, even after all that higher education, I’m still in danger of failing high school)...

...(I’ve never had the showing-up-at-school-naked dream, but suspect that, metaphorically, it’s the same thing)...(like the dreams a friend said she was having, in which it turned out her divorce papers never got properly filed and she’s still married to her ex-)...(anyway...)...

...in this one, though, I’m at some kind of office job, realizing I haven't the slightest idea what I’m supposed to be doing, and getting a bit panicked about it...but, then, realizing I really don’t want the job, anyway...

...got an e-mail (in my spam folder) this morning reading Congratulations you have been chosen for Registry of Distinguished Women...(sic)....don't think I'm being overly humble in saying this honor was unexpected...

The Day Before the Earthquake Hit

2011-08-23T15:59:00.004-04:00

...feeling totally miserable the day before the earthquake hit...thought I’d reply to some e-mails...y’know, reach out a bit...but was finding it difficult to say anything about my life that didn’t come across like an outtake from a Dostoyevsky novel...

...so trying to put things in perspective, decided to describe the catastrophically horrible day leading to my miserable outlook...only to find that, as details appeared in little black letters before my eyes, it didn’t really appear all that bad....slept badly, had an unpleasant driving experience, dropped my ipod in a swimming pool...(with things kinda spiraling from there, mentally, at least, to more general money concerns to self-laceration for a history of klutziness to a life seeming in such dark moments to go nowhere but the next costly fuckup...y’know, that kinda crap)....but, then, how many people got to spend a good chunk of a sunny summer Monday lying around in a swimming pool, thus allowing expensive electronic toys they’re fortunate enough to have to get wet, in the first place?...so, I left that part out, too...

...(then, I’ve never really understood how the other people have it worse thing is supposed to cheer anybody up....it’s more likely to make me think oh god, there’s misery everywhere...just as look at what a good life you’ve got makes me think jeezus, there’s no hope for anybody....and, anyway, both kinda translate as you’re an asshole for feeling bad...which doesn’t make me feel better at all)...

...then the spigot farted out something nasty when I tried to get a glass of water...so went downstairs to see what was up...

...towards the end of the yoga teacher training, they had us write letters to ourselves, put them in self-addressed envelopes...which would somehow be sent to arrive when you most need it....I thought it sounded all touchy-feely and new-agey, but, nonetheless, wrote something heartfelt...

...and there, as I asked about the water...turned out the plumber was working on the pipes, earlier...in the basket, was an envelope with my name written on it in my own chicken scratch...containing a lotta semi-poetic stuff about untapped possibilities and diaphanous veils all too easily mistaken for reality...and, at the very bottom, five words: you are on the path...

The Yoga Cynic Has Issues

2011-08-13T12:41:00.006-04:00

It would be useless to try now to impose upon my narrative more order than there was in my life.
André Gide

....as may be obvious by now, the author of this blog has issues....

...was doing some personal writing...purely personal...none o’ yer damn business...when, as tends to happen, my inner blogger told me to turn it into a Yoga for Cynics post involving the various people inside my head...

...like the inner critic people talk, write, and do expensive self-help workshops about...even as my own inner critic’s telling me that Yoga for Cynics is delving into that airy-fairy realm of new age pop psychology where, in annoyingly cutesy-putesy ways, everything gets personified, and.......the inner blogger says shut up and write...

BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
William Butler Yeats, The Scholars

...I’ve written about my inner Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitor...which works better, for me, than inner critic...most likely because, given the time I’ve spent as a professional literary critic, and around them, the image of some musty academic surrounded by dusty piles of books and reminder cards for therapy appointments, unable to say anything without citing a pile of jargon-laden articles from journals nobody reads, fails to embody the kind of fear involved...

...at Kripalu, we did this psychodrama kinda thing...taking the form of one’s own inner critic...not just personifying and speaking the natterings of self-doubt and -loathing running through our heads but taking on a physical posture to go along with them...which, for me, made a kind of asana from hell....seriously, my back hurt for days, afterward....which might say something about what happens to my psyche on a daily basis...

...which might bring us to the inner therapist...caring yet dangerously opinionated, ever groping toward that celebrated inner child...

...they open and close you, and talk like they know you,
they don’t know you, they’re friends and they’re foes, too...
Joni Mitchell, Trouble Child

...I get laughs in yoga class when the teacher asks if anybody has any injuries and I pipe up and say my inner child is wounded...but it’s only partially a joke....which may be be precisely what makes it funny...

...my inner yogi’d like to describe all of this in terms of koshas...annamayakosha, pranamayakosha, manamayakosha, vijnanamayakosha, anandamayakosha...sheaths surrounding the atman...the true, ultimate self-beyond-self.......which, to my inner pomo graduate student, sounds suspiciously phallic...

...(sometimes the inner pomo graduate student bears a suspicious resemblance to the inner adolescent...perpetually smart, creative, horny, reflexively defensive, and often downright nasty...sometimes acting like a flat-out inner bully...but without the sophistication of the inner critic or old-school pseudo-authority of the Grand Inquisitor....this shit gets confusing)...

Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing.
Anne Sexton, Said the Poet to the Analyst

...the inner blogger says now’s the time to bring this post to a satisfying conclusion...perhaps simultaneously funny and inspiring...the kind people really like, so they leave nice comments and share on Facebook and twitter and all that...but never quite enough to satisfy the other members of the inner committee...

...and ya wonder why it’s been a week and a half since the last post?...

Rehab and Elsewhere

2011-08-03T14:06:00.004-04:00

They tried to make me go to rehab,
I said no no no...
Amy Winehouse (1983-2011)

We’re all doing time.
Bo Lozoff

...last night, had an awesome dream...nothing too exciting...just standing, talking, after a yoga class, apparently, on a sidewalk, to somebody who, as far as I know, doesn’t exist in the world outside that dream...though, all day long, all I can think about is how much I want to see her again...

...was thinking that on the way to yoga class, and there, on the sidewalk out front, as I chained my bike to a parking meter, was a little girl, crying, and her mother, who yelled shut up, and kept walking...

...little while ago, wrote a post called Lost My Sacred Mala Beads Last Night at a Hipster Pool Party...which I mentioned to a friend from the teacher training, who still had his, wound around one wrist....that’s okay, he said, showing me an empty space on the string, one of mine broke and fell off when I got drunk and punched somebody....it was a long story...

...there’s a sign on the wall of the room where I work at the rehab that says Group Rules, with a long list underneath....one is no sarcasm....I look at that, every Tuesday night, and think I wouldn’t last five minutes...

Practice Makes...Practice (Running Into the Mirror, Part Three)

2011-07-28T17:19:00.011-04:00

It’s been so long since I felt at home
in the mirror...
Jorma Kaukonen

...they say...or at least some of them do...that we call it yoga practice...no matter how much we do of it and for how long, no matter what our level of proficiency...because it’s practice for the rest of life...which might sound cheesy, but it’s also probably true, and valuable...(sometimes that’s the case with cheesy shit)...(but not often)...(this is still Yoga for Cynics for chrissake, not Yoga for People Who Get Their Feel-Good Philosophies of Life From Washed Up Sitcom Stars Turned Motivational Speakers, or something)...

...that includes, of course, the sustaining-the-challenging-pose thing...or the as-far-as-you-can-get-into-the-challenging-pose thing...with poise and aplomb...as well as that continuing-to-work-on-that-challenging-pose-without-concern-for-the-fruits-of-your-actions thing...(also known as, y’know, that-whole-Bhagavad-Gita thing)...

...but also, and perhaps most challenging...the trying-to-feel-good-about-the-fact-that-the-person-on-the-next-mat-who’s-never-been-to-one-damn-yoga-class-before-can-do-a-perfect-bird-of-paradise-pose-(svarga dvidasana...though, judging by my recent Google search, there's some dispute about that)-with-no-apparent-effort-while-you-can-barely-get-your-“peace fingers”-around-your-big-toe thing...as well as its opposite and corollary, the trying-not-to-feel-the-slightest-bit-smug-toward-that-ultra-spiritual-person-on-the-next-mat-who-can’t-come-close-to-doing-gomukhasana-arms-despite-having-practiced-for-years-longer-than-you-have thing....the both of which might be summed up as the acknowledging-that-you're-totally-competitive-about-yoga-on-the-inside-even-though-you're-totally-against-the-very-concept-of-competitive-yoga-on-the-outside thing...

...and, needless to say, egolessness and awareness are even harder to sustain...or achieve in the first place...off the mat...but, then, at least part of that problem is that the taking-yoga-off-the-mat thing is part of a two-way dialogue...in which we, often as not, bring non-yoga onto the mat...so that what we take off the mat ends up being closely related to what we brought onto it in the first place...

...and that, of course, is why we gotta keep practicing...

Yamas, Niyamas, and the Way It Usually Goes... (Running Into Mirrors, Part Two)

2011-07-25T10:05:00.004-04:00

...went to dog-sit for some friends and found they’d left a bottle of Pinot Noir and two-thirds of a fresh-baked chocolate cake on the kitchen counter....some time later, sitting at the beginning of yoga class, it occurred to me that this might be a perfect yogic opportunity for an exercise in the yamas and niyamas*...particularly, santosha**, aparigraha***, and tapas****...

...but, alas, by that point, it was already too late...

* ethical restraints and practices...(you learn about this stuff in yoga teacher training)...
** contentment
*** non-attachment
**** self-discipline...not to be confused with those trendy bars whose attraction seems to be that you get to spend more money for less food...though, now that I think of it, there may be some relation...

Running Into Mirrors (Part One)

2011-07-20T16:27:00.003-04:00

...I try not to be too hung up on authenticity...since, y’know, just because it’s authentically what some they did in some far away there in a long ago then doesn’t mean it’s good...but I do try to avoid the more obvious bullshit...

...recently took a long plane flight which dropped me into the Philly airport just in time for a forty-five minute wait for the last—12:09—train downtown, where I could wait more than half an hour for the last train going anywhere near home...standing around a series of platforms thinking about the dinner I never had...so, utilizing the few options at hand...and, no, no organic local fair trade vegan ayurvedic co-op produce was available...got a packet of cheese crackers and a peanut bar from a machine and a large McDonald’s fries...though I glanced at the new “healthy” items on the lit-up plastic menu...ultimately deciding that, if I’m gonna fool myself, I don’t wanna do it quite that blatantly...would rather have something authentically bad, without the pretense...

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.
Rainer Maria Rilke

...had a thought recently that I might feel perfectly okay about where I am in life if where I was in life were just twenty years younger...a twenty-five year old with a forty-five year old mind....so, apparently, I’ve got an issue with aging...and some people might say that’s not very yogic of me...and, most likely, start throwing out the standard positive affirmations about aging...(which might have a bit more truth-value if people didn’t feel the need to repeat ‘em so much)...except in the sense that being yogic means accepting and embracing rather than rejecting and repressing not just the feel-good shit but also whatever not-so-positive-feelings might arise, and all that goes with ‘em...and, y’know, in that sense, of course, it’s all yogic...

...music plays...some of it’s good...raspberries, mangoes, a little bit of kale, and ice make an excellent smoothie...and life doesn’t answer to my fondest fantasies...when was it ever any different?...

You'll Have To Decide For Yourself Whether Any Of This Has Anything To Do With Yoga

2011-07-13T17:26:00.005-04:00

A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent series of actions but a constellation of things perceived.
Edouard Levé

...one thing I’ve learned from being called for jury duty is that, as long as I answer questions honestly, there’s no chance whatsoever I’ll ever be picked...the truth, you might say, sets me free...

...have never been one of those desperately unhappy people who wear all black and write poems about suicide...nor one of those desperately unhappy people with big toothy smiles constantly trying to buttress themselves with feel-good notions they can't actually force themselves to believe...though I’ve danced insecurely on the margins of both...

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.
Eric Hoffer

...a friend was leading a therapy group for mentally ill ex-con drug addicts....one day, a caseworker was talking with a client and had to leave the room...finding, upon returning, that both the client and her lap-top were gone....though the guy came back the next day, to what I imagine was as therapeutic a grilling about what happened to the lap-top as possible...it’s at a crack house, he said, but I can get it back for $20...not surprisingly, the staff was dubious...but given the value of the computer, not to mention all the classified files on its hard drive, twenty bucks really wasn’t much to gamble on the faint possibility of getting it back...so, they gave it to him, and, some time later, he came back, lap-top in hand...leaving my friend and me really impressed by what was apparently a very professionally and ethically-run crack house....making me wonder: can fair trade organic crack co-ops be next?...

...any time a student started asking a question beginning with do we have to...?, I’d interrupt, say no, of course not...they’d say really?...and I’d say you’re in college; you don’t have to do anything...I can’t send you to the principal’s office, can’t give you a detention, can’t call your parents, really can’t do anything to you; what you do or don't do is up to you....except the grade, they'd say...and I'd reply but that’s just a description of what you decided you felt like doing...in shorthand...like a haiku...but even shorter...

...the difference between self-pity and self-compassion is, I think, that the first is only marginally different from cruelty...a distinction merely in terms of the tone of voice with which we call ourselves pathetic...while the latter is more likely to give a soothing back rub before saying, in a loving tone, that it’s time to get up off your ass...

Where I Actually Live...

2011-07-06T15:23:00.005-04:00

Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other.
M. C. Richards

...working from the creative center generally seems like one of the better excuses for not making any money...lucrative vocation set aside in favor of heartfelt avocation...romantic slacker bullshit, if you will........not making any money but not producing much to speak of, either...killing time before the apocalypse as opposed to dancing with the muse in creative rapture...is, however, a bit more problematic...

...read a review recently in the Philadelphia City Paper of that new Woody Allen movie, which said no filmmaker has been so self-aware and yet so trapped by his neuroses...replace filmmaker with yoga blogger and you might have me...(just self-aware enough to figure that one out and yet too caught up in the usual crap to have any idea what to do about it other than find in it a solution to the fact that I haven’t posted anything on the blog in a week)...

...the trick is to find something truthful to say that represents neither a callow giving-in to habitual depressed thinking nor forced positive affirmations I don’t believe and, let's face it, neither do you no matter how many times you repeat them to yourself like a mantra in hopes they’ll grow legs and walk with us up the street for a cup of organic fair-trade coffee.....try to focus on that walk—not along some misty path in mythical Himalayas, but a street—the same old street—in Philadelphia, where I actually live...and on that cup of coffee the hardcore yogis might spurn...officially, at least, though most’ll drink it anyway...and, maybe, most of all, on that drinking it anyway...on that un-ideal realm of what actually happens in between hope to be and fear I am...

...and, right now, I fear I’m being pretentious...though, for what it’s worth, in the rough draft I compared myself to Van Gogh, not Woody Allen...(then, what the hell, people laughed at Van Gogh for trying to be Van Gogh, too)....right now sitting here on my mat writing and feeling lazy, wondering can this count as my morning yoga practice?...

Lost My Sacred Mala Beads Last Night at a Hipster Pool Party

2011-06-29T14:58:00.010-04:00

Renunciation is not getting rid of the things of this world, but accepting that they pass away.
Aitken Roshi

...everything you gather is just more that you can lose...
Robert Hunter

...lost my sacred mala beads last night at a hipster pool party...yeah, I hear ya: what’s a yoga cynic doing with sacred mala beads in the first place?!...is he perhaps being ironic?....actually, no....got ‘em at Kripalu on one of first nights of the teacher training, passed out with a mantra...om namo bhagavate vasudevaya...even if I can’t say what exactly that means to me....then, a night or two before leaving, passed them around ceremonially through the group...as, you might say, a means of tying us and our experience together like sacred beads on a string...to be taken metaphysically or metaphorically...and I’ve worn them every day since, feeling that connection, in some way or other...but now they’re gone, dropped somewhere, apparently, when I was changing my clothes before or after going in for a swim...

...biked over there first thing after coffee this morning...found nothing but empty plastic cups and broken pool toys in the trampled grass...

...headed downtown to yoga class soon after...felt a drop or two a few blocks from home but didn’t think that was anything...then a light sprinkle along the Wissahickon path....turning to a not so light sprinkle and then a steady rain by the time I got to the Schuylkill...not thrilled to show up soaked and muddy, but no desire to turn around and go home, either...hell, you don’t hear those old school yogis saying dude, I was gonna go meditate naked in the charnel ground with rocks hanging from my junk but checked the weather on-line and looks like it might be a tad inclement...and, really, it's not bad, biking through the rain...

The Subjectivity of Light

2011-06-22T00:10:00.005-04:00

...got an ice cream cake for my mom’s birthday...the woman taking the order said that’s wonderful when I asked her to write Happy 85th on it...apparently, even in a youth-obsessed society, there comes a point when over the hill becomes a compliment...an acknowledgment that the hills someone’s traveling are distant and hard enough to get to that fear of getting old is finally trumped by something closer to awe...

...when caught in a storm, a point comes, after much resistance and angst, when it’s all okay...after some period of hoping it’ll stop, dreading the consequences of wetness, eyes hunting desperately for shelter...clothes become saturated, water pours down through every crease, entering every orifice...resistance dawns that you can’t get any wetter...and there’s no more reason to worry about the rain...

...went to see the new Woody Allen flick, Midnight in Paris...in which Owen Wilson, playing the neurotic, wise cracking, Woody Allen character, goes in and out of time warps in Paris, interacting with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Gertude Stein, and falling in love with a woman who both isn’t his fiancée and died years ago...at one point, he meets Salvador Dali, who introduces him to his friends Luis Buñuel and Man Ray...who, hearing about his "crazy" predicament, says it makes perfect sense to me...to which our befuddled protagonist replies yeah, but you guys are surrealists...

Practicing Yoga for the Wrong Reasons? Who the Hell Cares?

2011-06-15T10:13:00.007-04:00

Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali 1.2

Some come to laugh their pasts away,
Some come to make it just one more day...
Robert Hunter

Everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner...
Lily Allen

One night a week, I work at a residential rehab for women coming from the most challenging backgrounds—long-term addiction, rape, prostitution, poverty, prison, childhood incest, loss of children, every imaginable kind of abuse. I bring my expertise in reading and writing, in hopes that they’ll get their GED’s, maybe go back to school, or simply learn to narrate their experiences in writing; they bring PhD’s in suffering.

I feel particular admiration for some of the older women, those most scarred and humbled. As bad as life can get—the stuff of nightmares that leave us shaking in our beds, afraid of falling asleep again—they’ve been there. They’ve known Hell, and what it’s like to claw their way out, only to slip and tumble backwards into the depths, again and again and again. And yet, here they are, still trying.

Then there are some of the younger women—still vibrant and cute enough to hide their scars, and still naive enough to think they can run away from it all, there because it beats jail; the older clients say they haven’t hit bottom yet. Often, as I arrive, many of the clients are on their way out the door, heading to a weekly outside meeting—a twelve-step group beyond the confines of residential rehab, allowing them to incorporate their experiences of recovery within that sequestered world with those of people on the outside...many of whom are men. While everyone, generally, cleans up a bit for the outside meetings—hair done, a little mascara, a skirt in place of sweatpants, maybe a touch of jewelry—a few of the younger clients take it a bit further: wearing thick layers of makeup, low cut blouses, jeans tight enough I wonder they don’t cut off circulation. One put on thigh high black leather boots with stiletto heels, fishnet stockings beneath a short leather skirt and bustier week after week, resisting the entreaties of staff members to the effect that this really wasn’t appropriate for Narcotics Anonymous.

But, though their attitudes seem be blatantly off, though they may be missing the point, though their dressed-up-get-messed-up choices in couture might be a complete mockery of the well-established values of twelve-step programs and recovery itself, they keep going. They’re encouraged to. And there’s a reason for that. Whether they realize it or not, they need help—badly, and such resistance only serves to put that need into stark relief. And it may be that in these meetings they attend for, apparently, all the wrong reasons, they will, in spite of themselves, find the help they need. It’s better to be there with the wrong attitude, in other words, than not to be there at all.

Meanwhile, the serious yoga world’s full of outrage that so many people see yoga as a means of getting a firm butt...or to show off one’s firm butt in the latest designer yoga clothing and compare said butt and clothing with those of others in the room...or to enjoy other peoples’ firm butts so tightly wrapped in that expensive stretchy stuff. The women at the rehab, from what I've seen, appear to see morning yoga as an excuse to go outside and smoke cigarettes.

That’s cool with me. They might learn something and it might help them, in spite of themselves...

Will Teach Yoga For Booze

2011-06-09T14:48:00.005-04:00

The shallowest still water is unfathomable.
Henry David Thoreau

File Under: Not Sure What the Traditional Yoga Sages Would Think of This, But Doubt It’d Be Good:

...after much talk, finally taught my first living room yoga class...trucked over to my friends’ place, bringing yoga mats & ancient wisdom...they made margaritas....I was, it should be noted, firm and forthright: no drinking ‘til after yoga...

...next week, I’m heading to the shore with some other friends, who’re already making up a menu of cocktails and exotic beers....in the mornings, I’ll be leading hangover yoga on the beach...

...it’s a start...

Botticelli's Niece

2011-06-02T23:50:00.006-04:00

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Rumi

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room, where I got me a date with Botticelli’s niece...
Bob Dylan

...trying to write but can’t ignore that classic profile...pre-Raphaelite...if moderated by a nose ring...hair straight outta Botticelli, eyes staring into another world...but there I’m editorializing...or, more accurately, fantasizing...more likely she’s thinking of some boyfriend with six-pack abs straight outta Jersey Shore...and, certainly a lot younger than I...but maybe that’s just cynicism...hard to stay out of these frames...a year or two ago on my birthday, a younger guy I was talking to said he bet I got laid a lot back in the day and asked if I regret never getting married...since, apparently, a man in his mid-forties is ineligible for either marriage or sex...no matter how much time he spends on the yoga mat...then, I always say, while it’d be great to have a twenty year old body again, I’d rather hold on to the mind I’ve got now...and sometimes believe it...and, anyway, now she’s stepping out the door to get away from a screaming child, carrying a paperback copy of To the Lighthouse, which, to tell the truth, I saw before coming up with the eyes staring straight into another world thing...and Botticelli’s Venus always looked more classically vain than anything, a yoking of Renaissance ideals with those pretty girls who wouldn’t talk to me in high school...which was exactly what appealed to me, wandering through the Uffizi after crouching awake all night on the train from Brindisi, having last slept, for only an hour or two, the previous afternoon...passed out from all those godawful early morning shots of Ouzo on the boat from Patras...covered by my rail-pass, of course...I’d slept out on the deck and rolled over in my sleeping bag at around seven a.m. to an invitation from that somewhat older guy I’d been talking to the night before to join him for a drink...and, later, somebody lent me a Walkman and I passed out blissfully listening to a scratchy Dead tape...twenty years old beneath a Mediterranean sky...

No Illusion, Just the Experience (Building From the Ground Up, Part Five)

2011-05-29T12:31:00.009-04:00

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit
Wisdom is not putting it in a Fruit Salad
the Internet

...was reading this major political/philosophical French novel on the plane, then turned on the computer, put in a Netflix to watch some episodes from a T.V. show...the older woman next to me said she liked my choice of amusement, from Malraux to Buffy....I said somehow, in my mind it all fits together...

...read blog posts recently from a couple different people lately talking about their disillusionment with yoga...and, believe me, I understand...been a disillusioned activist for a wide variety of causes and candidates, disillusioned fan, disillusioned student, disillusioned member of a number of different subcultures, disillusioned friend, disillusioned traveler and/or resident in numerous supposedly cool places, etc...

The pure products of America
go crazy—
William Carlos Williams

...thing is, in order to be disillusioned, ya gotta be illusioned in the first place...and I came in to yoga as a serious skeptic...or, ya might say, a cynic....never saw a room full of blissed-out smiles without suspicion...never got all warm and fuzzy thinking about India or listening to old men in robes with thick beards and thicker accents...never had any doubts about the ability of the marketplace to corrupt the purity of ancient traditions, but never saw that as a problem, since I never bought into the idea that any of those ancient traditions were pure in the first place...

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
Annie Dillard

...mostly, I came to it thinking it might help with a few physical and psychological issues, and trying to be open to other possibilities...and certainly, along the way, I’ve gone through my moments of irrational exuberance...thinking this next yoga retreat in paradise is gonna cure everything that ails me...(viewing my own wistful notions with irony, or course, and laughing at them, but, secretly, believing all the same)...and—guess what?—it didn’t...and, certainly, I’ve gotten sick of it...

...like not long ago, almost went all weekend without any yoga, after a week of not much...(or, at least, not much by the standards of somebody whose gotten to the point where he considers going a weekend without yoga a big deal)...and really didn’t feel at all inspired to do anything about that....but, then, late Sunday afternoon, decided to at least roll out the mat, stretch my neck a bit since it felt stiff...as it does when I don’t practice...maybe a little pranayama, since that’s always good for a little buzz, at least...ending up going pretty intensely for an hour and a half or so.....and feeling awesome.....like it may have been the best practice I’ve ever had on my own...better than most classes...not that there’s a competition, or anything...even with distractions of various kinds...calls that had to be taken, as tends to happen outside the cozy confines of a class...but even those seemed somehow to fit...yoga and day to day life seeming closer than usual...making the practice feel both awesome and incorporated...(not to be confused with immanent and transcendent...though a headier and/or more spiritual yogi than I might wanna get into that)...finding value, in the end, in saying namaste to myself...no illusion, just the experience...

Strap Yerself to a Tree With Roots (Building From the Ground Up, Part Four)

2011-05-25T11:37:00.003-04:00

Strap yourself to a tree with roots, you ain’t goin’ nowhere...
Bob Dylan (Happy 70th!)

...wasn’t writing much for a while, there...and still finding it awfully difficult.....you need a comfortable place to sit to write...and, no offense to my ever-beloved Ikea chair, that sturdy, soft but supportive seat has often seemed to be missing...replaced with a fervent desire to retreat and hide...dig a hole and bury myself...a metaphor superficially similar yet inherently, in spirit, distinct from that of being rooted...though distinctions can bewilder...

...we would argue that the greatest irreverence in yoga is to leave any dogma, conscious or unconscious, unchallenged.
yoga 2.0

...this is where dogma comes in, for some people...senses of the sacred that separate and exclude, providing that save haven with walls and battlements...a fortress as much as a refuge...

...but I’m getting away from the point...which tends to happen when yer not properly rooted....all those sacred scriptures I tend make fun of talk about the problem of grasping...the solution offered being non-attachment...making the grasping of scriptures themselves as inherent-answers-to-everything somewhat ironic...but, again, I digress....the common comforting view of the skeptic...which, truth be told, I tend to grasp toward, myself...is that this is a position of denial...

The shadow side of Buddhist practice is what I call “premature nonattachment,” which is actually avoidance masquerading as spiritual attainment.
Thanissara

...a denial! a denial! a denial!
Kurt Cobain

...in friendship...at least in an the abstract, or maybe retrospect, if not so much within the full catastrophe of everyday life...the difference between compassion and grasping can be seen pretty clearly...one creates union, the other attempts to do so, and may appear to succeed, but instead makes real closeness impossible...one grows lasting roots, the other clings desperately but, in the end, leaves us drifting...

...standing in tree pose...vriksasana... setting my drishti through the window toward the crux of a green tree branch...leaves dancing in a frenzy with the wind, as I remain rooted, still...almost...for a minute or two...

Alone Together, Together Alone (Building From the Ground Up, Part Three)

2011-05-22T16:31:00.014-04:00

...useta see yoga class as pretty much like any other educational venture...a place to gain useful information and/or skills...(and, y’know...maybe meet some babes)...that could then be effectively utilized elsewhere...with that absolute elsewhere always and essentially the focal point...or drishti if ya wanna get all yogic about it...and, in the case of yoga, that meant a reasonably quiet, and, in some sense, spiritual space, by myself...the inherently anchoritic practice of the serious yogi walking that path so fine that it can only be walked alone, like it says in the Bible and the Upanishads and that Grateful Dead song, toward enlightenment or at least a better relationship with oneself and maybe a bit less depression and anxiety in the morning and knees that won’t give out from biking up all those hills...or something like that...

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way....
Matthew 7:14

The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over...
Katha Upanishad

The path to happiness is so narrow that two cannot walk on it unless they become one.
Unknown

If I knew the way, I would take you home...
Robert Hunter, Ripple

...then, however, with an enticing mixture of compassionate guidance, collective experience, sense of community...(seriously, for all the stories I read online about people sniping about each other’s designer yoga wear...not to mention the nasty arguments online yogis get into...I rarely meet any but the nicest people in yoga classes...creating a sweet supportive sadhana in which it's perfectly okay that I try and fail again and again to get so much as a toe off the floor in side-crow...parsva bakasana...knowing that we’re all, in our own ways, struggling along our own paths, and it’s nice to have sympathetic company along the way)...yoga class itself kinda became the thing...and practicing solo became what I did when for one reason or other I couldn’t go to a class...and, even then, usually skipped it...having become, inadvertently, my own disappointing substitute teacher...thinkin’ damn, looks like I’m stuck with myself today...

We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn.
André Gide

You gave up all the golden factories,
to see
who in the world you might be...
Joni Mitchell

...and, then, such an outward and interactive focus goes along quite neatly, I think, with that part of Yoga for Cynics mission statement that goes something like...if I remember correctly...yoga is about opening...

...and yet, I realize, that’s not all...

...no, no, don’t worry, I’m not gonna start throwing vedas and sutras and florid potpourris of ancient beliefs at ya...though, for some people, that stuff certainly qualifies and may be essential for grounding...

...which is what I’m talkin’ about...or trying to, at least...(with, perhaps, all the more relevance now, on the day after the alleged apocalypse...which I wrote about yesterday, here...serving, perhaps, as a kinda reminder that life here on earth is what we’ve got to deal with...and that might be for the best)...

...what I mean is the establishment of a stable if ultimately provisional base from which to open...that mulabandha thing...the Shiva thing as it relates to the Shakti thing...trust me, I’ve read about this shit...the reasonably solid foundation from which the asana grows and expands upward and outward...the still point...or perhaps, a comfortable self...

...which can be hard to find...and might require openness...which, like I said, requires grounding.....as always, it's a work in progress...

Difficult Yoga/Difficult Yogis (Building From the Ground Up, Part Two)

2011-05-17T16:29:00.014-04:00

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.
Donald Barthelme

...my 84 year old mom and I have our own little yoga ritual...goes kinda like this:

Mom: I’m so stiff!

me: Y’know what’d really help with that, mom?

Mom [anticipating, correctly, that I’m gonna say yoga]: Shut up.

...then, such an attitude isn't exactly unique within my family...I'm one of a long line of difficult people...and, while there are lots of reasons I practice yoga, because family members pestered me to is quite certainly not one of them....so, as it's turned out...call it karma or the luck of the draw, as you will...somehow, at some point, I went from too difficult to practice yoga to becoming a difficult yogi...

Whatever it is you are craving at the moment, to be driven by such impulses means that, on a deep level, you don’t believe that you are whole as you are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

...ultimately, if all ya can do is have arguments in your head no matter how many asanas and attempts at meditative states, what can ya do but have arguments in your head?....it used to be when I was in a crappy mood in yoga class I felt like that was a problem...since, y’know, all these serious yoga types were so mellow and peaceful, filling up with bliss like wealthy SUV owners at the gas pump...halfway between yoga studio and astral plane...positive energy bouncing off 'em like beads of slobber from a Saint Bernard’s gooey lips...even if none of it landed on me....now, however, having become somewhat of a serious yoga type myself, instead of becoming like them, I’ve realized they’re not so different from myself...and if I’m feeling crappy practicing yoga, then I can practice practicing yoga feeling crappy...

Building From the Ground Up, Part One

2011-05-08T22:52:00.013-04:00

...sitting at the usual coffee shop, drinking the usual coffee, thoughtlessly cogitating the usual misgivings, apprehensions, and regrets...self-judgment, ennui, and mild depression...life as usual seeming like one big obstacle course with no clear path apart from that defined by the obstacles themselves...

To be able to free oneself is nothing; the hard part is being able to live with one’s freedom.
André Gide

...trying to fly away might have been your first mistake.
Bob Mould

...but, idly there in my favorite sunny window seat, the thought comes that I like where I live......(not my apartment, so much...though it’s not bad, really...its problem, for the most part, its messy inhabitant...and the messy thoughts he wakes up with...more internal, that is, than external...though the Upanishads, I think, say that’s all one & the same)...(Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 438:901: ...don't believe everything ya read in the Upanishads...)...coffee gone, irresistible high-calorie toasted buttered cheddar and black pepper biscuit reduced to tasty crumbs I pick up with a dampened fingertip to eat one by one...thinking I really should be getting on with the day but focusing dreamily out at the corner, naturally illuminated...center of my laughably crunchy community...food co-op, meditation studio, alternative bookstore, alternative pet store, alternative whatever the hell that store is, alternative kid's store...run by somebody who’s also a yoga teacher...more certified yoga teachers here than plumbers, certified public accountants, or Republicans...by far...more organic vegan gardeners than people who’d admit to eating fast food or shopping at Wal-Mart...tree lined sidewalks, bicycles with baskets, two churches down the hill, one Unitarian, the other Presbyterian but with a lesbian minister...a community justifiably famous for its effortless integration, though the skin tone in the coffee shop's conspicuously lighter than that in the public school across the street...but, it takes just a beautiful seven mile bike ride following the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill River through the park, past the sculpture gardens and Art Museum, to get downtown...residents notably friendly, usually laugh at my jokes about scoring organic crack on the way to yoga class and wanting to call myself a Mt. Airyan but concerned that might give the wrong idea...moved all over the country to live in famous hip communities: Boulder, Olympia, San Francisco, Burlington, Flagstaff, Ithaca, had some fun but couldn’t wait to leave each and every one...then ended up back in this area where I grew up somewhat unwillingly, out of necessity...it's a long story, and kinda personal...to find myself nearly four years later thinking, sea of troubles and all, I wouldn't mind staying for a while....and that’s not a bad place to start...

Waves...

2011-05-02T08:45:00.008-04:00

A little revenge and this too shall pass,
This too shall pass...
Bruce Springsteen

Shanti shanti shanti

It Ain't Easy

2011-04-27T21:08:00.006-04:00

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

2011-04-13T08:54:00.004-04:00

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

2011-04-09T21:44:00.016-04:00

...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

2011-04-01T09:32:00.009-04:00

...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...

What I Didn't Write in that Last Post (Epilogue to Notes from the Kripalu Teacher Training Thang)

2011-03-21T10:59:00.009-04:00

Every time you judge yourself, you break your own heart.
Swami Kripalu

Welcome to the camp, I guess you all know why we’re here...
Pete Townshend, Tommy

Friday morning, when we were hanging out on the couches after breakfast, procrastinating about packing and looking vaguely forward to the big graduation ceremony, somebody asked us about just how many hours of yoga a day people in the teacher training actually have to do....we were silent for a few seconds, and I told him it was kinda like we’d walked into a yoga class a month ago and were still there...

...a couple hours later, procrastinating about leaving, sitting in the coffee shop with my lap-top, getting up to hug people goodbye whenever they walked past, tried to post some thoughts I’d been writing up in the previous days...which went kinda like this:

Tadah drastuh svarupe vasthanam
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 1.3

...but don’t believe everything the Yoga Sutras say...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 121.341

...last Friday, went into bridge pose and stayed there half an hour...earlier this week, wrote I HATE YOGA on an unused notebook page, later scribbling the words out, though they could still be read, and tried to use them in a kind of photographic still life with the Ganesha statue on the Kripalu lawn, but the page came out blank...two nights ago felt myself a winged and carapaced insect, struggling to escape its chrysalis....one day, it might’ve been last weekend, dreamed in a deep savasana that I’d misplaced my head, but it didn’t seem too much of a problem...

...as well as a bunch of other stuff I kept deleting...(not even mentioning the performance of You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman...in a bathrobe...with backup singers...including a guy in a bikini...in front of the altar with the statue of Shiva and pictures of Swami Kripalu...to Devarshi, dean of the Kripalu School of Yoga, sitting up front in full lotus...and about seventy other people, instructed to maintain dirgha and ujjayi pranayama...and not to laugh....but you’d probably have to've been there for that)...

...drifting in and out of lifetimes, unmentionable by name...
Bob Dylan

...anyway, then, early Friday afternoon, after the big graduation ceremony...they got ceremonies for taking a crap up there at Kripalu, but this one was actually kinda special...the post felt insufficient...too vague, too slight, too focused on myself...

...and now I’m back in Philly, where there’s police sirens, pollution, and people aren’t nice to each other all the time....but, the snow’s all gone, early flowers taking its place along the sidewalks, and I get to sleep in my own bedroom, crap in my own bathroom, and don’t have to get up every morning for 6:30 yoga....so there’s a balance, kinda...

...and what I really wanted to say, but couldn’t quite get the words out onto the virtual page on Friday...(or was worried about how they’d translate beyond our magic mountain)...(which is still a concern)...(think I’m corny or done drunk the kool-aid if ya wish)...was this: that, on the first night at Kripalu, we were asked about fears and concerns regarding the training, and someone said something to the effect that she was the kind of person who...and Devarshi responded promptly with something to the effect that we could expect any assumptions about what kinds of people we were to be challenged...

...and, a month later, standing there amongst the people with whom I’d shared so much, I was struck with the realization that, far beyond learning how to lead people through downward facing dog...adha mukha svanasana...or upward pigeon...raja kapotasna...not to mention a whole lotta Sanskrit...atha yoga nushasanam...we were all actually a little bit kinder, a bit more open, a bit more compassionate, a bit more conscious human beings than when we arrived...

Words Fail (Notes from Kripalu #7)

2011-03-18T13:55:00.003-04:00

...and now it's time to go home...

? (Notes From Nowhere #6*)

2011-03-12T15:09:00.009-05:00

* Building from the Ground Up (Notes From Utopia #4) never made it online, mostly because I couldn’t find time to write it, much less get on the computer, though it was gonna include a really good George Harrison line...and the more I go inside, the more there is to see...and something from Godfrey Devereux quoted in a class here last Saturday...To push yourself beyond your limits will reduce and not expand them. Rather bring yourself gently to your current limit and stay there for a while; then your limits will naturally and easily expand...whatever...consider it the one that got away, while It’s Rough All Over (Notes From Samsara or a Dark Night of the Soul #5) was too dark, going on about how this place is kinda like a mental institution for people who aren’t particularly mentally ill...or a rehab for people who aren’t particularly addicted...at least, no more than most people...when the uncomfortable truth is that, when you can dare to look at it, just about everybody around you is carrying an almost unbearable amount of pain....culminating in our flight from the ashram following the day of intense silence to go sit in a noisy unconsecrated space and drink tequila...and yet unable to draw my eyes away from the T.V. set above the bar where horrifying images of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan ran on a continuous nightmare loop...and still I complain about having to do yoga all day...and you wouldn’t wanna read about that, wouldya?

Then there’s this post. I have no idea what it’s about.

The Yoga Cynic Goes Native (Notes from the Magic Mountain #3)

2011-03-05T10:30:00.004-05:00

...so far, my proudest accomplishment may be that, during my first practice-teach, somebody fell asleep during savasana....not that nobody ever dozed off back when I was teaching college English, but...

...I’ve been acquiring a reputation for going outside in the mornings in sub-freezing weather, barefoot...

...two weeks ago, parked my car in the upper lot, planning to go up and charge the battery once or twice a week....then, maybe four or five days in, went to get something and found the car so dead the clicker thing wouldn’t even work...thought guess I don’t have to worry about keeping the battery charged...

...after 6:30 am yoga and breakfast, Devarshi Steven Hartman led an morning-long “impolite conversation” of the Bhagavad Gita...following lunch, we undertook, as a group, a deep exploration of our individual pain and self-loathing, before closing out the day with an active vinyasa.....during dinner, ran into somebody from the coffee shop in West Mt. Airy, here just for the day, who asked what the teacher training was like.....I thought for a minute, said I’ll tell ya about it when I get home...

Walt Whitman, as it turns out, was right as usual...(Notes from Hogwarts #2)

2011-03-01T20:07:00.006-05:00

Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
John Huston, Chinatown

...reached the mid-point of my 40’s at some point Friday morning...you’d have to ask my mom for the exact timing...and, thankfully, the first person I told that gave me a hug and said congratulations...

...in the second day of the teacher training, they told us our main purpose wasn’t learning, but unlearning...and I thought my god, it’s probably about time I did that...

O my Body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you;
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the Soul, (and that they are the Soul;)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems—and that they are poems,
Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems...
Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric

...the teen years were a fucking nightmare...20’s had some high points...pun intended, somewhat...30’s were boring, mostly...which was a good thing...

...now, here...at 45...I crackle with energy...

*broadcasting live from the coffee shop, Kripalu Center, Cloud Hidden, Wherabouts Unknown, USA*

Kinda Like Boot Camp Except Everybody's Totally Nice to Each Other (Notes from Kripalu Yoga Teacher Training #1)

2011-02-24T21:44:00.007-05:00

...somewhere in the middle of the frozen lake,
a pulse.

Just to dig it all and not to wonder, that's just fine...
Van Morrison

Prepared for Lift-Off...All Systems Go

2011-02-19T16:25:00.007-05:00

Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare...
David Bowie

...for the next month, Yoga for Cynics, along with its affiliates, partners, and corporate subsidiaries, will be shifting its base of operations from West Mt. Airy, Land of Mellow Sadhana and No Snow Plows, USA, to the mystical highlands of Kripalu...the Berkshires, Massachusetts...cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown...(or, at least, the Google Maps directions are really, really confusing)...where its proprietor, webmaster, chairman, publisher, president, CEO, CFO, Grand Poobah, consigliere, Most Exalted Muckamuck, First Citizen o' Love, minister of information, malcontent-in-residence, spiritual advisor, guru, sensei, Grand Vizier, Imperial Lama, First Among Equals, and most humble author will be attending a 200 hr. Yoga Teacher Training...

...(which, yes, represents a significant step toward laying the groundwork for the long-promised Yoga for Cynics ashram.....anybody out there got a tropical island you’re not using for anything?)...

...was planning on some serious tidying up around the place before I go...but decided spring cleaning’s better left ’til spring....last night my mom gave me an early birthday present a sweater to replace, she said, my old favorite, now full of holes, which she tried to get me to promise to throw out, or, at least, never wear when anybody can see me...I explained that it didn’t matter, because I’ll still be the kinda guy who wears ratty sweaters with holes in them....even if I’m wearing a custom-made, designer-original tuxedo, anybody talking to me will always figure that out in no time...

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise
William Blake

...had coffee three or four...maybe five...times this week, after three months off... which, whether defensible in terms of yamas and niyamas or not, lemme tell ya, felt like three or four big steaming cups o’ happiness...

...which I’ll try to kiss as it flies, before heading up to Kripalu tomorrow, where, most likely I'll spend a month largely without caffeine, junk food, alcohol, T.V...probably a whole bunch of other minor vices, as well...while learning all about yoga...and god-only-knows-what about myself...and beyond that, who knows?...will I come back a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love?...or at least muster up the energy to clean up that filthy apartment?...throw out that rancid sweater...or perhaps more fully inhabit it?...

...guess we’ll see...

Parts, Spare and Otherwise

2011-02-15T22:11:00.010-05:00

...flying coach might be the opposite of yoga...causing everything to contract rather than expand...(except, of course, in the sense that everything is yoga)...

...out in Colorado for a coupla days...warmer weather than I’ve experienced in months making the body feel like it’s arising from hibernation...eating aloo gobi in Boulder with Waylon Lewis...(you might know him from Elephant Journal or the Dukes of Hazzard theme)...spending the afternoon wandering streets and paths in search of brain cells left behind there long ago...

...a good friend took me further up in the mountains to go cross country skiing for the first time in a years... awaking body parts long forgotten with a strange, snowy exhilaration...even as I wiped out four times on one hill...now reminding me of their presence repeatedly...

...went with the same friend to see 127 Hours...about a guy who didn’t exactly follow the wilderness dictum to leave nothing but footprints...finding, in the end, no matter how painful the process of separation might be, attaining freedom may involve letting go of a lot...including what appear to be essential parts of oneself...

A Passage to Camden

2011-02-09T18:42:00.006-05:00

...one time crossing the river from Philly, noticed I didn’t see the Welcome to New Jersey sign ’til past Camden...a notoriously depressed city with one of the worst crime rates in the country, so broke it just laid off half its police and firefighters...

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from
them,
No more modest than immodest.

...but that didn’t stop us, fueled by tequila, from crossing the bridge on a winter Wednesday afternoon, to visit an old man’s home...wishing I could show him my rambling Yoga for Cynics posts, ask him what he thinks...but settling for a vague plan to tip back a whiskey flask where he sat to write, despite the park service's no food or drink policy...a quick and surreptitious toast to the poet, patriot, and great American yogi...

I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

...the flask, as it turned out, was forgotten...which was fine since, truth be told, the margaritas with lunch were more than enough....the house small, narrow, and nondescript on a run-down street...an unspectacular example of what our guide called Victorian working class, even when it was built...a place anybody might’ve lived...which could not, of course, be any more fitting...

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Maybe About as Poetic, Spiritual, or Philosophical as I'm Likely to Get at This Point

2011-02-05T23:33:00.005-05:00

...been reading lotsa yoga philosophy...rereading, mostly, but paying more attention this time...taking notes...as well as just basking in all that high-falutin’ spiritual shit...

...there’s really no problem here. We can be absolutely human and divine at the same time.
Amrit Desai

...and I’m into all that, of course...have gone on record here as saying that, to me, yoga’s all about openness....while generally avoiding the ever-flowing stream of what-it’s-all-about-and-more-importantly-what-it-isn’t arguments that tend to fill the blogosphere...(along with the pompous expressions of egolessness and meanspirited lectures on loving-kindness)...if ever oscillating between not caring and caring enough I can’t deal with it....

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
Walt Whitman

...for me, really, on a purely practical level, it’s ultimately about getting from point a to point b....no, not samsara to nirvana...not atman to brahman, either...not even self-loathing to self-acceptance...(nor flabby ass to buns of steel).....more getting myself out of bed in the morning to somehow finding my way restful sleep at night...and, for now, that may be about as poetic, spiritual, or philosophical as I’m likely to get...

Little Scraps of Wisdom in a Frozen World of Grey Slush

2011-02-02T11:13:00.005-05:00

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?
Emily Dickinson

...strong emotions don’t come easy in a frozen world of grey slush...three weeks to Kripalu...something I never expected, being a full time student again...even if only for a month...and, while grad school’s just about guaranteed to make a person more neurotic, this could, conceivably, do the opposite...

...but, if one thing clearly to be expected, it’s that my final observations on the experience will include...for good or for bad...however stated...it was different from what I expected...

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
Umberto Eco

...maybe the best way to teach somebody something is not to try to teach them anything...talk, act, throw petals to the waves to watch them float...and the best way to learn is to forget about learning...stop grasping at information as if to save you from drowning...make you rich, thin, good-looking...less flatulent, more confident...more in love, less hungry....just swim in it....forget about being a wise old yogi...just practice...

The Paris Hilton of Yoga?

2011-01-26T10:03:00.007-05:00

...couple posts ago, made some joking remarks about yoga teachers...specifically involving stuff like the inaudibly soft, ultra-spiritual yoga teacher voice....and, as a long-time believer that, if it’s worth saying at all, it’s worth beating into the ground, have been repeating said jokes all over the place....to the point that I think I may be giving some of my (amazing, wonderful, beloved) teachers complexes.....so, to any who might be reading this, let me make it clear...the jokes aren’t about you..........they’re about those high-falutin’ yoga teachers who write for Elephant Journal...

........just kidding, people...jeezus, aren’t you all supposed to have transcended your egos by now?...

...seriously, I've been going to Facebook lately and finding I'm in demand as a yogi...really...my yoga teacher friends are sending me personal requests to go to their classes...including one that’s supposed to be videotaped for some kind anusara certification or something...(and not, I’ve been assured for World’s Funniest Yoga Bloopers on youtube)...

...not that this is interfering with my totally enlightened egoless state or anything, but it does raise all kindsa pertinent questions...like...could such desirability indicate that the mere presence of the friendly neighborhood yoga cynic now carries such cachet as to confer status and set the yoga world buzzing?...kinda like the way Paris Hilton, I read some time ago, was getting paid fifty thousand bucks just to show up at parties?...could I be the Paris Hilton of yoga?...

...(y’know, like, except for the fifty grand part...but I’m workin’ on that...see below)...

...for all you yoga teachers out there...

FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY!!!!

You can have ****ME**** doing sun salutations in your very own yoga class!

* Wearing a (mostly) clean t-shirt!

* Large shorts revealing nothing anybody doesn’t wanna see!

* No snoring in savasana, inappropriate groaning during forward bends, or rolling eyeballs if you start going on about your guru!

* Providing the low end, often badly needed in today’s predominantly female yoga classes, on OM! (Or, if you prefer, AUM)!

Just $49,999.99* if you act now!

* additional discounts negotiable**

** seriously, we’ll take anything...

Art is anything you can get away with.
Marshall McLuhan

Kinda Sorta What I'm All About...

2011-01-19T00:16:00.006-05:00

...in a dream was staying in a strange hotel and couldn’t find my room...went looking for it and realized I’d lost the floor it was on, too...then couldn’t even find the hotel....woke to find the world outside the window one big melted Slurpee...grey flavored...getting anywhere unscathed near impossible...

My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
Anne Sexton, Said the Poet to the Analyst

...the only time I like to write by hand is when it’s really deep, go-for-broke personal stuff...so illegible even I can’t read it....when younger, wrote because I had nobody to talk to...nobody I trusted, at least...now sometimes think what I write's brilliant, but never fail to be amazed when anybody likes it...now working with a new computer keyboard just subtly different from the last...an inch or two smaller, maybe...my most passionate prose coming out ;o=lr ‘-ae...

Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing….
Anne Sexton, Said the Poet to the Analyst…

...Allen Ginsberg, when he was young, wrote poetry for his father...later, wrote something he had no intention of getting published, because he’d never want his father to read it...and that, apparently, allowed him to Howl…

Mind is the sole source of bondage or liberation.
Maitri Upanishad

...a rehab client who a week before checked and double checked to make sure she’d passed my reading comprehension test so she wouldn’t have to work with me said she really wanted to talk to me about doing some writing because she was going nuts in there...I said writing to keep from going nuts is what I’m all about...

For MLK Day...

2011-01-17T08:16:00.006-05:00

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr.

With a broken computer, and about to head out to take part in the Martin Luther King Day of Service, I'm not saying much, but thought I'd share a few images and words...

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Namaste, & all that...

Off the Deep End, Gladly

2011-01-10T22:02:00.009-05:00

It’s easy to be a dedicated student of what you already think.
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 201:312

...long-suffering non-yogi friends think I’m going off the deep end...then, that’s kinda my intention...

...a yoga teacher friend was encouraging people to choose a word to represent their intentions for the new year...the kinda thing I tend to dismiss as new agey but end up finding useful...looked at my t-shirt, which read Springboard Studio...thought springboard...

...in preparation for the big intense yoga teacher training...6:30 in the morning to 9:00 at night six days a week, deep in the mountains in the dead of winter...kinda like nurturing, compassionate boot camp...been reading about fascia and synovial fluid (first time I’ve studied anatomy since 10th grade biology class)...(where I mostly sat there writing out Bowie lyrics on my notebooks, thinking about comic books and sex) and alignment...finding it kind of intimidating, though frequently coming to surprising realizations that I already know the stuff that seems most daunting and complicated...experientially...through the asana practice...just not the words for or theory behind...which seems a bit ironic...

Follow any analytic discipline, rigorously pursue any science or philosophy to its inexorable end, and you arrive at absurdity. From there, two paths diverge: toward despair of the overwrought intellectual, or toward the laughter of the gods.
Josh Mitteldorf

...first started practicing yoga as a grad. student, half way through a dissertation...more precisely, at the beginning of a lengthy break from said dissertation due to depression so severe I was just about picking a cliff to jump off....then, once the dissertation got going again, the yoga kinda faded away....never really got it going seriously 'til I left the land of theory and ironic quotation marks, entirely....not that there's a connection, necessarily...

...another teacher pointed out I tend to lead with the head...that’s Jay, PhD, she said...

Just how anti-intellectual can a guy with a PhD get before he starts sounding ridiculous?
Ancient and Revered Cynical Zen Koan

Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

...yoga is, to me...or, at least, for me...essentially experiential...making big debates about whether it’s a religion or whatever somewhat moot...does it feel like a religion?...if it does, it is...if not, it must be something else...

...we’ve found that yoga comes to vibrant life when we realize that while we have no stable idea as to what it is, we know that we embody its evolving pulse through our baffled wonder.
yoga 2.0

...then, maybe it's all how you define religion...some would say it’s all experiential, originally...somebody coming down from a mountain and saying whoa, some weird shit went down up there...lemme tell ya about it...beliefs, holy books, rituals, dogma, etc. all coming later...means to codify the uncodifiable, get a handle on what can’t be handled, put infinity in its place...making it clear that somebody else, in some spiritually privileged long ago time and far away place, slipped the yoke....you gotta shut up and do as you're told...

Editor’s note: it occurs to the staff here at Yoga for Cynics that this post about moving away from the intellectual and toward the experiential is getting highfalutin' in a manner that's, arguably, contradictory to its theme. We apologize for the apparent error and assure readers that it probably won’t happen again...at least not in this post....anyway, isn’t it all, really, about finding a balance?...

2011: The Year the Yoga Cynic Goes Legit

2011-01-01T00:46:00.012-05:00

I don’t believe in yoga...
John Lennon, God

I don’t believe in yoga, I practice yoga.
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 360.21

...it’s 2011 and I’ve resolved to stop leaving my yoga mat at the studio....that’s not the big news, though...

...up until now, this humble site has reveled in its unique status among yoga blogs...y’know, the one written by the guy who doesn’t actually know crap about yoga....as stated so succinctly in its very first post...

this woman I was kinda sorta involved with said she was curious about yoga and wanted me to teach her some. I told her I’m still working on not hurting myself by overstretching my hamstrings. Hell, I’m still not even sure what hamstrings are.*

...even cluelessness, however charming, turns out, eventually, to be impermanent...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 223:461

...this year, though...specifically in February and March...I’m stepping away from the time honored personal ritual of sitting around depressed until spring...instead heading up to spend a month in the snowy Berkshires, at Kripalu...eating, drinking, and sleeping yoga, while completing...are ya ready for this?...a 200 hour yoga teacher training...

...that’s right, people, the Yoga Cynic’s going legit...

...soon I’ll be able to fill this blog with dry, didactic, and painfully self-satisfied lectures on Real Yoga (i.e. what I learned in my teacher training...as opposed to that crap you do)...as well as to use that legendary inaudible-from-more-than-six-inches-away yoga teacher voice...(though, obviously, I need to come up with a written equivalent to use here)...(perhaps this)...and, generally, to act really egotistical while insisting I’ve overcome my ego...

...or maybe not...though I'll probably find out what hamstrings are...

...seriously, it's gonna be intense and challenging, and I'm excited...hope you all have good stuff coming up this year, too...namaste & all that...

*...this, needless to say, was before Y4C found the magic of ellipses...**

**...Y4C, I’ve decided, is a good abbreviation for Yoga for Cynics...up until now, I’ve used YforC, but everybody else seems to prefer the more succinct YfC...which makes me...and probably everybody else...think of KFC...which, y’know, doesn’t exactly help with the all-important-for-yoga-bloggers vegan demographic...

Post Holiday Doldrums and Accidental Haiku

2010-12-27T18:20:00.006-05:00

I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

Audrey Hepburn

sluggish, sinuses
on fire, don’t wanna know how
much weight I’ve put on*

* was compiling bodily complaints and realized they came out to exactly seventeen syllables, easily divisible into a traditional five-seven-five structure...making my whining about minor seasonal ailments a completely accidental and spontaneous complaint-haiku...which might be really spiritual...or poetic.......or neither....perhaps funny?...if so, that’s at least as good as either spiritual or poetic...at least to my current state of mind...which let’s face it, is pretty typical for the time of year...minus the all-too-common post-holiday colds or emotional wounds...no fights with family members, this year...not even close...seriously...and, to the best of my knowledge at this point, on the early evening of the 28th, nothing caught from little relatives sneezing on me....the days are getting longer by a couple seconds with every sunrise, and 2011, less than a week ahead, is shaping up already to be a year of momentous events...in my little universe, at least...(but more on those, later)...best wishes, namaste, & all that to all you Floating Glowing Beings of Pure Love out there who give Yoga for Cynics meaning by reading (even when its author's in a crappy mood)...

Tidings of Comfort, Joy, and Weltschmerz

2010-12-23T00:10:00.007-05:00

The jewel of modern consciousness is compassion. But its worms will become confusion, world-view overload, self-doubt, and paralyzing narcissism. The purpose of Yoga will be to dig carefully through the worms to extract the jewel.
yoga 2.0

Because if this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus is just as selfish as we are or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.
Stephen Colbert

...wrote something a while ago called Compassion Can Be Complicated...(the title got changed on me)...citing famous Buddhist Pema Chodron on idiot compassion that causes us to do for others only for the sake of making ourselves feel better, without actually helping anybody...

...but things get even more complicated when the goal is to feel worse...(as, contrary to more simplistic views of human nature, is quite often the case)...

weltschmerz {German, from Welt world + Schmerz pain}: mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state
Merriam-Webster

...there’s a often a fine line between feelings of compassion for the whole world’s pain and a self-indulgent wallowing in a sense of unhappiness-greater-than-oneself...comfortable rapture in a miserable sublime...between making an expansive sense of compassion part of a personal spirituality and forging religion out of depression...

the notion of some infinitely gentle,
Infinitely suffering thing
T. S. Eliot

...worshipping an egotistical and infinitely resentful deity fed with continual sacrifices of pleasure...our own and that of those unfortunate enough to be close to us...a simultaneously self-righteous and self-lacerating attitude of how-can-you-enjoy-yourself-with-so-much-suffering-in-the-world...as if refusing joy here will somehow ease suffering elsewhere...

...the dominant idea, I think, even if it’s seldom stated, is that we have very limited capacities for either joy or compassion...that the two are separate, and greedy, and one takes from rather than feeds the other...that happiness necessitates callous indifference to others’ pain, and real compassion inherently involves turning away from happiness and toward our own pain...receiving only a booby prize of self-righteousness...which might, paradoxically, make you feel good, in a way...though, ironically enough, it’s the complete opposite of compassion...(if often mistaken for it, in some circles)...(if you feel strongly about how much more compassionate you are than other people, you’re probably not)...

...if there’s a spiritual mode I can get with, it would have to be one that allows the parallel lines of joy and compassion to merge...a love that, in the face of suffering, grows only stronger...

The Slowly Unfolding Orgasm of Existence

2010-12-17T18:20:00.009-05:00

We exult in out extraordinarily responsive central nervous system, which we ever seek to amplify through increasing exposure. We live in order to experience life more, and more closely. We soak up experience at every turn. Our bodyminds have evolved to participate fully in the slowly unfolding orgasm of existence. We have created yoga as a toolbox of participation.
matthew remski & scott petrie, yoga 2.0*

...last weekend took my mother to see Black Swan...(both liked it, though I probably would’ve enjoyed certain scenes without knowing mom was watching in the next seat)...(yeah, that one)...(and that one...definitely that one)...I’ve known lotsa dancers, and people who have dance backgrounds and are now yoga teachers...(almost as many as acid heads who are now yoga teachers)...and there are clear parallels between the traditions...as well as glaring differences...in the movie, somebody destroys herself, mind, body, and spirit, in pursuit of an aesthetic ideal...dying for perfection...which might be one of the better reasons to self-destruct, relatively speaking...like Oscar Wilde said...Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour...

...I dunno, though...could be I’m finally coming to a point in my life where I start to see that all as just a lot of depressed romantic overgrown adolescent bullshit...

...not that there’s anything wrong with that...

...it’s cold out...cold enough stuff hurts when I go outside...or maybe I’m just getting old...or maybe both...growing old hurts, but youth, as I remember, can be painful as hell...

...snow’s falling gently outside the cafe window, sticking, first, to cars and benches...now sidewalk and street...not much more than a dusting, really...but enough to make driving ugly...had planned on going from here to run some errands...by car...and go to yoga class...but might be nice to stay put...have some more green tea and watch it fall...

...anyway, to misquote both James Joyce and Grace Slick, I’d rather have perfection die for me...

* this might be the first of possibly a buncha posts kinda sorta maybe having something to do with this book...which I just started.... thanks to Carol, for turning me on to the book with her review at Elephant...

The Critical Importance of Flexibility

2010-12-11T18:09:00.010-05:00

Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.
(attributed to John Lennon, T. S. Eliot, and Bertrand Russell)

...sleep, I find, is a chore when I need it,
but an indescribable luxury when it’s time to get up...

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever—

this is a somewhat new kind of religion.
Albert Einstein

...similarly, nothing makes writing harder
than having good, solid reasons to write...

Almost all of my epiphanies over the previous fifteen years
had been the same one: I don’t know.
Stephen Cope

...the worst thing to do if you’re trying to be more flexible,
it turns out, is to try to be more flexible...

No Comment

2010-12-04T00:45:00.005-05:00

...a bunch of friends crammed into my car to go downtown and see another friend play guitar in a record store...(yes, those still exist)...just down the street from where I go to yoga class...and, as it turned out, yet another friend, who’d biked down, was hoping for a ride home, asked if I could put her bike in my trunk....I said I’d see if it’d fit, but wasn’t too optimistic...having thrown all the crap from the backseat in there to make room for everybody....plus, one of those people had gotten off a train and put her luggage in there...but, the biggest problem with making the bike fit, even if the tires both came off, as she said they would, would be the bike rack I keep in the trunk, which takes up half the space...

....it actually took me a couple minutes to realize the bike rack might, in fact, be something other than an obstacle...

Giving Credit Where It's Due...the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program

2010-11-27T21:47:00.007-05:00

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake

...just got back from the eye doctor because my artificial doors of perception are badly scratched...missing a nose piece, and, since I stepped on them on getting out of bed last week, badly mangled enough I decided finally to do something about it...could be there’s a metaphor in that somewhere...

As long as we associate happiness with getting what we want, we’ve associated it with exactly the opposite thing that makes us happy. Getting what we want doesn’t make us happy, not wanting makes us happy.
Adyashanti

...it's easy to envy the bliss we see in little kids, especially when it's brought on by so little...an ice cream cone or a favorite cartoon coming on...but, then, with that, there's the total abject wailing despair when the ice cream cone falls on the sidewalk or mom decides that's enough TV for today....there's definitely something to be said for the kind of quiet equanimity you see in older people...

Some say they can recall a thousand years
Some say they have already visited the next thousand years
On a windy day I am waiting for a bus.
Ko Un (stolen from the legendary Brooks, who got it from Yoga for a World Out of Balance, by Michael Stone)

...for a while now, been biking around Philly taking pictures of some of the amazing street art that’s appeared over the past couple decades, and have quite shamelessly used it to illustrate Yoga for Cynics posts (particularly this one and this one) as well as an Elephant Journal article. It wasn’t ’til recently, though, that I found out where all the art was coming from, and realized I’d been severely remiss about giving credit where it’s due. The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, led by Jane Golden, began as an offshoot of the city’s anti-graffiti network, channeling the talents of graffiti artists to benefit their communities as well as themselves, and is now, as America’s largest public art program, responsible for Philly having more murals on its walls than any city in the world, working with a variety of non-profits, including Philly’s own Yoga Unites, to empower young people through art. I should mention I’ve showcased only a tiny handful of more than 3,000 in the city, and simply the ones I happen to have biked, walked, or driven by and liked with camera handy. In fact, they're everywhere, including neighborhoods where you probably wouldn’t expect to see dazzling public art (and, actually, a few of the photos here were taken very quickly before skedaddling away...making it highly inconvenient to realize suddenly that my back tire was going flat)...

Decaffeinated

2010-11-23T16:09:00.005-05:00

Coffee is prana.
Patanjali*

Since every pleasure’s got an edge of pain,
Pay for your ticket and don’t complain...
Bob Dylan

It’s been a week since my last cup of coffee...and you were wondering why this blog’s been so quiet?**

...then, I’m probably quitting the whole yoga thing, anyway...been reading so much about how healthy it is...which is a problem, since I'm currently working on gettin' me a new health insurance plan...and...unlike most people, who end up paying far more than they ever get back...making the insurance industry so profitable it buys senators and congressmen like yoga folk buy expensive crap with Om symbols on it...I wanna profit from the arrangement...

...so, from here on, my health is the insurance company’s problem...no more yoga, no more meditation, no more fruits and vegetables...organic or otherwise...no more biking (except in busy traffic...without a helmet...preferably drunk)....might even change the name of this blog to Sitting in Front of the Tube Eating Ho-Ho’s, Smoking Cigarettes, Drinking Cheap Booze, Snorting Crystal Meth and Letting the Insurance Company Pick Up the Tab for Cynics...but, it occurs to me, that might be a tad redundant...

* yeah, I know, that’s not in your copy of the Yoga Sutras...that’s ‘cause it’s an exceptionally rare out-take, available only as part of the outrageously expensive digitally re-mastered limited edition Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras: the Complete Sessions deluxe boxed set...along with a few alternate takes (Sutra 1.1: “let’s party”) and the legendary, unexpurgated, Vedic Times interview with Patanjali...in which he admits he was joking about celibacy....***

** not to mention that this particular post is, let’s face it, not up to the usual quality standards...loose though they are...really not much more than an excuse for that cheesy Patanjali joke....I recommend skipping the rest and checking out my far more inspirational Thanksgiving post at Elephant Journal...or going back and reading that last one, which was pretty good: One Breath at a Time....namaste & all that...

*** wha??!!... You think I’d make this stuff up???!!!

One Breath at a Time

2010-11-14T18:42:00.006-05:00

Beneath the heavenly equator in the valleys where the sweet and saline dew meet, there grows a huge poisonous fungus, and the tasty little edible mushrooms on its cap transform its contaminated blood into sweetness. The deer like to invigorate their masculine strength by nibbling these little mushrooms. But if they are careless and bite down too deep, they ingest some of the big poisonous fungus along with the little mushrooms, and then they die.
Every evening, when I kiss my beloved, I think: it is only natural that one day I will bite down too deep....
Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars [ellipsis in original]

...don’t let them fool you with dope and cocaine;
Won’t do no harm to feel your own pain...
John Lennon

...takes a few frustrating details to irreparably alter the most placid description...memories make me ugly, sometimes...I know alcohol’s not an answer, or even much of a question, but knowledge ain’t always all it’s cracked up to be...

...there’s a song called Boulder to Birmingham by Emmylou Harris, about the death of her friend and mentor Gram Parsons...I’ve always liked a line at the beginning of the second verse: well you really got me this time...thought about that a lot after my dad died...after so many years of fucking with each others’ heads...in protracted and largely unconscious psychological warfare...him a licensed shrink...me, the son of a shrink who’d grown up learning to resist anything anybody else wanted me to do or be like my life depended on it...which it kinda did...I’d say we were evenly matched...until he went and threw down the ultimate trump card...

...every couple years I quit coffee...temporarily...like, for a month or two...usually when it gets to the point that excessive caffeine seems to be keeping me awake and bothering my stomach...meaning that, at this point, I’m long overdue...down to one cup a day for the past couple weeks, but it’s still difficult to schedule that three day headache...

...last week somebody at the rehab called me an angel...I was trying to tutor her in writing, and, with just a couple sentences on paper, she put the pen down and vented to me for about an hour about how she missed her kids and how pissed off she was at their father...apparently, I called her to come meet with me just after she’d gotten off the phone with him and was sitting with the other clients, pretending everything was okay...said she felt she could tell me everything precisely because I’m not a therapist...that I was an angel God had sent to her just when she needed me...

...was late to yoga class this morning...hate it when that happens...walked in on everybody else already in yoga class mode while I was in fuck, I’m late to yoga class mode....after fifteen or twenty minutes in the car, getting pissed off at other drivers...speed up goddammit, I’m trying to get to my fuckin’ yoga class...tryin’ to be more open n’ compassionate n’ shit...get outta the fuckin’ way...

...maybe there’s a reason the women at the rehab can relate to me, even if I’ve never been addicted to cocaine or heroin...they’re struggling with the one day at a time thing...I’m working on one breath at a time...and thankful that I get another chance, every second or so...

Life in Motion

2010-11-09T10:38:00.005-05:00

...the time change confused me, as usual...spring forward, fall back seems simple enough, but somehow always so complicated...particularly considering the tendency of some, but not all, high tech appliances these days to update on their own...I quit wearing a watch long ago, and, more recently, my old clock radio broke...(actually, it still works, but the knob used to change the time on it doesn’t)...(so, I just need to turn it on at exactly midnight)...(which I’m gonna do...one of these days)...

...(that plan, however, is complicated by my recent efforts to get up earlier)...(while also cutting down on junk food and caffeine)...(which makes the early to bed part easier)...(but also leaves me kinda wandering in a dream)...(like, even more than usual)...(weeks going by like long, highly involved years)...(not that that's a bad thing)...

...have been going to the local meditation studio where people sit, generally, a bit too early for me...or, sometimes, more than a bit...and this is where the time change became an issue...waking up this past Sunday, saw my cell phone and computer both had the same time....so...did that mean they both changed automatically, or neither did?....as I was up, anyway, assumed the former and, since I was too late to walk, headed out to the car, hoping I wouldn’t be an hour early...to find that the car clock was an hour ahead...its wrongness letting me know what time was right...relatively speaking...

...watching Koyaanisqatsi...(wonder what the spell-check's gonna think of that one)...(Hopi for "life out of balance")...Godfrey Reggio’s masterwork of ecological chaos, fancy camerawork and Philip Glass minimalism.....first time I saw it was with a buncha people from the Philly Greenpeace office in the mid-80’s...passed around an eye-dropper, watched it along with The Lorax...("I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues")...and Star Trek IV...(the one where the Starship Enterprise goes back in time to saves the whales)...on somebody’s VCR...kind of a serendipitous psychedelic eco-film festival....certainly, never saw a mushroom cloud quite the same way again...

...time slowing up and speeding down...Hopi prophecies meeting momentous ill-conceived housing developments...embedded in the inherent contradictions of so beautifully using cutting edge technology to make a statement about technology growing out of control...dazzling unspoiled spaces and toxic wastelands...

...there in the midst, though, a kind of third term represented by moving images of people on the street...faces, hair, clothing...caught up in the maelstrom and looking very strange...and yet, they’re us...

Empty Voids or Open Space

2010-11-05T08:41:00.005-04:00

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.
Frank Zappa

...after much excitement, there’s little on the calendar...major holidays, of course...solid letters, in printer’s ink...lacking the passion of my barely-legible scrawl....weekly, bi-weekly, and semi-weekly commitments, of course, though they’re hardly necessary to write down, and some weeks, I don’t bother....what there are are days, lots of them...frightening or inviting...empty voids or open space...depending on how I choose to look at blankness...

The soul is a verb, not a noun.
David Mitchell

...was teaching...or trying to teach the men at the homeless shelter...who were having none of it....how do you give a well-meaning white liberal a hard time?...let me count the ways...

...at one point, my frustration reaching its ebb, a guy I’ll call Derek...(who, I was happy to find, had, since I’d last seen him, managed to get through a court date that might have sent him to prison)...turned to me with a smile, said: you can tell this is a house of pain, right?....I smiled back, grateful, said: yup...

To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
Stephen Covey

The Slow and Gradual Path to Minor Fame as a Yoga Blogger

2010-11-01T17:23:00.009-04:00

...time to say farewell to October, month o' major amounts of yoga...including the Philly yoga festival, trip to Kripalu, and only three days in which I didn’t attend at least one yoga class...including this past Saturday, when I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity...which, I think, was all about walking a line between humor and seriousness, accepting others, toning down the rage, and trying to be mindful rather than reacting out of instinctual fear...and, as such, kinda like a really big yoga class...

...but not requiring a mat...which is good since I've had a tendency to leave my mat at yoga studios lately...like yesterday...and last Tuesday....and the week before that, left my shorts...leaving little doubt that my subconscious mind wants yet more yoga...

...which it’s getting...as I ended up marking the first day of the relatively low-key yoga month of November feeling both mellow and energized...and, first and foremost, concerned with going to get my mat first thing in the morning and, though planning on my usual kundalini class in the evening (which I did end up going to, as well...work? what's that?), staying for a most excellent vinyasa class...in which, for the very first time, I dropped back from wild thing...camatkarasana...to wheel...urdhva dhanurasana...on both sides...even if I couldn’t manage to reverse it...(note to non-yogi readers: this is, like, really really impressive...)...(not that impressively performing advanced transitions between asanas is the point, or anything)...

...(...seriously, like, one thing I've come to realize is that, while a vigorous yoga practice while badly out of shape isn't much fun....trust me, I know...sometimes being in shape is even more of a problem...)...(like, a couple different teachers have told me they can tell runners and cyclists...that's me...by their inability to touch the floor with their heels in downward facing dog...)...(...and then there was the time I was struggling to get into a bind and the teacher explained that the trouble came from my arms and legs being so muscular...and I thought hmmmm...she's saying I'm just too buff and studly for this pose....that's gotta be the best reason not to be able to do something I've ever heard.....I think I can live with it...)...

...anyway, along with the practice, this yoga cynic's fame continues...slowly, very slowly...to grow...even as weird, existential stuff is fed to the masses....people meet me and then send really impressed e-mails saying stuff like whoa, dude! I can’t believe you’re the guy who writes yoga for cynics!!!...seriously...there’s talk of a Yoga for Cynics workshop some time in the new year (or, at least, there's been a brief chat after yoga class a couple weeks ago about meeting for coffee at some unspecified time in the future to talk about the possibility of a Yoga Cynics workshop maybe some time next year)...(...then, that's how democracy got its start, too...)...a couple weeks ago, got my latest blog award from the legendary Laura...and Brooks wrote an article at Elephant Journal featuring not only a picture of myself with herself and the uber-famous Seane Corn, but wrote such lovely stuff about me, I’m almost too embarrassed to link to it...but will...check it out...

...so, now, I sit contemplating possible layouts for the Yoga for Cynics ashram...thinkin’ recycled building materials, floppy-eared dogs roaming the grounds, inspiring inscriptions from the Tao Te Ching, Leaves of Grass, and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, and a totally laissez faire attitude toward sex...somewhere where the ocean meets the sea and dolphins frolic in the waves...and it occurs to me that I really oughtta be getting back to work...

Dancing Wildly With Your Eyes Closed

2010-10-28T07:55:00.010-04:00

...been goin’ to a lotta kundalini yoga classes....kundalini yoga, for them what don’t know, might be the most blatantly religious type o’ yoga...tied intimately to Sikhism...complete with headgear, long flowing robes, titles, and loads and loads of esoteric beliefs....making it not exactly the obvious choice for one so irreligious as your friendly neighborhood yoga cynic...

I can get you high—high on your breath.
Yogi Bhajan

...it’s also might be called the trippiest form of yoga...did I say trippy?!...I meant inward-focused...sometimes involving stuff like dancing wildly with your eyes closed*...which is why so many hippies got into it....personally, I get a solid buzz from yoga in general...but, in a kundalini class, I’m disappointed if I don’t get visuals.......not that, y'know, that's a reason to do it or anything...

* ...think I gained the respect of the drama club in high school simply by showing up for the West Side Story dance audition...I like to be in America okay by me in America everything’s free in America for a small fee in America...like, I was cool just to try in the face of an innate lack of grace, coordination, etc....in the end, getting the role of the guy who comically tries to make the Jets and Sharks dance rather than fight at the dance...without doing any dancing, myself....learned everything I know about the art of dance a year or two later at Grateful Dead shows...chemically infused & almost totally loose....so that trance-dancing in the yoga studio feels almost like coming full circle...

*thanks to Karin for her always amazing artwork*

From the Coffee Shop at Kripalu...

2010-10-24T13:58:00.008-04:00

soft foggy morning,

mist, quite the view from here, is

that a metaphor?*

* ...biggest problem with this place is the food's so good, and there's so much of it...and afterwards, you do yoga....then, I suspect there are worse things a person can experience in this world than a touch of indigestion during camel pose....all morning, stuff kept reminding me of a dream last night I can't remember...just strange amorphous resonances....was telling Brooks...(even better in person than on-line)...about it...she asked what the dream felt like....I thought for a minute, said nice...warm...she said that's good...and I think she's probably right...

Today I Wrote About Nothing

2010-10-18T11:07:00.004-04:00

All all the trees go piff
all all the rocks go paff
all all of nature poof.
Daniil Kharms (from Today I Wrote Nothing)

If at first an idea isn't absurd, There's no hope for it.
Albert Einstein

...all in all, doing nothing’s a lot easier when I’m supposed to be doing something...particularly if I have a precise idea of what that something's supposed to be...then I know just what to ignore...(even if I can never really ignore it completely)...and if it’s something I really don’t feel like doing...or, better yet, a whole bunch of things I don’t feel like doing...which, alas, is the case most of the time...almost anything can serve as a distraction...and the hours go by like...nothing...

...but seriously doing nothing...focusing on doing nothing...doing nothing with a sense of purpose...with discipline...that’s a different matter entirely...then, suddenly, everything I could possibly be doing instead seems to intrude as if by some kind of deep imperative...check the oil, clean the bathroom, buy some cheese...run for president, get a sex-change, find out what it’s like to eat a whole pocketful of sand...though, of course, if I quit meditating with an imperative to get all of these things done in a timely and efficient manner...most likely I’ll be right back to nothing in no time...

...started meditating again...like, a day or two ago...half an hour a day.......okay, twenty minutes........

Yoga Raving...

2010-10-11T23:09:00.013-04:00

...Thursday night at the Do Yoga Philly! festival looked intense: shamanism, Jedi training, three hours of very intense asana practice with yoga legends Ray Crist, John Vitarelli, and Simon Park...and something called a blender bike...not that it stopped me taking a twenty-five mile bike ride in the gorgeous fall weather, beforehand....nearly killed me...but in a good way...

...dreamed that night about yoga...somehow ending up riding in the back of a boxy little red car with a strange blonde haired woman I’d apparently just gotten married to...feeling suddenly terrified, realizing I’d inexplicably gone off the deep end, done something quite possibly irreversible, wondering how I’d gotten myself into something like this...was sitting there about to quietly lose it when realization dawned that it was a dream......felt a peculiar sadness mixed with the relief, though, realizing whatever might have been wouldn’t, and I was never gonna to see her again once I awoke...

Fear says ‘I’ll keep you safe.’
Love says ‘you are safe.’
Mahan Rishi Singh Khalsa

...in the morning found out I was on youtube, making smoothies for the yogic multitudes...that evening went to a class with noted teacher and Yoga Journal cover model Marni Sclaroff, who talked about childhood experiences that cause us to contract...I thought that covers pretty much everything from about age seven to seventeen...then, in the past, I’ve tended to think in terms of damage....and when stuff gets damaged, sometimes all the kings horses and all the king’s men can’t even begin to put it back together again....something that contracts, on the other hand, can, with patience and effort, be inspired to open up again...

...the deeper you go, the higher you fly,
the higher you fly, the deeper you go...
John Lennon

...feel like I’m entering a new phase of the yoga practice...deeper...beyond merely looking good in my Lululemon pants*....did sixteen hours or so of yoga over the long weekend...including seven and a half on Saturday...culminating in something called avatar yoga, complete with black light, pounding yogic techno, and a roomful of people whooping it up decorated in glow-in-the-dark body paint....kinda like a yoga rave...acid without the acid....(it could be argued that, deep down, I’m still some kinda hippie freak)....(but definitely one hardcore yoga dude)...

* note: the author doesn’t actually own and has never worn a pair of Lululemon pants...he’s not even sure they make them for men...

Mindful Irritation, Graceful Wipe-Outs, and Yogardosing in the Crisp Autumn Air

2010-10-06T11:55:00.011-04:00

...had this nasty rash all summer...(don’t worry...I’m not providing details)...(or pictures)...actually, longer than that...and still have it...but the high heat and humidity made it unbearable...(except that, obviously, I did bear it)...(and, as such, like most unbearable things, it really wasn’t)...(just really unpleasant)...which made concentration difficult...and uninterrupted sleep nearly impossible...making concentration even more difficult...causing me to write a lot less and find far less enthusiasm for the mindfulness meditation thing....since, y'know, being mindful of irritation gets old fast...

...yeah, yeah, I know what you hardcore yogis out there are thinking...this is exactly the kind of challenge I should welcome....at this very moment, you’re skimming to the bottom of the post to leave a comment about your guru who not only sat meditating on a fire ant nest for fifty years, but had acolytes continually pouring warm honey over his head....I ain’t him...

...as it is, I’ve gained a new appreciation for Autumn, though...the chill coming through windows I refuse to close, though any sane person would...

...the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill river bike paths both flooded Friday, leaving a good bit of mud on the pavement in places...cold rain still pitter-pattering along again on Monday, but I just had to get out on the bike...hit a muddy patch and, feeling the bike falling inexorably to the right, pulled my leg out and managed to sit perched on the left edge of the seat, riding gently to a halt....a passing jogger, once having ascertaining I was alright, complimented me on my graceful wipe-out...

...was gonna try to go to yoga class every day in October...ended up making it all the way through October 1st before one thing after another came up on the 2nd...but plan on serious yogardosing* from here on out, including Philadelphia’s first yoga festival, Do Yoga Philly! this weekend, and, two weeks later, a weekend workshop at Kripalu with yoga legends Brooks Hall and Seane Corn (I’m sooooo unworthy...)...and then might be heading down to D.C. for the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive...which might be yogic in its own way...a meeting at the crossroads of idealism and sarcasm...what could be more appropriate?

* defined...in section 11,266 of the Sacred and Venerable 3,197th Commentary on Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 312:474...as: like overdosing, but good for you...

* also just put up a revised version of an older autumn post "Falling" at Elephant Journal