Dancing Wildly With Your Eyes Closed

...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*

Homophobia Sucks

Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are,
(For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse really are?)
Walt Whitman

I can go off on an angry political rant to make even those who agree with me uncomfortable at the drop of a...actually you don’t even need to drop a hat, or anything....I do it spontaneously. And that’s exactly why I don’t bring politics into Yoga for Cynics much—it’d be too easy, and would end up consuming all else. That’s the inherent problem with that great, creative rage...ideals of peace and unity making a person so righteously angry as to end up snarling and barking and putting up walls.

The goal is to be positive, but not in that cheesy New Age pretend-shit-doesn’t-stink kinda way, though it's always a fine line. Yoga, to me, is about opening, and cynicism is about closing, and I’m hoping maybe humor can be a bridge between the two.

But cynicism isn't inherently bad. If people tell you it is, ask for their wallets and keys and credit card numbers. There are things we need to defend ourselves from, things we need to oppose, things we need to speak out against. In a couple of conversations recently, I’ve tried to put as positive a spin as possible on Amendment 8, casting it as a reminder not to be complacent, that there are still battles to be fought, right here and right now, and that anyway, things are steadily moving forward, that we’re still only twenty years away from a storied administration that proclaimed “morning in America” while ignoring the AIDS epidemic and we've sure come a long way since then. But I don’t really expect anybody to be mollified by that. The only thing more hateful than homophobia is trying to hide it behind one's God. I was struck by the thought when the beautiful new First Family walk on stage Tuesday night that my country is better than I imagined, but that doesn't mean we don't still have some serious shit to work on.

Old Roads Rapidly Fading

My mom’s not sure, at this point, how old she was at the time—very young, though old enough, apparently, to ride the Washington D.C. city bus by herself—but she got on and saw Estelle, a woman who worked for her mother, and went to sit with her. “No, Joyce,” said Estelle, “you can’t sit back here. You need to go up front.” Confused, she did as she was told, and it was only when she got home that her mother explained how it was that, in our nation’s capitol, Estelle had to sit in the back of the bus, and she couldn’t join her there. Earlier today, at the age of 82, my mom went to the polls and voted for Barack Obama, who, a few hours ago, accepted the office of the presidency of the United States. It’s been a long time coming, but change has come to America, he told the crowd in Chicago's Grant Park.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a satirical piece called Yoga for Real Americans, which turned out to be my most popular blog post (and I rather like it myself). But the truth is that yoga, in Sanskrit, means union (though this blog has offered up its own, related, definition: opening), so that real American yoga would have to, in fact, include all races, all genders, all sexual orientations, all cultures, all ideologies and beliefs, ultimately transcending America itself to embrace all the people of the world in a deep understanding that, ultimately, there are no differences between us that are anything but superficial.

Namaste, America.