Restless Teenagers of the Mind

...Tuesday night yoga class at the homeless shelter was a frustrating one...restless young teenagers incessantly chatting and goofing off as I endeavored to talk about the value of quiet and stillness....such, I’ve learned, in the past, can be a good time to amp things up...some lunges, side-plank, and core work...the time-honored kick their restless asanas method...which doesn’t work so well when people have more of an attitude of we’ll just sit here and have a conversation until you come up with something easier that we can do while having a conversation....as such, the experience was kind of ruined for the older folks in the room...including myself......and yet, no matter how disruptive they can be, I really don’t want to kick the kids out, since I think they’re the ones who can benefit most from the practice...such behavior only evidence of that...

...(then, it’s been that kinda week or two...so hot and muggy, relaxation is exhausting...and not relaxing even more so....thinking, of course, is always difficult...but not nearly as hard as not thinking....right now, I’m escaping the worst of the heat in someone else’s house, practicing yoga to Sonic Youth and John Coltrane in an air-conditioned room, with a boisterous young dog named Raffi who wants to wrestle....wrestling with a dog while in full padmasana might count as yoga, I think...calming him down with a scratch behind the ears while in supta baddha konasana definitely does)...

...Wednesday night meditation class wasn’t easy, either....sat there for the whole forty five minutes, though that restless, fidgety, and utterly unfocused thing I was doing would fit with only the most liberal definitions of meditation...the most I could say for myself was that I stayed, even if paying a whole hell of a lot more attention to so-slowly moving hands of the clock on the wall than to my breath...wondering what on earth I was doing in this room with all these good, tranquil-minded meditators sitting so calm and serene...

...and yet, it occurred to me, my mind is a lot like the teenagers in my yoga class...belonging on the cushion all the more for its failure at anything resembling stillness...

Coffee Yoga, Coffee Zen

...not, generally, a morning person, woke and decided to head for the yoga mat...though, as usual, the option of sitting in the Ikea chair, crankin’ up the interwebs, and drinking coffee beckoned, as well...especially the coffee part...

...ever the non-traditional yogi...(though continuing to insist that, if they’d had it in India, at the time, the first yoga sutra would have been preceded by first, some coffee)...wondered if the two might somehow be incorporated...

...lately, been working on sustaining sitting poses, particularly full lotus...padmasana, for you Sanskrit nerds...and hero pose...virasana...leaving open the question of just what to do while in those poses for long periods....yeah, I know, meditate...do some pranayama...stretch the neck and shoulders...but, then, sometimes I also like to read a little Walt Whitman or Zen Flesh, Zen Bones...an activity that goes just beautifully with drinking coffee...

...and there, tops of feet on my thighs, almost immediately upon opening Zen Flesh..., in the final, Centering, section, read...

When eating or drinking, become the taste of the food or drink, and be filled.

...so that’s what I did with my coffee....touching on that sacred matrix between aum and yum....(or somethin’ like that)...