Forty Days in the Yoga Wilderness

...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)

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)

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

? (Notes From Nowhere #6*)

* 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)

...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)

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)

...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