Post-Apocalyptic Self-Promotion

...Sandy, the semi-mythical Jersey girl Bruce Springsteen sang about and, apparently, spurned, so that she came back decades later to wreck the Jersey shore, has moved on...or maybe that conscious universe the yoga crowd’s always talking about caught an episode of Jersey Shore and decided to get all Old Testament on it...taking lower Manhattan and Red Hook Brooklyn...(which I know about from that Dylan tune...yes, I do comprehend the world through a lens of 70's rock ballads)...and much of the eastern seaboard with it....here in Philly, I’m finishing up a can of Mad Max brand dog food...Mad Max: The Dog Food Mad Max Eats!...and hoping to head out later for Tina Turner’s post-apocalyptic vinyasa class at Thunderdome...

...alright, enough snarky pop-cultural references...in the post-apocalyptic wasteland,* it’s self-preservation that counts...along with its dear acquaintance self-promotion...and so, I come bearing a cornucopia of  links: to my latest breathlessly self-indulgent book reviews, Yoga in America: Containing Multitudes and The Yoga of Biking: Pedal, Stretch, Breathe, as well as a first-ever interview with the Yoga Cynic (who manages to be sarcastic only about 73.2% of the time), all at Elephant Journal...read 'em, "like" 'em, share 'em, tweet 'em, make 'em central to your way of life and essential belief system...

* Totally Serious Postscript: actually went biking around Philly with a camera on Tuesday, hoping to get some good  pics of the local devastation for this post....it kinda looked like we’d had a bit of rain....thankfully, not only did Philly get through with little damage, but friends and family in harder-hit areas in NYC, NJ, and rural PA also got through unscathed, though some are still waiting to get power back....others, of course, weren’t so lucky, so here’s a link for anyone looking to help out the many still in need...

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Joyce

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

Bruce Springsteen, Adam Raised a Cain

 

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

Bullies and Warriors

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

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

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


image: Virabhadra Daksha

New Leaves in October

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Than Two Months Since The Last Yoga For Cynics Post

...more than two months since the last Yoga for Cynics post...can there be any more dire evidence of the decline and fall of blogging?...maybe...more likely, it’s just a reflection of my mental state...and what is a blog, at its best, but a mirror?...

...a brief listing of blog posts you may have missed since they never got written would have to include: I’m Miserable, Still Miserable, Totally Miserable, Oh God Am I Miserable, and I’m Gonna Try to Get All Sophisticated and Spiritual and Discuss My Misery in Terms of Samsara and the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths....in other words, ya haven’t missed much...(though there have been a few really, really insightful, interesting, and amusing Elephant Journal articles...with complete sentences, and everything)...

...things are improving, now, as the feverish ozone of the hottest summer ever gives way to the light chilly breezes of fall, and I’m packing boxes, getting ready to move the cynically yogic base of operations from the somewhat isolated sylvan hills of Mt. Airy, State of Perpetual Mellowness, U.S.A. to the more urban and connected, yet still somewhat sylvan, streets of West Philly, State of Semi-Intellectual, Semi-Grungy Samadhi, U.S.A....packing a few boxes but, mostly, throwing stuff out...

...if there’s one lesson I’ve learned lately, it’s that there’s an awful lot that needs to be thrown out...and I’m working on it...

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...

Let Freedom Ring

 ...takin’ it easy, with iced coffee, waiting for things to cool down a bit to bike downtown to hear the Roots and watch fireworks on the Ben Franklin Parkway....hot July 4^th Wednesday, West Mt. Airy, State of Mellow Mildly Caffeinated Satori, U.S.A. almost a ghost town, people staying in with the air conditioning, or maybe downtown with the parade...me, still recovering from dehydration and heat exhaustion, spending the weekend walking around D.C., a city built on a swamp, in 104 degree heat, sustained by coffee and margaritas with friends, making my way through the National Gallery for Van Gogh, Picasso, Gerhard Richter and the Mirò exhibit, catching a sunburn walking out to see the new Martin Luther King Memorial...

....(some ago heard a usually-pretty-hip public radio kids’ show identifying King on his birthday as a man who had a dream...nothing more specific to ruffle ideological feathers....all the world loves a dreamer and speaker of positive intentions, right?....and asking kids to call in and say what their dreams were...turned it off after one hearing one too many young voices voices their dreams of having millions of dollars)...

...(then, it was another great American who said very well, then, I contradict myself....this, too, is America)...