The Paris Hilton of Yoga?

...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

Imperfections R Us

...said sorry, not feeling quite myself today...though knowing that simmering misery is at least as much myself as anything else I might be feeling...

`I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.'
Lewis Carroll

...been reading this book called Just Kids by Patti Smith, about herself and Robert Mapplethorpe as young artists in NY in the 60’s...listening to Blonde on Blonde and Beggars Banquet over and over, but too broke to go and see rock concerts...young artists aware of the legendary Andy Warhol factory scene nearby but lacking the cache to get anywhere near it...kind of funny, in a way...later on, Patti Smith asked should I pursue a path so twisted?...a line I’ve always liked...perhaps because the straight and narrow has only ever tended to get me hopelessly lost...

...one thing none of the yoga books say is that there’s probably no better time for a neti pot than when you’re sick-drunk....or that there’s no better cure for a serious hangover than a really intense vinyasa class...the kind that makes you silently chant what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger...

...another thing they don’t say is that getting sick-drunk might indicate that you’re in a very different...perhaps less placid...state of mind than you might have been telling yourself...

...recently read this book called Letters From the Dhamma Brothers...about a vipassana meditation program for inmates in a southern maximum security prison...(which, like the Dhamma Brothers movie, is worth checking out)....in one place, the point is made, in reference to participants who’ve been addicts, that meditation shouldn't be used as a substitute for drugs...and I get that...these techniques were developed with higher goals than another addictive behavior or a buzz...just like yoga wasn’t invented for killer abs and firm butts...but, at the same time, can’t help thinking if somebody’s looking for a buzz, wouldn’t it be a whole lot better to get it from meditation than from heroin?...or, would it be better if the yoga-as-exercise crowd joined the 40% of Americans who don’t exercise at all?....all in all, am inclined to think that if people are replacing something unhealthy with something healthy, that’s a good thing...even if it’s a watered-down version of a better thing...

...I useta use all kindsa crap to dilute my coffee before finally learning to enjoy it black...

...(yeah, I just compared yoga to coffee)...(but, ya gotta admit, better that than crack)...

...still not so sure, though, about the food co-op employee heard a couple days ago proudly proclaiming that he smokes organic cigarettes...

*cross posted at Elephant Journal*

Nidra

I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are in case you don’t know...
Lou Reed

People are always calling me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?
Andy Warhol

...toes fuzzy and pink...remember dipping into cold water on the Oregon coast 1987...a mellow place, even if not feeling that way inside...scents of incense, wet bark, and self-righteousness...brightly colored star fish and those long green whips of seaweed...bright blue anemones in profusion on the rocks along the shoreline where I walked...

...knees harbor nostalgia for early childhood...when they touched the earth with every movement...dumb feet dragging behind...

...like a globe representing a tortured world...churning and rumbling at the most inopportune times...my stomach is prone to self-dramatizing...

...spine like an old soldier, too long stuck on guard duty...soldiering on, nonetheless...dreaming of learning to dance, like a snake...

...fingers have a regrettable tendency to get into trouble...well, a tendency, at least...can’t say I always regret it...

...shoulders tense, hard...impregnable bulwarks...or so they’d like to think...against dangers real and imagined...past and present...and far too often unable to tell the difference...

...throat feels lonely...too much struggling to express what needs to be said...to establish connections...victim of post nasal drip and whatever crap enters through the mouth...and yet, tirelessly bringing the breath in and out...I’m learning to pay more attention to my throat...

...nose often irritated...kinda like it’s the angry talk-radio host of my face...but open to whatever comes around...taking in as much as it throws out...hard to say what its politics are...

...right forehead, this morning, from the eye on up, a dark grey cloud...though dissipating as warmth and light gradually filter through...



...artwork stolen from Karin.......okay, so she gave me permission to steal it...which if yer gonna insist on bein' all literal n' shit means that, in a purely technical sense, it wasn’t actually stolen...but just lemme feel like an outlaw, awright?...

Talkin' Nonsense With Dostoyevsky

Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms. If you keep talking big nonsense, you will get to sense. I am a man, therefore I talk nonsense. Nobody ever got a single truth without talking nonsense fourteen times first. Maybe even a hundred and fourteen.
Dostoyevsky

...a guy I know shares a birthday with the guy who wrote Mein Kampf...I got the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere and get me home for tea...and I’m only a day away from the guy who said he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die....honestly, I don’t think this means much, but I’m not complaining, either...

...berenice left a comment on my Postmodern Yogi Bear post with a link to a story from the BBC involving a bear found sleeping in a campground in Washington state, surrounded by thirty-six empty beer cans...taken from campers’ coolers and opened with teeth and claws...need I mention that this makes me feel proud to be an American?...

...when I was twenty-one, hitch-hiked with a friend from Rome to Pompeii, where we had to leave our backpacks with this old lady in black who seemed like she’d probably been there since before the volcano erupted, to go and wander the ancient dead streets...climbing through windows where we weren’t supposed to go to see things closed off to other tourists....as we traipsed into the empty coliseum, history's weight seemed almost overwhelming...I thought wow...Pink Floyd played here...

...connections, it seems, are always tenuous...a shrink once told me small children go through a crisis when they realize they're actually separate from their mothers...autonomous, lonely beings in a frightening world....my question is when, exactly, does that crisis end?...

...if something is disappointing I know it’s not nothing, because nothing is not disappointing.
Andy Warhol

...Lao Tzu wrote when you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you....that is, with the right attitude, you can have everything you want...just like the new age people say....I doubt he was really talking about the mansion in the Hollywood hills, the private plane, or the movie star significant other, though...more likely, I think, he meant you can have everything you want when you stop wanting anything you don’t already have...

Notes from a Postmodern Yogi...Bear

...always been a big guy...bit on the hairy side...kinda slow and lumbering...with a sweet tooth...and a grouchy temper....have been referred to as that big lumberjack guy...but, far more often, as a bear...uso, in Spanish....apparently, if I were gay, that’d make me part of a subculture...but, then, I’ve generally fit in with subcultures only slightly better than with the larger cultures they exist on the fringes of, so maybe it’s just as well...even if it was kinda cool for a while when the grunge look came along and I was suddenly fashionable...but those things never last...

I turn into a bear every so often. I feel myself becoming a bear, and that’s a struggle I have to face now and then.
N. Scott Momaday

...have seen seven bears in the wild...the first, in the Tuolumne Meadows campground in Yosemite, was huge...seemingly fearless as it ravaged campers’ picnic supplies...turning to show its teeth and moving as if to charge when people got too close...which was certainly all the message I needed...though, after a while, a ranger came along, picked up a few pebbles and got the bear running with a few well aimed throws at its gigantic furry ass....the other six were along the Appalachian Trail...mostly crashing through underbrush at great speeds to get away from apparent danger...me....and then, maybe a week after the last, in the wilds of New Jersey...really...saw a few in cages, also just along the trail, down below Bear Mountain in New York, near the Walt Whitman statue...where tourists from the city shot me ugly looks, assuming, apparently, by my backpack and dirty, hairy thru-hiker's appearance, that I wasn’t the kind of person they wanted anywhere near their picnics...

And the number one threat to America is... Bears.
Stephen Colbert

...modern society wasn’t built with bears in mind...that much is clear...a culture of frenzied production and consumption looking ever askance at hibernations of any length, as well as the furry wildness of bears, in general...

“Well,” said Pooh, “we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought that if we looked for this Pit, we’d be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren’t looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really.”
A. A. Milne

...haven’t been too productive lately...somewhat indolent...attempts at decisive action like swimming through viscous sludge...struggling a bit, and then sinking...down through the floor, into the earth...to hibernate, like postmodern bears do, with the i-pod, DVD player and cheap greasy food from the Chinese take-out place down the street...but also books, yoga mat, and meditation cushion...making me a postmodern yogi bear...and I’ll crawl out when I’m good and ready...

So meet a bear and take him out to lunch with you
And even though your friends may stop and stare
Just remember that's a bear there in the bunch with you
And they just don't come no better than a bear
Lyle Lovett

Purple Prose

...saved for last...hardest to write about...perhaps operating out of some very deep kinda purple synaesthesia...I tend to be covered in it...purple sweater, purple shirts in numerous styles, purple sheets, purple blanket, purple towels...purple prose all over the place...even that Sanskritish title up there...purple lotus...purple Kool-Aid...Riders of the Purple Sage...and the wild mountain thyme grows around the purple heather...raspberries are best when they turn purple, almost but not-yet overripe...but only when you eat them right off the bush...really, they shouldn’t be eaten any other way...and, in an ideal purple world, they wouldn't be...

...blending blue and red...blood and the sea...rage and contemplation...celebration and melancholia... red-faced embarrassment and boundless sky...purple nurple...owww...

...prime color of psychedelia...even as all colors swirl together...Owsley Purple...Purple Haze...Jimi Hendrix himself seems to me to be purple...maybe that’s how he managed to cross the musical color barrier...he was more purple than anything...lately, I’ve been meeting up with old psychedelic friends...now all invested in purple yoga mats...

...Obama talked about a purple America during the campaign...not sure how well that’s working out, now...purple, of course is the color of royalty...nobility...people you're supposed to call your majesty or your holiness...as if kings and emperors could be any more majestic than convicts and elevator operators...popes and lamas any more holy than prostitutes and laborers...purple should always be for everybody...

Yoga for Real Americans

It's time that normal Joe Six-Pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency.
Sarah Palin

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
Friedrich Schiller

I don’t know about you, but I’ve about had it with these stuck-up elitist “yoga teachers” goin’ on about how they spent all these years “practicing yoga” and “reading books” about it. I’ll learn yoga from a regular American like myself, not some fancy pants “intellectual,” thank you, and you betcha it won’t be somebody who says all all these weird words from other countries. This is America, so I say talk English or go do your cobra pose in Cuba or Iran or somewhere. Lemme ask you this: when they start sayin’ all that foreign crap like surya namaskar and supta baddha konasana how the hell do you know they’re not talkin’ about terrorism? Answer: you don’t. Hell, you know when people started doin’ yoga here in the U.S.? The 60’s, that’s when. All the hippies got into it so they’d be all limber when they burned their draft cards and took LSD and had gay sex. How do you know Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright weren't doin’ downward facing dog while they were makin’ bombs and plottin’ how to kill “whitey?” You don't. Hell, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if those folks over there in India with their weird gods and crap didn’t come up with all this stuff just to keep us busy tying ourselves into pretzels while they steal our jobs.

That’s why now I’m workin’ with my buddy Joe, who’s taught me some real American yoga poses like sittinonthecouchdrinkinbeernwatchingnascarasana and gettindrunknshootinanimalsasana as well as the restorative passedoutdrunkonthefloorasana. Anybody else know any good ones, you be sure to let everybody know about 'em down there in the comments section.