The Interweb Quote of the Year!!!

One thing this blog’s kinda been known for is the quotations peppered through its posts...often making its original writing pale in comparison, but, then, so it goes...(Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five). Of course, in this, it's taking part in that greatest of postmodern practices, which has flowered so fully on the interwebs: using other people's stuff for lack of anything original to express. So, in honor of all that, the staff here would like to share the first (and probably last) annual Yoga for Cynics Interweb Quotation of the Year!

Certainly, in the year 2011, nothing else came close to the profundity, timeliness, or sheer ubiquity of:

Something I never actually said.
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thank you, thank you.

Runners Up include:

The timeless:

Something kinda new-agey I certainly didn’t say, and that probably wouldn’t really fit with my philosophy or beliefs, either...
Rumi, the Buddha, and/or Albert Einstein

And more topical:

Something I did say, but taken so far out of context that it seems to mean the complete opposite of what it meant in-context.
Barack Obama

And, finally, who could forget:

Of course we’re going to riot....What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?
Student, Penn State, November 9, 2011

Happy new year, folks...

Sober Reflections on Getting Wasted (Notes from a Car by the Ocean #2)

Wasn’t lookin’ too good but I was feelin’ real well...
Keith Richards

My earliest introduction to the whole Eastern philosophy thing came from friends who were mostly into attaining higher consciousness by other means....generally speaking, the emphasis tended to be on escaping from a world we never made...which, I’ve since learned, is the opposite of what yoga is about, ideally...though some would disagree on that....hell, even if escape might, ultimately, be impossible, it still sometimes seems a lot easier than being here without reservations...and that, it appears, is where drugs and religion tend to meet...with one, of course, far more destructive than the other...though I won’t say which one that is....

I inhaled frequently. That was the point.
Barack Obama

....in The Bacchae by Euripides, Pentheus, king of Thebes, decides the people of his city need to be more rational and sober...no more honoring Dionysus with drunkenness and revelry....to make a long story short, Pentheus’ head ends up on a stick carried by his mother as she leads a group of revelers marching into Thebes....nowadays in America, everybody agrees we’ve got a problem with drinking and driving, though, despite melting ice caps and 45,000 traffic fatalities a year, the main focus always seems to be on the drinking rather than the driving...with the perennial solution being, as with most problems, putting more people in prison...which, when a drunk with a suspended license slams into a school bus, is kinda hard to argue with....nonetheless, living in a place where the last train leaves two or three hours before the bars close, I can’t help wondering what might happen if we let just a little bit of the seemingly limitless supply of funding for new prison construction go toward providing alternative means of getting home from the bars....

...until that happens, if you’re going out for New Years’ Eve, take your toothbrush....

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.

Pieces of Eight

I got eight carburetors and boys I'm usin' 'em all.
Bob Dylan

Yoga for Cynics is feelin’ the love as, just in the past few days, it’s been awarded honors by blogger friends Svasti, Juliet, and Tony the Acoustic Guitar Playing Red Panda, as well as being called upon by Samantha Grace (not her real name) to provide the following list (which also answers some frequently asked questions):

Eight Things You Might Not Know About Me:

1. After getting my PhD, I could hardly wait to be on a plane or somewhere and have somebody say “is there a doctor on board?” so I could reply “yes! I’m a doctor!” A month or so later, I was on a plane, and that very question came over the loudspeaker. I decided nobody’d think it was funny, though. So, I came up with the “can explain Faulkner while you die” thing, which people do think is funny (or at least that’s what they say).
2. I was once called “yoga faggot” in an online forum.
3. Ironically, enough, others have suspected me of going to yoga class to ogle women.
4. Much as I’m into the idea of being bisexual, I’ve sadly never actually met a man I was attracted to.
5. I know lots of places where I can see women without having to twist myself into gurudasana to do it.
6. Besides, as I am sometimes the only male in yoga class, I fill the quite necessary role of providing the low end on OM.
7. The quotes on this blog are mostly from memory, though I usually look up the exact wording. J. Krishnamurti wrote “if you quote some high authority, then you equally stop thinking,” and I agree with that...I mean I don’t agree with it...I mean....
8. No matter how perplexing you might find this blog, you’re still not nearly as confused as I am.

we must stand up and say “eight is enough.”
Barack Obama

Biking the Back Roads of My Mind

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world.
Atul Gawande One time I was riding my bike to work in Ithaca, New York, by a slightly different route than usual, and decided to cut across a parking lot. I got distracted, looking off to the side and remembering something about the last time I was there, and, all of sudden, was lying face down on the pavement. My bike, meanwhile, was tangled in the chain that, as it turned out, was across the entrance to the parking lot. Picking myself up, I realized that blood was pouring down my face. It wasn’t, however, until after a brief conversation with a passerby who had a cell phone and offered to call 911 that I saw the strikingly unnatural direction my left middle finger was pointing, and, like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff but not falling until he looked down, felt a sudden, overwhelming rush of agony. Two fingers turned out to be dislocated, and my first and second metacarpals broken badly enough that, in order to hold the bone parts together until they healed, the orthopedist needed to insert four “pins”—called that because nobody’d show up for surgery if they called them nails, though that’s what they were. So, for a month and a half, I had four metal hooks sticking out between my knuckles—kinda like Wolverine, except, rather than being able to hold my own against evil mutants, I couldn’t even button my pants.

But that’s not my point. What I meant to write about here has to do with the part I don’t remember, that period of a second or two when a number of really unpleasant things happened. What those things were can be inferred from the above, but they’re not my point either. My point is that I didn’t lose consciousness, but all that happened seems to have been instantaneously forgotten, as if it never happened, except for the obvious and painful consequences. It’s as if my unconscious said “you don’t need to see this” and pulled a dark curtain, and that was that. The mind, in other words, didn’t simply receive outside reality, but edited it.

Speaking of biking, right now I’m preparing for a two-day 150 mile ride, benefiting the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, on September 27-28, from Cherry Hill, New Jersey (near Philly) to Ocean City, NJ (right on—you guessed it—the ocean) and back—except that, being a masochist, I’m planning on doing 175 miles—a “century” the first day, 75 the second. The photo at the top of this post shows me pre-training, pre-yoga, and here I am now:
For more info, check out:
http://main.nationalmssociety.org/site/TR/Bike/PAEBikeEvents?px=5393304&pg=personal&fr_id=8150

Things To Do While Drinking Coffee #4

Should I pursue a path so twisted?
Patti Smith

A general rule for dealing with mental health professionals: never go to a shrink who doesn’t readily acknowledge that she’s at least as fucked up as you are.

I use the feminine pronoun above not to be PC, but because most women I know are more willing to acknowledge how fucked up they are than most men I know. Admittedly, a lot of men take pride in how fucked up they are—as do a few women—but they probably don't make the best therapists, either. So, another rule: if you walk into a shrink’s office, and the guy’s sitting there starting at the wall saying “duuuude, I am sooooooo fucked up," you should probably turn around and go.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.
Jawaharlal Nehru

For the most part, I disagree with the kind of gender essentialism expressed in that last paragraph. When you start seeing stuff like “men are from Uranus and women look really hot in pink” all over the place, it should be taken as a sign that traditional notions of gender difference are in some amount of trouble and it scares people shitless. At the same time, I don’t really think the story about the guy with the beard and the female reproductive system having a baby means much at all, except maybe something about media shamelessness and the willing gullibility of people like me who can't stop ourselves from reading about a pregnant man. Hell, upon returning from a week-long self-imposed news blackout in Mexico last spring, that was the first thing I saw.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anaïs Nin

Then, at that point, it was preferable to the accusations of racism and sexism lobbing back and forth between the Clinton and Obama camps. Right now, of course, a lot of of the accusations flying around are about politicians acting like politicians. While I find most of the shifts Obama’s made lately disappointing, in the end it’s probably good for a lot of starry eyed progressives to have to acknowledge that he’s a politician rather than a liberal messiah or reincarnation of Martin Luther King.

Two monks were washing their bowls in the river when they noticed a scorpion that was drowning. One monk immediately scooped it up and set it upon the bank. In the process he was stung. He went back to washing his bowl and again the scorpion fell in. The monk saved the scorpion and was again stung. The other monk asked him, "Friend, why do you continue to save the scorpion when you know its nature is to sting?" "Because," the monk replied, "to save it is my nature."

(A refreshing counter-story to the better known and far more cynical “you knew I was a scorpion/snake” one, found on somebody else’s blog) (http://musingsfrommara.blogspot.com/).

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
Steven Wright

*yet more thanks and praises to the High Point Cafe, West Mt. Airy, State of Wondrous Befuddlement, USA*

Hatred by any other name...smells

From Blogger’s Content Policy: “Users may not publish material that promotes hate toward groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity.” This is not a problem, as I wasn’t planning on promoting hate toward anyone anyway. Nonetheless....

Can anything possibly be more irritating than somebody like Ann Coulter saying “of course I’m not allowed to say [fill in hateful utterance] because it’s not politically correct”? Notice that she did say it, even within the act of claiming she’s not allowed to? Notice also that she and her many cohorts on talk radio and Fox News have made incredibly lucrative careers out of such cheap demagoguery, all the while insisting it’s not permitted? Overall, sentiments along the lines of “man, I can’t even burn a cross or beat up gays without being criticized anymore” leave my well of empathy rather dry. And yet, it's striking to see how successfully “political correctness” has been co-opted by wealthy bigots seeking to present themselves as rebels against an oppressive liberal elite.

Watching the ongoing presidential race, I'm fascinated (and horrified) by the verbal contortions some people go through to get the point across that Barack Obama is “not one of us.” Get this: “Obama” rhymes with “Osama!” And that means he’s just like the guy behind 9/11! Okay, and, "Bush" rhymes with "Tush" and, as so many tasteless comedians have pointed out, it's also a common term for pubic hair, and, combined with a vice president named “Dick”...never mind. More damning, anyway, is the middle name: Hussein! It doesn’t take a songwriter’s facility with rhyme to get that one! Especially since he never uses it! He’s hiding it, just like Saddam hid in that basement! There’s no getting around this one! Except...if conservatives consider middle names so revealing, what’s their problem with William Jefferson Clinton? I mean...would they want to impeach one of our Founding Fathers? Repeal the Declaration of Independence? Give the Louisiana Purchase back to those surrender monkeys in France? They must really hate America! Or, perhaps, they’re simply desperate for means to imply the “n word” without actually coming out and saying it.

Ultimately, it seems that how prejudice is expressed, or the emotional content of that expression, tends to be given more weight than its potential effects. Suppose a drunk guy staggers into the room and starts calling people “bitches” and “faggots,” responding loudly and belligerently to anyone who doesn’t share his particular viewpoint. Almost everybody will agree that this person is a bigot and an asshole and that his stated opinions and attitudes need not be respected. Now suppose another guy walks in, sober and pious, holding up his Holy Book and announcing that, according to his God, women should be completely subordinate to men, gays and lesbians should be put to death, and anyone who doesn't believe in his book and follow its laws deserves to be tortured eternally. In such a case, many will politely disagree, but terms like “intolerance” will most likely be reserved for anyone who fails to respect this person’s deeply held faith. But can there be any doubt which of the two is more dangerous?