In Which Dr. Jay Weighs in on the Anusara Controversy (Kinda, Sorta), and then Goes into a Most Entertaining Digression Involving His Head & Neck

...as mentioned a little while ago, I’m doing this anusara-inspired Align & Flow training*...in which I'm learning all about, among other things, principles of alignment...

...like, for instance, the way the skull loop interacts with the shoulder loop...(anusara lingo)...the latter beginning all the way at the upper palate, and including the neck....human anatomy, it turns out, is quite distinct from that of the bobble head doll...

...twenty years ago, in Boulder*******, long before I even thought about getting into yoga*********...(and, anyway, at that point far more interested in attaining higher consciousness by other means***********)...went to a meditation class with a visiting Zen master at Naropa, and somebody asked him about posture....he said something like it’s important to keep the head on top of the neck, and people laughed...but, I’ve since learned, he was actually describing something profound and difficult...particularly for those of us who’ve spent most of our lives walking around with a Charlie Brown droop in the neck*************...


*just as, it turns out, controversy erupts in and around the anusara yoga world**...

** when, already, certain yoga friends were warning me not to drink the kula-aid or lookin' at me like I said I was joining the Westboro Baptist Church, or something...which I don’t fully understand, nor, to be honest, care all that much about***...at this point, I’m learning lotsa valuable stuff, from people I like and for whom I have nothing but praise****...

*** and, yes, that was the official statement of this blog, its management, writing staff, shareholders, legal representatives, clowns, concubines, and corporate affiliates...

**** and not that creepy, semi-lobotomized dogma-reciting too-far-gone-to-see-the-contradictions “my guru tells me to think for myself” kinda praise, either*****...

***** as long-time readers know, I get creeped out by that kinda stuff far more easily than most yogis******...

****** so, trust me, when somebody offers me the profound honor of licking the holy perspiration off John Friend’s feet, I’ll head for the door...but, at this point, it seems highly unlikely anything like that's gonna happen...

******* right, that Boulder, home to Elephant Journal and all those self-important yoga hippies...though I was there when it was cool********...

******** not that there’s anything wrong with being a self-important yoga hippie, or anything...namaste, Boulder brothers and sisters...

********* and, thus, blissfully unaware of the all-important high-falutin' conflicts & controversies of the yoga world**********...

********** a state of innocence to which I’d quite happily return....I mean, seriously, I work part-time at this residential rehab for women, y'know, tutoring in reading and writing, and, sometimes, clients like to kind of rant to me about their frustrations...they say they feel they can talk to me precisely because I'm not a therapist...which is cool...some weeks ago, though, I got a bit irritated with one client who kept ragging on the other women there...I said something like come on...you're supposed to be here helping one another through your recovery and all you do is snipe at each other...I think it kinda applies...

*********** a state of experience best, I think, left behind************...

************ notably also preceding my lengthy academic period, when I learned the value of foot-notes, about which readers can make their own judgments...

************* also explored in a notable Arrested Development episode**************...

************** unrelated to which, but I wanted to mention it somewhere, the title of this post was originally a good deal longer, like a classic Tom Jones-ish 19th century-type chapter title, but it turns out there's a limit to how many characters can be in a blog title...thanks for squelchin' my creativity, Blogger...

Parts, Spare and Otherwise

...flying coach might be the opposite of yoga...causing everything to contract rather than expand...(except, of course, in the sense that everything is yoga)...

...out in Colorado for a coupla days...warmer weather than I’ve experienced in months making the body feel like it’s arising from hibernation...eating aloo gobi in Boulder with Waylon Lewis...(you might know him from Elephant Journal or the Dukes of Hazzard theme)...spending the afternoon wandering streets and paths in search of brain cells left behind there long ago...

...a good friend took me further up in the mountains to go cross country skiing for the first time in a years... awaking body parts long forgotten with a strange, snowy exhilaration...even as I wiped out four times on one hill...now reminding me of their presence repeatedly...

...went with the same friend to see 127 Hours...about a guy who didn’t exactly follow the wilderness dictum to leave nothing but footprints...finding, in the end, no matter how painful the process of separation might be, attaining freedom may involve letting go of a lot...including what appear to be essential parts of oneself...

The Return of the Not-So-Thin White Duke

Yoga for Cynics is back!

What’s that? You hadn’t noticed it was gone? Okay, judging by the date up there, it’s only been a couple days...but it seems like longer...maybe because the holidays happened...not all that eventful but, as always, so deep down expected-to-be-eventful that, on a deep down emotional level...they were eventful...kinda...and, in the midst of all that, the laptop that birthed this blog crashed on Christmas Eve...big time...Titanic into iceberg...kamikaze pilot into aircraft carrier...George of the Jungle into tree....not that I wasn't prepared...emotionally, if not financially...but who could have expected it to happen just before one of the only days of the year when you can't go out and spend money you don't have to buy another one?...drawing into sharp relief the extent to which I’ve become dependent on whatever computer I happen to own, as if it were a major bodily organ...

Thus...it’s somewhat fitting that the title of this post comes from Bowie’s Station to Station, which, like all good pretentious rock n’ roll songs from its era, is about coming down from a heavy-duty drug addiction...and yet, I had to alter it since, particularly after so much holiday indulgence, there’s no way I’m gonna pass for the thin white duke....One thing that's cool about the yoga crowd, they tend to be into healthy lifestyles but not at all into that anorexic ideal that tends to pass for being-in-shape in Western society...and yet, here I am feeling too fat to fit into a goddamn David Bowie song....

So, for now, I’m heading down to the beach for a one man yoga retreat ’til the New Year....began my boycott of New Years Eve events about a decade ago, after six lousy ones in a row...though there were a couple good times before that...sitting quietly on the red rocks overlooking Boulder until the hoots and hollers erupted far below to let us know it was midnight....tramping across frozen farmers’ fields in the Amish country at four A.M. to stumble upon cosmic vortexes...or at least they seemed like cosmic vortexes at the time....

...and, anyway, the shore’s a good place to be in the winter...walking in the sand from lunch ’til dusk...perhaps working off some waffle cookies and red wine...reading and writing late into the night...no internet access unless I wanna carry the computer around town looking for a signal....never mind if I end up doing less actual yoga on these retreats than if I stayed home and went to class like usual...in the season of giving, it’s always the thought that counts.....

Kind of a Haiku by Allen Ginsberg

And now...an exclusive, never-before-published haiku by a famous dead American poet. Really. Seriously:

Just wandered in from
the void for a poetry
reading, the next morning
I was hung over.
Allen Ginsberg

You’re probably thinking that doesn’t look much like a haiku—in fact it looks even less like one on the original page, since the line brakes above are really just where the writing hit the edge of the paper, and he certainly wasn’t even trying for 5-7-5 (though it has been argued that, given the essential differences between Japanese and English, that schema isn’t important for English-language haiku, anyway) (then, those presenting that argument might simply be lazy) (but...far be it from me to get into debates about poetic form).

It was back in the summer of 1990, I believe, though it could possibly have been '91, while I was embarrassing my parents living the life of a slacker out in Boulder, a year out of college, no prospects for or particular interest in a promising career of any kind, and, when not wandering in the mountains or otherwise sacrificing brain cells to unknown gods, attending a free Zen meditation class at the Naropa Institute, which was also attended, at least once or twice, by Ginsberg, who one Saturday (I think), as part of a benefit for something or other, along with some other poets, did this thing—basically, you stood in line, paid a few or maybe five bucks, and a famous poet would ask you a few questions, then write an instant haiku on the spot....I told Ginsberg I was just wandering, kind of a bum—apparently thinking maybe he’d be impressed and tell me I reminded him of Kerouac or something (he wasn’t, and didn’t)—I also told him I’d gone to a poetry reading the night before, and now, in the morning, was hung over...and so ended up with a piece of rag paper, with this poem, a little drawing of a flower and what looks like a snake, and Ginsberg’s signature on it. I’ve still got it, though in the midst of a long summer living in my van, something apparently got spilled on it, staining and smudging it badly, particularly the signature, though you can still read it...kinda.....

That summer or maybe the next one, I also attended a seminar Ginsberg did—once a week for I think three weeks we read Blake and Whitman, and Allen related the poems to his sex life, drug experiences, and conversations with Bob Dylan...which could be interesting, sometimes, like when he talked about this Blake poem:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

and applied it to how, at one time in his life, he’d kept taking acid, each time hoping this one will last until, finally, he learned to kiss it as it flies...and he drew attention to this part of a line from an obscure version of the well known I asked a thief:

‘twixt earnest & joke

arguing that it was central to his own poetry as well as that of Shakespeare and lots of other people...now that I think of it, it’s probably central to Yoga for Cynics, too...and, some years later, in grad school I used it as the basis for what became my first published scholarly article, called The Trickster Metaphysics of Thylias Moss. Thylias Moss writes stuff like this:

Somebody told me I didn’t exist even though he was looking dead at me. He said that since I defied logic, I wasn’t real for reality is one of logic’s definitions. He said I was a contradiction in terms, that one side of me cancelled out the other leaving nothing. His shaking knees were like polite maracas in the small clicking they made. His mustache seemed a misplaced smile. My compliments did not deter him from thinking he conversed with an empty space since there was no such thing as an angel who doesn’t believe in God....

but, that was another time....

Meditations on Nirvana

it was shortly after finishing the Appalachian Trail that I found Nirvana... oh...wait a second...excuse me...I meant the band...sorry for any confusion...as mentioned, I’d tumbled down from the mountains pretty hard...no money no job no home no girlfriend no plans no nothin’...worse yet, I felt I’d found my paradise only to realize I couldn’t stay there...which, I understand, is actually a common experience among those who’ve gone off to the Far East to do the Buddhist thing...at least that’s what Bill Murray said in The Razor’s Edge...so it was fitting that a friend I stopped in with in Boston on the way down to Philly from Maine took me to a series of bars and in, I think, the one after the strip club, put “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the jukebox...hello hello hello how low...and then that, living at my parents’ house that Fall, reliving adolescence at 26, I bought the Nevermind CD, which was still new then... and anything else they put out as 26 turned to 27 and '92 became '93 and I really got into...I’m a negative creep I’m a negative creep I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned!...and I liked the fact that Kurt Cobain was about my age, when up to that point I’d mostly listened to people who were a good deal older...even though he was a rock star and I wasn’t...though he still seemed just about as miserable...I’m so ugly that’s okay cuz so are you...and that then, a year and a half or so later, when I was on my way out to Arizona to start grad school...leaving mid spring though school didn’t start till Fall...to spend a wasted summer in the high desert before starting the work of getting my life together...kinda thrilled and kinda revolted that the grunge thing had suddenly made my worn out jeans, flannel shirts, shaggy hair, and tendency not to shave too often stylish...when I stopped with some friends in Boulder and got snowed in at their geodesic dome in the mountains...I'm on a plain I can't complain...I heard that Kurt Cobain had blown his own face off...aqua seafoam shame...and felt like I’d dodged a bullet myself...