Return to Hogwarts

...January hit like a giant hunk of ice in the forehead...days of severe lassitude...not much work but that little bit took all day...endlessly seeking minor forms of stimulation, trying and often failing to avoid the ones that make things worse in the long run...

...this morning, dragged myself out early through a brushing of snow, drove five hours north to Kripalu, for the first time since the yoga teacher training two years ago...where I'm gonna spend the week in a meditation retreat with Jack Kornfield...Meditation for Freedom and Compassion Everywhere...(should definitely work better than meditating to right-wing talk radio to teach myself to be less compassionate...in line with my reverse-Boddhisattva vow not to attain full enlightenment until all sentient beings in the universe are as miserable as I am)...(just kidding)...

...hugged some old friends, mindfully chowed down the healthiest lunch I've had in a long time, took a walk in the woods, went to yoga class, had the healthiest dinner I've had in a long time, went to the first meditation retreat session...where they urged me to turn off the electronic devices and be silent for the week...oops...felt like I had a minor yet satisfying psychedelic experience, took a walk down to the beach in the dark to look at the stars while listening to Miles Davis In a Silent Way on the purple ipod...oops, again...maybe gotta wean myself a bit...

...now, it's almost 11:00 and I got yoga class to go to at 6:15 in the morning...oh yeah...

Planning on Not Planning on Anything

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
Walt Whitman

...too sluggish-in-the-membrane to come up with original subject matter, I stole this from Anthroyogini’s blog:

I’ve learned that taking it easy and following your natural rhythms is much more important than productivity. What matters most is how much joy you’re currently experiencing in the present moment. If you’re putting off your happiness until you accomplish something, you’re failing at life.
Jonathon Mead

...where it was part of a post about her incredible shrinking yoga practice...which made me feel better about my own kinda falling apart in recent weeks...particularly the more-and-more-occasional at-home every-morning end of it...especially if one considers that lighting up the incense and putting on Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way or Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidinanda to sit in a sloppy lotus pose and do a neck stretching routine for five minutes, all the while thinking shit, there’s so much stuff I should be doing now instead of self-indulgently sitting here fits only the most liberal definitions of yoga practice in the first place...does wonders for preventing tension headaches, though...

...then, as those who’ve read this blog for a while have no doubt picked up, I’m all about the liberal definitions...

...and, alas, the morning yoga practice is far from the only aspect of life where I’ve been sluggish and unproductive...which is probably a major reason for the anxiety about shit-that-needs-to-be-done while I’m trying to do that at-peace-with-myself thing...

...overall, I’ve been inclined to think that the key is finding a balance between setting goals and not beating yourself up for failing to meet them...though that’s a balance that makes that eagle pose thing look like child’s play...

...anyway, this Jonathon Mead dude seems to take things a good deal further than that...suggesting that doing away with goals altogether might be the way to go...as long as you don’t make a goal of that, presumably....when I first read it, I thought hell, my natural rhythm is to just fuck around all day...but, perhaps, it just seems that way because I've got so many conflicting goals, plans, expectations slamming around in my head, entangling themselves in desires and fears...leaving me, yes, fuckin’ around all day...

...might be interesting to see what would happen if I could just open the brain and let all that out for a while...might get a lot more done if I stopped yelling at myself to get stuff done...which can leave me too mentally exhausted to do much of anything...

...at this point, I’m thinking that, late tonight, I’m gonna get in my car and drive a couple hours to get to the seashore, and wake there the next three mornings...just to see what happens...

Self Indulgence: The Musical

Was called upon by a famous hippie yoga blogger to give a top seven albums list...which I’d consider way too shameful a self-indulgence...without an excuse (note that this one was in response to reader demand)...even if I’m gonna ignore the rules as always...so, here’s seven I feel like talking about right now, in no particular order:

Miles Davis—In a Silent Way: no diss to anybody’s favorite Windham Hill or Sanskrit chant music, but this is what I practice yoga to—a bunch of soon-to-be-major figures of what would come to be known as jazz-fusion enjoying a trippy groove while the Dark Prince lets out muted wails from places deeper than most would ever dare to go....

Joni Mitchell—Court and Spark—I hate slickness, and this is about as slick as 70’s pop albums get—but it’s about slickness, giving up Paris and People’s Park for the city of the fallen angels, and feeling unfettered and alive for the surface thrills of stroking the star maker machinery...because trying to hold on to that fabled romantic idealism has simply come to hurt too much....

The Clash: Sandinista—it’s up to you not to hear the call-up, you must not act the way you were brought up...that pretty much says it...not sure what can be added that won’t be lame, other than to evoke how it felt at sixteen to see Joe Strummer up there, belting out Police on My Back to a stadium filled with classic rock fans waiting to see the Who and not at all open to this punky shit—defiant absolutely, thriving in a world of manic sound as the slings, arrows, and orange peels fell impotently to the stage....

Cat Power: The Greatest—saw Chan Marshall in a club in Philly last Spring—no more of the legendary drunken rambling interspersed with the occasional bit of a song, or bursts of tears ending a show three minutes in—but the kind of painful nakedness of expression previously seen in videos of Janis Joplin or Billie Holiday...what most would call being fucking nuts...though it can make for some kick-ass music...when I lay me down, will you still be around? when they put me six feet in the ground, will the big fat beautiful moon be around?....

Bob Dylan: Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Volume 8—to say that when Dylan accidentally leaves the tape machine running before going to the toilet, the result is still better than 99% of the music-product painstakingly produced by just about anybody else is a tired cliché. It’s also true. While contemporaries fade away or make repeated lame attempts at relevance, Bob, reinvented as an old-weird-vaguely-19th-century-dude, growls I crossed the green mountain, I slept by the stream, heaven blazing in my head, I dreamt a monstrous dream....

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme—another great one to do yoga to, though even better through headphones with feet dangling over the rim of the Grand Canyon...really...try it and you’ll see.....

The Grateful Dead: Buffalo, July 4th 1986—dude...I actually don’t like even have this tape anymore...but this show was like seriously...whoah...like I was there n’ it was like a hundred degrees n’ I was gettin’ like really fuckin’ weirded out n’ shit, n’ then they played The Wheel n’ I like listened to the lyrics...round round robin run around, gotta get back to where you belong, a little bit harder just a little bit more, a little bit further than you’ve gone before...n’ then like everything was totally cool...seriously....