Dancing Wildly With Your Eyes Closed

...been goin’ to a lotta kundalini yoga classes....kundalini yoga, for them what don’t know, might be the most blatantly religious type o’ yoga...tied intimately to Sikhism...complete with headgear, long flowing robes, titles, and loads and loads of esoteric beliefs....making it not exactly the obvious choice for one so irreligious as your friendly neighborhood yoga cynic...

I can get you high—high on your breath.
Yogi Bhajan

...it’s also might be called the trippiest form of yoga...did I say trippy?!...I meant inward-focused...sometimes involving stuff like dancing wildly with your eyes closed*...which is why so many hippies got into it....personally, I get a solid buzz from yoga in general...but, in a kundalini class, I’m disappointed if I don’t get visuals.......not that, y'know, that's a reason to do it or anything...




* ...think I gained the respect of the drama club in high school simply by showing up for the West Side Story dance audition...I like to be in America okay by me in America everything’s free in America for a small fee in America...like, I was cool just to try in the face of an innate lack of grace, coordination, etc....in the end, getting the role of the guy who comically tries to make the Jets and Sharks dance rather than fight at the dance...without doing any dancing, myself....learned everything I know about the art of dance a year or two later at Grateful Dead shows...chemically infused & almost totally loose....so that trance-dancing in the yoga studio feels almost like coming full circle...

*thanks to Karin for her always amazing artwork*

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?...