Facebook, Junk Food, Suffering, Compassion, and Robin Williams

The hole I dig is bottomless but nothing else can set me free...

Robert Pollard, I Am a Scientist

It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Sprach Zarathustra

 

...a friend posted something on Facebook about how baffling it is to see people...middle-class, educated...who should know better in this day and age...eating at McDonalds...I told him I could relate...it’s the same way I feel about cigarettes, and people who don’t exercise beyond the effort required to walk to the car or find the remote....but that a lotta people I know feel the same way when they see people eating pizza...(which my friend passionately loves)...(real pizza...not that soy crap)...

Dairy and gluten and grease, oh my!

Dorothy Gale, The Yoga Teacher of Oz

 ...of course, thinking about it much at all makes me realize how little room I have to judge...(to paraphrase Bob Dylan, if the full extent of my unmindful consumption could be seen, the granola crowd’d probably put my head in some kinda earnest, self-righteous, painfully passive-aggressive equivalent of a guillotine)...especially since, with a PhD and a decade or so in the crunchy, life-affirming yoga world, I know, like, waaaay better...

 If I don’t know I don’t know

 ....................................I think I know
If I don’t know I know
                                     I think I don’t know
R.D. Laing, Knots

 ...really, I said, what I think it comes down to is that life is hard....(realizing, in retrospect that I might’ve been unconsciously plagiarizing something Kurt Vonnegut wrote about why we keep destroying our environment even though we know better)...(or maybe it was somebody else, and I’m still unconsciously plagiarizing)...(and so the list of my sins of consciousness or the lack thereof continues to grow)...

...I mean...I’m more than aware that a handful of raw organic kale grown in the backyard garden I’m too lazy to cultivate, in an extremely rural region where with a minimal quantity of carcinogens and other toxins in the rain and groundwater, would be a far better choice on just about every truly conscious kinda level than a cupcake or a beer...and yet, I’m probably gonna both eat the cupcake and drink the beer, anyway, for the sheer momentary pleasure of it...(though I will put a handful of store-bought-and-probably-not-organic-‘cause-that-shit’s-too-expensive kale in my daily smoothie)....just like I won’t spend nearly as much  time meditating as I do getting into idiotic arguments with relative strangers on-line...

...with so many sinkin’ now you gotta keep thinkin’ you can make it through these waves:
acid booze and ass, needles guns and grass, lotsa laughs...
Joni Mitchell

 ...and that’s because, deep down, to be painfully honest, no matter how many positive Buddhist quotes I might like to recite while people are holding poses for five minutes at a time in Yin class about the wonder and sheer illimitable awesomeness of the present moment, it doesn’t seem worth it...with so much despair lurking in the recesses of mind and body, those little things that help us through through the minutes of the day, things we love, even if they don’t benefit us in the long run, can't be so easily forsaken...

...Thoreau wrote that most of us live lives of quiet desperation...(and Pink Floyd, somehow, a hundred years later, appropriated that and called it the English way)....Freud’s death instinct...mean, grumpy old thanatos...often powerful as the life instinct, more upbeat and personable eros...sometimes more...no matter how many ridiculous positive affirmations we in the yoga crowd try to force-feed ourselves when we’re not trying to blame it all on being modern and western and thus trying to shed our modern western skins...(without realizing, of course, that there’s really nothing more modern or western than the romanticism that causes us to think that becoming ancient and the far away other will cure us of our despair)...(and now, it seems, I’m pointing the finger of self-righteous judgment in the opposite direction)....(I’ll stop)...(but not quite yet)...
 
...(here, without further ado, is my own painfully pissed off and horribly self-righteous Facebook post from a week ago, following the news of Robin Williams, dead of chronic despair: If there's one aspect of the yoga world that I absolutely loathe, it's how many people there are—including teachers, yoga bloggers with tens of thousands of "likes," and major revered gurus--who seem to think they're experts on depression even though they clearly know absolutely nothing about it—thinking it's synonymous with being bummed out and can be fixed with positive affirmations or an "attitude adjustment" (clearly unaware that depression might be defined as the inability to take on a positive attitude), or that it's synonymous with sadness, and thus, is something we all experience from time to time and should be seen as a natural and beautiful part of life. No, it isn't. And if you don't know that, you should keep your mouth shut on the subject, no matter how many people fawn on you and tell you how wise and spiritual you are.....harsh, but, if nothing else, it’s my own blood in which I’m writing)...

....ultimately, I think it all points to the incredible necessity for compassion...for all of us...in all of our junk-food eating, time-wasting, un-compassionate, judgmental, self-righteous, sometimes flat-out nasty glory....because of all that, in fact...because we have pain and because we all do what we do, however unmindful, however counterproductive, to make ourselves feel better...right here, right now...

Breathe... (A Life Worth Breathing...Kind of a Book Review #2)

I think if we take a look deep within ourselves with piercing honesty, we could agree that we carry around a file of our inadequacies with us—a file that contains many reasons to loathe ourselves...
Max Strom

...for me, it’s probably more like a file cabinet...or storage locker full of file cabinets...but point taken...

Breeeeathe...breathe in the aaaaaair...
Pink Floyd

Somebody from this publishing house said she wanted to send me a book to review...called A Life Worth Breathing...by this famous yoga teacher I’d never, at that point, heard of, named Max Strom...to which I replied if it’s for free, it’s for me...though not in so many words...figuring, if all else failed, I could call it a veritable tour de force...seminal...say it belongs on every yogi’s bookshelf...or it’s perfect for the yogi on your Christmas list....

...or, on the other hand, could actually read the thing...which I did...deciding in the process the book was actually worth writing about...meaning both that it was worth reading and I thought of some stuff to say about it that seemed clever...at least to me....found it at times illuminating...other times irritating....then, it’s the lot of the yoga cynic to rarely read anything that doesn’t have at least a 50/50 irritating/illuminating ratio...particularly when the author talks about subjects like...um...let’s see...God...

...but then, in the words of Ancient and Venerable Yoga Cynic Sutra 35:78...it’s always the really irritating stuff that makes ya think...and, big a deal as Max* makes of the metaphysical side of things, the book’s centered...literally and figuratively...at a far more basic level...on the breath...paying close attention to it...when practicing forearm stands or cutting toenails**...following and listening carefully to what such a simple, elemental process can tell about what’s going on inside...where the real action happens...

No matter how many vinyasas we do, no matter how much wheatgrass juice we drink, no matter how many kirtans we attend, we will not have a happy life if we are carrying resentment and hatred inside us...
Max Strom

...how you gon’ win when you ain’t right within?
Lauryn Hill

...as well as in the minute details of our lives...how we treat the people serving us coffee*** likely more revealing than any formal spiritual practice...

...and ya gotta like a guy who, for all the reverence expressed...and there’s a lot...toward celebrated holy people, says he thinks the only truly enlightened person he’s ever met was a homeless girl who didn’t say a word...

...overall, it’s a book that, in retrospect, had a lot more of an effect on me than was apparent while reading...(though...full disclosure...that might’ve been at least partly because I was thinking about what clever stuff was gonna end up in this post)...(seriously, dontcha love that Lauryn Hill quote?)...in the sense that it’s actually gotten me thinking more about the breath and what I can learn from it...the subtle but deeply important signs that, like most people, I put a lot of effort into dulling or ignoring...so that ya could say the book actually made me a bit more conscious of those little things that are really the big things...

...or, y’know, ya could call it a veritable tour de force...



* the guy’s a yoga teacher...so first names all the way...and, like this blog, his book is probably best experienced barefoot...

** or, conceivably, for really, really adept yogis, cutting toenails while doing forearm stands...though, truthfully, Max really doesn't go into that...

*** Max actually disses coffee...repeatedly...but that’s cool****...

**** while perhaps not quite yogic enough to abstain from coffee, I’m exactly yogic enough not to be bothered by the fact that even-more-yogic types often diss it...


*cross posted at Elephant Journal*

Greco-Roman Wrestling of the Heart

In 1987, I was twenty-one, freshly dropped out of college, rapidly growing disillusioned with my chosen failed avocation as a latter-day hippie, and, with substantial financial assistance from my folks, who I guess were hoping it might help me gain some perspective and possibly inspire me to come back ready to return to school—I flew to Europe, planning on meeting a friend at the Coliseum in Rome at three o’clock that afternoon—this is before cell-phones, kids: he’d spent a semester abroad in Germany, and I had a postcard with a date and time, and that was it...no real back-up plan if anything went wrong and one of us couldn’t make it—like, for instance, if I got bumped off my flight...ended up in Clipper Class on a later one—goblets of champagne, caviar on fine china and big, comfortable seats that stretched out for sleeping not quite balancing out the fear of being on my own so far from home, in another country, with another language...though I’d traveled by myself all over the U.S., somehow that sense of unfamiliarity...of being a foreigner in a foreign land...an actual alien rather than simply alienated...all on my own...was terrifying....

As it turned out, I was a few hours late, but Robert stuck around....we hitchhiked south, leaving backpacks with an ancient crone who might have shared bawdy stories from the days of Nero and Caligula to explore Pompeii...climbing over walls and through windows with broken bars in the city that slept for millennia...where Pink Floyd played for nobody in 1971....then catching a ride with some guys who, despite an almost complete language barrier, treated us to feasts in Rome and Venice before leaving us to swig down bottles of wine costing seventy cents a pop along the stately edges of St. Marks...then, joined by a girl whose name I never learned to spell, after the Neil Young and Crazy Horse show in Verona, to trek down through Yugoslavia...all one country, then, hammer-and-sickle flag so strangely above us at the train stations...this, the Reagan era, still, nuclear armaments poised...then down to Greece, and the Cyclades...more men hitting on us in the course of a week than in the entire three months I’d spent in San Francisco just before...finally camping out in a field on a chilly hot night above a blue and white monastery, apparently abandoned, a few miles outside of a tiny fishing town on the far side of Paros...the whole area inhabited apparently only by us and some goats, and not many of them, tempers long frayed, irritation blossoming in every available patch of psychic dirt....I climbed by myself to the top of the rocky peninsula alone, and, in the morning, back in the town, watched the two of them board a bus, heading for a boat to Crete...a final plea for me to join them and they were gone.....

Ended up sitting on some rocks by the harbor for a long, long time that morning and afternoon—probably eating the usual processed cheese and ripped off hunks of a loaf of bread bungi-corded to my backpack—there long enough to be sunburned so badly I had to turn the lights off to take off my shirt in the days that followed, in a tiny $3 cold water villa up among the hobbled goats in the hills above St. Stephen’s Beach where naked French girls came up from town for a quiet swim...but days to come didn’t matter right then, finding myself finally so truly all alone in a foreign country, willfully abandoned far from the tourist sights no less...exactly what I’d been so afraid of three weeks before, so far from the places I’d grown up, so far from anyone who’d known me, from all definitions imposed or claimed....here no one knew or cared about any of that...few, if any, I guessed, spoke my language...knew any of the words I’d been called...in the country of Odysseus, I was set free, adrift on the rocky shores of myself....

Here and Elsewhere

Life is elsewhere.
graffiti seen by Milan Kundera during the Paris uprising, 1968
There’ve been times when I’ve been in a beautiful place, with good friends, at a show, spending time with someone I want to get to know better...and I’ve thought "man, it’d be cool to be here...doing this."... The logical fallacy isn’t exactly hard to see...but the problem remains that life, often enough, does appear to be hopelessly elsewhere...and experienced by someone else....

Depression does get boring after a while...I have of late but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory....yeah, yeah yeah, tell it to yer goddamn shrink, Hamlet...no shrinks in Elsinore?...tough break, but maybe just as well...as a million despondent teenagers sing along with their Pink Floyd mp3's running over the same old ground, of how we found the same old fears....

History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.
Stephen Dedalus, Ulysses

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, but any student of history can see that’s often just as true of those who remember it. The past holds on tight, those memories from growing up that everyone tells you to treasure often as not taking the form of wounds...no matter how many yogis and Buddhists say it’s nothing but illusion...which is not to say that they’re not right...in most cases, the only walls that matter are those in the mind...but that’s not to say they’re easy to get over....

I work a few hours a week tutoring recovering addicts in reading. How amazing it is to see an adult go from having a handful of very basic nouns at her disposal to reading full sentences...even if she never gets to the point where she can read Dostoyevsky, it means a lot...far more than any particular words on the page...then, how great is it to be writing this right now?...skipping through thoughts and experiences, messing with words and meanings...lines from Shakespeare, Joyce, and Wish You Were Here...or even to be reading it, even if you think it’s all pretentious, boring bullshit...you can enjoy thinking what a dickwad I am...life given to words is itself miraculous....