More Dispatches from the Magic Mountain

...seems like it happens again and again with the meditation thing...every time I think I’m getting somewhere...or, y’know getting nowhere since there’s nowhere you need to go...opening things up, going DEEP, it goes haywire...seems all I can do is fidget...can’t get past the minor discomforts of the surface...as there’s some kind of hyper-vigilant sub-conscious life-guard blowing his whistle, yelling “come back in, there’s rocks out there, there’s sharks, go too deep and you could drown”...
 

...Jack Kornfield compares training the mind to training a puppy, but the mind’s a lot harder to train, and makes much bigger messes...

...two or three yoga classes a day, in between lengthy program sessions of intense meditation and discussion of compassion and mindfulness...sympathetic joy and trauma...loneliness and equanimity...kale and tempeh...peace and trauma...empathy and rage...

Show me that I’m everywhere and get me home for tea...

George Harrison
 

...didn’t even know it was officially contemplative week at Kripalu...so not only are we generally expected to be quiet within our group...with a suggestion to be totally silent for the week...but the dining hall is silent for all meals, and hallways are mostly filled with whispers...while I, of course, am committing what’s gotta be pretty much the ultimate in apostasy for a meditation retreat...multi-tasking...here both for the retreat and to reconnect with friends from the teacher training two years ago...so, y’know, I couldn’t, like, not talk to them....today, we were supposed to be practicing mindful eating at lunch, but I wanted to meet up with my friend for the noon vigorous vinyasa class, which left me really hungry and with less than fifteen minutes to eat...so I wolfed down a tray-full of stuff with great abandon, just mindful enough to have some consciousness of the fuller experience I was missing...

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,
no light and no land anywhere,
cloud cover thick. I try to stay
just above the surface, yet I’m already under
and living within the ocean.
Rumi (Coleman Barks, trans.)

...Wednesday morning...not feeling my best...(though, admittedly, it’s kinda like that bumper sticker about the worst day fishing vs. the best day at work)...woken by the alarm...6:15...best not to remind myself I don’t actually have to go to yoga class...gentle yoga...not gentle enough for the stiff, sleepy curmudgeon...then breakfast...pretty good, but disappointing after the French toast yesterday...then on to the first session...incessant sitting makes my knees hurt more every day...and I’m even sleepier than I was in yoga class...and who the hell cares what Thomas Merton said?....then walking meditation...I hate walking meditation and he’s telling us to go outside where it’s snowing, and I didn’t even bring shoes...they’re back in the room with my jacket and hat...at least it’s better than more sitting...go to the room, then outside...walk mindfully, matching footsteps to the in-breath and out-breath...across the grass and down the hill...to the spontaneous realization that everything I see, everything that exists, is infinitely, unspeakably beautiful....notice after a while that everybody else has gone back inside...guess I missed the bell, again...make my way back up the hill...

...cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown...

Van Morrison, Alan Watts Blues

...Friday morning, now...major snow storm blowing in...no way I’m driving home in that...guess I’m trapped at Kripalu ’til it’s over...nothin’ to do but sign up for a weekend vinyasa workshop...stay ’til Sunday...as misfortunes go, it’s not bad...

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...

Botticelli's Niece

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Rumi

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room, where I got me a date with Botticelli’s niece...
Bob Dylan

...trying to write but can’t ignore that classic profile...pre-Raphaelite...if moderated by a nose ring...hair straight outta Botticelli, eyes staring into another world...but there I’m editorializing...or, more accurately, fantasizing...more likely she’s thinking of some boyfriend with six-pack abs straight outta Jersey Shore...and, certainly a lot younger than I...but maybe that’s just cynicism...hard to stay out of these frames...a year or two ago on my birthday, a younger guy I was talking to said he bet I got laid a lot back in the day and asked if I regret never getting married...since, apparently, a man in his mid-forties is ineligible for either marriage or sex...no matter how much time he spends on the yoga mat...then, I always say, while it’d be great to have a twenty year old body again, I’d rather hold on to the mind I’ve got now...and sometimes believe it...and, anyway, now she’s stepping out the door to get away from a screaming child, carrying a paperback copy of To the Lighthouse, which, to tell the truth, I saw before coming up with the eyes staring straight into another world thing...and Botticelli’s Venus always looked more classically vain than anything, a yoking of Renaissance ideals with those pretty girls who wouldn’t talk to me in high school...which was exactly what appealed to me, wandering through the Uffizi after crouching awake all night on the train from Brindisi, having last slept, for only an hour or two, the previous afternoon...passed out from all those godawful early morning shots of Ouzo on the boat from Patras...covered by my rail-pass, of course...I’d slept out on the deck and rolled over in my sleeping bag at around seven a.m. to an invitation from that somewhat older guy I’d been talking to the night before to join him for a drink...and, later, somebody lent me a Walkman and I passed out blissfully listening to a scratchy Dead tape...twenty years old beneath a Mediterranean sky...

Better To Stay Silent Than To Write Crap

Don’t turn away. Keep your eye on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.
Rumi

I knew a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.
Johnny Carson

...better to stay silent than to write crap...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 45:931



*...until more inspiration hits, be sure to read and re-read my latest exposé: Elephant Journal: Not Affiliated With the Republican Party...namaste & all that shit...*

Procrastination as a Lifestyle Choice

he not busy being born is busy dying
Bob Dylan

...haven’t been doing much productive lately...some editing and tutoring to not quite pay the bills...working with recovering addicts, writing this blog, practicing yoga, biking, a few other things...but not exactly doing my part to fulfill the hard-working, pulling-up-by-the-bootstraps American dream...more in fact, like the modern American reality of deficit spending and lack of accountability...and I’ve tended to think of that as a problem...and some of it—like that last couple of items—definitely is... but maybe not all...

Nonbeing penetrates nonspace.
Hence,
I know the advantages of nonaction.
Lao Tzu

...procrastination and inertia might be more useful than they seem...which is not to say that not doing shit is a good idea...necessarily...though there is stuff that’s better off not being done...and that really shouldn’t be done at all...or even thought about...actually, I disagree with myself about that last bit...everything should be thought about...because it’s being thought about anyway, down below, on an unconscious level...so it needs to be brought forward...looked at and understood....but, actually, the darker recesses isn’t really where I meant to go with this...I was thinking not of those deep awful urges from the id...even if there might be something to all that stuff about idleness being the devil’s play pen...though, if so, it’s the angels’, too...and that’s my point, I think....idleness is simply the space between something and something else...

Who can stop what must arrive now?
Something new is waiting to be born...
Robert Hunter

...in some cases, admittedly, inertia is caused by fear....the ongoing lack of real effort to get my novel published would be a perfect example of that...but I’m talking about other stuff...practical stuff...stuff that can make me money but leaves me cold....coldness freezes...can make life a glacier...slow moving, destroying whatever’s in its path...

One day you’ll wake up in the present day
a million generations removed from expectations
of being who you really want to be....
Ian Anderson

...sometimes procrastination happens because people deep down know that what’s to be done won’t get them any closer to what they want and need, and might prevent them from getting there at all, despite all necessary considerations....and inertia is the ground in which new, as-yet-unknowable life is going to grow...if we let it...

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi