It Ain't Easy

These times of meltdown are precious.
Stephen Cope

...but it ain’t easy to write about it when yer in ‘em...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 31:922

...a woman at the rehab said she wanted to write her life story, send it in and get it published as a book...I said for now, let’s just write...and, in the last fifteen minutes before I went home, she came up with a good page and a half or so about age five, approximately, to age eight, stopping every sentence or so with questions...how to spell addict and dealer to describe her mom and the guy who moved in, respectively, whether she needed to write out Kentucky Fried Chicken or if k.f.c. was good enough to describe the place where she rooted through the dumpster for food, whether rape or molest was the best word to describe what happened when she was eight...I shrugged, glancing at simple sentences without punctuation or paragraph breaks, said either works, I guess...

...(when someone like Maya Angelou writes about this kinda stuff, the punch in the gut's devastating but lyrical...a resounding song of the phoenix....the cruder tune of someone struggling with everything she’s got to get above the flames is something else entirely...a view of an apocalypse that’s always right now)...

Mature in yoga, impartial
everywhere he looks,
he sees himself in all beings
and all beings in himself.
Bhagavad Gita

...tomorrow I'm supposed to teach a free yoga class to some friends...told 'em it's guaranteed...reach enlightenment or your money back...

The Critical Importance of Flexibility

Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.
(attributed to John Lennon, T. S. Eliot, and Bertrand Russell)

...sleep, I find, is a chore when I need it,
but an indescribable luxury when it’s time to get up...

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever—

this is a somewhat new kind of religion.
Albert Einstein

...similarly, nothing makes writing harder
than having good, solid reasons to write...

Almost all of my epiphanies over the previous fifteen years
had been the same one: I don’t know.
Stephen Cope

...the worst thing to do if you’re trying to be more flexible,
it turns out, is to try to be more flexible...

Questions to Meditate On...Or Not...

This is the third Yoga for Cynics post in the past week or so that’s featured the word not prominently in the title—could my need for this yoga retreat in Mexico thingy be any more stark?

In the immortal words of Neil Young: tell me why is it hard to make arrangements with yourself when you’re old enough to re-paint but young enough to sell?

What the hell does that mean?

Before Mexico, I’m taking a shorter trip...to New York City....could anything be more appropriate before a yoga retreat than a visit to the world capital of angst?

In the words of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: work and work for love and sex, ain’t you hungry for success success success success? Does it matter?

Are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards people you'd normally turn to for a critique of materialism?

Is to be or not to be really the question?

Why is a person with love considered a loser in tennis?

Is it possible to snort crystal meth mindfully?

Do you think there are people who fantasize about masturbation during sex?

Written in a shelter register on the Appalachian Trail in a very wet month of May, 1992: if April showers bring May flowers, what do May showers bring?

In the words of a guy named “Rudi” in Stephen Cope’s The Wisdom of Yoga: in the end, we all have to write our own scriptures, don’t we?

Really, Really Loaded Questions....

...though it’s absolutely meant as a compliment, yoga teachers don’t seem to like it when I say you fucking killed me with that shit at the end of class...though a person can't possibly be born to new possibilities without dying now and then....

Finally, I got it: a heart that is open to the world must be willing to be broken at any time. This brokenness produces the kind of grief that expands the heart so that it can love more and more.
Stephen Cope

...one time in college, I was feeling pretty down...not sure if my heart was broken, or if class work and the endemic to college ever-present threat of not-being-smart-enough was weighing me down, or if it was just another wholly ephemeral case of late-adolescent angst...though it could’ve had something to do with the people I hung out with...one of whom I ran into, a globally-thinking person I’ll call Alice....she asked how I was doing, I said I was feeling down...and she replied, with a contemptuous smirk, yeah, I bet a straight white male has a lot to be unhappy about....I knew some really lovely people in college...but, then, it seems like it’s difficult for most of us sometimes to get the point that compassion actually means being kind and empathetic—rather than something where, when you expend a bit on the oppressed of the world, you gain scorn credits to dump on those closer at hand....

I think it was Diogenes Laertius who told the story about a philosopher who studied for three years to rid himself of all passion, paying money to every man who insulted him. When his period of study was completed, he stopped giving out money, but the habitual skills remained with him: one day he was insulted by some ignoramus, and instead of setting about him with his fists, he began to laugh. ‘Well, did you ever,’ he said, ‘today I received for nothing what I’d been paying for three whole years.’
Victor Pelevin, The Secret Book of the Werewolf

...sometimes I help recovering addicts through practice GED tests....I hate that standardized test crap, but sometimes the best you can do is teach people the stupid rules needed to pass, including the rule that use of imagination and originality should be avoided....anyway, there are these essay questions: write six sentences about your family...write two paragraphs about a goal you have....meant to be innocuous, no doubt, for the average suburban teenager, but really, really loaded questions for those with so much trouble behind and only the most desperate hopes ahead....so, they write about staying clean, about not going back to jail, about getting a job, about getting custody of their kids again...in a nutshell, wanting to live...

...and, when ya think about it, what better goal could there be?

Angst! What Is It Good For?!

As the Buddha said, “All human beings are quite deluded.” The line between the staff and patients is sometimes frighteningly thin....It’s only a matter of degree.
Stephen Cope

Should I pursue a path so twisted?
Patti Smith

I’ve gone through a lot of these incredibly emotionally volatile periods (don’t worry—I’m not going through one right now)–generally when I’ve been getting really deeply into yoga, or therapy, or otherwise simply digging into those messy places inside my head on my own–which at times have led to strained relations, generally erratic behavior, and remarkably poor performance at anything practical I was trying to do at the time. So, for the most part, it’s not very pleasant, and I want it to end as soon as possible, but, at the same time, realize that, if I can navigate my way through the chaos I’ve unleashed and follow it to its source, there are amazing opportunities for change and growth…..

...from a depressed point of view, any situation and any life will look like crap. Not that I’m gonna throw any positive affirmations at you–if there’s one kinda situation that makes me depressed it’s when desperate positivity freaks start throwing positive affirmations at me....probably the most vile book ever written is the 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis De Sade...it’s about these four libertines who...you really don’t wanna know...but it’s an important book, I think...even though I couldn’t get through more than a hundred pages...and even that was enough to seriously screw with me....I was walking down the sidewalk in Rochester NY and had these unspeakable images stuck in my head...believe me, you don’t wanna know....there was a movie based on it called Salo, directed by Pasolini, best known for a movie about Jesus...which has been called unwatchable...though a guy I knew in grad. school loved it...along with a lot of other things...but it’s seriously tame compared to the book...which maps out those dark places Conrad hinted at like nothing before or since...

he feels that moving into the areas of society that he had rejected is the same as working with the parts of himself that he had rejected.
Pema Chodron (describing a Zen teacher named Bernard Glassman who works with the homeless)

So... what’s all this angst and mental distress good for? I have this extremely part time gig tutoring recovering addicts in reading, most of them from the kinds of backgrounds the nasty old Marquis would’ve taken way too much pleasure in writing about...and, a couple years ago, was a volunteer teaching college writing in a maximum security prison and publishing a now-defunct web-based magazine written and edited by those prisoners....I was there through the auspices of Cornell University, where I taught freshman writing for a year—for a while, I was teaching Ivy League kids in the afternoon, and men doing hard time for violent felonies in the evening...and man, did I prefer that second group....so, having done a lot of self-evaluation in the past year and a half or so, I’ve decided to expand my work with these populations, in terms of both quantity and depth, and am looking into getting the training and credentials necessary to use writing as therapy with them....I’m told that my interest in addicts, prisoners, and the dispossessed in general will be an advantage, in pragmatic terms, since they’re precisely the people most counselors and social workers try to get away from as soon as possible, preferring to work with middle class neurotics from the suburbs...not that I have anything against middle class neurotics from the suburbs...I mean I am one...and I have a lot of experience in the field of psychotherapy...even if it’s all been on the other side of the desk....

...and it's taught me that there are basically two kinds of therapists: (1) those who see themselves as residing on a lofty plateau of pristine normalcy and mental health, and are prepared to help their clients to be just like them, and (2) those who aren’t complete assholes....

The Velvet Underground and Yoga

Take the blue mask down from my face and look me in the eye.
Lou Reed

That silence thing, ever so important to the inner peace crowd, doesn't come easy. I find concentrating on much of anything (particularly reading and writing) difficult without music playing. That's due to what, if I were in grade school nowadays, would be diagnosed as ADD. The music is controlled noise that blocks out uncontrolled noise—both external and internal. Certainly, it's a symptom of our modern world (written with the caveat that I really don't think any other world is without its problems, either. Interesting how so many in the yoga crowd talk so much about the here and now, yet romanticize every there and then they can think of. I mean, Stephen Cope, early on in Yoga and the Quest for the True Self—a book that’s mostly great, by the way, much as it irritates me in places—talks about breaking up with his boyfriend, then later idealizes such famously gay-friendly milieus as traditional Hindu villages and pre-modern Europe.

What was I talking about? My inability to concentrate? Right. And I’ve even got music playing now—Lou Reed’s Blue Mask album—which reminds me...a couple of posts ago, I mentioned my top ten list of Lou Reed lines, as kind of a throwaway joke, though I really do have such a list. The thing is, I’ve gotten nothing but derision when telling friends about it. Mention it here however, and what happens? People, with, apparently, some of the same personal problems as I, come out of the woodwork and say they wanna see it. So:

Top Ten (partially annotated) Lou Reed Lines:

#1 How do you think it feels, and when do you think it stops? The Berlin album's so fucked up, you’ve gotta have something seriously wrong with you to actually enjoy it. I love the Berlin album.
#2 You made me forget myself. I thought I was someone else, someone good. Most people think “Perfect Day” is a lovely song about a lovely day in the park with a loved one. I wouldn’t want to disillusion them.
#3 I’m set free, to find a new illusion. Oh, Lou, how can you manage to describe such a positive sentiment, while being so utterly nihilistic at the same time?
#4 Won’t you recognize us? We’re everything you hate. Love that pain body.
# 5 The fact that you are married only means you’re my best friend, but it’s truly truly a sin. I have no idea what this one’s about.
#6 Taste the whip, in love not given lightly. Corporal punishment should only be between consenting adults.
#7 Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.
#8 Some kinds of love are mistaken for vision.
#9 There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out. People tend to see Magic and Loss as Lou’s darkest album, as it deals with cancer and death (and, yeah, it has that lighthearted song about the guy cutting himself up with a razor blade). And yet, this song is probably the most positive thing he’s ever written, dealing with walking through the "fire" of pain and trauma and finding when the past makes you laugh and you can savor the magic that lets you survive your own war, you find that that fire is passion, and there’s a door up ahead, not a wall.
#10 Put a fork in their ass and turn ‘em over, they’re done.