It’s easy to be a dedicated student of what you already think.
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 201:312
...long-suffering non-yogi friends think I’m going off the deep end...then, that’s kinda my intention...
...a yoga teacher friend was encouraging people to choose a word to represent their intentions for the new year...the kinda thing I tend to dismiss as new agey but end up finding useful...looked at my t-shirt, which read Springboard Studio...thought springboard...
...in preparation for the big intense yoga teacher training...6:30 in the morning to 9:00 at night six days a week, deep in the mountains in the dead of winter...kinda like nurturing, compassionate boot camp...been reading about fascia and synovial fluid (first time I’ve studied anatomy since 10th grade biology class)...(where I mostly sat there writing out Bowie lyrics on my notebooks, thinking about comic books and sex) and alignment...finding it kind of intimidating, though frequently coming to surprising realizations that I already know the stuff that seems most daunting and complicated...experientially...through the asana practice...just not the words for or theory behind...which seems a bit ironic...
Follow any analytic discipline, rigorously pursue any science or philosophy to its inexorable end, and you arrive at absurdity. From there, two paths diverge: toward despair of the overwrought intellectual, or toward the laughter of the gods.
Josh Mitteldorf
...first started practicing yoga as a grad. student, half way through a dissertation...more precisely, at the beginning of a lengthy break from said dissertation due to depression so severe I was just about picking a cliff to jump off....then, once the dissertation got going again, the yoga kinda faded away....never really got it going seriously 'til I left the land of theory and ironic quotation marks, entirely....not that there's a connection, necessarily...
...another teacher pointed out I tend to lead with the head...that’s Jay, PhD, she said...
Just how anti-intellectual can a guy with a PhD get before he starts sounding ridiculous?
Ancient and Revered Cynical Zen Koan
Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
...yoga is, to me...or, at least, for me...essentially experiential...making big debates about whether it’s a religion or whatever somewhat moot...does it feel like a religion?...if it does, it is...if not, it must be something else...
...we’ve found that yoga comes to vibrant life when we realize that while we have no stable idea as to what it is, we know that we embody its evolving pulse through our baffled wonder.
yoga 2.0
...then, maybe it's all how you define religion...some would say it’s all experiential, originally...somebody coming down from a mountain and saying whoa, some weird shit went down up there...lemme tell ya about it...beliefs, holy books, rituals, dogma, etc. all coming later...means to codify the uncodifiable, get a handle on what can’t be handled, put infinity in its place...making it clear that somebody else, in some spiritually privileged long ago time and far away place, slipped the yoke....you gotta shut up and do as you're told...
Editor’s note: it occurs to the staff here at Yoga for Cynics that this post about moving away from the intellectual and toward the experiential is getting highfalutin' in a manner that's, arguably, contradictory to its theme. We apologize for the apparent error and assure readers that it probably won’t happen again...at least not in this post....anyway, isn’t it all, really, about finding a balance?...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 201:312
...long-suffering non-yogi friends think I’m going off the deep end...then, that’s kinda my intention...
...a yoga teacher friend was encouraging people to choose a word to represent their intentions for the new year...the kinda thing I tend to dismiss as new agey but end up finding useful...looked at my t-shirt, which read Springboard Studio...thought springboard...
...in preparation for the big intense yoga teacher training...6:30 in the morning to 9:00 at night six days a week, deep in the mountains in the dead of winter...kinda like nurturing, compassionate boot camp...been reading about fascia and synovial fluid (first time I’ve studied anatomy since 10th grade biology class)...(where I mostly sat there writing out Bowie lyrics on my notebooks, thinking about comic books and sex) and alignment...finding it kind of intimidating, though frequently coming to surprising realizations that I already know the stuff that seems most daunting and complicated...experientially...through the asana practice...just not the words for or theory behind...which seems a bit ironic...
Follow any analytic discipline, rigorously pursue any science or philosophy to its inexorable end, and you arrive at absurdity. From there, two paths diverge: toward despair of the overwrought intellectual, or toward the laughter of the gods.
Josh Mitteldorf
...first started practicing yoga as a grad. student, half way through a dissertation...more precisely, at the beginning of a lengthy break from said dissertation due to depression so severe I was just about picking a cliff to jump off....then, once the dissertation got going again, the yoga kinda faded away....never really got it going seriously 'til I left the land of theory and ironic quotation marks, entirely....not that there's a connection, necessarily...
...another teacher pointed out I tend to lead with the head...that’s Jay, PhD, she said...
Just how anti-intellectual can a guy with a PhD get before he starts sounding ridiculous?
Ancient and Revered Cynical Zen Koan
Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
...yoga is, to me...or, at least, for me...essentially experiential...making big debates about whether it’s a religion or whatever somewhat moot...does it feel like a religion?...if it does, it is...if not, it must be something else...
...we’ve found that yoga comes to vibrant life when we realize that while we have no stable idea as to what it is, we know that we embody its evolving pulse through our baffled wonder.
yoga 2.0
...then, maybe it's all how you define religion...some would say it’s all experiential, originally...somebody coming down from a mountain and saying whoa, some weird shit went down up there...lemme tell ya about it...beliefs, holy books, rituals, dogma, etc. all coming later...means to codify the uncodifiable, get a handle on what can’t be handled, put infinity in its place...making it clear that somebody else, in some spiritually privileged long ago time and far away place, slipped the yoke....you gotta shut up and do as you're told...
Editor’s note: it occurs to the staff here at Yoga for Cynics that this post about moving away from the intellectual and toward the experiential is getting highfalutin' in a manner that's, arguably, contradictory to its theme. We apologize for the apparent error and assure readers that it probably won’t happen again...at least not in this post....anyway, isn’t it all, really, about finding a balance?...
