Bruce Springsteen's Shrink and the Overused Metaphor of the Lotus Flower

...was readin’ this New Yorker article about Bruce Springsteen...as usual with magazines, I read somebody else's copy, months after the fact....Ezra Pound said that literature is news that stays news...and, though old Ezra probably wouldn’t have thought so, the same might be said for the occasional magazine article about a rock star...(though probably not even the occasional blog post about a magazine article about a rock star)....anyway...

...apparently, back in the early 80’s, Bruce was suffering from serious depression...leading to some odd behavior...

For years, he would drive at night past his parents’ old house in Freehold, sometimes three or four times a week. In 1982, he started seeing a psychotherapist. At a concert years later, Springsteen introduced his song “My Father’s House” by recalling what the therapist had told him about those nighttime trips to Freehold: “He said, ‘what you’re doing is that something bad happened, and you’re going back, thinking that you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right.’ And I sat there and I said, ‘That is what I’m doing.’ And he said, ‘Well, you can’t.’”

...thinking about this, some of my own odd behavior makes a lot more sense....as if Bruce Springsteen’s shrink did more for me than some mental health professionals who’ve taken outrageous amounts of my time and money...

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce

Lost but not forgotten from the dark heart of a dream...

Bruce Springsteen, Adam Raised a Cain

 

...one of the most overused metaphors in the yoga world...where overusing metaphors is practically its own asana...is the lotus flower blooming from the muck...but, when muck is what ya got, there are really only two choices...stay down and wallow, or rise up...

Restless Teenagers of the Mind

...Tuesday night yoga class at the homeless shelter was a frustrating one...restless young teenagers incessantly chatting and goofing off as I endeavored to talk about the value of quiet and stillness....such, I’ve learned, in the past, can be a good time to amp things up...some lunges, side-plank, and core work...the time-honored kick their restless asanas method...which doesn’t work so well when people have more of an attitude of we’ll just sit here and have a conversation until you come up with something easier that we can do while having a conversation....as such, the experience was kind of ruined for the older folks in the room...including myself......and yet, no matter how disruptive they can be, I really don’t want to kick the kids out, since I think they’re the ones who can benefit most from the practice...such behavior only evidence of that...

...(then, it’s been that kinda week or two...so hot and muggy, relaxation is exhausting...and not relaxing even more so....thinking, of course, is always difficult...but not nearly as hard as not thinking....right now, I’m escaping the worst of the heat in someone else’s house, practicing yoga to Sonic Youth and John Coltrane in an air-conditioned room, with a boisterous young dog named Raffi who wants to wrestle....wrestling with a dog while in full padmasana might count as yoga, I think...calming him down with a scratch behind the ears while in supta baddha konasana definitely does)...

...Wednesday night meditation class wasn’t easy, either....sat there for the whole forty five minutes, though that restless, fidgety, and utterly unfocused thing I was doing would fit with only the most liberal definitions of meditation...the most I could say for myself was that I stayed, even if paying a whole hell of a lot more attention to so-slowly moving hands of the clock on the wall than to my breath...wondering what on earth I was doing in this room with all these good, tranquil-minded meditators sitting so calm and serene...

...and yet, it occurred to me, my mind is a lot like the teenagers in my yoga class...belonging on the cushion all the more for its failure at anything resembling stillness...

Inversions, Foundations, and a Slight Chance of Metaphor

Upside down, boy ya turn me...

Diana Ross

Foundation, foundation, foundation...

Justicia Friese DeClue

...went to this inversion workshop last weekend...two and a half hours of going upside down...headstands, forearm stands, handstands...what might be described as simultaneously the funnest yet most frightening part of the yoga asana thing....almost smell a metaphor there...

...our fearless teacher summed things up with an altered version of a real-estate motto: foundation, foundation, foundation....the idea being...I think...that, if you’re grounded, rooted, operating from a place of surety and strength, you’re basically there...whereas, if you're starting from a blob* of nervous, indecisive internal jello, you’re probably gonna struggle endlessly, flounder about, crash land backwards on a hardwood floor...

...could be a metaphor there, as well...but I'm just not sure...



* just before posting, noticed I'd accidentally written blog instead of blob...but it wasn't a Freudian slip...really...I'm almost positive...

Morning Haze

been thinking about
thinking about thinking, and
winter’s coming soon

...Massachusetts was a lot colder than Philly’s been so far this fall...saw some white on the mountaintops driving in, as well as remains of a snowman...or snowperson...snowbeing...on Kripalu’s back deck....still, had to get out and take a brisk hike down through that chilly air to the lake as soon as I arrived...causing already irritated early November sinus passages to just about scream...

...was surprised the next day to hear somebody mention his head had been hurting all morning...somehow, it never occurred to me that I might not be the only person in the entire place with a headache...

...y’know...when yer in a totally mellow spiritual holistic type setting like that, ya just tend to assume that everybody else is positively blanketed in wellness and good feeling...at least I do....then, I also tend to think I’m the only person in the yoga class thinking about lunch instead of fully inhabiting whatever asana experience we’re supposed to be having...the only person at the party feeling lonely and out of place...the only person on the sidewalk lost in worry instead of striding purposefully toward success success success...

...of course the irony is that I’m anything but alone in feeling that way...and the same goes for all of our headaches, our awkwardness, our doubts....and, certainly, if there's one thing we're never, ever truly alone in, it's our loneliness...

Wrestling, Yoga, and That Touchy-Feely Loving Kindness Shit...

the race is long, and in the end it is only against ourselves
Baz Luhrman

...have a terrible tendency to treat the yoga asana thing kinda like a wrestling match...I mean, I get that whole loving-kindness-toward-yourself thing...in theory...and yet...there I am again telling my knee to get down on the goddamn floor...whether it’s actually good for said knee to go all the way to the floor or not...

...and that’s not even mentioning calling my tendencies terrible...

...these things get complicated...

...especially since, even as I begin to see that vicious circle of recrimination clearly, that voice in my head keeps up...jeezus christ, yer the only person in the damn room can’t do a goddamn crow pose without fuckin’ fallin’ over...yes, the Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitor even finds his way into yoga class... that’s the thing about the yoga crowd—so open and accepting they even let the Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitors in...so long as they take their shoes off...

...for that matter, he even sometimes makes his way into this blog...yer usin’ that lame-ass Spanish Inquisition metaphor again?...jeezus , yer stretchin’ it ’til it breaks...kinda like torturin’ your readers on the rack...how fitting...this post suuuuucks...and, actually, I was wrestling with this post until three A.M. last night, and, this morning, deleted most of it...

...the truth is, sometimes the Inquisitor’s criticisms are valid...I mean, that stuff I cut out really did mostly suck....I just wish he’d be nicer about it...

...a person who’s likely encountered some actual flesh-and-blood grand inquisitors, Aung San Suu Kyi, wrote kindness is in a sense the courage to care...which, I think, means something other than the courage to beat one’s opponent into submission in a wrestling match...whether that opponent is a leg, a blog, or a Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitor...

...since, in the end, what is a Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitor but a badly wounded part of oneself, desperately trying to look tough...and, as such, as much in need of that touchy-feely loving kindness shit as anybody?