The Highly Prestigious and Karmically Significant Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love Award

...before getting this post started, I think I need to say something about a controversy currently raging on other blogs with yoga in their titles...that is, the highly acrimonious subject of competitive yoga...which, to many, is a bit of an oxymoron...so, let me just say right now that you won’t find any of that here....that’s because I happen to be the least competitive yogi on the web...one might even say the World Champion of Non-Competitiveness.............and if there's anybody out there who thinks you’re less competitive than I am, all I can say is bring it, bitch...

...ahem...as loyal readers know, now and then this humble blog receives awards from fellow bloggers...(with very little money changing hands...usually)...and, generally, that involves passing on the award to other deserving bloggers...known as blog love...which I’ve been far too uncooperative and un-loving to do....and so, the time has come to atone...(even though I’ll no doubt end up doing more harm than good by forgetting people who really deserve awards)...so, since nobody’s actually given me any awards lately...drum roll, please...

...Yoga for Cynics is, like, totally thrilled to present the highly prestigious, karmically significant, and not at all tacky Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love Award... redeemable for 15% off orders of $100 or more at participating International House of Yoga™ locations...honoring blogs and bloggers about whom I can think of something funny to say at the moment...

Holly's Earth to Holly is kinda like the blog version of that mellow friendly house where your mellow friendly friends live with their mellow friendly dog...you wanna stop by without calling first, you wanna hang out, you wanna borrow CD’s, you wanna crash on the couch...it’s all good...

Brooks' appropriately titled Yogic Muse is where half the posts here started out as comments...seriously, if this blog ever started making money, I’d worry about a lawsuit if Brooks wasn’t so full of that yogic lovingkindness and stuff...

Melinda's Melindaville offers such well-written, often hair-raising first person accounts of drug abuse, prostitution, and other really serious stuff that all the jokes I can think of are coming out way too offensive...

Iranian poet Human Being at Thus Spake the Crow appears to be further out there than I am...which I find kinda threatening...

Clutterquake is Lydia’s other blog...and it's getting the award instead of her main blog ‘cause that’s how edgy I am...

Seeing Eye Chick at Apocalyptics Anonymous is seriously pissed off...do not fuck with Seeing Eye Chick...she will fuck you up...

Lisa at Ecoyogini practices yoga in Canada, kinda like Roseanne at It’s All Yoga, Baby, which means...jeezus, I’m right on the cusp of making some lame-ass joke about curling, Celine Dion, and locust pose...which means my well of creativity is just about tapped....so that’s all for now...we return you to your previously scheduled internet activity...

Seven Veils

...Yoga for Cynics is once again feelin’ the blog love...with a whopping three (3) (III) blog awards coming to its lowly self from a trio of vastly superior...okay, I’ll cut the self-loathing/false humility...also-really-good bloggers...Roseanne of It’s All Yoga, Baby, Brooks of Yoga, the Mind and Culture, and Eco Yogini of...ummm...Eco Yogini...

...as is probably clear to anyone who’s read this blog for a while, I’m not so good with rules...like, for instance, I actually do know how to write complete, properly punctuated sentences...but don’t...nonetheless, I think there was something about seven things...

1)...which reminds me of that obscure Bob Dylan song Seven Curses which is totally stolen from at least one old folk song...or at least retells a classic folktale...also appropriated, at various times, by Leadbelly, Led Zeppelin, and the Marquis de Sade...about a young girl who agrees to sleep with a crusty old judge if he’ll spare her father’s life, only to wake in the morning to find out that the judge lied, and her father’s been hung after all...and it ends with seven curses on a judge so cruel...which are that one doctor cannot save him, that two healers cannot heal him, that three eyes cannot see him, that four ears cannot hear him, that five walls cannot hide him, that six diggers cannot bury him, and that seven deaths shall never kill him...

2)...I realize that the previous entry wasn’t about me, and in fact had nothing to do with anything other than the number seven, and will try harder with the rest...

3)...had a weird sensation in yoga class, doing bridge pose, with eyes closed...felt strangely small...which, in the way people generally use the expression feeling small doesn’t sound so good...but it’s different when one tends to think of oneself as large and ungainly...

4)...ironically enough, it often seems that those who are most nostalgic and resistant to change have miserable pasts...which, I suspect grows from of a feeling that something essential was lost back then...and that, the further away then gets, the less chance there is to retrieve it...

5)...my first attempt at a blog was called It’s Rough Inside Your Head...its name something a shrink said to me once, after I’d gotten her completely exasperated by expertly shooting down every attempt she made to get me to think about my life in a more positive way...as such, the blog, which I think I wrote four posts for, never telling anybody about its existence and then killing it when I started this one, some time later, was an outpouring of unreserved vitriol about whatever pissed me off so much I felt I had to express it but couldn’t in most social circumstances for fear of offending or frightening people...

6)...was actually planning on digging out some sample paragraph or two from that unmourned virtual entity...but, somehow, in between the laptop it was created on and the one I’m typing on now, the file that stuff was saved on seems to have been lost...

7)...the goal of this blog, on the other hand...or, at least, one I can think of right now...is to try and cultivate somewhat more open, less combative aspects...not to deny those other parts, but, virtually, at least, to create a relatively peaceful, quiet space where they can be allowed to rest for a while...like a yoga practice, but in words...kinda...

That Yoga Thing

to live is to fly, low and high,
so shake the dust off of your wings, and the sleep out of your eyes...
Townes Van Zandt

...had stuff to do in a whole lotta different places in the city today...without a lotta time to do any of it...running around like a chicken with its head cut off...but on a bike...and a bit on foot...healthier, cheaper, and avoids the waking nightmare of trying to get around center city Philadelphia in the middle of the day by car...hectic, crazy, frenetic movement...which, strangely enough, left me feeling better than I have in weeks...

...by the time I got to this evening’s yoga class, was exhausted, sore all over the place...and, as I know already, yoga class can be downright painful after biking crazily around town all day...and it was...but I was cool with that...not ignoring, transcending, or escaping sore and tired, but deep inside both...pumping on all cylinders...feeling whatever I felt...and good with it...

if the spirit moves ya, let me groove ya...
Marvin Gaye

...it’s never been exactly unusual for me to feel alienated from any thing or body around...especially my own...which is one reason that yoga thing’s been particularly potent...working that mind & body thing...even if I’m a bit more ambivalent about the spirit thing...tending to be kind of a trippy mystical dude when hanging out with atheists, and a grumpy non-theist when hanging out with believers...overall, probably happiest swimming in the boundless unknown...when I can manage it...

just to dig it all and not to wonder, that’s just fine...
Van Morrison

...then, I think I’ve come to some kind of understanding of that namaste thing...which doesn’t mean you’re cool because you believe what I do....it means whoever you are and whatever you believe or don’t believe, what's in you is as holy and sacred as anything...

...thanks to Brooks and Lea for sending some blog love my way...even while I’ve been barely reading anybody else’s blogs lately...so it goes...namaste to all...