Dr. Jay's 2,864th Discourse on Equanimity

...it's not that I don't care about missing the lecture on equanimity, but I'm okay with it...
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(for Frank Jude Boccio....thanks for a great week at Kripalu!)

Yes, This Blog Still Exists...

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
Don DeLillo

...some time ago decided I was gonna focus on practicing yoga and not think about it so much...read about it less...certainly stop arguing about it...and, for the most part, that's been a good thing...

...though, as a result, have also been writing about it a lot less....as readers may've noticed...but, then, I'm writing about other things less, too, as I try to work on a novel about dysfunctional superheroes...which I haven't been doing much in recent weeks, either...okay, let's fact it, I been slacking...

...anyway, more recently been practicing yoga a lot less, too, due to the injured arm...iced as I type...(was telling a friend about it, said it was getting better for a while, but then the recovery seemed to plateau....she asked if I was icing it...I said I was until it started feeling better....took me a couple minutes to make the connection between those two answers)...

...nonetheless, went on a yoga retreat with my friends and teachers John and Diana at a hilltop villa in the Umbria region of Italy...

...yes, that's actually the place...ancient stone buildings with modern infinity pool, hot tub, and yoga studio....before and after which, spent time in the magical city of Florence...

 



...as well as Barcelona (see also the lovely Antonio Gaudi doorway, at the top of the post),





and Madrid...



...after so much quality time with Miro, Picasso, Bosch, Botticelli, and ancient, storied rivers of red wine, wasn't easy to settle back into the autumn at home...been doing a lots of meditation and mindfulness mini-retreats, and, a few weekends ago, a Yin Yoga teacher training with the amazing Corina Benner in an area of South Philly not long ago infamous as the city's mafia battleground, now one of it major hipster neighborhoods...impermanence, y'know...

I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
'All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.'
William Butler Yeats, The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water

...but, anyway, told some fellow students about my semi-legendary blog...figured it might be a good time to post something...anything...for whatever it might be worth...

I had a discussion with a great master in Japan... and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, "That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.

Alan Watts

No Direction Home...

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Stephen Dedalus (James Joyce, Ulysses)

How does it feel
to be without a home,
with no direction home...?
Bob Dylan

...sadness didn’t really kick in ‘til the necessary stop back at the old house...the overwhelming sense of need to say goodbye...(unwilling nostalgia jostling with an equally painful desire to have it all done with and move on)...though the house is still there, certainly, though nobody lives there anymore, and, in fact, I’ll be need to be back, probably a lot, in the months to come, to go through stuff, clean up, scrub the place clean of memories and home...

...and though it’s been a long time since it’s been my own address...(though junk mail with my name on it still comes, thanks to the boundless memories of schools, political parties, and non-profits...though now there's nobody to put it in a neat pile on my childhood bed)...it's the home that's always been back there, where mom and dad and then just mom still lived, until a few days ago, when we moved her in to the swanky retirement community with the river view most Manhattanites would kill for....a good and necessary change, definitely...but...

...dogs buried in the yard, traces of pot smoke doubtless lingering in the attic, growth marked in pencil on a wall, since painted over...the world of someone's long-gone childhood and adolescence...not that those exactly constitute a paradise lost...more like a nightmare from which I’ve been trying to awake for three decades...the comfortable old house a burden in more ways than one...and yet, the birthplace, nesting place, launching pad of dreams and hopes...that shit about as ephemeral as ephemeral gets and yet still anchored, there...

Fundamentally, not one thing exists,
So where is the dust to cling?
Hui-neng

...same as it ever was...
David Byrne

...though of course as any Zen monk or Talking Heads singer can tell ya, those anchors, any anchors, really, are ephemeral as it gets, too...that we all, really, have no direction home...perhaps even more so when we don’t realize it...and that realization is, if anything, a good one...even if it doesn’t always feel that way...

I'm Not a Buddhist. Am I Still a Buddhist?*

...I find Use Extreme Caution signs strange....I mean, if you’re not huddled ‘neath the covers all day in a fetal position, can your level of caution really be called extreme?...

They always throw around this term ‘the liberal elite.’ And I kept thinking to myself about the Christian right. What’s more elite than believing that only you will go to heaven?
Jon Stewart

...every now and then, I’ll run into former clients from the rehab....usually, they’ll smile, call out my name, maybe give me a hug....except for a couple times, on the sidewalk near a yoga studio I frequent, which just happens to be just around the corner from a methadone clinic....there, eyes avoid me, feet walk rapidly away...ironically enough, telling exactly what they don’t want me to know...revealing through the very act of attempting to hide...

To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
Stephen Covey

...1987, leaning against my backpack on a traffic island outside Rome, my friend and I taking turns sticking our thumbs out, heading down to Pompeii to touch ancient history, admire ancient mosaics, and wander around the place Pink Floyd played....he asked if I wanted to read a book he had...An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, by D. T. Suzuki....thoroughly uninterested in Eastern philosophy, meditation, spirituality, or any of that kinda crap, I was, nonetheless, just bored enough to say yeah, sure....a lot’s happened since then....I meditate every day and recently dug out my old Alan Watts (purchased some time after returning from Europe in ’87 or ’88)...but still have no interest in being a Buddhist...

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding...
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

...letting go of preconceptions makes things a lot more mysterious...beyond labels, stereotypes, and convenient boxes, each person you meet as wondrously and terrifyingly, inscrutably complex as the paradoxes of infinity....and this, of course, is precisely why we come up with all those labels, stereotypes, and boxes....it’s just a lot easier to check off white black liberal conservative Democrat Republican hipster Buddhist Christian yogi cynic or even yoga cynic than to try and fathom a cosmos...


* ...title originally incarnated, humbly enough, as a comment on a Facebook post about an Elephant Journal article titled
I Don’t Believe in Reincarnation. Am I Still a Buddhist?...

In Which Dr. Jay Weighs in on the Anusara Controversy (Kinda, Sorta), and then Goes into a Most Entertaining Digression Involving His Head & Neck

...as mentioned a little while ago, I’m doing this anusara-inspired Align & Flow training*...in which I'm learning all about, among other things, principles of alignment...

...like, for instance, the way the skull loop interacts with the shoulder loop...(anusara lingo)...the latter beginning all the way at the upper palate, and including the neck....human anatomy, it turns out, is quite distinct from that of the bobble head doll...

...twenty years ago, in Boulder*******, long before I even thought about getting into yoga*********...(and, anyway, at that point far more interested in attaining higher consciousness by other means***********)...went to a meditation class with a visiting Zen master at Naropa, and somebody asked him about posture....he said something like it’s important to keep the head on top of the neck, and people laughed...but, I’ve since learned, he was actually describing something profound and difficult...particularly for those of us who’ve spent most of our lives walking around with a Charlie Brown droop in the neck*************...


*just as, it turns out, controversy erupts in and around the anusara yoga world**...

** when, already, certain yoga friends were warning me not to drink the kula-aid or lookin' at me like I said I was joining the Westboro Baptist Church, or something...which I don’t fully understand, nor, to be honest, care all that much about***...at this point, I’m learning lotsa valuable stuff, from people I like and for whom I have nothing but praise****...

*** and, yes, that was the official statement of this blog, its management, writing staff, shareholders, legal representatives, clowns, concubines, and corporate affiliates...

**** and not that creepy, semi-lobotomized dogma-reciting too-far-gone-to-see-the-contradictions “my guru tells me to think for myself” kinda praise, either*****...

***** as long-time readers know, I get creeped out by that kinda stuff far more easily than most yogis******...

****** so, trust me, when somebody offers me the profound honor of licking the holy perspiration off John Friend’s feet, I’ll head for the door...but, at this point, it seems highly unlikely anything like that's gonna happen...

******* right, that Boulder, home to Elephant Journal and all those self-important yoga hippies...though I was there when it was cool********...

******** not that there’s anything wrong with being a self-important yoga hippie, or anything...namaste, Boulder brothers and sisters...

********* and, thus, blissfully unaware of the all-important high-falutin' conflicts & controversies of the yoga world**********...

********** a state of innocence to which I’d quite happily return....I mean, seriously, I work part-time at this residential rehab for women, y'know, tutoring in reading and writing, and, sometimes, clients like to kind of rant to me about their frustrations...they say they feel they can talk to me precisely because I'm not a therapist...which is cool...some weeks ago, though, I got a bit irritated with one client who kept ragging on the other women there...I said something like come on...you're supposed to be here helping one another through your recovery and all you do is snipe at each other...I think it kinda applies...

*********** a state of experience best, I think, left behind************...

************ notably also preceding my lengthy academic period, when I learned the value of foot-notes, about which readers can make their own judgments...

************* also explored in a notable Arrested Development episode**************...

************** unrelated to which, but I wanted to mention it somewhere, the title of this post was originally a good deal longer, like a classic Tom Jones-ish 19th century-type chapter title, but it turns out there's a limit to how many characters can be in a blog title...thanks for squelchin' my creativity, Blogger...

Springtime Ebbs and Flows...

April is the cruelest month...
T. S. Eliot

...or maybe it’s just me...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 126:97

...when spring first hit...felt an awful lot like summer...went out and overexerted myself, ending up exhausted, sore, and sunburned...banged up my knees after catching a bike wheel in an old trolley track that still exists, far as I can tell, for the sole purpose of catching bike wheels...

...more lately it’s been wetter and colder, if greener...been feeling uninspired...not writing much...apart from being virtually eco-conscious by revising, refurbishing and reincarnating old Yoga for Cynics posts*...

...do I understand your question man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
Bob Dylan (in as crappy a mood, apparently, as T. S. Eliot)

...then, perhaps it’s really all a matter of ebb & flow—old-school well-worn zen-like metaphor in progress—and the only trick is to realize it...meaning not just in the sense of hey, maybe it’s all just a matter of ebb & flow—think I’ll write something about that on my blog...but to really realize it...take it in...accept it...stop expecting the world to stand still long enough to make sense...

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide

...but, maybe the not being able to believe in that...the suspecting it’s all bullshit...is simply part of that ebb...faith and doubt not pulling in a tug-o-war, but operating more smoothly in a kind of dialectic tide...unceasing movement avoiding the stagnation of self righteous surety, fanaticism and fundamentalism, as well as the dry sand of fatalism and despair...nothing definite...except that wherever ya end up, ya won’t be there for long...


*...like this one...about the haiku Allen Ginsberg wrote for me...which I then spilled something on...posted earlier today...

Zen-Like and Irritating

A friend always tells me when I’m being Zen-like and irritating...particularly when, just after yoga class, I seem unable to form a solid opinion about where we should go for beer...wanting simply to flow along with others’ plans like a babbling brook...or something...and I appreciate that.

Meditating, I
become a pain in the ass
to all of my friends

And so I offer up this haiku in small tribute to the long-suffering multitudes who tirelessly put up with pretentious yogis, hippie Buddhists, and other annoyingly cosmic and mellow types.

(...though suspecting that doing so only makes me more Zen-like and irritating...there’s a koan in there somewhere...)

Kind of a Haiku by Allen Ginsberg

And now...an exclusive, never-before-published haiku by a famous dead American poet. Really. Seriously:

Just wandered in from
the void for a poetry
reading, the next morning
I was hung over.
Allen Ginsberg

You’re probably thinking that doesn’t look much like a haiku—in fact it looks even less like one on the original page, since the line brakes above are really just where the writing hit the edge of the paper, and he certainly wasn’t even trying for 5-7-5 (though it has been argued that, given the essential differences between Japanese and English, that schema isn’t important for English-language haiku, anyway) (then, those presenting that argument might simply be lazy) (but...far be it from me to get into debates about poetic form).

It was back in the summer of 1990, I believe, though it could possibly have been '91, while I was embarrassing my parents living the life of a slacker out in Boulder, a year out of college, no prospects for or particular interest in a promising career of any kind, and, when not wandering in the mountains or otherwise sacrificing brain cells to unknown gods, attending a free Zen meditation class at the Naropa Institute, which was also attended, at least once or twice, by Ginsberg, who one Saturday (I think), as part of a benefit for something or other, along with some other poets, did this thing—basically, you stood in line, paid a few or maybe five bucks, and a famous poet would ask you a few questions, then write an instant haiku on the spot....I told Ginsberg I was just wandering, kind of a bum—apparently thinking maybe he’d be impressed and tell me I reminded him of Kerouac or something (he wasn’t, and didn’t)—I also told him I’d gone to a poetry reading the night before, and now, in the morning, was hung over...and so ended up with a piece of rag paper, with this poem, a little drawing of a flower and what looks like a snake, and Ginsberg’s signature on it. I’ve still got it, though in the midst of a long summer living in my van, something apparently got spilled on it, staining and smudging it badly, particularly the signature, though you can still read it...kinda.....

That summer or maybe the next one, I also attended a seminar Ginsberg did—once a week for I think three weeks we read Blake and Whitman, and Allen related the poems to his sex life, drug experiences, and conversations with Bob Dylan...which could be interesting, sometimes, like when he talked about this Blake poem:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

and applied it to how, at one time in his life, he’d kept taking acid, each time hoping this one will last until, finally, he learned to kiss it as it flies...and he drew attention to this part of a line from an obscure version of the well known I asked a thief:

‘twixt earnest & joke

arguing that it was central to his own poetry as well as that of Shakespeare and lots of other people...now that I think of it, it’s probably central to Yoga for Cynics, too...and, some years later, in grad school I used it as the basis for what became my first published scholarly article, called The Trickster Metaphysics of Thylias Moss. Thylias Moss writes stuff like this:

Somebody told me I didn’t exist even though he was looking dead at me. He said that since I defied logic, I wasn’t real for reality is one of logic’s definitions. He said I was a contradiction in terms, that one side of me cancelled out the other leaving nothing. His shaking knees were like polite maracas in the small clicking they made. His mustache seemed a misplaced smile. My compliments did not deter him from thinking he conversed with an empty space since there was no such thing as an angel who doesn’t believe in God....

but, that was another time....

What the hell kinda yogi writes blog posts at three twenty-nine in the morning?

Telephone’s ringing, but I don’t answer it
’cause everybody knows that good news always sleeps till noon.
The Cowboy Junkies

The truth is, I’d have nothing against morning people if more of them would simply acknowledge that they are morning people, as opposed to people who are livin’ right, unlike you lazy deviants still in bed. Yeah, we’ve all heard the old Ben Franklin, “early to bed” thing, and, of course, when people like Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett sing “the night time is the right time” and “gonna do all the things I told ya in the midnight hour,” religious leaders of all stripes can reply quite smugly “yes, and that’s exactly the problem.” The American attitude toward sleeping-in has always tended to combine traditional Christian attitudes toward sin with more practical concerns about lowering productivity in a capitalist economy.

And yet, when you get into that "alternative spirituality" thing, even among the mellowest of alternative spiritual types, you tend to find said people getting up even earlier. Seriously, we're talkin' Zen freaks getting up to meditate before the bars close...and B.K.S. Iyengar, "the pope of yoga," says yoga should be practiced early in the morning since that’s when the mind is clearest and body loosest. Dare those of us born under the sign of Charlie the Three Toed Sloth, as we drag our sorry selves out of bed, so stiff and fuzzy-headed that making that oh-so-necessary first pot of coffee seems as difficult and complicated a process as enriching uranium, say "speak for yourself, buddy?"

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Steven Wright

Probably Not the Best Example of Loving Kindness

I called somebody a "stupid fucking asshole" on the way to yoga class this morning...there in the middle of the street--him in his car that had careened in front of me, shaking with indignation, yelling, acting like he was gonna run into me on purpose, though I'd had the right of way...men, women, and children standing passively at the bus stop on the corner as I unleashed my invective, yoga mat slung over one shoulder.

Probably not the best example of loving kindness. Then, that well of rage, so easily tapped, might have something do with why I go to yoga class in the first place.

Joe Strummer sang

Let fury have the hour
Anger can be power
Know that you can use it

And that's true, up to a point, even if the number of oppressive regimes overthrown by punk rock seems to be securely locked at zero. I've been known to rage against people with positive attitudes, though it's generally only those who desperately want to have positive attitudes that are the problem; y'know, people who say "keep your bullshit negative attitudes away from me," without the least hint of irony. Smiling organic types who, if you're suffering, will tell you it's just your own bad karma, all your own fault for putting out negative energy--as if anything could be more negative than substituting rejection and judgement for kindness and empathy. Then, who knows, maybe all those people in Darfur need is just a good New Age seminar.

An American Tibetan Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron (yeah, I’m at least as dubious as you are about Westerners who become Buddhist nuns and change their names, though, as far as I know, she didn't drop nearly as much acid as Richard Alpert did before he became Ram Dass) (not that there’d be anything wrong with that if she had) wrote this about a Zen teacher named Bernard Glassman who works with the homeless: “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.” Could it be that all self-righteousness is, in essence, a refusal to accept what we see in the mirror?