From Pandagon’s commentariat.

Here’s the problem.

I first noticed it around..2000-ish or so. It might have been before that, or whatever. The local chain grocery store (I was living in a rural area where there was like one largish grocery store in about a 30-minute drive radius. It was insane.) put up a big public display applauding their cashiers for making a new scans per minute metric. I think it was 80 or so. In a few months, there was another display, showing a few who made a metric of 120. There was only a few.

There was also less lanes open.

Back up in your ass with the resurrection

Those two things are entirely related.

For much of the actual working class, it’s all about meeting specified and trackable goals. And everything else goes out the window. This stampede towards absolute productivity and eliminating waste is at the core of the great recession. What we’re seeing for the most part, is companies using this as an excuse to cash in on productivity gains. That’s why profits are up even as sales are so low.

This is THE problem. This is the reason why Obama didn’t push for single payer/public option..the economy simply couldn’t withstand the massive productivity and efficiency gains in the health sector. And fixing it isn’t just a political problem…

All the solutions…there’s a lot of people..average, regular people who are going to be very upset with them. You could do massive direct government hiring…but you need to give those people breaks, or pay them if it’s storming or whatever. Or you make a stronger maximum workweek and lower it. Again, the idea that those lazy kids/whatever racial group won’t have to work as hard…it just pisses people off.

This isn’t some fake, Fox News trumped scandal. These are real, common, very popular tropes among the general population. And that’s the problem.

Nothing short of a complete change of the nature of work, why we work, what we get for work, is going to get the job done. And yes, the change is as much cultural as it is political. And that’s what makes it so tough to change.

I had a dream that all my old friends who are also yoga teachers who I rarely see anymore since we are so incredibly busy were hanging out doing karaoke and dancing 90s style to Michael Jackson’s “Remember The Time”. It was awesome. Then when I woke up I was a bit sad because in addition to the usual attrition of babies and homes, it seems that yoga in Vancouver itself has experienced schisms…that is, that we have broken along tribal lines and camps, and never again the twain shall meet.

Or, I ruminated as I had the morning coffee-and-video-game-wakeup [Madden NFL '11] perhaps we have simply exploded; grown so fast that, like a Big Bang, what once was close and nestly is now at the wild periphery. Either we pay lip service to the idea that more people should do yoga or we actually believe it: either way, our dharma as teachers is to continually grow and expand, and that will necessarily mean abandoning that closeness.

And students notice it too, and nobody seems to know why it happens: where is the Old Group, they say? Why all the politics, why the camps and militant splinter factions? Why is that every person I used to see weekly without fail at our favourite teachers’ class is now off doing Core Bootcamp on the Northshore?

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This mornings’ practice detoured from my usual militant long holds and I tried Darren Rhodes’ new yogahour app for iPhone.  Anything that conflates my tech side with yoga is almost automatically cool, and in spite of some hiccups here and there it was pretty kickass.  Let me tell you why:

- his languaging is very clear

Hmm...I wonder how I can get more people practicing yoga?

- the sequencing, albeit peculiar-feeling at first, is a fine representation of many pose families

- there’s harmonium for the OMs which reminds me of Benjy, Heather and Brent

- he made me practice poses which normally make my eyes roll back in my head, favouring a lot of the salabasana family, which generally I don’t pick up on my own as they take my thighs forward leading to various disastrous psoas/abdominal organ pain, but his cuing and the pace made them less gruesome

- it really is a yoga hour, in that you do more than I would have ever thought possible in an hour, giving you that satisfying feeling of having worked hard but having your practice complete, which CrossFit fans tell me is deeply pleasant after spending 3.5 hours of your day dicking around with the primary series

- I can see this being a Godsend after flights or long car rides.  You don’t have to conjur up your own sequencing, motivation, cues or symetry.  You can’t get distracted and start picking up dustbunnies or checking email.  Family reunion and you’re staying on the fold-out couch?  Alls you need is a mat and a blanket and you’re good to go.

The best part about it, which is also sort of irritating in that I no longer practice some of these yoga styles and there’s a reason, is that it’s very ecumenical:  it embraces and references many different commonly practiced styles, so that you never feel like the whole thing is foreign to you.  Bikrams fans will enjoy the aforementioned Salabasana emphasis and standing head-to-knee pose.  Ashtangis will be right at home, keep it moving chop chop, starting with Trikonasana in the standing series [!!!  I know, I wonder what John had to say about that, if anything].  And naturally there are some poses and concepts that I find more prevalent in Anusara Yoga such as the twisted thigh stretch before backbending, and hip openers before arm balances, and thank whatever gods there be for that addition to the series because otherwise I think I would never sleep or poop again.  It goes really fast.  Several times I said, aloud and by myself, “Aw, Darren…”.

So it’s a great amalgam/mindful preparation for whatever yoga class you might find yourself in if you can’t do Darren’s yogahour classes, and the languaging is top notch.  I will try to make sure I do it at least once a week in the next little while to see what happens, maybe in addition to my usual jive, because when it was done I bounded up with one eye bigger than the other and tried to alphabetize all my canned goods, so clearly there is something in the pace and energy of the series that is not hooking up with my body yet, but I was also just learning it.  I’ll keep you guys posted.  My word there is so much yoga, and so many different kinds of yoga, out there.  A bit overwhelming to tell the truth.  How will we ever find peace amongst these combative yogis?  Stay tuned for the next exciting instalment….

You know, this used to be a blog that nobody actually read and that was oddly satisfying as I toiled away in relative obscurity.  Now I see by my clever little Google Analytics that somebody is actually Googling “Who Is Sjanie McInnis” like I was Carmen San Diego.  Somebody told me once that I should keep Heavy Metta all business…all yoga, all the time, only the finest amateur yogic journalism, where you always get exactly what you pay for and then some.  I took that to heart until I realized that THIS is my business:  pottering around the house, growing things and cooking them, obsessively rewatching science fiction, dancing in my living room to DJ Neil Armstrong [who, whoa, got famous at some point, look at that!].   My yogic chops may be questionable [levitating is out of the question] but by God I sure am good at pottering around the house.  Consider Exhibits A through F, if it please the court. (more…)

You know your life’s purpose has become too narrow when yoga is the biggest problem you have. Since the summer kicked in in earnest I’ve been remembering a lot of my old internal policies, one of which was to maintain yoga as an accompaniment to/facilitator of a rich life, not the focus of life itself, and that seems to be working out better than the latter. Asana itself is of course only one-eighth of the yogic smorgasbord at the best of times, and studying the yamas and niyamas more as a memo pad for guidance rather than the 10 Commandments Redux gives you a nice flexible template for contextualizing life’s peccadilloes: remember the light, basically. Remember that everything is sacred, and behave accordingly.

I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride

Everything is sacred, especially Star Wars. M got into Clone Wars a little while ago and I was always a bit distant from it, since it seemed to just be the same lame Lucasian dialogue over and over again, combined with preposterous CG antics and artificial conflict. Since I cut my teaching schedule down I’ve been getting into it all over again and then last night we rewatched Episodes II and III, the “new ones” for those of you not as nerdly as I.

The first time you watch Episodes I – III your focus is basically: 1. cool FX 2. hey, there’s some characters we recognize and their origin stories, always cute a la “Batman Begins” 3. we’ve never seen more than 2 living Jedi in one place and it’s oddly satisfying to see their little United Nations interspecies panel with their matching meditation cushions [retroactive note to Samuel L. Jackson: practice more hip openers or sit on a block] and then the rest of the time is spent in agony over script, performance or awkward animations. Now that I’ve bricked in the whole aesthetic bridge AND political plot via Clone Wars none of it seems as jarring. Either I’ve redorkulated completely and crawled into this silly little world to the point of being unable to criticize it properly, or it really was as Lucas claimed, a grand sprawling epic covering some richly ambiguous moral territory.

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4 lbs buffalo meat [I used chuck roast] in stewing cubes

nom nom nom

2 pieces bacon, chopped in lardons i.e. little slices; I actually diced mine and that was excellent
1 cooking onion, diced
1 piece celery, sliced
1 carrot, sliced
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
2 tbsp all purpose flour
3 cloves garlic, minced
Can tomato paste, waiting for the glorious day when it comes in resealable containers because you never need a whole can….what you really need is 2 tbsp so if you have that kicking around, God bless you, check to see that it’s not moldy because that always happens to me
Bouquet garni [fancy French term for a big bundle of fresh herbs: I get to use my silicon food-tie for this purpose: rosemary, oregano, thyme, parsley]
3 cups beef stock
Half a litre bouncy young red wine, this time around was an inexpensive [=cheap] organic Sangiovese, but we’ve used Beaujolais in the past and of course the classic Burgundy would not go amiss…I wonder if a Malbec would suit?
2 cups tiny mushrooms; if tiny ones are not available, I’m sorry. But you can quarter normal mushrooms and use them instead
24 pearl onions; use peeling them as a meditation of sorts
2 firm-fleshed potatoes e.g. Yukon Gold, cut into 2 cm cubes

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Let me add my voice to the chorus of Anusara bloggingheads to address this NY Times article; Christina Sell has already done a bang-up job responding to what I think are the most salient points [the stuff that is straight up head-scratchingly false and overall tone], so this might be superfluous, but here goes nothing. Or here goes something, here comes nothing, because I can’t stop watching TRON.

Mimi Swartz seems like she had a whole pile of Post-It notes with numbers on them all around her MacAir while she wrote, a journalistic stance I heartily endorse since I’m writing this surrounded by Post-It notes. Some of hers appear to be dates, as she roughs out the Anusara chronology for the n00bs, but most of them are dollar amounts: how much for a workshop, how much for a training manual, how much John gets paid, and how much “normal” yoga teachers get paid. These dollar amounts are accurate so far as they go, and while I’ve thrown a fair amount of ca$h money at Anusara over the years I never once felt ripped off or like I didn’t get what I paid for. As far as how much it costs to travel or get lodging in other cities, unless John is far more wily than I’ve given him credit for, he doesn’t benefit from those monies in any way, and the actual cost of the events is by far the least expensive aspect of travelling for trainings. Plus, if you’re really in bad shape money-wise, you can apply for a scholarship. I don’t really see the exploitative aspect there. (more…)

This is a public service announcement: Avoid people who think they have the answer. In particular, avoid people who think that

I stole this.

there is only one way to the truth. In particular particular, avoid teachers that think there is only useful aspect of human experience, either heart, mind or body. I’ve found some serious pitfalls and personal conflicts with those who seem to find merit in methodologies that favour only one of this trinity, and it’s freaking me out a little to see that that’s really where the wheels come off the rhetorical cart: there are SO MANY PATHS. There are strong camps delineated within a subculture [yoga] that SHOULD be loving and graceful, and most of them have to do with a blind obeisance to only one of the three. This blindness usually manifests in code:

1. “I don’t want to have to think too hard about yoga, I just want to have an experience” [body]
2. “If you can’t intellectually defend what you’re doing, it’s either dangerous or stupid or both” [mind]
3. “I know it doesn’t make sense and I can’t explain why but you have to give yourself fully over to this person or method before you will truly reap the benefits of yoga. You THINK you’re getting something out of it but you’re really not.” [heart]

Holy sweet moly, what a s***show. The very fact that these conflicts exist, to my childish brain, seem to be indicative of a deep misunderstanding of our nature, which is of course the uneasy coexistence of all these aspects as they duke it out in the inner world. I also enjoy these Underpants-Gnomes-esque syllogisms where one of the opposing teams’ beliefs shows up as the consequence of working with your chosen team:

1. Work with the mind only
2. ???
3. Experience a oneness with all creation even though you’re so, like, totally different!!

or

1. Work with the body only
2. ???
3. It knows what it wants and has an intellect that’s like, smarter than your intellectual intellect, and wait, what?

or

1. Work with the heart only
2. ???
3. ???????? [ha ha, that's my dig at bhakti, but seriously folks, tip your waitresses]

Look, stop the violence in hip-hop, y-o. If you’ve found yourself in any of these camps at any point in your path, and ESPECIALLY if you’ve come to see merit where you previously thought there was none, then we collectively acknowledge the possibility, however slim, that your mortal yoga enemy actually has something to offer the world, even if their chosen one of the 31 flavours is not yours. One of your students who’s been getting Rocky Road from you for the last 6 years needs some Pralines’n'Cream from your nemesis, and WE as teachers need to dig that if we really wish the best for them we’ll let them go with a good, if salty, grace. There are many, many paths and many, many souls, and may we keep what John calls a “luminous spaciousness” towards those who make us gnash our teeth and wail.

BTO has guided me lovingly from the weedy darkness of self-doubt to approaching my 34th birthday with some form of identity intact. I’ve put a post-it note on the bathroom mirror that says “I AM NOT GOING TO QUIT” in Sharpie marker. Now, “quitting” could take a number of different forms so for all practical purposes that post-it note is meaningless, but let’s say for the time being that I’m not going to quit teaching and start there. And yes, it was getting to that point after staring down the bleak barrel of the CTG to the energetic holocaust of Vipassana.

One of the ways I self-diagnose my mental state is how much I connect to music: does it seem like some sort of weird minstrelsy or is it oddly prophetic, hearkening to me down the decades? I know that if I don’t relate to the lyrics that I’ve slipped out of my groove somehow, and I’ve actually been listening to the most sad-bastard crap imaginable [indie lo-fi instrumentals!! wtf], in the hopes that my new pretentions to adulthood and spirituality would be reflected in grownup music. (more…)

Okay, I really hope that there are more holidayish summer holidays than the last couple of weeks, for although I was in the picturesque mountains of the Interior in late June/early July, I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder in my life. With the certification process being the hardest thing I’ve ever TRIED to do, a 10-day Vipassana retreat officially assumes the status of the hardest thing I’ve ever ACTUALLY DONE. “Fun” was not a component of this experience, at least not until it was over [viz. the banging-head-against-the-wall phenomenon]

The site explains the circumstances of these retreats clearly enough, so I won’t belabour that; nothing in the bare-bones font and design of the site prepares the human nervous system for 12 daily hours of meditation and what basically amounts to a daily 19-hour fast, as no food other than fruit and tea can be taken after noon…for not being able to even expose your upper arms to the sun or nod and smile encouragingly at a fellow victim, I mean participant, when they are so visibly shaken and miserable that every cell in you is alive with compassion. What’s a soft, decadent little pup like myself doing in this rigorous situation, you ask? Haven’t I structured both my practice and my teaching to avoid the tedious drudgery of “life is suffering”? Well, yeah, sort of, except that this is a vast and rich continent of practice and knowledge and if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em for a 10 day psychic evisceration. (more…)