Tubing

Test…test…sibilance….thibilanth, thibilanth…is this thing on? “Blog”, that’s like short for “Web Log”, right? like a record of my life but on the World Wide Web?

I’m just trying to think of fancy and hopefully vaguely humourous ways of pointing out that I haven’t been here in a while. Frankly I’ve felt mired in an Ouroboros of thinking-about-getting-certified-trying-to-teach-to-the-realities-of-not-being-certified-and-
wanting-to-be-certified-and-yet-not-wanting-it-so-much-that-my-class-is-crappy &c. DFW has this whole short piece called “Octet” where he writes about wanting so badly to actually ask outright, in the short piece, whether the short piece is working or not, and so therefore actually DOES ask. I read it last night prior to a [probably expected, for you mental health professionals out there] 90 minute anxiety attack at 4 am. There are enough blogs and, God help us all, LiveJournals out there dedicated firmly to the vicissitudes of daily mood swings [is citta-vritti.wordpress.com registered yet?]….”I feel ok today! Hurray for my feeling ok! Up with people! Let’s do this crazy thing!/Ugh, not well at all. Unspecific abdominal complaint./Man, you thought I felt bad the last time? Much worse today. Check in later for updates on the worseness./ Sorry for being such a drama queen over the last 45 posts. Everything’s totally fine./Who’s been blogjacking me? This crazy miserable person? Couldn’t be better. The thing with the jaw? Expression of overall fineness.” And I really did not want Heavy Metta to be that, because OMGrly? a daily chronicle of moods? Terrible when you’re in those moods, and not much better to read.

Yet, here I am, attempting to be as candid as possible, to honour my teachers and influences and their adherence to discipline and excellence and sometimes not feeling disciplined OR excellent. This silence-as-displaced-discipline must stop, I think; the catharsis of [Jesus!] LiveJournal has good intentions. I think we should feel free in this yoga to say/write what is really occurring. So where, then, is the practice….or do you just slide down into the linguistic slime whenever things are weird/bad/desperate? We all know the gravity of what they call a “cloaked” state. You get cloakeder and cloakeder, and it gets a momentum of darkness that is extremely perilous. Paradoxically, that’s the time that you least feel like practicing, that somehow all the good clean people at the yoga studio will get your dirt all over them, and yet your practice is the path out of the murk and back into where you just intuitively KNOW you should be. So you can’t let it be and you also must let it be. Confusing.

When I was in Courtenay this summer, before this blog was born or thought of, I indulged in the arcane and sacred art and science of “tubing”, that is, floating in an inner tube down their local river from where one hippie drove their van to where another hippie was taking their van to pick your tubed-self up at the bottom. In spite of gifted-amateur guidance I was not a natural tuber, so to speak. I was fairly adept at lying in the tube and relaxing, but then the low river in the heat of the summer was low enough that my butt scraped rocks all the way down. I was also prodigious at paddling frantically with little flipper-baby hands to try and navigate my way out of weedy situations; no tuber has ever flailed more frantically than I. In spite of my natural gifts at these two extremes my tubing companions were far ahead and I always seemed to find myself in the literal weeds. Spiders wove their webs in the riverside trees and they would get all caught in my dreads as I drifted by. I looked like cotton candy by the end. I would oscillate between these two approaches, and [extraordinary!] neither extreme seemed to serve me: paddling maniacally=weeds: laissez-faire=weeds. My companions were distant colourful jubilant specks. Locals with six-packs of Lucky Lager [ceremonial tubing beverage] showed up riverside to critique my approach, posture, execution and dismount, sometimes holding up small laminated cards with Sharpie-markered “5.5”s on them.

I did not find a true balance of these two native extreme skills. I had a bruised ass, spidery hair, a sunburnt nose, and no Lucky Lager of my own for miles. My companions actually had to WAIT for me to passive-aggressively drift/flail to the agreed van-parking. I taught to this phenomenon the next day, to hearty laughter, but I’m starting to take it more seriously…

Being “in the flow” is the perfect balance of discipline and freedom. There can be no compromise of either. How, then, in God’s name, do you know that you have done both to the best of your ability? Well, in tubing this balance can be empirically measured: you are either further down the river or you are in the weeds and spiders. In life it appears to be more esoteric, but I think it is just as easily measured. Here are my criteria/field notes from a burgeoning delight, circa last spring:

THE FLOW: has its own gravity

No happy persons shown here were harmed during this thought exercise

promotes itself
disinfects vibrations
is free!
attracts its like
provides energy to its host
requires no apologies
gives others permission to flow
is not folly
has profound depths
is the worship of life
takes practice

I wrote these criteria down in my little notebook last year when, frankly, the idea of a larger flow still seemed like a theory to me, rather than a lived reality. As I dwell in, lose, regain, dwell in, lose and regain this flow it’s always worth it to me to return to what convinced me it existed in the first place. No matter how strong your biceps are, you can’t paddle more frantically than the river’s innate glorious power. No matter how passive you pretend to be, you still want to be down the river with your friends, and this is a noble desire. The flow is real, it is pleasant, it feels exactly as good as you think it should, and it is available in the snap of your fingers…this is shraddha, faith, and it says YES to life. More on YES later, I hope. YES is so bold it makes me want to keep typing but enough for now…get out there and flow.

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