Spaces remaining in SPL retreat!

Don’t forget homies:  my Strathcona Park Lodge retreat is coming up on July 9 and you KNOW you want to come out to the

mountains and frolic with me and my girl Kristen.  Much yoga, stupidly gorgeous surroundings, high alpine activities, kick-ass local and organic food, and I think we’ll get to have a campfire.  If you would like to come but are having trouble thinking of how you’ll get up there, email me at my first name backwards at gmail dot com and I have some friends you can carpool with.  Plus it’s only like a couple of days off of work, making it a very dignified-sounding way to get out of the city:  “I’m going on a yoga retreat.  Yes, I am a very serious and diligent student”.  You know?  Contact the Lodge directly to sign up.

Didn’t I blow your mind this time? Didn’t I?

Woohoo, day 5 of Chris Chavez‘ Immersion II and I’m only one sleep away from holidays in Ucluelet. Uclulet? Uceluelet? Ulcluet? Dang.

I could probably create an entire verbose blog around just the discussions we’ve been having in this immersion. Every day is full of fertile conversations and multiple possibilities; I always end up with a bunch of things I want to say and anyone attending the immersion would be surprised to know I only put up my hand about 27% of the time, considering how much I end up talking, which, sigh…An old friend of mine once said, when asked why he was so quiet, “If I talk I know what *I* think, and I already know what I think. If I listen, I know what everybody else thinks”.

I’d like to try and stick with one particular point about the teacher/student relationship this time around. Periodically, after going deep inside the anatomy of the psoas or dissecting the relationship between shin loop and thigh loop, we’d all have to stumble, reeling, back to our higher priorities: feeling good, being bright, connecting with something greater. It’s like coming out into the mall after watching the Matrix. Not only are the flourescents way too bright but you’re fairly convinced that every civilian you see is after you. Once you’ve gone that deep, the simplicity of the purposes of practice seem too sophomoric to be real.

A couple of examples: A. Let’s say you get a big adjustment from your teacher that lets you know you are in alignment in Tadasana. He stands you in front of a mirror you can see that this is in fact absolutely true. Only problem is: IT FEELS INSANE. Like grade-A certified cuckoo insane. In alignment you feel like your butt sticks out or your shoulders are too active or you’re working too hard or you feel like you’re going to fall over. It seems preposterous that this is how you should stand, and yet you can clearly see in the mirror that this is in fact centre, also you trust your teacher, so your sense of yourself shifts…you think, “well shoot; anything is possible now. This feels so crazy that I doubt my own sense of proprioception, and I’ll definitely try to incorporate it into my practice and just standing around, except that apparently I’ll know it’s right because it goes against every normal instinct I have”.

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Keep on rockin’ in the free world!

The news is serving up fresh steaming hot cups of crazy…I’ve had 4.5 hours sleep, and Big Rock Friday VIII returns at 4 pm, with [I think] some slight modifications as I tinker around with it on this cloudy June morning.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited in my whole life:  my application for Anusara Certification has been accepted.  Please note this doesn’t mean I’m certified, merely that the formal process of certification can begin in earnest, but man:  does it ever feel good to be moving forward, and to be welcomed by the community and my teacher in this way.  My eyes shuttered open at 5:15 am, which is not the Sjanz’s style in any way, and that was it;  whatever weird combination of adrenalin and jacked-up brain waves makes kids not go to sleep on Christmas Eve is coursing through my veins, and this Summer Solstice is turning out to be running on all six cylinders.

I feel like jumping around in my pyjamas, so I’m gonna go do that for a while.  Hope to see you at 4!

C.O.R.E.

Consciousness.

This has been rattling around my headspace like a bean in a helmet for a couple of weeks. Clarification: I am aware of the function of the “core muscles” in the fitness sense, and I’m also aware that bandha practice is an incredibly nuanced and historically sound concept, one that we’ll be spending our whole lives refining. But just as I am encouraged to “teach to what I see”, I also want to “write to what I see”, and this is what the Sjanz sees.

I began my yoga with an Ashtanga practice as most of my students are aware, and man we used to have such an excellent time. We’d practice for like 3 hours and then go have brunch, and then wait tables in the evening. To be young again, I swear. I had tremendously skilled and knowledgeable teachers, and they taught us the way their teachers had tought them: beginning with a focus on ujjayi pranayam and the bandhas, or locks, of the lower body, most notably mula and uddhiyana bandha.

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Medieval faire

A huge part of a tremendous weekend was the Commercial Drive Car-Free Day.  Anybody who’s been to Commercial knows that it should be basically car free anyway, and almost is what with the random peeps running out into traffic here and there.  So yesterday from 1st to Venables it was formally, and it was fantastic…

props to Dustin “Quasar” Sacks for the Flickr pic

…all the local vendors and foodies come out and have impromptu street patios with impossibly well-priced specials on everything you might like:  Portuguese chicken, wild salmon, buckets of beer, pomegranate mojitos, prawn souvlaki, samosas.  Performance art.  Organic bamboo bedding.  Curries, slices of pizza, vodka tonics, used clothing.  Last pair shoe sales.  Lesbian collectives.  Natural fibres, bead curtains, freestyle rappers, Vietnamese spring rolls, falafel.  Protests against the Olympics.  The first legitimately young Young Communist Party booth I’ve ever seen.  A Yugo with plastic flowers glue gunned all over it.  The Healing Garden with everything from cushions and Tantric Healing [!!!] to sinus massage and a toning circle.  Chicken wings, Greek salad, bratwurst, cappucino, imported fair-trade shea butter.  Argentinian pan-flute music.  Chardonnay, home-made greeting cards, hemp pants, and a breast-feeding rest-station.

I recently re-read Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin:  the protagonist, an almost 90-year-old woman, describes the difference between the Toronto of her youth as a “Protestant city”  and the new Toronto [I'm pretty sure this was when I was in university] as a “medieval city”…half anticipating lepers in chains, and I always imagine Ren Faire foolz in jester hats at that point.  But for real, the Car Free Day is that:  a jostling crush of medieval bodies, interested in what we are all interested in:  food, music, massages, perhaps booze [I'm not saying, I'm just saying], togetherness, HUMAN NESS.

It was delightful, not least because of my lunch and seeing my friend Julie’s amazing clothes.  Srsly you have to check these clothes out.  Any line that describes their hoodies as “Faramir” is worth its weight in Elvish rope.

I think I…nope, I’m pretty sure I can

For serious, I don’t think I’ve ever had as much on my plate ["my plate" here referring to the Career To-Do List] as I do right now, ever in my life, even back in the UofT daze.  Students are notorious for letting the rhythms of the school year run their nervous systems, as they should be, since you only get one chance to write that exam/perform that recital/finish that précis or whatever.  But I can clearly remember finishing stuff.  I can very clearly see myself handing things in to be marked, walking away and really walking away, from the whole project.  Just hand ‘er in and let things take their course.

Working was even more delicious on that front [or, well, it would be if I had greater mental clarity].  5 pm comes and whoosh, out the door…transmogrified from stern administrative hard-ass to, well, anything I wanted.

When your job is the transformation of your own nature [ROFL!], there are no breaks and the due date never arrives.  I absolutely love teaching yoga in every way.  There’s nothing about it I don’t like.  I am simply unused to being this invested, both within and without, in any one project.  So let’s say [to pick an example totally at random] that I successfully memorize the contents of my anatomy workshop with Martin Kirk.  That covers pretty much the whole bod, and is a precursor to his excellent therapeutics training coming in the fall.  I have the notes and the handouts right there, along with good ol’ Blandine Calais-Germain’s Anatomy of Movement which is starting to get soup-and-chip-and-bathwater stains on it due to being read at mealtimes and in the tub.  I could totally do it.

BUT IF I DID I would simply be moving on to the NEXT to-do item, reading Douglas Brooks’ companion book to the Bhagavad Gita and making comparison notes in the margins as I do.  I should also probably work on my Handstand, the ongoing struggle.  As soon as I finish that I can take a break with Daniel Odier’s Spanda Karika, a little light reading [ROFLcopter], and then what would you say to a half-hours’ pranayam practice?  It’s only wafer thin!

Even the prospect of these studies, that I actively and consciously choose, that I shell out molto deneiro for, month after chock-full month, gets a bit overwhelming.  In fact, I’m pretty much fully whelmed.  Any additional whelmitude comes with some gasping and panting.

I’ve talked to friends, fellow teachers and students of other disciplines, who confess to a desire to just *stop* the s**tstorm and step outside themselves, to take a holiday from the constant and consistent self-examination that comes from a path this deep and a calling this passionate.  Who wouldn’t. I feel like that all the time.  I love life and I want to participate with her, and in fact that’s also explicitly made my “homework” and that actually makes enjoying myself feel like an obligation, in one of the more eye-rolling twists this path has offered me.

Here is my hypothesis, and the thrust of this post:  Life does not take breaks.  Which is not to say that you have to be dialled up to eleventyhundred all the time.  Au contraire, mon frère.  Rather, there is a momentum and constant growth to this existence, an outpouring of creative energy so massive that to simply immerse oneself in it is to be white-water-rafting in your soul.  It is our intransigence and learned patterns of inertia that exhaust us.  Step into life and GIT R DONE. (more…)

By their fruits ye shall know them

Had a great coupla conversations with friends and fellow teachers yesterday that, unsurprisingly, got me thinking. I mean, almost everything gets me thinking in some way or another; it’s a sickness; but rich and fruitful conversations like these REALLY get me thinking. The names, identifying marks and genders of the below-mentioned have been obscured to protect the innocent, up to and including using the third person plural to describe them, which I know is grammatically incorrect but darn it is so much more efficient than the s/h/e/its. Sheeeeeit.

Conversation #1 is yer standard confused-in-love conversation. I never know how to talk about these ones because now that I am old and stale and gray it always seems very obvious to me: what works, what doesn’t, that you fight all the time, that you should calm down and be together, or whatever. Call it the clarity of the aged, or blame it on M’s general awesomeness, but I have developed a diminished tolerance for drama on that front; it’s just so exhausting.

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A crime against nature

Truly, the summer cold is a blow against all symetry and elegance in the world.  It’s one thing to be huddled up in February watching DVDs and with a hot beverage, but what do you do in June?  Lollygag on the deck, alternately feverishly sweating and wrapping yourself in your meagre summer PJs?  Make your hot beverage cold?  It’s not right, I tell you, not right at all.

Especially as the world emerges from its layers of socks’n’sandals, long johns, Helle Hansen rain hoodies, and generally Vancouverian tarpiness into full bloom.  You just need that one day of getting a LITTLE too pink around the edges [I think that was last Wednesday] and you’re good to go until October.

I’ve been down for the count this week with a really weird cold/flu double-header that left no system in my body unturned.  I consider myself to have a relatively robust immune system for somebody who talks and touches sweaty people for a living but every once in a while it gets me.  I’m definitely in the ascendant, recovered more than enough to present to you Big Rock Friday VII.  Oh, and to watch this rad movie on Silver Screen Classics last night:  The Vikings with Ernest Borgnine and Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh and Kirk Douglas.  You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Ernest Borgnine in a bathrobe drinking beer out of a horn, pouring it all over his king-of-the-vikings medallion.

Big Motown/R&B Friday V, Special Edition One of the side effects of having such a close-knit yoga family is that every so often somebody’s gotta go on walkabout or pursue their graduate studies or visit their actual genetic not-yoga family, and so we have to say goodbye to our friends.  This Friday is Sylvia and Yuri’s last Big Friday before they leave the city and they have requested a couple songs and styles, so this is what I’ve cooked up.  They are both so precious to me that I’m pretty close to rending my garments but I’ll settle for putting my back into it tonight at 4. decades and make it a bit less abrupt.

This was a challenging one since it spans several decades and although there is a fairly straight evolutionary channel from the older Motown to, say, Usher, the recording technologies and sound palette has changed so much, it’s pretty astonishing.  In this case I used Boyz II Men, Janet Jackson and Lionel Richie as my “missing links”, to brick in the intervening

So much of this genre showcases voices together [esp. the Boyz II Men stuff] and what better way to connect our yoga family together than with our voices…let’s all party this afternoon and send the ladies off right.

Marvin Gaye, “Let’s Get It On”

Diana Ross, “I’m Coming Out”

Mary J. Blige, “Family Affair”

Justin Timberlake, “Señorita”

Usher, “Yeah!” [This is one of those songs that M and I pointlessly resisted on the grounds that it was everywhere for about a year, until we finally both admitted to each other that we loved it]

Lionel Richie, “All Night Long [All Night]” [title redundancy sic]

New Edition, “Something About You”

The Isley Brothers, “Footsteps In The Dark [Part 1 & 2]”

Boyz II Men, “Just My Imagination [Running Away With Me]”

Raphael Saadig and Joss Stone, “Just One Kiss”

Diana Ross, “Reach Out And Touch”

D’Angelo, “Untitled [How Does It Feel]”

Diana Ross w/Lionel Richie, “Endless Love” [what can I say, Happy Gilmore was on MovieTime the other night]

Boyz II Men, “Ribbon in the Sky”

Kaleidoyoga

†NOTE:  This post is full of yoga geekery and may not be suitable for all readers, i.e. it might not make much sense…reader discretion is advised.  Heh.

Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

Actually, I haven’t thought I was “out” of Anusara in a long time.  I haven’t committed to being IN it for very long, so perhaps that’s why.  I expect that most people go through this periodically:  they look at their state of mind and their chosen path and perhaps something weird’s happened and so they think:  “Hm, maybe I’d better reexamine this whole thing.  Is this really where I want to be?”.  Now that I’m writing that down I think that assessment doesn’t happen as much as it should, but that’s a topic for another post.

What I wanted to write about was the realization that this method accommodates and teaches to a larger framework of time than just an asana or a yoga class.  Here, I’m-a break it down.

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