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.

I let loose with a few of my pithy, crone-in-thatched-cottage insights: that love, although pleasant, was probably not going to be enough to save something that in every other way just doesn’t work; that a relationship was more than the romance involved, that it covered a great deal of practical ground like money and history and pasts and futures and geography and toilet-paper-rolls-going-down-the-back-or-over-the-front-or-on-one-of-those-things-that-looks-like-a-wooden-duck-with-a-long-neck-that-you-get-at-a-craft-fair-or-just-sitting-on-the-countertop and so on. Conversation #1, who is far from foolish, was staring at me agape like I had just bitten the head off of a kitten. I forgot how even the subcultural have their own tropes of romance and folly therein; they are the sacred cows of the hippies. I backed off a bit and just said, well, by its fruit you will know it: you will know true relationship when things WORK. It’s OK to love somebody like crazy and decide to not engage in that way. Even though it feels counterintuitive sometimes, that’s just the story, the narrative that we wind around each other and get trapped inside. Get pragmatic and look clearly at it, and see what seeds are sown. So.

C#1 is a good student and a great yogi and so they were interested in how this concept intersected with yoga. Aren’t we all. I lobbed the 3 As of Anusara Yoga back at them: Attitude, Alignment and Action. If love is the attitude, how do we line up with it? Do you love somebody that you fight with constantly? Maybe, I suppose, I’m not saying, I’m just saying. Can you have a loving attitude and not take the next step, or two steps? Sure. I think everybody who has practiced yoga a couple of times has thought, “I really should straighten my leg/set my foundation/do more tailbone/whatever” and just sat there and smiled like a Cheshire cat=no action. Yet, the yogis would say the pose has “less integrity”, because no matter how brightly I smile, I have a deeper awareness of how things should be, and I’m ignoring it in favour of inertia.

Conversation #2 was more focussed on the nuts and bolts of yoga philosophy through the ages. I apologize in advance if this is boring. There’s a concept called pratyahara, detailed in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, that has been translated as “withdrawal of the senses” but could be more laypersonally described as “focus” or “concentration”, that is, restricting the input of our many senses down to just one, or perhaps even none. C#2 wanted to know [although they described it more elegantly] whether this concept, so long enshrined in yoga, had a place in Anusara where I was always up in their grill trying to get them to set their feet properly, where I would stop them to demo, or whatever little vaudevillian method I was undertaking to get them to *ahem* take ACTION.

Another terrific student with a long and storied practice. This one was a bit harder to answer because, shoot, I have no idea what Patanjali was on about; I mean, I have an understanding that’s incredibly limited by time and space and spirit, but dude, I don’t know! Maybe he was a chick. Maybe he was 3 dudes. Maybe he was totally tripping out and had no idea what he was on about. Maybe he would look at us now and say, “Holy hell, don’t do any of that stuff; you’ve got to clean house first, start fixing carbon emissions and stop hitting your wife and THEN we’ll talk about enlightenment, sheesh”. It’s trippy for me to even go back and start thinking about the Yoga Sutras because I think about them rarely these days; I base my life and my teaching on other scriptures, so it’s kind of wild to rethink them now.

We discussed the matter with what I think was admirable clarity considering the slipperiness of the subject. I had an insight that

This was too cool to not use, but LINUX 4EVAR

I shared with C#2 on the way out the door, which was that I felt very strongly about the attitude of the Tantric sages towards relationship: that is, one person not on their own inner journey, divorced from family, lover and friends, but a yogi in the sphere of real life. Which I understand is a small slice of Douglas Brooks‘ offering to the Anusara community. In Tantra, no one is inelegible for the teachings. You can be a woman, or low-caste, or a householder, or whatever. You need not remove yourself from this life to be a yogi. This, to me, is incredibly key. Ram Dass says that your real practice is *in relationship*, that is, not in a romantic relationship necessarily but always with reference to other real living humans in all their frustrating impossibly gristly nonsense.

So when you step on the mat, it’s not about you in a little solipsistic hole, grooving on your own sense of yourself. Although I’ll admit that is totally fun. In a way, that refutes reality because, look, there’s the dude beside you, and those girls over there who you sort of know from the lobby, and there’s Sjanie bellowing at you to set your feet hip distance apart and parallel and darn it she’ll actually COME OVER THERE and make you do it. You are not some closed circuit in your yoga, functioning as a solo project. You are a symphony of relationship.

Please examine this relationship, and I’m saying this to you as somebody writing on a blog. Look at how you treat: everyone: your barista, your mom, your brother, the guy in the lane next to you, your lover, your kid, your boss, your teacher, your dog, your neighbour. Make your relationships your yoga, and make this yoga fruitful and functional e.g. make them work! Take ACTION to see your practice realized. Generally, this means we have to calm down and start not taking things so personally, but baby steps, right?

4 Comments »

June 13th, 2009 Hope Says:

Sjanie,
Do you know Douglas’ famous quote on this? “You become the company you keep, so keep good company.”
Our reality is created in the territory between people, the ricochet of conversation, culture’s call and response. It always reminds me of our own complicity in our relationship patterns, and excites the question: is kindness catchy?
I want to live in a world where it’s a smile for a smile, instead of an eye for an eye.

June 13th, 2009 Hope Says:

PS Hope you’re feeling ALL better! (What’s the vegetarian’s equivalent of mamma’s chicken soup?)

June 13th, 2009 einajs Says:

I have heard that quote in the past, Hope, but what a great reminder. And regarding the momentum of kindness: quite so. One could justify all sorts of scowly looks on the grounds that you were “focussed” on one’s “inner space” or whatever but the bottom line is, hostility [and introversion!] is contagious. Your yoga can be your smile.

The vegetarian equivalent of chicken soup is, well, chicken soup made with fake chicken. I don’t miss the bird at all. There’s a recipe on here somewhere for it.

June 17th, 2009 C.O.R.E. | Heavy Metta Says:

[...] a prayer of gratitude, because I knew this other way just was never going to work *for me*. By its fruits I know it: My pulse slows to a more regular rate. The hemispheres of my brain are more equitable. My face [...]

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