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

He's actually eating a Fisherman's Friend in this picture

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”.

B. Or perhaps you [like so many of us] have been studying with other teachers in other styles. It’s all yoga, right? How many genuine conflicts can there be? On the detailed level, quite a few, it turns out. [Author's Note: I think that's healthy] Your body, like the rings of a tree, is imprinted on such a deep level with different habits and techniques that when you’re called upon to shift them [as often happens as we learn] there is the physical resistance mentioned above, and then a mental resistance of: Have I spent my whole life doing this wrong? If I let this go, I’m basically floating in educational space: I lose my bearings of what to teach and what I’ve been taught. Let’s face it, that’s not a great feeling, at least not at first. For many of us this is our JOB, and if not that it’s our love and passion. It’s a natural response to be nonplussed at such a dramatic shift.

To complicate this latter situation, C. ideally we approach every asana session with spaciousness and expansion, and then in a

WHARRGARBL

training like this we boil it down to stuff like where the point of your elbow is in Pincha Mayurasana, and what the angle of the femoral neck is inside the, uh, femoral condylar axis or something commensurately mental sounding, and we find out that: yes: God is in the details, as She is in all things, and WHOA one little adjustment of your fingers two degrees to the left or whatever it happens to be has *massive* effects through the whole asana. At which point the discussion often lasers in on what so-and-so had to say before the First World War about where your fingers should be, and expounding on various theories about where the metacarpal innervation relates to weight-bearing and WHARRRGARBL until you feel like your head’s going to crack off. You just found out that these tiny details have huge consequences. You felt it for yourself. Now there’s 37 different takes on those details? and a lot of them are contradictory? sneff?

This used to happen in music school actually. When it was your turn to stand up and futz your way through some modal tune or whatever, you’d be called upon to just be free, “strong but wrong”, play or sing out with confidence &c. Only trouble was: You can, of course, HEAR that what you’re playing is not optimal and so in the very process of attempting to build performance confidence you’re actually vivisecting it. Your education moved in such a way that your knowledge developed ahead of your technical execution, and so now you are floating in space…you know too much to pretend that that note you just played was right.

After digging and sifting through all of this information, we usually have a closing meditation or little discussion-wrapping-up-bit where invariably our teachers [including myself] will say some variation on the following [these correlate to the examples above]:

A: “Just use your own sense of balance and spaciousness to come to a place of ease in your body and don’t worry about what it looks like, just let your light shine brightly”.

B: “All teachings have intrinsic value and we are merely expanding on what has gone before. Use what works for you as a tool to go deeper”.

C. “Don’t let the details get in the way of the experience of your own essence; ultimately this is a practice of spirit”.

Sounds good, right? You can probably see where I’m going with this. In Example A your sense of yourself, your basic proprioception, was shaken right down to the ground. How then do you return to a place that seems natural FOR YOU, knowing that what is natural for you is not aligned? In Example B your previous teachings are being pretty much contradicted, and it take a huge metaphysical leap to see how this contradiction is to be reconciled in your body after years of intense study. At that point in a serious student/teacher’s career, “what works for you” is a moving target, since your body is now a manifestation of these other teachings. In Example C, you just saw/felt how tiny details have a profound impact on the whole. How can you forget the details now that you are aware of their significance?

Taken with Teh New Camera

These examples all palpate the relationship between student and teacher, and how it can evolve and shift. I am a firm believer in giving students their autonomy since I know very well what it feels like to have your autonomy taken away from you; to feel like you don’t have a voice, like you’re not “seen”. Needless to say it’s a crappy feeling. I love the dialogue and the candour that can take place when a teacher is really ready to hear that method X doesn’t work for me. Having said that, as both a teacher and student I see where our patterns and our inertia really don’t serve us…how we cling to our stories and our pain as students, and how we see ourselves from inside with a lack of clarity. The clear gaze of a good teacher isn’t always going to feel “right” at first [no pain, but strange] because what “feels right” isn’t optimal. Sorry, but there it is. There’s sometimes a recognition of “Wow, that feels weird but strong/steady/cleared the pain/whatever” and you can use that as a student to tap into the optimal action, but I’ve had many adjustments that have come to serve me, where in the moment I was like “There’s NO WAY this is correct”. I remember one that Christina Sell gave me a couple of years ago, where I was pretty convinced she was having me on. So the next time we repeated the pose I did this wild exaggerated feeling version of the adjustment, and she [since she's awesome] was looking at me to make sure I’d applied what she’d given me the first time around, and said “Great to see a student who takes adjustment right away and applies it” or something like that. And I was all like, “geddddoudaheeeeyah…this is what you want me to do? for serious?”

I actually remember having the full-fledged thought that I distrusted my own body enough at that point that I was going to do this wild adjustment come hell or high water, no matter what, cause I figured Christina Sell’s gotta know what’s up, I mean she’s Christina Freaking Sell. It has since served me very well, but I did have a moment of self-abnegation where I surrendered my judgement to that of my teacher. In the long run it yielded greater spaciousness, but I didn’t really need more reminding to “be natural” because that’s my tendency, I’ll do what I want until you beat me with a ball-peen hammer.

This is ending up being considerably longer than I wanted it to be, sorry about that; I might not be blogging too much on the Island if we don’t have any Intertubes up there. What I’m trying in my long-winded way to express is that the autonomy and selfhood of the student is the gift, the sacrifice, that we as teachers receive. The call is not to become didactic or parochial, to enforce such anal specificity that we give our student a stroke, but to take this deep gift and respond with confidence and honesty. This is a gift in the true sense in that it maintains relationship; it is symbolic of a larger dialogue between subject and object, between individual and universal, and so when you get a gift you don’t snatch it up and run away with it, you let the giver tell their story; you also don’t shove it back in their face and say, “No, really, I just had an apple, I couldn’t possibly, just set your feet however you want, do what feels natural”. Maybe this is the spaciousness of mind that is needed: the spaciousness of honest and clear relationship, unburdened by fear and agenda. Hmm. I’ll work on that when I get back.

2 Comments »

June 30th, 2009 Leanne Says:

Whoa…that was a brillant rant. I totally hear you. I just hear me going ” THIS much???” and Juan Amigo saying, “Yes, THAT much.” Listen to your teacher girl and keep your mouth shut. No, just joking.. but trust plays a big part in the teacher student relationship and I am not big on blind faith. Juan can basically say “Do.” and I rather than thinking “He’s nuts.” I think ” He must know something I obviously don’t”. Something like that…
Hope Uculet is amazing! Love you and love your writing.
L.

July 8th, 2009 Sannie McInnis Says:

Well said, Sjanie! I’m trying to remember some of the corrections(oops! adjustments) you taught us and, yes, very strange feeling but the mirror doesn’t lie and I’ll keep struggling to balance 62 years of misalignment. Thank you.
Much love,
Mom

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