Haiku Haikus Vol. III aka j.u.i.c.y.

People keep asking
“What was it like?” I say, “It
changed everything”.

The spiders appear
much smaller here in darkest
Canuckistan.

Remember: Be Here Now.
Even if you are, sadly, not
still in Maui.

What am I doing writing Haiku Haikus when I’m on the ol’ futon back in Canada’s frosty autumnal clutches? I had some pics left on the camera and I also wanted to synopsize [if possible, criminy] the insights of the week in some sort of intelligent way without gassing on and on about the fruit and the scenery. Not that it isn’t rad to do that but some people started to narrow their eyes at me a little and I realized that if you can’t *go* to Maui, for whatever reason, it’s not exactly equivalent to just have your hippie friends TELL you about it.

Jnana [knowledge]: Judgement

I started to gain more clarity on why it was so important to address my issues with the Gita as I parsed them all out. Here’s the deal: I am blessed with a lot of really, really, REALLY brilliant students, whose minds are like Ginsu knives and who don’t shy away from calling ‘em as they sees ‘em. I am also, sadly, tormented by the idea that there’s a bunch of people out there who have received such wooly-headed answers to their questions about yoga that they figure to even engage in such flakery would be a compromise of everything they hold intellectually dear, and so they don’t practice. Ironically [is it actually ironic? I get confused sometimes] these formidable ponderous brains are engaged in the kinds of pursuits that IMO need MORE spirit, not less: activism, politics, healthcare, R&D, &c. And as such [and because of their mighty brains] they in their turn influence many others, and those others could also be benefitting from the practice. Even the least mathematically adept can see where I’m going with this: You tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on and so on and so on.

So it behooves me to bring whatever meagre powers I have to bear on the situation, and see if I have a better answer than the New Age boilerplate. See, what I never really saw before was the massive amount of CURRENT scholarship going on surrounding yoga and the attendant philosophies. As an Ashtangi I somehow inferred that our role as practitioners was to keep the Mysore time capsule afloat in a sea of non-believers, and that modern scholarship was really not relevant or desirable. 99% practice 1% theory, amirite? One could make a case for the practice itself being “current scholarship” but Douglas Brooks and Georg Feuerstein were more what I had in mind. And then in my middle [blue] period it never occurred to me to even ask those kinds of questions; I read the Jivamukti book a lot but it all seemed very idealized and disconnected [many counsels of perfection, further alienating me from my practice which was becoming increasingly dilettantish and diluted].

Then here we have the Gita, which, depending on which translation and what self-esteem issues you’ve got, will either inspire delight or despair. I realized I was always reading it assuming that Krishna was yelling at me for being a big bag of tamas, and then of course the woman-verses put it over the top. I leave you, dear reader, to armchair-Freud that particular core belief…yikes. I sez to myself, sez I: Is there ANY WAY on God’s green earth that this book could have anything to do with people like me, people who feel out of the current of conventional yoga, people who [used to!] roll their eyes when they were asked to stretch their arms up like a tree or arc them out sideways like a rAiNbOw*. It never occurred to me to consider that I was already on the path, and didn’t require constantly berating myself for not being “sattvic” or whatever hobby horse he has in that chapter.

See, I’ve always thought we sold God short. Never could figure out why we needed to be afraid of Her or pay more attention to her on certain days or in certain buildings, when from all accounts She was all up in our grizzle 24/7. And I’ve always prayed, since I was very small. I thought of them more as conversations although they often became imprecations if I was afraid of the dark [every night!] or nervous [public speaking] or wanted something [10-speed bike]. In my hypersensitive early 20s I would be moved to tears by the new snowfall outside of my dorm. I saw the Divine everywhere. However, due to a deadly combination of Henry Rollins‘ spoken word performances and a punk-rock ex-boyfriend I had no names for this phenomenon, and I certainly never connected it to yoga practice. Yoga practice was for biceps. Church was for the foolish. My emotional state? Without a name for it and a language surrounding it, I felt eccentric at best and erratic at worst.

Feuerstein’s book Tantra: The Path To Ecstacy quotes Osho [somewhat pejoratively] as saying that yoga and Tantra are not even the

same thing, as “yoga is suppression with awareness; Tantra is indulgence with awareness”. I don’t know anything about Osho and I can see how a sentence like that could get ya all turned around in terms of the discipline of your path. But it does ring true for me insofar as the unexamined assumptions about the yogic path include an automatic separation, an automatic refutation of the Divine’s presence everywhere. It’s like a HOT/NOT list:

DIVINE [YOGIC]
raw food
seated meditation practice
hemp pants

NOT DIVINE [UNYOGIC]
pork rinds
Tae-Bo
nylons

We Judgey McJudgersons simply love to find boxes for boundless spirit and then wedge Her in there. It’s kind of hilarious, actually. Now, certainly some of the above may or may not be life-affirming in isolation, but they’ve got NOTHING to do with a spiritual practice per se. This can help explain why some people bang out asana to beat the band and still give a slender, pranically charged finger to passing motorists, while others wouldn’t know a Down Dog if it humped their leg and are the kindest, most gracious and patient souls imaginable.

Upeksha [equanimity]: Understanding

Before we can choose any action with full agency, all the other options have to be on the table. I gradually got a little feistier about NOT finding anything powerful about the Gita, feeling a bit transgressive and naughty as I did so. As it is required reading for Anusara immersions, I’ve had to hash it out on more than one occasion, not to mention weathering classes themed around the Gita, journals and quotations from the Gita, ad infinitum. Douglas signed off on saying [I'm paraphrasing]: Look, you don’t have to like this book, you just have to know its context in the history of the practice, and take the parts of it that DO resonate [if any] and use them for contemplation.

For some reason that made me feel a bit better and some of my resistance [pointless immature rebellion?] subsided. I still wanted to be able to explain to any feminist/pacifist/social activist students why this volume seems to reinforce the caste system and misogyny, not to mention endorsing war.

What I’ve come up with is that this is not a time-capsule practice; we are not trying to maintain our yoga’s archeological perfection. If we believe [and maybe not everybody does believe this, but there we go] that yoga will help the people of Earth figure their act out and start behaving in an optimal way, the practice needs to be relevant, connected, and reflect the shifting reality of its current practitioners. It’s kind of like how Americans debate the intention of the Founding Fathers regarding the Constitution and all that good stuff, as if their original intention wasn’t made more than clear enough: They wanted you to figure it out for yourself to serve the populace in the ways that are needed NOW, not THEN. I was being anachronistic in applying modern freedoms to what is essentially archaic. And as Douglas wrote, you can indeed take or leave it. In my opinion, no single book or practice is a sacred dogmatic cow. [Dog-cow?] Let’s make sure our practice withstands intellectual scrutiny, as well as satisfying the heart.

That being said, sometimes smart people are just mean and they don’t actually want to have a conversation. Save your breath to cool your pork rinds.

Iccha [absolute will]: Integrity

Knowledge without wisdom leads to despair. Why? Because some other jerk will always be smarter than you, that’s why, and if you hang your hat on your limited head and put all your eggs in the intellectual basket, you’ll be hoarding your facts and your knowledge and you won’t be a TEACHER because the only thing that separates you from your students is the stuff that you KNOW so you can’t give it away. You feel me? Logically, only in the ground of spirit can each individual have full merit. Knowledge is a useful tool, like box cutters, but anybody smart enough to obtain useful knowledge can see the finite nature of its use, and then it’s tempting to start getting a little nervous, like it’s all about you. Maybe this accounts for the unease surrounding socialist government policies: it initially seems intellectually unsound to believe that all humans are deserving; that seems to take a leap of spiritual faith. Upon closer inspection

, however, it’s only logical to see that any freedom we wish to extend to ourselves must also extend to any other person. Any privileges you wish to enjoy as a practitioner or teacher of yoga you must also extend to your students and your crazy Uncle Larry.

What’s interesting is that I went into this Intensive with the curled-up lip of doubt and left it almost levitating with seemingly wooly-headed bliss. What’s even MORE interesting is that this is the first time I’ve come home and really connected with M on the subject matter that I was studying [as opposed to just technical knowledge or physical achievement, which he understandably can't relate to since he wasn't there and it basically just sounds tedious]. What’s even more interesting than that is that, as I have some pretty radical inner experiences, the kind that I always fancied myself too clever to have, the language and mise-en-scene of these experiences are described in detail by the Tantrikas. It’s almost as if their subjective experience was a legitimate form of research, and not just random flakery. Hmm.

Cit [consciousness]: Consistency

The most compelling argument I’ve heard for avoiding “woo” vs. science is that, since we have so many competing societal systems and subjective individual truths, you can’t have the colloidal-silver Ron-Paul guys making public health policy, nor the Christian Scientists and similar: you’ve gotta get some proper methodology out there, do some studies, and so on. I’ve heard some doozies about health out of the mouths of my fellow yogis, believe me. Look: essential oils and coconut water won’t cure polio, gnome sane? And most of our increased social awareness has arisen from an increased trust in impartial methods, such as they are, rather than the blind support of existing power structures [women's health awareness>feminism>patriarchy]. But in privileging hard science over subjective experience or vice versa, once again we create separation: we cut off our nose to spite our face. Ram Dass has this great bit at the beginning of Paths To God [btw Leanne has a great review] when he’s talking about how Harvard was all like, “Dude, you can’t drop acid and then pretend to be a scientist” and Timothy Leary was all like, “You guys just don’t know what science IS!”. RD went the other way and said, “You guys are right. From now on, I’m not a scientist, I’ll be what you guys *study*”. So have they studied him? Have they explained how a man with a stroke can hold 100 people spellbound for two hours? It’s all consigned to the “outlying” portions of the study, which they rarely tell you ends up being like 85% of the study. I guess they lost interest after he said he wasn’t going to be playing by their rules. It’s not like he suddenly got stupider. I don’t feel any stupider [/more stupid!].

Look, I’m still working on this and I’m bringing my best neurons in full battle regalia to figure it out, because frankly I perceive this manic division between proof-junkies and woo-junkies to be exhausting and detrimental to our health on all fronts. Tantra, via Feuerstein, is the first system that seems to be getting even CLOSE to a resolution. Judging by my limited forays thus far, it looks to be my life’s work. That’s okay, I wasn’t doing anything else more important.

Yantra [sacred diagram]: Yes.

A very dear friend and absolutely phenomenal teacher [in disguise as one of my students] laid a pretty heavy trip on me the other day. Look, they said. There’s really only two directions of emotional flow in this world: love and fear. And fear is just the fear of losing love, so really there’s only ONE pulse that animates our entire experiential spectrum. It was such an accurate synopsis of philosophy that I just burbled at them inarticulately for a while. It’s so succinct and elegant that I don’t feel the least bit compromised intellectually in signing on. That’s jnana *and* bhakti, baby. The next time you are struck by this apparent split between mind and heart, consider their CONNECTION rather than their separation. There is truly no reason why both can’t be deepened and expanded.

And after Christine’s deeeeelishus class this morning [Eka Pada Rajakapotasana IV: The Revenge] we had a wicked talk; we shared our experience of realizing that this practice had no secrets, and what a shift that was for us…the idea that there was this great yoga party that everyone else was invited to except us. Truly, you guys, there’s no real mystery. I’ve spent tons of time and energy on this, basically to realize that I had already repeatedly been TOLD the supposed secret over and over again: you are more than enough, you can live your dreams, you have everything you need, you are powerful, you are divine, all you need is love. Sure, implementing that stuff in practice can take some inspiration, but can you afford to have doubts anymore? How does doubt feel in your body? How does it feel when you outsmart yourself…is it worth it?

- I’ll be teaching an all-levels workshop at Yatra Yoga in Burnaby next weekend, focussing on the five elements and their role in practice and our lives. Everybody welcome! Contact Yatra Yoga to enrol.

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