Yeah, you just keep smiling, there, Ms. SkinnyRibs. Grrr.

I used to work for a cruise line [we shall draw the curtain of charity over the cruise line's name, in the hopes that I will be free to rant subsequently about said cruise line with impunity] singing songs in their back lounge.  One of the benefits of this gig was that lovely women in my circle of family and friends leaped, I say, LEAPED at the chance to get their super-ultra-extra-fancy sequinned/beaded/satin/spangled/strapless dresses out of the dry-cleaning bags at the back of the closet and on to a real live human, esp. since they could then imagine the glamour and mayhem the dress underwent throughout the cruise ship’s itinerary.  [Anybody else feel that way about the clothes they lend out to friends:  like, it's OK if they have them but you want to have each item fitted with a little radio collar so you can track its movements in the wild?  "Did you wear that long black sweater-dress to the job interview?  Oh, yeah?  And then where?"]

So I’ve been bragging about this lavish closet of mine since I left the ship, and every once in a while I flip through them, seeing their wears and tears and pulled threads [it's different to have evening dresses that you actually WORK in].  There really are tons of them, enough to ensure no duplicates for a month of full-on formal nights:  one my Mom made in rust-coloured satin, a real stunner that consists entirely of glass beads and wears about 200 lbs, some sleeper hits from corny prom-type stores on Eglinton that looked absurd on the rack but tremendous when worn, and a few genuine vintage gowns:  full length, none of this wussy cocktail-length bushwa.  I am proud of them, but let’s face it; they don’t get worn very often.  My uniform these days is more like what they wear on Star Trek TNG:  stretchy gender-neutral pajamas, to provide maximum practicality, so I can teach and bike and walk and whatever all else I do in comfort.  Not very glamourous I’m afraid.

Imagine my delight at getting invited to a proper New Years’ Eve party!  Time to pull ‘em out!  And the boas and gloves and earrings and whatnot!  I hasten home, disrobe, and enlist M as Senior Zipper Technician…

…and not a single one fits.  Not one.  And not in the usual ways you’d think they wouldn’t fit, either.  Bottoms, thighs and waistline are all relatively unscathed [a couple notable exceptions about which the less said, the better], but Sr. Z-T reports being consistently stymied at:  THE RIB CAGE.  The rib cage!  Yoga is SO UNFAIR.  All this “cultivating more fullness through the back body” and now I can’t wear my awesome dresses.  John Friend, you and I are going to have to have a little talk!  And then of course, I’m immediately assailed by a series of complicated and not altogether pleasant thoughts:

1.  I thought I wouldn’t care about this kind of thing when it happened.  But man, I really care a lot.  I also feel like I shouldn’t care, that part of this practice would free me up from feeling bad about weight or body image.  Self-Confidence=Ur Doin It Rong

2.  All the people I’ve been bragging to about these dresses are going to suspect me of pathologically lying

3.  I don’t want to give them away but I can’t use them anymore.  Huh, I kind of see how I came to end up with them in the first place.

I worried my way into a big wine-coloured flowy number with a sequinned bandeau top [that barely did up, I'll have you know] and enjoyed a most excellent NYE, but man…what am I going to do with them now?  Anybody going on a cruise ship anytime soon?  I’ll get them all fitted with radio collars in advance.

If you can stand to look at the background without getting an optical migraine, you are qualified to listen to MGMT

I may be drifting into “You kids get off my lawn!” territory, but very rarely do I hear some new or even newish music that I really like.  This goes for yer more conventional pop but even more so for what might be charitably termed “hipster” music; in fact, I usually find I like the pop music better.  The hipster stuff is so darn sad.

MGMT more than makes up for it.  I’m in the phase right now where I can really only listen to one song over and over again, and it makes me so happy I involuntarily jump around.  My practice today consisted of listening to MGMT, jumping around and giggling, doing some handstands, and then jumping around some more.

The last time I got this excited about newish music was Shad.  He still gets my music motor running, but MGMT has prevailed.

Evvie and her brother from another mother, Velcro (this was taken shortly after she flew in to Van)

To the tune of Hall & Oates’ “You Make My Dreams”†

Well you track around a metric tonne of litter
You’re a filthy little critter
You mess up my happy home
There were times I thought I’d make you into a sweater
Now wouldn’t that be better
But then I’d be alone, aw yeah

Because you, you are my Evvie Loo [Loo loo, loo, loo, looloo, loo, loo]
Well, well well, you, aw yeah, you are my Evvie Loo [Loo loo, loo, loo, looloo, loo.]

There are times when you are yelping in the hallway

Evvie as a baby, and Mr. Goodtimes (ne Ian Goodhue)

I think you do things the hard way
You could wait until the dawn
But your tone’s so sweet, you make us laugh and snicker
And I suppose that your way’s quicker
To get your dinner on, oh yeah, I said

you, you are my Evvie Loo [Loo loo, loo, loo, looloo, loo, loo]
Well, well well, you, aw yeah, you are my Evvie Loo [Loo loo, loo, loo, looloo, loo.]

EVELYN SOLO:

Listen to this! Brrrrrrrang? Braaaaaang? Breeeow?

ME:

You soundlike a caaaaar alarm, but you don’t have any lips, it’s okay….

Heck yes! you, you are my Evvie Loo [Loo loo, loo, loo, looloo, loo, loo]
Well, well well, you, all night, you are my Evvie Loo [Loo loo, loo, loo, looloo, loo.]

Now that I’ve graduated and joined the reality based community I don’t think that’s quite true. There was a lot of romance at the time about how Miles Davis wanted to be a singer and wanted to make his trumpet sound like a singer and blah blah blah but mostly we were the bane of small groups, brought out only for ballads, tacked onto big bands as an afterthought [and with simply ghastly charts...Van Morrison, anyone?]; sure, our goal was to sight read as accurately and quickly as any instrumentalist but I can still sight-read piano music faster than I can sight-sing. This is probably my technical failing and many apologies to those of you singers out there sputtering with righteous indignation. In my experience, however, I consider these shortcomings to be representative of our trade as a whole. I can remember one particularly chafing Steve Coleman chart where, to be honest, our whole group was a bit at sea and thinking: This really does not sound good when sung. Like, I’m trying everything here, and it just sounds foolish. The IDEA is laudable and pedagogically no doubt very sound [9/4! time no changes! whaaaaaaa] but it’s heartless…soulless…vaguely irritating.

Lettin' it all hang out

I submit that a big part of this phenomenon is not that the voice is limited in any way; on the contrary. What makes the voice so powerful is its intimacy and ability to connect. Without that it’s just a reedy or brassy sound, probably better accomplished by reeds and brass. In fact, culturally we seem to have such an attracto-repulsive fascination with the voice that people will watch even the FAILED American Idol auditions and just let their jaws swing freely in horror and awe. When you’re singing your {ahem} emotional pants are down. You’re putting it all out there. When you hear/see/feel “it all” from another human being, you get a charge that’s not always comfortable in the same way that total honesty is not always comfortable. Even singing that is considered technically not-that-great [and really, what does that mean anyway?] can give you that charge of naked heart.

So it sounds weird and unsettling to have this purity of heart directed at such a challenging piece of music that your frontal lobe is all contorted and you’re getting that little narrow wrinkle in between your eyebrows.  It’s like going to a yoga class that is ostensibly all about connection and spending the whole time talking about the iliotibial band and your left big toe.  Sure, you can [and should] know about that stuff, but don’t forget to bring it on home, you know?  There is TOO MUCH abundance of spirit in the voice to cram it into a lyricless leadsheet exploring the Locrian mode.  THAT’S why it sounds weird.

We’re now at the point, on this fine hemisphere of ours, where we are so inundated with recordings and simply flawless music coming at us from all directions that a human voice, with its tremors, spit and waverings, seems like taking your top off in public. I can now see [after many years of headscratching and sneers] why karaoke is so popular: it’s a reclamation project. And those of my yoga students whose practices are deepening as the years pass are getting more into chanting, and I believe that this is why. The voice is not just another instrument, with all due respect to my jazz teachers. It is a demonstration of the unclothed, honest heart. It is union of the highest sort: you imagine the note, you “hear” it in your mind’s ear, and then almost immediately you manifest. You conjure sound from empty air. Singing is yoga:  pure, unadulterated spirit.

The latest revelation that’s been in mental embryo for the last few years has been on the subject of “centering” or “being centered†”. I teach yoga to actors at Second Avenue Studios as an adjunct to their scene study classes, as another way of cementing their connection to their medium and [let's face it] encouraging them to relax since acting is probably one of the most psychically stressful things you can do [it's like going out for 5 job interviews a day and getting rejected for all of them, and that's a GOOD day; I have no idea how they manage it, really]. Almost everyone has a pet centering exercise that they can use to prepare before a performance or audition, usually including some combination of the following:

• a visualization or meditation

• breathwork of some sort

• stretches or yoga postures

• a physical release, like fluttering an exhale through the lips, shaking out the limbs, rounding up the spine from a forward bend

[Aside: I think it's pretty groovy that these exercises, although I'm sure they were influenced by yoga if not outright cribbed from it, whether the actors know it or not, include the aspects of a hatha yoga practice: breath, mind, body...it's like a little mini-practice right there on the spot]

The underlying belief behind these is that normal life is filling you up with bodily tension and undesirable mental stress, and that in order to return to Centre™ one must “clear out” somehow: hence the limb-jiggling, primal scream therapy, long sighs and exhalations.

+ four year old + golden Labrador = a challenge to equanimity

And with all due respect and big ups to the actors in question, this is the misapprehension I’m talking about. When the advertising collective consciousness shows us what being centered looks like, we see: blank modern spaces, Zen gardens, esoteric air fresheners. Hollow bamboo. Women with glazed eyes in long drapy minimalist fashions and tiny secret smiles emerging from an essential oil bath. It’s an aesthetic, precarious, perfect, incredibly easily undermined vision. It’s a clearing out, an emptiness. It’s beautiful, fragile, and utterly unsustainable. [Those women in the ads must do NOTHING but Swiffering and laundry. How relaxing can that be?]

I’ve had my share of being behind the scenes getting ready to perform or play and trying these little O-magazine techniques. Ah, a long breath in, and long exhale, and

WHERE IS THE SECOND PATCH CORD FOR THE DI BOX?

Right. Okay. Let’s try this again. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean. Inhale, and a loooooong….

DAMMIT I CAN’T REMEMBER THE LYRICS TO THE SECOND VERSE OF LUSH LIFE; CURSE YOU FEEBLE BRAIN

&c. Spirituo-mental mayhem ensues. It’s the psychic equivalent of a child putting poster paint on a white wall, and it includes the initial judgement, savagery and then subsequent guilt at that savagery [“Why am I getting so angry?”] What I am coming to understand is that clearing out and emptying, while absolutely essential to the centering process, is only half of the story. Once you’ve shaken the tension out, once the body/mind is a blank canvas: what will you fill up with? What part of you will you consciously feed? Centering is drawing back together, coalescing around a vision that you wish to make manifest. Nothing can upset that strength. You’ve shifted the inner white wall, the blank aesthetically gorgeous heavily marketted canvas, to a lush primal collage, and your inner child can put as many red handprints on it and thumbtacks in it as she likes. So when you feel like you need to find your centre, FEED your centre. Shake out, stick your tongue out, roll around on the floor, do what you gotta do, prepare yourself to create AND THEN draw in…get solid and strong. Then bring beauty to the world.

I have, however, noticed a dearth of resources about how to use yoga to release my inner rock star. Jeez. When I first started to practice I’d find myself mumbling Eminem lyrics under my breath, and felt not only guilty [for being mentally unfocussed] but also sort of sly and subversive [for introducing such apparently non-yogic material into this sacred space]. Since we’re ostensibly in the quest for greater UNION, this division provoked some fascinating questions: Can the yoga space BE sacred and retain its sense of consciousness and reverence, and also totally kick out the jams? Does one cancel out the other? Does rocking out mean you’re not doing yoga anymore but some crazy post-millenial hybrid? And is there ever going to be room for the wildness in my heart and my voice and my head on this little mat-space?

All you need is love.

It took a couple of years and a big leap of faith but I finally started to lead a vinyasa flow class that [I think, I hope] successfully integrates these seemingly polarized styles: yoga and ridiculously loud music. Sometimes it’s Big Rap Fridays, sometimes Big Funk Fridays, but it all started with Big Rock Friday, and to Big Rock Friday we shall always return.

When you visualize Shiva on Mount Kailash, dreads whipping in the alpine wind, he seems more like a wild headbanger than a quiet meditative monk. And Kali could make the move from battleground to a member of L7 effortlessly. It’s true that for many the yoga studio is their refuge from the noise and craziness of the world and I definitely can groove on a deep, silent practice as well, but to be in the middle of a long, grueling Utkatasana and hear the opening riff to “God Gave Rock and Roll To You”, or to practice ones’ Pete-Townsend-esque power-chord thrashing from Virabhadrasana II, and see everyone just smiling and sweating onto their teeth…man, it’s fantastic. We laugh, we roll around, we try new things, we go big and then we go home. I’m glad I finally cultivated the courage to bring the powerful rasas of these other styles of music, and I’m grateful for all of the students who are enjoying the classes and support our sonic adventures.

Oh, and I take requests and am always looking for ideas, so post ‘em in the comments….SKYNYRD!!!!!!1!1

Typical filthy hippie, captured here in natural, imaginary environment

I’ve been hashing out this theory lately, and it goes a little something like this:

Many artists and yogis, and many fans/readers/students, believe that the life of the Creative Person is somehow free of responsibility. In fact, in many cases that’s why people BECOME artists, and in many cases that’s why people become yoga students. They perceive, not wrongly, that there is an ease of being on the other side of the practice that isn’t seen in other lines of work, like, say, being a Starbucks barista or an international merchant banker. I certainly did.

When I started singing and pursued a career in music, I considered the more prosaic aspects of a career in the arts [like getting a GST number or a grant application] as being the same sort of sordid nonsense I had come to music to escape. I wasn’t trying to hear that I should save my receipts. Obviously, practice was essential and I did work hard, but I did sometimes ponder the inherent difference between myself and those who seemed born to slog the hard path in the practice cubicles in the basement. I did my time because it seemed expected of me but I didn’t seem to derive the essential joy my classmates did. I speculated on this matter at length, but never really examining the axiomatic premise that Art=Freedom. I just figured why the heck else would you bother with art? I could have been an accountant, I don’t need to deal with this nonsense.

When I began my yoga practice I felt the same way. I was constantly looking for the Trick, for the Short Cut that would suddenly, easily, shift my perspective and enable me to stick Pincha Mayurasana [my friends and I had a peculiar lust for Ole Pinchy, as asanas go]. I’d read all the exciting picture-filled bits of Yoga Journal and skip over the sweaty tales of kicking up against the wall for 3 decades because, ew.

I now see I fell prey to the romantic fallacy that my greatness would strike out of sheer awesomeness…it would be so easy to come into oneself, it would feel “natural” and “effortless”. When you see a great musician performing, you see the ease only. It takes a different mindset than the one I had to project backwards and see the huge support of daily, rigorous practice to present this seamless, joyful performance. This might seem like common sense and I suppose it is, but it’s been a hard lesson for me to learn.

The intensity with which you must approach your art, your practice, as a vessel of the bigger spirit, is more work than an MBA [with all due respect to many excellent and hardworking MBAs]. More than physicians and cardiologists [see above]. I suspect that the great MBAs, physicians and cardiologists actually already know this and that yet again it’s me who lacks this uncommon common sense. Georg Feuerstein has talked about the body being a transformer for this huge energy and using asana [posture practice] to create a strong enough transformer to step down this energy into the world in an intelligible way. I am daily gaining a deeper awareness of how strong that actually is.