How I Spent My Summer Holidays

Okay, I really hope that there are more holidayish summer holidays than the last couple of weeks, for although I was in the picturesque mountains of the Interior in late June/early July, I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder in my life. With the certification process being the hardest thing I’ve ever TRIED to do, a 10-day Vipassana retreat officially assumes the status of the hardest thing I’ve ever ACTUALLY DONE. “Fun” was not a component of this experience, at least not until it was over [viz. the banging-head-against-the-wall phenomenon]

The site explains the circumstances of these retreats clearly enough, so I won’t belabour that; nothing in the bare-bones font and design of the site prepares the human nervous system for 12 daily hours of meditation and what basically amounts to a daily 19-hour fast, as no food other than fruit and tea can be taken after noon…for not being able to even expose your upper arms to the sun or nod and smile encouragingly at a fellow victim, I mean participant, when they are so visibly shaken and miserable that every cell in you is alive with compassion. What’s a soft, decadent little pup like myself doing in this rigorous situation, you ask? Haven’t I structured both my practice and my teaching to avoid the tedious drudgery of “life is suffering”? Well, yeah, sort of, except that this is a vast and rich continent of practice and knowledge and if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em for a 10 day psychic evisceration. (more…)

Party for your right to fight

I gotta say, this whole Anusara Certification process is f***ing hard.

Not because of any physical or educational endeavour, although it is that. I recently realized that I get most of my energy from

responding to the status quo with what I think is a balancing force, in most cases rebellion. That’s how I started teaching, actually. I would rumble around in my head with reasons why such-and-such instruction or demeanour was ineffective and think of ways that I could improve upon it. That’s why I started Big Rock Fridays: to puncture the dirigible of piety and passivity that seemed to cloak yoga, and I’ve actually been afraid that somebody would come along and think it was a terrible idea and that I was a jerk and that I was wrong in my passionate instinct.

And finally, they have. I recently got a double-barrelled attack of both anti-Anusara polemic and anti-Sjanie polemic. A more fierce spirit than I would probably respond to such playa-hataz with some serious game but I curled up and died inside because working on “balanced action” as I’ve been asked to do in my training has sapped the zeal and fire out of what started me on this path in the first place.

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Posted for pure awesome

H/t Oli, who turned us on to the Infinite Cat Project.

More stuff that I like. No, stuff that I LOVE.

I know that the gift-giving tyme is upon us so it’s somewhat perverse to be gassing on and on about the stuff that I’ve got for *myself*.  So much for the reason for the season.  I just happened to look around our dishevelled home and was so comforted and delighted to see so many things that have improved my life this winter.  I’m also attempting to promulgate the idea that yes, a yogi can enjoy stuff and even want to have more of it:  shocking, I know.  Also, link farm.  By the way, do you know this blog averages 400 spam comments a day?  I wipe the sweat off my brow as I delete massive chunks of ostensibly nude celebrity pics and various forms of, um, enhancement. (more…)

Oh, THERE’S your problem, right there.

Quoted for Tantric contemplation and truth, from a Pandagon commenter on a thread about fashion-model Photoshopping:

The perception of the female form is warped and turned into an inhuman image. Those attracted to the female form will then see normal, healthy women as being grotesque. The women will also consider themselves grotesque, and will look at themselves only with pain. They will tend to want to rectify the reality of their body, and change it into the idealized image that they see.

If perception of the female form is always skewed, then women (the bearers of the female form) and those attracted to the female form, will be always off-balance, always dis-satisfied. In western art and myth, the female form can symbolize the world. If perception of the female form is skewed and unbalanced, then is perception of the world likewise skewed and unbalanced?

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.

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”

Doop de doop, cleaning the bike

There’s only one thing better than blogging and that’s blogging OUTSIDE.  Every once in a while I have a little timewarp moment where I remember the old dial-up modem that hissed and spat, and I realize I’m blogging:  OUTSIDE:  and I have to pause and just pant a little bit because technology is so cool.

I’m also enjoying the properly warm June weather and the fruits of my gardening labours, which have been sporadic at best this year.  I sowed some “Grand Rapids” lettuce, rainbow chard, and “King of Denmark” spinach in the hopes of having a little mesclun patch I can shave off every so often and conjure a salad from; we added a beefsteak tomato plant to our offerings of “Sweet 100″s, San Marzano and Romas; I planted some kale in the shadier box in the hopes that that too will give some greeniness to pastas and soups here and there, and some nasturtiums where the heather used to be before the snowy winter killed it.  We’ll see.  If I can get M to sow the white beans we’ll have our full yearly vegetable complement back again for ‘09.

Also, as the post title implies, June is Bike Month and my poor old girl has seen better days, maintenance-wise.  I had a cunning little apparatus from MEC that was supposed to help clean the chain, and the chainguard is too big so I had to sort of jerry rig it with twisties and bungee cords, besides which my snootier cycling friends sneered at such acoutrements and told me just to use a toothbrush.  So that’s what I did.  She’s 5 years old, is my lovely bike, and she’s almost customized:  she’s got an internal 3-speed hub which was not standard issue, and some monstrous tires that are really too fancy for her, ditto pedals.  She’s also got a handmade metal basket that M created from some spray-painted jobsite scrap that, before it started to get all banged up, was the envy of my fellow cruisers.  I took her out on the deck and wiped her down, toothbrushed her, and then used the garden watering hose to polish ‘er off.  A little White Lightning goes a long way.

If I was really my father’s daughter, however, I’d have an annual ritual where I took the whole durn thing apart, every nut,

gasket and O-ring, and soak it in little aluminum pie plates of degreaser, whereupon once all the bits had been defilthed to my satisfaction I’d put the thing back together again, with one extra bearing or washer every year.  In this way I would contribute to the annual joke, which like great humour concepts everywhere increased with teh funny year after year:  that one day Dad’d be biking along and the whole shebang would collapse underneath him, having been losing parts annually for well over a decade.  It was a Peugeot, that bike, IIRC.  I think I’ll just wipe my bike down with a ShamWow.

We are amused

Omgomgomgomg…only one more sleep until the our annual Victoria Day Weekend trip to Nelson Island, huzzah! Calloo, callay! A quick Wikipedia search would help answer my questions about why we even have Victoria Day here in the unwashed colonies but I actually prefer sweet, sweet Googleless ignorance on the subject i.e. I’m glad that I have a holiday and I don’t know why.

These Fridays that preceded spring/summer long weekends really put the urgency on creating Big Rock Fridays, as it happens. The amount of…zeal? Enthusiasm? Chutzpah? SHAKTI that was in my fevered brain and body on these Fridays would not sit still for Ganesha bhajans and pranayam practice. It needed to flail and writhe, and so BRF was born. I hope that in the ensuing months these classes have been effective for “bringing the party to the party” as M likes to say. We’ll be revisiting BRFIII tonight, quite possibly my favourite of the playlists, and kicking Vicki’s holiday off in style.

Last weekend was, according to my more astrologically-minded friends, a very important full moon. The days surrounding said full moon were fraught with import and strange events, and it was said [by the aforementioned friends] that it was a time when all of our spiritual practice would be called on; tempered in the fire, if you like. I can dig it. It’s not that bad things happened; it was just all very intense. And the intensity, although lessening somewhat, is still leveled on me like crosshairs as I continue to develop my teaching, finish my certification required reading [The Shiva Sutras are easily the craziest thing I ever read, and I made it through Gravity's Rainbow], and stay on this path in spite of many distractions and enticements elsewhere.

I don’t want to use a scary word like “mature” to describe my new approach to these challenges, but this tenacious me is definitely no me I would have recognized, even a couple of years ago. The balance of perfect transparency and unrelenting commitment has a good resonance inside my body and head, and I slowly begin to see what is meant by “self confidence” in the non-cocky-jerk sense. The only people who seemed self-confident to me were the people who could never hear a word of criticism or comment. And then of course the deeply insecure, such as myself, who were not so much drama queens as drama farmers [new fresh crops grown daily!] There were these other people, though, who were so alien to me they might as well have had 2 heads, who simply quietly went about their business, engaged authentically with others, solved more problems than they caused…I did not get those people at all. Srsly. Never had the foggiest notion how they could go through their lives without gnashing of teeth, rending of garments/flashy gestures and displays of dominance. Maybe this is how they felt.

Now when I get presented with a freshly harvested crop of drama I feel more like chuckling than anything else. I suppose that’s also the luck of the draw; I have a pretty sweet life right now, D.V. But there also doesn’t seem to be too much point to pouring emotional gasoline on life’s fires, you know? I can see little sparks and pops of human beings writing their life’s story, with good guys and bad guys, dragons and princesses, and I think those lobes of my brain have become underused in the last couple of years. I might be cruising for a hubris-bruising here even posting this, but I just wanted to report back from the Other Side of drama in case anybody is feeling pulled down by their story. Enjoy the spring this weekend and we’ll see you in the couple of days on the t00bz.

P.S.  If you’re looking to put some rad events on this summers’ calendar, check out mah retreats.  They’re going to be the perfect combination of getting-away-from-it-all and getting-into-it-all, you know?  I’ll remind you as they draw closer.