If you are using Heavy Metta as a new media review outlet you, good sir or madam, will always be sorely disappointed, cause I’m generally crap at getting on top of good shows or viral links or hot new albums until well after they have risen, peaked and faded. The reason for this is simply that when somebody says “Check out this show/book/site/band/teacher, you’ll love them”‘ I BELIEVE THEM: as somebody who obsessively listens to one song for weeks and generates an entire worldview and lexicon around the lyrics and becomes firmly convinced of said songs’ portentious message for me in the coming years, an almost oracular faith in this song…I cannot afford, do you hear me, cannot afford to click on that link or check out your downloaded .flac album…if it’s as good as you say it is I will go deep into the rabbit hole and spend mammoth amounts of time and energy loving and processing and ruminating on this art. And so it is with Friday Night Lights. (more…)

A combination of a miserably slow Internet install [I'm glaring balefully at *you*, Telus] and the challenge of getting the laptop under?  around?  alongside?  the pregnant belly, combined with the below-mentioned fuzzy brain and generally slower-moving energy [both physical and intellectual] has cranked my blog pace down below sporadic to non-existent.  It’s not that I haven’t had stuff to say or write about, it’s that I seem to have some sort of attention deficit disorder that only permits me to do one thing for about ten or fifteen minutes before I have to get up and boogie around doing something else.  And although I have been trying my hardest to continue to serve our community and keep communicating the core of my teaching, I gotta say:  I weigh 186 lbs:  I’m getting freaking tired.  I’ve been super lucky throughout this whole pregnancy experience and have dodged most pain- and discomfort-bullets, but the straight up weight of these little suckers is really changing the game.  So this post might be a bit

Thanks, Al Gore

schizoid but I’m trying to catch up on both practical details, upcoming community events, and thought-nuggets of varying value.

• Living downtown has so far proved magnificent, although I’m still kind of intimidated by living somewhere that’s so nice and keep expecting somebody to either turf me out for being a hippie or slide a Holiday Inn Express check-out form under the door.  As we near the end of our first month here I am starting to dig in a little more and get comfy.  The concrete and the building security soothes the low-level autistic tendencies in a very happy way.  And you never know how much you miss abundant electrical outlets until you live somewhere with an appropriately modern amount of them [there's nothing like the A-Christmas-Story-like nest of frothing, sparking plugs, sealed with cat-hair, all piled into a Black and Decker power bar from 1996].
• My last class before “mat leave” will be Big Rock Friday on April 1 at 4.  Play hooky, call in sick, if you have a pass at another studio don’t worry about the $$$, just come and visit please.  It’s a nice big space so it’ll be a bit roomier than the Yaletown sweat lodge.  As much as I’m looking forward to focussing more time and energy on these little beans I’m going to miss grownups like crazy, especially since almost all of you are continent and can speak in complete sentences.  So let’s party.  And I’m sorry about the outdated schedule that’s been up here on the blog…that’s pretty irritating…for what it’s worth [not much with a week to go] it’s fixed now.
• Don’t forget to keep checking our Vanusara community site for upcoming events.  Sianna Sherman is this weekend and Martin Kirk’s therapeutics on April 1-3…not to mention a years’ worth of Immersions, Teacher Trainings, Philosophy Weekends, Advanced Practices and other abundant opportunities for study.

Another episode of BRFs That 70s Show, this time inspired by dino-rock and Wiley Wiggins and his enormous human-heart sized headphones. I really should see that movie again; I remember it as quite poignant but then I was one of those grungy teenagers completely captivated by all things late 60s/70s.

He looks a bit like my brother at that age

“Tuesday’s Gone”, Lynyrd Skynyrd

“Free Ride”, The Edgar Winter Group

“Rock And Roll All Night”, Kiss

“Space Truckin’”, Deep Purple

“Paranoid”, Sabbath

“Slow Ride”, Foghat

“Sweet Emotion”, Aerosmith

“Balinese”, ZZ Top

“Take The Money And Run”, Steve Miller Band

“Dazed And Confused”, Led Zeppelin

“Nassau/Baby I Love Your Way”, Peter Frampton

“Summer Breeze”, Seals and Crofts

“Lights”, Journey

1.  I had the pleasure of meeting Sarah Leavitt the other day and we rocked out at BRF together.  She’s one of those cats that makes me remember the person on the mat beside you is a genius, so get to know them, even though you might be shy.  Check out her Heavy Metal Yoga cartoon.  Great minds, &c.

Like getting a hug, except all the time

2.  If you’ve been delighted by the preponderance of crocheted items showing up on necks and heads of students and staff at Yaletown lately, look no further than another gifted yoga buddy, LBG.  Buy her stuff.  Then give some of it away to people you like.  Then buy more.

3.  In the “Scary Brilliant” file goes this magnificent essay by Gail Hochachka, another stealth genius on the mat.  There’s so much in here I feel a bit slow and feeble unpacking it, but am honoured and humbled to have helped inspire it.   Stay tuned for a more fleshed-out post in response, complete sentences pending.

4.  Another year, another redonkulously talented group of Chris Chavez teacher training grads.  I just can’t say enough good things about these guys, nor about Chris’ dedication and diligence in helping us all become better teachers.  The word “all” is key here, because as you know, I’m not particularly interested in technologies that just reinforce existing awesomeness, since I figure that’ll take care of itself.  I’m interested in real transformation for everyone who participates, and that’s what happens when I assist these trainings.  Next one starts March 2011, giddy up!

Loosely continued from here, sort of

picturesque verdure

Following one of John’s many edicts I spent the last week of August running around in the forest. Well, he didn’t say that exactly, but he does often encourage those of us who wish to align with nature to spend some time with nature, so we know what the heck we’re doing. Here are some things that I’ve heard about Nature and why we should align with it:

- it’s beautiful
- it’s beneficent
- it has a pattern

which I don’t disagree with per se, except that almost every conventional definition of those words is challenged by actually hanging out in uncultivated Nature for any length of time. Breaking it down further, it seems clear that Nature, while unquestionably “beautiful” for values of “beautiful” that include “wild” and “filthy” and “beneficent” insofar as it is “ruthlessly fair”, is not arranged for OUR benefit as humans. Nature is not always picturesque. It is far from kind. It doesn’t exist for our pleasure alone, although you can frequently get pleasure out of it. It utterly fails to exist according to our organized rules and dogma, and trying to get it to fit in there somewhere is high-maintenance. (more…)

From Pandagon‘s commentariat.

Here’s the problem.

I first noticed it around..2000-ish or so. It might have been before that, or whatever. The local chain grocery store (I was living in a rural area where there was like one largish grocery store in about a 30-minute drive radius. It was insane.) put up a big public display applauding their cashiers for making a new scans per minute metric. I think it was 80 or so. In a few months, there was another display, showing a few who made a metric of 120. There was only a few.

There was also less lanes open.

Back up in your ass with the resurrection

Those two things are entirely related.

For much of the actual working class, it’s all about meeting specified and trackable goals. And everything else goes out the window. This stampede towards absolute productivity and eliminating waste is at the core of the great recession. What we’re seeing for the most part, is companies using this as an excuse to cash in on productivity gains. That’s why profits are up even as sales are so low.

This is THE problem. This is the reason why Obama didn’t push for single payer/public option..the economy simply couldn’t withstand the massive productivity and efficiency gains in the health sector. And fixing it isn’t just a political problem…

All the solutions…there’s a lot of people..average, regular people who are going to be very upset with them. You could do massive direct government hiring…but you need to give those people breaks, or pay them if it’s storming or whatever. Or you make a stronger maximum workweek and lower it. Again, the idea that those lazy kids/whatever racial group won’t have to work as hard…it just pisses people off.

This isn’t some fake, Fox News trumped scandal. These are real, common, very popular tropes among the general population. And that’s the problem.

Nothing short of a complete change of the nature of work, why we work, what we get for work, is going to get the job done. And yes, the change is as much cultural as it is political. And that’s what makes it so tough to change.

I had a dream that all my old friends who are also yoga teachers who I rarely see anymore since we are so incredibly busy were hanging out doing karaoke and dancing 90s style to Michael Jackson’s “Remember The Time”. It was awesome. Then when I woke up I was a bit sad because in addition to the usual attrition of babies and homes, it seems that yoga in Vancouver itself has experienced schisms…that is, that we have broken along tribal lines and camps, and never again the twain shall meet.

Or, I ruminated as I had the morning coffee-and-video-game-wakeup [Madden NFL '11] perhaps we have simply exploded; grown so fast that, like a Big Bang, what once was close and nestly is now at the wild periphery. Either we pay lip service to the idea that more people should do yoga or we actually believe it: either way, our dharma as teachers is to continually grow and expand, and that will necessarily mean abandoning that closeness.

And students notice it too, and nobody seems to know why it happens: where is the Old Group, they say? Why all the politics, why the camps and militant splinter factions? Why is that every person I used to see weekly without fail at our favourite teachers’ class is now off doing Core Bootcamp on the Northshore?

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You know, this used to be a blog that nobody actually read and that was oddly satisfying as I toiled away in relative obscurity.  Now I see by my clever little Google Analytics that somebody is actually Googling “Who Is Sjanie McInnis” like I was Carmen San Diego.  Somebody told me once that I should keep Heavy Metta all business…all yoga, all the time, only the finest amateur yogic journalism, where you always get exactly what you pay for and then some.  I took that to heart until I realized that THIS is my business:  pottering around the house, growing things and cooking them, obsessively rewatching science fiction, dancing in my living room to DJ Neil Armstrong [who, whoa, got famous at some point, look at that!].   My yogic chops may be questionable [levitating is out of the question] but by God I sure am good at pottering around the house.  Consider Exhibits A through F, if it please the court. (more…)

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…)

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

WHAT TIME IS IT?

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.

(more…)