Heh. It hadn’t actually occurred to me to blog about this until Christine, God bless’er, told me to. I trust her instincts in this as in all things. It’s kinda embarrassing though.
I had a teaching nightmare…you know, THOSE teaching nightmares? where you’re naked? except in this one I wasn’t naked. We were trucking along, fully clothed, warming up, and I made this fatal error:
“Please step your right foot forward and lower your back knee. On your next inhale, please lift your arms to the sky for a lunge.”
Immediately, a melée ensued [as M likes to say]. Some people took balancing poses, others Reclined Half Happy Baby. A couple people had a STRAIGHT-legged lunge or other variations. [Remember, this is happening IN MY HEAD while I sleep. No flying, no dragons, no fantastic voyages. Am I dedicated, or what.] I decided to give everybody the benefit of the doubt in spite of the generally descending energetic temperature of the room:
“Okay, so, uh, from Down Dog, please step your RIGHT foot forward, and gently lower your back knee to the ground. When you’re ready, follow the breath and lift the body and the arms for a lunge pose.”
Little to no effect, maybe an eyeroll here and there. So, as we yoga teachers do, I decide to get right back to first principles: I soften and take a breath, and I wonder why I want them to do a lunge so badly, and then I ask them to please just sit on their heels and I’ll tell them…ahem…
“You know, I hope you all feel able in your yoga classes to honour what your body really needs, because nobody knows you like you know yourself, and being sensitive to that call is probably one of the greatest and most noble practices you can cultivate. Having said that, as teachers we are passionate and excited about sharing our experiences and what makes our lives on the mat as rich and joyful as they are, so if I suggest a posture, it’s because that’s the way that *I* know to bring my experience to you. I’d love to talk about those reasons more if you have questions. In the meantime, let’s come back into Down Dog, and…”
People just start getting up to leave. Like, they’re giving me a deadly stinkeye combination of the “How could you let me down like that” and “What type of nonsense is even coming out of your mouth, woman?”
I’m like, “You guys! Let’s just sit down and talk about this some more because I think we’re getting somewhere…guys…? Please?” As they’re walking out, some students are saying, “That was just unacceptable”…”totally beyond the pale”, &c. I wake bereft, and to be honest, really sweaty. Brr. I’m getting the hot-colds again just thinking about it.
So, teachers: remember to cultivate gratitude that adults pay their nickel and step their right feet forwards when you ask them to. Students†: You have a lot of power and, as in Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. And mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Yoga Cowboys: a good teacher should have a reason for why they’re doing what they’re doing, which is a two-way path of clearly conveying and being open to receive.
†I wish to clarify that this did NOT happen in real life; my real life students are game for pretty much anything and laughed their keisters off when I told them this story. YMMV.
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The phrase “1995 Ford F150” is pronounced with 4 “ahs” and no Rs.
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You get carded buying cold medicine at the CVS but not getting boutique IPA in the Back Bay
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The public transit system actually takes you where you want to go in a timely manner without having to sit in somebody’s lap, and [as far as I could tell] is completely free of class stigma
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The football commentary doesn’t even bother attempting non-regional diction [e.g. “75 passing yahds”]
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There are people to actually help you in real life in the T-Line and will come up to assist you without even being asked
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They have “Green Cabs”, presumably hybrids
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Dreads on a white woman are seen as striking an astonishing blow against the dominant culture, as opposed to merely demonstrating a lack of desire to do one’s hair. I’ve never had so many strangers start conversations with me about my hayah.
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Purchasing Montepulciano d’Abruzzo for $7.99, rather than besmirching one’s character, is celebrated as a triumph of free market economics
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There really is a Copley Square public library although the hot air blower grate where “Bobby C” met his demise was not readily available due to Green Line construction
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The manholes are helpfully labelled “SEWER”
The trickiest part of living a life of spirit, these days, is to keep your eyes open and your feet on the ground and not get so “woo” that you miss the vibrance of reality; which is hard, given the intoxicating qualities of spiritual knowledge and practice. Man, if I had a nickel for every abstract energetic Quality I’ve experienced through meditation or asana…I’d have enough to retire young. Colours, lights, vague feelings of well-being; visions of the future, of distant lands, of imaginary places. Contact with what I assume is the Divine. Also some experiences not so pleasant, usually resulting in multiple-hour crying jags. They were all real to me, and they were very strong and potent. And I definitely think they inform my practice and help me discuss similar situations with my students if that comes up.
They just haven’t helped me when I’m having an argument with a friend, or on voting day, or to remember my keys, or when I’m in line for the ferry. You know what helps then? The REALITY of the method of practice, not the energetic woo. The concrete techniques, and maybe most importantly, actually taking action.
Don't just do something, sit there
It’s Remembrance Day today, a holiday with many convoluted layers of sweet and bitter. What’s that line from Lord of the Rings: “Love is now mingled with grief”. In a way, our affection for those in our tribe actually ends up feeding armed conflict in many ways [when we feel those we love are threatened], and those conflicts result in loss, which would not be so poignant if it were not for our love. I never really know how to feel about this holiday, apart from wanting to volunteer at the Legion or something: I don’t want us to have any more wars, but I don’t want to undermine the honour of those men and women who truly, genuinely believed they were fighting for their lives and their loves, just because I have the luxury of pacifism. I want to remember, but I want to take action based on that remembrance.
Colours, lights and sound
This year we are seeing how taking strong action, on this crazy plane of reality, can have tangible results. On the US Election Day, in my classes, I talked about finding unity through our core reasons for voting, even if we ended up choosing differently: everybody wants to be happy. The American voters expressed, in a concrete way, their strong vision of their desired future. And a criticism [unwarranted IMHO] levelled by opponents of then-Senator Obama was that he was all woo, all concept, all Hope’n'Change. The ACTIONS of the voters were undertaken, at least I’m pretty sure, to make this concept concrete. Vision without action: insubstantial woo. Action without vision: a hard, exhausting slog with no purpose and no end in sight. The voters remembered what was important to them, and then they made their remembrances manifest.
I haven’t had the privilege of talking with veterans about the details of their experiences, but I believe that they are asking for more than our remembrance. They are asking us to take action to continue to realize their vision of what was so important to them. When you re-member, it’s not just a mental exercise, it’s a repopulation of the mind and the heart with what is central and vital. The natural extension of remembrance is action. The way back to Spirit is through action.
Most yoga teachers in North America are looking for ways to keep their classes relevant to their students’ daily lives, and also to more successfully integrate their own practice on the mat with their other pursuits and roles. There is a surfeit of magazine articles discussing how to be a better parent through yoga, a better caregiver, a better life partner, even a more successful business person. Which is all very grownup and mature [pron.: "maTOOR"] and appropriate, and I can dig it.
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
Congratulations to my dad, shown below, in triumph 10 days after his hip replacement surgery [insert many, MANY "hipness" puns here].
How it came to be: I was looking for a name for my Yoga4Kidz society 24-relay team. This organization works through UNICEF to provide funds to children living with HIV and AIDS, and the aftereffects of same [HIV and AIDS, not the children or the funds] which are numerous and ghastly. Through the 24 hour relay, each member of our 8-person team will be practicing yoga for a 24 hour period, thereby raising money and awareness for the Yoga4Kidz society.
I was pretty much levitating with panlinguistic glee when I came up with this name. I had just completed my stint as a guest artist at a Delta sports bar singing Iron Maiden and Judas Priest covers and was enamoured of the raw power of rock and roll mayhem. If my adventures on the Interducts have taught me anything, it’s that my genius was likely not just my own, and so I contacted the Great Gazoogle to see my colleagues in brilliance…
They seem like pretty kool kats. I am humbled and pleased by the ability to [hopefully] share a screen name and blog spot with some donuts, a gorgeous woman and her talent for photography, a hilarious and deep sketch, and what seems like the nerve center of New York veg*nism.
It’s like watching the Ethan Hawke scene of “Waking Life” and suspecting that you and everyone else you might know share a brain. So please, fellow brain-sharers, let me know if I’ve omitted credit where credit is due.
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.
You know, when I initially began my first blog, I had hoped that its Incredible Cleverness would outsmart any criticism in advance. It was all very meta, and if any of you hapless enough to click on that link are able to parse what the heck I was trying to do, big ups to you; half of the time I forgot what I was doing. My many alter egos were meant to have their own ability to comment and fight amongst themselves, and theoretically even without the benefit of actual real-life readers my internal battles would be fought on these here Interducts for all to see.
Unsurprisingly, my drive to log these battles has waned considerably. I mean, really. There are some funny bits, and I’m not saying I don’t still believe and think all of the bits that are on there now; I just don’t want to have to hide from my own words with all these little nods and winks and injokes.
Maybe it’s because my favourite author recently took his own life. I have been rereading all of my favourites and my heart has been so heavy, missing the potentiality of his voice. He made the decision that he thought was right, and I realize it’s idle [also irrelevant] to debate this choice or speculate about his reasons. I just don’t want to be silenced before I’ve even spoken, if you know what I mean. He often wrote about being the critic of one’s own material, even before it was out of cranial-embryo, before it was ever typed or [God forbid] read. That idea has stopped me from writing so many times it’s pretty embarrassing, and as a tribute to his impact on my creativity and my inner world I’m just going to go ahead and let it all hang out.
He would probably say, now that I mention it, that this is a classic technique to end-run potential criticism: to actually say out loud that you realized that naïvite was the last great Millenial sin but that you literally were driven, DRIVEN I say, with pointy sticks and irate villagers, to disclose the incredibly dramatic and pathos-filled genesis of this particular weblog, and therefore undercut those smallsouled Philistines who are waiting to mark this paragraph as a run-on sentence and not a very good one besides.
Sometimes you have to be willing to look like a little bald-headed fat-legged baby to do what you believe is right.