Previous title: “Gang of three” or “The scale of modern practice”
*insert appropriate pithy epigram here*
Another great Teacher Intensive weekend has come and gone and, as all fruitful studies should, it answered some questions and then asked a whole host of others. One of the portions I found the most powerful was our round-table discussion on when and if political material should ever be included in class. As expected, the responses ran the gamut from “good Lord, no, are you kidding? that’s the most inappopriate soapboxing/proselytizing misuse of your teaching energy, ever” to “I love hearing it in class and it connects me to the higher purposes of practice”. And also as expected, the responses to teaching technique have a great deal to do with the context of the class and studentship. I mean, the C word is the one that just keeps deluging me lately: it’s like an even shorter of that excellent Facebook bit that started showing up and going viral a few years ago: “Everything is changing. Everything is connected. Pay attention”.
Since I seem to have garnered the reputation for being so political, even though my own political studies are ham-handed and infantile at best, I thought I’d use this post as a way of explaining why I’ve been drawn to political concepts in recent years and how, if at all, they might harmonize with practice.
So I sez to Morgan, I sez, it has always bothered me that Yoda says “Do or do not, there is no try” in Star Wars Episode V, because it has always seemed to me that there is TOTALLY SO try. I mean, the Bhagavad Gita says that one should work without anticipation of reward, not for the fruits but for the actions themselves, which would actually seem to me that try is the most important bit, and that no effort is wasted, which I interpret to mean that “try” is some sort of accruing currency that actually increases every time one tries.
w00t w0000t
I also have this bit that I teach, especially to beginners, where I point out that they are just at the start of their journey and there’s no point getting all het up about not executing e.g. Bakasana to their satisfaction on the first attempt because life is long and keep coming to class &c, and Yoda sort of undermines that whole spiel, because if their options are at the point just “do not” i.e. there is no try, then they won’t come back to class again because “do not” is sort of a bummer [unnecessarily harsh and discouraging] and inaccurate besides, because the preparatory actions of a pose are very helpful and therapeutic even if you don’t get your feet off the ground in Bakasana as above, or whatever pose you’re sharpening yourself against…[ellipsis...]
And you know it’s kind of a bummer to try to do something and then not actually be able to do it, viz. certification [see below] because you’re all like, dude, if there’s no “try” then what in the world have I spent the last however-long doing? I seem to remember some trying. And some doing not, I suppose. But mostly TRYING! And the complex intersecting layers of how much one wants to try vs. how much benefit one might obtain from doing, or not doing, or trying…it’s all a rich tapestry…I explained about the nexus of tattvas, that is, experiential layers of the universe, where concept,will and execution intersect on an absolute level, and that this in fact is the generative power of the universe [icca, jnana and kriya], which appears to effectively demonstrate the UNIVERSE IS MADE OF TRY: that every cell of your body is pure try: that without “trying” there is no BEING, much less doing or not doing, and that the synthesis of spiritual endeavour consisted primarily of the essence of Try, in that no result was expected, demanded or desired and yet the path presents itself, over and tedious over again, pursuing Light in the most occluded and cystlike environments, attempting the impossible triple-axel Sight of Light in spaces where no light should by all rights be and simply by virtue of the pure-hearted attempt GENERATING light in this sclerotic places…By gum, trying makes the world go round, three cheers for try, how can this geriatric little Muppet even dare to sully the good name of Try with his tortured syntax and burlap robes, and I became quite aerated about the whole prospect; I even cultivated a slight bloom of rhetorical sweat on my upper lip. I may also have been changing Hannah at the time, I can’t quite remember.
M said, “He’s referring to telekinesis”.
I thought for a second.
I said, “Oh, well, that’s true then.”
Since I had such a sweet pregnancy and practiced throughout with very little pain or discomfort it’s been a real ass-kicker not to be able to move as freely as I once was able now that the twins are born. I know, I know: what a surprise: and of course intellectually and empathetically I had heard tales from the post-partum crypt more than I can count. It’s challenging to operate on levels like, here’s my spirit and here’s my brain and my brain wants to serve spirit and here’s how I do it, I get up at this time and I move my body in this way and that feels good, does it feel good to you too? It does? Great, let’s keep doing that and O SNAPS WAIT UP SOME PEOPLE CAME OUT OF ME. Body totally different=fried. Brain still wanting to serve, heart still wanting to serve. Students and community constantly distracted, chatting about diet and buying habits and Ayurveda and raw macaroons and The Core™ and assorted other miscellany that seem to have about as much to do with the twin-raising project as, say, a doodled outline of your own thumb on a message pad has to do with a lunar probe. Me: not coming up with any even halfway decent answers, mostly cause I’m a bit ashamed of having been SO SURE about yoga asana and Anusara and now I’m not just unsure, I think I’m kind of over it. So is my spiritual practice consistent? Yes. Here’s why.
You can't balance what you can't see
My body is already being used in intense devotional service every single moment of every day. The very cells I occupy are redolent with life’s purpose by way of estrogen, fat and sleep deprivation. I am making food with my body instead of poses and directly serving those who cannot serve themselves. I am remembering God as I do so. So while I can appreciate that you are finding deep significance in e.g. Tibetan throat singing or Scorpion pose, it all seems PROFOUNDLY beside the point at this stage in my development. *warning – gender essentialism ahead* Sometimes I think dudes came up with yoga cause they were all jealous of how much women’s bodies are in service by nature. Regardless of their sexuality or procreative decisions, there is still a pulse that is always serving life. Maybe dudes just wanted to keep themselves busy playing the sacred flute or some such s**t. So just as the Vipassana gong rang at 4 am and I got up to sit whether I wanted to or not, so Robert’s fussing keeps me in touch with the relentless divine whether I want to or not. That’s where my discipline is channelled.
Therefore I have run out of steam pursuing the Holy Grail of Certification, and not only steam, money. The longer this process takes the more expensive it is and therefore only the comfortable or the very ascetic will attain the position without severe debt and stress. I am fairly comfortable but not enough for additional $500 mentoring programs after already shelling out (mumble) benjamins at this late stage of the game, and I’m not ascetic at all. Also, my whole thing with Certification was “I wasn’t doing anything more important” and now I am. So I’m in the penalty box after my last video [submitted 2 weeks before giving birth btw] didn’t pass, and as my year in the dunce corner whiles away the whole thing is becoming ever more baroque and complicated, and costly, and frankly it’s all I can do to make sure everybody’s set up with some stewed pears and organic milled brown rice cereal if ya feels me.
Okay, so. Anusara may fall away. Asana may fall away. Formal seated practice has been wobbly right out of the gate. I don’t tend towards formal devotional practices, although I admire those who hold them down, as I’ve always associated the representative forms of God to be just that, tokens, the same way Monopoly money is associated with real money and then the way real money is associated with value and worth. But I still feel God every day, and I actually kind of dig this new iconoclastic by-any-means-necessary practice, where spirit *has to* be tethered to every action. The only real suffering I have in this new space is that of loneliness; I was craving companionship both through Anusara and through yoga in general and ironically my commitment to the former seems to have further disconnected and splintered me away from the latter. It’s lonely to have failed, and it’s lonely to be the gelatinous pie-eyed chronic pain sufferer in the back of the room, but hell, at least it’s real. Also, my babies are cute, which helps a lot.
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…)
You know when you’re on holiday somewhere beautiful and you find every vista and spectacle so irresistibly stunning that you take brazillions of pictures and upload and categorize them all, perhaps with some cunning file naming convention so that you can readily access each splendid panorama (depending on your nerdlitude), checking in on Facebook constantly, charting your trip on GPS, creating clever prose poems about the magnificence you’ve witnessed…
…and when you get home you realize you have no *actual memory* of your holiday apart from camera cabling and digital fluff? My love of the Internet is legendary, and I generally avoid taking neo-Luddite pot shots at people actually using their phones or being really proud of not having a TV. However, I’ve been keeping a really low electronic profile since the twins were born, partly because I’m way too busy feeding them and/or cleaning up after them, and partly because most baby-related material is not exactly riveting journalism to me, and partly because I felt like once I started diving into the avalanche of needed e-communication I’d never dig myself out again. But mostly, just because I don’t want to miss any moment of this, no matter how hallucinatory or hormonally amplified. However, the longer I wait to surface the more it seems like I’m potentially unwell or something disastrous has happened, and I want to be clear that both they and I are in good health and the delivery was a success, if by no other metric than they used to be inside me and now they’re not 
Hannah (back) and Robert (front) were born on April 19 at 2:38 and 2:48 pm respectively. Hannah had the cord wrapped around her neck, which if local anecdata can be trusted is true of pretty much half the people I know, and was therefore delivered by forceps (as was I); Robert was helped down the road via vacuum, which gave him a little yarmulke of bruise that we used to differentiate him from his sister while they were still so wrinkly and generic newborns that we had trouble remembering which was which. They don’t actually look anything like each other, but let’s face it: we weren’t the brightest logs on the Yuletide fire in that little postpartum room.
I kept thinking to myself during labour: I haven’t ruled anything out, I am not attached to any one method of getting these guys out, I am “ready” at least on the conceptual level for different levels of pain and different interventions. I did, however, realize that whatever it took to get the first one out I was then going to have to duplicate or intensify to get the second out, and so I elected to have an epidural, which ended up being a great mercy once we knew that Hannah was having trouble. I am about 15-25% guilty that I could not deliver them without intervention, mostly due to some bullshit-fueled narrative about Womyn Goddess Power or some such crap, but I’m pretty much over it (amazing how pernicious that meme is).
Hannah (back), Robert (front)
They are as well-put together as we can ascertain with the battery of tests that they launch at neonates these days, like they’re studying for the LSATS or something. I’m recovering well although understandably still pudgy and slow. So! Healthy babies, healthy mom, and a healthy (if stubbly) dad.
Weirdly, the experience of raising these guys so far is more like a meditation retreat than any other experience of mine, but not for any of the poetic fluffy reasons you might expect. Ways In Which Newborn Twins Are Like A Meditation Retreat:
1. Your existence is ruled by time: gongs, beeps, arbitrary chunks of time by which you measure the repeated menial tasks which are your due.
2. Mealtimes and excretions are the most exciting parts of your day.
3. You wear pajamas 24/7. (to be fair, I pretty much did this anyway)
4. Even if you could somehow access an adult to whom you might express some insight arising from the experience, through fatigue and energetic confusion you couldn’t form accurate words anyway.
5. There’s no way to record your insights, either because journals are prohibited or because you don’t have any time and even if you did you don’t make any sense (see #4)
6. At least for as long as they are 12 days old [yesterday], both experiences last for 12 days.
My love for them, and everything else that I really feel, is too sacred and quiet to write about.
You can attempt to resist the dreaded Baby Brain with every fibre of your being but apparently it will eventually still come to kick your ass. This is part of my slowness in blog output, and may also account for the possible febrility of this post, especially when set up against its genesis, this article by my friend Gail. I taught a class before Christmas with the admittedly bold subject matter of the Christian nativity story as its theme [why is that bold? more below] and it was one of those classes where I could potentially have really pissed some people off but it seemed worth it at the time, and it seems more worth it now that I’ve read her writing.
Reasons why it is contentious to use Christian narrative as a theme in a public class: Christianity dominates the dialogue, even as it loses adherents. I never care for that itchy-ass feeling of expressing the privilege of the very, very dominant culture. I think this may be in part why middle-class white kids of my vintage are such spiritual tourists: they’ll explore any mythology, any culture, as long as it’s the underdog. Fair enough. Strays perilously close to Orientalism, but that’s a post for another day, or perhaps an unfleshed-out theme of many other posts that I haven’t really explored fully. Plus which I’d venture to say that people come to yoga class, in these trying post-millenial times, to “get away from it all”: to release the stranglehold of culture and consciousness, to trip out however temporarily on pure body sensation, to get distracted either by novelty or discomfort from what the usual monologue/dialogue/multilogue [!?] in their heads. Part of “it all” is the tedium of watching the Dominant North
Why can't we all just get along?
American Culture [DNAC] chew at its own ambivalence about being dominant like a bear in a leg hold trap: happy holidays! I’m spiritual, not religious! I definitely fell into this pit of discomfort during the class that Gail describes. The whole time I’m wondering: Is this like the douchiest thing I’ve ever said [which would put it in some admirable company]? The white chick with the iPod full of Wu-Tang and the dreadlocks [!!!] and the, sadly, discouragingly, abysmally pronounced Sanskrit [!!!!!!] is gonna sit here and talk about the Christian God like there’s some sort of rebellious novelty here? Cripes. What am I, Glenn Beck?
Trouble is, I really do believe in the ecumenical power of the Christian nativity story. The DNAC can shuffle its feet and grind its toe into the ground, but I actually see some *there* there: the seed of the unseen and inexplicable Divine made limited, suffering flesh. Of course it is only one of many stories that tell of this transition, from sky to earth, and so it definitely can’t make any claims to uniqueness. But if it’s how I cut my spiritual teeth, how much should I pretend not to explore it, at least as philosophical or narrative content? What I actually know about Biblical scholarship you could inscribe with a blunt crayon around the inside of a shot-glass, but I’m not a King James literalist or anything embarrassing like that. (more…)
I held off on the previous two posts cause I thought they were unreflective of how I actually feel, which is: great. They do have some funky ideers in them, though, if I do say so myself [even if most of the ideers are borrowed if not outright stolen]. Yup, it’s been a tremendous winter and some of the contributing factors are delineated below:
1. Finally shelled out for the iPad. I’m still figuring out how it hooks up with the WordPress app and am so far having minimal luck with my style of blog posting [i.e.: irregular, dilettantish, and when finally prepared, overcomplicated] but it’s perfect for everything else I want to do…primarily having access to the Internet as close to my frontal lobe as possible. It’s durable, cuddly, shiny and small. Definitely looking forward to travelling with it, although I haven’t had as many travel opportunities in ’10 as in ’09.
2. Christine and I will be teaching an advanced workshop at Yoga For The People on Sunday January 30 2011 from 12:30 to 3:30. Watch this space for details.
3. I get to teach at the stunning Inner Space on Thursday nights from 5:30 to 6:45. It makes me feel so good just being there. If you’ve never been, check it out.
4. Yaletown Yoga will be closed for renovations from Dec. 10 through Dec. 20. Until its new gorgeousness is unveiled, catch me at Inner Space above or Big Rock Friday.
Just one; I am full of babies. Whattaya need?
5a). Being pregnant with twins is way more awesome than I had been led to believe. Thank Everything for Anusara yoga, without which I am really not sure how I would cope with this new body in the context of yoga or at least what I previously thought yoga was about. For front body softness, thigh loop, muscular energy in the legs to alleviate SI pain…but mostly front body softness and trusting the divine…thanks John. Srsly. It’s so sweet to be able to continue with an active practice and not be treated like a fragile delicate flower just because OMG THE CORE. Handstands and forearm balance feel the best, with backbends a close second. Oh, and eating whatever I want. [Side rant: Why is this only permissible when in the ostensibly self-sacrificial mode of gestating humans? Whoops, I forgot this is supposed to be a non-grumpy post.]
5b) This is why I haven’t posted too much: because while of course this is a big deal in my world I haven’t wanted to write about it. It’s like very quiet music that only I can hear, and while I could conceivably gas on and on about the subjective inner experience, it can be alienating and/or tedious. It’s also a very sensitive topic. Now that they are getting a bit bigger, and hopefully more stable, and people are getting out of my way when I go to the mall, I suppose it’s more public-domain. I am terribly pleased, though 
6. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. I wish it was snowing more, mostly because I got the first proper winter coat I’ve had since university, and also because I enjoy the State of Emergency snow provides here on the West Coast…or, well, to be perfectly clear, I enjoy not SUCCUMBING to the State of Emergency that seems to prevail because it makes me feel tough, and you all know how much I like to feel tough. Stay warm, everyone. Happy Hanukkwanzmas.
You know, sometimes you’re just wandering around the Bay with CP, sniffing at the $595 Halston Mrs. Roper muumuus, when all of a sudden it comes clear: the source of so much of my anxiety and frustration w/r/t the technologies known as “spiritual practice” is that the game is rigged. The house always wins. Since you’re here anyway permit me to elucidate.
Let’s take an aspect of human experience, you can pick your favourite:
One for each deadly
- hunger
- thought [viz. the dreaded "monkey mind" or other pejorative]
- sexuality
- sleep
- anger
- (there are more but let’s start there)
And here are some questions for your contemplation:
- are these aspects of the human experience going away anytime soon?
- what would the world look like if they were gone?
- if you believe any of these aspects of human experience to be undesirable, is that they are INTRINSICALLY and inescapably wrong, or are there some situations in which they might be desirable?
I chose those ones, the five deadlies, cause those are the ones that catch the most knee-jerk unexamined flack from various spiritual technologies. Sometimes a modality will be bold enough to censure all five and then some; sometimes they will stigmatize only a couple (desire in the guise of “attachment”, &c.). In fact, this contrariness has come to be a dead lock on any of these practices, to the point where any emotion or behavior outside of a sort of a bland bemused pleasantness is interpreted as “unyogic” or similar. This (inherently nonsensical btw) assessment is leveled both at self and others, and is an endless source of flagellation a la those crazy mofos in the Da Vinci Code who hit themselves with spiky thongs because they are just so baaaaaaaaaaad.
Working title: It’s not the band I hate, it’s the fans
One of my fave bloggers, Amanda at Pandagon, has had a running series lately about “hipsters” (no, I don’t know what they are either, but bear with me) and this post got my brain juices a-flowin re: our cultural obsession with authenticity. Of course I’m going to focus on our yogic subcultural obsession with authenticity, because that’s what you pay me for, and you always get what you pay for at Heavy Metta†.
The beef with hipsters appears to be that specifically clothing, but any cultural marker like clothes, music, social events &c. make a statement about the wearer/participant. For example, somebody wearing a Judas Priest t-shirt is assumed to know what or who Judas Priest is. To make matters more complex, a young man who has always been within wireless Internet distance might wear a “Whalley Tractor Pull” t-shirt, and his genuine knowledge of or support of said tractor pull is undermined by the dreaded ironic hipsterism. How can we know whether the shirt-wearer’s support of Judas Priest or their devotion to the Whalley Tractor Pull is real? What if they can only sing the chorus of a couple of marginally radio friendly singles but don’t know the whole discography? If I am a true adherent of the WTP is this hornrimmed ass clown making fun of me? Or is this a sign that I can give him the secret Tractor Pull handshake and we can retreat to more private environs to discuss last years’ finals?
(more…)
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?