Ok so let's talk yoga: Indy's ashtanga self-practice room, Week 3.

I wake up on Wednesday and Friday mornings at 5:03 am, by alarm, which I quickly turn off. Mat and rug and clothing is on the front room futon, and coffee (I caffeinate pre-practice, a habit I'll surrender eventually) is made in the kitchen, in back, via french press. I take maybe 6-8 ounces of coffee with me on the 20 minute drive from my house in southeast Indianapolis to our self-practice room which is in the western mid-city.

I leave the headlights in the car off until I'm turned around and on the way. Some mornings I'll let NPR roll, but often I want less language, less rationality, so I'll switch on whatever mix CD is loaded. This morning it was all 1980s, so "Crockett's Theme" on the way up, with some Prince after, and then Springsteen and Madonna on the way back.

At the early 5 am's in June, on the westernmost edge of the Eastern time zone (because Indiana really probably should be Central time but isn't) dawn begins at 5:20 or so and the sun begins to turn the sky from blue toward whitish yellow at 5:50. So as I drive east to a street that has a highway onramp, and then well west onto I-70 so I can get to I-65N, it's green-blue dawnish on one side of the car, and black night on the other. I've seen that light in Austin, Texas, and St. Paul, Minnesota, and of course a ton of times in San Francisco, and in a few other towns besides, but here? What the hell am I doing in Indianapolis at this hour?

This ritual drive makes a familiar road (because I take I-65 EVERYWHERE; its cross with I-70 is why Indiana calls itself "the Crossroads of America") into something very pleasantly disorienting. The buildings look different at dawn, all of those hospital buildings by the trio of hospitals that surround the IUPUI medical campus. The highways lights are on, the S-curves familiar, and of course the exit I take is the same one you take for the Children's Museum, so I've taken it a thousand times also, but again, it's all strange, and it's because I am doing the yoga here. HERE?

I am doing morning practice HERE? How is this POSSIBLE? The novelty is totally compelling. I like practicing at our self-practice space better than practicing at home regardless of "quality" of practice, because of this weird ritual, this sort of transportation through memory and other spaces, while I'm "actually" here. I forget where, when; spaces multiply and time forms a sort of weird French pastry layering system. I become who's, when's. Temporal fugue, double vision, triple vision.

Once off the highway, it's north again, past the museum, north of 38th street, a huge and notoriously crime-ridden horizontal, and suddenly into well-treed lanes and big houses. Money leaves its mark. Fifteen blocks north in there, stop signs and lights every three blocks, and then west into an even more rural area, a little mini-neighborhood connected to the rest of town only by two bridges. Quietness, stone quietness, maybe a bicycle or a woman walking her dogs. Five blocks in, turn onto the stone driveway, there's our humble little practice space. I'm there by 5:45 am. It's still mostly dark.

This is the inside of the room at about 5:30 am, I think from Friday last week.

Today we were three, all in our 40s, and we did Primary series, with one practitioner in back doing some Intermediate also. My two co-practitioners are also regular in my Sunday room. Total silence, aside from a "hi" and an occasional knowing glance between practitioners doing hard poses. Breathing, bending, wonderful practice.

My right hip and left knee are sore from yesterday's hard bouldering, but they're fine, and really, those sensations really helped me crank myself into a deep practice mind. There is a ticking clock in the practice room and I can hear it when I walk in and when I get up from rest, but I don't hear one single solitary tick during practice.

Practice ends for me between 7:20 and 7:40 (late today, 7:40: about 1hr50 for Primary with three heels-up dropbacks, no stands).

By then, sunshine is yellow, the sun is above the treetops, and while the light is big and slanted, shadows long and stretching, it is definitively daytime. We are technically in a stretch of drought here, but it's a beautiful drought, blue sky and sunshine (we'll see how much we like the 102 degrees predicted for Thursday).

I drive back exactly the path I took up there. The highway is busy at 5 am, but it's crazy busy at 7, life is "back to normal."

Let's do this again, let's do this again soon.

Detour: Gender Roles, Set Off by the Atlantic.

This:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-can-8217-t-have-it-all/9020/4/

(that link is to page 4; just click to the start).

In a nutshell, that piece argues that women trying (in the best feminist fashion) to "have it all" (i.e., high-powered career AND family) are essentially becoming as overworked as men, but without the gendered reward system and WITH the added liability of having to choose family-nurture OR high-powered career. So as we see with so many things, social empowerment of women STILL turns them, in social empowerment terms, INTO MEN. This is also tangentially how most "feel desire again" rhetoric works when it comes to low "sex drive." Everyone is assumed to have "male" desire (a friend of mine can tell you miles and miles more about that than I can, but trust me, it's so).

Put another way (and I'm going to borrow a line from the author here and note that this entire discussion is well-planted with land mines), women have been given "access" to the high-powered and apparently well-monied career potential of men, but have ALSO still retained all of the weight of child-rearing and maternity generally. So a man can still be a man in terms of social empowerment, but a woman must be both a woman AND A MAN; this is that great line about Ginger Rogers doing "everything Astaire did, just backwards and in heels."

I was thinking about privilege last night and how all of the various "losses" that I felt in becoming a parent, are a better kind of instruction in privilege than any "pretending to be a minority" game would be. For example: if I go to a workshop and "spend a day being a woman" or I read statistics about social disempowerment, or I learn a lot about the way racial minorities are profiled, I still cannot CLIMB INTO those bodies, and more importantly, I can't climb into those bodies FROM BIRTH, where the ideologies act upon me (and upon my parents, peers and caretakers) before I can interact properly with them with clarity.

This is why privilege is tricky; it's largely invisible not because it's social power (anyone with sufficient vision can see that) but because it is MATERIALLY PRESENT in your social circumstances before you're fully conscious of anything, much less of ideology.

In 2002 I went to the GenderPAC conference in Washington DC, and while I was there I went to a number of panels that were trying to mutually theorize race, gender and age, all at once. A sort of united field theory of minoritization and power in the West. Audacious stuff. After one panel, I had a conversation with an African-American woman (author, lecturer, powerful figure whose name I unfortunately forget over this much time) and briefly told her my story, the ways that white and male weren't as empowering for me as they might have been (about which more below in a minute) and about the marriage I was just about to end (which would happen about six months later), and she said, "If you do this, you will fall. That will be a very interesting experience for you."

I have forgotten a lot of things from those days but I have never forgotten that.

The parenting losses (which to be brief were my climbing practice and my sexual relationship with my partner, at least those are what you see if you look this briefly) were not privilege losses. Nothing "white" or "male" was lost in those (and no, I don't count relationship bliss as a male thing). But now that I am returning to climbing practice, I realize what a privilege it is to be able to get my endorphins in a structured and safe way like this (safe danger, if you will) and not to have to run from bombs or snipers in the street. I'm 42 and I have all my limbs and senses; I've been subjected to no sexual violence (outside of a lot of emotional clusterfuckery, but that's not the same as physical violence). I guess what I'm discovering here is not a LOSS but, in the context of being unable to exercise my given privilege, a degree of awareness of that privilege AS what it IS.

I'm never going to be deported, for example, so I don't have to live with that. Is the two-year panic about paying outrageous student loans similar? Maybe, in the lightest way. But even that wasn't poverty; I never had to participate in the risks of any underground economy. I never had to become a single parent even when my parenting was at its most challenging. When my father was sick, I didn't have to do months of in-home care, for example; there wasn't any for one, and I was too far away to do that without other massive sacrifice, for two.

The point of this is not didactic; we lose the whole track if we devolve to "life is easy, better appreciate your gifts." My typical hatred of nuggetry.

So what is this about? Awareness, really. Just being aware that the color of this body's skin has played a huge role in this body's social capabilities. This is trippy to think about when hanging off a climbing hold, because that physical activity, the lifetime ability to commit that, happens in social context. Change this body's gender or skin color or even orientation (perhaps) and you change the whole social context, you rewrite this body's lifetime narrative in lived space and time. Even if this body's physical capabilities remain unchanged at all.

In LIVED TIME, we are not just our bodies. In Western terms, ideologies form part of not just the outer world but the inner world (and we can get all spooky and Baudrillard about that and say that postmodern power forms our bodies and domination is inside us, blah blah blah, but that is SO 1995). In Eastern terms, of course, we (the Self) are not our bodies in the first place, but that is metaphysics rather than politics and context.

The stuff of this world includes meaning, language, history: these are tangible things. I was at an interview yesterday at the big museum in the city, to set up a lecturing gig to their docent class, and the grounds were being carefully manicured by a crew of guys in bright yellows and oranges. Minimalist stone arrangements, massive monuments. "Art." Grass, sculpted curvaceous grounds. "The aesthetic." But the guys too, were aesthetic, like when Jean-Luc Godard started making movies about classical art and money in the 1980s. The maintenance of the aesthetic, that TOO is work. Scaffolding and hoses are art, no?

When I was a teenager, I did not find the discourses of masculinity empowering, because I found them to be based primarily on exclusion and competition, as if masculinity was a thing that there was only enough of for a limited few, and it had to be fought for, and you had to step on everyone else in order to get some. But we are all masculine, yes? Like in physical ed, the locker room division, were we (pardon the atrocious reference) not men?

And we were not. Not in terms of the social ideologies. Then what were we? Women. I'm not joking. Or homosexuals, and again, I'm not joking. Be less hairy less soon than another guy, and he gets a step up on you for the prize of "being masculine." Learn to drive later than your neighbor and he gets to be mannier than you do. Get a spontaneous erection in a gym shower and you can expect feminizing homo jokes for a month. Get a "proper" (if you will) erection watching some desirable female celebrity, and you get masculinity points. It was like a reward system, like some Pavlovian thing. And to live in it (and keep in mind that I lived in it in the 1980s) was to see all of its mechanicity, its assembly-line nature. Social, yes, lived, yes, but utterly mechanical, even predictable. Heterosexuality not as a given, an innate state, but like a reward given for the best high jump. Literally. You didn't get to be straight, ever. You only got to be "non-homo."

To have female friends was to be a homo unless you were willing to brag about how available they were, which of course felt degrading to your lived friendships but was important to your homosocial peer group: what to choose? Illusion and empowerment? For those were the same.

In actual relationships, this was hell. The reason I stopped drawing and painting in high school was that it was marked homo. But on the other side of that fence, wanting sexual experience was marked "reward" on the male side and potentially "violation" on the female side (remember, this was the 1980s, the era of McKinnon-Dworkin rhetoric in the water; we didn't read it, we just felt it, lived in it, some kind of weird gender/power political soup....). How can I get the reward without the violation? What constitutes the violation? Why can't women help me answer this? These were the sorts of things I was thinking about at 17.

I became a feminist in college (at least, that sensibility began then) not because I liked women especially (I did, but feared them also, a reaction that I think is very typical) but because feministic people were thinking through these kinds of questions. It would have been far too aggro to take a Womens' Studies course (this was now the early 90s, the time when men were sometimes downright Not Welcome in such coursework) plus, such courses were OBVIOUSLY marked "homo" because only homos would study women, right?

I think that men aren't "insensitive" by design; they are made that way. I would go as far as saying that patriarchy used homophobia in the 1980s to literally terrorize men into certain kinds of gender performances and beliefs. The rise of the "sensitive new age guy" in the 90s did nothing to stop the patriarchy machine, which is really what needed stopping.

"It hurts men too," said filmmaker Chantal Akerman IN THE NINETEEN SEVENTIES.

So if white masculinity is what people call "privilege," I'm not having it. I see and I grant that for example I'll get promoted more easily, and I make more money on the dollar than men who are not white, but that piranha pond in which we were all "born" into mature manhood? That's no privilege, or if it is, then maybe we should start saying that privilege, like the privilege of the colonizer, is born in and by violence. Privilege in a way IS violence. I was terrorized ethically by privilege's attempts to manufacture me in its mold.

By the time my now-ex was actually using feminist rhetoric to work out her date-rape history violence on me, I could fight back because I could read her books and find out what she was using against me; I separated the academics from her psycho-emotional content and basically I out-argued her point for point. This was stupid in that it did nothing to make our relationship better, but it certainly worked for defense. I also learned at that point that our relationship was basically full of her emotional trauma business, and perhaps in a clumsy way she wanted it handled, dealt with, wanted some help with it, but the only mode of approach that stuff had was claws-and-teeth.

That practice has helped me "step off" from other relationships where the emotional business gets too blurry and starts to become an ocean in which we swim. It's great for stepping away from students' stuff.

So to come back around to the Atlantic piece, am I living with a woman who is trying to have it all? Sort of: J defends her administrative job by saying that it doesn't have night hours, so lets her be with her kid. This is precisely accurate. But she barely gets any exercise, and when really stressed from work, can't tell that she's sick--a week goes by and she says, "Oh I thought I was just tired, but I went to my doctor who said..." This happens a couple times a year.

Things get left out, like self-care and our relationship itself, which she has said to me is basically our co-parenting, to which I VERY NEARLY said, "Um hello, there's more to our relationship than co-parenting, hello??"

The Atlantic piece very clearly does not go there: it's all job/parenting/the promise of feminism. But what about "the personal is political"? Some questions: if I'm a feminist man, should I be promoting her dual job/mother role? Should I be psyched about her "having it all" and be a supporter? Where does or should our relationship fit in? When? Are we just taking four years off? Why didn't she and I negotiate that when we got pregnant? Is consent of that kind, feminist? Is the sexual relationship "just for me" since I want it more? Is THAT feminist, or anti-feminist, or something else? Should I have taken her up on the somewhat cold and yet more-regular-than-now "expedient sex" that she had on offer that first year? Where is all the feminist discourse on family and RELATING, not just family and JOBS?

Is it possible that "having it all" is linked, essentially, to the woman having the "man's job," if you will? Like I said at the opener: the empowered job-feminist is she who is BOTH woman and man? Gender roles defined as he who wins the bread, she who nurtures the kids? This does nothing at all to answer any of my questions.

True, there are pregnancy books and many many online sites that talk about how much, how soon after the birth, and so on and so forth, but every single one of those sources tends to talk about either victory or frustration; no one wants to talk about process or negotiation.

I think all of the talk about women making more money than men and "unmanning them" is misplaced for me, or maybe for my generation (it's possible that it's got a big fat social strata element, also). I don't in the least feel unmanned by J making more money than I do, being more important at work than I am, and having a better CV than I do. I don't even see any basis on which we should compare ourselves like that, particularly in gender terms; that seems patently ridiculous.

Since "manning" (if you will) was such a repugnant process, I think that "unmanning" is not a problem I will have, not even with being sparsely laid for almost four years. I maintain affection with J, she just has no time and no attention and there is no sign at all of when or whether this will ever end. I keep reading Buddhist and yoga texts and really enjoying the endorphin rush of the climbing wall. We'll be on Northwest vacation next month and I expect that this will change nothing in our relationship. The boy comes along, which means that J-the-parent comes along, and she has to wrestle her strange history with the Northwest, the way she thinks it grants her some kind of soul-home, some kind of inner peace, when really she's about as busy there as here. True, there are older parents there, leftism, and probably an atmosphere that is "easier to breathe" in political and social terms. I suppose I feel that since I was manufactured in denial (Catholicism), frustration (gender) and warfare (capitalism, gender, Catholicism) I don't really need or trust a "pleasant atmosphere," which J translates as my never being happy with anything. It's not so.

As I've said before, she asks, "Why don't you read any Nice Stories, you could get some archetypes and a basis for happiness?" and I answer, "Because I want to know how Reality Works."

I'm trying for an impermanent, moment-to-moment happiness, whereas J is still looking toward big-picture happiness, in terms like "retirement" and "return" to the Northwest and such. In terms of gross objects (gross vs. subtle), I can be happy wherever I have a yoga mat, a climbing wall, a willing partner and a growler of India pale ale. As we've seen over the past few years, I get unhappy when those vanish, and so now I know better, but just in terms of gross objects, that mix will do nicely thank you very much. I don't know what J's terms for happiness are: more nature, more rain, less heat, fewer bugs? Basically non-stop foresty autumn? But is that it? What activities, what relationship? I don't know.

Some time ago she said, "We'll get to know each other again," after some indeterminate time of parenting. Maybe the first thing that will happen, at whatever time that is, is that we'll have a conversation about who we are and what we want, instead of this weird system where we parent and work instead of relate.

Maehle, Mandukya Upanishad and An Answer to "Is Ashtanga For Me?"

Maehle's Pranayama book, "The Breath of Yoga," is fantastic so far. I'm through 80 of its over 300 pages. Characteristic for Maehle, he does not half-ass anything; his tone is one of experience and authority and yet friendliness and it is not without self-awareness (a level of meta-). As with his two asana books, he is not for everyone. I appreciate how he quotes sacred text chapter and verse, and the way in which he insists that we are living in the Kali Yuga (energetic/intellectual dark ages) and the way in which, from this, he extends his own understanding from texts written ages ago, directly to the present day. He could easily be seen as manufacturing another "yoga myth" in the same cynical way many people use Singleton ("well yoga's only 120 years old, so omg, lyk whatever!!") but I really enjoy his embrace of a legend wherein yoga practices go back thousands of years and we belong to a trajectory that is deep and full of what he calls "the inner astronauts."

The Mandukya Upanishad is hard to read. So far it seems to be straight-up Advaita Vedanta, and one of the things I've pulled easily from it is that "Bad Advaita" consists of the following sentence: "Everything is a figment of my imagination" with the following often unspoken subtext: "But I'm not." So what you get is a solipsistic megalomaniac who thinks everyone and everything is imaginary. This often takes two forms:
a) No one can change what I think because you're all imaginary, and
b) I can manifest anything I like (and so can you!) because everything's imaginary.

By making the subject an actor and the rest of the cosmos imaginary, Bad Advaita makes us into egomaniacs, and any limit on our superpowerful egos is, of course, only imagination, and in fact, is a limit We Ourselves imagine, and so the "freer" we become, the more egomaniacal we become. Bad Advaita forgets to include ITSELF as imaginary. But that's also where the trippy-as-hell stuff begins.

In Western terms, Advaita Vedanta wrestles with "unity" and "multiplicity," which can be nicely rephrased (somewhat inaccurately) as "transcendence" and "immanence." Everything is God: that's unity, that's transcendence (well, the Godness of everything; if we look at the Everything, we're in immanence and multiplicity).

Immanent multiplicity is, literally, everything, and the idea that everything is different and independent. The plastic egg is not the computer speaker is not the table is not the wall is not the cushion I sit on. So when we mix unity AND multiplicity, we get two ideas that don't get along without paradox: this mix of the Everything being incarnate with, or of, the One Thing (God, Brahman, etc).

So far it seems to me that the Mandukya argues that there IS indeed multiplicity, but there is more importantly unity, and so it doesn't matter how mulitplicitous everything is, because it's all Brahman, it is all the mental movements (and I REALLY want to know if that can be translated "chitta vrittis", you know?) of the Brahman.

There is also much discussion about the waking state, dreaming state and dreamless sleep, a trio which appear in Patanjali, also. Is this a root feature of Eastern study of the self, to figure out the relationship between those states? The Mandukya says that dreamless sleep provides full non-duality but no consciousness, and therefore ignorance reappears in either dreaming or waking. This leaves me with what I feel is the Essential Question: by what methods then, do I get that knowledge?

Maehle, for what it's worth, remains tied to his Patanjali and Samkhya (although I don't think he's a strict Samkhya disciple) and mocks the "prattling Vedantins" several times, which makes me giggle. At the same time, he uses the terms "transcendence and immanence," which I really like. Reading these two together is fascinating stuff.

***********************************
Not long ago, in a post on Facebook by a friend, who was writing about a blog post elsewhere which was about people fleeing ashtanga for different yogas, I posted this:


"Well it's dumb to simply define "limit" by annamaya kosha (food body). There are energetic limits (and development), emotional limits (and development), intellectual limits...you get it. You don't have to get your knees to the floor in Baddha Konasana or your hand to the floor in Parivrtta Parsvakonasana, some days (or some lifetimes) in order to get a massive emotional change or release or some other limit-challenging discovery. This is the double mistake of people who make Ashtanga "easier" (i.e., remove all the various limit-challenging bits, basing their "ease" on annamaya kosha) and people who make Ashtanga dogmatic, insisting on full expressions (again, locked into annamaya kosha). Gross not subtle. Shallow teacher, in both cases (sorry for any polemic)."


What I was trying to get to in that post, was this idea that teachers will "push the student's limits" in dogmatic physical ashtanga vinyasa practice, or else they will "modify the practice to suit people" simply by cutting out all of the so-called "dangerous" postures. That's not making the practice suit people--what if someone's super-challenged in Purvottanasana? Or what if someone can't breathe at a speed where sun salutations are possible on vinyasa count? Or what if someone lost a parent a month prior and is having massive emotional breakout stuff?

And by extension, this is my complaint also about people who "leave ashtanga" for something easier or "less challenging." Less challenging HOW? Easier HOW? I created a modified no-wrist-pain ashtanga practice in 2007 after teacher training, and it was pretty damn mellow, I'll tell you that. Early this year I was doing just sun salutations and standing poses and breaking out in all kinds of emotional detonations. Did I want my practice to be EASIER? You damn bet I did, but I wanted it to be EMOTIONALLY easier, AND YET I still persisted in getting the expressions out because it felt good to have it done even though it felt miserable to express.

Or, "the expression must be full!" Sure, that can bust up people's knees, but what about when emotional stuff was making me go to pieces in a modified Janu Sirsasana A?
Where does emotional expression fit into the idea of "full" physical expressions? Or is the whole idea of a "full expression" simply locked into annamaya kosha?

By extension this is my entire problem with Western yoga, if by that we accept that we mean physicalizing the yoga and reducing it to that, taking the eight limbs and making them into eight separate things, or, as Maehle puts it, only doing the asana, making all of yoga simply into asana.

Maehle argues that pranayama is the limb that connects asana to meditation, and in his uncompromising and wonderful way, says that anyone who is simply doing meditation or simply doing asana is missing part of the picture.

A posture IS energy, also; IS emotion, also. Let's not pretend that we're only flesh, right? Or that flesh is only flesh, let's not grandly underestimate ourselves. Those realms that are not (precisely not) BEYOND flesh but exist ALONGSIDE and INSEPARABLY from flesh, those TOO are practice zones. One does asana with THOSE bodies also.

I believe that ashtanga vinyasa is the practice for people who see the value in traditional practice (by which I mean not to open a whole can of "we're authentic!" worms, but by which I mean, not made up in 2006 by some random dude in Nevada or whatever) with history (and yes, EVEN IF that history is 120 years old; that's what, a HUNDRED years more history than Anusara has, to pick one example?), with repetition (because that builds depth, in a way that "doing the 5:45 on Wednesdays with Whoever" does not) and with ideas about progress (meditative state, sense withdrawal, next series, ethical decisions made necessary by adding the yoga to life, until yoga/life becomes a meaningless dichotomy, intensified concentration, and so on).

A lot of these elements that I put in "progress" will be nutshelled by any yoga teacher at all ("yoga adds to your concentration, and makes you sweat!") but it's much, much more rare to get depth, a groove into which to sink, and really truly rare to get a teacher who will go there when postures get emotional, not just on the first class where your glutes or shoulders revolt, but when the practice TRULY begins to burn down your samskaric stuff, to destroy "who you think you are" because that's an illusion you don't need.

I guess in a sentence, THAT is why I do and choose and persist with, ashtanga vinyasa. "I need something easier" is so often about, "it makes my whatever sore" and teachers who are dogmatic do nothing to serve those students. A teacher who has nothing better to offer than, "Make the shape cuz the manual says!" is a shallow teacher who needs more practice.

And the teachers who make the practice easier, not TO SUIT A STUDENT, but easier for everyone, all the time, and call it "ashtanga," those teachers also do a disservice. Sure, half-lotus is hard for Western hips, and dangerous for Western knees when not taught well, but the hip opening that working TOWARD half-lotus, there is powerful emotional magic in there. I learned that for over two years. To cut a posture or change a sequence because it's "unsafe" in strictly annamaya terms, is to miss all of the pranamaya/manomaya/etc levels, all of the OTHER bodies that do that pose. Again, that's the mark of a shallow teacher.

Can one blame a student for wanting something "easier" and less confrontational? Most of the time no, by which I mean there's only one stripe of student who annoys me regarding this question: those are the people who run from confronting their stuff.

The students who just cannot do the poses and get defeated, or can't handle the speed, and get defeated, or who find the sequence just offputtingly impossible: those people I try to sell on repetition and modifications and "work toward it over time" and I know I won't see most of them again and I don't blame them for that.

No, I misspoke: the two types of students who annoy me are 1) the cowards, who run from any ACTUAL transformation the yoga might commit in them, and 2) the flow monkeys, who want to do Big Powerful Poses Because They Can! "Watch me shine!" Hey, you, put your fucking ego down for two seconds and climb into a Janu Sirsana, eh? These are the people who want to be "pushed harder!" because they don't have any idea about emotions or about working on their weaknesses; they just want to go further and further out on the branch of their strength, whatever it is they're good at. And this is much, much more an ATTITUDE than it is an aptitude. Plenty of physically skilled people come to my ashtanga room, and they do as I ask them to do. Every now and then one of these "multiple level flow class" monkeys will come in and simply not respect the system, have no desire to learn it or learn about it; they only experience Primary series as a restriction on their marvelous, glowing asana superpowers.

Tangentially, this is something I meant to credit Kathryn Budig with: from her online presence, it looks like she should be producing Flow Monkeys left and right, but when she taught in Indy, she lived, like I said, deeply in her ashtanga background and she credited the system in ways that I really enjoyed and that felt totally sincere.

The third thing that I'm annoyed by (and this is not a type of student) is a blog post or rhetoric generally that takes Singleton (most of the time) or someone else, and uses new "yoga history" to try to destroy all the myths and the wonder, in the name of "clarification." Conclusions drawn here often take the form of "all asana is only a century old, so no system is better than any other" (relativism) and "the West is making up yoga now, so it's really moved on from its Eastern roots" (relativism, differently stated). The main problem with these, which I also hit (I think, anyway) in the FB reply I quoted above, is that these conclusions only talk about ASANA. It's not that the yoga is becoming "physical" or "Western," it's that we are progressively tossing the Eastern philosophy along with the admittedly-mythical "thousand year old tradition" of asana practice, and ALL WE'RE KEEPING is the asana, and just giving lip service to the rest. Now, I think that digestive asana (bound angle, forward bend) really are quite old, as I recall seeing statuary and carvings with those postures represented (sorry, can't recall where), but as I'm learning in Maehle's pranayama book, pranayama is talked about in some depth by EVERYBODY. More sages and mystics than I can shake a stick at. But look around town for pranayama practice, and you see it discussed as good for athletes and people with allergies (which it is, but notice no mention of meditation in a state of kumbhaka, right?). EVEN THERE, we haven't turned the body to meditation, haven't understood meditation as an EMBODIED STATE. This weird Western idea that the body does not think, is only a flesh bag, cannot be or do anything holy.

This is hardly a brief and concise answer to "is ashtanga for me?" but I really think that it's for anyone who wants to find out about the system, do the work, find their own (always mobile, however slowly) limits within that system, and who wants to be open to the impossible (because long practice DOES bring the impossible). You don't have to have a face-to-floor Baddha Konasana to be able to call it an asana practice, or to be able to do pranayama after, or to be able to access samadhi. Or at least I hope samadhi's not that shallow :D :D :D

The Climbing Post: Fear.

I probably wrote one of these in 2007.

I climb plastic, in a gym, not stone outdoors; this alone, to some, makes me a poser. So be it.

I restarted a regular climbing habit on June 4 of this year. I've been to that gym four times since then and it's the 16 now. I started climbing walls in January 2003 because the lady I was living with (yes, one month after exiting the messy fuckedup marriage; the details of that are too important to summarize in a sentence and too messy to get into here as a long story, so you'll either have to hunt for them or else hold off til later) said, "You need to come climbing." I wasn't at all in the mood to do what I thought was some masculinist funky-smelling competitive sport thing (I've always hated that, a hate that high school physical education made more stout), but I went anyway.

I climbed a 5.7 the first day, up to the top, 34 feet high.

A word on ratings: the whole-wall (20 feet, 30 feet, 40 feet, however high) pathways are routes. Climbing routes. Also, outdoors, known as "lines." To "see a line" on El Capitan or whichever. 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7 are fairly "ladder-like," by which I mean that you build the basic techniques on them. Step up, hold on with your hands, press with your legs, put your hands on the next higher ones, repeat.

5.8 requires some kind of funky move: swing your hips out to the side, step high, something like that. 5.9 requires additional funkiness: match your hands on a hold, press rather than pull, step out to the side, and so on.

5.10 is a mark-making grade. Slopy holds, overt technique, hands crossed, tiny footholds, fear. From this point on, there are four "levels": a, b, c, d.
5.11 is more of the same, even harder, stronger, more fearsome and technical. 5.12 is more of the same. So on, through 5.13, 14 and 5.15 (I think that Chris Sharma, climbing superstar (check YouTube videos if you like) is one of the only people on the planet working on a series of 5.15's).

That is ROUTES. Bouldering, which is done sans partner and sans rope, is shorter (up to 16 feet in my current gym) "problems" and are referred to as problems. Bouldering is graded in the US on a V scale (should mention that the 5. system for route-grading is also US). V0 is about 5.9-10. V2 is 5.11ish. V3 is 5.12ish. Because the V system is grading shorter problems, the hardest move in those 10-16 feet is the one you rate. Same as on a route, the "crux" move is the rating-maker. So a 5.10b might be mostly 5.9 with a hard crux move.

Apparently bouldering goes up to the V-teens, V15 or so. The hardest boulder problem that I've ever finished in my life is V4.

In the current gym, almost all bouldering problems, because of the fabulous new walls, are overhanging. I think this is obvious, but THIS is an overhanging wall:
http://www.threeballclimbing.com/climbing_wall_plans/overhanging_climbing_wall.jpg

(yeah pardon my lack of HTML; I can do it but I'm feeling lazy).

Overhanging walls are hard because they force you to pull your weight INTO the wall to make moves and to hang BACK off the wall when you're not making a move. Very conscious weight management, or else you pump out (lose strength in the arms; over-exert). Arms straight, whenever you're not working a move. That's the golden rule.

This consciousness is the major part of climbing; in this it resembles the yoga.

Bouldering is more dynamic and strength-based than climbing routes on a rope. Historically I haven't liked it because it's hard, and once I was doing a bunch of the yoga, I had the proprioception and flexibility to pull a lot of delicate climbing technique. At my height, I could reliably climb (with a few falls) 5.11b/c on rope (at least to a height of 34 feet). But now with no partner, it's easier to boulder than to do all of the training and hello and interpersonal stuff.

I have not yet finished a V3 in the gym, but I've come within a single hold of doing so. V2+ I have finished, and V4 I have made some inroads on. This way of measuring one's power ("what rating do you climb?"--it's like "what's your last pose?") taught me that I was mis-measuring. There is a V1+ in the gym which is just TERRIFYING at the top because you've got a two-hand fingertip grip over a ledge (arms over top, rest of body below) and you have to step up into a tuck, knee in your belly, and then extend dynamically to complete the problem. It's HORRIFYING, the fear of falling backwards into space if your fingers slip off the hold, and it's one knuckle deep. Such, such fear. So it's NOT just a matter of "oh I climb high 5.10" or something like that, not a matter of strength or how technical you are.

It's also a matter of FEAR.

Nearly every boulder problem harder than V0, and even a few V0's, have dynamic movement. You HAVE to leap, extend, reach, hope and pray, and hit the hold. This can be stabilized with core strength, but it's not like anything in yoga, even ashtanga, because as dynamic as ashtanga is, it is NOT like leaping from one hold to another on an overhanging wall. I can't describe the precise core strength demands because I barely have them physically and in my bodymind and I can't intellectualize the kind of strength (yet).

It's worth saying that, of course, as you pop up or over to get a hold, you can swing right off the problem and off the wall, and that's called a "barn door" in climbing lingo. There is a V4 in the gym that I really like, that is big barn doors, and I can't finish more than two moves on it without swinging right off the wall.

There are also bouldering "caves" which have horizontal ceilings, and so you're climbing totally upside-down in those cases. I have no practice at these and find them very difficult. There are two V1's in the gym that have ceiling movement and I can't finish either one, a combination of strength demands and fear. Again with the fear. Climbing a ceiling requires that combination of pressing the hips toward the wall, and hanging back, but hanging off a ceiling is HARD. This is to say nothing of the proprioception required in order to step "up" onto a ceiling and reach "forward" which is really "over" while you hang upside down (it's like trying to tell students in inversions, which way "up" is). Add to this, having to grab a hold with one hand (while upside down, with all that fear of falling directly onto the floor) and then release the precious hold you're clinging to for dear life, in order to advance on the ceiling and finally get OFF the thing. One is tempted to stay, to just not take the risk (of what? failure? doom? certain death? injury? or none of the above? Nothing to fear but fear itself?)

And that's the life lesson of climbing. Stay through the discomfort, but never get to the end? Is that how we live? Is that, for example, what I did for seven years in that wacked marriage? Did that history REALLY HAPPEN?

Or progress through the experience with discomfort, dynamism, cathartic fear, sweat, screaming fingertips, feet swinging off the wall, core strength pulling them back on, and final victory?

I find that even when that happens, I like to sit on the floor (in a wide Virasana, if it matters) and let the fear channel, let myself take over my own fear, let myself fill in the space. Like reinstituting peace where effort was. Sometimes I can't "digest" the meal of fear and that's enough of that problem for the day.

I'm finding more and more that overcoming fear on the wall demands to have a social form, to become something in daily life. But there it isn't "overcome fear," it's some kind of alchemical operation. It's not like I more easily talk to strangers or something or confront my third-year dossier with less fear, it's a different kind of alchemy I've not yet processed intellectually. What are the "life effects" of climbing through fear?

Self-Practice Room, Bouldering and the Yoga, Service Instead of Injury

This morning was our first self-practice room over at the westside space. Wood floor, great light, dedicated yoga-and-dance space with a small mirror on one side that you can avoid if you really want to.

I had a difficult and heavy practice with a lot of modifications and I gave up after Supta K, but some days one has those practices. Three others in the room this time (and two more, I expect, next week, when they're back from vacation), and total silence, just practice.

This is on the one hand sort of "nothing," in that we just practiced in a room, but it is also a very big "something" as it's ashtanga yoga going totally studio-independent, REALLY and truly stepping outside of the "teacher/taught" dynamic where only the studio space is important. By turning it "down" we turn it "up," or if you like, we set up a room where the inner teacher has to step up and take personal charge. Over time, we learn more, become maybe not "better" at poses, but certainly better at practice. This sort of thing is the answer to every cheap-and-easy yoga question ever posted at Elephant Journal or on someone's Facebook feed.

I have retaken up my climbing habit, but with changes. Back in 2003-2005, I was almost entirely toprope guy, climbing with partners, ascending and trying to hit the hard move, with the fear of falling off (but on toprope you never REALLY fall, not like in lead climbing or bouldering).

In 2005 I started setting toprope, which meant most of my "work" on the wall was pulling my own moves, and most of my "work" in the climbing community was giving beta for those routes (telling people what the move was, either explicitly or with movement hints).

By 2008 I was too far away (Indy to Bloomington, 75 minutes) and too infrequent and the type of body-mind-movement problems I was setting, weren't popular. I never set "training" routes in the physical sense of "learn to climb," I set "mind-body problem" routes, where you had to get that flow state and get out of the ego-possible in order to hit the magic zone of step-acrosses and crossed-hands and off-balance high-steps and mind-game puzzles that can only be resolved through dance.

Mind-body training, just in the form of a climbing route. My art history room is not dissimilar.

But now (and "now" is as of June 4) I'm doing exclusively bouldering; I haven't been on a toprope in almost ten days where I've gone to climb three times. Bouldering is more confrontational and dangerous than toprope climbing; your hand at the top of a problem is 13-16 feet above the floor, so your drop (or fall) can be as much as ten feet. Even with a crash pad, that's spooooooooky.

I used to be a solid V2 boulderer; that means problems where you have to crank hard on holds but not generally do a lot of dynamic leaping or swinging the feet off the wall and over to the other side or crazy stuff like that.

The gym now (which is the Indianapolis incarnation of Bloomington's Hoosier Heights franchise, where I worked out a HELL OF A LOT of negative energy from my marriage/divorce, or as another guy who teaches yoga put it last week, "You left a lot of anger on those walls") is very training-centered. All of the routes and problems are set in way where the next hold appears if you can pull the move. It's not to bend your head, it's to train your body, or ideally, body-mind.

But by and large, the boulder problems are set on overhanging walls, and the holds are crimpy. There are exceptions, but in the V2-3 range, it's a crimpfest. Overhanging walls make crimpy holds even crimpier. Let me give you an example. Hold a wood clothespin, long way between your thumb and three fingers. Now crank down with your fingers, press into that thing. That's crimping. Now imagine that the clothespin is on a wall that leans out toward you, twenty degrees, and you have to find a way to hang off that thing with all the weight of your hips falling back toward earth. See?

I have two sore knuckles today; one that I think will be all better tomorrow, and one that seems a bit more persistent. These are old injuries, overuse injuries, that I didn't (couldn't, in a fashion) let heal all the way, because climbing used to be the doorway FROM one life TO another one, the problem being that I never set a "finish line" as to when the new life would be achieved. What level or rating of problem would indicate that I had ARRIVED? An impossible question. "Well take some time off." No, no, what if I SLIDE BACK into old habits, what if I can't stay NEW, my new life, my new me, my new...?

More simply, mistrust of change, treating the present like a slippery deck on a ship (what if I slide into the sea?). More interestingly, a new desperation like the old desperation. A new life that never considers itself launched from the cannon. Still fears, hates, wants distance from, the old days. An addictive behavior (far from my first, likely not my last). To GET FAR FROM THAT. A need that can never be met (hmmmmm, wonder if I have any OTHER BUSINESS that works like that, eh?).

When I climb for an hour, sustained effort, I get a massive endorphin rush, and my core muscles melt into jelly, and I often take some pressup backbends when I decide that I'm done with the climbing. They are inevitably easy. I've been dropping back and standing up after climbing ever since I could do those movements (which isn't often, since I learned those in 2009 and haven't had much chance to climb since then), and those are also the biggest ever, much bigger than in any yoga class or practice. But this is the same "get there, don't be patient" mechanism that keeps me climbing into overuse injuries and (in part) waiting to see when my relationship will "turn back on." It's all future tense, so much weight on the future, NEEDING IT to be what I want it to be.

How else could this be done?

Skills turn into service. WHY do I climb? Ok, because I love it, easy answer. It's fun as hell and often creates flow states. On toprope that's easier, because you're "up" longer, but on a bouldering problem, you often have to move; you can't hang or you'll pump out and have to drop. So the mind and body move FASTER. I was doing a hard problem, with a lot of fear (one had to lean out and dynamically catch a hold, or else fall), and I felt my inner voice guide the movements, sort of simultaneous with the movements: observer and actor, one body. "Put the foot up here first; foot first, hand second." Then the shaky move up, panic about falling. "Put your hand on that thing. PUT IT THERE!" Hand comes up, finds purchase. Panic eases off. Two moves later, in about four seconds, it's over.

What or whom can I SERVE with this bodymind dynamism? Well, when we ask this question about the yoga, we don't look for whom we can serve with Navasana, that's dumb. We look for whom we can serve once we've done morning practice and we're temporarily all mellowed out, or as Swenson related about Williams, "You do the yoga, and then you see how long it takes for you to turn back into an asshole!"

Perhaps that's where this comes in:
http://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/06/why-yoga-is-or-can-be-different/

The yoga creates an opportunity for a state which biking, lifting, and so forth, do not. Now, I see this point, but I also disagree with it. Remember Jason's Crossfit colleague who said, "You think you only get kundalini when you have a white turban on?" Think of long-distance runners or bikers who get wisdom from the road. Long-term climbers, too. But yes, I see how a sort of LAYPERSON'S exercise regimen, doesn't provide those things easily, yes. Perhaps exercise too has a laity and a mysticism.

I don't like at all how the author here refers to "Sanskrit nonsense" or uses Singleton to basically disembowel the eight limbs and turn asana into "exercise" and FROM THERE goes back toward (but not as far as) meditation and integrative movement. He gets there, but without taking the "eight-limbed path." I guess maybe it's fair: abandon the Eastern "nonsense," turn it Western, then use Western vocabulary and concepts to try to talk about bodymind integration. Although the great weakness of this, as I said a number of posts ago, is that if you REALLY FEEL emotional stuff and confrontation coming out of your bodymind movements (in asana, pranayama, meditation or elsewhere) it's DAMN USEFUL to be able to put those in Eastern terms, to talk about samskaras, koshas, pain, samsara, all of that. I find the West woefully lacking in concepts that could serve a philosophy of the bodymind. To me it tends toward New-Age crap about holistic mindful blah-blah-blah or else strict anatomy-body answers. And then we're not far from Mars and Venus and Cosmopolitan. The other way to do it in the West is to imbibe a huge amount of theory (as I have about AFFECT) and then try to make French theory into mindbody practice. Or I suppose another way to do it is to take a book like Arno Ilgner's THE ROCK WARRIOR'S WAY and make Castaneda into mindbody practice and mysticism-ize your movement. And that's not far, for my money, from the Sutras and the proper eight-limbed path.

I believe that tossing the Eastern philosophy and keeping the asana practice, no matter how clued in about alignment and mindfulness and presence and confrontation with our energy we are, is never a good idea. At the very least, be able to put your stuff in BOTH Western and Eastern conceptual terms.

So whom or what can I serve with the climbing, or maybe the same question is, whom or what can I serve with hands that I can actually USE? I used to have four separate knuckles so swollen that I couldn't type without pain, and at one time, I couldn't properly pick up a pint glass with the one hand.

A desire in the mind to "be a climber who does that" overrides my sense of my own safety, as if the wish to be atop that problem overrides physics. The immediate cure for that in the moment, is to pull on the hold and see if it's pain-free; if and when it's not, off you come. Secondary: I cannot do that, not right now, maybe not with this body as it is, and how it is, is how it is. Tertiary: either change the body (hangboard training for finger ligaments, for example) or accept this body's limits as they are.

Old habits come with old conditioning: something that our Eastern concept of the samskara proves so well. I still believe I have to GET THERE, to be SOMEONE, to make a footprint in that gym, leave a handprint on the ceiling or something. Not now from fear of slipping into the past, but a disembodied wish for the same presence, dominance, to be spotlit. Like a computer virus, pre-programmed: the behavior remains, even without the psychology that once spawned it.

The thing to do here is to change the psychology in the site where it was spawned, what better fun is there than this? Broadly speaking, you change your life FROM WITHIN, you can't change it from without, even if you do as Vasistha once said, "The man of true determination has no destiny." Even if you can change your karmic destiny, makeup of your gunas and so on.

You change your life from within, so I think the answer is not "do not climb," but rather "climb in a way to change this psychology, change it ITSELF on the very walls where it was forged." Sauron Ring territory.

This is what's happening with my asana practice: suprising hip tightness in December 2011, which has been fairly persistent ever since. There are exceptions. I've redesigned practice around it, not a "new" or "temporary" practice from which I will later RETURN TO NORMAL, but simply How Practice Now Is.

It's key to remember that the ego isn't really the problem, the Samskaric Patterns are the problem. They provide the tree the ego climbs; they give the ego its climbing training. Knock off the ego and you still have the tree, and some invisible, intangible energy which climbs it. But change the TREE, and the ego has to reckon with that.

Back to Morning Practice.

On Saturday last week (now nine days ago), I up and decided to practice in the morning.

Actually I made this decision Friday night: my living room is the location where, in 2006, I was doing Primary series in the morning dark, getting ready for teacher training and some San Francisco Mysore room (I hadn't decided which one at that point). There's a couch on one side, a futon by the east-facing windows, and a TV (with VCR and DVD player but no actual "television"; it's a monitor only) on the other side. I usually lay out a mat (now the Manduka; back then, my old 1/4" red Jade, which I used so thoroughly you could see footprints through the rubber and into the white mesh knit, and there's a photo of the mat in that condition on my Facebook page) going from roughly the couch to the TV, and I tend to practice these days, facing the TV. At night I roll up the rug and put the Manduka down and put the cotton rug on the futon in case practice is a sweatfest.

I CAN practice facing the windows, but that takes up the whole room and I like the light coming in sideways. So I practice facing north; in 2006 I used to practice facing the couch, facing south.

Right now dawn happens at about 5:45 am, and I've been becoming a LAZY MAN and my intention of "on the mat 5:30" has become more like "ehhhhh, welllllll, creep up and feed the cat and make a bit of coffee, have one little cup, THEN get on the mat, 6:15." But I DO IT, so right now that's what counts. And yes, I'm aware that today is a Moon Day, but I'm calling yesterday's miss a moon day (and yes, I realize I'm not resting on Saturdays either, but I'm not doing full practice, so I am also calling THAT ok).

I've only missed one day, yesterday, and other than that I've practiced every morning. At the beginning, this was AGONY. Hips tight, hamstrings totally reluctant, it was like practicing on some alien planet with wacko gravity. The first sun salutation that I pulled at 5:38 am or so, that first Saturday morning, was legs heavily bent, breathing challenged, hopping back had to be accompanied by a step, to get the length. AGONY. But really informative agony.

Many mornings that first week, I just did sun salutations. One morning I got into seated series but Janu Sirsasana A gave me such sensation in the right hip that I quit then and there. I've done fullish closing series almost every practice, although on really tight days, it's impossible for me to fold Pindasana in, without falling over.

The longest practice was up through Marichyasana D one day (and I tacked on the Navasanas because Swenson says, if you practice to Mari D, do the boats also). Mari B another day. Just standing series, another day.

One day of dropbacks in the past week, no standups, because I was getting duck feet on the way down and that only intensifies on the way up. Hanging back this morning was plenty.

What's been informative is breathing. I stand, do the Invocation, inhale ekam, arms up. Breath has gotten really long and become a guide, and this morning in particular, I was puzzled as to "what" an inhale or exhale was. I mean, on a scientific level, yes, in, out, right. BUT it was like I couldn't tell the movement of breathing from the movement of blood or the pressure of my feet on the floor in downward dog. Not that I lost the knowledge, but it sort of dissolved into the rest of the sensations. I couldn't tell if I was "inhaling" at a given point, didn't need that information.

I jumped at certain points; up and back. Sometimes my mind would count vinysasa (six! seven!) but other times I just moved and felt the hips stretch, felt the hamstrings lengthen, felt the arms rising, saw the increasing light. Nothing voluntary guided this; there was no "now jump," no tracking the vinyasa, but also no refusing this, no "hey, today try to go on autopilot!"

That's impossible, right? It's exactly like "don't think of an elephant." Empty your mind! How the fuck are we supposed to DO that, actively DO that? I mean, what, do I turn to the side like I'm shaking pool water out of my ear, and my mind just empties out? You don't DO that activity, you FIND IT, you just sort of OPERATE in it without thinking about it or wishing for it or acting on it at all.

I know there are probably meditation strategies for this, and they probably work, but I find that I really enjoy a motto more like, "Take practice; you do." I've been quietly grooving on breathing and bending for a few years now, particularly since practice got spotty with seventh series, and so I'm more interested in asana/pranayama than I am in hitting dhyana. If it shows up, great. I'm not ready right now to take up an active meditation practice; I like my "lie on the floor, watch the show" version.

This morning was good energy, really doing some annamaya (flesh) work in the right hip, feeling things stretch, without all that white lightning (hah!) emotional stuff hiding in there. Muscle, fascia, bending. J is now home, and that alarm goes off at 7:30, so I got on the mat at 6:24, up through Purvottanasana, three backbends, one hang and closed, done at 7:30. With fewer asana, I take the head fully off the floor in Sirsasana and have been holding that for ten breaths.

She does not seem to love this idea that I get up and bend, but I was up and onward for the morning by the time the boy woke up, and as I told her, this practice slot means I don't borrow yoga time from family OR from work, and so it fits. She had nothing snarky to say. I see this as doing the yoga AND my dharma activities, making room for the latter by moving the former to where it must fit.

Speaking of which:

The Indianapolis ashtanga scene is moving, sometime this month, to a two-day-a-week morning practice, a room which I will open, in a midtown location. Little hippie building, that holds euchre games and yoga classes and dance classes and other stuff. Wednesday and Friday mornings we will pay for a 6-8 am slot, and I will probably open the show at 5:30. I'm going to try to compose a SKPJ collage of images, and bring a couple pillar candles, so we can have a proper ashtanga vinyasa "shrine," and all I have to do regarding the owner's rules is find waivers, sign-in sheets, and have people put money in a collection basket (sounds like church!! Hahahaha!). Then it's on. No teaching, self-practice only, ashtanga vinyasa only.

Other than that, my Sunday room remains 6-10 in attendance, even with some of the regulars on vacation or recovering from injuries (they didn't get those in my room). This past Sunday we were able to go full Mysore-style, no led portion. Awesome. A visitor came to "watch only," which I thought was fine, and told me she'd like to return, maybe with a friend from Lafayette (that's an hour north of here on I-65) who would "like to practice in my room."

YES, my friends, now I like the sound of that. Commuters who want to practice, coming down (or in one case up, from Bloomington), to practice in MY HUMBLE YOGA ROOM. This is what I wanted on offer, years ago (2007) when I started teaching here. THIS.