Learnin' n' Unlearnin'

...it’s been...good gawd...over six months since the two hundred hour certification...during which I’ve kinda taught yoga five times...groups of one to three people...only one of whom insisted on drinking a beer while practicing...(as well as assisting with that class of, I’m told, two-hundred and fifty people)....meaning, ya could say, I’ve not been overly ambitious...perhaps lazy....or, maybe, to take a more positive view, simply humble...egoless...just too damned enlightened...

...at Kripalu, they said what we were doing was less about learning than un-learning...and I most certainly did that....still confused about those esoteric fancy-schmancy Sanskrit-derived terms...particularly that pesky pair: right and left....used, generally, in reference to something even more confusing: the human body...its anatomy, physiology, alignment...

...over a series of weekends, beginning tomorrow, I’m gonna be continuing my yogic education through a fifty hour Align and Flow training...based in principles of anusara...a Sanskrit term which, as I understand it, means something like don’t care how long you’ve been practicing yoga, your alignment’s waaaaaaay off...
...this time, it's only a twenty-minute drive away...(maybe a forty-five minute bike ride, if I could figure a route that wouldn’t likely leave me sprawled out on the blacktop with alignment off in ways all the king’s yoga teachers might never put back together)...with a great teacher I’ve known a few years, and at least one fellow student I know...who's an advanced teacher, too, actually....raising suspicions I could be one of the more unlearned persons in the room...the Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel of yoga...Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yogi...sittin' on my mat muttering downward facin’ dawg?! whut th’ heck’s that?!....I'm looking forward to it...

The Day Before the Earthquake Hit

...feeling totally miserable the day before the earthquake hit...thought I’d reply to some e-mails...y’know, reach out a bit...but was finding it difficult to say anything about my life that didn’t come across like an outtake from a Dostoyevsky novel...



...so trying to put things in perspective, decided to describe the catastrophically horrible day leading to my miserable outlook...only to find that, as details appeared in little black letters before my eyes, it didn’t really appear all that bad....slept badly, had an unpleasant driving experience, dropped my ipod in a swimming pool...(with things kinda spiraling from there, mentally, at least, to more general money concerns to self-laceration for a history of klutziness to a life seeming in such dark moments to go nowhere but the next costly fuckup...y’know, that kinda crap)....but, then, how many people got to spend a good chunk of a sunny summer Monday lying around in a swimming pool, thus allowing expensive electronic toys they’re fortunate enough to have to get wet, in the first place?...so, I left that part out, too...



...(then, I’ve never really understood how the other people have it worse thing is supposed to cheer anybody up....it’s more likely to make me think oh god, there’s misery everywhere...just as look at what a good life you’ve got makes me think jeezus, there’s no hope for anybody....and, anyway, both kinda translate as you’re an asshole for feeling bad...which doesn’t make me feel better at all)...



...then the spigot farted out something nasty when I tried to get a glass of water...so went downstairs to see what was up...



...towards the end of the yoga teacher training, they had us write letters to ourselves, put them in self-addressed envelopes...which would somehow be sent to arrive when you most need it....I thought it sounded all touchy-feely and new-agey, but, nonetheless, wrote something heartfelt...



...and there, as I asked about the water...turned out the plumber was working on the pipes, earlier...in the basket, was an envelope with my name written on it in my own chicken scratch...containing a lotta semi-poetic stuff about untapped possibilities and diaphanous veils all too easily mistaken for reality...and, at the very bottom, five words: you are on the path...

The Yoga Cynic Has Issues

It would be useless to try now to impose upon my narrative more order than there was in my life.

André Gide



....as may be obvious by now, the author of this blog has issues....



...was doing some personal writing...purely personal...none o’ yer damn business...when, as tends to happen, my inner blogger told me to turn it into a Yoga for Cynics post involving the various people inside my head...



...like the inner critic people talk, write, and do expensive self-help workshops about...even as my own inner critic’s telling me that Yoga for Cynics is delving into that airy-fairy realm of new age pop psychology where, in annoyingly cutesy-putesy ways, everything gets personified, and.......the inner blogger says shut up and write...



BALD heads forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads

Edit and annotate the lines

That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love's despair

To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

William Butler Yeats, The Scholars



...I’ve written about my inner Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitor...which works better, for me, than inner critic...most likely because, given the time I’ve spent as a professional literary critic, and around them, the image of some musty academic surrounded by dusty piles of books and reminder cards for therapy appointments, unable to say anything without citing a pile of jargon-laden articles from journals nobody reads, fails to embody the kind of fear involved...



...at Kripalu, we did this psychodrama kinda thing...taking the form of one’s own inner critic...not just personifying and speaking the natterings of self-doubt and -loathing running through our heads but taking on a physical posture to go along with them...which, for me, made a kind of asana from hell....seriously, my back hurt for days, afterward....which might say something about what happens to my psyche on a daily basis...



...which might bring us to the inner therapist...caring yet dangerously opinionated, ever groping toward that celebrated inner child...



...they open and close you, and talk like they know you,

they don’t know you, they’re friends and they’re foes, too...

Joni Mitchell, Trouble Child



...I get laughs in yoga class when the teacher asks if anybody has any injuries and I pipe up and say my inner child is wounded...but it’s only partially a joke....which may be be precisely what makes it funny...



...my inner yogi’d like to describe all of this in terms of koshas...annamayakosha, pranamayakosha, manamayakosha, vijnanamayakosha, anandamayakosha...sheaths surrounding the atman...the true, ultimate self-beyond-self.......which, to my inner pomo graduate student, sounds suspiciously phallic...



...(sometimes the inner pomo graduate student bears a suspicious resemblance to the inner adolescent...perpetually smart, creative, horny, reflexively defensive, and often downright nasty...sometimes acting like a flat-out inner bully...but without the sophistication of the inner critic or old-school pseudo-authority of the Grand Inquisitor....this shit gets confusing)...



Your business is watching my words. But I

admit nothing.

Anne Sexton, Said the Poet to the Analyst



...the inner blogger says now’s the time to bring this post to a satisfying conclusion...perhaps simultaneously funny and inspiring...the kind people really like, so they leave nice comments and share on Facebook and twitter and all that...but never quite enough to satisfy the other members of the inner committee...



...and ya wonder why it’s been a week and a half since the last post?...

Lost My Sacred Mala Beads Last Night at a Hipster Pool Party

Renunciation is not getting rid of the things of this world, but accepting that they pass away.
Aitken Roshi

...everything you gather is just more that you can lose...
Robert Hunter

...lost my sacred mala beads last night at a hipster pool party...yeah, I hear ya: what’s a yoga cynic doing with sacred mala beads in the first place?!...is he perhaps being ironic?....actually, no....got ‘em at Kripalu on one of first nights of the teacher training, passed out with a mantra...om namo bhagavate vasudevaya...even if I can’t say what exactly that means to me....then, a night or two before leaving, passed them around ceremonially through the group...as, you might say, a means of tying us and our experience together like sacred beads on a string...to be taken metaphysically or metaphorically...and I’ve worn them every day since, feeling that connection, in some way or other...but now they’re gone, dropped somewhere, apparently, when I was changing my clothes before or after going in for a swim...

...biked over there first thing after coffee this morning...found nothing but empty plastic cups and broken pool toys in the trampled grass...

...headed downtown to yoga class soon after...felt a drop or two a few blocks from home but didn’t think that was anything...then a light sprinkle along the Wissahickon path....turning to a not so light sprinkle and then a steady rain by the time I got to the Schuylkill...not thrilled to show up soaked and muddy, but no desire to turn around and go home, either...hell, you don’t hear those old school yogis saying dude, I was gonna go meditate naked in the charnel ground with rocks hanging from my junk but checked the weather on-line and looks like it might be a tad inclement...and, really, it's not bad, biking through the rain...