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...

Rehab and Elsewhere

They tried to make me go to rehab,
I said no no no...
Amy Winehouse (1983-2011)

We’re all doing time.
Bo Lozoff

...last night, had an awesome dream...nothing too exciting...just standing, talking, after a yoga class, apparently, on a sidewalk, to somebody who, as far as I know, doesn’t exist in the world outside that dream...though, all day long, all I can think about is how much I want to see her again...

...was thinking that on the way to yoga class, and there, on the sidewalk out front, as I chained my bike to a parking meter, was a little girl, crying, and her mother, who yelled shut up, and kept walking...

...little while ago, wrote a post called Lost My Sacred Mala Beads Last Night at a Hipster Pool Party...which I mentioned to a friend from the teacher training, who still had his, wound around one wrist....that’s okay, he said, showing me an empty space on the string, one of mine broke and fell off when I got drunk and punched somebody....it was a long story...

...there’s a sign on the wall of the room where I work at the rehab that says Group Rules, with a long list underneath....one is no sarcasm....I look at that, every Tuesday night, and think I wouldn’t last five minutes...

Yamas, Niyamas, and the Way It Usually Goes... (Running Into Mirrors, Part Two)

...went to dog-sit for some friends and found they’d left a bottle of Pinot Noir and two-thirds of a fresh-baked chocolate cake on the kitchen counter....some time later, sitting at the beginning of yoga class, it occurred to me that this might be a perfect yogic opportunity for an exercise in the yamas and niyamas*...particularly, santosha**, aparigraha***, and tapas****...

...but, alas, by that point, it was already too late...


* ethical restraints and practices...(you learn about this stuff in yoga teacher training)...
** contentment
*** non-attachment
**** self-discipline...not to be confused with those trendy bars whose attraction seems to be that you get to spend more money for less food...though, now that I think of it, there may be some relation...

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...