It is just Practice.

Gudo himself.

"It is not necessary for us to get the so-called enlightenment. Because the so-called enlightenment is just a Romantic story, which many children love. But Buddhism is never a Romantic story, but it is just Action. It is just sitting. It is just Practice. It is just Reality."

—Gudo Nishijima

WANTED: YOGA TEACHER. MUST HATE MONEY.

I had a funny idea for a wanted ad, so I Google Image'd "yoga teacher money" and this pic popped up.

On one hand, it's easy to hate on videos like this, for all the obvious reasons. My European readers might be shocked to discover that I will have to inform our Northern American readers who the hell this is: it's Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls.

Which begets a second question: Who the fuck are the "Spice Girls"? But I digress; take a tip from me and don't waste time looking them up, either.

It's also easy to go the "It's all good, man" route. It's introducing yoga to a broader audience, increasing exposure, etc, etc.

I always look at shit like this, and no offense, Rodney, but the Rodney Yee videos on the racks at Target ("Yoga Abs") and marvel at the beauty of the packages.

A pretty, fresh-faced and scrubbed-clean blonde in short-shorts with just a hint of abzzz on a flat belly. The font and colors are coordinated with her face and skin-tone, and all are pleasing.

The video is selling a brand of yoga with which I'm not familiar ("Geri Yoga"), but it offers instant perspective on my favorite brand of yoga (ashtanga vinyasa), the ways this tradition is a brand — and the ways it is not —and how it is transmitted, as well as how it is sold in the marketplace.

FREEZER, CONTENTS, APRIL 2010

Because my wife dared me.

As the Chinese proverb goes, I had some, shall we say, interesting times as an adolescent and teenager, and but for the grace of god, emerged without Black Flag bars tattooed on my body. During one particularly interesting journey to the depths, I wrote a letter to Henry Rollins, the lead singer of Black Flag and Rollins Band.

Six or eight months later, and well after I'd forgotten all about the letter, a postcard appeared in the mailbox, one side filled with small, neat, hand-printed block letters. "Hang in there," wrote Rollins, "the next 10 years are going to blow your funky mind!"

It was compassion as Dogen describes it, a hand reaching for a pillow in the night, and damn if Rollins wasn't right.

The guy is still out there, doing his thing. Here he talks about the fact that the Black Flag logo is now flash-art at tattoo studios around the country:

"It’s what happens when anything stands still for too long. It’s why there’s bird shit on Buddha’s head, ’cause it’s a statue. That’s why monks laugh and go, 'Well, you shouldn’t be sitting there. The birds crap on you.' It’s what happens when anything sits still — it gets swept into the lexicon."

Those of us practicing and, god forbid, teaching ashtanga vinyasa are transmitting this tradition, this lineage. I have written before that ashtanga is a reflexive practice — just as it informs and transforms us, we inform and transform it.

As Eliot wrote in "The Wasteland," "Lips that would kiss/ Form prayers to broken stone." It is our duty as tradition-bearers to not cast new statues to worship. It is our duty to not practice yoga as though it were flash-art off a tattoo-studio wall.

It is our duty to not let the birds shit on our heads.

YOU NEED TO EAT AND SLEEP MORE. NOW.

Clearly that is not enough food.

The ashtanga vinyasa yoga practice is a reflexive one, meaning it reflects on, and in turn is reflected upon, other aspects of your life.

Some of the biggest gravitational bodies to exert larger tidal pulls are diet, sleep, relationships, work, and stress.

Are you getting your 9-to-11 hours of sleep a night? No?

If you are a bipedal primate belonging to the species Homo sapiens, you need your 9 hours every night. Especially if you're undertaking a physically demanding endeavor such as two hours of ashtanga vinyasa daily.

The question of what constitutes a supportive diet --- and in turn, the question of how our practice supports, effects and influences our diet --- is much trickier. As you're a bipedal primate of the species Homo sapiens, you are an omnivore, and can survive on wood chips or filtered cow's blood (i.e. milk).

Patanjali didn't concern himself so much with the specifics of what to eat, though his suggestions for the yamas and niyamas, one's personal and social ethical qualities, provide a framework in which to make one's dietary choices.

Pattabhi Jois wrote a bit about diet in Yoga Mala. The guy was nothing if not common-sense.

"If the mortal body is to be sustained, things like food are essential. After all, by sustaining the body, does one not attain divinity through following the righteous path? Thus the food we eat should be pure (sattvic), untainted (nirmala), and acquired by righteousness, and not be secured by cheating, deceit, persecution or other unjust means. Only taking as much food as we need to maintain our bodies, and not desiring things of enjoyment which are superfluous to the physical body, is aparigraha." (P.24)

Guruji also had some suggestions of what our food should — and should not — be comprised. I don't feel the need to talk about that, save to say that genetic, personal, and social context (your samskaras) should be taken into account.

In my experience with this particular system, many people tend to under-eat. That is, many people tend to not eat enough to support recovery and growth from the physical stress of ashtanga vinyasa practice, with its emphasis on 2-hours-plus practices of strength wedded to active flexibility.

I'm sorry I'm not sorry, but if you aren't sleeping right now, you need to be eating.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF YOGA JOURNAL

Dear Madam,

I must sincerely laud your endeavors at Yoga Journal.

The editorial direction and the pictorial content that you and your shareholders have determined to be the most lucrative — that which will attract advertising dollars aimed at 20-to-40-something middle- and upper-middle-class caucasian women — have indeed attracted top-tier women's yoga clothing brands.

However, as a testosterone-laden, red-blooded heterosexual male (can you say householder? Cha-ching!), I must also congratulate you on so successfully capturing another important yoga demographic and, like true market innovators, meeting a heretofore unknown demand. While Namarupa remains the premier magazine for yoga-related philosophy, discourse, photography, and interviews, you are the only high-quality glossy yoga jerk-mag on the market. Kudos!

Sincerely, et cetera, et cetera.

P.S. I anxiously await your "Girls of the Bhagavad Gita" pictorial. "Hardtail," indeed!

JESUS CHRIST!

Alice Joanou is one of my first asana teachers; she teaches in Oakland and occasionally posts some good stuff.

This is from a new one called "Yeshua Avatara":

"In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says to his students: 'Here I am sending you out like sheep amid wolves, so be smart as snakes and innocent as doves.'

I couldn't help but think of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who taught that even an enlightened snake should not lose the power to hiss ferociously: 'I asked you not to bite, but I didn't forbid you to hiss!'"

Which reminds me of Jim Morrison: "Ride the snake, the snake is long," which in turn reminds me of riding Lady Gaga's disco stick. (Lady Gaga: banging!)

So there you have it, from Jesus to Lady Gaga in four easy steps. Bonus points for Cobra Commander pic. Also, bonus points for resisting the obvious reference to kundalini.

VIDEO DAYS

Mysore '92.

NEW POST. HUZZAH.

This post will be just like Slayer's "Raining Blood." Short and brutal:

Do less on your yoga mat.

If you're banging out 5-6 day weeks (if you're doing it, you know what I'm talking about), I dare you — I dare you! — to take every fourth week at half power.

Half!

Power!

Do less!

Pattabhi Jois would say, "Practice practice, long time. All is coming."

He didn't say, "Practice, practice all primary series, as hard as you can, long time. All is coming."

So you have my permission to unclench your butt-cheeks every four weeks.

That is all. Carry on.

MAD BUSY

We've had a hectic fall and winter, with heaps of traveling, two weddings, and what the hell, a good ol' fashioned move thrown in for good measure. I still feel like I'm recovering. I've been immersed in several intensive physical practices which for all intents and purposes have drained me of the impetus to write.

Good news, however: we're traveling to Encinitas in a few weeks, and the free time and god hope the sun will recharge some of my batteries. So for the three of you who read this, don't worry. I'll be back.

I promise I'll drop more f-bombs, too, and we can discuss eating copious amounts of meat, the appropriateness of wrath, and other yoga topics probably not under discussion in the intellectual yoga salons in Gokulam.

PRACTICE NON-ATTACHMENT?

I'm not really that smart. More accurately, I'm dumb-smart, in that I have a mind for minutiae and a steel-trap for trivia. I'm not so quick on the uptake, however, when it comes to translating abstract yoga concepts into everyday experience.

So I greatly admire the poetry of directions like "Lift your kidneys," "Open your heart," or "Practice non-attachment." Feel free to insert your most poetic, flowery yoga chestnut here.

Like, I get it. But only intellectually. Looking back at my experience in various led-class yoga settings, directions like the ones above immediately established in me a glaring gap between what I was really experiencing and what I thought I should be feeling. Like I said, maybe it's my own faulty wiring, but I just don't know how to "open my heart."

The instances when a great heart opening have occurred have never been intentional, and have always arisen independent of my own desires or efforts to do same.

So these aphorisms helped build a model of experience separate from my own, which turned the practice of yoga into my efforts to get to, or achieve, or attain that model.

Over time, the mundane and decidedly simple physical (and thereby mental) yoga techniques that one can actually do are what has grounded me: Inhale, exhale. Activate mula bandha, or "Take yanal control," as Pattabhi Jois used to say.

So don't ask me my thoughts on that book Mula Bandha: The Master Key. I will say that my thoughts on the subject currently are this: if you can stop the flow of urine and feces, you are intimately familiar with mula bandha. Otherwise, what use?

To have a goal or intention is okay — this is, after all, what the bandhas do for our ujjayi breath; that is, they anchor and give shape and direction to the in- and out-breath. So it's okay to want to perform an asana. But to paraphrase Shunryu Suzuki, you make the effort, and then lose yourself in the effort. It is that perpetual return to the breath, bandhas, and gazing points that allow the non-attachment and heart-opening to perhaps (or perhaps not) arise.

Yoga practice becomes an engagement with what we can do, and this relationship with what we can do right now is an engagement and relationship with the boring splendor of everyday, ordinary reality, just as it is, right now.

OCTOBER 17 PRANAYAMA CANCELLED

For all those of you (cough cough) planning to attend the pranayama class tomorrow at Near East: class has been cancelled as I'll be filling in from 8-9:30 AM at Yoga Pearl

A side note: the class at Yoga Pearl is an Introduction to Ashtanga Yoga, and it'll be very compassionate.

For those heavy breathers out there, pranayama at Near East will resume the following Saturday, October 24.

DEVASTATED, SIMPLY DEVASTATED

All these years of practice and I could have just rigged up an iron contraption?

Fuck.

15 BREATHS

KILL ALL HIPPIES

I especially like how it's titled "Hippie Weirdo Yoga Farmers." Because really, aren't they all?

GEAR CHECK

Purple tank tucked into white spandex?! SHREDS YOUR FACE OFF.

BUFFET YOGA

New York Times douchebag Stanley Fish, in "Think Again" in the June 14 edition, reviewed Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.

The application of Crawford's thinking to an established, systemic yoga practice is apparent. As Fish writes, "Crawford associates ... 'remote control' knowledge with liberalism, a way of thinking that has at its center the individual self unburdened 'by attachments to others and radically free,' a self whose chief commitment and obligation is to its own 'creativity.'

Crawford prefers to the ethic of individual creativity and its 'rhetoric of freedom' the ethic of submission to facts 'that do not arise from the human will.' It is that submission, he says, that characterizes the work of craftsmen, artisans and musicians. 'One can’t be a musician without . . . subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys.'

Whereas craftsmanship 'means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it,' the 'preferred role model' of the radically free liberal self 'is the management consultant, who swoops in and out and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise.'"

Here Crawford might as well be discussing the difference between buffet-style and systemic yoga practices, the former an extension of the self and beholden only to its practitioners' "creativity."

This in comparison to the latter, which has an established sequence of asanas, pranayamas and seated techniques that cannot "arise from the human will." One thinks here of Krishna's definition of yoga, in the Bhagavad Gita, as "skill in action," the residue of which — yoga — arises only after "dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it."

Here we can also default to Pattabhi Jois' simpler, famous four-word dictum: "Practice, practice. Long time."

Then there's also the idea of "submission." It is a great paradox that freedom, liberation or moksha arises only after submitting to discipline. Richard Freeman uses the image of the ouroboros, the alchemical symbol of the snake swallowing its own tail. A practice like ashtanga yoga is, by its very nature, the limiting or closing off of potentiality, of choice, of freedom.

Yet it is only by rubbing against the edges of the practice — these poses, in this order, using these techniques — that both self and not-self can be transcended. Nowhere else is this made more apparent than in the application of one of the three tristhana, the fundamental techniques of the ashtanga vinyasa yoga practice: drishti. For, in order to see all points, one must fix one's gaze on a single point.

WHY NO STORIES?

Well, the stories occasionally bleed out of here, but you're right — I'm definitely not writing as many anecdotal stories as I used to. I just glanced back at some posts from a trip to India (in 2005!), and realized posts here have drifted into tangential raving about my ideas relating to the practice of ashtanga vinyasa. What gives?

A lot of it stems from the fact that these last couple years I've been teaching a lot more, and more specifically, teaching ashtanga yoga at yoga centers (as opposed to fitness clubs). Who wants to practice where their daily tapas is potential grist for some storytelling mill? I sure don't. So I've toned the jibber-jabber way down.

What's more, as I've come to teach the techniques of ashtanga vinyasa, Leaping Lanka has come to serve an important humanizing function, lest anyone confuse me with the powerful effects of the ashtanga system itself. The system provides the tools, the techniques, that when practiced consistently and correctly, will engender evolution.

I'm merely the semi-half-wit (quarter-wit?) who kept showing up at my teacher's studio in order to practice it. For my part, I enjoy Lil' Wayne, comic books, and naughty words, and at certain nebulous and unspecified times of my life I allegedly may have enjoyed some forms of illicit chemicals. Every 6 weeks I enjoy a glass of wine or a mojito. Et cetera, et cetera.

I really do believe this practice will help us evolve. It shouldn't deform us to an ideal or an obsession. Our lives shouldn't serve our practice. Our practice should serve and enrich our lives.

There you go: more tangential raving. I swear I'll whip up a story that ties eka pada sirsasana to bong-loads, eightballs, and the yamas and niyamas. Next time.

READING LIST

Always easier to hate on dudes, nahmsayin'? I shit on Breaking Open the Head and 2012 before: fine.

Not saying you shouldn't read 'em — I just put 'em on the same level as books by Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Paramahansa Yogananda, or Jed McKenna: pulpy plane-flight entertainment.

Here're a couple books whose authors speak more lucidly, more eloquently and more experientially about practice, its means, its ends, and the various highs and lows in between.

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa

According to Georg Feuerstein's Crazy Wisdom, as well as many other accounts, Trungpa was one very weird dude who got up to some ultra-weird shit. Another instance of an Eastern adept unable to handle the West? Maybe.

Still, this book ought to be mandatory reading for anyone with a daily practice of any sort.

Two asides: First, isn't "Chogyam Trungpa" such a great fucking name? It's an amazing potpourri of consonants and syllables, all arranged most flavorfully. I often wander the house reciting aloud it and its many variations: Chogyam Trungpa, Chungpa Trogyam, Chogpa Trungyam.

Second, and this is empirically proveable in a laboratory setting, but Georg Feuerstein possesses the supernatural ability to string together words — any words! in any combination! — in such a way that sleep is automatically, instantaneously induced in the reader. Sorta like chugging a bottle of NyQuil or being sapped with a velvet-covered blackjack, only without the attendant aches.

Not only will a Feuerstein book stun its reader to unconsciousness, but all Level 3 characters or lesser within a 10-foot radius must make a Saving Throw against Sleep Spells or else succumb to a deep slumber that lasts for three rounds.

Remember, Feuerstein's Enchantment won't work on oozes, constructs, the undead, or Richard Freeman. Mainly because Richard doesn't actually need to read yoga books — he merely glances at a yoga book's Library of Congress summary to parse its contents.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Sunryu Suzuki

I can neither confirm nor deny any weirdness on the part of Sunryu Suzuki, though I'm sure there're some tell-alls out there. As with Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, though, it doesn't matter. This is a collection of transcripts of many of Suzuki's talks. He hits on aspects of practice in a clear, lucid, no-nonsense manner.

HIMSA!

I copped a pair of used Chuck Taylors (blue) at Buffalo Exchange ... what, maybe 3 months ago? They were $14.99. "Gently worn," as the tag said.

Some d-bag stole 'em this morning from in front of the door to the yoga studio. Never mind the logistics — like, who's trolling around at 8 a.m. in an empty building? Who would steal a pair of wet, dirty, well-fucking-worn pair of Chuck Taylors? (Well, a smack/crack/meth-head, of course.)

After the incredulity passed, I gleefully entertained fantasies of laying hands on this individual, catching him in the act, as it were, and administering "frontier justice," a stiff dose of pure himsa — "harm" or "wounding."

Also, maybe a little bit of himsa for anyone who chirps "Guess it's just another lesson in non-attachment!" Not so much for the sentiment, of course, but for refusing to acknowledge the dynamic, energizing reality of anger. Anger exists. It's not going away, nor would we want it to.

Reminds me of one of those Buddhist guys — I think Milarepa — whose son was killed by bandits. Milarepa weeps, ragged and wet with tears, and one of his students asks, "But Milarepa, I thought all was illusion?"

"Yes," said Milarepa, "but some is super-illusion."

The shoe-theft anger sparked, swelled, raged, faded. I commiserated with the wife and have since funneled that heat into this post. Consequently the flames have banked and cooled.

Of course, now I'm in the market for another affordable pair of Chucks. I'll take 'em "gently used," too.