FOUND IT

Found it.

Probably could do a crossword puzzle in the bottom position, though maybe not the Saturday New York Times.

Kapotasana? Not so much.

THE HARD ONES ALL START WITH "K"

That is a quick five breaths, I'm sure.

And repeatable on a daily basis? Hmm.

I'm sure I've got the other krippling k pose, karandavasana, floating around my desktop somewhere.

THE ETERNAL RETURNING

Why keep returning to Encinitas?

After all, at a certain point, usually after seven or eight years, one has achieved a relative mastery of one's chosen craft. That's roughly the length of most apprenticeships in many trades, and seems to correlate with skill acquisition, whether it's blowing glass, playing an instrument, speaking a foreign language, or, as our friend Patanjali has it, "Desha bandhas cittasya dharana," fixing one's attention on one thing for long periods of time.

So why keep returning to Encinitas? Emerson said, "What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say." The silence that emanates from Tim Miller is so loud and so still, and reaches into such a deep place in me that speech becomes superfluous, in fact futile.

So? "I did not go to my master to learn his words of wisdom," a Hasidic rabbi once said, "but to see how he tied and untied his shoes."

YOU KNOW IT AIN'T EASY

It's a tightrope act sometimes, isn't it? You want to practice every day, as teachers and texts prescribe, and because, y'know, it's what feels good. So you shuffle and organize your life in whatever ways are appropriate to make this happen — negotiating with employers, clients, spouses and children or child-care to carve out the requisite time.

The other side of the tightrope, though, is that once the time has been marked out, the space for the practice demarcated, and the pattern of behaviour established — get up, wash face, pranayama for 45 minutes, sit for 20, chug espresso, drive to yoga studio, unroll mat — the entire thing becomes what you've worked so hard to build, that is to say, it becomes routine, with all the negative connotations that word implies, such as rote, habitual and unconscious.

It never gets easier, either. My wife's warm body in the pre-dawn hour has not gotten less warm, less comforting, less inviting (traits for which I continue to blame her, of course), and the thought of turning off the alarm has not become less tempting. This practice, any practice, continues to refuse to do itself — I still have to initiate it, tend to it like a banked fire, expend however skillfully the energy required to complete it.

My wife and I both continue to practice, though, supporting each other as best we can, reaching to the texts, ancient and new, for impetus and inspiration, and modeling the long-time practitioner with whom we studied for those many years and who we call our teacher. It's like sailing a ship, a lifelong journey during which we make minute and constant adjustments of our course in the face of unexpected gale winds, long periods of daily routine, and patches of becalmed sea.

MY ISSUE WITH CONSERVATISM

Mind you, not that I disagree with conservatives (not that I disagree with liberals, either), but Douglas Adams summed up quite well the strain of thought I find most troubling in what I perceive to be typical conservative thinking.

"1) Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal.

2) Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;.

3) Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really."

KUDDLY KALI

Publicly, I maintain that my kid would love a plushie Kali doll. Privately, I want it for myself.

Created by artist Leeanna Butcher after designs by Sanjay Patel, and as displayed on Butcher's blog of plushie creations, Meet Sam and Pete.

SOME OF MY MORE RECENT PROJECTS

I'm writing treatments for several yoga-related novels! They're gonna be squarely in the female romance-cum-memoir genre — chick lit, baby! — and they're gonna be aimed squarely at the beating heart lodged beneath the silicon-enhanced bosom of upper middle-class white women. (In the old days they used to call 'em JAPS or WASPS, though I'll have to check Wikipedia for confirmation.)

The Devil Wears Prana
A young yoga teacher — a woman, naturally — recently graduated from a Baron Baptiste Power Yoga Teacher Training, takes a job as an assistant to one of the world's premier power yoga teachers. Shenanigans ensue as the young yoga teacher struggles to cope with her boss' outrageous, bitchy personality and ridiculous requests. The yoga world will be buzzing, I assure you, as it attempts to guess on whom the identity of the powerful yoga teacher is based!

Yoga High School
After their guru takes mahasamadhi, a group of devoted teenage yogis and yoginis, with the help of Jai Uttal and the Pagan Love Orchestra, take over their ashram to combat its newly installed oppressive administration. Picture this closing scene! Yogis and yoginis twist and contort in various advanced asanas as the ashram burns to the ground behind them and Jai and his merry bunch get all bhakti'd out on the front steps! I'll pitch this to the Weinsteins as "Fame meets Rock 'n' Roll High School — but with yoga!"

Starve, Curse, Hate
The rebellion of no rebellion! The dropping out of dropping in! An upper middle-class white woman, tired of living a life of spontaneous, free-wheeling yoga practice in a yoga ashram in India, enrolls in college, obtains a law degree, and joins a law firm. At the same time, she falls in love, gets married, has children and helps maintain a family — all while engaging in a daily spiritual practice, as part of a living tradition and under the auspices of a teacher! This is pure escapist fantasy that's gonna hit every yurt-dwelling, granola-eating Burning Man yogini right in the chest-plate.

Ghee
This is the story of the yogini Martine, a young mother who arrives at a small, insular yoga school in the Pacific Northwest with her 6-year-old daughter Penelope. Martine, a gifted cook, begins preparing and selling various dishes, all of which feature heroic amounts of the titular ghee. Her cooking siddhis begin to change the lives of the yoga students through magic, which puts her in direct opposition to the school's guru, who sees Martine's use of siddhis as a distraction on the path to Self-realization. Salty tears will spatter your Lululemon top upon completion of this little gem, I assure you! Though I trust that, if it's Lululemon, it will wick away the moisture appropriately.

Sex and the Siddhi
This is gonna detail the intimate life of a sassy, raunchy New York City yogini who regularly meets her three yogini friends for lunch at various posh Hare Krishna temples in order to dish intimate details and eat veg samosas. Sample dialogue: "Then he manipulated my muladhara, I contracted my bandhas, and the kundalini rocketed right up my sushumna!" Titillation ensues. Each of the narrator's three friends is an extension of an aspect of her own personality, and together they function as her very own Trimurti!

ASK! AND YE SHALL RECEIVE!

Ah ... not quite exactly Pallas Athene or Gaia ... but we do have the Gorgon from Clash of the Titans and Athena from the OG Battlestar Galactica!

I don't quite know how you'd package, as per Erato's request, all the flora and fauna of creation, like if you'd just have several expansion packs or try to put 'em out grouped by phyla, but I suppose as long as the aforementioned flora and fauna had articulated joints and some sort of weapons, I'm all for it.

WHAT! DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH YOGA?

You have to say it just like that, too: "What!" Pause. "Does this have to do with yoga?"

I would just like to say that I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Vaneigem, in that people, that is to say, human beings everywhere, are funnier, smarter, and more creative than they're usually given credit. Perhaps that's a tenuous leap to make after watching such a short clip, but the idea that someone recorded this, digitized it, then posted it for the rest of us leads me to believe this is so.

Hat-tip to William Gibson.

THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE CLICHES
Sung to the tune of the Coltrane jam.

In no particular order, a few of my favorite cliches about yoga. Feel free to contribute your own! Remember, just because something is a cliche doesn't mean it isn't true or accurate. Though wouldn't it be more fun and rewarding to acknowledge that they are, in fact, cliches, so that we can move on to see how they originated, if they're true and accurate, and what sort of transformation they might undergo over time?

— A conflation, signaling greater confusion, of yoga asana with all yoga practices; or, in the case of ashtanga vinyasa, confusing a branch for the tree, as it were.

— All yoginis are ...
White; upper-middle class or upper class; thin; "cut" or toned; vegetarian; female; twenty-something; eco-conscious or green; liberal; partial to organic food and clothing; single; ascetic; non-smoking; non-drinking; non-synthetic drug taking; rapturously in love with India; have a guru; value bliss and happiness.

— Yoga is a lifestyle, with accordingly appropriate books, movies, clothes, accessories, services, and holidays to be purchased and consumed.

From (oV0), whose handle looks to me unabashedly like a pair of breasts:

— The knees are the ego. Kapotasana will open your heart. Emotions are in the hips. Stiff people have issues.

RAMESH & RADIOHEAD
I don't care for the latest Radiohead release, In Rainbows, which leads me to wonder what Ramesh Balsekar would make of it. During our visit to his flat in Mumbai, I didn't get a chance to wander from the main room, but I assume somewhere on the premises is a computer with Internet access. One could also assume that Ramesh opted to either download the release from Radiohead's site, in which case one could wonder what amount, if any, Ramesh consented to pay for the music. Forty rupees? Four hundred? Or perhaps Ramesh is an active BitTorrent user, and simply downloaded the music for free from Pirate Bay or Demonoid.

My personal like or dislike of a Radiohead album is in the same vein as that Picasso anecdote, which I am doubtlessly misremembering. The painter is accosted by a woman at a party, a woman who insists to him that she neither understands nor cares much for Cubism. "But madam!" says Picasso. "It really doesn't matter!"

Does Ramesh have a preference either for or against the new Radiohead album? While he was listening to it, did he lean to his wife and say, "Aum Shiva, but Thom Yorke is one whiny bastard!" Or has he completely extinguished all patterns, imprints, habits, and other boundaries of the ego? As water ceases flowing from a tap, has that part of mind that produces preferences within Ramesh been completely shut off

Or does Ramesh's lack of preference either for or against the new Radiohead album mean that he still witnesses desire or its opposite as either arise — only he is not identified with them, as them? The thought arises, "I do not like the discordant, free-jazz pseudo-electronica of In Rainbows," that thought in turn observed by the single and expansive pinpoint of overwelming consciousness?

Perhaps a clue can be found in Consciousness Writes, in which Ramesh quotes Yang-Chu: 'Let the ear hear what it longs to hear [including In Rainbows].' When there is disassociation or dis-identification with whatever happens to the body-mind mechanism ... the prevailing tendencies of the body-mind are merely witnessed without any comparing or judging."

NOW WITH NEW LANKA-LEAPING ACTION!
We are taking the gods, we are turning them into toys, and we are putting them into the hands of children, or into the hands of grown men trapped in a retarded adolescence. Worship has become a form of play and play has become a form of worship, archetypes and icons at once immanent yet transcendent. Please note: Hanuman comes with his Gada mace and the Himalayas; the latter fits snugly in the palm of his hand.

Who knows, if there'da been a Jesus action figure — a good Jesus action figure, on a He-Man or G.I. Joe level, you know, a Jesus with an eight-pack stomach and massive pecs, money-changer-thrashing pump-arm action, personal stats and info on a file card to be clipped out, collected, and saved, and a whole passel of accessories (shepherd's crook, bread loaf, fish, chalice, crown of thorns, various sandals and robes ((white, black, dun-colored))) — my whole kick mighta turned out quite a bit different.






Sonofa ... ! Of course, why wouldn't they have a Rama action figure, too? Ram comes equipped with Shiva's Bow and a Divine Arrow. He also has "11 points of articulation plus a flexible grip," said "flexible grip" to be utilized for putting the pimp hand down on Ravanna.

BACHELOR DAYS
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Well ladies, one way to find out what evil lurks in the hearts of your men is to leave them to their own devices. Tara (wife) and Rowan (daughter) are out of town for the week, which means the numbers of penises in our household now outnumbers the vaginas by two to one. (Note: of the aforementioned genitalia, one penis and one vagina are of the feline variety.)

Now that I've finally ascended to my rightful place as benevolent-ish oppressor, as compared to my usual standing as woefully oppressed minority, exactly what brands of evil am I consuming?

1. Japanese Animation
Appleseed: Ex Machina: A bit Matrix-y, but Jesus, they knocked it out of the park with the animation. Produced by John Woo, some costumes designed by Miuccia Prada?

2. Gun Porn
Anyone seen Rambo? Ho. Lee. Shit!

3. Comic Books
Brubaker's/Phillips' Criminal

4. Making Organized Messes
My wife views our house as a home, a warm, comfy, inviting environment that functions as a safe respite from the harsh winds of the world outside, a place in which we, as a family, can snuggle and nest. Our home is to be decorated and adorned, and consequently kept brain-splittingly clean.

I, on the other hand, view our house as the staging ground, the outpost, the secret headquarters, the Fortress of Solitude, if you will, for the various adventures that I embark upon on a daily basis and that constitute the stuff of my life. As such, in the same vein as Richard Dreyfus' character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I am compelled to stack, pile, and otherwise accumulate, throughout the house, waist-high mounds of the various equipment, gear and accoutrements that are necessary for the life of action and daring I lead.

Therefore, I have been busily at work turning our warm and inviting home into a combination Everest Base Camp and Batcave, or perhaps Justice League Satellite?

5. Tour de France
They will be hitting the Alps tomorrow morning, so when I am not practicing, I will be glued to my computer.

6. Paul Grilley's Yin Yoga DVD
Trying to make it through the theory bit.

THOUGHTS ON "THE PATH OF NO-PATH"
Reading David Loy's "The Path of No-path: Shankara and Dogen on the Paradox of Practice"
Shankara, as David Loy writes, had some very specific ideas regarding the usefulness of a yoga practice: It is "for those of inferior intellect," he commented in the Brahma Sutra Bhasya. Repetitive meditation techniques? They may be helpful because "people do not always understand the first time."

Shankara, or Adi Shankara, who perhaps lived some time around 800 CE, was the renowned scholar and consolidator of the strain of philosophy called Advaita Vedanta. In the world of ashtanga vinyasa, many of those who practice the ashtanga pranayama recite the first verse of the Advaita Guru Parampara to begin the four chants that come at the closing of the practice. In so doing, they honor Shankara among the prominent teachers of Advaita.

So it may seem a bit paradoxical to, at the end of a practice, salute a prominent, pre-eminent teacher who didn't think much of "practices" at all. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (I.iv.7) suggests that "the Self alone is to be meditated upon" — and Shankara does not agree. He comments on this line to say that "except the knowledge that arises from that statement ... there is nothing to be done, either mentally or outwardly."

I personally find it useful to locate my relationship to a practice or a belief-system in relation to yet a third system, one that appeals to me in some way and one that shares many similarities, and yet one that also presents opposites and oppositions. It is this act of triangulation that allows us to examine areas of overlap, areas of concordance, and areas of tension. I've heard Richard Freeman use the algebraic metaphor of the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram, in which one overlays different systems to see where they meet and, more importantly, where they don't. It is these seams, these areas where systems meet and flex and threaten irruption, their borders and boundary areas, that provide the richest, most useful insights.

In order to reconcile our practice of ashtanga vinyasa with, at least according to a key philosophical figure in its tradition, its utter uselessness, it's useful to veer completely and totally in the opposite direction, and head towards Dogen, a key figure in the Zen tradition. Unlike Shankara, "the heart of [Dogen's] teaching is this shusho itto (or ichinyo), 'the oneness of practice and enlightenment.'"

More importantly, as Loy says, where "Shankara resolves the delusive dualism between means and ends by denying the need for any practice, Dogen resolves the same dualism by incorporating enlightenment into practice."

In this light, we can re-examine the metaphor of the eight-limbed tree of ashtanga yoga, in which all limbs are in fact part of and inseparable from the same tree. From this viewpoint, the practice of the yamas, the niyamas, the asanas, the pranayamas — the external limbs — are inseparable from and equivalent to the internal limbs — including, most importantly, samadhi. The practice of the yamas is samadhi; samadhi is the practice of pranayama. Samadhi is the practice of the asanas.

Loy's suggestions for the Zen practice of zazen echo Patanjali's famous "abhyasa vairagyam tan nirodha": "This does not deny the reality of enlightenment from the relative standpoint. Done in such a fashion — neither seeking nor anticipating any effects — zazen in itself gradually transforms my character, and eventually there is an experience in which I realize clearly that the true nature of my mind and the true nature of the universe are nondual. Zazen cannot be said to cause this experience; enlightenment is always an accident, as Chogyam Trungpa has said, but practice undeniably makes us more accident-prone."

*The entire article can be found here: "The Path of No-path: Shankara and Dogen on the Paradox of Practice," Philosophy East and West, Volume 38, Number 2 (April 1988), pages 127–146

OTHER SUMMER JAMS? 2008 VERSION
Lil' Wayne, "Lollipop."
Personally, I love it that all these rappers are getting positively baroque with the vocoder.

Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart."
I don't even like this band. At all. But this song kills, absolutely kills.

To qualify as a summer jam, a song must exist simultaneously in the past, the present, and the future. It must have a timeless appeal, as though specific sequences of your genetic chain, long dormant, await both this particular hook or melody and warm summer months in order to come to full expression.

A summer jam must also be so of the moment, so au currant, so immediate, that it renders frozen time itself. A good summer jam will freeze into golden amber instances during which it is heard, so that these friends, this car-ride, that barbecue are instants of utter summery perfection.

Finally, the perfect summer jam should trigger a deep nostalgia. For, like a snowflake on a fingertip, the crystalline moment that is the essence of the summer jam has already passed. The moment is over, and in fact, the moment never existed in the first place. You can recognize a summer jam the very first time you hear it when you recognize that you are already listening to it next fall, or winter, or years from now.

YOUR ADVAITA SUMMER JAM!


Yes, it is true that this is the plaintive scorched-earth howl of a woman hanging, by her cracked and pitted and doubtless painted-black fingernails, on the edge of a vast precipice, but at the same time it is also the ultimate wail of the bhaktin yogini — "Oh my god!" — offering up to and outright demanding that God take both her passion and her rage. At some point in the process, the offering and its intended result become one and the same, the means become the end, and Ida Maria surrenders, and not without a fight, the idea, the underpinning illusion, that she is the captain, piloting from the bridge, the cruise-liner that is her life. "Oh you think I'm in control/ Oh my god/ Oh you think it's all for fun." She is not asking questions here. This is not a comfortable process, nor is it a pretty one.

A THOUSAND KISSES DEEP: YOUR DAILY COHEN


You win a while, and then it's done
Your little winning streak
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat
You live your life as if it's real...

You lose your grip, and then you slip
Into the masterpiece.

THE MONEY SHOT --- THE "BEFORE" PHOTOS
John got me sparked, so what the hell --- these were shot on Thursday.

I went from road-kill, levered myself up until my back was against the wall, and then used my bodyweight to bear down until, if you and I may speak frankly, my muladhara chakra was on the ground.

On reflection, I wonder why I ought to go through all this trouble, as it felt good, I could hold it for a long while, and it's since been repeatable. It will still be an interesting experiment, so I'm gonna do it.

I've used the following tips during the last few months. They're from a book called Relax Into Stretch by Pavel Tsatsouline.

"From road-kill, slowly transfer your weight to your legs and assume as upright a position as you can muster. Keep your lower back arched. It is a must.

The pelvis usually gets in the way of your femurs when you try to spread them apart. Tilt your pelvis forward by making your lower spine go concave — and it gets out of the way!

Pinch the floor with your feet with one to two thirds of your maximal strength. Build up the tension gradually, over a couple of seconds.

Push the walls apart and—it is very important! — push your hips forward. Keep your lower back arched and chest open.

Hold steady, unwavering tension for twenty seconds, perhaps even longer, and do not forget to breathe. Although holding the contraction for such a long time is not always necessary to relax the muscle effectively, it helps to build strength.

Suddenly release the tension with a sigh of relief and allow yourself to sink a little deeper into the split.

You must understand that you will never, ever do a side split without positioning your pelvis in one line with your feet! Drive your hips forward at every opportunity, try to get them in line with your feet. Push your hips forward with the help of your arms.

There are three hand positions to choose from. You can push-pull with one hand in the front and one behind you; you can grip the floor in front of you with your hands and pull yourself forward; or, once you are flexible enough, you may push from behind your back.

[Italics mine] Leaving the glutes a few inches behind the heels is a fatal mistake, which keeps many very flexible people from going down all the way in a split. They either end up falling on their butts, or sitting down on the floor with their legs spread wide, but never wide enough.

[From road-kill:] [Y]ou will feel that the muscles in the front of your thighs resist the stretch more than your inner thighs. It is normal. It is time to shift your concentration from your groin to these front muscles: sartorius, psoas, etc.

Consciously contract all of the above, the muscles underneath and in the front of your hip joints, once you have driven your hips forward. Hold that tension! If your muscles start quivering and give out by themselves at some point during the stretch (a la the Clasp Knife), do not freak --- take it as a favor.

Keep at it, until you can no longer increase your stretch or you have reached your pain threshold. Carefully get out of the stretched position. Do not twist your knees and do not panic! Try to use the strength of your groin muscles to get up."

SAMAKONASANA; OR, WHO THE FUCK CARES?
Not much asana chatter on this blog --- I prefer Ambien to reading about supta kurmasana (It was hard! It was easy! Rinse, repeat). The little pill works much faster and I don't have to worry about my face hitting the keyboard. But I'm going to conduct an experiment on myself during the next 14 days, so come along for the ride, why doncha? Plus I'm gonna promise some photos with this one, which ought to prove mildly entertaining, if not downright titillating.

Samakonasana
"Sama": same
"Kona": angle

Sequence:
1. "Road-kill" Part I
Widen stance as far as possible maintaining 180-degree angle between legs. Outer edges of feet, chest and chin down on floor, arms spread at shoulder level. Ten 10-second ujjayi breaths. (10 seconds in, 10 seconds out.)

2. "Road-kill" Part II
Outer edges of feet, chest, chin and belly down, arms reach out in front. Round low back and ground as much pubic bone into floor as possible. Ten 10-second ujjayi breaths (10 seconds in, 10 seconds out.)

3. Samakonasana
Begin in "road-kill" part II, point toes and kneecaps skyward, lever spine upright to vertical position with fists or blocks, then lower sits bones to floor until asana is sthira sukkham.

Notes:
1. Do NOT sit down unless and until angle of legs is 180.
2. Mula bandha, uddiyana bandha.
3. Nasagra drishti.

Sequence Prescription:

Week 1
Monday: 1x a.m., 1x p.m.
Tuesday: 1x a.m.
Wednesday: 1x a.m., 1x p.m.
Thursday: 1x a.m.
Friday: 1x a.m., 1x p.m.
Saturday: 1x a.m.
Sunday: OFF.

Week 2
Monday–Friday: OFF.

Week 3
Saturday: 1x a.m.

Strategies
1. Ujjayi-assisted total-body contract/release.
2. To be contracted: heels into floor, quads, glutes, ashwini, vajroli, mula and uddiyana bandhas, clench floor with hands, clench jaw, kechari mudra variation.
3. Gravity-assisted clasp-knife stretching, i.e. exhausting inhibitor muscles and stretch reflex through lengthy contraction while related tissues are bearing body weight. Google and practice this at your own risk. It is not for the faint-hearted.

Photographs
Before and after photos are coming soon.

Half Cat, Half Amazing

We got a new lil' homie for the house. His name is Haku and Pete Rock is one of his favorite emcees. It said "American short hair" at the animal shelter, but c'mon --- lil' homie has got to have mad Abyssinian blood coursing through his veins: gigantic radar dishes, almond eyes, lil' triangle head. Jealous? Don't be. We stay winning.