TRIMMING THE FAT

I've just been skimming the fat off my blog aggregator, Net News Wire. You know how sometimes you do things because you think you should be doing them, rather than because you actually enjoy and derive sustenance from them?

I labored through Breaking Open the Head and 2012 by Daniel Pinchbeck, and I attended an appearance he made at Powell's Books. I think I may've posted about it, too, or else I wrote the post but declined to publish it because, you know, if you can't say something good ...

Anyways, I just axed my sub to Pinchbeck's blog as well as that other bullshit site he curates, Reality Sandwich. Reality Sandwich seemed like it had the potential to be great, and on occasion I'd slog through postings that seemed interesting because occasionally they'd run yoga-related stories or posts or whatever. But it's bullshit and I'm done with it.

You know what? You can't get "it" by drinking ayahuasca. Whether or not there are tribes of hyper-dimensional machine-elves attempting to communicate with us via DMT and "spirit molecules" is not something that can either be affirmed or denied with any sort of certainty.

And congratulations, you now require a drug as an intermediary, which at best further externalizes Source and reinforces a sense of separation, and at worst deifies another omnipotent supernatural figure.

I guess when I was younger, Terence McKenna seemed kinda cool. But then, I was more occupied with chemically stretching the confines of consciouness. Maybe I've mellowed as I've aged, but really, any state of consciousness that refuses to stay "stretched" without some substance, and in fact, any technique or substance that induces days of depression or anxiety, or any substance that induces a state of consciouness in which I can't piss straight, tie my own shoes, or feed myself, let alone my daughter, is worthless.

Well, maybe not worthless, but let's call it for what it is — fantasy wish-fulfillment. You want to get wasted? Fine, get wasted — there are times when the radical reduction or expansion of consciousness is called for.

This sort of dovetails with my lack of use for mystic union in general. I mean, it's great to experience when it arises, and I'm not saying we need to run Rumi out of town — psychedelic cosmonauts can tell us a lot about the outer fringes of consciousness. Problems arise, though, when those fringes become enshrined as goals or end-states to be reached.

What's that bullshit book fobbed off to every aspiring yoga student, the Parahamsa Yogananda one? It's the one you can find a dozen copies of at any book swap in India. Diary of a Yogi? Confessions of a Yogi? Autobiography of a Yogi? The book in which Yogananda repeats stories of instances of mystic rapture so great, so deep, that he couldn't be bothered to talk or wipe his ass.

That pretty much covers a broad range of books, by the way — the field of pop yoga literature is filled with books by guys from India describing bouts of mystic rapture and union. Sai Baba and the Krishnamurthis, J. and U.G., the crabby one.

I just caught a book on Papaji at the local Goodwill; Papaji's the guy behind Gangaji, Eli Jaxon Bear, I think Andrew Cohen? He's got some interesting things to say about the state of non-dual consciousness or awakening. As for how he "achieved" it — his description of states of bliss sound a lot like the nitrous room in early-90's raves — rapturous, wide-eyed, drooling, insensate. I'm not kidding, either — they sound exactly like chillout rooms on day two of a three-day rave. In which case — hey! I've been there, too!

So what good is bliss? This is the Twenny-first Century, after all. I can get MDMA, ibogaine, DMT, ayahuasca: anything Burroughs, McKenna, RA Wilson wrote about, all that bliss is available on the Internets.

In addition to the inevitable hangovers the bliss powders provide — my favorite is the "chucha," or explosive projectile "sacred diarhhea" that ayahuasca causes during the experience — I'm highly skeptical about anyone or anything that glorifies some great, bliss-filled ecstatic condition. If only because life contains so much more than that.

Life is great and wondrous, sure, but it's ordinary, too, and it's shitty, and people can be mean and small-minded, and there's sadness, and despair, and all that. Plus it's just ordinary — terrifyingly, achingly ordinary. You get to wait in line at the DMV, you get to clean up cat barf off the rug, you get to hang out on hold when you call your cable company. All is ordinary bullshit is the package, too. It is not separate from all the wonder and awe, it's not separate from the suffering and pain.

We practice the yoga not to suppress or eliminate any of this — the good, the bad, the ugly — but to recognize them for what they are — momentary thoughts, emotions and evaluations that arise and pass away, and that can never touch what we really are.

Some oft-hoped-for "return" to an Edenic, pre-lapsarian relationship with machine-elves, Mother Earth, or the aliens who make crop circles smacks of Idealism, in which we attempt, through sheer force of will, to turn the Universe into what we desire or hope it to be.

This seems to only cause, at least in me, a ton of dukkha. Suffering. Ever try to make a 4-year-old do something you want? What actually causes stress and anxiety? Generally not her behavior (I'm talking to you, Rowan), but your own attempt to make the situation something other than what it is.

This doesn't mean I'm letting the kid run rampant through the Goodwill, mind you. It's just that it's hard to remain open, flexible, and spontaneous when you're rigidly trying to stick to your Saturday morning agenda, right?

So back to Pinchbeck: I don't know how sustained use of ayahuasca will help with anything more than momentary flashes of mystic union, which, if we take a moment to use the Ashtanga yoga structure, is but one of the eight limbs, samadhi. Samadhi being but one of the tools used to allow kaivalya to arise.

I know Patanjali suggests that ausadhi, or "herbs," can be one of the tools to use to remove the veils ... but he also lists "vyadhi," or sickness, as the first obstacle to practice. If one's use of "herbs" is causing sickness, it's no good. If one's use of herbs is causing any of the subsequent barriers to practice — doubt, "stuck"ness, langour, etc, etc — then it's not bloody well working, is it?

Sort of a long-winded way of saying I'm done with Reality Sandwich, and with thinking that one day I'll get around to reading it.

COMMUNISM, HYPNOTISM AND THE BEATLES

"The music is loud, primitive, insistent, strongly rhythmic, and releases in a disguised way (can it be called sublimation?) the all too tenuously controlled, newly acquired physical impulses of the teenager. Mix this up with the phenomena of mass hypnosis, contagious hysteria, and the blissful feeling of being mixed up in an all-embracing orgiastic experience, and every kid can become 'Lord of the Flies' or the Beatles."

--Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles, David Noebel, Christian Crusade Publications, 1965

From Jack Womack, on William Gibson's blog.

EXPRESSWAY TO FLEXIBILITY

Had a brief discussion with Barb yesterday about speedy ways to insure flexibility, beyond the ol' "consistent practice" cliche. BOR-ING!

Here're some suggestions based on my experiences because clearly, the sooner you can fit your leg behind your head, the sooner life will get a lot easier.

1. Dysentary
Spend five or six days bed-ridden, pants tied off around your waist and ankles, and subsisting on crackers and soda water, you'll come back to the mat super bendy and pliable. Dysentary is also a great weight-loss plan! Your body will digest the muscles off your bones.

2. Food poisoning
Also another great weight-loss plan. You'll also gain the benefits of a bhakti practice, too, because you will never chant, pray or more wholeheartedly dedicate your existence to a higher power more fervently than when you have absolutely and utterly no control over your bowels. O lord, I surrender to Thine will!

3. Cip-Zoxx
I asked the chemists what they had for back pain and they sold me a sheaf of horse-pill-sized beauties called Cip-Zoxx. One part ibuprofen, one part acetominephen, one part why-have-my-legs-turned-to-jelly-and-my-face-gone-slack-as-a-stroke-victim? The third magic ingredient is some wicked muscle relaxer. You'll feel your vertebrae moving out of place during kapotasana and you won't care.

4. Sleeplessness
Practice after a three-day bender in Vegas is, shall we say, loosey-goosey.

5. Crystal Methamphetamine
Now, I've got no personal experience with this one, but in San Francisco I used to practice next to a guy with jaundiced sweat-stains on his shirt, and who emitted the sweet smell of ether and the sound of grinding teeth. He told me he practiced two or three times a day, and the crystal really helped him get into that groove.

PAIN, SUFFERING, OTHER FUN STUFF

There's an important distinction between "pain" and "suffering." Pain is a reflex reaction, a signal to withdraw from pain-causing stimulus.

Suffering tends to be thoughts and thought-patterns associated with that pain-causing stimulus.

The ashtanga vinyasa yoga gives us the tools to help us clearly perceive this aspect of suffering. This practice is not designed to relieve us of pain, however — though it's not designed to cause us pain, either, despite what other yoga teachers say. (So quit wrenching your leg into lotus!) The effect of physical pain relief through injury rehabilitation is but a secondary effect of the yoga.

The practice of ashtanga vinyasa gives us several tools to cultivate the practice of clear perception: the union of a breathing technique to movement, the internal focal points, and the cultivation of the discipline of a daily practice.

All of which are designed to allow a specific understanding to arise on a somatic level: Suffering is caused not by specific sensations, but by our thoughts associated with those sensations. This realization is the tip of a deeper understanding that we are not, in fact, the sum total of these or any thoughts. The true cause of all our suffering is our identification with our thoughts.

So I'm sorry to report that ashtanga vinyasa yoga isn't going to create a pain-free or even a suffering-free life. Banish from your mind any fantasies of sitting in lotus and floating blissfully miles above the tidal pull of life's glorious little catastrophes.

I've found that ashtanga vinyasa has given me the tools to see with great precision and clarity exactly when my thinking is causing me suffering. Often this suffering arises during the states of the asanas themselves, or transitioning between them.

Some days, a posture will feel much, much harder than it did the previous day, or when I was younger, or when I was uninjured.

The progression of thoughts usually goes like this: The physical stimulus is registered, whether it be stiffness, discomfort, or perhaps pain. Next, it is cataloged in comparison with a previous experience. Finally, I will go on to link a judgment to that comparison: "This sucks," or "This should be easier," or "This was easier last night," or "Why doesn't this feel like Friday night's class?"

Kaboom! Instant suffering arises when reality and my perceptions of reality inevitably fail to match up.

The more insidious aspect of suffering is created when the asanas are enjoyable or pleasurable. It's much easier to root out the thorn than spit out the honey. It's very easy to bask in the sensory pleasure of the endorphin rush of a full series of ashtanga vinyasa. But even this is merely setting the stage for future suffering, because your next practice, and the next one, and the one after that, will now invariably fall short of this internal mental benchmark.

So what to do? The human mind has evolved to organize and catalog, weigh and measure. The Indian goddess of worldy illusion is named Maya, which is derived from a root meaning "to measure, demarcate."

Maya is not someone to suppress, overcome, silence or eradicate. Attempting to do so only riles her up all the more, and gives the mind more to weigh, measure and catalog.

This is where the return to the fundamentals is critical: vinyasa, bandha, drishti. To paraphrase Tim, we work with the soma to influence the psyche. Practiced correctly and consistently, these techniques are simple and powerful enough to allow to arise observation of the maelstrom of the internal dialogue. When you are observing something, you are not participating in it.

One of the techniques to exercise a hyperactive dog, as employed by Cesar Milan in The Dog Whisperer, is to put a weight vest on the canine and let it run on a treadmill. The different series of ashtanga vinyasa will function as your very own consciousness weight-vest and treadmill. Perform them consistently and correctly to the best of your ability, and the hyperactive puppy of your mind will quiet of its own accord.

It's not that thoughts won't arise, nor is it that you'll stop experiencing emotions — the yoga is not a narcotic, after all — but their immediacy, their seriousness, will gradually come to have less an iron-clad grip.

WHEN TO TAKE TIME OFF

When can it be okay to not practice? Indeed, when is it advisable to not practice?

The ashtanga vinyasa system is, after all, a practice, not a workout. Importantly, this means we want to practice smarter, not just harder. The mind-body is not a dumb muscle that we can batter into flexibility or strength.

So, as a practice, it is definitely possible to plateau. It's possible to burn out. It is possible to experience many of the symptoms of overtraining. (Fatigue, exhaustion, weakness, depression.)

Most casual yogis and yogins will not reach this level. Practicing 2 to 3 times a week — even 4 — isn't sufficient to exhaust the central nervous system.

However, practicing 5 to 6 days a week, every day, for 5 years ...

To plateau is definitely possible.

True burnout tends not to occur for many practitioners, though, simply because life, as is its wont, hurls those terrific curveballs at us, and we invariably take time away from our mats, whether due to family obligations, work, travel, illness, or injury.

Let's say, though, that you've managed to avoid those influences that pull us from our mats, and also let's say that, for whatever reason, you've hit a place in your asana practice where you are stuck.

This can manifest as failure to perform the state of the asana — which in ashtanga vinyasa also often includes the transition — even though you've been practicing that asana for a lengthy period of time.

What's lengthy? Well, if you're a casual practitioner, it may come as a bit of a shock that some of the more complicated asanas can take 8 months to 2 years to perform as indicated.

My wife Tara took perhaps 8 months to a year-and-a-half to comfortably address eka pada sirsasana.

I started with Tim Miller in 2001, and he adjusted me every single day in baddha konasana, until I returned from India in mid-2004, at which point he said, "You no longer need my help."

That would be The Squash every fucking day for 3 years.

(Don’t even ask me the lengths to which I went outside of class to facilitate this process, either.)

So what to do when you hit a pose at which you're stuck ... and a year slips past? And you're still on that pose, with no measurable progress?

First of all, allow me to repeat the old yogic chestnut, "Practice non-attachment."

Now let me add: That chestnut is utter horseshit.

"Practice non-attachment" has devolved into a cliché empty of meaning. It's become a yogic-New Age-Buddhist catchphrase.

Usually it's uttered like a mantra as a result of pain that has arisen when a desire is not gratified or an expectation fulfilled.

You didn't get the raise you were expecting at work? "Practice non-attachment!" you tell yourself.

"Practice non-attachment!" the guy on the mat next to you says after watching you struggle to reach your toes in kapotasana.

This “mantra” helps you avoid looking at and experiencing the disappointment, anger, sadness, and fear that your boss' frown and shaking head has created in you.

This “mantra” also creates a subtle sense of guilt and inadequacy, as though something were wrong with you for wanting to touch your toes in kapotasana.

And oh! If you only practice harder, more correctly, more fervently, then one day that glorious state of non-attachment will arrive. Then life will be one giant red velvet cupcake with cream-cheese frosting.

Well, it’s not going to happen.

Attachment and non-attachment are two sides of the same coin. You cannot have one without the other. They are not separate. As soon as you try to "practice non-attachment," you are practicing attachment.

So we don't want to utter a trite catchphrase as deferment or deflection.

Yoga is not teaching us to defer our feelings and thoughts. It is not training us to detach from them. It's teaching us to acknowledge them as they arise, see them for what they are, and then see that we are not those feelings and thoughts, though we become so when we identify with them.

So, what to do? What to do when the plateau hits and frustration arises? Frustration is a normal part of a daily and intense practice — it's the flip side of the coin of intense effort. Intense effort is essential to getting up every day to get on the mat, after all. Like our friends "attachment" and "non-attachment," "effort" is not separate from "frustration."

It can be helpful to know: are you the first person to ever experience the plateau and its partner, frustration?

Patanjali doesn't think so: in book 1 of his Yoga Sutras, verse 30 addresses nine obstacles that arise during practice. He calls them "antarayah," or obstacles, and they function as "citta-vikshepa" that “vikshepa,” or “scatter” the "citta," or mind.

The first antarayah he lists is vyadhi, which is illness or sickness.

Hopefully, your practice of the primary series of ashtanga vinyasa has strengthened your body and "purified" your mind and body of "toxins": hopefully, it's made you more aware of your physical, social, dietary, and personal habits, and allowed you to tune, tweak or adjust all of them to be more effortless, more in tune, in order to more consistently practice the techniques that will allow a still mind to arise.

The second antarayah Patanjali lists is "styana," or "stuck-ness." Sound familiar?

So now that you've been made aware that these are naturally occurring obstacles — which means there's nothing wrong with you — what to do?

As I mentioned before, the idea is to practice smarter, not harder. After a certain point, simply showing up daily and hurling yourself at an asana is not going to effect any further transformation on the nervous system.

Patanjali can again be helpful to us here, as he goes on to list in verse 31 some of the symptoms of the aforementioned obstacles.

If you've ever struggled with an asana, they should be familiar: "dukkha, "daurmanasya," "anga-mejayatva" and "shvasa-prashvasa."

That is, "suffering" or "dis-ease," a "sour" or "bitter" outlook (I like to think of the word "dour"), anxiety ("anga" meaning "limb" and "mejayatva" meaning "trembling," so this literally means "shaking of the limbs"), and "shvasa-prashvasa," which refers to an unsteady or irrythmic in- and out-breath.

So we end on the breath — which, as we practice ashtanga vinyasa, is a good sign, and which leads us back to my favorite horse-shit yogism: "Practice non-attachment." We can't practice non-attachment without practicing attachment.

But we can practice steadying and lengthening our breath (a technique Patanjali suggests in later Sutras), we can activate internal "locks," or bandhas, we can then synch our movement with our breath. Given a pinch of grace, we can allow a condition of non-attachment to arise.

In verse 33, Patanjali goes on to suggest that in order to stop the aforementioned mental projections, and their ensuing symptoms, we ought to practice, “abhyasah,” one principle or truth: “eka tattva.”

Personally, I take this to mean we should find a practice that resonates with us — and then stick to it! Don’t go switching it up because you want to do what “feels good.” But I digress to a previous post’s topic.

How can we translate "practice smarter" to real-world, concrete principles? It's not easy, it will vary from person to person, and it will take someone familiar with your practice to provide some perspective, scale and impartial observation for you.

The following ideas really only work if one is practicing 5 or 6 days a week, and has consistently for years. That is, if a daily yoga consistent yoga practice has become standard.

If you hit that plateau, and it's not budging after say, a whole year: why not take time off?

Entirely.

Don't come in.

Stay home. Sleep in. Take a week off, maybe 10 days.

(Usually, you will miss the practice. Trust me, getting back on the mat will be the least of your worries.)

It will be a very interesting exercise in noticing any grasping or hoarding tendencies you may have towards the practice, and by noticing and acknowledging them, hopefully the scrabbling, clenching intensity will recede.

Or, for example, you could practice all of the standing sequence ... and then you could sit!

I know, it's a rather revolutionary idea, but perhaps it's time you developed a sitting or breathing practice. There is a rigorous and, might I add, highly effective system of ashtanga vinyasa pranayama that ought to be practiced.

You could, perhaps, practice every other day for two weeks, so that you were only practicing 3 days a week. You could again use the free days to develop your sitting practice.

The main thrust of any of these techniques is that using your breath, your bandhas, and following the vinyasa, you will come to recognize that the disturbances of your mind are just that: disturbances of the mind.

I’ll close with by reiterating the fact that the above-mentioned strategies only work for someone who is doing the practice as recommended 5 or 6 days a week. They will have no effect if half-weeks or truncated sequences are your normal method of practice.

SATURDAY MORNINGS AT MY HOUSE

We leaned pretty heavy into Death Note and Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion for a while, but The Kid had trouble parsing the subtitles. Actually, to be more accurate, she can't yet read, so parsing subtitles is way out of the occasion. We've also watched 110 episodes of Yu Yu Hakusho. So we've gone back to Ben 10 and Spongebob.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Spongebob Squarepants is fucking hilarious. I'd be hard pressed to name a favorite character. They're more like the gunas — sometimes I'm feeling Gary's sattvic splendor, sometimes Patrick's tamasic tendencies, and sometimes Spongebob's rajasic energy. My like for each character arises, plateaus, and decays. And what about Plankton!

THE BOREDOMS

I get asked from time to time if I ever get bored doing the same asanas, the same sequences, over and over again.

I'm going to come clean about the asanas: for the most part, they are fucking difficult for me. Whichever sequence I'm practicing still demands a ton of my concentration and breathing.

It's not that I don't juggle the sense of routine with an urge for novelty. Maybe I lack imagination or creativity.

Boredom is, in many ways, a blessing, at least during the seated practices, because for me it means a certain level of my mind is rattling its cage for novelty and stimulation, usually because it wants to avoid an impending quietude.

The question as to the boredom of a set sequence arises from people who have, I think, a fundamentally different conception as to the purpose of the asanas. Asanas can be therapeutic tools, they can make you fitter, stronger, more pliable, they can help you lose weight, they can prepare you for meditation. They can be tools and they can be medicine.

This is quite different from a sense of asanas as ends in themselves. If asana is the fourth limb of an eight-limbed plant, then asana is yama, asana is pranayama, asana is samadhi. None of them are separate. However, as Pattabhi Jois has said about the eight limbs: "The first four can be taught. The last four can only be caught."

I'll give it another 10 years. Maybe at that point I'll have sufficient physical mastery of the asanas, the transitions into and out of them, their sequencing, and the most skillful application of bandhas and drishti, in order to allow boredom to more fully arise.

'60's LSD TEST IN THE UK

Apparently the experiment required them to test it on the foxiest girls in London?

Link via PAPPADEMAS.

The Blizzard of '08

People are cross-country skiing down the street in front of our house here in Portland. For my part, I have secured several pieces of flint. I am carving some into firestarters, the rest I'm flaking into spear-heads. I'll afix the spear-heads to long sticks in anticipation of hunting the wooly fucking mammoth and sabre-tooth tigers sure to be returning at this, the dawn of the new Ice Age.

This is Portland, however, so rest assured I'll do my hunting from the saddle of a fixed-gear bicycle.

Sweet consolation, then, that we leave for SoCal December 25.

Naturally, we'll be going to see the Boss in Encinitas.

The other day, I told Tara, "Honey, we have to get on our A-game here, or else the B0ss is going to think we've been slacking!"

Tara has been fitting her legs behind her head and coming up from karandavasana. "I don't have anything to worry about," she said.

There's definitely something about practicing with the Boss that makes us step sharpish. Nothing like those tan legs hoving into the corner of one's vision to inspire a little extra English on a pose.

Perhaps my favorite strategy that Tim employs is the Sneak Attack, when he vanishes from your field of vision. Perhaps he's behind the pillar? You enter an asana — only he's been behind you the entire time! Shazam! Your feet are on your head! The only way to survive is to give up.

NARCISSUS, O NARCISSUS

Let's go big-picture here for a second. Most of us practice ashtanga vinyasa, which is a living tradition. Both parts of that phrase, "living" and "tradition," are important considerations.

It's a "living" tradition in that we are fortunate enough to have Pattabhi Jois still living and (mostly) teaching in Mysore. The system grows, changes and evolves as he sees fit, one hopes based on his years of experience practicing, teaching, and observing.

In this regard, it's important to consider that Yoga Mala is not a shastra. It's a manual, albeit one to which serious practitioners should give serious consideration. However, we ought to remember that it was first published in 1957. Would you want to be treated by a doctor who's reading medical texts and practicing techniques from 1957?

What we can take away from this consideration is the idea that the fundamental techniques and concepts about medicine and anatomy — and vinyasa, bandha, and drishti — have not changed or been transformed since then. They have, however, evolved.

Ashtanga means "eight limbs," after all, and not "eight stairs," or "eight steps," or "eight rungs," and implicit in the word "anga" is the conception of a system that is organic, interrelated, and rhizomatic.

As a living "tradition," ashtanga vinyasa is comprised of established techniques and sequences, to be transmitted by a teacher and practiced in a prescribed manner.

The benefits to practicing within a tradition are many. It's vital to have other people, a teacher or otherwise, say, "You are not the first to experience this. I have been there, I have felt that, too. Now get back to your breathing, bandhas, drishti."

This is helpful beyond the purely physical aspect of the practice. It's more than simple advice on how to press your lotus up into handstand or grab your thighs in a backbend. When the siddhis manifest, it's having someone to ground you. When Hanuman speaks to you during meditation, it's having someone tell you to focus on your breathing and bandhas. When you walk out of the shala, suffused with Oneness, it's someone to remind you to take your shoes. When you begin teaching, it's someone telling you it's not a good idea to sleep with your students.

The confines of tradition also help one emerge from under the shadow of one's ego. Pattabhi Jois says, "Asana is correct, pain is going." Jois is, like Patanjali, nothing if not pithy. He does not say, "Asana is correct, pleasure is there." This is the same way Shankara uses "neti, neti," because, as when trying to describe Brahman, the affirmative is entirely inadequate to describe the state of an asana.

Often, what feels "good" feels pleasurable. Confusion arises, though, when "feeling good" is conflated with the means and end of yoga, which is Union. "Feeling good" and Union are often parallel pursuits, but they are not the same pursuit. Quite frequently the practice of yoga, the practice of Union, and the sensation of pleasure, not to mention comfort and ease, are entirely at odds.

Let's face it, sometimes yoga can — and should — fucking hurt. There's an autobiography by New York poet John Giorno called You've Got to Burn to Shine. Sometimes, if you're lucky, your most deeply cherished beliefs of self get tossed on the fire, and the tapas of practice consumes them. And that can hurt.

Other common mistakes about the purpose of yoga, all of which stem from transposing two similar but ultimately separate and usually shallower conceptions are: yoga as fitness workout, yoga as stress relief, yoga as a therapeutic tool for physical rehabilitation, even yoga as meditation. These are all pleasant and marketable side effects of a yoga practice, but they are not its purpose or intent.

So if one abandons the confines — and they are confines, make no mistake — of a tradition, and one follows one's inner guru, one holds up the mirror to oneself, what tends to happen? At least in a Mysore room, I've noticed that practices tend to drift towards varying degrees of narcissism. That is, the practice begins to play up the practitioner's strengths and avoids their weaknesses. It only serves to sharpen one's sense of a separate self.

When you hold your own mirror, you open yourself to various blind-spots, pitfalls, and subtle but pervasive and very powerful tendencies. Narcissus held up his own mirror — in the Hellenic version, he kept leaning forward to admire himself in a pool of water until fell in and drowned. In the whirlpool of conditioned existence, one would imagine.

Do you "need" a hands-on teacher, as opposed to, say, practicing from Yoga Mala or As It Is? Or Richard Freeman's or Sharath's DVD? No, of course not. You don't need to live in Spain to learn to speak Spanish — though it sure can accelerate the process. But are you really practicing the teaching as it's laid out in the manual?

Then arises the question as to the legitimacy of the manual you're using, and which texts you choose to pay attention to — again, people tend to cherry-pick texts that support their tendencies, their desires, what they want to believe, and what makes them feel good. A practice manual should support practice, and put words and context around aspects of the practice. Texts are incidental and secondary to the practice, as it's from the practice that the texts are derived, and not the other way around.

A good teacher will serve to hold the mirror into which you gaze. They'll prod you when you're lazy and cuff you about the head when you take pride in your practice. The different ashtanga vinyasa series can serve as gurus of their own. They are (relatively) unchanging and ever-present, and they hold up a mirror in which one can, if one suffers a serendipitous accident, see one's Self.

It takes discipline to get up every morning to perform them — but then, it takes even greater discipline, one might even say heroic discipline, to surrender to the sequence.

It is so very difficult to abandon the notion that we always know what's best for ourselves. Often, perhaps usually, what's "best" for us tends to be what's pleasurable or self-satisfying. It can become fantastically difficult to discern when we're operating from self-interest when aspects of the practice begin gratifying subtler, deeper psychological notions of self.

The "no pain, no gain" mentality is an example of a person causing themselves actual physical pain in order to meet deeper, more powerfully held ideas of self-worth.

Again, this is where surrender is important. A good teacher will cut the Gordian knot of "Should I or shouldn't I?" by determining when one is ready for another pose. There is a paradox in the inherent freedom of a disciplined practice, and to paraphrase Douglas Brooks, in order to see all points, you must fix your gaze on one point. It can be very liberating to relieve yourself of the idea that you know best for yourself, though this surrender, too, can be a practice in itself if it lacks love and faith in both a teacher and the teachings.

The ashtanga vinyasa yoga is a progressive sequences of asanas. This is an important characteristic to remember. If you skip or gloss over a pose now, the skills you are not developing will return to haunt you later. So there is most often tremendous value in exploring a pose with the attention and focus naturally generated at one's end-pose.

Specific to second series, with regards to kapotasana, people are generally protected by their inflexibility. However, my experience is that if one is unable to grab the heels from day one, kapotasana will be impossible if one cannot rise from laguvajrasana or stand up from a backbend.

The real trouble comes from dwi pada sirsasana, a pose that will destroy your back if you do not address eka pada sirasana. For some people, eight months to a year on eka pada are what may be required.

My wife Tara, for example, spent a year to 16 months on eka pada sirsasana before Tim moved her along to dwi pada. This is a woman who could do full splits in all directions (samakonasana with feet on folding chairs, even), yet needed that length of time to develop the specific hip flexibility for her anatomical proportions.

On a practical level, what to do if you don't have access to a teacher? You can travel to see a teacher, or you can practice with other people, once a week, once a month, twice a year. Attend workshops. Organize daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly self-practice groups on Craig's List

I met people in Mysore who had practiced on their own for years, in their closets, hallways, and kitchens, and whose only exposure to a teacher came once every 14 months or so when they traveled to Mysore.

If you do have access to a teacher, however fleeting, try to establish with them some sort of dialogue regarding certain aspects of your practice. If you're lucky, you can develop a relationship in which you don't get what you think you want. What's gained easily is esteemed lightly, and usually done with poor form and bad technique, both of which are anathema to a definition, put forth by Krishna in the Gita, of yoga as "skill in action."

I assisted Tim Miller for roughly two years in his Introduction to Ashtanga Yoga class, held every Monday night at 5:30. During that time, I came to see several of the same people over and over again — but only ever in the Monday night class, never in Mysore, or in any of the other led classes.

I asked Tim his thoughts on the subject of people never moving to other classes. "Some people are just on the 10-year plan," he responded. Which also in a way sums up his attitudes towards teaching Mysore-style, too.

One can burn through intermediate, even third series, perhaps in the spirit of inventiveness and exploration (though watch out for the craving for novelty). Perhaps not the most efficient and skillful way to learn and practice, but give it 10, 15 years of daily, consistent practice. It'll smooth out! Or you'll break yourself and be forced to start again.

HOME PRACTICE, PLUS CHILD

The way our current schedule has shaken out, Tara and I have been practicing at home on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 6 to about 8 a.m., though depending on when Rowan wakes up, we occasionally have to truncate our practices.

This in turn means we rise sometime between 4:30 and 5 a.m. for the sitting, breathing and (in my case) espresso-consuming portions of practice.

Rowan woke up a little early this morning, and so was put to good use during Tara's backbends. She's also getting the post-urdvha dhanurasana smush down pat.

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.