Back to Basics: Yoga as I know it, 101

Of course, I've been following the Anusara scandal lately. And I have many, many thoughts about it. And there's many of you that I'd love to sit down and talk them over with - hashing it all out over a cup of tea. Or maybe a luscious glass of red wine.

But otherwise - right now, I'm feeling like it's not my story to tell. So I'm going to write about what I know . . .

Which is:

I spent two hours practicing by myself today in a mostly empty room. And it was wonderful. And I realized that - yes, I am so, so blessed to have this knowledge. Of how to get into my tight spots and feel them start to open. To sense something wonderful, and even mysterious, about such a seemingly banal process. Um, just stretching . . .  yeah, just stretching my mind open again, prying off the scabs of ancient samskaras and feeling the liberated fresh skin breathing underneath.

Jail

Mia, a Chicago yoga teacher I don't really even know (we volunteer for the same organization and briefly met once) sent me (and the other members of our little "Yoga for Recovery" group) an email yesterday explaining that she's just had a conversation with a MD who works at the Cook County Jail (where our group runs yoga classes for women on Fridays) that made her realize just how little she (and by extension, all of us) knows about the women we're teaching there.

i felt ignorant. maybe i'm the only one in the dark, but did you know that our clients are in this usually court-ordered "sheriff's women's justice program" for 120 days and are drug addicts &/or mentally disabled &/or prostitutes trying to leave the life?

She embedded the link below, which previews a documentary on prostitution produced by the Oprah channel. Surprisingly to me, it highlights the program we've connected with through our program. Lisa - the woman who starts speaking at 1 minute 24 seconds into the video - is someone I've worked with a number of times. She's our insider point person and a huge yoga booster.

Lisa lights up the room with her enthusiasm whenever she helps me set up the room for yoga, chatting brightly and energetically as we push furniture to the sides of the room. I had no clue that she's been a prostitute for 20 years. I can't even imagine.

But while we're working together to get ready to provide a yoga class to a dozen or so women, the truth is that . . . I don't even care. I don't mean that in a callous way. I just mean that - if we're working together, and if we both believe that the yoga's worth our time and effort, then - we're just  together, absorbed in that project, in that moment. And the past and the present and society and its cruelties and inequalities don't go away. But they don't divide us either. We're just there, dedicating some time to some yoga - and to some exploration, and some healing.

And while there's no silver bullet, there is a distinct, real sense that - this is valuable. It does work. How? Why? Right then, it doesn't matter. I don't have to analyze it, prove it, or even say it. I just notice that my mind is clearer, that I feel more grounded. And I see enough students lighting up, and smiling, and thanking us as they say "goodbye" to feel assured that no, it's not just me - they're getting a lot out of the yoga, too.

And it's a good feeling. 

Sneak Peek: Prostitution: Leaving The Life

Prostitution: Leaving the Life tells the story of the world of prostitution from the people that know it best - the women that live it. Three former prostitutes work with the Cook County Sheriff to help women in Cook County Jail leave the life, and gain the life skills and confidence to escape prostitution.

Blather 

Now, the latest iteration in the endlessly spooling Anusara scandal story is "Science of Yoga" author William J. Broad writing with easy, jocular journalistic authority in the New York Times that since yoga "began as a sex cult," practitioners today shouldn't really be surprised when libidinous gurus color outside the lines when it comes to ill-advised or even abusive sex with their followers. OK . . . sigh. How to muster the energy to even start to address all the problems involved with framing the issues at hand in this way? Right now, I don't have it in me. So I won't.


Basics

There's a lot of interesting talk about Tantra circulating around in the newly opened space created by John Friend's current implosion. What I used to call the "Anusasra Police" formerly had Tantra on commodified lock-down - it was their thing, damn it, and they were going to control the terms of discourse so that it was quite clear that they had their copyright right there, squarely on top of it.

Well, that's no longer the case. And that's good. But still, all of this intricate Tantra talk that's been circulating in the blogosphere recently can just feel like a lot of - blah blah blah. At least to me.

Bottom line is that: I don't really care about your religion or your ideology or your atheism or your science or your whatever. But if you love yoga, and find that the physicality of asana can in fact ignite some magic for you - then it seems to me that the core issues are quite simple:

Is it helping you to heal, and through that process, helping others?
Is it helping you to grow in wisdom, and compassion?
Is is helping you to connect with something mysterious, and sustaining?

If we can pretty much answer "yes" to those questions, then - do we really need anything more?

Kripalu's Reincarnation and the Anusara Scandal

This isn't the first time that a sex scandal has hit an American yoga community hard. Regardless of how the current Anusara controversy plays out, it's a good time to go back and re-read Chapter 16 of Stephen Cope's classic, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self (1999). (Or, if you've never read it, buy it and read it cover-to-cover! If you have any interest in yoga, it's one of the best contemporary works out there.)

In the book, Cope describes how Kripalu imploded after finding out that its guru-teacher-leader, Amrit Desai, had been secretly having multiple extra-marital affairs for years. The wonderful thing about the story, however, is that it explains how the community eventually emerged stronger and wiser because of the scandal; newly dedicated to and organized around meaningful democratic principles.

Kripalu today (http://www.kripalu.org/article/656)

Cope, a practicing psychologist, astutely describes the deeper psychological roots of the scandal:

Among the hundreds of people of all ages, races, and religions who have been residents at Kripalu, I can safely say that almost all came seeking some version of the idealized family. In the guru and in the community at Kripalu, thousands of seekers sought the perfect Dad and Mom . . . (they) bring a tremendous amount of idealization and projection in their relationships with teachers. We fall in love with our teachers, and with our communities, and as a result we do not see them at all clearly.

As the idealized love driven by unconscious desires projected at them grows, Cope explains, it's easy for teachers who aren't yet ready to handle this wave of adulation to become sucked into these powerful psychological dynamics:

If the teacher is not aware of his own unresolved needs to be admired, highly praised, and adored, he or she may being to believe the idealizations of his students. An air of unreality begins to infuse the entire situation . . .  Teacher and student grow further and further from an understanding of their complicated unconscious motivations. It is only a matter of time before the situation collapses of its own weight.

When the guru was exposed, all hell broke loose. Of course, as a live-in ashram, it was impossible to keep things quiet and contained when events including "shouting, screaming, and what sounded like furniture flying" were there for all to hear. ("'You fucked him. For years. You fucked him. Don't tell me you didn't!' The entire building stopped breathing in that instant.")

Did the community then draw on their yogic resources, start taking deep breaths again, tap into their inner peace, step out of their "mis-alignment," and gracefully forgive? Well . . . there was a bit more to the process than that.

Within days, the guru and his entire family were gone. Press releases were written, forthrightly declaring the details of the scandal . . .  Standing in the naked truth was difficult to bear, but we were doing it . . . We were standing in the best traditions of yoga. We had learned something. This was good.

 But the bonfire did not stop there. There were legal maneuverings. Lawyers' bills mounting into the millions. Challenges from former residents. New allegations of sexual misconduct . . .  The guru's throne was smashed to smithereens in the main chapel. The flames raged on . . . 

Over the course of the next years, the community would go through a complete death and rebirth. Many of the senior members would leave . . .  most did well. The more vulnerable remained deeply wounded by from the betrayal and death of the idealized family. The entire organization was restructured, from the board down.

. . . With several years, signs of rebirth were in the ascendent. But the dream had to die, the guru had to leave, and the idealization had to be irreparably broken. 

 Cope goes on to explain that the success and failure of Kripalu were inextricably interrelated:

It was not the scandal that forced the death of the old forms of yoga at Kripalu. Quite the opposite. It was the impending death of the old paradigm that required the scandal. It is clear that the fact of Amrit Desai's affairs had been in the unconscious of the community all along. It was not new information. Quite a few individuals held the secret. It was simply information that could not be brought to the light of consciousness until the community was more or less ready for it.

In 1994 when the scandal erupted, Gurudev had not suddenly changed. In fact, the sexual misconduct was by that time many years old. Amirt was who he had always been -- ambitious, brilliant, sometimes a sincere yogi, sometimes just a smooth performer, too often a teacher who was too charming for his own good. It was the community's own capacity to see and bear the truth that had changed.

The bonfire was just as much a sign of success as of failure.

I visited Kripalu back in the mid-2000s and loved it. It is beautiful, and has a clean, clear, positive vibe. Of course, it's not perfect. But the organization does offer tons of valuable teachings to tens of thousands of people each year.

I felt blessed to have visited; it's a memory I still cherish today.

In Praise of the Local Yoga Teacher

I've learned a huge amount from reading about yoga online. I've connected with amazing people. I've had the opportunity to say some stuff I care about and have some people listen to me. And all of that's been wonderful and gratifying.

But there's also been times when reading about yoga, and learning about other practitioners' views on all sorts of yoga-related issues has been a terrible downer.

And so far, on the whole, 2012 has been more of the latter than the former.

You know, there's been that New York Times article about yoga wrecking your body. Yes, it was good to raise the issue. But then it got depressing, learning about all the yoga injuries, thinking about all the unqualified teachers, hearing about why there's so many unjustified teacher training programs, and on and on . . .

And don't even get me started about the whirlwind of debate that formed around that stupid Equinox video. When Kathryn Budig posted yet another huffy shallow piece in the HuffPo, I couldn't help it - it dragged me down all day.

Sometimes I feel like I've learned too much about yoga - or, that is, about American yoga today. And it's just like - ick. Get me out of here. I hate this shit.

Thank you, thank you

And then.

And then I get back on my mat to practice at home because I'm feeling so cranky and stiff and I know that I just need some asana. And it makes me feel so much better. And it's great. And I think - OK, forget all that crap. Yoga really is great. At least here at home alone in my own little room.

Which is wonderful. But it still feels lonely. Until . . .

I make it back to my local yoga class. I drive to a nearby studio with some friends. We've all managed to arrange our work schedules to attend this class together. It's small. Twelve students would be a big day. Usually it's more like 6 - 8.

bradfordkissellphotoart.com

But it's magic.

We've got 6, 7, 8, 9 women in a room, including the teacher. And we work our way through some really serious stuff. And it's fun, and it's hard, and it's deep, and it's wonderful.

And I realize - all those headlines are important, but they're not the backbone of what's happening. No, it's the stories that are too "small" to be written up in the New York Times.

It's all those teachers who've invested thousands of their own dollars in training programs that will take years, if ever, to pay off. It's the teachers who trek to their local studios, or gyms, or church basements, week after week to teach a small group of students, who may or may not be able to make it regularly, who may or may not be able to use what's being offered to lift off. But who go back and keep teaching anyway. And keep studying, keep practicing.

Who will never be on the cover of Yoga Journal. Who will never be a headliner at Wanderlust. Who can't help but wonder sometimes why they're investing so many resources in something that seems so impractical. Who can't help but feel bad sometimes because they know that they'll never be featured in a video that's gotten two million hits; that they'll never be beautiful enough to command those big advertising dollars.

Who've studied the Sutras not because it sounds impressive, but because they're interested in learning more about yoga. Who've wondered about enlightenment not because they're on some byzantine ego trip, but because they want to plumb the depths of what life really offers.

Who will always try their best for their students - even if there's only three of them in the room, when they were hoping for 20. Who'll be careful to note what each one needs for the next class, and try to devote some of their scant time to learning more about it before they get back in front of that student again.

Who really want to share the best of what they've experienced through their own asana practice with others. Who know that they don't understand what this gift means, but know that they care about sharing it.

Thank you. 

http://blog.uvm.edu/iberrizb/tree-houses/

Yoga Teachers with Guns

One of my blogosphere friends, a yoga teacher who lives in Nashville, had told me that in her world, it's not uncommon for yoga teachers to pack heat. I, living in my bluest-of-blue-state bubble of an uber-liberal neighborhood in solidly Democratic Chicago, was stunned. Yoga teachers with guns?!

 I wanted to do a red state-blue state blog post dialog with her on how weird this may - or may not - seem, depending on your political and cultural sensibilities. But the subject didn't interest her. Yeah, yoga teachers with guns. Lots of conservatives around here. So what's new? Not inspiring.

Now I find that CBS produced a little human interest news segment on (female) yoga teachers and moms who like to shoot:

I find this fascinating.There is so much that's so important packed into this subject, it's hard to know where to start. But I'll just mention a few:

Feminism. Bracketing the yoga teacher part for the moment, is this whole trend of women toting guns empowering to women? A recent book, Chicks with Guns, reports that 15-20 million American women own their own firearms. And they love them. "When you get outside of the blue-state cities," explains author Lindsay McCrum, "everybody has a gun.” Shit. Really?

For those of us who associate guns more with criminals, right-wingers, and survivalists than hunters and skeet shooters, that seems pretty scary. But of course, the counter-argument is that guns enable women to protect themselves, and are therefore empowering. One conservative blog on "The Changing Demographics of Gun Ownership" made precisely this point, posting these provocative photos:

Politics and Culture. Statistics show that American gun ownership is disproportionately concentrated among conservative, white, non-urban men (although, as these recent stories about the growing popularity of guns among other demographic groups such as women show, this may be changing). Here's a table reporting on a 2005 Gallup poll:

As Gallup explains, the stereotype of a gun owner being "a white male, most likely Republican, living in a rural area of the South" is essentially true. "While many Americans who don't fit that demographic profile do own guns, the likelihood of owning a gun is higher among people with these demographic characteristics."

So, as someone who's really not into white male dominated, conservative Southern politics, guns carry a lot of negative political and cultural associations - and the data show that these are well-founded.

Buddhists & Yogis with Guns. While it's impossible to say how prevalent it is, it's certainly likely that just as the number of women owning guns is rising, so is the acceptance of gun ownership in the  American (convert) Buddhists and yoga communities. When researching this post, I came across the following picture from a blog post on "Buddhists with Guns":

The blogger, Justin Whitaker, notes that "Well, for the record, that’s a yoga instructor (sister), mechanic (brother), and Buddhist scholar (me)":

Growing up in rural Montana – about 10 miles north of Helena, the capital city, neighbors had horses, dirt road, cactus in the back yard – we were introduced to guns fairly early in life. I think I skipped the “you’ll shoot your eye out!” bb-gun that many friends were getting and moved on to a pump-action single shot pellet-gun around the age of 8.

So . . . urban blue-stater that I am, I get that. I understand that guns are not necessarily evil. I think that it can be fun to shoot, say, beer cans (which I've done, and enjoyed). And while I personally would never want to hunt, I'm completely OK with people who hunt for food (as opposed to sport. I definitely have ethical problems with that).

I can also imagine living in circumstances where carrying a gun for self-defense might feel justified - e.g., impoverished rural areas where you're worried about being jumped by meth addicts and know that law enforcement or even other people are likely to be far away. 

BUT -

That said, in the bigger picture, I'm not happy about the whole women-with-guns, yoga-teachers-with-guns, Buddhist-scholars-with-guns sensibility at all. Really, I think it's just another unfolding of the dismaying logic of:

1. Yoga and meditation have become much more mainstream.
2. The mainstream has become much more right-wing.
3. Therefore, more people involved with yoga, meditation, mindfulness, Buddhism, etc. are folding those practices into conservative-to-right wing politics. (Witness, of course, the recent Ayn Rand promo by Lululemon.)

 
Some will say that yoga, meditation, etc. have their own cultural logic in which guns have nothing to do with right-wing politics. For example, when YogaDork posted on the CBS piece referenced above, her one commentator sanguinely suggested that yoga teachers who love to shoot guns is "no different then practicing aikido (a Japanese martial art) or Kyudo (zen archery)."

Um, well, sure - in some cases, that may be true. (It's also true, however, that we don't necessarily want to replicate many of the politics historically connected with, for example, Zen.) But considered as a broad cultural movement, it's not. Instead, what it means is that American yoga is starting to be "rebranded" as something that's no longer associated with cultural liberalism. (If you read the comments on yoga blogs that attract more conservative types, you'll see that there's many out there who're eager to push it in a more right-wing direction.)

Which is why I think that those who'd like to see yoga and meditation as vehicles for realizing a different type of cultural and political sensibility in North America need to step up and speak out. Many, of course, are. (Witness Seane Corn's and Michael Stone's engagement with the Occupy movement.) But there needs to be more.

I think that when it comes to feminism, politics, culture, yoga, and Buddhism, in the final analysis the most important point is that we desperately need inspiring alternatives to the dominant (and growing) view that it's just great to embrace guns as a means of empowerment. The more that people like women and yoga teachers, who've traditionally been more committed to creating other alternatives, instead shift to celebrating the power of the gun, the more impoverished our culture will be, and the more dangerous our world will become.

On Light, Photography, Yoga and the Body

Sometimes, life's quandaries seem so devastatingly simple: we need to love and be loved in order to thrive, but the world is commonly callous, and cruel. We're hurt by others, and we hurt ourselves because it's so hard to learn better. We're angry at ourselves and others for our human shortcomings. We're fearful of more pain. It seems like too much of a risk to stay open to love. Yet if we don't, we wither and what's precious within us dims into darkness. It's a life's work to create the courage to love ourselves and this fucked up world. Yet no matter how bad it gets, there's always that flicker of spirit to be breathed back into life.

The candle in the darkness image is sooo cliched, right? But that's why I love blogging - a quick internet search, and voila - I found an image that I truly like. It's from the blog, Maggie's Photography, in the post titled, "Weekly Photo Challenge: Light."

Which feels like another small serendipity, as this random image search just brought together the key themes of this day: the week, photography, challenge, light . . .

Concretely, our power went out for the entire evening earlier this week. We hauled out every flashlight and candle we had to get by until bedtime. Most of the flashlights were broken. So we relied on the candles.

They cast off a surprising amount of light. And they captivated us, one by one. I found myself transfixed by the row of flames on my dresser, which arrested me and made me feel how deeply different it was to live in synch with the dark, with only these small flames for illumination. Later, my son, who was doing his homework by candlelight, remarked that he had just realized how much he likes candles. Coming from a kid who's passionate about xBox, skateboarding, urban culture, and electronics, this was notable . . .

But I think we all recognized that unexpectedly finding the house lit up by candles and blowing them out early to go to sleep in the dark . . . and really noticing the darkness of the dark - felt quietly wonderful.

Then there was the question of photography. I stirred up a bit of a ruckus with the lead photo I chose for my latest Yoga Modern post on "women in yoga." It's of a very thin, very young looking woman posing (incongruously) in a lush bed of brightly colored hair scrunchies - you know, those hairband-covered-with-fabric things that were popular at some point in the not too dimly distant past. (You'll have to click through to check it out - I'm not reposting it here. Instead, that's Susan Sontag, above. But more on that later.)

Anyway, so the model in this photo has multiple rings of these scrunchies on her ankles and hair too. Other than that, she's wearing only a skimpy black leotard. She's staring into the camera, looking a little come hither, and a little - whatever. She seems casually but defiantly comfortable with the playful absurdity of the shot. But because she seems so young, and unapologetically sexual, there's also something discomforting about it - it just doesn't seem quite right.

Or so I thought. A surprising (to me) number of people who commented on the post were simply offended by it instead. I hadn't anticipated the intensity of this reaction - the photo was not central to the content, really. But it was meant to reignite some of the same conflicting emotions that images of women in yoga can stir up more generally (at least when they start to be critically interrogated. Many people get really uncomfortable with that, and remarkably quickly.) I wanted to capture some of these warring emotions in one image, rather than juxtapose a "good" photo against a "bad" one (which is what one reader urged me to do instead).

But my intended strategy backfired a bit, as it became a distraction from my written content. But then again, maybe that was the lesson to be learned here: that the ideas I laid out in words couldn't necessarily compete (or hold a candle to, ha ha) the emotions ignited by a provocative image.

It's yet another testimony to the power of the photographic image. Which can be so potent, it's hard to step out of the emotional force field it generates.

So I started thinking about photography, and the ubiquity of these images in our culture today. I wanted to read the words of someone who had thought into this phenomenon long and well, which of course brought to mind Susan Sontag (pictured above). I realized then that we don't own a copy of On Photography, which seemed like enough of a lamentable lack in the holdings of our home library to justify spending $10 to order a copy - so I did.

I also became curious to revisit what Mark Singleton had written about the importance of photography in the creation of modern yoga. I didn't have time to reread the chapter that deals with this (8). But I did skim through to find this quote, which I like very much - there's a lot packed in here, and I think it's charming in its off-handed brilliance (like Mark himself, who I loved being able to meet this summer in Toronto . . . ):

Today, the yoga body has become the centerpiece of a transnational tableau of personalized well-being and quotidian redemption, relentlessly embellished on the pages of glossy publications like Yoga Journal. The locus of yoga is no longer at the center of an invisible ground of being, hidden from the gaze of all but the elite initiate or the mystic; instead, the lucent skin of the yoga model becomes the ubiquitous signifier of spiritual possibility, the specular projection screen of characteristically modern and democratic religious aspirations. In the yoga body - sold back to a million consumer-practitioners as an irresistible commodity of the holistic, perfectible self - surface and anatomical structure promise ineffable depth and the dream of incarnate transcendence.

Well . . . unpack that, and it's sort of like - ok, ouch (at least, perhaps, for us more committed yoga practitioners). But of course, he's right - at least socially and culturally. But being the sort of scholarly work that this is, it does leave out that back door of redemption that doesn't change over time - yeah, breathing some life back into that almost suffocated, but never extinguished inner light.

I also thought about how damn hard it is to find photographs of contemporary yoga that really capture the spirit of what - in any meaningful sense - it's really about. It's easier with meditation - perhaps because there's no impetus toward drawing our desiring gaze to the body, which is so inevitably commodified today. Instead, the photographer's focus is where it should be: on capturing the outer manifestation of that inner light.

Random Yoga Magic: Ballooning Spiders &c.

I love random moments that feel like magic melded into the mundane elements of everyday life.

I had a few of these this week, already. It’s good. 

#1. I open the door to the room in my house where I practice yoga. Stepping in, my eye is immediately caught by the sight of a spider strangely suspended in midair.

It’s hovering halfway between the floor and the ceiling, right over my round blue meditation cushion.

I stop moving and watch, curious. The spider drops straight down, touches the meditation cushion, then bounces straight back up to where it was before. Suspended in midair. In the middle of a room. No web in sight.

How is it doing that? I peer closer.

I don’t see anything other than a tiny gossamer triangle suspended in midair a few inches above the spider. How is that there?, I wonder. Has the spider woven some sort of suspension mechanism from a speck of dust?

The spider floats. I stare.

Eventually, though, I decide that I just want to practice.

I move my mat away from the spider, who’s invaded my normal area. I decide to just let him be.

I start practicing. Next time I look behind me to check him out, he’s no longer in midair. I look up. Yup, he’s made it all the way up to the ceiling.

It’s an old house. That was pretty far. I don’t know how he managed. But it was impressive.

This feels like a triumph. Even though I normally recoil from “bugs” (ewwh, gross), I’m oddly happy for this strange feat.

I go back to practicing. Next time I look back to check, the spider’s nowhere to be found. Disappeared. Vanished. Gone without a trace.

I’m glad. It feels metaphorical. I think of the thread that I try to follow in my own life, in my own practice. It feels just as invisible as whatever that spider was suspended from. But just as vital. I hope that I’m moving up too. I think that I am.

It feels like a sign. 

#2. Later, I stumble into a post explaining that what I’ve seen is a “ballooning spider.”

From “Travelling on Gossamer Without Wings,” by Tom Turpin, Professor of Entomology at Purdue University:

Spiders sometimes fly. Not under their own power, of course, but by a process known as ballooning. Ballooning spiders hitch a ride on their silk as the breeze carries it. Spider silk floating on wind currents is known as gossamer. It has attracted attention for centuries. The word "gossamer" is an old English term, apparently based on a period of warm weather in November, known as goose summer. That was the time of year when geese were eaten. Late fall is also the time when ballooning spiders are most likely to be seen floating on the breeze.

Yes, it was a warm day in November. But who knew this was “goose summer”? I didn’t. And wtf was the spider doing inside the house, above my meditation cushion anyways?

(Besides giving me a magic sign, that is . . . )

 I read on. And yes: another strange synchronicity. Turpin quotes Whitman. Yep, old Walt, none other than the namesake of this blog:

A noiseless, patient spider, I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself:
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space.
Ceaselessly, musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them.
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

#3. I’m practicing next to a woman I’m friendly with in my regular weekly yoga class. She’s a teacher, too. This particular class is full of yoga teachers.

Doing minutely detailed variations of Bow. All of a sudden, there’s something that feels like an electric CRACK in the air next to me. But all I hear instead is this lovely woman next to me starting to cry, almost sobbing, and at the same time, amping up her Ujjayi breathing. Breathing slowly, steadily, strongly, powerfully. Sobbing, and breathing.

I think, this sounds like a heart breaking – and opening. It feels like an energetic body cracking open – and growing stronger. I go deeper into my own backbend, and feel my own chest and shoulders open. It feels like inches; it feels like a seismic shift; it feels like nothing special. Sobbing. Breathing.

Then everything shifts, and quiets. We finish class. Rolling up mats, our eyes meet. We pause, and hug. “It was nice practicing next to you today,” I say.

“You too,” she replies. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Yoga happens, I think. And then it’s on with the rest of the day. 

Buddhist Practices of the Self: Reflections of a Post-Modern Ex-Academic Yogi

All images in this post are works by British artist Andy Goldsworthy.

  
I went to a free lecture yesterday morning at the University of Chicago on "Buddhist Practices of the Self." It was given by Steven Collins, a professor in the South Asian Languages and Civilizations program there, who lists his current research interests as "the translation of Pali texts, civilization and gender, madness and possession." Now, how cool is that? This is the sort of academia that I love, truly.

And the experience and substance of his lecture were both right on target for me. After all, I had toiled away for years, getting a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago myself . . .  so it was an odd experience to be back, much later, now a certified yoga teacher, writing a book about 21st century yoga - and still in the process of integrating my academic past and yogic present.

Practices of the self, indeed.

Philosophy as Self-Creation

The lecture began by fleshing out the concept of "practices of the self" via several historical examples. (And yes, all you knowledgeable readers out there, the fact that Buddhism doesn't believe in a "self" was discussed. But it would take too long to get into that here.) So, for example, the ancient Greeks believed that studying philosophy transformed the self. And that, really, was the point: meaningful knowledge changes who you are.

Learning in this sense is a very deliberate process of acculturation - a shared tradition designed to develop particular ways of being.

It saddens me to think about how much this contrasts with our taken-for-granted understandings of education and learning. The mainstream model is to accumulate facts and techniques in order to demonstrate our proficiency on tests. It's a consumer-based, factory-model mindset. Take it in, process it, churn it out.

The point of learning isn't to transform your inner state of being; it's to make your social self more marketable and competitive.

I also thought about how dominant cultural patterns in our own society encourage particular ways of being . . . and that if we systematically promote junk food, cheap entertainment, and mindless distraction, it has a profound effect on who we are . . .

And it's a pretty disturbing thought, given what's been going on here lately.

From the Monastery to the Middle Class

Collins also talked about how until recently, practices of the self were found only in exclusive settings, such as monastic communities. In pre-modern Buddhism, meditation was for monks only (and, to a lesser extent, nuns. Collins briefly mentioned how nuns once existed in the Theravada tradition, but disappeared quite a long time ago. It's not clear why.) Traditionally, only a very small minority of people were assumed to be suited for such serious, engaged practices  - whether philosophy, meditation, studying scripture, or whatever.

While the masses had their devotional religious practices, these were quite different. And most of the population was necessarily absorbed in the work of everyday survival in any event.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, however, the rise of an educated middle class (particularly in the West, but also worldwide) expanded some of these practices out to a small, but significant minority of interested lay people. And so today, people like yours truly (and probably most of the people who bother to read this blog) practice meditation (and other parallel) techniques that were formerly the provenance of monks only.

Integrating Philosophy and Yoga

Now, I basically knew all this already. But what was interesting to me was the more personally recursive nature of this whole lecture experience. I had studied at the same institution in which I was now listening to this lecture. But at the time, I had no interest in yoga, meditation, Buddhism, or anything like that.

I had, however, been very interested in knowledge. And I certainly believed that serious learning was a practice of the self in the sense discussed in this lecture. But it was only later, after doing some the practices that I was now returning to hear about in this lecture, that I discovered that there are also other, very powerful ways of learning that transform the self too - e.g., yoga. 

So I was listening, and reflecting on how much I like this sort of incredibly elegant, erudite, academic learning (when it's well done, as this was, it's an absolute art). But I also realized that even when I had been the most single-mindedly into it, I had also found something lacking there too.

And now I know why. The experience of doing yoga opened up parts of my mind for learning that simply weren't being systematically cultivated before. Or at least that's how I think of it.

ISO More Post-Modern Yoga Philosophy

I wish, however, that the study of yoga today were far enough along that I could go to hear a parallel lecture on "Yogic Practices of the Self." Because I feel that the core idea presented - that these systematic practices of transformation have a long and important history, but that who's engaged with them has expanded, and that as that's happened, the practices themselves have changed - applies to yoga as well as Buddhism.

But yoga, being body-based, tends to be much less intellectually rigorous (today - not historically), mirroring our culture's larger mind/body split.

By the same token, however, I feel that bringing the body back into philosophy, and consciously recognizing how important both are in human development (particularly today, when we are so cut off from nature, and so alienated from our own physicality) is critical.

For me, integrating the mind and body, the academic and the yogic, my past and present feels very synergistic, compelling, creative, and enlivening. And I can't help but think that it would be good to have something along the same lines happening on a broader societal level as well.

And to some extent, of course, it is. I've read some great writing on yoga in the past year. But I also feel like we haven't even explored the full tip of the iceberg. There's still so much interesting and significant work that (in my view) calls out to be done. 

I guess my no-longer-secret ambition is to give a lecture on "Yogic Practices of the Self" someday myself . . . I have tons of ideas, although it would take awhile to get them organized. And then, the big question, of course, is: who would come? So for now, I'll just stick to blogging.

http://www.ucblueash.edu/artcomm/web/w2005_2006/maria_Goldsworthy/TEST/index.html