it's totally cool to dip your toes in the water first

My student Annette sent me a link to an elephant journal blog yesterday.  It was called "How I Dismissed the Ashtanga Police."  Here: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/01/how-i-dismissed-the-ashtanga-police-jean-marie-hackett/  I went through several responses.  First, annoyance at the deliberately provocative title.  Second, annoyance to the point of homicidal ideation as I read through the first two thirds of the article.  Third, relief when the writer got to her point, and finally back to milder annoyance at the deliberately provocative title.

It boils down to this: if I read one more fucking thing in elephant journal, recovering yogi, facebook, or the blogosphere in general in which somebody complains about Ashtanga police or Ashtangis' lack of a sense of humor, or boasts about not practicing six days a week, practicing on moon days and Saturdays, eating meat, never going to Mysore, omitting vinyasas, practicing other styles of yoga, or expresses indignation about Sharath or any other senior Ashtanga teacher's wealth, or self-identifies as a "rogue" or "maverick," etc. etc. I'm going to shit a whole chicken.  I'm fucking over it.  Ah.... Catharsis.

Now that that's off my chest, we can examine the root causes of the problem.  Why do some people feel compelled to write snarky, clever things about Ashtanga yoga?  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's probably often a case of too much, too soon.  To be sure, the Ashtanga yoga life, i.e. six day a week practice (regardless of whatever crappy circumstances short of fever or swelling), vegetarianism, trips to India, holding to the yamas and niyamas as best as possible, all that, is a daunting one.  Lots of sacrifice.  I sense that for some people the asana side of the practice gets its hooks into them and they want more, but are resentful of the encompassing life changes required to get more.  The bad news is that while there may be a way to get a really advanced asana practice without the aforementioned sacrifices, I don't know what it is and if anybody does, he or she isn't sharing it.  .

The good news is you don't have to jump into the deep end right off the bat.  Rather try, if you can, to shift your asana expectations and focus on what you're willing to sacrifice, and only sacrifice what your willing to sacrifice and not a scintilla more.  My own experience of Ashtanga yoga has been incremental.  I've been very fortunate to find that with each step I've taken towards immersion into the life, my asana practice and the other aspects of my life have improved.  I always went at my own pace and although I started out a little skeptical and cautious, I never got resentful.

Finally, I would like to defend some of my fellow Ashtanga teachers and call others of them out.  I think I speak for many of my colleagues when I say we don't care if you think Hinduism is silly or that moon days are mumbo-jumbo, or that we're all in a cult, or whatever.  As long as you come to practice and you don't show contempt to me or your fellow students in the shala, we're cool.  To paraphrase A Tribe Called Quest: "if you came to the party then I'm glad you came."  And if you open up to more, when you're ready, then we'll both be happy, trust me.  On the other hand, if you are a teacher who has ever made a student feel bad for not fully embracing the life, or pushed him or her into embracing the life faster than he or she was ready, then you are a dick and a fool.  For whatever reason, valid or not, Ashtanga does often get a bad rap for being to dogmatic.  Let's change this, shall we?

my favorite time of the day

A one-liner from Louis C.K., who is one of my favorite comedians, goes like this: "it's easy to have the body you want, you just have to want a shitty body."  This plays around the edge of where santosha (contentment) ends and nihilistic despair begins.  I was thinking about this when trolling through facebook this morning.  My teacher Kino had re-posted some of the instructional videos we made together and so I re-read the disparaging comments about my physique made by some lonely shit-heel out there in cyberspace.  The same sequence of gut reactions that I had the first time I read the comments played themselves out again.  First, amusement at the comments, which are actually pretty funny.  Then, some self-doubt and body image insecurity came up in spite of myself.  I know I'm not obese or even overweight by most any criteria, but neither could I be an underwear model.  One or zero.  "If you ain't first, you're last," as Ricky Bobby said.  Then, annoyance at the guy who made the comments, but that turned to compassion for him when I did a personal inventory.  I want what I have, so I have what I want.  While I can't say for sure, I'm guessing that this is probably not the case for the person who has to tell people, anonymously in a youtube comment stream, about his six-pack abs and chiseled arms.


There have been some dramatic changes in my life in the past few months, but I still want what I have, maybe more so than ever.  I've got a new schedule, a new house, and a new favorite time of the day.  My work load has decreased drastically, leaving me more time to tend to my new home, yet I am also more spartan than ever before.  This is my typical day now: up at four am; roll out of bed, brush teeth, etc.; walk the dog around the block, bond with him; get on my bike at quarter til five and ride to the metro rail station to catch the first train at 5:05; take the train to downtown Miami, get off and ride my bike through Overtown to the bus station and bus onto the beach; teach Mysore-style from 6-8:30am; practice; teach guided full primary if it's tuesday or thursday; come home by the same route; once I get home I have lunch and pick some household project to get done; make dinner; chill with Nubia; walk the dog one last time; go to bed; repeat...

The very best part of my day now is the last dog walk, which I do with Nubia.  Temperatures are cool (at least for next few more months) and it's quite serene in our little suburban enclave.  It is an activity known in the athletic circles as active rest and it's totally magical.   This simple act causes the three of us to bond ever deeper in some primal way.  I love it and look forward to it every day because I am reminded of what is essential, and that I have that.  Let my lucky circumstances be a springboard from which I can serve others.

the year in review, the year ahead

In writing this blog, I am getting a head start on a New Year's resolution.  Namely, to be consistent with my blogging.  So let the record reflect that I hereby resolve to issue blogs on the 10th, and 20th, and 30th of each month for the year of 2013, whether I have something to say or not.  Brace yourselves, I may be reduced to regurgitating dirty jokes.

It's been a busy year.  Achievements have included the selling of a home, the purchase of another, a trip to India, building my Mysore program at Miami Life Center to an unprecedented level, and lastly (as in just yesterday), the adoption of a beautiful retired racing greyhound.  Bummers have included the renovation of the aforementioned home, lack of a shared vacation with my wife, a persistent shoulder injury, my brush with prostatitis, and the handing of the Mysore program I worked very hard to build up over to the capable hands of my colleague Alexandra.

This is what I'm looking forward to in the year to come:  I'm excited to kickstart a Mysore program up out of the ashes.  For some time now the 6 am time slot at Miami Life Center has wobbled between languishing and inconsistent.  I'm eager and confident I can make something cool happen.  My lovely wife Nubia and I will go somewhere nice together.  Maybe back to New York city, maybe Portugal.  And speaking of travelling, a visiting student invited me to do a weekend workshop at her studio in Minneapolis.  This will be my first out-of-state extravaganza.  It is also an opportunity for me to stop playing the old Groucho Marx line ("I'd never join a club that would have me as member") and assume the mantle of an up-and-coming teacher with good knowledge to share.  I will try to do more weekend workshops, wherever I am welcome.  A trip to Mysore in November is in the plans, if possible.  I want to get some closure on my shoulder thing, one way or another.  Put more concretely: I want to deal with the level two SLAP tear in my left shoulder once and for all, by whatever means necessary up to and including surgery (surgery being a very last option, of course).  Finally, most importantly, I'm ready to start the so-called seventh series.  That said, not all options are on the table for that one.  If it happens, it happens.  In any event, it's always fun trying to make it happen, so we'll see.

So there.  I've set the bar high for this year.  Wish me luck, as I wish you luck on your resolutions.  Stand by for blogs on the 10th, 20th, and 30th.  Call me out if I don't come correct on this, please.  That is all.  Happy and prosperous New Year to all...

When you lose your trump card; or, Welcome to Middle Age

Disclaimer:  I know my last blog was medical and personal in nature, and I promise I'm really not fixated on these types of things.  I can only write about what is happening to me now.  Besides, I think this actually is revlevant to yoga practice vis-a-vis mens' issues.  So....

My trump card, as of late, has been pristine health.  You know, that radiant, yogic well-being we all boast about one way or another.  It's not that I go around saying "ask me about my health."  But when asked about being a vegetarian, for example, one of my lines is that I'm never sick.  When I bump into people from college or high school that I haven't seen in years and I'm complimented for looking fit, I credit, as casually and nonchalantly as possible, my yoga practice and my mostly abstemious lifestlye.  I have lost that trump card.  It turns out I have prostatitis.  My entry into middle age (I will be forty in February) has become most unceremonious.

Prostatitis is not as bad as having the Ebola virus or ALS, but it isn't fun.  When symptoms are at their worst.... I had described the symptoms in an earlier draft but I decided that it might be off-putting.  If you're desperate to know hit me up on facebook and I'll tell you.   Let it suffice to say, in short, that it sucks.  Apparently the condition is somewhat baffling.  Sometimes it's a clear-cut bacterial infection treatable by antibiotics.  Sometimes it's chronic, unexplainable, and tricky to treat.  My interweb research into the condition yielded this abstract, which could have heavy ramifications for my practice of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga as taught by Vidwan Shri Krishna Pattabhi Jois:

Anyone with prostatitis should be aware of the disagreement among professionals about the cause of prostatitis....

The reason that understanding this lack of agreement about the cause of prostatitis is important, especially for sufferers of the problem, is that the definition of a problem determines what you do about it. If you have chest pain caused by indigestion, you don't elect to have open heart surgery to correct the pain. Indigestion tells you what to do about your chest pain..

Similarly, if prostatitis is caused by chronic tension in the pelvic muscles where there is no evidence of infection, you might take pause before you elect to have your prostate removed or take another course of antibiotics or have your prostate gland painfully squeezed and massaged.

There is a genuine controversy about what prostatitis is among urologists and professionals treating this problem. There are three basic views outlined below:

Prostatitis is a condition caused by chronic squeezing of the pelvic muscles that, after a while, causes a self perpetuating and chronic irritation of the contents of the pelvic floor, including irritation of the nerves and other delicate structures involved in urination, ejaculation and defecation. Prostatitis is caused by a bacteria or unknown microorganism in the prostate gland. Prostatitis is an autoimmune problem.

The majority of urologists tend to propound the second and third theories. Because of this, their treatments tend to focus on the use of antibiotics or pain medications. Sometimes urologists will tell their patients that there may be a microbe responsible for the problem that still has not been identified..

Below I want to discuss the first that prostatitis as a condition of chronic tension in the pelvic floor. In this view, everyone deals with the stresses of life by focusing their tensions in different parts of the body. For instance some people tense in their necks and heads and get headaches. Some tense in their gastrointestinal tracts and get irritable bowel syndrome or constipation. Some clench their jaws and get a condition called TMJ syndrome. Some subset of these people develop pain and dysfunction in their heads, gastrointestinal tracts, jaws etc. as a result of this chronic focus of tension.

Similarly, prostatitis as a tension disorder sees abacterial prostatitis/prostatodynia essentially as a 'headache in the pelvis" or "TMJ of the pelvis". In this view it is a condition usually manifesting itself after years of tensing the pelvic muscles. It usually tends to occurs in men who hold their tension and aggression inside. They squeeze themselves rather than lashing out at others. Often they have work in which they sit for long periods of time and the only way they have found to express their frustration is to tense their pelvic muscles. This tension has become a habit with them. Often they do not know they tense themselves in the pelvic floor. Oy vey.  Could it be that Mula Bandha, one of the fundemental building blocks of my practice, is to blame?  To invert Juliet's dillema, has my one hate sprung from my only love?  What to do?  Now I'm not a knee-jerk "western medicine is always wrong" type of guy by any stretch.  But I think this could be as good a case as any to get some Ayurvedic or TCM (traditional chinese medicine) work done.  Especially since the Ciprofloxacin I'm on isn't really doing it this (second) time around.  I will say, though, that for the first course the antibiotics worked as they were supposed to and I was symptom-free for about three weeks.  The other thing to bolster the tension issue claim is that I'm asymptomatic when I wake up in the morning and when I'm practicing, during which times I'm either chilled out or warm and open, respectively.  I have to re-evaluate.  As one of all-time favorite quotations goes: "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."  It sure is easy to sit around and say "we are not our bodies" when our bodies are in good working order.  I'm hoping this can be an opportunity to see if I really mean it when I say that.  And if I don't mean it when I say it, to mean it in earnest from now on.  But I hope even more that this condition will respond to some form of treatment.

Stuck inside of South Beach with the Mysore Blues again

It's been a few weeks since I've posted anything, I know.  Part of why it's taken a while to write is that the transition back has been a little rough.  I suppose the title suggests that I'm pining over being in India, but that's not where it's at.  I just wanted to paraphrase Bob Dylan, and now that I've done that (twice, check out the end of that last sentence), I can say that the roughness of the transition has been mostly physical.  While Mysore maintains a special place in my heart, the fact is that it isn't a total picnic being there and I am very happy to be home with my wife, my family, my students-- all that good stuff.

The first thing was that when I got back it seemed like the jetlag was lasting more than I had remembered from my previous trips.  Somebody I met over there said in a Facebook status that she was having a hard time getting over it as well.  Then a third person, who was still over there and has been many times, casually joked that maybe intestinal worms were the culprit.  This comment, meant as a light busting of the balls (and not even my own balls, at that), sent me into a full Woody Allen-esque neurotic hypochondriacal tailspin.  I looked up the symptoms: fatigue and feeling run down? Check.  Persistent general dyspepsia?  Check.  Recent travel to a tropical country not noted for its cleanliness? Check.  The fact that all of these could have added up to a mild flu caught on the plane never crossed my mind.  It was worms, for sure.  I made an appointment and went to a doctor.  This doctor, who is from my wife's native country of Honduras (another tropical country not noted for its cleanliness), was quick to agree that some sort of parasite may well be the issue.  I gave some blood and urine on the spot, and then went home and, after a nice strong energy drink, whipped up a stool sample.  All my friends know that I'm usually quick with a dick or fart joke, but this was really not fun.  I didn't want to wait for results, so I proactively took some antihelmintics (de-worming pills, for the layperson) that my awesome mother-in-law had left over from a recent trip back home.  As it turned out, all my tests were negative.  My wife's lack of sympathy and patience was completely justified.  The worm pills were wasted, but they did give me peace of mind.

The second thing, on a more serious note, is that both of my shouders are jacked up right now.  How did this come to be?  I'm going to chalk it up to two things:  The first is a phemonenon of practicing in the shala in Mysore.  Basically, having made the sundry sacrifices it takes to get there, one brings one's A-game, so to speak.  This is usually a good thing.  The energy of the room, being with Sharath, all that, makes for a super focused and intense practice every single day.  Since I was doing primary series the majority of the time, this meant the cleanest, prettiest jump-backs and jump-throughs I could muster and the deepst urdhva danurasanas possible every day.  I think this began the process of irritating an old injury in my left shouder and paved the way for new instability in my right shoulder.  I made it through on adrenalin and spirit, so to speak. 

The other thing leading to my current state can be chalked up to vanity.  One of the mental challenges that some Mysore-goers face is the fact that they may have a different practice at home than they have in Mysore.  Since everybody starts from scratch with Sharath, people who have more advanced practices and come to Mysore for the first time have to hang back for a while.  If you're far enough along at home it can take many trips to get your Mysore practice in synch with your home practice.  Such is the case with me.  This can be hard.  Even if you get past the initial egoic response of resenting being held back from doing what you already know you can do, you can still be susceptible to simple boredom.  Now, while I was there this time I befriended a super-cool guy whose Mysore practice was just about two or three poses further along than my home practice is.  Which poses these are, specifically, is not the point.  Let it suffice to say that Kino (my teacher back home), in the interest of me not totally wearing myself out by having to practice for three hours a day, allowed me to split my practice some.  This guy (Luke is his name), however, ommitted nothing and did a few more poses than me to boot.  I felt the need to to do likewise just as soon as I got home.  In my defense I'll say that I didn't want to be better than Luke, I was just inspired to be like him.  I was afraid I had been being slack somehow.  About a week into my full-bore, balls-to-the-wall practicing I noticed a quarter-sized bruise, in the shape of Jupiter's Great Red Spot on my left side.  Just around where my scapula meets my lats.  I had torn a muscle by overworking a body that was already at the end of its rope, so to speak.  And for what?  Only so as not to feel slack.  Just for that I have to go back to a super gentle, scaled-back practice and back to my physical therapy exercises for a month at least. 

Oh! the vanity!  Lessons learned.  It's cool to be inspired by colleagues, but be careful not to feel that you have to be just like them.  And don't jump to the ickiest possible conclusions about your health.

The Dialethia of Progress

When you go to 12-step meetings, you encounter various styles of oratory.  Sometimes you get a string of horrific experiences recounted, although this is known as "trading war stories," and is frowned upon.  Other times you hear inspirational messages and it seems as if you're at a Southern Baptist revival in rural Alabama.  At one meeting which burned into my memory the talk was reminiscent of a half-time speech given by a high school football coach.  This guy paced around the front of the room bristling with virile intensity, like a panther in a cage.  At one point he barked out "If you think clean time is no big deal, try getting some!"  What he meant by this and how this is relevant to yoga practice is what I'd like to discuss here.

In 12-step programs, pretty much everybody falls off at some point or another.  When that happens, one (hopefully) gets back on the wagon and tries again.  So there is a duality here.  One tries, earnestly, to do something which is basically impossible.  This leads some to emphasize the process as opposed to the goal.  Indeed, "progress, not perfection" is one of the myriad 12-step slogans.  Another 12-step slogan is "easy does it."  Too much emphasis on process, though, and you can lose sight of the goal completely.  Still another slogan, in rebuttal to the aforementioned one, is "easy does it, but you gotta do it."  For addicts, too much emphasis on the goal can lead to an endless cycle of failure (both actual and perceived), guilt, and then resentment.  On the other hand, addicts who put too much emphasis on process at the expense of the goal might continue to fuck up, harming themselves and others, with no accountability.

In yoga practice, less direly, emphasis on process can mean stagnation and ultimately, resignation.  At this point, and at the risk of redundancy, I guess I should clarify what I mean by yoga practice.  The yoga that I do is Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga as taught by Sri K Pattabhi Jois.  It is a system of hatha yoga, which means that asana is the point of departure into investigating ethical principles, the mind, spirituality, etc.  Although I don't really practice them any more so I can't say for sure, this should also be true of other systems of hatha yoga as well,eg, Sivananda, Iyengar, Viniyoga, etc., etc.  I'll repeat: asana is the point of departure.  Therefore it behooves a practitioner of any hatha yoga system to be acutely involved in his asana practice. He or she should always strive for improvement and growth.  Progress and striving can be good.  So it confuses me when I keep reading over and over again in places like Recovering Yogi and Elephant Journal complaints about yoga teachers who supposedly place too much emphasis on asana.  The complaints are typically along the lines of: "Yoga isn't just about asana, and anybody who emphasizes asana can only be somebody who doesn't have the intellectual and/or emotional means to get the deeper spiritual dimensions of the tradition."  I find this attitude insulting.  I'm over it.  To paraphrase the speaker at the 12-step meeting:  if you think it's not about asana, try working at asana.  And furthermore, if you have a yoga teacher who says its not about asana, chances are his own asana practice is deficient.  

I've gone on some about the relative merits of goal orientation and process orientation and by now you may be asking yourself, "so, which is it?"  Well, at play here are two examples of what is known as a dialetheia.  A dialetheia is a statement such that both itself and its negation are true.  Remaining sober is essential to recovery.  Continuous progress in asana is essential to  hatha yoga.  Something that is essential cannot be impossible, yet in these two examples that is the case.  True and not true at the same time.

So, having established that work and progress in asana could be both essential and not essential to one's development in hatha yoga, the question is this: given these two options, i.e., goal orientation or process orientation, where do you stand?  You don't even have to think in either/or terms.  Think in terms of a spectrum.  Are you more on the Bartelby the Scrivener end (he is a character from a Melville novella who said "I prefer not" to every task he was asked to do)?  Or are you more like those Olympic gymnasts who launch themselves 30 feet into the air and land on legs that were already broken in half?  Be honest with yourself.  And after you've finished being honest with yourself, check in with your teacher.  Chances are your self-perception is incorrect at least on some levels, if not completely.  When you've sorted that out, put on your Buddhist cap and integrate the notion of friction points.  Find your way to the middle of the spectrum.  Smooth out your friction points and I'll bet you'll grow.  Now get out on you mat and be honest with youreself about where you're at and work!  Or take it easy.

Concerning Authorization

So, this is a delicate topic.  How to write objectively?  I'll start at the beginning...  The first I heard of authorization to teach Ashtanga Yoga as taught by Sri K Pattabhi Jois was from my mentor/teacher/friend Greg Nardi.  Back then it was still just Ashtanga yoga to me, the preferred of the two styles of yoga I had first tried. (The other was Bikram Yoga; I had done a little of both back home in Key West.) Miami Life Center (hereafter referred to as mlc) had recently opened and I was full-time devoted athlete in a somewhat obscure Olympic sport.  At the time I was supporting myself in the restaurant business and wanted desperately to get out.  Teaching yoga seemed like a good fit, and I preferred Ashtanga, so after having taken a few classes I asked Greg about how to become a teacher.  When he explained that in our thing (please forgive the gratuitous mafia movie reference) the only way it could happen is that I would have to schlep over to India not once, but several times at least, my response was understandable-- "Fuck that, I'm going to sign up for the 200 hour teacher training at the 23rd street yoga shala." Which I did, but almost immediately upon completion of my teacher training I felt a lack in my knowledge.  I felt Vinyasa yoga, as it is known, contained intrinsic flaws as a system so I returned to mlc.  While I continued to teach in the Vinyasa style my own practice became exclusively Ashtanga.  The India thing kept me in awe, sometimes a resentful awe, as I was breaking my back first in restaurants and then as a fledgling yoga teacher and barely keeping my head above water.  I wanted to go deeper, to earn a recognition for my knowledge and training that "meant something," for lack of a better way to put it.  But to drop four or five grand on such a trip was simply unthinkable.  I never thought I would be able to go myself, and by extension, I thought I could never have as strong a practice or as deep an understanding as those who had been.  To be Authorized, or rarer still, Certified, would remain an unobtainable sine qua non.

Fast forward to now.  As I write these words I am waiting in Bangalore International Airport to go home from my third trip to Mysore, India.  In addition to my time with Sharath, I have been extensively trained by teachers of international renown.  I teach yoga full-time for a living and am solvent in doing so.  My asana practice is somewhat strong.  I have a grasp of, and a keen interest in, yogic philosophy.  But I am still not authorized.  Didn't happen this trip.  I was pretty fucking bummed when Sharath didn't call me into his office after my last practice this morning.  Although this disappointment is something of a taboo, I confess this freely and openly.  We're supposed to go to India to learn from Sharath for its own sake, not to be chasing a certificate.  Sharath has made it perfectly clear on many occasions that he has no interest in or patience for students who come to Mysore merely to get authorized.  Despite this fact, it's a certificate of which we all make a big deal anyway. What a mental mine field to be presented a goal towards which to work but that you're not supposed to want or expect. When you work for something even though you know you're not supposed to expect to get it, you still feel let down when your work doesn't pan out.  Then you feel disappointed for feeling let down because you remember you weren't supposed to expect it in the first place.  The snake eats its own tail.  Talk about vrittis.  With the love and support of my wife Nubia and my teachers Kino and Tim I was able to snap myself out of it, thank God.

The mystery surrounding Authorization is an extension of one of the most damning misconceptions about Ashtanga yoga.  That being that there are absolute standards.  It can be hard, at times, not to play the "why does Johnny have pose C when I'm stuck on pose A and I'm stronger and more flexible than he is" game.  I think it's natural and probably never goes away, completely.  Furthermore, the notion that one must have an asana "perfected" before learning the next is simply not true.  It's absurd, in fact.  And so, by extension, the notion that if one has been Authorized his or her practice must be at some lofty, nearly superhuman level also persists.  Well, if you're Authorized it could mean you have a lovely asana practice, but not necessarily.  I've come to believe it means you have shown Sharath, or Guruji if you're old-school, hardcore dedication to the lineage by making the sacrifices (time, money, etc.) to come to India multiple times.  Nothing more, nothing less.  But what could be more essential?  We're all aware of the paradigm of the guy who has an amazing asana practice but remains an asshole.  Conversely there's the ultra stiff guy who is an obedient, dedicated student who treats everybody with kindness and compassion. Why shouldn't this extend out to the decision to authorize, or not authorize?  One's ability to carry on and convey the message of our lineage should be assessed by Sharath and Sharath alone.  To bring back the mafia analogy, chain of command is very important our thing.  Sharath seems pretty deeply intuitive to me.  I resolve to trust his judgement in these matters, and to keep returning to Mysore, authorization or no.