instruments only

For about three or four hours this afternoon I was quite sure that my wife didn't love me anymore.  She didn't say anything explicit, she didn't even suggest it.  I knew, though.  Or rather felt it in a deeply visceral way.  Anybody who knows her or us will tell you that said conviction is in no way rooted in reality.  For most of this week I have been textbook insane, although I hope (and I have good reason to hope) only temporarily so.  The fact is I have struggled with Depression (note the capital D) for the better part of my life. If you ask my mother, she can tell you about the pediatrician who told my her and my father not to leave me alone for fear of a suicide attempt.  I was in third grade, if memory serves.  It's been coming and going, always.  Simply put,  my hardware, i.e. the neurotransmitters in my brain, is essentially and categorically deficient.  Sufficient wattage, but some crossed and burnt out wires, you could say.  I don't have it as bad as some, thank God, and in the past seven years or so, I've been able to construct a life for myself in which I can deal without the help of pharmaceuticals, most of which I've tried and earnestly hope never to do again.  The tri-cyclics, SSRI's, MAOI's, etc. all come with a price, and unfortunately there are many fellow sufferers who cannot live without them.

Still sometimes, every so often, I slip off a cliff.   When this happens it is a shit sandwich on rye with caramelized onions and russian dressing.  Physically, it feels like opiate withdrawal: I can't get comfortable in my skin and I just want to jump through a plate glass window.  Mentally, I feel like Tantalus in the river: almost every time I try to formulate a thought I can sense it receding away into ephemeral nothingness.  I'm always left grasping.  Such thoughts as do come through are prone to be absurdly self-flagellating with no basis in reality.

Now for the hopeful part.  I have been cultivating a means of protection from episodes such as this, and mercifully it came through for me.  For some time now I've been immersed in a way of life which teaches that all of the  material world is impermanent, and therefore illusory.  I chant "from the unreal, lead me to the real" almost every day.  I take it as an article of faith that despite the illusory nature of our physical world, we are all endowed with a transcendent eternal soul.  The trick is being able to tell the real from the unreal.  This is known as viveka, or discrimination.  Another way to put it is to say that today I decided to fly instruments only.  Experienced airplane pilots, ones with advanced certifications, are able to fly by looking only at the instruments on the dashboard.  Certain weather phenomena can render what the eye sees out of the window completely false.  It is presumed this is why John F. Kennedy, Jr. crashed his plane and died tragically.  He couldn't see the horizon properly and thought he was higher above the water than he actually was.  For me this meant ignoring the input from my heart and gut, however real it seemed, and going by what I knew to be true.  I'm not out of the woods yet by any stretch, but yoga has come through for me today, big time.  I have a plan to keep these episodes at bay, but I want to implement it first to see if it works.  You'll have to tune in next time.

Chapter 23: In which an experiment gets off to a rocky start

For all you smarty-pants literary type readers out there, the title of this post is in fact a nod to Thomas Pynchon's cryptic Beat masterwork, V.  That said...

I changed my schedule at the beginning of the year, going from teaching Mysore-style Ashtanga yoga from 630-9pm to a more standard time of 6-830am. [A quick digression: how about replacing the word "traditional," which seems to cause such consternation among skeptics, with "standard" when discussing Ashtanga Yoga?  This way we can retain the notion of a centralized authority, i.e. our beloved teacher R. Sharath Jois, as a reason for doing what it is we do, and sidestep the notion of authenticity and authority rooted in time.  Think about it....]  I quickly realized something that many other teachers probably already knew, and that is that it really sucks to practice after teaching.  It sucks bad.  The first few weeks I just dealt with it. Then I started making some changes.  Changes that seemed to me to be ingenious problem-solving but are actually just common sense.  Bear with me.  First, I started taking a half hour break between teaching and practicing.  Rest and a light snack made for a pleasant improvement.  Then, I brought another change of clothes.  Dry underwear and a dry shirt makes for a substantially more pleasant practice.  These changes helped, but not enough.  Practice still felt as if it were being started a step behind emotionally/mentally/physically.

Two weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and do what many teachers (Sharath and David Robson come to mind immediately, but there are so many more, I'm sure) who are levels above me do: bite the bullet and get up as early as is necessary to practice before teaching.  This means up at 3am and begin practicing at around 3:15 for me.  It also means home practice, another thing not necessarily in my comfort zone.

As with anything, this new system has its pros and cons.   First, it will come as no surprise to those who know me that I do get off on the Spartan, "hard core," if you will, nature of finishing practice before the sun has even risen.  I can practice in my underwear, and throw decorum to the wind, so to speak.  (Get it?  The wind....)  I like practicing in front of the altar I've made in my home shala and checking in with the picture of my late father which adorns it from time to time.  I've come to like practicing alone, I must admit.  Now when I've finished teaching I have time to do pranayama and sitting practice at Miami Life Center before I either go back home or teach my full primary class on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

That's all well and good, but the fact remains that it's very very hard to get up at 3 in the morning.  Hypothetically it shouldn't be too bad if you can get yourself to bed by 8, but that goal has remained elusive as of this writing.  My wife is seldom home from work before 7, and it's crucial that we eat together and have at least an hour together before going to bed.  Most nights I'm in bed by 9, giving me about 6 hours of sleep a night, which is just barely not quite enough.  The ever-so-slight sleep deficit has done a number on me emotionally.  I've been up and down and all around.  One morning the alarm went off and I didn't get up, having one of those most belittling body trumps the mind moments.  I wonder if this will be sustainable.  Will I be able to get myself to sleep earlier?  Will mid-day naps do the trick?  Lots of extra sleep on Saturday?  I'm open to encouragement and suggestions.....

Giri

A few weeks ago I got a text from Coach on a Friday night, asking me to contact him.  It's been about three and a half years since I stopped fighting, and I haven't actually seen Coach I think in about a year, but when he texted me my response was the only one it could have been: "How can I help?"  Coach's name is Juan Moreno, although I'd never call him that to his face.  I think I'd just as soon eat a cockroach.  He is a three-time Olympian in the sport of taekwondo, having won silver medals in Seoul '88 and Madrid '92.  Furthermore, he coached two athletes to bronze medals in the London Olympics last summer, both of whom I am proud to say were my teammates when I trained.  He is, as Don Corleone would say, a serious man, to be treated with respect.  Here's why I jumped to help him when he contacted me out of the blue....

In the spring of 2005 I was scraping along the bottom of a nine-year battle with drug addiction.  Some of the lowlights included an overdose, a divorce, and even a ten day stint of homelessness when my mother kicked me out of her house for stealing her bottle of vicodin (she had recently been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma).  Pretty scummy.  Whoever came up with the old cliche "you only really regret in life the things you didn't do" clearly was not, or never knew, a junky.   By the end of that summer I was just starting to turn the corner.  I had sorted myself out enough to move back in with my mother, I had a job, but I was still doing hard drugs.

So in the fall of 2005 I realized that I wasn't going back to New York as I had originally planned when I left a year ago before, and that I wanted to give the sport of  taekwondo another try.  You see, I had begun doing taekwondo when I lived in New York in an effort to take the reins of my life, which was spiraling out of control.  It didn't really work out at the time, but a seed was planted.  In January 2006 I made the pivotal decision to seek Coach out and started driving up to Miami from Key West (a three-hour drive, give or take) twice a week to train.

Coach took me on, and took me in, and something finally clicked.  As my body got into shape I had a slowly unfolding epiphany: I couldn't keep doing both drugs and this sport. I had to choose, and I wanted to do taekwondo more.  It still strikes me as absurd that none of the other crazy shit I went through, including the lowlights mentioned above, got me to quit drugs and get my life straightened out, but training at this sport did.  When the student is ready, the teacher will appear, as the old saying goes.  I eventually moved to Miami so I could train six days a week.  I stopped fighting in 2009 and completed a transition into yoga.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Through Coach and taekwondo I learned tapas, I learned courage, and I learned the unflinching patience that it takes to do a thing for a higher goal week in and week out even when it sucks.  These things, obviously enough, have been absolutely crucial to my yoga practice.  It wouldn't be exactly accurate to say Coach saved my life, but I will say unequivocally that he helped save my happiness, and helped me become an actualized adult.

Giri is a japanese word meaning duty, or obligation, or even burden of obligation.  If you are indebted to somebody worthy, then that debt is an honor.  I have been born under a lucky star vis-a-vis teachers in my life, and I am happy to fulfill whatever obligations to them I can. 

a triptych

Panel One:  No margin for error

In a shala where Mysore-style Ashtanga yoga is taught there is great potential for hurt feelings.  We all know this, and teachers get to experience both ends of the equation.  This is why teaching is a heavy responsibility, not to be taken lightly.  Recently I had a student come in for her first Mysore-style practice.  She said she had been coming to Miami Life Center for some time, taking the Saturday morning full primary class.  As it turned it out, the new student didn't really have anything memorized at all so I let her go to navasana and stopped her there.  She left upset, saying she had hoped for more of a workout (she told me she did triatholons) and that she felt rushed.  Now 9.78346 times out of ten I would have vetted a new student more than I did this morning.  For the life of me I don't know why I didn't today.  I wasn't particularly sleepy, the room wasn't particularly busy.  But because I didn't talk to this new student and adequately explain to her how it all worked and what to expect not just for today, but in the overall arc of her experience with yoga, her feelings were hurt.  There's a chance, probably a good one seeing as she was hoping for a "workout," that this student might have been put out even if I had talked to her more first.  People who do endurance sports often feel that if they haven't taxed themselves to their absolute limit then they've done nothing.  But we'll never know. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.  This has eaten at me, as you see.  It's a tough hustle, but you've gotta be on point every day.  Feelings and bodies can be hurt, and as a teacher the buck stops with you.  This analogy is extreme, I know, but it's like having an infant in a bathtub or a pool: you only have to look away for a second for something bad to happen.  No margin for error.

Panel Two: An Aikido concept is applied to yoga

The Japanese martial art of Aikido is practiced with a partner.  One person attacks in a given way, and the other practices the technique required to neutralize the attack.  The terms for these roles are uke  and nage, respectively.  In The Principles of Aikido,  Mitsugi Saotome explains: "If you think in terms of attacker and defender, it is likely that you will regard the role of nage, the one who is attacked and executes the technique, as the important role, and the role of uke as merely giving nage a body on which to practice his technique.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Ukemi is the art of being uke, and the quality of nage's practice depends on how well uke has learned his art... In short, uke is responsible for creating the conditions that allow nage to learn."  I've had ukemi on my mind these days because I've taken on apprentice/assistants a few days a week.  Most of my students have been receptive, some have been resistant.  I still remember the resistance I got when I began assisting in my own apprenticeship.  I want to protect my assistants.  I don't want them to go through some of the ball-busting that I went through.  So I hereby exhort my own students and students every where to practice good ukemi with new teachers.  Nobody issues forth from their mother's loins a good teacher of anything.  Teaching is a skill that must be learned through practice.  In practice mistakes are made and hopefully learned from.  We can all agree that it sucks to get a crappy adjustment, in fact sometimes it can be dangerous.  But I think students can help themselves in the long run by helping new teachers learn.  Nobody says you have to sit there and take an awful adjustment, but an opportunity to show generosity and compassion is there.  Try giving feedback in as nice a way as you can.  Try practicing good ukemi.

Panel Three: A eureka moment with Chuck Miller

A few weeks ago I had the great privilege of taking a workshop and then breaking bread with Chuck Miller. I always love being around teachers who spent an extensive period of time with Guruji and I try to soak up as much of the shakti as I can.  (For the layperson, shakti could be thought of as mojo, and it gets transmitted from teacher to student throughout the generations.)  As we talked over dinner on Lincoln Road two things were increasingly apparent to me: Chuck has great love and respect for Guruji, but he also disagrees on a number of issues with how Guruji taught.  He differs as he defers, as my postmodern aesthetics professor from college would say.  My eureka moment came as I realized how parental the guru/student relationship can be.  Unless you were raised by Bing Crosby, Joan Crawford, or John Phillips (from the Mamas and the Papas), chances are you're going to, or rather you should, raise your children the way you were raised.  That doesn't mean, however, that there aren't some things your parents did that you'd just as soon spare your own children of.  I think the same applies to teaching yoga, but that doesn't mean you can pick and choose what to pass on and what to pass over higgledy-piggledy.  The discrimination must come from adult experience.  As I conceived and executed this blog I had another eureka moment, a formulation that I will leave you with.  I posit that there is a roughly one-to-one ratio in years of development as a human being and as a yoga practitioner.  By this formulation, relatively few teachers, the Sharaths, Chuck Millers, Nancy Gilgoffs, Eddie Sterns, etc. who have been practicing for twenty or more years are adults.  Even my teachers Kino Macgregor and Tim Feldmann are barely in high school.  This puts me in about first grade.  Sounds right to me.  I have much to learn.

reflections on turning forty

I'll begin this blog as I ended the last one, with a paraphrase-- "When I was young I was told, 'You'll see, when you're forty.'  I am forty now and I haven't seen a thing."  The super cool French composer Erik Satie (whose ouevre includes prototypes of minimalism and performance art, among other things) said this, but in the original quotation the age was fifty.  But the point is just as salient with forty.  I don't feel I understand this world any better than I did as a child.  The thing is, I think this is a good thing, or at least it can be.  The trick is to attain a balance between keeping a child-like wonder when viewing the world and having a healthy dose of caution which has been earned with experience.  That aside, my big take-away from yesterday is this: events which are ostensibly the most about you are actually the least about you.  You see, I don't like to celebrate my birthday, so I always exercised my prerogative not to do so.   But with this birthday being something of a milestone, my mother made a stink about my grumpy unwillingness to celebrate.  I relented.  I had a little gathering of family last night and it was awesome.  Then the epiphany came which will decode the cryptic statement a few sentences earlier: however rotten and miserable you may be there are other people in this world who are happy you are here.  To deny them a chance to celebrate you is stingy and asshole-ish.  So birthdays, weddings, funerals, those types of things are not really about you but rather are a chance for those who love you to celebrate you.  So from now on, small-scale birthday parties for me.  One more quotation, direct, to wrap this up.  It comes from will.i.am, the creative force behind the Black Eyed Peas.  In an interview on NPR he said: "Thirty isn't the new twenty, forty isn't the new thirty.  Creativity is the new youth."  Fuckin' a to that.

the r-word

For a long time the term religion would typically conjure for me images that are unsavory at best: pedophile priests, the reverend Fred Phelps, Islamic jihadists,the ritual of sati, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir, etc. etc. etc.  Unfortunately it seems many people, to some degrees rightfully so, also hold religion in suspicion.  In light of this situation, and so as not to ruffle feathers, yoga practitioners often refer to what it is we do as spiritual, or maybe sacred.  However, I've been coming to terms, more and more lately, with the fact that my practice of yoga is a religious act.  This realization has been gradual and subtle.  You see, I come from a family of liberal, secular, intellectual snobs.  I love them/us, don't get me wrong, but we are what we are.  My mother, who became disillusioned with the Catholic church she was raised in, decided to keep our upbringing secular.  So when I began practicing yoga I would bristle even at the notion of it being a spiritual thing, much less a religious one.  I "got" the philosophical aspects of it, but that came from a more detached scholarly and intellectual place.

Then a funny thing happened.  The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh once said something along the lines of: "sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, sometimes your smile is the source of your joy." Change can come from the outside in, in short.  A few years ago I began a year-long apprenticeship with my teachers Kino Macgregor, Tim Feldmann, Greg Nardi, and Angelique Sandas.  Part of the deal was that I had to buckle down and commit to daily practice and vegetarianism, among other things.  I have stayed mostly true (I still eat fish maybe three or four times a year) to this ever since.  Here I've been, living a holistic way of life, replete with rituals, ethical principles, etc. the goal of which is to experience something which is unable to be verified empirically.  What else can you call that?  In the several months I've taken the final step and self-identified as religious.  I wouldn't want to be like those people who are monogamous, spend all of their time with, and truly like their significant other but if you ask them if they're in a relationship or if the person in their life is their girl/boyfriend they scoff.  It just isn't productive not to accept a label just because it may seem unpalatable when the label fits.  Why waste time denying what is?

I also have to give credit to my wife Nubia for helping me get to where I am now.  She is a devout Catholic. Back when we started dating I was not totally comfortable with that.  I thought it would be a deal breaker, being still in my intellectual/secular frame of mind and all.  Then her faith pretty quickly became one of my favorite things about her.  She remains my moral compass, always.  One of the things she taught me is that when you are part of a faith you try to follow it to the best of your ability.  It's not a one or zero proposition.  You just do your best and accept that you will fall short because you are human.  I learned, or rather really experienced, that not everybody who is religious is a proselytizing hypocrite.  I'll bet plenty of you readers out there know that, but it was a hang-up I had, I'm embarrassed to say.

For those of you still uncomfortable with the r-word, let me say that just because you have a daily practice doesn't mean you're necessarily gonna see the light.  It doesn't happen for everyone, but it did for me.  I'll wrap this up with a very loose paraphrase of John 9:25: whether or not all this is really just bullshit, I cannot say.  All I know is that I was weak and miserable, and now I am at peace. 

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?