Quarterbacks and Golfers: some thoughts on moving and sitting meditation

 My relationship with sitting meditation practice now is quite similar to what my relationship with asana practice used to be.  That is to say, it fluctuates between periods of earnest dedication to one particular form and periods of not so much.  When it's on and humming, I feel great, feel the benefits, and I resolve that this is the time I stick with it.  Then it fades.  Other shit creeps in, and, having firm and solid dedication to asana practice, I let sitting practice go.  Then my schedule shifts, or a workshop happens, and I'm back in the saddle again.  I feel great, feel the benefits, and I resolve that this is the time I stick with and not let it go.  As of this writing I've resumed a regular practice again.  Feeling great, the benefits, etc. etc.

Now, the goal of meditation, whether sitting or moving, is to attain a state of single-pointed mental focus.  We call it ekagarata.  This focus can be narrow or expansive.  Consider athletes from two different sports: As an example of narrow focus, the golfer on the putting green has only one thing to consider.  He is focused entirely on the ball.  On the other hand, the quarterback in football must be pretty much equally aware of everything happening on the field (a very important distinction, mind you) at the same time. His focus is expansive.  In each case the athlete must have a calm, clear, mind unobstructed by emotions such as fear, anger, or anticipation of victory.  I think this model could be applied to sitting practice and asana practice.  When sitting, focus is narrow; when doing asana, focus is expansive.  Just to be extra clear, for the asana practitioner the body is the field.  There are two systems of sitting meditation with which I'm familiar, each with a different "ball" on which to focus.  One is the Anapanasati style, which I learned from my teacher Kino.  The other is Transcendental Meditation.  I was initiated into Transcendental Meditation by Narasimhan (of Jayashree and Narasimhan fame).

Upon initiation into Transcendental Meditation (hereafter TM) one is given a mantra by the teacher. It is not a mantra in the conventional sense, typically it is a just a one or two syllable phoneme--  "a word that don't mean nothin', like looptid," as the old song says.  As one sits, one continues to bring back the mind, gently, to the mantra.  You don't fight the thoughts that bubble up, you just come back to the mantra.  It has been compared to housebreaking a puppy.  Just keep putting the puppy (your mind) back on the newspaper (the mantra) every time it poops or pees (the bubbling up of thoughts).  You have to be patient and gentle with your mind, as you would a puppy.  The rules, as it were, of TM are quite simple: it should be done for twenty minutes, twice a day, you should begin and end your practice sitting up, and eyes should be kept closed.  You can shift, scratch, lie down-- just keep your eyes closed.  In my experience the effects of TM are felt especially in the somatic field.  A body high, to use stoner parlance.  The relaxation is really really profound.

In Anapanasati meditation practice is done once a day, anywhere between twenty minutes to an hour.  The "housebreaking the puppy" principle, basically the same as it is in TM, is there but the object of focus is physical as opposed to conceptual.  One brings one's attention back to the nostrils and the upper lip, focusing on the air coming in and out.  Anapanasati is more rigid, and therefore more physically rigorous than TM.  Once the clock starts you are asked not to move at all.  No scratching, shifting, eye opening, I believe if you're really really doing it you aren't even supposed to swallow.  Sleeping feet, and I mean asleep to the point of paralysis from the knee down, can be a risk.

So, for some basic pros and cons of each system:  TM is great, but it can be really tricky to carve out to separate spaces of twenty minutes daily for busy people.  I find myself in guilt loops when trying to maintain regular TM practice.  Anapanasati meditation only requires one shot a day, but it is a pretty type-A practice.  As Ashtangis our asana practice is already type-A so this system can feel burdensome.  Both systems, I can vouch from experience, function in a way slightly similar to SSRI's (anti-depressants such as Prozac or Zoloft) in that you don't feel the effects really until about a month in to regular practice.  Then one day, you realize you're calmer, happier, and things are a better.

Here's some food for thought.  Sitting meditation practice has helped me see how mentally corrosive popular music is.  There's nothing more hellish than settling down and into a practice with five seconds of Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" looping through your head.  I see the point that fundamentalist Muslims have in their proscription of music.

If you can't or don't want to work sitting practice into your daily life that's cool.  I have heard both Sharath and Manju Jois be overtly disdainful of it.  Each has said that the expansive (my term, not theirs) meditation which comes from asana practice is sufficient.  I have heard other senior teachers say otherwise.  I do invite you to try it, though.  It helps me, for sure.

don't confuse the optimal with the possible, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good

It's been a while, I know.  My bad.  I've had a something of a rough month in the mental health arena again, and I just haven't felt like I've had much to Say.  Note the capital S.  I've gotten a little too hung up on the need to say something profound each time I write, so much so that I've ground to a halt.  Mercifully, I had another one of those eureka moments this weekend, so now I'm back in the saddle.  Here's what happened:

Nubia and I went down to Key West, where we spent some nice time together and also with my best friend and his family.  Marc writes for the Miami Herald and his father Phil is an author of some distinction.  They had rented a pair of adjacent condos with a private beach and a deck, upon which they graciously allowed me to practice yesterday morning.  At some point I noticed Phil up on the balcony writing.  It must have been out of the corner of the eye because my drishti is always perfect.  I never under any circumstances look around or notice anything else when I'm practicing.  Bullshitting aside, there he was, at 8am on a Sunday morning, at work.  It all dawned on me a few hours later: yoga isn't the only discipline out there.  There are other endeavors requiring daily practice, regardless if the outcome is good or bad.  This wasn't a new revelation.  Nor was it something I had outright forgotten.  I just had become un-mindful of it, I suppose.  As a teacher I'm always encouraging students to get on their mat even if conditions aren't optimal.  Or to finish practice even though conditions aren't optimal.  Why shouldn't this be applied off the mat?  The thing is, you can apply the lessons of yoga, or boxing, or ballet, or whatever to other facets of your life, but you have to take the time to turn the lens outward.  Take the time every once in a while and examine what you do off the mat, out of the ring, off the barre, etc., and see how you can apply what you learn from your main passion to the other things you do.

In my asana practice, I'm mostly pretty good about not getting hung up on perfection.  Let this blog signal a redoubling of efforts not to get hung up so in my writing.  Selah.

heat, or, too much sacrifice makes a stone of the heart

Last week my acupuncturist told me I have an excess of heat in my body.  Well there's a fucking news flash.  I'm sure many an acupuncturist has given this diagnosis to many an ashtangi.  For those less hip to the ways of non-Western medicine, rest assured: her diagnosis doesn't necessarily mean I have a fever, which could be treated with some aspirin, or ibuprofen, or in dire cases an ice bath.  No, this heat is more of the metaphysical variety, and it is caused by an imbalance of some sort.  My tone here may sound a little dubious bordering on contemptuous, but let me assure you that is not so.  I think Dr. Liang is great. Here's the thing: we (my lovely wife Nubia and I) have been seeing her so as to help along the baby-making process, and fertility treatment is her specialty.  She has helped a number of members of our Miami Life Center family.  So, at this point I'll just come out and say that according to Dr. Liang my excess heat may be interfering with my ability to produce viable sperm.  I'm on a regimen of herbs and acupuncture now, and am trying all the more earnestly to wean myself off of caffeine, or at least reduce my intake dramatically.

This is all well and good, but there's an elephant in the room here.  The asana practice I do, which is the foundation of my religious duty, my career, my life's work, really, is designed to create heat.  I've said this before in lectures and written it in other blogs, but it bears repeating: in Indian (for sure) and Chinese (I'm pretty sure) conceptions of the body and the universe certain conceptual things can be discreet, superimposed, or interchangeable.  This applies to the purifying heat generated in asana practice.  One heats up the actual, physical body from the exertion.  This makes the body stronger and lighter while toxins are sweated out.  At the same time the metaphysical heat renders infertile the seeds of karma.  With any luck, you won't have to keep repeating yourself over and over and over in this life and into the next.  Unfortunately, though, this heat is also interfering in other aspects of my physical body in this life now.  What to do?

Enter Tim Miller.  He came into to town this weekend and although I wasn't able to get to all of his workshops, the ones I did get to really counted.  This was a classic case of hearing the right message at the right time.  In Saturday's workshop Tim discussed, among other cool things, how Ayurveda relates to asana practice.  Ayurveda is the traditional medicine of India and it works on very similar principles to Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine.  According to Ayurveda,  all people comprise three basic qualities, known as doshas, which are represented by three of the elements: earth (kapha), wind (vatta), and fire (pitta) (which I'm pretty sure is where the magnificent soul band got its name).   Bad health and disease is caused by imbalance of the doshas.  Therefore, good health is maintained proactively by monitoring and regulating the balance of one's constitution.  Now, here's where it relates to my problem:  the three doshas each have a more subtle counterpart, and they are known as the vital essences. In reverse order they are tejas (light/heat) which goes with pitta, prana (breath/life force) which goes with vatta, and ojas (water) which goes with kapha.  In hatha yoga practice tejas is associated with asana, prana is associated with pranayama, and ojas is associated with devotional practice.  If you only ever practice asana and pranayama then you are just adding oxygen to fire, basically.  You will only burn hotter and hotter and eventually be reduced to a dried up smoldering husk.  Or a lump of coal, perhaps.  Too much sacrifice makes a stone of the heart.  Tim exhorted us to take a more balanced approach to yoga practice and to begin, perhaps, to look beyond and within and cultivate spiritual practice.  He also made sure to drive home Patanjali's notion of Ishta Devata, which is, like in twelve step programs, the higher power of your choosing or which resonates best with you.  Nobody says you have to go bang a tambourine and chant Hare Krishna and spin yourself dizzy.  Nor do you have to be dunked in a freezing river and handle rattlesnakes and speak in tongues.  But you should cultivate devotion to something outside of yourself and greater than yourself.  If there's ritual involved, so much the better.  Otherwise you run the risk of getting burned.

I went to mass with Nubia right after Tim's workshop and it felt good.  I will continue to cultivate more Ojas.  As to the other stuff, I will trust and let the cards fall where they may.

a new venture

For some time now my mother, whom I adore and venerate, has been busting my balls to come up with some way of making extra money.  "You should make a DVD or a book or some kind of gadget," she'll say.  "This running around teaching isn't sustainable, you're gonna kill yourself.  You need some kind of passive income generation."  She typically finishes with the sine qua non of maternal ballbusting: "I just worry about you."  Who could get annoyed with such well-meaning concern?  Me, apparently.  The bad son.  "Sorry I let you down, Ma.  Wish I coulda done (or been) better."  There's the sine qua non of filial ballbusting and we're back to even.

In all seriousness, though, Mother's right, of course.  I mean she may not be hip to the absurd proliferation of yoga-related books, DVD's, and gadgets and how glutted the market for said items is, but the teaching alone isn't quite cutting it for the life I envision for myself.  To be clear, the life I envision for myself is almost exactly like the one I have now.  I'm not trying to be Tom Vu, he of the yachts and the bikini-clad bimbos, or some other late-night infomercial huckster.  I'm pretty unattached to material things. What bugs me is owing money.  I want to pay off my student loans, my home loan, and have some set aside to educate any as of yet unborn children.  It will take a long time to make that happen with things as they are now.

I have a seed planted now which hopefully at some point will bring in supplemental income while I do what I really love, i.e., practice and teach Ashtanga Yoga. Nestled in with the optimism is a seed of doubt.  Goals can be Hydra-headed: to attain one can mean two more grow back.  This can be good, it is good to keep moving.  If it works out, though, I earnestly hope I don't become materialistic, graspy, a hungry ghost.  I will tread lightly, and keep family and teaching at the center, always.  

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.