our-yoga

It seems that backbending has re-emerged as a topic of discussion in the blogosphere, so I'll use this topic as a launching point to get myself out of my recent blogging funk.

Sereneflavor, Grimmly and Boodiba have all recently blogged about backbending. The latter two have also made some cool videos of their backbending exploits. I have not made any such videos, although I do know that a picture of me in Kapotasana has recently been making the rounds on the web. I've also learnt that said picture has apparently been re-blogged on a gay site... I'm not sure what to think about this. I've nothing against gay people. But still, it's a little bit unsettling (not to mention creepy) to consider the possibility that my backbending likeness may be the subject of some guy's fantasy right this moment... I guess this teaches me something: One has no control over whatever content one posts online. Let it go.

So, as I was saying, backbending. With my left knee being... (how should I put this)... out of optimal Ashtanga performance mode, I have recently found myself focusing more on my backbends. In particular, I have been working on reducing the level of splay in my feet when I drop back. In a recent post, Frank suggested that a certain amount of splay is to be expected if one's thighs naturally turn outward. The idea is not to allow the feet to turn outwards more than the degree to which one's thighs naturally turn outwards (does this make sense?); if one's feet turn out more than the angle to which one's thighs are turned out, the knees get compromised. Which gives me an additional reason to work on reducing the amount of feet-splay in the backbends, since I need to do everything I can to protect the knees at this point.

Here's a little discovery I made during this morning's practice. I discovered that rather than just drop back immediately after first coming up from Urdhva Dhanurasana, it is useful to hang back for two or three times before actually dropping back. I discovered that doing these two or three hang-backs brings more of the backbend into the muscles of the front body, which somehow also results in less feet-splaying. There is also an added benefit: When I finally allowed myself to drop back after these two or three hang-backs, I was able to walk my hands to touch my heels more easily, probably as a result of the added front-body opening. I still can't get into Chakrabandhasana unassisted, but maybe if I keep working on this, I will be able to do this one day.

Alright... that's all for now. More later.

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

Hello Blogosphere,
                                I'm just writing to let you know that I am still alive and kicking, even though I haven't blogged much the last few days. I don't really know why, but I couldn't seem to get motivated enough to write much about anything. There is, of course, that NYT article about that ex-Ashtangi who claims that Ashtanga didn't do much to get her a tight ass. Ho hum.

And then there was that big hoo-ha about Lululemon's latest shenanigan (all that Ayn-Rand-who-is-John-Galt business). To be quite honest, I just don't get what the fuss is about: I've never had any illusions about what Lululemon is, i.e. a big corporation that tries to make a big buck (and does so very successfully, I have to say) under the guise of the "yoga lifestyle". So I really don't understand why everybody in the yoga world seems to be so up in arms about what Lulu is doing: Why is it so shocking to many folks that Lulu has chosen to blatantly trumpet its brazenly capitalistic outlook on its shopping bags? If anything, we may even commend Lululemon for being so honest, where other corporations try to disguise or draw attention away from their questionable practices by jumping on the free-trade-label bandwagon. Not that there's anything for Lulu to brag about being free-trade about (free-trade ambassadors? Hmm...) Anyway, excuse me for saying this, but I really think that anybody who thought any differently about Lulu's capitalistic motivations from the get-go (and are now scandalized by the whole John-Galt affair) is clearly being naive. Wow... how many people did I just offend?

Hmm... are my days as a blogger numbered? I mean, if this whole trend of not finding anything interesting worth blogging about is any indication, I may have to take a break from blogging soon.

But I guess I should stop ranting. Maybe I'll tell you a little about what I did over the Thanksgiving break. Well, I had a quiet and relatively uneventful time. I spent much of the time reading. Over the weekend, I read The End of the Beginning, by Harry Turtledove. Turtledove specializes in the sub-genre of science-fiction known as alternate history. Alternate history novels basically invite the reader to imagine a world in which a particular historical event had turned out differently (e.g what if Germany had won WWII, what if the Japanese had followed up the bombing of Pearl Harbor with a subsequent invasion of the Hawaiian islands).

The End of the Beginning is part of a series of two novels which is set in an alternate universe in which the Japanese followed up the bombing of Pearl Harbor with an invasion of Hawaii. After occupying Hawaii, they install a puppet King and Queen of Hawaii. There are a number of characters in Turtledove's story; some of them are actual historical figures, and some of them are totally fictional characters. Turtledove does a really good job of depicting the trials and tribulations of these characters as the war affects their lives. There is the Japanese commander who planned the whole attack and invasion, who carries on an affair with the Queen. There is a U.S. Army officer who becomes a POW, and who is forced to do hard labor under terrible conditions. And there is his ex-wife, who is forced into prostitution by the Japanese Army. All in all, Turtledove is a good storyteller, and this is a very absorbing read. Well, you may not find any of this very interesting, but I'm bit of an amateur history buff myself. 


I guess I should also say a little about my practice, since, well, this a yoga blog, after all. Nothing much to say here, except that I have basically resolved to really follow the "any sensation is too much sensation" rule when it comes to my left knee. I've decided that I really need to do this in order to give me the best chance of healing completely and quickly (well, "quickly" is a very relative term when it comes to knee injuries...).

And boy, is it hard to practice this way. There are so many padmasana variations in primary, that it is quite shocking how different one's practice becomes when one cuts out all these variations, even if only on the left side. I will even venture to say that this is even harder than, say, working on landing Karandavasana. At least in that case, you just do one pose, maybe fall, then move on. But working with injury... gosh, the injury permeates the entire practice, turning the practice into a totally different monster (did I just say "monster..."?). Sometimes, I get the feeling that more than half the primary series is designed to make fun of my present condition. Okay, I'm probably taking things too personally. But what has to be done has to be done, and what I need to do right now is to do everything I can to make the practice healing and not hurting. So it is.

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

Some recent posts in the blogosphere (and more generally online) have caused me to ask some fundamental questions about the practice of Ashtanga yoga: What exactly should one aspire to in doing this practice? Is it alright to practice Ashtanga only for the purpose of getting a tight ass, for instance? And I don't just mean people who are new to the practice, who may quite understandably be attracted to the practice because of such "tight-ass considerations" (one irony here is that making one's ass too tight (i.e. if one clenches the buttocks too much) may make backbends difficult and even injurious. But this is a topic for another post). If this recent article in the NYT is any indication, even long-time "advanced" practitioners may still be motivated by "tight-ass" or fitness considerations.

Which is totally fine, as far as I am concerned. If doing this practice for the sole purpose of getting a tight ass or beach body (or whatever ass/body) works for you and rocks your boat, more power to you. After all, didn't this particular South Indian gentleman, one Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, famously declare, "Do your practice, and all is coming"? The "all" here, I suppose, should include tight asses and beach bodies, don't you think?

But I suspect that many people out there may look at the tight-ass-motivated Ashtangi and shake their heads in disapproval, saying that our Ashtangi here should be aspiring to more exalted things. After all, if our friend here has "advanced" to second or even third series, shouldn't he or she have totally transcended any ass considerations, and be striving for higher, less body-oriented goals?

What might be these goals be? Energetic openings might be one possible candidate. The trouble with energetic openings is that, for one, they are not things that you can necessarily will or intend to occur at particular times or places in the practice (then again, is there anything in the practice--or indeed, in life--that works this way?). For another, according to Owl, it is quite possible that:

"most westerners intuitively slow down their own transformation by half-assing the concentration, relaxation, diet or drste. At first, some rajas or tamas intake (emotional, dietary, mental) may act as insulation." 

As somebody who half-asses these things in more ways than I can count (or am conscious of), I think I can understand at least some of what Owl is saying here, even if I may not fully appreciate what my half-assing is preventing me from experiencing (or insulating me from, if one wants to put a more positive spin on it... it's very much a matter of perspective here, I suppose :-)). If many other Ashtangis in the west are in the same position as me, then it looks like if one is to have any chance of experiencing any kind of energetic opening, one would need to eliminate those things in one's concentration, relaxation, diet or drste that are causing one to half-ass one's practice. Which is possible, I suppose, but definitely no mean feat.

Long story short: Striving for/aspiring to an energetic opening is probably counter-productive, and would probably lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering from unfulfilled expectations.

So striving for/aspiring towards energetic openings as an explicit goal of practice is out of the picture. What other possible candidate/s is/are left? What about Samadhi, that holiest of holy grails of yoga practice? After all, if one is going to forego tight-ass considerations as a motivation for practice, one may as well strive for the highest possible yogic goal. But samadhi turns out to be a little more complicated than might be apparent at first glance. Yoga Sutra 1.17 describes four forms of Sampragnata or distinguished samadhi:

"Thorough knowledge
is accompanied by inquiry
into its four forms
analytical thinking about an object,
meditative insights on thoughts,
reflections into the nature of bliss,
and inquiry into one’s essential purity."

translated by M. Stiles

According to Swami Shyam, these four forms of samadhi culminate in an inquiry into bliss during which there is an awareness of peace and joy, and a lack of awareness of words, meanings, time, space. At the same time, there is also an awareness of the fluctuations of asmi, the source of ahamkara, or ego.

Commenting on this passage, Swami Satchindananda further cautions that the practice of samprajnata samadhi must be pure and selfless or else the practioner or sadhaka will abuse their new found powers and abilities.

I find Satchindananda's words here very interesting: If one does not practice samadhi with pure and selfless intention, one will abuse one's newfound powers in this area. This means that it is possible for one to attain samadhi while having impure intentions and being selfish. In other words, it is possible to attain samadhi and still be a total asshole! Which means that one can be a self-realized asshole!

Interesting... But if one is going to make all these efforts to attain samadhi and still remain the asshole one was, why bother? Why not just stick with tight asses and beach bodies? At least one would have less things to worry about that way.

Maybe I have discovered a certain paradox; let's call this the paradox of samadhi: One starts out the yoga practice being an average asshole. In order to overcome this asshole nature, one embarks on the practice of yoga, aspires to and eventually attains samadhi. However, if Satchidananda is right, then it is quite possible that one could still be an asshole after attaining samadhi. A samadhied asshole, but an asshole no less.

Or maybe the goal of yoga practice isn't actually to stop being an asshole, in the first place. Maybe it's just this: Do your practice, and all is coming (and even if you are an asshole, it is still coming...). Shows what I know, right? :-)

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

So today is Thanksgiving (if you live in the U.S. of A, that is; if you live anywhere else, it's just another day). As much as I think this is not a bad country to live in (after all, I'm still here, after all these years), I've never really bought into the whole Thanksgiving myth, that whole story about the pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower and all that; for one, whoever came up with this story seems to have conveniently forgotten that Spaniards had already been in this country at least a couple of centuries earlier. Or maybe the point wasn't to celebrate who came first, but something else? Shows how much I know the history of this country, doesn't it?

In any case, this is no place or time to engage in any kind of academic head-banging about the origins and meaning of Thanksgiving. If you celebrate Thanksgiving, Happy Thanksgiving! If not, well, celebrate anyway and be happy! Moreover, from the point of view of an Ashtangi, the timing couldn't be better: Tomorrow's the new moon. Which means you can eat all you want (maybe get drunk too, if that's your, uh, glass of wine), and sleep in tomorrow! No point practicing: If the Ashtangic lore is to be believed, your body will be sluggish and all tomorrow, it being a new moon. So you may as well go with the flow, weigh your body down with lots of fuel, and let it be as sluggish as it wants to be!

So go forth, my friends. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. If this is a bit morbid for your taste... well, there's more truth in it than we might want to believe. After all, seen from the perspective of an entire life, we do eat, drink, and be merry (hopefully, more often than not). And then we die. So why not have all the merriness we can, while we can? What we don't use, we lose, no?

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

I just came across this very nice Youtube video of a talk and asana demonstration that Kino did at a recent workshop in New Orleans. The asana demonstration, which is in the second part of the video, is great, but I think her talk is even greater! Don't get me wrong; Kino's asana demonstration is beautiful and effortless, as it always is. But there's always a part of me that goes, "Okay, but this is Kino, right? What else can you expect?"

But her talk is a different story. Here are a few gems:

(1) "I don't need it to be easy, but what I want is a way that I can work on it today." Even though most of us know that Ashtanga is not a quick fix for anything, many of us are still consciously or unconsciously conditioned by contemporary consumer culture, and expect things to happen relatively quickly in our practice. So that if we, say, aren't able to master the jump-back in three months, we decide that our bodies aren't cut out for jumping back.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Everything is possible, but we need to trust the process, be prepared to give it time (lots of it), and things will happen when they do. Hard for many of us to swallow in the heat of the passion of the practice on the mat, but that's just how it is.

(2) Five steps forward, Four and a Half Steps Back: Actually, if Pema Chodron is right, for the first couple of years of practice, it's more like five steps forward, five steps back. And then you progress to five steps forward, four and a half steps back. And if you're wise, you'll celebrate that half step forward rather than brood over the four-and-a-half-steps back.

(3) This has nothing to do with the video, but Kino emailed me last week to ask about how I am doing with my knee. I am very grateful--touched, actually--that she would take time out of her very busy schedule to ask after me. When I first got injured, I had emailed her for advice, and she had been very generous and unstinting with her suggestions and advice as well. I think she's a really great person. I'm very grateful to be able to learn from somebody like her.


All this brings to mind a recent conversation I had with a friend. Some time ago, I had taught this friend Surya Namaskars A and B and a few standing postures, and had told him that there are six series of postures in the Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga system. I also shared with him that I am only somewhere in the second series (for more details, see the second half of this post).

Anyway, during a recent gathering with some friends, the topic of yoga came up, and my friend brought up the fact that I had been practicing yoga a couple of hours everyday for a few years now. He then threw what he thought was a wisecrack at me: "But how come your yoga still sucks even after all these years of practice?" (I supposed he meant, "How come you are still only at second series after all these years?") I laughed at the supposed wisecrack and said self-deprecatingly, "Well, I am a person of limited talent. What to do?"

To be quite honest, it didn't even occur to me in that moment to be offended. After all, my friend sees yoga as one of many possible ways of keeping fit, and not so much (if at all) as a spiritual practice: To him, it made perfect sense that one can be "better" or "worse" at yoga, just as one can be better or worse at, say, tennis or racket-ball. And of course, if I were a self-realized yogic saint, I would have stayed unruffled and unoffended. But you know how remarks like this often have a way of festering and snowballing, so that the sting comes long after the remark has already been delivered? Well, this is kind of what happened with me (it probably also doesn't help that given the state of my left knee (which he did not know about), I was probably more conscious of my physical limitations than I usually am). Anyway, my first thought when I first felt the sting of the remark was something along the lines of, "Yeah, easy for you to say: Spoken with the true arrogance of somebody who's never used his body for anything much else than eating, sleeping and going to the bathroom!" No really, think about this: Have you ever noticed how many couch potatoes and other largely sedentary beings have this curious tendency to be overly critical of and to put down any display of physical ability that is anything short of Olympian? (Couch potato: "What? He can only jump this high? My grandmother can do better!" Nobel: "Really? Let's see your grandmother do that...")

Well, I probably should stop ranting about this. In any case, what can I do? The only productive thing to do, when all is said and done, is to let go and try to happily acknowledge that I am now in the five-steps-back phase of my practice. The only thing to do is to acknowledge this, go back to the mat, and practice. And then, after long time, all is coming.   

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

I spent a big part of the weekend reading Time Out of Joint, a science-fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. I've never read anything by him before (I was going to write "I've never read any Dick before", but I thought that would have been in very bad taste... but hey, I've written it anyway, albeit parenthetically. Sigh...).

In any case, this is the first book I've read by him. I've heard lots of good things about him; apparently, a number of movies (Total Recall, Minority Report, Adjustment Bureau) were adapted from his novels. I'm not going to spoil the story for you by telling you what the book is about. But let me just say this: If Time Out of Joint is any indication, it seems that Dick's novels are not very fast-paced; the screen-writers who adapted his novels probably took a lot of liberties with the story, and spiced up the plot with lots of action scenes so that people like Tom Cruise and Matt Damon would look good in them. But if you can get past, say, the first fifty pages, the plot thickens, and you get so sucked into the story that you can't do anything else. Including blog; which explains my blog-silence over the weekend :-)

How can you possibly have time to get lost in a sci-fi novel when you have, like, a million other things to do? You may ask. Well, the same question can be posed about blogging as well: How can I possibly have time to blog when there are a million more, uh, "productive" things I could be doing? What about yoga? How can I possibly have time to spend a couple of hours each morning doing this thing called Ashtanga when I could be using that time to, say, write a book that will blow somebody's mind, or at least get more sleep?

The list of such "How can you possibly have time..." questions goes on and on indefinitely. The correct answer is probably "No, I don't have the time for any of this, objectively speaking. But I choose to do these things anyway. Why? I don't know... because I can't imagine not doing them?"  Or maybe it's because I instinctively know that a life spent not doing these things, while possibly more "efficient", would probably not be as fulfilling as this life. 

Practice this morning was quite good. Here are a few highlights and thoughts:

(1) In the Suryas, especially Surya B, I think I am increasingly getting the hang of floating back and forward into Uttanasana. For a while, I have been able to lift up into trini and kind of plop back into chatvari. It's only in the last couple of days that I started to figure out how to do the reverse (floating forward into Uttanasana). I think the trick is to pretend that I am jumping through, but lower my feet at the last moment, so that I end up landing in Uttanasana instead of jumping all the way through. The trick, I guess, is to pretend to such a degree that your body actually believes that it is going to jump through, and then trick your body, and lower your legs to the ground at the last moment. I'm still unable to hover above the ground just before I land, the way people like Kino and David Robson are able to, but not to worry; do my practice, and all is coming... :-)

(2) I think I am making progress in locating the spot in my mid-back that is not open in backbends (at his Minneapolis workshop back in July, Matthew Sweeney told me that my mid-back needs opening; see this post). I'm not exactly sure how and exactly when this happened, but something last week, while going into Kapotasana, it suddenly occurred to me that my mid-back is really lower down my back than where I previously thought it was. Pretty funny when I put it into words, don't you think? That I shouldn't know where my mid-back is, when it has been on my body my entire life! But I think this is what makes yoga practice so intriguing; it's one thing to be able to locate the mid-back on an anatomical diagram, or even to touch your own mid-back in an everyday setting. But to be able to bring forth the prioproceptive awareness to actually know where it is and get it to open up during a backbend... now that is an entirely different ballgame.

In any case, as I was saying, sometime last week, I suddenly had this awareness in kapo that my mid-back is actually lower down my body than where I thought it was; with this awareness came the realization that I had been spending too much energy trying to open that which does not need to be opened further (my upper back), neglecting that which needed to be opened more. Over the last week or so, I have been working on bringing more awareness to this new-found place. I think it's causing my kapotasana to open a bit more easily.

(3) My left knee is not 100 hundred percent recovered, but it's better.     

(4) Lately, I've begun to wonder if breakthroughs in practice can sometimes be a double-edged sword. For instance, I discover a new way to open up something in my body, which leads to a breakthrough in one area (say, floating in the Suryas or landing Karandavasana). But unbeknownst to me, the breakthrough causes me to use certain muscles or to move my body in a certain way, creating imbalances in some other part of the body. Which might then lead to injury. Which then requires scaling back the practice to heal the injury and hopefully, going back to the same place in the practice at a later point in time with a wiser and more balanced mind-body. If this is correct, then it seems that "progress" in practice might often be a 2-steps-forward, 1-step-back kind of process. Do any of you out there have this feeling?

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

In my philosophy class yesterday, we discussed the problem of freedom. Specifically, we focused on this question: If cultural determinism is true, can we really make any genuinely free choices? In other words, if our ideas, worldviews and reactions to events in the world are all ultimately determined by the society and cultural environment in which we are a part of, can we really have freedom in any meaningful sense of the word?

Here's an example I used in class to illustrate this question: Suppose I decide tomorrow that I don't want to be a philosophy teacher anymore. As interesting as talking with students about philosophy can be, I decide that ultimately, teaching philosophy in a university enables me to have only a very limited impact on the lives of people and on society as a whole. I want to do something else that will enable me to have a much more direct impact on people's lives, that will inspire them in a much more direct way. I decide that the best way to do this is to become an NBA star. Yes, you heard it right; NBA as in National Basketball Association. I decide that nobody could fail to take notice of a severely shortsighted, five-foot-eight Chinese guy who is nevertheless able to dunk. And once people take notice of me, they will get curious about how I got to be in the NBA, and will want to interview me on all kinds of late-night TV shows (Larry King, Jay Leno, etc.). And then I will be able to unleash my inspirational words and teachings on the public. Since way more Americans watch TV than take philosophy classes, I figure that if I can get to this position of great eminence, I will be able to make many friends, gain many fans, and influence and positively inspire the lives of millions. Great idea, no?

But of course, there is a very practical problem: How am I supposed to transform this five-foot-eight Chinese body--a body which, I may add, has no aptitude whatsoever for ball games--into a high-jumping, basketball-dribbling-and-dunking-NBA-star body? But well, this is a philosophy thought experiment, and in philosophy thought experiments, money is never an issue. Which means that, at least in theory, I can hire the best basketball coaches in the country and spend all my waking hours training until I acquire the requisite athletic abilities and the basketball skills. Which means that, at least in theory, only time and a shitload of training stands between me and the athletic prowess and basketball skills of Michael Jordan.

But here's the problem: Even if I succeed in becoming the greatest basketball sensation since Michael Jordan, and go on to inspire millions on Larry King with my philosophical abilities (yes, a philosophical basketball star. Think about that :-)), it will still be questionable whether I will have done anything really significant. After all, it can be argued, my breaking out of my present mode of existence (being a philosophy professor) and becoming a basketball star, as radical as this may seem, is still very much an action that is conditioned by the cultural and social environment of which I am a part. After all, if I did not live in this time and age and in this part of the world, it would never even have occurred to me to want to become an NBA star. Indeed, I probably got the very idea of becoming an NBA star from watching NBA stars on TV. Which means that even my radical act of reinventing myself has its roots ultimately in mass media, which is, of course, the biggest purveyor of social and cultural norms in contemporary society. So here's the question: If even this act of radically reinventing myself is ultimately an act that is conditioned by social and cultural norms, and therefore not genuinely free, is there any action we can take that is truly free? Right now, I don't have a definite answer to this question, although I'm leaning more and more towards "no."


What has any of this to do with yoga? You may be wondering. Well, although we don't usually couch it in these terms, what we ultimately after in yoga practice is also freedom. Whatever form of yoga we practice, the ultimate goal is moksha, or liberation from the chains of samskara, or the karmic grooves that have defined and bound our actions thus far.

But here we are in a somewhat similar predicament as my NBA-star-wannabe alter-ego: None of us would have encountered yoga if we did not live in the time and place that we do now. This is true whether you first encountered yoga by seeing it on TV, through the introduction of a yoga-practicing friend, or by randomly picking up a copy of Yoga Journal on some newsstand somewhere. You may argue that your yoga practice today and your present understanding of it has evolved to the point where it has transcended these humble beginnings. Fair enough. But even if this is true, it still remains the case that you would probably never have encountered yoga if it weren't for the fact that you live in this culture and society with its various norms and values. Even if you are one of the relatively few people who first started doing yoga on some hippie commune somewhere, and you now practice some obscure and highly esoteric form of yoga that is not accessible to mainstream society, it still remains true that you are a member of a subculture, and insofar as all subcultures originally arose as reactions to a perceived establishment or "mainstream culture", you are still, by extension, a product of the norms and values of this time and age. In other words, we are very much limited and conditioned beings. How, then, can we be truly free?      

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

The issue of eating or not eating meat (and the accompanying issue of whether one can eat meat and still be a proper yogi) seems to have resurfaced recently, both in the blogosphere and in my everyday environment.

 
First, my everyday environment. A couple of days ago, I was ordering my usual lunch (a veggie sandwich on wheat bread) at the campus cafeteria. As the server was putting my sandwich together, the guy next to me in line remarked, "Oh, you have no meat in your sandwich!" From the baffled tone in his voice, I think he meant something along the lines of, "Dude, you forgot to put meat in your sandwich!" This being the upper midwest (and a rather rural part of it, at that), the idea that somebody could eat a sandwich without meat in it probably still strikes many people as quite strange, to say the least. In any case, this is how the conversation between me and this guy unfolded from this point: 

Nobel: "I'm vegetarian."

Guy: "Really? I could never imagine going without meat. How long have you been vegetarian?"

Nobel: "About two years."

Guy: "How do you feel, not eating meat for so long?"

Nobel: "Well... I feel lighter. But really, most days I don't even think about it anymore. I've not eaten meat for so long, I barely even notice I'm not eating meat." 

Guy: "Very interesting."

And we then went our separate ways.   


The same issue has also recently emerged in the blogosphere as a topic of discussion. First, Grimmly recently blogged about his journey from vegetarianism to non-vegetarianism, and back to vegetarianism. Grimmly's story is very authentic and inspiring. You should check out his story, if you haven't already done so.

Bindy also ends her recent post about her wonderful trip to Akron, Ohio with an account of these delectable cheeseburgers that she ate at an old-school burger joint, the kind "with waiters who run out to your car to take your order & return quickly with a tray that hooks on to your window just like in the 50s. you eat in your car."

Anticipating the possibility of the vegetarian/vegan police/PETA activists leaving snarky comments in her comments box, Bindy continues,

"i know many of you who read this blog are probably repulsed by this, but i eat meat because when i was a vegetarian for 7 years, i got sick ALOT. since i began eating meat-the exact same year i started doing yoga-i haven’t been sick since. not all bodies are meant for the vegan/vegetarian lifestyle.
even though i know many of you will anyhow, don’t judge me. i myself am not fond of vegans but i try not to judge either."
  
Well, Bindy, I am certainly not repulsed by your account (and pictures) of the delectable cheeseburgers. And I think it is probably true that not all bodies are meant for the vegan/vegetarian lifestyle. If eating meat (and lots of it, to boot) is your, uh, piece of steak, then more power to you!

Personally, I don't think I would have become vegetarian if it weren't for the Ashtanga practice. Two years ago, I moved to Milwaukee, and became a full-time Ashtangi when I started going to morning mysore at my teacher's shala. At my teacher's recommendation, I decided to try not eating meat. To this day, I still don't really know why I listened to him: Many, many people have tried to persuade me about the wonders of vegetarianism before that, including a couple of (in my opinion) rather misguided big-name yoga teachers (I'm not going to name names here...) who resorted to cheap scare-tactics like showing PETA videos (you know, the kind with graphic depictions of chickens getting their beaks cut off), but I had basically ignored them, and continued merrily eating meat, especially my favorite meat dish, fried chicken. It probably also doesn't help that I was brought up in a culture (Chinese culture) whose members have been known to eat anything that crawls, swims or flies. Which, if you think about it, is an evolutionary advantage, since this pretty much means that Chinese people will probably never die of starvation due to lack of food in foreign environments :-) So growing up, meat was as much a part of my life as, I don't know, apple pie and cereal might be to the lives of others. Growing up, I used to think that the only people who didn't eat meat were (i) Buddhist monks and nuns, (ii) people with certain medical conditions. I suspect that many Chinese people still think this way.

But I digress. As I was saying, I still don't know why I listened to my teacher, where so many have tried to persuade me but failed. Maybe it has something to do with his no-bullshit way of going about it ("If you stop eating meat, you can get deeper into Marichyasana D!"), but I almost immediately decided to start by limiting myself to eating meat once or twice a month. After about a month of doing this, I realized to my surprise that, except for the occasional craving for fried chicken or Friday Fish Fry, I really didn't really miss meat all that much. And I also discovered that not eating meat allowed me to feel (and be) lighter. Which really helps a lot when you are getting up early to put yourself into things like Mari D and Pasasana six days a week.

So really, I don't have any particularly noble or high-minded reasons for becoming vegetarian. The chief reason is my Ashtanga practice: I love doing the practice too much to let something like fried chicken get in the way of Mari D or Pasasana. Which is probably a very bizarre and egotistical reason to go vegetarian to most people in the so-called normal world ("What? You give up fried chicken and Filet Mignon just so that you can twist yourself into funny shapes every morning? Have you lost it?"). But hey, I'm sure people do even stranger things for way stranger reasons all the time...

In any case, since my reasons for being vegetarian are not very high-minded (in fact, they are actually rather egotistical, if one equates asana achievement with ego), I'm not in a position to hit anybody over the head for not being vegetarian. Nor do I want to. Having been on both sides of the vegetarian-omnivore divide, I don't think being or not being vegetarian puts one in a better or worse position to become a self-realized being. As a matter of fact, I hear that His Holiness the Dalai Lama eats meat too. So if you are a meat-eating yogi/spiritual practitioner, you are at least in good company :-) 
 

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities