our-yoga

I just read this very thoughtful and insightful article by Matthew Sweeney on the evolution of Ashtanga Yoga. It gives me a lot to chew on; I think Sweeney does a wonderful job of articulating and giving a balanced treatment from different angles of the way the practice has evolved over the years. I'm not going to quote any of it or offer any commentary here; I think the article speaks plenty for itself. But do take a look at it when you have a chance. It's definitely worth reading and pondering over.

In other news: It appears that a new pope (the first one from the Americas, no less) has been elected. Will the election of a new pontiff have any effect on my digestive and elimination processes, just as, say, the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in the Amazon might cause a typhoon in Asia? Probably not. But who's to say? Anything is possible in the universe these days.  

On that note, I'll keep this post brief, and sign off here: The election of a new pontiff is probably not a good occasion for a long, pontificating post :-) More later.

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I have a bad feeling that this is going to be one of those posts that contribute to the popular (mis?)conception of  Ashtangis as self-torturing pain junkies who delight in inflicting pain on themselves. I hope I don't contribute too much to Ashtanga's already bad rep in this area. But everything that I'm about to describe here actually happened yesterday and during this morning's practice. So I can at least say that I am being honest, if nothing else.

Before I go on to tell the story proper, I think it would be useful for me to give you a little background story. I am going through a rather nerve-wracking and angst-provoking time in my life right now: I don't particularly feel like going into the details here (although I might when all this is over, however it turns out), so you'll have to bear with me for being a little vague about things here. Suffice to say that I am waiting for a couple of things to fall through (or not), and I'll know in a couple of days whether they do. Right now, there is nothing to do except wait. And wait some more. And in the meantime, continue to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, do the practice, blog, and try to stay sane the whole time. I have tried reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, but honestly, it hasn't been helping much. He's just too harsh and rational about this whole being in the present moment thing for my state of mind right now. For example, at one point in his book, in response to somebody who said, "Surely we need hope to keep us going, and hope is always hope that things will turn out better in the future. So doesn't having hope imply not being in the present moment?" To this, Tolle replied that if one is fully present in the moment, one doesn't need hope: When one is able to fully savor the present moment, what use is there for hope for the future? I'm paraphrasing, as I don't have the book on me right now, but I'm pretty sure I captured the essence of his reply. I don't know about you, but I think this is kind of harsh. I mean, it does make for a certain logical kind of sense: If you are fully, fully present, you won't need to hope for anything in the future. But I think it is no exaggeration to say that we humans are hardwired by centuries of cultural conditioning to hope for a better future when things get rough. And, to borrow a phrase from Marx, perhaps Tolle is saying that hope is the opium of the un-present masses, just as religion was the opium of the masses on Marx's view. And maybe it's just me, but isn't it a little bit cruel to deny a frail mortal like me even the opium of hope in a time like this? Well, I'm guessing that Tolle will disagree here; he'll probably say that I need to go "cold turkey" and use this difficult time in my life as an opportunity to rid myself once and for all of the opium of hope. Whatever. Go to hell. (Yikes! What did I just say?)

To add insult to possible injury, I was talking with a friend yesterday about my present situation. He listened for a while, and then suggested that I take a bigger-picture view of things as they are right now. Even though things are not going quite as I would like them to go, there are many blessings in my life: Good health, a yoga practice, etc. He then proceeded to point out that material possessions and worldly position are really quite insignificant in the light of this bigger picture. Wow... this is what happens when one reads Eckhart Tolle: Even your friends start to sound like him. 

But here's another ironic twist: As much as a certain part of me refuses to buy into any of Tolle's talk about being in the present, the Ashtanga practice seems to be the one thing that is actually fostering such presence in my life right now. This morning, I woke up with a rather funky mood. My whole body felt stiff and heavy, and I did not feel like practicing at all. Well, okay, I asked myself, what are you going to do then? Go back to sleep? But I somehow knew more sleep was probably not going to make me feel much better: If anything, I'll probably end up feeling even heavier and stiffer a couple of hours down the road. So I gingerly rolled out my Mysore rug, and started moving through the practice. As I got into primary series, an idea suddenly struck me: The last couple of days, I had been re-reading Matthew Sweeney's Astanga Yoga As It Is, and familiarizing myself with the Sanskrit vinyasa count of the postures and transitions in primary. It's pretty funny to say this, but as much of an Ashtangeek as I am, I have actually never gotten the exact Sanskrit vinyasa count in the seated postures of primary down pat. I figured that now would be the time to rectify this gap in my Ashtanga career :-) Anyway, as I got into primary this morning, I suddenly thought it would be kind of cool to recite the vinyasa count mentally to myself as I did each of the postures. So on I went: Sapta, inhale and jump into posture. Ashtau, exhale and hold for five breaths. Nawa, inhale and exhale there. Desa, inhale lift up. Ekadesa. exhale into chaturanga. And so and so forth. And since Sweeney does the traditional long count, he doesn't "reset" the count to Sapta on the second side of the posture, but continues with the count on the first side. So I get to count all the way up to Ekonavimsatihi (I really love the sound of this particular word!) and then Vimsatihi, which is when you exhale into downdog before starting from Sapta again and jumping into the next posture of the series.

It's really interesting, but before I knew it, I realized that counting the vinyasa to myself really helped to remove all extraneous thoughts from my mind. Who knew that one could pull an Eckhart Tolle simply by doing the vinyasa count? Maybe one day, when all this shit that I am presently going through is over (I know, I know, I'm not being present again, but whatever...), I'll teach a workshop titled, "Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and Eckhart Tolle: How to use the Traditional Vinyasa Count to bring greater presence into your practice". Maybe you come? :-)

Another, less pleasant thing also happened during practice this morning. My upper back muscles, especially the Trapezius, goes through periods of tightness. Such tightness tends to recur during periods of stress or anxiety. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been feeling this tightness from time to time whenever I sit in front of my computer or when I am reading. These past couple of mornings, I have been feeling the tightness during practice itself, especially when I lift my legs to put them behind my head in Supta Kurmasana. But I thought that if I moved into and out of the pose carefully, I'll probably be fine. And in a sense, I was right. Nothing major happened in Supta Kurmasana this morning. But something major did happen as I rolled over into my second Chakrasana (the one following Setu Bandhasana). As I rolled my legs over my head to go into downdog, I felt this sharp pulling sensation in my trapezius. Somehow, I still managed to land my feet in downdog. But I knew the damage had been done. Damn... no more Chakrasana (and probably also no more putting legs behind head in Supta Kurmasana) for the next few days, or maybe even for the next few weeks. We'll see. Anyway, my traps have been aching since then. In fact, they are aching right now, even as I am typing these words. I am doing a whole bunch of gentle trapezius stretches throughout the day to relieve the soreness. But the funny thing is, even this pain has its upside: It is making me more present in my body, and causing me to fixate less on the other things in my life that are causing great anxiety. I guess this says something about my state of mind, when I am actually at a point where I actually prefer physical pain to mental anxiety. I hope this doesn't mean that I need to go see a psychiatrist or something. Scary. Anyway, I guess I'll sign off here. More later.

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This morning, I re-read Matthew Sweeney's book, Astanga Yoga As It Is. It's very refreshing to re-read such a gem, and to come into contact with Master Sweeney's wisdom again. I highly recommend this book, especially the introduction, which covers the basics of Ashtanga practice as well as some of the more esoteric and lesser-known aspects of the practice and its philosophy. Upon re-reading it, there are a couple of passages that really speak to me. For instance, he writes:

'The traditional [Mysore] method is relatively linear and methodical. Keep adding asana, remembering the vinyasa as you go, until you come to something you cannot do. You keep practicing up to the asana that is difficult or impossible but you do not add new postures until you can do it effectively. This can be a little limiting but it does establish the body's capacity in the asana. You become settled in the "seat". An unfortunate side-effect of this format is the tendency in Astanga to ask the question "What posture are you up to?" as if this indicates some kind of personal development. It is normal to want to move ahead, particularly as far as positive motivation and liveliness is concerned. The practice should never be lifeless, something new can be experienced every day, even if it is just a changed attitude. This forward looking attitude, however, should always be tempered with present tense awareness; stay in contact with what is rather than what should be.'

These words speak to my present practice and life on so many levels. First, on the asana front, I have been doing the same sequence of postures (full primary plus second up to Ardha Matsyendrasana) six days a week for the last ten months, ever since certain issues in my body made me decide to scale back from my second-up-to-Karandavasana practice. I won't bore you with the details of exactly what these issues are; if you want to know, you can look up my blog posts from around September to November 2011 :-)

I sometimes think that if somebody who is not familiar with Ashtanga Yoga were to come to my home every morning and observe my practice, he or she would think that what I am doing is very boring, except for maybe the part from Kapotasana to the finishing backbends (even with these, though, I would still imagine that boredom would set in after a while: I mean, not to be immodest or anything, but just how many times can you look at somebody do Kapotasana day in and day out, even if that somebody can grab his heels in that posture?). But I think it was David Williams who once said that the real yoga is what cannot be seen, not what can be seen. I know he wasn't referring to asana when he talked about what cannot be seen, but in a sense, what he said can be applied here. Even though I haven't been adding any "new" asanas to my practice for the last ten months, I really feel that over this time, the consistent performance of the same postures has resulted in a certain depth to my practice. Every posture is really familiar, and yet also feels uniquely different from one practice to the next, because every single practice uncovers some new aspect of the posture and how my body relates to it. And since the mind and the body are ultimately one and the same entity, every single practice also, in this way, reveals some previously unseen or previously forgotten part of the mind. In this way, the practice is a mind-body meditation.

And actually, in a very interesting way, this no-new-asana practice has led to physical breakthroughs in other areas. Because I do not have to contend with learning new asanas, I am able to surrender my mind and body to the process of working deeper and deeper with the postures I already "have." And I can't help thinking that this attitude of surrender is very helpful with the backbends that I am currently focusing my attention on. This morning, for instance, as I walked my hands to my feet for Chakrabandhasana after the three dropbacks, a lot of mental chatter came up in my mind: "Will you be able to grab your ankles today? What if you don't succeed?" "Don't you feel your thighs burning already? Maybe you should call it a day?" And so and so forth. As my hands walked towards my feet and around them, I listened to these voices, mentally acknowledged and nodded at them in understanding, and then proceeded to continue the work of walking my hands around my feet, slowly inching my hands until they could grab the ankles. And then, with a steadiness that is almost not of my body, they held on to the ankles for five breaths before letting go. Again, something like this made me feel that the mind and the body really are one: If one seats the mind down steadily, allowing it to listen without judgment, and allowing it to direct the body to do what needs to be done, the results follow.

But having said all this, it is also true, as Sweeney observes, that "It is normal to want to move ahead." This is true both in asana practice and in life, whether we are talking about wanting to be in another physical location, or wanting to be in another, "better" situation in life. And this is good. But it is also useful to know that one doesn't always need to change one's external circumstances immediately in order to change one's state of life; "something new can be experienced every day, even if it is just a changed attitude." Or here's another way to look at it: If one wants to move forward safely and comfortably, it is best to first make sure that one is fully settled in the "seat" of the present moment. Again, this true in both asana practice and in life: If one doesn't settle oneself fully and securely in the seat and make sure the seat belts are buckled, etc., one might get thrown out of the windshield of life when the going gets rough.   

Wow. I seem to be in "sermon" mode today. Wonder why? Pretty interesting, considering that it is actually quite sunny outside where I am right now, and sunny days are not usually associated with contemplative or "sermony" modes of mind. Hmm... interesting. Well, with this thought, maybe I'll sign off for now, and try to spend the rest of the afternoon enjoying some sunshine :-)

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I have not written anything on this blog for close to a week now. Why? Honestly, I don't know: It's probably a combination of life, stuff that happens in life, and whatever else it is that prevents me from wanting to blog, the origin and nature of which are unknown to me. But if we must have some kind of semi-coherent story about why I am not blogging so regularly, the closest thing I can come up with would be something that I just read over at Patrick's blog. Patrick has been documenting his experiences and feelings at a Matthew Sweeney immersion that he's attending right now. By the way, if you haven't studied with Master Sweeney before, I highly recommend it: He's very Yoda-like in his powerful insights :-)

Anyway, there is one thing that Sweeney said at the immersion that really struck a chord with me. Here's how Patrick relates it:

'Later in Q-and-A I would ask about negative stuff (fear, panic) in sitting; I'm used to it by now in asana, but in sitting, I'm not. He [Sweeney] said, "Well, humans have mess; this is entering the mess. But be careful not to turn FEELINGS, which are embodied and quite healthy, into EMOTIONS, which is how the mind ramps up feelings." I liked that. I like the idea of engaging the mess, and I've had this in asana for over two years. And I like this idea that sensation, feeling, is pure and healthy, while EMOTIONS are a sort of conceptualized feeling, the mind ramping up our feelings, sort of exaggerating them. Matthew also made it very clear: KEEP OBSERVING.'

I really think that Sweeney's words really speak to blogging: Isn't blogging (at least my blogging) a process of putting feelings into words, thus conceptualizing them and turning them into emotions? If so, might blogging inadvertently add to my emotional baggage (and by extension, yours, since you are reading this)? Hmm... I wonder if this is why I have consciously or unconsciously been blogging less: Why conceptualize that which does not need to be conceptualized?

But now that I am actually blogging (and conceptualizing) again, the floodgates have been opened, if only temporarily. So I may as well blog and conceptualize some more :-) And actually, I do have something to say about my practice this morning in connection with this. Over the last couple of months, I've noticed that I have come to regard Kapotasana as less and less of a challenging posture. I wasn't sure why this is so. Perhaps it's because the intensity of Kapotasana fades when compared in my mind's eye to Chakrabandhasana, which is what is really pushing me to my limits right now in my practice. This may be true. But this morning, when I was exiting Kapotasana, it suddenly occurred to me that on a purely visceral physical level, Kapotasana is no less challenging than it has always been, even if I have been able to get deeper into the posture with more ease now than, say, a year ago or even half a year ago: I still feel those really intense sensations in my back and in my front body, and it still takes quite a bit of work to steady my breath when I am in the posture. The difference, I realize, is that I tend to hold Kapotasana less tightly in my mind's eye (if this makes any sense); I basically do the posture, feel the intense sensations that it brings up, and then move to the next posture (Supta Vajrasana). Because I hold it less tightly in my mind's eye, there is less of an energetic shading around the posture, and my mind has come to regard it as less of a challenging posture, even if visceral physical intensity of the posture itself hasn't actually changed. This brings us back to what Sweeney was saying: The intense feeling will always be there. But if you conceptualize the feeling and hold it in your mind's eye longer than you have to, the feeling becomes ramped up into an emotion, and acquires an energetic shading all its own. Interesting, no?


I had a bit of a health scare yesterday. Around noon, I was looking closely at myself in the bathroom mirror (yes, I love looking at myself in the mirror :-)) when I noticed a blood-red spot in my eye just below the pupil. That really worried me, so I went online and googled "blood red spot on eye". WebMD then proceeded to inform me that I probably had what is known as a Subjunctival Hemorrhage, a.k.a. bleeding in the eye. F%$k! My eye is bleeding! was my first thought on seeing those words. But then it went on to assure me that in most cases, this is probably quite harmless, and is probably caused by forceful sneezing or coughing or rubbing of the eyes induced by seasonal allergies, and should clear up on its own. This made me feel a little better, but only a little, because I don't really remember sneezing or coughing very hard or rubbing my eyes in the recent past. And besides, trying to self-diagnose something is almost always a bad idea. So I went to my optometrist immediately. They ran a few tests on my eyes (checking eye pressure, etc.) and looked in my eyes with a microscope, after which the optometrist told me, to my great relief, that it really was a seasonal allergy. I could treat it with some eye drops, or simply wait for it to clear up on its own. I chose the latter.

My eyes have always been a source of anxiety to me: I am very near-sighted, and have been near-sighted since the age of eight. I am always very painfully conscious of the fact that if not for two pieces of glass in front of my eyes, my world would be an indistinct, hazy patchwork of color. But after this health scare yesterday, I took a little time to reflect on this condition of mine, and am reminded of the fact that ironically, my being near-sighted has almost certainly saved me from going blind at least twice in my life. The first time was when I was nine. I was playing and running around in a parking lot with my younger brother when I tripped and fell on my face. I landed face-first on a sharp corner of a concrete slab, which impacted my glasses and inflicted a big scratch on the lenses. As you can probably imagine, if I weren't wearing glasses at the time, my eyes would almost certainly have been on the receiving end of that scratch. The second incident happened when I was nineteen and doing my military service (in Singapore, where I was born and grew up, you have to serve in the military for two years after high school if you are a male citizen). On this particular day, a bunch of us in my platoon were doing some work with barb wire: If I remember correctly, we were setting a barb-wire barricade for an exercise. Anyway, this guy in front of me was trying to twist some barb-wire into shape when he lost his grip, and the entire length of wire sprung into my face. Somehow, the wire hit my glasses, and dropped harmlessly to the ground, leaving a big gash on the lenses. None of us thought much of it at the time: We probably even joked about my having an excuse now to go get some cooler-looking glasses from my optometrist, now that my glasses are broken. But a while later, thinking back about it in the quiet of the barracks, I couldn't help noting that if I weren't wearing glasses, I would have gotten a big gash on my eye. And while one can quite easily get new glasses, one can't get new eyes so easily...

So, as ironic and strange as it may be to say this, I have to say that my disability has actually protected me on at least two occasions in my life so far. Perhaps what they say is quite literally true: A disability can sometimes be a gift.     

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I just watched this video of an interview and a backbend demonstration by Anne Nuotio. I don't know much about her, except that she is an Ashtanga teacher based in Helsinki, Finland.

What she says in the interview really speaks to me. Nuotio says that the physical body has a memory that is activated by yoga. In particular, the intense nature of the Ashtanga practice has the tendency to bring these forgotten or repressed body memories to the surface. Some of these memories surface as pain--pain that the body had amassed at some point in the past, but has forgotten. The practice brings these to the surface and forces one to deal with them.

In my experience, I feel that this is especially true of backbends. Sometimes, despite one's best intentions with maintaining good alignment and form, one still feels pain in backbends, especially with intense backbends like Kapotasana or dropbacks. This pain is not bad pain. A couple of teachers I have studied with have alluded to this pain. For instance, at his Minneapolis workshop in July, Matthew Sweeney said at one point that very often, pain that is felt in backbends actually points to an issue that can lead to future injury. This being the case, backbends give us an invaluable opportunity to address the issue now, rather than in the future, when it surfaces as injury. A few years ago, Eddie Modestini made the same point to me in a rather less elegant way. He said, 'Well, if you still have an "ouiii!" sensation in backbends after you have done your best with alignment and all that, then maybe the "ouiii!" sensation needs to be there!'

Last but not least, in light of all the Ashtanga and senior-teacher-bashing that has been going on in the blogosphere lately, maybe I should end this post with a disclaimer: Please, please, I am not telling you to go inflict pain and injury on yourself in backbends. Please take care of alignment and be responsible for your practice (Ashtanga has a bad enough rep, as it is...). I'm just saying that not all pain in backbending is bad pain.

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