our-yoga

Warning: If you are the sort who may be offended by hypothetical (but not actual) Barhmacharya violations, I suggest you skip this post, and read no further.  

Hello everyone, I understand that I have not posted anything here for more than a month now. Well, I'm still alive and kicking, and am still working on my Karandavasana.

These days, the practice is something that I do in the morning, and then I shower and go to school (after putting some clothes on, of course!). I feel that the practice is now part of the background machinery of my life. I do it to keep my physical and mental and spiritual life going, but this is also probably why I haven't had much to say about it. I mean, would you blog about the state of your AC or heating unit at home everyday? I'm guessing the answer is no; I mean, we should all be grateful to have AC and/or heating, and offer thanks for that. But blogging about every little sound and vibration that it gives off is just a bit... much, don't you think? This is kind of what I feel about yoga blogging right now.

But after getting an email earlier this afternoon from a friendly reader (you know who you are) who pointed out to me the lack of posts on this blog, I suddenly felt guilty enough to actually write something today. But what should I write about?... Oh okay, here's something: I turned 38 yesterday (January 24th). Yay! Happy Birthday to myself (Cue cheesy music: Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you...). What did I do on my birthday? Well, I didn't actually do anything on my birthday itself. But the day before (the eve of my birthday, if you will), I went with a couple of friends to the local brewery, where we had a few too many glasses of beer and wine. We stayed there till midnight, and my friends wished me a happy birthday on the stroke of twelve. And then one of the bartenders had an offer for me: Would I like to go on an all-expenses-covered trip to the local... (what's the polite term for this?)... gentlemen's club?

As freaking intoxicated as I was, I actually said no to the offer! Now, before you get any exaggerated ideas about my supreme mastery of Brahmacharya, I'll like to politely inform you that my refusal of the offer had less to do with my mastery of my baser desires, and more to do with my aesthetic tastes: I simply find the very idea of going to a gentlemen's club on one's birthday to be supremely tacky. Why is it tacky? I can't really explain, it just is. It probably has something to do with the idea of gawking at a female stranger's lady parts on the anniversary of the very day on which I came out of another lady's (i.e. my mother's) lady parts! If this isn't tacky, what is? And moreover, due to some funny clause in Idaho law (this is a red state, remember?), the gentlemen's club is not really a gentlemen's club, technically speaking: Idaho law actually requires the ladies to keep their lady parts covered! So it should probably be more properly referred to as a lingerie club...

But why quibble over semantics? Hmm... is this story even appropriate for a yoga blog? Well, I haven't been blogging for so long, I no longer even have a sense of what is yoga-blog-appropriate and what is not. But what the hell is yoga-blog-appropriate, anyway? Do we yoga bloggers inadvertently censor ourselves in our writings? Hmm... something to think about, no?       

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I just read this article on Recovering Yogi by Sarah Li Cain, where she describes her experience with taking yoga classes in China. In the article, Cain relates at length an interesting episode about the bowels and yoga. But I am going to leave you to read about that episode for yourself. What I'm going to do here is to focus on some observations she makes at the beginning of her piece. She begins her article with these observations:

"The yoga studio I went to was very competitive. It’s an unspoken rule in China that the female patrons make sure they are dressed to the nines in expensive yoga gear so they can look the prettiest. They also compete to be the best in every yoga class, bending and twisting whichever way they can...
Men go to yoga studios to pick up women. Why wouldn’t you want to be the only male surrounded by twenty other females and have your pick of them?"

Hmm... I honestly don't quite know what to make of this. All of this brings up many thoughts in me. Where to start? Well, let's start with myself. I myself probably won't feel very at home in such an environment; even though Ashtanga does have a not-so-good rep for fostering competitiveness and Type-A-ness (doesn't this sound like Type Anus?...), I do try my best to follow the yamas and niyamas, and to not be competitive with myself or with others.

On the other hand, being Chinese myself, on some level, I kind of get why people in China would go to studios with this kind of mindset. I can't speak for women, but I do know that most Chinese men, for example, are very pragmatic in nature. This being the case, if you are a man who is, well, looking for a mate, it would seem to make sense, according to this pragmatic logic, to go to places where many women are at, and a place where you are outnumbered twenty-to-one by women would seem like a very good place to start, from the perspective of such a logic.

Of course, if you are a good yogi, you'll be thinking: But what about Brahmacharya? Well, at the risk of over-simplifying things, I'll start by observing that Brahmacharya, as far as I know, is a concept that is foreign to the average Chinese mind; and literally so, since yoga comes from India, which is a foreign land to the west of China. And at the risk of over-simplifying things even more, I'll venture to say that Brahmacharya is, in an important sense, also alien to the Chinese spirit of pragmatism. To illustrate this pragmatic spirit further, let me share a little story here. The Chinese writer Lin Yutang once gave the following witty explanation for why Chinese philosophy is so different from western philosophy: When the westerner sees a duck, he asks himself questions such as: Does the duck exist? How is it possible for the duck, which is supposedly a soul-less being, to move? The pragmatic Chinese person, on the other hand, simply asks himself: What is the best way to cook this duck, so as to produce the best-tasting duck dish?

Well, if you apply the above pragmatic spirit to the mind of a Chinese man who is looking for a mate, what kinds of questions do you think the man would be asking himself when he sees a fairly attractive woman (or, in the case of a yoga class, a bunch of fairly attractive women clad in lululemon pants (which, incidentally, are becoming more revealing than ever before))? I'm guessing I don't have to elaborate here...    

So I'm guessing that if you were to tell the average pragmatic Chinese man that women in yoga classes are not to be picked up, he would quite probably look at you like you are crazy, and then say, "But why not? If ducks are to be cooked, why shouldn't women be picked up?" Sounds sexist, I know, but it is what it is.

But then again, for all we know, things may be changing even in China. Some time ago, I was chatting with a senior Ashtanga teacher (I shall not reveal his name here) about possible changes in the global demographics of Ashtanga practitioners in the near future. He believes that as China becomes a world power and more Chinese citizens get exposed to different cultures, more people in China will also start taking up Ashtanga seriously (this is probably already happening anyway). When this happens, Chinese people will then start traveling to Mysore to study at the KPJAYI, and will also naturally delve into the other limbs of the yoga practice (including Brahmacharya). When this happens, they will then start absorbing and internalizing a notion that was once foreign to their minds. And perhaps things will change then.

Well, I'm not sure if this will happen. We'll just have to wait and see, I guess. 

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'It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship. The way she put it was:

"When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"'

George Orwell, 1984

I spent all of yesterday evening on my couch reading 1984. I know what you're thinking: Who spends Christmas Eve reading George Orwell? Well, apparently I do: Having disconnected my home internet account in preparation for my move to Idaho, and having no family in this country (and thus no family obligations to attend to during the holidays), I found myself home alone and effectively disconnected from the rest of the world yesterday evening (the significant other had gone to Florida to visit her dad). So what better thing to do than to curl up on the couch and read some mind-blowing scary shit like 1984?

Well, it wasn't scary, but it definitely was disturbing and thought-provoking. As I read, I couldn't help forming connections between the novel and things I experience in my everyday life, and the above passage was one of those that definitely jumped out at me in this regard. In the novel, the Party champions chastity as one of the virtues to be cultivated by the citizens of the totalitarian state; the Party Line is that the sole purpose of sex is to beget children for the service of the Party (which involves, among other things, telling on and denouncing their parents). This being the case, sex is not something that should be done for pleasure; sexual intercourse "was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema." The Party also recognizes that sex and making love uses up energy; energy which could be channeled into more "constructive" things like marching, waving flags, and other Party-sanctioned political activities. Which is another good reason to promote chastity and discourage gratuitous sex, from the Party's point of view.

As I was reading and thinking about these things, the cynical and subversive part of my mind couldn't help forming a connection here with our yoga practice. As you know, Brahmacharya is one of the yamas or ethical observances of yoga. The yoga "Party Line", if you will, is that if you conserve your sexual energy and not have too much sex, you will have more energy for your practice and the other great things in life, like fulfilling your householder duties and eventually becoming a self-realized being. So if we look at things in this rather cynical way, doesn't our yoga practice function to control and re-channel our sexual energies for a larger goal, just like the Party in Orwell's world tries to control and re-channel the sexual energies of its citizens in order to fulfill some larger political goal? Is yoga then a sort of self-imposed Totalitarianism of the soul?

Wait a minute, not so fast! You may be thinking. Surely yoga practice is the furthest thing from totalitarianism! If nothing else, chastity is imposed on you from the outside in Orwell's totalitarian state, whereas brahmacharya is self-imposed.

Or so you say. But what's the real difference between "self-imposed" and "imposed from the outside"? They are both forms of imposition. I'm not saying that there is definitely no difference between the two forms of imposition, or that there definitely is a difference somewhere. To be honest, I don't know the answer, one way or the other. I'm just thinking aloud, as always. But here's something else to think about: Remember all those gurus who have fallen from their states of grace since the beginning of the history of yoga? If you need a little memory jog, the latest two such cases involve somebody whose first name rhymes with "bathtub", and somebody whose name can be rendered in Spanish as "Juan Amigos". Could it be, could it just be that perhaps these gurus fell from their states of grace because of some failure of whatever systems of brahmacharyic self-imposition that they have imposed on themselves? Could it be that perhaps they had had enough of a life which consists of sex gone sour, from their point of view, so they decided to take things into their own hands and make the sour sweet again (which, of course, resulted in things becoming even more sour than they ever were to begin with...)?

Well, as I said, I have no answers here, only a few not-so-well-thought-out questions. But maybe, if you would like to burn off a few calories from your holiday indulgences by exercising a few brain cells, you might like to ponder this matter a little, and maybe leave a comment or two here. I'll love to hear what you have to say.      

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During this morning's practice, I decided, on the spur of the moment, to see if I could get into padmasana without using my hands in headstand (well, can you get into padmasana using your hands in headstand? :-)). What happened was, my body was itching to try Karandavasana again after laying off that infamous pose for more than a year. But I told myself to take it slow, and first see if I can get into padmasana in headstand first.

So I tried doing that, and it worked quite fabulously! My balance wobbled a bit in the first stage, which involves bringing the left extended leg way back to open the hips to accommodate the right foot into the left hip crease. But everything else went quite well after that, and I stayed in headstand padmasana for ten breaths. I think my hips have become more open over the last few months, because it didn't feel so easy the last time I tried padmasana in headstand, which was, I think, more than a year ago. So yeah, this is quite exciting. Maybe this means that Karandavasana is coming. Or not. We'll see.

Speaking of padmasana in headstand, Kino recently made a video about this. It's very helpful. Check it out:

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A very interesting thing happened to me after practice this morning. After savasana, I got up from my Mysore rug, and was floating around the house in my post-practice lightness/glow. I really love that post-practice almost-unbearable lightness of being. For me, this almost-unbearable lightness typically lasts for about 20 to 30 minutes. After I take a shower, the lightness mellows somewhat, to be replaced by a feeling of contentment. And then I step into the hustle and bustle of the "real" world. And then the dust--both physical and mental--of the "real" world settles over this feeling of lightness-contentment, and the rest of the day becomes a battle to retain and remember this feeling as much as I can.

But I digress. As I was saying, after practice this morning, I was moving around in my post-practice lightness/glow. While I was enveloped in this glow, my fiancee came up to me, and asked me what my plans were. I replied that I was going to take a shower, and then go downstairs to the coffeeshop to have an espresso (I have my own special interpretation of Sharath's famous "No Coffee, No Prana" dictum: For me, this means that if you practice and then drink coffee, the ability of the caffeine to circulate prana throughout the system is greatly enhanced. But I understand that many Ashtangis--and probably Sharath himself too--differ. But it's okay. Whatever works for you :-)...).

And then my fiancee said, "How about vacuuming the house?" I smiled sheepishly, hemmed and hawed a little, and then... I agreed! Now this may not strike you as anything out of the ordinary or even interesting. After all, Saucha (cleanliness) is one of the niyamas. So cleaning the house ought to be something that comes naturally to an Ashtangi, right? Well, yes, probably. Except that I have always disliked cleaning, and basically try to get away with cleaning as little as possible. Which means I probably don't score very high in the Saucha department... actually, here's an idea: Maybe this is something that Yoga Teacher Training Programs out there can implement. You know, have the teacher trainees live in some kind of residential setting for a certain period of time, and have the trainer rate each trainee on how he or she performs in each of the yamas and niyamas. But then how would you assess somebody's performance in Brahmacharya? Maybe have a fairly attractive fellow trainee of the opposite sex (or same sex, if the trainee is homosexual) parade naked in front of the trainee who is being assessed, and see how well he or she holds up under temptation? But then the stakes are probably too high here; who would want to volunteer himself or herself to be the "temptation"? And this is probably sexual harassment, anyway; the studio or yoga school holding the training will probably get their pants sued off (talk about Brahmacharya...) and be forced to shut down.

But I didn't mean to go on this tangent about Brahmacharya. Can't seem to keep my thoughts straight today. As I was saying, I've always disliked cleaning, and probably don't score high in the saucha department. But my fiancee picked the right time to ask me to clean; if she had asked me later in the day, I probably would have found some excuse or other and put it off indefinitely. But, as things stood, she asked me when I was in that post-practice blissed-out state, when the reading on my Asshole-meter is at its daily lowest. What Asshole-meter? You may be thinking. Well, some years ago, at a workshop in Florida, David Williams said something along these lines, "Everyday, you get on your mat and do whatever practice you can do. And then you go into savasana. When you come out of savasana, you are in this blissed-out state. Today, you may be able to stay in this state for 10 minutes after savasana. And then you go back to being the asshole you are. Maybe tomorrow you will be able to stay in this state for 11 minutes before lapsing back into being an asshole. And so and so forth."

These weren't the exact words that Williams used. But I think they are pretty close; I'm very sure he actually used the word "asshole." The idea is that, over a period of time (10 years, 20 years, maybe one lifetime, or even two) of consistent practice, the amount of time in the day when you are blissed out will slowly equal and maybe even surpass the amount of time you are an asshole. Finally, you will get to the state when your "asshole time" is very short, even negligible to the point of being, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. And maybe this is when you will finally achieve Self-realization. I don't know for sure, but I think this is the idea.

But all this is just me. Maybe none of this really applies to you. Perhaps you love cleaning and score very high in the Saucha department. If so, more power to you, and please ignore everything I've said above. But maybe you will still find all this entertaining, in some way, in which case you would still have gotten something good out of reading all this. :-)

In other news: Several Ashtanga bloggers have written a few wonderful posts on how to start an Ashtanga practice (at home or at a shala): Check out these posts by Grimmly, Maya Lassiter, and New York Yogini. Maybe I will also write a post about this in the next couple of days: I'm too blogged out right now, and also have a few other things to get done today.

Speaking of home practice... As you will know if you read this blog regularly, I practice mostly at home. Sometime last year, a studio near my home started a once-a-week Mysore program on Saturdays. For a while, it was quite well-attended. I also attended whenever I could (see this post). But since the beginning of the summer, the owners of the studio have suspended the Mysore program due to personal things going on in their lives. And as far as I can see, there are no plans to restart the program.

None of this really affects me; I still happily do my daily home practice. But in some corner of my mind, I feel this urge to do something to get some semblance of the Ashtanga flame burning again in my part of the world. And recently, a friend also remarked to me half in jest, "What good is having a beautiful practice if you don't do anything with it?" Hmm... are you supposed to do anything with a beautiful practice? But maybe he has a point. And besides, as I mentioned, I do feel this urge to contribute in some tangible way to spreading the Ashtanga practice, beyond blogging about it.

But due to my present circumstances, actually starting an official Mysore program myself is not feasible. I live in an apartment, which means opening my house is not an option, as there simply isn't enough space. My finances are limited now, which makes renting a space unfeasible. And besides, I am also trying to devote more time to getting more research done, with the aim of eventually landing that thing called a tenure-track position. All of which makes taking extra time out beyond my daily practice to teach not a very viable option.

I have toyed with some ideas here and there. For instance, I have thought about going out to a park nearby on some mornings to do my practice, and maybe, in this way, attracting interest in the practice in an organic fashion and teaching whoever wants to learn it. But I wonder if people will just look at me and think I'm some kind of a Chinese Yogic Freakshow ("Welcome! Welcome to the one and only Chinese Yoga Freakshow in the Upper Midwest! Featuring the One and Only Ashtanga Fundamentalist in these parts..."), and then just walk on. Then again, maybe this is what David Swenson and his brother Doug had to contend with in their early yoga days, when they practiced in a park in Texas...

Anyway, I'm just thinking aloud here. If you have any thoughts and/or suggestions, I'll love to hear them.

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I'm probably going to piss off a few people by writing this, but I really think the yoga blogosphere has become a very funny place recently. What do I mean? I get the sense that, rather than using their blogs as a place to share their own feelings about their own practice and life as it pertains to the practice, many bloggers seem to be increasingly using their blogs as platforms to air their views about the latest storms and/or scandals in the yoga world, both online and in the "real" world.

Why is this an issue? Well, in a sense, it's not. After all, our blogs are our own private virtual soapboxes, and we should be allowed to say whatever we want, right? Who am I to dictate what people should or should not blog about?

Fair enough, fair enough... but I always feel that in order for yoga blogging to be meaningful and authentic, it needs to be based as much as possible on thoughts and feelings about things that one has experienced directly.  These can be thoughts and feelings about the current state of one's own practice, thoughts and feelings about things that are happening in one's own life and environment, or thoughts and feelings about things and ideas that one is reading about or thinking about. I'm not quite sure how to express all this more succinctly, but the general idea is that blogging should be as close to one's first-hand empirical experience as possible. I've even coined a fancy term for this idea: Empirical Blogging.

But who says that blogging needs to be empirical? I do! Well, you may ask, what's so important about blogging's being empirical? Why should it be empirical?

To begin, the more one focuses on things that one directly experiences, the more one can come to understand what is going on in one's own life. In this way, blogging becomes a way of studying and understanding the self (i.e. svadhyaya or self-study). By contrast, the more one focuses on things in the greater world (even if it is the greater "yoga world") that may or may not have anything to do with one's own direct experience, the more likely one is to add to the already voluminous amount of vrtti that is in one's chitta. What's so bad about adding more vrtti to the chitta? Well, I can't answer this question. Only you can... 

Wow, I think my professional life is starting to spill over into my blogging life: I'm beginning to sound like the didactic, preachy professor that I am in "real life"! So I better sign off soon. I see that this is not a good blogging day (or maybe it's the full moon?). But I'm guessing you know what I'm trying to say here with all my talk of empirical and non-empirical blogging. Well, in case you don't, I'll give you a couple of recent examples of non-empirical blogging:

(1) All that blogging about that William Broad book about how yoga wrecks your body: I have no problem with blogging about books. I do that myself. But from what I can see, most of the bloggers who have blogged so far about the release of this book have been blogging about it second-hand: They basically quote reviews of the book that have been done by other people or news agencies.

Rather than quote some review or other which I can go find and read myself online, wouldn't it far more valuable to go read the book yourself, and then write up a detailed, balanced appraisal of what is in the book based on your own reading? (Need I say more?)

(2) All that blogging about that John-Friend-Anusara affair: I really have no idea what is going on in this affair (which is why I don't blog about it!). Again, it seems that whatever blogging I have seen so far involves some kind of secondhand quoting of this or that source that may or may not know anything about what is actually going on.

But seriously, do I really need to know anything about what John Friend is or is not doing? If it's a matter of Famous Yogi X having sex consensually with not-so-famous-but-very-physically-attractive Yogini Y, and then going on to have sex consensually with another not-so-famous-but-also-very-physically-attractive Yogini Z, and so and so forth... why would I need to know any of this? I mean, don't people have sex with each other/one another all the time? Granted, Famous Yogi X, being a Famous--and therefore supposedly Self-realized--Yogi, shouldn't be running around having sex with a bunch of people. It's bad for his brahmacharya, and probably also for the brahmacharyas of all the people he's having sex with. But again, why do I need to know any of this? Knowing somebody's non-observance of brahmacharya isn't going to help me with my brahmacharya (nor, I suspect, with yours...). And moreover, the information, being secondhand, may or may not be accurate. So we are stuck with a very bad deal: We get some (admittedly juicy) information that may or may not be accurate, which benefits us in no tangible manner, and which most certainly adds to our collective chitta vrtti, and does nothing to help with our collective brahmacharya (or, I might add, with the other yamas, most particularly Satya, or truth).

So what gives?

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