our-yoga

Over the past few weeks, I have been feeling emotions in a more intense kind of way. These feelings can be described as a sort of muted melancholic feeling that originates somewhere deep in the gut. It's not the "can't get out of bed" kind of depressed feeling that some people who are depressed report feeling. Rather, it's more like a deep melancholic feeling that feels like an undercurrent that is undercurrenting everything else that I may be feeling or going through. And honestly, the feeling is not entirely unpleasant. It feels like tapping into something deeper within myself, wherever "deeper" may be. I also feel a bit like an onion whose layers have been peeled away, exposing deeper parts of myself that I may not have aware of before.

I think the occurrence of these feelings has something to do with my second series practice, but I have no objective way of proving this. It may, of course, also have something to do with the fact that I am reading existentialist writers (Sartre, Heidegger, Camus) very intensively and closely in the course of teaching my Existentialism course. But again, I also have no objective way of proving this.  

Anyway, these intense episodes usually occur off the mat and at seemingly random times. For instance, I was in a restaurant a few weeks ago, and the in-house TV was playing a documentary about the 1994 attack on the figure-skater Nancy Kerrigan. I suddenly found myself feeling very sad (and yes, I will even confess that I felt a lump in my throat...) for Kerrigan, even though I normally don't feel too much for the trials and tribulations of celebrities, being the normally cynical person that I am.

I have communicated with a couple of my teachers about this phenomenon. They have encouraged me by telling me that this is 100 percent normal, and that I should continue with my practice. They also suggested that I learn to appreciate and love these moments, and to see them as windows into a deeper place within myself (probably somewhere in the liver... just kiddin').

Recently, I have also been struggling with a very simple question: Is there life after death? Or, more specifically, do we need to believe that there is some kind of existence after death in order to be an effective Buddhist or yoga practitioner? I know that Buddhism and yoga are two very different things (whatever clever new-age-ists out there may say), but this much at least seems common to the two traditions: Both traditions seem to presuppose that this worldly existence is not all there is, that something, whatever that may be, persists after our earthly bodies have expired and decomposed.

Of course, none of this should be any concern to you if you practice yoga simply for "stretching" or to stay in shape. But if you take any of the accompanying spiritual mumbo-jumbo (karma, purusha, the five koshas, to name just a few) even a little bit seriously, I simply cannot see how you can then call yourself a yoga practitioner and not believe in some notion of an existence beyond this one.

So what's the problem here? Well, maybe there isn't a problem. One could simply accept the minimal amount of metaphysical baggage that your community deems to be kosher, and continue to merrily do one's asana practice as is. You know, maybe believe in some kind of afterlife, just don't commit yourself to too many specific details, so that when you die and go to wherever you go, and find out that the details are not quite what you thought they were, you can quickly adapt and be on the right side of the fence :-)

The problem arises if you have a slightly more rationalistic bent of mind, like me, and if you have always had the suspicion that any talk of the hereafter (even if it is packaged in cool-sounding shit like karma and purusha and emptiness and whatnot) is a kind of intellectual opium designed to pull the wool over your unsuspecting eyes and make you more likely to listen to people who want to control your life and tell you what to do. The problem is also compounded by the obvious fact that nobody (at least nobody that I know) has actually been to the other side and seen what is actually in the hereafter. So if you tell me that there is karma and purusha and a bigger purpose beyond the ken of our intellect that can guide us to a better place, my first question would be, "How do you know this? Have you been there?"

Oh well. I really don;t know what else to say at this point. This is really just me talking my head off, as you can see. If you have anything to say, feel free to comment. If not, I hope you have fun reading and thinking stuff through with me. It's all good, one way or the other.     

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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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