our-yoga

Some of you may be aware that Kino has recently been on the receiving end of some negative reactions, both in social media and in the "real" world, over a video about practicing Ashtanga yoga in Mysore that she made about six months ago. Apparently, some Ashtangis who were in the video were offended because Kino did not ask for their permission before filming them doing their practices (for more details about the whole thing, see the January 22nd posts on Kino's Facebook page). Anyway, here is the video in question:

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I just read Patrick Nolan's latest post, in which he relates an incident that came up with regard to the Ashtanga instructional videos he has made with Kino (they are very helpful, by the way; you should check them out, if you haven't already). Patrick writes:

"My teacher Kino had re-posted some of the instructional videos we made together and so I re-read the disparaging comments about my physique made by some lonely shit-heel out there in cyberspace.  The same sequence of gut reactions that I had the first time I read the comments played themselves out again.  First, amusement at the comments, which are actually pretty funny.  Then, some self-doubt and body image insecurity came up in spite of myself.  I know I'm not obese or even overweight by most any criteria, but neither could I be an underwear model.  One or zero.  "If you ain't first, you're last," as Ricky Bobby said.  Then, annoyance at the guy who made the comments, but that turned to compassion for him when I did a personal inventory.  I want what I have, so I have what I want.  While I can't say for sure, I'm guessing that this is probably not the case for the person who has to tell people, anonymously in a youtube comment stream, about his six-pack abs and chiseled arms."

As a veteran of, ahem, one youtube yoga video (if you haven't already seen it, you can see it in this post), I think I can relate at least to some of the things that Patrick brings up here. I think I'll start by saying this: It takes a great deal of courage to make a video of yourself doing yoga and to put yourself out there in that way (especially if your name is not Kino MacGregor :-)). This is even more so if your intention in doing so is to help others with their practices, and give people who would otherwise not be able to go to a yoga class the opportunity to get some much-needed yoga instruction. I mean, think about this: If you are just making a video of yourself doing, say, the primary series (now, I think I know somebody who just did this recently...), all you have to do is do the primary series while the camera is rolling, and be sure to place the camera at such an angle that it tends to show your body from a flattering angle. Whereas if you are making an instructional video, you inevitably have to place your body in some rather awkward and frankly, not-so-flattering positions while you demonstrate the finer points of the posture to your viewers...  

But anyway, I went over to Youtube earlier today, and looked at the offending comments that Patrick talks about. While, like Patrick, I can't say for sure, I am actually more or less certain that those comments came from a place of insecurity, inadequacy, and uncalled-for negative judgment on the part of the commenters. Why else would anyone feel the need to put somebody down for not having the body of an underwear model?

Which brings me to the whole "If you ain't first, you're last" mindset that seems to pervade much of our contemporary capitalistic culture. This is basically an all-or-nothing mindset: "You either have a job, or you don't", "You either are a movie star, or you're not", "You either have an underwear-model-worthy body, or you have a crappy-looking body..." I could keep on multiplying examples, but I think you get the picture: Either you have something that is great and exalted and worthy of public exhibition and praise, or you have... nothing.

Anyway, in my humble opinion, I think that a big part of our yoga practice (or of any spiritual practice worth our time, for that matter) lies in freeing ourselves from this kind of all-or-nothing mentality. Because as much as our mundane capitalistic world today wants us to believe otherwise, life is not all or nothing. What is life about, then? Well, that's a big question to try to answer here, but I like to think that among other things, it is about making choices: We can choose to focus on our practices, and not pay too much attention to what others may or may not say about us. Or we can choose to do the opposite, and buy into the all-or-nothing mentality, and severely limit our own life-horizons in the process. The choice is ours, and it is one that we continue to re-make and reaffirm everyday.

Anyway, I guess what all this means is that you probably won't be seeing any instructional videos from me anytime soon (I'm not sure you want to, anyway...). So, if you had subscribed to my Youtube channel in the hopes of seeing such videos from me, well, I'm sorry to disappoint. Hey, it's still not too late to unsubscribe, you know...

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Here it is, finally: My first-ever Youtube video! After waiting for a very, very long time to get it uploaded (see previous post), it finally, well, uploaded! I am both happy and relieved at the same time.

In the video, I am doing primary to Sharath's count, from Paschimattanasana all the way to Utplutih. I decided to leave out the standing postures, because I didn't have enough space on my memory card, and also because I can't bear to watch myself dance in UHP :-)

The whole thing is 45 minutes, so please don't feel like you have to watch all of it. But I hope you like it.

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First, a little video eye-candy. I'm not particularly big on posting yoga videos, especially videos of people doing handstands. I know lots of people out there are fascinated with handstands, but honestly, I've never really understood this fascination. Don't really know why; I guess I just don't get what's so magical about being able to lift your feet all the way above your head without support; I mean, aren't there enough things to work on within the practice already? Besides, I often have this suspicion that people who make handstand videos are really just looking for an excuse to, well, show off their asana prowess in a gratuitous kind of way (btw, is there such a thing as non-gratuitous showing off? Hmm...).

Or maybe I just have a bad case of sour grapes. But in any case, there are handstand videos, and then there are handstand videos. The following handstand video that Kino recently made in Bali is so well-shot (the peaceful surroundings, the sound of water flowing from the stone buddhas, etc.) that even I have to suspend my usual non-fascination with handstand videos. It's definitely in a class of its own. Check it out:

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Yesterday evening, I attended a book reading by an author whom we ("we" as in the philosophy department, of which I am a member) invited to campus. I was half expecting (more than half-expecting, actually) to see a smug, pot-bellied middle-aged white guy read dourly and dryly through a section of what he thought was his great book, and answer a few questions in a perfunctory, smug manner. Although I am definitely guilty of stereotyping here, stereotypes, like rumors, often have a grain of truth: Over the years, I have encountered more than my fair share of philosophers who actually fit this stereotype.

So I was very pleasantly surprised to have my stereotype broken last night. The author in question (I'm not going to tell you who he is, because I try to maintain a certain separation of blog and work here, but if you really want to know who this guy is, email me, and I'll tell you...) turned out to be this unassuming Bostonian who has written a few novels that take a humorous, slightly irreverent, yet ultimately charitable view towards things religious and spiritual. As I listened to him read sections from his very entertaining prose and interact with the audience, I couldn't help feeling, in light of all those wonderful things that happened in the yoga world in Encinitas lately, that perhaps too many of us take ourselves just a little too seriously, that perhaps, when all is said and done, life and its contradictions might be just a little more bearable if we learn to laugh at ourselves and also laugh with others.

There was one thing the author said that I found to be quite insightful. He was telling us that he is basically a political junkie, and listens to late-night talk shows hosted by people from every point on the political spectrum. Listening to these shows often make him sad, because he realizes that when it comes down to it, we are actually 99% percent similar to each other, but people like talk show hosts (and probably politicians too, with the aid of the media) really exploit the remaining 1% that make us different (our socio-economic backgrounds, religions, political persuasions, sexual orientation, etc, etc.) to sow fear and division among us. The result is a very divided country in which people talk at each other rather than with each other. Which is not to say that our differences are not important (they are), but why allow these differences to make life more difficult than they need to be?

Honestly, I can't say that I can always see that we are 99% percent similar; truthfully, even as I am writing this now, there's a part of me that finds it difficult to believe that I, a Chinese-guy-born-and-grown-up-in-Singapore-who-moved-to-the-United-States-when-he-was-twenty-five-who-does-Ashtanga-and-stopped-eating-animals-some-years-ago-who-also-teaches-philosophy-who-likes-double-espresso-and-still-sometimes-has-cravings-for-fried-chicken-or-fish-and-chips-even-though-he-has-ostensibly-stopped-eating-animals, can actually be 99% similar to you who are reading this now. But the more I run this 99% similarity thesis, as I shall call it, through my head, the more I sense that it is true: Over and above our differences, we are probably much more similar to one another than different.

Here's something else I heard on NPR the other day that also reinforces this 99% similarity thesis. This economics professor at some Ivy League university conducted an experiment in which she got a random group of people with very different socio-economic backgrounds and political persuasions to come together in a room (now, why don't I ever get to conduct cool experiments like this that make it onto NPR? ;-)). After a round of introductions in which everybody told everybody where they are from, what they do, etc., they were all assigned to try to solve a problem together. The economist reports that all these people were able to work together amiably, despite their differences. The basic idea is that if you get people to sit down face-to-face and talk about things together, people can often set aside their differences and find workable solutions to common problems. Which is, of course, a bit hard to believe sometimes, given all the differences that are being aired everywhere in seemingly every corner of the mass media during this election season.

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