Ongoing, deeper, practice

sutra-1-14That (Abhaysa) becomes a solid foundation when practiced with devotion, sincerity, and for a long period of time without interruption. 1.14 There are certain things that happen in a yoga practice, if a person hangs with it long enough.  They happen with such precision and such regularity that I want, sometimes, to offer a guarantee that they will happen.  The thing is, though, they are generally not what we expected nor what we first came looking for.  Folks come in for stress reduction, weight loss, relief of back pain.  Or someone suggested it would help with a knee problem, a shoulder injury, a difficult period in life.  When people come in, these are the things they're going to ask about.

I can't, honestly, say that yoga will fix any particular problem.  I can't promise that it will heal our traumas or relieve our anxiety.  I can't promise it'll fix bum knees.  I can't promise that because, a) that depends so much on how the person goes about practicing and what they practice and b) we actually have very little idea of how yoga works with things like healing, pain, and emotions.  To be fair, this is because no one, science or religion included, understand how healing, pain, or emotional life really work.

So I say that.  I say I don't know if yoga will fix your ........  But I can say it will improve your life.

I want to say, I can promise.  I guarantee.

If you practice for a very long time, consistently, with some reverence and willingness, and with sincerity.

If a person does, inevitably we gain a self-clarity.  We see, ourselves.  Both the bullshit and the potential.  The sastras talk about this as a quieting of the distractions, so that who we really are becomes apparent.  Or, a journey to the self by seeing through the self.

Secondly, a person gets a kind of unshakeable, unflappable, honest self esteem.  This isn't the kind of self-esteem wrought by affirmations, accomplishment, or privilege.  It's a self esteem that can fully handle feeling remorse, without falling apart.  And, can fully accept opportunity, without being oppressed by fear.  It's a self esteem that comes from a slow process of coming to understand we can trust ourselves.  This is no small thing.  I think the vast majority of humanity doubts, this.  It's important that we trust ourselves to survive.  Trust ourselves to act humanely.  Trust ourselves to do well.  I heard a woman in a check out line this morning, getting the work done before dropping the kids at school and going to the job before the second job, say 'you know, like women do'.  This is badassery.  But it's not quite what I mean.  I mean a capacity to do such things, but not be slowly ground down by them.  To actually feel enlivened by them, and better over time.  The kind of self-esteem I see come up recognizes that we are better today, than yesterday, but still has some hope and faith that tomorrow we can be better, still.  Without that, we get lost in yesterday's accomplishments or a sense of loss.  Or, we suffer grave doubt.  Doubt is smothering.

Thirdly, I watch a kind of sacred knowledge being born.  The body, itself, becomes sacred.  We begin to regard the body, to listen to it's whisperings, to be lost in wonder at it.  It loses it's terrible warzone, aspect, and becomes instead a sanctuary.  This is important.  This is feminism.  This is also, humane.  We cannot come to this relationship with our bodies without feeling, deeply, understanding, that this is true of all the other bodies in the world.  There is something precious to humanity.

With a devoted practice, a person also develops resilience.  The world is hard.  Aging is, hard.  We practice as a means of mitigating and understanding what has happened in our lives.  But, if we practice long enough, resilience becomes something more.  A kind of reservoir that runs deep.  A kind of source that doesn't run out.  Practice itself is filling this well.  And we'll need it, sooner or later.  We'll need a source of inner dignity, because the world has a way of withdrawing the dignity it once gave, dismissing bodies as they age for younger versions, forgetting you.   Further, this resilience is the most valuable thing we could offer.  It will, in the long run, be more important than money, or accolades, or social rank.  It will be called on.  It will be called on precisely when money won't solve the problem, or social rank, or mere words.

Eventually, through the process of having a devoted practice, we move through handed down wisdom, then cognitive wisdom, to finally having insight or embodied or experienced wisdom of our own.  Various strands of the tradition call this the perfection of practice, the perfect wisdom, the most true source of clarity.  But the only route to it is time, commitment, experience with a lineage handed down and some practice time with a mentor and guide.

I promise these things happen.  They are inevitable.  Practice gone deep enough changes our behavior, and ultimately changes the direction of our lives, changes who we are.  This change is mysterious and stunning.  And, inevitable.

If: we practice for a very long time, consistently, with devotion.

This raises questions, though.  Once people understand it.  The question of how to keep practicing.  How to find a guide.  What exactly to practice rather than the sporadic things taught in drop in classes, or the one you scroll through on the online sites, or the DVD you happened to buy.  Where is any of that, going, over time?

A person's practice develops once they begin to work with how the body works, rather than looking to perfect it, master a pose, work out or do gymnastics.  There's nothing wrong with any of those things: they can all be done.  And they can even be done in a smart way.  But if a person makes the shift from wanting those things to wanting a deeper practice, they inevitably begin a bigger curiosity about asana, the interface of psychology and physiology, the questions raised by flesh and time.

And, they eventually begin to work with breath, to understand that it is a doorway to a different experience of body, and psychology.

And, they begin to work in a way that is developmental.  That builds depth over time.  That goes into themes.  That allows for personal experience to deepen.

I've been playing with many of these ideas for years, asking my teachers about them, wondering how this path works in modern day america, in our current conditions, with what we have.  I'm enjoying playing with this in the weekly videos.  A way to practice, developmentally, rather than sporadically.  A practice that begins to tap breath, mantra, physiology, bhavana.  A practice that has a purpose and dedication to it.  A way to weave time, experience, soft tissue and structural understanding with the subtle body and mind-body aspects of dharana, dhyana, and samadhi.

This month, we're going to the mountain of the spine, all sorts of spinal release, and a bit of bandha.  Watch as the tactile 'getting it', grows.

 

Movement into Stillness: Fall 10 week special series

Start date postponed so you can still sign up.  New dates: September 19 - November 23 Yoga has been touted in recent years as a healing modality.  It's said to balance the body, and stabilize mood.  As the seasons shift, these are important issues.  Autumn tends to be stressful - a returning to school and a sudden shift of gears from summer activity to winter's, dark.  Any seasonal shift brings with it a rash of allergens, digestive stop and gos, changes to sleep and schedule.  But this shift toward winter, in particular, is hard on the body and the nervous system.  It tends to light up sore joints, remind us of aging, bring down all the pressures of the world.

Winter is hard, metaphorically, and physically.  Seasonal Affective Disorder is a fancy name for a very real thing that happens as we lose the long days and spend most of our waking hours in the dark.  I've found that other mood and psychological issues are also sensitive to the seasonal shift: depressions darken, anxiety moves more, old griefs return and the monotony of living our lives feels more tedious. Auto-immune issues flair. Our worlds get smaller as we shift from social and community life to staying at home where it's warm. We lose the freshness of the garden and start to eat stored things.

It's said that yoga, helps.  Yoga can be, therapeutic.  If it is used that way, taught that way, and understood to be more than yoga asana. Yoga asana can be more than a shape. Yet yoga therapy is distinct from physical therapy, and psychotherapy.  Come learn the how, the why, and the practices.

Yoga therapy is distinct from physical therapy.  AND a therapeutic practice of yoga veers away from yoga as generally taught in classes: postures and sequences done a few times a week are not enough to effect healing (though the insight gained there often launches people off, into a more healing and personalized practice).

Yoga therapy is distinct from psychotherapy.  Partially, in that it so clearly identifies the person as a complex of body and mind.  Yoga sees emotions and moods and experiences as happening on both psychological and physical levels.  But yoga therapy isn't just a mind-body wellness system, like deciding that exercise and diet will help our moods.  This is true, but it's only the beginning of understanding the interface of mood, experience, personality, and body.

This ten week series will look at the interface of physiology and psychology, mood and body, through the ancient system of the 'subtle body'.  It will tie ancient practice to neuropsychoimmunology.  This will be a course on mind-body wellness.  But it will aim at personalizing, practice, as well.

Unlike the summer special series that used the same asana sequence every week, this course will introduce different principals and progressively explore the concepts of vi-yoga (release or purification) and samyoga (connecting to something whole, healing, true).  We'll work up and down the spine and discuss chakra theory and practice in depth, while coming to understand modern somatic healing techniques.  We'll develop our yoga practice beyond asana by learning a few new chants, deepening our meditation skills, and coming to understand yoga methodology or practices as working on the physiology, psychology, and behavioral spheres not only through postures but through a range of practices.

If you have any fascination with subtle body and chakras, or any interest in the therapeutic applications of yoga practices, this is a course you should attend.  If you are interested in the way yoga affects psychology and behavior, you should be there.  If you just enjoy learning in more depth than is possible in drop in classes, come.

awake

Practice, Depth. Subscription video now available!

authenticityThis was a long time coming, and a fairly big deal.  And, as things which are a long time coming and a fairly big deal always happen to be, this is so simple. You can now subscribe to deeper practice videos.  All of Karin's deep anatomy and deep philosophy, ruthless ditch the sequence and the alignment and find the breath, teaching.  In your pocket, your cellphone, or your living room.

Each week you'll get a 90 minute asana sequence AND a 30 minute breath/meditation/technique video.  That's two hours of practice a week, at your convenience, for fifty bucks a month.

More expensive than the freebies on youtube or the other subscription sites, yes.  But I'm not teaching canned vinyasa.  I'm not looking for mass production, but for a way to interact with human beings, provide a context for learning and practice.  This is deeper practice, my teaching, getting the tools and actually understanding what's going on, feel the difference in your life, stuff.  I draw the people who are called to personal change.  To deep thinking.  To reason, not vapid hippy-dippy stuff.  I teach to people who love yoga but have become disillusioned with the culture and the studios.  To people who realize it isn't about contortions.  Folks who realize sun salutations aren't always possible, chronic illness is hard, that there's something to asana and breath that is NOT about alignment or advanced postures.  I teach to soul and am only really interested in teaching, that.  Let the masses learn, elsewhere.

More expensive than the freebies and the cheapies and the franchised studios, yes.  But, still, you could pay for unlimited classes in studio, and get the subscription, for less than other studio's class packages.  Those things are two and three hundred bucks.

This is what I believe: learning, healing, the gifts of practice are available to anyone who makes an honest commitment.  But the gifts of practice involve breath, meditation, study, developing body literacy, and intelligence AS MUCH AS ASANA.  Asana are, ideally, paths right up to those other bits.  You could practice postures for years and still be a jerk.  Or, practice postures for years and wonder why you're still miserable.  Or, practice a certain style for a while and then be lost and confused when illness, injury, or life trouble comes up.  Or, finish your RYT 200 and realize you don't know diddley squat, yet, and long for more.

We need practices that go to depth, and don't snag on the superficial.

Put this in your toolbox.  If you miss my teaching, sign up.  If you can't make studio classes.  If you've never been to the studio, but are still drawn to reading and the idea, of having a personal yoga practice.

Yoga is personal.  Take it that way.

The meditation session, freebie from Karin Burke on Vimeo.

Guru Purnima

As the sun sets tonight, I plan on making my way outside to sit in the moon.  Tonight is Guru Purnima: a time in which the 'guru principal', or that which dispels darkness and wakes us up, is a thousand times stronger than any other day.  Traditionally, this night marks a time of honoring spiritual and academic teachers.  The ones who saw us, lit us up, called us out. According to Buddhist tradition, Buddha gave his first public sermon on this night.  According to the yogic tradition, Shiva became a teacher on this day, and Vyasa, the author of the sacred Mahabarata, was born.

I think of the nights I've spent laying flowers and candles at the feet of teachers.  But I also think of the happenstance people who've helped me on this path, whether they knew it or not.  Whether I knew it, or not.  My folks who didn't know if it was a decent career goal, but supported my trying.  The girlfriend who pulled me into a class.  My mentors who've said, go and see.  Teachers who held space for me to doubt, to cry, to fly and to fall.  In busstops and church basements.  In doctor's offices and university hallways.  In a parked car, while we tried to get to the bottom of it or simply sat back in quiet wonder.

We are so lucky.  So privileged.  That at some point, a path was shown to us.  Take a moment tonight to light a candle, touch on gratitude, do a little puja (ceremony) to recall the folks, living or dead, who held the light before you.  Thank god, we've been inspired.  Good gracious, but we've been ignited.  Soak in the principal of light, the dispelling of darkness, the possibility of waking up.  Gratitude to the moon, who ignites women and sages and seekers, those who don't believe the dark is impenetrable.  May we all know this inner light.  May we never think it ends.

Come chant with me tomorrow morning, and feel the light of bones.

guru purnima

#blacklivesmatter

lynchedFor the last week I've been writing an essay on privilege, identity, politics, and our own lives.  This isn't that essay. This is just saying I am angry, and terribly sad.  I've been reaching out to POC friends today.  One said, we're in a war against black bodies.  And we're losing.  I feel insane.

I'm hearing them say be safe out there to each other.  I am wildly terrified at the implications of this.

 

This isn't small.  It will not go away in a few days or news cycles.  It is important that we grieve, that we feel, and that we take care.  And, it's important that we do what we can.  I use my physical and meditation practice to feel and realize how I'm doing, what's happening in my life.  The anger.  The fear.  The speechless grief in my gut.  My physical and meditation practice helps me know, so that I can then stop practicing.  Then, I can be in my life without so much of my own reactivity, apathy, exhaustion, bitterness filtering my world.  I can listen.

On Saturday, 10:30 am, trainees and I will be sitting meditation.  Afterwards, we'll talk.  We'll break for lunch around 1.  I want to open that time up to everyone.  Trainee or not.  Yoga student or not.  We have to be able to sit with our anger, our fear, and our confusion.  And, we need spaces in which we can talk, that aren't facebook.

I'm also thinking we'll wash the windows of their current signage and get #blacklivesmatter, up there.  I was talking with a cop friend today, about trying to get yoga, in there.  I want to hear from my friends.  I want to hear from my students.  I want to know how I can help.  Not 'if'.  I want to know how.  I would love to hear from you.

Please consider joining us, or sharing the info with someone who might.  We have candles. We have hearts.  And we can talk.  We can also sit, quietly.

In love,

Karin

Art of Self Care begins again July 18

body language 2This is the third incarnation of this class, and it keeps getting better.  The whole is hosted on the website.  Guided meditation and asana sequences are included in each week. The course presents the yoga tradition in a way that cuts through all of the fads, the lists, the hard to understand herbs and the conflicting advice.  I try to explain the principal of change, which is consistent to the tradition and the most cutting edge modern day research on brains and bodies.  What we find is that healing is uncovered, change is allowed, power is something revealed if we can just create a space for that to happen.

You are encouraged to sign up for this course WITH A PARTNER, as a half hour chat with them once a week fuels the practice and makes the whole thing go.  Each week centers on an hour long podcasted video: supplementary material is optional, something you go back to in time, or dive into when you are ready.

This is rich material, a lot of karin's deepest personal work, (and experience, and years of trial and error, slowly coming to understand) streamlined for you to learn, more easily and without the stuck points.  This helps us understand what asana are, what minds and bodies are, how energy and mood and thinking works, so that we can feel yoga unfurl in our lives, off the mat.

Repeat students can retake the course for $108.  This is required of the 500 hour training, because questions of self care and life and meditation are central to a deepening practice and the majority of the questions you'll be asked, as a teacher.  This is a golden place for newcomers to begin, as NO EXPERIENCE is required but you'll get the principals down.  This is ideal for students who have been practicing for a long time, have some idea of a meditation practice, but are wondering about the gap between practice and life, longing and reality, all those conflicting rules and cues.

I love this stuff.  I love watching what it's done for people, so far.  I think you will love it, too.  Sign up, here (and then bookmark it).

The Art of Self Care: Clarity from Karin Burke on Vimeo.

 

intimacy, pornography, yoga

This begins with a phone call from a stranger. She said she’d been Google searching for a yoga studio, found mine and tried to click it, and suddenly just like that she was watching porn. No kidding. No filter. No warning. Slapped flesh and bared bums, thrust right in your eye. So close you felt sticky. So fast you weren’t sure what happened, but that it happened in your belly and your mouth. So unexpected you were caught. I got three more phone calls within an hour. I got Emails. And I got silence. I’d been hacked. The silence was thundery. This I don’t know what’s happening. This this is out of my control.

There was a vomit of re-action, out of me. I was pissed. I recoiled. I muttered and paced. I spent hours hunched over my laptop, ignoring the physical need to pee. My face hardened and my voice went high and tight. I was embarrassed. I was crazy scared; what did I do wrong? How do I make it stop? What would happen to my writing, to the studio? To my students? What would happen to my name? I felt incompetent: I can send an email, post a blog, share on Facebook but I don’t really know how the internet, or computers, or basic math, works. Have I been playing with fire, all this time? I felt insulted. I was afraid. I was terrified people would look, for the first time ever, to find some answers about yoga or some guidance, and be slapped in the face with an aggressively erect penis. I felt, sundered. My eyes burned. I spent the whole of the night with people more tech savvy than me coaxing me through the back end of a coded labyrinth. We were trying to find the one thread, the one glitch, something maybe that blinked or was red or broke a pattern. I was blind. Eventually, these kind and more skilled than I people managed to figure out it was deep, not a superficial or amateur problem we could lift up and off and out of all those numbers. It was a seeping, poison. The best we could do was to shut the whole thing, down.

We shut the whole thing. Down.

Then, the real re-activity began.

A real question was raised. Many questions. First: what happens when you lose so much? Second, what do you replace loss, with? If, faced with having to start from scratch or trying to resurrect something from years ago, why this pull toward not losing? What is it I think I’ve lost? What emotive and pathetic and visceral psychology is this, now?

Third: what does the internet have to do with me, with yoga, with a small studio in a smallish town in the Midwest? ** Fact: most people spend vast swaths of their day, of their lives, online. We know this is impersonal, and we do it anyway. Fact two: we are a globalized, socially mediated, enormously fast, culture. This is both alienating, and connecting. Revolutions are instigated on twitter. Police brutality is caught on cellphones. People are called to protest, effectively and quickly, out of the privacy of their own otherwise uncommitted lives. People date, hook up, end up married. It’s unreal, in so many ways.

And yet there is something intimate in what we’re doing online. We laugh, out loud, so often it’s changed the language. Images, move us. Words come, into our hearts. We send out, words. I have found people I would never have been able to find – good, kind, wild, inspiring people - in the strangest of formats **. On the one hand, there is an irresponsibility and disconnect to who we are, online. We say things we would never say to a human face. We posture, frame, and pose more than we’re able to in the flesh and the heat of moments. Much of our online presence is mimicry; reposting; liking and blocking without consequence; mindless click bait that dulls the brain; polemics and memes that we shouldn’t have to post, anyway, because all our ‘friends’ are so like us they probably already agree with us. In this sense, what we’re doing is masturbation. At what other time in history have individuals so been able to curate their identity, choose their own profile, correct their image?

The pleasure centers of the brain light up when someone likes a post. We’re hooked, physiologically and emotionally and in the hours of our days. In real time.

In a sense, what we’re doing is exhibition. There is a difference between what happens in a feed and our actual posture, gait, face.

Yet, in a sense, what we’re doing is the best we can. And every once in a while, we find ourselves collectively mourning, collectively outraged, publicly validated and communally informed. We find things we would never have access to, otherwise. We browse, globally. We test world class educational systems, cutting edge research, second by second politics. We’ve access to experts and universities and artists, images, music, unimaginable to previous generations. Every once in a while, we read something that changes our lives. Sometimes, this is moving. Often, this informs our lives. We find our answers. We connect.

In the wild blue light of midnight, naked in our own bed, we sometimes get lost in human stories. We sometimes, tell them. Sometimes, we are braver than we thought. More vulnerable. More willing. More real.

This raises a question, of yoga. What was living isolated in a cave has become mass produced, readily available, consumed by millions. In the most recent Yoga in America survey, a staggering proportion of the millions doing yoga have only ever done it in their own home.

The implications, the questions, are dizzying. What if teaching were to become an internet based reality (already true)? What if this media provided a way toward depth, resources, community?

What if this is jet fuel?

Yes: the stupidity of yoga advertising, the way yoga is used to sell products completely unrelated to yoga, the blitzkrieg of ‘mindfulness’ and the stupidity of the Zen-esque memes with dubious quotes is silly. It’s heartbreaking, at times. It’s annoying and mind-dulling, always. Yet: what if we could make this, real? ** I never knew what I was doing. A long time ago, I realized procrastination and fear were a personal problem that had caused and was symptom of other deep, scary, entrenched problems in my life. I wanted, desperately wanted, to write. But most of my life was spent doing other things. Procrastinating. Deleting. Supporting other people’s writing. Believing that I wasn’t ready, wasn’t good enough, that it wasn’t gorgeous the way I needed it to be, yet. Believing I was a fraud. That no one could see the depth of what I intended to write. That if I didn’t ever manage to get the writing, out, life was meaningless. Hyperbole, probably. I can see the obsession. But this is the truest thing I know.

I once had a favorite writing professor. I kept taking her classes. In the sixth or seventh, she said she’d fail me in her course if I didn’t submit my stuff for publication. On the last day of that semester, she marched me to the corner mailbox. I dutifully deposited five fat, ponderous, promising manila envelopes, addressed and stamped, into the box’s maw. What she didn’t know, and I did, was that the envelopes were fat not with poems or even my name, but with hundreds of sheets of blank paper. What she didn’t know, and I did, was that following this façade, I’d never see this woman I’d been calling a mentor for years, ever again.

That’s mostly what my life, was. Phone calls that weren’t returned. Goals that never got off the ground. Promises that weren’t kept. A feeling that my face value was so low I’d be better off shooting blanks than offering my heart.

It was a problem, you see. If I wanted to change, I’d have to get over it. So. I committed to writing something, every single day, and hitting ‘send’.

I did this, for years. I never knew what I was doing. I never did feel, ready. ** What happens, when you lose so much?

Nostalgia distorts what was a small, daily thing, to a romantic or breakthrough one. Memory renders us. As in, tenderizes us. What was just a normal old pair of jeans, or a kitchen floor, or the laugh of a girlfriend, becomes luminous and gilded and portentous.

Honesty tells me that none of the things were so very large, when they happened. They only accumulated. They ripened. They laid down a path for next steps and next ones until I’d arrived at some wholly other place.

And yet, they were: precious. And small.

They were the story, the record, of how I left Brooklyn a willowy, jaundiced thing with dirty hair, with no home or prospects or skills, and ended a yoga teacher whose name people know in Australia, LA, and New Orleans. They were daily moments of recovering from alcoholism and a lifetime of running away, to coming home. They caught, in mis-used Sanskrit and a terrified voice, the way it was yoga that woke me up, the way I went off to teacher training not sure what teacher training meant. They enumerated the insights; how to teach, how to move. How to love. How to be, upright. The seeking out of something that could answer, something that made sense, someone who could help me. The looking for teachers. The wisdom of the teachers. The becoming, my own, teaching.

I felt like a kid who’d spent all day painstakingly, deep focusingly, care-fully constructing a fort out of feeble materials on unsteady ground. Only to have it knocked over by wind. I felt like I’d been hunched over a jigsaw puzzle, for years, trying the strange little pieces in my hands at different angles and different light. The kinda puzzle that covers the dining room table. Takes months. Establishes residency and re-arranges your diet. Then, someone kicks it.

I never knew what I was doing. I just hit send, one day, and kept on sending. It was mostly rough. Hardly coherent. When I needed a tool, I’d slowly learn it. And then some other tool. So that given years, I don’t remember the little things I learned along the way, what I started with, or how it’s all jerry-rigged together. So many, words. So many times the tool was a bit of flesh and tenderness, a skinned knee insight, the calloused knuckle of many other hours, undocumented. So often, it was licking my dry lips, swallowing, and opening my mouth to break a silence. Or to invoke one.

People read them. People found their strange, oddly shaped little pieces and turned them in their fingers, held them up to different light, cocked their chin and focused their gaze. What happens when we lose something, or someone, or the way we took to be normal, is that we aren’t sure we’re ourselves, after all. The quip says something like, if you did a one armed handstand but didn’t post to Instagram, did it ever really happen?

Of course, it did. Of course, this is what yoga philosophy is for. It’s trite and it’s full of pathos and lamentably awkward positions, but it is our life, our identity, and when our identity is questioned, all sorts of monstrous emotions erupt. Monstrous: wild, huge, irrational, strange.

This is what yoga, says: our identity is mostly a house of cards, a duct taped fort, a castle of twigs. Sometimes, they topple.

I answered a friend: it wasn’t very good, most of it. If it was, it was good by its honesty. It’s naked. Good by heartrending. It was good only for being the moment of change, scored in ink. It was, I think, a good story.

I went on: It’s okay to let it go. ** It was a good story.

But the thing was, all of it, every flash of clarity or moment of rare authenticity, every long worked for skill or accidental wisdom, was nothing if passage to the next step and a new question.

The longing, the pull, to recover or not lose the past is a plea of identity. We fear we will lose, credibility. A thinking that our merit or goodness or worth lies in something we did, a long time ago. We tend to think we are, who we’ve been. Go ahead and try thinking differently. I mean it. I dare you. Try. For all our talk of neuroplasticity, healing, authenticity, and change, we none of us are very good at believing we can change.

And, in a sense, this is true. We are what we have learned, how we have loved, what we’ve experienced. But we are not limited to that experience. We are not, that experience. The experience is gone. We are, only, what we make of that experience, now. How we use the ingredients of this moment, the seasoning of what we remember, the courage of having survived, so far. It’s uncanny to think about, really. That we are here.

You replace loss, with this. ** This isn’t a story about yoga, I suppose. It’s a private bitch session about having your work, though it’s value be negligible, erased by something as faceless and as cruel as an internet hack and pornography. I felt lost and personally insulted, but had no one to be personally mad at or put responsibility, on.

It was only in the hours that followed, when other tech worldly people told me of their own experience of smut wiping out their sentences, their hours, and their accounts, that I realized part of what I felt was violated. I’ve written about that word, before. In the context of rape, domestic violence, a wider culture of violence. Somewhere, in that long tract of words I can’t go back to, I said violation is having the self, destroyed, by a force or a person or a culture that is indifferent to the personal nature of the crime. It’s having one’s self, denied.

Shortly after realizing that was what I felt, I didn’t feel it any more. It wasn’t, personal. In the context of all the world, my website was nothing. Nothing compared to gun violence, terror and crime. All these things I was aware of, yet separate from, through that miraculous communication maelstrom called the internet. My loss was nothing compared to the things I know are not broadcast, but closer to home, so close I know they are secrets in my community, in my friend’s lives, in every body that walks in the door: loss, time, violence, identity, tits and ass. In regards to wider culture, and the private lives, and the way I know most human beings are more likely to look for answers and support when alone, after hours, or before the kids are awake, the question is not what I’ve lost but what I’m going to do.

Yoga was once ascetic; lonely men, who chose to live in caves. Today, it’s hawked at Walmart. It’s so readily available there is a glut. As in, gluttony.

And yet, we moderns all seem isolated. We’re every one of us weary. We are all, lost and seeking. We might as well be living in caves. Caves of modernity, lit by screens, shadowed by ancient human drives and young fears. The web (the weave, the tantra, the thread, the sutra, the line, the union) can function just as well as any ancient practice.

More. I say: more. I have three teachers that I talk with, once a month, via skype. Not a single one of those airy, oddly lit conversations is terribly meaningful. But the fact that I can have them, that I go on having them month after month until years have gone by, means something. The fact that I get handwritten letters from Belgium, wishing the author could study with me. The emails I get from students who have moved away, saying they miss my classes. The distant friends who have never practiced with me, but say ‘I wish you taught here’. Young girls are googling yoga for eating disorders, middle aged women are looking for something more humane than the tripe offered by the health care industry, men and boys are looking up symptoms and workouts and top ten lists from smartphones and iPads. Even those in the minority who do seek out a yoga class in a gym or a studio or a library tend, after some little study, to start a process of wondering: how to find more; real; better; answers; guidance; teaching. It can be hard to find, teaching.

I often snarl at wider yoga culture. And I am leery of prescriptive, one size fits all, nothing but asana, approaches to yoga. People trying to handstand in their bedrooms, without ever having met a teacher. Reading about meditation, endlessly, but unable to find two minutes a day to make it real. Scared, if it does get real, because it’s so real. And they are so alone. This frustrates me and worries me.

And yet: yoga is connection. Yoga is intimate, or it’s nothing. I snarl and say yoga’s gotten the soul kicked out if it, it’s been prostituted, it’s been bought and sold and it’s hollowed. I say yoga is intimacy: wherever we happen to start, something in us touched, irritated, or called out. I say screw around all you want, take it lightly, go for the circus tricks or the weight loss or the stress busting. But sooner or later, you’re going to have to get personal if you want it to keep going, at all.

We do, start to take it, personally. We start to wonder. What if? What is this? What more? Is it possible? We don’t ask in a hypothetical kinda way, but in the ruthlessly personal one. The kind that shows up out of nowhere, surprises you with its immediacy, worries you with its questions.

We’re asking some of the most private and scary questions of our lives. We’re talking about our bodies, for god’s sake. We’re starting to feel things and wonder things we don’t have easy answers for, can’t quite wrap our minds around. The sense of feeling grounded and safe, of empowerment, of release, all the quirks and the hang ups that show up in our head, the behaviors that start to come out of us, all this is nothing if not personal. I’m looking for the light, please help me, said the student. Forget the light, said teacher: give me your reaching. The question isn’t what I’ve lost, but what I can offer. What I’ve got left to.

Everything. Personal. My very own self; whole. In a world where sex is porn and yoga is cheap, I want to offer love. I want to have breathy conversations about the soul.

(The joke of it is, it all came back. All the words, the website, the format, the story. But in losing it, I realized that wasn’t ever the question.)

the art of transformationcreative

The Secret of Sequencing

This weekend was deeper practice, aka teacher training, at the studio.  People ask such good questions.  They have such good hearts.  To wit: 'how do we translate this to a class?'  How do we take all of this philosophy, all of this anatomical knowing of what's happening in people's bodies, all of our own wild experience and confusion into a neatly packaged, hopefully articulate, and we'd-like-to-think-enjoyable 45 minute 'yoga class'?IMG_3353 That is: how do we teach?

They have such good hearts.

I said, you teach love.  I shrugged (probably no end of aggravatingly), and said on Monday, I teach Monday.  

I left, as I always do, both exhausted and jacked up.  I leave bleary tired and gutted out, having given everything I had to give.  Simultaneously, restless with enthusiasm.  I leave so tired thoughts don't congeal or make anything but nonsense, and words out of my mouth are just plain stupid.

And yet, I leave so touched, so hopeful, so excited I can't sleep.  How do you take care of yourself, someone asked, when you have big classes and lots of people taking your energy?  I said, it takes me a week to recover from these weekends.  I meant: it takes me a week to recover, and it feeds me more than any food, any travel, any information.  It's the most meaningful thing I know.  It is the best thing, I do.  The best things often cost.  They ask more of us, than normal.

I once said to my teacher: I don't know that I'm particularly good at teaching.  But I also know that the best things I've ever done, I've done while teaching.  I'm not, necessarily, a great teacher.  But teaching is the greatest thing I've ever done, as a person.  It is the most humane I've ever been.

After training, I laid under a tree and put my legs up.  The wind, softly, moved the young leaves.  I hadn't laid under a tree yet, this spring summer.  It took all of thirty seconds for me to slide into marveling, hearing bird, feeling time slow down to the lift of the breeze.

Huh.  I thought.  It takes 30 seconds.

Which I knew, already.  But re-discover, every single time.

With my exhausted restlessness, I decided I didn't in fact want to be alone but wanted to make the drive to see my boyfriend, spend the night with him, drive back to teach Monday morning's class.  This morning's, class.

On pulling into the coffee store early this morning, I realized I didn't have a wallet.  I had no money, no driver's liscense. I didn't know where my wallet was, but it wasn't with me.  I realized I'd lost it on the way down.  Had stopped for gas.  Had set the wallet on the car while I pulled back my hair.  All that exhaustion.  All those questions.  All that restlessness.

Starting Monday morning with a voluntary commute, while realizing you've lost your wallet, is not the best of ways to start the week.

Three minutes before class, only one woman was there.  She and I chatted.  I drank coffee from the studio's Kuerig, since walletless I'd been unable to caffienate, prior.  We talked about teacher training.  The exhaustion.  The open hearted vulnerable, ripped open thing.  The tears.  The knowing that, even as it is a realization of how little we know, how our answers have to be dropped, we also know that it's a good thing.  This crying that is unlike the crying we've done in the months or years before is both hard, and probably a very good thing.

Two other women came in, right as the hour struck.  Three women who I know very well, students who aren't strangers but hearts, personalities, folks who've worked with me for a long time.

Now, I felt all sorts of things, had all sorts of thoughts.  Not least: fucking wallet.  Driver's license.  More cash than I ever carry (post training weekend) and really the bulk of the month's income.  Also: three students does not the rent pay.  Also: fucking wallet.

But, also, this: I know these women.  So well.  I know what yoga has meant to them, what they have learned, where they can go, what they are living.  I quick fire said grab every prop, all the things, two chairs and blankets and all of the toys.  Today, we go deep.

The last, also, was the humming and loudest.  Was on the tip of my tongue and in my eyes.  This last, also one was spicy and reverent and ready.  My heart - all of the ways in which I love this practice, have been changed by it, lean on it, fall back into it, have been made more stable and less reactive - was able to speak directly to their souls.  I repeat: I spoke with my heart, to their souls.

As in: I invoked reverence.  I invoked Monday morning.  I talked to their shoulders.  I referenced their personalities.  I reminded them of bodies.  I said, first, now we do yoga.  Yoga is not the world out there.  Stop, first.  Then, we moved and breathed, tried to move and breath in co-ordination for awhile, to see and to be with whatever came up.  Then, we stopped again.  For long minutes.  Before the day started.  They lay, and I put away the room full of props while they lay.

Sirsasana.  Sarvangasana.  Hold.  

The secret of teaching is this.  It isn't about which postures you do, or how you describe and instruct them.  It isn't about the anatomy or theory you know.  It's only that you, yourself, have fallen in love with this practice over the years.  Your cumulative knowledge is like a soggy, dense, inarticulate mass in your brain.  It runs the fibers of your muscles, curves with the aorta.  You've done this, a long time.  You have changed, and are changing.

When human beings come to you, you offer your soggy mass to their wide open experience.

We all, together, stop.  Move and breath in co-ordination, seeing what chitta bubbles up.  Then, we stop again.

It takes 30 seconds.  You become.  Everything changes.

Inhale: puraka.  Exhale: rechaka.  Now shoulder, now throat, now eyes.  Inhale, are you here? Exhale, lay it down.  Anjayneasana.  Trikonasana.  Extended side angle.  Words aren't words.  Poses aren't poses.  It's this: breath, and know you're doing it.  Inhale and see: what crazy, and what gratitude, what love, comes up.

I am not trying to downplay the art of vinyasa krama. It is an art.  There are vast stores of information.  You can't possibly take in all of the information.   There is sport's medicine, kinesthetics, anatomy, psychology.  All of this is changing, constantly.  All of it has specialties, variant hypothosis, big characters and incoming studies.  Let alone the vast tradition.  It goes both deep and broad, across so much time.  You can't cram, that.  You can't memorize it.  The fact is, you'll never even know the half of it.  And, the fact is, within a 'class', you can't teach, that.  You have thirty seconds.

You're here because something in the practice, a book, or a posture made you feel.  Made you want, more; feel, wild; understand, it's all messy, and yet there's something beautiful.  You're here because something in the practice made you feel.  The answer to the question isn't yoga.  The answer is you, your own self.

I asked: who is it you think would most benefit from this?  who is it you think you want to teach, or what questions are you yourself asking?  Then: from that, what is it you need to develop in yourself?

You go deeper and deeper into having your own experience.  You must go on, letting this work you over, being uncomfortable, falling apart and then realizing the falling apart made you more clear.  You must maintain your love, and fall more deeply into it.  You have to allow this path to change who you are.

And then, you stand in front of others.

The best teachers are deeply knowledgeable.  Some, of bodies.  Medical, anatomical, pathological.  Some teachers are like walking wiki pedias of sayings, teachings, stories, sanskrit.  Some seem to have truth laced into their breath, and others have such a calm and awake presence that you see serenity in the way they blink.  Some seem to have an intuitiveness that is neither 'anatomy' nor 'philosophy', but reads bodies, knows what students are thinking, anticipates and acknowledges.  The best teachers have teachers, a lot of time along the way, and incredibly funny stories about the dead ends and false starts and things they have had to work through.

When you stand up to teach, as a knock kneed neophyte, as someone who is scared shitless and mostly knows that you don't know all the answers, you don't teach yoga.  You offer, yourself.

Then people find, themselves.

If you want to do this - and I don't mean if you want to become certified or if you want to open a studio or you think you might want to teach kids, I mean: if you want to understand, yoga - you have to be willing to have your own experience.  That means you learn now this, now that.  You learn what you can learn, right now.  You say yes.  You teach, Monday.

If you want to understand yoga you have to become yourself.

This takes 30 seconds.  And, it takes years.

I'm offering, both.  Sometimes, I doubt myself, and slide back into trying to be someone else. Falling into pessimism, delay, thinking I'll do it later when I'm better or when there is more time.  Thinking either I can't or what's the point or the whole 'business' is trash, anyway.    Usually, all these at once.

But at this point, all these at once happen within the context of an abiding, soggy knowing.  This is the best I can possibly give.  I lost my wallet.  I'm going to have a lot of crappy and inconvenient things to do today.  It's probably okay.  I once lost my passport the night before I flew to Guatemala. I used to lose things all the time.  I sometimes loose them, now. And, also, more than this: yoga.

 

 

The year the gods died

I was folding laundry. It was Thursday. The hamper and folded tee shirts, jeans and underwear covered my bed. The windows were open. The church bells across the street struck one. I heard birds. My phone hummed, next to the folded jeans. My girlfriend texted: Prince is dead. We’re all alone.

I sat down.

My boyfriend texted. Prince died. I’m sad. Going to the record store.

It is hard to explain. Death. It’s hard to explain what Prince means to a girl who grew up an art fag in Minnesota. I miss David Bowie, terribly. I hold his records, gently. I haven’t been able to play them, yet. Once, standing beside my car pumping gas, Rebel Rebel came on the piped and canned gas station speakers and I stood in an island of false light and pavement, weeping.

Now Prince is dead, too. My breastbone is bruised and too close. This is the year the gods died, I texted back. I crawled onto the bed, laid between the folded underwear and jeans, knocked the hamper to the floor. I laid there for a while, and then I got up.

Before he was my brother in law, my brother in law was my high school classmate. There was a long stretch of years, post high school, before the night he ran into my younger sister at First Avenue and they fell in love. There’s been another long stretch of them being hitched and parenting and cooperatively, being my siblings. I’ll let you do the math while I just point out certain things: the gangliness of high school, First Avenue in Minneapolis, young love and middle age, and the weird routes of relationship. How we’ve gotten to be who we are.

In 1992, my now brother-in-law, then freshman classmate and I listened to Prince under a stairwell at school. We decided we’d be at First Ave New Year’s Eve, 1999. It’d be the party to end all parties, the time we’d sit on top of the world, and be angels. There’d be music in the spheres and we would be, all of us, beautifully alive.

That’s not what happened. I don’t remember what happened, exactly. Other than dancing, once, with a girlfriend in an elevator after we’d danced the sun up over Manhattan. Other than sliding down a refrigerator to sit on a floor, once, trying not to pee I was laughing so hard. I remember dancing in a bar in Louisiana with a man who looked like whiskey tasted, dancing with a gay man in a Sunday afternoon apartment in Williamsburg, singing with a girlfriend while walking through a parking lot. I remember watching Purple Rain as a kid. As a young adult. As a grown up in a walk up in Brooklyn.

I don’t remember how my life happened, other than that strange things happened, bad things and beautiful unexpected things happened, so that somehow I’m older now. When Prince died I suddenly remembered all of these things that don’t really matter but feel so sweet, things that I’d forgotten, but that turn out to be about the only thing I’ve got. My memories. My life. This craziness.

I don’t think we mourn for a man so much as we’re suddenly sad to realize our own lives are disappearing. We’re losing our selves.

Minnesota is crumpled, publicly weeping, singing old songs on the street that we somehow all know by heart. Flowers pile up along chain link fences, lights are lit, candles and balloons and hand written letters fade in the rain. Thousands and thousands gather and it’s unclear what they’re doing. Mourning? Singing? Dancing? They stop traffic. Cops allow this. People lift their faces into the rain and the sky is, actually, purple.

Why do we so publicly and collectively mourn idols? We didn’t actually know, them.

Maybe we mourn because they helped us to know ourselves.

Not many things, do that. It’s not often we realize who we are. When a man or a song or a guitar can prove to you that you’ve got a soul, a groove, you gangly ugly uncoordinated mess have a right to wear the sequins or fuck the gorgeous creature or be loud with your confusion and love, you feel better about the things. The things are, for rare spare moments, going to be alright.

It’s horrible to suddenly feel that isn’t so. The man who proved it, doesn’t exist and won’t be singing, any longer. We’re alone in the world, is what death means. Our hands are empty and we’ve got nothing to prove otherwise. The songs hurt because you can’t, for anything, go back.

You are not yourself, anymore, is what I mean.

I think it’s like that.

Oddly, in sadness, we sing together. We bond over the radio. Like stars, isolated and immeasurably far apart, suspended by a common gravity. We cry alone, and together. Everything looks crooked for a few days. Everyone is tender. All the eyes are big and wet.

And somehow it’s okay: traffic is softer, the news reels clot, our humanity swells. Public spaces are transformed by masses of human bodies and scraps of art. It’s strange how we sway with strangers who’s names we don’t know. How we feel together, all by ourselves at midnight, because the internet proves that everyone is listening. Everyone is mourning. We’re all in this together.

It’s terrible how close sadness comes to love. Terrible, how sweet this all feels, how important, how true to ourselves, but that it’ll fade in weeks to come. The flowers will die. The radio will stop repeating, and we’ll stop listening. Eventually, people will change their status and profile picture back to something more current and less purple. Someday the kids won’t know the words to the songs we all know, by heart.

I don’t want them to be gone. They defined, me. I don’t know how I would have understood love, and dance, and the power of rebellion and creativity and crossing over the vast cold wasteland of politics and culture to find other human beings and call them important, unless these gods first showed me how. Sang something, and even though I’d never heard it, knew that I’d go on hearing it, always. That I always had heard it, and recognized it in their songs. I could listen to those songs, forever. Somehow, I thought they’d never die.

Death is so hard. Death is such a problem. In his last Op-Ed to the New York Times, Oliver Sacks talked of being increasingly aware of the people around him dying. Of knowing this wasn’t new, and of also knowing that whenever an individual dies there is an absence born, a rupture in the fabric of the way things were, an irreplaceability and the fact that life will never be the same.

There is a platitude that is thrown about, suggesting that we become our dead. This is both true, and not true, at the same time. It’s true that we can take up our dead father’s humor or kindness to waiters and small children, but it’s not true that our father than lives again.  I mean it is true, I've got every single one of my dead, deep inside me where the blood stops.  But unless I somehow express it, this doesn't mean anything at all.  And expressing it doesn't mean that they'll live on.  It means that I do. Church bells rang out a Prince song, yesterday. People stopped in the plaza and streets below. They leaned on buildings and stood very very still, ears cocked, faces still. Separately, they listened together. This made me think of Jesus. Maybe his influence isn’t that he died and rose, but that when he died, we all did. Not that he died for us, but with us.  That something died, with him.

The influence of the gods is terrible. They made us believe. In the complicated, gnawing discovery of sex, the importance of friendships, the beauty of ordinary lives. Occasionally. Every once in a while.

All the crooked love stories. The mistakes of youth. The depth of what we wanted. Sing, they say. Love. Be wild and moved and have sex and make art and call the terrible mediocrity down. Stand on tables. Crawl on fire-escapes. Open your goddamned throat. The gods teach us passion, give us a narrative and soundtrack, create a stage.

We’ve all danced in our stocking feet. We’ve sung alone in the car. We’ve drunk and knocked and crawled onto tables, once, when we were teenagers. We crawled on tables, cars, beaches, stairwells, fire-escapes, all the structures and infrastructures and directly into one another’s hearts.

I remember where I was when I heard Jeff Buckley died. And Princess Diana. My folks remember the way the world was when JFK died. Where were you, when the towers fell? When the shots were fired? When the gods, died? I remember moments of history. Mostly, as the faces of all my long departed friends.

Strange, how quiet the world can get. Our lives become a blur, but suddenly we’re all telling stories. We all, remember. We aren’t telling stories about Prince, or David, or any of the gods. We’re telling the stories of own lives.

My boyfriend and I walked, slowly, up the sidewalk to Paisley Park. I slipped my hand into his. We stopped, and started, and saw the people, and were with the people. I wanted to hum songs into his ear. But then, I didn’t. I watched six year olds set cellophane wrapped bouquets atop other cellophane wrapped bouquets. Leave teddy bears. Crayoned drawings.

I don’t want to sing a love song. I want to be one.

The influence of the gods is terrible. It means we dance for a moment, pause the mediocrity and remember who we were. I don’t think it’s true: that memory lives on. That in some weird way we’re supposed to become our dead. I think it’s more true to say that we, ourselves, have to become.

Rock and roll. Brave. Creative. And humane. We don’t remember them for their music, only. We mourn their humanity. They proved a human being can be ruthlessly gorgeous.

I am so shy. I’m stupid, really, and have mostly only ever screwed up. But on Saturday morning, when my ordinary yoga class laid down in savasana, a place of quiet and stillness and privacy, I opened my mouth. I sang. I belted. I sang them Prince. I won’t do that for long. It wouldn’t help and I can't sing worth shit. I’ve got to find my own weird beauty.

But if I ever have a child, I’ll lullaby them with Ziggy Stardust, Purple Rain, every cracked and warbled hallelujah I can muster. You’re not alone, I’ll sing, and they will be. Alone, and not alone. prince

New scribbles on the website. Prince and Bowie. And me.

A photo posted by Karin L Burke (@coalfury) on

Personal Practice

the-brain-is.jpg

Around my sangha - in the studio, via the internets, in conversation - people are in some pretty deep practice.  Some are beginning or ending a training program.  Some are in the online course.  Some have dealt with major health or life changes and are having to shift their priorities, values, and practices around.  A lot of them are in pancha karma, or the annual house cleaning of the body mind. Whenever people start digging around in the meaning and the experience of their practice, they ask what my practice, is.  I mean I start to push buttons and challenge assumptions.  I spend a lot of time saying neti, neti or not that, not that.  Practice is not accomplishing a pose.  Practice is not getting better at asana, though you will in spite of yourself.  Practice is probably not even getting healthier, although that probably comes along as a side effect.  Practice isn't the techniques of practice.  Recently, I've been saying practice is not arms and legs, practice is not alignment, practice is not hamstrings and shoulders and backbends.  I've been citing the oldest yoga texts to back me up on this: the hatha yoga pradipika, the yoga yagnavalkya, the sutras, the vedas.  Asana aren't mentioned there except as breath and organs, spine stuff, the interface of attention, feeling, and having a body.  I've been backing it up, too, with modern science and functional movement: asana classes that focus on vinyasa flow or yin or weight loss or restoration are imbalancing, and not the practice.

So people tend to wonder, quite fairly, what's left if practice isn't any of those things.

My practice looks like this:

  • 45 minutes of meditation
  • half an hour of squiggling my spine and diaphragm free (all that lay on a blanket, inhale exhale stuff)
  • 10 to 30 minutes of asana.  Like four poses.
  • Once a week I get a solid couple of hours in.  I sweat my butt off and I shake.
  • Once or twice a year, I have a private session
  • whenever I can, I go on retreat or training, take a class.  This is workshopping time, learning time, and teacher time.  Being a student, time.
  • once a month i skype with my teachers.

You get the point.  Asana is given the least importance, and the least time.

But it's also vital and necessary.  I go a few days without, and my character gets gross.  My skin changes.  My muscles backslide.

This is what my practice is like, now.  It's been different at different points.  It'll be different again in future.  But I'm not 'practicing' when I teach.  I'm working with your bodies, not mine.  And my asana is only mildly 'progressing': it's mostly medicinal, with a faint edge of blowing my own mind and pushing my own envelope.  But that's not toward handstands or feet on my head.  It's breath work and tiny flickers of movement, integrating movement, steadiness and control.

the brain isThere have been years where I've had the luxury of a yoga class every day.  There have been years of privates, once a month.  Those are feeding times, but they are not standard.  They give me nourishment for the upcoming not-class and not-privates, part.  I need them to not gnaw my own paws off, or get so alone I think I'm doing the right things when really practicing my bad habits.  I learn so much in them that it takes a few months and years of trying to integrate the stuff before it sinks in.  I get insights two and three years after a meditation session.  I remember a teacher's hand, five years after the hand touched me.  Here's the thing: I both needed the hand five years ago, and i needed five years of ongoing in the meantime practice to understand and really feel the hand.

Over and over again, I have to teach, say, learn: most of this is stuff you'll do, alone.  And, you can't do it alone.  In a lifetime, most of the 'time' you spend in yoga will have been solitary.  But much of the breakthrough, comfort, information, challenge and peak will be something that cost a bit more in effort, time, boundaries, and personal gumption.  It'll come from someone else, provoking you to change.  Giving you a chance.  Giving you feedback or asking if you knew your hip was crooked, inviting you to some other door that you couldn't see on your own.  A teacher is not a person.  A teacher a is a context in which you can change.  No teacher, no context.  But the teacher doesn't matter, isn't a person, not a guru or a miracle or a visionary.  Just a role you need in your life.

Most of my practice is not asana.  It's reading, studying, writing, service work.  It's little assignments teachers give me with the sutras.  It's hiaku writing, as a practice.  It's gone back to a mindfulness of dishwashing.

I want people to go deep into practice.  I want them to go more deeply into what it means.  And what it means is their lives.  Their feelings.  Their health.  Their relationships, career, meditation.  Maybe I'm a bad yoga teacher, but I tend to think practice is not yoga class.  It's everything yoga class introduces you, to.  But I think yoga class remains the backbone, the frame, the measuring stick.  Inability or unwillingess to get to a class is a sign.  But so is addiction to or dependence on class.  So often we say we don't have time or money, but that's not actually the issue.  And so often we want the classes to be enough, we aren't ready to commit money or personal time to things like trainings, privates, retreats, reading the books and doing the homework.  There isn't anything wrong with whatever 'your practice' or lack thereof happens to be, so long as we get it: it's a reflection of values and choices.  I know and respect and love some yogis and zen teachers who have completely left the yoga world.  Closed studios.  Started some other career.  I know others who have opened studios.  I know people who leave teaching so that they can reclaim learning.  And I know people who keep saying they want yoga (insert: health, ease, serenity, time, to 'get it', to do teacher training, whatever) but never seem to get around to it.

My practice is asana.  And it's not asana, at all.  It is teaching.  And it's not, at all.  But it is, every single day.  After years of this, I couldn't begin to tell you what has changed most, what is most important, what i love or what i hate.  I'm still trying to find what inhale, means.

I sit for 45 minutes.  I move slow through my spine breath.  I do asana for ten minutes.  And then I move on.  Once a week, I take hours.  And that once a week resets me from bones to neurons.  Once in a blue moon, I have others to help me along the path.

 

Sutras

I was talking with one of my teachers today.  I was talking about the same things I always talk about.  To wit:

  • the biophysical reality and psychological minefield of asana and yoga practice, as opposed to empty energy talk and one size fits all group classes;
  • the need for a private, intimate, personal relationship to this path.  An unfolding of theory into workable practice, an understanding;
  • "Teacher", longevity of practice, and transformation through relationship
  • authenticity of the teaching, translation of the tradition, a living reality and credible source, as opposed to palaver, spiritual platitudes, and gobbedeegook.
  • becoming more alive

I apologized for my repetition.  He pointed out that what feels like a tension, an unsolvable dilemma, has become something that holds.  The questions are resolving.  I have a path. I've learned this much, from practice: follow the threads.  Don't let go.1.1

I've been playing with the yoga sutra.  In a number of different ways.  I've begun playing with the sounds I can make in my throat.  With song.  With what I can say, what I can sound, and with breath.  Don't take me too poetically: I'm singing the sanskrit alphabet in the shower every morning.  You wouldn't believe the things I do in private.  All this fascination with toes.  Now, with the tongue, the brain, and the breath.  Impression and expression, the things we cannot say, the uncanniness of emotional states and perceptions being hooked, locked, bounded by our voice.  What it takes to unravel our own minds.

1.3This sounding out sanskrit tangled for a while with conversations I was having about teachers.  As in, The Teacher.  This is a who am I, question, but also a please help me, one.  Which also tangled with a few years of conversation about tradition.  As in, The Tradition.  The Teaching.  And how hard it is to find the teachings.

All of this then shifted to me chanting the Yoga Sutra every day, before I practice.  As a practice.

Because something uncanny happens when you spend that much time with an idea.  A commitment.  A thing that isn't easy.

1.4It's said every syllable of the Sanskrit language carries metaphysical undertones and trails of meaning, much like Hebrew.  Every syllable is a book of nuance, history, image and connotation. I know this: every time I repeat a chant I am simultaneously invoking all the prior times I've sounded the sound, as well as all of the other billions of times other people have made the same sounds, down through time.  I make a little refuge, right there just by calling out.  It's a kind of prayer, I suppose.  But it has no bargaining, in it.  No promising.  No debate.

The concept is beautiful.  So, too, are the sounds.  Once you get over being a shy warble throated harpie who can't make the sounds very well.

1.5But the absolute beauty of this stuff is that it isn't just a pretty concept.  Something physically is changed.

Do this for five days in a row and you suddenly start dreaming different things.  You start thinking different thoughts.  You begin to make strange choices.  And suddenly, the practice isn't itself but a kind of suffusion.  It perfumes everything.  It's right on the tip of your tongue and shows up in the sound of dishes being washed, traffic passing by.  The words are tree trunks, and bird lift, and cloud pull.  I've started reading my skin.  It's something like seeing the moon, in full daylight.  You realize the hidden aspects to things.

I wonder what would happen if a person were to practice sound for forty, fifty years.

Eventually, I decided I should teach the sutras, as retreat.  Because.

Because it is so hard to find the teachings.  So hard to understand.  We're told - promised - that yoga works, that the teachings are profound, that there is more to come.  We've been told and told this.  But all we ever really get is a yoga class, a posture, maybe a workshop now and then.  But 'certifications' and even 'trainings' rarely work with the primary source.  They offer synopsis and send you home.

1.12If we want to understand a thing, we have to work with it.  Just as there is a difference between reading a recipe and knowing how to boil yourself an egg.

Over the years, my teachers have given me work to do with the texts.  Over the years, I've done more. I have dozens of copies, many translations.  But over time, the language and the practice begin to inform one another.  The concepts begin to be felt realities, rather than abstract concepts.  After awhile, the 'text' is not a thing printed and bound, but an event that has happened in my bodily tissues, and my mind.

All the threads, bind:

The yoga sutra are the primary source.  Or one of them.

Yet they aren't a book.  It isn't a thing you 'read' like a textbook.  Nor is it something to memorize and drop into a class sequence once in a while.  The sutra are pithy and short, and people use them like inspirational memes or pull quotes for an asana class.  But a yoga sutra is not a quote from the yoga sutras: it is an embodied experience that takes a dozen years, and a relationship that takes place between a student and a teacher, and a practice experience a student has in time.

1.13They aren't a book. Each sutra elicits a deep study, discussion and context between student and teacher.  They quite directly answer questions about 'alignment' in asana, the issues that come up and how to work with them, the principals of practice, the questions of psychology and personal dead-ends.

The yoga sutra is not a book, but a practice intended to be gone through, in and over time, with a teacher, in light of your own life.

To say this another way: I have been working with my teachers for years.  They have opened doors for me that I couldn't have opened myself.  I couldn't have opened them because I didn't know they were there.  Shown a door, I've had to over and over again realize that the person holding it open for me can't walk through it, for me, and I've had to go deeper into my own practice.  Then, I have to go back to my teacher.  Because I can't practice alone.  Because I don't know where the doors of my body, of the tradition, of what do I do now, might be.  Every time this happens, further transformation occurs.

The yoga sutra, says this.  Literally.  Everything I've learned of physiology and anatomy are supported by the old sources.  The essential questions of how to practice, what to practice, how to find a teacher and how to go on, are in there.

The sutra are not a book.  They are something you do.  Understand what breathing is.  Feel where you are not able to breath.  Change.  Of course, there is a lot of application that needs to happen.  We need to work with our own individual bodies.  We have to understand what bodies are, what mind is, this incorrigible relationship between ourselves and reality being nothing like what we thought.  This question: is yoga a spiritual path or not?  Yes.  I say.  If you want it to be yoga.

All this to say I've been playing with the sutras in my practice.  Half of this has gone into writing the curricula for retreat,  my whole enthusiasm and heart is being poured into how to cultivate discussion, personal practice, establish solid meditation practices, marry silence and insight while we're together.  Little bits of it are leaking out in a daily translation, that's showing up in images on instagram.  Some further little bit of it becomes poetry.  But mostly, it is my own practice.  Which is all I can really share with you.  The way this works.  The way it has been, for me.  The way yoga continues to evolve.

Finding the teachings isn't hard.  Not in the way I'd first thought.  It's there as surely as moon is, by daylight.  Whether you've noticed, or not.

There are certain things that happen in the course of practice. They happen every single time. They are so predictable I might as well offer guarantees or seals of quality. We begin to have honest self esteem. As in we can see ourselves more clearly. We can see where we've screwed up or are imperfect, without falling apart. We know the growth and beauty possible in our own lives. And we become more fluid. Less frozen. Less cold. We become like water: now snow, now dew, now cloud. We become creative, without obsession. without fear. We become more eclectic. Not arbitrarily nor falsely, but with honesty and truth. We become more than one self all the time, insisted on and scared of having the masks pulled away. We become both our mother and our children. Sick, and well. Lover, parent, beloved, artist, common joe. We begin to enjoy ourselves, more. We begin to have greater intimacy. And we begin have a greater interior life, a soulfulness and sacred, reverent gestures. Yet we don't become dogmatic or theoretical. It happens, every single time. I can guarantee it. IF we are practicing for years, without getting lost and quitting, with reverence, and with care. If, then. You notice I say nothing of advanced postures, ended disease or aging gracefully. I say nothing here of teachers or styles or specific postures. I only said practice. Really give yourself to this, and the practice begins to give you to yourself. #retreat #yoga #yogateacher #patanjali #sutra

A photo posted by Karin L Burke (@coalfury) on

 

 

 

 

Don't let me be lonely

Shanti-DevaThis morning I'm reading Shantideva- an 8th century text that will form a frame for this weekend's deeper practice meeting. I want to be clear about the deeper practice group: there is a 12 module syllabus, with a backbone of reading and personal study, that you go through. But each time I teach, I'll be teaching from those bones, differently. Each time I'll be introducing a different text or practice for us - for you - to work with. So you can start at anytime - the backbone is there for you to work with. It's a thread you pick up and follow, regardless of whether you can make every month this year or not, the thread is there. And you should come back: the changing skin and deeper textures and tones aren't things you could understand or live with one brush through. We're trying to create community, create a sanctuary of depth practice. That is a rare thing. I'll give you a certificate and you can register as a yoga teacher once you've completed the syllabus. But that is only the surface. Shantideva's text is a handbook for living the way.

We'll be using it because the heartwood of the book talks about the middle. The time after the honeymoon. We all fall a little in love with this practice, have moments of awe or startle or release. But those don't last. So it's important to tend to our practice, after the first fire has been lit. I think this is an important reflection for us to have, as teachers and students. How do you go on? How do you protect the practice and it's insights? How do you develop trust in the practice even when your body can't practice, or life throws you a little chaos, or you remember - because we're all going to have to remember - that there is such suffering in the world? What is the point of practice if there remains such suffering?

To me, Shantideva hears that hearts cry out: don't let me be lonely. Don't leave me. He understood, and he wrote this book.

I was talking with a friend who has had a lot of grief in his life, about my grief. We fumbled. Grief is such a hard question. It touches that bone: please don't leave me. We all want to feel secure, to feel love, to feel at home, to feel like ourselves. And we're all a little neurotic because at base, we know we might lose the job, or our health, or our family.

When we find a practice, we tend to think it'll stay. Just like when we fall in love or get a good job. We think we've finally found it.

Then life kicks in.

Shantideva helps. Come read with me, come sit. There are photocopies of Shantideva's chapters on the table in the prop room if you want to come. I want you to come.

Anyway, I came across this in one of the commentaries: bodhisattvas are passionate about awakening. I say again: this is a passionate practice. Wake up.

Bloodlines

winter-enso.jpg

Today is a Monday, late in the year.  I have to say this because I get confused, recently: I was supposed to be headed to New York City, yesterday, and a Zen retreat center early this morning.  Instead, I'm at home nursing Ty, listening as cancer swells his abdomen and pain laces his bones.  We wake and sleep all night long,  The neighborhood went silent and empty over the holidays, and I cancelled my flight, and there didn't seem to be any sound anywhere.  All the people went away, to family and parties and airports.  I stayed.  Snow fell, eventually. Time stopped.  We - the dog and I - fell out of the world. Time moves, for us, differently.  Time is measured by his breath, this waking and sleeping all night long. I measure time since he last peed or ate, the hundreth time I clean up after him, the thousandth time I lay my forehead on his heart.

When I wrote to my teacher to tell him I wasn't coming, I used every word I could: cancer, diagnosis, uncertainty, responsibility.  He answered simply, and intimately, as he does.  Using the one word I didn't.

I'm sorry your dog is dying, he said.

I didn't say that, I realized.  I didn't say the one thing.  I didn't say: death.

Late in the cold, silent night I sat on the stoop and watched him limp around the yard.  Put my hand on his big square head when he came back to me.  Here is the gist of it: I don't know how many more times he will come back to me, anymore.  It's a limited number, now, but I don't know what the number is. While on this retreat, I was to take my buddhist vows, to say out loud to my teacher I vow to follow this path, I vow to practice, I vow to practice until all sentient beings reach enlightenment.  In the way of late, silent nights, it occurred to me that I am vowing: I am crossing over with this sentient being.

At four am, he fell asleep with his head on my lap.  I sat still.  I sat so still.  I've often sat at four am, and this morning I remembered all of those times.  I often joke that there was no transition period for me; I went from still being awake at four am as a drunk to waking at four am as a yogi with no interlude.  The threshold of one day to another goes back a long time for me, touches a lot of people and places.  This morning, my heart opened like an umbrella in my chest.  I started to chant my chants, and then I sang old folk songs, and then I sang nothing at all. My throat stayed, wide open.

I wrote this much, this morning, and then stopped.  I took Ty out to the woods and he refused.  He looked at me as if apologizing.  So I lifted him, carried him, back to the car and then the house. I took him out hours later and he left blood all over the snow. I want to write about blood on snow, but I can't find any words for it other than blood, on snow.  A few hours ago, with his head up against my chest and my lips on his head, Ty died.

There is no direct lineage to this tradition, yet there is said to be a bloodline.  The bloodline is the vowing, by countless human beings over time, down through time, that brings the length and breadth and abstraction of this practice to the bruisy aliveness of your own heart.  We vow to use this moment, this experience, to wake up, to not be asleep, to not break.  In some ceremonies, you chant all the names from the Buddha to your own teacher.  Joan Halifax has a ceremony in which you chant all the names of the women ancestors, down to your very own.  Bloodline ties abstract ceremony and intention to your own veins, to the reality of hot blood on cold snow.  To say, right now, I use this moment to wake up.

I lost a dear friend, last February.  Now Ty.  Both of those beings formed me, or informed me, or something.  Without their being in the world, I don't know who I am.  Or, who I am isn't real any longer.  All the meanings and things that tethered me to a schedule, a role, a relatedness, are undone. They are words that don't reflect reality, signposts that point to nothing, maps to things that no longer exist. I tried to study some of the work another mentor has sent me, but was absent minded and couldn't concentrate.  I tried to review what I'm going to teach and couldn't understand my own handwriting. I can't remember the train of thought my notes were intended to map out. I feet lost: disconnected from my teachers, disconnected from what I am doing or why, disconnected from the ones I love.

Of course, grief is not my story.  Getting lost, having the things that make our life, change, is the only certainty there is.  We do something for a while.  We love people or places or landscapes for a while, we say oh this is how it is, or find a practice and say oh I'm going to do this everyday, this is the beginning of the rest of my life, but then it changes.  The marriage you're in today is not the marriage you started with.  The body you have today is not the one you had a few months ago. Michael Stone once said he used to wonder how people go on living.  We continually have to find new meanings for our lives.

Sometimes, the changes feel wonderful.  You fall in love. Sometimes, they are death.

As Leslie says, you've never been this old before.  And you'll never be this young again.

Bloodline is a question of how to enter where you are, now, amidst all these changes, as honestly and as bravely as you can.  Because of this practice, over time, I have learned and can see how much depth there is.  There is so much depth for me to move in my life, and so much depth for students to move into their own.  Bloodline, a depth practice, is a way for us to not just 'know' things about yoga, or ourselves, but to really go for it, to go all the way. To keep giving ourselves to the practice, so that the practice can give you to yourself.  It's so important that you not waste your own time.

You are on this threshold, too.  Of time.  Certain things have come to you in the last year or months, and certain things have gone away.  Where you stand is a question, how to really go for it, into it, to find the deep heart of the question that is, ultimately, you.  There are parts of this heart that are mechanical, routine, and rote.  And there are parts of it that are wild.  Parts of it that are poetic, mysterious, unknowable as a dog's deep eyes and unsayable as blood on snow.  It's this part we come closer to though the bloodline.  The wild bit of the heart that both loves and mourns.  The part that screams out for healing.  The part that is murky and unborn.  The parts you suspect but can't quite explain.

I don't have much to say today other than grief, but time spins: if you'd like to go deep, deep into practice, deep into your own mind and your own experience over the past year and coming blank slate, I recommend the intensive at Saint John's January 17-22 or in Costa Rica this March.  How can we let go, without ceremony?  How can we make space for all that rushing newness in you, without marking space?  How can you know what deeper means, if you don't open to deepening?

Costa Rica is 10% off if you book by January 31 (use GIFT4ME at check out here).  Saint John's is 20% by the same date (use link below).  And everyone who has NOT been to the studio in the past three months is welcome to come back at the intro rate of $30 for 30 days.  Use this moment.  Wake up.

20% off if purchased by 12/31

 

Everything, and nothing.

Yesterday, snow, and today the cold.  My body doesn't do well with cold snaps.  Sudden cold seems to be the sure fire trigger to fibro flares.  So I'm tender today.  Sore and slow.  I've never been able to figure out if sadness is a symptom, same as shouting bones and sour muscles and confusion, or if it's a natural consequence.  I stub my toe and it doesn't stop that panging all day long.  All day.  I walk cautiously, which helps and doesn't.  I am teary and sad, but also not.  I am both sad, and sweetened.  Things are so beautiful, I'm made sweet. I walked the dog yesterday in the new fallen snow.  It was so quiet, so still, so detailed in it's millions of black branches and millions more snowflakes.  My pain doesn't bother me as it used to.  I'm not as afraid of it as I once was.  There are whole days I can't do asana or eat or sleep, but this doesn't seem very terrible any longer.  I've learned some things.  I've learned to breath.  I've learned that most of the time there are things I can do, squiggling on the floor and moving my spine, opening the siezing muscles, letting my weight find a not so sore spot to drop.  And somedays, I can't.  I never know which day is which, until I start.

When I walk in the new snow, it seems the sound of my walking is the most beautiful sound on earth.

And then when I stop, it seems the silence is.

Someone asked if I was angry or disappointed in yoga: wasn't it supposed to heal me?  I certainly have moments of that.  But also, no.

No: at some point my practice became a way to work with pain, rather than a fantasy about 'curing' it.  I tend to think my practice has, largely, healed my fibromylagia.  But it hasn't cured it, and that is okay.

Last night, in dharma talk, I told people this practice would make their lives harder.  They would become more aware of everything going on in themselves.  They would see and not be able to unsee.  At the same time, their lives would become much easier.  They would enjoy themselves more.  The world is a mess and they will know it; their minds and bodies are a mess and they'll know it; but they will have an equanimity in which those things don't belittle us or need to be pushed aside.

This morning, someone asked why we're doing 108 saluations for the solstice.  Why 108, in particular.  One symbolizes everything, I said.  Zero symbolizes nothing.  Eight symbolizes infinite relationship.  There are dozens of other meanings of 108, but this is my favorite.  Everything, and nothing at all.

As in, this practice is nothing.  The postures don't matter much, and you'll lose all of them in the end, anyway.  The meditation doesn't get you any cash and prizes.  And accepting the ethics and an inner awareness doesn't necessarily make you happy.  They often make life more hard.

But it is also, everything.  It is the absence of fear and the walls of fear.  It is a remedy to re-activity and expectation and chosen ignorance.  It is a way to be in our life, pained or anxious, terrorized or privileged, with an ability to work with those things rather than suffer them.  We work with our conditions, with our heart, with our bodies, and we become people able to know pain, fear, or death, without fear.  Yogis will die just like everyone else will.  But the time before might be spent, differently.  Dying itself might be a wonder.

You can't hold or quantify the gifts of this practice.  They are immaterial.  Last night I said it'd be like taking a mason jar out into the snow and gathering some up, intending to keep it.  Or bagging a breeze.  Boxing an angle of sunlight.  They aren't yours, and they don't last, and you can neither create them nor claim them.

You can only stand in wonder.

In a few weeks, I'll be leading retreat at Saint John's Abbey.  You won't really get anything out of that, either.  You may be working your way toward certification. You may be developing your capacity to teach, or to sit.  You may learn a new chant or get some insight during meditation.  You might develop.  But it's only real outcome is a quality of wonder, an experience you do or don't have intimacy with, a depth to your inner life that you could never explain to another, anyway.  I think it's everything.  Sign up here: Spine, Soul, and Breath 2016.

Other notes:

108 Sun Salutations December 20th, 7 pm

Paula is adding a 6:30 am Friday class, starting in January.

I'm opening up more time to privates - in studio or via skype - for $108.

The Deeper Practice curricula is about to launch into the feet, which is a very good time to start, indeed.  We'll meet January 9 and 10th.

The Art of Self Care 11 week online course will run again starting Feburary 1, on a new platform hosted on this site.

108 sun salutations Sunday December 20, 7 pm. $108 private sessions, Skype or in studio.

A photo posted by Karin L Burke (@coalfury) on

A tangle of hopelessness and gratitude

The Dalai Lami responded to the terrorist attacks in Paris, like this:  "We cannot solve this problem only through prayers. I am a Buddhist and I believe in praying. But humans have created this problem, and now we are asking God to solve it. It is illogical. God would say, solve it yourself because you created it in the first place . . . So let us work for peace within our families and society, and not expect help from God, Buddha or the governments." photo: Matt Mead

Meanwhile, I was making preparations for a silent retreat over the New Year, during which I plan to take my Buddhist vows.  Also, meanwhile, an unarmed black man was shot by the police, possibly while he was handcuffed.  And while police brutality against blacks has been increasingly covered in national news, this time it was local.  I haven't said much about this shooting.  I've talked about the others.  Someone asked why; if I was just overwhelmed, or was afraid that students would get tired of finding anxiety and pain in the studio instead of a respite, from it.

That isn't the reason.  Or all of it, anyway.

I haven't spoken of it yet because this local incident also involved domestic violence.  And while there was an immediate furor, protests, media coverage because all of our nerves are so frayed and this has happened so often, there was really no mention of the woman beaten by the man who was then shot.  I haven't said anything because I haven't been able to find the words for this tangled, complicated problem.  It is racism.  It is police brutality.  It is, also, domestic violence.

It is my niece's second birthday today.  Also, the birth of one of my best girlfriend's first child.  I was in the grocery store when I heard her daughter had been born.  I was shopping for milk, but staring at the tinsel and aisles of candy cane colored cheap shit that replaced the orange and black cheap shit of Halloween.  It isn't thanksgiving, yet, but Christmas insanity has descended upon commercial America.  Two pictures, via text message, that made me stop in place.

I am trying to figure out what gratitude means.  Or how to have it, when everything feels so very hopeless and I myself feel unable to make any difference at all.  There is so much harm in the world.  There is so much, wrong.

I've said, often, when I teach, that gratitude is the first thing I lose when I lose my practice.  I'm not making that up.  It's a palpable measure.  But I'm not sure I've ever managed to say how to find gratitude in the first place.

It's often hardest for me to sit meditation or to practice asana when the world seems awful.  Easier to practice asana.  Perhaps because tension and heartache are things I can feel in my body and I want, in a very controlling, urgent kinda way, to work out.  This is experienced truth, and I use it.

But it's probably also harder to sit meditation because I know how that works, too:  you sit and the real of whatever is happening comes up.  Complicated, terrible, terrorized, unsettling.  When days are hard I often just want to get through them, not sit with.

Yet I teach this stuff, and I know it, and so this morning I bolted myself to my blanket and I sat.

As expected: tears, anxiety, and a whole lot of "i don't know what to do I don't know what to say I can't do anything I can't help but this contradicts that contradicts all of it and nothing nothing nothing I can't".  Outright exhaustion, more tears, flippity heart and tight chest that is my brand of anxiety.  Rape victim rage, domestic violence victim rage, images of infants and nieces and black friend's faces, and handcuffs, and guns, and roaring sounds in my ears.

Not expected: gratitude.

I believe many things.  But some days, there isn't any hope left.  Without hope, there isn't any reason, either. And from there, just nihilism, rank and pissy.

Truths, left to their literal selves, stun me to helpless and I do nothing.  Meditation is where hopelessness becomes gratitude, and then action.

Truth number one is that black lives matter.  It's ridiculous that we have to affirm such a thing, enraging that we do, and yet true that we have to.  It's also true that all lives matter.  And it's also true that to say so as a retort to #blacklivesmatter is racist, completely dismisses the reality of racism, and redefines terms.  It is also true that gendered violence is endemic, silent, and taboo.  To say Jamar Clark was an abuser detracts from the argument that he was killed by the cops because he was black.  To not say he was keeps domestic violence taboo and silent, less an issue than men's lives and politics.  Mr. Clark's attack on his girlfriend is directly related to the fact that he was shot as an unarmed black man, yet this is just too complicated to talk about.  And it is also true to say that every single victim of the terrorist attacks in France, every single one of their family members, are all just as heavy, soul and flesh wise, as my very own.

I'm saying that anyone who tells you they have an easy answer to these things isn't telling all of the truths.  There isn't an easy answer to this.  There is only growing evidence of a systemic problem, a sick and completely shattered society.

I am not saying gratitude is simply a realization of how lucky I am.  Luck is undeserved and impersonal.  I didn't earn my skin.

Realizing privilege is not gratitude.

That would be mistaking an impersonal thing for something personal.

Meditation is often misunderstood or misrepresented as being somehow a resolution.  Somehow a clarifier.  Somehow a truth reveler.

I think this is a dangerous misinterpretation.  Meditation does not simplify.  Meditation proves how subtle and complex everything is.  How tangled.  We can't use meditation to analyze our problems or look for answers.  There aren't any answers.  To keep looking for them even in our 'mindfulness' practice is to superimpose our ego, our flaws, our compulsions, and our dualistic thinking onto something that simply will not resolve.  We can't 'resolve'.  We have to change.  There is a difference.  The difference is gratitude.

The only thing meditation is any good for is honesty of what is present.  And the contradictions, therein.  And the feeling, thereof.  I think meditation is about embracing hopelessness, not a resolution of it.  Just as meditation becomes a way to embrace illness or pain, grief, anxiety, depression, and trauma.

I used to think gratitude was about simple things.  Grateful to be alive; grateful for food on the table; grateful for the handful of human beings in my life who love me in their messy - our messy - ways.

This year, I don't think that definition works.  That version of gratitude, of 'attitude adjustment' and the decision to be happy, feels as tacky and as untruthful as all the cheap plastic shit in the grocery store earlier today.  It feels selfish and full of denial.

I think gratitude is endlessly complicated.  As finely striated as muscle.  Infinitely complex and far beyond my comprehension, control, or will.  It isn't a thing of decision or trying.  And this is good, because simplifying is an insult.  Because somedays there isn't any hope left.

Gratitude is a thing more fleshy than thought.  And it comes from hopelessness, unresolved, and sat with intimately.  I think you only get gratitude - get hope - by acknowledging the pain of hopelessness and helplessness.  By realizing how truly impersonal world hurt is, yet how personal response must be.  It's the razor thin paradox between knowing my opinions cannot heal the world, and that my actions matter.

In 1996, Bernie Glassman started a meditation retreat to Auschwitz.  Anybody who isn't a mediator might see this as crude spectacle, as garish, or outright pointless.  Just as anybody who hasn't really sat with the concept of Dukkha dismisses 'life is suffering' as pessimistic.  According to Glassman, you sit with the pain, you face it as honestly as you can, and then you come back, changed.  Pain informs your humanity, wakes it, startles it.  Pain is the doorway to loving action.

When I sit on the hard days, I often start with agitation, frustration, and apathy.  I don't want to sit still, but to break things.  Or to run away.  To say screw the world and its pain, let me get the best I can on my own.  That was whole chapters of my life. You can read them, elsewhere.

But now, in this chapter of my life, I sit.  What shows up is both expected (anxiety, discomfort, sadness, restlessness, tears) and not (a softening, a gulping, a slowing of time, a realization I'm making fists.  Gratitude).

When I stand up from meditation, awareness of moments and of feeling go with me.  And then I can't be apathetic anymore.  When you have really allowed yourself to feel the unresolved problems, the very unsolvability of them, each new pain is both unbearable and trifling.  When I hear of the suffering of others, I care.  I care.  And this is the only way I have any hope.

I speak to my dog and I hear the modulations of anger, fatigue, and wavering love in my voice.  I notice it, too, projected onto other drivers when I'm in my car.  I notice it in the way I handle the silverware and plates as I'm washing the dishes.  Noticing,  I soften.  The dog forgives me, because he always does.  The drivers don't know any different, because it wasn't road rage but muttering.  The dishes don't clash so hard, but I don't think they're conscious of the shift. I've been to protests before, and black men have died after them.  So I can't quite say that my actions matter in the world.  But I can't quite say that they don't.

I'm going to the protests.  Tomorrow I'm buying a gift for a newborn baby girl and one for my niece.  On Thursday, Thanksgiving, I will teach a gratitude asana class in the morning, go to dinner with my family, and maybe go to the protests again.

I can't, really, say that my actions resolve the issues.  But they do change the world.  Gratitude doesn't seem to be a realization of how privileged I am, right now.  That is a completely moot point that answers nothing and resolves to apathy and doing nothing.  No: Gratitude is admitting how hopeless I feel, and how much I love the bloodied world, anyway.  Gratitude is a question of how willing I am to touch it, blood and all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scar tissue

"Memories are stored not only in the brain, but in a psychosomatic network extending into the body, particularly in the ubiquitous receptors between nerves and bundles of cell bodies called ganglia, which are distributed not just in and near the spinal cord, but all the way out along pathways to internal organs and the very surface of our skin." Candace B. Pert, Ph.D I can explain why we sometimes cry during savasana.

There are tears of relief, tears of gratitude, tears of exhaustion, and tears of mourning.  There are 10,000 kinds of tears.  Generally, we know why we're crying.  Or at least we think we do.  We stubbed our toe.  We get divorced.  Something dies.

Or there's just one straw too many; after waking up late, fielding two hundred incoming emails, having an unhelpful and largely inane conversation with tech support, your boss gives you another responsibility without having said thank you for the last three weeks of around the clock work.  Then you pick up the kids and your kid's school has sent a note home that feels mostly like you're not giving enough time to the school district and the classroom, you're a failed parent, you don't dress your child adequately and their behavior reflects your own disorganized finances.  When you get back to the car, a traffic cop is writing you up a parking ticket.  And then suddenly there you are.  Holding on the the steering wheel and crying, and crying, and crying without there seeming to be an off switch.  Crying that is disproportionate to the day.  Crying that has more than the day in it.

It has the whole of your career at this bloody job behind it, all seven years of your kid's life and the difficulty you had in pregnancy, the whole garbled romance and relationship with the kid's father, the failed relationships before that one and the way you tend to short sell yourself, contort yourself, try to make someone love you, and how you've done this since you yourself were seven carrying a note home from school.

Or whatever.  Or maybe you have very good off switches.  That would prove my point, not unmake it.

We think we know what we're feeling and why.  And we tend to think we've got it all under control. But sometimes, without knowing why, we cry during savasana. Emotional release - tears or laughter - aren't actually things we understand or do not understand.  The 10,000 things between relief, gratitude, exhaustion and mourning don't comply with reason and they live outside of time.  They live in bone, in fat tissue, in old songs, and our perfectionism. Yoga calls them samskara.  Scar tissue.  Effective yoga practice softens, elongates, heals deep body tissue.  Letting the breath and the light shine on the old places, the gristled tissue, the storage around your pericardium and the ballast around your lower back is evocative.  It is healing.  This isn't an understanding, thing, but a bodied one. Your mind and your body are not "related"; they are the same thing. It's deeper practice weekend.  We're going to:

    • understand yogic ideas of scar tissue, neuro plasticity, character and why we keep doing the same things in our lives.

 

 

    • see how stress affects metabolism, cognition, and immunity

 

 

    • learn how to effectively practice to relieve built up tension, rather than creating more.

 

 

          • Explore how this moving in or toward is ultimately where the healing happens, not in the final expression of a pose.  This is the vinyasa or mindful, attending, movement, more than sequence is.We'll also look at transitions in asana practice, the way we move from pose to pose and into a pose.
          • Thus we'll understand how to get where we're going with clarity, strength, openness, and integrity.  This in terms of asana, but also in terms of life.  We move differently and make different choices and ultimately, rocket ourselves into change if we move from openness, clarity, strength, and integrity.
          • We'll look at relaxing the diaphragm and getting better at reading our own bodies, making asana more effective

 

 

 

 

 

Truth or Consequences

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Yoga was, in fact, discovered. I assert that Yoga could no more be invented or owned than electricity, gravity or respiration. - Leslie Kaminoff I sell mirrors to the blind. - Kabir

When Iyengar died, I felt an absence in the world.  Absence came, as blood clusters to bruise or rain appears in the sky.  Absence formed and was felt.  It hadn't been there, before. Ghosts appear out of nowhere.

I started to look for a teacher.

I wasn't looking for another certification.  And I wasn't looking for a different slant on the yoga tradition, as if the one prior had somehow not been right for me or I'd matured past it;  I'd done all of that before.  I'd done enough to know floating from teacher to teacher,  relationship to relationship, day to day, is more likely avoiding the path than walking it.

That's not what I mean.

I mean I started looking for a guru.

I warn you: this is probably not a sentence you ever really want to say out loud.  I'm not sure it's something you should ever lay money on.  And yet there I was, all in, a suitcase and a maxed out credit card.  I ended up in Truth or Consequences, new Mexico.   The Or hooked me. The fulcrum, the unanswered question. Either this is real, or it isn't.  I'd begun to suspect the hinge comes down to teachers.

I know this:  If you're looking for a teacher, or a teaching, or a tool to hang up pictures or chop vegetables with, you'll come across both charlatans and craftsmen.  Most promise a version of happiness.  They promise power, a miraculous life,  the life you most want to live. All that you desire appearing. Like a ghost, but backwards.

Meanwhile, a few will offer you truth.  This doesn't sound as nice.   In fact this sounds downright threatening. You aren't sure you want it. You'll catch yourself wondering if you really need to hang up pictures or chop vegetables, after all.

If you don't go for truth, though, there will eventually be some suffering.  There will be some, if even only a little, hell to pay.

When I was a little girl, the neighbors had horses.  One was a palomino named sugar.  The girl who rode the horses used to stand at the gate and call: shuugeeeer, shuger shuger shuger.  The mare would come with long, heavy steps.  In the yoga tradition, we call it sukkha.  Sweetness.  Promise.  Easy Freedom.  Out of the sanskrit comes our indo-european:  refined and bagged and hawked.

Too much sukkha, goes a quip, causes truth decay.  All stability falls out and the path dissolves, sugar into water.  And all you're left with is a high, a self absorbed and immature high.  And after that, you're left with nothing at all.

Truth is slippery and evasive.  It is not a thing.  Not in the way table or plant is.  And it isn't quite god. Maybe it's a pull. A force. Like gravity.

Whatever it is, it is somehow related to men like Iyengar. And Jois and Desikachar.  It's probably the thing that made Jesus what he was. St. Francis for all I know.

I'm saying this as a woman who never met Iyengar.

But when he died, I realized I was standing alone amidst the bullshit.  The forefathers are gone and all we've got are stepchildren and bastards.  Although they are related to the practice, they are not the practice.  Not quite.

So this is how it happened.  I flailed about, taking up this word, guru.  And I ended up buck naked in southern New Mexico.

The sky could kill you in New Mexico.  The Rio Grande is the smallest, reddest little river I've ever seen.  I come from the land of the northern Mississippi, where water is power and fat and black at the bottom.  The Rio isn't impressive in itself, but surprisingly tawdry.  What awes is the swath it cuts, miles deep, through stone, the hardness of the stone is the proof, the visible track, of thirst.  Sky did that.  But I was the one who felt it.

The desert on my skin was real enough.  Windchimes thread the breeze in New Mexico, a glittering sound that is gone before you've really heard it and back again so often you forget it's there.

Still and all, soul is something like the desert. Pilgrims have always wandered off there.  Soul is to desert as voice is to wind.  We can doubt soul.  We can lose our voices.  But you can't much deny an atmosphere with so little humanity in it. You can see time on the mountains.  You can feel what heat is, and night. Things fade in the rarefied light and yet other things survive centuries, leaving churches and cave dwellings and cowboy ghost stories trailing in the wind.  Chiming it with tinny stories. Landmarks slip. The only animals around are the scrappy ones.  Plants have the fibrous quality of thirsty vein. Stone and dust are so clearly the same thing you know ashes are ashes and dust is dust. You could die in New Mexico.  Or go mad.  Therefore, you know humanity.

Hot water outside bath while up in the mountains.

A photo posted by Karin L Burke (@coalfury) on

If you've ever really prodded soul, or god, or the infinite, you know already that it comes down to emptiness. Emptiness and silence.  My body, itself, reeled.  I swear my bones began to feel sunburnt, my blood got dry, my lungs first struggled and then met the thinness by peeling. Everything inside dialated.  It was something of a gutting.  The whites of my eyes burned and now I've got a scar on the whites of my eyes.  That's not even a metaphor. I came home from the desert with a mark on my iris that makes it look not quite whole. The word pilgrammage started popping up in all of my notebooks.  The windchimes stopped bothering me after a day or two.  People need to tag the invisible, I figured.  They need to put glass beads or tin on it, I figured, in order stave off the madness. The sound drifts and wavers, is only half conscious, audible imposition on all that vastness.  The sound mitigates the space between the selfishness of kitsch and the authenticity of looking into the world, reverently.

The consequences of untruth aren't lies, but anxiety. Lostness.  Relativity that will go straight down into nihilism. It's godawful lonely. The consequences of illusion are complete pettiness and the loss of reverence, the loss of meaning.

Reverence doesn't negate the awkward, god and the devil help me.  It's hard to call Truth or Consequences a town. It's a street, a bizarre little street, hugging the banks of the river and slid between the spines of mountain. It's an American town just shy of being Mexico, which in itself is all kinds of brutal truths and falsehoods. Truth or Consequences is a bunch of trailer homes parked on the ridges, a few upscale spas proprietorially constructed around the hot springs. The town, if that's what we're calling it - it had a post office so I won't argue - wasn't called anything more than Hot Springs until 1950, that weird cultural decade of manliness and subterfuged revolt. Ralph Edwards, host of the NBC radio quiz show Truth or Consequences, announced he would air the program from the first town that renamed itself after the show; someone in Hot Springs called up. Edwards visited each and every spring for the next 50 years.

The question is this: how do we translate something historically passed from guru to student to a world such as ours?  What is it we are trying to translate?  What happens when you're all in, naked and looking for soul, smack in the raw surface of the blanched earth of the American Southwest? Is it even possible to sit there, a toe in the water, a rock in your back, sun in your eye and take yourself seriously? Can we be fully aware of the consequences and of truth at the very same time?

We can't say that there is a true yoga.  Yoga has no founder, no dogma, no word of god.  From the beginning, yoga was many yogas.  There are no yogic popes, there was never a reformation, there are no creeds or dogmas and there are very scattered ashrams and monasteries.  The line between Buddhism and yoga is sketchy.  The line between this yoga and that is gray, nuanced only by trademark.  There was never an attempt to impose uniformity of doctrine so much as there was an injunction to seek.  But that injunction is so quiet, so fleeting, that it's hard to hear.

Yoga is a vocation, rather than doctrine.  A listening and responding. Something calls.  We can listen.  This is yoga.

And yet I was sick of it.  I was sick of the selfishness, the flimsiness, the way listening becomes an excuse to hear what you want to hear. In an odd and completely unnoticed slight of hand, 'listening' became 'singing your own song'.  As the years went on, that droning cacophony swelled and now it sounds exactly like wider culture.  All of the stuff that is wrong with the world.  All of the alienation.  The cultured unfairness.  The denial.  I stumbled.  I took pause. We're not listening.  Not to nuance.  We're listening to trademark and hawking and sugar, sugar, sugar until we're stupid with our own childish energy.

Absence arrived. I got scared.  I started looking. I would have gone to India, but in spite of being a very well trained and fairly successful professional in the yoga industry - I make my entire if feeble living at this, which most don't - I would have no idea where to start on that teeming subcontinent.  I am absolutely and resolutely lost.   So I went to New Mexico.

I can't exactly tell you what happened there.  Taos, Sante Fe, Sedona and enviorns have a particular spiritual eerieness.  The beauty that stuns makes it desirable. The ghosts of seers left a lore in the atmosphere, like wood smoke.  It's beauty means people who can afford it lay claim to the most delicious spots. They set down ski resorts and fine dining.  They wear couture sun-glasses and buy up the turquoise.  They just drive through any actual Indian reservations.

I sat there in a room full of white and wealthy people practicing yoga.  I had a moment of actual rage as they talked of going to the spa and then an expensive restaurant after the day ended.  I had no money to go to a spa.  My motel room reeked in exactly the same way motel rooms used to reek when I frequented them for tawdry, Hunter S. Thompson kind of reasons.  Which would be poignant if it wasn't just honest.  Honestly, it made me wonder about trajectory; if in time anything ever changes or matters in the least.

Motel rooms don't change, we do.  

I got hot and bothered, sure. That's what I do. But I was also there with a kind of willingness that wouldn't let me walk away. During the day, we practiced, we sat.  Mist evaporated out of the arroyos.  We did the things you do in yoga.  And the master teacher, was.  

He saw things in me, strange wordless things that aren't muscle and aren't bone and aren't pose. A teacher, of course, sees things that we can't.  He got me to feel them.  He moved them.  He held the meditating and I fell into it.  I wept. He saw things in me, personality flaw and personal strength and hanging question, wise, that I knew damn well were there but hadn't done anything about.  And he says them, invites me to face them.  And where my own gumption and all my friends and doctors and family telling me so for years had not done a damned thing, when the teacher said so I said yes.  okay.  I will.  without batting an eye.  And I began.  

They all went to the spa.  I drove for miles and miles and miles.  I pulled over and walked through cemeteries.  I climbed under barbed wire fences and lay on my back on the red earth.  I drove north, and south, and I ended up in Truth or Consequences, paying a few bucks for a few hours in a sulpher laced spring.

And I thought this:   The teacher student relationship has always been there, always has been part of the yogic path even though now it's blown apart like a cat with a firecracker up it's ass.  Vows, commitment, thread the narrative like windchimes thread air.   This is a spiritual practice that isn't attached to a god, and the vows you take aren't like the catholic ones that end you in a cloister or the marriage ones that end you a legally different person.  Although the vows might be that, they don't have to be.   In this tradition, the vows are not about the outcome of the vows, but about the making of them.   A distillery of intention.  Which, when done honesty, humbles you.

It isn't what you expect.  That's the point.  Nothing is what you expected.  But it turns out, you aren't what you expected, either.  And this is the only possible way to make any difference.  This is the only possible way we can change.  Ourselves, or the world.   We need the commitment of a spiritual practice not because of god, but because of our own mad nature.  We need the commitments of a moment to moment, real and flesh bound practice because rage, fear, shame, and anger are hard and hot and heavy and fast.  So fast.  We need something to slow us down.  We need commitment because even though we love our loved ones, sometimes we don't.  We sometimes hate and resent and would strangle them if we could. Or we'd quit.  Think we're better off, all alone.  Vows and commitments keep us more than we keep them.

We need a teacher not because the teacher is enlightened, but because he knows we could be. Any honest transformation is a relational one.  One that leaves us changed in our most intimate, most political, most human ways.  Left alone, we are so drawn to our own navel that we're blind.

Once, a very long time ago, a first teacher sat behind a great big desk in Greece while I stood meek and busted for some indiscretion in the middle of the room.  Both cowed and defiant.  My dear girl, this man said, you're a brilliant young woman, fast on your way to mediocrity.  I'm not young any more.  Just recently I realized that teacher had died.  I went on right head on into mediocrity but I swear his presence made me dig, try, scrabble for what little brilliance I've been able to mete out.  His ghost now makes me commit to more.  More gutting.  More digging.  More, unmediocre.

In New Mexico, my teacher gave me a metaphorical mirror.  It was only having a mirror that could show me, honestly, how goddamned blind I can be. Truly, truly, this is awkward.  Seeing your blindness is a kind of vision, see, but it's as awkward as laying in the desert in the mid afternoon, soaking your bones that don't have cancer or psoriasis or any of the other things silver and sulpher are said to cure.  Your ailment is subtle.  Your bones float in mystery.  

Nothing changed in New Mexico.  But I came home without what I thought I knew. Teaching is the best thing I've ever done in my life.  I don't say this because I'm particularly gifted as a teacher, but because other aspects of my life are decidedly unskillful. But the truth of my being a teacher is I have to have a teacher.  If I don't, I become the charlatan.

I'm going to go ahead and say this.  I don't exactly know what made Iyengar Iyengar.  Or Jesus, Jesus.  I don't think it's what we'd expect.  But I do think it was something.  Something rare, and precious in that rarity, but absolutely true and as real life as a motel room if you're willing to be in one.  And I think there are such teachers, now.  Leslie Kaminoff's one.  Tias Little is another. Michael Stone listens to me being ridiculous until I myself can hear it.   Teachers are there. But most of what is passed of as 'teaching' is just not.  And that's okay.   If you try, you'll find the rare souls pretty easily.  There are 7.3 billion of us here.  One in a million is actually quite sufficient.

Listen when you're called; you come out moved.  Scarred, humbled, marked and bitten by the forces of nature.  Which is a better thing, a far more sthira thing, than is culture.  It's a more humane thing, held and supported by another, than is the blind attempt to do it your own way.   

Mostly, Santa Fe feels like this. But you have to apply your own sarcasm. A photo posted by Karin L Burke (@coalfury) on

Guided Savasana and the Generous, Open Heart

I spur of the moment decided I should offer the Art of Self Care course a gusavaided savasana, and then couldn't figure how to host an mp3 on the forum, so it will live here.  Lucky you. Some of the most important work we do happens in savasana.  It's often seen as a time to rest.  It's sometimes simply called 'final relaxation pose'.  It's often skipped and students can spend years not really liking it, not feeling able to relax, or being uncomfortable with how silly it feels to lie down and do nothing, so vulnerable, such a place where tears are likely to come.

The fact that tears come in savasana might, though, be indicative of how psychologically important it is.

 

 

[audio mp3="http://www.returnyoga.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/savasana.mp3"][/audio]

In savasana, we are practicing.  We're practicing the final act of our lives.  We're practicing dying.  It's worth the time to try to die, well.  There is no point to the yogic path if it doesn't culminate in that moment.  The yogic path starts with that moment in mind.  The instructions for savasana are relatively simple: lie down and play dead.

We either minimize it or completely misunderstand it.  In our culture, death is portrayed as loss. It's the moment at which everything is taken from us.

From a mindfulness perspective, death isn't a loss but the moment we become supremely generous, and give ourselves completely.  In meditation, we work to realize the instinctive clinging of the mind and the limitations of perspective.  In savasana, we practice going so deeply into our own open hearted awareness that we can give back everything.  We give our weight back to gravity, first.  And then we give our breath back to the atmosphere.  Slowly, we give the heat of our blood away to the warm elements of the universe, and when they have gone and we are bone dry, we give our very dryness.  We give until we are not.  And this isn't a loss, but a moment in time.  It's the moment our greatest illusion passes out of our awareness and a next moment arises in its wake.

Many of us love postures, love a good yoga session, and bask in those sensations when it comes time to lie down.  But the real physiological and psychological work comes in the ability to feel what was turned on in us and allow them to be flipped back off.  Asana heal us and cause physiological transformation in the body.  But in order to really transform, we have to let the tools of transformation go.  If we don't, than we're rejecting the transformation in trying to be the person we were prior to transformation, in trying to hold on.  This is yoga philosophy, pure.

Savasana quiets any agitation out of the body.  Agitation or restlessness (is said to be one of the five hinderances to meditation or panca nirvavanas.  The other hinderances are sloth, doubt, and clinging or what I've been calling stickiness.  Stickiness can either be clinging to what we want, or the attempts we make to avoid what we don't.

Savasana brings equilibrium to the five tattvas of the body, corresponding to the five elements.  What belongs to privthi or earth becomes earthy again.  What is composed or flourishes with fluidity (such as the lymphatic system and the movement of Cerebrospinal Fluid and hormones through the endocrine system, especially the adryenal glands and the waters of the kidney line) is brought to an even tide.  Agni tattva, which lives in our blood, digestion, organs of perception especially the eyes, is clarified of it's oily burn and residual scum.  And akasha tattva, the space element, creates freedom for the mind heart to begin healing.

In somatic therapies, being able to sense how we hold ourselves against gravity and then allowing our movement through the world to become more of an embrace, a loving dance, is said to be the primary mechanism of healing.  That is, it's less about rearranging our insides or alignment than it is being able to feel our alignment, including our alignment in the world, and to finally recognize that how we move on the surface of the earth can be liberating or crushing.  Savasana is the absolute fulfillment of such somatic awakening.  Which is probably why Moshe Fedenkries had people lie that way for 16 minutes to release the psoas and rearrange absolutely everything.

Just try it.  Try it more than once.  Practice it for a long time.  If you want the yogic promises to start working in your body and heart, you can't skip it.  In a sense, it all starts with this.

from the pradipika:

Lying flat on the ground with the face upwards, in the manner of a dead body, is savasana.  It removes tiredness and enables the mind to relax.

Savasana is the corpse pose.  Shav means 'corpse'.  This asana has been adapted from the tantric practice of savasana in which the sadhaka sits on the corpse and practices his mantra.

This practice is useful for developing body awareness and pratyahara.  When the body is completely relaxed, awareness of the mind develops.  Its effects influence the physical as well as the psychological structure.  It is very useful in yogic management of high blood pressure, peptic ulcer, anxiety, hysteria, cancer and all psychosomatic diseases and neurosis.  In fact, savasana is beneficial no matter what the condition is, even in perfect health, because it brings up the latent impressions buried within the subconscious mind, and the mind which operates during waking consciousness relaxes and subsides.  It is, therefore, necessary to practice savasana for developing dharana and dhyana.  Even though it is a static pose it revitalizes the entire system.

 

 

Magical Thinking, Yoga, and Internal Inquiry

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Mostly, yoga is bullshit. This is breaking my heart.

One of my teachers says I should allow my heart to break.  Another shrugs when I say I'm about ready to leave the path and start working retail.  Leaving the path may be the path, he says.  Neither of these feel helpful. I'm finding myself standing still in the middle of the room a lot, lately, forgetting what I meant to do or losing the motivation. I find myself pausing before the locked studio door in the mornings, looking at the key, asking some kind of question that doesn't have words.

I started to write this last week.  I had been invited to a party.  Since I live in bare feet and messy hair, I generally thrill at the chance to put on a dress.  I've lived in New York and Paris, after all.  I am a woman who firmly believes in pretty shoes.  I sat down, the pretty dress on but the shoes, not.  They lay on the floor in front of the closet.  I looked at the shoes and I poked around with what I was feeling.  The yoga people were going to be at this party.  When I say that, I mean Lululemon, Yoga Fit, and Core Power.  A new yoga magazine has been launched.  As a studio owner, I ought to be there.  I ought, really, to advertise in it.  But their rates gave me sticker shock that lasted four hours and no small amount of cussing.  The party was to be artfully catered.  The magazine spread boasts luxury spa retreats, a few recipes, and a solid block of pretty ads with pretty girls.

My ambiguity about the party wasn't really about the party.  It probably wasn't even about the magazine.  In my normal mood, I would have damned the pretense but enjoyed the swank music and night out.  But there was too much subtext.  My mood was fragile.

The yoga world has been gearing up for something called International Yoga Day.  Studios are hosting special classes.  They're running sales. The internet and social media preen and belch.  But no one mentions that this event is largely being pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Indian BJP.

I'm crabby. There's a new mn yoga magazine and they're running a column called "ask a swami". Green smoothies and finding your tribe (on a beach, apparently) are in the same sentences as satya and ahimsa. Its my day off and maybe I'm just exhausted, maybe it's my own crap coming up, but all I really want to do is quit and stay laying right here. Be very angry or start working retail and leave this yoga crap to the corporate gyms and self help self publishing monolith. The bad guys win. The goodness in us is wounded. I'm tired. #yogateacher

A photo posted by Karin (@coalfury) on May 18, 2015 at 1:09pm PDT

Modi's government is enforcing yoga postures much in the way the third Reich pushed calisthenics.  Modi is connected to a government that is selling wide swaths of his country off to global corporations - think Lehman brothers - dispossessing an already starving people living on less than 20 rupees a day.  Modi is mobilizing one of the largest armies in the world against some of the poorest and hungriest people in the world.  India is allying itself with the U.S. (and Isreal) against China, much in the way Afghanistan was drawn into the orbit of the U.S. against Russia in a previous cold war.  We've seen how that worked out.  International Yoga Day is Modi's nationalist propaganda.  It's then taken up by yoga studios in the west as a very good idea.  I bristled.  I began to write this all down.

Then the shootings in Charleston happened, and I stopped writing.

* When I was a little girl, I really wanted a pony.  I believed I would - someday, after I rode my pony to Olympian fame and wrote a Book - fall in Love and live happily ever after.   I've heard that other people dream of being President.  Or flying.

I'm a recovering alcoholic and the only woman I know who has two bought-as-wedding-dresses, never worn, hanging in my closet.  I haven't ridden a horse in years.

It seems to me that much of our understanding and practice of yoga is this naive.  It amounts to magical thinking.  Suffering begins in the mind, says the superficial reading of this stuff: think positively and your suffering will end.  Doors are said to open and teachers appear.  Wealth is said to manifest.  We will, vaguely, thrive.

Magical thinking is self indulgent, petty, and dangerous.  It's a version of spirituality that hasn't grown up.  Most of us stopped believing in Santa Claus and many of the tenets of 'theology' a long time ago; the archaic structures of religion no longer seem relevant in our post-modern and post-metaphysical world.  We believe in science, after all.  The premises of Buddhism, yoga, and 'mindfulness' suck us in like Walmart's halo over a parkinglot.  Convenient.  It's all the sweetness of soul, with no god in it!  We can go for this.  We consume it.

And why shouldn't we? It's so pretty.  Who wouldn't want to meditate in Costa Rica?

Who wouldn't buy a product that packages 'happiness' backed by modern day science?

We've overlooked, or failed to appreciate, the more substantial and difficult teachings of this path.  The prior ones.  The difficult work of accepting pain as true.  Ourselves as self-interested and completely, absolutely, contingent.

Sometimes, pain doesn't go away.  Sometimes we are rejected.  We don't thrive.  How could we thrive when we don't even live up to our own standards? Green smoothies, aside.  I used to think I was a pretty damaged piece of work.  But any perusal of Barnes and Nobel and it's oversized self help, motivational, and DIY sections reminds me I am not the only one.

Yoga students swarm to the teachers who promise 15 day makeovers, personal power, and bliss. The modern popularity of mindfulness isn't indicative of a healing culture.  It only proves how many of us are wounded.

*

Today, in India, a right wing government is pushing yoga exercises.  In our Western yoga culture, yogis push yoga in the schools.  I am concerned.

Magical thinking is dangerous.  It pushes 'living our truth' to narcissistic action.  It displaces responsibility for doing our own work onto 'the divine' or 'karma'.  Magical thinking obverts self inquiry and neglects the suffering of the world.

We are dangerously loose with our stories about what 'yoga' and 'India' are.  We idealize, taking what works for us while dismissing what we don't want, a kind of buffet style enlightenment. We adopt the names of Hindu goddesses or the sanskrit words for 'fire' or 'space'.  We hold big festivals with reggae superimposed on Kirtan and asana teachers signing autographs to applause and sighs.  We have no real idea what India is, and tend to forget that Pakistani border, let alone Kashmir and the Tamil, the Maosit uprising, megacity overwhelm and the displaced agrarian community in which IMF and microbank endebted farmers commit suicide and an overwhelming - unthinkable - number of human beings live in famine conditions.  We forget that Muslims even live there.  If we do remember, we remember only in the context of terrorism;  we wonder what 'kind' of Muslims they are.

Tourist yogis who go to trainings and retreats in India send back Instagram pictures of themselves posing in temples, climbing on holy sites, and doing asana in front on the poor street children. Meanwhile, back stateside, the confluence of money and power results in sex scandals. What sells is emphasized over what is honest. Franchised studios shadow Starbucks like a kid brother.  Local studios disappear.  Advertising goes sexy.  Youtube videos teach people to do advanced asana and suddenly orthopeadic surgeons and physical therapists are treating yoga injuries as often as hockey injuries.  Sweaty, enthusiastic urbanites chant 'om' in spa like settings but few of them chant in protests, and while we're vaguely aware of riots in Baltimore we don't do anything other than post on Facebook about it.  Yoga 'service' trips amount to a vacation to third world countries, nominally advocating but really accomplishing about as much damage as Christian missionary work did.  We didn't realize a flash mob style 'om the bridge' event in Vancouver would insult First Nations people or inconvenience anybody.

We didn't think about anybody, at all.

We just wanted to feel whole.

And then the shootings happened in Charleston.

*

In trying to hold the space of the studio open to process the shooting, I felt exhaustion.  As though I were holding the walls up with my shoulders.  I found myself saying what my teachers have been saying, to me.  I get the irony.

What I say as a teacher is always something my teachers have said to me.

I didn't invent the path.

But I know what it says: now, the heart is breaking.  Now, the teachings of yoga.

*

I say this, often, when I teach:  we don't practice for the good days.  We practice for when it gets hard. I've wanted to say, in the national debate about mental illness, gun control, and the goddamned confederate flag, that we were racist last week, too.  I've wanted to say Baltimore.  Ferguson.  I don't know a black person who hasn't lived with racism their whole entire lives, and if I inspect my own life I find it in there, too.

I talk about death and grief and mourning in my classes, I talk about the waste feeling of our busy lives, I talk about fear and sadness.  I try to say love and strength and healing, but I say death. Grief.  Ghosts.  I know that in every single class I teach, there is someone who has lost someone near in the last few weeks.  I know this affects a persons practice for a year and more; I've seen it, even if they are so close to their own thoughts and bodies they can't see it for themselves.  I know that in every class there is trauma, financial fear, self doubt, people who have been rejected, taken for granted, people who are afraid to grow old.

I want, sometimes, to say 'feel how much I love you'.  I want to say hope and I end up saying look at your life.  I suppose these are the same thing.

*

There is more, subtext.  I've been full of piss and vinegar at the yoga world in recent weeks.  But that isn't new.

What is new is my own body going through a shift.  I had thought my yoga practice and changed lifestyle 'healed', mostly, my fibromyalgia.  In recent months, the pain has been steady.  I'm laid up and a week later I'm laid up again.  I feel betrayed.  I feel confused.  I wonder how I can teach if my body starts to give out.  I wonder how seriously I can take the 'healing' promises, if I am losing my health.  I wonder how seriously I can be taken.

There is more, still.  My best friend died this spring.  I wasn't expecting it and I wasn't expecting how deeply grief would move into my days.

And perhaps it is grief, only.  Or grief and physical illness.  But I'm watching myself lose my appetite, sleep, motivation.  I realize I'm depressed.  This makes me angry.  I ask someone for a referral for a therapist.

This is the question: did my lifestyle of overwork and physically using my body as a business tool lead to a worsening of my chronic condition?  Did grief trigger it?  Did depression fray my tolerance of the (always has been there) yoga bullshit to the point of disillusion?  What does any of this have to do with the shootings in Charleston, a pair of high heels, a continent I've never been to?

My teachers have shrugged.  This has felt like loneliness.  I keep finding myself standing still in the middle of the room, some forgotten thing in my hand.  But I know they are giving me solid, and downright traditional, guidance.  They are pointing me back to my own heart, asking me to stay with the question of my life, to answer not with ultimatums or theory but with as honest a next moment as I can stand.

I've been telling people, over and over again: yoga began as inner inquiry.  Through all of it's variations, history, branding.  Through all of those flashy characters and instagram super stars.  Through it's becoming a mass practice directly because of it's association with Indian nationalism.

My writing in the last few months has been hijacked.  It's all about grief.  Or perhaps, more truthfully, about friendship.  Maybe there is no difference: grief, friendship. When he died, I got a tattoo.  This was silly.  Also, not.  I lay in the back of a tattoo parlor in the East Village and listened to the punk rock we used to listen to, back when the East Village was the East Village and we were 16.  I get the irony.  The tattoo has words, they say 'I know I have a soul, because you touched it'.  This is what friends do for us. Make us better.  Illuminate our stupidity. Give us a sense of home and self.  The words of the tattoo are covered with more tattoo, a wordless black band.  

The friend is gone and all I'm left with is this shitty tattoo.  And when the hard days come, the only thing left is soul.  I'd be lying if I said I can wrap my head around this.  

It is impossible to step out of my body.  It is magical thinking to think that my body is anything but the body politic, that there is not a direct sutra-ed thread between my body and nine other bodies lying dead in a church.  There is a direct line between commercialism, economics, and terrorism.  I am all tangled up.  

It is maturity to know this, to go on loving when the heart breaks.  I can't very well leave the path, if I am it.  I might as well have some good shoes.  One of the teachers says: if yoga means union, what is it we are joining?  And what does that union feel like?  I am not writing about rage or morbid grief.  I am writing about love.  

I was, however, totally dressed for the occasion. A photo posted by Karin (@coalfury) on Jun 12, 2015 at 8:59pm PDT

Bare soul, a sharpened truth

Bare soul, a sharpened truth

All of this - the trash of the wider culture, the bite of my own truth, the longing I hear from others - gives me the go.  It touches, I think, that tender longing spot in me, that urge toward truth and balance and yes-ness.  I want to rend the fabric of the false.  I want to reveal the sexualized and bulemic matrix, the absurd amalgamation of goddess-nature-ecstatic dance-feel your wildness-new ageism.  I want to show how our attention is tangled in the absolutes, the all or nothings, the goal setting and expectations and how much this hurts. The falsity hurts.