donutszenmom.com

I’m not sure why I’m so curious about technology gadgets lately, but this morning I got it into my head that what I really needed was a little camcorder. Yes, no doubt it will be used to record an asana or two as I work them out. I’ll admit to being curious about how the beginning of kapotasana looks before I start heading (often a bit more rapidly than I wish) toward the floor.

Anyhow, here I am, voice-recording this entry. (0v0) asked about how I can use the voice recognition software to create entries, how I can write an entry without seeing it, without working it with my hands. The way I’m doing it right now, with a head mic, means I’m able to see it as the computer prints out my words, so that’s simple enough. A little bit of performance anxiety, I’ll admit. But I can see what I’ve said, and kind of aim towards where I’m going. I just have to stop every now and again to correct a mistake that the voice recognition has made, which actually is very cool because I get to teach it that way.

Just speaking into the recorder, unable to see any printout as I go, is a whole ‘nother story: I usually need to think a bit about the entry I intend to make and kind of focus on three or four bullet points. That way I can keep the larger points in mind. It actually isn’t terribly unlike how I work day in and day out. I design instructional materials, so from the very beginning of the design, when you determine what the objectives of the training are going to be, until the very end, when you design the points of individual screens and pages, it’s all about identifying and prioritizing the larger points, and then organizing the material under each point. Poetic, associative thinking it most decidedly is NOT. I remember first getting into information design and having the worst headaches! I really think it was my right-brained self agonizing in response to the left-brain training.

Anyhow, this morning I looked into digital camcorders on cnet. I wanted something very small, very simple. Just need to grab video clips that will work on the Web, so nothing fancy or high-resolution. Sure enough, I found a little camcorder about the size of a deck of cards, and cheap. Circuit City has this great service where you order a product online and then just go pick it up. So within a couple of hours, I had in hand. Very cool technology: the USB connector retracts into the camcorder. When you extend the connector and plug it into the computer, the setup software that is embedded in the product launches and automatically downloads. It also includes a little editing application and a link to a site where you can store your clips. I’ve already sent a video greeting to my friend in California who’s been after me to send pictures of my post-surgery eyes.

One thing I’m definitely thinking about is the ability to take some video clips at the shala. They may be useful on Volleyball Guy’s website. And I think the Mysorians may be curious to see some moving images of their individual practices.

So all of a sudden I have an audio files folder on my desktop and a video files folder. I never saw this coming. And I have no idea how it’s all going to add up. When I was an undergrad sculpture major at Mass College of Art, we had a department called SIM, the Studio for Interrelated Media. They were always the wierdos (which is saying something in a school full of arty types), the people who mixed up technologies and made art out of them. (The people who took the most acid, too, as I recall.) It feels weird to be using voice recognition and making audio files, and it feels very weird to be making video files. I have no idea what can be done with them, but I feel like they need to be around as possibilities somehow. Kind of like how it used to feel to need to have sketch pads around the house and pencils and charcoal, and then in the writing years, lined notebooks and pens.

We’ll see.

Sluggish practice. I feel like I am fighting a cold, my upper back/shoulders felt tuckered out right from the first chaturanga. Ugh. My pep talk to myself was simply, “Sometimes you just practice because it’s time to practice.” Not very high expectations, clearly.

I think I need to open up my practice a bit. I tend to create efficiencies in anything I do routinely, and in movement situations, that can mean reducing the movements, making them tighter (versus letting them open out a bit). So that’s a little something to start thinking about.

Otherwise, everything was fine. My lower back is stiff, stiff, stiff when I wake up these days. Not sore, just stiff. I’ve kicked my ibuprofen habit and this morning decided to go without pre-practice coffee. Oh, hey, maybe that’s why I felt kind of sluggish! Anyhow, by savasana, I couldn’t get the thought of CHAI! out of my head. Mmmm.

Volleyball Guy gave me a great assist in pasasana today. I can get my feet flat and the bind (tenuously) on my own, but it never feels like a real twist. I think I compromise the twist in order to keep my balance. So it rocked to get some serious twist happening in the pose. Maybe I will put my heels up for a while, perhaps that will allow me to twist more and still keep my balance?

Kapotasana was okay, I’m ending up an inch from my toes according to Volleyball Guy, which is fine by me. A good enough starting place.

Souljerky has a video of the Tibetan Buddhist ceremonies following Allen Ginsberg’s death (wonderfully titled “Scenes from Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit”). I’ve watched it a couple of times: it reminds me of a great documentary on Tibetan practices (“Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Way of Life”). Allen was one of my teachers in grad school, and I spent a good bit of time hanging out with him. He was a really gentle man, very sweet and funny and irritable and human. He thought poetry was the heart of reality, a perspective I couldn’t really share. Once, he had to be away during class time and sent Gregory Corso in his place. Gregory was pretty awful — I think perhaps he was baiting us on purpose, but suffice it to say, he managed to be belligerent and sexist and racist all in one fell swoop. The next week, Allen said, “What did you think of Gregory?” “He’s an asshole,” I replied. “He’s a genius,” Allen said. “Maybe so, but he’s still an asshole,” I said. Allen just nodded.

This was an interesting conversation to me, because when Allen came up, “poets behaving badly” was de rigueur. Some poets behaved badly in the ’30s and ’40s, but by the ’50s, being troubled and substance-addicted and suicidal was a prerequisite, and the clan of poets was always inspecting itself, eager to determine who among the crowd deserved the title “genius.” I always got the feeling that Allen saw people like Corso and Burroughs and Kerouac as more “genius” than he: they certainly were more troubled. And by that criterion, Allen couldn’t “win” — he was a kind man who tried to do the right thing and be thoughtful of other people. He seemed very curious about the idea of forgetting about “genius,” about not valuing the notion, but I think when you are famous and live in New York, it’s pretty much impossible to escape the constructs that get built by your self and around your self.

I hope he escaped rebirth entirely, or found a very happy new life.

The Cop still isn’t home from the night shift. Called him when I got up to check in. He’ll call when he’s finally done with all of his paperwork and we’ll go out to breakfast. Sounds like his Saturday night was quite a trip. So as I’m making my coffee this morning, I look at the refrigerator. There are two pictures Volleyball Guy has taken of me doing urdhva dhanurasana. Just before I’d gone into the kitchen to make coffee, I read a few blogs, and a couple of people had images of their backbends. I looked at the photos on the refrigerator and thought, “Hey, why am I so wound up about this? My backbends look like everybody else’s!” And it struck me how much I’ve been striving, feeling like something’s wrong, that I have to get my act together. This is kind of funny, because I can usually keep things in perspective. Okay, Karen, it’s like enlightenment. You already understand, as the Kwan Um zennists would say. You’re already there. I don’t need to feel like this is an enormous weakness.

Duh.

Teacher training

When I first started doing yoga, about seven years ago (before I discovered Ashtanga), it struck me that it might be fun and/or instructive to take a teacher training course. Nothing ever came of that, because I was saving for My Gift’s college fund for one thing, and very busy at work for another. I put down the idea of training and teaching. Clearly it’s an enormous responsibility. I taught poetry workshops for a while, back in California, and let me tell you, teaching is hard work! But here I am, two years into my Ashtanga practice, and suddenly I’m thinking about it again. Now that Volleyball Guy and Sanskrit Scholar have their own studio, I wonder if they’ll offer teacher training. Yesterday the British Director mentioned going to Tim Miller’s training next year. I think I may want to do that. I don’t know if this is borne out of an actual desire to teach, or if it’s just wanting to learn more. I don’t suppose it matters either way. I can go ahead and do some training, and then see how I feel about how to proceed.

Organization: Preserving the Empty Mind

Thank you, Inside Owl, for your mention of GTD. I’d never heard of it, but it sounds somewhat similar to what I’m trying do these days. I think of it as a work practice. I ordered the book, because if he has some good insights, I want to hear ‘em. The way I have things set up now, I’m always sifting out action items and next steps, figuring out what belongs to me and what belongs to other departments. There are so many details to think about all the time. It’s actually been an ongoing zen consideration: how to deal with so many things, how to keep them in perspective, and also how to keep them out of my mind. It is almost impossible to have a still mind when all you can think about is the whirl of things to be done. I think I manage pretty well, but am eager to hear if this guy’s got some more ideas. The voice recorder/transcription software I purchased last week was purchased because I realized that everything was starting to run together. I’d be making notes about work and making notes about blogging and making notes about things to do in real life. It seemed like I needed to up my organizational game a bit. When the software arrived, The Cop asked if I was going to charge it back to work. It hadn’t even occurred to me to do that — I ordered it because I need it for my head. My goal is to empty my mind of all the stuff. There is something about using technology to still the mind that truly delights me.

Hanging on to things

With this week being a vacation week, I decided to get the Asatoma tattoo. Of course, once I started thinking about it, I started looking at the lotus tattoo on my shoulder, which is not a great tattoo to begin with, and which is pretty washed out. I started thinking about what else it should be. I had a million ideas. I thought about Kwan Yin, I thought about doing something to the lotus, some design kind stuff, I thought about a Buddha. Then I just decided to leave it alone. This is surprising because back in the day, I would have attached to the need to change it, and I would not have been able to put the notion down. I would’ve had to decide what it would be, where to go, when I was going to go, etc., etc. Now, though, I just kind of think about it a little, then go “meh,” and put it down.

Okay, so all of this backbending has been focusing me on my shoulders. Like any normal person who works on a computer day after day, year after year, my shoulders hunch in. I will qualify that by pointing out that people at work often comment on my fine workstation posture, but be that as it may, I still bear the mark of the computer-enslaved. And let’s be honest, it isn’t just the computer-related career. I remember my brother, who was a personal trainer, getting on me about my shoulders before I ever worked in an office. He didn’t understand why the fashion is for women to kind of hunch their shoulders forward. Look at models — they slouch all the time. He suggested it was a way for women to distance themselves from their own strength and uprightness, which I think is a really interesting idea.

So anyhow, I hunch. A teeny bit, but a bit nevertheless. With the new focus on backbending, though, I’ve been opening up through the shoulders. And where the shoulders go, so goes the upper back. I’ve been doing my passive stretching, and it seems to be loosening up the shoulders and upper back. I feel a little conflicted about it, I must admit. The flexibility: good. The diminished strength: waaaaah! Today in led class, I was a weakling in urdhva dhanurasana. It’s like all of the internal structure of my upper back and shoulders is coming loose, and my abiliity to coordinate and apply strength is totally shot.

I kind of put it all together and realized I’m probably going to have to reapportion the strength in my urdhva dhanurasanas. I used to always have the arms and legs doing equal duty on the lift into space. Maybe work for more lightness and flexibility in the upper body and more grounding and strength in the legs? My logic may be off, but it seems like when I get that squared away — voila, the scene will be set for proper dropbacks and standing from UD. Okay, now translate that from mind to body. Huh? That particular software isn’t working?

Okay, so it still felt like there was a missing link in the whole deal, and I don’t just mean in backbends. Over the whole primary experience, I’ve been at a bit of an advantage, given the forward bend/strength/endurance focus of the practice. Now with second, I hit the brick wall of flexibility and upper body coordination. Did I ever mention I was a goalie on the field hockey team? Used to run? Considered squats my all time favorite weightlifting exercise? Yep, all lower body coordination. Upper body? Yeah, um, not so much.

Which explains why I am such a dolt, really, with the upper body stuff. So I’m sitting here, feeling like something is missing, strength and coordination-wise, between the highly stable core of uddiyana bandha (shout out to “cave of the sacrum”!) and the as-yet-to-be-accomplished-but-starting-to-be-apparent coordination of the shoulders/upper back. Hmmm. The strength of uddiyana bandha and the flexibility/articulation of the shoulders… What can possibly mediate between and integrate them?

Yes! Duh! The kidney wings. That’s the place where I’m “leaking energy”–yeah, I hate to use a phrase like that, but I do have the sense that uddiyana bandha is a-okay and my shoulders starting to come clear a bit, but that there is a no man’s land in between that is just a big hazy expanse of… well, of nothing. But you know, if I do kind of bring my consciousness to the space between my lower ribs and my sacrum, I find that I kind of “hunch” there, too. Not in any distinct way — it’s more a subtle habit. A kind of closing forward versus opening out. A place I don’t activate or open.

Okay, note to self: Use the opening/stabilizing of the kidney wings to coordinate/mediate between core and upper back/shoulders. Sigh. Is there no end to the places that I’ve managed to forget about or just miss entirely?

My shala. Well, my soon-to-be new shala (as of July 1). If you’re ever in Scottsdale, come practice with us!

To celebrate the moon day, I thought about having some ibuprofen with my coffee. Then I decided just to go along with the pain. It’s not bad pain by any stretch of the imagination. Just in an unusual place: mid-back and shoulders. Why is it that pain in an unusual place seems more compelling than pain in the places you’re accustomed to having it? Some of this soreness has been brought on by passive stretching. I still find it hard to believe that passive stretching does much of anything at all, but as it turns out, it does actually seem to be working. So now I lie around in the evenings, stretched over blocks and sandbags.

Speaking of passive stretches, I had a dream last night that OKRGR was helping me with the lunge/kapotasana against the wall stretch. I found that I could easily pull my legs forward until my feet were in front of my face. “Oh,” I thought, “so this was never about my back, it’s always been about…” and there my memory of the dream is hazy, because in the dream I could identify where, physically, the resistance in my body was, but now that I am awake it seems like it was all about another part of me that doesn’t actually exist when I am conscious, or which may exist but which defies examination and any description in language. This is what happens when I get eight hours of sleep.

Today’s thoughts on kapotasana: What’s happening with the pose, whether I “get it” or not, is immaterial. And by “get it” I mean both physically and… what’s the word? Intellectually? Emotionally? How do I characterize the superego of the pose? Realized (again) this morning that “progress” can only be measured by change: I wake up and my shoulders feel different. I don’t know how to qualify the difference; I don’t know how to understand it; I simply have to trust that whatever change is occurring is necessary — since I can’t do the pose. Really, there’s no choice but to trust that any change that is occurring is a step in the right direction.

All I can do is this: get to the pose, try the pose, try to absorb whatever the heck is happening, and then go on. My satisfaction has to come from the fact that I did it. Sanskrit Scholar helped me in the pose this morning. She is struggling with this particular pose as well. Afterwards we talked for a moment, and she asked if the pressure she had applied to my elbows to align my shoulders (more) correctly had been helpful. I said I didn’t really know. I said that when I’m in the pose I have no idea what’s going on. I have no clue. I can feel individual sensations: I can feel my lower back, and I can feel my mid-back (which is something new and something that I had hoped to accomplish), and I can feel my legs, and I can feel that the bulk of the tension is in my shoulders. Now, how I am supposed to coordinate all of these sensations, how I am supposed to optimize the action of getting into and being in the pose, I have no idea. Yet.

Delightfully, I may never have an idea. I may never in my mind fully understand how to work this pose with my body. That’s the part I often have trouble with, that’s where despair (and yes, 0v0, self-loathing) can try to rear its head. I am accustomed to understanding things with my mind. I pride myself on understanding things with my mind. I love “difficult” literature (James Joyce and contemporary language poets come to mind), because it eludes me. I could never figure them out. I kept going back. And then one day, there it is: the language just opens up in front of me, it all unfolds. It was like the literature had been going along all this time, and I just couldn’t “get” it. And then, one day, I could. I had an experience like that with a Carl Andre sculpture many years ago, and the same thing happens with the work of my favorite sculptors and painters. I guess that’s why I love non-representational art. There are few clues on the surface for the mind to grab. You just have to be patient. And adjust your expectations for how accessible something should be. And then throw in some persistence. And openness. And if you try too hard, you’re not going to get it. But when you do, what a terrific surprise!

Yes. That’s the thing I love most about asana.

***

This entry is brought to you care of voice recognition software. Very nice, to just speak my thoughts, instead of typing. I was wondering how different it would feel to actually say things out loud. I tend to be very quiet. When I was in graduate school for poetry, the other writers around me often said that they couldn’t understand what they were writing until they read it aloud. Not me. I’m a huge fan of silence. As is The Cop, luckily. I hated doing readings. Only agreed when it was a request from a publisher – figured I owed them for publishing my work.

***

For Father’s Day I bought my father a book on the birds of Arizona, a pair of binoculars, and a water bottle with a holder that you can clip onto a belt loop. I want to encourage his inclination to wander out past the fence and walk in the desert.

Home practice. Decided to do standing and then segue right into the intermediate poses. Wanted to have a look at them without going through all of primary first.

It was interesting. I know that I tend to gain momentum through primary: by the time I get to the intermediate poses, I am very warm and also tired. And my mind has usually been kind of lulled. Then I hit the intermediate poses and tend to barrel right through. I don’t watch the clock at the shala, but I do know that I am coming up to the end of practice, and that I need to keep things moving. As I move at that quick primary-induced pace through the poses of second series, I am definitely running on momentum, which functions as a kind of drug. I’m exhausted, I’m steaming along — that can carry me right through the scary poses.

While reading this morning, I came across this line from Godfrey Devereux: “Do we tend to push and bludgeon our way through life?” Well, I’m not sure about what “we” do, but I do know “I” tend to do some bludgeoning. So I decided to do the intermediate poses “cold,” without the momentum of primary.

It worked out well enough. A totally different experience. I had to revise my expectations, being less warmed-up, but it was a great opportunity to experience each pose a bit more sensitively. All in all, it was an experience rather like when I was first learning primary: a short practice, a bunch of poses that have tons of information to reveal, all adding up to an experience that is somewhat discontinuous (discovering a detail here, a revelation there). Basically, an experience with no coherent boundaries. Primary as a whole, because I’ve done it so many times, has well-defined boundaries. Intermediate is an open field.

When the stains from old habits are exhausted, the original light appears, blazing through your skull, not admitting any other matters. Vast and spacious, like sky and water merging during autumn, like snow and moon having the same color, this field is without boundary, beyond direction, magnificently one entity without edge or seam.

- Hongzhi

There’s a part of me that rebels against not knowing what I’m doing. Simultaneously, there is a part of me that adores new experiences — the chance to find new things, to have surprises. Already, it would seem, I am attached to doing my practice “well,” to knowing what I’m doing, to not being too terribly surprised. Okay, time to pull that rug out from under me!

Woke up this morning feeling depressed. A very unusual feeling for me. First thought of the day: I can’t do this (seriously, I never think this way), and I’m too old (a thought I’m astounded to even hear myself thinking).

They were more than thoughts, though, they were the seeds of beliefs — they had resonance and gravity and they were bubbling up from the place where emotion meets language in the subconscious and starts to form beliefs. Nuh uh. I won’t have it. If thoughts like this are starting up, it means I have to be more mindful of the internal monolog that usually goes on under my radar.

First off, sort the facts. Here’s the sticking point: Someone told me SKPJ won’t allow people over 40 to start intermediate series. That little piece of information is the grain of sand around which my belief is being built. Well, that and the fact that I was brought up to never put myself in harm’s way. No physical danger. The Cop and I visited with my parents yesterday and my Mom told me that my Dad had taken a walk in the desert. They live in a planned community and their place is on the very edge. Beautiful raw desert beyond their fence. My Dad, as she put it, “went outside the fence” and took a walk.

“I had my cell phone,” he said.

She wasn’t buying it. “You can’t get reception everywhere,” she countered.

He walked a mile. This is how I was brought up.

Then, when The Cop and I got home from visiting my folks, we watched “Babel.” Human suffering. Great, just what my subconscious needs before sleep. How can I possibly be surprised that I woke up convinced that my life is pretty much over?

The only thing that kept the hope alive was pain. No kidding. I had pain in my back. Here’s an idea of how poor my awareness of my back is: I had to actually touch the pain to understand where it was. Lower back I understand; the rest of it, foreign terrain. A wilderness, really. Outside the fence of my consciousness and not safe for me to explore, even with a cell phone.

The pain was right where my lower ribs end. Oh! I was so happy! It was my thoracic! You know what this means, don’t you? It means I actually managed to stress my thoracic area in practice. Which is just what I’m aiming to do. It’s not a horrible pain, just a little nagging thing. I felt more concerned about it than intense lower back pain, because it is less familiar. But I told myself to just go along with it and see how this thoracic thing plays out.

No ibuprofen. No coffee. Nah, I’m lying. I had coffee. Skipped the NSAID, though. Went to practice, as is my habit, despite feeling weird emotionally. The thoracic thing stayed all through practice, and was quite a good reminder to make the most of up dog. I even used it as the marker that I was trying to curl over as I went back in kapotasana. First try was solo. Fine. Mostly about getting more acquainted with the fear. Second try was assisted by Volleyball Guy. He stood over me and took my right hand to my toes, then took my left hand to my toes in a very exaggerated manner that made me lose whichever foot I had as he moved the other hand. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, repeating the motion so I could see how my shoulders have to rotate to grab the feet.

When I came up, I told him thanks, and that I am not used to articulating my shoulders separately, that in weightlifting it’s all about stabilizing the whole shoulder girdle. “You go back to that in third,” he said. Interesting.

As I drove home, I realized that I am back to a broader perspective of practice. I’ve spent recent months working on details of primary. I had the big picture squared away and my breath all smoothed out, and what I needed to do to fine tune each pose was very clear. Now, I’m back to broader strokes. To really not knowing.

Not knowing is most intimate.

Yesterday IO asked about zen practice as compared to vipassana practice. I outlined some of the differences I think exist, and now I’m thinking about how when we describe differences, it’s easy to assume the project is about making a case for what’s right and what’s wrong. People often like to have a sense of closure around things, and the easiest closure is: “So this is what’s right.”

Sigh.

These are all good questions. Once I asked Hokaku about my eyes, and he said, “Open.” Once I asked Sokai, and he said, “Try it with them closed.”

So for a while there, I meditated with my eyes closed. It was different. Sokai and I talked about the experiences. Then for a good while, I’d close my eyes sometimes and keep ‘em open sometimes. If Hokaku was leading the meditation, though, I would practice with my eyes open.

Now I know the difference between meditating with my eyes open and meditating with my eyes closed. I meditate with my eyes open about 99.9% of the time.

So what’s the right answer? If you think I think the answer is “open,” go back and read again.

***

In backbending news, I am ready to decide if taking 200 mg of ibuprofen before practice in the morning is right or wrong. Just kidding. I’m gonna try skipping the drugs and see what happens. I’ve always kind of ignored my pain receptors. Guess that’s a little habit I might want to think about a bit…

My lower back is tender this morning, but not bad at all. Ice will be my friend again, as it was when I started practicing. I can’t say I remember the days of icing my hamstrings twice a day with great fondness, but that’s only because I am lazy and don’t like to have extra rituals to remember.

I guess it’s pretty important for me to consider the fact that though I have reduced my habit of bullishly forcing my way to all of my goals, I have most definitely not freed myself of the habit. Kapotasana may be a finetuning of this particular kind of letting go, and if I keep being stubborn, the lesson’s just going to be all that much more difficult.

***

Found a website with a good bit of writing by Hongzhi Zhenjue (1091-1157), one of my all time favorite writers.

The field of boundless emptiness is what exits from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness. Utter emptiness has no image, upright independence does not rely on anything. Just expand and illuminate the original truth unconcerned by external conditions. Accordingly we are told to realize that not a single thing exists. In this field birth and death do not appear.