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Nice led class today. Then lunch with The Sicilian, Sanskrit Scholar and The British Director. The Sicilian is moving to San Francisco soon, and The British Director showed us plans for her new home in Utah. She won’t be leaving for a couple of years, but the writing’s on the wall: things don’t stay the same. I write that with a little smirk, that the writing’s on the wall. I mean, it is, all the time, in all situations. Still, I always try to hang on. My little conditioned existence.

Volleyball Guy talked a bit at the end of class. Suddenly he asked me to critique his zazen posture. I had to grab my glasses out of my bag, because I skipped the contacts this morning. He got into padmasana, then started fidgeting. I asked, “Do you want me to respond like a zen monk?” and followed up my question with, “STOP MOVING!” I saw my opportunity to add in an extra tidbit: “AND NO YOGA BREATHING!” Everyone laughed. The point of this was the distinction between zazen and asana practice. That they’re heading in the same direction, but distinctly different in practice. Just as your consciousness stays awake in zazen (though you are perfectly still), so your body stays awake in asana (though you may appear to be still).

During class, Volleyball Guy used the phrase “move around under the skin,” which I took to mean that practitioners shouldn’t crystalize in postures, instead remaining sensitive to the moment, and careful to not fall into habitual kinesthetic patterns. That it’s essential in a physical practice to destabilize habit — to not hang on to being able to do a pose in a certain way, at the expense of exploring it more thoroughly. God, so finger-pointing-at-the-moon. As soon as you use concepts and words, you have to wonder what people are hearing, what they are intuiting, whether you can point them in directions, whether language can work at all. As always, I am flummoxed by the very idea of trying to explain what needs to be explained in order for people to practice yoga.

You can make the case that nothing needs to be explained. You can make the case that there’s an enormous reservoir of knowledge about yoga that should be explored. As usual, when it all boils down to words, I feel vertiginous. Hmmm. Is there a yoga of words?