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Knocked off at ustrasana. Yes, I have to ask my teacher to take away poses. I turned and did ustrasana with my thighs against the wall. It keeps me honest, to have that feedback loop when I start tipping back. Otherwise I go way back and lose the uprightness of the legs and the deep stretch in the back.

I was surprised, in my experiments with ustrasana at the wall, to discover that I am tight down the sides of my body. Really feel it from the ribs to the hips. Anyhow, the thoracic has to open up, and the lower back has to strengthen and stretch before I will really get anywhere with kapotasana.

Why didn’t I leave laghu vajrasana as the last pose? ‘Cause I can do it and I don’t want to feed my ego. I need to end on a pose that perplexes me and makes me work. Truth be told, I’ve been sailing through ustrasana and not really working it for all it’s worth. Gotta double back and face the music.

Anyhow, when I look at this picture of Arjuna in the midst of kapotasana, I see a good deal of work for myself in ustrasana.

In other news, I’ve been hating work. Trying not to focus too quickly on what the problem might be: I don’t want to jump to some reductionist “solution.” Need to kind of just explore the issue a bit…

I sometimes wonder how spacey I am as I drive to practice. Very, I suspect.

Met up with Renaissance Man and his daughter, The Cat, in the parking lot this morning.

“We were driving next to you and I told The Cat to wave,” said Renaissance Man. “You never looked over. You were in the zone.”

“It’s a good thing you remembered to stop at the lights,” quipped The Cat.

***

After kapotasana B, VBG says, “Okay…” expectantly.

I put my hands down, and no WAY am I going to be able to support myself in a handstand.

“I can’t…” I say, “I just don’t have it in me.”

“Jump back,” he says, sounding slightly perplexed.

Oh, uh, duh! Apparently the handstand orders were all in my own head.

***

Saturday at led class, VBG brought us through the first third of second (amusing phrase). Anyhow, I was really happy to see how different it is now than when I started second. Gone are the days when I panted through the poses. No more hideous nausea. It was a nice illustration of how practice just does the trick and all of my worrying about progress is pretty much my own little trip.

***

Today I struggled to get my toes in kapotasana. That’s the big opportunity for despair in my current practice. VBG helped me finally find my toes, but it seems like it’s getting harder, rather than easier. And then I thought about what I’d experienced on Saturday and realized that if I practice consistently until this time next year, I will be able to get my toes easily. Whether I fill the trip with despair and moments of anguish is entirely up to me.

***

The Sicilian’s last practice with us. She’s off for a world tour with her husband, including a trip to Goa to study with Rolf, who she considers her main teacher, and then they’ll settle in San Francisco.

Sad to see her go.

Silence on the way to practice.

Van Morrison on the way back.

VBG busy with others but swings by for supta kurmasana and baddha konasana. Then off again, into other parts of the room. Fine by me; I can use a quiet Friday. Look up, though, after laghu vajrasana, and there he is. “Four more,” he says, “Just entry and immediate exit.” Uh, okay. And after I finish the entry/exit exercise, he says, “Up.” Oh crap, a handstand? No idea how to coordinate body or breath coming out of laghu v and into a handstand. So do it totally gracelessly. Poor VBG. The things he sees.

Kapotasana is fine and then he says, “Up.” Oh, no effing way! But I do it. Slightly less gracelessly than the previous one, but I’m panting at the end of it. Criminy.

Fear today. Not unbearable, but significant. Residual pain in the sacrum last night — enough to push me past ibuprofen and into (well, along with the ibuprofen) a scalding epsom salt bath and some arnica. I don’t know that the pain was any better or worse than any other night, but The Cop was invited to go do some mixed martial arts fighting, so I had the evening to myself and it seemed like a nice idea to do back pain treatment. So I think I might have brainwashed myself into thinking I was worse off than I actually was.

Weird, huh? A perfect example of (over)thinking being not necessarily useful.

So this morning I turn off the alarm and fall back to sleep for 15 minutes. This is hilarious because I never do it, and when I jolt awake 15 minutes later, I feel like the whole morning has escaped me. I am very dramatic inside, when I am half-conscious. Duh, just get up and get your coffee!

I have the coffee and head to practice. Got some Otis Redding for the iPod, and that’s some great music to listen to, driving in the pre-dawn.

Practice feels good, except for my mind, which is worried about my back. My back feels just fine. Not sure how to reconcile this. Apparently I’ve been taught my back is vulnerable (perhaps coming from a family of lower back pain sufferers explains this), and now kapotasana is challenging my deepest beliefs about physical weakness. Interesting.

Strangely, I feel frightened through practice, but in a very low-grade way. I have enough zen training to just keep putting down the thoughts as they arise, but my inner monitor notes that they keep rising. No way am I going to do a short practice: I want the security blanket of all of primary and my chunk of second. I let the fear thoughts bubble up unchecked once I get to ustrasana. That’s close enough to kapotasana to let them join the party.

As kapotasana is about to unfold, VBG steps over to assist, as he always does, and I realize that this is the pose I am most NOT afraid of, because he is always there. Cognitive dissonance! How can this be? My mind is actually fighting with me to keep me afraid of kapotasana, despite the fact that my emotions aren’t really feeling it. Obviously this is about something other than asana.

Kapo is fine and dropbacks go marvelously. VBG is now just using two fingers on either side of my hips to keep me aloft. At the end of 10 dropbacks (Jesus, I just realized that we did two sets of five), I laughed and said that I was imagining learning to ride a bike, how the dad runs behind the bike and the kid pedals, thinking they’re being held, but there’s the dad, holding his hands up, gesturing to the audience that the kid is, unbeknownst to her, riding all alone.

Yeah, okay. This is all related stuff. Now I think of VBG and imagine how he would get on with my psychoanalyst of decades ago. I’m sure they’d shake their heads at how difficult it is to get me to trust someone.

Especially my self.

Fine.

We’ll see, eventually, if trust trumps imaginary vulnerability.

Work stuff. Politics. All of a sudden all this upward mobility/increased visibility, and all I can think is: Uck! It’s throwing me into small mind. Too many opportunities. For things I don’t even want.

It’s the zen work thing again. You sweep the walkways when that’s your work assignment. You clip the roses, and brush off the ants that bite your feet. You just do until the lead monk claps his hands and work period ends.

Very impersonal, very meditative, very free of the self.

Is my real life work supposed to be like that, too?

I generally feel like a huge weirdo in the midst of the organization, but for some reason my boss accepts my weirdness. I’m really trying to find a way to practice zen in the midst of a company. All of the revenue and strategy stuff is just part of the game. It’s a sport, and I try to keep it like any other sport: gauge my own personal practice against previous practices. Leave out the competition with others and the trying to “win.”

Every so often, though, I do have to ask if I am doing what I ought to be doing with my life, and then things get more complicated. I need to have cash resources for My Gift. If I did what I really like to do, I wouldn’t have the cash. Because, really… writing poetry, practicing yoga, maybe some rockclimbing… how much does that pay?

I suppose this could be a crisis, except somehow it’s not. I still feel like there’s a way to merge the current situation and the ideal. I just need some breakthrough of imagination.

And to that end, been reading Ken Wilber. Gosh, philosophy reading in the morning. What a luxury. It makes me laugh. And, at the same time, I was reading Getting Things Done in the bathtub before practice (for what it’s worth: ice, ice, ice, ibuprofen, ibuprofen, hot bath just before practice, and kwan leung oil just before bed is a pretty good answer to hamstring insert irritation). So there is the concept of the holon (yes, of course) and the concept of organizing the in-box (organize or die). And now a dash of zen, perhaps, to make the whole thing impersonal.

Volleyball Guy talked a bit about the need to not personalize things during savasana this morning. I’ve been burnt out recently, so dozed through most of it. Perhaps a subliminal pep talk.

Need to get out of small mind. Need reliable access to big mind. Thanks, IO, for the timely reminder from Ram Dass.

Right hamstring insert is irritable. Well, at least it gives me a good excuse for the ibuprofen I love to take. It’s been a year, I think, since I had angry hamstrings. This time around it feels less dramatic, and I understand how to work around it. Handy knowledge, the work-around-injury knowledge. Important for Ashtangis, I guess.

I am reading about the management of intellectual capital on this fine Saturday. Interesting enough, I suppose. Work-related. I can get interested in just about anything, really. If I had my druthers, it’d be all fiction, poetry and a smattering of philosophy (started off the day with some Ken Wilber). But I’m not sure what kind of job would pay me to read what I actually prefer. And I suppose it might be kind of indulgent, intellectually. Anyhow. Fun enough reading and now I need to percolate in my head and come up with some diagrams/bullet points for work. I tracked down a highly relevant book and excitedly thought, “Oh boy! This is just what I want!” as I ordered it. Except it’s not really what I want; it’s what I need. (I could probably make an argument against the need, too, really — but that’s another thing entirely.)

So what’s the deal with this kind of intellectual work? It is reminding me of zen work: you just sweep the floor or wash the dishes or (as I often do at the zendo) weed the flowerbeds, and you don’t think about whether you want to or not. You just do. It’s like mothering tasks: I’m not a super-maternal person, but when My Gift needed something, I responded. Zen helped a lot. Took away the internal arguments about what I preferred to do. Now she’s off at school and the dog is getting old and needs to be let out often during the night. Sometimes it’s hard to get up, but there’s never a question about whether to do it or not. Note to self: zen makes life a lot easier. You can look after other creatures and after tasks without getting your own wishes too terribly involved.

Okay, so Australia. Everyone thinks I should divert from Singapore to Australia for a class with Matthew Sweeney. I think that is hilarious. It’s a 7 hour plane ride and 100 mile drive. The fact that it’s ONLY 7 hours and 100 miles out of my way cracks me up. Sure, if you’re flying 23 hours to get somewhere, what’s another 7?

I was telling My Gift about the trip yesterday and said, “Guess how long the flight from here to Singapore is?”

She immediately said, “Around 22 hours.”

“Hey, did you just look that up online?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I just knew how long it takes to get to Australia, and I figured it was around the same.”

“How do you know how long it takes to get to Australia?”

“I don’t know. It’s just one of those mysterious facts I have in my head.”

So anyhow, in late October I’ll be in Orlando for 4 or 5 days, then come back for just a day or two and then head off to Singapore. Much as I may like the idea of an additional side trip, I think I’m going to be jonesing for home in a big way by the time I wrap up in Singapore.

At least that’s how it seems right this moment.