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Over on the Ashtanga Voices site, Eeyore was talking about favorite books. I immediately thought of the book I’d nominate for best book ever written: Ulysses. I also thought of Joyce’s great short story, “The Dead,” which I always think of as a Christmas story. Primarily because of the image of a social gathering in a warm house as it snows outside.

I also thought of my all-time favorite short story, “A Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. Now that I think of it, this story always reminds me of Christmas time, too. Again, the omnipresence of snow. It’s a twisted Christmas with Kafka, though, for sure!

Moon Day. No practice. Just stories and Art in America magazines. Nice.

Yesterday I watched “Who the Eff is Jackson Pollock?”” A very amusing documentary about a 73 year old female long-haul truck driver who may have unearthed a Jackson Pollock painting in a thrift shop. Astonishing, to watch the clash of cultures — and I must say, the art elitists came out looking especially bad. Teri (the truck driver) hires a forensic scientist to examine the painting, and he finds a fingerprint. Pollock’s fingerprint. The art experts snottily explain that the beliefs of expert connoisseurs is how authenticity is determined, not something so gauche as a fingerprint. Hilarious.

A day off. In fact, four days off for the holiday. What a relief! The past week has been a whirlwind at work and at home. I don’t really participate in the Christmas thing, but still, it winds everything up quite tightly, doesn’t it? On Thursday, I brought My Gift to the airport, where she set off on her first international adventure.

Her dad lived in Amsterdam for years when she was growing up, so she spent portions of her summers and school vacations travelling in Europe. I would put her on the plane here in the US, and her dad would be there at the end of the journey. She travelled as an unaccompanied minor, which meant — at least back then — that the flight crew really kept a close eye on her. She flew business class, and was a cheerful little international traveller from the time she was 9.

This trip, though, is her first self-funded, self-planned adventure. It involved a plane to Chicago, a connecting flight to London (coach, not business class), and a train to Wales. No flight crew to oversee, no parent to verify arrival, no one to help with all the luggage. She was very, very happy and excited when I dropped her off at the airport. And she arrived safe and sound in Wales. Apparently there were late planes and train fiascos and all sorts of mini travel-dramas, but she got there. So all is well.

***

Lately, I’ve been starting practice with a stick of incense and recitation of the Heart Sutra (Kwan Um version). I always feel a little question in my mind as I add the sutra. Definitely not part of the tradition. But it “translates” what I learn in practice into my personal belief system. It’s an extra “step,” this little translation, and all would be the same without it, but still, for now it helps me understand what I am doing.

The Maha Prajna Paramita Hrdaya Sutra

Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva
when practicing deeply the Prajna Paramita
perceives that all five skandhas are empty
and is saved from all suffering and distress.

Shariputra,
form does not differ from emptiness,
emptiness does not differ from form.
That which is form is emptiness,
that which is emptiness form.

The same is true of feelings,
perceptions, impulses, consciousness.

Shariputra,
all dharmas are marked with emptiness;
they do not appear or disappear,
are not tainted or pure,
do not increase or decrease.

Therefore, in emptiness no form, no feelings,
perceptions, impulses, consciousness.

No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind;
no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch,
no object of mind;
no realm of eyes
and so forth until no realm of mind consciousness.

No ignorance and also no extinction of it,
and so forth until no old age and death
and also no extinction of them.

No suffering, no origination,
no stopping, no path, no cognition,
also no attainment with nothing to attain.

The Bodhisattva depends on Prajna Paramita
and the mind is no hindrance;
without any hindrance no fears exist.
Far apart from every perverted view one dwells in Nirvana.

In the three worlds
all Buddhas depend on Prajna Paramita
and attain Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi.

Therefore know that Prajna Paramita
is the great transcendent mantra,
is the great bright mantra,
is the utmost mantra,
is the supreme mantra
which is able to relieve all suffering
and is true, not false.
So proclaim the Prajna Paramita mantra,
proclaim the mantra which says:

gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.

***

Notes from the Ashtanga research satellite office:

Chakrasana: Driste! I found this week that my driste in chakrasana tends to drift up toward my feet — that I am watching my legs/feet to understand where my body is in space. It throws the whole roll off. Tuck the head and keep the driste tucked, too. I’ve been trying to correct for the problem by consciously looking at my tummy — though I suspect what I need to get to is nasagrai driste. Tummy driste is better than padayoragrai, so I’m on the right track.

Urdhva dhanurasana: I’ve been setting up for urdhva dhanurasana with my head touching the wall. Then I tuck the corner that my hand/wrist makes into the corner of the wall. And lately, I’ve pressed my forearms into the wall, too. All the way up to the point of my elbows. This seems to keep my lower arms from getting discombobulated as I go up. Initiates a kind of alignment. I’ve been looking carefully at the relationship of my hands to my shoulders, turning them the way Vanessa suggested in an earlier comment on this subject. And I’ve been trying to get more conscious of my lower psoas muscles. A little attention revealed that my right lower psoas is much tighter than the left. And it even came with a strong and immediate visual image. A Jeep Wrangler hood latch. Yup, that’s the psoas situation for me. Strong hood latches. Luckily, I know that these kinds of latches loosen up with continued use.

***

I have some things I need to accomplish: purchase cheesecake for Christmas Eve at my parents’ house (no, all of you baking Ashtangis, I do not relish the thought of a day in the kitchen!), do some reading/documentation for work. But you know what? I need a day off. A WHOLE day. I am not going to do anything today except read for pleasure and lie around and then later, I will eat something tasty. Nice.

And tomorrow is a moon day. Oh, I feel the rest and rejuvenation already!

Gah! Seriously, I have always been pretty liberal regarding the “no onions, no garlic” rules — especially as regards garlic. It’s part of my heritage, after all. Last night, though, The Cop and I went to see “I Am Legend” (four thumbs up, BTW) and then out for Italian food. The croutons in the salad — garlicky. The garlic in the pasta — garlicky. The spices in the olive oil for your bread — garlicky. This morning on the mat: gahhhh! File that away with the “look out for margaritas the night before practice” rule.

Being a nerd, I made a note for myself to look at before urdhva dhanurasana. It read: “Lower psoas. And rotate hands.”

Check.

I skipped the blocks and went for awareness in the lower psoas muscles — which are STEEL, signifying SUCCESS at the gym… And I checked out my hands when I was up there, too. I do tend to rotate my hands the way Vanessa suggested, but what I found this morning is that I don’t pull the rotation all the way up into my shoulders. That may well be what’s making the stress/stuckness in my upper arms.

So a step forward, thanks to your comments.

I did want to remark on (0v0)‘s note that the UDs don’t seem to fatigue me. This is absolutely due to a combination of Annie’s order not to do more than 5, and my own “first pass” with all poses that I’m working on. First order of the day is always to get the breathing squared away. I know I’m a dork with the ear plugs, but listening to see if the breath is ragged in any places helps me understand how my energy is working. I try to deal with that before doing any detail work or mucking around with mechanics. You should have heard when I first started doing UD: it was all about huffing and puffing and straining and gasping. The thing that’s surprising is that you can actually do all of those things pretty quietly, and without really noticing anything more than that you feel anxious.

One of the more interesting things about yoga. Always revealing the very things I keep secret from myself…

Just finished up a lovely practice. Sunday is a good day to take some video — weekday practices happen when it’s too dark to get good images, plus there are time limitations.

Anyhow. Urdhva dhanurasanas. Five. The Annie P limit. The good news: I have tons of room for more extension through my legs and tons of room for more bend in my back. The legs and back feel like there is all sorts of space to move more deeply into the pose. The catch? My arms. My shoulders.

Is there something someone can see here? I feel like my arms rotate in the wrong direction, but I can’t seem to pinpoint how to solve for it… My legs and back are ready to move into the pose more fully, but somehow my arms are gumming it up.

I’m curious to hear thoughts. Even if the thought is simply that I just need to be patient.

[video 4812 w=400]

Chakrasana. How do I love thee?

Not so much, though getting better.

What’s my problem with chakrasana, you ask? I think it may be my tight shoulders and traps. Or my back that doesn’t like to curl up into a ball. Likely both.

For a long time, I just ignored it. Transition — not important. But I knew I was fooling myself. So the day came that I had to face chakrasana. I wish I could say it was a moment of self-revelation, but it actually happened in Singapore, when — after I blithely skipped chakrasana — I heard Celeste Lau ask, “Karen, why don’t you do chakrasana?”

“Because I’m lazy,” answered my remarkably honest inner monolog. For Celeste, I just shrugged.

And then she made me try chakrasana. A BUNCH of times. It was excruciating, in large part because I had just flown for 25 hours, and was in a new shala in a new city in a new time zone far, far from my normal time zone, and had hopped into a cab with a slip of paper with an address, and asked a driver who didn’t speak English to take me somewhere I wouldn’t recognize even when I got there. I was a little stressed.

I keep my stress in my traps and shoulders.

Okay, so Celeste put me through my paces, in terms of trying. She put a towel under my shoulders to prop me up. She gave me a boost over the top of the roll. I’d understood for a while, of course, that I couldn’t go around feeling like I was doing primary series until I squared chakrasana away. I just hadn’t decided that it was time to actually do the work. So Celeste decided.

Those practices in Singapore were very chakrasana-centric. She kept an eye on me, and when I flopped through the one after supta padangusthasana, would say, “Well, you’ve got a few more.” Before the post-urdhva dhanurasana paschimottanasana or sirsasana, she’d ask, “Did you do chakrasana?”

So chakrasana’s what I’ve been doing since November. Every single one. It’s been interesting, too. What I have found, as I mentioned, is that my neck and shoulders are very resistant to the roll. Not in an injury sort of way — more in a stubborn, I don’t like this kind of way. Chakrasana was really the last hold out of my relationship with primary. I learned the asana, I learned the vinyasas: correct breathing, correct driste, yada, yada. But I was willfully thoughtless about chakrasana.

‘Til Singapore.

So now I do my dutiful chakrasanas. And they are coming together. Interestingly, chakrasana has taught me a lot about my relationship with urdhva padmasana, which is a pose I’ve always struggled with. Look at the picture. It’s all about getting into the traps. Oh, and I always feel like my butt is pulling me out of balance. How amusing is it that the sense that I have of being too big-butted for the pose is actually all about the tensions I hold in my shoulders/traps? Consciousness gets so turned around in a body! All those years (perhaps lifetimes) of beliefs about physical reality.

Anyhow, all of the finishing poses now speak to me about the tensions I keep in my traps. Courtesy of what I’ve learned in chakrasana. I can’t say I love this lesson, but I think I will be transformed once it’s done. How weird is it that some day I’ll look back and remember the decades I spent with my shoulders and traps tensed up? Ashtanga really does provide a way into the long view.

So for now I muddle through my chakrasanas using a pad to raise my shoulders. Yesterday I understood the little “pop” of the bandhas that launches/coordinates the roll. I don’t love it now, but I think I’ll really like chakrasana in the future.

Home practice is going well, Tova! Thanks for asking.

The ear plugs are a really interesting experiment. It makes the evenness (or raggedness) of the breath so apparent. Moments of stress sound very different from moments of ease. What I’ve discovered is that in moments of stress, I tend to suck in the inhale. Exhales are fine by me — I’ve always loved exhales when sitting zazen. It’s the inhaling that can hang me up. So, interesting to listen to.

I am chakrasa-ing my butt off. Every single last one that’s called for in primary. Even if I don’t want to (especially if I don’t want to!). I am using my crash pad to prop my shoulders up a bit, and this morning I finally got the little synchronization of the abs (or, if I want to be fancy, the bandhas) that pops you up and over. Still need the propped shoulders, but eventually that will get squared away and I’ll be able to lose the pad.

Urdhva dhanurasana with earplugs is fascinating. I am a nervous backbender, though much less so than when I first started. I wondered this morning if it is merely a case of response to the adrenaline that one gets in a backbend: some people may “read” it as exhilaration, while others — like me — read it as a kind of stress. Anyhow.

When Annie Pace was here, I asked her about doing “extra” urdhva dhanurasanas. Her advice (haha! as if Annie gives advice; let me tell you: Annie gives answers) was quite clear: do three or do five. No two, no four, no nine. Three or five. I also asked about whether to pause on the top of the head between each, or whether to lie all the way back down. Her answer: do it according to the breath. If the breath is wacky, go all the way back down and re-set.

I’ve been doing three with blocks under my hands, then two without. Listening to my breath and making the call each time as to whether to go to the head or all the way down in between. Generally speaking, I am good to rest on my head and then go back up. But it is excellent practice to LISTEN to the breath. Then the “win” lies in listening to the breath and responding to it, rather than “winning” by forcing myself through rapid-fire urdhva dhanurasanas that test my will and stress my system. This morning, something felt different — the weight was in my legs, the bend was throughout my back, and my shoulders and arms weren’t screaming. Will it stay that way now forever? Oh, Karen — always grasping…

Last night, The Cop said, “You are a lot happier, now that you’re practicing at home.”

I often like to practice with Sharath’s CD, which I’ve loaded onto my Shuffle. Today, though, it finally dawned on me that my favorite thing about this is hearing my own breath. Because of the ear buds, I can hear my breath as loudly as when I have a cold, but without the pesky congestion. It’s weird, perhaps, to be so soothed by the sound of one’s own breath, but there you have it.

Once I realized this, I asked The Cop to share some of this ear plugs. He uses them on the range, and I will use them in the yoga room. I even started daydreaming about using them at night when I sleep. I am feeling inclined toward sensory deprivation, I guess.

This morning was also the first practice with the new tattoo. I figured I’d be holding off on pushing my arms through the lotus for garbha pindasana, but I hadn’t really thought it out much more than that. Turns out, the tattoo is slightly affected in the marichyasanas as well. Mostly the “svad” side of the tattoo. One day I may have a tattoo that’s worn off enough that it reads “Yaya” in Sanskrit.

And here at work, I received this video clip. Which I adore. Particularly the fellow who bolts over the desk after having enough paper clips thrown at him. I’ve watched it a few times, and my amusement only increases. I can’t quite figure out why, but his reaction totally delights me. Not yogic, I’m afraid, but oh well.

Slept late (yay, Moon Day!) and woke to a dream of being at led practice. Lots of new people, who kind of clustered in a corner of the room, with very disorderly mats. We were doing a new pose that required a bed pillow for a prop. Everyone was doing some kind of headstand to… well, I’m not sure what the pose was, ultimately, because I had my head on my pillow and couldn’t see what the final expression of the pose was. I couldn’t get the headstand going on with the pillow, so tried folding the pillow in half, which didn’t help. So I bagged it and decided to go get a bottle of water. Cut to the place where I went for water, a nearby Starbucks, which was in Singapore and which, architecturally, looked suspiciously like the second storey storefront of my local tattooist.

Now that I write this, I am highly amused by the pose that I kept trying to do but couldn’t understand. Dreams. Just like real life.

All of a sudden I have a hankering for a tattoo on my inner wrist. [Oops. Note: this last sentence isn't the dream anymore. This is waking consciousness speaking. I think. ] I might as well just get this over with and write things all over myself.

Speaking of which. Writing. Yesterday morning, I thought a bit about associative thinking. Or, more to the point, about my moratorium on associative thinking. For the past ten years, I have been pointedly focused on reasoned, discursive thinking patterns. Which is all well and good, and I’m quite good at thinking this way, and I am rewarded heartily. But man, do I miss associative thinking. Sure, I still think associatively; I’m still creative. I still say things at work that make everyone tilt their heads and go, “Huh?” and “Wow, I never thought of it that way.”

I think I’m tired, though, of always being at the service of reason. I mean, really. Reason? As if it’s not as arbitrary as anything else…

Go ahead, test this out. Read a good poem. A really good one; not one of those sentimental narratives with line breaks. Or look at a painting that doesn’t try to hide its brushstrokes (sorry, Boodiba, but abstract works best for this experiment). The aesthetic choices, the flights of fancy, lie in the associations: be they word images or visual images. The relationship of word to word or phrase to phrase or line to line. The relationship of brushstroke to brushstroke or shape to shape or color to color. The astonishing ones, the ones that look so natural and yet so unlikely: therein lies the magic of association. It defies the frontal lobe.

I think I need to go eat some granola, put on my hippie hat and take a walk in nature. I have a stack of books to read for work, but I’m going to limit myself to poems and maybe a nice Art in America.

I’m loving the curtains in the yoga room. Basically, the yoga room is part of an open floorplan that includes the foyer, livingroom and hallway. There are half-walls and vaulted ceilings, which adds up to a lot of open space. Which I love. I am not keen on decorations; what I like about architectural spaces is the open space.

So I was amused when The Cop came home from work yesterday morning, peeped his head into the yoga room where I was practicing and said, “Nice bat cave.” I looked around: the yoga room has been winterized. In summer, I leave the windows, which are one wall, uncovered, and use a light shoji screen to strategically deflect any unreasonably strong sunlight. The rest of the room is open, with one wall being a half-wall that shares the livingroom, and another side entirely open to the hall/kitchen space.

Anyhow, yesterday I was on my mat, little heater blazing beside me, with one whole wall covered by thick, dark blue drapes, and the shoji screen pulled close to block off the open side of the room and keep the heat all nice and close to me.

A warm, dark bat cave.

***

Seeing as today is the weekly day off, and tomorrow is a Moon Day, I scheduled my tattoo appointment for yesterday afternoon. Svadhyaya. On my inner left forearm. I’ll get The Cop to take a picture later. I just got up and am feeling lazy.

This tattoo was not hard to figure out: I knew just where I wanted to put it. It did, however, kick off all kinds of other ideas for tattoos. All of them words. I’m not sure what the deal is, but I have no desire for images, and a great attraction to tattoos that are just words. Go figure.

I was thinking about a matching isvarapranidhana, but then felt like I needed to wait on that one. So we’ll see what happens.

I also spent some time thinking about zen-related tattoos. Amusingly, when I think about a zen tattoo, and kind of “feel it through,” conceptually and aesthetically, I’m finding that they tend to disappear. Perhaps they are too close to non-existence right from the get?

As it turns out, svadhyaya has a nice zen component, as it dovetails with some of Dogen’s most evocative words — wait a minute, how can I even say that? ALL of Dogen’s words are pretty evocative! Anyhow, from the Genjōkōan:

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.

***

Navasana, for some reason, is really bothering me lately. Not physically so much as mentally. I’ve got an aversion going. Funny how those aversions arise. I wonder, when they happen, whether I am “missing” some component of the pose, whether I’ve coasted along with it for a couple of years and am now hitting the wall because of shiftings in other parts of my practice. Or perhaps my mind has taken a little flight of fancy that includes aversion to this pose.

Dogen/boat:

When you sail out in a boat to the middle of an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round or square; its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like this.

I don’t know if there is such a thing as physical shaktipat, but I am more in my body in a different way since the workshop. As if, simultaneously, the possibilities are broader than before, and the energy… tighter? No, that sounds like stiffness. Contracted? Not quite — that sounds too tense. It’s more… well, more whatever term you would use for the process of squishing coal into a diamond. Perhaps “compressed.”

Lovely practice this morning. The Cop kindly (and swearfully) put up curtain rods in the yoga room, and now I have nice thick indigo velvet curtains to keep the room warm. Mmmmm, toasty!

***

Here is a poem I read and loved this morning:

Hour, by Christian Hawkey

My sixth sensurround
is down, my second skin
the skin I’m stepping
into: I lick
a new finger & hold it up
to the wind: O my beloved
what. O
my beloved what. O my
beloved shovel-nosed mole
can I clean the soil
from your black, sightless eyes
can I massage with fine oils
your tiny, webbed feet
are you tired of running
into drainpipes
does your mouth foam
approaching power lines
are your tunnels collapsing
do you have work to do
does the dirt breathe
do you breathe the air
between the dirt
are your lungs
the size of earlobes
do you hear me
in the tunnel next to you
have you cut your nose
on a shard of glass
have you excavated
the severed, blue leg
of Spider-Man
did you pause to admire
his red booties
are your tunnels collapsing
do you have work to do
am I keeping you
am I keeping you