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Coldplay at practice this morning. Very nice.

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The tyranny of success. It breeds a belief that we can bend everything to our personal will. Dangerous place to go. And God forbid, we use our practice to shore up that delusion.

In practice, in those “successful” poses, the ones that are easy or that you can zip through, there can be spots of blurriness, where you kind of gloss over the moment(s) of the pose — where your consciousness is working to avoid experiencing the pose, to avoid experiencing any difficulty or lack of ease or even any difference from yesterday’s practice. Yikes! I thought it was the difficult poses, the impossible poses, I was trying to solve for. Turns out it may be the successful ones that are most insidious…

All I have to do is wake up, right? Experience where I am now. Don’t gloss over the moment with “success,” or “I’ve got this one,” or what I want, or a sense of mastery.

Dealing with other humans makes for a great practice: there is an impulse to have mastery over one’s experience, to “know” the other person (always an illusion), or insist they do what you want (even if it’s an unspoken, passive kind of insistence). These are great ways to avoid actually experiencing another person, a great way to dissociate yourself from the moment. And as with people, so with asanas.

Repetition certainly can exacerbate this impulse. I had this fleeting vision in practice this morning, of a series that is simultaneous – that transcends the sequential. In the meantime, though, I guess I’ll just try to work my way past the tendency to inject a sense of mastery into life by gaming the fact of routine. That routine — it looks like mastery on the outside, but it’s just a glossing over, a closing down, an avoiding.

Be here now.

Put everything down.

Stop fussing about ME. (Gah! The tyranny of ME! How tedious that little show is.)

Right or wrong is never the point. Good and bad are never the point. Getting through the moment “successfully” is never the point.

Being present. Yeah, that’s it.