“The pose is a tool, not an issue”

Posted in ashtanga, moment, technology, things i like on 08/05/2009 02:41 pm by karen

I rarely do two posts in a day, but I just saw this GREAT quote on autumn lotus yoga blog, and I had to pass it along. I assume it’s from Ana Forrest, since the blogger is a Forrest yoga teacher. Anyhow, sorry for the rip-off, E — but this is something good for the Ashtangis, too! :-)

Ah, quote — why do I love thee? Well, mostly ’cause you’re pragmatic and straightforward. You remind me that all of the whining we do about poses is really about US. All of the fear we feel? The desire? The hatred? The shame? The pleasure? Yup — it’s all about us. Not about the pose. The pose is a tool. To dig into the stuff of us — whether we do it well, or badly, or fanatically, or slackerishly. All of it is just part of the excavation effort. Whether we want the pose, or don’t want the pose. Whether we idolize the teacher, or hate the teacher, or beseech the teacher, or reject the teacher.

None of that matters. ‘Cause the pose is just the pose. A tool. Like a hammer or a shovel. Do with it what you will. But if you make it into an emotional issue or a physical issue or a psychological issue, at least recognize that it is an issue of your own making. ‘Cause the pose is a tool, not an issue.

Garden-Tools

 

30 Comments

  1. EXACTLY!!!! I’m thrilled you spread the Ana-speak!!! Big hearts and flowers & perfect kapo crazy variations wishes to you. : )

  2. :-)

    And the Ashtangis can also sub in the word “system” instead of “pose.” it works both ways!

  3. If I had to throw .02 at this, I’d say that the hard part (for me anyway) has been figuring out not that the system is a tool, but the followup question, a tool for WHAT?

    I would love to see Owl’s .02 on this. Of course, in a way, much of the Owl online is about this, I think.

  4. Good follow up question, Patrick! For what?

    I’m going to enjoy thinking about this. And yes, Owl’s blog is a lot about this, I think!

  5. Very good indeed!

    Perspective from Forrest would be that it changes all the time. We set intentions/themes for the practice (which can change during it!) as maybe working with an injury, cleaning out stuck emotional crap, creating pleasure, brightening spirit, healing or feeding ourselves, being in the moment… there’s a bunch of possiblities.

    And then, what the tool/pose/system actually ends up doing may be to yield some entirely unexpected gift, like recognizing our own strength or making us aware of & able to let go of a self-mutilating habit.

    And, ooooh, what’s Owl’s blog?? Wanna read!! :)

  6. that’s beautiful, thanks, Karen.
    hugs,
    Arturo

  7. Love it, Elizabeth! Here’s Owl’s blog: http://www.insideowl.com/

    Anyone else who wants to chime in on the question, do. It’s such a great question.

    I woke up thinking about an essay of Richard Freeman’s, who –as usual– has totally got it going on:

    “Freedom in yoga is not a single experience or a belief, or even the giving up of a belief: it is the ability to enter and to release theories and experiences to find direct experience of the living process… It has been called love, but it’s not what you think.”

    Can I use his words as my answer? :-)

    And Patrick! That last line: how fitting in relation to your new experience with your baby, no?

  8. Hi Karen,

    Something like that; I still have so tenuous a grip on what this whole baby business is about, that it’s hard to say anything about anything. More to come, of course.

  9. I trust in your “ability to enter and to release theories and experiences to find direct experience of the living process” (to quote RF again). :-)

  10. A recent edit over at my place perhaps goes a good way toward this.

  11. So hang on your saying (or rather Ana is ) that that the pose and/or system is a tool not an issue.

    However then it turns out that the tool is an issue as in a tool for what.

    What is the pose a tool for, what is the system a tool for.
    How do we use tools? To make to mend…. what are we making with this tool, what are we mending with this system.
    It’s important, I’m sure you’ll agree, to use the right tool for the job. Why this tool rather than that , this pose rather than that.
    How should we employ our tools. should we use them respectfully, employ them efficiently… there’s a right way to use a Saw and a right place to hold and swing a hammer. Should we use our tools then conscientiously

    system/pose = tool
    tool = issue
    .
    . . System/pose = issue

    So it’s an issue how we approach, employ, use our poses/the system suggesting that the pose is very much and issue as indeed the system.

  12. The issue of what the tool is for has to be solved by the user. It’s not an aspect of the tool. You can just use the tool; you don’t actually need to spend time thinking about it. Not to say that thinking about it a bit mightn’t facilitate more efficient/effective use — but if you use a shovel by holding the blade end and digging with the stick end, eventually you’re gonna know to flip the darn thing over. Conversely, you can think about it (make an issue) until it biodegrades and turns to dust. User’s choice! 99% practice? :-)

    system/pose = tool
    tool’s use? < = user => issue

    tool’s use issue = user issue

  13. :-)

    Thanks to whatever frustrated student inspired Ana to put this so well. Maybe I can shut up now!

    One could see a tool as a found object, yes. Like, wow, I was just cruising along and then here was this pogo stick, or sextant, or shovel, or supta virasana. Or, more intentionally, I was just doing/trying to do this action and grabbed whatever was at hand to complete it. (This is big in Martin’s work, if I recall.) The tool is constituted by its usefulness. At any rate, I’m not sure how well that explains, uh, karandavasana. In western phenomenology, there is a tendency to see tool use as an end in itself. (And you can say this is consonant with Zen, but is it? Zen would only say this paradoxically: immanence and transcendence collapse, or somethin’ like that. I dunno.)

    Ana is saying, and I am awkwardly trying to say, and the Bhagavad Gita is saying, that intention matters. The pose is not an end in itself in an accomplishment sense. Give your intention to something high, and the intermediate steps and what they look like all become opportunities for equanimity. The BG talks about this beautiful paradox of being fully invested in activity but detached from its results.

    On a practical level, maybe one could give oneself over to (1) concentration (2) absorption (3) love (4) “god” (5) contemplation, whatever. The tools and how they get used along the way is collateral. Admittedly, given depth intensity of intention, there’s often pretty damn shiny collateral.

    But the thing is, I just practice this way because it bypasses unpleasant neuroses and emotions. I’m not trying to be all scriptural and stuff. It’s just more dignified and fun, less fraught and frustrated. If making poses in to problems was actually pleasant or rewarding in my experience, I’d probably go ahead and do it. :-)

  14. Three thoughts:

    1) “being fully invested in activity but detached from its results”

    Indeed. So it doesn’t matter at all WHY we’re doing what we do. Just THAT we do.

    2) “If making poses in to problems was actually pleasant or rewarding in my experience, I’d probably go ahead and do it.”

    Haha! Touche! Me, too.

    3) I keep thinking of how surprised everyone was when chimps used sticks like tools to dig termites out of their nests. Yummy! :-)

    Oh, okay, four thoughts:

    Karandavasana. Like Mt. Everest. Just because it’s there. :-)

  15. Indeed Owl, he does say a lot about tools, about the Present-at-hand and the Ready-at-hand and how the former may becomes the latter and he could be said to make quite an issue out of it.
    Wish I could post a picture of my workbench (for those who don’t know I’m a woodwind repairer) Shop staff are always coming in and asking what some strange looking tool on my bench is for. No just picking it up and using it her, well not them anyway, I of course just pick up the right tool instinctively. Ask yourself why that might be. Some tools are of course intuitive some are not. Often nobody has made the tool I identify as necessary for a job and I have to pop up to the lathe and make one myself to my own specs. What tools do you use in your job Karen, or in yours Owl or Arturo’s?

    Watch again the film of the hanuman fishing for termites, he can be very particular about the stick he chooses ansd will even adapt the stick to make it just right.

    And todays lesson, ‘The pose is a tool not an issue’ is also a tool, a teaching tool no? we like it because it’s an effective tool, may bring us to question and explore what what a pose really is, what the real issue might be in our practice or might work counter to as intended and reflect that a pose, the system as a tool is very much the issue at hand and allow us to clarify why that might be.

    Damn, i should get back to posting videos.

  16. Grimmly, this is top notch. What a great thing to read first thing in the morning! Sent me off on a delightful retrospective of tools I’ve used in my life.

    I forgot about your close relationship to tools in your work.

    In my current work, I use pens, paper, whiteboards & markers, post-it notes. tape flags, manuscript clips, books, computers, software, learning theories, and project management processes. Also business & management models. All of these, though, are at the service of design models, which are my favorite tools.

    Writing: pens, paper, computers, software, books, magazines, literary journals, nouns, verbs, adjectives, punctuation marks.

    Art school: pencils, charcoal, paint, sticks, chisels, mallets, mig welders, acetylene welders, grinders, foundry apparatus.

    What fun!

    Okay, here’s a thought. One thing that came out of all of the art/writing years was a tendency to think of things as materials, rather than as tools. And to value process over product. Which makes for a kind of skewing toward the alchemical. I love tools, especially when they turn one thing into another, when they effect change. I don’t really care so much for the why, provided there’s transformation, a change in the materials. I have to think more about why that appeals so much.

  17. Guys, something is missing. You are trying to explain method in terms of tools, and both as exclusively imminent, practical, sensory experience. Phenomenology brackets existence, places transcendence outside the realm of inquiry.

    I am saying: Yo! Orient toward the Mystery! Allow existence back in! Be idealistic! (bad word some quarters)

    Heidegger and friends wanted to get away from the classical Greek model of action as starting from intention. They modeled a purely immanent theory of action that was practical and taken-for-granted, and embedded in its environment. They were right. But… as we practice we do have the ability to set high intentions and orient action toward them. It’s not just about immanence. It’s about the side that phenomenology repressed when it talked about mere mortals: everyday transcendence. Not just tools: practice.

  18. This is the only thing I have understood so far:
    “Karandavasana. Like Mt. Everest. Just because it’s there”

    ha ha ha!!!

  19. I think of Pollock playing with paint’s materiality until he found a kind of intentionality (more dances with waves and particles than dances with wolves) and (to my nervous system) a spectacular transcendence. Most mysterious!

    Purposeful intention stickered onto the current moment doesn’t appeal to me. But intention that rises up out of the moment (surprise!), sure does.

    Of course, I’m on a post-practice high.

  20. Owl, Bracketing was just a tool of enquiry for ‘The phenomenologists’ Not that there ever were ‘The Phenomenologists’ just a bunch of thinkers who used Phenomenology as a tool in their enquiry, try and find two Phenomenologists who could agree about anything. I certainly don’t consider Heidegger a phenomenologists, despite his debt to Husserl (whom he later critically eviscerated over the Cartisian meditations) although he ( Heidegger )did write some wonderful phenomenological passages. Heidegger and Friends? which friends would that be? They? who is this they? And Heidegger adored the Greeks and was constantly, lovingly, deconstructing them,( which is where Derrida got the idea) and reconstructing them anew. When you say Classical Greek theory of Action you just mean Aristotelian praxis yes? And you really should read later Heidegger, read him on Holderlin, on thinking….. limiting him to what he was doing in Being and Time would be as bad as limiting Ludwig to the tractatus.

    back to tools and issues

    Just playing here, holding a quote up to the light and turning it this way and that. Karen, I was struck by your use of process as we were talking about tools. I remember some Zen guy, forget who, who posed the glorious question … What does the Spoon want?
    (loved that) have never been able to, just throw the spoons in the drawer since, they all have sit snuggly on top of eachother.
    And then I got to thinking about tools and what is made. Think of sculpting and ask yourself what does this chisel want to do, or of painting and and ask what does this brush want to do. Screwdrivers want to turn screws, ploughs want to plough the ground. there’s the wonderful moment in Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy where it turns out that it’s the mice who are running us through their maze, perhaps its the tools that are employing us and remember you use tools to make a tools.

    Is this crazy? your Pollock example, do you think he went out and bought paint especially for a canvas, no, i think your right, he just went into his studio and picked up whichever tins of paint he had around. It’s those tins of paint perhaps, that determined the painting, not Pollock. he just finished it off.

    Like i said just playing here…. and yet…..

  21. Yes! Pollock’s relationship to his materials is what “made” the painting!

    Making things for no good reason is something I learned to do in art school, and I’m so grateful for that. This reminds me of a book that’s affected me very deeply: Coming Through Slaughter, by Michael Ondaatje (http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Through-Slaughter-Michael-Ondaatje/dp/0679767851)

    It’s about Buddy Bolden — trumpet player in New Orleans, who some consider the originator of jazz. The BEST part of this, at least for me: he was never recorded. All of his art went into the air and disappeared.

    Pollock had paintings at the end of his work, but his work wasn’t about those paintings.

    There’s something about asana that aligns satisfyingly with these examples.

  22. But Pollock later chose housepaint enamels (over oils) for his work, which goes to show that he adapted his tools, to better suit his process or as he put it, “expression”.

    I heard the word “immanence” and was sent directly to Deleuze and Guattari, where “immanence” means, basically, “not metaphysical.” Present, everywherewhen. But then the trail led to this Laura Marks stuff I’ve been reading on sensation and cinema and how electrons have desire and how dust motes can be considered to have subjectivity, and then the discourse on tools simply vanished.

    I think that transcendence, if I hear it with my “immanence” brain on, cannot mean “far from us, to be achieved” (as in, wait until the next life to reach paradise, blah blah blah). But it CAN mean that the tool is not necessarily in and of itself, the process and the end-all-be-all of the “thing” (sorry Grim, no Heidegger intended).

    It’s the same mind, to my thinking, as “to look at everything, we need look at only one thing.” Pick up the tool on the immanent plane, what D and G call the “body without organs,” and suddenly the whole non-metaphysical immanence is implied. MAYBE. If we’re HIP to it, TUNED into it, even (although I dislike the agency implied here), LOOKING for it. This is how I hear Owl’s .02.
    Of course if I hear Karen as saying, “Dude I practiced and suddenly the plane of immanence appeared,” then that’s also good and notably, not oppositional.

  23. Hi :-) Y’all lost me between poses being tools and poses being toys. Whatever arises though, yes. I’ve been realizing how much spontaneity and flow there is in ashtanga… hahahaha! But it’s true. Totally spontaneous practice.

    Re: all these dead white guys, you know that I am in love with half of them (including a few gay ones, Heraclitus and Ludwig), but… sometimes… I dunno. What’s the use?

    We live in this world that is so much more complex and egalitarian than their worlds. Almost ALL of them were writing reactively–hard to understand them without context. But how much less could they understand our context? We are more complex and have more resources for human connection and self-discovery than any other humans ever. Imagine telling Martin that some hybrid Indian-British contortionism practice blended with esoteric southeast Asian absorption techniques was what we found “ready at hand.”

    There are potential tools everywhere now… in that context, I see a lot of value in intentionality and choice. Some tools are sharper than others; and some toys are, admittedly, more fun. :-)

  24. Well, it’s delightful how you guys are complicating this, but…

    Just sweep the floor, dammit! Here is the broom :-)

  25. Ha!

  26. What’s the use? Think that’s what H was thinking when he gave up on his translation of the Tao. He knew that all those ‘ dead White guys’ were the horizon of our our thinking. Whether you’ve read them or not they’ve filtered down to every aspect of our culture and when we read anything outside of our own culture then we’re approaching it with the dead guys sitting on our shoulders whispering in our ears.

    Karen I love his books Especially the Bolden one ( jazz is my thing after all ) interesting an how many Ashtangi’s seem to like Jazz ….. Who’d have thought we’d like an improvisationary form. Makes up for not getting any on the mat perhaps.

  27. Sorry point being, we have to get to the same place as the Tao or the Gita or whatever but from within our own organic tradition, you need to read well the dead White guys as well as other dead guys from elsewhere to take your tradition forward into new area. Interesting to read Nishitani , the Japanese philosopher bringing Heidegger to his Zen background, he didn’t abandon his tradition for the western philosophical approach, unlike some of his countrymen at the time but thought Heidegger in the light of Zen ….. Or is that the other way around. Heidegger becomes the broom to sweep the red maple leaves into new piles at the edge of the garden.

  28. The sequences were once improv. I love Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concerts, in large part because it’s improv. But because they were recorded, they exist in a way that lets me listen over and over. But I always listen for the essence of the improv, of the moment — of being sensitive to the moment and the materials.

    I do like looking for that in the sequences. Intermediate is more jazzy, no? Primary is more like a pop song, with its catchy repeating refrain (vinyasas).

  29. Maybe the sequence is the chord structure and the vinyasa is the improv, everyone does it a little different.

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