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Walk through every fear.

“You come from the west, you see postures, you say ‘I want it.’ And then you take. All of this is taking, it is the western thinking. I want it I want it. If you don’t understand yoga because of that way of thinking, not my fault. Your fault.”

Practice was slow and a bit ponderous. If you are sad, do NOT listen to Sigur Ros when you practice. That’s my lesson for the day.

More Freeman:

You need the ability to take a stand and see what the results of taking a stand are, and then you need to see that even that was just a stand and that there are other stands. The passive or lunar mode makes a context, but the active or solar mode allows a single viewpoint.

The theory of Hatha yoga is that this is reflected in the body, the breath and how the muscles are patterned. The idea is that eventually these two different modes connect. And that’s the game.

Just seeing that it’s a game intellectually is a pathetic state; it’s eternal pathos. That’s what the existentialists see; Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill. Having the game insight and then reducing it to a nihilistic theory is just another game.

The nice thing about realizing that it’s all a game via yoga is that you can let it go, which is freedom. The mind creates, constructs and dissolves religious practices, but the joy is the fact that it’s free, open. There’s nobody in there; no player who’s suffering.

The insight into the game is seeing the nature of awareness as it is. That’s the ecstatic joy. There’s no cognitive process involved at all. Yoga is the endless pouring out of infinite radiance from this mysterious core, deep in the body.

And today, let’s have one of Berryman’s Dream Songs. I had a total crush on Berryman’s poetry for many years, and still love the Dream Songs to this day.

Dream Song 29    

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
so heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of.  Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late.  This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

Left to my own devices, I tend to drift around in space. Over the years, I’ve been called to now by My Gift as a child (and still, as an adult), by my brother when he was ill, by Ty as a puppy. I am called to now by the needs of people at work, by deadlines and decisions. Basically, I guess I am called to the now by others’ needs. This isn’t inconsistent with what I’ve been taught by zen teachers.

At this point I’m floating (and struggling), because I was so called to now by Tyler’s needs, and then they disappeared suddenly.  

God, that’s a cool picture.

***

Quadratus lumborum. Left side. Owie.

Not sure what’s going on. Lots of sensation, feels tight, but then when I practice it actually seems stretchier than usual. I know I have twisty things in my baseline alignment. Maybe they are resolving?

In the meantime, I feel mentally tentative, like I’m afraid I’m gonna make a false move and the QL’s gonna do something bad. Nevertheless, when I DO actually move/stretch/challenge it, it seems to be responding better than ever. So now it’s a battle between my expectations/fears, and the plain old what’s-actually-happening-now.

***

Richard Freeman quote for the day:

Hatha yoga is where we use the impulses of the mind, and we go with them in order to dovetail them back so we can observe them. In a sense, hatha yoga is like sitting practice with a lot of squirming. Whereas in sitting practice you just let it be. The urge to squirm arises, but it doesn’t translate out. You sit on the urge rather than squirming. In yoga we actually do both practices.

***

I’ve been reading and listening to some Frank O’Hara poems. O’Hara was a man who was deeply connected to the now.

What I’m always confused by, though, is the way other poets read his poems. Everyone over-reads them. You can verify this by listening to an audio of someone reading O’Hara, then listening to O’Hara reading O’Hara.

O’Hara was certainly gregarious and exuberant, but it’s hard to tap into and represent someone else’s exuberance, particularly when you are reading their words off a page. Everyone makes FO sound so campy and overwrought. Gah! What’s best are his little crystalline moments of feelingfulness, which are just bulldozered by all the over-reading.

Okay, so it’s agreed. Read O’Hara in a quieter voice.

In Memory of My Feelings
  
My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.

My quietness has a number of naked selves,
so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves
from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons
and have murder in their heart!
though in winter
they are warm as roses, in the desert
taste of chilled anisette.
At times, withdrawn,
I rise into the cool skies
and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification
of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape,
speaks, but I do not hear him,
I’m too blue.
An elephant takes up his trumpet,
money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror
across shoulder blades. A gun is “fired.”
One of me rushes
to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me
flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes,
and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips
are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt’s lust,
definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs
of earth.
So many of my transparencies could not resist the race!
Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets,
a flaking moon drifting across the muddied teeth,
the imperceptible moan of covered breathing,
love of the serpent!
I am underneath its leaves as the hunter crackles and pants
and bursts, as the barrage balloon drifts behind a cloud
and animal death whips out its flashlight,
whistling
and slipping the glove off the trigger hand. The serpent’s eyes
redden at sight of those thorny fingernails, he is so smooth!
My transparent selves
flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing
without panic, with a certain justice of response
and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa. 
 
 

Owl asked if asana can be considered art. From a three-dimensional object in space perspective, it could certainly count as sculpture. But what else?

I’ve been reading a book called Picturing Mind: Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art and Poetry. I don’t quite know what to say about it. Now that I think back, I’m not really sure what I expected it to be. The things it gets at seem obvious, which makes me tempted to say that the book is naïve.

I wonder though if the author just isn’t interested in many of the same things that I am and, therefore, drawing many similar parallels — so it all seems, well, obvious so far.

Here’s a quote:

Observational painting as enquiry into “the real, resistant and experienced world”

In our experience of things-in-the-world, we seem to encounter volume, solidity, materiality, substance — yet the appearance of substance is deceptive when looked at through three different lenses. Firstly, through our perceptual experience, we discover that the object is not a static stable entity but a dynamic part of a continually changing field of perceptual and interpretive activity. Secondly, through our cognitive processes, particularly scientific modes of enquiry, we encounter at the sub-atomic and quantum levels a world of interpenetrating energies and forces. Thirdly, in considering our existential condition we find our own identity or self to be anything but a fixed, finite, object-like construction — rather it is a matrix of at times contradictory moods, feelings, thoughts, processes which somehow cohere but are open to continual revision and transformation as we negotiate changing circumstances and conditions. Our position as observer is more transparent, indeterminate and inseparable from what we observe that might at first be assumed.

Thus “objects” are events or fields of relationships, transactions between observer and observed. They have no enduring substance or self-identity, no permanent essence. They are relative, impermanent, and ever-changing. And observational paintings present us with iconic and indexical images which are the products of an engagement with these event fields.

Some of these ideas about painting and drawing from observation can be linked to ideas about experience, thought, perception and notions of the real put forward by a number of poets from the 1960s onwards. In exploring their ideas we can see, from another angle, more of the complexities and paradoxes that surround our relationships with the world — our entanglement in the unfolding mystery of being with other beings in amongst the fabric of things. We share our existence with beings who have purposes, needs and corporeal presences that are not ours, and we exist in a world that has a profound disinterest in our presence and an enduring materiality that is both our habitat and spatial/temporal reference. Engaging with this materiality gives rise to questions about reality and otherness, how we experience and how we represent or express changing fields of consciousness.

Okay, as I was reading that into the voice-to-text software, I thought, “Wow, this is actually quite pretty.”

Now I just want to throw in something that I was reading yesterday from Shunryu Suzuki’s book Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, which is a series of talks as he did on the Sandokai.

We do not make much distinction between things that exist outside and things that exist within ourselves. You may say something exists outside of yourself, you may feel that it does, but it isn’t true. When you say, “There is the river,” the river is already in your mind. A hasty person may say, “The river is over there,” but if you think more about it you will find that the river is in your mind as a kind of thought. That things exist outside of ourselves is a dualistic, primitive, shallow understanding of things.

So the characters in the first line [of the Sandokai] refer to ri, the source of the teaching beyond words. The true source, ri, is beyond our thinking; it is pure and stainless. When you describe it, you put a limitation on it. That is, you stain the truth or put a mark on it. In the Heart Sutra it says, “no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no objects of mind,” and so forth. That is ri.

The next line reads Shiha anni ruchusu — “the branching streams flow on in the dark.” Shiha means “branching stream.” Sekito says shiha for poetic reasons: to make these two lines of the poem beautiful and to contrast shiha with reigen, “source.” Reigen is more noumenal, and shiha is more phenomenal. To say “noumenal” or “phenomenal” is not exactly right, but tentatively I have to say so. That is why it is good to remember the more technical terms ri and ji here. Ji refers to the phenomenal — to something you can see, hear, smell, or taste as well as to objects of thought or ideas. Whatever can be introduced into our consciousness is ji. Something that is beyond our consciousness — the noumenal — is ri.

We talk about emptiness, and you may think you understand it; but even though you can explain it pretty well, it is ji not ri. Real emptiness will be experienced — not experienced, but realized — by good practice.

So you may ask, “What is the real teaching of Buddha?” If you don’t understand it you will keep asking, “What is it? What is it? What does it mean?” You are just seeking for something you can understand. That is a mistake. We don’t exist in that way. Dogen Zenji says, “There is no bird who flies knowing limit of the sky. There is no fish who swims knowing the end of the ocean.” We exist in the limitless universe. Sentient beings are numberless and our desires are limitless, but we still have to continue making our effort just as a fish swims and a bird flies.

When we understand things in this way, according to Dogen, we are not people in mappo, the final period; our practice is not disturbed by any framework of time or space.

Okay, so back to asana as art.

LOL!

What does art need, in order to be art? Documentation? Intention? A “product” or “object”?

Gah! I can’t go down this path. It gives me art school flashbacks!

Maybe art needs ri, tied up somewhere in the web of its aesthetic or documentation or intention or objecthood? No matter, it is WELL beyond anything we can pick at with critiques or analyses. (Thank God.) And how about the web of the being making shapes? Can it possibly be in a position (yes! a little joke!) outside/beside/beyond ji, with its appearances and words and framework of time and space?

Who knows? No matter. In the meantime, let Suzuki Roshi put a bluejay in your heart.

Reading about observational realism — the pursuit of likeness. Meh. Not my favorite thing. Not enough recognition of the air quotes it needs.

Still, it’s like looking at a still life. Soothing and seemingly solid. Still.

***

“there is equality among you and all beings when separated from prakrti, owing to having one form as consciousness” (Ramanuja)

***

Charles Bernstein’s blog. Some good art (LOVE the Joan Mitchell painting!), and some good audio of poets reading.

***

Led class with Muscleman on Saturday. I have no idea what the deal was, but it was about a thousand degrees in the room. He went over and messed around with the thermometer a few times — perhaps it was broken.

Zipped through primary and headed into second. He’d left me alone through primary, but came by to give an extra crank on both sides of pasasana, then a serious cranking on both sides of eka pada sirsasana.

“Huh,” I thought. “I’d be moving a lot faster if I had a teacher crank me into this every morning.” Followed by: “I don’t know if I want that.”

Surprising thought.

Lovely birthday morning.

Started with a great poem on Owl’s blog. (Listen to the audio — she has a nice reading voice.)

Then, because I decided I’d treat myself to a leisurely morning, practice started a little late. Amusingly, Tyler knew when it was time for yoga practice, so he climbed into his playpen in the yoga room and settled down on his little mat. How funny that my practice is now being initiated by the puppy??

After practice, I called My Gift (which I do routinely on Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester — to help her wake up for an early art class). We had a lovely conversation about Freud and psychoanalysis. She is coming across lots of references to psychoanalysis in her readings for her Feminist Literary Theory class. We had a chat about how she can read any writing as metaphorical — this conversation was reminiscent of the conversation we had when she was in pre-school and I told her she always had the right to color outside the lines, and the conversation when she was in high school about how literary critics don’t have authoritative understanding of what a poem means. And I sent her a copy of The Words to Say It, an amazing novel about a woman’s psychoanalysis.

After our chat, I felt a little guilty for not bringing her up to be a scientist, but c’est la vie. I do the best I can with the poetry and novels at my disposal.

So now I am taking time to write a blog entry, considering buying myself a Kindle, and listening to Tyler eat the pinecone he discovered at obedience class last night (& which I brought home in my purse for him).

Nice morning.

Holy piriformis, Batman!

Seriously, my piriformis was angry today. Or maybe it’s the gluteus medius? I don’t really know. I’ve been too busy to try to look things up and figure it out.

Work has been insane since last Friday. We are rolling out a new program and there are all kinds of customer satisfaction things to think about, and then there was a programming glitch — well, not a programming glitch, really, so much as a human logic glitch. The programmers did their job just fine. The people who were trying to figure out the logic of some of our initiatives (including me) came up short on the “figure out every possible permutation” challenge.

So starting Friday morning, and continuing on until close of business Tuesday, I was locked in a room, thinking and re-thinking three strings of logic that couldn’t, in the end, be reconciled.

But it was fun, you know, getting the headaches.

While all my other work, already on absurdly tight deadlines, backed up.

***

I practiced valiantly each morning, though. When work is that crazy, morning practice is all about getting it done and moving on. Which is fine. In those instances, the practice is a surface upon which “real life” is anchored. During those times, practice and life aren’t integrated. Which isn’t — I suppose — optimal, but so be it.

I have a slip of paper here that I found in the yoga room this morning. On it, a note-to-self: Sometimes practice is all about the processing and transformation of despair.

Interestingly, we use the practice to *generate* despair, too. I mean, in the end, I imagine practice can be a despair processor for life-in-general. The funny thing, though, is that we generate all kinds of angst around the very practice itself, and then use that to refine the processor. Kinda funny.

***

When you are both alive and dead,
Thoroughly dead to yourself,
How superb
The smallest pleasure.

Bunan 1602-76

***

I just went out on the patio, realizing Tyler was being too quiet. Managed to sneak up on him: he was lying there with a little pile of dirt between his paws, which he’d taken from a planter and was happily eating. Nothing better than lying in the sun, eating some dirt. He looked up guiltily when he realized I was there. He is so freaking cute.

Now he’s here on the couch, trying to get hold of one of his favorite things: a hair tie. In this case, the hair tie I’m wearing.

***

Tyler is now on an elimination diet to try to pinpoint what, exactly, he is allergic to. The Cop brought him to his favorite vet in the world, which involves close to a two hour drive time (each way!). She is running blood tests, and in the meantime, an elimination diet.

And to top it off, Tyler is eating a vegetarian elimination diet. Brown rice, pinto beans, tofu, some green veggies, apples, carrots. That’s it.

The difference in his health is astonishing. His skin is no longer all pink and angry; he doesn’t scratch relentlessly; he sleeps better. He is so much happier.

Last night, I gave him some flax oil, and he had an allergy attack. I looked at the kibble we were feeding him. Yup. Flax. We’ll see what else the blood tests tell us when they come back.

The beauty part of this diet is that I am making huge pots of rice and beans. We keep all of the dog food on the middle shelf of the refrigerator. Maxine has always had a raw food diet: ground meat and bones, chopped veggies, raw eggs. Now there’s a tupperware of beans and one of rice and a container of tofu.

The Cop was kind of horrified the other morning as I made my lunch before work. “Are you eating the dog’s food?” he asked, as I pulled tubs off the middle shelf.

“Yeah! It’s great!” I replied. Very handy.

***

And now Tyler is fast asleep beside me, lying on his back with a length of climbing rope clenched in his teeth.

Marco… … … Polo…

…reality is originally devoid of ontological properties and it is only via an incessant and largely unconscious habit of emotional self-reference and categorization that a conceptual structure is created and ultimately reified; a process necessary for daily life, but that also tends to condition the individual into predefined patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Meditation is believed to counteract this tendency in favor of a condition of equanimity where the provisional nature of one’s own conceptual structure is realized, bringing about a greater freedom of thought and action as well as a decreased sense of self-attachment.

…the attempt at mental regulation through meditation involves developing a progressive familiarity with the interplay of voluntary attention (often directed to the breath and/or the posture) and the spontaneous conceptual processing that appears in its fractures…

***

…we tested the hypothesis that the habitual practice of being heedful to distraction from spontaneous thoughts during meditation renders regular meditators, as compared to control subjects, more able to voluntarily contain the automatic cascade of conceptual associations triggered by semantic stimuli.

***

I’m not sold on the word/nonword task — why not just use real words at intervals and MRI the brains to “look” for indications of conceptual thinking? Still, between this and LHC and the ongoing research of yogis, we’re getting closer. And, funnily enough, further away.