Swim update

After a few weeks of hardly any yoga and lots and lots of swimming, I have the following to report: 1. My endurance is definitely improved... over a mile is no longer a problem. 2. My speed must be improving too. The swim-freestyle-for-laps-and-laps-and-laps people were there last night doing their thing, and they only passed me 3 times (last time I swam with them, it was 4, and over a shorter distance).

I'll be in yoga class tonight... I'm kind of dreading it, I know I lose flexibility quickly when I don't practice regularly.

There's a "master swim class" tomorrow up at Minnewaska that I will probably go to. The last time I took swimming lessons was twenty or more years ago at the YMCA, and for the vast majority of those two decades I wasn't doing any sort of proper swimming at all, so I know my technique definitely has room aplenty for improvement. In fact, I'm almost embarrassed to go to the class tomorrow and be critiqued.

I leave for Guatemala on Monday... maybe I should start packing or something. I looked up "to shower" in my Spanish/English dictionary today. "Ducharse." I don't think I'll have difficulty remembering that one. Sheesh, I can be so puerile sometimes.

I had a discussion last night about whether it's okay to be angry at someone else (or yourself) when you recognize that anger really isn't appropriate or well warranted. Maybe okay vs not okay is not the right way to look at it. When I get stuck in anger, figuring out whether it's justified never gets me anywhere. I just get more and more frustrated. Unfortunately, sometimes it's an intractable situation and there's just nothing else to do with it. What I really need is a distraction.

Tagged by NoR

So this is the task:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the 5th sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

This is going to be so unsatisfying for my tagger... I'm in my office, so the nearest book is a programming reference guide:

"You can store text that is generated by the macro facility during macro execution in an external file. Printing the statements generated during macro execution to a file is useful for debugging macros when you want to test generated text in a later SAS session. To use this feature, set both the MFILE and MPRINT system options on and also assign MPRINT as the fileref for the file to contain the output generated by the macro facility."

I tag... anyone who cares to be tagged by this.

Wow... I think this is now officially my dullest post ever! I almost fell asleep writing it.

ADDENDUM: I just noticed that my copy of the unabridged Shakespeare (one of my copies of the unabridged Shakespeare, anyway) is closer to me than the programming manual is. Oh well.

ps

That last post was supposed to be mostly funny with a side order of serious, I think I got my ratios mixed up.

water, water everywhere

So I'm a scorpio (shocker, I know), and apparently that's a water sign. I have no idea what that means, but it seems like there's been an awful lot of water in my life lately. #1 - since finishing the teacher training, I pretty much can't stand the thought of being on a yoga mat anymore. I'm burned out. I think I'll come back to my practice in a while, but right now, no. So I've been swimming a lot lately, up at Minnewaska. #2 - there's a periodic and very very very annoying leak in one of the bathrooms in my condo. The leak originates from the unit behind mine, so there is nothing I can do about it apart from alert the management, which I've done, and hope they do something to fix it, which so far they have not. Water torture. This brings up my shit to a degree that is probably hard to imagine for anyone who does not know me well. Understanding why this is such a big deal to me has not so far made it a smaller deal. #3 - My mother owns a lake house which is currently involved in legal issues which involve me and which I don't want to deal with. But since when is what we want a predictor of what we have to deal with?

I had to laugh on Sunday afternoon - I was at the town pool (more water!) helping with the testing of new Minnewaska swimmers, thinking about all this water, and the irony of the song that's been playing in my head for the past few days struck me:

Hopefully, I'll be able to avoid any nautical disasters of my own. I should take some perspective from this song, probably.

Happy Canada day

Slightly drunk on expensive Canadian beer from Bacchus right now, so please disregard any spelling and/or grammatical errors...

Went swimming this afternoon up at Minnewaska - did my mile, with much less emotional hullaballoo than last year's first mile swim. There were two other swimmers also in the lake while I was doing my laps. They were swimming exclusively freestyle. They were swimming when I got there, and they were still swimming when I left, and they passed me at least three times. By my rough calculations, that means they swam at least two miles exclusively freestyle (plus whatever they'd swum before I got there and whatever they swam after I left). Granted, they were stopping to tread water for a minute or two after every length (1/8 of a mile), but still, wow. I know there's a triathlon in the 'gunks in September, maybe they were training for that. I keep thinking I'd like to train for that and take part in it some year, but I hate running, so realistically, it probably ain't gonna happen.

I'm kind of afraid of the swim-laps-for-hours-and-hours people. I see them coming up behind me with their synchronized strokes, and I feel like a little kid stuck in a corn field with grain threshers bearing down on him. I try to give them a wide berth. I kind of wish there were a standard rule of thumb for where the faster swimmers should swim, but some of them seem to like to stick to the rope, and some of them stay further out. It makes it impossible for us slower swimmers to know how best to stay out of their way.

more yoga ramblings! yay!

Okay, I was all ready to close the book on post-training rambling, but I just found this, which I wrote in mid May:

I did my second of three assistant teachings this morning; [J]'s all levels class in [C]. It went well. I felt comfortable doing it, and that has been the big stumbling block for me to work through in this training. I really am getting there. "I can win this," as River says in the last episode of Firefly.

This is graduation weekend for SUNY New Paltz, and I mulled that over on my drive up to [C] this morning. I've known college students who really blossomed and unfolded in the course of their undergraduate years, and it has been beautiful to watch; but that was not my experience. I remember an abiding sense of emptiness after I got my degree. The questions "Well, what was the point of all that?" and "What now?" loomed. Those questions don't present themselves to me in the same ominous overtones with respect to the culmination of my teacher training. I know what this was all about, and I know what happens next. This has been a major part of my blossoming and unfolding, in a way that college really wasn't. As college was about listening to other voices, this has been about listening to my own.

Anyway, this morning's class was all women. I felt a little uncomfortable and out of place at first, until I hit my rhythm with assisting and adjusting, and I forgot that I had the only Y chromosome in the room. I'm not 100% sure what to make of my discomfort. I'm comfortable with friendships with women, obviously, and I'm comfortable practicing with women. Why not teaching? I think it's the power differential. I'm not a peer anymore when I'm at the front of the room giving directions, or making adjustments. I bear a different level of responsibility, and I know how badly that responsibility can be abused. The phrase "trembling before g-d" comes to mind for reasons I don't entirely understand. Maybe that makes sense given the central role this practice has in my life. I know how vital this has been to me as a personal practice, unimpeded by concerns of the sincerity of my instructors. I want anyone I teach to have that same experience.

On an entirely unrelated note, in a month's time, I will be in Guatemala on holiday, assaulting the poor unsuspecting natives with my absolutely atrocious Spanish, and probably contracting aeomebic dysentery. Can't wait! I've never been outside the US and Canada before, and I really have no idea what to expect. "Show up and see what happens" is the mantra I'm choosing to apply to this situation. (Of course, I AM doing some preparation as well... brushing up on my Spanish, getting injections, doing some amount of planning. I am fortunate in that I'll be traveling there with friends who have been there before.)

Waring blenders and microscopes

[largely bastardized from a journal entry I wrote this afternoon, while sitting in the Muddy Cup and eavesdropping on a group of nursing mommies and social workers]

I've spent the past two days mulling over the best way to write this - not because it's a difficult topic, but because it's important to me and I want to write it well. I didn't come up with any great ideas though, so I guess I'll just jump in and see what happens. I completed my teacher training this past weekend; took my final exam on Saturday, and had the last class session on Sunday. I had the impression that no one wanted to leave at the end of Sunday's session. Certainly I didn't.... Now that it's over, I find myself in familiar, well-worn territory: reflecting on and contemplating that which has been...

...there are things I understand better now than I did before the training. I get what samskara means now, having caught myself building new samskaras around the prospect of student teaching. I get that tapas and svadhyaya are necessary conditions of ishvarapranidhana; we need to study ourselves honestly and work earnestly in order to produce something of value to offer up. And I get that, as the Bhagavad Gita says, we are entitled to our efforts, but not to their fruits. It's not about self-denial. It's about mindset. Work becomes its own reward when it is undertaken with honest intention and diligent effort. Work ceases to be work, and becomes something almost sacred; a covenant between self, Self, and That-Which-Lies-Beyond-Self-And-Permeates-All. For some, this means god. For me, it means Love.

I often shy away from the use of superlatives, but as regards my instructors and fellow trainees, I can say without equivocation that they are the finest, most dedicated group of yogi(ni)s with whom I could have hoped to share this process. A more generous, courageous, grateful cohort is difficult for me to imagine. I am honoured to have had the great fortune of practicing with and learning from them, and I look forward to continuing to practice with and learn from them, in whatever form that may take. So thank you all - fully, completely.

Recent reflections and adventures...

...as recorded (for the most part) in my journal last night while sipping tea at the Muddy Cup:

If whiskey is a poor man's Prozac, then chamomile tea is a poor poor man's whiskey. Or do I have this completely backwards?

Regarding the imminent culmination of my teacher training: One of the benefits of doing a training this way, stretched out over many months interspersed with day to day life, is that one's usual issues continue to arise, but because of one's ongoing studies, one is impelled to use a new set of tools to deal with them. Life becomes the crucible of practice. Life becomes the mat, and then, suddenly it becomes clear that there is no mat, and maybe there never was.

I successfully executed a stealth sconing on Friday. I took off from work for the day, woke up early, made pumpkin ginger scones, and dropped them off on the doorstop of an old friend who I hadn't seen in a while (and whose birthday it was).

My first CSA distribution of the season is today. Huzzah! I can't wait to see what I'm going to get (in addition to mounds and mounds of greens).

words in passing

Last week's episode of Canadia 2056 was incredibly dull. I think the writers are running out of ideas (and honestly, the premise was pretty weak from the start). Good episode of Battlestar Galactica (aka Battlenerd Galactigeek) on Friday, though. The religious and heady (yet vital) philosophical themes in well written science fiction make me think that sci-fi is really coming of age. But then I see a few minutes of the impossibly bad programme Doctor Who, and I'm back to thinking that sci-fi is still largely the domain of rubbery monsters, bad acting, explosions, and unnecessarily dramatic music. Honestly, I'm embarrassed to call myself a geek sometimes. Sometimes.

Anyway... for the past few months, Friday nights have found me at a friend's house watching BSG. Usually, I arrive early, and we spend some time talking about yoga, mindfulness, being present, &c. We draw from a common vocabulary about such things that is largely lifted from Buddhism and Tantra, but these are not academic discussions. They are grounded in a desire to make sense of our experiences. Saturday mornings, on the other hand, I usually spend in a coffee shop, working on yoga homework. Rather, trying to work on yoga homework. Mostly I seem to get distracted by snippets of the most inane conversations imaginable. A few months ago, I listened to two "men" talk for over an hour about fights they had been in. Street fights. Bar room brawls. They were comparing notes. WTF?

Recap. Friday night: meaning of life, spirituality, what does it mean to be human, blah blah blah. Saturday morning: Dumb and Dumber shooting the bull about people they've beat up. Am I being overly snobbish about the stupidity of other people's conversations? I would probably have found this conversation absolutely hilarious/ridiculous/fascinating if it hadn't distracted me from what I was working on.

It makes me wonder what people say about the conversations that they overhear me having... maybe I'm just as bad in my own way. I'm sure there's someone in New Paltz who thinks of me as that obnoxious prick who's always going on about secular humanism.

Guilty pleasure

So there's this radio drama that airs on the CBC every Friday morning at 11:30, and I simply cannot stop listening. It's called Canadia 2056; it features science fiction, American-Canadian relations, intergalactic toilet plunging, amorous computers, a brain in a jar, romance, action, comedy. It really has it all. It's like a mash up of Futurama, the Hitchhiker's Guide, and this stupid audio production of the story of King Midas that I did in grade 5.

What is it that's so compelling about radio dramas? And why aren't there any in this country? (Or if there are, where are they?) Why do I have to outsource for my auditory amusement? Afghanada (when it was on the air, and I hope it's coming back for a third season) also held me totally in thrall.

Yoga

As my training winds up, there's all manner of thoughts running through my mind, and I think this blog is going to be a clearing house for them over the next few weeks. I'm going to start with my translations/commentaries on the first three yoga sutras of Patanjali (I'll list these in the format Sanskrit... English translation... Squirrel translation).

Atha yoganusasanam

Now the exposition of yoga is being made.

When is the best time to practice yoga? Right fucking now!

Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah

The restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is yoga.

Yoga is when your mind shuts up.

Tada drastuh svarupe vasthanam

Then the Seer abides in His own nature.

Then you can stop frontin', and start dealing with what's real.

I somehow doubt my own vulgar and dumbed-down translations are going to catch on, but they're helpful for me.

I did my third and final assistant teaching last night, for a Basics class. I ploughed through it, but I was definitely not on my A-game. I kept stumbling over words and directions. It sucks that I ended my assistant teachings on a down note. My second assisting (which I did on Sunday) had gone much better; I think the difference may have been that Sunday's class was first thing in the morning, so I was fresh and vibrant, and yesterday's was in the evening after I'd spent all day staring at a computer screen writing code, and my head was still stuck in zeroes-and-ones mode. I'm concerned about what this may mean for my future as a teacher. Does this mean I'll only be able to teach competently on days on which I wasn't thoroughly immersed in computer code? I hope not. I never planned to give up my programming career in order to teach yoga; I want to be able to strike a balance between these two disparate worlds in which I live. I don't want to have to choose.

My mind is very much drawn to contemplations of effort and surrender today, so here's another excerpt from one of my recent yoga essays:

Effort and surrender. "Ay, there's the rub," to borrow a phrase from Hamlet. We do our practice, whatever that means for each of us; we are compelled to interact honestly with the world and treat each other as well as we can, but we don't control the outcomes of our actions. Effort is trying to do whatever is right in the moment; surrender is hoping like hell that our actions are beneficial to others (and to ourselves), and realizing that the effects of our actions are beyond our ability to control. Sometimes, everything turns out the way we think it should. Sometimes, well, not so much. Effort and surrender is intense practice, so a lot of the time we try to avoid it. Donna Farhi enumerates some common avoidance techniques: neurosis (throwing our hands up and saying, "I can't control anything; it's all someone else's fault; I give up."), half hearted effort (self-explanatory), conditional perfectionism (diligent effort coupled with a refusal to accept any outcome but the one we desire), and impossible perfectionism (in which we keep moving the goal state so that it can never be achieved, because achieving some desired outcome would require relinquishing control). Diligent, honest effort followed by genuine surrender opens the doors to possibilities that just can't present themselves otherwise.

Not that I'm any sort of an expert on surrendering control. I understand it in theory well enough, but theory isn't worth a damn when the rubber hits the pavement.

On an up note, here's another snippet from an earlier essay:

Farhi writes a lot about the importance of slowing down, and how frantic the pace of modern life can be. This reminds me, of all things, of the introductions to several cookbooks that I own. It seems that every time I page through a cookbook, the author's first priority is to bemoan the rapid pace of modern life and lament the fact that no one makes time to cook anymore, despite what a calming, soothing, centring thing it can be to make a daily routine of preparing a meal. The same, of course, can be said of yoga. (When you start looking for it, you discover that there's dharma everywhere, even between the recipes for shish kabobs and pork tenderloin.)

Family

The last time I visited my father was in 2002. The last time I spoke to him was probably 2004 (I ran into him on the rail trail), and the last time I saw him was last summer (I took off before he saw me, so we didn't have any interaction). I've been avoiding him for a long time, and eventually he acceded to my requests to stop trying to contact me. So the letter I received from him a few weeks ago informing me of his diagnosis with prostate cancer came as a bit of a surprise. The letter was pretty short on details; no mention of his course of treatment, his prognosis, or whether the cancer was caught early. When I first read the letter, I didn't feel much emotional response to its contents. Mostly what I noticed was the fact that he'd spelled prostate wrong, and that his grammar and sentence structure were atrocious. Distractions from the real matter at hand, I guess. I harbour at lot of anger towards him, some of which is well placed, some of which probably is not, but the whole mess of it has long since grown stale, and I have other emotions and memories competing for supremacy. Nothing with family is ever linear or cut and dry. My siblings (who have also shut him out of their lives) and I seem to be of a common mind that we should at least send him a card to thank him for letting us know and wish him well with his treatment.

Unrelated to the above, I've been favoured with dreams of wish fulfillment for the past two nights. Wednesday night was rated PG. Last night: G. I'm keeping the details to myself. Dreams are a good road map to where my mind is, but they are ultimately just a map; they are not the territory itself, as I have to keep reminding myself.

Excerpts

Because I'm too lazy to write anything fresh, here are some excerpts from recent writings. First, from this morning's journal entry:

Yesterday, I told [my therapist] about quinuituq, deep patience - sitting by a seal hole, motionless, for hours, waiting for a seal to surface. There's absolutely no sign of anything happening until the very last instant. One simply waits. I've lately been wondering at what point the hunter abandons the hole and walks away, giving up the hope of catching a seal at that hole. How does he know when to call it quits? When he is in that calm mindset, quinuituq, does he simply know when it's time? Does he come bck to the same hole the next day and try again? How does he feel walking away, knowing he may have missed the seal by a few minutes?

My guess - and it's only a guess - is that when he's in that mindset of deep patience, he knows when it's time to walk away, and he probably doesn't second guess his decision when he does. But only if he's in that mindset; only if he is calm, and deeply patient.

And from a yoga homework assignment I handed in last month, and just received back (a summary of the excellent book Bringing Yoga to Life by Donna Farhi):

The box of monsters that Donna Farhi writes about, the uncomfortable parts of our psyche, may be likened to weeds stabilizing the soil of a steep slope. They are unsightly, perhaps, but they are performing a vital function, and it's important to tread lightly around them as we uncover what that function is. We are more than our box of monsters, though this is impossible to remember at times. "I am always a bit suspicious of people who walk around spouting angelic proclamations about how wonderful and beautiful and full of light everything is. When I meet people like this I have an overwhelming desire to go out and buy a handgun." Wow. I mean, wow! In years to come when I reflect on this book, I suspect that this will be one of the chief passages to which I return. Not that I advocate yogicide, of course, or any sort of violence for that matter, but I think I know exactly what Donna Farhi is talking about. Life isn't all kittens and rainbows, and it's very hard to deal with people who pretend that it is. Keep it real. (Of course, sometimes it is all kittens and rainbows, so the other half of keeping it real is recognizing those times as well.)

A lot (all?) of what Donna Farhi wrote about the descent into the pit of despair rang true for me. There is no bottom to the pit; there is always lower to go. Sometimes a breakdown, or a "dark night of the soul" (p. 206) occurs with no apparent reason. Not everyone experiences this, but many people do. This isn't necessarily a one-shot deal; we can find ourselves in the pit more than once. To call these sorts of experiences humbling robs them of some of their rawness. "Flattening" is a better word. One is pummeled by travels in the pit of despair that Donna Farhi writes about. Yet there is perhaps no other way to discover that the small self doesn't get the final word. If the small self is annihilated and we still find a way to keep on truckin', then there must be something more to life than a shopping list of "I am"'s, "I want"'s, "I don't want"'s, and "I fear"'s.

There's more to say, but I think I'll stop here. I'd like to end on an up note for a change.

My yoga teacher made some lovely comments about this paper; she called my writing lively, funny, and insightful. That felt really good.