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.

Quirks & Quarks

Here are the rules: 1. link the person who tagged you, NoR. 2. mention the rules in your blog… 3. tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours 4. tag 6 following bloggers by linking them. leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged

(I don't think I'm going to tag anyone else, but here are a handful of my unspectacular quirks; btw NoR, #4 on your list isn't something I'd call unspectacular.)

1. I listen to CBC Ottawa pretty much every morning (as I'm doing now); despite the fact that I don't live in Ottawa. I don't even live in Canada.
2. I've been telecommuting (not just once or twice a week; exclusively) for the past seven years.
3. There are two degrees of separation between me and Bruce Campbell.
4. I carry a cotton hanky wherever I go so that I don't have to use paper tissues.
5. I can't walk past a sink full of dirty dishes without rolling my sleeves up and washing them. My brother and sister are aware of this and use it to their advantage when I visit them.
6. I like taking naps in my car, sometimes.

Qapla'!

Did my first (of three) assistant teachings last night. It went okay, I guess. Some of my touch corrections could have been a bit less tentative. I found it really, really hard to triage who to give touch corrections to, but I guess this is something all yoga teachers experience. I know that I didn't put a whole lot of "me" into the teaching; partly, this was because I was nervous; partly, it was because it wasn't my class; I was just assisting another teacher.

Next up: assisting an all levels class on Sunday morning. I think that will be easier; I'll be less nervous, already having assisted once, also because no one I know will be in the class! It's surprising how big a difference this makes. By way of analogy, two people can be sitting next to each other in a bar having completely different experiences, because one has been there a thousand times before and has all sorts of memories and expectations associated with it, and the other is there for the first time. I'm finding the same thing is true with teaching. Last night's class? I've been to that bar before, kind of a lot. I know the patrons, and pulling pints for them was a totally different experience than sitting there getting sauced myself.

Yes, I may have taken that analogy a bit too far.

And yes, the title of this blog entry is in Klingon.

"How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin"

At last, the inspiration for the title of this blog is coming into fruition. (I have discovered that almost everything I write eventually comes true in one form or another, if I write it well enough. I choose to see this as a blessing, though it has its downside.) My yoga teacher training is two months shy of completion, and we have now entered into the student teaching portion of the course. I'll be giving classes to some of my friends this coming week, and will probably be assistant teaching a class of real live yogis on Wednesday (unless someone else signs up to assist that class before I do).

I was nervous when I learned that the next portion of the course would include student teaching. I knew it was coming, of course, or at least I should have known, but I guess I just didn't think much about it. Two things occurred to me which have mitigated my fears, at least mostly:

1. This is the whole point of the training. Now is not the time to question myself.


2. Samskara is a Sanskrit word; briefly, it means a sort of emotional scar or pattern which effects our interactions with the world (and the conditions of our eventual rebirth, if you buy into that sort of thing). I realized that worrying about teaching was creating a new samskara for me to deal with, and frankly, I don't need any more samskaras to deal with. Not if I can avoid them.

Still, I'm somewhat nervous. I am about to leap feet first into the crucible, and I'm not certain what will happen. Probably best not to think about it too much.

Dreams, borrowed poetry

I keep dreaming about zombies eating my brain, or other sorts of B-horror monsters sneaking up on me and terrifying me. I've been waking up in a dead panic, heart racing. Usually, I can tell pretty quickly what my dreams are about, or if they are just random neural firings. These do not have the feel of random neural firings. I think there's a message here, but I can't see it. Which means I get to sit with it, stir this cauldron of images and memories, and hope that the meaning percolates to the surface.

Seemingly (but not really) unrelated, part of Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese:"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Dreams

From Sunday night:

Some very peculiar dreams last night. One involved shooting up heroin. I woke up terrified of the health and safety risks involved, and scared that I'd never be able to give blood again. It was only after a few panicked moments of wakefulness that I realized it was only a dream. I think that dream was a reflection of overblown health concerns I have in waking life.

Another dream: I was at a banquet of some sort. It had a science fiction feel to it; perhaps it was on another world. I think the other revelers must have had a substantially different biochemical make-up; they drank alcohol to stay sober and water to get drunk. I remember wondering about this in my dream. I think I had a hard time finding my way back home, or to my spaceship or whatever, after leaving the party.

Wind of Change

The title of this post refers to the Scorpions song from 1990. In my memory, this was an exciting time. I was 15; walls were falling, families were being reunited, the cold war was ending. The whole year felt like spring to me. A lot of this feeling came from the fact that my parents, too, were (temporarily) reuniting (though less dramatically than those families long separated by the Berlin Wall) after a (long, long, long overdue) year long separation. My father had cleaned up his act, and everyone seemed hopeful.

Actually... this post wasn't supposed to be about my family stuff, but I felt I had to mention that as background. The theme of this post was supposed to be: what the hell happened? So many good things (well, except Gulf War I) seemed to be happening in the late eighties and early nineties. Then we had the boon years of the Clinton administration, then everything went to hell. How the hell did we drop the ball? And how do we pick it up again? Maybe I'm misremembering the sense of optimism I perceived back then. I was young and unjaded (well, less jaded), and my memory of world history might be coloured by my memory of my own history (cf: above).

I attended a talk on the four noble truths and the eightfold path of Buddhism a few weeks ago. Afterwards, I had a private moment with the speaker, and he gave me the following dharma advice: tell more jokes. Corny ones. In rapid succession. It was damn fine advice, so here's a joke for this post: How many Iyengar teachers does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but she needs a mat, a bolster, a blanket, an eye pillow, a chair, a strap, and two blocks.

It's kind of funny if you've studied yoga with Iyengar teachers.

A mix for the big appointment

So, I have this morbid ongoing project that I like to think about at odd moments, for reasons at which I can only guess, and which I won't go into right now. The project: selecting songs that would properly eulogize me if I were to meet an untimely end. In no particular order, here's what I've got so far:

Wave of Mutilation - The Pixies. This is the first song that I knew would make the cut.

American Tune - Paul Simon. Very grounding and humbling. There's not a shred of ostentation or pretension in this song.

The Darkest One - The Tragically Hip. Hard to explain, exactly, but for me, this song has the character of a love song that one could sing to oneself during moments of despair.

Membership - The Tragically Hip. Like most Hip songs, I have no idea what this is about, but it feels like a theme song for me. Something about a river.

O Canada Girls - Dar Williams. "I'm so sick of forgetting myself to remember who I am; and you say, 'Yeah, but why so cold, and so Canadian?'"

Finlandia - Indigo Girls. The acapella version of this is beautiful.

Hasn't Hit Me Yet - Blue Rodeo. The last time I went on antidepressants, I remember driving to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription, listening to this song. I wasn't very familiar with it yet, but I knew it fit the moment perfectly. Still makes me cry sometimes.

Brothers In Arms - Dire Straits. Makes me think of my friend Byron, for some reason. I never discussed the song with him, but I think he would have gotten it.

If It Be Your Will - Leonard Cohen. A prayer, a dirge, a love song all wrapped up in one neat package.

Watershed - The Indigo Girls. I don't think I heard them play this song in concert until the 13th or 14th time I saw them perform. It was a long time to wait.

Lord, I Have Made You A Place In My Heart - Cry Cry Cry. The only convincing gospel song I have ever heard.

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life - Monty Python. Good to end on an up note, I think...

Secret - Meryn Cadell. ...or not.

Slightly less morbid line of inquiry: if there were a movie made about my life, who would provide the soundtrack? Right now, I think The Tragically Hip. They write beautiful songs that are almost impossible to understand; sort of the REM of the north. Readers of this blog (both of you)... who would you choose?

"...as makeshift as we are, we are..."

I've had this thought in my head for a while now, and I keep hoping the words to explain it are going to arrange themselves perfectly without any effort on my part, but that just hasn't happened yet. I keep forgetting that writing (like yoga) is not magic, it's work, and takes practice. So here's my practice:

One of my recurrent issues is feeling like I don't deserve anything that I have, or want. I don't deserve this relationship, that job, this house, these friends, blah blah blah. Generally this feeling only strikes when I'm down on my luck or stressed for some other reason. Like a zit before a blind date, it always comes at the worst possible moment. So I've been sitting with this realization about myself for a while; perhaps a few years since I really started to see it. Recently I've had a revelation: of course I don't deserve the things I have or want. No one deserves the hand they've been dealt, either good or bad. That's not the point. The point is that whether I deserve it or not, it's my hand and I need to play it.

A side factor that plays into this sense of not deserving, which I've lately recognized, is that I'm much more comfortable wanting something than having or working towards having it. I know this comes from growing up in an environment in which it was much, much safer to live in my head than to make my desires and needs known, but even knowing this, it remains a mindset which is dreadfully difficult to abandon.