In both form and content, the work curated by Aghori Babarrazi presents a jagged paradox, true to his pseudonym, that defibrillates the limping heart of yoga philosophy. His crew consistently speaks for yoga-as-egoic-dissolution – through the most singular and eccentric voice of modern yoga literature. They repeatedly invoke the austerity of complete personal responsibility, while delighting in trash-talk from behind the scrim of anonymity. Aghori’s editorial paradox mirrors the dueling desires of yoga itself: to become, but to disappear. His masala of cruel empathy flavours the absurd task of making us naked and strange to ourselves, forcing us to wriggle, shift, and grow in the glare of our own contradictions. It’s a dirty, dirty job, but somebody – I mean nobody – I mean somebody who’s made himself a nobody pretending to be everybody – has to do it.

An article last week finally brought the full tension of Aghori’s project into sharp focus for me. In This is Probably What a Lot of Yoga Practitioners are Looking For, the Babarazzi critiques the “yoga-as-self-expression” trend within today’s yoga culture as the indulgence of the common desires, behavioural patterns and self-perceptions that he claims yoga is actually meant to erode. Babs proposes that doing what one is naturally drawn to do (singing, painting, design, fashion photography, ecstatic movement) and then laminating it with yoga-speak does a vain disservice to the tradition’s (allegedly successful) history of discipline and surrender to wordless authority, not to mention degrading the artform in question with a veneer of faux-transcendence. Babs also makes the subtler point that yoga-washing can become a value-added marketing meme that blesses any unchallenged consumerist activity with a self-satisfied glow.

The yoga-media critic must serve integrity by spotlighting the lines between evolution and self-entertainment, or self-consolation. But if we take the charitable view that “self-expressing” yogis really are nurturing their own integrity as much as self-erasing yogis are (and that further, that it’s arguably impossible to tell the two activities apart), Babs’ critique merely points to an honest problem as old as Indian philosophy itself: do we gain personal freedom and realize interdependence by dissolving or by refining our uniqueness? Babs suggests that this question has somehow been answered in yoga discourse. But it most definitely has not. In fact, the question expresses a key split within yoga philosophy. The ambivalent dance between the two views enriches the meaning of each, and it’s a great story in itself. I think it’s actually Aghori’s favorite dance as leader of Squad Babarazzi, regardless of the austere positions they pretend to take. (And when I say “pretend” – I mean to invoke respectful intrigue, à la Dérrida: “When I pretend to do the thing, I actually do it, so I must only be pretending to pretend.”)

Whether we must dissolve or refine our personality differences towards greater psycho-social-somatic harmony is the internalized version of the metaphysical question common to every system that considers the problems of language. Is “ultimate reality” describable, or not? The dissolution track (Patañjali and the Vedāntins) says “no”. But the refinement track (Nāthas, Babas, Aghõris) says: “let’s give it a try, and enjoy ourselves in the endless process”. In the Indian context, ultimate values that can be described and mimicked by aesthetic actions belong to a tradition of saguṇa (“with qualities”) liturgy. Ultimate values that must be formlessly pondered because we know they cannot be described belong to a tradition of nirguṇa (“without qualities”) liturgy. Using the context of Babs’ post, we could say that yogas that refine or accentuate personal uniqueness are playing in a saguṇa paradigm, insofar as the qualitative aspects of self-expression are emphasized, and felt to mirror the specific graces of the “divine” or “absolute”. Yogas that seek to dissolve differences are playing in a nirguṇa paradigm, insofar as qualitative uniqueness is felt to distort one’s reverie upon the quality-free absolute. Here, and in other posts in which he makes elliptical reference to the nameless beyond and elides the yoga of personality-erasure with the deconstruction of consumerism, Babs stakes out nirguṇa territory. This strikes a chord of common disgust: who among us is not at times sickened at the viral proliferation of memes, simulacra, yoga hoodies, and performed selves? Who is not at times exhausted by the tyranny of endless possibilities? Who does not, at times, despair at the fleeting dross of it all?

The nirguṇa impulse is at the heart of the cultural critic’s task, and surely its affect will intensify with the saguṇa overload of a spectacle society. Simply put, the nirguṇa mood is the reflex, audible as a constant refrain through Aghori’s curation, that says: “Nope. This isn’t it. It can’t be described.” In Nāgārjuna’s words: neti-neti. Nirguṇa head-bobbles with ironic and often bitter laughter, and calls out the foolishness of every platitude and hypocrisy, and every discourse or style that takes itself seriously. It’s a revolutionary impulse that in its highest expression carries the despair of all failed revolutions.

In Indian literature, nirguṇa language shows up in response to the claustrophobic hierarchy of Vedic culture: particularly the caste system. The earliest ascetic protests to the Vedic order say “Nope, this isn’t it” by stripping themselves of clothes, social signs, duties and privileges. They amputate themselves from Puruṣa – the macrocosmic man whose head was the priesthood and feet were the outcastes. Their refusal to participate in the social order harmonized with both their idealism and their democratization of the “absolute”. Ascetics have always, paradoxically, wanted to both leave and level society. They spurn both roles and riches.

But the ancient paradox – which Babs parades in all of its perversity – is that you can’t be a nirguṇa dude without sustaining a morbid fascination with saguṇa life. The energy of your renunciation depends upon the nausea of excess. To yearn for the quality-free involves constantly turning away from something. One can’t meaningfully withdraw to an empty or anonymous space from within empty or anonymous space. And so we witness Babs’ continuous obsession with the aesthetics and social politics of yoga culture. Whether it’s tone-deaf yoga-seva initiatives, or yoga capitalism, or the question of whether Sadie Nardini’s haircut is cyberpunk or steampunk, the world of self-expression is the self-erasure addict’s smack. It feels so good to take it, and it hurts so good to stop.

Often, the nirguṇa impulse seems more defensive or more angry than a simple “Nope, that’s not it”. It can feel triggered by a crisis of overwhelm: “Enough!” I’ve heard enough, I’ve seen enough, I’ve felt enough. Let me be free of the demands of thought, decision, self-consciousness, and being a self. Let me be free of the suffering of others struggling with the same task. I’m reminded of Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, which proposes that at a certain threshold of social-sensory excitation and complexity, the ventral vagus nerve (phylogenetically more evolved, running between the vital organs and the frontal cortex) begins to freeze, diverting autonomic energy to the dorsal vagus nerve (primal, unmyelinated, running between vitals and the limbic brain). The nirguṇa impulse sounds like it comes from ventral vagus overload – a drive to shut down, a drive towards pratyahara, a drive away from the moment by moment exhaustion of self-creation, re-creation, and re-creation. If we conceive of yoga as a strategy for toning ventral vagus nerve function, we might begin to see the nirguṇa impulse as a practice of last resort: the dissociative yoga you perform when you just can’t deal. You turn the wifi off, wrap a tensor bandage around your head, do some yoga nidrā, and feel self and other dissolve. You know you’ve recovered when the saguṇa begins to slip back in, right on the heals of the I-sense, like waking up from a deep sleep. You turn the wifi back on, and in it pours, this world of things: sweetly at first, and then pornographic. Nausea rises and the critique begins.

But the critique cannot help but to validate the view it is trying to derail: that appearances, styles, marketing memes really do matter. That how we perform our identities and adventures is of crucial importance, because identity is the medium of our being present to one another. The paradox of renunciation is that its poignancy is based upon the rising valuation of everything it renounces. The world denied is like an emotion suppressed: it grows until it bursts.

(Sometimes I wonder: is transcendence often an act? I rarely meet those who are more obsessed with the world than those who claim they desire to leave it.)

While the via negativa longs for invisibility, it can still cast a baroque shadow. Nirguṇa moods and aesthetics can be co-opted by the crowd, drift towards their own hegemony, and establish an unconscious saguṇa order. When the ascetic wanderers of the Iron Age begin to establish first ashram and then monastic life, the nirguṇa ethos becomes a powerful organizing principle. No one is special; everyone should wear a uniform; the teachings are bigger than the individual; the individual attains salvation through his or her group affiliation and adherence to the code – not through their personal gifts. Saṃgha (sharing the truth) is elevated over śramana (personal revelation). The first Buddhist monks were instructed to gather rags from charnel grounds and sew them together, and then dye them uniformly into robes. This was at once an avowal of interdependence (through scavenging), a sign of renunciation and poverty, and a sacrifice of personal affect. The robes conveyed an anonymity that reflected the post-egoic yearnings of the religion.

At least for a while, and only on a small scale. To reject the clothes of your station and wear the style-less rags of the common dead is a radical, nirguṇa act. But just as the band that can never be cool again after other hipsters discover it, the more dudes who join up, the less quality-less the choice. The robe, conceived to erase all uniforms, slowly becomes a uniform itself, an expression of personal allegiance and choice. A new form of self-expression, in fact. Over time, styles of how to assemble the robes emerge. The number of patches becomes an indicator of years of seniority or a mnemonic device for now-ossifying articles of faith. As enlistments increase, new efficiencies in robe-making must emerge. Soon, each monastery has a tailor, and robe-fashion begins to take on adornments of position and status. As qualities creep in, the philosophical emphasis upon no-qualities rings hollow, priming the next generation of those who will say “Nope. This isn’t it”, or, more angrily: “Enough.”

And so the oscillation tilts. Nirguṇa needs saguṇa to enjoy the surprise of its emptiness. Saguṇa needs nirguṇa to give the senses a break. Nirguṇa becomes saguṇa over time, and must recover itself through renewed revolt. Babs needs Sadie’s haircut to reveal the absurdity – but also the ecstasy – of style. And it could be that Sadie needs Babs to remember that for all of the roles she is playing, she is still, like all of us, nobody.

There’s an additional complication that I’m sure Aghori’s inner anarchist is aware of: that nirguṇa mood and diction can have a reactionary affect. As Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad point out abundantly in The Guru Papers, the language of nirguṇa metaphysics – as we hear it ring through both ancient and modern non-dualism– can be used by an authoritarian culture (or even a lone-wolf blogger) to chill the dialogue of learning. It is just too easy for sentiments like “God cannot be understood”, “if you haven’t had the experience, stop talking”, “the mind doesn’t have the answer”, “your reasoning can’t help you”, “Practice, practice, and all is coming”, or even “yoga has nothing to do with self-expression”, to be used to suppress the very kind of questioning that is Babs’ food as critics. Such claims of ultimacy are too easily interpreted according to their presumed factual rather than performative value. But Aghori’s curation brings primarily performative value to the table. He farts on the cocktail wieners and tinkles in the punch bowl. He inverts and subverts, but breaks no news. He provides rhetorical disruption, which is its own form of wisdom that plays with the ways in which we make meaning, but cannot itself establish facts. And how in the end could we glean facticity from a writer who is himself fictitious?

Which brings me to the nirguṇa/saguṇa paradox of Aghori’s anonymity, and that of his cohorts. Writing under a pen-name is at once an act of self-erasure, and self-and-other construction. Because he is a blank, a cipher, he can take on any excess of personality he pleases. Aghori is no-one, but potentially everyone, a bald monk with a closet of zoot suits, skinny jeans, Banksy hoodies and rainbow wigs. He’s free to pluralize himself with other anonymous collaborators, which further obscure his individuality while showcasing his internal archetypes. Like some fabulous yidam, his content might cry out for a quieter union, but his form splashes pluralism loud and proud.

Some months ago I messaged Aghori to say I wanted to mail him a copy of my book for entertainment, and maybe to review if he felt so moved. He wrote back and said he had no mailing address. I asked if he had a work address or the address of a friend who might receive the book for him. No, and nope – maybe later. I was briefly concerned he might be homeless, and had an awkward fantasy about sending him money. But then came daily Babarazzi posts at 5am EST for three weeks straight, tightly-written, well-designed, and smartly-managed as the comments flowed in. So I was satisfied he had a roof, high-speed, and was eating protein. But I felt something else while reading the posts compulsively in the pre-dawn: here was the part of me who is anonymous and anarchic. Here was the part of me that after fifteen years of meditation still closes his eyes to see absurdities. Here was the part of me who could be anyone with any thought at all, who could awaken into the world every day with my dream-language unbroken.

In Indian horary astrology, the two-odd hours before dawn is called brahma muhurta: the “hour of expansion” (according to my post-religious translation). It is said to be the most auspicious and efficient time for practice. Perhaps Aghori edits at night, and simply cues wordpress to publish before dawn, so that the post shows up at the top of his readers’ inboxes. But he must know that it is the time of sādhana, and that for his readers who are less-than-completely disciplined with their devices, his absurdist sermons will interrupt and then inform their practice. I’m willing to bet that for Aghori, critique is itself a sādhana, in which he erases and rebuilds both self and other, and one he wishes to interject into the strange, anonymous saṃgha we belong to, by chance or by choice.

But as the morning gathers, the saguṇa thickens, along with its discontents.  One recent mid-morning Aghori posted a lonely request on his timeline: “Friends: give me something to write about”. Part of me felt like he was asking what we ask of each other, and of yoga, constantly: “Who should I be today?”

I answer: write about the anxiety of this threshold between being something and being nothing. Write about the pain of having to be so smart, every single day, and smarter still, as our complexity rises. Write about how the world rushes into the heart until it is too full, and we want to fall blank and silent. Write about the terrible guilt of the critic. Write about how not self-expressing is simply the expression of a quieter self. Write about how it is just as harrowing to share something through the mirage of selfhood as it is to try to disappear. Write about how self-expression is itself erasure, being a palimpsest upon previous selves. Write what you would write if you could never be anonymous again. Write about the impossible ideal of your pseudonym, Aghori, which means “without fear”.

image from www.joeyl.com.

An excluded section from threads of yoga. 

There is a Oedipal subplot to this book that I would like to make transparent. It’s been fuelled by a subconscious drive: by definition, I won’t be able to tell the whole story. But I think I have some idea of how I’ve loved and hated Patañjali, how I’ve wanted to steal his fire, strip his book down for parts and bury him – but then, still dream of him in my bones. I’m at least partially aware of how this desire is but one shade of my general feeling within the grip of history and language.

In my introduction to this text, I described the process of “remixing” — how an intrinsic blend of ancient and postmodern influences has seemed to gel within me as the psychosomatic practices of yoga have challenged wherever I avoid integration. Patañjali inspired me, but from the first moment of hearing of him and reading his book a decade ago, I wanted to go further: to change him, to change history, to forge another path. Philosophical revisionism is an act of quiet patricide. As such, it is riven with fear and doubt.

I am reminded of how helpful the work of Harold Bloom was to my self-inquiry as a young poet, when everything I read crushed me with both admiration and the silent complaint: But your truth isn’t mine. You don’t understand me. I must make my own way. In his seminal Anxiety of Influence, a Theory of Poetry (1973), Bloom describes how contemporary poets of every age are psychically overwhelmed by the eloquence and gravitas of their precursors, and struggle towards originality using six rhetorical patterns that simultaneously mimic and overwrite the old songs. A brief outline of these gestures brings the question of what we do when we remix our sources and paths into sharp silhouette.

The younger poet commits clinamen: a deliberate correction of the original poem at key junctures, as though it had to be saved from its false direction.

I walked with him down his path of subtraction, and I needed to add the newness of my world. I forced it in between the lines, the threads.

The younger poet commits tessera, a “completion” of the original poem by interpreting its language with more richness or ambivalence than originally intended.

I turned consciousness into an evolute, and awareness into its child. I turned non-violence into protection, and purity into ecology. I took the things he was sure of, and unfolded their facades.

The younger poet commits kenosis: a break in the precursor’s rhythm and voice that emphasizes uncertainty. He empties himself into the gap of his deconstructing.

The more forcefully he spoke, the more I challenged him. Not with my certainty, but with my not-knowing, my emptiness.

The younger poet daemonizes his precursor, finding within the old poem a power that does not belong to the precursor alone, but that should now be generally accessible.

You were a collector, a syncretist. I was fascinated by what you loved. You tapped into something, you put things together, you were inspired. I listened for the breath beneath your words.

The younger poet commits askesis: abstaining from the conventional reading of his precursor to reject the social endowment that comes with it. He removes himself from the lineage of the canon to be uncontaminated by approval and acclaim.

Forging my own path made me as obscure as you once were. Being alone in my verse let me read myself newly.

The younger poet commits apophrades: a resurrection of his precursor. Bloom writes that the younger poet, “in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself…. But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem’s achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.”

I began to dream we were the same writer. Sometimes you guided my hand, sometimes I guided yours. We wrote for each other. We wrote each other.

Canadian poet and general cultural roustabout Irving Layton (1912-2006) wrote a poem to his son sometime in the early Sixties called “For Max Who Showed Me His First Good Poem”. In the last stanza he gives a somewhat grandiose aspiration, some honest fatherly advice, and then acknowledges and invites the necessary rebellion of growth.

I fathered you for holier ends

To live with greatness from day to day,

Avoiding the common joyless ruck;

Your emblem the proud scanning eagle

Alone under the pitiless sky.

Be gentle and have a loving heart.

Then kick your dear father in the balls

And go your own way to renown,

Knowing you’re one of the lucky ones.

Now I read this as though it comes from all of my mentors and influences. As I become a father myself, I understand why children must rebel. I love my child (and my child-self) so desperately I sometimes feel I could keep him folded in my arms forever. But then he would never grow.

(a draft chapter from Ayurveda: East and West, forthcoming)

We can dream of the story of human medicine through the progression of the elements, from earth to space. Today, we sit on the juncture between fire and air modalities. But we long for an older water medicine.

We began with earth medicine, derived from a sense of here, from the grasses and herbs that grow underfoot and in rings that widen from the camp and village. A valley is nourished by a river god, and a sprite protects the forest within the radius of a single day’s walking. Wounds are sealed with the tree resins that are also used to fletch arrows, and then plastered with the same clay from which simple pots are pinched. Earth-medicine people depend upon their material roots and the psychic sensations of place. When they lose contact with the earth they know, they suffer. In the early 1980s, Hmong refugees from the highlands of Cambodia began to die of no apparent cause in their government-subsidized housing in Chicago. The phenomenon was called “Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome.” Health care workers were baffled, until an elder finally told them: “It’s because we can’t feel the mountains.” (Siegel and Conquergood, 1985)

Earth medicine wove the local tangle of textures, aromas and well-trodden pathways into the safety of a home that made and remade us daily. We were so much of the here that we enforced taboos against eating the food of another tribe. Nourishing yourself from an unknown part of the earth would change you, shift your allegiances, make you Other.

Earth gives an exteroceptive medicine, dependent on constant and reliable sensual contact with familiar surroundings. The goodness of a food or a juice or an herb or the flesh of an animal is a function of its constancy in tribal memory, and its coherence with the landscape of which you and your forebears are an intrinsic part.

The theory of homeodynamism that is slowly coming to displace the homeostatic model of Claude Bernard — which from its mid-19^th century root has dominated physiological theory —  is perhaps a memory of earth medicine. Homeodynamism says that the flesh is not self-enclosed, self-supporting, and able on its own to maintain internal equilibrium. Balanced health is, rather, an interdependent intimacy between the person, her people, and her land. She feels in a failed crop the withering of her flesh. She feels her own blood thicken as she sees her river thick with salmon.

Some earth medicines carry strong currents of water-feeling within them. The songlines of the indigenous Australians described by Bruce Chatwin (1987) are streams of life that flow through the land, creating a web of meanings that the person must travel and sing along to be whole, and to participate in the continual rejuvenation of the earth. Traveling the lines and singing their stories transforms the earth into a coherent body of pulsing currents.

Water medicine evolves from our earliest sense of the world as an impersonal swirl of complementary, and at times antagonistic energies which collide and dovetail on the path to equilibrium. So too becomes our flesh. As we flow through the world, the world flows through us — in different textures depending upon where we are and our personal elemental biases, but with structure and sense, and not according to the whim of plant or animal spirits. Caprice melts into necessity, and the feeling of a system emerges, along with agency. A more autonomous self appears. The older earth way felt the sickened flesh to be possessed by local gods, animated from within to serve the needs of the land. As the currents of life are re-imagined according to naturalistic forces, the grip of divine possession loosens. Vayu, the old Vedic wind-god, who used to take up residence in the lungs, generalizes to prana and vata. Agni, the fire-god, who ruled the liver and spleen with force, now generalizes to the simplicity of a single candle flame at the solar plexus. Soma, the god of milk and nectar, who possessed the senses with sweetness and fullness, is now the mucoidal principle of phlegm. We are still possessed, but now by nature, and not by agencies we cannot understand or reason with. We are possessed by weather and sunlight and rain, and these we can study.

We begin to pay closer attention to the internal sensations of thickness, warmth, and movement. The clay, fire, and wind we’ve relied on for generations as external tools of stability, cooking, and diffusion are now seen as powers internal to the flesh. Water medicine makes its home in an internal space. The flesh is felt to be made and animated by, but to also contain an aqueous vitalism — prana, chi, dunameis (in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Greek) — which can intermingle in harmony, or overflow and rupture its boundaries towards death. With water medicine, this dualism of flesh as container and energy as the temporarily-contained emerges, just as Axial Age thinkers throughout the ancient world are beginning to codify the first speculative distinctions between “body” and “soul”. The English word “body” carries an etymological echo of this early framing of life-force as a contained liquid. “Body” comes down to us through the Old German word botahha, which means “tub” (Fields, 12), and carries the sound of “bottle”. The first “soul” or “essence” was liquid. Perhaps the idea first occurred to us simply, through the squeezing of fruits.

Water medicine softens our fetish upon our land while placing health and balance inside the wandering or cosmopolitan flesh. It is interoceptive, more homeostatic than earth medicine, more independent of the landscape, more portable, and now translatable between cultures. Internal space is palpated newly, and inner movements are metaphorized to rain and irrigation. Hippocrates suggests that phlegm resides gelid in the brain, and that a portion of illnesses emerge when it melts due to heating circumstances and descends to clog the channels of respiration and digestion. (Pitman, 176) Water medicine interiorizes visions of a broader ecology, visualizing the healthy flesh as a dialogue amongst boundaried zones – mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes – everything in its place.

The watery ethos constitutes the beginning of a medical theory that goes beyond earth-story to focus on a sense of subjective feeling and internal travel: a story of flows and confluences, waves and eddies, channels and dykes, foam and silt. Therapy develops to enhance or subdue the currents. Massage eases liquid vitalities along dried pathways, pressure points open dykes – ideally gently – and herbs accelerate or quiet the flowing of saliva, mucous, blood, urine, stool, menses. Patients are encouraged to vomit and purge liquid impurities, or to cleanse themselves by letting blood. In a parallel path, martial techniques develop that disrupt or release fluid vitality in catastrophic ways. Warriors memorize the weakest points of the circulatory web to attack them with blows or blades that cause mortal spillage.

The inner liquids of life are assigned various temperatures, savours, and actions. Some cool, sweeten, and congeal, while others heat, spice, and acidify. Some waters build and others pucker and strip away. The tastes are sweet, acrid, insipid, sour, salty, bitter, bilious, briny, pungent, sulphuric, astringent. Health is invoked through principles of balance, blending, and homogeneity. Cooking becomes a central metaphor, alongside themes of irrigation. The enemy of health is the isolated fluid or taste that wicks, spreads, or pools its influence into inappropriate channels. Fluids that trickle are enriched, while fluids that coarse rapidly are given narrower channels. Balance hearkens back to the resting continuity of the sea.

With its goal of harmonious blending, water medicine predicts the primary drive of the psychotherapeutics that would emerge two millennia later: all things must be integrated. Memories are to integrate with present realities, old selves with new, private selves with public, shadows with light, and unconscious with conscious knowledge. Water medicine is inclusionary. The most watery of psychotherapies – Gestalt – employs metaphors of digestion and circulation towards the integration of hidden selves.

Further, the fluids of vitality, whether characterized as breath or blood or nectar or light, are at once universalized — discoverable in anyone — but also as personalized as a family recipe for soup. Constitution emerges as a framework for explaining how we all share the same ingredients, and yet express an infinite variety of taste-blends through our personhood. In India, the masala — the “mixture” — emerges as the staple of the family kitchen. Dozens of spices in distinct ratios are roasted and ground according to closely-guarded recipes thought to enhance a family’s unique gifts and vitality. A family’s masala carries the keys of its pleasure, fertility, and adaptability. It can be taken in a jar to foreign lands to normalize novel foods into its balanced aromas. Water medicine mirrors the body now free to travel overland: its unique essence can be bottled.

In its concentration on tastes and sensations, the medical imagination under the thrall of water begins to dream of what it cannot see, a skill that will drive all medical research, even to the present day. The masterworks of Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and the Hippocratics are codified by 400 of the common era. But as it dreams the unseen, medicine also reaches for new ways of seeing. Aqueous theories of energetic flow depend upon an invisible but felt internal flesh, and they last for as long as flesh remains closed to the eye. In the west, water medicine dries up under the blaze of surgery lamps. The vitalities it carried will vanish into medical myth, and suppressed interoceptions.

In 1533, Andreas Vesalius, then 19 years old, arrived in Paris to learn anatomy and physiology as inherited from the Hippocratic master Galen (AD 129-200 approx), whose theories of fluid vitalities still ruled the medicine of the day. Vesalius saw that his instructors were using the ancient drawings of pigs and monkeys that had served anatomy classes for over a millennium, and found that the internal flesh was treated with a kind of prim disregard. Siddhartha Mukherjee in his chapter “Vanishing Humours” (2010) quotes a letter from Vesalius: “Aside from the eight muscles of the abdomen, badly mangled and in the wrong order, no one had ever shown a muscle to me, nor any bone, much less the succession of nerves, veins, and arteries.” So the young surgeon undertook to elevate dissection to an art, spending a decade collecting corpses from execution grounds and alleyways, meticulously separating the finest layers of tissue from each other and drawing everything he saw. He had set out to prove the genius of Galen, but found through his labour that the vital fluids where nowhere in the tissues. Nor were the channels Galen described anywhere to be found. Vesalius deconstructed Galen with the simplest use of quill and ink. The interoceptive medicine of water began its slow evaporation as the first print run of his book De Humani Corporis Fabrica sold out. Anatomical precision in India was stymied by religious taboo until Madhusudan Gupta performed the first dissection of a corpse in Calcutta on January 10^th of 1836, cheered into the dryness of modernity by his British sponsors. The dissection taboo is one of the main reasons that Ayurveda enjoyed a longer life than Galen’s medicine, and why it stands today as a rich and continuous lexicon for the poetry of being alive, getting sick, recovering, strengthening, and pouring forth fertility.

The new surgical epistemology was visual. What was real was what could be seen. But it could be seen only if exposed, and exposed only if dead, or in the critical trauma that was early surgery. So begins the medicine of fire, a masculine and frantic enterprise, turning the flesh inside out to surrender an overdetermined — i.e., lifeless — truth. (Foucault) Surgery tries to make the internal body a surface of exteroception. An internal feeling would now remain nameless and meaningless, until it was denuded and devitalized by the blade. This reified the split between “body” and “soul” that water medicines had only hinted at in their metaphors of pooling, channels, and pitchers.

Galen’s poetry of the flesh withdrew into poetry on the page: the interoceptive was no longer under the purview of science, and philosophers were doctors no longer. The split between physics and metaphysics hardened. In the west, subjectivity and interiority retreated to the humanities as categories for study, where a sense of the invisible-but-felt remained – most obviously in the natural world, according to the Romantics. In 1798, Wordsworth writes: “Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; / Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things : — / We murder to dissect.” Had he been clearer that his enemy was partly visual epistemology, his third line might have read “Neglects the sensuous touch of things.” The cleft between visually-oriented medicine and the now-nameless interoceptive world contains the seed of the earliest air medicine: the talking cure, whose primary medium is breath, and speech, and, prior to Freud, is conveyed through oral poetry.

Fire medicine burns ever hotter down through the ages. Surgeries become more radical. Cautery and acids seal the hot wounds. In the 1880s, Marie and Pierre Curie dredged a primal fire from the earth itself, using water as a solvent: “from several tons of pitchblende, four hundred tons of washing water, and hundreds of buckets of distilled sludge waste”, they rendered one-tenth of a gram of an element that burned “with such feverish intensity that it glowered with a hypnotic blue light in the dark, consuming itself.” Marie Curie named the element radium, Greek for “light”. Radiation therapy was born — a silent, searing heat that attacked and burned the DNA of cancer cells, and every other cell it illuminated. Alongside the external fire of radiation, new forms of internal fire were being blended by the first oncologists. Chemotherapy hearkened back to water medicine in method, if not elemental texture or temperature: as a systemic approach, it flooded the tissues with liquid flame.

We see medicine specialize as our scopes of attention narrow. The ornate systems of flesh-channels for liquid vitalities require specialized and coordinated training above and beyond the osmotic learning of the local herbs. The fiery precision of surgery and radiation add critical layers of focus and years of hands-on training, and its visual epistemology drapes the site of the incision away from the rest of the person. As medicine shifts paradigms from earth to water to fire, specialization intensifies, diseases are framed more tightly, the flesh shrinks into objectified parts, the zones of personhood are further splintered into the structural, biochemical, kinesiological, and and dietetic, and interventions become more aggressive and directed at later and later stages of etiology.

Earth treats in stillness, and only if you go to it. Water treats in transit, slowly, in widening rings of absorption. Fire treats quickly from a single centre of cutting or ignition. Fire is employed in acute circumstances with acute results.

On the medieval tail-end of the water-medicine era, Ayurvedic physicians tried to incorporate the speed and devastation of fire into their medications by incinerating metals including arsenic, lead, and mercury into ash over days and days in underground kilns, and then infusing the resulting powders into liquid carriers. Vaidyas offered these alchemical bhasmas, born of earth and fire and delivered through water, as panaceas for instantaneous healing from fatal diseases, as though they foresaw their growing irrelevance in the coming age of surgery and rational biochemistry. The bhasmas always failed their magical promise, and today their vestiges, packaged in poorly-labeled plastic bottles and distributed through the alt-health global economy, cause heavy-metal poisoning in those who long for “ancient” cures. Water medicine loses itself when it tries to compete with fire medicine.

I believe we’re in the last chapter of the fire-medicine story. Treatments have cooled down. Radical, scorched-earth, surgeries – such as the double radical mastectomies innovated by William Halsted in the 1880s, are virtually unknown today. Objectifying an etiology to a specific disease site is now known to fail: imbalances always seep around boundaries. Radiation and chemical therapies have become more subtle and targeted, are applied in series, and have an almost tidal rhythm. New insights into the auto-immune nature of many inflammatory disorders have encouraged research into alkalizing treatments, and, more radically, corticosteroid treatments that actually suppress the over-reactive fire of the stressed and self-isolated immune system.

As fire medicine cools, air medicine emerges: through the subtleties of homeopathy, the headiness of genetic studies or epidemiology, and in the relationships we can now posit between cognitive behavioural therapy or mindfulness practices and decreased cortisol levels, and increased vagal tone. Air medicine thinks, reflects, imagines. It amasses data and dreams of genetically modifying disease factors. It is interested in psychoneuroimmunology, and suspicious of the old hard dualisms. Air medicine blows where it wills with interdisciplinary excitement. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic can now take yoga classes on their lunch breaks.

In the natural history of yoga and Ayurveda, space element is the connective principle by which all other elements find their position and function. I think this is the medicine we truly want. We have largely forgotten the former paradigms, but we still feel them in our bones. Our earth medicine comes to us now through our farmer’s markets and the herbalists who know the local terrain. Our water medicine comes to us through massage and acupuncture and hydrotherapy and daily routine exercises and constitutional counseling. Our fire medicine intervenes in acute situations, pouring fury upon fury. Our air medicine tabulates and hypothesizes, and suggests expansive, multi-layered approaches. In an ideal cultural history, an earlier medicine would never be rejected outright as a new paradigm takes hold, for fear of psychic rupturing. However our epistemology shifts, we keep the older forms, hidden in the same way we retain our own previous ages: my toddler squatting in the earth, my ten year-old swimming in the lake, my teenager setting his first vulnerable fires in the world, my middle-aged man, combining these ages as I breathe in the morning air.

It’s important for those of us interested in Ayurveda to understand its place in medical history, and to stop trying to shoehorn into our zeitgeist, as though it could replace everything that followed it. Its Iron Age embodied poetry is beautiful and integrating to us, but severely limited in the functionality we have come to expect from biomedicine. It does not understand biochemistry. It did not have an accurate view of the internal organs until 120 years ago. It did not admit of the germ theory of disease. It did not conjure vaccinations, or antibiotics. It could not safely amputate a gangrenous limb. It could not have saved the lives of my partner and child while they struggled through obstructed labour. The worldview and practice of Ayurveda has not contributed any significant medical advancement in human culture since its cannon of texts was formalized around the ninth century, although the echoes of water medicine generally have largely inspired whatever bias towards holism and integration biomedicine wants to conceal.

But these limitations, if accepted honestly by practitioners, are actually great strengths. We should be happy that Ayurveda has not substantially advanced since the late Axial period. It is precisely because of its technological and research stagnation that it can remember for us who we were before our empirical-rational sciences obscured and objectified the interoceptive, subjective flesh. Ayurveda softens the medical gaze by remembering an age in which we listened to our own circulation, and felt-into our own waves of cohesion, heat, and movement. Ayurveda is valuable today – perhaps even essential to a disembodied species – insofar as it reawakens an internal physician of sensations, alert to the waves of heaviness, inflammation, and scatteredness that are predictive of illness. Ayurveda provides the hands and the hearing of a poet, blind from birth.

When I practice Ayurveda, I often feel myself standing at the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Around eleven or twelve years old. The earth and water of childhood have given me support and nourishment and wonder at life. There is a cognitive faculty that is just beginning to ignite. Water is about to give way to fire. Pleasure is about to give way to analysis. Abiding is about to give way to doing, and magic is giving way to the empirical-rational. I’m connected enough to the right-brain of childhood to feel what the client is feeling directly. I can feel the left-brain fire beginning to discern and determine – but it’s unformed. In the transition from water medicine to fire medicine, we lost something similar to what we lose crossing the threshold of adolescence, into a sharper, narrower, brighter kind of knowledge. Ayurveda reanimates a rich shadow. It pours into a jagged gap.

References:

Arikha, Noga. Passions and tempers: a history of the humours. New York, NY: Ecco, 2007. Print.

Chatwin, Bruce. The songlines. New York: Viking, 1987. Print.

Das, Rahul Peter. The origin of the life of a human being: conception and the female according to ancient Indian medical and sexological literature. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2003. Print.

Fields, Gregory P.. Religious therapeutics body and health in Yoga, Ayurveda, and Tantra. Albany: State University of New York, 2001. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. Print.

Langford, Jean. Fluent bodies: Ayurvedic remedies for postcolonial imbalance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Print.

Meulenbeld, Gerrit Jan, and D. Wujastyk. Studies on Indian medical history. Reprint ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2001. Print.

Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The emperor of all maladies: a biography of cancer. New York: Scribner, 2010. Print.

Pitman, Vicki. The nature of the whole: holism in ancient Greek and Indian medicine. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2006. Print.

Siegel, Taggart, and Dwight Conquergood, producers. Between Two Worlds: The Hmong Shaman in America. Video-documentary. Siegel Productions.

Wujastyk, D.. The Roots of Ayurveda: selections from Sankskrit medical writings. Rev. ed. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.

Wujastyk, Dagmar, and Frederick M. Smith. Modern and global Ayurveda: pluralism and paradigms. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Print.

Zimmermann, Francis. The jungle and the aroma of meats: an ecological theme in Hindu medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Print.

Zysk, Kenneth G.. Asceticism and healing in ancient India: medicine in the Buddhist monastery. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.

On the surface, it’s hard to imagine a public leader doing a better job than the President did last Sunday evening as he executed a priestly role from the stark lectern of the Newtown vigil. His posture was saturnine, yet buoyant. His oration, as always, was pristinely measured in pitch and tempo. He presented empathy, dignity, and resolve as he worked to embody the dumbstruck sentiments of not only the nation, but everyone on the planet aware of the slaughter. But his carriage and his message clashed, as they must, whenever the grief of the flesh is interrupted by metaphysics. Listening carefully to what he said, one hears the friction of two dissonant languages: existential gravitas and religious consolation.

The middle portion of his speech delivered existential gravitas: we can barely comprehend the events of our normal lives, let alone the chaos of a massacre; words alone cannot resolve trauma; our children are that part of ourselves we are always surrendering to the world; we cannot be happy or even functional without each other as community; we are this world for the children of others, as others are this world for our children, and we have no choice but to take responsibility for each other and the world. But for reasons both political and psychological these somber and inarguable facts required a religious framework to be digested or even considered. And so the speech was bookended by references to the soul and the mysterious intentions of an omniscient and omnipotent god.

I understand he was speaking within the context of a religious vigil, and in this sense his statesman/rhetorical choices, even if they insulted the non-religious, were as appropriate as covering one’s head in a synagogue, or removing one’s shoes in a Hindu temple. I also know that the President is a believer. His language was a reflection of his firmly held convictions about how human life is made both meaningful and consolable through the presence of an unseen soul, an unseen god. I have no doubt as to his sincerity, although with many other agnostics and atheists, I question his assumptions.

Admittedly, the very structure of his role carries an implicit metaphysics. The President’s flesh, especially in moments of public sacrament, is not the flesh of a single human, but the totem of everyone invested in his office. This is the origin of the “royal we” in courtly etiquette: his flesh is a sublimation of our own. In terms of socio-mythic structure, he is not a man speaking about god’s intentions, but rather a seeming conduit of the intentions themselves. Given his role, it would be very difficult to not deliver the metaphysical goods. Hundreds of millions of viewers would feel that a sacramental contract had been broken. They would feel abandoned by the god the office is unconsciously constructed to project.

Risking outrage, I’ll pose this problem of the two languages harshly. One language is descriptive. With quivering breath and a quickened pulse it attempts to register the visceral horror of twenty children, six teachers, and the shooter’s mother, each executed with eight or nine bullets that ripped through their tender flesh, exploded their faces, sprayed their blood and sinews over bedsheets and blackboards and crayons and newsprint art projects and desks and bags of cookies for snack time. It is a language of flesh, and evidence. Alongside it, trying to distract and soothe and comfort it, religious language calls out through an unfindable soul to an unprovable god, a meaning-maker beyond ourselves. It speculates on divine intention, and envisions a perfected afterlife.

For those it does not offend, religious language might serve many good purposes. As a trauma response, it may provide immediate relief from the horror of the descriptive. It may allow the narrative mind to momentarily relax its demand for causation and closure for long enough for the flesh to recover from shock and regain the innate courage and perseverance of the autonomic nervous system. Religious language may allow us to direct a deep breath to the places in which we are gripping and contracted. The sonorous recitation of prayers and creeds may allow oxygen and blood to return to the organs, while the hands and feet regain their warmth. As a shared heritage, it makes a choir of a tribe. When a hymn swells, its singers naturally reach for each other’s hands. In these moments, the dogmas presented within the language might be irrelevant. Religious language may simply invoke a relaxation response, help to digest emotion through sharing, and give us the resolve to return to matters at hand with renewed resilience that says: come hell or high water, our flesh persists. We want to be here, together. We shall nurture each other. We shall not be moved.

Ideally, anyway. For the problem with religious language and metaphysical referents is that they can also allow their speakers to absent themselves indefinitely from the visceral experience of trauma, and then hover there, within dissociation, distracted from evidence that is plain to see, fantasizing about the mysterious will of either God or the Founding Fathers, endlessly repeating to themselves articles of faith, psalms of propitiation, and misreadings of the Second Amendment. Former pastor Mike Huckabee’s empathy has been so twisted by this dissociative aspect of religious language that he could not tolerate for a single day the weeping exit wounds of twenty children without consoling himself and rallying his constituency with the insane notion that the children were victims of those who insist on church-state separation. Pastor Huckabee, standing at the edge of a pit of slaughtered babies, turned his back and babbled about his god.

It was a masturbatory performance. Huckabee surveyed incomprehensible suffering, and to relieve his tension, he retreated – publically, belligerently – into a self-soothing private fantasy of revenge, where god’s justice, though unfathomable, somehow establishes order and safety by deciding who shall live in privilege and who shall die in absurdity. What a festering heart to live with: to be so invested in a god that that god is the first thing you think of and must pontificate about when you are confronted with real people trying to scrub real blood out of the library carpet. Of course he will ignore evidence: from gun-violence statistics in agnostic cultures to temperature data from climate scientists. He is interested in his fantasy, not the world he lives and votes in.

Someone should give Pastor Huckabee a job. Hand him a roll of forensic tape. Or a scrub-brush. Or a small hammer, to tap finishing nails into the tiny coffins, and actually feel the world again.

Some will say that Obama and Huckabee are talking about different gods. Obama’s god is a New Testament god, a process god, a god of renewal and resurrection. Huckabee’s god is an Old Testament god, the psychopathic god of Abraham on the mountain, a god of wrath and punishment. I think these are minor differences when considered against the broader issue of how metaphysical language itself is used. Pastor Huckabee actually agrees with me here: he praised Obama’s spiritual invocations. He’ll happily lay aside the obvious differences between their theologies – liberal and evangelical. Why?

Huckabee approves of Obama’s scriptural references because they harmonize with the general dissociation of the arch-religious and socially conservative mind, which rarely seems to focus on people and relationships except in terms of disgust, while fixating upon ideals and laws-by-fiat that they believe will protect them from change and death and growth. Pastor Huckabee is happy when Obama endorses through his Pauline references the root Abrahamic myth that happiness and love are paid for in blood sacrifice and that human violence is intrinsic to the divine plan. His traumatized psyche is most pleased, perhaps, with anything that distracts us from evidence.

So here’s the problem with Obama’s ministry: “god” is not a safe or neutral meme in the rhetoric that tries to soothe trauma. Not only because “god” has little meaning for a demographic that grows by the day, but because too many people will use “god” not to heal their torn human relationships – their real relationships, the only relationships they actually have – along with the material conditions that support them or degrade them. They will use “god” to avoid relationship altogether. Ontologically, affirming an eternal mansion in heaven, or having a “personal relationship with Jesus”, or the deeply offensive notion that “god has called” the children of Sandy Hook “home” is no different from “knowing” that the Founding Fathers intended for school teachers to be armed. Such positions harmonize in the symbolic order, where the fearful retreat to escape the pain of blood on the cafeteria wall.

For the intellectually honest, metaphysical language must be metaphorical. It plays a poetic role, not a judicious one. I can’t assess Obama’s intellectual honesty, but I would imagine that as he is speaking, and transitions from the crushingly granular focus upon the boy who wanted to protect his teacher with his white-belt karate moves to the vision of god calling that same boy’s dead friends “home”, he can feel his cognitive faculty move from the descriptive order and diffuse into a symbolic horizon. We can feel the exact same thing in a less charged manner as we sit reading this post, if we look down at our arms and say “This is my shirt”, and then close our eyes, soften our focus, and say: “This is my life.” The oscillation between detail and abstraction is a primary tool of poetry, and we know that poetry heals something within us. Neurologically, it strengthens the bonds of the corpus callosum, which coordinates the perceptual and cognitive biases of the two hemispheres. I think this is what the President is doing, what he wants to do.

But I hope he becomes more self-aware. Perhaps then he’ll find another way to console – a way that does not stand arm in arm with Pastor Huckabee (or by extension Wayne LaPierre), and fuel the public masturbation of traumatized dissociatives. A way to console that doesn’t obscure actual causes and conditions, and cuts a clear path towards correction. Those who are truly intellectually honest understand that every metaphor comes at a price, and will strive to use their symbols to strengthen our gaze upon horror, and to act as swiftly and as certainly as parents who see harm approaching a child.

I’m making the same point that Sam Harris and others have made ad infinitum regarding religious-moderate language: invoking a forgiving and intelligent deity rationalizes the deities of sacrifice and punishment, not to mention nationalism. When the President invokes god as metaphor, he holds the rhetorical door open for Pastor Huckabee to invoke the pride and vengeance of Yahweh, and for Wayne LaPierre to blubber in evidence-free jabberwocky.

The poetry of the symbolic order should give us the space we need to come back to the real, breath renewed, to face calmly the material duties we are called to. In this case, the material and realistic duties are obvious: change the conditions by which a suicidal young man can destroy the flesh of children with a weapon designed for armageddon.

There is a clear difference between the realists who know that a weapons ban is the only meaningful answer to civilian bullets ripping through the flesh of six year-olds, and gun-rights-metaphysicians who counter that such restrictions are limitations upon “freedom”. The realists are able to use the symbolic order therapeutically, to descend from it as they know they must, restored in some way from their shock. The gun-rights-metaphysicians cannot. They float from symbol to symbol, from fantasies of violence to fantasies of god’s will, to fantasies of freedom, assiduously avoiding the gore of what remains of these little boys, these little girls.

I don’t imagine that these dissonant languages will ever untangle themselves completely from each other to clarify our existential expediency. We have evolved religious language for good reasons, and it won’t be leaving us any time soon. I myself still feel it well up within me in circumstances of joy and grief: this is my heritage as an ex-Catholic. I am glad that religious language can comfort some of the mourners of Newtown as they bury their dead. They need all the help they can get. But it would be best if metaphysics – in its religious, nationalistic, and legalistic forms –were eliminated from the hard work that is always at hand.

I can hear, if I get really quiet, an embodied sacramental language of mourning. A language that is aware of the function of its poetry, and doesn’t allow its poetry to bury any evidence. I’ll end by rewriting the first paragraph of the President’s speech in such a language, removing or at least grounding anything that might dissociate. I long for a speech that does not invite us to fantasize ourselves clear of our trauma, but links our trauma firmly and without distraction to what we are called to change with our hands, given the evidence of right now.

President:

Scripture tells us:  “…do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away…inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.  For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.”

Rewritten as:

Those who are wise tell us: the seasons change. We rise and fall like wheat, but sometimes in rhythms that defy understanding. Even so: do not lose heart. For as we suffer, we feel empathy, and empathy overflows to connect and bind us more strongly, even to our future. As individuals, we are not here for long. But our actions remain in this world that abides, this home, to be enjoyed by those who follow. Our love today will become their food. Our policies today will become their civility. Our flesh will become their soil.

1. Structural Flaws Mirror Interpersonal Flaws

When the Anusara scandal broke, I suggested that a structural flaw in mass-market yoga was as much to blame for the community’s implosion as John Friend’s shreenis. Namely: a homeless, credit-card-and-air-miles-dependent “movement” built on a mostly-fictional spirituality will probably incubate many thin, dishonest, celebrity-heavy, mutually-enabling, power-distorted, ungrounded, woo-woo relationships. I argued that Friend created the perfect mirage to cover for his shadows and sins: a transnational brand of universalist sentimentality so thick with the jargon of Shringlish that his top shareholders lost their ability to speak truth to power.

We can judge the personal shadows and sins as we must, and call for justice as we should. But as we consider the larger themes of yoga culture and pedagogy I believe we also have to pay attention to is how these shadows calcify into the social structures that then protect them. I think we can agree: we really want to stop creating yoga schools that purport to teach yoga when their corporate and spiritual bureaucracies force them to do the exact opposite.

We want to stop it in Encinitas, but equally in Chennai. Because now it is even more clear that corrupt yoga community is not simply the specialty of late-capitalist yogis, who have been accused of both appropriation and shameless invention, and who, because they lack “grounding in the tradition” are presumed to be ripe for scandal. Dysfunctional community is also to be found at the acclaimed root of the modern global yoga tree. Recent allegations against Kausthub Desikachar have enveloped the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram (KYM) and Kausthub’s affiliated venture, Krishnamacharya Healing and Yoga Foundation (KHYF), in scandal. It smells like the Anusara situation, notwithstanding the fact that the two organizations run on opposing meme-sets (neo-Tantric , and neo-ascetic) and have built their marketing on differing modes of celebrity (the self-made man, and the genetic heir). To me, both of these corporate yoga models are dysfunctional, and if we look at them clearly, we can envision something more real.

At least five women have accused Kausthub Desikachar of emotional abuse and sexual harassment. The details are out via this letter from KYM insider Sriram, and they are nauseating. I encourage you to read them to appreciate some of the analysis that follows. He stands accused of psychological intimidation, spiritual bullying, humiliating his students sexually in group settings, subjecting female students to bogus “granthi” massages, promising to endow them with special powers through intercourse, and of course demanding silence and secrecy from his victims. Rumours abound that the number of his victims are much higher. Reports have been filed with the police in Austria.

I am sure that other very painful stories will emerge over time. The elements are achingly familiar: systemic sexism, vulnerable students seeking psychological validation, magical thinking, a self-deluded, developmentally stunted and perhaps sociopathic teacher abusing his power in the hotel rooms of his ennui. What we’ll have to dig for is the murkier but critical social story of Kausthub’s enablers, from his associates at KYM and KHYF, to his American and European hosts and champions, all the way up to his father, the venerable T.K.V. Desikachar, son of the late T. Krishnamacharya.

Inquiring into T.K.V.’s possible enabling role at this point will be very uncomfortable. The man is in declining health. As we can see from Sriram’s public letter, his students will now feel compelled to protect his sanctity and legacy, upon which many of their own reputations are surely hinged.

But the question must be asked: is everything in order at the top? It seems that as far back as 2007, key figures in KYM/KHYF were complaining loudly about Kausthub’s predation, and their voices were either unheard or silenced. V. Saraswathi hand-delivered a letter to T.K.V. on July 24^th, 2007, detailing Kausthub’s abusiveness and misogyny going back for more than a decade at that point. What is so painful about her appeal is that it is being made to the man who is perhaps his primary enabler:

But there comes a point when the very teachings and practices you have empowered us with have woken us up from a very deep slumber… Many people in this tradition, just like me, have woken up to a very harsh reality – in the form of your prodigal son. This may also be your wake-up call.

A. Ranganathan, a long-term student of T.K.V., writes:

It hurts me that Sri. Desikachar, a stickler for discipline and ethical behaviour among his students and teachers, turned a blind eye to his own son’s unpardonable misdemeanors.

We don’t know if these charges of negligence are true. KYM/KHYM should be responding to them transparently, and quickly. But so far, key players seem to be ducking for cover. The first thing that’s happening is that the non-profit parent organization, KYM, is trying to sever ties with the for-profit “son”, KHYM. Sriram calls, in fact, for a boycott of all KHYM activities, and – presumably – its affiliated teachers. A former student of Kausthub, Scott Rennie, has decried the unfairness of this action, describing how the two organizations have long-term financial ties, and that the programming activities of the Kausthub-led KHYM have recently been a substantial portion of KYM’s income, to the point of having paid in full for their new building in Chennai. Indeed, KHYM lists T.K.V. Desikachar as one of its founders and a head faculty member. And in light of the breaking scandal, T.K.V. and his wife Menaka have resumed proprietorship over KHYM. On November 6^th, they are scheduled to preside over an “Evening of Healing”, during which they will offer Vedic chants for the community far and wide. From the outside, it certainly looks like Kausthub has never fallen far from the tree: his organization is being reabsorbed even as he is being isolated. Which calls into question the 10/19 statement of KYM Managing Trustee Dr. Latha Satish, who writes: “The Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram has never had and never will have any involvement with any activities of the KHYF.” A key objective of Satish seems clear as he closes his letter, “As always we seek your continued support and patronage.”

I don’t imagine amputating Kausthub will be easy, nor should it be. As with the Anusara episode, we are seeing at KYM/KHYF a corporate yoga structure that seems to have allowed a terribly wounded and insincere person to hold power for over a decade over those who seek healing and sincerity. As the curtains are drawn back, both scandals raise profound questions about who is given authority in yoga culture, how we form learning relationships, how we project our yearning onto idols, how we nurture intimacy, and where we consider the heart of our practice to lie. It’s becoming clear that neither fly-by-night showmen nor the patriarchs of tradition offer functional and transparent leadership for our new yoga culture. It’s becoming clear that neither the entrepreneurial model of Friend nor the dynastic model of the Desikachar family can form equitable and democratic community. It’s also becoming clear that often when we chase a hyper-spiritual dream, we deepen our evolutionary sleep. We have to find another model. I don’t think we have a lot of time before the entirety of yoga culture becomes a pop-culture punch-line.

2. Pain and Confusion as a Community Unravels

I want to be very clear that in my analysis of both situations I am not implying that meaningful connections and lifelong learning can’t or didn’t take place on the kula-bus or over chai in Chennai — or, indeed, within the context of yoga instruction. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of students have benefited greatly from the tools and networking that both Anusara and KYM/KHYF have offered through the years. This makes the story all the more complex and painful. My critique is aimed at the cultural frameworks of ungrounded celebrity-worship (in John Friend’s case) and corrupt hierarchy (in the case of KYM/KHYF), and how these both squander the true potential of yoga community. I hope to shed light on why we’re attracted to these structures, what we can do to force them to change, and how we can turn our attention elsewhere.

I want to acknowledge that one of the most difficult things that happens when a scandal like this breaks and challenges the integrity of an institution like KYM/KHYF is that many people who enjoyed their learning experience with the organization and benefited from it suddenly feel polluted and defrauded, as though the abuses they were unaware of at the time now somehow invalidate their own personal narratives. For those of you who feel this way – and especially those who are currently enrolled in the now-paused KHYF programmes in Austria, Estonia, and elsewhere – I hope that you can take comfort in the notion that the goodness of your learning experience speaks mostly, if not completely, to the integrity that you brought to it.

I also want to be clear that as I critique KYM/KHYF, I am doing so from an outsider’s perspective, which means that I am analyzing how the organization presents itself to the public, the commonly available documents that expose the scandal, and also presenting insights from conversations I’ve had with those who have been affiliated with KYM/KHYF over the years. I have never met any of the principles involved, and I bear no one ill will on a personal level. This makes this article a political act, aligned with the commonly accepted practice in modern democracies to analyze and critique public figures and institutions from afar.

I’m including this quasi-disclaimer because in my experience so far I’ve found we’re still trying to get comfortable with open critical discourse of our leaders and institutions in modern yoga and mindfulness culture. In response to two instances of my criticism – writing about Anusara and exposing the deadly corruption at the heart of Michael Roach’s neo-Buddhist cult – I have received hundreds of emails from devotees accusing me of interference or malice or jealousy or even blasphemy, because, I believe, they are intensely hurt by the revelations and do not know where to direct their anger.

So where is this “afar” from which my observations come? I’m a community builder in Toronto yoga culture. My practice has been honed in India, the U.S., and Canada. I am a non-denominational practitioner fascinated most by the integrative embodiment strategies that yoga has to offer, and how they intersect with somatic psychotherapy and neuroscience. I care little for yoga metaphysics and less for gurus. I am compelled to write about KYM/KHYF because I am a shareholder in the broader yoga tradition and have a deep interest in how it can become a globally relevant culture. And when something as bad as this happens, I have to act.

On a personal note, I also have to act because my own baby boy was born just this week, and something in me aches for the tangle that T.K.V. and Kausthub are in. I wish them transparency and healing, and I week for father-son relationships worldwide.

Being primarily a North American yogi also means that I cannot speak to the politics of KYM/KHYF from an Indian point of view. Having spent some time in India, I know that KYM/KHYF is embedded within a web of cultural influences that I will never fully understand. I hope that my postmodern and North American critique inspires something equal from an Indian counterpart, who can speak to the meaning and position of KYM/KHY within Indian yoga culture particularly, and Indian culture generally.

3. Resorts and Ashrams, Vacations and Pilgrimmages: Where Shall We Find Yoga?

As I described last winter, the Anusara situation presented a kind of systemic vata derangement with regard to relationship, intimacy, and home. Too much air and wind element, too much wandering-lust, too many qualified elders bailing out of the tour bus, too many householders borrowing against their homes for yoga vacays with John, too many DVDs, too many breathless people opening their unboundaried hearts at too many eco-resorts. The violations of Kausthub and the so-far hunkered-down responses by KYM/KHYF, by contrast, seem to have the sticky coating of excess kapha. Entrenchment disguised as stability. Stunted infantile sexuality. Self-satisfaction disguised as authority. Possessiveness over teachings disguised as “lineage purity”.

Constitutional imbalances aside, both organizations project the same distortion: yoga as an exoticism to be purchased in a place more hallowed than your hometown. There are differences, but I believe each system leads us away from our hometowns and existential facts. Friend hawked the pseudo-Tantra of “follow the Shri”, while KYM/KHYF promotes the throwback transcendentalism of Patanjali. Friend was always a little more accessible in the “manifesting abundance” department, offering a liberal distribution network: he vended in conference centers and wellness destinations, and assessed his students by video. The Desikachars, by contrast, have leveraged their exoticism through an opposite, scarcity model: you have to make a pilgrimage to their home to get the goods. In a way, Kausthub has bridged the two models with his travelling training show, but the umbilicus of his authority reaches back to Chennai.

Here’s my main point: between the junkets to Shringri-la and the devotional pilgrimage to the feet of teachers upon which we project our unintegrated wishes, I believe our daily experience, local resources, and workaday lives – which is where our yoga is really found and learned in the end – are vastly undervalued. Our studio newsletters and yoga magazines are filled with advertisements for places that are anywhere-but-here.

Why not just stay home and build grounded communities, rather than corporate satellites for cultures not our own? Is it too plain-Jane? Too every-day? What is this star-dust in our eyes?

4. Assessing the Memes and Products of Corporate Yoga

I’ve gleaned certain things from the opposing memes of Anusara and KYM through the years. The pilgrimage to KYM seems heavier in tone and commitment than zipping up to Denver to Blow Your Mind™. Those I know who have gone to Chennai speak of their trips in low voices, using few particulars. They use the word “authentic” a lot. They take their time with their words, cloaking what they have learned with caution and humility. This is in stark contrast to the barkers of Shringlish, who couldn’t seem to refrain from bullying everyone with the presumed divinity of everything. They’ve recently gone quiet, thankfully.

The KYM/KHYF product seems to be framed by the journey to KYM/KHYF, a pilgrimage to make contact with the body of the son of the father who lived there once: T.K.V. is the lineage-holder of a kind of cryogenized shaktipat. I imagine he has needed to hold this power close, because he offers no easily-extractable method, as does Friend. You can’t boil yoga therapy down into UPA-style sound-bites, sellable in 20-hour doses in Puerto Vallarta. Yoga therapy demands the touch of a master so intuitive and specialized, it cannot be packaged. You have to sit at his feet for years to learn how to do it. It’s so very complex, you might just have to be his very son to understand it, inherit it, to own it, and to pass it on.

The Anusara product offered a lot of excellent instruction, but seemed to stake out its financial position through a kind of grandiose self-validation scheme, available to everyone who could pay to play. The KYM/KHYF product is subtler and richer, projecting a hushed sanctimony, and available to those willing to devote themselves to months per year in India, and a lifetime in the master’s shadow. On the Anusara side we have a product that shareholders are eager to divorce from its disgraced inventor. They can afford to dispense with Friend, because they can divide his product from his charisma. But on the KYM/KHYF side we see a product that is intrinsic to the master’s DNA. If T.K.V. is found conclusively to have sheltered his son from ethical scrutiny, what would be left of the organization he has built upon his character and his family name? He seems to have delegated relatively little substantial authority, except to his son. Even one of his most prominent Western students, Gary Kraftsow, was forced by some behind-the-curtain intellectual property-rights battle to rebrand his teaching syllabus as “American Viniyoga”. “American”, as in: “parts of it came from somewhere else, but now it’s mostly my own thing.” The message seems to be that real viniyoga remains safe within the Krishnamacharya gene pool, although they no longer even use the word “viniyoga”. The deeper message? Genes trump knowledge? This is sure to backfire when the genes begin to deviate.

5. In the Shadow of the Fathers

I’ve thought for a while that the global attraction to a place like KYM/KHYF is in part an attraction to the same paternalism that now factors heavily in its troubles. Perhaps our drive to follow the son of the father of modern yoga, and then the son of the son, reflects our chronic need for a protective “authentic connection” to the “source”. Perhaps KYM/KHYF is a popular self-transformation destination in part because it serves up yoga with a sheen of that paternal certainty for which postmoderns are unconsciously nostalgic. See the tintype portraits in the hallways. Dream of being adopted into this venerable caste. Dream of approval, of being at the centre of things, of the benediction-pat on the head.

from kym.org

But seriously: who believes that father-son dynasties are altogether healthy? I look at those pictures of T.K.V. sweating through asanas under the “eagle eyes” of his father and wonder: Did you really choose this? And your son – did he choose it too? Or are we seeing in you guys a chain of demands, and the anxiety of influence?  I remember the story of Krishnamacharya snapping both of young Bellur Iyengar’s hamstrings to force him into hanumanasana to show off for visiting dignitaries. How imperious might he have been with his own son? It is clear that Mr. Iyengar has gone on to injure some if not many of his own students. Aadil Palkhivala stood in front of a room I was in a decade ago and smiled as he regaled us with the story of how B.K.S. humiliated him by commanding him to perform handstand for an hour in front of the group. “I couldn’t lift my arms for six months afterwards!” he laughed, which is what men do when they don’t know how else to process the absurd violence committed upon them. (They also laugh in deference when they are still scared.)

Elder male/younger male – not to mention father-son – dynamics are complex enough without adding in the spectacle of a public family business built upon spiritual exceptionalism. Anyone with a shred of basic psychoanalysis on board can see that T.K.V. stepped into a long shadow when he donned his father’s dhoti. And I imagine that if we scratch the surface of any of these first families of modern yoga we will see – as we do in every family and every culture – strong evidence of transgenerational cycles of violence and repression. Or do we think it’s somehow all simpler and more benign because it’s Indian?

6. Infantile-Aggressive Sexuality

One of the strangest themes in the allegations against Kausthub is his apparent aggressive sexual infantilism: enshrouded in magical thinking, enraged frustration, intense guilt and slut-shaming. These are accounts of a child-man playing sadistic doctor: pressing marma points with enough force to send one woman into convulsions, slapping buttocks and poking breasts, creating public scenes of icky innuendo, and assaulting female students with full-tongue kisses and potty-mouthed epithets. This is not John Friend’s schmaltz of multiple smooth-talking seductions and sophisticated lying that kept women waiting for him in supta baddha konasana in every port-of-call. Although it seems like Friend’s neo-Tantric sexuality couldn’t just be sex either – it had to be “therapy”, involving the very well-known and double-blind-tested procedure of “urethral-pouch massage”, for example. Or it had to “raise energy” for the coming global Shreevolution. It could be anything except intimate.

If the allegations against Kausthub are true, we’re seeing something much darker in Chennai. I’ll read it, hypothetically, through Freud:

Kausthub seems to present a sexuality arrested at a pre-Oedipal stage in which the child-man has been wrenched from the maternal sphere to be disciplined into the patriarchal path, and is now turning to women to beg for attention and validation as he tries to overcome his father’s power. But he unconsciously hates women, projecting onto every one he meets the image of the mother who seemed to abandon him. He digs deep into the misogyny of patriarchy, and runs with it: women are troubled, they are sick and degraded, they are possessed – and the fact that they do not yield to him proves their pathology. He pokes them, prods them, punishes them and slaps them like an overgrown toddler. This is straight-up limbic brain sexuality, murky and aggressing. It fears castration. It’s neither procreative, nor self-confident, nor joy-seeking. It is overwhelmed with a BPD-like terror of abandonment. It attempts to impersonate the power of his patrilineage: he told one woman that having sex with him would heal her, because he would let her hold Krishnamacharya’s ring during intercourse. It is the gross amplification of the sick and fearful tremor that many boys feel on the terrible threshold of autonomy and sexual action, and which he has not been allowed to resolve.

The tremor will deepen to the extent that a boy has been force-fed the psychological splitting of a sex-shaming and body-digusted tradition. Should we really be surprised at the shadow-explosions of a man like Kausthub, given his spiritual heritage? Given that T.V.K. and KYM/KHYF have taken their neo-ascetic reading of Patanjali as their root scripture, which says “By purification arises disgust for one’s own body and for contact with other bodies” (2.40, translation by Sacchidananda)? Or given that all Krishnamacharya would say about the sexual practices of the 3^rd chapter of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika was that they were “dirty”, and “improper”? Or given that A.G. Mohan, Krishnamacharya’s other senior student beside T.V.K., is still giving Victorian-era tsk-tsk-ing lectures on how “Spirituality and Sexuality are Diametrically Opposed”? What are we to expect, amidst this much repression? A man-child with urges that disgust him throwing himself at women who both disgust him and whom he must objectify, all in the shadow of a father who unconsciously humiliates him with his virtue, fame, and sublimated virility.

AG Mohan, fellow long-term student of T. Krishnamacharya with T.K.V. Desikachar, expressing the master’s neo-ascetic view. Mohan posted this video in response to a KHYF course in “Yoga and Sexuality” offered by Kausthub, whose shadow life may have been aggravated by this type of systemic sexual repression.

7. Boycotting Guru Culture

I say: let’s help KYM/KHYF close up shop for a few years and do their family/communal therapy in private. When they re-open, it should be with a revamped Board of Directors in which less than a third of the members are direct students of T.K.V. Desikachar. Administration and devotion shouldn’t mix. When they do, decisions benefit internal delusions more than the common good.

Let us encourage senior KYM/KHYF teachers to make full disclosure of what they knew about Kausthub’s behaviour, when they knew it, what they did to address it, and what they saw others do to enable it. How can they remain qualified as teachers of yoga therapy without this step?

Let’s request that KYM/KHYF refund 100% of the course fees of any current trainings with Kausthub that have been suspended because of the legal action — including for portions of courses that have already been completed. Interim KHYF director Anupama Das has already tried to head off this obviously-ethical move at the pass by declaring that in one current but unfinished programme, “intangible knowledge has already been transferred”, and that discussion of refunding would acknowledge guilt. I would argue that the best-faith gesture KHYF could make would be to refund immediately to show willingness to restore confidence amongst the student body. They should also suspend their tasteless request for membership renewal monies. It is precisely this kind of bureaucratic arrogance that amplifies the interpersonal arrogance of which Kausthub is accused.

Let’s go further, and request that if any former students of Kausthub now feel that their certifications are invalid, that their fees be reimbursed.

Let’s request that KYM/KHYF offer to hire independent, qualified therapists/counselors to meet with anyone who has been in a programme with Kausthub if they apply. These counselors should be fluent in therapeutic languages outside of the language of yoga therapy, which I’m sure has been gutted of integrity for many of these students. The last thing they need is someone “correctly” massaging their granthis or re-tuning their cakras.

These are ethical no-brainers as far as KYM/KHYF is concerned. But the global yoga community can do even better than this, and take this terrible opportunity to show that we can actively take care of our own, while carving out new models of relationship.

Let’s take up a collection – maybe launch a Kickstarter campaign? – to help the victims with their legal costs and to finance those students who desire to complete their training, covering their travel expenses, etc. This recovery-training should take place with another organization, i.e., one that has not lost their trust. Perhaps another yoga therapy institute would consider organizing a special training period for those who wish to continue. Perhaps the students might ask Mr. Kraftsow if he is available. Let us also ask the associate-teachers of KYM/KHYF — especially those who distanced themselves from the organization based on suspicions they were not able to confirm at the time — to provide active support and mentorship for those who are now trying to “exit”.

And in the meantime, the rest of us can stop fetishizing the perfect and the exotic. Sriram’s letter calls for a boycott of Kausthub’s activities in order to sever him from the fathership. I say: let’s boycott guru culture altogether, because it’s not working. While we’re at it, let’s stop being bamboozled by charisma, and let’s give up on the tyranny of the “authentic”, because it should be clear by now that everyone is creating something. Yoga culture is growing because we’re making stuff up, for better or for worse. Adventurous teachers are creating dance-asana hybrids. Hatha and mindfulness are cross-pollinating. The Desikachars have created a family dynasty out of a name and a disparate array of practices. John Friend created Shringri-la. Creativity isn’t the issue. Motivation is. Transparency is. Developmental maturity is. (I don’t care who your guru is — if he hasn’t gone through some kind of psychotherapy because he’s too special or famous, he’s probably got a pile of unexamined shit in his closet, and he’ll look for any opportunity to dump it onto you.)

Things might be simpler if we just ditched the language of lineage altogether. Honestly: there are no real “lineages” in modern yoga. There are movements, art forms, brands, celebrities, and memes. Ideas float, combine, change, and disappear. Irony: Krishnamacharya himself was a syncretist, a bricoleur – sewing together a tapestry of Vedic, Tantric, and Hatha influences, collecting techniques from Lanka to the Himalayas. Who was around in his day to crown him “authentic”? He did then what we’re doing now – weaving together the tools that make sense to us in our own time, regardless of where they come from. He opened a bunch of old boxes and put a bunch of stuff together in a creative way. Assuming he nailed the whole thing down and passed it on completely to his son is like thinking John Lennon mastered music and then mind-melded all his talent into Sean. In what other sphere would we imagine that a son had osmotically absorbed the grace of his father, other than one so rife with magical thinking and totemism?

At the nitty gritty level, boycotting guru culture means looking at the ways in which we’re seduced by an over-determined notion of “teacher”. A regular and useful teacher of yoga is just somebody with good manners and a few good tools for self-inquiry they can show you in an encouraging way. You learn with them until you more or less get what they have to offer. But in the process you’ll make it into your own thing, because what’s worked for them can’t ever completely work for you. When you’re bored you’ll move on to someone who has a different focus. No teacher can give us everything we need: expecting them to is a psychologically immature refusal to accept the always-incomplete nature of the growth process.

8. Where the Real Teachers Are

It’s taken me a bunch of years to wipe the star-dust out of my eyes, but now I have a good sense of where the real teaching is. If you live in a city of a million or so, I guarantee you there are at least a dozen teachers who have been instructing asana and breathwork and meditation in relative obscurity for fifteen years or more. They began in the mid-nineties or before, when YTT programmes were few and far between. Maybe they took one, maybe they didn’t. They learned what they could from whomever they met, and did a lot of work at home. They stopped spending their money on the big conferences a decade ago. Some have traveled to India for ashram retreats, and some have road-tripped through the mid-sized towns visiting the older teachers who also work in low-overhead, quiet studios: mentors like Francois Raoult in Rochester, or Kim Schwartz in Albuquerque, Erich Schiffman in Ojai, or Angela Farmer wherever she shows up. They’ve practiced consistently and read and digested many of the key books. They’ve been teaching and learning and serving, largely on their own, mostly unrecognized.

But most importantly, our best not-famous teachers been living their normal lives: giving birth, raising children, paying taxes, voting, getting injured and recovering, working out sexual issues, staying put most of the time, sitting on PTA boards, getting married, getting divorced, celebrating anniversaries, getting foreclosed on, feeling tired, getting cancer, opening something new, undergoing chemo, doubting what they do, going into remission, and loving what they do, relapsing, crying in the dressing room after class. Their yoga is practical and bling-free, it’s not jacked up on power dynamics or heavy paternal pressures. Or if it was, they got over it. They know just enough to show you just enough for you to find your path. They are good-enough. You don’t have to take out a second mortgage or learn Hindi to learn from them. They are just like you, only a little older. You can see into their lives plainly. You’ll never amplify their flaws into social crises, because you reflect each other’s commonness too closely.

O precious teacher!  Precious, precious teacher – humble and good, kind and normal – however shall we find you? I’ll tell you how. It’s dead easy.

Go to any class at any yoga studio. Approach the teacher after rolling up your mat. Ask them “Who are your favourite well-rounded senior teachers in this town?” They will give you three-odd names. If they all work at that same studio, press for two more names. If they’re all under 40, press for two more. Make a commitment to yourself to go to each of the named teacher’s classes in the following months. You will definitely find somebody you resonate with. Someone who is good enough to simply start you on your own path of inquiry, which is all you really need. They won’t be perfect, and they know it, and that’s good. They can’t give you everything. Some day you’ll move on.

Forget heart-openers on the beach in Costa Rica. Forget prostrations in Chennai.

We need to learn from someone like ourselves, right where we stand.

What we need is as close as we are to each other. We’re here to learn together.

Idols stand between us because we prop them up.

Falling, they will become human again, and seek healing and integrity with the rest of us.

_______

I have to do this now while I am alive and awake. memories are fragments pulling towards each other by the magnet of absence. the people who are still here, circling a gap. drops on a window conjoining in gravity. two small hands, reaching into space.

jenna sails through the door at the last minute, rushing to meet her students. she dashes upstairs. I stand in the lobby watching her bag swing on a hook. she trails autumn air in her clothes. then her voice from above: is that you, matthew? are you here? you downstairs? where is my lovely matthew-baby?

years ago her dreadlocks wouldn’t fit under her bike helmet. now she takes it off and ringlets fall about her shoulders. my past tense will be inconsistent when I speak of her.

everybody knew that always on the edge of being late was a function of how much love and service she crammed into her day. and here we are ourselves: always on the edge of being too late.

she used to say my body is built for asana. before she would teach I spied through the studio door as she warmed up. her eyes closed, her spine long: step forward, breathe, step forward, breath, jump back. when she breathed her breath seemed to shimmer over her silhouette in a wave. she was wiry but had learned to soften, and by softening to find a broader strength. this was natural for her tissues, and she let her tissues teach her emotions in the same arc. this took a longer time.

I stand a foot taller than her and 90 pounds heavier. but one day she picked me up like a baby, slung me around in thai massage on a cotton pad. she grit her teeth and moved me.

she told me a little of her past. she scrapped and fought for years and then started lighting candles every morning.

after the bartending ended and the chanting began, after devotion broke into her confusion like a lighthouse beam, after committing to teachers and a sadhana –there were still hard years. no money. crossing the city 4 times a day on the green bike. (green is ruled by mercury.) trying to align classes and clients into reasonable time frames and vicinities. insomnia. lucas getting sick or having nightmares. in spare moments, she meditated or did the breathwork she’d learned. when that didn’t work, she smoked a cigarette or two. smoke made her breath visible: okay, look. I’m here. I’m working. I’m here and I’m getting through this. look at my breath.

one afternoon i came around a corner and saw her in the hallway embracing my ex-wife. holding her around the waist, pinching her a bit here and there, stroking her hair and quietly talking about my step-daughter, all grown up and in england. you have such beautiful hair. do you miss her? i can’t imagine how you feel. but yes you could, jenna. i stood back. my ex-wife missed the flesh of her flesh and was bathing in the tribe of one.

florian told their meeting-story at the funeral: the first time he saw her she was beginning to cross the street, and she was almost clipped by a car. so as it passed she kicked at the fender. the driver stopped, got out, and shoved her down to the pavement. florian rushed him and beat the shit out of him. then he helped her up with their eyes locked together.

I think her father died alone in china. alcohol I think she said. I wonder what kind of booze they drink in china, when they are abject. he was so far away from her. I remember her saying she had to arrange for his ashes to be returned two weeks before lucas was born. she stood at the desk at the chinese embassy, filling out repatriation forms on paper so thin her pen ripped through it. and her water ready to break.

[I would like a woman who was close to her to describe at this point in the text how she gave birth. maybe her doula? I need a co-author here, or to leave this shining and blank.]

there were years of family bed. she slept lightly, watching them both.

then florian got sick with lymphoma. she came to me trembling and weeping. what will happen? will you see him? when he came to see me I understood how she loved him: this alienated lion of shadow and flare. I told her that in ayurveda lymph disturbances were kapha and according to this he needed support but freedom from possessiveness and attachment.

his cancer was a volatile existential fuel. he looked at fear and flinched, and then settled in for the dark night. taking his shame in one hand and brashness in the other said come here my shadow let me wrestle you. I could see that jenna had married a man, and not one of these boys slouching around nowadays in skinny jeans slipping down. together they wrestled their flesh towards love and his cancer towards dasein.

they loved to the quick. they loved their friction. she lit her candles, and he lit blowtorches – I think he builds things. she wouldn’t have suffered someone without his black forest must. she let him be faustian and she loved it. he let her be a madonna/magdalen in teal, and he loved it. they chafed away each other’s roles, throwing off bright sparks. their virtue was lawless chiaroscuro.

she gathered all the herbs and recipes to purify him of cancer. he could manage some of it. but soup wasn’t enough to help him confront despair. she knew this, and allowed him to grieve, and mend his body through ultimate freedom, ultimate responsibility: through angst. she gave him space. she wept with me and said I love him so much, and I need to surrender to his pain, and mine.

when he recovered he wore his black euro-snaz suits with deeper austerity. saturn, rejected of the sun, taken into the fold of venus, now diplomatic with death.

(see how lucas rides his broad shoulders now, following the urn and piper down the aisle.)

jenna used to wrap her teal sarong around her in any-which-way. when she was still nursing she had no modesty. it fell open. just like our hearts when she asked us how we were doing.

there’s a picture with lucas in a sling on the beach, and darlene with the goofy hat. (darlene, darlene: how can we hold you?) back in the city the sling was functional. it let baby lucas hug close, while like a village woman from another century, she worked the fields of our hearts.

the week before she died she wanted to buy the last of my ghee. I just gave it to her, of course. money is basically meaningless to both of us. although I always had more money than her and this seemed terribly wrong. I had to push it into her hands as she protested and then batted eyelashes and said I’ll get you back my matthew-baby. she held the bottle at her rounded belly and reached for her helmet.

carlos told me over the phone first. I’d never met him but he was instantly my brother, and I wanted to drink with him to the very bottom of the night. then it fell to me to phone a hundred friends to give them the news. I came to fear, expect, and then finally welcome the impossibly long silence on the line. because the story was ruptured, I needed grammar and syntax to stop. because she had been crushed, I needed to hear breath and breath alone.

a week before she had wanted ashwagandha to stabilize the fetus. this baby was coming late in her life, you see. I gave her a pound of the ground root. the name means “sweaty horse’s balls”. and shatavari: “she who can please one hundred husbands”. because she was always on the edge of underweight. her body was like a kite under her breath. her family was the kite-string, staked to earth element, this dream of continuity. sweaty horse’s balls: she laughed and laughed. she actually liked saying shweaty.

she had no beliefs but rather great faith in doing things, faith in the things that were to be done. she used spirituality as a gesture to the relationships she could feel and act in. like every mother, she had no time for metaphysics.

she came to me once in tears about selling the studio she’d built with her friend dana. she couldn’t manage it with the baby and everything. but everyone and everything was her baby and why should she have to choose? every pregnancy was hers.

she was a pincher. she pinched flesh and made it pink. cheek, tricep, thigh, bum. she was a big bum pincher. women and men both. everyone was her baby. but she was also saying: I hope you’re getting enough sex. you deserve it. making sweet love is why we’re here, you know.

for staff meetings she sometimes had to skype in from ottawa. the shot was grainy but her eyes flashed. in the background glowed the walls of a childhood room. I think I saw a pennant from school. and a softball trophy? her mom’s computer was old. she was always apologizing for her crappy technology and vanished e-mails. she had a gnarly old cell phone with a busted screen and buttons crusted up with baby food, always lost in the bottom of a purse. it was useless: no technology would translate her body or feed her child.

she would leave the longest damned phone messages, interweaving business and intimacy in an excited gush of wanting to be close to your body. the distance of the phone frustrated her. you could feel her hands reaching down the line to pinch your ass. I used to skip ahead to the end of her messages, and now I regret this.

for community meetings I would make sweets from ghee, roasted mung flour, ground almond, shredded coconut, spices, and jaggery. sometimes she ate a half-dozen, feeling more and more grounded with each bite. her chatter slowed down, her ass got heavier on the floor, and she started to absorb the motherhood she bestowed on everyone else.

she was cremated. all the food she ate, which became her body, disappeared into light. I fed her food that turned into her flesh and then into light.

the moonstone hanging around her neck encouraged her to take on more water, with lime and soaked date and sea salt. it reminded her to keep her weight on. it reminded her of being pregnant: wearing ovulation around her neck. my eyes went from her eyes to the moonstone. when she was skinny it nestled into her clavicular notch. as she gained weight in the last months it lay on the surface of her flesh and moved as she spoke.

a catastrophe destroys the storyteller. i catch myself trying to speak a consolation, but it sticks in my heart. how is anything supposed to end?

in december michael stone wrote me an email that said only: grief, grief, and all is alive. i agree, and add to the refrain:

grief, grief, my body is alive.

grief, grief, her ashes are alive.

grief, grief, her little man is alive.

grief, grief, the white bicycle is alive.

grief, grief, the bike pirates are alive, with bike locks in the back pockets of their skinny-ass jeans.

grief grief, the rolling city is alive.

grief, grief, the pavement is alive.

grief, grief, the truck is alive.

grief, grief, the apartment as a womb of grief is alive.

grief, grief, the undertaker’s suit is alive, hanging in a black closet.

grief, grief, pinching each other makes us alive.

grief, grief, the dead are alive. they are here but we don’t know where.

grief, grief, the caregiver’s weeping is alive.

grief, grief, the caregiver is losing weight but she is alive (I was so worried about dana sweet dana).

grief, grief, mass cards and lilies are alive.

grief, grief, Sabbath candles and unrisen bread are alive.

grief, grief, the space between the truck’s wheels is alive and vibrating with death and the future.

grief, grief, krishna’s open mouth and grinding teeth are alive.

grief, grief, the driver is alive, and his children.

grief, grief, her crushed helmet is alive.

grief, grief, the maple trees are alive, it is november.

grief, grief, the men are alive, but they still feel like boys.

grief, grief, the yellow leaves on the ground are alive.

grief, grief, the kettle is alive, the loose tea waits in the pot.

grief, grief, her clothes in the closet are alive.

grief, grief, her purse is still messy, and very alive.

grief, grief, she leaned over me and her chest was radiant and alive.

grief grief, her shoes by the door are alive.

grief, grief, the ova are alive.

grief, grief, her husband is alive, wandering the black forest.

grief, grief, her son is alive, clinging to his father as to a raft, hesitant heroes.

grief, grief at the beginning of the line is a heartbeat.

grief, grief, the grief is alive.

as a choirboy in soutane and surplice I once sang: did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown? in the end that goddam jesus might win my heart after all. a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

it was the most splendid fall. everyone has felt it. a bright quickening. more of us out on our bikes, and later in the season, despite the bastards taking away our bike lanes. a splendid fall. moments of resolution that pass and leave us gutted but invite more to follow in a cascade. a splendid fall. we’re going to repaint bike lanes on the pavement ourselves, in the middle of the night, in teal.

jenna died on a monday. on the sunday before I was downstairs packing up my ex-wife’s favourite belongings to ship them off to england. I was crying with loneliness and floods of memory, missing my step-daughter, missing the complexity of the broken bond. jenna came down after her class was finished and knocked on the door and came in and saw me and knelt down beside me and then took me in her arms as I wept and shivered. she put her right hand on my sternum and placed my right hand over her navel. her round belly, in the sun.

still shivering and sobbing, I told her that in the midst of my breakup I’d fallen helplessly in love with a woman. she broke into this huge grin: who is it, my matthew? and I told her the woman’s name, and she knew who it was, and her smile got wider: o that’s very good. that seems just right. then her face darkened a bit. but I’m sure that makes it harder for your ex. I nodded and wept harder still, unbearably and mystically guilty for what simply was. but you can’t help that or change that. I shook my head, weeping harder still. and no matter what happens, everyone needs a little tenderness. we do the best we can in love.

from jenna: a pause. a grin. a pause. a grin. then: so are you going to have babies together?

I nodded and wept harder still. I always thought you would be the best papa. I sobbed and said I hope I am not too old. no way you’re not too old, and you have good health. you are totally full of life and you will make new life and it will change everything. she cradled me, and my tears went quiet and cooled on my cheeks, and then she left my arms and sight for the last time, and I continued on with the day, and I continued on with many days, doing the same things I did when she was alive, but with more resonance, and teal in every shadow.

and today it is easter, and I walk in the sun on quiet streets with my lover, her left hand in mine and her right hand on her shining bump. baby will come sooner than all understanding.

Sunday morning, this beautiful empty winter in Wisonsin Dells.  Neon vacancy signs in front of a hundred 50s motels go pastel in the crystalline sun.  A few old pickups outnumbered by leased minivans prowl the parkway towards church or a sleepy buffet of powdered eggs and maple-flavored corn syrup.  Matchbox-flimsy roller coasters cut cubist arcs against the frigid blue, icicles glinting from the cross-ties.  The outdoor water parks are barren but for their enormous cartoon sculptures grinning down at summer’s absent children, and across drained blue pools like bedpans of molded plastic, kidney or pear-shaped, the twigs and leaves and beer cans gathered around the drains in frozen halos of inconsequence.  Transports hum on the interstate behind the Wal-mart and Home Depot at the town limits.  There is everything to buy, but spending begins again in spring, in preparation for Memorial Day, which should be called something else.

Look in the mirror.  See how your own eyes are strange to you; see if you can hold your own gaze.  Feel time passing like humans with nothing in common except the suspicion they’ve nothing in common.  Look in the mirror: allow yourself no comparisons, no weighing of circumstance, no judging of situation versus expectation.  Life is a luminous absence of meaning.  The hard-disc whines and zings its memorization of binary essences.   It spins and whines as his eyes loll shut, backing up his soul.

At times he has felt on the edge of satisfying answers, balanced cadences to rich prose.  But the edge has disappeared, and there’s no big drop-off — just a generalized sinking, buoyed up at moments of inadvertent participation in a culture he no longer has the energy to critique.  And there’s a lot of waiting-room, pause-button time, both desired for and created by pawning the real questions off on somebody else, and then pretending to be open to new answers.

All very liminal, o so post, and that’s all great, whatever, but goddam it, help.  He’s an unmedicated possibly clinically depressed stalled-out novelist with fresh abandonment issues, working for reality television, the grind of which puts the great themes out of his focus, out of his reach.  And yet the great themes focus on him, they reach him, they reach right inside, unbidden and matter-of-fact.  Answer the question.  At night he feels the hand of a sculptor around his heart.

You are born into a body and a place that you do not and will not ever understand.  (Intervening happy moment: something impressionistic in the nursery.)  You learn through pain and fear to accept the logic and permanence of pain and fear.  (Intervening happy moment: Cookie Monster.)  Your mother and father are as kind to you as they are able, but in their eyes you see the reflection of the outer dark into which you are slowly hurtling.  (Intervening happy moment: there are walks in the park, a petting zoo.)  You form relationships in order to share and verify your fragility, and even these ones betray you, to form alliances with those more or less fragile than you (Intervening happy moment: sitting with Marcus in a cineplex, agape at the Star Wars matinee.  His hand is big around your own.)  (Question: is agape meaning agog related to agape meaning love?)  The perpetual and monstrous danger of the physical world shadows your days and floods your dreams.  (Intervening happy moment: you have 20 bucks and you’re on the downtown train with your best friend, at the age of 14.)  The web of interpersonal betrayals through the adolescent years makes your malaise more specific, and you look for things to blame.  Sitting bolt upright in bed, you are one of billions, each unknown to each, and everything that everyone is doing is insane.  There’s government, money, money, authority, money, the “way things are”, older people who are smug in their achievements, war-mongering, your peers enlisting in the military for college scholarships, a burning pile of tires, young conservative parties, sell-outs of all persuasion especially artistic, disposable plastic shit, people who seem to like their lives, the growing fatigue of your parents that you call apathy to their faces.  (Intervening happy moment: meeting a girl one night at closing time.  You went to her place and she had a white cat.  She said I could fall in love with you. It was perfect because you didn’t screw.  You don’t even know if she had a regular vagina – could have been a tunnel of pearls.)  Because the world is hopeless, you answer with the idea of  personal apocalypse; undying death, day after day.

He’s always been a dramatic thinker.  Absolute this, absolute that.  If you’re not for me you’re against me.  It’s nothing if it’s not everything.  A perpetual fencing with definites, under an ambivalent sky.

Now a new self-judgement was dawning inconspicuously.  After this lifetime of self-obsession, this stormy impostering of Narcissus, a thousand contracted nights of pornography and Leonard Cohen, this searching through modern literature for the novel that his deep reserves of deeper experience would surpass, all the late-night viewing of classic French films rented from the local betty boop and granola dvd shop, after all of this serious pursuit of self-knowledge, he was finally beginning to wake up of the mornings with a eerie blank light around his head.  A halo of no big deal.  The cat gazes at him from the end of the bed and his heart rips open with mute love that makes his buried suicidal thoughts peal and list like a happy sea.  New snow on the lake, cross-country ski tracks giving  evidence of normal goings-on, white smoke over the ice-fishing huts, rumours of people doing things that he would never waste his precious self-examination time on — all of these things were normal and around him and inviting him to a brighter world of less importance.  Other folk seem to live their lives quite just-so.  Perhaps nothing was in the way of the sun.  Waking up relaxed, with nothing to overcome.  Creation was never your competition.  There are billions of cats like this one.  Billions.  Not one of them burdened with the need to achieve something beyond being furry and yogically comfy.  Death cannot stop this or anything, nor should it be avoided.  Goddam who knows what to do.

As an imposter of Narcissus, he was failing in one respect.  Narcissus was honestly enraptured with himself.  Out of control, beyond the basic morality of even knowing about other people.  But he knew of other people, to be sure.  In fact his self-interest was built on an awareness of other people, and a jockeying into line with them before his internal judge.  The fact that these other people were not as self-interested as him amounted to points in his favor.  Always comparative was his self-interest.  Somehow impure, because it was based on the premise that his own mind was actually more interesting than anything else on the periphery of his sphere of possession.  So the shocker was: ‘Maybe I’m actually not an extraordinary person.  Maybe I’m not even that intelligent.  Thinking for three decades that I am intelligent does not make me so.’

And let’s just revisit the phrase, ‘a thousand contracted nights of pornography and Leonard Cohen’, which you dashed off in a spasm of needing to express ‘a long time, full of wasted passion and secret communiques from our better angels’.  Brush aside the poetry like dust from a skull on a fossil dig: nobody was counting, but it really was close to a thousand nights.  And you really did spend the minutes and hours and breaths and heartbeats on meaningless luminous pursuits.  And how many nights are there in your life, between the age of mastering the basic skills of being a person, and the age at which the great denouement of personhood begins.  The window of who you are as distinct from others is an opalescent sea of ten, fifteeen thousand nights.  You spent them doing this, and  that.  They are gone, and now you’re spending time remembering them, confused about their relevance.  Moments of pride, nostalgia, regret, and boredom.  This is your material, your characters are in your heart.  We have some idea of where the heart is.  But where is the story?

Okay. Last post. Maybe.

I’ve really been warmed by the strength of the discourse emerging from the Anusara experience. Blogs and comments are flying, phones are ringing off the hook (what a quaint old phrase!) and barrels of tea are flowing. It’s clear from the posts and threads of Brooks, Birney, Pomeda, Ippolitti and Brower, as well as compassionate outsider analyses like this one from Michelle Indianer, that we share a ripe opportunity to gaze calmly through the wreckage and heartache towards a yoga culture that actually mirrors yoga just a little bit more.

My deal has been to focus on the incoherence between corporate and communal cultures. (I also did a thing on the Ayurveda of the whole sitch.) My basic community-centred argument is this: notwithstanding figures like John Friend as both idols and phalli, the airplane and hotel-bound modus operandi of any transglobal yoga corporation will have a hard time fostering grounded relationship, because it mimics the alienation of all late-capitalist structures. How could it not? Either cynically or unconsciously, the corporation will try to hide its relational weakness behind escapist/transcendental philosophies, exclusive knowledge hierarchies, classist economic barriers, distractive marketing copy written in Shringlish, and the palm trees and spa robes of its resort-retreat-intensive gatherings. Eventually, the corporation will come to rely upon the weakened capacity for transparency amongst its adherents to continually conceal its obvious nature as a power system brokered by charismatic narcissists and their enablers. It will run on the carbon-heavy fumes of the spirituality of tyrannical happiness: the most despairing form of consumerism. This spirituality is a paper-thin consolation for guilt and despair. Tragically, it distracts adherents from serving all others and healing our ecology.

Inspired by the comments and questions on this view so far, I want to pull two functional propositions out of this analysis, and let them breathe a little more broadly. I’ll again limit my focus to the form and structure of the community issues involved. The content (John Friend’s psychology, the psychodynamics of cults, etc.) will continue to slowly unfold on a granular and therapeutic level. I think this can happen more easily if safer structural space is created.

1. In yoga it is obvious that economies of scale obstruct relationship. Go big or go home? Let’s go home, thank you very much.  Let’s think smaller.
2. Transglobal corporations need definable and saleable products. A Yoga Method with “Universal Principles” works well for its marketing, as we have seen. But a trademarked product cannot be a therapy.

Through spotlighting these two issues through the following reveries, I think the collapse of Anusara begins to show us a structural way forward – involving a smaller scale, localism, inclusivity, and existentially reasonable philosophy, with (fingers crossed) a new-found focus on social service.

more than six mats in the room and you lose relationship

I’ve been teaching asana for nine years. About eight years and eleven months ago I realized that the tripwire from intimate pedagogy into yoga-styling performance lay at about six mats per class. More than six students in the room, and I would lose my ability to do what I cherish most: interact with each body and its needs, each personal story and its possible temporary resolutions.

How much more yawning would this absence of intimacy be for John Friend or other top-tier Anusara (or substitute any name-brand here) teachers, who regularly teach to hundreds at a time? A one-way lecture format might work with big numbers – but asana? Really? When every posture and adjustment and sequence should really be dictated by constitution, real-time bodily needs, injuries, and biorhythms?

More importantly – what pours in to fill the gap in pedagogical intimacy? The performance of virtue? Likely. Clichés as vague as newspaper horoscopes? Probably. A bias towards celebrating uniformity over diversity? Yep. I wonder whether the philosophy of Anusara became more and more simplistic in direct relation to the fact that John Friend eventually spent way more time interacting with crowds than with people. And simplicity, of course, is the groundwork of marketing. Find that perfect meme, trim that tagline down. This the opposite of responsive therapy.

It’s pretty clear in Ayurveda: if you’re doing good work as a therapist or teacher, you simply can’t make much money, because “good work” depends on small class sizes, and limiting your consultations to 4 per day, tops, unless you’re some sort of genius. But more importantly, the individual-care demands of Ayurveda mean that generalized herbal formulas (for instance) are of limited use. There are no panaceas in personalized naturopathy. This means: nothing to patent, nothing to brand. Each churna is best blended from scratch by a practitioner who contemplates the uniqueness of the client as the pestle gently rubs against the mortar.

“But product-driven capitalism is the system we have” comes the rationalization. Sure: but it’s also the system we do, and I for one would like to do it less and less, and smaller and smaller. There’s no reason my small classes and low client flow can’t earn me a middle-class income to support a modest family life. Interacting with 6-8 students at a time in my living room or someone else’s will net an average of $75 per hour in cash and trade. I can work about 15 public hours per week (backed by about 45 hours of practice and preparation) without getting exhausted. This nets a little over 45K per year, which keeps me well in dosas and chai. If more money comes to me than this, it would come from writing (yeah right), which for me is simply a process of transcribing and distilling the intimacy of my therapeutic experience. I always loved the sound of the word: santosha.

douglas in madhurai

I don’t know anything about Douglas Brooks’ mentor in Madhurai. But I’ll brush off the old novelist’s chops for a moment and speculate on a few things, just from looking at that beautiful picture he posted on EJ. His learning environment was quiet, humble, functional. He probably sat on that carpet for hours, not doing much, happy and warm (sometimes too bloody hot to move), received and receiving, chatting gently with Appa about everything from G_d to cricket, stirring the dal and fetching ladoos for guests. He probably learned as much about cooking and family dynamics as nirukta in his time there, and when the day came to bring his lovely daughter to the gurkula, I’m sure the old man made her princess for the week. I’ll also bet when Douglas finally started drawing a post-hippy paycheck he tried to wire money to Appa and later found out he’d given it to some orphanage down the street.

For however many years, Brooks slurped up the fresh-squeezed gurukula juice, now so rare in our world of bottled and from-concentrate. It took time and quietude. Of course, he brought his own precocious skills to India in his tatty army surplus duffle bag, but I’ll bet they were honed into analytical brilliance not by flashy knowledge nor charismatic displays, but through the light that glows in space held intently between fellow learners. It is a small light, in small rooms. The smallness keeps you humble, because you know there’s lots of light in other small rooms. This doesn’t have to just exist in the past, nor in India alone. om, sahanavavatu. If we’ve been in love, we know how yoga gets transmitted. We don’t have to settle for less. The trick also lies in not wanting more. Think smaller. The word santosha really does sound like what it means.

yoga should be a local masala

If you wind up learning yoga in a honking convention hall, hungover from plane travel or carsick from the interstate and smelling like the mini-soaps in your hotel bathroom, you’re probably getting shafted. I think we can all feel that in our bones.  But I’ll go further in my praise of the small: the only reason that any yoga system should even want to move beyond the kitchen and living room in terms of scale might be to mirror the fact that we humans seem to need our micro-levels of government to receive supportive oversight from macro-levels. It might therefore be useful to have some kind of international yoga organization in some form, but only to engage in international politics, perhaps as a charitable NGO to shadow a particularly non-yogic international system, such as the IMF. We can’t let ourselves think that a creepy office complex in The Woodlands, Texas, is somehow going to foster intimacy in Baraboo, WI. “The center cannot hold”, quoth Yeats. And should it even try to, when every day is a winding road, and each new town a joy to discover?

Throughout India, yoga traditions are like masalas: hyper-local, bubbling over with jolly secrecy, lauded and gossiped about near and far, and impossible to export. Anusara made the fatal mistake of trying to patchwork the appropriated localisms of the Other into a centralized universalism. It cannot work for us, for despite our dissociation, we too are local at heart: the river sprites of Connecticut have different lessons to teach than the mountain gods of Taos. Most likely, the local gods will eventually pull us away from the transglobal idol. (And if they don’t, divorce or death surely will.) In my sannyasin phase I hope to hitchhike from town to town, and answer the question for myself: “What does the yoga taste like here, I wonder?” I’ll remember to drink a lot of broth and slather myself in ghee to keep my vata at least somewhat in check.

a “Method” does not exist outside of the way it is shared

My therapist once said to me: “I fuckin hate therapy methods. The worst thing a therapist can have is a fuckin method. Because then the interaction becomes all about the fuckin method instead of the relationship.”

This is at the heart of my second point: a trademarked product cannot be a therapy. Because it is in nature of trademarking to provoke the one-way relationship of producer and consumer. Consumerism derails the therapeutic.

In an understandable attempt to save a sinking ship, it sounds like the meme of “Anusara Method” is being thrown around by those who are hanging onto it by their nails as though it wasn’t the direct and ongoing outcome of the hierarchical relationships that shared and promoted it. The “Method” is sounding pre-ordained, now canonized, eternal, outside of us, something we all signed up for in the presence of G_d and that we didn’t continually bend to our shared purposes.

Can anyone continue to say in all seriousness that the method of Anusara is somehow distinguishable from the way in which John Friend and his teachers and his students related and continue to relate to each other? Did it really come from somewhere else? Does it really exist beyond the classes and conventions and somewhat-shrouded Gurumayi references that echo somewhat-creepy Muktananda memories and the parties and the workbooks and the syllabi of postures newsletters and levels of training? Where is the Method beyond its practitioners and how they have behaved? The spirals become real through the spiraly femurs. The loops manifest through the loopy shoulders. You can’t take yer spandas without yer scandals. Both men and Methods cast shadows. It’s all in there together. We are, warts and all, the very expression of our methods.

the ambivalent authenticity of methods/products

The branding of an “authentic” learning method requires precise definition: overdetermination, in fact. You can’t copyright what you haven’t determined. But ironically, the outcomes of learning are never determined. That’s why we call it learning.

Overdetermination governs the reified object, method, or product. Its perky definition makes it excruciatingly other from you, who are undefined. You hope that its completeness might bestow completeness upon you. The glitzier its completeness, the more broke your brokenness. We hear in the shiny whine of wholeness-marketing an anxiety that splits the heart.

Only the branded thing can be profitable, lifted up and out of context and touted as applicable to everyone and everywhere. Its alleged universality depends on fuzzy and presumptuous terms (“the Teachings”) and a lot of capital letters: “You and I always shared a love for what is Good, Shri, and Delightful” writes John to his coven-mate. (Because the relationship is unstable, the sentiment must pretend to be.) The capital letter is the primordial trademark sign.

But there’s a more troubling tension, which I hope to see Drs. Brooks et al address: it feels beyond my grasp. There is a perennial drive within yoga culture towards “authenticity”, which employs notions of inherency and ultimacy. This energy can be very easily co-opted by strategies of commodification. The mechanism of authenticity in capitalism is ownership: a thing becomes a thing through its trademark. The real and the true are established by protecting them against the assumption that someone wants to steal them. I think we have to take a long hard look at how copyrighting, economic exclusion, and the natural scarcity delusion fostered by both capitalism and the charismatic leader prey upon our need for authenticated (“certified”) spirituality.

Something tells me it may have something to do with Cabbage Patch dolls. Remember them? Now you do. You’re welcome.

During some 1980s Christmas shopping season there was a shortage of these puke-ugly dolls. Some joker claimed to have a planeload of them, and they would airlift them to a field outside of the city. All you had to do to gitcher doll was to show up in the field and hold your credit card skyward so that they could take a picture of the number, drop the dolls in little parachutes, and complete the cha-ching. So there stood a hundred suckers shivering to death in the late November afternoon, saluting the sun with their Visas, praying for an ass-doll (with a stamped certificate of authenticity!) all their own. The butt-faced cherubs never descended.

Obviously, yoga needs some additional and more transparent metrics for the authentic. I would start with the following: the authentic mentor never has more students than he/she can hold close to the heart at any one time. The authentic mentor considers him/herself a creative compiler and practitioner – not an author. The authentic mentor can’t imagine packaging up what she knows into a product, because she knows there’s too much she doesn’t know. The authentic mentor says “I don’t know” a lot. The authentic mentor busts open the canon with apocrypha. The authentic mentor is transparent about his/her practical and personal challenges, and through this transparency he/she shares power. The authentic mentor makes clear choices to deflect or unknot any spell of grandiosity that creeps into the exchange. I had one crazy-wisdom teacher who took great delight in ripping loud stinky farts and belching wetly during satsang. He had his own authenticity/integrity problems, but fame and vanity were not among them.

method is relationship

Indian pedagogy has always insisted on three pillars of authority-exchange which I think might help cut all the “Method”-talk down to relationship size. The pillars are guru-sisya-sastra: mentor-student-book. (“Book” in this case might stand in for “method”.) I learned about this triad, old-timey fashion, this way: the mentor needs the student just as the parent needs the child, to extend life and passion into the future. The student needs the mentor to empower them. The book keeps the mentor honest: “on-book”. But the book has margins that the student can write in. And as the book gets passed from mentor to student, it becomes rich and palimpsested with notes, underlinings, and pressed flowers. But if a third person picks up that book, they won’t be able to reconstruct or inhabit the relationship that co-wrote it. They can read what they like, but they will be reading an artifact of an encounter. They might glean the “Method”, but certainly not the means.

If we strip Anusara of its brand-locked (i.e. prematurely canonized) “Method”, what would we have left? Some really useful evolutionary memes: spirals, spandas, the value of giddy/goofy pleasure in vinyasa (in moderate doses). A general mood of hope and encouragement. I’m not diminishing things here: I’m sure there’s much more. I’d like to see these memes show up everywhere, unbranded, like spraypaint tags in the laneways behind yoga studios, as part of our authorless overflow of learning.

Or another metaphor: I’d love to see Anusara deconstructed into tiny bits of code, freely traded by yogis, hackers of the human experience. In the open-source world, it’s just plain rude to hold onto anything for yourself. The assumption is that useful things will be cobbled together into even more useful things, not by individuals pursuing possessive goals, but by the hive, expressing unconscious empathy.

notions for moving forward: make it open source

If you practice yoga, you have skin in this game. Because what happens now with the Anusara crowd has heavy implications for the general cultural perception of our beloved evolutionary art. Look at how the New York Times is consistently Broad-siding the lot of us. What happens now will impact everyone who has worked so hard to bring yoga into school Phys. Ed. programmes, for instance. What happens now will define yoga’s ability to speak truth to power, yoga’s political relevance, yoga’s capacity to work with dysfunctional relationships, and yoga’s therapeutic capital. I see modern yoga as a revolution of faith in embodiment and love for ecology. It is well-positioned to address core issues of human psychology – alienation, dissociation, reactivity – while providing an experiential gestalt to our scientific discoveries. It is very important for all of us that yoga transforms from a consumer cult into a community culture.

So I hope the newly-ordained Anusara Steering committee, along with new half-owner Michal Lichtman, doesn’t waste time polishing turds. There’s an opportunity here for something more. Currently, Anusara presents a highly-functional infrastructure standing as open as an empty city, holding millions of hours of networking equity. It can benefit many: not by resurrecting a Method-as-product by detaching it from the thrall of John, but by actually doing what it failed to do in the first place: support localism and the creative evolution of the Method into methods, of Shringlish into dialogue.

I have many niggling nuts-and-bolts ideas about yoga community structuring – mostly around how we might better use money – which I’m developing for a chapter in a new book project edited by Carol Horton and Roseanne Harvey. I’ll save those for that.

I was going to end here by laying out a big radical suggestion, but Douglas Brooks kinda scooped it. And then, in a way that has yet to come into focus, the Yoga Coalition perhaps scooped it as well. I too think AY should dissolve. But my concern is less about the insider-outsider, new AY/old AY frictions and more about resisting the general aparigraha of branding and rebranding.

Anusara can’t become a real non-profit if it remains reliant upon what has been a for-profit product. The best way that Anusara can improve the relational integrity of its Method is by giving it away for free. The best way that Anusara can prove its usefulness as a method is by seeing what its value becomes as an open-source tool, beyond the echo-chamber of those who have a vested interest in proclaiming its value because they’ve either invested a lot in it, or because they make at lot from it.

Some guidelines as to how this would work:

• Give up the trademark. Allow the word Anusara to become as nebulous and evocative in meaning as hatha.
• Continue to use the language if it floats your boat. But also allow others to use the language – in fact, teach them freely how to use it well so that we all have more tools to work with.
• Offer the syllabus and manuals freely to the general population. Offer the video products at cost.
• If you really do have such a great training programme for postural instruction (and I believe you do), offer to consult for free with Yoga Alliance – G_d knows they need some guidance in the standards department.
• Keep all of the teaching dates on John’s current calendar open, but assign teachers to the events who are local to the venue, so that these events stop dissipating local energies by creating unsustainable flash-in-the-pan learning infatuations.
• Lower the tuition prices of the 2012 events to cover the venue costs only: the teachers teach for free. It’s only a weekend. They’ll manage.
• Make the 2012 tour the primary means for dispersing the Method into the general yoga population. Call it the “Passing the Torch” tour. Or maybe go ironic: “The Scrapyard Tour.”
• Change the theme of the tour to generalize the content for the broader yoga population. A guiding principle might be: “What is the core gift of this method as I’ve learned it?” And, more importantly: “How does this method interact with other methods?” This would force prominent AY teachers to peak into what the rest of us have been doing.

In this proposal, there’s nothing of real value for anyone to lose, except a few weeks of pro bono work. Senior teachers have made enough from the brand: they will continue doing what they do best, and hopefully develop useful idiosyncrasies to meet their students’ unique and local needs. They’ll be fulfilled and suitably pecunious in their careers to the extent that they learn and teach transparently.

Nobody in the Nonusara world wants to give John Friend a red cent at this point. If the Method remains under any kind of copyright, we’ll be forced to pay him whenever we want to learn from one of its teachers. Releasing the trademark means cutting John free to make a living like the rest of us, floating from studio to studio, gym to gym, getting paid by the class or per mat, slowly reclimbing the mentorship ladder into his late middle age. If cutting him off seems cruel, and if his senior students really want to take care of their own and thank the man for his many innovations, let them all chip in an buy him an annuity to help him retire with dignity and a dental plan.

Anusara doesn’t need more money or to protect its teachings. What it really needs to see is whether its methods can function in intimacy, stripped bare of the spa-dazzle and doublespeak.

And everyone wants to stop shivering in the cold, waving our credit cards at the dim winter sun.

I’ve had a number of questions about the Ayurvedic riff in my last post on the Anusara situation. I had suggested that the bio-rhythm of a corporate/transglobal spiritual culture built on air travel, resort-land heart-openings, Shringlish, and gobs of marketing wind would be intensely aggravating to vata dosha. I suggested that John Friend might do well to take up gardening and turkey-baster an ounce or two of warm ghee up his rectum every afternoon to relax the vayus and bring him down to earth. But there’s quite a bit more to say here, and I won’t be as flip.

The principle behind my suggested protocol involves “the application of opposites”. The homeless, hyper-mobile, light, fast-paced, and breathless quality of the Anusara collapse can be pacified through various expressions of warmth, weight, stillness, moisture, regular stool production, oiliness, and familial cuddling. Ayurvedic therapy begins here: identifying a central imbalance, and applying  balancing/opposing forces to existing vulnerabilities. The most precious thing I learned from my teachers was ‘There’s nothing good or bad. A thing is always good-for, or bad-for.” The technique uses any tool available to correct qualitative imbalances in diet, asana and other physical pursuits, career path, relationships, meditation experience, and even spiritual path.

But here’s the problem that Ayurveda face as it tries to re-integrate with the new streams of modern postural yoga. The therapeutic application of opposites is antithetical to a culture that markets ideas of universality and ultimacy. The very notion of “Universal Principles” implies that a single thing can be good or right for everyone. Obviously, this is not true.

Modern yoga culture is dominated by overdetermined methods and systems protected by branding and copyrighting. Branding and copyrighting amplifies a more traditional fixation upon “authenticity” and “completeness”. As those who have invested time and money and emotional ballast into the Anusara meme try to sort out the value of their stake, there’s a rising chorus emerging that suggests the Method is yet pristine, still universal, embodying a preternatural authenticity and completeness. While understandable, this reification will only strengthen the root of continued commodification, as we’re starting to see with the recent “restructuring” announcements from Michal Lichtman, which don’t really restructure anything at all. I’d like to address the “completeness” claim in a post next week, and how it amplifies the bullying of spiritual marketing, but for now I’ll limit the question to: “Even if Anusara is ‘complete’ and it ‘works’ – who exactly does it work for, and how?” That’s what Ayurveda can speak to.

Here are some first thoughts:

For those with chronically miserable self-perception, the Tantric assumptions of always-already-divine and the admonition to “Look always for the good” might be encouraging, in an Adlerian sense, or from the perspective of CBT. But for those who have developed heavy patterns of emotional stuffing or splitting, too much bliss-speak might be toxic. All constitutions are vulnerable here: kaphas may use it to suppress pain, pittas may use it to deny pain, and vatas may use it to dissociate from pain.

For those who feel alienated from community and withdrawn from intimate contact, the ubiquitous backbending of Anusara might indeed “open the heart”. Gentle thoracic extension is also a smart antidote for computer-back. Great. But for those with poor boundary issues or a history of compensatory behaviour, repeated backbending might exacerbate patterns of relational sacrifice. Let’s remember that consciously opening the sternum depends upon less-conscious abdominal extension: the baring of the belly to primal vulnerability. This might not be the best action to repeat in the context of a dysfunctional power relationship with a narcissistic guru, for example. And the pace at which backbending is tackled is important in discerning the almost-invisible threshold between “opening” and retraumatizing. In another vein, for the pitta-dominant, the constant adrenal-squeezing of backbending (if not antidoted by generous kidney-looping) may over-caffeinate, overheat, and bring a fanatical edge to a practice and/or belief system. Also: we do have back-bodies, folks. That’s where the shadows be. The forward fold of surya namaskar is an invitation to the sun to illuminate what we cannot see.

For those who have been rejected by their families and micro-cultures (as Shaka McGlotten astutely pointed out in a comment to my previous post), the surrogate tribe of the kula might be very welcoming. But for those who have not even attempted to integrate their familial tensions and wounds, this surrogacy can be a grand distraction while time passes, parents age, and estrangements deepen. In Ayurveda, this can also contribute to vata aggravation, as the life-story becomes less rooted, and memories (subtle earth element, along with supportive fats) dissolve.

For those whose angst is heavy, Shri can brighten a gloomy day. But for those who are existentially naive, Shri might lobotomize. For those who are insecure, the piercing heat of this bija mantra (agni), combined with the abstractions of its meanings (akasha), can whip up a good case of vata-pushing-pitta into udana vayu. This is in fact what gives that sharp tenor edge to charismatic speech, which is heavy on insistence, but sometimes scant on balance and detail.

For those whose homebody-ism aggravates the emotional and lymphatic congestion of kapha, a weeklong retreat to the Sierra Nevadas to do vigorous vinyasa while living out of a tent can be invigorating and catalyzing. (Come to think of it, all yoga retreats should offer constitutionally appropriate lodgings: no mattress pads for kapha, lavender sachets and rosewater candies for pitta’s bed sheets, and lots of velvety pillows and binkies for vata.) But for vata types who never quite know where home is to begin with, traveling to practice yet more flowing movement will be even more ungrounding. And watch out for constipation: added altitude (space element) and dryness (air element) can be real corkers.

For those who have felt postmodern banality obscure the natural mystery of moment-by-moment life, Tantra can re-enchant. But for bliss-ninnies so wispily enmeshed in the etheric mystery that they cannot find their apartment keys, let alone effectively help others or contribute to socio-political change, Tantra can hyper-mystify.

For those who have felt disembodied by technology, the absence of physical labour, and the general pornography of a overly-visual world, rigorous asana might be the most enlightening practice available. But for those who feel the need to discharge their neuroses into grinning repetitive movements in the frontal plane on a 2×6 rectangle of rubber, asana can be profoundly distractive from relationship.

So it all depends – even into the realm of spiritual paths. Are the aesthetics of zen appropriate for vatas? Too cold and abstracting, perhaps. Is Iyengar good for pittas? It may satisfy a need for precise accomplishment, but it can also encourage anal fanaticism. (And hot rooms? Fuhgeddaboudit.) How about bhakti and kapha? Well – if they chant heating mantras at a good clip, this can raise a good therapeutic sweat. But if they loll around singing languorous bhajans and munching on ladoos under the Ganesh murthis, both mucous and lethargic self-satisfaction can accumulate.

In newage culture, we typically encounter spiritual paths in one of two ways: through marketing, or through word-of-mouth. Both tend to feel accidental, and neither of them are intersubjective. Meaning: we encounter the path as a thing we are told we want, rather than experimenting with a loose set of ideas and their mentors as a relationship we could develop. If we had Ayurvedic guidance counselors for every city, we could set up some kind of yoga chamber-of-commerce: “No – you don’t want to go to that guy, his fire will fry out your own. Try the kapha lady down the street: she’ll chill out your pitta.” Or: “It sounds like you have a real fascination with metaphysics. Maybe you can balance that out with a nice kitcheri cooking class, or by volunteering in a homeless shelter.” The application of opposites brings us deeply to wherever our conflict lies, and doesn’t allow a spiritual path to amplify our blind spots in flesh and thought.

Word-of-mouth is a better entrée into a spiritual path than marketing, because your self-selected friends may well be constitutionally resonant with you. But straight-up marketing pulls on the worst possible strings for anyone trying to dance freely of the puppeteer: insecurity, lack, alienation, we know the deal. We’re almost never sold what we need, but what protects our unexamined pain. So it’s really hard to choose the right path. You have to know yourself really well. But you don’t at first.

You can take an online test or fly to Albuquerque to have Dr. Lad read your pulse and give you some constitutional insight, and from there start to ballpark-estimate what might be right for you. These are good starts – on opposite ends of the commitment spectrum. But neither is enough. I tell my clients and students that finding out who you are constitutionally takes about five years of self-study and experimentation, utilizing the perceptual language of elements (bhutas), moods (gunas), and humours (doshas). Of course, five years is about twice as long as most folks stay with any particular brand of spirituality these days. I would imagine that many people leaving the Anusara fold at this point have stayed just long enough to find out what they don’t need. This is perhaps as it should be. A self-announced “universal” practice can serve very well as a static touchstone for your unique responses to it. As you change, and it doesn’t, you realize the vibrancy of your life outshines any imaginable system.

The other thing that I tell my classes is that in my opinion you also don’t know who you are constitutionally until you’ve observed yourself go through a major loss. Divorce. Death in the family. Or the collapse of a community. As the Anusara dust billows, some will stay the course with either faith or denial (kapha), some will thrust and parry towards justice or out of rage (pitta), and others will fly away in the spirit of unleashed creativity or dissociative avoidance (vata). It really takes all types.

But there is one universal-ish remedy in Ayurveda for emotional loss and vata-aggravation. No media after sunset, full massage with warm sesame oil followed by light sweating, a bowl of root-veg soup for dinner, sky-gazing through your window, and then child’s pose, until you feel fully where you actually are. Child’s pose: to feel in the bones that sinking and horizontal maternality that Shringlish and hyperphallic leaders and the whine of jet engines have all obscured.