Category: Yoga philosophy
It’s Time for Yogis to Develop Transparent and Democratic Community in Their Hometowns: some notes on John Friend and Kausthub Desikachar
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. Continue reading “It’s Time for Yogis to Develop Transparent and Democratic Community in Their Hometowns: some notes on John Friend and Kausthub Desikachar”
Grounding Anusara 3: intimacy, methods, therapy, and making it open-source
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. Continue reading “Grounding Anusara 3: intimacy, methods, therapy, and making it open-source”
Grounding Anusara 2: a brief ayurvedic follow-up consultation
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. Continue reading “Grounding Anusara 2: a brief ayurvedic follow-up consultation”
Grounding Anusara
I have many friends who hitched their stars to the Anusara comet, and I’ve been listening to their stories over the past few weeks. I listen from my own experience in extracting myself from the sphere of charisma: it hurts, it is humiliating, and yes – through therapy and hard work, it can be a turning point in the evolution of personal integrity. I talk quietly with these friends for a long time. For many, the sorrow and embarrassment is taking a hopeful arc. There’s a lot of courage emerging through the process, and our general discourse around what works and what doesn’t is rising in quality and subtlety. This is a very good time for modern yoga culture. Continue reading “Grounding Anusara”
Mic Check: how the Occupy movement is creating empathy through communication
Of the countless intersubjective graces unfolding in Zuccotti Park and around the Occupy world, the “human microphone” is recapturing something as old as human learning. This is something sacred: a repurposing of voice, ear, and content that may serve no less than the re-membering of a more coherent human consciousness. Continue reading “Mic Check: how the Occupy movement is creating empathy through communication”
notes on bhakti: up the down staircase
The power of the ‘divine’/’human’ dream is that each perspective beckons the other. The micro is not broad enough, and the macro is too distant. The mind seeks pleasure in the transitional zone between the two, its pleasure deepening as its focus widens or narrows in a surge of learning. Becoming god is ecstatic, being god is not. Becoming man is entastic, being man is not. It is not enough to see that the categories of human and divine are dependent and intrinsic. The categories seduce only where they meet. The child does not play on the slide by resting at either the top or the bottom. Continue reading “notes on bhakti: up the down staircase”
translating translating patanjali
some notes to help visualize an open loom, to weave new sutras
(this post is my apocrypha to the threads of yoga, which scott and I have published on the yoga 2.0 site)
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What does it mean that the central text of modern yoga tells practitioners that it is good to be disgusted with their bodies (2:40)? What does it mean for us to hear and read that our personal ethics can remotely control the behaviour of others (2:35)? What does it mean for us to hear and read that the world of things exists only as a play for human consciousness (2:21), and that this world is materially destroyed for the person who enters a deep swoon (2:22)? What does it mean for us to hear and read that devotion to Isvara is the path to human healing (2:45)? Continue reading “translating translating patanjali”
waking up remembering proust waking up
Dreaming of an origin to existence: rising to wakefulness from sleep. A fetus to the new day invites a parade of revelations: a point, a moving point, a length, laterality, longitude. A muscle opens as its antagonist contracts, the seam of the eyelids flutters, forms glint, warmth down here, cold air on the upper shoulder.
The first thought, a tiny wind, is mental vocalese, a series of long vowels opened into through mm or nn, to mimic the breath and the chiff of sensory doors opening. What is the sound of the eyes recognizing form? What is the colour of an ambient breeze? Continue reading “waking up remembering proust waking up”
start with any kind of pause
Start with any kind of pause. To stop moving forward, to relax the clenched circle of possession that has hardened the edges of how you meet what is wanted. To feel needs hover like mist, and lift. The bones sink into the chair. Eyes relax back into the skull. Sounds become spatial again, and breath breathes you. Continue reading “start with any kind of pause”
the speaking therapy, bookless cooking, and a book
The page bows before orality.*
Ayurvedic worldview is primarily conveyed through oral tradition, which means that it establishes validity in relationship (in dialogue). Ayurveda is learned heart-to-heart, in the home (kitchen, garden, bathroom) of someone who learned about it by living it in someone else’s home. Oral traditions predate the ossification of the written word into stable definition and Platonic ideal – the etching, scribing, and typesetting that fails to mirror the modulations of voice, but changes nonetheless, unconsciously, with the broader sweep of time that erodes the letters and the pages they mark, and now, the technology of the book itself. Continue reading “the speaking therapy, bookless cooking, and a book”
