{"id":4026,"date":"2014-06-20T08:35:59","date_gmt":"2014-06-20T13:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=4026"},"modified":"2014-06-20T08:35:59","modified_gmt":"2014-06-20T13:35:59","slug":"wawadia-update-7-pain-performance-and-politics-in-yoga-a-conversation-with-mike-hoolboom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wawadia-update-7-pain-performance-and-politics-in-yoga-a-conversation-with-mike-hoolboom\/","title":{"rendered":"WAWADIA update #7 \/\/\/ Pain, Performance, and Politics in Yoga: a Conversation with Mike Hoolboom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Out of these pieces, it was left to us to put ourselves back together again in such a way that the cracks would surely show. \u2013 Mike Hoolboom<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

My general policy with the interviews for this project has been to maintain the anonymity of my subjects so that they can speak freely of yoga injury experiences that involve particular teachers and studios without fear of social, professional, or legal reprisal. But some subjects don\u2019t need this protection, either because they are not dependent upon professional yoga culture, or because they are personally able to clear their stories with the people they reference, or because they bring a certain expertise from beyond Yogaland that we both feel would enrich the conversation. And, of course, they have to also want to be on record. My interview with Mike Hoolboom<\/a> \u2013 or his interview of me \u2013 fits the bill here.<\/p>\n

Mike is one of the world\u2019s leading avant-garde filmmakers. His haunting work uses found footage to explore transitional spaces, sexuality and impermanence. Film critic Tom Waugh says: \u201cFor more than two decades Mike Hoolboom has been one of our foremost artistic witnesses of the plague of the twentieth century, HIV. A personal voice documenting and piercing the clich\u00e9d spectrum of Living With AIDS from carnal abjection to incandescent spirituality, no surviving moving image visionary surpasses him.\u201d<\/p>\n

As with so many people one orbits in the yoga and meditation scene, I didn\u2019t know about Mike\u2019s professional life. I just knew him as someone who came to practice radiating some unnamable need. He was the quietest dharma sponge of Centre of Gravity, sitting like a statue sculpted from air, writing full transcripts of Michael Stone\u2019s wide-ranging talks in pristine shorthand characters so small it looked like his fountain pen wasn\u2019t even moving against the moleskin’s ivory page. Mike watches things with wide-open eyes.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m happy to know him a little better now, and to feel him use his penchant for detail, texture, character and backdrop \u2013 filtered by his hard-won understanding of bodily vulnerability under the pervasive assault of time and politics \u2013 to describe his experience of yoga through the years.<\/p>\n

_______<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> Slavoj \u017di\u017eek noted recently that the New Economy requires flexible workers. He was referring of course to multiple employers, migrating job sites, the abolition of weekends. But couldn\u2019t this also be read as a call for more yoga? I can see the boardroom heads already nodding yes. \u201cAnd let\u2019s put in a meditation room for the overachievers while we\u2019re at it!\u201d\u00a0\u017di\u017eek\u2019s riff made me wonder if there wasn\u2019t a fit between yoga\u2019s newfound popularity and the rise of globalized capitalism. Perhaps it\u2019s only a coincidence.<\/p>\n

The ongoing conversion of downtown real estate into yoga studios brings to mind a koan by my friend Simone Moir who runs the Parkdale Prana Room.\u00a0She assured me, \u201cYou can\u2019t teach yoga. All we can do as teachers is share our maps.\u201d Yoga might mean knowing what\u2019s happening in your body and then finding an external geometry that rhymes. How can you do that with a stranger standing at the front of the room offering a succession of poses? How can I become my own authority if I keep leaning on experts?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a yoga teacher and was never trained in anatomy. So yoga has been tremendously helpful for articulating certain moments of the body, and translating sensation into language. But at the same time there are so many things going on in my body that are mysterious, including: \u201cWhat pain is good pain, and what pain is not good pain?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> If there was to be a \u201cgood pain,\u201d what would make it good? Where would it lead?<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> Good pain means that I\u2019m in pain right now, but I haven\u2019t woken up with it tomorrow. It\u2019s a temporary guest, instead of a permanent kink in the plumbing.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> So on the morning after you\u2019ve not only returned to neutral, but you\u2019ve gained something from that discomfort?<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> Yes, I\u2019ve been able to sit with the pain and not overly identify with it. There are patterns of sensation coursing through the lumbar spine, but those patterns are not me, myself. They\u2019re not something that needs to be claimed or owned, like a deed of land.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> Are you also describing a type of pain that can be good because it\u2019s not so overwhelming, and it can be used to acclimatize? \u201cI was able to withstand that, it didn\u2019t damage me, and now my response time is a little more expansive?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> I think so, though when I hear you put the aerial quotation marks around \u201cgood pain\u201d it makes me wonder if I\u2019ve swallowed too many Lululemon ads. My yoga life started out of friendship. My friend Gary decided, at a catastrophic moment in his life, to go through teacher training at Downward Dog, which at the time was a fearsome nexus of Ashtanga orthodoxy. Each Wednesday morning Gary dropped off his son at Alpha Alternative School, where he very generously taught a couple of moms and I the primary series in the school\u2019s basement. Every time we practiced it was painful. I asked: \u201cAre you sure the body is supposed to do this?\u201d Over time, some of the postures grew less difficult, while some were dropped from the repertoire as none of us managed even a likeness. I associated yoga with asana and asana with pain from the very beginning. It suited too well my core story of \u201cnot-enough-ness.\u201d And it rewarded qualities like hard work, striving, overcoming, diligence and perseverance: values that I\u2019d absorbed from earlier school systems.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> As you were going through pain in the primary series, did you feel as though you were being cleansed of something, or was it a matter of proving your capacity for hard work?<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> There was no cleansing involved, I never learned to divide the world between what was clean (and good and beautiful) and what was dirty (and disgusting and bad, and perhaps all the more desirable for it.) Pain reconnected me to my body. It\u2019s pretty usual that we wake up to a moment of our body only when it stops functioning. When we\u2019re sick in a particular way. \u201cOh my shoulder!\u201d \u201cOh my liver!\u201d I didn\u2019t have a liver until it stopped working properly. Before yoga, illness had already taught me about waking up through pain.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> It\u2019s startling because the moment of pain or realization of illness is two things at once: a moment of presence, as in \u201cI didn\u2019t know that<\/em> was there,\u201d or \u201cThat\u2019s part of me too, and it\u2019s suffering, and I can connect with that.\u201d But at the same time, pain and illness are the marks of a body that cannot do what your agency would have it do. So pain brings you into contact with a formerly absent thing, but then puts \u201cyou\u201d in opposition to it.<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> I think there\u2019s a quality of surrender, or the way they like to call it in yoga \u2014 \u201ctrusting the form.\u201d I\u2019m not super-religious, but the dominant religious iconography in my childhood depicted a man who\u2019d been tortured and wounded, nailed to a cross\u2026<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> \u2026as a sign of love.<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> \u201cSuffering must be like love \u2014 look at that guy!\u201d<\/p>\n

The man on the cross leads me to wonder about the front of the room. Who do we put at the front of the room? Is it the one with all the muscles, the very smartest, the one with the smoothest pitch? Yoga teachers are embodied ideals. The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips reminds us that ideals in our culture are often used to punish ourselves. \u201cI\u2019ll never be that smart. I\u2019ll never be that flexible. I\u2019ll never be able to speak those beautiful sentences.\u201d Most of the time, that very traditional view of ideals has been at play in the asana classes I\u2019ve been to. Though there are exceptions. For instance: Christi-an Slomka\u2019s work at Kula Annex. She\u2019s doing something different at the front of the room that allows me to do something different on my mat. She\u2019s modeling her uncertainty and mistakes. It\u2019s become important for her to project those less-than-perfect qualities. Her decision to put something short of ideal at the front of the room is a political decision. \u201cWait, wait, is that my teacher expressing doubt, inability, even failure? Wow. That gives me permission to fail. That makes my failings ok.\u201d Instead of only giving me permission to succeed, which is just another form of punishment. Because what if you don\u2019t succeed? Oh, then you can play those old self-punishment tapes again, the ones that never sit on the shelf long enough to collect dust.<\/p>\n

Only showing our strongest, shiniest face at the front of the room, at the front of a yoga room for instance, seems directly related to over-striving and injury. When I\u2019m given permission to stop practicing right at the edge of my abilities, to stop pushing to the max every instant, to take child\u2019s pose because that supports the whole group, it means that I can respond to patterns of sensation in a new way. I don\u2019t have to push away or push through the pain. I can make a space for softness and inability, and say yes to that. I think this leads to greater embodiment and less injury, but I\u2019m only speaking for myself.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> About the person at the front of the room. The paradox might be that that\u2019s the person who is most able to hide or sublimate the pain they are already in. I\u2019m just at the beginning of this interview process, and you\u2019re the first of about twenty subjects who\u2019s not a yoga instructor. There\u2019s a repeated story of instructors being injured, or knowing something\u2019s not working, and being enslaved by the tyranny of happiness they\u2019ve been hired to provide. They put themselves in positions in which they feel like frauds. Or they project their own sublimation of pain onto their students in terms of a skill to be developed.<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> Just a few days ago I was chatting with a friend who is a yoga teacher at a thriving downtown studio. During self-practice she was adjusted far too deeply by a studio colleague and was injured as a result. I couldn\u2019t help asking, \u201cDid you tell this person you were injured?\u201d \u201cNo, I didn\u2019t.\u201d Several months later she\u2019s back in self-practice when the same person performs the same adjustment and she gets injured again. \u201cDid you tell them after the second time?\u201d Of course the answer was no. We work so hard to protect the people at the front of the room. Is this a version of Chomsky\u2019s observation that the poor always have to pay for the rich? It means having a difficult conversation and creating bad feelings that may never leave, and who needs that? But it might also mean losing faith in the entire project. \u201cHaven\u2019t I come to the yoga studio to experience some newly customized version of my parents? If the parents don\u2019t really know, then\u2026 what am I doing here exactly?\u201d<\/p>\n

I want to say this person\u2019s name out loud but I can\u2019t. I must also do my part to protect the yoga teacher who injures. But my friend assured me that her injury forced her to find a new way to practice, and that this was a good thing. I\u2019ve heard this song before. Certainly this is why Christi-an is doing slow-motion yoga, creating almost moving poses out of the spaces between postures. And then there\u2019s my pal Lana describing a moment on a recent retreat. \u201cI saw all of these people doing yoga acrobatics, while I was just trying to put my arm in the air and feel my shoulder joint.\u201d So I asked my injured friend, \u201cDid this change in your practice shift your teaching?\u201d She said, \u201cNo, that\u2019s not why people come to this studio. They don\u2019t want to practice that way.\u201d Which made me wonder: how would you know that? And what does it mean that even colleagues who are injuring each other are unwilling to have the difficult conversation that begins with \u201cYou hurt me\u201d? If colleagues can\u2019t talk the talk, how are we merely mortal students ever going to manage in a studio culture with non-existent feedback mechanisms?<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> If we\u2019re speaking about the more rigidly formulated yoga styles, the dominant narrative is that the practice isn\u2019t for the individual. The individual is meant to serve the practice. And that dovetails strangely with branding. That\u2019s what I hear in your friend\u2019s comment: \u201cThat\u2019s not why people come to this studio. That\u2019s not the image we project. If I change the rules, I\u2019d be going off-message and outside of the expected exchange mechanism.”<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s this really fascinating way in which a patriarchal rigidity inherited from a few teachers has melded itself seamlessly into capitalist branding structures, in which the thing that\u2019s on offer really can\u2019t be questioned. But it\u2019s weird, because even Apple takes feedback on its iPhones. Many yoga studios feature a kind of capitalist branding that isn\u2019t responsive. One of the supposed rules is: \u201cFind out what the client wants.\u201d When you ask the question, \u201cHow would you know whether your students really want a change?\u201d \u2013 you\u2019re really pointing to the difference between authoritarian and customer service models.<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> Perhaps the difference is between gym culture (lots of people want a work out, nothing wrong with that) and what I think of as post-yoga. The post-yogis are mostly women yoga teachers who have done endless workshops, trainings, self practice. Nearly every one has been injured through over practice, repetitive strain, sometimes too much flexibility. Some of the studios, I think, are trying to hold both sides of that divide, but the inclination is always to promote the more aggressive space, the hot flow workout hour.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong>\u00a0Most of the\u00a0friends you reference are women, and most of the yoga people I know are women. So the vast majority of injuries that I\u2019m aware of are sustained by women. Given the fact that there\u2019s an inherited patriarchal teaching structure, I\u2019m hearing \u017di\u017eek in my head and thinking that just as capitalism requires flexible workers, so patriarchy requires flexible women.<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> At the end of a ten-day vipassana retreat I asked one of the fearless leaders: \u201cDo people ever leave? Does everyone always stick with the entire ten-day program?\u201d He assured me, \u201cOnly the men leave. Women already understand pain.\u201d I couldn\u2019t help but be struck by the incredible diversity of people who showed up. But while the retreat is extremely painful, women never bow out, it\u2019s only the men who can\u2019t stand it. I wonder about that in the context of a yoga culture that sets pain up as an implicit marker of progress.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> It sounds like you had a painful experience while sitting on that vipassana retreat. Did you have some kind of critical moment in which the pain or the perception of the pain shifted?<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> It happened every day. You\u2019re doing one-hour sits for fourteen hours a day, so you\u2019re in full-on pain from the start. I just spoke with my friend Marina who said that she had to do physiotherapy on her knee for six months afterwards. Though she hastened to assure me that the retreat was five-star and that she wouldn\u2019t want to change a thing about it. On retreat, the pain comes and it feels like it\u2019s coming for a long time, because your new full-time job is noticing sensations. After awhile even the deepest sensations of pain change. The reaction shot shifts as the impossible becomes manageable. By day four or five you\u2019re settling in, the internal tweeting is down to a whisper, and you can observe the sensation patterns arise and pass away with something like curiosity.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> I\u2019m asking about the breakthrough moment in vipassana because I think there\u2019s a folklore crossover between how intense or painful experiences of meditation and asana are told. We have a threshold, and then we have a breakthrough. I know that in sports medicine terms, the mechanism of endorphin release at a certain intensity of pain facilitates a flight-response advantage. It will allow the marathoner to finish a race on a broken tibia, or the football player to not realize that his shoulder is dislocated until the end of a scoring drive. So I\u2019ve wondered whether the nervous system is forced to make a different choice after ten days of sitting or lots of intense asana. I wonder if we have to release some kind of analgesic chemistry in order to survive these spiritual practices. With the retreat stories, I\u2019ve heard over and over again that a person is in their bed on day seven, quivering with pain, and then they say, \u201cOkay, one more sit. I\u2019m going to do the damn sitting, and then I was flooded with bliss that day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> Pain is the doorway, no question. If you don\u2019t go through it, there\u2019s nothing on the other side. One of the aims of vipassana practice is to stop the sitter from identifying with sensations. That\u2019s my<\/em> itch. That\u2019s my<\/em> hunger. And what sensations could be more urgent and compelling than pain? If you can stop labeling those sensations as \u201cmy pain\u201d then your body has realized what Stephen Batchelor calls the principal of the dharma. That everything arises and passes out of conditions. During the retreat this is not an idea, it\u2019s something you experience in your whole body, moment after moment. To enact the separation of paying attention and not identifying is both a movement towards and away from the body. Amazing things happen. I had a flashback of my first body memory. I was back inside my mother, feeling her breathing, the blood red of her organ life, and then the involuntary contractions when she started to smoke. It emerged from every part of the body, and was so complete it felt like time travel.<\/p>\n

Today I have a couple of major reservations. The first is about your object of inquiry. Why does it have to be so physically painful? Do we have to sit so long that people need to undertake physiotherapy for months afterwards? And the second question is even more fundamental. Do the insights gained on the cushion make us better people? Sitting is not a relational practice, who cares if you can concentrate like a demon for months on end if you can\u2019t show up for your friends? I think we can all rattle off the stories about great dharma leaders who had major sidelines in greed, sexual exploitation, dishonesty. On retreat, as the hours roll past and various people begin to cry or glow in the dark, it can create a feeling that everyone\u2019s having their own trip. Trust the form. It\u2019s all going to be okay. How we love to ring out the special experiences that make us feel so special. Like the silverware reserved for guests.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong>\u00a0There’s always this\u00a0strange combination of \u201cThis yoga\/meditation\/mindfulness is a universal form that works for everybody\u00a0but you\u2019re on your own with it. It\u2019s applicable to everyone, but you will have an irreducible and incommunicable experience of it.\u201d It affects kind of a cosmic shrug. \u201cWhat should we say about our pain? Well, we\u2019re not sure. It will pass. Trust the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> The tape-recorded leader of the retreat is S.N. Goenka, who was drawn to the practice because of migraine pain. On my last retreat there were two chronic migraine sufferers, both of whom recounted the same miraculous breakthrough that the founding father had arrived at decades earlier. Incredibly, they had both failed to bring enough medication. The migraines were coming on and there was no way to stop them. Both were advised, separately of course, to simply \u201cDo one more sit.\u201d And then one more. And then one more. They begged the organizers, \u201cYou don\u2019t understand \u2014 I\u2019m going to die from this pain, it\u2019s not humanly possible to withstand it.\u201d They both described an overwhelming crescendo of pain, and then in a single instant that they could both identify, they burst through to a clearing on \u201cthe other side\u201d and sat pain-free for the first time in their lives. Both were men, one in his twenties, the other well over sixty.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> Have you been in touch with either of them since? I\u2019m wondering what the longevity was of that recovery.<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> I wonder too. It\u2019s certainly an inducement to practice.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> It is, but having heard many such miracle stories myself, I\u2019m also aware of how they frame the rest of the narrative surrounding practice. They\u2019re presented as though they are evidentiary. And they are, in a self-reporting sense. But they\u2019re only anecdotes: \u201cI heard that vipassana cured so-and-so\u2019s migraines.\u201d That narrative has power with regard to encouraging people to exert themselves in a particular way, to validate the method. It\u2019s a great story, but I\u2019m very aware that we don\u2019t know how it ends.<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> I think it\u2019s good to see these as cautionary tales, that striving and sitting through pain can be reframed in terms of someone who\u2019s willing to inflict an incredible amount of suffering on themselves, and then is willing to project a need for that suffering onto others. That projection can be named after whatever ideal is floating through the room.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> So how has your own experience of pain and injury in asana changed?<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> I sustained a rotator cuff injury two years ago. It happened via a couple of different yoga classes. One was a slow-motion Ashtanga practice and the other was an Iyengar class that was offered in the neighbourhood. I met the instructor in the elevator who assured me, \u201cI know exactly what to do about your shoulder.\u201d She never touched the joint, or had me demonstrate its motion range, and I\u2019d made it clear to her that I was already injured and resting, trying to recover. \u201cCome with me,\u201d she said. So I go down to the class which is now rejigged with a special series of poses dedicated to strengthening the muscles around the rotator cuff. As we proceed, and I am adjusted in every single position, I rip the joint apart, and for the next few weeks I can\u2019t even lift my arm up in the air. Of course I was foolish to follow my teacher\u2019s advice, but I had been in pain in this same class many times before and it had turned out to be OK. Why was this pain permanently damaging, while the other pain was alright? I simply don\u2019t have the know-how to tell the difference. I\u2019m not sure what the muscle is that could tell the difference, but the one I have is obviously undeveloped.<\/p>\n

I spent a year rehabbing with a rubber strap and slowly the rotator cuff got better. Though it will never be the shoulder it was. And I have developed a wariness around yoga that has kept me from the mat. I remember reading about Krishnamacharya, the great modernist yoga collage artist\/teacher, who offered everyone their own practice. This series of poses would evolve (and continue to evolve) after watching the individual student, and working with them, and adjusting them. In other words, the practice of yoga was relational. Doesn\u2019t this make sense? But perhaps there\u2019s no time for that in studio culture. Perhaps everyone would go broke if it all came down to one on one.<\/p>\n

The teacher I see now is Patricia White at Yogaspace, who works out of a woman\u2019s lineage that begins with Vanda Scaravelli. It\u2019s anti-hero yoga: a lot of the poses don\u2019t look like anything at all. You\u2019ll never see them on the cover of Yoga Journal. But there\u2019s a form underneath the form. The work isn\u2019t athletic or aerobic, and there\u2019s not so many standing postures these days. I feel like she\u2019s breaking down the most basic postures of walking, sitting, and lying down and showing my body how to receive these basic asanas.<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> So you began with an acceptance that pain was part of the process. But it seems that with the shoulder injury that really dissolved. In between those two positions, what was that edge of pain telling you in practice? How was it expressing growth or limitation?<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> Michael Stone kindly invited me to his month-long retreat a few summers ago even though I didn\u2019t have the cashola. Michael is a genius yoga teacher, endlessly inventive, always coming up with a fresh take, another approach. But he is also a rare and splendid physical specimen, and like most of those on retreat, he is decades younger than I am. As a result, I staggered from the exit door each day with every part of me hurting. Mornings began with a sit, during which a woman in the corner would sob for the entire half hour. On day three someone dozed off and planted their face on the floor and had to be taken to hospital. On day four during lunch break someone got their bike wheels caught on a streetcar track and broke their leg. Have you ever watched forty people have a slow motion nervous breakdown? The focus throughout was on the end of the exhale, can you stay there and feel the unwanted parts of your body\/mind as they settle into the darkness layered into the mula bhanda, and can you bring those difficult and left behind feelings up with every breath and let them pulse through your heart? It felt like a dismantling of body and self. Our aching bodies were the lens through which we experienced the philosophy and the chanting and the Zen that was being unpacked. Together we stepped off the edge so we could find that place where the bodies we used to have, and the stories that we told about that thing we called the self, no longer held. What was harder to find was the relational piece. How do we put all of the bits together again? We had shared the ecstasies of falling apart but lacked the recipe to put Humpty back together. When a teacher shines so brightly at the front of the room, they invariably cast shadows, and some of those shadows are sangha. Who are we when mom and dad leave the room? What lay shimmering through the broken fog was the promise of practice. Just keep practicing. Though I have to emphasize that as Bernie Glassman says, \u201cIt\u2019s just my opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> It goes back to your earlier question: \u201cIs there another way to do this work?\u201d Because what you\u2019re describing is that the process of self-making and the process of presumed bodily integrity are intertwined, and that especially as the body becomes more \u201copen,\u201d more expressive of lengthening, stretching, unknotting itself, the personal self, which is seen as a series of contractions, is unravelled. Obviously there\u2019s psychological pain in learning that you\u2019re not who you thought you were, or that you don\u2019t have to be who you thought you were, or who you were told you were. The physical pain involved in stretching or mobilizing a joint is analogous. It leaves me with the question of whether pain is instrumental, and if there is something else available?<\/p>\n

Mike:<\/strong> I think there\u2019s another way to do this work. Just as yoga teachers are often encouraged to promote an endless athletic cheer, it\u2019s also possible for them to project the post-injury body, the imperfect and broken body. This is what is happening in Christi-an\u2019s classes where her inclusive speaking about trans bodies, differently-abled and shaped bodies, the consent cards she\u2019s developed around being adjusted or not (touch me, don\u2019t touch me), and a physical practice that is no longer aimed at the pose but at the places between the poses, all this is a projection or sharing of some of the most difficult places in her life. But will her combination of ethics and physical practice be enough to withstand the relentless capitalist tide that has turned yoga into just another business?<\/p>\n

Patricia White just got back from a hip replacement, which she insists came from her long ago days as a dancer, and not from yoga. On Wednesday mornings, she steps into the room on a cane, a striking image in a yoga studio. Who do we put at the front of the room? An older woman walking on a cane. In her class I am beginning to feel tiny openings in the hip flexors and around the collarbones that I\u2019ve never felt before. I can follow this network of fissures and they lead me to new places where I can say yes. It\u2019s like the life you share with your best friends. As they tell you the story of the past weekend, even though the circumstances are new so much of the telling is familiar, you\u2019ve been hearing variations on this story for thirty years. Those small variations are at the heart of what friendship is. How to love these small differences? What Patricia is teaching me is how to get in touch with and love the small changes. It doesn\u2019t look like much from the outside. When I started studying with her I would look around the room and think that people were just hanging out. That they weren\u2019t trying hard. It\u2019s taken many years for me to understand what the judgmentalism of \u201ctrying hard\u201d might really mean. Perhaps it\u2019s about accepting a very different notion of what \u201cwork\u201d is. One of the unfortunate congruencies between yoga culture and capitalism is the notion of work. In the Fordist economy there was work time and holidays. In what some are describing as the New Economy, work time never stops, while our digital devices ensure that every place is potentially a work place. In yoga there is another way of saying this: \u201cPractice. Practice. Practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthew:<\/strong> \u201cLean in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mike: <\/strong>Yeah. \u201cI\u2019ve gotta work it till I find my edge.\u201d That\u2019s what the whole machine of dominant culture is urging us to get on with. Even as yoga continues to explore and celebrate resistances both in and outside the body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have developed a wariness around yoga that has kept me from the mat. I remember reading about Krishnamacharya, the great modernist yoga collage artist\/teacher, who offered everyone their own practice. This series of poses would evolve (and continue to evolve) after watching the individual student, and working with them, and adjusting them. In other words, the practice of yoga was relational. Doesn\u2019t this make sense? But perhaps there\u2019s no time for that in studio culture. Perhaps everyone would go broke if it all came down to one on one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4028,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,21,23,24,27,19,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activism","category-articles","category-blog","category-featured","category-wawadia","category-yoga","category-yoga-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}