borrowed poem, again

Time flies, knells call, life passes, so hear my prayer.
Birth is nothing but death begun, so hear my prayer.
Death is speechless, so hear my speech.
This is Jake, who served his ka and his tete. Say true.
May the forgiving glance of Lakshmi heal his heart. Say please.
May the arms of God raise him from the darkness of this earth. Say please.
Surround him, Shiva, with light.
Fill him, Kali, with strength.
If he is thirsty, give him water in the clearing.
If he is hungry, give him food in the clearing.
May his life on this earth and the pain of his passing become as a dream to his waking soul, and let his eyes fall upon every lovely sight; let him find the friends that were lost to him, and let everyone whose name he calls call his in return.
This is Jake, who lived well, loved his own, and died as he would have it.
Each dog owes a death. This is Jake. Give him peace.

Tao, yo.

An interesting contrast of yoga with Buddhism and Confucianism. But it's Taoism, you say? Well! From some schools of thought, Lao-tsu was purportedly a siddhe, who found that his teachings (as an Indian man) were not really accepted in China. So, being a well-developed soul who just had decided not to transcend into nirvana quite yet, he jumped ship into a dying Chinese man's body. Voila! Yoga and Taoism being very parallel, yet adjusted for Chinese culture.

"There is a famous old painting called "The Vinegar Tasters," a work of art whose origins are shrouded in some mystery. Three men are pictured standing around a vat of vinegar. Each has just dipped in his finger and taken a taste. One man has a somewhat sour look on his face. The next has a very bitter expression. The third is smiling. The vinegar represents the essence of life, and the tasting stands for the human experience of it. The three men represent the three major teachings to be found in China.

The sour expression is intended to capture the Confucian conviction that life can be a bit sour because it is out of step with the way it once was and ought to be. The bitter look is meant to be that of Buddha, who believed that life on earth is full of pointless craving and needless suffering. The smiling man is supposed to be Lao Tsu, who held that by properly attaining a harmony between your own path and the Way of objective reality, by properly plugging into the Tao, you can truly enjoy being a part of the action of this world, making your journey one of happiness and joy moment to moment. And this is not to be thought of as a payoff or reward for having done things right, but rather as the proper experience of doing things right, finding your own way forward in unity with the deepest reality there is. This, Lao Tsu believed, is true success."

sequencing

Writing out sequences for homework has really confirmed what one of our teachers described, that sequencing is as much a science as an art.

In one sense, it is almost formulaic - designing a sequence in a classical manner requires setting a purpose or focus (a bhavana), deciding on a core pose or principle, using the initial poses to prepare for that core, and then counter-postures to relieve the stress accumulated in the initial process. Of course, depending on the strenuousness of the sequence, there might be counter-postures needed even before the core moment, and several layers of complexity beyond that.

But, in the same sense, knowing what pose to use to follow another and deciding on which counterposture to use (especially when a counter-posture can also be a preparation) relies on an understanding of the asanas in how they are linked to each other. And it is in that connective, creative knowledge requirement that sequencing becomes an art, in my mind, as connecting and creating are intuitive skills.

In that, creating a sequence can be as much a yogic exercise as performing an asana itself. Logic and intuition must be balanced and united, Shiva and Shakti, to create a useful practice.

not so much in a state to write

When you let your own light shine, you unconsciously give others permission to do the same. - Nelson Mandela
related: For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. - Nelson Mandela

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. Gandhi

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Albert Einstein

"We all think we’re going to be great and we feel a little bit robbed when our expectations aren’t met. But sometimes our expectations sell us short. Sometimes the expected simply pales in comparison to the unexpected. You got to wonder why we cling to our expectations, because the expected is just what keeps us steady. Standing. Still. The expected's just the beginning; the unexpected is what changes our lives."
-Gray’s Anatomy

musing

I remembered an old martial arts teacher's ideal-dream idea of developing an apartment complex into a sort of fitness community. People would live in the apartments, and as part of their rent they would get their choice of general-personal training or fitness classes, and various martial arts (I think he very grudgingly conceded a need for a yogic aspect at some point). As a community - community building was something he was big on, something I looked up to him for - they would be able to support and maintain each other's practice, and enjoy having like-minded people around.

I definitely understand the like-minded people aspect being in yoga school now - I've never really found myself in a setting until now where mulitple people were actually having the same thoughts as me (at least in regards to a yoga/personal development side of things); individuals, yes (my roommate and a couple ex-girlfriends, say) but not a community before. Anyway, that's a tangent from what the original point of this musing was to be, that as much as he had something of a cool idea going, I'd maybe back it down to this: an analagous school for martial arts.

Right, I understand the Japanese arts have their own traditions and whatnot of almost purely physical training and specific ways of how things are done. But, interestingly, the yoga school I attend considers the idea of lineage just as important as the dojos I once attended did. And they still have classes that attend to the purely physical. But, in the actual school aspect, there's a more holistic approach - philosophy, language, anatomy, nutrition, etc. It would be amazing to see the effect of that applied to martial arts, in my mind - zen and Musashi instead of samadhi and the Bhagavad Gita, Japanese instead of Sanskrit, anatomy with a different focus...I'm not saying it would necessarily make the students better fighters, mind, but rather, I think certain students would find the discipline immensely more interesting and valuable, and be much, much more effective at the supposed non-physical aims of martial arts, which are usually brushed quickly by, if mentioned at all. Which, in the end, is a sad thing in the case of styles like aikido, where they should be focus, instead.

"Context is very important. Without context we can never really master yoga or any other art or science. For example, artists learn all the classic principles of their form before learning to improvise and find true creativity. Without training in the classical skills of their art as well as understanding how their art has developed, there is no ground on which artists can base their creativity. Most of the great masters have developed their mastery in this way: by first learning the context."

on Iyengar

I noticed a couple things in going to the first of several classes outside of yoga school proper. One is that it's I've come to appreciate previous teachers I've had immensely more, after running into a teacher who was just relentlessly negative and critical, both in phrasing ("don't," "struggle," etc) and in attitude.

Another was that it turned out to be a lot more valuable than I thought it would be to experience a different style of yoga. I assumed there would subtle or slight differences, but nope - where I'm used to vinyasa flow, with its reasoned sequencing and relaxing movement, the Iyengar yoga was disjointed and based on relatively few, static asanas. I'll acknowledge and perhaps even admire the point that in that manner one is able to really look at the minutae of a pose, but they seemed to focus on it so much to the point that it was ultimately more hindrance than benefit. The constant criticism and obsession with ideal form, regardless of injury (in the case of one poor woman grimacing at shoulder rotation) or the unique structure of an individual's body only exacerbated that hindrance. The idea that achieving conformity to some perfect idea of a pose would help the body achieve integration with the mind holds some shallow logic for me (in the sense of visualization, perhaps), but also seems intuitively wrong on several levels to me (ignoring the breath as bridge between body and mind, forcing which just brings resistance, etc).

-coincidentally, I just had happened to read these passages in one of my textbooks:
"Asana should not simply be an external form into which you fit your body, but should arise from within you. What you see in the mirror is the form. What you feel is the function of the posture. Unity, not uniformity, is the goal of yoga."

"Rigid adherence to the ideal form is simply habit or conditioning, whereas adaptation to insure function is an act of creativity."

- both from Yoga for Body, Breath and Mind, by A.G. Mohan

a few notes on posture

At class last night, we did a quick postural analysis of a partner; we first found our natural posture by jumping up and down a few times, and just stopping however we landed, without fixing anything. And I realized a couple of things -

One, that it actually became painful after a bit to maintain that incorrect posture, with one shoulder a little too high, my feet turned a bit wrong, my neck canted a bit too much to the side, etc. I started to feel the beginnings of kinks form in muscles, even, by the end of it. So it's interesting how much a lazy, uncorrected posture can affect us.

Two stemmed from our homework - our feet affect our posture enormously. The sole of the foot is in effect the beginning of the back, and the alignment of our feet reflects up our bodies, through our pelvis, all the way to our shoulders and neck. That isn't exactly a weakness, however; rather, it can be turned into a strength by achieving proper alignment in the feet (good arch, grounding through the front of the heel and bases of big and little toe), and through integrating an awareness of the feet into asanas. For example, in the soles being the first part of the back, if one begins one's forward bends by beginning the stretch in the feet, the overall stretch is augmented, and moreover the body is better integrated as a whole. Clever!