2011: The Year the Yoga Cynic Goes Legit

I don’t believe in yoga...
John Lennon, God

I don’t believe in yoga, I practice yoga.
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 360.21

...it’s 2011 and I’ve resolved to stop leaving my yoga mat at the studio....that’s not the big news, though...

...up until now, this humble site has reveled in its unique status among yoga blogs...y’know, the one written by the guy who doesn’t actually know crap about yoga....as stated so succinctly in its very first post...

this woman I was kinda sorta involved with said she was curious about yoga and wanted me to teach her some. I told her I’m still working on not hurting myself by overstretching my hamstrings. Hell, I’m still not even sure what hamstrings are.*

...even cluelessness, however charming, turns out, eventually, to be impermanent...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 223:461

...this year, though...specifically in February and March...I’m stepping away from the time honored personal ritual of sitting around depressed until spring...instead heading up to spend a month in the snowy Berkshires, at Kripalu...eating, drinking, and sleeping yoga, while completing...are ya ready for this?...a 200 hour yoga teacher training...

...that’s right, people, the Yoga Cynic’s going legit...

...soon I’ll be able to fill this blog with dry, didactic, and painfully self-satisfied lectures on Real Yoga (i.e. what I learned in my teacher training...as opposed to that crap you do)...as well as to use that legendary inaudible-from-more-than-six-inches-away yoga teacher voice...(though, obviously, I need to come up with a written equivalent to use here)...(perhaps this)...and, generally, to act really egotistical while insisting I’ve overcome my ego...

...or maybe not...though I'll probably find out what hamstrings are...

...seriously, it's gonna be intense and challenging, and I'm excited...hope you all have good stuff coming up this year, too...namaste & all that...


*...this, needless to say, was before Y4C found the magic of ellipses...**

**...Y4C, I’ve decided, is a good abbreviation for Yoga for Cynics...up until now, I’ve used YforC, but everybody else seems to prefer the more succinct YfC...which makes me...and probably everybody else...think of KFC...which, y’know, doesn’t exactly help with the all-important-for-yoga-bloggers vegan demographic...

Post Holiday Doldrums and Accidental Haiku

I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

Audrey Hepburn

sluggish, sinuses
on fire, don’t wanna know how
much weight I’ve put on*

* was compiling bodily complaints and realized they came out to exactly seventeen syllables, easily divisible into a traditional five-seven-five structure...making my whining about minor seasonal ailments a completely accidental and spontaneous complaint-haiku...which might be really spiritual...or poetic.......or neither....perhaps funny?...if so, that’s at least as good as either spiritual or poetic...at least to my current state of mind...which let’s face it, is pretty typical for the time of year...minus the all-too-common post-holiday colds or emotional wounds...no fights with family members, this year...not even close...seriously...and, to the best of my knowledge at this point, on the early evening of the 28th, nothing caught from little relatives sneezing on me....the days are getting longer by a couple seconds with every sunrise, and 2011, less than a week ahead, is shaping up already to be a year of momentous events...in my little universe, at least...(but more on those, later)...best wishes, namaste, & all that to all you Floating Glowing Beings of Pure Love out there who give Yoga for Cynics meaning by reading (even when its author's in a crappy mood)...

Tidings of Comfort, Joy, and Weltschmerz

The jewel of modern consciousness is compassion. But its worms will become confusion, world-view overload, self-doubt, and paralyzing narcissism. The purpose of Yoga will be to dig carefully through the worms to extract the jewel.
yoga 2.0

Because if this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus is just as selfish as we are or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.
Stephen Colbert

...wrote something a while ago called Compassion Can Be Complicated...(the title got changed on me)...citing famous Buddhist Pema Chodron on idiot compassion that causes us to do for others only for the sake of making ourselves feel better, without actually helping anybody...

...but things get even more complicated when the goal is to feel worse...(as, contrary to more simplistic views of human nature, is quite often the case)...

weltschmerz {German, from Welt world + Schmerz pain}: mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state
Merriam-Webster

...there’s a often a fine line between feelings of compassion for the whole world’s pain and a self-indulgent wallowing in a sense of unhappiness-greater-than-oneself...comfortable rapture in a miserable sublime...between making an expansive sense of compassion part of a personal spirituality and forging religion out of depression...

the notion of some infinitely gentle,
Infinitely suffering thing
T. S. Eliot

...worshipping an egotistical and infinitely resentful deity fed with continual sacrifices of pleasure...our own and that of those unfortunate enough to be close to us...a simultaneously self-righteous and self-lacerating attitude of how-can-you-enjoy-yourself-with-so-much-suffering-in-the-world...as if refusing joy here will somehow ease suffering elsewhere...

...the dominant idea, I think, even if it’s seldom stated, is that we have very limited capacities for either joy or compassion...that the two are separate, and greedy, and one takes from rather than feeds the other...that happiness necessitates callous indifference to others’ pain, and real compassion inherently involves turning away from happiness and toward our own pain...receiving only a booby prize of self-righteousness...which might, paradoxically, make you feel good, in a way...though, ironically enough, it’s the complete opposite of compassion...(if often mistaken for it, in some circles)...(if you feel strongly about how much more compassionate you are than other people, you’re probably not)...

...if there’s a spiritual mode I can get with, it would have to be one that allows the parallel lines of joy and compassion to merge...a love that, in the face of suffering, grows only stronger...

The Slowly Unfolding Orgasm of Existence

We exult in out extraordinarily responsive central nervous system, which we ever seek to amplify through increasing exposure. We live in order to experience life more, and more closely. We soak up experience at every turn. Our bodyminds have evolved to participate fully in the slowly unfolding orgasm of existence. We have created yoga as a toolbox of participation.
matthew remski & scott petrie, yoga 2.0*

...last weekend took my mother to see Black Swan...(both liked it, though I probably would’ve enjoyed certain scenes without knowing mom was watching in the next seat)...(yeah, that one)...(and that one...definitely that one)...I’ve known lotsa dancers, and people who have dance backgrounds and are now yoga teachers...(almost as many as acid heads who are now yoga teachers)...and there are clear parallels between the traditions...as well as glaring differences...in the movie, somebody destroys herself, mind, body, and spirit, in pursuit of an aesthetic ideal...dying for perfection...which might be one of the better reasons to self-destruct, relatively speaking...like Oscar Wilde said...Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour...

...I dunno, though...could be I’m finally coming to a point in my life where I start to see that all as just a lot of depressed romantic overgrown adolescent bullshit...

...not that there’s anything wrong with that...

...it’s cold out...cold enough stuff hurts when I go outside...or maybe I’m just getting old...or maybe both...growing old hurts, but youth, as I remember, can be painful as hell...

...snow’s falling gently outside the cafe window, sticking, first, to cars and benches...now sidewalk and street...not much more than a dusting, really...but enough to make driving ugly...had planned on going from here to run some errands...by car...and go to yoga class...but might be nice to stay put...have some more green tea and watch it fall...

...anyway, to misquote both James Joyce and Grace Slick, I’d rather have perfection die for me...

* this might be the first of possibly a buncha posts kinda sorta maybe having something to do with this book...which I just started.... thanks to Carol, for turning me on to the book with her review at Elephant...

The Critical Importance of Flexibility

Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.
(attributed to John Lennon, T. S. Eliot, and Bertrand Russell)

...sleep, I find, is a chore when I need it,
but an indescribable luxury when it’s time to get up...

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever—

this is a somewhat new kind of religion.
Albert Einstein

...similarly, nothing makes writing harder
than having good, solid reasons to write...

Almost all of my epiphanies over the previous fifteen years
had been the same one: I don’t know.
Stephen Cope

...the worst thing to do if you’re trying to be more flexible,
it turns out, is to try to be more flexible...

No Comment

...a bunch of friends crammed into my car to go downtown and see another friend play guitar in a record store...(yes, those still exist)...just down the street from where I go to yoga class...and, as it turned out, yet another friend, who’d biked down, was hoping for a ride home, asked if I could put her bike in my trunk....I said I’d see if it’d fit, but wasn’t too optimistic...having thrown all the crap from the backseat in there to make room for everybody....plus, one of those people had gotten off a train and put her luggage in there...but, the biggest problem with making the bike fit, even if the tires both came off, as she said they would, would be the bike rack I keep in the trunk, which takes up half the space...

....it actually took me a couple minutes to realize the bike rack might, in fact, be something other than an obstacle...

Giving Credit Where It's Due...the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake

...just got back from the eye doctor because my artificial doors of perception are badly scratched...missing a nose piece, and, since I stepped on them on getting out of bed last week, badly mangled enough I decided finally to do something about it...could be there’s a metaphor in that somewhere...


As long as we associate happiness with getting what we want, we’ve associated it with exactly the opposite thing that makes us happy. Getting what we want doesn’t make us happy, not wanting makes us happy.
Adyashanti


...it's easy to envy the bliss we see in little kids, especially when it's brought on by so little...an ice cream cone or a favorite cartoon coming on...but, then, with that, there's the total abject wailing despair when the ice cream cone falls on the sidewalk or mom decides that's enough TV for today....there's definitely something to be said for the kind of quiet equanimity you see in older people...


Some say they can recall a thousand years
Some say they have already visited the next thousand years
On a windy day I am waiting for a bus.
Ko Un (stolen from the legendary Brooks, who got it from Yoga for a World Out of Balance, by Michael Stone)


...for a while now, been biking around Philly taking pictures of some of the amazing street art that’s appeared over the past couple decades, and have quite shamelessly used it to illustrate Yoga for Cynics posts (particularly this one and this one) as well as an Elephant Journal article. It wasn’t ’til recently, though, that I found out where all the art was coming from, and realized I’d been severely remiss about giving credit where it’s due. The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, led by Jane Golden, began as an offshoot of the city’s anti-graffiti network, channeling the talents of graffiti artists to benefit their communities as well as themselves, and is now, as America’s largest public art program, responsible for Philly having more murals on its walls than any city in the world, working with a variety of non-profits, including Philly’s own Yoga Unites, to empower young people through art. I should mention I’ve showcased only a tiny handful of more than 3,000 in the city, and simply the ones I happen to have biked, walked, or driven by and liked with camera handy. In fact, they're everywhere, including neighborhoods where you probably wouldn’t expect to see dazzling public art (and, actually, a few of the photos here were taken very quickly before skedaddling away...making it highly inconvenient to realize suddenly that my back tire was going flat)...