Ripped

Since the awful bout with colds and whatever it was in the early spring my practice has been spotty at best as I have said before. During the summer I kept trying to get back to it, but the most I could pull off was maybe one, at the most two, days a week. The odd thing is that every time I did practice yoga, I felt really good. I would end the practice saying to myself, "Wow. I feel really good now. Why don't I do this every day." But I was also trying to initiate a regular work out routine in an effort to combat the lethargy I felt and to get in shape. I had been running and that didn't get me quite where I wanted so I started a program called "7 Weeks to Getting Ripped." The program in itself is very effective. I began to feel the results almost immediately. Then, classes started this week just as I was reaching a peak in the program. During this first week of classes I have felt more frazzled than I have in years. I can't seem to think straight or see things well. I feel like I'm running 100 miles a minute and yet I am doing nothing. I am nervous and tense and my sleep is awful. The Getting Ripped has ripped me, but it has also increased my metabolism or whatever to a point that I can't settle down. I can't think. I feel fragmented. So, I go back to yoga almost crawling on my knees begging it for help. I began reading yoga books in bed before falling asleep and the lines that stand out from what I recently read is that yoga is not to make your body look better, it is to help the functioning of the mind. Sure, one of the side-effects of yoga is that you may have a healthier body, but this should not be the emphasis. Yoga. As Geogor Maehle says, "Yoga is the science of training the mind, and it is for those who are in need of this training". And boy oh boy am I in need of training. I returned to practice on Wednesday. Today is Friday and I have completed three days. I feel somewhat better. My mind isn't racing as much as it was. I can control my thoughts a bit better-- nothing like before when I was practicing everyday. Maybe I needed this long break from yoga. Maybe I needed to get ripped to realize that there is more to yoga than the body. That it is distinct from any exercise program because it is really training the mind. And to survive I need that.

Belief

My practice has been spotty at best and I am definitely feeling the affects. I'm losing the calm that I had and didn't even notice really, the mindfulness that I built up over two years and took for granted is slowly slipping away. Yesterday I made it a point to get on my mat again. As I did so, as I stepped on to it the thought crossed my mind in a really clear, loud voice: "You've got to believe this stuff." The one thing that has slowly drifted me away from yoga is all the Hindu stuff that goes along with it. Chanting I like as well as the "Oming" and all that. But I can't get into the gods that many yoga practitioners seem to venerate. I didn't leave one religion to fall victim to another one. Why put up in front of me and why bow down before false idols? I can't do that and I won't. My rejection of those images and the veneration for them slowly led to the distance I created between myself and the yoga community and led to me practicing on my own. But, as I practiced on my own, I stopped believing in yoga as a meditation and looked at it more as a way to stay flexible and exercise. I'm wondering if there is a middle ground somewhere. Is it possible to believe in the yoga as a meditation without having to accept all of the myths that go with it? I'm thinking that is probably possible, but whenever I read on blogs or on the Facebook page of the local studio and see references to Hanuman or some other deity, my stomach clenches and I reject it.

Slow return

On the advice of my doctor, I've been running and swimming in an effort to add some cardio to my life. Slowly I've worked up to be able to run 3 ten minute miles. The swimming is coming along too. Both feel pretty good and when I practice yoga I notice that it's much easier to control my breath, to keep it smooth rather than forced. This week I practiced yoga everyday including the moonday. On the moon day I went to a Yin class followed by a Vajra class. I felt really, really good afterward. There is something about the slow pace, the extended holds and the focus on meditation even as you are moving that I find really nice. Of course, in Ashtanga you are focused on breath and movement also, but in Yin you hold the poses for 3-5 minutes. The next day when I did Ashtanga, the tightness and resistance I had felt before just wasn't there at all. Maybe one reason I stopped Ashtanga was that it seemed too closed off. The opening on a mental and physical level that happens when I do Yin and other forms of yoga are good in a number of ways.

Monkey Practice

Do I dare say that I have stopped practicing yoga? Deep down I knew this day would come. I knew that it would be like just about everything else in my life; that I would get really excited about it, become very passionate about it and then I would stop. Look how long it has been since the last blog post if you don't believe me. When did I stop? I think it was in March after coming back home from spring break when I became pretty ill with some sort of upper respiratory infection that lasted about a month. Finally, I broke down and took some medication for it and the illness left. But, after a trip for a conference, I came down with something similar again. A relapse. Not only did I feel ill, but my lungs and head felt stuffed with gunk and the last thing I wanted to do was to get into downward dog. Practice seemed to make it worse. In fact, I went to an ashtanga class when I started feeling a little ill the first time and then the illness came on full blast. But, I'm well now so there is no excuse for not practicing. Yet, I can't seem to put in more than one day in a row. This is really odd, because when I do practice, I always say, "wow that felt good. Why don't I do it more often?". Deep down I see how this is a reflection of other things in my life. I see how I have a superficial knowledge of many things, but I've never really delved into one thing and really learned it. In the past year this is the thing that has been coming back to me about my life that has bothered me the most: that I have a half knowledge about things, but I lack depth in everything. So it is interesting that this would happen in my practice as well; that I would give up just when things started to become too deep. Yes. Now that I'm thinking about this I know exactly when I stopped practice or at least when I backed away from it. It was in late December when I had been practicing ashtanga daily for about one year. I had also been reading a lot about yoga and other philosophy related to that area. Something happened one day in the studio or perhaps it was the accumulation of things happening in the studio over time and I realized that I am not really part of this community. I saw myself as an outsider. I felt like I had no business being here. Why? Well, part of the reason is my age. At 52 I am a late comer to ashtanga to say the least. The other is my gender. How many guys do you see in your yoga classes? Generally, we are the 1%. The other is the fact that I am not that flexible. After years of sitting in a chair along with heavy weight lifting and running with little or no stretching, I'm about as far from the wet noodle like flexibility that you see in most students. So here I am in a room filled with young, super-flexible women. I couldn't be more different from them. The job I have is pretty isolating and time consuming. Basically, I have no free time. I had hoped for some sort of community or sense of community to develop from the little bit of time I devoted to activities away from work. But, after some attempts to open up, I realized that this just wasn't going to happen. So. That was one reason. The other is probably the real reason. In December I felt like I was on a precipice. I felt the pull of yoga and the pull of a life devoted to meditation and burnishing my soul. And, I could feel how this was pulling me away from my job. As I said, my job requires a lot of time. I got to the point where I saw that yoga and my study of it, was just absorbing too much time and interest. It was detracting from my work in other areas. I was on the point of just making the leap into yoga and forgetting the rest. Then I realized that maybe I was having a mid-life crisis. I read in the Bhagvad Gita that service is something we all have to do and I decided that my service was my life, my profession. So I dropped all inquiries into spirituality and went back to work. I asked several teachers about this before making the decision and they all said that we can balance things, that yoga is about finding the balance, that all we can do in this type of situation is practice as best we can. Maybe I have allowed the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction and once again I am out of balance.

Home

After spending time in the Caribbean visiting my wife's family, I returned home and found myself getting up to practice in the morning. I did that when I was away. It was great to greet the sun with sun salutations and to feel warm without the aid of a heater.

Since being home, I've been practicing everyday in the morning. Though it is difficult in the sense that the muscles aren't as warm as they should be-- in part because of the (mild) Vermont winter I suppose-- everything feels tight. But this week, at last, things seemed to loosen up a bit and I could go deeply into the same poses that I could do when I was practicing later in the day. The big problem is staying focused on the breath, the bandhas, and the posture.

Something happened just before I left for the Caribbean. I was, once again, getting really into the Yoga philosophy and the practice and was feeling really drawn to it. So much so that the strong desire to abandon everything and just follow this path was becoming a reality. In short, it conflicted with "my life" and it made me become really judgmental of myself and the profession I chose making it difficult to continue doing my work. I started getting a little stressed out for lack of a better word, because of the conflict that I saw between the two. Then I read the Bhagavad Gita and the words about service really resonated with me. I realized then that my service, my path, in this life is to do what I do. Once I realized that I became more drawn to practicing at home rather than in the studio and I suddenly feel entirely OK with the job I do. There is a purpose to it and it is my dharma, so I must follow it.

Weirdness

Since that last post, I've been experiencing a lot of... weirdness. I don't know if it is because I am slowly venturing into intermediate and that is opening up a lot of things that aren't just physical... or maybe it is the fact that it's that time of year again when the sun goes down at 4. Hurrah for solstice tomorrow!!!

But, since I wrote that I have gone through a lot of different things. After writing that, I kept going back to it thinking that I was being hyper-critical. Then, the more I read it and read it, I kept thinking, no, I'm not being critical, but maybe there is something more there. Yes. There is. Oddly, from that stage I began to become super critical of myself in a way that was almost damaging. Maybe strike the almost. Rather than opening up to myself and others, this has the effect of closing me down, of shutting things and others out.

Yet, as this was going on, I kept noticing how people seem to be oddly attracted to me. From out of nowhere, someone will come up to me in the store or wherever with a big smile and the next thing you know we're having a long conversation about cookie dough or something. And, yet inside I feel this sort of trembling, a sort of vulnerability, something that feels like it is very fragile. I think I've been here before. I can see that my criticism or any other negative reaction has the effect of pushing others away because I'm afraid of whatever that thing is inside of me will be damaged, hurt, injured if I open myself up. And yet, it is the closing off that is the most damaging, the most painful and causes the most injury.

Reading over my journal, I see that this is something that keeps coming up as I practice Yoga. There is an opening, there is fragility and then anger arises or some other negative defense mechanism to protect whatever it is. The choice is to either keep exploring it, to venture into the realm of "danger" or to allow it to close up, scar over and keep living in pain.

I'll keep practicing and see what happens.

Discipline, Acceptance and Auto-Ahimsa

I've been thinking about a blog entry I recently saw.

The message there is to "not be afraid of who you are." I think that is fine. But I also think that it can lead to a type of permissiveness. I understand the point about there is no good or bad and so on, but I also think this type of thinking can play into the New Agey type of thing that says anything goes. Or as the mantra of the sixties put it, "if it feels good do it." That feeling good led in someways to the coked out, disco era of the 70s for many. The question I think is to find what really does feel good and to do that.

At least what I have been finding is that with consistent practice you definitely start to choose things differently. Or at least I do. Slowly, certain things just fall away. In the "Damn Good Yoga" blog there is an old entry about how she just stopped smoking after she practiced yoga for awhile. It just sort of fell away. She had no withdrawals. When I first read about this happening with yoga I thought, "no way. There is no way that is going to happen with me and coffee." And yet it did. I guess the thing is that it-- along with other things-- just sort of fell away. I like that way of describing it because it wasn't like I consciously pushed them out or went through a 12 step program or something. I was not judgmental. I think that is where the blog entry is right, there should be no judging, simply acceptance. Here is where we can practice ahimsa on ourselves. I don't think of myself as a "good" person for having stopped eating meat or that coffee was evil and so I must stop drinking it. They were just things that sort of happened all on their own. Similarly, if someone eats meat, drinks or whatever, I don't think of them as a bad person or of myself as any better than they are. And with myself, if I do any of that stuff, I have to be kind to myself and forgive myself. But I also realize that when I do it, it doesn't feel that good in the long run. Because of that, the practice of eating sweats or whatever it is, slowly falls away. So I have to practice auto-ahimsa, or ahimsa on myself.

But the acceptance also has to be combined with a discipline of some sort. And I think that Ashtanga, for me at least, is that discipline.

The word discipline also has resonances with education-- in college you study a "discipline" or a field of inquiry-- just as it also means that you "bring something under control" or you train something or yourself to act according to certain codes. If Ashtanga is a discipline, then it is a way of controlling certain things, my breath, my movements, my thoughts, when I am practicing. But it is also a field of study. And the thing I am studying is the union of mind, body and spirit as I move through the asanas. I also study how I interact with things and people around me.