like

i just like this picture.

slowga

i've been doing yoga for about eight years now. i practice more or less every day for between an hour and an hour and a half, usually in the early morning, sometimes in a class, sometimes with gabriel, sometimes with lots of others, mostly alone. a few years ago i trained to teach yoga at the kripalu center for yoga in lenox, massachussetts. at the time i really had little interest in teaching. in fact my decision to do a 200-hour yoga teacher training program was somewhat frivolous. i told myself i was deeply serious about yoga and needed to go deeper, but really i was looking for escape, something completely different, a hyperwarp to a distant galaxy with focus, clarity, physicality and good food!

the training was excellent. my two primary teachers, naresh and yoganand, were longtime yogis who had lived at kripalu when it was an ashram. they both practiced and taught yoga with unmistakable authority. however, my experience of yoga itself during the course was shallow. i did not experience epiphany, release or much of anything other than lots of sore muscles and a vague embarrassment that i seemed to be one of the only students not surfing deep emotional swells. i wasn't unhappy that i was losing weight, gaining muscle, growing limber and learning a lot of new-age vocabulary. all that was fabulous and i enjoyed checking out my new body in the full length mirror down in the basement men's locker room where it seemed many came to admire their own bodies and those of others (at least that was my fantasy, unyogilike as it was).

back at home, life returned to normal, meaning all the stresses and unresolved things that had complicated my life prior to hyperwarp into yogaland asserted themselves again. my life was remarkably the same, unchanged. i resolved to try teaching yoga and found a position at a local gym where i taught for about nine months, ironically in the same space that i had first taken a yoga class. i developed a loyal following of several students who told me they enjoyed and benefited from the classes. but, i found myself simply repeating what i'd been taught at kripalu and that grew stale very quickly. not much later, my own practice dwindled to a day or two a week, if that and it felt like a chore. i found myself not really caring at all about yoga, thinking about other things during practice, begrudgingly doing postures. the more i parroted what i'd learned in teacher training during my classes the more i realized how little i understood about yoga and how deeply shallow my experience of it was. i walked into a local clothing shop owned by a friend. she sported a tight-fitting "fuck yoga" t-shirt. i kind of gasped at first, but then i thought, yeah, fuck yoga. i stopped teaching partly because of conflicts but also because i felt fraudulent teaching it.

since then, slowly, i've dropped a lot of what i considered yogic discipline: i started eating meat (killing); i started having wine with dinner now and then (and recently even some martinis) (impurity); i started drinking coffee, even getting into a dunkin donuts coffee-in-the-morning habit complete with eco-unfriendly piles of styrofoam cups in the back of my car (more impurity!); and there's more. but, what's fascinating to me about this turn of events is that re-engaging my old habits (and dropping the superficial yogic ones) has brought me face-to-face with yoga.

how? well, in saying "fuck it all, i'm going to just be who i am, not try to be perfect" the yoga postures became real to me. i began to feel my limitations, muscles that were held tight by stress, fear, anger. postures seemed to intensify and filter my experience--if i allowed them to--providing feedback about myself. this has helped me realize that almost all yoga classes i've experienced move much to quickly for me. it takes me a long time to sense what's happening and without awareness yoga is meaningless to me. this new sense of yoga has more than once made me think about teaching again--i'd love to bring this slow yoga to others. but, i want to remain, for the time being, in research mode. i'm very much enjoying yoga as an experiment, as a kind of self-science that uses the body to enter the soul. after i've banged about with this strategy, and maybe cleaned up my act, perhaps then i'll teach again.

oh boy

hey, i'm not even taking pictures any more. but, i am organizing my life. i've discovered some online organizing tools that i'm really enjoying. though it feels a bit remedial in that i like to think of myself as an organized person (though my physical environment would suggest otherwise) it's been an excellent exercise to parse my life into projects and tasks and see just how much i've got on my plate. as with so many revelations in my life, i am the last person to see what others can see perfectly clearly. in this case: i have too much to do myself. applicants for jobs at the new aloofdork corporation should contact me directly. i have many positions available.

the hardest part of delagating for me is letting go, acknowledging that there are limits to human endeavor. it feels a bit to me like giving away something very valuable. there is a pain to it but also a fabulous sense of lightness when the cherished task is given away. i cling to very little materially, but i do cling to tasks. "that's my job!" part of this control-freakish behavior is yankee frugality (though i'm not a yankee, at least not directly). i dread spending money. the other part is losing control, having to trust, having to communicate a need to someone else, admitting that i have a need. i somehow have programmed deep inside me the delusion that i should be self-sufficient. it's a ridiculous concept given the way i live, with so many inputs from others, including energy, money, food, transportation, entertainment. very few of us, even the most remote, live in isolation. i need to admit my enmeshedness, my interconnectedness and reliance, that while i'm a strong person, i'm deeply indebted to my family, friends, society and the planet. seeing this clearly is a first and crucial step in genuinely organizing myself.