Yoga, for the moment.

Happy Hour Yoga: THE LAST DAYS

2012-02-07T19:02:46Z

Dear friends,

This is a note to say THANK YOU to JC and Sybil of Stop Smiling for hosting our bare footed nonsense for the last 2.5 years! What a goddamned great time we've had.

For those that aren't up to date: Stop Smiling as we know it will come to an end March 1st. And congrats are in order, as their new space, and new magazine, is sure to be of the shiniest, best things Chicago has seen in ages. MANY GOOD WISHES to you guys for the future!

Here is the breakdown on the last Happy Hour Yogas at Stop Smiling:

THIS FRIDAY, 2/10: NO CLASS
MONDAY 2/13: class as per usual
FRIDAY 2/17: our very own Leah Phillip will teach Qi Gong!
MONDAY 2/20: regular class
FRIDAY 2/24: THE LAST POTLUCK! We shall bask in the ambient glow of our sweaty, drunk love for one last time.

You might be asking yourself, what now? And I'll tell you: I don't know yet. Happy Hour Yoga is a nomad. A new home will come, and when it does, I will alert you.

I love you all and will see you Monday.

We're back.

2011-12-29T12:50:58Z

Happy New Year, friends.

I'm delighted to alert you that Happy Hour Yoga will reconvene this coming Monday the 2nd at Stop Smiling with a New Year's catch-up/ease-down at Rodan to follow. See you soon!

Love y'all.

Karen

---

HAPPY HOUR YOGA @ Stop Smiling 1371 N Milwaukee

MONDAYS AND FRIDAYS 6:30-7:30pm, cash donation $5-$15

HAPPY HOUR YOGA in Pilsen 1856 S Throop

WEDNESDAYS 6:30-7:30pm, cash donation $5-$15

Happy Hour Yoga is a donation-based community yoga practice for normal ass people. We do a moderately-paced Hatha/Vinyasa style thing, depending on how many busted up limbs are in the room. Most days it's fun, some days it's better than that. Wanna help get the word out? Write a little ditty on our Yelp page. Thanks bunches for that and all the other stuff.

All the things

2011-09-28T18:45:15Z

Dear friends,

We've got a lot to cover here. Any time wasted begging pardon for my solipsism is time I could be telling you all my thoughts and feelings. Let's get to it. For anyone needing to skip to the important part, here is an outline of the information you are about to be informed of:

I. YOGA CLASS ANNOUCEMENTS
     a. class cancellations
     b. the pre-holiday season potluck
     c. upcoming yin workshop
II. PERFORMANCE ITEMS
     a. thanks for coming to the whale
     b. please come to the victory project
          i. things
          ii. things
          iii. things
     c. the centennial thing
     d. down with OPP
III. WRITING NEWS
     a. the blog
     b. the job
     c. the book
IV. EMOTIONAL FEELINGS
     a. love
     b. gratitude
     c. sleep

---

I. YOGA CLASS ANNOUNCEMENTS
a. class cancellations
Recent developments (see all other items) have offered us all an opportunity to gain highly coveted skills of adaptation to mutable structures. While Happy Hour Yoga is eternally thriving on both the astral and metaphysical planes, the following three consecutive Friday classes will not be happening in the arms and legs universe as we know it:

NO FRI Sept 30
NO FRI, Oct 7
NO FRI, Oct 14

b. the pre-holiday season potluck
Before Halloween catapults us into the chocolate covered time warp birthing the Occidental New Year, let's have dinner together.

POTLUCK OCT 21 @ STOP SMILING 1371 N Milwaukee
Yoga at 6:30, Food at 7:30, Unanticipated Makeout Party at 9:30. ish.

c. upcoming yin workshop
If you didn't get to check this out last time due to the sold out quality of this highly sold out event last time because it sold out, then sign up on the internet and buy a ticket. It's fun. You get to lay on the floor and I talk really nice to you.

YIN YOGA WORKSHOP OCT 28 @ NAMASKAR 3946 N Southport
8-10pm, $25, click here and scroll down

II. PERFORMANCE ITEMS
     a. thanks for coming to the whale
So, this was kind of amazing, right? Thanks for coming, all of you. The people that made this thing, and the people that puppeted it, and the people that made it sing, and the people that made it glow, and the people that bought beers for all those people, are without a doubt the best people I know. We are called Opera-Matic. You can like us on the facebike. I mean, facebook.

     b. now come to the victory project
The dance thing I have been going on about. It's happening next weekend. The big deal show. Last weekend we went to Cleveland (photo above) and performed at the Ingenuity Festival, and now we're doing it in Chicago once and for all. It's really far away though, in this so called "urban paradise" area that doesn't even have any booze, plus it's probably going to be really cold, so whatever if you don't make it. It's just a thing that's been transubstantiating my limbs and inner stuffs for the last six months, which is really only 1/66th of my 6-dimensional lifetime, pretty much cosmic dust in the tachyon universe.
          i. regarding the location
                Northerly Island is near museum campus on the lake. It is hard to know how to get to it if you don't know how to get to it. If you ride you bike, you will get a discount. Also, there will be iGo car shuttles taking people from real world locations at different times.
          ii. regarding the iGo cars
                We are looking for volunteer drivers to shuttle the people in the iGo cars. You must be an iGo member to do the shuttling. Probably if you do this we'll let you in free and someone will buy you a beer in the future.
           iii. regarding my saying it's no big deal if you don't make it
                That was not true.

     c. the centennial thing
It's the 100th birthday of the Athennaeum Theater. I'm going to light that many candles for them at dusk on October 10th. I don't know anything else because they haven't told me. But if you like watching me creep around like a light witch, come over.

     d. down with OPP

In the way of Other People's Projects, I'd like to say congrats to Justin Cabrillos on getting the Links Hall LinkUp residency and then making a heart exploding dance out of it last weekend. Also, come with me to Links Hall again Saturday to see whatever it is Anthony Romero has been hollering about. (To Say Nothing Of the shout out from Time Out.) Also, the dearly diligent Sara Schnadt is giving a talk at the Art Institute Oct 1.

III. WRITING NEWS
     a. the blog
Yeah, I know. I've totally dropped the blog. As it turns out, the yogaforthemoment.com was the lovechild of a contemplative nature mixed with relative unemployment. I would like to share what it is that happens when a querying mind adopts a hyper calendared lifestyle, but I don't have time.

     b. the job
I got a writing job is the thing. It is temporary, thank god. I like it. I get to wear my good shoes.

     c. the book
Not right now, guys, come on.

IV. EMOTIONAL FEELINGS
     a. love
One can't rule out dehydration, but I've got a really tender feeling in my heart toward you.

     b. gratitude
Yesterday I had a run in with a really unpleasant person demanding to know the name of the manager on duty and what not. She was slamming doors and things because she was not allowed to open a package of tights before buying them. This was important for me to experience, because my first impulse was to ask her what her problem was, but instead I asked myself. What was that woman's problem? I decided it was a lack of gratitude, so I started reminding myself to be grateful. I started by being grateful I was not the manager on duty, and then grateful for all the people that ring me up and make me sandwiches and drive me around and read my emails, which reminded me that it was time to get back in touch and to remember to say all the things and then thanks after all the things. I feel deeply lucky all the time, and it's because of you.

     c. sleep
Into it.

Sign the papers and make them into airplanes

2011-09-13T20:58:19Z

Occasionally I must adopt list format. Today is such an occasion.

1) I took a day job. I am possibly the only person I know who could be genuinely fascinated by a B2B writing gig. But get this. My job is to attend business conversations and fuck them up a little bit by being friendly. They think this will invite more creative exchange and upend new info that might have been missed in a strictly pro talk, and they are right. What they don't know is just how incalculably good I am at fucking things up with my friendliness. That I was chosen for this task is possibly one of the evidences for a divinely organized universe. Anyway, after I mess with the talks, then I make them into 250 words and send them to other people to have other talks about, which I also attend and interrupt and summarize. I don't know. Someone might not have thought this through. I did, though. I did think it through. My thinking was that I had better go get that paper. Today was my first day. Which means I have not been writing the blog all day while I leisurely consider my thoughts and shop for muscle relaxing bath salts online. I'm just writing it right now real quick before I go to Whale Practice.

2) I didn't tell you about the whale? There is a whale in my life. It is a puppet. And it is big. Ten of us are practicing puppetting the thing all together. You might wonder how I got involved with a whale. I'll tell you. It started last fall, when the collaborators of Opera-Matic were hanging around inspiring one another by drinking beer and looking at the internet together. One of them told us a story that made our hearts into goo, and so then the whale puppet was born. Rather, it was born yesterday, after months and months of getting the dollars to make it and figuring out how to make it, and then making it. I'll send pictures later. For now, you are invited to read the story that goo-ed are hearts all up:

The lovesick whale

by WILLIAM LOWTHER

For 12 long years, the whale swimming deep down in the North Pacific has been calling out for a mate - and for 12 long years, there has been no reply. Scientists have yet to see the whale, but they know he (or she) is there because they have picked up its plaintive calls, using US Navy technology that usually monitors enemy submarines. The lonesome whale's sex and species remain unknown. But its love cry in a basso profundo frequency - just above the lowest note on a tuba - is all too familiar to the marine biologists at America's Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. They have called the creature '52 Hertz' because it makes a distinctive stream of sounds at around that frequency. Whales are social animals that usually travel in schools and play and feed together in pods where they find their mates and raise their families. A lone whale - such as the fictional Moby Dick - is extremely rare. Dr Mary Ann Daher, a marine biologist at Woods Hole, said: "Its sonic signature is clearly that of a whale, but nothing like the normal voice of the giant blue or the next biggest species, the fin, or any other whale for that matter." The sounds come from a single animal whose movements appear to be unrelated to the presence or movement of other whale species." The scientists believe the whale could be on its own because it is a hybrid of a blue whale and another species. Being of 'mixed birth' it may not be accepted by any single species. While it has been monitored for more than a decade, the whale's existence has only now received publicity because of a paper by the biologists published in the US journal Deep Sea Research.

Under a top secret programme, the US Navy has hidden microphones and recording equipment throughout the North Pacific so that it can pick up and monitor the sounds of enemy submarines passing through the area.

And it is on this classified system or 'sound array' that the mysterious whale has been heard.

3) How is your heart area now? Sorry about that. You can come see the big guy sing with Andrew Bird at the Hideout Block Party not this Saturday but next Saturday. Not kidding. Serious.

4) So, the whale has some jellyfish friends. They are also puppets. Last week or whenever, I was sewing jellyfishes with the ladies of Opera-Matic when, for reasons I shall not detail presently, it was suggested to me that I order the book The Highly Sensitive Person. I got it in the mail yesterday, and good god damn, I believe I am having a psychophysiomotion response right now. Give me a minute. (My point. if you are a freak who cries at everything and sleeps in earplugs just to stay calm, you, too, should order that book. Warning: you are in for a very intense self-help language immersion, so take the next few days to acclamate your Infant/Body Self to the energy of Spirit Mother Care, then find your Womb Center, crack a Healing Elixir and get comfortable.)

5) Ok. Better now. So, hmm, the thing is that I have now, in the interest of rent payment and whatnot, scheduled every hour of every day except Sunday nights until Halloween. Yes, I'm worried about it, but mostly I'm trying to remember that I'm having a good time. I am dancing the dances and making the jellyfish and puppetting the whales and doing the yoga and fucking up the business conversations all day long. Life is good, I'm almost certain of it.

6) I'm going to keep in touch with you. It is going to be weird and hard, but that's how strong my love is. To those darling dears who have written to me this week and received no reply, forgive me maybe. I will write you soon!

7) Seven is better than six.

Twenty Two Million

2011-09-07T20:40:54Z

FYI: if you Google god, this is what you get.

This morning I woke up late and arrived at Swim Cafe late to write the blog late. Sam got here right after me and we stood at the counter visualizing breakfast options while I told him about Janet Jackson giving my dance group $22 million to make a dance film in my sleep. I'd asked for a guiding dream before bed actually, so this was encouraging.

As it happened, before bed I was in low spirits. I'd been too busy all day, and got to rehearsal late and without eating. Furthermore, Erica had our crutch wings visually enhanced, which made them twice as heavy and globbed with fiberglass. I have to lift these things with my arms and legs, see. I have to dance with them. So at a few moments, during the working with them, my eyes welled up in like anger and fear and exhaustion. I came up against something internally, I think. I know the thing, too. It's a thing I've run into before, the limit of where I am comfortable hanging out and working and being cool. It is the line between "ok" and "not ok." Just getting there takes some doing, to say nothing of crossing over. And somehow, even though running into it kind of smashes my physical and emotional feelings, I seem to like running into it, for reasons that just made sense about an hour ago.

Last night, though, after the smashing, I walked to the train with a reverence for my crippledness, amazed at how spent and uneasy I could be. Don't misunderstand; I felt terrible. I wanted to crawl into a fetal donut and get pet on the head by someone nice while I whimpered. It was a crying "mommy" moment, although my experience does not support the crying of "mommy" as an effective help-getting practice. Walking south on Milwaukee, I texted a friend about the limit I'd reached. He replied, perfectly maybe, "The only option is to see what's on the other side... or to sleep." As I hauled myself up the stairs, I reported I'd be doing both at once. I ran a hot bath, opened a beer, and drank my dinner in the tub while exfoliating shards out of my limbs. I put on the too big pants for pajamas and asked for a guiding dream with my guiding dream asking ritual, which is honest to god an unmagical yet cogent routine involving a rock and a stick and a cigarette. Then Janet Jackson gave me twenty two million to dance.

The dream helped me some. When I told Sam about Janet at the bagel counter, he said he didn't know that I regarded her so highly. "I didn't either, but my dreamguides must know something I don't. I was real down last night. I got super tired and hungry and I'm really broke right now and have way too much non-paying work, you know, so like, I was scrambled and they were on top of it I guess."

"It is pretty good. Twenty two million from someone less famous would still be good."

"Also Paul McCartney was there, though he was young and black - I think he was played by Jamie Foxx but I knew he was Paul, you know how it can be like that. He said I was really talented. And not to forget that I am a musician first or something. Then we did some coke with a beautiful and sweet ex-con I was making out with. A bank robber, no lie. I mean, that part is from real life."

"I didn't think you did coke."

"What? No. Coke is for assholes. I mean, I made out with a gorgeous bank robber recently. Well, he's a sculptor. But he used to be a bank robber. I should tell you about it. Lovely man. Absolutely lovely. A gem of a human. And enormous. Like, a giant. My forehead came up to here on him. I'm not kidding. He could lift me up in one hand, which he did. I mean, it was, I don't know, I don't know if I can tell you about it right now."

"I don't know if I can eat a quiche right now."

"You could just get one piece."

"I could, but I'm not going to. I'm going to get a bagel."

"I'm going to get the scone with all the bacon in it."

Sam and I sat down. Sam opened his book and I opened a little composition window after deleting all my spam comments. Neither of us got any work done for at least an hour. First we were talking about the wedding this weekend, and then about religion, and we might have been getting to ethics but I interrupted. "You want to know what I think about god?"

"Yeah?"

"I smell fear behind your yeah."

"That's because of the way you just set that up."

"Oh, right. Well. Can I tell you? And then you can tell me all the people that already thought of that before me?"

"Sorry. Do I do that?"

"I love it when you do that. I usually think these are my own ideas that I came up with, so it's nice to know that smart people have thought my thoughts. Even if other smart people think my thoughts are bullshit."

"Well, the idea is to provide an alternative---"

"I know, I know. So the thing is that I don't think god is a guy..."

Although I went on, I spoke more slowly than usual, because it turns out god is hard to explain. I stared out the front window at the spot just underneath the backwards blue lettering, where I look when I'm trying to find words for things, and I did what I do when I try to find a word for something, which is to bring it to mind in every possible way. From the front and back and sides, to go into it and step out of it and know what it is and how it relates to a person or a chair or a chihuahua, whether it is waterproof or bulletproof or 90 proof. And usually when I do this, when I open myself up to all the things a thing might be, I come up with a good word or phrase for the thing. Maybe even a newish one. The problem was that I was doing this with god, and so what happened was I started crying and Sam asked me if I was ok.

I'm telling you this for a very specific reason that I don't understand all the way, because it is not something I really approve of chattering about casually. It is private to a degree that completely shatters any makeout session with any hot felon anywhere. (Sorry, dear. I adore you, I do. But this is about the unfathomable great light of all universes. You feel me.) Today I want to tell you about this because, after some weeks of feeling disconnected from my contemplative writing mojo, I worried that my increased involvement in the art and dance and performing worlds was cutting me off from my sparklier realms, the height and depth, the sharpness (though I have not missed the basketcasitude, to be honest). I hoped I was wrong, that they were not separate paths, and I think I got that confirmation. I danced and arted and performed all the way up to and maybe over the boundary of my comfort zone (the place where most of our yoga practice is spent by the way), and my body and heart and spirit cracked a bit, which I hate to say, is how the light gets in.* Also the money from Janet.

If I were going to talk more about this, I might say it’s really good to talk about god ideas, but really tricky to talk about god experiences, because talking ruins the best things, and accidentally crying out of overwhelming awe is pretty much the best, most ruinable thing. But I’m not going to talk more about it really. There isn’t a lot to say. I carried it with me for a few hours, this openness, which made normal tasks obstacular, if blinding heart light could be called an obstacle. Here’s a thought though: to what is the great light of all universes an obstacle? Anything worth giving a crap about? I wonder. I will think about that for next time.

Speaking of comfort zones and not talking about god, this Friday night I am leading a two hour Yin Yoga workshop at Namaskar, which you are welcome to read about here.

*(Yes, Leonard Cohen said that, but it's pretty good.)

Half a Tuesday

2011-08-30T20:32:14Z

Chipp Inn, the other Swim

I'm here in the cafe again. Brittany is here, and Anthony. Amanda and Diana fixed my tea and scone, respectively. John came in just before nine and pretended not to see me, just the way I like him to. Jamie waived, Mark said hi. Philip and Ellyn aren't here, because they move to Austria today, which is what I thought I'd write about actually, since their send off beer at the Chipp was one of those magical neighborhood things I'll tell myself years from now that we used to do all the time.

Sam isn't here today. He put himself on layaway to write all week long. Writing takes time, after all. More time than half a Tuesday, which is all I've been giving it lately, and now the distance between me and the writing has become a third party with its own influence and demands. So yes, I get it. The part of me that does the writing has been elsewhere. You noticed, you said. The dancing is the thing. Number one because I've been spending my time in my arms and legs brain instead of my sentences brain and number two the dancing wants so much of me that I start to feel stingy about giving my attention to anything else. This is a mistake. As logical as it may seem that there is some finite amount of me to be rationed, I'm not ready to divvy up my parts and clock out. In fact, seems like most of the time, the more generous I am with my energy, the more energy I have to give. I'm going to try this out by re-devoting myself to you and hoping that'll make me a better dancer.

Let's see if it works. Next Friday, I have been invited to lead a two hour Yin Yoga Workshop at Namaskar. This is really good, guys. This is the yoga that you wanna do because you are done doing everything else. It is also, conveniently, the only yoga you can do with a sprained ankle, a broken heart and a hangover, just in case you were gonna try and exempt yourself. We are going to get on the floor and spend some time dealing. We are going to deal with our joints, our limitations, and our attitude problems. We're going to expand our comfort zones, as I like to say, by hanging out at comfort zone border patrol and making friends with the guards. Am I saying that yin yoga is painful? Well, darlings, in the paraphrased words of Ida Rolf, that depends on your attitude toward change. Yin yoga, just like the yang-y yoga we usually do, is as intense or as gentle as you want it to be. You can choose to work or rest in any pose. There are blankets and pillows and things. Come hang out. I'm going to play really good music (seriously) and squirt the air with smells that are different from sweaty feet and Nagchampa.

CTA Insider Info: Namaskar Yoga, while kind of "up north," sure, is RIGHT OFF OF THE ASHLAND BUS, as the #9 happens to veer east on Irving Park and drop you right in front of the door.

P.S. I want to say thanks to the folks that came out to see the dance work in progress this weekend: Lenore, Sam and Josh, Megin and Ali, Chris, Mark, the Zalek family, Armin and Joe, Faith, Roberto, Ben and Anna, Skip, Anthony and Justin, Paul, Kerri, Tricia, Maggie, Blake and all those with hearts big enough to forgive me for missing them, thank you for being with me. I have been so invested in the work, and it was the world to me to share that with you. More on that later.

Three things

2011-08-16T21:41:37Z

It might not surprise you that I regard art making and yoga practice as the same thing. At least, I'm only interested in the place where they intersect, which is to say, if you came here for an essay on yoga, you are going to have to use your analogy reception and application tools, because I'm still responding to the 2 week artist's residency that just lit me up and tossed me back to Chicago. And also I never really write about yoga, let's be serious.

Some of you know that I spent the larger part of my future earnings on an arts education. Five years of music school, followed by 3 years of art school, with 4 years in between of what some might call "day camp." Nevermind that for now. Since then, since I got out (odd way to put it, considering what I put myself through to get in), I've been trying to get myself more or less back to the way I was before I went in. I don't want to say that arts education was a waste of money. Well, I don't know. Maybe I do want to say it was a waste of money, but I won't say it was a waste of time. The hours I spent there were beyond good. I was asked important questions, and learned to answer them with new tools. Even so, now, as a mover and thinker and maker of things, when I consider my working philosophy, I feel that it was shaped by few teachers, and fewer teachings. When I make my work, I keep in mind 6 basic ideas. Today I'm going to tell you three of them.

1. "Art is not a punchline." Johanna Timpson. 2002.

During my first semester in art school, I was introduced to a slew of sassmouthed brats making simple, clever work that charmed me maybe more than it should have. For example, a guy hijacked a movie by buying up all the cinema tickets and not using them, so that the film played for no one. Another guy made a human-sized ball of rubber bands. A better known guy cast an inflatable toy bunny rabbit in steel. The thing about these ideas, the thing I didn't realize until my then-boyfriend's father's wife pointed it out to me over Christmas break, peeking over her knitting to hem me in, was that 'hearing' them was just as good as seeing them done. Standing in the presence of the work didn't offer much, if anything, more than I got from reading a line explaining them. Johanna told me that when you describe a work of art, something should be lost in translation, and that something, the thing that is lost, is the whole point. Let's call that thing the essence of the work, the thing that prompts a, "had to be there."

And it is true, regarding my recent performance. You did have to be there, so I hear, though I'm not going to offer that as a report of the event. To employ the phrase in post-performance exchange indicates a poverty of imagination or generosity, and while I may, at times, lack one of those things, I do my best to keep those periods brief. Even so, I am finding that to represent the work is itself an art with which I find I have little fluency. I have been compiling writing and images from my process, to give entry to those who weren't there in the moment, and what I'm finding is that those recreations, prototypes and narratives are making their own story, their own essence.

Yesterday I was hanging out at headquarters with my very learned friend Sam and he said something about the distilation of massive bodies of information and experience into pithy slogans and minimalist icons being one of the most crucial skills of the contemporary era, as most of us do the larger part of our experiencing virtually and with abbreviated attention. (Actually, I am not sure that is what he said, because sometimes when Sam tells me his thoughts I spend all my brain power using context clues to identify the subjects and verbs, leaving little left for the pairing of them, let alone the clauses. But. I think that is what he was saying. And I agree with that. ) I agree that it is an important practice, but number one it is no substitute, truly not, and number two the persons who take it upon themselves to translate an experiential gestalt into just one or two dimensions had better have a firm grasp of essence making, I reckon.

2. "The true artist address the spiritual," overheard on the 13th floor, 2005.

One day in art school I was eating cold pesto noodles from the cafe in the lounge. They weren't delicious, but when I was told by a visitor from U of C that they had the same pasty green cavatappi from the same cafe chain at their school, it made me feel like maybe I was getting a good education after all. Anyway, the quality of light in the lounge was excellent. Huge windows looked out on to the lake from a height, offering a generous expanse into which one could hurl the mind's anchor while at work. I often did that. It is legitimately demanding brain labor, though I admit it looks like laying on a couch and staring out the window. One day I was busy at this very task when I overheard a teacher with a grad student. There were always teachers and grad students having salads, talking about grants and depression and whether it would be a good idea to move to New York City. This particular afternoon they weren't talking about any of those things. They were talking about essence, more or less. The teacher said, "the true artist addresses the spiritual," and then I stopped listening, because I'd just heard the only thing I needed to hear.

I'd like to clarify that I don't know who the teacher was, or what she meant by that. What I know is what happened as I took it in. I felt like she was saying that art which does not in some way touch the essential questions is not really worth making. This not only challenged me to make more expansive work myself, but to ask more of my receptive eyes and ears. Could I find the spiritual in two or three dimensions? Could I find it in the profane, banal, vulgar and vernacular? Could I find it outside of my art practice? It turned out that I could. In fact, it turned out that the question wasn't so much, "is this artist addressing the spiritual?" but rather, "am I, the viewer, addressing the spiritual in my approach to this work?" Are you with me?

To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, I'll tell you this: One time I told someone I believed everything was spiritual, and he said, "going to the grocery store is not spiritual," which I found hilarious, and blurted out, "Are you even being serious? How is that not spiritual?" He went on.

"What about taking a shit?"
"Purification."
"Masturbating?"
"Ecstasy."
"Being a garbage man."
"Devoted service is spiritual, and cleanliness is next to godliness? Purification again, man, but on a bigger, more communal level. It is bigtime. Plus garbage men have great attitudes. Have you ever talked to a garbage man, dude? They are like freaking prophets."

It's true I tend to regard everything as deeply mystical and holy, but it's also true we have a bit of a task in front of us to find it on most occasions. More on that later.

3. "Be brave." Mark Jeffery, via email, 2011.

I wanted Mark to mean, "make something bold and brilliant and powerful!" Or, "Light bigger explosives!" But that is not what he meant. Mark meant, "if you do this right, you will have to face yourself, and that is going to be a bitch. Do it anyway."

Thanks, Mark.

I'm back. Almost.

2011-08-09T19:54:58Z

1) Sometimes when writing is hard, like today, I have to make a list of the things I want to tell you.

2) The last two weeks were pure magic. Though, by "pure" I mean the kind of perfection that embraces blemishes, scratch-outs and do-overs. By "magic" I mean magic.

3) I made a new piece. I would like to tell you about it, but every time I try, I end up saying something like, "you had to be there," which makes me feel like a bad writer and a jerk. How can I tell you about it? Maybe pictures. Here are some pictures.

4) I had prepared myself for surprises, I thought. Five days before the performance, I expressed the following affirmation:

I have fully embraced the fact that my work is uncontainable. I concede that I must collaborate with the universe, with the weather and with spacetime limitations. I accept that ambient noise, unforeseen illness, errors, chance and the fragmentation of light will all be credited with me. I grant some authorship to local insects, unwieldy children and those persons unable to soundlessly unwrap hard candy. I invite inspirational disruption, aberrant distraction, and random content not otherwise specified in to my process. I celebrate that the far and near history of those present will distort my intentions before they reach the eyes and ears of their carriers. These things I understand. Everything else, though. The rest of this. You are going to have to pry it from my hot little hands.

First of all, I was foolish in assuming I had covered all possible surprises with this list. Secondly, to give preemptive credit to "errors, chance and the fragmentation of light" may have been a mistake. (Foreshadowing alert.)

5) To prepare myself for the performance, I did some things every day: yoga and meditation, eating and sleeping. (Writing, dancing, showering, ice cream, whiskey and venturing away from the compound - those were more every other day.) To gather my wits about me, I snuck into the sanctuary once in a while to play Bach and sing the old songs. I did a lot of youtube research, gchatting, and poking in on Michelle, my studio neighbor. Michelle was probably the secret to my success. Me and Michelle would go outside to sit on the steps and try not to smoke cigarettes. We talked about health and beauty techniques, family dramz, art criticism and interpersonal communication, which is to say, mostly we talked about love. I mean romance love but I also mean the love we were trying to give to our work and to our parents, to our bodies, our guts, our imaginary friends and especially to people who weren't even alive anymore. It was funny because we kept thinking we messed it up a lot, forgetting that we can't mess it up really. Because love is bigger than we thought.

6) I have to skip a lot of things right now.

7) Ok, sorry. I'm going to tell you about the rest of it later, ok? I ran out of writing time today. I'm not really completely back yet in my brains and so I'm going to take a minute to re-enter my life and then I'll tell you about it. Is that alright? Thanks. Look at the pictures though, and send me an email or something. I love you guys.

Memorial (2011)

2011-07-27T17:46:50Z

Memorial (2005)

Dear people,

I am currently an artist in residence at the Contemporary Artists Center at Woodside in Troy, NY, and would like to invite you to participate in my work. Memorial (2011) is a performance borrowing the memorial service as a structure to contain some ideas about personal and collective commemoration, the editing of cultural memory, and the symbolic gesture as a spiritual vernacular.

Content sources include but are not limited to Amma the hugging saint, Obama's signature, the Norway memorials, Amy Winehouse's eyeliner, folk music from Epirus, Woodside Church history, Memorial (2005) from my first residency at CAC, the mala, Melanie Moore's So You Think You Can Dance audition, Southern Baptist funeral practices, church bells, New Orleans jazz, Margaret and Shirley, The Lakeshore Limited, and sheet cake.

In short, I am going to light 1100 candles, play my viola, lead a song, recite a few old and new prayers, and do a dance on a floor of flowers. That's your cue.

a memorial site in Oslo

Whether your intention is to honor someone you have lost or celebrate an event from your history, you are invited to build my floor of flowers with your dedications. Please send fresh or fake flowers with a note about your commemoration to:

Memorial @ CAC
71 Mill Street
Troy, NY 12180

Memorial (2011) will be performed on the evening of August 5th. To have your dedication included in the performance, please be sure your bouquet gets to the church by Thursday, August 4th. Here's a good resource for petals by post, should you go that route: www.flowerdeliverydeals.com/

Eleven hundred thank yous,

Karen Faith

--

FAQ

What is it you want me to do again?
I want you to use this performance as a space to commemorate someone or something. If you didn't get to send flowers to your grandpa's memorial, you can now. If you want to celebrate finishing your PhD, you can send a dozen roses in honor of your fortitude. If you feel compelled to offer zinnias to your inner child, spirit animal, invisible friend, or celebrity lust obsession, this is for you, too.

I would like to participate, but find the sending of flowers to be fiscally irresponsible. What should I do?
Send a card!

What if I can't get off Facebook for long enough to get to a postbox?
Send an ecard!

Will there be cake at the performance?
Yes.

Will it be vegan?
No.

Is this going to be a super downer?
Not entirely.

This is not my thing, but I think my old roommate's girlfriend would be into it. Can I send this email to her?
Yes. This is an open and public invitation. I'm sending it to you personally because I like you. Feel free to send it to the people you like.

Are you going to think I'm an asshole because I don't want to waste $20 on something beautiful that you're going to stomp all over and then toss with the trash?
No. But it sounds like you are the kind of person who thinks that falling in love is a waste, too. In which case, possibly. Also, it may interest you to know that the flowers will all be blessed and respectfully rendered into compost for the garden here, where people who fall in love all the time get their vegetables.

Happenings Notification

2011-07-19T18:55:00Z

Hello friends and yogis,

There are some things about me that I'd like you to know. Most of these things are general things, things you already know probably, but a few of the things are more specific, things that aren't really about me at all but things, it could be said, that I am about. These things, three of them, are happenings. Most of you will only care about one of these things, but some of you will care about two of them, and one of you will care about all three. If you are that one, the one person who is doing the caring about all the things I am about, then you should send me an email, because I'd like to buy you a drink. For the rest of you, please select the thing for which you may care from the list below:

1. Saturday I am going away to be an art monk for two weeks at this place. I do this sometimes. It is my time to turn on the facebook-blocking software and remember what it is I am here on this planet to do. All I can say is that me and 1200 candles are going out there, and only one of us is coming back.

2. While I'm gone, Happy Hour Yoga will have four babysitters and two cancellations. Try to stay calm. If you need time and place details, go here. If you want to know who is teaching when, look at this:

MON, 7/25 NO CLASS in Wicker Park
WED, 7/27 NO CLASS in Pilsen
FRI, 7/29 Kerri Noto brings Tantric Hatha to the Wicker Park gang
MON, 8/1 Kerri Noto brings Tantric Hatha to the Wicker Park gang
WED, 8/3 Naomi Vaughan leads the Pilsen practice
FRI, 8/5 Sara and Chris Zalek will co-teach Yoga/Tai Chi in Wicker Park
MON, 8/8 Karen Faith is back, and would like to go to dinner with you afterward

3. Before I go, I'm going to help hostess a 50s dance party at Beauty Bar. I know. This seems unrelated. But remember how I am dancing with some dancers now? I'm sure I told you. Anyway, some of those dancers are stuck in a time capsule. Don't laugh. It's a thing, getting stuck, total drag if it happens to you, but kind of fun to watch, which is what you are invited to do tomorrow night. The thing about this thing is that #1, I am going to be in a period dress, which is far more flattering than it sounds and #2, this is the first installment of a trilogy of performances, the latter two of which will see me take the energetic forms of soldier, mermaid, sufi, Geppetto, valkyrie, warlock, Vitruvian Man, marshmallow, snake, spiral, warrior princess, regular princess, jellyfish, push puppet, stilt walker, ocean wave, quinceanerita, cyborg, soap bubble and also, sometimes, briefly, I will borrow the form of Karen Faith, the woman person. Oh, and there are other women people in this performance, too. They are pretty alright.

I love you all very much.
Don't forget that yoga classes this week are all totally happening.

Karen

This High To Ride, pt 2

2011-07-12T16:12:29Z

We walked to the car without deciding to. The sun had gotten a running start. I opened the black door of Gladys' black car and sat in her black pleather seat.

"So what did you think? Did you feel something?"

"I don't know, I have to say that was really weird, Gladys. I mean, I'm glad I went. I wanted to go and I am glad I did, but it's just really hard to know what to make of a pop up mall in a hotel."

"Yeah, that part is weird."

"I tried not to have any expectations, you know? But that's impossible, really, I mean, I wanted everything. I confess. I wanted to feel something transformative. And I felt something, I did. But I wanted to have an awakening. I wanted Amma's love to be better than sex. Better than break up sex, even. What, I'm serious. Stop laughing, you're making me cry again."
“No one ever said the hug was that good! Though my first one was better – well, it was different. I like that she is doing different languages this time.”
“What language did you ask for?”
“What do you think? Spanish!”
“Well, I know, I guess I just wondered because you mostly speak English now. Where are you from again? I forgot, I’m sorry.”
“I’m from Argentina! How do you forget that?”
“I know, I’m terrible. I feel like sometimes if my memory switch is not turned on when the information comes in, it just doesn’t get saved. It’s weird. I’m an asshole. I think Argentina is the best, though. It’s super beautiful, right? And you guys do winter during the summer and everything. I’m into that.”
“Mm, yes, Argentina is in the southern hemisphere.”

The ride back into the city was quiet. Gladys blamed her blissful trance, but I think I was just really tired. The kind of tired you get after crying, which is the kind I’ve been for three 3 and a half years. Possibly more, but it's hard to remember anything before that. I spaced out over the highway. There were a lot of turns. Anytime we needed to go left we had to make a giant circle to the right. It happened over and over, and each time I felt a little seasick and angry at the centrifuge, how it wanted to push me away just for using it as an anchor. It was saying, listen, Karen, you can use me as a pivot point, but you can't stay here. The longer you stay, the harder I will throw you. This arrangement is non-negotiable.

It made me think of love. Of Amma, of my stupid, stupid heart. How hard I tried to make a pivot into an anchor, how thrown I was. How many times. How slowly I learn. How my life is made much richer and much heavier by reading every event as an analog of both greater and smaller rhythms. How it feels like a big made up story, like one of the good ones that win awards because someone tried really hard to make metaphors out of all the things in it, as if true stories don’t do that already if you just write them the way they happen.

Gladys dropped me at the Blue Line stop in Oak Park and showed me her braces again, promising not to let another 3 years go by.

“I barely recognized you with all that hair!”
“I know. Maybe next time you see me it will all be gone. The hair was his idea anyway.”
“No, don’t cut it! You look so much better with it! I mean, you were beautiful before, but this is just, wow, I mean, if that’s all you have to show for it, at least you look good, girl.”
“Good point. Thanks. Hey, let me know if you’re doing qi gong or whatever. I’ve been into it lately. I think. I mean, who knows what I’m into.”
“Cheer up, beautiful. There are so many fish in the sea! I’ll email you about the class, or, oh are you on Facebook? Oh right, sorry! That’s how the, right, right. Take good care, dear.”
“You, too, Gladys. Thanks again.”

I was still forgiving Gladys for saying fish in the sea as I pushed through the turnstile. I have always liked the placed where it hits my thigh, and for a minute I wondered whether this place was measured in the designing of the leg-pushing thing. Then I remembered about how not everyone is 5’3”, that other people get hit in a different place, more knee or waist. The turnstile that presses the upper third of the quadricep with this exacting balance of anonymity and familiarity, a touch so perfect as to be something or nothing, a terrific flirt, this cold and coy machine was possibly nothing to anyone else. Knowing that both flattened and inflated it. Maybe it is only something to me, but maybe it is something to only me. The benches at the stop were empty. I signed on to my phone’s chat app and waited for someone to say something. A dude that I keep unblocking and then blocking again asked me what was up. I started to tell him about Amma. You’re in all white? Damn, What have you got on under the purity get up? Not right now, ok? God. I didn’t know you were religious like that. I’m not religious, I just want to stay mellow right now. Ok, be mellow then, you kinky disciple. Stop. Ok. Jesus.

The train raged up to the station, invited me in, and raged on. I was tired and hot and late for my client, which prompted three fantasies. Fantasy one: Maintain Amma zone love mellow home from Division and take a cool bath, pack a sandwich, reschedule client, “meditate” while lying in bed under the a/c until dance practice. Fantasy two: cab home from train, cold shower, iced ginger tea, maintain mellow via energy conservation, do client autopilot, lotus, breath, twists, cat/cow, puppy, dolphin, elbow puppy, ddog, lunges, warriors, pigeon, hamstrings, bridge, abs, twists, savasana with heart visual, tacos, rehearsal. Fantasy three: be extra present and open and sparkly, do everything relaxed but efficient, go to client and explode her heart guts with now potent love mantra power, teleport to dance like a lightwitch, transform rehearsal into mindbending ninja magic, do so humbly and with uddiyana engaged.

None of my fantasies happened. What happened was that I took a bath and showed up late to my client. We only had a half hour so we opted to take a fitness walk together, which is fun when we do that, except that I run my mouth the whole time and then regret it. I tried to tell her about Amma’s hugging practice, but whatever I said made her think it was a scam made for ignorant, racist white people.

“I don’t think she is a phony. I’m not saying that. Yeah, no, I mean, people are changed by it. They are really moved by it. And she does a lot of profound humanitarian work.”
“Like what?”
“Like, different things. A lot of them. I saw a video about it.”
“And? What did the video say?”
“I don’t know, a girl learned to make sculptures, like goddess figurines? but I got the impression that maybe she wouldn’t have been able to do that if Amma hadn’t helped her? Maybe she got a scholarship to go to school? I don’t know, there was some other stuff about farming and healthcare and things, I mean, it was a lot. I’m not making it up. I mean, if I was gonna make it up I would do a better job.”
“Karen, listen, crystals have nothing to do with Hinduism. That is a white hippie thing and you know it.”
“Amma isn’t Hindu. I mean, actually, she might be Hindu, I don't know, she probably is Hindu, but following Amma isn’t a Hindu thing, but anyway the crystals are just part of practice. It’s an energy/vibration thing. Like, once you are practicing in the realm of energy, everything is significant. Crystals and colors and words and sounds, it’s the whole thing. There is nothing that isn’t part of it. I know you aren't into it. I get that. It doesn’t seem authentic or historical or whatever but – I don’t know. I can’t explain why people are into crystals. I like them. It is meaningful to me. You don’t have to be into it. It’s totally not your thing. It's not even my main thing, whatever my main thing is. Actually, dream yoga might be my main thing, though I'm terrible at it, but that's not the point. I don't know. I am a person with many things. I have different things. I don’t know if Amma is my thing.”
“It doesn’t sound like she is.”
“Look, remember when you were mad at everyone on Facebook for making fun of those rapture people?”
“You did it, too! You posted that link to the rapture prank!”
“I know, but I was just responding to another video. I take it back. Anyway. This is the same thing. It’s just the way some people believe, and it means something to them, and to me, some of it, so go easy ok? I know it seems fruity, but not fruitier than believing Jesus was going to vacuum all the Christians up, and you were going to bat for them, remember? Because, you said it was their faith. Do you mind if we walk on the shady side? I can’t stand all this sunshine.”
“Sure. Yeah.”

We finished our walk and I broke west to wait for the #50, got a sesame ginger gelato and shoveled tiny mountains through my lips in a shrunken act of Fuck It. The sun laughed at me, making soup of my medicinal compound. I bustrackered the fifty and went hunting for a trashbin. Behind the building was a row of Rubbermaid Roughnecks. They were filled up with food and paper, broken shelving and cat litter. I tossed the gelato cup and spoon, the Dixie cup from the Hawaiian, then the receipt from the bags of holy ash, which was twice as big as both bags of holy ash. This is it, I thought. This is the deal. The hug, the walk, the sun, the gelato, the paper, the ash, all holy, all arm wrestling. All transforming into and out of one another. So what. What then. Is today a holy day?

This High To Ride

2011-07-05T13:36:00Z

On most days I have a hard time believing a tylenol will relieve a headache, so the fact that I, last Tuesday morning, washed with the special soap, ate a karma free breakfast, stuffed my pockets with crystals, smudged myself with smoke and flowers and stood in a Lombard hotel ballroom for five hours waiting for a healing hug is kind of funny. I mean, it is.

I got a ride with an old co-worker, Gladys, from the spiritual spa where I used to work. When we got to the Westin, we were greeted by a woman in a white sari and hair to match, nametagged Chicago Service. Next to her at the greeting table, a mini dry erase board said "Seva blissful service: vegetable chopping needed NOW. Love and serve." I considered sharing my tomato technique, the way I figured out how to hold them for dicing straight cubes, but it seemed early to be signing up for things, and the woman was giving instructions. She was barefoot and grinning, like all the volunteers, and pointed to the shoe parking area before briefing us on how to get a token. We needed a token for the hug, she said. We got in the token line. I thought to turn my phone off but muted it instead. The line moved fast and at the end a ponytailed white guy said something I didn't understand.

"I'm sorry?"

"HaveyouseenAmmathisyear?" He copied himself exactly.

"Oh, I thought you said, 'of use tweet I'm the seer,' which was weird."

"HaveyouseenAmmathisyear?"

"Oh, uh, I've never seen--"

"Keepthistokenwithyou. Donotenterwithshoes. Thankyou."

Gladys and I made our way to shoe parking and got naked from the ankles down. There was an altar back there with a wedding cake on it. In the ballroom, I learned from the vinyl banner that Amma and North American were celebrating 25 years of hugging one another. The stage was covered with hot pink foamcore OM signs and streamers. A group of Indian musicians sat on rows of pillows singing kirtan, which was brain-numbingly boring, the way I like it best.

A framed rectangle: Westin Ballroom capacity 675 persons. We were over the fire safety limit, I'd bet, but there weren't as many people as I expected from the documentary. Eight hundred? Nine? I couldn't walk in there, that's for sure, though it might have worked without the vendors. We were invited to shop while we waited for our bracket to be called for the hug. Vertical banners labeled the vendor areas. Gifts, Worship, Apparel, Dolls. I browsed the saris and scarves, Amma brand incense, Amma bath and laundry products, Amma’s healing ointment, bells and crystals, flowers and chocolate, toys shaped like Amma, Indian astrology stones, coconut shell earrings. It was like a dogless hippie market, branded with the face of Mata Amritanandamayi Devi.

Gifts Given To Amma displayed a selection of things devotees had offered their guru. These things were for sale, and included ornamental bath soaps, Giovanni Golden Wheat shampoo and conditioner, handmade candles, candy, a Valentines Day teddy bear, and other items that felt awkward to purchase while standing on sacred carpet. I was rattled, and hadn't even seen the Amma's Things table yet, which was where her actual belongings were sold for bigger bucks. Her noserings and bracelets were for sale. Her outfits were draped underneath framed photographs of her wearing them. I was invited to buy her old socks, her petticoats, her bed linens and her hair combs. Amma is really into smartwool, btw.

I spotted the vertical Worship banner and found bells, quartz, frankincense and kum kum. Small bags of blessed ashes from the ashram went for $2 each. A miniature copy of the Baghavad Gita covered with pile of one inch shells caught my eye. A hand written sign read, Rare Conch Shell Spirals To Right Side, Increase To Prosperity. This seemed like a good choice for me, so I asked about the price, which helped me decide to pick up two small envelopes of holy ash. An hour and a half had passed. Gladys was at Health and Beauty trying on healing crystal earrings. I went to the restroom, still barefooted, and texted a friend: when I got here she was hugging the Bs, now she's hugging G1. I'm X1.

Outside the restroom area there was a makeshift food court where a few cafes had set up kiosks next to rows of tri-fold poster boards about Amma's charitable organizations. A humanitarian trade show perfumed with cumin, curry and coriander. I sat down in front of a video monitor, put on a pair of headphones, and ate my walnuts from a ziplock bag while I listened to the story of a young Indian woman who went to school to be a sculptor of god and goddess figurines. There is a name for that style of sculpture, I guess. A service request whiteboard hovered through like a PacMan ghost, weightless on the palms of a young blonde who appeared inflated with nixtrous oxide. “Blissful service, shoe monitor needed NOW. Love and serve." Seeing it was an ideal position to pick up some new kicks, I stalked Blinky to see who went for it. Head to toe purple velvet took the job. Brown women’s New Balance were nothing to a beanpole with a face full of surgical steel, I hoped. I sat down in the tired people area and stared at the monitors.

Amma's embrace blew up huge on live feed screens on the arms of the ballroom. The video cropped around her body, making each seeker appear pressed to her bosom by four floating arms. Her attendants placed one after the other in a hypnotic rhythm. Few hugs lingered, perforated by meddling limbs. All were the same shape, the same architecture. Amma wide-collared each neck with her elbows and took the three middlemost fingers of her right hand with all five of her left. Same grab every time. The elbows sunk and she snapped the head to its side, then grabbed again. Mouth to ear. Moving lips. On the screen her face looked blank, and I wondered what she thought, if she thought. If she was feeling it. If she was in a trance. A hand with an open flip phone entered the top left side of the frame, hanging close to Amma's ear as she hugged. She lifted her head and barked at the hand, eyebrows clenched, then resnapped the head to its side, regrabbed the fingers. Mouth back to ear. Lips again moving. I made a mental request to the great suggestion box in the sky that Amma not take a call during my hug.

From the old people seating area, I looked around at the crowd. Half Indian folks, half hippies. The people from India seemed normal. Most of them were working in the food court or sitting on cushions. Some of them had kids who were playing robot ninja hide and seek. None of them were shopping. Of the non-Indians, dreadlocks accounted for at least a quarter of hairdos present. I saw a pregnant 60 year old, a blonde in a sari and a fannypack, a dozen older dudes in pale suits and cowrie shells. Some girls holding hands over their babydoll dresses slithered down the aisles slow motion with faces like they were watching Titanic on a screen a mile away. A young black man explained to an older black woman with three decade dreads that he needed energy work regarding an abundant libido. "If you sleeping in my bed, I am gone be waking you up, because that's how it go with me. Don’t be tryna get in bed with me if you sleepy. My energy all sacral tantric and shit."

Gladys was missing since the bathroom. I wanted to find her, but wasn’t worried since she got X1, too. I took a walk to look around anyway and was approached by a tall man also named Chicago Service. He was not grinning.

"You are not allowed to take pictures in here."

"Oh. Sorry."

"You have to delete that picture."

"Ok."

"I mean right now. You have to delete it right now in front of me. This is a very strict policy. It is posted everywhere. You may not take pictures."

I deleted it, but it made me mad. I guess I understand that people get to do that, they get to say no pictures when they want to, but it made me mad anyway. How I get. Sometimes. Like if cop says I can't cross the street. Or like, that time the bus driver told me to take my feet off the seat because I was in lotus on the 56, and I was like, really dude? People piss and puke and jerk off on this bus and you are going to give me grief because I’m trying to freaking meditate, dickface? I was an inappropriate kind of mad. I mean, people were slow walking in a bliss trance and I wanted to give the finger to a dude that probably does tai chi with handicapped children for a living. I was getting something wrong. I mean, I did not arrive at the Westin with a clean slate. I’d come with my nightmares and my broken heart, my fear and longing and suspicion. I decided I should have some lunch.

The Amma Foundation provided a vegetarian Indian buffet for $1.50 a dish. I had curried chickpeas with hari chutney and puri, and a cardamom mango lassi that would have knocked my socks clean off, were they not under the watchful eye of purple velvet. Gladys showed up at the food court and had a couscous thing with vegetable stew. I talked her into the lassi, and then we discussed a proposal to buy the remaining 15 gallons and divide it between us.

“There are only a few things here that I want, and one of them is all that lassi.”

"Have I told you I feel deeply disappointed with conventional clothing? I have been seeking more satisfying options. Something which allows my Qi to flow more freely, you know? It has been an obstacle for me. I find normal clothing to be very restrictive and oppressing to my energy. I have always loved the sari but I don't know how to fit myself for one. I did find some wonderful earrings though.”

"Huh. What letter is she on now?"

"I don't know, O3 I think. Bodies were not made to be so contained. I feel so much discomfort with western pants."

"We might not make it to X."

"Sure we will. It's going fast. Even this dress is really restrictive, and it’s not tight. The western cut of clothes is so binding."

"Where did you friend go? The woman I met?"

"Oh, she’s already gone. She got her hug and left. She wanted to remain in her bliss."

"Oh."

"She's going through something right now. She is in chemotherapy for breast cancer. I think this will be very good for her. She needs a healing."

"Oh, does the hug heal things, too?"

"Love heals everything!"

"Oh yeah, I guess I just thought you meant, uh, hey I think I'm going to go get a chair massage."

"Wonderful! Enjoy it! I will find you at Healing and Wellness."

I made my way past Pinky and Inky oscillating in slow motion. "Blissful Service: dish running needed NOW. Love and serve." I considered whether running dishes would be as good as deep tissue in terms of the generated healing love quotient, then paid a dollar a minute for some love on a padded kneeler. A beautiful woman in a headscarf gave me some elbow while I inhaled sweat and tulsi from the face cradle. Afterward I peeled the paper towel from my forehead and took in her smile.

"Thanks so much, I really like your work. Are you in Chicago?"

"Oh, thank you, I live in Hawaii.”

"Damn."

"Would you like some healing tea?"

"Yeah, that sounds great. Thanks."

“Om nama shivaya.” She handed me a dixie cup half full of a stale tasting brown broth.

I'd lost Gladys again. Somehow we were at the Ts. I sat down in front of the monitors, listening with more attention as I crushed my paper cup from five directions like one of those rubbery gel eggs at the checkout in Office Max. I couldn’t see the stage, took notes of the sound instead. The singers ornamented simple melodies in the most imprecise and yet formulaic way. The women's voices seemed so much younger than the men’s. They called and followed one another, while a shruti box held the space made by their breath. I listed to myself all the conditions that made meditation impossible. The enormous overhead lights. The token countdown. The thousand people. The outfits. I needed to find a garbage can.

A few hours more and I found myself in line only a few dozen hugs away. Gladys was in front of me, stretching glad lips around her braces. We advanced in a double row of chairs toward the center. At about 6 yards from the beloved, a radiant warmth pounded me in the chest. I knocked the tears off my face, startled and rationalizing. I was instructed to move forward, and when I was up, a foxy butch latina said, "single?" Yes I am. "Language?" English. "One. English." She shot at the divine mother, then she shot back at me. "Kneel here. Place your hands on the table at either side." I noted there should have been a height requirement at the back of the line. Must be this high to ride. My head was pushed into the place where Amma's white sari was most stained with foundation and snot, tears, mascara and hairspray.

She leaned to my ear, “my dog, my dog, my dog, my dog,” while I tried to be her daughter, her daughter, her daughter.

I felt a shove as the four hands yanked me from the floor. "Get your things and move to your left." I moved. Gladys materialized holding a folded bolt of lavender silk in a plastic jacket. I congratulated her.

Pre-Amma

2011-06-28T13:33:00Z

Amma, the hugging saint

Hi guys. Today I am postponing the blog writing because I was offered the opportunity to go see Amma, the hugging saint. I have never seen Amma before, but I've heard about her for years. I have several dear friends who are devotees of hers, and they are beyond a doubt among the fruitiest people I know. They are wonderful, generous, caring people. There is nothing inherently screwy about them. They have boyfriends and drink beer and they all believe they make the best guacamole. What I'm talking about when I say fruity is folks that go to healing drum circles and listen to pop renditions of sanskrit chants on their iPods. It is a stylistic thing, and one that I am not typically a part of, mostly because I am allergic to tye dye, but also because I'm an arrogant shit with a burned and bruised heart who doesn't feel like being "one of" anyone. Real talk.

Anyway, I used to think Amma was kind of weak. Like, your thing is hugging? Seriously? I wanted her to be more serious. Or to have healing powers like a lady Jesus. Then a few years ago, back when I was going to Netflix University, my course load of inspirational documentary choices prompted the Netflix Academic Advisors to suggest Darshan: The Embrace. I remember watching this and thinking, ok, so you felt from a young age that you cared about every living thing, so what, me too. Everything broke your heart, yeah yeah yeah, you wanted to share love with the world, right. So did I. I used to cry for the healing and salvation of people I met at the mall, Amma. Come on. Give me a break. So anyway, I was finding out about Amma's childhood and I was unimpressed. So she had a big heart. Possibly also a mood disorder, who knows. She was just like me. Then. Then, guys. Then she started, in the movie, licking, with her tongue, the wounds of a leper. Over and over. Hundreds of sores. Open sores. On his body. Did you guys read what I just wrote? Yeah. So. The deal is, whatever you want to say about Amma, fine, but Amma is serious. She's not hugging around.

I don't know what her deal is, or what will happen today. I might stand in line for 5 hours and hug her and then feel like I just stood in line for five hours to hug someone. Or maybe it will be the big great thing so many hundreds of thousands of people have reported that it is. I don't know. My job right now is to open myself up to possibility and empty myself of expectation. To soften my suspicion and allow all the hippies and fruitloops to be a someone that I am one of, if only for a day. I'll tell yall about it later. Don't worry.

Every Day Last Tuesday

2011-06-21T20:03:00Z

Last Tuesday, my friend, Sam, surprised me with a visit to headquarters during blog hours. He'd been at the pool. My pool, I like to say, though you should all know when I say I'm "swimming," that what I'm doing is sitting at a computer in a cafe across from a pool, dry as a scone. Sam came in around one or two. His hair was wet, and when we squeezed, I checked him for chlorine. He hoped he'd washed it all out, he said, and when he said it, I sniffed his 6th chakra and flashed back to a Pert Plus commercial from the 80s, where ladies who had enough time to swim every day but not enough time to condition after shampooing found their lives salvaged by a shampoo and conditioner in one. Green tile. White towels. Ladies locker room. The tilted head towel dry. Fresh faced smile. And it's gentle enough to use every day.

I decided to pretend it was still Sam's birthday and that his surprise visit to me was actually my surprise brunch for him. He agreed to this, and ordered something like breakfast and lunch in one. We talked about things. Stuff that happened, stuff that was ninety seven percent going to happen. In the middle of it, Sam described a feeling I have had but never before named.

"...well we were going to watch it, but then it was getting late and he was like, guys, are we really about to put on a two and a half hour movie, because it seems like that's not what we're doing, and I was like, yeah, probably not, so we ended up playing Mario Kart 64 on the Wii 'virtual console,' which we had somehow never done before, even though it was right there, and I thought, god, this could be my life all the time. I could do this every night. Why didn't I do this until now?"

I promptly identified several other instances where this thought has emerged. Discovering a simple and delicious combination of sandwich ingredients. Buying flowers for the apartment. Yogurt and figs for breakfast. Playing my viola. Sitting in, instead of walking by, the park across the street. I didn't tell Sam all of them. "I bet I'll feel that way about swimming once I start doing it. One day I'll be so into swimming that I won't believe I lived next to a pool for 5 years and never used it."

"What about the bathing suit thing?"

"Yeah, I don't know, I'll have to get over the bathing suit thing."

"There are lots of different kinds you know."

"Yeah, I guess."

There are 3 ideas in here that I can see. The most obvious one is how mind-bendingly common it is to miss what is right in front of us. So much of the time, the good thing we want feels much further away than it is, so much so that we don't reach for it at all. It seems like it should be harder to get to, I guess. For example, I am like this about mopping my floor. I don't mop my floor unless I have an entire day free to do it. Mopping my floor takes 20 minutes, guys. And every single time I say to myself, "Huh, that was fast. And now the floor is so much better. I should do this every week. Why don't I do this every week? I could be a person whose floor is always really clean. Those people are awesome."

Idea number two, a more interesting idea, I think, is the notion that we, and when I say we I mean me, as soon as we experience something nice - a moment of calm, beauty, delight, satisfaction - the first goddamned thing we do is LEAVE that moment where the good this is happening and jump to all future moments where the good thing ISN'T, in order to try to schedule the future moments with the present moment we are then ignoring. You see how crazy that is, right?

I can't remember what I thought Idea number three was, but number two is plenty for now. What is it that makes us so insecure? And I guess I'll just go ahead and say me. Why do I feel so terribly uncomfortable not knowing the future? Am I the first person to ever be in the dark about it? I am not. Has my experience not shown me that 1) I can access a reasonably satisfying pleasure if I would do the things I know to do that make it happen and that 2) even if I don't do anything I know to do, once in a while, and fairly regularly, I will stumble upon a moment of well-being? It has. And it has shown me that the moment will go away. And another one will happen. Actually, I guess I do know the future, in a way. I just don't know the details.

The thing I find truly baffling is, after ages and ages of evidence that 100 percent of feelings are temporary how come humans were born craving eternal love? Why do we want forever things? What is up with lifetime promises? Why does change shock and traumatize us? Where did I get the idea that I should have security and commitment? I find this utterly amazing. Nothing in my experience has shown me that that is a reasonable expectation, and yet, I am constantly dodging my very best moments by trying to re-book them.

After the birthday brunch with Sam, later in the evening last Tuesday, I did exactly that thing. The night was cool enough and warm enough and I took a walk in it. By accident or alignment, things came together and I felt happiness, I think. My very first thought after the happiness thought was that I ought to recreate the events leading up to the happiness feeling again the following Tuesday, which is today. So far, I have done almost everything I did last Tuesday, and I do not feel the same at all. Later on I will be doing more or less what I did in the evening last week, and it, too, will not be the same.

Can I change the subject? This is bumming me out.

A long time ago, maybe 15 years or something, and you know, it feels really weird to say shit like that, but anyway, some time ago I remember my sister getting really into the Yeast Connection diet. I mean, REALLY into it, which, like being gluten free or raw vegan or whatever, is the only way to be into it at all. My fiance at the time (haha, yeah, what? I'll tell you later) was on some Sugar Busters thing, too, and the Eat Right 4 Your Type deal, so like, everything was contraband, and life sucked a little, because I was constantly having to defend my reasons for not having reasons to eat what I was eating. At some point, Katie asked me, how, if I didn't have any rules, did I decide what to eat. I told her a lie that turned out to be a good idea.

"I think about what it would be like to eat that thing every day of my life. If my life gets better, it is a green light. If not, it is a yellow light."

"Huh. Are there any red lights?"

"No. I don't think so. I think red lights are a red light. The rules are, take it easy, change things up."

"That seems like a good way to do it. I have been making a list of the diet and exercise program that would be perfect for me to do every day, so I don't have to think about it. I'm going to do a little research and then once I find out what the best foods are, I can make recipe cards for variations of the ingredients on days that my schedule is weird and I can't do the same thing."

"That's the opposite of what I'm saying."

"It is?"

"Yeah. I'm saying THINK about what it would be like to eat a thing every day, but don't DO it. Do different things."

My point. I have an actual list of the things I wish I would like to include in my hourly agenda. Some of them are chores, some of them are pleasures. A few of them are people. I look at that list and I get my mind blown on how perfect life would be if I would just do what the paper says. Just put the shampoo and conditioner in one bottle and use it every damn day, Karen. Daily, moderate practice coupled with regular vegetables and socializing at intervals make for temperate moods, steady love, stable work, you'd think. But this is not how it breaks down, friends. It doesn't break down like this at all.

At 7:16 a.m. on Thursday, I texted Sam to tell him that "this could be my life all the time" was going to be my theme song for the week, and then I kept it with me. Every day I watched myself grasp moments, some of them memories I tried to revive, and some gloriously present suspensions I abandoned to re-book for later. I did some same-things with different results, I did some different-things with same results. None of it made sense except the changes.

Today it is Tuesday and I am in the same cafe. I didn't get to keep my regular table because I had to run out around ten for a bit. No one surprised me for lunch. It is hotter this Tuesday, but I don't mind as much as I did some weeks ago. Tonight I'll go to dance rehearsal, like last Tuesday, and I'll practice moving through space balanced on asymmetrical crutchwings, which is - holy shit, so much better a metaphor for what I am talking about that I can't believe it got lost under Mario Kart 64. Next Tuesday for sure I'll write to you about dancing on a moving surface. I mean, unless things are different by then.

Yoga for Heartbrokenness

2011-06-14T21:52:00Z

Baby Schnauzers are actually really helpful.

You guys know my love life is like something out of a Pedro Almodovar film, right? I mean, you might have guessed that. I don't tell yall about it, for reasons anyone can guess, but suffice to say that when it comes to heart muscles, I'm a heavyweight champion. I am also an idiot.

Love drama doesn't get enough discussion by spiritual teachers if you ask me. I remember reading in the first few pages of Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart, I think, that her spiritual path was catapulted into full time mode when her husband told her one fine day, as she was sitting on a lawn chair having a lemonade or something, that he'd been having an affair. If I remember correctly, she said she took a pause, threw a rock at him and then got a divorce. Shortly after, she became a Buddhist nun (and one of the most influential spiritual teachers of the common era, in my opinion). When I read that, I thought, "You threw a rock at him? And then left? And that was then end of it?" I concluded that if Pema were able to do that, to behave so, so damned appropriately, she could not have possibly had the kind of intensity of feeling that I do, and therefore nothing valuable to offer me regarding passionate, devastating grief.

The part I missed was that, yes, she threw a rock at him and left, but then SHE BECAME A BUDDHIST NUN. Pema's response to her heartbreak was more dramatic and extreme than anything I have ever done in the name of love, which, seriously guys, is a long and torrid list of hilariously tragic dramas that, if captured on video, would go so goddamned viral, I'd be having appletinis with Pooky by next Tuesday. Most days I assume this isn't the kind of thing anyone would find helpful. Today, however - finally! after all these years! - I was asked, "Hey Karen, is there any yoga good for heartbrokenness?" And do I have an answer? You bet I do.

No. There is no yoga good for heartbrokenness. You mean real life and mind shattering shit, right? Where you don't eat or sleep for weeks? And if you take a deep breath you end up sobbing violently? And you can't think or talk about anything but your memories? Yeah, no. There is no yoga for that. That's in the food poisoning category. If you get food poisoning, you should not try to do yoga for digestion, you know? You need to just throw up for as long as it takes and then hydrate carefully. Time and water. Some things have no other cure. Those things, let's call them, I don't know, Emergencies, are not remedied by immediate practice, no matter how customized. You know why? Because they are the things we are practicing for.

Yoga and meditation are best employed as preventative medicine, and then, after the shit hits the fan anyway, because it is going to guys, they become our recovery plan. In the moment, though, those wild moments of Feeling It, whether they are heart, mind or body related - those moments are not moments when one can typically strike a pose, or hit some pranayama. The resilience and grace we need to pull us through the wreckage is what we get when we practice during non-emergency hours, when we have our wits about us to lift our little emo barbells with our little emo muscles.

Even so, to the persons out there who are Feeling It right now, and I know you are out there, because I am one of you, even now, I'm not about to leave you alone with time and water. Take heart.

The benefit of spiritual practice is not something that is given to you, it is something that comes from within you. The bad news is you can't pay extra to have it overnighted. The good news is that you already have it, all of it, right there. Inside, I don't know, somewhere, under all that junk. There is, right this minute, a part of you that is not hurting. If you are in it the way I get into it, that might be hard to believe. It may seem as though every single atom is damaged, that every particle of your heart matter has been bruised and bloodied beyond repair, that there is nothing to salvage, nothing from which you can build again. (I mean, I warned you. I get dramatic.) I've shared this with you before, but I got this idea, of the essential, un-harmed self, from a Buddhist text:

"Padmasambhava describes the luminosity:
This self-originated clear light, which from the very beginning was never born, is the child of Rigpa,
which is itself without any parents – how amazing!
The self-originated wisdom has not been created by anyone – how amazing!
It has never experienced birth and has nothing in it that could cause it to die – how amazing!
Although it is evidently visible, there is no one there who sees it – how amazing!
Although it has wandered through samsara, no harm has come to it – how amazing!
Although it has seen buddhahood itself, no good has come to it – how amazing!
Although it exists in everyone everywhere, it has gone unrecognized – how amazing!
And yet you go on hoping to attain some other fruit than this elsewhere – how amazing!
Even though it is the thing that is most essentially yours, you seek for it elsewhere – how amazing!" (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, pp 263 – 264)

I have mentioned this text before, because it was pivotal to my healing and probably the cornerstone of my own practice. What it means to me is that there is a part of me, the most essential part of me, that is perfect. (Yeah. Perfect.) This morning, my dear friend Jose asked me a very good series of questions about this. He called to tell me he's becoming a Canadian citizen next week, which is super, though I don't know how it's better than being a Costa Rican citizen because we didn't end up talking about that at all. I told him I needed a little prodding regarding a spiritual matter, and he immediately hit me with this:

"You want to ask something, ask are you sure you have a spirit? Are you really sure? Where is it? Is it in your eye? Does it see? Is it in your mind, as the Easterners think? Or in your heart as the Westerners think? Is it a made up thing? How do you know it is there?"

I stopped him before he could crush my entire universe, but I want to address this gigantic question, because if you are in the throes of devastating grief, illness or injury, and I am telling you to seek out the infinite source of luminosity within yourself, I had better be sure it is there.

Well, I am not sure it is there. Not at all. I have no proof. I don't even feel is it there - I can't even tell you that I can sense it within myself most of the time. You'd think that a lifetime of faith fail would have taught me not to trust what can't be photographed, fingerprinted and notarized, but I promise guys, this time it's different. This time it isn't a matter of true or untrue, real or unreal, it is a matter of helpful or unhelpful. When I imagine that there may in fact be this unwounded part of me, this source of wellness and infinite non-suffering, I actually get better. It helps me to act as if I am whole underneath my tangled mix of parts. I have been doing this for about 6 years now, believing I am not completely screwed up, and my experience in the world has become not only much less painful for me, but less painful for the people who have to deal with me, as far as I can tell.

To the woman with a broken heart, I say, don't try to practice right now. It's showtime. You have spent plenty of time training yourself to connect with your strength and compassion, the wisdom and peace that is found at that clear, luminous core. Now is the time to cash in on that connection. IRL this might look like you biking the length of Lake Shore Drive in a snot-faced trance. It may look like smashing every dish you can buy at the thrift. I don't know where your inner wisdom will take you. But your inner wisdom knows. Once the storm has passed, I highly recommend gentle asana practice (yin and/or restorative) coupled with lengthy pranayama sessions. (This won't work if you are still crying every time you inhale, by the way.) Also really good, for me at least, is a variation of a compassion meditation where you mourn with and for every woman who has every hurt the way you hurt right now, and then every man, too, and then you mourn for those who have never loved deeply enough to hurt the way you do, and then for those who have been so wounded they have hurt others, and then with those who inflict pain with no remorse. That is kind of bonus round, though. You can start with crying for all the broken hearts. I like doing that, actually. Even when I'm fine. But that's me.

For anyone out there who is living the nightmare of finding themselves on stage without having practiced at all, ever, even once, please know that I feel for you. If you don't have anyone to listen to you barf all your guts about it, you can write me an email and I will write you back. After years of barfing my guts to anyone who would sit close enough to hear me, it is not only my pleasure, but my karmic duty. So go right ahead. In the meantime, time and water be thy companions.

NOTICE: THIS FRIDAY WE ARE HAVING A POTLUCK AFTER YOGA CLASS. BRING YOUR BROKE ASS HEART OVER TO 1371 N MILWAUKEE AND WE'LL STUFF IT FULL OF QUINOA.

Practice Makes Practice

2011-06-06T19:43:00Z

Jose Delgado-Guevara, not pictured above

This week one of you guys wrote me a question on the internet. It was a good question. I know this because I had no idea how to answer it.

Q: Why is it that if we are doing all the things we should be doing yoga, meditation etc. we still have these days where we feel like complete ass and can't see any reason to do those things when we are still chasing our own tail and dealing with our SELF. - Jana G (a lovely person currently living in a designated mindfulness practicing area, funny enough)

NEARLY USELESS REPLIES STOLEN FROM OTHER PEOPLE:

One of my best teachers ever was my college roommate, Jose. We lived together from the year I turned 18 until I was 23, a time of my life and maybe everyone's life marked by behaviors which make the fact of our continued friendship nothing less than a milagro. Not only was he older, smarter and gayer than me, but I loved him like my life depended on it, which made it easy to believe everything he said. He taught me some important foundational things. That all ghosts are real ghosts, that corn tortillas are the only tortillas, that a person displaying signs of hysteria should be offered a glass of water and little else.

Jose and I used to practice viola together, meaning that he used to practice viola while I made drawings of him practicing viola. He would play the same phrases again and again, trying fingerings, bowings, again and again. And once they were right, he would make it alive, again and again, he'd bring it to life, the same phrase for days, again and again, sounding alive, the fingers all right, again and again, days and days the same phrase. I noted that he would never be able to keep a roommate who didn't adore him. He knew it strained me, but what it did to him was worse. Once in a while I muted the sound a bit with my bedroom door, muffling all but the intermittent, "WHY I AM NOT A VIRTUOSO?! WHY I AM NOT A VIRTUOSO?!"

He wanted to know why, after so much devotion, so much discipline, he still struggled to learn. Why didn't things start coming together more easily? Why was he born without the genius of effortless mastery? Sometimes I let him wail it out his f-holes. Sometimes I said dumb sweet things like, "You are a virtuoso to me." But most of the time I couldn't say much. That wall, that bitter reality was the reason I'd long since stopped bowing phrases, and taken up Anything and Everything Else 101.

Jose got his masters and moved to Canada, where he is now a sought-after pedagogue and a conductor and also a violinist (surprise) and like, the freaking director of a real live conservatory of music up there. Jose won. Jose did the thing that makes people say shit like, "practice makes perfect," and maybe you thought that's what I was going to say I learned from Jose about the topic at hand, that if you just keep trying, you'll be glad you did. Well guess what. Everybody already knows that. It's just that, firstly, knowing that in your mind area isn't enough to sustain you when the thing you're trying to do is change your mind area, and secondly I've got something way juicer to tell you.

You might have seen this coming, but I was in love with Jose. Like, in the way that doesn't work out for a young woman and a gay man. (We shall not even address our best friendship and roommatehood and same school/ same teacher/ same orchestra jobs problems.) Jose did love me back, but in a far more appropriate way, and was pretty (mostly) kind to me, given the improvement his quality of breathing and sleeping would have seen had I taken a permanent internship in Kazakhstan. Because I loved Jose in a romance way and also a teacher crush way, I wanted to share every single thing with him so he could explode my consciousness about it.

Lots of times in the morning, Jose would make coffee and tofu scramble and sit at the kitchen table with a book about things that could never, ever happen in time and space as we know it. Then I'd place myself directly across from him and tell him everything I dreamed all night. One day, at the table exchanging unrealities, the following things were said:

J: Wait, this is still the same dream?
K: Yeah, why?
J: I don't know how you remember all that.
K: I'm not even telling you the whole thing. I had to leave out a lot of stuff. You know how dreams are.
J: My dreams aren't like that.
K: What do you mean?
J: The last time I had a dream, it was the sea. Just that. Not like, I was at the sea. There was no me. It was just, the sea. Not even blue. Just gray. I don't know. Maybe I'm not a good dreamer. I might be mentally ill or something.
K: I don't think you're mentally ill. But I think you might be depressed. That seems sad, not dreaming things.
J: It's ok with me if it is sad. I don't want to be happy.
K: Bullshit. Sure you do. Happiness is definitively the thing a person likes, so if you like sadness, then sadness is what makes you happy.
J: I don't mean that I don't enjoy happiness, I mean that happiness is not my goal. I'm not trying to be happy. If I were trying to be happy, oh lordy, I would be very unhappy.
K: But aren't you unhappy anyway if you don't try to be happy?
J: Sometimes I am happy and sometimes I'm not happy, but it doesn't matter which one. It's the same thing.
K: I take back the thing from before.
J: Which thing.
K: You might be mentally ill.
J: That's ok with me, too.

What Jose introduced to my 19 year old self, was that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is optional. There are other ways to go about this. We aren't irreversibly locked into the the cycle of desire and disappointment.

The reason I mention that is, when things get shitty, when we are working at our practices and the practices aren't working, we have got to ask ourselves why we are on board. Is it really to achieve whatever enlightenment is? Or is it to feel better? Because I have two things to say about that. Here is thing number one: If we only practice in order to have more pleasant feelings, we are going to be really disappointed with the benefits of practice, which do not include discomfort removal. And here is thing number two: I, for one, am in this to feel better. To be helpful, sure. To be kinder and wiser and better at getting along with folks, yes, but, as a friend expressed to me this week, I am a far-ass cry from super most of the time, and have zero chance of achieving enlightenment this time around, let's be serious. Real talk, folks. I have to live with my shitbag self all day every day, and I don't want to have a lousy time. I want to have a good time.

The feelings talk reminds me of a scene from about a thousand movies that Jose and I reenacted twice during our time together. It goes like this:

Person 1 (desperate, urgent): But I love you!
Person 2 (unshaken): SO WHAT.

So you have some feelings! Big deal! They are going to go away like everything else! Chill out! Just because you feel something doesn't mean anybody, least of all you, owes your feelings anything. Feelings aren't nothing and I'm not saying that, and even Jose wouldn't say that. In fact, one day when I broke into his studio crying that I didn't want to do the thing on Earth anymore, he did a great thing that I have since done for a few people. He wrote down the call number of a book at the library and told me to go look at it until he was done teaching. Then he showed me out. The book was an anthology of French poems that had nothing to do with anything even slightly urgent. Jose had given me an assignment to go enjoy something beautiful for an hour. (I actually got lost and ended up with a book of Chinese ink painting, but whatever. Same same.) My emergency was there waiting for us both that night, when Jose attempted to convince me that everything would make more sense later. What he didn't say then was that it would make more sense by making so much less sense that I'd let go of sense-needing and have an ok time sometimes. But, back to having a shitty time.

Assuming that you know why you are practicing, and that you have fully swallowed the notion that feelings are not indications of anything that should be banked on, built from, or made into news, then I've got one more thing to share with you. Gleaned from my teenage youth minister, Jeremy Jones, and highly applicable outside the realm of Christianity, what he taught was that as our spiritual life develops, our ability to see ourselves becomes sharper and more sensitive. Because of this, we often perceive that we are getting crappier as people, when the reality is that we are simply becoming less tolerant of garbage (which starts to include debris, then lint, then dust, then smoke, then fog, then pictures of garbage, thoughts about debris, you get me).

Practicing diligently is guaranteed to bring the lamp of clarity over to the workstation, which feels a lot like staring into one of those magnifying mirrors with all the damn light bulbs on it. How is anyone supposed to feel ok with one of those in the bathroom? I get it that you want to know how you look before you go out of doors, but that, in my opinion, shouldn't be the only view you offer yourself of yourself. Jeremy said that the antidote for introspection-induced self loathing was to remember that grace is greater than our sin, that Jesus picked up the tab on that so everything is actually already way better than fine. But how does the non-Christian lacking that sense of limitless forgiveness deal with self-hatred? What do you do if you don't like having to believe in things? I admit this is tricky, but I ask you, does it really take tons of faith to believe that an ever-expanding consciousness produces an ever-refining perception of impurity, suffering and instability? Is it crazy sounding? Does it seem like that is not an equation we observe in nature and other places? I don't think it does.

For the non-Christian practitioner, I say designate blackhead-examination time, and then give yourself a break. Keep up your practices if you can stand it, but then also hang out with people that don't just forgive you, but really, really like the you a whole lot. Then try to be one of those people by doing things that remind you of your favorite self. Remember that we are all full of mess. Conjure the tiniest seed of faith that you are on the right track. Enjoy something without deconstructing the reasons you enjoy it. And if none of those things help mellow your inner hater, go right up to the big mean mirror and say, "SO WHAT."

Speaking of types

2011-06-01T20:32:00Z

I have a feeling that Ice Cube and Ice T are a Kapha and a Vata, respectively. But I wouldn't put them in a box.

The thing about telling people I am a person from Mississippi, is that they, like, immediately have to deal with the difference between me and what they think a person from Mississippi is. In my case, this invariably prompts two comments. The first is that I do not speak with a Southern accent. The second is that I should be comfortable with temperatures over 90 degrees.

Let's not have the stereotyping conversation right now. I don't think it's that that big of a deal, to be honest. We are all constantly working with the information that we have, making decisions and learning things, and a lot of the time, the information that we start with is screwy. I am ok with that for the most part, and don't feel offended or put off or even bored with folks who assume that I was raised on biscuits and gravy (almost true), or could milk a cow if needed (not true), that I regard hospitality as a spiritual practice (true), or feel safer with a gun under the bed (untrue, with emphasis). One reason I don't mind is that, like the weird jewelery my Granny used to wear to church potlucks, these odd little misfires are all super 'conversation pieces.' Stereotypes are helpful templates to kick off the learning process is what I'm saying. We need only be vigilant to throw them out the moment they have expired. It's complicated, I know. Because of things ending in "-ism" and "-cide." But in the everyday, I personally feel that not getting rattled is almost always a more helpful choice than taking offense at a person's ignorance, laziness, or disrespect. (Yes, even disrespect.) I mean, who has ever been inspired to expand their consciousness by getting blasted with some "how dare you" vibes? Anyone?

So. Mississipians. Right. We don't all sound like Forrest Gump, nor do we all feel at home in summer weather, unless by "home" you mean a hostile environment that induces fever, sweatrash, nausea, headache, suicidal ideation, hives, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, dizziness, temper tantrums, aversion to physical affection, hyperhidrosis and attitudinal difficulties, and even then, only a few of us do. I am among the few. Meaning, I will not be attending your midday BBQ without a tent, a cooler of ice, and a handheld fan.

Now, I realize that my whiteness is part of the deal here. My people, whoever they are I don't know (mom always said, "whadyu mean where we come from? We're Suthurn, hunny!) were for sure originally from somewhere cold. But that isn't the only singer in this choir, folks. There are three more: Vata, Pitta and Kapha. You wanna talk about types? Let's get our profiling on.

In Ayurvedic philosophy, the three doshas, Vata, Pitta and Kapha represent the three qualities of being, or vital energies, that join forces to make us the way we are. Everyone has a unique mix, and most of us are a bit wonky. Each dosha has a different favorite diet and schedule, so much so that one dosha's valhalla is another dosha's inferno. Diversity, people. All kinds of illness and quirky business can be sorted out and balanced using this system. It's super thorough without being complicated. Here is the breakdown:

Get it? I am Pitta in the body, Vata in the mind, so like, I get hives if I go outside and feel kind of amazed about every damned thing. Of course, I'm not any more "pure" Pitta than I am "pure" Southern. There are exceptions, aberrations, deformations, or, I guess, "variety," if you prefer. The dosha type is just a starting point, a structure from which we can begin to discern the details. How about you? Wanna know? Click here to take the best dosha quiz I've found on the internet. I've found it immensely helpful in the treatment of various discomforts, particularly the discomfort of explaining to all you cheerful mothersunners why I am not freaking going to the Bikram beachparty this weekend or any weekend for Jesus sake please give it a rest.

Everybody else, I am considering an all-cold food potluck in a few weeks. What do you say? Chilled bean salad, avocado soup, cucumber and dill sandwiches, ginger limeade, corn salsa, beet tartar, celery soda, coconut water and sake, honeydew snow cones. In the meantime, class-goers please take note of two exceptionally canceled classes coming up: This Friday, June 3rd, and next Wednesday, June 8th, we will not have Happy Hour Yoga! one of them is canceled because of something, and the other is because of something else, but basically, guys, I did the best I could, so just hang in there, check your dosha, and be sure to get enough ice cubes in your ice T, ok?

Superman High

2011-05-24T20:39:00Z

I have been asked for clarification.

Firstly, I guess some of you couldn't see the image in last week's post, but it was a photo of a man playing anvils as church bells. (I've heard reports that the image appears if you wait about 20 seconds.) Anyway. The reason I posted it was because I wanted to tell you that whatever it is that feels too heavy is ok. The thing you are carrying that seems to be useless is not useless. The obstacle that you have been battling, that thing about yourself that you have dropkicked, bitchslapped, downsized, and paid good money to have surgically removed might not be garbage. It might be your superpower. I am not an expert on this yet, but recently, the idea sunk down into my guts and made itself at home. At first, I was a little rattled by the visitor, I think now we are new bffs. I'm going to tell you how it happened.

I auditioned for a dance performance group about 2 months ago or so. I didn't tell anyone about it, almost no one at all, because number one it was kind of a long shot, me getting in, and number two I wanted it really bad and was afraid you would jinx me. Nothing personal. There were a lot of weird magic things about how the whole deal unfolded, to tell the truth. Hints and coincidences. An elbow in the ribs from the universe. I tried to back out, for example. I actually no-showed the audition, and somehow then received an email offering me a second audition time. It was a total Jonah situation, come to think, but with less whales. I took that second chance and, like Jonah, threw a fit afterward, a real emo tantrum. I paced down the red line tunnel sniffling and hollering and all this, shouting into the noise when it came, feeling lost and exposed and worthless and abandoned by maybe god and probably this other guy. It wasn't just the audition, of course. There were other things. Just a few until I looked at them, and then lots more. I was a mess, you might say, poisoned with self-loathing, and then grief stricken that I couldn't seem to bear the weight of my own being, kind of thing. Ultimate Feelings-Having, Inner Conference Finals. I decided to take myself out for a whiskey at the dive around from my place. It was a Tuesday and I sat next to myself at the Chipp Inn and did some hardcore discomfort observation. It was more than a little ridiculous, seething with unidentified rage to a mix of Rhianna and Kenny Rogers. A nice man came in with his dog, and then a nicer man came in with a thermal lunchbox of hot tamales. I considered that my life might be a made for TV dramatization of someone else's more convincing life, and then I ate an entire ziplock bag of steamed cornmeal with queso and nopalitos. I set my glass on the bar so that it didn't sound. The walk home disappointed me. My inverted outburst didn't earn me any kind of revelatory vision. No breakthroughs, no dreamguides, no fog sightings of the virgin. I would have settled for far less than even entry level stigmata. Perhaps a verse of motivational graffiti. A shoutout from a guy with a forty, anything. I stopped at the crooked benches on the edge of the ballfield and named the peaks in view. Aon. Hancock. CNA. Sears. They were so high, and so heavy.

For some weeks, I had been carrying with me a stiff sense of not just wrongdoing, but wrongbeing. I make a lot of mistakes, folks. I don't often tell you about them because they are even more humiliating than the things I do tell you, but they are plentiful and keep me busier than most with recovery efforts. I have an odd way of going about things. My emotions are vivid and intense. Nearly everything appears to me as an analog of both greater and smaller systems, making gestures, words and desires carry with them incredible weight and meaning. There are probably things I don't care about, but I don't know what they are. Some people, at least 3, might say that the only thing wrong with me is that I am unmedicated, and I do have days that make me wonder whether that is true, but even if it is true, the thing I want to say right now is that it isn't the only thing that is true.

Last week I wanted to write about this, but what happened was that I was maybe, possibly, in the midst of a hypomanic episode, to put it one way, and had too many thoughts to make any sentences. This happens sometimes. Sometimes I have 'too much' energy. I talk too much and click on too many things. I invite everyone over and read the things and volunteer for the events and go to the places and write all the people until I am so full of ideas that my heart races and my face starts leaking about how meticulous the universe is, how absolutely not boring and in fact superrad the things inside these hours can be. Of course, whatever it is that causes me to feel that way, fully lit up and surfing the sublime, is the same thing that causes the events described in paragraph 2. And it's ironic that the reason I couldn't write about re-contextualizing obstacles in order to harness unique strengths last week was that the mood/ energy/ outlook problem I seem to have, was live and in person upon me, because that is the very thing in my life that I'm trying to re-position into something useful.

While I know plenty of people who are working at this task, the best example I can think of is not a real one. Fiction is convenient like that, and has offered us Selma Blair's character, Liz, from Hellboy II. (Sorry.) In case you don't have a comic dork to bring you dvds on sick days, I will fill you in. Liz is in a psych ward because she keeps setting things on fire. She doesn't mean to. It just happens when her emotions flare up that actual flames erupt from her hands and buildings are consequently turned to piles of smoldering junk. Over the course of the movie, however, thank god, someone finally convinces her that she isn't a psycho, she's a superhero. She only needs to learn how to wield her own fire, which is hard, but not impossible. Once she does this, once she practices igniting and snuffing out her fire at will, she becomes ultra powerful, and ends up (spoiler alert) saving the whole world from certain ruin.

I got in to the performance group. Maybe you saw that coming. I did not. I did not see it so much that when I got the email upon waking at 5 one Thursday morning, I promptly texted several friends who, having not heard that I'd auditioned for anything at all, were still somehow less surprised than I was. We began rehearsals right away, and you're never going to believe this, but the thing we are learning to do? The thing we're practicing for hours and hours every week? Wielding our inner fires. It's a lot like what we do in yoga class - presence and courage and deep listening - but we come at it differently, so the work feels new and potent and horrifying. Some of you may have noticed class has been different lately. We're moving more, and making noise. We're doing Qi Gong and Kundalini, we're taking brahmari in savasana and telescoping our energetic antennas way, way out. You might be feeling more rattled. (I am feeling more rattled.) You might be feeling more sensitive. (I am feeling more sensitive.) You might be noticing your inner valves are opening and closing, finding new sources of energy and entire spaces within yourself that you hadn't encountered before, sustaining bursts of feeling and being which surprise you. (Me, too.)

Yesterday it was hot and I had a walk to make around noon. The light was sharp, the traffic stacked and moaning, and as I moved through it, my eyes and ears agreed: "This is summer." It seemed that the sound coming in was a certain sound that doesn't come in the cold. I don't just mean that hot days amplify the ongoing Cyclist-Motorist Conflict, but that hot throttle doesn't sound the same in the shade. Diesels need blinding light to sound like that, sluggish and roaring like drugged lions on stage. The squinting had narrowed my eyes but broadened my ears. My skin steamed up and my breath slowed and deepened, surrendering to the heat, the light, the unruly chorus of motors. I couldn't tell what came from where. The light stunned me, transmitting something I might expect a bit more from a mountain peak. I'd hypnotized myself, I realized. Waking up inside the clamor of it, I felt so grateful, so utterly blessed and glad to be crazy enough to get suspended by the engines of Ashland Avenue. I made a choice to step out of the trance, and then back in. I practiced igniting the flame and putting it out, over and over as I walked south. This will be my superpower, guys. I will be a feelings expert, a channel for new visions, a chimera tour guide. It might not save millions from certain ruin, I realize, but I am inclined to believe it may save one.

My point today is that the way you are in the world is not wrong. It is ok. You might be weird. You might do things that freak people out. You might feel too much and say too much and maybe sometimes, on occasion, you might do a thing that causes a person to block you in their chat list. It is ok. The fact that you are in the world in the way you are is itself plenty evidence of the validity of your variety of being. I would recommend identifying what bothers you most about yourself, and then finding the strength in it. Get with this thing. Find out about it. Dive into it. Know where it can take weight, and where it needs support. Locate it's entry and exit points. Celebrate the joyful stuff, honor the grief. It's all right. We are all mad here. And we are all miraculous. Am I getting all new age motivational speaker on you? Yes, kindof. I am. Sometimes I do that. I don't apologize.

Everything I am trying to say has been said by this man.

2011-05-17T20:45:05Z

Who is kidding? Anvils as church bells. Get into it. Love, Karen

This is water, this is water.

2011-05-10T17:35:00Z

Dear people,

It is pretty safe to say that, while I experience an impressively diverse range of human things, I do not experience boredom. I walk around with my antennas out most of the time, and can get pretty hot about the most regular no sauce business. The way I choose what to write to you about is a collecting and simmering process. All week I go do activities and see images and exchange words and meaningful looks with known and unknown faces and usually one or all of those things will confuse me, or inspire me by confounding me, or excite me by hurting me in an endearing or infuriating way, and then all the things will seem related to all the other things, and so I will let them mingle in my inner area until Tuesday, when I get up at dawn and go sit with my work at Swim Cafe for longer than the people who are paid to work at Swim Cafe. This is my blog writing process, and I am fine with it, but every rule has exceptions and this week is one of them.

This week I have done too many activities and seen too many images. I have been ignited and destroyed and healed and schooled by so much and in so many ways that I am at a loss for a single thread of sense. My heart feels like a tupperware sandwich box with a hurricane in it. Sometimes I feel that, guys. Sometimes I feel like I am a storm container. In fact, I was just having a gratitude moment this week that the feeling of being empty and numb to the world is not a thing that has visited my time here so far. My experience in this life might be treatable with medicine, sure, but it is a rich and vibrant thing that I am currently really, deeply into. I was going to try to tell you all about it, but it's too much and I'm practicing being less much where possible, so instead I'm going to share with you something I read this morning which resonated with my heartguts, though I admit that after the week I have had, I could have been as touched reading an in-flight magazine. (It has happened before.) I'll explain next Tuesday.

----

David Foster Wallace
The Guardian, Saturday 20 September 2008

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete ...

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real - you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues". This is not a matter of virtue - it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home - you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job - and so now, after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.

Or if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20 stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks ...

If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do - except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: it's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible car accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am - it is actually I who am in his way.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

· Adapted from the commencement speech the author gave to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio

Try Being Me: Identity Opportunity

2011-05-04T12:45:00Z

Pictured above: Chris Cuellar, center. Karen Faith, also center.

I met Chris Cuellar at a cast party for The Labors, a performance whose performers I yoga-ed earlier this year. I didn't remember him being a part of the cast, but I remembered him, almost.

"I know you from Swim Cafe, right?"

"I don't think so. What is that?"

"You aren't my barista? At Swim Cafe? I swear I know your face."

"Yeah, me too, but I've never been to that place. We probably know each other from here."

"From The Labors? No, no. I've seen you before. Recently. I know your face. I feel like I see it all the time. You're super familiar to me. Where do you work?"

"Uh, you wouldn't know me from there."

Chris answered my questions, and occasionally suggested a possible intersection, but didn't seem concerned. His voice was known to me. The more I tried to place him, the more I failed to place him. (This is a problem that runs in my family, and by family I mean kin, and by kin I mean anybody born bottom of the Mason Dixon line. Part hospitality and part fear of strangers, the impulse to identify people or places in common can strangle small talk like kudzu on collards and pine. My uncle John once spent 4 hours trying to figure out if he'd ever met my friend Sarah, a German exchange student he was sure he must have run into when he was stationed in Germany twenty years prior. Anyway.)

I let Chris talk to some other people while I glared at him, confounded. "Wait wait, do you know Aaron David? Oh. Are you on waxidermy? Huh. Milk and Honey? Yeah, I didn't think so. Filter? Mm, me neither. Rodan? Reckless? Big Star? Where do you live? Where is that? Do you ride the 66? Where are you on Tuesday mornings? Do you walk dogs in Ukrainian Village? Do you bank with North Community? Have you ever spent any length of time at the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams? What about Woodside? Yoga? Sound artist? Heaven Gallery! Oh. Yeah, I never go there either. Damn."

Four days later, I sat at Swim with a notebook and a tea, staring out the front glass, when I remembered harassing Chris. How I asked so many questions without getting even a last name was baffling. So weird, right? And I shamed myself for failing to connect by trying too hard to connect. A theme with me, it seems. At that moment, as my gaze drifted through the backwards lettering on the window to the airspace above Chicago avenue - and you shouldn't believe this except I'm lousy at fiction - I spotted Chris Cuellar's face moving eastward. For three seconds I thought I was daydreaming. Then he walked in.

We ate lunch together and talked about some things. I fought the urge to reconcile my investigation, in spite of the still-raging vibe of familiarity. I would have been less confused to find out he were my half brother or something, and Chris is brown skinned with short black hair and a moustachioed half beard deal, which is to say, he doesn't look like me. When lunch was over, we picked up our smart phones and made it official on the social network. That night, he sent me an invitation to a group called Key Party, and it all came back.

In January, I went to a performance shin-dig called The Simulationists. It was a day of talks by artists working with time and language and bodies and technology. It was there that Chris presented his project to my forward leaning ears, two of a hundred others. What I recall him saying was this:

"In response to the lack of anonymity that Facebook offers the individual, I have formed a new group for users who want to trade profiles by exchanging their user names and passwords for a discreet period of time. The project went live several months ago, but has been slow to develop, as participation is somewhat lower than expected. For those of you here today that would like to join, there is a sign up sheet on the table next to the coffee, where you can write your login information. You can sign up over the break in a minute. I'll be happy to share my login in return."

Chris and I traded identities on Friday morning. I logged in under his profile, and browsed his newsfeed. Some common friends, most uncommon. It took a few minutes for the experience to register. I could speak my mind without censorship, without consequence! As the cursor flashed in the status window, my elation grew uncontainable. If I didn't have to fear being misunderstood, judged, overexposed, what would I say? I got stuck. I didn't know what to do. It felt wonderful. Terrifying, disorienting, euphoric. What I chose to do first will not surprise you. I went to the search box and typed, "Karen Faith."

I think I was craving a touch in at home base, but what I was thinking was that I wanted the impossible perspective of seeing myself as others see me. I, as "Chris," suggested to Chris, as "Karen," that perhaps we'd always been the same person. "Karen" wrote "Chris" back. And so it went. I began to experience what some might call a manic episode, accompanied by a bit of anxiety. My actions wouldn't be without consequence, after all. Someone would pay for them, and that someone was presently holding the key to my own network. Chris had access to my friend relationships, familial ones, acquaintances and professional connections, some of which were in a state of heightened security. It was important to me to be considerate and to do no harm, but at the same time I didn't want to remain passive while holding the chance to be someone else for a day. Because it was impossible to know who of Chris's friends may be offended by what, I decided to be safe, upbeat and careful. I did a terrible job. Within two hours, "Chris" received concerned messages from those close to him.

Let's take a moment to reflect on the fact that I, the real Karen Faith, in my attempt to remain positive and harmless, was able to cast doubt on the mental health of a perfectly normal-seeming person in less time than it takes to find a decent pair of sneakers at the Family Thrift. Put another way, the stimulation I felt at being freed of my persona can not be over-emphasized. I wrote a private message to Chris detailing my sense of liberation, emphasizing the breadth of meaning that the project could communicate, and attributing some of my excitement to the transcendental experience of non-self. "Karen" replied: "wow."

I didn't change my password after our 12 hour period expired, not because I wanted to continue, but because I can't do that on my Blackberry, and wasn't in computerland for a while. After teaching two yoga sessions involving some pretty heartfelt interpersonal discussion, I logged in as myself on Saturday morning to find that I had alerted my entire community, including the clients I'd just seen, that I was massively hungover and downing bloody marys. I considered backtracking, calling my clients to let them know that, no, that wasn't true, and yes, I had really been listening to them and definitely not hair of the dogging it while we did the work we did. Then I thought that might make me seem even more guilty of therapizing while barfy. I decided to take action dba "Chris."

"I had no idea i was hungover until a few minutes ago," I updated as "Chris." He, as me, posted a photograph of a beach bum metal detector guy and I, as him, replied with a quad heavy rap video series. All was well enough until he announced that "Karen's" alarm was "set for 7:15 a.m." Was he trying to character assassinate me or what? I couldn't deal with anyone thinking I sleep that late, or worse, use an alarm clock. I laughed at myself. Like, really laughed. Come on, Karen, I said to one of me, how important is it this? I had to acknowledge an ugly thing about me. I had to face the fact that, deep breath, my sense of personal identity includes a feeling of superiority to people who rely on electronic devices to rouse from their slumber. It hurt. I wanted to let go, breath by breath, of the nonsense. I knew I was learning something immense about humility, surrender, and my own embarrassing ego. I tried to I had a moment of simple happiness - not mania, not euphoria - just pleasant resting in the fact of my powerlessness over the perceptions of others. Then, late Sunday night, my sister uploaded and tagged me in 5 childhood photographs, including my 8th grade show choir glamour shot, and all was lost. I was going to post it here, to out myself and practice non-self and shit, but it involves suspenders and a bowtie, guys, and I am just not there yet.

In the meantime, friend Chris Cuellar on Facebook and join Key Party. It's the fastest way to total meltdown. In a good way. One of my requirements for quality experience is that doing it has to be different than hearing about it. This is such an experience. You think you get it right now. You think you get why it's clever or funny or risky, but until you do it, you don't get the gifts it offers, as they are many.

I still don't really think Chris's face should have been so familiar after seeing him speak once 4 months ago, but even if I had a psychic inkling there was something ahead, I don't think I'd have guessed it was that we'd become each other for 3 days. If you read last week's entry, that's like, my dream come true, and like most dream come trues, not without a side of nightmare. As of the date of this entry, Chris and I share a Facebook profile picture (above).

Warning: Key Party may not be suitable for individuals with Bipolar I, Bipolar II, Borderline, Hypomanic, Schizoid, Schizotypal, Narcissistic, Obsessive Compulsive, Histrionic, Hyperactive, Antisocial, Sociopathic, Paranoid, Passive Aggressive, Panic, or Sadistic Personality Disorders as symptoms may worsen with use. Participants may experience mood swings, crying spells, hallucinations, fragmented identity crises, social withdrawal, mania, psychotic episodes, disorientation, fear of the unknown, hangovers, delusions of grandeur, nausea, vomiting, skin rashes, sleeplessness, periods of anxiety not otherwise specified, terminated relationships, sex with strangers, youtube fame, buying sprees, unflattering portraiture, unprotected chat, hot flashes, substance abuse, exaggerated feelings of mirth, cynicism, headaches, lost keys, wine coolers, zeal, ambivalence, enlightenment, loose stools, forgetfulness, palpitations, discordant color preferences, involuntary vocalizations, supersonic hearing, side salads, and general discomfort. Caution is advised.

HUG #39

2011-04-25T12:46:00Z

HUG #39

On our way out the door, Sara caught the attention of her workday lunch buddies, who asked her what was up.

"I'm doing the hug today."

"So you dressed like a couple of bananas?"

We did. Friday morning it was raining and cold, and I got dressed imagining what would keep me sturdy under all of that weather. It was a real lucky thing that the all-red uniform switched last week to an all-raincoat colored one. I was performing as a guest in Sara Zalek and Aurora Tabar's durational performance, "HUG," which is Aurora and Sara hugging for an hour in public every week. It is street theater, microdance, community service, and endurance sport. Mercifully free of irony, it is also a sincere heart to heart squeezing, and I was happy to do it.

Or, I was happy for the first part. I was actually happiest before we started, when it was just an idea, or even happier afterward, when it was over. We wrapped ourselves in blonde and saffron pants and sweaters and shoes, carried the HUG sign and stepped out onto an sunless Michigan avenue. Sara set up the sign, held the umbrella in one hand and we stepped into each other's arms. My left arm went under her right, my right arm over her left. There were a few moments tucking fingers into sleeves and softening the knees under shifts of weight. I settled my head into her shoulder and took the air like a gulp of ice water in to my chest, turned it into steam and pushed it into her vanilla pudding cableknit.

Hugging was a repeat offense of mine as a shorty. Back when the Care Bears were on TV, Mom started calling me "Hug-a-bunch," and by the time the movie came out, she was shouting at me to get off of everyone. I wanted to be very close to people. The urge isn't hard for me to conjure. I am, even now, a magnet whose effect is compounded by proximity. As I wove myself into Sara's arms, my chest and belly softened toward her. My awareness of the things between us grew sharper and heavier until it was unbearable to be two separate people.

"See, now I want to tell you all of my secrets."

"You can do that."

"But then you will know them."

Sara assured me that the performance could contain whatever I brought with me to put in it, and I savored that, because it was different from what I'd prepared myself to do. Our attention turned inside and out as passersby reacted. Some people put their arms around us. Lots of them did double and triple and quadruple takes as they passed. A few wore their concerned or confused eyebrows down the sidewalk. The fact that our small work was received so differently, that the range of response was so broad indicated to me that we were in fact offering something, I just wasn't sure what it was, because everyone seemed to have been given something different.

I was still chewing on this a few days later in conversation with an artist friend about performing. He was playfully referring to performance as "faking it" and it was rattling me, because I tend to see performing as a kind of radical honesty, perhaps a composed and disciplined honesty, but something which draws from a place of sincerity, something elemental. "If it isn't honest, then it has no substance," I argued.

"It doesn't need to have substance. If it looks good, the audience will bring their own substance."

Back when I used music in my classes, I wanted to play music which was itself impressionable, meaning, you could press your own experience into it, rather than the sound pressing its agenda on to you. The idea is that it is not manipulative, that it what it offers is an opportunity. I have made this connection as a teacher, to invite my students to choose their own adventure, but I don't reel them in with artifice. My classes are pretty unalluring. The idea that one could begin with nothing more than an attractive facade and still invoke something powerful felt new and pointy to me. Alongside it hummed another cousin of an idea, that there are sublime gifts which accompany the practice of self-emptying.

The Hug isn't my piece, after all, I was a substitute whose job it was to let the work use my limbs for an hour. Because of the rain and the cold, the tweaky aches that grew inside my body as we stood so close, I was strained to do the performance as a vessel. I had so many urges. I wanted warm, dry, feet. I wanted the umbrella to stop draining onto my bare hands. I wanted to stretch my back, to twist my shoulders, to shake my legs. When the pain would crest, I comforted myself in the fact of Sara's affection, and then wanted to dive in and have a pow wow in her heart area. I was not empty, not at all, but the work itself had room in it, not just for the impressions of those who saw it from the outside, but for the two bananas on the other.

...

"...it's a strange thing, though, because on the one hand everyone says it's the most amazing miracle ever, and so when something like that happens, I wonder what that means. What miracles are. If god or fate or whatever gets the praise for all the goodness, can we give it the blame for the tragedy? How are we supposed to process that? It's really hard to think about things like fate, I don't know, I think it's not very helpful to think about what is 'meant to be.' It is a deep idea, but it isn't always helpful."

"Yeah, I know."

"Yeah."

"I thought you were taller than me. These boots have a heel."

"How tall are you?"

"Five four."

"I'm only five three. You've been taller the whole time. I keep eating your hair."

"Aurora does that, too. Eat it up. You are doing great. I knew you would be good at this. You're really good at hugging."

"I know, right? I'm proud of my technique. Though it has gotten me into trouble more than once, let me tell you."

"I can see how that might be."

"Problem is, I guess, I mean I've been told that you aren't supposed to hug someone with your whole self. Like, other people hug with their arms, but I don't really see the point of that. I'd rather give them the full deal. Let's merge. You know?"

"You always hug deeply. I've noticed that about you."

"It sucks actually, Sara. I am too open with people. It's something I've been thinking about a lot. I want to talk to you about it but then I'll be doing it again. I don't know. I think my hug is a good example. I am so damn intense, and like, really actually sincere, which is what draws people to me, I guess, and it is why they can't stay long."

"Some people can stay."

"Yeah, I know. I think I know. It's hard to know. I don't know. I need to switch arms, babe."

"Go for it. Where do you want this one? Over here?"

"Just, like, yeah, like that. There. Almost. Wait, let me, um, ok."

"It's crazy but doing the hug in the rain is way worse than the cold. Even sub zero, we've been out here and it's been fine. We bundled up you know. Little hand warmers and foot warmers and everything, and it's been totally fine. Until the rain started. That's been the worst."

"Yeah, I can imagine."

"So nuts, right? You'd think that ten below would be hard. But it's this cold misty stuff that kills us."

"It'll be good in the summer. Hot rain hugs? I love that."

"Hi! Thank you! You, too! Aw, those guys were awesome."

"I can't see them cause the umbrella is too low. I only see yellow right now. It's almost sunny under here."

"Oh, here. That better? You get your fingers covered? You can put them under my sweater if you want. Aurora does all the time."

"I don't want you to freeze, little lemon popsicle. Frozen banana."

"No, no, it's good. Get em in there."

"I can't figure out how to be though."

"Your shoulder?"

"No, I mean how to love the right way. I think it is like this weather. I mean having feelings. Deciding to be out here when I would normally do my best to not be out here. It's fascinating, learning how the rain really feels. Like, I try to avoid this because it sucks at first, but then staying, observing what a raining, crying sky really looks like. Not trying to run away. Being here and seeing it shift. It's a primary survival skill, I think. I mean, I didn't always think so, but in the last while I think I learned that the best thing is to be able to just be here, wherever here is, to learn how to be uncomfortable. It's not fun, really. Fun is something else. But it's good, whatever that is. I don't even know what 'good' means. What do you think 'good' is? I think I mean, 'helpful.' My toes are aching. God. I've got frostbite, for sure. It's ok, though. I am still here. I'm ok. It's just that these shoes are really stiff. I'm not complaining though."

"It's all the paint. Aurora painted them so yellow! They look really good."

"Imagine if you froze your toes and then put them in a hard foot-shaped case and then you bent the case right where your toes were."

"I don't want to imagine that."

"That's how walking back is going to feel. I'm not complaining, I promise, I'm just expressing my experience with words."

"Expression is allowed. What time is it? Are we getting there?"

"17 more minutes. Those guys are still looking at us. It's nice when folks are into it. I am pretty much fine except my fingers and toes. And my ass. Oh my god I just realized my ass is incredibly cold."

"Here, just turn around and put it on the south side."

"You are so good to me."

A Reach, part 2

2011-04-19T18:38:00Z

(diagram not to scale)

Hi guys. I am still talking about what I was talking about last week. If you don't know what that is, click here.

I appreciate that Edmund Burke seems to have opened up the notion that the horrific has enormous value, though I'd arm wrestle him about the sublime and the beautiful not being friends. I suspect that this is a vocabulary problem, the kind where where we are saying one thing and meaning different things. In fact, I might define beauty as possessing some aspect of the sublime, rather than something that gives pleasure or satisfaction (as dictionary.com does). Because I find that which is overpowering, either by means of it's pulchritude, it's fragility or it's ungraspable nature, to be sublime, it follows that I might experience beauty within the horrific, the grotesque, the bitterly confounding. For me, it is precisely the inability to fathom a thing which is itself wonderful. And by that I mean literally wonderful, as in "full of wonder," that it grazes and then maybe trips over the limits of comprehension. That's what the word meant once upon a time, though you wouldn't know it by listening to any of us talk. "Amazing," is that way too. Chai lattes are not amazing, guys. Humans that eat other humans are amazing - which illustrates my point: would I say cannibalism is beautiful? No, I would not. But I would say it is awesome, in a literal sense, and I find the transcendent trance of incomprehension beautiful, so, yes. Kind of I would say that. Though I wouldn't say it that way.

There are a few ideas in here I want to unpack a bit. One is what transcendence is. I want to get into this right now, believe it or not. I am sitting at headquarters, with an achy assleg and sore shoulder loops (courtesy of the tyrannical loving kindness of Rich Logan). I have been sleeping in 1-2 hour increments due to recent explorations in interpersonal farpotshketization. I've got a client in a bit, a class after that, a bank run to make, lunch to eat, a catbox to change, a resume to update, groceries to joggle, an undisclosed quantity of emails to answer, and what I want to do right now is write to you about transcendence. I just want to point that out. Simply because it is hilarious, the joy of my life, and the reason I never get anywhere with anything.

Last week I mentioned "the divine" and I could actually feel some of you get a little airsick. I did it anyway though, because I sense it is, on occasion, the best way to say what I'm trying to say. Lots of times, "the divine" is referred to as a who, a godthing or personhood, and while that is kind of a neat idea when you think about it (provided you haven't already been screwed up from thinking about it), I think it is more interesting to take it to mean "all that is divine." Problem is, "divine" is in god's thesaurus entry, and "godlike" is in divine's. If you don't know what either thing is, then you are like me, forced to sniff around for context clues, confused and upset.

I don't know what god is, or what is god-like, but, in a definitely human-like move, I've made something up, and the thing I invented is as unique as I am (which is to say, not very, but totally). My idea of the divine is slug love compared to The One True Omnipotent Creator Of All That Is Seen An Unseen (only one of the things I've heard god might be). To me, what is divine is whatever gets me beyond myself. Well, let me back up, because it seems like I just said that the tools which lead me toward the divine are themselves divine, and actually, I did say that. I do think the Divine is the Big Great Something, the unfathomable unreachable wonder, a "god" that embodies all gods and yet also all evils, but it is way too much to discuss now, and nothing I expect to see or understand in the next 10,000 years. This, because I can not reach it or understand it or metabolize it undiluted, is why I seek remnants of it squeezing out of the crevices of pedestrian experience, and so those things, those vulgar squirts of god juice I get from time to time, have become a sacred thing to me. They are not holy and not perfect, sure, but to a man dying of thirst, a drop of lemon juice isn't too little or too sour, it's LIQUID. To get back to my point, the thing I regard as holy is the thing which moves me a bit closer to the divine I can not reach, and seeing as though the only thing between us is me, a holy thing, to me, is the thing that breaks me down a bit. It is the thing than can bring me a new perspective, a broader consciousness. It is that which turns me inside out, which chews me up and spits me out, the thing that destroys what I know of myself to reveal a self I have not yet known. That thing is the thing I mean when I say "sublime."

It's like, The Big Great Something is everywhere, all around me, containing all universes, being literally awesome, but I can't feel it or see it or understand it because I'm completely locked in this me-capsule, the very thing I use to try and see and feel and understand things, and all I want to do is get rid of all this me-shit so I can get with The Big Great Something, but the part of me that wants to do that is the stuff I have to get rid of in order to do it, so, do you see my problem? The cat wants to be a fish so she can play with the dolphin, but if she is a fish, she won't have legs to play with, and anyway the dolphin would eat her (major Gift of the Magi vibes), so there they go, reaching toward one another, her feet in the water, his nose in the air. They are attempting to extend toward a thing they will never reach, and they fail and they fail and they fail and it is wonderful. The reach out of the me-capsule is excruciating to observe. It may be naive or sincere or accidental, but the real heart of it is horrifying and gruesome and more than a little bit suicidal, and I have a hard time saying that's gorgeous, of course I do, but god damn is it gorgeous.

This weekend I went to see The Field, The Mantel, a new performance by Cupola Bobber. I won't get too heavy into performance art gibberish right now, but I want to tell you a few tiny things. Number one, it moved me. It reached into my inners and made star cut outs on my little bulb of a heart. Number two is how it did that. Now, I don't know if what I'm about to say is like a fact or not. It is a thought, though. During the performance, two guys, Steven and Tyler, run around the stage in a circle, stopping only to slam into one another or do things that we might call horsing around if we didn't know they were dances. They run for a long time, and by long I mean they wear themselves out completely. I don't know whether they had instructed themselves to run until they couldn't run any more, or perhaps constructed the running dance to extend further than their physical comfort zone, but what I saw was two men, exactly my age, bringing themselves to their maximum physical capacity, and then finding a new capacity, and pushing through that one. Over and over and over. That's not why the performance was good, though. It wasn't good because they put a lot of effort into it. It was good because they confronted our edges by confronting their edges in front of us. They also made shadow puppets of cowboys, which was pretty nice.

To get back to something from earlier, it would be easy to say I am missing the point in deifying the attempt to reach god. It is an old and solid argument. Let us recall the Zen master whose students, when he pointed at the moon in order to teach them about it, got stuck on his hand and concluded, "ah! the moon is a finger!" I have a counter argument, though, and that is, um, this is different. They could have looked at the moon and seen it and known what they could know without, say, dying. Maybe it's just me, but when I try to grasp the vastness of The Big Great Something, I want to tear my skin off and merge with the light, which is, I hear, not where it's at. I'm really sensitive to sun exposure, too.

Oh, guys. This is rich. I just stopped typing and tried to make a diagram of my thoughts here for clarity. You should see it. The first one has a little circle called "me" and a bigger circle around it marked "god" (for brevity), and there are arrows which go from the "god" area to the "me" area and vice versa, my thinking being that the arrows are the things I am calling sublime and beautiful and holy, the reaching from one to the other. But then it occurred to me that "god" maybe doesn't really reach directly? But through things? So then there was an intermediate circle, bigger than me but smaller than "god" marked "the world," and arrows reaching between me and the world, only then I had to think about whether the world and "god" do any reaching between them or are they just a part of each other, and so then there was another one with all perforated circles instead, which made the reaching part seem overwrought, because how hard is it to break through a dotted line? It isn't hard, right? So why is it so hard?

A Reach

2011-04-11T15:03:00Z

(If this video doesn't play, just youtube "cat and dolphin play together")

Guys, I know you think this is just another cute youtube video about animal love. But, whether I am entering an ironically delusional period of hyper-sincere awareness, or just a bit underslept, I watch this and I ache for union with the divine. I recognize that this is hilarious, but the best part is, I'm not really kidding.

*Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime was developed in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy is... antithetical to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." [Thanks, wikipedia.]

It is my feeling that great art addresses the spiritual, but that great spirituality can be found within the tedium of the ordinary, the basest human banality. Regardless of origin, no broken heart, hateful anger, vulgar indulgence or delirious praise lacks a window to the transcendent. Great artists, and great teachers, as I see it, have done nothing more than cracked that window open. Occasionally, a cat and a dolphin are great teachers.

Do you see what I see? This isn't a kitten and crow story, or dogs nursing tiger cubs. What moves me isn't compassion or novelty or reaching across the aisle. This is longing and failure and the great impasse of intimacy. This is an accidental treatise on love, on the impossibility of oneness with the beloved. I don't mean to imply that the feline and the big fish remind me of Romeo and Juliet, Tony and Maria, man and mermaid, rather, it is those myths of lovers from different worlds which illustrate to us the experience of yearning for oneness. When I look for this longing within myself, I find it not only in the loves I could not reach, but within the love that I have known and shared and still somehow ached for, the passion that failed only in that it couldn't destroy me completely enough. After all, the only thing that separates me from you is me and you. The chasm between us is the very essence of what drew us together, our discordant minds, our magnetic hearts, the gross physical obstacle of our skin and bones, which we attempt to merge in a valiant, ecstatic failure. It is our way of reaching for, because we can not yet reach, god.

There are times my human nature is a bit more pronounced, when the experience of days and years opens up in a space which leaves me very soft, and there is a danger in this un-nameable feeling to attach it to something, to call it a product of the grief of loss, the mania of enamorado, the tension of unresolved conflict, the pain in the ass of the pain in my ass. It would be akin to saying the above video is a sweet romance - too small a box for something which is a window, an opening. My mind is in this kind of place, a kind of sublime channel for the whole of my humanness. I am resisting the urge to transform it into a story, a causal chain. Some of this I am learning from yoga, to allow the hours to be, to pause from the narrative and open this up.

Without grasping words for the sensation in my chest, my eyes, my throat, my body, I can allow my experience to move through me and see what remains. In the moments I am able to loosen my grip on this, when the stories of my days, my loves, my worries all enter and then pass, it seems that so little is left to name. It is more fragile than fear, more expansive than gratitude. It is an enormous, meticulous hum, an irresistible draw ever closer to absolute ruin, to the point at which I can release all that comes between me and you, between us and the great light. (Yes, ruin.)

Last week I stumped myself in trying to find a motivation stronger than pain-avoidance. Today I am surprised that it was so elusive. I am imagining that what we want is to want, not because we don't like having, but because longing is the mark of our reach toward the divine. We love because it teaches us how to reach and it teaches us how to let go, because love fails us in exactly the way we need to be failed in order to reach ever further. I haven't lost my mind. I know dolphins are just really cool. But look, here we are in this godforsaken wasteland of life, flailing around, hurt and confused and empty, and a youtube video that had a few hundred hits yesterday has 736,000 right now, and I'm saying that there is a reason for that. A very good reason, and if we look for it, we might find something worth reaching for.

Reflections On A Pain In The Ass

2011-04-05T13:20:00Z

My semitendinosis tore right at the top, under the sitting bone, a place that I use for almost everything.

I don't really like children. I know it isn't nice to say. And yes, to all of my friends with kids, your kid is without a doubt the rare and notable exception. All the other ones, though. They make me nervous, or like, frightened. They cause me to suffer. They just do whatever they want is the thing. They scream if they feel like screaming, and run when they feel like running. The littlest ones will tell you that you look like a fat clown monkey, and the bigger ones will smash your windows in just to see if they can. They haven't learned all the things we adults know, like, how to lie about your feelings in order to make other people more comfortable, or, when it is appropriate to smash things and when not. (Hint: usually not.)

Kids ruin the game of pretend. And I don't mean their game, which they play honestly, and with clear boundaries*. Kids ruin adult pretend, a game that differs in that it has no boundaries. We play all the damn time, which is exhausting, by the way, and makes me want to hit my hands in a T shape, but one of the things you aren't supposed to do in the adult version is call attention to the fact that the game is on at all. It should come as no surprise that this is something I take care to do as often as I can. Like now: We are playing adult pretend, guys. And have been for a while. Since when I don't know, but I would guess it is nearbout when we started being told to "toughen up." We started playing the first time we had to look unscared of a bully, or unhurt by a crush, the first time we had to act like we felt something we didn't, not for fun, but for real, because something was at stake. Here's a question: what was at stake? (I suggest asking someone who’s stopped playing. These people are typically over 75 years of age and absolutely finished giving a crap. They are our elders and they are wonderful.)

I'm not implying that we should drop the facade and let it all hang out. My father, when I met him as a teen, I think I told you about that guy, great mind corroded by a good brain, but I digress - my father told me that "manners" are the things that keep us from killing one another. Seemed dramatic at the time, but now I might agree. Most of us are nuclear reactors on sneakers, hot cauldrons of rage and shame, walking around contained by the structure of the game we are playing. Then kids come along and, by their sheer rawness of being, just fuck the whole thing up. The adult game is designed so that playing along strengthens the structure of the game, the way taking an online survey makes the survey "smarter," but kids are like, signing up for the fakeout adult survey and entering honest answers! Kids don't help hold us together, they help break us open. They remind us of all the work we have done to put ourselves in character, all the pain we have packaged and placed aside in order to win friends and influence people, to get work and pass through security.

This morning at the cafe, a pair of teens from the school down the block came in early. They were so new at the game, they were really just rehearsing the moves. They practiced holding hands and then practiced ordering bagels with cream cheese. The bagels went fine. Inside voices, please and thank you. The hands proved more difficult, hanging at the ends of arms that grew from uneven heights at uneven speeds. One had to lift, the other, slouch. Minimum requirements for verbal exchange and eye contact were satisfied. He paid. She thanked him. Her chair pulled up to the counter, and his chair pulled up to her side, pressing just a little more of his body to hers as the rules allow in a cafe setting. She took tiny bites, left handed, as his touching arm and leg rendered her other half immobile. My heart broke open and splattered tiny pools of half-n-half all over the counter. What an intricate choreography, the way to behave around someone we like. Impossible to fake, impossible to not-fake, Their earnest ineptitude shook me up, reminding me that this is all a game, and counter-intuitive to most. Some folks might be born knowing how to interact with others, how to love, how to communicate, but I'd guess it's the same number of people born knowing how to compose metered verse.

The wild thing is that kids learn most of the stuff they learn without being taught explicitly. They just figure it out. And while I don't have insider information on the way that other human brains process their lessons best, I've got plenty of insider info on mine, and I'm going to put it out there that one of the more active ingredients in the learning cocktail is pain. It underlines, highlights, boldfaces and italicizes exactly what not to do. I've been living the metaphor this week with my troubled hammy, as the ache in my assleg has offered me specific and vigilant guidance. A big thanks to pain! I am never without the knowledge of how I use my semitendinosis, and this knowledge has not only granted me an opportunity to expand my practice, breaking my habits and developing new skills, but it has kept me present as all heck in the ever-elusive now moment. Magical! I'm assuming that you guys remember pain only works because it sucks. No need to remind you, right? It is powerful.

Kids do as they wish, they chase their whims and feed their urges until it hurts. Sometimes that pain is inflicted by the actions themselves, and sometimes by those certain others who feel obliged to help them by hurting them a little. And I'm not trying to say anything about spanking or whatever, because, seriously now, as much as I get the idea you should never hit a kid, every time I meet one that has never been hit, I question that idea. But that is not my point here. My point is two fold, or three fold. We'll see. My point is that number one, we are all playing pretend, containing ourselves in order to be accepted/loved/respected/productive. And number two, we learned to do that because at some point it hurt too much to not do it, which might mean that all of our good manners and kindnesses are essentially a complex (and ill-fated) effort to protect ourselves from suffering. Now I'm not the first person to say that even our most generous-looking behaviors are selfish at their core, but that's not really all I'm saying. I'm saying that when we grow up, like me, let's say I'm a grown up for our purposes here, now that I'm grown up, pain isn't working as well to help me.

If pain were flawlessly effective, we wouldn't do things that hurt more than once. Just imagine. If people learned lessons the first time. We wouldn't still be on nuclear power, I bet. Or drilling offshore. Or addicted to drugs and porn and donuts. Things would be different. Whether we have become accustomed to pain, or scarier, become comfortable with pain, the fact remains that pain-avoidance as a primary motivation is inadequate. It doesn't just leave us with a limited capacity for generosity, but with little room for our own pleasure. Some pains prove pretty healthy and helpful, extending our comfort zone, the way that, in yoga, we endure the pain of stretching to lessen the pain of sitting, while others are a sign of harm and indicate a cue to exit. The way those pains differ is a tough thing to explain, and I spend most of my classes trying to. It is a thing we learn by experience, and that experience, unlike "toughening up" which shuts down the senses in order to bear the unbearable, is a practice of awakening and refining our senses in order to discern what is to be endured and what is to be, let's say, modified.

I have to tell you up front, the practice of extending our antennae and listening, taking more in, actually intensifies the pain at first. Or it seems to, which is the same thing. It even makes things hurt which didn't hurt before. To use an example from the archives:

"Say you are on the jury for an orchestral audition, and you hear 13 skilled violinists play the same excerpt one after the other. Which one is the one? You can't tell. Only someone who listens all day for years and years can tell. We've got to spend lots of time listening. And time takes time."

The bad news, as applied to my music example, is that when you spend years and years learning to discern great playing from excellent playing, good playing becomes unlistenable. Bad playing induces illness. Really bad playing, however, can become an exquisite delight, when coming from a place of sincerity, the way that film grads love Troll 2. It’s a mystery, really, but to take this back to pain discernment, becoming more sensitive can mean that paper cuts feel ever-present, headaches morph into shapes and colors and sounds, and that, I don't know, being bitten, let's say, being bitten hard, feels transcendent. The discriminating nervous system has a multi-channel pain threshold. Of course, I've only been using physical pain examples, but the big hollerin dogs are the heart and brains pains, every time. No question.

This week my adult pain-discernment mechanism has been overwhelmed with input and unsafe for navigation, so I've had to do a kind of elimination diet thing where I stop doing everything I was doing in order to silence the alarm and get my bearings. My antennae are way out. My awareness is way in. Kids are freaking me out left and right, not in the usual way, but in the way that I suddenly and freakishly understand them. For example, this babynugget is screaming right now, right next to me, in the cafe, and I'm like, "YES, girlfriend. I hear you. Scream for me, too." I don't feel bad, actually. I feel awake. Buzzed, even. I feel as though my consciousness has shifted and tuned in to a different frequency. It's not unlike being stoned, come to think. I'm not pain-free but I have been able to separate the pain experience from suffering, making it less like being skinless and more like being lit from the inside, a look that doesn't mix well with grown-up role playing games, but I've decided that's alright, because what is at stake? From what I can tell, nothing that isn't guaranteed to disappear anyway. I don't know about you, but I'm still on board. For the game, for the game overthrown, for the screaming and the spacing out, for the teens and the geezers, for the bites and the violins. The whole deal.

Hey, I almost forgot. This week is the potluck. Come to it. Bring food and booze and someone you get along with. It's fun.

*(Example: "Let's play pretend. You be a dinosaur princess robot and I'll be Justin Beiber, ok? Let's start. Wait, I don't like this game. I'm not playing anymore.")

To-Do and To Not-Do

2011-03-29T16:18:00Z

1) There is no class this Friday. The lack of class is neither a joke nor related to the joking nature of April 1st, but if you'd like to make some jokes with me, I have a few ideas that I am going to need some help to pull off.

     a. Guerrilla Carollers. A group of individuals now forming with the intention of meeting regularly to practice and perform numbers in places where they have not been invited, including but not limited to CTA vehicles, swimming pool dressing areas, shopping center food courts, out of doors sporting locations and popular brunch eateries.

     b. Guerilla Carollers, Tiny Dogs Troupe. Tiny dog owners come together for the purpose of letting their dogs loose on formal events, to bring both jollity and an increased awareness of humankind's ultimate powerlessness over the wheel of chance. Works of performance art, weddings, religious events and legal proceedings can be brought to life with the sudden and unanticipated appearance of 100-200 small yapping canines.

     c. Guerilla Carollers, Solo Saxophonist Edition. Oh. Nevermind.

2) There is also no class Thursday, March 31st, in support of the General Strike in Wisconsin. What does that have to do with yoga, you ask? I don't know. Sometimes a thing seems like the right thing to do. If I worked for a yoga studio or a gym, I wouldn't be allowed to speak about such things, as it is "bad for business" they say, but you know, I'd like to point out that I do little more than run my mouth about drama and controversy and that my business is doing the opposite of suffering as a result. So surprise, everyone, I have political views.

3) I want to tell you about a thing happening in May. I know, too much notice. But I'm helping organize it, and we are looking for corporate sponsors and helpers, so if you're inspired to help, holler at me. Mindful Medicine Worldwide is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that builds integrative medicine clinics in developing areas of the world. Read: free hospitals in Nepal. They are great. In order to raise money for their work, they are having a kind of wellness party thing on May 20th. It costs $50 to come to it, but your admission comes with a free acupuncture or Thai massage treatment, and a bunch of organic food and wine. Come to it. It'll be full of hippies and those blonde ladies at the Whole Foods, so we need to represent, got to show the world that normal ass people give a crap about good practice. Normal ass people don't pay $50 to go to a party, I realize, but you're getting dinner and drinks and bodywork, so it's like buying a groupon for a good-for-you night out. Click here if you wanna. My dear buddy is one of the acupuncturists going to Nepal with them, so if you'd rather skip the party and support a real live medic doing the work instead, click here.

4) Did you guys hear about how I tore my hamstring on Friday? Man, it was something to behold. I was standing in bound half moon pose, which is, hm, let's see, it's like, from bound side angle you shift the weight over the front leg and lift the back one so you're in an L-shape position balancing while backwards-hugging yourself. Got that? I was standing on my left, feeling strong and open and adventurous so I went ahead and extended through the right all the way up to a kind of rotated bound standing split. I am told that this looked amazing, like a totem carved from a tree trunk, spiraling and tall and victorious. I felt a feeling right underneath my left sitting bone, where the hamstring connects to homebase. It was a tearing feeling, the sound of which, if amplified, would be best simulated by the rope on a ship at sea. A pirate ship. My eyebrows made an "oh fuck" shape and I came down. Since then, I have begun to resent spirals and pirates and victory in general. Doing anything hurts. Furthermore, the healing time on soft tissue tears is about a zillion years. I do want to say that I've done an outstanding job of maintaining a positive outlook on the matter, if you don't count the accidental crying I did at my client's house Sunday morning (number one the menses were after me, and number two she said, "How are you?" and I don't know about you but I certainly can't be counted on to hold up under that kind of interrogation). Point being, I am bummed. I have two small-time insights about this event:

     a. It is possible that this would be a good time for me to stop messing around and get serious about my writing.

     b. It's interesting that pain relievers are not advised because they increase the potential to do more damage. Take THAT metaphor to the bank, eh?

5) Don't forget not to come to class Friday, ok? Also, next Friday the 8th is the potluck, so bring food and drink and whatnot.

The entry where I try really hard not to talk about BDSM

2011-03-24T18:43:00Z

Hey guys, I have been trying to write to you on the serious about teaching.The thing that interests me is how how much strictitude is enough. I haven't figured it out, of course, but having no idea about a thing has never stopped me from sharing my thoughts on a thing. Why start stopping now? Here's my deal. I want to be nice to everyone. I want my students to feel good all the time. But, as some of you may have noticed, yoga practice feels best when you stop doing it, because most of yoga is spent feeling at least a little bit uneasy. That's the whole point. We practice staying a bit out of our range of comfort in order to be more comfortable with more things, so while the goal (a goal, let's say) is to be more at ease, we won't get there by taking it easy all the time. Crazy, I know.

I had a great History teacher in 8th grade. Mr. Driscoll. He was a complete asshole. Example: if he asked you a question, and you didn't know the answer, he would not ask someone else to answer. He forced the entire class to wait, even the entire class period, until you produced an answer, however ridiculous or crazy sounding, because he wasn't teaching us to spew information back at him, he was teaching us to think. He was strict, did not pat anyone on the back, and came close to humiliating us lots of the time. I got a teacher crush on Mr. Driscoll, maybe like a regular pre-teen gets a teacher crush, but maybe more like the way an affection-starved, aggressively-reprimanded and subsequently over-achieving pre-teen gets a teacher crush, which is what we call an obsession. The trouble with obsession, one of the troubles, is that very often the subject of the obsession, and for argument's sake let's say the subject of my obsession (almost always a teacher), was given the power to heal or destroy me, which is not what teaching is about, really.

Even so, the result was not all bad. I did my very best work for Mr. Driscoll, and had my first major breakthrough as a young thinker while under his tutelage. It was in his class - it's a great story I should tell you one day - but it was in his class that I first realized that everything I believed to be real was actually so processed through the mechanics of my senses, upbringing and circumstance, that there was no possible way to be absolutely sure that ultimate truth existed. That was a moment, let me tell you. Ok, screw it, I'm going to tell you the story, even though it's going to mess up my outline on pedagogical severity. Here's what happened.

We were discussing truth in the media. Mr. Driscoll pointed out that what we hear on the "news" is filtered by innumerable variables, and gave a demonstration of how an event could be spun to imply something entirely untrue without stating any "false" information. He then gave us examples from our history books of events that may have gone down very differently from the way the read on the page. We were all with our jaws on the floor, like, not only is the TV maybe not true, but BOOKS are also maybe not true??? Then he hit us with this, he asked, "What if the land we know as America were discovered from the west side first rather than from the east side? What kind of history books would we have then?" And we came to realize that if, say, "easterners" would have settled in the Americas, they might have made friends with the Native Americans, who knows. They certainly wouldn't have called them "Indians," and if they got along better, which all of us dreamy eyed kids seemed to think they may have, then what we know as the USA would probably not be made up of mostly black and white Christian-ish people, and nothing in US History would have happened. There would be no USA, and no way to know what would have taken its place. This made me feel very fragile.

I had just learned that information was subject to countless mistranslations, including the limits of language and its built-in prejudices (the way calling America and Asia the "west" and the "east," respectively, is based on a western-centric flat map of the Earth, for example), and then found out that everything that existed, if it existed, was the result of such infinite and complex causal chains, that it - everything and everyone and even me - was both hugely significant and rich and weighted, and also laughably trivial. Nothing. Cosmic throw up. At this point, the worst thing that could happen happened. Mr. Driscoll asked me a question. "Karen. Tell me something you know for certain to be a true fact."

On the outside, I looked like I'd just been slapped in a game of freeze tag after seeing the face of bloody mary on the girlsroom mirror. Inside, though, I was spinning through data like one of those demon-possessed rolodexes in the movies. There were two problems. One was I was discovering that there was nothing in this world that I could believe, nothing I could be sure was not false, nothing I could lean on at all. The other was that the class was waiting for me to come up with something. The more time passed, the harder it was to discern how much time had passed. My tiny little mind cracked open and started leaking out of my nose holes and eye holes. Salty tasting, brains are. A regular teacher would have invited me to step outside and talk it out. Mr. Driscoll asked the class to step outside. They thought he was kidding. He was not.

I admit this was the very most best thing that could possibly happen to an attention-hungry teacher-lover, but I wasn't in any shape to appreciate it. He pulled a chair over to my chair in the evacuated classroom and asked me to say something. I told him in barely decipherable snotspeak that I could not see any reason to keep living, that I didn't know how anyone could bear the ache of consciousness, and that it was pointless to endure it at all. His two hands took one of mine and swallowed it up. He said, "the only problem I see with what you are saying is that you are absolutely right. There is no reason to live. But it's not as bad as you feel like it is. Tell me this. How old are you?"

"13, if you count using the Gregorian calendar, which I just found out is complete bullshit anyway." (He unlaughed.)

"Ok. I want to make you a solemn vow, and I want you to make me one. I want you to give it 7 years. Promise you'll call me when you are 20, and if you still want to die, you and I will both kill ourselves. We can do hanging or overdose or guns, your choice. Deal?"

I made the deal. Oddly, just before I turned 20, I was admitted to a partial hospitalization program for the wickedly depressed, and had already begun taking razor blades to my wrists with some regularity. I didn't call him. Mostly because I didn't want to let him down, but also because I didn't want to stop living as much as I wanted to stop wanting to die. This got worse and then better and then worse and then better for years, and although I can't say for sure it won't get really bad again, I can say that Mr. Driscoll gave me at least one really good tool in my toolbelt for dealing with it, and that is to wait. I've gotten good at waiting. Too good, some might say. But let's see if I can bring this back around to my original thought.

Great teaching is both radically strict and radically compassionate. I tend to prefer overly rigid teachers for a few reasons, two of which are appropriate for me to talk about on the blog. On the one hand, if much is demanded, much is produced*, but on the other, if I give over my will entirely, I can trick myself into believing that I am no longer accountable for my actions or their outcome, which makes me both dependent on my teacher for instruction, and irresponsible for myself. [Flash red caution lights here.] This is why, as a teacher, I often feel unsure of how much to push. I want to bring my students to a level they may not have reached on their own, but I want them to learn to bring themselves to that level. If a student doesn't take responsibility for her own practice, she will have no practice as soon as said teacher wins the lotto and moves to Costa Rica. Mr. Driscoll was harsh with me (he had the nerve to NOT give me the History award that year, in spite of my undying devotion and flawless GPA), but that was because, I think, he was less interested in my love for him and more interested in empowering me to manage myself. As much as I wanted to be his devotee, he never allowed me to depend on him, nor did he allow me to control him with recurrent emotional outbursts, because (believe me, after that major win?) there were more.

I've been pondering how strict is too strict. How much adjusting is energizing and how much is exasperating? I want to give my students the benefit of the doubt that they are monitoring their own level of effort and challenging themselves appropriately, but the fact is that no matter how much they push themselves, my job is to push them differently, maybe more, maybe less, to encourage them to do the one and only thing they would never willingly do on their own, which means, guys, for real, that if it doesn't make you a little mad at me, I'm not doing my job. I think I err on both ends, depending on the day. It makes me feel schizo. I'll be like, on top of you, pressing your limbs into unnatural shapes while incongruously assuring you that we are breathing together and that the pain is rising out of a kind of love we are both giving to your body, and then on the days I give us a yummy dessert class we all feel cozy about, folks start, like, checking their iPhones or chatting up their mat-neighbor, and then suddenly I'm all, "wtf guys, seriously, like, try to give a shit for a minute will you?" And then somebody says, "whoa, look who's about to be on her moon cycle."

I know. It's weird, right? But here is the deal about balanced cooperation: You stand on the teeter totter, wherever you want is fine. My job is to stand exactly opposite you, to be on the side you are not on, to do the thing you are not doing, in order to achieve balance. You say to me, "hey, that's too different from where I am, come closer." And I say, "If I walk toward you, you'll fall down. I can't come closer until you come closer." And you say, "you first." And I say, "no, you first." This is when we both decide to trust one another and pick up our feet in unison. You work harder and I'll be softer. You be gentle with yourself and I'll challenge you more. You wait 7 years and I'll kill myself too. Once we find the center, it'll be great because then we'll have no idea who's teaching whom, which is my idea of a good time.

*barring the havoc that is wreaked by abuse, in which case way too much is demanded, usually with threats, and far less is produced due to a debilitated and/or demoralized student.

What Yoga Isn't Good For

2011-03-15T17:15:00Z

text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation toward the relief effort in Japan.

Last night my friend, Ben, came to Happy Hour Yoga for his first ever asana practice. I like to hear what folks have to say after their first class, and was particularly anxious to hear from Ben, an enthusiast of the extreme and a likely cynic. I was over by the mat bin rolling up sheets of sticky PVC when Ben approached me with the following comment: "I don't know how you are such a basketcase if you do this all the time."

Point: Ben.

I was reminded of that passage from the sermon on the mount (yeah, from the Bible, deal with it) that says something like, "you know a tree by its fruit" which leads me to ask, how AM I such a basketcase when I do this all the time? Shouldn't a yoga teacher be chill and grounded? Shouldn't folks be asking me what's the secret to my mellow vibe*? I want to remind you that yoga is for people who need it. I didn't come to yoga because I was bored. I came because I was a mess. And although an image search of "mental health" will not produce my freckly face on the first hundred thousand pages, I am for sure getting a passing grade these days, thanks to some intentional inhales and exhales.

Even so, Ben's comment, let's say, inspired me to look at myself. I asked me, I said, "how often are we having feelings-related emergencies and what are we doing about them?" You wanna know what I said to me? I'll tell you. I said, "surely not more than our previous average of once per hour. And what we are typically doing involves submersion in hot water or tepid whiskey. Second tier solutions utilize friendship time including but not limited to pedicures, television, and root vegetable stews." Eureka, guys.There is no yoga on that list. The good news is that I just put it on there now, so everything will be fine. Except some things. Like earthquakes, politics and nuclear fallout.

That reminds me of a song. It was the best track on this kids record I listened to growing up, and by far the most depressing children's song I know. Click the lyrics to hear little Lexi sing it.

The String Song From Music Machine

With a ball of white string
I can do many things
Tie a bow on a gift for you
Fly a kite free, tie a star to a tree
Strap a sling, make a ring
For a trick or two

Twist, twirl and wind things
Tie up and bind things
But there are some things that string can never do

String can't bind a broken heart
When it's been torn apart
Mend a friendship that's almost through
Can't pull hate out
Tie up fear, wrap up doubt
String is useless when it comes to me and you

There is not a concluding verse which offers hope to the heartbroken. That is the actual end of the song. It occurs to me just now that it may in fact be relevant that this is the tune I related to most as a kid. Nevermind that for now. Here's what I don't want to say. I don't want to say that yoga is all about personal development and has no efficacy outside of the realm of the individual, because I don't think that is true. All big things are made out of small things, and while we, as individuals, may be small, when a bunch of us come together, we are big.

I often feel as though I am completely powerless, hopeless and worthless to the cause of political revolution or global disaster. I feel that right now, actually. But if I settle my mind and body, as yoga has taught me to do, I can see that these huge events are the result of many small decisions. The idea is to keep my mind clear and focused while I make the ones allotted to me. Today, particularly in regards to Japan, my area of potency is small. So small, that I couldn't think of anything to do except light a virtual candle on the internet. (See the sidebar to your right.) It has been suggested, however, that one really good thing everyone could do is to get off of nuclear power. Wherever you have the option, folks, please choose green energy! And send all your money to Japan! And support Wisconsin in the General Strike! And buy American! Or something!

Of course politics and disaster are only this week's reasons why I'm so basketcasey, though honest to god I much prefer the term, "passionate," and while yoga can't do much about those, I suppose, there are a whole host of others that are remedied with mega doses of awareness and brain-detangler via yoga. For example, I was helped this week in remembering an old zen story about anger. A man sleeping in a boat at dusk is rudely awakened when another boat slams into his. Furious at the dipshit, the man sits up to give him an ear full, when he sees that the boat is empty. Without a target for his rage, the man asks himself, "whose anger is this then?" I like that story because whatever my feelings-related emergency is, the boat is pretty much always empty, and the feelings always mine all mine to chew on. This week I will do better at my chewing, thanks to the peek at my inners. Just bring your ass back to class, Ben, and we'll see who has something to basketcase about.

*I asked this question to a very happy and relaxed person recently, and received the reply: marijuana.

Trying To Quit Quitting: A Fat Tuesday Special

2011-03-08T19:35:00Z

There is a plastic baby inside this cake.

Happy Fat Tuesday, everybody. I've been thinking of moving to Central America.

For those that grew up near to New Orleans, Fat Tuesday means sweets and titties and all things rich with sin and syrup, because Fat Tuesday is the day before everybody quits it with the gluttony for Lent, the feast before the fast, so to speak. As a Baptist, I observed neither Lent nor Fat Tuesday until college, when I went in on a King Cake with my roommate while driving down HWY 49 in her little blue pick up. She was listening to the Indigo Girls, but the cake was great anyway. King Cake is a chewy crusty yeast dough filled with sometimes jam and sometimes praline, but everytime a tiny plastic infant (if you find it in your slice, you're buying), kind of like if Auntie Anne and Cinnabun had a baby with a baby in it. I don't see many in Chicago. Here it's paczki land, which isn't bad at all.

Fat Tuesday makes me think of urges, and then this happens: urges =>motivations => ambition => failure => go hang out with monkeys in Costa Rica. They are beautiful, guys. In case you didn't know. Those monkeys are the best damned thing ever. But I suppose the thing to talk about isn't so much monkeys as why and how it is that once in a while my runaway reflex kicks in.

The details are just details, but I get to where I feel like things aren't working so I want to quit, just the same as everyone else (under 6). On the upside, it used to be that this kind of urge was a quitting-living urge, but it's improved to more like a quitting-trying urge. In the last week or so I've had a couple of good conversations, thanks to you guys, during which the following themes arose:

1) If you don't like where you are, you can change the where or you can change the you. One of them is fun and the other one is helpful. Guess which is which.
2) You can't find out which doors are unlocked without pushing on a few.
3) Just because the door doesn't open doesn't mean you aren't doing anything.
4) Seeing the trees and not the forest is a legitimate perspective.

I don't know that I would regard myself as a disciplined person, but I appreciate discipline, as indicated by my effort to post to the dingdang blog on No Matter What Tuesdays. (Not every Tuesday is No Matter What Tuesday, but today will be. Look at me, making it so.) In the way of discipline, I also take a good deal of pride in being prompt, writing follow up texts/emails, and brushing my teeth before bed regardless of my level of consciousness. No Matter What energy is powerful stuff. I'm not sure of the recipe, but I can guess by the taste that it's a blend of determination, endurance and lemon juice. It's third chakra stuff, pretty much, and yellow isn't my color. I'm all orange and bluegreen, which is, like, sex, love and talking*. Not helpful. My point is, I have so little No Matter What energy, I pretty much only use it on Tuesdays. The rest of the days I try to schedule things that don't require a tap into the determination reserves. You know what you get when you do that, though? When you only do what is automatic and effortless? Well, whatever it is, you've already got it. Sometimes we discuss this in yoga class, when, for example, one of us doesn't feel like doing (m)any sun salutations, and I try to encourage that one of us by saying something like, "if we only do what we've already done, we'll only get what we've already got" or other such popcorn. I want something different for myself, so I am trying, on Tuesdays at the very least, to do something that is contrary to my whim, to post an entry even if I might have a sinus infection and an achy heart and all I want to do is eat paczkis and watch TV. It is my hope that one day this will have been fruitful.

Here's what I'm thinking about: why does anyone do what they do? In a life-situation like the one we have here, all confused with fake emptiness and fake meaning, what motivates people to do things that are uncomfortable? Not just getting out of bed, but doing better and better work, facing horrific fears, giving love that isn't returned, forgiving people who aren't sorry, paying debts to institutions that throw away hundreds of thousands of times more money that I will ever owe them, say. Big deal discomforts. I'll tell you why I do (some of) those uncomfortable things. I do them in order to be more comfortable. I don't want to do lousy work, or live a cowardly, loveless and resentful life in collections. I have to live with myself, is the thing. No one else does for now. Except my cats, whom I treat very nicely, by the way. But, so, for whatever reason we do what we do, at some point we will want something that will require a bit of discomfort to attain. Most of us keep our "eyes on the prize" to get through the rough patches, but that's not always as helpful as it seems.

The thing that sucks is that just because you try hard doesn't mean you win. See item 3. I've had to remind myself that failure to do what I've set out to do doesn't equal zero. It doesn't leave me with nothing. It leaves me with more yellow stuff in my solar plexus. It flexes my trying muscles, which I need for like, everything. My trying muscles are getting stronger, I guess, but right now they are tired. Recently, I have not been winning. I have been, how do you say, not-winning. And I've been not-winning for so long and in so many of the same ways that I've been thinking I should get out of this culture where winning is such a big goddamned deal and live somewhere where folks value, I don't know, sex and love and talking. Like, Fat Tuesday forever.

But Fat Tuesday is only Fat Tuesday because of Lent. (Letting it all hang out is a pleasure with an expiration date and it's really best enjoyed proximal to at least some period of restraint.) Thinking I'll be happier if I don't have to hem myself in is not my best thinking. It's just right now thinking, which brings me to item 4. It would be solid to argue that I have no business writing about what I write about because I've got no perspective. I'm inside of my problem. But although I might not be seeing the big picture in my rattled moment, that too is it's own perspective, isn't it? And I can see things from here that I'll forget in a while, let us hope, so best to be where I am, maybe. Keep my eyes open. Notice what hurts and why, notice where the hurt goes in the morning.

*(Creativity, Compassion and Communication are the themes of the 2nd, 4th and 5th chakras, which are often indicated by the colors orange, green and blue.)

DIY lifecoaching

2011-03-01T14:57:00Z

Consider the above image. Note the weather.

Everyone needs some perspective sometimes, and lots of times winter is those times. When you next re-examine your life choices and self-worth, feeling crushed under the weight of significance that, say, a lease renewal seems to have, take a moment to ask yourself: is it winter right now? If the answer is yes, seek help. This week, it became evident that some perspective was in order, and because my employer does not yet find it feasible to provide me with the salary required to access professional services, I sought help the old fashioned way, by asking my friends. I got on the social network and made a call for unspecified advice. Well, what I said was, "say some lifecoach things." What came at me was so helpful and weird that I've decided to share it with you today, complete with serving suggestions.

The things that make us happy make us wise.

What makes me happy again? Good music and mild weather, potluck dance parties and romantic hogwash, making art things and food things and bathtubs and french fries and endless gchats and wine and oh, god. Oh, I get it. Crap. What makes us happy makes us fat and lazy and selfish and lonely and that makes us wise eventually if we are good learners and don't feel too at home with misery to regulate ourselves. But wisdom is a big enough bonus that it cancels out the middle miserable part?

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. (That one's Emerson.)

I used to write this on things like yearbooks and book covers when I was an early teen like it was straight out of the Bible, not that you guys wrote Bible things on your book covers, but some people did, I mean, anyway I liked this one because it was so damned, like, "oh yeah, parentals? Emerson says I'm the only one who knows what is best for me so there." The problem now is that on most days I do not feel qualified to be running anyone's show, least of all mine, because when I ask myself something like, "but what do you know, deep down, is the truth of the situation here?" sometimes I just go blank, or I hate the truth so much I have already brought home, dressed up and positioned another truth beside it on the couch making finger bunny ears behind it's head. Over-exposing side note: when I imagine my "deep down inside" I see the inside of the bottle on I Dream of Jeannie, meaning, yes, my deep down inside is a gold and purple velvetcave of pillows. Did you think of me with a superego by Ikea? Think again.

"Seated, they share a long look of mutual incomprehension . . ."

Nothing says, "I understand you" like refraining from saying, "the only thing I get from what you just said is that you didn't get what I just said." You better sit down for this.

Abhyasa.

Hey, a yoga thing! So guys, abhyasa is a word for the long game. This means practicing regularly over an e x t e n d e d period of time. When I was in music school, this crummy viola grad used to say, "you know sometimes you practice and practice and nothing gets better for like, months. Then one day you can play. It pisses me off." Me, too, man. It is a big picture thing, and a fine counterpart to this next one:

Baby steps!

The small picture perspective, and the very nicest way of saying "get your butt back the heck in the present moment and start taking some effing action, you freakishly underdeveloped whiner."

‎"Do not regard yourself as a wicked person" - R. Shimon

Good one. I am trying not to do that. Perhaps the bottom line is that while none of us is beyond reproach, it's useless to imagine that one's own inners are rotten... unless I am missing something, which I probably am, though I might not assume so if it weren't for the quotation marks and credit to an "R. Shimon" You know what I mean? Like check this out:

Because I'm me.
vs
"Because I'm me." - C. Sheen.

See? See what I mean? How it's different?

Chocolate tastes good even in stormy weather

It does. It really does. And it might be good to have some just to remind me that just because something might be sucking, not everything is sucking. Everything can't suck at once. Do we live inside a vacuum cleaner? Do we?

Life is empty and meaningless, and it doesn't mean anything that it doesn't mean anything. So write your own story!

I do get pretty excited when I realize that I'm in a fake movie I can direct and star in at the same time, but what happens is that when I am trying to write my own story, I get really invested in it, which makes it seem "important." Which is a problem. It is hard to find the line between caring too much and caring too little. A point well-noted by Mr. Guthrie:

‎"Take it easy... but take it!" -- Woody Guthrie

For real, Woody. Way to get all yin yang on us.

When life gives you lemons tease your hair and choreograph a dance battle with your oppressors

Will do.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

Understood.

From what I understand therapists get us clearer on who we think and what we want. Life coaches say it takes concrete work to do? For instance, are you still working on the book? How many hours a day/days a week are you dedicating to writing it?

Sure, ask about the book. Way to stick a lemon wedge in my rugburn. The book is the most obstacular thing in my personal known universe. Are you surprised. Are you surprised that the biggest project I've ever taken on turns out to be difficult. Well don't be. Thank you for your participation.

So tell me Karen, how can I help you?

A+ in the way of a lifecoach thing to say. You can help me by convincing me this book is not the worst idea ever so that I can pursue it with the zeal of a Landmark educator.

you become what you think....self fulfilling prophecy which means you can recreate yourself at any stage in life by changing the way you look at yourself and your life... of course after renewing your thoughts you must add action.

Wait, are you guys all talking to each other?

i think "jersey shore" is available online now.

Confession: when I need a gratitude adjustment, I alternate episodes of Hoarders and Intervention.

Protein. Best.

TRUE FACT.

‎"Life isn't about being dealt at good hand but about playing a poor hand well." Robert Louis Stevenson

This must be why I cook best when there's nothing in the kitchen. The lack of options make the process so much more creative. Like, all we got is some pistachios, a can of cat food and some week old chili? Watch out, Chicago. It's about to get Iron Chef up on Noble Street.

Learn from the Honey Badger.

Yes, m'am.

‎"Sweet sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care" ... Macbeth, Act II ... When in doubt, sleep.

There has got to be a reason we spend a third of our lives sleeping. That reminds me of something my Grandmother used to say when we would go mattress shopping. It went like this: The most important decision you'll ever make in your life is to asked Jesus into your heart, because that's eternity. The second most important is who you marry, because that's until you die. And because you work 8 hours a day and sleep 8 hours a day, the third most important decision is a toss up between your career path and which Serta perfect sleeper we can fit in the car. I would also add that my astral plane is rich with helping helpers, and they wear the best outfits, too.

Eat a brownie with ice cream and fudge. Make sure the brownie is hot.

The all-weather solution.

Thanks, friends. You were, as always, an invaluable help. Don't forget to come to freaking yoga class this week though, ok? It's nowhere near warm enough to have a relevant excuse to ditch. Though I grant that it is cold enough to never want to leave the bathtub again, so let's make a deal. You hang in there till April and I will, too.

The Only Thing God Ever Says

2011-02-22T18:38:00Z

Don't you hate when you are, like, in revolved triangle pose or something, and your I.T. band is broadcasting messages to space, and you are trying to do the thing with the hip aligning and chest broadening and the foot planting and the belly breathing and things are hard enough and then your teacher, your freaking teacher tries to tell you that this is a metaphor for your life, which feels not only irrelevant to the matters at hand, but also mean to say because trying really hard to do something that hurts so much you question your participation in it while someone else runs their mouth at you about some nonsense is for sure an apt metaphor for life, thanks for the reminder? Yeah, I hate that too. But I keep doing it to myself, even though I've mostly stopped doing it to you, during class at least, because it isn't nice or helpful to tell someone their physical problem is merely a fraction of the body/mind/heart/spirit malady they are limping around with.

I am not sure whether it was too many poems or whatever growing up, but I tend to think everything is a metaphor for everything else, which is sometimes, possibly 'often' but more likely 'seldom' helpful, I guess. The rest of the time it gives me the feeling that I am in a closed loop of endless, layered repetition, as if god were trying, if god were a guy, and I don't think he is, which makes "he" the wrong word here but whatever, it makes it seem as if god were trying to drop me hints by saying the same thing louder and slower, like a grandma talking to an alien baby. And I'm like, "ok, grief and love and growth all have the same shape, and destruction makes way for creation, and life is a 54 story layer cake of illusion but so what? What am I supposed to make of that? And if I figure it out do I win the privilege of quitting it?" And then god, because god isn't someone who says things back right away or ever, doesn't say anything, which sounds to me like, "chill out."

The fact that I only ever hear god say, "chill out" might tell us more about me than about god, but then I'm still not sure what I mean when I say "god." Should we even get into that? It's really only an interesting conversation the first time, and I think we've all had it already. Can I be allowed to say "god" when I mean "the big giant something or other that makes everything the way it is" without anyone freaking out? Ok, fine. Some of you are going to freak out anyway. But just keep in mind that I could spend all my energy inventing a new word for that thing and then teaching you what I mean, or I could just use one that was already invented, and then we can both find out what I mean using context clues. It's not that I'm lazy as much as it is that I secretly like god as a concept, and have less and less of a problem with imaginary friends in general, so it suits me. Besides, I'm about to tell you that imaginary things are real anyway.

This is not what I meant to discuss today, guys, but now it feels too important to delete it and straighten this entry out. Let's just get back to where we were, which was metaphors. If there were a religion that consisted of using metaphors to connect and unravel everything, I might sign up for that religion. Forget the obvious fun factor. Check out the helpfulness quotient.

Something happens in yoga class a lot where folks say, "so what if this is a metaphor for dealing with my recent heart-bashing? Are you trying to tell me that revolved triangle makes a chihuahua's shit of a difference?" And here is where I say YES, and then, if I ever did any preparation for these blog entries, I would hand you over to Jason Yee, my dear friend with an actual PhD in brains, who would be happy to guest-answer that question from the perspective of neuroscience. I didn't do that, though, because I do these things in one sitting when I get an idea to do them, so if Jason has anything to say, he's going to have to do it in a comment box (and like, please do, Jason, especially if what I'm about to say is a bunch of bullshit, which I hope it is not).

The thing about brains is that they are awesome. Let me give you an example. There is evidence to show that if you can not exercise for whatever reason, then imagining yourself exercising will burn more calories than not imagining you are exercising. It will also give you a small amount of some of the benefits of exercising. What does that mean to me? It means that imagining is not fake, it is real. It may be subtle, but it is not nothing, not at all. Now let's take this a bit further with a both over-simplified and exaggerated example. Say you get your leg broken riding your bike. Now not only is your leg broken, but bike riding makes you nervous. Why? Because your brain just did you the favor of making it so that you are more careful next time. Furthermore, as it happens you were riding your bike too carelessly because you just got dumped by some jerk, so you hate love now, too. I will venture to say now that not only were you "riding your bike" too carelessly, but you may have also been a bit uninhibited, for whatever very possibly good reason, in your recently ended romance, which might make the broken leg and the broken heart sort of the same thing.

Are your broken leg and heart actually the same thing? No way, of course not. But in your brains, because brains can connect things that do not even exist on the same existence plane, they are holding hands in a way that will allow them to heal up together. I am saying that the better you take care of your leg, the better your heart will heal, and vice versa. Years later maybe in yoga class we'll be doing revolved triangle, and your long-ago healed up leg might holler at you a little, and you'll get upset because it hurts, but maybe also because I bet you might be in a new relationship that is pushing your buttons, and what I'm going to say is, "chill out." Feel it hurt. Breathe more deeply. Ask yourself whether it is the discomfort of moving through a no-longer-needed boundary or the pain put in place to signal you to stop and retreat, and when you hear the answer, heed it. If you give your leg the chance to relax, the support to grow stronger, and the safety to do it at its own honest pace, I believe your heart will benefit as well. I say 'believe' because that is the word we say when we are not completely sure of the factualness of something.

I've read some about trauma, pain and visualization in my own attempts to get over myself, and practiced a bit of what I've come to understand as a working theory of the integral body/mind/heart/spirit. In my experience, using the body to work out the heart and mind is effective. Is there science behind it? Yeah. I think so. Does Jason think so? Let's see if he does. Maybe he will say, "Karen, wait a second, you just made an idea salad out of a bunch of unrelated sciency things that weren't trying to say what you just said." And then I'll say, "yeah, but this salad feels right in my guts." And then we'll have another really interesting conversation. In the meantime, I dare you to bring your achy limbs and emotional feelings to class and see if we can't listen for what god will not say but sort of silently imply about it.

What Does It Mean

2011-02-15T14:29:00Z

Happy Hour Yoga is in a fashion magazine. This Friday I heard Happy Hour Yoga getting hollered at by Chicago's Nylon Daily, an e-list of local suggestions from the national style establishment. Say what! What does it mean! What does yoga class, particularly our no frills cheap date in a makeshift space class, have to offer a mag whose recent tweets include reports of "floaty long confections backstage," a "model crying...on the mirrored floor" and "red sequin nails?" Well, for one, the Daily is a list of things that pretty people do, and I believe I've made it clear last week that Happy Hour is nothing if not a room full of radiance. Even so, it is safe to say that our collective pulchritude was perhaps not our "in," and that yoga really is a thing done by the hip and happening. I get a little fussy sometimes at how flashy and polished yoga culture has become in the US, you know, but first of all, there is very little reason to try and get purist about it [read this article about the origin of yoga and be happy that it's always been a mixtape] and secondly, sometimes, not always and not often but sometimes, things go big because they are great. Though you might not know it by watching this year's music awards.

The song that swept the Grammys is about a drunk dial. Why was I watching the Grammys if I wanted to be inspired, you ask? I'll tell you. Because four, count em four friends of mine were there, in the audience, on accounta having been nominated, which is neat stuff, if you try not to think about who it is that wins and why they win. My friends lost, actually. But how disappointing is it really, when, let me say it again: "Need You Now," the tune that took 5 trophies home, is a whiny wa-wa from a drunk person to a person who does not want to be telephoned. It is, guys. Not only that, but the chorus sounds a whole lot like "Eye In The Sky" from 1982, though admittedly a lot less than Lady Freaking Gaga's "Born This Way" sounds like Madonna's "Express Yourself." To make things stranger, LG thanks Whitney Houston for inspiring the song. If there is any math to do here, someone else is going to have to do it, because I need all the brains I got to try and figure out performance art.

Every House Has A Door does not have a door. I went to see my old professor's new work, let us think of these things always, let us speak of them never, at the MCA Saturday night, and since then I have been trying to figure out what to tell you about it. Because I was planning to bring two friends along who were new to this level of non-sense, I went to the MCA's afternoon symposium on the piece so I might be better prepared for my role as tour guide. At the symposium, I took notes. I learned about the source material and the reason the title is so long. I heard a few people say some poetic things about saying things poetically, and then I saw a young performer, as a creative response to the work, lip sync to Talking Heads on the stage of the MCA theater. It was then that I realized this could go one of two ways. It went the other one. My friends and I witnessed what felt like an 80 minute riddle with no solution, then we ate dinner. We ate a burger, a skirt steak, and a beet salad. We had a manhattan, a whiskey ginger and something that should have been called a margarita because that's what it would have tasted like if it would have cost half as much. We talked about family things, romance things, science things, and then they asked me what I was waiting for them to ask me, which was, "what the f^@k was that about, anyway?" And I had no idea what to tell them, except that some things are meant to awaken a different part our consciousness, and that we might regard the letting go of meaning and reason as a kind of spiritual practice, a struggle to overcome ourselves, to cease fighting for order in a chaotic world, but I didn't tell them that, because you and I both know I would have sounded like an assface if I would have told them that. I told them I did not know what it was about, because I did not know what it was about.

Untrained in Geometry, on the other hand, the play we heard last night after yoga, starring of a troupe of shouting drunks making professional U-turns while avoiding a dinner party, was obviously about love. Thanks to Emily Dendinger for bring the Inchworm play reading series to Stop Smiling this time around! We'll have you back anytime. And speaking of doing things again because it turns out they were and still are absolutely worth repeating, guess what we are doing this Friday? POTLUCKING. Would you like to know the meaning of the potluck? No? Huh. Yeah. Me neither.

FRIDAY FEB 18
The Happy Hour Yoga Belated Chinese New Year Potluck and Pre-Spring Social
1371 N MILWAUKEE::YOGA 6:30PM, FOOD 7:30PM::$5-15 CLASS DONATION
ALL PEOPLE, FOODS AND BEVERAGES ARE WELCOME*

*technically, only nice people, delicious food, and potent beverages are welcome, but the rest are tolerated with kindness

Real Talk: Getting A Yogini In The Sack

2011-02-09T01:05:00Z

Firstly and foremostly, let the record reflect that Happy Hour Yoga welcomes neighbors of all gender styles and preferences, however, I would like to address a topic of concern brought to me from my students which, after careful review, appears to be a topic of most concern to the straight men who attend my class. That said, even if you are not a straight man, you may find some helpful information below. Please note that I am an accomplished matchmaker, and would like nothing more than to get you lucky.

FAQ

Is everyone in your class incredibly foxy?
In a word, yes. Every single person that has ever come to Happy Hour Yoga is so beautiful and charming, it is actually difficult for me to stay on task most of the time. Thanks for noticing.

Is it ok to come to class to pick up chicks?
Seeking a potential sex partner is a perfectly healthy activity, let's be clear. Far be it from me to ban anyone from romance or passion on account of maintaining a relaxed environment for spiritual practice.

Depending on your goals, there are a few ways to go about this (more on that later) so the first thing I'd say is, if you are interested in meeting someone who enjoys doing the things you enjoy doing, you are likely to meet that person while doing the things you enjoy doing. If you like yoga, then yoga class is a great place to meet women. If you don't like yoga, it stands to reason that you would be coming to class solely to seek a sex partner, which leads me to believe that you lack interest in sharing interests with your mate, which makes me think you might make a lousy boyfriend anyway, so no, then, the answer is no.

How many poses do I have to do before I can ask someone out?
Let's back up. While I did say yoga class is a great place to meet women, I must add that it is a terrible place to ask them out. Shall I tell you why? The reason why is that what we learn about each other during yoga class is little more than how our naked bodies would look if they were painted black and folded into geometric shapes, and since you and your chosen lady both know that's all you know about each other, when you say, "would you like to get some dinner with me?" what she hears is, "halfway through class I was thinking I would really enjoy having sex with you while your legs are behind your head." This seems like a good time to outline some of the basics.

Happy Hour Hook Up Rules And Regulations

I. Making Contact

     a. The Right Way To Get In Touch

          i. Hang Out. Happy Hour Yoga hosts potlucks and various offsite activities for the expressed purpose of community building. If you see someone in class you think you might like to know a bit better, hang out. Introduce yourself, see if you have any other common interests by having a conversation. If things are going really well in your conversation (as in, more than one person is talking), you might suggest friending them on Facebook, or simply hang out again the next time there is a hang out. Asking for a phone number might seem like a friendly thing to do, but it is considered forward. Wait a second on that.

          ii. Ask For Help Hanging Out. If you feel shy or awkward or lame, ask someone you know to introduce you. You can even ask me, and if I don't think you are up to no good, I might help. But then, hang out.

     b. The Wrong Way To Get In Touch

          i. Hanging Out And Not Saying Anything. This doesn't work.

          ii. Asking Someone Else What Her Name Is And Friending Her On Facebook Before You Have Ever Spoken. This is doubly ineffective, as it makes you look like the kind of person who would friend someone on Facebook before you have ever spoken.

          iii. Snatching Her Email From A Group Message And Asking Her Out After Meeting Her Once. For reasons similar to item ii, this method is unadvised. Please note: it is not ok to take emails from a group message and use them for anything. Not evites, not mailing lists, not nothing. If I send a group message and CC instead of BCC everyone, that is because I want the recipients to know they were selected and not sent a mass mail. It is also because I trust them not to do this to each other.

II After Having Made Contact

     a. What To Do After A Drunken Yoga Field Trip Impromptu Make Out Session

          i. Say Hi. If you have been drinking, and end up having a little make out with someone who has also been drinking, it is safe to assume that you have a chance with that person, but it is not safe to assume you have started dating. Alcohol is a cruel wizard. If you remember her name*, and she has given you contact information, send her a message the next day or so telling her it was nice to see her or ask if she'd like to meet for tea before yoga class next time. It is important that this message does not contain any material which references the make out or presumes sexual activity. It is also important that this message is not sent within 12 hours of said make out. 12 hours, guys. Let 12 hours go by. 24-48 if you can, 72-96 if you don't want to date her, but do want to be polite. If she has not given you contact information, you can Facebook her, but don't you dare send her a friend request without writing a personal message. Best bet is a message with no friend request. She will friend you if she wants to.

          ii. Start Over. When you meet up again, if you meet up again, you have to start from the beginning, as if the make out never happened. You can not pick up where you left off. All you are allowed to take from a drunken make out is the knowledge that it is not impossible that this girl is attracted to what she saw when she looked at your blurry forehead. The make out has not furthered your potential relations in the slightest.

          iii. Come Back To Yoga Class Even If You Don't Want To Date Her. It is very likely that she is looking forward to seeing you at class next time. If not, she'll at least be impressed that you have the character to show your face after slobbering all over hers. Once you're both in class, make eye contact, smile, say hi, be cool. Do you feel a little uneasy with that? Yeah, sure. She does, too. Welcome to being a grown up. If you can chill out for a few weeks and be friendly, you could end up with a good galpal who might just forward you to a more appropriate match. If you can't be cool after a drunken facemeld, you should avoid drinking and smooching.

     b. What To Do After Dating Someone From Class

          i. Yoga. Once you have successfully met, crushed on, contacted, vibed with, dated, dumped and still remained cool with someone in my class, you are no longer allowed to date anyone else in my class again, so you might as well do some yoga while you are there. You heard that right. I will matchmake your ass one time and one time only, so choose wisely. What do you think this is, the Debonair Social Club? The Darkroom? The Jewel after midnight? Give me a break.

III. The Lowdown

     a. Our Motto. Happy Hour Yoga is a neighborhood community group. Our mission statement, if we had one, would be something like "We Support Doing Yoga Together In A Fun And Friendly Way For As Long As We Can." That means the things which don't promote our mission are not what we do. This includes giving folks the lurker creeps, making drama or gossip about stuff that isn't funny, and breaking up. We don't support break ups. We support stay togethers, so you should think about that before getting into the sack. Is this a person that you can navigate a not-sleeping-together-anymore-but-still-being-friends-and-hanging-out-at-yoga arrangement with? If not, maybe just be yoga class pals is my suggestion. Longevity is the name of the game. And the thing about longevity is, in the words of a very wise friend of mine, upon my asking him whether he felt attracted to a fine looking lady at the club, "it's not urgent."

     b. I Will Throw Your Ass Out Of My Class And Don't You Think I Won't. Haha, just kidding! (Not really kidding!) Guys, just be cool. Don't be urgent. Follow the guidelines above on how to experience yoga related romance without being a creep and we will be fine. But if any one of my students tells me that you are making them uneasy, you are going to hear from me about it, even if I have to covertly write a blog entry to let you know without singling you out.

     c. There Is No Recipe. As it turns out, there are plenty other ways to warm up to folks than those listed above. Please feel free to ignore everything I've said and, I don't know, follow your heart. But just make sure it is the heart that is above your waist. In fact, see if you can use the one above your neck first.

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY ALMOST!
This Monday the 14th after class, Emily Dendinger is hosting Inchworm play reading and wine drinking thing at Stop Smiling. She is fantastic and adorable and brilliant. (Not single. Sorry.) There will be non-yoga people there of the literary sort. I'm bringing conversation hearts. Good time to hang out.

*if you do not remember her name, or how you met her, click here.

Happy Hour Yoga Extracurricular Field Trip Series

2011-02-07T14:27:00Z

1) Official notice! Starting today, Happy Hour Yoga at Stop Smiling starts at 6:30pm, which means, for clarity and emphasis, that from now until further official notice, the Monday and Friday classes in Wicker Park that used to start at 6pm and last until 7pm will now start at 6:30pm and end at 7:30pm, while the Wednesday evening class in Pilsen, that has always started at 6:30pm, will continue to start at 6:30pm just like before.

2) Official notice! Starting yesterday, the Happy Hour Yoga Extracurricular Field Trip Series is off to a running start. The Detour(ed) Tea Tour (the scheduled tea hop that inexplicably and seamlessly morphed into the Chinese New Year Dim Sum Pig Out And Superbowl Party) was, I think you can agree, a remarkable win for all involved. Confident, athletic and intricately choreographed high-fives to Jason for teaching us the correct intonation for "Gung Hay Fa Choy," even though he remains the only one of us that got it right. Celebratory jump fists shaken in air (see above photo) to Carrie, Joe, Christine, Kurt, Sara, Christina, and Rachel for systematically increasing our collective capacity for happiness and fried dough balls, which we learned may be the same thing. What does the Happy Hour Yoga Extracurricular Field Trip Series have in store for the coming months, you ask?

     a. The Un-detoured Tea Tour, This Time For Sure: date unspecified; bicycles involved
     b. Whirlyball: proposed for February 18th, following the belated Chinese New Year Potluck
     c. Reggae night: Clare and Jason are conspiring
     d. Dinner on Devon: because Indian food is good, not because yoga is from India, let's be clear
     e. The Springtime Stuff Swap: clothing and housewares re-distribution and giveaway event
     f. Upcoming Yin Yoga workshop: befriending gravity with Karen Faith and a firm pillow
     g. King Spa: because we would in fact drive to Niles to experience the Amethyst Room
     h. YOUR IDEA HERE

3) Official notice! To expound upon item f, I have been asked to lead a two hour Yin Yoga Workshop at Namaskar Yoga not this Saturday but next Saturday, February 19th at 1pm. This is really good, guys. This is the yoga that you wanna do because you are done doing everything else. (It is also, conveniently, the only yoga you can do following a night of Whirlyball.) We are going to get on the floor and spend some time dealing. We are going to deal with our joints, our limitations, and our attitude problems. It's stretching, guys. We're going to stretch the area inside of which we feel at ease, extend our comfort zones, as I like to say, by hanging out at comfort zone border patrol and making friends with the guards. Am I saying that yin yoga is painful? Well, friends, in the paraphrased words of Ida Rolf, "that depends. What is your attitude toward change?" Yin yoga, just like the yang-y yoga we usually do, is as intense or as gentle as you want it to be. You can choose to work or rest in any pose. There are blankets and pillows and things. Please come hang out. I'm going to play really good music and squirt the air with smells that are different from sweaty feet and Nagchampa. CTA Insider Info: Namaskar Yoga, while kind of "up north," sure, is RIGHT OFF OF THE ASHLAND BUS, as the #9 happens to veer east on Irving Park and drop you right in front of the door.

2/16/11: BAD NEWS: THE ABOVE WORKSHOP HAS BEEN CANCELED BECAUSE I'VE GOT SOME AWFUL COUGHING GERM AND CAN'T BE QUIET FOR 2 HOURS, NOT THAT I EVER COULD

Invisible bones

2011-02-04T12:39:00Z

Hoo boy. Are you guys ready for me to get back to talking about how crazy I am? Because that is what is about to happen. If you aren't into it, or if you would like to get to the really important class time change notice that I'm going to give you today, skip to the bottom. For those of you, like the reader who told me this week that the blog is "getting too esoteric," who prefer that I get back to full disclosure on my struggle to dog paddle the ocean of human interaction, stick around.

Thanks for sticking around. This week, guys. Damn. So, I was reading this lousy in-flight magazine while idling on the runway in Charlotte. I don't fly in planes very much, because I don't enjoy the experience that accompanies flying. I don't like the ticketing process, nor do I like traveling to the airport 2 hours in advance. I do not appreciate the 3 oz rule, the shoe thing, or how wild people get if you say, like, "somebody give me a drink before I blow something up," which by the way you can totally say on the Amtrak and get not just a drink but a, "hear that, girl." Airports are control freaks, and as it turns out, control freaks make me feel very, very anxious. To quell my anxiety, I decided to read the literature in the seat pocket.

I scoured SkyMall, memorized the drink menu, noted the exit ways and skimmed vacation package deals until my eye caught some quote in the middle of the page, enlarged and boldfaced for the purpose of doing exactly what it had just done, and was reeled in by a reference to "God's grace in my life" or the like, not because I like reading inspirational non-fiction (shut up, you do too) but because it seemed out of place. Like, do we talk about our walk with the Lord on in-flight magazines now? I thought we don't do that. Who can keep up.

The story was about a guy who became a non-denominational minister. Totally safe, vanilla sunrise over the mountain (if you are not a devout anything other than Christian, which USAirways hopes you are not). His life changing circumstance was that, as a young adult, he'd been in an accident, a bad one, and broken all his bones or something. I read about how he thought he was dead, and then laid in a hospital bed for months before he could even sit upright, more months before he could move on his own, then more months and years of casts, braces, crutches, and still, after all these years, his bones are all grown back crooked and the lifelong nerve damage makes it so regular tasks hurt him more than they hurt other people, so he needs help with everything. If you are like most everyone else, you just read that and thought, "damn, that is terrible and amazing, cheers to that dude for pulling through, I would absolutely hold a door for him if I saw his crippled ass coming through the Macy's." But if you are like me, that story made you jealous.

When I read that thing, all I could think was that I wished so much I could explain myself so easily, that my story could be told so matter of factly, and responded to so simply and clearly, but all the bones I've broken are invisible, and the thing that broke them is rated NC-17. I, too, had a life changing circumstance that left me barely alive and in dire need of intense care for years and years. I, too, feel acute pain doing regular chores and have a crooked posture and wicked scarring. I, too, need a little help all the time. But I don't often get it, which I say not to trigger your pity, but to ask you to consider mental illness in a new light for a moment. Imagine what that man's life would have been like if no one believed his bones were broken. What if he was told not to mention the accident because it made people uncomfortable? What would that man's life be like if he had to set all his own fractures with cardboard and masking tape, pretend not to have been hurt, and go on working like a regular person? What if, when he broke down in pain, he was criticized for being obsessed with himself?

I want to tell you what it was that happened in my life, what my accident was, but I can't, because it is the kind of thing that you will never read about on an in-flight magazine. It is violent and disturbing and sexually explicit, and happened lots, from the time I was 3 until I was 15, leaving me with a load of diagnoses that, even if I listed them, would not give any unspecialized person any idea what to do with me. This is probably why I have so many friends with psychology degrees. (Broken bones dude marries his physical therapist, whatchu wanna bet.) I, unfortunately, was not believed nor was I treated for so many years that my invisible bones are crooked as hell, people. I have mental and emotional nerve damage that is so for real, a seemingly regular difficult thing may actually incapacitate me. Like going to a funeral. Which is what I was on the plane to do.

My grandfather died last week. He was one of my favorite people. He was hilarious and hardheaded about all the right things. He was the only registered democrat in a family of buttoned up baptist republicans, and judged a man solely on how clean he kept his Sunday shoes. He cursed in front of the kids for what he said was their own benefit, and remedied his ages ago drinking problem not by teetotalling, but by confining his drinking to an annual binge with his boys out of town. When I was growing up, I ate dinner at Grandma and Grandpa Ellis' house every Friday and Sunday. We went to church together 3 sometimes 4 times a week, and they went to every single kidthing I did. They took the only pictures of my childhood that exist, and provided me with the only stability that I've known, if I've known any. I will miss Grandpa Chester, but then I have missed him for a long time already.

I hadn't seen the people from that part of my life in 17 years, because the accident broke us all up, so my old church was exactly like a haunted house would be if haunted houses were real. The teachers I had when I was young, the cousins I never talked to again, the family and church elders who told me my bones were not broken, that there was no accident and that I would start walking straight or else, they were all there. One of them, really well-meaningly, friended me on Facebook and then wrote some things about burying the hatchet and accepting God's grace, and I felt like saying, "hey you know what, it's not that I'm so angry at you guys, it's that the thing you all said wasn't real turns out to be really real, so like, while you've all been praying for me to stop being so mad about something that never happened, I've been in an out of psychiatric institutions trying learn how to function in the actually real world, which wouldn't be so fucking difficult if you guys would have been vaguely in touch with it back then." But I didn't say that. I simply accepted her friend request, and then used my privacy settings to make it so that we never ever see each other's posts ever again.

Of course I could go on. There is a lot more, really. I ended up having a massive meltdown and doing some damage, which I hate doing. Hate hate. But my point today, for the purposes of discussing spiritual practice, is that our mental and emotional bodies are real bodies. Futhermore, most people are walking around with a ton of injuries, some nearly fatal injuries, and very few of us have had the treatment and support to recover from them in any reasonable way. You know how sometimes, when you watch, like, Lord of the Rings or Last of the Mohicans or whatever, and dudes are getting speared and knifed and dismembered and they just tear off a piece of some lady's dress, tie it up and keep fighting, you think, "there is no way that injury is going to heal properly?" Or maybe when you watch WWI movies, where soldiers are getting drunk before having limbs amputated, to deal with the pain, and you think, "that is actually not a good idea?" Or like, when you even think anything about dentistry before anesthetics? I think one day we will look back on this time as a time when folks were totally retarded about mental and emotional well being, and by retarded I mean slow to develop, which is what that actually means, no offense to those with learning disabilities.

We are not without the knowledge of mental illness, by the way. There has been a lot of very fine work done by the pioneers of brainstuffs. The problem, as I see it, is that we, as a society, do not know our own inner landscapes well enough to recognize when we are lost. We can care much better for the physical body and help others who are injured, because the knowledge and understanding of how to care for physical injuries is more or less widespread now. Mental problems are not like that at all. Almost no one has any idea how to help someone who is suffering mentally or emotionally, excepting the use of alcohol and platitudes. This problem, the problem of no one knowing or talking about mental problems, has escalated because, I propose, most people do not even recognize that their mind is a part of their whole, and falsely believe that their thoughts and feelings are what make up who they are. This makes a mental problem seem like a problem with one's actual "real" or "true" self, and therefore, super shameful to have. Who wants to tell anyone that their most essential being is damaged goods? If someone says, say at a dinner party, "The reason I need to sit in this special chair is that I fell from a 5 story building and broke my back," no one says, "I can't believe she would say something like that in front of all of us. She needs to stop being so selfish and keep her personal problems to herself. Besides, where's my special chair?" Mental illness is just an illness of a different part of the self, guys. It doesn't mean there is anything wrong with me me, the real me.

You may have noticed that I have not referred to "spiritual" illness. This is because, while I believe the spirit has preferences, as far as how it would like us to arrange our physical and mental and emotional selves for optimum health, I do not believe the spirit has needs, or can be damaged or sick or deformed in any way. The most essential part of a person, the truest personhood of a person, is unharmable. This is an operating theory, of course. I don't know that this is "true" any more than anyone knows anything else is true, but it helps me to believe this, and some other people in history, some really high functioning people, have believed this, too. I hold on to that, at times like this excruciating week, in order to stay above water. When I feel like a waste of a person, a collage of damages doing damage to those around me, I try to remember to think of us all as medieval knights wrapped in ladies' skirt rags, bleeding and crooked and still swinging our ridiculous swords, perfect inside, healing imperfectly. I have to get to the really important announcement now.

Due to changes in the changing world, Happy Hour Yoga at Stop Smiling, starting not today but Monday, February 7th, will begin at 6:30pm rather than 6:00pm. Please adjust accordingly!

also:

Aint no blizzard leftovers gonna keep us from the Detour Tea Tour! Meet us in Chinatown Sunday morning at 11am, or hit us up along the way. (Details in last week's post.)

and:

February 14th, everyone's favorite day, friend of Happy Hour Yoga, Emily Dendinger, will be hosting her play reading series, called "Inchworm," at Stop Smiling after yoga class! Will there be laughter and romance? I don't know, but there will be booze. Stick around.

one more thing:

NEXT POTLUCK FEBRUARY 18TH. It is rumored that we will be playing whirlyball after the potluck. Do rumors come true?

The Detour Tea Tour

2011-01-26T19:19:00Z

Today I want to talk about community building, my very favorite thing, and I want to talk about it with particular regard to an upcoming event that is only in the most stretchy branch of a way related to yoga. I'm going to make it related though, because you might have noticed that I've been trying to stay on topic with that lately, by writing about my experience studying the yoga sutras, though I should point out that when I say studying, I mean studying in the Southern Baptist way, which is, like, reading through them and trying to find something that could be interpreted to mean something I already wanted to say. (This statement should not offend in the slightest, because lately I discovered, again, that you are pretty much not allowed to say anything about any group of people unless you belong to that group of people, in which case you can say whatever you want and it is considered, "funny." So, since I am full on Baptist by generations and generations of Baptist blood, you will be hearing from me about them, and you are allowed to laugh.)

So far, the yoga sutras do not say anything about community building. But I read today that there are five attitudes, efforts and commitments that should be cultivated:

1) faith in your direction.
2) energy to go there.
3) mindfulness and memory to stay there.
4) the ongoing commitment to seek the higher states of concentration and wisdom.

So, right, that is only four. I know. The thing said there were five and then listed four. Could that be because there was a fifth one that I was supposed to write based on the inspiration I was feeling upon reading the first four? Maybe. (Probably not.) If that were true, you know what I would call the fifth attitude, effort and commitment that should be cultivated?

5) community building.

The first four are really good, kind of Oprah style self-empowerment joints. Believe in your path, stockpile some Redbull, get a reminder tattoo, then sign yourself up for a meditation series. But there's something missing, I think, and that is the good vibes of a group of folks who are traveling compatible paths. I've told you guys this before, but I am pretty inflexible on the importance of a supportive community spirit. We can talk about why that is later, but for now, I've got a new community program to throw at you. Is this a Happy Hour Yoga Field trip? Yes it is.

THE DETOUR TEA TOUR
a publess pub crawl for the healthy or hungover

ITINERARY for SUNDAY, FEB 6

11am Ten Ren Tea in Chinatown: green tea wasabi peanuts highly recommended. From there, we stock up on Pocky varieties, lucky cats and "surprise gift!" and head to the south loop.

12pm yoga class with Kerri at Tejas A delightful class. Pillows are involved.

1:45 Russian TeaTime downtown: high tea doesn't start until 2:30, but we can do a fine job on the a la carte menu. Meaning, we can eat lunch here. Unless someone brought a few boxes of krimpets that we've been dogging all day. Afterward, we start the trek to Evanston.

3:45 Dream About Tea in Evanston: super potent oolongs, hand tied tea that blossoms in the cup, and other curiosities at this killer teashop.

This itinerary is subject to change at the whim of the participants. Email me to get on board.

Focus

2011-01-18T18:29:00Z

I like going to the eye doctor. I like to sit in a wildly adjustable chair and see that what is seen isn't as it seems. At least, it isn't only as it seems. I look at a white card of black smudges. The doctor narrows the field of one lens, and the smudges seem to shift. She broadens the field of another, and suddenly the places where black meets white sharpen into crisp edges. What I see then, presumably, is what is actually there.*

This week I remembered the focus mechanism one morning when I was practicing yoga. It seemed that what I was doing was aligning the lenses of body and mind to bring about clarity and focus, to gain a truer perspective. On most days, I think my body could be described as nearsighted and my mind farsighted. Meaning, usually I sense my awareness of body is rooted deep within, in my middle, while my awareness of mind is brightest in the far reaches. Put another way, when I visualize where "Karen" resides in the body, my consciousness doesn't automatically extend beyond my chest, guts and, on special occasions, the lower middles. I forget that I am also my pinkytoes and elbows, my gray hairs, chapped lips and sock-ringed shins. On the other hand, my mental self lives in the outer edges of theory and memory. I imagine my mind playing in the branches of imagining mind imagining. I disregard the mental middle path as a place where I can thrive. This probably qualifies me for some new diagnosis, but yoga doesn't care about that.

In yoga, un-colored thinking, or clear vision, is something that must be practiced. No one is born with it --- actually, everyone is born with it, but we lose sight of it quick. It is in there somewhere under all the clutter, and yoga teaches us how to do clutter-removal. Yoga also teaches us clutter classification: "There are five types of interfering mental impressions that block the realization of the true Self: 1) knowing correctly, 2) incorrect knowing, 3) imagination, 4) deep sleep, and 5) memory. The Yogi learns to witness these five kinds of thoughts with non-attachment, discriminate between these five, and to cultivate the first type of thought, which is knowing correctly." (I snatched that from here.)

While I was thinking up my lens-focus body/mind metaphor, it occurred to me that we are not just body and mind. We've got other stuff, there is more to us than that, and I believe it is that other stuff which comes into focus when our bodies and minds are aligned well. In yoga, I draw my awareness of body out to its periphery, the limits of the skin and perhaps just beyond, expanding my physical consciousness to awaken even the space around my 3D self. I reign my mind in, crawling back from the branches and standing skill at the trunk, distilling the soup of ideas, dreams and chatter to a potent, clear extract. Once these two lenses are adjusted, the blur resolves into a 'true' image, in the case of our metaphor, the crisp san serif characters on the eye chart. This, to me, is spirit - the luminosity, the clear light of the self, without blur, without color.

And there is something else. Those black and whites shapes might be crystal clear, but they are not just shapes. They are symbols within symbols. They speak, they direct, they have meaning. I think this, meaning, is heart.

This week I was given the opportunity to lead yoga for a group of dancers every day before they were to perform, to help them cultivate clarity and focus. They were 8 men in uniform, performing dances made out of the gestures of employment in a piece called The Labors, created by my teachers and students Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey. We practiced together in an education room at the Museum of Contemporary Art, breathing and moving, chanting and laughing, doing the work of presence. I could have phoned it in, really. I want to be clear about that. I could have led their practice in my sleep. And sometimes I do that, guys, to be nearly perfectly honest. I teach a heck of a lot of yoga, and even though yoga is all about being there, sometimes I'm just not. I do something I've done a hundred times, I say it the same way, I daydream about lunch. I am a regular person. The thing was, I was not working with regular people. On day one, the intention and devotion these men showed me woke me up. I got rattled a bit, witnessing such sincere focus. It wasn't something I could sleepwalk through.

I went home and wrote new sequences. I polished a few techniques I hadn't used in a while. I wanted to give them everything I could. I wanted to challenge them, to be generous, but also I just wanted to be present with their extraordinary presences. We drew our bodies and minds so quickly and exactingly into focus, that spirit (clarity) and heart (meaning) leapt out at us and danced. I got goosebumps a lot. Twice I swallowed back tears while instructing them. Why was that? (Other than my menses, I mean. And being barefoot on tile. And the caffeine. Other than those things.) What happened?

I think what happened is a really simple but all too rare thing called, by me at least, collective presence. That thing, the spirit and heart magic of aligning our stract and abstract matter, is what drew me to performance art to begin with. The desire to make that happen, to create a shift of consciousness, a vivid presence shared by many at once, is one of my prime movers. It gets me out of bed in the morning. I think I forgot about it, because we goof around a lot and get distracted by imagination, deep sleep and the like, but I want to come back around to spirit and heart. It isn't impossible. It isn't really even difficult. We can do it every time we meet up, we just have to want to. Want to?

*I have a hard time saying this, because I truly do not believe that there is one right way of seeing anything, not even a white card of black letters. There is one way that we humans have decided to agree on, but 20/20 is by definition a relative definition. If most everyone had x-ray vision, the whole world would not just look different, but be built differently. For our purposes here, though, let's assume that a perfectly focused image is what "reality" looks like.

Kshipta is the new F%$#!

2011-01-11T22:20:00Z

Guys, I have got to make this quick, due to my brain. It is like the final episode of Hoarders, did you guys see that one? With all the rats going all over the place? Google it. Only, actually, try to imagine they are chipmunks. Imagine I have a thousand chipmunks in my brain. You know what that is called? In yoga? It is called Kshipta. It is the yoga word for being effed in the brains. Let me explain.

Vyasa, a sage who, if he were still a virgin, would be about 400 years older than the Virgin Mary, but I'm pretty sure that it's not true about virgins living forever and both of them are dead, unless maybe virgins DO live forever, but Vyasa and Mary weren--- Nevermind. So Vyasa. He made some commentary about Patanjali's yoga sutras, some remarks that became pretty important to the knowing what Patanjali was talking about, since, let's be serious, Patanjali did not, how do you say - is there a word for using a lot of words to say something that can be said with far fewer words? Anyway, Vyasa was helpful in that regard, and he explained, for example, that when Patanjali said something like, "mind," he was talking about the 5 states of mind. There are only five, says Vyasa, and they are these:

Kshipta/disturbed: This is when you do not have 1000 chipmunks running around up there. You have 1000 rats.
Mudha/dull: This is when whatever you got up there is watching TV.
Vikshipta/distracted: This is chipmunk style, but maybe a dozen talented and inspiring chipmunks, a dozen chipmunks that you are sending to grad school to better themselves, but one of them, and the brightest one, who knew, turns out to be huffing glue and trading futures on the side, and who can keep up with that, you ask, but it is your chipmunk, and the up keeping must be done, so you use his futures revenue to send him to rehab, while requesting letters of recommendation for him and the remaining 11, all but two of which are starting to feel neglected and cast off for being merely talented and inspiring instead of talented and inspiring plus slightly deranged.
Ekagra/one-pointed: This is when you have and have only ever had one chipmunk.
Nirodhah/mastered: There are no chipmunks, I think. Or you are the chipmunk? Alvin? I don't know. I have never been here.

While Vyasa indicated that only Ekagra and Nirodhah are desirable, I tend to spend most of my time in Kshipta or Vikshipta. I've witnessed Muhda in others, and get along fine with Mudha type folks, all told, but really it doesn't suit me. I almost never go there. Vyasa suggested, I think, that it's good to be aware of which state of mind you are in at any given time, to update your status, so to speak, as often as possible, both for it's own sake (self-awareness) and that of knowing what needs to be done to get into the best two states. (Chipmunk reduction.)

Let me tell you where was my brains on Friday. You remember Friday, right? The most raging Happy Hour Yoga Potluck ever to rage, ever? In case you missed it, you are going to have a hard time getting over this when I tell you that there was:

vegetable quinoa
triple chocolate bundt cake
vegan banana bread
sauteed collards
veggie maki rolls
penne and meatballs
pork tamales
salad greens
triple layer hummus
sesame covered fried sweet potato balls
wild mushroom crepes with bechamel sauce
jello shots
manchego and sea salt flatbread
baby carrots
corn chips
other tasty things I forgot
uncounted bottles of red and white wine
uncountable beers
Stop Smiling back issue giveaway
laughter and romance
iPod DJ rotation
dancing until midnight
photographs of said dancing

...which is why, I tell you, I was so dang Vikshipta, maybe even Kshipta if you add the braintangles of some things that I am certain will be over soon so don't you worry about a thing, that I forgot to tell you something really important, and that was this:

THERE IS NO CLASS THIS FRIDAY, JANUARY 14TH AT STOP SMILING!

and this:

SOMEONE ACCIDENTALLY TOOK SYBIL'S YOGA MAT HOME! CHECK IF IT WAS YOU!

and this:

CARRIE CAINE BOUGHT HAPPY HOUR YOGA A CHRISTMAS PRESENT, AND THAT PRESENT WAS 10 YOGA STRAPS FOR US TO YOGA STRAP OURSELVES WITH!

but mostly this:

THERE IS NO CLASS THIS FRIDAY, JANUARY 14TH AT STOP SMILING!

1.1.11

2011-01-01T23:15:00Z

1.1 "atha yoganushasanam" is the opening line of Patanjali's yoga sutras, a foundational text for orthodox yoga practice written in the 2nd century, BCE. Really primitively translated, atha yoganushasanam means "now yoga begins." More thoroughly translated, however, it reads, "at this auspicious moment, after proper preparation and discipline, the teaching of uniting the actualized self with the cosmic self is expounded."

In other words: Y'all ready for this? Here comes self-actualization. Here comes learning new stuff. Here comes finding out everything matters even though nothing is real. Here comes pain and bliss wrapped up in one big burrito. But let's get back to self-actualization. Because I had to look that up. I mean, it is not really obvious as a word. Aren't I actually myself? How can I be any more or less actual than I already am? The deal is that self-actualization, the goal of yoga, pretty much, is I think another way of saying, "growing up." The annoying part is that there is an order of operations to it. You have to get your shit together before you can actualize. Check this out:

The deal is that the bottom needs are more urgent, and should be met to some degree before moving up the pyramid. You can't get a job if you aren't able to breathe, for example. In order to self-actualize, we've got some homework to do. We've got to take care of our bodies, straighten some life shit out, deal with people, feel our feelings, learn stuff, be productive, interact with our neighbors, care for our plants, wash our dishes, stop participating in self-oppressive patterns of behavior. This is what Patanjali was getting at with the "after proper preparation" implication.

It's New Year's, guys, and that's as good a time as I can imagine for contemplating the self-actualization pyramid. Where am I in there? Am I still messing around with basic needs? Do I need to get my belongingness act together? How are my aesthetic values coming along? I am not really asking you really, of course, not right now, not that I wouldn't ask you, I mean, but you know, I am going to privately consider my progress and make the necessary adjustments where applicable, hopefully, so please refrain, if possible, from telling me all my faults, guys, but like, rhetorically speaking, are we ready for this? I mean I think it's time we got ready.

With that in mind, I'd like to invite you to start coming back to yoga again on Monday, January 3rd. We've been on break a while, but NOW YOGA BEGINS. Also! This Friday, January 7th is the Happy Hour Yoga New Years Potluck! For all those that have not yet attended a HHY potluck, you are guaranteed a measurable increase of well-being in the Biological & Physiological as well as Belongingness & Love, Esteem and Aesthetic Needs categories. Happy New Year, friends.

G.I. Joga

2010-12-28T16:16:00Z

you're welcome.

there is no reason you should read this entry

2010-12-21T17:11:00Z

But guys, reason is overrated.

[Carrie Caine, you can skip to the post script if you are busy.]

And besides, it's Tuesday morning, which is the most trafficked internet time of the week, particularly Tuesday at about 10am. Documented fact, folks. My feeling on this is that folks, most of them, not me of course, but other folks, maybe you, are at work, and Tuesday morning at 10 is the best time to be somewhere other than work. (It's free day at the museum, after all.) Monday's to-do lists can wait, because there are like, 4 whole days until you'll be away from all those crazy jokers at the office, nestled snuggly in your yoga pants. So people, people at work on Tuesdays, they ask the internet for sanctuary. Save us from ourselves, internet, they say. Show me some funny videos, put me on some mailing lists, offer me, perhaps, an word from my yoga teacher and friend, Karen, who considers it serious business, sending follow up emails, and who has been awake for a while now thinking of what she'll write to everyone who came out to the unofficial holiday party last night.

Thank you for coming to the unofficial holiday party, is what I'm intending to say right now.

It's an odd thing, what we've made of it. It used to be a regular yoga class. Well, kind of regular. But just look at us now! We're like family, in the gay way, which has always been my favorite kind of family. My blood family is like your blood family, by which I mean difficult, to be honest, and so I've made a practice of gathering other families together where possible, and I'm really pretty freaking grateful for this one. It took a little doing, sure, but lots of that doing was you guys showing up, and the rest was a no-brainer.

I have no reason to believe that 2011 will be worse than 2010, which is to almost say, without jinxing it, that I think this next year is going to be awesome. I'm going to spend some time over the holidays re-charging my yogic batteries and polishing up a few old tricks to surprise you with come January, partly for my own self-respect, but mostly so that you don't get bored and start taking some other class. Not that I have issues, but you know. Just don't go away.

Hey, well, Happy Solstice! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! And Kwanzaa!

Love,
Karen

PS: Did you guys see the eclipse? I definitely didn't. But I wanted to remind you that today is the solstice, which pretty much means that everything is going to be ok, starting now. To commemorate this incredible thing, I recommend singing along with a classic solstice carol.

Who cares

2010-12-17T15:07:00Z

This is exactly what you think it is.

Hi guys. I've got to tell you something important today, so I should get to that.

But before I do, really, thank you for all of your emails and comments and texts and phone calls and in-person guilt trips. I have never in my life been so encouraged by an onslaught of complaints. To answer some of your questions, no. I did not re-enroll at Netflix University. Nor have I forgotten about you, become pregnant, or given up writing for the art of baking (though I must report I have done very well in the way of yeast doughs and Scottish shortbread of late.) It's just, well, it's just that, I've told you guys before, but I can be a bit mental. You know. I mean mental in that I am largely occupied with matters of the mind, but also mental in that it's possible I'm a bit tilted in the works.

Most of you know I got the rug beneath me yanked a bit this Fall, and first of all, thanks for being so nice about it, most of you. Secondly, I'm here to report that although I dropped out of my routine for a bit, I've been doing an alright job managing my inners. Example: I started seeing a psychotherapist here in Chicago, and when said therapist encouraged me strongly, for two weeks in a row, to acquire and stay very near to a horseshoe, based on a message she felt she was receiving from "somewhere outside of [her] body," I actually, in the spirit of accepting guidance from whence it should emerge, kept my eyes open for a horseshoe for like, 2 days before firing her. I am on a waiting list to talk to someone else, but you know who I like talk to a lot? You guys. I've missed you, and I might have just learned that I get a little bonkers without you. I got embarrassed about using you as an audience for my therapeutic journaling, but a review of your recent complaints reveals that you liked it best when I did that. So here you go. Let's gossip about my lousy therapist.

Emily was well meaning enough. She wasn't a jerk. She simply wasn't very skilled. I think she actually cared about me with her emotional feelings. But caring, I don't know, just caring is nearly worthless, guys. I hate to say it at Christmas, I do, but I don't care who cares. It's like, say my parents told me, "we totally support you in becoming a professional clown." Ok. You support me. But will you pay for clown college? Because that would be actual support. Caring is cheap. Anyone can care. What not-anyone can do is take caring action which is helpful. In Emily's case, what she needed to do was put her feelings aside and listen to me. Instead she talked about how I made her feel. That was not helpful. Shit, that made me think of a Bible verse. I know you get squirmy when I go Jesus on you, but check out James 2:15-16 (KJV, King James Version): "if a brother or sister be naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body, what doth it profit?" KFV* translation: "if somebody tells you they need help and you tell them you hope they get it (or that a horseshoe is in order), your talking privileges should be revoked."

I'm gonna go so far as to say that a person who says they care but doesn't help out is possibly misusing the word. Probably not intentionally, but, on the real, if you actually care, then stating the fact should feel to someone like it will feel to you when I say, "I am typing a blog entry." Duh. The evidence is right in front of you. Like, maybe Han wasn't being a jerk, maybe Leah was just talking too much. With that in mind, I'm going to take back** my earlier assessment and say Emily did not care. She certainly didn't care enough to contain herself for a minute and help me out. Not that it's easy. I know this because some of my clients are so nice and interesting that I want to make best buddies with them and chit chat through their sessions about all of my thoughts, and it can be hard not to do that, particularly with some of them, ahem, some of them who intentionally provoke me to such unprofessionalism in order to escape their own quietude. (Called out: Casey, Manya, Mark, Judd and Lori. Called. Out.)

But look, I have some important news.

1) THIS WEDNESDAY NIGHT'S PILSEN CLASS IS CANCELED AFTER ALL. AND NEXT WEDNESDAY, TOO. (Check the sidebar for the whole story.)

2) In fact, after this Monday's (December 20) Happy Hour Yoga at Stop Smiling, there will not be another Happy Hour Yoga until Monday, January 3rd.

3) This is one of the reasons why we are all going out to dinner and drinks after class on Monday. (The unofficial holiday party to which you are officially invited takes place at Rodan -1539 N Milwaukee Ave - about 7:30pm.)

4) Between December 21st and January 2nd, I would be happy to do yoga with you at your house if you want. I'm here. We just canceled class because most people are busy. If you're not, send me a note.

5) Sorry about saying caring is baloney right before Santa Claus comes. What I meant to say was that if you give a shit, give something better than a shit. This morning I found out about KIVA and loaned $25 to some ladies trying to buy a new sewing machine, which I feel more comfortable telling you because it wasn't charitable at all. I could in fact be ashamed that I only gave so willingly because the money is coming back to me later. Anyway, it's a good program, and I recommend, if you care to be helpful but don't feel super able to be tossing your dollars, that you check it out.

6) I realize that not everyone celebrates Christmas. I, too, do not celebrate Christmas, but that certainly doesn't make it any less Christmastime. Besides that, the so called "most wonderful time of the year" is more often the darkest, most stressful and depressing shitshow you'll see annually, which is why I say, sincerely, have as merry a Christmas as you can. And if you are having a hard time doing that, write me an email and let's go eat french fries.

7) Hang in there. The New Year's Potluck is January 14th.

*Karen Faith Version. I am fully aware that this is a sacrilege, but it is also just for fun and possibly helpful for those who do not read Olde Englifh.
**one take back per day is a birthright I would not refuse any living being, including myself.

The Sorry Blog

2010-11-16T17:00:00Z

Hi, guys. Since my last post, I heard about Cory Arcangel's blog, "Sorry I Haven't Posted," which may have itself inspired me to slack off for a bit. Sorry I Haven't Posted is a collection of excuses from bloggers regarding their own irresponsibility. That Mr. Arcangel created a Google alert for the words "sorry I haven't posted in a while" is funny. The fact that it returns hundreds and thousands of links to outrageously banal content is also funny, which makes his discriminating selection of posts even more funny. Like most funny things, however, the Sorry blog is funny for a depressing reason, which is that no one cares or has ever cared when someone stops blogging, nor do the said careless care to be alerted. With that in mind, here are my top ten excuses for not blogging this month:

10) I was teaching Luiza how to make lasagna.
9) Something shifted energetically for me, internally or whatever, and I found myself full on freaked by the idea of sharing anything at all with the internet.
8) My good good friend Rene gave me a journal for my birthday, the kind made out of paper that you can't write in without a pen or something, and on the cover it said, "Fuck you and your BLOG," which seemed like a hint.
7) I have been writing a book instead.
6) My heart broke apart and then got taped and glued and held together and then it broke again.
5) USPS relapse.
4) If you are invited to an 80s dance party, be warned that this night will not end at midnight. It will not end at closing time, or at sunrise, or by Monday morning. It will crawl up into your hippocampus, poke three fingers into your amygdala, cerebellum, and nucleus accumbens, and, possibly, have a seat in your periaqueductal gray, which, if you are me, means you give love a bad name.
3) Guy Fawkes Night observed.
2) I was researching alternative methods for dealing.
1) I watched The Secret Life of Plants, and got sensitive.

So, I'm back. I'm back in Chicago, I'm back on freaking Facebook, I'm back at the ding dang blog. Some parts of me are bruised a little, others are budding, but here I am. And I have some announcements for yoga class (relevance alert!), regarding the holidays and whatnot.

CANCELED FOR REASONS I HAVE NEVER FULLY UNDERSTOOD:
Wednesday, 11/24 and Friday 11/26

CANCELED DUE TO A VERY HIGH PROBABILITY OF VERY LOW ATTENDANCE:
Friday, 12/24 and Monday, 12/27

CANCELED DUE TO ALL OF US HAVING PLANS WE ARE ACTUALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO:
Friday, 12/31

Two thousand eleven has two many damned syllables, don't you think? Until the future. Love, Karen

It Gets Better

2010-10-22T13:45:00Z

This morning I watched President Obama's contribution to the It Gets Better Campaign, which is, for those who don't know, an online video collection of messages to young people to hang in there. A response to the overwhelming number of gay teen suicides of late, it is one of my favorite helping actions, and I'm going to tell you why. I don't think that strengthening laws against gay-bashing is a very helpful thing to do about this. Of course gay-bashing is crappy, anyone-bashing is crappy, but kids do not kill themselves because they were picked on. They kill themselves because they do not have any tools to deal with emotional and psychological pain. While bullying is awful and should be stopped, there are at least a dozen other horrors of adolescence, equally excruciating, that we ought to put on the list, and we could spend our lives dealing with the list and forgetting about the kids.

I have said before that most of what I know about anatomy has been learned from my experience with injury. For example, I have never really had pain in my stomach muscles, and so I really don't know them so well, but I have a clear mental image of the way the muscles of the shoulders connect to the back and neck thanks to a lifetime of tension headaches. For me, pain illuminates what can not be seen. It gives definition to the shape and structure of my insides, physically, mentally, and emotionally. It isn't the only way to learn, of course, but it is one way. For this reason, the anatomy of the suicidal mind and heart are not a mystery to me.

To discuss this further, I will now nutshell the themes of each of my major suicidal episodes here, for your reading pleasure:

Age 13: I am worthless.
Age 16: I am unloved.
Age 19: The pain will never end.
Age 26: I am irreparably damaged.
Age 28: I do not belong in this world.

See how none of those things are facts*? Of course, I was told some facts by some people during those times, but they didn't compute, because all my life I had practiced believing that my feelings were real indicators of real ultimate truth. Do you think I would attempt to end my life over some falsehoods? Of course I wouldn't! Who would? My experience was REAL LIVE TRUTH to me. Furthermore, I didn't know anything about the shape of the grieving process, and almost no kids know about it because it takes time to learn that, but meanwhile, we can at least give them some good information about what thoughts and feelings are: totally temporary experiences of tiny little chemicals in the brain. Key word, temporary.

It Gets Better wins my vote because it declares the impermanence of suffering. It does not dismiss or minimize the pain of the present. It Gets Better brings reason to a highly unreasonable situation, and it does so with personality and style. Way to go, video guys. I don't have a webcam yet, so I'm going to do my It Gets Better here with words.

--

Hey Teenagers!

Guess what? You are totally right that shit is fucked up. It makes sense that you would be upset. We've been telling you since you were little that everything is great, and it's not great. People are assholes, and there is no santa, and we're not sure if everything is ok when you die. Sorry you just found all of that out at once. That's actually our fault, so we understand why you'd be pissed at us. We were trying to give you a nice childhood by lip-spelling curse words slowly to each other and not letting you watch anything good on TV, but it turns out that was stupid. We don't know what we're doing.

I can tell you as one person who was once a teenager that it is honest to shit the single worst thing you will have to do in your life, getting through that. Your parents might say that they are really stressed out, that they have "responsibilities" and that your life is so easy compared to theirs, but I want to tell you right now, that is total bullshit. They just forgot. They forgot that now they only hang out with who they want to hang out with, they forgot that they have to power to make their lives exactly the way they want them to be, they forgot that their responsibilities are the price of having really incredible things like kids. Actually, if their lives really are super hard and painful, I bet you anything it's because of some shit that happened when they were your age that no one ever helped them with.

That's why I'm writing to you. I realize you don't care that "I was your age once," that I was really hopeless and angry and sad, too. Some really awful shit went down when I was younger, one day I'll tell you about it, and I thought I could never be happy or even ok, and so I treated myself like crap for years, and tried to die a few times. You can't really understand what I'm saying right now in exactly the same way that I can't understand what you are feeling right now. There are certain ways that people can't understand each other even when they are saying the same thing. So I realize that you don't care, you can't care, because I'm a grown up who does whatever I want whenever I want. But you will be a grown up, too. Right after this crappy part, in fact. Of course, the not very great news is that all those jerks you have to sit next to at school will also grow up, at least in the way that they will get taller, and some of them will be jerks until they die. They will make tons of money and run for political office and this kind of thing, but you won't care, because you'll be happier.

You will be happier because you are more interesting. You will be the kind of person who has guts and character and compassion, because of the very bullshit you are dealing with right now. You will have strength and creativity. You will be wise. You will know how feelings show up and disappear like a flame on a match, really big and firey and then smaller and then nothing but smoke. You will know that because you'll be a feelings expert, and your expertise will make it so that you have psychic-seeming powers where you can tell what is going on with other people sometimes better than they can tell themselves. You will clearly see their pain, their motivations, and their beauty, and you will be really valuable to them. The people that love you will not be faking it and you will know that. This is just one of the reasons why your sex life will be awesome.

The important thing for the moment is to stay alive for that. I recommend that you make two rules and two rules only:
1) Do not hurt your body. (No guns, blades, needles, drunk driving, or drugs made by humans, and no forgetting a condom.)
2) Do not hurt anyone else's body. (Also, try not to fuck up people's cars unless it is for activist reasons, can we agree on that?)
Other than those two things, I think you have a lot of things to express and you should do anything you want. Primarily because now is the time to get that out of your system. Your parents will get mad, but they will get over it. If they hit you about it, or say really shitty things to you, or if they are doing anything else to you which feels terrible, seriously, tell an adult that doesn't suck, like, now.

I am happy to be that adult, if you don't think I suck. So, write to me if you want. karenfaith@yogaforthemoment.com Meanwhile, if there is no one at school that you like, get on the internet and find out what college has the most queers, geeks, freaks, punks or whatever and apply for early admission to that college.

Keep kicking ass,

Karen

*they are also relatively unrelated to the events and abuses that triggered them, isn't that interesting?

WWJD

2010-10-08T12:30:00Z

This ancient photograph of Jesus doing yoga proves that everything is ok.

Presumably because I am a yoga teacher (professionally), and Southern Baptist (ethnically), I've been the beneficiary of multiple links to the recent story regarding the compatibility of yoga and Christianity, as understood by Albert Mohler.

This story makes me think of my family reunion down in Mississippi this summer. I hadn't been there, to the reunion, in 17 years, and not to Mississippi at all since I'd gotten into yoga, so the experience of saying "I'm a yoga teacher" to a Southern Baptist was new. Some had questions, some didn't. Most heard, "I'm an exercise teacher," which is, honest to pete, folks, the truth. More on that later. Anyway, one guy answered loudly and demonstratively, "WHAT A SHAME THAT YOU'VE CHOSEN TO WORSHIP A DEAD GOD." First words he'd spoken to me since I was a teen. He went on to explain that he done won hundreds of souls to Jesus on a mission trip to India, and he seen the Buddha statues, and so he knew first hand that the god I worshiped, the Buddha, was made of stone, and rocked his wrinkled eyebrows side to side to feign sympathy for my chosen path to hell. Ben Bounds, if you're out there, I've always wanted to tell you that I think you're an asshole. Furthermore, everyone I've ever known to experience a "conversation" with you has felt like they were held hostage by the rudest man on Earth. And I'm talking about your fellow Christians, man. My mom is going to be really mad at me for saying that, but only because she's embarrassed that she's never been able to deal with you either. Anyway. There are a lot of points to cover here so I better get to it.

For Ben Bounds: 1. Yoga and Buddha are not related to one another (you meant to reference Hinduism, probably, but yoga is also not Hindu, look it up), and 2. the man that came to be called Buddha is not a god, and he explicitly taught this to his students. In fact, Buddha's primary historical achievement involved planting the seed for what would become the world's first (maybe only?) major religion which has no god or man at its head. It is only called a religion, I think, because people don't know where to put things they don't already have a drawer for.

Now, one really interesting thing about "making arguments" for this or that thing is that it's got to be taken into account that not everyone values the same principles with the same priority, and so, for example, using reason to defend an idea will only feel right and true to someone for whom reason is regarded very highly. I know some of you think I'm being snappy and making fun of the faithful a little bit here, by saying that they don't value things that make sense or something, but I'm not really saying that, and I am in fact one of those people that doesn't feel like the scientific method is the end all be all. There are a lot of ways to "know" something. In fact, I place a lot of value on the unknown, on failure and contradiction and mystery. My point here is that you can say to Albert Mohler that Buddha, if Albert were concerned about Buddha, said he is not a god, but he is not going to hear that, because if there's one thing about Buddhism that is widely recognized, it's those cute little Buddha statues, and statues, a.k.a. graven Images, are an outright violation of the second commandment, end of story. Reason and explanation, to Southern Baptist Christians, is (and should be?) secondary or even thirdiary or fourthiary to the word of God, meaning, the Bible. (Interpretation problems are a big deal, I'm not ignoring that, but most Baptists agree that Buddha statues are out of the question, nevermind the fact that nobody is afraid they are worshiping GI Joe or whatever when they buy an action figure. Nonetheless, this interpretation of the second commandment is why Baptists more often use an empty cross to represent Jesus than, say, a statue of Jesus, in places of worship. This is also one reason why Baptists get squirmy if they have to hang out with Catholics at pro-life rallies or wherever else they intersect. Hard to be like-minded with someone who prays to all those damned plaster saints.)

I bring up the making arguments thing because I have to explain why Christians might not be into yoga even though there is no rational reason why they shouldn't be, but it's difficult due to the fact that there are a lot of different kinds of Christians. For the sake of argument, I'm going to have to stick with the Baptist flavor in order to stay organized here. Also, it is the one I am most familiar with, so that's a plus. (If I were going to be talking to a Catholic, though, I'd have an easier time of it I bet, because they aren't as squeamish about foreign languages, chanting and ritual in general, and tend not to have trouble understanding symbolism, hence, the concept of one divinity expressed in multiple ways may not rub them as hard. Who knows. I don't, because I wasn't allowed to hang out with Catholics that much growing up. Sigh.)

If I were speaking to a Baptist in their first yoga class, I would explain yoga to that Baptist as a practice like prayer is a practice. Christians pray and Hindus pray and Muslims pray and they all do it differently and in accordance with their faith. Who invented prayer first? I don't know. Yoga is the same deal except that we know who invented yoga, kind of. Yoga grew up alongside Hinduism in India, but has developed into what we know of it today (the exercise part) only about 150 years ago, as an extension of some earlier attempts, we think, to be more comfortable while sitting in meditation. The first yogic text, the Rig Veda, recently re-dated at 3,000 BCE, has no mention of asana (physical) practice as we know it. The roots of yoga are meditation. Pure and simple. The idea was that people might sit and be quiet in order to be healthy, but also so that we might do so in order to be in contact with the divine. Here is where Christians get flustered. "Did you just say the divine? There is only one divine, and He only wrote one book, so what impostor wrote this one?"

I get it. It is hard to handle the idea that that one divine being could have inspired someone other than the dudes that penned the Bible. But maybe these things will help unrattle your cage. As far as I know, which isn't far, but it's something, no yogic text claims to be the word of god. Neither do the earliest texts describe the divine specifically, or give him/her/it a name. The praises that are sung are sung to the teacher, in thanks for showing the students a good way of life. Those praises, essentially thank you cards from students, are chanted (a kind of singing without pitches) in Sanskrit, which sounds "spooky" to Baptists because they are accustomed to singing in major keys on a Western diatonic scale in English. I swear to you that there is about as much spooky stuff happening in Sanskrit chants as there is when we sing The Star Spangled Banner, a praise most of us agree to sing which is not a praise of anything holy. That said, I do not often chant in Sanskrit in my classes because my classes are made up of English-speaking Westerners for whom the chants have zero meaning and seem artificial, like white kids getting tattoos of their own name phonetically in Chinese characters, even though they are not Chinese, have never been to China, and would not know if their tattooer inked "dumb ass" instead. I'm all for multiculturalism, friends, and I don't think I should only be allowed to practice white people things because I'm a white person. (Please, please Jesus, may I never be bound to the confines of white people things.) I just find that there are places to go to chant in Sanskrit for folks that want to, and for everyone else, there's my class.

All that said, Albert Mohler's argument remains that yoga just isn't Christian, and to that I say, YES, SIR, you are absolutely right. You know what else isn't Christian? Christmas Day. Jesus was born in the summer, says fact. December 25th was chosen to compete with the Pagan Solstice celebration. So cross that off the calendar. Actually, cross the whole calendar off the calendar, because the names of the days of the week are all Pagan, and the months were named after Roman deities. The fact of the matter is that, even if Jesus were the only true path to heaven, and let's just pretend He is for a second and we are all Christians here, we have a lot of things to do which aren't Christian. The systems we must work with to accomplish the simplest daily activities are not Christian because we do not live in a Christian universe, we live in a universal universe. There's lots going on in here folks, and Jesus, if the stories are true, never asked anyone to isolate themselves in a Christian theme park. In fact, Jesus was really into hanging out with hookers and thieves, and you know what he didn't do while he hung out with them? Give them shit about not being Christian. To put it another way, Jesus was really influential because he didn't act like Ben Bounds. (That was free advice, Ben. You'll win more souls when you step off your self-aggrandizing pedestal and start acting like a respectful human being.)

There is some talk about being "in the world but not of it." A lot of Baptists focus on the "not of it" part by disengaging from non-Christian ideas or activities, completely forgetting the "in the world" part. To me, being in the world but not of it means that I am a participant, that I engage in my community, my environment, my government (maybe), but that I do so while maintaining a sharp and sturdy consciousness about who I am. I've carried a lot of memberships cards, after all. I have been and sometimes still am an American, a woman, a musician, a queer, a Southerner, a vegetarian, a smoker, a Christian, a member of the jury. I have loyalty and responsibility to "my people," but my people are many, and not all of them are on the same team, which means I need to know what citizenship is primary to me. For me, it is important to my spiritual health that my connection to the divine (whatever it may be) supersedes all other connections. (I fuck this up a lot, for the record.)

As for me being an exercise teacher, the cat's out of the bag, folks. I teach a group fitness class. In fact, lots of times while I do it, I am not thinking about raising the consciousness of my students, I am thinking about making my ass look better in pants. Hey, don't judge. I have poor genes for ass-roundedness, as it turns out. It's my cross to bear, so to speak. I digress. So, sure, there are deeper principles behind what I do which guide how and why I do it, but honestly, I can tell you that my dear friend Jose, a violin teacher, is at least if not more spiritually guided than I am in his teaching practice. As is my other dear friend Rene, in her practice of selling out-of-doors-enjoyment products. Yoga is not Christian (neither is this, btw), but it is spiritual, and so is everything else in the universal universe, friends. Much love to Albert Mohler, and Patanjali, and all y'all who sent me all those ding dang links, and even some highly reluctant love to Ben Bounds, as if it would do him any good, the jerk.

The 100th entry

2010-10-04T15:25:00Z

Hi guys. This here entry is the 100th entry posted on Yoga, For The Moment. Congratulations would be in order, if this were some kind of a big deal. But it isn't, really. I mean, this is a blog. And in the words of some jerk whose tweet got passed around last week, "getting 'published' online is like getting a 'blow job' from your hand." If today's entry says anything, maybe it says I've gotten dexterous.

I thought I'd tell you where the blog came from, since sometimes people ask me things like, "what is your blog about?" and, "why did you start writing a blog?" and I usually make some shit up about my concern for thinking and feeling 20-70 somethings who can relate to tranced out gurus about as much as they can righteously dogmatic atheists, which is, like, zero, and how, with regard to spirituality, no one can be trusted, of course they can't, being human, who can blame them, but how, without an anchor point, without giving oneself to any point of view, meaning, I think, having faith in something, or even just trying it on for a while but really zipping it all the way up and putting the shoes on with it, it's really hard to get any clarity or perspective, and so what do we do with all this, wanting to be smart thinkers and still soulful or whatever? And when I say all that, usually in a lengthier way, with hand gestures and profanity (for emphasis), I get the feeling that I have been heard and understood and connected with and then sometimes, if I've done a good job, both parties are visibly but silently like, "we are really having a conversation now," because of all the really important-seeming things that just got casually referenced.

The problem is, that story is a little bit made up after the fact. I mean, the blog is about that stuff, and is for those people, because those people are me, but I started writing this blog to amuse myself, or to save my own life, which I'm coming to believe is the same thing.

It was Summer of 2008, and I wasn't thinking straight. After years of taking lots of prescribed (and unprescribed) drugs for mental problems and general misery, I decided not to take them anymore. There were a lot of things going on, not the least of which was my Saturn Return, but I'd weaned myself for 6 months AMA, and felt like the time had come, so there it was. I wrote about this once before, because it was nuts. (The drug I stopped taking, Effexor, is not really to be fucked with. Really, don't fuck with it.) I went crazy. The first day off of the stuff and I had the feeling that the wires connecting my eyes to my brain were shorting out. I blinked a lot, squeezing my eyes like I was trying to reset them. By day three I seemed to have lost access to my short term (7-15 second) memory. The apartment was a mess. Books in the sink, scissors in the refrigerator. I spent most days pacing around my studio in a disoriented fog. I saw dead people, had dreams while awake, and "knew" things about what was behind the fluorescent lighting at the Kmart. I don't often mention this, because, well, you'll know why in a second, but another thing that happened was that I had random and seemingly unprovoked orgasms. I'm not kidding. And maybe that sounds like fun, but it was really alarming. I mean, think about that. Wait, don't. Anyway. This went on for weeks.

The blog was born that June, in the middle of the night, during a fit of online impulse buying that included novelty ice cube trays, three pieces of Moldavite, an antique enamel colander, and solar-powered phone chargers for all my friends, which is to say, I didn't really think it through. When I bought the domain and about $300 of additional features, I had in mind to create an online store where folks could purchase things which can't be bought. I set up a shopping cart utility and stocked my store with items like Peace of Mind, Affection, A Flash of Illumination, The Feeling of Not Being Alone, A Sense of Gratitude and the like. It was the kind of thing Miranda July would find romantic. Oh weird, I think I just threw up a little bit. So, I actually had in mind, in my psychotic haze, that I could provide these things to people, via words, for money, which is honestly THE MOST DELUSIONAL, CONCEITED AND HEINOUSLY WRONG-HEADED IDEA I HAVE EVER HAD. Though my heart was in the right place. It really was.

Thankfully, 24 hour customer service was available. Around 4 a.m., a guy answering phones very far away listened to me explain that it was all really very embarrassing and could I just un-buy that stuff and go to sleep because wasn't the whole thing a little out of hand. It might have been his idea, actually, come to think, maybe he said, "Sure, let's just refund all these products, but how about keep the blog? Everyone has a blog now. You might like it." Or something. And so I kept the blog, which turned out to be helpful in the coming months, when my brain began re-wiring itself.

The blog address used to be www.aparticulartimeandplace.com. Back then I had 23 subscribers, which, counting me, made 24 people who had no idea what they'd signed up for. After months of being asked "what are you writing about?" and "what do you actually do for work anyway?" and "what is it you're up to in Chicago?" I renamed the blog, to answer everyone's questions right up front. Yoga was never my destination, and I would hardly say I've landed here. Hell, I can barely remember to mention yoga in most of these posts. I continue to imagine that I'm on my way somewhere else, to do something else, but I suppose it's ok that I'm doing yoga, for the moment. (It's odd to me that it became what it has become, because I don't know what that is, but I am grateful for it, solely because of you, believe it or not.)

I've deleted most of the first posts, as they were written under the influence of suddenly being out from under the influence, though many of them were, let's say, "remarkable," by which I mean, remarks could be made about them. I don't stand behind everything I say here on the blog, as most of you know, particularly the really opinionated sounding stuff, because it's been my experience that the feeling of certainty and zeal inevitably precedes a contrary revelation. I was just telling a friend the other night that there should be a word for the opposite of "conversion," wait, is there one? Because every conversion experience I've had has seen an equal and opposite un-conversion - a realization that what was regarded as true is, at best, only true sometimes, that the ground underfoot is not ground at all but a floating bubble of quicksand made out of melted gummy bears and lube. That experience, the un-epiphany, is stronger than the faith that it stalks and then murders, by virtue of the fact that it accomplishes the faith-killing. And dear lord does it hurt, holy shit it does, like getting evicted, dumped and fired while free falling through an icestorm with a headache. But I'm a fan of it, I am, because, as some smarty pantses paste to the bottom of their emails, "if something is true, you don't have to believe in it." The illusion-crusher can't smash anything worth having. It's got a safety on it for that.

Wow am I ever off topic now. Haven't any of you wondered how the heck I'm going to write a whole book, not having the ability to stay focused for 5 paragraphs and all? Well, I wonder that all the time. Nevertheless, I'm going to get out of town next week and see if I can bury my head in it for a while. I'd really like it if you would send me words of encouragement, or anything else you have in mind to send me. I'm not sure I'll keep up with the blog while I'm away, so you might have to put a post it on your computer to remember me. In the meantime, Chicagoans, please do join me for the potluck this Friday after class! (Details in last week's post)

Happy 100th blog entry to me and you.

Love,

Karen

DOUBLE POTLUCK OH MY GOD WHAT DOES IT MEAN

2010-09-28T12:42:00Z

I'm going on sabbatical, folks. Off to the CAC,my favorite retreat, to write the heck out of my book. I'll be gone from Oct 14 until November 7. Not that long at all, I promise. So that everyone is clear on everything, here is a list of facts:

1. Happy Hour Yoga is still happening while I'm away, except Mondays.
2. This means only three classes are canceled, and they are these: 10/18, 10/25 and 11/1. (Mondays.)
3. Sara is teaching Fridays. Wednesdays will be led by community members Carrie, Naomi & Megin.
4. Zarina is going to take care of Cassidy and Veda.
5. I am going to miss you.
6. I'm also going down to Mississippi for my college choir reunion.
7. My birthday is November 2nd.
8. Some owls have bogus "ear tufts" of feathers atop their heads which are just for looks. These do not.
9. This whole trip is made possible by Amtrak's frequent anti-flyer club, and Hezzie and John.
10. Hezzie and John are getting married.
11. Sara and Chris from Friday's class got married this past Saturday, and it was SUPER.
12. The bouquet was snatched from my arms by a lady in Bjork knots who didn't look unlike Bjork herself.
13. Due to item 5, it has been decided to bookend my period of isolation with potlucks.
14. Those potlucks will be held October 8th and November 12th. (Fridays.)

You know how this works. Bring food and drink of any kind to class on potluck Friday. You might also bring a mat, a friend, and $5-15. We yoga at 6pm and potluck at 7. Nobody ever doesn't like it. Sometimes some people come who are real grumps, you know the sort, and they come after having exited their beds on the wrong side, and gotten stuck on the sourbus,and don't even want to be there really but feel like they have to because I bothered them about it maybe a lot, and you know what happens? They end up eating too much jello and getting friendly. Like magic. So come see me off or welcome me back or both. You can say hi to all the other people too.

Happy Hour Yoga Fall Potlucks #1 and #2
October 8 and November 12, respectively
1371 N Milwaukee (Stop Smiling Storefront)
Yoga 6pm, Food 7pm
Bring one or more of the following: food, booze, mat, friend, dollars
RSVP! Because it makes me less anxious that my potluck is going to be a disaster!

BONUS ROUND: I enjoy getting mail at camp, and if you send me something, I will send you something back. From Oct 14 - Oct 28, address envelopes full of paper goods and sloppy handwriting to Karen Faith c/o CAC 71Mill Street, Troy, NY 12180

Let's talk about polytheism

2010-09-21T12:56:00Z

I don't know about you, but I'm certainly not ready to say BBQ Barbie isn't a deity named Carrie.

I don't have any major personal traumas to pretend not to be writing about today, so I was thinking I'd tip the boat some. What better way than a little discourse on polytheism in contemporary American culture? Ok. Sure. I could make bigger waves, you say. But believe it or not, there are a few banned topics here on the blog. (When conception begins, how to navigate the afterlife, my mother's fondness for Sarah Palin, and the seething hatred I carry for zippers in shirts.) Other biggies, though, the existence of god, the problem of evil, time and space perception issues, drug addiction, self mutilation, child abuse, love drama, suicidal ideations, the benefits of smoking, the vanity of yoga teachers, sex injuries, reality TV, any of that stuff is fine. But the above-parenthesed items shall never be disclosed here, ever. Because they hurt.

Polytheism, by comparison, is a cake walk. I realize that to monotheists reading Yoga, For The Moment in order to feign tolerance toward smart-mouthed heretics, a discussion of plural deities may well kill your interfaith buzz, but you know what? If the buzz you're riding can be flattened by an idea that's different than your own, it was probably just your ego tooting its own kazoo. Anyway, never mind how many gods there are. If we were counting stuff that gets worshiped, we'd be counting a long time (and if anything be considered holy, let it be time). I am equally unconcerned with which of the however many gods are "real" gods, or the "true" God, or anything like this. You guys know I don't invest much in objectivity. As long as I am figuring stuff out with my hands and eyes and brains, I'm going to be a least a little wrong, and that's really, totally ok with me. (Today.)

This conversation started a few months ago, alongside a discussion of performance art, which, in case you're a person that enjoys things that make sense, is nothing you should mess around with. Of course, I'm not knocking it. I ditched my whole "orchestral musician" plan to study the stuff. One reason I did that was because I was sick of playing the same Mozart quartets for cheesy wedding receptions, and the other was that I am irresistibly called to impossible tasks, unanswerable questions, and attentive audiences. Anyway, in just the same way that I found bridal procession requests for Pachelbel's Canon in D annoying (yes, you do know that one, just watch any clip of any wedding in any movie starring Steve Martin), I became and then grew weary of, say, the female performance artist working out her own personal virgin/whore dilemma via painting with menstrual blood. (It occurs to me now, at this moment, that the idea of anyone doing anything, anything at all with menstrual blood - which I did not personally do for the record, of course I didn't and wouldn't though I can't really deny the making-alginate-casts-of-my-vaginal-cavity thing - but seriously anyone doing anything with periodstuffs is, and rightly so, far more disturbing than any number of deities wearing zippered polos at a Sarah Palin rally to save the past-lives of the unborn. My apologies. But it is important to the discussion so pretend I'm still talking about wedding music.)

My performance artist friend and I were talking about this, this virgin/whore piece (wedding music wedding music), when I had a personal ah-ha moment regarding cliches. I tried to talk about this once before, but I didn't get it into it the way I intended. That happens here. I digress. In any case, my little brain wiggles made a connection between the virgin/whore performance cliche, the idea of archetype, and what little I knew about kachinas, which are maybe like deities but also a whole lot like Barbie dolls. Let me explain.

I said a few entries ago that I like to categorize things functionally rather than by common characteristics. To use the example from that entry, I would say a ground beef sandwich (piece of a cow, treated with heat, brown, round) has more in common with a veggie burger than it does with a leather coin purse (also a piece of a cow, treated with heat, brown, round), because of what you do with it. Kachinas are dolls made to teach children and remind adults about various roles and spirits which are/were a part of Hopi life, like the Warrior Kachina, the Squash Kachina, and the Snake Dancer Kachina. There are some 400 of them, representing everything from cumulus clouds to left handed hunters. Is this sounding familiar? Think Day-To-Night Barbie, Tropical Island Barbie, BBQ Barbie (pictured above), etc. Kachinas are said to represent spirit beings, but I think Barbies - though more recently the American Girl situation, as well as the onslaught of TV shows shall we say "highlighting" stereotypes and abberrations, and our everyday practice of typecasting folks (queers, yuppies, hipsters, crusties, jocks) - do this work precisely, if we remove the divine implication and take the word spirit a bit more generally. To illustrate using more cliches, I mean spirit as in "the spirit of the time," "the Christmas spirit," "in the spirit of togetherness," and so on.

To acknowledge the role yoga plays here on the blog (that being, the first word of the title), I will also say I think the gods and goddesses of Hinduism (important note: yoga is not Hindu, but it did grow up in a Hindu culture, much like Scientology grew up in a Disneyland culture but has more in common with Xenu) serve the same function. When knowledge is needed, the goddess of knowledge is called upon, not that she is a real someone out there waiting by her phone for an assignment from us, but that we draw our attention to the essence, or spirit, or quality of knowledge. When I was growing up, we did this at our Christian church simply by calling the one singular God by the name that represented the characteristic of His that we were interested in at any given time. I don't think this is different from Hindu polytheism or kachina dolls in any noteworthy way, to be perfectly frank. (Not that I AM Frank, but that frank is a quality I sometimes have so you can call me frank now and again.)

Forget whether any of this is real or true or "divine." The names of God, characteristics of deities, or variations of kachinas, might be considered characters that emerged from their respective cultures, and I suspect that our social stereotypes and cliches may well be what is emerging from ours. No need to hate on them. They are what they are, prevalent as all get-out as the result of being shared experience. Is it quality experience? Sometimes, sometimes not. The lowest common denominator is low because it's common. Cliches are in many ways the basic buildings block of contemporary life, contained and employed in unique proportions by each of us. The trick may be to observe the difference between the spirit of a type and a person who wears or tries on that spirit for a while. The essence/style/spirit of Yoga Teacher Barbie is different from me, a real live yoga teacher, because I have other essences and styles and spirits, too. But there is no use in my feeling that to embody the cliche of it is some kind of failure on my part to achieve originality, the way I criticized the virgin/whore performance piece as a dead idea. It clearly isn't a dead idea if we keep embodying it over and over again. It is an archetype, a cultural mythology that we will call on like a cliche mascot to herald the spirit of our time for as long as it takes. (As long as it takes to do what, you ask, and I ask with you.)

Let's get physical

2010-09-14T14:44:00Z

Are you guys on Facebook? I am maybe a late social media bloomer, some might say I have yet to bloom, but in any case I've spent a good part of my Facebook time, maybe all of my time until yesterday, half hating it. Friend of Happy Hour Yoga and FB conscious objector, J.C. Gabel and I were discussing this recently when I heard myself saying it is precisely faces and books that the dang thing has all but removed from our routines. My technology grudge is old. (e.g., I wouldn't allow electronics in my bedroom as a kid. Who knows why, but I'm not really over it.) Anyway, in 1994, when my college gave everyone an email address, I actually cried. In the computer lab, in front of the computer screen, I got all upset because here was my penpal, Greg Homza (hi Greg, vanity Googling, eh?) nearer than ever, speedwise, I mean, look at the "time sent" on that message! But it was all type, green type on a black screen. I couldn't see his handwriting, or inspect whatever it was he'd crafted into an envelope with magic tape and gluesticks. The words felt dead. And yet, because ornament, texture and smell - yes smell - had been removed as variables, writing took on its own life, more so than before, as the job words had to do became much bigger. (And then much smaller, when emoticons took over.)

Yesterday morning I guess I officially stopped hating Facebook because I realized that it may, in fact, be one of the major factors staving off The Depression for me. (Other major factors: yoga, fish oil, Rene Kane, the Pilsen contingent, CAC Woodside, and brisket sandwiches, very likely.) I snatched my blackberry from the bedside table first thing, checking to see who was out there, and I had a little flashback to my pre-FB days, waking up alone in a silent room, unaware of anyone's thoughts but my own, which, I think I can say pretty objectively, was a bad scene for me. People say, I don't know who, but lots of them say, that all these status update windows have made us narcissistic egomaniacs, perpetually presuming that the world is dying for a broadcast of our every hummus plate, but I'm thinking it isn't necessarily so. Sure, we've pretty much collectively decided that damn near anything is news-worthy, but that is another matter entirely. What I'm getting at here is that for me, a textbook "people person," being in contact with my loved and liked ones on an hourly basis does a fine job of keeping my brain chemicals out of the deep end. (As well as out of the focused, productive end.)

This summer the New York Times posted an article confirming my suspicions that "having few friends or weak social ties to the community is just as harmful to health as being an alcoholic or smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes a day." Of course, a more recent article on Wired.com goes so far as to say that alcohol is the least of anyone's worries, if only by virtue of the socializing it enables. Being with people, even "being" with "people," is really helpful, not only to the heart and mind, as most of us knew, but to the body. And while I certainly have a few friends that would rather self-administer an orchiectomy than attend, say, a wedding, let's recall from the beginning of this sentence the word, "friends." Even those crazy jerkfaces have friends, often very accommodating, nurturing, compassionate friends, who help lubricate their rigid and humorless presence in the world. (What? Am I being unfair? Well, to be sure, budding sociopaths, even and especially those I adore, don't read Yoga, For The Moment - let's be serious - so an apology would be moot as heck.)

The fact is that socializing ranks top 2 in survival related usefulness, and the other one doesn't as often come with snacks. As a tool, socializing is as good a release valve for stress as sketching out identity issues, sturdying the (albeit false) sense of ground under foot, cluttering up the calendar squares, finding out how everyone else is dealing with this mess, and tons of other stuff, not the least of which is providing physical affection where applicable. (While the benefits of hugging are outlined here, Sara Thompson's public hug blog has better pictures.) One of my very favorite sciency books, A General Theory Of Love (not to be confused with The History Of Love, also very good but not even a little bit sciency), talks about how mammals (not just peoples! mammals!) need eye contact and chest contact and hand holding and all this crap to live, by which I mean, to actually survive, and it really made me feel a lot better about being so damned 1) hands on with folks, and 2) prone to emergency level heartbrokenness when left to myself. Of course, for me there are other factors, too, "they" say, like way-too-early childhood experiences and what have you, but that's just one way of explaining how I turned out how I turned out. A member of one of my old support groups - yeah, the plural of support group, what? - said to me once, in a really memorable way, "shit, girl, you shoulda been a crack whore for all the shit fucked up about you." And, I don't know, maybe some people who go through crack whore phases have stories that sound like mine, but I'm pretty thankful I am working it out the way I am, which is via yoga, I reckon. Yoga and vibrantly dysfunctional intimate relationships. (I would like to ask, though, how dissimilar to crack whoredom is taking money in exchange for pleasure and pain so that I can buy myself a whiskey now and again? Or, if I'd married Southern style, taking housing in exchange for home cooking and sex? Or, if I'd "become successful," taking money for my work so I can get my fix of whatever it is people with money spend their money on? This is a bigger thing than I can get into now, but my thought is that we are all bound by the cycles of attachment and transaction. Some hurt more, some hurt less, but none of us, as far as I can tell, are free of it. My current trap is just a mellower trap than my former trap. Way mellower. But seriously, take away the house and family and money of a regular someone and you will more than likely see exactly what you see on a junkie fresh off junk. Hell, just hijack their wireless and you'll see it.)

Am I off topic again? I am. But I was on to something before the whoretalk. The things we do to work out other things. This came up with a friend recently, a super bright, spiritual slash mystical man who is always doing extreme endurance sports and whatnot but can't be bothered with things like eating and sleeping. My theory is that he has a hard time remembering this 3D stuff he's got to deal with. So much of his energy hangs out in his upper chakras, spirit and brainthings, perhaps heartitude, who knows, that he forgets about the skinsuit he's wearing, and swings into it, tearing it up and working it out in this amplified way, just to feel that he's in there somewhere. I understand this. The reflex to get really real, to gather all of our parts from their various browser windows into one fleshy container, can appear coarse (in the case of masochism, alcoholism and American football, namely), but I want to point out that however destructive-seeming, these self-abuses may well be efforts at integrating the knowledge of the body with the experience of the mind.

Yoga means "union," presumably of the body and spirit, the sacred and the profane, but the tall order it turns out to be, most of us are lucky if we can manage a "meet and greet," and even that feels about as peaceful as introducing adult felines. We have to begin with the door closed so they can sniff each other out. Then maybe the screen. Then we open the door and they claw each others ears off. Re-divide and repeat. You feel me? My first attempts at integration were primitive, to put it flatteringly. In fact, no one ever believes me when I tell them I used to be a cutter. Really. I used to cut myself, like, on purpose, no less, with sharp blades, you know the ones, yeah, I know, nuts. And even though I've read a gazillion books explaining it, I can't for the life of me give you one good reason why I did that. It actually didn't seem like a good idea at the time. It seemed like a terrible idea, which was I guess what I was interested in. Anyway I knew it was uncool, and felt shitty about it until my then-therapist said "Karen, never be ashamed of what you do to survive," which illustrated that she was at least as crazy as me, a comforting distraction when you're busy with self-loathing. But then later it made sense, and now I get it, that I was trying to make my inside and outside parts match. I was doing yoga. In my very own beyond backwards way.

Most days now I feel pretty far from ready to unite my holy and unholy selves, so I just attempt to reconcile them, to call a ceasefire for an hour or so and see how it feels. Thankfully, the more I practice, the less damage is needed to bring my parts together. Then I take my parts on over to Facebook and say hi to everyone's profile pic. See what I did there? Facebook is medicine and masochists are just really spiritual people. Nice, huh.

Unreasonable

2010-09-07T14:16:00Z

This is going to be a short one. Because I'm in Los Angeles, using the computer of someone who will probably wake up 2 hours after I did (still on CST). I might not write while traveling usually, but I skipped last week due to getting really into the book writing, and so here I am now.

In spite of burying my nose most days, I am lucky to be distracted by a number of fascinating people, and spend my favorite time gleaning insight and inspiration from them*. Theme of the fortnight (hold your horses because I'm about to hit this with some letternumbers, thanks to the IIT contingent):

If we use y to understand x, we limit x by y.

Example: if we use our eyes to understand our bicycle, we will know what our eyes can discern. This conversation came up because some of us, I don't know, maybe I, get hung up on using reason to understand everything. We do this for the most part because it is a fine tool for lots of things. And I mean FINE. A freaking incredible, consciousness-changing tool a long time ago, too, back when folks only used their personal sensory and/or emotional experience (including but not limited to hearsay) to get along in the world. But it will only reveal what it can reveal. For all the rest, I think we need a different approach.

Now, don't nobody go around saying that I'm knocking the scientific method. I'm not. I promise. Here is my thought: isn't it true, haven't we discovered, scientifically even, time and time again that we were painfully incorrect about our scientific findings and even more wrong about what we imagined was possible? And isn't it likely that our consciousness is fully fluent in the language of reason and ready to tackle something more expansive, something that will bring us somewhere reason can't?

Reason is subjective, folks. The scientific method is super for lots of things, and I will emphatically agree with the very obvious objection to this line of talk that as soon as we dis reason, we are opening up a very big can of very stupid worms. I know. And I think reason should be used for everything reason is best at. I'm saying, though, that I am not a rational person. I am an emotional person. And a spiritual person. And a physical person. And also a rational person. And a largely self-contradicting person. I am complete chaos, and yet I harbor perfect stillness and peace. (Sometimes.) If i want to gain an understanding beyond the limitations of my rationalizing brain, I must concede that there is something greater, more expansive, more true, than basic cause and effect can deduce.

I'm realizing now that this is not a topic that can or should be taken on in a hurry. Thankfully, the Californian is still asleep.

Here's some more crazy talk. And listen, I firmly assert here that I do not necessarily stand behind my own point of view. So don't freak out that this sounds a lot like, "I don't need to look in no books, I'm gotta listen to my gut." What I am proposing couldn't be further from, or closer to, that statement.

I support listening to guts. I support the seeking of guidance from outside one's own limited experience, and sometimes outside of rational experience. I believe that we can not get beyond our own brain tangles by using our tangled brains to liberate us, and what that means, in a practical sense, is that if I want something I've never had, I must do something I've never done. I feel like this comes back to discipline, at the choice-making level. Acting with purpose regardless of feeling, thought, or circumstance places my small individual will in submission to what is beyond my small individual will. Let's say we are talking about a diet. The way I eat, as I wish when I wish, has given me the body (and mind, to some extent) that I have. Following the diet regardless of my cravings will give me something new. Simple, right? And rational as heck.

This all started because I was talking to Sam, the smartest Sam I know, about keeping the rules regarding kosherness (HAPPY NEW YEAR, JEWISH CALENDAR OBSERVERS!) and how one can rationalize breaking them or modifying them or whatever depending on the argument one makes for this or that, and I found myself saying (for real! me!) "the problem is that once you use reason to justifying doing whatever you want, then reason, or your own will, becomes more powerful than god's word*." The idea is that if we want to understand something we do not currently understand, we might have to, in fact, DO something we don't currently understand. We have to say no matter what I'm going to give myself to this thing, and see how it changes me.

What's hard is deciding on what to give your No Matter What energy to. Because some things are more beneficial than others. And yet there is a certain way it doesn't matter. To me, at least. I think you can keep kosher, or be a ballerina, or decide you're going to get up at 5am and jog. Sanskrit mantra and kegel exercises are the same thing as I see it, as repetition and devotion will bring about transcendence regardless, but as practices, one will give you a nice voice and the other will make it possible to achieve orgasm at will. Your call. In the way of discernment and discipline, I said some stuff I don't completely disagree with back here.

I'm a little off topic now, actually.

My point was, as a result of this conversation about discipline and reason, I got to thinking that it's important that we remember that reason is a tool, and not the ultimate key to the universe. Thinking is awesome, but learning things involves allowing myself to discover the limits and faults of my previous learnings, and I've been having a feeling lately that one day, some day, a lot of the things that seemed rational to me will seem very very foolish. And that will be a fine day, maybe, and if I've kept in mind that reason is unfaithful, maybe I'll laugh and laugh instead of checking myself in.

Until that day, I would like to express my support for wholehearted devotion to a (rationally chosen) something greater than oneself. And while I'm at it, I think I'd like to say that if it turns out that the subject of this devotion was a dumb idea, or involves L. Ron Hubbard, I support the breaking of the vows to choose something else. No shame in that.

* I don't thank my friends enough for this. Thanks, friends. Thanks, also for the whiskey. And the peanut butter and jelly.
**My feeling on this is that one should use reason or whatever else to decide what rules you'd like to follow, and then freaking following them. The spiritual part happens in the following.

Fated/Effed

2010-08-20T15:08:00Z

I don't know.

Apparently Joseph Campbell said, ”We must be willing to get rid of the life that we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” And I dig the idea that we're suppose to feel empowered to shed self-oppression like an ugly cocoon and spread our mucus covered wings in the hopes that someone else will have settled for being the wind beneath them, but what is this "life waiting for me" bullshit?

My problems with this statement can be detailed as follows:
1. Since when is there any thing like "a life" hanging out somewhere in a life waiting room, doing anything in relation to me, least of all waiting?
2. What?

It seems as though Joseph Campbell is saying "Free yourself to choose to accept your destiny!" Which doesn't make one bit of sense to me. Which is it, man? Am I choosing to change my life or is there a life pre-determined for me already, and if there is, how could it not include this part that I'm living right now, and if it does include this, then why should I change it?

This, like all my favorite problems, is an old, old problem. And I'm certainly not going to propose that I know the first thing about it, but that's sure as heck not going to get in my way now, writing the ding dang blog with all my thoughts in it. I either spend or waste or invest a lot of energy in these sorts of unanswerable questions, probably because I enjoy the illusion that my thoughts aren't completely out of context, misunderstood and badly recycled collages of smarter people's ideas, but also because I can't help it. I'm "that type" of person, I suppose, meaning, even when I am talking to "not that type" of person, I am usually analyzing their verb tense and adjective color choices to find out whether they live from a perspective of fate or free will (or god/no god, good and evil/cause and effect, present hedonism/future preparation, exaggerating and minimizing/comfortable with gray areas, etc). In my years of wholly scienceless research, I can say that almost everyone I know believes, or behaves as if they believe, both. Most people seem to act like there is such a thing as destiny, and that they had better do some work to make it happen - an idea I find utterly charming and evidently practical, depending on the application, though it isn't exactly my way.

So, a while ago, when I was 19, I had this really intense year as a Presbyterian. (For those to whom this makes sense: PCA, not PCUSA. Big difference.) It's a long story, really, that I'll definitely tell you (I'm in fact telling you the whole thing in the book I appear to be writing in my off-blog hours), but not right now. Suffice to say that, while I did not care much for his ideas on the destruction of church organs, John Calvin really made a mark on my mind that absolute predestination is the God-damned truth. His argument is barely more complex than this: if God is in charge, God is really totally in charge.

I don't believe in the god that John Calvin believed in, and, actually, what I believe in can only in the most wiggly way be called "god," but I don't mind using the word primarily because, like vegetarians relate to vegetables pressed into the shape of a disc the same way that everyone else relates to a disc of ground beef, my relationship to it is similar to a theist's relationship to her god. And to take this analogy questionably far, the way I see it, an atheist is less kin to someone who eats veggies or meat for lunch and more like someone who doesn't eat lunch at all. An atheist (by my definition) doesn't use a "god substitute" but instead doesn't acknowledge the "god" role with a functional object of dominion. (It is also my super controversial opinion that there are very few people who actually fit this definition. Most self-proclaimed atheists have simply found non-sacred things to worship, serve, and/or consult.) Because I do something like pray, I do seek guidance outside of myself, and I tend to act like there is a big giant undefinable thing that is powerful beyond comprehension - even though I don't even believe that thing is "good" or "loving" or "wise", I fall among the lunch eaters. This is a whole other conversation actually. Nevermind for now.

After losing my faith in god as a guy (a being with thoughts and feelings and moods and desires), I held on to my belief in a pre-ordered universe because of something I read in a nature book. The idea was this: a particular species of bird lives in a particular time and a particular place. Why? Because it can. For how long? As long as it can. Not one hour different. If the environment, food supply, predator/prey relationship, or temperature changes, it's a different scene. When I read that, I freaked. It occurred to me that everything in the known universe might be just like that, from the biggest to the smallest thing, and that, while the causal chain is complex, it is fixed. Sure, the bird COULD have lived in this other place, but it didn't, and why? Because some other thing didn't happen. No if, only is. It's my impression that choice is an illusion that I experience because I can only make choices inside of the limitations of time. Choice exists in the now moment, but nowhere else. Outside of time, if I can even imagine that, which I can't, choice doesn't exist.

Of course, this is a shitty way to go about my choice-making life. Because here I am, in this now moment with choices to make. I don't live outside of time. I'm not there. I'm here. Thank god. (Meaning: thank whatever it is that has made that possible.) This perspective, now totally over explained and retarded, pretty much colors me identical to my scienceless study's majority, who behave as if destiny and free will are both true facts without knowing why or how they came to believe that. A friend of mine recently announced, in response to a question about his motivations, "You know what I am? I'm Anti-Depth. Trying to figure shit out makes people miserable. I support Non-Misery." (A devout hedonist, my friend remains a perfect foil to my Anti-Anti-Depthology.)

I also support Non-Misery, though I do it I guess by trying to figure out how to understand everything, and it's wild to me that I'm about to say the same thing I always say, but, because choices only exist in the now moment, that's the only place I can make them. Being present is sort of the big deal of existence, as far as I can tell. So crazy. I was sure there was more to it.

Come to yoga class. We stay present, like, almost the whole time. OTHER NEWS: No class Monday 9/6 due to Labor Day, and also, holy shit was that the best potluck or what? If you missed it, I can't believe you missed it. See you for the Happy Hour Yoga Autumnal Potluck Series.

NOTICE

2010-08-17T16:36:00Z

NOTICE

Wednesday's Pilsen contingent will be classless tomorrow, August 18, due to our hosts' Dan and Megin's complete failure to achieve omnipresence. Do not come to Happy Hour Yoga in Pilsen tomorrow night. Come next week instead. Or come to Friday at Stop Smiling. We're just skipping a Wednesday. This happened once before, when Carrie and Kristin were hosting, which leads me to believe there is something special about Pilseners.* Something that makes one want to be all the way there, in the 3D and the 4D. It's a stranglehold, sure, locking the infinite self to the physical self, but once in a while, a thing or two is worth it. Who knows what Dan and Megin are up to, but we are pretty thankful that when that thing is us, we really get all of them, brains, body and bicycles.

(It should be noted that because JC Gabel is unconfined by time and space, the Wicker Park class does not experience this limitation. Thanks, JC, for being supernatural.)

*residents of the Pilsen neighborhood, not pale lagers, but then one could go either way with that.

The Spiritual Lessons I Learned From Brick Breaker For Blackberry

2010-08-11T17:43:00Z

WHAT DOES "A WASTE OF TIME" EVEN MEAN ANYWAY?

I have a confession to make. I have spent my life hating on video games. Wherever my attitude came from I don't know, but I've spent more than my share of energy bitching about video games, role playing games, sports games, ice breaking games, not to mention what I've said about the people who play them. Sorry, Earthlings. Part of it was my whole "waste of time" argument, and another part was my tendency to take shit too seriously (clearly illustrated below, by the way). I recently learned that there is a lot to learn about learning stuff. One of those things is this: you can learn everything from anything if you want. Since I got a Blackberry this Winter, I've been learning how to make a guru out of the stupidest time waster to which I've ever become addicted. Here are my thoughts.

1. It's a game.

Let's call the time when you are not playing Brick Breaker, "not playing" and when you are playing Brick Breaker, "playing." In comparison with not playing, playing is short. Because the game exists in only two dimensions (not counting the dimension of time), playing seems really limited next to the comparatively vast possible experience of not playing. When one considers not playing, playing seems silly, useless, a meaningless waste of time, and irrelevant to not playing besides. Losing the ball, when not playing, is not upsetting. It is nothing. While playing, however, it is a big deal. It is everything.

I propose that all of life is playing, and that there is another consciousness, a greater reality maybe, which is the equivalent of not playing - the thing we will wake up to when this life gives us the GAME OVER - and I think it will make all of these stresses and sufferings seem like dimensionally limited, useless, silly bullshit. Do I think that the richness of our lives will seem as proportionately tiny and obsolete as a video game seems compared to "real life?" Yes. Yes, I do. One might ask, if Brick Breaker (i.e. our entire life) is so stupid, why do we even play? And there is only one reason I can think of: because it is fun. It is fun when it rules and it is fun when it sucks. Why? Who knows. If it's not fun for you, it might be because you are playing like it's not playing, which is silly. Don't play like you aren't playing.

2. You must play by the rules, but the rules don't always play by the rules.

So, the ball hits the bricks and smashes them. The ball does not break the metal bricks, nor does it pass through them. When a ball hits a brick, it bounces back in the opposite direction. Sometimes a hit brick will drop a capsule down to you, which you can accept by touching it, and it will give you some named ability or quality or value, like LIFE for an extra life, MULTI, for a multi-ball, LONG, for a wider paddle to hit the ball, GUN to shoot the bricks with ammo and the like. Some aren't really helpful and should be avoided if possible. FLIP changes the direction of the trackball control on the blackberry (instant death, unless you can instantly call opposite day on your reflexes), WRAP unlocks the left and right walls so the paddle slides all the way around to the other side (not as instant death, but definitely a fate tempter), and CATCH, which makes the ball stick to the paddle instead of bounce (helpful in tense moments, but not great in some situations, which I won't bother you to outline here). You get 10 points per hit, 50 points per capsule, and blah blah there are some other things too. These are the rules. In order to play, you have to count on these things as true, or, if you don't like derivatives of the word "truth," let's say, it is helpful to expect that this is the outcome. The funny thing is, sometimes it is not.

Sometimes, the ball passes through the brick without breaking it. Sometimes, the ball slides around the side of a wall of metal bricks. Sometimes, you catch a capsule and don't get the thing it says you were going to get. Are these glitches? Are they built in to make you crazy? You don't know. And it would do you no good to know. Do you stop playing by the rules because there are exceptions? Well, go ahead and try. I don't think it will work out. You must allow that the rules are subject to change temporarily and without notice. Want to write a letter to somebody? You can't. You just have to deal.

3. Chance is everything. Almost.

There's no way to know which way the ball will bounce, or how many LIFE capsules you will be offered. You can keep starting the game over to try and get off with 2 extra lives, but what are you going to do after level one? What if you don't like level 2 or 3? Will you start level one over again? Are you going to stay at the beginning waiting for the perfect game where there are no mistakes and no FLIP capsules? Ok, fine. Super, but guess where you are? In level one, perpetually, controlling the heck out of a stupid game. It is important to allow that there is not much you can do about anything.

4. Just when you accept that you have no control, you find out that you do have control. A lot of it.

One day you notice something funny: there are patterns. You will notice that if level one starts with two LASER capsules, the whole game has a lot of laser in it. Then you'll realize that if you aim on your first throw all the way to the left, and then back right one notch, it will hit them first, giving you time to catch them and start shooting before the ball has already broken the bricks. This is good because you get more points for shooting the bricks than hitting them with the ball. You'll find that there is a certain amount of strategy that can be applied to the accepting of capsules, particularly in regards to the order of operations (see item 6). And then you'll find that the one thing you thought you could never control - the direction the ball bounces after it hits the paddle - is actually within your ability. If you hit on the left side of the paddle, it bounces sharp left, and vice versa on the right. A middle hit sends it straight up, and it will move slower than a side hit. Holy crap. Cause and effect actually works, it's just SO SUBTLE THAT SOMETIMES IT IS HARD TO PERCEIVE IT AT ALL UNTIL WE PRACTICE SOMETHING OR OTHER FOR A LONG TIME.

5. Once you understand that you are in control, you are reminded that this has never been true.

As you begin to hone your ball-aiming skills, you might get over-confident. Chance, random changes and glitches are right there to remind you that you are playing. They are wicked little teachers in that way. They say, "hey, dingdong, you are taking this shit too seriously."

6. Sometimes prizes are not really prizes. Alternately, some obstacles come with reward.

Greediness is a bad look on anyone. If you play for points, and take every single capsule that drops down, you will learn this quickly. Take LONG when you've got GUN and you lose GUN. Take CATCH when you've got MULTI and you're back to one ball. If you keep your eye on the capsules and forget your ball, you die. Period. On the other hand, FLIP and WRAP are certain death, but if you can afford it, they are 50 points each. All experiences have drawbacks and benefits.

7. To grow, one must experiment. To experiment, one must play without keeping score.

You've got to play for playing's sake once in a while to try some stuff out. See what happens if you do something new. Don't worry about dying. Don't worry about points. Try a new tactic. Get out of auto-pilot on level one just because it's easy and you found something that works. Do something that doesn't work, just to see if you'll get surprised. I can promise you, you will.

8. If it seems too easy, just wait.

So, you breezed through levels 1-15. Fine. 16 will smack your face. Mastered 16? (Totally possible if you get CATCH, GUN or LONG on the first throw, but otherwise you are screwed. Seriously.) You might just make it to 34. You know what happens then? You go back to the beginning. No fireworks. No rescued, grateful princess. No trophy. You actually go back to where you started: level one, take two. Same as before, only this time, it's faster. And you probably have about 16,000 points to lose, so starting over just because you're not into your capsules is out of the question. Let me reiterate this: your reward for getting through the first 34 obstacles is the chance to do a harder version of the same obstacles a bit more skillfully. Yeah. Fun times.

9. The most important rule is to keep the game going.

The way to keep that goddamn ball in the air is to keep your eye on the lower half of the screen, where you will be hitting it. If you follow it everywhere, you'll get overwhelmed. Don't worry about what the ball does when it's up there breaking bricks, only worry about what you have to do, which is to hit the dang thing before it touches the ground. There are two other things that might distract you: capsules and ammo. Don't let greed, achievement or aggression lure you away. You certainly can't get any more points when you're dead. The only capsule you should risk your life for is the LIFE capsule, and even then, it's kind of dumb. (If there were a LOVE capsule, I'd be screwed, but thankfully, there isn't.)

In order to stay in the game, you have to play when you play. You can't play and not play at the same time. But while you are playing, know that you are playing. Knowing it's just a game doesn't mean you aren't playing, it just means you are having more fun than, say, my friend whose name I will not name, who can be audibly identified by random exclamations such as: "FUCK FLIP! THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT. GOD, WHAT? FUCK THAT, I TOTALLY HIT THAT ONE! THIS INTERFACE SUCKS!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WRAP?! I DON'T NEED WRAP YOU STUPID FUCKING - WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS THING ANYWAY?"

Conversely, in order to having more fun when you're not playing, I think it is a good idea to consider that not playing is also playing, compared to the ultimate whatever it is that we will one day awake from this dream of a life to explore.

10. I thought it would be good if this list were a list of ten.

I'm just playing.

HEY! ALSO: THIS FRIDAY THE 13TH IS HAPPY HOUR YOGA SUMMER POTLUCK #2! I would so love for you to be there. It is even more fun than sitting in bed under the fan in your underwear playing electronic games on your handheld device.

FRIDAY AUGUST 13, 6PM YOGA, 7PM FOOD
STOP SMILING: 1371 N MILWAUKEE AVE
BRING FOOD, BRING DOLLARS, BRING A MAT, BRING A FRIEND, OR DON'T BRING NOTHING AT ALL

Regarding the Happy Hour Yoga Potluck Mailing List

2010-08-09T15:26:00Z

The above diagram is not to scale, and in many instances, inaccurate. It should be noted, for example, that not all blog subscribers are non-dress wearers, and that many attorneys do not like how their feet look. Happy Hour Yoga is a nice-people-friendly community group made of less than 65% women and a tiny chihuahua.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Happy Hour Yoga Summer Potluck #2 is this Friday, August 13th
6pm YOGA - 7pm FOOD

at Stop Smiling: 1371 N Milwaukee
bring one or more of these things: mat, $5-15 cash, food/drink, friend

Average Drama

2010-08-03T15:31:00Z

"If you've got a pet cat, put your hands up." -Regular Everyday Normal Guy

This week has been absolute garbage, I must say. Thankfully, I haven't forgotten how to compost. Sometimes when everything is fine for a while, we forget, if we are me, how to practice. And then things happen, certain metaphorical trains are derailed, proverbial rugs are pulled sideways, hypothetical disasters cross the actuation threshold, and suddenly amidst the chaos, it appears that some asshole has arranged the rubble into letters dancing around like Al Jarnow's sea shells, forming at last, a message from the great something or other: This Is What You've Been Practicing For.

Everything has been fine for a while. For me. And so I forgot. But man, I remember now. When things are not fine, my little fist of a heart really punches me right out. I did ok this time around, thanks to getting reminded just in time some crap like "this too shall pass," (point goes to Tom) which I honestly hate when people tell me. (Hate when. Love Tom.) Even though it's true. I know it's true. And everyone knows. It just feels dismissive. Because you can say it for anything. And I'm special. And if there's one thing that really pulls a special person's trigger, it's being dismissed. Now I've been known to holler about things that don't need hollering about, sure, but that is a real chicken or egg because, really, when you've spent your life being ignored at a normal volume, you tend to think you have to shout about things, which I am probably too willing, on most days, to do. But I digress.

Here's what came up this week: ordinary life stuff is intense. Panic/Rage/Shame/Grief attacks are not just for crazy people. Having your innerstuff implode is actually a completely average response to a number of common happenings such as: having your apartment flood and losing all belongings in contact with the floor, moving out of your home suddenly, losing a job, drinking coffee, getting lost on an unfamiliar street, having your dress strap break 10 minutes before an event, locking yourself out of your own apartment, getting into a fight with a loved one, losing one favorite earring, not being able to charge your phone, getting electrocuted, having out of town guests, not having rent again, coming home to find your apartment robbed, 90 minutes of Sinbad on DVD, suffering the cramps, ending a 5 year relationship, having Facebook repeatedly suggest friends with whom you have unresolved conflict, getting stood up, accidentally standing someone else up because you couldn't see your calendar because your phone was dead because your charger was at home where you locked yourself out and were staying with your loved one with whom you were not getting along very well on account of the out of town guests arriving right after you gave up your apartment to your friend who lost hers in the flood on the same night as the other friend's place was robbed.

Drama is life. Life is drama. Go ahead a freak out. You are supposed to. Here is the thing. Everything passes, but until it does, it is here. And if my now moment is wild, ok! I'm going to cry! Feel overwhelmed! Feel crushed, feel panicked, feel furious! That is practicing, too, I think. The trick is to know that it is temporary, to resist the belief that any of it is any more real than anything else.

Due to feeling skinless and volcanic, I got involved in a few noteworthy conversations this week involving Regular Everyday Normal Guy, an apparent internet sensation that got to me 3 years late. (Thanks, Mark.) In the case that you are not one of the over 17 million people who've seen this video, it is a rap by a comedian about being an average person, no doubt playing on the hip hop artists' tendency to exaggerate their images to nearbout supernatural levels (which would be funny itself, except that it is possible that extraordinary wealth and exemption from standard operating protocol might actually make some of that shit true for them).

The first interaction over Regular Everyday Normal Guy was a comparison to what I've been told was "the first thing on YouTube," (doubtful, but, sure, this is an old video: ) Average Homeboy shares with RENG the form of a young white man rapping his completely unremarkable story to a chuckling video audience, but the difference in this case is that Average Homeboy is not kidding. His video was sent to MTV during the stylishly delicate 80s in an earnest attempt to become a star. What I find interesting about that is how excruciating it is to watch him sell himself so honestly. It hurts bad. It hurts in part because, excepting a laudable ability to self-start, he is nearly talentless and utterly unaware of this. When I met my father that one time for lunch when I was a teenager, he told me a few mind-shifting things, one of which was that, "the essence of being deceived is not knowing that you are deceived, Karen. I won't be worried about you until you think you know the truth." (Ironic, considering that my father has, for all my life, been driving an RV named Pokey The Wonder Bus and teaching people the "truth" about the Bible, but that is more than we can take on right now. Hi Don! Look! Your estranged daughter became a nutjob spirituality writer, too!) Anyway, Average Homeboy is deceived about his capacity, which hurts to watch, probably because it only reminds me how much I am him, how regular I am, how I don't know and there is no way for me to know how ridiculous I appear to this or that other person. That's what really hurts. It isn't actually comedy, it's horror.

...which brought me to interesting conversation number 2. Aside from the regular ego business of wanting to be smartfunnycoolhipsexy or whatever, we have a very big deal problem (yes, my opinion, but yes, problem) in our culture right now with the concept of celebrity. I'd like to blame the media, reality TV, technology, the photograph, the printed word, maybe anything that contributed to our fixation with known faces, but truly this is an old, old problem. As far as I can tell, it comes down to messianic thinking, the idea that there exists The One, the one that will come, the one that is not like us, the one who can save us, the one that knows things we don't know and does things we can't do. We have longed for that one for as long as stories have been told, and when he (or she, but come on, it was going to be a he) didn't come, or came and disappointed us, we started thinking - I'm not kidding folks - we started thinking, maybe it's me. I'm not saying any of us believe we are saviors of the world, though there are some, there are. I'm saying that there exists, evidenced by the ubiquitous striving for celebrity (do I need to reference Comcast's programming menu here), a widespread wish to stand out, to be unique, to be discovered, and that that wish has made us very unhappy.

When I was a kid I used to describe, in painstaking detail, a recurring sensation in my stomach that alarmed me. It was a gnawing feeling, slightly cramping, slightly burning, and my mom would tell me, as often as I described it, "sounds like you're hungry." This statement (like "this too shall pass") shocked and appalled me. Hunger was a sensation everyone experienced, every day. There was no way my pain could be that. It felt like an army of tiny GIJoes were at war in between my lowest pair or ribs! How could anyone endure that day after day! I was sure there must be another explanation for that, and for atrocities I would later discover were fatigue, caffeination, and heartsickness. See paragraph three. Banal stuff is not that boring. Cliches are potent. My cliche, banal, textbook existence is more than enough to keep me occupied. I like to think I feel more deeply and love more passionately, but I probably don't. As it turns out, love trouble is heartwrenching, work trouble is exhausting, money trouble is brain-numbingly stressful. For everyone. Not just me.

The good news is that because my problems are shared by everyone in all of history, a lot of work has been done already on solving them, and all the old simple wisdom that I tend to reject on the grounds of not fitting my complex, contemporary problems, is still true. That Chicken Soup For The Soul shit was right on, people. Don't pretend it wasn't. But you didn't want to believe something that stupid could apply to you, so they had to make Chicken Soup For The Exceptional Soul, in like, 45 varieties. I can't act like I don't want to be discovered as some freaking miracle of a person with incredible genius and guts and sass. I totally do. I do! I want someone to say, holy shit Karen Faith, how did someone as brilliant as you end up broke and unloved, with nothing to show for your years of magical greatness! But in truth, if anyone ever said that, I would, on the grounds of their having said it, declare them foolish and walk on, because I actually know, I do, that I will waste my life trying to be The One. If I can just be one, just one of us regular people, I will be happier. Things will make sense, mistakes will be forgiven, moments will pass.

I seriously just wore myself out and can't remember what was going to be my main idea. Which is why I'll never be a star.

Anticipated Separation Anxiety Provokes Preemptive Backlash Of Togetherness

2010-07-20T14:25:00Z

Happy Hour Yoga @ Stop Smiling presents:

Because it's too hot to move your limbs in direct sunlight, because beer tastes better after savasana, because it's time we admitted we have kind of a thing for one another, but mostly because Jessie is moving back to Amsterdam: Let's do it again.

Summer Potluck #2

::FRIDAYTHEAUGUST13TH::
::6PM YOGA::7PM FOOD::
(And what then? Will genre-appropriate music ignite a fakedance breakdance competition? Will it?)

You are invited to join us for yoga or eats or both, regardless of the extent to which you will be ruined by Jessie's departure. The Happy Hour Yoga Potluck is an all-inclusive neighborly event that has been shown to cause an up to 78% increase in feelings of altruism, magnanimity, mirth, vivacity, reverie and unbridled optimism, as well as more than doubling existing levels of nostalgia, romantic idealism and involuntary gestures of affection. The happening is thus scheduled at long intervals of ascetic mindfulness practices to ensure adherence to yogic ideals of temperance.

NOTES: Stop Smiling is at 1371 N Milwaukee. Please bring one or two or three of the following: a yoga mat, dinner/dessert item and accompanying serving utensil, drinks, 5-15 cash dollars (if you're taking class). Due to the variety of classmates on potluck night, a beginner-friendly class is (almost) guaranteed. Everyone is welcome. Especially you.

JOIN HAPPY HOUR YOGA ON FACEBOOK

Let's Talk About Chakras

2010-07-14T14:47:00Z

Is this entry really about yoga? Is this guy rocking some elemental ink?

As I've pointed out in the past, I am not in the business of arguing what is real and what is other than real. "Real" is misunderstood, at least by me. In any case, I aim to receive ideas as ideas and images as images, all the while understanding that both are illusion. (No hard feelings, illusions. I, too, am all chimera.) As I see it, concepts like the Holy Trinity, the Id/Ego, and The Seven Chakras should be judged on usefulness alone. Whether they are real things is not my concern, so if you're really hung up about that, you won't get much help here. I will say, though, that if you adopt a certain concept or structure of concepts for a little while, and you find it helpful (toward the goal of clear thinking, peaceful living, meaningful being, or the like), then perhaps the proof is in the pudding, no? We shall see.

"Chakra" means "wheel," and is often depicted by a wheel, or a flower. The idea is that these concentrations of energy are moving, spinning around. Generally speaking, energy can be thought of as air and water in that it wants, rightly, to move. Stagnant energy is a lot like standing water. It gets nasty. And I didn't know this until my old boyfriend tried to grow plants in a closet, but air needs to move around, too. Think of your body as a pinball machine. Your energy is bouncing around in there, getting stuck in corners and dense areas, and then shooting fast through clear places, too fast on the slopes. What we want is a regular flow of action, not too speedy, not too sluggish. What happens when we experience blockages in our system is that, depending on where the blockage is, certain aspects of the self aren't getting the nutrients they need to thrive. Thus, imbalance.

The chakras are, in some ways, access points to the body's subtler matter. If the body's energy matrix were a highway system, the chakras would be the cloverleaves. You can mess around with your chakras with yoga postures, visualization, diet, aura spritzers, crystal magic, clothing colors, herbs, affirmations and pretty much any other thing. Your subtle energy body is unlimited in its jurisdiction. How much effect practice has on your energy, or vice versa, is not really measurable by any method I know of, but in my experience it is noticeable. Anyway, here is a run-down of the seven main centers in the energetic body, known as chakras. (For the record, this is pronounced with a "ch" as in "charredchocolate cherries," not a "ch" as in "my chauffeur's clichedmachine.") There are more than seven chakras, and lots and lots ofdetailed information about what means what, but this is Chakras 101here, so if you want more, wiki the heck out of it. You won't getbored. Illustrations, ancient texts, energy maps, meditations and allthe rainbow light you can handle.

7: THE CROWN CHAKRA, aka Sahasrara
Located at the top of the head, this is the place where messages from above come in. Spiritual guidance, psychic friends, ETs, all this stuff. Right there. Zoom to the brain. It's violet or white and sometimes called the Thousand Petaled Lotus, which means it wins. It's the mystical chakra, the spacey chakra, the holy shit chakra. Physically, it corresponds to the pituitary gland, the thalmus, the nervous system. It is usually stimulated through meditation, or, I like to think, the tender little ache that comes with headstands.

6: THE BROW CHAKRA, aka Ajna
Here is your third eye. Ajna is located between the eyebrows, some say slightly above them. I like to think of a headlamp rather than a cyclops. A deep indigo blue, this one is all about seeing with clarity. Intuition, understanding, thinking, cognition. There is a relation to the pineal gland, which has something to do with light and sleep. This one is brainy where the crown is more spiritual, but both have a heady element, obviously. Sometimes trouble here results in mental tangles like ADD, depression, anxiety, dyslexia.

5: THE THROAT CHAKRA, aka Vishuddha
This is the chakra of loudmouths, singers, quiet-talkers, poets, actors, and the deathly shy. It's about words. Expression, creativity, communication. It's lighter blue, turqoise-ish. It is my favorite, kindof my strength and weakness all rolled into one. Folks who have blocks here have recurring sore throats, unexplained loss of voice, perpetual laryngitis, or diarrhea of the mouth (guilty). Folks with highly active 5th chakras might be good with words, but somehow bad at saying what they mean to say, like chatting up your waiter for 10 minutes and then ordering something you don't want. This one is about expressing ideas, desires and boundaries. Tough business if you ask me. Shoulder stand works out some of this stuff.

4: THE HEART CHAKRA, aka Anahata
Hooray! The heart! Right under the center of the breastbone, this one is a no-brainer. It is green (sometimes pink) and all about love and blood. Heart business. Compassion, vulnerability, giving a shit. All matters of the physical heart are related here, too. Folks with 4th chakra issues may have blood pressure problems, tension headaches rooted in the back and shoulders, circulation trouble, etc. They might be assholes in relationships. They might have a hard time giving or receiving love. Their chests are too tight, shoulders rolled in. They shun vulnerability. They might over-involve themselves in ironic gestures, for example. On the other hand, a person might have the opposite problem of caring too much, being too touched by everything to function. This happens. Backbends, chest openers and this kind of thing help the hard-hearted. Shoulder strengtheners will comfort and protect the tender.

3: THE NAVEL CHAKRA, aka Manipura
This is not really at the navel, but the solar plexus, which is about halfway from the navel to the heart. This is a big one. It's yellow, a fire in the belly. Digestion is involved. This is the seat of self-confidence, drive, ambition, dignity, self-esteem. People with strong 3rd and 5th chakras are wicked negotiators (add a closed 4th, and I say run for your life). This is the one where you believe you can, and will, and do, and feel great about it. Literal and figurative guts! You know if yours sucks, and so does everyone else. Shame, cowardice, shyness, soft bellyness. I am not great here, believe it or not, but I have actually found that doing core work helps bigtime. Chicken or egg situation. Sometimes action follows feeling, sometimes feeling follows action. If you ain't got one, do the other.

2: THE SACRAL CHAKRA, aka Svadhisthana
Orange is the sexiest. This little vortex lives in your lower belly, at the sacrum, round about the womb, or, if you are a man, balls and vicinity. Creativity in its entirety, meaning, that which involves the arts and that which involves diapers. Passion and hormones galore. Lust, violence, addiction, pleasure, drama. Think Spanish soaps. You may have noticed we do a lot of pigeon pose in my class.

1: THE ROOT CHAKRA, aka Muladhara
Ah, yes. Your very special spot. Between the holiest of holies! The root chakra! Better known as the "taint," the perineum is
located at the pelvic floor, legs at the east and west, ass to the south, sex to the north. It's the beginning of the beginning. Here is where our earliest developmental things are grounded. Survival, familial/societal acceptance, instincts and safety. This is where the "sleeping serpant" lies coiled, waiting to release the kundalini energy. (This is kind of a whole other topic.) There is some sexual energy here, too, for sure, but here is it more related to basic, primal sexuality rather than pleasure and emotional needs. The root is red red red, and can be blamed for troubles with social acceptance, family or origin problems, and phobias. In yoga, we call Kegels, "mula bandha." Find it and start squeezing. I do them in groups of 108, as a little Root Mala, to stay both grounded and orgasmic. And honestly, if I could only take one yoga move with me on the journey, it might me that one. Potent little friend.

I do want to talk about how these things work, how to self-diagnose and work with your own energy flow, but it's a long story. If you have a question, ax me. I'll do my best. In the meantime, get your rainbow light on.

Gratitude Adjustment

2010-07-07T13:59:00Z

Remember the ancient art of writing postcards? With a pen? Wasn't that fun?

Last night I showed up to do the yoga with one of the best people in the world, Casey Crane, and we were doing that part of the warm up where we deconstruct our psychoses by doing with language what a Super Soaker does with water. It's fun, kindof. And usually, if I'm doing what I ought to be doing, I take the entire blast of words and wring them out, find what is useful and let the rest evaporate. We figure out what's the main idea, where the site of action is in the body, and then get to work on it. When things work right, it's magic genius fun. Last night didn't go as well, which I would like to blame on the heat, but can't. What happened was, basically, that Casey said, not really but for example, "one thing that is really bothering me is Justin Beiber. I have heard all I want to hear about that little twit, and every time his name comes up it makes me want to die." And then I said, "I hear you. Absolutely. You know what else though? I was just listening to Justin Beiber's new song, and it's so cool. Also I like Justin Beiber's haircut."

After I did that retarded thing, and by retarded I mean the kind of thing done by someone whose brain does not work well, two things happened simultaneously. Casey forgave me and I did not forgive me. We had a good session following. She was kind and generous and didn't even try to pay me back for being a thoughtless jerk by pretending not to understand my instructions, which is what I do whenever my teacher hurts my feelings or makes me mad, for the record. (For real. Tell me something upsetting and guess what? I suddenly don't know my left from right, and in fact I might have just gone deaf. Whoa are you talking? I can't even see your lips moving, I just launched my personal Self Protective Force Field slash Passive Aggressive Assault. Please try your call again later, when you are willing to say what I am interested in hearing.)

Somehow Casey overlooked my bullshit and had herself a nice yoga practice. What I did, though, was spend the next few hours wading in a swamp of self-loathing, which, by the way, is the enemy of self-improvement. I suppose it is good to note which areas of oneself need a makeover, but the marshy shitland of negative thinking is not a great place to reinvent oneself. It's got filth and sticky junk and sinkholes and sub-goop goblins and all kinds of stuff in there. Once you're up to your thighs in slop, getting out takes some doing. One thing I do in the swamp is make lists of the things I hate about me, like this one:

1. Stop talking so damn much.
2. Don't exaggerate everything all the time the way you always do.
3. Complainers suck, and you freaking are one, which sucks.
4. People who engage in name-calling are assholes, which makes you an asshole, asshole.
5. How can you seriously take yourself so seriously?
6. You: lazy.
7. Stop trying to make everyone like you all the damn time, like you need any more freaking attention.
8. I am surprised you aren't dead from an overdose of self-reflexive analysis. Unless you are, and this is hell, which would make sense considering you are an ENFJ Scorpio with a Saggitarius rising.
9. Stop exposing all your private neuroses to everyone on the blog, you skinless moron.
10. How many times do you have to "see if you can" drink coffee? You can't fucking drink coffee. It makes you crazier than a fish with titties. Don't even act like you are having a nervous break down, because you aren't having shit. You drank a goddamn cappuccino and now you are making the world a shittier place. Nice work, dipshit. See you next month when you try that shit again.

As you may have guessed, this approach to self-improvement doesn't work. Self-improvement happens best by building from strengths rather than scratching the eyes out of weaknesses. Someone said it best: if I want self-esteem, I must do esteemable things. I've got to ease up on the judgment and add some pleasant activities to my brain's to-do list. Think positive thoughts, forgive myself for something once in a while, allow myself to be a human person. I realized once and then forgot that my so-called "high standards" for myself are really arrogant. Like, do I really think I am above mistakes? That faults are for other, more lowly, people to have? This stuff is hard, folks. I want to be better. I want to be decent and treat people well, and gain understanding and wisdom and all this crap, but it's nearly impossible when I'm suffocating myself with shame. You might not do this as much as I do, I don't know, but if you do, I feel for you. We have to treat ourselves better, maybe create a nurturing environment for growth, which probably includes gentleness on oneself. One thing that makes me feel a little more worth the space I take up is saying Thank You to all the people who bless me with their tolerance. I tend to be kindof a spoiled brat, and this keeps me in check a little.

Because nothing says Thank You like a card that says Thank You, and because writing Thank You cards is the number one easiest thing to procrastinate doing, I'm going to host Gratitude Adjustment, a Thank You Card Writing Event at my house the week after next. You can come to it. Sunday, July 25 at 1pm. There will be both air conditioning and iced beverages, such as Southern Sweet Tea Punch. I have paper and mark-making utensils. You should bring your address book and some postage stamps. If you think you don't have anyone to say thank you to, it's possible that you are an asshole, in which case we might could use you to clean up glitter glue. If you want to bring papery things, envelopes or whatever, sure, more more more. If you don't know where I live, email me and I'll consider whether there is a reason for that.

You might like the idea of saying Thank You in theory, but then it may be that postage seems expensive or that you're out of practice using a pen, or maybe on July 25th at 12:20pm, it is so pants-melting hot you can not imagine what exposure to the element (singular) during a location change might do to your sense of well-being. I understand. But here is another thought: just as compassion requires the willingness to feel pain that isn't your own, generosity isn't really generosity if it doesn't hurt a little. Not that we have to punish ourselves in order to be kind to others, but seriously, how "generous" is it to give away something you were about to pay someone to remove from your house, for example? Giving when it is easy is a two-for-one, but sometimes giving is hard, and that's usually when it counts. Uniquely, gratitude isn't just giving, it's giving BACK. Like, you owe it. So, get with the program, people. Come to Gratitude Adjustment and earn your self-respect by being a debt-paying person. That's my plan, at least.

Meantime: Casey Crane is getting a freaking thank you card from me, and so are you. Every reader of this bliggetty blog deserves my thanks. I may not be able to send every one of you a card, but if you send me your mailing address, I will damn well try.

Why I Talk So Ugly

2010-06-29T15:06:00Z

104 degrees and Granny Penney is in pantyhose, long sleeves and a hat. Why? Because it is Sunday. Period.

1. In the last week I have been asked on approximately five occasions why I am so foul-mouthed, particularly on the blog. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I tend to speak to people in their own language whenever possible. The other is that I have a filthy mouth. If you did not know this about me, it is probably because you don't, and I've been translating in order not to be an asshole when I talk to you. Shit, there I go again. Anyway, the blog is mostly for my yoga students, and mostly my yoga students have expressed that the blog's tone provides them a feeling of refreshment. Takes all kinds to make the world go round.

2. The influx of questions regarding my use of the vernacular came about as the result of the week's events. Last Wednesday I attempted to list Yoga, For The Moment in the Universal Life Church directory, since I am a ULC minister, but was denied on the basis of profanity. (Frankly confounding, considering that they ordained the founder of The Beer Church, but anyway, no hard feelings.) The other thing is that I went to Mississippi to my family reunion, where people (I mean my people, not Mississippi people) don't say "fuck" for any reason, at any time, no matter what, god forbid. I thought maybe they had gotten over this, since they do have the movies down there, but they haven't, and I actually felt shitty at dinner with my brother, when I said "fuck" and the heads of the two nearest tables all turned to see who on Earth wasn't raised right. Sorry, y'all, I forgot. If I could, I would put a filter on the blog that would bleep out all of my ugly words when accessed from a computer south of the Mason-Dixon, but I am not yet techie enough to do that. I will try to be more considerate, but really it's just a style thing. It don't mean nothing.

3. I'm truly a supporter of When In Rome, and by that rule, I attended my brother's new church in Stone County. Luke and I were having our own private reunion in the midst of all the other reuniting, and so it seemed a good idea to visit this part of his life. Luke's church is contemporary, jeans-friendly and profoundly helpful to its community. You had to be there, really, but if I had only two words to describe the vibe at Northwood Church , I'd have to pick: fog machine. Anyway, after rocking it out in the name of getting real with the Lord, we heard a message from Matthew chapter 6. A FINE message, and one that I found personally inspiring, in spite of not really being Christian at all. Even though I know some of you get ants in your pants when I get all Jesus on you, just chill the fuck out for a second and see if you can deal.

4. Matthew 6, in summary, says this:
Only jerks tweet about their charity work. If you've got something worth doing, do it without advertisement.
Keeping your spiritual life a secret is more powerful and rewarding than the biggest commemorative plaque you ever saw.
If you want praise, you can have it, but then that's all you're getting. Shut up about yourself.
This includes praying in public. When you pray, do it alone.
Be humble, ask for one day's needs at a time and to be at least as forgiving as you are forgiven, because this is how shit works.
Get your priorities straight. Figure out whether you want to serve yourself or serve something greater than yourself, and then stick to it. After you work that out, stop fucking worrying about every tiny ass thing in your life.
You only need food, water, shelter and clothes, and chances are good that you'll have them.
Anxiety is not natural. Nature doesn't stress, and nature is doing fine*.
One day at a time, folks.

5. Don't let me forget to tell you about Scrapin' The Coast, the inversion table, and the easiest blueberry cobbler recipe ever.

*Rather, it was doing fine, before humans started destroying it.

Jonah And The Big Fish

2010-06-22T13:09:00Z

This week I had occasion to re-read the story of Jonah and the Whale. Although the Bible has changed less lately than in its earliest years, reading has changed a lot more. There should be another verb altogether for what I was doing, which was snatching sentences from my tiny little Old Testament while on the gchat via Blackberry. There's no way it's good for my brain, chatting while reading, but I do it. Anyway, I was chatting with Tom, a man who has mentioned on more than one occasion that I "grew up with too much Jesus." While I can't really argue that, I tend to think I can't be blamed on Jesus entirely. Anyway, I had to remind Tom that Jonah is not even a Christian story. (Yes, Mom, we share Jonah with the Jews*.) Speaking of which, I have to say, in danger of offending any number of people, that I have always been jealous of how much more Jewish people know about shit than everyone else. Seriously, what I learned about Jonah growing up can be summarized entirely in the above illustration,** and when I look at the Jewish Encyclopedia online (admittedly akin to Googling "the secrets of Freemasonry" but how the heck else am I going to find out about this stuff), what I get is this. Start reading that thing and see if you aren't like what I was like, which was like, WHOA, back up! Jonah didn't write the book of Jonah? How did you guys know that? And why does my Bible say he did? Also, who are all those other people? I'm not making a sweeping generalization that Jewish people are smarter, I'm just saying their thoughts are better.***

So I'm on the gchat with Tom, trying to help him get Jonah off the ark and into the big fish, and I bring him up to speed with a live, thumb-typed translation from NIV to KFV,**** reproduced here for your reading pleasure:

me: God told Jonah to preach to the town of Nineveh, where people were fucking up all over the place, and to tell them they would get blasted if they didn't straighten up, but Jonah was a shy or whatever so he ran away by boat, a retarded idea because God being God, is on top of the whole ocean situation. It gets pretty Deadliest Catch out there, and the guys on the ship freak. Jonah knows it's his fault and tells them to throw him overboard, which they don't want to do, but get desperate enough to do, etc etc, Jonah gets swallowed by a whale.

He stays in the whale's inners for three days, during which time he gets the hint and when the whale barfs him up, he goes to do what God told him to do in the first place.

It was a success, either because the people changed their ways or were destroyed, I don't remember, but he was glad he stopped being a coward is the point I think.Tom: Poor guy

me: I learned in Sunday School to figure out how every single story is about me. Like, how I am Jonah, and what it is that God told me to do or this kind of thing. I think I have run from every damn calling I've had until this book writing recently, now that I think of it. I hope I don't chicken out.

Have I been swallowed and barfed up enough? That's what I'm wondering.

Let's hope I'm now bringing it to Nineveh, whoever that is.

Tom: Or what.

me: Or what. I need to find out what happens.

I'm re-reading Jonah now. I forgot the ending.

Tom: What book is it in?

me: Dude. Jonah.

He got the whole book named after him.

Tom: Didn't ever notice that.

me: Wow, Jonah is a douchebag!

He says "God is going to destroy you!" And so the whole city fasted and prayed, repented completely.

So God showed them some mercy, didn't destroy them.And then Jonah said to God,"I KNEW you weren't going to do anything! Why did I have to go through all that just for you to go easy on them?"

Ha!

What a brat!

Tom: God did nothing, though.

me: Not really nothing, but I guess Jonah felt stood up. Wait.

THEN

Jonah was pouting outside the city somewhere,

And God made a plant with big leaves sprout up to shade him,

But then it died and he got a wicked sunburn,

Jonah was PISSED.

God said "Dude, I just gave you a vine and you didn't even water it. What the fuck is wrong with you?"

And Jonah said "You killed my plant! I'm not even talking to you right now. It's hotter than shit out here. I'm so mad I don't care if I die." Drama to the max.

So God said "I was concerned about a whole city of people and cows and shit, and you are bitching at me about your sunburn. Those people didn't know shit from a hole in the ground so I sent you to tell them what was up, and now I've got to find someone to come tell you how to water a fucking plant." Tom: You should rewrite the Bible.
me: I don't think that would go over very well.

Anyway, I think I could be Jonah, in that I am a cowardly brat. As far as the preaching thing, not so much, but how about how screwed up life gets when we don't do what we were born to do? AKA: water the plant we were given? I know, it is sometimes hard to tell what that is. And besides, some people would disagree that any of us even have a purpose. I am one of those people on lots of days. (I was told by a barista at Swim Cafe this morning that I seem not to have an optimistic outlook in general.*****) But I do think, on occasion, lots of us do get an inkling that there is a bit of a something we ought to be doing, and then we get on the excuses boat and don't do it. This application of the Jonah story is a no-brainer: Do what you know you should do, even and especially if it is scary. Will a whale swallow you if you don't? YES. No question.

(Unless you aren't Jonah. Maybe you are the whale, doing what God told you to do, which happens to be strong-arming fuck ups until they start acting right. You might be one of Jonah's shipmates, an honest fisherman getting served hardcore for being on the wrong boat at the wrong time. Or perhaps you are the plant, comforting those who are too self-obsessed to care for you in return. How could I know?)

What on Earth this has to do with yoga is not much. If I had to tie it in, I'd say something about learning to be courageous and confront your fears by doing handstands or something, but that is unnecessary, don't you think? Should I say yoga is what I do to help me get over myself so I don't get swallowed by whales? The humble prayer uttered in the belly of the great fish? A fantastic way to get in shape before finding yourself swimming in a stormy sea? I don't know, folks. This one is up to you. Do with it as you will. I'm busy writing my book, so the blog is a little barfed up after three days fermentation, sort of thing.

CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT: Sara is teaching this Friday. I'm going to be at my family reunion in Mississippi. Let's hope God sends me a leafy vine. It's hotter than the outskirts of Nineveh down there.

*The story of Jonah also appears in the Qur'an! Who knew!
**It does make a difference that virtually all my experience with the Christian church was gained in Baptist Sunday School, but you get my meaning.
***Am I saying that Christians suck, after writing a whole entry on saying not to say that? No, I am not saying that. What I'm trying to do is honor the depth and magnitude of Jewish thought, which blows my damn mind every time I encounter it. That's all. The other part is me trying to be funny by being kindof a jerk.
****New International Version to Karen Faith Version.
*****My response: "What the fuck, Philip? You don't think I'm optimistic? Are you kidding me? I'm so positive! You know what's not positive? Telling yourself everything is awesome and then having reality fuck up your face. Everything doesn't rule all the time, man. The sooner you get it the happier you'll be. Shit sucks! Cheer up! See?"

Waste not, Want not

2010-06-08T13:21:00Z

The use of the above image does not reflect the political concerns of Yoga, for the Moment, and should be viewed as a cultural artifact only. That said, it is not entirely irrational to make a connection between waste and oppression.

I'm getting more and more bent out of shape about the oil spill situation, and I have no idea what to do about it. It is way, way, way bigger than anything within my area of control. Not only that, it's way outside the realm of things I understand, or can process with my little thought processor. Because of this, I'm not going to write about the oil spill today. I'm going to write what I know. And what I know is how it is to be utterly overwhelmed.

So, I'm writing this book, and it's great. I mean, I love writing it. I spend my days digging around in my tool box, dusting off old tools, finding some others I've never used just laying around brand new. The problems of getting motivated, having something to say or finding a place to begin, are not problems I have. I wake up at 5am and want nothing more than silence and a firm back support to tip tap type away all day long. Some things have suffered under this regime. Laundry, dishes, catbox, refrigerator, and posture all need more attention than they've been getting. (Solutions under construction.)

The reason I bring up the book is that it is the longest thing I have ever written, and it's not even long yet. My usual practice of stopping and reading from the beginning in order to gain a sense of what has already been said or not said is no longer in the budget, time-wise. I scroll back through pages and pages and I feel like the story becomes unwieldy, that I'm not sure where one thought begins and the other ends, if I should save this idea for later, or does it go there, and where is that in comparison with other things? I just kind of drown in the scope of the thing until I feel lost and unsure of myself. This, if you will forgive the gross disproportion, is how I feel about the oil spill.

And politics. And my student loans. And quilting. But the oil spill is a kind of overwhelm I think we can all relate to right now, because raise your hand if that's a problem you can solve. So we must, if we are me, find a way to function inside the magnitude of bigness. Where is that, I ask myself. Where is that inside the magnitude place from which I am attempting to function? And then the hidden cameras come out and go "Hey! Jokes on you Karen! Trick question! The answer is here and now! Again! Same as before!" And a little broken horn goes waaa-waaa, and I sigh and hit myself in the forehead as they cut to commercial.

Books are written one word at a time. There are moments of checking out the big picture, and the medium big picture and all this, but the work of it is in making very small choices, one after the other. Same with all the other big stuff. We may not be able to see how our immediate choices affect the huge project we have or have not agreed to take on (seems to me it is happening regardless of our agreement), but they do. When I look at the oil spill, I find a few relevant items for my now moment: 1) I must take care to understand and make amends for the impact of my actions, 2) I must increase my consciousness of non-human life, 3) i must use the least possible amount of oil and other resources. These are things I can do today, right now. They do not stop the oil gushing into the Gulf, but they do create chains of action and reaction, cause and effect, which might could prevent another one. Who knows.

With regard to BP, my moment of checking in with the big picture crushes my heart. I think we have a responsibility to be crushed for a moment. And then write a letter, organize a consciousness raising event, call a senator, whatever feels like action. I personally feel good when I see people boycott the heck out of driving. I'd like to see if I can boycott greed, boycott waste, boycott irresponsibility. (Harder to do, but well worth trying.) For now, I am making tiny choices, one at a time, to manage the overwhelm. I invite you to join me.

The potluck is this week, folks. It's this Friday. Nobody knows how much I love the potluck, but there is a chance that you, too, could experience Abundant Merriment, should you attend. In the spirit of cutting down on waste, I invite you to:

-bring your own plate, cup and fork!
-bring a container for leftovers!
-bring something with locally grown produce!
-bring double for someone broker than you!
-bring it by foot, bike or bus!

Summer Potluck #1
FRIDAY JUNE 11, 2010
1371 N Milwaukee
6pm Yoga
7pm Food

Above times are approximate, meaning, highly exaggerated. we will probably start yoga at 6:17, and start eating at 7:33, so don't get bent out of shape if you're running late. Potluck night is wiggly. Remember to invite everyone and bring anything. Stop Smiling will (very generously) provide a case of beer, and disposable utensils and such in case you don't bring your own. So don't sweat it.

NOTE: Monday's class will be on Tuesday. Check the sidebar. Monday isn't happening. Tuesday is.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

2010-06-01T12:02:00Z

Adam, Dan, Jessie, JC, Alicia, and Amy... and Didi, Chris, Sarah, Carrie, Naomi, Jason (not pictured)

1. Not this Friday but NEXT FRIDAY, June 11, Happy Hour Yoga at Stop Smiling will be hosting Summer Pot Luck #1. Please bring something to share for dinner! Anything you like is ok. Healthful, green nutrients are welcome. Sweets, meats and booze are not shunned. Yoga at 6, Potluck at 7. Kindof. Potluck night never runs on time. It just doesn't. So take it easy. Also, if you have a mat, bring it. We usually run out.

2. The following Monday, June 14th, an event at Stop Smiling is scooting our class to Tuesday. There will be no yoga Monday, June 14. Instead, please come Tuesday June 15th at 6pm. The following week we return to the Monday format.

3. Dream Yoga Sleepover is coming. Still working out the issues of time and space. Will keep you updated. What is Dream Yoga Sleepover, you ask? Dream Yoga Sleepover is a lucid dreaming workshop wherein participants will gather sleeping bags and listen to ambient sound designed to encourage REM sleep. Your host (me, Karen Faith) will be awake through the night to assist with waking and recall, using aromatherapy and light to stimulate the imaginative mind. Everyone gets a commemorative Dream Yoga Sleepover notebook and pencil to record what may arise. Then we share our experiences over a potluck breakfast. How fun does that sound?

4. Many thanks for your encouragement on the book writing. It is happening.

Eka Pada Mukhasana: The Advice Column: Downers

2010-05-22T12:51:00Z

What is really going on in there.

Occasionally I spend so much time trying not to be pretentious about my practice that I forget to be sincere. This week I was reminded, graciously, that there is a time and place to stop trying so hard and let myself be as I am. It's tricky to know when and where that is, propriety and safety-wise. I can assure you I often choose poorly, generating humiliation rather than humility, which then results in stronger, tougher externals and softer, more fragile internals. If it seems like I am always talking about trying to be real without being assholish or psycho, that is because it seems to be my karma to work this out. Honestly I don't know what other concerns there are. Getting rich? Having babies? Archiving folk arts before they fall extinct? Not as much on my plate, those aren't.

Once I heard that if you want to know what your karmic project is, take a look at what you are always bitching about. It isn't always a direct connection, but you can find out a lot about your priorities and energy distribution by observing the recurring themes of your conversation, your reading list, your twitter tweets. Mine have, consistently, since the day I learned to speak it seems, concerned intimacy, mental health and spirituality. I realize that there are plenty of other worthwhile things to get into, but somehow I've never tired of the emo-trifecta. It occurred to me recently that I might have a book's worth of thoughts on the subject, so now there's that. I'm writing a book, people. If you like that idea, send me a word of encouragement, because this is biggest project I've taken on so far, if you don't count taking on the me project.

A giant part of the me project has been dealing with brain tangles, and after getting an email this morning asking for my advice on severe depression (after a phone call last night and 2 emergency coffees last week), I thought I would post a bit of my experience with Helping Methods. Sorry for the downer, but lots of people aren't into living right now, and, oddly, there is nothing like somebody else's suicidal ideations to get me fired up with Clarity and Purpose. Here is some practical advice on dealing with depression.

1. MEDICINE: I've taken Welbutrin, Zoloft, Effexor, Klonopin, Seraquel, Prosac, Atavan, et cetera ad nauseam, and although the doctors said they were helpful to me, I did not find them helpful in the slightest. I felt disoriented and made of plastic, tired, wired, not myself. IN MY OPINION, psychiatric medicine for depression/anxiety is tricky business because those illnesses in particular are fueled and strengthened by our thinking patterns, and medicating without looking at that is like taking pain relievers while wearing nipple clamps. I'm not saying you shouldn't take them, or that they won't help. I'm saying see about taking the damn clamps off.

2. SUPPLEMENTS: That said, brain chemistry is no joke, and I found that my diet was not conducive to proper brain function. A fish oil supplement, as well as ample vitamin B and D are essential. Once I started with those, a lot of things fell into place, like, the ability to distinguish a thought from a feeling, a fact from a point of view, a sensation from an extraterrestrial communication. It should be noted here in the diet section that getting into the cups under these circumstances is like wiring up those nipple clamps with a car battery. Don't get drunk a lot.

3. THINKING: Depression is a lot like chronic pain in that, the same "I'm in pain" signal fires over and over again until there is a groove cut into the brain tissue along that path. (I'm not a doctor or a scientist, but I'm pretty sure this is true. If not, let's go with it as a metaphor.) After a while, this signal flows with or without a stimulus, meaning, you feel pain (emotional or physical) regardless of whether there is any immediate problem. One way to stop suffering is to re-route the signal, thought by thought, which takes vigilant work. It's not as fruitless as re-routing the Grand Canyon with a garden hose and a shovel, but it does feel that way at first. We have to, whenever we see these thoughts coming, take them somewhere else. In order to notice that they are coming, we must practice mindfulness. (Yes, it really does come back to that.) It is also helpful to regard the pain as a passing sensation, not one's ultimate reality. Example: the air feels hot on my skin, I feel pressure on my sitting bones where my body meets the chair, my heart feels like it's got an anvil on it, and my brain just made some connection between "suicide" and "a fine idea"... ok, all passing experiences, nothing to reject, nothing to deny, nothing to suffer about, next moment here I come... (BONUS ROUND: learning to regard pain as separate from suffering! Experiencing discomfort without agony! Imagine! Fun stuff.)

4. SPIRITUAL SOMETHING OR OTHER: It saved my ass to discover that I contained some manner of self which was not screwed. I felt like the damage was so deep that the pain reached all the way in and messed up all my mechanisms. After reading a Buddhist poem (former entry on that here) about the nature of this inner stuff, I tried to imagine, in spite of my disbelief, that there could be this part of me which was deeper than my suffering, a source of stillness, peace, healing, all this. I now believe that the most essential self is not affected by the changes of the body, mind, or heart. I believe this, for the most part, because if it is not true, I am fucked to the gills. It is not important to me to find out whether there is an actual thing which could be called my spirit which has whatever qualities and can be contacted in this or that way. For me, this idea is a tool that works, and feels real enough to give my practice some depth. I can't take on the project of finding out what is real or not real. If you can, great. Tell me all about it. For now, this idea, this essential self, is my safety net, my foundation.

5. ACTION: The other thing is kind of a no-brainer, but if you are depressed, you have GOT TO have fun. Schedule something enjoyable every single day, doesn't matter what it is as long as you look forward to it. I'm not talking things you feel good about, like the laundry or exercise (also very helpful), but something you can generate some futurelove about. (Presence in the now is best, sure, but when the present sucks it, better shift forward than back.) I know, I know, you don't even want to get out of bed. I'm telling you, this is a prime example of how just doing what you feel like doing is a terrible idea. While I do think our cravings are, on occasion, excellently customized indicators of our needs (for example, right now: celery and cucumber popsicle, come to me), they can not be counted on for damn near anything, least of all guidance.

6. YOGA: Oh, yeah. That. Yoga helps. Backbends, inversions, heart openers, all that stuff. One of my favorite things, though, is Nadi Shodna, or alternate nostril breathing. It balances the left and right sides of the brain, makes you feel like a York peppermint patty commercial. I'll show you how to do it later. For now, I'm going to go freeze some vegetable juice with a stick in it.

Learning To Speak Italian

2010-05-17T12:49:00Z

Good thing I learned how to do twisted staff pose. Now I can do twisted staff pose.

I am convinced that the upper body strength I've gained in the last few years hasn't come from chaturangas, but from getting these dang sport tops over my head. Less Journey Over Destination, more Side Effect Over Placebo Effect.

Sometimes, while doing the yoga, I visualize my inners getting the toxins squeezed out of them, my middle stuff growing resilient, my uppers letting go of so much computering. While I can't be sure sure that any of this is actually happening, it gives me peace of mind to affirm that I am, in fact, giving myself something useful. I can't get into difficulty for it's own sake. There should be, at the very least, some kind of desirable side effect. Seriously, though, what do I need stronger arms for? If I needed them to carry groceries, wouldn't they be stronger from carrying groceries? Muscles develop extremely specifically, and what helps me mop the floor doesn't necessarily help me unscrew a jar of honey. Our bodies and minds do exactly what we have trained them to do. I am reminded of this every time a dude comes in to my class and expects, because he just did a triathlon or whatever, that he won't break a sweat. That dude usually gets his ass beat.

The only thing that makes yoga easier is doing yoga. Unlike a triathlon, however, yoga can make everything else easier. Put another way, learning to pronounce, "Possono i plug mio laptop in sotto la sua Presidenza?" doesn't really help you learn to speak Italian, but learning to speak Italian will definitely help you get online in Florence. I think of yoga as the grammar lessons of moving, thinking, feeling and being. Meanwhile, there are all these other things we have to do that aren't covered on the mat, like safe and effective sport top removal, to which we would do well to apply yogic principles, only we find ourselves, maybe if we are me, flailing around with little more intention than liberating my frontals as quickly as possible.

Here I want to insert something about how excruciating living is and how yoga practice doesn't seem to be helping at all with the stuff that really needs help. But I only want to bring that up if I can explain it, soothe myself or encourage you to keep practicing. Which I'm not sure I can do today, though I will give it a shot. Sorry. I don't feel good. I got my feelings hurt and went on a bender. Definitively unyogic, but let's remember that teaching grammar isn't the same as improvising sonnets on the mic. Before I try and let myself off the hook with that one, I will reiterate: our bodies and minds do exactly what we have trained them to do. When dealing with 20 year old feelings, I am highly likely to use a 20 year old tool. It might take a long time before my mindfulness practice is anywhere near as strong as my mindlessness practice. Until then, patience and diligence be my companions.

Christian Hate: A Mother's Day Special

2010-05-09T14:13:00Z

Funny? Kindof. True? Sortof. Ignorant, disrespectful and ultimately divisive? Totally.
(Also: get a designer, Christian hater poster maker. This shit looks terrible.)

For Mother's Day, I thought I'd do a special on the hating of Christians. Hi Mom!

As many of you know, I was raised in a church-going family, and while a lot could be said along the lines of Mistakes Were Made, I can say, for the most part, that I admire my mother's faith. Here's why. My mother has been playing the piano at church since she was knee high to the damn thing, and I don't know if she's ever paid attention to what kind of church it was. She believes in Jesus. She believes "the Bible is true," that "God answers prayer," and that everyone's life would improve with an increase in both Bible- and prayer-related activities. That is, on most days, as much as she'd report. She's happy to hear about a baptism, but doesn't concern herself much with whether it was a dunk, a sprinkle, or a saturation of the Holy Spirit. She is as down with speaking in tongues as she is with Wednesday night prayer meeting. Communion is awesome, whether wafers or bread, grape juice or wine, done over dinner or in robes. She does not care to argue logistics, and has been known to say, in the midst of heated family debates over theological intricacies, "Hey, y'all, everybody here believes in Jesus! Don't that make us on the same team? Praise the Lord! There's another piece of chicken here if anybody wants it!"

My mother created a spiritual practice out of playing the piano. It is her calling, her service, her prayer, her study, her praise, her devotion, her discipline. I'm certain that she would not actually say that the piano is more important to her than God's only son, but I tend to think that if music were not a part of Christianity (as John Calvin would have had it), my mom may have become Jewish. (It's okay, Mom. Jesus was Jewish.) What I love about my mother's faith is that it's hers. She doesn't let anyone tell her what the truth is. And she doesn't tell anyone that she knows what it is. My mom is the kind of woman that would rather not mention who she voted for if it means dinner is going to be awkward, and while I can appreciate the view that we've got to Stand Up For What We Believe or whatever, I actually like my mom's method better: table's for talking, pulpit's for preaching, voting booth's private for a reason. Everything in its place.

I say that to say this: there are a lot of different ways to be a Christian, whether Jesus would have approved or not, and frankly I take issue with how popular it is to hate on them. I will be the first to point out that my mother's Christianity is theologically unsound, her taste in spiritual music is tacky as all hell, and her practice of teaching hymns in public school is not just inappropriate, but unconstitutional. (Actually, that last part seems like a big deal, but it really isn't. In fact, in Southern, rural Mississippi, it isn't really inappropriate at all, as demonstrated by the fact that no parent has ever complained about it. In that context, church music is no different than folk music. Jesus is a cultural heritage, honored by believers and non-believers, me included. No May Pole Dance participant that I know of has actually considered that they were participating in a Pagan ritual, for example. I digress.)

My mother, with regard to her faith, is not an asshole. Not even a little bit. I mean, she makes me mad sometimes. She is a human person. But as a Christian, her practice and her faith make her life, and the lives of those around her, for the most part, a better experience. Sure, there are some Christians who are aggressive and intolerant and condemning, and maybe they form megachurches that attempt to gain political power by manipulating and controlling huge numbers of people while spending their private time with hookers, I mean, um, yeah, ok, that exists. But that is not Christianity. That is something else. I don't even know what it is, but it's a mutant for sure. Now hold on a second, because I'm about to shake you up a little bit: I am not unlike that kind of mutant, myself. The yoga that I do, in the eyes of great teachers, holymen, and perhaps the common people of India, may well appear a cheap, hypocritical bastardization of a deeply powerful spiritual tradition, exactly like Christians doing the Holy Ghost Hokey Pokey in televised healing services might look to Saint Paul, or to us on the outside.

What I have done with Happy Hour Yoga is create a spiritual practice which is relevant to a very specific group of people, namely, 20-60 year old cynical bohemian smarty pantses of a 2010 Chicago, Ilinois. To anyone outside that group, it probably doesn't make any sense. Visualize this for a minute: young, secular progressive 20 something in India posting a video on Indian Facebook of Karen Faith saying something like, "Kapotasana fucking sucks, but it's great for sex. I like to do my kegels during pigeon so I don't get bored. Who's coming out for beers after this?" And his comment is something like, "Can you believe this garbage they teach in the U.S.A.? Patanjali would roll in his grave. Yogis are idiots, but Americans are disgusting." He could do that. And he wouldn't be wrong, really. And maybe a dozen or so of his Indian Facebook friends who had never known a yogi or an American might mentally note that yogis and Americans are the "them" while people who are clever enough to make fun of them are the "us."

People, friends, family, dearest dears! Whenever we engage in an activity which makes divisions between an "us" and a "them," we are declaring war. Not exaggerating. Serious. It hurts me when I see and hear Christians being ridiculed, however tacky or wrong they appear to be in whatever context, because it does us, as a whole, exactly zero good. It moves us no closer to understanding and peace. Yes, I agree that religion should not impose on the rights or freedom of the people, but isn't that because those impositions are intolerant, aggressive and condemning? I am arguing that making fun of another person's faith is made of that same ugly stuff. I realize that Christians are not exactly an oppressed minority here and now, but it is for that reason, that they are such an enormous group, that we have got to acknowledge the diversity and richness within that group. Sure, the Holy Ghost Hokey Pokey is one of the tackiest things I've ever seen, but let's not confuse that with the message of the gospel, which is one of grace, humility, compassion and redemption, nevermind the badass depth and wisdom of Christian Mysticism. The differences between traditions often come down to style. Music preferences. Slang. Tone. Fashion. Meaningless bullshit. Christianity does not suck, guys. It really doesn't. Some Christians do, I'll give you that. And my mom, sometimes, when she is on her fifth cup of coffee, pumped up about her kids' Vacation Bible School program, sucks a little. But so do I, and with far less caffienation. Everybody sucks. So what.

Being a hater sucks worse. If I want to make any damn sense right now, though, I can't conclude by hating the haters. I've got propose something that will help. So, my idea is this: love a hater. Love the shit out of them. Blow their minds a little bit with some grace. Be forgiving, be generous, be compassionate. Don't go on the ranting spree, but don't shame them for it. Listen, talk, introduce something expansive, befriend a perspective-maker. Grant a hater a heart. And if you're the hater? Ease down. Let people casually say the word "god" without inserting a comment about non-existence. (That's what is known as "forcing your beliefs on someone else," by the way.) Let go of thinking you know what exists and what doesn't. Allow yourself to be surprised. Recognize that intolerance wears many outfits, and you might have one of them on right now. And for shit's sake stop re-posting those freaking videos about how much Christians suck. You're talking about my mama.

Yoga For Assholes

2010-04-19T16:25:00Z

This week's Happy Hour Yoga Community Building Activity: Beer Specials at the Beachwood.

This Friday, making intensive efforts on our growing sense of community spirit and mutual trust at the Beachwood, one of Wicker Park's last remaining dives, the Happy Hour Yoga crew raised an important point regarding a commonly experienced side-effect of yoga practice one might call, "assholishness." Curiously, yoga-related assholishness is almost exclusively observed in yoga practitioners immediately before and after class, and may be identified by:

-lack of eye contact
-competitively sustained eye contact
-unfounded permagrin accompanied by unsolicited blessing of people and things
-usage of spiritual name given by spiritual guru in place of birth name given by birth mother
-irrelevant/overuse of the word "practice" as a noun:

A: "Have you met Michelle's dog?"
B: "No, but I heard her practice is really strong."

A: "Do you have an extra hair thing?"
B: "Sorry. That is not a part of my practice, but totally, if I still used those, that would be totally cool. Your practice is your practice. No judgments! Namaste!"

-appearance that one walks as if wearing a cape, when capeless
-use of Sanskrit upon introduction
-audible mention of recently attended silent retreat
-"warm-ups" involving complex binds and/or chanting
-authorship of yoga-themed blog

If you or someone you love is experiencing yoga-related assholishness, see a mirror immediately. And then laugh. Laugh a lot. Because assholishness happens everywhere that humans congregate. In part because mama said not to talk to strangers (malformed but well-intentioned personal boundaries), and in part because it isn't nice to go around skinless in the name of "keeping it real" (misguided effort to courteously mask true feelings). So we try on this or that image, but as self-consciousness kicks in and starts messing around, like in bakasana when we look back to see how high our toes are, we fall down and smash out faces. We lose perspective, forget where we are and who we're talking to, we get convinced of our own fantasies. It happens. Presenting ourselves to the world in a way that is safe, effective, and still somehow attractive to our desired audience isn't easy. Building an identity, suiting it up and taking it on the road is an art, and godbless those of us who are shitty at it, because the talented ones scare the crap out of me.

To build our energetic exoskeletons, most of us can't help but invent stories about ourselves, stories that say we are practiced, or focused, or awkward, or deeply sincere beyond anyone else's capacity to comprehend. The trouble with all of my self-stories is that they only ever work on me. I begin believing I'm this or that thing, and maybe even becoming this or that thing. But to everyone else, I look like a phony asshole. Nobody buys it. Well, it is true that some people buy it. It is also true that I don't often develop respect or valuable contact with people who have paid cash up front for my bullshit. In fact, this arrangement ceaselessly brings out my ugliest qualities, and has offered me no benefit other than remorseful resolve to prevent its recurrence. (I'd like to take a moment to say, to all those who have temporarily fallen for my selfish, bratty, vain and deceitful baloney, it has not escaped my attention. And I'm doing my homework. I am. But I do owe you a cup of tea, or three really nice dinners, or the replacement of 5 solid years of your life, as the case may be.)

My best friends are the people who I couldn't fool on the foolingest day of my life if I had an electrified fooling machine.* They know that I put together this little package of myself to bring out into the world, and they don't mind it, but they aren't going to listen to it tell them who I am, how I'm doing, or what I paid to have my beard removed. Their presence alone makes puppetting myself around completely impossible. And I'm grateful for the time off. I need my baloney-intolerant friends to remind me that I am the asshole who I most resent, that I know better than to believe everything I think, and to give my inner hater a pedicure once a year or so. Thanks, friends. And even more thanks for when you do that respectfully, and compassionately, and with as little humiliation as possible. Because I like that way better.

As for spiritual-practice-related assholishness, as much as I have set myself up to urge tolerance here, I think I'm going to say something else. Three somethings. To me. 1) Stop doing that. 2) Stop pretending you don't do it by bitching about people that do. 3) What the fuck good is your fucking spiritual practice if you can't be a fucking nice person? If I want to really "act spiritually advanced," I might take a cue from those that actually are by "acting" kind, generous and humble. What is the difference between "acting humble" and "doing acts of humility?" "Being generous" and "performing acts of generosity?" "Showing kindness" and "demonstrating acts of kindness?" Good fucking question. Some say fake it till you make it. I tend to think we may just make it when we realize we were never capable of anything but faking, and that faking is not really that fake, it's life, all as real as illusion ever gets, and it's totally cool. Our practice is our practice. No judgments. Namaste!

*Thanks, Homer Simpson

How I Ended Up Doing Transcendental Jazzercise...

2010-04-10T23:09:00Z

Me and the big bells at CAC Woodside last July, remember?

I've got a favor to ask, so I'll offer you a story in return. (If you're short on time, skip to the bottom.) I'm pretty sure I've told 108 versions of this story, but I can promise you one thing: they are all true.

How I Ended Up Doing Transcendental Jazzercise Instead of All The Other Things I Had In Mind And Why I'm Finally Happy About It A Mini-Memoir in 5 Paragraphs, with an extra one to try and squeeze some help outta you.

Why I Don't Have A Driver's License.
I didn't know, when I showed up to an orchestra audition at USM in the summer of '94, that I'd just taken the first of a dozen major detours. The music department at Forrest County Agricultural High School consisted of 2 dozen brokedown horns and a stack of Aggie Fight Songs in a tore up trailer back between the greenhouse and the cattle, halfway out to the ball field. I was 15, and in some pretty inappropriate ways, I was exactly like I am now: chatty, bratty, and Self-Exempt From Adherence To Socio-Structural Boundaries. Example: I wrote a lengthy complaint to the guidance counselor at said high school regarding the quality and breadth of class offerings for incoming sophomores, of whom I was one, and made suggestions for their improvement. Rather than grant me the Intermediate Latin Study Hall and Orchestral Excerpts Preparation periods requested, Dr. Bellew hooked up an audition for me at the nearest college, planning (if only to be rid of me) that I'd do half days and then go up to Hattiesburg to play in the orchestra. Running it by the conductor of the USM symphony on try-out day, we realized the commute alone was prohibitive, let alone the paperwork. Following my selection of Baroque dances, we got into a somewhat buzzed chat which prompted him at some point to pick up the phone. He put his hand over the receiver and said, "Have you taken the ACT?" I shook my head. "Super, thanks. I'll send her over." I was tested that afternoon, and went to college two months later, not yet old enough to get a learner's permit, a job, or a bank card.

Because Classical Musicians Spend Their Formative Years In A Practice Room, They Can Become Over-Sensitive To Stimulants.
In 1998, 8 semesters, 7 recitals, 6 auditions, 5 addresses, 4 passport stamps, 3 fiances, 2 acid trips and one church membership later, I moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan with my viola teacher, and 5 other musicians. We all transferred to Western Michigan University in order to finish our performance degrees, and the lot of us did. In my case, I found out about John Cage (then George Saunders, Krishnamacharya and the Beatles, in that order), and would never be contained by a practice room again. It's still the most delicious agony to me, realizing how limited my own experience has been. But at 19, unable to catch up fast enough with the world outside of Mozart and the Southern Baptist Convention, I was insatiable. That year I took up yoga, painting, sewing, writing, glass etching, and Drinking For Its Own Sake. Raw Foodism, Eastern Mysticism, and Post-Modernism came shortly thereafter. Over the better part of the next decade, I went to Trinidad once as a missionary, Costa Rica twice as a lesbian, and Stone Institute of Psychiatry three times as an At-will Inpatient Not Otherwise Specified. Something of a flash flood took place, and the task of containing it almost wasted me. A lot could be said on this, but suffice to say that in 2005, the breakthrough year I found out that <CONTROL> C then <CONTROL> V was what folks actually meant when they said "copy and paste," I found myself in Chicago with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute in Daydreaming, having begun a few years ahead of schedule and finished twice as many behind. It was as if the first 15 years of my life were spent as Kaspar Hauser, and the next 15 as everyone else.

The Good Part Of This Story.
Unemployed and lost as a goose, I detoured once again when The Divine Something Or Other (in conjunction with a faerie godmama named Hezzie Phillips) flew in to assist. I won an art contest and the prize was one month's stay at the Contemporary Artists' Center in North Adams, Massachusetts. The CAC was a large communal living space in an enormous old textile mill. Artists came there to exit their daily routines and distill ideas, focus on new work, recharge and collaborate. My performance work back then harbored an intention to create vernacular community rituals. The first piece I made was for the people of North Adams, and the second for the people of New Orleans. They were witchy and artsy and candles were involved. I danced around and played my fiddle and said prayers like any artwitch would do, until I stopped wanting to be in front of people, and tried getting underneath them. (Think flooring.) I bloodied my knees on a large scale floor mosaic in town, made several pairs of shoes from someone's discarded art project, and got really into being a yoga prop. It was there in the old Beaver Mill that I bought my first unlimited yoga pass. Frog Lotus shared a roof with the CAC, and when they offered a teacher training, I hornswaggled my way into taking it in exchange for sweeping the studio floor thrice a day. Hezzie was for it. She didn't tell me I was off-task, using my art residency to mess around at a yoga studio. She may have known even better than I did how important my yoga practice would become to my art practice. What neither of us knew was that when I got back to Chicago, they would become the same thing.

My Infinite Lightbody Can't Do The Dishes, Pay The Rent, or Brush My Damn Teeth.
Yoga was a game changer for me. I was still, in 2005, a mess in the brain. Frequently panicked, riddled with nightmares, trauma-prone, existentially perplexed, and perpetually It's Complicated, I was on 3 psych meds, in therapy, AA, journalling, praying, chanting, doing the yoga AND going to group. I couldn't have squeezed 2 minutes more of self-reflexive obsession into my days even with my sister's help. (Girl is a minutes vicegrip. Hi Katie! Let me guess. Reading this on your phone? In an elevator? Between Cubscouts and the YMCA? While listening to voicenotes from lunch meeting #3, updating your Netflix queue, texting your man re:dinner and changing your outerwear? Just skip to the last paragraph. It's cool.) The deal is that I felt like damaged goods, and struggled with making "art" because I so needed to "get well." Yoga practice introduced the idea that there is in fact a part of me that has never been rattled, tangled or even blurry (the Atman, or essential self), and this idea - simply that this self existed - became the core principle of all my practices. It was not just heartening, it was arguably life-saving. Even so, back in Chicago there were things which needed taking care of, and the Atman couldn't do shit to help me. I had nowhere to live, no job, and few mastered skills outside Extreme Connecting, the high-impact version of meeting and getting along with people that typically interests those of us who dig around in our inners. I needed a custom blend of orphanage, ICU, ashram, rehab, psych ward, monastery, halfway house, incubator and studio workshop. Guess where I went.

This Story Is Not Actually About Yoga.
In the last 5 years, I've ridden the night train back to the CAC for guidance, practice and community over and over again. They have since moved into a magnificent old church in Troy, NY. I spent 6 weeks there last summer staring into stained glass, chanting and praying and doing the yoga in a bell tower, in between Ice Cream Intermission, Waterfall Intermission and Second Opinion Intermission. Mala For Bells, the 27 day practice/piece that I performed there, marked a turning point for me, gave me footing and propelled almost all of the last year's Really Good Stuff. I have lots of people to thank for that. Hezzie, Leah, Tony, John, Jim, Meg, Hye Soon, Masako, Laura, Rosie, Christy, Sara and Ali made up my backbone creatively, spiritually, and at one point even physically. [see: Projectile Architect Incident] I say all the time that the important work we do has to be done alone, but even a monk needs a cave, and sometimes our community is that cave. And sometimes the cave's cave need's renovations due to being weather-worn and previously neglected in spite of its status as a historical landmark. [<- Foreshadowing.] At the Woodside church in Troy, the CAC is still supporting artists and dreamers and workers and makers of all things in an increasingly sustainableway. The whole thing runs on grants, homegrown vegetables and Hezzie's smile. The CAC made it possible for me to reconcile my art practice with my spiritual practice, integrate my scattered parts and create a life I like very much. The quantity of doctors, therapists, teachers, mentors and sponsors in my wake are proof enough that this took some doing, and while I'm grateful, stable, and usually helpful, I'm nowhere near finished. I'm heading back to Troy in a few weeks for this year's reunion show, and will present the debut of my new practice/performance Dream Yoga Sleepover, a lucid dreaming slumber party coming soon to a sleeping-bag-covered-floor near you.

Taking One Minute To Enter An Email Address And Clicking A Vote Button Doesn't Cost Anything Unless You Are My Sister, And Even She Finds The Time.
CAC at Woodside is up for a $50,000 Pepsi Refresh Grant, and I implore you to go to the link on the sidebar (or right here) and vote every day for the month of April for us to get it. Winners are determined by votes alone, so this is truly within our grasp. We need to reach way out into our community caves, do some Extreme Connecting, and build a critical mass of voters to win this thing. Is this an ingenious marketing strategy to get Pepsi's brand image polished, endorsed and distributed by each one of us to our personal networks? Yes, dear friends. Of course it is. And I have two things to say about that. 1) That doesn't make their money any less helpful to CAC Woodside, and 2) There is, at this time, zero evidence of Pepsi using anyone's registered email for advertising purposes, but if you feel really paranoid about it, you should have a secondary email address that you only give to people you do not want to hear from. Hezzie is offering a $500 incentive grant to the artist who is able to get the most votes, which is very nice of her. I don't have any of your emails (I am not allowed to view my subscribers emails, by the way) so I can't give Hezzie my list to cross-reference her vote list, which means I'm officially not personally doing it for the money. You can pat me on the back by clicking this link right here. IMPORTANT: IF YOU DON'T HIT THE VOTE BUTTON AFTER YOU SIGN IN, IT DOESN'T COUNT.

Thanks, friends.

Love,

Karen

Eka Pada Mukhasana: The Advice Column: Making Excuses

2010-04-05T15:55:00Z

Example Photographs of Community Building In Progress

4/2/10 6:48pm, 4/2/10 7:48pm

I'd like to address some of the following excuses I have heard recently regarding the non-attendance of Happy Hour Yoga. To protect the innocent, the excuse-maker's real names have been used intentionally.

1. Inability to mask ego-mania.
I have bad news, Mark. In fact I have the worst news an ego-maniac will ever hear: you are just like the rest of us. We're all selfish assholes. Some of us assert our ego by performing competitively, and others by clamming up and getting shy. I am fairly certain, based on the direct testimony of introverts, that shy people are at least as proud as demonstrative types. The shyness is a side-effect of Perfectionism, The Enemy of Learning. When I act shy (admittedly rare, and usually reserved for instances involving singing and the pronunciation of French names), it is because I don't want anyone to see me "in-progress," so I hide and make little effort while in the company of others. The rest of the time I try to be reasonable about my blatant ego-mania, tempering it with awareness and the occasional gesture of humility. Point being, it's cool. I know you wanna be special, but in this case you're not. The fact that you give a crap about it is honorable, I guess, but we're all in the same boat here. If it'd help you to win a trophy about it, I'll let everyone know you are the most rivaling jerk of any of us. First prize. You. The Cockiest Bastard. No judgments, though. All y'all. In fact, I think I'm going to rename Friday's class Yoga For Assholes. To be more welcoming.

2. Fear of socklessness.
So, Ben, you think you've got weird toes? My toes are so long I could thumb wrestle you with my left foot and win. Get this, though. You know how other people's feet look kinda like alien tentacles at first? And how that's because you're used to how your own feet look? Well, you might not know what I mean, since you have a foot complex. I'm thinking that if your own feet look crazy to you, you might not see enough of them. Get some flattering man-sandals and spend some QT with your toes. You guys need to get to know each other in a non-judgmental environment. I was actually thinking it'd be fun to do unisex pedicure night after yoga sometime. You'd have to show off your dogs sans sock, but afterward they would be so fresh and so clean.

3. Misalignment of planets.
I could argue with this more precisely if I were an astrologer. But because I am subject, as so many are subject, to the interpretive whim of Susan Miller, I must say, something more like, Yeah, Right, Misa. You are getting the present and the future mixed up. Just because the future says you are going to the roller rink tomorrow doesn't mean you aren't going to the roller rink today. Don't get me wrong. Astrology is real. And so is Palmistry, and Graphology, and Numerology, and possibly Psychology. But just because something is real doesn't make it true. And having some truth in it doesn't mean it makes any sense. If there were some way of unlocking the secrets of the universe by studying a distinct set of variables (and I tend to believe there are many of those ways), I bet it would take a very, very, very long time to learn to do it. Susan Miller writes forecasts like Starbucks makes lattes: about half as well as she sells them. And while I've never been able to tolerate any amount of coffee due to my somewhat severe sensitivity to stimulants, that very same little brain twitch of mine has guided me, and all Those Who Worry Too Damn Much About The Future*, directly into Susan Miller's mystic trance. In any case, be now. Do your now thing. Read Susan Miller, but don't listen to her. Unless she tells you to come to Happy Hour. Then obey.

4. Pre-existing date with sofa.
Oh, I almost forgot, Rich, I can't meet you for tea next week because my YouTube Favorites are on a playlist now.

5. Recent severe knee injury.
A knee injury, Sarah? That you have painstakingly prompted several different people describe to me in horrific detail? I'm so sure. You "fell up an escalator and punctured your knee with the stair tines all the way down to the tendon, leaving a gash which has taken over a month to close and remains deep purple in color?" Huh.

6. Delirium tremens.
Ok, nobody actually said they had the DTs**. But if they did, I would tell them to get the heck out of the cups, and that yoga is helpful to that end. Recently I was reading Yoga As Medicine, and saw this crazy long list of ailments that, in some grand survey, folks reported that yoga has assisted in healing. Arranged from highest to lowest efficacy percentage (zero idea how that was calculated), the conditions included everything from seasonal allergies to cancer. Alcoholism was at the very top of the list. FIRST! Yoga helped alcoholics more than anyone else. Now, being a person who has, in the past, a long time ago, for nearly three years, attended the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, due to believing she may have a drinking problem, due to actually having one, I can say that yoga is, in fact, super. Let me note, however, that while I just said yoga helped alcoholics more than anyone, I did not just say that alcoholics were helped by yoga more than anything. If you have a drinking thing happening, go to an AA meeting. It's the best. No joke. All the community, self-obsession and excruciating life-lessons of yoga class, but they let you talk.

7. Lack of pants.
So, Naomi tried to use this one a while back and you know what I did? I brought her a pair of freaking pants. Try me.

8. The Super Burrito.
Tom, we have talked about this. Don't eat that thing. You'll be stuffed stiff for 72 hours. Have a lunch-sized lunch at 2, you'll be mobile but not starving by 6.

9. Calculus study group.
Follow your dreams, Anna. But nothing says limits, functions, derivatives, integrals, or infinite series like Surya Namaskar B.

10. Fear that the potluck class was so incredibly awesome that one will be perpetually disappointed by all Happy Hour happenings henceforth.
I made this one up, too. But only because it occurred to me that if I were to try and make every class better than the one before, I would run out of steam at some point, and this Friday may have been that point. I mean, that was fun, right? If you think so, please post your thoughts on YELP! Is it shitty of me to continuously self-promote? I say no, it is not. You know why? Because even shit doesn't happen unless you make it happen. (Susan Miller backs me on that.) We're building a community here, right? I mean, look at the Example Photographs of Community Building In Progress at the top of this virtual page. That took some doing, remember? Let's do it again.

*I addressed this a few entries ago. I suspect that everything in and outside of the universe has already happened, but because we wear the contact lenses of time and space, the best we can do is just walk through it in the moment. I am almost certainly wrong about this, but that is ok with me. I'd be more alarmed if I started get really sure about things.

**Two noteworthy asides: A) Although many kinds of substance withdrawal make a person feel as though they are dying, alcohol withdrawal is the only drug withdrawal from which a person can actually die, due to the extreme changes in blood pressure. (If you are a solid drunk, detox under the care of a doctor.) At the bottom of that list of things yoga helps, the very bottom, as in, the least helped thing, was Menstrual Problems. Sorry, ladies. This one's for the winos.

The Ritual Feast, Holy Sanskirt, Sub Doms, and a very good song.

2010-03-27T14:04:00Z

This is it. Happy Hour Yoga will be observing both Passover and Holy Week with a collective ritual feast known as a POTLUCK. Please bring any dish, bowl or ceremonial bottle to pass and let's observe. FRIDAY APRIL 2 @ STOP SMILING, 1371 N MILWAUKEE AVE. Yoga at 6, debauch at 7. If you need help thinking of something to make, I have in mind a Resurrection/Liberation Theme, suitable for the season. The idea is to bring something back to life, zombie style. Make a recipe that hasn't been made in a while. Something weird your mom used to make (mine made peach cobbler with canned peaches, canned biscuits, and a shitload of butter and sugar, for example), something from 18th century Poland, something you haven't made since college. REVIVIFICATION IS UPON US. Liberate some eats. The Red Hen dumpster counts. Frozen things count. Leftover Charoses counts. Booze counts.

OTHER RECENTLY EMERGED PONDERANCES AND CURIOSITIES

1. It has been discussed, voted on, seconded and casually mentioned in follow up with some degree of excitement that Happy Hour Yoga in Pilsen will begin learning to chant Sanskrit (not "sans skirt," as was recently assumed). Let me say a word on that, because I almost never do. The reason why I do not chant in Sanskrit in my yoga classes is not just because "it freaks people out." (Though it definitely does, let's be serious.) My intention in teaching is to create a community practice made out of things that are relevant to the people practicing. This is a slowly evolving thing, and we're beginning with the most basic practice of being here with all of our seeming un-sacred bullcrap and banality. (I think that is pretty holy business, actually. More on that later.) But the main reason is, in my experience, chanting is a sure fire way to invoke the devil of Taking Oneself Way Too Freaking Seriously. And along those lines, here's my thing on the display of super sacred solemn shit: If you are that devoted, and that sincere about your spiritual practice, you should be doing it at home by yourself with nobody watching you. Period. Getting all deep into your innermost reaches in a demonstrative public way is akin, as I see it, to touching your privates on the subway. Think about it. For real.

That said, I certainly do not think chanting yogis are all shrines to sanctimonious vanity, and appreciate that this blog is an easy target for the same critique. Ahem. That's not really the point. The point is, the Pilsen class is busting at the seams with over-educated curious types, and I'm pretty sure they are interested in, how do you say, learning for its own sake. So, the attitude we will be taking is one of elementary introduction. We will not be lighting candles and feigning some kind of Feeling It For Patanjali in our deepest heart of hearts, because we are not Feeling It, and barely ever do what he suggested we do*.

2. Remember last summer when I went away and rang churchbells in a tower for a month? I'm going to do it again. This time only for a week, April 25 - May 2. Rest assured I will keep you informed of what is happening via belfry, but for the moment, the news you need to know is this: that week, Happy Hour Yoga will do something unprecedented in its history. Rather than bringing someone from Elsewhere to teach in my stead, I've asked 3 Happy Hour Yoginis you already adore to lead our community practice. Not to worry, I will write them a class sequence to follow, and maybe make y'all a music mix. I fully expect this to be a hit, so please do hit it. Here's the lineup of subs scheduled to dominate late April:

Monday 4/26: Hurricaine a.k.a. "Carrie"
Wednesday 4/28: Naomi "The Ruiner" Vaughan
Friday 4/30: SaraTonin Thompson.

ENJOY.

3. You know what sucks more than impermanence? Permanence, that's what. Death is on my mind today, again, still, and death really brings that forward for me. So I"m thinking, if nothing is permanent, WTF death? And then I think about very large time scales, beyond lifetimes, and only then can I imagine death as a transition rather than a state of finality. This morning I am here at Swim Cafe, watching groggy faces revive themselves with coffee and sugar on yet another Saturday morning, same as always and yet different, moving, shifting, and I think, ok impermanence, you win again, but the illusion of Forever, is kicking my ass right now, so give me a Perspective Maker to help me out, will you? And here comes a song**. Just that. And inside of that song, the tangled hearts and drippy eyeballs of however many dozens or millions who heard it at exactly the right time, who became family through the blood of its melody, sit there alive and united and say, "Hey, Karen. Look. We're all here. Now. Nobody is going anywhere." So, in a moment, the littlest one, there is a big something, a constantly moving infinite space of Nothing Lost. How about that. Tiny Little Now: a great place to hide. If I hide there long enough, maybe they'll grant me citizenship.

*The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali outline a set of do's and don't's akin to the 10 commandments, differing only in that they make sense. We can talk about them later.
*when Alex Chilton died, a little earthquake happened all around me, as I mourned Micah, and I felt both a part and not a part of it. But I want to say I witnessed something wonderful, seeing that a music had truly made family of its listeners. Those who knew and never knew Alex seemed grieve with identical sorrow. His songs tied the brains and guts of the world together. Might we all strive to make things like that.

Samadhi

2010-03-25T13:23:00Z

I'm overwhelmed, so let me just be here, now, with you.

For the last week or so, I've been dogpaddling the quicksand of inner space, observing my shallow and ungrateful habits in this weird trance, the way it might feel to look at a video of myself in a drunken blackout. Not that I have ever done that. (In fact, I have not. Mercifully, video cameras were somewhat of a rarity back when I was a drunk.) But in any case, had I actually seen myself covered in blue fingerpaint making out with some online gamer chick behind the broken deep freeze, I bet it would've felt like this, like the mix of bewilderment, distance, and wonder (read: horror, denial and shock) which, in the right combination at just the right temperature, gives birth to Samadhi.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Samadhi might be best described as a flash of enlightenment. It's a big deal like deja vu is a big deal. Meaning, it's not. But it isn't nothing, either. It's something. It's a tiny epiphany, a moment of clarity, a spiritual orgasm. It's that spaced out, tuned in moment looking out the window on the bus when you realize that not only could that homeless guy be you, that homeless guy IS you, and so is his piss in a mad dog bottle, and the bed of daffodils he's crashed out in, and the sun shining on it all. You get me. Samadhi is a swift hot smack in the face of the neatly sorted and sanctioned notions of Get Along Move Along that we carry with us most days. I think meditation is the proposed front door to this kind of consciousness growth spurt, but everyone I know gets in some other way. You might experience Samadhi during an acid flashback, you might get it watching made for TV dramas examining latch key kids and the resilience of the adolescent lanyard. I got it last week when I found out that my first love, Micah, shot himself.

I have labored over whether I would tell you that. It isn't nice to read, I know. And I'm sorry if it hurts you to think about it right this minute. It hurts me, too. But listen, when I got that news, it was like a sonic boom, like a hundred sonic booms, like the freaking Air and Water Show up in here. I holed up for a few days and tried to work out the tangled mess in my heart, and then I gave up on that and started walking around again. I've got his letters in my bag. I look at his picture every hour. Totally normal grief stuff. No big thing.

Here's the big thing, though. The morning after I got the news, I made a smoothie and I thought: Micah doesn't get to make smoothies anymore. Then on the bus: no more buses for Micah. I waited in a stupid line and imagined it may well have been stupid lines that Micah couldn't bear. I did some brainless work for brainless dollars and figured maybe Micah wouldn't tolerate the emptiness of labor and money. I hugged my friends as if they were possibly, quietly, unsure if they'd ever been loved. I taught my students imagining that they may well be in class as a last ditch effort to find something worth living for. As I walked through the sun downtown and tried to get my head around love and death, I heard the narration of my life as emo rock lyrics, and so I took a picture (above). I understood, as I think honest people do, that my deeply unique existence was in fact a cliche in its entirety, a theme and variations with vital applications in New Age, Goth, inspirational, Metal, Classical, Romantic, Gangsta, Alternative, Folk, Trance, Post-Mod, Pop, Renaissance, Soul, R&B, Grunge, Zombie, Disco, New Wave, Honky Tonk, Punk, Bluegrass, and Electronica, to name only a few. It's an ego-maniac's nightmare, that everybody's living the same story, but I'm afraid the hippies might have gotten it right. We really are all one love. God damn it.

Samadhi* is seeing the dual become the non-dual. Samadhi is a moment of grasping that life and death, love and war, bliss and suffering, are one. The sacred and the secular, the strange and the ordinary, the banal and the profound - same same. Samadhi is a state of understanding that there is no reason for being, and that every last breath carries with it the power of all known and unknown universes. It is the sick and fitting placement of Micah's suicide next to our first kiss as mirror images, observing how Micah has, twice now, shaken my mind, marked my heart, opened my eyes to the essential chimera of this life. For that, I thank him, wherever he is. (Micah, where are you? And do you wish you were here? I do.) For now, I think that's as much as I can say.

Until next time, I leave you with the cliche of your choice, paired with a heaping helping of accidental and temporary enlightenment. (I'm pretty sure you want the temporary one. I hear the permanent stuff is a real bitch.)

Love,
Karen

*Samadhi is of course, really complex and bigger than I can explain, but so is everything else, and I can't wait until I understand. Do you want to argue with me about it? Because I would enjoy that very much.

Fuzzy Dice: Karma, Jesus, Parallel Universes

2010-03-08T13:43:00Z

A while ago I was at a dinner party (read: playing a drunken game of dice at a table of foul-mouthed ladies) when the concept of karma came to the floor (as did several ounces of pita chip pieces, a glass of 3 buck chuck, and half a mini brownie). The following summarizes our arguments, which were repeated with little variation for the duration of the "discussion."

Artist: I think karma means we have limited choices. Like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. Hey, I rolled 1000 again!
Social Worker: People aren't born with the same opportunities! We can't be blamed for our failure to thrive in this unjust world! But we can't give up thinking it's fate! Or the bootstraps thing! Karma is no excuse! I'm confused and upset! Down with the establishment! And whatever you're talking about! Is it my turn?
Friend of Friend: I have to roll 3 of a kind in the SAME throw now? This is bull. What? Who cares.
Pastry Chef: Of course I have free will. I can do whatever I want. Try to stop me. Who needs another drink?
Yoga Teacher: It's just cause and effect, ease down. No, nothing. Yeah, again. Next time maybe I'll meld.

As much as I love to tangle about choice and freedom and fate, I think karma is actually pretty simple. The way I see it, karma, which means "action," refers to nothing more than the causal chain of events in one's life, and yes, past lives. And here's a word on past lives, for the squeamish. Do you think you were made out of nothing from out of nowhere, suddenly and without warning? Come on. Everything is made out of something. Einstein was on that game years ago. You have parents, ancestors, a family tree that reaches further back than anyone would care to trace. And because you have those things, you do not arrive on planet Earth with a clean slate. Sorry, folks. Doesn't happen. Not for anyone. Thanks to my pre-birth backstory, I came here with blue eyes, impressive external hip rotation, hazardous menses, wicked headaches and a fervent preoccupation with unanswerable questions.

The reason why is nothing more than cause and effect. My genes are a certain way, so my body and mind are a certain way. Genes aren't everything, though, and for all that stuff modern science hasn't yet decoded, an answer could be karma. Karma is simply the genealogy of actions. Folks say things like, "karma means you're getting what you deserve." I've had a hard time swallowing the concept of "deserving," personally, because firstly, it invites a hint of shame when cause and effect will do fine without it, and secondly, how the hell can deservingness be calculated? Back when I was a Christian, I got very much into Jesus because it felt right to me that I was deserving of eternal punishment, and simultaneously (because of Jesus Christ's redemptive act) totally pure and cleansed of all guilt. It was an explanation for a phenomenon that baffled me. (Still does. I still feel both evil and holy. It isn't just that this seems right to me, it's that I actually perceive it with some amount of visceral detail.) There were a few reasons why I left the Christian church, but the main idea was this: I don't think anyone (not even Jesus) can ultimately take the effect of my causes for me, and if I am conflicted about feeling both evil and holy, maybe it's because those things don't exist in the way I'm gripping them.

A tangent on evil: I'm not going to be one of those rainbow light hippies who say that there is no evil in the world. But I will say that I don't think it is a distinct force which opposes good. I think "the force" is probably a scale here, like light and heat. Dark and cold are the names we've given to low amounts of light and heat. I might say Evil is the name for a very low amount of Good. It could be said the opposite way, actually, that Good is a low amount of Evil, but this is a glass full or empty, thing. My point is that, in a half glass of water, the water and lack of water aren't at war with each other, they simply co-exist in proximity, at a particular and changeable proportion. As it follows, I harbor both Good and Lack of Good, shaken and stirred in the glass that is me, at a particular and changeable proportion.

Back to the matter at hand. People get all jacked up about karma for two reasons that I can see. 1) They are afraid this means they are screwed, choice-wise. (Agency) 2) They are afraid this means they have to clean up a mess they don't remember making. (Justice) As for forgotten mess-making: too bad. Those bottles aren't going to recycle themselves, don't matter what you remember. As for choice, one of the things I carried with me from Calvinism - and by the way, I use Christian references because its the language I have. I'd happily use others, but I wouldn't know what the heck I am talking about, and I am, let's face it, already out on a limb here - is the idea that time is an important factor when we are ruling out variables. We perceive that we have choice because we live inside of time. We're total chumps to it. If our awareness reached outside of time, we might not perceive choice at all. It may look like a fixed causal chain so meticulously specific that there were never any options at all. Now, sure, it does no one any good to look at things that way. But it's interesting, isn't it?

Sometimes I think I might not have any choice at all about the way things go. But thankfully, if I avoid excessive memory, prophecy, astral travel or pyschoactive drugs, I will continue to live inside of the (infintely liberating) confines of time, strapped inside the tiniest now moment making choices like it's going out of style. I can say, "I could have avoided the use of a cliche at the end of the previous sentence," for example. And I could have. But there the sentence is. There is an outcome. That we know. Is there only one outcome? That we do not really know. So, there are a lot of points at which these ideas break down. Here is what I'm going to say, I think. My point. For now. My point is this: we are so extremely limited by our perception, we shouldn't get too worked up about it. Karma is the name for the cause and effect of our actions. It doesn't mean we are slaves to anything. Here we are! Making choices! Dealing with other people's choices! Bitching about it! And who can stop us!

For me, karma means I can think before I act: "What chain of events am I about to fire off here?" It also means I can say to myself, when life seems a disaster-mess that needs a superhero, "this is neither chance, magic nor mystery and shan't be cured by such things." Chance is a whole nother thing, actually. It's the thing that had me rolling zero for most of the aforementioned game of dice, in spite of my furvent prayers to meld. It's a thing that makes all sense and no sense. A very misunderstood thing. A thing I will not be tackling today. I should point out that I am not saying I believe the concept of karma is "true" or "a real thing." (We don't know whether the id and ego actually exist, but we use them to understand the mind, right?) Like everything I yammer on about, it is just an idea. It is a way of looking at things. And it is a way of looking at things that I find helpful enough, for the moment. I promise we won't talk about it in class.

Eka Pada Mukhasana: The Advice Column: Hydrophobia

2010-03-02T21:15:00Z

Recently a buddy who I'd seen regarding a troubled digestive system (as well as soreness, fatigue, aches and pains, dizzy spells and general discomfort) emailed me at 3:40am to tell me he thought he might have yanked himself up during our session. When I got online, I summoned him to the google chat to discuss. What follows is an excerpt of our conversation, which he suggested I post as advice. For any of you that have not been to class with Karen Faith, please be warned that the following transcript contains her authentic style of exclamation, not suitable for public broadcast.

T: I'm icing my neck and shoulder. Damn!
me: What? We barely moved you neck and shoulder. We were trying to get your sh*tter to fire up, remember? What happened?
T: Dunno, felt like a pinched nerve. Ok now.
me: That sucks, let me know if I can help. Sometimes when one thing releases, another thing yanks up. It takes some time (and regular practice) to get everybody chilled out, so easy does it.
T: Fine now.
me: Yeah, I heard you, but you shouldn't be up at 4am in terrible pain. That's bullsh*t.
T: No worries - Maybe I just slept on it wrong.

me: I know I know, you keep saying it's no big deal.

But in any case, take it easy.

There's a lot going on for you in the physical lately, and it couldn't hurt to bring some gentleness to the issue.

T: I think it's all diet. But can't bring myself to change.me: Well you can do a lot by adding a gallon of water a day. Not kidding.

You can get away with eating a g*dd*mn mack truck if you hydrate like a m*therf*cker.

T: Did I ever tell you I almost drowned once? Ever since then I've had a phobia about drinking water.

me: I can't tell if you are kidding or not.If you seriously don't drink water, I think we've found our problem.

T: Not kidding.

Never drink water.

me: J*SUS F*CKING CHR*ST

T: I mean, I'll drink it if nothing else is around.

me: J*SUS F*CKING CHR*ST
I don't even know where to begin.

Are you f*cking serious?

That's like running your car without oil, man.You know what happens when you do that?

The g*dd*mn thing blows up.

You can't f*cking do that.

T: Not kidding. Water creeps me out.

me: You *sshole! Bothering me about your f*cking aches and pains when you are f*cking running your body through that kind of torture. Have you got info on 9/11 or some sh*t? Water deprivation doesn't make the truth come out man, it kills, I don't care who you are - and don't give me that Buddha Boy sh*t, because that's different. Whatever he's doing is definitely not what you're doing. For sh*t's sake you are practically killing yourself. Not a fan, Tom. F*ck that.

Sorry. I shouldn't get all worked up. I'm a professional. A compassionate professional. And you are suffering from fear. Like all of us do.

But seriously. Water, man. WATER.T: I drink lots of fluids that contain water.me: Fluids that CONTAIN water? The fluids you speak of also contain things which defeat the mission, like bourbon and espresso.You're out of your mind.

T: I am not.

Prior to the mid '70's people in the US didn't drink much water, you know.

I mean, you're right and everything.

me: Yes I am.

T: Old dog, new trick.

me: Well, I suppose I have said my piece.

T: You should consider this a question for your advice column.

me: Do I have your permission to copy the insane things in this chat? Because everyone is going to think you are a masochistic moron.

T: Yes

me: Wow, neat. Ok.

What I didn't tell Tom on the chat that I will tell you all now is that I, too, almost drowned as a kid. It was in the ocean. Me and my little brother got pulled way out into the water before we knew what was up. The beach was empty that day, and my mom and sister were laying out on their oversized beach towels getting tans, presumably. The situation got kinda urgent, and mama was hollerin' and thrashing around. Suddenly, some guy in white (yes, white) swimming trunks showed up in the middle of the ocean. He seriously came up out of the water from nowhere, ushered us both back to my mother's flailing arms, and disappeared. My mother reported that we were saved by an angel. Not an 'angelic' person. An angel. Like Gabriel. Like a divine being that flies (or in some cases, swims) around doing the will of God. I do not know who that guy was, but if he were here right now, he would be getting a big Thank You from me, and then he would tell Tom to drink some g*dd*mn water.

While dipsophobia is the fear of drinking, Hydrophobia is the fear of water. Hydrophobia is also, curiously, the fear of rabies. (Tom, how are you with rodent bites?) Since the above confrontation, Tom has made incredible progress confronting his fear and is now carrying a water bottle with him to work. With diligence and courage, soon I hope he will begin drinking it. When that time comes, Tom - and anyone out there who doesn't get enough fluids in their tank - I recommend employing a drinking straw of a cheerful and inviting shape. While the aforementioned sea angel wouldn't have been so sloppy as to allow me to develop a trauma-related phobia, I have, in fact, experienced trouble drinking water in the past, as I used to get so booze-poisoned that I could barely lift a glass to my lips. (Trauma-sans-savior related.) Using a straw, I found I could take in liquid much faster, and without the insufferable use of my arms! That 50-pack of smiley straws saved my life, I'm pretty sure. Though, those straws were part of the problem, come to think of it. Be sure to put the straw in the right glass.

Eka Pada Mukhasana: The Advice Column: Levitation

2010-02-27T16:00:00Z

Dear Eka Pada Mukhasana,

What pose do I use to levitate? Cause I think levitating would be pretty sweet. I saw David Blaine do it, so I think I should be able to also.It would be good to do at parties. I tried once, but then a funny episode of The Office came on so I got distracted. I'm about 6'3,190lbs.

-Russell

Dear Russell,

Thanks for you question. While it seems as though you have a clear understanding of your height/weight ratio, I believe you lack a firm grasp of the limitations of physics, to say nothing of appropriate modes of entertainment at social events.

As with any practice, we must begin where we are, and where we are if we are you is heavy (relative to things that float) and distracted. About the heavy, I wouldn't sweat it. You'd have to lose so much weight to float, maybe all of it, and we're talking achievable, so table that. As for the attention problem, I must say that The Office, a formerly funny TV program destined to bust with Pam's water this week, is no excuse. I'm not suggesting that you practice with the TV off, but Russell, even I can't imagine practicing on a Thursday night. 30 Rock? Grey's Anatomy? CSI? Be reasonable.

The next thing we are if we are you is misinformed, which is, lucky for the you that is us, 100% curable. Allow me: what levitation is and what David Blaine does are distinct wiki entries, if you get my meaning. In order to do what David Blaine does, you will need a pose for the tip toes, a mantra (optional), and a trick quarter (stunt fail back up).

Levitation, on the other hand, that cousin of miracles, magic, and the mail-in rebate, is something that only ever almost happens*. Its half-happening is so prevalent that we have given it a name and a history, because we do that, we just decide once in a while that formerly nonsense, irrelevant or non-existent stuff is legitimate. (Check out the new words in the OED.) But you know what? In my opinion, being common is no substitute for being real**. Like, these guys "levitating" while holding a walking stick? Not happening. That stick is connected to a platform they are sitting on. Tough balance, ok, applause for that, but give me a break, fakers.

That said, I can get kinda into these Buddhist guys who do a jumping practice thing. I mean, they are leaping, not hovering***, but that is just the view through the glasses of silly old time. Slow the time down, or take it away altogether via photograph, and you've got yourself a floater. I like to say, in yoga class, that if you stay in a balancing pose for one second, you have a one second success. No need to call it a failure because you collapsed and smashed your face. Time is a real perception-screwer-upper. Thankfully it has one loophole, and that is the right now moment, the only place where levitation - in fact the only place where anything - is possible.

With that in mind, the pose I recommend for us, if we are you, is the pose you are in, if by you I mean us, the each and every one. The only essential thing - and I'm talking the whole deal - is that you and we do it at a very specific moment: this one.

When your done doing that, skip the yoga show and pick up The Beamz for your next party.

Good Luck Russell!

Eka Pada Mukhasana

*I will also quickly point out that many poses make one feel as though one were levitating. Tip toes pose, the lotus lift/scales pose,and, more commonly, the savasana following one of those classes that give you The Bliss (also known as The Yoga Stoned Dipshit Space Out).
**Deep thoughts. You can quote me. But for the record, I am fairly certain that "real" is a made up word for nothing, and everything. (See also: God, Meaning, Purpose, Money, and Contemporary Art.)
***They are also not selling tickets to a hovering show.

Stop Smiling Provokes Rebellious Grinning Yoginis

2010-02-26T16:53:00Z

Going To Incredible Lengths To Continue Smiling Unnoticed

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS.

1) All things considered, 6pm was better than 6:15pm after all, so, come on down to Fridays at 6. Here's the deal: sometimes things happen due to traffic or whatever, and some folks, maybe the folks who have the keys, are not there right at 6. Hey, it's ok. Just hop on over to Filter for some tea and probably by the time it reaches a drinkable temperature, yoga class will be starting.

2) Guess what else we discovered! On Fridays, we like to go fast. From this day forward, Happy Hour Yoga invites you to a gentler paced Mental Monday class, a hearty and balanced Winsome Wednesday and a slightly caffeinated Fast Friday. If you are a brand new baby yogi, or feeling maybe not like a vinyass-kicking, you should come on Monday or Wednesday instead of Friday. If, on the other hand, you have accumulated weekday resentment, Seasonal Affective Disorder, or excess calories/karma that need dealing with, Friday is your day. Should you accidentally find yourself there on a Friday and need to take it easy, you can wuss out all you want, no points deducted. And if you like, I'll tell everyone you are not a chicken shit pansy at all, but that you are honoring your boundaries and maintaining a mindful, balanced practice, because that is probably true. The rest of us will indulge our egos while attempting to crush them, and probably envy you later.

3) The Spring Potluck is in the works. I'm thinking a Resurrection Theme maybe on Good Friday, April 2. If you're going to be out of town for that weekend, tell me now! The Spring Potluck should be a grand event, and that means your ass showing up with some grub. Spoiler alert: we will be bringing dead things back to life, zombie style.

4) Eka Pada Mukhasana; The Advice Column, thanks you for your recent inquiries re: fertility, levitation and beer-induced yoga. All will be answered shortly. Feel free to send your questions to karenfaith@yogaforthemoment.com, with Eka Pada Mukhasana in the subject line.

Eka Pada Mukhasana: The Advice Column: Back to Backs

2010-02-16T15:35:00Z

Hey,

Great idea. Here's my question: what are the best exercises/stretches to strengthen your back?

M

--

Hi M,

It sounds like we're looking at a complex web of issues here, the root of which being an apparent unfamiliarity with google.com. (You're welcome.) The next thing is, shouldn't you deal with your own back before pointing a finger at mine? Sure, I don't do as much Shalabhasana as I did before the Projectile Architect Incident, but that's hardly your concern. Trapezius, Latissimus Dorsi, Erector Spinae, are all fine. Mostly. I mean, lower left Iliocostalis is pretty pissed there under a wad of nerve damage near the SI joint. Meanwhile, upper right Longissimus is gripping me like a popsicle in the summertime. Shit. My back is a mess. Some days I could slap myself for coming into the path of that beautiful flying Scandinavian. How he flew through the air before igniting my sacral chakra!

Did you feel that somehow? Were you able to pick up the suffering emanating from my backside into the energy body of the collective unconscious? Do you sometimes have dreams that come true? We may have more to deal with than originally anticipated. In the meantime, more about me. While most days I think I want a deep forward bend like Plow or Hands-under-the-Feet pose, it just isn't a good idea to get right to it immediately. The order of operations is super important, particularly regarding backbends, trigonometry, and the baking of savory pastries. There are some arguments about what should go where in a sequence, but here's what I do, based on my ongoing devotion to The Great One, Guruji Google. And my professional training.

I warm up in a general way, salutations or whatever. Actually, the simple up and down (Uttitha Hastasana, followed by Uttanasana and back up) is no small task for the back, and does plenty to wake up the erectors. So, after that, I'll do a few Baby Cobras (inhale up and exhale down. If you've got an Upward Dog, hit it), and then start working into deeper bends. Wheel, Bridge, anything. Bow is a good one, though my favorite variation involves lassoing your own feet and hoisting them up by reaching the arms overhead and holding the strap like you're santa with his bag of toys. (Handcrafted illustration above.)

After backbends, it's pretty essential to do core work and forward bends. But don't do the forward bends in between the back bends, or right after them. I'm serious. Forward bends and back bends are like toothpaste and orange juice. Proximal but not conjugal. After a spacer of a minute or so, I do core-strengthening stuff to help support the back and prevent any sneaky business, particularly in the lowers, then let go of all that with some reclining twists, and then get into the yummy forward bending, like Plow, Rabbit, and Utthita Paschimottanasana. There's tons of yoga good for backs. Triangle, Fish, Lord of the Fish, Triangle of Fish, you name it.

The thing is, M, your back is probably fine. You clearly aren't spending all your time doing online research, so you are probably running around picking up litter and participating in other Culturally Relevant Tasks Which Also Increase Back Strength. The back is the strongest muscle of the body. Ok, I just googled that, and its not true, but its pretty strong, and you are likely plenty strong for everyday use, unless you just got a job as a furniture mover, in which case, you will be plenty strong soon. In fact, forget yoga. Get a job as a furniture mover. Just don't forget the toothpaste and orange juice thing.

SAMSARA HOLLA HOLLA,

Karen

Eka Pada Mukhasana: The Advice Column

2010-02-15T16:46:00Z

Eka Pada Mukhasana

Happy Chinese New Year, Valentine's Day and Presidents Day, friends.

The Year of the Tiger has kicked off with tributes to romance and government in its first two days. In case you're worried that the rest of the year will fall short of this glorious opener, fear not. Tomorrow is Mardi Gras. Then we've got Michael Jordan's birthday on the 17th, followed by National Crab Stuffed Flounder Day. The 19th is the day commemorating the Mister Roger's Neighborhood debut, then John Glenn's orbit on the 20th, National Sticky Bun Day, Pebble Flintstone's birthday, Dog Biscuit Day, the Day of the First Multi-Stage Rocket, the Day a Hen Laid the Largest Egg, Levi Strauss' birthday, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's birthday, Smokey the Bear's birthday, and then, if this were the right year, which it is not, we'd have Leap Day. (Holy Sadie Hawkins, ruiner of womankind, we salute you.)

We'll see about March in March. In the meantime, please note that due to traffic disturbances, Happy Hour Yoga on Fridays at Stop Smiling will begin at 6:15pm rather than 6:00pm until further notice. You are welcome.

More importantly, Yoga, For The Moment is kicking off Eka Pada Mukhasana, an Advice Column! If you have a question about yoga, or heck, anything else, email me at karenfaith@yogaforthemoment.com with Eka Pada Mukhasana in the subject line. As always, I am at your service. You have something to say, andI have something to say about it. Note: Eka Pada Mukhasana is a posture in which the foot is placed in the mouth. Let's do it.

hey look I made us a new flyer

2010-01-31T23:49:00Z

Believing

2010-01-17T13:41:00Z

Early morning light colors the truth.

The quality of light shifts each morning from what lulled early dreams upon us to what may grant us some hope that yes, this too shall pass. Or something. My short walk this morning became a bit longer as I slowed but didn't quite pause to notice a small ball field covered in snow, reflecting bluing skies behind the Diocese board up in scattered mirrors of ice. The frozen puddles offered up their wares atop a sleek surface: 2 Snapple bottles, the known foil and orange of Doritos, a torn and folded stack of corn tortillas next to their untorn, unfolded paper envelope.

After a few breaths of sincere awe at the beauty of my one block commute from free breakfast to free wi-fi, I thought to share it with someone, maybe my mom, and this placing of other eyes in front of mine revealed that it was no picture postcard. If I had taken out my tiny telephone, snapped a pic and txtd it to my mama, she would have 1) looked at it while driving, 2) looked at it while driving past, and ignoring, a doe and her fawn prancing through handsome acres of pine forest delicately sparkling with dew, 3) looked at it while driving past clean natural wonders and considered that it may have been sent as a mistake, 4) looked at it while driving through nature, wondering whether I sent it as a mistake or was I trying to tell her something, and was that something a cry for help, at last, from the coarse, brutality of urban life, and if so, would it mean I am coming back home soon? Maybe for her birthday this week? Never again to leave her for the city? I did not take a picture.

Borrowing my mother's imagined distaste for urban decay, my cognitive landscape soon flooded with the knowledge of Haiti, and my neighborly scene looked magical again, splitscreen with true ruin. Gratitude and shame rolled around together having charged break-up sex, as is their habit in this here heart situation of mine. Perspective is a glorious and cruel charm. There are days that my view cuts and flashes so suddenly, the suspension of disbelief can't be held long enough to compose a worthwhile status update. My pulse races, feeling no ground under my feet, knowing there is nothing, absolutely nothing which will not shake loose, which will not dissolve, which will not look weird in HD. When the light changes, our eyes change. We ask for more, we ask for less, but, please, somebody give us better CGI so we can sleep at night. We know it's fake, but we wanna believe, for the duration of one scene, that we are alive, that there are diamonds under all this rock, that one of these universes is the one, and god, maybe it's this one here, now. But our consciousness of illusion is growing just a bit faster than technology can keep up, and it hurts, having to be here, lucid and uneasy.

Pema Chodron has written: "If we're willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path." Dear Pema: Typically, when outlining a progressive set of instructions with the intention of being helpful, the first step should read as something vaguely within reach. With that in mind, giving up hope that we will can relieve our suffering or find something to lean on seems a bit more suited for step 7, level 13, difficulty settings on Total Mastery. Can I get a modified step one? I imagine myself telling Pema I have an injury which exempts me from practice. Yes, severe. Yes, chronic. Yes, painful. She does not hesitate to inform me that there is no modified acceptance of reality. That it is not something that can be done in part. I ask her if there is a way I can just get ready to prepare to become willing to start doing it, and then I can't really hear what she says. Either something about the secret crystal caverns of Atlantis or to stop being such an insatiable brat.

One of my favorite teachers is my best friend, Rene. She recently summed up Pema's first step, my current dilemma and the only reasonable solution to it with two words: Stop fantasizing. There is a difference between hope and fantasy, though I admit I don't know what it is. As much as I'd like to pretend I'm a ferocious scrutinizer of the world, at heart I'm a believer. Or, more accurately, a wanna believer. I wanna believe in miracles, transformation and the ultimate goodness of humanity. I wanna believe in god, in love, in healers and saints and magic prayers. My apartment is left unlocked most days. I don't zip my bag up on the train. I give love and trust where it has not been earned and is not reciprocated, and not because I've never been burned, but because I'm still longing to have my experience proven wrong. This is foolish. It is neither compassionate nor wise, it is plain folly, and just as gross an error as it would be to shut myself in under the belief that there is nothing worthy of my confidence.

My other favorite teacher, Tom the Tutor, then poked his head into my mess of an attempt at faith and said, "if something is true, you don't have to believe in it. Karen. You're wasting your energy." Thanks, Tom. One can hardly argue with that. But that doesn't make the truth any more discernible through these eyes. I'm swamped with dreamscapes, counterfeits and well-intentioned fakers like me. And sometimes I love them all so much, it doesn't seem that bad. Believing is fun when its fun. And one day at a time kind of works if I don't think too much about why it works. But then the agony of discovering there is no Santa emerges, over and over again. The bottom line is, I don't know how to navigate an ever-changing, completely phony landscape and still give a crap. All the early childhood training tools for that kind of thing, Atari, Nintendo, D&D, Glamour Shots, Star Search (I'm in my thirties, give me a break) were off limits in my house, which is not to say that we didn't play our share of I-dare-you-to-call-bullshit-on-my-alternate-reality-right-now. We did. And I was the bullshit-caller. Until the anguish of being that person sent me back to my poetry anthology. Which is, I suppose, how its done. Sometimes this, sometimes that, depending on the day.

Today I'm calling bullshit on me. That's the work I can do for the moment. That and I might compose a picture on the way home. The Sun has brightened over the ball field. The mirrors have melted, the shadows are crisp. It is a weak masterpiece, banal, unspectacular, temporary, perfect. If no one is passed out on the bench, I'll have a seat and enjoy the quality of light for a minute. I'll think about taking it home with me on my handheld digital device, and then I'll decide against it, to practice un-grasping abstractions. A modified step one. Take that, Pema.

In case you would like a more substantial way to practice getting with the truth, Yoga, For The Moment is teaming up with a local helper and fellow yogini, Misa C, to gather food, clothing and monetary donations for the people of Haiti. Email me to take part. Meanwhile, enjoy what light there is and I'll see you in class.

2010, you are welcome.

2009-12-29T15:51:00Z

1) You aint never seen nothing like the Happy Hour Yoga Community Building Neighborhood Care and Share Potluck Monday, January 11th. Because you people turned our last potluck into a culinary competition (with special prizes to Gluten Free Dessert Eating, Savory Pie Mastery and First Person In History To Bring 267 Pieces Of Sushi To A Potluck), I am going to go ahead and say, bring it to 1371 N Milwaukee Ave. I double corndog dare you.

YOGA 6-7PM An opportunity to keep one of the resolutions you made 10 days ago.
FOOD 7-9PM An opportunity to break one of the resolutions you made 10 days ago.

NOTES:
***You are encouraged to bring friends we have not met yet. ***We are bohemian yogis, and welcome both meaty and over sugared products. ***Stop Smiling has generously offered to provide a little beer and wine. If you drink something else, you'll have to bring your own bitters, cherries, whiskey and wedge of orange. ***Because I am compassionate toward the anti-social, I will bring Scrabble. ***If you have other plans or are otherwise uninteresting in attending,please know that I am very sorry to hear that. Very, very sorry.

2) Happy Hour at Stop smiling has added Fridays at 6pm to our weekly schedule. This means Happy Hour Yoga happens THRICE A WEEK. Mondays and Fridays at Stop Smiling 6pm, Wednesdays in Pilsen 6:30pm.

3) Yoga is not about getting back your beach body, for the record. Not at all. But you may find yourself thinking you shouldn't have eaten all that fruitcake and butter-drenched Alaskan King Crab. And you shouldn't have. But you did, and so did I. Don't play. The great part about yoga is that it is a holistic practice, and will treat your holiday hangover symptoms be they physical, emotional, spiritual or mental. Even so, it's no more comfortable to talk about "getting back in shape" than "working out my karma" or, say, "cleansing my aura of unwelcome energy triggers from my family of origin," so let's agree not to talk about it, and just do our work. Your intentions are your business.

4) Bring your friends. Right now, they are making resolutions they can not keep without your endless badgering.

HAPPY NEW YEAR DEAR WONDERFUL PEOPLE.

Getting Uncomfortable

2009-12-15T14:47:00Z

After 7 takes, Ardha Baddha Padma Padangusthasana. For 1/125th of a second.

For months I've pondered writing on Devotion To A Harsh Guru (other working titles: Getting Off On Bottom, The Infinite Strength Of Selflessness, or A Southern Woman's Marriage Handbook), but kept getting hung up in realizing that I do not, in fact, have anything like a clear understanding on this. I can't write about it - the merits and dangers of unconditional devotion to something or someone in the face of what appears to most everyone else as an insanely ill-fated path - because I'm too tangled up to see it, but not tangled enough to forget that the essence of being deceived is ignorance of the fact*. However, I will say a few things about finding a teacher. We can just wander on down that road, since I don't pretend to have any authority on any of this. Sometimes I resist saying I'm a "teacher" because it implies that I actually "teach" when I just set up opportunities. Making time and space for practice is the long and the short of what I do. Less of a president, more of a community organizer.

Even so, I honor the fact of others' trust in me, and try to find teachers of my own so that I can be more helpful to the people in my life. Looking for a teacher is like choosing a personal trainer. The one I like will probably not give me the most profound results. The one I dread will. Many of you may have just assumed that the one I like is a softy, and the one I dread a Nazi, but allow me to point out that even if my preference is the Nazi, I'm not going to grow as deeply if I'm simply getting what i want, be it 6 pack abs or naptime in the steam room.

I teach 2 kinds of yoga, basically. Vinyasa and Restorative. Yang and Yin. Vinyasa is active, vigorous, builds heat, strength and endurance. Restorative is passive, gentle, cools, releases and soothes. I love them both, but most of my students prefer one or the other. Here's an impolite example: Type A stress freaks with jobs and kids and frequent flier miles like vinyasa. Laid back, unemployed, out of shape stoners like restorative** These stereotypes are typically true because we typically like the familiar. What we need, however, is often a bit of the opposite. Workaholics need restorative yoga more than anyone, and, I can assure you, it is excruciating for them. I have a few students who regularly challenge themselves to take the medicine and get through an hour or so of the very last thing on Earth they would want to be doing, and I applaud them. They are practicing balance. Or they enjoy torturing themselves. Which could mean, if that's what is comfortable, they should maybe try the opposite, which would, in this case, be the thing of similar constitution (hair-of-the-dog-related), unless taken in too large a portion, and so on.

Which is it? I have no freaking idea, not about you and not about me, so I practice both, and watch my response to each practice shift from Hooray to Oh God Help Me and back again. I'm wiggly that way. It's how balance works. Stand on one foot, notice the shifting. I like to assure myself that teetering back and forth isn't an indication that one is failing to balance, but that one is defining the center by process of elimination. The way we do with our beliefs***. One day we believe one thing, the next day it seems we need contradiction, the following day yet another belief may prove helpful, and so it goes. If this metaphor holds, what we will briefly glimpse, and ultimately rest with, is none of the above. All beliefs, all practices are tiny nudges of propulsion, pushing and pulling us into and out of the poles. In the center, none are needed.

If moving, believing and feeling become unnecessary, what will we do with our time, you ask? Well, you'll have to ask someone else. I've never been in the center for longer than a few seconds. But if you are having trouble filling your schedule due to extreme equanimity, please consider attending yoga class and I'll be sure to knock you around some.

GRATUITOUS SOLICITATION: Yoga sessions would make a very nice holiday gift for your dearly beloved workaholics or couchpotatoes. As always, rates are flexible. Email me.

*Try to sleep at night, pondering this.
**Let it also be made clear that I am fully aware that workaholics experience periods of couchpotato, and stoners have an inner type A.
***Presto change-o! Physical body translates to mental body! I'll let you do the emo body as a take home quiz.

The Neverending Story

2009-12-11T01:09:00Z

Atreyu and Artax

You know how everything we perceive in this world is illusion? And how, on some days, when you remember that, it makes you feel sad, and on other days, its a huge relief? Today it feels like a huge relief. And that is ok. Because today is a moment, an illusive moment, and it is all that I have. And on a day like today, I am choosing to write to you, because that is one of the things which helps my moments feel worth the pain of their infidelity.

Some years ago I was burdened with chronic hopelessness, and while I still believe that unconditional cheerfulness is a sign of psychosis and/or shortsighted marketing, I have learned finally that bitterness is no badge of honor, does not stand for truth or resilience any more than a scar stands for courage. I've learned that I create my own mind, that I will grow the seeds I plant, and that sometimes, if I've got shitty soil and shitty weather, it will do me some good to hone my brain-gardening skills. That said, some years ago, I didn't think I could garden in that crap, and thought a lot about ditching the brain garden to push daisies. I won't go into goth detail on that; it's an expired scene, thankfully. What I want to tell you (read: remind myself) today is how it changed.

One day I was lying around shooting at hopes like bad guys in a video game. It was a February afternoon, and giant, slow-motion snow muted the streets. My mind was worn out, my eyes bored of tears, and as I went to sleep, I asked for guidance. In my dream, there was nothing. No set, no actors, no silhouettes. There was only an expanse, like a giant, limitless room of light, and a message so clear that I could hear it, though it was soundless. "Karen, pay attention to the way that you wake yourself from this dream, because you will wake yourself from your life in exactly the same way." In a breath, I woke up, feeling that I'd just hung up on someone. As soon as I identified the magic white space as the sheet over my head, I remembered the dream. Fearing I'd missed the message, I fell back into sleep, trying to rewind and playback. It came again, as a variation. "Karen, pay attention to the way that you wake yourself from this dream, because you will wake yourself from your pain in exactly the same way."

And so I began to dissect the act of waking. What did I do? How did I get myself from one state of consciousness to another? It just happened. I didn't do anything. Maybe I simply realized I was asleep? Perhaps it was time to wake up. In my mind, I drew parallel lines from sleeping & waking to living & dying to suffering & not suffering. They were all mind places, all moments, the distance between which always seemed navigated by something other than me. If I'm driving, I thought, why does this trip suck so much?

I remembered the relief of lucidity, the peace which floods the heart upon realizing that a nightmare is only a nightmare, and could imagine how it will feel one day to be free of my attachment to this life. I will wake up - I believe we will all wake up - to a truth so much more real and obvious and ultimate that it will embarrass us for ever sweating money, love and public transportation. Just as we know in our waking life that a dream is an infinitely small, infinitely short little arrangement of wiggles in the brain, we will see that this whole world we have created here is just that small beside our next knowing. I got up and put on my stretchy pants. Epiphany or no, I went out to lead a group of strangers in transcendental jazzercise at the Metropolitan Club.

Snow was well over a foot deep, and I lifted and dropped one boot at a time thinking, "this is a funny dream." Over a blanked out Federal Plaza, snow eased down so slowly, making deep orange and white stripes of the huge Calder there, and I thought,"this is a beautiful dream." Three overworked corporate attorneys wearing elastic bottomed sweatpants and identical club-issued sport tees asked me how they should arrange their bodies to alleviate lock jaw, hernia and a trick knee and I thought, "this is a weird dream."

Today I am having a bad dream. The one where you get chased to school naked and accidentally kill a baby Schnauser that turns into a zombie of your ex-boss who blows up the world with poison gas pork chops and, in the rubble of the apocalypse, makes you join the new army or pay for your crime by breaking all of your own bones, your choice, which turns out to be the same choice. Think of how great it will be when I wake up from that. All I have to do is realize that I am dreaming, that there is something so much more ultimately true than this little torrent, and then let it pass. Or get myself the heck out of here.

I am also at high risk for Seasonal Affective Disorder, as is everyone north of I-70, so I must be mindful that any present discord may seem disproportionately disturbing for the next 4 months. It is important to fight through this. Someone I love very much often reminds me, "don't let the sadness of the swamps get to you ARTAX!*"

*Of course, Artax dies. But try not to dwell on that.

What happens in Mississippi

2009-12-04T14:13:00Z

Mom, Granny Penney, and Me

This Thanksgiving I went home to Mississippi. It was warmer, slower and, if you don't count my mother's constant joyful shrieking, quieter there. I hadn't been home for a holiday since long before my vegetarian period (1998-2008), and it was for the best. Mama doesn't serve Tofurkey. Here are the week's themes, in short.

1)When in Rome. In the spirit of family, I was obliged to observe traditional customs. Up with the sun, coffee on, breakfast out to the men who are doing something involving chain saws and a truck. A photo exists of me in a denim shirt squinting into the scope of a rifle, but I promise it was just a BB gun. The plastic coke bottle at risk remains unscathed.

2)Everyone has a mantra. An old friend taught me long ago that at times of familial intersection, like holidays, funerals and weddings, family members effortlessly adopt a mantra to get them through the hours. "Just look at that baby." "I can't believe they sent the wrong flowers." "Bless her heart." These phrases are a way of grounding, creating an anchor point from which to observe and experience the whirlwind that is family. We can find out a lot about a person based on their chosen mantra, and can do ourselves good by selecting one carefully. Some mantras are initiated by the event itself, and sustained for its duration, sometimes becoming long-term mantras. "Karen done been gone so long she forgot the way home and come up Jeannie's driveway!" In such cases, the same mantra can be used for decades "Oh Karen, I'll neva forgit the time you ate that big giant helpin a' bubblegum ice cream when we was shoppin and the discount mall, and thowed the whole thing up in a para shoes in the back seat!" (short version: "Oh, that bubblegum ice cream!")

3)Forgetting the way home. It isn't true, what they say, that you never forget the way home. Sometimes you are in the car at night in the middle of the sticks with no streetlights and no road signs, doing your best not to end up in a $%&ing ditch, and you make a mistake and come up Jeannie's driveway. If this happens to you, do not worry that you've severed your connection to your roots. You've in fact made them stronger, because the people waiting for you at the top of the correct driveway, who didn't see but actually heard your mistake with their disturbingly accurate country sonar ears, will always have something to say when they see you. For the rest of your life.

4)Hand-me-downs. I did acquire a few heirlooms while at my Grandmother's house. Grannygreat's cookie jar, the afghan Granny Penney made for my mom when she went to college, and a ring with a blue stone that Penney's first husband gave her. The rest of the stuff is junk. Piles and boxes and baskets of junk that gets gifted, re-gifted, thrifted and re-thrifted. One set of decorative framed virtues actually has provenance which traces back 4 acquisitions: grandmother purchased for mother, who gave it to the Goodwill, where sister found it and bought it to replace mother's "lost" items. This happens more often than one might expect. My mother has, on more than one occasion, returned a gift from my grandmother, who then saw it marked down and bought it again, thinking she got an even better deal. This can happen when you live in a place with a population only a few dozen greater than last summer's family reunion.

5)Yoga can save your life. Everyone practices for a reason, be it fitness (vanity), health (fear), spirituality (anxiety), personal growth (depression), community (desperation), or sex (yes, sex). But some people practice yoga because they'll lose their damn minds if they don't (all previous parentheseed items combined times ten). I am one of those. I managed exactly three brief yoga sessions on my trip, which were pure butter for my brain.

After last week, I can say I am personally done with this year's holiday season. I knocked it out early, leaving me wholeheartedly available to support you over the coming weeks. 'Tis the season, and I'd like to remind you that as you sync your email and handheld device's calendar applications (merging year end tasks with travel arranging, shopping, co-worker and bf/gf's co-worker holiday parties, cookie baking for said parties, and exponentially increasing family drama), and begin to lose entire halfdays to unplanned meltdown, inevitable hangover and spontaneous napping, you may feel as though you do not have time for yoga. And you don't. But if you practice anyway, I can promise you that the rest of that crap won't hurt as much.

Happy Hour Yoga (donation-based community class) is happening every Monday in Wicker Park and every Wednesday in Pilsen. (Check the sidebar on the blog for details.) If these times don't work for you, email me to have me come to your home or office when it works for you. Hell, I'll even do a yoga-themed holiday party if you want. Blue/White, Green/Red, or rainbow candles. Your pick.

Bliss and Suffering: visitation rights

2009-11-13T15:26:00Z

I Googled an image for "infinite consciousness." Let us hope this is inaccurate.

The last few weeks have been shifty. I turned 31, my computer broke again, windows closed and doors opened, it got cold and then hot and now cold again. I've thought of writing so often, but the circumstances weren't having it. I like to write with my laptop, in bed, on a day that I have nothing to do but dishes, when I am free to stare out the window and pontificate for hours. It has come to my attention that this scenario is not one that is common to my readers - people with jobs, people with kids, people with extremely tiny windows of what is known as "free time." To those of you I would like to apologize for being a whiner, and get down to this entry here, on someone else's computer real quick while that person is busy doing something else. In situations which require superefficiency, I have found "list" format to be useful. Here are my thoughts.

1) Today, it is my impression that cause and effect have an unstable relationship. I've loved them together like Oreos and milk, and I think they'll be together a long time, but let's be clear: sometimes a event occurs as the result of a logical causal chain, and sometimes not. As well acquainted as I am with nonsense, this topic has been on my mind to write for weeks, and has stumped me each and every time I've been still enough to attempt composition. I know, I know. This is a problem for poetry to solve, you say. But we have all those poems already - most of them koans - and they aren't helping. Have you ever read a koan that gave you a sense of peace with the impossibility and limitlessness of the universe? Koans make me mad.

2) There is a vast, great energy - the bliss or light or goddishness* - that we can tap into via meditation, sublime experience and spiritual devotion, but I want to point out that occasionally our consciousness pokes its head in to the divine at random. For example, sitting on a crowded bus and having a spontaneous sense of brotherhood which overwhelms a person to the point of shivers, tears or unprompted conversation, or seeing a TV commercial which gives one a genuine sense of illumination and breathless wonder. Most people I know would agree, if only in secret, that this happens.

3) I am coming to believe that this energy has a counterpart - the suffering - that we visit during times of extraordinary loss, violence, tragedy and the like. Parallel to the bliss, the suffering can also be visited at random. You may have known this at times when the amount of feeling seems entirely disproportionate to the action preceding it, or, its "cause." Example, a person who is incapacitated with grief upon hearing of a stranger's death, or while simply sitting on the same bus as the blissed out brother from item #2.

4) Both cases of the bliss or the suffering by seemingly random induction are unhelpfully labeled by most as instances of mental illness, PMS, sleep deprivation, workaholism, mania, drug abuse or other pathology. I love sciency stuff, and I would not assert that those explanations don't hold water in the world of science. What I'd be more interested in pointing out is that there are more worlds that the world of science, and that we are not always served well by calling experiences of ultimate, infinite truth (if I may be so bold as to suggest they are such a thing) a problem to be solved.

5) What if we came to terms with the existence of these vast energies as presences in the world, and considered the ability to know them a gift rather than a curse? What if we welcomed the expansion and transformation of consciousness rather than running from it fearfully in order to continue living out our routines? What if we stopped telling ourselves, "I'm clinically depressed" and started realizing that we are temporarily experiencing The Suffering? What if we allowed ourselves to be changed and healed by it so deeply that we are renewed with insight and energy to help others? And of The Bliss, what if we stopped patting ourselves on the back for achieving some grand spiritual something or other just because we had a moment of clarity? What if we took none of the credit and none of the blame and let ourselves be humbled and grateful for such a vision? I'm just saying, what if.

6) I think this is a good idea. There is great bliss, there is great suffering. It has nothing to do with me, but my awareness of it is pure liberation.

7) I think it is funny that I would attempt this kind of a subject, and even more funny that I just spit it out in 14 minutes.

8) There was actually something in this idea which was related to yoga practice, but I can't put it together very well now, and it's time to finish this up. So, you think on that and come to yoga class this week. For the record, we keep deep thoughts to a minimum during class. Happy Hour Yoga (both Pilsen Wednesdays and Wicker Park Mondays) are full of wonderful people that would like to see you. This week, Daisy the Tiny Dog joined us both Monday and Wednesday, and I have a doggie crush on her. I love her so much that I am not going to try and make any downward facing dog puns about her. Because love and puns do not go together, friends. They do not.

Daisy

PS: Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, Happy Hour PIlsen will be canceled 11/25, and Happy Hour Wicker Park will be canceled 11/30.

* I would have liked to officially coin the term goddish, to replace both god and goddess and for use in cases of gray-area divinity, but just learned it's been done.

Happy Hour at Stop Smiling

2009-10-27T16:22:00Z

Happy Hour Yoga at the Stop Smiling Storefront

Beginning this Monday, November 2nd, Happy Hour Yoga will convene at the Stop Smiling space in Wicker Park. Thanks, JC, for this great community space to practice. 1371 N Milwaukee is walking distance from the Division or Damen Blue Line stops, and near 'bout across the street from the late Walt Whitman space [nostalgic music here]. Happy Hour in Wicker Park meets every Monday 6-7pm.

View Larger Map

ALSO: Happy Hour Yoga in Pilsen has grown into a new space, too.
Join us Wednesdays 6:30-7:30pm at the 1856 S. Throop storefront.
If you aren't a driver or biker, the Ashland, Blue Island and 18th St. buses work just fine.

View Larger Map

Sincere but not solemn, Happy Hour Yoga is a community vinyasa yoga practice (cash donation$5-15).
Both beginners and broke folk are welcome. Some mats provided, bring one if you have one. It's fun.

Why Chicago Didn't See my Underpants

2009-10-23T13:09:00Z

Luke, my "little" brother, and the giant thing he made for muddin'. Bill, my "big" brother, speeding through Chicago

Recently a friend pointed out to me that my mother has a lot of real estate here on the blog. (Hi Mom, I'm working on Thanksgiving, calm down.) I figure the widespread having of mothers makes it a universal topic, but you know what's more universal? Brothers. Because brothers you can pick up along the way. Most of us have lots, if we're lucky. My first brother, Luke, was born when I was 2. He's a big giant man now, and lives in Mississippi near bout my mama. He's the best mechanic in the South, and holds the Guinness for Most Efficient Use of the Spoken Word. Dude can lead 10 men in the emergency repair of a hydro-electric precipitator without uttering three syllables. He's that good. I've seen the house he built with his two hands, and when I gushed to him in amazement at the perfect mitres on every oak moulding, he stunned me with a full sentence: How the hell you know what a mitre is? Luke is not on Facebook. He got married in jeans. I've never had his phone number, but I'd bet my last Pellegrino that if I asked him for a hand, he'd rub one cleanish and offer it to me.

Luke's my only blood brother, but there are more Other Brothers*. Of those, Bill I actually grew up with. He had about 5 years and 20 inches on me, called me Half Pint, and regularly spun me in the air against my will. We all remember the story differently, but to me it was something like, some kid from church kept showing up at our house round dinnertime. When we started picking him up for school, I knew he was ours. When we started getting him out of bed for school, I knew we were his.

My sister and I had a little singing group at church with a girl who had Bill by the heartstrings, so Bill joined my very front-and-center family by teaching himself to rap about Jesus. Now I mean rap as in the language that black people** speak. Bill is more black now than he was then, given, but Bill now is white like a golf ball**. (In the spirit of David Letterman, I would like to announce, preemptively, that there is a VHS tape of this, of Bill rapping for Jesus, and me, Karen, singing a Michael W. Smith song in a straw hat and stonewashed jeans. It is not ironic. It is sincere as all get out.) Lucky for Bill, Dena didn't mind his bad rap, and married him anyway. This was long before I began greeting engagement announcements with an "Oh. Weird. Why?" (later shortened to "Oww"), so I gleefully led a team of girls in the blessed practice of tossing flowers day of.***

Things went haywire when Bill went to college, and we lost touch. Last week I had dinner with him at Italian Village downtown. He was in Chicago speaking, presumably without the aid of a backbeat, to some youths. He does that now, speaks to youths. The plan was to get as up to date as we could, after more than a dozen years of quiet. Anticipating a lift and twirl over Bill's head, I arrived in pants, to avoid a 360 degree view to visitors of Millennium Park - one that could turn parabolic panorama if he chose to do it in front of the Bean. He waived from the East side of Michigan avenue and I checked my bag was zippered shut as his towering figure came toward me. Hugged. Feet lifted 6 inches, and... no twirl. I was saved. But not because of the pants. I was saved from centripetal face-flushing because Bill crossed the street having already done something that very few long time loved ones do: he had allowed me to grow up.

Bill did not expect me to be the girl he remembered. He didn't talk to me like he knew what I was going to say. And he didn't express shock at the gap between the present and the past. What I want to know first of all is: who taught him not to do that? It's tough business, allowing our friends and family to change, and although its probably the only thing we can count on them to do, I know of no structure which teaches us to make room for it. What a gift it was to be honored with the space to become completely and utterly myself. Bill made no assumptions, no judgments and no recommendations for improvement. In my last post, I implied that unconditional love is only possible when we know every square inch of a person down to their closeted ugliness. I'd like to amend that by adding that it could also happen in the case that we let ourselves know nothing. I sense that I could have been the most unmannered A-hole or superfreaked babbler Bill had ever seen, and he would have chuckled and said, "it's so cool to see you."

Bill's welcome taught me two important things, one old and one new: that everything changes, and that letting it do so is pure love. I've been looking at my older relationships, checking to see if I'm trapping my loved ones in gripping an outdated version of who they are, and I confess, I'm guilty of asking some to replay long-dead characters just to interact with my fantasy of what used to be. I'm gonna take a pencil and just make a note on the do-to list right here and now: cut it out. My friends and students and dearest dears each deserve the opportunity to grow out of the suit I met them in, and THANK GOD my oldest friends have all done that for me. The holidays are coming (I said it, I'm sorry) and I'm (almost) looking forward to trying this out on my relatives. What would happen if I got to know them fresh, as new people? If I allowed myself to be surprised by something I've never seen before? I mean, Luke could be leading focus groups on cosmetic dentistry by now, really. (Will report come January.)

In the meantime, one way to get skilled at surfing the changing current is to practice our practices, watching the breath, the body, the mind and the heart rise and fall and rise again. Each cycle is different, each breath unique. If I get bored, I'm probably not really watching. Your inner workings may not be a 3-ring flea circus****, but they're still a pretty good show. If you're into watching your tiny brain wiggles go back and forth, join me this weekend in Oak Park for Sound Mind Acupuncture or Happy Hour Yoga in PIlsen at our !NEW! location. (Thanks, Megin!) Wednesdays 6:30-7:30pm through the double doors at 1856 S. Throop, $5-15 (or not), for a grand ole time with other breathers. I am also available for private yoga sessions anytime you like. Maybe.

Love to my brothers and sisters too numerous to count.
PEACE

*Lucas, the brother I met in college, is a story that will one day be rendered in novella format. Love you, man. Another Bill, first love turned brother, is a someone I will soon be loosening my past life grip on. Working on it. Jose, the gay roommate brother, is a prize-winner in both tolerance and endurance. Several others currently undergoing brothering initiation.
**Eminem and Tiger Woods notwithstanding.
***Instead of outgrowing, traumatizing or divorcing each other, Bill and Dena made a little girl and are living happily ever after, by all accounts. A miracle if I ever saw one.
****mine are, by the way.

Psycho, drugs, the real me.

2009-10-06T14:29:00Z

(brain on drugs)

Did I tell you guys I was crazy? Long story short, I had a bit of a rocky time of it, let's say, ages 3-28. Nevermind the trouble, I did a very thorough job of trying on various solutions. These include but are not limited to: psychotherapy (meh), art therapy (a fun if not effective release valve), hypnotherapy (there's something to it, but I can't remember what it is), relocation therapy (effective for up to 14 whole days), dialectical behavioral therapy (loosely disguised Buddhist training, works if you work it), support groups (I would rather be supported by those who share my best qualities than those who share my worst, as it turns out), various techniques which, in retrospect, can be described with words ending in "-ism" (ugh), and more to the point I am about to make here in a minute, psychiatric medications (wowiezowie, drugs!).

I bring up psych meds to tell you a story. Let the record reflect that I do not advise ANYONE to accept or refuse drugs of any sort for any reason. That is in no way what I am getting at. What I want to tell you is that, after lots and lots of trying to fix myself in all kinds of ways, I got the idea at some point that maybe I wanted to let go of the meds. (That was, coincidentally, roundabout the minute I lost my student health insurance.) If one word could describe my journey on psychiatric pharmaceuticals, it would be: expensive. And the money was only part of the cost. I'm still not sure how it helped or harmed me, but because I had new skills and felt ready to rely on them, I decided to go unmedicated.

After a 6 month wean, the day came that I took no more medicine. I'd read online that this particular drug reported a wicked withdrawal, but just as a sunbather does not fear the coming windchill factor, I didn't really think it could be so bad, particularly since I saw it coming. Suffice to say, that proved shortsighted. Because here's the deal, folks - trying to get a cognitive grip on one's own psychology is like trying to fix a broken bicycle while riding it. (And it is really hard to get off the mind bike in order to get a clear view, by the way - possible, but difficult.) In two weeks, I lost my phone and 3 sets of keys, no-showed a job interview, saw dead people, left water in the tub, fire on the stove and the garbage halfway down the stairs, until I found myself in the automotive section of the Kmart, crying on a car battery, wondering if there were in fact messages being sent through the fluorescent lighting directly to my cortex or should I maybe get a refill. No amount of study could have prepared me for that. Thankfully, because I had some mindfulness tools in my belt, I was able to maintain a small amount of consciousness that the problem was a matter of chemicals alone. Even so, I often found myself saying, "I'm not really like this, really."

What did I mean that I wasn't really like that, you ask? Was it not me acting crazy, saying crazy and feeling crazy? What I meant at the time was that I usually acted, said and felt a different flavor of crazy* than the one pictured above. The personality that you and I know as "Karen Faith" didn't exist for weeks. It became apparent that even the regular crazy I was accustomed to wasn't really me, either, and never was. The "really me" part has nothing to do with brain chemistry, is beyond it, impervious to it. As I observed myself thinking and feeling and acting in ways which were utterly foreign to me, I began to get the idea that maybe everyone else was subject to their chemistry, too. Maybe every personality was simply the result of a particular distribution of substances in the brain, and if that was true, how could I really know myself, or anyone else?

The good and useful part of this little freak out showed up when my response to obnoxious people suddenly mellowed. It was obvious that most people were not in control** of their own responses, and created their lives and identities primarily via auto-pilot (usually, as I had been, totally unaware of it). Quiet people, loud people, jumpy people, warm people, candid people, suspicious people - they all had become what their chemicals allowed them to become. A jerk was no longer a jerk to me, but someone who's mind was shaken and stirred differently than my own. It became easier to overlook small offenses, and inconveniences were easy to forgive when I remembered what a scatterbrained freakshow I'd been for those weeks. So I experienced a period of tolerance. Like everything else in the world, that was temporary. I am grateful for it, though, because I can revisit it as needed. If I remember to.

On the flip side, I began to understand that the most essential part of myself was not connected to my personality. My spirit had no hand in the creation of my identity, that was all sciency stuff. I realized that the infinite part of me was, maybe, exactly the same as the infinite part of you. This is tough, I admit. If the things that make me love someone - the way they smile, their sense of humor, the gestures they adorn with the tone of their voice - are not really truly who they are, then what is this collection of things that I love? And, equally unnerving, does anyone know or love the real me? Who would love me if my outsides and actions were different, if I were (even more) paranoid and forgetful, anxious and fidgety, blaming and loudmouthed? My mom would say that only she and Jesus love the real me, and I might just take that answer, except*** for the facts that 1) no way is your love unconditional, Mama - don't make me prove it to you, and 2) as if fact number one weren't a plenty bratty thing for me to say, I must add, you can't speak for Jesus.

I don't want to say that unless you love the most essential self you don't love at all, but I bet that is really where it's at. The good news is, if you can love that pure, infinite part, you can love it in anyone, because everyone's got it. Being able to love at the spiritual level is like being 0-, the universal blood donor. (I suspect most of us are more like 0+****) I think only a few have gotten the trick down. Maybe Jesus, Ghandi, Buddha, Amma, and all dogs.

BY THE WAY: I can say without question the most helpful thing I did while coming off of the medicine was a 3-week energy cleanse with my mentor, Laryl Fett, which included vibrational therapy, tuning forks, earthy teas and lots of tiny rituals, prayers and good vibes. I'm doing another one in November. Laryl has created a 3-week group session we can do as a community. If you'd like to join me, please send an email and I'll give you all the info. it's a spiritual retreat you can do at home, and totally worth the ride. Plus we can hang out together and talk new age 'shop'.

ALSO: I am now accepting new private yoga students. Nearly fully recovered and ready to be of service. If you or someone near you has a hankering for yoga, please drop me a line for at-home private or group sessions: karenfaith@yogaforthemoment.com

*for the record, the withdrawal side-effects did not reflect anything similar to the symptoms which prompted the prescription in the first place.

**I am not making a case that people are not responsible for their actions. I am saying that we can choose to live intentionally, but if we do not, we are simply reacting to a chain of events in the mind. Some know they can make better choices, and some seem not to be aware of this yet. Either way, we are not trapped by our chemistry, we are simply swayed by it.

***only my best friend Rene has any idea how crazy and unpalatable I can be, so really her love is the only one that counts so far. And, ok, my mom. Though, Mom, I assure you, you aint seen nuthin, and if I am the woman you taught me to be, you never will.

****I don't know what I'm talking about.

New Stuff

2009-09-29T01:44:00Z

Hello friends,

Due to the inability of hosts Carrie and Kristen to achieve omnipresence before Wednesday, Happy Hour Yoga in Pilsen will be canceled this week only. Those wishing to practice yoga are encouraged to email me for a session or hold your horse still next week. If you or someone you know is considering attendance this Wednesday, do something about it. Friends don't let friends show up to stuff that isn't happening.

Some of you know that I have been on divinely ordered sabbatical, as indicated by the inimitable back injury which came upon me this summer. I'm happy to report that 1) I'm all better and 2) I will soon have an honorary doctorate in Floor-Based Reclining Techniques. While I am happy to be teaching again, I am even more delighted to reunite with the singing bowls. Starting next weekend,you'll enjoy healing vibe pairings, including Singing Bowls, Yin Yoga (grandma-proof yoga) and acupuncture, just like old times.

You are invited to join me for any and all of these grand events at a new location right off the Blue Line Austin stop in Oak Park. For those who think Oak Park is far, or a hassle to get to, please keep in mind that your friend Karen Faith has never in her life possessed a drivers license, suffers from recurring motion sickness, is an impatient brat, and gets to Oak Park just fine. Regularly, even. 15minutes from downtown. Not lying.

Even so, Oak Park may not be where we meet again. I'll happily come to your place for private 1-on-1 or group yoga sessions at your convenience**.

One more thing: I'm gathering participants for a 3-week energy detox this Fall. This is not the kind of thing where you starve yourself,get diarrhea and want to cry all day, no offense to those who dig that sort of thing. The experience is a collective practice created by my mentor,master of good-witchery Laryl Fett, including energy therapies, tiny rituals,teas, color baths and meditations intended to improve our happiness and potency in the world. Long story. If you're curious, let me know and I'll tell you everything. It's fun.

Best blessings to you, yes you.

Karen

---

Energy Flow
with Kate Wester, MaryJane Neumann, Xie Ling Welch and Karen Faith
Sunday, October 4th, 9am-12pm

Join us for this collaborative workshop blending ancient wellness practices with contemporary energy and warmth. Enjoy the community experience combining qi gong,gentle yoga, vibrational healing and a stress-reducing acupuncture treatment with flower essences and energy cleansing. Participants in the reclining circle come in comfortable dress for the revitalizing perk of qi gong, yin yoga, a few well-placed acupuncture needles and the other-worldly hum of huge crystal singing bowls.

Registration: this workshop is part of the Oak Park Arts Retreat Weekend
To register, go to www.oakparkartsdistrict.com, or go to the www.yogatrekcenter.com homepage and follow the links to the retreat.
Cost: $65
Location: Yoga Trek, 911 S. Lombard Ave, Oak Park, just steps away from the Blue Line Austin stop, or the Eisenhower Expressway

---

SOUNDMIND ACUPUNCTURE

Former creators of Healing Lounge at Ruby Room in Wicker Park, Karen Faith and Maryjane Neumann reunite to offer this balancing and soothing acupuncture reatment combined with the healing vibrations of crystal singing bowls.

Sundays, Oct 25th and Nov 8th, more dates to come.
3-4pm at Yoga Trek in Oak Park (same as above)
$40

---

*arguable.
**(If you're as financially secure as I am, bring your broke ass to Happy Hour Yoga Mondays or Wednesdays, where friends have been known to get yoga for a bag of very tasty chips. Details on the sidebar.)

The Hard On of Learning

2009-09-20T18:18:00Z

If I were to make a diagram of the learning curve, I think it would look something like an exponential growth pattern, crawling along the x-axis and then erecting itself in a great swing of momentum. Like healing from an incapacitating back injury, or getting drunk on an empty stomach, the first part is barely noticeable, and then before you know it, you're doing the macarena with someone you have just met*. It seems a lot of processes share a similar, orgasmic shape when measured from the outside. The shape that's more interesting to me is the shape of the internal process, which I'm fairly certain looks like the kind of maze where you go everywhere there is to go, but only because you have no options. (Ah, thank you Google: a labyrinth.)

Let's assume, for the sake of convenience, that there is a god and that god is in charge. Given that, it would appear that god has a curriculum for me which involves digging through every corner of my being, with zero choice in the matter. It even seems there is a prescribed order of operations, though no time limit, no skipping steps, and no going backwards. I am more certain of the existence of this inescapable curriculum than I am of god, for the record. Here's why.

I started learning to play the violin when I was 7. I was very excited about this from the moment I heard there would be violin classes at school to the moment I understood that they would occur before school, at 6:30 in the morning. I loved the violin, but it was my mother who got me out of bed. That we know. Before long, the enjoyment of playing outweighed the pain of arriving at school before dawn, and at that point it was difficult to get me to stop practicing (many tried**). A while later, when the concept of the seasonal recital was introduced, I was again troubled. My mother diligently stepped in to assist. My love for music waxed and waned according to my perception of suffering and pleasure, and my mother (hi Mom, I will call you back, oh crap, Happy Anniversary) regularly applied the board of education to the seat of learning, so to speak.

Once in college, I had to find out how to do this myself, which is where the learning curve began to reveal it's exponentiality. The deeper I got into it, the more excruciating, and more rewarding, it became. Every lesson pounded full frontal self-knowledge, which was somewhat of a drag. I needed to learn Brahms, I thought, not how to take responsibility for my fear, say. What happened was this. I got really distracted by art, because it was super and did not confront me so much right away. Think, the difference between a first date and couples counseling. Mistaking the ease and pleasure of my new practice for a sign that it was my true soul mate, I broke up with music and moved in with art.

I got deja vu. My very first struggle with art echoed the same stunning ring as the last one with music. I found myself almost precisely where I'd left off, let's call it Lesson #17. (I'd give you a real example here, but those are confidential, and for good reason: internal, god-made curriculums unearth the kind of tangled, soul-shaking stuff that folks maybe rightfully require payment to hear.) Suffice to say that my progress hit a speed bump. Because I am in some ways, Jonah***, I broke up with art and moved in with yoga. And this summer, getting walloped in the back turned out to be my whale, the place where I stared at the ceiling for a month going, "damn, I'm really going to have to finish Lesson #17, aren't I."

What's odd is that I nearly decided to break up with yoga and move in with a desk job, thinking I could pretend I didn't know what was coming. I didn't. I decided to go poly-amorous, which requires more couples counseling than the alternative, as it turns out. I've started to learn some marketable skills lately, with the help of a generous tutor (many thanks, Tom), and because I've taken up a fiercely engaging learning process again, I am now looking at the assignment sheet for Lesson #17. Again. Because that's the one I'm on. And there is no way around it. Subject irrelevant. I could be learning German, astronomy, or cross-stitch. I would still be on Lesson #17. It could in fact be the entire point of this incarnation.

Of course, I haven't been completely idle since those days crying through my recitals, and it's possible that I'm not exactly where I was, but slightly to the left of there. Someone once told me, "life isn't a circle, it's a spiral." When it seems like I'm back where I started, it isn't because I'm going nowhere, it's because I've come around. I'm doing Lesson #17, version 3.1. This kindof screws up my labyrinth curriculum idea. So the labyrinth has 3 dimensions. (Illustration still rendering.) It is very difficult to represent one's life path graphically, as it turns out. And even more difficult to explain without a visual aid. So it goes.

Today I feel happy about version 3.1. I'm doing a better job this time, with more tools and more help. Thanks, everyone. You are the only reason this is working.

*not the same as a stranger, who is someone you have not met, and strange

**irresistible Dune reference:
"They tried and failed?"
"They tried and died."

***from "Jonah and the Whale," y'all.

Yoga, finally

2009-09-08T15:02:00Z

I always expect one of you to alert me to the fact that Yoga, For The Moment very rarely discusses yoga classes, yoga teachers, or yoga postures. None of you ever has. Thank you. I am fully aware that the discussion of yoga here has broadened to include whatever it is that sprouts up. This is not entirely inappropriate, as spiritual practice is not limited to 60-90 minutes per week, hopefully. And yoga is, kindof, everything, and everything yoga. It just isn't possible to contain it with those kind of boundaries, or any other kind in my imagination. If you disagree, I will be happy to receive your argument in the Argument Reception Area, during the appointed Argument Reception Time.

That said, this entry is an undisguised announcement of my upcoming yoga class schedule. Amazing. I am teaching again. I am not spending extended lengths of time in Karnapidasana, Viranchyasana, or Viparita Chakrasana, but let's be serious: nobody needs to. Class with me has always been a choose-your-own-adventure sequence; choices have now increased in quality rather than quantity.

Note that 3 of these classes are located in homes, and are cheap. If you are feeling friendly and broke, come on over. The rest of you are welcome to be as introverted and spendy as you wish, at the more formally structured spaces at Studio L'Amour and Namaskar.

HAPPY HOUR YOGA
ROGERS PARK $9 cash only
1125 W Farwell unit D3 (Red Line to Loyola or Morse, buses 147 or 155)

2 FRIDAYS ONLY: 9/18, 9/25 7-8pm
yoga class for everyone at Jingwoan's place

STUDIO L'AMOUR
WEST LOOP GATE $15 packages available
939 W Randolph, 3rd floor
(Halsted bus, other buses)

SUNDAYS 5-6:15pm Rejuvenation Yoga
"oh she may be weary...wearing that same old miniskirt dress, but when she gets weary you try a little tenderness."

HAPPY HOUR YOGA
EAST VILLAGE $5-15 cash only, pay what you can
923 N Noble, 4R (Milwaukee bus, Ashland bus, Division Blue line)

MONDAYS 6-7pm
yoga class for neighbors of Eckhart Park

NAMASKAR
LAKEVIEW $15 packages available
3946 N. Southport Ave(Ashland bus)

TUESDAYS 7:45-9pm Yin Yoga
Bring me your injured, expecting, weary or contemplative - all bodies welcome to this gentle, meditative class.

HAPPY HOUR YOGA
PILSEN $5-15 cash only, pay what you can
1623 W.17th, apt 1 (Ashland bus, 18th St Pink Line)

WEDNESDAYS 6:30-7:30pm
yoga class for friends of Pilsen

Known

2009-08-30T18:18:00Z

My first house, 204 Ross Blvd, Hattiesburg, MS

I've been thinking about honesty and identity and spiritual intimacy. It occurs to me that I may not have told you much about how I turned out like this. Risking indulgent autobiography, I will give you a little history. Just a little.

My parents were very active in our Southern Baptist Church, and so was I then, by default. When I was a child, the church and the lordjesuschrist were meaningful to me primarily as a terror. I was afraid and confused about what those stories meant, and, inevitably, a bit misguided by the example of some. It wasn't until the conversion experience I had when I was older, after I'd enacted the over-achiever's runaway plan (I went to college at 15), left the church and become a more dedicated sinner, all dirty and full of evil (read: incapacitatingly depressed and self-destructive), that I began to search urgently for a god who might save me from what I knew of my insides. When I heard the gospel story again, that I had already been cleansed of every ugliness that burdened me, my bruised and thundering 17-year old heart wanted nothing more than to devote myself to presence in this state of grace. I lived and breathed an immensely sincere devotion for like, an entire year. There are things about that time that I still revisit, sometimes as memory and sometimes as experience.

Laryl, my mentor, told me this summer about my little handicap of requiring intense pain to see the divine at work around me. This was the case back then, too, and was probably the only thing which made my conversion possible. I mean, at one point my minister actually said to me, "I think you're using the church for something it's not really for. God does love you, and Jesus has taken your sin away, but I think you need a spiritual ICU. Or a psychiatrist." He was right, bless him, and actually found for me the best therapist I've ever had (of many, friends, so so many).

Those days were saturated with prayer and longing. My morning prayer time saw the sunrise on the porch of my hot pink house in Mississippi. It was the best little 2 bedroom, with a garden and a swing for $295 a month. I lived alone then, and I remember I'd just learned to put fresh ginger in my tea, a belly trouble remedy which remains a ritual elixir for me. I would take my tea out on the porch with my tiny Bible and read Psalm 139 over and over, sometimes singing it to myself. At nighttime I would repeat the whole thing, adding cigarettes to the tea ceremony, and a few pitches to the lower end of my vocal register. On especially alto occasions, I would sing 142, "Out of the depths do I cry to thee oh Lord..." moving myself to tears. And this shit went on for months. It was great.

This summer at the Woodside Church, the dead of night visits to the bell tower reminded me of that devotion. I experienced again the magical way the most solitary space can be filled with presence, and I spent many hours trying to discover what or who that presence was. I can't remember now if I told yall, but a wonderful funny thing happened one day when I found myself explaining that sensation as what one might feel upon hearing their original name,after losing their memory and taking another. That sense of hearing the forgotten name, the sensation of being known beyond even my own comprehension (which is the subject of many beautiful mythologies, by the way) still shakes me, the way my favorite Psalm did.

In yoga class, I often quote the description of luminosity from the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. (See where I rambled on that one back in March.) This is because I think that to acknowledge the truest self is a confrontation with honesty that transforms humans. To take this a step further, and imagine that there is ANOTHER consciousness which can also see and know the very truest self, prompts a depth of intimacy and humility next to which I can only imagine nakedness seems a laughable costume. I still have Psalm 139 memorized, with the exception of a few stanzas about slaying his enemies that I always skipped*. It helps me remember that I can't run from myself, and that I don't have to. Maybe that's all I need to know. In case you haven't gotten much into the Psalms, start here. This is the best one, really.

Psalm 139

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me
You know when I sit and when I rise
you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down
you are familiar with all my ways

Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O Lord

You hem me in—behind and before
you have laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me
too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?

If I go up to the heavens, you are there
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn
if I settle on the far side of the sea

even there your hand will guide me
your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,"

even the darkness will not be dark to you
the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

For you created my inmost being
you knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made
your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth

your eyes saw my unformed body
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!

Were I to count them
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake
I am still with you.

...(kill kill kill the haters I hate, etc)...

Search me, O God, and know my heart
test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me
and lead me in the way everlasting.

*(I like King David a lot, and know he was a great artist, a sincere heart, and maybe a polyamorous bisexual - like most people I adore - but he was a killer, an adulturer and an unbelievable narcissist as well, so I reserve the right to give honor where and only where honor is due).

B.Y.O.Hero

2009-08-19T13:50:00Z

Wonderful news - I have left home. Not only have I left, but I have done so alone, without the assistance of a driver, helper or walking stick, as those tools are now obsolete! A fine day it is, when a simple liberty like walking out of doors alone can be savored like an exclusive privilege. Carrying the computer was troubling, but the taste of independence proved more delicious than the Cuban sandwich that lured me. It will be some weeks yet before I am free of the knot in my back, but today I am free enough to walk 1.5 blocks, and that is great news.

There are some thanks in order, and they are for you. You who have smothered me in your good wishes, emails, foodstuffs, cards, books, dvds, gifts (including an ETCH-A-SKETCH!) and visits - may my gratitude reach out and kiss you three times on the cheeks of your choice. There is no better thing than to be cared for at just the right time, and this has been that time for me. While I am still a bit slow, and unable to bend forward with any ease or precision, I would like to announce that I am now in need of a person to whom I may be helpful. If you are out there, and need a word of encouragement, a teatime companion or other low-impact assistance, please tell me about it. There is no better medicine than caring for another person, and I will heal much faster if I can be of service. I just remembered this last night.

I was on the phone with someone who has been a surprisingly present and solid support to me over the last 2 months of various and sundry difficulties including, but not limited to 3 events worthy of deep grief, a fractured and poorly casted thumb, a sister's baby daddy drama, a conceptual dilemma concerning time based art practices and the existence of god, several job losses, recurring night terrors, a spontaneously sparked and snuffed out romance, the death of Michael Jackson, an armpit rash, an issue regarding graphic scoring practices in contemporary music via planetary transits, 68 bad hair days in a row, and the projectile architect incident (aka the back injury). This friend of mine began talking to me about his concerns, and maybe for the first time, I realized that his summer has been at least as tumultuous as mine, very likely more, and he has been present for me each and every day, listening and listening and listening, and never once telling me to shut the hell up (excepting occasions of self-depricating or destructively hopeless talk). My friend, let's call him Chris, was so giving and attentive that I may have assumed the troubles weighing on him weren't weighing on him very heavily, but last night I realized that I'd gotten that mixed up. It wasn't because Chris' problems were less troubling that he was able to support me, it was because he supported me that his problems were less troubling.

Some years ago, when I was doing that part of growing up marked by the realization that one must take care of onesself, that there are no knights in shining armor waiting in the wings for a cue to rescue, I got the idea that life was a B.Y.O.Hero event. It is tough, accepting that I have to conjure the saving grace within myself, that no one can heal me but me, and I think I got bent out of shape about it back then, primarily because I didn't think I'd ever have the guts to be the Hero that could save a wreck like me. That is why we practice, because I think most of us lack the faith that we can pull our own weight, at least not while we're carrying all that freaking baggage. The trunks and cases and sacks we're hauling require a complex system of pulleys, casters and ratchets to make the trip, and we know now, thanks to Aristotle, that the employment of deus ex machina is weak, at best, because a true plot resolution must arise internally to have any resonant vigor or integrity whatsoever. Why does the last-minute, crane-lowered savior not seem to hold water? Because it does not happen like that off stage, and no one's life is improved by hoping it will.

That said, I have felt recently that you have been my miraculous hero. I told a friend that I felt like the love and prayers and help that have come to me this week were in fact a deus ex machina, an unlikely and unprompted savior swooping in waving a confetti-spraying magic wand. She pointed out that this is not true. The plot device Aristotle criticized was so shunned for coming from outside of the tangled mess of the story, rather than rising up from within it. She explained that your help has come because of the investment I have made in you over the years and months and hours that my plot has thickened, and it is only logical that because I have nurtured our relationship that it would be strong enough to hold me if and when I lost my grip. Every good magician knows that magic is made of illusion which require diligent practice to create. Nothing spooky happens. It's not a miracle, it's math.

I have not taken as many math classes as most people, having completely skipped high school and buried my head in art and music throughout college, so I may be unclear on this. But it seems to me that it is a good practice to be my own hero by generating kindness, extending a hand so that I will remind you of your inner hero, and your hand will extend back, and that all the arms reaching back and forth will weave a safety net for us. It's true that I have to draw the god out of my inner machine, but it isn't true that I can do it alone. You've taught me how by watching you, and soon one day I'll show you that same magic trick when you forget it, and both of us will suffer a little less.

Thank you.

Help

2009-08-09T21:06:00Z

Dear friends,

The day I left to return to Chicago, I was in an accident. I have been in bed for 9 days, barely able to move after sustaining the most severe injury of my life thus far, a blow to the left side of my back which has caused a massive muscle spasm. Everything hurts. I'm getting better, little by little, but will not be able to teach yoga again for a while, no one knows how long. That being my only source of income, I am in a situation right now, looking at the calendar, seeing rent coming up, not knowing how this will work.

For the record, I have no idea who reads this blog, and am not able to see the names or addresses of my subscribers, so there are times when I write to you as this unknown entity, a kind of prayer to an invisible god. I haven't written for a few reasons. The first being that I have spent most of my time on heavy pain relievers, and the second that I had little to say that didn't sound like whining. I have now realized, again, that I do not write because I have anything important to say. I write because I must write. And if you don't like it, you can unsubscribe. Simple.

My spirits are really low. Going to the bathroom is an ordeal. I want to reach out and ask for help, but don't even know how to ask, or what to ask for. I need money and a new body. Last time I checked, those things do not come without a lot of work, which is one thing I can't do much of right now. What happens when things get really tough like this? Is there some kind of safety net for us?

It just occurred to me that the safety net is our spiritual practice. Shit. I hate that answer. Not only because it doesn't pay the rent, but because I've been definitely non-spiritual this week, doped up on hydrocodone and cyclobenzaprine, cursing life. I stopped taking the meds yesterday, because I couldn't stand myself looking so much like a junkie, nodding out over my lunch. So now that my head is back on straight, it is all the more evident that my heart, my spirit and my body need some major repair.

I could also use a fundraiser.

Striking Out

2009-07-25T18:42:00Z

There are 5 days left in the belfry, and I believe I will miss the bitter smell of old wood and pigeon remnants, my trembling body on unfixed ladders, the unmatched stillness of dawn. I have prayed for the waking of my own heart, the liberation of those in between spaces of being, for the manifestation of truth for all those within earshot, and beyond. The letters of support and connection that so many of you have sent are treasured.

lifted and struck

2009-07-18T20:11:00Z

"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that
moment I was lifted and struck."

Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

Bell Fail

2009-07-15T17:30:00Z

Leah recording the bells from the roof

I missed the midday bell on Monday. I wasn't going to tell you, I admit. There is not a good story behind it. I simply made a mistake. High noon came and went, and the tolling of the bell did not occur until after the correct moment had passed. I failed to do what I intended to do, and for a few moments, I wanted to quit everything, to stop the piece, to give up my practice and go home, get drunk, break my promises and call it over. Instead, I sat on the steps of the sanctuary and tried to breathe, to get my head around all the hyper-reactivity and be a grown up. It seemed to me that I needed to do something drastic in order to demonstrate how much my failure hurt me. I feared that to let it go by without marking the event would mean that it didn't matter, and I needed to know that it mattered.

I remember a jury I had to play back in music school, in 1995. I had just started practicing meditation, and was counting on my new skill to magically induce total focus and presence during my performance. I was playing some un-noteworthy Baroque dance on viola, and had prepared it adequately, I suppose, but I had a bit of performance anxiety, and often got a little shaky onstage, which is to say, I usually covered the lower half of my instrument in tears while I played. That day, standing in the small recital hall in front of a handful of professors, I took to noticing my breath, my body, feeling grounded. The first few minutes went pretty well. And then I made a mistake. It is a mercy that I do not remember exactly what the mistake was anymore, because I think I did remember it for a few years. I made this mistake, and then I kept thinking of the mistake. I tried to rewind my thoughts, to see where things went wrong, how it had happened, how it could have happened, replaying the sound of it in my head. This was a bigger mistake, because I was doing it while playing the rest of the piece, and I began to feel the salt water gathering in a little pool on my chin rest as the notes came though without life, without breath, just empty muscle memory. My teacher, Igor, gave me a look of disappointment, maybe. I couldn't say for sure because I would not have been able to see such a look from beyond the blinding light of the stage, but I felt it, and was outraged that he would shame me at a time like that, when I was clearly so broken by my own failure. I imagined that he felt he'd failed, too, that I embarrassed him in front of the other professors.

Earlier that year, Igor had me over for dinner at his house. His wife was in Russia, and he apologized that he would have to do the cooking. He brought fried red potatoes and bratwurst to the tiny, crooked kitchen table, where we'd already gotten going on a few pints of dark ale and half his box of Benson and Hedges. (This is an integral part of the legacy of artistic apprenticeship, I assure you. After a recital the following year, Igor announced, finishing a bottle of Stolitchnaya, the loss of his colleague to liver disease, "Alcoholism is the illness of our art form," he said, in an oddly triumphant embrace.) I remember only one exchange from dinner. He asked me pedagogically, "Karen, what makes a good teacher a good teacher?" This question seemed to be an invitation to be brilliant and insightful, and I took a few moments composing my answer before spilling some bullshit about languages of empathy. I'd barely gotten going when he said, "No. No, Karen. There is only one answer. A teacher is good if the student can PLAY. Tell me, what do I have to do to get you to play?"

Whatever it was, he hadn't done it before my jury. Whether I wanted him to see he was not at fault, or that my suffering outweighed his, I really showed everyone, by running offstage and sobbing audibly in the wings. He told me at my next lesson that I was going to have to grow up at some point. It hurt, like most truths, and Monday I heard him again. I'd love to tell you that I marched on with integrity and wisdom, having been humbled and taught by the pain of failure. But that's not what happened. Not yet anyway. I acted like a brat for a few hours, played the bells badly at sunset, and went to bed a mess. Today I'm here and human, and looking squarely at the fact of myself. I see that this is not a great story. But I'm starting to think that lack of greatness is important, too. Not because we need any more mediocrity, but as far as I can tell, most of us do not harbor a surplus of awareness about it. I tend to overlook, ignore or deny my failed attempts, meanwhile losing their spacious, simple wisdom.

I decided to write a letter to an imaginary successor, who would take over my practice of ringing the bells everyday at the sun and moon transits, and found myself expressing the need for vigilance. This brought me back to the story of Jesus (yes, that guy again) in the garden of Gethsemane, telling his disciples to keep watch, and coming back to find them asleep. He was disappointed, but he didn't send them home. And they didn't give up trying to be there for him. They stayed with him through the night and the next unfathomable day, making mistakes, maybe quietly obsessing about their mistakes, and walking alongside him anyway. We fall asleep sometimes. Even during our own devotion, our own dances, and we must wake ourselves from the dizzying rumination of our failure and move through the piece! Play every note, one at a time, with breath, with our living eyes open. I am trying.

Bell Save

2009-07-13T13:45:00Z

Leah peeks at the clockworks

Yesterday I swam around in doubt for most of the morning. I rang the bells with little ado, at 4:30 and 5:27am. Waking has become much easier. I feared it, and dreaded it, but it really hasn't been bothersome. I've heard about new mothers brushing off midnight nursing as something that doesn't occur to them as an inconvenience - it simply must be done, and they simply do it. There may be joy in doing it, or not, but something comes over them which takes a larger rule, and they walk forward. I have much the same feeling, and now that the moon transits are moving into the daylight hours, I feel a bit nostalgic about those most quiet, still nights up in the tower alone with the great something else.

In the last days I've had a bit of artistic postpartum depression, seeing this new baby as something which I don't mind feeding, exactly, but something I'm not sure why I brought into the world. It has forced me to observe my motivations for the direction of my life, the structures behind my choices, the meaning of my own being. I've worried that I have chosen something which is beyond my capability to even understand, much less nurture. I have chosen to create something invisible and immaterial, something which evaporates, something which is in fact not a thing. I've worried that it is not only a non-thing, but that it is nothing, that I am in a maternity ward with mothers and mothers-to-be, only I am a day-TV character who is holding an empty blanket in her arms hoping no one can tell she's a faker.

Yesterday, exactly 4 minutes before my scheduled strike at 1:00, I went to the great door of the sanctuary and began patting myself down, first curiously, and then feverishly, discovering the lack of keys in my pockets. I checked my studio, my room, the bathroom, no find. With two minutes remaining, I ran to the office for a spare. As I pounded the sanctuary door, Christy, who was outside sanding something I think she'd been sanding for 6 days, said, "they aren't here today." She reported later that the look on my face at that point was a look she knew well, from the inside. I ran into the kitchen, where Tony was making lunch. "I can't find my keys, I can't get into the tower." Tony dropped his utensils as Christy swept in behind me, "I've got the bathroom!" Tony dashed back to the studios, delivering instruction as he searched my usual paths. I ran up to my bedroom, again, upturning everything, again, hearing shouts downstairs.

"Who has seen keys?!"
"Rosie found keys this morning!"
"Where's Rosie?!"
"What'd she say?!"
"She had oatmeal!"
"Kitchen!"
"Karen! Kitchen!"

I snatched the cluster beside the toaster oven and ran to the tower, Leah scurried up behind me. At exactly 1:00pm, I struck the bottom octave and collapsed on the folding chair while Leah mopped up the tears of someone who had just escaped certain ruin. I survived. The most heartening revelation was that no one here was unclear on the urgency of the matter, and for about 70 seconds, the entire compound was unified in a single baby-saving gesture. There were other openings and lights I'm still processing, among them, the

need to superglue my keychain to my thumbcast.

The Immense Journey

2009-07-10T19:31:00Z

“I leaned against a stump at the edge of a small glade and fell asleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some commotion and outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in such a way that the glade was lit like some vast cathedral. I could see the dust motes of wood pollen in the long shaft of light, and there on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak. The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling’s parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing.

“The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery. The bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death. And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, for
midable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.

“There the black bird sat, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed. The sighing of the little birds died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so poignantly prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil things were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats, joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven for they were the singers of life, and not of death.”

Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

Crossing my fingers at the moon

2009-07-08T13:40:00Z

the chime mechanism in the bell tower

A small collection of sounds is gathering in my memory, and each day I try to grasp them a bit tighter, making marks with crayons on paper, so their vibrations are not lost. It helps a little, I guess, but the longing of loss may be our greatest common malady, and if we are to live presently, jumping from one now moment to the next, we may prepare ourselves for a life of disappearances. There is very little, if anything, that can be held in the hands, or the heart, which will remain.

I have an idea that our longing to grip the remnants of our experience is a way we reach, if clumsily, for the divine. Like buying something plastic out of the gumball machine, because there is this moment maybe, in the grocery store, when you find yourself staring at a box of corn Pops, vaguely recognizing some orchestral rendition of Your Love Is King on the overhead, and a man in a Cavaliers hat walks by talking about pork chops to a woman you imagine to be his woman, and the ocean and sky inexplicably open up and swallow your heart and mind, because why is god trying to talk to you at the Price Chopper in Troy, NY anyway? And you want to put it away, and get yourself back together, there is a list to take care of, and you make your way through check out without too much upset. But something happened back there in aisle 6, even if you don't know what, and so you put a quarter in the slot, and turn the crank, and this little bubble comes out with a prize in it, and its a tiny little crucifix on a black string, and nothing is making sense, but you know and you know that something else knows you know that there was a moment worth remembering, or getting back to later when it will be more clear and you can think better, and so you pocket the crucifix and walk back home. This happened to me a few days ago.

For a long time I would not keep any 3-dimensional objects unless they came to me in this kind of way, and so my apartment back home is somewhat empty except for very tiny things which would probably fly away without the weight of their dense and tangled stories. This got to be impractical, because it is hard to come by a shoe organizer with meaning and depth, and besides, how many boxes of very tiny things can a person keep on the Table of Very Special Things? Nonetheless I've kept this collection of small souvenirs with me in the hopes that they will carry the essence of so many accumulated moments of presence or divine intervention or maybe fabricated and sentimental hogwash (depending on the context), with me. The question I ask myself is: WHY? While I can't be sure of the reason, I am still hinged to this idea that our moments of presence are moments of contact with something much greater than ourselves, and that we long for it so irresistibly we'll do all manner of crooked-minded things to keep it tight in our hot little hands.

There is a concept in Calvinism of Irresistible Grace, which, in summary, states that if God calls you, you answer. I don't want to get into Calvinist issues of predestination or human choice at the moment, because I think this concept is more about divine power than philosophies of time and free will. To me, it is simply a demonstration of the wildly magnetic pull we feel as human beings to this Great Something Else, that when we sense that something else, we simply must follow it, and we usually do. Trouble is that we often go down wrong wrong roads in our attempts. (See: gumball machine crucifix.) I never tire of this old Zen story of the finger pointing at the moon. The students ask, "Teacher, what is the moon?" and the teacher replies by extending a finger up to the night sky. The students exclaim, "Ah! The moon is a finger!"

The art that we make here is a finger. The crayon markings of the bell sounds are a finger. The bells are a finger. The sublime spookiness of the empty sanctuary at 3am is a finger. My sweet and turbulent dreams of Chicago are a finger. But what is the moon?

The moon is the heart of my longing, and I may spend 60 more years longing, because most days the fingers I find are so wonderful I want to chop them off and put them in tiny boxes on my Table of Very Special Things. But today, I am holding on to the idea that I if am truly called to the moon, its okay to follow the pointers I see, picking up my souvenirs along the way, and one day I'll let them all go, and accept the irresistible call of grace.

27 days in the bell tower, Part 1

2009-07-03T14:11:00Z

The levers to the bells above. Thumbs not required.

July 4, 2009
5:22am, sunrise

I played a G. The bottom octave. I would have played more, but my impression is that normal human beings are sleeping at sunrise, particularly on Saturday, and my intention is not to tread on anyone's sugary dreams but my own. I have decided to climb the old ladder to the bell tower 108 times, fit nicely as fourfold over 27 days, July 4th until July 30th, during moments of transit - sunrise, high noon, sunset (a longer bell session moving into twilight) and high moon (check your local listings; this one is a bitch) - with an intention of calling all those who are in transit, in the in-between spaces of being, to freedom from, let's say, gray-area syndrome.

Gray-area syndrome is something I just made up, which covers afflictions like confusion, adolescence, blurry vision, fear of commitment, mediocrity, seasonal affective disorder, indecision, facebook, rut-cycles, graduate school, sleepwalking, addiction to memories, numb resignation, and not being able to get through whatever this is to whatever is coming next (the last one being particularly relevant to those in the bardo of becoming, meaning, um, ghosts). There are specific and powerful remedies for all of these little obstacles, I realize, but often those who suffer from gray-area syndrome, by definition, can not seem to grasp them. Are you thinking you are not sure if this could be you, but aren't ready to look into it? The bells now toll for thee.

I woke before my alarm, at 4:45am, afraid I might sleep through my own practice. Twilight had already brightened the stained glass above my bed, and I was relieved not to need the flashlight and umbrella that some anonymous angel placed on my desk for me, along with a hot pink flower in a bowl of water. It is good to be with others who support you in creating excruciating works that you yourself can not be sure are worth supporting. On Sundays here at CAC, we visit each others studios and offer eyes and ears of reflection to one another about our journeys of practice. Last week, when I told the group about the 27-day work I wanted to do, unsure whether it was art or devotion or heartbrokenness or something else, someone told me that the very idea of my project was already moving something around inside of her, and someone else said I should never doubt whether I should passionately walk forward into my destiny. Well, ok, she said, "don't think about that shit and just do it." And I let that feed me this week, all the way to this morning, this Independence Day at sunrise. Someone who had visited my studio Sunday knew it could be very dark this morning, and, if the last week were any indication, monstrously rainy, and offered me a hand. By the grace of god, or America, I didn't need that particular hand today. The floating fushia petals, however, woke a part of me I'd forgotten about. A sleepwalking part.

Not long ago, I came down the stairs from my apartment in Chicago to find a friend standing at my gate with a bunch of slightly wilted supermarket flowers, and while the context here is huge, this action was monumental to me, having weight and lightness like finding a $100 bill in the jar of change you were about to take to the Coinstar for groceries (which has also happened to me, by the way, because maybe its true that god takes care of fools and children and deeply passionate people with perpetual gray-area syndrome). It's possible my flower-bringer had no idea what he'd done, because when I clutched his neck, sobbing in disbelief, he assured me that getting flowers for a person is incredibly easy, doesn't cost much, and can be done with relatively little forethought. And he is right. Picking up flowers for someone takes about as much effort and money as getting yourself a tub of hummus, and can often be done at the same location. The power of the gesture is amplified by its intention, and by the presence in time and space that those actions line up and brighten so nicely.

Ages ago I used to practice music, and then performance art, and then yoga, which are all the same to me, not just in that they demand the use of my right thumb, but in a certain way, ultimate way, that they are each practices of presence and awareness. I believe that is all that is required to see miracles and experience transformation, to create a rich spiritual life. I am reminded now of a Bible verse, because sometimes I have these little hauntings from my spiritual upbringing which challenge me to expand my scope. It is from Micah: "He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" I think the justice and mercy part is a bit of a no-brainer, but this walking humbly with your god business is pretty much presence and awareness, which, albeit simple, is no small order. The way I see it, walking with god can happen in one very specific location only (the judges do not accept "along the beach as scenes from my life flash across a dark sky"), and that is here, now. I think the now moment is so very tiny, it is hard for us to get into it with our big awkward bodies and minds. And it is unfortunate that we spend so much time elsewhere, because I'm fairly certain that tiny tiny spot of now is actually the tiny tiny front door of god's studio apartment (he's a live/work space kind of guy), and he keeps it unlocked.

So when, before dawn this morning, I shuffled down the spiral staircase with my contacts and my toothbrush, every yawn gaping with doubt that a single strike of a churchbell could carry any value whatever to the thousands of people who would sleep through it anyway, I went to my studio, to check my email of all things, for a message from god* saying that I was on the right track with this. Instead I found a flower in a bowl of water, and I was so suddenly there, and so awake, and that was enough.

*I set up an email address for god some years ago, to help this along, but so far its all inbox, no outbox.

To the left, to the left

2009-07-02T13:29:00Z

Hye Soon gave me a big piece of paper, and things got bigger.

My apologies for the uncentered photos. Propped with cast, cameraphone in left hand... an ungraceful process.