Cultural Appropriation in Action

I’d like to highly recommend the following commentary from Bhakti Collective to all: Yoga Journal’s Abstract Impression of Bhakti. Although the author Kaushtuba das doesn’t frame it as such, in my mind it speaks to the kind of cultural appropriation that the Western “yoga scene” is unfortunately saturated with. I’m not in any way claiming to be innocent of any inappropriate appropriation myself (it’s hard to stay pure in this globalized world), but I do think that as mostly-Western-born-usually-white-almost-always-economically-privileged yoga students we do need to be aware of our responsibility in this arena. It can be extremely hard to discern between healthy cultural exchange and selfish cultural appropriation, but I believe that with self-education and reflection, we can at least make a start. What we seem to lack at the moment, however, (in the yoga world at least) is any method of accountability to those whose cultures we are learning/taking from.

Cultural appropriation and yoga. It’s a juicy topic, one that I have a hard time wrapping my head around sometimes. . . but it’s really a collective issue more than a personal one, so. . . any thoughts out there?

PS: Apologies to K-das if I may be taking his writing out of context! I simply found the topic a poignant starting point for a dialog I’m interested in having. Thx.

My Manduka Mat Broke My Toe

I think I actually broke my toe on a yoga mat. Not a brick, not a wall, not a 2×4, but a yoga mat. It takes a real spaz to pull off something like that.

The victim: my 2nd left distal phalange.

The culprit: the Eko mat.

The good news is that a somewhat broken toe doesn’t need much by way of treatment, and I can still hobble around and generally do yoga. The bad news is that vinyasas are out, as are Sun Sal B’s- - way too much maneuvering of the foot involved. And my whole lower body is achy from avoiding walking on my bad toe.

Sigh.

Gold Stars, Weird Yoga Injuries, and Snoopy Squirrels

To help keep me on track with my yoga in the absence of a teacher, Mr. Z devised a gold star system to reward me for good yogi behavior.  Just like a little kid’s chore chart–you know, brush your teeth every morning and evening without putting up a fuss and you get a dinosaur sticker on Saturday,  clean your bedroom four weekends in a row and get an ice cream sundae, that kind of thing.  For me, I have to do my full practice three times a week and at least partial practice three times a week to get one gold star.  I then accumulate gold stars, which I can exchange for dinner dates, back rubs, and the like.  I think it’s a pretty good deal.  So what if it’s completely ridiculous- - I like it!  Don’t hate on the inner preschooler.

So last week, week one, I got a gold star for doing full practice three days and partial practice three days, as planned.  This week . . . too bad there’s not a silver star option.  But it’s not too late!  My week ends on Saturday, so there’s still a chance to do one more full practice and earn my gold star.  Then I’m that much closer to an on-demand back rub.

I just hope my newest Weird Yoga Injury doesn’t hold me back tomorrow.  I stubbed my second toe on my schmancy Maduka Eko mat pretty hard whilst attempting a yoga photo shoot for my other blog and now blood is welling up at the nail bed.  God, I hope my toenail doesn’t fall off.  Methinks yoga and photography might just not go together. . .

And as long as I have my camera out,  for your viewing pleasure, a charming photo  of our resident squirrelly troublemaker:

Isn’t he cute?  Here he is again:

Yoga on CD: Help or Hinderence?

I’m thinking about buying the above led primary CD to help keep myself “on track” when I’m practicing at home.  I’m not sure whether this will be useful for my practice or if it will just be another “thing,” another object of attachment.  I don’t know.  I’ve never practiced with a CD or DVD- - once, I bought Shiva Rea’s Yoga Matrix, but I just ended up sitting there and watching it. . .

Thanks, Mr. Iyengar

In Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, BKS Iyengar posits in his explanation of the sutras on pranayama that “the implication here is clear [clear as mud] that the sadhaka who had to struggle initially to cultivate a yogic way of life by self-discipline and study, now [after the practice of pranayama] finds his efforts transformed into a natural zeal to proceed in his sadhana.” So there’s hope for those of us who are dunces at self-discipline. I came across that juicy tidbit last night. (I got about half way through the second pada last summer when I set the book down, not to be touched again for a year. . . I’m all out of novels at the moment.) So this morning I did my full pranayama practice (which really only takes about 15 minutes) before asana, and it was fantastic. I felt motivated, I felt - - could it be? - - zeal! Thank you, Mr. Iyengar. I’ll be doing my pranayama regularly from now on.

Transition and Discovery

Mysore practice a few days a week combined with home practice a few days a week is one thing. All home practice all the time is going to be quite another. I’m going to have to muster up an uncharacteristic amount of will power or figure out a good system or something. Because the yoga’s not just going to do itself (except for on those rare days of amazing, magical flow. . . aaah). I need a plan.

AYS being closed and gone forever, I’ve weighed my options and decided to go the all self practice route, at least for the time being. On the mysore ashtanga front here in Seattle, the other option is to practice with Mr. Troy at Velocity dance studio, which sounds like a fabulous option indeed, but- - it’s weird- - I feel like I’m not ready for a new teacher. I guess I’m kind of greiving the loss of the teachers I’ve depended on for just over a year now- - in fact, it feels kind of like getting out of a strange breakup. I need to break free and go it alone for a while. (I had no idea I was so emotionally involved.) The idea of having some space to turn inward and really observe myself and my practice sounds very attractive right now. In fact, I’m craving it.

But that doesn’t mean it will be easy. However, I am lucky enough to have a fantastically supportive partner who cares about my yoga practice because I care about it so much, and he’s volunteered to be my project supervisor of sorts. I’m supposed to do my full practice with the twosies three times a week and at least an honest effort at something the other three days and report back to him. Presumably he will give me a scolding if I don’t meet my goal or something. At any rate, it’s helpful for me to be even slightly accountable to someone besides myself.

This might also be a good time to re-integrate pranayama into my daily practice. The lead teacher of my yoga teacher training, Paul Dallaghan (look at him–isn’t he cute?), is a longtime student of O.P. Tiwari, and as such prescribes individualized pranayama practices for each of his students at the end of training.

Paul and SKPJ

Which of course means I never took it very seriously. I was travelling in SE Asia for four and a half months after training! By bicycle! I didn’t have time for extra practices (I told myself). But now feels like a good time to pick it up. Really and truly, I have this feeling in my bones that the next few months are going to be a great time of discovery. . .

Goodbye Ashtanga Yoga School

Last class this Saturday.  Then AYS is shutting its doors forever.  *Tear*  Bye David–maybe I’ll catch ya in Mysore sometime.  Bye Satya–thanks for all the killer Supta K and Kapo adjustments.

~Fin.~

So. . . what happens if you practice on a moon day?

Don’t even try it.

Media Fast

Ever since my landlady inadvertently canceled our house’s internet connection at the end of April, I have had the unexpected, um, opportunity to go on a bit of a fast from news media, blogging, and compulsive email-checking for a number of weeks (yes, weeks!). It hasn’t been a total restriction of internet access, because I can attend to my most pressing online needs and habits while holed up in my windowless office after work, but because of my distaste for spending extra time in said office, it has been a significant restriction. I won’t say I particularly welcomed this partial media fast, but now that I’m back online (wow, “I’m” online–total cyborg thinking here), I have a feeling it was good for me. I feel a bit more relaxed, less of a sense of needless urgency pacing around in my head. I’ve read a few novels and had time to myself to think.

It’s been nice.

10% Useful, 90% Brain-Garbage

At one time in my past, however, a strict total media fast of a month or so was not just nice, but critical to circumventing a total mental breakdown. This was around the time of the 2004 elections. I was in a challenging period in college, working through lingering PTSD from a violent relationship, working on too many projects at once as usual, hardly doing any yoga, and utterly despairing of the fact that Americans were in the process of reelecting the inarguably worst president the (supposedly) democratic world has ever seen. A scary panic attack let me to make an emergency appointment with a school counselor, who introduced me to the idea of a media fast. Brilliant!

Is the world going to fall apart if I don’t know what’s happening in it for one month? No. Is there anything the media the might tell me in the next month that’s going to make me change the way I live my life? No. Is the media telling me anything about all the positive things that are happening in the world right now? Again, no. Maybe 10% of what I read, hear, see in the media is useful to me in some way, but the other 90% is just noise! Absolute brain-garbage!

My First Media Fast

So I decided to stop picking up the free copies of the New York Times on campus, stop reading news online, stop listening to Democracy Now and FSRN on the radio, and stop seeking out any kind of news or unnecessary information for one month. (TV was never an issue–I haven’t had one for years.) This was the only change I made and I believe it radically changed the quality of my brainwaves. More authentic thought and emotion, less noise. And when I did start reading newspapers again, I did so less often, and with more of a focus on the things that were important to me. I became better at keeping some emotional distance between myself and the events of the world. Tragedies and stupidities in the world still made me sad, but it was a cleaner quality of sad–less despairing-of-the-world sad, and easier to get past. I could listen to the news without letting it have such a powerful influence on my worldview. Looking back, I think this particular media fast was an important step in developing my emotional maturity. Before, it was as if I had no defenses, and would just be swept about by the information coming at me from all sides. A strict media fast required me to solidify my own views based on my own actual observations and experiences, to become more of the subject of my own life. It helped to teach me about the practice of mental freedom.

I think the counselor’s name was Dana–I will always be grateful for her and this little piece of timely advice that had such a big impact on me.

Flow, Escape, and My New Secret Obsession

Flow

I love those days when asana just seems to move through me without any particular mental effort of my own. I just set my mind aside and go, one posture flowing into the next in a long, intuitive chain. It’s one of the benefits of working on loosening up, I suppose, but it also seems to be due to a bit of grace, unasked for, undeserved, and freely given. I don’t want to say “I did it” because that seems to be an oversimplification at best. Maybe it’s a nice alignment of the planets plus a pinch of sunny weather plus the lingering effects of premenstrual relaxin. Maybe it was the grace of Ganesha. Plus I did it. Woo hoo!

I should point out that this experience of natural flow doesn’t mean asana was easy–it was as strenuous as ever–it’s rather that it had a wonderful feel to it. Presence. Ease. Calm absorption. Thank you, universe.

This brings to mind a passage from a book I recently read, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. It is an excellent book, delicious to read, which is why it’s words are still rattling around in my head. She recounts her Zen teacher saying, “When you do zazen, you should be gone. So zazen does zazen. Not Steve or Barbara does zazen.” She extends this to the practice of writing. Writing does writing. Yoga does yoga. Sounds a bit easier that way, doesn’t it?

Escape

I’ve been quite busy and in my head a lot lately. I’ve started taking new classes, embarking on a new volunteer position at the hospital, strategizing around ways to improve things at work, and on top of that, I’ve been compulsively devouring printed material. (Not literally, okay? I mean I’m reading a lot of books at the same time. Well, not at the same time exactly , but alternating. Anyway.) And whenever I get all cerebral and out of body, the energy of it all seems to stir up dreamy visions of escape. As in, I want to run off to some little island somewhere, and build a studio and become an “artist” of some sort (doesn’t really matter what kind), and change my name, and wear bright mismatched clothes or maybe just all white, and I just want to go absolutely mad. Feral, even.

Which makes me curious about the concept of escape. If I sold all my things and moved to some far off land for some completely irrational undertaking, would it really be escape? Or would it be a kind of diving in? I guess it all depends on one’s mindset and intention. I should rephrase that: It absolutely solely depends on one’s mindset and intention. The intention defines the personal meaning of the action, plain and simple. (The social meaning is another story.) Which is why. . . it doesn’t really much matter what I do. I can keep on doing the same old thing, or something new. The question is, am I escaping? Or am I diving in?

My New Secret Obsession

And now for something less philosophical. Or more, I don’t know yet. My new secret obsession! (Ooh la, la.) Yin yoga. Remember how I tried yin as something to do when I was dizzy for a week and taking a break from ashtanga? I can’t stop! I looove it! I’ve been practicing a sort of hybrid of ashtanga and yin when practicing at home, usually starting with the standing sequence and then moving on to a long, slow yin sequence. The practice of holding poses in a soft, passive way for longer periods of time has seriously opened up some areas that have been eternally challenging for me. A certain bit of my hamstrings. My pelvic area, especially my hip flexors. I haven’t experienced a major change yet, but I’ve experienced some change, which is plenty wonderful.

I used to think that when people were talking about “yin yoga,” it was just code for “easy yoga.” I thought, oh yeah, nice, I like easy yoga too. Now I understand quite clearly that it’s its own little thing. And a lovely little thing it is.