But can I really?

If I feel like it, can I really read the whole of Burnt Norton as an intro to my stress management group? And follow it with the 5 stages of healing: rolling around on the floor like an embryo, creeping like a snake, crawling, squatting and reaching, standing and walking. Followed by a traditional walking meditation.

It makes sense to me. The idea of being in the present moment, being one's past and one's future, emptying out and recasting.

Problems: the complexity of the poem (some people might be put off), the difficulty of the movements (creeping and crawling can be rough on the body). I will have to preface it all with some gently-gently instructions. What associations does this bring to you, without thinking too much? Imagine following the movements if it is uncomfortable for you to physically do them.

More problems: tomorrow morning I have to teach a gentle yoga class, and still not sure how much movement my knee will allow me. Hmm - I can practice the sequence of poses in Jon Kabat-Zinn's book. After all, the following week I need to teach them to the stress management group...

Aha moment

I realized the other day, as I was biking up Mount Diablo, that I still have probably most of my life ahead of me. I thought about the fact that I've only been having sex for about half my life, and how much more of that there is to come. I thought of all the things I've learned in the past 38 years, and how much more I could learn in the next forty-odd years. Perhaps I should keep a scrapbook, otherwise it might be too much to remember.

The view of the sunset as I rode down the mountain was magnificent. If I could paint a picture in words, it would be a pink sky with the crisp lines of blue hills in the distance, the red sunbeams snagging the fog in the valley as it rolls over the pale dry grass beside the orange tinted tarmac. I had a flat near the bottom and my friend helped me change the tube by the light of a bikelamp in the cold dusk. It would be nice if he noticed I love him and if he stopped wanting to date other women, but we always have such wonderful adventures together. Maybe I am too forgiving.

Today I learned a new yoga pose from a book. Garbha pindasana or womb pose involves sitting in lotus and squeezing the hands and forearms through the space between the shins and the calves and then balancing with the chin resting on the hands. I taught it to my students, who seemed to have a good lotus position.

Modern Yoga

Finished reading A History of Modern Yoga by Elizabeth de Michelis. I love the title of her concluding chapter: "Modern Postural Yoga as a healing ritual of secular religion." Here are some selected quotes:

"... the term 'secularization' refers, in a general sense, 'to the gradual decline of [institutionalized] religion as a consequence of the growth of scientific knowledge and [to] the continued diversification of social and ethnic groups in the Occident' ([Fuller, 1989]). All of these elements would be especially prominent in conditions of 'urban living', and it is in such environments that MPY grows and thrives. Adopted and cultivated in conditions of marked privatization and relativization of religion, MPY is successful, like other Harmonial belief systems, because it provides 'experiential access to the sacred'.
Such experiential access to the sacred, epitomized by the 'secular ritual' of the MPY practice session, represents the third key to understanding the current success of MPY, along with its fitness and de-stressing applications...
Thus the MPY session becomes a ritual which affords various levels of access to the sacred, starting from a 'safe', mundane, tangible foundation of body-based practice... there is room for the practitioner to decide whether to experience her practice as 'spiritual' or as altogether secular. Except in cases of thoroughly utilitarian (fitness or recreational) performance, however, some notion of healing and personal growth is likely to provide the deepest rationale for practice."

"Health is religious. Ill health is irreligious." (BKS Iyengar)

De Michelis' book is a thorough and thought-provoking look at a discipline that repeatedly emphasizes experience over knowledge. Because of this, the book is inescapably written from an 'etic' (outsider's) perspective, but is nonetheless empathic to the 'emic' views of yoga practitioners. What I have learned is that far from being a claptrap religion cobbled together to fill the void left by science, Modern Yoga was carefully crafted by a series of Indian intellectuals in a reverse mission to the West that began in the 19th Century. More recently, BKS Iyengar initiated the Modern Postural form of yoga, with its emphasis on the practice of asana poses. It came out of an expression of his own experience of yoga and his artistic creativity, carefully setting up the structure of the yoga session that has become a framing ritual for many Americans and people around the world.

Gem Lake

Photographed upside down while doing yoga on the rocks.

Bodies are interesting

When I was in my 20's I co-taught an undergrad anthropology class on 'The Body and the Senses.' At the time, I saw my role as teaching the anthropology students about sensory neurophysiology and brain anatomy. They didn't like me very much! Today I realized for the first time that bodies are actually pretty interesting.

I finally finished reading Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain. She links pain and creativity or imagination, albeit rather tenuously, by defining 3 kinds of objects that she names a 'weapon', a 'tool' and an 'artifact'. A weapon has two ends, with power on one end and sentience (pain) on the other end. A tool is similar to a weapon, except that it has power and sentience both on the same end, acting on an inanimate surface. An artifact is a lever or arc that has no obvious ends and is a projection of the body onto an object which is then interjected by other bodies. Examples of artifacts are clothes, languages, and God. Riding on the bus this evening I noticed that we surround ourselves with artifacts, the crust of the earth is cluttered with them. I think we are as much made by them as making them. For instance, Scarry talks a lot about the chair as an artifact, and imagines Adam making the first chair for Eve to ease the pain of her body standing on her feet all day. But Western man (and woman) is shaped by the chair, chairs make our bodies lose the ability to bend in the middle and sit on the ground. The internet makes us lose our memory. We are made out of this stuff as much as we are made out of our genes and the food we eat.

One of the things that interests me, which Scarry barely mentions, is that this stuff we are all made of is co-created. Unlike Adam making the first chair for Eve, our chairs carry within them a whole history of chair design. When I was 6 years old, I used to wonder if my life had really happened, or if it was just a dream that I had dreamt and I was still really only 3. At that age I had to learn a new language because we moved to a different country, and I realized that I couldn't have invented a whole new language myself so therefore at least some part of my life was real. Artifacts can go beyond the creative capacity of a single individual, even a single generation of people that happen to be living on the earth at the same time.

We imbue objects and artifacts with sentient qualities, and can get quite upset with them at times. In some ways, I think this is a good thing. For example, my son was once upset that his surfboard had hit him on the head, so he spent a good few minutes cursing and being angry at the ocean. God can safely be blamed for most mishaps. Without God, we have only ourselves or other people to blame and that can be problematic. A student in my yoga class seemed tired, and I asked her after the class how she was feeling. She seemed a little embarrassed by the question, and said she wasn't doing too well today because she had skipped her cardio workout. I felt so sad for her, feeling that she had to do so much and that I was asking for more. Later I complimented her on listening to her body.

Going back to the theme of yoga as a religion, I realized the other day that when I took my yoga mat to the park I was noticing all the other people carrying yoga mats. I notice them all the time now. The mat is evidently the artifact of the new religion, since yoga can be practiced perfectly well without it. Most reminiscent of a Muslim prayer rug. The mat serves to protect our skin and hands from the surface of the world. I will [unconsciously] enact death by lying on it, but not get too close to the dirt?

Over the years, I came to my yoga teachers for advice on what to do for different aches and pains - asthma, blocked sinuses, backache, pain in the knees and neck. Not only for myself, but also for my ex. I trusted them more than my doctor, whom I thought to be in the pay of drug companies, and I found them more helpful than a massage therapist, because they told me what I could do for myself rather than doing it for me. I never thought about this up until now, perhaps I just regarded them as experts on the body, but I came to them as one would to a priestess or a shaman.

Summary of philosophical conclusions so far:
- Pain reminds me that I'm me, in my body, which is in the world and not in my imagination.
- Yoga has the elements of a religion. It has no god, but it incorporates ritual enactments of death. The central artifact of modern Western yoga is the mat.
- The power of yoga to heal pain may be based as much on faith as exercise.

Also thinking about eating disorders, and the problem of trying to attract clients to a group. If I have an eating disorder, then I am at war with my body. The therapist has to align with me and not with my body, so saying things like 'accept your body' and 'be diet free' would be counterproductive. If I have a pain disorder, then my body is at war with me. The therapist has to align with the part that experiences the pain, because that part feels like the real me.

Is yoga the new godless religion?

Project sleep has not been going too well (I slept for the whole of 4 hours). I've been reading Patanjali's Yoga Sutras online, and looking up the life and works of Wilhelm Reich. Yes, that is Yoga Sutras (not kama sutra) and Wilhelm Reich (not Theodore Reich) although the other ways around might have made more sense, in retrospect.

A friend of mine said, after the yoga prayer for peace at Power to the Peaceful last month, that we [scientists] have blown away the people's religion so they have cobbled one together out of the pieces. Yoga practice has been increasing steadily in the US since the 1990's, to the degree that up to 12% of Americans are now thought to have tried it and with 3% becoming regular yogis. Those who practice yoga regularly do so on average 5 times per week, and are split roughly equally between seeing it as a form of exercise, therapy (mostly for back pain) and a spiritual practice (guesstimated from various online sources). Research shows that yoga is an effective treatment for back pain, migraines, recovery from chemotherapy etc. It both increases wellbeing and reduces the use of pain medications as compared with self-help control groups. I wonder why? Perhaps this has something to do with breathing and relaxation, but I suspect there is also an element of faith. A recent study found that Catholics exposed to pictures of the Virgin Mary experienced less pain when exposed to pain-inducing stimulation, as opposed to atheists exposed to the same pictures or other calming works of art. [There was also a change in the pattern of activation in their brains, but this only matters if you doubt what they reported and either way there is always room for doubt]. The point I'm making is that while yoga is not associated explicitly with faith in any particular object, faith in yoga is part of the health zeitgeist.

My insomniac reading suggests that yoga in its origins is anything but godless. In fact, according to wikipedia, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (around 150 BC) were a branching away from the older Samkhya system of Hindu religion or philsophy, adding the specification of a divine entity and a practice for gaining disentanglement from the bondage of human nature and unification with the divine (possibly the meaning of the word yoga). Hatha yoga, or the practice of asanas (postures) was outlined in the 15th Century in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika by Swatmarama. Why is this so popular now? The focus on the body matches the materialism of our culture, as does the obsessive emphasis on detail - posture, diet and lifestyle made into words. Samkhya philosophy stems from a primary dichotomy of self vs. other (rather than mind vs. body) that suits our individualist society better than the shackles of Judeo-Christian religion, with its baggage of an unpopular creation myth and the pre-requisite faith in the miraculous.

Personal experience of yoga suggests the opposite. My first experience of chanting om at a workshop in the North of England, years after I had started asana practice, was one of surprising loss of self in the community. It made me want to do this (chanting) with my own people, in a synagogue, not here with a random gathering and improperly explained articles of faith. Around the same time, I used yoga while babysitting to help calm my 8-year-old charge who was having an asthma attack. I had her lie in savasana on some cushions and breathe. Later she told me that she used to live with her family above the Quaker meeting place and watch people practicing yoga while her father was working on his PhD. She remembered this pose being described as the corpse pose, and she used to practice it on her own wondering if this was what it was like to be dead. I have to say that death is fascinating, and as a child I used to meditate on what it might be like to join some small animal that seemed to die easily, such as a sparrow, on its mysterious journey into nothingness. One thing I learned from the Yom Kipur sermon this year was that fasting and mourning practices are a symbolic exercise in death. As a yoga teacher and practitioner, I find savasana one of the most beneficial poses and like to do it before and after the other poses to experience them at their fullest.

I mentioned Wilhelm Reich, the psychoanalyst. If you want a good laugh, look up the 'orgone accumulator'. Now I will have to sit straight-faced through a training on Reichian analysis. Yikes! Anyway, he got in trouble with the FDA and the FBI in the 1950's because of the sex taboo (compounded by the fact that he was a socialist and a charlatan among other things). I would argue that money is an even greater taboo in the wider society. In my corner (if I have one) sickness is taboo. I recently heard a psychiatrist say that his patients don't mind having a disorder, but they don't want to know that they're sick. It hasn't always been this way. In the past, people loved their ailments. Read Pepys. Or maybe death is the real taboo, and that's why we can't sleep and need to practice savasana.

McNears Beach, CA

Where else affords free beaches with hot showers in October? And just as I was running out of dance class credits and wondering what to do tomorrow evening, I get a call to sub for Ashtanga yoga.