viparita dandasana

"Our bodies are the bow," I tell Sebastian and Liam on the way to school, "and Time the archer." I've gotten to one of those moments in working up a metaphor where it's not clear which way it's going to go. What's the arrow going to be?

Our village in England is an odd mix of a wealthy working-class population grafted onto a fishing community. No one fishes anymore, but there are lots of retired boatbuilders, and there are plenty of people stooped by age. I nod to some of my retiree friends who are buying newspapers at the Spar.

"Wish I was going to school," shouts an oldster. He was an artilleryman in the war long ago, and he's pretty deaf. We smile.

"At the end of our lives, Time releases the bow, and our spirits are shot heavenward," I tell the children, stepping over the fecal matter which seems to dog my footsteps wherever I go. I release the children into the playground, and they are off like a shot.

The metaphor is hokey, but back home I stay a little longer in viparita dandasana. The plan is to straighten the bow a bit, even if it hurts the metaphor.

one beat at a time

Granny Self and my mother. Both presumably heirs of the Green and Self genes, including plenty of sciatica. Granny Self died when I was young. I wish I'd noticed how flexible she was (or wasn't).




Have been thinking about yoga in relation to the injuries of my friends. The lower back pain of one, the upper back pain of another, and so on. Even a friend who's had paranoid scizophrenia for thirty years. The upper back friend has been told by her osteopath (practitioners who straddle east and west? I'm always surprised that they still exist.) that she has "early onset" arthritis.

What do I know to be true, about myself and about our likely relationship to healers? And of what do I wish to persuade people? Or should I stay quiet and attend to my own practice?

My friend David Noble Green Self, who sometimes has an erratic heart, writes (mixing metaphors a bit): When I’m doing yoga, old injuries keep me staked to the ground like balloon tethers. But sometimes I stand before the mirror in tadasana and jump my limbs apart, leonardo da vinci position, and I feel my friends’ injuries. They are written on me like a butcher’s chart of a cow. In headstand, my heart beats just one beat at a time, and offers no guarantee that there will be another.

For my part, perhaps I'll leave off writing for a while, and get more seriously onto the mat.

rectangle

In the middle of the night, deep space is two feet by six on the north wall of Sebastian’s room. And you can see it pressing down on the allotment gardens. I struggle to cover it with a blanket.
“Mama, mama,” Sebastian murmurs in his sleep. Mama is far away in Argentina. I kiss the soft folds of his ear.

I have been dreaming of flying again. This morning, we etched the shadows of the rising sun in pencil on the white wall, and felt the earth move beneath us. This evening, dal soup and brown rice, and our guest showing us how to stand in doorways during earthquakes, the boys quietly leafing through Time Life picture books of mummies and continental drift. Now it’s the witching hour, the dead less sleepy than us.

Who will know that I have loved this much, or to such distant parts of the world?

Back in the big bed, night dew settling on my face in a dry room, like an answer to Gideon’s question in the Bible about whether there’s a God. Liam puts a finger to my face, pulls it back. “Daddy,” he says reproachfully. I hold his foot.

In the morning, on the living room floor, the rectangle of thin sky-blue sponge, long as a grave. I won’t take myself so seriously, and in ardha chandrasana, I will be a soft-bellied bird tipping back to land.

why Iyengar

Liam, age five, likes to do yoga with me. Its effect on the quality of my pose is apparent.


The kind of yoga I study is Iyengar. I'd tried other kinds, but when push came to shove, it was only Iyengar, which stresses healing rather than glamour, which helped me.

In Illinois I lived in a town where you had two choices for yoga. One was yoga lite, with a teacher who was good at marketing.

The other choice was a woman with a formidable reputation who tended to be irritable with people who didn't just do the poses. She was an Iyengar teacher. She had--has--a Jewish name which sounded kind of jarring for people looking for sonorous Sanskritty sorts of names. At first she rejected me for a university study she was doing. I was injured badly but it was uncertain if my injuries fell within the parameters of the study. At the last moment I was taken on.

For a year I was skeptical. I'd tried thirty-five different alternative treatments. The surgeons were standing by keeping their knives sharp. I'd even done yoga on and off for years, but it hadn't helped me when I'd woken up one morning with a leg that didn't work. It was a bizarro injury. I couldn't walk properly, but I could sort of run because I could tip the leg forward if I hopped. My teacher stopped the running, and things seemed to get worse. For nine months the most I could do was hobble. I was in her therapeutics class, and there were people in there worse off than me. A beautiful young woman died of cancer. There was another woman tipped forward ninety degrees. Victims of various accidents. It was like Dante's inferno, that class. Made you look straight at things.

In the end, my leg came around. I have a letter from my partner, Eva-Lynn, who wrote in the middle of that period that I would walk again, and even climb mountains. I didn't believe it. It seemed unlikely at the time. But a couple of years after beginning Iyengar I did a thirteen mile hike along the Appalachian Trail.

I hope that, deo volente, Bad Yogi can be a sort of continuing exploration of myself and of Iyengar. My teacher is named Lois Steinberg. Unfortunately we've moved to England and Lois lives in the U.S., so part of Bad Yogi will probably be the story of my grouchy search for another teacher. [p.s. November 2005 note: I'll be seeing Lois as she teaches in different parts of the world: hopefully in Poland at the end of this month and in France in April.]

tone

Liam considers the meaning of two trees in the Lake District.


I'm going to wait a bit before I make the links that will connect this page to the outside world, because I want to feel out my rythm in posting to it. You might think that time spent jotting notes here could be better spent on the mat, but in fact I tend to write on days when I have my strongest (or any) practice. So the two work symbiotically, rather than antagonistically.

I also want to have a little time to inspect my tone. Certainly in my words I'll try to avoid moments of false closure ("Doesn't yoga make you feel great?"), but I also want to see if the tone can be as honest. The particular type of therapeutic yoga I've trained in has, not to put too fine a point on it, saved quite literally my ass. On the other hand, if I'm writing on my good days, the days when I feel strong and happy in adho mukha vrksasana, downward facing tree, say, rather than worried because I may or may not have strained my lower back in urdhva dhanurasana, the upward arch of backbends, then my tone might imply some simplistic resolution.

On my good days, I want to maintain sympathy for the self that is the practitioner of bad days. And perhaps, by extrapolation, I can feel at least something for sufferers in New Orleans or Falujah. A possibly too-simple ending which will undoubtedly be subject to its own share of scrutiny in some future post.

bad yogi dreams of flying

A sailboat off Southwold beach, dark clouds.





There's a lot of perky yoga stuff out there. Kind of blends in with late capitalism's ability to eat good intentions and spit them out as a list of products along the margins of our lives. I hope that this space can be more sacred and grumpy. More attentive to the dream that wakes you at 2 a.m., or to the little ping of pain at L4/L5 that could be nothing or really could be something.

You want to feel better, be stronger, look younger? Find someone else's webpage.

In most classes I've been in, I'm taller, stiffer, sweatier, older, and, if my eyes don't deceive me, considerably more male than the other students. Advantages and disadvantages to this. Sweatier: my hands slip in adho mukha svasana, downward facing dog, but there's a perfect level of medium slipperiness I attain in salambha sarvangasana, shoulder stand, and my hands suddenly grip well. More information than is perhaps strictly necessary, but it's out of these bits that I'm building my enlightenment. My nickname in high school was Riga. Massachusetts slang for rigor mortis: stiff. One good thing about stiff is, you don't have as many illusions.

Yesterday I had a strong practice, but it was more exuberant than precise. Afterwards, I carried children and bikes a long way. This morning, a dull ache in my tailbone. All the material Bad Yogi needs for despair and self-recrimination, despite Bad Yogi's knowing full well that he ought to go easy on himself. England is green and the sun is coming up and the day is filled with promise. Bad Yogi dreams of flying, but his ass is stuck to the earth.

bad yogi

I'm the one sitting on the lap of my Dad, the Texas oilman, out-
side our trailer. My Dad is six foot seven inches tall.




I haven't done any pranayama, breath work, since my recent illness. But when I do, the unimpeded flow of air into every corner of my lungs is a gift.

The asanas or poses which we usually think of as yoga are actually just one of yoga's eight limbs. Pranayama, for example, is a limb of equal importance. Imagine spending as much time on breathing as on poses...

Today I inhale into fully emptied lungs in three waves of expansion, without retention between them. Exhalation is unimpeded. In between, normal breaths.

I have done more complicated forms of breath work: ujayi, viloma, digital pranayama. But perhaps because I have strayed into advanced-level and teacher-training classes directly from a long tenure in therapeutics (for injured people), I have a great many complicated ideas about breathing but no clear path for the intermediate future. Clearly, I need a teacher, especially if I am ever to be a teacher. At the same time, I know that the best teachers turn one back to oneself, to time alone on the mat.

This, then, is Bad Yogi: out of illness and injury, the movement forward. The quest for knowledge. To the mat I bring decades of (possibly ephemeral) Western fitness training, nineteen years of Anderson Method stretching, a long acquaintance with injury, the four years of practice in this tradition of yoga (mostly in therapeutics) with its tale of grudging redemption, more philosophy than you could shake a downward-facing stick at, a desire for transcendence, and the occasional child and cat.

What this tradition is, and what the particulars of its grudging redemption have been and will be, is the theme of Bad Yogi.