A Gift from a Beautiful Spirit

 

 

A beautiful Mantra to the Goddess Green Tara. Female incarnation of the Buddha of compassion.

 

There must be a Yoga dynamic I'm only beginning to learn about. The more my heart opens up through the practice, the more arrows seem to be aimed at it, and the more I'm having walk on eggshells around other people, even my closest friends. The keystone of that learning curve seems paradoxical to me now, but no less essential: the more my heart opens outward, the more I need to go back inside as in meditation. The rest will take care of itself, I imagine.

Vinyasa Yoga and Capoeira

I want to link Yoga and Capoeira in parallel or sequential fashion, or use one to reinforce the other (not an original idea, but I want to do it myself). Capoeira de Angola was my love and life when I was footloose and fancy free, before I was sidelined by family and business. Now that I've given myself to Vinyasa , I realize how much the muscle memory, strength, body awareness, mindfulness, and flow resonate with capoeira and prepared me to take on power Yoga. Indeed, the radical inversion, "inverted tadasana"-hands-on-the-earth work, and flow are defining features of capoeira, which surprise-attacks the colonial order upside down. Each "move" is an Afro-Brazilian "asana" of sorts, but they are connected by dynamic movement--an elegant flow. We could say that capoeira de angola is the ritualistic, spirit-inspired Tai Chi of the Afro-Atlantic danced "martial arts." If you are a yogi, look at the delicious dance driven practice of Shiva Rea or Tias Little, for example, you will immediately get it, even if you don't know capoeira directly. I would love to dialogue with anyone who continues to practice dance, martial arts, and yoga. As I write this, I think immediately of two beloved members of our Yoga community. Don't be shy. (The first video is a didactic introduction and is, technically, the fast "up" style of Capoeira Regional; the second video is a staged and produced representation of Angola Capoeira).

Click here: http://youtu.be/DF9o9hJ2-ic

A New Student's Revelation

Yoga encourages us to stay present on the mat and take joy in our practice: this happens in-and-through the breath and our growing expression of asana. So, this type-A personality, who has worked all his life just a bit too hard for success, discovers one day in a deep pigeon pose (ah, emotions stored in the hips!) that it's actually possible to relax and enjoy asana. It's not a moral or intellectual mandate. It's the practice, stupid. No one can do it for you; certainly not your head. "The body speaks and the breath responds," a teacher close to my heart recently told me; still, what I took away from her class was the profound impression of her joy. I thought about these words and her joy for a month, but they had no effect until three minutes into the pigeon, when the practice permitted my body to relax. Then I knew joy. It was fleeting but certain--and portends good things ahead.

Better Than Anything

Janine's Vinyasa flow and Yin class this morning was masterful and transformative, nothing less than a smorgasbord of neurotransmitters. And it gets better and better on and off the mat. Oh, just for the sake of metaphor, imagine Al Jarreau's or Patti Cathcart Andress' version of "Better Than Anything."

Better than sailing at midnight
Better than diving for pearls
Better than skiing in Aspen...
Better than feeding the squirrels
Better than finding a horseshoe
Better than losing your head
Better than anything thought of
Better than anything said
Better than singing right out loud
Or being spotted in a crowd

Better than anything except being in love

I'm talking about being in love....

Better than four sets of Dizzy
Better than Count Basie's band
Better than Rollins and Coltrane
Better than being on the stand
Better than Ella Fitzgerald
Better than Miles' latest news
Better than Bill Evans' ballads
Better than Joe Williams' blues
Better than hearing Lady Day
Or checking in at Monterey

Better than anything except being in love
We're talking about being in love...

Better than Lucy and Desi
Better than Route 66
Better than Kildare and Casey
Better than quiz shows on Pix
Better than Huntley and Brinkley
And Singing with Mitch
Better than Hitchcock and Karloff
And clicking the switch
Better than movies late at night
And watching Emile Griffith fight.

Better than anything except being in love
We're talking about being in love....

Elephants dancing
Clowns on parade
Better than peanuts and popcorn
Fresh lemonade
Better than rides on the midway
Better than seals blowing horns
Better than men shot from cannons
Better than fresh ears of corn
Better than balancing on a wire
Or watching tigers leap through fire

Better than anything except being in love...say now...being in love...
[Talking 'bout] being in love....Skat, Skat, Skat....Better than anything except being in love.

Our America

  

This is how beautiful and complex it is. It's not just "Cubans" vs. "Americans"--that's a neo-nationalist idiom. I heard an English speaker from the 786 area code call me. After all, she's 29, born here, but a (second generation "Cuban-American") santera for 24 years. The first words she spoke had me confused. I first greeted her in Spanish and then turned to English once she responded to me in English. She said: "oh, you speak really good English," having thought I was Hispanic (after all, I run "Folkcuba"). So, we started speaking "perfect English" together. After the WTF reactions, we then began to speak to each other in "Spanish" again, and then in the more restricted idiom of  santeros. Our conversation "switched" between "perfect English," Cuban Spanish, and "Osha," which "Spanish" speakers, non-santero Cubans, or Americans would understand. So, she's at least "tri-cultural" and probably has Spanish and creole ancestors, not to mention African. I am--descending from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with roots in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires--perhaps, tri-, quad-, pent-, hex-cultural. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. More to come...

Selfies and Narcissism

YogaAnonymous tells us: "Research | Scientists Link Selfies To Narcissism, Addiction & Mental Illness."
http://yoganonymous.com/research-scientists-link-selfies-to-narcissism-addiction-mental-illness/
Will Wonders Never Cease. I've not read the article but it seems dubious on its face, confusing cause and effect. It would seem that Narcissism, Addiction, and Mental Illness lead to Selfies. Or not. Way back when, they were worried about blobs eating Philadelphia. Now anxiety about runaway technology produces a ridiculous Jeremiad twice a day. Why not focus on more pressing concerns such as global warming, world hunger, environmental destruction, genocide, social inequality, invasive surveillance, fundamentalism, etc, which will make us all dead way before Selfies make us crazy maladaptive alcoholics.

Yoga on Instagram

YogaAnonymous tells us: "A picture might be worth a thousand words, but in the world of yoga on Instagram, a photo could mean a whole new career."
http://yoganonymous.com/yoga-instagram-turned-lucrative-business/

Yoga itself has been a lucrative business since it hit these shores in force--for some people with certain ambitions. In cases, it's gone multinational. The Starbucks story might soon be applied, for example, to the Paul and Sonia Tudor-Jones' corporatized luxury "Jois" studios, which have moved in next to the humbler original students of Jois himself. So the "lucrative business" angle is nothing new. Instagram and other social media are potentially revolutionary social media technologies--witness the Arab Spring. Careful. If the medium is the message, then one major internet capability is to efficiently commoditize anything and suck us consumers into its vortex. So, perhaps Yoga photos might be a "lucrative business." Do we yet have criteria for evaluating them, not to mention their business model? I would want to go on a case by case basis. Can any of us look at just one more Bikram speedo photo shot against a background of 500 sweaty bodies or 40 Rolls Royces? The gorgeous Equinox YouTube videos are as notable for their magisterial poses as they are for their soft-core porn allusions. On the flip side, the communicative and community-building possibilities of the internet offer to (mostly) women and very small businesses the possibility not only to survive and flourish, to surprise us with gorgeous poses and individual creativity we thought not possible, and to offer some visual competition to the daily round of bears driving cars, drunken teens, and wardrobe malfunctions. As well, from this new marketplace of Yoga photos, we can sharpen our criteria for discriminating good poses and virtuous teachers from bad snapshots and crass propaganda. So much out there begs the attention--especially of wide-eyed new students. If we potentially benefit from a grand visual array of beckoning photographs, would we not also benefit from a public exchange as to what content makes us the Yogis we want to be?

Wounded Healers

"Affix your own oxygen mask before turning to your child." We've heard that endless times. Those of us caring for others, whether teachers, therapists, or parents, are human, hence, imperfect, and invariably still smarting from our own past hurts. That makes us "wounded healers." A contradiction? Not if we are ethical, seeking to walk in the present. Heal yourself first, then turn to your charges. Accomplishing both at once is a tricky proposition. This is  where we can get confused and cross boundaries. In reality, in the present, teachers, therapists, and parents do not require their students, patients, and children, respectively, to treat their own past hurts and needs--clearly an impossibility, except in fantasy or delusion. This, indeed, is confusion, and leads nowhere but to abuse. Seek your oxygen and then breath life into your charges.

"Zombies" and Nzambi: There's Oh So Much Confusion

For those of you who don't know, in variants of Kongo cosmology, Nzambi-Mpungu can be conceived of as the "High God;" more specifically, he reigns over both Ntoto, the mountain of the living, and Mpemba, or Kalunga, the world of the dead beneath the water, which is chalk white, like the kaolin at the bottom of the river. A special category of the dead, very close to Nzambi Mpungu, consists of "Nzambi creatures," chalk-white beings. "Zombies" are the stuff of American hysteric...al legend, originally brought to these shores and immortalized in ethnocentric fiction by soldiers returning from the US occupation of Haiti in the early twentieth century, just as was "Voodoo." In Haitian Vodou, people believe in "Zombi," but they are not at all the stuff of ludicrous and endlessly repeated American B-movies. Though many and varied, some Zombi are purgatorial anti-social persons, who have been condemned, captured, and taken "to the north" to labor eternally as slaves--the greatest fear that a Haitian can have, given the torturous history of the island. Therefore, contrary to popular conception, the Zombi does not come after you; a priest charged with carrying out the "sentence" comes after the anti-social person, adjudged as such by local secret societies. (Please correct any errors you see here, my knowledgeable friends.)

My Android, My Zombies

Zombies? Facebook is an insatiable Zombi and David has likely become one. I awoke to a Brave New World. Facebook inserted 1,120 "friends"--a swarm--into my Android phone's contact list. Someone opted into the Facebook "sync" app linking a mobile device and Zuckerberg's global social media circus. Having no conscious memory of opting in, I ask: who did this? Was it a butt call? David in a sleepwalking episode? David bitten and possessed by a Zombie? If I were possessed by a ni...neteenth-century doctor, he'd have no social media skills. The only conclusion: a millennial who had met an untimely end possessed me. So, now I've got 1,120 souls crashing my lonely little corner of New Jersey. I want my life back. Nothing personal, Facebook friends.

The Verizon wireless representative, a media saavy baby boomer, sympathized with me; but no one can "unsync" what's been done wholesale. So, this morning I spent two hours individually terminating all of you Zombies. Sorry good people.