What is Addiction? Why is it Bad? All Your Questions Answered.

I am now an expert in clinical diagnoses! Just kidding, I talk out of my rear end, just like everyone else.

At work we were talking about addiction. I was thinking about this because it occurred to me that processed food is like opium or heroin - you take something whole and innocent and natural, refine and extract and condense it to (one of) its essence(s), and you're left with something extremely potent and usually bad for you. The experience of ingesting such highly concentrated materials is an exaggeration of our normal sensory spectrum. Whether in the form of getting super high or tasting something super sweet, our sense are manipulated by processed goods, and we are more likely to feel addicted to them since our concept of the range of our sensory spectrum has been artificially distorted, requiring repeated input from hyper-ized products to return to the falsely elevated feeling of "good." Personally, this makes a lot of sense to me when I think about spaghetti and potato chips, which I love and have emotional cravings for.

Okay so that's what we were talking about at work. So then I suggested that people become "addicted" to processed foods the same way they become addicted to opium or anything else. This isn't a new concept at all, but it finally seemed really clear to me. And we were talking about the overuse of the concept of addiction, and victimhood culture, and people's relinquishing of their own autonomous decision making power to something they can claim to be addicted to. So this got pretty heady pretty fast, so to back it up we decided to define addiction.

My offering: anything that has a negative impact on one's life that one feels powerless to combat. Seem broad? I think it fits. Habits and routines and practices that do not serve us, and yet we continue to do, I think can be swept under the definition of addiction.

And I think this is useful, because then everything can be given the AA treatment - by which I mean: abstention, community support, and giving oneself over to a higher power. My pal at work said that everyone getting to be addicted to whatever they want makes a culture of helplessness and excuse making. I sort of like the view of addiction, however, that connects us to a sense of our own smallness - we are not all powerful, autonomous beings who just need to try harder, think harder, and do better. Instead, we are tiny particles of a larger, more mysterious set of forces, and sometimes the self-obsessed feeling of addiction/helplessness is an inroad to this more selfless feeling of humble connectedness. Why not, right?

Sometimes I feel like I'm combating my "addictions" one by one, and that my view of myself and my progress toward inner peace is the process of shedding the negative habits that I seem to do without thinking. And I have to ask for a little cosmic help to do it because I'm pretty weak, generally speaking - I'm giving myself 30 days for t.v. right now, which would be from October 9th to November 9th I suppose, and I already fell off the wagon once for 1.5 hours of House on the 19th, but it's still a worthy undertaking - and I need a little Sky God Earth Power or whatever to help me exercise my will. The whole thing forces me to redirect my attention more positively, and I really appreciate the after effects.

So I think that giving attention to your challenges as though they are addictions can be a handy way of thinking about yourself in order to take your obstacles seriously and to be connected to the magical powers of the universe. The end.

Traveling

Yeah, I don’t really care about traveling. The whole thing is generally harder than usual life, and I don’t find it particularly relaxing. I get a lot of anxiety about things like where to sleep and eat, and how to use the public transportation or read the road signs. It’s cool to do stuff, for sure, and see things and go places, don’t get me wrong. Like THIS post from my friend Katie’s travels – I mean, how could you not want to see that? But I am not going to travel the world to do that. Sounds hard.

While on vacation, I enjoyed having no responsibilities, I guess. And my parents are pretty organized and motivated to go sight-seeing (bleh, stressful and cattle-call feeling to me usually), so that level of decision-making was also taken care of, and that was nice. But really I wanted to be home working on my projects. My guitar practice was going really well, and of course Le Blogge needs a-tendin’, and I didn’t get to do my yoga stuff while on vacation (no mat, no private empty space), so leaving all the active threads of my mind behind was a little tough. Naturally I could have found ways to make it all continue for the 8-9 days we were on the ground, but come on, I was supposed to be there to see my folks and see Germany, and it was only a week.

So by the end of the week+, I was ready to head out. I wanted to be back in action on my personal self-fulfillment/improvement stuff. And I am wondering about a few things related to this feeling: one, is feeling ho-hum about travel an entitled way of thinking, an unsophisticated way of thinking, or a legitimate preference? Two, is my preference for my carefully crafted self-distractions a crutch for my mind or an investment in my mind expansion? Probably everything is true in one way or another.

As far as the ho-hum travel thing goes, the entitled interpretation is that I have no idea what a neat opportunity it is to go abroad. This could be because I have been abroad enough times in enough ways, and I have my own ideas about what it means to travel well, that I don’t feel impressed or blown away by Western sight-seeing. One church after another or one lovely vista after another, it doesn’t matter. The best thing we did in Germany was go to a parade in the tiny home town of one of my Dad’s friends, and have beer in a big tent with the whole town singing Bavarian songs to an oom-pa band. This experience was more about the human interaction and participating in community than anything, and I like that when I’m at home, too (it's a breadth/depth thing - I think as we get older we crave depth above breadth). So whatever. The unsophisticated interpretation is that I am a pedestrian and closed-minded person who can’t be ripped away from her own comforts for ten minutes to open her mind to other ways of living and thinking. This could be true because, well, at this point in my life, I don’t feel like more “input” is what I need. I need LESS input. I’m finding it challenging enough to work on breathing in and out without going insane, and whether or not another country of humans on the planet yield the right of way for left-hand turns doesn’t rock me, it overloads me. Wait, hm - Germans in the south sunbathe naked near the water like it’s no big deal in the cities’ public parks and the countryside’s hiking trails, and it made me a little sad that America isn’t that chill about it, and I did think about that a little for a while. Okay so lastly, the legitimate preference option means that I just like to stay put, really, and that’s fine. I might be turning, at last, into one of those people who just wishes she could move her whole apartment to the beach for two weeks and not go to work, and that would be the perfect vacation. No driving, no phones, no t.v., just reading and exercising and sunning and swimming and cookouts. Pretty American approach to vacation, actually, at least as far as my own memories of vacationing on Cape Cod as a kid goes. I think my feelings about travel are all of these things. I am both entitled and unsophisticated and have legitimate feelings and maybe want to recreate my childhood and it’s all fine. I want to travel by going to somewhere else and staying put for a while and working on stuff. That’s what I like.

And next: is my desire to stay put and work on my little projects a weakness or a positive thing? On the one hand, it would be nice to feel totally okay with the unproductiveness of traveling instead of thinking about what I want to get done when I get home. It’s a be-here-now problem. And I think I am generally okay with being-there-now, and I enjoyed the countryside and the weather and walks and certainly enjoyed myself. But I feel un-tethered from life when I can’t engage with myself in a more focused, learning- and progress-based way, and it expands my enjoyment of things outside myself as well as makes little connections in my mind that complete my understanding of the way I view things blah blah blah. So it could be that my mind prefers the discipline and the feeling of working toward something, and I really get something good out of it. But this could be a crutch – instead of being-here-now, I would rather elaborately occupy myself with mental departures that take me outside my mind, because I find simply enjoying life to be boring, because really I am boring and my mind is not actually a great place for me to be. Hm. So, as you may have guessed, I think both these things are true, too.

Ah travel, sneakily enough it was mind-expanding, though, regardless of my resistance and toe-tapping, since it made me consider some stuff about myself. Well played, Travel.

Vacation mit Parentzen

So I'm here in Germany on a vacation with my parents, which is a total throwback to days gone by on Cape Cod, chafing against the sand in my bathing suit, eating potato chips, and reading "just for fun" books.

My "just for fun" book for vacation is one of the Terry Pratchett Discworld books, dozens of which have been kicking around the house since I was as little as I recall - at least from my most early literate era (I brought The Brothers Karamazov with me, but I keep re-realizing that I am not much of a High Thinker, so I've put it down 20 pages in in favor of sci-fi-fantasy-humor). Terry Pratchett writes magical fantasy books with a comic twist, featuring lovable and fallible wizards-in-training, very well organized assassins' guilds, and, my personal favorite, death's apprentice named, of course, "Mort." So then, yes. I'm reading yet another of his delightful books, this time about sexism in the magical education system, and it's terrific, of course. And this got me to thinking about magic books and how much I liked them when I was little.

I liked magic books probably mostly because I hoped that my magical powers would be shortly revealed to me by a kindly witch/grandmother who'd been watching and waiting for the right moment to reveal me to myself, and then I would at last be ripped from my longing for specialness into a state of actual specialness. By ten or eleven I thought I had been doing a heroic amount of waiting and figured it was going to happen basically any day now. Oh how long it takes to shed dreams of our own significance.

I read other books, too, with other versions of magical children in them (no Harry Potter for me, though - I feel too old for those, somehow). There's always some version of using one's powers wisely, and that things go poorly for people who abuse their powers. Sort of along the lines of pointing a finger at someone means there's three pointing back at you blah blah blah. The full import of this magical approach to the golden rule didn't really gel for me until well into adulthood. I remember it coming up with road rage - I remember wishing I had the power to pop someone's tire from my car and inconvenience them, or that I could control their speedometer or otherwise use some magic to thwart them. I can't remember if I've blogged about this yet, but one day it occurred to me that if I really were a witch, and I popped someone's tires, then at least three of my tires would pop or some other equally inconvenient thing would happen right back to me, and I don't want that at all. But I would like to affect the meanness in the world . . . . So then, how to exact my revenge without incurring any negative effects? Why, a wise witch will use her power for good, yes? But if "punishing" the "evil" isn't clearly "good," then that changes things - maybe it's less for "good" (which requires a judgment call) and more "in a good way." So instead of wishing for people's tires to pop, I wish in my head that they feel more patient and less stressed out. That way it will hopefully come back to me times three that I feel patient and calm, and that would be very nice. This is a good game to play in all corners of life. It's hard to practice, though.

But anyway, I was reading this Pratchett book and it's about magic of course and one phrase in it was very nice: "Magic's easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push. Anyone could do it. There's nothing magical about it." Nice, yes? But I like this because I disagree (yoga stuff coming). In my Jivamukti book the authors say that it's much harder to put something together than take it apart - this makes sense to me - I could certainly unscrew a radio without thinking about it, but put it back together? Yeah, harder, right? And yoga is all about integrating and balancing oneself with oneself - that's the magic that yoga is getting at. It's taking things that are out of balance and pushing them into place. The study of it, the real academic part about it, is learning to identify imbalance, or to see where balance should be underneath all the veils and smoke and fog of life and of the mind. Because it's not easy to tell "what's wrong" and then make it right. Figuring out where things are imbalanced takes a lot of time, and it's easy to get sidetracked or obsessed with correcting one particular thing and then that ends up tipping the scales a different direction, and you need to be shaken sometimes to see that all your effort towards balance is taking you further away - it's a way of mistaking an attempt for balance with what is actually egotism and a desire for specialness.

So the good news that I'm getting from this is that I do have a chance to develop my magical powers, after all. And when I see imbalance at work in the world and how far away from center out efforts can take us, my fantasies about increasing my own specialness have been replaces by my gratitude for my ordinariness. Therefore, yoga is great, and sci-fi-fantasy-humor is great, and Germany is great. You can order beer bigger than your head anywhere you go, and drink it at 10 in the morning and nobody judges.

Finding a Locus for a More Hocus-Pocus Yoga Focus

So last week I went to yoga on Monday night at a local place that definitely appears to be the main center of happ-nin yoga around here, and took a Jivamukti class. Jivamukti is a type of yoga that two Manhattanite folks started in the ‘80s that focuses a lot on ahimsa, or nonviolence (very much in the form of vegan living), and has a pretty vigorous post-Ashtanga vinyasa-flow approach. Anyway. From what I understand, in order to call oneself a Jivamukti teacher, as opposed to someone who teaches yoga and was trained and certified by Jivamukti teachers, one must adhere to a certain kind of class structure and style. And I get this in one sense – Jivamukti needs to protect its brand, and it can’t have way off-base teachings with its name attached to it happening all over the place. So, sure. It was in the back of my head, though, at this class, that this teacher couldn’t fully be himself within the parameters of this method. It’s probably not true – there’s certainly lee-way available – but that was one distraction about the class for me. It felt so very by-the-book in terms of the little snippets of yoga wisdom that came out that I wondered if the teacher really felt it. Well, it’s also that he rambled a bit – like he knew what he should be offering up but didn’t really know how to say what he was trying to say. His chattiness ran a little long, which to me indicated a level of searching as he was talking, which meant his vision wasn’t concrete to him yet.

This is something I want to keep in mind for my own teaching. Sincerity is important. Lack of sincerity is extremely obvious, no matter how well you can “say” the words. And I’ve noticed this in the classes that I’ve been teaching – part of me feels like I need to hand out some kind of peace/love guidance thing to give to the class, and it’s pretty tough to articulate peace/love feelings genuinely. First of all, it’s hard to articulate them at all. “You know, peace and stuff.” Second, communicating one’s feelings genuinely and succinctly enough in a class context requires serious choice of words and clarity of thought, so you have to know and mean what you say. Third, hell to muffins I am no beacon of successful peace/love for someone to model and I don’t want to suggest that any yoga information I have to offer represents my confidence or achievement of something great.

Which leads to me to the fourth, which is that peace/love isn’t the primary thing for me in yoga right now. The teacher last week, in spite of my feelings about his convictions and his teaching, said something that really rang in my mind – he said that if you are doing yoga postures in a checklist kind of way to feel accomplishment then you are missing the point of yoga. And this is something I do. I am pretty caught up in the athleticism of yoga. I love feeling myself progress in postures that have been eluding me because they require more strength than I have, and I feel pretty pleased with myself when I notice I have gained the strength to do something. I am mostly motivated to do yoga by my desire to exert my energy and expand my vocabulary of movements so that I can really get sweaty. The sheer exertion feels like a huge relief, and I can purge some anxiety and shed the day away, but this mostly happens because of the physical fatigue, not because I connect with the Universal like a champ. Well, actually, I have usually considered my exertion to BE my connection with the Universal, but there is definitely an element of the inner world that is lacking right now, something I’m just not going for. I can feel transcendent etc. when I am doing my postures, and I do my final relaxation on the floor, and I sit still and try to focus on my breathing, but I’m not as gung-ho about it as I am the pure work-out part of it. So I’d like to up the ante a little bit on my spiritual hocus-pocus, so that maybe I’ll have something more genuine to offer to future classes about the inner-world aspect of yoga practice.

This Week in the Life

I'm visiting Brooklyn again, this time with some friends from overseas who are on vacation. I am the mini-chaperone! Well, not really, actually, since they have been running around Manhattan by themselves for two days while I sit around a little bit. It's been freezing cold and tourism is all about walking all the hell around. I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge with them yesterday and called it a day. All I care about on vacation is the food and they ate at Sbarro's and the Hard Rock Cafe, so I was thinking I would try to arrange delicious lunch for them on their last day and that will be my contribution to international warm fuzzies.

So in terms of Operation: Self, there's been a little bit of a back-slide with the t.v. - I've seen a lot of t.v. in the last two weeks. I guess I feel fine about it, but that's almost the worrisome part. I should be disappointed, and feel gross, and depressed, but I feel pretty okay. I'd still be more pleased with myself if I had been working on one of my Serious Purposes instead of watching shows, but I'm not feeling like a failure about it. Wait a minute, that might be great news. I do tend to think that I need my anger with myself to change my ways, but lately I feel fine about regimen lapse. I can't get too far away from everything, though - I'll start to lose the thread - but I don't feel like berating myself, and yes, I officially think that's great.

The biggest, simplest, and most important change I've made to my life in the last six months remains my alcohol consumption. Not drinking is the best thing I've done for myself since I started drinking regularly. I had a sip of wine that my overseas friends brought as a gift just to taste, and that was plenty. I had no desire to feel drunk at all - I had a little desire to have delicious wine with my salmon, but at long last I feel connected enough with the cause and effect of alcohol's impact on my body/life/heart/mind to know that I want nothing to do with the feeling that alcohol produces in me. And I feel more interesting to myself without hours of each evening lost to the soft pink sugary blurring and hazing of my head and limbs. I sleep better, which improves pretty much everything in life. I read so much more, which has been a return to myself that I am grateful for. Even if I don't really find myself or write a book or end up with a great job or anything else "important" after this little hiatus from adulthood is over (or at least changes dramatically), wrestling booze into a place where it is no longer a source of fear was well worth it. I wasn't going to be able to do it at the old job. I needed the room and silence and solitude to really practice at the abstinence. So anyway, yes, pleased with myself there.

I think I'm going to do a basic Pilates certification after th yoga stuff is done. My friend who has a Pilates studio upstate does weekend trainings, and there is one happening the weekend after yoga is over. I want to do it since I know that Pilates is good for my particular body issues, and also because I feel more and more convinced that yoga asana should be treated as a series of suggestions. Forget the hocus-pocus about each pose ringing a special note in your cosmic cells, don't do things that hurt - this is something that comes up with things like headstand. The benefits are oversold to the point that it can feel like you're really living half a life if you don't do headstand, and it's just nonsense. Our anatomy teacher said she doesn't even do them; based on the shape of the vertebrae in the neck, bearing the weight of the body on the head just wasn't something she was interested in doing. Humans around the globe carry water jugs on their heads all the time so it's not like it's an impossible and dangerous thing, and I happen to like headstand, but there are safer and more fun ways to get upside down if you are doing it for body/mind health and awareness. And besides, I try to put about 85% of the weight into my forearms and touch my head only very slightly to the ground. Anyway long story short Yogilates is definitely already taken, but I agree that Pilates offers a lot of inroads to the body that are complementary to what most yoga class sequences I've experienced don't really focus on. Hip strength and stability is the main one. Flexibility without strength is not good. So I guess it might not be "real yoga" that I end up feeling best about.

That actually reminds me of a question I asked our teacher about this issue of "what's yoga" - I asked the teacher about whether making things up (like poses) is okay, and the answer was basically that it's fine, as long as I actually do the thing that I'm talking about and don't just throw things out there on whims. Yoga started with something like 30 postures, and now there's thousands, so I think the evolution of yoga allows for the incorporation of different disciplines (although yoga "fusion" gets eye-rolled about, for sure) and can still be called "real yoga." Whatever that means. This is another one of those "how strictly do I have to adhere to be sincere" kinds of questions that I guess I'll be letting take shape for myself.

New Fantasy: Holistic Physical Therapist

So one new future version of my big non-existent life direction is to become a physical therapist after the yoga stuff, and then use yoga and, you know, science, to make people feel good in their bodies. One of the things I already like about practicing the yoga classes on my friends is trying to attend to their particular quirks. It takes some serious actual knowledge (which I don't yet have) to really "prescribe" yoga to someone in a way that helps them heal. I know that for my back problem, I have been incredibly reluctant to give up or adjust certain yoga postures that were not helping me. In particular, I love getting into wheel pose (big ol' back bend), and doing pigeon pose (really big hip stretch). Especially with respect to the hip stretches - which I thought must be really good for me since I have hip problems - I need to cut way back. With my hips and back, extending my hip flexibility is the opposite of what I should do; I need to stabilize and strengthen my hips. Again, it has taken me about ten years, two orthopedists, three chiropractors, at least one physical therapist, an acupuncturist, and an extra astute yoga teacher to convince me that this is the right thing for me. That is ridiculous. My intuition with respect to my hips was just wrong - stretching is always good, right!? Do all the poses the yoga teacher says to do! DO THEM ALL OR YOUR EXPERIENCE IS SUB-PAR.

That's the weirdest thing to think about - physical yoga is really supposed to be about tailoring movement to your body, not just trying to do things regardless of how they react with you. But it takes so long to be able to tell what is happening and what is helping and what is hurting. I still can't totally "feel" the hip/back stuff in a way that leads me to the same conclusion as all the other people who told me the useful hip/back information, but I am getting better, so the dots are starting to connect (ah direct experience is frequently the precursor to crediting authoritative advice or knowledge - but what happens when your direct experience is a misconception? well, in my case, you keep doing pigeon and wheel even though it is a bad idea). And then there's the feeling that by attending a class, you are submitting yourself to an experience that it would, at the very least, be rude to disregard in favor of just doing your own thing for some of the poses. And the trust and respect I think I should be expressing for the yoga teacher and the class structure s/he has designed makes me hesitant to skip things that I shouldn't do. And I might think that I'm shortchanging myself in a cosmic full-body yoga kind of way if I skip stuff because all the poses have magical yogic hocus-pocus that I need to experience or something.

So anyway yoga anatomy weekend is this weekend and I sent the guest speaker a bunch of questions and she wrote me back some interesting and illuminating anatomical responses, and it made me day dream about being someone who really knows the functions of the body and who can use yoga to really help people move in a way that is healing and helpful and challenging, and empower people to tailor their yoga practices to their own bodies. And of course the way that I thought I could do this in a highly credible and career-oriented way was to become a licensed physical therapist with a happy/spiritual holistic yoga-physical-therapy practice.

And here's the real point of this post! School is expensive!! I looked at the program closest to me in Troy, NY, and it was listed as a three year program for a doctor of physical therapy degree (no info about just a masters so far), and it was $790 per credit hour, and a 120 credit program. That's over $94,000 dollars. That's absurd, right? It should definitely not cost that much money. I am really bummed out by that information. I feel like the strangle-hold on information and education is pretty evil. Yeah I know I have a library card and everything, but really, people need a syllabus, and opportunity for discussion and to ask questions, and clarification and help and all that stuff. Feels unfair to put such a high price tag on access to these things. It's classist, too, which bothers me. You have to be able to afford to know and learn and grow. And then the government gets involved and needs to touch your education with a magic wand for you to be able to legally use and make a living off of your knowledge (yes there is an up and a downside to this). So there goes that little fantasy, at least in that form.

Feeling Conflicted (as usual) About Revelatory Insights

It seems like I am always hearing about people's next, next, and then next best and profound realization about life. I get tired of this. There is always a book I have never heard of, a swami I've never heard of, a retreat to the mountains I've never heard of, or some obscure little extra credit corner of spiritual and revelatory life that is providing someone with the new perspective they are finally ready to hear (tee-pees! Amazonian Shamanism! Kundalini energy!). Bleh. Even just the saying "when the student is ready the teacher appears" is kind of snobbish - "well look at me, I'm ready!" It could just as easily say "when the human is desperate, the free market will fill the hole for anywhere from 20 to 3,000 dollars." I mean, I'm pretty skeptical that new-insight people are enjoying entry into new aspects of self-inquiry as a result of their mastery of previously studied disciplines. And it's tough to take seriously the "next thing" seekers when everything else in their lives seems to have been taken so lightly that it can be abandoned for something "better." I mean I'm not trying to hate on personal evolution - our progress should be continual/cumulative in life and I certainly don't think we should ever consider ourselves to be "done" becoming who we are, but there's a line, no?

On the other hand: I like this stuff a little bit. I like to read books about things that are supposed to be useful to my perspective on myself and the world and everything like that. I even like to tell my friends about handy little ways of looking at the world that have been useful for me, and I'm sure I have been at least a touch sanctimonious about it a few times (I am thinking of one blog post in particular that I re-read and then cringed at myself about; there is no prize to readers who know which one I mean). And I love love love to hear what other people are thinking about with stuff like this. Also I am sensing a shift in myself away from the sect of Buddhism I have been looking into and more toward the India-centric yoga-related schools of meditation and stuff - at least in my inquiry stage (man I'm feeling jaded about Buddha - dharma is cool, but karma can suck it, and so can the priestly hierarchy and the glamorous temple and the unending, supplicating prayers). So am I a dabbling dilettante? A potential guru-hopping "new truth finder?" Probably. What to do about this?

Well, sticking with something is maybe a good start. I mean, sometimes I don't want to read anymore books about this stuff. I have enough books as it is, and I haven't exactly integrated them fully into my life in terms of insight and application. In a case of actual irony, I am thinking about this partly thanks to the insightful books I just read that my friend lent me. But really, to just keep reading on and on and on is the same thing as Sharpening Pencils. It's hard enough to hold on to new insights as they are arising. It's another thing to apply them to life and let them affect you enough to mean anything. In Buddha class this comes up sometimes - intellectual insights are nothing without putting it into practice, and the metaphor is that it's like having the prescription for the right medicine, and believing that since it is on your bathroom sink you're cured. You have to actually take the medicine. Knowing something is useless without acting upon it. In some way, being in a constant stake of seeking is yet another way to postpone meaningful life progress.

So anyway I feel like I have to boil down my plan for my relationship to yoga a little bit so that I don't end up in the ever-seeking stage dilettantish amateurism they way I have for everything in my whole life so far. For now, I have in front of me: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which is the main yoga source text; my own physical and mental yoga practice; and muscular anatomy to learn. That's plenty. Can't go picking up book after workshop for the rest of time. Sigh, well, I have one new book right now on women and yoga which I'm going to read but I feel okay about that one because I feel like I can file it under anatomy. But seriously let's keep things manageable, here.

I Never Do My Hip (the body part) Exercises

So my low back pain is the result of two main, big things in my life.

One: doing yoga with my ego instead of my bodily intelligence. I just want to do some of that stuff so bad even though it kind of hurts!! Or what I’ll do it convince myself that my discomfort is a “roll with it and you’ll make it better” kind of discomfort instead of a “back the hell off or you’ll make it worse” kind of discomfort. In this way I treat yoga as my personal forum for vanity and denial. Nice! Totally working on that, though. I went to yoga today and tried to back way off of the stuff that makes my back cranky but I didn’t hold back enough, and my back hurts now. Key-riced-all-my-tea.

Two: my low back pain is pretty much caused by my hip problems. I have a hip thing, and it’s been there for a while, and basically I ignore it until I can’t, and then I get some attention or make some life changes, and hopefully I get a little relief, and then I go back to ignoring it. Every time I talk to anyone about my hips – generally either the orthopedist, the physical therapist, or the chiropractor, I get the same exact advice in the form of exercises to do. These exercises are basically Pilates – lots of abdominal work and leg lifts. I have heard this exact advice probably seven times from seven professionals in the last ten years; I have even literally been told to “do Pilates.” These exercises are good for my hip because stuff is both too loose and too tight up in there and strengthening it is good for the rotation of my pelvic bowl which then helps align my sacrum blah blah blah blah blah blah. For some reason which is not clear to me, I basically never ever do these exercises. I figure that between lots of walking and lots of yoga I am in pretty good shape and these dinky lame-o exercises aren’t doing anything extra for me, and besides, those doctors just regurgitate whatever they had to memorize for a test once and they don’t know ME, they don’t understand MY experience (so why do I go? I foolishly want to hear something totally miraculous someday, that’s why). But at long last, I think I am finally capable of saying that I am wrong about this. Hopefully this means I will do the freakin’ exercises. (If you are a friend of mine who has heard me say that I should really do my hip exercises, I want you to know that I think I might mean it now, and I won’t say it again, because I’m pretty sure it’s utterly exasperating to hear me complain about it. Sorry about that.)

This forces me to confront something that I do not like to acknowledge: yoga is not my ally in all things. That’s what the latest professional told me recently, that certain parts of yoga are not necessarily my ally in my hip/back issues. I hate this information. I want so badly for yoga to be a complete system that I just need to stick to, with enough variety in my poses to hit all major parts of the body, and I’ll be perfectly comfortable and have zero pain. I feel like I could just figure out the right prescription of yoga poses and I’d be fine! Yoga yoga yoga! With that other stuff, it’s like there’s something that just feels so freakin’ pedestrian about doing my hip exercises, not holistic or magical at all. And it feels like I’m not doing “real” yoga when I just throw the hip exercises into my routine. Isn’t that ridiculous? How do I feel about Yogilates (I think this is a real thing with a trademark and everything)? I used to think it is the corruption and dilution of yoga, all this combining and brand-naming and multidisciplinary made-up nonsense. But I am also probably wrong about this too (all knowledge is broadening, not narrowing, I recall me saying that sometime - also I was recently publicly wondering about how strictly one needs to adhere to a discipline to consider oneself a follower, and deciding that I can take whatever I want from anything - why do I view yoga asana differently - mystery! at least I haven't claimed to be a really consistent person). It’s just that there’s already so much to know about yoga all by itself. But I have to do something else, too? Feels unfair.

Here’s some more embarrassing information. I did some hip exercises last night and they were hard. Clearly whatever I’m doing in yoga isn’t making me so rock solidly strong that I am too diesel for these hip exercises. And here’s something else: I like Pilates. I actually have a DVD that I don’t really look at, but anyway I took Pilates a couple days a week for about a year (this was a few years ago) and I really got a lot out of it physical-comfort-wise. Ugh, so, I know what to do for my hip and back, I know I can even enjoy it, and I know it actually does help me. So what’s my problem? I don’t know. I just feel like I have enough to think about without the stupid hip pain making my back hurt. I asked the chiropractor about going to get acupuncture, to see what she thought about it, and she said sure why not – but then she said that she’d also like to see me being a little more active in caring for my hips. So embarassing that I want a quick fix for a problem I’ve had for over ten years, I mean how stupid am I!? So it’s tough nuts time for me, time to do a little Pilates for my hip every day, bleh.

Dude, Meditating is Hard, But Still Awesome

Meditation practice is so hard. What I mean by meditating (or what I should say) is meditation preparation, since really what I’m still trying to do is develop my concentration. Hopefully after a lot of practice concentrating I will approach actual meditation. I did some meditating the other morning and my mind was like frantic horses, all stomping and galloping and running all the hell around the place. And trying to bring my focus back singularly to my breath really is like pushing against the gate while the horses are trying to get out. Horses! Me vs. Horses! And being released from meditation, letting the gate burst open, is their flight – and as I stop pushing the gate against their tramping and stomping, it is both an immense relief and a return to chaos. I thought about this while I was trying to concentrate. I should have only been thinking about my breath. So that’s how that’s going.

Sometimes people say they “can’t” meditate or they tried it and they aren’t “good” at it because they just can’t stand to sit still or they have to keep moving and thinking etc. And just to get a little mean here for a minute, saying you are too scatter-brained to meditate is like saying you are too out-of-shape to exercise, or too thirsty to drink a glass of water. One is the very reason to pursue the other, and the other, its cure. We will find water and drink it even if it’s a pain because it’s so vital to our comfort and existence. Calming my mind sometimes feels this important or urgent. It can feel like my very life is in the balance . . . and yet, it’s so much easier to just watch a movie with my free time instead of training my mind. It’s like dying of dehydration because that’s easier than finding water. Ridiculous. One way that meditating is hard for me is that it feels like I am confronting everything ever that has been or will be, and trying to shoo it out of the room so I can just play and be happy, but that takes so much work I’d rather just go find another space and do something else. But there isn’t “another space,” only the outskirts of existence. But still I will get too tired or weak to herd the noise, and I let all the chaos hog up the nice space, exiling me to sit in the sewers of distraction with my cowardice and sloth. Yoinks. Holy metaphors!

And the temptation to use meditation time as grocery-list time is hard, too. I’m just sitting there with nothing to do but nothing, and the rest of the day or the next day starts to come into my head asking for shape: “when should you go to the post office? Also don’t forget to go to the post office in the first place. How about calling your cousin back finally, huh? Maybe you can do that today.” On and on. Always the future coming in and wanting to beckon me out of the present, or the past wanting to settle accounts or put me on trial yet again for my errors. It’s so hard but I feel pretty dedicated, at least today I do. I haven’t been the most consistent student but that’s coming along, too.

School School School

Man I love learning stuff. I love waiting for the click in my brain when I'm reading something I don't quite get. When you push a little bit and then figure something out you get to have that little burst popcorn kernel all to yourself forever, a little flower of comprehension to snuggle up to. Mmm mmm love it.

I frequently put down my learning, however, after the initial bloom of comprehension. Sort of goes along with my being pretty-good-at-a-whole-bunch-of-stuff-but-not-meaningfully-proficient-at-anything-at-all.

Why is this? I mean I do believe that depth actually is breadth and through the former you can achieve the latter, and following the thread of god through any discipline or body of knowledge takes you through the source of all. Iyengar says this about love - that dedicating our love to someone is our entry to universal, divine, unlimited love. Yep yep yep sure totally on board.

Ah but putting this into practice means choosing something to follow all the way down its rabbit hole, and I don't feel I've done a ton of that in this lifetime. I think I tend to figure out the baseline rules or concepts so that I know just enough of what is happening to see where something is going, and then I sort of get off the bus. So now I'm 32 and I have a bunch of things that I can do pretty okay and enjoy pretty okay but nothing that I feel I've followed so far afield that it's brought me back home. I'd like to buckle down a little but it's hard to choose what (to my three readers: I've written about this before so if there is a repetitive blogging apology to be made consider it made).

There is toughing it out involved. When the learning curve is super high in the early stages of learning about something, it's pretty thrilling to start to see the pieces put themselves together into the whole. But then there's the plateau. Sigh, the inevitable plateau when you know what's going on but don't know what to do next to make it feel like you're still on the ride. After that the feeling of progress is infinitesimal and at the same time the jump to the next plateau is further away. This is the point in learning that I usually move on.

Well no more! Kind of. We'll see. I think I have three things about myself that I really feel like I want to follow all the way down - under "meaningful work" in my criteria for happiness. My music-playing, yoga stuff, and a bit of philosophy reading that I want to know more about. Feels manageable. Whoops I'm totally forgetting my other little projects like brushing up on my Latin and working on my collages. But this is the problem - the desire to do so many things (breadth) just makes doing anything (depth) impossible. This is the problem with constantly trying on new selves. It never goes anywhere anyway, you are always just you afterward.

And the vanity issue is troubling, too. Experts are so intimidating and special and magical. It would be neat to be seen as an expert on anything. And my own sense of pride and credibility and self-worth is tied into how hard I work on any one thing (which is usually not that hard). So I'm looking for that feeling as well. Not too bodhichitta of me. Mergh, bleh.

Hounded

I went to Chile by myself for about 4 weeks in February of 2005. I have always had a vague sort of Latin-America-is-neat type of thing, and my college Spanish was pretty okay, and I had some money saved up and I wasn't getting any older etc etc.

I came home about a week early. I was supposed to stay a full month but I didn't make it. I was starting to feel insane and lonely and trapped in my head. In some way this was what I wanted - I wanted to be alone and feel like I knew myself and affirm some kind of self-sufficiency or independence of mind. But what I found, confronted with myself, by myself save for the hotel owners and waitresses, was not familiarity or a return to being, liberated from obligation, uninterrupted by context, but instead, a daily, lonely terror of boredom and self-loathing. Somewhere inside, I thought, I could reconnect to some nascent version of my identity that gazes contentedly out windows, feels no more severely than curious and happy wandering through new scenery, and has no worry about the future and no regret about the past. But being alone with my thoughts was too hard. Every single petty horror of my life up to that point chased me all day long, replaying over and over, sometimes with new clever ways I should have behaved thrown in for a bit of memory theater. My mind was swimming and churning so much that after a while, I couldn't even make sense of what I wanted to do with my day besides find breakfast and go to sleep. Did I feel like walking? Did I want to go to the museum in this town? Did I want to read a book, and could I find one in English ('cause screw practicing my Spanish, btw)? How about a movie? Which place for dinner? How do I even "know" how I "feel" or what I "want" to do? What is my compass? Who am I besides every stupid and horrible thing I've ever done? Every single inclination I might have had just felt so stupid, just some attempt to sustain the desperate, infinite distraction from myself. I couldn't wait to get back to my life and all the convenient distractions of it; the kitchen and cooking, my friends, some job to take up the hours of the day, anything but the endless walking in loops in my toxic brain.

So this is habit of mind for which I seek relief. This is what I want yoga or Buddhism to cure me of. And I believe that I can escape the prison of memory, and I can re-train myself to ruminate positive things, and learn to contribute only positive, helpful things to me and my loved ones and the world, AND ALL THAT STUFF. And while I am further along in my sense of confidence and worth and stuff than I was in 2005, what still troubles me most is the sustained effort of training my mind. It's so difficult. There is this pacing that I do that doesn't help me, and I know that working on my concentration, which would eventually result in meditation, is so clearly right in my reach, and I just have to sit down and dedicate a little sincere time and effort to it, and I will build up new habits of mind that will free me from myself, but it's hard. I get fatigued by trying to live purposefully, and sometimes all it feels like is the "righteous" version of traveling in Chile - instead of figuring out whether I want to go to the museum, I'm choosing books to read or yoga classes to attend, like the low-fat edition of everything else I've ever done. When does the distraction end and existence begin? When I've absorbed enough tools of positive action to put them to work? When I am more disciplined? When? How? I hope I am getting closer.

Revisit: Christian Radio

This is a revised and updated version of a post I made and then deleted.

Sometimes I listen to the Xtian radio stations, and not in a totally ironic way. There is a combined sociological, historical, and educational aspect that I sort of enjoy. Not just the Bible stories and stuff, which is neat to learn about, but also culturally, to know the substance of what so many people are apparently almost wholly influenced and guided by these days. The music blows, like fer shur, but the conversation pieces are sort of interesting. And I like batting around this stuff a lot - I love advice columns. Carolyn Hax and Dan Savage are my favorite since they are really entertaining and well-reasoned. But I also like Dr. Laura and Dave Ramsey. I like the full circumference of points of view; there is something to be gained from all of them. The benefit can be in either in challenging your biases, or finding commonality where you thought there might be none, or reaffirming your own positions in your mind in spite of contrary points of view.

Okay so that faux-intellectual meta-analysis of pop culture talking heads was a disclaimer made entirely for the benefit of my vanity because I know it's totally square to listen to Christian radio, but I do it anyway, so there's that.

Anyway last week I was listening to some Xtian radio in the car, and the pastor (minister? reverend? chaplain?) guy was describing some confessions of sins of teen lust, and how they go something like this: "I dunno pastor, we were down a dark and private lane at 2 in the morning and gosh, it just . . . it just happened." And of course the point of this is that the lapse into sinful behavior took place waaaaaaay before it supposedly "just happened," and, really, lots and lots of decision lead up to a person's giving into temptation.

So the pastor recommended giving your weaknesses wide berth. Avoid situations that give rise to opportunities to make bad choices. At first I thought this was a little silly - it's a bad idea to hide from temptation as your means of dealing with life. Um, hello, virtue untested isn't virtue at all, it's like a totally famous quote. But the observation he made that really appealed to me was this question: why do we rub up so close against our weaknesses and then ask ourselves to resist? Why do we walk the edge, thinking we can have just one bite of a sundae, or one sip of wine, or anything else like that? It's a lie of our own desires. We want to do the thing we are trying not to do. According to the pastor the feeling of want is the devil trying to get us to cave in, and that's where I fall off the train, but I'm still on board with the idea that the state of mind that makes bad decisions unfolds long before the undesired behavior takes place. You know in your heart, way ahead of time, even though you may say the opposite to yourself, that you are going to create permission for yourself to do something you claim not to want to do. Anyway I like this because when I am thinking about my own bad habits, I like the idea that I can exercise my resistance or disciplined state of mind long before the moment of temptation. I can give my weaknesses wide berth in my mind, and without having to literally stay home to avoid temptation, I can stay "home" in my head. And even when temptation is right in front of you, turning away and waiting for ten minutes, or distracting yourself from it can be effective for letting a wave of weakness pass over you. Like deciding not to have candy - if you just keep walking, ten minutes later the impulse is usually gone.

Ah, all this is just to say that yoga was so awesome this morning. I went to class taught by one of the teacher trainers and it was so great. The whole time I just kept thinking to myself, "yes, this is how I feel best, and most myself, I want this feeling, I want to hold this state in my heart all day, every day." And I can have this state of being all I want - but I have to work at it, keeping all my triggers for weakness at a distance, fomenting the state of being I really want to be anchored to. I imagine that in this positive state of self, former temptations will lose their luster anyway, and I will have to deal less with waiting out waves of weakness.

First Class Weekend

And it was both first-class and the first class in the yoga teacher training undertaking. AS WELL AS the weekend of my AC/DC cover band's big show, so man oh man, talk about trying to be a fun-lovin' social-times haver as well as a student of physical and spiritual discipline!

So teacher training was great. I had a bunch of hesitations about how this was going to go, based on my usual eye-roller type of approach to corny stuff. I mean, when I think of who would be doing the training, I definitely picture corny people with herbs and bells and hugs and stuff. But I am doing it, and I like herbs and bells and hugs and I don't really think of myself as corny, so the first order of business to was confront my judgment against Corniness. The teacher asked us to set an intention for the experience to return to in our minds throughout the next six months, and I decided that mine is to think to myself that I am open to this experience. See, that sounds corny, but I am totally open to that. And it wasn't that corny and neither were the people, really, so there's that. I think I actually am much Cornier than I think I am, and I am totally open to that too. Boom.

The other hesitations were related to the curriculum and the books - there aren't a ton of books in this experience, and just one anatomy book, and the classes this weekend didn't have a touchstone text associated with the learning. I like a reference text to study, and maybe that's coming but maybe not. So I was running into my expectations about what is a credible experience, and I think because I went to law school my opinion about what is legitimate learning is probably way cranked up, like if it's not basically impossible to keep up with what's happening even if you study 24/7, then you're not really doing anything. It's such a puritanical boot-camp kind of mentality. But so far this is a completely different kind of learning, since I really did learn a lot, and again, yes, totally open to that. I actually thought of that when I felt myself feeling disappointed that I probably wouldn't have to memorize the skeletal system and point out bones on a dummy in order to pass the class. I am good at memorizing and this disappointment is probably vanity-related. And I can absolutely do that myself if it increases my own sense of credibility anyway.

What we did do was some ice-breaker stuff, which was nice - 10 women and 1 man I think! Yoga is frequently a chick sport. And then we spent the first day dissecting and critiquing everyone's expressions of two poses. We had to talk each other into the poses and learn some gentle assists to demonstrate alignment for each other, and man is that harder than it sounds. The articulating of how to move one's body is really difficult, and the impulse to over-talk is overwhelming. I just wanted to keep talking, saying things like, "okay, now move your foot - the right foot - wait, I mean front foot - more over to the left, and then think of lifting up - up in the legs, but more over with the torso, but also over, I mean up" - blah blah blah so yeah it's hard to be brief and clear and helpful when speaking, so I will be practicing that on any friends who will let me.

And the learning about the alignment of the poses was good too, and I'm sort of excited to work like crazy on the handful of poses we did this weekend with my new, teacherly insights. Can't wait for the next teacher weekend! Go Team Corny!

So on to the AC/DC show. Yes, Saturday night, after much anticipation, my law school dude buddies and I rocked the be-dickens out of a tiny night club in Albany, NY. I love being in the AC/DC cover band, and I think it's because even though I think of rock and roll and beers and hanging out as being the activities of my "other self," I actually have to really tap into my most disciplined and attentive self to make it work. Because the thing is, I am not actually super great at playing the guitar, and I have to practice and practice and practice and straight up memorize the things that I see other musicians just intuitively understanding (which may be a function of their having practiced like hell to be good, but it always seems like magic to me). This is because even though I have been playing guitar a long time, I never really liked to practice playing guitar that much. I always just strummed and hummed and figured it out without thinking too hard about what was happening, and that was always fine. But to truly rock super hard and super loud and super fun is pretty difficult - and it's because the payoff of rocking out is so exciting in my mind that I can be pretty dedicated to practicing my AC/DC songs. Also I don't want to let down my band mate friends, that would be horrible. Anyway the release available in the moment of the show is most rewarding when I've practiced to the point that I don't have to worry about my hands doing the right thing, I can just go for it, and everyone plays together and can listen to each other without having to worry about getting it right, but just letting it happen. Good stuff.

Time and again in my life I find that discipline is always the gateway to freedom. Learning the dance moves so you can flail with abandon. Getting in shape so you can hike to the more beautiful view. Learning the chords so you can just play and have fun. I think I know this somewhere inside me about yoga and the spiritual stuff, too - I know that somewhere on the other side of the breathing and the poses and the meditation is unlimited abandon and freedom (corny meter off the charts with that). It just takes a lot of practice and focus to experience that abandon, and I know the kernel of desire for that payoff is in me, I just need to embrace the Corniness and all that stuff and let that kernel grow as big as my desire to rock out.

Hoorah, continuity! Totally just threaded yoga and AC/DC together for myself.