“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
I’ve been thinking of rabbit holes this morning. As in click bait, doom scroll, distractions and vitriolic comment sections. You know what I mean. You know exactly how it feels.
I think Lewis Carroll was riffing on an understood thing. I think he was talking about the labyrinthian underground passages that take you round and round and deeper and further and the tendency to get lost. I’m talking about rabbit holes and rat’s nests as metaphor for something else, something human beings are prone to. Dark. Twisted.
Wandering.
I mean his Alice story wasn’t making something up so much as it is playing with something true. Something we know. And Alice’s marvelous adventures…goodness, such flights of fancy. But also: executionary queens who lop of heads if they don’t get a yes ma’am; cannibalistic beach combers who lull their victims with a byes; terrifying purveyors of haberdashery, shouting at you every minute and moving things around; eat me drink me eat me drink me, bent mirrors everywhere…it’s sinister dreaming. Thank goodness she wakes up.
All fairy tales are like that. The brothers Grimm are, actually. Little Red Riding Hood is one of the most terrifying stories I know, partially because I know the calculus of walking as a woman alone.
Human consciousness has some truly wild possibilities. It’s potent stuff. The fact that we can change our state seems to me both obvious and hardly understood. It’s happening all the time - we caffeinate, crave the high of exercise, and slide into Netflix like its home base.
I wonder if we don’t over value certain states - ecstasy, alertness, artistic inspiration or spiritual….well…spiritual something or other…without understanding how ordinary it is. I mean caffeinated, dominant or submissive, zoned out, stimulated, agitated, dopamine hit by the Esty scroll or the Insta recognition or the things we do to feel I’m a good person.
Yoga isn’t magic, I blurted out to a mentee yesterday; but you are.
She blinked. I blinked. We were quiet a minute.
I often say things without really knowing what I mean.
I guess we all do.
And I think that’s okay. I think there is actually a richness to spontaneity, a real spit of wisdom and truth to naked conversation. But there is also an art to it. The richness of wise naked is a thing you have to practice.
It’s natural
Minnesota legalized marijuana. Maybe that’s what I’m thinking about. Frankly I’m for legalization - mostly from an I-don’t-care-what-folks-do-recreationally standpoint. I have more important things to do with my cares. But I also have some pretty serious qualms about criminal double standards. I worry about our incarceration system and the way it hides rank disparity in care, education, public health, crime and punishment generally. I also, as an addict, have a sensitivity to the human oh so human propensity to self medicate. Bricks to head, like. Fingers in ears or down a throat. There are a thousand ways to pray, and ten thousand ways to distraction.
At the end of a yoga class several years back, laying on the floor of a darkened gym space, someone asked me about CBD oil and musculo-skeletal pain. I had nothing to say: I have no doubt that it can help certain things, and that there are scenarios in which such help is a blessing - HIV and chemotherapy patients come to mind. I’m also aware that folks can torque rhetoric. We often use valid science to justify our own less rational choices.
There is a contemporary brassiness to moral righteousness - trending ethics and principled jargon – that is slant rhetoric. Regardless of which side folks are on, they wheel out moral superiority with a quickness. We honest to god think we are better folks - smarter, too - than others. When it really comes down to it, though, we mostly just aren’t doing anything personally. We’re wandering around and picking our noses. Netflix and chill. CSpan and outrage. Rabbit holes and rat’s nests in our laundry baskets and drawers at work. The virtue signal is a slight of hand – an insultingly simple deflection. Making a point does something in us not unlike sneaking a small item from a shelf into your pocket. The brain lights up. The heart thrills.
Righteous indignation can be - not is, can be - an easy way out.
This is delicate. Listen close. As a rape and domestic violence victim, I can attest to the horrible realization that I’m not always being victimized. I am an angry woman. I am justifiably angry. The world continues to justify my anger.
It is also true that at a certain point anger isn’t a thing being done to me; it’s a thing I’m doing to myself.
Breathe. Breathe.
Yoga, now: people often talk about yoga as if it is some sort of trance state, an ecstasy or revelation. You hear about the yoga high and the zen state and the bliss bunnies. You hear about insights and intuition. Throw in current trendiness of psylocibin and ayuashauca, a good sage cloud and a cacao ceremony, or your garden variety spliff. I’m not judging here - but I do have questions.
To my experience, yoga techniques feel less like a trance than they feel like coming out of one. Yoga is waking up.
Many times this is a literal disenchantment. Gawd the realizations. The oh, shit clarity. The allowance of grief that hits you like summer thunder or the understanding of limits, so very like the purple summer rain. A draining, an absolution of waste. The miracle of quite ordinary things like grass moving like water moving like light, or like water boiling, or like goosebumps.
Once in a while I get the clean blown sensations of a mind ticking along when it’s functioning at its best, tickticktickticktick. I know the body singing itself alive. I glory in the thickness of the heart thump. A glinting bright. A sudden lifting of birds.
It is both humbling and extraordinary. Another mentee was speaking of the boredom of early sobriety, how getting clean means letting go of the fantasies we’ve had about ourselves; it works, but it’s also disappointing. A friend, diagnosed with cancer, looked off at the sky and said we never think it will happen to us, do we? My menstrual cycle has changed profoundly in the last couple of months, in the predicted ways my doctor and all sorts of other people who know have told me that it would. But somehow it still comes as a surprise. Age does. Every time I bleed now I both resent it - because fucking hell - and grieve it, mourn it. I wonder how many more times it will happen.
Hang in there, I told my mentee: you don’t even know who you are yet. My friend laced her fingers in mine and squeezed. Things folks said to me years ago, that I resented at the time, are starting to taste very, very, real. Unmotherhood is a gift, they said; it saved your life. The grief of a person who has lost a child, they said, is so rich it can feed the whole community. It’s a briny taste, a little coppery. A pinch deep behind my face. A breaking of waters.
Inhale, and know that you are inhaling, I say to my students. I say it to myself. Breathe
and know it. It’s so fibrous. It’s so pulpy. The way it both does and does not answer.
The capacity of a human being to change is gobsmacking. The pitches of human consciousness are a live wire we hardly ever notice. I love how it sometimes is quite like a symphony, a shock, a portal, a beauty, a flame. This is true. And at the same time, we are so bloody impressionable. We are so heavily brainwashed. We are gullible and ignorant and mediocre.
The wildest thing about yoga is actually the tuning of mediocrity. The science of mallable. It is the imprinting of mind. Yoga is the decision to accept training. It is a willingness to change knowing you don’t get to decide what change means.
We can alter our consciousness. In fact consciousness is nothing but alterations. This is important: intuition is liable to be delusion. One more subliminal bias. A distortion.
I mean we need to be careful. Think good and hard about what you’re putting on your various altars.
Magical Thinking
I believe it was the honesty and clarity around this - the calling out of escapism - that first appealed to me so strongly in the Desikachar lineage. They tend to downplay euphoria, or accomplishment in āsana, emphasizing the small, practical, adaptable, every body ness of yoga. They raise eyebrows at sudden revelations and pithy austerities. Mr. Desikachar himself is famous for saying things like you know yoga is working when your relationships improve, and yoga might help us in our life, by which he meant ordinary householder life, not an enlightened one. He said it as a direct challenge to the idea that we should expect miracles or waste our time perfecting what are essentially parlor tricks.
The goal is calm without lethargy, he said, awake without agitation.
Not: do whatever you want.
Alter/Altar
I have spent the last several years - and last couple weeks fairly intensely with a few students - trying to lay out the technology of yoga. Some folks call it the science of yoga. I agree, but I also get prickly about what we mean when we say “science”. From my students, we garnered these defining traits: science is inquiry within parameters; science is a willingness to accept the data, rather than interpret according to expectation, faith, or rhetoric; science is experiment and replicability, with an awful lot of failure. As a side note, science changes the function of failure, our understanding of it and relationship to it. If we are scientists, failure is not a moral or personal failing, and it certainly does not demean; from a scientific standpoint, failure is information.
In this technology, we put our attention on something. Or we try. Pay attention to a bone in your foot or the belly of the exhale or a sculpture on an altar.
When we do this, stuff happens. Stuff might happen. Something might happen! Sir Desikachar used to say. I imagine him shrugging. Or rubbing his hands together in hungry anticipation. Both. Eh.. and Ah!!
On the high, spiritual, metaphysical plane we could say if we focus on the qualities of the elephant god Ganesh, we end up strengthening like qualities within ourselves. Simultaneously, we reveal our weak spots. Ganesh is usually associated with leadership, success, bravery, strength. But he’s also self-checking, wisdom, and logic. In the end, he isn’t gumption so much as he is discernment. Informed consent. Green light. No excuses.
Gods - devas if you wanna get Sanskrit about it - are not “Gods” in the English western meaning of the thing. They are simply forces of nature. Like gravity and light. Like gravity, neither your belief nor your understanding matter very much: It Is.
To my experience and understanding, this technology never works if you are either merely projecting or abjectly bowing. That is to say, this scientific spirituality is neither narcissist manifestation gobbledegook nor is it religious dogma. It isn’t about ‘god’ out there, but it also isn’t about ‘truth’ inside. Instead, it’s a reckoning. A relating. An attuning. An Atonement (At One Meant).
This world is real, and so are you. Act accordingly.
It gets dangerous, I’m saying, if we naively or superciliously believe that the working of your foot is terribly revolutionary. It’s problematic to think the god on your altar is actually an intervening angel. It’s just wrong to be taught or to assume that you’re always supposed to breath yoga breaths. You’re just a dude, dude. You’re supposed to laugh, and cry, and sing, and snore. Yoga breaths are only really interesting in that they bring up questions or help us with laughing and crying, song and sleep.
How to Pray
I’ve been teaching Gāyatrīs for several years. I’ve been teaching them in a particular way. It isn’t terribly particular, actually: it’s gleaned from what lots of folks have previously taught me that I just spit out my mouth one day after years and years of personally working it over subliminally and actually.
First, I do a little deconstructing of what tends to be taught as “The Gāyatrī.” It’s simply fetishisitic to take the definitions used by other folks, no matter how pretty they are. I mean, many of us were told something like there is One Gāyatrī (tat savitur varenyam) and it means something about the sun. Or spirit of the universe. Or impelling spirit? I don’t know, it’s all quite esoteric.
We’re taught (or Guided by Google) that ‘oṁ’ means the four states of consciousness, or beginning middle and end, or all the letters of the magical Sanskrit alphabet, or the mystic sound of the universe, or whatever. That is all pretty, sure. Titillating in its way. But I have no flipping idea what any of it actually means, let alone what to ‘do’ with it.
I was pointedly taught that none of it ‘means’ anything except what you yourself put into it.
There are dozens of Gāyatrīs, not just the one. “Gāyatrī” refers to a particular Vedic meter, not that particular mantra about the goddess of light.
I picked up on - and had confirmed to me when I asked - the fact that there are three similar words in each of the many prayers. “Vidmahe”, “Dhīmahi”, and “prachodayāt”, or words with a very similar meaning, define the action of each of three lines of a Gāyatrī. Like all Sanskrit words, these are like balls of yarn. It’s silly to give one off definitions. But they do have, together, a kind of hang together that is remarkably similar to the Serenity prayer. Acknowledge, commit, surrender. Accept, focus, let go. That old God grant me rag.
I figured - and again, had confirmed to me in the asking, asking has been the most effective yoga I’ve found to date - that this is kind of a recipe or formula for how prayer works. In other words, these songs do what yoga is. They both describe the purpose and articulate how it works. This is a form/function science. It helps us in recognizing, sheepishly, where we have been trying to use a foot, or a god, to do something feet or gods are not designed to do. Or in realizing, suddenly gradually, that we have been allowing our family of origin to inform our entire understanding of human dynamics. Or slowly come to understand that a friend or a lover is not the same thing as a savior, any more than a god is an escape route, or a human life is a punishment. If we’re asking: how there could be a rational spirituality? A transformative, responsible understanding of the sacred? A personal relationship with God? this formula - the science of yoga - is my best shot at answering. Give things their proper role. Don’t use a book spine to hammer a nail in the wall. Don’t use your teeth to open packages. Don’t use your phone for your sense of belonging. And don’t use your heart as a bargaining chip.
Fascinating things begin to happen when once you start asking what things are for, what they are designed to do, how they work. A knee, for example. A spine. A mother. An hour. A peony.
I suppose the easiest way to say it is that things start to work. Resentments fall away. You start to have a lot of thoughts along the line of it’s not her fault, or that’s not actually my job or worrying about that is a waste of my time. You start to have a lot of feelings of the compassion, respect, and serenity species, which in turn starts to shine a light on I want what I want when I want it thoughts, or the bitter, spiteful, weirdly both self important and self loathing kind of feelings.
If you pay close attention, all of these prayers are about right relationship with reality. I think all yoga is, ultimately, about right relationship with reality. It’s an attention game that makes reality more obvious and yourself a little more clear.
There is a further, synergy layer here, in putting these things together has more spin than any single one of the things on their own. The principle of synergy is consistent in yoga philosophy: none of it holds together when taken out of context.
Name something bigger than yourself. God works if you want but is absolutely unnecessary. I tend to say things like I know I only have 24 hours today, or I know I can’t control the weather, or I realize other people are beyond my control. A student pointed out that my prayers are all rather gritty. Yes, well. I tend to be. But there have also been times I say oh my god, the stars! or sweet Jesus flowers are amazing! or oh glory be, it hurts when people die. All of these are true. And all of them are bigger than me. This is the function of varenyam or vidmahe. It corresponds to the Serenity in Niebuhr’s prayer.
Next, state your responsibility, in light of the above. Alternately, make a commitment. Say what you can do. Admit. I don’t care how you say it: if one of those words is too laden for you, skip it and find some other word that works. That part does not matter in the least, aside from the fact that it only works if you work it, personally. For me, this is often I know I can’t control the weather, but I still have to walk the dog. This is the function of Dhīmahi, or the Courage bit of Niebuhr.
At last and en fin, ask for help. Asking for help is the wisdom. Prachodayāt.
It’s pretty silly. I mean in being so ordinary. You might say gritty. Or petty. Or mundane. There is nothing esoteric about it.
But I’m telling you, this shit changed my life.
Snake Oil and Spiritual Slime
Occasionally folks tell me they feel a smarminess, a manipulation coming from spiritual spaces or folks or practices. Me too.
Sometimes, brilliantly, students ask if maybe we aren’t just manipulating ourselves with yoga (or, painfully, they realize they are being manipulated by a teacher).
Yup. I say.
This manipulability, this impressionability, is both our weakness and our strength.
That, to quip on all the Upanisad’s clout, is what you are. Tat Tvam Asi.
You’re changeable.
You’d better tend to your fire.
afterward/afterword
I have never, personally, had much of an altar practice. Maybe it’s my Lutheran upbringing. It’s like Ikea and protest - I mean, nailing a list of demands on the church door is pretty Antifa, isn’t it? - predetermine my understanding of ritual. I like the art - you’ve heard me wax gorgeous about iconography and lent and cathedrals before - but I’ve never had a personal devotion in my bone scrabby, dirty haired life.
I remember practicing Astaṇga at dawn. It was always a room full of sweaty, athletic, sensual bodies breathing loudly but otherwise chillingly silent. There was no instruction, no gab. Everybody just doing their own thing. Together in one room.
It was both beautiful and deeply weird.
I practiced in a lot of different rooms, in a lot of different cities. Partially, this was what I liked about it. Like 12 step meetings, I knew I could go anywhere in the world and find my people. It’s clubby. It’s culty.
It’s very very real.
In most of those rooms there would be some version of an altar. They varied quite a bit. Some were elaborate and gaudy and centered while others were subdued and low to the ground, close to the door. There was usually a stick of nag champa wafting blue smoke across a draft, until it hung like a ghost under the ceiling. There might be a couple of flowers or a tea-light candle. Inevitably, in Astanga spaces, there would be a framed picture of Patthabhi Jois.
I’m not about to recount the controversy (controversies) around Patthabhi Jois and astaṇga yoga, the problematics of guru power, the hard question of what to do about the artist if you still love the art. We simply don’t have time.
My point is that we are creatures of habit, influence, and subtlety. If you put a picture of a predatory sexual abuser on your altar, there will be some consequences. You’ll change.
From what I gather, since I haven’t really been a card carrying member of astaṇga actually ever but I still hear gossip - there are different camps these days. There are the old school devotees and then there are the new school reactionaries, equipped with consent chips and props for adapting the rigor of the poses. The fad these days is to remove Jois’ picture, if not the whole altar scene entirely.
I have friends and teachers who have altar practices. I’ve often enjoyed being in proximity to them. One friend told me that she didn’t really have her current level of strength and personal gumption - an aspect of grace - in her anti-racism work until she started putting pictures of her ancestors on her altar.
A teacher talks about her murtis - she is a god geek and has many - as being things that either her father or her teacher gifts her; they have to approve of the iconography, it matters how the god is painted or posed. It has to be right. I lifted my chin a little as she talked, bemused. There’s something interesting in not choosing gods for yourself. There is something provocative in being given them. Her adoration of them proves it.
I think it was fetishism that generally kept me from having an altar myself. Lutheran, remember. Altars felt gimmicky. I preferred my yoga to be stripped down and minimalist. It was always more about the honesty of the human body for me. It was blunt and raw.
Which makes sense: I’d come to realize the untrustworthiness of my mind. This was the major revelation of my first years of yoga. I couldn’t trust my own mind. The subliminal was too powerful and dark. To my surprise, I kept discovering that I could trust my body. I realized it is a million times over more intelligent than I am. To my unending bewilderment, I came to understand I could take refuge in reality. Anatomy became as wild as star gazing and as picayune as art collection. I was drawn to blood, called to clavicles, enamored of arteries. I would get lost in the strange wisdom of bones, the Latinate coil of muscles, the lift of the aortic arch so blessedly like a cathedral’s vaunting. There is genius in the flesh.
It didn’t take long for a teacher to point out that I was, actually, fetishizing. I gathered anatomy books and anatomy art. I found bones in the woods and hoarded them. Once this was pointed out to me, blessed with a nod by someone who knew more about it than I did, it took on a different tone. It got reverent. Why do you let your books sit on the floor?! an old teacher asked. Show some respect!
And while the cultural difference in what we thought of floors and associations of impurity were clear, I did start to tend to and revere the things that are important to me. I started to take care of the things that I loved. I looked for a way to make things I’d deemed important take up space in my line of vision. To organize, and vaunt, and dust off.
You have to touch the work every day, goes a writing truth.
You have to live with it a while.
Or, simply look around and ask yourself what you’re living with. A student once asked about the struggle to meditate every day. Well, I said, what are you doing instead of meditating? She blinked. And then everything changed for her.
“A Certain precise tilt of the will”
Whenever I think about altars, I think about Annie Dillard’s essay Teaching a Stone to Talk. A local character has made it his life work to, yes, teach a stone to speak. She describes how he does this, every day, carefully and patiently and with conviction. She talks about the absurdity of it, but also the truth in it. Deciding that you are going to spend your human life teaching a rock the rudiments of human language is not any more or less absurd than what most of us do every single day. The conviction itself makes it worthy. Better, even, then other things we might happen to do. Conviction lends a thing gilding.
The dailiness of it, I mean. The devotion. What makes it go is dedicated, committed, consistent, time. It’s all fine and well to talk talk talk about what we believe or don’t or what we want or have decided, but our biases tend to show in our behavior.
It comes down to what we actually do every day. Dillard wrote: “I assume that, like any other meaningful effort, the ritual involves sacrifice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a certain precise tilt of the will, so that the will becomes transparent and hollow, a channel for the work.”
I admit the day, and sweep the floors, and mumble something like prayers as I change my tampon. I sigh. I pick up my notebook.
“I wish him well.” Dillard said, and I take a vicarious drag of bonheur for myself whenever I remember it. “It is a noble work, and beats, from any angle, selling shoes.”
Let me go back to rabbit holes and doom scrolling. You know how that feels. But here’s an important distinction: it isn’t like the internet or the Netflix are terrible. It’s that our minds have these burrowing, wandering, lost tendencies. What we fetishize is less important than the fact that fetishize.
The thing about mantras is that you already have a whole bunch of them. You have all sorts of things that cycle through your mind on repeat. Wheedling. Boring. Sinister. It’s not Netflix; it’s that you do it to yourself. It’s that you’re doing it all the time. And if you know that sucking, dull, self disgusting thing that happens with the doom scroll and the comment sections, well. Think of the cruelty and sabotage, the cannibalistic beach combers, wandering about in your own heart.
If we can find something else to focus on, the very tendencies of humanity are suddenly bent to a very great strength. You’ve got go. Everything turns out okay. It’s just a little tilt of the will.