Home » Personal (Page 14)

Category Archives: Personal

Posturing Women

Posted on by | 1 Comment

It has been fifteen years since I have let a women caress my body. That hasn’t been for lack of opportunities, but after my marriage collapsed, I realized that I am constructed to engage problems that most people run from, and that the spiritual intimacy of intercourse made it impossible for my ex-wife to avoid entanglement. Her response was to use anger as a protective shield. That was disastrously painful to my spiritual intimates.

So I’ve been very careful and reticent about drawing someone else into that milieu.

Dance is the foremost expression of my entanglements, and the context in which women most often flirt with involvement. Having confronted the surrender of the Southern California sage to drought back at the turn of the millennium, I found myself repeating this flow again and again during the celebrations: standing with legs spread apart, I would position my hands over my heart, and lean to one side in a lunge, pushing energy down into the ground. The repetitions alternated from side to side, until a deep yearning would bring me to my knees. Scooping up the suffering spirits from the floor, I would raise them to the heavens, weeping.

I was greatly heartened by the identification Jamie Grace made with Persephone, but even she wanted me to lay my burdens aside. One day as I was dancing alone, I felt her looking into me as she rested against the wall, urging me to liberate myself into joy. An enormous pressure forced me to the floor, and, crawling and squirming, I tried to work my way out from under it. As I spread my awareness, I realized that the source was a spiritual membrane that encircled the globe. There was no escape except through the violence of birth.

The only woman to actually engage me in my dance of restoration was innocent of the consequences. I felt her standing in front of my as I bowed to the ground, and opened my eyes to find her lifting along with me. Surprised, I stood and put her hand over mine as I reached out into the world, thinking “Guide me.” She hesitated but did not run, so I took the world out of my heart and handed it to her. Her face broke in sorrow and fear. I tried to put it away as she fled into the arms of one of the elder ladies. I approached from behind to caress her heart, but she turned a shoulder to me. Realizing that she could not manage the burden she had accepted, I sat on the floor, cupped the pair of women in my hand, then raised my fingers and slowly rotated them to separate her from the moment that had overwhelmed her. Her features relaxed, and she settled more deeply into her comforter’s embrace.

I had a friend tell me that I lost Jamie Grace because I rejected her, but I didn’t see it that way. Every time she came into the room, my heart leapt to embrace her, and she would stop in the doorway and look away, silently begging me to come to her. Eventually we would work our way around to it, but she never let me dance with her again. Perhaps that was because I would dance first with other women, those other manifestations of Life’s thirst for healing. Perhaps she didn’t see in them what I did. The closest we came, until the last day two years ago, was when I stopped, took her hand, and placed her palm on my heart. She paused, then took it away and positioned it more directly into the flow that emanates from me there. But when I turned around to expand our expression to include the community that surrounded us, she became visibly angry. Given past experience, I was compelled to withdraw.

Without anyone to help me channel my creative energies (the second chakra being that source), I am wide open to women that seek to engage that energy in its most primitive procreative expression. I occasionally engage in visualization with those that I perceive have a deep connection to Earth: walking in the forest, and stopping on the shadowed crest of a bluff to rest with her legs over my shoulders, my head on her belly, my mind spreading into the earth through her womb. Or lying naked on the bed as she brings her yoni down on my heart, allowing its compassionate power to rise into the heavens and spread.

But the frequency with which someone breaks through and gets into me sexually has dropped steadily over the years. I am building up resistance, establishing barriers. The great sex-scene in Golem will be read by many as the fevered production of a frustrated old man, but in fact it was my way of saying good-bye to sex – of allowing it to wash over me one more time before putting it aside.

There are spiritually mature woman that I find occasionally looking in on me. Not long after writing that passage in Golem, I woke one night to some really passionate yearnings. They just wouldn’t go away, and one of my friends showed up in concern. The source of the desire wasn’t apparent, and in frustration she announced to me, “Maybe you’d better just give her what she wants.” As I blissed, I found myself floating in space billions of years ago, regarding the gathering nebular gas as it ignited and give birth to the Sun.

Are we here because it was possible for the infinite she to receive love from us?

Meeting Graziella H.

Posted on by | 28 Comments

Graziella has a fashion and family blog out at Sweet Pea, Apple of My Eye. Having seen a couple of my comments out at Ramona Chrisstea’s blog, she flattered me with a request to review and critique her work. Looking at her most recent post, I found myself thinking that any mom that can get kids to participate like they do must have a really constructive relationship with them. I was also impressed by the thoughts she shared on Father’s Day.

This captures our conversation back and forth up to this point, and creates a space for us to continue to dialog:

Graziella:

I love your insightfullness! Maybe you can look over some of my posts and give me your honest, constructive opinion of them?

Brian:

Thanks for the compliment, Graziella. I’ll be happy to take a look after I have lunch!

Graziella:

Sure no problemo! Take your time!

Brian:

Lol. We’re chasing each other’s responses around.

I didn’t know whether to post this on your home page, as it brings some criticism – hopefully constructive, as you requested.

OK – first off, you have a beautiful family, and the affection and bonds are really evident. Congratulations and GOOD JOB!

I’d recommend being a little more selective with the shots, and trying to work the text around them. Your experience of the environment would also be a plus, particularly when it involves elements that are unique or personal . For example, the rusty smiley face in the last post with your children, or the horse farm in “A Little Country, a Little Rock and Roll.”

As a example, you might look at Ramona Crisstea’s blog (ramonacrisstea.com). What comes from her writing is a sense that she’s sharing a journey with others. I think that you and Ramona have different stories at this point, and so you might gain a lot without risk of becoming “me-too.”

Your post on father’s day reveals that capacity. I’d like more of that! While not everybody can look as adorable as your family does, there are a lot of fashion blogs. The ones that spark my interest are those that relate fashion to the life journey.

So, for example – how did your little boy react to having a daddy tie put on him?

Thanks for the follow. If this is helpful, let me know and I’ll follow back to see how things develop.

Graziella:

THANK YOU. And you know what, I actually found you on Ramona’s blog. I saw your comment and figured you’re the guy I need to talk to. You are so right. I have been battling with myself trying to incorporate my first love, which is writing and my intellectual side, all while hosting a fashion blog. All the advice I’ve gotten in the past was to keep it short and simple, a fashion blog is one thing and a journal is another. But I felt confined! After seeing her blog I saw how you can add pieces of your mind and your own two cents along the way without it becoming too much or boring, and without the risk of losing the reader’s attention. What a fantastic idea to incorporate more of the experience of the surroundings, that’ll be easy to do. I was also thinking maybe write under some photos as if it’s a story book (similar to hers). I love the handwriting quotes, I love expressing my unique view and beliefs of the world, but I didn’t know how to incorporate Fashion, Parenting, & Writing all in one without losing a direct focus or target audience. Like you said, my family and my babies is the one thing that separates me from all the other fashion bloggers. I’ve been told to drop the kid fashion stuff and just stick with me, but that’s ridiculous too. Why can’t I be a fashionable woman, a mother, and a writer all at once? I love my kids so much and even in my about me page it says I’m doing this all for them, and it’s true so I could never think about NOT having them involved in my blog. I only just started on Oct 1st so people and advice like you REALLY help. Thanks a million, I hope we can keep in touch and you can see if I improve as time progresses 😊

Brian:

It’s the exploration of fashion as expressive symbolism that is the key, as I value it. It’s a hard call, because ultimately it’s about selling things, but here’s an anecdote for you: After my sons saw Fast and Furious 6, I asked whether there was any character development. They stopped and thought, and said “Hey, now that you mention it, there was! Wow, that was different!” Which elicited my observation, “I guess that the producers have brought the audience along far enough that they can handle it.” So don’t worry about fitting into a box.

Graziella:

Absolutely. And I was hoping to express the same ideal in the future posts I have with my daughter where a lot of what I’m wearing has nothing to do with fashion per say at all, but with being in tune and in love with her as she serves as an inspiration to me. For example, there’s some necklaces I have that are pastel colored and have hot air balloons on them. I only bought that because of my daughter, it reminded me of her. And the story and pictures that I envision came to mind immediately as soon as I saw the necklace. Because it reminded me of her, and through her all these thoughts and motivations were born, as it always is constantly in every aspect of my life, not just fashion.

Brian:

And there’s a lot that you might be able to do in the way of relating fashion to the preparation of your children for their life transitions, or for parenting them through their joys and traumas. In other words, making it about dressing them in what they need, rather than dressing them to please us.

Not that they shouldn’t look adorable. And, being the kid that wore stripes and checks to school, not that I have much real-life experience in the matter…

An administrative detail: I may try to relocate this conversation to a new blog post (“Meeting Graziella”), just so it doesn’t distract from the topic of this post, which was really important to me.

Graziella:

Ok you do that or let me know where I can respond back because I really like your thoughts and wanted to not only thank you again but chip in and elaborate a little further and see what you think 😊

Reflection

Posted on by | Leave a comment

In Golem, the goddess Zenica turns to her protégé Beilda and asks,

Does a man have free will if he cannot count his options?

I am coming up on a year of consistent activity at Word Press, and see that I have published 200,000 words here this year, on topics ranging over human nature, religion, politics, physics and programming. Reflecting on that experience, what comes to mind is the assessment of a friend who went spelunking in my mind one night,

There’s no bottom to you.

The problem, of course, is that there’s also no place to stand. No one will ever come to EverDeepening and think “I see where Brian’s coming from.”

And while that means that I probably don’t have much appeal, that’s all very well, because it’s for the counting of options by others that I write.

I alluded a few days back to the tyranny of convention that I have struggled against. It has a valid basis, which is observed in the psychological maturation of children. They go through phases of trust and distrust with the world, driven largely by their experience of significant trauma. Convention is a strategy that we use to protect ourselves from traumatic experiences.

Unfortunately, the sense of some anthropologists (see my summary of Jared Diamond’s perspective) is that the conventions of modern cultures foment mistrust. My own observation is that there are few adults that sustain a perspective of trust. But as a Christian, I am committed to the arrival of an era in which all of our relationships are anchored in trust.

That may appear paradoxical, in that much of my writing is to decry the untrustworthiness of those that sustain the conventions of mistrust. So what’s that all about? Am I not just adding my voice to the echo chamber?

First, I hope that it is clear that I don’t just deconstruct the logic of mistrust. I do try to describe the alternative as I experience. Yes, the world is in pain, and many of my posts are great cries from the heart, but what I find is that in expressing that pain, a lightening occurs. That lightening has two parts: the suffering spirits are relieved of their fear of being forgotten and so lost; and then God enters into the darkness through me, remaining even after I turn my attention elsewhere.

When I revealed my burdens to Diane Hamilton at a Buddhist Geeks conference, her first reaction was to declare “No one person can carry that burden.” A day later, she testified that the “Cosmic Mind” enters to assist us when we open our hearts to problems that are beyond our strength. Her reflection was in response to my testimony that its essential nature was to be “infinitely enamored of the potentiality of living things.”

So that’s one half of the coin, and I hope that I have presented that choice to my readers. I may sound crazy at times, but this is really the way that I experience life, and my experience does contain great and inexplicable gifts of beauty.

But there is a flip side to the Cosmic Mind: “inexorably destructive of selfish personalities.” That seems contradictory: if the Cosmic Mind is committed to the creation of living things (“selves”), why is it set against them? The reason is that selfishness impedes the elaboration of the potential of life. The predator would consume all its prey, and so must die if any life at all is to survive.

So for those of you that still read this, I must beg your pardon. Much of what I write here is a form of exorcism – it is a violent characterization and excommunication of ideas that contradict the formation of trust.

I had great hopes, in beginning this project last year, that it would stimulate reading of the parables that express my dreams for humanity, and so to inspire others with hope. I realize now that is unlikely. But I do feel that I have come to a much brighter place through this work. There are far fewer dark corners in my mind.

Oh, Gosh

Posted on by | Leave a comment

One of the joys of dancing is that in caressing the air around people, they eventually come to realize that I’m clearing a space for them to manifest their strength and beauty. The most precious moments for me are those when I’ve lost track of the effort, just kind of puttering around the floor playing with my elbows, hips and knees, and I find myself wandering into a space where someone is really focused on understanding what is happening.

Usually they are off to the side, or sitting in lotus, or lying on the floor – but always with their eyes closed and a look of intense concentration on their faces. I come into their orbit and it’s like a force field comes up and I’m just compelled to address them.

It happened several times today – I had a really great experience at MovinGround and Ecstatic Dance LA. It was a lot of energy – roughly 4 hours on my feet, with another hour of rest. I also stubbed the nail on my right big toe, hard enough that it bled and looks completely ready to come off (it was pretty loose anyways).

But one encounter rises above the rest. The woman obviously had trained, her elegant features alight with pleasure as she moved the strong and slender body of a dancer. But she hooked me as I was puttering around, gliding through the other dancers. Noticing her attitude, I turned to face her from about four feet away, raised me hands to the heavens, and invoked my retinue. Slowly lowering my hands, I draped them all around her, opening my eyes to make certain that she was assimilating it well, and caught her peeking at me under her lashes. She quickly closed them in submission, and so I really went to work.

It starts with the motor sulci, a raising and lowering, stretching until the crown chakra opens. At this point I drop down into the heart, and I often get a surge of sexual energy, but I lift it back up until the heart and prefrontal lobe are enmeshed, then lift the crown chakra until it merges with my retinue.

I usually slip away at that point, but she stepped into the space I vacated. We didn’t flirt with our eyes, but followed the flow of energy leaving the fingers and running up our spines.

One of the joys of engaging a skilled dancer is that you can get really, really close without worrying about incongruous bumping and grinding. We got pretty deeply enmeshed, so I stretched it out around those that were close to us, finally flirting a little bit. We went on for several minutes until I found myself behind her, hand just millimeters from her back, caressing her heart chakra, and she just spread her arms and blocked my way. I stretched my arms as I dropped into a shallow lunge behind her, and she lowered her forearms until they rested against mine.

Contact dance can be physical or sublime, and this was definitely the latter. Just one or two points, a shoulder against the back, hips coming into contact as she pivoted behind me. Finally, when she lifted her leg to get around my crouch, I grabbed it and pressed her foot into my hip bone, reaching out with my left hand to accept her grip. She smiled in bemusement, not expecting this from an amateur, but rose to stand with both feet on my hips. Gripping her lower back, I stood.

It went on from there, never becoming overtly sexual. When we were done, I offered, “You’re an incredibly transparent person. Energy moves gracefully through you – you don’t grab on to it.” After she recognized the compliment, I said “No, thank-you for being you.”

Maybe I’ll see her again. I don’t know why, but most of the time, they don’t come back.

Dreams of a Worthy Man

Posted on by | Leave a comment

When I took my sons out to Georgia three years ago, my uncle led the way up the highway to his boat house. He pulled over at a wilderness station, and as I dropped down from the driver’s seat of his VW bus, I was immediately ravished by the lush exuberance of the woods. He made his way into the station for some purpose, my sons following, but I stayed in communion with the sense of life that had become so desicated in Southern California. Eventually, he came out and said, “You know, there’s an exclusive resort on the other side of the hill.”

I don’t know why, but I thought of that when my son started talking about Jimmy Carter. Since Mr. Carter’s illness was made public, I have had this urge to go out to Plains and sit in on his Sunday school. When I shared that with Greg, he said “Well, maybe you should.”

A couple of Saturdays back, as I was puttering around the house in the morning, I found myself visualizing what would happen in that event, finding myself guided into a role as interpreter of a passage of scripture. As is perhaps obvious from my writing here, it’s hard for me to couple my experience of life to the world of daily affairs. So I fumbled around with big picture issues – meaning of life and process of Christ abstractions – until I finally struck on “You know, what I really want to do is to celebrate you, and the contributions you have made to society.”

I haven’t gone out to price travel to Plains – I’ve been distracted by other issues. But it keeps on popping up, and became particularly pointed this morning. I found myself standing in a long line outside of the church, and realized that I didn’t actually need to be in the class. I went to the door and introduced myself to the Secret Service agent, saying that I just wanted to offer Mr. Carter my blessing.

So I was ushered into a waiting room. He sat calmly in a chair. I walked up and placed my hands on his shoulders, and then on his scalp, trying to feel the shape of the wound that he carried. A chair appeared behind me, so I sat to embrace him gently, rubbing my hand in circles on his back over his heart. As I laid my left temple against his, I felt this shaft of anger and fear piercing his mind – the anger and fear of those that had fought to sustain control against the influence of the tolerance and caring that Mr. Carter manifests so consistently.

I moved my hand so that my fingers interrupted the painful flow, and sent healing behind it. With the pressure relieved, his grace bloomed outwards into the conduit, relieving fear and pain as it went.

He was eager to leave at that point, but I held him still. “I want them to see your radiance,” I explained. I pressed our hearts more firmly together, and arched as the power of Christ filled him with joy. As he took the floor, I watched in the doorway as the gathering stared in awe.

T-Shirt Heaven

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I prepared an experiment last week by creating some t-shirts that tried to explain what is going on with the energy that surrounds me. It was pretty much an act of desperation. I accepted long ago that when you send love out into the world, you surrender control over what is done with it.

In the specific context of the dance celebrations that I enjoy so much, what happens is that people channel it into sex. I’ve gotten to be much better, over the years, at controlling the reflection of that corrupted energy, but it’s been pretty exhausting. The political consequences are also disruptive to my life. A lot of men are visibly angry when I come into a club and start dancing by myself while the women stare in wonder at me. My son shared with me once that his female friends described it as “like discovering fire.” I kept on hoping that the men would be inspired by the beauty that wells up in a woman when she encounters a man that doesn’t want to dump poison into her, but in most cases the male reaction is rather to try and beat me down.

I thought that I was going to have to postpone the first trial this Sunday. I’ve been shifting energy in my yoga practice. It started three weeks ago when I held balancing stick posture beyond my normal point of collapse, and I felt energy emanating from my root Chaka and flushing up along my obliques, the wave cresting just under my ribs where the nerves erupted in burning. I knew that I had displaced something, and it manifested more recently in vertigo focused on the right side of my head. It was different from the normal cochlear vertigo (stimulated by a trapped air bubble), and finally shifted to the top of my head, directly over my foremen. I was a little panicked by that change, and was relieved when one of the ladies in class reassured me that “It’s just trying to work its way out.”

But with my obliques fully active, I’ve been building strength in them, which has led to stiffness in the area. That culminated on Saturday when I strained my right side during standing head-to-knee posture.

I wasn’t sure that I could actually dance – I could barely get in and out of the car on Sunday morning – but I went down to Culver City anyways. When an acquaintance asked me how I was doing, I explained my situation, and he jumped right in, rubbing, pulling, and massaging the right side of my back from hip to shoulder. I didn’t realize how much blockage I was dealing with, and when he was done, I was far looser that when he started.

So I went in to change and came out with my t-shirt on. He approached me almost immediately, sharing that he was an engineer and offering where he had heard similar thoughts. It was the first meaningful conversation that I have had in that community.

But what was most amazing was that people didn’t struggle against the energy that I organize when I dance. This was most evident in a young Filipina. She caught my attention, and we kind of skirted each other for a while. When I left the center of the room to rest against the stage, she took up the space I had vacated and began waving her arms gracefully in the energy there. Surprised, I pointed my finger to push energy into her heart, stilled the sexual response that came back, and then connected her cerebral cortex to the community of thoughts that was celebrating her courage.

When I had done this in the past, one among a group of men always approaches the woman to steal the gift from her. This happened next, and this lady just ignored him, staying focused on her dance. Finally, she turned to me, building a ball of energy in the air with her right hand, and pushed it back my way.

There was more – much more – and some of it wandered down the familiar pathways to sex. But as I laid Sunday evening on the couch trying to relax my abused muscles, I felt this great glow of energy enter my heart through the channel of the world. I’ve just kept on sending this message out: “Don’t focus on me. I don’t need more of it. Look rather into the world, and liberate people into the healing of it. It’s from there that the energy is magnified.”

Trying to Make It Simple

Posted on by | 2 Comments

I’ve been struggling with misinterpretations of the energy I project, so I designed and ordered this t-shirt this morning.

T-Shirt FrontT-Shirt Back

The text on the back says:

Love’s infinite possibilities
Are beyond our control.
But let it pass through us
To the people and places we love
And it returns to us multiplied
Every single day.

To those that have faced disappointment in love: there is no discipline more difficult than to let it pass through us, rather than trying to force it to go where it does not find a home.

Sunday, Blessed Sunday

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Friday found me complete worn out – I actually spoke with my supervisor about taking most of this week off. Greg, my younger son, rescued me, after a fashion. His classmates finished the transition to college this week, so he was at lose ends. Runescape is having one of its “Double-XP” weekends, and he was anticipating spending 72-hours glued to a monitor. I convinced him to come out to Barnes and Noble with me all three evenings. We sat on the bar stools along the counter – he reading an assigned novel for English and I working on C# exercises.

We did take some time off Saturday to take in The Intern, having a discussion of “class”, which I like to think of as a quality of character that preserves dignity. But while he ground away at his MMORPG, I went to bed early and slept, and added long naps in the afternoon.

I decided to go down to Culver City today to spend time with Jo Corbett and the community she nurtures with 5 Rhythms dance celebrations. It’s been more than a year since my last visit. I’ve been nurturing heartbreak, and am still very much in love with the woman that I lost down there. What can I say: the day that I met her, I was dancing alone, and turned around to find her gesturing with her arm in the air. We started dancing together, and the connection was just incredibly clear and strong. I noticed the people around us smiling. When I was done, I stepped back to bow in Namaste, and she called me closer, until I stood with my lips against her temple, whispering “That was so beautiful.”

What I realized was that, while with every woman before her, I felt like I was being drawn in and wrapped up, the dance that we had shared involved an expanding through each other. That night, my dreams were filled with turmoil, with people clamoring for my notice, only resolving in the early hours of the morning when she announced “I was Persephone.” The last time I saw her, I told her “Jamie Grace, every time I see you, I see all of life. Everything that I have done here has been in an effort to give you the power you need to heal yourself. I am sorry it hurts, and I wish that they would just stop.”

I still dream of her, but her mother is also in the community, and seems to still believe that she has the right to manage our affairs. So I withdrew, hoping that my lady would call me back when she was ready to take on the work that we were meant to do together.

It seemed that the signals were becoming more positive, so I decided to head back down. I woke this morning, however, to a tumult in my mind, with churches all over the Conejo Valley clamoring for my visit. I thought to go out to Malibu for some peace, but the early services were all underway by the time I was ready to leave. So I decided to just skip church, and go out to Malibu Creek State Park.

Pool at Malibu Creek State Park

It was not entirely a mistake. I haven’t been out there in years, and was devastated that the river was dry. The chattering voices on the trail kept interrupting my communion, so I headed down the bank to the dry, lime-covered river rocks. I crept back to the trail at the bridge crossing. A shady copse called to me, but I kept on heading down the trail, and was surprised to hear what I took to be rustling in the dried leaves from the other bank. The wind didn’t seem strong, and when I rounded the last curve, I was happy to see the source of my error: apparently the Park was diverting water to the pools that blocked the trail at its end. I sat in the shade of a reed bed to luxuriate in the air’s moisture.

Down in Culver City, I encountered many new faces, but no Jamie Grace. I did what I always do there, however, trying to clear the psychological space around those that needed it, letting them connect to the healing energies that were trying to reach them.

What was really different, however, was that others began to reach out to me. This culminated near the end of the celebration. Jo was playing a melancholy meditation on the modern state of affairs, with lyrics that prayed for patience from an unknown source. I internalized the plea as directed to the Earth itself, and felt just overwhelmed by the sorrow of the land that we had suffocated with asphalt and concrete. As I bowed my head to the floor, two people came up to press on my back.

That had never happened before.

Recovering somewhat, I rolled over, and felt this beautiful energy reaching down to me from the sky. Jack-knifing to bring my heart closer to the heavens, I was suffused with joy, and laid down on my back, arms outstretched. I felt hands on my head, and a gentleman stroking my solar plexus. They kept on stretching me out, perhaps not understanding what they were unlocking.

And so it happened again, for the third time in the last three months. My heart filled with sorrow, and I arched on my back and shouted my agony. They didn’t run away, but hung on as my body arched in powerful spasms, settling only to arch again. Gathering myself, I shut the door again, and rested. When I recovered, I embraced them each in turn to whisper, “It’s going to be OK.”

There must have been some talking as I changed, because afterwards two women came up to ask if I was the man that had “cleared” today. Upon my confirmation, they said that they were really glad that I had – that everybody in the room felt a great release when I did – and thanked me for having the courage to share my sorrow with them.

I know what specific images I have when these experiences occur, and often wonder whether others share them. But they seemed confused when I alluded to the matter. They weren’t directly involved, however, but I wonder how long it will be until the consequentiality of the phenomenon is obvious to others.

Reflection: Yoga Beyond Asana

Posted on by | 4 Comments

It’s coming up on the end of my fourth year of practice in the Bikram Yoga school in Agoura Hills. Obviously the primary impact has been physiological. When I was out at the Skeptics Conference in Pasadena in May, a number of people commented that I had excellent posture. As I am painfully aware right now, that process is ongoing – I realized just recently that when standing, my right hip is shifted about an inch to the left. The pain derives from a shortened band of muscles in the right side of my lower back. Every class, I stretch them out, and every evening they crawl back to the length they have had for the last thirty years.

I didn’t realize how great the changes in the rest of my body had been until I met again with Balwan Singh yesterday. Balwan works at Bikram headquarters organizing teacher trainings. He is very Indian, struggling still at times with his English, but humble and joyful to the core. He had taught in Agoura Hills on Saturdays while the studio was establishing itself, often coming by with his lady-love Sharon (who is now expecting). The first words out of his mouth were “You look really good.” Sitting on the floor in the second session, I looked in the mirror and finally saw what people have been talking about. My body has filled in, and it responds gracefully to direction.

Most teachers in the Bikram method hew tightly to the established environmental constraints – primarily to keep the room near 105 degrees and the students in posture. The conditions were established while Bikram was developing his practice in Japan, and as a 6’6″ physically active American, they are really brutal on me. Most of the advanced practitioners in the studio are actually proportioned like the Japanese.

Balwan always catered to my challenges, and yesterday was no exception. I set my mat up in the back in the path of the air through the door. It came open early, and the oxygen that came with the air made it a very different practice. When the owner Rachel, who was set up just to my right, indicated that she wished it closed, Balwan remarked that advanced practitioners created heat internally, and the environmental controls weren’t as important as for beginners.

Rachel is a really beautiful lady, both inside and out, and I’ve been trying to facilitate her union with some angels that have been floating around in my orbit. Balwan got us to focus on breathing from the get-go, and I surrendered the tension in my chest to let the air really fill my lungs. I got into this rhythm with Rachel, each of us just looking into the other to see where the energy was getting stuck. For me, the most surprising impact of that collaboration came during head-to-knee posture. For the first time I really got up into the second stage, balanced on one leg with the other held out parallel to the floor in front of my hip.

When the practice was over, we were offered a lecture by Arvind Chittamulla, organizer of MokshaFest here in LA. As anyone who has studied the Vedic practices knows, there is far more to Yoga than the physical training, or Asanas. The ultimate goal of Yoga is to allow the purifying energy from the divine source to flow into the world through us.

As Arvind explained, here in the West yoga has spread as a physical practice. As I see it, that reflects the forces that Western society organizes to channel our behaviors to the purpose of creating wealth for those that employ us. They are reinforced by media images that impose air-brushed standards of beauty. We lack both consciousness of the psychic costs of internalizing these forces, and methods for purging them. Yoga asanas allows us, to a certain degree, to at least regain control of our physical manifestation.

But there is much more to yoga than that. Meditation is essential to management of our minds, and breath-work grounds us in the world. Asana, meditation and breath-work are connected: if we don’t have control of our mind, the corrupt thoughts that we entertain during asana practice will infect our bodies. For this reason, Arvind sees that the narrow focus of yoga in the West actually hurts many practitioners.

Arvind walked us through the other seven limbs of the tradition. In Indian studios, orientation to the first two, involving morality and life action, are often prerequisites to practice of the asanas. The remaining five manage the inward journey that opens into relationship with the divine.

The lecture was directed towards the teachers in the room, and Arvind’s ultimate goal is to broaden instructor certification to include, at a minimum, meditation and breath work. As a business proposition, he believes that the idle hours at many studios could be filled with sessions that offered students those tools.

I know that I have benefited from the coupling of my physical practice to my spiritual development. As I explained to Arvind, the difficulty of the conditions during a Bikram class forced me to completely surrender my ego – I had to accept that I had a lot of work to do before I could achieve the postures even in their initial expression. Given that surrender, the consistency of the sequence ensures that I am able to enter a meditative frame, letting my muscles do the work until something doesn’t work, and then focusing only on that. I have learned to ignore the other students in the room while still sharing the energy that arises between people committed to a common goal.

So I must wish Arvind success in his efforts, although I think that he might find more acceptance if he packaged them as advanced certifications.

The interaction with Arvind came with some tensions. I was glad to be with Balwan at the end of the evening. He was talking with one of the other attendees, and I circled around behind to put my hand on top of his head and share a hug, wishing him all the deepest joys of fatherhood. He sent me off with a heart-felt “Thank-you, Brian. Thank-you so much.”

Zmed Brothers

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Played at Twisted Oak tonight. They actually are brothers, on electric mandolin and guitar, both with soaring reverb that carried up and around. The tension of the week was left behind, and I feel really relaxed right now.

Eclectic mix of covers, ranging from Kentucky Old Timey to Simon and Garfunkel to Hip-Hop S&M. When not soloing, the guitarist laid down the chord progression and offered edgy lead vocals. His brother sang with a far more polished alto voice, the contrast matching the tone of the instruments.

Much of what I was hearing was electronic tone generation, but there’s a definite skill in knowing when not to play as well. That was evident in their original numbers, the voices slipping around each other like sea-otters in the pool of sound. I stood up and drifted on my feet for the last two numbers, doing some floating myself.

As I noted last month: definitely a spiritual experience.