This blog has long lost some of its timeliness. Meh, it happens. But, like me, it's on a comeback tour. For me, and for this blog as a product of me, the lag and the subsequent commitment to revival are both results of my life's pace rapidly having shifted from a saunter to a swirling, whirling dash. No complaints (any more... for a while.... for a few moments...). Extreme gratitude from here on out (except, of course, for when I revert back to whining and either slap myself out of it or someone around me *compassionately* performs said slapping for my own benefit). Some great challenges are behind me and even more great opportunities fill the present and the future. I'm currently writing from Canggu, Bali. I'll say that again and emphasize the implied enthusiasm of my tone: I'm writing from BALI. When I was ten I talked incessantly about going to Bali, so this is very much the fruition of a seed planted years ago. I'm here for a yoga training with one of my/the great teachers, Rusty Wells. Hopefully that doesn't require repetition to embolden the greatness of that statement and that man, but he's pretty incredible and certainly worthy of every utterance and mention: RustyWellsRustyWellsRustyWells. Here in the solitude of my thatched cottage (named Majapahit... it took me a while to stop calling it Mahaprajapati, the name of the Buddha's mother), I'm finally given the mental and emotional space to look at things and hopefully to see things with greater clarity than I was able to during times of difficulty and relative obscurity. In the rapid flow of winter term 2011, my mind had difficulty maintaining the pace at which it needed to function, let alone pause to reflect.
I'm done with my undergraduate education (yes, I still need to give a final presentation on my senior thesis, but that will hopefully be more a gesture of completion than actual rigorous task). Which is weird; for four years I could so easily just say "I'm a student at Carleton College," and that was a satisfactory answer to questions like "Who are you?/What do you do?". I don't think I ever allowed myself to be tranquilized by or limited to that identity, but it was undeniably a convenient heuristic that most people accepted as a sufficient indicator of leading a productive, valuable life. I keep thinking of and talking about Carleton in the present tense when that isn't quite accurate. I'm no longer enrolled in classes. I'm no longer a resident of Farm House. I can still claim the title or occupation of student since I'll be starting graduate school in the fall and will be enrolled in a language program this summer. But I'm still very much in between roles, spaces, identities, institutions. If I weren't consciously continuing on the academic path, I think I'd be in a very different transitional position. Especially during moments of doubt and questioning, I had been wondering for a long time what it would feel like to know what came next. Now I know. And I have to say that it feels right. I am confident in my decision to continue my academic studies and I am confident that I picked the right program. Each of these decisions came with a lot of care and research and a lot of questioning: "Why am I doing this?" "What are my motives?" "What will I gain by this?... and what will I give up?" Along the way, many people helped me make sense of my possibilities and helped actualize said possibilities. Applying to grad school is a surprisingly acute lesson in no-self. Without support and guidance, I'm really not sure what I'd be doing right now. That might be the most comforting element of my in-between liminality: I haven't done it alone and I have profound trust in the breadth of my support networks. I could go on, but really the Avatamsaka Sutra says it with greater precision (and length!) than I can. If anything, I've been so tremendously supported that my life trajectories seem more like reflections of the people behind/around me than any individual agency I might like to construct (Indeed, here I am, just a little gem in Indra's jeweled net). Selecting which graduate institution to attend became a very challenging decision. I said "no" to what had been my goal and "yes" to a possibility I hadn't really taken seriously. Fancy that; I surprised even myself.
But for now there is Bali. The challenge is to slow down and be present and be mindful. I often look at my life as the interplay between hardening and softening, opening and closing. Academia facilitates the sharpening of my mind and the refining of my intellect, but the rigor of building critical skills often translates to a personal hardening/closing. In order to not take criticism too personally, I think part of the (heuristic) 'person' shuts off and the humanities lose touch with humanity. Academia is an invitation to challenge, to question, to debate. Yoga facilitates the broadening of my mind and the expansion of possibility, opening my head and my heart. Yoga gives permission to accept, to receive, to allow. I don't think one system needs to reign supreme or exclude the other. I find them to be balancing; maybe I haven't found that balance yet: I will. Tara Judelle, Anusara teacher here in Bali, taught a class in which she said "I don't care about your thinking mind." My initial response was: Oh shit, what am I without it? The dialectic tension (we can even call it
lila,the divine interplay, if so inclined) between softening and hardening, I think, explains a lot about me. Before I started my freshman year at college, I did my first yoga training at Kripalu. It rocked my world. It blew my mind. It kicked my kundalini. Starting school that fall suddenly felt forced, rigid, constrictive. My mind didn't want to deconstruct things and my body didn't want to sit in a desk (true story: I sat in half lotus in class most of freshman fall). While my classes focused on South Asian religions, I struggled to negotiate different registers used for talking about the same things as what I thought I was learning through yoga. Competing truth claims are easy to rhetorically juggle, but on a personal level they're... challenging. I take satisfaction in the fact that a yoga training directly preceded my undergraduate studies and now a yoga training is directly following these studies. I've changed a lot since fall 2007, but it's more about transformation and deepening of interests than about total rejection of a past self or past interests.
It's a tremendous privilege to be in Bali (dream location) for yoga (dream activity) with Rusty Wells (dream teacher). So, I should probably have really solid answers to the questions: Why am I here? What do I hope to accomplish? For whom am I doing this? (Hopefully not
just myself, but I'd be a fool not to acknowledge that, hell yes, I hope to benefit from and grow from this experience. This is far from self-sacrificing asceticism.) In class, Rusty regularly invites students to ask the question: "Who would you do it all for?" This question is a reminder that, if yoga becomes self-contained and individualistic, then it's not really about the union and joining that the practice intends. It's a reminder that things like yoga practice or bodhisattva vows are relational, not self-serving. I've been talking/thinking a lot lately about 'shared reality': if any idea- generated through academia or yoga or any other system or language- cannot engage, relate to, or be communicated via some element of shared reality, then this idea needs refocusing, revisiting and rephrasing. Shared reality is what prevents the academic from getting lost in the dense obscurity bred by specialization and shared reality is also what prevents the yogi from getting lost in lunacy that made possible by the occasional interiority of self-exploration. I'm not claiming that an objective shared reality exists. I'm just saying that if we cannot share something with others or explain something to others as part of dialogue, then I personally think that this reflects a lack of clarity or understanding about what is so 'ineffable.' If something is really beyond words... then I say get a better dictionary and try a little harder. Maybe language can't capture something with the power of total reflective powers, but language is
the tool of shared reality. I won't apologize for being unsure of what I think yoga is/yoga does. I think global/normative claims about yoga are restrictive. But to call anything 'beyond language' isn't sufficient. There are questions that need recurring revisiting: What is yoga? For whom do you show up? These are constant questions with shifting answers. I'll be thinking about my answers.
I've been reading Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide. Kristof's regular columns in the NYT are weekly reminders of world humanitarian issues. When I read his column, I remember that the world is big and flawed but also ripe with opportunities to change this through both small and large actions. What I respect about Kristof and WuDunn is that they present the issues and also present possibilities for transformation (as the title implies). Their book isn't just descriptive and fatalistic: they show the power to shift the sometimes sobering realities of women into possibilities. And it reminds me of the importance of yoga for women. The retreat/training in Bali is overwhelmingly female; most yoga communities are. I think female yoga teachers are instruments of cultural change: women can be strong, smart, sassy and powerful on many levels, in the so-called developed world and in the developing world. Strong tribes of women are essential to every culture, to every community. Physical/sexual violence against women outrages me and disgusts me and motivates me to figure out how to be a part of ending it as a tool of domination/oppression. Yoga teaches about using the body as a liberative tool, but in so many circumstances the female body is a an object to be marked through violence and disfiguration. This is my challenge: How can yoga be expressed, shifted, transformed, worded, conveyed, presented in a way that women can be strengthened and empowered both individually and collectively (and I should probably clarify that I am here promoting gender equality and integration rather than an exclusive female practice)? Again, I'll be thinking about my answer(s). Maybe these connections aren't as self-evident as I hope. Maybe yoga isn't as cross-cultural as I think it can be adapted to be. Maybe it's more about the ethos of empowerment and the reminder of interconnectedness.
I'm beginning this retreat/training with beginner's mind (well, actually, more like hyperactive, precritical mind habituated to an academic setting) and beginner's body (this is true: the stress of winter term very much physically manifested). When I feel anxious or insufficient, I need to remind myself: "Get over yourself, bitch," because this isn't about how stretchy I am but is about how I can take it away to give it all away, hopefully in a linguistically communicable manner. Thank you, Janice Cadwell, for saying over and over again until I believed it to be true (no matter how many times I might violate this maxim): "You cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought." So here I am: Getting the fuck over myself by ruminating endlessly about... myself.
