Archive for March, 2008
32 items.
See, I’m being nice and polite and not writing about it constantly, but I’m 21 days into the yoga now and it’s interesting. Others in better shape would be soaring along but I’ve got years of bad desk habits that the yoga is first dealing with.
At this point, Marty says I look secure, like I’m doing yoga instead of (as he puts it) attempting to do yoga, that I appear sure and steady, but I know that however I look on the outside to him, in all my postures I’m still a baby and learning about them and just a micrometer of a step away from where I was three weeks ago. I know that my postures too probably leave much to be desired.
It’s interesting because I’m experiencing shifts in alignment and balance with it, my entire body undergoing a process of rearrangement which carries into every day life with all that I do. As I move around doing the most basic things I feel my body and mind engaging, thinking about how I’m using my body. It is as if right now I always have two choices, to either enter or come out of a move in the old way or use what I’ve learned in yoga. The old way isn’t working for me any longer. The balance has shifted over to the new but I’m still in transition, the muscles causing the shift into the new alignments but also needing to catch up with the new alignments.
All my motions seem now to have three stages. I will think about how to go into a move, then in it I am mindful of what I’m doing and exactly where I should be, and then I have to make choices in alignment for coming out of the move. Which is a little strange and unsettling, that for the time being, with those muscles rearranging, I find myself having to think about virtually all of the smallest most ordinary moves, and I end up making the choice for the way I might move while doing my yoga less out out of mental selection than my body seeking that new engagement yet still transitioning. This has become fairly accentuated in the past couple of days and I expect it to continue for a while. Instead of rising up from a squat any old way, I have to think about what I’m doing…think about my feet, my ankles, my shins, my knees and thighs, my pelvis and spine and shoulders and head.
Yes, even my pelvis. I am constantly aware now of where my pelvis is as I move. These little shifts in alignment with the groin and pelvis that are made during the sessions, I was wondering what their importance was as I did them, but now I find myself adopting those shifts in my every day motions and thinking about where my tail bone is going.
My feet are gripping the floor differently.
I pulled a muscle in my upper back a while ago–nothing to do with yoga, this happened before I started it. The muscle will stop hurting for a couple of weeks and then I’ll tweek it and it’ll start hurting again, a cycle which has gone on for a while. However when I’m doing the yoga I never even feel it. I knew that my desk posture was possibly a real point of aggravation. Today it was hurting again and my body as if mindfully began assuming postures more suited with what I’m doing in the yoga, using those muscles and ways of handling and holding myself, the stress in that area alleviating greatly, the result being that I hold my upper back and shoulders differently. It is a push-pull. As if being pushed out of one way of holding myself, being pulled into a new way.
As I said, this is all a little unsettling right now because of the stage of transition I’m in. And I wonder how all this will play out, how I will be moving two, four, six months from now. It took me three weeks of yoga at an hour and a half a day to reach this point…y’know, a full grown toddler.
I know I don’t believe this would be happening if I had simply been doing postures and not really working on muscles and alignment in those postures. Instead I think I would have been carrying the old way of moving into those postures and this pull into using new alignments in every day life would likely not be occurring.
This feels to be an important point of transition and I’m hoping that the next couple of weeks of road trip doesn’t throw it off. I’m bringing along my mat and a number of yoga podcasts. If I find myself unable to do a full hour and a half in one session (which I like best) I have also a few 20 to 40 minute podcasts and I can split my practice up into morning and evening.
2Comment
It’s the fizziest ultimate bubble bath of your childhood all grown up, Mister and Madam Bubble dropping the shower curtain on their library of reflections.
The title says it all. Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead.
I laughed. And I laughed. Which was a nice balance for the cry I had the other day, from which I don’t feel much recovered.
Was talking with a sister last week about her eldest daughter’s engagement to an Australian and she brought up the song “Waltzing Matilda”, how she was unfamiliar with it and he’d introduced her to the song during his Christmas stay with the family. My mind went immediately to “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” done originally by Eric Bogle, later by the Pogues and others. I forget there’s any other version. But no the one she’d heard was the anthem, not the anti war song.
I texted myself so I’d remember to find and download “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. Both the recordings by Pogues and Bogle, which I used to have.
I did today.
And I choked up as I listened to Eric Bogle sing. And the tears rose up out of the choked throat and sat at the edge of my eyes, for I nearly always cry when listening to this song. But I managed to not cry and I thought it was over as I sat to write this post, the song playing again…
I was caught unawares, cracking into a sob. Then another. I had to stop writing.
It’s just the kind of cry I needed after reading last week about Bush’s remarks on the war on March 13th.
“I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed,” said President George W. Bush in a Thursday video conference.
He was responding to civilians and military personnel who gave him an earful about the problems in Afghanistan where the war has dragged on for over six years.
“It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks,” continued the 61-year-old Bush.
You can download the Bogle version of the song I was listening to here. The link is down toward the bottom of the page.
Here Kitty! Kitty!
Copyright H.o.p. 2008
What fun.
Am listening to Marc Gunn’s Irish and Celtic podcast. That’s fun as well.
Loading music onto the iPod for the trip.
I lost my bagpipe CD. I need to find some bagpipe music.
Yes, I love bagpipes.
Marty does not. He finds them irritating.
I used to fancy learning to play the bagpipes.
I’m not big on Bergman. Yes, I’ve got “Bergman on Bergman” on the shelf but that’s from my late teens and early twenties.
However H.o.p. came across Bergman’s Seventh Seal I don’t know but a couple weeks ago he brought it up.
“What’s The Seventh Seal?” he asked.
Yes, I watch great movies with H.o.p. H.o.p. introduced me to great animation. I, in turn, have introduced him to great films and great trash films (suitable for his age and because I’m just that benevolent and wonderful) since he was little. I want him prepared for those film courses at whatever college/university he may end up attending. I want him to have a nice foundation in some of the classics. When he’s interested (and he tends to be interested) we watch Kurosawa and Fellini and Goddard and Antonioni and De Sica and Chaplin and Kubrick and Altman and…well, you get the idea…but I’ve never even brought up Bergman’s name so I, of course, thought H.o.p. was talking about a marine animal.
“Seals? You mean like in the sea?” I asked, uncomprehending.
“It’s a movie,” H.o.p. said.
“You mean…Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal?”
“Yeah! That’s it!” H.o.p. said, all excited. “Can I see it? I want to see it!”
We checked our Blockbuster. They didn’t have it. So I put it in the Netflix queue. Then last night Marty walked in with a DVD from the bookstore.
We ate dinner then settled around the television with H.o.p. to watch The Seventh Seal.
I saw a lot of comedy this time around that I didn’t catch when I was 18, and I probably haven’t seen this film since I was 18. Right from the beginning, when Death gets the black chess pieces and says that black’s a good color for him. I thought, “Hey, that’s a poke in the ribs?”
A good deal of the film needed explaining to H.o.p. as he’s not up on his bible lore, has a barely marginal acquaintance with Christianity and knows nothing about religious sadomasochistic humiliation and atonements. This is the child who, upon seeing a crucifix for the first time, thought it was a bizarre totem pole. H.o.p. believes in the Great Spirit but has no idea why people would think whatever that spirit is would desire to punish them.
H.o.p. wasn’t raised on a diet of man falling from god’s grace, the punishment for the bite of knowledge or worrisome tales of a god that desires to kill his creation by flooding it off the face of the earth. Instead he’s been raised on the great cycle of life, the interrelatedness of all things, respect, the golden rule, the mysterious nature of electricity…and trickster stories (ever his favorites). We talk about myths and legends and how their purest essences speak to something in the psyche, and how they have been carried through the ages by people and institutions who have fleshed them out with a good bit of craziness for their own purposes.
When H.o.p. is an adult if he ends up on the psychiatrist’s couch I won’t mind if it he’s having to deal with his mom being a total basket case of a human. I can be the villain. What I don’t want is his having to spend decades fighting through a childhood inculcation of the insanity of religion putting the fear of god in him with terrors of a lost soul. I didn’t want him to have to waste time sorting out if a man named Jesus Christ actually lived or not. I didn’t want him growing up thinking any religion’s cultural or political controls were eternal truths. I wanted his brain as free and clear as possible in that respect.
We’re heathens.
When we were at the Metro Museum of Art in New York, at one point H.o.p. came and pulled me to the side, very concerned. We were in the gothic religious art area and he was wanting to know why his grandmother (who had just given him an illustrated book of children’s bible stories for Christmas, which she politely balanced out by giving him also a book of Greek myths) kept talking to him in the museum about “the Jews killing that guy on the cross”. He didn’t understand it at all and he didn’t want to hear it.
H.o.p.’s father’s mother is a faithful, well-meaning Baptist who is concerned with his salvation. Among her proud stories are Marty being a tot and the first word he spelled being b-i-b-l-e and that he accepted Jesus in an altar call at the age of five.
The first word H.o.p. spelled, at about the age of three, was b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t. He had learned it via a much beloved Tommy Dean tune and would sing it out with wholehearted glee.
It has followed through with H.o.p. not liking anyone telling him how to think and do things. He thinks it’s bullying. This is innate with him, though I suppose I’ve nurtured it in part, and yes there are times when it can be crazy-making.
Of course, you can’t watch Fellini without discussing religion and we’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about Juliette’s release of the child from the fiery theatrical pyre of the church in Juliette of the Spirits. But Bergman’s Seventh Seal takes it all up a notch.
H.o.p. viewed the movie with the eyes of someone who has been raised to believe in the great cycle of life, and his responses were interesting, sometimes surprising.
He enjoyed The Seventh Seal. He gave it two big thumbs up, in particular liking the costumed performance of the actors.
Here’s his very straightforward review: “It was so fabulous. It just was. The acting was great. It had an amazing plot. Lots was great about it. I can’t even say it all. It was awesome.”
The Tasseled Hat
MoMA, 2007
Boccinoi’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player with Tourists
MoMA 2007
This beginner at yoga so far likes Elsie's podcasts the best
March 16th, 2008 |Posted In: Everyday Stories, General
So, I’m on my 16th day of yoga and for the past 11 days I’ve been using Elsie Escobar’s yoga podcasts.
When I first came upon Elsie’s website I wasn’t sure what to think and actually, the first time, passed it by without downloading anything. She seemed too personable and I didn’t quite trust that. But I returned the next day and pondered a bit more and again almost didn’t download a podcast because again there was this very personable thing going and I was skeptical. I sat and stared at the website, this strange no-no-no-no-maybe-no-no inner dialogue going, and I really have no idea why because how simple is it to simply listen to a few minutes? Finally, I admitted I was curious and so I downloaded the first of Elsie’s yoga podcasts. And I did that one.
Then I downloaded another of Elsie’s podcasts. And another.
Here’s my strictly beginner’s assessment.
Not only does she give a lot of information on the poses that I wasn’t hearing elsewhere, I liked the stream of her classes (most of which run about 115-130 minutes), how she threaded the poses together and the encouraging mix of elaborations on alignment and use of muscles with the reminders of the spiritual nature of the discipline.
On Friday and Saturday I went ahead and viewed a couple of other highly recommended DVD resources that I’d ordered before finding Elsie’s podcasts, and I found that I am so used to her flow, her descriptions, her sequences, that with the others I felt I was just getting a flat routine of calisthenics that weren’t physically, emotionally, intellectually or spiritually engaging. Her balance of push and pull, of resisting while opening, of tension and relaxation, really does feel like it’s awaking the body’s mind and demands my concentration be in the postures rather than my brain sitting somewhere outside observing and nowhere near in touch with what’s going on physically except for measuring ease or stress like an accountant.
Her gentle enthusiasm, with her clear elaborations and reminders, had me digging in for experience with a kind of physical and mental commitment that I wanted. I’ve realized one of the things that’s so inviting about Elsie is her voice is strong when she’s inviting strength and relaxing when she’s encouraging relaxation, all of this in the matter of a few seconds, she shifting back and forth in her descriptions of the desired balance, as one adjusts one’s posture for a single pose or set-up. Which is great for a podcast. Her voice even seems to bypass the ears and go straight for the muscles themselves, so they hear the strength in her voice and the muscles that are supposed to be strengthening respond and tense, while another set of muscles hears relaxation and relax. She says pull and I can tell from her voice just how to pull. She says push and those muscles can tell from that voice how to push. She says widen and I feel in her voice how I should widen.
When I’m done I feel I’ve done something and I feel that what I’ve done is well rounded and satisfying rather than disjointed and,well, lifeless.
And I breathe throughout. No matter what we’re doing I’m able to remember to breathe.
I am really kind of baffled that here I spent this money on several highly recommended yoga DVDs and I’ve no use for them. They either leave me stressed or pathetically limp and unengaged (which is in itself stressful), plus it’s exasperating trying to learn the poses from mostly watching how it’s done when, it seems, hearing how it’s done is a superior way of learning. And I’ve listened to a number of podcasts and not everyone can tell you how it’s done. Many voices never modulate or simply lay out the poses like a flat drive-by menu, which is perhaps fine for someone who’s advanced, but as a beginner my muscles and body seem to need to hear and feel through hearing what to do.
There’s nothing like first hand experience with a good teacher but in my day-to-day here at home Elsie’s podcasts are wonderful. If someone offered me, free, more yoga DVDs than I could watch in a year, in exchange for Elsie’s podcasts, without hesitation I’d tell them, “No, I’m keeping Elsie’s podcasts.”
Boccinoi’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space #2
At MoMA, 2007
Copyright Juli Kearns
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