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Tag Archives: Kia Naddermier

The Age of Abandonment, in notes

29 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by racheltejas in Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Travel, Yoga

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Ashtanga yoga, beauty, change, classical music, divorce, fear, hip-hop, Kia Naddermier, loss, meditation on suffering, motherhood, music, Paris, politics, short poem, sick during travel, sickness, solo travel, spiritual practice, travel, Trump

The Age of Abandonment, in notes

About a week ago I came to Paris. The world is an implosion: as the atmosphere thins and the sorrowful trees grow desiccated, weary of reaching, we do the same, mirror to mirror. Humanism is dying before it was fully born, and democracy seems to have been a brief experiment as we now return power to the powerful, poverty to the poor. Le Pen, Trump, Turnbull, Duterte, Maduro. There is a club to which only the murderous, the greedy, the obscenely wealthy and mentally pathological can belong, and we have anointed this club with the title “World Leaders.” All will fall, is falling, has fallen, the tenses only a pause now.

About a week ago I came to Paris. As my flight took off I learned I had no money in my account, my credit card was frozen, and I had not a Euro to my name. Fear. But I worked it out, sort of. The day after my arrival, which had been spent haggling with Western Union and banks, I could not get out of bed. So strange to be jet lagged. But I am never jet lagged. I am often, however, sick.

Not this sick. Fever vomiting dehydration a visit to a hospital IV fluids IV pain meds headaches so intense I cried out to my children, I knew I would never see them again. A sleepiness like death. No. A sleep of death, not rejuvenation, for I’m not sure how many nights, partial days were lost, are lost still. I miss my children. I want to hold their fuzzy heads, even the brilliant one, the one who rejects the holding and so most needs it.

I know the city. I arrived here, about a week ago, already knowing it with a fair bit of intimacy. City, I said, be my mother. Heal me. Light of spring awakening the secret beehives in the Jardin du Luxembourg, heal me. This pain, can it be prayed away? Can it be walked away, cried away? Music, then. Dvorak and Bowie and Denk playing Bach; Schubert quartets and the new Kendrick, the older Kendrick, the swoon of J.Cole.

It is difficult to be very, very sick in a city that is not, despite one’s most ardent wishes, a home. It is difficult to be so very ill all by oneself, to take the pain and cradle it, soothe it, reject it accept it breathe with it or against it; there is no one to remind you, except early Bob Dylan, that it is “life and life only.” Buddha does that too, but then I will pray, or cry, and turn Buddha into an idol, and he will disappear from my life. I don’t care if I turn early Bob Dylan into an idol; he disappeared from my life when he started making Victoria’s Secret ads.

I came to the city to study. To engage in spiritual practice with my teacher, Kia Naddermier. I adore her. I thought I needed this training, this Ashtanga Yoga training, more than anything else. But now I am a convalescent – yes of course like Proust, would you not think of Proust, to be sick and slowly wandering the boulevards of the 6th? I thought I would be practicing for days Ashtanga asana and kriya with a beautiful sangha.

Instead, I got this training.
I arrived in Paris about a week ago. All I know is leave-taking. My husband, who used to be my lover and has been my best, often only friend, for more than 17 years, is no longer my husband. My children are a fury; I am turning into a Mother, as opposed to mama. I always thought, somehow, I would be mama, and they would be my bunnies, safe under my soft, my infinitely soft touch. Money, home, health, my best girlfriend, who wrote me off as a hopeless bitch about a year ago.. sex, time, youth, family, Barack (fucking Barack, where are you? Stop accepting 400k fees for opening your beautiful mouth and fucking come back to us), love love love love love love

love gone pain here. love gone pain here. And here. There? No, further down. Neck. Here?  Yes, there, and lower, of course, always those low, still points, now untouched unseen just…gone. And Christ, even the italics, they’re just… me. Singing out loud on the sidewalks, talking to myself in print.

It is the age of abandonment. Everywhere. For the poor for the sick for refugees and migrants for the thirsty the hungry (why does no one speak of South Sudan?) for fine, cultivated minds, for women for the sensitive for lovers for lovers who conceive a baby and can’t afford to birth that baby for the young (here’s your Betsy DeVos, stupid and greedy as they come – enjoy, little ones, kissing goodbye your right to an education not owned by a fucking corporation), and may the gods help the old. And may the gods help all of us, because damn it may be this fever or this pain or this solitude but all I see when I open my eyes, or at least try to open them, is a farewell party.

And now I am tired and this was supposed to be brief. Brevity is not one of my strong points, a fact to which my ex-husband and his attorney might gladly testify. Maybe if I could just shut the fuck up, in my head, on this page, in the company of les autres, I would still be married. Maybe I’d have friends.

Somewhere does that world exist? For all of us? For me, for the mothers in South Sudan, watching their children die as their milk dries and the diseases come and the flies thrive; for those languishing in Duterte’s camps, for those to be deported by a man so stupid he governs by text, for the hipsters who ruin neighborhoods and for the solitary wealthy and for imprisoned black men and for their mothers and their lonely little daughters, does it exist?

Serenity
Light
Lightness
Feet quiet upon the tired Earth
Hands down
Hands down
guns down
fingertips soft
bellies as full as they need to be
not more
and certainly not less
there is music
somewhere
Can you hear
the whisper of Apollo
and the 9 muses
dance
No
No
not Heaven
Maybe
just
a softening
somewhere
along those suture lines
even the Earth has them
that softening
is a song
repeat
repeat
repeat….

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An Exit

05 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by racheltejas in Meditations and Poetry, Yoga

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Tags

asana, Ashtanga yoga, beginner's mind, brilliance, great teachers, Iyengar yoga, Kia Naddermier, Manouso Manos, Mary Taylor, modern yoga, problems with modern yoga, Richard Freeman, teaching yoga, yoga philosophy, yoga studios, yoga tradition

An Exit

I have been a student of yoga since my late 20’s. At the time, I was on the verge of becoming a cocaine addict, I was sleeping with a silly fool and carrying on my most meaningful relationship with his sister. When I met my future husband, who in a handful of days will be my ex-husband, he found an apple and a bottle of vodka in my refrigerator and percocet on my nightstand, which I think I imagined as an appropriate recipe for the crashes. When I moved out I didn’t even need to go into the kitchen, because I had never cooked so much as a pot of water for tea.

Yoga is sometimes referred to as a net, containing within it all the elements of the universe. It caught me, or, more accurately, I had already been caught, and the net slowly revealed itself to me in secretive glimpses. Sometimes it felt like a prison, particularly when I misapplied to the concepts contained within the yamas and niyamas (loosely, internal morality and universal goods) the habits of an upper-middle class white girl with a high Episcopal background. People with such backgrounds usually prefer their commandments to be inviolable, and therefore forever guilt inducing. There is little place for that in Classical Yoga.
20150905_152346-2 (1)Mostly, yoga has been a release and a discovery. The asana element, certainly, is a revelatory joy and impossibly difficult. However, it is a fraction of the practice, and to me the greatest jewel is the steadiness that arises from yoga’s ancient, evolving philosophical background. There seems, to my admittedly crude understanding, to be literally nothing of the human experience that is not expressed, addressed, and analyzed, with often frustrating and contradictory results, within the canon of yogic texts, beginning with the Vedas and Samkhya philosophy.

From the beginning of my practice, I sought out extremely gifted, often brilliant teachers. I did not, to my unending regret, spend time in India before having children. This is a gap in my life that grows with every passing month, and within the next few years I will have to close the gap by creating a large one in my bank account, hauling three little beings with me to South India for whatever period of weeks I can steal from joint “parenting time” (a more inane phrase for pissed off divorce people was never imagined; fodder for another essay).
kalamkari
In the meantime, I have been busily spending countless hours and dollars and intellectual energy on an unending series of study with four teachers who have grown to mean more to me than it is possible, in this context, to express. These are the people, I have found, who can see; they have attained, or were born with, a capacity for philosophical, physical, and emotional insight that far surpasses even the more intelligent among us. It is the great gift of my life to be around these people, and to absorb their observations in my small way, to transmit them to my children, my students, and, to a far lesser extent, my own life (“the brain,” says Manouso Manos, “is the most difficult part of the body to adjust”).
downloadGiven that I attend these dharma talks, asana classes, pranayama teachings, and philosophy discussions with such radiant people, and with great regularity, it has only recently dawned on me that it is something of an irony that I have never truly examined why I seem to need to teach yoga, whether I should teach yoga, or if I even want to teach yoga. And this is not even examining the more important issue of general competency: attending dozens of trainings and intensives with great minds does not make my mind great; nor does it necessarily make my teaching anything that would differentiate me from the growing herd of Western people who open studios, teach in them, and develop ever new “forms” of yoga.

All manifestations of art and philosophical or creative systems require their participants to possess a beautifully rare blend of gifts with no antecedent, luck, and discipline (which, in itself, might be a gift). Certainly this is the case in becoming a devoted yoga practitioner, particularly if one is from the West, and therefore hasn’t the slightest idea what such practice really means from a cultural perspective. We are not one of us in the West born to the practice, and therefore make all manner of category mistakes in identifying with yoga and its lineages. It is, in some real and fundamental ways, an absurd experiment, possibly failed from its inception.

Or it is something new. New and beautiful and fraught with danger, ego, and possibility. I don’t know; no one does.

I do know this: what is manifesting all across cities, towns and retreat centers in the Western world are forms and styles of yoga that are more and more foreign to me. I won’t make any friends writing this (but that is OK, this blog is practically a private diary anyway), but most of the studios I find, to whatever city I travel, vibrate with a new-age fakery that makes me feel not like a yoga practitioner, but someone being asked to leave intellect at the door as I move through a series of poses set to a musical “soundtrack.” It’s as if I’m being asked to create a lovely film of my own life, which is the precise opposite of yogic teachings about illusion, ahamkara (ego) and realization.
beer-and-yoga

Clearly, I am in the minority, as are all the other practitioners of Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga. Millions of people practice in this way, and receive life-transforming satisfaction from doing it. Or, at the least, increased health, which in our sick society is nothing to dismiss. But flowing to Chance the Rapper will never do it for me, or, more accurately, would utterly do me in, and so the fact that my teaching opportunities are all at studios that celebrate and develop these sorts of practices make me… an outsider, and an increasingly alienated one.

I will never be an Iyengar teacher. I would not be happy only studying in this manner, as I already live so much in my pointlessly analytical head that not just jumping, many times a week, into movement and breath (Ashtanga) or movement and music (ballet) would kill me. Nor, however, do I possess any interest at all in the competitive, odd world of Ashtanga authorization, which one must gain in order to truly call oneself an Ashtanga teacher.  I have met, frankly, some authorized teachers who are quite wanting in the teaching and compassion department, sometimes to the point of pathology. Too often, within a system that embraces an element of strict orthodoxy, people take the system containing their beliefs as something to overlay on an individual, as opposed to observing the manner in which that system and the individual blend and bend toward and away from one another. If Antonin Scalia were alive today and practicing, he would be at home as an ardent, strict Ashtangi. Literalists stick together. But what do I know? I’m not authorized.
alleySo I cannot teach at an Ashtanga shala, and I cannot teach at an Iyengar studio, although these are the two lineages I study. And I belong less and less to studios that offer every form of yoga except something recognizable and resonate to me, as a teacher and a student. Of great concern to me as well is the fact that in the current yoga industry, a studio can only survive by offering teacher training programs of 200 hours. These are taught by people who are usually total beginners themselves. So in the West we are developing, rapidly, forms of practice that are becoming more diffuse, less precise, with barely a skimming glance toward the antiquity and impossible difficulty of yoga as a whole, in favor of keeping financially afloat in a world that already has too many studios doing exactly the same thing. It is literally the blind leading the blind.

To be a beginner is wonderful. To see oneself as a beginner is even better. I am at my most unhappy when I think I know something. I have never questioned the very simple fact that I am a beginning yogi, and I always will be. The beginner state is what I was born to: I am just lucky, very lucky, to practice. Enlightenment in, perhaps 10,000 lifetimes? One can only hope. So it is not a criticism to call other teachers, other students, beginners. Our society, however, is so egoic, and unused to taking decades and lifetimes to reach mere competency that the extreme slowness of practice itself might be what kills the practice. But the practice doesn’t care. It will just keep manifesting: it is, after all, the universe, and many universes, and all of consciousness itself.

My daughter asked me yesterday, “Mama, what was the first thing invented?”

“Well,” I said, “no one knows.” She looked at me, holding Bear. “Time, I suppose. Or space. Time and space, and whatever was before that. Can you imagine??” And we both looked ahead of us, as if the question had become something real, a concrete object. “Planets,” she murmured. “All the planets…”

“What a brilliant question,” I said to my little daughter. But she had not heard me, she had skipped off to her room to play with her little creatures in her own, brand new universe.

This essay is dedicated with all the love and grace I possess to Manouso Manos, Mary Taylor, Richard Freeman, and Kia Naddermier.

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manouso-manos-iyengar-yoga-2rima

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