Third Month Crying

Except for the creaking of my fan and the occasional howling street dogs, Mysore's been quiet over the last three weeks. With no fellow students around I've taken the opportunity to catch up on work, take on a few writing assignments for causes I believe in, go gluten-free and regroup after the intense month and a half of practice with Saraswathi.

During self-practice these days I decided to revert back to the primary series. Mainly, to give myself an incentive to stand up from urdhva dhanurasana. I decided I wouldn't work on intermediate again until I could do this. I know that Sharath doesn't let anyone start intermediate till they've mastered this bit, and I figured, there must be a reason for it.

I researched online and found every possible resource to guide me through it. I found some really valuable advice by Kino MacGregor, saying that you should press the insides of your feet on the ground. What a difference that makes. A blog on the Ashtanga Picture Project said you need to believe that you can do it. A few weeks back, I'd asked a certified teacher who lives here in Mysore, Philippa Asher, how to stand up and she said you have to use the breath.

So every day, I completed the primary series, dropped back, pressed the insides of my feet on the ground, tried to believe that I was gonna spring back up, and breathed.

Nothing happened.

I wasn't anxious to get the pose or anything, there's no rush and I'm well aware that all is coming if you just keep practicing. And if it didn't, well, pura vida, at least I tried my ass off. So I stuck to my little routine. Pressing, believing, breathing.

Then last Friday, something miraculous happened. No, I didn't stand up from Urdhva Dhanurasana. The Costa Rican football team (called la Sele) beat Italy at the World Cup in Brazil. Jaws dropped everywhere. Tears were shed. No one was expecting this, not even the Costa Rican football players, I'm pretty sure. I was chatting with a friend back home after the game and we resolved that if our team had beat Uruguay and Italy, then everything was possible. EVERYTHING.

The next day, when I stepped onto the playing field of my mat I thought, if Bryan Ruiz scored a goal against Italy, then I can surely get up from urdhva dhanurasana.

I finished the series. I pressed. I believed. Only this time, I really believed. I breathed. I pushed my pelvis forward and got onto the tips of my fingers. I felt waves of electricity circling from my hands to my feet. It was like being strapped into the electric chair. I was zapped, my body collapsed to the floor. But I'd felt something. I'd felt energy moving to my legs, and I was pretty sure this was the energy that lifted you up.

The next day...

I pressed. I really believed. I breathed. I got zapped. And then my body sprang up to standing. Gooooooooooooooooool! Gooooooooooooooool de Costa Rica! Gooooool gooool goool.

Like a replay on television of the moment of victory, I repeated it about twenty times to make sure it had really happened. Yup. It was for real.

I assumed I was going to feel ecstatic all day. Ha.

After I practiced, I showered, ate and got ready to start working. As soon as I sat down in front of my laptop, I started sobbing. Uncontrollably. The tears took me completely by surprise. It couldn't be PMS. Everything was great. But I couldn't stop crying. How could one not cry, when the sky turned orange and pink and yellow at sunset. I went to the grocery store and I couldn't reach the toilet paper on the shelf so a man came and helped me. He was just so kind, so sweet looking. I walked out of the store and started sobbing again. I wanted to call my mother. Then the floodgates really opened.

The next day I felt like myself again. I finished the series, I dropped back. I shot back up. And as soon as I was standing, I started wailing. I dropped back. Shot back up. Wailed. Dropped back. Stood up. Sweat and tears were gushing out everywhere. I had to sit. I felt nauseous. I managed to get through the closing sequence. I lay down to take rest and I was still sobbing. I looked at the sky outside and understood that everything was okay out there. Everything was okay in here too. Whatever was happening did not require an explanation. It just...had to be.

Clearly, the backbending was getting intense, and it had triggered something. I googled "backbending, emotions" and found this:

"Backbending often brings up strong emotions when students first begin to practice it more regularly and go deeper. It often does not really matter whether you are flexible or stiff in your spine if you are unfamiliar with the strength, stamina and flexibility needed for most backbending movements. It takes lots of practice before you will feel confident about integrating a full backbend sequence into your daily practice. Healthy technique and anatomical awareness is crucial to the longterm practice of backbends. Be aware that when learning how to safely bend your back you may experience rational and irrational emotions. Sometimes the most flexible students have the most troubling emotions arising when they start practicing backbends." ~ Kino MacGregor

Well, I guess I don't need to be institutionalized.

I found a ton of blogs exploring the rise of emotions during backbending. I'm no scientist, but considering that the spine is a key player in our nervous system, I figure a lot of traumatic experiences must be stored in there. That time you pushed a kid in the second grade and he and his desk rolled onto the floor. That guy who crushed your heart when you really, really needed him. The finality of death. The entire journey of existence from day one. What if it's all stored in there? Inside our cells, and our spine controls it all? And when you bend it every which way, all the traumas get squeezed out. Stuff that goes beyond our own existence, from the collective subconscious. Experiences that have been handed down from one generation to the next and come prepackaged in our DNA.

Maybe this is why we have to be able to drop back and stand up before starting intermediate. If the intermediate series, nadi shodhana, purifies the nervous system, then backbending is a hell of a great way to get started. Maybe if everyone just waltzed into the second series, the shala would be full of emotionally paralyzed, wailing ashtangis.

During my online search, this is one of the most beautiful blog entries I was able to find about backbending:

http://www.yogachikitsa.net/2013/11/01/standing-up-from-back-bending-a-lesson-in-vulnerability/

She talks about how terrified she was of standing up from backbending without assistance, and then she realized what this meant: she wasn't able to stand up for herself.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I must get back to sobbing.

SELF-practice

Choose Your Own Adventure

When I was a kid I had trouble sleeping. And whenever I managed to sleep, weird stuff would happen, like I'd sleepwalk and scare the crap out of my big sister who'd think I'd turned into a zombie.

To cope with the ordeal of bedtime, I started reading. (Back then there were no laptops or iPads or devices to distract night-fearing children). So I read. I read all kinds of stuff, anything that I could get my hands on, all the books in my sister's bookshelf. Some stuff I couldn't even understand because it was written in Old English, but I read it anyway. And instead of worrying about the ghosts under our beds and the demons in our closets, I'd run through the prairies with Laura Ingalls Wilder, visit the trippiest enchanted kingdoms and my favorite...Oh! My very favorite were the Choose Your Own Adventure books. You see, the night was so long, and if you finished one adventure, you could always just turn back and choose another one and another one and so on, until one of two things inevitably came: sleep or daylight, and the ghosts would go home.

When we turn back to look at the things we've said and done throughout our lives, the decisions we've made, it's always tempting to consider, "Well, what if I'd chosen that other adventure? What would've happened then?" And sometimes we'd like to turn the pages and go back to find out. But unless you're proficient in time travel, you don't get that privilege. You author the linear plot of a novel called: Your Own Adventure.

When you're on the spiritual path you begin to understand that every twist on the road, every hair that falls out, every word that comes out of your mouth and every single thing that happens from the moment you open your eyes in the morning until you close them at night, is exactly what you need to happen for your own personal evolution.

It's during the stormy times when this is hardest to remember, when you desperately want to flip the page, but ironically, these moments accelerate our growth like nothing else.

This week, I officially turned down a six-month communications consultancy back home. And today I rented an apartment in Gokulam for one year. And I thought of the adventures that will follow from these choices. I'm smiling like a jack-o'-lantern as I write this.

Mysore is quiet these days, the Ashtanga schools are now closed, Saraswathi's in Malaysia and most of my friends have gone home.

The other day I told a certified teacher how much I was dreading self-practice and she said something along the lines of: "But Ashtanga is meant for self-practice!"

I mulled this over and decided to quit looking for authorized teachers all over the place and just unroll my mat where I am right now. So each morning I practice in the middle of my living room, which is airy and sunny and spacious.

And the strange thing is, I've realized that the Mysore magic is not exclusively contained inside the walls of KPJAYI. It appears to unfold all over Mysore, all over the world, in our own living rooms! I've understood that we carry it inside wherever we go. When we practice, we plug into the Source.

The stuff we learn from our teachers keeps us going, it fuels our self-practice. For however long is necessary until we can get back to them. Even if it takes a lifetime or two.

"The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure." ~ Joseph Campbell

Kapotasana in a Few Short Verses

"Relax," she ordered.

But how to relax,
when your teacher is trying
to rip off your arms?

"Breathe," she said.

Oh how I tried,
but I gasped and suffocated instead.
When the world is upside down
how should the air find your lungs?

"Don't move your arm!" she scolded gently.

But a rebel arm kept
jerking to one side,
governed by a mind of its own,
irreverent to the desperate pleas
of my exposed heart.

"Kapotasana is a bitch," I wrote in an email to my teacher back home.

"Kapotasana is an ego killer," she replied.

"Extend your arms. Keep your head off the ground," chirped a teacher in a YouTube video.

I extended my arms. I kept my head off the ground.

I surrendered completely.

"I trust you with my life," my cells spoke to Saraswathi from an unnameable place. "If worse comes to worst you'll just snap off my arms."

"Relax," she ordered.

I relaxed.

"Breathe," she said.

I breathed.

And my hands clutched my heels for the very first time.

Backbending poetry from the Source 

A Hindu, a Muslim, and a Christian

So...it's not about the asana.

I've figured that much out. Challenging as they are, the Ashtanga yoga series are simply a means to an end. I have no idea what this end is. Is there a pot of gold at the end of the sixth series?...(I like to envision it as a long sweaty rainbow) A stack of warm chapati and dhal? A really fancy saree? How can we even be sure that there is an end? A destination. I think it's a lot more ambiguous than that. I think it's about the journey, just like life itself.

Along the way, the series heal all kinds of stuff, if you allow them to, that is, if you surrender and give them all you've got. Everything. They'll wring out your mind, forcing out streams of negativity, anger, fear, hatred, anxiety, sadness, you name it. They leave you free to sit there with a giant smile on your face, like a drooling, toothless baby in a state of permanent goo goo da da bliss. Of course, babies have their tantrums and dark days too, but ultimately, they snap out of it. Or so I've heard.

The practice also awakens some dormant demons. We've all witnessed them, heard of them or felt them tossing and turning as they rouse out of their slumber.

As luck would have it, I made a friend here who has been coming to Mysore for years, he actually practiced with Guruji. He's almost 50 years old but looks (and acts) like he's not a day past 13. So, not only has he been something of a restaurant and tour guide for us newbies, but he often drops these groundbreaking wisdom bombs that are pretty earth-shattering. He's really private and would definitely kick my butt if I revealed his name.

So, he's clear on one thing. The teachers he respects are humble. They're the ones who are not out there seeking the spotlight, waiting to pose for the yoga paparazzi, the stars of their own celebrity fantasy. The ones who, like Guruji, are dedicated to transferring their knowledge to a little family of students that they care deeply about. Because parampara goes both ways. They're low profile. Ego-free.

When he says stuff like this, I imagine Saraswathi or Guruji or Sharath opening Facebook accounts and posing for selfies and new profile shots and it makes me giggle internally. I am so glad they are not into that kind of stuff. I am so glad that Saraswathi is a 72-year old grandma who is clearly not into this for the glory. And that you can see that just by looking at her face. Into her radiant, multicolored eyes. She really wants everyone to get the pose, whatever pose they're stuck on.

I'm also glad that my teacher back home sometimes wears really old yoga pants that have holes in them. And I'm so glad that, from what I've seen, Ashtanga yoga generally attracts simple people, who are not into trendy yoga mats and flashy yoga clothes. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I just don't think that's what this is about, not for me anyway.

So, my friend, I've asked him countless times to sit down for an interview to share everything he knows with the world but he's too humble and private for that, he says there are tons of people who know more than he does and believes that every bit of knowledge will come to us if we just keep practicing. I kind of agree. Maybe words and blogs and magazines are pointless too in the end. In the face of this practice, that strips you of everything unnecessary, down to the very bone marrow and our pumping hearts.

Anyway, he shared a beautiful story the other day, something he heard straight out of Guruji's mouth. One day Guruji said something like this:

"Three men are shipwrecked." (Ok, picture it all in Guruji's accent, and actually my friend couldn't remember if it was a sinking boat or some other catastrophe. Let's go with the boat.) "One man is Muslim and he prays to Allah and Allah saves his life. One man is Christian and he prays to God and God comes and saves him. And the other guy is Hindu, so he prays to a thousand different Gods. And the Gods start to quarrel with each other about their plan of action. The boat sinks and the man dies."

Apparently, Guruji used this story as an example of what'll happen to people who have multiple teachers. He said we should stick to one guru. Otherwise we'll get all confused and end up a (ship) wreck.

I think I have two now, my teacher back home and Saraswathi, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't quarrel if my boat were to sink.

And the other day I had the overwhelming feeling that it simply wouldn't make sense for me to practice anywhere else right now. I want to stay in Mysore and learn everything that Saraswathi can possibly teach me.

So I decided that I'm not going back...yet.

I feel like I've found everything that I was ever looking for here, and I looked pretty much everywhere. Under the sea, in deserted islands, all around the world. And this kind of explains why I didn't want to leave India when I visited the first time. I wasn't done with this place. India wasn't done with me. But does anyone ever want to leave India? I guess so.

And now I found her, Saraswathi. And a place where everything revolves around the practice. So, there's no time to lose. I was starving for this, and one day I hope that I'll be humble enough and ready to share what I've learned.

In the meantime, practice, practice.