On Drinking

It's New Year's Resolution season, and I've got the fever.  For my 2013 resolution, I shall undertake one of the most common resolutions.  I shall try to drink less.

A bit of context is important, especially since my boss is one of the more frequent readers of this blog, post reboot (hi, Russ!).  I don't feel that I drink too much now.  I mean, self deluders of the world unite and everything, but in my case, I really don't think I'm what society would consider a problem drinker.  I have a beer after work about 2-3 days per week.  I will have more than that most weekend nights, but seldom more than four.  If I have four, I will not drive, because I know that four beers equals .08 BAC equals our good friend John Dewey.  Most importantly, my drinking has not caused any problems in my life of which I am aware.  My family and friends have not indicated any level of discomfort.

With that disclaimer out of the way, one can reasonably ask the question: if no one thinks you have a drinking problem, why the resolution to drink less?  To answer, I need to reference an idea that has been percolating at the back of my mind for some time but came into focus when I read Anthony Alvardo's excellent D.I.Y. Magic.  The book contains a whole chapter on different legal substances one can consume to alter one's perspective, like a bunch of coffee or yerba root.  He also, as I recall, delves into the effects of several illegal substances, none of which I use or will use, because I like being employed.

Anyway, the idea that crystallized reading Alvardo was that one should use or not use substances to alter perception, a topic that frequent readers will note is one of this blog's animating ideas.  Almost all of the ideas that grab me these days, from Buddhism to string theory to magic to whatever, speak to man's limited ability to perceive reality in his normal state and his potential to transcend these limitations and grasp reality more fully.  To me, any effort that changes my normal practice with minimal foreseeable negative consequences is worth the effort.

Well, what's more normal for me than drinking?  I've been going out and having a pint ever since it was legal to do so, and I don't really know what my body and my mind and my soul are like without the limited amount of alcohol I do consume.  Can I handle awkward social situations without liquid courage?  Will cutting back on booze improve my yoga, my meditation, my gnosis, and my learning?  Does alcohol have positive effects that I take for granted but will become aware of in their absence?

I have no intention whatsoever of cutting out all alcohol now or ever.  There are too many things to love, and I will never pass up scotch with my lady or cocktails at the Velvet Tango Room or Kirin Lights with Jimmy and Beav or Untappd check ins or...well, any time that is special, and feels like the use of alcohol will push me towards the kind of freer mind and body that I am trying to develop.

But give up alcohol as part of day-to-day life and see what happens?  Yeah, that's something that very well may shift my perspective.  Sign me up.

Why Home Practice Wins

On the Solstices, the good modern American yogi is supposed to do 108 sun salutations.  I had done it before, but always as part of a group.  This past Friday, I didn't want to invest three hours to knock them out with the only Bucks County studio I found that was observing the Winter Solstice, so I decided to do my 108 by myself.

I doubt I'll ever do them with a group again.

A study that made the rounds a few months ago claimed that a home yoga practice provides greater health benefits than group classes.  Even though I love classes and will probably always attend them, I believe this study, and my 108 experience reminded me why.

Doing the 108 by myself, in a room with nothing but fading natural light, there was nothing but me and my breath.  20-30 salutations in, my breath became a frickin metronome.  The nice thing about a home practice is that one can let his or her breath dictate everything.  If I'm tight, my muscles will tell my breath, my breath will tell me, and I will need to back off in order to get that wonderful ujjayi breath back.  And when I get that breath locked in, the effect it has on my body-mind is unbelievable.  Friday, it was the equivalent of an hour and a half of perfect meditation.


There's so much going on in a contemporary yoga class.  At a lot of studios, there's contemporary music and an instructor who's straining to be heard over top of it.  Even the best studios can only minimize the distractions, not eliminate them.  There's always someone else, some stray movement that can distract you from what is important, which is the breath and only the breath.

Someone should point out that the ultimate goal is to be able to take this deep calm into the world and to have it in spite of (because?) of the world's "distractions."  I agree, but I also know I'm not there yet.  I lose that feeling in the broader world.  Yoga classes help me get it back, but not as well as a good home practice.

Is Yoga a Religion?

This weekend, the homeboy Mike Lyons posted up a video on whether yoga is a religion.  Mike's been doing his practice for a long time and is serious about aspects of yoga beyond asana, so I have no doubt the video is worth a watch.  However, I'm going to skip it, because I have no interest in the question.

Don't get me wrong.  I am very interested in the history and roots of yoga, and I think yoga in the West has probably strayed too far from them and rushed into the embrace of "Rock Your Asana" a little too eagerly.  I'm all for making yoga more quiet, more contemplative, and more spiritual.

That said, two things bug me about the religion question.  One, from my limited understanding, asking whether yoga is a religion is like asking whether a duck is a number or a letter.  When we in the West use the word "religion," I don't think we can escape the Judeo-Christian association with the word.  So when we ask if yoga is a religion, we're asking if it fits into a box that was designed to fit something else, whether a square peg can really fit into a round hole.

Some people I've heard in this debate acknowledge this dynamic, and they have a tendency to use it to justify a negative answer.  As in, no, yoga doesn't fit into the tidy western concept of a religion, so it isn't a religion.  What bothers me here is not the answer itself but its consequences.

In my experience, the quicker someone is to maintain that yoga is not a religion, the quicker they are to try to sell you something.  The religion debate seems to me to be a way to decouple yoga from its roots so that it fits more easily within a consumer culture.  In other words, if yoga isn't a religion, you don't have to be like dirty brown people.  You're not going to to dive naked into the Ganges, or whatever.  You can continue to lead your good American consumer life.  In fact, here's a 100 dollar yoga mat we think you'll like.

Yoga is hard, and yoga is alien to the West.  It is a demanding way of life that, if practiced fully, will lead one into conflict with the broader society.  Yoga is about achieving transcendence by yourself right now, so if you think Jesus Christ is our savior and the only road to transcending the misery of day to day life, yoga is going to cause you some discomfort.  Yoga demands nonviolence, so it's going to be pretty hard to justify eating that factory farmed beef that's so readily available.

The Ten Millionth Kendrick Lamar Blog Post

I know I'm late with this post.  I know everyone and their mother has screamed good things about this album.

But if ever cared about hip hop, go get the Kendrick Lamar record.  I'm not sure if it's the instant classic many say it is, mainly because modern production techniques like compression leave me cold.  Good Kid M.A.A.D. City's beats are as hot as beats can get in 2012, but they still sound a little clinical and overly digital for my tastes.  The boom bap is there, but not like it used to be.  You have every right to dismiss such complaints as another old guy whining and waxing nostalgic for an 808 and Primo's technique, but if we're serious about our standards for a classic, these are the heights an album's beats must reach.

Lamar himself deserves every bit of acclaim he's receiving.  He's simply a lyrical monster.  Rod from The Black Guy Who Tips made fun of the developing cottage industry of dudes trying to flow over the album's beats, because there's absolutely no way anyone can exceed the lyrics K. Dot has already spit. I don't need to break down how brilliantly he weaves the extended metaphor throughout the entire album, because someone has already done it.

If I have to pick my favorite thing about Kendrick's rhyming on the record, it's how he manages to presents the joys of youthful nihilism and reflect on their consequences at the same time.  Listen Money Trees or Backseat Freestyle, Kendrick communicates both the excitement I remember from raising hell as a kid and the remorse I feel about most of that stuff now.  I couldn't write an essay on the topic half as elegant, and he's doing it as poetry.  Amazing.

Anyway, if you haven't yet, do whatever you have to do to listen to this record.

Change Your Mind

I'm on Facebook as much as anyone I know.  I made myself stop posting about politics on FB, because it's annoying.  Although I think I've been successful, I obviously have no problem offering up off-the-cuff opinions about the issues of the day.

With this, though, not only can't I...

I can barely even type about it.  Sitting here right now, promising that I'd try to write something down about it, and having been successful writing about love and loss and everything else...

It comes down to this.  I've never had a political issue that I've lost friends over, and in my mind, I still don't, because guns aren't a political issue.  And if you want to pretend that guns aren't at all an issue, we can't be cool.  We probably can't be friends any more.

We can argue about how much guns are responsible.

I'm not taking away your right to hunt.  Shit, I'll eat every piece of venison you put in front of me.

We can say other things matter more.

But if you're against any and all new regulations, you're worse than the people in 1491 who said the world was flat.  You saw, with your own eyes, that it isn't.  We have 20 dead elementary school children because a gun made them that way.

I type all this with no joy whatsoever, nor any of the emotions that I usually feel when I'm right about a political argument.  I'm not 23, and I don't start Internet beefs.  I'm sad, sad because some very good people are posting about guns not being a problem, and I can't just sit by and pretend that this shit is ok.  In the face of 20 dead kids, all other arguments fall away.

So, yeah, debate is entirely over for me.  If you respond to this blog post with something inviting dialogue, I won't respond, because I'm just too exhausted and sad to handle it, and because I can't talk with you until you do some really deep introspecting.  And if you keep sharing NRA pictures, you're getting blocked.  I wish it weren't this way, but it is.  I just can't handle it.

The Dreaded Yoga Finger Touch

It comes with five minutes left in the yoga practice.  The work is done, the teacher has called for shavasana, and I have splayed out on my mat with an eye towards total relaxation...at which point, out of nowhere comes another sweaty finger bumping up against mine.

Bumping into people is par for the course in most studios I've frequented.  The most popular classes pack people close together, so some contact is inevitable.  I've taken more feet to the head than I can count.  Hell, tonight, on the way to one pose, I completely bumped into the instructor's, er, posterior.  It didn't phase either one of us, because both of us know the deal.  In modern American yoga, some level of accidental contact is just going to happen.

Yet shavasana seems like it should be different.  Ashtanga's primary sequence is an allegory for life, and shavasana literally translates into English as "corpse pose."  It is the pose where, if you've practiced well, you may be able to do nothing and be nothing and be utterly content.  The self can dissolve, and you can be at one with your surroundings.  If some sweaty dude is rubbing his digits up against mine, how can I possibly deal?  How can I possibly let go?  My natural reaction to the accidental finger touch has always been to jerk away ASAP.

And yet...

And yet...

We aren't separate, not a single one of us.  Zen is a factually correct way of looking at life, because there is no stable self, no stable Bryan, just a billion quarks and neutrons and cosmic stardust that shifts and changes entirely in every instant.  What is physical contact if not a reminder that the self is boundless and shifting?  Someone touches me, and everything about my existence seems to change.  My thoughts change.  My heart quickens.

And as for corpse pose, who's to say that death is lonely and isolated?  What if death really is the fall back into everything, where our consciousness merges and dissolves and unites with the universal?

What if, when we die, someone is there to hold our hand?

Tonight, I didn't move my hand, and neither did she.  As I fell into shavasana, I tried to project all I had learned and hoped to learn.  I tried to share whatever calm I have managed to gain in my life.  I tried to let her know about the time when I practiced and fell into shavasana and realized that God was real.  I hoped that the physical connection between us could help her along her way.  I tried my best to make that physical contact into a form of service.  And it felt great.

Of course, I still have a ways to go on my path.  Next time, if I'm REALLY advanced, I might even listen to what the person touching my hand is trying to say to me.

Still D.R.E.

Given that my readership pre-hiatus was, uh, just my friends, I don't think I need to spend much time explaining why I was on hiatus.  I moved to Cleveland.  I took a job crunching numbers with Cleveland Metropolitan School District.  My whole life flipped.

Well, not the whole life.  Some things stayed the same.  I still love my family.  I still went camping with the homies.  I still date the best woman on the planet. I still dig Terry Riley.  I still watched good triumph over evil.  I still almost have pincha mayurasana. All of these constants have been tremendous comfort during a time when my life was in upheaval.  

I also try to be mindful of these constants as constants as much as possible now because there's a great lesson about how little concepts like "change" and "constancy" mean.  I've changed jobs and locations, which feels like a lot because it is, but the bedrock of who I am remains blissfully unchanged, for which I am so, so grateful.  But that bedrock is an illusion, too.  All the things in the preceding paragraph--my yoga, my relationships, the kids wearing the Pennridge green--all of it changes constantly.  The second I define it, it changes, and I struggle for words to describe how that feels, because it feels like a koan.

One thing I know for sure: I miss writing.  It's one of the few parts of my old profession that I do miss, and this blog was a great source of personal development and a way to connect with others.  I don't know if I can live up to the blog's name any more, but I am committed to trying to write here as frequently as possible.  Hope you stop by.

The Sky

We only think of blue skies as tranquil, but I tend to think the sky is always tranqu and storm clouds as intruders in the sky.  There's some essential skyness that exists separate from those clouds that retains its tranquility even as the clouds race across.  The sky accepts and embraces the clouds but does not let them disturb its essential skyness.

Probably because the sky is empty and completely full and complete at all times.