Last Night, A Pose Saved My Life

A week or two ago, friend of the Blogcast Inspector Clawseau said she wanted an entry on how yoga changed my life.  I'm not sure if I've been pushing it off, but I hadn't done it yet.

The universe has a reason for everything.

Tonight, I got home and laid down on my couch.  It was too late to make either of the classes at Cleveland Yoga.  As it turns out, I was too discouraged and exhausted to even make it off the couch for the class that takes place in my building.  I passed out for about 45 minutes and woke up as miserable as ever.  Yoga was just about the last thing I wanted to do.

But my teacher training starts tomorrow.  Maybe the fear of embarrassing myself in front of my classmates got me moving.  Maybe it was the memory of Tuesday's class, which was one of my best practices ever.  For whatever reason, I managed to get off the couch, roll out my mat, and do 20 minutes of the most miserable Sun Salutations imaginable.  I couldn't leave the past behind.  Every movement felt broken, tedious, so, so, so very wrong.

20 minutes into the practice, however, I got a gift that almost brought me to tears.  I sat and meditated, and I realized that, with the exception of my weary head, I felt fantastic.  My body felt alive, energized, healthy, and altogether perfect.  My body was so perfect that it even had areas that were still tight, which meant, OMG, I could do MOAR YOGA.  

I proceeded to practice for another hour in complete bliss and gratitude.  By the end, even my brain felt pretty good.

What have I gotten out of yoga?  It grows and changes every day.  Today, I got out of my own mess of a head.  When all seemed lost, I got on my mat, and everything got better.

Let's Talk About Girls

Have you ever read the 33 1/3 album review of Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love album? I can't recommend it enough. 33 1/3 is waging a one-series war to keep pop music criticism alive. The series gives a music critic an album and book length to review it. By all accounts, the series is a fantastic success, but the review of Miss Dion's magnus opus is probably the most cited and most read.

The setup: 33 1/3 gave a hipster dude one year and the most horrible of tasks: to learn to appreciate Dion's music. What makes the book so awesome is that the dude actually gets there. By the end of the book, he states that he really, truly enjoys Dion's music, and this reader completely believes him.

How did he get there? First, he acknowledged that, technically, Celine Dion is amazing. Each and every person reading this blog has rolled their eyes at Dion's "oversinging," but we should all be able to admit that her voice is amazing, that there's nothing she can't do with it. So why do so many people have such a visceral negative reaction to Dion's music, when she's such an obvious, undeniable talent?

The author's contention is that the hate stems from the class consciousness of the listener. He shows how Dion's music has its roots in genres traditionally favored by the working class, genres that upper and middle class listeners have learned to reject as a way to separate themselves from "the rabble." The pop culture industry took that class consciousness and made it mass consciousness. In other words, they made it uncool. I don't want to like something that sounds like something the female students at Tech School might listen to.

In short, what we think of a piece of art depends highly on the trappings that surround it. Dress something (like country music) up in the clothes of Red America, and people like me are going to hate all of it, even despite the undeniable talent of someone like Alan Jackson. Dress something up in upper middle class clothes, language, mannerisms, and experience, and people like me will fall for it.

I can't stop thinking about that review when I hear people talk about Girls. If you like Girls, bully for you. I liked Entourage, because it was a fairy tale very typical to someone of my age at that point in time. However, I never claimed that Entourage was particularly good or meaningful. Girls is getting such accolades, and we have the class trappings of the show and its target audience to thank for it.

Girls is not original, profound, or even particularly well done. It trades in exactly the same shock aesthetic as the worst reality TV: promiscuous sex, bad behavior, and balling with no concern for real life trivialities like a job. It's JUST rich 20 something white girls pretending to be broke but otherwise acting like Real Housewives. You can argue that allowing young women a venue to express their sexuality on their terms is a good thing, but it's not like that hasn't been done before. Sure, there's some angst, but that's because, in the upper class 20 something worldview, there's SUPPOSED to be angst. It's not a very fulfilling fairy tale for the rich and elite if they don't rage against something. If you're just happy all the time, you must be stupid. You probably like Celine Dion or something.

But unlike the Real Housewives, these girls wear respectable clothes. They went to the right schools. Their vocabulary could ace the SAT Verbal. And, of course, Lena Dunham comes from NYC art royalty, so how could she possibly make something mundane? These cues, and these cues alone, have been enough to convince Very Important People (thanks, Paul) that Girls is an important snapshot of our cultural gestalt.

I don't begrudge the twenty something who are into the show, because, shit, every generation should get to retell the same old story in a way that resonates with them. If young women want their own Entourage, they should get it and enjoy it. What bothers me is older folks who should know better.

PS: I'm willing to grant a little ground on one of the most criticized aspects of the show, which is Lena Dunham's willingness to be naked on screen. Potentially positive message about body types and beauty there.

When Yoga Hurts

This practice keeps teaching me things.

Somehow, some way, I decided my practice needed less focus on technique and more on how my body actually felt.  In Journey Into Power, which I'm reading as part of my teacher training, Baron Baptiste instructs us to do as much, but I'm happy to say that the idea came to me from my practice.  At some point in the last few months, my practice told me that a laser focus on how it felt was my next step.

I'm less than happy with the results.

I hurt.  

It's not hurt from my practice; rather, it's hurt my practice is revealing.  I have lot of hurt stored up in my body.  Specifically, deep in my hips and in my shoulder joints and in the muscles of my upper back.  I'd known about the back muscle stuff for a while.  I have the hardest time relaxing my shoulders, which may have been the impetus for my new emphasis.  I was tired of teachers pushing my shoulders down in Warrior 2.

The soreness in my joints surprises me.  Some of it may come from the fact that I'm not quite back in the practice rhythm I was in prior to Christmas.  I had been hitting the heated classes at Cleveland Yoga 3-4 times a week, and they are the most rigorous classes I have attended on a regular basis.  The "rigor=openness" equation isn't perfect, but in my case, I think I was more open, particularly in the hips.  Due to travel, I haven't gotten back into that rhythm post holidays yet, and my body is telling me I need to.  

But I don't think that's everything.  Baptiste talks about how our bodies carry around everything that ever happened to us, an idea he grabbed from the ancients.  Every hurt, every slight, every stress, and every REBUT has a home in our body, until we learn to let go of it.  I think of myself as a person with a good sense of my inner landscape who does a good job of avoiding repression.

And yet...

During Saturday's savasana I had a pretty deep conversation with the muscles in my upper back.  I told them they didn't need to hold all of my stress, that the rest of my body and my heart and mind and soul could help handle the load.  My shoulders weren't so sure.  They started talking about all the stuff that I could be worried about: my job, my relationship, my future.  They said that they'd been taking care of all that heavy stuff for so long, that I had no idea what I was getting into when I said I would take some of the load.  I left class pretty sad but grateful, because I felt like I understood some little part of me I hadn't before.

Hmm.

The Greatest Song Ever of the Week

The Greatest Song Ever of the Week is Cunninlynguists' “Southernunderground.”  To listen to this song is to confront hip hop in its totality.  Put bluntly (pun intended), this song is a monster, in all senses of the words.

Cunninlynguists is not an act I plan on sharing with my girlfriend anytime soon, let alone my mother.  Hip hop has all different kinds of misogyny it can throw at you, but “Southernunderground” features the type that might be most least favorite: the hate that technically proficient emcees often use to assure the listener that they aren’t bougie.  In the span of two minutes, each of the three emcees manages to write off women as sexual punch lines.

The frustrating thing is that Cunninlynguists clearly don’t need to rely on tired, hateful clichés, because they are obvious master of their forms.  These dudes typify the early 2000s come up of the underground, where rappers could conjure up internal rhyme schemes so complicated it hurts to try to plot them, all without sacrificing any delivery or charisma.  Listening to “Southernunderground,” it’s no longer worth arguing that anything besides hip hop is the highest, most advanced form of oral expression that we’ve ever seen.

Non fans need not apply.  Much of it is completely indefensible.  But it is wildly creative, completely addictive, and never compromises anything.  It’s hip hop.

Guns in Schools

Last week, the Washington Post ran an article which describes how the school system in Butler, Pennsylvania is hiring former state troopers to serve as armed security guards.  The article is fantastic and presents about the best possible case for arming school employees.  The officers who are serving in Butler Schools deserve nothing but our respect, and the Butler School System deserves all credit for demanding that only the most responsible, best trained personnel serve in these positions.  That alone allays my greatest fear, which is civilians with guns taking shots at people besides the bad guys.  In an emergency situation, I have a hard time imagining anyone but a trained professional hitting the person they need to stop.  With trained officers, there's a much lower (but, to be sure, a non zero) chance that they choke.

It still won't prevent the unthinkable.

The sad, bad, awful truth is that so many of these tragedies end with the gunman turning the gun on themselves.  A lone ex-cop with a pistol isn't going to deter someone who has already decided to die.  We have multiple examples of serial killers whose planning is as thorough as it is horrifying.  Think about the bombs the Colorado movie theater shooter set up in his apartment or the planning the Columbine kids did.  These dudes can be smart.  They can and will scout their targets.  And the first bullet they fire is going to head directly for the armed security guard.  The guard is a sitting duck.  

And I repeat: no one has told me how we are going to pay for an armed guard in every school.  There are roughly 15,000 schools in the United States.  Say we can find enough retired officers to staff every school and that, out of generosity, the officers all agree to take a $30,000 salary.  That's 450 millions dollars.  45 plus seven zeros, before we factor in the cost of training and benefits.

It's simply not a viable solution.

Dream Weaver

I have broken the Seventh Seal of the New Age Apocalypse.  I have started to keep a dream journal.  If you don't, I cannot recommend it enough.

I never gave dreams much thought, even when I encountered therapists who encouraged me to treat them more seriously.  The psychological approach to dreams seems so clinical and cold to me, and, although I never consciously had this thought, I think I always wanted my dreams to remain free, wild, and mysterious.  The idea of putting dreams on the couch seemed to rob them of all their potency.

Thanks to Arthur Magazine, I know I'm not the only one that feels that way.  The cover story of their big comeback issue is an interview with comic book artist Rick Veitch, who has spent the better part of 20 years writing and illustrating his dreams for over 20 years.  That's his work on the cover.

Something about the combination of dreams and comic books spoke to me.  Comics are one of the last places where the free, wild, and mysterious can still bubble up into the larger culture, unless you think a Norse god teaming up with the Tin Man and an unfrozen WWII soldier is standard everyday happenings.  I love comics but have never been able to participate in the creative process.  I can't draw, and I haven't written any fiction since high school.

Rick Veitch tells me I don't need to do either.  All I need to do is dream, and I can play with the same magic he does.

So, yeah, I started a dream journal this weekend, and I am already amazed at what I am uncovering.  Thus far, because the cosmos has a sense of humor, the primary benefits I have seen have been psychological.  I am amazed at what writing and rehashing my dreams has told me about how I carry guilt around.  Some of the details have been painful to write down, but doing so has let me walk around this week with a little less weight on my shoulders.  Being aware of some previously subconscious coping mechanisms has let me understand myself a little better, and I'm able to be just that much gentler with myself.

Thus far, I haven't dreamt up the next great superhero franchise, but, hey, the Dream Every Day Project is less than a week old.  Give it time.

Fox News Doesn't Like Yoga

Every time Fox News says anything, I am reminded of a conversation I had with one of my favorite colleagues at Wake Forest.  She would give some small extra credit to any student who went to an on-campus political event and wrote a page about it.  Our conversation revolved around a student who had attended, and written a piece about, a talk by David Horowitz, a semi-famous right wing bomb thrower who has written some pretty abhorrent screeds about Muslims, African Americans, and other groups.

Our disagreement centered around whether the student should get the extra credit.  My colleague did not give the student extra credit and explained to him that Horowitz was closer to hate speech than legitimate political dialogue.  She reasoned that our job was to broaden students minds and make them more tolerant of difference, and that Horowitz's message was fundamentally opposed to that goal.  Clearly, she would not give extra credit for someone who attended a Klan rally, and she saw this as closer to that than to legitimate political dialogue.

I agreed with her that Horowitz often trafficked in racism and other unacceptable isms but that the solution was to engage his ideas, not to shut them out.  In my opinion, the modern conservative bluster industry has made far too much hay through claiming to be shut out of certain institutions like academia.  Better to welcome Horowitz's ideas into civilized debate, because they can't survive it.  A good teacher should be able to engage Horowitz's arguments and show, without malice and bias, that they are ridiculous and reprehensible and point students towards more thoughtful arguments that square with a person's conservative leanings (or liberal, or libertarian, or whatever).

My bias is to include.  It's not a fool-proof policy.  Certainly, hatemongers throughout history have preyed on people's inclination to give them space to express views that led to devastating consequences.  But I have faith that people will see the light and gravitate towards good arguments.  Moreover, I think when you don't let trolls get under your skin, their arguments will implode due to sheer ludicrousness, and everyone can have a little chuckle at the implosion.

And that is why I can't get too excited by anything Fox News says, especially not when they blame yoga for making Americans into wusses.

What Racism Looks Like in 2013

You ask what factors predict a person's likelihood of becoming a serial killer.

You run this photo.

And yet the words "white" or "Caucasian" appear nowhere in your article, and the first mention of gender is buried in the second half of the article.

I mean...

Slang Rap Democracy

You don't know what cysage is, although you've certainly cysed a bunch of shit.  Maybe you're thinking about cysing this post.  It might not be a good post, but you like me, so you're going to share it on your wall.  Boom.  Cysage

Nor do you know what a cuban b is, which is really unfortunate, because you've ABSOLUTELY cuban b'd a boatload of stuff.  If I know you, I've probably done some shit to piss you off.  If we're still cool, you've cuban b'd my nonsense.

Both those terms come from Southeast DC.  I only know about them thank to the FiyaStarter Crew, hosts of the funniest podcast on the Internet.  Every Thursday morning, you can wake up and download three hours of unfettered opinion, presented by gentlemen not at all interested in how you think they should sound.  They're doing what groups of guys do every day: busting each others balls in language only they can understand

What's crazy is, these DC motherfuckers have absolutely changed the way I think.  I was reading something the other day that didn't make any sense, and I said, aloud, "man, what a cyse."  I called it a cyse because that's what it was.  It wasn't just bullshit, although it was that.  It wasn't just a pain in my ass, although it was that too.  It was someone writing something that they talked themselves into believing, and all my fellow FS heads are nodding right now, because if that ain't a cyse nothing is.

In other words, a podcast has changed my reality.  That was the squarest example I have yet seen of the Digital Age's direct influence on the deepest workings of my poor little brain.

I guess it surprises me every time I think of someone cysing or cuban b'ing some stuff, because some part of me clings to an antiquated view of the relationship between our physical and digital selves.  Often those of us who spend so much time on the Internet think of our real lives as separate from our online lives.  In my experience, that distinction is artificial.  There's not a whole lot of difference between Bryan Shelly, the entity who moves through the physical world, and the various bshelly logins I use in various corners of the digital world.  Really, the only difference is that bshelly is a little more prone to yelling.

What I find most interesting is, as what has happened with me and cysage, how my digital life influences my "real" life. For a long time I have realized the effects of, say, the choice the web sites one frequents impacts one's view of current events or even their evaluations of public figures.  But this was something different.  This was something akin to learning a word that has no counterpoint in my native language, like, oh, schaudenfreude.  Prior to learning the German word, I guess I could have imagined the concept, but the word itself distilled the concept to its essence and allowed it to be more fully integrated into my life.

Potential for good here?  As KBadd would say, "SURE!"  I find it kind of heartening that three regular dudes from DC can bring me into their world enough to change mine.  Maybe the loftiest dreams of the Internet as a place where people, rather than massive corporate entities, control the majority of the content are long dead, but my experience with Fiyastarter shows that normal people can reach out across time and space to shape other people's concepts of reality.

Everything and Nothing That You Were

Yesterday, as part of its year in review, the New York Times ran a memoriam for Beastie Boy Adam Yauch that didn't sit well with me. Specifically, it maintained that MCA was never down with the Licensed To Ill-era frivolity:

"“Fight for Your Right” created expectations; the Beasties met those expectations by touring with cage dancers and a giant inflatable penis and hosing one another down with Budweiser onstage. But they weren’t those guys, not really....Even in “Licensed to Ill”-era interviews, you can see the Beasties already growing weary of playing the roles they’d assigned themselves."

This, frankly, is a load of shit. Yauch himself, in a quote the author includes, noted that he was more than willing to play along with the shenanigans: “I went and got drunk and made some stupid music.”

I have a problem with any attempt to scrub a person's record after they die. To do it after a Buddhist dies seems especially disrespectful and clueless.

Look, MCA was an asshole. He was a guy who gleefully made a lot of money putting women in cages on a stage.

And then he changed.

When we pretend, "oh, he was always this saintly person, they didn't REALLY mean all the bad shit they did," all we do is miss the fundamental lesson: Adam Yauch was an asshole. In my life, I have certainly been an asshole. If you haven’t been an asshole, you’ve been something else that you’re not proud of.

You know who else was things he wasn’t proud of? The Buddha. I prefer not to get into the Buddha’s previous lives stuff, but even if you accept that he was the end result of a lot of lives dedicated towards awakening, at the beginning of that chain of lives, the Buddha was not special. He was not a saint. He was as far from perfect as the rest of us. At some point in his chain of lives, the Buddha was an average guy.

And then he changed.

He got better. He found calm, and he knew that if he, vile sinner though he might be, could find enlightenment, anyone can.

When we make people we admire into saints, we rob them of their humanity, and we lose the most critical message of their lives, which is that anyone can be a hero. Anyone can wake up. It doesn’t take someone special. It doesn’t take a saint. It takes you, and you can do it right now. No matter what you or I have done, an end of our suffering is available to us. It is our birthright, it is our destiny, and we can have it right now, in this moment.

Happy New Years.