Yoga Book Reports: The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga by Bernie Clark

I've done and loved a lot of yin yoga (thanks Andrea!), but before reading The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga by Bernie Clark, I never really understood why yin is so important or how it benefits the body.  Perhaps my biggest misconception was the yin yoga was meant to be restorative.  Clark popped that balloon by page 2.  Yin is meant to stress ligaments, facia, and other tissue that yang practices (think the typical vinyasa class, ashtanga series, etc.) usually can't get at.

"Stress" is a big word to Clark.  He writes that all tissue, not just muscle, needs some amount of stress to grow strong.  The trick is that the stress one puts on ligaments, face and other yin-targeted tissue has to be even more careful than that placed on muscles in even the most deliberate practice.  One simply can't "go for it" to get deeper into a pose that targets a knee ligament and expect anything but disaster.  Type As need to lose their expectations.

As I have made the space in my life to reintegrate yin yoga into my practice, I've reflected on the relationship between restorative and yin.  One can certainly do a yin class as restorative yoga, or one can pursue the gentle stress that Clark describes as the heart of yin.  However, given the sensitivity of the tissue yin stresses, the relationship can't be either/or.  One has to take a relaxed, inquisitive, careful approach, and Clark himself subscribes to the "if it feels good, you're doing it right" motto.

Either way, highly recommended read.

In Defense of Duck Dynasty Dude (Sort Of)

Unless you think all speech against homosexuality is hate speech, there is nothing hateful about what dude said.  Read for yourself.  Robertson doesn't couple the standard insane comparisons to bestiality with language calling for a jihad against homosexuals.  He's just a dude stating what he "knows" to be true.

I completely understand why people who agree with Robertson would be very, very upset that he is being punished.  American pop culture has just made it crystal clear that they only want to see rural whites at their most buffoonish.  Yes to an offensive caricature of rural life.  Yes to dudes out in the wilderness taking all kinds of stupid risks.  Yes to words with two syllables or less.

Sharing an opinion that challenges the dominant narrative?  Shut the fuck up, redneck.  We don't pay you to think or to have opinions.  We pay you to be a stereotype that makes the dominant class say, wow, my life could be worse, I could be those guys.

Now get back to cooning.

Moving With Intention

Ran Prieur linked to a comment the other day on the myriad of ways we distract ourselves from the present.  For the comment author, productivity was his distraction.

"I have a strong dislike against "wasting time." I don't like myself when I spend time on nonsense. And so I fill all of my day with "constructive things." My walk to work is filled with podcasts, the time waiting for the food to bake filled with news articles. While eating I entertain myself with shows or Ted talks or whatnot."

My distraction of choice is not so high-minded.  I like to mess around on the Internet.  I can't even be bothered to read a quarter of the articles I skim.  I tweet and post to message boards without taking any time to consider what I am reacting to or formulating my own arguments.  I flit from thing to thing without fully engaging in any of it.  I am fully present for none of it, and the comment made me think that this pattern of behavior compromises my happiness.

My new intention is to move with purpose through both the "real" and virtual world.  I am not at a place where I could fully unplug, nor do I want to.  What I can do is to try to make sure I am fully present for everything I do in front of a computer.  If I am writing a blog post, I need to concentrate on that blog post, and not rush over to Twitter or Okayplayer or wherever.  No.  Be with the blog post.  Be fully with the blog post.

And, yeah, for those moments where I can't even remember why the computer is open, I'm going to try to close it.

Letting Go

To let one's self go to the currents of the world is the path to liberation.  To stop trying to force the world to be what one wants it to be and to surf on what actually is can free us all.

And for a recovering overachiever at Step One, it is completely terrifying.

Yoga Is Yoga Is Not Something Else

Maybe you've seen them: the fawning profile of your favorite yogalebrity that grinds to a halt when the author asks said yogalebrity how her personal practice is surviving the rigors of traveling and teaching and such.  The yogalebrity gets very, very wistful and admits the days where she puts in two hours of asana practice per day are over, but she assures us we need not worry for her.  You see, she's found a NEW way to do yoga.  Now, her teaching is her yoga.  Her community service is her yoga.  Her photo shoot to convince you to buy an eco-friendly mat and send your current mat to the landfill is her yoga.

It's all nonsense, of course.

Yoga is yoga is ONLY yoga.  The only problem with that obvious statement is that it, too, is all nonsense.  Yoga is made up of eight limbs, so to do say one "does yoga" is completely devoid of meaning.  One might say that she practiced pranayama or asana or observed the yamas and the niyamas, but those phrases are aggregations as well.  To say one "did" any of them is completely empty.  The only thing you can practice is an individual thing, not a category.  You can't even do downward dog.  You can do THIS downward dog.  The one you do in the moment.  The one in the now.  Your next downward dog will be something completely different that is united with the previous downward dog mostly by linguistic convention, not reality.

Yoga bleaching is real, and the worst form of yoga bleaching might be when one tries to substitute something else for an element of yoga.  The practice of individual asanas confer a set of benefits that, by definition, can come only from the practice of asana.  Meditation, and nothing else, confers the benefits of meditation.  A thing is a thing, and nothing else is that thing.

Feel for the yogalebrity.  She knows she is not practicing asana as she once did, and she misses it.  Her attachments have gotten her all twisted up, and the tragedy is that she need not be.  She has made her choice, and her choice is just fine.  Other things are worth doing!  Other things, like teaching and traveling and making enough money to not live in a van down by the river, offer their own rewards.  If a mature adult weighs the rewards associated with an activity that necessitates she lessen her asana practice and finds that they outweight the costs, we should celebrate such enlightened decision making.  Many paths to the top of the mountain and all, but lying to one's self about what one is and is not doing is a sure way to steer directly into oncoming traffic.

The Fifth Element

"Spirit?  Oh well, it's dazzlingly obvious then.  The spirit's role's always unpredictable, you know that.  It exists to galvanize and revitalize the elements around it.  Here's a boy whose hatred of authority is such that he even rebels against us.  I think he's here to test you to your limits, Gideon, that's what I think.  He's here to shake you to the core."  Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

Building a Better Echo Chamber

So a historian wrote a book on Jesus.  Fox News invited him on.  Said historian pwned said Newscorp.

I try not to write about politics anymore, but I'd like to think the Aslan/Green exchange is about something bigger than partisan politics and represents a victory for anyone who thinks of themselves as one of the good guys.

Contemporary society has become so postmodern that it is skeptical of the very idea of expertise.  When we hear an expert speaking on something, we think they're just one more salesman pushing one more product.  Salesmen have facts and figures too, yet they always seem to omit those facts that don't support their desired end.  Understandably, we've all gotten pretty cynical when someone claims to be presenting just the facts, ma'am.

What makes this three minute video so fascinating and important is that Aslan strongly asserts that we need to get over all that shit.  This is the most vigorous, concise statement I've yet seen of what I'll call The Nate Silver Lesson.  Remember when conservatives thought Nate Silver was not a witch but merely a partisan hack?  How did that work out for them?

Experts exist.  Plenty of very smart people spend their entire lives pouring through hundreds of thousands of pages of Ancient Greek, developing ridiculously complex statistical models, and doing a million other really cool things.  The best part: they do so not to get over, but because they want to do the best possible job capturing reality, in all its complexity and messiness.  They constantly ask themselves whether their biases could be compromising their ability to accurately depict reality, and they take steps to compensate for those biases.  A worldwide community vets their work, and the vast majority of its members share the same commitment to presenting the world as accurately as possible.  The resulting product that they put out is measurably more accurate than the ranting of some person who's on TV because s/he is entertaining or looks like what we think an expert should look like.

If the notion of expert seems less than robust these days, it may be due less to the failings of the experts themselves and more to the inability of society to distinguish real experts from people who can act the part and still say what the audience wants to hear, rather than the truth.