Left Hand Path

Meditation and Metal, Part Deux

There's only so much yoga I can take.  And by that I mean, I have only a limited tolerance for the endless hippie spirituality that often accompanies the yogic experience in the States.  In India, it's both better and worse.  Worse because it's more prevalent, but better because it draws from local religious tradition, specifically Hinduism, and therefore feels more authentic.  Still, as I discussed in a previous blog, yoga does not have to be religious.  When I first heard this -- and that realization alone made the yoga course worthwhile -- I was quite relieved because I love yoga but have no interest in religion.

Unfortunately, the fact that yoga can be employed to purely secular ends sometimes get lost, particuarly in a class taught by a lesser teacher.  Part of the curriculum is an "Application of Yoga" class which quickly proved to be my least favorite.  The teacher, who is a very fine person, is so filled with faith for yoga therapy that unfortunately he cannot be objective about it, and as a result his class has very little substance.  This sharply contrasts with the Yoga Philosophy teacher, who is also religious but presents the material in a nuanced, intellectual way that allows for multiple interpretations, including the notion that yogic philosophy can be a secular healing tool used to quiet the mind and diminish and/or eliminate human suffering.  I went for a consultation at the Mandiram in order to begin a pranayama practice (pranayama is controlled breathing and is considered the natural evolution from an asana practice).  Pranayama fascinates me but I know very little about it and I've only studied it sporadically. As fate would have it, I was assigned the Application of Yoga teacher for the follow-up session and despite my eagerness to develop a pranayama practice, it didn't take much contemplation before I decided to cancel.  (I took it as a sign that neither the asana nor the pranayama at KYM is for me, although I've enjoyed the yogic philosophy greatly.)

In the last two weeks, the Application of Yoga teacher has subjected us to a parade of case studies in which he has claimed that yoga therapy has cured diabetes, Parkinson's, asthma, bipolar disorder, high blood pressure, allergies, depression, you name it.  The intense faith of his students/ patients matches his own, and what could have been an informative exploration of yoga therapy has instead morphed into an exercise in proselytization.  There are only so many ways to deliver the same message and the class has become a drone.  The patients have without exception been very kind and pleasant people but I feel the religious angle is being shoved down our throats and today I slowly got angry during class and I briefly considered leaving the room when it dragged over schedule.  The class has become excruciating and it has nothing to do with what I want from yoga.

Fortunately, last night we once again heard from Desikachar's son, who told us that yoga therapy does not cure disease but rather changes the person's experience of the disease.  If a person's experience of the disease improves, the disease itself may also improve.  This is a mind-centered approach, not a disease-centered approach.  Desikachar himself in last Saturday's lecture once again emphasized the point that yoga is a healing practice, not a spiritual practice (although he later qualified this somewhat to say that yoga is not necessarily a spiritual practice).

Ultimately, I predict that this lesson of tolerance will the aspect of the Krishnamacharya Mandiram that will stick with me.  As you may have gleaned from the previous blog and guest blogger, I can't stand the warm and fuzzy meditation class.  This is not because I think it's a bad class or that I think the instructor doesn't know what she's doing because I think she does and I also think she's an exceptional person.  But the "let's draw love and peace into our hearts" approach does not work for me at all and I'm done with trying.  I'm sick of it and after nearly four weeks it's really starting to piss me off.

Today in meditation class she told us to close our eyes and visualize something that makes us happy and focus on that image.  I've discovered that visualization doesn't work for me on a basic, elemental level because I'm better at focusing on sound rather than images (this may be why I like the Vedic Chanting class, but I'm getting sick of that shit, too, it's burning grooves into my brain and I can't get those damn chants out of my head).  But I solved this problem by focusing on a song and running it through my head.  Specifically, I meditated on "Concubine" by Converge from the metalcore masterpiece Jane Doe.  It's an explosive burst of rage and aggression that moves through multiple tempo shifts and hyperspeed riffing and blast beat drumming in under two minutes.  It's heavy as fuck and it makes me very happy.  I had trouble summoning the bridge that leads into the fiery opening vocal but aside from that, it was easily the best meditation experience I've ever had.  The sounds morphed into shapes in my head but the images were secondary to the sounds that created them.  Unfortunately, after a few minutes of silence in which I was free to soak up and focus on the hate and anger internally, the meditation teacher fucked it up by chanting in Sanskrit and punching a hole in my concentration (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I should think of her chanting as just another distraction that I need to put aside to be able to meditate, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, blah, blah, blah, fuck you).  I still managed to keep my mental thread going on but the competing (external) sound dampened the experience.  Still, when I opened my eyes at the end of class, I actually felt pretty chill.  Not a bad start.

Circle of Love/ Circle of Shit

Hey there, folks.  The following was written by my "friend" who will be known only as "A" and it's about an unusually harrowing meditation class.  Dante's 7th layer of hell, to be exact.  Some of the names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent.

...........

"Josh does not like the meditation class.  Why?  Because the sweet, grandmotherly teacher, Padmini, has us doing "homogay" (Josh's term) gestures and cultivating feelings of friendliness.  At the beginning of class she asks questions like, "Who likes flowers?"  I rather enjoy the meditation class because I am a hippie.  Josh's raging discomfort is an added bonus.  You too would derive endless pleasure from seeing him drawing the light of the sun into his heart with a gentle sweep of the arms.

Friday's class was Josh's nightmare realized. 

The class started out only moderately saccharine.  We were to choose and meditate on the image of a person (puppy or tree) which would inspire feelings of compassion within.  We did a few other practices and then something out of the ordinary occured. When the teacher asked us to sit in a circle I knew what was coming.  When she asked the class to hold hands, Josh became very still as though he was harnessing his energy for a rapid escape.  But it was already too late.  He had a hippie on his right (me) and (here's the best part) "Dominick" on his left ("Dominick" is "that guy", he fancies himself a smooth yogic operator, moderately enlightened and an all around pleasure to know.  I once shared a rickshaw with him and he told me in about ten different ways how desirable and modest he was).  Josh held Dominick's hand for at least three minutes.  Dominick was in rare form sporting a shimmery blue/purple faux-silk button-down.  When the hand holding was finished we had to go around and express appreciation (ie hug) other group members.  I whispered to my friend Anna to go hug him to freak him out, but alas, there wasn't enough time.  Josh stood like a pillar and mostly avoided being hugged.

Josh now calls the Circle of Love, "His Own Personal Hell" and has promised to start skipping the class if anything like it ever happens again.  I can only hope that we will do it all again on the last day at which time Dominick will most certainly cry tears of joy and gratitude."

God Luck And Good Speed

Here at the yoga studio, I generally arrive early for the morning asana practice so I have some time to relax before we begin.  Recently I've been bringing my iPod along and cranking up some vicious sludge metal while people slowly trickle in and do their pre-class warm-ups.  I quickly earned a reputation as the resident metalhead, probably due to the Buried At Sea and Weedeater "God Luck And Good Speed" and Birthday Party (the latter of course isn't metal but yogis wouldn't know the difference) t-shirts I wear on a regular basis.

All of our teachers our Indian, including the man who teaches Application of Yoga, which endeavors to illustrate in the most concrete terms how yoga can cure mental and physical disease.  It sometimes crosses a line into the evangelical.  Our teacher eventually revealed that yoga cured him of severe asthma, so he's a true believer, and this past week class was populated by case studies of people claiming that yoga alleviated and/or cured high blood pressure, diabetes, depression and low back pain, amongst other maladies. One day he was lecturing us on the dangers of "excessive indulgences" (I forget the Sanskrit word for it) and then rather bizarrely mentioned what he called "hard metal" and made this awkward downward pounding motion with one of his arms, like he was smashing his way through a moshpit stomp or something.  A full third of the class turned around and looked at me.  I can't blame them, I think it's pretty clear that I'm a poster boy for the detrimental effects of longterm exposure to doom metal on the male psyche.

I proudly walked into the ultra-posh Park Sheraton the other day wearing the aforementioned "God Luck and Good Speed" t-shirt.  For those of you who have yet to enjoy the bliss that is Weedeater live, frontman Dixie Dave has one of the most fevered stage presences I've ever witnessed.  Walking around the club before the set you can observe the off-kilter energy in his movement, he can't sit still, he always has a leg or a foot dancing around pounding to the beat of his invisible drummer and when he's in motion during an instrumental bit of a song he does this jig that looks like a schizophrenic homeless man dancing for quarters on a street corner to pay for his next dose of Haldol.  He has a bad habit of puking up Jack Daniels during the set because of the way he screams from the back of his throat.  And the music is heavy and sludgy as fuck.  So it felt good to spread that vibe around a high-end hotel, where I must add I ate beef -- to be exact, a hamburger -- for the first time since I arrived in India on January 7.

Meditation is of course a popular topic amongst the yoga students.  I had a conversation the other day with another yogi about the music we listen to while we practice.  I told her that I prefer songs that are long and heavy and slow and even in tempo and that language distracts me.  She responded that she also preferred instrumental music, and I clarified by telling her that it was language that bothered me, not vocals and that I preferred music where you couldn't make out the words because the screaming was so intense.  This is absolutely true, my favorite yoga soundtrack at the moment is Rosetta's "Wake/Lift" and I'm lucky if I make out a word or two per song due to all the larynx-shredding.

To their credit, as bizarre as this may seem to the other students, no one seems to judge me for my eccentricities, there's a remarkable lack of ego in the program -- a welcome break from the Ashtanga scene -- and people know that I love yoga, even though I listen to metal and I'm a (unemployed) lawyer and can't sit still during meditation class.  I'm a fidgeter by nature and on top of that, we don't have proper chairs to sit in so we've spent the last 3 weeks propped up on cushions and yoga mats.

I've noticed a similar policy of tolerance from our teachers.  I have never earned a reproachful stare for my restlessness during meditation or my off-key "singing" during Vedic Chanting.  I'm surprised by how much I like Vedic Chanting, it's very soothing and when you find your rhythm it's quite captivating.  I've been doing my best to irritate my friends before and after class, as usual. My "friend", who I shall refer to as "A", is American and familiar with South Park, and in a moment of divine inspiration I launched into my Eric Cartman vocal imitation while doing Vedic Chanting (If you haven't heard me imitating Cartman singing "Come Sail Away", it's highly recommended, same goes for Asia's "Heat of the Moment").  She gets red in the face when I do this and has to fight back laughter, so naturally I enjoy breaking her concentration at the most inappropriate moments.  At one point her group kept stumbling over a particuarly tricky Sanskrit word and during a lull I leaned over and recited the line nigh perfectly in Cartmanspeak, a beautiful thing.  While I'm doing Cartmanesque Vedic Chanting, I like to add in at the end of a line "Hey you guys, seriously" or "I hate you guys".  It's fortunate I have about 40 SP episodes ripped to my Video iPod or I would be in serious withdrawal by now.

One more week to go!  The time has gone by very quickly here in Chennai.  Next Saturday I'm off to Shanghai!

Yoga Is Not A Religion

Every Saturday morning at 8:15 a.m. at the yoga studio in Chennai, we are invited to attend a 45 minute lecture delivered by TKV Desikachar, the founder of the studio and son of Krishnamacharya, who is basically the father of modern yoga. Krishnamarcharya is credited with inventing the physical practice of yoga that is the model for how asana is taught in Western yoga studios.  He died in 1989 at the age of 101.  His son Desikachar founded the Krishnamarcharya Yoga Mandiram, where I am taking a month long course.  The course is highly theoretical while at the same time very practical.

Last Saturday was my first opportunity to attend one of Desikachar's lectures, and the topic was meditation.  His approach was very utilitarian.  He basically said that meditation -- particularly for the beginner -- must be adapted to the individual and it is essential to find what works for that individual.  Everyone is different, and yogic teaching should reflect this (the school often emphasizes one-on-one teaching, for this reason).  Which I took as an endorsement of doom metal as a vehicle for meditation.  Whatever works.

Last night Desikachar's son spoke on the topic of "Is Yoga Religious?"  The answer surprised me-- not only did he conclude that Yoga is not a religion, he stated quite emphatically that yogic philosophy has nothing to do with Hinduism.  By yogic philosophy, he is referring to the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, the seminal yogic text (I'm not sure how the Bhagavad Gita figures into this debate).  He distinguised Yoga from Vedanta, the latter which is a religion that came into being around the same time as yoga.

These conclusions floored me, because they explained why I've responded to emphatically to yoga but have no interest in the appurtenant hippie spiritual stuff that tends to surround the practice of yoga.  I have no interest in becoming a swami or practicing in front of a statute of Ganesh.  But because yoga has nothing to do with Hinduism, it has nothing to do with Ganesh or religion or vegetarianism (I now have the perfect answer to all the annoying questions I've gotten over the years about how I can practice yoga and continue to eat meat).

The lecture was rapid fire and quite detailed.  He told us that yoga was devised as a means to relieve suffering (duhkham).  Yogic philosophy states that the reason we suffer is because our mind incorrectly perceives things.  Clarity of mind results in better decisions and less suffering.  (In contrast, Vedanta says that we are not happy because we do not understand God.)  Yoga concerns the human mind.  Patañjali discusses ways that we can discipline our mind.  One method is meditating on something called Isvarah (īśvaraḥ). Patañjali defines Isvarah as someone who is not affected by 'klesas' (that which hurts).  Normally, some knowledge creates a desire, which leads to an action and then a consequence, and ultimately a feeling remains, i.e., the feeling that we have about the consequences of our desire.  For instance, I heard about a band I might like, I went to the concert and I loved it, and when I think about that concert, I am happy.  If the desire originated from Viveka, a mind filled with clarity, the action and the consequence are fine.  But usually knowledge comes from the klesas and we will suffer as a result.

Isvarah is someone who is not affected by klesas.  Isvarah is also defined as the source or seed of all knowledge.  Isvarah is not bound by time and is a teacher for all generations.  Patañjali presents Isvarah as something connected with knowledge.  The first reason why Vedanta rejects Isvarah as God is because is God is a creator, whereas Patañjali only describes Isvarah as the source of knowledge. 

According to the Sutras, yoga is meant to remove life's obstacles.  You will find yourself and remove life's obstacles with yoga.  Isvarah is something that gives us light-- light represents clarity.  This light is consciousness, it is internal, not external.  If our mind is agitated, we connect with the gross and not the subtle aspects of existence.  Meditation is a means to quiet the mind.  By meditating, the qualities of the focus of the meditation (for instance, the sun) will be transferred to the meditator.  The wisdom or clarity that results from meditation is not intellectual knowledge but is something deeper, a more experiental knowledge or wisdom.

Isvarah is something that we meditate on as a model, a manifest form of knowledge that we can link with.  Isvarah is a tool that we can use to make our minds clear.  Yoga/asana and pranayama are called "practices" for this reason.  Once our mind is calm, Isvarah is in a way disposable. 

Perhaps most germane to the debate of "Is Yoga Religious?" is the fact that Patañjali presents Isvarah as a choice.  Patañjali never presents Isvarah as the Creator or suggests that the goal of yoga is to become Isvarah.  This is interesting because a quick google search revealed that not only is Isvarah often translated as God, lots of sites on the web (including Wikipedia) state that yoga originated from Hinduism.  Desikachar's son told us that this confusion probably results from the fact that many yoga masters were also practicing Hindus, but he likened this to a math professor who happens to be Christian.  Yogis are not monks or swamis, that's Vedanta philosophy.

So there you have it-- Yoga is not a religion.

Chennai

I arrived a week ago yesterday in Chennai and it's been a bit of a whirlwind ever since.  One of the reasons I chose to start my India adventure in Goa is that it's "India lite", very Westernized and not so extreme in the ways that India can be extreme, such as congestion, pollution, heat and traffic.  Chennai, however, while not the most extreme of Indian cities, is definitely not India lite.  The traffic is the worst I've ever seen, with the possible exception of the day-and-a-half I spent in Bangalore a couple of years ago.  Utter chaos, constant honking, every inch of street crammed with cars and scooters and taxis and rikshaws during rushhour.

I arrived on a Saturday night and the normally twenty minute trip to my apartment took well over an hour.  I don't take out my iPod in public-- it attracts the wrong kind of attention-- but it got dark and I couldn't read in the cab and traffic was 100% deadlocked so I capitulated and cranked up some Rosetta, screamingly heavy epic rock-metal, and halfway through the ten minute song the traffic still hadn't budged an inch.  Bent over the digital iPod display and mesmerized by the heavy tunes, I made the mistake of looking up and briefly meeting the gaze of a ragged woman beggar who was making her way between the deadlocked vehicles.  Immediately she moved directly in front of my passenger side window and started banging on the door and holding her hand out for money.  I remembered the old "woman with baby" begging trick from Goa and to my semi-horror she very dramatically raised up a tiny child she had in her arms to feed it some milk and the baby obligingly started crying.  I wish I could say that the image moved me in some way, but instead I wanted to lock the door and roll up a non-existent shade so I could block the whole thing out of my mind.  You get numb to this sort of poverty and need after a while or you go a bit mental.

Sunday I met up with a friend-of-a-friend who's also in the program, "A", who is in India for the first time and was well into the throes of culture shock, an inevitable process for a Westerner.  We went to orientation Sunday night and met the people in the program.  It's mostly an older crowd, predominantly women, with a bunch of Americans but also people from Italy, the U.K., Ireland, Singapore, Brazil, Australia and even... India!  (Which is odd, since it's a program for international students, but maybe he counts as a foreigner because he lives in Austin, Texas.)  Monday morning began with a brief asana practice, which for me proved to be less than satisfying, as the program is geared towards yoga therapy and it's a far cry from the vigourous asana practice to which I am accustomed.  Also, the program is way more theoretical than I realized, but my English major theory nerd side has taken over and I'm digging the classes.  Surprisingly, I love the Vedic Chanting class, there's something very soothing and hypnotic about chanting Sanskrit.  Another notch in my hippie belt.

As usual, the food is a problem and I will occasionally just throw up my hands and get full-on pissed off about the fact that the South Indian diet is so heavy on vegetables and carbs and is way on the other side of the spectrum from my usual protein heavy diet.  But I've hunted down some more Western style places and I'm pleased to report that this morning I had a cheese omelette AND a chicken sandwich and like 3 cups of coffee and everything is right with the world!