On Having Too Much to Do and Advanced Poses

As always, I have too much to do. Everyone does.

Having repeatedly failed to establish a practice in the house, I had planned to move to the Y (at the north end of town, same as last fall/winter/spring) and just set up the ritual early.

This of course did not happen (yet). There were days off daycare (and with no daycare run, said Y yoga is a waste of gasoline) and then there’s a grandparental visit going on and that requires management of vehicles and which car is where when, and who has a carseat and who’s doing pickups and at what time, and all of that alongside who teaches when and has to do what research and then suddenly time and space simply don’t permit any yoga time.

So be it. You do, or you do not.

I still have an article to compose and no time in which to do it. I get two practices a week if I’m lucky, both at the studio, and so the yoga is also getting shortened, and the kid is often at daycare for an 8 hour shift. HOW can this be done? There’s no time for anyone anywhere and everything is virtually overwhelming. It’s like the new semester beginning, and you find that you must undertake what seems like an inconceivable amount of compression and productivity in order to move from summer to fall. It’s a seasonal change, what Jim Bennitt, who was here two weeks ago, called a vata time (seasonal changes are vata apparently).

To paraphrase Ayurvedically, said flightiness requires more fire (determination) and more earth (groundedness). Precisely, if metaphorically. So be it.

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Less than a week ago I did my “Intro to Ashtanga” workshop for the studio. I opened with a pose demonstration, modeled on and inspired by the ones that Kino does on her tour this year (I think of travelling yoga teachers as something akin to a Grateful Dead tour; you get groupies and discussion and “trading of sets” as it were, with all the videos that get bandied about).

Said pose demo had a pack of advanced poses in it, many of which look pretty in the photos which I arranged to be taken. But I’m not totally settled on this photography. Let’s take a climbing detour in order to explain this ambiguity.

I used to set routes, when I had time. I like the combination of mental puzzle and physical movement, and so I set pretty hip-swingy technical-movement-oriented routes, which if I’m not there to give the “beta” (to hint to people what to do), are VERY hard routes to climb. Without my regular presence, people found these too hard, too challenging, and eventually frustrating, and then my “ratings” began to sink, largely because I was not there to teach. It’s like taking a course that is very challenging and having the professor point you only to online lectures, without either translating the content or being around for questions and consultation.

Exactly like that. I was not there to consult, so people had to take their not-as-technical experience and confront my maze, and only Theseus was going to make it out alive.

So that ended.

A photo cannot teach you; it might inspire or it might frustrate, but it cannot communicate, and that’s largely why I’m allergic to photography. I’m allergic to YouTube “teaching videos” for the same reason. A practitioner can only teach his or her own body, in a video, because the listeners are not REALLY THERE. If you’re listening and your body simply WILL NOT DO what you see, then you’re stuck, because the “teacher” is literally talking to him/herself. It takes some SERIOUS skill to be able to teach through a video (Kino has skill in this department).

So people have commented on said photos, mostly in the “wow, yikes, eek” vein, which is fine, but I notice that I want said photos to communicate, and they don’t. I do like seeing what the inner experience looks like (how it manifests, if you will) but that’s all for my own research, and I also like that the human spectators IN THAT MOMENT were able to have something that spectators of the photos were not.

How can one address the fact that an advanced pose in a photo is probably more offputting, more terrifying, than it is instructive and inspiring? How does one resolve the “Yoga Journal paradox”?