Body as Artist; Life as Art

Asana classes are fun ways to move, stretch, breathe, relax and they make you feel good about taking care of yourself.  We come in for our weekly, or twice weekly sessions, restore ourselves in an hour and half, and leave with a bit more knowledge of where we are, how we work, and what is going on inside our bodies and minds.  We continue through our week, our work, our stresses and our forgetting about our bodies and everything we store in them, and start all over again the next time we make it up to the studio or, for some, onto our mats at home.

For this reason, asana is important: it helps us remember our bodies, and helps us calm our minds, and all this makes us more productive and happier people. 

There is more to do in asana, though, then just have someone lead you through an experience of your body.  Asana is part of a larger process that in Indian philosophy is a spiritual pursuit leading to elevated states of consciousness.  Whilst I practice meditation and am quite enamoured with the pursuit of elevated states of consciousness (and Indian philosophy), I cannot say that I personally practice asana for the sake of Self-realization.

When I practice, though, I do it to learn.  When I have the opportunity to take classes, I am brought through a range of experiences of my body; when I have a chance to take a workshop, I have the opportunity to understand and name the experiences I am having.  When I take a flow class, my muscles open, my breath changes, I observe my thoughts, and I discover new feelings of strength and release.  When I take a workshop, I am given the time to pause and understand and move into these experiences more deeply, allowing new levels of insight into my own thoughts and feeling, accessing deeper tensions that might be the cause of more superficial aches and working away at older and more powerful inhibitions.  At the same time, with a knowledgeable teacher, I am given a vocabulary that teaches me how to understand the range the experiences I am having in my body and mind, and most importantly, what I am doing to create them and what I can do to release them.  As I say to my trainees, a powerful asana practice is not about doing certain things with your body, it is about learning how to use your body in specific ways, making it a medium that you have control over and can create with.

It’s like learning how to paint.  To make a painting, I could take a handful of paint and rub it onto a canvas and call it a symbolic representation of an object or feeling; but to actually make a picture look how I want it to look, I need to learn a few things about my medium.  Learning how to identify different parts of the body by feel, is like learning to separate out colours and organize our brushes; learning how to use different muscle groups and create certain movements and alignment on command, is like knowing how each brush works to create different effects and how each colour will sit on the canvas.  To have focus and presence of mind, an ability to isolate and combine movements, is like knowing how to mix and apply paint with care and precision to make a picture.  By learning how to breathe in a pose and generate a receptive, inquisitive, meditative mindset, it is like taking a step back from the canvas to see what we are making, what to fix and where we harmonize. 

As she practices, an artist become more adept at manipulating her medium, becoming able not only to depict her vision with accuracy, but also communicate with more depth of feeling.  As a yogi becomes adept at asana, she learns to work with her body at increasing levels of subtlety and precision, starting with arms and legs and moving into the infinite recessions of the core, the subtle power of the breath, sculpting with emotions to generate positive behaviour and relationships.  In yoga, we are learning to depict our vision and our values with accuracy through our movements, getting to know our medium and learning how to use it.   We all struggle with the conflict of having something to say and not knowing how to say it, of believing in certain definitions of good and discovering how difficult it is can be to act in accordance with what we believe.  The practice of yoga, beginning with asana and the body, and deepening into pranayama, meditation and the mind, is learning how to use your body (including your mind) as your medium, sculpting and crafting the moments of your life accurately to your intentions and vision.

Photos of Aziza Kids

 

Aziza Christmas party, Grey Building in background, on Dey Krahom.	outside Aziza schoolroom, November 2008
inside Aziza classroom: Dr Annie's basic medical care course, attended by, among others, our teacher trainees. December 2008	Post-eviction, Day 4.    Grey building on Right; formerly Dey Krahom on Left.
in front of Aziza School now.	through the Grey Building to yoga
	not happy
getting happier	no flies, no tractors, a little peace and quiet
crawling through a tunnel of downdogs... you can imagine the pile of kids that resulted.	group critiques to follow individual feedback sessions
small, maybe, but she knows her colour theory.	they've mastered the arts and crafts, and are determined to conquer the rope wall.
it's not quite realism, it's not quite expressionism....	15 to a tuktuk

Chances to Practice

The new years—2009 and the Year of the Ox—are here; they have been seen in with celebration, drums, parties, firecrackers, and also bulldozers, tear-gas, and some profound opportunities for practice.

I would like to tell you a story about four NataRaj Yoga teacher trainees . This story begins in an empty schoolroom on the bottom floor of the Van Molyvann Grey Buildings, on the warm side of a corrugated iron fence dividing demolition workers and detritus from the living efforts of a community whose homes have been razed to the ground by bulldozers and small men. Our trainees have been working with the Dey Krahom community and Aziza school for the past three months as part of our studio’s outreach program, and as part of their own teacher training; one of our trainees spent a few years of her own life there; another grew up in a local community not far away, a community that had been forced out of the city two years prior.

And this story begins with another story, the one I told my trainees contextualizing the events that were unrolling on the cold side of the fence.

I told the yogis about a group of people who wanted the land of Dey Krahom because they wanted to make money off it, and they wanted money so badly that they forgot that human beings and families and communities also have value. They tried to bargain for the land with small sums of money and inadequate housing alternatives; and some people took what they were told to take, but 150 families thought the deal was unfair, and so they stayed. That created a conflict.

In a functional society there are laws that most people agree to follow because of a common allegiance to certain social values such as equality or order; and conflicts are resolved not on the basis of upholding one or another person’s personal ambitions, but on upholding those overarching interests. I wished I could tell my yogis that although this “development” of Dey Krahom seemed destructive at first glance, there were larger movements taking place that made it right, and we just had to see things from a broader perspective like when you practice a difficult pose for the sake of learning something new—the immediate experience may be uncomfortable, but there is more to be gained by opening to it than there is by indulging what is easiest.

But, of course, forced evictions, demolition of people’s homes and lives, unfair compensation, intimidation and theft are not done in the name of shared values; they show no respect for law, human life, or the institutions that keep a society coherent; there was no justice taking place at any level of subtlety on the cold side of that fence. Cities evolve, Phnom Penh has been undergoing massive changes in the last couple years, and such changes are never without disruption; shifting an entire community, especially one with so few options to begin with, would invariably be upsetting, but it didn’t need to be violent.

The trainees and I discussed three possible ways the developers could have resolved such a conflict: they could have offer fair compensation, but they had refused to participate if it meant giving something of themselves for the sake of someone else. They could have curbed their own covetous desires in deference to higher principles like the value of human life, but, as most Cambodians know from experience, small men with big pockets in this part of the world are not in the habit of holding back.

Instead, they exercised a third form of power, the I’m-bigger-than-you form of power, the I’m-bigger-than-the-law form of power; and, sadly, they get away with it. Developers in bed with the government have demolished other communities before Dey Krahom; they will continue to take what they want when they want it, and the institutions that run Cambodia will consistently fail to uphold a social conscience, instead aligning themselves with the interests of the wealthy few. Power in this country means you don’t have to care; powerlessness is being forced to care and unable to do anything about it.

And so like the families that had been displaced, like the victims of so many other government initiatives, we sat in silence, baffled by the next step, me feeling vaguely guilty about dropping such a sandbag onto my students without the mechanisms to lift it off again. The questions lurked like the stench of upturned sewage: where does this leave us? What are we doing here?

And, of course, unlike the families and many others, we had some options: we could go home and have a shower and move on with our lives; or, we could go back to the yoga studio and practice; we could send good energy to the land; or breathe in the bad and breathe out the good.... A yogi keeps a whole bag of tricks for such occasions, ways of dispelling the sense of powerlessness in the face of circumstances that cannot be changed.

And so we looked at the tricks we’ve been learning in the studio. We remembered discussions about asana practice as a way of looking at your own limitations, not turning away when you come to a difficult pose, and the techniques we draw on to sustain our strength and clarity; then, investigating and gathering knowledge of the present moment—of our limitations, as well as imaginative possibilities of actions beyond our limitation; and from there creating a pose or a movement infused with agency and self, based on the materials you have, not on what you are missing, manifesting a work that is true to your own body, even if the resultant expression is different from what you thought, or even hoped, it would be.

The yoga practice is a series of loops through the process of finding, investigating and creating. What we came to do at Aziza School that day was find out where we were. We all had different experiences of the place, triggering different associations and emotions in each of us, at different levels of intensity: the environment feels very different to someone who grew up nearby, or someone who was trafficked there as a pre-teen, or someone who only knew it as the spastic and smiling children from Aziza school. But first we needed to look, instead of laughing off the evictions as another helpless and tragic headline, or wearing it like another layer of resentment and armour. And so we took our practice to the schoolroom and held the pose while the trucks clattered at the green fence and the flies flew in our noses, and we watched how our bodies and minds responded.

Having made contact with the matter, we were able to investigate the contours of our experience through sensation and imagination. We moved potted plants around, we swept the skinny strip of cement between the doorway and the wall, we heard the trucks, we remembered the families; my students cried; my students remembered their own stories; Vannac listened to mothers desperately losing their grip on their own lives. We found some parts of our own bodies that day: my students caught glimpses of their feelings of loss and anger, and turned their faces towards parts of their history they had resisted when I first mentioned going to the school. And now they took the time to sit down when they needed to sit; they took the time to touch and hug when they needed the contact. They took the time to give names as best they could to what they felt.

And we discovered that when we take the time to find these places in ourselves, and acknowledge where we are, we generate at the same time an ability to move. Instead of sitting silently under the groans of tractors, or safely on our blue mats in the yoga studio, we were able to join discussions with the staff of Aziza school and arrange ways of getting the kids to the studio so their school time would not be disrupted. We coordinated times to help serve meals and clean up. We cleared a space at the studio for our NataRaj staff member, Kunthea, and her mother and sister who lost their own house that Saturday morning.

Busy-ness can be a way of obscuring our own experiences, but mindful action is a restorative gesture of creativity and part of a healing process. Our small team of yogis noticed that what made us angry at 7NG was that the developers broke things that we believe in: respect for human beings, communities and law, and instead manifested their opposites: violence, disrespect, destruction. We had a choice in our own actions, and we chose not to perpetuate their violence by hating them, or settling ourselves into anger or harbouring a futile hunger for vengeance. Instead, through our actions we chose to reinstate what had been damaged by deliberately bringing into being what we wanted to see. Of course we cannot rebuild the homes, but we can support the community, we can kindle respect for the people whose lives have been shattered and extend kindness to the kids who have been shaken to the ground.

Such is the place for yoga in Cambodia: a yoga studio is not a human rights NGO, we are not activists and advocates; we are diggers and see-ers and healers and artists. My students are recognizing that the practice of yoga means learning to acknowledge our own limitations and still give to others, not as two contradictory gestures but as part of a single healing process. In our practice, we are discovering the quality of those things that cannot be bulldozed, in a country where gross acts of disrespect are the order of the day and pleas for justice will take many many more years to be heard. And we are cultivating the strength in ourselves to hold the pose—to keep our sights on what we believe in and our actions true to those values.

My students did not lose their homes last weekend, but they have suffered their own traumas and erasures of self during their lives, and they continue to embody their losses; what they are practicing now are ways of confronting loss, and they are discovering that there is always something we can do to reinstate what at first glance seems to have been taken away. Touching the tragedy of Dey Krahom is a loop in the lifelong practice of yoga: a dip into feeling, a journey of investigation, and an act of creation. Each time we look, find and then create, we gain confidence and strength to look a little deeper the next time, to look more closely into the body, to keep our eyes open longer, to hold the pose from a different place, a more vulnerable place, a less known place. And as we gain the courage to speak from those spaces, our acts of creation become more authentic, and each expression of our self voices a more deeply held and more meaningful intention.

Since that day at Aziza school, thirty children from Dey Krahom and the Grey Building have been coming to NataRaj for yoga classes, games, relaxation, clean air, and respite from frantic parents and swarms of flies. We have a massive team of volunteers, including Sandra and Tressa, all our trainees, Vannac, our receptionists Dara and Theara, and guards, Piseth (who is also a trainee) and Sothea; there are even a few other people who I don’t really know, all banding together to keep the kids off the ceilings and walls, collecting materials for craft projects, buying food and supplies, breaking up fights, translating, and playing along. For the hours that the kids are out of the Grey Building, the staff of Aziza school are able to meet, or put their heads down, or help the grownups find new places to live or ways of feeding the family.

The Dey Krahom program is proceeding on NataRaj Studio funds which are in short supply at the best of times. We would like to ask for support from the extended yoga community so that we can continue with this project for as long as need be. We have set up a donation box at the front desk of the studio should you be interested in making a contribution: monetary donations are great, as are donations of food and classroom materials, although they probably won’t fit in the box.

Donations will fund transportation and materials for the kids yoga program at NataRaj. Additional funds will be directed to Aziza School in support of the following projects:

· Sponsoring families’ rent at new homes until they are either compensated by the government or re-establish a means of generating income;

· Lunches and dinners being served at Aziza School to families without income or food preparation facilities;

· Supplementary transportation funds for relocated families that must travel into Phnom Penh to work;

· School uniforms, shoes, clothing for the children who lost all their belongings in the demolition;

For those of you on this mailing list that are not living in Cambodia or for anyone interested in learning more about what happened at Dey Krahom, check out the following websites and blogs.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/cambodia-hundreds-left-homeless-after-forced-eviction-20090126

http://blog.onphotographycambodia.com/

http://yourphnompenhpal.blogspot.com/2009/01/human-wrongs-eviction-of-dey-krahorm.html

For more about Aziza School or to make a donation directly to their organization, visit:

http://www.villageearth.org/pages/Projects/Cambodia/Index.php

We extend deep gratitude to all those who support the families of Dey Krahom, and the team of volunteers at NataRaj who are donating their time and efforts to our own small contribution.

And to the members of our NataRaj community in Phnom Penh and overseas, who keep this place up through your ongoing patronage and enthusiasm, thus making such projects and extensions of yoga into the community possible.

And, to John Ang and his students at Living Yoga in Taipei, Taiwan, for their generous support for our outreach programs, and for the sponsorship that has allowed our teacher training course to come into being.

Shanti

Personal Narrative

A narrative is the story of an event, or the linked set of events that form a plot. For there to be a plot and sense of forward momentum, there must be a set of driving values and a conflict amongst those values, and a sense of an eventual outcome.

I’m looking around me at these Western bodies and I see networks and layers of narrative, bodies with stories, names and backgrounds, symbols. Each body weaves language around itself like cocoons, or rather grows itself like a snowflake, configurations of identity built off crystallized cultural stuffs, expressing personal narratives. And bodies come together and communicate between themselves, creating further patterns of language that spin themselves together into community narratives, and the communities weave themselves into (and from) the larger narrative of a city. It is rich, the air here.

Montreal is a city of narratives par excellence; a city of style and interaction and art. Every individual, it seems, designs him or herself and formulates a narrative: clothes have symbolic value, alluding to one’s own system of ordering the universe. We may not all understand what each other is saying, but we see each other in Montreal and recognize that we are saying something. Clothes are not accidental.

Style extends from clothes and tattoos to values, language and employment, the key components of identity. And broader narratives form: I practice yoga, and others who are very different from me share my love of the practice and together we create a new narrative, where each of us is a word and together we make sentences and story held together by certain values: a commitment to positive and loving values, sharing, respect for the body, health and conscientious living.... We are the yoga community. When I lived in Montreal as an adolescent, I took part in a very different narrative, but one just as dense; a youth counterculture based on negative values of rebellion, shedding expectations and escaping pressures. We had our own vocabulary then also, and our own symbols. And I see any number of other narratives that I don’t participate in: there are churches and synagogues, there are immigrant and minority communities. There are other narratives that I could participate in if I lived here, and I am tempted to come back and dress myself in them again.

An individual identity is woven from its body’s own words and beliefs, and expressed in one’s own stylistic decisions and manifestations—clothes, what kind of house I live in, how I move around the city, the language I speak and how I spend my time. All these are spun ideas that dress a body in personhood. And people come together on the basis of matched values and create higher orders of narrative, dialogues amongst themselves that evolve new symbols and create new states of affairs and institutions: there would not be a yoga studio unless there was more than one person who believed in the underlying values of yoga and this specific way of realizing them. And as the community narrative consolidates, as more yoga studios spring up and the practice diversifies and more voices join the discussion, the community discourse becomes its own reality that in turn generates the raw material that minds use to sculpt the identity of their body. Someone can choose yoga as a way of dressing who would otherwise not have had the words to express exactly that feeling. Identities become more sophisticated, but also one step removed from the original being they are representing. I am no longer primarily my body: I am a yogi and a traveler and a queer and I will present myself accordingly through my manner, style and speech and the communities I speak into and from. Bodies generate their own values and identities, the expression of which creates communities; and at the same time communities generate words and styles that bodies take on as symbols of their identities.

And it continues upward: a city is made of interlacing communities, interacting like coloured threads in strip of material, creating a unified sensory experience when you take a step back and squint. New York has a million possible vocabularies, and countless intellectuals have spent their careers sorting through them and giving them names and reasons. To an insider, New York is like a mini-Europe, each native belonging to a given culture and language, and holding an opinion on the others they share the space with: the Brooklyn guys, Jersey, Long Island, punks, health nuts.... But even as an outsider, the tapestry is rich: walking into that city gets you caught in a buzz of chatter and possible language and all you have to do is hold out your hand and you’ll come back with a fist full of words that are just your size.

Toronto is a city where people go to work, and the communities have to weave themselves through the grey cement buildings of the dominant financial district, settling in tidepools of living cultures like Kensington market, the Danforth, the universities, Toronto Island....

Each city has a narrative, based on its history and the diversity of communities that live in it and how strong a voice each one is given. And each community has a narrative created by the discussions amongst the individuals that make it up, discussions made up of the unique interests and vocabularies of individuals. And each individual has her own narrative, based on the values that she embodies. And each individual expresses her values in how she talks and looks and lives; and she gains the vocabulary to express herself by listening and absorbing the symbols of the community. And the community narratives exist within a context of an urban tapestry and voice themselves according to the pressures and tones of a shared cultural space: yoga communities are different in Montreal, Toronto and New York, because the city itself has a different overarching vocabulary that sets the tone and context in which the subculture defines itself.

My body is a living organism with this brain that forms complex ideas. There are things that I feel are true and ways of being that I believe lead to the best possible world, and these are my values. I look for ways to make those values take place in the world around me and I express them through my being and through my ideas: this is my identity. When I share my ideas, I communicate with people: this network of communication is a community, and through a community, new ideas are formed. I borrow from this culture, and my identity expands. I am no longer only a belief in health and the body, but I am a yoga teacher and practitioner, as opposed to other things (and in addition to other things.) My identity becomes one step abstracted: I can call myself something, and I can dress the part and people will know something about me. Many communities, perspectives, possible realities weave together in a cosmopolitan Western city, and my symbols take on different meanings depending on the context, and accumulate a different momentum based on how broad or narrow my vocabulary.

It is different on Phnom Penh. In Phnom Penh, each person holds up their own narrative: this is who I work for, this is my business, this is the country I come from. I articulate my own definition based on the scant resources of the city. There is usually only one person per identity here, and we each present ourselves for who we are, not for the culture we embody.

Maybe that is why underneath the traffic and karaoke, Phnom Penh always feels so silent. We make our own identities by our actions. We create our own communities as an act of will and they disappear if we turn our backs. There is something liberating about this, and limiting, also.

Spending Time with Words

Back in the West, back in Toronto. The air is dense here with thought and verbosity. Opinions abound, style, literature, publications, galleries, every carefully crafted individual human entity, self, vying for airtime. My friends are artists, writers, curators and I am exhausted spending days with them and their anxiety.

The world is buried somewhere under here. “Remember these,” I‘d like to say. “There are bodies here, things that live and eat and fart and get sick and love and hurt and want. These things that hold our clothes up and move the pens and paint brushes around, these things that do actually have their own set of feelings, even before we write an essay about the complex conjunction of forces and relationships that have come together in such a way so as to cause this particular event that we no longer even recognize to be an emotion.” But I can’t find them here. They must be here somewhere, bodies. I know they exist.

We’re obscured under the waves here. Each desperate and abused body churning in this ocean of identity, unaware of its own movements, watching the surface, hoping that one of the ripples will be me, mine, my visible being. Only if I make a ripple will I exist. True: only if I make a ripple will I pay the rent when I’m a painter, a writer….

We are bodies here.

The city is full of ideas, solidified in brick and cement--a university, shop, government building, hospital, Buddhist temple, a home. We all agree. We all know a bank is a bank and my world rests on the fact of that bank and the fact that these colourful bits of paper will buy my bread and beer. Here, ideas are so forceful that the concrete world shapes itself according to them.

Where I come from, my land of Cambodia, ideas live on bodies, and it is our responsibility to make them real. Red light means stop by virtue of my stopping. (In Toronto, a red light can be ignored like a brick wall can be ignored--only if you’re really drunk would you consider going through.) Where I come from, torn US currency has no value; in Toronto, the banks determine what counts as money. Where I come from, law is context-dependant. Where I come from, a hospital is a set of walls and white coats, not a concentration of knowledge. Where I come from, when I look out the window I see a chaos of movement.

In Toronto, when I look out the window I see ideas in the shape of buildings and behaviour. And I see people, loads of them, masses and throngs and herds of them, all immaculately put together in the shape of their ideas--this scarf, this job, this part of town and set of words. They are fine sculptures, these residents of Toronto.

The ones I talk to are not happy. The ones I talk to that are happy are insane.

I don’t think they even believe in bodies over here anymore.

Layers of Understanding

Reality settles in in layers. Something happens and you know it’s real; and then you stay with it and learn about it, and it becomes more real. And then something opens and all of a sudden it’s really real; and what you knew at first starts to look like a vague cloud of seeming and you start to think that the world you were looking at before as a figment of your own imagination. But, of course, it was real at the time, too.

I work with people who have suffered from traumas in their past, of the sort and degree that it is beyond my imagination to conjure an understanding of. I meet them and start teaching them, and they are who they are: smiling, happy, shy, innocent, giggly, with some undefined history of ups and downs that shapes their identity and brings their own set of limitations and motivations to their yoga practice; and we work with it. We work past the “I can’t do that” reflexes, or the “that movement is inappropriate for a girl” notions; we learn to hear our own voice chant without melting into awkward snickers or laughing-so-hard-I’m-crying hysterics. Together, we deal with teenage stuff, girl stuff, body image stuff, the same everywhere; and even though I know, because of what I’ve been told, that these girls have endured things that nobody should have to even think about, I have no idea what that really means. But, if you were to ask me of course I’d say I know what it means to have had these experiences and I am even designing my classes to accommodate what they might be carrying around with them. But, really, all I know is this person with this body, this name and this personality, and that we have this relationship. Their past is no more real to me than that.

As my relationship with a student deepens, two things happen: one, they get a sense of what we’re doing together, and they find ways to express themselves through the practice. The other thing is that I learn how to understand the vocabulary of their individual body. As a teacher, I engage a dialogue with these bodies, not just with the personality that inhabits it. And this is the case with all my serious students; no matter how radically different our personalities or backgrounds might be, even if we could never be friends or even connect in conversation at all; bodies speak to each other. Some bodies open very quickly, and before I’d even recognize their face on the street, we have a relationship. I was reminded of this the other day teaching a group of people who have survived acid attacks. I noticed before I started teaching that these people were disfigured, but when you lay your hands on someone with no eyes to show them what a twist is, everything that a body is sensitive to takes over, and a relationship between two living beings speaks.

It is beautiful to connect with someone at this level, before all the differences and defenses of the cognitive self; but the fact is, bodies have it rough. Bodies are innocent &mdash minds, not so much &mdash but bodies are all innocent in the way that trees are innocent; horses are innocent; children are innocent. And they suffer, sometimes from the actions of others, often from our own actions and decisions. And bodies carry these traumas innocently, and bodies change under their burden. Minds retaliate and hate and cry for justice and revenge and want, but bodies speak more quietly; bodies receive and process and deal with the world as they can.

Something that i know becomes really real to me when I become able to hear what it sounds like spoken from a body, not just from an intellect using words to describe a past event. With the young women I work with, I still don’t know what they have been through: we have never spoken about it; I have never been informed by their councilors. But now when certain topics and phrases enter conversation, they are not just bad words or ideas to me; they are faces and the personal challenges of these young women I know. It is a reality that some people make a living selling other people; it is a reality that some people live to buy other people. I know this, but those are just facts, ideas; and “human trafficking” and “sexual exploitation” are just phrases, bad ones.

But now they are not just words. The kids that come in to practice with me are bodies that speak, and they speak of energy and willingness and the commitment to make a space for themselves and each other. These are bodies that want to grow and want to love and reach out of themselves into things they don’t understand because they trust the people around them now. And they have such hurts on them, and such greynesses that I don’t see in words, that I don’t see in facts, and don’t even understand. And now when I hear those other words, those bad words, I hear them not as “real things that happen,” but as what my students live with and move through every time they move their bodies.

It boggles the mind what a burden some of us are asked to carry. It’s no wonder that we keep things safely stored away in words and sentences that we can pull out and use as needed and then put away again when they get too noticeable. It’s no wonder why we live so much in our minds, and are afraid to move into parts of the body and ways of feeling that threaten this linguistic net we spread out in front of us to catch the world before it gets too close.

The experiences of these young women are testament to the magnitude of evil humans are capable of; and by accepting the people around them and the practice of coming back into their own bodies, by growing and creating and trusting, these girls defy this same evil. They are the best yoga teachers I've had in a long time.

A Little Ideological Housekeeping

I often find myself in class talking about the body as if it were a separate thing from the person that inhabits it. “Listen to what your breath is telling you,” “the hips need to think about what they can do to keep the pelvis straight,” “let the body relax, don’t force it to do something it doesn’t want to do.” This language troubles me, since if asked, I would deny any conviction in a mind-body duality: I do not believe in a special soul that makes us who we are and gives us value; I do not believe that thought, emotion and ego are anything more than the workings of a very complex piece of material: the human body. There is no “me” separate from my hips, pelvis or breath. So, if the mind is a part of the body just as the arm or big toe are, then why do I create this distinction in my language?

The fact is, this duality is not just in my language but in my experience, and it manifests in many different ways, both on the mat and off. On the mat, I’m taking a symmetrical pose, say Downward Facing Dog, and it feels like I am doing the same thing on both sides of my body. My mind tells me I’m symmetrical. But I work around a little, I open my practice so that my body can voice itself clearly, and I discover that actually, I’m doing totally different things in my hips, my pelvis is completely out of whack, and to put myself in correct alignment is a Herculean task that requires shrunken and alien muscles to be summoned by some bizarre ritual of bending, breathing, jumping around and sweating. My practice is about coaxing these far-away muscles into my mind, so that they can do their jobs effectively, and I can skip the song and dance to convince them to perform. My goal is to get my body as symmetrical as my mind thinks it is.

Another opportunity for my body to speak with a voice that is not “mine,” arises around the question what I put into it. Before I was a yoga, I was quite happy eating meat and junk food, smoking and drinking often to excess. I knew it wasn’t good for me, but since I didn’t feel that it was doing anything particularly bad, I figured I was okay. Once I started practicing and getting in the habit of listening to my body, I found it saying things like, “hey, that animal’s back leg may not be such a good thing to tear off, chew up and digest,” or “hm, actually, when I stay up late and smoke and drink, I am really significantly less productive for the next few days than I would like to be.” It tells me when I need to consume more iron or protein, or when I have consumed too much, say, sugar.
Sadly, just because the body voices itself, doesn’t mean I always listen. In fact, when it comes to that last row of chocolate and a cigarette with a glass of wine, I still indulge every now and then; but now I cannot take a puff off a cigarette without hearing, clear as language, a hearty shut up barked at my body.

And there are other things, bizarre things, emotional things, like the way my body gets sad when I menstruate, or happy when I’m around blood-relatives, regardless of whether I get along with them or not. But I can’t say that these are things that I feel—I don’t: there is sadness in my body; there is happiness in my body; and what my mind makes of itself is, of course, coloured by these states; but, I do believe, that if I am able to identify them as something happening in my body, I have a better understanding of why my mind is creating the kinds of thoughts that it does.

I have been exploring this question of duality for a couple years now, philosophically and anatomically. My research is not extensive, but I have stumbled across certain ideas that might offer some inroads.

I was touched, recently, by a remarkable talk given by a brain scientist who suffered from a stroke. Jill Bolte Taylor gave an 18 minute account on TED.com of how her faculties gradually shut down as a golf-ball-sized blood-clot grew around the key language centers of her left brain, and describes for us the states of consciousness that she experienced as her awareness shifted between a semi-functioning left-brain state to a euphoric and essentially non-functional (but heavenly!) right-brain state. To summarize her talk, the left brain is a linear, analytical, serial processor that divides the world up into me and not-me; into details and values and order. The right brain is a parallel processor that receives unresolved sensory input from all sides; that experiences the energy of this body as one with the energy of all things. As Ms. Taylor lost the faculties of her left brain, she found herself in a state of Nirvana.

I believe it is a simplification to say that the left brain makes our ego and the right brain gives us unity consciousness, but I would lend credibility to the idea that certain cognitive and certainly evolutionarily advantageous mechanisms would be responsible for creating a subject-object duality that us meditators are so critical of; and that there is a purely kinesthetic awareness of sensory input that does not divide the world up by value and form, and for all I know, it might as well be a right brain affair.

Taylor urges us to take a step to the right of our egos and find peace and unity in that hemisphere of our brain. It is possibly this simple, although other neurological accounts of Enlightenment would claim that it is not just the right brain but the result of balanced and highly communicative hemispheres. I do like the idea, though, of a non-verbal, kinesthetic way of “thinking,” a state of receptivity that our brains are capable of bringing to the forefront of our consciousness. It sounds very much like the place I go to in my yoga practice, where these other states of awareness start to operate in their non-linguistic ways. And it makes the more esoteric justifications of the practice tangible: one may not believe in Enlightenment by Sun Salutation, but one can believe in practice that exercises the brain in all the right ways by doing different things with its body.

In terms of more immediate behaviour, though, and voices that tell me coherent and analytical things about my wants and needs, another model has presented itself, that makes a lot of sense to me.

In the aforementioned book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Gary Marcus identifies two streams of thought that determine our actions: the more recently evolved and judicious deliberative system that can conceive of things like short-term sacrifice for long-term gain; and the automatic and largely unconscious reflexive system, evolved according to the needs of humans who lived under prehistoric conditions, and based in the hardware common to almost all multicellular organisms. (45)

The reflexive system operates off the more ancient parts of the brain that are responsible for things like balance, breathing, alertness and proprioception—things that we just know how to do without thinking, and that were essential to the survival of our pre-hominid ancestors as well. The deliberative system operates out of the forebrain, particularly the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain swollen in humans to an unprecedented degree, and gives us the capacity for self-awareness and reasoned decision making.

There is a lot that is relevant to the practice in this distinction, and I will no doubt come back to it in subsequent entries. But for now, it sounds like the deliberative system in the prefrontal cortex is where the I of my intentions lives, and the hindbrain is where the non-linguistic voice of my body comes from. In my practice, I am using meditation and concentration to quiet the forebrain and go into a state where my habitual tensions and inhibitions don’t restrict the available movements of my body. I am using the physical practice to strengthen not just my body, but the capacities of the hindbrain—balance, breathing, movement, proprioception—and bring them into harmony with the deliberative, conscious aspect of my reasoning, my I. Through the practice of yoga, I am teaching my forebrain to stop fighting against the natural movements of the body and to stop trying to dominate the inevitable; and instead I am encouraging the hindbrain to speak up, to show itself because the more I know about the base drives and balances of my body, the more I will be able to act in accordance with them or curb when necessary.


Left brain-right brain; hindbrain-forebrain; it seems these days dualities persist, but at least now both sides are ontologically consist. I will continue to explore how the brain works from an academic perspective as it helps me understand the relevance of what we are doing on our mats, and also how my body works and how my self is made. And, I will continue to embrace a physicalist perspective on the mind and body and also our experiences of transcendence, not to cheapen the physical world that we live in, but to celebrate it.


http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

http://drjilltaylor.com/

http://mystrokeofinsight.com/

Marcus, G. (2008). Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company.