Shannon Lee recently posted a picture of me teaching from Light on Yoga at the Castle.
I've made a commitment to teaching people how to unlock the wealth of knowledge in Light on Yoga. I was telling that to Devon's class today and Marianthi said, "that's good. It is a hard book to use."
It was one of those moments where my two lives coalesced into one. I have spent my life teaching people how to read difficult texts, how to make them accessible in their own lives. It really struck me how much I am doing the same thing in two very different contexts. Academia and real world, well as real word as the Austin yoga scene gets.. which may not be that real world. It is its own sort of rarefied plane of existence.
I was also pondering a loud to the class at 4:30 about the question of why it matters what light on yoga says. Why does it matter what Plato says? On some level, I'm completely satisfied with the answer that this is a very smart person doing what I'm interested in doing and I want to see how that person does it. But as Manouso said to me long ago, "you wouldn't be asked that question if yoga didn't have its hooks in you." So for me, the intrinsic interest is enough. I care in and of itself, but why care if you aren't hooked at that level.
I've come up with three metaphors that I will develop in future posts. It is like following a recipe. You don't have to follow it exactly but it gives you basic guidelines. It is like a piece of music. You can change it a bit, but at some point it stops being the song you love. It is like a postcard of the vacation destination you arrive at and a map to the destination all wrapped into one.
Plato's dialogues are the same way. Why care about them? They give us a picture of philosophy in action. Not one we have to follow exactly but it helpfully navigates the terrain of the journey for us.
2 comments:
Anne,
Your post got me to thinking about learning how to play jazz music. I spent hours and hours learning, memorizing, different mode scales, how chords progress in numerous ways, and all the math and rules around jazz music. At the end of it, I couldn't play jazz at all. What I got from it, and now writing this, was:
1. I can learn the rules, but they function as a means to go beyond them. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue comes to mind with only a few cords in a very simple progression. Inside the cords there is so much creativity! How do I learn how to create? Maybe learn the rules first, but only as a means to take me to a new beautiful place.
2. The second thing I think of is practice. I couldn't play jazz for anything and I practiced and practiced, but in the end I let it go. It didn't "hook me" like you said. Somehow the practice of you has hooked me or has always been there and now needs to come out through practice. Maybe that's why I get on my mat when I am feeling good and bad. I never practiced jazz when I was feeling bad.
Hi Carrie, Thanks for the post. I think there are very few venues in contemporary america where we really practice. Music is one. I played clarinet for years and really practiced. I was never that great but I definitely cultivated an attitude towards practice. Athletics is another domain obviously. but I think music is a much closer analogy about what we are up to on the yoga mat. You take the rules and apply them, not rigidly, but you do have to know the scales, you have to know the chord progressions, you have to understand harmony. You can't really play music without that, at the same time if music is only that, then it is not really music. Yoga, like music, is also a art.
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